Federal prosecutors will retry teacher & human rights activist Scott Warren for providing water, food, clean clothes & beds to two refugees crossing the border into Arizona. His first trial ended in a hung jury with four jurors finding him not guilty & four with their heads stuck up their butts ruling him guilty. He will be tried again in November & faces up to ten years in prison.
Most Assadists are Tulsi Gabbard supporters. Her grotesque Islamophobia, Zionism, anti-Semitism, Hindutva nationalism, & support for General Sisi don’t disturb her guppies at all since her social antipathies correspond with their own. Most socialist Assadists are Sanders or Warren supporters. Sander’s & Warren’s support for a Jewish-only state in Israel & US wars don’t disturb their supporters since when push comes to shove they are completely indifferent to the monumental struggles against war, occupation, genocide. Gabbard supporters outright support the oppressors & oppose popular resistance to them. Sanders & Warren supporters are simply indifferent which is a criminality of another sort, but still a criminality.
There’s no question that Ivanka Trump is as corrupt, amoral, & lying-assed as her father. She does after all, use sweatshop labor to make her clothing line & then has the temerity to argue against a minimum wage. But while she has no place in government, she isn’t as completely stupid as him & may be more intelligent than several past US presidents. It’s becoming a social media game to ridicule her for butting into discussions with political figures including a G20 discussion between Christine Lagarde, Theresa May, Justin Trudeau, & Emmanuel Macron where they rebuffed her. She’s as corrupt as the four of them & as vicious toward working people, but why is she more worthy of contempt than they are? Does anyone really think their discussions are on a higher level than that of Palestinian, Kashmiri, Rohingya freedom activists? It’s a misogynist thing to carry on about her. I would not defend that girl for all the stars in heaven but when you take her amorality on, it ought to be on terms of her corruption, not her gender.
Forty-three civilians & 120 militants were killed in the first six months of 2019 in Kashmir, mostly in Indian army hunt to kill operations. Among the 43 civilians, nine of whom were children, 14 were killed by Indian occupying forces or police, 12 were killed by ‘unidentified gunmen’ who might have been undercover agents, 8 civilians died in reckless crossfire in the border areas with Pakistan, 5 were killed by ‘suspected militants’, & 3 died in explosions set off by unidentified agencies.
In addition to the large number of deaths, 95 Kashmiris were injured by pellet guns, mostly in their eyes, including three who died from their injuries. In these operations, civilian property continues to be vandalized & destroyed, including livestock.
The report issued by the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS) says 108 Indian army personnel were also killed, 80 of them in the 177 hunt to kill operations carried out this year by the occupying army. These deaths cannot be blamed on Kashmiri resistance but only on the Indian government for its violent occupation of over 700,000 troops.
Go home India, go home!
(Photo from Independent)
A friend traveling down from San Antonio stopped at a rest stop & saw a bleeding mother bird who had been run over with her baby sitting next to her. It’s illegal in Texas to rescue wild birds but my friend knew the baby would also be run over so she took it with her. As a notorious bird lady, she brought it over to me to care for. Many have brought orphaned birds to me & the prognosis is just not good. They grieve unbearably & believe me, it is painful to watch. One frantically tried to find his way out of my house over & over again but because he couldn’t fly, I knew feral cats would pounce on him within minutes. Once, in deference to the law, I returned a bird to where he’d fallen from his nest & crows had him within minutes. I am still distraught over that. What I’ve reconciled myself to is caring for them as long as possible knowing their grief at losing their mothers & their flock will very soon get the best of them. It’s a merciless world for wee creatures.
As reports of Border Patrol abuses & violence against children in the concentration camps dominate world media, we’re beginning to see reports of Border Patrol heroics in rescuing refugees from the Rio Grande River. Not to be the cynic–since it’s certain many Border Patrol agents have not become completely jaded–but it was reported a few years ago that the federal government spent more than $4 billion on public relations services just between 2007 & 2015. Nothing should salvage the image of immigration agents from that of the little boy with the poopy diaper & tin foil shoes.
To date, prominent Assadists & their guppies publicly support the Chinese & Burmese regimes & deny the Rohingya & Uyghur genocides, support Duterte’s death squads against the urban poor & his war against Moro Muslims, denounce the Tiananmen Square massacre as nothing more than anti-capitalist propaganda, denounce the millions protesting in Hong Kong as anti-capitalists trying to shelter criminals from mainland China, deny poverty in Venezuela to support Maduro’s dictatorial regime. You’d think that would make some of those guppies question propagandist’s judgement about Syria. But in fact, they end up agreeing with all the other lies. When it comes to democracy & justice, whose side do you think they’re really on?
The majority of the so-called ‘left’ made itself irrelevant, if not completely criminal, by supporting the Assad dictatorship & justifying Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians to defend Assad’s right to self-determination. It was all over for them, no matter how well-versed they were in Marx & Engels quotes. But now they’re engaging in a gaseous dispute about Kautsky versus Lenin’s politics. Most of the leading figures in this dispute are people who haven’t gotten off their asses in decades to do something against injustice. So blither on boys since you’re living in an echo chamber.
If the Kautsky crowd want to join the Democratic Party (DP) & rally for Sanders & Warren, why stop them? Let them go & godspeed. This is still a free country. It’s their right to reproduce the mistakes & betrayals of the Communist Party who were among the most active members of the Democratic Party for decades. In my brief tenure attending DP meetings in the 1960s, the CP crowd voted at one meeting to oppose the Vietnam War & at the same meeting voted to endorse the 1968 presidential candidacy of Hubert Humphrey, an ardent supporter of the Vietnam War. Me, I’m a hard-ass & couldn’t live with that kind of contradiction so I quit & never looked back.
The point is not to engage in pissing contests exchanging quotes from Marx & Engels but to understand what they would say today about Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, about Sudan, about sweatshops, about those US concentration camps for children, about refugee rights, about the Kashmiri, Palestinian, Uyghur, & Rohingya struggles. But about those issues, the so-called ‘left’ is either silent or on the wrong side. It really is all over for them.