Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
WikiLeaks’ founder tried to retaliate against hacktivist hero Barrett Brown and prompted a crack-up at a whistleblower protection group, losing an asset in an extradition clash.
By Spencer Ackerman @ DailyBeast.com, Aug. 13
A botched power play by Julian Assange has led to a split within a key organization supporting whistleblowers and leaves the WikiLeaks founder more isolated than ever among his core constituency of radical transparency activists. Assange has grown furious at a one-time ally with substantial moral authority within their movement: the journalist and activist Barrett Brown.
Since his release from federal prison on trumped-up charges related to a major corporate hack, Brown been increasingly public in voicing disgust at Assange’s embrace of Donald Trump and his general comfort with the nationalist right. That has led Assange, an erstwhile transparency advocate and whistleblower champion, to retaliate [....]
By Marc Caputo @ Politico.com, Aug. 13
[....] “If a blue wave is forming, it certainly hasn’t crested. Maybe there’s a red tide coming in and affecting the blue wave?” said Daniel A. Smith, a University of Florida political science professor who studies the state’s voter rolls and trends.
So far, there’s enough data to show that some of Democrats’ hoped-for advantages — concerning Hispanic voters, Democratic voter registrations, Democratic ballots cast or young voters — haven’t clearly materialized heading into the Aug. 28 primary. With close Senate and gubernatorial races, Florida is one of the most important states for both parties in the 2018 midterms.
For this election, the percentage of active registered Democrats is down by nearly 2 percentage points compared with 2016, according to Florida Division of Elections data published Sunday for the primary. Because Florida doesn’t allow last-minute voter registration, the figures are final.
Some Democrats are worried, but they won’t say so publicly [....]
By Madeline Aggeler @ TheCut.com, Aug. 14
Usually, Twitter.com is a place where people go to hurl insults at celebrities, strangers, and fast-food restaurants. But sometimes it’s also a place where they go to own their parents. Like Bobby Goodlatte, a designer and investor who recently announced he gave the maximum allowed donation to Jennifer Lewis, the Democrat running against his father, GOP congressman Bob Goodlatte, for Virginia’s 6th Congressional District.
“damn Bobby ice in those veins,” one user tweeted. “Certainly wasn’t an easy decision,” the younger Goodlatte replied.
A few hours later, he shared a Washington Post story about FBI agent Peter Strzok. [....]On Monday, Bobby wrote that he was “deeply embarrassed” that the Strzok’s career “was ruined by my father’s political grandstanding" [....]
I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, who is an educated man and well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country.
...The Glossers came to the U.S. just a few years before the fear and prejudice of the “America First” nativists of the day closed U.S. borders to Jewish refugees. Had Wolf-Leib waited, his family would likely have been murdered by the Nazis along with all but seven of the 2,000 Jews who remained in Antopol. I would encourage Stephen to ask himself if the chanting, torch-bearing Nazis of Charlottesville, whose support his boss seems to court so cavalierly, do not envision a similar fate for him....
In what sure sounded like a direct rebuke of Ingraham, the ‘populist’ Fox News host said there’s nothing to ‘fear’ about America’s changing demographics.
By Matt Wilstein @ DailyBeast.com, Aug. 13
[....]Steve Hilton, host of the The Next Revolution and self-described “populist,”did not mention Ingraham’s name Sunday night, but in the segment, first flagged by CNN’s Brian Stelter, he did appear to be condemn her sentiments about the “massive demographic changes” that have “been foisted upon the American people.”
“It’s at moments like these that it’s important to make something clear,” Hilton said at the top of his show. “We must draw a line between populism and racism, between populism and xenophobia, between populism and white supremacy, of course, but also between populism and white superiority, which is subtly different, but equally unacceptable.” [....]
WHEN ELECTION officials in North Carolina audited the 2016 vote, they found 441 ballots had been cast by felons on probation or parole who voted despite a state law barring them from the polls until their sentences are complete. Those votes were illegal, but most state prosecutors sensibly declined to bring charges on the grounds that the offenders didn’t know the law, weren’t alerted to their ineligibility and didn’t realize they had done anything wrong.
Not so in Alamance County, a small locality in the Piedmont where a dozen individuals convicted of felonies, nine of them African Americans, cast votes. There, the Republican district attorney, Pat Nadolski, has gone forward with prosecutions that reflect his own lack of judgment while reminding the nation of North Carolina’s recent poisonous racial history.
In North Carolina, where 70 percent of the population is white, blacks represent a hugely disproportionate share of convicted felons and incarcerated people. African Americans make up more than two-thirds of the 441 citizens statewide identified as having voted illegally.
