Kat's "Kat's Korner: Chase Rice delivers and then some" is a great review of Chase Rice's new album. Please read it. I am tired, so tired. So I'm just going to note an important article from WSWS. Alex Findijs reports:
Deaths of prison inmates increased over 60 percent in the first year of
the COVID-19 pandemic according to a new report by the UCLA School of
Law’s Behind Bars Data Project. Data acquired by the project, which in
many cases exceeds the data reported on by states and prisons
themselves, indicates that 6,182 imprisoned people died behind bars in
2020 compared to 4,240 in 2019, a 62 percent increase despite a 10
percent decline in the prison population.
This increase in prison mortality was led by 16 states which saw an
increase in inmate deaths of more than 90 percent. Notable among these
are Michigan, which saw a 130 percent increase with 131 more deaths in
2020 than in 2019, and New Jersey, which saw an increase of 142 percent
with 47 more deaths than in 2019.
The collection and reporting of
this data is a significant achievement that compiles invaluable
information about the cost in life that the pandemic has taken on prison
populations. Many states have stopped reporting publicly on COVID
deaths and data on deaths in prisons can be difficult to acquire. The
Bureau of Justice Statistics used to take detailed records of inmate
deaths for monitoring of health and safety but stopped in 2019, leaving a
large gap between the real numbers of inmate fatalities and the
official figures reported by government agencies.
Missouri, a
state with over 23,000 prison inmates, declined requests from the Bureau
of Justice Statistics (BJS) to provide data on COVID deaths, and both
Pennsylvania and Georgia claimed that they did not have or could not
access data on COVID deaths in prisons to provide to the BJS.
Additionally, no data was collected from privately run prisons operating
under federal contracts, making accurate reporting on deaths of
incarcerated individuals virtually impossible.
This is an important story and it's one that should be very easy to track. Much easier than deaths in a more mobile portion of society. But think about it, you really haven't read a great deal about the prison COVID deaths.
This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot" for Monday:
Monday, February 20, 2022. The 'big' 'event' in DC turns out to be a
big flop, they brought together the center, the right and the extreme
right, THE GUARDIAN continues to sell war, Iraq needs to get serious
about preventing domestic abuse, and much more.
They
had their Sunday non-action. Not a big turnout. At times it seemed
more speakers showed up than 'activists.' Was it an issue of lack of
star power?
Look! It's Ron Paul! And Tulsi Gabbard!!!! With Mindy Cohn!
You take the good, you take the bad
You take them both and there you have
The facts of life
The facts of life
Poor
Sabby Sabs. On TV, behind a desk, she can pretend she's slender. Look
at her next to Jimmy Dore. He's thinner than she is.
Fortunately,
she's not a complete idiot. She knew the next best thing to FACETUNE
was the original slenderizing ap: StandNextToTara. Yep, stand next to
her and the pounds just seem to melt away.
Looking
at the small turnout, I'm starting to think they shouldn't have banned
convicted pedophile Scott Ritter-- they truly did need every person that
they could scrounge up.
Such a small turnout
and it is surprising. I mean they had all the losers on their side.
Even Ryan Dawson used his Twitter feed to promote it -- ahead of the
'event' and after. You know Dawson, right? No?
SPL describes him for you:
Another Mises Caucus-linked speaker, Clint Russell, is a host of the
“Liberty Lockdown” podcast. Russell started the podcast in May 2020 to
push against COVID-19 lockdowns meant to stop the spread of the virus.
Russell has appeared alongside Ryan Dawson, a Holocaust denier and
self-described journalist who combines criticism of Israel’s occupation
of East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank with antisemitic
tropes.
In one video that garnered widespread criticism, Dawson claimed
Jewish people are responsible for communism, pedophilia, wars and more.
He then said, “And for no reason at all, they elected Adolf Hitler,”
referencing the Nazi government that oversaw the Holocaust.
The video originally featured a thumbnail image of Zyklon-B, the gas
Nazis used in death camps to kill millions of Jews in the Holocaust.
Sound like a fun bunch?
A
smattering of people attended thereby ensuring that Tucker Carlson
stayed true to form -- lying. He'd declared it would be a "massive
turnout." Well if by now you don't know that FOX NEWS is where you tune
in to hear lies, I guess you never will.
Maybe the 'action' fed Jimmy Dore's ego -- wasn't that always the point?
