Paramount Halts ‘Mission: Impossible’ Filming In Venice Due To Virus Outbreak
More than 100,000 Italians in 10 villages are on lockdown in northern Italy amid new concerns the Covid-19 outbreak has spread to Europe. This prompted Paramount Pictures to halt filming of Tom Cruise’s “Mission: Impossible 7” in Venice, Italy, for the next three weeks.
Paramount announced on Monday that the Italian government had banned all public gatherings, which prevented movie production crews from filming.
“Out of an abundance of caution for the safety and well-being of our cast and crew, and efforts of the local Venetian government to halt public gatherings in response to the threat of coronavirus, we are altering the production plan for our three-week shoot in Venice, the scheduled first leg of an extensive production for ‘Mission: Impossible 7,'” the statement said.
“During this hiatus, we want to be mindful of the concerns of the crew and are allowing them to return home until production starts. We will continue to monitor this situation, and work alongside health and government officials as it evolves.”
Most of the cases have been recorded in Lombardy (200+), while Veneto, Emilia-Romagna, Piedmont, Bolzano, Trentino, and Rome have all confirmed at least one case.
Here’s a chart showing the parabolic trajectory of cases in Italy:
The emergence of Italy, Iran, South Korea, and Japan as new outbreak zones of the virus is causing new concern that a pandemic could be imminent. So far, 80,300 people in 37 countries have been infected, resulting in 2,700 deaths.
The Trump administration is preparing to ask Congress for $2.5 billion in emergency funds to fight the virus as pandemic threats continue to surge.
As we’ve previously noted – WHO’s Dr. Tedros Adhanom said during the organization’s Monday morning press briefing that the outbreak isn’t yet a real “pandemic” because the world hasn’t seen “large-scale deaths.” Yeah, okay, but just ignore all the surging cases around the world!
The economic impact of the virus on Italy’s economy could be much deeper than previously thought. As cases spread across Europe, the continent is now on recession watch.
According to Sajid Javid’s Home Office, research and findings on the characteristics of grooming gangs across the United Kingdomis not in “public interest”.
After it was found that nearly 19,000 suspected victims of child sex exploitation transpired in just one year, survivors blamed the government for making “empty promises” on ending, or even addressing, the epidemic.
In 2018, Javid claimed there would be “no no-go areas of inquiry” in regards to the rampant sex grooming of children in England.
After Javid’s statement, no further statements on the review have been made. According to The Independent, the outlet was told that the work had been finished but it would only be used for internal policy-making and would not be released publicly.
Even after a freedom of information request inquiring on the research and reports, the British Home Office said they held the information but it would not be released.
Disclosure would risk pre-empting decisions still to be made by ministers. In addition, the information could be misleading if made public and used out of context. We recognize that this topic in general and any insight and learning are matters of strong public interest, although it does not necessarily follow that it is in the public interest to disclose any specific information relating to it.
The Home Office has explained that it will soon publish a national strategy that will create a “whole system response to all forms of child sexual abuse”.
However, until the new system is made and utilized as promised, it seems that the U.K. Home Office is content on allowing the sexual abuse and grooming of children to continue unabashed.
Seeing as how the epidemic of different sex grooming gangs around the United Kingdom has been reported since 2018, it seems that the matter is not a pressing issue to British authorities. As sad as this is, it is likely a trend that will only continue, as the U.K. continues to allow itself to aid and abet criminal behavior among its refugee population.
The Nobel Peace Prize was founded in 1901 by Alfred Nobel, an arms manufacturer. His family factory first gained notoriety for producing weapons for the Crimean War of 1853-1856. Alfred Nobel invented dynamite and various other powerful explosives. These explosives were used to devastate people in conflicts such as the Spanish-American War.
After Nobel’s brother died, because of a journalistic error, the public believed that Alfred Nobel had died. In his obituary, he was portrayed as an amoral businessman who made millions of dollars off of the deaths of others. His critics declared that “the merchant of death is dead” and that Alfred Nobel “became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before.”
According to Live Science, this discovery shocked Nobel, and to improve his legacy, “one year before he died in 1896, Nobel signed his last will and testament, which set aside the majority of his vast estate to establish the five Nobel Prizes, including one awarded for the pursuit of peace.” This may very well have been a genuine act, but it is important to draw parallels between the origin of the award and its not so peaceful recipients. Here are three of the Nobel Peace Prize winners that turned out to be war criminals.
HENRY KISSINGER
Henry Kissinger won the award in 1973 for his “efforts” to conclude the Vietnam War. What a joke. In 1968, Kissinger helped tank President Johnson’s peace talks on behalf of the Nixon campaign for political gain. Kissinger helped orchestrate the secret bombing of Cambodia. These bombing operations were known as Operation Menu and Operation Freedom Deal.
