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Monthly Archives: March 2012
Where there’s smoke and no fire, there’s somebody blowing smoke
I doubt if “where there’s smoke there’s fire” is a firefighting principle. It seems more suited for WMD witch hunt rumor mongering, failing to find fire, you decide smoke’s enough. Well it holds true for a smoking gun, but not smokers, hence, blowing smoke in the hyperbolic sense. What a horrible hearsay accelerator, and the most basic of post hoc fallacies, before schools phased out thinking.
Street vandalism, economic vandalism
With Denver Civic Center Park fenced, Occupy Denver activists spring forward
OCCUPIED DENVER- March 24.
Now MoJo throws Apple critic Mike Daisey under the bus in their exposé of Walmart Chinese shadow factories
Mother Jones is next to discredit Playwright Mike Daisey for his dramatization of Apple’s supply line abuses in China, right in the byline of Andy Kroll’s piece on Walmart’s shadow factory system in China, which they call their, haha, “fiction-free investigation”. THEN THEY FALL FOR A GREEN INDUSTRY-STRENGTH CLEANER! MoJo asks: Are Walmart’s Chinese Factories as Bad as Apple’s? and never really answers. Instead it’s a behind the greenwash exposé, and what else is new. AND Kroll falls for a Walmart PR contractor who adversaries of sustainability hacks recognize as the archetypal intelligence fiend, the federal witness protection program hair club for men, biker, treehugger alias. This time in the persona of “Terry Foecke (pronounced FAKE-ee), a consultant spearheading Walmart’s factory energy efficiency program in China. In a lobby full of Westerners, Foecke cut an unmistakable figure—thickly bearded, 6-foot-3, with a broad belly and hip square-framed glasses. He was an unlikely Walmart ally: a soft-spoken, almost professorial progressive who quoted George Bernard Shaw and told me he spoke out against runaway consumerism at his Unitarian church back home in Minnesota.” Um, yeah Andy. Fake-ee.
Wise up Colorado Springs only YOU can stop fracking
Heads up Colorado Springs environmentalists! If you’re thinking that among your colleagues, someone’s got your back on hydraulic fracturing, your count is off by one. NOT ONE SINGLE local organization or leader has taken the position that oil and gas fracking must be stopped, or even can be stopped! Did you miss that memo? I’m guessing they haven’t issued a distress signal among their membership, because, um, fracking’s “inevitable” right?! Green-minded residents, and Manitou tourists we’ve come across while holding NO FRACKING signs are incredulous at the thought that local officials would permit fracking, I’ve even been assured that local eco-celebs are on the case. NOPE. If you’ve got the phone tree, give them a call. If someone’s going to stop fracking, it’s going to be you.
Question Military Impunity
This American Life caves to Apple Corp, swaps Mike Daisey Chinese factory horror story for Marketplace puff spin
This American Life host Ira Glass tried to pull an Oprah on playwright Mike Daisey, to dress him down on creative license Daisey took with an excerpt of a monolog aired on TAL titled Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory. The debunking came courtesy of American Public Media’s laughable “Marketplace” Wall Street PR engine, which Glass pretended were reliable experts on the subject of China’s apparently resolved labor abuses. That’s not even funny. This “retraction” reeks even upwind, and Apple’s having become the most highly valued corporation probably explains Glass’s uncharacteristically virulent condemnation. Shameful is what it was, and I hold it unforgivable, for the pretend-affable Glass, so-called folk archivist, to scuttle someone else’s too successful artistic quest for fundamental truth.
Let’s be clear. Mike Daisey was “debunked” based on his Chinese translator contradicting his version of events, and Marketplace finding Hong Kong based activists ready to give Chinese labor problems the all-clear signal. Both sources no longer protected by anonymity are under duress in China, and it’s not mentioned under whose employ they are now.
The Apple Factory story was the first best thing TAL had aired since pioneering post-sardonic navel gazing, but this week Glass issued a full retraction, removed the episode from the archive, and aired a blistering character assassination complete with manipulatively edited confrontations with Daisey, loaded with the expectation he’d buckle like fictional-confession memoir author James Frey. Except Frey’s lies unraveled because they contrived to propagate untruth. Daisey’s truths were undisputed, but the liberties he took to weave a personal narrative were “debunked” to cast doubt on his every word. It was a shameful moment for This American Life, and I’m hoping this time Glass has overestimated the vapidity of his listeners.
