Jury refuses to convict man who gave food and water to migrants

I wrote recently about how the US Customs and Border Protection agency had been destroying water stations left by humanitarian groups in the desert to prevent migrants dying from dehydration. After one of those groups No More Deaths had publicized these horrendous actions by the CBP, the US government arrested one of its volunteers Scott Warren because he had provided migrants with water, food, clean clothes, and beds in a barn. He faced up to 20 years in prison.
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What’s happening in Sudan

There has been a lot of violence in that country. After public protests resulted in the dictator Omar al Bashir being deposed on April 11 after 30 years in power, the military took over under what they call the Transitional Military Council (TMC) and have started brutally suppressing the pro-democracy groups who had organized a civil disobedience campaign to demand civilian rule.

In his latest episode of Patriot Act, Hasan Minhaj provides the background to what is going on there. He says that the military junta in Sudan is getting support from the despotic leaders of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the UAE and that what is happening is similar to what happened in Egypt where the overthrow of a dictator ushered in a brief period of democracy before the military took over again.

The other scandal of the Central Park Five

The case of the Central Park Five has become famous as a miscarriage of justice. After a 28-year old white female jogger was brutally raped in Central Park in 1989, so badly that she was traumatized and could not even remember what happened, five black youths, four of them under 16 and one was just 16, were arrested, tried, and convicted for the crime, largely based on confessions they made during interrogations without their parents or lawyers being present.
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The impact of Plessy v. Ferguson

Brown vs Board of Education is a landmark 1954 case in the US civil rights movement because it deemed the practice of ‘separate but equal’ to be unconstitutional. That policy had held that it was acceptable to have separate schools for black and white students as long as the schools were ‘equal’. Of course, in practice they were not. But it interesting to go back to the earlier 1896 case Plessy vs Ferguson that had challenged the constitutionality of segregation laws. The US Supreme Court held that the laws were constitutional, thus putting a seal of approval on practices that had already existed for 60 sixty years in all parts of the country and led to their further expansion.
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Get ready for an anti-progressive propaganda blitz

The US is a one-party state and that party can be accurately called the Pro-War, Pro-Business Party (PWPBP) controlled by the oligarchy. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans. Ideological debate within this party is restricted to a narrow spectrum that only encompasses neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and right-wing extremism. This party has unanimous support from the establishment media and much of the intelligentsia, two groups that can be accurately labeled by the Chinese pejorative of ‘running dogs’, because of the tendency of dogs to do what their masters says in return for a few scraps. (It is an accurate label but one I hesitate to use because of my fondness for dogs who have many sterling qualities that these running dogs lack.)
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Goldman Sachs and sovereign wealth funds

The Goldman Sachs investment bank has been a force of financial evil for a long time and yet it has managed to use its power and influence to avoid being brought to account for its actions. Matt Taibbi did an expose of the bank and said that it had “engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression” and gave it the memorable description of a “great vampire squid wrapped round the face of humanity”. But even after the financial collapse of 2008, it escaped serious accountability thanks to its cozy relationship with Department of Justice under president Obama.
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Entitled comedians should stop taking cheap shots at millennials

Around this time of year, many commentators take the opportunity to make mock graduation speeches as a way of giving advice to young people and comedian Bill Maher used his ‘speech’ to attack the younger generation, all lumped under the ‘millennial’ label, as pampered whiny brats with a strong sense of entitlement who have been so coddled by their parents and the ‘politically correct’ environments of their schools and colleges that they are in for a rude shock when they enter the ‘real’ world.
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Brexit, drugs, and fly-tipping

It’s been awhile since I looked at the goings on in the UK as it staggers towards yet another Brexit deadline on October 31. The latest wrinkle is that the Labour Party managed to squeak through to a narrow victory in a by-election in Peterborough, just edging out the candidate for the newly-formed Brexit party led by Nigel Farage by a margin of 10,484 to.9,801 votes. The Conservative party trailed in third place with 7,243.
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Having health insurance does not mean you can afford medical care in the US

When it comes to health care in the US much of the attention has rightly focused on the plight of those who lack any insurance at all. But this gives the impression that those who have employer-based insurance have few problems and would even suffer with the increasingly popular Medicare For All proposal that has now been embraced by pretty much every Democratic presidential candidate and would replace the current system. But that impression is erroneous. This is because in order to lower insurance premiums, employers are pressuring employees to move to high-deductible plans. But a new study finds that a quarter of people with employer-based health insurance in the US cannot longer afford to pay those deductibles
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Rich people behaving like jerks: Part infinity

Wealthy people like to buy expensive seats so that they can sit courtside at professional basketball games. And when I say ‘courtside’, I am not kidding. They are right on the side of the playing area right near the coaches and substitute players. Why they would want to do this is not clear to me since you can probably see better from a few rows back in the raised seats. You also run the real risk of a 250 lb player barreling right into you as they chase a ball that goes out of bounds and causing you serious injury. Apparently the tickets warn you of that possibility but perhaps the desire to be seen on TV is enough for people to take that risk.
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