I expect this will be a recurring segment. It will cover things that people of a libertarian bent get outraged about every day that finally bubble up into the public consciousness. Suddenly, much outrage is spouted because a particular person, possessing some special trait, attractive to media outlets and their audiences, has been treated badly by the government.
The first in this series is NASA engineer Sidd Bikkannaver, US born citizen who was ordered to unlock his phone at Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston.
It was January 31. Bikkannavar had just arrived at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport after a nine-hour flight from Santiago, Chile, where he’d competed in a two-week race from the southern tip of the country to its capital in a solar-powered car. In a few hours, he would board a connecting flight back home to California, where he’s worked at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena for over a decade.
Be still, my beating heart. So smart, so hip. And his phone was property of the JPL! How dare the agent not believe the “it’s not even mine” story! Who does this agent think our hero is? Some scruffy-looking dope mule? This is an outrage!
Actually, the outrage is that ICE agents can hold people indefinitely, or at least long enough to cause them signifcant loss of money and time, to get around 4th Amendment protections that apply to everyone on US soil, citizen, resident, visitor, or illegal. The broad police powers, rather than how or to whom such powers are applied, are the outrage. This example is, sadly, a result of a well-designed program in that it occasionally assigns a random check (probably, I don’t have special knowledge) to even people who ICE has good evidence are solid citizens. Bikkannaver “[is] a part of the Customs and Border Protection Global Entry program, whose members are waved through the line after just scanning their passport and fingerprints. That would lead me to believe that this is not the result of some Border Patrol agent from flyover country picking the guy with the funny name.
So welcome to the party, pal! You’ve done everything right and felt the State’s boot.
He begins by admitting to his tone-deafness on the issue and how he perhaps needed to have more understanding of a broad audience when speaking in a scholarly manner. He then puts out a claim that he has received many death and rape threats on him as well as his family, although he doesn’t substantiate the claim in any way, shape or form.
He then continues to spin interesting stories about what he means and that the context was completely misrepresented. He continues to explain how Muslims were actually some of the greatest abolitionists in the history of mankind and that a lot of the latter slavery in the Muslim world was misunderstood, especially much of that from the Ottoman Empire.
Read it for yourself, but I personally have a hard time taking someone seriously that says rape can actually be punished under Sharia as assault with only two witnesses as opposed to the four necessary to prove the charge of Hudud (fornication/adultery). It diminishes the rule of law in a civil society and still essentially makes women second-class citizens.
After eight years of waging war on whistleblowers, and indeed, being president during former Army intelligence officer Chelsea Manning’s sentence, trial, and three years of brutal detainment before that—President Obama finally delivered some pleasant news on Tuesday. Instead of 35 years in prison for 20 charges, Manning will be out in May of this year.
A heroic whistleblower to some and a traitor to others, Manning was an Army private who leaked thousands of documents related to the Iraq and Afghan wars to WikiLeaks, which in turn shared some of those documents with various newspapers. Though U.S. officials and their most dutiful lapdogs cried out in outrage over this individualist act of light shedding, no one died because of these leaks, as some claimed. We did, however, get to see what war looks like live with the “collateral murder” video. Furthermore, Manning’s information gave us body counts for Iraq, reports of the U.S. failing to follow up on reports of torture and murder, and war crimes committed that were never prosecuted.
There was all the reason in the world to assume Obama wouldn’t free Manning. His administration tried a record number of people under the espionage act. Edward Snowden fled to Russia rather than face the dubious justice that anyone unimportant would be granted for spilling government secrets. Former NSA executive Thomas Drake narrowly escaped the Espionage Act, and now works at an Apple Store, because he spoke to a reporter about privacy concerns he had with the agency, which he said was committing privacy violations worse than those which took place under Richard Nixon.
General David Petraeus could have been charged under a section of the Espionage Act for leaking classified secrets to his mistress/biographer, but he wasn’t. He pled guilty to a misdemeanor, and retired as CIA director, and that was all. Six months later, there was talk of him being in Donald Trump’s administration.
