Poll: Majority of Americans want 2020 winner to pick Ginsburg's replacement

Female legislators look on as the casket of the late Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is carried Friday. A poll released Friday found that a majority of Americans want the winner of the 2020 election to select her replacement. Pool photo by Jonathan Ernst/UPI | License Photo

Sept. 25 (UPI) -- A majority of Americans believe whoever is elected president in November should be the one to nominate the jurist to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court, a poll released Friday found.

The Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 57% of respondents want the Senate to hold hearings for a nominee picked by the winner of the election, while 38% want hearings on President Donald Trump's pick.

Ginsburg died one week ago, less than two months before Election Day. Trump said he plans to nominate a new Supreme Court justice before Nov. 3, but critics said he should wait and let the winner of the election decide.

Democrats are especially eager for the nomination to be delayed pending the results of the election after Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell blocked hearings on President Barack Obama's pick after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia about nine months before the 2016 election.

RELATED Votes cast in November will shape Congress through 2030

McConnell promised to hold a floor vote on Trump's pick, though.

After Scalia's death, a Post/News poll found that 63% of respondents believed the Senate should hold hearings on Obama's pick to replace Scalia, while 32% believed hearings should wait until a new president.

Trump ultimately picked Scalia's replacement -- Justice Neil Gorsuch.

Asked who they'd prefer to pick the next Supreme Court nominee, 50% of respondents said Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and 42% said Trump.

The Supreme Court appointment, though, came in sixth on the list of things most important to Americans when it comes to their choice for president. Those issues, in order, are the economy (25%), the coronavirus pandemic (17%), healthcare (15%), race equality (14%), crime and safety (12%) and the Supreme Court (11%).

The Post/News survey questioned 1,008 adults between Sept. 21-24 and had a margin of error of 3.5%.

Another poll published Thursday found that most Americans said the ideological makeup of the Supreme Court before Ginsburg's death was "about right."

Aviation company says it flew aircraft with hydrogen fuel cell



The company said it retrofitted a Piper M-class six-seat airplane with the hydrogen fuel cell. Photo courtesy of ZeroAvia

Sept. 26 (UPI) -- Aviation company ZeroAvia announced it has made the world's first flight of a commercial-grade aircraft powered by hydrogen fuel cells.

The company said it retrofitted a Piper M-class six-seat airplane with the fuel cell at its research and development facility in Cranfield, Britain. In a test flight Wednesday, the airplane off, completed a full pattern circuit, landed and taxied without the aid of fossil fuel.

"It's hard to put into words what this means to our team, but also for everybody interested in zero-emission flight," Val Miftakhov, CEO of ZeroAvia said in a statement. "While some experimental aircraft have flown using hydrogen fuel cells as a power source, the size of this commercially available aircraft shows that paying passengers could be boarding a truly zero-emission flight very soon."

ZeroAvia said it will attempt to have the airplane make a 250-mile trip to an airfield in Orkney, Scotland, from Britain by the end of 2020. The company said the trip would be equivalent to completing popular short-trip routes like from Los Angeles to San Francisco or London to Edinburgh, Scotland.

"Aviation is a hotbed of innovation and ZeroAvia's fantastic technology takes us all one step closer to a sustainable future for air travel," said British Shipping and Aviation Minister Robert Courts in a statement. "Through our ground-breaking Jet Zero partnership we're working hard with industry to drive innovation in zero-carbon flight, and we look forward to seeing the sector go from strength to strength."

United Kingdom government funding has supported the venture.

Chinese automaker unveils flying electric car

A staff member holds a board reading 'Wear mask and keep distance' at the Beijing International Automotive Exhibition in Beijing, China, Saturday. Photo by Wu Hong/EPA-EFE

Sept. 26 (UPI) -- A Chinese auto maker revealed an electric flying vehicle at the 2020 Beijing International Automotive Exhibition Saturday.

The car, dubbed the Kiwigogo, can carry up to two passengers and is designed to flow at altitudes between 16 and 82 feet, according to Xpeng Motors, the Alibaba-backed manufacturer that produced the car.

It has eight propellers and a small, capsule-like frame.

Xpeng, a startup with $1.7 billion in investment capital that raised another $1.5 billion at its initial public offering in August, is considered an emerging rival to Tesla in the electric vehicle market.

The company said the Kiwigogo is the first in a series of electric flying vehicles it's developing as part of a long-term research and development that includes research into mapping technologies.

"We think in the future not only electric vehicles will have the smart mobility autonomous driving features, but with other technology, enable other devices that can create a multi-dimensional ecosystem, that will be very exciting," said Brian Gu, vice chairman and president of Xpeng. "That's why we are investing in that area, and doing some exploration."

