necropolitics: freedom fries thought crimes

theintercept |  The apparently criminal viewpoint he posted on Facebook declared: “Tonight, as far as I’m concerned, I feel like Charlie Coulibaly.” Investigators concluded that this was intended to mock the “Je Suis Charlie” slogan and express support for the perpetrator of the Paris supermarket killings (whose last name was “Coulibaly”). Expressing that opinion is evidently a crime in the Republic of Liberté, which prides itself on a line of 20th Century intellectuals – from Sartre and Genet to Foucault and Derrida – whose hallmark was leaving no orthodoxy or convention unmolested, no matter how sacred.

Since that glorious “free speech” march, France has reportedly opened 54 criminal cases for “condoning terrorism.” AP reported this morning that “France ordered prosecutors around the country to crack down on hate speech, anti-Semitism and glorifying terrorism.”

As pernicious as this arrest and related “crackdown” on some speech obviously is, it provides a critical value: namely, it underscores the utter scam that was this week’s celebration of free speech in the west. The day before the Charlie Hebdo attack, I coincidentally documented the multiple cases in the west – including in the U.S. – where Muslims have been prosecuted and even imprisoned for their political speech. Vanishingly few of this week’s bold free expression mavens have ever uttered a peep of protest about any of those cases – either before the Charlie Hebdo attack or since. That’s because “free speech,” in the hands of many westerners, actually means: it is vital that the ideas I like be protected, and the right to offend groups I dislike be cherished; anything else is fair game.

eliminate the conditions which breed the muslim movement

get rid of the useless eaters, the simulation

Motherboard | SimCity players have discussed a variety of creative strategies for their virtual homelessness problem. They’ve suggested waiting for natural disasters like tornadoes to blow the vagrants away, bulldozing parks where they congregate, or creating such a woefully insufficient city infrastructure that the homeless would leave on their own.

You can read all of these proposed final solutions in Matteo Bittanti's How to Get Rid of Homelessness, "a 600-page epic split in two volumes documenting the so-called 'homeless scandal' that affected 2013's SimCity."

"I started to find the discussion about homeless in SimCity way more interesting than SimCity itself because people were talking about the issue in a very—how can I say, not racist, not classist, but definitely peculiar way," said Bittanti, a visiting professor at IULM University in Milan who spent seven years teaching in the Bay Area.

Bittanti collected, selected, and transcribed thousands of these messages exchanged by players on publisher Electronic Arts' official forums, Reddit, and the largest online SimCity community Simtropolis, who experienced and then tried to "eradicate" the phenomenon of homelessness that "plagued" SimCity.

anti-definition of cathedral manliness

Art of Manliness | When I first started the Art of Manliness, I didn’t put too much stock in physical strength as an important component of manhood. Strength of character, sure, but physical strength was more of a secondary pursuit. Maybe it was because I started AoM partly to get away from the overdone fetishization of getting ripped that was (and is) promoted by other men’s magazines. Maybe it was because I wasn’t in shape myself at the time. (We often construct our definition of manhood in accordance with that which describes ourselves best, and I’m certainly not immune to this temptation!). I had played football in high school, but after going to college, my workouts became halfhearted and sporadic. This was especially true in law school — between trying to keep up my grades and running a fledgling blog, exercise just wasn’t a top priority.

Over the last couple years, however, working out, and lifting weights in particular, has become a fundamental part of my life. It started with my 90-day testosterone experiment; I started exercising regularly to see what effect it would have on my T levels. When the official experiment ended, the habit stuck. I went from being fairly indifferent to exercise, to looking forward to my workouts as my favorite part of the day. And I found that building my body changed the way I felt and carried myself as a man.

At the same time, my research into the core of masculinity gave me a theoretical understanding of the role of strength in the ancient, universal code of manhood. This research convinced me that strength forms the nucleus of manliness, as it truly makes all the other manly virtues possible.

Over time then, the importance of strength-building to a man’s virility sunk into both my mind and my bones. Strength may not seem very necessary in today’s world where most men sit behind desks at work all day. But being strong is never a disadvantage, and it is frequently quite beneficial on a variety of fronts. Most importantly, strength forms the backbone of the code of manhood. Today I’d like to talk about why.

neologism: the midgley effect

resilience |  We imagine ourselves to be members of a thoroughly scientific culture and to be scientifically minded. But, what science tells us is that the evolution of the universe and thus of planet Earth and its inhabitants is random. It is following no predetermined felicitous course. This process of change could be favorable to humans or it could be horrifically dangerous to them.

Our technological innovations will not necessarily shield us from this change. In fact, these innovations are part of the change. They influence climate in a way that is deleterious to the human future; they empty fisheries with a swiftness never before seen; they lead to degradation of the soil, not in isolated areas, but worldwide; and they poison the food, the air and the water in a manner that is global in scale.

A friend refers to this as the Midgley Effect. Chemist Thomas Midgley Jr. was heralded for his work in creating leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons. The story of leaded gasoline is rehearsed every time we pull up to a gas pump and fill our automobiles with UNLEADED gasoline. Lead added to gasoline for the purpose of preventing so-called engine knocking turned out to be very bad for human health. Big surprise!

But chlorofluorocarbons were even worse. Used primarily as refrigerants from the 1930s onward and later as aerosol propellants, they escaped into the air. No one thought to track their destination until the 1970s when one scientist, F. Sherwood Rowland, asked where these compounds ended up. They were by design inert--that is, they didn't readily break down--so they must be somewhere.

