It used to be controversial to call for a ONE STATE SOLUTION to end the fighting over Palestine. Israelis and their American Zionist supporters rightly feared that without bantustans to isolate Palestinians, Israel’s Jews would become the minority and democracy would upend the legitimacy of a Jewish state. To be fair, that’s not only probable, it’s inevitable. But how cavalier to wait confidently as Palestinians continue to suffer reprisals and recently a teenager abducted and burned alive by marauding Jewish settlers incited by Israeli ministers calling for collective punishment and genocide. Nevermind the IDF air strikes burning Gazans alive. Yeah, maybe it’s time to stop pretending a Zionist theocracy can be democratic, and stop pretending that invaders and occupiers want “peace”. They want their conquest and human rights abuses left in peace. End this thinly veiled western colonial adventure. Palestine for Palestinians, not Europeans and Americans claiming a “birthright” that usurps a refugee’s right of return.

It would appear eternal candidate Hillary Clinton has launched her presidential bid into a barrel of ducks. She’s titled her campaign bio HARD CHOICES. Let’s see… Doing the right thing? Not really a hard choice. Favoring human rights? Not a hard choice. Peace? Social Justice? Humanity? Morality? These are not hard choices. For a warmongering sociopath, ok, impossible. Jailing bankers or war criminals? That should be no choice at all. For an informed public, rejecting another oligarch figurehead, even in the guise of electing a woman president, should not be a hard choice.

At a commencement ceremony, President Obama told the college graduates: the most powerful leader in the world can’t address the climate crisis, you unemployed under-educated debt-slaves do it.

DENVER, COLORADO- The weekly demonstration in front of the Tattered Cover bookstore ended once again in arrests yesterday. Three Occupiers were arrested, led away in handcuffs, detained at length in the back of police cruisers, and given citations for “disturbing the peace”. Four bucket drums were confiscated, presumably one was beating itself. This marks the fifth arrest at the Tattered Cover action. Arrestees at earlier homeless ban actions had been cited for jaywalking, some required to post bond before being released from jail. Many more Friday night actions have been interrupted and truncated by a DPD show of force or DPD warning that a complaint gave officers license to restrict “time, place and manner” of what the activists decry as their free speech. Although a bullhorn was initially taken last night and declared to be evidence, it was returned to the Occupiers, probably for fear the act would too literally represent their voices being silenced.

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Are women under attack? Recent attacks on women’s rights look more like straw men for feminists to stress their underrepresentation in the power structure. While the inequality is ever present, social engineers appear to be positioning women’s rights as the wedge issue to divide the electorate in 2016 and insure the two corporate parties are choice enough. Yes all women, except Hillary in 2016.

Click bait posts on social media promise surprise and wonder, such that “you will not believe” and “this will blow your mind” but doing so reveal the terrifying vacuum of the average reader’s mind. As the internet allows users to cloudsource their brain functions, very consciously the memory storage, we are also consigning it our processing. In interspace no one can hear you think.

Cops are people too, voting matters, use honey not vinegar, the only way is nonviolence, yada yada. Try this against your old liberals’ tales: If one million indignados foreswore property destruction, a policeman with a sharp pencil could subjugate them all, the state could spend more on amassing capital, and the press wouldn’t have to report a thing, etc. Occupy is a revolutionary movement rallying support for the understanding that we must burn down this castle of inequity and injustice. Those urging demonstrators to lower the pitchforks are the primary defensive line of the system. Armored police are nothing compared to the duped stooges who circulate among us enforcing conformity and dissent within-limits. Occupy Wall Street targeted Wall Street because it pulls the strings in DC. We can continue to protest corporations and the military but our biggest adversaries are our own defeatist tendencies. They are neither accidental nor transcendent, they are malignant.

[FULL TEXT OF LETTER SUBMITTED TO CS INDEPENDENT MAY 14] Two years ago Colorado Springs lost 346 homes to the Waldo Canyon fire which precipitated floods expected to haunt the westside and Manitou for years to come.

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COMING TO DENVER for a repeat performance: on MAY 17 Keystone XL thugs will run a leaking pipeline through downtown Denver to give everyone a further taste of undemocratic, eminent domain abusing, profit driven, bullying.

