All posts by nedhamson

Activist, writer, researcher, addicted to sharing information and facts.

Greta Thunberg’s Stirring UN Speech Is Not ‘Cute’ or ‘Badass’

Thunberg is not here to be palatable. She is not here to be adorable GIF-fodder, or to reassure apathetic elites that the future is in good hands. She is here to be taken seriously. The stakes are too high for her not to be. Her activism isn’t cute—it’s terrifying.

Source: Greta Thunberg’s Stirring UN Speech Is Not ‘Cute’ or ‘Badass’

He’s not going to stop on his own

For impeachment to work, you need a Senate majority to convict. If conviction is not likely, you get to feel better but you inspire his supporters and the idiots who might sympathize with his and risk his re-election. Defeat him in 2020 by votes and win the Senate – and you get to fell better and the nation moves forward.

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If Democrats put off impeachment until Trump does something worse, he’ll do something worse.


This week’s biggest news story unfolded slowly, and we still don’t have it all.

Flouting the law. Early in the week, the story centered on yet another example of the Trump administration flouting the law: On August 12, a whistleblower in the intelligence community filed an official complaint, which the the IC’s inspector general (Trump appointee Michael Atkinson) found to be “a credible urgent concern” on August 26. Invoking that phrase legally requires the Director of National Intelligence (acting DNI Joseph Maguire, who got the job after Dan Coats was let go; on July 28 Trump tweeted that Coats would leave on August 15) to pass the complaint on to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. But he did not do so.

House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff wrote to Maguire on September 10:

In an unprecedented departure from past practice, you have not transmitted the disclosure to the Committee, nor have you notified the Committee of the fact of the disclosure or your decision not to transmit it to the Committee. Instead, in a manner neither permitted nor contemplated under the statute, you have taken the extraordinary step of overruling the independent determination of the [Intelligence Community Inspector General] and preventing the disclosure from reaching the Committee.

He followed this up with a September 13 letter, which appears to be a response to the DNI’s refusal to produce the complaint. This letter accuses the DNI’s office of

a radical distortion of the statute that completely subverts the letter and spirit of the law, as well as arrogates to the Director of National Intelligence authority and discretion he does not possess.

The DNI’s action

raises grave concerns that your office, together with the Department of Justice and possibly the White House, are engaged in an unlawful effort to protect the President and conceal from the Committee information related to his possible “serious or flagrant” misconduct, abuse of power, or violation of law.

The letter concludes with a subpoena to deliver the complaint by September 17, or to appear before the committee to explain why on September 19. Maguire refused to do either one.

Mr. Schiff told CBS that Mr. Maguire had told him he was not providing the complaint “because he is being instructed not to, that this involved a higher authority, someone above” the director of national intelligence, a cabinet position.

That “higher authority” can only be the President.

What the complaint is about. Up to that point, no one — including Schiff or any other members of Congress — knew anything about the substance of the complaint, or why it was worth breaking the law to suppress. But then details began to leak out.

Wednesday the Washington Post reported that the complaint involved a conversation Trump had with a foreign leader.

Trump’s interaction with the foreign leader included a “promise” that was regarded as so troubling that it prompted an official in the U.S. intelligence community to file a formal whistleblower complaint

Naturally, pundits speculated about Vladimir Putin, but Thursday the New York Times reported that the complaint involved Ukraine, and included “other actions” beyond just a phone conversation.

Thursday night, Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani let the cat out of the bag in an interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo. It kind of has to be seen to be believed. Rudy claimed CNN won’t cover Obama/Biden scandals in Ukraine, but when Cuomo asked for the proof Giuliani says he’s assembled, he yelled, “I’m not going to give you proof!” Later in the interview he repeated that refusal and explained “You’re the enemy!” Giuliani kept on yelling:

You won’t cover it! But you want to cover some ridiculous charge that I urged the Ukrainian government to investigate corruption! Well I did, and I’m proud of it!

Just that fast, it goes from a “ridiculous charge” to something he’s proud to have done.

Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported

President Trump in a July phone call repeatedly pressured the president of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden’s son, according to people familiar with the matter, urging Volodymyr Zelensky about eight times to work with Rudy Giuliani on a probe that could hamper Mr. Trump’s potential 2020 opponent.

Yesterday, Trump admitted he talked to Zelensky about Biden and his son, but insisted there was nothing improper in the call. However, so far he has refused to release the transcript. (As he so often does when he’s trying to deflect criticism, he says he’s “considering” releasing it. He considers a lot of things that never happen — sitting down with Robert Mueller, for example.)

