Tag Archives: OddBox

Revealed: Trump team hired spy firm for ‘dirty ops’ on Iran arms deal

Revealed: Trump team hired spy firm for ‘dirty ops’ on Iran arms deal:

aka14kgold:

This utter stain on humanity.

Al Khader- seized with settlements

You can have the best vine yards in Palestine… the grapes that are considered the pride of the area , settlement wineries are competitively confiscating and stealing to sell ‘holy’ wine … you look around and attempt to take a breath with the breeze of nature with the smell of vine leaves and drying almonds awaiting a new phase of its season … you look deeper and you start noticing caravans , houses that are quite shubby stacked on hills watching the land . A huge settlement surrounds the area. Outposts are another invented threat . The Palestinian farmer thought he won the case . He succeeded in getting an order from the court to remove those caravans from his land…

The officials start a commitment to the assumed demolition !!! They decide to open a road. … another road to bring the bulldozers into conduct the demolition . Lands are confiscated for the assumed removed illegal outposts on the illegal settlement on the Palestinian farmers land move to … the road is a highway project for a more expansion of the growing settlement… all under the name of fulfilling law…. law of occupation that systematically cleanse people and landimg_1043.jpg?w=1170img_1035.jpg?w=1170img_1030.jpg?w=1170img_1029.jpg?w=1170img_1024.jpg?w=1170img_1031.jpg?w=1170img_1028.jpg?w=1170img_1033.jpg?w=1170img_1042.jpg?w=1170img_1034.jpg?w=1170img_1032.jpg?w=1170img_1026.jpg?w=1170img_1027.jpg?w=1170

Silwan tunnels.. holy Roman sewage that is judaised ( above)

Too much irony for one day … I admit.

We made a tunnel tour of Silwan . Under the ruins of a Roman city ( old Jerusalem – David city) that an take the visited directly to the Wall, surrounding the Aqsa ( al Buraq – western wall).

There is something about this city that is by all means beyond anything any history tries to invoke. This is a city of a civilization that made history continue to exist . From kanaanite to Hellenistic to Roman to Islamic ….

It is so disturbing to see how your history is distorted into pieces of robbed stones and even sewage tunnels the romans built in the 2nd century And miraculously touch base the Wall adjacent to al Aqsa… needless to mention, all this runs under al Mughrabi quarter that was demolished completely in 1967img_0985.jpg?w=1170img_0971.jpg?w=1170img_0968.jpg?w=1170img_0964.jpg?w=1170img_0953.jpg?w=1170img_0944.jpg?w=1170img_0945.jpg?w=1170img_0940.jpg?w=1170img_0920.jpg?w=1170img_0916.jpg?w=1170img_0912.jpg?w=1170img_0910.jpg?w=1170img_0899.jpg?w=1170img_0898.jpg?w=1170img_0891.jpg?w=1170img_0883.jpg?w=1170img_0880.jpg?w=1170img_0876.jpg?w=1170img_0877.jpg?w=1170img_0871.jpg?w=1170img_0868.jpg?w=1170img_0836.jpg?w=1170img_0824.jpg?w=1170img_0820.jpg?w=1170img_0808.jpg?w=1170img_0800.jpg?w=1170img_0796.jpg?w=1170img_0792.jpg?w=1170img_0788.jpg?w=1170img_0784.jpg?w=1170

thefingerfuckingfemalefury: cheskamouse: thedevilspanties: spar…

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thefingerfuckingfemalefury:

cheskamouse:

thedevilspanties:

spart117mc:

viridieanfey:

romanimp:

beatnikdaddio:

admiring the stockings. 1940’s.

#[40S COMMERCIAL ANNOUNCER VOICE] WHAT’S BETTER THAN THIS? GALS BEING PALS

Fun fact: Though being gay in the 40s sucked, being gay in the military was easier, and pretty common. There were apparently, at one point in time time so many lesbians in the military that when they tried to crack down on it, the girls wrote back and said “Look I can give you the names, but you’ll lose some of your best officers, and half your nurses and secretaries.” And they pretty much shut up about it unless you were especially bad at subtlety. (Source: Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers. A good source for gay history from 1900s onwards.)

