25 February 21
Don’t Be an RSN Tourist – Get Involved!
We are serious about RSN’s Mission. We take seriously all that RSN does and its impact on the wellbeing of the community. We accomplish nothing as a grassroots organization without public participation and support.
Don’t just look at RSN from a safe distance, get involved with the organization’s wellbeing.
It’s about you.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts
CA 95611
24 February 21
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar | 'One Night in Miami' Grapples With the Risk and Responsibility of Black Entertainers Speaking Out
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Hollywood Reporter
The Oscar-contending film imagines a heated debate between Malcolm X and Sam Cooke about the duty of successful Blacks to be the public face of the civil rights movement — one The Hollywood Reporter's columnist long has embraced.
ere's what we know happened Feb. 25, 1964: 22-year-old Cassius Clay (soon to become Muhammad Ali) became the heavyweight boxing champion of the world by defeating Sonny Liston. Clay's close friend, NFL superstar Jim Brown, was a ringside radio announcer. After the fight, Brown had planned a lavish celebration that Clay nixed in favor of hanging out at a small Black motel along with his other friends, Malcolm X and Sam Cooke. We don't know what they talked about, but the next morning Clay announced to the press that he had converted to the Nation of Islam. The riveting new movie One Night in Miami imagines what took place among those four Black powerhouses, distilling many of the key struggles facing prominent African Americans into a series of tense, playful, combative and emotional conversations. One conversation that especially resonated with me was the heated debate between political activist Malcolm X and music mogul Cooke about the responsibility of successful Blacks to be the public face of the fight for civil rights. It is the same debate I've had with myself and others for the past 50 years.
Here's what else we know: All four of them had lived with discrimination their entire lives. All four had been called the N-word since childhood. All four had been refused service in restaurants, hotels and stores, even at the height of their fame. Two were killed within the year. Cooke was shot to death under suspicious circumstances 10 months later. Malcolm X was assassinated 12 months later. Three years later, Ali would be stripped of his title and sentenced to prison. The context of their night of celebration in Miami is that it was a dangerous time to be Black in America — and an even more dangerous time to be a famous Black.
As the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer showed, not much has changed. Unarmed African Americans are still murdered by the police. Because of inequities in the health care system, Blacks have a shorter life span and receive less quality medical care than whites. COVID-19 has highlighted the differences: Blacks have a death rate 2.8 times higher than that of whites and are hospitalized 3.7 times more than whites.
Which is why the movie's argument between Cooke and Malcolm X is so relevant today. Malcolm X argues that famous Blacks like Cooke have a responsibility to use their fame to publicly demand civil rights, while Cooke believes he should be able to choose to work quietly behind the scenes building his business empire to gain economic power and freedom. By being entertaining but nonconfrontational, Cooke thinks, Blacks will find that whites are more accepting of them.
In one memorable conscience-versus-commerce scene, after reprimanding Cooke for not writing more political songs, Malcolm X plays Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind": "This is a white boy … from Minnesota who has nothing to gain from writing a song that speaks more to the struggles of our people, more to the movement, than anything that you have ever penned in your life. Now, I know I'm not the shrewd businessperson you are, my brother, but since you say being vocally in the struggle is bad for business, why has this song gone higher on the pop charts than anything you've got out?" Cooke has no response, though I would have said Dylan's song was successful because it was sung by a white boy from Minnesota and not a Black man from Chicago. Whites needed a nonthreatening white Pied Piper to lead them from the sunny suburbs into the murky shadows of civil rights. After that acceptable introduction to Black struggles, they were more receptive to Black voices telling their own stories.
I had my own go-tell-it-on-the-mountain moment in 1967, when Jim Brown asked me to be part of the Cleveland Summit, a group of Black athletes tasked with deciding whether we would support Muhammad Ali's decision to refuse the draft as a conscientious objector. I was only 20, a sophomore at UCLA, surrounded by veteran athletes, some of them also military veterans who were not pleased with Ali's stance. It was not a rubber-stamp group. We grilled Ali for hours. Some in the group had come with the intention of trying to convince Ali to accept military service, especially since the government had promised he would only do boxing exhibitions and never be sent to Vietnam. So great was Ali's spiritual conviction that he convinced us all of his sincerity. We voted to support Ali. Two weeks later, he was convicted of draft evasion, sentenced to five years in prison, fined $10,000 and banned from boxing for three years. Although he remained out of prison while appealing his case (which he eventually won), the ban alone cost him millions of dollars. Seeing Ali willing to sacrifice his career and even face imprisonment for the sake of his conscience inspired me to speak out against inequality whenever I could.
Clearly, Black athletes, entertainers and businesspeople risk so much when they openly and publicly speak out for equality that I don't think we should bully anyone into becoming a target. That's a choice each person has to arrive at on their own. During much of his career, Michael Jordan chose not to use his position as a platform, explaining, "I do commend Muhammad Ali for standing up for what he believed in. But I never thought of myself as an activist. I thought of myself as a basketball player. I wasn't a politician when I was playing my sport. I was focused on my craft. Was that selfish? Probably. But that was my energy. That's where my energy was." That pretty much sums up Cooke's position in the movie. But in May 2020, Jordan changed his mind, issuing a defense of BLM protests: "I stand with those who are calling out the ingrained racism and violence toward people of color in our country. We have had enough."
