Monthly Archives: February 2013

Ditching schools to make American Taliban enclaves in Colorado Springs

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COLORADO SPRINGS, COLO.- While secularist crusader Richard Dawkins was delighting evangelical atheists at a nearby college campus, addressing how the charter school movement is subverting public education with religious indoctrination, the local District 11 school board was selling off another two primary schools –to charter school privateers! Flipping moribund neighborhoods to the Christian Soldiers.

Is privatizing schools better than selling the properties to real estate developers? Communities need their schools. But yesterday’s decision means the neighborhoods of Jefferson Elementary and Irving Middle School will encircle Christian madrases, centers not of learning but militant god-on-our-side imperialism. The schools were closed in 2009 due to alleged declines in enrollment. If charter entrepreneurs succeed with their revival tent schools for dummies, they’ll turn more Springs neighborhoods into klan xenophobe enclaves.

Who wants to raise their kids around Xbox/drone suicide bombers in training, beside American Idiot parents? They recoil at the Taliban, its madrasa schools and suicide bombers, extremist misrepresentations of Islam. But in the West, Christian zealots are the norm, technology perhaps obscuring their imbecility, fighting for Our God and disposing themselves into the trash heap of war. Now Colorado Springs has two more soldier fodder incubators.

Now Colorado College students have to ask permission if they want to protest

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COLORADO COLLEGE- How do you protest having to seek permission to protest? Do it without. But Colorado College students learned on Wednesday that protesters risk arrest for trespassing: trespassing on the private property of a private college ostensibly protecting the non-dissenting students from having to see dissent. It would be interesting to see college administrators have to explain that on their campus, the freedom to speak didn’t include the freedom to hear.

Lincoln: from Obama we hoped for a presidential reprise, not an Oscar

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President Barack Obama couldn’t deliver on the campaign inference he’d fill Abraham Lincoln’s shoes, so what do we do? Cut the Great Emancipator down to size. Portray America’s most lionized president as political operator, and distribute copies of the film to all the nation’s schools to cement the revisionist theme. Generations of visitors to DC’s monument will no longer recognize the seated giant, he’ll seem to big.

Police are pretty much thugs here, there, and everywhere

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prisonMexico’s and the USA’s prison system is run by thugs!
 
Capitalism has long created and enforced a thug-like prison system. I have recently been told the experience of someone in this system and which thousands of people do too. I am also reading The Trial by Franz Kafka and  I was reminded of this experience. As I listened to this person in tears both of relief because he got out, but also because of complete fear for what happened to those not as lucky as him, I felt sorry for him because even if he was not put back in jail, he won’t be able to become anything else because of capitalism’s structure. And so here is his story and I hope that this will not be the fate of him, and that someday Mexico’s thug-jails will be gone as will the criminality produced by poverty  in an alienating system like Capitalism.

“I was at a party and two friends went to a store and stole some alcohol. They went back to the party and continued listening to loud music. The police showed up and  I tried to run. I would have gotten away but my brother was in the house and I couldn’t  leave him.

The police caught us and lined us up against a wall where they began to hit us. They hit the girl with the butt of their gun on her head and she fainted. They hit us on the shoulders, the head and the face and they kicked us and stepped on us. My brother yells as they hit him and I scream at them to let him go but they continue punching us on the face and then they put us in the car. My brother is sixteen and so he gets lucky and is only kept over night. I, however, was there for three months.

My  friend was sent to Topo Chico where they tied  him up and hit him with wooden boards. They then soaked  him and connected  him to the light where he was electrocuted.

They are tied up for three months where they lie in their own filth and some are shot in front of all the other prisoners. My friend owes the Zetas 20,000 Pesos and the police will continue to hit him until he pays the Zetas.  

Sometimes when the police shoot someone that is tied up, they offer a prisoner to take the blame in return for 20 years in prison but without being tied up in their own filth and without the daily starvation and blows.

Most of them are innocent but they get us on the street and they torture us to get money from us; which isn’t much and sometimes their parents are forced to accept the cruelty of which is bestowed upon their kids. Sometimes it’s 4,000, sometimes it’s 30,000 but if you don’t give them money, they torture you.

They get us to confess by putting us on a board and then a towel on our face which will become drenched with water and we’ll feel as if we’re drowning. We begin to get sick from the filthy cells. I have sores all over my skin and I can’t stop itching, but I almost forget it because of how happy I am to get out.

