US officials are touting Israel’s defense of Iran’s attack as a
victory, and that’s the message Biden conveyed to Netanyahu, a sign the
US doesn’t want the situation to escalate. Iran fired over 300 missiles
and drones at Israel, which was a response to Israel’s bombing of Iran’s
consulate in Damascus on April 1.
“Israel really came out far ahead in this exchange. It took out the
IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp] leadership in the Levant, Iran
tried to respond, and Israel clearly demonstrated its military
superiority, defeating this attack, particularly in coordination with
its partners,” a senior Biden administration official told reporters, according to The Times of Israel.
In a statement on the attack released by the White House, Biden said he would convene with other G7 leaders to “coordinate a united diplomatic response to Iran’s brazen attack.”
Israeli officials claimed 99% of the Iranian missiles and drones were
intercepted by Israeli air defense systems and with assistance from the
US, Britain, and Jordan. Some missiles got through and damaged the
Nevatim Airbase in southern Israel. Only one person was injured in the
attack, a seven-year-old Bedouin girl in the Negev, and nobody was
killed.
Iran gave Israel plenty of time to respond to the attack by
announcing it fired the drones hours before they reached Israeli
territory, and Tehran said it gave other regional countries a 72-hour notice. Iranian officials said the attack was “limited” and made clear they do not seek an escalation with Israel.
But Tehran is also warning it will launch an even bigger attack if
Israel responds. “If the Zionist regime or its supporters demonstrate
reckless behavior, they will receive a decisive and much stronger
response,” Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said in a statement on Sunday.
While the US is signaling it seeks de-escalation and won’t support a
potential Israeli attack on Iran, it’s unclear what Israel will do next.
The Israeli war cabinet convened to discuss the situation on Sunday, and Israeli media reports said they agreed a response would come but didn’t decide on where or when.
Israeli War Cabinet Minister Benny Gantz vowed Israel would respond
but signaled it wouldn’t be imminent. Gantz said the “event is not
over” and that Israel should “build a regional coalition and exact a
price from Iran, in a way and at a time that suits us.”
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that Biden also told Netanyahu
“that the United States is going to continue to help Israel defend
itself,” signaling the US would intervene again to help Israel if it
does choose to escalate the situation and comes under another attack.
Israel’s bombing of the Iranian consulate in Syria killed 13 people,
including seven members of the IRGC. Israel has a history of conducting
covert attacks inside Iran and killing Iranians in Syria, but the
bombing of the diplomatic facility marked a huge escalation.
simplicius | Now, let’s get down to the nuts and bolts.
This strike was unprecedented for several important reasons. Firstly, it was of course the first Iranian strike on Israeli soil directly from Iranian soil itself, rather than utilizing proxies from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, etc. This alone was a big watershed milestone that has opened up all sorts of potentials for escalation.
Secondly, it was one of the most advanced and longest range peer-to-peer style exchanges in history. Even in Russia, where I have noted we’ve seen the first ever truly modern near-peer conflict, with unprecedented scenes never before witnessed like when highly advanced NATO Storm Shadow missiles flew to Crimea while literally in the same moments, advanced Russian Kalibrs flew past them in the opposite direction—such an exchange has never been witnessed before, as we’ve become accustomed to watching NATO pound on weaker, unarmed opponents over the last few decades. But no, last night Iran upped the ante even more. Because even in Russia, such exchanges at least happen directly over the Russian border onto its neighbor, where logistics and ISR is for obvious reasons much simpler.
But Iran did something unprecedented. They conducted the first ever modern, potentially hypersonic, assault on an enemy with SRBMs and MRBMs across a vast multi-domain space covering several countries and timezones, and potentially as much as 1200-2000km.
Additionally, Iran did all this with potentially hypersonic weapons, which peeled back another layer of sophistication that included such things as possible endoatmospheric interception attempts with Israeli Arrow-3 ABM missiles.
But let’s step back for a moment to state that Iran’s operation in general was modeled after the sophisticated paradigm set by Russia in Ukraine: it began with the launch of various types of drones, which included some Shahed-136s (Geran-2 in Russia) as well as others. We can see that from the Israeli-released footage of some of the drone interceptions:
nakedcapitalism | I recently came across this piece
from the Century Foundation titled “A Bolder American Foreign Policy
Means More Values and Less War.” Its central argument is that the US
must “recenter values” like “multilateralism and human rights that are
core to its identity.”
The Century Foundation calls itself a “a progressive, independent
think tank,” and this particular piece appears to mean well but is just
as disconnected from reality than all the neocon think tanks’ war
mongering policy papers saying Washington will prevail as it takes on
Russia, China, Iran, and whoever else it feels like.