When famous Black athletes like Jordan join Brown, Bill Russell, Colin Kaepernick, LeBron James, Eric Reid, Steph Curry, Maya Moore, Tina Charles, Naomi Osaka and many more, it becomes more difficult for mainstream white society to portray protesters as outliers or complainers. Last summer, between 15 million and 26 million Americans protested in support of BLM, the largest movement in U.S. history. Part of the reason the crowds were so large and so passionate was that the people were made aware of heinous injustices because famous Blacks consistently spoke out against them. So, yeah, I've got to side with Malcolm on this issue.
As it turned out, Sam Cooke was not that far apart philosophically, because in reality, he released "A Change Is Gonna Come" a few days before that night in Miami, with these lyrics:
It's been a long /
A long time coming /
But I know a change gonna come /
Oh, yes it will.
The businessman Sam Cooke was right that "being vocally in the struggle" was bad business; the song was never as popular as his other hits. But Sam Cooke the artist and Sam Cooke the African American was proud because he had finally found his own voice and, in doing so, the voice of his people. The song quickly became an anthem for the civil rights movement. It also was performed at the celebration of Barack Obama's 2008 inauguration and at his Nobel Peace Prize Concert. Speaking after his election, President Obama referenced the song: "It's been a long time coming, but tonight, change has come to America."
Despite Cooke's reluctance to risk his career by speaking out, when he finally did, he added a mighty strength that helped us all roll that rock farther up the hill.
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. (photo: AP)
RSN: Adam Schiff | Remove Louis DeJoy (a Petition)
Adam Schiff, Reader Supported News
Schiff writes:
emember Louis DeJoy? He’s the big time Republican donor who parlayed his contributions into being Donald Trump’s hand-picked Postmaster General. And he’s still in charge of the U.S. Postal Service.
In the months leading up to last November’s critical election, DeJoy took steps to ban employee overtime, decommission mail-sorting machines, remove drop boxes, and sabotage a service that Americans count on every day, but especially in the middle of a pandemic.
But now, even with Trump out of the White House, DeJoy is still running the Postal Service, and recent months have seen even bigger service declines than what we saw last year. That means unacceptable delays, lost mail, and packages taking far longer than normal.
Protesters march in Rochester on February 23, 2021. (photo: Shawn Down/USA Today)
Protesters Gather in Rochester Streets After Announcement That No Officers Will Be Charged in Daniel Prude's Death
Christina Maxouris and Taylor Romine, CNN
ozens of protesters marched in Rochester on Tuesday night, just hours after New York Attorney General Letitia James announced a grand jury voted not to indict any police officers on charges relating to Daniel Prude's death.Prude, a 41-year-old Black man, was having a mental health episode on March 23 when officers handcuffed him, covered his head with a "spit sock" and held him on the ground in a prone position. Prude was taken to a hospital, declared brain dead and died a week later.
The protesters, some holding "Black Lives Matter" signs, called for justice and chanted Prude's name, according to video from CNN affiliate WHAM.
"This is not what we expected, this is not what we wanted, and until there is justice in this system, they will not get any peace from us," one demonstrator told the affiliate.
The protesters marched to Rochester Police Department headquarters, "climbed over the barricades and gathered at the front door of the building," according to a statement from the department. The crowd dispersed at approximately 11:45 p.m.
No arrests, injuries or destruction of property were reported following the protest, police spokeswoman Jacqueline Shuman said. Approximately 150 people attended.
James, the state's attorney general, said her office "presented an extensive case and we sought a different outcome than the one the grand jury handed us today."
"We made every attempt to demonstrate the facts, but ultimately we have to respect the decision," she said.
She vowed to pursue reforms of use-of-force laws and shared recommendations to address issues, including mental health response and de-escalation training.
"The criminal justice system has frustrated efforts to hold law enforcement officers accountable for the unjustified killing of African Americans," James said. "And what binds these cases is a tragic loss of life in circumstances in which the death could have been avoided.
"History has unfortunately repeated itself again in the case of Daniel Prude."
Grand jury minutes will be released to public
In a statement Tuesday evening, James said a judge has ruled to unseal the grand jury minutes related to the case for release to the public.
"As soon as the judge authorizes, my office will release those proceedings so the Prude family, the Rochester community, and communities across the country will no longer be kept in the dark," her statement said. "This is a critical step in effecting the change that is so desperately needed."
Two attorneys representing several of Prude's family members said they were "deeply disappointed that the officers will not face criminal charges."
"This tragedy could have been avoided if officers had been properly trained but also used basic human decency and common sense to treat Mr. Prude with compassion and get him the medical attention he deserved," attorneys Ben Crump and Antonio Romanucci said in a statement.
"We will continue to advocate for justice in the civil courts, while also seeking federal police reform so that these continued tragedies against Black citizens end once and for all," they said.
