US mistreatment of detainees. Shocking!

We know from reports from inside the centers that migrants will first pass days caged in freezing cold hieleras, or “coolers”—the Border Patrol’s overcrowded temporary holding facilities—where the lights blaze 24/7 and migrants are forced to sleep on the floor. They’ll receive substandard and even deadly medical care, and will have the constant threat of deportation hanging over them as they are thrust into an increasingly antagonistic and restrictive immigration-court system. They could spend months or even years behind bars, many without ever having committed or even having being charged with a crime. And, as detailed in a new report from immigrant advocacy group Freedom for Immigrants, the guards and detention center officials sometimes treat them inhumanely, hurling racist, Islamophobic, and homophobic nastiness at them. The report, “Persecuted in Immigration Detention: A National Report on Abuse Motivated by Hate,,” details the deeply unsettling, rampant hate spewed by ICE and ICE-contracted guards in immigration detention centers, documenting at least 800 complaints of abuse.  https://www.thenation.com/article/just-hateful-abuse-immigrants-face-detention-centers/Immigrant detainees, mistreatment

Why does it take a comedian to speak the truth?

Save The Chew

Trump's tenuous ties to truth

Now PlayingMemorable...(CNN)President Donald Trump has a very casual relationship with the truth. To him, facts are fungible. They are things to stretch, pull and sometimes break -- all in service of the story that he tells himself about his life.

In his first 466 days in office, Trump said more than 3,000 things that were either partially or entirely untrue, according to a count kept by the amazing Fact Checker blog at The Washington Post. That's 6.5 a day!

Trump's penchant for prevarication is, at some level, an accepted piece of his presidency at this point. It's a feature, not a glitch. For most people -- both those who support Trump and who vehemently oppose him -- his exaggerations, mistruths and, in many cases, outright lies are baked in.

But there's one place where Trump's lack of candor and honesty is a major liability: in a legal deposition where lying carries criminal penalties.    https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/15/politics/donald-trump-mueller-special-counsel-russia-sit-down-interview/












T

Stupid Crook News: Man takes drugs to police

Avoiding the main rule of buying drugs--only buy from someone you know will sell you the real deal--a Florida man had doubts about whether he'd purchased real methamphetamine so he took the stash to police.

Bad move.

The police confirmed the Hawthorne, FL did indeed have meth and promptly arrested him for possession.  Helpfully, the Putnam County sheriff's office also volunteered to test any drugs for authenticity.

Holders, however, will find themselves subject to arrest.

The police posted the following note for others seeking police assistance in such matters: “If you believe you were sold bad drugs, we are offering a free service to test them for you. “Remember, our detectives are always ready to assist anyone who believes they were misled in their illegal drug purchase.”  https://jonathanturley.org/2018/06/15/florida-man-takes-drugs-to-police-station-to-confirm-authenticity-police-confirm-and-then-arrest-him/

President Dummkopf gives short shrift to our closest allies and embraces Russia

In a feat of stupidity unrivaled by all previous occupants of the Oval Office "our" president managed to shun all our closest allies and embrace our worst enemy: Russia.

Herr Dump stiff armed our allies by demanding they drop imagined trade barriers, thus upending 70 years of strategic and economic relations and turning towards our main international competitor: again, Russia, thus earning the appelation Dummkopf.

Of all the short sighted, ill considered, and frankly stupid blunders, this has to rank among the worst in at least a hundred years and threatens to start an international trade war and ignite another Great Depression similar to the way US actions precipitated the first Great Depression.

Ain't just me saying that:

Our allies are not stealing anything. It is far from clear what, if anything, would satisfy him. If — and it is a big if — Trump is serious about erecting barriers to U.S. markets, we are looking at a full-blown trade war with our closest allies and trading partners, along with the trade wars with China and Mexico. All this would redound to the benefit of exactly one country, Russia. A worldwide recession would not be hard to imagine. 

Trump becomes irrational and unhinged when contradicted, and given the degree of contradiction permitted within his inner circle (none), it must be unnerving indeed to discover that our allies view him with disdain if not contempt. Arriving late and leaving early from the G-7 gathering, Trump played the petulant child, trying so very hard to say that he didn’t want to be part of their group anyway — so there! Worse still, his disturbing invitation for Russia, the United States’ most worrisome foe, to join the G-7 suggests he really cannot tell who is a friend and who is an enemy.  (emphasis added)  https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2018/06/10/after-the-g-7-summit-be-afraid-be-very-afraid/

Anthony Bourdain's first paen to kitchen life

Anthony Bourdain burst into the literary world with this article unmasking the secrets of the professional kitchen.

Don't eat the fish on Tuesday; it ain't fresh.

Gastronomy is the science of pain. Professional cooks belong to a secret society whose ancient rituals derive from the principles of stoicism in the face of humiliation, injury, fatigue, and the threat of illness. The members of a tight, well-greased kitchen staff are a lot like a submarine crew. Confined for most of their waking hours in hot, airless spaces, and ruled by despotic leaders, they often acquire the characteristics of the poor saps who were press-ganged into the royal navies of Napoleonic times—superstition, a contempt for outsiders, and a loyalty to no flag but their own. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1999/04/19/dont-eat-before-reading-this 

Suicide is a desperate act, but it is also a hostile act. It begets more hostility. It gives the survivors the perfect opportunity to express all their real feelings about one another, good and bad. Years of petty resentments, years of unmentioned slights and snubs, grab center stage. 

