Poor Stallman

But we don’t live in a sane world. We live in a bizarro world where someone can leak private communications, blatantly lie about what was said, and cause a selfless man’s life to be ruined. And in reaction to these events, people cheer. This is madness.

He is now likely homeless and his friends (such as Eric Raymond) have had trouble contacting him.

true(1)

Diversity & inclusion consultant @ottertechllc. @outreachy organizer. Django dev. @WisconSF3 Anti-Abuse Team co-chair. Non-binary and trans. They/them

Diversity & inclusion consultant

Somewhat recently a code of conduct was adopted. It says that the

The last drop was llvm associating itself with an organization that

but how can you have _zero_ females among 100+ employees

writing useful code about twenty fucking years ago

post the emails

Schoolkids are taught about sex already. By transgender people.

He's not a pedophile.

Something you've never done in your whole life. Not a single line.

Shalom

Funny, I distinctly remember him talking about wanting to fuck schoolkids.

I did, on the old /prague/. If you want to read them, go search the archives

The absolute state of

I'm surprised you fuckers can't remember the original posts, newfags.

fake NOT CRYPTOGRAPHICALLY SIGNED

Anon.

withnail420

  __QQ
 (_)_">  I am a mouse in a maze.
_)

But please ELI5 me like I'm five with some simple instructions to install a libreboot because the website is a mess and I don't understand jack shit. Also is there a way to avoid using flash for the installation? IMHO it sucks to have to use proprietary software to install free software.

PEBKAC

Hans Reiser - framed up

Stallman is a fucking gay.

All of the self-insert fiction he wrote is heterosexual.

conservative "family values"

Harvard is a degree mill for the rich, not an academic institution

quotes from a celebrity hagiography mean nothing

Stallman has never gotten within a dozen orders of magnitude of being penniless in his life.

He was born into an upper-middle class family and coasted on family money until it got him firmly entrenched

he's an inveterate parasite

Quote a Twitter thread to prove Elon Musk is a brilliant self-made entrepreneur next.

See how hyperbole works? He was penniless in comparison to the kind of money required to buy a Harvard degree for someone who cannot make it on skill,

Having run out of both arguments and fabrications our only remaining option is to retreat into ad hominem.

No results found for Global Thermonuclear War.

what you're made of

*We can't let the coronavirus lead to a 9/11-style erosion of civil liberties.*

It's not just increases in state repression and surveillance that threaten us. Pressure to surrender to nonfree software and its constant companion, surveillance, are a threat too — whether it is for work, for school, for purchasing, for leisure, for chatting, for political organizing, for whatever, it is unjust.

In resisting this, it helps to draw a clear line and refuse ever to cross it. If you say, "I don't like the idea of using Zoom/WhatsApp/Amazon/Google for this," people will argue back, "If you can do it for that, why refuse to do it for this?" By contrast, if you say, "I'd like to join you in this, but I do not use Zoom/WhatsApp/Amazon/Google — it is an injustice," people will find it hard to argue with your stance.

That doesn't mean you will always convince people to adopt your views. They may say, "We're going to use Zoom/WhatsApp/Amazon/Google; if you want to participate, that is the only way." How you respond to that will show what you're made of.

Tattoo Recognition Research Threatens Free Speech and Privacy.

Here are some ways these computerized systems could be used, and why that could be harmful.

Face recognition technology is dangerous in many of the same ways. What's more, many of us have no tattoos, or none that would generally be visible, but everyone has a face.

The FBI wants a program to recognize tattoo images, and plans to infer people's beliefs and associations from their tattoos. Even when a human being looks at the tattoo, the inference of associations is unreliable. This unreliable basis is used today in the US for punishing people.

commies

windows

near-completely eradicate computer viruses

Stalin did nothing wrong. We must force everyone to use GNU/Linux.

Linux has no video games because no ABI and multimedia ecosystem broken by design

My Childhood Sweetheart
2010-08-17

I met Melynda Reid in 1995, and it was love at first sight.

We met at a conference about computers and ethics at the Brookings Institution which had invited both of us to speak. I did not know of her before I met her there, but she was prepared in advance to dislike me. As always, I asked the conference to pay my air fare. Melynda had also asked for her air fare, but the conference only had funds for one speaker's travel, so accepting my request meant refusing hers. She blamed me for not getting her travel funded.

She changed her mind when she met me. She heard my footsteps approaching in the corridor and found them intriguing. (I have a vague memory that I ran down the corridor in 7/8 time.) Thus, when I entered the hall, she looked at me with interest. I saw her looking at me, so I assumed we had met before and struggled uselessly to recall where.

During the conference lunch I sat next to her and introduced myself. That is when we started to fall in love. After that day's session was done, I invited her to have dinner with me. We talked at length, and then I walked her to her hotel.

We did not become lovers. I didn't fancy her, and she didn't want sex outside marriage. We were fascinated with each other without sex. So I thought of her as my childhood sweetheart, the idea being you're never too old to have one.

I didn't see her presentation at this event — I think it was early in the morning. But she told me about a silent performance she had done, in a courtroom, while a businessman was testifying in favor of destroying a wilderness area that she had campaigned to save. She took off her dress, grabbing the attention of everyone in the room, revealing another dress with pictures of endangered animals sewn on. She ostentatiously pointed them out, one by one. Then she took off this dress, revealing yet another dress which had pictures of extinct animals. She pointed them out, one by one. Whatever the developer said, nobody listened. She called this her "strip moll act".

I visited Melynda at home in Florida a number of times in the following year or two. She lived in the woods west of Tallahassee, and we had to watch out for rattlesnakes while walking outside and make noise so they would know we were coming. Next to the house she had an aviary filled with 50 finches and doves. She had named each one, and knew who its parents were.

She wrote stories with powerful emotion about the suffering she had seen in the community around her. She made drawings of the endangered plants and their flowers (and others as well) in the finest of fine lines. She drew dance students at the universities in Tallahassee to show them how their postures might lead to injury. She had a theatrical sense of dress; once she put on a hat with a thin and flexible feather, wearing it backwards so that the feather pointed forward and oscillated strangely as it was thrust through the air.

When we both went to another conference in Oregon, I made sure to see her presentation. She stood up on the table and began to declaim. It was rivetting.

Not long after that, Melynda became suicidally depressed and was hospitalized. I spoke with her every day, usually for an hour, trying to reassure her that she would get better, and that it was important for her to live because of how wonderful she was and how much people loved her. This did not have much effect; the depression was too strong, except when it shifted to mania.

The hope I spoke of was real, since there were many drugs that could be tried. During the following year, they were tried, but none of them brought her back to her old self. She remained depressed and suicidal. Her husband had to travel to work, and did not know what would happen to her while he was away.

At one point, she seemed to be better, and I invited her to a MacArthur fellows' reunion. (Each fellow could bring one guest.) I knew she would be delighted by the chance to meet the other fellows, and they would surely be fascinated by her. However, after two days she broke down into despair again. They got her a flight home right away. I went there the next day and visited for a few days. I think that was the last time I ever saw Melynda.

A few months later, a beautiful and clever but rather too forceful woman asked me to be her lover. I had some doubts but wouldn't reject the idea out of hand. So she spent the night with me. The next morning, Melynda phoned me and I began to reassure her. My would-be lover grabbed the phone from me and told Melynda to stop bitching and get a grip. I was aghast at the harshness of this, and that she had not troubled to learn the nature of the situation before intervening. She asked me, somewhat jealously, what I was doing with Melynda, and I told her that I was keeping Melynda alive. After a little more discussion, she left, and that was the end of that. Then I called Melynda to reassure her again as usual.

But this experience made me realize that I had exhausted my reserves in a year of listening to Melynda's depression every day. The drug options had been tried, and had failed, so I could not longer say that I expected her to be well again and be able to do work again. I could not fake it. The year had drained me, and I could not bear up to her depression any more. I had to stop the daily calls.

After that, we only spoke at rare intervals. Melynda got well enough to live at home again, but she was never able to resume productive activities. They stopped the birds from breeding, and after a few years very few were left. (It was just as well — the birds had become rather inbred.) Then they moved to Tallahassee where it was easier to take care of her, although it was not the place she loved.

Melynda died on July 8, 2010, of natural causes.

If your business model is "thou shalt not cp; I shall cp on my end and charge the sheep for every copy"

Linux is much harder to use

as a user exploitation platform, such as if you want to sell copies of the same binaries instead of the users cp'ing them.

Forward Reasoning and Dependency-Directed Backtracking in a System for Computer-Aided Circuit analysis
by Richard M. Stallman and Gerald J. Sussman

We present a rule-based system for computer-aided circuit analysis. The set of rules, called EL, is written in a rule language called ARS. Rules are implemented by ARS as pattern-directed invocation demons monitoring an associative data base. Deductions are performed in an antecedent manner, giving EL's analysis a catch-as-catch-can flavour suggestive of the behavior of expert circuit analyzers. We call this style of circuit analysis propagation of constraints. The system threads deduced facts with justifications which mention the antecedent facts and the rule used. These justifications may be examined by the user to gain insight into the operation of the set of rules as they apply to a problem. The same justifications are used by the system to determine the currently active data-base context for reasoning in hypothetical situations. They are also used by the system in the analysis of failures to reduce the search space. This leads to effective control of combinatorial search which we call dependency-directed backtracking.

Manage my dubs

Dump interesting things about Management Engine even if hidden

14 days without eating would not kill me

People who enter Taiwan are subject to a strict quarantine, tracked by their Stalin's Dream devices (portable phones). If the device ever does not respond (such as, out of power), enforcers go after you immediately.

The strict quarantine may be necessary, but the specific method of enforcement is intolerable. I wonder what they would say to a person who has no Stalin's Dream device and refuses to have one.

The tracking of my movements would not matter if I were forbidden to leave the apartment. It would only show I did not leave. But it is also a listening device, and I would protect myself from that one way or another.

What worries me most is how I would get food. I buy things only anonymously. I do not give my name or address and I pay only cash. Under those quarantine rules, I might not be able to buy any food.

14 days without eating would not kill me, but it would be extremely unpleasant — enough to convince me to do as Paul Huang did, and stay away.

For me personally, that is all theoretical. Travel for speaking is not feasible if entering a country requires a 14-day quarantine, regardless of the details of how it is enforced. But the issues of freedom posed by the enforcement affect everyone, not just me.

but being locked in your own home doesn't mean you can't drink since there's tap water.

US citizens: call on American officials at various levels to end water shutoffs and restore water service to everyone.

If you sign, please spread the word!

Still shilling for Russia and China?

spending a huge portion of payroll expenses on their employees' medical insurance

America too does it today, but sneakily and only against very high profile people like Jeffrey Epstein,

The more power government has the more authoritarian it is.

Check-mate, commie!

Soviet government wasn't filled with authoritarian followers.

revolutionaries (who painted themselves as fighting against authoritarianism), but in a few years they turned more and more authoritarian

mistreated and beaten by an authoritarian drunkard dad in his youth

preferring to fight to freedom instead
that free spirited leader

This won't pass as an unqualified assertion. Early on he used kidnappings and as you say robberies.

>>214
This won't pass as an unqualified assertion. Early on he used kidnappings and as you say robberies.

Yes. But Stalin kidnapped bad guys (Tsarist officers), who oppressed common folk.

I.e. think about say a Black gangster. He had tough child hood, fought with racist white police for place under the Sun. Now by some by some miracle the gangster became a president. And instead of legalizing weed and fighting racism, the new elected president begins his term by opening new prisons, and not for racists, but for his own Black people, and even orders the execution of his gang mates, who funded his presidential campaign. In addition he persecutes other national minorities, ordering the deportation of all Muslims to the Arizona desert in hope that they will die there. The president also opens a thinly veiled concentration camp for the Jews in the frozen Alaska mountains ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Autonomous_Oblast ). He bans workers unions, signs a decree on food expropriation to export it into Russia, and then rigs all the follow-up elections to maintain him lifetime presidency.
I.e. think about say a Black gangster. He had tough child hood, fought with racist white cops for a place under the Sun. Now by some miracle the former gangster becomes a president. And instead of legalizing weed and fighting racism, the newly elected president begins his term by opening new prisons, and not for racists, but for his own Black people, and even orders the execution of his gang mates, who funded his presidential campaign. In addition he persecutes other national minorities, ordering the deportation of all Muslims to the Arizona desert in hope that they will die there. The president also opens a thinly veiled concentration camp for the Jews in the frozen Alaska mountains ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Autonomous_Oblast ). He bans workers unions, signs a decree on food expropriation to export it into Russia, and then rigs all the follow-up elections to maintain him lifetime presidency.

Such Black president would be deserving the title of Stalin.

But Stalin kidnapped bad guys (Tsarist officers), who oppressed common folk.

by some miracle the former gangster becomes a president
orders the execution of his gang mates, who funded his presidential campaign

rigs all the follow-up elections to maintain him lifetime presidency

Such Black president would be deserving the title of Stalin.

Why do cops come to protests early?
To beat the crowds.

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-may-aug.html#15_August_2020_(The_wrecker_admitted_to_sabotaging_vote_by_mail) -- The wrecker admitted that he is undermining the USPS to sabotage voting by mail. -- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/13/donald-trump-usps-post-office-election-funding -- Trump admits he is undermining USPS to make it harder to vote by mail -- The president says he opposes providing additional money to the postal service to help it deliver mail-in ballots -- Thu 13 Aug 2020

Donald Trump admitted on Thursday he opposed additional funding for the United States Postal Service (USPS) in order to make it more difficult to deliver mail-in ballots. Trump’s comments lend evidence for critics who say the president is deliberately trying to hamstring the USPS in advance of the November elections to help his re-election bid. Trump said on Thursday that congressional negotiations over stimulus aid were held up in part because of Democratic proposals to provide $3.6bn to states to run elections and $25bn in aid to the postal service. The president, who has falsely claimed that widespread mail-in voting will lead to fraud, suggested that without the funding it would be harder to vote by mail.

“They need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo. “If they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting because they’re not equipped to have it.” Congress has allocated just $400m to help states run elections, a small fraction of the $4bn the Brennan Center for Justice estimates is needed this year. Many election officials are scrambling to figure out how they will run an election where there is expected to be an unprecedented level of mail-in and in-person voting. The lack of funding may already be having an effect; in Kentucky, the state’s top election official said this week he did not support expanding mail-in voting for the fall because the state did not have the capacity to do so.

The president’s comments also come amid accusations that Louis DeJoy, the new postmaster general and a major Republican donor, is making cuts at the agency to intentionally slow down the mail. There are reports of severe mail delays in places across the country and the Washington Post and other news organizations published internal USPS documents last month saying there was a blanket ban on overtime and that workers were being told to leave mail behind if it will delay them on their routes. A USPS spokesman denied there was a blanket ban on overtime, but did not address questions about whether employees were being told to leave the mail behind.

A slower mail service could have a big impact this fall because an unprecedented number of Americans are expected to vote by mail and many states require a ballot to arrive at an election office by election day, regardless of when it was put in the mail, in order to be counted. At least 65,000 ballots were rejected during the 2020 primaries because they arrived too late.

“If we don’t make a deal that means they don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting. They just can’t have it. Sort of a crazy thing,” Trump said on Thursday.

Andrew Bates, a spokesman for Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, said in a statement Trump was attacking the US economy and democracy.

“The president of the United States is sabotaging a basic service that hundreds of millions of people rely upon, cutting a critical lifeline for rural economies and for delivery of medicines, because he wants to deprive Americans of their fundamental right to vote safely during the most catastrophic public health crisis in over 100 years,” he said.

USPS officials have not said they need additional funding to deliver mail-in ballots this fall. “The Postal Service has ample capacity to deliver all election mail securely and on-time in accordance with our delivery standards, and we will do so,” DeJoy said at a meeting of the USPS board of governors on Friday.

In a separate interview on Thursday, Larry Kudlow, the president’s top economic adviser, dismissed efforts to make it easier to vote in negotiations over stimulus money.

“So much of the Democratic asks are really liberal left wishlists,” he said. “Voting rights, aid to aliens and so forth. That’s not our game.”

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-may-aug.html#18_August_2020_(The_bullshitter_told_cronies_he_would_defund_Social_Security) -- The bullshitter told cronies he would defund Social Security. The White House says we should ignore that. We cannot determine what the bullshitter will really do from anything he said, but we can deduce one thing from that statement: defunding Social Security is not unthinkable for him. Thus, if his aides are saying he certainly won't, they are mistaken. He might like to do it, and he might do it.

Trump Just Admitted on Live Television He Will 'Terminate' Social Security and Medicare If Reelected in November -- https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/08/08/trump-just-admitted-live-television-he-will-terminate-social-security-and-medicare -- One progressive critic called the president's promise "a full-on declaration of war against current and future Social Security beneficiaries." -- Saturday, August 08, 2020

President Donald Trump on Saturday afternoon openly vowed to permanently "terminate" the funding mechanism for both Social Security and Medicare if reelected in November—an admission that was seized upon by defenders of the popular safety net programs who have been warning for months that the administration's threat to suspend the payroll tax in the name of economic relief during the Covid-19 pandemic was really a backdoor sabotage effort.

"We just heard it straight from Trump's own mouth: If reelected, he will destroy Social Security." —Social Security Works

Announcing and then signing a series of legally dubious executive orders, including an effort to slash the emergency federal unemployment boost by $200 from the $600 previously implemented by Democrats, Trump touted his order for a payroll tax "holiday"—which experts noted would later have to be paid back—but said if he won in November that such a cut would become permanent.

The Trump campaign was apparently so satisfied with the public acknowledgement of the president's promise to make the payroll tax permanent—a move that would inherently bankrupt the Social Security system—that it clipped the portion of the press conference and shared on social media immediately after it concluded. The president's critics did as well, though they carried a different message:

Friendly reminder, if victorious on November 3rd, @realDonaldTrump will GUT Social Security and Medicare.#TrumpPressConference #trumppresser pic.twitter.com/9iNJ7sNYvo — American Bridge 21st Century (@American_Bridge) August 8, 2020

Defenders of the program, including the advocacy group Social Security Works, were quick to point out the implication of what the president said and condemned Trump for threatening the program that has kept countless millions of people out of poverty—during retirement years or due to disability—since it was created over 75 years ago.

"We just heard it straight from Trump's own mouth," the group responded: "If reelected, he will destroy Social Security."

Commonly known as the payroll tax, those are taxes paid both by employers and employees—as dictated by the The Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA)—that go to pay for both Social Security and Medicare.

"Trump's executive order, which seeks to defer Social Security contributions, is bad enough," said Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works. "But his promise to 'terminate' FICA contributions if he is reelected is a full-on declaration of war against current and future Social Security beneficiaries."

"Social Security is the foundation of everyone's retirement security," Altman added. "At a time when pensions are vanishing and 401ks have proven inadequate, Trump's plan to eliminate Social Security's revenue stream would destroy the one source of retirement income that people can count on. Moreover, Social Security is often the only disability insurance and life insurance that working families have. If reelected, Trump plans to destroy those benefits as well."

As the Trump administration has foreshadowed this kind of move for months, economists on Friday warned again that any effort to undermine the payroll tax would do practically nothing to help struggling workers and families, but everything to sabotage two of the most popular and successful programs in the country.

"It's like borrowing money from the Social Security and Medicare trust funds to give to employers just to hold," Seth Hanlon, a tax expert and senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, explained to Business Insider. "They're just gonna hold the withheld taxes because they'd have to pay it eventually."

As Common Dreams reported earlier this week, retirees and their advocates have vowed to fight any "attempt to gut" the program.

On Saturday, Altman called on every lawmaker in Congress to denounce what she called Trump's "unconstitutional raid on Social Security." In the upcoming election, she said, "voters should treat any Senator or Representative who is silent as complicit in destroying Social Security. Furthermore, every American who cares about Social Security's future must do everything they can to ensure that Trump does not get a second term."

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-may-aug.html#13_August_2020_(Facebook_suspended_one_of_the_cheater's_PACs) -- Facebook has suspended one of the cheater's PACs for false advertising. -- https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-election/facebook-bars-pro-trump-pac-from-advertising-citing-repeated-false-posts-idUSKCN25236I -- Facebook bars pro-Trump PAC from advertising, citing repeated false posts -- August 6, 2020

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook Inc is temporarily banning a Republican political action committee, the Committee to Defend the President, from advertising after it repeatedly shared content that was deemed false by external fact-checkers, the social media company said on Thursday. “As a result of the Committee to Defend the President’s repeated sharing of content determined by third-party fact-checkers to be false, they will not be permitted to advertise for a period of time on our platform,” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said in a statement. The company declined to specify the length of the advertising ban or which posts prompted it.

Politicians’ ads and posts are not subject to Facebook fact-checking, a policy that has drawn heat from lawmakers, but content from political groups like PACs can be fact-checked. The committee’s Facebook page, which has almost 1 million “likes,” has had four “false” or “partly false” fact-checking labels attached to content since the start of July. Founded as the Stop Hillary PAC in 2013, the group has spent more than $15 million to advance the agenda of U.S. President Donald Trump, according to its website. It claims to reach millions of Americans via digital and telemarketing channels. Committee chairman Ted Harvey said in a statement the group would not be “silenced by ‘woke’ Silicon Valley elites” and would reallocate its Facebook budget to other platforms.

Reuters, a Facebook fact-checking partner, determined last month that one of the group’s advertisements took a quote from Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden out of context, misleadingly claiming he made racist comments in 1985.

The Biden campaign last year wrote to Facebook asking the company to reject an ad by the PAC that it said was false, according to a CNN report.

The Trump and Biden campaigns did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-may-aug.html#7_August_2020_(SEC_launches_probe_into_kodak) -- SEC Launches Probe Into Kodak After Warren Raised Questions Over Lucrative Covid-19 Deal With Trump. -- https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/08/04/sec-launches-probe-kodak-after-warren-raised-questions-over-lucrative-covid-19-deal -- SEC Launches Probe Into Kodak After Warren Raised Questions Over Lucrative Covid-19 Deal With Trump -- Tuesday, August 04, 2020 -- "If investors or Kodak employees were trading based on the unauthorized disclosure or discussion of nonpublic information, then it would appear to be a clear violation of securities law. The SEC should hold them accountable."

The Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday reportedly launched an investigation into Kodak after Sen. Elizabeth Warren demanded a probe of possible insider trading at the tech company, which gifted its CEO nearly two million stock options just a day before President Donald Trump last week handed the company a $765 million federal loan to produce generic pharmaceuticals to combat Covid-19.

"Good," Warren tweeted in response to reports of the SEC's investigation. "If investors or Kodak employees were trading based on the unauthorized disclosure or discussion of nonpublic information, then it would appear to be a clear violation of securities law. The SEC should hold them accountable."

Trump's announcement of the $765 million deal on July 28 sent Kodak shares surging by more than 1000%, increasing the value of CEO Jim Continenza's new stock options to around $50 million.

In a letter (pdf) to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Tuesday, Warren said the decision to grant Continenza stock options was just one of "several instances of unusual trading activity prior to the announcement, raising questions about whether one or more individuals may have engaged in insider trading or in the unauthorized disclosure of material, nonpublic information regarding the forthcoming $765 million loan awarded under the Defense Production Act."

Kodak's stock began to surge a day before Trump's announcement of the massive federal loan, drawing suspicion from analysts who saw the sudden spike in activity as abnormal.

The Wall Street Journal reported that some of the stock activity can be explained by a Kodak media advisory announcing an unspecified and historic new initiative with the federal government. Because the advisory did not indicate that the information was not yet supposed to be released to the public, local media outlets ran stories on the announcement, causing Kodak's stock to jump.

Warren said that while the Journal report "may resolve questions about the individuals who purchased the stock after seeing those public disclosures, it also opens up new questions about how Kodak handled what appears to be 'non-intentional disclosure of material nonpublic information.'"

The Massachusetts Democrat noted that SEC regulations require companies to "publicly disclose the information promptly after it knows (or is reckless in not knowing) that the information selectively disclosed was both material and nonpublic." Instead of adhering to SEC rules, Warren wrote, Kodak simply asked reporters to remove their stories on the inadvertent announcement.

Warren went on to point out that Continenza and other members of Kodak's board of directors also purchased stock while Kodak and the Trump administration were "negotiating the deal in secret." As the New York Times reported, Kodak granted 240,000 stock options to board members on May 20.

"The purchase of stock... while the company was involved in secret negotiations with the government over a lucrative contract raises questions about whether these executives potentially made investment decisions based on material, non-public information derived from their positions," Warren wrote.

"If investors or Kodak employees were trading based on the unauthorized disclosure or discussion of nonpublic information," Warren added, "then it would appear to be a clear violation of securities law."

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-may-aug.html#2_July_2020_(Commando_disbanded_due_to_far-right_culture) -- German [army] commando company is disbanded due to far-right culture. -- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/01/german-commando-company-disbanded-after-extremist-rightwing-culture-discovered -- German commando company is disbanded due to far-right culture -- Wed 1 Jul 2020 -- KSK soldiers to lose their jobs or be moved after reports of Hitler salutes and extreme attitudes

Germany’s defence minister has disbanded a company of special forces, saying a culture of rightwing extremism had been allowed to develop behind a “wall of secrecy”. Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer told reporters on Wednesday that “toxic leadership” in the company was found to have fostered an extreme rightwing attitude among some members of the Kommando Spezialkraefte, or KSK, unit. Around 70 soldiers will be distributed among the KSK’s other three combat companies, while “those who made clear they are part of the problem and not part of the solution must leave the KSK”, she said.

The entire organisation’s training and deployments are being scaled back as the investigation into extremism continues, and reforms are implemented. It comes at a time of broader concerns that Germany has not done enough to tackle rightwing extremism within its Bundeswehr military in general. Kramp-Karrenbauer emphasised, however, that she felt reform was the right course rather than the dissolution of the entire KSK. “The vast majority of the men and women in the KSK and in the Bundeswehr as a whole are loyal to our constitution, with no ifs or buts,” she said.

The KSK was formed as an army unit in 1996 with a focus on anti-terrorism operations and hostage rescues from hostile areas. It has served in Afghanistan and the Balkans and its operations are kept secret. Military investigators have been looking into the unit since a group of public German broadcasters reported in 2017 that at a going-away party, members displayed the Hitler salute, listened to rightwing extremist music and participated in a game that involved tossing a pig’s head. In January, the military reported 20 soldiers were under suspicion of being rightwing extremists.