Analysis: Racial discrimination has been major factor in U.S. executions


Tuesday's report notes that of the 57 people presently on federal death row, 34 are persons of color. More than two dozen are Black men and some were convicted by all-White juries. File Photo by Paul Buck/EPA

Sept. 15 (UPI) -- The Death Penalty Information Center said in a new analysis Tuesday that racial discrimination in the United States has played a prominent role in the administration of capital punishment in the past.

The report, titled, "Enduring Injustice: the Persistence of Racial Discrimination in the U.S. Death Penalty," examines the way that people of color -- particularly Black Americans -- have disproportionately faced executions, lynchings and police killings.

"The death penalty has been used to enforce racial hierarchies throughout United States history, beginning with the colonial period and continuing to this day," said Ngozi Ndulue, DPIC senior director of research and special projects and the report's lead author.

"Its discriminatory presence as the apex punishment in the American legal system legitimizes all other harsh and discriminatory punishments. That is why the death penalty must be part of any discussion of police reform, prosecutorial accountability, reversing mass incarceration and the criminal legal system as a whole."

Tuesday's report notes that of the 57 people presently on federal death row, 34 are persons of color. More than two dozen are Black men and some were convicted by all-White juries.

The analysis specifically cites the cases of Abu-Ali Abdur Rahman, who's argued that a prosecutor unjustly removed two potential Black jurors based on racial stereotypes -- and Julius Jones, who was sentenced to death by an all-White jury for killing a White businessman.

The report said between 1990 and 2010, 20% of inmates scheduled for execution in North Carolina were sentenced by all-White juries, and qualified Black jurors were disqualified at more than twice the rate of their White counterparts in almost 200 capital cases.

A mock jury study of more than 500 Californians six years ago also found that White jurors were more likely to sentence poor Latino defendants to death than poor White defendants, Tuesday's report noted.

Further, it cited an analysis that found killers of Whites were more likely to face capital prosecution than killers of Blacks.

The DPIC report also tied the racial history of capital punishment to ongoing civil unrest over police brutality that followed the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, noting that exonorations of Black Americans are more likely to be linked to some type of official misconduct.

A separate report on Tuesday similarly found that more than half exonerations of innocent victims of all races involved some type of misconduct by prosecutors or police.

"Racial disparities are present at every stage of a capital case and get magnified as a case moves through the legal process," DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham said.

"If you don't understand the history -- that the modern death penalty is the direct descendant of slavery, lynching and Jim Crow-segregation -- you won't understand why."

 

N.C. Supreme Court reduces 3 death row inmates' sentences to life]

Sept. 25 (UPI) -- The North Carolina Supreme Court on Friday reduced three death row inmates' sentences to life in prison after they appealed under a now-defunct law that protected against racial bias.

The ruling provided relief for Quintel Augustine, Tilmon Golphin and Christina Walters.

They each sought a new sentence under the Racial Justice Act, which was passed in 2009 but repealed by Republicans in 2013. The law allows death row inmates to appeal their sentences if there's evidence of racial bias.

The state Supreme Court this summer ruled that even though the law was repealed in 2013, it could still be applied retroactively to cases tried before the repeal.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the three defendants, hailed the high court's decision.

"Today's decision affirms that the state won't sweep evidence of the racism people experienced in their capital cases under the rug. It's an important move towards rectifying the harm that has been caused," the organization said.

Augustine was convicted of killing a Fayetteville, N.C., police officer in 2001; Golphin of killing a North Carolina Highway Patrol trooper and a Cumberland County sheriff's deputy in 1997; and Walters of two gang-related killings.

Jerry Saltz: How Caravaggio Destroyed (and Saved) Painting

Michelangelo Caravaggio, The Calling of Saint Matthew (1599–1600). Photo: Public Domain

Again and again during this pandemic, unable to actually see art in person, I have time-traveled within myself for sustenance — with the help of the internet, of course. Viewing art online flattens the contextual experience: It is just as easy, or just as difficult, to call up a Renaissance masterpiece as a contemporary painting, and each appears on my computer screen in precisely the same way, without any of the trappings of art-historical importance (gilded frames, museum lighting, grand settings) or contemporary novelty (the vacuum-quiet space of a blue-chip gallery, the buzz of hype).

