Blame corruption, “corporatism”, or capitalism, social inequity and oppression is BY DESIGN. The system isn’t broken, it was designed that way. You’re not going to fix it, it’s already FIXED.
The system isn’t broken, it’s fixed.
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Monthly Archives: January 2016
Maybe we can ask the Pope to call for the release of American mercenaries captured in a Baghdad brothel
WE SAY they were civilian contractors kidnapped from a Baghdad neighborhood apartment. WE ARE investigating whether the abduction was coordinated by Iran. When those missing are Western agents or corporate media propagandists or covert special ops (or wayward US sailors armed with AK-47s), we say they are abducted and scour diplomatic channels for traces of the underword. When the victims are adversarial persons of interest to Western military intelligence or the White House, they are rendered extraordinarily or summarily incinerated from the sky end of story.
Can you imagine foreign diplomats approaching US officials about their passport holders gone missing? How simply ludicrous that the US is indignant that our mercenaries are being picked off at the scene of their crimes. Iraq is a war zone. What, the occupied peoples must endure our drones but can’t arrest our criminals? Even when we’re raping Iraqi women? American exceptionalists bomb hospitals but hold brothels to be no fly zones.
US media won’t report who the contractors were or what they were doing. Security service company SALLYPORT is denying the three men work for them, or their parent company MICHAEL BAKER INTERNATIONAL, or doing work for GENERAL DYNAMICS CORP under contract with the US Army. The Dirty Three might have been in the sex trafficking service of providing “comfort women” for the US soldiers being redeployed to Iraq. “Sallyport” sounds pretty damned ugly to me. Good riddance.
You won’t see Michael Marshall in his jail death video because his body is obscured by five deputies killing him
DENVER, COLORADO- Never mind the video showing the in-custody killing of trespass suspect Michael Marshall, says Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey, “Most of Mr. Marshall’s body is not visible in the majority of the video footage after he is taken to the floor because the deputies bodies’ block the view of the camera.”
That’s right, it took five sheriff deputies to keep the 112 lb. Marshall floored. “He was surprisingly strong” said one of the deputies, which is the same compliment deputies paid to Marvin Booker, another 135 lb. 50 year-old African American man whose schizophrenic episode was treated with a lethal dose of dispassionate elbow grease.
The Denver DA announced today he had no plans to prosecute the dentention center deputies for Marshall’s sudden involuntary release from confinement. The DA ignored terrifying details from the earlier coroner’s report but adds previously unknown facts which will be revealed when the video is made public later this week. He reports that “OPN devices (nunchucks) were used on Mr. Marshall’s ankles” and “a leg chain was placed on his lower legs.” Michael Marshall “struggled on the floor for over 2 minutes before he went limp.” and it took deputies 13 minutes and 20 seconds before Marshall was placed into a restraint chair where nurses discovered he wasn’t breathing.
Ignored completely are the damning details listed by the medical examiner: the blood in Marshall’s lungs and pulverized muscle tissue consistent with beating.
Instead Morrissey concentrates on aspiration as cause of death. Did it cause Marshall’s death or did others factors contribute? By other factors he’s not talking about the 900lbs of deputees.
As with Marvin Booker, police experts blame not the excessive use of force but the victim’s exertions against the force, struggling to breathe under a pile of officers very specifically. I’m reminded of the adage, it’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden deceleration at the end. Michael Marshall couldn’t breathe, he kept trying alegedly, and the officers weren’t going to loosen their hold until he was comatose.
The city attorneys office plans to release the jail surveillance video tomorrow. You won’t see Michael Marshall but you’ll see the deputies who wrestled the slight-built Marshall to his death. The DA report lists their names: sheriffs deputies Bret Garegnani, Carlos Hernandez, Smajo Civic, Thanarat Phuvapaisalkij, and Sarah Bautista.