Let's note a portion of this Tweet from Jimmy.
I’m killing it in this clip, thanks for posting!
Even
when dealing with a supposed massive 'action,' it's all about Jimmy for
Jimmy: "I'm killing it in this clip." When he makes love to his wife,
do you think he scream his own name? Yeah, I think so too.
The “Rage Against the War Machine” rally held yesterday in Washington,
D.C., was a political freak show attended by a motley crowd of several
hundred Libertarian Party supporters, neo-fascists, and disoriented and
demoralized middle-class individuals without an independent program or
perspective. The speeches, many of which were obscenity-laced rants,
were pitched to the lowest political level. By the time the event
finally dribbled to an end, it had left nothing behind but confusion and
a bad smell.
That is so perfect, I just want to stop there. Read that again.
Okay, let's continue with their report:
The rally, which was moderated by Angela McArdle of the Libertarian
Party and Nick Brana of the “People’s Party,” was sold as an opportunity
by the organizers and the speakers to “bring together” the “left and
the right” to oppose war. In fact, there was no left-wing perspective;
the political direction was provided entirely by the right.
Even
on its own terms, the event was an organizational fiasco, with a
turnout of approximately 750 to 1,000 people, at most, despite being
promoted on Fox News by Tucker Carlson and other right-wing outlets.
The
rally featured no less than three speakers from organizations
affiliated with the late fascist and anti-Semitic cult-leader, Lyndon
LaRouche, including his wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche. A platform was also
provided for Jackson Hinkle, a fascist proponent of “MAGA communism,”
and Jordan Page, who wrote the Oath Keepers anthem. Page gave an
extended “musical” interlude with far-right anti-vaccine advocate and
“bitcoin” enthusiast, Tatiana Moroz.
[. . .]
To the extent there was a political perspective, it was provided by
Paul, the former Texas congressman. In his headline speech, Paul falsely
claimed that by eliminating the Federal Reserve, the US government
would be forced to pay its debts and therefore could not fund military
expenditures.
In reality, Paul’s program of austerity and debt
elimination, if put into practice, would result in the evisceration of
every single social welfare program in the United States, which is in
fact the aim of the most right-wing sections of the ruling class and the
program of the Libertarian Party.
Paul
ended his speech with a call for an end to all “regulations,” i.e.,
minimum wage, social security, medicare and medicaid, child labor and
work place safety laws, that “bankrupt the country.”
Individuals
linked to the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia,
and who participated in former President Donald Trump’s failed coup
were in attendance.
Local journalist Molly Conger photographed
Matthew Heimbach, the leading neo-Nazi who helped organize the 2017
rally in Charlottesville. In a podcast prior to the Unite the Right
rally, Heimbach called for the extermination of the “international Jew
and the local Jew, I don’t care if he runs a f**king bagel shop, he’s
got to go.”
Conger also photographed Proud Boy Randy Ireland, wearing a shirt
with the phrase “Justice 4 J6,” a reference to the small number of
individuals who were imprisoned for participating in Trump’s failed
coup.
Perhaps the biggest fraud of all was that the rally was an
“antiwar” event. Whatever the denunciations of the “military-industrial
complex” and the “war machine,” the main impact of the rally was to
politically legitimize and elevate far-right forces that are utilized by
sections of the ruling class itself.
Because
we have a large international audience, let me be clear, I was being
sarcastic at the top when I said Mindy Cohn attended. That was a man
who looked like her, Mindy has too much intelligence to ever show up at a
dumpster rally with those people.
Turning to
Iraq, the Iraq War is being used again. By THE GUARDIAN, no surprise. I
guess we're not done with the idiots at the rally just yet. But at THE
GUARDIAN, columnist John Kampfner wants to insist "Iraq was a terrible
war but it cannot excuse our failure to confront the tyranny today."
No link to trash.
I
don't know how much time you have, but mine is limited. So once I got
2015 and saw that John hasn't written on Iraq in the last seven years, I
knew he was a useless whore. Today, to sell continued war, he wants to
pretend that he sees the Iraq War as terrible. But the reality is he
didn't.
Of course he didn't. He wrote for THE GUARDIAN.
Which brings us to Idiot Swanson.
David
Swanson was at the DC 'event.' Of course he was. He's to be found
where ever non-action occurs. He's the original WalkOn, WalkOn.org.
He cared briefly about Iraq. Or pretended to.