In these sessions of inner priestcraft, I invariably arrive in the past, indeed always the distant past, often the Renaissance. Lately, I’ve been traveling to Rome in 1600, when, at the age of 28, Michelangelo Caravaggio triggered a thermo-nuclear artistic explosion when the first two of his paintings of St. Matthew were installed in a small, newly built chapel in a church. Even then, everyone knew something shocking had happened. Painters were “looking upon his works as miracles,” it was written. Rivals groused that “this monster of genius” had wrought the “end of painting.” Artists had spent the previous 50 years revering Raphael, Leonardo, and Michelangelo, so much that ersatz Renaissance paintings had become a cottage industry among worshipful painters and princes wanting to show they had the same taste as popes and potentates — much like current monkey-see-monkey-do collectors of contemporary art. Yet there were brilliant Mannerists like Pontormo and Bronzino, who were estranged from this type of classicizing but found ways around it by wildly exaggerating certain aspects of Renaissance paintings: elongating necks, fingers, and torsos till bodies became paranormal apparitions to express strained emotions in ethereal spaces. In one fell swoop, Caravaggio shattered Renaissance wholeness, clarity, recessional space, and unity, along with Mannerism’s aristocratic affectations, anxious self-consciousness, and abstruse optical effects. (I adore Mannerism for all of this.) Caravaggio’s work seems to unleash new human forces into art; whirling, corkscrewing space; shafts of light and shadow; theatricality; and, above all, a new, colossal unideal naturalism of painting from life. He creates an almost modern psychological interiority that leads directly to geniuses like Rembrandt and Velázquez (who dispense with theatrics for miracles of sensual inwardness), Vermeer and Bernini, and, in English literature, to John Milton’s lines like “Blood, death, and deathful deeds are in that noise, Ruin, destruction at the utmost point.” All this is why Caravaggio’s follower Nicolas Poussin praised him for coming “into the world to destroy painting.”

Caravaggio would be dead within ten years, but he changed art history. He arrived in Rome in his early 20s, destitute and often in trouble, but was soon taken in by a Medici-family associate. Before his life and career were over, the constant brawler was arrested numerous times, imprisoned, convicted of murder, and sentenced to beheading; he escaped south and never returned to Rome. He may have been murdered himself while trying to get back. Nevertheless, he was, in his few years, a pop-culture superstar loved by the people and controversial among the clergy. Caravaggio’s titanic new style is called Baroque, and it transformed painting, sculpture, architecture, music, literature, fountains, cities, religion — everything. The Baroque feels vital now in the way it refuses to accept a simple world of surfaces, rule-bound theoretical art, and overly thought-out scenes and instead probes deeper into the core of lived experience.


The commission for the Matthew cycle came in July 1599, courtesy of that Medici connection, and paved the way to stardom for the unruly, unconventional painter while allowing this new chapel to take a chance on a new artist. A lot rode on this commission; plus, the pope might even see it. The cycle was painted in a tear — he must have been on fire. The last painting of the story was begun first, The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew. It is the greatest depiction ever made of what Shakespeare, writing concurrently, in Hamlet, calls “murder most foul.” Two large figures center the painting, one of them a twisting, nearly naked young man with a pointed rapier in his right hand. He is standing over and grimacing in fury at an older man who is sprawled on the ground between his legs. He has murdered the old man, running his heart through with the now-withdrawn sword. Blood spurts from the mortal wound. That man is Matthew; this is his martyrdom; he is already dying. The slayer stands in dominion over Matthew the way Muhammad Ali stood over a knocked-out Sonny Liston. This is the exact second before death, an instant of action, and pain, never before or since rendered this realistically, horrifically, or beautifully. We are stunned, hypnotized, repelled, frightened, fascinated, confused, and stupefied by it all. Caravaggio’s realism is so derived from observation that the scene becomes undeniable.

The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew (1599–1600). Photo: Public Domain

According to some tellings, Matthew was martyred in Ethiopia after saying Mass. This is why he wears vestments here and seems to be on the steps of an altar. People in various states of nakedness suggest baptisms. All the dress is contemporary; the executioner appears to have been painted from life and was perhaps a friend of Caravaggio’s. Predator and prey form this riveting, still center of the pandemonium around them. The geometry is a kind of swirling, chambered-nautilus spiral. There may be 13 figures here, but it’s hard to make them all out; it’s like some pictorial deep-sea vent.

Our eyes search for anything anchored — some place of stability among the chaos. There it is: Above Matthew, visible only to him, is a beautiful, winged angel who twists and bends to offer the palm of martyr-dom to the dying disciple. An altar boy in white robes screams and flees. His right arm mimics Matthew’s; his trunk turns the opposite way of the murderer’s. Caravaggio often echoes, opposes, mirrors, and flip-flops poses. Often someone will face forward next to a figure facing away. In the darkness over the swordsman’s right forearm, we see the artist, large boned, brooding, staring, and intense.

As maximal as the Martyrdom is, the Calling of St. Matthew is minimal. This is the scene where Christ calls Matthew as his disciple. The entire top of this picture is almost empty. That’s radical! Whole areas are just blackness. In a dim room, five figures sit around a table. We know Matthew was a Jewish tax collector. He’s the richly dressed patrician with a coin in his hat; his right hand is near the money pile in front of him. Note his elegant belt. Around him are a man apparently paying his taxes, an associate, and two sword-wielding, thuggish young buccaneers, typical types of Caravaggio’s time, when Rome was overrun with crime, unemployed soldiers, mercenaries, gangs, and local Mafia-like warlords.

