A Pennsylvania Town Wants to Force an Amish Widow to Give Up Her Outhouse

|||Rdavidthomas/Dreamstime.comAn Amish widow in Pennsylvania is at the center of a case pitting religious freedom against modern waste management.

Sugar Grove Township is attempting to force Iva H. Byler to pay monthly fines of $100 for refusing to hook up her home to the city’s public sewer, as required by the state’s Sewage Facilities Act. Byler currently uses an outhouse as her religious beliefs prevent her from using electricity, which would be required to connect to the public sewer. The town has argued that Byler has failed to satisfactorily show how a sewage connection would harm her religious liberties, and therefore must pay the fines.

In April 2017, a Warren County judge sided with Sugar Grove and ordered Byler to pay up. This decision was reversed on Friday by state Judge Patricia A. McCullough, who ruled that the state’s religious freedom law protected Byler’s right to maintain her unconnected outhouse.

In addition to Byler’s religious freedom, McCullough also argued that Byler could not possibly pay the fines as she had no source of income and relied on support from her sons, who are carpenters.

The case is part of a larger fight between Sugar Grove Township and the Old Order Amish community. Earlier in the year, the Yoder family of Warren County was ordered to connect to the public sewer. The family, which is also Old Order, was forced to do so despite the need to use electricity and foot the cost in the process. Senior Staff Attorney Sara Rose of the American Civil Liberties Union said the decision “didn’t consider the other ways that the government could have achieved its ends.”

“What we have here is a situation, perhaps one of frustration, where the township has been unable to force the Old Order Amish to connect their homes to the sewer systems which requires an electric grinder pump,” wrote Bernard Hessley, Byler’s lawyer. Hessley said the Amish community was willing to move to another town or even to New York so that they could practice their religious beliefs.

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Elon Musk Reportedly Called Boss Of Well Known Tesla Critic To Complain

Elon Musk is said to be calling the bosses of noted Tesla critics and voicing his displeasure with their negative opinions online about the company. At least, that is reportedly the case today with one of the company’s most well known critics, the (for now) anonymous “Montana Skeptic”.

Montana Skeptic has been one of the most vocal critics of Tesla and Elon Musk for the better part of the last couple of years. So when he disappeared from Twitter today without explanation, it set off red flags to many Tesla skeptics.

That was until this Twitter post from Quoth the Raven, who has hosted Montana Skeptic several times on his podcast. He tweeted:

The “skeptic” recently appeared on the Quoth the Raven Podcast to voice his skepticism of the company in a debate with HyperChange TV’s Galileo Russell, a well known Tesla bull and investor in the company:

Skeptic has also written a multitude of articles on Seeking Alpha covering the story from a bearish standpoint. Naturally, he has disclosed numerous times that he is short Tesla by owning long-term puts in the name.

If this story is true, it brings fresh attention to Musk’s emotional state and (in)ability to handle criticism.  His conduct is totally unbecoming of a $50 billion company CEO and in light of recent grumblings by TSLA shareholders, this move – more appropriate of a Chinese fly-by-night fraudcap CEO – may lead to more harm than good.

The news comes after this weekend’s blockbuster report from the Wall Street Journal, claiming that Tesla was calling suppliers and asking for refunds.

Throughout the past few months, as Elon Musk has been lurching from one PR fiasco to the next (having a meltdown on the Q1 earnings call, calling a Thai sub rescuer a pedophile , being exposed as a donor to a key GOP PAC), amid an exodus of key Tesla executives

… during which time the Tesla CEO has been far more obsessed with tweeting than “sleeping on the factory floor“…

.. and which has – so far – culminated with an article in which for the first time, a journalist dared call Musk “a total fraud, investors have been increasingly concerned that Musk’s erratic behavior has been the result of a mounting liquidity crisis for the company which currently is burning roughly $12 million per day

… even as Tesla’s debt grows and grows and grows.

All those concerns became far more acute following a WSJ report that the company, seemingly facing a liquidity crunch, has asked some suppliers to refund a portion of what the electric-car company has spent previously, an appeal which the WSJ notes “reflects the auto maker’s urgency to sustain operations during a critical production period.” Which is especially odd in light of Musk’s vows that Tesla will “at least be profitable in Q3 and Q4.”

In any event, now that the details of Montana Skeptic’s Twitter departure are known, we wonder if the mainstream media will have anything to say about this.

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Could Elizabeth Warren Topple Trump in 2020? New at Reason.