By now we seem to know this much: On July 25, Trump talked to new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, pressuring him to investigate a story (largely unsupported by facts, as Chris Cuomo lays out) that as Vice President, Biden pressured Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who had investigated his son. [2]

On August 30, Trump was reported to be considering withholding $250 million in military aid that Congress had appropriated for the Ukraine (which badly needs the aid because it is under persistent attack from Russia, which has already taken Crimea from Ukraine). On September 1, Mike Pence met with Zelensky in Warsaw. Schiff’s letter demanding the whistleblower complaint is September 10, and aid to Ukraine is released on September 12.

We still don’t know what “other actions” the complaint talks about.

Now let’s connect the dots. Those are all just facts; now I start to speculate. It appears that Trump tried to coerce Ukraine into taking action that would help his re-election campaign.

This would be an unprecedented abuse of power. Constitutionally, presidents have sweeping power over American foreign policy, but using that power to extort partisan political favors from foreign countries is an enormous breach of trust.

However, this also would be entirely consistent with everything we know about Trump. One character trait that has been consistent all through his administration is that he can’t compartmentalize. He can’t keep his government trips separate from his campaign rallies. His people can’t keep their political campaigning separate from their taxpayer-supported jobs. He can’t separate his business from his administration, or his family from his government. He can’t keep from blurting out secrets when he talks to the Russian ambassador.

Each previous president has understood the distinction between his person and the office he held. Each has understood that the power of the presidency is a trust from the People of the United States, to be used for the benefit of the nation. Sometimes presidents have crossed that line — for example, by bringing a foreign issue to a head when they needed a distraction from a domestic issue that was going badly for them — but they all knew the line was there.

Trump simply doesn’t grasp this. He is the President, so the power of the presidency is his, to do with as he likes. Sometimes that might be for the benefit of the nation (as he understands it), but he may also use that power to enrich himself and his family, cover up his mistakes, reward his friends, or strike at his enemies. And if, as in this case, the opportunity to get a partisan advantage from a foreign power presented itself, I doubt he would see anything wrong with pursuing it. One purpose of foreign aid is to make other countries do what the president wants, and this president wants Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden.

What should be done? First, no one should give Trump the benefit of the doubt on this, because he’s the one withholding information. If the whistleblower complaint [1] is as laughable as he says, he could just instruct DNI Maguire to release it so we can all enjoy the joke. If his conversation with Zelensky is as “perfect” as he says, he can release the transcript for us all to admire.

But if he won’t reveal those pieces of evidence, it’s probably because they don’t support his version of events. We all know this from childhood: If somebody stole the candy, and there’s one boy who won’t take his hands out of his pockets, you can bet that those hands are chocolate-stained.

Second, Politico’s legal affairs columnist Renato Mariotti makes an excellent point: It’s important not to try to shoehorn this abuse of power into the definitions of more typical crimes.

If what Trump is accused of doing is true, it is a kind of corrupt conduct that the criminal system is not equipped to handle. Labeling his behavior with criminal terms such as bribery and extortion not only misunderstands the statutory language, it gives Trump and his supporters ammunition with which to defend themselves, making impeachment—the proper constitutional remedy for presidential corruption—harder to achieve.

We have seen this happen already with the Russia investigation: Criminal conspiracy became the standard of judgment, and when Mueller didn’t find proof beyond reasonable doubt of Trump’s participation in that conspiracy (perhaps because his obstruction of justice worked), Trump could crow about “no collusion”. What Mueller did establish — that Trump knew about and welcomed an attempt by an enemy nation to get him elected — would have sunk any previous administration. But because winking at a foreign dictator’s attack on our democracy is not an indictable crime, Trump could claim “total exoneration“.

Trump and his defenders are already trying to spin things the same way in this case, by claiming that no explicit quid-pro-quo came up in the Zelensky conversation. (Trump’s near-simultaneous blocking of military aid Ukraine desperately needs was just a coincidence.) Quid-pro-quo would be a key element of a bribery or extortion charge, but it misses the point here. Mariotti continues:

Labeling Trump’s alleged conduct as “bribery” or “extortion” cheapens what is alleged to have occurred and does not capture what makes it wrongful. It’s not a crime—it’s a breach of the president’s duty to not use the powers of the presidency to benefit himself.