Jesus and Peter appear on the right. Jesus raises his hand and arm toward the table. This gesture intentionally echoes Michelangelo’s Sistine-ceiling Adam extending his left hand to be touched by God. This makes sense for an artist saying there’s a new game in town; narratively, Christ is also known as the “the new Adam.” (Challenging Michelangelo so directly took amazing guts and risked offending the taste of any patron insulted by this gesture of pictorial gall.) A beam of light from above Jesus dawns across the room. It shines on Matthew, who instinctively raises his left hand as if to wonder, Who, me? In the Bible, Jesus calls Matthew thusly: “ ‘Follow me’ … And Matthew got up and followed him.” Some say Matthew is gesturing at the man to his right, as if saying, “Who, him?” Yet this man has no idea what’s going on around him and still looks down. Now examine Matthew’s legs and feet. They unconsciously turn toward Jesus. This is Matthew in the act of leaving one life and joining another. Talk about being “called.” Caravaggio is mind-blowing this way.

The Inspiration of Saint Matthew (1602). Photo: Public Domain

The final painting in the cycle, the Inspiration of St. Matthew, is Matthew writing his Gospel. He has just arrived at a table — there’s an open book on it waiting for him — and dipped his pen into an inkwell. He’s so taken by something that he hasn’t even sat down and turns on one knee while standing. (The stool is about to fall off the ledge it’s on.) I’ve never seen anyone painted this way before or since. I know this pose in my bones, though. I’ve run to my desk in the grip of imagined inspiration like this, possessed. Matthew isn’t looking at the page. He looks above him at the same seraph we see in the Martyrdom. This angel gestures with his fingers as if counting — one, two, three, this, then that, then the next — as if establishing and clarifying the narrative of the life of Jesus that Matthew is attempting to set down. It is patient angelic aid for an author trying to get this right. In effect, the angel is consoling him, saying, “Okay, Matthew, first comes the Sermon on the Mount, then the loaves and the fishes, then his entry into Jerusalem, then the Last Supper.”

I’ve seen these paintings thrice; each time ranks among the best days of my life. In this, my 188th day of quarantine, largely away from galleries and museums and fixated on the chaos around us, something in these paintings called to me. A mystery of some kind beckons; a skeleton key that wants turning. I can’t stop thinking about that angel showing Matthew how to write, the same one who reaches quietly downward, extending the palm as Matthew’s arm rises upward. This way of rising speaks volumes. But what is it telling us? Then, bam, after ten days, I see it. Amid all the action, observation, and dramatics, a paradoxical deep content opens. It is slowness — the slowness of Matthew wondering, not quite knowing what is happening in any of the paintings; a slowness that makes him me, you, all of us. Humanness.

In the painting of him writing, I see an author at a loss for words to suit the subject, trying, failing, hoping a ghost of inspiration might appear. This is a slowness and desperation that all writers and artists know. The Martyrdom is a man looking away from his killer, knowing another presence is here, not knowing what, coming to terms with something, allowing his hand to reach in wonder toward this otherness he feels above him. None of this comes with a lightning bolt of revelation and is more like the gradual, almost glacial, boreal reckonings I have been feeling these days away from the world yet watching the world lurch in starts. Matthew’s hand doesn’t extend in protest or terror. It extends in a gradual, final acceptance of grace, of knowing something new. In these frozen moments of painting, time eases into some cosmic soup of slow knowing. This lets me finally let go, too. I give up on knowing how Caravaggio created this quelling quietude of balm within clamorous space. Instead, I just savor it.

*This article appears in the September 28, 2020, issue of New York Magazine.

Aaron Sorkin’s Annoying Tics Are Actually Good in The Trial of the Chicago 7
By Alison Willmore MOVIE REVIEW SEPT. 25, 2020

The speeches, the grandstanding, the quips — they totally work in the context of this Netflix courtroom drama. Photo: Niko Tavernise/Netflix

The most maddening, irresistible proposition in an Aaron Sorkin production is that a speech can change hearts and minds. Sorkin loves speech, period — motormouthed walk-and-talks where the cleverness of the characters mitigates the fact that they sound awfully similar, quippy exchanges that ping-pong back around to an eventual callback, arguments that rise in a calculated crescendo until one character breaks into a yell and the room abruptly falls silent. He’s a playwright who moved into film and then television and, more recently, started to direct. The Trial of the Chicago 7, about the protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the seven participants who were charged by the federal government with crimes like conspiracy and inciting a riot, is Sorkin’s second venture behind the camera, after Molly’s Game in 2017. But he’ll always be a writer first, and you can see it in his certainty that the correct words, delivered with the proper amount of conviction, can win someone over from the other side of the aisle, even if it’s only one instance — cracking a closed mind open with some carefully crafted sentences.