A recent poll shows Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts leading the 2020 Democratic presidential primary field in neighboring New Hampshire. The New York Times is following her encouragingly around early-voting Nevada. Maybe it’s time, though, to start paying some more skeptical attention to Warren.

A recent Senate speech by Warren denouncing Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, gives a flavor of what she’d be like as a presidential candidate. It’s a divisive, class-warfare approach unmoored from reality.

“For millionaires, billionaires, and giant corporations, Trump has kept his promises all the way,” Warren claims. Actually, more than a few millionaires were annoyed that Trump and the Republican Congress limited their federal income tax deduction for state and local taxes. And more than a few giant corporations are upset about Trump’s tariffs and immigration restrictions.

If Warren really wants to become President Warren, at some point she’s going to need to do something she hasn’t yet accomplished, which is explain to voters nationwide how she or her message are unlike John Kerry, Michael Dukakis, and Hillary Clinton. Otherwise she’ll wind up on that list of also-rans instead of starring in the inaugural parade, writes Ira Stoll.

View this article.

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Larry Kudlow Is Bad. So Is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Chartreuse Is Good: Podcast

Yeah, gigantic deficits are not good,” says director of President Trump’s National Economic Council Larry Kudlow in a clip at the top of today’s Reason Podcast, before he goes on to make ridiculous excuses for gigantic deficits. Matt Welch is somewhere in a French chateau, so today’s pod features special guest star Managing Editor Stephanie Slade, plus the usual gang of Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and yours truly.

After digging into the deficit darkness, we turn our thoughts to the latest revelations in the Trump Russia imbroglio, as well as the politics of criticizing socialist Democratic candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. We wrap up, as usual with our recommendations for stuff to read or watch or put in your face holes, which this week includes the new Mission:Impossible movie and some fancy booze from France.

Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes. Listen at SoundCloud below:

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

Valse in D-flat major “Minute Waltz” by Chopin, played by Muriel Nguyen Xuan is licensed under CC BY SA 4.0

Further reading:

Reason‘s best headline this week: “Whirlpool Took Tariffs for a Spin, Ended Up With Tumbling Sales: Tariffs let the government pick winners and losers—but sometimes even the winners get hung out to dry.”

Scott Shackford on “Secret Carter Page Warrant Documents Released

Robby Soave on Ocasio-Cortez’s economics mistakes.

Our recommendations:

Family Ghosts podcast

Mission:Impossible – Fallout

And check out these monks who make Chartreuse!

The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Don’t miss a single Reason Podcast! (Archive here.)

Subscribe at iTunes.

Follow us at SoundCloud.

Subscribe at YouTube.

Like us on Facebook.

Follow us on Twitter.

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“Moment Of Truth” Looms As “Avenging Angel Of ‘Price Discovery’ Returns”

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

Russia Attacked Us

This idiotic fantasy congealed in the political matrix last week as everyone across the spectrum of parties and factions scrambled for patriotism brownie points in what is shaping up as an epic game of Capture-the-Flag for the mid-term elections. Listen to me for a moment, as our arch-nemesis Vlad the Putin said to Fox News knucklehead Chris Wallace in an interview aired Sunday Night — when Wallace interrupted Mr. Putin for perhaps the fourth time, saying, “I don’t want to interrupt you, sir, but….”

“Listen to me. Be patient,” Mr. Putin repeated dolefully, like a second-grade teacher struggling with an ADD kid.

The interview was trying my Christian patience, too. And my own personal fantasy was that Mr. Putin would whip out 30 inches of rebar and whap Chris Wallace upside the head with it. But he only repeated, “Be patient….”

So, listen to me: Russia did not “attack” us. Trolling on Facebook is not an attack on the nation. The allegation that Russia “hacked” Hillary’s email and the DNC server is so far without evidence, and computer forensics strongly suggests that the information was transferred onto a flash-drive on its journey to Wikileaks. And, of course, the information itself, concerning embarrassing unethical hijinks among Democratic Party officials, was genuine and truthful – they “meddled” in their own primary elections.

This lingering Russia hysteria got a big re-boot last week following Mr. Trump’s impressively awkward performance onstage with the nimble Mr. Putin, whose self-possession only reinforced Mr. Trump’s lumbering oafishness and amazing verbal incoherence. It’s hard enough for Americans to understand what the Golden Golem of Greatness is trying to say; imagine the torment of the translators untangling his tortured utterances!

