CSPD Junior Police Explorers learn early to swagger and menace like pros

2011 DIVERSITY FAIR, NOTES, PART 1- What is our police department doing with high school age “explorers?” They’re uniformed and have their own shoulder patch. Exploring what? The limits to which they impose their weight against peoples’ rights? I’m at a civic festival in Confluence Park, across from a canopy whose shade does not conceal a mass of blue uniforms, adult officers bulky with bullet-proof vests and leather, holstering all manner of law enforcement weaponry, and CSPD apprentices, skinnier for lack of the armor and accouterments, but otherwise dressed exactly like police officers, and adopting the swagger which comes of trooping the colors, emboldened by the anonymity of the requisite Ray-Bans.

I don’t know what the CSPD think they’re doing. Community outreach would be far better accomplished in t-shirt and shorts. I can’t help but think that the authority communicated by the uniforms is being abused in this setting. I’m reminded immediately of the menace which fascist youth groups projected over even their parents. These kids are strolling around the event like appointed hall monitors. Patrolling, some of them would you believe, with their thumbs looped on their leather belts. If they had clubs they’d be twirling them.

Of course, they stroll pretending it means assimilation, as if submission to authority is a normal ingredient of any balanced community. I suspect that’s what the early indoctrination “explores.”

Actually, the Explorers get their name because they’re “exploring law enforcement as a career.” Yes any profession would be something an apprentice might want to explore, but police craft is one which requires alerting the public that this uniformed person does not have full-on authority/responsibility over you. Well, responsibility is probably what they’re most concerned about.

No one should doubt the craft of policemanship bears complexities worthy of journeymen, but I’d rather recruits came into law enforcement in the more common manner, after a college education.

Well, this IS the EVERYBODY WELCOME Diversity Fair, so we can’t exclude the Fascists. But do the city’s traditionally marginalized populations really feel welcomed by such an asserted police presence? I’m thinking of the immigration-challenged circles. But in general, how welcome do you suppose Hispanic, African, or Native Americans feel with white kids semi-officially playing cop?

Presumably the Klan was excluded from invitation, like any hate-group, because it offends the hatees. Probably law enforcement should take a backseat too, and not pretend that policing be considered a cultural component of a community.

It’s given me an idea however. Maybe the point could be brought home if we injected the event with worse than these crew-cutted crackers. How about a para-militarized presence?

I’m thinking cops in riot gear, patrolling like it was no big deal. In protest situations it’s become the norm, imagine if the average non-protester were to see the face of the US police state. Would citizens be so comfortable if instead of officer friendly, or junior uniformed friendlies, the event was patrolled by storm troopers. The CSPD knows better than to expose itself like that, but imagine a riotous development to draw them out.

Or, why not assert a pseudo-authoritarian presence for them?

If not riot gear, maybe a paramilitary uniform, American dark blue, with plenty of USA insignia, the American eagle made to look a little Germanic, let’s say. Jack boots, riding pants, leather straps, and black gloves a must.

Technically, the force could pretend to be a secret service, community outreach for the NSA or the plethora of intelligence agencies. The idea would be to present a dark, ominous authority. Handing out small fliers that read “Please take no notice of us, if you’ve done no wrong, you’ve nothing to be afraid of.”

A little break for the AIPAC ChickenHawks Flooding the Site..

Something more the War-mongering Freaks can bitch whine and snivel about, Welcome back, David Haddad errr “Mary”
 
So, since unabashed ChickenHawks like Glenn Beck like to “donate” Tax Deductible stuff like free airtime on their “news” shows, and the USO is begging for money for the families of the troops…
How, then, can the Recruiters claim in other (taxpayer funded) advertisements that the Military is a Good Career?
A few background items, if you will.

Glenn Beck, Chickenhawk, in 2007 participated in a “charity” Auction and one of the articles he donated (For a Tax Break…) a really really butt-ugly painting.

The bidding on it at the point where I tuned in, was 3400 dollars.

That means, for a few minutes of his time, about $10 worth of paint and a $30 canvass, he was getting a Tax Break to the tune of $3400.00

And publicity for his show, which consists almost entirely of licking Government Boot for an hour at a time.

He earns Is GIVEN his pay for Promoting The War and thus the very poverty/slash/hardship conditions the Military Personnel have to endure.

An Establishment Media Whore like that then gets to Pretend that he gives a damn about the Soldiers, their wives and children/slash/widows and orphans…

Gets paid to spew his drivel on the Air and then gets paid again by “donating” something to the USO.

