Tag Archives: here’s M

Happy (International) Labor Day

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Because the official one will be (a) months away and (b) it’s going to be a party for office workers more than laborers. All the bars and restaurants and stores will be open. THEIR employees ain’t going to have the day off.

But since this is also a Communist holiday, and of course in Northern Europe an ancient celebration of spring, well, I can’t really write about it without being called a commie. Too bad.

It doesn’t bother me any. Communism as an economic structure has been continuously practiced for more than a century and has proved more stable than Capital. In just my lifetime we’ve been subjected to recession after recession or as the Wall Street Elitists (not the same thing as being elite, just thinking that they are) “market corrections” more times than I have kept count thereof.

the “corrections” actually put more control of resources into fewer pockets/hands/bank accounts and especially if there’s massive bail outs. The ones who engineer these “corrections” know full well what they do. Nice for them, but for those who have been repeatedly impoverished by the same scam being perpetrated over and over and over… shit, we don’t even have to participate in the scam to be steamrollered.  Although Steam Rollers are kind of outdated, the name lives on as a verb.

 

And as the first sentences said, the Corporates have taken Labor Day and are selling us a shadow of what it is supposedly the meaning of actually celebrating Labor and our contributions to the world.

Try to have a good time anyway. Sometimes it actually works.

 

 

 

 

Once more the Hippie Bard takes keyboard in hand..

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Some might be asking themselves (as I often do) “Self, just what in Hell is Brother Jonah thinking, ragging on obscure moments in American and British history and raggin’ on the Queen?” Hmmm…

Perhaps it has much ado about something. Like the partitioning of Arabia which has taken an uncounted (by me) number of wars to keep in about the same political and religious boundaries.

Here I should interject the very much related wars on the ol’ Pipeline Grid such as VietNam, Thailand, (they host U.S. Air Farce Bases) (so do about two thirds of the countries around) India in all its manifestations, Ceylon which is now Sri Lanka as per the wishes of the people there, same with Mumbai, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, the new yet strangely ancient British and American policies to keep China as a client state rather than a superpower (way too late, fellas, way too late) by encircling them militarily and economically… but let’s start with the partitioning of Arabia. The Saudi, Jordanian, Yemeni, defunct Syrian and Iraqi, Kuwaiti etc Royal Houses have been placed on their thrones not by genuine common consent of the people the Kings and Emirs but by the Armed Forces and on behalf by the British and American 1% oil (and every other marketable commodity) cartels.

By the way Iran is not an Arabic nation. They’re Persian and the muddled inclusion in the Arabian bloc by people who say stupid shit like “well, they’re all alike” just pisses off some people.

While the Queen doesn’t have full political power in England or her royal former colonial empire, she IS a major shareholder in British Petroleum. The ones who screwed up the Gulf of Mexico and told the American/Mexican/Cuban and all other nations to mind our own business, they would take care of everything and we should just run along and play somewhere.

Economic concerns fuel military affairs. In the case oil, fueling is the correct word.

AND.. the 3 leading Protestant churches in America, Methodist, Baptist and AOG, are offspring of the Episcopal Church. And there’s movements in these churches to re-start the Crusades. Taking ISIS and al Qaeda as the excuse.

I have witnessed the Colorado prison and jail system allowing and encouraging volunteer Religious Leaders who spread the Gospel of Hate and exclude as many dissenters to that perverted gospel as possible. I’ll assume here that it’s a nationwide deal. Radicalizing American prisoners, many of whom are actually habitual violent criminals, to continue a war inflamed by the actions in behalf of the 1%.

And insisting all along that every “Ay-rab” meaning every Muslim in the entire world (it hurts my brain to translate Standard English into Standard Redneck) is born with a bomb in his or her hand.

maybe not that extreme, but hyperbole spawns hyperbole.  It doesn’t matter who gets in the way of the bullets or shrapnel, not to the bigpigs at least.

You might remember this…

“Charlie asd Camilla almost got their asses dragged out of their limo and street just would have prevailed, blue blood would have flowed in the gutters of London etc… (sic) the London Anarchists found a neat way to defeat kettling”

Maybe the rich bitch establishment ought to really worry about reprisals.Their gated communities can be kettled and turned into ghettoes in the most real definition of the term.

By volunteers who probably wouldn’t ask a dime in pay, merely a just society for their children.

One in which their kids or siblings or parents won’t be shot down in the street by the cops. Or shot in their own homes. I hadn’t been up here a red hot two months when the Denver cops shot a man to death in his bed, said they saw him “reaching for something” and the evidence at their automatic acquittal hearing was their word against that of a dead man. Then they charged the victim’s nephew for the killing because he wasn’t home when they went in to serve a warrant on him but shot his uncle instead. True Story, from the summer of ’04.

They obviously want war, or think they do. Or at least their masters believe they’ll come out on top.

But their social doctrine is entwined and mirrored in Capitalism. Which is a pyramid scheme, can’t last forever and when it falls, and their social doctrine goes down with the supply of non-existent money, based on resources they don’t actually have… too bad, right? Only we’ll have the privilege of joining them in their misery.

Denver art student informs Tale of Two Hoodies with Goya’s Third of May 1808. This KKK cop executes the black child.

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A Tale of Two Hoodies
DENVER, COLORADO- Here’s what the Denver Post article didn’t explain about the Denver high school art student who was pressured to remove her controversial piece from public display. Where was it being shown? At the Wellington Webb Building. That’s not irrelevant because it’s where viewers became offended. You could go inquire about the incident, if you knew where to ask, or where to protest the work’s removal. The WELLINGTON WEBB BUILDING downtown on Colfax. What’s so controversial, the scene is real isn’t it? There’s more.

The student’s drawing is essentially a reproduction of Michael D’Antuono’s 2014 piece “A Tale of Two Hoodies” which still sparks outrage. Missing in this version is the bag of Skittles which the black child offers the cop, locking the two figures in a standoff. Or obviously a mugging. The Skittles of course recalls Trayvon Martin and we know how that ended. The hands in the air references “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” and Michael Brown who shared the same fate.

Original 2014 workAll else about the Denver student’s contextualization of D’Antuono’s work is the same, the confederate flag uncovered from beneath the wallpaper of Old Glory. In the student’s piece the American flag appears worn through. In D’Ontuono’s original the racist flag has bursted through. The cop and hood are the same, except in the original the cop was maybe more fat.

What’s also missing in the DenPo whitewash is the context of the unamed student’s assignment. She was tasked with contextualizing TWO works. The influence of the second piece is not as apparent as the first. The boy’s hands-up wasn’t merely recalling the mantra of the Black Lives Matter movement, it was evoking the student’s other chosen influence, Goya’s famous “The Third of May 1808.” In that iconic work, a firing squad is executing a rebel with outstretched arms.

KNOWING THIS, you can see the student’s policeman has drawn his gun for an EXECUTION, not an arrest. The boy is not following an order or raising his hands in surrender. If even in resignation, this boy’s upheld arms communicate a plea. How does that inform you about this young Denver student’s understanding of “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” or “I Can’t Breathe”?

The officer’s Klan hood certifies that this shooting is a lynching. Many lynchings in the traditional sense were perpetrated by deputized citizens.

Denver Chief of Police Robert White said of the student’s work: “I’m greatly concerned about how this painting portrays the police.” Well sure, and Chief White didn’t know the half of it.

Should you go complain at the Wellington Webb Building? The Denpo article mentions Chief White intends to “have a conversation with the student and her parents.” You may want to caution that the Office of the Independent Monitor be invited attend that conversation, as a ride-along so to speak, to assure it isn’t the one-sided transaction to which we are becoming accostomed and inured.

Does Chief White think that racially enhanced officer involved extrajudicial executions should not be a student’s concern? He needs to look past what offended him and try to understand the art piece before he forces a conversation. Or what kind of conversation will it be. The student has already made her statement.

FOOTNOTE:
Here’s what Michael D’Antuono had to say about his original work. I’ve updated the original broken links:

This painting, created during the Trayvon Martin case, symbolizes the travesty of racism in the criminal justice system. It has been the object of much controversy and censorship. In 2014, I was Incensed that George Zimmerman was trying to profit from his notoriety for killing an unarmed teenager by auctioning his painting on eBay. In response, I put this piece on eBay with half of the proceeds going to the Trayvon Martin Foundation. The very same day Zimmerman sold his painting for $100,000, and as soon as it became evident that my piece was on par to pass Zimmerman’s mark, eBay shut mine down for violating their strict policy of not selling anything on their site glorifying hate groups or showing anything symbolic of the Klu Klux Klan. The hypocrisy of eBay was that at the time they killed my auction, they were selling over 1500 other items related to the KKK. Misrepresenting it’s meaning, a hate group co-opted the piece in 2015, passing out flyers in Southfield, Michigan. In 2016, a high school teacher in Nevada, was suspended for using the painting to inspire critical though.

CASE DISMISSED! City of Denver drops charges against Occupier Patrick Jay

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DENVER, COLORADO- Prosecuting attorneys for the City of Denver were granted their own motion to have their case against Patrick Jay dismissed for lack of evidence! Prominent civil rights lawyer David Lane was informed this weekend that all charges against Patrick have been dropped.

Patrick was arrested last December while returning to his car after a ?#?BlackLivesMatter? protest. He was seized by SWAT officers while VIDEOTAPING the snatch and grab arrest of fellow activist Max Mendieta. Patrick was charged with obstructing traffic while marchers staged die-ins at prominent Denver intersections. *

According to police, HALO cameras recorded Patrick and others blocking vehicles. The cameras might also have confirmed that their actions prevented cars from running over the marchers laying prone on the pavement. We’ll never know because the DPD now says the footage is gone. After defendants declined to take plea deals, Patrick’s defense attorney David Lane learned the HALO footage would not be available for discovery because the surveillance files had been accidentally overwritten! In view of this, David Lane motioned for a dismissal, but city attorneys assured the judge that there were DPD officers enough to bear witness against Patrick Jay. Lane vowed to compel those officers to first have to pick Patrick from out of a line up. Patrick’s jury trial was set for April, but last week city attorneys tendered their own motion for a dismissal and that motion was granted.

Patrick Jay’s charges were dropped and his First Amendment rights were vindicated, but of course the Denver Police achieved their goal of intimidating activists who have to brace themselves for arbitrary arrest even though they know their rights. Over the course of many months of marches, participation has suffered attrition not just because people are frightened, don’t want to or can’t subject themselves to arrest, but some activists who had no alternative but to take plea deals now cannot risk violating the terms of probation which forbid their participation in protests.

Only a few days after Patrick’s arrest, he and I were leaving another anti-police-brutality march when multiple DPD cruisers swooped up to us on the sidewalk. This time instead of jumping off and unto us, an officer in the lead vehicle shouted from his rolled-down window: “Scared you?!”

Yes, officer, you did. **

Arrests and harassment have helped the DPD reduce protest numbers. Because of favorable plea deals or inadequate legal representation, no one has yet had the chance to challenge the veracity of their charges, until now. Several cases, including Max Mendieta’s, are still pending. Max is also represented by David Lane. Hopefully the recognition of Patrick’s arrest being unwarranted will turn the tide.

————-
NOTES:
* PATRICK’S ARREST WAS SURREAL. Everyone was returning to their cars, putting signs into trunks etc, when the police SUV carrying riot cops on its sideboards made a slow pass. This was a development we began to notice at earlier events. Even though the officers in riot gear might not have had to show themselves during a march, they would emerge afterward on their SUVs to cruise by our vehicles, almost to a stop as if scanning our cars looking for suspicious occupants. We didn’t think much of it except this time they stopped and the entire gang lept off to seize one of our group, Max Mendieta, as he walked the few solitary steps to his car. Patrick started to film the whole incident, from when police forced Max to the ground until they hauled him into custody. We’d reconstituted into a small group of less than a dozen, activists eager to dissuade further arressts, but the riot cops elbowed past us to seize another, which Patrick filmed, and then they grabbed Patrick. Patrick asked what they were arresting him for, but the officers wouldn’t say, only that it would be listed on his arrest warrant.

Ironically their irreverant answer turned out to be incorrect. But first I want to tell you what happened when the police drove off. They left an officer behind. The SUV loaded with riot cops, minus one, stopped several car lengths away when someone noticed the error. Their sargeant had been left on the street, in his cumbersome riot gear, unable to fit in the ordinary cruisers, and barely able to catch up with the waiting SUV. I guess the SUV driver didn’t want to risk backing over his sargeant, so the fat man lumbered slowly back to his perch, his riot gear clinking with every plodding step, like a minuscule robocop, the crowd barely able to sustain its “nah-nah-nah-nah” chant for laughing so hard.

Perhaps as payback, the arrestees that night -there were four total- had to wait sixteen hours “for their fingerprints to clear.”

Back to Patrick’s undeclared charges. Due to what we could only construe to be a typo, Patrick’s citation read “database-error” where the offense was supposed to be. Patrick had to sit in jail for 16 hours, post bail, await arraignment, and seek a lawyer, knowing only that he was charged with database-error. When the magistrate asked if he pled guilty, Patrick said “To what? Database error?” “No.”

** YES THERE’S MORE TO THIS STORY TOO. After the DPD pulled their gag, the officers watched as we walked to the building under which we’d parked our vehicle. The hour having become late, we discovered the stairwell doors locked. We imagined the officers laughing as they saw us circle the office building testing every door. We soon realized that our only recourse was to descend the car ramp to the parking area, but we were afraid that the police would follow and corner us there, out of view of other late night passersby. Security cameras or no, we feared what two dozen or so cops could do to two pedestrians; what we know often happens to homeless indigents in back alleys and poorly lit spaces; what happens to African Americans in broad daylight while they scream “I Can’t Breathe!” So we waited until the police cars lost interest before we ventured down the ramp.

Not being able to count on even our own police to obey the law, knowing the brutality of which police are capable, and witnessing the capriciousness of police abuse of authority, is the terror that defines living in a police state.

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.

First Nations insurrection flash mob IDLE NO MORE hosting a round dance at a mall near you

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Idle No More Round Dance
DENVER, COLORADO- This was the scene in Denver’s Cherry Creek Mall on Saturday, December 29, where a flash mob of over 300 Native Americans commemorated the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, in solidarity with “IDLE NO MORE” demonstrations stretching from Canada to Mexico, where First Nation members are raising their voices to defend their land and sovereignty.

So here’s a wonderful video of the event:

This one’s a bit shaky, but it’s filmed with the exuberance of someone simultaneously dancing:

Here’s Mall of the Americas in Minnesota on the same day:

Winnipeg, Manitoba, December 22:

Edmonton, Alberta, on December 18:

What it’s all about. December 10:

George Seurat’s afternoon on an island

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CHICAGO- What’s in a name? I expect its originator could explain. Do art collectors or curators have final edit over a famous painting’s title? I can understand the Art Institute of Chicago nicknaming its familiar La Grande Jatte, but the first paragraph of the painting’s gallery description has to explain that the iconic riverbank scene is named not for a tributary, but an island on the river Seine, because their slimmed translation of its full title now reads “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” à la Sunday in the Park with George. Gone are afternoon and island from Un dimanche après-midi sur l’Île de la Grande Jatte –you wonder why bother to keep “la”? I remember the original full English title from art history textbooks, whose color plates now seem like a greatest hits album of the Art Institute’s collection. Did Chicago corner the market on Impressionist masterpieces, or did their image licenses determine which we’re taught are representative? Reframing painting titles suggests to me there’s more likelihood of the latter. Does great art jump out at you intuitively? I doubt we even know what we like.

