Portland seems to have weathered the neo-Nazi rally just fine

Much credit has to go to the Portland Antifa, who turned up in numbers to mock and dissipate any action by the racists. Eric Ward summarizes the day on Twitter, as does Robert Evans, with lots of photos. It sounds like the Proud Boys rally mostly fizzled, although there was a scattering of arrests and weapons confiscated. I think the best sign that they failed, though, was that they were reduced to arguing that they won because Go look at President Trump’s Twitter. He talked about Portland, said he’s watchin’ antifa. That’s all we wanted.. Your victory is getting Donald Trump to blab some nonsense on Twitter? That’s what he does every day while sitting on the toilet.

Here’s a great overview of events from Ward:

Today’s white nationalist rally in Portland, Oregon was a complete rout.

The largely non-Portland crowd was mostly abandoned by its leadership the night before. People arrived with no places to sleep and calls to cell phones went unreturned. This morning found hate group members without places to eat, water and access to restrooms. An increasing number of businesses (like the one pictured) were denying service.

The promised five hour hate rally lasted about 45 minutes; participants were forced to rally underneath a bridge and then had to beg police to escort them out (a very long walk) over year another bridge. Rally leaders then quickly took to their cars to allegedly attend a BBQ that just happened to not be in Portland.

Other remnants of the rally were forced to walk around downtown Portand for nearly two hours as they searched for their cars. I heard at least two Portlanders give them wrong directions. Tired, thirst and walked out; people started to drift away in droves, leaving a dejected looking Joey Gibson (leader of Patriot Prayer) with an increasingly smaller and smaller crowd around him. Not getting the physical confrontation he sought and contemplating his growing civil and criminal legal woes, Joey was very subdued today.

After analysis?

The social pressure and evolving diverse and incredibly fun tactics of PopMob; the seriousness of the Portland Police; and the number of city, civic and business leaders mobilized seems to have taken serious steam out of the white nationalist/alt right protest.

It’s clear from the speeches and comments today that White nationalist/alt right leaders are wary of the increasing civil suits led by the Oregon Justice Resource Center and criminal liabilities they are facing from disrupting communities.

Really proud of Portland today. Super impressed, from the leadership in the streets to city hall. Folks will be back to political positioning and eating each other alive tomorrow, but hope everyone gives each other a small nod of respect tonight

You are an amazing community Portand and you showed up this month and it mattered. Community and leadership made this happen and you showed up with a lot of both. Goodnight from the Rose City. #OurCityOurHome

Keep up the pressure. It’s great when the pinnacle of success for the Proud Boys is getting a pat on the head from Daddy Trump, and nothing more.

Andy Ngo is a fraud and a right-wing provocateur

Nothing more. Ngo is an empty vessel who has found a way to gain the attention of right-wing chuds. He’s probably foaming at the mouth today at the opportunity to fire up violence in the streets of Portland, with the eager of his friends, the fascists.

Burley says, “One way to think of Andy Ngo is he is part of a far-right mediasphere that creates victimization narratives of conservatism and profit from it. It’s all about the embattled American man who is under siege at every turn, whether its trans children, immigrant criminals, anchor babies, or dangerous college campuses. ‘They are all out to destroy us and our values.’ It’s an entire infrastructure that’s moved from commentary like National Review to populist media hucksters drumming up a controversy. Ngo doesn’t seem to have many real journalistic credentials, and any he does is from creating controversy. He gets in the Wall Street Journal and New York Post from being a conservative celebrity. His actual reporting is very infrequent and sparse.”

Ngo adds a new element in facilitating violence, intentionally or not. Burley says, “He appears to target ideological opponents, which can make them fair game for harassment and violent confrontation.” The scale of the threats keep escalating. Now Portland is bracing for the August 17 rally.

Or maybe not. Right-wing organizers have been backing away from Portland, since some of them have been getting sued or arrested for their violent acts, and Ngo hasn’t publicly committed to attending the demonstrations today. If there’s a hint that the powder keg will blow, though, he’ll come running. That’s his chosen grift, after all.

The Proud Boys are claiming that they are rallying to “end domestic terrorism”…if that were true wouldn’t they just disappear themselves?

Let’s all hope that the Nazi show fizzles today. Another factor is that Portland Antifa has been doing an amazing job of making them afraid to show their faces — they’ll be mocked as cowards and clowns.

ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ, my ass

Myke Cole dissects the weird phenomenon of laconophilia, or Sparta worship. There’s something about it that has fascinated men for centuries — the whole fiercely macho, iron man myth keeps going and going, despite the fact that it is actually that, a myth.

