OCT13 teach-in at Occupy Austin. Starring Roy Casagranda, Political Science Professor, Austin Community College. Yes, the lecture is one hour and sixteen minutes, you’ll get a semester’s worth, just watch it.

Maybe like me you’re wondering how a landmark falls off the face of the earth, in particular Google Earth, assuming as we do that web crowdsourcing is archival, not perishable. A stagecoach watering hole in Kansas Territory, formerly Arapaho, was Hedinger’s Lake, between present day Limon and Hugo. Like the history of Colorado’s water, Lake became Lake Station, later a railway siding, today a creek.

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…because, really, I DO believe there’s a deliberate sabotage of Public Education being done simply by handing a “liberal” program over to be administered by “conservatives”.
In 7th grade in Texas you’re taught Texas History. Some of it would be almost unrecognizable from a Yankee point of view.
For instance, we were taught that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, it was about State’s Rights.
State’s Rights to spend civic money and exercise military and police powers to enforce slavery.
We were also told, and I have reason to believe that it’s gotten worse, we were told that the Slaves were well treated, given decent food and housing, and Medical Care. Happy Days on de ol’ Plantation wif all de Darkies singin’ and happy and de Massa jes’ lubbin all of dem!
O, de sun shines bright
on my old Kentucky home
it’s summer and the darkies are gay…
You smile and laugh and sing because the Massah would beat you and maybe have you killed if you indicated any dissatisfaction with the arrangement. It’s that simple.
The Slaves were all Happy and Content and Well Treated… so why do the Corporate Slaveholders of the Modern Plantation, the ones who advance this bald-face lie about how good slaves had it, refuse to provide health care and good nutrition and housing for their Debt-slaves?
Is it only profitable to provide a decent standard of living if you outright OWN the workers?

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Not “US-Israel” as in an alliance, but U.S. Israel, protectorate.

L’audace of the savage Arabs to assassinate the white settlers one by one, or by means of uncivilized cafe bombs, defying France’s brutal measures to wall the terrorists off and impoverish them.

We got our satellite TV today, and on History International there’s “History’s Mysteries”. War Profiteer/Wall Street Weasel (ok, so the European version thereof) financier Lownstein is flying across the English Channel. End of life history is he’s reported to go to the bathroom in his private plane and disappeared Found dead later. My thought, the crew took out the trash and jettisoned it over the Channel. Good riddance to bad rubbish. So why is an 80 year old murder important? The commercials. Borrow money from this start-up upstart bank that I’ve not heard of before. Buy gold. Sell your “unwanted” gold at a smaller price of course.

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“If you work through the existing structures you are going to be corrupted. By working through a political system that poisons the atmosphere, even the progressive organizations, you can see it even now in the US, where people on the “Left” are all caught in the electoral campaign and get into fierce arguments about should we support this third party candidate or that third party candidate. This is a sort of little piece of evidence that suggests that when you get into working through electoral politics you begin to corrupt your ideals. So I think a way to behave is to think not in terms of representative government, not in terms of voting, not in terms of electoral politics, but thinking in terms of organizing social movements, organizing in the work place, organizing in the neighborhood, organizing collectives that can become strong enough to eventually take over —first to become strong enough to resist what has been done to them by authority, and second, later, to become strong enough to actually take over the institutions.” –Howard Zinn, Anarchist, in 2008 AK Press interview

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Awww, the “Gift of Reading.” Wasn’t that something we gave ourselves for free in public school? And look at the e-book with which Amazon expects to separate readers from viewers –the latest movie.
 
Holy Schnikies Amazon picked a whopper of a name for its e-book reader! Is the “Kindle” supposed to inflame our gone-digital hearts to the warm fuzzies of reading? Because kindle wood and books have always been combustible dance partners. Firelight was something man used to have to read by, but kindling was also indispensable for book burnings. Which role most likely foreshadows this Kindle’s potential?

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“For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead Tree near the River, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the Labour of the Fishing Hawk; and when that diligent Bird has at length taken a Fish, and is bearing it to his Nest for the Support of his Mate and young Ones, the Bald Eagle pursues him and takes it from him.

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The US military must first and foremost train Afghan fighters to submit. They don’t know how to lose. Afghanistan never has.

Wouldn’t you think it bad form for Israeli militants to behave like Nazis, while immunizing themselves with the self-righteous indignation that any criticism of their actions can simply be dismissed as “anti-Semitic?” Photographs and confessions emerging from the IDF’s atrocities in Gaza just beg comparison the German Einsatzgruppen in Poland. Earlier this year UC Santa Barbara professor William Robinson forwarded an email photo essay to a UCSB listserv, the already much-circulated side by side comparison to the WWII atrocities. Two students complained, plagiarizing stock IDF lingo. Now the Anti-Defamation League wants Robinson to recant. With IDF propagandists pouring on the bullshit, let’s revisit the documents.