The Century Foundation authors possess a Hollywoodized idea of
America that isn’t a land filled with brutal class struggle but virtue,
which flow out into its foreign policy that stands for international
humanitarian or human rights law. I think anyone with a basic
understanding of current events or recent history knows how ridiculous
this is, and yet it is repeated ad nauseam by every purported think
tank. I suppose this is a classic example of Upton Sinclair’s saying
that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his
salary depends on his not understanding it,” but I think the Century
Foundation is onto something with its focus on values. It’s just that it
has it backwards. The problem is that values are what has the US on
the brink of starting World War III in multiple locations.
So what are the core values that do have it such a position – and whose are they?
I think the story of former US President Herbert Hoover is
instructive. He had interests in mines in Russia until they were seized
by the Bolsheviks. [1] Hoover never forgot about it and remained terrified of Communists for the rest of his life – and for good reason considering how much he stood to lose.
Though Hoover got booted out of office in 1932, he played a central
role in organizing capitalists to counter worker organization both in
the US and abroad. His legacy lives on at Stanford’s neocon Hoover
Institution. Throughout his life, he remained a major admirer of
pre-Soviet Russia: “At the top was a Russian noble family and at the
bottom 100,000 peasants and workers with nobody much in between but the
priesthood and the overseers.”
That pretty much sums up the capitalist class’ enduring vision not
just for Russia, but everywhere. Ownership of Russian mines or Opium
Wars in China might not factor much into my or your everyday life, but
you can bet it’s an important part of American ruling class ideology.
Whose values? The dominant value at play there is a belief that as
Western capitalists they have a right and a duty to exploit and profit
off of every corner of the globe. Just like capital must dominate labor,
it must expand and find new sources of revenue. If governments in
Russia and China impede that progress, they must be destroyed.
Rather than bromides like more American “values,” the following are
some questions or thought exercises for think tanks to consider –
whether they want to win another war or maybe even quit starting so many
of them.
Can You Practice Realpolitik with Gangsters?
The US is a market state that is dominated by and run for
transnational capital. Its foreign policy and the military are a tool of
the American oligarchy. Therefore, any serious policy discussion needs
to deal with the fact that national interests as they’re expressed today
are not in any real sense national but representative of the interests
of a small cohort of the super wealthy.
When US officials go on about spreading “freedom,” they’re not lying.
It’s just their idea of freedom is a state devoted to high profits – free from the political whims of local populations that could degrade an investment’s expected return.
Let’s remember there likely wouldn’t be any problem with Russia had
Putin not put an end to the 1990s shock therapy administered by the
Western finance capitalists who were making a killing by pillaging
Russian resources. Like Bert Hoover, they’re haunted by that opportunity
snatched away from them, and they’ve been trying to get it back for a
quarter century now.
The question is will American capital ever voluntarily give up? Will
it ever say “okay, we’re satisfied with what we’ve got here, you do your
thing in your sphere of influence”?
It’s not like Moscow and Beijing haven’t tried. Russia for example
floated the idea of joining NATO or working out some other security
arrangement. For decades after the end of the USSR, Russia tried to be
accepted into the West’s club to no avail.
China, too, constantly repeats the refrain that the world is big enough for both Beijing and Washington. It invited the US to join it in its Belt and Road Initiative.
The US could have helped steer projects that would have benefited both
countries. While such cooperation between the two big powers wouldn’t be
a panacea for all the world’s problems, it would likely mean a lot
better spot than current one. Instead the US wanted the whole pie and
instead we got the TPP, sanctions, export bans, a new Cold War, a spy
balloon scandal, the disastrous effort to weaken Russia before taking on
China, the successful effort to sever Europe from Eurasia to disastrous
effect for Europe, and the desire to see a Ukraine sequel in Taiwan
and/or the South China Sea.
There is a lot of confusion over why the West keeps escalating in a
losing effort. Why, for example, are Western governments going around
begging for shells to send Ukraine rather than accepting the L? The
desperation seems to stem from the creeping realization that their
system is coming undone. The entire post-WWII elite American mindset is
built on the foundation of worldwide profit expansion via silicon and
fire, and if they throw everything at Russia and lose, well a whole new
domino theory could come into play – one where parasitic Western finance
capital is driven back. (Granted it might in most cases be replaced by a
more local form, but it’s nonetheless frightening for the Western
honchos.) Just look at what’s happening to France in Françafrique! And
the US in the Middle East!
The fact that the West can no longer even manufacture enough weapons
to supply its proxy wars almost certainly means that the dominoes will
keep falling.
middleasteye | It cost Israel more than $1bn to activate its defence systems that intercepted Iran's massive drone and missile attack overnight, according to a former financial adviser to Israel's military.
"The defence tonight was on the order of 4-5bn shekels [$1-1.3bn] per
night," estimated Brigadier General Reem Aminoach in an interview with
Ynet news.
