Into The Mix

Another reminder who we're dealing with:

BBC World News:

A Russian journalist who campaigned against government corruption and suffered brain damage from an attack in 2008, has died aged 55. 

Mikhail Beketov, founder and editor of the Khimki newspaper, campaigned heavily against the construction of a highway through the Khimki forest near Moscow.

Mr Beketov died on Monday from cardiac arrest, said his lawyer Stalina Gurevich.

His attackers were never identified.

Mr Beketov wrote several articles criticising the planned destruction of the Khimki forest to make way for the Moscow-Saint Petersburg motorway.

He also raised suspicions that local officials were profiting from the project.

Mr Beketov continued campaigning, even after his dog was left dead on his doorstep and his car was set on fire.

Soon after, on November 13th 2008, Mr Beketov was attacked outside his home by two men using an iron bar. They smashed his hands and legs, and fractured his skull.

Mr Beketov's right leg had to be amputated, he lost most of the fingers on his left hand and he was left severely brain-damaged. The attack also left him unable to speak.

Ms Gurevich said Mr Beketov never fully recovered.

"The culprits have not been found and now we can honestly say these people were murderers," said Yevgenia Chirikova, an activist who campaigned alongside Mr Beketov.

Several other journalists and environmentalists who campaigned against the project were also attacked.

In 2010, Mr Beketov was found guilty of libelling the local mayor but was subsequently acquitted.

Some 54 journalists have been killed in Russia since 1992, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). The CPJ states that Russia has the ninth worst record for solving murders against journalists.

Mr Beketov, who said he had received threats to stop writing, was given a government print media award in 2011.

Divide And Conquer

Turns out the Mark Zuckerberg character in the movie Social Media wasn't the plucky entrepreneurial good guy supernerd after all.

I think maybe the writers and producers had that suspicion all along.

WaPo, Yaël Eisenstat:

I joined Facebook in June 2018 as “head of Global Elections Integrity Ops” in the company’s business integrity organization, focused specifically on political advertising. I had spent much of my career working to strengthen and defend democracy — including freedom of speech — as an intelligence officer, diplomat and White House adviser. Now I had the opportunity to help correct the course of a company that I viewed as playing a major role in one of the biggest threats to our democracy.

In the year leading up to our 2016 election, I began to see the polarization and breakdown of civil discourse, exacerbated by social media, as our biggest national security threat; I had written about that before Facebook called. I didn’t think I was going to change the company by myself. But I wanted to help Facebook think through the role it plays in politics, in the United States and around the world, and the best way to ensure that it is not harming democracy.

A year and a half later, as the company continues to struggle with how to handle political content and as another presidential election approaches, it’s clear that tinkering around the margins of advertising policies won’t fix the most serious issues. The real problem is that Facebook profits partly by amplifying lies and selling dangerous targeting tools that allow political operatives to engage in a new level of information warfare. Its business model exploits our data to let advertisers aim at us, showing each of us a different version of the truth and manipulating us with hyper-customized ads — ads that as of this fall can contain blatantly false and debunked information if they’re run by a political campaign. As long as Facebook prioritizes profit over healthy discourse, it can’t avoid damaging democracy.

I'm good with the argument that we don't want a private sector entity deciding questions of free speech - that's not really what we're talking about - but I get the argument.

Coupla things:

• It's everybody's job - everybody's right, and everybody's obligation - to hold as many people as possible to account for telling the truth.
• There's a near-absolute expectation that advertisers don't get to put out false or misleading claims about their own products, or the products of their competitors.

Caveat Emptor applies, but only to a certain extent. So if (eg) your dealership has a car for sale that you advertise as a peach, when it's a lemon - you can expect a visit from the fraud unit.

You can be fined.

You can go to jail.

You can be barred from that industry.

Thing 3: No rights are absolute or unlimited. Speech is not just an expression of ideas - it's also an action. If your actions present a clear and present danger to others - as individuals or as a community - you can be (and should be) smacked down.

We've got to have a taste of a Teddy Roosevelt-style Trust Buster in the White House. Some of these companies have grown too big and too powerful.

It's not like we've never been here before

Today's Tweet

"Free speech" is a guarantee that the government can't punish you for expressing your opinion...

James Woods says he's leaving Twitter 'until free speech is allowed' on the platform following suspension | Fox News 👍👋👏👍👋😁😁best thing that has happened to twitter in a long time! This pathetic has-been two bit “actor” will definitely not be missed https://t.co/DoPadqZbgQ

— Suzanne's Criteria68 (@criteria681) August 21, 2019

...but no rights are absolute or unlimited.