His equally Cowardly Loud-mouthed War-Monger Friend who bought the painting also got to take an equal tax deduction

So far, that was $6800 dollars taken off their taxes,

The Same Taxes Which Form The Basis For The Costs Of The War

So they’re not only getting OTHER People to Fight for their Obscene profit Margins Ooops I was supposed to say “our Freedom”, thus putting the Soldiers and their families in dire financial straits…

They’re Getting Paid To Sell the “necessity” of THEIR War to those of us who DO pay taxes, and thus PAY THEIR BILLS for THEIR War…

On a show that gets Government Subsidies as well,

And make a huge Show of Concern for those poor families of the Soldiers.

The Soldiers who are being aggressively recruited even before they leave high school, whose Parents are being told several times an hour to support the decisions of their sons and daughters Sign The Papers Allowing Their Underage CHILDREN to drop out of school and join the Killing Machine.

Because being an Imperial Storm Trooper is such a Good Economic and Educational Opportunity.

It’s Payday today. because the 1st is on a weekend.

Since the middle of the month Military families have been seeking donations to just feed the kids until the end of the month.

People who get Food Stamps.

That’s not a slur against the families or the soldiers themselves.

The “Welfare Cadillac” Food Stamp Queen (who is invariably depicted as Black, although our Republican “Friend” tells us that the propaganda they put out is not Racist at all in any way, shape or form) Is And Always Was a Mythological Construct.

People don’t get rich off being on welfare.

Although the Right Wing Professional Liars, like for instance Glenn Beck, tell us that they do.

Remember though, in the Information Age, their lies about How Righteous and Noble the War is, how we’re obviously Winning the War, how Everybody in the Army Loves The War, How Great a Career The Army is…

Get shown simultaneously with advertisements begging for relief for their families, ads for the Army recruiting CHILDREN to quit school, give up any chance of a real educational opportunity, and Join The Storm Troopers… because they can’t retain enough of the soldiers who are already in their Glorious Wonderful Marvelous Career to keep fighting a war that was supposedly won 5 years ago.

Excuse me, that last figure is inaccurate… it was 5 1/2 years ago.

I wonder if the AIPAC Anti-Semitic types who post all these long letters that say “blah blah blah Israel is always right blah blah blah you’re ignorant to say otherwise blah blah blah how DARE you criticize people for being Babykillers blah blah blah”

I wonder if they’re getting a tax-break for it, or maybe just making money from the “Defense” Industry which is supplyin’ the (Israeli Puppet) Army with the tools of the Trade?

Or is it

D) All Of The Above.

Pardon, your hypocrisy is showing.

Televised football is the fascist pageant

Offensive projectileI’ll tell you, this is the heart of the beast. Colorado Springs may be the apex of US religio-military nonsense, but the American beast is television, the rotten core of which is Fox TV, and its absolute poisoned heart is televised football.

Football is crass, violent, anonymous, uniformed, incorporated and a perfectly trivial distraction from all else. Nothing new, but I’d like to offer this impression.

For starters, have you noticed, the camera coverage of the cheerleaders is from exactly the angle a pervert would ask? In uncouth parlance it’s called “upskirt.” How do you suppose the camera bearers excuse themselves panning across the cheerleaders at bare thigh level? It’s neither a spectator POV, nor that of any athlete, unless he’s Chucky, strolling well wide to receive the cheerleaders. When the girls leap on and off the shoulders of their male counterparts, the cameras explicably-enough climb to male shoulder level.

Of course it’s not a matter of impolite cameramen getting up from their knees. The cameras today float on wires like surveillance robots to produce tailor-made angles. Being my point I suppose.

Thanks to these robots, the audience is afforded action shots without precedence. As a result, we can follow the action practically outside the context of what’s taking place. It’s great isn’t it? Who cares what bones are getting crunched outside the frame, follow the ball. The action is violent but without consequence. Athletes are expected to defy physics for cameras themselves liberated from constraint. Catch without thought to how you’ll land. The players are so jacked up on painkillers and adrenaline that the impacts will register only later. Off camera.

That’s how we fight wars, isn’t it? Eye on the bouncing ball, all damage is collateral, the players expendable.

Players jump all over themselves enthusiastically after successful plays, but lo, have been forbidden to posture victoriously in the end zone. The unsportsmanlike penalty is unpopular and proving difficult for the athletes to avoid. I can tell you what that’s about. The rich white man doesn’t mind his gladiators amping themselves for a challenge, but he’ll be damned if he has to witness what will almost always be a black man crowing about his superiority. Rich white men can propagate rap music to the masses like crack cocaine, but they’re not about to abide the braggadocio themselves. When did acting too-big-for-your-britches become unsportsmanlike behavior? When it proved to make heroes of the likes of Muhammed Ali. Who went to jail sooner than go to Vietnam.