Kramp-Karrenbauer established an independent commission in May to investigate the KSK and propose reforms after a cache of weapons, explosives and munitions were found at one of the suspected extremist’s homes in Saxony, which she said revealed a “new dimension” to the problem.

She said the investigation has revealed “grave deficiencies” in the unit’s record keeping and that there were many missing items, including ammunition and explosives. It was not clear whether the munitions were used, left behind after deployments or pilfered, she said.

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#2_September_2020_(Making_Secret_Service_pay) -- The corrupter makes the Secret Service pay his companies in order to protect him. -- https://boingboing.net/2020/08/27/how-trumps-company-charged.html -- How Trump's company charged the U.S. government more than $900,000 -- Thu Aug 27, 2020 -- Room rentals, resort fees, and furniture removal

Trump managed to grift the United States government for nearly a million bucks. This is quite an amazing report by The Washington Post's David Fahrenthold, Josh Dawsey, and Joshua Partlow, with all the receipts. Trump has now visited his own properties 270 times as president, they report at the Washington Post — "with another visit planned for Thursday, when he is scheduled to meet GOP donors at his Washington hotel."

Through these trips, Trump has brought the Trump Organization a stream of private revenue from federal agencies and GOP campaign groups. Federal spending records show that taxpayers have paid Trump's businesses more than $900,000 since he took office. At least $570,000 came as a result of the president's travel, according to a Post analysis. Now, new federal spending documents obtained by The Post via a public-records lawsuit give more detail about how the Trump Organization charged the Secret Service — a kind of captive customer, required to follow Trump everywhere. In addition to the rentals at Mar-a-Lago, the documents show that the Trump Organization charged daily "resort fees" to Secret Service agents guarding Vice President Pence in Las Vegas and in another instance asked agents to pay a $1,300 "furniture removal charge" during a presidential visit to a Trump resort in Scotland. In addition, campaign finance records have provided new details about the payments the Trump Organization received from GOP groups, as a result of the 37 instances in which Trump headlined a political event at one of his properties. Those visits have brought the company at least $3.8 million in fees, according to a Post analysis of campaign spending records. -- http://archive.is/Basbu

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#2_September_2020_(Private_documents_from_the_saboteur_in_chief's_Covid-19_task_force) -- Private documents from the saboteur in chief's Covid-19 task force show that when he said it would disappear, he knew the opposite was true. -- https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/08/31/white-house-cover-covid-19-task-force-reports-withheld-public-reveal-trump-knew -- Covid-19 Task Force Reports Withheld From Public Reveal Trump Knew of Threats as He Spread Lies -- Monday, August 31, 2020 -- "Rather than being straight with the American people and creating a national plan to fix the problem, the president and his enablers kept these alarming reports private while publicly downplaying the threat to millions of Americans."

As President Donald Trump and administration officials have been publicly downplaying the Covid-19 crisis and even predicting its imminent disappearance over the past several months, the White House task force formed to coordinate the federal pandemic response has simultaneously been issuing dire assessments of the nation's fight against the pandemic behind the scenes. Those assessments were kept secret from the public until Monday, when the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis released a trove of task force reports dated between June 23 and August 9 that highlight the extent to which Trump's public proclamations about the Covid-19 crisis have diverged from the findings of experts operating in the White House. "Another indication of how Donald Trump could care less how many people die due to his malfeasance on protecting lives from the Covid-19 pandemic." —Chuck Idelson, National Nurses United

"The task force reports released today show the White House has known since June that coronavirus cases were surging across the country and many states were becoming dangerous 'red zones' where the virus was spreading fast," said Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), chairman of the subcommittee. "Rather than being straight with the American people and creating a national plan to fix the problem," Clyburn continued, "the president and his enablers kept these alarming reports private while publicly downplaying the threat to millions of Americans." Each of the eight task force reports released by the subcommittee on Monday contain analyses and conclusions that run counter to the recent public statements of Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, the chair of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. The White House sent its reports privately to states but never made them available to the public until the subcommittee requested (pdf) that Pence and task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx turn them over late last month.

In a report (pdf) dated July 19—the same day Trump confidently predicted that the coronavirus is "going to disappear" even as cases surged across the country—the White House task force estimated that 20 states were in the "red zone," meaning more than 10% of new Covid-19 tests were positive. On June 29, just days after Pence declared that "all 50 states are opening up safely and responsibly," the task force issued a private assessement (pdf) warning that "Mississippi reported an 117% increase in new cases in the week ending June 26, resulting from increased community transmission in multiple counties attributed to reduced social distancing." Chuck Idelson, communications senior strategist for National Nurses United, tweeted that the newly released task force reports are evidence of a "White House cover-up" and yet "another indication of how Donald Trump could care less how many people die due to his malfeasance on protecting lives from the Covid-19 pandemic." In a press release, the House coronavirus subcommittee listed several other examples of the internal reports contradicting Trump's public pronouncements on the Covid-19 pandemic, which has infected more than six million people in the U.S. and killed at least 183,000:

🐘 June 23 Report. On June 16, Vice President Pence claimed in an op-ed that "panic" over a resurgence of coronavirus infections was "overblown." But on June 23, the White House task force concluded that seven states were in the "red zone," indicating the highest risk of coronavirus spread. The task force found new cases were up 70 percent in Arizona, 72 percent in Texas, 87 percent in Florida, 93 percent in Oklahoma, and 134 percent in Idaho.

🐘 July 14 Report. On July 14, President Trump stated, "No other country tests like us. In fact, I could say it's working too much. It's working too well. We're doing testing and we’re finding thousands and thousands of cases." The same day, the task force concluded 19 states were in the "red zone" and recommended they increase testing. The report noted, “Disease trends are moving in the wrong direction in Georgia with record numbers of new cases occurring in urban, suburban, and rural areas. Testing positivity continues to increase. The number of tests has increased, but more testing is needed."

🐘 July 26 Report. On July 21, President Trump tweeted: "You will never hear this on the Fake News concerning the China Virus, but by comparison to most other countries, who are suffering greatly, we are doing very well—and we have done things that few other countries could have done!" On July 26, the task force reported 22 states were in the "red zone," and stated: "Georgia is experiencing widespread community spread without evidence of improvement. Improvement will require much more aggressive mitigation efforts to change the trajectory of the pandemic in Georgia."

🐘 August 2 Report. In a July 28 interview, President Trump stated: "They are dying, that's true. And you have—it is what it is. But that doesn't mean we aren't doing everything we can. It's under control as much as you can control it." On August 2, the task force concluded 23 states were in the "red zone." The report noted, "Widespread transmission continues to occur from rural to urban areas" in Louisiana; "Aggressive continuation of mitigation efforts will be required" in South Carolina due to "widespread community spread throughout the state in urban, periurban, and rural areas"; and, "The virus is spreading deeper into the rural areas" of Oklahoma.

🐘 August 9 Report. On August 3, President Trump tweeted: "Cases up because of BIG Testing! Much of our Country is doing very well. Open the Schools!" On August 9, the task force reported that 48 states and the District of Columbia were in either red or yellow zones. In Indiana, the Task Force warned: "Cases continue at a high plateau in Indianapolis and mitigation efforts, testing, and contact tracing need to be aggressively implemented. Covid-19 is widespread throughout the state and mitigation efforts should be statewide."

The subcommittee went on to warn that despite the continued spread of Covid-19 around the U.S., the Trump administration has refused to support private task force recommendations aimed at stemming the pandemic.

"The task force reports released today recommend that state and local governments implement heightened public health measures to combat the spread of the virus—including requiring face masks in public, closing bars and gyms, and strictly limiting gatherings on a statewide basis in certain states," the subcommittee said. "Yet the Trump administration has failed to publicly support most of the task force's recommendations. For example, President Trump has refused to call for a nationwide mask mandate."

In a statement, Clyburn said that "as a result of the president's failures, more than 58,000 additional Americans have died since the task force first started issuing private warnings."

"It is long past time that the administration finally implement a national plan to contain this crisis, which is still killing hundreds of Americans each day," Clyburn added.

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#2_September_2020_(Wrecker's_triumph) -- The wrecker's triumph: thugs and right-wing extremist militias are now allied and supported by the right-wing media. Cities whose thug departments are permeated with right-wing extremists may need to abolish those departments and start new ones, so as to have no right-wing extremists among their police. -- https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/01/us-mainstream-right-vigilante-terror -- How did the US's mainstream right end up openly supporting vigilante terror? -- Tue 1 Sep 2020 -- The apocalyptic conspiracy theories of rightwing groups afraid of losing their power give evil a name, and offer an answer

Kyle Rittenhouse, a “Blue Lives Matter” fanatic, Donald Trump supporter and militia member, has been charged with murder. It is alleged that having travelled from Illinois to Wisconsin to point his assault rifle at unarmed protesters, he shot two people dead. He was later heard claiming: “I just killed somebody.” While the Trump campaign quietly disavowed this enthusiastic supporter, insisting he had “nothing to do with our campaign” (as though anyone had suggested otherwise), the president himself defended Rittenhouse, saying he appeared to have been acting in self defence. Message boards such as Reddit and 4chan are humming with commentary supporting Rittenhouse. Predictably, every accused lone-wolf murderer generates an online fan club. Likewise, the Christian right has already raised $250,000 for Rittenhouse’s defence. However, the decision of rightwing celebrity journalists to gleefully defend Rittenhouse crosses a new threshold. Ann Coulter, the infantile shock-jock of American reaction, said of Rittenhouse: “I want him as my president.” While Coulter is a media opportunist mining for controversy, Tucker Carlson of Fox News, a more doctrinaire far-rightist, offered an emotional defence. “How shocked are we,” Carlson said, “that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?”

This, from a talking head who has spent the Trump years mainstreaming various white nationalists, inciting racism and portraying the apocalyptic meltdown of the US caused by immigrants and liberal elites, betrays a conception of order identical to that of Rittenhouse and other white vigilantes who have pointed their guns at Black Lives Matter protesters, such as the Three Percenters and militiamen who have paraded the streets of Philadelphia, Ohio, Chicago and Albuquerque. For the ideologues, law and order in Kenosha is social obedience on the part of those targeted for police violence, and it would be legitimately upheld by a white paramilitary who guns people down in cold blood for opposing the racist murder of black people. This is an ideology of law and order that could come from the antebellum South, or the frontier west. Just as disturbing, for those likely to be on the receiving end of police violence, has been the convergence of police and paramilitaries. It is not just that militiamen are hardline supporters of the police who see themselves as augmenting state repression. Police themselves have repeatedly condoned and indulged the vigilantes, who have been permitted to roam around with guns out, attacking Black Lives Matter crowds unimpeded by authorities. In Kenosha, police were recorded handing out water to a crowd of white militiamen, telling them: “We appreciate you being here.” The chief of Kenosha police has defended the role of white vigilantes in the protests. Police allegedly declined to arrest Rittenhouse after he’d just shot two people, was pointed out as the shooter by several witnesses, and was walking towards a police vehicle with his hands up.

The brazen overtness of the right’s dalliance with vigilante terror in answer to Black Lives Matter has been some time in the making. Trump has done as much as he can to mainstream the violent far right in the same way that he has normalised conspiracist paranoia with his birtherism, climate denialism and references to the “deep state”. From his declaration that armed Charlottesville protesters were “very fine people” to his defence of armed protesters in Michigan, and his exhortations to rightwing paramilitaries to “LIBERATE MINNESOTA”, “LIBERATE MICHIGAN” and then “LIBERATE VIRGINIA” from Covid-19 lockdown, Trump lets the purveyors of armed fury know just whose side he’s on.

He has also conspicuously refused to disavow the QAnon conspiracy theory. According to this, he is saving the world from a “deep state” conspiracy of liberal, Satan-worshipping paedophiles, and hastening the “storm” – a day of violent reckoning. Its supporters are deemed a domestic terror threat. The American far right thrives on the prospect of annihilation, and the “end of days” mood licenses its paranoid violence.

There is a broader context for America’s turn toward what writer Huw Lemmey accurately characterises as a sub-Verhoeven dystopia. Rapture-seeking movements such as QAnon, or those prepping for the “boogaloo”, are working the margins of a culturally mainstream phenomenon. Although the US has always been immersed in the fantasy of “regeneration through violence”, rarely has so much of the country been so thoroughly in the grip of adrenaline-pumping, apocalyptic excitement and conspiracist paranoia.

In both conspiracy theories and apocalyptic fantasies, life is reduced to a cosmic showdown between good and evil. The traumas and disappointments of life are folded into a millenarian revenge fantasy-cum-death wish, as in the enormously popular series of Left Behind novels about rapture and the struggle with the papal antichrist. Such apocalyptic thinking reverberates through a network of institutions, including white evangelical churches, Fox News and the Republican party itself.

Trump’s rhetoric has always invoked gruesome apocalyptic scenarios if his opponents win. This year’s Republican convention is fully channelling this mania, with speakers shouting about liberals who want to “enslave” Americans, steal their freedom and turn the US “into a socialist utopia”, or comparing the Democrats to “communist China”. Notably, the convention paraded a white couple arrested and charged for waving guns at Black Lives Matter protesters, who claimed that the Democrats would abolish the suburbs and let the criminals move in next door. Truly, the end times.

The specific American form of apocalyptic thinking is not just Christian but, historically, anti-communist. In an era of anti-communism without communism, Trump charges that Black Lives Matter protests are led by Marxists, “leftwing extremists” and others out to destroy “the United States system of government”. Thus, the crises that afflict the US are figured as a diabolical plot, much as past generations of anti-communist blamed worker strikes and civil rights struggles on what John Rankin of the House un-American activities committee called “this great octopus, communism, which is out to destroy everything”.

Today’s conspiracist bricolage thrives on the collapse of consensus reality, and on the disintegrating authority of older gatekeepers of truth. More importantly, it milks a fascination with the destruction of one’s enemies and, tacitly, oneself. In the past, apocalyptic fantasy has been seen as a paranoid reaction to economic deprivation and political persecution. That was true of peasant movements such as the Lazzarettists, who launched a violent revolt against the government and the ruling class in 19th-century Italy, but it hardly explains the disproportionately affluent Trump base, and it doesn’t explain rich Washington journalists such as Tucker Carlson rationalising murder in cold blood.

Apocalyptic conspiracy thinking is, above all, a theodicy: it explains evil, and says what will be done about evil. The end times thinking that is sweeping the US, and justifying every new outrage, is the theodicy of groups frightened of losing their power and arming themselves to defend it.

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#6_September_2020_(Republican_congresscritter_who_fanatically_defends_the_right_to_carry_guns) -- A Republican congresscritter who fanatically defends the right to carry guns says he would shoot any blacks that carry guns at a protest. Does this mean he advocates the right to carry guns only for whites? Does he now believe that guns should be prohibited at demonstrations? I'm in favor of that, as long as it applies to everyone. -- https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/03/id-drop-any-10-you-gop-rep-clay-higgins-threatens-shoot-armed-black-protesters -- 'I'd Drop Any 10 of You': GOP Rep. Clay Higgins Threatens to Shoot Armed Black Protesters -- Thursday, September 03, 2020 -- The Louisiana lawmaker is a staunch gun rights advocate in an open carry state.

U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins came under fire Wednesday after threatening to shoot armed Black protesters in a now-deleted Facebook post. "Fair warning," the Louisiana Republican, a former police captain, wrote in a Tuesday post that included a photo of armed Black men at a Black Lives Matter rally in Louisville, Kentucky. "I wouldn't even spill my beer. I'd drop any 10 of you where you stand." "Nothing personal," Higgins continued. "We just eliminate the threat. We don't care what color you are. We don't care if you're left or right. If you show up like this... you won't walk away. That's not a challenge, fellas, it's a promise. We don't want to see your worthless ass and we don't want to make your mothers cry." Facebook told the Acadian Advocate that it removed Higgins' post for violating its policies against promoting or inciting violence. "I did not remove my post," Higgins wrote on Facebook on Wednesday. "America is being manipulated into a new era of government control. Your liberty is threatened from within... I'll advise when it's time, gear up, mount up, and roll out."

Higgins' comments drew a stinging rebuke from one of his congressional colleagues, as Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-La.) said Wednesday that the Republican's "dumb and reckless Facebook post requires serious condemnation." Richmond accused Higgins of staging a "clear adolescent ploy designed to stoke fear, incite violence, garner social media clicks, and raise money for his campaign." "He should be calling for a thorough and transparent investigation into the shooting of his constituent Taylor Pellerin," said Richmond, referring to the 31-year-old Black man fatally shot by Lafayette police on August 21. "But considering his own record of police misconduct... I won't hold my breath." "[Higgins'] comments were disappointing but not surprising," Richmond continued. "My colleague still has not learned that words have consequences, especially when they come from supposed leaders." "This is the same man who criticized the use of protective face coverings, yet coronavirus infections continue to spread throughout his congressional district," added Richmond.

Shreveport, Lousiana Mayor Adrian Perkins (D) slammed Higgin's comments as "racist, violent, and divisive." Higgins, whose nickname is "Wild," has been a vocal supporter of the Second Amendment and of expanding gun rights throughout his career. Explaining his co-sponsorship of a 2017 bill legalizing the interstate concealed carry of handguns, he wrote that "every American that (sic) can legally possess and own a weapon, and carry in whatever manner, should have that protection in every state across the nation." "I will always vote to defend and uphold Second Amendment rights for all Americans," Higgins vowed. Louisiana is an open-carry state. Higgins is regularly seen wearing a handgun. Critics accused Higgins of hypocrisy for loudly defending gun rights for "all Americans" while threatening to kill armed Black men exercising their constitutional rights. "Our conclusion can only be that what's good for white people is not good for Black people in Higgins' Ramboworld fantasies," wrote the editors of the Acadian Advocate. Higgins' threat came ahead of a Tuesday evening Black Lives Matter demonstration in Lafayette to protest the Pellerin shooting.

The Acadian Advocate reported that the event was peaceful, with 40-50 armed members of the Louisiana Cajun Militia present. One of the group's leaders, Michael McComas, said he wanted to protect protesters from white supremacist militants who were rumored to be traveling to Lafayette to disrupt the demonstration. While armed Black people are a rare sight at protests, white militias and vigilantes have shown up at Black Lives Matter demonstrations over 500 times this year, according to Alexander Reid Ross of the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right. Police have often embraced their presence, including when officers in Kenosha, Wisconsin praised armed vigilantes and threw a bottle of water to Kyle Rittenhouse, who would shortly after allegedly kill two protesters and injure a third with an assault rifle he illegally transported across state lines.

This isn't Higgins' first incendiary statement. In 2017 the Christian fundamentalist posted a video on YouTube from the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland to promote an "invincible" U.S. military, and he has also compared women who choose to abort pregnancies to the genocidal extermination of Jews during the Nazi Holocaust. It's also not the first time Higgins has threatened to shoot someone. According to court records, he allegedly made such a threat against his ex-wife Eloisa Rovati Higgins. "He put a gun to my head before, during, an argument," she claimed in 1991. "He threatened that if I ever came near the house he would shoot me."

2. Stallman supports paedophilia.
https://www.stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#14_September_2019_(Sex_between_an_adult_and_a_child_is_wrong) Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it. Through personal conversations in recent years, I've learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that. I am grateful for the conversations that enabled me to understand why.

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#6_September_2020_(Republican_congresscritter_who_fanatically_defends_the_right_to_carry_guns) -- A Republican congresscritter who fanatically defends the right to carry guns says he would shoot any blacks that carry guns at a protest. Does this mean he advocates the right to carry guns only for whites? Does he now believe that guns should be prohibited at demonstrations? I'm in favor of that, as long as it applies to everyone. -- https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/03/id-drop-any-10-you-gop-rep-clay-higgins-threatens-shoot-armed-black-protesters -- 'I'd Drop Any 10 of You': GOP Rep. Clay Higgins Threatens to Shoot Armed Black Protesters -- Thursday, September 03, 2020 -- The Louisiana lawmaker is a staunch gun rights advocate in an open carry state. >>236

Stallman supports Eugenics? I haven't read on that

from an upper middle class family.

4. Stallman haven't worked a single day in his life. No. He has no disability.

While working (starting in 1975) as a research assistant at MIT under Gerry Sussman,[17] [...]

+ "I remember after Stallman had already come out with the GNU Manifesto, GNU Emacs, and GCC, I read an article that said he was working as a consultant for Intel," says Perens, recalling his first brush with Stallman in the late 1980s. "I wrote him asking how he could be advocating free software on the one hand and working for Intel on the other. He wrote back saying, `I work as a consultant to produce free software.' He was perfectly polite about it, and I thought his answer made perfect sense."
+ His first chance finally came during his junior year of high school. Hired on at the IBM New York Scientific Center, a now-defunct research facility in downtown Manhattan, Stallman spent the summer after high-school graduation writing his first program, a pre-processor for the 7094 written in the programming language PL/I.
+ After that job at the IBM Scientific Center, Stallman had held a laboratory-assistant position in the biology department at Rockefeller University.
+ etc.

considering research assistant being a real work

"I remember after Stallman had already come out with the GNU Manifesto, GNU Emacs, and GCC, I read an article that said he was working as a consultant for Intel,"

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#6_September_2020_(Republican_congresscritter_who_fanatically_defends_the_right_to_carry_guns) -- A Republican congresscritter who fanatically defends the right to carry guns says he would shoot any blacks that carry guns at a protest. Does this mean he advocates the right to carry guns only for whites? Does he now believe that guns should be prohibited at demonstrations? I'm in favor of that, as long as it applies to everyone. -- https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/03/id-drop-any-10-you-gop-rep-clay-higgins-threatens-shoot-armed-black-protesters -- 'I'd Drop Any 10 of You': GOP Rep. Clay Higgins Threatens to Shoot Armed Black Protesters -- Thursday, September 03, 2020 -- The Louisiana lawmaker is a staunch gun rights advocate in an open carry state. >>236

6. Advocating violence for a cause where organized action through peaceful protests and political pressure is known to work, and where violence can only undermine the cause to the status quo's delight, automatically marks you as an agent provocateur, and not a bright one either since you immediately give yourself away. -- https://dis.tinychan.net/read/prog/1596796049#reply_27

A Short History of U.S. Law Enforcement Infiltrating Protests -- https://theintercept.com/2020/06/02/history-united-states-government-infiltration-protests/

schizo ramblings

7. Stallman haven't wrote any code himself.

Frustrated, Steele took it upon himself to the solve the problem. He gathered together the four different macro packages and began assembling a chart documenting the most useful macro commands. In the course of implementing the design specified by the chart, Steele says he attracted Stallman's attention. "He started looking over my shoulder, asking me what I was doing," recalls Steele. For Steele, a soft-spoken hacker who interacted with Stallman infrequently, the memory still sticks out. Looking over another hacker's shoulder while he worked was a common activity at the AI Lab. Stallman, the TECO maintainer at the lab, deemed Steele's work "interesting" and quickly set off to complete it. "As I like to say, I did the first 0.001 percent of the implementation, and Stallman did the rest," says Steele with a laugh.

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#6_September_2020_(Republican_congresscritter_who_fanatically_defends_the_right_to_carry_guns) -- A Republican congresscritter who fanatically defends the right to carry guns says he would shoot any blacks that carry guns at a protest. Does this mean he advocates the right to carry guns only for whites? Does he now believe that guns should be prohibited at demonstrations? I'm in favor of that, as long as it applies to everyone. -- https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/03/id-drop-any-10-you-gop-rep-clay-higgins-threatens-shoot-armed-black-protesters -- 'I'd Drop Any 10 of You': GOP Rep. Clay Higgins Threatens to Shoot Armed Black Protesters -- Thursday, September 03, 2020 -- The Louisiana lawmaker is a staunch gun rights advocate in an open carry state. >>236

8. Stallman is a big friend with Russia

*Navalny poisoning forces Merkel's party to ask: how do we hit back at Putin?* Here's a suggestion: switch to renewable energy as fast as possible. It's vitally necessary anyway, and it will eliminate demand for Russia's key exports (fossil fuels).

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#10_September_2020_(Justice_Department_taking_up_liability_for_damages) -- The wrecker has told the "Justice Department" to make the US take up the liability for damages, as well as defense costs in E Jean Carroll's lawsuit accusing him of raping her. -- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/08/trump-defamation-justice-department-e-jean-carroll-rape-accusation -- US justice department seeks to defend Trump in lawsuit tied to rape allegation -- Wed 9 Sep 2020 -- Attorneys seek to substitute US for Trump as defendant in E Jean Carroll case, meaning tax dollars could cover any payout -- Carroll is trying to get a DNA sample from Trump to see whether it matches as-yet-unidentified male genetic material found on a dress that she says she was wearing during the alleged attack

The US justice department is seeking to take over Donald Trump’s defense in a defamation lawsuit from a writer who accused him of rape, and federal lawyers asked a court on Tuesday to allow a move that could put the American people on the hook for any money she might be awarded. After New York state courts turned down Trump’s request to delay E Jean Carroll’s suit, justice department lawyers filed court papers on Tuesday aiming to shift the case into federal court and to substitute the US for Trump as the defendant. That means the federal government, rather than Trump himself, might have to pay damages if any are awarded. The filing complicates, at least for the moment, Carroll’s efforts to get a DNA sample from the president as potential evidence and to have him answer questions under oath.

Justice department lawyers argue that Trump was “acting within the scope of his office” when he denied Carroll’s allegations, made last year, that he raped her in a New York luxury department store in the mid-1990s. She says his comments – including that she was “totally lying” to sell a memoir – besmirched her character and harmed her career. “Numerous courts have recognized that elected officials act within the scope of their office or employment when speaking with the press, including with respect to personal matters,” the DoJ attorneys wrote. The White House echoed the argument. “Last year, the president vehemently denied allegations made by Jean Carroll about a supposed incident from some 25 years ago,” a senior White House official told the Guardian in a statement. “The president was acting within the scope of his office when he publicly responded to these false allegations.”

Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, called their argument “shocking”. “Trump’s effort to wield the power of the US government to evade responsibility for his private misconduct is without precedent,” she said in an email to the Guardian. Carroll told the Guardian by email: “Today’s actions demonstrate that Trump will do everything possible, including using the full powers of the federal government, to block discovery from going forward in my case before the upcoming election to try to prevent a jury from ever deciding which one of us is lying.”

It will be up to a federal judge to decide whether to keep the case in federal court and to allow the US to become the defendant. Carroll is trying to get a DNA sample from Trump to see whether it matches as-yet-unidentified male genetic material found on a dress that she says she was wearing during the alleged attack and didn’t wear again until a photo shoot last year. Her suit seeks damages and a retraction of Trump’s statements.