The carpet bombing of Cambodia led to the deaths of 10,000s, if not 100,000s, of Cambodian civilians. The total death count has been estimated to be as high as 500,000 (most estimates range between 150,000-300,000 deaths). The vast majority of these deaths are considered to be civilians because of the indiscriminate nature of the carpet bombing. These bombings also destabilized Cambodia and allowed for the rise of the genocidal ruler, Pol-Pot. The bombing campaign was so gratuitous that it made Congress pass the War Powers Resolution in 1973, in an attempt to curb the bombing campaign.
With all of that being said, Kissinger still won the award for his role in the Paris Peace Accords. The peace talks began in 1968, the same year that Kissinger undermined the process to win an election for Nixon. After the agreement was signed in January 1973, it lasted less than two months before full-scale war broke out again in March 1973.
After winning the award, Henry Kissinger then proceeded to indirectly back Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia. This was done primarily as a way to put pressure on the former North Vietnamese Army. Pol-Pot’s genocide killed between 1.5-2 million people (20%-25% of Cambodia’s population).
Henry Kissinger’s crimes are not limited to Vietnam. He has a long bloody history in Latin America as well. Kissinger was a major proponent of Operation Condor. The highly secretive US-backed campaign enabled South American dictators to kill an estimated 60,000 to 80,000 people. It also led to political imprisonments of over 400,000 people. Transcripts of telephone conversations reveal that after President Allende’s election in 1970, Kissinger began plotting a coup with CIA director Richard Helm. After the 1973 coup in Chile, Kissinger, as Secretary of State, formalized close ties between Pinochet and the United States.
For years to come, Kissinger proceeded to have close ties with the Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet, who killed 1000s of his political opponents and imprisoned and tortured 10,000s more. Pinochet popularized death flights: a practice where people’s stomachs were cut open before they were tossed out of planes into the ocean.
Kissinger also backed Argentina’s military dictatorship. He was buddy-buddy with Jorge Videla, a dictator who disappeared an estimated 30,000 political dissidents. Videla also tortured political opponents and their families at secret concentration camps. Kissinger encouraged all of this brutality and praised the dictatorship for stamping out “terrorism.”
Henry Kissinger’s war crimes are far too numerous to neatly fit into one article. For a better understanding of his many war crimes that I left out, I recommend reading The Trail of Henry Kissinger.
BARACK OBAMA
In 2009, Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between people.” Before digging into Obama’s war crimes, I would like to add a few caveats. Obama is not exactly like Kissinger.
On the 2008 campaign trail, Obama did claim that he would meet with adversaries without preconditions. Furthermore, he followed through on this promise in two major ways. He successfully negotiated the Iran Deal and lifted the embargo on Cuba. These are not accomplishments that should be brushed aside. That being said, Obama’s diplomatic achievements are overshadowed by his imperialist failures. I also blame most of Obama’s failures on a lack of conviction in his values and not on any Machiavellian schemes. Most of Obama’s bad foreign policy decisions can be traced back to him getting rolled by people in the military industrial complex establishment like his CIA director John O. Brennan.
Barack Obama’s most reprehensible policy was his support of the Saudi Arabian-fueled genocide in Yemen. Obama authorized mid-air refueling to refuel Saudi bombers on average twice per day and he set up a Joint Planning Cell to give Saudi intelligence and logistical support to bomb Yemen.
Obama also approved 10s of billions in arms sales to Saudi Arabia that were used to devastate Yemen’s infrastructure and throw the country into a mass famine.
In 2016 alone, Obama’s policies led to the deaths of 63,000 Yemeni children. They died from preventable causes overwhelmingly linked to malnutrition. These deaths were caused by the Saudi bombing campaign and the de-facto blockade of humanitarian aid.
For example, Saudi Arabia, with US backing, bombed the cranes at the port of Hodeidah in August 2015. 70% of all humanitarian assistance to Yemen is channeled through Hodeidah. Bombing the cranes of the major port in this area is a war crime.
In fact, humanitarian aid groups warned that the US-backed August 2015 bombings would lead to mass child death in Yemen. The Obama administration’s support and aid of these siege warfare tactics was an abhorrent moral failure. It is highly unlikely that the war in Yemen would have even been possible without US support. Neither Saudi Arabia or the UAE had the ability to wage a sustained bombing campaign without outside support from a major imperialist power like the United States.
