They Release Cops Name..
- Thread starter Rock the Casbah
- Start date
The Day Ferguson Cops Were Caught in a Bloody Lie
The officers got the wrong man, but charged him anyway?with getting his blood on their uniforms. How the Ferguson PD ran the town where Michael Brown was gunned down.
Police in Ferguson, Missouri, once charged a man with destruction of property for bleeding on their uniforms while four of them allegedly beat him.
?On and/or about the 20th day of Sept. 20, 2009 at or near 222 S. Florissant within the corporate limits of Ferguson, Missouri, the above named defendant did then and there unlawfully commit the offense of ?property damage? to wit did transfer blood to the uniform,? reads the charge sheet.
The address is the headquarters of the Ferguson Police Department, where a 52-year-old welder named Henry Davis was taken in the predawn hours on that date. He had been arrested for an outstanding warrant that proved to actually be for another man of the same surname, but a different middle name and Social Security number.
?I said, ?I told you guys it wasn?t me,?? Davis later testified.
He recalled the booking officer saying, ?We have a problem.?
The booking officer had no other reason to hold Davis, who ended up in Ferguson only because he missed the exit for St. Charles and then pulled off the highway because the rain was so heavy he could not see to drive. The cop who had pulled up behind him must have run his license plate and assumed he was that other Henry Davis. Davis said the cop approached his vehicle, grabbed his cellphone from his hand, cuffed him and placed him in the back seat of the patrol car, without a word of explanation.
But the booking officer was not ready just to let Davis go, and proceeded to escort him to a one-man cell that already had a man in it asleep on the lone bunk. Davis says that he asked the officer if he could at least have one of the sleeping mats that were stacked nearby.
?He said I wasn?t getting one,? Davis said.
Davis balked at being a second man in a one-man cell.
?Because it?s 3 in the morning,? he later testified. ?Who going to sleep on a cement floor??
The booking officer summoned a number of fellow cops. One opened the cell door while another suddenly charged, propelling Davis inside and slamming him against the back wall.
?I told the police officers there that I didn?t do nothing, ?Why is you guys doing this to me??? Davis testified. ?They said, ?OK, just lay on the ground and put your hands behind your back.??
Davis said he complied and that a female officer straddled and then handcuffed him. Two other officers crowded into the cell.
?They started hitting me,? he testified. ?I was getting hit and I just covered up.?
The other two stepped out and the female officer allegedly lifted Davis? head as the cop who had initially pushed him into the cell reappeared.
?He ran in and kicked me in the head,? Davis recalled. ?I almost passed out at that point? Paramedics came? They said it was too much blood, I had to go to the hospital.?
A patrol car took the bleeding Davis to a nearby emergency room. He refused treatment, demanding somebody first take his picture.
?I wanted a witness and proof of what they done to me,? Davis said.
He was driven back to the jail, where he was held for several days before he posted $1,500 bond on four counts of ?property damage.? Police Officer John Beaird had signed complaints swearing on pain of perjury that Davis had bled on his uniform and those of three fellow officers.
The remarkable turned inexplicable when Beaird was deposed in a civil case that Davis subsequently brought seeking redress and recompense.
Schottel figures the courts might take the problems of the Ferguson Police Department as more than de minimis as a result of the protests sparked when an officer shot and killed an unarmed 18-year-old named Michael Brown.
?After Mr. Davis was detained, did you have any blood on you?? asked Davis? lawyer, James Schottel.
?No, sir,? Beaird replied.
Schottel showed Beaird a copy of the ?property damage? complaint.
?Is that your signature as complainant?? the lawyer asked.
?It is, sir,? the cop said.
?And what do you allege that Mr. Davis did unlawfully in this one?? the lawyer asked.
?Transferred blood to my uniform while Davis was resisting,? the cop said.
?And didn?t I ask you earlier in this deposition if Mr. Davis got blood on your uniform??
?You did, sir.?
?And didn?t you respond no??
?Correct. I did.?
Beaird seemed to be either admitting perjury or committing it. The depositions of other officers suggested that the ?property damage? charges were not just bizarre, but trumped up.
?There was no blood on my uniform,? said Police Officer Christopher Pillarick.
And then there was Officer Michael White, the one accused of kicking Davis in the head, an allegation he denies, as his fellow officers deny striking Davis. White had reported suffering a bloody nose in the mayhem.
?Did you see Mr. Davis bleeding at all?? the lawyer, Schottel, asked.
?I did not,? White replied.
?Did Mr. Davis get any blood on you while you were in the cell?? Schottel asked.
?No,? White said.
The contradictions between the complaint and the depositions apparently are what prompted the prosecutor to drop the ?property damage? allegation. The prosecutor also dropped a felony charge of assault on an officer that had been lodged more than a year after the incident and shortly after Davis filed his civil suit.
Davis suggested in his testimony that if the police really thought he had assaulted an officer he would have been charged back when he was jailed.
?They would have filed those charges right then and there, because that?s a major felony,? he noted.
Indisputable evidence of what transpired in the cell might have been provided by a surveillance camera, but it turned out that the VHS video was recorded at 32 times normal speed.
?It was like a blur,? Schottel told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. ?You couldn?t see anything.?
The blur proved to be from 12 hours after the incident anyway. The cops had saved the wrong footage after Schottel asked them to preserve it.
Schottel got another unpleasant surprise when he sought the use-of-force history of the officers involved. He learned that before a new chief took over in 2010 the department had a surprising protocol for non-fatal use-of-force reports.
?The officer himself could complete it and give it to the supervisor for his approval,? the prior chief, Thomas Moonier, testified in a deposition. ?I would read it. It would be placed in my out basket, and my secretary would probably take it and put it with the case file.?
No copy was made for the officer?s personnel file.
?Everything involved in an incident would generally be with the police report,? Moonier said. ?I don?t know what they maintain in personnel files.?
?Who was in charge of personnel files, of maintaining them?? Schottel asked.
?I have no idea,? Moonier said. ?I believe City Hall, but I don?t know.?
Schottel focused on the date of the incident.
?On September 20th, 2009, was there any way to identify any officers that were subject of one or more citizens? complaints?? he asked.
?Not to my knowledge,? Moonier said.
?Was there any way to identify any officers who had completed several use-of-force reports??
?I don?t recall.?
But however lax the department?s system and however contradictory the officers? testimony, a federal magistrate ruled that the apparent perjury about the ?property damage? charges was too minor to constitute a violation of due process and that Davis? injuries were de minimis?too minor to warrant a finding of excessive force. Never mind that a CAT scan taken after the incident confirmed that he had suffered a concussion.
Schottel has appealed and expects to argue the case in December. He will contend that perjury is perjury however minor the charge and note that both the NFL and Major League Baseball have learned to consider a concussion a serious injury.
Schottel figures the courts might take the problems of the Ferguson Police Department as more than de minimis as a result of the protests sparked when an officer shot and killed an unarmed 18-year-old named Michael Brown on the afternoon of Aug. 9.
?Your chances on appeal are going up,? a fellow lawyer told him.
At least one witness has said that Brown was shot in the back and then in the chest and head as he turned toward the officer with his hands raised.
?I said, ?Well, that doesn?t surprise me,?? Schottel told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. ?I said I already know about Ferguson, nothing new can faze me about Ferguson.?