The above detail is not Seurat, but Gustave Caillebotte’s Rainy Day in Paris and illustrates the difference it makes to see a painting in a gallery. High Def. Hopper’s Night Hawks is just as stark in actual size, but Caillebotte’s wet Parisenne has a lace veil which you’d never have noticed on a print.

Four Occupy tormentors unmasked

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Occupy Colo. Springs held a NO WAR ON IRAN demo today, counter- protested by some soldiers who think any antiwar criticism of their mission fails to Support The Troops. (Horrifyingly curious don’t you think, that US soldiers would already consider war with Iran as their mission?!) Joining them it turned out, were four of OCS’s sneakiest saboteurs. I got them with one camera click! From right to ultra-right: Raven Martinez aka Briaunna Webbing aka Occupy Csprings, Michael Clifton aka Agent of Doubt, Ian Carman aka “Father” Ian, and Ryan Butler aka Ry King aka Lone Wolf.

My policy until now was not to dignify any of these Facebook twits with attention, but their rumor campaign against OCS has become so virulent and untrue, and their misdeeds are now tipping the balance. Today the entire intersection had to bear personal megaphone taunts, but I’ll say that the final straw was yesterday when I learned of misinformation they attempted to spread to the local news. Occupy CS’s hand was forced in issuing a public statement about accused-arsonist Kyle Lawrence, because someone asserted Kyle had joined a violent group that had sprung up in OCS. Uh, let’s get to the bottom of that one, shall we?

WARNING: OCCUDRAMA AHEAD. All of it boring, but these creeps need to crawl back under their mouse pads. Ignoring them hasn’t worked, and even though they crave attention, I’ll give that a try.

Exhibit A
Ryan Butler, Ryan King, Lucky Dog, Lone Wolf
At far right is RYAN BUTLER aka Lucky Dog, aka Lone Wolf. When he disrupted OCS GAs he went by “Ry King”.

The secretive Ryan Butler is half of the Clifton/Butler nerd team that hijacked the “Occupy Colorado Springs” Facebook Open Group. It’s got about 400 members, doesn’t represent Occupy at all, and is maintained as a launchpad for Tea Party occu-haters under the pretext of “free speech” as decided by its unlisted admins Ryan & Michael. The open group was originally created by authentic occupier Amber Hagen, who in her idealism let all participant have admin privileges. When Amber discovered that haters among the admins kept wrecking the page, she began to delete them. Michael Clifton once recounted at a meeting how he and Ryan scrambled over Skype to keep Amber from shutting them out. They hurriedly deleted Amber’s admin access, thus exiling her from her own group. This was the act that inspired Raven Martinez to do the same with the OCS Facebook community page, in all fairness I should say, to prevent others from doing it to her.

Ryan’s claim to fame in OCS came from a failed coup to share the spokesmanship monopoly held by occupothead Jason Warf, but I digress.

Ryan had to step away from OCS after legal trouble from a drunken poker game gone awry, which he tried to blame on authentic occupy vet RTG. Ryan has a criminal record of domestic violence and wears a gun in his home in violation of having lost his permit to carry. That much is not disputed. But Ryan refutes RTG’s version of the event: that Ryan pistol-whipped his ex-girlfriend, which enraged RTG and the two fought, trashing the house. Both face assault charges and Ryan’s ex has filed her usual plea to the court to dismiss any notion that Ryan abused her. Instead we are to believe Ryan tried to defend himself with a vice-grips laying about (leaves a strike pattern similar to a gun maybe), accidentally striking his ex.

I’ll add that my perspective doesn’t come from hearing RTG’s testimony, but rather from eavesdropping on private IMs sent by Ryan as he deliberated what to say by way of damage control. Anyway.

Entirely relevant here however is Ryan Butler’s favorite bragging right, his secret Fight Club-inspired “PLAN-B” CLUB (First rule of Plan-B, you don’t talk about Plan B, snore). Apparently “Plan B” is for Amendment Two fans who want an alternate plan “when the revolution fails.” Was this the pro-violence group to which Michael Clifton alluded in TV interviews? It had nothing to do with Occupy, didn’t come from Occupy, and if its membership is limited to Ryan’s friends, I’m guessing that pares it down to two: he and Clifton. Thus Clifton’s statement about his disassociation from proponents of violence was also facetious, because the above photo was taken upon their arrival at the counter-protest, they came together.

But how absolutely scurrilous to attempt to tarnish OCS with the suggestion that occupy was the breeding ground of their pro-gun Amendment Two fantasy life?!

Exhibit B
Michael Clifton, Agent of Doubt
Occupying more than the center of this photo is Michael Clifton, self-appointed videographer of the local occupy, known on Youtube and DIY newsites as “Agent of Doubt”.

Michael Clifton was a very early supporter of OCS, donating water and food as he documented its progress on Youtube, each segment introduced in his best impersonation of Alfred Hitchcock, minus the wit, or substance. Let’s say Clifton’s motives started out good, what would lead him last week to step forward and break the story about arsonist Kyle having a history with OCS, packaging his videos for best consumption by the local media?

Of course the answer is simple, and we’ve seen it before. Apparently 15-minutes of personal soundbite, TV attention converted to Youtube views, trumps any consideration for possible negative blowback for the movement. Clifton actually keeps distancing himself from OCS every time he alleges to speak authoritatively as an insider. It’s laughable if it wasn’t damnable, because this time the oaf said he quit when OCS members began to plan illegal strategies. Whaaat? –leaving listeners to infer that arson was among the strategies. What kind of tomfoolery insinuation is that?

Not surprisingly, once more Clifton is defending himself against accusations of being an informer or provocateur. I make no such charge. He’s an idiot. What can you do, Colorado Springs is full of them. Am I being too harsh? Read on.

In an earlier episode in front of City Council, Clifton famously declared himself an outsider to OCS so that he could take all the credit for a –he-thought– brilliant bit of investigative deduction regarding CSPD’s billing of man hours charged for policing OCS. Our friend had videotaped an OCS march you see, and noticed there weren’t any police officers in sight, ergo, the billings must have been fraudulent, yes, ignoring the possibility the cops were plain-clothed, or observing from a perimeter, or on call, etc. So like a flat-earther who draws conclusions based on only what he can see, our intrepid Sherlock declares the CSPD guilty of fraud, and… marches straight into the local office of the FBI to make the charge! The FBI, he reports, were only too happy to accept all his video footage into evidence!

This might point to Clifton’s real reason to declare he was not part of Occupy, because a GA consensus would have vetoed his FBI idea. OCS had recently endorsed a no-snitch policy, not on anyone, not even the city, and let’s face it, not least of all I’m guessing, TO the FBI.

Thus, however unwittingly, let’s call it witlessly, Clifton is an FBI informant in the very technical sense, isn’t he?

To put a fine point on it: everyone who’s participated in OCS activities recorded by Agent of Doubt Clifton, is now on record at the FBI, in not just the lossy Youtube segments available online, but the original hi-def digital sequences, in their entirety.

And while Agent Dork has been a stalwart companion to Occupy, if only for the videos which he converts into ad-views whose revenue he “contributes” to the Occupy movement by funding his own efforts to “promote” it, so far the sum of his efforts has been to give law enforcement and the local media evidence to build a case against Occupy. Thanks a ton Agent Dork. From here onward, your camera aught to record everyone giving you the finger!

Exhibit C
Department of Homeland Security Officer Ian Carman
I was tempted because of his sign to give Father Ian Carman a pass. Who’s to say a Department of Homeland Security employee shouldn’t consider himself part of the 99%? But after successive absences from GAs, then hiding among the haters, it might be time to take a close look at this very disruptive occupier.

Divisive behavior can be very subtle, so I’ll cut to the quick on Father Ian. He revealed to us that he worked for DHS because he wanted to explain that he had access to confidential files on certain occupiers, one of whom, supposedly a veteran, still had a very high security clearance, indicating he was likely still active duty, or perhaps in the intelligence service. Father Ian was asserting this about our high profile occupy star JWS, effectively trying to snitchjacket JWS. Come down on that whichever way you like.

Exhibit D

Raven Martinez writes on Facebook under the identity of her daughter, or the occunonymous Facebook user “Occupy Csprings”. Once a formidable OCS volunteer, Raven suddenly became my own personal raving critic. It’s been suggested that her fury bears the air of a woman scorned — I’ll delve into that further down, if I feel like it.

As reported above, the Tea Party mutiny of Amber’s Facebook OCS open group is what inspired Raven to hijack the OCS Facebook COMMUNITY PAGE. Raven might have done it with the best intentions, but did it utterly undemocratically and to everyone’s chagrin and condemnation. Here’s what happened.

Embattled by internal struggle against the very identity of mothership Occupy Wall Street, the OCS GA had adopted the moderating policy implemented by the New York OWS to thwart vanguards and saboteurs, but the Springs admins at that time were refusing to implement them. Admins were continuing to post political endorsements, conspiracy theories and statements critical of fellow occupiers. Further protocols were adopted by OCS to require admins to use their initials to identify who was responsible. Again this was ignored, and now many of the admins were refusing to attend the GAs.

One day Raven noticed important posts being deleted and snide comments being made about OCS protest actions, all being done by an admin who would not reveal his/her identity, and worst of all, in the name of Occupy Colorado Springs. An admin herself, Raven made the clever move of temporarily deleting all the other admin users on the chance that this one might be stupid enough to reveal himself by complaining about his suddenly lost access. The idiot took the bait, and turned out to be none other than OCS-permit-holder and self-important-leader Hossein Momsforpot. For shit. Well this left Raven with a dilemma. Who was going to believe that Hoss was anti-OWS? More critically, who among the admins she had deleted, could she reinstate without the risk that Hoss would convince them to reinstate his admin status with which he could then delete Raven? This was the lesson Raven had gleaned from the hijack perpetrated by Wolf & Agent Duh.

I neglected to mention that the earlier hijack was accomplished anonymously, with Ryan pretending that sole admin status was held by “his dog”. So with her hijack, Raven added her own innovation, Raven loudly proclaimed that she’d been shut out too! She planned to claim that her eventual “reinstatement” was the result of an omniscient AnonymousTM hacker who’d intervened for the betterment of the movement.

Raven’s problem was that I had just the day before publicly refused an admin appointment, and when she cavalierly let suspicions fall on occupier PJ, he promptly deleted himself. Funny story, no?

Well, although a number of very earnest admins felt slighted, oddly enough things worked out for the better after Raven’s purge because all the internal occuhating stopped, and a number of the admins who felt pushed out ultimately outed themselves as Ron Paul enthusiasts, conspiracy nuts, or single-issue MMJ addicts. In reality, no one was ejected from OCS, but having lost their control over the Facebook page, they chose to make kissoff statements and move on.

So Raven was able to coax PJ and me to share the admin responsibilities with her, and it’s a good thing too, because when Raven eventually turned against the broader OWS mission, she’ll say it was because of my personal agenda, Raven went and DELETED the Facebook page. She thought she’d done it, but Facebook has safeguards fortunately, PJ and I were alerted and able to save the 3,300 member page from oblivion.

And the rest is history in the making. Three of us administrate the community page now, we trust each other and our dedication to the values and goals of the original Wall Street occupiers, and the Facebook likes continue to rise.

Is that enough about Raven? Yes it is. She’s doing her best to vilify and destroy our efforts, but that’s as much as I want to say about her.

What the hell. Each of these four unsavory characters knows that I could say far more than I’ve divulged here. I’m already embarrassed enough to talk about them as I did, good grief. The personal attacks on me are based on nothing that I hadn’t written about on NMT, yet they persist via email and phone calls to everyone they can reach. Well, here’s my shot across the bow.

Growth Busters’ all white cast asks dark skinned people not to have kids

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COLORADO SPRINGS- Local filmmaker, city council candidate, and critic of urban sprawl, Dave Gardner, screened his new doc GROWTHBUSTERS to a receptive hometown audience last night, on the heels of its world premier in Washington DC. Gardner has long defined his personal mission as questioning the wisdom of “growth”. Finally his unpopular theme is gaining traction. With GrowthBusters Gardner addresses economic growth, rampant consumption, carbon footprints and over-development, building to what he’s decided is the most elephantine challenge in the room, global population growth. Except, I’m sorry, that’s an elephant of another color. I resisted the Q & A, not wanting to pull down the evening’s celebratory curve. A giddy panel of white folk is for me as much a temptation as the easy target Gardner chose. In the privacy of the internet, we at Not My Tribe don’t have bubbles we’re too reluctant to burst.

Dave Gardner’s long unrewarded campaign against our city’s recidivist, graft-driven, and ever tragically unsustainable growth is so damn laudable, and his chopping away at the Capitalist assumptions of neoclassical economists is so urgently pertinent. But by folding both into the Inconvenient Truth of exponential global population rise, does Gardner mean the Colorado Springs audience takeaway to be we must distribute condoms to our Machiavellian land developers?

Let me first applaud Gardner’s critique of our region’s imbecilic growth. It’s ugly and residents are unhappy but powerless to depose the greedy exploitative speculators in charge. A memorable segment describes the Southern Delivery system being built to bring Pueblo water northward to serve El Paso County’s endless eastward developments. The energy to pump that water uphill will require the output of an average coal fired power plant, that much more emissions, pollution and coal ash.

Over the years Gardner has proven to be more than a gadfly battling our land barons. When he challenged Jerry Heimlicher, a pro-growth incumbent for a seat at the city council, the otherwise like-minded progressive adversary beat him, only to resign after his victory to make a sudden move out of town, leaving the position to be chosen by the usual undemocratic powers, looking suspiciously like his campaign had been a desperate measure to keep Gardner’s anti-growth voice off the council. There’s more to applaud about Gardner locally, but first–

I know this is easy to overlook in Colorado Springs, but Dave, the demographic character of the Stargazer Theater audience was what, last night, entirely white? It was, and probably not coincidentally, the dozens of experts you interviewed onscreen were also with one single exception white. Further, I’m sure we can agree the economic class represented was equally homogeneous; let’s call it comfortable. Tell us then, Dave, what does Middle America’s middle class white birthrate add to the worrisome arc of population growth?

Not that I think any socioeconomic group should address itself to out-breeding the next, but an audience with a zero or negative birthrate hardly needs to concentrate on curbing its numbers. Anticipating the challenges of exponential population growth is important, but HOW UNSEEMLY for a white community to plot counter-reproductive measures for the larger masses, specifically the darker-complected Global South, virtually all of its peoples lesser advantaged?

And let me add, how embarrassing that a Grist Magazine editor wants to brag about her lifestyle choice not to have a family, exchanged for the benefit of a “more dynamic schedule” which leaves her more easily free to join three similarly unencumbered friends for coffee.

We’re trading our biological imperative to live a Seinfeld episode?