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#7_September_2020_(Bully_wants_to_punish_journalist_who_reported_his_contempt_for_US_soldiers_that_died_in_wars.) -- The bully has repeatedly expressed his contempt for US soldiers that died in wars. Now he wants to punish a journalist who reported this. About the US soldiers that died or were injured in Iraq, the bully is half right. They were duped — by Dubya. He started the war >based on lies. All the US military personnel that Dubya hijacked to make the Bush forces were duped, and Dubya is guilty of an enormous crime, against them and against Iraqis. They deserve condolences for that, not contempt. They wanted to serve their country — it is not their fault that Dubya lied to them about what they would be doing. The bully has contempt for them because he is heartless. He lives by duping people; to excuse this, he believes that anyone who is duped deserves to be duped. Now he has mad veterans, many of who supported him, very angry. -- https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/04/veterans-groups-condemn-trump-national-disgrace-over-reports-he-called-fallen -- Veterans Groups Condemn Trump as 'A National Disgrace' Over Reports He Called Fallen Soldiers 'Losers' and 'Suckers' -- Friday, September 04, 2020 -- "Donald Trump does not respect our men and women in uniform. He does not respect their families. He does not respect veterans."

Advocacy organizations representing millions of veterans across the United States voiced disgust and outrage late Thursday in response to reports from multiple news outlets detailing how President Donald Trump has repeatedly disparaged American soldiers killed or wounded in war as "suckers" and "losers" in private while publicly presenting himself as the unrivaled champion of the nation's service members.

The Atlantic, citing anonymous sources with direct knowledge of the president's comments, reported that Trump in 2018 canceled a scheduled visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris "because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead."

"This is not surprising, nor is it the first time President Trump has attacked veterans, but it is a new low, even for Trump." —Will Goodwin, VoteVets

"In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, 'Why should I go to that cemetery? It's filled with losers," according to The Atlantic. "In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as 'suckers' for getting killed."

The Atlantic additionally reported that during a 2017 visit to Arlington National Cemetery with then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, whose son Robert is buried there, Trump turned to Kelly and said, "I don't get it. What was in it for them?"

"Kelly (who declined to comment for this story) initially believed, people close to him said, that Trump was making a ham-handed reference to the selflessness of America's all-volunteer force," the magazine reported. "But later he came to realize that Trump simply does not understand non-transactional life choices."

The president's reported comments, confirmed by the Associated Press and the Washington Post, were immediately condemned by advocacy groups, lawmakers, and individual veterans as further confirmation that Trump has nothing but contempt for former service members whose lives were taken or severely impacted by overseas wars.

Just so I’m clear: Nazis = very fine people Soldiers who died fighting Nazis = losers — Perry O'Brien (@Perry_OB) September 4, 2020

"This is not surprising, nor is it the first time President Trump has attacked veterans, but it is a new low, even for Trump," Will Goodwin, an Army veteran and director of government relations for advocacy group VoteVets, said in a statement. "There is no rhyme or reason for Trump to cruelly attack our nation's fallen heroes. And it is especially egregious given that he's the commander in chief of our Armed Forces."

"Donald Trump does not respect our men and women in uniform," Goodwin continued. "He does not respect their families. He does not respect veterans. And worse, he has matched his vile language with action. He has abused our military, has made our country less safe, and has put our men and women in uniform in harm's way for his own political gain."

The Union Veterans Council, a national labor organization, called Trump "a national disgrace" in the wake of The Atlantic's reporting. Alexander McCoy, political director of Common Defense, which represents millions of veterans across the U.S., also weighed in on Twitter:

Attn: my fellow @USMC vets. The President thinks the 1,800 fallen of the battle of Belleau Wood were “suckers.” Belleau-fucking-Wood. Vote accordingly.#MarinesAgainstTrump#VetsAgainstTrump — Alexander McCoy (@AlexanderMcCoy4) September 3, 2020

In a series of tweets late Thursday, Trump denied the comments attributed to him in The Atlantic, writing—falsely—that he never called late Republican Sen. John McCain a "loser."

Trump went on to write that he swears "on whatever, or whoever, I was asked to swear on, that I never called our great fallen soldiers anything other than HEROES," a denial that critics found thoroughly unconvincing.

"This is more made up Fake News given by disgusting and jealous failures in a disgraceful attempt to influence the 2020 Election!" the president added.

This is the person that thinks kneeling is 'disrespectful to our troops' right?https://t.co/8Ye6wIFP94 — Rep. Mark Pocan (@repmarkpocan) September 4, 2020

In a statement, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, whose late son Beau was an Iraq War veteran, said that "if the revelations in today's Atlantic article are true, then they are yet another marker of how deeply President Trump and I disagree about the role of the president of the United States."

"I have long said that, as a nation, we have many obligations, but we only have one truly sacred obligation—to prepare and equip those we send into harm's way, and to care for them and their families, both while they are deployed and after they return home," Biden added.

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#6_September_2020_(Republicans_suing_to_stop_large_numbers_of_postal_ballots) -- Republicans are suing many states to try to stop them from sending out large numbers of postal ballots. Even if they lose the lawsuits, they will delay sending out the ballots. With that on one side and post office sabotage on the other, they can cause ballots not to be counted. -- https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/03/fighting-against-voting-rights-everywhere-trump-rnc-sue-democratic-montana-governor -- 'Fighting Against Voting Rights Everywhere': Trump, RNC Sue Democratic Montana Governor to Restrict Mail-In Election -- Thursday, September 03, 2020 -- "This template lawsuit appears to be part of a pattern of lawsuits across the country by Republican Party operatives to limit access to voting during the pandemic," said Gov. Steve Bullock.

President Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee on Wednesday sued Montana's Secretary of State and Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock for giving counties the choice to hold the November election by mail, an expansion of a safe voting option during the Covid-19 pandemic that the lawsuit alleges—without evidence—would "invite fraud and undermine the public's confidence in the integrity of elections."

"I don't think it can be emphasized enough that Trump has been emboldened to the point that he sees democracy as his primary rival. He is asking Americans to reject it, and he's not waiting for an election to validate his thinking." Walter Shaub, former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics

In a statement announcing the lawsuit (pdf), the RNC called Bullock's initiative to improve voter access and safety during the ongoing deadly outbreak of coronavirus an "unconstitutional vote-by-mail power grab."

But many Republicans in Montana would likely object to that description of Bullock's directive, which "he issued after a request from county clerks statewide," NBC News reported.

According to the secretary of state's elections office, 42 out of 56 counties have already confirmed plans to conduct the November election completely by mail, and voting rights expert Stephen Wolf pointed out that "even many GOP counties" in the state "have opted" to mail ballots to voters ahead of the election.

In a statement, Bullock said:

This template lawsuit appears to be part of a pattern of lawsuits across the country by Republican Party operatives to limit access to voting during the pandemic. Voting by mail in Montana is safe, secure, and was requested by a bipartisan coalition of Montana election officials seeking to reduce the risk of Covid-19 and keep Montanans safe and healthy.

Marc Elias, a lawyer and founder of Democracy Docket, an organization advocating for fair elections, argued that the "GOP is fighting against voting rights everywhere."

BREAKING: Trump, RNC and NRSC sue to block Montana's vote by mail plan. The @GOP is fighting against voting rights everywhere. We @DemocracyDocket are fighting back. pic.twitter.com/xPipMyqS6Z — Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) September 2, 2020

For Wolf, Wednesday's lawsuit filed by the President's re-election campaign and the RNC cannot be understood outside of the context of Montana's "hotly contested Senate race" between current Gov. Bullock and Sen. Steve Daines, the Republican incumbent.

Montana has voted mostly by mail for years. In the primary, even *state Republicans* supported mailing every voter a ballot, & even many GOP counties have opted to do so for November. Trump & the RNC are freaking out here because Montana has a hotly contested Senate race https://t.co/VjCMLdy6A6 — Stephen Wolf (@PoliticsWolf) September 2, 2020

Given the large number of "split ticket voters" in Montana who might support Bullock over Daines regardless of which presidential candidate they prefer and because the outcome of this contest could determine the balance of power in the Senate, some think that the state's voters are key to a potential victory for the Democratic Party.

Trump and the RNC's attempt to limit Montana's recently expanded vote-by-mail option came within hours of Trump's felonious encouragement of voter fraud in North Carolina—where he told residents to vote twice—and Attorney General Barr's failure to acknowledge whether doing so is illegal, as Common Dreams reported earlier on Thursday.

"I don't think it can be emphasized enough that Trump has been emboldened to the point that he sees democracy as his primary rival," said Walter Shaub, former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, earlier this week.

"He is asking Americans to reject it, and he's not waiting for an election to validate his thinking."

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#7_September_2020_(Felony_of_incitement) -- When the wrecker called on his supporters to try to vote twice, which is a felony, he committed the felony of incitement. -- https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2020/09/03/trump-call-supporters-vote-twice-felony-inciting-felony -- Trump Call to Supporters to Vote Twice is a Felony for Inciting a Felony -- Thursday, September 3, 2020

Americans expect and deserve more from their President than statements urging his supporters to commit a felony by voting for him twice in the coming election. President Trump’s repeated requests to his followers to commit felonies are felony crimes themselves because he is inciting the commission of those crimes. And if the last several years have taught us anything, it is that some Trump followers will do virtually anything Trump recommends including taking unproven, unapproved, and potentially dangerous medications he has recommended for COVID-19.

The Department of Justice needs to make absolutely clear to the public that what the President is encouraging his supporters to do is to commit a felony punishable by jail time. This cannot be the cable news fumbling of Attorney General William Barr trying to not to offend the President by excusing his urging of Americans to commit crimes. States have laws and processes in place to ensure every eligible voter can cast only one ballot. The laws are strict though in places they are selectively enforced. Crystal Mason, a black woman in Texas, is still in jail serving a five-year sentence for voting in 2016 when she did not know she was ineligible in the state because of a prior felony conviction. By contrast, Terri Lynn Rote, a white woman from Iowa, received two-years probation and a $750 fine for a felony conviction for attempting to vote twice for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

What President Trump is suggesting his supporters do is not only nonsense, but it is also a felony meant to undermine the integrity of our elections. You cannot test election integrity rules by breaking them any more than you can rob a bank to make sure your money is safe.

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#6_September_2020_(Police_officer_tried_to_stop_a_thug_from_choking_someone_and_was_fired) -- In 2009, a Buffalo police officer jumped on a thug's back to stop him from choking someone. She was fired, and lost her pension while one year from retirement. Now she is suing to demand her pension. -- https://www.cityandstateny.com/articles/policy/criminal-justice/black-buffalo-cop-stopped-another-officers-chokehold-she-was-fired -- A black Buffalo cop stopped another officer’s chokehold. She was fired. -- June 10, 2020 -- Will Cariol Horne finally see justice 12 years after losing her job?

In 2006, Cariol Horne, a black Buffalo police officer, intervened when a white officer, Gregory Kwiatkowski, had a black suspect, David Mack, in a chokehold. Horne jumped on Kwiatkowski’s back to prevent him from harming Mack. In 2008, she was fired from the Buffalo Police Department for her intervention in that case and lost her pension.

Horne, who had been on the force for 19 years, was just one year away from earning her pension. The Buffalo Police Department investigated the incident and its final report said Horne’s actions put her fellow officers in danger.

“The police department didn’t believe her story, and they punished her severely,” Brenda McDuffie, president and CEO of the Buffalo Urban League, told City & State. “She lost her livelihood. I mean, which one of us who has any humanity, seeing someone choked to death, just like those officers (in Minneapolis) who should have said, ‘Get off his neck.’ ... Excessive force is something that we’re finally dealing with as a nation. But we had a woman in our community who stood up and she has suffered greatly.”

After she was fired, Horne worked several jobs to make ends meet. “It didn’t just affect me,” Horne told Spectrum News in 2016. “I have three sons that I have to worry about now. The message that they sent was clear: Even as a police officer, you don’t stand up against police brutality.”

On Tuesday, the Buffalo Common Council approved three resolutions in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the recent protests against police brutality. One of the resolutions will enforce the city’s “duty to intervene” policy, which mandates that officers intervene if they see another officer using excessive force. The council will also create a task force to review police policies, and the third resolution will ask the state attorney general’s office to determine how many days Horne would need to work to regain her pension.

Since her firing in 2008, Horne has become outspoken against police brutality and hopes to have legislation passed in her name that would protect officers who intervene when another officer uses excessive force and when reporting misconduct by fellow officers. According to McDuffie, a petition campaign is expected to unfold within the next few days to draw attention to the need for such legislation.

The Buffalo Police Department has been widely criticized since June 4, when 75-year-old protestor Martin Gugino was pushed to the ground by Buffalo police officers. In the video, Gugino walks over to a large group of officers, appears to say something and then is shoved and falls on the concrete sidewalk. As he lays motionless, he begins bleeding from his ear. One officer attempts to tend to him, but a fellow officer motions for him to keep moving. On Saturday, the officers who shoved Gugino, Robert McCabe and Aaron Torgalski, were charged with second-degree assault. They had previously been suspended without pay on June 4.

In response to the suspensions, 57 Buffalo police officers resigned from the department’s Emergency Response Team in protest, but they are still on the force. It is not uncommon for police officers in any city to stand in solidarity with their fellow officers, even if the offending officers are found to be in the wrong. “In case after case, police unions have defended deadly misdeeds committed by law enforcement,” Peter Suderman writes for Reason.

It’s this culture that McDuffie cites as one of the major reasons why Horne was fired in 2008. “She’s a woman, and a black woman, and she broke the wall of silence,” she said. “So basically (the department said) let’s get rid of her because she’s somebody that we can’t depend on to be silent in matters like this.”

The Buffalo Police Department has a history of police brutality and racial profiling, and lacks de-escalation training and transparency. The Buffalo Police Department did not return a request for comment. And residents have been asking Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown to reform the police department for years.

McDuffie hopes that Horne is finally “made whole again and feels that whenever that happens that there were people who were listening and people who didn’t forget (her).”

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#10_August_2020_(US_thugs_have_their_own_secret_criminal_gangs) -- US thugs are so lawless that we should not be terribly surprised to learn that they have their own secret criminal gangs. Also their own right-wing social media hate groups. -- https://www.huffpost.com/entry/police-protests-floyd-law-enforcement-today-rant_n_5ee3ef5fc5b699cea53196b4 -- alternative access: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.huffpost.com/entry/police-protests-floyd-law-enforcement-today-rant_n_5ee3ef5fc5b699cea53196b4 -- 06/17/2020 -- part 1: Inside The Dangerous Online Fever Swamps Of American Police https://dis.tinychan.net/read/anarchy/1587122567#reply_189 -- part 2: The Extreme Views Of ‘Law Enforcement Today’ https://dis.tinychan.net/read/anarchy/1587122567#reply_197 -- part 3: Old-School Message Boards Breed Hatred And Racism https://dis.tinychan.net/read/anarchy/1587122567#reply_202

part 4: Facebook’s Cop Communities -- Social media sites are another place where law enforcement officers can find each other and talk about modern policing — and, lately, post a torrent of false and unsubstantiated antifa-related information. In many large pro-cop groups and pages on Facebook, people have been gleefully exchanging videos of “antifa” protesters getting beaten, and threatening to publish the personal information of supposed antifa activists. Many such pages and groups claim to be operated by police, although it’s unclear how many members are actually law enforcement officers. A search for the term “antifa” in Back The Blue, a Facebook group with more than 60,000 members, yields dozens of recent results, including a blog post baselessly accusing Gugino of being a “professional agitator and Antifa provocateur” — another early example of police media circulating a conspiracy theory that the president would later share on Twitter to swift condemnation.

Posters in the Facebook group Law Enforcement Family, which claims to have been “developed by law enforcement officers” and has more than 53,000 members, perpetuate racist stereotypes about Black people and call cops who kneel with protesters “pussies.” Those in Brothers Before Others have been sharing entirely unsourced data about gang violence in Black communities and spreading debunked claims about antifa. U.S. Law Enforcement, a page that claims to be run “by several current and retired US Law Enforcement Officers,” has also spread false information to its nearly 500,000 followers. It posted a screenshot of a tweet from what appeared to be an antifa account claiming that antifa would “move into the residential areas… the white hoods…. and we take what’s ours.” But as Twitter quickly noted, a white supremacist group posing as antifa activists was actually behind that account. The U.S. Law Enforcement page has since acknowledged that the tweet was debunked, and suggested this happened because the Twitter account “may not have been ‘official.’” Yet it has not removed the false post from its page.

part 5: ‘We Can’t Have That In Policing Today’ -- American police officers have already been tied to the spread of extremist content on social media. A Reveal News investigation last June found that hundreds of active-duty and retired officers, from every level of U.S. law enforcement, had quietly joined private Confederate, anti-Islam, misogynistic or anti-government militia Facebook groups full of racist memes and conspiracy theories. The investigation was a rare glimpse at the culture behind the blue wall. As Reveal News noted, disciplinary records and investigations into police misconduct “are kept secret in a majority of states, meaning most American cops enjoy a blanket of protection that can cover up biases.”

But the recent unrest has provoked some law enforcement officials to openly broadcast their tolerance for police misconduct online, outside of these closed or little-known groups. In a Facebook post earlier this month, the Brevard County, Florida, chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police offered to rehire police officers from other areas who are charged with using excessive force against protesters. “Lower taxes, no spineless leadership, or dumb mayors rambling on at press conferences,” promised the now-deleted Facebook post, for which Brevard County FOP President Bert Gamin has claimed responsibility. “Plus.... we got your back!”

Certainly not all police officers believe the wild stories pushed by Law Enforcement Today and circulated on pro-police social media groups. But right-wing media and many police labor leaders are heavily invested in the idea of presenting police as hard-right defenders of law and order. Outlets such as Fox News and OAN often provide a safe space for former officers and labor officials to defend law enforcement’s conduct without challenge. One such voice has been police union leader Ed Mullins, head of the NYPD’s Sergeants Benevolent Association, who in February announced the NYPD was “declaring war” on de Blasio and accused the mayor of fomenting anti-cop sentiment. Mullins has recently appeared on Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity’s shows, as well as far-right outlets Newsmax and OAN, where he called for military support to quell the protests.

Levin, from the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism, said police and city officials nationwide need to pay attention to what some cops are reading and writing online, and get a handle on it. “We can’t have that in policing today,” he said. “We’re now in an era where police are so detached from many segments of the community that they serve that we don’t have the luxury of having this kind of garbage being tolerated within departments.”

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-mar-jun.html#11_May_2020_(Attorney_General_Barr_has_dropped_the_case_against_Michael_Flynn) -- Attorney General Barr has dropped the case against Michael Flynn even after Flynn pled guilty. Barr prosecute and releases as the corrupter-in-chief orders. -- https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/08/trump-attorney-general-william-barr-flynn-case -- Welcome to William Barr's America, where the truth makes way for the president -- Fri 8 May 2020 -- The justice department has announced it will drop its case against Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI – we know why

Welcome to law and order in the age of William Barr. Against the tableau of a raging pandemic and job market in freefall, on Thursday the justice department announced that it would be dropping its case against Michael Flynn, the president’s short-tenured national security adviser. The fact that Flynn had pleaded guilty and Donald Trump had previously accused him of lying to the vice-president no longer mattered. These days, Trump was claiming that Flynn had been exonerated and, after all, Barr was the president’s obedient servant. His tweets were Barr’s commands. To be sure, Barr had already been there before with Trump and decades earlier with George HW Bush.

Little more than a year ago, after Robert Mueller had relayed his conclusions to the justice department, Barr issued a summary that distorted the special counsel’s report and turned them into a wholesale vindication of the president. When Mueller complained in writing of Barr’s deceit, Barr became “pissed”, thought Mueller’s letter “nasty” and felt personally “betrayed”. Supposedly, the two men had been friends. But that wasn’t the end of his story. This past March, Barr also earned the ire of Reggie Walton, a George W Bush appointee to the federal bench. The judge “seriously” questioned Barr’s integrity and credibility. The court’s March 2020 opinion deployed words like “distorted” and “misleading” to drive the point home, not the language generally used to describe the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. To be sure, that was just another episode of Barr’s fealty to Trump. In February, Barr put his finger on the scale when it came to the sentencing of Roger Stone and overrode the recommendations of career prosecutors. For his valor, Barr won the president’s admiration. In a pre-8am tweet, Trump congratulated his attorney general and trashed Mueller, accusing him of lying to Congress.

Like Roy Cohn, Trump’s personal lawyer of yore, Barr had attended Horace Mann and Columbia. History can repeat itself, in more ways than one. In the early 1990s, when Barr was George HW Bush’s attorney general he repeatedly ran political interference for the man who hired him. Confronted with congressional demands for copies of classified documents and that Barr appoint an independent counsel to investigate Iraqgate, the extension of government credits to Saddam Hussein’s regime before its invasion of Kuwait, Barr pushed back hard. In a rebuke to congressional oversight, Barr refused to turn over the information. In a separate letter to the House judiciary committee, Barr denied the committee’s request for an independent counsel, tossing around such phrases as “not a crime”, “simply not criminal in any way”, “nothing illegal”, and “far from being a crime”. In essence, Republican presidents were legally off-limits, ditto their appointees.

But that wasn’t the end of Barr running interference for the elder Bush. After he lost his re-election bid to Bill Clinton, Barr successfully argued for the pardon of Caspar Weinberger, Ronald Reagan’s defense secretary, and others in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra scandal. Then as now, Barr was attorney general: “I favored the broadest pardon authority,” said Barr. He added, “There were some people just arguing just for Weinberger. I said, ‘No – in for a penny, in for a pound.’” Not every attorney general is the president’s handmaiden. Likewise, not every president is determined to ride roughshod over DoJ.

John Ashcroft, attorney general to George W Bush, refused to be steamrolled by the White House and declined to reauthorize “Stellar Wind”, a domestic surveillance program. At the time, Ashcroft was in a hospital intensive care unit. The fact that the president’s counsel and the White House chief of staff were hovering over his bed did not alter the outcome. Indeed, unlike Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, the younger Bush recognized that presidential pardons were not baubles. Bush commuted the prison sentence meted out to Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, after a jury had convicted Libby of obstruction of justice and perjury in connection with an investigation of unauthorized leaks of the identity of Valerie Plame, a CIA officer. But despite Cheney’s repeated requests for a pardon he was rebuffed. At the time, Bill Burck, the deputy White House counsel, told the president: “You have to follow the law, and the law says if you say something that is untrue, knowingly, to a federal official in the context of a grand jury investigation and it is material to their investigation, that’s a crime.”

The favoritism and unfairness of the process “frustrated” Bush. Ultimately, the relationship between Bush and his vice-president took a permanent hit. As history would have it, Libby had represented Marc Rich, whose pardon further tarnished Clinton’s legacy. There is a coda. Trump subsequently pardoned Libby just as he pardoned Joe Arpaio, the Arizona sheriff found to be in contempt of court. For Trump, l’état, c’est moi, and for Barr it’s pretty much what a Republican president says it is.

Psychological projection is a defense mechanism in which the human ego defends itself against unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others.[1] For example, a bully may project their own feelings of vulnerability onto the target. It incorporates blame shifting and can manifest as shame dumping.[2] Projection has been described as an early phase of introjection.[3]

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#20_September_2020_(Reversal_of_DeJoy's_postal_sabotage) -- A US court has ordered reversal of DeJoy's postal sabotage. -- https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/18/denouncing-intentional-effort-sabotage-election-judge-orders-nationwide-reversal -- Denouncing 'Intentional Effort' to Sabotage Election, Judge Orders Nationwide Reversal of DeJoy Mail Changes -- Friday, September 18, 2020 -- "At the heart of DeJoy's and the Postal Service's actions is voter disenfranchisement," said Judge Stanley Bastian.

A federal judge late Thursday issued a nationwide injunction temporarily blocking and reversing dramatic changes to mail operations imposed in recent months by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, slamming the policies as a "politically motivated attack" on the U.S. Postal Service that—if allowed to stand—would disenfranchise voters in November. "Although not necessarily apparent on the surface, at the heart of DeJoy's and the Postal Service's actions is voter disenfranchisement," wrote Judge Stanley Bastian of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington in a 13-page ruling (pdf), largely granting a request by 14 states for a court order halting the postmaster general's sweeping changes. Bastian said that based on President Donald Trump's repeated and ongoing attacks on mail-in voting, it is "easy to conclude" that DeJoy's changes are part of "an intentional effort" by the White House to "disrupt and challenge the legitimacy of upcoming local, state, and federal elections, especially given that 72% of the decommissioned high-speed mail sorting machines... were located in counties where Hillary Clinton received the most votes in 2016."

The judge's ruling requires the USPS to immediately stop instructing postal workers to leave mail behind in order to leave for their trips at set times, continue treating all election mail as First Class mail, and return or reconnect any sorting machines deemed essential for efficient processing of election mail. Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, who led the coalition of states in suing the Postal Service, celebrated the ruling as a major victory that "protects a critical institution for our country." In a statement to the Washington Post, USPS spokesman Dave Partenheimer said the agency is "exploring our legal options" following the nationwide injunction. "There should be no doubt that the Postal Service is ready and committed to handle whatever volume of election mail it receives," said Partenheimer. "Our number one priority is to deliver election mail on-time."

Huge victory for democracy and for all Americans that rely on this critical institution. https://t.co/8NpyWTFBJH — Bob Ferguson (@BobFergusonAG) September 17, 2020

Pointing to statistics showing that "there has been a drastic decrease in delivery rates," Bastian dismissed the USPS leadership's "remarkable position that nothing has changed in the Postal Service's approach to election mail from past years." An investigation led by Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), the top Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, found that "on-time mail delivery fell abruptly following Postmaster General DeJoy's July 2020 directives ordering operational changes to mail service and delivery." "By the second week of August 2020, on-time delivery of First Class mail nationwide had fallen nearly 10 percentage points compared to the week preceding the changes," reads a report (pdf) Peters released this week. "This means approximately 85 million more deliveries were late in a single week, compared to what the late deliveries would have been that week under on-time delivery rates before the changes."

