#Cuban crime of being “antisocial”

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

Assassins

John Wilkes Booth was a Confederate sympathizer, and he believed Abraham Lincoln was 100% to blame for the war.  He called Lincoln a tyrant, a murderer with the blood of 700,000 American men and boys on his hands.  Lincoln split the union apart by trying to stop the spread of slavery into the western territories.  Lincoln refused to let the south go peacefully; Lincoln was a warmonger, he’d rather fight to the last man than discuss southern independence.  Booth believed that by killing Lincoln, he could boost morale for the south, jump start and prolong the war just long enough to sue for peace, the terms of which southern Democrat Andrew Johnson would be more likely to accept than northern Republican Lincoln.  Booth broke his leg by jumping from Lincoln’s theater box onto the stage, but managed to escape and have it set by a doctor who may or may not have been in on the conspiracy (a few of Booth’s comrades were supposed to kill the VP and the secretary of war, but they both chickened out).  Booth was found a few days later in a barn; the authorities set it on fire to try and smoke him out, and he was shot when he tried to flee.

Charles Guiteau was antisocial and narcissistic, believing himself to be God’s gift to humanity.  He survived a shipwreck once, all the proof he needed that his destiny was ordained from above.  He had delusions of grandeur, and thought of himself as far more important and beloved than he was; he passed out political leaflets for a candidate on street corners, but then the candidate lost, so he just changed the names on the leaflets to the new candidate and kept passing them out anyway.  James Garfield became president in 1881, and Guiteau was convinced that he himself was solely responsible for Garfield’s victory,  If he hadn’t passed out those leaflets (which were actually written about his opponent), if he hadn’t given stump speeches that he plagiarized from someone else, why then Garfield would surely have lost!  Guiteau wrote countless letters demanding a high paying government job as payment for his services in getting Garfield elected, but nobody at the state department had ever heard of him because he was a nobody, so they ignored him until he actually confronted one on the streets.  They then explicitly rejected him.  With this, he came to the conclusion that Garfield was a monster, a bastard, a sorry little ingrate who doesn’t look out for the people who helped put him in office.  The only thing he can do now is kill Garfield to take him out of office.  So he does; shoots him in the chest, but he survives for weeks before succumbing to infection because doctors probed around the wound with unwashed hands trying to dig out the bullet.  Guiteau defended himself at his trial because he said he was smarter than any lawyer, lost his case, was denied an appeal, denied a pardon, and hanged, though not before reading a poem to the audience at his execution where he gushes about himself and how great he is and how God and Jesus are looking forward to meeting him in Heaven.

Leon Czolgosz (Chole-gosh) was an anarchist. His motivation was the simplest of them all; he wanted to kill William McKinley to create chaos for chaos’ sake.  As President, as head of the government, McKinley was seen as the enemy of the people, so he had to be taken out of the picture by any means necessary.  A major flaw in Czolgosz’s plan was his fundamental misunderstanding of American politics; killing the president doesn’t really cause a power vacuum like it might in other countries, because we have an organized line of succession.  Kill a president you don’t like, his functionally identical vice president will take over and continue doing whatever he was doing.  If he really wanted to sew anarchy in the streets, he would have shot McKinley and made it look like he was working for Roosevelt, or made it look like it was perpetrated by the opposition Democrats; if he wanted anarchy, he should have made it look like a conspiracy, but instead he was arrested and held until McKinley finally died days later.  Charged with murder, he plead guilty, but the judge overruled him and entered a not guilty plea instead, I guess to try and stretch the case for as long as possible?  He then pleads insanity, but the jury sees through this and finds him guilty after less than 30 minutes of deliberation.  He is electrocuted, then the doctor laughed at his malformed penis covered in scars and sores; the prison dissolved his body in acid and burned all his stuff.