Sergeant Phelps worked for General Eisenhower. Four decades after Eisenhower had defeated the Axis powers, Phelps recalled an extraordinary event. One day the general told her, “I’m giving you an order to ferret those lesbians out.’ We’re going to get rid of them.”

“I looked at him and then I looked at his secretary. who was standing next to me, and I said, ‘Well, sir, if the general pleases, sir, I’ll be happy to do this investigation for you. But you have to know that the first name on the list will be mine.’

“And he kind of was taken aback a bit. And then this woman standing next to me said, ‘Sir, if the general pleases, you must be aware that Sergeant Phelps’s name may be second, but mine will be first.’

“Then I looked at him, and I said, ‘Sir, you’re right. They’re lesbians in the WAC battalion. And if the general is prepared to replace all the file clerks, all the section commanders, all of the drivers—every woman in the WAC detachment—and there were about nine hundred and eighty something of us—then I’ll be happy to make the list. But I think the general should be aware that among those women are the most highly decorated women in the war. There have been no cases of illegal pregnancies. There have been no cases of AWOL. There have been no cases of misconduct. And as a matter of fact, every six months since we’ve been here, sir, the general has awarded us a commendation for meritorious service.’

“And he said, ‘Forget the order.’

– The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America

I’ve reblogged this before but it didn’t have these comments and HOLY HOT DAMN DID IT NEED THEM.

So, when someone sits down to write a fiction about Women commandos, and a Dudebro steps in to say “Huh, that is so unrealistic huh.” 

Harold… oh, Harold…sit down, shut up, and stay out of our way.

History is infinitely gayer than a lot of people want to admit

A game to better understand the wisdom (and madness) of crowds

You’ve probably heard of the wisdom of crowds. The general idea, popularized by James Surowiecki’s book, is that a large group of non-experts can solve problems collectively better than a single expert. As you can imagine, there are a lot of subtleties and complexities to this idea. Nicky Case helps you understand with a game.

Draw networks, run simulations, and learn in the process. The game takes about a half an hour, so set aside some time to play it through.

Tags: crowds, game, groupthink, Nicky Case

Is the US Border Patrol Committing Crimes Against Humanity?

Illustration: Sarula Bao.

Who kindly sets a wanderer on his way

Does e’en as if he lit another’s lamp by his:

No less shines his, when he his friends hath lit.

–Ennius

On February 10, 2017, at around 4:15 pm, a white male Border Patrol agent parked his truck in the shadow of a rusted windmill outside of Arivaca, Arizona. He was about two miles, as the crow flies, north of the Mexican border. The temperature was in the mid-eighties. A slight breeze swayed the ocotillo and mesquite branches. The sky was clear. The agent turned off his truck and stepped into the dirt. Maybe he radioed in his position. Maybe he finished his sandwich, or packed his lip with tobacco. Maybe he pissed in the weeds. A cow lowed somewhere nearby. A raven alighted on a branch. A saguaro towered sedately.

The agent shouldered his Camelback backpack, strapped his M4 Carbine over his shoulder, and put on his green boonie hat. He pulled on his gloves and folded his sleeves up his forearms. After locking his truck, he walked a few dozen yards down the uneven dirt road before turning into the high grass of a narrow trail. In ten minutes, stopping occasionally to scan the hillsides, he entered into a rocky wash. As he hiked south, stepping over boulders and shags of rock, between cat claw acacia and tufts of grass, he saw the remnants of other people who had walked before him—discarded blankets, backpacks with broken straps, and empty, sun-brittled plastic bottles. After about thirty minutes he came to the water cache. Maybe he hummed under his breath. Maybe he stopped to scan the hills with his binoculars—the scrub hills green with recent rains.

At the cache site, just off the thin dirt trail, were eight one-gallon bottles of water set in a row and, slightly further up the slope, four flats of pinto beans—four packs holding eight fifteen-ounce Sun Vista pop-top cans. The supplies were left by humanitarian-aid volunteers. On the opposite slope they also left a camera, which, when triggered by the agent’s movement, started to record.