That somewhere turned out to be high in the atmosphere attacking the ozone layer which protects humans and other living creatures from excessive radiation from the Sun. Had it not been for Rowland asking a very specific question and receiving a grant to fund the answer, we might well be living with little or no atmospheric protection from dangerous levels of solar radiation. Such are the perils of our technology. In this case, only one curious man stood between the human species and widespread disaster. Chlorofluorocarbons and other ozone-destroying chemicals were subsequently phased out worldwide by the Montreal Protocol.

Midgley--who believed he was doing good things for society and received many awards for his discoveries--turned out to have "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history," according to environmental historian J. R. McNeill. And, it wasn't a good impact.

One of the pillars of our modern techno-utopian outlook is that invention is presumed to be good and should not be unduly impeded. It turns out, however, that our own science has shown that inventions can be potentially catastrophic.

So, now we come to the central contradiction of the modern outlook. We rely on science. We say we believe in science. But what science tells us about the trajectory of the universe and thus human beings is no more complicated that what "Planet of the Apes" tells us. There is no particular or preordained direction for the future development of humans or the universe we live in.

Yet, the techno-utopian vision that we cling to as modern people rejects this view even as we say our favored instrument of progress is science. Thus, we must conclude that our dissenting party guest's reply above--"They'll figure something out. They always have."--enunciates a religious belief, not a scientific observation.

tony blair pretending he doesn't understand what russell brand is on about...,

telegraph |  Tony Blair has revealed he is mystified by Russell Brand. 

The former Prime Minister said he has “studied” the works of Brand, the comedian turned popular philosopher, and concluded he “literally doesn’t know what he means”.

Mr Blair, Labour’s most electorally successful leader, said modern politicians should spend less time attempting to “empathise” with voters who are disaffected and instead show strong leadership.

“I’ve studied a lot of what the Russell Brand stuff really means. But I suspect if you implemented that, or tried to implement that, I literally don’t know what it means,” Mr Blair told the BBC’s Nick Robinson, whose latest series looks at a “crisis” in democracy.

Mr Brand, a multi-millionaire comedian, has sought to reinvent himself as the leader of a populist, anti-capitalist “revolution” against a broken “system” of tax evasion, environmental destruction and poverty. Critics argue Mr Brand’s manifesto is intellectually arid and devoid of meaningful policies.

None the less, he has struck a chord with the public, earning nine million Twitter followers and a wide audience for his internet television show. 

He has refused to stand for election in case he becomes “one of them”. He fled from Mr Robinson as he attempted to interview him. 

Mr Blair said MPs should not think that changing the process of democracy, such as introducing internet voting, will address public cynicism towards Westminster. 

“There is a whole swathe of the country that thinks, I elect my government, you guys go and govern. Don’t keep troubling me every three seconds with what I should think or shouldn’t think; they want to see their leaders leading.”

necropolitics: a war zone of the mind playing itself out on the streets

NYTimes |  At least in these cases that have galvanized the nation and the world in protest, we all see the twisted logic that results in the exoneration of the police who take away the lives of unarmed black men and women. And why is that the case? It is not because what the police and their lawyers present as their thinking in the midst of the situation is very reasonable. No, it is because that form of thinking is becoming more “reasonable” all the time. In other words, every time a grand jury or a police review board accepts this form of reasoning, they ratify the idea that blacks are a population against which society must be defended, and that the police defend themselves and (white) society, when they preemptively shoot unarmed black men in public space. At stake is a way that black people are figured as a threat even when they are simply living their lives, walking the street, leaving the convenience store, riding the subway, because in those instances this is only a threatening life, or a threat to the only kind of life, white life, that is recognized.

G.Y.: What has led us to this place?

J.B.: Racism has complex origins, and it is important that we learn the history of racism to know what has led us to this terrible place. But racism is also reproduced in the present, in the prison system, new forms of population control, increasing economic inequality that affects people of color disproportionately. These forms of institutionalized destitution and inequality are reproduced through these daily encounters — the disproportionate numbers of minorities stopped and detained by the police, and the rising number of those who fall victim to police violence. The figure of the black person as threat, as criminal, as someone who is, no matter where he is going, already-on-the-way-to-prison, conditions these pre-emptive strikes, attributing lethal aggression to the very figure who suffers it most. The lives taken in this way are not lives worth grieving; they belong to the increasing number of those who are understood as ungrievable, whose lives are thought not to be worth preserving.

But, of course, what we are also seeing in the recent and continuing assemblies, rallies and vigils is an open mourning for those whose lives were cut short and without cause, brutally extinguished. The practices of public mourning and political demonstration converge: when lives are considered ungrievable, to grieve them openly is protest. So when people assemble in the street, arrive at rallies or vigils, demonstrate with the aim of opposing this form of racist violence, they are “speaking back” to this mode of address, insisting on what should be obvious but is not, namely, that these lost lives are unacceptable losses.

necropolitics: freedom fries any semblance of fair and uniform application...,

France24 |  "Tonight, as far as I'm concerned, I feel like Charlie Coulibaly", Dieudonné, who has several convictions for making anti-Semitic remarks and jokes, wrote in a post that has since been deleted from his Facebook page.

The comment was a play on “Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie), the phrase that has become a rallying cry following the massacre of 12 people at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo last Wednesday. But it uses the last name of Amédy Coulibaly – the gunman who murdered four people at a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris on Friday.

Coulibaly, who prosecutors say was also behind the fatal shooting of a policewoman in the French capital on Thursday, was killed when police stormed the supermarket and freed the surviving hostages.

He is believed to have acted in coordination with Said and Chérif Kouachi, the brothers responsible for the Charlie Hebdo shootings, who were also killed in a police raid Friday.

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, who visited the heart of Paris’s Jewish quarter on Monday, described Dieudonné's remarks as "contemptible".

