Profiling is Just Fine with the Trumpette?

Indeed, if one is looking for ISIS type folk, one looks at many of a certain nationality, and if one is looking for Nazi or other White supremacist types, say, like our McVeigh, one will not especially look at Middle Eastern folks, but rather, White guys. This is common sense, and the media can call it what they like. So, does America realize that we could end all White supremacist crime by simply locking up all the White guys? How bout that Japanese internment, Mr. Trump? Imagine, we could eliminate the White supremacist control of prison crime by simply sending all the white guys back to where we came from, say, Russia or Germany, where the brainiac white guys have introduced those great additions to political theory called fascism and Communism. Course, then we’d have to send back all the Scots as well, but at least there would be a decline in libertarian cynicism about the workplace, making for increased profits!

We protect the rights of the citizens of every nationality by exercising the oversight of the executive agencies, not leaving them sovereign and subject to the opinion, ignorance or whim of directors who have spent their lives in service rather than in contemplating fundamental and comprehensive matters. They are allowed common sense, but not allowed the violation of the Bill of Rights, and it is the job of Congress and the President to govern the unelected agencies, both so that they can do their jobs and so that they do not over-do their jobs, destroying liberty.

On Torture: Terry Gross Has Eric Fair On NPR

As an hypothesis, let us entertain that the torture done at Abu Grabe is a national sin. And let me urge you to read what George Mason said about national sin, in this case the sin of slavery, at the Constitutional Convention. For all you well read patriots, I do not need to quote the passage, for I know that in your studies of America, the studies that qualified you for your cushy jobs making policy for the NSA for soldiers and, oh, contractors to follow and obey, I just know that you have read and re-read the prophesies of Mason and Jefferson many times, perhaps as many as your dogeared copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince. Who says the liberal arts have been in decline? But no let us have no Libertarian sarcasm here. No forty pages to be unpacked from a single sentence, accessible only to those who care to think it through. Let us return to prose, straight prose, promising to refrain from Satyra-grapha, satire writing to express rage without violent anger in the words. Let us get to the report.

Eric Fair is a now penitent former NSA contractor who tortured people in Iraq for the U. S. government, the very same government that was elected with the George Bush administration and those previous to represent the intentions of the U. S. people. We, the people, are told that lives were saved, that there is nothing we can do about these decisions anyway, and that we are being spied upon, and spied upon by men like those who threaten we are no longer allowed to use the words CIA and torture in the same sentence. Only these are men who do not change their mind upon being called to reflect upon the particulars in light of the First Amendment, the Declaration, and the Bill of Rights. These men are far above the law, protected in their exercise of power by layers of secrecy, which layers are then protected by that order they now routinely give even to librarians not to say a word about what you have just heard or seen: those folks. The people who suggested that St. Martin Luther King kill himself, and were never held accountable. They are there for our protection, after all, and are no doubt very busy working as knights, saving American lives, probably risking their own lives for free, like Jesus. And they can always withhold their protection, and order others to do so- who would call that an action?

Although a private contractor, Eric Fair was confused by the attention to duty of a soldier, the sense of camaraderie and common mission that pertains among Soldiers. While Isis was displacing the former Sunnis, some of whom were merely Al Qaeda, Eric Fair was torturing people to get information, important information such as the location of Saddam’s chemical weapons, so we could catch him violating the Gulf war treaty. This treaty required verification, or else the Gulf war of George Bush senior that pushed Saddam out of Kuwait would be back on, and we could pick up where our president had refrained from proceeding without the agreement of the coalition nations, to Baghdad to depose Saddam and prevent the impending tyranny of his sons Oudai and Kusai, both of whom promised to be worse than their father Saddam. Instead, the CIA fabricated evidence of nuclear weapons in order to gain a unanimous vote from the U.N.security council, you remember, the embarrassment that destroyed Colin Powell’s career. Consequences. Saddam was not the worst, not as bad as some. He would merely play American gangster movies and watch videos of real torture, like hooking car batteries to genitals, unlimited by any attempt to stay this side of the fine line where some might still be able to say this is not torture but “enhanced interrogation.” Straight prose, please, without euphemism. This is torture under a nation that is becoming a tyranny, not one that is already a tyranny plain and simple. We used things like keeping the prisoners nude in the cold cells, depriving them of sleep, and many kinds of sexual indignity and violation of the sort that would qualify an American citizen for the sex offender’s registry, if dumpster pissing will, the sort leaked in the photos of the female soldier who piled up naked Iraqis and led them on dog leashes to get them to confess that vital information that surely just could not be had in any other way, like going to find it. This is what they call going to find it, and it does seem to quickly have become the only way followed of going to find it. And if they ever found anything, these Machiavellians were their own justification, as though it truly were for them the only way.