In a statement late Thursday, Peters applauded Bastian's ruling as further confirmation that "Postmaster General DeJoy's changes were directly responsible for slowing down the mail for seniors, veterans, small businesses, and other Americans." "While today's ruling is a welcome development," said Peters, "I will continue to work to push Mr. DeJoy to ensure the Postal Service returns to providing reliable, on-time delivery and pass my legislation that would reverse changes to the Postal Service during the pandemic and provide necessary funding for the Postal Service during this crisis."

8. Stallman is a big friend with [...] Cuba >>237

Proyecto Varela is a campaign for human rights in Cuba. Oswaldo Payá obtained more than 10,000 signatures on a petition for a referendum for basic freedoms, such as freedom of the press and association, and release of political prisoners. According to the Cuban constitution, that means the referendum must be held -- but it has not been. Payá seeks peaceful reconciliation among Cubans, and wants to preserve the achievements of the Cuban revolution (health care, education, elimination of extreme poverty, and independence from the US and multinational business). As a result, the right-wing Cuban exiles in Miami don't like him either. Most reports say that Castro regime holds 284 people prisoner without trial in Cuba, but the last reliable figures are from late 2005: 70 political prisoners. The bulk of the prisoners held without trial in Cuba -- almost 400 -- are not held by Castro's government. They are prisoners of the Bush regime, in Guantanamo. All of these prisoners, whichever government holds them, deserve to be freed, or given fair trials.

Cuban dissident Oswaldo Payá died in a car crash. Payá attempted to invoke a clause in the Cuban constitution which allows a certain number of citizens to demand a referendum. His petition was for a referendum to establish certain basic human rights. Although he submitted far more than the required number of signatures, the state never held the referendum. He appreciated some of the achievements of the Cuban revolution, and did not seek to turn Cuba into a US-dominated tyranny such as it was before Castro.

The driver of the car in which Oswaldo Payá was riding says that he made a false confession under duress, and that the accident which may have killed Payá occurred when a government car rammed his car from behind. -- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/07/anti-castro-activist-car-crash-allegations

Cuba has arrested artists that planned to protest a new law that would require all artists and musicians to get government licenses. Cuba has continued to be repressive in recent years.

while GCC is copy of public domain pascal compiler, which Stallman put under the copyleft >>237

In an effort to bootstrap the GNU operating system, Richard Stallman asked Andrew S. Tanenbaum, the author of the Amsterdam Compiler Kit (also known as the Free University Compiler Kit) for permission to use that software for GNU. When Tanenbaum advised him that the compiler was not free, and that only the university was free, Stallman decided to write a new compiler.[10] Stallman's initial plan[11] was to rewrite an existing compiler from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from Pastel to C with some help from Len Tower and others.[12] Stallman wrote a new C front end for the Livermore compiler, but then realized that it required megabytes of stack space, an impossibility on a 68000 Unix system with only 64 KB, and concluded he would have to write a new compiler from scratch.[11] None of the Pastel compiler code ended up in GCC, though Stallman did use the C front end he had written.[11]

Shortly before beginning the GNU Project, I heard about the Free University Compiler Kit, also known as VUCK. (The Dutch word for “free” is written with a v.) This was a compiler designed to handle multiple languages, including C and Pascal, and to support multiple target machines. I wrote to its author asking if GNU could use it. He responded derisively, stating that the university was free but the compiler was not. I therefore decided that my first program for the GNU Project would be a multilanguage, multiplatform compiler. Hoping to avoid the need to write the whole compiler myself, I obtained the source code for the Pastel compiler, which was a multiplatform compiler developed at Lawrence Livermore Lab. It supported, and was written in, an extended version of Pascal, designed to be a system-programming language. I added a C front end, and began porting it to the Motorola 68000 computer. But I had to give that up when I discovered that the compiler needed many megabytes of stack space, and the available 68000 Unix system would only allow 64k. I then realized that the Pastel compiler functioned by parsing the entire input file into a syntax tree, converting the whole syntax tree into a chain of “instructions”, and then generating the whole output file, without ever freeing any storage. At this point, I concluded I would have to write a new compiler from scratch. That new compiler is now known as GCC; none of the Pastel compiler is used in it, but I managed to adapt and use the C front end that I had written. But that was some years later; first, I worked on GNU Emacs.

Symbolics, a company formed by his MIT colleagues >>237

By the time the KL-10 arrived, the hacker community had already divided into two camps. The first centered around a software company called Symbolics, Inc. The second centered around Symbolics chief rival, Lisp Machines, Inc. (LMI). Both companies were in a race to market the Lisp Machine, a device built to take full advantage of the Lisp programming language.

Created by artificial-intelligence research pioneer John McCarthy, a MIT artificial-intelligence researcher during the late 1950s, Lisp is an elegant language well-suited for programs charged with heavy-duty sorting and processing. The language's name is a shortened version of LISt Processing. Following McCarthy's departure to the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT hackers refined the language into a local dialect dubbed MACLISP. The "MAC" stood for Project MAC, the DARPA-funded research project that gave birth to the AI Lab and the Laboratory for Computer Science. Led by AI Lab arch-hacker Richard Greenblatt, AI Lab programmers during the 1970s built up an entire Lisp-based operating system, dubbed the Lisp Machine operating system. By 1980, the Lisp Machine project had generated two commercial spin-offs. Symbolics was headed by Russell Noftsker, a former AI Lab administrator, and Lisp Machines, Inc., was headed by Greenblatt.

The Lisp Machine software was hacker-built, meaning it was owned by MIT but available for anyone to copy as per hacker custom. Such a system limited the marketing advantage of any company hoping to license the software from MIT and market it as unique. To secure an advantage, and to bolster the aspects of the operating system that customers might consider attractive, the companies recruited various AI Lab hackers and set them working on various components of the Lisp Machine operating system outside the auspices of the AI Lab.

The most aggressive in this strategy was Symbolics. By the end of 1980, the company had hired 14 AI Lab staffers as part-time consultants to develop its version of the Lisp Machine. Apart from Stallman, the rest signed on to help LMI .See H. P. Newquist, The Brain Makers: Genius, Ego, and Greed in the Quest for Machines that Think (Sams Publishing, 1994): 172.

At first, Stallman accepted both companies' attempt to commercialize the Lisp machine, even though it meant more work for him. Both licensed the Lisp Machine OS source code from MIT, and it was Stallman's job to update the lab's own Lisp Machine to keep pace with the latest innovations. Although Symbolics' license with MIT gave Stallman the right to review, but not copy, Symbolics' source code, Stallman says a "gentleman's agreement" between Symbolics management and the AI Lab made it possible to borrow attractive snippets in traditional hacker fashion.

On March 16, 1982, a date Stallman remembers well because it was his birthday, Symbolics executives decided to end this gentlemen's agreement. The move was largely strategic. LMI, the primary competition in the Lisp Machine marketplace, was essentially using a copy of the AI Lab Lisp Machine. Rather than subsidize the development of a market rival, Symbolics executives elected to enforce the letter of the license. If the AI Lab wanted its operating system to stay current with the Symbolics operating system, the lab would have to switch over to a Symbolics machine and sever its connection to LMI.

As the person responsible for keeping up the lab's Lisp Machine, Stallman was incensed. Viewing this announcement as an "ultimatum," he retaliated by disconnecting Symbolics' microwave communications link to the laboratory. He then vowed never to work on a Symbolics machine and pledged his immediate allegiance to LMI. "The way I saw it, the AI Lab was a neutral country, like Belgium in World War I," Stallman says. "If Germany invades Belgium, Belgium declares war on Germany and sides with Britain and France."

The circumstances of the so-called "Symbolics War" of 1982-1983 depend heavily on the source doing the telling. When Symbolics executives noticed that their latest features were still appearing in the AI Lab Lisp Machine and, by extension, the LMI Lisp machine, they installed a "spy" program on Stallman's computer terminal. Stallman says he was rewriting the features from scratch, taking advantage of the license's review clause but also taking pains to make the source code as different as possible. Symbolics executives argued otherwise and took their case to MIT administration. According to 1994 book, The Brain Makers: Genius, Ego, and Greed, and the Quest for Machines That Think, written by Harvey Newquist, the administration responded with a warning to Stallman to "stay away" from the Lisp Machine project.Ibid.: 196. According to Stallman, MIT administrators backed Stallman up. "I was never threatened," he says. "I did make changes in my practices, though. Just to be ultra safe, I no longer read their source code. I used only the documentation and wrote the code from that."

Whatever the outcome, the bickering solidified Stallman's resolve. With no source code to review, Stallman filled in the software gaps according to his own tastes and enlisted members of the AI Lab to provide a continuous stream of bug reports. He also made sure LMI programmers had direct access to the changes. "I was going to punish Symbolics if it was the last thing I did," Stallman says.

Such statements are revealing. Not only do they shed light on Stallman's nonpacifist nature, they also reflect the intense level of emotion triggered by the conflict. According to another Newquist-related story, Stallman became so irate at one point that he issued an email threatening to "wrap myself in dynamite and walk into Symbolics' offices."Ibid. Newquist, who says this anecdote was confirmed by several Symbolics executives, writes, "The message caused a brief flurry of excitement and speculation on the part of Symbolics' employees, but ultimately, no one took Stallman's outburst that seriously." Although Stallman would deny any memory of the email and still describes its existence as a "vicious rumor," he acknowledges that such thoughts did enter his head. "I definitely did have fantasies of killing myself and destroying their building in the process," Stallman says. "I thought my life was over."

The level of despair owed much to what Stallman viewed as the "destruction" of his "home"-i.e., the demise of the AI Lab's close-knit hacker subculture. In a later email interview with Levy, Stallman would liken himself to the historical figure Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi, a Pacific Northwest tribe wiped out during the Indian wars of the 1860s and 1870s. The analogy casts Stallman's survival in epic, almost mythical, terms. In reality, however, it glosses over the tension between Stallman and his fellow AI Lab hackers prior to the Symbolics-LMI schism. Instead of seeing Symbolics as an exterminating force, many of Stallman's colleagues saw it as a belated bid for relevance. In commercializing the Lisp Machine, the company pushed hacker principles of engineer-driven software design out of the ivory-tower confines of the AI Lab and into the corporate marketplace where manager-driven design principles held sway. Rather than viewing Stallman as a holdout, many hackers saw him as a troubling anachronism.

Stallman does not dispute this alternate view of historical events. In fact, he says it was yet another reason for the hostility triggered by the Symbolics "ultimatum." Even before Symbolics hired away most of the AI Lab's hacker staff, Stallman says many of the hackers who later joined Symbolics were shunning him. "I was no longer getting invited to go to Chinatown," Stallman recalls. "The custom started by Greenblatt was that if you went out to dinner, you went around or sent a message asking anybody at the lab if they also wanted to go. Sometime around 1980-1981, I stopped getting asked. They were not only not inviting me, but one person later confessed that he had been pressured to lie to me to keep their going away to dinner without me a secret."

Although Stallman felt anger toward the hackers who orchestrated this petty form of ostracism, the Symbolics controversy dredged up a new kind of anger, the anger of a person about to lose his home. When Symbolics stopped sending over its source-code changes, Stallman responded by holing up in his MIT offices and rewriting each new software feature and tool from scratch. Frustrating as it may have been, it guaranteed that future Lisp Machine users had unfettered access to the same features as Symbolics users.

It also guaranteed Stallman's legendary status within the hacker community. Already renowned for his work with Emacs, Stallman's ability to match the output of an entire team of Symbolics programmers-a team that included more than a few legendary hackers itself-still stands has one of the major human accomplishments of the Information Age, or of any age for that matter. Dubbing it a "master hack" and Stallman himself a "virtual John Henry of computer code," author Steven Levy notes that many of his Symbolics-employed rivals had no choice but to pay their idealistic former comrade grudging respect. Levy quotes Bill Gosper, a hacker who eventually went to work for Symbolics in the company's Palo Alto office, expressing amazement over Stallman's output during this period: I can see something Stallman wrote, and I might decide it was bad (probably not, but somebody could convince me it was bad), and I would still say, "But wait a minute-Stallman doesn't have anybody to argue with all night over there. He's working alone! It's incredible anyone could do this alone!" See Steven Levy, Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback], 1984): 426.

5. Stallman has a history of sexism [...] and just plain misogynism behind him. >>237

The smoke from wildfires, when breathed by pregnant women, causes lasting harm to their fetuses in later life. In some US states, women could be prosecuted for breathing the smoke. Perhaps millions of women would commit this "crime". One could imagine prosecuting oil companies too, but the right-wing officials in those states don't want to go after oil companies, only women.

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#20_September_2020_(Reversal_of_DeJoy's_postal_sabotage) -- A US court has ordered reversal of DeJoy's postal sabotage. -- https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/18/denouncing-intentional-effort-sabotage-election-judge-orders-nationwide-reversal -- Denouncing 'Intentional Effort' to Sabotage Election, Judge Orders Nationwide Reversal of DeJoy Mail Changes -- Friday, September 18, 2020 -- "At the heart of DeJoy's and the Postal Service's actions is voter disenfranchisement," said Judge Stanley Bastian. >>277

5. Stallman has a history of [...] racism >>237

Racist bigotry is more prevalent in China than in the US. In the US, many of us campaign against it.

The expression "playing the race card" is the racists' excuse to bury the issue of racism. For burying the issue of gender bias, the expression is "You must be a feminist." Meanwhile, the supporters of plutocracy say you are "trying to start a class war" if you talk about their War for Poverty.

*Want to dismantle structural racism in the US? Help fight gerrymandering.*

The UK needs to recognize and break up the racism that pervades its thug departments. It is difficult to correct racism in thug departments by hiring from minority groups, because the same racism targets them and forces them out.

US citizens: call on Faux News Advertisers to stop supporting racism and disinformation — that is, to stop advertising in Faux News.

A black man watching birds in Central Park asked a woman to put her dog on a leash. She responded by calling 911 and making a false accusation against him. She now faces criminal charges. One aspect of racism is that whites think they can get away with bullying blacks with false charges. To Kill a Mockingbird presents a fictional example.

Americans are rapidly becoming aware of systemic racism and the systemic injustice of the thugs.

Georgia Republicans made an all-out attack on voting while black. *"It's their test run for November," said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.* * What Georgia did yesterday was criminal, a racist crime against our democracy, and it’s time to criminalize voter suppression once and for all.*

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#24_September_2020_(Counting_valid_postal_ballots) -- The cheater hopes courts will stop states from counting valid postal ballots that arrive after election day. By itself, this is merely unfair. But when combined with DeJoy's efforts to delay mail, it adds up to sabotage. -- https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/21/trump-says-he-counting-federal-court-system-declare-winner-election-night-many -- Trump Says He Is 'Counting on the Federal Court System' to Declare Winner on Election Night—Before Many Ballots Are Tallied -- Monday, September 21, 2020 -- "This is an open admission that Trump hopes to use the Supreme Court to steal the election."

President Donald Trump said during a campaign rally over the weekend that he is "counting on the federal court system"—which he has packed with right-wing judges—to declare a winner of the presidential election on the night of November 3, a statement that one journalist described as an "outright pledge to use the courts to stop votes from being counted." "We're counting on the federal court system to make it so that we can actually have an evening where we know who wins, OK," Trump said during an event in Fayetteville, North Carolina on Saturday. "Not where the votes are going to be counted a week later, two weeks later." Trump appeared to be referring to states that have extended absentee ballot deadlines to accommodate the unprecedented surge in mail-in voting driven by the coronavirus pandemic, which is expected to delay the announcement of an election winner. In the key battleground of Pennsylvania, for instance, the state Supreme Court ruled last week that mail-in ballots received by November 6 must be counted as long as they are postmarked by Election Day. More than 20 other states are similarly allowing mail-in ballots to arrive days after November 3 if postmarked on time. Watch Trump's remarks, which came just 24 hours after the Supreme Court announced the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg:

"We're gonna have a victory on November 3rd the likes of which you've never seen. Now we're counting on the federal court system to make it so we can actually have an evening where we know who wins" -- Trump pic.twitter.com/q5bfsJQb76 — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 19, 2020

"Trump said he wants to use the federal courts to cheat in November by denying Americans’ lawfully-cast mail-in ballots," Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) tweeted Sunday in response to the president's comments, which came less than 45 days ahead of the November election. "This is an open admission that Trump hopes to use the Supreme Court to steal the election," added Beyer. MSNBC's Garrett Haake noted that while declaring an Election Night winner is "not a thing courts do," the "fact that the president is calling for it demands our attention."

This shouldn't get lost. At last night's rally, President Trump said he was "counting on" the federal courts to declare a winner on election night. That's not a thing courts do... but the fact that the President is calling for it demands our attention. https://t.co/m1AZHjBqVW — Garrett Haake (@GarrettHaake) September 20, 2020

Trump's comments further validated growing fears that the president could attempt to falsely declare himself the winner on Election Night, even with many mail-in ballots—which Trump has baselessly characterized as uniquely vulnerable to manipulation—left to be counted.

"It's easy to imagine the president, a geyser of self-serving lies and conspiracies, prematurely declaring himself the victor, crying foul as his lead evaporates as additional votes are counted, and challenging any loss based on the mail-in ballots he's already condemned as fraudulent," Vanity Fair's Eric Lutz wrote earlier this month. "Such a scenario would be every bit as dangerous as one in which he tried to postpone the election."

As Common Dreams reported last week, major corporate media outlets are facing pressure to craft and publicize a plan to combat any misinformation or premature victory declarations by the president or other candidates on Election Night.

The National Task Force on Election Crises, a coalition of election experts and academics, warned in a letter to news outlets last Wednesday that the "period of uncertainty" caused by the historic flood of mail-in ballots "will add further pressure to an already strained system and allow bad actors to attempt to undermine our democratic process."

New York magazine's Ed Kilgore has argued that any effort by the president to falsely declare victory on Election Night will depend on media outlets echoing and failing to adequately debunk his "bogus claims."

"Challenging the lies at the very point of utterance," Kilgore wrote earlier this month, "will be essential to stopping them from developing into a contested election and possibly a constitutional crisis."

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#24_September_2020_(Plotting_violence_ahead_of_rallies) -- *Revealed: pro-Trump activists plotted violence ahead of Portland rallies.* *Patriots Coalition members suggested political assassinations and said ‘laws will be broken, people will get hurt’, leaked chats show.* We all suspected this, but we could not be sure. Now we know that the bully's supporters are a criminal gang. -- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/23/oregon-portland-pro-trump-protests-violence-texts -- Wed 23 Sep 2020 -- “I’m waiting for the presidential go to start open firing”

Leaked chat logs show Portland-area pro-Trump activists planning and training for violence, sourcing arms and ammunition and even suggesting political assassinations ahead of a series of contentious rallies in the Oregon city, including one scheduled for this weekend. The chats on the GroupMe app, shared with the Guardian by the antifascist group Eugene Antifa, show conversations between Oregon members of the Patriots Coalition growing more extreme as they discuss armed confrontations with leftwing Portland activists, and consume a steady diet of online disinformation about protests and wildfires.

At times, rightwing activists discuss acts of violence at recent, contentious protests, which in some cases they were recorded carrying out. At one point, David Willis, a felon currently being sued for his alleged role in an earlier episode of political violence, joins a discussion about the use of paintballs. Where other members had previously suggested freezing the paintballs for maximum damage, Willis wrote: “They make glass breaker balls that are rubber coated metal. They also have pepper balls but they are about 3 dollars a ball. Don’t freeze paintballs it makes them wildly inaccurate” [sic.] Willis did not immediately respond to voice and text messages sent to his listed cellphone number.

Another prolific poster is Mark Melchi, a 41-year-old Dallas, Oregon-based car restorer who claims to have served as a captain in the US army. Melchi has been recorded leading an armed pro-Trump militia, “1776 2.0” into downtown confrontations in Portland, including on 22 August. At several points in the chat he proposes violence in advance of those confrontations, and appears to confess to prior acts committed in the company of his paramilitary group. In advance of the 22 August protest, Melchi wrote: “It’s going to be bloody and most likely shooting, they’re definitely armed… so let’s make sure we have an organized direction of movement and direction of clearing or other Patriots will be caught in the possible cross fire. When shit hits the fan.” He advised other members to ignore weapons statutes, writing, “I saw someone say bats, mace, and stun guns are illegal downtown. If you’re going to play by the books tomorrow night, we already lost. We are here to make a change, laws will be broken, people will get hurt… It’s lawlessness downtown, and people need to be prepared for bad things.” Following these comments, several rightwing demonstrators were recorded using gas and bats on 22 August, where Melchi and his militia were also present.

In other remarks ahead of the day, Melchi draws on what he claims is his group’s history of traveling to multiple states to engage in violence at protests. “My Group 1776 2.0. Has been fighting Antifa in Seattle, Portland, for months”, Melchi writes, adding “this won’t be a simple fist fight. People will get shot, stabbed and beat.” He also claims police cooperation in interstate violence, writing “Yes, going after them at night is the solution… Like we do in other states, tactical ambushes at night while backing up the police are key. You get the leaders and the violent ones and the police are happy to shut their mouths and cameras.” Melchi nevertheless recommends that members disguise themselves to avoid the consequences of homicide. “We must be ready to defend with lethal response… Suggest wearing mask and nothing to identify you on Camera…to prevent any future prosecution.”

In response to detailed questions about these contributions, Melchi responded with an email that falsely suggested his comments might have been photoshopped, and concluded with direct threats. Melchi wrote: “I suggest you don’t threaten combat veterans sweetheart, might get a little uncomfortable for ya big guy!” Melchi’s sentiments in the chat logs were in keeping with fantasies of, and plans for, violence, which are constantly discussed by group members. Although some members are connected with extremist groups or militias, on the whole they describe themselves as “patriots”, and they express no clear ideology beyond a hatred of the left, and a preparedness to use violence. The shared allegiances expressed in the group are mostly to the police, the United States and Donald Trump, a person whom some say they are prepared to kill for. Ahead of 22 August, a user “Paige” says “I’m waiting for the presidential go to start open firing”. Melchi, the militia leader, responds, “Well Saturday may be that go lol”.

Alex Newhouse, the digital research lead at the Center for Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute, said of the group that “the main mechanism that makes these communities so dangerous is the incessant desensitization to the idea of political violence”. Newhouse said that the ideas expressed in the group were entrenched in “extreme nationalism – that a few strong men with guns can together take out an evil that is at once imagined as an existential threat, and pathetically weak”. Newhouse added that the group’s discussions “fit within a broader trend of rightwing extremists becoming more accelerationist over time”.

The chatlogs became fractious at the peak of Oregon’s recent wildfire emergency. While some members said they had gone to rural areas to “hunt” imagined antifa arsonists, others became concerned about the dangers. As early as 9 September, the baseless idea that the fires were a coordinated arson attack was treated as settled fact, with Melchi writing: “People have officially died from these Antifa Fires. I’d shoot them on site” [sic], and another user, Dub, responding: “Yes sir if I see them they are getting dropped where they stand.” When adverse consequences of vigilantism became evident, leadership attempted to bring the group back under control. After a member of the group reported that an associate had been arrested in Lane county for “holding [someone] at gunpoint”, the group’s administrator, who used the user name Patriot Coalition, wrote “STOP HOLDING PEOPLE AT GUN POINT- STOP PULLING YOUR WEAPONS… VIDEO- TAKE PICTURES AND CALL 911.”

Mary McCord is the legal director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law School, which on Wednesday released a series of fact sheets on anti-paramilitary laws in all 50 states. Given details of the content of the chats, McCord said that “this is the kind of thing that might allow authorities to take action”, and that members of the group may “already be in violation of Oregon’s anti-paramilitary laws”.

The group also talked about coordinating at the rally with the Proud Boys, an extreme rightwing group. One user, identified as Bravo91 and a part of the group’s leadership, spoke of phone calls with the Proud Boys. Along with antifascist demonstrators, Democratic politicians are also the target of violent fantasies in the chats. In particular, Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, is demonized and nominated as a possible target for assassination by the group. On 24 August, a user identified as “Trent-Medford” writes, “Fuck wheeler… guess what soon as we are done with these punks. He’s next freakin coward !!!!!!” User T Durden went further. In response to news that an alleged arsonist had been released on bail, and without encountering disagreement, they wrote: “Maybe we need to start taking care of the justice ourselves!”, adding, “Start with justice on our DA and then move on to the governor. Maybe by the time we get to the first judge, they will have changed their tunes.”

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#25_September_2020_(Stealing_the_election) -- *Trump Keeps Telling Us How He and Republicans Plan to Steal This Election. Can we stop him and save our republic before it's too late?* Is "steal" the correct word? The final step would use a loophole in the Constitution, and that a such would not be stealing it. But the first step is a fraudulent accusation of fraud, and I think that would justify the word "steal". Why are Republicans in control of all the swing states' legislatures? Some of those states now vote majority Democrat, but gerrymandering has prevented the voters from electing legislators that reflect their views. -- https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2020/09/23/report-trump-campaign-actively-discussing-radical-measures-to-bypass-election-results/ -- Report: Trump Campaign Actively Discussing Radical Measures To Bypass Election Results -- Sep 23, 2020

A jarring new report from The Atlantic claims that the Trump campaign is discussing potential strategies to circumvent the results of the 2020 election, should Joe Biden defeat Donald Trump, by first alleging the existence of rampant fraud and then asking legislators in battleground states where the Republicans have a legislative majority to bypass the state’s popular vote and instead to choose electors loyal to the GOP and the sitting president. Following the casting of ballots and counting individual votes in a presidential election, the United States Constitution prescribes that the 538 electors who constitute the Electoral College cast their electoral votes, determining the winner. Customarily, electors are chosen by popular vote, but nothing in the Constitution mandates that tradition, with Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 merely asserting that each state shall appoint electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.”

Since the late 1800s, every state in every presidential election has ceded the decision to its voters, but the Supreme Court affirmed in Bush v. Gore that a state “can take back the power to appoint electors.” The Atlantic report claims that sources in the Republican Party at the local and national levels confirm that “the Trump campaign is discussing contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors” in red battleground states. “The push to appoint electors would be framed in terms of protecting the people’s will,” an unnamed Trump-campaign legal adviser tells The Atlantic, adding, “The state legislatures will say, ‘All right, we’ve been given this constitutional power. We don’t think the results of our own state are accurate, so here’s our slate of electors that we think properly reflect the results of our state.’”

The chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican Party says, on the record, that he has discussed appointing loyal electors with the Trump campaign: “It is one of the available legal options set forth in the Constitution.” A critical factor in the Trump campaign’s approach is delegitimizing mail-in and provisional ballots and any other votes that are not counted by the end of Election Day, November 3, as those other votes are expected to heavily favor Biden. Earlier this summer, Trump tweeted, "MAIL-IN VOTING WILL LEAD TO MASSIVE FRAUD AND ABUSE. IT WILL ALSO LEAD TO THE END OF OUR GREAT REPUBLICAN PARTY. WE CAN NEVER LET THIS TRAGEDY BEFALL OUR NATION." Later, in a Twitter post in July, Trump wrote, "With Universal Mail-In Voting, 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history." However, due to the coronavirus pandemic, 2020 will feature more voting by mail than any other election in history. Earlier this week, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said he plans to spend the next six weeks urging the country to prepare for a "nightmare scenario" in which Trump declares himself the winner of the election and refuses to leave the White House. Thus, Sanders recommends states tally mail-in ballots as quickly as possible, urging them to begin processing and counting ballots before Election Day. When The Atlantic asked the Trump campaign to comment on the quotes in the article, and about possible plans to take the unprecedented step of appointing loyal electors, the president’s deputy national press secretary, Thea McDonald, did not address the questions directly. “It’s outrageous that President Trump and his team are being villainized for upholding the rule of law and transparently fighting for a free and fair election,” McDonald said in an email. “The mainstream media are giving the Democrats a free pass for their attempts to completely uproot the system and throw our election into chaos.” When asked by Fox News' Chris Wallace earlier this summer if he would accept the election results, President Trump said, "I have to see. Look, you—I have to see. No, I'm not going to just say yes. I'm not going to say no, and I didn't last time, either." 31: An investigation by Justin Levitt at Loyola Law School uncovered a total of 31 credible allegations of voter impersonation out of more than 1 billion votes cast in the United States from 2000 to 2014.

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#10_September_2020_(Justice_Department_taking_up_liability_for_damages) -- The wrecker has told the "Justice Department" to make the US take up the liability for damages, as well as defense costs in E Jean Carroll's lawsuit accusing him of raping her. -- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/08/trump-defamation-justice-department-e-jean-carroll-rape-accusation -- US justice department seeks to defend Trump in lawsuit tied to rape allegation -- Wed 9 Sep 2020 -- Attorneys seek to substitute US for Trump as defendant in E Jean Carroll case, meaning tax dollars could cover any payout -- Carroll is trying to get a DNA sample from Trump to see whether it matches as-yet-unidentified male genetic material found on a dress that she says she was wearing during the alleged attack >>259

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#6_September_2020_(Republican_congresscritter_who_fanatically_defends_the_right_to_carry_guns) -- A Republican congresscritter who fanatically defends the right to carry guns says he would shoot any blacks that carry guns at a protest. Does this mean he advocates the right to carry guns only for whites? Does he now believe that guns should be prohibited at demonstrations? I'm in favor of that, as long as it applies to everyone. -- https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/03/id-drop-any-10-you-gop-rep-clay-higgins-threatens-shoot-armed-black-protesters -- 'I'd Drop Any 10 of You': GOP Rep. Clay Higgins Threatens to Shoot Armed Black Protesters -- Thursday, September 03, 2020 -- The Louisiana lawmaker is a staunch gun rights advocate in an open carry state. >>236

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#25_September_2020_(Stealing_the_election) -- *Trump Keeps Telling Us How He and Republicans Plan to Steal This Election. Can we stop him and save our republic before it's too late?* Is "steal" the correct word? The final step would use a loophole in the Constitution, and that a such would not be stealing it. But the first step is a fraudulent accusation of fraud, and I think that would justify the word "steal". Why are Republicans in control of all the swing states' legislatures? Some of those states now vote majority Democrat, but gerrymandering has prevented the voters from electing legislators that reflect their views. -- https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2020/09/23/report-trump-campaign-actively-discussing-radical-measures-to-bypass-election-results/ -- Report: Trump Campaign Actively Discussing Radical Measures To Bypass Election Results -- Sep 23, 2020 >>286

>>252 I am aware that he insists on differentiating between minors he labels children and minors he labels adolescents, and his belief that the latter can consent regardless of the age from which he chooses to label them adolescents. This is obviously indefensible. He holds plenty of indefensible views especially on anything related to sex and women. But that is precisely why there are plenty of things he can be legitimately criticized over without resorting to strawmen. >>242

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#24_September_2020_(Plotting_violence_ahead_of_rallies) -- *Revealed: pro-Trump activists plotted violence ahead of Portland rallies.* *Patriots Coalition members suggested political assassinations and said ‘laws will be broken, people will get hurt’, leaked chats show.* We all suspected this, but we could not be sure. Now we know that the bully's supporters are a criminal gang. -- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/23/oregon-portland-pro-trump-protests-violence-texts -- Wed 23 Sep 2020 -- “I’m waiting for the presidential go to start open firing” >>285

5. Stallman has a history of sexism [...] and just plain misogynism behind him. >>237

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#23_September_2020_(Working_against_womens_rights) -- *AT&T, Coca Cola, Disney, Nike, Procter & Gamble and Uber all target female consumers and promote women-friendly work environments, yet they bankroll candidates who actively work against women’s rights.* -- https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2020/09/21/new-corporate-accountability-campaign-puts-six-major-companies-notice-anti -- New Corporate Accountability Campaign Puts Six Major Companies On Notice For Anti-Choice Political Giving -- Monday, September 21, 2020 -- The #ReproReceipts Campaign by UltraViolet Highlights Hypocrisy in Corporate America and Calls for Accountability at AT&T, Coca Cola, Disney, Nike, Procter & Gamble and Uber

Today, UltraViolet announced a new campaign to hold six corporations accountable for their political giving to anti-choice, anti-women candidates and calls on them to end their support for such politicians entirely and to commit to investing in reproductive health and justice. AT&T, Coca Cola, Disney, Nike, Procter & Gamble and Uber all target female consumers and promote women-friendly work environments, yet they bankroll candidates who actively work against women’s rights. The #ReproReceipts campaign highlights the discrepancy between corporate America’s public statements in support of gender equity and their political giving to extreme anti-choice candidates. These contributions not only work against equality for women, but also racial equity and justice. In a year marked by a global pandemic, uprising against racial injustice and a historic election underway, during which each of these companies are showboating their stands on racial and gender equality, we must highlight the hypocrisy of corporate social responsibility posturing and demand companies walk their talk. Companies need to know that they can’t have it both ways. More than 80 percent of millennial consumers believe it is important to buy from companies that align with their values, according to a recent report on consumer behavior. Yet, outside of public statements, buyers often don’t know where their frequented brands’ values actually lie. #ReproReceipts shines a spotlight that exposes which anti-choice politicians are receiving large sums of money from some of the largest consumer-facing retailers and brands. “These six companies embody the disconnect between corporate social responsibility efforts that are just PR posturing and actually doing right by their employees and customers. Corporate America is eager to show their support for women and diversity, but they actively work against their statements by supporting and funding anti-women candidates,” said Sonja Spoo, Director of Reproductive Rights Campaigns at UltraViolet. “The receipts are clear: these companies continue to give politically in ways that don’t align with their value statements. We invite these companies to be leaders by ending their anti-women and anti-equality political contributions.” Supporting anti-choice politicians often is tantamount to endorsing an ideological framework that leans anti-racial justice, anti-science and anti-immigrant. These views have plunged our nation into a political crisis, hampered our response to the pandemic and endangered the lives and well-being of women, especially women of color, Indigenous women and other communities.

UltraViolet’s campaign will include ongoing actions to call on these companies to make change, such as:
* Petitions calling for change to UltraViolet’s more than 1 million members
* Digital and print ads targeted at each company noting the misalignment of their values and political giving
* Public actions to inform consumers these companies are anti-women
* Polling of consumers to demonstrate political giving matters
* Coordinated social action among UltraViolet’s members calling out corporate targets across digital platforms

The correlation between private political giving and the impact it has on gender equity and racial justice is impossible to ignore. Topline findings include:

AT&T was named to the Bloomberg Gender Equality Index and came out at the top of DiversityInc.’s 2020 list of top 50 companies for diversity. While it pledges to support the growth of its employees who are people of color and women, including reproductive benefits...
* $1,956,953 (56 percent) of AT&T’s total political giving in 2020 was to anti-choice candidates or their associated PACs including Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX), David Perdue (R-OH), John Cornyn (R-TX) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC); Representatives Liz Cheney (R-WY), Kevin Brady (R-TX) and Steve Scalise (R-LA). Vice President Mike Pence’s Great America Committee PAC also received support.
* Women only make up 33.2 percent of AT&T’s U.S. employees and only two of nine executives at the company.
* People of color are 39.4 percent of AT&T’s U.S. management and 44.8 percent of its total U.S. workforce. But as recently as July 2020, AT&T workers in Memphis were protesting the company’s commitment to racial equality and treatment of workers.

Coca Cola As the fifth best company on the Forbes Best Employers for Women 2020, Coca-Cola also placed at the top of Comparably’s Best Company for Diversity in 2018 and 96 on the Forbes’ Global 2000 in 2020...
* $1,028,838 (59 percent) of Coca Cola’s total political giving in 2020 was to anti-choice candidates or their associated PACs such as Senators Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Representatives Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Steve Scalise (R-LA).
* Only three of the top ten company executives are women and people of color make up only four of ten executives.
* Recently retired Executive Vice President Carl Ware warns that Coca-Cola is behind in shepherding women and people of color to top leadership positions.

Disney Seventy-two percent of Disney’s workforce is women and/or people of color and yet...
* $203,350 (51 percent) of Disney’s total political giving in 2020 was to anti-choice candidates or their associated PACs including Senators Deb Fischer (R-NE), Marco Rubio (R-TX) and David Perdue (R-GA); Representatives Steve Scalise (R-LA) and Kevin Brady (R-TX). Both former or then (he is in the US Senate now) Governor Rick Scott (R-FL) Vice President Mike Pence’s PACs received financial support.
* Only 25 percent of the C-Suite is made up of women.
* Disney was sued in April 2019 for the unequal pay of its female employees.
* On diversity and inclusion, former CEO Bob Iger failed to make good on his promise to make changes in Disney’s C-suite before his tenure ended earlier this year.

Nike may be noted as a 2020 Forbes Best Employees for Women, has promised pay equity, and 49 percent of global employees are women, but…
* $99,000 (27 percent) of Nike’s total political giving in 2020 was to anti-choice candidates or their associated PACs including Senators John Thune (R-SD), Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Rob Portman (R-OH) and Representatives Kevin Brady (R-TX) and Greg Walden (R-OR).
* Nike has been called out for its lack of representation in leadership and discrimination against pregnant female athletes.
* The company faced a class-action lawsuit in 2018 on systemic gender pay discrimination and rampant sexual harassment.

Procter & Gamble P&G is recognized in the Working Mother 100 Best Companies for Working Mothers and Working Mother Best Companies for Multicultural Women, but...
* $144,000 (55 percent) of Procter & Gamble’s total political giving in 2020 was to anti-choice candidates or their associated PACs including Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and the Ohio Republican Party.
* These contributions counter the very initiatives and partnerships P&G pushes publicly for gender equality. They also work against the best interests of the six of 13 board members and eight of 14 executive officers who are women.

Uber The number of female employees at Uber grew 42.3 percent in 2019 and four out of ten board members are now women, however...
* $148,000 (36 percent) of Uber’s total political giving in 2020 was to anti-choice candidates or their associated PACs including Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) as well as the Republican Governors Association and Republican State Leadership Committee.
* It is involved in a host of lawsuits for sexual harassment and settled with the EEOC at the end of 2019 for $4.4M and requires monitoring for the next 3 years.
* Uber hired its first-ever diversity and inclusion officer only recently in response to the 2017 “Holder Report” documenting rampant harassment, discrimination, retaliation, and toxic workplace culture for women and racially diverse employees.

[1/2] https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#24_September_2020_(Austin,_Texas_voted_to_cut_the_thug_department's_budget) -- Austin, Texas, voted to cut the thug department's budget. Texas Governor Abbott threatens to cut Austin's taxes as a punishment for this, and put the city's thug department under the control of the lawless and cruel state thug department. The article starts by describing how the state thugs attacked Lauren Mestas. Her car had slogans such as FUCK THESE RACIST POLICE, and "all cops are bastards." A thug was so offended by this that he believed he was entitled to bring many thugs to point guns at her, then force her out of the car, which they ruined ‐ demonstrating that at least Texas state cops are bastards. -- https://theintercept.com/2020/09/22/texas-austin-police-militarization-budget/ -- Texas Deployed SWAT, Bomb Robot, Small Army of Cops to Arrest a Woman and Her Dog -- September 22 2020 -- She had done nothing wrong. State troopers started following her because of “anti-law enforcement rhetoric” on her car windows.

Twenty-four-year-old Lauren Mestas was already having a bad day when she noticed a cop car tailing her northbound on Interstate 35, headed into downtown Austin. She wasn’t overly concerned at first, as she wasn’t breaking any laws, but the patrol vehicle remained on her tail as she exited onto Riverside Drive, headed west. She started to suspect that it might have something to do with the slogans soaped all over the windows of her 2001 Toyota 4Runner. In addition to “BROWN PRIDE” and “BLACK LIVES MATTER,” written across the rear window were the words “FUCK THESE RACIST POLICE.” Two days earlier and not even a mile away, a few blocks south of the Texas Capitol in the center of Austin, Mestas had witnessed an off-duty Army sergeant named Daniel Perry shoot and kill an Air Force veteran named Garrett Foster, who had been at a BLM protest with an AK-47 slung across his chest, pushing his quadruple-amputee fiancée in a wheelchair. At the sound of gunfire, Mestas and two other young women had fled across Congress Avenue, the main downtown boulevard, and hidden behind a column of the Frost Bank Tower. In the process, she had accidentally lost her cell phone, as well as the remote control to open the gates of her apartment complex. That night, on arriving home, she’d parked in an ungated portion of the sprawling, 42-building apartment complex, located in far South Austin. Badly shaken by the shooting, she must have confused the spot, because when she went out the next morning, a Sunday, she couldn’t seem to find the 4Runner anywhere. “I was not in a good headspace,” she told me. “I thought somebody had stolen my car.”

She called the city’s non-emergency line to report the suspected theft. Eight hours later, she stumbled across the 4Runner while walking her dog, a chihuahua named Optimus Prime, and redialed 311 to retract the stolen vehicle report. The operator, Mestas told me, assured her that the 4Runner’s vehicle identification number and license plate number would be removed from the police department’s stolen vehicle list, and gave her a confirmation number for verification, should she happen to get pulled over. Monday morning, she went to her job at Planet K, the longtime Austin smoke shop where she was employed as a shift lead. She had yet to recover, emotionally, from witnessing Foster’s murder. “I spent two hours on my shift sobbing,” she told me. “I had just seen somebody get shot and killed. I was pretty much catatonic.” A little after 10 a.m., her manager sent her to the bank to break $200 into small bills and coins. She took Optimus Prime with her for company. It was on the way to the bank that the cop car picked up her tail. The officer, a state trooper from the Texas Department of Public Safety, or DPS, later filed an incident report which made clear that his reason for running a license plate check was that, in his words, “the vehicle had anti law enforcement rhetoric scribble [sic] all over the outside.” He followed her for a mile on Riverside Drive along the south shore of Ladybird Lake, and waited a full five minutes to hit the siren and lights.

“Oh my God,” Mestas thought, surmising what must have happened. “They think I stole my car.” She panicked, and instead of pulling over, she came to a dead stop in the middle of the First Street Bridge, blocking the inside lane. The spot where she braked to a halt might well have been the precise geographic center of Austin, with Ladybird Lake flowing beneath her toward Longhorn Dam, Auditorium Shores and all of South Austin to her rear, and City Hall directly in front of her. It was 10:40 on a weekday morning, and normally the bridge would have been packed with traffic, but four months into the pandemic, there were hardly any other cars. The state trooper, Garrett Ray, was joined by a second DPS officer, Jason Melson. Instead of approaching the 4Runner, they drew their service weapons and took cover behind the open doors of their patrol vehicles. According to Ray’s incident report, it was an “HRS,” or high-risk stop, also known as a felony stop: a procedure employed when an officer believes that someone in the car has committed a serious crime and could be dangerous.

The tactical terminology is worth noting because earlier that very same morning, the Austin Police Department had released damning dashcam footage of officers shooting and killing an unarmed man named Michael Ramos in a high-risk or felony stop that, like this one, had been based on faulty dispatch information. A 911 caller reported that Ramos and a woman had been using drugs in a parked car, and that he was holding a gun. Ramos had been spooked by the sight of eight armed officers pointing weapons and screaming at him to get his hands up. When he tried to flee, one of the officers opened fire with an assault rifle. APD later confirmed there was no gun in Ramos’s possession. One hour after Mestas was pulled over, at 11:40 a.m., I happened to come across the scene by accident. I was riding my bike around Ladybird Lake, and I counted at least 40 DPS vehicles blocking the south end of the First Street Bridge. There had to be 80 cops on scene by that time, if not 100. The emergency vehicles included a fire truck, an ambulance, and two BearCat armored personnel carriers. Every minute or so, a mechanical RoboCop-like voice repeated, “Driver, exit the vehicle with your hands up.” The dystopian intonation sounded over Auditorium Shores, where a crowd of people who had been exercising or playing with their dogs had gathered on the sidewalk to watch the spectacle unfold.

Like other bystanders, I initially assumed that it was a hostage situation, bomb threat, or active shooter. The first clue that it might be something more farcical or absurd were the slogans soaped on the windows of the weather-beaten old 4Runner, which the police had so thoroughly surrounded. From 100 yards away, in the blinding sunshine, I couldn’t quite read them, but on one rear window I distinctly made out the acronym ACAB, which stands for “all cops are bastards.” Ever since the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota on May 25, cities across the United States had been convulsed by protests against police brutality, and Austin was no exception. Like virtually every other big city in America, the lion’s share of our municipal budget goes to an increasingly militarized department of police, and all through June and July, there had been rising calls for APD to be defunded, and for the chief to resign. In response to indications that Austin’s relatively liberal city administration would give in to protester demands, the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, had deployed thousands of DPS troopers to Austin, as well as to Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio, to combat “violent extremists, anarchists, and antifa,” as DPS Director Steven McCraw put it in a June 2 press conference. “They just can’t help themselves,” McCraw said of the out-of-town antifa operatives believed to be besetting the city. I had seen the newly arrived formations of state troopers standing guard around the Capitol but never out in force like this. The officer who appeared to be the incident commander was a relatively young man with black hair, shiny black cowboy boots, and a black tie under his flak vest, which identified him as a DPS special agent.

Other agencies were present as well. A U.S. Marshal in boots and jeans suited up in a bulletproof vest alongside his Ford F-150 4×4. Texas Army National Guardsmen patrolled the side of the bridge, lest an amphibious threat come from the paddleboarders on Ladybird Lake. City bike cops in blue polo shirts held the outer perimeter. Overhead, a police helicopter circled. Technicians in T-shirts and camo pants were unpacking a drone the size of a coffee table on the pavement. A smaller police drone, consumer-grade, already hovered above the beleaguered 4Runner. I had only been there a few moments when an APD SWAT team arrived. They pulled up in eight blacked-out Chevrolet Tahoes with all the insignia removed, and commenced to unload an arsenal of military weapons and body armor from big drawers that pulled out of the beds. The sound of multiple firearms being locked and loaded echoed from the face of the apartment building across the street. One SWAT officer with tribal tattoos had his shirt off as he changed uniforms. A SWAT sniper with a heavy backpack went trotting off in the direction of Aussie’s, the sand volleyball bar, presumably to find a shooter’s nest in the urban terrain.

A vehicle like a refrigerated truck pulled up, and police technicians placed an antenna on the roof and busied themselves assembling some kind of machine in the cargo area. The surface of Mars would have seemed a more suitable place for the thing that they eventually rolled out than the First Street Bridge. It was a bomb robot on a platform of tracked wheels the size of an ATV, bright silver in color. It must have made some kind of ultrasonic noise when they booted it up, because it set a dog walker’s clutch of terriers barking. Half an hour passed, and nothing seemed to happen. Under the glare of the midsummer sun, it was impossible to see inside the motionless 4Runner at a 100 yards’ distance. Some bystanders got bored and drifted away or sought shelter in the shade. A potbellied DPS officer in a felt cowboy hat walked up to those who remained and began to take photos of us with a digital camera. It was an unexpected thing to do to unoffending pedestrians, and chilling the way he went about it, coldly making eye contact with each person in turn. But then, it’s not for their friendliness that Texas state troopers are so famous. Anyway, we were all wearing face masks, as was he, on account of the coronavirus pandemic.

[2/2] >>299 https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#24_September_2020_(Austin,_Texas_voted_to_cut_the_thug_department's_budget) -- Austin, Texas, voted to cut the thug department's budget. Texas Governor Abbott threatens to cut Austin's taxes as a punishment for this, and put the city's thug department under the control of the lawless and cruel state thug department. The article starts by describing how the state thugs attacked Lauren Mestas. Her car had slogans such as FUCK THESE RACIST POLICE, and "all cops are bastards." A thug was so offended by this that he believed he was entitled to bring many thugs to point guns at her, then force her out of the car, which they ruined ‐ demonstrating that at least Texas state cops are bastards. -- https://theintercept.com/2020/09/22/texas-austin-police-militarization-budget/ -- Texas Deployed SWAT, Bomb Robot, Small Army of Cops to Arrest a Woman and Her Dog -- September 22 2020 -- She had done nothing wrong. State troopers started following her because of “anti-law enforcement rhetoric” on her car windows.

Shortly before noon, the SWAT team — about two dozen men — stacked behind one of the BearCat armored vehicles and began to advance on foot toward the stationary 4Runner. Behind them, a line of half-ton police SUVs crept forward at a walking pace, their bright LED light bars flashing silently in the heat. The two BearCats boxed in the 4Runner, front and rear, and physically sandwiched it in place, crushing both bumpers. The big gray police drone hovered directly above, like a UFO about to abduct the driver. Finally, the bomb robot moved in and used its mechanical arm to smash a window that said “NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE.” At that point, the 4Runner was completely blocked from view. It would be another 18 days before I obtained the incident report from DPS through a public records request, and three weeks before I tracked down Mestas and learned from her what happened next. After coming to a stop, Mestas told me, she couldn’t understand why the officers didn’t approach. She only saw them standing behind the doors of their cop cars with their guns drawn. She says she never heard their commands, which they made over a megaphone, for her to exit the vehicle. Her windows were rolled up, her hands were in the air, and she was too afraid to reach down and switch off her blasting music. “They might have thought I had a weapon or something,” she explained. As a first-generation Mexican American, “I didn’t want to give them any reason to think I was a threat.”

She saw more police cars arriving, many more, which only worsened the incipient panic attack she was suffering. She told herself that she would not lower her hands, not move a muscle, no matter what happened next. Optimus Prime could sense her terror. “He was trying to comfort me. He was up on my lap licking my face like, ‘It’s OK, mom.’” She saw the drone hovering by her window and tried to talk to it. “I was screaming at the top of my lungs: ‘Hey, this is my name, this is my car. You guys are going to look so stupid after this, when you realize it was you that messed up.’” She couldn’t believe it when the armored vehicles crushed her bumpers. “I was like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ At this point in time, there were dudes in military gear all around me. I’m worried about my dog because that’s my baby boy, and I don’t know if he’s going to jump out and how they’re going to react. I’m trying to tell them, ‘Dudes, this is a misunderstanding. Someone didn’t file the paperwork. I have my driver’s license in the car. I have the case number in my purse written down.’ They’re like, ‘Don’t talk, don’t talk.’”

The SWAT officers instructed her to reach with her left hand and open the door from the outside, step out slowly, and lie face down on the ground. She was wearing a stretchy black dress and boots, and the hot pavement burned her bare knees. Next, they had her crawl backwards toward the sound of their voices. “They’re shouting all this stuff at me: ‘Go forward. Now actually back up. All right, go forward. No, no, no, wrong. Go back.’ I’m like, ‘What do you want me to do? I’ll do it.’” She was literally shaking with fear, and could not help thinking of the 2016 killing of Daniel Shaver, an unarmed and unoffending 26-year-old who was mercilessly executed by police in Mesa, Arizona, for failing to follow their confusing instructions— screamed at him like some cruel game of Simon Says — to crawl backwards toward them in a hotel hallway. Mestas avoided that fate, at least. The SWAT officers zip-tied her wrists, jerked her to her feet, put her in a black sport utility vehicle, and transported her to the DPS building just north of the Capitol. The state troopers detained her for the purposes of a “CID interview” with DPS’s Criminal Investigative Division, charged with investigating organized crime, transnational gangs, active shooters, and other acts of terrorism. They told her she wasn’t being arrested, only detained, and took her into a room where she was interrogated by a detective named Bibler — pronounced, he told her, “like the Bible.”

According to Mestas, Bibler asked her nothing about the 4Runner but grilled her on the subject of Black Lives Matter, her opinion of police officers, and the rioting and looting allegedly taking place in Austin. “He was trying to propagate his thoughts on me,” Mestas said. “He was like, ‘All lives matter.’ And I was like, ‘So you agree: Black and Brown lives matter.’ He’s like, ‘And Green and Blue.’ At the time, I had some pretty visible self-harm scars, so he was also kind of commenting on that. And I was like, ‘Uh, this ain’t therapy, dude. Like, nah.’” DPS and APD told The Intercept that the incident was caused by Mestas’s failure to report that she had recovered her car. 311 records, however, show that she did place a second call — as she says she did to retract the stolen vehicle report. She was released without charges within the hour. DPS returned her 4Runner with the window broken and both ends crushed. She was not offered compensation for the damage but was thankful to be reunited with Optimus Prime, who was rattled but otherwise unharmed.