For example, when Mike Daisey explained his rationale for not wanting to “unpack the complexity” of his narrative, Ira Glass responded that he didn’t know what that meant. To what kind of reporter, editor, producer, or storyteller would that concept be foreign?
APM’s Marketplace
This was not the first collaboration between Marketplace and TAL. As the Occupy Wall Street protests grew, Ira Glass commissioned folksy research pieces from a Marketplace team to explain world banking and derivatives trading in terms sufficiently lazy to not disturb the usual NPR stupor. It was bunk coiffed in TAL’s typical carefree je ne care pas.
So this time, Marketplace’s man in China was consulted to fact-check Mike Daisey’s account. ACTUALLY, Glass reveals that he was approached by Marketplace AFTER they’d looked into Daisey’s sources. Glass thanked Marketplace for offering the story to TAL, instead of exploiting the exposé themselves. That’s Glass pretending he doesn’t know PR is about getting someone else to say it for you. Absolving Apple required more than one media property criticizing another. Somebody probably wanted a full retraction.
To foul Mike Daisey’s story required one phone call to the translator and guide he’d used in China, whose contact information he tried hide from Glass and co. No mention that this might have been to protect her from angry Chinese authorities, or from Apple and its supplier Foxconn and the inevitable underworld that rides herd on its victim laborers.
Marketplace’s feat consisted of tracking down his translator, breaking her cover, and putting her on the spot for the harsh criticisms which Daisey laid on Apple, Foxconn and their Chinese hosts. Especially as the popularity of Mike Daisey’s performance piece grew, and after its airing on TAL and his many media interviews, the anonymity of his Chinese translator would remain of paramount concern, but once exposed by Marketplace, what choice might she have had but to denounce Daisey’s heresies?
Could Apple’s being the world’s most high valued company have had anything to do with this kill-the-messenger hit piece? Apple has scheduled a press conference Monday morning to announce what it plans to do with its now famous $100 Billion cash holdings.
Storytelling
Isn’t it rich that TAL suddenly wants to hold its stories to journalistic standards? Imagine if someone had called them on the Christmas elven adventures of David Sedaris. Was that fact-checked? Or what of the elementary Christmas play Sedaris so gloriously skewered? IF YOU Criticize TAL for its too-often neglect of difficult subjects and you’re scolded that the show is about culture and storytelling.
Mike Daisey’s TAL recording is now offline, although the transcript remains. In it you’ll find an indictment that Ira Glass perhaps lacks the temerity to redact as well. It’s his introduction to the segment, and I’ll reprint it here, because Glass praises exactly Daisey’s storytelling technique, separate from the facts he recounts.
A couple weeks ago I saw this one-man show where this guy did something on stage I thought was really kind of amazing. He took this fact that we all already know, right, this fact that our stuff is made overseas in maybe not the greatest working conditions, and he made the audience actually feel something about that fact. Which is really quite a trick. You really have to know how to tell a story to be able to pull something like that off.
In his own words, Glass concedes what his show’s retraction is all about. He’s not retracting the facts, these “we all already know”. Glass and Apple are trying to retract Mike Daisey’s effect, that “he made the audience actually feel something about that fact.”
TO BE CONTINUED
Wanna occupy? Sorry Colorado Springs but your Wall Street is the military, yes the pointy end of our oppressors’ stick.
Nobody likes to draw the short straw, but isn’t that already our lot living in Colorado Springs? Yeah, it’s easy to protest Wall Street from the safety of a provincial backwater, our city even backed us with a permit, but is that really grabbing the imperial bull by the horns? The Occupy Movement has spotlighted how the world’s 99% are oppressed by the ruling elite. It made more clear how true democracy is undermined by their military-industrial-corporate-banking complex. Now, doesn’t a major chunk of that alliance operate right where we live? Think. It ain’t banking or industry, and the corporations here orbit around the headliner of that lineup, the military, our city’s dominant export. Yes, criticizing the military in a military town is not popular. Do you think the Wall Street protesters were a welcome sight to Manhattan’s bankers? You can call to “End the Fed” online, or protest anything in the world from a digital soapbox, but a public demonstration is limited to what’s in your local vicinity, especially if you mean to OCCUPY IT. Look on this as a curse or a blessing: The Zuccotti Park activists get to target sharkskin-suited traders, we’re up against men with guns. But what are you going to do, cheerlead the OWS front in NY, or hold up your end of the fight?