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When I was assembling my dorm room kit for college, I wanted an army blanket as a bed cover. For reasons I must have understood better then, the heavy duty olive drab wool, emblazoned with a U.S. monogram, was inarguably cool. Its generic quality was iconic, thus it had a caché more authentic than a stack of Izods. I considered my Army blanket to be the No. 2 Pencil of bed linens.

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After the 1914 Ludlow Massacre and the later capitulation of the UMWA union, Mother Jones, by now 85 years old, toured the US to spread the word about what happened. She wrote in her autobiography, about a meeting in Kansas City: “I told the great audience that packed the hall that when their coal glowed red in their fires, it was the blood of the workers, of men who went down into black holes to dig it, of women who suffered and endured, of little children who had but a brief childhood. ‘You are being warmed and made comfortable with human blood’ I said. … ‘The miners lost,’ I told them, because they had only the constitution. The other side had bayonets. In the end, bayonets always win.’”

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LUDLOW MEMORIAL, COLORADO- Day three of the Colorado College Ludlow Symposium featured a bus ride to the site of the 1914 massacre.

COLORADO COLLEGE- CC is holding a symposium on the 1914 Ludlow Massacre. Actually, it’s only called the Ludlow Symposium. True to Colorado Springs form, several among the audience want to call it an “incidence,” instead of a “massacre.” One of the participants, author Scott Martelle, is willing to oblige, explaining that if the militia hadn’t known that women and children were taking shelter beneath the tents which they were putting to the torch, then the soldiers were guilty only of criminally negligent homicide.

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I’m reading about the Sumarians (5,300 – 2,000 B.C.) FROM THE TABLETS OF SUMER: 39 Firsts in Man’s Recorded History. The Sumarians originated civilization as we know it, and their demise may look a lot like ours too. In case you missed the memo, Sumer was earliest Mesopotamia in southern Iraq.

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I am curious as to why a Roman Catholic bishop would risk a second excommunication over the historic particulars of the Holocaust. Bishop Richard Williamson is being labeled a “Holocaust Denier” because he questions the extent, and mechanism, of the official version of the Holocaust. Because Williamson is also criticized for his skepticism about the official 9/11 narrative, and for his praise for the Unabomber’s manifesto, I want to take a closer look, and wonder what is he reading?

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If it matters what to call this financial crisis, what is it? Is America in a recession? When does a deep recession approach a depression? When is an economic crash revealed to be a collapse? Before we can rename the Great Depression, as we did the Great War (WWI), in deference to this latest, we would do better to address the cataclysm which left this depression.

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In the mid-fifties the newly-public Ford Motor Company sought a name for its soon-to-be-released experimental car, known in its design stage as the E-car. After in-house marketers came up with 300-odd names which were felt to be embarrassing in their pedestrianism, the company approached Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Marianne Moore, an icon of the popular culture, known as much for her wild passion for baseball and boxing as for her poetry…

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We get fed so much bullshit all the time about how supposedly the US has always been this great beacon of light in the ‘civilized world’. But did you know that the US under Lyndon Johnson helped create a genocide that murdered at least 500,000 people in the island country of Indonesia? Yes, this was a MADE IN THE US genocide, People, and the Associated Press revisits the scene in this brief report online today. AP Exclusive: Indonesians recount role in massacre

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Shattering a ‘national mythology’ Shlomo Sand’s book is titled “When and How the Jewish People Was Invented?” and you probably will not find it stacked up on tables for sale in Barnes and Noble or Borders. I don’t expect it to be readily available for Colorado Springs librarian patrons either. Ask for it though.

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Yes, there has already been the establishment of ‘a Jewish nation’ and ‘Jewish Homeland’ since the Roman soldiers destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem after its siege in 70 AD.

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The superlatives were flying at the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Hyperbowl: it was China’s defining moment of the modern age, on, the newscasters said, “eight eight of o’ eight.” But before 888 in Beijing was August 8 of 1988 in Rangoon, known as the 8888 Uprising. This movement for democratic reform in Burma was brutally suppressed by General Ne Win who directed that his soldiers’ “Guns were not to shoot upwards.” This resulted in the massacre of 3,000 students and priests and a military coup which survives today, supported by the Chinese government.

The Olympic Games are almost upon us. Which contests are you most looking forward to? I tend to like them all, even the events that aren’t immediately understood as sport, like table tennis, rhythmic gymnastics and archery.

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In the US, it is always called the ‘Korean War’ simply to cover up the fact that it was really the US invasion of Korea, followed by our long occupation of the southern part of the Korean Peninsula. Millions died, and over 100,000 of them were innocent Korean civilians picked up by US directed forces off the streets and then simply slaughtered. AP: U.S. Okayed Korean War Massacres The history was then swept under the rug.

Early in WWII, a German Army film staff recorded this deed in color: enraged by the loss of two officers on April 21, 1941, the invading German soldiers gathered 36 random males from the town of Pancevo, Vojvodina and hung or shot them. How different was this from what US soldiers did on November 19, 2005, in Haditha, Iraq? In Haditha American Marines killed the women and children too. The Pancevo events in 1941 were kept from the German public lest their support for their troops waiver.