Schottel has also deposed the new chief, Thomas Jackson, who took over in 2010. Jackson testified that he has instituted a centralized system whereby all complaints lodged against cops by citizens or supervisors go through him and are assigned a number in an internal affairs log. Schottel views Jackson as ?not a bad guy,? someone who has been trying to make positive change.
?He wants to do right, but it was such a mess,? Schottel said Wednesday.
Jackson has seemed less than progressive as he delayed identifying the officer involved in the shooting for fear it would place him and his family in danger. Jackson would only say the officer is white and has been on the job for six years. This means that for his first two and most formative years the officer might have been writing his own force reports and that none of them went into his file.
?It?s hard to get people to clean things up, especially if they?re used to doing things a certain way,? Schottel said.
On Friday, police finally identified the officer as Darren Wilson, who is said to have no disciplinary record, as such records are kept in Ferguson. We already know that he started out at a time when it was accepted for a Ferguson cop to charge somebody with property damage for bleeding on his uniform and later saying there was no blood on him at all.
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Tim Mak
Tim Mak
U.S. NEWS 08.15.14
Web Sleuths Get It Wrong Again in Ferguson
The hacker group Anonymous blew it?and tormented a woman not connected to the shooting of Michael Brown. Victims of careless ?dox? attempts say the consequences are miserable.
Although the Web carries with it great collaborative potential, mistakes can be made in the heat of a crisis, especially when research is being led by amateurs. It is even worse when online actors ?dox??or publicly release the private information of?the incorrect person. As online social communities grow, bands of well-meaning users are increasingly trying to play detective to enforce a type of street justice?and about as often, they get it wrong.
The consequences can be miserable, as those affected tell The Daily Beast in interviews.
The misidentified Ferguson shooter
This week the nebulous hacker collective Anonymous released the name of a man they believed to be the shooter of Michael Brown, the teen killed in Ferguson, Missouri, last Saturday. They were flat out wrong. Not only did Anonymous issue the incorrect name, posting the information of a man who had never been a St. Louis police officer, but the vigilante hackers also acquired a false address. They posted the address of the man?s 48-year-old stepmother, Stephanie Warnack.
?Wow, this is not good,? she said, when informed by a national reporter. She began to weep. ?Now I have to defend myself and I didn?t do anything wrong.?
A harried-sounding woman answered the phone at a publicly listed number for Warnack on Friday. The phone had been ringing off the hook all morning, the woman told The Daily Beast, refusing to identify herself.
?Don?t call back again,? she warned.
Twitter messages show there was some internal dissension among Anonymous hackers as to whether they had the correct name. Despite misgivings, some decided to release it anyway?with unfortunate results for those wrongly fingered as responsible for a police shooting that has led to widespread protests in the Missouri suburb.
The wrong Boston Marathon bombing suspect
In April 2013, Reddit users began to speculate that one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects looked like missing Brown University student Sunil Tripathi.
Online commenters remarked that the student bore a similarity to one of the suspects pictured in a picture released by the FBI. Their suspicions were solidified by a user who supposedly went to school with Sunil and wrote that she recognized him in the FBI photos.
So as they continued the search for their son and brother, the Tripathi family had to deal with a second, overwhelming ordeal: the flood of accusations and insults that comes with being associated with a violent, criminal act.
?The whole night the phone was ringing off the hook with news reporters and nasty messages.?
?We were already in a very tense and anxious state, having looked for Sunil for 32 days or so,? Judy Tripathi, Sunil?s mother, told The Daily Beast. ?The whole night the phone was ringing off the hook with news reporters and nasty messages. It was devastating because we knew it wasn?t him, and we were so worried? It just seemed to be an epidemic.?
Of course, Tripathi had nothing to do with the bombing. His body was found after the Tsarnaev brothers were fingered as suspects in the bombings. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed during a shootout with police in a Boston suburb, and younger brother Dzhokhar is facing charges for his involvement in the attacks.
But before Sunil?s body was found, his mother was most concerned that the online speculation might cause someone to recognize him on the street.
?The thought of this misidentification and what anyone would do if they saw him, or what Sunil would feel if he got wind of this news, was beyond my imagination,? she explained. ?It was just another horrible thing on top of everything else? it?s very unsettling, because it can happen again [to others].?
The general manager of Reddit later apologized for the community?s inaccurate sleuthing, which ?fueled online witch hunts and dangerous speculation.?
The impact of the error will stay with Sunil?s family for all time.
?When you Google his name, forever, it just pops up a million sources that are connected to the Boston bombing. When you?re trying to memorialize your 22-year-old, that?s very horrible. It?s had a very devastating long-term impact,? Judy Tripathi said.
After Newtown: Adam Lanza, not Ryan Lanza
In December 2012, Adam Lanza shot more than two dozen people in what has come to be known as the Sandy Hook massacre. In the immediate aftermath of the incident, his brother Ryan was forced to defend himself online as commenters flooded onto his Facebook page. Ryan?s identification was found at the scene of crime.
?Everyone shut the f*** up it wasn?t me,? he wrote on his page. ?I?m on the bus home now it wasn?t me. IT WASN?T ME I WAS AT WORK IT WASN?T ME.?
Adam had not spoken to his brother in a year, according to a book on the shootings, but the younger Lanza had carried his identification during the shooting, leading to police, media, and online commenters to finger him as a suspect.
So the elder brother, whose family member had just shot and killed his mother, along with 20 children at an elementary school, had to deal not only with the trauma of that nightmare, but also with defending his own reputation. And much like Sunil Tripathi, his name will forever be associated with an act he was not involved in.
Reached by phone, he did not appear interested in reliving the ordeal.
?I?m out of the country right now,? Ryan Lanza said, before hanging up.
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Clive Irving
Clive Irving
GET OUT OF HERE08.10.14
Obama?s Extravagant Summer Break? More Like, America?s Vacation-Deficit Disorder
It?s not just that we don?t take enough time off?4.1 days on average?it?s that we do such a poor job of using it.
The president is setting a personal record. At 15 days, Barack Obama?s vacation on Martha?s Vineyard will be the longest summer break of his presidency. The world is on fire almost everywhere, come the protests. How dare he do that?
Give the guy a break ? literally. It?s not that he?s exactly out of the loop. He can only go someplace where there are secure communications, a huge security presence and an easily ring-fenced site ? like a small island within an hour?s flying time to the White House. Wherever he goes the crises will follow, 24/7. (And the commander in chief will hop back to Washington for a couple of days in mid-vacation.)
In any other civilized nation this effort at some kind of summer escape would barely raise an eyebrow. But among all the world?s advanced economies the United States stands out for what should be called a serious case of vacation deficit disorder. We are the only country that does not have mandatory paid vacations for its workers. Not one day. Zilch.
Remarkably, Americans have not risen in revolt against this gaping inequality. Indeed, our acceptance of it reveals a great deal of confusion about that part of the Declaration of Independence that involves the pursuit of happiness. We?ll fight for the life and liberty bits, but happiness?? Surely happiness is most readily delivered by a decent vacation?
A tour of the Uffizi in Florence is now a commonplace to a manager from Tokyo whereas in the 19thcentury it was still attainable by very few.
Those avatars of hedonism, The Europeans, are aghast at discovering that the average American vacation lasts for just 4.1 days. They see this as further evidence of cultural collapse.
