Tag Archives: Teens

Denver cops kill hispanic teen Jessica Hernandez, seize the death video, gag public protest, and now pay her family a pittance because they’re immigrants.

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DENVER, COLORADO- Not one Denver cop is going to jail for emptying their sidearm into a carload of teenagers, mostly girls, January 2015, killing just-turned-17 Jessie Hernandez, ON VIDEO, which officers confiscated from a witness. DPD was found to be lying about the joyride suspect aiming her car at officers, wounding one. She did not and the cop was not. The car only veered AFTER officers pumped 18 bullet into the driver as the four other teens screamed. DPD pulled Jessie’s expiring body from the vehicle like a sack of potatos and handcuffed it. Now the City of Denver is settling the matter with Jessie’s family for under a million dollars according to the local press, who’ve played no small role in covering up the missing video and blaming the victim by painting Jessie Hernandez as a petty-criminal, even though the “stolen car” belonged to a relative. As if auto theft calls for the death penalty. Because there’s some question about immigration status in Jessie’s Spanish-speaking family, lawyers and community leaders have quashed public outcry in the interest of working with Denver authorities, to exhonorate the police and minimize a wrongful death settlement.

Shadoe Garner jailed because Denver police fear the homeless Dirty Kids.

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DENVER, COLORADO- Credit Shadoe Garner and his fellow Dirty Kids for Denver’s current police crackdown on the downtown homeless. Credit might not be the word you choose, because the consequences have been disastrous for those living and panhandling on the street, but the homeless teens known by their community as the “dirty kids” were the first to stand up against the abuse. They refused to abide being commanded to stand when they needed to sit, or make themselves scarce on public property.

In May 2016 a dozen were arrested defying Denver’s sit-lie ordinance, to test the law’s constitutionality, but DPD found other infractions with which to charge them. Shadoe was jailed for possession of an illegal weapon, but the pretext for taking him in was even more contrived.

As a Wiccan druid, Shadoe carries a ritual dagger called an Athame. He wasn’t threateding anyone with it, but a second stop and frisk revealed a repeat offense, so now Shadoe’s bond is set at $10,000, beyond what any homeless person can raise. The pretext for Shadoe Garner’s arrest wasn’t the weapon, but a charge of LITTERING.

On the third day of their sit-in protest at the 16th Street Mall, Shadoe was trying to serve District Six Commander Tony Lopez with notice of a federal suit being filed against the DPD by 27 homeless complainants, for their continued harassment downtown. Though Garner informed Lopez that he was a contracted process server, Commander Lopez refused to take the 11 page document. When Shadoe dropped it at his feet, Commander Lopez gave the order to have Shadoe arrested.

Shadoe appears in court on Thursday, August 11, in division 3F of the Lindsey Flanigan Courthouse. Shadoe will be brought into the courtroom in shackles and will likely be represented only by a public defender.

Heads rolled because the McKinney TX pool party had a video. Where is video of DPD murder of Jessica Hernandez?

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The COPS-GONE-WILD video of 14-year-old Dajerria Becton getting manhandled by McKinney Texas police officer Eric Casebolt got him in trouble. It’s even meant trouble for the racist woman who started the fight, for the racist who called the cops, for a school principal who defended the officer and for another teacher who defended the racism. I’d love to see repercussions too for the crackers pictured in the video waddling about with impunity as the black teens are being picked out. All that, not because some racist shit went down in McKinney TX, but because someone videotaped it and it went viral.

NOW IMAGINE if the cop had pumped four bullets into the teenager, killing her!

Imagine if he’d fired a total of eighteen bullets and he kept pulling the trigger even after he’d emptied his magazine!

How upsetting would that be to see?

If you could imagine that girl a Latina, in a car full of Latina teens, one January morning in Denver, you’d be picturing the police murder of Jessica Hernandez on January 26, 2015. Jessica was unarmed, parked in a vehicle purported to be stolen, with four friends.

If you imagined there might be a video of that too, you wouldn’t be imagining things. Someone did make a video, in defiance of police ordering everyone to put down their phones. By a twist of unhappy fate, the Denver police took that video into evidence. They assure us it shows nothing remarkable. I imagine that might be what authorities in McKinney TX would say about their pool party video if it wasn’t in the public’s possession.

The police murder of Jessie Hernandez -what happened? (to the outrage)

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DENVER, COLO.- The Denver police had really stepped in it this time. At 6:30am on January 26, officers opened fire on a parked car full of unarmed teenage girls, killing Jessie Hernandez with eighteen bullets. This time the most homocidal police force this side of Baltimore used lethal force against a charismatic 17-year-old Latina. Even if officers had confused the queer tom-boy for a male, Jessie wouldn’t pass for a boy over eleven. Jessie’s killing follows a year rocked by public protests against police excessive force in Ferguson and New York City. Victims Mike Brown and Eric Garner were black males with the attendant stigmas. This victim was literally a poster child. If Jessie had a criminal record it was as a juvenile. The official account immediately began to unravel as witnesses came forward. Most notably, after the passengers were released from jail, one of them said the police fired first, before an officer was struck by the vehicle and not afterward as the officers claimed. Yet the public’s revulsion has been measured and dimminishing. What happened? Was the outcry stage-managed? By whom? The aftermath of Jessie’s execution was captured on video, in defiance of officers threatening the bystanders. It’s only been described to reporters but the Denver Post has it.

If the family of Jessie Hernandez decides they don’t want people to protest, do we cease protests? If the family doesn’t want to see the video, do we stop demanding its release? Of course they don’t want to relive the brutality of Jessie’s murder, no one does. But the DPD and the Denver Post must not be allowed to draw the curtain on the teen’s brutal death. The DPD’s actions must be exposed. The family doesn’t own this tragic crime. The responsibility to demonstrate against police brutality doesn’t fall on them, or the Latino community or the queer community. It falls on everyone. The Denver police own Jessie’s murder. They own all eighteen bullets, they own the handcuffing and searching of Jessie’s still-live body, they own the jailing of the four other traumatized teens, and they own all the subsequent lies told to excuse the inexcusable, shooting at a carload of unarmed children. If the public is not given the chance to face the reality of police brutality, we’ll never stop the DPD.

When Denver policemen train in Israel, city alleys become Iraqi checkpoints

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To Denver police unarmed female teen queer brown lives matter the same as black lives
DENVER, COLORADO- When police killed 16-yr-old Jessie Hernandez in a Denver alley where the teen was dropping off a friend on the way to school, they claimed her vehicle had struck a DPD officer. Police jailed her four teen passengers, ordered residents not to videotape, and refused to release details of the incident except a statement from Police Chief White which claimed that all police conduct had been according to protocol. Now journalists have reached one of the teens who reports that police officers fired first, killing the driver, which caused the car to veer toward the officers and crash. Where did Denver police learn they can face a car load of teenage girls and shoot first. Let’s note that DPD brags about sending officers to train in Israel. Let’s consider too that DPD hires recent veterans who may be suffering from PTSD, some of whom may have experience with the “Iraqi Checkpoints” where vehicle braking speeds were augmented with the stopping power of US bullets.
 
SO, the police lie about shooting Jessie Hernandez after the car struck an officer and not before. Maybe next we’ll learn they’re lying about the teens’ car being “stolen”.

Bored Oklahoma teen murder suspects not bored or under-educated enough to be considered teens

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James Edwards, Chancey Luna and Michael Jones
Bored Oklahoma teens who shot a random jogger in the back are being tried as adults not juveniles because “it was an adult crime”; though killing while bored seems a juvenile crime by definition. So does immediately confessing a motive, “we were bored,” to the police, it would seem to me. But there’s more. Despite the confessions, it was not immediately clear who pulled the trigger as the three teens trailed their victim, Australian college baseball player Christopher Lane, in their car, then sped away to find a next target. But that didn’t stop Oklahoma police from charging just TWO of the boys with first degree murder, bail denied, with the third considered an accessory. I’ve provided the mug shots to give you a hint. For which 15 and 16 year-old do you think the state of Oklahoma is seeking the death penalty? (Spoiler: YES) And the older accessory –17 but white– gets bail and will be tried as a juvenile.
 