I daresay that some of the American observers secretly wished that we could swap over Mr. Trump for Mr. Putin so as to have a national leader with some decorum and poise, but alas…. And one can’t help but wonder how Mr. Putin sizes up POTUS among his intimates inside the Kremlin. I’d love to be a fly on that wall.

The Helsinki summit meeting has the look of a turning point in Mr. Trump’s political fortunes. One irony is that he may escape his enemies’ efforts to nail him on any Russia “collusion” rap only to be sandbagged by financial turmoil as the dog days of summer turn nervously toward autumn. Events will cancel the myth that his actions as president have produced a booming economy. If anything, the activities that make up our economy have only become more vicious rackets, especially the war industries, with all their inducements to counter the imagined Russia threat.

The financial markets are the pillars of the fantasy that the US economy is roaring triumphantly. The markets are so fundamentally disabled by ten years of central bank interventions that they don’t express the actual value of any asset, whether stocks, or bonds, or gold, oil, labor, currencies, or the folly known as crypto-currency. We await the fabled “moment of truth” when the avenging angel of price discovery returns and shatters the illusion that accounting fraud equals prosperity.

The revelation that Mr. Trump is not an economic genius will spur a deeper dive by chimerical Democrats into nanny state quicksand. They will make the new fad of a Guaranteed Basic Income the centerpiece of the midterm election — even though many Democrats will not really believe in it. They are pretending not to notice how broke the USA actually is, and how spavined by unpayable debt. The lurking suspicion of all this is surely behind fantasies such as Russia attacked us, the displacement of abstruse and impalpable fear onto something simple and cartoonish, like the President of the United States.

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Georgia Sheriff Buys $70K Dodge Charger Hellcat With Forfeiture Funds

Gwinnett County Sheriff Butch Conway thinks his department’s $70,000, 707-horsepower Dodge Charger Hellcat (black with tinted windows, natch) is a perfectly normal policing tool to buy with federal asset forfeiture funds.

The U.S. Department of Justice disagrees.

The Justice Department sent a letter last week demanding that the Georgia county reimburse it for the “extravagant” muscle car, which was purchased with funds from the Equitable Sharing Program—a federal program that funnels hundreds of millions of dollars a year in asset forfeiture revenues to local and state police departments.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports:

Guidelines prohibit “the use of equitably shared funds for extravagant expenditures,” the [Justice Department]’s letter, dated July 10, said. “The vehicle in question is a high-performance vehicle not typically purchased as part of a traditional fleet of law enforcement vehicles.”

The feds also took issue with part of the request that stated Conway would also use the car for undercover and covert operations.

The sheriff’s office defended the claim. It said that, in addition to driving the car to and from work, Conway uses it “when he participates in field operations, covert and otherwise, with our deputies.”

Under the equitable sharing program, federal authorities may “adopt” state and local forfeiture cases and prosecute them at the federal level. Those local police departments get to keep up to 80 percent of the forfeiture revenue, while the rest goes into the equitable sharing pool and is distributed among partner departments around the country.

Civil liberties groups have long argued that the program allows local and state police to bypassstate-level restrictions on asset forfeiture. In response to growing criticism, former Attorney General Eric Holder introduced new rules limiting so-called “adoptions” in 2015.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded those rules last summer. “President Trump has directed this Department of Justice to reduce crime in this country, and we will use every lawful tool that we have to do that,” Sessions said. “We will continue to encourage civil asset forfeiture whenever appropriate in order to hit organized crime in the wallet.”

The Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office is far from the first department to get in hot water for misusing forfeiture funds, or even the first in Georgia. For example, there was the $90,000 Dodge Viper that the Camden County sheriff purchased with forfeiture funds for the department’s DARE program.

Then there was the Illinois police department that spent more than $20,000 in equitable sharing funds on accessories for two lightly used motorcycles, including after-market exhaust pipes, decorative chrome, and heated handgrips.

Between 2014 and 2016, the Tennessee Department of Homeland Security spent $112,614 in asset forfeiture funds on catering, luncheons, retail food, and banquet tickets, all of which are not allowable expenses under the Justice Department’s guidelines for the equitable sharing program.

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Google Soars After Smashing Expectations; Nasdaq Jumps

After Netflix whiffed on Q2 earnings, there was a sour taste in the mouths of FAA(N)G fans: was Netflix’ weakness indicative of what to expect from the other tech mega caps?