I got lucky but I’m sorry for others that don’t because they can’t afford the quota. We are all poor and we don’t receive decent educations because even the public education is expensive and so we resort to petty crime and then get caught… Sometimes, even those with money get caught.”

Mexico has thug-like prisons that are run by cops that are no better than the organized crime. In fact, the Zetas, a major cartel group, came from the Mexican police force. And by having this alienating system and prisons, it creates a circle of even more crime.  Good luck to all of the youth trapped in this unjust system that is full of corruption and which many people cannot escape.

Do you care about two white people in post colonial South Africa? Me either

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Could this ugly crime matter less? Except that the media is exploiting the story to deny domestic violence (The Blade Runner couldn’t have meant to kill his model girlfriend, she was so beautiful). And except now that it looks like the Oscar Pistorius case is taking a JonBenet Ramsey turn. A celebrity shoots his girlfriend through a locked bathroom door, and suddenly detectives are reported to be botching the case, misidentifying evidence and contaminating the crime scene. This is big league defense where the moneyed class walks even as one of their own dies, justice usually failing a woman. Why should a crime of passion ruin a second affluent life?

Fracking protest message at Denver 350 rally cuts through nebulous “Forward on Climate” theme

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DENVER, COLORADO- Score another success for Colorado Fractivists who crashed this weekend’s climate rally with their unequivocal anti-fracking message. The February 17 event was intended to urge President Obama “Forward on Climate”, to borrow his most recent campaign vagarity, but when official speeches began, and the prefab signs were distributed, it became unclear who might be trying to co-opt whom.

Gas
The 350.ORG sponsored march, coinciding with a rally and civil disobedience in DC, called specifically for a halt to the Keystone XL Pipeline and Tar Sands extraction which climate scientists have dubbed “game over” for hopes of averting climate disaster, but the dominant signage spoke vaguely of “Climate Action” and “It’s Time to Cut Carbon” and “Big Coal Makes Us Sick”, all of which are slogans used by proponents of natural gas. 350-ORG has been raising awareness of the imperative to reduce carbon emissions, while recognizing that the groundswell driving environmentalists across the country is opposition to oil & gas hydraulic fracturing.

It’s all the same fight to reduce burning of fossil fuels, but moderate allies like the Sierra Club haven’t been prepared to denounce their new-found bed partners urging consumers to get “Beyond Coal.” To her credit, local 350-ORG coordinator Micah Parkin incorporated fractivist groups into the Feb 17 rally, but Democratic Party panderers didn’t get the memo. A representative read a letter of support from Senator Michael Bennet and was able to sneak past: “I stand with Obama” and even “in favor of US energy independence” although that’s code for oil & gas exports, dependent on construction of the XL pipeline. But when Mark Udall’s representative referred to “clean burning natural gas” the crowd booed. Even as he pleaded “we’re on your side,” the crowd wouldn’t relent, making sure his takeaway would be that fracking compounded global warming, among its other horrors.

The highlight of the rally occurred immediately afterward when the master of ceremonies, a twelve-year-old rapper and member of the Boulder based Earth Guardians, thanked Udall’s rep affably but then assured the audience that “of course there’s no such thing as clean natural gas!”


Occupy
A word about Occupy Denver’s part in Sunday’s march. Occupiers took the black-tie invitation to heart and turned up in black bloc attire with bandanas and balaclavas. OD then pushed the envelope to the consternation of parade marshals, stepping into the street at one point, blocking cars at another, in the spirit of their banner which read “ONLY DIRECT ACTION WILL STOP THE PIPELINE.”

To what end, creating friction during an event otherwise running smoothly? Who knows. The demonstration was uneventful and garnered scant media attention. Mixing it up might have helped, or not. The turnout was large but not up for a confrontation. Occupy didn’t push it.

The irony of 350-ORG supporters being upset by the antics of the Occupiers, was that behind the masks were many activists who’d actually gone to Texas to stop the XL pipeline, who’d gotten arrested, some out on $25,000 bond. How unfortunate that those troublemakers weren’t recognized from the stage. It was a real missed opportunity, this having been a rally to, um, STOP THE PIPELINE. These rowdy boring-party crashers were actually its unsung, veritable heroes. What the crowd wanted to mistake for infantile grandstanding, was really the infantile audacity that stops pipelines. Yes you get in trouble if you step off the sidewalk. Do you think the police are going to let you stop the pipeline?