But I fear that this is the way that national stereotypes can lead to international conflicts of attitude. Invariably the example of France comes up. To begin with, this is the country that introduced a 35-hour workweek. Then there is the fact that officially every French worker is entitled to 31 days of paid vacation. But by exploiting other allowances, smart people ? both government employees and company employees -- can extend that to five and a half weeks.
Five and a half weeks?
Just think, they?re already in France. This is a country that more or less invented the basic ground rules for the pursuit of happiness. Let there be wine, food, music, and ravishing summer landscapes from Alpine meadows to Riviera beaches. (Forget Paris in August. Leave that for the Americans to discover that everything is ferme.)
Before you invoke images of a nation enjoying more indolence than industry, there is an uncomfortable statistic to digest. Specifically, comparing the output per worker in the U.S. and France. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development expressing the Gross National Product in terms of value per hour worked, the U.S. comes out on top at $60.2, and France a close second, $57.7.
Of course, GDP is an economist?s yardstick, not a hedonist?s. These numbers may be a measure of efficiency, but they?re not a measure of the quality of life. Almost a quarter of Americans have no paid vacation time at all, and many of them are in the lowest-paid jobs. For those who do get paid vacation time, the lack of any regulatory framework creates wide variations in what employers grant. The total is often geared to years served ? for example, 14 days after five years. But it?s difficult to escape the conclusion that the brevity of the average American vacation betrays a high degree of angst about absence from the workplace. Those 4.1 days of vacation often include a weekend, minimizing the risk of finding somebody else in your seat when you return.
As a result, Americans are burning through leisure time without getting real leisure. At this point it?s necessary to invoke the warning delivered by a British social historian, E. P. Thompson, that ?time is currency. It is not passed but spent.?
The best return on that perpetually diminishing currency in terms of leisure is ? or should be ? travel. Not just going somewhere, but coming back the better for having gone, while noting that although travel can broaden the mind it can do so only if the mind is prepared to be broadened.
I?ve heard people boast of ?doing ten cities in seven days,? which amounts to mindless consumption, not travel at all ? not travel of the kind that gives something back of lasting value, purchases of the mind rather than the purchases that are stuffed into the suitcase.
Travel with lofty purpose really began when it was accessible only to a small and privileged class with unlimited time to travel. Most notably, the English nobility who initiated the Grand Tour of Europe in the 18th century on the principle that their cultural sensibility could be greatly advanced by exposure to rediscovered classical sites in Italy like Herculaneum and Pompeii, together with the works and worlds of artists like Raphael and Michelangelo.
But these wandering toffs were forerunners of today?s most egregious believers in personal entitlement. They wanted to keep the uplifting moments to themselves. By 1729 one of them was already complaining that ?Rome is much changed to the worse ? entirely owing to the British.?
This particular wave of culture vultures was terminated by the Napoleonic wars, but by the end of the 19th century a new and more familiar engine of travel was spreading the word ? elitist literary journeys: among them Flaubert?s roaming eye in Egypt, Elizabeth Wharton?s languid pensees on Italian villas, and later a more robust compulsion: Hemingway?s adoration of matadors.
Ironically, these classic literary experiences no longer travel well. We may yearn for them but they are unreachable now, left in a past that seems almost to belong to a distant planet. How different it is for us today, when travel has been enabled by two forces: a newly affluent global middle class of which the Chinese are the latest wave, and the efficiency and economy of air travel.
In one sense this is democracy at work ? a tour of the Uffizi in Florence is now a commonplace to a manager from Tokyo whereas in the 19th century it was still attainable by very few. But in another sense this democratization has led to commoditized travel ? pre-cooked, packaged and marketed for groups rather than individuals at every level from the budget tour of Tuscany to the trophy African safari replete with luxury lodges in what is left of the wild.
Often sold as ?bespoke luxury travel? these trips require the advice of specialist consultants who frequently get paid commissions by the hotels they recommend. The more luxurious the trip, the more it seems that personal choice is delegated by the client to the planner.
At a price, such trips deliver such treats as private access to the Louvre when it?s closed to the public. This is a strange way of getting acquainted with other places and other cultures ? unless you really feel more comfortable remaining inside a portable bubble of your own well pampered culture, which I suspect is often the case.
These developments illustrate another point: that one of the most insidious ways to misspend the precious currency of time is use of the timetable. Organized travel demands the scheduling of every waking hour. Breakfast at 7:30; assemble with guide at 8:30; 15 minutes at Buckingham Palace at 9:30; half an hour at the British Museum at 10.30; an hour of shopping at Harrods at noon?and so it goes, a disciplined progression allowing no digressions or risks of surprise.
To me this is the antithesis of what travel should be about. The essence of real travel is spontaneity. Plan as little possible ? ideally just a beginning and an end, plus some advance reading. Then let things happen. Get off the beaten track. There will be completely unforeseen magic moments ? settling at just the perfect table outside a harbor-side caf? at twilight and lingering there, even going back the next evening. Technology has actually made this kind of unplanned traveling easier. A cell phone can now tell you which hotels nearby have last-minute vacancies, and deliver user reviews.
To be sure, there will be mistakes, some surprises you would rather have avoided ? the elevator redolent of some flaw in the municipal sewage system, or a promising road that leads to a pig farm. But accidents, both good and bad, are part of a real traveler?s education.
Those aristos who could spend a year or more on the Grand Tour returned believing that they were without doubt the world?s best travelers. Who could fairly be called the world?s best travelers today?
I would vote for the Australians. For many of them, it?s partly to do with living on an island continent distant from their European roots. In the days when they could travel to Europe only be sea, Australian families planned and saved up for long absences abroad in the manner of the Grand Tour and they were ? and still are ? enthusiastic imbibers of other cultures and ideas.
But now their country has an enlightened policy about paid leave. After 10 years working for the same employer they are entitled to more than eight weeks of paid vacation on top of the basic annual allowance of 20 to 25 days. As a result, Australians can spend months in Europe, Asia, and the Americas without any time pressures.
That?s a state of bliss that most Americans, locked in the grip of vacation deficit disorder, can only dream of. Hard-wired into the psyche of many is the idea that somehow time off is akin to sloth. Yet when it comes to sloth we have surely produced the world?s current best in class ? members of Congress. By the end of its current year the House of Representatives will have been in session for fewer than 135 days, turning up for an average of 28 hours a week (with very little to show for it.) Not even the French have got their working week down to that level.
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Ueslei Marcelino / Reuters
James Bloodworth
James Bloodworth
WORLD NEWS 08.15.14
Putin's Useful (British) Idiots
From Neville Chamberlain to the pages of today?s ?Guardian,? many members of the British elite, left and right, have proved themselves suckers for totalitarianism.
LONDON ? During the Cold War the mass of the British people were, as George Orwell put it, at once both too sane and too stupid to accept any left-wing illusions about the Soviet Union.
But there has long been a certain muddleheadedness about totalitarianism on both the left and the right in Britain, with the most obvious example being British Conservative Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who was unable to grasp the fact that Adolf Hitler might actually believe the Nazi theories about blood and the ?volk? until it was too late. By then the Nazis had already annexed large swathes of Europe, and Britain was embarrassingly unprepared for war.