They Knew

Drug makers and drug sellers and drug prescribers and drug insurance providers all knew what was going on.

This doesn't happen outside the consciousness of those involved.

WaPo:

For the first time, a database maintained by the Drug Enforcement Administration that tracks the path of every single pain pill sold in the United States — by manufacturers and distributors to pharmacies in every town and city — has been made public.

The Washington Post sifted through nearly 380 million transactions from 2006 through 2012 that are detailed in the DEA’s database and analyzed shipments of oxycodone and hydrocodone pills, which account for three-quarters of the total opioid pill shipments to pharmacies. The Post is making this data available at the county and state levels in order to help the public understand the impact of years of prescription pill shipments on their communities.

My home county

In the heart of the heartland 

- and -

Just six companies distributed 75 percent of the pills — oxycodone and hydrocodone — during this period: McKesson Corp., Walgreens, Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen, CVS and Walmart, according to an analysis of the database by The Washington Post.

Top pill distributors, 2006 through 2012

(go to the article to see the rest of the top 100 suppliers)

The long slide into Coin-Operated Government has produced some incredibly shitty results.

Plutocratic Regulatory Capture and the failure of the Free Market to "self-regulate" has to be obvious now.

This approach - remedial vs preventive - isn't just costing us way more than good government would cost us. It's killing us.

The Virtue Challenge

The New Colossus --Emma Lazarus 

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, 

With conquering limbs astride from land to land; 

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand 

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, 

and her name Mother of Exiles. 

From her beacon-hand 

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command 

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. 

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she 

With silent lips. 

“Give me your tired, your poor, 

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, 

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. 

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, 

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

#ThisIsVirtue

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years.
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears.
America. America.
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea.

Today's Tweet

And an answer from another deeply unpopular president who understood something important about not trying to force himself on us.

It is part of the price of leadership of this great and free nation to be the target of clever satirists. You have given the gift of laughter to our people. May we never grow so somber or self-important that we fail to appreciate the humor in our lives.” --LBJ
(in a letter to the Smothers Brothers show upon their cancellation by CBS partly because POTUS had called the network and complained)

Nothing funny about tired Saturday Night Live on Fake News NBC! Question is, how do the Networks get away with these total Republican hit jobs without retribution? Likewise for many other shows? Very unfair and should be looked into. This is the real Collusion!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2019

The Prophet Zappa

From Joe's Garage, Acts I, II & III (1979):

Eventually it was discovered
That God
Did not want us to be
All the same
This was
BAD NEWS
For the Governments of The World
As it seemed contrary
To the doctrine of
Portion Controlled Servings
Mankind must be made more uniformly
If THE FUTURE
Was going to work
Various ways were sought
To bind us all together
But, alas SAMENESS was unenforceable
It was about this time
That someone
Came up with the idea of TOTAL CRIMINALIZATION
Based on the principle that
If we were ALL crooks
We could at last be uniform
To some degree
In the eyes of THE LAW
Shrewdly our legislators calculated
That most people were
Too lazy to perform a
REAL CRIME
So new laws were manufactured
Making it possible for anyone
To violate them any time of the day or night,
And
Once we had all broken some kind of law
We'd all be in the same big happy club
Right up there with the President,
The most exalted industrialists,
And the clerical big shots
Of all your favorite religions
TOTAL CRIMINALIZATION
Was the greatest idea of its time
And was vastly popular
Except with those people
Who didn't want to be crooks or outlaws,
So, of course, they had to be TRICKED INTO IT...
Which is one of the reasons why
Music
Was eventually made
Illegal

Garrett Epps, The Atlantic:

If a citizen speaks at a public meeting and says something a politician doesn’t like, can she be arrested, cuffed, and carted off to the hoosegow?

Suppose that, during this fraught encounter, the citizen violates some law—even by accident, even one no one has ever heard of, even one dug up after the fact—does that make her arrest constitutional?

-and-

He was charged with “disorderly conduct” and “resisting arrest without violence,” but the local prosecutor dropped the charges, saying in essence that no reasonable person would believe them. Lozman then brought a federal lawsuit against the city for “First Amendment retaliation.” A federal judge agreed that Lozman had “compelling” evidence that he’d been arrested as punishment for his protected speech. But the judge then threw out the case, reasoning that he actually could have been charged with the obscure state offense of “willfully interrupt[ing] or disturb[ing] any school or any assembly of people met for the worship of God or for any lawful purpose.”