The Spartans, popular wisdom tells us, were history’s greatest warriors; in fact, they lost battles frequently and decisively. We are told they dominated Greece; they barely managed to scrape a victory in the Peloponnesian Wars with wagonloads of Persian gold, and then squandered their hegemony in a single year. We hear they murdered weak or deformed children, though one of their most famous kings had a club foot. They preferred death to surrender, as the legend of the Battle of Thermopylae is supposed to show—even though 120 of them surrendered to the Athenians at Sphacteria in 425 B.C.E. They purportedly eschewed decadent wealth and luxury, even though rampant inequality contributed to oliganthropia, the manpower shortage that eventually collapsed Spartan military might. They are assumed to have scorned personal glory and lived only for service to the city-state, despite the fact that famous Spartans commissioned poetry, statues, and even festivals in their own honor and deliberately built cults of personality. They all went through the brutal agōgē regimen of warrior training, starting from age seven—but the kings who led their armies almost never endured this trial. They are remembered for keeping Greece free from foreign influence, but in fact they allied with, and took money from, the very Persians they fought at Thermopylae.

I’ve actually used a short clip from the opening of that comically over-the-top movie, 300, in introductory biology classes when discussing the flaws of eugenics. You know the one, the bit about how they culled the weak, shown with a mountain of infant skulls, and sending young boys off to fight unrealistically gigantic wolves with a stick. It’s a horrible way to run a society, and isn’t going to “improve the stock” in the way they imagine it. Spartan culture doesn’t seem to have survived very well, and has left to us only these destructive myths. Really destructive myths.

For much of this time, laconophilia was a relatively benign ahistorical myth, but Spartan admiration unmistakably turned malignant in the late-nineteenth century with the advent of scientific racism. German scholar Karl Müller included in his influential Geschichten hellenischen Stämme und Städte a history of the Dorian race responsible for founding classical Sparta. Müller’s work lionized the invaders’ Northern origins, which dovetailed into the early evolution of Nordicism, the pseudo-anthropological notion of a Nordic master race that would become a cornerstone of Nazi ideology. Müller was hardly alone, and European thinking about inherent inequality and Nordic superiority was already maturing in the fevered minds of thinkers like the French aristocrat Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, whose writings influenced the famous composer and German nationalist icon Richard Wagner. It is not surprising that Adolf Hitler saw in Sparta “the first völkisch state” and gushed about the ancient city-state’s legendary eugenics: “The exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children, in short, their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more human than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject.”

The only “wretched insanity of our day” we have to worry about is the fascism Hitler endorsed, and the toxic masculinity celebrated in all of this Spartan nonsense. Pathological cultures, like Sparta, might capture the imagination, but they don’t last.

That strange feeling when you see your lawyer celebrated in a Ben Garrison cartoon

It’s true. The lawyer defending us is Marc Randazza.

The wall that protects the First Amendment is not manned with pretty, happy smiling thoughts and easy-to-love characters. That rampart is manned by ugly people, disturbing images, and thoughts that you could swallow no easier than if they were made from cat shit mixed with broken glass. The picture of them is a picture of ugly, scowling faces; burning crosses; images of mothers having sex with goats in outhouses; lies about winning medals of honor; and protests at soldier funerals. They’re dirty. They’re ugly. They’re mean. But when they all sing together, that collection of voices that most decent people among us hate, are collectively a beautiful chorus because when you weave them all together they sound like the same 45 words, the same five freedoms, the same First Amendment.

So, umm, that’s a description of me? Dirty, ugly, and mean? OK, it’s a fair cop.

Anyway, he’s our lawyer, and he’s not cheap. We still need contributions to our legal defense fund. Don’t hold that loon Garrison against us.

The best explanation for the death of Epstein

Jamie Bernstein explains the most likely explanation for Epstein’s suicide: neglect, terrible conditions, and America’s prison system.

The truth is that the Metropolitan Correction Center where Epstein was being held, like other federal jails, has suffered from decades of budget shortfalls and understaffing. The night that Epstein died, the two corrections officers that were on staff were both working overtime hours, and for one of the officers, it was his fifth night in a row working overtime. In terms of conditions at the jail, Slate writes that “in the Special Housing Unit where Epstein was held, the fluorescent lights are kept on 23 or 24 hours a day, prisoners are prohibited from calling out to each other, and the cell windows are frosted to prevent any glimpse of the outside world,” conditions that can often lead to mental illness and suicidal tendencies. They also point out that even though mental illness and suicide is extremely common in jails, at MCC there was only one psychiatrist on staff for both MCC and another local jail, a population of 2000 prisoners.