Pundits deride African American leaders for not decrying the Lane murder like they did that of Trayvon Martin, presumably because the victim was white. But I’ll ask where is the community outcry for young James Edwards and Chancy Luna, joy-killers they may be? Though I understand full well that other than the “doing it for fun” headlines, this event is unexceptional. Black children bear the brunt of law enforcement everyday, our prison system follows in the lynching tradition.

Another Lick

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Guess I’m on a roll, so–speaking of shit you find lying around outside: The Pikes Peak region is “semi-arid” and pretty sparse, so far as dinner plate items from Nature’s bounty are concerned. “Pioneers”, (which of course is proto-Orwellian for “conquerors”), had rather more game around til they killed it all for the sheer glee of it, so if your caught out now things can be even rougher. To top off the chicken thingy I used strictly ingredients found outside. Lying around.

Take and harvest a bunch of prickly pears–the fruit are nice and ripe at this very moment! Use a razor sharp knife, and don’t take more than half the fruit from a single plant. Thank whomever you like to Thank as you harvest, and be gentle. We caused our Moms enough grief as teens; we don’t need to carry on so with our Mother.

Find some other kind of berries or other fruit for variety, anything that’s not apt to poison you will do just fine, as will skipping it.

Hunt down some kinda wild mint. There are several varieties around. Keep track of your living stash and you can harvest till the Apocalypse. The shit’s like weeds, only tasty.

OK, wild honey. You really can, I promise, find bee trees by following bees. Look for a good field of flowers and be patient with the difficulty of the task. Even if it takes all summer, it’s worth it. WATCH OUT FOR BEARS! I’m not joking at all about that one. It’s even more important to exercise great care when harvesting, given the delicate position of bees, lately, and their crucial function to the current Manifestation. Also, they might sting you, but that’s minor. Use smoke to quiet their anger–if you are serious and find a good tree, it’s worthwhile to get hold of a smoker from an apiary supply^. Agave nectar would probably render a more “authentic” version of this, if such a thing exists, but you’ll have to figure out how to get it yourself, (let me know). This is strictly a thing of mine, but I can’t believe no indigenous gatherer ever worked it out before.

One thing–I used a little lemon juice, both for flavor, and for its marvelous preservative quality. It’s not necessary, by any means, but if you want the effect and if you really want to be a purist and go all native and shit, you’ll need to sort out a local source of citric acid. Or, duh–it dawns on me the pricklies probably suffice for that, too.

I used the other half of the jalapeno from the chicken thing, too, which I found in it’s natural environment at the bottom of a Whole Foods donation box. It’s awful tricky to find a wild pepper around here, but not impossible….

Pluck the fuzzies from the pears and seed them. You can blanche and peel them very much more easily, but the skin has half the flavor and even more of the nutrients. Besides, the plucking offers an excuse for sitting around a table with your family without an idiot box blaring inanities, though I recommend blaring some jammin’ tunes. Look me up on Facebook and I’ll post some for you.

Put all the ingredients except the honey in an appropriately sized saucepan, add a little water so it don’t burn while the juices are coming out, cover, and simmer til you get sick of simmering.

Add honey to taste and use for ice cream, a kind of chutney, or whatever. Mixes well with cream, too, if you’re not too aggressive about the process.

Best when built as a family project from top down, side-to-side, and suffused liberally con molto amore!

(Reprinted from Hipgnosis)

Composer Jason Robert Brown wants to protect his unintellectual rights

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As a musician and fan of stage musicals, I must proffer this disclaimer about American theater composer Jason Robert Brown: he’s terrible. Brown is a poster child for the music industry’s common mediocrity, of commerce’s habitual triumph over art. Now Brown has appointed himself defender of intellectual property rights, holding that teens should not use the internet to pirate his sheet music. Of course, I can only wish him foolproof success.

American musical theater saw a golden age in the 1940s, with notable glimmers of resurgence since then, in ever infrequent cycles. I don’t think anyone would argue that in-between was constant dreck –to which “show tunes” owe their stigma. Defenders of Andrew Lloyd Webber will find themselves similarly unrestrained enthusiasts for popular music, popular fiction and television. To each his own slop.

I have particular antipathy for contemporary composers of awfulness because they drive the inartistic music publishing industry where it does irreparable harm. School bands and theater departments are influenced to pay royalties for the performance pieces whose rights are most profitably leveraged, at the expense of older works of renown. Instead of seeding young repertoires with melodies and lyrics to enrich their memories, teachers pollute their students with forgettable claptrap, courtesy of bards like Brown.

I have the same prejudice with regard to literature. Why aren’t today’s students reading Stevenson or Poe instead of Blume or Rowling? Of course, composer JR Brown is more on par with author RL Stine, he’s that horrible. But don’t take my word for it, have a listen.

That said, here’s Jason Robert Brown championing not just the exclusive right to sell online what his publishers hawk through their network of scholastic pushers, but he wants the same markup. If ever a commodity could change hands for its true worth, Brown’s entire catalog should be ventilated for free through file sharing. Instead he’s personally joining various trading websites and then emailing each and every member who appears to be trading in his goods.

To paraphrase: Hello, I’m Jason Robert Brown, yes, The Jason Robert Brown, and I’d appreciate it if you stopped illegally sharing my music, since it deprives me of my rightful royalties.

Brown has posted some of the ensuing email exchanges on his blog, without any mention of offering remuneration for their contributions. Most laughable, but consistent with the weakness of his music work, Brown has engaged chiefly teens in his discussion of intellectual rights. He lists one discussion in which he compares his stolen sheet music to a loaned screwdriver, a Xerox’d book, and a copied CD.

Mr. Brown, might I direct you to the innumerable organizations which argue that intellectual property rights are not inalienable. They are restraints to trade, impediments to idea sharing, and diametric to elevating community wealth.

You have every right to contrive a product and sell it by whatever connivance, but your monopoly ends there. Whoever were your customers should have the right to do with their purchases what they will. What right have you to tax the use of your thought fart as it passes from ear to ear? Home Depot can’t charge multiple times for a screwdriver it’s already sold; to use your example.

Consider also that your melody was plucked from the ether of shared cultural experience. Should a rights police attach royalty liens on every whiff of inspiration you borrowed? Better to admit we are all channels of a community expression.

Mr. Brown, please be satisfied to exploit the business advantages you’ve built. Your Tony Award is indication enough of that accomplishment. Insisting that you deserve more only invites scrutiny of your ouevre. Your arguments may find refuge with fans of the “Twilight” caliber, but I am not about to underestimate the sophistication of your own musical taste. If you love Broadway, you know the incredible deficiency of the songs you are peddling. Describing your “music sensibility [which] fuses pop-rock stylings with theatrical lyrics” is faint self-praise enough.

Young stage enthusiasts. To you, JRB may appear a “genius” but what else would we expect of a generation raised on High School Musical. For superior fare, check out the pre maudlin days of Broadway, the shows which see regular revivals. If you want something further afield, look to lesser known works by those same composers. Even their obscure productions eclipse the best efforts of hacks today. Much of this material is freely available, but you’ll find that real showstoppers will have you showing no reluctance to part with your lunch money.

Jason Robert Brown, please stop your indecorous whine about the new leak in your traditional income monopoly. Leave your fans to trade them for their real worth.

16-year-old Jessica Watson completes solo circumnavigation, flunks geometry

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When 16-year-old Jessica Watson arrives in Sidney tomorrow, she will be the youngest person to sail around the globe alone. The precocious Aussie will be denied an official record however, for the same reason the Olympics enforce a minimum age for gymnasts, protecting suggestible minors from overzealous parents ostensibly. The snubbing might seem an unenforceable formality, but it turns out Jessica comes up short on another technicality, the same principle which holds that girth is measured at the waist.

The “circum” in navigate refers to circumference. Let’s take nothing away from the young adventurer who’s proven herself plenty brave, a capable sea-person, and undeniably a class act. Criticism of her geometry or vocabulary is aimed really at her internet fans who are now raining expletives on sailing officials who would deny her a world record.

Just as we credit her home team for media, communications, and consultation, readers of her blog know that Jessica set her autopilot to daily coordinates provided to her. Thus it was Team Jessica which charted the interesting compromise.