The media coverage is equally restrictive about which athletes it acquaints with viewers. Do you think Peyton Manning is the only charismatic quarterback, or rather the only safe spokesman? The videotaped segments of players introducing themselves have become completely stilted in formality. Post-game interviews mandate that athletes wear some official headgear which casts their features in shadow, preserving their anonymity. They remain monosyllabic gladiator brutes who otherwise wear helmets, increasingly now with visors like so many Power Ranger Storm Troopers.

The talking heads attendant to the bowl games, whether ex-athletes or sportscasters, were all wearing the Neocon uniform, the black suit, and new for 2008, a four button jacket buttoned to the top like a veritable military uniform. Only Brent Musburger had enough clout to decline the odd conformity. Black used to denote caretakers. Fully buttoned suits were for tailors and soldiers. History has never looked fondly on soldiers who wore black.

The Kangaroo Trial of Lieutenant Colonel William Steele

Saddam’s US jailer goes on trial What’s this about? Who is this man, Lieutenant Colonel William Steele, who now faces life in prison? What did he do?

Wikipedia gives us some basic information about the charges this man faces. William H. Steele We learn what the legal charges consist of here, and what we find is that this man, like Guantanamo military chaplain James Yee before him, has done absolutely nothing worthy of being made into a criminal offense. James Yee was let go after a torturing Kafkaesque experience where the military threatened to destroy his life completely. William Steele will not be so lucky it appears.

So what did he supposedly do, this Lieutenant Colonel? It turns out that he gave Saddam Hussein a cigar and some hair color to cover up the gray hair while he was in jail! For this he is charged with aiding an enemy of the United States and was threatened originally with the death penalty!

Oh yes, there are other charges they used to stack the deck for conviction against this career officer. He was charged with flirting some with a female interpreter! And get this! He was charged with having porn on his computer! Oh, and it gets much worse…. He allowed some kids, that were thrown into this military prison, to call out on his own personal cell phone to notify family members of their arrest by the US storm troopers! What a beast!

I think we can see now why people like Yee and Steele have to be imprisoned. They are to be made into an example for others in the US military, that no compassion must be allowed with Muslim prisoners. Muslim prisoners are to be tortured, humiliated, and murdered, and not coddled as Steele is made out to have been doing.

What a contrast! Under the Bush Administration with active Democratic Party help, the US has put thousands of POWs in Afghanistan in air tight containers where they were suffocated, choked, and shot to death. They have hooded and tortured POWs at Guantanamo using isolation techniques of sensory deprivation. They have raped and sexually humiliated POWs at Abu Ghraib, along with using other forms of physical and psychological tortures. They have moved (‘rendered’) POWs to hidden torture centers around the globe using a hidden fleet of unmarked aircraft. But giving a cigar to Saddam Hussein in jail is now to be made into a capital offense, which in the infinite mercy of these Christian Crusaders will be turned into a mere life sentence in prison. All minds off Donald Rumsfield and Dickey Cheney… Who’s the guy who gave the cigar to Saddam? Get him! Give him LIFE!

This whole trial is an indecent charade, and shows how little support the government really does give the troops. Instead of support, they threaten and bully them just like they wish to do with the rest of the whole world. When you sign up with the military, you truly do sign a deal with the Devil. This is the real mistake that Lieutenant Colonel William Steele has made. Now he is to be scapegoated and made into an example for the other troops.

Bad guy! You showed a drop of compassion for our official enemy, the Muslims. For this you must be punished but good.

‘Save Darfur’ interventionists seem bloody ignorant about Africa, its culture, and its history- Save Lado, too, Comrades!

Free Tibet, Stop Genocide in Kosovo, Liberate East Timor, and now Save Darfur with that ‘genocide’ tag being thrown around again. And lots of vitriol against Arabs and China mixed in. There seems to be all sorts of poorly thought out comments and ill considered positions going around town concerning this issue of ‘Darfur’, currently in the national spotlight ala Paris Hilton.

One local activist recently claimed on his web site that the Sudanese government was a US puppet state. Talk about getting it totally backwards! The reality is it’s the independence of the Sudanese government from DC control that Another activist here in the Springs was cheer-leading Democratic Party Colorado Governor Ritter for taking steps to firm up the US campaign beginning an economic war against Sudan. Colorado will not do bizness with bad Africans! Oh, Whoopee, Guvnor! I’ll bet my bottom dollar that you will do business helping your political buddies commit GENOCIDE against Palestinians and Iraqis, though. Am I right?