In a way, I think I want to believe Epstein was murdered because it’s a tidy end to the story of Epstein. It’s easy to believe that Epstein, by dealing with experts at crimes and coverups, ended up as the victim of one of those crimes and coverups. I want to believe it was murder, but the truth is much scarier.

The truth is that the MCC already had a reputation as an extremely dangerous place that was often mismanaged, creating situations that put their inmates at risk. Slate writes this about the MCC

We know that MCC, the federal prison in Manhattan that also recently housed Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, was deemed “worse than Guantanamo” by someone who spent time in both facilities. We know that cells are infested with bugs and rats so big they’re “more like roommates” and that the temperature swings from unbearable heat to frigid cold. We know that inmates have not received adequate medical care, that a corrections officers was found guilty of raping an inmate, and that officials allegedly tried to cover up the fatal beating of another prisoner.

It seems likely that Epstein was taken off suicide watch early because suicide watch is expensive and they need to conserve their budget. It seems likely that the inmate who was staying with Epstein was transferred out because he needed to be moved and the jail didn’t have the resources or manpower to quickly find a replacement cellmate. It seems likely that the corrections officers who were working the night of Epstein’s death were not checking on him every 30 minutes because they were overworked and tired and likely had many other inmates to check-in on every 30 minutes, along with a lot of other work to do, so doing those bi-hourly checks just fell by the wayside.

We don’t need a vast conspiracy among powerful people to explain why Epstein died. We already have the information we need to know what happened, but we don’t want to face it because it means we might have to do something about it. Epstein likely died due to suicide in a jail that didn’t have the budget or wherewithal to be able to fully protect him and provide him with mental health resources when he showed suicidal tendencies. He died because federal jails in the US are terrifying hell-holes with conditions that exacerbate mental illness then do not provide inmates the medical care they need to manage their conditions. It’s not a conspiracy so much as a total lack of regard from politicians and the taxpaying public who vote for them.

If you want a conspiracy theory, you can have one…but it should revolve around the right-wing demonization of drugs and mental illness, the proliferation of for-profit prisons, and the awful people who run prisons as punitive pits for the unwanted. I’ll believe in that before I believe in shadowy assassins staging murders as suicides in prisons.

Next question: why aren’t we doing something about our national hell-holes? A billionaire was driven to suicide in one, shouldn’t that be enough to motivate Republicans to change policies? I know they’re only about self-interest, but the odds are improving that they’ll eventually end up in one, you know. Trump himself could end up in the Metropolitan Correction Center, and I don’t believe his pampered ass would last long “with bugs and rats so big they’re ‘more like roommates'”, although his Cabinet might be preparing him for that situation.

Eat Less Chikin — it’s made from the blood of labor

In one accounting, Joseph Grendys is worth $2.9 billion. In a more accurate accounting, he ain’t worth shit.

He’s the underserving owner of big chicken processing plants, an enterprise desperate for cheap labor and loaded with terrible working conditions. One of the reasons they hire undocumented workers is because they can be paid little and compelled to work under inhumane, dangerous connections, so that people like Grendys can make more money; because this country is caught up in anti-immigrant fervor, ICE can carry out massive raids on his plants and arrest workers, not bosses, and no one complains…at least no one with any influence.

You might be wondering, though…doesn’t this disrupt the work, costing Mr Grandys money? Sure, but he’d rather pay it out as a little loss in output than to, for instance, pay workers a living wage, or upgrade the processing plant to be cleaner and safer. And, as it turns out, this raid occurred after the plant was penalized for harrassment, and after efforts to unionize. We here in America have a fine tradition of brutal union-busting, how convenient that the federal government provides thugs at no cost to the owner.

The unusually large size of the raids is unheard of, but in this instance, there were extenuating circumstances. A raid that took in an estimated 680 immigrants of various statuses was allegedly planned 11 months in advance. In this case, the circumstances include a $3.75-million-dollar lawsuit settlement. This lawsuit, brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in a Morton, Mississippi, plant included accusations of physical and sexual assaults against its workers. There were also accusations of intimidation, labor violations, exploitation, and harassment of its labor force, with immigrants making up a huge portion of that labor. Some people believe that the raids may be part of a larger intimidation. According to the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice, “ICE field office’s actions will fuel labor abuses, human trafficking, and a race to the bottom for workers’ rights.”

It’s not just brown-skinned people who feel the hammer, though. Have you ever heard of Christian Alcoholics & Addicts in Recovery, also called “The Chicken Farm”? It’s a program operating in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas and Missouri which purports to provide an alternative to prison for anyone convicted of drug crimes, although they’re apparently willing to accept anyone, whether they’re addicted to anything or not. You can sort of guess where this is going by the word “Christian” in the name.