Marshall’s death hasteners join Marvin Booker’s killers, deputies James Grimes, Kyle Sharp, Kenneth Robinette, and Sgt. Carrie Rodriguez, all still on the jailhouse team. Except Deputy Faun Gomez, who was disciplined for another excessive force infraction and now serves with the highway patrol.
David, Goliath, and Eric Brandt
I must confess, I’m no fan of the Bible, I’ve never understood how a man’s lips are moving and it is called the word of god. The same is true with the written word, the pen is in the hand of the human. But there are stories in the bible with a powerful message. One such story is of a small shepherd boy who goes down into the valley armed with a slingshot and a few small stones. The story of Eric Brandt.
Eric Brant went down into the valley of the 16th street mall and waited there for the giant to come to him. Eric had baited his trap with a donut, he knew of the giant’s hunger for donuts.
The giant lard ass cop came into the valley astride his motorcycle, he meant to dispatch Eric to the nearest jail. This lard ass cop had with him the power of the prosecutor, the court and a kangaroo judge.
Eric had only the truth, a small sling shot and one small smooth stone, attorney David Lane who was with the gift of words.
The giant raised his mighty sword to slay Eric. With one smooth motion Eric brought forth his smooth stone (David Lane) and sent the giant to the ground in a matter of moments.
The Moral of this story: When you come into Eric’s valley, you better bring more than the power of the state or he will send your donut munching ass back to yo mom-ma, minus yo head and ego.
Fuck Cops Guy Eric Brandt deployed ACME Kop Katcher Kit but caught Denver’s SIT-LIE ordinance instead
DENVER, COLORADO- That’s right, DPD motorcycle gang members fell for Eric Brandt’s cop trap, hook line and donut, but as usual, that’s not what Eric was after. On this particular arrest date, Eric wanted to test Denver’s “Sit-Lie” ordinance and this week Eric had his day in court. The city pressed its case for two days but after only ten minutes of deliberation the jury found Eric innocent. He admitted to sitting down, to purposefully seeking arrest, but his lawyer drove home the import of repudiating unjust law. Denver’s ban on sitting or laying down in its Business Improvement District is a prohibition aimed squarely at the homeless. By a five out of six majority the jury vindicated Eric Brandt and refused to convict.
The first day was spent hearing the testimony of a 20-year veteran cop so clueless he thought protests required permits, so flaky he denied seeing Eric’s donut or the six by four foot box tilting above it. He was so smug he cropped the ACME Kop Katcher Kit out of his crime scene photo, and so dumb he reported verifying Brandt’s identity by his RTD disability pass yet failed to deduce Brandt was disabled. This poor officer was so simpleminded that Eric’s defense attorney risked being seen badgering him with a mere superiority of faculties.
As a result, the officer’s misconception about permits was not corrected. The audience knew his MO to be an unconstitutional, the jury got it, as might your average highschool civics student, so the cross examination ended without having to contradict the little officer of the law. But the cop left the stand as he came in, having spent sixteen years of his service on the motorcycle unit, policing marches downtown, following orders and harranging protesters because they don’t have permits. And he’s back on the beat right now.
Otherwise the outcome of Eric’s trial was a total victory. For jury nullification. For freedom of expression. For the affirmative defense that performance art trumps a municipality’s authority to enforce conformity and order. And for human rights. Everyone has a right to sit down whether or not a chair is provided or deprived for that purpose. Those of us with places to sit, like cars and houses and restaurant chairs, don’t need that protection, but the homeless do. No gentrifying business-first politician should be coaxing police to pretend it should be otherwise.
The DPD may still issue citations but the likelihood of conviction is now greatly diminished. A civil suit from Eric will now hasten Denver’s incentive to repeal the errant ordinance. Downtown Denver’s sit-lie law is about to sunset by natural cause, Eric Brandt, force of nature.
Is Palin writing for SNL or vice versa? Who are this election’s screenwriters?