Barack Obama also authorized Operation Timber Sycamore, the CIA train-and-equip program in Syria. The multi-billion-dollar program armed and trained fighters to topple Assad. I personally believe that the Syrian conflict is not black and white. There is a lot of blame to go around. In my opinion, both pro-Assad and anti-Assad writers do not tell the entire complex story. Over half a dozen countries helped fuel the proxy war for different reasons, and Assad himself is not simply a victim of Western imperialism.
Those caveats aside, it is very clear that Timber Sycamore was a terrible idea that led to textbook mutual escalation that broke open the Syrian conflict further and might well be the reason that 100,000s more Syrians died. Billions of dollars were poured into “vetted” rebel groups. Many of these groups turned out to be Salafi jihadist groups and Muslim Brotherhood-linked groups that carried out ethnic murder and various other war crimes.
Among these groups that received either training or weapons were Ahrar al Sham, Jaysh al Islam, and Nour al-Din al-Zenki, all of whom have been accused of war crimes as per Amnesty International. The massive delivery of BGM-71 TOWs via Timber Sycamore is also sometimes cited (in my opinion correctly) as the policy that caused Russia to intervene in Syria. This is the aforementioned textbook case of mutual escalation.
Obama also set up a worldwide drone program that Noam Chomsky called “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times.” A study done in Afghanistan over a six-month period found that 90% of people killed in US drone strikes were not the intended targets. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism is one resource that has documented the high civilian casualty rate that occurred under Obama’s drone program (and continued and oftentimes increased under Trump’s administration).
AUNG SAN SUU KYI
Aung San Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for “her nonviolent struggle for democracy and human rights.” She is currently the State Counsellor (equivalent of prime minister) of Myanmar. State Counsellor Suu Kyi just oversaw one of the largest violent ethnic cleansing projects of the 21st century. It turns out that she fought for human rights and democracy…unless you are a Rohingya Muslim.
The crackdown on the Rohingya that Suu Kyi oversaw led to a conservative death toll of 10,000 Rohingya. The Myanmar military burned children alive and raped 1000s of Rohingya women. Since 2015, over 900,000 Rohingya have had to flee from Myanmar, mostly into neighboring Bangladesh.
There have been claims that the ethnic cleansing project may have been a response to violent Rohingya extremist groups that operated in the Rakhine State area of Myanmar. I find this to be plausible given the history of oppression that Rohingya faced and their subsequent insurrections dating back over a half a century.
However, this certainly does not excuse hacking Rohingya civilians to death with machetes (similar to what the Hutus did to the Tutsis in the Rwandan genocide)
State Counsellor Suu Kyi denied that an ethnic cleansing project was taking place and she backed the military crackdown. She gave cover for the war criminals in her military by stating “there have been allegations and counter-allegations…We have to listen to all of them.”
Suu Kyi proceeded to be the figurehead that attacked the International Criminal Court investigations into Myanmar’s ethnic cleansing project as “not in accordance with international law.” She proceeded to run interference for her military’s war crimes at the UN.
To be clear, as I alluded to above, not all Rohingya are innocent in the conflict. There are credible reports that tie some of the more extremist groups in Rakhine State to outside Saudi funding. But it is a false equivalency used by ethnic cleansing apologists to conflate all the Rohingya in Myanmar with Al Qaeda. Buddhist nationalists used the (likely) correct allegation that worldwide terrorism sponsor Saudi Arabia was funding a couple of Rohingya groups as an excuse to ethnically cleanse an entire population that is mostly peaceful.
CONCLUSION
It’s very simple. The Nobel Peace Prize is just like most other awards. Sometimes its distributors get it right and sometimes they get it wrong. The people that win awards do not win them based off of objective score cards about morality. They win these awards based off of media narratives.
When the Nobel Peace Prize awarded Martin Luther King Jr. with the award, they got it right. When they awarded Henry Kissinger with the award, they exposed themselves to be clowns of the highest order. Do not take awards like the Nobel Peace Prize seriously. They are popularity contests, where oftentimes those that are popular are actually in favor of abhorrent policies.
Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg during Tuesday night’s presidential debate in South Carolina twice stressed the importance of basing policy on good “science,” while defending his idiosyncratically intrusive approach to public health. It is lamentable, though not at this late stage surprising, that the 78-year-old billionaire continues to not let facts get in the way of his passion for limiting Americans’ choices.
Bloomberg, who bragged during his first campaign that he “enjoyed” smoking pot then promptly turned Gotham into the marijuana arrest capital of the world, was asked by CBS News anchor Gayle King about his now-atypical prohibitionist stance, particularly since he has previously (in King’s paraphrasing) “called marijuana another addictive drug that we’ve never done research on.”