But the truth is that their own argument from effective deterrence of terrorism undermines their own case, if there is any other more effective way, such as not committing a national sin and preserving the ability of the decent people caught up among the enemy to tell who the good guys and the bad guys are. We made 10 or one thousand enemies of friends, or kept them enemies, or reassured them in their opposition to America. We confirmed for them that America is clearly like every other power in the world, a tyranny beneath appearances, appearances which fool only the vulgar. We made enemies of potential friends who would have given us information far more valuable, and as John McCain says too, gained an awful lot of false information to then sift through for every little piece we might pick up glimmering and rush back to show to the American people to incite their terror and justify the Richard Cheney and the CIA method of fighting a war. This assumes that it does not matter at all if one deserves to lose. What matters is power, because underneath, the truth is, that liberty is an illusion, always was an illusion, and every government is already, necessarily, a tyranny.

The now penitent Eric Fair looks America in the face for falling for the Machiavellian argument. In speech, he reminds us that it should not matter if these methods were the most effective:

Torture is wrong, and all Americans should know better. Anyone who argues that it is a matter of effectiveness fails to understand what this country is about.

Again, the position of the CLC, which is only a bit further along than that of the Obama administration, is that “when we capture you, “War Is Over.” With that, we will both win and deserve to win this war, that war which only about half of the Americans have looked up from their natural and ordinary desire to acquire or their pursuit of epicurean pleasures to notice is even going on yet.

Finally, Eric Fair has some advanced psychological insights, from his penance, about the effects and the definition of torture.

He mentions the Donald Trump / New Republican position that waterboarding is not legally torture, and says that though one could bring in six different lawyers and get six different legal definitions,

The minute you violate another person’s will, [it is ] torture.

So he moves the definition back prior to the area of legal quibbles. We will agree, if what he means by “will” is the same thing we mean by fundamental choice or authority over one’s own actions, the Montesquieu definition of liberty, to neither forbid doing the right nor compel to do the wrong, the violation of our fundamental liberty to obey God rather than man. He was especially disturbed by the nudity for some reason, and when brought back to Iraq, seems to have done some things that are “classified,” and deeply sickened him. He is under a legal threat which our president too upholds regarding revealing classified information, the sort of thing that makes one glad to have never seen a classified document in his life. I myself offered to help design a constitution for Iraq if the three parts artificially thrown together did indeed wish to remain a single nation, and offered to serve, since I agreed with the purpose of that war. He says that torture involves:

forcing someone’s will against them, …like creating two people inside them…

…to replace the one person who would never treasonous-ly collaborate with the enemy, even if it were the United States. It works to…

create two people inside of one, …to physically insert yourself inside that person.

He is convinced, and he repents that he has…

violated another person’s will… We hurt people, destroyed them emotionally. We suffer some of those consequences.

When questioned as to how he could reconcile these things with his Christian faith- he was about to enter Presbyterian seminary to seek ordination before the war- he answers that God is never on the side of the jailer. Later, after the part surrounding the redactions, he says he was disgusted not primarily by his actions, but “by how good it feels to wield power.” He says he chose not simply the wrong path, but had gone in the “wrong direction entirely.”

