How and why police brutality is institutionalized

On the latest episode of his show Patriot Act, Hasan Minhaj explains why the many cases in which police kill unarmed mostly black people and escape any punishment is not only due to the specifics of each case but that it is encouraged by a system in which the training of police encourages immediate violent action and the unions and the laws are designed to give police immunity from the consequences of their actions, however egregious they might be. In other words, this is a systemic problem that cannot be blamed on a few ‘rotten apples’.

Bye, bye, John! So happy that you have been kicked out

John Bolton, an incredibly ruthless neoconservative warmonger who seemed eager to use the US military to attack and invade any and all perceived enemies of the US, especially if they were also designated enemies of Israel, has been fired by Donald Trump from his influential position as National Security Advisor.

As is the case with this chaotic administration, there are conflicting reports of why he was fired and how. Bolton claimed he resigned while Trump insists he was fired. The days are long gone when firings were papered over with fake expressions of regret.

Trump tweeted: “I informed John Bolton last night that his services are no longer needed at the White House. I disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions, as did others in the administration, and therefore I asked John for his resignation, which was given to me this morning. I thank John very much for his service.”

He added: “I will be naming a new National Security Advisor next week.”

Bolton instantly tweeted back: “I offered to resign last night and President Trump said, ‘Let’s talk about it tomorrow.’”

Bolton’s dismissal was unexpected in the White House, which about an hour earlier had announced a press conference involving Bolton and the secretaries of state and treasury.

Bolton had taken consistently hawkish positions on major foreign policy issues that had frequently clashed with Trump, who had sought close relationships with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un.

What does it mean about US policy? Who knows? There seems to be no coherent policy, just the whims of an impulsive and erratic president. It may be that Trump just got sick of seeing Bolton’s walrus mustache up close, since it is known that he likes people to be clean shaven.

But one fewer ultra-aggressive warmonger who has the ear of the president has to be considered a positive development.

He’s not going to last long

[UPDATE: Neil Jacobs, the acting administrator of NOAA and himself a career meteorologist facing a potentially hostile audience of weather scientists at a meeting in Huntsville, Alabama who had threatened to walk out on his talk, tried to smooth over the conflict by tearfully thanking the Birmingham scientists in the audience for their work. The semi-apology seemed to have been accepted.]

There has been much publicity over the absurdity of Donald Trump claiming that Alabama was in the path of Hurricane Dorian when it was not. National Weather Service scientists in Birmingham immediately corrected it as they should, since warning residents that they are in the path of a major storm when they are not is a serious matter. Trump then doubled down on his claim by showing a doctored NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) weather map that showed Alabama in the projected path. But the most serious aspect of this was when an unsigned press release came from NOAA (the NWS is overseen by NOAA) saying that earlier forecasts did include Alabama, implicitly rebuking the NWS scientists.
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The Taliban meeting reportedly collapsed because of Trump’s ego

The surprise announcement by Donald Trump that he had canceled the secret meeting he had scheduled at Camp David with the leaders of the Taliban and the Afghan government has led to a lot of speculation as to what the deal might have contained and the real reasons for the cancellation. No one really buys Trump’s reason that it was because of the bombing on Thursday that killed a US soldier, because there had been no agreement about a ceasefire and both sides had been continuing hostilities anyway.
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Women’s rights and equality

Victoria Batemen, director of studies, fellow and college lecturer in economics at Gonville and Caius College at the University of Cambridge, argues that making the world more free, fair, and prosperous begins with giving women control over their own bodies to do with as they like, which includes them having the right to wear as much or as little clothing as they like and to do sex work.
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Why did Trump cancel the Afghanistan talks?

It has been an open secret that Donald Trump’s envoy to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalizad has been having ‘secret’ talks with the Taliban about the withdrawal of some of the 13,000 US troops from that country as part of a larger peace deal. Ending US involvement in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria were Trump’s key promises in his election campaign and the lack of achieving any of those may have been heavy on his mind so the fact of there being negotiations over troop withdrawals were not a surprise.
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The fact that ‘both sides’ criticize you does not mean you are neutral

Mainstream media journalists and editors like to pride themselves on their ‘political neutrality’, that they do not take sides. Some even claim they do not vote in elections because of their commitment to this neutrality. Thoughtful media analyses have long since debunked that idea, pointing out that though some journalists might not consciously bias their reporting (though others of course do), the institutional filters that exist in media institutions ensure that only people who have a certain limited range of views can survive in the media institutions. These people are then given the freedom to say and write what they want without explicit orders from the top because the media entity is confident that they will stay within the boundaries. If on occasion a journalist goes rogue and challenges the consensus, they are taken to task or dismissed, thus warning any other journalists of the dangers of straying from their assigned path
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Why you should never listen to the foreign policy establishment on war

It is a predictable pattern. As the US gears up for war, any war, the foreign policy establishment reacts like soldiers to a bugle call, quickly lining up to support it, irrespective of where they supposedly stand on other political issues, and whether they are self-identified as liberal or conservative, Democratic or Republican.

On the occasion of the death of Leslie Gelb, one of the many ‘liberal interventionists’ who cheered on the Iraq war, Philip Weiss reminds us of something that Gelb said when asked later to explain why he initially supported the invasion of Iraq, something that he said that he later regretted.

“My initial support for the war was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility.”

That pretty much sums it up. ‘Credibility’ is not dependent on being right but on being supportive of wars. All these people in the establishment media know the unwritten rules of the game, that if you oppose, or just even seriously question, any of America’s wars, you are not considered ‘serious’ and will immediately become a pariah and lose your media and professional platforms. As the cliché goes, they know which side of their bread is buttered.

For these people, it is easier to quickly support the war and then when things turn sour, as they almost inevitably do, to express regret and say that ‘everyone’ agreed with them. In this way, blame is spread so thinly that no one gets expelled from the ranks of punditry and they can respond enthusiastically to the next bugle call. This is why we still see Andrew Sullivan, Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, and the rest still around pontificating in the media, while people like Phil Donahue who opposed the Iraq war from the beginning were sent into the wilderness and remain there.

In-depth look at Tulsi Gabbard

Presidential candidate and Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii is a bit of an enigma, hard to pin a label on. She has incurred the wrath and venom of the Democratic party establishment for reasons that are not totally clear to me but seem to involve the fact that she does not take an instinctively hostile attitude to the designated enemies of the political establishment, namely Russia, China, Syria, and Iran. Edward Isaac-Devore tried to understand the reasons for this antipathy. He says that the party establishment seems convinced that she has some ulterior motives for running for president even though they cannot articulate what it might be.
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