While no one expects round-the-world sailors to follow the equator, circumnavigation at minimum requires traversing an orb over its circumference. You cannot, as an extreme example, run a few paces off the South Pole and call yourself a circumnavigator. Soon we’d have swimmers circumnavigating the North Pole. The de-icing of the Northwest Passage likewise will be providing new shortcuts for would-be record breakers. Jessica Watson’s ability to traverse the south seas owed entirely to techncal innovations which have yielded stronger crafts and better storm avoidance. The latitudes formerly named for their impenetrability, the Roaring Forties, Furious Fifties and Screaming Sixties, are now open to sporting pursuits. Making the straight shot across all longitudes there is a distance a fraction of the equator. As a result, ocean racing adjudicators have decided that a proper circumnavigation should mean at least 21,600 nautical miles across the seas, a distance that approximates the width of our planet.

Did Team Jessica miscalculate? More likely it was an expeditious decision to enable a finish before the youngster’s 17th birthday. Going the extra distance would have added extra days to Jessica’s sixteen years. The course was thus plotted to make Sidney at greatest haste. Which meant setting their own interpretation of a circumnavigation.

To do this, Team Watson contrived a simplification of the minimum requirement: crossing all longitudes and passing over the equator twice, which their sailor dutifully did. Their explanation to Jessica’s fans sounds officious, but is not universally accepted as equivalent to a full circumnavigation. Can you measure a waistline by passing the tape around one leg so long as you extend it up through a belt loop? On a globe such an approximation comes up short. Level of difficulty to sail it, still enormous, but a foreshortened route.

Actually, Miss Watson’s Burmuda rig will have traveled 23,000 sea miles taking into account her drift and the tacks required to work the wind, but her charted course accumulates to only 19,000. Imagine shortening the Tour de France to substitute sections on stationary bikes. No less effort, but not quite the Tour.

Watson’s official start was delayed by a mishap that sent she and Ella’s Pink Lady back for repairs and may have sealed the fate of her world record.

Pink Lady’s departure made the news in a bigger than expected way over a half year ago. Concerns about allowing so young a person to attempt a solo circumnavigation appeared vindicated the next day when Jessica struck a freighter on her very first night. This meant a return to harbor for the Pink Lady and having perhaps to reroute the journey of shorter duration than initially planned.

Perhaps the racing officials are right to retire seafaring records based on age. With modern technology and remote systems having become what they are, what does it mean anymore to differentiate “assisted” or “unassisted”? 2009 witnessed the first Atlantic crossing of a catamaran captained by a quadriplegic. By any conventional understanding of seamanship that feat was impossible. Before long, who or what is put at the helm will be irrelevant, watercrafts will progress –“unassisted” meaning untouched– guided by unmanned vehicle operators at computer consoles. Perhaps the control could eventually even be crowdsourced online.

The crowd’s attention to Elle’s Pink Lady was owed undeniably to its captain being a 16-year-old girl. For a period on the official blog, public comments were closed off to shed followers whose infatuations may have been unflattering to the schoolroom audiences which Australian television news was drawing to the website. If I had to guess at what was jettisoned, it was probably fan fiction fantasies thinly veiled as hopeful advice to avoid Somali pirates. While some followers were no doubt titillated by the thought of a vulnerable young woman alone on the dark sea, to the average audience, the opportunity to check-in on the Pink Lady in 10-meter swells in near-real time, took vicarious adventuring to new heights.

On the other hand a 16-year-old captain’s log had obvious drawbacks. The facility to wax poetic hits at an age later than the teens apparently. Previous age-record holders like the teen who took five years to circle the globe in the Dove was in his twenties when he chose to write about it. Jessica’s narrative was extemporized and followed a pragmatic motif. Her notes reflected the singular focus of young specialist whose technical proficiencies might have crowded out wider observation skills. Preoccupied with her boat’s speed, in between, nothing. Her typical report was peppered thus:

“Yeah, so, nothing new to report really, so, yeah, so, that’s about it for me, so, yeah.”

When Captain Jessica wasn’t relating the progress the Pink Lady was making, or the occasional repair attempt she planned to revisit, her thoughts were on the day’s menu, the supplies packed for her which she opened like a Christmas chocolate calendar, supplemental gifts scheduled to lift her spirits at regulated intervals and the latest blog comments to which she relayed personal replies.

In addition to the typical teenager sweets fixation was another unexpected first, although clearly enough foreseen by Team Jessica’s sponsors. Video blogging on a daily basis meant that Jessica had to worry about her makeup and hair. She holds the world record I’ll bet for first solo circumnavigator to concern herself with wardrobe and beauty products.

For the most part, Jessica impresses like the average gifted and talented, and disappoints where you’d expect it too. How interesting are the whims of a child of millionaire parents able to indulge a not-necessarily world-changing enterprise? Elle’s Pink Lady is a model of commercial endorsement banking on publicity spectacle. No different from most high profile sports, professional tennis for example, but of virtuoso certainly less athletic. It’s more like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, watch their children take to the sea.

With Jessica’s upcoming arrival garnering excitement, isn’t it fitting that an unpredicted non-sponsor is stepping forward to reap product placement. It turns out the Australian conglomerate responsible for the “Pink Lady” apple considers the name of Jessica Watson’s project a trademark infringement, but they’re ready to settle if she considers adding them to her endorsements.

Would you believe Fortune 500 corps & “Bat Gangs?” Yeah, that’s the ticket.

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Poverty threatens sense of prosperityFrom the same mouth that told reporters the ludicrous tale that scouts from two Fortune 500 companies told a local realtor (let’s leave her unnamed, shall we) they rejected locating in Colorado Springs on account of the city’s homeless camps along I-25 –yeah right– comes a really despicable meme she’s now trying to spread of teenage “bat gangs” purportedly terrorizing our homeless.

The fabrication serves two purposes: to lend urgency to efforts to get the homeless out of their tents, and to scare the vulnerable would-be victims themselves. A tent isn’t shelter enough if there are gangs of youth ready to bludgeon every homeless they encounter.

I was almost taken in myself when I received this email titled “HOMELESS ATTACKS”, the text of which has also been copy and pasted unto other online forums:

Sitting here with a homeless friend who got beat up by the Bat Gang on Saturday. He said it was 8 kids with baseball bats who attacked him under the Bijou Bridge. He was taken to Memorial Hospital and spent the night. He got stitches around his right eye and his right elbow.

We’re lucky he is alive! Again we need your support to transition the homeless out of the tent camps to shelters.

It turns out a user “Beepbeep” has been peddling this hard on local websites, luckily without much traction. Any ideas about how to intervene if she lands another TV interview? Fear-mongering like this slanders the CSPD and further erodes the image of Colorado Springs.

A search of the Gazette brings up the murder last year of a vagrant on the I-25 pedestrian overpass, killed with a baseball bat. A teen bragged to his a friend about the crime, and now the friend may be implicated as well. This is a development from the recent trial. From this our enterprising Iago has extrapolated a “bat gang” of malevolent teens, to put fear into stories told around homeless campfires.

Her most recent example cannot be corroborated. Even given the benefit of the doubt, our misinformant may have fallen dupe to a homeless cliche, the public drunk’s version of “a dog ate my homework.” I remember from friends cleaning up their act at the Salvation Army, when someone fell off the wagon and returned literally bruised, from a fall or fight they were too inebriated to remember, the blame was cast away from themselves. What happened was often a recurring theme, the bang-up attributed to “teenage tormentors” armed with bats.

Can you think of a more despicable strategy, to haunt the neighborhood with a fictional specter, all for the sake of trying to shoo the homeless out of town. It’s the KKK’s burning cross strategy isn’t it?

Barack Obama is your president

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Does the presidential plane say NIGGER?COLORADO SPRINGS- The superintendent of District 12 schools announced Friday that Barack Obama’s address to schoolchildren on Tuesday will not be shown in his district’s schools. I’m no defender of this president, but I have to ask, what possible rationale could excuse such disrespect? It’s probably too easy to decry racism, so what’s left?

Personally, of course, I could imagine steering schoolchildren clear of George W. Bush. Old President Bush had a 13% or so approval rating. Foreign leaders dismissed him as a moron. It was whispered that he’d resumed drinking, and it was common knowledge that he’d been a cocaine user until his forties. George Bush was no example for impressionable youth. What parent could hold him up as a role model, other than the town drunk or village idiot who was not to be emulated? But I’m certain the same schools just a year ago would never have crossed that president.