About 280 men are sent to CAAIR each year by courts throughout Oklahoma, as well as Arkansas, Texas and Missouri. Instead of paychecks, the men get bunk beds, meals and Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous meetings. If there’s time between work shifts, they can meet with a counselor or attend classes on anger management and parenting. Weekly Bible study is mandatory. For the first four months, so is church. Most days revolve around the work.

“Money is an obstacle for so many of these men,” said Janet Wilkerson, CAAIR’s founder and CEO. “We’re not going to charge them to come here, but they’re going to have to work. That’s a part of recovery, getting up like you and I do every day and going to a job.”

The program has become an invaluable labor source. Over the years, Simmons Foods repeatedly has laid off paid employees while expanding its use of CAAIR. Simmons now is so reliant on the program for some shifts that the plants likely would shut down if the men didn’t show up, according to former staff members and plant supervisors.

Translate “Money is an obstacle for so many of these men” to “We make them work for free.”

Jim Lovell, CAAIR’s vice president of program management, said there’s dignity in work.

“If working 40 hours a week is a slave camp, then all of America is a slave camp,” he said.

“Dignity in work”. There’s also dignity in earning a just and fair return on one’s labor. Is there dignity in being a parasite who lives on the dangerous, back-breaking work of others?

I’m going to have to agree with that last statement, though. The rich are doing their best to turn the country into a slave camp, to their benefit.

Just to put more frosting on the grift, here’s a cute trick the parasites can pull. Chicken processing is dangerous work — all kinds of machines that shred birds can also do terrible things to worker’s limbs. And when someone’s hands are shattered in a machine? CHA-CHING, CAAIR gets the benefits.

Men who were injured while at CAAIR rarely receive long-term help for their injuries. That’s because the program requires all men to sign a form stating that they are clients, not employees, and therefore have no right to workers’ comp. Reveal found that when men got hurt, CAAIR filed workers’ comp claims and kept the payouts. Injured men and their families never saw a dime.

Wait! There’s more! Remember, CAAIR is advertising itself as a tool for therapy and recovery of addicted individuals. So why don’t they employ therapists and experts in drug treatment?

In addition to injuries, some men at CAAIR experience serious drug withdrawal, seizures and mental health crises, according to former employees. But the program doesn’t employ trained medical staff and prohibits psychiatric medicine.

Poultry processing has become a sinkhole of unfair, criminal labor practices. All I can say is…stop eating chicken. It’s cheap protein where the filthy rich can degrade worker’s lives in its production, because it is poorly regulated.

Maybe you can start eating KFC again when the profits of their labor is shifted to the pockets of the workers someday.

Free Speech and Artistic Expression…DENIED

The crazy leftists are no-platforming everyone now. Look at this magnificent work of art!

It was shown at CPAC, where everyone loved it, so it must be objectively valuable. However, when the artist, Julian Raven, demanded that the 16-foot-wide masterpiece be given space at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, they refused. I can’t imagine why.

Raven was inspired to create the giant image in 2015 when he saw Trump campaigning on television — roughly the left third of the 300-pound painting is devoted to a giant neck-up rendering of the then-presidential candidate, with the rest depicting a bald eagle flying through space with a giant American flag in its talons and our pitiable blue planet in the background, with no idea what it had in store. Raven, driven by this searing vision to complete the painting in three weeks, hoped to display the work at the Smithsonian in coincidence with the 2017 inauguration, but found himself roundly rejected by the gallery’s director, Kim Sajet, who told him that it was “too political” and “too big” and, generally, just not very good.

“The last thing she said to me was ‘it’s no good,’” Raven is quoted as saying. Welcome to the art world, buddy.

What does a good wingnut do in such a situation? He sued, of course. His suit was dismissed, so now he’s appealing the decision.

Gee, that art director shouldn’t have said that. They were too generous — I’d have said that was a shit painting that deserves to be displayed in the dumpster out back.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before

I know you’ve heard this one way too many times before, but this time, God tells a story.

Once there was a nation suffering the plague of gun violence. “Help us,” the nation prayed, “save us from the violence.” And God said, “You shall be provided with the legislative tools to ban assault weapons, high-capacity magazines, and other wartime instruments of death.” And lo, the nation said, “I’d rather not.” And so nothing came to pass.

“Help us,” the nation prayed a year or so later, “save us from the violence.” And God said, “You shall be provided with the best universities and research institutions in the world, so that you may study the topic of gun violence and arrive at solutions to this public health crisis yourselves.” And lo, the nation said, “Let’s make funding studies of gun violence illegal.” And so nothing came to pass.