The typical traffic on the trail consists of ranch hands, Border Patrol agents, militia members, humanitarian-aid volunteers, people hefting backpacks of marijuana, and the errant birder or desert rat. Animals walk it, too: mountain lions, coyotes, fox, skunk, coatimundi, jackrabbits, and deer. But it is primarily roaming cattle and migrants on their way north who flatten the grass on this trail.

The migrants’ stories are as varied as anybody else’s, but most of them come from poor southern regions of Mexico or the northern triangle of Central America. Most are fleeing violence or extreme poverty. Some have lived for long stretches in the US, have roots, families, jobs, loves, and daily routines there, and are returning to a home as much as fleeing one. Some, the poorest, make the perilous journey clinging atop a roaring freight train, which they call the Beast. Sometimes the trains buck them off, killing and maiming dozens a year. Some take their chances — skirting Mexican immigration checkpoints — and ride busses. Almost all have paid expensive smuggling fees.

All have walked at least one day, and most of them have spent a night sleeping on the ground—scared, hot, cold, bug-bitten, thorn-scratched, sometimes raped, often terrified, and always uncomfortable. From the cache, there is at least one more day and night ahead; probably more. If they twist an ankle walking at night on the uneven ground, or grow a blister, or drink from a cowtank or stagnant puddle and get diarrhea, their chances of dying are high. And, if they keep walking, they are hunted by a paramilitary-style law enforcement agency, one of the largest in the world, with a well-established history of violence.

Among these seemingly endless perils, it is the weather that poses the most immediate danger. Even in winter the temperatures in the Sonoran Desert are extreme, and, except for giardia-contaminated cow tanks and puddles, there is almost no water. For a three-day walk—which is the shortest most migrants will make—it is impossible to carry sufficient water. Medical experts recommend, for these conditions, at least one and a half gallons per day. For a three-day walk, that’s almost forty pounds of water. Throw in food and clothes, and a migrant would have sixty pounds on their back, which, given the terrain, is unfeasible. Many carry one or two gallons. Most become desperately, dangerously thirsty after about two days of walking. Some fare worse. If they don’t find water, they are in danger of heat exhaustion, severe dehydration, and death.

The risk isn’t happenstance: US Border Patrol policy intentionally pushes migrants into crossing in regions where they are more likely to suffer and die. An analogous policy in the interior of the country would be rerouting a sidewalk to force pedestrians to hazard straight across a busy highway, and chasing them with armed helicopters as they do so.

*

The agent, after scanning the hills, looking up and back down the trail, squatted to inspect the cache. The water bottles had hearts drawn on them, as well as uplifting messages written in Spanish: Agua Pura, ¡Ánimo! ¡Que Vayan con Suerte! He shifted his rifle and awkwardly readjusted his squat. Then he took out his knife and began lining up the water bottles. One by one, he stabbed them, sticking in his knife and then pulling it back out along with a little gulp of water. He stabbed all eight bottles. The water bled out, soaking the dirt.

When you die of dehydration or heat stroke—the most common causes of death among border crossers in southern Arizona—you go insane. Lack of water in your body leads to hypovolemia, insufficient blood in your circulatory system, which dries out your brain. Your skin begins to shrivel, and your body redirects blood away from non-vital organs. Then—without your kidneys working as a filter—your own blood begins to poison you. Without enough water to sweat, your entire body becomes feverish; by then your brain is not only drying out, it is cooking. Severe exertional heat illness—because, somehow, you’re still walking north—leads to vomiting, dizziness, disorientation, and the breakdown of the heart muscle. The pain is slow, complete. Your tongue begins to whiten and swell, and you strip off your clothes, stumble through the thorns and shin daggers, until, finally, you prostrate yourself to the blaze of the sun. In the desert, the chain of causation is short—a day without water, then your corpse is torn apart by animal scavengers. The bottles of water that agent was stabbing may just as well have been the border crossers’ necks.

Excruciating death is the fate, annually, of hundreds of people who attempt to cross the US-Mexico border. Since the turn of the century, over seven thousand are known to have died. Many more have disappeared, lost into the desert, their remains scattered by scavengers and weather. US Border Patrol’s culpability for these deaths is highlighted by a recent report from No More Deaths (I was part of the team that wrote it), which brings what for some has remained an abstraction—government policy clashing with human life—into sharp relief.