That kind of breach is what impeachment is for, and “No one should expect law enforcement to act if our elected representatives are unwilling to do so.”

Impeachment politics. It’s important to recognize that this is just another in a long series of impeachable offenses. If the evidence turns out to be what as it seems now, this may be the most flagrant violation yet, but it’s far from the only one.

  • The Mueller Report collected evidence of seven instances of obstruction of justice. (It examined ten possible obstructions, but found that three of them failed to include all three elements in the definition of obstruction.) Mueller himself refused (because of DoJ policy) to conclude that the president had committed a crime, but literally hundreds of former federal prosecutors have signed a statement saying that the evidence in the Mueller Report would be enough to indict Trump if DoJ policy did not forbid indicting a sitting president.
  • Trump’s business relationships with foreign countries and foreign governments violate the Constitution’s Emolument Clause. (Again, the reason we don’t have more complete information about this is that Trump is withholding it. Until he releases his tax returns and other relevant documents, he doesn’t deserve any benefit of the doubt.) So far, Democrats have left this violation to the courts, but that is not the proper jurisdiction. Oversight of the Executive Branch is a fundamental congressional responsibility. The primary issue is abuse of power, which is a political judgment, not a legal one.
  • Trump’s self-dealing — using presidential power to channel public money into his businesses, as well as getting government entities to do PR for his properties — is another abuse of power.
  • His stonewalling of Congress’ legitimate oversight authority — claiming ridiculous privileges, refusing subpoenas, and flouting laws requiring the administration to turn over documents — threatens the constitutional separation of powers.
  • His declaration of a phony emergency and subsequent pilfering of money to build his wall threatens the constitutional separation of powers.

As I’ve explained before, impeachment is not just about crimes, it can also be Congress’ only way to defend our system of government and maintain its status as an equal branch, if the President refuses to respect that equality. We’re at that point now.

The objection to impeachment among House Democrats isn’t that there is no case, it’s that the politics are wrong: The majority of voters aren’t there yet; some purple-district Democratic congresspeople might lose their seats if they vote to impeach; bringing impeachment to a vote and failing might be worse than doing nothing; likewise, impeaching Trump only to see the Senate acquit him might be counter-productive.

Nate Silver sums up this point of view:

I don’t understand how impeachment serves as more effective deterrent against impeachable conduct when the opposition impeaches even when it would politically benefit the president to do so (& he’d remain in office). That actually incentivizes impeachable conduct, in fact.

But Elizabeth Warren sees it differently:

A president is sitting in the Oval Office, right now, who continues to commit crimes. He continues because he knows his Justice Department won’t act and believes Congress won’t either. Today’s news confirmed he thinks he’s above the law. If we do nothing, he’ll be right.

What tips me over to Warren’s point of view is that this is not going to stop. Trump will push until he finds the line that Congress will defend. If that line hasn’t been reached yet, then he’ll push further.

Up until now, I have argued against those who worry that he’ll lose the election and refuse to leave office. And if the election happened today, I still think the system would stand against that usurpation. But if standards are allowed to continue eroding, who can say where they will be by November 2020 or January 2021?

Even Nancy Pelosi seems to recognize the seriousness of this moment:

I am calling on Republicans to join us in insisting that the Acting DNI obey the law as we seek the truth to protect the American people and our Constitution.

This violation is about our national security. The Inspector General determined that the matter is “urgent” and therefore we face an emergency that must be addressed immediately.

If the Administration persists in blocking this whistleblower from disclosing to Congress a serious possible breach of constitutional duties by the President, they will be entering a grave new chapter of lawlessness which will take us into a whole new stage of investigation.

Republicans. Democrats hesitate to pursue impeachment because they expect Republicans to refuse to defend the Republic and the Constitution against a president of their own party.

So far, for example, Mitt Romney is the only Republican in Congress who has expressed even a slight concern about either the flouting of the whistleblower law or the abuse of power allegedly described by the suppressed complaint. And his mildly expressed tweet is unlikely to make the White House quiver in fear.

If the President asked or pressured Ukraine’s president to investigate his political rival, either directly or through his personal attorney, it would be troubling in the extreme. Critical for the facts to come out.

