Silly voters: We Are the One Percent!
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Monthly Archives: February 2012
Hollywood to rest of world: Whatever.
It used to be the effusive “You love me. You really love me” but the Oscars post-Guy Fawkes have lifted Hollywood’s green curtain. Meryl Streep may have thought she was retweeting the audience when she pulled the Federer/Schumacher victor’s lament, but what was that really saying? A world audience appreciates genius in the performance arts, equal parts haughty, but Hollywood’s standard for a thinking-man’s actor is clearly not deep. Hollywood puts the silver shimmer on the corporate media pro-war propaganda, and when its spokes-glamor catch a whiff of discontent from the masses, their reaction is as genuine as Sally Fields, says the 1% to the 99%: “whatever.”
Support the Dupes
SUPPORT THE TROOPS? Oh let’s address this buggaboo straight off. Apparently you can’t protest war without disrespecting the troops, that criticizing the soldiers’ mission means to criticize them for following their orders. Okay… if it is indeed all grey area for those lacking grey matter, then I suppose you can’t support the troops. And so I WON’T, NOT A LICK. The killing needs to stop. Expressing “support” for those doing the killing gets you more killing. Here are two complementary banners to protest the use of drones to increase our remote killing:
Paired with the followup below, because what’s an antiwar message today without the obligatory “support the troops” nonsense:
US use of torture on POWs should stop
The U.S. has a long history of torturing its POWs. Torture of POWs is used by many other countries. However its use is denied by many U.S. authorities or government officials. The definition of torture put simply is to cause pain, emotionally, physically, or psychologically. Torture is used to terrify enemies, and hardly ever gains information.
Some examples of the U.S. A. military use of torture on P.O.W.s
Che Guevara
Che Guevara was murdered on October 9, 1967 in Bolivia. He was tortured and killed by Bolivian soldiers trained and equipped by CIA operatives. Che was told he was going to be killed by Felix Rodriguez. He was shot in the legs several times, and put into a dirty schoolhouse. His arms and feet were tied while he lay in the dirt. He lay by the bodies of his dead Guerrilla fighters. The USA tried to cover up his deliberate murder by shooting him in the legs to make it look like he died in battle. He was never given a trial. He was shot nine times.
Philippines war
The Philippine war was a war fought by Filipino revolutionaries and the USA. Waterboarding was one of the main techniques used by the CIA. It was used on Extra Judiciar prisoners.The department of Justice authorized this. Sleep Deprivation and de-sensorizing among other things was used. The use of solitary confinement and confusion is used frequently, prisoners are made to wear blindfolds to cause confusion and panic. Medical treatment is also refused. Bribery, and threats are used to force a confession.
Korean War
The Korean war was fought between South and North Korea. The US occupied the south, while the soviet troops occupied the North.
Vietnam War
Prisoners were put in Tiger cages. Lime was dumped on them, and water was dumped on them after.
Central America
In Nicaragua Somoza tortured people by putting them in cages with lions. Somoza was a dictator backed up by the US military. In Argentina children of communist parents were stolen, while their parents were tortured and killed.
School of The Americas
The CIA distributes an interrogation manual which shows torture techniques to use during interrogations. The manual was used by the CIA to train US-supported Latin American militaries at this school.
Abu Ghraib Prison
Torture has been recently used in Abu Ghraib prison, located in Iraq. Some of the main forms of torture used here are rape, sodomy, water boarding among many others. Military Intelligence has been present during these procedures, and highly encourages it. A prison guard said prisoners receive snake bites for minimum mis-behavior. In the AD. seg units prisoners are dumped into poop and pee.
Afghanistan war
The US invaded, tortured and suffocated thousands of POWs to death.
Officials claim that Torture must be used to gain information. During the presidency of George W. Bush some U.S government officials said that they believed water boarding was not a form of torture. In 2002 the Office of Legal Counsel stated that water boarding wasn’t a form of torture. The OLC said that the reason water boarding was not thought of as a torture was that “In order for pain or suffering to rise to the level of torture, that statute requires it to be severe & water boarding did not cause severe pain or suffering either physically or mentally.” Even though water boarding causes the victim to believe he/she is being drowned.