Lee Harvey Oswald was a US Marine sharpshooter, but he became a communist sympathizer and defected to the Soviet Union.  He soon grew bored of his new life because there was nothing to do or buy, so he defected back to the United States.  This apparently set off exactly ZERO red flags with the military or state department.  In Oswald’s mind, everyone was either a communist or a fascist; there was no in-between.  If you were against communism, you were for fascism, as simple as that.  At one point he started passing out leaflets in support of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, and even tried to visit Cuba, though all travel from the United States was forbidden, so he had to go through Mexico instead.  The Cuban Missile Crisis saw Kennedy and Khrushchev use Castro as a pawn in a larger game, so Oswald decided to take Kennedy out.  He hated Kennedy for being anti-communist and anti-Cuban, so he shot him in the back and head with a sniper rifle.  Any deeper motivations or hints about possible co-conspirators died with Oswald because he was shot by a wannabe crime boss while he was in police custody; Jack Ruby wasn’t a mobster, just a criminal who wanted to be one.  The ballistics show that Kennedy was shot in the back from the Texas School Book Depository, where Booth’s rifle with fingerprints was found; he was the only shooter, but we’ll never know if there was a larger plot with more people involved because of Ruby.  The Warren Commission says there probably wasn’t a conspiracy, but you can’t trust “the man” to tell you the truth regarding “the man.”

These were all terrible men.  Booth was a racist piece of shit.  Guiteau is almost a tragic figure; he needed psychological help, and never got any.  Czolgosz deserves no sympathy, he just wanted to watch the world burn.  Oswald was politically confused and a trained killer.  None of their targets deserved to die, and in fact the only presidents who really DID deserve to die survived their attempts; Andrew Jackson, Ronald Reagan, Dubya, Gonad Lump.  It’s a total crap shoot.

[minnesotafollower]

Former Cuban Judge Criticizes Cuban Legal System   

On January 13,  Edel González Jiménez, a former high-ranking Cuban judge who left the island in 2018 and now lives in Peru, told a press conference in Madrid, Spain about the many problems in Cuba’s legal system. Other details were added by Javier Larrondo, the president of Prisoners Defenders and a longtime anti- Castro activist.[1]

González Jiménez’s Comments

Based upon recently released Cuban…

[trendingnewsb]

18 Creepy Declassified Documents That Give Us the Heebie Jeebies

There are plenty of secrets kept by the government without getting into conspiracy theorist territory, and sometimes those secret actions become declassified.

Reddit-users recently went over some of the creepiest declassified incidents throughout the world, from a sinister Soviet-era island to a United States nuclear gaffe that almost ended in catastrophe.

Check out 18 of the craziest declassified episodes in history!

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The U.S. wanted flying saucers.

via: Getty Images

Project 1794 was a top secret program with the U.S. Air Force working with a Canadian aeronautics company to build a supersonic flying saucer-like aircraft that would be able to simultaneously wage psychological war on our Cold War enemies as well as physical war (it was also designed to be a bomber).

The project was scrapped when they figured out that not only would it be too expensive to build enormous flying discs, but also that crafts of that shape were near impossible to fly at supersonic speed. –VictorBlimpmuscle

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During Operation Sea-Spray, the military sprayed supposedly harmless bacteria over San Francisco to study the spread of biological weapon attacks.

It was revealed that this happened over 200 times all across the US. –Paranoidas

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A similar test was run in New York City subway system by dropping lightbulbs filled with bacteria onto Manhattan train tracks.

An army report in 1968 concluded that “similar covert attacks with a pathogenic disease-causing agent during peak traffic periods could be expected to expose large numbers of people to infection and subsequent illness or death.”

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via: Wikipedia

Not exactly creepy, but during Operation PBSUCCESS, the CIA backed the 1954 coup d’etat in Guatemala at the behest of the United Fruit Company and US State Department.

Basically a socialist friendly government was elected in Guatemala and started land reforms to give people an opportunity to better their lives by dividing up large portions of estates and plantations owned by the United Fruit Company.

The CEO and board of directors approached the US State Department and asked them to put pressure/intervene to stop these reforms from continuing.

Eventually, because some members of the Guatemalan government were friendly with the Soviets, the President authorized operations by the CIA to remove its elected government.

The CIA backed a right wing faction and spoofed a full on military attack. –broccolistinks

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Sweden had a compulsory sterilization program running from 1935-1979.

It was state-sanctioned and given without consent, sometimes without the people knowing they were being sterilized.

The three main reasons for these sterilizations were:

1) Health concerns for the mother.

2) Eugenic (not wanting to pass on mental illnesses or any form of handicap).

3) Social (antisocial people, criminals, drunks etc).

In other words anyone who didn’t conform properly and was considered unfit to raise children. –Sugary_skull

This next one makes it look like the Pentagon has some serious secrets…

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The truth is out there…

The Pentagon commissioned an initiative called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program and they recently just released footage of US military aircraft approaching these “advanced aerospace threats.” –JihadiRotiJohn

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Jeffrey Dahmer’s full confession – a couple of hundred pages of pure madness.