Right now, the Colorado Springs pro-peace people seem to be stumbling around in the dark on many fronts. The police attack on the St Patrick’s Day parade participants has them stumbling, and the anemia of the national Pro Peace folk hasn’t helped either. So why not jump on the ‘Save Darfur’ bandwagon? It makes sense. I guess there is just not enough problems on the home-front at this time? So let’s go save some Black folk from the evil Arabs and Chinese! And we’ll be led by Dubya, who will correct his problems in Iraq by changing a letter and nuking Iran.

The Justice and Peace had ourselves up a booth at Juneteenth today. They placed us right next to our old buddies, the storm troopers under the command of Police Chief Liars Myers. We’re getting to be almost family at this point. And on our nice little table we had some lit about Saving Darfur.

No, nobody had brought any material saying it might be nice saving all of Africa by getting the US the fuck out of their. I felt in a genteel mood and just sat for a while chitchatting and smelling the bbq. The Gazette was Heiled as being so very generous for poor Black folk by having ‘given generously’ with the publicity. It felt so good, so why be contentious? I just couldn’t…

I had my sign ‘Stop US War on Somalia’ with me, but Aw Shucks. Why confuse folk still trying to decide whether the Dar is for the Fur, or the Fur is for the Dar? And every body’s Albanian is still not much up to par And what’s the national language of island nation of East Timor anyway? Uh sorry, I meant the half island nation of East Timor. Hey, why shouldn’t we demand liberation and independence for West Timor, too? And what’s the next half-island down the shore? The world is complex, but you can speed read it if you are a liberal interventionist, for sure! I would have felt like a simpleton with my sign at the picnic.

There were some pamphlets to help you out on this with Darfur on our table. Did you know that Darfur was once an independent nation? Until the British defeated them of course.

Believe me, you will never learn this sort of stuff from the ‘Save Darfur’ crowd. They just don’t know it. That’s right. Darfur was pasted onto Sudan by the British. Those who paste on may want to peel the paste on back off, though. For humanitarian reasons, no doubt. From Blair to Brown to Save Darfur!

By the way, I am thinking of starting up a Colorado Springs society to save the Lado people. Don’t know about them? Hey, they’re just right down the road from Darfur. And guess what? They are victims of genocide, too. Save Lado! Is it pronounced like in Spanish, or like ‘lad oh!’ in English? It’s always fun when nobody can pronounce the name of the place we’re headed to ‘intervene’ into. Makes it more fun to watch the TV news!

I’m not making this up, so do the research on your own and let’s then get together and start a group (or 2 or 3) at Colorado College and get some sweet chickens (let me know if the use of ‘chickens’ here is not pc, like headless chickens) to help us out. What do you say? This is America, is it not? Anything can happen. We’re a good people for sure. So let’s do something for the Lado people right now! Start the propaganda, uh I meant ‘education’ going and we’ll get the troops in as soon as we can!

Meanwhile, let the conservatives increase the military budget a tad more, so that we’ll all then be ready to move into action together.

Save Lado!

Rose Bowl Impeach Bush Parade

As you can see I’ve been reading and writing a lot. So I was on the pacifism tab. Got to the one about the parade in Manitou.
 
Empire rebellion banner in PasadenaOn New Years, somebody at the Tournament of Roses parade was across from the grandstand, where the cameras would be sure to catch it every time a float or band or whatever passed by, holding up a sign made of each letter on a separate square of cloth, I M P E A C H.
I pointed that out to my landlady, who had oohed and ahhed when the Air Force did a flyover with a couple of fighters and a stealth bomber, right after some insipid songfest about how good and nice everybody in America is, and we should all be so very proud of our goodness and nicene….aaaaaarrrrggggggghhhhhhh!

But for a half hour every float that passed by had the impeach sign flying prominently in the background.

Then the marching Storm Troopers, literally, it was a tribute to Star Wars, and the sign was nowhere in the shot. I noticed that they were keeping the shots kind of tight from there on, so I don’t know if the cops made them take down their banner or if the cameramen had specific orders not to show it ever again.

I mentioned this to my landlady and she said Good,! That’s just disrespectful to put politics into a parade where everybody is just out to have a little fun.

I told her that since we are being shut out by every media outlet there is over the peace marches, she said there is a Proper Time for everything, and some bullshit about working within the system….

And not a word of protest about the government sponsored anti-peace demonstrations.