They fell for Darfur and Kony (and Obama!) and now the Colorado Springs social justice community confirms that the city’s national repution for dim-bulbedness doesn’t reflect just its conservatives. Even the dissenting voice in this belly of the US military-judeo-christian-racist beast, is pro-imperial, toe-the-line, neoliberal dumbass. They’re against war and injustice, they even understand illegal war, but cloak it in terms of “intervention” and they stand beside their warmonger neighbors cheerleading for US aggression in Sudan, Libya, Syria, and wherever Pax Americana dictates we bomb in Africa. Where the local armed-forces community might be slow on the uptake regarding a Democratic president’s pandering to transnational corporate needs, the Springs peacekeeping Left will lead the way. On Monday, the usual shepherds of non-confrontational conformity held a vigil for the Lost Girls of Sudan -pardon- Nigeria, echoing the White House call to #bringbackourgirls. Unlike authentic antiwar vigils, this action got press, quelle surprise, from the media war machine! Congratulations AFRICOM-dupes! Nevermind non-American girls lost to US collateral malfeasance, no official hashtag for them, ergo no Springs peacenik campaign that would give a conscience indigestion.
 
Would we care more if the 267 kidnapped schoolgirls were not black? If they were white we wouldn’t be trying to destabilize their country.

DENVER, COLORADO- Five arrests resulted from last Monday’s Anonymous march, two on the scene and three afterward, but measures employed by combined Municipal, County and Homeland Security forces to suppress the demonstration will likely prove to undermine charges of wrongdoing. Marchers were accused of obstructing the roadway, but all vehicular traffic had already been blocked while ordinary pedestrian usage continued unhindered.

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Western interest are desperate to create public consent for airstrike interventions in Africa, having failed with their KONY 2012 campaign, the Rwanda remembrance handwringing, ad infinitum. Now Nigerian insurgents have thwarted a military “rescue” of two hundred schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram by announcing that the girls will be put up for sale. The western media is spinning a horror story of sexual bondage while trying to ignore the obvious solution: purchase the girls. It’s even cheaper than euthanizing them with drone strikes. The US kills dark-skinned children by the thousands without a care. I have yet to hear anyone consider the circumstance of these Nigerian schoolgirls before they were abducted? Can we know the Chibok girls weren’t repossessed by dissident factions of their own communities? The White House hashtag campaign #bringbackourgirls seems dreadfully Freudian. The kidnapped girls were liberated from our clutches and we want them back. BOKO HARAM is an Islamic movement which opposes Western indoctrination. While it’s labeled “terrorist” outside of Africa, certainly its methods are no worse than those of the Western-imposed dictators ravaging Africa for corporate extraction interests. Western schools in Africa are entry points for providing the labor pools for Capitalism. Are African children better off in our recruiting mechanisms or out of them?

“You can fuck Magic Johnson for all that I care, just don’t put him on Instagram” billionaire Donald Sterling told his mistress in a now infamous recording in which he also explained he didn’t want her bringing black people to his basketball games. The NBA responded by stripping the LA Clippers owner of his franchise because they won’t abide blatant racism, as if the NBA performer audience color divide wasn’t overt enough. Who could have envisioned a boyfriend being more jealous of Instagram than actual physical infidelity? KUDOS INSTAGRAM! And three cheers for billionaires so greedy that they can’t abide a sex-worker mistress being compensated with a house and car. Sterling’s wife sued the mistress to recover less than one percent of their tax-evading family trust, in spite of being forwarned that an incriminating tape would be leaked to the press. But I’m really curious about the friends Sterling said were complaining to him about the Instagram pic. Who sees someone posing with Magic Johnson and asks “why is your girlfriend standing next to a BLACK MAN?”