Setting aside his surprising political turns, Barack Obama projects inspiring leadership qualities. He speaks intelligently with attentiveness and compassion. His message to children is to be one of encouragement in the hard times ahead, dealing with the increased imperative of higher education. Recent generations have been growing successively nihilistic. Perhaps the economy’s turn is an appropriate occasion for a president to address our nation’s kids. We like to call them our future.

Bush gave our schools the disastrous NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND ACT which completely degraded public schools and ushered the calls for privatization of education under the guise of Charter Schools. In Colorado, Bush’s measure prompted the CSAPs, which hobble teachers by requiring classes to focus on passing standardized tests, instead of teaching broader lessons. Bush’s act also guarantees that military recruiters have access to the personal records of our children at their most vulnerable, to more easily prey upon them when they are rebellious teens. Bush was no friend of schoolchildren.

Election button 2008Obama on the other hand won a decisive victory in November, and no small number of his supporters were young children. Many teachers were pushing for Obama and his promise of hope, in the midst of a culture of pessimism sowed by George W. and his destructive agendas. Bush waged war against everything schoolchildren are fostered to care about. Obama’s campaign represented salvation for our planet. How now are school administrators prepared to extricate the students from their own personal rapport with the new president?

To quote a favorite Twit, Badbanana:

Obama is going to address the nation’s schoolchildren? One good fart joke and the Democrats control Congress for 60 years.

We know of course the high pitched extremists groups whom the superintendent thinks he is placating. They are the Teabaggers and Birthers who reject Obama as president. “He’s not my president” they say. They learned the phrase from their adversaries who protested the stolen elections of 2000 and 2004, but never understood its meaning. Obviously they have nothing to teach children about the workings of democracy.

At the recent health care town hall hosted by Congressman Doug Lamborn, I had a chance to witness these Birthers, so named because they reject Barack Obama’s birth certificate. They are so certain that Obama will be discovered to be foreign born and will thus be stripped of the presidency. “Three More Months, Three More Months” they countered, while progressive citizens were chanting for health care reform.

Ed Bircham of Bircham Office ProductsLocal wing nut business owner Ed Bircham was dancing a jig singing “Ho Ho, Obama’s Got To Go, Ho Ho.” Egged on by KVOR djs and unabashed gay-bashers, Ed Bircham repeated his calls for Obama’s removal from office.

Incredible. Obama hasn’t done anything yet –which is my complaint– so what have the teabaggers against him? It’s patently absurd, if it wasn’t so obviously bigoted. “No Country For Old Bigots” I yelled.

Actually I joined local NAACP leader James Tucker in interjecting “Obama Is Your President” between Bircham’s call for his ouster. “Respect Your President” we found ourselves saying, even as I knew that I would not hold myself to such restraint. On the other hand, my opposition to President Obama has nothing to do with his skin color. On what principles do these white men disagree with Barack Obama, except that they’re not about to show deference to a nigger?

You had a good home but You Left (You’re Right!)

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Your Recruiter LIED to you so you Left (You’re Right!) Classic Basic Training marching cadence chant.
You’re all supposed to be “in step” because if you have a single person planting his left foot forward while everybody else is planting the Right, a Column Left or a To the rear, March! command or any other won’t work out correctly.
If The Military is such a good career move, why would the Pikes Peak or Bust Rodeo and others have to donate the proceeds to “Military Charities”?

Go on Craigslist and in Barter and Free classifications, and Rants & Raves you find military families, especially right before payday, begging for FOOD. Food which is subsidized at the Commissary, the Post Exchange and the Base Exchange.

And, these families, they’re not kidding. They actually ARE hurting.

But the Recruiters still Lie through their teeth. Daily.

They even have special programs TARGET-ing poorer kids, Minorities…

In Hispanic and Black neighborhoods the recruiter drives around in a “tricked-out” Hummer with a sound system blaring Hip-hop, the recruiter himself is going to be Ethnically Matched to the neighborhood or barrio, and a younger guy, and even with that will be TRAINED in Street Talk as though it were a foreign dialect.

Are they foolin’ the 18 year olds (17 and dropped out of school if yo’ Momma signs you in)? Apparently not. They give out their pamphlets to pre-teens.

Recruiting Children for a Later Date With Death.

For the 17 and 18 year olds, they break out the Economic Opportunity and the closely related Educational Opportunity bullshit.

But then, the U.S.O., Red Cross, Pikes Peak or Bust Rodeo… they come right along and spoil the lie. Because those organizations have to scramble to raise funds, beg a little less obviously…

But the Recruiter Lies are spoiled only if the kids see or hear or read something like this.

All y’all young dudes who want to sign up, try this first… when you turn 16 and can legally do it, volunteer at the VA hospital.

Hang back a little, don’t crowd, let the Human Misery speak for itself. And the humans who are suffering that misery. Go around emptying the wastebaskets and dry-mopping the floor in the waiting rooms, listen to the guys and ladies talking to each other, listen to their stories about how the VA is screwing them.

Volunteer at the U.S.O. and there are others, fill out forms for the guys and Ladies.

See people and talk to them and try your best to help them when the VA screws them.

When a guy is dying from a service related cancer like you get with Agent Orange or from the Uranium Poisoning, that the VA officially denies even exists, try to help him get his basic medical needs tended to.

Volunteer to read or sing to the guys in a Persistent Vegetative Coma. Or the guys who can’t communicate, can’t see, but are conscious under the bandages.

Keep in mind when you’re doing it that some of these guys are laying there with half their body mass taken off by American fire.

Then when you see the Recruiter rolling through the ‘hood jamming some tunes…

See all the young kids flocking around eager to be part of the next Children’s Crusade…

Eager to be lied to, eager to be seduced into the Glorious War.

Listen to the commercials again, watch with fresh eyes as they Army/Navy/Air Force/Marines tell the parents of kids too young to legally join on their own to go ahead and sign the papers for their sons and daughters.

Telling young guys who are dropping out of High School that somehow the Army is going to pull off a magic trick that will get them into College and a highly paid profession.

Because you KNOW, don’t you, that if Yo Momma is signing you in, that means you’re not 18 and there’s very little chance that you completed High School.

And that those commercials are aimed at the guys who are having trouble in school and about to drop out anyway.

When the Recruiter rolls through the ‘hood blasting the jams, walk up to him and tell him, in front of his intended victims, that he’s a damned liar. Print this up and make your OWN pamphlets.

I’m not saying commit acts of violence against him, or vandalism.

That perpetuates the Hate cycle and nothing more.

Even though it would be entertaining to watch one get dragged out of his tricked out Liar-Mobile and having a case of Advanced Whoopage liberally applied, don’t do it.

Confront Hate with Hate and everybody loses. Confront the Hate and the Lies with truth.

It’s our only weapon, and it’s more effective than all their bombs, and guns, and Air-shows, and “see how many chinups you can do” demonstrations, all their pamphlets and commercials and their Tricked Out Humvee can ever be.

You know how I can tell? Because they’re having so much trouble trying to recruit people that they’re going after the young kids now.

The kids are getting smarter and asking more questions. The Army loses. Too bad, so sad. They shouldn’t be trying to convince Kids to go and kill for the “super-patriots” so the “super-patriots” can make money off their lives, and deaths, and the lives and deaths of those people whose countries are being stolen for their resources.

The “super-patriots” who like Bush and Cheney and Wolfowicz and Limbaugh and O’Reilly, aren’t going to enlist and when they had to do so, they had their parents buy their way out of the Draft.

They expect YOU to die for THEIR comfort and riches. And pay you so little for it that your families will literally have to Beg in order to survive.

Black Pirates meted Southern Justice

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US Navy Seals recover captive lifeboat from the USS Maersk Alabama
Dutch NATO forces rescued 20 hostages off the coast of Africa last week without loss of life. They thwarted a pirate attack, confiscated the booty, but must release the captured pirates owing to International Maritime Law. Contrast this with American cowboy rules of engagement.

Several US Navy warships faced a solitary lifeboat on which three teenage Somali pirated held hostage Maersk Alabama captain Richard Phillips. The covered lifeboat remained tethered to the stern of one of the Navy ships while negotiations, we’re told, progressed.