Oops. Add two rapes to the feat of Staff Sgt. Bales, death squad of one (Aghans say 1/16th) behind Panjwaii Massacre
An Afghan parliamentary fact-finding mission reports that two women were raped before being killed in the US NATO night raid on Panjwaii. Yeah, Americans still can’t pronounce My Lai. The same US corporate press is raping Afghanistan.
Occupy chases snakes from Colorado Springs 2012 St. Patrick’s Day Parade
OCCUPIED COLORADO SPRINGS- March 17 St Patricks Day parade.
I’ll see your Staff Sgt Robert Bales and raise you 15 death squad members
Everyone from the US Department of Defense to the School of the Americas knows it takes a village to raze a death squad, or vice versa. According to the manual, if you want to storm houses in the middle of the night, gather the male family members for execution, shoot everyone in the head, gather stray bodies into a pile, pour gasoline over them and burn them, then repeat the operation in a neighboring village, you need a death squad, possibly two, especially if everyone’s drunk. US forces have pulled off so many of these massacres in Iraq and Afghanistan, that it’s a wonder military analysts don’t recognize the Panjwayi raid as a textbook operation. If the official US spin is to be believed, and one drunken staff sergeant can do the work of 15-20, I’m thinking our entire NATO force in Afghanistan could be reduced by the same factor without jeopardizing US kill goals.
Ron Paul is a hopey change bubble for white people, this time let’s burst it
RPtard – An American voter who’s peeing himself silly at the prospect of Ron Paul snatching the democracy movement for the Fascists, but who shortly will be rolled into the Republican Party like every other Teabag Libertarian antisocial supremacist before him.
Birds of a feather laugh at doggy sex jokes together
I saw this thread under a video posted to Facebook making light of a joke made on NMT by Ed Billings, at Tony’s expense.
LOVE IT. There are the names in one webshot, IN LEAGUE, laughing as one of them offers to contract for a dog-napping. Freedom of Speech doesn’t protect making threats and menacing, you dopes. Further along Clifton suggests that the dog sex jokes are surrogates for the politically incorrect laughs they’d rather be having, at thinking about Tony and me being GAY.
Do you suppose any of these comedians think we could give a fig about what they’re saying? They’re irrelevant do-nothings. And while my advice to anyone is assert yourself and get involved, I’m thinking a worthy cause would be ill served by these intellects.
We support the troops when we bear responsibility for their atrocities
TROOPS KILL KIDS- You’d think the statement was so obvious it didn’t need saying, but it does, everyone is in such denial about it. Other people’s kids die everyday by airstrike or at the hands of our marauding soldiers, yet Americans still pretend no one’s done it.
Do you Facebook? You’re a Yahoo
What is Facebook worth? To whom does it belong? Reigning property right schemes aren’t reciprocal to Facebook’s actual content providers. Maybe an outrageous IPO will prompt a user’s bill of rights and a new intellectual rights paradigm, monetizing the net to flow outward instead of inward to the cyber 1%. Facebook is the whole world in a filing cabinet, but they’re your files, and you’re the volunteer file clerk. Facebook is Yahoo outsourced basically, because Google is too complicated for thought-overwhelmed people. Yahoo mapped the known internet, Google rationalized the database, but the social networking outfits calculated that interests could be predicted along personal ties. We’re sheep after all, and we only want to follow where the flock is going. While Twitter’s cues comes at you like Space Invaders, Facebook provided the blinders and rear view mirrors to coax the reluctant along, and resurrected the virtual community of the World Wide Web’s first internment camp, AOL. This time when everyone is comfortably corralled, it will be interesting to see what becomes of the web’s open range.