The answer, at least according to Google parent Alphabet which just reported Q2 earnings, is a resounding no, because the company not only beat, but smashed resulted as follows:

  • Q2 revenue$32.66BN, Exp. $32.17BN
  • Q2 revenue ex-TAC $26.24BN, Exp. $25.55BN, and above the highest estimate.
  • Q2 Adj EPS (ex the $5BN fine the company was slapped with by the EU) $11.75, Exp. $9.66

Putting Google’s total Q2 revenue in context, courtesy of @JonErlichman:

  • Q2 2018: $32.7 billion
  • Q2 2017: $26.0 billion
  • Q2 2016: $21.5 billion
  • Q2 2015: $17.7 billion
  • Q2 2014: $15.9 billion
  • Q2 2013: $13.1 billion
  • Q2 2012: $11.8 billion
  • Q2 2011:  $9.0 billion
  • Q2 2010: $6.8 billion
  • Q2 2009: $5.5 billion

Q2 2008: $5.3 billion

Also notable: Traffic Acquisition Costs as a percentage of revenue declined modestly, from 24% last quarter, to 23%.

Summarized:

Some other details:

  • Q2 Google advertising revenue $28.09BN
  • Q2 operating income $2.81BN
  • Q2 free cash flow $4.66BN
  • Q2 CapEx $5.48BN

While Google suffered a 22% decline in ad pricing, this was more than offset by a 58% growth in paid clicks and according to BBG Intelligence, this “highlights how strong mobile ad demand is… These results are robust on both the top and bottom lines, and should spur optimism in upcoming earnings for other internet names.”

Traffic acquisition costs rose 12% from last year, significantly lower than the 29 percent estimate from analysts at B. Riley. According to Bloomberg, this may be GOOGL’s largest EPS surprise in the recent years if one excludes the impact of the EU fine. More importantly, traffic acquisition cost increases seem to be moderating.

Commenting on the result, Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat said “we delivered another quarter of very strong performance, with revenues of $32.7 billion, up 26% versus the second quarter of 2017 and 23% on a constant currency basis. Our investments are driving great experiences for users, strong results for advertisers, and new business opportunities for Google and Alphabet.”

While it took the market a few minutes to react to the adjusted numbers, it is clearly happy with what it sees, and GOOGL shares are now 5.5% higher in the aftermarket.

Google’s stellar quarter is also pushing the rest of the FAANGs higher:

Meanwhile, the Nasdaq has completely forgotten the Netflix disappointment:

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Japanese Jawboning Sparks Global Bond Rout; Stocks, Dollar Unimpressed

How Tesla and US Treasury bondholders felt this morning…

The fun and games started last night when The Bank of Japan decided to offer an unlimited bid for 10Y JGBs at 11bps (well above their trading level) as a signal to the market. This was the first open-ended bid since Feb…

JGB yields spiked over 5bps on the news.

This rippled through Europe, with Bunds extending their yield spike to one-month highs…

And 10Y US Treasuries spiked – extending Friday’s surge – to the highest in 5 weeks – to the level before The Fed hiked rates…

This is the biggest 2-day spike in 10Y Yields since Feb 6th (when the XIV collapsed sparked all sorts of chaos in the RP funds).

The huge spike in yields has, rather coincidentally, recoupled bonds and stocks in the US markets…

 

The Dow trod water all day long (ending lower), Trannies outperformed…

 

FANG dip-buyers were back…

 

Tesla Stocks and Bonds were ugly..

 

“Most Shorted” stocks dumped at the open and were squeezed higher into the European close…

 

The last two days have seen huge surge sin bond yields, both starting to ramp at 0830ET…

 

The spike in Treasury yields broke the 21-day-streak of closes 10Y closes with a 2.8x% handle

 

And the yield curve steepened dramatically…in Japan, Germany, and US…

The US Yield curve is at its steepest in 4 weeks…

 

The Dollar rebounded intraday to a modest gain (retracing around Fib38.2% of the Trump drop)…

 

The Peso spiked late on as Trump made positive comments about AMLO…

 

And Offshore Yuan tumbled to its weakest close since June 2017…

 

Cryptos are higher from Friday’s close with Bitcoin leading the way..

 

Bitcoin pushed well above $7700 – its its highest since May…(BTC is +35% from the June lows)…

 

Commodities were all lower on the day…

 

With oil traders entirely ignoring the rising rhetoric between Trump and Iran…

 

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The Burden Of Proof Is On The ‘Russiagaters’

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

I saw a Twitter thread between two journalists the other day which completely summarized my experience of debating the establishment Russia narrative on online forums lately. Aaron Maté‏, who is in my opinion one of the clearest voices out there on American Russia hysteria, was approached with an argument by a journalist named Jonathan M Katz. Maté‏ engaged the argument by asking for evidence of the claims Katz was making, only to be given the runaround.