Going into day three, before the American TV audience could lose interest, US Navy Seals rescued the captive Phillips at a cost of a 100% casualty rate to the pirates. Although the DoD did not initially want to reveal its anti-pirate tactics, spokesmen have admitted that the “daring rescue” was in effect three precisely-simultaneous sniper shots to the heads of the three captors. The fourth pirate already having been entrusted to the US ship’s custody for medical care. The captain freed, the wounded pirate’s collateral was thus gone, and his grant of safe-passage was rescinded.

The official story is that US infrared imagery revealed that the American captive’s life was in danger. One of the pirates was holding a gun to his head, and this act prompted the snipers to intervene. Negotiations, apparently, were not proving fruitful. I’m guessing that this account reflects the exact opposite of what happened. The navy snipers had been holding their fire until the moment Captain Phillip was NOT in a pirate’s crosshairs.

Although the Somali pirates were just teens, I bet they knew from brutal experience, what most of us know from violent television, that holding your gun to a hostage’s head is the only way to prevent your rivals from gunning you down. Trapped in a lifeboat, the pirates knew that high powered US weaponry would be trained upon each of their heat silhouettes. The moment their captive was not in the predicted trajectory of the crossfire, nor threatened by a collateral death-spasm squeeze of a trigger, the pirates would be toast.

The rescue operation began with a greater-than-three number of US snipers aiming weapons at the little boat. The more the better, to assure that at every instant, complicated by the rocking and turning of the lifeboat in the waves, at least one sniper could claim one pirate, without the hostage laying vulnerable to leeward bullets. The images in the sniper scopes were wired to a director’s console, where the determination could be made when all three targets were spoken for, and the order could be given to fire. The last hurdle remained for the pirate who held his gun on the hostage to drop his guard for just an instant, lest he squeeze off a round into the hostage. Wanna bet that’s what happened?

Great marksmanship, no question. Plenty of training no doubt. We can take nothing away from the heroism shown in braving responsibility for jeopardizing Captain Phillip’s life. It is probably also a common law enforcement strategy. Although that doesn’t make it legal.

Unless the US Navy releases the targeting footage, we are unlikely to confirm the true sequence of events. But where the pirate’s gun was pointing makes a difference. The Navy is explaining that it acted because Phillips’ life was at stake. Otherwise, shooting people who are not shooting at you is considered underhanded.

The Dutch navy forces bay have bellyached that they had to turn loose their captured pirates, instead of leaving them imprisoned somewhere, but the Dutch had seized them in Somali waters, where the pirates operate as their nation’s only Coast Guard. The Dutch NATO commandos prevented an attack, and liberated the detainees being held by the de-facto Somali border agents, and their directive ended there.

The US on the other hand, executed three “Somali Pirates,” regardless the varying degree of culpability the individuals might have had.

Without a day in court, that’s extra-judicial murder. If you consider these were three African youths, it looks like a lynching.

Let’s take note, by whose account to we know what happened out on the high seas? Do we know even that these were pirates? Says who? I am simply playing devil’s advocate. Do we know these four youth weren’t stowaways? Perhaps they had been Shanghaied and attempted an escape via the Maersk Alabama’s lifeboat. Do we know what happened really? That’s what courts are there to decide.

Everything the American TV audience knows is from the mouths of the US military. What do we know? These youths might have been human-trafficking cargo, en route to or from war zones. They might have broken free, running straight into the Maersk’s convenient cover story that all inconvenient incidences can be labeled pirate attacks. Have we anybody’s word who has not been lying to us about war crimes everywhere, about the use of torture, about the true magnitude of renditions and secret prisons?

These black youths might just as well have been the captive sex slaves of the porky white contractor mercenaries who were planning to kill them while in the act of buggering them, but the damn Negroes slipped free. So the Navy Seals had to come play cleaner to the embarrassing mess. I exaggerate to emphasize: what the fuck do YOU know?!

“This is how the USA handles pirates” was basically our statement. Americans stateside cheered and grabbed their dicks. But overseas, and on the seas, the sentiment is much more wary. The US Navy has escalated the war on piracy. Now the rules of engagement for both sides is going to be shoot first, ask questions later.

Are the Somalis quaking in their pirate boots? When the news hit about what the Navy Seals did, the self-styled privateers of the Somali Coast redoubled their attacks on foreign ship traffic.

I found this looking for something else. (About Mayor Rivera)

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I couldn’t embed it but here’s the link to the video.
 
I was looking for something that came up in the inevitable angry political discussion on the City Bus yesterday.

Actually, nobody was angry with or against each other.

We’re all just a little teensy tiny itty bitty small bit P.O.’d about the “Lower Class” being bought and sold like so many hummm… what’s that Minor Piece in a chess game, you know, the ones that always get sacrificed to save or capture a Chessman of higher rank, oh yeah… Pawns…

But it seems Our Illustrious Mayor has once again applied his own foot to his own mouth…

On the subject of cutting bus routes.

The bus in question is to one of the medical districts.

Which is getting a large percentage of Budgetary axe.

The other parties to the conversation were a retired lady and a lady who makes her living as a Teacher.

The Mayor, allegedly (but, for some strange reason, I believe every syllable of it) His Dis-Honor has made what he thought was an unrecorded remark that he doesn’t really care what bus passengers think because “The only people who ride the bus are bums and alcoholics”

This was supposed to be posted to YouTube after having been caught on a cell-phone camera.

I haven’t found it, YET.

Strangely, I have a lot of confidence that I will, and I don’t doubt for a moment that His Dis-Honor said that, simply because he has a long and rich history of making disparaging remarks about the Lower Classes, who, unlike himself, actually do the Labor that provides the wealth of Our Nation and more directly, his own Portfolio.

AND, about the soldiers who came back with pieces missing, both of body and mind, from the War of Conquest which benefits, directly, His Stock Portfolio.

One of the ladies, the schoolteacher, is blind. I had located the information she wanted on the Bus Route and schedule changes she had tried to ask the bus driver about.

The bus is the one she and the other lady use to go between their homes and, well, Everywhere Else.

I, as usual, was going to a doctor’s appointment.

One of the other bus Route Cancellation, 3 of them in fact, involve getting within a half-mile of Peak Vista Health Care, the El Paso County Health Department, and a Memorial Health Systems facility across Parkside Drive from Peak Vista.

In other words, facilities that serve the Disabled and Poor.

It’s not really a coincidence that those two groups merge at several points.

Also, in an entry into Jonah’s Museum of Spectacularly Bad Ideas, it seems the budget crunch was made an order of magnitude Worse by the reversal of the usual order of the Financial Universe,

Instead of issuing Municipal Bonds and having OTHER PEOPLE invest in the City, the City has been using Our Tax Money to GAMBLE errr… “invest” in the Stock Market, under the tutelage of Our Own Resident Pre-Chimpanzee Douglas Bruce.

The one who makes Les Freres Bush et menages look like Intellectual Giants by comparison.

I wonders, yes I does, if these Parasite Class Heroes bought, with our money, a whole bunch of those Mortgage Notes?

They could sue me for “Definition of Character” and if they win they would get everything I own.

At a net loss of the vast majority of the costs of hauling it away.

I guess they’re used to losing investments anyway.

There is much grumbling among the Working Class to the tune of a Recall Election to unseat these vermin.

As usual, Jonah speaks only for Jonah, but I think we should take that idea and run with it.

TWILIGHT vampires resemble predators of the less mystical sexual variety

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stephanie meyer dreams of Babe the PigTWILIGHT- For those parents who have unwittingly encouraged their daughters to delve into Twilight, where our episodic fascination with Dracula lore is adapted for the young adult romance genre, be forewarned that author Stephenie Meyer may have fogged her rose-colored glasses with romantic nostalgia from her Mormon upbringing: old older men, arranged marriages, and, if you’ll pardon the dropped pretense, date rape.

DESPOILER ALERT.
Better you than your child?

Old fashioned matchmaking
First, Meyer’s teenage vampires are generations-old men, stuck reliving their teens, repeating high school to prey on each successive year of students. Matthew McConnaughey played it, minus fangs, in Dazed and Confused: “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.”