After two suicide attempts, miserable treatment, and draconian punishments for crimes such as possessing verboten books and expired toothpaste,
The law is the law, and “illegal” has serious meaning which all should respect. Because toothpaste.
and seven total years without freedom, Manning has five more months to go. It appears that President Trump will have no power to reverse this decision. Presidential clemency power is a beefy power indeed. Obama, after a term and a half of being known for a dubious healthcare law, and setting exciting new precedents in drone assassinations of Americans, finally started using that power in earnest, and is now breaking records there. As of today’s news, the president had commuted the sentences of more than 1500 people, and pardoned 212 people.
Though the news of Manning’s imminent release is great, there can be at least a semi-cynical explanation. Having diluted his civil libertarian rhetoric with his, uh, actual record, Obama can now go out with a bang, one that makes even the crankiest small government fans cheer when they consider the 1500 people whose lives are improved (or in the case of the handful of people who sentences Obama changed from death to life imprisonment, saved). But he can also keep an elite credibility by saying Manning was punished already. The clemency was a surprise, but there’s a certain savvy logic to it as well.
It’s not enough for security state vampires such as National Review’s David French, who found 35 years in prison for Manning to be an unsatisfying compromise, and seven measly years and torturous solitary confinement to be an insult. French and his ilk, such as former UN Ambassador John Bolton (and the Trump of 2010), thought Manning deserved death. She could have received the death penalty if she had been charged with treason, or if she hadn’t been acquitted of the charge of aiding the enemy. Manning’s sentencing must have been a sad day for people who demand their pound of flesh, and who think that 35 years behind bars is small.
That’s the thing. This could be a brilliant compromise move. There are people who believe Manning deserved to be punished, and there are people who have been furious about her imprisonment for the past seven years.
But the former could develop some proportionality and realized that seven years is a lot of life to lose. Manning was punished for trying to show the world what war looks like beyond George W. Bush and a “mission accomplished” banner, or even sanitized photos of flag-draped coffins. By freeing her, Obama gets to get back some of his civil libertarian cred, but also isn’t doing something “crazy” like pardoning Snowden. In a country that loves to punish too much (2.3 million people in prison), Obama ending his presidency with a cascade of mercy is a good thing, no matter what you think of the people whose sentences he has commuted, or the people he has freed. But it’s a shame that he didn’t have the courage to push for these things earlier. Or that he didn’t feel like risking some of the political capital that he spent on drones, Libya, and ObamaCare.
Petraeus was showing off to his mistress. Hell, Dick Cheney has been enjoying his freedom for many years now. Henry Kissinger has a Nobel Peace prize, no matter how many Cambodians he helped to melt.
What happened to Manning is proof that there are rules for them, and rules for the rest of us. There are rules for former heads of the CIA, and there are rules for Army privates who want Americans to know what is going on.
They will go to war for us, and in our name. But God help anyone who wants to help the public get a picture of what those wars really resemble. No matter what Obama’s motivation was, sincere or otherwise, his freeing of Manning is a pleasant surprise, and a capper to a rocky, often-authoritarian presidency that Trump is about to inherit.
Originally published at Rare.us on January 17th, 2017. Reprinted with permission.
According to a poorly-sourced Wikipedia bio, Louis J. Marinelli, driving force behind Yes California (better known as Calexit) and the [former] interim co-chair of the California National Party (CNP), was born in Buffalo, NY and raised in the area. He went to Iowa to work in the Edwards campaign there at 17 for the 2004 election, but became frustrated when the party chose the overly liberal Kerry. In 2006 he started a Facebook group called Protect Marriage: One Man, One Woman, while he was living in Russia as an English teacher. It eventually became affiliated with the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) and he (according to Wikipedia) was a paid strategist for them. He returned to the US in early 2010 to help with the Summer for Marriage Tour. By late 2010 he had come out in favor of repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and fully broke with NOM’s position on marriage equality by April 2011, which brought him to the attention of MSNBC, The Daily Beast, Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo. According to The Daily Beast, NOM spox, Brian Brown, denied that Marinelli was a key player and stated that he was just a “bus driver”:
Bear Republic
“Louis was a bus driver,” Brown said. “It’s pretty hilarious, this idea that he was a top strategist for NOM. He was a part-time consultant. He has since changed his position, and people have a right to change their minds.”