Aminoach highlighted that the staggering price tag stands in contrast
to the relatively low amount that Iran had spent to launch its assault,
which some estimates have put at less than 10 percent of what it cost
Israel to stop the attack.
Iran launched more than 300 drones and missiles towards Israel on
Saturday, in response to an Israeli attack on its consulate in Syria
that killed two senior Revolutionary Guard commanders earlier this
month.
Israel said its military forces and its allies had intercepted 99
percent of the missiles, but some ballistic missiles penetrated Israeli
defences and hit the Nevatim Airbase in southern Israel.
"If we're talking about ballistic missiles that need to be brought
down with an Arrow system, cruise missiles that need to be brought down
with other missiles, and UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles], which we
actually bring down mainly with fighter jets," he said.
"Then add up the costs - $3.5m for an Arrow missile, $1m for a
David's Sling, such and such costs for jets. An order of magnitude of
4-5bn shekels."
David's Sling is a weapons system meant to intercept medium to
long-range rockets and missiles. The Arrow system was designed to thwart
long-range missiles, including the types of ballistic missiles Iran
launched on Saturday and of long-range missiles launched by the Houthis
in Yemen.
LATimes | If you’ve ever heard that soothing voice or read those scholarly sentences, you’d know it’s him. Syndicated columnist Carl Rowan has a signature style.
That jowly baby face and genial manner have been fixtures among the talking heads on PBS’ “Inside Washington” since 1965. His voice can be heard on 25 major-market radio stations broadcasting “The Rowan Reports,” a daily radio commentary. He has written seven books, some of them bestsellers.
But lately, Rowan, an elegant and polished black man of 69 years who writes and speaks in the terse and precise prose common among the well-educated of his generation, has become something of an attack journalist on a self-appointed mission to bring down the current leadership of the NAACP.
His bitterly critical columns, distributed by the King Features Syndicate and published in 100 newspapers across the land, are the major reason the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People is facing its greatest crisis. NAACP Executive Director Benjamin F. Chavis was forced to resign late in the summer amid allegations first raised by Rowan--that he used the organization’s money to settle a sexual discrimination suit brought by a former employee, opening the organization’s financial practices to unprecedented public scrutiny.
Rowan’s current target is NAACP Board Chairman William Gibson, who had been Chavis’ most ardent supporter. By repeatedly demanding that Gibson resign, Rowan has set himself apart from most mainstream reporters--black or white--who tend to steer clear of pointed and determined criticism of the NAACP. But Rowan relishes the combat of writing to incite change--regardless, he said, of whether his targets are white-led government institutions, such as the FBI under former director J. Edgar Hoover in the 1960s, or the current NAACP leadership.
During a wide-ranging interview conducted recently in the living room of his rambling northwest Washington home, Rowan defended his hard-edged columns. He called them “a service,” written with the intention of educating the public and instigating reforms within an organization he views as necessary to the interests of African Americans.
Rowan rejected the argument that he is bent on destroying the NAACP. In fact, he says, the organization absolutely has a role in the post-civil rights generation. “Take this (recent mid-term) election. The NAACP in a good and normal time would have been out there for weeks trying to get blacks out to vote,” he said. “They have been virtually paralyzed by all their money troubles and could only do a little trifling stuff.”
Once Gibson is out of office, Rowan said, and a new management team is in place, he will use his column to urge supporters to send money back into the NAACP.
“There is a group preparing for the moment when (Gibson) steps down so they can say to the nation, as I will say, ‘The time has come to rush to the rescue to the support of this organization because the United States would be a lesser place without an NAACP,’ ” Rowan said. “But no way will I ask anybody to give a nickel as long as (Gibson) is there at the head of the NAACP because I know the extent to which the meager funds of the NAACP have been abused.”
Rowan also brushed aside suggestions he was an “Uncle Tom” or tool of the mainstream media, noting his 43 years as a Life Member of the NAACP. Among the highlights: Rowan “worked closely with (then NAACP attorney) Thurgood Marshall in the days way before Brown v. Board of Education.”
It’s not easy to shock Joe Rogan but that’s exactly what happened when they played this eerily accurate prediction from 1965 on how to destroy the fabric of society.
theatlantic | Did
the decline of religion cut some people off from a crucial gateway to
civic engagement, or is religion just one part of a broader retreat from
associations and memberships in America? “It’s hard to know what the
causal story is here,” Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at NYU, told me.
But what’s undeniable is that nonreligious Americans are also less
civically engaged. This year, the Pew Research Center reported that
religiously unaffiliated Americans are
less likely to volunteer, less likely to feel satisfied with their
community and social life, and more likely to say they feel lonely.
“Clearly more Americans are spending Sunday mornings on their couches,
and it’s affected the quality of our collective life,” he said.