Dieudonné: 'I’m no different from Charlie'

In an open letter to Cazeneuve published online Monday, Dieudonné responded to the minister’s criticism, accusing the French government of “trying to kill me by any means”.

“For a year, I have been treated like public enemy number one, while I seek to do nothing but make people laugh,” he wrote.

Defending his right to freedom of speech, he compared himself to Charlie Hebdo, which frequently sparks debates over its controversial content, such as publishing cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed.

“When I speak … you look for a pretext to ban me. You consider me an Amédy Coulibaly, while I'm no different from Charlie,” he said.

Dieudonné made his controversial Facebook post after attending Sunday's unity march against extremism that brought more than 1.5 million people on to the streets of Paris in the wake of the attacks.

He described the march, considered the biggest rally in modern French history, as "a magical moment comparable to the big-bang".

necropolitics: freedom fries structure, meaning, self-worth and dignity...,

truthdig |  Becoming a holy warrior, a jihadist, a champion of an absolute and pure ideal, is an intoxicating conversion, a kind of rebirth that brings a sense of power and importance. It is as familiar to an Islamic jihadist as it was to a member of the Red Brigades or the old fascist and communist parties. Converts to any absolute ideal that promises to usher in a utopia adopt a Manichaean view of history rife with bizarre conspiracy theories. Opposing and even benign forces are endowed with hidden malevolence. The converts believe they live in a binary universe divided between good and evil, the pure and the impure. As champions of the good and the pure they sanctify their own victimhood and demonize all nonbelievers. They believe they are anointed to change history. And they embrace a hypermasculine violence that is viewed as a cleansing agent for the world’s contaminants, including those people who belong to other belief systems, races and cultures. This is why France’s far right, organized around Marine Le Pen, the leader of the anti-immigrant Front National, has so much in common with the jihadists whom Le Pen says she wants to annihilate.

When you sink to despair, when you live trapped in Gaza, Israel’s vast open-air prison, sleeping 10 to a floor in a concrete hovel, walking every morning through the muddy streets of your refugee camp to get a bottle of water because the water that flows from your tap is toxic, lining up at a U.N. office to get a little food because there is no work and your family is hungry, suffering the periodic aerial bombardments by Israel that leaves hundreds of dead, your religion is all you have left. Muslim prayer, held five times a day, gives you your only sense of structure and meaning, and, most importantly, self-worth. And when the privileged of the world ridicule the one thing that provides you with dignity, you react with inchoate fury. This fury is exacerbated when you and nearly everyone around you feel powerless to respond.

The cartoons of the Prophet in the Paris-based satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo are offensive and juvenile. None of them are funny. And they expose a grotesque double standard when it comes to Muslims. In France a Holocaust denier, or someone who denies the Armenian genocide, can be imprisoned for a year and forced to pay a $60,000 fine. It is a criminal act in France to mock the Holocaust the way Charlie Hebdo mocked Islam. French high school students must be taught about the Nazi persecution of the Jews, but these same students read almost nothing in their textbooks about the widespread French atrocities, including a death toll among Algerians that some sources set at more than 1 million, in the Algerian war for independence against colonial France. French law bans the public wearing of the burqa, a body covering for women that includes a mesh over the face, as well as the niqab, a full veil that has a small slit for the eyes. Women who wear these in public can be arrested, fined the equivalent of about $200 and forced to carry out community service. France banned rallies in support of the Palestinians last summer when Israel was carrying out daily airstrikes in Gaza that resulted in hundreds of civilian deaths. The message to Muslims is clear: Your traditions, history and suffering do not matter. Your story will not be heard. Joe Sacco had the courage to make this point in panels he drew for the Guardian newspaper. And as Sacco pointed out, if we cannot hear these stories we will endlessly trade state terror for terror.

“It is a sad state of affairs when Liberty means the freedom to insult, demean and mock people’s most sacred concepts,” the Islamic scholar Hamza Yusuf, an American who lives in California, told me in an email. “In some Latin countries people are acquitted for murders where the defendant’s mother was slandered by the one he murdered. I saw this in Spain many years ago. It’s no excuse for murder, but it explains things in terms of honor, which no longer means anything in the West. Ireland is a western country that still retains some of that, and it was the Irish dueling laws that were used in Kentucky, the last State in the Union to make dueling outlawed. Dueling was once very prominent in the West when honor meant something deep in the soul of men. Now we are not allowed to feel insulted by anything other than a racial slur, which means less to a deeply religious person than an attack on his or her religion. Muslim countries are still governed, as you well know, by shame and honor codes. Religion is the big one. I was saddened by the ‘I’m Charlie’ tweets and posters, because while I’m definitely not in sympathy with those misguided fools [the gunmen who invaded the newspaper], I have no feeling of solidarity with mockers.”

Charlie Hebdo, despite its insistence that it targets all equally, fired an artist and writer in 2008 for an article it deemed to be anti-Semitic. Fist tap Vic.

necropolitics: poor gary younge, panem's got his tongue....,

guardian |  Given world events over the past decade or so, the most obvious explanation is also the most plausible: the fate of Muslims in foreign conflicts played a role in radicalising these young men. Working-class Parisians don’t go to Yemen for military training on a whim. Since their teens these young men have been raised on a nightly diet of illegal wars, torture and civilian massacres in the Gulf and the Middle East in which the victims have usually been Muslim.

In a court deposition in 2007, Chérif Kouachi, the younger of the brothers affiliated with al-Qaida who shot the journalists at Charlie Hebdo, was explicit about this. “I got this idea when I saw the injustices shown by television on what was going on over there. I am speaking about the torture that the Americans have inflicted on the Iraqis.”