I am not accusing anyone of deliberate racism, unlike the Sierra Club, who was certain this documentary took aim at Hispanic Americans. This was a detail we learned from the post-screening panel discussion. The local Sierra Club chairperson who sat on the panel last night told us that the national office was alarmed to learn that its Colorado Springs chapter was cosponsoring a documentary which called for curbing population growth. She assured her headquarters that she knew Dave Gardner personally and that GrowthBusters‘s thesis was above reproach. In particular, she explained, it didn’t target illegal immigration, which she presumed was their worry. To clarify, she was thinking: not birthrate but immigration rate, not global population growth but national population growth.

Population growth as it threatens America.

Once again we are reminded of the provincial brain freeze that characterizes our community. Even progressive ideals become distorted by the gravitational pull of our Tea Party tendencies. We support national reformist campaigns, but only to the limit of our stunted conservative comprehension.

Yes, discussing how to limit the birthrate of people of color is racist. It’s White Man’s Burden theology to believe that it is the privilege of the developed white world to decide for our lesser brethren whether they can procreate.

How is rushing to Dave Gardner’s defense, vouching for him that no racist insensitivity was intended, very much different from the excuse given by Congressman Doug Lamborn when he called President Obama a Tar Baby? Lamborn explained that he didn’t know black people were offended by “Tar Baby”. Would it really surprise Gardner that his call for White America to be alarmed about population growth, would threaten the of-color communities whose cultures still encourage having children?

Dave Gardner partnered with strange bedfellows when he took his anti-growth message to what he thought was the next level. The experts he interviewed are well aware their prognostications invite accusations of racism. I found it rather odd that one of them, speaking for the Club of Rome, was not introduced with his organization’s repute fully disclaimed.

If I were to guess, hitting upon the population question is where Gardner’s production finally took wing. Friends were recounting last night how he’d labored on the project for over half a decade, one scene shows Gardner lamenting the lack of financing available for a subject such as his. In the local sequences of GrowthBusters, the subject was about development and sustainability, while all the national interviews concerned population growth. When Gardner described the last year spent immersed in the project, I’m guessing that’s when underwriting for the population meme kicked in. The small cadre of usual suspects advancing today’s equivalent of eugenics theory were probably eager to add a fresh name to their roster. Yesteryear’s infamous population doomsayer Malthus was reviled because people inherently equated dire population projections with depopulation solutions. Malthus’ inheritors are accustomed to the same heat.

It is hard not to wonder if the First World’s cavalier disregard of climate change is because depopulation programs are being readied on the front burner. Peak oil, diminishing resources, declining agricultural yields and higher ecological toxicities cease to threaten human survival with the implementation of depopulation scenarios. Presentations like Gardner’s which reinforce the imperative of reducing the world population, create the popular consent with which population control compliance can be manufactured.

I’d have no problem with population growth engineering if it meant applying in the Third World, the proven method that has subdued the birthrate in the First World. Prosperity. If developed nations could share their abundance and education with the developing world, rendering the wealth of Africa’s natural resources back to Africa’s people for example, they’ll arrive at zero birthrates just like ours.

SPOILER ALERT: Redistribution of resources is not in the cards among the solutions which GrowthBusters suggests. Instead the feel good conclusion of this movie revolves around local applications of sustainability measures. Here I should confess I have a prejudice to corpulent over-eaters lecturing others on sustainability. Austerity measures are danced around, and a suggestion of cutting work hours to twenty one hours a week masks obviously a 50% cut in income.

Just as Gardner celebrates a return to hands-on farming, the oversimplified doubt he casts on the benefit of financial growth ignores the technological progress we all enjoy as its result. Gardner lampoons government planners who look to compensate for trends toward zero birthrates. They’re not “pro-growth”, they mean to fill diminishing labor pools. This is why the US invites its illegal immigrant workers. An increasingly idle population, mostly aging, needs people to service it. The benefit of growth and development was by design at least a rising tide for all.

I say we all, but who is comforted by Gardner’s thesis? How many of us have the savings to invest in a house with land to farm, install an orchard and solar panels to take ourselves off the grid, prepared to barter with our neighbors for the necessities we cannot make ourselves? Few of us live near an American dairy brave enough to defy government regulations against raw milk, I dare say that demographic has shrunk to approximate, no coincidence, the currently proverbial “one percent”. How many of us have access to community shared farms? I’ll hazard a guess you probably can’t afford to buy shares in the farms we have already, Grant Farms or Venetucci.

Let’s be honest about who’s supposed to be cutting back on having babies, and who’s in the position to weather the austere future mankind faces. One of the final scenes of Gardner’s domestic sustainable bliss depicted a model family unit belonging to one of the population growth think tanks. I’d like to think this was an oversight, but in a passing bit of the b-roll footage the audience was let to see that one of the white affluent women was pregnant.

If it weren’t for the nonviolence sneaks

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In honor of Oct 2, the International Day of Nonviolence, which hardly any government of the world honors IN DEED, especially the league of NATO and USA’s coalition of the killing. I thought I’d perseverate further on the role nonviolent dogma plays in squashing dissent. Here’s my theme: If it weren’t for the nonviolence sneaks the antiwar movement of the 60s might have deposed the military industrial complex before it became supersized, privatized and above the law. Or not, but NV claptrap certainly got us nowhere.

If it weren’t for the nonviolence sneaks, Gaza might have been liberated already. Nonviolent kabuki demonstrations have spoiled attempted marches from Egypt, have scuttled would-be flotillas, have squeezed out real activists from sailing to Gaza’s rescue. Ask yourself, which brought more attention and sympathy for Palestinians, the Mavi Marmara or “The Audacity of Hope” which didn’t even show audacity enough to confront Greek harbor keepers? The Turkish activists on the Marmara were nonviolent, but not neurotically so. They might have expelled their Israeli boarders, but we have to pretend at least surprise at the brutality of Israel’s massacre. The US Boat on the other hand exchanged indignation over bullhorns without ever leaving the harbor, then stood down. Nonviolence doesn’t mean passivity, really?

If it weren’t for the nonviolence sneaks, the Palestinian’s right to defend their homeland from their occupiers would not be an issue. If Palestine was allowed to resist their invaders, Israel would stop trying to take it all.

If it weren’t for the nonviolence sneaks, Bush could not have stolen a second election and Americans wouldn’t have had to settle for hope instead of change.

If it wasn’t for the nonviolence sneaks with their ultimatums of passivity, who knows how soon the New World Order might have been prevented? It’s the nonviolence sneaks who are the most despicable provocateurs, alienating the 99% by ensuring public protest remain forever ineffectual.

If it weren’t for the nonviolence sneaks, antiwar movements would end war, social injustices would be righted, and greed brought to justice.

If it weren’t for the nonviolence sneaks who enforce public compliance, world governments would respect their people and couldn’t rule by fear.

If if wasn’t for the nonviolence sneaks, the public’s urgent will would be heeded, instead of dismissed for inconsequential whine it’s become.

Stage Magick

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For Bruce McCluggage
 
Had some words with my friend Bruce yesterday–OK, lots of words. In fact, the Spirit moved me, so I was blasting words all over the place like that guy from the X Men, only with a gag instead of a visor. All the way toward the end of much conversatin’–and yes, Bruce held his end respectably in the face of my torrent–we came to a summation.

The idea is already on the pages here, so it’s important, and needing some flesh, but it’s also very simple. We all know we can’t prove a negative. Any third grade philosopher know this as an unshakable verity, right? So who will step up to prove that? No one, that’s who–we can’t do it, and mind you, I don’t hearsee that term coming from myself often. I’ll beat my kids senseless if I hear them using it. (Hi kids! Molto amore!). Hell the notion is generational. My totally outstanding 95 year old Granddad banned the word from his brood’s vocabulary, and he started his family during the Great Depression. But we can’t, and we know we can’t.

We can’t even prove that we can’t prove that we can’t prove a negative. We can add layers to our investigation to Eternity, and never can we prove a negative. And yet we know that we know that we know (&c.) that we can’t do it. What the Heellll!!? This is why: Reason breaks down at a point between proving and knowing right here for us to examine like a fascinating diamond, cut in some diabolically ingenious fashion to as to hide its facets from us like a tesseract or something. There’s math that explains this pretty succinctly. Look up Kurt Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, (here’s a good start http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel/). Godel, whose name I’ll be disrespecting til I figure out how to add an umlaut on this thing, wrote a bunch of High Math, way beyond my capacity, that shows us in terms even I can grok, that any closed system can never possibly contain all the tools necessary to fully describe itself. With me so far?

This shows us another Eternal Verity: Truth transcends Proof; and further–our ability to know does the same. Now, Bruce is a philosopher, and kind of a Christian, so this sort of shit doesn’t bother him like it may the Scientific Determinists that may read this. What we are gazing upon, through the lens of our little diamond, is an example of our ability to “jump out of the system”, and view it from outside, in some manner as indescribable as how we can know there’s no proving a negative. (Apologies to Doug Hofstadter for abusing an idea I came across in Godel, Escher, Bach. I’m about to depart from his comfort zone, I think. He did, give him mucho credit, respectably describe the idea within the closed system of those pages). This is an ability we share with God. This, I think, is why some tidbit of western scripture says, “Ye are gods,” (Psalm 82, for you skeptics; read it all and get some context before attempting to argue, please).

This whole line of thought is closely associated with the Ontological Argument as proof of God, if not fully dependent upon it, (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-arguments/). For the uninitiated, this is a supremely brilliant bit of philosophical tomfoolery that attemtps to prove the existence of God by reason alone, in an orderly procession of thought utterly divorced from empirical evidence. If anyone would care to take it on, I’d love–no LOVE–to see a genuine debunking. It’s very slippery indeed, and feels for all the world like a stage magician pulling infinite decks of cards from his sleeves. But it’s irrefutable, in my stupid little mind. It jumps the system.

I’ll readdress the crap we’ve mulled over here, but this is good. Put simply–arithmetically, one might say–We can’t prove a negative>We know this>Truth is superior to proof>We are therefore superior to the closed system of All-There-Is>Only god is thus>We are gods. (Yes, I took a leap there at step 6. I only have so much attention span. Roll wit’ it for now, OK? It’s in the Ontological Argument if you feel like getting ahead of me). This is arithmetical, yes, and handily sums up my points from yesterday, Bruce and friends. But, as you’ve seen by now I guess, that doesn’t mean one can’t do a bit of Algebra, Trig, or (Meta)Physics with it.
***
Jeez, I hope you all enjoyed that. Please don’t burn me at the stake yet. There’s more. It’ll take a while to work around the mess of toroidal thinking here. See Bruce–I didn’t forget that part. I’m only human, even if we are all gods. Bear in mind all, that Nothing here is any more valuable than the opinion of one idiot house painter. And any of you who have read the stuff before this will know already: It’s all a bunch of bullshit.

(Reprinted from Hipgnosis)

Rupert Murdoch mistaken for Mr. Burns and pied by Jonnie “Marbles” Marbles

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Unseen, Rupert Murdoch Sr. receiving shaving cream pie to the face.“It is a far better thing that I do now than I have ever done before #splat“
    –tweeted by activist/comedian Jonnie Marbles, immediately before pie-ing News Corp godfather Rupert Murdoch at UK parliamentary hearing. Murdoch’s wife Wendi Deng reached over their bodyguard to strike Mr. Marbles, and curiously, hearing room cameras cut all direct images of the spectacle. Watching Murdoch deny knowledge or curiosity about NOTW wrongdoings, you wonder how word even reached him that his presence was requested at this parliamentary inquiry.

I’m thinking the PR coaching the Murdochs received is being overrated. Pretend to be a hands-off boss so not to expose your wrists to be slapped in cuffs? No one was buying Murdoch the Elder’s senility schtick, until the media began its spin, and wasn’t it amazing to gaze upon the breadth of media fealty shown to Rupert? Everyone wanted to distance themselves from Braveheart Marbles, because he purportedly threw audience sympathy to Murdoch. Right. The only ones fooled are those shills pretending. The world TV audience saw Murdoch for what they know he is, a blackmailer of world leaders, pursuing the ugliest of neoliberal war-making agendas.

Of course Rupert’s media was going to praise the Missus for her flying-clawing attack of the pie-wielding Marbles. It wasn’t intervention mind you, but retaliatory. I hope he can sue her. He’d already done the pie and was being subdued, she leaped over security to have at him.

Did Marbles spoil the show? Nonsense. He waited until the last of the softball questions, and took his turn. The parliamentarians may have been setting technical legal snares to trap the Murdochs at a later date, but certainly they could also have been asking, for example, did Murdoch wonder how the NOTW obtained confidential information, and was any ever withheld because it would lead others to question its illegal source. Also, did Murdoch ever use the threat of releasing confidential information to leverage government policy in his favor?

The big story for me was how the camera feed cleverly cut away from Marbles’ stunt. Ostensibly to capture the action suddenly coming from off-camera, but ultimately censoring the main scene. Where were the multitude of stills from that moment, of Elder Murdoch’s face filled with pie? Images abound now of the pie-wielder, caught effectively with egg-white on his face, but of Murdoch, not even a smudge, his splattered jacket whisked out of view before the frontal camera feed was let to resume.

How that sequence was managed for Murdoch tells a lot I think about the power he wields. Similar to the aftermath of the murdered girl’s violated voicemail. As the story broke, it wasn’t just messages erased, but internet caches of the early evidence, effaced even from hacktivists who know how to rescue unarchived data. Tracks of NOTW malfeasance erased by malfeasance at a much higher pay grade.

But I celebrate Jonnie Marbles, aka Jonathan May-Bowles, for daring something even the most powerful men in the world dare not, to humiliate Rupert Murdoch, on live TV with a world audience no less. It was a feat worthy of the shoe thrower, and no less deserved. I only hope the price Marples may have to pay, isn’t the fate of Sean Hoare, an earlier source of ire for Murdoch Elder.

I celebrate Jonnie Marbles’ last tweets before his deed:

I’m actually in this committee and can confirm: Murdoch is Mr. Burns.

RT @RachelvsPublic: Have you ever wondered what a verbal sudoku would be like to solve? This is it. #Hackgate #Yates

One gets the sense that they haven’t really done the required reading ahead of their presentation. Think they may fail this module #hackgate

It might be quicker if Baby Murdoch simply listed all of the things that he does know #hackgate

It is a far better thing that I do now than I have ever done before #splat

UPDATE: The Guardian gave Jonnie Marbles a chance to explain his stunt. He’s taking a beating in the comments, but here’s my favorite:

At last we have someone in this whole sorry mess who can own up and take responsibility for their own actions.

If the Murdochs had thrown a pie at Johnnie the article would read :

I never threw that pie. I was not in the position at the time to throw that pie.?

I don’t remember that pie, I throw 56,000 pies every day, how I am supposed to remember one individual pie??

If a pie was thrown, then someone I trusted must have thrown that pie.?

With hindsight I never threw the pie but if I had thrown the pie it was a mistake and I will apologise once all the facts are known about the pie and if I really threw it or not.?

This is the most humble pie day of my life.

Cheer up Johnnie.