I’m going to copy the back-and-forth into the text here for anyone who doesn’t feel like scrolling through a Twitter thread, not because I am interested in the petty rehashing of a meaningless Twitter spat, but because it’s such a perfect example of what I want to talk about here.

Katz: Are you aware of what Russian agents did during the 2016 presidential election, by chance?

Maté‏: I’m aware of what Mueller has accused Russian agents of — are we supposed to just reflexively believe the assertions of prosecutors & intelligence officials now, or is it ok to wait for the evidence? (as I did in the tweet you’re replying to)

Katz: Why are you even asking this question if you’re just going to discard the reams of evidence that have supplied by investigators, spies, and journalists over the last two years?

Maté‏: Why are you avoiding answering the Q I asked? If I can guess, it’s cause doing so would mean acknowledging your position requires taking gov’t claims on faith. Re: “reams of evidence”, I’ve actually written about it extensively, and disagree that it’s convincing.

Katz: Yeah I’m familiar with your work. You’re asking for someone to summarize two years of reporting, grand jury indictments, reports from independent analysts, give agencies both American and foreign, and on and on just so you can handwave and draw some vague equivalencies.

Maté‏: No, actually I’ve asked 2 Qs in this thread, both of which have been avoided: 1) what evidence convinces you that Russia will attack the midterms 2) are we supposed to reflexively believe the assertions of prosecutors & intel officials now, or is it ok to wait for the evidence?

Katz: See this is what you do. You pretend like all of the evidence produced by journalists, independent analysts and foreign governments doesn’t exist so you can accuse anyone who doesn’t buy this SF Cohen Putinist bullshit you’re selling of being a deep state shill.

Maté‏: Except I haven’t said anything about anyone being a “deep state shill”, here or anywhere else. So that’s your embellishment. I’m simply asking whether we should accept IC/prosecutor claims on faith. Mueller does lay out a case, that’s true, but no evidence yet.

Katz: No. You should not accept a prosecutor’s claims on faith. You should read independent analyses, evidence gathered by journalists and other agencies, and compare all it to what is known on the public record. And you could if you wanted to.

Katz continued to evade and deflect until eventually exiting the conversation. Meanwhile another journalist, The Intercept‘s Sam Biddle, interjected that the debate was “a big waste of” Katz’s time and called Maté‏ an “inverse louise mensch”, all for maintaining the posture of skepticism and asking for evidence. Maté‏ invited Katz and Biddle to debate their positions on The Real News, to which Biddle replied, “No thank you, but I have some advice: If everyone has gotten it wrong, you should figure out who really did it! If not Russia, find out who really hacked the DNC, find out who really spearphished American election officials. Even OJ pretended to search for the real killer.”

Biddle then, as you would expect, blocked Maté‏ on Twitter.

If you were to spend an entire day debating Russiagate online (and I am in no way suggesting that you should), it is highly unlikely that you would see anything from the proponents of the establishment Russia narrative other than the textbook fallacious debate tactics exhibited by Katz and Biddle in that thread. It had the entire spectrum:

Gish gallop— The tactic of providing a stack of individually weak arguments to create the illusion of one solid argument, illustrated when Katz cited unspecified “reams of evidence” resulting from “two years of reporting, grand jury indictments, reports from independent analysts, give agencies both American and foreign.” He even claimed he shouldn’t have to go through that evidence point-by-point because there’s too much of it, which is like a poor man’s Gish gallop fallacy.

Argumentum ad populum— The “it’s true because so many agree that it is true” argument that Katz attempted to imply in invoking all the “journalists, independent analysts and foreign governments” who assert that Russia interfered in a meaningful way in America’s 2016 elections and intends to interfere in the midterms.

Ad hominem— Biddle’s “inverse louise mensch”. You have no argument, so you insult the other party instead.

Attempting to shift the burden of proof — Biddle’s suggestion that Maté‏ needs to prove that someone else other than the Russian government did the things Russia is accused of doing. Biddle is implying that the establishment Russia narrative should be assumed true until somebody has proved it to be false, a tactic known as an appeal to ignorance.

I’d like to talk about this last one a bit, because it underpins the entire CIA/CNN Russia narrative.

