Thank You, Comissioner Schmidt!

I just voted thanks to the hard work of a public servant who clearly knows the meaning of constituent service.

The City Commissioners' office had mailed me a ballot on May 1, but it never arrived. I'd repeatedly tried to contact them about it but, until a couple days ago, I hadn't reached anyone who could help me.

Then I got a text from Joanne Beer with Philly for Bernie checking on whether I'd voted yet, and I explained my situation to her. She gave me a different number from those I'd tried up to that point.

The first time I tried it I was promised a follow-up from someone who had just come in but never actually called back. When I tried again later, I got their voice mail, from which I learned it was Republican City Commissioner Al Schmidt's office. I've met him a couple times.

This time, however, I did get a call back Friday evening, from Commissioner Schmidt himself. He said he could come by where I live today and give me an emergency ballot to go fill out in private someplace nearby, then seal and give back to him.

I started to get anxious as five o'clock came and I hadn't heard from him. He informed me his operations had been greatly hampered by effects of the rioting last night. But he arrived at about 6:40 with my ballot.

Except for the state house offices, I'd already had a chance to see who and what was on the ballot so I didn't need to ponder much as I was actually filling it out on a bench outside my residence. Since I saw no challenger to stinker Josh Shapiro, I wrote in my friend Chris Votey for state Attorney General.

Quote of the Day

From Caitlin Johnstone:

"Spend less energy concerning yourself with which individuals are good or bad and more on what information and ideas are true and helpful."

Wiser words were never said!

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/05/30/twitter-censorship-and-other-notes-from-the-edge-of-the-narrative-matrix

The Conspiracy Myth

This essay offers an interesting meta view on the importance of avoiding self-imposed milieu control in assessing mainstream vs. alternative narratives. I saw it in the latest OpEd News.

The Conspiracy Myth

Show Up (Virtually) for This Courageous Journalist!

What follows was posted on Facebook by Free Julian Assange. I've applied to attend the virtual hearing 10 June and I encourage everyone who cares about civil liberties, human rights, and government accountability to do likewise. Follow the link below to see images of some of the text being discussed..