DENVER, COLO.- I might be sensationalizing a technicality, but in effect it’s what happened: the remembering of Ludlow has been commandeered by the class who perpetrated it. The preliminary series of events commemorating the 100 year anniversary of the Ludlow Massacre (April 20, 1914) concluded tonight at Denver’s History Colorado Museum with a panel discussion featuring only establishment voices. “Is Ludlow relevant?” was the question posed to five participants among them three professors, a soldier, and a union rep. That’s like asking “is global warming real?” The question is loaded with the suggestion that the opposite is equally plausible. I would have preferred to hear HOW is Ludlow relevant. Though the union rep skillfully skirted the issue, no one pushed back at another flawed presumption, that the coal strike was an armed conflict. Yes the massacre provoked the ten day “Coal Field War” during which striking miners retaliated against the mine company employees, but the death toll was still but a fraction of the number of miners killed in the mine accidents which precipitated the Ludlow strike. It took an audience member to address that omission. Alas nobody mentioned the aftermath that found many miners under arrest, others scattered, and no mine owner, operator, guard, strikebreaker, Baldwin-Felts thug, or National Guard save one, was punished for the atrocity. Yes many immigrant miners were veterans of Bulkan wars, but some Colorado soldiers were veterans of the US campaign in the Philippines, where villages were dispatched with flame and machinegun fire. Not mentioned. Instead a Colorado National Guard representative was let to say that burning the tents at Ludlow was not a tactical error -and since the “non-combatant” deaths were unintended, Ludlow was not technically a massacre.

I know as many functional drug users as victims of substance abuse addiction, so it’s a complicated issue for me. I’m against drug criminalization fueling our prison industrial complex, but marijuana rights activism seems too guided by self-interest for my comfort. Is your access to pot more urgent than suffering, injustice and inequity? Of course that may be my privilege speaking. It’s a condescending bugger.

Whether an airliner disappears in thin air, or a ship capsizes right before the eyes of rescuers, the failure of modern technology is confounding television viewers. Will the common fate of passengers become the tragic constant?

Yes the crime was horific, highschoolers being stabbed from behind, their assailant without character enough to face his random victims, without motive, armed with such a weapon as any amateur can pick up in their parent’s kitchen. Though signs migh point to medication or mental illness, the troubled 16-year-old is being charged as an adult, because schools have been failing Americans for generations before Alex Hribal.

DENVER, COLO.- Saturday’s “Every 5th” Anonymous march didn’t get two blocks along the 16th Street Mall before Denver police officers advanced into the compact procession to extract what looked to be targeted activists. Said one Anon: “One minute we were chanting ‘FUCK THE POLICE’ and the next they were fucking themselves! Our demonstration AGAINST police brutality was in solidarity with the New Mexico action #OpAlbuquerque, but became a demonstration OF police brutality. Thank you DPD!” Hundreds of downtown shoppers were drawn to the shit show, to see four dozen masked protesters menaced by a paramilitary force three times the size, ostensibly for jaywalking.

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OCCUPY DENVER recidivist Caryn Sodaro was given 90 days this week for violating the terms of her probation, an earlier plea deal which relinquished first amendment rights in exchange for what turned out to be temporary freedom.

This graphic circulating on the interwebs is a lot easier to find than Vladimir Putin’s March 18 address to the Kremlin about the referendum in Crimea after the Western coup in Ukraine. Bypassing dubious translations excerpted on Capitalist media sites, here is a transcript of his speech direct from the Kremlin. Putin is no hero, but he threatens US-EU banking hegemony, gives asylum to Edward Snowden, and executes zero people with drones.

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SO, Westboro Baptist weirdo patriarch Fred Phelps died this week, before he could finger who it was bankrolling his unpopular church outings to far-flung, media-covered, sensitivity-defying graveside demonstrations orchestrated to make protest look bad and prompt public support for preemptive limits on free speech.

I’ll believe corporations are people when one is declined the chance to pay a fine instead of face criminal penalties. Imagine OJ Inc or Pistorius Inc or Bernie Madoff being able to pay off US marshalls instead of going to jail. Next question, who is the beneficiary Toyota’s $1.2 Billion payoff?

Yes, yes there are grey areas. Black and white is for the printed page. But publishing is a great example of the decisive expression of intention, whether to write it down or not. So too, taking action requires commitment to a direction. I fail to see how “taking the middle road” serves anyone but those trying to forstall your getting beyond the status quo. My objection to middle roads is that they lead you nowhere. They’re basically medians.