Today, that same sort of delusional thinking is evident in regard to Russia?s latest Tsar, Vladimir Putin. Comparing Putin?s aggression in eastern Ukraine to Hitler?s ?protection? of Germans living in Czechoslovakia, as Hillary Clinton did a few months ago, is stretching things a bit. But Putin?s British apologists, on both the left and the right, are sticking faithfully to the script laid down by the man who had the dubious distinction of signing the Munich Agreement.
A number of British right-wingers have long admired the Russian president for his unapologetic assertion of Russian power, his promotion of ?traditional? values (see gay baiting) and his cynicism when dealing with ?decadent? democratic governments. Alex Salmond and Nigel Farage, both leaders of burgeoning nationalist parties (Scottish and English respectively), have named the butcher of Chechnya as the one politician they ?most admire,? with Farage describing Putin?s cynical manipulation of the conflict in Syria as ?brilliant.?
There is also the prestigious Bruges Group, a self-described ?neo-liberal think tank? made up of Conservative MPs and Lords, which claims to be ?spearheading the intellectual battle? against the European Union. The group?s president is Norman Tebbit, Margaret Thatcher?s former Secretary of State for Education. What?s interesting is where the Bruges Group?s detestation of Europe has led it politically: straight into the arms of the Kremlin. According to a recent video put out by the group, the main problem in ?the Ukraine? (as they revealingly call it) is not Russian-backed separatists but rather ?E.U. meddling.?
This idea of a Russia that?s been treated badly extends deep into the Conservative press, where the Telegraph?s economics correspondent, Liam Halligan, has built almost an entire career on poorly disguised Putin apologia. Despite the fact that a majority of Ukraine?s 328 lawmakers voted on February 22 to remove former President Viktor Yanukovych from power due to his abandonment of office and the deaths of more than 80 protesters, according to Halligan Ukraine?s ?democratic process? was in fact thwarted by ?rock-throwing thugs.? As is perhaps predictable, Halligan is a regular pundit on RT, the Russian state?s English-language satellite channel, where he rallies against Western sanctions on a network that also gives a voice to neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, and people who believe the Pope is part of a species of cone heads that secretly rule the world.
It would be unfair to single out the right; the left has its own share of useful idiots, largely made up of neo-Stalinists who see Putin as the new Man of Steel, and soft-headed liberals for whom the default response to any global crisis is to mutter about Western ?double standards.? The Guardian columnist (and former editor of the paper?s comment pages), Seumus Milne, is a typical case of the former, and has blamed the violence in eastern Ukraine on ?the disastrous Versailles-style break-up of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.? In other words, any Ukrainian desire for self-determination can go to hell: Putin is right to be concerned about the loss of his ?sphere of influence.? In Milne?s case the thread connecting Cold War moral bankruptcy to post-ideological moral bankruptcy is a direct one: This is a man who has built his career writing columns with titles like ?Stalin?s Missing Millions,? meaning he probably didn?t really kill as many people in the Gulag as alleged.
Soon after Milne had put down on paper his sympathy for Tsar Vladimir, the Australian journalist John Pilger, another self-proclaimed ?anti-imperialist,? took to the pages of the Guardian to?wait for it?denounce the opponents of Russian imperialism. Using fabricated quotes from alleged victims of ?Ukrainian Nazis? pulled from Facebook pages that later vanished, Pilger blamed the entire crisis on ?Washington?s planned seizure of Russia?s historic, legitimate, warm-water naval base in Crimea.?
The Guardian?s own Moscow correspondent, Shaun Walker, described the use of the quotes as ?inexcusable.?
Finally, and in keeping with the suspicion that pacifism is little more than disguised power worship, the biggest organization in Britain dedicated to ?peace,? the Stop the War Coalition, wrote in March that, ?if we must pick a side, let it be Russia.?
Schooled in a parochial ?common sense? view of the world, Neville Chamberlain viewed every political decision through the prism of the Birmingham Town Planning Committee where he spent his formative years. The assumption in every quarrel was that there was ?something to be said for both sides??why, then, shouldn?t the Germans of the Sudetenland join Germany if that was what they wished?
Putin is no Hitler, but today?s useful idiots, while lacking the stature of Chamberlain, are no less parochial and foolish. In some cases they are worse, for what they lack in power they make up in malevolence.
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The Daily Beast
Kevin Fallon
Kevin Fallon
ENTERTAINMENT 08.15.14
Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Martin Consciously Couple
The Oscar winner and Coldplay singer are dating, according to reports. LOL, am I right?
If Jennifer Lawrence were to find out that "Jennifer Lawrence"?that brassy ball of fun who regales all the patrons at the pub with stories about shitting herself while eating copious amounts of fried food?was dating Chris Martin, we like to think that Jennifer Lawrence would laugh.
"You guys joshing me?" she might say. "That shiz is cray cray!" she'd laugh. And then you'd whip out your iPhone and pull up that snarky tweet your friend wrote linking to the E! Online report suggesting that this shiz, though cray cray, does appear to be true.
According to their report, the one known as J. Law and the one know as That Guy From Coldplay Who Was Married to Gwyneth Paltrow have been seeing each other since Ms. Law split with her on-again/off-again boyfriend Nicholas Hoult in June. The former Mr. Paltrow, you'll remember if you're a consumer of any kind of Internet news, "consciously uncoupled" from the Oscar-winning GOOP maven in March.
This conscious uncoupling was a big deal because WTF is that even. And also because they had been married for over a decade, have children together, and many saw this as proof what many have long expected: that living with the woman who purportedly subsists on vegan tofu crudit?s, wisps of positivity, and self-manifested shakra may have truly been as insufferable as it sounds.
Oh would Jennifer Lawrence laugh at this news of who "Jennifer Lawrence" is dating. She would laugh at this, you see, because we have decided that Jennifer Lawrence is not just our favorite Hollywood dream BFF, but she is one of us. Nay, she is all of us. And like the legion of obnoxious gossip mongers who are snickering in their 140-character salons, she would find the fact that Chris Martin moving on from a partner with a reputation for pretention, rigidity, and unattainable clean living to one who is best known for falling up a staircase while winning the most respected prize in the arts and flicking off the press soon after poetically hilarious.
From the uptight, insufferable bitch to the cool It Girl, you go Chris Martin! That's what everyone (or at least those I follow on Twitter) think.
The thing is, though, this kind of attitude is not very nice. Hating on Gwyneth Paltrow and judging her self-appointed lifestyle ambassadorship is so pass?. (It's all about judging Blake Lively now.) And let's not pretend that if it were any other Hollywood starlet shacking up with a (much) older man while still not divorced from the wife and the mother of his kids, we would be publicly shaming her as some sort of vicious jezebel with a SAG card.
It's ok to obsess over this news. We love celebrity news! The only thing better than dreaming about the life we'd lead if we were rich and famous is being snootily judgmental about the life choices of those who already are.
So laugh about this bit of tabloid news. Laugh because you might find it funny. Laugh because it's such an utterly bizarre partnering. Laugh because you?re Jennifer Lawrence and if there's one thing Jennifer Lawrence likes to do, goddammit, it's laugh.
But don't laugh because you're being mean. Jennifer Lawrence would hate that.
....................................................................................
looks like the Fergy police were used to beating some blacks asses
Probably the same ones that showed up with tanks, swat equipment , and large cal guns top of trucks aimed at the protesters.
the police and military attire should not go in the same context in public.
geeezzz louise........