Poetry of Barack Obama invokes MLK but pays true homage to Rod McKuen

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Jesus what a bore! Remember when SNL lampooned Sarah Palin’s first prime time TV interview by reenacting it verbatim? They could do that with Obama’ humorless addresses, I think it would make great theater, but the joke’s already abysmally old. Maybe we need a drinking game where everyone paying close attention could drink the moment President Obama mouthed a phrase that wasn’t a cliche or platitude. Alright, not a drinking game.

At least George Bush punctuated his utterances with inanities, funny ones. We appreciate Sarah Palin for the same preposterous gaffs. Obama’s meaningless drone is similarly inane really, divorced from meaning but colorless.

I had to revisit Obama’s Mubarak-steps-down speech to see if there was anything there. His usual podium bedside manner now hits me like chloroform. I’m not sure if Obama’s tennis ball red-state blue-state head swings aren’t calculated to hypnotize, or if the vacuity of his bombast is the prescribed anesthetic.

At first I was going to reprint the speech with the cliches highlighted. I opted to simply reformat it like a poem, putting the carriage return after each cliched platitude. I’ve parenthesized phrases which in Star Trek or ER scripts are called tech-speak, expository details whose particularities are actually irrelevant.

I’ve neither added, nor subtracted from this official transcript. I can hardly believe it myself.

There are very few moments in our lives where we have the privilege to witness history taking place.

The people of Egypt have spoken.

Their voices have been heard.

And Egypt will never be the same.

(By stepping down, President Mubarak)

responded to the Egyptian people’s hunger for change.

but this is not the end of Egypt’s transition. It’s a beginning.

I’m sure there will be difficult days ahead and

many questions remain unanswered.

But I am confident that the people of Egypt can find the answers,

and do so peacefully, constructively, and in the spirit of unity

(that has defined these last few weeks, for Egyptians have made it clear that)

nothing less than genuine democracy will carry the day.

Well, that’s just the opening paragraph. Obama follows it with more expository blah blah blah. He begins by crediting the nonviolence to Egypt’s military, instead of the incredible restraint of the student protesters.

The military has served patriotically and responsibly as a caretaker to the state and will now have to ensure a transition that is credible in the eyes of the Egyptian people.

You’ll note Obama is advising the military on appearances — very likely his definition of “meaningful.” He continues by listing the demands of the Tahrir Square demonstrators, without crediting them, as if this list was his own.

That means protecting the rights of Egypt’s citizens, lifting the emergency law, revising the constitution and other laws to make this change irreversible, and laying out a clear path to elections that are fair and free.

And then it’s a return to platitudes, encapsulating the admonition that Egyptian forums must give access to secular, “pro-democracy,” pro-Zionist pro-globalist concerns.

Above all this transition must bring all of Egypt’s voices to the table for the spirit of peaceful protest and perseverance that the Egyptian people have shown can serve as a powerful wind at the back of this change.

While he has you almost gagging Obama counterattacks with something to blow your drink through your nose. Obama promises to be the kind of friend to the newly free Egyptians that only the day before was supporting their oppressor Mubarak, and promising there’s more help where that came from.

The United States will continue to be a friend and partner to Egypt. We stand ready to provide whatever assistance is necessary and asked for to pursue a credible transition to a democracy.

And back to cliches:

I’m also confident that the same ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit that the young people of Egypt have shown in recent days can be harnessed to create new opportunity, jobs and businesses that allow the extraordinary potential of this generation to take flight.

Isn’t this the same war-on-the Future speech he’s peddling to his domestic audience?

I know that a democratic Egypt can advance its role of responsible leadership not only in the region but around the world.

Oh you can read the rest for yourself. I’m bored.

Egypt has played a pivotal role in human history for over 6,000 years. But over the last few weeks the wheel of history turned at a blinding pace as the Egyptian people demanded their universal rights.

Alright, one more interruption. Below Obama describes watching events of the Egyptian Revolution, AS IF it was a shared American experience. The irony of course is that he watched it on Al Jazeera, while the rest of America could and did not. They would be at pains to draw the same sympathetic conclusions as he. Obama comes off quite the perceptive, humanitarian bastard.

We saw mothers and fathers carrying their children on their shoulders to show them what true freedom might look like. We saw young Egyptians say, for the first time in my life I really count. My voice is heard. Even though I’m only one person, this is the way real democracy works. We saw protestors chant… ‘We are peaceful, again and again.’

We saw a military that would not fire bullets at the people they were sworn to protect. And we saw doctors and nurses rushing into the streets to care for the wound. Volunteers checking protestors to ensure that they were unarmed. We saw people of faith praying together and chanting Muslims, Christians, we are one. And though we know the strains of faith divide too many in this world and no single event will close that chasm immediately, these scenes show us that we need not be defined by our differences. We can be defined by the common humanity that we share.?And, above all, we saw a new generation emerge, a generation that uses their own creativity and talent and technology to call for a government that represented their hopes and not their fears. A government that is responsive to their boundless aspirations. One Egyptian put it simply — most people have discovered in the last few days that they are worth something, and this cannot be taken away from them anymore. Ever.

This is the power of human dignity, and it can never be denied. Egyptians have inspired us, and they’ve done so by putting the eye to the idea that justice is best gained through violence. For in Egypt it was the moral force of nonviolence, not terrorism, not mindless killing, but nonviolence, moral force that bent the arc of history toward justice once more. And while the sights and sounds that we heard were entirely Egyptian, we can’t help but hear the echoes of history, echoes from Germans tearing down a wall, Indonesian students taking to the streets, Gandhi leading his people down the path justice. As Martin Luther King said in celebrating the birth of a new nation in Ghana while trying to perfect his own, there’s something in the soul that cries out for freedom.

Those were the cries that came from Tahrir square and the entire world has taken note. Today belongs to the people of Egypt, and the American people are moved by these scenes in Cairo and across Egypt because of who we are as a people and the kind of world that we want our children to grow up in. The word ‘Tahrir’ means liberation. It’s a word that speaks to that something in our souls that cries out for freedom. And forever more it will remind us of the Egyptian people, of what they did, of the things that they stood for, and how they changed their country and in doing so changed the world. Thank you.

Yeah look at those dead bastards. Nice.

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Here’s the Wikileaks decrypted Apache AH-64 combat footage of 2007 collateral murder of Iraqi civilians including two journalists, wounding two children.

Wikileaks is tweeting the ensuing developments. Democracy Now has interviews recorded the day after July 12, 2007 by Big Noise Films.

We have individuals going to the scene, looks like possibly uh picking up bodies and weapons.

Let me engage.

Roger, hey, we need to stop that.

Can I shoot?

Request permission to engage.

Picking up the wounded?

Yeah, we’re trying to get permission to engage.

Come on, let us shoot!

They’re taking him.

We have a Black SUV err, Bongo Truck picking up the bodies.

Fuck.

Request permission to engage.

Engage.

Transcript from the Full video:

00:03 Okay I got it.
00:05 Last conversation Hotel Two-Six.
00:09 Roger Hotel Two-Six [Apache helicopter 1], uh, [this is] Victor Charlie Alpha. Look, do you want your Hotel Two-Two two el-
00:14 I got a black vehicle under target. It’s arriving right to the north of the mosque.
00:17 Yeah, I would like that. Over.
00:21 Moving south by the mosque dome. Down that road.
00:27 Okay we got a target fifteen coming at you. It’s a guy with a weapon.
00:32 Roger [acknowledged].
00:39 There’s a…
00:42 There’s about, ah, four or five…
00:44 Bushmaster Six [ground control] copy [i hear you] One-Six.
00:48 …this location and there’s more that keep walking by and one of them has a weapon.
00:52 Roger received target fifteen.
00:55 K.
00:57 See all those people standing down there.
01:06 Stay firm. And open the courtyard.
01:09 Yeah roger. I just estimate there’s probably about twenty of them.
01:13 There’s one, yeah.
01:15 Oh yeah.
01:18 I don’t know if that’s a…
01:19 Hey Bushmaster element [ground forces control], copy on the one-six.
01:21 Thats a weapon.
01:22 Yeah.
01:23 Hotel Two-Six; Crazy Horse One-Eight [second Apache helicopter].
01:29 Copy on the one-six, Bushmaster Six-Romeo. Roger.
01:32 Fucking prick.
01:33 Hotel Two-Six this is Crazy Horse One-Eight [communication between chopper 1 and chopper 2]. Have individuals with weapons.
01:41 Yup. He’s got a weapon too.
01:43 Hotel Two-Six; Crazy Horse One-Eight. Have five to six individuals with AK47s [automatic rifles]. Request permission to engage [shoot].
01:51 Roger that. Uh, we have no personnel east of our position. So, uh, you are free to engage. Over.
02:00 All right, we’ll be engaging.
02:02 Roger, go ahead.
02:03 I’m gonna… I cant get ’em now because they’re behind that building.
02:09 Um, hey Bushmaster element…
02:10 Is that an RPG [Rocket Propelled Grenade]?
02:11 All right, we got a guy with an RPG.
02:13 I’m gonna fire.
02:14 Okay.
02:15 No hold on. Lets come around. Behind buildings right now from our point of view. … Okay, we’re gonna come around.
02:19 Hotel Two-Six; have eyes on individual with RPG. Getting ready to fire. We won’t…
02:23 Yeah, we had a guy shoot—and now he’s behind the building.
02:26 God damn it.
02:28 Uh, negative, he was, uh, right in front of the Brad [Bradley Fighting Vehicle; an tracked Armored Personal Carrier that looks like a tank]. Uh, ’bout, there, one o’clock. [direction/orientation]
02:34 Haven’t seen anything since then.
02:36 Just fuckin’, once you get on ’em just open ’em up.
02:38 All right.
02:40 I see your element, uh, got about four Humvees [Armored cars], uh, out along…
02:43 You’re clear.
02:44 All right, firing.
02:47 Let me know when you’ve got them.
02:49 Lets shoot.
02:50 Light ’em all up.
02:52 Come on, fire!
02:57 Keep shoot, keep shoot. [keep shooting]
02:59 keep shoot.
03:02 keep shoot.
03:05 Hotel.. Bushmaster Two-Six, Bushmaster Two-Six, we need to move, time now!
03:10 All right, we just engaged all eight individuals.
03:12 Yeah, we see two birds [helicopters] and we’re still fire [not firing].
03:14 Roger.
03:15 I got ’em.
03:16 Two-six, this is Two-Six, we’re mobile.
03:19 Oops, I’m sorry what was going on?
03:20 God damn it, Kyle.
03:23 All right, hahaha, I hit [shot] ’em…
03:28 Uh, you’re clear.
03:30 All right, I’m just trying to find targets again.
03:38 Bushmaster Six, this is Bushmaster Two-Six.
03:40 Got a bunch of bodies layin’ there.
03:42 All right, we got about, uh, eight individuals.
03:46 Yeah, we got one guy crawling around down there, but, uh, you know, we got, definitely got something.
03:51 We’re shooting some more.
03:52 Roger.
03:56 Hey, you shoot, I’ll talk.
03:57 Hotel Two-Six; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
04:01 Crazyhorse One-Eight; this is Hotel Two-Six. Over.
04:03 Roger. Currently engaging [fighting/shooting at] approximately eight individuals, uh KIA [Killed In Action], uh RPGs, and AK-47s.
04:12 Hotel Two-Six, you need to move to that location once Crazyhorse is done and get pictures. Over.
04:20 Six beacon gaia.
04:24 Sergeant Twenty is the location.
04:28 Hotel Two-Six; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
04:31 Oh, yeah, look at those dead bastards.
04:36 Nice.
04:37 Two-Six; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
04:44 Nice.
04:47 Good shoot.
04:48 Thank you.
04:53 Hotel Two-Six.
04:55 Hotel Two-Six; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
05:03 Crazyhorse One-Eight; Bushmaster Seven. Go ahead.
05:06 Bushmaster Seven; Crazyhorse One-Eight. Uh, location of bodies, Mike Bravo five-four-five-eight eight-six-one-seven [military map grid reference].
05:15 Hey, good on the uh…
05:17 Five-four-five-eight eight-six-one-seven [map grid reference]. Over.
05:21 This is Crazyhorse One-Eight, that’s a good copy. They’re on a street in front of an open, uh, courtyard with a bunch of blue uh trucks, bunch of vehicles in the courtyard.
05:30 There’s one guy moving down there but he’s uh, he’s wounded.
05:35 All right, we’ll let ’em know so they can hurry up and get over here.
05:40 One-Eight, we also have one individual, uh, appears to be wounded trying to crawl away.
05:49 Roger, we’re gonna move down there.
05:51 Roger, we’ll cease fire.
05:54 Yeah, we won’t shoot anymore.
06:01 He’s getting up.
06:02 Maybe he has a weapon down in his hand?
06:04 No, I haven’t seen one yet.
06:07 I see you guys got that guy crawling right now on that curb.
06:08 Yeah, I got him. I put two rounds [30mm cannon shells] near him, and you guys were shooting over there too, so uh we’ll see.
06:14 Yeah, roger that.
06:16 Bushmaster Thirty-Six Element; this is uh Hotel Two-Seven over.
06:21 Hotel Two-Seven; Bushmaster Seven go ahead.
06:24 Roger I’m just trying to make sure you guys have my turf [area], over.
06:31 Roger we got your turf.
06:33 Come on, buddy.
06:38 All you gotta do is pick up a weapon.
06:44 Crazyhorse this is Bushmaster Five, Bushmaster Four break. We are right below you right time now can you walk us onto that location over.
06:54 This is Two-Six roger. I’ll pop flares [drop flares]. We also have one individual moving. We’re looking for weapons. If we see a weapon, we’re gonna engage.
07:07 Yeah Bushmaster, we have a van that’s approaching and picking up the bodies.
07:14 Where’s that van at?
07:15 Right down there by the bodies.
07:16 Okay, yeah.
07:18 Bushmaster; Crazyhorse. We have individuals going to the scene, looks like possibly uh picking up bodies and weapons.
07:25 Let me engage.
07:28 Can I shoot?
07:31 Roger. Break. Uh Crazyhorse One-Eight request permission to uh engage.
07:36 Picking up the wounded?
07:38 Yeah, we’re trying to get permission to engage.
07:41 Come on, let us shoot!
07:44 Bushmaster; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
07:49 They’re taking him.
07:51 Bushmaster; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
07:56 This is Bushmaster Seven, go ahead.
07:59 Roger. We have a black SUV-uh Bongo truck [van] picking up the bodies. Request permission to engage.
08:02 Fuck.
08:06 This is Bushmaster Seven, roger. This is Bushmaster Seven, roger. Engage.
08:12 One-Eight, engage.
08:12 Clear.
08:13 Come on!
08:17 Clear.
08:20 Clear.
08:21 We’re engaging.
08:26 Coming around. Clear.
08:27 Roger. Trying to uh…
08:32 Clear.
08:35 I hear ’em co.. I lost ’em in the dust.
08:36 I got ’em.
08:41 I’m firing.
08:42 This is Bushmaster Forty got any BDA [Battle Damage Assessment] on that truck. Over.
08:44 You’re clear.
08:47 This is ah Crazyhorse. Stand by.
08:47 I can’t shoot for some reason.
08:49 Go ahead.
08:50 I think the van’s disabled.
08:53 Go ahead and shoot it.
08:54 I got an azimuth limit for some reason [gunner moved gunsight too far]
09:00 Go left.
09:03 Clear left.
09:15 All right, Bushmaster Crazyhorse One-Eight.
09:20 A vehicle appears to be disabled.
09:22 There were approximately four to five individuals in vehicle moving bodies.
09:28 Your lead Bradley should take the next right.
09:31 That’s cruising east down the road.
09:34 No more shooting.
09:38 Crazyhorse; this is Bushmaster Four. We’re moving a dismounted element [troops] straight south through the Bradleys [tanks].
09:44 I have your Elem- uh, Bradley element turning south down the road where the engagements were.
09:53 Last call on station’s uh Bradley element say again.
09:56 Roger this is Crazyhorse.
09:58 Your lead Bradley just turned south down the road where all the engagements [shooting] happened.
10:03 Should have a van in the middle of the road with about twelve to fifteen bodies.
10:11 Oh yeah, look at that. Right through the windshield!
10:14 Ha ha!
10:16 All right. There were uh approximately four to five individuals in that truck, so I’m counting about twelve to fifteen.
10:24 I would say that’s a fairly accurate assessment so far.
10:27 Roger that.
10:29 I want to just be advised Six, Bushmaster Six are getting mounted up right now.
10:35 Okay, roger. Hey, we can’t flex down that road towards that, uh, where Crazyhorse engaged.
10:43 So, uh, I don’t know if you want us to do so or stay put. Over.
10:46 Why can’t they go down there?
10:56 I think we whacked [killed] ’em all.
10:58 That’s right, good.
10:59 This is Hotel Two-Six.
11:03 Hey you got my dismounted element [troops] right there over to your left.
11:06 Roger, I see ’em.
11:11 Hey yeah, roger, be advised, there were some guys popping out with AKs behind that dirt pile break.
11:19 We also took some RPGs off, uh, earlier, so just uh make sure your men keep your eyes open.
11:26 Roger.
11:27 And, uh, Bushmaster ahead are, uh, Hotel Two-Six; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
11:33 Crazyhorse One-Eight; this is Hotel Two-Six.
11:35 Yeah Two-Six; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
11:37 Uh, location I have about twelve to fifteen dead bodies.
11:42 Uh, where else are we taking fire from?
11:48 Currently we’re not being engaged, ah, but just south of that location. Break.
11:55 You should see dismounted elements with Humvees [armored cars] moving to the east, over.
12:01 This is Crazyhorse One-Eight; we have elements in sight.
12:05 Bushmaster Three-Six.
12:07 I’m gonna get down a little lower.
12:09 All right.
12:10 I’m gonna come down a little lower and take a quick gander.
12:13 Roger that.
12:14 Six; this is four. We’re headed to the area where Crazyhorse engaged.
12:26 Bushmaster Six; this is Hotel Two-Six.
12:28 Request to go to the south to our original BP so if you flushed them to the south we will be there to uh intercept over.
12:39 Hey this is Bushmaster Seven; we’re coming up on B… on the ass end of the Brads [tanks].
12:54 Hey uh, Bushmaster Element; this is Copperhead One-Six break.
13:00 We’re moving in the vicinity of the engagement area and looks like we’ve got some slight movement from ah, the ah van that was engaged.
13:06 Looks like a kid. Over.
13:11 This is Bushmaster Seven, roger. Uh, we’re about a hundred meters behind you.
13:16 Got that big pile, to the right?
13:18 Roger, you gonna pull in here? Do you want me to push stuff so you can, uh, get clear of it?
13:21 Right on the corner?
13:22 What’s that?
13:23 Got that big pile of bodies to the right, on the corner?
13:24 Yeah, right here.
13:25 We got a dismounted infantry and vehicles, over.
13:30 Again, roger.
13:31 And clear.
13:48 There’s the Bradley right there.
13:51 Got ’em.
14:00 Hotel two-six; are you uh at this grid over?
14:05 Yeah I wanted to get you around so didn’t you just get that one dude to scare them all away. It worked out pretty good.
14:11 I didn’t want those fuckers to run away and scatter.
14:12 Yeah.
14:15 Bushmaster Six; Hotel Two-Six. Roger, we linked up with our two element they are all mounted up in our trucks break.
14:23 We moved south so that we could ah possibly intercept personnel being flushed south. So we are vicinity Fifth Street.
14:30 And ah please line Gadins. Over.
14:37 Bring the trucks in, cordon this area off.
14:39 Can we move the Bradley forward so we can bring trucks in and cordon off this area.
14:44 If the Bradleys could take the south cordon, that could help out a lot.
14:53 Bushmaster or element. Which Element called in Crazyhorse to engage the eight-elem- eight-men team on top of a roof.
15:02 Bushmaster Six; this is Hotel Two-Six. Uh, I believe that was me.
15:07 They uh had AK-47s and were to our east, so, where we were taking small arms fire. Over.
15:20 Hotel Crazyhorse One-Eight.
15:26 Crazyhorse One-Eight; this is Hotel Two-Six.
15:28 Yeah Two-Six. One-Eight I just also wanted to make sure you knew that we had a guy with an RPG cropping round the corner getting ready to fire on your location.
15:36 That’s why we ah, requested permission to engage.
15:40 Ok, roger that. Tango mike.
15:46 Hotel Two-Six; do you understand me, over?
15:51 I did not copy last, uh, you got stepped on. Say again please?
16:00 They cordoned off the building that the helicopters killed the personnel on.
16:04 Don’t go anywhere else we need to cordon off that building so we can get on top of the roof and SSC the building. Over.
16:13 Hotel Two-Six; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
16:16 This is Hotel Two-Six.
16:19 Hey, whoever was talking about rooftops, know that all the personnel we engaged were ground level. I say again ground level.
16:27 Roger I copy ground level. Over.
16:30 One-Eight roger.
16:33 Can I get a grid to that one more time please?
16:36 Target twenty.
16:36 Roger.
16:40 You want me to take over talking to them?
16:42 S’alright.
16:46 Seven-Six Romeo Over.
16:49 Roger, I’ve got uh eleven Iraqi KIAs [Killed In Action]. One small child wounded. Over.
16:57 Roger. Ah damn. Oh well.
17:04 Roger, we need, we need a uh to evac [evacuate] this child. Ah, she’s got a uh, she’s got a wound to the belly.
17:10 I can’t do anything here. She needs to get evaced. Over.
17:18 Bushmaster Seven, Bushmaster Seven; this is Bushmaster Six Romeo.
17:20 We need your location over.
17:25 Roger, we’re at the location where Crazyhorse engaged the RPG fire break.
17:37 Grid five-four-five-eight.
17:46 Well it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.
17:48 That’s right.
17:56 Got uh, eleven.
18:01 Yeah uh, roger. We’re monitoring [observing].
18:02 Sorry.
18:04 No problem.
18:07 Correction eight-six-one-six.
18:16 Looking for more individuals-south.
18:18 Bushmaster Six-Bushmaster Seven.
18:29 I think they just drove over a body.
18:31 Hey hey!
18:32 Yeah!
18:37 Maybe it was just a visual illusion, but it looked like it.
18:41 Well, they’re dead, so.
18:44 Bushmaster Six; Hotel Two-Six over.
18:56 Six; this is Four. I got one individual looks like he’s got an RPG round laying underneath him. Break.
19:05 Probably like to get…
19:10 Look at that.
19:12 Bushmaster Six; Hotel Two-Six over.
19:29 Bushmaster Six; Romeo Hotel Two-Six over.
19:44 Bushmaster Six; Hotel Two-Six over.
19:56 Hotel Two-Six; Bushmaster Seven colocated with Six.
20:08 Hotel Two-Six; Bushmaster Seven.
20:10 Bushmaster Seven; Hotel Two-Six over.
20:14 Roger, we got a little girl who needs to be evaced. What’s your location over?
20:22 On route Gadins, I am all the way to the south. So I am Gadins and Fifth Street.
20:28 I say again Gadins and Fifth Street, over.
20:40 Bushmaster Seven; Hotel Two-Six. Do you want us to push to your location?
20:55 Hey, uh, I need to get the Brads to drop rads I got a wounded little girl we need to take her off the maya.
21:04 Bushmaster Seven; Hotel Two-Six. Do you want us to move to your location over?
21:30 Bushmaster Six; Hotel Two-Six over.
21:34 Hotel Two-Six; this is Bushmaster Seven. Roger, come to our location.
21:39 Okay, roger, we’re coming up north on Gadins and then we will push east to your location.
22:06 Bushmaster elements be advised we have friendlies coming from the south to your location. Over.
22:13 All right, got ’em moving up from the south.
22:35 Bushmaster elements be advised we are coming up from the east.
23:49 Hey One-Two; follow me over. I’m going to try and get out of here as quickly as possible.
24:10 You guys all right back there?
24:13 Yeah, we’re with you.
24:35 Lotta guys down there.
24:37 Oh yeah.
24:37 Came out of the woodwork.
24:38 This is Operation, ah, Operation Secure.
25:16 Yeah we have fifty rounds left.
25:17 Yep.
25:19 Two-Six; Six Romeo over.
25:21 Two-Six; Romeo over.
25:23 Hey roger, what’s your current location over?
25:47 Six; speak it’s Romeo.
25:50 Three-Six Romeo; Six Romeo over.
25:52 Roger, at the six once it’s back on this guy.
25:56 Lost him.
26:00 What’s he got for us?
26:01 Stand by.
26:06 Hotel Two-Six; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
26:21 Hey, did you got action on that target yet over?
26:25 Speak to Charlie roger.
26:32 Hotel Two-Six; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
26:55 Bushmaster Six; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
26:59 Roger, you have traffic over.
27:02 Roger. Uh, just wondering if you had anything else you wanted us to drive on?
27:08 Yeah roger keep on, ah, for the time being over.
27:11 Six calls Six Romeo. Can you tell battalion that two civilian children casualties are coming back to SMI in the Bradley over.
27:26 Six calls Six Romeo.
27:29 Bushmaster Six Copper White Six.
27:32 Copperhead White Six; this is Bushmaster Six Romeo over.
27:36 Roger, that’s a negative on the evac of the two, ah, civilian, ah, kids to, ah, rusty they’re going to have the IPs [Iraqi Police] link up. They can put us over here. Break. IPs will take them up to a local hospital over.
27:50 Copy over.
27:54 One six oh.
28:08 … they’re all going to.
28:10 Say again?
28:12 Where all those dismounts [infantry] are going to?
28:18 Going into this hous-. Sorry
29:29 Three Six, Three Six; Bushmaster Six Romeo over.
29:37 Six Romeo, Six Romeo.
29:39 Roger, Bushmaster Seven wants an up on all personnel in your battalion over.
29:44 Roger.
30:08 …friendlies [US troops] on the roof.
30:10 Crazyhorse One-Eight; this is Bushmaster Four over.
30:12 Bushmaster Four; this is Crazyhorse One-Eight.
30:15 Roger, I can ah hear small arms fire from your engagement area at two zero zero zero ah about three hundred meters from that objective over.
30:27 Crazyhorse; from what I understand small arms fire at two zero zero zero degrees about two hundred meters.
30:39 Just to the southwest.
30:41 Yup.
30:49 Right about where we engaged.
30:51 Yeah, One of them with that RPG or whatever.
30:55 He’s got a weapon. Got an RK–AK 47.
30:58 Hotel Two-Six; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
31:02 Gonna lose him.
31:03 Crazyhorse One-Eight this is Hotel Two-Six over.
31:08 Roger, have another individual with a weapon.
31:10 Dammit, they’re in the same building.
31:12 Hey roger that, just make sure that ah, you’re firing from west to east over.
31:16 Just went in the building.
31:18 Crazyhorse Three and Four will be on their way.
31:21 The individual walked into the building previously past grid [map reference]. So there’s at least six individuals in that building with weapons.
31:30 We can put a missile in it.
31:31 If you’d like, ah, Crazyhorse One-Eight could put a missile in that building.
31:46 It’s a triangle building. Appears to be ah, abandoned.
31:51 Yeah, looks like it’s under construction, abandoned.
31:52 Appears to be abandoned, under construction.
31:56 Uh, like I said, six individuals walked in there from our previous engagement.
32:01 Crazyhorse One-Eight; this is Bushmaster Six Romeo. If you’ve PIDed [Positively IDentified] the individuals in the building with weapons, go ahead and engage the building over.
32:08 Crazyhorse One-Eight; will be coming up north to south engaging with Hellfire [missiles].
32:13 All right, I’m going to do manual.
32:17 All right, we’ve been cleared to engage with…
32:18 This is Bushmaster Six Romeo. Crazyhorse One Eight is going to be engaging north to south with Hellfire missiles over.
32:24 This is Hotel Two-Six. Roger.
32:26 All right, you ready?
32:27 No, I’m trying to get over to the November [target]. Trying to find the fucking…
32:33 This is Bushmaster Six. Has that RPG round been extended already or is it still live, over.
32:38 Looks live to me.
32:40 Let me know when you’re going to fire.
32:44 All right, I’m fucking having a brain fart. Where’s the man [manual] advancement?
32:48 You got one on the clutch on the bottom left on your left door.
32:54 Roger let me stand by.
32:57 Got it?
32:59 No.
33:03 All right.
33:09 Let me just put a kilo [Hellfire missile] in there.
33:12 Ok.
33:15 Got it?
33:21 Put a kilo in?
33:22 All right, let me get back.
33:26 I’m gonna come around, get some more distance.
33:27 Roger that, you’re clear.
33:33 Got more individuals in there.
33:36 You wanna hit from north to south or you wanna go from west to east? I don’t wanna fire with the friendlies [US forces] right there, you know.
33:41 Yeah, go north to south.
33:53 Right, come around, right.
33:56 I’m just gonna put one or two in, if they want any more.
34:09 Right.
34:12 Found the missile.
34:15 Roger, I’ll get you in this straight.
34:16 You’re clear.
34:17 I’m firing.
34:26 Target hit.
34:28 It was a missile.
34:29 Left.
34:32 You’re clear. I’m above you.
34:36 Crazyhorse One-Eight; was that explosion you engaging over?
34:38 Crazyhorse One Eight, roger. Engaging building with one hellfire.
34:46 Let’s come around and we’ll clear the smoke. We’ll fire one more.
34:50 Hey uh, we’re going to wait for the smoke to clear.
34:52 Yes Crazyhorse One Eight now. We’re going to put one more missile into the building.
34:57 Yeah, did it ah, go in the building? I see the wall knocked out of the way.
34:59 Yeah, it went in.
35:01 Bushmaster Six Romeo; this is Hotel Two-Six. Yeah roger, that was Crazyhorse engaging with one Hellfire over.
35:10 Yeah roger, I got a November [target] if you want.
35:12 Fire away.
35:13 You want us to fire?
35:18 You ready?
35:19 Yep.
35:20 Bushmaster Six Romeo. They are going to engage ah, with one more Hellfire in that building.
35:24 Uh shit, why I do I have AP flashing on there? [warning on helicopter display]
35:47 We’re not even going to watch this fucking shit?
35:49 Till next one. It won’t come around, I need a little more distance.
35:53 Still want me to shoot?
35:57 You guys, following hot.
35:59 Roger.
36:13 You are clear.
36:14 Roger.
36:16 You going to bring up the missile?
36:18 Roger.
36:19 And firing.
36:20 Come down? There you go.
36:23 Fire.
36:24 All right.
36:28 I’ve got, ah BACKSCATTER [warning on helicopter display].
36:30 All right, come around.
36:32 Roger.
36:34 Coming around left, backscatter.
36:49 Firing.
36:53 There it goes! Look at that bitch go!
36:56 Patoosh!
37:03 Ah, sweet.
37:07 Need a little more room.
37:09 Nice missile.
37:11 Does it look good?
37:12 Sweet!
37:16 Uh, you ready?
37:18 Roger.
37:30 There’s a lot of dust.
37:36 Crazyhorse One-Eight; this is Hotel Two-Six. Was there a BDA [Battle Damage Assessment]?
37:40 This is Crazyhorse One-Eight. Stand by, engaging with another Hellfire.
37:43 All right.
37:45 You’re clear.
37:47 Lemme know when I’m clear.
37:50 Roger that.
37:59 He wasn’t.
38:02 Hotel Two-Six; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
38:07 Crazyhorse One-Eight.
38:09 Roger, building destroyed. Engaged with three hellfire missiles.