“Help us,” the nation prayed a few months later, “save us from the violence.” And God said, “You shall be provided with the best mental health resources in the world, and you shall be provided with wealth beyond compare so that all who are struggling with homicidal or suicidal thoughts will have access to care.” And lo, the nation said, “Sounds socialist to me. Let’s make Medicaid harder to access, not easier. And, oh yeah, our leaders are going to spread hate and xenophobia to give people a reason to commit acts of violence.” And so nothing came to pass.

“Help us,” the nation prayed a few weeks later, “save us from the violence.” And God said, “If you are scared that the Supreme Court will overturn sensible gun laws, if you are scared of the lobbying power of the NRA, then you shall be provided with a way to create Constitutional Amendments overturning the Second Amendment and making it harder for lobbying groups to influence elections.” And lo, the nation said, “A Constitutional Amendment? Sounds kinda complicated. It can’t be done except for all those times it’s been done. Nope.” And so nothing came to pass.

“Help us,” the nation prayed a few days later, “save us from the violence.” And God said, “It seems like many of these shooters are white men. I think you should raise boys differently and look closely at what whiteness does to someone’s psychology.” And lo, the nation said, “How dare you even say that.”

And so God — that’s me — I’m sitting up here going, What the hell is wrong with you? I have given you people a raft. I have given you people a boat. I have given you a helicopter on top of a fucking cruise ship. And still you are drowning???

That’s so familiar. I told my own version of that very same parable in The Happy Atheist, only from the perspective of a nonbeliever. It came out a little differently.

Once upon a time, there was an atheist who was trapped in her house by a flood. As the waters rose higher and higher, she had to climb up on the roof, where she hoped for rescue.

A little later, her neighbors paddled by in a canoe, and offered to take her to high ground.

She got in the canoe.

See? That’s the difference between a godly person and an atheist. Our stories are shorter and
don’t assume the protagonist is an idiot.

I’m pleased to see that God is coming around to my perspective.

Neil deGrasse Tyson said something stupid

It happens. We all say stupid things now and then. But this gaffe was spectacularly ill-timed — he’s trying to diminish the emotional response to our Weekend O’ Mass Murder.

Yes? And? If I’m told someone died of a medical error, I will be distressed and say we should reduce the frequency of those errors, and doctors and hospitals will agree and point to efforts to prevent them. Those same doctors will tell you about vaccination and treatment programs to reduce deaths due to flu. There are suicide hotlines and therapists who strive to help people who want to kill themselves. We require licensing and training before you are allowed to drive a car, and we pay fleets of police to enforce traffic laws. The police are also paid to prevent criminals from killing people and to arrest those who do. Those terrible deaths? Society is trying to do something about them.

Mass shootings, not so much. People are grieving and terrified and even, dare I say it, emotional about these incidents because they are so arbitrary, because we would be helpless in those situations, and because nothing is being done to prevent them. Limited regulation, gun manufacturers gleefully peddling instruments of destruction to the public, and a criminal organization, the NRA, dedicated to opposing all restrictions on gun availability…so people are rightfully angry at this continuing madness. Don’t try to minimize it. Placidity in the face of preventable horror allows it to continue, while anger gets shit done.

That was a bad tweet. But there’s something even worse: Tyson’s apology. Oh my god. It’s horrible. For one thing, it’s not an apology. He regrets nothing he did, but gosh, all you other people — you should appreciate the information he has bestowed upon you.

“My intent was to offer objectively true information that might help shape conversations and reactions to preventable ways we die,” his note read. “Where I miscalculated was that I genuinely believed the Tweet would be helpful to anyone trying to save lives in America. What I learned from the range of reactions is that for many people, some information –-my Tweet in particular — can be true but unhelpful, especially at a time when many people are either still in shock, or trying to heal – or both.

“So if you are one of those people, I apologize for not knowing in advance what effect my Tweet could have on you,” he continued. “I am therefore thankful for the candor and depth of critical reactions shared in my Twitter feed. As an educator, I personally value knowing with precision and accuracy what reaction anything that I say (or write) will instill in my audience, and I got this one wrong.”

Don’t you realize that he was trying to be helpful? He admits he got something wrong…how his audience would react. He still doesn’t appreciate the difference between a flu death statistic and a specific event in which a racist murders a group of people for the color of their skin.

Neil, you need to learn how to apologize. Here’s a helpful video. I apologize in advance if it triggers resentment on your part, and for not knowing how you will react to helpful advice.

Or perhaps you’ve already researched the topic of how to make an apology and encountered this video.

If so, I have to tell you that that one is satire. It’s what not to do. Your apology seems to follow the template with surprising accuracy, unfortunately.