EMMYdiocracy
Mediocracy is a situation which can occur in a democracy in which mediocre people prevail. The society is then subordinated to a quasi-egalitarian ideology in which words and ideas are redefined by mediocre people, to be convenient for mediocre people. Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a frequent critic of mediocracy in contemporary Western countries. || This where the tag cloud goes if the tag cloud loads:
Oops: Conservative group photoshops out minorities in mailer opposing pro-voting legislation.
(via paxamericana)
Wondering what movie to see this weekend? Look no further than the film about North Korean terrorists invading the White House, Olympus Has Fallen!
What’s that you say? Oh, you’re one of those people who need to hear some reviews first? Not to worry! These fellow movie goers’ tweets are sure to sell you on the film:
Whenever I see someone use that specific slur, I wonder how old could they possibly be.
“Good Mercian movie.” Mitt Romney gives it two thumbs up.
(P.S. The villains in the movie are North Korean.)
There are a ton of these “now I hate all Asians” tweets on Twitter now…
…but that above tweet specifically led to this amazing conversation:
“Typical Asians.”
At least she knows what she is, I guess?
Wait a minute…take a close look at who “favorited” that last tweet.
(via paxamericana)
WELP.
Stop what you are doing.
Read those.
Right now.
I’ll wait.
If you don’t want to read, I’ll explain the key bullet points, but please read them afterwords:
This is not “we didn’t protect him enough.”
This is not “the government screwed up some random detail or accidentally let his killer loose.”
The 111th Military Intelligence had a team taking pictures of his balcony during the assassination.
They brought in a Special Forces 8-Man Sniper Team from the 20th.
Memphis Police withdrew their regular protection detail from him.
A jury of 12 people, six black and six white, found the United States Government guilty of conspiracy to commit murder.
YOUR GOVERNMENT. MY GOVERNMENT. THE GOVERNMENT OF, BY, AND FOR THE PEOPLE, SHOT AND KILLED DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING. And the media never reported the case.
MLK was ASSASSINATED. By a government YOU PAY FOR.
I hate those posts where someone tries to pressure you into reblogging. I almost never ask you to reblog.
This shit is important.
Reblog this. I don’t care what kind of blog you have. I don’t care what you normally talk about.
Reblog this.
Repost.
One reason why this received little attention or traction was that it was in a civil court, where standards of evidence are lower, and because you can’t sue an organization like the FBI in it, that requires you go to a higher court, where the Federal government can basically say no to being sued.
Regardless having read the articles, and poked around on top of that, it pretty much all suggests that the government wanted King dead before the summer of ‘68 when he was planning a series of huge sit ins around Washington to protest the Vietnam war.
In effect the way the story unfolds is that a military intelligence group arrives in advance of the assassination, set up photographic and surveillance positions nearby, then tell the Memphis police to pull out of guarding King’s hotel. A lot of the testimony comes from an older man, who owned a nearby bar, named Jowers, who described mafia types passing large sums of money and a smoking rifle through his bar, while he feigned ignorance of what all of it meant. Ray himself recounted his admission of guilt, and described people who matched similar characters described by Jowers. Once the assassination took place the intelligence service ordered a series of shrubs to be cut down, later during the trial some of King’s party suggested that the shot had come from that area, but that there were now no shrubs at the site where snipers could have been concealed.
Basically the whole thing comes across as being a fairly ornate, if not purposefully direct conspiracy, since many of the details of military intelligence group, the accounts of Jowers, and people related to him, and the details of tampering with the area immediately after the shooting.
Even the discovery of the weapon that was claimed to have been used by Ray is highly suspect, as no ballistics tests were performed on it, it wasn’t checked to see if it had been fired that day, the bullet was too badly damaged to be tied to the gun, and more importantly is that the gun and ammo was discovered by a policeman in front of an amusement store, wrapped up, where a clerk testified that the package had been dropped before the assassination had taken place. The gun has never been tested to this day actually, as the state of Tennessee claimed the gun was ‘abandoned’ and thus was exempt from outside investigations by the court, and when the gun was given to the Civil Rights museum in 2001 they also refused to allow the gun to be tested stating that they’d let ‘people decide for themselves’ who was responsible.