There are a lot of speeches in The Trial of the Chicago 7, but it’s hard to mind, given what it’s about. This film is one of those exhilarating instances when Sorkin finds a context in which all of his well-established impulses that can be so annoying elsewhere — the self-righteousness, the straw men, the great men, the men who aren’t onstage but are nevertheless digging deep in their diaphragms to deliver their lines to the back row — actually work. (It helps that there are almost no women here for Sorkin to mangle.) It’s about a trial, and it’s about activism, two worlds where people spend a lot of time trying to move hearts and minds with instances of grandstanding. The film moves between these innately theatrical spheres with a crackling energy, slipping easily from the courtroom in 1969 to the preparations and protests in 1968. What makes it so rousing is not the floridness of the dialogue but the way it’s used to acknowledge that moral clarity is not an end unto itself. While Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Schultz (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), acting at the behest of the new Nixon administration, tries to create a monolithic bogeyman out of the “radical left,” we’re shown how little agreement there actually is on the side of the seven defendants as to what it means and how to effect change.


There’s so little agreement that there are actually eight defendants when the trial begins. Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) insists on his own representation, despite being forced to fend for himself after his lawyer has a medical emergency. It’s politically expedient for the prosecution to group Bobby in with the others in what they dub “the all-star team,” but he rejects the forced comparison — “Your life, it’s a fuck-you to your father, right? And you can see how that’s different from a rope on a tree?” he asks Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) midway through the movie, after Fred Hampton (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) is killed by the FBI. Tom and Rennie Davis (Alex Sharp) are part of Students for a Democratic Society, and their focus on stopping the war and winning elections doesn’t entirely jibe with the anti-authoritarian Yippies, as represented by Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) and Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong), who want a cultural revolution as well as a political one. Their readiness to hurl Molotov cocktails in turn contrasts with David Dellinger’s (John Carroll Lynch) committed pacifism. John Froines (Danny Flaherty) and Lee Weiner (Noah Robbins), more minor players who comment from the sidelines, muse that “this is the Academy Awards of protests, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s an honor just to be nominated.”

It’s a sprawling ensemble — capped by Mark Rylance and Ben Shenkman, as the group’s attorneys, William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass, and Michael Keaton in a small but pivotal role — and Cohen and Strong emerge as the standouts. They sometimes feel like a stoner-comedy duo, with Strong doing a voice best described as Tommy Chong by way of Bullwinkle J. Moose. But Cohen emphasizes Abbie’s shrewdness, the intention behind all the jokey irreverence. The Trial of the Chicago 7 plays fast and loose with certain details; when Seale was infamously bound and gagged at the order of Judge Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella), who wears his biases openly, it was for days, not for the minutes shown in the movie before his trial is severed from the rest of the defendants’. But as an account of history as filtered through Sorkin’s sensibility, the film takes a thrillingly unexpected, if also understated, turn against civility. When Abbie and Tom have it out over who should be the one among them to take the stand, it’s Abbie whose point is the better one and Abbie who tells the courtroom, “I think the institutions of our democracy are wonderful things that right now are populated by terrible people.”

Sorkin will always romanticize the idea of the honorable conservative and the promise of polite bipartisanship that accompanies it. At the end of a talk at the San Sebastián Film Festival earlier this week, he offered up his scenario for how he would script the end of Election Night, and it was more unbearable than anything The Newsroom had to offer: Trump refuses to concede, and “for the first time, his Republican enablers march up to the White House and say, ‘Donald, it’s time to go.’” It’s the reason that fantasy of the perfect speech is as nauseating as it is appealing: It’s one based around the idea that there’s a universal understanding of what is right and that everyone wants to act on behalf of it, once enlightened or appropriately shamed. From the first time Gordon-Levitt appears onscreen as Schultz, who is portrayed as an eager up-and-comer disturbed by some of the trial’s developments, it’s obvious that the movie won’t be able to resist giving us some sign that he’s not just a good soldier. It’s an eye-rolling moment but minor compared with the film’s underlying acknowledgement that this trial was about attempting to punish people for refusing to abide by rules and structures that are inherently unfair. The movie ends not with a speech but with a listing of names — a reminder that demands for respectability and good behavior can equal demands for silence, especially when the straightforward speaking of facts counts as rebellion.

 DEJA VU DOO

THE TOMB: DEVIL'S REVENGE Trailer (2020) Shatner Vs. Satan

PLOT:
John Brock is a down-on-his-luck archaeologist who returns from an expedition to the caves of rural Kentucky, after unsuccessfully trying to locate a mysterious relic that his family has sought for generations. Upon his return, John starts to see dream-like visions of a ferocious bird-like creature from ancient folklore.