What this meant, the court decided, was that the officer who arrested Lozman would have had “probable cause” (a reasonable basis to believe a crime had been committed) to arrest him if he had known about “assembly of people” statute and wanted to enforce it. The fact that the officer didn’t know about it was irrelevant—and so was the city’s unconstitutional motive. As long as an officer could have arrested Lozman for something, in other words, the retaliatory motive didn’t matter. The Eleventh Circuit affirmed: the existence of probable cause for any offense is an “absolute bar” to a suit for retaliatory arrest, it said.

"You're making trouble, so we'll have you arrested, and we'll charge you with some weird shit later because everybody's guilty of something - all we have to do is smash-fit some bullshit ordnance around what you did".

Free Speech

Freedom ain't free. And the cost can be pretty heavy.

We were alerted that white supremacist Chris Cantwell was on OkCupid. Within 10 minutes we banned him for life.

— OkCupid (@okcupid) August 17, 2017

We always have to be a little careful in how we react to people expressing views we disagree with. 

That said, it's important to remember Popper's Paradox:

Today's GIF

There's always a dark and sinister side to populism, but as long as we have people who can stand off and make fun of it all, we'll have the best of checks-n-balances.

And when it comes to the issues of Net Neutrality, that's kinda the whole fuckin' point. Fight for it.

Because "Checks and Balances" is a metaphor, not a mechanism. It doesn't work if we don't work it.

Demand Progress

Check in with the ACLU

But Not Here

We get lazy sometimes.  We start to think "we shouldn't need that kind of reminder - not here in America".

Obviously, we do need it. And we need it precisely because this is America.

The Libel Bully

The ABA is a group that's almost exclusively lawyers - high-profile and high-compensation people - but they were worried Trump would sue them if they criticized him in print.

And Eiron did a spit take.

via GIPHY

Vox:

The New York Times reported Tuesday that the American Bar Association refused to publish a report that it had commissioned on Donald Trump’s tendency to file meritless lawsuits. The punchline? ABA's in-house lawyers were afraid Trump might file a meritless lawsuit over the contents of the report.

An ABA spokesperson now denies that the organization quashed the report. (It was not an official ABA inquiry but a thorough article by the LA-based solo practitioner Susan E. Seager, a longtime media lawyer, written for a publication of the media lawyer subgroup of the ABA.) The spokesperson insists that the ABA's editorial and legal staff simply offered its professional opinion on changes that ought to be made to reduce its supposed partisan tenor, ad hominem tone, and — yes — its profile as a target for a suit. Withdrawing the piece rather than negotiating over changes was the authors' call, the ABA says.

Seager, however, says it was clear that the editorial instructions were nonnegotiable, and David Bodney, the immediate past chair of the ABA's media law subgroup, backs her up. He tells Vox in an email: "In my experience, the ABA's attempt to dilute Ms. Seager's article was extraordinary, if not unprecedented, and demonstrates the importance of lawyers standing up against actions taken under the guise of our libel laws that would chill freedom of expression."

What follows is Seager’s fully footnoted original article, including the vivid language and headline the ABA brass vetoed. —Christopher Shea, Editor of The Big Idea

Freedom Rings A Little Hollow

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, over.

hat tip = FB buddy VWE and Addicting Info

God Love John Oliver

And the response was big enough to crash the server trying to handle the FCC's comments page.

It's up again now.

https://www.fcc.gov/comments

Try to remember that "The Government" is still (tho' sometimes just barely) in charge of some of its own functions; but privatization is a real thing and a real threat to our little experiment in self-governance; and that if we're going to have a real shot at turning back this hostile takeover, we'll have to step out from behind the comfortable illusion of online anonymity.

If you want the power, you have to stand up and take the power.  Nobody's handing it out.

Civil War II

'Conservatives' are exceedingly fond of prattling about FREEDOM as if the word itself had some kind of magical power.

It's as if the Conservative Handbook has instructions that read: "Never mind the actual concept the word is supposed to represent - that shit's for the pansy-ass eggheads who spend way too much time thinking - just intone the word whenever you're in a debate that you know you're losing because you've brought nothing to the party but bumper stickers and t-shirts to rationalize putting your basest instincts into action.  Don't think, just act; and if anybody calls you on it, they're just a LibTard who's trying to take away your FREEDOM."