Klinenberg doesn’t blame individual Americans for these changes. He sees our civic retreat as a story about place. In his book Palaces for the People,
Klinenberg reported that Americans today have fewer shared spaces where
connections are formed. “People today say they just have fewer places
to go for collective life,” he said. “Places that used to anchor
community life, like libraries and school gyms and union halls, have
become less accessible or shuttered altogether.” Many people, having
lost the scaffolding of organized religion, seem to have found no
alternative method to build a sense of community.
Imagine,
by analogy, a parallel universe where Americans suddenly gave up on
sit-down restaurants. In surveys, they named many reasonable motivations
for their abstinence: the expense, the overuse of salt and sugar and
butter, the temptation to drink alcohol. As restaurants disappeared by
the hundreds, some mourned their closure, while others said it simply
didn’t matter. After all, there were still plenty of ways for people to
feed themselves. Over time, however, Americans as a group never found
another social activity to replace their dining-out time. They saw less
of one another with each passing decade. Sociologists noted that the
demise of restaurants had correlated with a rise in aloneness, just as
the CDC noticed an increase in anxiety and depression.
I’ve
come to believe that something like this story is happening, except
with organized religion playing the role of restaurants. On an
individual basis, people can give any number of valid-sounding reasons
for not frequenting a house of worship. But a behavioral shift that is
fully understandable on the individual level has coincided with, and
even partly exacerbated, a great rewiring of our social relations.
And
America didn’t simply lose its religion without finding a communal
replacement. Just as America’s churches were depopulated, Americans
developed a new relationship with a technology that, in many ways, is
the diabolical opposite of a religious ritual: the smartphone. As the
social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in his new book, The Anxious Generation,
to stare into a piece of glass in our hands is to be removed from our
bodies, to float placelessly in a content cosmos, to skim our attention
from one piece of ephemera to the next. The internet is timeless in the
best and worst of ways—an everything store with no opening or closing
times. “In the virtual world, there is no daily, weekly, or annual
calendar that structures when people can and cannot do things,” Haidt
writes. In other words, digital life is disembodied, asynchronous, shallow, and solitary.
Religious
rituals are the opposite in almost every respect. They put us in our
body, Haidt writes, many of them requiring “some kind of movement that
marks the activity as devotional.” Christians kneel, Muslims prostrate,
and Jews daven.
Religious ritual also fixes us in time, forcing us to set aside an hour
or day for prayer, reflection, or separation from daily habit. (It’s no
surprise that people describe a scheduled break from their digital
devices as a “Sabbath.”) Finally, religious ritual often requires that
we make contact with the sacred in the presence of other people, whether
in a church, mosque, synagogue, or over a dinner-table prayer. In other
words, the religious ritual is typically embodied, synchronous, deep, and collective.
realclearpolitics | Batya Ungar-Sargon, the deputy editor of Newsweek and author of the new book, Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women, speaks with RCP Washington bureau chief Carl Cannon on Thursday's edition of the RealClearPolitics radio show.
"People don't talk about it like it is an outrage," she said about the
transformation of the Democratic Party into something other than a party
for the working class. "It is such a fait accompli at this point
that we forget that it is outrageous for a party that used to represent
labor, the little guy against big corporations and the rich, completely
abandoned that constituency to cater to an over-credentialed college
elite on one hand, and the dependent poor on the other. And it is double
outrageous because that party still masquerades as the party of the
little guy, even though it is not the case anymore."
"It started with the handshake agreement between both parties that we're
going to become an economy that embraced free trade," she said. "That
was Bill Clinton's contribution to this, signing NAFTA into law and
trade agreements that resulted in the offshoring of 5 million
manufacturing jobs to China and Mexico."
"And then President Obama showed up and said repeatedly those jobs are
not coming back, and pioneered this idea that everyone was going to go
to college and become part of the knowledge industry, and that was going
to be the pathway to the American dream. And then it became the only
pathway to the American dream!"
"Joe Biden played his part by effectively opening up the border,
decriminalizing illegal border crossing, and welcoming in 11 million new
migrants to compete with working-class Americans for the jobs that
remained here," she said.
"It's true that immigration raises the GDP in the aggregate. The problem
is nobody lives in the aggregate. GDP is not equally distributed across
the nation. We know the top 20% now has 50% of the GDP at its disposal.
The very people who love to rail against the 1% are the people who have
made the largest gains in the last 50 years, and they are the consumers
of low-wage migrant labor, which is why, of course, they want more of
it. It is an upward transfer of wealth from the working class to the
elites who consume that labor."
"If you bring in 11 million people and you know they are going to be
employed as cleaning people, landscapers, and in construction, you have
effectively stolen wages from the Americans who were employed in those
jobs. It is just obvious supply and demand."
Carl Cannon asked: "Do they really hate the working class, or are they
just in their politically correct bubble and don't see what they're
doing?"