John soon learns that the cave he came into contact with on his last expedition was indeed the cave that contains the relic, and also a portal to Hell and a place of worship for the occult. John discovers that the only way to stop the increasingly realistic visions is to go back to the cave with his family, find the relic once and for all, and destroy it...

CAST:
William Shatner, Jeri Ryan (Star Trek: Voyager), Jason Brooks (Star Trek, 2009), Jackie Dallas (Stranger Things) and Michael Yahn (Daredevil).

DIRECTOR:
Jared Cohn

For more daily horror news updates, check out the ARROW IN THE HEAD: http://www.arrowinthehead.com/

#thetombdevilrevenge, #trailer #williamshatner

Nick Sweat1 week ago
This movie's been out for close to a year now. It's horrible by the way, just warning anybody thinking of watching it>


Earl Richardson1 week ago (edited)
Fact Check: Aired in 01-Oct.-2019 to watch try Amazon prime. It was released as "Devil's Revenge". In US. 

WAIT A MINUTE SPEAKING OF REALLY BAD MOVIES WITH SHATNER VS SATAN

CHECK OUT THIS SEVENTIES DRIVE IN THROW BACK

Featuring William Shatner as Mark Preston, Ernest Borgnine as Jonathan Corbis, Tom Skerritt as Tom Preston, Ida Lupino as Mrs. Preston, Anton LaVey as High Priest, and John Travolta in his first feature film role as Danny ("Blasphemer! Blasphemer!").

Opinion:

A Little Bit of History Repeating – The New “Satanic Panic”

By Storm Faerywolf | September 19, 2020




It isn’t funny anymore.

We live in a strange world, my friends, one that is populated with many colorful personalities and individuals. Our diversity is our strength. We have no shortage of opinions, perspectives, and voices and that myriad of voices is what makes the “alterative spirituality movement” as robust and vibrant as it is.


[Envanto Elements]

While many of those voices–if not most— are what adds strength and beauty to our communities, there are some that are – either in their ignorance or outright derangement — a growing threat to rational thought and the health of our society. A dire-sounding warning, and not one that I am leveling lightly.

I am referring to QAnon, the latest manifestation of group psychosis and hysteria to hit the scene since a failed businessman and mediocre reality TV show host was gobsmackingly elected to the nation’s highest office. Even I have been tempted to at least consider the possibility that the CERN collider timeline-slip theory might actually have some merit at this point. (Okay, fine – maybe not.)

In short, QAnon is a (baseless) conspiracy theory that asserts the world has fallen prey to an evil cabal of Satanic pedophile Democrats who have infiltrated Hollywood, the media, and the highest levels of world governments (the so-called “Deep State”). According to QAnon, these Satanists use the blood of children to extend their own lives and are working to pull down Donald Trump, whom they believe is waging a secret war against pedophiles and child trafficking. Add-in some pretty eyebrow-raising thoughts about Tom Hanks, Oprah Winfrey, the Wayfair website being used for human trafficking, Lady Gaga, the Baphomet, and more, and you have all the makings of a crazy conspiracy theory the likes of which we haven’t seen since “the Satanic Panic” of the 1980’s and early 90’s.

A QAnon supporter at a 2019 rally for Donald Trump’s re-election [Marc Nozell, Wikimedia Commons, CC 2.0]

I’m a warlock of a certain age, and so I remember the Satanic Panic and what it did to real people’s lives. Accusations of a global Satanic conspiracy that had infiltrated police and governments abounded, in which member-families were alleged to ritually abuse and even sacrifice their children to the devil, often drinking their children’s blood in their macabre rites. No evidence was ever found, of course, because of “the conspiracy,” and perhaps even because of special technology not available to the public like portable cremation machines.

It was all so over the top that it’s hard to think anybody ever actually believed in it. But believe it they did, and real people went to jail without a scrap of physical evidence. The McMartin preschool scandal in 1983 was a precursor to the more recent Pizzagate, but both shared the same DNA: both involved accusations of occultist pedophiles operating with impunity under everyone’s noses, enough to stoke real fears even if nothing ever actually happened.

It might have been “fake news,” but real people’s lives were destroyed as a result. Like Damien Echols of the “West Memphis Three,” who in 1993, was wrongfully convicted, along with two other teens, of the grisly murders of three eight-year-old boys in what law enforcement and the media proclaimed to be the result of a “Satanic ritual.” While there was no physical evidence linking the teenagers to the murders, Echols was interested in the occult, and this proved to be all that was needed for the prosecution to focus on him in what became a literal witch trial.

