You Cannes Not: Cannes wants to ban burkinis

I consider islam to be as laughable as christianity or any other religion, and the forced covering of women's skin to be ludicrous and sexist.  Get muslim men to cover their own eyes if they don't want to see women's skin.  But burkinis can at least serve a legitimate purpose.  I sometimes wear diveskins (full body lycra catsuits) when swimming in waters infested with jellyfish, or as skin protection if I'm at the beach for hours.

I have no doubt that David Lisnard, the mayor of Cannes, France will claim he is not an islamophobe.  Clearly he's too dim to understand that islamophobia and discrimination are part of what leads people to extemism.

Burkinis banned on France's Cannes beaches by mayor

The mayor of Cannes has banned the wearing of burkinis - full-body swimsuits - on the beaches of the French Riviera resort famous for its annual film festival, officials said on Thursday.

Mayor David Lisnard signed off on the ruling that "access to beaches and for swimming is banned to anyone who does not have (bathing apparel) which respects good customs and secularism", which is a founding principle of the French republic.

"Beachwear which ostentatiously displays religious affiliation, when France and places of worship are currently the target of terrorist attacks, is liable to create risks of disrupting public order (crowds, scuffles etc) which it is necessary to prevent," it says.

If Lisnard wants to ban burkinis, is he also going to ban neoprene wetsuits and diveskins which look very similar?  Or will he just admit he is a bigot targeting one specific religion?  It makes me wonder if his reactionary dictum is an overreaction what happened in Marseille.

'Burkini-only day' at French waterpark criticised

A waterpark in France is to be booked out for one day to Muslim women wanting to wear "burkinis" - but the decision has led to criticism by politicians on the right.

A community group in Marseille arranged the day, giving access only to women wearing the all-over swimming garment.

Note the key word: booked, which means people paid for use of a privately owned business.  Would people be getting into such a lather if a nudist group booked the facility?  Would people like Lisnard demand pork be served if muslims booked and paid for a halal-only menu at a restaurant?

Cops Copped: It's becoming black and white who the criminals are

Overheard in a Baton Rouge cop shop: 

Captain: "How can we make ourselves look like victims and use it to attack and demonize BlackLivesMatter?"

Lieutentant: "How about inventing a phony 'terrorist attack' and claim black people planned to kill cops?"

Are the cops in Baton Rouge, Louisiana borrowing a page from the George Bu**sh* regime?  They claim to have foiled an alleged "threat to murder police" and arrested a group of black men but have not shown any evidence to demonstrate their claim.  Given the history or Baton Rouge police violence and their destruction and falsification of evidence, one has to wonder if this "arrest" is a fiction done to make themselves look good and pretend to be victims.  The Bu**sh** regime did this many times, playing the fears of non-existent "terrorism" and pretend they were making the US "safe" while taking away people's rights.

Meanwhile on the same day in Virginia, three black men were sitting in a car and listening to music when they were shot in a drive-by attack.  The victims were not gang members nor engaged in any crime, as proven by their livestreaming on facebook.  Thus far, Norfolk cops had put little effort into capturing the suspect(s).

Questioners Marked: Farage breaks it, Carney has to fix it

Back in May 2016, Bank of England Chief Mark Carney predicted economic woes for England if the "brexit" vote passed.  The racist and xenophobic mobs that wanted separation accused Carney of scaremongering and campaigning for the "remain" side.

Brexit Vote May Spark Recession, Mark Carney Warns

The Bank of England has given its starkest warning yet that a UK vote to leave the EU could hit the economy.

Mark Carney, the Bank's governor, warned that the risks of leaving "could possibly include a technical recession".

Prime Minister David Cameron said the warning amounted to "a very clear message" of the dangers of Brexit.

Vote Leave campaigners have strongly criticised Mr Carney, with one calling for him to resign.

However, a spokesman for Mr Carney rejected the call, saying the Bank had "a duty" to make its judgements known.

Now, in July 2016, the Bank of England has produced a post-"brexit" report, and the news isn't good.  Carney was right.  (Many predicted Greece to be the domino that destroyed the EU, but it's just as likely that England will be.)

The Bank of England's Doom-Laden Predictions Are Beginning To Come True

"The current outlook for UK financial stability is challenging," the Bank of England warned on Tuesday.

The central bank's Financial Policy Committee has released its biannual financial stability report looking at the financial health of Britain and assessing any changes to the outlook since the most recent report.

For those who don't know, in 2013 Mark Carney was appointed to run the Bank of England.  He previously worked for the Bank of Canada between 2003 and 2013, chief of the Bank of Canada from February 2008 until he left. 

Canada had NO BANK FAILURES during the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009 while Carney was in control.  Canada played by the old banking rules (i.e. Glass-Stegall type rules), not the fast-and-loose rules the rest of the world played by.  It's not surprising that he knew better than the UK Ignorance Party.