craigmurray [dot] org [dot] uk [slash] archives [slash] 2020[slash] 05 [slash] authoritarianism-is-shoddy [slash] ?fbclid=IwAR1Vg3L-YguuWYInotyaU6bUSbF_TkZTzl7Sz7K6nby6JDXbM6xCf5uGVYQ
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  Craig Murray  Historian, Former Ambassador, Human Rights Activist
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Authoritarianism is Shoddy
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 Well, it is really happening. It is something of a shock to see yourself listed as a criminal for writing the truth. I have a tiny extra glimpse now into the way my friend Julian has been feeling.
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  Three appeal court judges even at the procedural hearing – though not unheard of, that is not normal. The state is sparing no resources on this; in a sense I am flattered.   There will be no jury at the eventual trial, and this worries me. Not least because the indictment (called a “petition”) contains within itself evidence that this process is a stitch up.
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Please help me here, and read paras 49 to 56 of the indictment after reading this explanation.  Para 49 of the indictment is an utter garble. It states that I sent a twitter message beginning “It is respectfully submitted…”.   I sent no such twitter message. Para 50 is missing. This is not a misnumbering, para 50 really is missing. I assume my twitter message, intended to be quoted at para 49, and whatever led in to the Crown’s argument beginning “it is respectively submitted” were in the missing section.  At para 53 the same thing happens again. It explicitly states that I published another tweet starting: “it is respectfully submitted that”.  I published no such tweet. Again the indictment does not give the actual text of the tweet complained of, even though it claims to do so. This time two paragraphs are clearly missing, and again this is not just a misnumbering, because of the missing material. It jumps from 53 to 56.  In short, the indictment from paras 49 to 56 is an inoperable jumble, with three paras missing from two different locations and which does not even contain – though it states it does – the very tweets which form part of the alleged offence with which I am charged.
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 You may argue this does not matter, and clerical errors are easily corrected. But that is to miss the point. I used to prepare official documents in my 20 year diplomatic career, from ministerial replies to members of the public to fully fledged international treaties.   A Diplomatic Note to a foreign government, which has a legal status, might be the best comparator from my work to this indictment or petition. I always scrupulously proof read every one I sent before signing. It is unthinkable that a Diplomatic Note would be sent containing not one but a series of major, material errors.  Is this document any less solemn? It is an indictment on which they are attempting to brand me a criminal and potentially send me to prison for up to two years. It is signed by Alex Prentice, Depute Advocate General on behalf of the Lord Advocate, and by the senior judge, Lord Turnbull.   But one thing is abundantly clear. Neither Alex Prentice nor Lord Turnbull can have carefully read through the document before they signed it. I do not believe for one moment that they would knowingly sign off a document containing such major errors. The judge, in particular, is meant to weigh carefully the matter to see if there really is a case to answer before he signs the Crown’s “petition”. But, I say it again, plainly Lord Turnbull has not actually read through it; or he would never have signed this garbled mess.
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 I am advised that it may be “contempt of court” for me to point out that Lord Turnbull signed this without reading it. But when a law makes it illegal to point out a blindingly obvious fact, then the law is an ass.   If Lord Turnbull does not wish to be criticised, he should try doing his job properly and actually paying attention to what he signs.
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  Contempt is the right word. I have a great deal of contempt for anybody who would send me such a portentous legal document rotten through with utterly careless error which would have been spotted by even a cursory reading of the document.  They did not read it. The judge who approved it did not read it.   Neither of them bothered to read the indictment or petition because it had already been decided to “get” Craig Murray and it therefore did not matter what the document actually said. The content of the charges is immaterial to them. Otherwise, they would have read them before signing. There can only be two reasons for that failure. The first is incompetence. The second is corruption. In a sense, it does not matter which it is in this case.   A state which is turning to authoritarianism to crush dissent does not need to be very careful about matters of process.
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  The failure of both Prentice and Turnbull to read before signing is not important for the mistakes in the document, which can be remedied by a new document. It is important because of the clear indication of attitude. This prosecution is abuse of process, a clear Article Six violation under the European Convention on Human Rights.   A series of facts make this abundantly plain. The abuse of process lies in this combined with the extraordinary selectivity in prosecuting me, when others who can be objectively proven to have much more effectively produced “jigsaw identification” are not prosecuted. There is a very clear political motivation behind the selection of who to prosecute and who not to prosecute.  When you put together the facts that there is overwhelming evidence that mainstream media journalists were more guilty of “jigsaw identification” than I, that systematic police action is being taken to harass only supporters of Alex Salmond, and that they don’t even care what the indictment to be used against me actually says, the overall picture becomes very, very clear.  Authoritarianism doesn’t have to worry about mistakes in the indictment, because it can just smash you in the face with the jackboot. That is what is happening here.  My own view is that they were so keen to “get” Craig Murray they just signed without any proper scrutiny whatsoever. I don’t see any other conclusion. Do you?  They do not have the excuse that this is routine. Major prosecutions for contempt in Scotland are extremely rare – the last one was Aamer Anwar about a decade ago (it failed).  So why could the state be so keen to prosecute Craig Murray, that is doesn’t even care what is in the indictment, or even if it is drawn up with the most basic level of competence? Well, I refer you to this excellent letter setting out the fact that the state is only acting against those who defended the innocent Alex Salmond, even though his detractors were much more in contempt of court. And I refer you to the Panelbase opinion poll which showed that very substantially more people who know the identities of the accusers, learnt them from the mainstream media.   I remain clear that I identified nobody. If I had wanted to, I would have done so openly. I have never been noted for cowardice.
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 The other accusation, that I wrote articles stating that the prosecution of Alex Salmond was a fit-up, is something I state again here. It is a proper exercise of my freedom of speech under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.  Actually, you don’t have to go past the very first sentence of the indictment to understand what is happening here. It reads “On 23 January 2019, Alexander Elliott Anderson Salmond was arrested by police officers in relation to a number of incidents that had taken place in Scotland.” 
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 “That had taken place”. Not “alleged to have taken place”. “That had taken place”. And Prentice wrote this, and Turnbull signed it off, after the acquittal.  After independent witnesses gave eye witness accounts that several of the incidents had not taken place at all. After it was demonstrated in court that the accuser of the most serious offence was not even present when she claimed the offence took place.  After the jury threw out the pile of ordure that the very same Alex Prentice as prosecuting counsel presented to them.   “That had taken place”. No, most of the incidents had not taken place at all, and none in the form alleged.   Right at the start, this wording gives away the motivation. The conspirators have still not psychologically processed the fact their attack on Alex Salmond was foiled by the jury. The Crown is now coming at Mark Hirst and at me in an effort to get some kind of victory from this massive waste of public resources. The conspirators seek to assuage their massive humiliation in the failure of a prosecution that stank and quite obviously ought never to have been brought.  I am not going to pipe down under this abuse of process and attack on freedom of speech. On the contrary, this will be a reasoned, forceful and very public resistance.
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  TWO WAYS YOU CAN HELP  The hearing on 10 June is supposed to be public, but it will be virtual because of coronavirus. While it is a case management hearing, I shall nevertheless be grateful if you are able to “attend” virtually, as I am very keen indeed that I am not stitched up out of the public eye. Please send an email requesting access to the virtual hearing on 10 June to judicialcomms@scotcourts.gov.uk. I am very keen as many people do this as possible. Journalists please in addition copy in communications@scotcourts.gov.uk for accreditation.   Secondly, many people come to this blog through social media and I am currently suffering a very high level of suppression, on Facebook and especially on Twitter. Rather than just retweet and share any soical media post that brought you here, (which may appear on the face to have worked but the dissemination will be suppressed), I would be very grateful if you could also write your own new posting and put a link. If you have your own blog or access to one, a commendation of this post with a link would be very welcome, even if it is not your normal policy. And finally of course, the entire post is free as always to copy, republish and translate as you wish.
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  Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.  Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.  Choose subscription amount from dropdown box:  Recurring Donations  Paypal address for one-off donations: [censored by Blogger on the spurious grounds that contact information for Craig Murray provided by Murray himself is "Personal and confidential"]