Torture hardly ever gains information but instead is used to terrorize people so they don’t resist, or to force a confession. Torture is used in interrogations by cops, being put in handcuffs that are to tight is also a less painful form of torture. During the st. Patrick Parade a couple of years ago the police stopped the parade and threw older people on the ground, an old lady was dragged across the pavement and put into handcuffs. She died a couple of months later.
People say that the US doesn’t torture people, because supposedly it is better than that.The fact of the matter is that the USA is the biggest user of torture in the world. It has and will continue to torture its POWs while everyone here says the USA government and military does not torture and has never tortures POWs.
It’s not a recession, it’s a robbery.
This image gets my vote for the KILLER APP of internet memes to explain what the “economic crisis” and its global banking “austerity measures” are really about: pure greed.
All the rich have ever wanted is everything. Damn the middle class, the working class and the poor. Economists are part of their getaway illusionist crew, if you want to understand Milton Friedman and the banking economy, call CSI.
If an Israeli preemptive strike against a perceived threat would be legal…
If preemptive war was not against international law, wouldn’t Iran have a good case to launch a preemptive strike on Israel, with all the threats Israel and the US are making against Iran? And while the USG deliberates about how difficult hitting Iranian sites would be, how Iran’s infrastructure is distributed over such a broad expanse, etc, the same cannot be said for not-yet-Greater-Israel. If Western leaders really feared a similarly-lawless Iran, they’d be scrambling to take Israel’s 200+ nuclear arsenal into safekeeping for fear it be set off like a radioactive powder keg. How absolutely shameless to demonize Iran and at the same time count on Iran’s superior morality not to smite its truly corrupt tormentors.
Question for the Green Cities Coalition: How “green” is alcohol?
My friend Lotus has a few words for the Green Cities Coalition, the so-far irrelevant activist hub which purports to speak for the region’s environmentalists. One of their number will be debating a fracking proponent on Thursday, where the public will see firsthand whether the GCC is a fighter or pushover against the local global warmers. But Lotus questions why the GCC always meets in bars, and I concur. From “Geeks Who Drink” to “Drinking Liberally”, maybe our city probably owes its paucity of effective activists to the delusion that they’re getting somewhere by drinking.
Here’s what Lotus sent in reply to their latest email invitation to “Happy Hour”:
To so called Green Cities Coalition,
Does the so called Green Cities Coalition have a contract with the local bars to promote, to advertise, alcohol? Is this a source of revenue for GCC? Is that why GCC puts such a sick and inaccurate phrase (Happy Hour) in the subject of your widely circulated emails?I have never attended a Green Cities Coalition function thus far, and will do my best to avoid your organization, and to avoid promoting GCC so long as you continue to promote the use of alcohol, and especially the Orwellian double speak use of the word “happy hour” (sic). There is nothing happy about alcohol for a very large number of the users. According to the National Association for Children of Alcoholics about 43 percent of the U.S. population has been exposed to alcoholism in their families; and about one in eight adult drinkers in the US consumes alcohol problematically or alcoholically. (Which might explain in part why many of your members apparently need to meet in bars and promote alcohol.)
In my own life I have seen lots of relatives, employees, and friends and tons of strangers destroyed physically, mentally, and spiritually to one degree or another – often completely or almost completely destroyed – by alcohol. None of the people currently attending AA meetings is likely to be able to attend Green Cities Coalition functions either because your functions are so often held in bars, where alcohol is present, and because you so often promote alcohol. The same goes of Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. So all of these people are excluded from all or most of your so called green functions.
Do a computer search for AA meetings in Colorado Springs, Denver, etc and you will see that there are thousands of AA meetings in these cities every week. Probably millions of people attempting to undo the damage that alcohol has done to them.
If Green Cities Coalition members are so addicted to alcohol that they are unable to have green functions without mixing them with alcohol, then please leave me off your email lists, and please stop calling yourselves green. Call yourselves black instead, which is often the color used to symbolize evil, for that is what alcohol is for millions of people.