Here's a bit from a speech Mr Lincoln delivered in Baltimore almost 150 years ago.

"We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name-liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names-liberty and tyranny.

"The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today among us human creatures, even in the North, and all professing to love liberty. Hence we behold the process by which thousands are daily passing from under the yoke of bondage, hailed by some as the advance of liberty, and bewailed by others as the destruction of all liberty. Recently, as it seems, the people of Maryland have been doing something to define liberty [abolishing slavery in the state]; and thanks to them that, in what they have done, the wolf's dictionary, has been repudiated."

giant hat tip = Blue Virginia

How We React

...to the event is what's important now.

From Bruce Schneier at The Atlantic:

As the details about the bombings in Boston unfold, it'd be easy to be scared. It'd be easy to feel powerless and demand that our elected leaders do something -- anything -- to keep us safe.

It'd be easy, but it'd be wrong. We need to be angry and empathize with the victims without being scared. Our fears would play right into the perpetrators' hands -- and magnify the power of their victory for whichever goals whatever group behind this, still to be uncovered, has. We don't have to be scared, and we're not powerless. We actually have all the power here, and there's one thing we can do to render terrorism ineffective: Refuse to be terrorized.

It's hard to do, because terrorism is designed precisely to scare people -- far out of proportion to its actual danger. A huge amount of research on fear and the brain teaches us that we exaggerate threats that are rare, spectacular, immediate, random -- in this case involving an innocent child -- senseless, horrific and graphic. Terrorism pushes all of our fear buttons, really hard, and we overreact.

Note to the terrorists/nutballs/wingnuts/whatever:

You're not going to make me close myself off from the world.  I won't be cowering in a Safe Room behind doors and windows sealed up with plastic sheets and duct tape.

I sure as hell don't get everything right every time, but I claim the right to keep trying; to go on stumbling forward; and you're not going get me to strangle myself in a security blanket just because you don't have enough hair on your sack to look me in the eye and call me out on the shit you don't agree with.

I live my life, and I do my little FreedomThing out in the open where everybody can see it.  You don't like it?  Well here I am, asshole.  Come and get me.

And oh yeah - almost forgot - there's 300 million of me, so fuck you.

Defending Amina

Proof once again that ya gotta be careful with the whole Rights Thing - if some folks get the rights they're entitled to, before ya know it they're all gonna want 'em.

So anyway, in the last several months, we've seen the story about a kid in Afghanistan speaking up in favor of education for women and being nearly shot to pieces for her trouble; then we got the one a few weeks ago about the Islamo-Fundies coming down on a young woman who dared go against her father's choice of a suitable husband or some such nonsense; and now there's this about a young woman somewhere in Tunisia who really just wants the Theocrats to leave her the fuck alone already.

19 year old Tunisian Amina who posted a topless photo of herself bearing the slogan “my body belongs to me, and is not the source of anyone’s honour” has been threatened with death.

Islamist cleric Adel Almi, president of Al-Jamia Al-Li-Wassatia Tawia Wal-Islah, has called for Amina’s flogging and stoning to death saying Amina’s actions will bring misfortune by causing “epidemics and disasters” and “could be contagious and give ideas to other women…”

We, the undersigned, unequivocally defend Amina, and demand that her life and liberty be protected and that those who have threatened her be immediately prosecuted.

On 4 April 2013, we call for an International Day to Defend Amina.

As a well-conditioned American consumer, I readily admit to hearing a bell whenever  somebody runs a little T & A at me; and to being kinda transfixed by the the visual prospects of an actually-naked real-life non-PhotoShopped female human.  So on that one (very important) level I'm like 'Yeah - OK - throw me some jiggle, and I'll follow you anywhere'.

But this isn't about the usual crapola of small-head-thinking or forbidden fruit or any of the standard moralistic bullshit.  It's also not about American First World Feminism bitching about self-loathing and self-objectification; and it's not about showering pity on some poor soul - "oh look at how she has to degrade herself just to make a point; isn't that awful?"  It's not about anything but having the guts to stand up for yourself.

It's about "by any means necessary".

People will be free; they'll do it for themselves when they're ready; and it's best for all of us if we try a little harder just to stay the fuck outa their way.

Close Encounters

...of the police state kind.

9/11 changed everything, because our reactions to the terror of that day have created the conditions necessary for the petty tyrants to be handed power.

Here's a blogger describing the events at an airport in San Diego.

I wonder how many of us have to be abused before we find the courage to insist that we be allowed to take the risks of living in freedom again.