The truth is that what we do to one another is in fact done to us in the effects upon our souls. Such a soul is in faction, distracted, and hence cannot act efficiently toward any purpose. Every adulterer knows this from experience. The most calloused learn to ape love to save face, though the effort consumes their souls. They cannot ornament the Christmas tree at home. Their joy is ruined, and their brief time spent this way. When you are done reading your Machiavelli, if you ever finish, you can study these things in the first book of Plato’s Republic, where faction in the soul is considered, or in the scripture, if read with subtlety in any genuine program of liberal study, aimed at learning for its own sake, rather than for the sake of wealth, security or power, as a free man rather than the pawn of some executive agency. These things may well be missing from the Aristotelian study of political faction. For just as Aristotle does not much study the soul and love, he seems to leave out a study of the soul and faction, and this is why Plato is superior to Aristotle.

Now, how could anyone be so delusional or “schizophrenic” as to suggest that our own FBI, in domestic matters, would go so far as to set a woman on a man to pretend she admitted his love, and might even marry him, a man of whom one just cannot be too sure whether he is a Russian spy or something, since, though in proximity to the CIA, and impoverished, he turned down an invitation to apply to work with them? How else could such a thing be explainable, but that he may just be a spy or something else treasonous we have yet thought of? It could indeed have been in part because he knew they would do such things, and, sworn to obedience, they would expect such things of him. And since he pissed them off as though he had stirred their tortured conscience, why should they care for him, especially now a-days, with so much at stake, amid human uncertainty, when one just cannot be too sure? Is the gateway to hell not again that old passageway of science called the desire for certainty? Take that into your effectiveness calculation Richard Cheney, and as John McCain has said, “Good Luck.” My suggestion is that the case is anything but that we know our nation and our NSA: the CIA, FBI and ETC. all together, just would never do such a thing, and anyone must be mad even to suggest that the question be asked. Besides, it is still possible to rape the mad, though there may be problems with their testimony in court. A little slander and an order of silence will take care of that, because of the great reputation for integrity demanded by these agencies. We want the president to order the agencies to tell our representatives in both the House and Senate the truth about this matter, so they can figure out what America needs to do for accountability and meaningful recourse to make things right, to purge the sin against the image of God in man that America has taken into itself, both for its own sake and in order to mitigate the consequences of these sins for the world and for our nation. As in the civil war, many unborn and un-involved in slavery would suffer and die, because that is what happens by nature with national sin. Ask Mason and Lincoln and Jefferson. No one need ever know the details outside of Congress, but otherwise, more sin such as murder will be necessary to hide the sin, and even that will not work any longer. And Otherwise, if at least the representatives of the people do not decide these issues, it is an usurping faction that we have allowed to take our flag and do these things in our name.

Barack Obama, it is time to hold our government accountable, letting those like Eric Fair lead the national penance, rather than hide from possible assassination in a monastery. Did you see the suggestion that he kill himself amid the comments he has received? Who makes such suggestions, and where have we, on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination, ever heard of anyone making such a suggestion, yeah, and who invents such acronyms? It is time to clean house, to get these people out of government, and correct those who can be reminded of the meaning of America. Again, as with the argument of the McCarthy essay on Islam, it is a question of repent or risk losing a war with ISIS and Russia and anyone else with an interest in America’s corpse, for it is a big world we have wronged, and we are dying of our own sin. Nineveh indeed repented and avoided catastrophe, but that, I fear, is not any longer in the cards. What does seem to be in the cards is the question of better or worse, and even the possibility of national survival if we do return immediately to the great American founders, and to the Lord.

When Have Corrupt Cops And Judges Ever Been Arrested?

AG Loretta Lynch wants to let nation break law without consequences

By Paul Sperry

March 27, 2016 | 6:00am

 

Loretta Lynch Photo: Getty Images

 

 

As New York moves to decriminalize low-level offenses, arguing enforcement is “rigged against communities of color,” other large cities are coming under pressure from the Justice Department to do the same thing.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch has issued a warning to municipal and state judges across the country that their courts could lose federal funding if they don’t ease up on fines and arrest warrants for minor crimes involving poor offenders, indigent minorities in particular.