Joe Biden Faces a Novel Accusation

Actually not a novel but a memoir. A passage in the memoir of Tara Reade's late father, published in 1998, is remarkably similar to what she now says Joe Biden did to her.
https://www.powells.com/book/-9781452009551

Note: this post is corrected from an earlier version in which, following others, I described the book as a novel.

That "Coerced Sex" Study

When I heard about this study, my own thought was that women who are more easily pressured into having sex they don't want have lower self-esteem, and that increased health problems are caused by the same factor -- such as by way of being less likely to see a doctor about symptoms -- more plausibly than by a single unwanted sexual experience. 
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-HmcJKYdxls

Was Marx Autistic?

I had this thought today and, seeing some reasons to think he may have been, decided to search the Web. I found someone else had posed the same question on Quora, and I wrote the following

I just had this thought a few minutes ago, and the more I think about it the more probable it seems.

I was identified as being autistic a little over a year ago (at age 57), and as a result I've learned a lot more about it since. One of the most significant things about autistics is that, being instrumental rather than social learners, we tend to think about objects more in terms of their objective properties and less in terms of how society defines them. The thought I had a few minutes ago was that maybe the reason many of Marx's ideas, like commodity fetishism, make more sense to me than to many other people is that, being autistic, it's easier for me to see through socially-consensual illusions such as the idea that value is an intrinsic property of an object rather than the social relation between people that it really is.

 
Once I had that thought, naturally the next thought was that maybe Marx himself was autistic, and that's why he was able to see through illusions like that. And then other thoughts: autism would certainly be consistent with Marx's intense focus on one subject — revolutionary philosophy and politics — over his entire life. It would also help explain why so many Marxist groups have failed to practice these in the same way Marx did — because, being composed mostly of neurotypical people, they adopted his doctrine in the fashion of taking on a marker of allegiance to a particular social group with a particular consensus reality, rather than perceiving things in a way that's independent of any social consensus, as Marx himself did. So , I think it's very likely Marx was autistic.

Stacy Abrams Caught Lying for Biden on CNN

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rv0NxAwlS2k#

Stacy Abrams doesn't expose herself as a neoliberal (as Jimmy Dore says) by saying allegations should be investigated; #BelieveEvidence, not #BelieveWomen, is the epistemically correct -- and the genuinely progressive -- slogan. Where she demonstrates her bad faith is in lying that NYT found Tara Reade's allegation against Joe Biden "not credible," which they did not in fact do. Unfortunately Jimmy and Steph Zamorano get the critique wrong because they've bought into identitarian-feminist BS.