Officers involved in case remain on leave
Meanwhile, the officers involved in the case will remain on leave pending the outcome of an internal investigation, Rochester Police Chief Cynthia Herriott-Sullivan said in a statement.
"My heart goes out to the Prude family during this difficult time," the chief said. "I want the family and our community to know that I accepted the role of Interim Police Chief to make real, systemic change, and that is still my goal."
The Rochester Police Locust Club, which represents the seven suspended officers, declined to comment pending the ongoing investigation.
Matthew Rich, who represents several of the officers, said the decision was a "long time coming."
"We've been eagerly awaiting this, and we aren't surprised by it. We are glad the grand jury made the right decision, but this doesn't put an end to the situation the community finds itself," Rich said.
Attorney James Nobles, who represents another officer, echoed Rich's statement and said the city should seek policy changes within the department rather than punish individual officers.
Michael Schiano, an attorney for another officer who was suspended, said, he wasn't surprised at the decision.
"We have said since the beginning the officers did what they were trained to do," Schiano said in a statement. "I disagree with Attorney General James that somehow the Grand Jury got it wrong."
Trump supporter Jake Angeli is seen at the Capital riots on January 6. (photo: Brent Stirton/Getty)
The Future of QAnon, Explained by 8 Experts
Sean Illing, Vox
f you’re a hardcore QAnon believer, you had high hopes for January.
Among other things, you expected Donald Trump to remain president. You expected mass arrests and public executions. You expected an underground cabal of child-trafficking Democrats to finally be captured.
None of those things happened.
Instead, Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States. So if you’re one of those people — perhaps millions — who were deeply invested in the various QAnon conspiracy theories, the past few weeks likely produced an immense amount of dissonance.
But for the most die-hard QAnon followers, hope springs eternal! The next big prophecy is supposed to unfold on March 4, which had been Inauguration Day before the ratification of the 20th Amendment in 1933 — and the day Trump will gloriously return to power and retake the White House, according to the febrile imaginings of the QAnon movement.
All of which is to say, QAnon is still with us, and may be with us for a while. Conspiracy theories are powerful precisely because they’re so flexible. They never have to cohere; they just have to explain what seems otherwise inexplicable and, above all, offer the believer a sense of direction in a complicated world.
With that in mind, it’s worth asking what might become of the QAnon movement. Assuming March 4 doesn’t go as expected, where do the followers of Q turn next? And what does it mean for our politics moving forward if QAnon shape-shifts into an even more nebulous cult?
To get some answers, I reached out to eight journalists and researchers who’ve covered the conspiracy beat over the past four years or so. Their responses, edited for clarity and length, are below.
There wasn’t a perfect consensus, but a couple of themes emerged. One, the way to think about QAnon is that it’s less a political movement than a religion. Two, that is precisely why QAnon will keep going even as its prophecies fail to materialize. Everyone agreed that QAnon will likely persist as a major factor in American politics.
If these experts are right, and I suspect they are, the problems driving the QAnon movement will probably get worse before they get better, if they get better at all.
It’s a religion — and religions have staying power
Andrew Marantz, staff writer, the New Yorker
In late April 2011, while walking through Times Square, I stumbled on a group of Christians who were holding a rally to warn about the coming apocalypse. They were followers of the radio evangelist Harold Camping, and they believed not that the end was nigh in some general sense but that it was extremely, specifically nigh: that Jesus would return on May 11, which was then about two weeks away.
I asked one of the rallygoers, a firefighter named Jeff who lived on Long Island, how he planned to spend that day. He had no specific plans. Somehow, he agreed to let me spend the afternoon and evening at his house, observing up close what it looks like when prophecy fails. By the time I left Long Island on the uneventful night of the 11th, Jeff had convinced himself that the world-ending earthquakes were late, but that they would arrive by morning. His wife, who took me aside for a desperate whispered chat, was less convinced.
I haven’t spoken to Jeff since the non-rapture. Maybe he woke up chastened on the morning of May 12 — even while I was with him, friends were already sending him mocking texts — and stayed away from DIY prophecy. Or maybe he kept exploring, swinging from apocalyptic theory to apocalyptic theory like vines leading farther into a forest, until he found his way to Pizzagate and Frazzledrip.
Research suggests that some people are unusually predisposed to accept implausible conspiratorial beliefs, and that those people may accept multiple such beliefs at once, even when the beliefs are brazenly contradictory. In any case, the glaring failure of a prophecy is almost never enough to make the prophecy go away. In late May 2011, Harold Camping made a new announcement: He had miscalculated. The rapture would actually arrive in October.
Jane Coaston, host of The Argument, New York Times
Many observers of the movement have compared QAnon’s failings — the myriad predictions that did not come to pass, including the very predictions of ultimate Trumpian victory that served as the foundation of the conspiracy theory — to the 1844 “Great Disappointment.”
During a time of significant religious upheaval in the United States, Baptist minister William Miller predicted that the world would come to an end on March 21, 1844. When Jesus Christ did not return to earth on that date, Miller revised his prediction, saying that the Second Coming would instead take place on April 18, 1844.