"They can not stand the idea that they will lose, even if they lose in a
very obviously democratic way," Ungar-Sargon said. "They are very
comfortable when they can sit there on cable news making millions of
dollars to sneer at the working class. They're comfortable when the
working class can't clap back."
"This was really Obama's revolution, the idea that the 'smart set'
should run things. We should have an oligarchy of the credentialed. But
when the working class has their audacity to vote in their own interest
and clap back by putting somebody like Donald Trump in power, that
sneering contempt turns to hate."
tri-statedefender |Sharing their experiences with crime
reduction, The Black Mayors’ Coalition on Crime wrapped up a two-day
conference at the Hyatt Centric Beale Street Memphis on Thursday, March
28.
Memphis Mayor Paul Young hosted Black leaders from 18 U.S. cities during the meeting that began Wednesday, March 27.
“People want the short-term solution.
They want to figure out how we are going to stop crime today. And then,
we want to figure out how to stop crime in the future. In order to do
that, there has to be an intense dialogue,” said Young.
In addition to Washington D.C., they
came from several states with large African-American populations, like
Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Missouri, Indiana,
North Carolina and California.
“We have a lot of violence around convenience stores and gas stations,” Mayor Tishaura Jones told Action News 5 after the conference.
“So how can we hold those business owners accountable and also bring
down crime? (We’re also finding that ) some of the things that we’re
already doing, we’re finding that other mayors are doing as well.”
Strategies were front and center in
the discussion. They included Operation GOOD in Jackson, Miss. and
Operation Scarlett in Charlotte, N.C. According to proponents, both have
paid dividends in their respective communities.
Operation GOOD is a nonprofit with
ambitious goals to curb recidivism, reduce violence and tackling blight,
for example. Operation Scarlett is an ongoing anti-luxury car theft
operation that was expanded to 11 states and 152 law enforcement
agencies. So far, 132 vehicles have been retrieved.
Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris and Memphis Police Department Chief Cerelyn “CJ” Davis also appeared at the event.
Russ Wiggington, president of the National Civil Rights Museum, moderated the conversation.
The Council on Criminal Justice, a
think tank devoted to criminal justice policy, began the conference with
a keynote presentation.
To allow attendants to speak freely,
no media were invited to the event. However, Young has suggested future
meetings could be open to the public and virtual. It’s a sentiment
matched by Mayor Chokwe Lumumba Jr. of Jackson, Miss.
“We’re ensuring amongst ourselves that this will not be the last
engagement, but that we will continue to lean in,” Lumumba said at a
post-conference press event.
Latest Crime Stats
Although crime rates in Memphis has dropped recently, they are still above pre-pandemic levels.
Overall, the Memphis-Shelby County
Crime Commission statistics reflect a 6.4% drop in fourth quarter of
2023, over 2022’s final period. This includes murder, burglary, robbery,
theft, weapons and drug charges. Property crimes fell 10.1% too.
However, violent crime in Memphis
bucked the trend. In addition to 398 homicides in 2023 – breaking the
2021 record – the major violent crime rate rose 7.4% in Memphis. Shelby
County saw inflated numbers too, with a 6.3% jump over 2022.
To date, there have been over 80
homicides in 2024. Memphis has the highest number of all the cities
represented during he meetings. Most have seen a decrease.
The Black Mayors Coalition on Crime
is the latest in a series of conversations Young has recently held to
address crime early in his first term.
In a bizarre segment, a transgender 'personality' who previously wanted to be a "human Ken doll" before deciding to become a 'woman', lectured JK Rowling on what being female really means, declaring that the author should "stick to what she knows." Report: https://t.co/K06cu2wjbTpic.twitter.com/fHcFCrS9sY
Joe Biden, who grew up a Muslim attending a Black church in the Puerto Rican part of Scranton, where he beat up Corn Pop while marching for trans rights on his way to a synagogue, now claims his family were “watermen in the Port of Baltimore in the 1800s”pic.twitter.com/zHHpaIYb4L
newsweek | Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson was booed by members of the audience of The View after expressing regret for his endorsement of President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.
Boos were heard on Friday morning after the airing of a short clip from a recent Fox News
interview with the actor and professional wrestling star, who is set to
return to the ring for the first time in eight years at this weekend's
WWE WrestleMania event.
Johnson said that he was not "happy with the state of America" in the
clip and revealed that he would not be endorsing Biden in this year's
election because he feels his 2020 endorsement had caused "division."
"The
endorsement that I made years ago with Biden was one that I thought was
the best decision for me at that time," Johnson said. "Am I going to do
that again this year? That answer's no, I'm not going to do that."
"I realized what that caused back then was something that tears me up in my guts—back then and now—which is division," he added.
The View crowd responded to Johnsons remarks by loudly booing, seemingly taking co-host Joy Behar and the show's other co-hosts by surprise with their overwhelmingly negative response.