Off campus, some of the undead “imprint” on newborns. Want that explained? Meyer’s succubus babies are born fully-conscious, if that’s any excuse, but elders are able to perceive them as soul-partners, and claim dibs to pair with them later. When they are of consumable age, I presume.

Perhaps you find these details to be inconsequential “vampire” technicalities protected by Meyer’s un-poetic license. There’s a zinger in the fourth book which you may find less palatable.

Vampire sex
Because your tween-ager should know to make the distinction?

In book four, Bella marries the 117-year-old high school hold-back Edward Cullen, and finally he consents to consummate their marriage. He’s been withholding his afflictions for fear that vampire sex would kill her. By the way, that’s the romantic dynamic of the first three books, in case you wonder what’s titillating your acts-beyond-her-age young reader.

Typical of respectable novels, and the romance genre too perhaps, the sex scene is glossed over. Bella disrobes and joins Edward for a midnight swim, where he “leads her to deeper waters.” The narrative returns as the sun rises the next morning.

Classy enough for this lowbrow storytelling, except that Meyer earns no credit for obscuring the steamy bits, because the exact details are lost on her post-coital heroine as well. A fog of amnesia covers Bella as she spends the morning trying to reconstruct what exactly happened to her. With only her bruises for clues.

Meyer describes Bella waking feeling as if her skeletal-structure has been crushed like a wishbone, “but in a good way.” Bella discovers that she’s covered in bruises which grow still darker in severity, obscured by a dusting of feathers. Nevermind the injuries apparently, why the feathers? Her ravisher reveals he had to bite “one or two pillows” to keep himself from eviscerating her. For this act of consideration, Bella, and the readers, find Edward all the more endearing. Since vampires kill humans, how sweet that Edward merely vampire-man-handled her.

Bella survived the Twilight climax, and although she doesn’t remember the act, she’s feeling sexually satisfied. I’m open to the possibility that a gender gap might be confusing me. About what is Bella all aglow, if she doesn’t recollect what happened? Conquest? Having hosted a smashing party? I’ll tell you what I think has quenched Bella’s desire, if the Mormon motif is any indication. She’s fulfilled her biological drive. Not to possess Edward, but to become pregnant. In Meyer’s grandiose predestined sense, Bella is triumphant in having attained motherhood.

Do these themes fly over the heads of her impressionable readers? Why put them there.

The scene reads to me like waking from a date-rape drug, although the experience might more likely describe a young Mormon girl coming out of the state of shock induced by the violence of her older experienced polygamist husband rapist. At the least, how she might cope with having endured the brutality of a sexual drive unmatched by her own, and beyond her comprehension.

Men are not to blame, they are but slaves to their monstrous sexual urges. Obviously this is where Meyer looks for humanity in her vampires. Your daughter’s assignment? Assure her presumptive taker that she’s up for the worst he can unleash. She can favor the monster who feigns leniency.

Four books versus two
You may not have to worry about your child reaching the S&M sex, pregnancy, and monstrous-birth scene of Book Four. There’s a good hope that your young sophisticate will tire of Meyer’s underwhelming literary skill before the end of the first tome. There’s an even more likely chance that books three and four will bore her into maturity. Even Meyer’s fans hate the vacuity of those stretches.

Apparently the fourth volume was written as the original sequel, but was rewritten later to make room for the two filler episodes. They upped the Twilight movie take by fifty percent. Every fan is saying you appreciate the movie the most if you’ve read all the material.

What a great publishing scheme! The movie tickets are eight dollars, but the requisite quartet box set, sets you back $100. Ravaging the innocence of America’s tweens? Priceless.
Edward Cullen Robert Pattinson
Twilight the Movie
The biggest anxiety I heard expressed about the movie, was not if it could do the books justice, but whether the character of Edward could possibly live up to his physical perfection in the novel. Judging from audience reviews, film Edward was an exact match, which means Meyer left no room for a reader’s imagination. Is that what young-adult fiction is about?

Stephenie Meyer’s dream crush, as cast in Twilight the Movie, resembles the fittingly abusive Stanley of A Streetcar Named Desire, literally Marlon Brando’s brooding stage turn as the violent husband, wearing an Elvis wig, on lithium, as viewed through a camera lens smeared with Vaseline, probably also a polygamist staple.

How about just a bite?
You might be thinking, what’s wrong with just the first book? Can’t a girl luxuriate in the hyper-romantic swoon over the opening story?

I don’t know. I’ve often been perplexed about the teen Goth living death fixation, nihilism and teen suicide. I suspect they get fuel from mall rat romantics like Stephenie Meyer.

You be the judge. I was able to wrestle a few minutes with our household copy, to see that Meyer opens with this quote:

But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
Genesis 2:17

Does that equate vampirism with the forbidden fruit of knowledge? Meyer followed Dan Brown’s example to find a biblical passage to provide coded authority. More proof that insipid writing multiplies with inbred fiction authors.

In the spirit of taking guidance from a quotation, I entreat you to sample the preface of Twilight, because the Amazon Look Inside sample astutely skips it. If you’ve already read Twilight, please slap yourself on the cheek and try to extricate yourself enough to look at these paragraphs one by one.

Here it is, adulteration entirely courtesy of Meyer. Even if she was twelve when she wrote this, I hope your daughter can show more acuity than she.

PREFACE

I’d never given much thought to how I would die — though I’d had reason enough in the last few months — but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this.

I stared without breathing across the long room, into the dark eyes of the hunter, and he looked pleasantly back at me.

Surely it was a good way to die, in the place of someone else, someone I loved. Noble, even. That ought to count for something.

I knew that if I’d never gone to Forks, I wouldn’t be facing death now. But, terrified as I was, I couldn’t bring myself to regret the decision. When life offers you a dream so far beyond any of your expectations, it’s not reasonable to grieve when it comes to an end.

The hunter smiled in a friendly way as he sauntered forward to kill me.

I bet Stephenie Meyer cannot even gag herself with a spoon.

Racist police wait 2 weeks before finally arresting local teenagers who murdered undocumented worker in Pennsylvania

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Democracy Now ran this interview with an eyewitness about the case of an undocumented Mexican worker, Luis Ramirez, who was murdered in an assault by a gang of racist football players in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. The following day, July 25, local police finally arrested some of the perps for this murder, almost 2 weeks after it occurred on July 12!

See AP report about the arrests …Teens charged in fatal beating of immigrant Pa. town ‘filled with tensions between many ethnic groups’

Note that Amy Goodman gets the timing of the murder wrong in her reportage by 1 week, but still a very revealing report at that. And also note the framing done by Associated Press, which tries to excuse the racist hate crime by talking about a town full of ‘tensions’. Can one imagine such a title to a news report if a gang of Hispanics had beat and kicked to death a White Anglo in this town?

So we go from police inaction and prevarication in Pennsylvania to the murder of a Black man in Louisiana in the same time span,who was tasered multiple times by a White racist cop, including twice when he was already unconscious! See my previous commentary titled
Cop torturing by taser gets a little out of hand down South It is clear that the police and legal systems are racially biased at all levels and regions of this country.

But what can one expect from a legal system that has made legal testimony from prisoners (POWs) that are tortured in the hands of US authorities? The racism flows from the top levels of government straight down to the local football player thugs in our society. And of course, ti was probably the racist parents of these ‘kids’ that voted for this sick government in the first place. The violence in American society is circular in nature and is becoming more and more out of hand, and at the heart of the problem is our bloated military and the bloated corporations that supply it.

Avenge Vietnam among other things

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POW-MIA pin- Bring em Home Or Send Us BackThe wait was long at the post office, prompting a gentleman ahead of me to remark “Soon this is what health care is going to be like. Get used to it.” I might have agreed, if he hadn’t gone on to expound with unsolicited details. “Socialized medicine like Obama has in mind will lead us to ruin -etc, etc.” I had to chime in. “A good part of the population can only hope their health care will be as easy to get as walking into the postal office.”

I asked him if he’d had health care lately. He said yes. I asked if he was insured. Again yes. I assured him he was more fortunate than a sizable number of Americans. He told me he could tell by my tone that I was a liberal, and that he had no intention of arguing, but he’d just say this, etc: No one is being denied health care anywhere and proceeded to list all the hospitals that couldn’t turn them away. I assured him people were suffering from inadequate health care, unemployment, etc. He: “why don’t they get off their asses?” Me: can’t get jobs with benefits, malnutrition, unequal access, don’t know their options. He went on about lazy immigrant jerk-offs, between pointing his finger in my face and telling me to “shut up,” while insisting on getting the last word. Finally he turned away and I saw what was on the back of his jacket.