Basically the King assassination sounds like a clusterfuck.
Reblogging again for added commentary^
(via brianlionzion)
Obama Administration Refuses To Say If Americans Can Be Killed By Drones On U.S. Soil
The Justice Department “white paper” purporting to authorize Obama’s power to extrajudicially execute US citizens was leaked three weeks ago. Since then, the administration - including the president himself and his nominee to lead the CIA, John Brennan - has been repeatedly asked whether this authority extends to US soil, i.e., whether the president has the right to execute US citizens on US soil without charges. In each instance, they have refused to answer.
Brennan has been asked the question several times as part of his confirmation process. Each time, he simply pretends that the question has not been asked, opting instead to address a completely different issue. Here’s the latest example from the written exchange he had with Senators after his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee; after referencing the DOJ “white paper”, the Committee raised the question with Brennan in the most straightforward way possible:
Obviously, that the US has not and does not intend to engage in such acts is entirely non-responsive to the question that was asked: whether they believe they have the authority to do so. To the extent any answer was provided, it came in Brennan’s next answer. He was asked:
“Could you describe the geographical limits on the Administration’s conduct drone strikes?”
Brennan’s answer was that, in essence, there are no geographic limits to this power: “we do not view our authority to use military force against al-Qa’ida and associated forces as being limited to ‘hot’ battlefields like Afghanistan.” He then quoted Attorney General Eric Holder as saying: “neither Congress nor our federal courts has limited the geographic scope of our ability to use force to the current conflict in Afghanistan” (see Brennan’s full answer here).
Revealingly, this same question was posed to Obama not by a journalist or a progressive but by a conservative activist, who asked if drone strikes could be used on US soil and “what will you do to create a legal framework to make American citizens within the United States believe know that drone strikes cannot be used against American citizens?” Obama replied that there “has never been a drone used on an American citizen on American soil” - which, obviously, doesn’t remotely answer the question of whether he believes he has the legal power to do so. He added that “the rules outside of the United States are going to be different than the rules inside the United States”, but these “rules” are simply political choices the administration has made which can be changed at any time, not legal constraints. The question - do you as president believe you have the legal authority to execute US citizens on US soil on the grounds of suspicions of Terrorism if you choose to do so? - was one that Obama, like Brennan, simply did not answer.
As always, it’s really worth pausing to remind ourselves of how truly radical and just plainly unbelievable this all is. What’s more extraordinary: that the US Senate is repeatedly asking the Obama White House whether the president has the power to secretly order US citizens on US soil executed without charges or due process, or whether the president and his administration refuse to answer? That this is the “controversy” surrounding the confirmation of the CIA director - and it’s a very muted controversy at that - shows just how extreme the degradation of US political culture is.
As a result of all of this, GOP Senator Rand Paul on Thursday sent a letter to Brennan vowing to filibuster his confirmation unless and until the White House answers this question. Noting the numerous times this question was previously posed to Brennan and Obama without getting an answer, Paul again wrote:
“Do you believe that the President has the power to authorize lethal force, such as a drone strike, against a US citizen on US soil, and without trial?”
After adding that “I believe the only acceptable answer to this is no”, Paul wrote: “Until you directly and clearly answer, I plan to use every procedural option at my disposal to delay your confirmation and bring added scrutiny to this issue.”
(via brianlionzion)
Around this time, state and municipal executives began putting their infrastructure assets up to lease — essentially for sale, since the proposed leases in some cases were seventy-five years or longer. And in virtually every case that I’ve been able to find, the local legislature was never informed who the true owners of these leases were. Probably the best example of this is the notorious Chicago parking meter deal, a deal that would have been a hideous betrayal even without the foreign ownership angle. It was a blitzkrieg rip-off that would provide the blueprint for increasingly broke-ass America to carry lots of these prized toasters to the proverbial pawnshop.