Now in hindsight, it all sounds somewhat incongruous, in much the same way that the events of the Salem witchcraft trials might sound as much to the modern observer. But taken contextually, these intangible, unprovable accusations remain enough to stoke fear to the degree that eventually anything seems possible, even the otherwise unthinkable – no matter how far-fetched, demonstrably false, or downright absurd. The West Memphis Three spent eighteen years of their lives in prison because of unfounded fears and prejudices. And some people are still in prison because of the Satanic Panic today.

When I first heard of QAnon it seemed easy enough to dismiss. It’s not even that original an idea; it directly draws from anti-Semitic propaganda and repurposes many of the same claims and accusations that have been leveled against Jewish people for centuries, repackaging them for a new fad movement of pop hatred, only disguised in the form of defending the vulnerable. The ultimate “concern trolls,” QAnon believers hide behind the fallacy of “protecting children” – and in so doing, may actually be hurting the very cause they think they are here to champion.

What causes my concern, however, is the sheer number of people who seem to be – for lack of a better phrase — “body snatched” by the movement, as if their brains have been rewired to only believe what the cult tells them to believe. Despite all evidence to the contrary, they believe wholeheartedly that they are the only ones that have it right and that the rest of us are either ignorant sheep or part of the secretive cabal as well. And in part, we are to blame.

TWH’s readers may already know this, but it recently came to my attention that, depending on where a person lives, their Google results will be drastically different. And we’re not just talking about which Starbucks is closest or what the local Walmart’s hours are. We will get fundamentally different results in terms of news and information and current topics.

For extra credit do this little experiment: In a separate page, go to Google and type in “Climate change is” and observe what the predictive search suggestions say. Feel free to share the results in the comments section of this article.

I’ll start:




What does Google say where you live? [S. Faerywolf]

This underscores the necessity to get our information from multiple sources, but we also have to consider those sources as well. For years I have heard people on the Left as well as the Right bemoan the existence of “corporate media”. The accusation is that, since these media conglomerates are privately owned businesses, it is in their best interest to not report on activities that would cast a bad light on their corporate masters. I do think that this is a concern, but not to the degree that it has been assumed by this growing fringe. And this is a fringe that has easily infiltrated the Pagan and spiritual communities, and been quietly growing in plain sight for many, many years.

In the “Venn diagram” of Pagan community fringe interests, QAnon seems to fall somewhere in the middle, between alternative healing, chemtrail enthusiasts, anti-vaxxers, the transphobes, and the racists. With respect to alternative healing, the rest of these ideologies have usually been begrudgingly tolerated in some form at the Pagan events I have attended over the years in various states across the US, with more of a push in recent years to weed-out the more racist and transphobic elements. But corrosive ideologies do not simply go away when they are swept under the rug or into a corner. They fester. They grow. They mutate.

The poison remains, only now clothed in the garments of current events, seemingly new, but really just telling the same sad old story: from the depth of our feelings of powerlessness and insignificance, we turn to crutches and to the vice of small-minded ideologies because we find comfort in them. We find comfort in them because they make us feel larger than others, and that, to a wounded ego, is what we think will bring us healing and satisfaction.

The followers of QAnon truly believe that they are in possession of special knowledge and that they are truly awake, while the rest of us remain asleep. This is a tactic used in cults to help separate members from “outside influences;” it is employed in all the cults that are effective, even cults that have are typically called religions, including Christianity, Mormonism, Scientology, and the like. If members can be separated into “Us vs. Them,” then the battle is already half-won.

Right now, that battle is very real. I have been personally shocked at some who have suddenly “turned to the dark side.” People whom I casually knew but whom I thought were sane, balanced individuals, now spouting pro-Trump memes that draw directly from racist propaganda, without a flicker of conscious awareness of what they are actually serving. In one recent exchange, when confronted with the argument that there was no scientific basis for any of their spurious claims, their response was, “Well, who funds your science?” (I hadn’t realized it was my science. I sort of assumed it was for everyone.) And that, as they say, was that.

For practitioners of spirituality, this level of unconscious bypassing is alarming as many of these individuals have positioned themselves to be authorities in their largely insular communities, creating the perfect environment for the rot of cultish thinking to flourish.

It is important that we research for ourselves but not limit ourselves to social media like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, or 8Chan. (I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.) If one were to assume that the corporate media is lying to the public, then what exactly do we think these platforms would be doing any different? If the goal is to suppress free speech, as is alleged, then what is stopping the corporations that own Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and 8Chan from doing the same? The goodness of their hearts? How is social media more credible than the Associated Press? Or BBC News? Or Reuters? I’m supposed to get my news from the same place that made PewDiePie famous for – I’m checking my notes – being anti-Semitic and racist?