I’d already sized this fellow up by his ironed dark blue-jeans, his Harley-Davidson patch and his trim grey hair. He was a pensioner biker, but I hadn’t appreciated him bad-mouthing the postal workers who were on their break but still within earshot. He was likely a Limbaugh ditto-head, based on his outspoken populist right-rage, and on his too-crisp denim jacket he had a large MIA-POW emblem.

Now, I’ve seen folk still caught up in the MIA sentiment, and they take it very sentimentally. I’ve even seen young teens performing a “missing you” place setting ceremony with the empty chair, candle and rose, on military occasions, for what must be by now a grandfather or great uncle. Probably this is a ritual they have grown up with and will pass on to their kids. It’s a depressing self-isolation, but I don’t want to begrudge them their incapacity to question the poor-man’s lost-war avenger dogma.

But an MIA freak who’s also a beer-hall loudmouth? No quarter.

I remarked, to the back of his head, that I didn’t see how someone could expect to be taken credibly on the subject of social problems, who also believed there are American soldiers still being held hostage in Vietnam. The Lord-Harley-Fountleroy wheeled around and nearly clocked me.

“I’ll punch you in the face if you dare insult the memory of the guys who -etc, etc” he yelled. The broader my smile, the more he repeated his threat. Our already indiscreet argument had drawn the attention of everyone in the line, including the counter staff. I guess he thought that an MIA blasphemy would give him license, in the court of public queue opinion, to shut me up with his fist. He went on to make the rest of his arguments to the postal clerks, looking for affirmation of his inherent indignation. I just kept smiling and winking at them. Sentimental conservative hard-asses? I don’t feel for you.

The mosquito ringtone

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My little girls just shared an amazing secret with me. High frequency mosquito ringtones are being used by kids to receive calls and text messages in school, movie theaters, the dinner table, and other off-limit locales. Most adults over 30 can’t hear the ringtones due to presbycusis, a fancy medical term for old ears. The piercing sounds were originally used by British shopkeepers to keep loitering teens at bay, but kids have discovered how to use the teen repellent to their advantage. So clever!
 
The kids and I tried this over and over at different frequencies. I couldn’t hear anything except their squeals of laughter.
 
This is supposed to be a great boon for teens. But with a household of cell-toting young ones, it sounds like a win-win to me!

Merck Alors! What a load of caca!

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The CDC study of teens showing a quarter to have already contracted an STD, implying that THREE MILLION teenage girls are infected, is sensational alright. It’s also five years old, extrapolates from an incredibly small sample of girls who’d been treated only by public health services, and offers a skewed result to be sure. Who would foist upon us such a canard? (Merck) And why now? (Gardasil)

HPV is to STD, as a wart is to Leprosy. What outrageous fear mongering all because a pharmaceutical giant wants to mandate its vaccine on all girls aged nine. Gardasil is of dubious efficacy and had proved to be a risk in its own right, so it hasn’t been catching on as Merck had first hoped. The State of Texas has made it obligatory because its governor, a Republican (on the take), bypassed the state legislature to do it. Merck is now lobbying to require their product nationwide. An American populace frightened for its little girls will give our lawmakers the cover they need.

Looking into HPV and cervical cancer prevention, even annual pap smears appear to be excessive medical procedures. What I couldn’t learn anywhere, is whether Greek immigrant Dr. Papanicolaou, inventor of the Pap Test, was only by coincidence studying the Papillomavirus. Or was HPV named after him, his father, or yours?

The Spears sisters genetic tree stump

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Result of face growing around premature nose job.Dumbshell Britney Spears’ little sister is having a baby. The clan are mega millionaires, why shouldn’t they decide what they please? Clearly they’ve already decided a premature preteen nose job is fine, even if your face is going to outgrow it. Time for another!
 
Baby at sixteen. Please. A young mother in Bangladesh is on her third by sixteen. Young Indonesian tsunami survivors were starting second families by sixteen.

What does the Spears pregnancy say about American teens in general, ill-served by abstinence-only sex-ed, who are finding themselves pregnant? Most of those young mothers do not have media fortunes to fall back on and can expect basically lives of uneducated hardship. Historically, before public education, before the middle class, girls were pregnant as early as nature provided to yield the next generation of workers. Their witless beaus as well were shackled to prospect-less futures.

Appropriately enough the Spears celebrity news critics treat this development like it was a stumbled performance on American Idol. What does this mean for the profile-challenged Spears’ career? What advice can they offer to improve viewer poll reception in the next round? Will Nickelodeon dump pregnant Jamie Lynn from Zoey 101 because her figure may no longer be believed as a sixteen year old passing as a middle schooler. Oh my God. Forget about dumping the errant Bratz Doll because she presents too skewed a role model to America’s preteens.

Why are our culture deciders glamorizing White Trash?

In other Trailer Park news, a worker at a Lowes store discovers that a coworker is his biological mom who had given him up for adoption. What does that say about genetic self-determination? Even with new parents he couldn’t roll further than a mega store aisle from that tree.

Colorado Springs Mack the Knife

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The Gazette reported this weekend that Alexander Pring-Wilson, now of Court TV fame, has won a second reprieve against accusations of knifing an Hispanic Boston teen in 2003. Pring-Wilson’s legal team has twice successfully confused juries by defaming the victim’s poor man’s past, detracting from Pring-Wilson’s drunken, unprovoked pounce with a knife.
The Jackknife is not named after Jack the Ripper, who was never caught. Is Jackie back in town?
In the fawning article about the family’s blue blood Wood Avenue heritage, the Gazette oddly shrunk Pring-Wilson’s 4-inch-blade Spyderco military jackknife to a “penknife!” We’re informed the CC grad will be spending the holidays in Colorado. And will the ex-rugby captain be drinking?
 
I say, won’t somebody visit the CSPD and ask if the Colorado College campus hasn’t any unsolved closing-time stabbing deaths among its cold cases?

Maybe Pring-Wilson can stop by the Police Department and volunteer the DNA sample he refused to give them from Boston. The CSPD were alerted in 2003 about the similarity of the Boston stabbing to the fatal assault on Jocelyn Sandburg in 2002, and have yet to be given evidence to preclude him as a suspect. But Pring-Wilson’s mother was a long time Colorado Springs prosecutor and, as the Gazette article reminds us, is from a very influential family.

In Boston, Pring-Wilson was stumbling home from a Reggae bar after closing time. He came upon a car parked next to a pizza joint, with two Hispanic teens who he thought were laughing at his drunken state. Pring-Wilson approached the car, opened the passenger door and began stabbing one teen as the other ran from around the other side to pull Pring-Wilson off. The driver had not realized that the pummeling he was witnessing involved a knife. Pring-Wilson claims self-defense, prosecutors are suspicious of Pring’s having begun at the onset with his knife unpocketed, blade open.

Before Pring-Wilson moved to Harvard, he attended Colorado College. The year after graduation he still returned to Colorado Springs regularly to visit his former-teammates, parents and girlfriend. Might one of his visits have coincided with Jocelyn’s murder, a weekend night in 2002, a little after 2am?

Jocelyn and passenger were just a block from home when someone threw an object at their car. Jocelyn stepped out to address the young pedestrian, he suddenly threw what looked like a punch but oddly Jocelyn fell face forward to the pavement. She got up to chase him further into the CC campus where her body was found later with multiple stab wounds.

If you trace a direct route between the bars of Tejon Street and Pring-Wilson’s house, as a drunk might navigate, you cross Jocelyn Sandberg’s car right in the middle. It happened at an hour when Jocelyn was returning from a concert in Boulder, and when a drunk would be turned out from a bar at closing time. And what an unusual scenario for an altercation: knife-wielding pedestrian versus car.

Why rent-a-cop if you can rent-a-killer?

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The city clerk has been working on a proposal to the Colorado Springs City Council to authorize private security firms to carry semi-automatic weapons. The New Life Church shootings raise the issue, apparently, that security personnel should be better armed, although there were no private security firms present. The mayhem was averted by volunteer church members assigned to security, who made do with a handgun.