My attention is focused on North Carolina Senator Richard Burr, the Republican who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee. DNI Maguire’s refusal to release the whistleblower complaint is snubbing Burr in the same way that it snubs House Intelligence Chair Schiff. Will he roll over and accept that diminishment of his authority? Up until now, the Senate committee has been less partisan than the House committee. His Democratic counterpart, Senator Warner of Virginia, seems to express bipartisan confidence:

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence panel, said on Thursday that he and the committee’s Republican chairman, Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, also expected both the inspector general and acting director to brief them early next week and “clear this issue up.”

We’ll soon see if that confidence is justified. If Burr demands to see the complaint, then things get interesting.

But in any case, if the Democratic majority in the House won’t move forward with impeachment, Senate Republicans will never be put on the spot. It may be true that they will respond in a corrupt and cowardly way. But if the question is never put to them, they don’t have to expose their corruption and cowardice.

Above all, Democrats need to ask themselves: If the abuse doesn’t stop here, with Trump pressuring a foreign leader to dig up dirt on his major rival, where will it stop?


[1] One important point is often getting shuffled aside: When government officials leak information to the press, critics ask why they didn’t do things “the right way”, by going through the official whistleblowing process. By all accounts, this whistleblower has done everything according to the proper legal process, and so far it is not going well: The complaint has not reached Congress, and it appears that the DNI has not protected his identity. The Justice Department (which has no role in the official process) has been consulted, and quite possibly the White House as well.

People throughout the government are watching. What many of them are learning, I suspect, is that if they know about wrongdoing, their only effective choices are to keep quiet or go to the press. I’m sure the Washington Post would be doing a better job of getting the complaint heard while protecting the whistleblower’s identity.

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[2] The short version of the context is that Biden was one of many people pressuring Ukraine to get rid of the corrupt prosecutor, for a variety of reasons unconnected to Biden’s son. The dismissed prosecutor also claims that his Biden investigation had already concluded (without charges) before he was fired.

Dead Eyes

India’s racism and terror in Kashmir!

Hiba Nisar was eighteen months old when she became the youngest casualty of the latest phase in the deadly, decades-long conflict in Kashmir. Last November, protesters clashed with Indian security forces outside her home in Kapran, a village in the south of the Muslim-majority state controlled by India but also claimed by Pakistan. As protesters pelted them with stones, Indian police fired tear gas, which began to seep into Hiba’s home. Hiba started to choke.

Her mother, Marsala Jan, grabbed her and opened the door, intent on getting her out of the smoke. “As I sneaked out, I heard a loud bang,” Jan recalls—the security forces had fired their shotguns. A spray of lead pellets ripped through the doorway. Jan had covered her daughter’s face with her hand, but a pellet went through her hand, she says, and into Hiba’s left eye.

Hiba was partially blinded. “Fate struck a terrible blow,” Jan says. “I held my child tight, but … I failed to protect her eye.”

Since 2010, Indian security forces have used pellet guns to deal with widespread protests in Kashmir, leading to the blinding, maiming, or killing of hundreds of people, according to human rights advocates and local medical personnel. While the term “pellet gun” brings to mind a children’s toy, the pellets—also known as birdshot—are metal and spray over a wide area. Most countries do not use them for crowd-control purposes because they cannot be aimed and thus cause indiscriminate injury.

Furthermore, while touted as “non-lethal,” the projectiles can kill and mutilate. In Kashmir, seventeen people died in 2016 and 2017 after being hit with pellets, according to reports compiled by the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCC), a consortium of human rights organizations working in the state. Hospital records from Srinagar, the state capital, indicate that more than a thousand people have suffered eye injuries from pellets since 2016. A study earlier this year by researchers at Government Medical College in Srinagar found that 59 percent of those with pellet-related eye injuries ended up with permanent visual impairment, and 11 percent were completely blinded.

Photo of a boy holding a photo of himself in his left handFaizan Ahmad Bhat lost his eyesight after he was hit with pellets fired by Indian security forces during the 2016 uprising. Photo by Sharafat Ali

The long-running conflict in Kashmir continues to kill scores of people every year, with 108 security forces personnel, 120 militants, and forty-three civilians dying in the first half of this year alone, according to the JKCCS. In response to the international outcry over civilian deaths and maimings from pellets, Indian security officials have argued that they need to respond with deadlier forms of force because anti-government protesters use deadly force, including throwing stones. “There is an orchestrated campaign against pellet guns precisely because it is doing the work of effectively controlling the violent mob protests,” an unidentified senior security official in Kashmir told the Washington Post. “When there is a determined militant crowd hurling sharp stones at us and [they] break our helmets, shields and bones, then we need to act. Tear-gas shells are not very effective, because protesters use wet cloth to cover their eyes and are back in action in two minutes.”