Michael Moore CAPITALISM postscript

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From Michael Moore: “15 Things Every American Can Do Right Now:”
> Friends, It’s the #1 question I’m constantly asked after people see my movie: “OK — so NOW what can I DO?!” You want something to do? Well, you’ve come to the right place! ‘Cause I got 15 things you and I can do right now to fight back and try to fix this very broken system. Here they are:

FIVE THINGS WE DEMAND THE PRESIDENT AND CONGRESS DO IMMEDIATELY:

1. Declare a moratorium on all home evictions. Not one more family should be thrown out of their home. The banks must adjust their monthly mortgage payments to be in line with what people’s homes are now truly worth — and what they can afford. Also, it must be stated by law: If you lose your job, you cannot be tossed out of your home.

2. Congress must join the civilized world and expand Medicare For All Americans. A single, nonprofit source must run a universal health care system that covers everyone. Medical bills are now the #1 cause of bankruptcies and evictions in this country. Medicare For All will end this misery. The bill to make this happen is called H.R. 3200. You must call AND write your members of Congress and demand its passage, no compromises allowed.

3. Demand publicly-funded elections and a prohibition on elected officials leaving office and becoming lobbyists. Yes, those very members of Congress who solicit and receive millions of dollars from wealthy interests must vote to remove ALL money from our electoral and legislative process. Tell your members of Congress they must support campaign finance bill H.R.1826.

4. Each of the 50 states must create a state-owned public bank like they have in North Dakota. Then congress MUST reinstate all the strict pre-Reagan regulations on all commercial banks, investment firms, insurance companies — and all the other industries that have been savaged by deregulation: Airlines, the food industry, pharmaceutical companies — you name it. If a company’s primary motive to exist is to make a profit, then it needs a set of stringent rules to live by — and the first rule is “Do no harm.” The second rule: The question must always be asked — “Is this for the common good?” (Click here for some info about the state-owned Bank of North Dakota.)

5. Save this fragile planet and declare that all the energy resources above and beneath the ground are owned collectively by all of us. Just like they do it in Sarah Palin’s socialist Alaska. We only have a few decades of oil left. The public must be the owners and landlords of the natural resources and energy that exists within our borders or we will descend further into corporate anarchy. And when it comes to burning fossil fuels to transport ourselves, we must cease using the internal combustion engine and instruct our auto/transportation companies to rehire our skilled workforce and build mass transit (clean buses, light rail, subways, bullet trains, etc.) and new cars that don’t contribute to climate change. (For more on this, here’s a proposal I wrote in December.) Demand that General Motors’ de facto chairman, Barack Obama, issue a JFK man-on-the-moon-style challenge to turn our country into a nation of trains and buses and subways. For Pete’s sake, people, we were the ones who invented (or perfected) these damn things in the first place!!

FIVE THINGS WE CAN DO TO MAKE CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT LISTEN TO US:

1. Each of us must get into the daily habit of taking 5 minutes to make four brief calls: One to the President (202-456-1414), one to your Congressperson (202-224-3121) and one to each of your two Senators (202-224-3121). To find out who represents you, click here. Take just one minute on each of these calls to let them know how you expect them to vote on a particular issue. Let them know you will have no hesitation voting for a primary opponent — or even a candidate from another party — if they don’t do our bidding. Trust me, they will listen. If you have another five minutes, click here to send them each an email. And if you really want to drop an anvil on them, send them a snail mail letter!

2. Take over your local Democratic Party. Remember how much fun you had with all those friends and neighbors working together to get Barack Obama elected? YOU DID THE IMPOSSIBLE. It’s time to re-up! Get everyone back together and go to the monthly meeting of your town or county Democratic Party — and become the majority that runs it! There will not be many in attendance and they will either be happy or in shock that you and the Obama Revolution have entered the room looking like you mean business. President Obama’s agenda will never happen without mass grass roots action — and he won’t feel encouraged to do the right thing if no one has his back, whether it’s to stand with him, or push him in the right direction. When you all become the local Democratic Party, send me a photo of the group and I’ll post it on my website.

3. Recruit someone to run for office who can win in your local elections next year — or, better yet, consider running for office yourself! You don’t have to settle for the incumbent who always expects to win. You can be our next representative! Don’t believe it can happen? Check out these examples of regular citizens who got elected: State Senator Deb Simpson, California State Assemblyman Isadore Hall, Tempe, Arizona City Councilman Corey Woods, Wisconsin State Assemblyman Chris Danou, and Washington State Representative Larry Seaquist. The list goes on and on — and you should be on it!

4. Show up. Picket the local branch of a big bank that took the bailout money. Hold vigils and marches. Consider civil disobedience. Those town hall meetings are open to you, too (and there’s more of us than there are of them!). Make some noise, have some fun, get on the local news. Place “Capitalism Did This” signs on empty foreclosed homes, closed down businesses, crumbling schools and infrastructure. (You can download them from my website.)

5. Start your own media. You. Just you (or you and a couple friends). The mainstream media is owned by corporate America and, with few exceptions, it will never tell the whole truth — so you have to do it! Start a blog! Start a website of real local news (here’s an example: The Michigan Messenger). Tweet your friends and use Facebook to let them know what they need to do politically. The daily papers are dying. If you don’t fill that void, who will?

FIVE THINGS WE SHOULD DO TO PROTECT OURSELVES AND OUR LOVED ONES UNTIL WE GET THROUGH THIS MESS:

1. Take your money out of your bank if it took bailout money and place it in a locally-owned bank or, preferably, a credit union.

2. Get rid of all your credit cards but one — the kind where you have to pay up at the end of the month or you lose your card.

3. Do not invest in the stock market. If you have any extra cash, put it away in a savings account or, if you can, pay down on your mortgage so you can own your home as soon as possible. You can also buy very safe government savings bonds or T-bills. Or just buy your mother some flowers.

4. Unionize your workplace so that you and your coworkers have a say in how your business is run. Here’s how to do it (more info here). Nothing is more American than democracy, and democracy shouldn’t be checked at the door when you enter your workplace. Another way to Americanize your workplace is to turn your business into a worker-owned cooperative. You are not a wage slave. You are a free person, and you giving up eight hours of your life every day to someone else is to be properly compensated and respected.

5. Take care of yourself and your family. Sorry to go all Oprah on you, but she’s right: Find a place of peace in your life and make the choice to be around people who are not full of negativity and cynicism. Look for those who nurture and love. Turn off the TV and the Blackberry and go for a 30-minute walk every day. Eat fruits and vegetables and cut down on anything that has sugar, high fructose corn syrup, white flour or too much sodium (salt) in it (and, as Michael Pollan says, “Eat (real) food, not too much, mostly plants”). Get seven hours of sleep each night and take the time to read a book a month. I know this sounds like I’ve turned into your grandma, but, dammit, take a good hard look at Granny — she’s fit, she’s rested and she knows the names of both of her U.S. Senators without having to Google them. We might do well to listen to her. If we don’t put our own “oxygen mask” on first (as they say on the airplane), we will be of no use to the rest of the nation in enacting any of this action plan!

I’m sure there are many other ideas you can come up with on how we can build this movement. Get creative. Think outside the politics-as-usual box. BE SUBVERSIVE! Think of that local action no one else has tried. Behave as if your life depended on it. Be bold! Try doing something with reckless abandon. It may just liberate you and your community and your nation.

2p, 2p and Honduras… and Mexico… and Nicaragua… and…

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I don’t know if I’ve published this here or not or how I packaged it. But for background, the “p” stands for “piastre” a South VietNamese coin that was worth a little less than a quarter of a U.S. penny. This was the “Great Free Market Opportunity” our government was sending people to fight and die to defend. The way I heard it on some occasions it’s used to condemn the VietNamese people.”How nasty and vile and filthy they are” for living in such poverty.

But it was the VietNamese version of a washroom attendant, a little old granny lady… “Wipe your ass for you, GI… 2p, 2p do extra good job 2p, 2p…”

Yes, we were there, so it seems, to give the people such a wonderful Free Market and the opportunity to wipe our asses for less than a half a cent per “use”.

And to despise them for being so desperately poor.

I wasn’t there, my sources were, so what if you say it’s false?

Talk to them, those who are still alive that is.

Now there’s a war going on in Honduras, backed exclusively by U.S. and Canadian corporations, to topple a “Dictator” who was going to nationalize the resources of Honduras and make the U.S. and Canadian corporations pay more than the 3-4 dollars a day for the labor of the People of Honduras.

The police and military have been battling in the streets for a week now, busting the heads of “elitists” who are trying to “enslave” everybody in Honduras. They did this in a Military coup ahead of an election that the “Dictator” probably would have won.

That there’s no CIVILIANS out busting the heads of these “elitists” and “Communist Radicals” tells a far different story than you might hear on, say, Fox News or in the Colorado Springs Gazette.

In Nicaragua the goon-squads were called “Contras” and backed by the same people who bring us Fox News and the Gazette. They bombed and shot up schools, orphanages, churches and hospitals, and “our” government called them Heroes and Freedom Fighters.

In Mexico, the PAN party has been running the show for a while now. They took over from the “socialist radicals” in the PRI party and for the same reason as Honduras, and Nicaragua, and South VietNamese, to give the people “Freedom” and the unfettered “Free Market” and all the benefits of Capitalism.

Doug Lamborn and Tancredo and Michelle Malkin tell us so, thus, it must be true.

They also tell us that the economy in Mexico after two and a half terms of a PAN controlled “Free” government, so filled with opportunity… is somehow oh.. how does one make this sound logical… fueling a massive wave of Illegal Immigration into the United States. By people seeking to feed their families.

Record Numbers in fact.

My my my my my… give them all the Benefits of a Reagan-inspired Libertarian Free Market and their country falls to shit and more of the people have to flee poverty and come here to find work.

Like the KTEL commercials used to say “Now how much would you pay? BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!”

They’re wanting to expand the same Corporate Free Market Rule all across the United States as well, promising us such wonderful Economic Freedom and Opportunity…

Wipe your ass GI, 2p, 2p…

Yuppie Feminist Brigade comes to life on behalf of US Imperialism in Afghanistan

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hollywoodIt’s impossible to make this yuppie humanitarian interventionist lunacy up on our own, and since we at Not My Tribe have talked so much about Greg Mortenson and his Three Cups of Tea, why not take a quick look at Jay Leno’s wife’s new “cause celebre.” See: Jay and Mavis Leno turn serious about the plight of Afghan women.

Move over Darfur. Move over Tibet. There’s a new ‘In’ thing for yuppie America to focus its tears on. And the new team has on board CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, former National Organization for Women President Eleanor Smeal, knuckle chinned Jay Leno and wife, and wait!!! …where’s Madelyn Albright? It must just be a matter of time before she and the President’s wife come into the act, too! Whooppee! The Imperial Yuppie Feminist Brigade is now coming to life to save women in Afghanistan! Move over Greg Mortenson!

Humanitarian interventionism tied now to terrorist extermination by Pentagon drone! Isn’t this all so sweet? I know that the Muslim women of occupied Afghanistan must just be so happy about this ‘aid’.

Bombs away! Bombs away with NOW, Ms. Magazine, and the ‘Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission’ propaganda drops on dumb-founded America, too! Hollywood America appeals to Shopping Mall America to CARE!

Obama’s slam Duncan of public education

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arne duncanIt seems that the ‘Change’ President and basketball player, Barack Obama, has picked another Basketball jock like himself to head up National Education policy? In choosing Arne Duncan for the post, Barack Obama slam Dunkan-ed the Chicago community organizing group, Parents United for Responsible Education, with an Aspen Institute prodigy who specializes in closing down public schools and then reopening them as privatized ‘charter schools’.

No wonder Pastor Rick Warren will be at the Inaugural Ceremony performing for BO, because this is the favored program of the Religious Right that would have religion put back in schools forcefully, using public tax monies to get it done. Barack is on board this program, and so is Harvard Basketball jock Arne.

Who is this Arne really? He is a guy who has never been a teacher, and get this! … he has a degree in Sociology! That would get me and you a job at about $13/hr, but Arne got his Sociology Degree at Harvard. Add some extra points, because he paid some extra dollars for that degree. PLUS, he’s added on some honorary credentials from other elite outfits, too, including a ‘Doctor of Laws’ degree from Lake Forest College. Wkipedia tells us that Most (if not all) U.S. universities that award the degree of Doctor of Laws (LL.D.), award it only as an honorary degree. Read…. big shots are given it for free, this degree.

But that would not be enough alone to have gotten Barack Obama to pick the guy for Education Boss. The fact is, that Arne Duncan was one of Harvard’s greatest basketball Stars! Oh the alumni! Oh, and there’s more! Arne plays BB games with Barrack in Chicago! Never has cronyism been so narrowed!

The impact of Obama’s slam dunk of public education with this sorry choice of exHarvard BB Star Duncan, is more than just an indication of how Barack Obama wants to do yet more with the ‘No Child Left Behind’ sort of privatization mish mash of the Dubya years, but is also an indicator of how little real public heath care we shall see in the cards in the years ahead. After all, if you think that privatizing public education is a good thing, then it is not going to mean that this ‘Change’ BB Dude will be ready to change the already privatized American Health Care System for the better either. No way! He’ll just put a basketball jock, this time from Yale, perhaps?, in charge of Medicine. First the Boss would have to be vetted by the Aspen Institute or some other elite ruling class money laundering outfit like them though. Then slam dunk Health Care. It looks deadly.

Yes, it’s going to be corruption as usual in the Education Department and one doesn’t need a Sociology Degree to figure that one out from this choice. Good luck, Kids! 2+2=4 and Barack Obama is bouncing people around in court. It’ll be a real public education for all of us very soon, and could it get much worse? Social Security on the chopping block anybody?