Cops Empowered: Death of a nation

Police banality is as much a problem as police brutality.  US cops have become so used to committing murder with impunity that they no longer hesitate to kill.  The white robes of "Birth Of A Nation" in 1915 have been replaced by blue uniforms during the death of the nation in 2016.

The US media no longer make any pretence about their overt racism.  Not one media member called the Dallas shooter a lone wolf, even though he was a lone wolf.  He acted alone, unaffiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement, but good luck getting any racists in the media to admit that fact, to label a black shooter the same way as a white shooter committing the same crime. 

And good luck getting anyone to admit the shooting in Dallas is the fault of US cops, courts and so-called "legal system".  The murderers in Minnesota and Louisiana who murdered two black men bear more responsibility for the five dead cops in Dallas than the shooter.  Minnesota governor Mark Dayton deserves credit for calling the crime a murder, yet for doing so the rightwing media and corrupt police establishment have sought to vilify him - the same police establishment that publicly celebrated when one of the six murderers in Baltimore was "acquitted" by a corrupt legal system.

I am not wishing for this and don't want to see it, but Americans should brace themselves and expect to see a lot more tit-for-tat killings. People are tired of violent cops acting with impunity.  As happens in many other places, when legal means don’t work, people will resort to extralegal means. Note that I say extralegal, not illegal. There is a difference.

I won’t be shocked if the US turns into Vietnam on a small scale, warfare between the occupiers (cops) and the populace. The US military killed Vietnamese civilians indiscriminately to try and subdue the populace, but instead enraged people into supporting the resistance. The resistance killed US soldiers randomly to demoralize them, blending in with the population, and leaving the US military unable to find them.

Occupation of a population is impossible because people won’t stop fighting for their homeland until they win or they can’t fight anymore. It ends up in one of three results: a police state (e.g. USSR, South Africa), genocide to the point where the occupied populace can’t fight back anymore (e.g. US, Canada, Australia), or the occupiers realize they can’t win and give up (e.g. Vietnam, India, Afghanistan, the US civil rights fight). Palestine is a place heading towards one of these three endings.


Not two days after the Dallas shootings, cops in Baton Rouge have used trumped up charges to justify perpetrating violent acts against protesters.  The streets of the US are turning into Tiananmen Square.  The Black Lives Matter protester in this photo shows the same courage and dignity as the Chinese man who stood in front of a column of tanks.

Ignorance Wins: The UK commits suicide, not EU-thanasia

England wanted to EU-thanize the EU but instead has just committed economic and political suicide.  A vote based on racist and reactionary (lack of) thinking won't only separate the UK from the EU in terms of borders.

The UK banking system will be isolated, which means no EU loans, consumer protection or international banking.  It means UK citizens cannot travel, work or live in the EU.  It means UK citizens will lose the legal protections that the EU offers (environmental, economic, labour and employment rights, human rights, food and consumer safety, etc.).

The Scottish vote on separation in 2015 failed, but the possibility of voting again still exists.  Once the economic and political fallout of this vote come to pass, Scottish people will flock to the polls and will gladly return to the EU.  And you can expect Wales and Northern Ireland to choose the same route soon after. 

Within ten years, England will either become an economic basket case, the North Korea of Europe, or it will come crawling back, begging for readmittance that will only come on the EU's terms.

As seen on twitter:

Silence Kills: Media complicity in another Israelis human rights abuse

In the West Bank, part of Palestinian land, ramadan is not the only news story.  But you won't hear about the other story in the corporate media.

Update: The Israeli government has since admitted to human rights abuses by intentionally cutting off water to the West Bank.  But they still blame the Palestinian authority for the Israeli government's own actions.

The Israeli government has cut off the entire water supply to the West Bank.  Cut off all water.  As daily temperatures soar to 35°C or higher.

There are only two reasons to commit a human rights violation like this against a civilian populations:

1) To kill as many of the population as possible while protect by media silence and a US veto.

2) To drive people into such desperation that they decide to leave their homeland and allow an occupying invader to take it.

As if Israeli policy toward the West Bank and Gaza has ever been any different.

West Bank Palestinians Without Clean Water After Israel Cuts Off Supplies

“Mekorot, the main supplier of water to Palestinian towns and cities, siphoned off water supplies to the municipality of Jenin, several Nablus villages and the city of Salfit and its surrounding villages,” Al Jazeera reported.

Daytime temperatures are reaching 95 degrees and some people have not had access to drinking water for 40 days, according to Ayman Rabi, the executive director of the Palestinian Hydrology Group.

[...]

"Israel allocates to its citizens, including those living in settlements in the West Bank deemed illegal under international law, between three and five times more water than the Palestinians," Martin Asser wrote. "This, Palestinians say, is crippling to their agricultural economy."

Music Rules: Rough Trade, "What's the Furor About the Führer?"

Who says things never change? Sometimes they get worse.