I suggest you promote and consume green raw smoothies instead! If you do not know what these are, which is probably the case, then do a search. Why not promote the creation of a health food restaurant that serves green smoothies in competition with the hundreds of unhealthy bars in Colorado Springs? Stop promoting the bars (which serve not only alcohol but junk food) and start promoting health – green smoothies, health food restaurants.
Lotus
Israel vows to “settle the score” with Iran. What are they, gangsters?
Israeli Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch has vowed to “settle the score” for an explosives incident in Bangkok, where an Iranian man blew his legs off with a grenade while trying to evade capture. Are they suggesting a rival of Iran sacrifice his legs in retaliation?
Abajo y a la Izquierda esta el Corazon
OCCUPY COLO. SPRINGS will be occupying the 3rd UCCS OWS symposium this Wednesday to challenge the straw man argument that Latinos are underrepresented in the Occupy Wall Street Movement. Nationwide, OWS may be white and middle class, but in the context of the outcry for global democracy, isn’t OWS a bandwagon cargo cult of the Global South?
Berthers
Apparently it’s not enough to decry the illegitimate hegemony of the Federal Reserve, we have to fear that we wear its brand. Specifically it’s being alleged our birth certificates –the originals, not our copies– carry a mysterious red number that corresponds to a fixed portion of the national debt, our true personal credit status, irrevocable insolvency as it were. Umm. Indentured servitude I get, ours is an open-air debtor’s prison, but thinking the FED has some inalienable paper claim on each of us jumps the shark. Recently a friend was so excited to tell me that birth certificate numbers are imbued with the legal authority of some maritime act which issues registration numbers to ships when they’re berthed. He enunciated “berthed” all wide-eyed, I’m guessing he thought it was spelled the same. Want to wager he also believes some naval registry holds the secret of Obama’s berth?
Stop the Keystone XL Pipeline
Want to protest our corporate government’s determination to foist the catastrophic Keystone XL Pipeline unto our precariously climate? Here’s a great slogan: TAR SANDS = DIRTIEST OIL ON EARTH. More below:
TAR SANDS KILL, PIPELINES SPILL.
And the definitive: THE XL PIPELINE IS “GAME OVER” FOR OUR CLIMATE & COMMUNITIES.
Hiding an ulterior agenda in plain view
AND NOW FROM THE ALL ABOUT ERIC DEPT– I learned the other day that a recurring meme spread by counter-activists is that we harbor a hidden ulterior agenda. To judge from this picture taken at last weekend’s action in Acacia Park, does it seem rather to stretch credulity to suggest I hide mine?
Worldwide F4 protest: No War on Iran
OCCUPIED COLORADO SPRINGS– On February 4, OCS joined the international day of protest to decry NO WAR ON IRAN!
Ayn Rand SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Let me first begin with how I was exposed to Ayn Rand. I am in high school and awhile back my teacher was doing a course on homelessness. In a ‘prompt’ that she gave me as to what are the causes of homelessness, I answered CAPITALISM. A week later I was astonished to get back my paper with a Zero. I showed this to many people all of whom agreed that it was in no way deserving of a zero. My dad and I took this question as to why I had gotten a zero on my paper to the teacher. I wasn’t expecting much but even after one hour of asking my English teacher why I had gotten a zero on my paper she had no reasonable answer other than that I had not followed the ‘format’ correctly, even though I had a previous organizational sheet on which I based my writing on following her format. she ended by saying I was a horrible writer; we gave up trying to get to through to such a numbskull.
I didn’t quite understand why she had given me a zero until a couple months later, and so began my experience with Ayn Rand. My teacher took us to get the book. As I read the summary I knew it would be some sort of method for her and d-11 to push their politics on students; however I had no previous knowledge of who Ayn Rand was. The next day in class she gave us a powerpoint on the background of Ayn Rand and what the book Anthem was about. It was filled with negative comments on communism including that communism supposedly takes away knowledge, individuality and free expression. As I was assigned to read more and more of Ayn Rand I realized how horrible of a writer she was. I started to listen to Ayn Rand’s interviews. I then understood that they were forcing me to read a writer who didn’t believe in helping anyone, because she was a racist, a nationalist and a pure evil witch. These interviews can be found on <youtube> and <bluecorncomics> among many other articles revealing Ayn Rand to be a racist.