"Should I pay any attention to someone who gives an interview on Fox
where they lie every day?" Behar asked the crowd, before questioning
whether celebrities should "endorse public figures" or "keep their
politics to themselves."
Some in the audience could be heard responding "no" after Behar asked
if celebrities should make endorsements. A short time later, the crowd
made their opinions on former President Donald Trump's 2024 candidacy clear after co-host Sunny Hostin weighed in.
"I
do think we're living in a time where we have someone [Trump] running
for president that is an existential threat to democracy," Hostin said,
prompting loud cheers and applause from the audience.
"Now is the time—if you have a platform—you must be active, you must speak out," she added, drawing additional applause.
While endorsing Biden in 2020, Johnson described himself as a "political
independent and centrist" who was making his first public endorsement
due to the outcome of the election being "critical."
FT | Author JK Rowling has attacked Humza Yousaf, calling Scotland’s first minister “bumbling and illiberal” and stoking a row over the country’s contentious new hate crime law.
The creator of the Harry Potter franchise was responding to criticism from Yousaf on Thursday that posts she had made on X earlier in the week identifying transgender women as men were “offensive and upsetting”.
Rowling posted on X: “Most of Scotland is upset and offended by Yousaf’s bumbling incompetence and illiberal authoritarianism, but we aren’t lobbying to have him locked up for it.”
Rowling, a leading gender-critical feminist, used her social media profile to test whether the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act would criminalise promoting the importance of biological sex over gender identity.
The legislation, which came into effect on Monday, has triggered a row between the author and lawmakers, and thrust culture wars into the forefront of Scottish politics.
Yousaf in an interview with the BBC hit out at the author’s provocative posts on social media, insisting the law had a high threshold for criminality and was not intended to respond to those who are “upset or insulted”.
The legal difficulties in balancing the protection of vulnerable communities with the right to free speech have opened up a new line of attack for the opponents of the Scottish National party and Green coalition, with them characterising the legislation as an example of unworkable progressive policymaking.
It comes as opinion polls fail to provide a clear picture of voting intentions ahead of the general election later this year.
A YouGov poll this week predicted a UK landslide for Labour in which it would become the largest party in Scotland, winning 28 seats north of the border to the SNP’s 19. A Survation poll last week forecast that the SNP would hold 41 seats to Labour’s 14.
The act widens the existing crime of stirring up racial hatred to include other protected characteristics, such as sexuality, gender and disability, with the threat of jail terms of seven years.
Thousands of complaints have reportedly been made to the police about Rowling’s posts, as well as about a speech Yousaf gave to parliament in 2020 during which he complained about the number of senior positions of authority held by white people.
Police Scotland, which has yet to announce the number of allegations of hate crimes it has received, earlier this week decided Rowling’s posts, in which she invited the police to arrest her, were not criminal.
The force also decided against logging Rowling’s posts and Yousaf’s speech as “non-crime hate incidents”.
The police, who note such incidents when allegations do not breach the threshold of criminality, use these records to monitor trends, but opponents say this process has a chilling effect on free speech.
The police decision sparked an angry response from Murdo Fraser, a Conservative MSP, whose post last year on social media saying identifying as non-binary was as valid as “choosing to identify as a cat” did get logged.
Fraser on Wednesday accused Police Scotland of political bias. “They have taken a different approach to comments made by the SNP first minister to those made by an opposition politician,” he said. “It is hard not to conclude that Police Scotland has been captured by the SNP policy agenda.”
stanford | In a special episode recorded in front of a live audience, Dean Lloyd
Minor welcomes Chelsea Clinton, a bestselling author and an advocate for
public health and early childhood education. They discuss the
importance of accountability for scaling global health initiatives, and
the power of storytelling to counter misinformation in science and
health. They also talk about finding motivation through conscious
optimism and rebuilding public trust through support of individuals,
families, and communities. Along the way, they share memories
of Chelsea’s time as a Stanford undergraduate and their overlapping
memories of their home state of Arkansas.
Chelsea Clinton is vice chair of the Clinton Foundation and
the Clinton Health Access Initiative, working to improve lives, inspire
emerging leaders, and increase awareness around public health issues. At
the foundation, she is active in the early child initiative Too Small
to Fail, which supports families with resources to promote early brain
and language development; and the Clinton Global Initiative University, a
global program that empowers student leaders to turn their ideas into
action. A longtime public health advocate, Chelsea uses her platform at
the Clinton Health Access Initiative to address vaccine hesitancy,
childhood obesity, and health equity. In addition to her foundation
work, Chelsea also teaches at Columbia University’s Mailman School of
Public Health and has written several books for young readers, including
the #1 New York Times bestseller She Persisted: 13 American Women Who Changed the World. She is also the co-author of The Book of Gutsy Women and Grandma’s Gardens with Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton and of Governing Global Health: Who Runs the World and Why? with Devi Sridhar. Chelsea’s podcast, In Fact with Chelsea Clinton,
premiered in 2021, and she is a co-founder of HiddenLight
Productions. Chelsea holds a bachelor’s degree from Stanford, a master
of public health degree from Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health,
and both a master of philosophy degree and a doctorate in international
relations from Oxford University.
— Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) April 1, 2024
WashingtonTimes | President Biden stoked more outrage over his decision to honor Transgender Day of Visibility on March 31, which was also Easter, by issuing a head-scratching denial Monday as the White House blamed the political backlash on “misinformation.”
As he left the 144th annual White House
Easter Egg Roll, Mr. Biden was quizzed by reporters about House Speaker
Mike Johnson’s denunciation of the transgender proclamation as
“outrageous and abhorrent.”
“Speaker Johnson called it ‘outrageous’ that Easter Sunday was Transgender Day of Visibility. What do you say to Speaker Johnson?” asked a reporter, according to the White House pool report.
Mr. Biden replied: “He’s thoroughly uninformed.”
When pressed for details, the president responded: “I didn’t do that.”
He offered no further explanation, but critics pointed to his proclamation on the White House
website honoring Transgender Day of Visibility, which has been held on
March 31 since it was created by a transgender activist in 2009.
Also falling this year on March 31 was Easter, the holiest day on the Christian calendar. The date varies from year to year.
“I, Joseph R. Biden … do hereby proclaim March 31, 2024, as Transgender Day of Visibility,” said the White House proclamation issued Friday and signed by Mr. Biden.
“I
call upon all Americans to join us in lifting up the lives and voices
of transgender people throughout our nation and to work toward
eliminating violence and discrimination based on gender identity,” Mr.
Biden said in the proclamation.
Mr. Johnson posted the proclamation on X with the comment: “This you, @JoeBiden?”
Conservative media critic Stephen L. Miller asked on X: “Did anyone in the press pool then show him his own statement?”
Rep.
Wesley Hunt, Texas Republican, asked on X: “Is the Biden Administration
backtracking after the political backlash they’ve received in the last
24 hours?”Hours later, White House
press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre accused critics of promoting
“misinformation.” She said it was “unsurprising that politicians are
seeking to divide and weaken our country with cruel, hateful and
dishonest rhetoric.”
“It
is dishonest what we have heard the past 24 hours. It is untrue what we
heard over the weekend,” she said at the press briefing.
White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said Monday that “President Biden is right.”
“He did nothing in conflict with the ‘tenets’ of Easter,
which he celebrated yesterday,” Mr. Bates told The Washington Times.
“Nor did he choose the date of March 31 for Transgender Day of
Visibility, which has been set since 2009.”
Mr.
Biden has issued proclamations marking Transgender Day of Visibility
since taking office in 2021, but his decision to do so this year with Easter falling on March 31 struck conservative Christians as tone-deaf at best and a slap in the face to Christianity at worst.
Easter is the Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox, or March 21.
“This
is a direct assault on Christianity. It’s evident the left is
determined to undermine our religion and traditions,” Rep. Diana
Harshbarger, Tennessee Republican, said Saturday on X. “This isn’t just
blatant disregard, it’s intentional.”
The Trump campaign called the transgender proclamation “appalling and insulting.”
“We call on Joe Biden’s failing campaign and the White House to issue an apology to the millions of Catholics and Christians across America who believe [Easter Sunday] is for one celebration only — the resurrection of Jesus Christ,” said Trump national press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
Mr.
Biden and first lady Jill Biden issued a statement Sunday sending “our
warmest wishes to Christians around the world celebrating Easter Sunday.”
“Easter
reminds us of hope and the promise of Christ’s resurrection,” they
said. “As we gather with loved ones, we remember Jesus’ sacrifice.”
Other
Democratic officials, including New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, issued
proclamations this year declaring March 31 as Transgender Day of
Visibility, or TDOV.
After
Democrats on the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors approved a TDOV
declaration, CatholicVote President Brian Burch accused them of choosing
“to mock Christianity on its holiest day of the year.”
He said the 15-year-old transgender event should have been moved to avoid conflicting with Easter.
“They
may claim that this holiday is always on March 31, but it is a fake and
arbitrary observance which was invented in 2009 compared with the
2,000-year history of Easter,”
Mr. Burch told The Washington Times. “This would never be tolerated
with any other religious tradition, and that’s the point. Christianity
is their target.”
MSN | K Rowling has challenged Scotland’s police to arrest her under the SNP’s new hate crime law after stating that a series of high-profile trans women are men.
The
Harry Potter author, who lives in Edinburgh, wrote on X, formerly
Twitter: “Freedom of speech and belief are at an end in Scotland if the
accurate description of biological sex is deemed criminal.