“Look, the first thing you do is we should not make this a criminal thing if you have a small amount. For dealers, yes, but for the average person, no, and you should expunge the records of those that got caught up in this before,” Bloomberg said. Then: “We’re not going to take it away from states that have already done it.”
As Jacob Sullum has noted in these pages, this position, while better than the one Bloomberg staked out during his three mayoral terms, is fundamentally incoherent, since “as long as producing and distributing cannabis remain illegal, of course, the government will still be ‘putting people in jail for marijuana’….If people should not be arrested for marijuana use, as Bloomberg now claims to believe, it is hard to see why people should be arrested merely for facilitating marijuana use.”
But what rankles even more than the bad policy is the smug, self-satisfied, pseudo-scientific hubris with which Bloomberg then attempted to sell his continued opposition to legalizing a non-lethal recreational drug enjoyed peaceably by tens of millions of Americans.
“You should listen to the scientists and the doctors. They say go very slowly,” he claimed. “They haven’t done enough research. And the evidence so far is worrisome. Before we get all our kids, particularly kids in their late teens, boys even more than girls, where this may be damaging their brains. Until we know the science, it’s just nonsensical to push ahead.”
The worrisome “evidence” Bloomberg is almost certainly alluding to here is a shoddy and near-universally misreported study about pot use on the brain that serious researchers eviscerated on arrival back in 2014. And yet this doesn’t begin to do justice to Mayor Mike’s incandescent insincerity on the issue of marijuana science.
If indeed scientists “haven’t done enough research,” the biggest single impediment to that discovery has been a suppressive federal government informed by the same kind of prohibitionism Bloomberg has long practiced publicly, if not quite personally.
Nevertheless, some science has persisted—enough to allow the Food and Drug Administration to approve a synthetic version of THC for nausea way back in 1985, and various spinoffs thereafter. Yet as recently as 2013, the proudly ignorant mayor was calling marijuana’s health benefits “one of the great hoaxes of all times,” and snorting, “Yeah, right, ‘medical,’ my foot.”
As Sullum noted then, “it is worth highlighting how woefully misinformed this supposedly smart and scientifically sophisticated technocrat is on the subject of marijuana’s therapeutic utility….Contrary to what his dismissive tone suggests, Bloomberg has no idea what he’s talking about….[His] arrogance is, if anything, more infuriating than his ignorance.”
Also cloaked in the holy mantle of managerial lab-coatery Tuesday was Bloomberg’s infamous mayoral record as a nanny-state busybody controlling the consumption habits of poor fatties. The good news is that the Democrats’ very own trash-talking Manhattan billionaire recognizes that New York City isn’t necessarily a model for the rest of the country. The bad news is that he continues to espouse some of the most intrusive philosophies of governance in all American politics.
“I do think it’s the government’s job to have good science and to explain to people what science says or how to take care of themselves and extend their lives,” he said. “[W]e are a country where there are too many people that are obese. We should do something about that.”
He later added this non-humble brag: “Before I left, life expectancy in New York City had grown by three years during our 12 years in office, such that when I left, it was three years greater than the national average.”
True? New York Times fact-checkers note that the number is actually 2.3 years greater than the national average, and that “research has also suggested that New York’s high rate of immigrants may also explain part of the trend: Poor immigrants, in general, tend to be healthier than native-born Americans of similar incomes.”
Like his notorious Stop, Question, and Frisk policy, some of Bloomberg’s consumption-restrictions were eventually deemed by courts to run afoul of the law.
But the important thing for the pint-sized entrepreneur and those who nod along to his we-respect-science claims is that he is the avatar of technocrats who actually do not.
Bloomberg is the country’s leading advocate for banning e-cigarettes in the name of public health, despite conclusive proof that vaping is one of the best harm-reduction strategies that smokers can employ short of quitting nicotine altogether. He is also the leading advocate for gun control, in which service he tells campaign whoppers about children killed by gun violence that are just 73 percent off the mark.
Nonetheless, credit where credit’s due to the Democratic presidential candidate currently polling in third place nationally after dropping a cool half-billion on his three-month quest: The government should listen more often to scientists and doctors. Then maybe politicians wouldn’t campaign on such anti-scientific, freedom-restricting claptrap.
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“Roger Stone Did Nothing Wrong!” proclaimed the T-shirts worn by his supporters. Federal prosecutors, by contrast, argued that Stone deserved at least seven years in prison.
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson split the difference last week, sentencing the longtime Donald Trump crony to three years and four months in prison—a penalty that still seems excessive given the nature and consequences of his crimes. In addition to the perils of presidential pronouncements about ongoing criminal cases, the case highlights the dubious wisdom and fairness of federal sentencing guidelines.