The No More Deaths (NMD) report finds that, over a two-year period in just one small corridor of the Arizona desert, 3,586 water bottles left out for thirsty migrants were vandalized. After conducting a detailed geographical analysis and collecting video evidence, we concluded that Border Patrol agents were the most consistent culprit.

To capture the Border Patrol in flagrante delicto, we placed motion-activated trail cameras near our water caches catching footage of agents who appeared armed as if for battle. (The likelihood of a Border Patrol agent being killed while on duty—apart from dying in single-vehicle accidents—is exceedingly low.)  Despite considerable setbacks—lost, stolen, wind-shifted, mis-functioning, animalized, or poorly aimed cameras—at least four times we documented agents confiscating or vandalizing our caches. The footage was shocking to witness. After years of studying, investigating, writing about, and altogether embroiling myself in the reality of the border and the callousness and cruelty of US immigration policies, I was dumbfounded at the blatant inhumanity of the act. How could a human being intentionally deprive another human being—a thirsty human being—of water?

The violence haunted me. I remember coming upon one water cache (our camera had been over-triggered by windblown grass, exhausting its memory before capturing the crime) with two fellow volunteers where a massacre seemed to have taken place: water bottles kicked, slashed, drained; cans of beans stabbed, smashed against rocks, popped open and left to rot; shards of plastic and aluminum shrapnelled across the desert trail.

Surveying the scene, I wondered: Can you murder water?

*

The definition of “humanity” (the word is related to humus, or dirt) hides somewhere between two antipodes: the totality of featherless bipeds and seven-plus billion images of god. The word, with all of its dirt, bombast, and abstraction, rings of both collectivity and compassion. To act with humanity is to act with empathy: it is to do the kind or decent thing. Such usage suggests an inherent goodness in us, though the definition is more aspirational than accurate. (The word’s two other usages further undercut any sense of loftiness: underfunded academic departments and a mostly empty—with some exceptions—type of organizational charity.)

A crime against humanity is not simply an act devoid of the second sense of the word—of decency—but also encapsulates and targets the first sense as an act against the collective. It is an act that somehow—when perpetrated, suffered, witnessed, or merely heard tell of—has the capacity to affect all of us.

The term “crimes against humanity” came into popular and legal potency after World War II (though it was first mentioned by Robbespierre in 1792, when the Jacobin accused the king of being not only a traitor to France, but a “criminal toward humanity”) as the international community struggled to imagine how to define and prosecute the atrocities committed during the holocaust. The legal definition, according to the 1945 Nuremberg Charter, is “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population… or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds.” During and since the Nuremberg trials, successive generations have labored to consequentially apply the definition. At what point does a crime—a murder, multiple murders, or mass murder—pass the threshold and become more than murder?

The abstraction is, perhaps, part of the subjective nature of what defines the experience of humanity as much as crimes against it. Philosopher Christopher Macleod underscores the dearth and difficulty of philosophical inquiries into the definition of such crimes, and claims another understanding of “humanity”: humanness, or the value of being human. And though standard legal definitions of crimes against humanity do not specify which of the multiple understandings are targeted, it may well be all of them.

The purpose of human rights, political theorist David Miller writes in Strangers in Our Midst, “is to identify a threshold that must not be crossed rather than to describe a social ideal.” Merely crossing that threshold, however—a violation of human rights—isn’t enough to constitute a crime against humanity. Such a crime is more than a breach; it is, rather, a deliberate and concerted attack not just on a human being, but on what makes us human. As philosopher Daniel Heller-Roazen explains, humanity is something that marks us, and yet “to be marked by the quality of ‘humanity,’ it seems, is only ever to approach it.”  What makes us human includes striving towards our a sense of humanity, as in harboring enough hope (or fear) to walk across a desert, to approach and cross a border.

The value of being human is, perhaps, what allows us to build off of those rights we have popularly defined as fundamental. The value of humanness is the surpassing of the fundamental rights of life and free speech, for example, into love and song. Or the surpassing of the fundamental right of freedom into joy or art.

