Daily Blend: 10/16/17 – The would-be airport bomber you never heard about

Michael Christopher Estes

• A man ^[pictured] tried to blow up a North Carolina airport two weeks ago. I wonder why no-one heard about it.

• US pulls out of UNESCO because it dared to criticize some of Israel’s bullshit.
  (via @AFP)

• Attorney General Jeff Sessions sends experienced hate crimes lawyer to help prosecute a man charged with murdering a trans high-schooler … despite having rolled back anti-discrimination laws for trans students.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• In other DoJ news, Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein still argues that weakening computer and Internet security for everyone in exchange for helping law enforcement is a fair trade.

• New research indicates some Vikings may have been Muslims. White supremacists aren’t having it.

• Finally, a new survey finds most Americans no longer believe you need God to be good.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Links: 07/27/17 – US Senate kills “repeal-only” healthcare bill

• Despite yesterday’s blind vote, US Senate still rejects Republicans’ monstrous “repeal-only” healthcare bill. And now they need to lose their jobs.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• Germany passes law enabling police to use “state trojans” to hack into people’s phones and spy on their communications and other data – for everything from suspected terrorism to drugs and sports betting fraud.

• Republican efforts to push anti-trans “bathroom bills” continue, this time in the Texas Senate.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• Google goes to US court to fight Canadian Supreme Court decision to censor search results globally. I hope they win. Allowing any country to dictate what information people in other countries may access is a terrible precedent.
  (via @cancivlib)

• White supremacists & alt-Rightists are rejoicing that Trump & co. are giving them “room to destroy” by backing off from domestic terrorism investigations. There is so very much wrong with this.
  (via Dispatches From the Culture Wars)

• And finally, the US Government Accountability Office can’t find any actual scientific evidence to support the TSA’s “Behavioral Detection” program.

If you have any story suggestions, you can leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Links: 07/01/17 – Innocent men can’t sue “grossly negligent” forensic experts who put them in prison

Some of my old art
[full size (1500×1418)]

I’m still working on setting up my art blog, but in the meantime, I’ve gone ahead and posted some of my older art ^[pictured] from back when I was a young teenager searching for something to do during those long classroom hours.

• Federal court rules that even though forensic experts’ “grossly negligent” testimony put two innocents in prison (and one on death row), they still can’t be sued.

• Rare puppycide accountability: DeKalb County, GA cops enter wrong home, shoot & kill dog and injure two people. Two years later, the county pays up to avoid a lawsuit.
  (via Dogs Shot by Police | Facebook)

• Want to inform the cops on someone you think may be a terrorist? There’s an app for that.

• That last story comes via Radley Balko, who has a bunch of links you should check out. Includes a whole lot o’ police misbehavin’.

• And finally, this crowd knows who the real star of the show is:
  (via @radleybalko)

If you have any story suggestions, you can leave them in the comments or send them in.

Perception of terrorism vs. the reality

What does a “terrorist” look like? A group of researchers have just published a particularly in-depth exposé on the reality of terrorism in the US, and it shows it’d be more accurate to mentally swap out that swarthy skin and Koran for a pasty Breitbart reader toting a star-spangled AR-15 named Bertha.

The whole thing is worth reading, but I just wanted to bring attention to two particularly enlightening charts.

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That second graph is especially damning, not just of the US court system but also of the wider culture and media that work to ensure only a particular brand of extremism is labeled “terrorism”, whilst the far more prevalent regressive ideologies and deadly acts of our homegrown barbarians are downplayed and excused.

For instance, consider the recent case where a federal judge released an admitted neo-Nazi with a penchant for home-cooked explosives and death threats because he just didn’t seem that threatening. I wonder if the judge would’ve been of the same mind if, all else being the same, the guy looked less like a Devon and more like a Naseem.

(via Pharyngula)