Undaunted by being arrested in so spectacular a fashion, she rejoined the ongoing BLM protests the very next day. She estimates that she has been to a dozen or more demonstrations since then, around APD’s headquarters, the Capitol, and the corner of Fourth and Congress — the spot where Foster was shot and now the site of a makeshift shrine. “We don’t need more police,” she said. “We need more social workers, and EMTs on nonviolent calls.” She acknowledged that she was partly at fault for the incident on the bridge — she should have pulled to the side of the road and exited the vehicle as instructed — but called the over-the-top reaction “a complete waste of resources.” Despite its reputation as a progressive bastion in a conservative state, Austin spends nearly 40 percent of its municipal budget — some $434 million — on its police force, a more lopsided allocation of resources toward law enforcement than any other big city in Texas. But there are indications that this could change. On August 13, the City Council voted unanimously to cut APD’s funding by up to a third. Although it was a preliminary move that could be walked back, $21.5 million in cuts will take place immediately, and it counts as one of the most concrete measures that any U.S. city has taken to rein in police spending to date. Echoing knee-jerk support-the-troops rhetoric used to suppress criticism of Pentagon waste, Abbott said that the City Council’s decision “puts the brave men and women of APD at greater risk.” On August 18, he and other Republican leaders unveiled a proposed bill to freeze the property tax revenues of any Texas city that reduces the budget of its police department. Abbott also vowed to deploy even more DPS troopers to “stand in the gap,” and on September 3, tweeted that he was considering a separate legislative proposal that would allow the state government to assume control of APD, which would effectively become a subsidiary of DPS.

That agency’s nearly $6 billion budget does not appear to be in any immediate danger of reduction, even with the looming $4.6 billion deficit the state comptroller is predicting through 2021. DPS employs 4,129 full-time commissioned officers and spends about $1.4 billion on salaries alone. If the overwhelming number of state troopers summoned to arrest Lauren Mestas for stealing her own car was any indication, they have an awful lot of time on their hands, not to mention an apparently unlimited cornucopia of top-of-the-line vehicles, equipment, and gear to draw on. The plentitude of resources contrasted strongly with the street refugee camp directly underneath the First Street Bridge, which grows a little larger every day that the pandemic grinds on, and more people lose their jobs, face eviction, or are ruined by medical costs. Not just here but beneath bridges and overpasses all over Austin, homeless encampments are proliferating, made of dome tents, shelters built of old signage, lawn furniture, laundry lines, and dumpsters installed by the city to contain the trash. All the wooded and overgrown areas of the hike-and-bike trail around Ladybird Lake are now tunneled and burrowed by human residents; at night you can hear their radios playing softly and catch whiffs of hot dogs grilling on small charcoal fires. A stone’s throw from where Mestas was arrested, not 100 yards away, is the House the Homeless Memorial, dedicated to those who have lost their lives on the streets of Austin. The plaque at the base of it says, “Homelessness is the essence of depression. It is immoral. It is socially corrupt. And it is an act of violence.”

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#29_September_2020_((satire)_Biden's_lack_of_plan_for_widespread_violence) -- (satire) *Reporter Presses Biden On Lack Of Own Plan To Trigger Widespread Violence.* -- https://politics.theonion.com/reporter-presses-biden-on-lack-of-own-plan-to-trigger-w-1845183264 -- Friday 1:45PM (datetime="2020-09-25T13:45:00-05:00")

Questioning the former vice president’s preparedness for the nation’s highest office, CNN reporter Jim Acosta pressed presidential candidate Joe Biden Friday on his lack of a plan to trigger widespread violence across the U.S. “Sir, we are weeks away from the election and yet you still haven’t offered your own comprehensive policies to ensure that Americans continue to be killed and brutalized in the streets,” said Acosta, urging the Democratic nominee to highlight the concrete steps he would take as president to provoke bloodshed on a massive scale. “What message does it send to voters when you criticize President Trump’s actions without offering a contrasting vision for terrorizing vulnerable citizens to the point that fear of bodily harm becomes a fact of daily life?” Acosta went on to critique Biden for never publicly disavowing the hordes of immigrants illegally casting ballots for him.

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#28_September_2020_(Military_and_constitution) -- What would the US military do if the wrecker orders it to suppress "rebellion" based on "fake news"? For generals to resign if ordered to overthrow constitutional government would save their own individual honor, but it would not save constitutional government. Rather, the first one in line who hasn't got enough honor to resign would commit the crime. Their duty would be to preserve constitutional government, not step aside. -- https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/25/trump-and-gop-openly-hatch-election-theft-plot-question-grows-which-side-will-our -- As Trump and GOP Openly Hatch Election Theft Plot, Question Grows: 'Which Side Will Our Military Be On?' -- Friday, September 25, 2020 -- Amid growing concern that chaos will be unleashed in wake of uncertain results, Pentagon officials reportedly discussing their response.

Amid President Donald Trump's transparent efforts to sow doubt and discord around this year's election, his desire to confirm a right-wing Supreme Court justice ahead of November's contest, and his repeated refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power regardless of the outcome, the specter of Trump ordering active-duty troops to quash protests during a possibly chaotic interregnum has reportedly provoked anxiety at the Pentagon. According to Friday reporting by the New York Times, high-ranking military leaders have vowed to keep the armed forces out of the electoral process and its potentially chaotic aftermath, with Defense Department officials saying top generals could resign if the commander in chief tries to deploy them to U.S. streets. As the Times reports:

Senior leaders at the Pentagon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged that they were talking among themselves about what to do if Mr. Trump, who will still be president from Election Day to Inauguration Day, invokes the Insurrection Act and tries to send troops into the streets, as he repeatedly threatened to do during the protests against police brutality and systemic racism.

The Insurrection Act gives the president the power to deploy active-duty military personnel to neutralize civil unrest even if governors are opposed to it. General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Defense Secretary Mark Esper both objected to taking that route this summer, and Trump yielded, though not before nearly firing Esper. But the Times noted that Trump, "who refers to the armed forces as 'my military' and 'my generals,' has lumped them with other supporters like Bikers for Trump, who could offer backup in the face of opposition" this fall and winter. "Which side will our military be on when this happens?" tweeted Charles Idelson of National Nurses United earlier this week after Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he is defeated at the polls. In other countries, a head of state's threat to "get rid of the ballots" to ensure a "continuation" rather than a "transfer" of power would be called a coup d'état, Idelson remarked.

In all the other banana republics they call this a coup d etat? Which side will our military be on when this happens? https://t.co/EH9bIvW8lU — Charles Idelson (@cidelson) September 24, 2020

Many have been wondering for weeks what will happen if Trump, who has declined more than once to abide by the results of the election and has repeatedly and baselessly attacked mail-in ballots in an attempt to undermine the validity of the vote—which is already underway in some states—loses and refuses to voluntarily leave office. On August 11, retired Army officers John Nagl and Paul Yingling argued in an open letter to Milley that "you may have to choose between defying a lawless president or betraying your constitutional oath... If Donald Trump refuses to leave office at the expiration of his constitutional term, the U.S. military must remove him by force, and you must give that order." As CNN reported last month, Nagl and Yingling's "advocacy for having the armed forces get involved in settling a disputed election prompted backlash from both the Pentagon and other experts in the field of civilian-military relations."

When answering questions posed by Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) and Rep. Mikie Sherril (D-N.J.), both members of the House Armed Services Committee, Milley in late August was emphatic that the military would play no role in resolving a disputed election. "I believe deeply in the principle of an apolitical U.S. military," Milley told lawmakers. "In the event of a dispute over some aspect of the elections, by law U.S. courts and the U.S. Congress are required to resolve any disputes, not the U.S. military. I foresee no role for the U.S armed forces in this process." As the Associated Press reported last month, Milley "anchored many of his responses" in the U.S. Constitution. "Asked if the military would refuse an order from the president if he was attempting to use military action for political gain rather than national security, Milley said, 'I will not follow an unlawful order.'"

Milley was sharply criticized in June by current and former lawmakers and members of the armed forces for participating in Trump's militarized stunt in which protesters in Lafayette Square near the White House were violently dispersed by the National Guard so that Trump could be photographed holding a bible in front of St. John's Church. Milley publicly apologized for escorting Trump through the park, much to the chagrin of the president. According to the Times, in private discussions at the Defense Department about "the possibility of Mr. Trump trying to use any civil unrest around the elections to put his thumb on the scales... several Pentagon officials said that such a move could prompt resignations among many of Mr. Trump's senior generals, starting at the top with General Milley" and likely including General Charles Brown, the Air Force chief of staff.

Earlier this year, Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown University law professor and past Defense Department official under former President Barack Obama, was the head of a bipartisan team of more than 100 former national security officials and election experts who simulated the most significant risks to a peaceful transfer of power. The Transition Integrity Project stressed that there is "a high degree of likelihood that November's elections will be marked by a chaotic legal and political landscape," and it is likely that Trump will "contest the result by both legal and extra-legal means, in an attempt to hold onto power." But the analysis highlighted that "these risks can be mitigated," and the report (pdf) states:

The worst outcomes of the exercises are far from a certainty. The purpose of this report is not to frighten, but to spur all stakeholders to action. Our legal rules and political norms don't work unless people are prepared to defend them and to speak out when others violate them. It is incumbent upon elected officials, civil society leaders, and the press to challenge authoritarian actions in the courts, in the media, and in the streets through peaceful protest.

In a letter released Thursday, nearly 500 retired military leaders and national security officials from both major political parties said Trump is unfit for office and endorsed Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden. The Times reported that Milley on Thursday during a virtual question-and-answer session with U.S. service members around the world urged them to "keep the Constitution close to your heart."

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#10_September_2020_(Justice_Department_taking_up_liability_for_damages) -- The wrecker has told the "Justice Department" to make the US take up the liability for damages, as well as defense costs in E Jean Carroll's lawsuit accusing him of raping her. -- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/08/trump-defamation-justice-department-e-jean-carroll-rape-accusation -- US justice department seeks to defend Trump in lawsuit tied to rape allegation -- Wed 9 Sep 2020 -- Attorneys seek to substitute US for Trump as defendant in E Jean Carroll case, meaning tax dollars could cover any payout -- Carroll is trying to get a DNA sample from Trump to see whether it matches as-yet-unidentified male genetic material found on a dress that she says she was wearing during the alleged attack >>259

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#29_September_2020_(Thugs_in_Boston_and_some_neighboring_cities) -- The reforming district attorney for Boston and some neighboring cities has published a list of cops in the zone who have been specifically accused of being thugs. It will be harder for them to succeed by testilying ( https://www.stallman.org/glossary.html#testilying ). -- https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/09/25/metro/suffolk-da-rollins-releases-watch-list-136-area-officers-accused-misconduct/ -- Suffolk DA Rollins releases watch list of 136 area officers accused of misconduct -- September 25, 2020

Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins released a list of 136 police officers on Friday night that her office said have been accused of lying, corruption, or misconduct, and whose credibility may be undermined in court. The database, called the Law Enforcement Automatic Discovery, or LEAD, database, includes current and former officers from the Massachusetts State Police, Boston Police, and Transit Police, as well as Chelsea and Revere. There is one IRS officer and one Special Police Officer. The list is a revision and expansion of an existing database of officers with credibility issues maintained by previous District Attorney Daniel F. Conley, which had fewer than 20 names. “The LEAD database will help us ensure that the legal process works and people charged with crimes by our office receive all of the information they are entitled to in order to properly defend themselves,” Rollins said in a statement released Friday night.

“If testimony provided by prosecution witnesses is suspect, then the criminal legal system itself is suspect. All of us in law enforcement must be beyond reproach, because what we do impacts matters of life, death, and freedom for the general public.” Under the 1963 Supreme Court decision in Brady v. Maryland, prosecutors must turn over evidence favorable to a defendant, including material that may undermine the credibility of a prosecution witness, such as a police officer. Many prosecutors' offices keep lists of officers found to have engaged in misconduct in case they are needed at trial. Matthew Brelis, a spokesman for Rollins, said her office would make decisions on whether to call officers or consider their evidence on a case-by-case basis.

Rollins’s office is working with defense attorneys to determine whether officers in the new LEAD database have been testifying without anyone being aware of their issues. The database will be updated regularly, Brelis said. Officers can be added for several reasons: an investigation or prosecution for criminal conduct in any jurisdiction; an investigation in any jurisdiction into discriminatory or defamatory actions targeting a protected category or class; an investigation in any jurisdiction, including by a law enforcement agency’s internal affairs or anti-corruption unit, that casts doubt upon their truthfulness or integrity; or a finding by a judge, review board, or oversight entity that an officer is not credible. Brelis was not able to provide information Friday night about how the database was compiled. In many cases, the district attorney cited Boston Globe articles and information requests as the basis for officers' inclusion. Of the 136 names in the database, 126 were added on Friday. Brelis said it was not clear how complete the database is, but said Rollins believes “the overwhelming majority of law enforcement officers and employees in Suffolk County are dedicated and compassionate professionals who provide exemplary service to the communities they serve.”

The database contains 70 State Police troopers, 54 Boston police officers, 5 Transit police officers, 3 Revere police officers, and 2 Chelsea police officers. A Boston Police spokesman was not able to immediately comment because the database was released at 9 p.m. Friday during a large protest downtown. A spokesperson for the city of Boston was also not able to immediately comment. Spokespeople for the other police departments were not immediately able to be reached. Rollins, who took office in January 2019 after running on a platform of criminal justice reform, has clashed repeatedly with police and other state law enforcement officials.

She has instructed prosecutors in her office not to prosecute certain low-level crimes, decried racial disparities in the criminal justice system, and called for greater scrutiny and oversight of police. Her release of the LEAD database comes amid a national reckoning on policing and racial justice, sparked by the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, and as the Boston Police Reform Task Force prepares a final report on on ways to build better accountability and transparency in the department. Rollins previously resisted releasing the database. The Globe filed two public records requests, one last fall and another in June, requesting the list, but her office refused until the state’s Supervisor of Records ordered her office to respond. Legal advocates said the release of the database was an important step towards ensuring defendants' rights are protected.

“Police officers are paid to be observers, and then to testify truthfully as witnesses in prosecutions," said Randy Gioia, Deputy Chief Counsel for the Public Defender Division of CPCS. “That’s what they’re required to do, and when they’re dishonest they undermine the core of our criminal justice system and it taints the integrity of the good police officers, the honest ones.” Gioia said that prosecutors should not call officers with credibility problems to testify in the first place. “There has to be a bright line rule,” he said.

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#24_September_2020_(Plotting_violence_ahead_of_rallies) -- *Revealed: pro-Trump activists plotted violence ahead of Portland rallies.* *Patriots Coalition members suggested political assassinations and said ‘laws will be broken, people will get hurt’, leaked chats show.* We all suspected this, but we could not be sure. Now we know that the bully's supporters are a criminal gang. -- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/23/oregon-portland-pro-trump-protests-violence-texts -- Wed 23 Sep 2020 -- “I’m waiting for the presidential go to start open firing” >>285

he was a friend of Epstein

I'm sure

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#10_September_2020_(Justice_Department_taking_up_liability_for_damages) -- The wrecker has told the "Justice Department" to make the US take up the liability for damages, as well as defense costs in E Jean Carroll's lawsuit accusing him of raping her. -- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/08/trump-defamation-justice-department-e-jean-carroll-rape-accusation -- US justice department seeks to defend Trump in lawsuit tied to rape allegation -- Wed 9 Sep 2020 -- Attorneys seek to substitute US for Trump as defendant in E Jean Carroll case, meaning tax dollars could cover any payout -- Carroll is trying to get a DNA sample from Trump to see whether it matches as-yet-unidentified male genetic material found on a dress that she says she was wearing during the alleged attack >>259

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#7_September_2020_(Bully_wants_to_punish_journalist_who_reported_his_contempt_for_US_soldiers_that_died_in_wars.) -- The bully has repeatedly expressed his contempt for US soldiers that died in wars. Now he wants to punish a journalist who reported this. About the US soldiers that died or were injured in Iraq, the bully is half right. They were duped — by Dubya. He started the war >based on lies. All the US military personnel that Dubya hijacked to make the Bush forces were duped, and Dubya is guilty of an enormous crime, against them and against Iraqis. They deserve condolences for that, not contempt. They wanted to serve their country — it is not their fault that Dubya lied to them about what they would be doing. The bully has contempt for them because he is heartless. He lives by duping people; to excuse this, he believes that anyone who is duped deserves to be duped. Now he has mad veterans, many of who supported him, very angry. -- https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/04/veterans-groups-condemn-trump-national-disgrace-over-reports-he-called-fallen -- Veterans Groups Condemn Trump as 'A National Disgrace' Over Reports He Called Fallen Soldiers 'Losers' and 'Suckers' -- Friday, September 04, 2020 -- "Donald Trump does not respect our men and women in uniform. He does not respect their families. He does not respect veterans." >>260

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#1_October_2020_(Right_wing_extremists_infiltrating_thugs) -- An FBI report from 2006 warned that right wing extremists would try to infiltrate US thug departments. We know that a large fraction of thugs are right-wing extremists. Whether this is the result of active infiltration, I don't know, but I don't think it matters much. -- https://theintercept.com/2020/09/29/police-white-supremacist-infiltration-fbi/ -- Unredacted FBI Document Sheds New Light on White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement -- September 29 2020 -- A 2006 intelligence assessment reveals that officials had concerns about the infiltration of police departments for years but failed to warn the public.

The FBI has long been concerned about the infiltration of law enforcement by white supremacist groups and its impact on police abuse and tolerance of racism, the unredacted version of a previously circulated document reveals. The FBI threat assessment report was released by Rep. Jamie Raskin, chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform’s Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Subcommittee, ahead of a hearing about the white supremacist infiltration of local police departments scheduled for Tuesday. A heavily redacted version of the 2006 document had previously been published, one of a handful of documents revealing federal officials’ growing concern with white supremacists’ “historical” interest in “infiltrating law enforcement communities or recruiting law enforcement personnel.” A different internal document obtained by The Intercept in 2017 had also noted that “domestic terrorism investigations focused on militia extremists, white supremacist extremists, and sovereign citizen extremists often have identified active links to law enforcement officers.” The unredacted version of the first document sheds further light on the FBI’s concerns, as early as 2006, about “self-initiated efforts by individuals, particularly among those already within law enforcement ranks, to volunteer their professional resources to white supremacist causes with which they sympathize.” “Having personnel within law enforcement agencies has historically been and will continue to be a desired asset for white supremacist groups seeking to anticipate law enforcement interest in and actions against them,” the report notes in a section that was previously redacted.

Another previously redacted section warned of “factors that might generate sympathies among existing law enforcement personnel and cause them to volunteer their support to white supremacist causes,” which could include hostility toward developments in U.S. domestic and foreign policies “that conflict with white supremacist ideologies,” the report warns. Some redactions do not seem to be justified, for instance, the FBI’s conclusion that “white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement can result in other abuses of authority and passive tolerance of racism within communities served” — an apparent recognition of the potential harm to the public posed by white supremacist individuals embedded in police departments. Other redactions relate to incidents of compromised intelligence. The unredacted document notes that “a white supremacist leader is known to have acquired a sensitive FBI Intelligence Bulletin on the white supremacist movement that had been posted on Law Enforcement Online and had inadvertently become publicly accessible through a law enforcement Web site. In addition to identifying the FBI personnel who prepared the bulletin, the document identified the FBI’s targeting interests within the white supremacist movement.” The redactions also include examples of “strategic infiltration and recruitment campaigns” by white supremacist groups. “Most information about systematic attempts by white supremacist groups to infiltrate law enforcement involves efforts by the National Alliance (NA) during the era of its founder, William Pierce, and in the years immediately following his death in 2002,” the document notes. “White supremacist infiltration of the federal government, including the FBI, plays a prominent role in Pierce’s novels, The Turner Diaries (1978) and Hunter (1989), both widely read works that are sometimes interpreted as practical guidance within white supremacist circles.”

The memo goes on to note that active and retired law enforcement personnel were known to have joined the National Alliance, in some cases holding regional leadership roles in the organization, and raises concerns that the group’s successful efforts to infiltrate law enforcement would likely benefit other white supremacist groups with which it shared intelligence. The redacted sections also include two examples of what the FBI refers to as “white supremacist sympathizers.” In one, the memo mentions that “in July 2006, a former police officer with possible ties to the KKK was charged with civil rights violations involving alleged death threats made against black schoolchildren and a black city council member.” In another, the report mentions the case of Shayne Allyn Ziska, a state correctional officer at the California Institution for Men in Chino, California, who was sentenced to 17 1/2 years in federal prison. “Ziska was convicted on federal racketeering charges for helping the Nazi Low Riders white supremacist prison gang distribute drugs and assault other inmates, and reportedly providing white supremacist indoctrination to an inmate,” the report notes. “Ziska advised he considered himself a government infiltrator consistent with National Socialism’s strategy for revolution.” It’s not clear why the FBI chose to redact those sections. Markings indicate that officials believed redacted portions of the document would disclose techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions, or expose “substantial internal matters.” But some of the redacted text appears to refer to incidents already known to the public. The bureau has for years resisted calls for greater transparency with regard to its knowledge of white supremacist groups. “The public deserves to see the truth reflected in this finally unredacted report,” Raskin said in a statement to The Intercept. “The FBI saw long ago the multiple potential dangers associated with violent white supremacy and its efforts to infiltrate local law enforcement with ideas, attitudes, and personnel.” “The FBI’s continuing refusal to acknowledge and combat this threat, just like its refusal to appear today, constitutes a serious dereliction of duty,” Raskin added. The FBI was invited but declined to participate in today’s hearing, a spokesperson for the committee said. “These newly revealed passages underscore the seriousness of the threat posed by white supremacists to law enforcement personnel and the public at large. That the FBI has continued to withhold this full document, despite enormous public pressure, at a time when the white supremacist threat is rampant again, is indefensible.”

The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a report published last month by the Brennan Center for Justice, former FBI agent Mike German detailed law enforcement agencies’ longstanding failure to respond to affiliation with white supremacist and militant groups in their ranks, as well as the long history of law enforcement involvement in white supremacist violence. Since 2000, law enforcement officials with alleged connections to white supremacist groups have been exposed in more than a dozen states, while hundreds of federal, state, and local law enforcement officials have been caught expressing racist, nativist, and sexist views on social media, “which demonstrates that overt bias is far too common,” German noted in the report. “Efforts to address systemic and implicit biases in law enforcement are unlikely to be effective in reducing the racial disparities in the criminal justice system as long as explicit racism in law enforcement continues to endure,” German wrote in that report. “There is ample evidence to demonstrate that it does.”

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jan-apr.html#12_February_2020_(Fighting_voter_suppression) -- How Advocates Are Fighting Voter Suppression. -- Friday, February 07, 2020 -- As the 2020 election season gets under way, activists are beginning to push back against voter disenfranchisement across the country.

Voting rights advocates are battling on multiple fronts this presidential election year to fend off a proliferation of voter suppression maneuvers that largely restrict people of color and younger Americans from casting their ballots. “Heading into the 2020 election, voters in half the states face more obstacles to the ballot box and will find it harder to vote than they did a decade ago,” says Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. These new obstacles have energized a counter-campaign to restore and expand voting rights. Often the newer restrictions focus on bureaucratic details, but their intent and impact target the same populations that historically faced violence and harassment when seeking to exercise the right to vote. The proliferating challenges to the right to vote include requiring people to show specific government identification; mandating an exact match between the name on voting registration records and on approved forms of ID; reducing early voting and absentee voting; preventing voter registration drives by third-party organizations; and aggressive purges of voters who may have moved or who failed to vote in previous elections.

* Voter ID requirements: According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 36 states now have voter ID laws. Millions of Americans don’t have the requisite ID.
* Exact match standards: Georgia enacted a strict match requirement in 2017, and 80 percent of voters whose registrations were blocked by the new law were people of color. A lawsuit forced Georgia to largely end the policy.
* Early/absentee voting restrictions: cutting hours or days of voting in states such as Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Ohio has the effect of longer lines at the polls and fewer overall voters.
* Restrictions on voting registration drives by third-party organizations, such as those enacted in Tennessee that impose civil penalties on canvassers that submit incomplete or inaccurate registration forms. The measure was enacted after the Tennessee Black Voter Project registered 90,000 new voters for the 2018 midterm election.
* Roll Purges: States like Georgia and Wisconsin are removing hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls, often on flimsy pretexts. A federal judge recently backed Georgia’s purge of more than 100,000 voters.

According to the Brennan Center For Justice, these practices disproportionately disenfranchise people of color. “What we are seeing is systematic voter suppression around the country,” says Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of Fair Fight Action, the Georgia organization building on former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’ work mobilizing and protecting the rights of voters. Abrams ran against then-Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who refused to step down from his job of overseeing elections while campaigning for governor. The final vote count gave him the race by a margin of just 55,000, after as many as 1 million voters were removed from the rolls. She has called Kemp an “architect of voter suppression,” and Abrams used her now-famous non-concession speech of Nov. 16, 2018 to launch Fair Fight Action with Groh-Wargo. “We’re going to have a fair fight in 2020 because my mission is to make certain that no one has to go through in 2020 what we went through in 2018,” Abrams said in a speech to a union in Las Vegas last summer when she announced an additional initiative aimed at mobilizing voters and countering voter suppression in 20 battleground states. In Georgia, Fair Fight sued in federal court over voter suppression issues raised by the gubernatorial election and the state’s move to purge 300,000 voters under a “use it or lose it” rule. The court so far has refused to take emergency action to stop the mass Georgia purge, but Groh-Wargo says the suit led to nearly 30,000 voters getting restored after the state admitted to a technical glitch and after advocates’ outreach prompted some voters to update their own registrations. “The court didn’t give us the ruling we had hoped for which was to completely restore these use-it-or-lose-it people, but we ended up viewing it as a win,” says Groh-Wargo.

“What we are seeing is systematic voter suppression around the country.”

That rule also is at the heart of an Ohio law that allowed purging of voters who failed to vote for six years and did not confirm their residency. An unknown number of voters, thought to number in the thousands, were removed from the rolls in 2015, but in 2018 the Supreme Court upheld the law in a 5-4 decision. Other states besides Ohio and Georgia with some version of use-it-or-lose-it include Pennsylvania, Oregon, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Montana. In Wisconsin, which like Georgia is expected to be a battleground state in 2020, a purge of 200,000 registered voters based on a computer algorithm showing they had changed their residence has led to suits in federal court and has divided the state Elections Commission along party lines on how to proceed. On Jan. 14, an appellate court put a hold on the purge, but pending litigation challenges the hold. At a private event in Wisconsin last fall, Justin Clark, an adviser to President Trump’s reelection campaign, was recorded confirming that “traditionally, it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes.” Clark was quoted at a later event telling a crowd of Republican lawyers that voter suppression is “going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program.” Wisconsin also is in the voting rights crosshairs over identification restrictions that opponents say make it more difficult for students to vote. A 2011 law establishing a photo ID requirement was signed by then-Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, and survived initial court challenges. A federal lawsuit filed by Common Cause is still pending.