Jonah and the Obama Chinese food story

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(Editor’s note: Jonah posted this account yesterday on Alfrankenweb, which reached the Rec List on Daily Kos. Now I’m fielding emails and calls inquiring whether Jonah is real. Here are the Alfrankenweb posts, until Jonah can give us an update.)

OK, so this is the story as I finally got straight.

I was out scrounging scrap metal today, to get enough food money to last us through the weekend.

I came home and Miss Johnnie, my landlady, was crying and showing me a table full of food.

I thought one of our friends or my relatives had come over and bought for us.

But it was bought, according to the lady who owns the restaurant, by Barack Obama over the phone.

After the Obama Campaign Workers came to the door, and were listening to Miss Johnnie describe why she, a registered republican, was voting for Obama.

She showed a picture of her daughter Michelle the Marine who had been deployed to Iraq twice, and is still pending discharge because of the Stop Loss.

All her kids in fact.

And her late husband, who had died of Agent Orange from his service in VietNam.

About that time the campaign workers started making phone calls and she got to talk to Obama.

She was in tears while telling me all this so I got the story wrong at first.

She talked about the War, about the health care bill that got turned down because it was “too expensive” but the Rich Thieves got to take 16 times as much just because they had broken the economy with their wild schemes.

About the VA messing around with the repayment of the medical expenses she had borne by herself over the 12 years since her husband died, over nitpicky paperwork errors on Their Part.

About me being out against doctor’s orders scrounging scrap metal just to make it through til monday.

One of the volunteers was a Marine and a Nam Vet, so much for the notion that Veterans are all voting for McCain, (despite his continued votes to screw the veterans the same way the VA is messing up Miss Johnnie’s paperwork and payments)

Miss Johnnie, understandably, doesn’t talk without a great deal of emotion on those subjects.

So after the Volunteers left, about 20 minutes later a very large order of Chinese food charged to Obama came to the door.

The Delivery man is a recent immigrant and doesn’t speak English, so he called his boss, who confirmed it but said it was supposed to be a surprise.

Enough food to last until Monday.

I came in with this really pitiful half gallon of milk and about a meal worth of food and some cat food.. and she was crying and showing me all the food.

And said that Obama had bought it for us.

I didn’t get the story quite right the first time, so I thought he had been there in person.

Not quite, but you know how in the Churches people say “I’ll be there in spirit”?

He was there in a way that really counts.

McCain has a fake falsified made-up “Joe the Plumber” who turns out to be a white-collar person named Sam and not even a plumber…

Obama now has Miss Johnnie the Viet-Nam Widow and a Real Joe the Ex-Roofer with Busted Feet.

That’s why Obama wins.

He’s Real, his concern for the people is Real, and the people who supporting him, WE’RE real too.

…

Hell, I don’t know where to research it myself.

There’s been a flood of out-of-state volunteers past two days, because Ms Sarah was doing her Schtick at the baseball park to a tame crowd.

Tame as in no Nasty Obama Supporters being let through to ask all kinds of icky-poo questions.

I went in yesterday and mentioned at the welcome desk at Obama HQ about the FreakSquad chalking the death-threat or death-wish either one on the sidewalk essentially directly across the street from them.

The restaurant is “Coal Mine Dragon” at 1720 W Uintah, the Springs. The lady who runs it is Second Generation Chinese. She told Miss Johnnie that it was Obama paying the tab, and that it was supposed to have been secret.

If it was merely the Volunteers calling in the order, and the restaurant owner not getting it out clearly distinguished, that’s still great.

as to was he the one who spoke to her, he identified himself as such.

If he was a clever impostor doing a good imitation that’s more improbable.

Not much reason anybody would, especially as Obama wouldn’t tolerate it.

if he confirms it himself is the best proof I could think of.

…

Who has that kind of pull to hotline direct to Obama during a rally?

Congressman Mark Udall, that’s who.

He told Miss Johnnie about being a Marine himself, I had thought “damn, that sounds a lot like Mark Udall…”

And, sure enough…

…

Run the pack of clowns out of office.

There’s some tidying up to do, seems like a herd of Elephants has gone through the national living room, pooping on the floors, breaking stuff and drinking out of the toilet.

If I’m not mistaken, some poor clerk at the VA in Denver is going to have a rude surprise Monday morning.

Mark Udall is running on Workers Rights, and Veterans Affairs… very large issues here in Colorado.

The “Terror Connection” they’ve been trying to tar Obama with, with Udall it’s “the Department of Peace” and Labor Unions.

His opponent is making big talk from those same National Attack Ads just like with the “Daschle Democrats” Ads with the bobble heads…

Well, Daschle was proven RIGHT about Iraq.

Trying to paint Udall as a hippie-dippy doper (seriously, they’ve been using that angle) when he’s a Marine and a Nam Vet, I think they bit off a chunk of the wrong sandwich.

I don’t know what all the names of the meals are, one involved a lot of chicken and broccoli, mushrooms… oh man..

Another same recipe, stir fried, with steak in it.

Cabbage rolls and rice with more chicken in it…

I think I like this restaurant and plan to give them my patronage.

The bill came to just under $40 bux.

If you’re in Colorado, vote no on 47 and there’s two more Blatantly union busting amendments there.

Oh, there’s an attack ad on right now….

These freaks need to be slapped repeatedly, in fact I’ll start a thread about that…

…

I had to reboot the puter, knocked my keyboard connection loose.

We have one cat, Keenan, neutered male.

She built him cat-runs at three of the windows, we can’t let him outside because our next-door neighbor is a Confirmed Cat-Kicker.

Last summer she contracted Leishmaniasis, which is also called the Baghdad Boil, in Mesopotamia it’s spread by the bite of a flea…

They gave her Antibiotics for it, and for the Mycelin Resistant Staph Aureole that goes with it.

This has affected her inner ear, because the antibiotics were so strong.

At the time we thought it was her lymphatic cancer coming out of remission.

After her husband died, she was waiting on getting her Widow’s Pension, the VA wasn’t even acknowledging that her husband had died of Agent Orange.

It took a few years for that. That’s when she had the lymphoma.

She was out on the street while taking chemo.

Last year she started to try for her CHAMPVA benefits, so she could get meaningful health care.

The ones who come to the forum to blast “Socialized Medicine” don’t know the least part of what the hell they’re putting out, or putting down.

We had the paperwork and forms from the VA to take to the Air Force to get her Widowed Spouse ID card, to get the CHAMPVA started.

We rode the bus across town to Peterson AFB, they allowed her onto the base, but not me, made me get off the bus and wait outside.

Which I prefer anyway, when I left the Air Force, I LEFT.

The guards at the gate, they weren’t Air Force, didn’t have any insignia or rank or name tags, but I knew they weren’t SPs because the SPs are stone freaky about maintaining a spit-shined appearance.

Turns out they’re mercenaries, I thought at first Blackwater but it seems it’s a different group of Mercs.

All the same to me.

At the Admin building another Mercenary, not Air Force personnel, clerk told her that the VA was full of shit, everything changed with nine eleven, don’t you know there’s a war on yadda yadda and threatened to have her arrested.

This year we finally got her ID card, got her CHAMPVA started.

Any Vets reading this, be-the-hell-ware because this is what they’re fixin’ to do to YOU next if McInasane gets in power.

So she’s owed 11 years worth of reimbursement for all the medical care she had to pay for out of pocket, even with the next to worthless Colorado Indigent Care Program insurance (Look up “worthless” in the dictionary and right next to it will be a picture of CICP) one of those “Massive Entitlement Programs For Bums” that McCain bitches about.

She got some reimbursement but is owed about 5 times as much more.

They keep bouncing her claims back, saying the forms are “incomplete”.

Utter bullshit, because I went over their claim as to what information was missing, and it was all right there in the papers.

That’s why I believe somebody from Mark Udall’s office is going to give them a Nasty Note Monday.

That’s the status so far.

The Health Care meltdown in Colorado is almost as bad as it was in Texas when I left.

Privatized everything. Well, I can testify, it didn’t work in Texas, and it surely ain’t working in Colorado either.

…

I get SSI and Medicaid. Miss Johnnie gets a Widows pension and CHAMPVA.

I supplement it by repairing computers and selling them, and the Scrap Metal.

I’ve been making more money off the scrap metal than the computers though.

The internet is part of our Cable package.

And, it’s necessary for the repairs I do to the computers, otherwise we would have ditched that part and just used dial-up.

The past month I haven’t been able to scrap, doctor’s orders.

That drop in income brought us near the edge.

We have for vehicles three bicycles, two of them mine, and she can’t ride hers anymore because of some of her injuries.

And ride the bus for further transportation.

I don’t drive anyway, never learned because it would be too dangerous.

Trust me on that.

But I’ve been getting on fairly well using the bicycles.

Until last month.

On top of that, scrap prices are down, way down… and there’s more competition for what scrap there is.

This is what’s happening across America.

I find out on November 5th what exact kind of surgery is going to be needed, for the foot I thought was uninjured 16 years ago.

I do know part of it is going to involve removal of a bone, the Cuboid.

I won’t have a leg to stand on.

It would be really really cool, you know, if this situation were anywhere near being unique.

Fact is, it ain’t.

That’s why there’s this:

I’m not dancing with joy that McCain is going to lose…

I’m rejoicing that America now has a chance to WIN.

…

Thanks, but we’re getting there. You might need it yourself soon anyway.

Stocks are tanking like mad.

Gas prices are down to 3 a gallon but that’s mostly because so much business, small and large, has crashed that there’s a huge drop in actual consumption.

First law of economics, supply and demand.

There’s going to be money coming in, just a question of when.

We both know how to make money, just we aren’t going to try doing anything on credit, build from a cash-only base.

Johnnie used to be a business owner, she and her husband did custom printing. Before his illness got to him they had over a million in the bank.

That’s how quick a catastrophic illness can do you down.

“difficult” and “impossible” are two separate equations, if something is difficult that just means it’s possible.

It’s a challenge more than anything. I hope.

I’ve got good skills I can adapt, like these computer skills.

This one I’m using now I built up from parts I salvaged, part of the scrap metal deal.

Here in town there WAS a steady supply of one-off computers, like, HP would come out with the newest mainboard and all the HP employees would get a discount on the new one, and either sell the older ones cheap or donate them to the ARC or Goodwill. Here’s a really good business tip, something you might want to invest yourself into, a new mainboard combination comes out roughly every 6 months and the older one, the one that’s King of the Jungle today, is going to be only worth half of what it is today.
Same with all the parts.

And for all practical purposes, the best there is today, in 6 months will still be able to run any software package there is. Not much point in buying a brand new computer, unless you’re developing software specifically for the newest chipset. so I’m developing a base of people who will want to buy good computers, that’ll do whatever they want, just at an amazingly lower price than they would pay to HP or Dell.
it’s more a matter of timing your purchases than anything else.

Now HP is closing down most of their local operations here, moving some to Albuquerque and some to iirc Little Rock.

But I’ll adapt. Part of it is that I don’t have a huge monetary investment in anything, mostly my investment has been in skills.

At least we have a plan, and are getting, slowly to be sure, but it is building up, the means to implement the plan.

Dire straits are familiar territory for me. At least I know my way around.

There’s good coming onto the horizon.

Singin’ the Bail-out blues…

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..except nothing that ugly could possibly be put to music..

There’s a massive effort from the Far Right to blame the Liberals, blame the Working poor (whispered rumors are that it’s those MINORITIES) when the evidence has been staring us right in the face for all this time.

Infomercials on how to Get Rich Without Trying filled the late-night, early morning TeeVee…

The loans that were defaulted, turns out that not only most but the Vast Majority of them were to people who were speculating.

Not people who were buying homes to actually, you know, LIVE in them.

The “Flip that house” show is still on HGTV…

Buy a house at a flexible rate, wait while the real estate value goes up, then sell it at a profit.

The Infomercials promised that you could do this with “little or even NO money down! How could you possibly lose?”

Buy a house with no money, sell it a week later, pay off the balance of your mortgage and use the rest as paper collateral, “Cash Instrument” on another loan, preferably two, and do the same thing over again.

“How could you possibly lose?”

ummm… maybe by following the instructions, yeah, that’s a fast way to lose.

NOW, How Much Would You Pay? BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!

these “Cash Instruments” essentially a post-dated check backed by an extremely ætherial government guarantee of payment…

then get used as collateral for secondary and tertiary levels of loans.

Now, the Republican-controlled Congress, (until January 07), top heavy with Harvard MBAs and even Doctorates in Economics, and of course the Investment Banks and the Brokerage Houses, for some reason now they’re saying they’re the victims, that none of them had the experience or the intellect to spot a Pyramid Scam in the works.

Especially not when given a 15 year head start on spotting it.

They say they were forced to give loans to Poor Risk (meaning: underpaid Minorities) customers, but neglect to mention that most of those owner-occupant houses didn’t default.

They also weren’t “required by Federal Law” to push the bank guarantees off onto the Speculators, in fact, they seem to be complicit in those crimes.

And all these Financial Experts, especially those in Congress, like McCain, have had their Corporate Sponsors spend Large Money telling us how vigilant they were over our economy…

WELL, DUH!!

So the most they can claim is Not Guilty By Reason of Massive Incompetence.

But they come, not hat in hand, not humbly, but Arrogantly, demanding that we pay their bills, with no questions and no oversight.

Because, so they say, they’re the only ones who have the competence and experience to do it.

my yass.

We’ve just experienced the full measure of their “Competence”

Then there’s the little matter of that Federal Insurance on the mortgages.

It wasn’t there. Why was that insurance not there?

Two Words: Eye Rack.

Seems Mr Bush, whose Grandpoppy, Poppy and brothers are all Bankers, has had a little Fancy Finance Finagling going on to “pay” the bills on that mess.

It makes the Treasonous Actions of Reagan, North, Poindexter Bush Sr Secord and Casey look like a trial run.

Which essentially it was.

This time instead of funding the Cuba Libre, the Contras, the Medellin Cartel, the Taliban, Hizbollah and al Qa’eda, it goes directly into the American Taliban in other words BlackWater, Halliburton and other more highly organized Terrorist Groups.

But they’re going to blame the entire collapse on a relative handful of low-budget homeowners.

Eat the Rich.

Not Sons of Bitches, Dems are bitches

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When the Democrats were the minority they seemed so weak. Now in the Majority they’re positively wimps. Pundits tell us it’s a lack of leadership. Why would the corporate media overlook who’s at the whip? It would seem clear that the corporations writing the legislation, funding the campaigns, and paying for the free lunch, are driving the agenda. The GOP is paid to play the white hats, and when a bill is unpopular, the Dems are pushed forward to play the creeps.

On the proposed bailout ripoff, the Dems were not the sons of bitches, they’re just the bitches. I heard a Dem scare-mongeree explain that in spite of loathing the idea of a solution which benefited the wrong people, the bailout was our only option. “All economists agree we have to do this” he said, ignoring quite a few who have urged the opposite. The interviewer interrupted to announce, this just in, the vote had failed and as a result the DOW had plunged by 700 points. She wanted his response: “Oh. My. God.”

As Bush and his GOP team stand in the shadows, the Democrats are thrust forward to “lead” the support for this criminal legislation. Whether the bill won or lost, either way the Democrats would come out looking like shits.