When Christ did not make his return on that date, Miller apologized for the error, but another Millerite preacher, Samuel Snow, declared that Christ would return on the “tenth day of the seventh month of the present year,” and, using the calendar of a Jewish sect he believed to be more accurate than our own, said that that date would be October 22, 1844.
Clearly, the world did not end on October 22, 1844. But neither, surprisingly, did the Millerites. Instead, they broke into factions — the most famous of which, the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, came to believe that October 22 did not mark the second coming but rather an event that took place in heaven.
Failed predictions will not doom QAnon, as it did not doom the Millerites, because QAnon could perhaps be best understood as a religious movement of sorts that places faith above accuracy, and believes in, above everything else, a final judgment for sinners where, to loosely quote Philippians 2:10-11, every knee shall bend and every tongue shall confess. It’s just that to QAnon, “sinners” are “all Democrats, and most celebrities” and the tongues of all would be confessing that Donald Trump has defeated ultimate evil.
Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor, the Atlantic
One of the weirder things I discovered when I began reporting about QAnon is that the true believers don’t care who Q is. Naturally, I wanted to know who was behind the hoax. But to the QAnon devout, Q’s identity simply did not matter. This observation was key to my realization that the QAnon movement doesn’t behave merely like a pro-Trump conspiracy theory but instead like a baby religion, born on the social web and spread by Q’s acolytes to extremists who feel the movement’s anti-establishment message in their bones.
Jared Holt, Visiting Research Fellow at DFRLab
The QAnon movement is no stranger to failed prophecy. It is not a logical or rational movement, and it can’t be simply debunked or cast aside. There are some QAnon believers who are likely to maintain their faith in the distorted reality for the rest of their lives.
When forecasts that Trump would somehow retake office before or during inauguration failed to materialize, though it shook the faith of a significant portion of believers, it did not end the broader movement. Within the QAnon movement exists a well-practiced ecosystem that reflexively shifted the goalposts to keep followers engaged. Some claimed that their predictions had come true despite appearing not to, and others pushed the deadline for their prediction back a handful of weeks.
Travis View, co-host, QAnon Anonymous podcast
QAnon followers have been mostly purged from mainstream social media platforms following the January 6 insurrection. While this has hurt their proselytization and propaganda efforts, it has also enhanced their self-image as persecuted renegades.
A minority of less tech-savvy or less committed QAnon followers have given up on the movement, but the true believers are doubling down on alternate platforms such as Gab or Telegram. They continue to “trust the plan” and will likely do so for the rest of their lives. They’re now committed to the cause because of the community, the sense of mission, and the time and sacrifice they have already invested.
Where QAnon goes from here
Charlie Warzel, opinion writer at large, New York Times
The short answer is that I don’t know where QAnon goes from here, but I do not see it going away. My big fear, though, is that it becomes a political abstraction as it veers out of the fever swamps and is a subject of more mainstream reporting, fascination, and punditry.
That’s a real concern because I think if QAnon becomes some kind of vague shorthand for “right-wing loons,” it has two pretty negative effects.
First, it flattens and obscures what QAnon really is and that is, as Ben Collins [reporter for NBC News] has rather eloquently put it, “a political movement based on the imminent, public executions of political enemies.”
Second, it has the potential to mainstream the belief even more. It’s one reason why I think Democratic lawmakers need to be very careful about their framing of the GOP as the “QAnon party.” Because while I understand and even agree that the GOP has to be held to account on their embrace of this movement, I also think it could drive the party deeper into the arms of its furthest-right fringe.
Basically, our political leaders really underestimate just how much a huge portion of the country values the ability to piss off liberals. And how much those who love to see elites angry/uncomfortable/upset are willing to excuse the people who can deliver on “triggering the libs.” Marjorie Taylor Greene is a perfect example of this type of person. She is a particular brand of politician who feeds off outrage and uses it to acquire political power. For that reason, I think trying to make her the face of the GOP could absolutely backfire.
It’s important to note, though, that there is absolutely no good, satisfactory answer here. And that is because one of our two political parties has openly embraced and tolerated a movement whose hallmark is hostility toward democracy. Whatever happens in the short term, this is likely to be the longer-term legacy of QAnon: a process of radicalization against the democratic process, underwritten by increasingly dangerous and absurd conspiratorial fictions.
Jane Coaston
The point of QAnon is not just that Hillary Clinton is already in prison at Guantanamo Bay or that Nancy Pelosi eats children. The point of QAnon is that there will be a point of reckoning in which evil will be punished and good will be rewarded. QAnon offers purpose, direction, mooring in a world that seems threatening, and offers insider knowledge of a “Plan,” one that remains clear no matter what actually takes place in real life. Donald Trump will somehow be president again, or already is president, forever and always, amen.
QAnon will change, and likely decrease in popularity but remain critical to the lived experiences of those who remain steadfast. Like the Millerites, Qanon will not be defeated by being wrong. Faith doesn’t work that way.
Hilary Sargent, freelance journalist and researcher
Despite the fact that the so-called inside knowledge shared by Q has proven false, time and time and time again, the number of QAnon believers has grown exponentially since its inception. I don’t think there’s any reason to think that won’t continue. QAnon believers are a captive audience, and a vulnerable one.