Necrophilia, dismemberment, skinning, lobotomy, body part preservation, cannibalism…

Dahmer became pretty close to his interrogating detectives (Dennis Murphy and Patrick Kennedy), and provided a lot of detail to them.

A lot of it in a pretty candid, off hand manner. –Miss_Musket

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Nixon had a second speech prepared in case a failure on the 1969 moon landing left Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin marooned with no hope of rescue.

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Operation Northwoods nearly saw the US harm its own citizens.

via: Wikipedia

Basically, the U.S. government was going to carry out attacks its own people (as well as other military targets) and blame it on the Cuban government, so that the U.S. would have a “justified” reason for going to war with Cuba.

The plan involved blowing up U.S. ships and even inciting acts of terrorism on the streets of America, killing civilians.

It was backed by the DoD and Joint Chiefs of Staff. Thankfully, John Kennedy vetoed the idea.

According to Adam Walinsky, JFK’s speechwriter and friend at the time, JFK left the meeting and said, “And we call ourselves the human race.” – Boat_on_the_Bottle

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In the 1940-50’s the US government gave doses of radiation to newborns and pregnant women in an attempt to study the effects radiation had on newborns and pregnant woman.

In one study, researchers gave pregnant women doses of iodine-131.

When they inevitably miscarried, they studied the women’s aborted embryos in an attempt to discover at what stage, and to what extent, radioactive iodine crosses the placental barrier. –FreeThe_Truth

But did you know North Carolina was almost blown up twice? In the same accident? Read on to find out how…

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The 1961 Goldsboro B-52 crash involved an aircraft breaking up midair, and dropping two 3-4 megaton nuclear bombs (much bigger than those dropped on Hiroshima, for reference) near Goldsboro, North Carolina.

A report declassified in 2013 reveals that one bomb came very close to detonating—essentially, a one safety switch was all that stood between the US and a devastating explosion.

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In the 1940s a Swedish group of scientist gave mentally ill patients candy to see the effects it would have on their teeth.

What makes it especially bad is that these experiments were performed on people who were “uneducable” who had no say in what went on and needless to say their teeth were beyond repair. –FreeThe_Truth

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The Soviet Union established a cannibalistic island.

via: Wikipedia

In the 1930s, the Soviet government decided to send thousands of “undesirables” to a swampy river island called Nazino with nothing to survive on but bags of flour.

People tried mixing the flour with river water and this resulted in outbreaks of dysentery. Eventually people started eating corpses and later on killing other people for food.

There was no leaving the island, since the guards would shoot you if you tried. Eventually the settlement was dissolved and the 2800+ survivors were sent to smaller settlements upstream.

All of this was kept secret by the government until 1988 when the glasnost policy was introduced and the details were made public.-DemotivatedTurtle

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After the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam war (killing of around 400-500 innocent civilians in Vietnam after an army troop killed an entire village), the U.S. government established a group to investigate other war crimes like this occurring in Vietnam.

They found 7 massacres of equal or greater magnitude than My Lai and 203 reported war crimes that the public was unaware of—thousands of innocent people killed by U.S soldiers.

The information has since been reclassified, but there were several journal articles on it when it was first released. –TripleJericho

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The infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study:

via: Wikipedia

The U.S. Public Health Service conducted a study between 1932 and 1972, observing the untreated progression of syphilis in Alabaman African-American men under the guise of receiving free health care from the United States government.

None of the men infected were ever told that they had the disease, and none were treated, even though penicillin was proven to successfully treat syphilis.

Instead, the men were told that they were being treated for ‘bad blood.’

This next one will make your blood boil…

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Unit 371 committed horrific war crimes—and got away with it.

via: Wikipedia

A covert research and development unit of the Japanese army, Unit 371, committed a vast number of lethal experimentations on people during World War II.

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Over 3,000 people were experimented on, and instead of being tried for war crimes, the U.S. gave Unit 371’s researchers immunity in exchange for the data they gathered.

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Operation LAC: from 1957-1958, the U.S. Army sprayed zinc cadmium sulfide in primarily African-American areas of St. Louis to test the dispersion and geographic range of bio or chemical attacks.