Humans don’t seek just life, or, as Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (leaning on Hannah Arendt) has termed it, bare life—a reduction of the human to mere biological mechanism. A human right so inherent that it need not be articulated—or so one would think—is the right to water. Without water—as demonstrated by the water protectors’ fierce defense in North Dakota—even bare life is a non-starter. These rights are the baseline that make it possible for a person to engage in, for example, luge, Noh, pickling, and politics (or whatever else you might be into). The concept of humanity, the value of being human, is both aspirational and inescapable. We are trapped in it as much as we are inspired by it. A crime against humanity is an act that impinges on the definition more than the subject—humans reduced to bare life are, of course, still human.

The agent stabbing water bottles in the desert is not even, at least by the common legal sense, committing murder—his knife doesn’t come close enough to his victims. Though his actions (in concert with broader Border Patrol policy) results in the deaths of border crossers, his crime is more against the idea of the migrants than against the individuals themselves. His actions thus share something with those labeled as crimes against humanity—they are crimes against a people, or the idea of a people, and are motivated by ideology or politics. The crimes of Border Patrol agents bind the perpetrators to an ideological absolute (duty and nation replacing individual and morals), thus erasing the individual on both sides of the crime.

What person would refuse another person, especially a person they don’t know, water? The agent stabbing the water bottles acts not as a person but as an agent of ideology. Racism operates under the same schema.

Acts considered crimes against humanity must also meet, according to theorist Norman Geras, the “threshold of scale.” A single murder, no matter how gruesome, cannot be a crime against humanity. Nor, probably, would a dozen murders. “The nature of a crime against humanity cannot be revealed by the enumeration of crimes of a lower order,” Macleod writes. There must be something essential to the crime itself—besides simple repetition—that elevates it beyond the victim and the perpetrator, and targets the idea, the identity, the definition. (In 2012, I was riding on a packed bus in rural Guatemala. A woman and two children, none of them wearing shoes, were sitting in the row behind me. At a security checkpoint, for a reason I didn’t understand, an officer boarded the bus and told the woman she needed to get off. Her defense, repeated loudly and insistently, was “Somos gente. Somos gente. Somos gente.” We are people, she said. The officer let them continue riding.)

With crimes against humanity, as with humanity itself, there are no third parties. We have, as Macleod puts it, “universal jurisdiction,” and are thus affected by the act as well as its punishment. We are implicated as perpetrators, victims, witnesses, judges, juries, and jailers. The prosecution of such a crime is not so much an uplifting of humanity, or the resumption of its construction, but its exposure.

A murder is an aberration of a “normal” or desired societal relationship, and it merits—by standard moral norms—the restoration of justice and the meting out of punishment. Crimes against humanity merit something else: reflection, and then working towards reparation, repair, a reconstitution of the thing (humanity) itself. These crimes are not an aberration, but a revelation of what humanity (in the first, collective sense of the word) is capable of, as well as what we are incapable of.

*

What would it take you, personally, to deny water to someone dying of thirst? Is xenophobic or nationalistic rhetoric enough? How about centuries of normalizing violence against indigenous, black, and brown people? Or the trumpeting of fear of ethnic, racial, or geopolitical change? What about the myth of national geographic unity? Would putting on a green uniform and strapping a rifle over your shoulder be enough?

A border crosser we interviewed for the No More Deaths report, Miguel, a thirty-seven-year-old man from Sinaloa who had attempted repeated crossings, offered an answer: “Yes. I saw the water bottles stabbed. They break the bottles so you can’t even use them to fill up in the tanks. I needed water, some of the other people in the group needed water, but we found them destroyed. [I felt] helplessness, rage. They [the US Border Patrol] must hate us. It’s their work to capture us, but we are humans. And they don’t treat us like humans. It’s hate, is what it is. They break the bottles out of hate.”

Perhaps part of our fear in labeling more acts—mass incarceration, the widespread use of solitary confinement, constant war, sexual abuse and harassment, gross economic exploitation, the intentional deprivation of water to thirsty migrants—as crimes against humanity is not that the demarcation would minimize the severity of other crimes, but that they would prod us to look at the contemporary state of humanity, with its spots of beauty, its pools of hate, its constant thirst for freedom, security, and water. We cannot escape humanity—no more than other humans can escape us—but we can (and we must) continue to work on its definition.