Step on up folks, He-Who-Shoots-From-Cover Indian name hits nerve with identity-obscuring internet trolls
A little bird tells me there’s been a discussion on Facebook, an overnight marathon of name-calling about ME. Alias-extrovert Agent Doubt offered a beer or coffee to whoever could come up with the best quip to counter my Indian-name for Chairforce pilots and other US soldiers who wield disproportionate force: He Who Shoots From Cover. I guess this sobriquet hit too close to home for identity-concealing internet snipers too. In any case, it looks like Doubt’s outsourcing his creativity again, and sneaking the makings of a date on an unsuspecting winner.
Without women there is no revolution!
I believe it, don’t you? No patronizing flattery here –but also IMO what’s behind the diversionary War On Women with its ready- made astroturf battle stations.
Spinning US atrocities, words matter: shooting sprees & shopping rampages
Headlines about Sunday’s midnight massacre in Kandahar transformed quickly from NATO FORCES RAID to become LONE GUNMAN KILLS 16, as the attributed sources shifted from Afghan locals on the scene to US military spokesmen. One might argue it’s in the interest of national security to attribute the murders in Balandi and Alkozai to a solitary stalker, to tamp the swelling anger of the Afghan populace, but what’s the truth? Making a rare concession, the NYT has revised its headline a 3rd time to read LONE SOLDIER SAID TO BE KILLER OF 16 AFGHANS, and the BBC puts “ACTED ALONE” in quotes. (UPDATE: AP adds “allegedly” and LA Times “apparently”)
Pundits stroke our soldiers’ egos by asking could one special forces soldier alone kill so many (?!), but more difficult to imagine is how a rogue fighter can equip himself and pass through multiple security defenses unobserved. Also doubtful is how and why a stealth assassin would burn the victims’ bodies as he moved about. Easier to believe is that damage control decided it best that one man take the fall for his comrades, God and country, probably the one too drunk to object.
“Safe” Fracking is a Fairy Tale, & other great slogans from The War On Water
Visit Chicago for mirth and adventure
MoveOn wants to mobilize the world’s largest nonviolence movement, calling on the 99% to teach-in itself in time for their American Spring. That’s certain to sound more palatable to America’s unbaptized middle-roaders, than the invitation above, invoking the reception likely awaiting protesters who plan to converge on Chicago in May. The G8 has been relocated to Camp David, but the larger NATO summit is still scheduled to warrant a two mile wide security perimeter around downtown Chicago. What does this poster communicate to you? I’m guessing the menacing image wasn’t chosen at random, it says to me the unadventurous need not apply.
Were Qurans the only books burned? Where’s the outrage from US churches?
If the Qurans recently burned at NATO bases in Afghanistan were disposed of accidentally in the incineration pits, aren’t American Fundamentalist Talibans concerned about where the excess bibles go? By now we all know the M.O. at US camps in our occupied territories is to incinerate any and all unused inventory. They’re even ordered to burn leftover bottled water. Can there be any doubt if the US forces found themselves with too many Qurans to go around, that they had fewer takers for Christian bibles? When you raise the subject in these parts, even yokels profess their indignation at the prospect of burning a bible, so wouldn’t they want to scrutinize what’s being burned at our military bases? Or is it the same with American flags? When hippies do it, it’s a national sacrilege, when the Army does it, it’s ordained cremation.
Oops, troops don’t get memo, kill kids
SUNDAY- Drunken US soldiers kill 16 Afghanistan civilians, nine of them children. The US military is claiming the massacre was the work of one soldier who “wandered” inside homes in Kandahar’s Panjwayi district, but witnesses report it was a squad who laughed as they shot the families and tried to burn the bodies. US Army defenders might argue mouths agape that it doesn’t make sense, what would US NATO forces accomplish by doing that? State terrorism is no accident. Whether by directive, unleashing berserkers, or enlisting young men with mental deficiencies, TROOPS KILL KIDS.
For our remedial readers I’ll note that Tony and I are under fire for raising that point at an Occupy GA. What’s the vigilante posse got to say about the US soldiers in the village of Zangabad? Just part of the ugly job of war? Happens everyday? Yes it does.
Tea party klan patriot thug Jim Kross circulates fliers to incite mob violence
OccupyAfghanistan vets Jeremy and Brittany Westmoreland attracted Patriot Shop teabag Jim Kross to their vow to destroy our local occupy. I’d like to say as little as possible about this lamentable development, except to document today’s escalation.