In a video from beyond the grave the other shooter, Amedy Coulibaly, claims he joined Islamic State to avenge attacks on Muslims. These grievances are real even if attempts to square them with the killers’ actions make your head hurt. France opposed the Iraq war; Isis and al-Qaida have been sworn enemies and both have massacred substantial numbers of Muslims. Not only is the morality bankrupt, but the logic is warped.

But Islamists are not alone in their contradictions. Today is the anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo Bay. Given the recent release of the US torture report or France’s role in resisting democratic change during the Arab spring, many of those who claim that this is a battle between liberty and barbarism have a foot in both camps.

This is why describing these attacks as criminal is both axiomatic and inadequate. 

year of shattered illusions...,

alt-market |  It has been said that during the economic collapse of the 1930s that the Great Depression was a depression only for the 30 percent of people that had lost everything. For the employed and the financially secure, the depression was much like any other time. This is the point at which we stand today in the collective mindset. With nearly a third of the U.S. population kicked off the unemployment rolls and approximately half the country dependent on a government check of some kind for their survival, the current depression is only now beginning to feel like a depression for anyone. The soup lines have received a fresh candy coating of EBT cards and welfare payments, but the illusion is finally fading, and this should be of great concern to us all in 2015.

Even more frightening is our culture’s deluded sense of what a collapse actually looks like. For many, collapse is a cinematic and overnight affair, with zombies, nuclear bombs and mass panic. In real life, and throughout history, collapse is a process. Since at least 2008, the U.S. and the rest of the world have been experiencing that process. Everyone is waiting for equities to implode and for social unrest to erupt before they take the threat seriously, but these are not signals of collapse. These are the things that occur when a collapse has run its course. Collapse never occurs overnight. It takes years for the effects of social and fiscal breakdown to be visibly felt. And when they are felt, many people refuse to notice. Eighty years ago, America was halfway through the Great Depression, and mainstream economists were STILL claiming that recovery was right around the corner. Illusion and self-deception can be so powerful that the worst miseries can be normalized, at least for a little while.

And it isn’t only the general public that is stricken with crippling bias. There are those within the liberty movement who have bought into false paradigms for various reasons, and this threatens any progress we have made over the past several years. There are those who still think that the “conflict” between Eastern and Western politicians and banking elites is somehow real. There are those who believe that Russia and China, despite their numerous and undeniable ties to the global banking syndicate (information I have covered in multiple articles over the years), are the "good guys", while Western nations are the "bad guys", rather than them all being mere subsidiaries and franchises of the same monstrous globalist machine.

They hold onto this illusion, I think, because it is much more frightening to accept the reality that we are alone, that the liberty movement is the first and last line of defense against centralization, that the responsibility for the future of independence and individual freedom rests on our shoulders. It is much easier to fantasize that there are others out there, nations and governments with armies and capital, that are on our side and will fight our battles for us. This illusion will be a painful one for many in the movement as they begin to realize that the East is actually working in tandem with international financiers instead of working against them.

There are also those in the liberty movement who cling to the notion that the fight against globalism will be won without physical conflict. They believe that if we simply protest long enough, play the political and legal game long enough, nullify long enough, refuse to participate long enough, that the elitist edifice, an edifice which has existed for centuries and has manipulated historical precedence for just as long, will suddenly disappear in a puff of fairy dust.

yeah.., no.., - sum'n faux

Joe Sacco The Limits of Satire Fist tap Vic.

the establishment has worked since _________ to create a common political identity against grievance

juancole |  The horrific murder of the editor, cartoonists and other staff of the irreverent satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, along with two policemen, by terrorists in Paris was in my view a strategic strike, aiming at polarizing the French and European public.

The problem for a terrorist group like al-Qaeda is that its recruitment pool is Muslims, but most Muslims are not interested in terrorism. Most Muslims are not even interested in politics, much less political Islam. France is a country of 66 million, of which about 5 million is of Muslim heritage. But in polling, only a third, less than 2 million, say that they are interested in religion. French Muslims may be the most secular Muslim-heritage population in the world (ex-Soviet ethnic Muslims often also have low rates of belief and observance). Many Muslim immigrants in the post-war period to France came as laborers and were not literate people, and their grandchildren are rather distant from Middle Eastern fundamentalism, pursuing urban cosmopolitan culture such as rap and rai. In Paris, where Muslims tend to be better educated and more religious, the vast majority reject violence and say they are loyal to France.

Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall of disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination.

This tactic is similar to the one used by Stalinists in the early 20th century. Decades ago I read an account by the philosopher Karl Popper of how he flirted with Marxism for about 6 months in 1919 when he was auditing classes at the University of Vienna. He left the group in disgust when he discovered that they were attempting to use false flag operations to provoke militant confrontations. In one of them police killed 8 socialist youth at Hörlgasse on 15 June 1919. For the unscrupulous among Bolsheviks–who would later be Stalinists– the fact that most students and workers don’t want to overthrow the business class is inconvenient, and so it seemed desirable to some of them to “sharpen the contradictions” between labor and capital.

not feeling je suis charlie...,

al-islam |  Someone may say, "The economics you claim to exist in Islam do not comprise an economic doctrine but an ethical code the religion (of Islam) provides as guidelines which Islam exhorts people to follow. Just as Islam enjoined the prohibition of deception and backbiting, etc., it also enjoined helping the poor. 

It prohibits injustice, admonishes the rich to console the needy, forbids the strong from confiscating the rights of the weak, and warns the first against earning their wealth through illegal means. It also imposes a mandatory rite, among others, called zakat. It imposes it besides prayers, pilgrimage and the fast in order to make a variety in the means of worship, and to emphasize the necessity of helping the poor and being generous to them.