In 2016, a federal court struck down the state’s restrictive voting law, enacted by the Republican-dominated legislature, saying the measure targeted blacks “with almost surgical precision.” This year, GOP lawmakers took a new tack, trying to place a proposal on the November ballot that would in the future scratch the final Saturday of early voting, a day that in recent years has attracted large numbers of blacks to the polls.
Voting laws, including for felons, vary enormously across the country. In some states the right to vote is restored automatically when people leave prison; in others, including North Carolina, felons are required to complete their sentences, including serving probation or paying fines, before their rights are restored. Elsewhere, ex-felons face waits of several years before they can regain voting rights. In two states, felons may vote even while incarcerated.
In the case of the Alamance 12, as they are now known, most seem to have had no intent to break the law; they were simply unaware of it. As it happens, a bill to require intent as a precondition for prosecuting illegal voters died this year in the state legislature.
.........
WaPo editorial, yesterday.
By Matt Binders @ Mashable.com, Aug. 7
The U.S. Defense Department is already preparing itself for the fight against deepfakes, fake audio and video created by artificial intelligence that burst into the mainstream last year thanks to sites like Reddit.
According to MIT Technology Review, the development of tech to catch deepfakes is currently underway. Through the Media Forensics program run by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), researchers have already built some of the tools to expose these fake AI creations. The Media Forensics program was actually originally set up to automate existing forensic tools, however its mission changed due to the concern over the rise of deepfakes. The project’s deepfake mission was announced earlier this year.
In 2017, users on Reddit started utilizing what amounts to extremely convincing face-swap technology to add actor Nicolas Cage into random movies he wasn’t already in. The technology was also being used to insert some female Hollywood celebrities into pornographic video clips. After deepfakes found its way into the daily news cycle and the outrage grew online, some websites banned deepfakes from being posted on their platforms. However, deepfake creators kept perfecting the technology, continuously making the fake AI-generated imagery even more realistic [.....]
NEWS ANALYSIS by Hilary Matfess @ Mail & Guardian (South Africa), Aug. 10
With elections just a few months away, the political situation in Cameroon looks bleak. There is the escalating conflict in the Anglophone region, there is the Boko Haram-linked instability in the north and then there is the president who is determined to extend his decades-long stay in power.
It is the Anglophone crisis that is currently making international headlines, although it has been brewing for several years. The conflict between state security forces and armed separatist groups appears to have intensified in recent weeks. The separatists believe that English-speakers in Cameroon — about 20% of the population of 24-million — have been marginalised and discriminated against by the predominantly Francophone government.
“If you see a civil war as a war between the government and its citizens, then I think it is headed towards a civil war, if it’s not a civil war yet,” Emmanuel Freudenthal, one of the few journalists to have reported from the affected region, told the Mail & Guardian.
Fighting on both sides has been characterised by extreme violence [....]
By Anthony Colangelo @ SMH.com.au, Aug. 11
A law firm representing the United States Democratic National Committee has served legal papers to WikiLeaks for their role in the Russia-led interference of the US campaign during the 2016 election.
In a twist, the legal papers have been delivered via a tweet to the WikiLeaks account, with that organisation's physical address listed as the University of Melbourne [.....] The DNC has made numerous attempts to file the suit against WikiLeaks via email but those have failed, meaning DNC lawyers Cohen Milstein took to Twitter to serve Julian Assange's organisation with the legal papers instead. The DNC first filed the lawsuit against Russia and WikiLeaks in April, but in late July they filed a motion in a New York court to get permission to serve the documents via Twitter. The court papers were filed in the NY Southern District [....]
“It must be electorally disqualifying to equivocate on racism.”
By Emily Stewart @ Vox.com, Aug. 11
Mitt Romney is calling on Americans to “categorically and consistently reject racism and discrimination” on the anniversary of racist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 and on the eve of a repeat of the Unite the Right rally this year in Washington, DC. The former Massachusetts governor and current US Senate candidate in Utah issued a lengthy statement on Friday defending equality, steeped in his religious upbringing and belief that “we are all children of God.” [....]
He also suggested that it’s misguided to perceive pushes for equal opportunity by groups that have historically been discriminated against as grabs for a disproportionate share of the pie. “I firmly believe in the moral foundation that underlies and is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution: ‘all men are created equal,’” Romney wrote. “I recognize that while individuals are born with unequal talents, unequal family circumstances, and unequal opportunity for education and advancement, the equality of the intrinsic worth of every person is a truth fundamental to our national founding and moral order.” [....]
By Chiara Jordano @ Independent.co.uk, Aug. 11
A high-end PC case maker says it has been “forced into bankruptcy and liquidation” by tariffs introduced by Donald Trump. CaseLabs, which makes custom towers for computers and has a high-profile following, including prominent YouTubers such as LinusTechTips, announced it would be permanently closing on Saturday.