The Pentagon maintains to this day that no one got ill from it, but residents and leaders of St. Louis speak differently.

This only got widespread exposure after Missouri’s two senators demanded the declassification of the project about 10 years ago. –AulayanD

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The Nth Country Experiment yielded unnerving results.

via: Wikipedia

The gist is that three newly-graduated physics PhDs with no weapons experience, only two of whom were working at a given time, were tasked to design a nuclear weapon in the 1960s.

They didn’t have access to classified materials (that is, no existing nuclear weapons designs or weapon-focused supporting materials), and only basic computational support.

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It took about two and a half years of part-time work to come up with a workable design of the more challenging “fat man” type. Understandably, the final design and a whole lot of details remain redacted from the public version.

The takeaway: difficulty of design is not the limiting factor in a country developing a nuclear arsenal.

Not by a long shot.

It’s so easy, a couple new physicists could do it in a couple years back before modern computational methods. –bigscience87

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Read more: http://twentytwowords.com/creepy-declassified-documents-that-give-us-the-heebie-jeebies/

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[cubaverdad]

Police Raid Rafters’ Homes Looking for a Boat Stolen From the Army

Police Raid Rafters' Homes Looking for a Boat Stolen From the Army 14ymedio, Mario Penton, Miami, 26 April 2017 — Cuban police are searching for a boat stolen from the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) and to find it they are raiding houses of former rafters, according to Solainy Salazar, whose husband tried to leave the island several times. That was the justification given by the authorities, including several State Security agents, who searched her home on Monday. "I was resting next to my four-year-old boy when the neighbors called me and I discovered the officers who were searching my yard," says Salazar by phone from San Miguel del Padrón in Havana. "They came into the house and told me they were going to search everything because they were looking for an inflatable boat and that I and my husband were accomplices to the theft," she adds. José Yans Pérez Jomarrón, Salazar's husband, has tried unsuccessfully to escape from Cuba six times, but has been intercepted by the Cuban Coast Guard or returned to the authorities of the island by its American counterparts. On his last voyage he took refuge, with some twenty Cubans, in a lighthouse 30 kilometers northeast of Key West. Although most of the rafters managed to be admitted a special program that gives them the opportunity to be relocated in a third country, because they were able to demonstrate "credible fear" of being persecuted in Cuba, for Pérez Jomarrón the outcome was different. "When I finished my military service they offered me a job with the Ministry of the Interior (MININT). As an inexperienced boy I agreed and when the immigration agents in the United States learned that I had once belonged to that repressive organ, they returned me to Cuba," explains the rafter-turned-entrepreneur who at the moment is in Guyana looking at the possibility of some business linked to his commercial activity. Police and State Security agents accused Solayni Salazar of being an accomplice in the theft of the boat and described all the members of her family as antisocial and counterrevolutionary. "They offended me with their words as much as they wanted and when I threatened them with filing a complaint they were indifferent, because they know nothing is going to happen to them," says the wife, age 31. "They threatened to arrest me. But they never brought the witnesses (required by law) when they did the search and they never showed me a court order to enter my home. And they did all this in front of my little boy," she says. In addition, she says, she was told that her husband was in Guyana escaping from the law, an argument that Salazar considers "completely false." "I fear for what will happen to my husband when he returns from the trip. Surely they will try to arrest him or persecute him for a crime he has not committed," she says. Salazar believes that the authorities are persecuting her family due to her husband's multiple attempts to illegally exit the country and because of his opposition to the government. "They do not want to give me jobs in state institutions. It's a way to persecute those who disagree with official politics," says José Yans from Georgetown via telephone. The situation is increasingly complex for the Cuban authorities. "Now not only do we have to pay for a 'crime' we didn't commit but we are suspected of everything else that happens in the country." Alfredo Mena, a rafter who tried four times to leave the island, was also searched last Wednesday. "They came to my house and broke down the door without a search warrant. They took me to the police unit and accused me of having stolen a boat belonging to the FAR (National Revolutionary Police)," says Mena, nicknamed El Pelú, by the locals. "The officers who were dealing with me asked me why we wanted to go to the United States, because there they killed people like us and another series of lies," he adds. Mena, 50, a native of Granma province, says he was threatened with being "deported" to the East, because he resides in Havana without having an address officially registered in the capital. Mena was fined 2,000 pesos for the crime of "receiving" for buying supplies for his work as a welder. Although he swears he is innocent, those metal parts are an indispensable component in the manufacture of the makeshift boats used to emigrate. "Nothing they took had anything to do with the supposed theft of the boat. The only thing they do with these things is to reaffirm one's desire to escape from such garbage," he adds. Source: Police Raid Rafters' Homes Looking for a Boat Stolen From the Army – Translating Cuba - http://ift.tt/2qk3UVQ via Blogger http://ift.tt/2qcIP3q

[theantisocialcritic]

The AntiSocial Critic Reviews… Live By Night

Here’s an interesting truism about filmmaking: 

Actors tend to make good directors. 