When Attorney General William Barr overrode the original sentencing recommendation for Stone, which called for a prison term of seven to nine years, the resulting controversy focused on the appearance that he was acting at his boss’s behest. But whatever the motivation for the amended sentencing memorandum, which recommended “a sentence of incarceration far less” than the one originally proposed, it raised legitimate concerns that should figure in the penalties imposed on all federal defendants.
Stone was convicted of lying to a congressional committee about his attempts to help elect Trump by contacting WikiLeaks, which had obtained emails that Russian hackers stole from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. He was also convicted of witness tampering because he persistently pressured his erstwhile friend Randy Credico, one of his WikiLeaks intermediaries, to refrain from contradicting those lies.
Contrary to the claims made by some of Stone’s defenders, he did not stumble into a “perjury trap” set by the president’s enemies. When he voluntarily testified before the House Intelligence Committee, which was investigating Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election, the panel was controlled by Republicans and chaired by Rep. Devin Nunes (R–Calif.), a Trump ally.
Stone easily could have avoided his legal troubles by declining to testify or by telling the truth. Instead he lied, repeatedly and flagrantly, about his contacts with people he thought could relay messages to WikiLeaks, about his communications with Trump campaign officials, and about the emails and text messages that documented those interactions.
Having lied, Stone persistently pressured Credico to back up his story or avoid testifying. When Credico received a subpoena, he invoked the Fifth Amendment, as Stone had suggested.
Judge Jackson indignantly rejected the idea that none of this was a big deal, and she had a point. Unless you think Congress has no business holding hearings on issues such as foreign meddling in U.S. elections, it seems clear that witnesses at those hearings cannot be allowed to lie with impunity.
Yet the actions Stone tried to conceal, while potentially embarrassing to the president, were neither criminal nor consequential, and the facts eventually emerged despite his dishonesty. And while the assistant U.S. attorneys who prosecuted Stone argued that he deserved a hefty sentencing enhancement for threatening Credico with violence, Credico himself implored Jackson not to impose a prison sentence, emphasizing that he never took the defendant’s bluster seriously.
In addition to making that point, the amended sentencing memorandum questioned “the two-level enhancement for obstruction of justice,” which was based mainly on Stone’s public statements about his case. While conceding that the enhancements recommended by Stone’s prosecutors were “arguably” consistent with the guidelines and “perhaps technically applicable,” the second memorandum argued that the resulting sentencing range was disproportionate for nonviolent crimes.
The memorandum noted that prosecutors have a duty to pursue justice, not simply to clobber defendants with the heaviest penalties the law allows. It thereby called attention to the disjunction between just punishment and the sentences recommended by the guidelines, which have long been criticized as excessively harsh, mechanical, and complicated yet blind to relevant moral differences.
“Many defense attorneys and judges have been making that point for a very long time,” Jackson noted last week, “but we usually don’t succeed in getting the government to agree.” The problems with the guidelines are real and troubling, even in cases that do not involve the president’s pals.
Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg during Tuesday night’s presidential debate in South Carolina twice stressed the importance of basing policy on good “science,” while defending his idiosyncratically intrusive approach to public health. It is lamentable, though not at this late stage surprising, that the 78-year-old billionaire continues to not let facts get in the way of his passion for limiting Americans’ choices.
Bloomberg, who bragged during his first campaign that he “enjoyed” smoking pot then promptly turned Gotham into the marijuana arrest capital of the world, was asked by CBS News anchor Gayle King about his now-atypical prohibitionist stance, particularly since he has previously (in King’s paraphrasing) “called marijuana another addictive drug that we’ve never done research on.”
“Look, the first thing you do is we should not make this a criminal thing if you have a small amount. For dealers, yes, but for the average person, no, and you should expunge the records of those that got caught up in this before,” Bloomberg said. Then: “We’re not going to take it away from states that have already done it.”
As Jacob Sullum has noted in these pages, this position, while better than the one Bloomberg staked out during his three mayoral terms, is fundamentally incoherent, since “as long as producing and distributing cannabis remain illegal, of course, the government will still be ‘putting people in jail for marijuana’….If people should not be arrested for marijuana use, as Bloomberg now claims to believe, it is hard to see why people should be arrested merely for facilitating marijuana use.”
But what rankles even more than the bad policy is the smug, self-satisfied, pseudo-scientific hubris with which Bloomberg then attempted to sell his continued opposition to legalizing a non-lethal recreational drug enjoyed peaceably by tens of millions of Americans.
“You should listen to the scientists and the doctors. They say go very slowly,” he claimed. “They haven’t done enough research. And the evidence so far is worrisome. Before we get all our kids, particularly kids in their late teens, boys even more than girls, where this may be damaging their brains. Until we know the science, it’s just nonsensical to push ahead.”