Austin’s geographic divide has a specific legal past. As I came to learn, African Americans had been living throughout the city in the early 1900’s, until a 1928 city plan proposed concentrating all services for black residents—parks, libraries, schools—on the East Side to avoid duplicating them elsewhere (this was in the time of “separate but equal”). Racial zoning was unconstitutional, but this policy accomplished the same thing. By 1940, most black Austinites were living between Seventh and Twelfth streets, while the growing Mexican American population was consolidating just south of that.
For years Austin has held the dubious distinction of being the only major city in the country clinging to an outmoded model of elective representation that all but ensured its racial exclusivity would persist. Since 1953, members of the city council have been elected on an at-large basis, which means that residents vote for individuals to represent the city as a whole, not their own neighborhoods. Because levels of voter participation, not to mention money, are unequal from neighborhood to neighborhood, this has perpetuated a serious imbalance in who holds and influences power. In the past forty years, half the city council members and fifteen of seventeen mayors have been from four zip codes west of I-35, an area that is home to just a tenth of the city’s population. The few have been governing the many.
The roots of this system are shameful. Until 1950, the system was straightforward: the top five vote-getters on a single ballot would become council members and select the mayor themselves. In 1951, a black candidate, Arthur DeWitty, then president of Austin’s NAACP chapter, came in sixth, which alarmed the city’s white business establishment. The system was rejiggered to create designated seats, or “places,” requiring more than 50 percent of the vote to win, a majority no ethnic candidate could achieve at the time. Not until twenty years later, in 1971, was an African American elected to the council, followed by the first Latino in 1975.
"“I ain’t never heard of the Germans celebrating the invasion of Normandy, or the bombing and destruction of Berlin. I ain’t never heard of the Spanish celebrating the destruction of the Armada.”
Asked to clarify, Meredith said: “Did you find anything 50 years ago that I should be celebrating?”
Besides wanting nothing to do with Ole Miss’s desegregation anniversary, Meredith has also said that a statue commemorating him on campus, erected in 2006, is “hideous” and should be destroyed. According to the Associated Press, he believes it “glosses over the magnitude of Mississippi’s resistance to his exercise of what should have been recognized as an obvious human right.”
“Mississippi has so humiliated me,” he told the AP. “They ain’t never acknowledged that there was a war.”
(Source: memejacker, via brianlionzion)
Cruelty on the border
The bodies have been turning up for years, thousands of them, scattered across the borderlands in the American Southwest. Ever-stricter border enforcement has encouraged migrants to avoid cities like San Diego and El Paso and take their chances at remote desert crossings instead. As they trek across the vast, unfamiliar and scorching terrain, many get disoriented and run out of water, with devastating consequences. So far this year, 94 bodies have been recovered in Arizona alone.
Since 2004, a faith-based coalition called No More Deaths has been leaving gallon jugs of water near common migration routes in a desperate bid to save lives. But in May of this year, just as temperatures in the harsh Sonoran Desert climbed above 100 degrees, the group’s volunteers began to notice that their water bottles were being slashed, destroyed or emptied. With violence from ranchers and vigilantes a constant threat, No More Deaths installed hidden cameras. They were surprised at what they found: Border Patrol agents were purposely, even gleefully, destroying the life-saving jugs of water.
Visible on the tape, which will be broadcast for the first time tonight on the PBS show “Need to Know,” are three Border Patrol agents, two men and a woman, walking along a migrant trail and approaching half a dozen one-gallon jugs of water. The female agent stops in front of the containers and begins to kick them, with force, down a ravine. The bottles crash against rocks, bursting open. She’s smiling. One of the agents watching her smiles as well, seeming to take real pleasure in the spectacle. He says something under his breath, and the word “tonk” is clearly audible. “Tonk,” it turns out, is a bit of derogatory slang used by some Border Patrol agents to refer to undocumented immigrants. One agent told me it’s derived from the sound a flashlight makes when you hit someone over the head — tonk. After destroying the entire water supply, the three agents continue along the path.
(In response to specific questions about these events, Border Patrol officials replied only with a general statement emphasizing that misconduct would not be tolerated and that agents were trained to treat migrants with dignity and respect.)
(via brianlionzion)
“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
“Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam” April 30, 1967