As we’ve discussed previously, in a post-Iraq invasion world the confident-sounding assertions of spies, government officials and media pundits is not sufficient evidence for the public to rationally support claims that are being used to escalate dangerous cold war tensions with a nuclear superpower. The western empire has every motive in the world to lie about the behaviors of a noncompliant government, and has an extensive and well-documented history of doing exactly that. Hard, verifiable, publicly available proof is required. Assertions are not evidence.

But even if there wasn’t an extensive and recent history of disastrous US-led escalations premised on lies advanced by spies, government officials and media pundits, the burden of proof would still be on those making the claim, because that’s how logic works. Whether you’re talking about law, philosophy or debate, the burden of proof is always on the party making the claim. A group of spies, government officials and media pundits saying that something happened in an assertive tone of voice is not the same thing as proof. That side of the Russiagate debate is the side making the claim, so the burden of proof is on them. Until proof is made publicly available, there is no logical reason for the public to accept the CIA/CNN Russia narrative as fact, because the burden of proof has not been met.

This concept is important to understand on the scale of individual debates on the subject during political discourse, and it is important to understand on the grand scale of the entire Russia narrative as well. All the skeptical side of the debate needs to do is stand back and demand that the burden of proof be met, but this often gets distorted in discourse on the subject. The Sam Biddles of the world all too frequently attempt to confuse the situation by asserting that it is the skeptics who must provide an alternative version of events and somehow produce irrefutable proof about the behaviors of highly opaque government agencies. This is fallacious, and it is backwards.

There are many Russiagate skeptics who have been doing copious amounts of research to come up with other theories about what could have happened in 2016, and that’s fine. But in a way this can actually make the debate more confused, because instead of leaning back and insisting that the burden of proof be met, you are leaning in and trying to convince everyone of your alternative theory. Russiagaters love this more than anything, because you’ve shifted the burden of proof for them. Now you’re the one making the claims, so they can lean back and come up with reasons to be skeptical of your argument. Empire loyalists like Sam Biddle would like nothing more than to get skeptics like Aaron Maté‏ falling all over themselves trying to prove a negative, but that’s not how the burden of proof works, and there’s no good reason to play into it.

Until hard, verifiable proof of Russian election interference and/or collusion with the Trump campaign is made publicly available, we are winning this debate as long as we continue pointing out that this proof doesn’t exist. All you have to do to beat a Russiagater in a debate is point this out. They’ll cite assertions made by the US intelligence community, but assertions are not proof. They’ll cite the assertions made in the recent Mueller indictment as proof, but all the indictment contains is more assertions. The only reason Russiagaters confuse assertions for proof is because the mass media treats them as such, but there’s no reason to play along with that delusion.

There is no good reason to play along with escalations between nuclear superpowers when their premise consists of nothing but narrative and assertions. It is right to demand that those escalations cease until the public who is affected by them has had a full, informed say. Until the burden of proof has been met, that has not even begun to happen.

*  *  *

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Hollywood Stars Defend James Gunn From ‘Cyber Nazi’ Lynch Mob

The stars of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy franchise have come to the defense of director James Gunn, who Disney fired from the films on Friday after right-wing trolls dug up some of his ill-advised Twitter jokes from years ago.

The tweets from Gunn, who directed the first two Guardians of the Galaxy films, involved violence and sexual assault against children. They’re disgusting, but they were clearly intended as gags. Making them an issue now is an act of pure retaliation against the left (Gunn is a liberal), perpetrated by far-right hypocrites who are just as committed to weaponizing PC culture as anyone on the other side of the spectrum.

Dave Bautista, who plays Drax in the Guardians films, said on Twitter Friday that Gunn is a “gentle and kind” person. Though he admitted that Gunn has “made mistakes,” he said he’s “NOT ok with what’s happening” to the director. In a pair of follow-up posts, Bautista called out the “cybernazis” responsible for getting Gunn fired:

Chris Pratt, who plays Star-Lord, didn’t directly reference Gunn, but the implicit meaning of the Bible verse he tweeted out Sunday was clear: “‘Understand this, my dear brothers and sisters. Let every person be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger.’ JAMES 1:19.”

And Zoe Saldana, who stars as Gamora, was sure to point out that she loves “ALL” the members of the Guardians of the Galaxy family:

Guardians stars weren’t the only ones who expressed their support for Gunn. Rick and Morty creator Justin Roiland and filmmaker Fede Alvarez also wrote that the director deserves better.

Actress Selma Blair even shared a Change.org petition urging Disney to rehire Gunn. As of Monday afternoon, more than 200,000 people had signed it.

Gunn, for his part, has apologized for the old tweets.

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