I don’t think anyone can say with confidence what will happen in the next year — or the next week — but it’s safe to assume that bad actors (including those openly encouraging acts of violence) will continue to take advantage of the faith QAnon believers have and are clinging to.
I wish I could say that we will see the movement’s members begin to realize they are being toyed with, but I think that’s unlikely on a widespread scale anytime soon. As the major social media platforms crack down on QAnon content, violent extremists are actively working to radicalize QAnon believers for their own purposes. The extent to which this will be successful on a wide scale remains to be seen, but the risks posed by QAnon believers being radicalized and weaponized on even a tiny scale are significant.
Adrienne LaFrance
Just as elements of ancient anti-Semitic doomsaying belief systems were recycled into Pizzagate and eventually into QAnon, the QAnon narrative is already evolving and adapting to the current moment.
The Q worldview isn’t just highly tolerant of contradictions; it’s reality-proof. Which is another way of saying QAnon is not going anywhere. It will morph, and may even eventually go by a different name, but for as long as the major political fault lines in this nation are drawn between elites and populists, QAnon — or whatever it warps into — will be with us.
Travis View
Some QAnon followers may be recruited by or blend with more militant extremist movements. We can already see this in how they borrowed arguments from the sovereign citizen movement in order to absurdly claim that Trump’s true inauguration date will be March 4. Some extremism researchers have also observed neo-Nazis organizing social media “raids” that are part of an effort to recruit disaffected QAnon followers. If these efforts are successful, then the domestic extremism problem in the United States will only become more dangerous.
That, combined with the fact that QAnon followers have grabbed a foothold of real power in the form of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA), a handful of state legislators, and at least one mayor, make me convinced that QAnon, or some form of it, is now a permanent part of the American political landscape.
Jared Holt
In its current form, QAnon exists as a decentralized catchall for conspiracy theories alleging nefarious actions are being conducted in the upper echelons of world power. Even if Q posts and Trump gradually take a backseat role in the movement, many of the tagalong theories — on topics including 5G, vaccines, and alternative medicine — will produce significant risks to the public.
Kevin Roose, tech reporter, New York Times
I may be tempting fate here, but I think that QAnon, as it was originally constituted, may be almost over. Without Trump in office or on Twitter, and with no new posts from Q in months, the community is basically running on fumes. It’s always conceivable that Q could come back, or that some new development could jolt believers back to their keyboards. But I don’t think random tweets from Lin Wood and the MyPillow guy are going to be enough to keep them hopeful and engaged. They’re pretty dispirited.
But even if QAnon dies, I fully expect that many of its core beliefs will get watered down a bit, stripped of the Q-related language, and dissolved into Republican Party orthodoxy. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some kind of a “Patriot Party” made up of ex-QAnon believers and MAGA dead-enders that forms ahead of the 2022 midterms, and I wouldn’t be shocked if that cohort pushed the entire Republican Party in a more conspiracy-minded, reality-denying direction. By 2024, Marjorie Taylor Greene may look like a moderate.
I also think the QAnon epistemology — the idea that every official narrative and mainstream institution is inherently suspect, and that real knowledge is produced by like-minded strangers working together on the internet to “do their own research” — is likely to become a more or less permanent feature of American life, regardless of what happens to QAnon itself. Once you’ve started seeing the world as a massive, interconnected conspiracy orchestrated by bloodthirsty elites, it’s very hard to stop.
From now on, every time there is a natural disaster or a political protest or a Hollywood awards show, there may be millions of people squinting at their screens, looking for clues about who’s pulling the strings.
A 30 November 2017 photo shows navy veteran Angelo Quinto in Mountainview, California. (photo: Cassandra Quinto-Collins/AP)
US Navy Veteran Having Mental Health Crisis Died After Officer Knelt on His Neck
Ed Pilkington, Guardian UK
Pilkington writes:
Family of Angelo Quinto said police officer knelt on his neck for almost five minutes after they called for help
US navy veteran who was experiencing a mental health crisis died after a police officer called out to help him knelt on his neck for several minutes, asphyxiating him, lawyers for his family have said.
Angelo Quinto, 30, was suffering a bout of paranoia, anxiety and depression in his family home in Antioch, northern California, when his sister Isabella Collins called police on 23 December.
According to an account given by the family at a recorded press conference, the responding officer grabbed Quinto from the arms of his mother who was trying to calm him, then knelt on his neck for almost five minutes while his legs were being held by another officer.
In a cellphone video recorded by his mother, Cassandra Quinto-Collins, her son is seen lying limp on the floor with blood on his face and on the floor beneath him. She is heard saying: “What happened? Does he have a pulse?”, as officers begin pumping his chest in an attempt to resuscitate him.
Quinto was taken unconscious to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead three days later.
Lawyers for the family have filed a wrongful death claim against the city of Antioch, accusing police of having carried out an illegal chokehold. The family’s lawyer, John Burris, told the ABC channel 7 News: “Given what we know, a healthy young man in his mother’s arms, they stuffed the life out of him.”