But the use of pellet-firing shotguns in Kashmir has brought about an epidemic of “dead eyes”—blindings from the sprayed projectiles. In 2016, medical workers in Srinagar, the capital of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, were seeing so many of these injuries that they staged a protest, wearing gauze patches over one eye to raise awareness about the suffering caused by the Indian government’s use of the deadly ammunition.

Danish Rajab was partially blinded after being shot during that year’s wave of protests in Srinagar. A soft-spoken man in his early twenties, Rajab says he regularly took part in anti-India demonstrations downtown, joining the throngs of young men who would throw stones at security forces. At one protest near his home in the city’s Jogi Lanker area, Rajab was running toward the crowd to join them when he heard a bang. “I felt a little warmth in my eye,” he says. “I looked down, and blood was pouring across my face and neck. The blood was coming from my left eye, and I wasn’t feeling any pain. People watching me from the alleys shouted that pellets had hit my face.” Rajab was rushed to the hospital. The operation to save his eye was excruciating, he says. Today, after raising money from his community to fund three expensive surgeries, Rajab can still only see blurry images from his wounded eye. He says he used to work as a salesman, but he could no longer continue with his job after he was injured.

In a 2017 report, the human rights organization Amnesty International documented eighty-eight cases of people blinded by pellet-firing shotguns used by the Jammu and Kashmir Police (JKP) and Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) over the previous three years. It condemned the use of pellet guns in Kashmir as violating international human-rights standards on the use of force. “Authorities claim the pellet shotgun is not lethal, but the injuries and deaths caused by this cruel weapon bear testimony to how dangerous, inaccurate, and indiscriminate it is,” said Aakar Patel, the executive director of Amnesty International India, in a statement. “There is no proper way to use pellet-firing shotguns. It is irresponsible of authorities to continue the use of these shotguns despite being aware of the damage they do.”

In spite of the Indian government’s statements over the years that it would replace pellet guns with less dangerous forms of crowd control, “those promises have not been kept,” the report by Amnesty International concluded. Two years later, Indian security forces continue to use pellet-firing shotguns. In a May protest in Srinagar, for example, about sixty civilians were injured by pellet fire, according to hospital officials—ten critically.

Painting of wounded boy with bloodied eyesMohammad Imran Parray, a teenager from Kashmir’s northern Baramulla district, was hit by pellets fired by government security forces on July 13, 2016. Painting by Hina Arif

While the blindings have become a graphic symbol of the violence in Kashmir, the larger issue, activists say, is the government repression that makes such injuries so common. As Arif, a student activist from Srinagar, puts it: “Indian forces find it justifiable to mow down civilians.” (The student, a graduate student from Kashmir University who asked that his last name not be used, was later arrested and is currently detained under a state law that permits authorities to hold suspects up to two years without a trial.)

According to the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, civilian deaths from the state’s ongoing conflict spiked again in 2018. That year, 160 civilians died, the largest death toll since 2010. The group also says that between 2003 and 2017, eight children died from pellet injuries in Jammu and Kashmir, though another eight died from riot-control measures that are supposed to be less deadly than pellet guns: tear gas and “chili grenades” (a pepper-based weapon similar to tear gas), which can bring about asphyxiation.

After subsiding somewhat in recent months, violence in the area has surged again following a controversial government decision to revoke Jammu and Kashmir’s special status. On August 5, the administration of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi passed legislation in parliament to strip the state of its semi-autonomy and split it into two territories. Modi’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, known for its Hindu nationalist policies, sees the move as a way of better integrating the conflict-ridden region. When the Modi administration announced the decision, it immediately imposed a curfew, sent in additional troops, and cut off phone and Internet service across the state. As protests have raged in the streets over the past month, authorities have released little information. According to government data acquired by the Reuters news service, however, security forces have so far arrested more than 3,800 people. About 1,200 individuals—among them, some prominent state leaders—are still being detained, and dozens more are being arrested every day, an Indian official told Reuters. Meanwhile, the communications blackout remains in place. After first denying that there had been any casualties because of the military lockdown, the government earlier this month confirmed five civilian deaths, which an Indian army official blamed on “terrorists, stone pelters, and puppets of Pakistan.”