Occupy Colorado Springs held forth on the sidewalk in front of Memorial Hospital this Saturday, making a plea for UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE. Across the street once again were our threat-making stalkers, fortunately not reprising their Westboro Baptist tauntings, but sitting in their truck as OCS’s original heckler Jim Kross finished his cigar.
We weren’t many, but of course the recent news stories didn’t help recruit participants, claiming that OCS is so against the troops, that it kicked out members because they were soldiers. And not more accurately, because they initiated a witch hunt against occupiers who weren’t showing solidarity with the US military’s occupy movement, OccupyIraq, OccupyAfghanistan, OccupyLibya, veni, vidi, vici.
We were in the unusual position of trying not to elicit honks of support from the passing traffic, in view of standing outside a hospital, but drivers signaled their enthusiasm in friendly ways. We discussed repeating this healthcare action soon, it was such an easy sell.
Eventually Patriot Kross came over to film us as he made his best taunts. The Westmorelands watched from the truck and after Kross was through, they drove back and forth flipping us off.
At first Kross denied any knowledge of the dozen fliers we’d found taped and pinned around the hospital’s perimeter.
The fliers were “wanted” posters which offered a bounty for the eviction or firing of certain occupiers. The fliers bore Kross’s email address and website. He conceded they were his, or belonged “to one of [his] identities,” whatever, and then he named the reward, said the amount may have grown since he looked online, and then solicited the occupiers present.
We had already removed the fliers he’d circulated around the hospital, from trees, street signs, walls and doors.
We had found some fliers downtown on our way to the action. This one was taped to the office building door.
Jim Kross’s animosity for Occupy goes back to the original GAs, when he used to videotape from the circle’s center and exploit the opportunity it gave him to counter everyone’s statements. He hadn’t been harassing OCS actions until last week when OCS held its NO WAR ON IRAN event. Kross made a gleeful reappearance with Raven Martinez counter-protesting what she considered an anti-troop message.
Speaking of Raven, I received this Facebook message on Friday, from her daughter’s account which Raven uses when she finds her account blocked…
Are those the words of an 11-year-old? “WATCH UR BACK”?
Neither Raven nor the Westmorelands seem to understand the line they cross with their threats. On Tuesday Raven defended her comment on NMT asking me what I’d do if my home went up in flames. She said I needed to take it in the context of her talking about soldiers, police and first responders, ignoring the context Soldier Westmoreland had created with his vow to burn NMT down.
Patriot Kross says he’s a veteran of the police force. You’d think he’d understand that distributing wanted posters charging his own personal complaints is a call for vigilante justice. To begin with, posting fliers is against city code, and these incite violence.
Kross came across our noon bannering at Acacia on Friday, mocking Patti for standing on her lonesome, Occupy reduced to just herself. He didn’t like the color of her flags.
I caught this priceless photo as Kross stepped quickly back when he saw that reinforcements were coming.
The bright side of this story is that when I went to take a picture of Jim Kross’s store, the Patriot Shop, it was gone, in retreat, to within another store, on Academy. Bye Jimbo.
Character assassination par for course, but KOAA falls for “hijack” complaint?
THAT’S RICH. “Occupy Hijacked” is the takeaway from a KOAA news blort on division within Occupy. Because Agent Duh and Co had been calling the TV station to complain they’d lost their right to march into GA and take it over, KOAA concludes that someone stole their protest movement. Let’s see, was it the group on the corner, standing before the camera, whose faces have adorned the occupy protests since the beginning? They’re the hijackers? Compared to two newcomers and an internet slacktivist, who are under disciplinary probation for acts of aggression against OCS? Hijack is a baseless enough claim among discontents, but why does KOAA give it credence? Plus KOAA airs a tirade from the OCS encampment’s most vitriolic tormentor Mr. Clean, alias Michael Jay aka Mike Mike V-Jayjay, allowing him to rant on, incognito. What a scurrilous hit-piece, not unexpected, but probably their best shot. Let’s see the so-called hijackees pull off anything Occupyish as they pretend to be “more in tune with Occupy Wall Street.” Have at it. And best of luck to KOAA to keep up that charade.