The reason why isn’t that hard to figure out. An actor is trained to understand character and performance above anything else. Given how important character and motivation are to storytelling this tend to look for those sorts of things and focus on them when it comes time for them to start working on writing and directing their own films. Many great directors like Clint Eastwood and Orson Welles started out as actors and became directors after they became accomplished as such.

Ben Affleck has been going through this since his directorial debut with Gone Baby Gone (2007). Since then he has directed two additional films in The Town (2010) and Argo (2012) and gone on to become the star of the rapidly sinking Justice League franchise. As of today we also have his fourth directed film Live by Night. 

Live by Night follows the story of gangster Joe Coughlin who comes home from World War I suffering from a massive desire to rebel against authority. After he ends up becoming a criminal in Prohibition-era Boston he finds himself caught between a violent war between the Irish and Italian mafias who are murdering one another in droves. When he finds himself sucked into the conflict by a personal tragedy, he ultimately finds himself as a new crime lord in Tampa where he starts running rum, gets married to a Cuban woman and gets into fights with the KKK and religious extremists.

…. Yah this film goes off the rails pretty spectacularly. 

Exiting the theater with my friend who was kind enough to accompany me to the screening we found ourselves confused and laughing rather hard at just how bizarre some of the aspects of this movie turned out. It’s hard really to explain just how much the film fails both because it would spoil large sections of the plot and because the problems are pretty deeply rooted. 

Starting at the beginning of the film things move along rather fine. Despite the exposition heavy execution which is probably a flaw in and of itself the film does do an excellent job establishing the world it seems to be building up. This is a great setup for a Boston gangster film in the style of an old James Cagney thriller like The Public Enemy or White Heat. Unfortunately the film carries pretensions of wanting to be The Godfather really badly and doesn’t quite understand how to meld gangster schlock with high brow storytelling as that film did. 

The great momentum and emotional resonance of the first act essentially stops dead in it’s tracks so that the movie can move 1000 miles south into a whole new location which requires it’s own world building and exposition. For the next hour and a half the story essentially stops so that the director can get his rocks off by preaching about the joys of vice and diversity set against the evils of the KKK and stupid religious people. Even if this wasn’t cheap and preachy the film looses all semblance of dramatic tension for the duration of the run because all the emotional groundwork and fun gangster stuff gets left back in Boston in the first act. The film really should have focused on that and let itself be a film all about the thrills. 

That’s not to say Affleck shouldn't direct a film addressing political issues he is interested in but understanding how to weave those issues and dramaticize them in the narrative of the story is vital to filmmaking and here they are just plopped ungracefully into the film. It doesn’t help that the end of the film just brings back the gangster stuff briefly enough to tidy up but the story contrives itself to get to the ending it wants before finally tailing off and finishing up the film. 

If the film had just been about a psychologically unhinged mobster being dragged into a gang war to take revenge on those who did him wrong it probably would have a been a movie as good or better than Gone Baby Gone, The Town or Argo. Instead it let itself fall apart upon the mantle of Wanting-to-be-as-good-as-The Godfather. 

Live by Night is a mess. It’s a consistently distracted piece of dramatic storytelling suffering from delusions of grandeur. As I told my friend walking out of the theater, “whatever virus is going around the DC Comics office seems to have affected Ben Affleck”. Strangely both Batman vs Superman and Live by Night are high concept genre films that hammer home their themes with the subtlety of a jackhammer at the expense of dramatic storytelling. I had very high hopes for this film and unfortunately the rank incompetence of the storytelling tore the film apart. I sincerely hope whatever spark of creativity brought use Affleck’s recent slate of films returns after this recent funk but it’s hard to say looking forward.

Thank you for reading. You can follow me on Twitter @AntiSocialCriti. Live long and prosper!