The company, based in California, said tariffs had raised costs by almost 80 per cent and that “the default of a large account” had added to the issue [....]
The country's football association has launched what many believe is the first investigation into 'racial abuse' following the Demba Ba 'incident' and hit Zhang Li with a six-game ban and $6,100 fine
By John Duerden @ ATimes.com, Aug. 11
[....] Shanghai boss Wu Jingui gave his club’s version of what had happened.
“I learned that a Yatai player used insulting language toward [Ba],” Wu said in the post-match press conference. “Around the world, it has been stressed that there should be no insulting speech toward black athletes. The Chinese Super League has players of many different skin colors. We should respect our opponents and there should be no discrimination.” [....]
Ba, who has played in France, Germany, Turkey and most notably in England with Chelsea, Newcastle and West Ham, did not publicly comment but did retweet a post from a fan that called for an investigation from the Chinese Football Association, or CFA, into the affair [.....]
There tend to be two kinds of racist abuse in football [....] Much of the abuse had come from the fans. It reached such a level last year that Pescara’s Ghanaian star Sulley Muntari walked off the pitch in protest after chants and insults from opposing supporters. His action was supported by some in the country but not all [....]
With help from Beijing, Erdogan is hoping to find an alternative to IMF loans, one that could turn Turkey into 'an economic satrapy of China'
By David Goldman @ ATimes.com, Aug. 10
Like the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, Turkey’s present financial collapse has been expected for years. The sloth of credit rating agencies and the laziness of bank credit committees allowed Turkey to struggle on a year or two longer than it should have, but the collapse of the Turkish lira this week after a long, sickening decline surprised no-one.
Turkey’s volatile president Recep Tayyip Erdogan might have put off the crisis, but instead decided to butt heads with US President Trump over the arrest of an American Protestant minister for alleged terrorism [.....]
Turkey will have to sell some of the state’s most important assets. With the Turkish lira trading at 6.26 to the dollar, the whole of the Istanbul 100 equity index is worth just US$35 billion. If Chinese investors were to buy every share of every company on the stock index, Turkey would raise enough foreign exchange to cover just seven months of its current account deficit. Turkey will have to sell a great deal more than its publicly traded companies to raise the money it requires, and it will also have to tighten its belt drastically.
Altay Atli, a Turkish economist and past contributor to Asia Times, told the Chinese television station that Turkey will offer China more partnerships in its ports and other transportation infrastructure [....]
One of the largest population movements in Latin American history is under way from Venezuela, according to the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, which on Friday confirmed that it is increasing assistance to neighbouring Ecuador, where more and more Venezuelans are arriving each week.
Amid ongoing social and political upheaval in the South American country, more than half a million people have arrived in Ecuador since the beginning of the year, UNHCR’s William Spindler said.
“The exodus of Venezuelans from the country is one of Latin America’s largest mass-population movements in history,” he added. “Since the beginning of the year, some 547,000 Venezuelans have entered Ecuador through the Colombian border at a daily average of between 2,700 and 3,000 men women and children. However, the influx is now accelerating, and in the first week of August, some 30,000 Venezuelans entered the country. That’s more than 4,000 a day.”
In response to the situation, Ecuador has declared a state of emergency in the northern provinces of Carchi, Pichincha and el Oro [.....]
Twenty months after the president-elect reached a deal to keep blue-collar jobs from leaving the country, absenteeism plagues the Indiana plant.
By Nelson D. Schwartz @ NYTimes.com, Aug. 10
[....] After three earlier visits, I wanted to know what Carrier workers themselves thought of the outcome, long after Mr. Trump and his media hurricane had moved on. From afar, one might assume the picture is rosy: Indiana has an unemployment rate of just 3.3 percent, and for people without a college degree, few employers offer the kind of salary and benefits that Carrier does. But when I got to Indianapolis in July, I found that the factory Mr. Trump is often credited with saving is plagued by rising absenteeism and low morale.
“People aren’t coming to work, which is sad because we really need these jobs,” said Ms. Hargrove, who has worked at Carrier for 15 years. “They had a chance to prove that staying was good, but this is ruining it for everybody. It’s killing us. It’s pushing us out the door that much sooner.”
What’s ailing Carrier isn’t weak demand. Furnace sales are strong, and managers have increased overtime and even recalled 150 previously laid-off workers. Instead, employees share a looming sense that a factory shutdown is inevitable — that Carrier has merely postponed the closing until a more politically opportune moment.
In some ways, the situation is a metaphor for blue-collar work and life in the United States today. Paychecks are a tad fatter and the economic picture has brightened slightly, but no one feels particularly secure or hopeful. “People still don’t trust Carrier,” said Paul Roell, a group leader who has worked at the plant for 19 years [....]