In lieu of fines and jail time, Lynch urges the nation’s 6,500 municipal courts to provide an avenue for offenders to perform “community service” or take advantage of “amnesty days,” whereby outstanding arrest warrants are cleared for nominal fees.

Failure to comply with these policies could trigger a Ferguson-style discrimination investigation. Already, Lynch says she’s “evaluating discrimination complaints against several court systems.”

A strongly worded “guidance” letter, written by her civil-rights team, warns that a local court policy of enforcing warrants for failure to pay court fines and fees can have an adverse “disparate impact” on African-Americans, who are fined and/or arrested for outstanding warrants at “disproportionate” rates versus whites.

Federal data also show that blacks tend to break both felony and misdemeanor laws at a disproportionate rate. Even if applied evenly across all races and in neutral, color-blind fashion, such policies could be found by Justice to be discriminatory.

“In court systems receiving federal funds, these practices may also violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when they unnecessarily impose disparate harm on the basis of race,” the nine-page letters states.

“It’s a slippery slope to clemency for criminals, large and small.”

This is the same dubious legal threat the administration is using to force the nation’s public schools to back off suspending unruly — even violent — black students, and to force cops to avoid stopping, frisking and arresting minority offenders.

The Supreme Court has ruled that disparate impact doesn’t violate Title VI, only “intentional” discrimination does. “The administration is quite wrong to say that Title VI incorporates a ‘disparate impact’ standard,” Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity points out. “The Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that it does not.”

This new court “reform” will only exacerbate the crime problem. Studies show ignoring low-level crimes like warrant violations only leads to bigger crimes.

Under Mayor de Blasio, the NYPD has scaled back its aggressive enforcement of low-level offenses only to see both minor and serious crime rebound. Already cops have backed off public urination and other public nuisance violations, while overlooking outstanding warrants for many other misdemeanor crimes.

Even a senior Justice Department official predicts the decriminalization-cum-deincarceration movement will backfire in higher crime nationwide. “In five years the crime rate is going to be crazy again,” he said.

The official, who oversees probation of felons paroled from federal prisons and who requested anonymity, worries the new department policy will be abused.

“I don’t see liberal judges even attempting to make people pay or spending the time making an accurate determination of a person being ‘indigent,’ ” he said. “It’s another way of not holding people accountable for their actions.”

Modal Trigger

Bill de Blasio greets police officers in the subway station at Times Square.Photo: Getty Images

The Justice guidance defines “indigent” as anybody who might be “eligible for public benefits,” but not actually receiving them. “Jurisdictions may benefit from creating statutory presumptions of indigency for certain classes of defendants,” the source said.

The administration claims cops and courts conspire to exploit poor blacks to generate city revenue in some kind of shakedown. But data show blacks fail to pay their fines at far greater rates than whites, so why not target whites if cash extortion is the objective?

Many of the cities with the highest fines, such as Philadelphia, are run by Democrats; and the Justice Department is no piker when it comes to levying fines.

“US attorneys always want fines and restitution amounts in the millions from people who have little chance of ever paying it back,” the department official said.

Liberals are actually to blame for the trend they’re trying to reform. Court fines and fees help pay for all the new costs liberals have added to the system, such as drug counseling and home electronic monitoring. They’ve also pushed judges to assess more fines in lieu of incarceration, especially for drug offenders.

Yet now they claim the whole court fine and bail system is racist.

Former federal civil-rights attorney Hans Bader, now with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, describes the latest reforms as a “massive assault on the criminal justice system.”

It’s a slippery slope to clemency for criminals, large and small.

Paul Sperry is a former Hoover Institution media fellow and author of “Infiltration.”

Filed under broken windows ,  crime ,  justice department ,  loretta lynch ,  nypd

Comment, by M. McDonald:

 

Indeed, Mr. Sperry, a slippery slope. What ever happened to the Judge who threw a girl in the reform farm for kickbacks because she had a pain med of her mother’s that was the same as the medicine she was prescribed for uterine cancer? Guess it didn’t make the news. These low level establishment criminals who are indeed destroying our nation, let us just cower and wink at them, since we fear their power, and, oh, we might just lose our cushy jobs.