"All of this has been done by Islam in accordance with a general ethical procedure, and these injunctions, pieces of advice and directives are no more than ethics which aim at the growth of the good energies within the Muslim individual's own self, and to tie him closer to his Lord as well as brother man. They do not imply an economic doctrine or the level of a generally inclusive organization of the whole society.

"In other words, the above stated injunctions, which have an individualistic ethical nature, aim at the individual's reform and the growth of goodness within him. They do not have a social organizational nature. The difference between the preacher who ascends the pulpit in order to admonish people to be kind and compassionate, to warn them against injustice, wrongdoing and trespassing on the rights of other, and like the social reformer who plans the sort of relations which have to exist among people, defining rights and obligations."

Our answer to all of these arguments is as follows:

The facts about Islam and its economics do not agree at all with such an interpretation which reduces the level of Islamic economics to that of mere providing counsels and ethical codes. It is true that the ethical trend is obvious in all Islamic tenets. And it is true that Islam contains a huge multitude of injunctions covering all spheres of life, the human conduct, and the economic sphere in particular.

It is also true to say that Islam has gathered the most fascinating means to ethically nurture the Muslim individual, help the growth of his good energies and bring out of him perfection personified. But this does not at all mean that Islam confines its teachings to ethically nurture the individual while setting social organization aside. Nor does it mean that Islam preaches only to the individual rather than being, in addition to this, a doctrine and an organization for the society in its various aspects of life, including its economic life.

Islam has not forbidden injustice, admonished people to be just, warned them against transgressing against the rights of others, without defining the concepts of injustice and iniquity, from its own viewpoint, or without outlining the rights not to be trespassed. Islam has not left the concept of justice, injustice and righteousness clouded with obscurity, nor has it left their interpretation for others, as do ethical preachers. 

Rather, it has brought a defined image of justice and general rules of coexistence of people in the fields of wealth production, distribution and handling, considering any deviation from such rules and the justice it defines as sheer injustice and flagrant transgression on the rights of others.

This is the difference between the position of the preacher and that of the advocate of the economic doctrine. The preacher preaches about justice and warns against injustice, but he does not lay down the criteria for justice and injustice; rather, he leaves such criteria to the commonly followed customs, those that are recognized by both preacher and the congregation to which he preaches alike.

As regarding the economic doctrine, this attempts to put down such criteria and mold them into a well-planned economic system that regulates various economic fields.

Had Islam come simply in order to say to people, "Quit injustice! Practice equity! Do not be transgressors!"—leaving to them to define the meaning of "injustice," to draw the portrait which embodies justice and to agree on the rights required by equity according to their own circumstances, education and the ideals in which they believe and the interests and needs they realize. 

Had Islam left all of this for people to determine, confining itself to enjoining justice and attracting people towards it, forbidding injustice and warning them against it through both methods of attracting and warning…, then it would have, indeed, remained a preacher and nothing else.

When Islam required the Muslims to quit injustice and practice equity, it at the same time provided them with its own definition of justice and injustice. It has taken upon itself to differentiate between the fair method in distribution, handling and production, and the foul one. It has indicated, for e.g., that forceful possession of land without tilling it is injustice, that maintaining it on the basis of utilizing it is "permissible," that the accumulation of wealth by acquiring a portion of the produced wealth in the name of "interest" is injustice, that its own achievement of profit is right, and many such relations and norms of behavior in which Islam has distinguished between injustice and justice.

panem's ruthless fakery transparent in the light of living memory history...,

wikipedia |  The Paris massacre of 1961 was a massacre in Paris on 17 October 1961, during the Algerian War (1954–62). Under orders from the head of the Parisian police, Maurice Papon, the French police attacked a forbidden demonstration of some 30,000 pro-FLN Algerians. Two months before, FLN had decided to increase the bombing in France and to resume the campaign against the pro-France Algerians and the rival Algerian nationalist organization called MNA in France. After 37 years of denial, in 1998 the French government acknowledged 40 deaths, although there are estimates of over 200.^[1]

The 17 October 1961 massacre appears to have been intentional, as has been demonstrated by historian Jean-Luc Einaudi, who won a trial against Maurice Papon in 1999 — the latter was convicted in 1998 on charges of crimes against humanity for his role under the Vichy collaborationist regime during World War II. Official documentation and eyewitnesses within the Paris police department indeed suggest that the massacre was directed by Maurice Papon. Police records show that Papon called for officers in one station to be 'subversive' in quelling the demonstrations, and assured them protection from prosecution if they participated.^[2] Many demonstrators died when they were violently herded by police into the River Seine, with some thrown from bridges after being beaten unconscious. Other demonstrators were killed within the courtyard of the Paris police headquarters after being arrested and delivered there in police buses. Officers who participated in the courtyard killings took the precaution of removing identification numbers from their uniforms, while senior officers ignored pleas by other policemen who were shocked when witnessing the brutality. Silence about the events within the police headquarters was further enforced by threats of reprisals from participating officers.

Forty years later, Bertrand Delanoë, member of the Socialist Party (PS) and Mayor of Paris, put a plaque in remembrance of the massacre on the Saint-Michel bridge on 17 October 2001.^[3][4] How many demonstrators were killed is still unclear, but estimates range from 70 to 200 people. In the absence of official estimates, the placard which commemorates the massacre stated: "In memory of the many Algerians killed during the bloody repression of the peaceful demonstration of 17 October 1961". On 18 February 2007 (the day after Papon's death), calls were made for a Paris Métro station under construction in Gennevilliers to be named "17 Octobre 1961" in commemoration of the massacre.^[5][6]

necropolitics: from interrogation to extermination in a climate of perpetration

WSWS |  One month ago, the Senate Intelligence Committee released the 525-page summary of its voluminous report on the torture of prisoners in secret CIA facilities overseas, conducted between 2002 and 2007. In grisly detail, the report documented such practices as waterboarding, systematic beatings, and hitherto unknown tortures such as “rectal feeding.” But in practice, the report has been buried, its evidence of government criminality ignored, the perpetrators and organizers of torture going scot-free.