The more and more I read into the book the more i was infuriated at the pure ridiculousness and hypocrisy of it. In the ending chapters it is written by Ayn Rand that
“The word WE is the lime poured over me, which sets and hardens to stone, crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black are lost equally in the grey of it. It is the word by which the depraved steal the virtue of the good, by which the weak steal the might of the strong, by which the fools steal the wisdom of the sages. What is my joy if all hands, even the unclean, can reach into it? What is my wisdom if even the fools can dictate to me? What is my freedom, if all creatures, even the botched and the impotent, are my masters? What is my life, if I am but to bow, to agree and to obey?”
As i read this I wasn’t sure whether to laugh, throw up, or rip the book apart . I was sickened by how when I had expressed my “free speech” I was given a ZERO; by how I had to read an author who believes being selfish is a virtue. And by how every day, whenever I went to class instead of being taught English literature I got the teachers Right Wing, anti-communist politics thrown into my face. Each time a question on the book was asked I didn’t hear an opinion on whether the book was good or bad i only heard questions on how communism takes away individuality and how Ayn Rand is right on what her idea of what communism is? I said the teacher was expressing personal opinion and the whole class started to yell at me to shut up. I got so alienated and depressed after they said that communism makes robots, and brain dead people even though I couldn’t find more brain dead robots as hard as I looked than the ones that were sitting right next to me.
I couldn’t take the class anymore as it was an insult to who I was, what I believed in, and all the people I respected were continually insulted and lied about. I started skipping the class after my dad not only talked at a school board meeting but also to my assistant principal, in both cases we were given the cold shoulder and treated horribly rude. I decided to go to the class again and deal with it. As I read the quote given above in that class and as I looked around i became terrified of being like them. I was torn between staying and swallowing my believes and to be JUST LIKE THOSE SHEEP or to get up and leave. The overwhelming fear of being lost into them made me get up and walk out of the class. Later that day the assistant principal took me out of a class and made me feel like an outsider, like a weird person that needed to be put in a psychiatric hospital. I complained that I was being pushed politics in a public school and his response was that no other students felt like I did. When I told him that the teacher had given me a zero and was now failing me out of the course, who had said I was a horrible writer; he said He didn’t believe me and that I was wrong. He told me that if I was to walk out again I would have to deal with the consequences even though he wouldn’t deal with a teacher pushing politics. He smiled as I cried for being looked at as being an idiot and a weirdo kid ; it took me about two hours to get with it. We continued to try to get me switched out of the class, which finally we did only to find that Ayn Rand was being taught in that course too and in all English classes for that matter.
I realize I will probably never get them to change, to respect students, parents and INDIVIDUALITY. But this continuing fight which is probably the hardest I’ve ever had to fight proved to me that I would stand up for myself against a herd of flesh eating zombies, that I would NEVER BE LIKE THEM . And I felt pride in knowing I stood up to being brainwashed by anti communist right wingers.
By defunding Planned Parenthood, Komen Breast Cancer Foundation shows its true colors aren’t pink
Is the all-things-pink breast cancer impresario bowing to Right-wing anti-abortion pressure in pulling their financial support for low-income breast exams provided by Planned Parenthood? That a nonprofit industry heavyweight like the Komen Foundation would shift its emphasis from helping the poor on quasi-moral grounds is deplorable, but hardly surprising. Their ubiquitous “breast cancer awareness” campaign is all about duplicity and greed. Instead of raising funds for awareness of where cancer comes from, research we could all use, Komen shifts the focus on mitigation. What would you think about a rape “awareness” campaign that emphasized victim convalescence over chasing down the rapists? Looking after the victims while rapes escalate? That’s practically enabling.