That suit says that among 28 states with voter ID laws that allow use of student IDs, Wisconsin is the only one that requires students also to show proof of enrollment and that the student ID can only be valid for up to two years. Carolyn DeWitt, president and executive director of Rock the Vote, a nonpartisan organization that works to get more young voters to the polls, says ID laws generally can be problematic for young people who move frequently and may not have a driver’s license or other requisite identification. “In Texas, student IDs from public universities are not accepted for voting, but gun licenses are,” says DeWitt. Rock the Vote also opposes residency laws like the one New Hampshire lawmakers adopted last year, which changes the definition of residency to require that voters be permanent residents of New Hampshire. That makes it more difficult for out-of-state college students to be eligible to vote where they go to school.

“We are definitely seeing a backlash against the wave of youth voting that we’ve seen over the last couple of years,” DeWitt says. In addition to monitoring voter suppression initiatives from Republican-controlled state legislatures, voting rights advocates worry about identifying and curbing stealth tactics by local election officials. Administrative moves that can depress voting include shutting down or moving polling places, changes in polling place hours, using new ways of voting that may confuse voters, and not adequately training polling place workers, all of which also may contribute to long waits to cast ballots. “These types of things are hard for us to alert people of and address everywhere,” says Sophia Lakin, an attorney with the ACLU’s Voting Rights project. “So many of these restrictions fall disproportionately on these communities that have been growing in strength over the last decade or so—voters of color, young voters, voters with disabilities,” adds Lakin. “What’s at stake for many of the state actors who are perpetrating these restrictive measures, and certainly what’s motivating it, is an attempt to keep control.

“As the country’s electorate has changed over time becoming more diverse, that has motivated I would say a lot of efforts to make voting more difficult. Look at what we are seeing with racial gerrymandering,” she continued. “You’re putting in place a situation where politicians are choosing their voters, and voters are not choosing their politicians.” Advocates cite two key triggers that helped propel voting restrictions: the 2008 election of Barack Obama and a 2013 Supreme Court ruling gutting part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Lakin says the huge increase in voters of color and young voters in 2008 “resulted in the election of the first African American president, and almost immediately in that aftermath we start to hear the beginnings of a suppression period that follows about 45 years of expansion of voting rights.” Then in Shelby v. Holder, the Supreme Court in 2013 removed a requirement for states and local governments with a history of discrimination to get approval from the federal government before implementing any changes to their voting laws or practices. Lakin says the ruling gave the jurisdictions formerly subject to preclearance “free rein in terms of putting into place restrictions,” and since the 2013 ruling those states have had a higher rate of purges.

“People need to understand our whole country’s history is a fight for voting rights and in many ways.”

The Voting Rights Advancement Act, which passed the House in 2019 but is unlikely to get through the Republican-held Senate, would restore the preclearance process voided by Shelby and update the Voting Rights Act to provide protections against newer forms of voter discrimination. The counter-campaign to increase voting access advocates measures that make it easier to vote, such as same-day registration, automatic voter registration, automatic registration updates and voting by mail. At this point, 16 states and the District of Columbia have approved automatic voter registration, but Weiser says only 12 states will have it in place in time for the 2020 elections. She says that 24 states will have same-day registration in place for the November general election. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 21 states now allow some elections to be conducted by mail, and four use mailed ballots for all elections: Oregon (2000), Washington (2011), Colorado (2013) and Hawaii (2019).

Groh-Wargo urges candidates and campaigns to start early building voter protection infrastructure and to follow the “Abrams Playbook” of reaching out to all voters, including those in underrepresented communities and those considered unlikely to vote. “We can’t win every court battle, we can’t overcome Russian interference in our elections, we can’t do Congress’ job for them,” says Groh-Wargo. “We’re not going to sit around and wait. We’re going to be fighting day in and day out. So much of the right to vote is an exercise in organizing as much as it is an exercise in the battle in the courtroom.” “People need to understand our whole country’s history is a fight for voting rights and in many ways, this is about a new fight, and it is a fight worth having and we can be victorious,” she says. What Can You Do? Advocates urge individual voters to help counter voter suppression by:

* Checking your voter registration early and often to make sure it’s up to date. Make sure family and friends also check. Many states have easy online access to your view registration records, and vote.org also has voting data from all 50 states.
* Helping counter misinformation and disinformation by knowing the credible sources for voting information and sharing it with others. Double-check the information you hear and report disinformation immediately.
* Volunteering to be poll workers.

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#1_October_2020_(Right_wing_extremists_infiltrating_thugs) -- An FBI report from 2006 warned that right wing extremists would try to infiltrate US thug departments. We know that a large fraction of thugs are right-wing extremists. Whether this is the result of active infiltration, I don't know, but I don't think it matters much. -- https://theintercept.com/2020/09/29/police-white-supremacist-infiltration-fbi/ -- Unredacted FBI Document Sheds New Light on White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement -- September 29 2020 -- A 2006 intelligence assessment reveals that officials had concerns about the infiltration of police departments for years but failed to warn the public. >>314

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#2_October_2020_(Cars_driven_into_Black_Lives_Matter_protesters) -- 104 drivers have driven cars into Black Lives Matter protesters since May 25. Some of them were terrorist attacks, and 39 drivers face criminal charges. Some right-wing fanatics escaped prosecution by claiming they were afraid of the protesters they had driven into the middle of. -- https://eu.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/nation/2020/07/08/vehicle-ramming-attacks-66-us-since-may-27/5397700002/ -- Cars have hit demonstrators 104 times since George Floyd protests began -- updatedate="2020-09-27T22:55:35Z"

Dozens of people had gathered in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for a third night of protests demanding justice for Breonna Taylor when a car barreled through the crowd, hitting several protesters. "It just went straight into the middle of the crowd and veered off toward the left," said Samantha Colombo, 25, an Albuquerque resident who said they've been protesting with dozens of other people for three nights at the same intersection. No one appeared to be injured, Colombo said. Video of the incident began to circulate on Twitter on Friday. "For the first two nights, the police blocked off the streets. Today they did not, so we had a couple cars blocking the streets for us and people lining up their bikes," Colombo said. "There was this one car that for a few minutes was just beeping for a minute or so straight, so a few people went up to the car to get them to move, and they eventually just started going." Amid thousands of protests nationwide this summer against police brutality, dozens of drivers have plowed into crowds of protesters marching in roadways, raising questions about the drivers' motivations.

Witnesses, law enforcement and terrorism experts said some of the vehicle incidents appear to be targeted and politically motivated; others appear to be situations in which the driver became frightened or enraged by protesters surrounding their vehicle. "There are groups that do want people to take their cars and drive them into Black Lives Matters protesters so that they won’t protest anymore. There’s an element of terrorism there. Is it all of them? No," said J.J. MacNab, a fellow at George Washington University's Program on Extremism. "I look at it as an anti-protester group of acts, some of which are white supremacists, some not." There have been at least 104 incidents of people driving vehicles into protests from May 27 through Sept. 5, including 96 by civilians and eight by police, according to Ari Weil, a terrorism researcher at the University of Chicago's Project on Security and Threats who spoke with USA TODAY this summer. Weil began tracking the incidents as protests sprung up in the wake of George Floyd's death in police custody. There have been at least two fatalities, in Seattle and in Bakersfield, California.

Weil said that by analyzing news coverage, court documents and patterns of behavior – such as when people allegedly yelled slurs at protesters or turned around for a second hit – he determined that at least 43 of the incidents were malicious, and 39 drivers have been charged. Most of the incidents happened in June, in the weeks following Floyd's May 25 killing, Weil said, and half of the incidents happened by June 7. While incidents continue to happen, they've trended downward since then, he said "While these incidents were clustered in the beginning of the protest period, they continue to occur," Weil said on Twitter on Thursday. "As violent rhetoric intensifies in the lead up to the election, I worry about an uptick in these incidents."

To date, I've tracked motorists driving into protests from 5/27 to 9/5. There have been 104 incidents of drivers going into protests, with 96 by civilians and 8 by police. 39 drivers have been charged. In 43 cases, I have coded the driver as having malicious intent. pic.twitter.com/6uhZ3O0mSg — Ari Weil (@AriWeil) September 24, 2020

New York, California, Oregon and Florida have seen the greatest number of incidents, according to Weil's data. Just this past week, drivers struck protesters in Denver, in Laramie, Wyoming, and in Los Angeles, where one person was hospitalized, according to local news reports. On Saturday, in Yorba Linda, California, south of Los Angeles, a woman believed to be supporting Black Lives Matter with the group Caravan4Justice drove through a crowd of protesters and counterprotesters, injuring two people who were transported by ambulance, according to the Orange County Sheriff's Department. A man had possible broken legs, and a woman had "multiple injuries all over her body," according to Carrie Braun, director of public affairs for the department. The department released a statement late Friday saying the driver would be booked for attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon, and that the investigation is ongoing.

Many of the incidents have been captured in photos or videos shared on social media: Earlier this summer, two New York police vehicles plowed into demonstrators as the crowd pushed a barricade against one of them; a woman in a black SUV drove through a crowd in Denver; a Detroit police vehicle accelerated away with a man flailing on the hood. One of the more "clear-cut" cases of malice, MacNab said, was in early June in Lakeside, Virginia. An "avowed Klansman" drove up to protesters on a roadway, revved his engine, then drove through the crowd, wounding one person, Henrico County Commonwealth's Attorney Shannon Taylor said in a statement. The 36-year-old man was "a propagandist of Confederate ideology," Taylor said. He was charged with four counts of assault with hate crimes, two counts of felonious attempted malicious wounding and one count of felony hit and run. "We lived through this in Virginia in Charlottesville in 2017," Taylor said, referring to when a neo-Nazi plowed his car through a crowd of counterprotesters at a Unite the Right rally, killing Heather Heyer. The driver was sentenced to life in prison on hate crime charges.

In June in Visalia, California, occupants of a Jeep displaying a "Keep America Great" flag hit two protesters in the road, causing minor injuries, according to Visalia police. Witnesses said those inside the car mocked protesters by cupping their ears as if they couldn't hear their chants. The protesters started chanting profanities and throwing items before they approached the Jeep, which accelerated, hitting the protesters before driving off. County prosecutors didn't charge the driver, saying the protesters involved weren't "seriously injured" and the driver and his passengers felt threatened. Other civilians and police officers have similarly claimed that they drove through protesters because they were afraid of them and wanted to escape the situation. MacNab noted that "some of that fear is going to come from racism and bigotry." Officials in Minnesota said in June that a 35-year-old semitruck driver who drove through a crowd of thousands of protesters on a bridge did not deliberately target the group.

A lawyer for a man who hit two protesters in Seattle, killing one, said the crash was a "horrible, horrible accident." Prosecutors filed three felony charges against the man. Video of many of the vehicle rammings has circulated on social media, including white supremacist websites, according to MacNab, who said she has seen "revolting" commentary on videos shared to white supremacist accounts on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. "This has become something of a meme in white supremacy circles. There’ll be a picture of a car driving into a crowd, and then there will be a humorous remark about it. It’s definitely part of the discourse," said Daniel Byman, a senior fellow at Brookings who researches counterterrorism and Middle East security. "They’re doing a lot of kidding-not-kidding sort of humor ... which is the modern white supremacist world." Byman said earlier this summer that he's seen a meme shared by the Charlottesville killer circulating in white supremacist circles. Right-wing extremists turned the man into "a bit of a saint" after the killing, MacNab said.

Since the grand jury indictment in the Breonna Taylor case Wednesday, and the protests that have erupted in the ensuing days, the use of particular Twitter hashtags referencing such memes has more than doubled, according to Weil. "These 'Run Them Over' memes continue to circulate. Twitter said they were going to block the hashtag All Lives Splatter, but it still remains in use," he said. Vehicles have been used as tools of terror for decades, but it's become more common in the past 10 years, experts said. The Islamic State disseminated information about how to use the tactic, said Lorenzo Vidino, director of George Washington University's Program on Extremism. "Between 2014 and 2017, we saw several attacks, and ISIS was very meticulous in a variety of languages that gave clear instructions about what trucks to use, how to rent a truck and how to hit a group," Vidino said. "ISIS made it a science."

Most of those attacks were in Europe and the Middle East, Vidino said. Terrorists influenced by the Islamic State used vehicles to kill people in Nice, France, in 2016 and on London Bridge in 2017. That year, a man influenced by the Islamic State killed eight people when he drove a pickup about 1 mile in Lower Manhattan. Other extremist groups borrowed the tactic, Vidino said. In 2018, a member of a misogynist online subculture drove a van into downtown Toronto, killing 10 people. The vehicular attacks have been "the trademark of the affiliated wannabes that are at times extremely deadly," he said. The tactic is cheap and doesn't take much coordination or organizational support. It's also "camera-friendly," Vidino said.

"The Charlottesville attack, it killed one person, but it stuck in everybody’s mind because you have the spectacle of bodies flying. It’s catchy. And that’s what a lot of extremists pursue. It terrorized people," he said. In the U.S., the tactic was introduced by the far-right around 2016 to attack Black Lives Matter protests and demonstrations against the Dakota Access Pipeline, Weil said in a Twitter thread. That's when "the right began creating memes to celebrate" the attacks, he said. "I would be very careful in the middle of the street," MacNab said. "There's a significant amount of people who think that any protester hit in the street has it coming, and that’s a dangerous mindset."

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jan-apr.html#12_February_2020_(Fighting_voter_suppression) -- How Advocates Are Fighting Voter Suppression. -- https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/02/07/how-advocates-are-fighting-voter-suppression -- Friday, February 07, 2020 -- As the 2020 election season gets under way, activists are beginning to push back against voter disenfranchisement across the country. >>320

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/end-child-marriage-u-s-you-might-be-surprised-who-n1050471 -- End child marriage in the U.S.? You might be surprised at who's opposed -- Sept. 8, 2019 -- Conservatives have found some surprising allies as they fight efforts to raise the marriage age.

A bill that would have ended child marriage in Idaho — which has no minimum age for couples who want to wed — died in the Statehouse this year. Republican lawmakers, who control the Legislature, opposed it, including state Rep. Bryan Zollinger, who said it "went too far." "Obviously, I'm against child marriage," the GOP lawmaker told NBC News. "But basically marriage is a contract between people that shouldn't require government permission."

Even as more states take action to end child marriage, concerns about government overreach, along with scant data about the extent of the problem, have driven skepticism to reform across the country. The divide has sometimes created unlikely alliances between conservative politicians and liberal-leaning groups, including the ACLU and Planned Parenthood. In California and Louisiana, opponents of change have argued that raising the minimum marriage age is an ineffective solution since other child welfare laws already can prevent young girls from being exploited.And other states, such as Massachusetts, have raised doubts about the extent of the problem, even as experts note that survivors are often reluctant to come forward. Idaho has the highest rate of child marriages in the U.S., according to a national report from Unchained at Last, an organization dedicated to ending the practice in the U.S. The Democratic sponsor of the Idaho legislation, which would have set the marriage age at 16, said that she thought her bill was "a modest compromise."

However, Idaho state Rep. Christy Zito, who voted alongside Zollinger against the measure, said she was concerned about protecting the "sanctity of family." She added that there are sufficient safeguards in state law — such as a judicial review of underage marriages — to prevent older men from exploiting young girls, an issue she said she has not seen evidence of in Idaho. In California, a bill to set the minimum marriage age at 18 — the state's age of consent — failed in 2017 after objections from lawmakers and liberal groups such as the state's American Civil Liberties Union. The state currently has no minimum marriage age and collects little to no data on child marriages. The ACLU argued that the bill "unnecessarily and unduly intrudes on the fundamental rights of marriage without sufficient cause," adding that "largely banning marriage under 18, before we have evidence regarding the nature and severity of the problem, however, puts the cart before the horse."

Other groups, like Planned Parenthood and The National Center for Youth Law, a youth advocacy organization, agreed. In New Hampshire, it took Cassandra Levesque and other advocates several tries to raise the minimum marriage age to 16. After Levesque learned that the state's minimum marriage age was 14 for boys and 13 for girls, she made the issue a focus of a Girl Scout project, compiling research, contacting her state representatives and reaching out to advocacy groups. In 2017, a bill was introduced in the state House to raise the marriage age to 16 — the state’s statutory age of consent.

“I was just trying to get as many people behind this as possible,” Levesque, now 20, told NBC News. But a legislative maneuver killed the bill indefinitely after state GOP Rep. David Bates and others raised concerns about whether teens could marry while one was deployed for military service. Bates lambasted Levesque and scolded his colleagues in a speech on the state House floor at the time. “We’re asking the Legislature to repeal a law that’s been on the books for over a century, that’s been working without difficulty, on the basis of a request from a minor doing a Girl Scout project,” he said.

Despite the opposition Levesque faced, she was able to work with representatives to draft a new bill setting the age limit at 16, which later passed. And last year, at age 19, she decided more needed to be done on the issue and ran for a House seat in the state. She won and is now working to raise the minimum marriage age to 18. “This time, I had all my bases covered,” Levesque said. “It’s definitely a big issue I’m trying to fight.” Idaho and California are not alone in not having a minimum marriage age. A majority of states, which issue marriage licenses, allow 16- and 17-year-olds to marry, a few allow 14-year-olds, and 13 states have no minimum marriage age as of September. Before 2016 — when Virginia became the first state to put its marriage age into law — more than half of the states had no minimum marriage age fixed by statute.

Fraidy Reiss, a survivor of forced marriage and the founder of Unchained at Last, told NBC News that she finds some of the rationales against raising the minimum marriage age in all states to 18 baffling because the federal government considers marriage under 18 in foreign countries a human rights abuse. According to the group, nearly a quarter of a million children were married in the U.S. from 2000 to 2010 — the majority of whom were young girls marrying older men. "This is happening, and it's happening at an alarming rate," she said.

In Louisiana, a heated debate erupted in the Legislature this year as lawmakers haggled over whether to set a minimum marriage age in the state. Republicans — and a handful of Democrats — argued that teens should be allowed to marry in certain instances, such as pregnancy or military service. “If they’re both 16 years old, and they both consent to sexual relations, and they’re about to have a baby, why wouldn’t we want them to be married?” state Rep. Nancy Landry, a Republican, said at the time. Kathleen Benfield, the legislative director for the Louisiana Family Forum, an influential conservative nonprofit in the state, said that her organization was also concerned about forcing a teen mother to give birth out of wedlock if the age was set at 18 with no exceptions.

“We would oppose any exploitation of young girls by older men — that's the bottom line,” Benfield said. “But we just wanted to make sure that the value of marriage as a cherished institution was supported.” In the end, the group gave the bill lukewarm support thanks to provisions such as requiring that the age difference between a minor and an adult be no more than three years, placing stringent guidelines for judges to review each case and mandating the collection of marriage data in the state to study the extent of child marriage. The bill passed in June, setting the minimum marriage age at 16, and the law was set to take effect in August.

Reiss, who lobbies lawmakers as part of her group's advocacy work against child and forced marriage, said she has seen some success in direct outreach. "Where we have less luck is legislators who say: 'I don't care. I don't care. A girl gets pregnant, she's got to get married,'" she added. "Or the ones who look at me and say — I've had this in multiple states — 'Well, Joseph married Mary when she was 8. If it was good enough for God, why shouldn't it be good enough for us?'" She believes lawmakers often conflate the maturity of some teens with the legal capacity to enter a marriage, which is considered a legal contract that many laws specify only adults can enter into or annul. "For someone to say if you're 17 and you're mature and in love that it's somehow OK for you to marry. No, it's not because you're still not an adult," she said. “You cannot be allowed to marry before you were allowed to file for divorce. That's just so obvious."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection -- Psychological projection is a defense mechanism in which the human ego defends itself against unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others.[1] For example, a bully may project their own feelings of vulnerability onto the target. It incorporates blame shifting and can manifest as shame dumping.[2] Projection has been described as an early phase of introjection.[3]

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#1_October_2020_(Right_wing_extremists_infiltrating_thugs) -- An FBI report from 2006 warned that right wing extremists would try to infiltrate US thug departments. We know that a large fraction of thugs are right-wing extremists. Whether this is the result of active infiltration, I don't know, but I don't think it matters much. -- https://theintercept.com/2020/09/29/police-white-supremacist-infiltration-fbi/ -- Unredacted FBI Document Sheds New Light on White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement -- September 29 2020 -- A 2006 intelligence assessment reveals that officials had concerns about the infiltration of police departments for years but failed to warn the public. >>314

We are too lazy to manufacture a fake source for our bullshit, unlike Faux News.

On Saturday, Fox apologized in an editor’s note posted to stories about CHAZ on its website, sayings its home-page photos “did not clearly delineate” the splicing together of multiple images from different locations. The editor’s note also acknowledged the erroneous use of the Minnesota rioting photo to illustrate Seattle news. “Fox News regrets these errors,” the note stated. -- https://primepatriot.com/2020/06/13/fox-news-runs-digitally-altered-images-in-coverage-of-seattles-protests-capitol-hill-autonomous-zone/ -- Fox News runs digitally altered images in coverage of Seattle’s protests, Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/end-child-marriage-u-s-you-might-be-surprised-who-n1050471 -- End child marriage in the U.S.? You might be surprised at who's opposed -- Sept. 8, 2019 -- Conservatives have found some surprising allies as they fight efforts to raise the marriage age. -- A bill that would have ended child marriage in Idaho — which has no minimum age for couples who want to wed — died in the Statehouse this year. Republican lawmakers, who control the Legislature, opposed it, including state Rep. Bryan Zollinger, who said it "went too far." -- >>328

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#30_September_2020_(Armed_fascist_demonstrators) -- Armed fascist demonstrators invade Portland every day and confront antifascist and BLM protesters, occasionally committing violence against them, against reporters, and against bystanders. The thugs tend to let them do it. -- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/28/portland-violence-far-right-protests-police -- Portland suffers serious street violence as far right return 'prepared to fight' -- Fri 28 Aug 2020 -- Armed rightwingers have attacked leftwing protesters and reporters, supplanting the nightly standoffs with police

Over the last three months in Portland, mass protests against police violence and racism gradually gave way to nightly often violent standoffs between a core of pro-Black Lives Matter and anti-fascist protesters and law enforcement. But in the past week the city has fallen back into a pattern of more politically polarized street violence which has marked the city throughout the Trump era, with broadly leftwing and anti-fascist activists sometimes facing off against far-right groups. Last weekend a rightwing “Say no to Marxism in America” rally saw serious, widespread violence. Much of it came from rally attendees – who included members of far-right groups like the Proud Boys – and was directed not only at leftist counter-protesters, but also reporters.

One rightwing protester drew a firearm on opposing protesters. Earlier, he had fired a paintball gun into the crowd, and a local journalist was caught in the crossfire. Others appeared to be armed with firearms and knives. Some carried wooden shields with nails driven through them. One pro-Trump protester took to a snack van with a baseball bat. Others joined in and destroyed the vehicle. Near the peak of Saturday’s violence, a reporter’s hand was broken by a rightwing protester with a baton, and video of the incident went viral on social media. That reporter, Robert Evans, has been covering the protests since they began, for Bellingcat and other outlets.

That assailant was identified by Bellingcat on Tuesday as Travis Taylor, a Portland-based Proud Boy who has been previously observed attending violent street demonstrations in the city. In a telephone conversation, Evans told the Guardian that the rightwing demonstrators “absolutely came prepared to fight”, were “very aggressive from the jump” and were equipped with “knives, guns, paintball guns with frozen pellets, batons”. Neither the Portland police bureau (PPB) nor the Multnomah county district attorney (MCDA) responded to questions about whether Taylor would be charged or prosecuted over the incident.

It was the worst violence of its kind in the city since an infamous afternoon in 2018, also involving Proud Boys, who came from all over the country to attend a rally that culminated in another vicious street brawl. But as that precedent indicates, the polarized violence was not so much a new development linked to the massive anti-racism protests that have continued around the US, as a return to the dynamic that has afflicted Portland since the election of Donald Trump. From 2017 to 2019, the city was a magnet for street protesters and street fighters from groups like Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys, who were regularly met by antifascist counter-protesters.

At rallies in 2018 and 2019 hundreds of rightwingers from all around the country descended on Portland, and rightwing media and e-celebrities worked hard to identify the city with “antifa”, a movement that conservatives from Trump down have sought to demonize. Throughout this period, PPB were regularly accused by protesters and media outlets of heavy-handed, one-sided enforcement. This year, however, as the Black Lives Matter protests sprang up in Portland, members of far-right groups had not been a significant factor during an unbroken 85-night streak of protests. Instead the focus of many protesters was the presence of federal agents in the city – which became a national scandal as local elected officials sought to force the Trump administration to withdraw them.

Mainstream media attention was then diverted after the apparent resolution of the conflict over the unwanted presence of federal agents. But now the renewed presence of rightwing groups in the city has some fearing the fresh violence will continue, especially because activists say the PBB has a record of not intervening to prevent rightwing violence. Amy Herzfeld-Copple, the deputy director of Portland-based progressive non-profit, the Western States Center, wrote in an email that: “Portland police allowed alt-right and paramilitary groups to sow chaos and deploy violence against the community with apparent impunity.” She added: “There’s a real risk that protests for racial justice and police reform will be subsumed by alt-right mayhem if city leadership doesn’t change its approach.”

The office of Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, did not directly respond on Monday to questions on last weekend’s violent events. Not all locals blame PPB for the violence. James Buchal, chair of the Multnomah county Republican party, wrote in an email that “as Republicans, we condemn the cowardly and totalitarian attacks on the pro-police demonstrators” by leftist demonstrators.