In the past, the Indian government has called upon Kashmiri locals to stop “supporting the terrorists” by attacking Indian security forces as they conduct anti-militant operations. In a 2017 statement, Indian army chief Bipin Rawat in 2017 condemned the “local boys” who flock to the sites of gun battles in order to throw stones and help militants escape. “If they want to continue with the acts of terrorism, displaying flags of ISIS and Pakistan, then we will treat them as anti-national elements and go helter-skelter for them,” Rawat said. (The Islamic State, also known as ISIS, has supporters in Kashmir, and in May the extremist group declared it had established a “province” in the state—though experts have said ISIS is merely using such claims to motivate its dwindling base of support following its recent expulsion from Iraq and Syria.)

Painting of wounded girlFifteen-year-old Insha Mushtaq was hit by pellets in both eyes at her home in southern Kashmir’s Shopian district in 2016. Painting by Hina Arif

The conflict over Kashmir dates back to 1947, immediately following the subcontinent’s partition, when the Hindu ruler of the Muslim-majority state turned to India for protection after armed tribesmen from Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province threatened his rule. India currently administers 45 percent of the territory that it and Pakistan both claim, with the remainder controlled by Pakistan and China. India and Pakistan have fought three wars over Kashmir, but neither has been able to claim the territory in its entirety.

India, the world’s largest democracy, has allowed Kashmiris to vote in elections. But widespread allegations of rigged elections and brazen meddling by New Delhi in the region’s governance has led many residents—particularly young Kashmiris—to lose faith in Indian democracy over the years.

The dissent reached a more dangerous pitch when armed revolt erupted in 1989. Pakistan backed the separatist movement, providing militants with weapons and funding and training fighters in Azad Kashmir, the western part of Kashmir that it controls. In response, the Indian government pursued brutal counterinsurgency measures, resulting in the deaths of more than 47,000 people—not including those who have disappeared amid the violence.

The latest phase of the conflict—marked by the widespread adoption of pellet guns by Indian security forces—can be traced to the Amarnath land row in 2008, when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in Hindu-dominated Jammu and Muslim-dominated Kashmir to either challenge or support a government decision to use public lands to facilitate a Hindu pilgrimage. The street fighting spiked again in the summer of 2016, after the killing of Burhan Wani, the popular twenty-two-year-old commander of the pro-Pakistani militant group Hizbul Mujahideen. Forty-five protesters and one police officer died and thousands were injured during the ensuing protests that swept the state of Jammu and Kashmir.

More recently, relations between the region’s residents and security forces have suffered due to the discovery of mass graves with the remains of an estimated 2,000 individuals allegedly “disappeared” by authorities, as well as accusations that security personnel have sexually harassed local women and men. These developments have added to a long history of alleged human rights abuses in India-controlled Kashmir, some of which are—decades later—still being investigated or litigated. Such atrocities inevitably occur, activists say, because of the impunity that Indian law provides to security officers when they operate within the conflict-ridden state. At the same time, government officials have cracked down on the civil liberties of Kashmiris. In addition to the state laws that allow them to detain suspected militants—including minors—without a trial, the authorities impose periodic curfews and have taken to throttling the Internet whenever a civilian or militant killing sparks renewed fears of protest.

Painting of wounded boy with closed eyesfrom the northern Kashmir village of Palhalan, was hit by pellets on May 21, 2016. In May 2016, government security forces fired at protesters in the northern Kashmir village of Palhalan. The pellets struck teenager Hamid Nazir Bhat all over his face. Painting by Hina Arif

The constant presence of armed Indian paramilitary troopers in Kashmir has brought about a collective feeling of “hopelessness” and an uncertainty about the future, says the Kashmiri poet Madhosh Balhami. “We can’t even be sure about what will happen tomorrow, leave aside the future,” says the fifty-three-year-old, whose real name is Ghulam Mohammad Bhat. Last year, separatist militants forced their way into his home in Balhama, seeking cover in a standoff with Indian troops. The poet and his family fled, but their house burned down in the firefight, destroying hundreds of pages of his poetry, he says. Nowadays, Balhami is pessimistic that India and Pakistan will ever negotiate peace. “Most people in Kashmir think both nations are after their own interest,” he says. “If this dispute was not resolved for seven decades, how can it be resolved [now]?”

One thing that has changed in recent years is the ability of Kashmiris to document the violence around them. After her injury, a photo of Hiba’s bloody face went viral, leading to a renewed wave of international criticism of India’s use of pellet guns in Kashmir. In May, the toddler was the focus of media attention after she and her family appeared at a demonstration in Srinagar. In another photo that appeared online, Hiba held a placard that read “India: Stop Blinding Kids.”