As the World Socialist Web Site declared at the time, “Two irrefutable conclusions flow from the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture: 1) The United States, during the Bush administration, committed criminal acts of the most serious character, in violation of international and domestic law; and 2) None of those responsible for these crimes will be arrested, indicted or prosecuted for their actions.”

Far from being shamed or humiliated by the detailed exposure of their criminality, those most implicated in the establishment and operation of the torture chambers have brazenly defended their conduct. From former Vice President Dick Cheney to ex-CIA directors George Tenet, Michael Hayden and Porter Goss, to the operational head of the interrogation program, Jose Rodriguez, they have displayed a well-justified confidence that the Obama administration will protect them from any consequences.

The Obama administration has officially shut down the secret CIA prisons and adopted a policy of blowing up its enemies with drone-fired missiles rather than capturing them. The shift from interrogation to extermination has increased the number of innocent victims many-fold. Whereas dozens of those jailed in CIA prisons were found to have no connection to terrorism, the drone-missile strikes have killed thousands of civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and other countries.

Two recent incidents demonstrate the complicity of the Obama administration with the torturers. On December 30, the outgoing chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Dianne Feinstein, sent a nine-page letter to the president outlining proposed legislative and administrative actions to be taken on the basis of the torture report.

The changes were largely cosmetic, such as enacting into law the ban on waterboarding and other forms of torture imposed by executive order after Obama took office in 2009. Even these minimal legislative actions will go nowhere in the new Republican-controlled Congress, and the proposed administrative actions will be ignored by the military-intelligence apparatus. The White House has not bothered to respond to Feinstein’s letter.

In a statement issued January 5, the CIA announced that after four years in office, the agency’s inspector-general, David Buckley, was resigning, effective the end of the month, to “pursue an opportunity in the private sector.” Buckley ran afoul of the CIA top brass with a report last July acknowledging that five CIA operatives had penetrated the computers used by Senate Intelligence Committee staffers who prepared the torture report, in an effort to find out how the Senate panel had obtained certain CIA internal documents the agency had decided to withhold from the committee that has legal oversight authority.

This electronic surveillance of the legislative branch was so brazenly criminal that Senator Feinstein felt compelled to deliver a one-hour address on the floor of the Senate last March denouncing the agency’s actions. She charged that the agency “may well have violated the separation-of-powers principle embodied in the United States Constitution,” and also “the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the CIA from conducting domestic searches or surveillance.”

rule of law: petraeus never gave sworn testimony...,

fp |  Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, has requested that former CIA director David Petraeus testify under oath in a new public hearing on Benghazi in a letter to Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA). 

The request comes in response to Issa’s recent remarks that Petraeus was pressured into toeing the administration line in the aftermath of last year’s Benghazi attack. "David Petraeus said what the administration wanted him to say," Issa told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. 

In the letter, Cummings challenges Issa to make those allegations to Petraeus’s face. "These are some of the most serious charges you can make against our nation’s top military and intelligence officials, and I believe the American people deserve to hear their responses in the same forum in which you made them — a public hearing before our Committee," writes Cummings. 

When asked if Issa would consider calling on Petraeus to attend a public hearing, Issa spokesman Frederick Hill left the possibility open, saying "We always welcome the minority to make suggestions." Petraeus’s lawyer and Washington heavyweight Robert Barnett, who has handled media requests for the retired general in recent months, did not respond to a request for comment.

Interestingly, in this highly politicized investigation, it’s not clear which partisan interest a Petraeus testimony would serve.

necropolitics: sleep&eat ain't gone do a dayyum thing...,

NYTimes |  The F.B.I. and Justice Department prosecutors have recommended bringing felony charges against David H. Petraeus, contending that he provided classified information to a lover while he was director of the C.I.A., officials said, leaving Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to decide whether to seek an indictment that could send the pre-eminent military officer of his generation to prison.

The Justice Department investigation stems from an affair Mr. Petraeus had with Paula Broadwell, an Army Reserve officer who was writing his biography, and focuses on whether he gave her access to his C.I.A. email account and other highly classified information.

F.B.I. agents discovered classified documents on her computer after Mr. Petraeus resigned from the C.I.A. in 2012 when the affair became public.

Mr. Petraeus, a retired four-star general who served as commander of American forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan, has said he never provided classified information to Ms. Broadwell, and has indicated to the Justice Department that he has no interest in a plea deal that would spare him an embarrassing trial. A lawyer for Mr. Petraeus, Robert B. Barnett, said Friday he had no comment.

The officials who said that charges had been recommended were briefed on the investigation but asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it.

Mr. Holder was expected to decide by the end of last year whether to bring charges against Mr. Petraeus, but he has not indicated how he plans to proceed. The delay has frustrated some Justice Department and F.B.I. officials and investigators who have questioned whether Mr. Petraeus has received special treatment at a time Mr. Holder has led a crackdown on government officials who reveal secrets to journalists.

The protracted process has also frustrated Mr. Petraeus’s friends and political allies, who say it is unfair to keep the matter hanging over his head. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, wrote to Mr. Holder last month that the investigation had deprived the nation of wisdom from one of its most experienced leaders.

rule of law: child-murdering overseer timothy loehmann operating a few points shy of IQ-75

cleveland |  Timothy Loehmann, the Cleveland police officer who fatally shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice in November, previously failed the written test to become a deputy with Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Department, according to records released on Wednesday.

