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Update on the alleged "MAGA attack" in Chicago.

I'm sure we'll be hearing more about this as police gather evidence.


Have you ever watched the movie Enemy of the State? There's a line in that movie I can still remember that went "The only privacy that's left is the inside of your head. Maybe that's enough."

Well, so much for that idea. Science Daily reports that neuroengineers at Columbia University "have created a system that translates thought into intelligible, recognizable speech. By monitoring someone's brain activity, the technology can reconstruct the words a person hears with unprecedented clarity."

What could possibly go wrong?

Jussie Smollett, a 36-year-old actor and star of a show called Empire, was reportedly attacked by individuals who yelled racial and homophobic slurs at him, poured bleach on him, and tied a noose around his neck.

A report from TMZ claimed the assailants shouted, "This is MAGA country!" during the assault, prompting a predictable anti-Trump backlash on social media. However, according to a report from The Daily Beast, that did not happen.

A Chicago Police spokesperson told The Daily Beast that the attackers’ genders are unknown, and that their faces and hands had been covered. TMZ reported that the attackers shouted “This is MAGA country,” but police told the Beast, “There is no report of that being said.”

Did TMZ make up the "This is MAGA country" story? Or did the alleged source make that up and TMZ ran with it without corroboration because, well, the media never misses an opportunity to make Trump or supporters look bad, even if it means running with bogus stories?

At least one country in western Europe is waking up to the dangers posed by "asylum" (from what?) seekers. The Nation is not happy about it:

Think of Denmark and you probably conjure up a mix of mid-century design, hygge, and people riding bikes. But as viewers of the noir TV series The Bridge know, it’s also a country marred by institutional xenophobia. Denmark has a network of camps and detention centers for asylum seekers. It has legally defined ghettoes, meaning urban areas with populations of “non-Western immigrants.”

But while something is clearly rotten in the state of Denmark, it’s far from an exception in Western politics. What’s happening in this former bastion of liberalism is the normalizing of white hostility to immigration. Denmark is building on Australian and Israeli tactics to form a new strategy: to disappear the refugee from society.

The Danish immigration minister Inger Støjberg has said that she intends to make conditions for people in the asylum system unbearable. And if my recent visit to Sjælsmark Detention Center, outside Copenhagen, is anything to judge by, she’s succeeding.

If the Danes don't make life in the asylum system unbearable, the "asylum seekers" will soon enough make life in Denmark unbearable for the real Danes.

Meanwhile Chris Hayes, who after all is only 14 years old, believes that somewhere on Planet Mongo there exists the "effective bureaucratic administration" of a socialist state.