Marinelli falls out of the public eye for a few years after this. He moves back to Russia to teach English, marries a Russian national, and (again, according to Wikipedia) started a movement called Sovereign California around the time that he fell in with Marcus Ruiz Evans and advocate for “sub-national sovereignty.” They began working together and re-branded as Yes California along the model of the Scottish Independence movement. He ran for state assembly, but did not generate much interest or make it past the primary. In 2015 and 2016 he received some friendly puff-piece coverage from the likes of The LA Times and Vice. He is named as a co-founder of the California National Party in the Vice profile while his involvement is otherwise implied in other venues.
And Then There Was Trump
Yes California became relevant to Californians following the 2016 elections who felt that the result was out of step with their values. A recent Reuters poll pegs Californian interest in secession at 32%. This Reuters devotes four paragraphs to Marinelli’s “quixotic campaign”. What it failed to mention is Marinelli’s participation in a Russian backed conference for Western secession movements hosted in Moscow. In December, KQED reported on how heavily Russian state news organization RT and the Communist Party organ Pravda had been covering Yes California prior to anyone in California actually caring. In fact, Marinelli had spoken at a September conference hosted in Moscow for Western secession movements including Catalonia, Ireland, and…Texas. Pravda quotes Marinelli in it’s article “Moscow gathers ‘fifth column’ for Washington”:
‘We’ll need international recognition of our voting in the future, when the referendum is held. We count on the Russian authorities to support us within this issue, as the Crimea also separated from Ukraine due to a referendum. We want to exit from the US the same way,’ Louis J. Marinelli said
The conference was hosted by an organization called Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia (ADR). ADR has been the recipient of Kremlin funds to drive their activities and have subsequently allowed Yes California to use office space in their headquarters as a “California Embassy” to Moscow. It is unclear how much funding the Kremlin provides ADR although it did receive a Presidential grant. ABC News confirms that the conference was funded by the Kremlin, but the head of ADR is evasive about how much of their funding is direct from the government, and Marinelli seems unsure across several interviews.
To make matters more interesting the CNP denies any current relationship to Marinelli. He was one of eight founding members, but has resigned his position as of June 2016, and has had no further involvement with the organization since June, according to CNP Vice Chairperson, Jed Wheeler (via email). Linda Daly, the Los Angeles co-chair of the CNP was in the audience, but not a participant, for a February 13 conference where Marinelli downplayed the influence of Russian involvement. Mr. Wheeler clarified that she attended to correct any potential misrepresentation Mr. Marinelli might make regarding his continued involvement with the CNP.
Marinelli is difficult to pin down politically. His CV purportedly includes stumping for John Edwards and the National Organization for Marriage. Various profiles from his Assembly run peg him as a “moderate liberal” and wanting a devolution of Federal power to the state, although in the most recent interview he indicated he wanted to “establish the kind of liberal and progressive republic that we want in California, but often can’t have because of congress, because of the White House, because of the supreme court.” His current position also hints at a more definitive break with the US than his previous “sub-sovereignty” solution.
Nancy smoothed the third layer of brightly-colored Spanx over her slack flesh and atrophied muscles. She felt powerful in her costume and a gormless smile spread over her nerveless face.
“I felsh powershful, Sharles,” she slurred.
Chuck nodded absently as he gathered his breasts and pushed them into his armored chestplate.
“I might need a hand, Nancy,” he said, pressing his left breast in only for the right to pop out again. “I feel like a can of raw biscuits.”
Nancy settled the domino mask over her eyes and nodded. She advanced on him, claws gleaming.
“Dick is here,” Dick yelled, jumping in the room. His yellow and black uniform reeked of aftershave and stressed letter.
Nancy looked up, hands deep in Chuck’s cleavage and gave him a smeared grin.