And not all locals consider the confrontation with far-right groups to be a distraction from the cause of protesting against police brutality against Black communities. A spokesperson for Rose City Antifa, a long-established local anti-fascist network which has supported the protests downtown, wrote in an email: “Police brutality and white nationalist organizing are two sides of the same coin, and they should be addressed as such.”

left-wing riots

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/end-child-marriage-u-s-you-might-be-surprised-who-n1050471 -- End child marriage in the U.S.? You might be surprised at who's opposed -- Sept. 8, 2019 -- Conservatives have found some surprising allies as they fight efforts to raise the marriage age. -- A bill that would have ended child marriage in Idaho — which has no minimum age for couples who want to wed — died in the Statehouse this year. Republican lawmakers, who control the Legislature, opposed it, including state Rep. Bryan Zollinger, who said it "went too far." -- >>328

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#1_October_2020_(Right_wing_extremists_infiltrating_thugs) -- An FBI report from 2006 warned that right wing extremists would try to infiltrate US thug departments. We know that a large fraction of thugs are right-wing extremists. Whether this is the result of active infiltration, I don't know, but I don't think it matters much. -- https://theintercept.com/2020/09/29/police-white-supremacist-infiltration-fbi/ -- Unredacted FBI Document Sheds New Light on White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement -- September 29 2020 -- A 2006 intelligence assessment reveals that officials had concerns about the infiltration of police departments for years but failed to warn the public. -- >>314

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#24_September_2020_(Plotting_violence_ahead_of_rallies) -- *Revealed: pro-Trump activists plotted violence ahead of Portland rallies.* *Patriots Coalition members suggested political assassinations and said ‘laws will be broken, people will get hurt’, leaked chats show.* We all suspected this, but we could not be sure. Now we know that the bully's supporters are a criminal gang. -- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/23/oregon-portland-pro-trump-protests-violence-texts -- Wed 23 Sep 2020 -- “I’m waiting for the presidential go to start open firing” -- >>285

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/end-child-marriage-u-s-you-might-be-surprised-who-n1050471 -- End child marriage in the U.S.? You might be surprised at who's opposed -- Sept. 8, 2019 -- Conservatives have found some surprising allies as they fight efforts to raise the marriage age. -- A bill that would have ended child marriage in Idaho — which has no minimum age for couples who want to wed — died in the Statehouse this year. Republican lawmakers, who control the Legislature, opposed it, including state Rep. Bryan Zollinger, who said it "went too far." -- >>328

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#1_October_2020_(Right_wing_extremists_infiltrating_thugs) -- An FBI report from 2006 warned that right wing extremists would try to infiltrate US thug departments. We know that a large fraction of thugs are right-wing extremists. Whether this is the result of active infiltration, I don't know, but I don't think it matters much. -- https://theintercept.com/2020/09/29/police-white-supremacist-infiltration-fbi/ -- Unredacted FBI Document Sheds New Light on White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement -- September 29 2020 -- A 2006 intelligence assessment reveals that officials had concerns about the infiltration of police departments for years but failed to warn the public. -- >>314

[1/2] https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#2_October_2020_(Human_Rights_Watch_Details_NYPD_Attack_on_Peaceful_Protesters) -- *Human Rights Watch Details NYPD Attack on Peaceful Protesters.* It was a Black Lives Matter protest on June 4. The thugs encircled the protesters to force them to remain till after the curfew, at which point the thugs attacked them systematically. -- https://theintercept.com/2020/09/30/nypd-nyc-protests-police-report/ -- A Human Rights Watch investigation found that police deliberately trapped and assaulted medics, legal observers, and peaceful protesters. -- September 30 2020

New York police deliberately assaulted dozens of peaceful protesters, medics, and legal observers in one of this summer’s most violently repressed protests, trapping people in the streets past a city-imposed curfew before beating and arresting them in what Police Commissioner Dermot Shea described as “a plan which was executed nearly flawlessly.” At least 236 people were arrested at the June 4 protest in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the Bronx, and at least 61 were injured by police, with some left with broken noses and fingers, lost teeth, and potential nerve damage, according to a detailed report [ https://www.hrw.org/report/2020/09/30/kettling-protesters-bronx/systemic-police-brutality-and-its-costs-united-states ] released on Wednesday by Human Rights Watch. “The police response to the peaceful Mott Haven protest was intentional, planned, and unjustified,” the report concluded. “The protest was peaceful until the police responded with violence.” More than 100 protesters have filed notice of their intent to sue the city over police actions that day, which are likely to cost the city millions in misconduct settlements and legal fees. The protest, one of hundreds that followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, came after New York Mayor Bill de Blasio declared an 8 p.m. curfew following looting in other parts of the city. Most people arrested in the Bronx were charged with curfew violations or unlawful assembly. Many were held overnight with no food, including several who were injured and received no medical attention. The majority of the charges have since been dismissed. Human Rights Watch’s reconstruction of the events, based on about 100 interviews and the review of 155 videos by participants and bystanders, reveals that about 10 minutes before curfew, police deliberately corralled protesters using a controversial law enforcement tactic known as “kettling,” preventing people from dispersing. When the curfew kicked in, police moved into the trapped crowd, shoving people to the ground, pepper-spraying them, beating them with batons from the top of parked cars, and violently arresting dozens of them.

“When the police began moving through the kettle, they started pushing us from the front and the back so we ended up essentially trampling over each other, trying to escape the violence of the police.”

Police also detained several medics and legal observers, despite them having been declared exempt from the curfew by the mayor’s office. Police on the scene were supervised by two-dozen senior officers in white shirts, including the highest-ranking uniformed officer in the department, Chief of Police Terence Monahan, who can be seen in one video confronting one of the protest’s organizers. Monahan also played a key role in the police repression of a 2004 protest at the Republican National Convention, during which police similarly kettled and assaulted protesters, ultimately costing the city $36 million in misconduct settlements. “This was just a completely unjustified, unnecessary, excessive use of force and brutal crackdown on peaceful protesters,” Ida Sawyer, acting crisis and conflict director at Human Rights Watch and a co-author of the report, told The Intercept. Monahan’s presence, she said, “really showed how the violence and abuse is encouraged and condoned by the NYPD and how the system really fuels impunity.” “If the top brass is leading this, then what message does that send to all of the officers below him?” she added. “It really just epitomizes how police officers are rewarded for abuse.” “They were basically doing collective punishment on us,” Andom Ghebreghiorgis, a protester and former congressional candidate, told The Intercept. “And they were doing it in a way that really didn’t give anyone the opportunity to escape it even if they happened to not be part of the protest.”

“We were kettled before 8 p.m. and they intentionally held us so that we were outside after curfew,” added Ghebreghiorgis, who was detained for nearly 24 hours following the protest. “When the police began moving through the kettle, they started pushing us from the front and the back so we ended up essentially trampling over each other, trying to escape the violence of the police on the front line and on the back line. … It was really scary; you just heard screaming and crying throughout the entire ordeal.” The mayor’s office did not respond to a list of questions from The Intercept. The NYPD did not answer questions but referred The Intercept to previously released statements by senior department officials in which Shea and de Blasio defended the police’s conduct in a press conference the day after the protest. “This is something that the NYPD saw coming,” the mayor said, arguing that police were responding to “an organization that literally was encouraging violence.” The NYPD did not address Human Rights Watch’s questions about violence by officers or its use of kettling to force protesters to violate the curfew, but claimed that the detention of nonessential workers was “lawful.” In a letter to Human Rights Watch, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for legal matters, Ernest F. Hart, argued that the protest’s intent was to “direct violence at a class of individuals based on their profession.” The protest was promoted on social media by an abolitionist coalition known as the “FTP Formation” — an acronym for “Fuck the Police” but also “Free the People” — and some fliers advertising the protest depicted a police car burning, though organizers specifically denounced “irresponsible adventurism” and called on participants not to bring weapons. In a review of video evidence, Human Rights Watch counted dozens of incidents of police beating protesters with batons, punching, kicking, tackling, or dragging protesters, and firing pepper spray directly at people’s faces. The group documented four instances of officers throwing bikes against protesters and two incidents in which police restrained participants with a knee to the face or neck. No officers were injured, and the department did not discipline any of the officers involved in the crackdown. The police response to the Mott Haven and other protests is currently under investigation by the New York State Attorney General’s Office.

The Mott Haven protest was one of several that took place in New York City that day. About 300 people had gathered in the neighborhood, which is home to mostly Black and Latino New Yorkers, including many who are without housing, and is one of the poorest and most heavily policed in the city, as well as one of the most devastated by the Covid-19 pandemic. The neighborhood is a perfect symbol for protesters’ demands for police divestment and reinvestment in services. “You have this neighborhood where the city has very intentionally concentrated poverty, homeless shelters, public housing, drug treatment centers,” a protester told Human Rights Watch. “And then there’s a hyper police presence on top of that. Literally stepping out of the subway in the area — you can see what the protesters are pushing for, investing in communities and the root causes so the police aren’t needed, and people are safer and healthier.” Shea later described the protest as an attempt by “outside agitators” to “cause mayhem,” “tear down society,” and “injure cops.” After the protest, police shared images of items they claimed to have confiscated that day during a car stop, including a sledgehammer, a wrench, and a bottle of lighter fluid. But they provided no evidence that those items had been confiscated from protesters. They also did not provide evidence that a gun they claimed to have recovered from an alleged gang member prior to the rally was connected to the protest. Human Rights Watch found no evidence of violent conduct by protesters and argued instead that police acted with particular impunity that day because of the demographics of the neighborhood and the protesters. “There seemed to be a real deliberate attempt by the NYPD to target this particular group of protesters in this particular neighborhood, in Mott Haven, in the South Bronx, a protest that was led by outspoken community activists who have been demanding police accountability and speaking out about police abuses,” Sawyer told The Intercept. “The fact that this operation was so well planned, it seems that they really wanted to send a message to them and send a message to the broader community there.” The FTP coalition, in particular, had been behind a number of protests and direct actions in the city, including in opposition to a recent spike in the number of officers assigned to patrol the subway. “FTP directly challenges policing and the authority that policing has throughout the city, which many of us see as a direct threat to our communities,” said Ghebreghiorgis. “So [police] had a preconceived notion about what FTP is, who the protesters were, and that’s why they had this plan.”

[2/2] >>342 “Anyone who experienced it knows that the only thing that was executed flawlessly was police brutality and abuse of peaceful protesters,” he added, referring to Shea’s comment. “We came there to protest police brutality, and we all became victims of police brutality.” Gideon Oliver, a former president of the National Lawyers Guild’s New York chapter, whose legal observers have monitored protests for decades, called police actions in the Bronx “incredibly heavy-handed and disproportionate.” “People are allowed to say, ’Fuck the police,’ that’s constitutionally protected,” he said. “Although that’s the police department’s m.o. in terms of responding to protests, to be heavy-handed, this was on a different order,” Oliver added. “After they kettled people, they could have said, ’You’re all under arrest, now we’re just processing you one by one so please, comply.’ Nobody ever did that. They just started going in and wailing on people.”

A video reconstruction of the protest released along Human Rights Watch’s report shows an energetic but peaceful march moving through the Bronx and crossing a public housing complex, where residents are seen cheering on the crowd from their windows. As marchers walk down a main thoroughfare, they are blocked by about 50 officers in riot gear and on bikes, the video shows. The march then redirects through a different street, but just a few minutes before the curfew, officers on bikes move to block that exit as well, before pushing into the crowd using their bikes as shields. As tension and panic rise, the crowd starts yelling, “Let us through,” while a different group of officers prevents people from turning around, effectively sealing off all available exits. “Police got us trapped,” a protester narrates in the video. “They fucking out here right now on the bullhorn telling us we can’t be here after 8. And we ain’t do nothing wrong. At about 7:45, they intentionally started cornering us. They have us pushed in, in a pen. … Whatever narrative is spun to you later, do not believe it.” “Where do we go?” kettled protesters can be heard asking officers later on. “Where are we going to go, we’re corralled?” “You are getting locked up,” an officer responds. “To jail.”

Police’s response to the Mott Haven protest violated both the U.S. Constitution and international human rights law, as well as the NYPD’s own Patrol Guide, Human Rights Watch charged. The Patrol Guide, in particular, explicitly permits clearly identified legal observers “free access through police lines at the scene of any demonstration … subject only to restrictions necessitated by personal factors.” But at least 13 legal observers, posing no threat to police, were detained in Mott Haven. In the video reconstruction, an officer wearing an “NYPD LEGAL” jacket is seen directing other officers to arrest legal observers clearly identified by their NLG neon green hats. “Legal observers can be arrested, they are good go,” the officer is heard saying, before other officers shove a woman to the ground who was showing them documentation proving her role as a legal observer. In his letter to Human Rights Watch, Hart, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for legal matters, argued that “legal observers did not enjoy an exemption as essential workers,” that they should be working “remotely,” and that “there cannot be a legal observer of a protest that itself is illegal.” But that claim contradicted both the Patrol Guide and instructions by the mayor’s office. “I checked with the Mayor’s counsel who confirmed: yes, those lawyers are essential and can show up in person if they can’t do their work remotely,” Persephone Tan, a senior legislative representative in the mayor’s office wrote in an email to the National Lawyers’ Guild. “Protecting one’s liberty is about as essential as it gets.”

“Several people from the mayor’s office gave confirmation to city and state lawmakers that legal observers and jail support and medical support for protesters were exempt from the curfew,” said Oliver. “What you see in those emails is the opposite of what the police department says.” Oliver noted that De Blasio’s executive order indicates that once the curfew is in place police have to give a dispersal order and that people who refuse to comply with that order can be subject to arrest. But in Mott Haven, protesters were physically prevented — by police themselves — from complying with the order. “People didn’t have any opportunities to comply,” he said, arguing that the police actions raise questions about the validity of all of the arrests made that day. In fact, legal observers weren’t the only essentially targeted by police that day. In the video, officers can be seen arresting medics in scrubs and with Red Cross insignia, while protesters yell, “These are essential workers.” “As they came towards us, I told them, ’Hey, we’re health care workers acting as medics, you guys trapped us in here, and if you let us go, we’ll go on the outside of this and continue acting as medics,” Mike Pappas, a medic interviewed by Human Rights Watch, said he told police. Pappas was arrested anyway, along with at least five other medics. And medics who were not arrested were prevented by officers from tending to injured protesters, despite several people crying out for help. In one incident, officers blocked a medic from assisting a protester who was lying in the street, bleeding from the head and struggling to breathe, after an officer had hit him with a baton. A different report [ https://phr.org/our-work/resources/a-targeted-attack-on-the-bronx/ ] on the protest, published by Physicians for Human Rights, concluded that “police violated the principle of noninterference with medical services.”

Conrad Blackburn, a legal observer at the protests, described officers’ conduct as “vigilante justice.” “Once the medical professionals and the legal observers are out of the way, the police really, really just started cracking down on the protesters with impunity,” he said. “It was a very, very tragic thing to witness.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/end-child-marriage-u-s-you-might-be-surprised-who-n1050471 -- End child marriage in the U.S.? You might be surprised at who's opposed -- Sept. 8, 2019 -- Conservatives have found some surprising allies as they fight efforts to raise the marriage age. -- A bill that would have ended child marriage in Idaho — which has no minimum age for couples who want to wed — died in the Statehouse this year. Republican lawmakers, who control the Legislature, opposed it, including state Rep. Bryan Zollinger, who said it "went too far." -- >>328

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection -- Psychological projection is a defense mechanism in which the human ego defends itself against unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others.[1] For example, a bully may project their own feelings of vulnerability onto the target. It incorporates blame shifting and can manifest as shame dumping.[2] Projection has been described as an early phase of introjection.[3]

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#6_September_2020_(Republican_congresscritter_who_fanatically_defends_the_right_to_carry_guns) -- A Republican congresscritter who fanatically defends the right to carry guns says he would shoot any blacks that carry guns at a protest. Does this mean he advocates the right to carry guns only for whites? Does he now believe that guns should be prohibited at demonstrations? I'm in favor of that, as long as it applies to everyone. -- https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/03/id-drop-any-10-you-gop-rep-clay-higgins-threatens-shoot-armed-black-protesters -- 'I'd Drop Any 10 of You': GOP Rep. Clay Higgins Threatens to Shoot Armed Black Protesters -- Thursday, September 03, 2020 -- The Louisiana lawmaker is a staunch gun rights advocate in an open carry state. -- >>236

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#29_September_2020_(The_corrupter's_loans) -- The corrupter will have to pay $400 million in loans within the next few years, and he may not have that much. No wonder his palm is always open for gifts. -- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/27/new-york-times-trump-tax-returns-key-findings -- Six key findings from the New York Times' Trump taxes bombshell -- Mon 28 Sep 2020 -- The president pays little, faces hefty audit costs as well as loans coming due soon, and Ivanka is not in the clear

The publication of Donald Trump’s tax records by the New York Times [ https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-trump-taxes.html ] is one of the biggest bombshells to hit a 2020 election campaign already buffeted by a litany of scandals, a bitter fight over a supreme court nomination and a pandemic in which 7m Americans have been infected and more than 200,000 have died. The president’s taxes have long been the great white whale of political reporters in America as well as prosecutors keen to find evidence of wrongdoing. Democrats too were eager to seize on them as a potentially game-changing stick with which to beat the Trump campaign. The Times, with its shock report published on Sunday evening, appears to have won the race. Its publication of details from the documents could send shock waves through the campaign as the key first debate between Trump and challenger Joe Biden looms, in Ohio on Tuesday night. Here are its key findings:

Trump pays little tax 💰🐘💰 The Times reported that Trump paid no federal income taxes in 11 of 18 years the newspaper looked at. In 2017, after he became president, his tax bill was only $750. This is despite Trump often railing against taxes in America and ushering through a series of tax cuts that critics say mostly helps the rich and big business. The Times said of Trump’s immediate predecessors: “Barack Obama and George W Bush each regularly paid more than $100,000 a year.”

A long audit – with potentially hefty costs 💰🐘💰 Trump is involved in a decade-long audit with the Internal Revenue Service over a $72.9m tax refund he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. A ruling against him could cost him more than $100m, the Times reported. It added: “In 2011, the IRS began an audit reviewing the legitimacy of the refund. Almost a decade later, the case remains unresolved, for unknown reasons, and could ultimately end up in federal court, where it could become a matter of public record.”

Ivanka helps reduce Trump’s tax burden 💰🐘💰 The president’s oldest daughter, while working as an employee of the Trump Organization, appears to have received “consulting fees” that helped reduce the family’s tax bill, the Times said. Such a revelation might further tarnish the reputation of Ivanka, a senior White House adviser married to another, Jared Kushner, who often tries to distance herself from some of the biggest scandals of her father’s administration. She is widely believed to harbor political ambitions of her own after Trump leaves office. The Times reported: “Trump’s private records show that his company once paid $747,622 in fees to an unnamed consultant for hotel projects in Hawaii and Vancouver, British Columbia. Ivanka Trump’s public disclosure forms – which she filed when joining the White House staff in 2017 – show that she had received an identical amount through a consulting company she co-owned.”

Trump businesses lose money 💰🐘💰 The Times was brutal in its assessment of Trump’s businesses, about which he often boasts and on the back of which he sought to promote a carefully curated image as a master businessman. “Trump’s core enterprises – from his constellation of golf courses to his conservative-magnet hotel in Washington – report losing millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars year after year,” the newspaper said. It detailed how since 2000, Trump has reported losing more than $315m at his golf courses, with much of that coming from Trump National Doral in Florida. His Washington hotel, which opened in 2016 and has been the subject of much speculation regarding federal ethics laws, has lost more than $55m.

Trump has a big bill to pay 💰🐘💰 The newspaper also reported that Trump is facing a major financial bill, as within the next four years, hundreds of millions of dollars in loans will come due. The paper said Trump is personally responsible for many of those obligations. The paper reported: “In the 1990s, Mr Trump nearly ruined himself by personally guaranteeing hundreds of millions of dollars in loans, and he has since said that he regretted doing so. But he has taken the same step again, his tax records show. He appears to be responsible for loans totaling $421m, most of which is coming due within four years.” In a blunt summary of the problem, the Times speculated: “Should he win re-election, his lenders could be placed in the unprecedented position of weighing whether to foreclose on a sitting president.”

Trump businesses profit from his presidency 💰🐘💰 The issue of whether Trump’s businesses benefit from his position in the White House has been one of the long-running themes of reporting on the Trump presidency. The global nature of the Trump Organization and its portfolio of hotels, resorts and other interests has left Trump open to speculation that lobbyists, business leaders and foreign powers could spend money in them to try and peddle influence in the US. The Times report on his tax returns is clear that Trump’s businesses have indeed benefited from his political career. “Since he became a leading presidential candidate, he has received large amounts of money from lobbyists, politicians and foreign officials who pay to stay at his properties or join his clubs,” the newspaper reported, before detailing monies paid at his Mar-a-Largo resort in Florida, his Washington hotel and other locations.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/end-child-marriage-u-s-you-might-be-surprised-who-n1050471 ✞🐘✞ End child marriage in the U.S.? You might be surprised at who's opposed ✞🐘✞ Sept. 8, 2019 ✞🐘✞ Conservatives have found some surprising allies as they fight efforts to raise the marriage age. ✞🐘✞ A bill that would have ended child marriage in Idaho — which has no minimum age for couples who want to wed — died in the Statehouse this year. Republican lawmakers, who control the Legislature, opposed it, including state Rep. Bryan Zollinger, who said it "went too far." ✞🐘✞ >>328

All tyrants would love to keep an insolvent >>347 neonazi dumbass in the White House

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#10_September_2020_(Justice_Department_taking_up_liability_for_damages) -- The wrecker has told the "Justice Department" to make the US take up the liability for damages, as well as defense costs in E Jean Carroll's lawsuit accusing him of raping her. -- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/08/trump-defamation-justice-department-e-jean-carroll-rape-accusation -- US justice department seeks to defend Trump in lawsuit tied to rape allegation -- Wed 9 Sep 2020 -- Attorneys seek to substitute US for Trump as defendant in E Jean Carroll case, meaning tax dollars could cover any payout -- Carroll is trying to get a DNA sample from Trump to see whether it matches as-yet-unidentified male genetic material found on a dress that she says she was wearing during the alleged attack -- >>259

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/10/facebook-bans-qanon-entirely-says-previous-crackdown-wasnt-enough/ Facebook bans QAnon entirely, says previous crackdown wasn’t enough -- https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-qanon-idUSKBN26R3JQ Facebook bans all QAnon groups as dangerous amid surging misinformation -- https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54443878 Facebook bans QAnon conspiracy theory accounts across all platforms -- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-bans-qanon-platforms-pages-groups-instagram-accounts/ Facebook bans QAnon pages, groups and Instagram accounts -- https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/facebook-bans-qanon-across-its-platforms-n1242339 Facebook bans QAnon across its platforms -- >>351

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/end-child-marriage-u-s-you-might-be-surprised-who-n1050471 ✞🐘✞ End child marriage in the U.S.? You might be surprised at who's opposed ✞🐘✞ Sept. 8, 2019 ✞🐘✞ Conservatives have found some surprising allies as they fight efforts to raise the marriage age. ✞🐘✞ A bill that would have ended child marriage in Idaho — which has no minimum age for couples who want to wed — died in the Statehouse this year. Republican lawmakers, who control the Legislature, opposed it, including state Rep. Bryan Zollinger, who said it "went too far." ✞🐘✞ >>328

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/aug/16/black-lives-matter-cashes-100-million-liberal-foun >>357

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#29_September_2020_(The_corrupter's_loans) -- The corrupter will have to pay $400 million in loans within the next few years, and he may not have that much. No wonder his palm is always open for gifts. -- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/27/new-york-times-trump-tax-returns-key-findings -- Six key findings from the New York Times' Trump taxes bombshell -- Mon 28 Sep 2020 -- The president pays little, faces hefty audit costs as well as loans coming due soon, and Ivanka is not in the clear -- >>347

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#2_October_2020_(Human_Rights_Watch_Details_NYPD_Attack_on_Peaceful_Protesters) -- *Human Rights Watch Details NYPD Attack on Peaceful Protesters.* It was a Black Lives Matter protest on June 4. The thugs encircled the protesters to force them to remain till after the curfew, at which point the thugs attacked them systematically. -- https://theintercept.com/2020/09/30/nypd-nyc-protests-police-report/ -- A Human Rights Watch investigation found that police deliberately trapped and assaulted medics, legal observers, and peaceful protesters. -- September 30 2020 -- >>342

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#30_September_2020_(Diverting_money_out_of_business) -- The conman's tax affairs illustrate that the US has made it easy for rich "businessmen" to divert money out of a business as an excuse to say it made no profit and owes no tax. -- https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2020/09/28/new-york-times-trump-tax-revelation-confirms-what-we-already-know -- New York Times’ Trump Tax Revelation Confirms What We Already Know -- Monday, September 28, 2020 -- "The New York Times’ revelation of Trump’s years of dodging taxes confirms something we already know. There are two tax systems: one that most of us follow and another far more generous one for the very rich."

Following is a statement from Steve Wamhoff, federal policy director at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, regarding a New York Times report that revealed President Trump paid $0 in federal income taxes in 10 of the last 15 years and just $750 in 2016 and 2017. “The New York Times’ revelation of Trump’s years of dodging taxes confirms something we already know. There are two tax systems: one that most of us follow and another far more generous one for the very rich. “In a detailed report [ https://itep.org/how-true-tax-reform-would-eliminate-breaks-for-real-estate-investors-like-donald-trump/ ], ITEP outlined how tax rules are particularly permissive for wealthy real estate investors like Trump, especially when it comes to when and how they can report losses to wipe out other income.

“Business owners have income from a venture only if it is profitable, so some rules are necessary to recognize when a venture fails to profit. But so-called ‘losses’ allowed by federal tax rules are not what most people think of when they hear the word ‘losses.’ “A business owner can report a loss when expenses exceed revenue, but the expenses that Trump reports are problematic to say the least. For example, some of his reported expenses appear to involve overcompensating family members through ‘consulting fees,’ which can have the added bonus of avoiding payroll taxes.

“ITEP has explained [ https://itep.org/the-cares-act-provision-for-high-income-business-owners-looks-worse-and-worse/ ] why many of the ‘business losses’ reported by the rich exist only on paper and why Congress recently made a mistake when it included a provision in the CARES Act that made it even easier for wealthy business owners to claim these losses. “While it is common for the wealthy to use the tax code this way, Trump is in a league of his own. His losses seem to be, in many cases, more than just paper losses. Anything he is personally involved in tends to lose money. And it is possible that his various maneuvers do, in fact, exceed what is allowed by the law. The IRS may soon find that he owes more than $100 million, according to the Times. “But the fact is that Trump has been able to get by for years with sketchy claims on his tax returns, including his endless business deductions for clearly personal expenses and his claim that a mansion is a business investment despite publicly identifying it as a family residence. Trump’s decades-long ability to avoid consequences for this tax dodging demonstrates that he enjoys a set of rules more generous than anything the rest of us can imagine.

“The New York Times report did not include Trump’s tax returns for 2018 and 2019, the first two years after the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act went into effect. The law opened new tax avoidance opportunities for wealthy business owners. “F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, ‘Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.’ As Fitzgerald knew, they often play by their own set of rules. Trump may not be as rich as he says, and he may be losing money by the minute, but when it comes to his taxes, he still fits that description.”