“I’m currently out of
the country, but if what I’ve written here qualifies as an offence under
the terms of the new Act, I look forward to being arrested when I
return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment.”
Rowling
posted pictures of 10 high-profile trans people on Twitter and mocked
their claims to be women. They included Isla Bryson, who was initially sent to a women’s prison after being convicted of two rapes.
nakedcapitalism | Philip K. Dick’s 1956 novella The Minority Report created “precrime,” the clairvoyant foreknowledge of criminal activity as forecast by mutant “precogs.”The
book was a dystopian nightmare, but a 2015 Fox television series
transforms the story into one in which a precog works with a cop and
shows that data is actually effective at predicting future crime.
Canada just tried to enact a precrime law along the lines of the 2015
show, but it was panned about as much as the television series.
Ottawa’s now-tabled online harms bill included a provision to impose house arrest on someone who is feared to commit a hate crime in the future. From The Globe and Mail:
The person could be made to wear an electronic tag, if
the attorney-general requests it, or ordered by a judge to remain at
home, the bill says. Mr. Virani, who is Attorney-General as well as
Justice Minister, said it is important that any peace bond be
“calibrated carefully,” saying it would have to meet a high threshold to
apply.
But he said the new power, which would require the attorney-general’s
approval as well as a judge’s, could prove “very, very important” to
restrain the behaviour of someone with a track record of hateful
behaviour who may be targeting certain people or groups…
People found guilty of posting hate speech could have to pay victims
up to $20,000 in compensation. But experts including internet law
professor Michael Geist have said even a threat of a civil complaint –
with a lower burden of proof than a court of law – and a fine could have
a chilling effect on freedom of expression.
While the Canadian bill is shelved for now, it wouldn’t be surprising
to see it resurface after some future hate crime. I wonder if this is
where burgeoning “anti-hate” programs across the US are headed. The
Canadian bill would have also allowed “people to file complaints to the
Canadian Human Rights Commission over what they perceive as hate speech
online – including, for example, off-colour jokes by comedians.”
There are now programs in multiple US states to do just that –
encourage people to snitch on anyone doing anything perceived as
“hateful.”
The 2021 federal COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act began to dole out money to states to help them respond to hate incidents. Oregon now has its Bias Response Hotline to track “bias incidents.” In December of 2022, New York launched
its Hate and Bias Prevention Unit. Maryland, too, has its system – its
hate incidents examples include “offensive jokes” and “malicious
complaints of smell or noise.”
Maryland also has its Emmett Till Alert System
that sends out three levels of alerts for specific acts of hate. For
now, they only go to black lawmakers, civil rights activists, the media
and other approved outlets, but expansion to the general populace is
under consideration.
California vs. Hate, a multilingual statewide hotline and website
that encourages people to report all acts of “hate,” is coming up on its
one-year anniversary, reportedly
receiving a mere 823 calls from 79% of California’s 58 counties during
its first nine months of operation. It looks like the program is rolling
out even more social media graphics in a bid to get more reports:
jonathanturley | House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer has sent a seven-page
letter (below) to invite President Joe Biden to testify in the
Republican impeachment inquiry. The letter is the latest, and best,
reduction of the glaring contradictions in the President’s past
statements on his family’s well-documented influence peddling operation.
President Biden is not expected to testify. However, the media should
be interested in his answering the questions presented by the Committee.
It is now clear that the President lied during his campaign and during
his presidency on his lack of knowledge of his son’s business activities
as well as his denial of any money gained from China. Yet, the White
House responded, again, with mockery — a sense of impunity that only
exists due to an enabling media.
Chairman Comer reduces the past testimony and evidence acquired by
the Committee in the corruption scandal. In the last hearing, Democratic
members simply refused to acknowledge that evidence. There was a
bizarre disconnect as members mocked the witnesses for not supplying
evidence of the President’s knowledge or involvement. They then did so
and the members declared that there was no evidence.
Various members also misrepresented my earlier testimony during the
hearing on the basis for the impeachment inquiry. Members like Rep.
Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) stated that I joined other witnesses in stating
there was nothing that could remotely be impeachable in these
allegations. That is demonstrably untrue. My testimony stated the opposite.
I refused to pre-judge the evidence, but stated that there was ample
basis for the inquiry and laid out various impeachable offenses that
could be brought if ultimately supported by evidence. I also discussed those potential offenses in columns.
The purpose of the hearing was not to declare an impeachment on the
first day of the inquiry. Unlike the two prior impeachments by many of
these same Democratic members, this impeachment inquiry sought to create
a record of evidence and testimony to support any action that the House
might take.
Now, the Committee has laid out the considerable evidence showing that the President had lied, knowingly and repeatedly.
A Foundation of Joy
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Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