In September 2013, Loehmann scored a 46 percent on the department's written cognitive exam, administered by Cuyahoga Community College and given to potential recruits. Seventy percent is considered a passing score. Recruits are tested on problem-solving, vocabulary, grammar, punctuation and spelling.

Other records show Loehmann did pass the department's physical exam, which requires applicants to perform at least 27 pushups in a minute and run a mile and a half in less than 16 minutes and 36 seconds, among other tasks.

Northeast Ohio Media Group reported on Tuesday that Loehmann had been rejected for a deputy sheriff job that he had applied for in September 2013. The county released Loehmann's job application and exam scores in response to a public records request. (Scroll down to read them.)

Loehmann was among 35 applicants who passed the physical exam but failed the written test, the records show.

Loehmann previously also was unsuccessful in getting jobs with police departments in Akron, Euclid and Parma Heights. He had been looking for a police job since he resigned from the Independence police department in November 2012 following a poor performance review. He had worked there for five months.

invasion of america

Aeon Magazine | Between 1776 and the present, the United States seized some 1.5 billion acres from North America’s native peoples, an area 25 times the size of the United Kingdom. Many Americans are only vaguely familiar with the story of how this happened. They perhaps recognise Wounded Knee and the Trail of Tears, but few can recall the details and even fewer think that those events are central to US history.

Their tenuous grasp of the subject is regrettable if unsurprising, given that the conquest of the continent is both essential to understanding the rise of the United States and deplorable. Acre by acre, the dispossession of native peoples made the United States a transcontinental power. To visualise this story, I created ‘The Invasion of America’, an interactive time-lapse map of the nearly 500 cessions that the United States carved out of native lands on its westward march to the shores of the Pacific.

what message was this terrorist sending

Denver Post | An improvised explosive device was detonated against the exterior wall of a building housing the Colorado Springs chapter of the NAACP on Tuesday, officials said.

The explosion knocked items off the office walls but no one was injured.

Agents from the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives went to the scene after the blast to gather evidence and place markers.

The FBI said that a gasoline can was placed next to the device but the contents did not ignite.

According to the the FBI, officials are seeking a "potential person of interest," described as a balding white male, about 40 years old.

"He may be driving a 2000 or older model dirty, white pick-up truck with paneling, a dark colored bed liner, open tailgate, and a missing or covered license plate," the FBI said in a statement said.

rule of law: proxy war on the impoverished 15% no longer needed for non-existent manufacturing jobs...,

pbs |  For the past 40 years, the war on drugs has resulted in more than 45 million arrests, $1 trillion dollars in government spending, and America’s role as the world’s largest jailer. Yet for all that, drugs are cheaper, purer, and more available than ever. Filmed in more than twenty states, The House I Live In captures heart-wrenching stories of those on the front lines — from the dealer to the grieving mother, the narcotics officer to the senator, the inmate to the federal judge — and offers a penetrating look at the profound human rights implications of America’s longest war. 

The film recognizes drug abuse as a matter of public health, and investigates the tragic errors and shortcomings that have resulted from framing it as an issue for law enforcement. It also examines how political and financial corruption has fueled the war on drugs, despite persistent evidence of its moral, economic, and practical failures. The drug war in America has helped establish the largest prison-industrial system in the world, contributing to the incarceration of 2.3 million men and women and is responsible for untold collateral damage to the lives of countless individuals and families, with a particularly destructive impact on black America.

“It’d be one thing if it was draconian and it worked. But it’s draconian and it doesn’t work. It just leads to more,” says David Simon, creator of the HBO series, The Wire.

Instead of questioning a campaign of such epic cost and failure, those in public office generally advocate for harsher penalties for drug offenses, lest they be perceived as soft on crime. Thanks to mandatory minimum sentencing, a small offense can put a nonviolent offender behind bars for decades — or even life. Many say these prisoners are paying for fear instead of paying for their crime.

“If you stand in a federal court, you’re watching poor and uneducated people being fed into a machine like meat to make sausage. It’s just bang, bang, bang, bang. Next!” says journalist Charles Bowden.

But there’s a growing recognition among those on all sides that the war on drugs is a failure. At a time of heightened fiscal instability, the drug war is also seen as economically unsustainable. Beyond its human cost at home, the unprecedented violence in Mexico provides a daily reminder of the war’s immense impact abroad, and America has at last begun to take the first meaningful steps toward reform. At this pivotal moment, the film promotes public awareness of the problem while encouraging new and innovative pathways to domestic drug policy reform.  Fist tap DD.

rule of law: who feels incompetent and inhumane overseer loehmann needs to be underneath a jail somewhere?

NYTimes |  The two Cleveland police officers involved in the fatal shooting of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy who was carrying a pellet gun, stood by without rendering medical aid as the boy lay wounded next to their patrol car, a newly released extended surveillance video shows.

Then, about a minute and a half after one officer had shot Tamir, the other officer tackled the boy’s 14-year-old sister as she tried to reach her brother. Tamir was shot Nov. 22 after someone called 911 to report “a guy” who had been pointing a “probably fake” pistol outside a community recreation center on Cleveland’s west side.

The video, obtained by the Northeast Ohio Media Group, provided fresh detail about a shooting that roiled Cleveland and quickly became the latest shooting to be absorbed into a broader national narrative about police violence in African-American communities.

