"The trial revealed that CPD infiltrators Mehmet Uygun and Nadia Chikko, known to the activists as 'Mo' and 'Gloves,' helped plan and instigate the crimes. They plied the defendants with alcohol, getting them drunk on multiple occasions, helped purchase gasoline for the Molotov cocktails, and even cut up a bandanna to use as a wick."
"Although the call that led Texas investigators to the ranch was proven to be a hoax, CPS removed 439 children as a precaution. The subsequent litigation to reunite the children with their families and the prosecution of 11 church members, including leader Warren Jeffs, dragged on for years. Ten of the 11 were convicted on child sexual assault charges."
This sort of thing is tempting -- but it's also a lot like providing your identification before robbing a bank. Still, he's not in jail yet!
"And I was struck anew that this case was all talk, talk, talk. Church said this. Chase said that. Betterly said this (although not much.) Right up until at the prompting of the undercover officers they poured some gasoline in some beer bottles and stuffed a torn rag in the top, they hadn’t committed any crime.
"What they would have done with those “Molotov cocktails”— a scary word for a weapon that any dumb kid can make at home as many have — we’ll never know. But I will always believe the NATO 3 never posed as great a threat to the freedom of the people of Chicago as those who assigned police officers to infiltrate dissident political groups in search of potential “criminals”— and by those who chose to define those criminals as terrorists."
‘NATO 3′ Sentenced to More Jail Time After Prosecutors Rabidly Invoke Boston Bombing | The Dissenter
Judges, prosecutors, and police who invoke the fear of violence to commit their monstrous acts of violence are incredible hypocrites.
"Unless you’re a southern Coloradan with roots in the area, or a union member well-versed in the hard-fought rights of fellow workers or a history buff who has delved into books on the topic, you could easily not know that in the height of the so-called Progressive Era, the state of Colorado killed scores of strikers at the behest of the world’s richest family. Most U.S. history schoolbooks don’t mention Ludlow. Those that do generally treat it as a blip."
Here's an interesting fellow. Watt became the first British convert to Mormonism by winning a foot race, he was a writer of Pitman shorthand and took down and edited several volumes of Brigham Young's sermons, he invented a phonetic orthography called the Deseret alphabet, and he had six wives. He was excommunicated from the church after joining the Godbeites.
The late Peggy Pascoe is the author of "What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America," an award-winning history of miscegenation law. In this essay she points out some of the parallels between the fight for racial equality and the fight for sexual equality under marriage law:
"I would argue that it is virtually impossible to understand the current debate over same-sex marriage without first understanding the history of American miscegenation laws and the long legal fight against them, if only because both supporters and opponents of same-sex marriage come to this debate, knowing or unknowingly, wielding rhetorical tools forged during the history of miscegenation law. The arguments white supremacists used to justify for miscegenation laws--that interracial marriages were contrary to God's will or somehow unnatural--are echoed today by the most conservative opponents of same-sex marriage."
Josef Stalin interviewed by HG Wells [1934].
I loved reading this interview. I've never read Stalin before (partly because I find his politics to be atrocious), but it turns out he was very good at explaining Marxism; and Wells, with his "Anglo-Saxon Socialism" and mishmash of liberal sociology and worship of order for the sake of order, was very good at making Marxism sound appealing.
(Mirror: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1934/07/23.htm)
100 years ago today in Ludlow, Colorado.
"as long as our own freedom is secured through the segregation of others, into concrete abysses – even, or especially, if these others remain invisible to us – it is a false sense of freedom, and it diminishes our own capacities for critical awareness."
"This weekly round of deportations at the NWDC comes as Ramon Mendoza Pascual and J. Cipriano Rios Alegria continue their hunger strike in medical isolation, under solitary confinement sentences."
Ha. I had no idea Grooveshark depends on DMCA's safe harbour provisions. I assumed they had some sort of clever licensing scheme worked out with music publishers.
And don't forget how Google illegally conspired with Apple and Intel and friends to suppress wages: http://goo.gl/1Piuez
(Also, I like how Google's top lobbyist, Molinari, shares the name of the originator of market anarchism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_de_Molinari)
Pretty animated graphs! Suicide has become the number one violent cause of death.
3 Quarks Daily is one of my favorite link-aggregator logs on all of the internet. It is strange and charming, and, um, top-ish. They post a lot of poetry, but that's usually easy to ignore. On Monday's they post original content.
"The only player in the game unworthy of “civil” is the defendant, because the object of the game is to put him in prison. And that’s why judges don’t find cops to be liars. It’s the same reason judges grow disgusted with criminal defense lawyers who won’t let the wheels of justice grind smoothly. We mess up the game."
The fact that this guy is talking to Salon on a cellphone while in solitary gives me the impression that the Free Alabama Movement has done some impressive pre-strike organizing.
"Yes, the cops raided Daniel’s home because they wanted to find out who was behind @peoriamayor, an account that had been shut down weeks ago by Twitter. When it was active, Daniel used it to portray Jim Ardis, the mayor of Peoria, as a weed-smoking, stripper-loving, Midwestern answer to Rob Ford. The account never had more than 50 followers, and Twitter had killed it because it wasn't clearly marked as a parody."