Has there been a call for an escalation of firepower in property protection skirmishes? Are marauding bands of drug dealers challenging malls and warehouses with overpowering force? Are rent-a-cop and house alarm responders finding themselves out-gunned by burglars and mischievous teens?

Private security firm owners claim the current limit of .38 or .45 caliber handguns is too restrictive for their new hires who are often coming from the military war zones and are used to patrolling with automatic weapons. Oh, and to what else are they accustomed? Shoot to kill orders? Shoot anything that moves “kill-zones?” After an I.E.D. ambush, shoot all living beings in the vicinity? Shoot women and children if suspicious? Shoot cars that do not heed shouted commands? Shoot through walls, into doors, around blind corners? What percentage of vets are coming back with PTSD? Aren’t they unsuited to most jobs except to be lonely night patrolmen?

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina we saw assault-rifle bearing Blackwater blackshirts unleashed on the traumatized population. The only thing keeping Blackwater and Aegis type goons out of our city would be weapons restrictions such as we have, as are common to all civilized population centers. Many British Bobbies still are not permitted to carry guns at all. That’s the kind of change we need. Stand down, don’t gear up.

Birth Mothers Exploited by Adoption

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You’ve seen those horrid little shop fronts run by the Religious Right. You know, the ones that offer ‘counselling’ to pregnant women. They say that they are there to help save women from the trauma they would undergo if they were to terminate their pregnancy by having an abortion.

It’s all pure bullshit though! The real trauma for a young woman is not so much from having an abortion, as these zealous creeps suggest, but rather is the trauma that would occur if the pregnant woman was to go on with her pregnancy and then give it up for adoption. It is about the worst trauma that a woman can undergo in her life, and yet the Religious Right ‘counsellors’ will pretend that giving their baby away will actually be less traumatic to the young woman than having an abortion would be. They are liars.

Yes, the Religious Right are like snakes in the grass of the Garden of Eden offering up a sweet apple to the innocent and inexperienced younger women of America. I personally despise these people with all my heart, and can only hope that their syrupy lies will never effect the lives of any young women that live around me as friends, family, and neighbors. Unfortunately, I know that many young women in our society will be bullied by the obnoxious and inconsiderate religious rhetoric of the Christian Right. The Christian Right thrives on child abuse, and their favorite targets are young child/ women in their early teens. Especially those that have gotten pregnant due to being denied access to appropriate birth control and appropriate education about their own bodies and their own psyches.

There are several national organizations that help battle the propaganda of the Religious Right about adoption supposedly being the best way to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Birth Mothers Exploited by Adoption is one of those. They struggle to help themselves, to help also to tell the truth to young pregnant women and their friends, and to also help those adopted children that want to find their birth parents, since the laws often make it next to impossible for adopted children to do this, even when they become adults!

Here are some of the tales of tragedy and trauma coming to those women that were coerced into giving away their children. This is where the real trauma is, and it is not from having an abortion. Birth Mothers Exploited by Adoption could just as well named themselves ‘Young Women Bullied, Brutalized, and Exploited by Right Wing Religion’. That would be even more to the point.

Ladies who lunch: a rebuttal

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Ladies who lunchEric, I hardly know where to begin. I guess I will leave the analysis of sorority girls alone as I was never one of them, neither were any of my sisters, I’m guessing neither were yours. I’m sure I have a few friends who were but I couldn’t tell you who.

I do know many society gals, however. And, yes, we threw a big party this month to raise funds for Newborn Hope. We also educated the 1600 people in the room about prematurity and gave them further opportunity to get involved with the cause.

Because we fed our fat faces, migrant workers on the Western Slope will have access to prenatal care; Peak Vista will have money to see high-risk indigent pregnant women; McKee Medical Center will have a bi-lingual social worker on staff, Penrose Community will hold smoking cessation classes for pregnant teens, etc.

In August we threw a big party called Pasta in the Park to raise funds for TESSA. We challenged each other to make the tastiest pasta sauce, dressed up as though we were heading off to Ascot, and made a bunch of money so that abused women and their children have a safe place to go. Ask Cari Davis what she thinks of the work we sorority gals do, and what she would do without us.

I think in December, it’s S-CAP. The Red Ribbon Ball. Yet another garish event designed to raise funds to help those suffering with AIDS.

In February, it’ll be the Heart Ball. We’ll raise more than $100,000 in a single night. The men will dress in tuxes and we girls will get to wear our ball gowns, maybe even our furs. We’ll once again eat delicious fattening food and dance to the mellow sounds of Moments Notice, or some other local boring band.

I was part of the organization that started the Children’s Literacy Center. Remember, we used to hold the Celebrity Dinner at Jose Muldoon’s? “Important” people served us tacos and margaritas and we made enough money to kick off our fledgling project. If you don’t know what a difference the Children’s Literacy Center has made in Colorado Springs, you should really check out their website. Or talk to any educator in town.

Guess what? The same 100 or so society women hold every one of these fundraising events. EVERY ONE. We also do the Festival of World Theater, the Dance Theater’s wine tasting weekend, the Fine Arts Center’s annual gala–all kinds of arts and culture undertakings that benefit our community mightily.

I took a graduate course on Nonprofit Management a few years ago at UCCS. It was taught by Cathy Robbins who heads up the El Pomar Foundation. She taught us that the role played by society women, the fund raisers, in the world of philanthropy is immeasurable and critically important.

The thing about your post that is the most upsetting to me is the accusation that Newborn Hope has played into the hands of the anti-abortion activists. As the person who was recently in charge of granting the nearly $300,000 we raised last year, all I can say is NOT ON MY WATCH. The ironic thing about society gals is that we are smart. Really smart. Maybe we gave up careers to marry the big guys and raise families, but we were chosen by those big boys because of our DNA. Because of our charisma. Because of our mental acuity. We were chosen by them because of our genes. Not because of our jeans.

My Advisory Council co-chair, former Kappa Kappa Gamma turned attorney who has recently published her fourth book, and I understood very well how the issue of prematurity might be linked to the issue of abortion. She and I are actually on opposite sides of the abortion issue. Be we are most definitely on the same side when it comes to prematurity prevention and the work done by Newborn Hope.

I’ll give you a little education. We give a lot of money for pregnancy tests. This has never felt to me like a great use of our funds. However, because we have several physicians, neonatal nurses and social workers on our committee (we’ll only accept them if they have a least one strand of genuine pearls and understand that Birkenstocks with knee socks are not allowed in any circumstance), the pregnancy test is a very important first step. It is imperative if (1) a provider wants to enter the woman into the healthcare system (2) the provider wants to enroll the woman in the Medicaid system (3) the provider wants to take control of the woman (usually a young girl) to prevent her from obtaining an abortion.

Those in category 3 usually are also interested in funds for “early ultrasound.” From a medical standpoint, there is almost no reason to do an ultrasound at six weeks except to show a young girl that this is in fact a “baby” living within her womb that should not be aborted.

My co-chair and I, despite the fact that we are society gals, are not idiots. Nor are any gals on our committee. We understand very well the dynamic. As a result, we changed the way Newborn Hope grants funds. We now have a rubric that we use to evaluate grant proposals. If the pregnancy test is a first step in getting the patient into Medicaid, or if it is a first step in referring the woman to a doctor who will provide “continuity of care” all the way until birth, we’ll pay for the pregnancy tests. If not, we won’t. On our watch, a local medical care organization, which is actually closely aligned with the anti-abortion movement, got nothing. NOT ONE DIME. For the first time in years. Check out our website at NewbornHope.org to see who gets our money. Our evaluation rubric is posted there as well.

So make fun if you must. But this town would be a much different place without the ladies who lunch. People in the non-profit world know it. They would never belittle our efforts, because we help them achieve their ends in a way they couldn’t without our support.

If you’d like me to throw a little soiree to raise funds for one of your pet projects, maybe the PPJPC, my sorority friends and I could have about a hundred grand in your pocket by the end of next week. So let us know. Even with the holidays fast approaching, lots of shopping to do for our little silver spooners, we’d still love an opportunity to feed our fat faces! And shop for new outfits from our fine local merchants! You don’t have to ask twice!