It used to be funny. Oh, that person believes in chemtrails. That one is a flat earther. This one believes that they have alien DNA. But now it isn’t funny. Things are getting serious. Trump has praised and courted the conspiracists and now this shade of crazy is just a shade away from being brought into Congress. We are already on the precipice of a functional democracy, experiencing a pandemic during the most closely watched election cycle of more than a century. And now we have another pandemic, one born of denial, cognitive dissonance, racism, and propaganda. And it’s so much closer than we could have imagined. It’s in our neighborhoods, maybe even in our covens. Qanon believers see Trump as a savior, and they intend to keep him in office.

The world holds its breath.

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To protest against reform bills, farmers block Delhi-Noida road at Sector 14A
NOIDA

 Updated: Sep 25, 2020 

Shafaque Alam


Farmers from Noida Friday blocked the city’s border with Delhi for over two hours to protest against three farm reforms bills passed by Parliament last week, throwing traffic in the area out of gear till afternoon.


A number of farmers bodies, under the aegis of Bharatiya Kisan Union, had come together to march from Noida to Delhi in support of the nationwide protest, but were stopped on the way by police.

More than 150 farmers —all members of Bharatiya Kisan Union — reached Noida Gate near Mayur Vihar border around 11.45am, but were met by barricades that had been set up by Delhi Police personnel.

Around 150 Delhi Police personnel — armed with anti-riot gear — were deployed at Chilla village on the border on Friday morning in a bid to prevent the agitating farmers from crossing over to the national capital.

The deployment of Delhi Police personnel at Alipur on the Delhi-Haryana border was minimal.


The farmers parked several tractors and cars on the Noida side of the border, completely halting vehicular movement from both sides. The protesters blocked the road till 2pm, slowing down vehicular movement on the Noida-Greater Noida Expressway, and forcing the police to divert traffic.

According to Delhi deputy commissioner of police (east) Jasmeet Singh, traffic going towards Noida was diverted towards other border points, including New Ashok Nagar, Kondli, and Mayur Vihar Phase-3. Except the Chilla border, which was blocked for nearly three hours, all other routes connecting Noida from Delhi, including the Delhi-Noida Direct flyway, were open for motorists. The traffic diversion, however, caused some confusion among several motorists.

At 12.44 pm, the Delhi Traffic tweeted a traffic alert, informing the public about the “obstruction in traffic at Chilla border due to demonstration.”


However, the police, in a tweet two hours later, said that the traffic had returned to normal.

Uttar Pradesh (UP) police officers spoke with leaders of the farmers’ groups in Noida, said Alok Kumar, joint commissioner of police (JCP), (eastern range), Delhi Police.

The farmers were apprised about the guidelines of Unlock 4, which prohibits any kind of mass gathering or protests across the country, including the national capital, owing to the Covid-19 pandemic after which the protests were called off.

The three farm bills approved by Parliament, the Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Bill; Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance; and Farm Services Bill and The Essential Commodities (Amendment) Bill, have become contentious issues.


The new laws aim to liberalise the agriculture sector by removing hurdles created by the Agriculture Marketing Produce Committee (AMPC) Act in direct procurement of agriculture produce by buyers and create a level-playing field for all, thereby allowing private players a bigger role in farm trade.

Farmer bodies and opposition parties say that these reform bills take away price protection provided through Minimum Support Price (MSP), whereas the government maintains that MSP will remain in place and the bills will ensure higher remuneration for farmers.

BKU’s NCR chapter president, Subhash Chaudhary said through the bills, the government will abolish mandis (agricultural produce marketing committees) and open avenues for corporates to directly access farmers’ produce.

“There are no measures in the bills to ensure farmers are able to sell their produce at decent rates. The government should at least ensure that grains are bought at or above the MSP. The government is promoting capitalism with the bills, and hence farmers demand amendments in them,” he said.


Ashok Bhati, spokesperson, BKU (Noida), said the farmers had held a symbolic protest in different districts of Uttar Pradesh on September 21 as well. “We had requested the government to address our grievances. The government ignored our demands hence we hit the streets,” he said. Bhati said the government framed the three bills— Farmers Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Bill, 2020, Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement of Price Assurance and Farm Services Bill, 2020; and the Essential Commodities (Amendment) Bill, 2020—without consulting farmers and without safeguarding their interest.

Vipin Pradhan,a farmer leader, said that the farmers submitted a memorandum to senior police officers demanding the three bills to be rolled back.

Kumar Ranvijay, additional deputy commissioner of police, Noida, said the protest was peaceful. “We had diverted the Delhi-bound traffic to DND Flyway and Kalindi Kunj. The police personnel were also deployed at the DND Flyway loops and Noida Expressway to guide the commuters. Delhi Police had diverted Noida-bound traffic to internal roads,” he said.


Ganesh Saha, deputy commissioner of police, (traffic) Noida said arrangements were placed on time to divert the traffic in light of the protest and there were no jams on Thursday.