Is Hillary Clinton the Worst Human Being in the Universe? Redux

Steve was wondering, on the tale of how Bill and Hillary Clinton used to run a slave plantation on the grounds of the governor's mansion in Little Rock:

So who in Russia unearthed this nugget from a years-old book and made it Topic A in the Hillary-is-Hitler wing of the left? https://t.co/VihJ0fOQ86

— Steve M. (@nomoremister) June 7, 2017

I think I've got part of an answer to that. The person in Russia isn't Russian but British, I believe, and not in Russia, but in Singapore, where he goes (or they go) by @JeanetteJing with the computer-generated composite face of an Asian girl, but he's been annoying me since last May, and also annoying somebody called T. Fisher King, who did the research to put his identity together: a vicious botfeeder pretending to be a legitimate Sanders supporter.

It was Jeanette, anyway (formerly "Jeanette Sandernista", now calling himself "Jeanette Corbynista", I'm sorry to say, but still working for Putin) who started tweeting the slavery story at 6:00 in the morning New York time yesterday and kept retweeting it throughout the day, which is what made it trend. The material was lifted without credit from a quasi-legitimate American source, Superpredator: Bill Clinton's Use and Abuse of Black America (July 2016), by Nathan J. Robinson, a Harvard grad student in political science and the editor in chief of Current Affairs, which is coincidentally the publisher of his book, but when Robinson found out about it later yesterday rather than complain about the plagiarism he decided to go for the free publicity, and threw together his own online article on the subject, also presumably cribbed from his book.

Annals of derp: What goes up, etc.

James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1872-77). Via JSS Gallery.

It's world-famous penitentiarist David Brooks out to stop all this nonsense he sees in the presidential campaign about ending the drug war as a way to deal with the problem of prison overcrowding:

The drug war is not even close to being the primary driver behind the sharp rise in incarceration. About 90 percent of America’s prisoners are held in state institutions. Only 17 percent of these inmates are in for a drug-related offense, or less than one in five.

Moreover, the share of people imprisoned for drug offenses is dropping sharply, down by 22 percent between 2006 and 2011. Writing in Slate, Leon Neyfakh emphasized that if you released every drug offender from state prison today, you’d reduce the population only to 1.2 million from 1.5 million.

The war on drugs does not explain the rocketing rates of incarceration, and ending that war, wise or not, will not solve this problem.

I think that the main thing Brooks is missing here is that the incarceration rates are not, in point of fact, rocketing, unless you're thinking about the way typical rockets, the ones that don't escape into space, take a parabolic trajectory in which after going up they go down, because US state incarceration rates have been going down for the past five years, since the annual number of admissions started declining around 2006, which is a good thing. That's not the problem our Democratic candidates are addressing.

Guantánamo by the Bay

Bagram. Photo by Tribune Express, Pakistan.

NPR did a story on the California prison hunger strike and the conditions in the Security Housing Unit at Pelican Bay State Prison; they never mentioned Guantánamo, or detention in the former GWOT (now Overseas Contingency Operations (or OscOPs as I like to call them) in general, but they didn't need to; the parallels are pretty eerie.

The prisoners are held in the SHU, many of them, for specious reasons; for trivial breaches of discipline, or because they are profiled in, or because they were reported by another prisoner who gains an advantage from reporting them. Conditions amount to torture, and there's no hope of getting out.

The SHU is for holding "the worst of the worst"—ever heard that expression before? But

the California Code of Regulations, Title 15, Section 3315, outlines two dozen “Serious Rule Violations” that can result in placement in the SHU. These include “Possession of five dollars or more without authorization,” “Tattooing or possession of tattoo paraphernalia,” “Participation in a strike or work stoppage,” and “Self mutilation or attempted suicide for the purpose of manipulation.” Approximately 50 percent of California SHU inmates may have committed no offense at all; instead, they are held in solitary due to the gang “validation” process, in which inmates deemed to be active gang members are sent to six-year terms in the SHU. Gang validation can take place based in large part on anonymous accusations. Commonly, these anonymous charges come from validated inmates in the SHU, for whom the only hope for early release has been summarized as “Parole, Snitch, or Die.” Prisoners have also earned points toward gang validation simply by possessing the book The Art of War or making reference to prison activist George Jackson.

Remember how they condemned the suicides at Guantánamo as acts of "asymmetrical warfare"? Those cowardly detainees taking advantage of the jailers' tender feelings and purposely making them feel sad?

And then Governor Jerry Brown, assuming the position of Mohamed Karzai, tried telling the federal government to go away and stop interfering because

"We've gone from serious constitutional problems to one of the finest prison systems in the United States," Brown said at a news conference, where he announced that he had signed a proclamation declaring an end to a state of emergency in state prisons.

Sharia lonesome tonight?

So Newt Gingrich, no doubt mainly to distract us from the increasing evidence of his complicity with a dark cabal of Belgian colonialist terrorists, has come out to say that he, like so many Americans,  is absolutely terrified that our great American legal system is about to be taken over by Islamic jurisprudence. So is that surprising, that a former Republican politician pretending to be running for president as a gimmick for his book tour/reality show projects, and suddenly finding that he is being taken seriously in certain gullible quarters in Iowa and the press box, should be tapping into our deepest irrational fears?

Um, no. It is not surprising at all. It is precisely what one would expect. What I have trouble wrapping my head around is the question of what, exactly, we are scared of. What is supposed to happen? When a group of those Stealth Jihadis sets about imposing Sharia law on an unsuspecting population, how does it work?