Burris said that the family intends to file a federal lawsuit relating to Quinto’s death at a later date.
He told the Associated Press that the case, and the alleged use of a chokehold, bore similarities with the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis last May which sparked a nationwide eruption of protest against police brutality.
Huge protests spread into a revival and expansion of the Black Lives Matter movement and demands for radical reforms to end institutionalized racism in the criminal justice system and across American society.
“I refer to it as the George Floyd technique, that’s what snuffed the life out of him and that cannot be a lawful technique. We see not only violations of his civil rights but also violations against the rights of his mother and sisters, who saw what happened to him,” Burris said.
Antioch police have so far declined to comment. After the family’s legal claim was filed last week, the police department said it was unable to provide information as the investigation was ongoing.
One question that is likely to feature in the investigation and any developing court cases is why the responding police officers appeared not to be wearing body cameras when they entered Quinto’s home. The family also want to know why the officers reacted to Quinto so abruptly in taking him from his mother’s arms, even though they had been forewarned that he was having mental health difficulties.
The AP reported that Quinto, who was born in the Philippines, was honorably discharged from the navy in 2019. The family said that he had long struggled with depression, with more recent episodes of paranoia and anxiety.
The man’s sister, Collins, told AP that she now regretted calling the police for help. “I asked the detectives if there was another number I should have called, and they told me that there wasn’t and that I did the right thing. But right now I can tell you that the right thing would not have killed my brother.”
Facebook. (photo: Getty
Sheryl Sandberg and Top Facebook Execs Silenced an Enemy of Turkey to Prevent a Hit to the Company's Business
Jack Gillum and Justin Elliott, ProPublica
Excerpt: "Amid a 2018 Turkish military campaign, Facebook ultimately sided with Turkey's demand to block the page of a mostly Kurdish militia. 'I am fine with this,' Sandberg wrote."
s Turkey launched a military offensive against Kurdish minorities in neighboring Syria in early 2018, Facebook’s top executives faced a political dilemma.
Turkey was demanding the social media giant block Facebook posts from the People’s Protection Units, a mostly Kurdish militia group the Turkish government had targeted. Should Facebook ignore the request, as it has done elsewhere, and risk losing access to tens of millions of users in Turkey? Or should it silence the group, known as the YPG, even if doing so added to the perception that the company too often bends to the wishes of authoritarian governments?
It wasn’t a particularly close call for the company’s leadership, newly disclosed emails show.
“I am fine with this,” wrote Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s No. 2 executive, in a one-sentence message to a team that reviewed the page. Three years later, YPG’s photos and updates about the Turkish military’s brutal attacks on the Kurdish minority in Syria still can’t be viewed by Facebook users inside Turkey.
The conversations, among other internal emails obtained by ProPublica, provide an unusually direct look into how tech giants like Facebook handle censorship requests made by governments that routinely limit what can be said publicly. When the Turkish government attacked the Kurds in the Afrin District of northern Syria, Turkey also arrested hundreds of its own residents for criticizing the operation.
Publicly, Facebook has underscored that it cherishes free speech: “We believe freedom of expression is a fundamental human right, and we work hard to protect and defend these values around the world,” the company wrote in a blog post last month about a new Turkish law requiring that social media firms have a legal presence in the country. “More than half of the people in Turkey rely on Facebook to stay in touch with their friends and family, to express their opinions and grow their businesses.”
But behind the scenes in 2018, amid Turkey’s military campaign, Facebook ultimately sided with the government’s demands. Deliberations, the emails show, were centered on keeping the platform operational, not on human rights. “The page caused us a few PR fires in the past,” one Facebook manager warned of the YPG material.
The Turkish government’s lobbying on Afrin-related content included a call from the chairman of the BTK, Turkey’s telecommunications regulator. He reminded Facebook “to be cautious about the material being posted, especially photos of wounded people,” wrote Mark Smith, a U.K.-based policy manager, to Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of global public policy. “He also highlighted that the government may ask us to block entire pages and profiles if they become a focal point for sharing illegal content.” (Turkey considers the YPG a terrorist organization, although neither the U.S. nor Facebook do.)
The company’s eventual solution was to “geo-block,” or selectively ban users in a geographic area from viewing certain content, should the threats from Turkish officials escalate. Facebook had previously avoided the practice, even though it has become increasingly popular among governments that want to hide posts from within their borders.
Facebook confirmed to ProPublica that it made the decision to restrict the page in Turkey following a legal order from the Turkish government — and after it became clear that failing to do so would have led to its services in the country being completely shut down. The company said it had been blocked before in Turkey, including a half-dozen times in 2016.
The content that Turkey deemed offensive, according to internal emails, included photos on Facebook-owned Instagram of “wounded YPG fighters, Turkish soldiers and possibly civilians.” At the time, the YPG slammed what it understood to be Facebook’s censorship of such material. “Silencing the voice of democracy: In light of the Afrin invasion, YPG experience severe cyberattacks.” The group has published graphic images, including photos of mortally wounded fighters; “this is the way NATO ally Turkey secures its borders,” YPG wrote in one post.