The officers got the wrong man, but charged him anyway?with getting his blood on their uniforms. How the Ferguson PD ran the town where Michael Brown was gunned down.
Police in Ferguson, Missouri, once charged a man with destruction of property for bleeding on their uniforms while four of them allegedly beat him.
?On and/or about the 20th day of Sept. 20, 2009 at or near 222 S. Florissant within the corporate limits of Ferguson, Missouri, the above named defendant did then and there unlawfully commit the offense of ?property damage? to wit did transfer blood to the uniform,? reads the charge sheet.
The address is the headquarters of the Ferguson Police Department, where a 52-year-old welder named Henry Davis was taken in the predawn hours on that date. He had been arrested for an outstanding warrant that proved to actually be for another man of the same surname, but a different middle name and Social Security number.
?I said, ?I told you guys it wasn?t me,?? Davis later testified.
He recalled the booking officer saying, ?We have a problem.?
The booking officer had no other reason to hold Davis, who ended up in Ferguson only because he missed the exit for St. Charles and then pulled off the highway because the rain was so heavy he could not see to drive. The cop who had pulled up behind him must have run his license plate and assumed he was that other Henry Davis. Davis said the cop approached his vehicle, grabbed his cellphone from his hand, cuffed him and placed him in the back seat of the patrol car, without a word of explanation.
But the booking officer was not ready just to let Davis go, and proceeded to escort him to a one-man cell that already had a man in it asleep on the lone bunk. Davis says that he asked the officer if he could at least have one of the sleeping mats that were stacked nearby.
?He said I wasn?t getting one,? Davis said.
Davis balked at being a second man in a one-man cell.
?Because it?s 3 in the morning,? he later testified. ?Who going to sleep on a cement floor??
The booking officer summoned a number of fellow cops. One opened the cell door while another suddenly charged, propelling Davis inside and slamming him against the back wall.
?I told the police officers there that I didn?t do nothing, ?Why is you guys doing this to me??? Davis testified. ?They said, ?OK, just lay on the ground and put your hands behind your back.??
Davis said he complied and that a female officer straddled and then handcuffed him. Two other officers crowded into the cell.
?They started hitting me,? he testified. ?I was getting hit and I just covered up.?
The other two stepped out and the female officer allegedly lifted Davis? head as the cop who had initially pushed him into the cell reappeared.
?He ran in and kicked me in the head,? Davis recalled. ?I almost passed out at that point? Paramedics came? They said it was too much blood, I had to go to the hospital.?
A patrol car took the bleeding Davis to a nearby emergency room. He refused treatment, demanding somebody first take his picture.
?I wanted a witness and proof of what they done to me,? Davis said.
He was driven back to the jail, where he was held for several days before he posted $1,500 bond on four counts of ?property damage.? Police Officer John Beaird had signed complaints swearing on pain of perjury that Davis had bled on his uniform and those of three fellow officers.
The remarkable turned inexplicable when Beaird was deposed in a civil case that Davis subsequently brought seeking redress and recompense.
Schottel figures the courts might take the problems of the Ferguson Police Department as more than de minimis as a result of the protests sparked when an officer shot and killed an unarmed 18-year-old named Michael Brown.
?After Mr. Davis was detained, did you have any blood on you?? asked Davis? lawyer, James Schottel.
?No, sir,? Beaird replied.
Schottel showed Beaird a copy of the ?property damage? complaint.
?Is that your signature as complainant?? the lawyer asked.
?It is, sir,? the cop said.
?And what do you allege that Mr. Davis did unlawfully in this one?? the lawyer asked.
?Transferred blood to my uniform while Davis was resisting,? the cop said.
?And didn?t I ask you earlier in this deposition if Mr. Davis got blood on your uniform??
?You did, sir.?
?And didn?t you respond no??
?Correct. I did.?
Beaird seemed to be either admitting perjury or committing it. The depositions of other officers suggested that the ?property damage? charges were not just bizarre, but trumped up.
?There was no blood on my uniform,? said Police Officer Christopher Pillarick.
And then there was Officer Michael White, the one accused of kicking Davis in the head, an allegation he denies, as his fellow officers deny striking Davis. White had reported suffering a bloody nose in the mayhem.
?Did you see Mr. Davis bleeding at all?? the lawyer, Schottel, asked.
?I did not,? White replied.
?Did Mr. Davis get any blood on you while you were in the cell?? Schottel asked.
?No,? White said.
The contradictions between the complaint and the depositions apparently are what prompted the prosecutor to drop the ?property damage? allegation. The prosecutor also dropped a felony charge of assault on an officer that had been lodged more than a year after the incident and shortly after Davis filed his civil suit.
Davis suggested in his testimony that if the police really thought he had assaulted an officer he would have been charged back when he was jailed.
?They would have filed those charges right then and there, because that?s a major felony,? he noted.
Indisputable evidence of what transpired in the cell might have been provided by a surveillance camera, but it turned out that the VHS video was recorded at 32 times normal speed.
?It was like a blur,? Schottel told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. ?You couldn?t see anything.?
The blur proved to be from 12 hours after the incident anyway. The cops had saved the wrong footage after Schottel asked them to preserve it.
Schottel got another unpleasant surprise when he sought the use-of-force history of the officers involved. He learned that before a new chief took over in 2010 the department had a surprising protocol for non-fatal use-of-force reports.
?The officer himself could complete it and give it to the supervisor for his approval,? the prior chief, Thomas Moonier, testified in a deposition. ?I would read it. It would be placed in my out basket, and my secretary would probably take it and put it with the case file.?
No copy was made for the officer?s personnel file.
?Everything involved in an incident would generally be with the police report,? Moonier said. ?I don?t know what they maintain in personnel files.?
?Who was in charge of personnel files, of maintaining them?? Schottel asked.
?I have no idea,? Moonier said. ?I believe City Hall, but I don?t know.?
Schottel focused on the date of the incident.
?On September 20th, 2009, was there any way to identify any officers that were subject of one or more citizens? complaints?? he asked.
?Not to my knowledge,? Moonier said.
?Was there any way to identify any officers who had completed several use-of-force reports??
?I don?t recall.?
But however lax the department?s system and however contradictory the officers? testimony, a federal magistrate ruled that the apparent perjury about the ?property damage? charges was too minor to constitute a violation of due process and that Davis? injuries were de minimis?too minor to warrant a finding of excessive force. Never mind that a CAT scan taken after the incident confirmed that he had suffered a concussion.
Schottel has appealed and expects to argue the case in December. He will contend that perjury is perjury however minor the charge and note that both the NFL and Major League Baseball have learned to consider a concussion a serious injury.
Schottel figures the courts might take the problems of the Ferguson Police Department as more than de minimis as a result of the protests sparked when an officer shot and killed an unarmed 18-year-old named Michael Brown on the afternoon of Aug. 9.
?Your chances on appeal are going up,? a fellow lawyer told him.
At least one witness has said that Brown was shot in the back and then in the chest and head as he turned toward the officer with his hands raised.
?I said, ?Well, that doesn?t surprise me,?? Schottel told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. ?I said I already know about Ferguson, nothing new can faze me about Ferguson.?