Manitou Indian Center yet Idle No More

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MANITOU SPRINGS- Idle No More organizers from Denver and Pueblo woke the sleepy local Native American community with a spirited gathering on Saturday, smack in the middle of Manitou, neath the town clock, only blocks from the CS Indian Center.

Rogue vigilante Chris Dorner burned at the stake by angry hooded white men

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Tuning in to developments with fugitive cop-killer Chris Dorner in Big Bear on Tuesday, I half expected a televised denouement like Fahrenheit 451, where impatient viewers were given a contrived final scene, fitting the short arc of the average attention span for corporate media fodder. As I recall, that renegade fireman watched his pursuers stage his capture/demise, because authorities favored truncating a felon-on-the-lam narrative lest it generate a deviant hopeful following; it didn’t matter if the criminal really escaped. Could Ray Bradbury have envisioned the expectations which reality TV has created to satiate real blood lust?

No doubt Bradbury foresaw the ferocity with which a vengeful police state would immolate their one-man insurgent, with a compliant media averting their cameras so American viewers didn’t witness another Waco.

Americans should be attuned to these out of sight infernos, all our wars for example. Except that we know Dorner was set aflame with an paramilitary incendiary device dubbed “the burner”, this is what our extrajudicial executions look like via drones. Only last week news junkies were treated to the legal argument which the USG made to justify killing untried suspects, even US citizens. A if international law differentiated among infidels. One man’s infidel may be another’s exemplar, but he’s every government’s infidel.

So Chris Dorner had snapped. His manifesto, rambling only as much as those were his parting words, Dorner a Falling Down avenger who knew there would be no Hollywood ending. But Dorner had bought into the Rambo Army-of-One mythology. No disrespect intended toward Dorner’s feat, but elite military training proved more of a dud than a fighting machine, did it? What a laugh that American forces deign to train Afghan recruits. Any one mujahideen is likely the equivalent of a high-capacity magazine clip of US special forces in their underwear. But it’s likely authorities will never reveal Dorner’s actual superhuman achievement. He knew what he was up against, and now so do we. The crooked police machine has proven to be worse than Dorner’s complaints. Perhaps that was meant to be the audience takeaway. We didn’t get to see Chris Dorner burn at the stake, but we sure as hell felt the heat.

Nazi Pope misjudged, resigns instead of ending life in a bunker with cyanide

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Pope Ratzinger is stepping down, it’s not an admission of guilt, more like a plea of no contest to the avaricious, woman-phobic, pedophilic neo-religious order’s continued depravity. He’s leaving office to spend more time with his health, an honorable act to be applauded actually, an example for future Ronald Reagans and George W. Drunkards. Pope Benedict, his official title, was the Vatican’s first Nazi pope, having begun his career in uniform as a Hitler Youth, but he kept with the Catholic Church’s long tradition of Fascism.

Super Bowl 2013 commemorates American warrior culture minus wounded vets

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nfl--tv-nmt
TV NATION- Can Americans no longer embarrass themselves? This year’s pregame holiday extended to Super Bowl Eve with an un-ironic commemoration ceremony, an all-star gala tribute to football, acclaiming it a venerated touchstone of the American character, the public mob like drunken monks feasting the humanitarian contributions of the Spanish Inquisition. Football celebrates America’s cultural blood lust, a surrogate for our preemptive senseless war making, whose shared cartoon violence is expunged of its real antisocial inhumanity. Probably owing to this season’s pre pregame homophobia scandal, where collegiate casualty Manti Teo showed signs of early onset Mohammed Ali’s disease, fans learned about the concealed football side effect of compounded concussions, akin to IED survivors’ collateral brain damage. Next we’ll probably hear that footballers’ home lives spread PTSD. As football injuries become more difficult to hide from battle-weary audiences, fans will be calling for more Kevlar and then of course commensurate armor piercing anti-Kevlar. I already think football offensive lines look spectacularly under equipped without drones. Or would that position be pretended to play defense?

Punxsutawney Phil fails to see eclipse of mankind, declares early spring for nature

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You know it’s GROUNDHOG DAY when newspaper weather forecasts read like articles in the Onion. The unseasonably warm winter that followed a record breaking hot summer has been declared by Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania’s mascot meteorologist to be an “Early Spring”. FOR NATURE. The rat.