The surveillance tape also seemed to clarify an issue in the shooting investigation: that the officers provided no immediate medical assistance to Tamir, who was not pronounced dead until more than nine hours later at a Cleveland hospital. An autopsy by the Cuyahoga County medical examiner later found that Tamir died from a gunshot wound to the abdomen. In addition, it confirmed the account that Tamir’s mother, Samaria Rice, gave in the weeks after the shooting, that the police had tackled and detained her daughter as she rushed out of the recreation center, trying to reach her brother’s side.

rule of law: a costume and a badge only confer extra powers in a comic book...,

rollingstone |  The few police spokespeople who are saying anything at all about the slowdown seem to be saying they're doing this for a variety of reasons. The New York Post reports that some of the reduction may be due to safety measures recommended by union members after the Ramos/Liu murders:

Cop union leaders told their members to respond to all calls with two patrol cars — and make arrests only when "absolutely necessary" — to avoid potential copycat attacks following the Ramos and Liu assassinations.

But then Edward Mullins, head of the Sergeants' Benevolent Association, who admitted that "people are talking to each other" and that the action has "became contagious," told the Times that police are still responding to essential calls, and only ignoring "financial" infractions:

All of the 911 calls are being responded to...The lack of summons activity, we're talking about financial fines. That's one of those things that will correct itself, I'm sure.

But then there was this bizarre quote in the Post yesterday:

Michael Palladino, the head of the detectives union, responded with frustration.

"You can't win," he said. "When cops make arrests and give summonses, they are accused of being robotic with no feelings, When cops exercise discretion and express feelings, they’re accused of being political and disrespectful."

So which is it? Are police cutting down on arrests out of concern for their safety post Ramos/Liu? Are they merely pulling a slowdown by specifically abandoning non-essential, financial infractions?

Or are they "exercising discretion" and showing "feelings" by doing away with the harassing, often arm-twisting, day-ruining barrage of useless and expensive summonses that have been handed out in low-income neighborhoods in massive numbers since the early Nineties?

I'm not buying the "feelings" line, although I know for a fact that a lot of police hate the endless regime of Broken Windows tickets (not as much as the people getting the tickets hate it, but still).

I'm guessing police are trying to make the public and the Mayor feel the pain of their absence as much as possible without opening themselves up to accusations of deliberately making the city unsafe, and this is the only way they can think to do it.

superb demonstration of why cats with bass in their voice aren't allowed on teevee anymore...,

rule of law: is the NYPD under the control of its democratically elected civilian commander-in-chief or not?

Lynch on NPR again demanding an apology from De Blasio

NYTimes |  Who is to apologize for bias in policing in general, and generations of racially biased criminal justice, both of which have contributed to mass incarceration?

This isn’t only about where the apologies should begin, but where they should end.

Sure, we can search for ways to rationalize behaviors and responses, talking about personal choices, culture, crime and family structures, but those discussions mustn’t be — can’t be — separated from the context of history and the confines of institutional structures.

Lift that rock and all sorts of uncomfortable things come crawling out — a privilege made possible by plunder and oppression, intergenerational transfers of hopelessness bred by intergenerational societal exclusions — truly ugly things.

We have to decide what racial conciliation should look like in this country. Does it look like avoidance and go-along-to-get-along obsequiousness, or does it look like justice and acknowledgment of both the personal parts we play and the noxious structural bias enveloping us?

How is mutual understanding achieved without mutual respect being given and blame taken?

How do we reconcile ourselves to one another without the failures of the systems that govern us being laid bare before us?

It seems to me, in the New York standoff, that the mayor owes no apology for fighting to overturn stop-and-frisk, disclosing that he talked to his son about encounters with police officers, or being compassionate to protesters. That is the man New Yorkers elected.

This, to my mind, is an attack on him as an agent of change. It is a battle to see which arm has the most muscle: the one that wants to deny bias, explicit or implicit, in the exercise of its power while simultaneously clinging to that bias; or the one committed to questioning the power and acknowledging the bias. Eventually, we will have to wrestle with the question of which of those forces must win for us to be true and whole.

pope going full-in on warsocialism

Western Catholic Reporter | Pope Francis, who has already broken new ground in his outreach to a suffering humanity, has put the weight of the Catholic Church behind a new humanitarian movement to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

The pope sent a message to the recent conference in Vienna, attended by more than 150 governments, to advance public understanding of what is now called the "catastrophic humanitarian consequences" of any use of the 16,300 nuclear weapons possessed by nine countries.

In his message, delivered by Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, a leading Holy See diplomat, Pope Francis stripped away any lingering moral acceptance of the military doctrine of nuclear deterrence: "Nuclear deterrence and the threat of mutually assured destruction cannot be the basis for an ethics of fraternity and peaceful coexistence."

He called for a worldwide dialogue, including both the nuclear and non-nuclear states and the burgeoning organizations that make up civil society, "to ensure that nuclear weapons are banned once and for all to the benefit of our common home."

Pope Francis has now put his firm stamp on the Church's rejection of nuclear weapons, to the enormous satisfaction of the delegates crowding the Vienna conference. No longer can the major powers, still defending their right to keep possessing nuclear weapons, claim the slightest shred of morality for their actions.

The pope's stand was supported by a remarkable Vatican document, Nuclear Disarmament: Time for Abolition, also put before the Vienna conference. The document did not mince words: "Now is the time to affirm not only the immorality of the use of nuclear weapons, but the immorality of their possession, thereby clearing the road to abolition."

The Church has now put behind it the limited acceptance of nuclear deterrence it gave at the height of the Cold War. That acceptance was given only on the condition that nuclear deterrence lead progressively to disarmament.

Washington, London and Paris, the three Western nuclear capitals where the Church's words influence, to some degree, government policy, used this limited acceptance to justify their continued nuclear buildup.

When the Cold War ended, they continued modernizing their arsenals and refused demands, reiterated at the UN many times, to join in comprehensive negotiations with Moscow and Beijing.