Dick quickly turned around. “Oh, God,” he groaned, “I really didn’t need to see that.”
“See what?” Dianne asked, toddling into the room, “What did I miss?” She was stripped to the waist and her pendulous breasts swayed ponderously. Dick turned a gag into an embarrassed cough.
“To arms!” Steny screamed as he slid in to the locker room on sock feet. He was only dressed in a red speedo and an American flag tank top. He insisted he wore so little in order to remain agile.
Dianne cheered as she struggled to get into the rest of her skin-tight black bodysuit and Dick watched in fascinated horror.
“Call an intern,” Nancy said, her arm down Chuck’s chestplate, “I think I’m stuck.”
Dick sighed, grabbed her by the waist and pulled. Her arm came out with a slithering pop and they both staggered back.
“Is everyone ready?” Steny asked.
“Hold on,” Dianne said.
“We need to get you there,” Steny said, a whine creeping into his voice.
Dianne admired herself in the long wall mirror, all in the black spandex, bulging all over like a rotting sausage.
“We gotta go,” Steny said.
Dianne wedged her helmet onto her melon head and yelled “Fuck fibromyalgia!”
“Trumsh dothint sthand a shance!” Nancy announced.
They all gathered in the center of the room and thrust their fists in the air.
They shouted as one: “Democratic Superfriends… GO!”
“Our complacency is killing us,” said Deborah A.P. Hersman, president of the National Safety Council and former chair of the National Transportation Safety Board. “Americans believe there is nothing we can do to stop crashes from happening, but that isn’t true. We lag the rest of the developed world in addressing highway fatalities. We just haven’t been willing to do what needs to be done.”
Don’t get offended. It’s not real.
That doesn’t sound good coming from a government bureaucrat (or even a former government bureaucrat). Perhaps the answer is as easy as STOP TEXTING WHEN YOU’RE BEHIND THE WHEEL.
And a note: we have added two tabs to the top of the site. One is for leads and submissions. This is for you guys to send in stories you’ve done, leads on things you’ve found that you think would make for an interesting piece. It’ll help us generate more content for y’all to criticize and/or comment on. The second is a contact button. This is there for those that have any questions pertaining to the site. If you want to understand the registration process before pulling the trigger or leave us feedback or anything in between, that’s the place to go and do it. Or you can always air your grievances or express appreciation in the comments, you guys know we all read them.
And perhaps a hint about why so much scorn is directed at the soi-disant “mainstream media.” In union elections yesterday, Boeing workers in South Carolina rejected union representation, and not by a small margin, either. Now, for me, I’d want to know what really happened, what were the actual issues and motivations. This apparently is not to be had. Reading the New York Times, there’s barely a clue. One might infer from hints buried deep in the article that there was some resentment that the union had opposed their plant in the first place for the benefit of workers in the high-wage (and this higher union dues rake-off) area of Seattle, but that’s hard to divine.
Worse yet is the coverage at ABC, who attribute the loss to dumb hick Southerners.
But this most recent test of Southern acceptance of collective bargaining movements was an uphill battle for the union and its backers… Southern states for decades have recruited manufacturers by promising freedom from the influences of labor unions, which except for some textile mills have been historically rejected by workers as collective action culturally foreign to a South built around family farms, said Jeffrey Hirsch, a law professor who specializes in labor relations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Translation: These rubes are just too dumb to know what’s best for them.
So what was really the thing which caused the union to be soundly rejected, which is only possible when the State declines to interfere with free transactions of labor and management? Well, I guess we’ll never know.
You have until Friday to gather your artwork (in any art medium) and write a “statement that engages in the theme.” Here is the exhibition vision:
As artists, we have the power to change the world and promote messages of peace and harmony. We have a responsibility to speak out against racism. Now, more than ever it is time to lift our voices. Offer a solution, illicit some empathy, discuss an issue. There is plenty of fodder for inspiration. We are seeking engaging images and thought provoking statements.
Spoiler alert: they don’t actually want anything thought-provoking.