Social media has also played a role in channeling local anger at the Indian government. Militant leaders regularly share video and audio messages on these platforms. Those young Kashmiris who are not protesting on the streets may instead be posting comments critical of the India government on social media—and the authorities appear to be cracking down on such activities, in addition to harassing and jailing local journalists.

With every “horror” visited upon the residents of Kashmir, says twenty-nine-year-old local activist Ashraf Wani, the population becomes more resistant to Indian rule. Wani lost most of his sight in one eye after he was injured in the face and chest by pellets during a 2016 protest in the southern Pulwama region of Kashmir. Afterward, he and other injured Kashmiris formed the Pellets Welfare Trust, which helps raise money to pay for the treatment and rehabilitation of those wounded by the use of such weapons. According to his organization’s figures, more than a thousand Kashmiris have had their eyesight damaged by pellet guns. “Not all the victims were demonstrating,” he says. “Even then, no government has the right to blind civilians for taking part in protest.”

In addition to blinding victims, the pellets fired by Indian security forces can become permanently lodged in their bodies—including in their eyes—because the metal ammunition is too risky for surgeons to remove. With each cartridge containing five hundred pellets, the bodies of victims can be riddled with the lead balls—as vividly depicted in X-rays. Doctors are unsure about what long-term complications may arise from the presence of these foreign objects in people’s bodies.

The damage is not just physical, but also mental. Without their eyesight, many young Kashmiris can no longer pursue their educations or continue to work the jobs they once did. They often become socially secluded and deal with depression and anxiety, says Ashraf Ali, an associate professor at Jamia Millia Islamia who studies Kashmir youth.

“I am worthless,” says one man in his twenties who was blinded by a pellet gun after attending a protest in Srinagar. “It [would have been] better to be killed than live a life of a corpse.” The man, who asked not to be identified, said that his injury turned his life “upside-down.” He requires constant assistance to survive, and he continues to have nightmares about being chased by Indian security forces, he says. “Whenever I find any military personnel coming towards me, I shiver.”

600,000 Images Removed from AI Database After Art Project Exposes Racist Bias

Artist Trevor Paglen and the AI researcher Kate Crawford categorized by their own project (image courtesy ImageNet Roulette)

ImageNet will remove 600,000 images of people stored on its database after an art project exposed racial bias in the program’s artificial intelligence system.

Created in 2009 by researchers at Princeton and Stanford, the online image database has been widely used by machine learning projects. The program has pulled more than 14 million images from across the web, which have been categorized by Amazon Mechanical Turk workers — a crowdsourcing platform through which people can earn money performing small tasks for third parties. According to the results of an online project by AI researcher Kate Crawford and artist Trevor Paglen, prejudices in that labor pool appear to have biased the machine learning data.

Training Humans — an exhibition that opened last week at the Prada Foundation in Milan — unveiled the duo’s findings to the public, but part of their experiment also lives online at ImageNet Roulette, a website where users can upload their own photographs to see how the database might categorize them. (Crawford and Paglen have also released “Excavating AI,” an article explaining their research.) The application will remain open until September 27, when its creators will take it offline; in the meantime, ImageNet Roulette has gone viral on social media because of its spurious, and often cringeworthy, results.

For example, the program defined one white woman as a “stunner, looker, mantrap,” and “dish,” describing her as “a very attractive or seductive looking woman.” Many people of color have noted an obvious racist bias to their results. Jamal Jordan, a journalist at the New York Times, explained on Twitter that each of his uploaded photographs returned tags like “Black, Black African, Negroid, or Negro.” And when one user uploaded an image of the Democratic presidential candidates Andrew Yang and Joe Biden, Yang who is Asian American, was tagged as “Buddhist” (he is not) while Biden was simply labeled as “grinner.”

In recent months, researchers have explored how biases against women and people of color manifest in facial recognition services offered by companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM. Critics worry that this technology, which is increasingly sold to state and federal law enforcement agencies, might encourage police overreach as a crime-fighting tool. There are also concerned that such tools might unconstitutionally violate a person’s right to privacy under the Fourth Amendment.

“This exhibition shows how these images are part of a long tradition of capturing people’s images without their consent, in order to classify, segment, and often stereotype them in ways that evokes colonial projects of the past,” Paglen told the Art Newspaper.