Guantanomo

Perhaps I just do not understand War. I would like to take a class from Senator McCain.

What if, when an enemy were captured by the U. S. Army, the war were over, just like Even the vulgar Jim Morrison could say the line “War is Over,” In the song the Unknown soldier?

What if when one were captured by the U. S., he got to see by surprise how wrong he was?

Does the “Actionable Intelligence” we supposedly gain by this method outweigh even the Actionable intelligence we would gain by the true method? Perhaps not in every case, but in the true long run?

And is this the only way we gain information about terrorist plots? Is it even a significant way, compared to foreign nationals who see America, the true America? These would want to help[ us voluntarily, in my America.

Machiavelli is wrong, and the appearance that he is right, an appearance one can produce or receive that he is correct may be a delusion caused by the confinement of our vision to the parameters of the lower world, the “Visible,” which, due to the imprisonment of the human soul, sees only half the earth and hell, and does not see heaven.

We believe that all men have the rights to Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. What if we treated enemies like we do the involuntary mad, securing their rights and even their creature comforts as we do an animal? What if when we capture you, war is over?

I Think that if we do this war is over.

I think I want to have a long talk with John McCain. His Spirit, his ferocity, his Courage, can only hurt an enemy till the enemy lays down his arm. I’ll betyou once you stop fighting against John McCain’s America, War is over and you will soon fall on your face and repent, even before a human being, so that he tell you, no, I am mortal.

I’ll bet the appearance to the Republicans that torture is a necessity of war is a delusion taught by Machiavelli. I’ll bet you if we followed Jesus, we would win.

I’ll bet you Machiavelli cannot take my hero John McCain

 

Prison Injustice II

Prisons are the universities of the underworld.

There the leading sects recruit and teach the future criminals of America. The sects are the gangs, which break down mostly, though not exclusively, by race. There are the Nazi types, all the different white supremacist sects, Aryan nations, KKK, Skin Heads, the Satanists, MS13 and other Mexican gangs, and now there is one called Knights Templar, and the black gangs like reds and blues in L. A., and the old fashion Italian, Russian, and maybe even Jewish gangs. There are gangs for every nationality, because the body is more prominent for these, and everyone in prison requires protection and wants or needs many things. This protection is similar to the reason that being in or related to a gang is almost a necessity in most large American cities. I used to watch Gangland on the History Chanel a few years ago, when I had a T. V.

So, should we really be sending people to jail for probation violations and unpaid court fees? The system- the judges, courts, lawyers, and prosecutors, they will not put a stop to this. They are making too much money doing it, fleecing the poorest. We, the people, must put a stop to this, their admissions to the new community colleges, our social program of enrollment in the colleges of crime. We can best do this, maybe, by remembering what a crime is: not when one cannot show up for probation, make some AA meeting, or go to anger management class, not when one cannot afford a lawyer, not when one smokes pot or talks to much. A crime is when one harms another, or violates the rights of a citizen to life, liberty, property and the like. Not when one is homeless, mad, drunk or unlucky enough to fail to escape the clutches of the dog catcher. He may have a quota, or be paid per dog. Drug use must be more sharply distinguished from dealing, which harms a fellow citizen to line ones own pocket. Though it may be some infraction of some sort, a crime is, basically, when one harms another. If these have not harmed their fellow citizens, perhaps they soon will learn to do so, in these, the only liberal arts colleges it seems we do fund.

The liberal arts, again, is one of the very few things we can do about drugs, not the stick applied to the bottom ten percent in the justice scale, but to the top half. These then might pull the others along, reorienting them, opening other possibilities, giving kids things to do that keep them so enraptured they cannot bear to miss, for example, this game, movie, play practice, music practice, dance practice, or anything else the liberally educated might think to put them up to, animal rescue, helping old people, or making money cutting lawns and building things, farming vacant lots, playing the other neighborhoods in baseball games, etc. How do we pull on this, as well as push?