*

A Border Patrol spokesperson issued a statement after the videos of agents slashing bottles were released, claiming the agency does not condone the practice. It was, in so many words, the same statement offered after similar videos were released years before. The next week, a No More Deaths humanitarian aid volunteer was arrested for providing aid to two migrants. Eight other volunteers were charged with federal crimes for littering. What they were “littering” were bottles of clean water—leaving them on trails where migrants die because they have no water. In effect, the volunteers were criminalized for committing the opposite of crimes against humanity. In 2017, 412 migrants are known to have died while crossing the border. Many more have never been found.

The post Is the US Border Patrol Committing Crimes Against Humanity? appeared first on Guernica.

Trump threatens government shutdown in September if he don’t get his way on funding for the US/Mexico Border Wall

You have to wonder why people choose to continue to believe his lies! Trump threatens government shutdown in September if he don’t get his way on funding for the US/Mexico Border Wall:

justinspoliticalcorner:

Reuters:

WASHINGTON, Michigan (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald on Saturday threatened to shut down the federal government in September if Congress did not provide more funding to build a wall on the border with Mexico.

“That wall has started, we have 1.6 billion (dollars),” Trump said at a campaign rally in Washington, Michigan.

“We come up again on September 28th and if we don’t get border security we will have no choice, we will close down the country because we need border security.”

Trump made a similar threat in March to push for changes in immigration law that he says would prevent criminals from entering the country. The government briefly shut down in January over immigration.

A $1.3 trillion spending bill, which Trump signed last month, will keep the government funded through the end of September. A government shutdown ahead of the November mid-elections is unlikely to be supported by his fellow Republicans who are keen to keep control of the U.S. Congress.

Trump cited the hundreds of Central American migrants traveling in a “caravan” as one of the reasons for strong border security.

“Watch the caravan, watch how sad and terrible it is, including for those people and the crime that they inflict on themselves and that others inflict on them,” said Trump.

“It’s a horrible dangerous journey for them and they come up because they know once they can get here they can walk right into our country.”

Migrants, who include women and children, have said they fled their homes in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras because of death threats from gangs, the murder of family members or political persecution.

Secession Is Still Popular

My Sunday is going good…hoping for lots of sunshine and garden stuff to do…..

Back in the 1860’s the first Southern state to secede from the union was South Carolina and immediately decided to fire upon a Union fort…..even though the Civil War is over some state tactics never die……

South Carolina wants to have the option of seceding from the US—again—if it feels the government does anything that goes against the Second Amendment. The Hill reports three Republican legislators in South Carolina introduced a bill Thursday that would let the state debate secession specifically “if the federal government confiscates legally purchased firearms.” It is extremely unlikely the bill passes out of the House by the April 10 deadline, according to the AP.

Rep. Mike Pitts says the bill is meant to draw attention to gun rights. “I see a lot of stuff where people even talk about totally repealing the Second Amendment, which separates us from the entire rest of the world,” he says. In 1860, South Carolina became the first state to secede ahead of the Civil War.

A silly pile of redneck manure……some states must do anything they can to get attention even when they know they have NO intention of doing anything like secession.  State legislatures are no longer working for the people of said state instead they spend all their time passing laws that do NOTHING to improve the loves of the citizens…..this is a prime example of the stupidity of these bodies.

If one has any idea about the Constitutional process then one will realize just how moronic this piece of manure really is……ever notice the people that hold the Constitution up at every turn have very little knowledge how it works…..

chuq is out for now……thanx for your visits and comments……enjoy your time and your day.

Eartha Kitt Playing in the Tree, New York, 1952

Gordon Parks, who was the first black photographer on staff at both Vogue and LIFE magazines, is best known for the photo essays he shot for the latter, where, wielding the camera that he referred to as his “choice of weapon,” he created searing portraits of black life in the years before and during the Civil Rights movement.

Parks is a master of angles, conjuring emotion through geometry, whether it’s Eartha Kitt, or the anonymous woman in “Untitled, Chicago, Illinois” (1950). These photographs were taken by Gordon Parks for LIFE magazine in 1952.

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