The worrisome “evidence” Bloomberg is almost certainly alluding to here is a shoddy and near-universally misreported study about pot use on the brain that serious researchers eviscerated on arrival back in 2014. And yet this doesn’t begin to do justice to Mayor Mike’s incandescent insincerity on the issue of marijuana science.
If indeed scientists “haven’t done enough research,” the biggest single impediment to that discovery has been a suppressive federal government informed by the same kind of prohibitionism Bloomberg has long practiced publicly, if not quite personally.
Nevertheless, some science has persisted—enough to allow the Food and Drug Administration to approve a synthetic version of THC for nausea way back in 1985, and various spinoffs thereafter. Yet as recently as 2013, the proudly ignorant mayor was calling marijuana’s health benefits “one of the great hoaxes of all times,” and snorting, “Yeah, right, ‘medical,’ my foot.”
As Sullum noted then, “it is worth highlighting how woefully misinformed this supposedly smart and scientifically sophisticated technocrat is on the subject of marijuana’s therapeutic utility….Contrary to what his dismissive tone suggests, Bloomberg has no idea what he’s talking about….[His] arrogance is, if anything, more infuriating than his ignorance.”
Also cloaked in the holy mantle of managerial lab-coatery Tuesday was Bloomberg’s infamous mayoral record as a nanny-state busybody controlling the consumption habits of poor fatties. The good news is that the Democrats’ very own trash-talking Manhattan billionaire recognizes that New York City isn’t necessarily a model for the rest of the country. The bad news is that he continues to espouse some of the most intrusive philosophies of governance in all American politics.
“I do think it’s the government’s job to have good science and to explain to people what science says or how to take care of themselves and extend their lives,” he said. “[W]e are a country where there are too many people that are obese. We should do something about that.”
He later added this non-humble brag: “Before I left, life expectancy in New York City had grown by three years during our 12 years in office, such that when I left, it was three years greater than the national average.”
True? New York Times fact-checkers note that the number is actually 2.3 years greater than the national average, and that “research has also suggested that New York’s high rate of immigrants may also explain part of the trend: Poor immigrants, in general, tend to be healthier than native-born Americans of similar incomes.”
Like his notorious Stop, Question, and Frisk policy, some of Bloomberg’s consumption-restrictions were eventually deemed by courts to run afoul of the law.
But the important thing for the pint-sized entrepreneur and those who nod along to his we-respect-science claims is that he is the avatar of technocrats who actually do not.
Bloomberg is the country’s leading advocate for banning e-cigarettes in the name of public health, despite conclusive proof that vaping is one of the best harm-reduction strategies that smokers can employ short of quitting nicotine altogether. He is also the leading advocate for gun control, in which service he tells campaign whoppers about children killed by gun violence that are just 73 percent off the mark.
Nonetheless, credit where credit’s due to the Democratic presidential candidate currently polling in third place nationally after dropping a cool half-billion on his three-month quest: The government should listen more often to scientists and doctors. Then maybe politicians wouldn’t campaign on such anti-scientific, freedom-restricting claptrap.
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“Roger Stone Did Nothing Wrong!” proclaimed the T-shirts worn by his supporters. Federal prosecutors, by contrast, argued that Stone deserved at least seven years in prison.
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson split the difference last week, sentencing the longtime Donald Trump crony to three years and four months in prison—a penalty that still seems excessive given the nature and consequences of his crimes. In addition to the perils of presidential pronouncements about ongoing criminal cases, the case highlights the dubious wisdom and fairness of federal sentencing guidelines.
When Attorney General William Barr overrode the original sentencing recommendation for Stone, which called for a prison term of seven to nine years, the resulting controversy focused on the appearance that he was acting at his boss’s behest. But whatever the motivation for the amended sentencing memorandum, which recommended “a sentence of incarceration far less” than the one originally proposed, it raised legitimate concerns that should figure in the penalties imposed on all federal defendants.
Stone was convicted of lying to a congressional committee about his attempts to help elect Trump by contacting WikiLeaks, which had obtained emails that Russian hackers stole from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. He was also convicted of witness tampering because he persistently pressured his erstwhile friend Randy Credico, one of his WikiLeaks intermediaries, to refrain from contradicting those lies.
Contrary to the claims made by some of Stone’s defenders, he did not stumble into a “perjury trap” set by the president’s enemies. When he voluntarily testified before the House Intelligence Committee, which was investigating Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election, the panel was controlled by Republicans and chaired by Rep. Devin Nunes (R–Calif.), a Trump ally.