Second, within these hell holes, how do we address the paradox that they must be kept together and have a society of some sort, without allowing and promoting the gangs? I am so pissed about this paradox, I am ready to keep them each in their own stall like horses, so that they cannot harm one another, and allow economic interaction only with non prisoners, until I can think of a better solution. Even this would be less expensive than allowing the mob fiefdoms now operating.

Third, I am even pissed that gangs on the outside take and mark territory, setting up their own “law” and “tax” systems. These are usurpations. If I were governor, I would treat them as though a foreign government had just claimed Michigan territory- which is perhaps why I am not governor. Tell a U. S. citizen from one neighborhood he cannot walk in another, and must wear certain clothing or risk being shot- rubbish. I’d tell them to boof it! But again, this is perhaps why I am not governor.

And what ever happened to the guardian angels? Why are there not gangs of virtue? The Masons are not even mad that they used their name, the Knights. Where are the Baptist martial arts groups in the big cities? Do they not join together like the neighborhood watch groups to protect kids and vulnerable old people? To push back when kids are pressured to join gangs, or dress up like old people and walk when there are muggings? Why are the associations in our cities all based on the fuel of drug dealing money, and the victims all isolated individuals? Oh, except for the cops, who are busy doing property seizures, or the FBI, busy spying on everyone. One must, after all, have priorities.

Prisons and Injustice

Thanks to NPR for their beginning to focus on injustice in the prison system. This has to be the next topic of injustice to be corrected in our society. While we pat ourselves on the back for how p. c. we are on all the liberal platforms of race and gender, we have sat idly for these now fifty-five years since Dr. King while homosexual rape and beatings have been tolerated in hell holes called correction facilities, and wardens daily allow and promote injustice perpetrated on the unjust and unlucky alike who are thrown into our prisons. Assault, rape and murder are the crimes they are regardless of who they are perpetrated against. Torture is wrong whether the one it is done to has tortured or not, though it of course true that we mind it a lot less, when one who has done harm himself gets a chance to see what his victims might have felt. But things like the torture of “solitary confinement” are routine in our prisons, along with all the other violations of the Ten Commandments that are also political laws: Thou shall not kill. Thou shall not steal.

It is not by inflicting injustice that genuine criminals might be reformed, but by seeing justice. When the criminals see that “every cop is a criminal,” they learn that they were right all along to think that it was all about the bigger fish eats the smaller. They learn that justice is a joke compared to self interest, and self interest can be understood in animal terms. They learn that the law is, like everything else, an instrument to be used as a means to feathering ones own bed.

Terry Gross had a man on the radio yesterday- Daniel Genis, the author of 1046, the number of books he read in prison. He served ten years in our Gulag, the splinter in our own eye that prevents us from seeing and helping to remove the log in our Russian brother’s eye. Our own injustice is right at hand, something we can do something about, whereas the injustice of others requires education, example and persuasion. My thanks again, and my hope that this become a topic of the new p. c., the one that considers issues of liberty on a par with issues of equality, rather than destroying liberty to institute the tyranny of popular opinion regarding equality.

Prison is indeed a punishment, and being thrown into the penal colony with others who have and will harm their fellow man is punishment enough. Society secures for us our liberty, and this is all we have a right to take away. That prison is not going to be a picnic will be unavoidable. We need do nothing in addition to assure it be regretted. But we do need to assure that those drawing these salaries at taxpayer expense are given only the power to do justice, and that the criminals among them be, well, thrown in prison.

Our prisons have become a strange world of the cultivation of racial gangs, which operate with impunity due to the cooperation of the criminal police, who are for all practical purposes unaccountable, uninvestigated, and very well paid. The only blessing is that faction prevents these interest from uniting. If the electricity were to go out, and we lose the ability to keep these drones in the hive, our sissy politicians would find themselves their slaves overnight.

I myself would have gone long ago to teach liberal arts in prisons, and for about twenty thousand dollars a year, if necessary, except that the system would want access to the inside of my body, if not also my mind and soul whenever possible.