I’m reminded about how an invading army flushes out defenders still hiding. Send your captives into the buildings to spring the booby-traps. Make them open the doors to draw the fire. Among thugs in prison the dirty work is done by the bitches.

Except for Democracy Now, the media won’t report the authentic Democratic efforts to lead. Here’s Dennis Kucinich on the floor of Congress speaking against the bailout and asking: why, why why:

“The $700 billion bailout for Wall Street, is driven by fear not fact. This is too much money in too a short a time going to too few people while too many questions remain unanswered.

Why aren’t we having hearings on the plan we have just received? Why aren’t we questioning the underlying premise of the need for a bailout with taxpayers’ money?

Why have we not considered any alternatives other than to give $700 billion to Wall Street? Why aren’t we asking Wall Street to clean up its own mess?

Why aren’t we passing new laws to stop the speculation, which triggered this? Why aren’t we putting up new regulatory structures to protect investors? How do we even value the $700 billion in toxic assets?

“Why aren’t we helping homeowners directly with their debt burden? Why aren’t we helping American families faced with bankruptcy. Why aren’t we reducing debt for Main Street instead of Wall Street?

Isn’t it time for fundamental change in our debt based monetary system, so we can free ourselves from the manipulation of the Federal Reserve and the banks?

Is this the United States Congress or the board of directors of Goldman Sachs? Wall Street is a place of bears and bulls. It is not smart to force taxpayers to dance with bears or to follow closely behind the bulls.”

Michael Moore is more charitable about the Democrats’ actions yesterday. Here’s his update:

Friends,

Everyone said the bill would pass. The masters of the universe were already making celebratory dinner reservations at Manhattan’s finest restaurants. Personal shoppers in Dallas and Atlanta were dispatched to do the early Christmas gifting. Mad Men of Chicago and Miami were popping corks and toasting each other long before the morning latte run.

But what they didn’t know was that hundreds of thousands of Americans woke up yesterday morning and decided it was time for revolt. The politicians never saw it coming. Millions of phone calls and emails hit Congress so hard it was as if Marshall Dillon, Elliot Ness and Dog the Bounty Hunter had descended on D.C. to stop the looting and arrest the thieves.

The Corporate Crime of the Century was halted by a vote of 228 to 205. It was rare and historic; no one could remember a time when a bill supported by the president and the leadership of both parties went down in defeat. That just never happens.

A lot of people are wondering why the right wing of the Republican Party joined with the left wing of the Democratic Party in voting down the thievery. Forty percent of Democrats and two-thirds of Republicans voted against the bill.

Here’s what happened:

The presidential race may still be close in the polls, but the Congressional races are pointing toward a landslide for the Democrats. Few dispute the prediction that the Republicans are in for a whoopin’ on November 4th. Up to 30 Republican House seats could be lost in what would be a stunning repudiation of their agenda.

The Republican reps are so scared of losing their seats, when this “financial crisis” reared its head two weeks ago, they realized they had just been handed their one and only chance to separate themselves from Bush before the election, while doing something that would make them look like they were on the side of “the people.”

Watching C-Span yesterday morning was one of the best comedy shows I’d seen in ages. There they were, one Republican after another who had backed the war and sunk the country into record debt, who had voted to kill every regulation that would have kept Wall Street in check — there they were, now crying foul and standing up for the little guy! One after another, they stood at the microphone on the House floor and threw Bush under the bus, under the train (even though they had voted to kill off our nation’s trains, too), heck, they would’ve thrown him under the rising waters of the Lower Ninth Ward if they could’ve conjured up another hurricane. You know how your dog acts when sprayed by a skunk? He howls and runs around trying to shake it off, rubbing and rolling himself on every piece of your carpet, trying to get rid of the stench. That’s what it looked like on the Republican side of the aisle yesterday, and it was a sight to behold.

The 95 brave Dems who broke with Barney Frank and Chris Dodd were the real heroes, just like those few who stood up and voted against the war in October of 2002. Watch the remarks from yesterday of Reps. Marcy Kaptur, Sheila Jackson Lee, and Dennis Kucinich. They spoke the truth.

The Dems who voted for the giveaway did so mostly because they were scared by the threats of Wall Street, that if the rich didn’t get their handout, the market would go nuts and then it’s bye-bye stock-based pension and retirement funds.

And guess what? That’s exactly what Wall Street did! The largest, single-day drop in the Dow in the history of the New York Stock exchange. The news anchors last night screamed it out: Americans just lost 1.2 trillion dollars in the stock market!! It’s a financial Pearl Harbor! The sky is falling! Bird flu! Killer Bees!

Of course, sane people know that nobody “lost” anything yesterday, that stocks go up and down and this too shall pass because the rich will now buy low, hold, then sell off, then buy low again.

But for now, Wall Street and its propaganda arm (the networks and media it owns) will continue to try and scare the bejesus out of you. It will be harder to get a loan. Some people will lose their jobs. A weak nation of wimps won’t last long under this torture. Or will we? Is this our line in the sand?

Here’s my guess: The Democratic leadership in the House secretly hoped all along that this lousy bill would go down. With Bush’s proposals shredded, the Dems knew they could then write their own bill that favors the average American, not the upper 10% who were hoping for another kegger of gold.

So the ball is in the Democrats’ hands. The gun from Wall Street remains at their head. Before they make their next move, let me tell you what the media kept silent about while this bill was being debated:

1. The bailout bill had NO enforcement provisions for the so-called oversight group that was going to monitor Wall Street’s spending of the $700 billion;

2. It had NO penalties, fines or imprisonment for any executive who might steal any of the people’s money;

3. It did NOTHING to force banks and lenders to rewrite people’s mortgages to avoid foreclosures — this bill would not have stopped ONE foreclosure!;

4. It had NO teeth anywhere in the entire piece of legislation, using words like “suggested” when referring to the government being paid back for the bailout;

5. Over 200 economists wrote to Congress and said this bill might actually WORSEN the “financial crisis” and cause even MORE of a meltdown.

Put a fork in this slab of pork. It’s over. Now it is time for our side to state very clearly the laws WE want passed. I will send you my proposals later today. We’ve bought ourselves less than 72 hours.

Yours,
Michael Moore

$35,000… for a Tanning Bed…

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Last summer, at the BEGINNING of the Real Estate Crash… there was a house (too late, it’s been bought) right across 23rd street from the Goodwill processing center for $10,000.

A FOUR BEDROOM HOUSE in a decent neighborhood, near shopping, schools, the Rocky Mountains all that… for ten grand.

And the lady who wishes to be President in charge of Vice for the United States, running on a platform as a Fiscal Conservative, blows more than three times that for a Tanning Bed.
That ain’t all that blows, apparently.

Hey, Ms Palin, there’s millions of Americans who don’t make 35K in TWO years wages.

Who’s out of touch with the people? YOU ARE…

Who’s the Big Spending Pork Barrel with Legs? YOU ARE…

Another bit of Hysterical Revisionism…

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This one from a purported former head of NORAD, allegedly had his finger on the Nuclear Trigger for 3 years therefore he knows all there is to know about radical Islam.

He spouted that Islam had been attacking the West since the 7th century, that it was and is and always will be about envy of Western achievements.

This doesn’t jibe well with the fact that in the 7th century, Europe was in the darkest part of the Dark Ages, Rome had just fallen forever, and none of the Kings of Europe including Charlemagne and his Daddy, Charles Martel, could even so much as write their own names. Some enlightened Western thought there, yes?

While and at the time what we now think of as the Muslim World were far far ahead of the West in every matter of art, literature and science. They invented Chess, Algebra, and chemistry. Amongst others.

But the Good Major General Some-name-or-other doesn’t let facts get in his way, no sir…

Next up is the assertion that the European powers decimated Islam to the point that they took centuries to crawl up to the level of whatever…

Again, REAL History rears its ugly head…

The European Powers managed to kill more Europeans than they did Arabs, and far more Europeans than the Arabs did. These would be European Jews and CHRISTIANS.

People who cite the Crusades as a shining example of Christian virtue, well, damn, what if they’re right and that actually IS the best Christianity has ever accomplished? I as a Christian am constantly defending my faith against the best efforts of these Bozoes to defile and destroy it. But never mind.

After getting kicked out of Jerusalem a scant 70 years after they had finally won it, they brought back to Europe the beginnings of the Renaissance, mainly in the form of Persian and Turkish and Arabic technology. They also opened up a corridor of Plague which not just figuratively Decimated Europe, it was like 3 and a half TIMES decimated…

Decimation means dropping your population by 10%.

So, according to the NutSack General, (God, PLEASE let the punk read this, PLEASE?) what happened was the diametric opposite of what actually did happen.

Another thing the Crusades brought to Europe, (and the Crusades aren’t officially over, mind you, nor is the Inquisition, just ask Pope Ratzinger) were more Christian-on-Christian and Christian-on-Jew crimes like the 30 years War, the Hundred Years War, war after war after war and all in the name of Religious Purity, and…

using the Crusades as their guideline.

World War One and the Spanish “Civil” War and of course WW2 were the almost culmination of it, but, wait, THERE’S MORE! Every stinkin’ single war of the 20th century can be traced to the massive defeat Europe took during the Crusades.

But hey, they put a Hate-Freak like THAT in charge of America’s Nukes?

…and he has the ear of the Bush Crime Family and their newly adopted son, John McCain.

so long, Mom…
I’m off
to drop
the Bomb…

Some “Inflammatory” rhetoric…

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About the Labor Day Fire on Pike’s Peak last year… And the Fascist editor at Westside Pioneer.

You can tell whose pockets the El Paso County Fire Control District are in.

The wealthiest of course.

Y’all remember the fire, right?

Wasn’t a red-hot week later the self-serving rag Westside Pioneer was reporting that it was a homeless person who started the fire.

Somebody was seen leaving the scene, nobody knows who, (I personally have been in a couple of wildfires, and let the Voice of Experience speak, I got the hell as far away from those fires as fast as I possibly could…)

The Fire Marshall or whatever the sell-out bastard’s title is pronounced that the fire MIGHT have been started by a carelessly tossed Cigarette, or MIGHT have been started in a campfire. It was mid morning, 80 degrees Fahrenheit, nobody had no damn campfire going.

And, the clincher of their messed up argument, it was in a “disheveled” homeless campsite.

The editor of the Pioneer, sounds kind of to the Right of Mussolini, arrogantly assumes that it WAS a homeless “Bum” (to use his phrase) who started the fire.

And proceeded to blame the homeless for every ill befalling society today.

    Now, here’s MY theory, and it’s a doozy.

That the camp was all torn up and littered up, that sounds like what happens when Socially Retarded Animated Sphincter Rich-Bitches teach their kids that “bums” are less than human, and that it’s ok to break into their camps (Not while they’re in camp, of course, no no, COWARDS don’t like to risk being confronted by the PEOPLE they’re assaulting)

They steal anything that might be worth money and then break or tear apart everything else. …

    … and in many cases, They Light The Place On Fire…

Occasionally, if there’s a chance that somebody in the camp would defend himself, and they might get more than their Piggy Pride hurt… they’ll call the cops, who are so bootlicking subservient that they’ll take care of the problem, “of course you’re right sir, the poor are causing all the problems of the world and no, sir, you should be insulated from seeing the suffering of your fellow humans, and we’ll take care of the “Bum”, sir”.

Now, I don’t have proof that some out-of-control Rich Bitch Punk Cowards, such as those who infest the multi-million dollar houses on Stolen Land along Gold Camp and Bear Creek roads, are the ones who actually started the fire.

Then again, my evidence is more substantial than theirs, AND, the aforementioned PIGS refuse to even consider such a possibility.

In their PIGGY minds, it has to be the fault of “Bums”, no questions need be asked.

Now, here’s a neat little Teach The Punks A Lesson thought:

Get a cheap tent, right, a cheap sleeping bag, some clothes books and such…
Set it up in an area Known To Be Infested with the “camp raider heroes”

Boil up a mess of poison ivy. Cook it just like collard greens (only without the hamhocks) and pour the “tea” all over the tent and clothes, let it dry, (or not, it wouldn’t make any difference, they would just assume it was soaked in a rainstorm, happens often enough.)

And then let their ChickenShit nature take its course…

Thank you, sir! May I have another?

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Buenos Aires protest
This morning I clicked on our new upper-left graphic which imparts info about protesting the state democratic convention. What I discovered was page after page of terms to meet and rules to obey, laid out neatly by the powers-that-be, so that would-be activists can protest the most egregious war and power-hungry administration in our country’s history. Happily chirping about meetings with policemen and attorneys, the activists invite us to join them in defining the terms of their oppression.

I’m sorry, I know these people are wannabe do-gooders, but this bullshit is akin to meeting with a gang of rapists to consent to the terms of one’s degradation. Oh yes, please! Just use lubricant and let me lie in a comfortable bed!

It’s pathetic that our passionate anti-war activists have so little vision, so little faith in human history, such a lack of conviction and temerity that they can be contented to hand out fliers and maps, cower in a cage gilded especially for them, and be completely marginalized by the system they profess to oppose.

Here’s my idea. Do not legitimize the trampling of your civil liberties and the silencing of your voices by compliantly meeting with police officers and attorneys. Instead tell them that you’ll see them on Venetucci Boulevard with a thousand of your closest friends. You’ll have drums and cowbells and bullhorns and offensive banners and whatever fuck else you feel like bringing. Tell them you’ll sing and shout and march and cross every boundary they put up to keep you on the fringe. Tell them you’ll do whatever the fuck you want to in order to make your voices heard.

What the hell? The vast majority of Americans oppose this war and despise this administration. Why aren’t they out on the streets? Do you really believe they’ll join you there as soon as they are enlightened by Amy Goodman? No! They aren’t out on the streets because they are sheep waiting for a shepherd. So where are the shepherds, our visionary and inspiring leaders? Where are the men with balls, bravely putting their necks on the line in the name of peace and justice? Where are the courageous vaginas, fresh from their New Orleans beaver fest, newly empowered to fight violence against women all over the globe? The anti-war movement in Colorado Springs does not have a single leader. It has a few worker bees — banner painters and flier makers — who don’t have a clue about what it’s going to take to stop the machine.

If you are like me you are saying “Well, Marie, why aren’t you out there making a difference?” I’ll tell you why. I am the system’s bitch. I have assets that can be frozen by the IRS. I have children in the public school system. I have dough invested in Social Security. I am tied by law to an ex-husband which precludes me from moving my family to another neighborhood, let alone another country. I am a cog in the machine. And in the scheme of things, nothing more.

I am, by position and ultimately by choice, powerless. But at least I don’t pretend to be anything more.

———————

Here are some pictures from the protest I was inadvertently caught up in in Buenos Aires. Maybe because Argentinians recently lived under a military government, one that silenced dissenters by kidnapping them and dropping them into the ocean, they appreciate their regained freedoms enough to band together and make their voices heard.

Argentina protestors
Argentina plaza protest
Banner
Blue period
Che
Drums
After the main protest
In the street
Green peace shirt
Osama

POLICE AND MEDIA! ON THE FRINGE! BEHIND THE BARRIER!
Argentina cops behind the barrier
Argentina riot police behind the fence
Argentina protest media