Stone easily could have avoided his legal troubles by declining to testify or by telling the truth. Instead he lied, repeatedly and flagrantly, about his contacts with people he thought could relay messages to WikiLeaks, about his communications with Trump campaign officials, and about the emails and text messages that documented those interactions.
Having lied, Stone persistently pressured Credico to back up his story or avoid testifying. When Credico received a subpoena, he invoked the Fifth Amendment, as Stone had suggested.
Judge Jackson indignantly rejected the idea that none of this was a big deal, and she had a point. Unless you think Congress has no business holding hearings on issues such as foreign meddling in U.S. elections, it seems clear that witnesses at those hearings cannot be allowed to lie with impunity.
Yet the actions Stone tried to conceal, while potentially embarrassing to the president, were neither criminal nor consequential, and the facts eventually emerged despite his dishonesty. And while the assistant U.S. attorneys who prosecuted Stone argued that he deserved a hefty sentencing enhancement for threatening Credico with violence, Credico himself implored Jackson not to impose a prison sentence, emphasizing that he never took the defendant’s bluster seriously.
In addition to making that point, the amended sentencing memorandum questioned “the two-level enhancement for obstruction of justice,” which was based mainly on Stone’s public statements about his case. While conceding that the enhancements recommended by Stone’s prosecutors were “arguably” consistent with the guidelines and “perhaps technically applicable,” the second memorandum argued that the resulting sentencing range was disproportionate for nonviolent crimes.
The memorandum noted that prosecutors have a duty to pursue justice, not simply to clobber defendants with the heaviest penalties the law allows. It thereby called attention to the disjunction between just punishment and the sentences recommended by the guidelines, which have long been criticized as excessively harsh, mechanical, and complicated yet blind to relevant moral differences.
“Many defense attorneys and judges have been making that point for a very long time,” Jackson noted last week, “but we usually don’t succeed in getting the government to agree.” The problems with the guidelines are real and troubling, even in cases that do not involve the president’s pals.
America’s Newest Most Powerful Submarine Has A Stealth Problem
The Navy’s newest fast-attack submarine was recently spotted with structural damage to its stealth coating after returning from its first deployment, which brings into question the manufacturing process of the shipbuilder, reported Forbes.
The USS Colorado (SSN 788), a nuclear-powered US Navy Virginia-class attack submarine, was recently photographed with large sections of its stealth coating, known as anechoic coating, missing on its starboard side. The layer is an outer skin, consisting of a sonar-absorbing material that makes the vessel virtually undetectable.
Colorado was launched on March 17, 2018, and this is one of America’s newest and most powerful submarines, already experiencing issues with its outer stealth coating that could make it susceptible to detection by enemy forces.
The vessel recently returned from deployment in harsh northern waters, traveling approximately 39,000 nautical miles.
Forbes notes that the US, British, and Russian navies have all had similar problems with stealth skin breaking off during deployments.
However, Colorado experienced structural damage to its stealth coating on its first deployment, opening up questions surrounding the shipbuilder’s manufacturing process.
At some point, all this unproductive war spending will bankrupt America. The latest evidence above shows the amount of waste the administration is spending on the military for machines that fall apart in the first deployment.
One thing we’ve learned from the Trump Presidency is that the “deep state” is not just some crazy conspiracy theory. For the past three years we’ve seen that deep state launch plot after plot to overturn the election.
It all started with former CIA director John Brennan’s phony “Intelligence Assessment” of Russian involvement in the 2016 election. It was claimed that all 17 US intelligence agencies agreed that Putin put Trump in office, but we found out later that the report was cooked up by a handful of Brennan’s hand-picked agents.
Via Reuters/The Independent
Donald Trump upset the Washington apple cart as presidential candidate and in so doing he set elements of the deep state in motion against him.
One of the things candidate Donald Trump did to paint a deep state target on his back was his repeated praise of Wikileaks, the pro-transparency media organization headed up by Australian journalist Julian Assange. More than 100 times candidate Trump said “I love Wikileaks” on the campaign trail.
Trump loved it when Wikileaks exposed the criminality of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, as it cheated to deprive Bernie Sanders of the Democratic Party nomination. Wikileaks’ release of the DNC emails exposed the deep corruption at the heart of US politics, and as a candidate Trump loved the transparency.
Then Trump got elected.
The real tragedy of the Trump presidency is nowhere better demonstrated than in Trump’s 180 degree turn away from Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange. “I know nothing about Wikileaks,” he said as president. “It’s really not my thing.”