Schottel has also deposed the new chief, Thomas Jackson, who took over in 2010. Jackson testified that he has instituted a centralized system whereby all complaints lodged against cops by citizens or supervisors go through him and are assigned a number in an internal affairs log. Schottel views Jackson as ?not a bad guy,? someone who has been trying to make positive change.
?He wants to do right, but it was such a mess,? Schottel said Wednesday.
Jackson has seemed less than progressive as he delayed identifying the officer involved in the shooting for fear it would place him and his family in danger. Jackson would only say the officer is white and has been on the job for six years. This means that for his first two and most formative years the officer might have been writing his own force reports and that none of them went into his file.
?It?s hard to get people to clean things up, especially if they?re used to doing things a certain way,? Schottel said.
On Friday, police finally identified the officer as Darren Wilson, who is said to have no disciplinary record, as such records are kept in Ferguson. We already know that he started out at a time when it was accepted for a Ferguson cop to charge somebody with property damage for bleeding on his uniform and later saying there was no blood on him at all.
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Tim Mak
Tim Mak
U.S. NEWS 08.15.14
Web Sleuths Get It Wrong Again in Ferguson
The hacker group Anonymous blew it?and tormented a woman not connected to the shooting of Michael Brown. Victims of careless ?dox? attempts say the consequences are miserable.
Although the Web carries with it great collaborative potential, mistakes can be made in the heat of a crisis, especially when research is being led by amateurs. It is even worse when online actors ?dox??or publicly release the private information of?the incorrect person. As online social communities grow, bands of well-meaning users are increasingly trying to play detective to enforce a type of street justice?and about as often, they get it wrong.
The consequences can be miserable, as those affected tell The Daily Beast in interviews.
The misidentified Ferguson shooter
This week the nebulous hacker collective Anonymous released the name of a man they believed to be the shooter of Michael Brown, the teen killed in Ferguson, Missouri, last Saturday. They were flat out wrong. Not only did Anonymous issue the incorrect name, posting the information of a man who had never been a St. Louis police officer, but the vigilante hackers also acquired a false address. They posted the address of the man?s 48-year-old stepmother, Stephanie Warnack.
?Wow, this is not good,? she said, when informed by a national reporter. She began to weep. ?Now I have to defend myself and I didn?t do anything wrong.?
A harried-sounding woman answered the phone at a publicly listed number for Warnack on Friday. The phone had been ringing off the hook all morning, the woman told The Daily Beast, refusing to identify herself.
?Don?t call back again,? she warned.
Twitter messages show there was some internal dissension among Anonymous hackers as to whether they had the correct name. Despite misgivings, some decided to release it anyway?with unfortunate results for those wrongly fingered as responsible for a police shooting that has led to widespread protests in the Missouri suburb.
The wrong Boston Marathon bombing suspect
In April 2013, Reddit users began to speculate that one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects looked like missing Brown University student Sunil Tripathi.
Online commenters remarked that the student bore a similarity to one of the suspects pictured in a picture released by the FBI. Their suspicions were solidified by a user who supposedly went to school with Sunil and wrote that she recognized him in the FBI photos.
So as they continued the search for their son and brother, the Tripathi family had to deal with a second, overwhelming ordeal: the flood of accusations and insults that comes with being associated with a violent, criminal act.
?The whole night the phone was ringing off the hook with news reporters and nasty messages.?
?We were already in a very tense and anxious state, having looked for Sunil for 32 days or so,? Judy Tripathi, Sunil?s mother, told The Daily Beast. ?The whole night the phone was ringing off the hook with news reporters and nasty messages. It was devastating because we knew it wasn?t him, and we were so worried? It just seemed to be an epidemic.?
Of course, Tripathi had nothing to do with the bombing. His body was found after the Tsarnaev brothers were fingered as suspects in the bombings. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed during a shootout with police in a Boston suburb, and younger brother Dzhokhar is facing charges for his involvement in the attacks.
But before Sunil?s body was found, his mother was most concerned that the online speculation might cause someone to recognize him on the street.
?The thought of this misidentification and what anyone would do if they saw him, or what Sunil would feel if he got wind of this news, was beyond my imagination,? she explained. ?It was just another horrible thing on top of everything else? it?s very unsettling, because it can happen again [to others].?
The general manager of Reddit later apologized for the community?s inaccurate sleuthing, which ?fueled online witch hunts and dangerous speculation.?
The impact of the error will stay with Sunil?s family for all time.
?When you Google his name, forever, it just pops up a million sources that are connected to the Boston bombing. When you?re trying to memorialize your 22-year-old, that?s very horrible. It?s had a very devastating long-term impact,? Judy Tripathi said.
After Newtown: Adam Lanza, not Ryan Lanza
In December 2012, Adam Lanza shot more than two dozen people in what has come to be known as the Sandy Hook massacre. In the immediate aftermath of the incident, his brother Ryan was forced to defend himself online as commenters flooded onto his Facebook page. Ryan?s identification was found at the scene of crime.
?Everyone shut the f*** up it wasn?t me,? he wrote on his page. ?I?m on the bus home now it wasn?t me. IT WASN?T ME I WAS AT WORK IT WASN?T ME.?
Adam had not spoken to his brother in a year, according to a book on the shootings, but the younger Lanza had carried his identification during the shooting, leading to police, media, and online commenters to finger him as a suspect.
So the elder brother, whose family member had just shot and killed his mother, along with 20 children at an elementary school, had to deal not only with the trauma of that nightmare, but also with defending his own reputation. And much like Sunil Tripathi, his name will forever be associated with an act he was not involved in.
Reached by phone, he did not appear interested in reliving the ordeal.
?I?m out of the country right now,? Ryan Lanza said, before hanging up.
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Clive Irving
Clive Irving
GET OUT OF HERE08.10.14
Obama?s Extravagant Summer Break? More Like, America?s Vacation-Deficit Disorder
It?s not just that we don?t take enough time off?4.1 days on average?it?s that we do such a poor job of using it.
The president is setting a personal record. At 15 days, Barack Obama?s vacation on Martha?s Vineyard will be the longest summer break of his presidency. The world is on fire almost everywhere, come the protests. How dare he do that?
Give the guy a break ? literally. It?s not that he?s exactly out of the loop. He can only go someplace where there are secure communications, a huge security presence and an easily ring-fenced site ? like a small island within an hour?s flying time to the White House. Wherever he goes the crises will follow, 24/7. (And the commander in chief will hop back to Washington for a couple of days in mid-vacation.)
In any other civilized nation this effort at some kind of summer escape would barely raise an eyebrow. But among all the world?s advanced economies the United States stands out for what should be called a serious case of vacation deficit disorder. We are the only country that does not have mandatory paid vacations for its workers. Not one day. Zilch.
Remarkably, Americans have not risen in revolt against this gaping inequality. Indeed, our acceptance of it reveals a great deal of confusion about that part of the Declaration of Independence that involves the pursuit of happiness. We?ll fight for the life and liberty bits, but happiness?? Surely happiness is most readily delivered by a decent vacation?
A tour of the Uffizi in Florence is now a commonplace to a manager from Tokyo whereas in the 19thcentury it was still attainable by very few.
Those avatars of hedonism, The Europeans, are aghast at discovering that the average American vacation lasts for just 4.1 days. They see this as further evidence of cultural collapse.