"Air is thick with propaganda
Terrorists? The new SS
We're in the midst of a recession
A new master race goossteps into our hearts
[...]
Every one of us is a neo-nazi
Living in a so-called democracy"

Being Nickel-And-Dimed: The elimination of voters in the US

There are a plethora of news stories from the US that make absolutely no sense to anyone who lives in a functioning democracy.  This is only a partial list of such things:

A twelve year old child being bodyslammed into a floor.
Police threatening violence and arrest without any justification or crime. 
Adults threatened with jail time for loss of a library book.
Usury "fees" that goverments force people to pay before paying fines or tolls.
Nationalizing local incidents that do not merit the effort.
Militarism of civic policing.
Seizure laws that presume guilt until innocence.
Governments steal more private property than criminals do.

The goal of the 1%ers in the US is, and always had been, to turn the country into a Plutarchy or dictatorship.  But doing it overnight is unlikely to be accepted without a popular revolt.  The only way to do it is a slow, gradual elimination of the general populace from the voting lists and taking away their rights.  So how can that be done? 

By catapulting the propaganda about "getting tough on crime". 

By redefining minor acts into criminal acts. 

By creating a Soviet-style legal system ("Anything that is not explicitly permitted is forbidden."). 

By criminalizing as many of the population as possible.

By revoking the right to vote from people with criminal records.

With enough laws and enough time, the majority of Americans will no longer have the right to vote.  Only those with wealth and lawyers will have rights. 

The US is turning into a feudal society where the working poor pay taxes while the rich pay none.  The poor can be arrested, jailed or subjected to violence for questioning the hierarchy.

Hysteria Repeats: Like father, like son of a...

In February 2016, Justin Trudeau signed a law that falsely equates boycotts of Israel to be "anti-Semitism" and attempts to silence reporting of Israel's actions.  In doing so, he has proven he is his father's son, both overreacting and reacting with callous bigotry and denying human rights and free speech.

From 1963 to 1970, the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ, or in English, Quebec Liberation Front) was a political terrorist group active in Canada.  They engaged in various acts of terrorism across the province such as bombing railway lines, the home of Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau, and bombing government buildings.  Their most well known acts were the kidnappings of British trade commissioner James Richard Cross and Quebec vice premier Pierre Laporte in October 1970, now referred to as the October Crisis.  (Cross was eventually released, but Laporte was murdered soon after being kidnapped.)

Then Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau enacted the War Measures Act, which was normally used only in wartime to do things like imprison Canadians of Japanese descent (and confiscate their wealth and property, for which they were never reimbursed).  This effectively turned Canada into a police state, giving the RCMP the authority to arrest people without charge and deny them access to lawyers or trials if they spoke or displayed any sympathies towards the FLQ.  Claims of torture by the RCMP were made but never proven (i.e. whitewashed by internal "investigation", not by independent eyes).

Little Trudeau's anti-BDS law is as morally repugnant and unethical.  It whitewashes war crimes and human rights violations of Israel (e.g. collective punishment of innocent civilians, the reporting of murders and illegal executions, illegal prisons where people are tortured and have no legal protections, the denial of food, water and medicine to civilian populations) and makes talking about and reporting such acts a crime.

No matter what each did or does to prop up their own image (i.e. national medicare or claiming to be a feminist), nothing is going to erase the taint of their unethical acts.  Like father, like son of a....

Liars and Bigots Colour: Whites More Likely Than Blacks to Use Drugs

In the least surprising news of the day, the same US government that made it policy to prevent black people from home ownership and wealth accumulation also intentionally targeted those least likely to use drugs with the most incarceration by race.

Stereotype Shattered as New Study Finds White Youth Are More Likely Than Blacks to Abuse Hard Drugs

By now we can all agree that the real target of Reagan’s enduring war on drugs was never drugs, it was African Americans. But if rising incarceration rates among black youth or the utter failure to curtail drug use is not enough proof, perhaps a new study from Northwestern University on racial differences among drug users will do the trick.

[...]

Researchers interviewed the participants in the study up to nine times through the course of their 20s. In that time, findings revealed that the odds of non-Hispanic white youths using cocaine were 30 times higher than African Americans. Hispanic participants trailed slightly behind, showing 20 times the odds of cocaine use compared to their African-American brethren.

Trust Mistrusted: Once again, "Corrupt Cop" is a redundancy

Newark city's "settlement" with the US's Department of Justice settles nothing.  It does not reimburse victims of police corruption, not does it hold corrupt cops accountable for their actions.

Unlike most cases of police corruption, there is direct evidence of their misconduct that could be used to convict them.  Every time corrupt cops filed false reports, they put their names on them.  The US's DOJ is not charging those corrupt cops, and by not doing so they are condoning further corruption.


http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/31/nyregion/in-settlement-newark-agrees-to-a-series-of-police-department-reforms.html

In Settlement, Newark Agrees to a Series of Police Department Reforms

Federal officials announced on Wednesday that a sweeping settlement had been reached to reform the Newark Police Department after a three-year investigation uncovered a pattern of unconstitutional practices, including improper searches and stops and excessive use of force.