Something — or somebody — had driven my father to take his life. Somebody had failed to recognize the symptoms. Somebody had failed him, over and over. It was somebody’s fault. It had to be somebody’s fault — anybody but the guy who did it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/suicide-is-desperate-it-is-hostile-it-is-tragic-but-mostly-it-is-a-bloody-mess/

 


https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/ 

Pres, Dump: "No porn in White House"

Deportation Kills

Manuel Antonio Cano Pacheco should have graduated from high school in Des Moines last month. The oldest of four siblings should have walked across a stage in a cap and gown to become a proud symbol to his sister and brothers of the rewards of hard work and education....

Instead, Manuel died a brutal death alone in a foreign land, a symbol of gang supremacy in a country plagued by violent drug cartels. It happened three weeks after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement returned him to Mexico, a country he had left at age 3 when his parents brought him here without a visa.

More than anything, his brief life and gruesome death are a reminder of the heartlessness and counter-productiveness of our immigration policies and removal practices, which don't factor in the harm that people may face upon return.  https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/rekha-basu/2018/06/07/deportation-death-des-moines-high-school-dreamer-daca-mexico-drug-cartels/680234002/

Trump a stooge for Putin and Russia

"When you look at Trump's behavioral patterns, his unwillingness ever to criticize Vladimir Putin, his slow rolling sanctions, his unwillingness to create problems with Russia, even though, as he attacks NATO, disrupts relations with the E.U., how can you not draw the conclusions that Donald Trump, the president of the United States, is frightened of Vladimir Putin."
https://www.alternet.org/former-nsa-analyst-claims-us-spy-agencies-have-known-trump-was-russian-agent-2016

Anthony Bourdain: Still exploring Parts Unknown--RIP

“He was elegant, he was kind, he was a dude. Charming. That’s the kind of guy he was,” LeDuff continued. “We all have to go. Some of have to go in a hard way. I’m shocked like everyone else, he had everything going. I don't know why. It’s just sad.”

“Even the world’s most interesting man hurt.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/anthony-bourdain-dead-from-suicide-cnn-says

[Yes, Anthony Bourdain was American cool.

I say this as somebody who hates the word “cool” and all the contrived nonsense that it stirs up, but the man really was. He could hold court with gourmand French chefs in one episode, and then gut and cook a chicken on the Congo River in the next. I was proud to have my country associated with him—he was in that brash yet debonair American mold that foreigners eat up.]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/anthony-bourdain-was-american-coolhttps://www.thedailybeast.com/anthony-bourdain-was-american-cool

Even I, with my studied and callous indifference towards others, hurt today.  The death of Bourdain diminishes us all.

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline

Call 1-800-273-8255

Available 24 hours everyday

Baptizing Pastor killed by croc

[Pastor Docho Eshete was baptizing at least 80 members of his Protestant congregation at Lake Abaya, in southern Ethiopia, an area known to have a huge crocodile population, when one of the creatures leaped out of the water and grabbed him.

“He baptized the first person and he passed on to another one,” a local resident told the BBC. “All of a sudden, a crocodile jumped out of the lake and grabbed the pastor.”]

Remember the Afghan War?; We lost!

As Colonel Danny Sjursen notes in his Tom Dispatch article, history provides a primer into the future of our efforts to "win" the war in Afghanistan.  Hard to believe, but a collection of warring tribes and sects and villages and a religious movement (the Taliban)--who collectively despise and hate the government in Kabul--can fight and beat the greatest military in the world.  Despite the bravery of our US forces, they try to do the impossible: unify Afghanistan and create a central democratic government.  The tribes don't defeat the United States, they just have to reach a stalemate.

Nevertheless, the policymakers refuse to realize we can never win.  From Bush Jr to Obama to the current occupant of the White House--and the alternative, Hillary Rodham Clinton--all refuse to accept this difficult proposition: the US cannot win this war.

That’s right, the local “Taliban” -- a term so nebulous it’s basically lost all meaning -- had managed to drastically alter U.S. Army tactics with crude, homemade explosives stored in plastic jugs. And believe me, this was a huge problem. Cheap, ubiquitous, and easy to bury, those anti-personnel Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs, soon littered the “roads,” footpaths, and farmland surrounding our isolated outpost. To a greater extent than a number of commanders willingly admitted, the enemy had managed to nullify our many technological advantages for a few pennies on the dollar (or maybe, since we’re talking about the Pentagon, it was pennies on the millions of dollars).  Links in original.

Even Bloomberg News, no bastion of progressive politics has noted the negative trends going on: [Almost sixteen years after the U.S.-backed ouster of the Taliban, Afghanistan remains in the grip of a war with “shockingly high” death rates among security forces and a record number of casualties among civilians, according to the U.S. government watchdog monitoring the country’s reconstruction efforts.]  (emphasis added)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-01/afghan-deaths-soar-to-highest-on-record-as-u-s-weighs-strategy

US policymakers need to face these facts: operations in Afghanistan have a deleterious effect on the entire US military as reported in Business Insider: "

Years of complex operations and the ongoing demands of units in the field have left the armed forces struggling to maintain both operational capacity and high levels of readiness, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office."]  (Links in original)

So the time has come for our imperious leader to turn his eyes from the false promise of peace with the North Koreans--does anyone seriously think Kim Jong Un will give up his nuclear weapons?--and fix the mess in Afghanistan by getting the Hell out of there and saving lives of American men and women, husbands and mothers, sons and daughters.

Tour the Millennium Falcon

https://www.space.com/40696-star-wars-millennium-falcon-photo-tour.html