For the artist, ImageNet’s problems are inherent to any kind of classification system. If AI learns from humans, the rationale goes, then it will inherent all the same biases that humans have. Training Humans simply exposes how technology’s air of objectivity is more façade than reality.

The post 600,000 Images Removed from AI Database After Art Project Exposes Racist Bias appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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Jeremy Bash lays out the three crimes that Trump committed in his phone call with Ukraine

Jeremy Bash lays out the three crimes that Trump committed in his phone call with Ukraine

Jeremy Bash lays out the three crimes that Trump committed in his phone call with Ukraine


— Read on 3chicspolitico.com/2019/09/23/jeremy-bash-lays-out-the-three-crimes-that-trump-committed-in-his-phone-call-with-ukraine/

The reality of vaccination success…

Perhaps we all forget just how well vaccines have protected us over the decades. Here’s a reminder! Vaccination success is not something we keep in front of mind because it’s harder to notice serious and debilitating disease and death when it’s hardly there!

The video below really brings home vaccination success.

I saw it on Twitter (thanks @sunlightandsnow). Enjoy a 99 secondreminder of how common some diseases once were, but are no longer, thans to immunisation.

History of Vaccine Preventable Diseases in the USA, 1912 to 2017

Hits: 93

The post The reality of vaccination success… appeared first on Virology Down Under.

Mr. Trump, Who’s Your Daddy?

All these years I have been laboring under a false concept that the US was the most powerful country in the world and others would do as we say……but in recent days under the Trump leadership the US is a slave to Saudi Arabia……especially in the aftermath of an attack on the KSA refinery.

I say this from a Tweet I got on Saturday morning…..

JUST IN: Pentagon to will deploy additional troops and military equipment to Saudi Arabia: “In response to the Kingdom’s request, the president has approved the deployment of U.S. forces, which will be defensive in nature and primarily focused on air and missile defense.”

So now the Saudi royals dictate our foreign policy, right?

Defense Secretary Mark Esper says Trump has approved the deployment already, and that it will be focused primarily on air and missile defense systems, at the request of Saudi Arabia.

This has been a major concern for Saudi Arabia. Even though they have the third most expensive military in the world, behind only the US and China, their defensive systems have proven unable to fend off drones and many missiles fired from neighboring Yemen.

The expectation is that the US will be sending more air defense batteries to the area to try to fend off future attacks. Whether or not that’s actually going to work is a huge if, however, since the US has been selling the Saudis their top-of-the-line gear in the first place. It didn’t work for the Saudis, so the question is if adding more of it will make it any more successful.

The US has been investing substantially in trying to improve anti-drone capabilities in recent years, finding that their existing anti-aircraft arsenal is neither cost effective nor super capable against the much smaller, cheaper drones coming into fashion.

Saudi and US officials continue to try to blame the Saudi attack from last weekend on Iran, and are presenting the US deployments as being an attempt to counter Iranian capabilities.

(antiwar.com)

I realize that he Saudis have a strong hand in the US government and policies but when did they start actually making our policy for us?

September 14th, two oil refineries and other oil infrastructure in Saudi Arabia were hit and set ablaze by 18 drones and 7 cruise missiles, dramatically slashing Saudi Arabia’s oil production by half, from about ten million to five million barrels per day. On September 18, the Trump administration, blaming Iran, announced it was imposing more sanctions on Iran and voices close to Donald Trump are calling for military action. But this attack should lead to just the opposite response: urgent calls for an immediate end to the war in Yemen and an end to US economic warfare against Iran.

The question of the origin of the attack is still under dispute. The Houthi government in Yemen immediately took responsibility. This is not the first time the Houthis have brought the conflict directly onto Saudi soil as they resist the constant Saudi bombardment of Yemen. Last year, Saudi officials said they had intercepted more than 100 missiles fired from Yemen.

Will Americans Let Trump Start a War for Saudi Arabia?

That is the overwhelming question…..will we Americans allow Trump to start another war?  Another war that we will not win regardless of the immature boast by the president.

Will Americans Let Trump Start World War III for Saudi Arabia and Israel?

Think about it…Pompeo had to rush to KSA to “confer” with MbS after the attack…..did he get his instructions from the new masters of US foreign policy?

Americans might want to pay attention for now……Dancing With The Stars will not get your loved ones killed……please remove heads from butts!

Be Smart!

Learn Stuff!

“Lego Ergo Scribo”