Facebook spokesman Andy Stone provided a written statement in response to questions from ProPublica.
“We strive to preserve voice for the greatest number of people,” the statement said. “There are, however, times when we restrict content based on local law even if it does not violate our community standards. In this case, we made the decision based on our policies concerning government requests to restrict content and our international human rights commitments. We disclose the content we restrict in our twice-yearly transparency reports and are evaluated by independent experts on our international human rights commitments every two years.”
The Turkish embassy in Washington said it contends the YPG is the “Syrian offshoot” of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which the U.S. government considers to be a terrorist organization.
Facebook has considered the YPG page politically sensitive since at least 2015, emails show, when officials discovered the page was inaccurately marked as verified with a blue check mark. In turn, “that created negative coverage on Turkish pro-government media,” one executive wrote. When Facebook removed the check mark, it in turn “created negative coverage [in] English language media including on Huffington Post.”
In 2018, the review team, which included global policy chief Monika Bickert, laid out the consequences of a ban. The company could set a bad example for future cases and take flak for its decision. “Geo-blocking the YPG is not without risk — activists outside of Turkey will likely notice our actions, and our decision may draw unwanted attention to our overall geo-blocking policy,” said one email in late January.
But this time, the team members said, the parties were embroiled in an armed conflict and Facebook officials worried their platform could be shut down entirely in Turkey. “We are in favor of geo-blocking the YPG content,” they wrote, “if the prospects of a full-service blockage are great.” They prepared a “reactive” press statement: “We received a valid court order from the authorities in Turkey requiring us to restrict access to certain content. Following careful review, we have complied with the order,” it said.
In a nine-page ruling by Ankara’s 2nd Criminal Judgeship of Peace, government officials listed YPG’s Facebook page among several hundred social media URLs they considered problematic. The court wrote that the sites should be blocked to “protect the right to life or security of life and property, ensure national security, protect public order, prevent crimes, or protect public health,” according to a copy of the order obtained by ProPublica.
Kaplan, in a Jan. 26, 2018, email to Sandberg and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, confirmed that the company had received a Turkish government order demanding that the page be censored, although it wasn’t immediately clear if officials were referring to the Ankara court ruling. Kaplan advised the company to “immediately geo-block the page” should Turkey threaten to block all access to Facebook.
Sandberg, in a reply to Kaplan, Zuckerberg and others, agreed. (She had been at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, touting Facebook’s role in assisting victims of natural disasters.)
In a statement to ProPublica, the YPG said censorship by Facebook and other social media platforms “is on an extreme level.”
“YPG has actively been using social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and others since its foundation,” the group said. “YPG uses social media to promote its struggle against jihadists and other extremists who attacked and are attacking Syrian Kurdistan and northern Syria. Those platform[s] have a crucial role in building a public presence and easily reaching communities across the world. However, we have faced many challenges on social media during these years.”
Cutting off revenue from Turkey could harm Facebook financially, regulatory filings suggest. Facebook includes revenue from Turkey and Russia in the figure it gives for Europe overall and the company reported a 34% increase for the continent in annual revenue per user, according to its 2019 annual report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Yaman Akdeniz, a founder of the Turkish Freedom of Expression Association, said the YPG block was “not an easy case because Turkey sees the YPG as a terror organization and wants their accounts to be blocked from Turkey. But it just confirms that Facebook doesn't want to challenge these requests, and it was prepared to act.”
“Facebook has a transparency problem,” he said.
In fact, Facebook doesn’t reveal to users that the YPG page is explicitly banned. When ProPublica tried to access YPG’s Facebook page using a Turkish VPN — to simulate browsing the internet from inside the country — a notice read: “The link may be broken, or the page may have been removed.” The page is still available on Facebook to people who view the site through U.S. internet providers.
For its part, Facebook reported about 15,300 government requests worldwide for content restrictions during the first half of 2018. Roughly 1,600 came from Turkey during that period, company data shows, accounting for about 10% of requests globally. In a brief post, Facebook said it restricted access to 1,106 items in response to requests from Turkey’s telecom regulator, the courts and other agencies, “which covers a range of offenses including personal rights violations, personal privacy, defamation of [first Turkish president Mustafa Kemal] Ataturk, and laws on the unauthorized sale of regulated goods.”
Katitza Rodriguez, policy director for global privacy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the Turkish government has also managed to force Facebook and other platforms into appointing legal representatives in the country. If tech companies don’t comply, she said, Turkish taxpayers would be prevented from placing ads and making payments to Facebook. Because Facebook is a member of the Global Network Initiative, Rodriguez said, it has pledged to uphold the group’s human rights principles.
“Companies have an obligation under international human rights law to respect human rights,” she said.
A mix of public and private forests in Oregon's Coast Range. (photo: Beverly Law/Creative Commons)
Keeping Trees in the Ground: An Effective Low-Tech Way to Slow Climate Change
Beverly Law and William Moomaw, The Conversation
rotecting forests is an essential strategy in the fight against climate change that has not received the attention it deserves. Trees capture and store massive amounts of carbon. And unlike some strategies for cooling the climate, they don't require costly and complicated technology.