But I fear that this is the way that national stereotypes can lead to international conflicts of attitude. Invariably the example of France comes up. To begin with, this is the country that introduced a 35-hour workweek. Then there is the fact that officially every French worker is entitled to 31 days of paid vacation. But by exploiting other allowances, smart people ? both government employees and company employees -- can extend that to five and a half weeks.
Five and a half weeks?
Just think, they?re already in France. This is a country that more or less invented the basic ground rules for the pursuit of happiness. Let there be wine, food, music, and ravishing summer landscapes from Alpine meadows to Riviera beaches. (Forget Paris in August. Leave that for the Americans to discover that everything is ferme.)
Before you invoke images of a nation enjoying more indolence than industry, there is an uncomfortable statistic to digest. Specifically, comparing the output per worker in the U.S. and France. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development expressing the Gross National Product in terms of value per hour worked, the U.S. comes out on top at $60.2, and France a close second, $57.7.
Of course, GDP is an economist?s yardstick, not a hedonist?s. These numbers may be a measure of efficiency, but they?re not a measure of the quality of life. Almost a quarter of Americans have no paid vacation time at all, and many of them are in the lowest-paid jobs. For those who do get paid vacation time, the lack of any regulatory framework creates wide variations in what employers grant. The total is often geared to years served ? for example, 14 days after five years. But it?s difficult to escape the conclusion that the brevity of the average American vacation betrays a high degree of angst about absence from the workplace. Those 4.1 days of vacation often include a weekend, minimizing the risk of finding somebody else in your seat when you return.
As a result, Americans are burning through leisure time without getting real leisure. At this point it?s necessary to invoke the warning delivered by a British social historian, E. P. Thompson, that ?time is currency. It is not passed but spent.?
The best return on that perpetually diminishing currency in terms of leisure is ? or should be ? travel. Not just going somewhere, but coming back the better for having gone, while noting that although travel can broaden the mind it can do so only if the mind is prepared to be broadened.
I?ve heard people boast of ?doing ten cities in seven days,? which amounts to mindless consumption, not travel at all ? not travel of the kind that gives something back of lasting value, purchases of the mind rather than the purchases that are stuffed into the suitcase.
Travel with lofty purpose really began when it was accessible only to a small and privileged class with unlimited time to travel. Most notably, the English nobility who initiated the Grand Tour of Europe in the 18th century on the principle that their cultural sensibility could be greatly advanced by exposure to rediscovered classical sites in Italy like Herculaneum and Pompeii, together with the works and worlds of artists like Raphael and Michelangelo.
But these wandering toffs were forerunners of today?s most egregious believers in personal entitlement. They wanted to keep the uplifting moments to themselves. By 1729 one of them was already complaining that ?Rome is much changed to the worse ? entirely owing to the British.?
This particular wave of culture vultures was terminated by the Napoleonic wars, but by the end of the 19th century a new and more familiar engine of travel was spreading the word ? elitist literary journeys: among them Flaubert?s roaming eye in Egypt, Elizabeth Wharton?s languid pensees on Italian villas, and later a more robust compulsion: Hemingway?s adoration of matadors.
Ironically, these classic literary experiences no longer travel well. We may yearn for them but they are unreachable now, left in a past that seems almost to belong to a distant planet. How different it is for us today, when travel has been enabled by two forces: a newly affluent global middle class of which the Chinese are the latest wave, and the efficiency and economy of air travel.
In one sense this is democracy at work ? a tour of the Uffizi in Florence is now a commonplace to a manager from Tokyo whereas in the 19th century it was still attainable by very few. But in another sense this democratization has led to commoditized travel ? pre-cooked, packaged and marketed for groups rather than individuals at every level from the budget tour of Tuscany to the trophy African safari replete with luxury lodges in what is left of the wild.
Often sold as ?bespoke luxury travel? these trips require the advice of specialist consultants who frequently get paid commissions by the hotels they recommend. The more luxurious the trip, the more it seems that personal choice is delegated by the client to the planner.
At a price, such trips deliver such treats as private access to the Louvre when it?s closed to the public. This is a strange way of getting acquainted with other places and other cultures ? unless you really feel more comfortable remaining inside a portable bubble of your own well pampered culture, which I suspect is often the case.
These developments illustrate another point: that one of the most insidious ways to misspend the precious currency of time is use of the timetable. Organized travel demands the scheduling of every waking hour. Breakfast at 7:30; assemble with guide at 8:30; 15 minutes at Buckingham Palace at 9:30; half an hour at the British Museum at 10.30; an hour of shopping at Harrods at noon?and so it goes, a disciplined progression allowing no digressions or risks of surprise.
To me this is the antithesis of what travel should be about. The essence of real travel is spontaneity. Plan as little possible ? ideally just a beginning and an end, plus some advance reading. Then let things happen. Get off the beaten track. There will be completely unforeseen magic moments ? settling at just the perfect table outside a harbor-side caf? at twilight and lingering there, even going back the next evening. Technology has actually made this kind of unplanned traveling easier. A cell phone can now tell you which hotels nearby have last-minute vacancies, and deliver user reviews.
To be sure, there will be mistakes, some surprises you would rather have avoided ? the elevator redolent of some flaw in the municipal sewage system, or a promising road that leads to a pig farm. But accidents, both good and bad, are part of a real traveler?s education.
Those aristos who could spend a year or more on the Grand Tour returned believing that they were without doubt the world?s best travelers. Who could fairly be called the world?s best travelers today?
I would vote for the Australians. For many of them, it?s partly to do with living on an island continent distant from their European roots. In the days when they could travel to Europe only be sea, Australian families planned and saved up for long absences abroad in the manner of the Grand Tour and they were ? and still are ? enthusiastic imbibers of other cultures and ideas.
But now their country has an enlightened policy about paid leave. After 10 years working for the same employer they are entitled to more than eight weeks of paid vacation on top of the basic annual allowance of 20 to 25 days. As a result, Australians can spend months in Europe, Asia, and the Americas without any time pressures.
That?s a state of bliss that most Americans, locked in the grip of vacation deficit disorder, can only dream of. Hard-wired into the psyche of many is the idea that somehow time off is akin to sloth. Yet when it comes to sloth we have surely produced the world?s current best in class ? members of Congress. By the end of its current year the House of Representatives will have been in session for fewer than 135 days, turning up for an average of 28 hours a week (with very little to show for it.) Not even the French have got their working week down to that level.
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Ueslei Marcelino / Reuters
James Bloodworth
James Bloodworth
WORLD NEWS 08.15.14
Putin's Useful (British) Idiots
From Neville Chamberlain to the pages of today?s ?Guardian,? many members of the British elite, left and right, have proved themselves suckers for totalitarianism.
LONDON ? During the Cold War the mass of the British people were, as George Orwell put it, at once both too sane and too stupid to accept any left-wing illusions about the Soviet Union.
But there has long been a certain muddleheadedness about totalitarianism on both the left and the right in Britain, with the most obvious example being British Conservative Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who was unable to grasp the fact that Adolf Hitler might actually believe the Nazi theories about blood and the ?volk? until it was too late. By then the Nazis had already annexed large swathes of Europe, and Britain was embarrassingly unprepared for war.