Donald Trump is trying to “make an example” of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder’s defense team argued Monday at the start of his extradition hearing https://t.co/wVgjWyl9y1
US pressure and bribes to the Ecuadorian government ended Assange’s asylum and his seven years in a room at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. After his dramatic arrest by London’s Metropolitan Police last April, he has been effectively tortured in British jails at the behest of the US deep state.
Starting Monday the 24th of February, Assange faces an extradition hearing in a UK courthouse. The Trump Administration – led by a man who praised Assange’s work – seeks a show trial of Assange worthy of the worst of the Soviet era. The US is seeking a 175 year prison sentence.
The Trump Administration argues that the Australian Assange should be tried and convicted of espionage against a country of which he is not a citizen. At the same time the Trump Administration argues that the First Amendment does not apply to Assange because he is not an American citizen! So Assange is subject to US law when it comes to publishing information embarrassing to the US deep state but he is not subject to the law of the land – the US Constitution – which protects all journalists and is the backbone of our system of government.
It is ironic that a President Trump who has been victim of so much deep state meddling has done the deep state’s bidding when it comes to Assange and Wikileaks. President Trump should preempt the inevitable US show trial of Assange by granting the journalist blanket pardon under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.
The deep state Trump is serving by persecuting Assange is the same deep state that continues to plot Trump’s own ouster. Free Assange!
Secretive Cult Linked To Coronavirus Outbreak In South Korea Held Meetings In Wuhan
Following reports that a strange Christian cult might be behind the outbreak in Daegu that kickstarted South Korea’s COVID-19 crisis, readers around the world have been curious to learn more details about the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, the small but surprisingly extensive church that follows a man named Lee Man-hee who claims to be the second coming of Jesus Christ.
Americans will recognize this as a similar concept to the Mormon theology. In South Korea, it’s one of several high-profile Christian cults with a doomsday-oriented philosophy (the leader of the Shincheonji will allegedly take thousands of followers with him to heaven when the world ends).
But in China, a cult like this is extremely illegal. Yet, somehow, in a state that’s constitutionally athiest, cults like this survive and sometimes flourish as it’s one of the few options that ordinary people have to do something genuinely subversive.
Churches like Shincheonji survive in a sort of tense standoff with the government, with scrutiny coming in waves. Typically, any kind of high profile attention would be bad for the church because it would rouse the authorities. In which case, the story that we’re about to share will likely be very, very bad for the church. But unfortunately for them the cat is already out of the bag.
he South China Morning Post has learned that the Shincheonji Church of Jesus has a branch in Wuhan, the Chinese city at the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak that is rocking the world right now.
And the paper has it on good authority that the church’s ~200 members in the city, most of whom are now in quarantine outside Wuhan, continued meeting even after the outbreak started to pick up steam.
One alleged member, who spoke under condition of anonymity, said in the beginning, nobody took the virus seriously – because authorities said it wasn’t serious.
“Rumours about a virus began to circulate in November but no one took them seriously,” said one member, a 28-year-old kindergarten teacher.
“I was in Wuhan in December when our church suspended all gatherings as soon as we learned about [the coronavirus],” said the woman, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter.
As of Tuesday evening in the US, there were 977 confirmed cases in South Korea, the highest number outside China, as well as 11 deaths. Of the 84 new cases reported on Tuesday, more than half were reported in Daegu.
A pastor in Hubei province who spoke with SCMP said that Shincheonji church members were especially dedicated, and probably continued their missions to recruit during the outbreak.
Another alleged member of the church, identified only as a kingergarten teacher in Wuhan, said she was sure the church in Wuhan had nothing to do with the outbreaks in South Korea.
The Wuhan kindergarten teacher said she was confident that the recent mass outbreaks in South Korea were not linked to Shincheonji church members from the city.
“I don’t think the virus came from us because none of our brothers and sisters in Wuhan have been infected. I don’t know about members in other places but at least we are clean. None of us have reported sick,” she said.
“There are so many Chinese travelling to South Korea, it’s quite unfair to pin [the disease] on us.”
However, she can’t prove this.
She sidestepped questions on whether church members had travelled from Wuhan to South Korea after the outbreak.
A spokesman for the church told SCMP that the group has had troubles with the Chinese authorities before, and that they would do anything to avoid any undue scrutiny connected to the virus, which they stressed had nothing to do with the church.
The teacher said that in 2018 the Wuhan group’s “holy temple” in Hankou district had been raided by police “who branded us a cult,” but members continued to worship in small groups.
“We are aware of all the negative reporting out there after the outbreak in South Korea, but we do not want to defend ourselves in public because that will create trouble with the government,” she said. “We just want to get through the crisis first.”
We wonder if Chinese authorities will see things the same way?