He
was especially vocal -- for months and months -- about The Downing
Street Memo that exposed Bully Boy Bush's plan for war and the decision
to go to war being made at a meeting between Bully Boy and Tony Blair at
the former's Crawford Ranch.
He called out a lot of press for ignoring that memo.
He had a real hard time calling out THE GUARDIAN.
THE
GUARDIAN did ignore it. They were a pro-war publication. In the UK,
Tony Blair was the 'left.' As a result, it was the right-wing TIMES OF
LONDON that published the memo. THE GUARDIAN never covered it. Not one
write up. David was so sweet on them that he never called them out.
That's how you know you're dealing with a fake ass, they don't have the
guts to tell you the truth.
A number of high-profile cases of women and girls killed by family
members across Iraq in recent months are attracting attention once
again, leading to a resurgence of calls for Iraq to enact laws against
domestic violence.
Last month, the case of a young woman in a “family dispute” in which
the community police had been asked to mediate ended badly when a
22-year-old Youtuber was killed by her father. He has reportedly
admitted to strangling her in her sleep.
An outcry on social media followed, with many calling for the case to be treated as premeditated murder and not as a so-called honor crime.
“Iraq has failed to criminalize domestic violence despite an increase
in reporting of incidents of domestic violence by national NGOs.
Shockingly, the Iraqi penal code still treats leniently so-called 'honor
crimes’ comprising violent acts such as assault and even murder. There
is also no effective system in place for reporting domestic violence nor
adequate shelters to protect women and girls,” Amnesty International
noted earlier this month.
Iraq’s community police answer to the Interior Ministry and operate only in central government areas and not the Kurdistan Region of Iraq
(KRI). They are tasked with alleviating problems plaguing Iraqi
society, such as domestic abuse, electronic blackmail, drug use and
runaways, and they claim to be seen as more approachable by the
population than other parts of the country’s security forces.
The case of Tiba al-Ali
The young woman killed on Jan. 31, Tiba al-Ali, had returned to Iraq
for a visit but had been living independently in Turkey for years. She
reportedly had complained of being sexually assaulted by her brother in
previous years, which her family allegedly told her to “forget about.”
She appeared happy and carefree in several videos posted online from Turkey with her Syrian-born fiancé.
In a December interview in Baghdad prior to her killing, Brig. Gen.
Ghalib Atiyah, who has been at the helm of the community police for the
last three years, told Al-Monitor that none of the women and girls whose
cases the community police had been involved in, had been killed. He
stressed that this should be seen as an accomplishment, given the
influence that tribal norms continue to have on the country.
Of the 153 cases that Iraq’s community police dealt with regarding
runaways in 2022, “not a single [woman or girl] was killed,” Atiyah
said.
During our visit to his office, a printout was provided with the
number of “family violence” cases the community police had dealt with in
the previous year. It listed the number of “child runaways” as 32 and
“young women runaways” as 153.
Al-Monitor was told that the “child” category refers to males under
age 18, while “young women” refers to women and girls both under and
over 18 but that “most of them are very young.” When this difference in
categorization was pointed out, Brig. Gen. Atiyah stressed that many
Westerners do not understand that “most Iraqi women live with their
families until they are married.” Many of the runaway cases are related
to young women who are “tricked” by men they meet online, he said,
adding that the runaways “fall in love,” but they are then lied to by
these men and want to go home but are too afraid to do so.
He said that through mediation with the families and regularly
checking up on the young women who return to their homes, his force
plays a key role in ensuring many of them do not end up doing desperate
things to survive and that their families agree to let them come home
without harming them.
A 2018 study by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
found that, at the global level, their homes are “the most dangerous
place for women, with the majority of female homicide victims worldwide
killed by partners or family.”
One female hotel employee in Baghdad claimed to Al-Monitor in a
conversation in early February that, from what she has seen, it is often
the families of young women who push them into prostitution in the
Iraqi capital.
Hey,
remember when THE NEW YORK TIMES used to tell us there was no
prostitution in Iraq? Remember it was while their own Go-Go Boys in the
Green Zone were paying prostitutes -- which meant THE TIMES was paying
them. Remember how only a few of us bothered to tell the truth on
that? OFF OUR BACKS is sorely missed. They were one of the few
feminist outlets that was actually interested in reporting, not in being
a glossy, lifestyle magazine.