Today, that same sort of delusional thinking is evident in regard to Russia?s latest Tsar, Vladimir Putin. Comparing Putin?s aggression in eastern Ukraine to Hitler?s ?protection? of Germans living in Czechoslovakia, as Hillary Clinton did a few months ago, is stretching things a bit. But Putin?s British apologists, on both the left and the right, are sticking faithfully to the script laid down by the man who had the dubious distinction of signing the Munich Agreement.
A number of British right-wingers have long admired the Russian president for his unapologetic assertion of Russian power, his promotion of ?traditional? values (see gay baiting) and his cynicism when dealing with ?decadent? democratic governments. Alex Salmond and Nigel Farage, both leaders of burgeoning nationalist parties (Scottish and English respectively), have named the butcher of Chechnya as the one politician they ?most admire,? with Farage describing Putin?s cynical manipulation of the conflict in Syria as ?brilliant.?
There is also the prestigious Bruges Group, a self-described ?neo-liberal think tank? made up of Conservative MPs and Lords, which claims to be ?spearheading the intellectual battle? against the European Union. The group?s president is Norman Tebbit, Margaret Thatcher?s former Secretary of State for Education. What?s interesting is where the Bruges Group?s detestation of Europe has led it politically: straight into the arms of the Kremlin. According to a recent video put out by the group, the main problem in ?the Ukraine? (as they revealingly call it) is not Russian-backed separatists but rather ?E.U. meddling.?
This idea of a Russia that?s been treated badly extends deep into the Conservative press, where the Telegraph?s economics correspondent, Liam Halligan, has built almost an entire career on poorly disguised Putin apologia. Despite the fact that a majority of Ukraine?s 328 lawmakers voted on February 22 to remove former President Viktor Yanukovych from power due to his abandonment of office and the deaths of more than 80 protesters, according to Halligan Ukraine?s ?democratic process? was in fact thwarted by ?rock-throwing thugs.? As is perhaps predictable, Halligan is a regular pundit on RT, the Russian state?s English-language satellite channel, where he rallies against Western sanctions on a network that also gives a voice to neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, and people who believe the Pope is part of a species of cone heads that secretly rule the world.
It would be unfair to single out the right; the left has its own share of useful idiots, largely made up of neo-Stalinists who see Putin as the new Man of Steel, and soft-headed liberals for whom the default response to any global crisis is to mutter about Western ?double standards.? The Guardian columnist (and former editor of the paper?s comment pages), Seumus Milne, is a typical case of the former, and has blamed the violence in eastern Ukraine on ?the disastrous Versailles-style break-up of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.? In other words, any Ukrainian desire for self-determination can go to hell: Putin is right to be concerned about the loss of his ?sphere of influence.? In Milne?s case the thread connecting Cold War moral bankruptcy to post-ideological moral bankruptcy is a direct one: This is a man who has built his career writing columns with titles like ?Stalin?s Missing Millions,? meaning he probably didn?t really kill as many people in the Gulag as alleged.
Soon after Milne had put down on paper his sympathy for Tsar Vladimir, the Australian journalist John Pilger, another self-proclaimed ?anti-imperialist,? took to the pages of the Guardian to?wait for it?denounce the opponents of Russian imperialism. Using fabricated quotes from alleged victims of ?Ukrainian Nazis? pulled from Facebook pages that later vanished, Pilger blamed the entire crisis on ?Washington?s planned seizure of Russia?s historic, legitimate, warm-water naval base in Crimea.?
The Guardian?s own Moscow correspondent, Shaun Walker, described the use of the quotes as ?inexcusable.?
Finally, and in keeping with the suspicion that pacifism is little more than disguised power worship, the biggest organization in Britain dedicated to ?peace,? the Stop the War Coalition, wrote in March that, ?if we must pick a side, let it be Russia.?
Schooled in a parochial ?common sense? view of the world, Neville Chamberlain viewed every political decision through the prism of the Birmingham Town Planning Committee where he spent his formative years. The assumption in every quarrel was that there was ?something to be said for both sides??why, then, shouldn?t the Germans of the Sudetenland join Germany if that was what they wished?
Putin is no Hitler, but today?s useful idiots, while lacking the stature of Chamberlain, are no less parochial and foolish. In some cases they are worse, for what they lack in power they make up in malevolence.
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The Daily Beast
Kevin Fallon
Kevin Fallon
ENTERTAINMENT 08.15.14
Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Martin Consciously Couple
The Oscar winner and Coldplay singer are dating, according to reports. LOL, am I right?
If Jennifer Lawrence were to find out that "Jennifer Lawrence"?that brassy ball of fun who regales all the patrons at the pub with stories about shitting herself while eating copious amounts of fried food?was dating Chris Martin, we like to think that Jennifer Lawrence would laugh.
"You guys joshing me?" she might say. "That shiz is cray cray!" she'd laugh. And then you'd whip out your iPhone and pull up that snarky tweet your friend wrote linking to the E! Online report suggesting that this shiz, though cray cray, does appear to be true.
According to their report, the one known as J. Law and the one know as That Guy From Coldplay Who Was Married to Gwyneth Paltrow have been seeing each other since Ms. Law split with her on-again/off-again boyfriend Nicholas Hoult in June. The former Mr. Paltrow, you'll remember if you're a consumer of any kind of Internet news, "consciously uncoupled" from the Oscar-winning GOOP maven in March.
This conscious uncoupling was a big deal because WTF is that even. And also because they had been married for over a decade, have children together, and many saw this as proof what many have long expected: that living with the woman who purportedly subsists on vegan tofu crudit?s, wisps of positivity, and self-manifested shakra may have truly been as insufferable as it sounds.
Oh would Jennifer Lawrence laugh at this news of who "Jennifer Lawrence" is dating. She would laugh at this, you see, because we have decided that Jennifer Lawrence is not just our favorite Hollywood dream BFF, but she is one of us. Nay, she is all of us. And like the legion of obnoxious gossip mongers who are snickering in their 140-character salons, she would find the fact that Chris Martin moving on from a partner with a reputation for pretention, rigidity, and unattainable clean living to one who is best known for falling up a staircase while winning the most respected prize in the arts and flicking off the press soon after poetically hilarious.
From the uptight, insufferable bitch to the cool It Girl, you go Chris Martin! That's what everyone (or at least those I follow on Twitter) think.
The thing is, though, this kind of attitude is not very nice. Hating on Gwyneth Paltrow and judging her self-appointed lifestyle ambassadorship is so pass?. (It's all about judging Blake Lively now.) And let's not pretend that if it were any other Hollywood starlet shacking up with a (much) older man while still not divorced from the wife and the mother of his kids, we would be publicly shaming her as some sort of vicious jezebel with a SAG card.
It's ok to obsess over this news. We love celebrity news! The only thing better than dreaming about the life we'd lead if we were rich and famous is being snootily judgmental about the life choices of those who already are.
So laugh about this bit of tabloid news. Laugh because you might find it funny. Laugh because it's such an utterly bizarre partnering. Laugh because you?re Jennifer Lawrence and if there's one thing Jennifer Lawrence likes to do, goddammit, it's laugh.
But don't laugh because you're being mean. Jennifer Lawrence would hate that.
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looks like the Fergy police were used to beating some blacks asses
Probably the same ones that showed up with tanks, swat equipment , and large cal guns top of trucks aimed at the protesters.
the police and military attire should not go in the same context in public.
geeezzz louise........
