90 Miles From Tyranny

Tuesday, August 30, 2022

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #623

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #621

No Whites Allowed: Pfizer Fellowship Flagrantly Violates the Law, Lawyers Say

The 'Breakthrough Fellowship' prohibits whites and Asians from applying, a restriction that is “flagrantly illegal”

The pharmaceutical giant Pfizer offers a prestigious fellowship that bars whites and Asians from applying. Trumpeted on the company’s website as a "Bold Move" to "create a workplace for all," civil rights lawyers are characterizing it in a different way: as a blatant violation of the law.

"This Pfizer program is so flagrantly illegal I seriously wonder how it passed internal review by its general counsel," said Adam Mortara, one of the country’s top civil rights attorneys.

Pfizer’s "Breakthrough Fellowship" offers college students multiple internships, a fully funded master's degree, and several years of employment at the pharmaceutical giant. It also restricts applications to "Black/African American, Latino/Hispanic and Native American" students, the fellowship requirements state.

In a Frequently Asked Questions brochure about the nine-year program, Pfizer asserts that it is an "equal opportunity employer."

Gail Heriot, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, described the fellowship as a "clear case of liability" under federal law: a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which bans racial discrimination in contracting, and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bans racial discrimination in employment.

"Major corporations seem to have forgotten that there’s such a thing as law," said Heriot, who is also a law professor at the University of San Diego. "They seem to think that as long as they’re woke, they’re bulletproof."

As a legal matter, that view is questionable. Some companies have scrapped race-conscious programs in the wake of discrimination lawsuits, which—when they involve overt racial quotas—typically succeed. Even the threat of a lawsuit can pay dividends: Last year, for example, the American Civil Rights Project sent Coca-Cola a letter demanding that it drop a requirement that law firms working with the company staff at least 30 percent of their teams with "diverse lawyers." In a memo to shareholders in February, Coca-Cola announced it was backing away from...

A lawyer for several of the January 6 political prisoners says his clients are being “tortured” by a system of “anarcho-tyranny” that considers them to be a “subhuman, sub-constitutional class of people.” In an interview this week, Joseph D. McBride said he is building a case to sue the federal government for millions of dollars over the abuses his clients have suffered.

The devout Catholic told the Blaze‘s Daniel Horowitz on his “Conservative Review” podcast Monday that he has witnessed the “deepest part of evil” while representing the political prisoners.

“They are gaslighting the entire American public,” McBride said. “They are calling these people extremists and terrorists, but the extremism and the terrorism lies with them!”

“January 6 did not happen in a vacuum,” he continued. “In the year or so that preceded January 6, you had all the BLM and Antifa riots all over the United States of America. We saw the burning down of cities, the attacking of police officers. Members of antifa out there in black bloc covered head to toe in full riot gear going at it with police, the looting of stores—you name it, we saw it.”

McBride posited that the left-wing agitators got a pass in 2020 because of new and expanded definitions of “civil disobedience, and political protest” which allowed government entities to view even violent riots “as grounded in the First Amendment, not criminality.”

In the wake of this, he explained, the pro-Trump protesters showed up in Washington, D.C. on January 6 with the impression there was this “new and modern definition of political protest.” Of course, most of the January 6 rioters came nowhere near the levels of violence the nation saw during the George Floyd riots, McBride was careful to point out.

Because of who they were, however, (that is, mainly white, middle-class, patriotic, pro-Trump Americans) they were targeted, persecuted, and not given the constitutional protections the much more violent and destructive left-wing rioters were routinely given, he argued.
“For the first time in U.S. history, the political party in power is hunting down and jailing members of the opposition party for political dissidence, and not only that, they’re torturing them in jail,” McBride said. “This is the stuff of dictatorships.”
He said he has two clients who are both currently being tortured in jail: Ryan Taylor Nichols of Longview, Texas, and Christopher Quaglin of New Jersey.

The attorney explained that both of these men are routinely thrown in solitary confinement for long periods of time, which violates international norms, and when their advocates on the outside speak out against the abuse, they get treated even worse.

“Legally, a pre-trial detainee in America is not allowed to be punished, never mind tortured,” he told Horowitz.

In the United States of America, we only punish convicted persons, meaning you had your day in court, and you either were convicted guilty, or you took a plea and you admitted guilt. Then and only then you can be punished and jailed. And even in those sets of circumstances, the punishment for your crime is the deprivation of your freedom.

The standard for a convicted person is no cruel and unusual punishment. The standard for a pre-trial detainee—because that person has not been convicted of any crime, and is still presumed innocent—is that no punishment of any kind is acceptable. Meaning, if you punish somebody, and they’re a pretrial detainee, you have violated their constitutional rights.

Quaglin is an electrician who was out of work in 2020 due to government policies surrounding COVID. “He has neither been in serious trouble before nor arrested prior to this incident,” friends and family of Christopher Quaglin said in a GiveSendGo plea for help. “He has always been an ardent supporter of the police and some months prior to his arrest led a local demonstration in support of the men and women in blue serving his...

Visage à trois #439

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #620

Country Hailed as 'First Major Renewable Energy Economy' Is Now Collapsing Into Power Poverty

It’s beginning to look like Germany put too many eggs in the renewable energy basket.

For years now, progressives have praised the European country for paving the way forward on renewable energy. With the fourth largest economy in the world, Germany has had 100 percent of its energy output covered by renewables for years now, according to Clean Energy Wire.

Renewable Energy World praised the country over a decade ago for being “the world’s first major renewable energy economy.”

Because of this overreliance on renewables, energy prices have skyrocketed. Thanks to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the price of natural gas is spiking, leaving European nations with no cheap alternatives. Power prices in Germany have reached record levels, forcing the German government to increase the annual cost of household gas bills by nearly 500 euros, Reuters reported.

“The alternative would have been the collapse of the German energy market and, with it, large parts of the European energy market,” German Economy Minister Robert Habeck said, according to Foreign Policy Magazine.

The country has since taken up a number of energy-saving measures. For instance, the government has shut off spotlights by monuments in the capital city of Berlin, and people have taken to stocking up on wood for the upcoming winter.

If the country had instead invested in nuclear power, a clean yet reliable alternative to renewables like wind and solar, perhaps this crisis wouldn’t be as severe.

Sadly, the country opted to phase out all of its nuclear power plants. In July, Reuters reported the many reasons for this decision — none of which really made any sense if you realize how great of an energy alternative nuclear power is.

“A first assessment by the environment and economy ministries in March did not recommend extending the plants’ lifetime, citing legal, licensing and insurance challenges, the need for extensive and possibly costly safety checks and a lack of fuel rods to keep the plants running,” Reuters reported.

Author and journalist Michael Shellenberger used to be a big fan of renewables until he learned more about their actual cost. Speaking with The Wall Street Journal on Aug. 8, Shellenberger revealed why Germany and the rest of green energy Europe, for that matter, were headed for disaster.

According to Shellenberger, the world is currently in a crisis of too many renewables.

“Germany had too much renewables. Its electricity is now the most expensive in Europe, and it became dependent on Russia for reliable fuels, mostly natural gas, because it depended so much on these weather-dependent renewables,” Shellenberger told the Journal.

In his view, Europe isn’t the only country in danger of...