Yet although tree-planting initiatives are popular, protecting and restoring existing forests rarely attracts the same level of support. As an example, forest protection was notably missing from the $447 million Energy Act of 2020, which the U.S. Congress passed in December 2020 to jump-start technological carbon capture and storage.
In our work as forest carbon cycle and climate change scientists, we track carbon emissions from forests to wood products and all the way to landfills – and from forest fires. Our research shows that protecting carbon in forests is essential for meeting global climate goals.
Ironically, we see the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve as a model. This program, which was created after the 1973 oil crisis to guard against future supply disruptions, stores nearly 800 million gallons of oil in huge underground salt caverns along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. We propose creating strategic forest carbon reserves to store carbon as a way of stabilizing the climate, much as the Strategic Petroleum Reserve helps to stabilize oil markets.
Carbon Stockpiles That Grow
Forests pull about one-third of all human-caused carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere each year. Researchers have calculated that ending deforestation and allowing mature forests to keep growing could enable forests to take up twice as much carbon.
Half of a tree's stems, branches and roots are composed of carbon. Live and dead trees, along with forest soil, hold the equivalent of 80% of all the carbon currently in Earth's atmosphere.
Trees accumulate carbon over extremely long periods of time. For example, redwoods, Douglas firs and western red cedars in the coastal forests of the Pacific Northwest can live for 800 years or more. When they die and decompose, much of that carbon ends up in soil, where it is stored for centuries or millennia.
Mature trees that have reached full root, bark and canopy development deal with climate variability better than young trees. Older trees also store more carbon. Old-growth trees, which usually are hundreds of years old, store enormous quantities of carbon in their wood, and accumulate more carbon annually.
There are many fallacies about forest carbon storage, such as the concern that wildfires in the American West are releasing huge quantities of carbon into the atmosphere. In fact, fires are a relatively small carbon source. For example, the massive Biscuit Fire, which burned 772 square miles in southwest Oregon in 2002, emitted less than 10% of Oregon's total emissions that year.
Another false claim is that it's OK from a climate perspective to cut trees and turn them into furniture, plywood and other items because wood products can store substantial amounts of carbon. These assertions fail to count cradle-to-grave emissions from logging and manufacturing, which can be substantial.
The wood products industry releases carbon in many ways, from manufacturing products and burning mill waste to the breakdown of short-lived items like paper towels. It takes decades to centuries for newly planted forests to accumulate the carbon storage levels of mature and old forests, and many planted forests are repeatedly harvested.
In a review that we conducted with colleagues in 2019, we found that overall, U.S. state and federal reporting underestimated wood product-related carbon dioxide emissions by 25% to 55%. We analyzed Oregon carbon emissions from wood that had been harvested over the past century and discovered that 65% of the original carbon returned to the atmosphere as CO2. Landfills retained 16%, while just 19% remained in wood products.
In contrast, protecting high carbon-density western U.S. forests that have low vulnerability to mortality from drought or fire would sequester the equivalent of about six years of fossil fuel emissions from the entire western U.S., from the Rocky Mountain states to the Pacific coast.
Focus on Big Trees
In a recently published analysis of carbon storage in six national forests in Oregon, we showed why a strategic forest carbon reserve program should focus on mature and old forests. Big trees, with trunks more than 21 inches in diameter, make up just 3% of these forests but store 42% of the above-ground carbon. Globally, a 2018 study found that the largest-diameter 1% of trees hold half of all the carbon stored in the world's forests.
Findings like these are spurring interest in the idea of proforestation – keeping existing forests intact and letting them grow to their full potential. Advocates see proforestation as an effective, immediate and low-cost strategy to store carbon. Older forests are more resilient to climate change than young tree plantations, which are more susceptible to drought and severe wildfires. Like the 2,000-year-old redwoods in California that have survived recent wildfires, many tree species in old forests have lived through past climate extremes.
Creating forest carbon reserves would also conserve critical habitat for many types of wildlife that are threatened by human activities. Connecting these reserves to other parks and refuges could help species that need to migrate in response to climate change.
Using Forests to Meet Climate Goals
More than half of U.S. forested lands are privately owned, so strategic forest carbon reserves should be established on both public and private lands. The challenge is paying for them, which will require a major shift in government and societal priorities. We believe that transferring public investment in oil and gas subsidies to pay private land owners to keep their forests growing could act as a powerful incentive for private land owners.
Many researchers and conservation advocates have called for comprehensive actions to slow climate change and reduce species losses. One prominent example is the 30x30 initiative, which seeks to conserve 30% of the world's land and oceans by 2030. In an executive order on Jan. 27, 2021, President Biden directed his administration to develop plans for conserving at least 30% of federally controlled lands and waters by 2030.
Recent projections show that to prevent the worst impacts of climate change, governments will have to increase their pledges to reduce carbon emissions by as much as 80%. We see the next 10 to 20 years as a critical window for climate action, and believe that permanent protection for mature and old forests is the greatest opportunity for near-term climate benefits.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.