Remember when Sarah Palin gave her infamous 2008 Katie Couric interview? Palin’s disordered responses were so Miss Teen Carolina that Saturday Night Live writers didn’t have to wring out a parody. Instead Tina Fey brought down the house by repeating Palin’s folksy schtick verbatim. Essentially SNL added a laugh track. Every week the entire country tuned in to SNL in anticipation of Fey’s mimicry act. Eight years later Palin has come out of the wood paneling to endorse fellow freak Donald Trump. Immediately everyone is salivating for the SNL instant replay. Hmm.
It seems Sarah Palin has reprised her role as fount of Ugly Americanisms and I have to wonder. Maybe SNL’s humorists hadn’t caught a break after all. Maybe they had been hard at work in preproduction. Working on Sarah Palin as season pilot. Gag writers didn’t have to write a Palin parody because they drafted the original jokes.
We like to think of our comedians as authors of their own brilliant wit, yet we know their TV talk shows employ gaggles of writers. It’s true from Comedy Central to the Tonight Show. Why do we give a village idiot like Sarah Palin credit for her seamlessly funny imbecility?
Or Donald Trump for that matter? Trump has yet to miss a single sour note or plumb an inoffensive punchline with his every gutterance.
If we recognize the American two party system and its lesser of bogeymen false choice as an unchanging melodrama, we must consider the show has its screenwriters. Palin and Trump and Hillary and Bernie are reciting lines already tested on focus groups, seasoned to our taste, to manufacture consent for political continuity.
And how about casting directors? Somebody is deciding who gets the screentime. Why is anyone asking Sarah Palin’s opinion about Trump or anything for that matter. What qualifies Palin to opine at all? She’s been neither public figure, candidate, governor, nor mayor of Alaska’s meth capitol, since she came and went two elections cycles ago.
Political kingmaking is frequently attenuated by media gatekeepers but clearly the casting decisions they make are based on viewership ratings.
If there’s a show with cast and crew, there’s a showrunner. Elsewhere in TV-land the spotlights is regularly turned on them. I’m not talking about campaign managers or party heads, they are the stage managers or Don Pardos at best. Showrunners are the real auteurs, if that word doesn’t lend excessive dignity to their oeuvre, which is crap.
Team Obama 2008 won advertizing’s most prestegious award for that brand’s successful campaign. The Cleo is an industry award, generally outside the public’s viewshed. Of course the awards should have been Emmys.
If you want to see the real wits behind the scenes, it’s time to unmask the twits. Exile them to Reality TV where they belong. Let us accept or reject the showrunners if you’re going to pretend this is a democracy.
14-yr-old black men rape 18-yr-old girl
You read that right. All parties are teenagers but the younger African American males (ages 14 to 17) are being charged as adults.
The atrocity of Michael Marshall’s autopsy is what they already knew
DENVER, COLORADO- Fifty-year-old schitzophrenic Michael Marshall died in the Denver jail in the same fashion as Marvin Booker five years ago. The city was made to pay out six million dollars for Marvin’s wrongful death but refused to discipline the deputies involved. Michael’s relatives await the release of security camera video to confirm not only another six officer pile-on, but it might have been the same personel. Actually the sheriff has admitted to the family that six deputies were on the scene, but that one of them sat it out. The sheriff would not confirm or deny the math of how many deputies were sitting on Michael Marshall when they induced his cardiac arrest. The autopsy reveals Michael asperated on his own vomit due to a spitguard placed over his mouth. The autopsy itemizes the effects of a brutal beating which left over a cup of blood in Michael’s lungs. But to me the most damning details were in the hospital’s initial diagnosis, kept from the public for reasons of medical privacy. When Michael’s body left the jail and for a week after, the news could only report that he was on life support. Unlike with Marvin Booker, the Denver Sheriff deputies hadn’t killed Michael Marshall. His family and the community awaited his recovery. But Michael would never recover. “Life support” describes his status as innacurately as “comfort care” describes the act of unplugging him.
To translate:
Michael Marshall arrived at the hospital effectively brain dead, not breathing, his body already acidifying, and his muscle tissues tenderized, ie breaking down. These are points of no return which should be recognizable to reporters on the crime beat, and likely to detectives and law enforcement managers who’ve seen this kind of thing regularly. The Denver public would know that it sees this regularly except that it’s lied to about what Denver police and sheriff deputies are doing regularly.
Though the coroner begins the paragraph noting Michael’s history of polysubstance abuse, without implying it had import, he closes the review with the detail that a pee test showed Michael was clean.
Bomb a Hiroshima plus a Nagasaki if you want the world to fear your nukes
APPARENTLY, nuclear club initiates have to demonstrate their bombs on real victims to convince other nations that their WMDs are real. How unfortunate for North Korea that its hydrogen bomb detonation was only a test. Naturally a bully like the US can taunt its pipsqueak adversary, asserting it doesn’t believe Piongyang’s claims of a successful nuclear blast. The US can find credibility in hoaxes like yellowcake, WMDs, or centrifuges, but a real hydrogen bomb, they have to see to believe. In WWII, Japan’s Kamikazi pilots and suicide Banzai charges were the pretext for immolating the civilian city of Hiroshima with an Atom Bomb. Americans are told it was to teach Japan the futility of resistance. The real reason we dropped the bomb of course was to show our Communist rivals that the United States of Capitalism had innovated a weapon of unimaginable power and look what it can do! Americans like Show & Tell, not just tell. We bombed Nagazaki because we had made two bombs.
#VanillaISIS, Y’AllQaeda, YokelHaram, al-Shabubba waging YeeHawd. Har har there but for the grace of an IQ go you.
So where’s the solidarity? Yes the Bundy rancher insurrection is a fight for settler colonial privilege, Yes the hunter-soldierers are reenacting the Okies land rush of the Indian Territories. Yes this Cabelas militia is waging #YeeHawd against the gub’mint for every wrong reason. Such as, the God-given right to despoil the commons, and such as. But NO these paleoammosexuals are not “terrorists”. They can’t even pack their own lunch. What they are are dumbass carbon-bigfoots. Their hillbilly occupation is a sidearmed rebellion. That said, the camo-twits have declared war on the US government. That’s closer to the barricades than you’ve ever ventured.
Under cover of stupid, they’ve brought guns. It’s unbecoming but the strategy has averted a shutdown thus far. Guns speak truth to power in the language power understands. And the oafs are trying to protect the people’s land from the BLM. That’s your wet dream for stopping pipelines, fracking, and ecocide. Of course these yokels want to facilitate the plunder of nature, but that’s no different than the corporate media. They’re not villains, they’re the shills.
Please stop complaining that if these white privileged jerks were black they’d get the whipping they’d deserve. What are you, cheerleading for a violent authoritarian response?! Same as with rioting fratboys, you don’t have to love them, just don’t call for their smackdown. The police need to ease up with the heavy hand, not spread the brutality with equal opportunity.
Same as the drunk fratboys, these “patriots” have zero political awareness. They are no emergent right wing, they’re not fascists. The Bundy posse is to political movements what the Westboro Baptist Church was to activism. No resemblance. Poisoned apples to oranges.
Cliven Bundy, like Donald Trump, is a distraction from the real fascistm long firmly entrenched.
Of course these poachers should be run off public land, without a federal show of air suppremacy. Don’t echo the call for imperial airstrikes. Instead of igniting a Waco, let’s wait the yokels out, slap them with fines, expropriate their gear and put them in jail. Setting a forest fires should be severely punished. But don’t let me hear supposed anti-government social media pundits cry for the ass-kicking of these wannabe-brighter insurgents.
A regime which terrorizes the have-less with drones and death squads and war has no business defining what is and isn’t terrorism, least of all the push-back.
#NotMyRevolution #FuckYou. First they came for the dumb yokels, but I was not a dumb yokel so I said nothing. It’s not without irony that the point of Martin Niemoller’s lament escapes you.
Eric Brandt’s A.C.M.E. Kop Katcher Kit
One highlight of 2015. Special thanks to Wile E. Coyote.