Tune in Thursdays 4 to 5pm (PST), at 89.5FM in the northeast San Pablo Bay Area, or online at [is.gd/kJ1EUt].
Hosted by Dr.G., Minister of Information of the Northbay MDS.
Be a Community Journalist with our Community Journalist's Notebook [link].
Send news & info to [NorthbayMDS@) gmail.com]!
Northbay Uprising News scripts [link].
Archived webpages at (archive.org) and at (archive.is) are available even if the original is taken down. News links are provided for educational purposes only, and do not constitute an endorsement of political tendencies, or, of foreign governments. Circumvent "Error 451" [archive.is/WOZXx] by using the proxy server at [webproxy.to] or, by using Tor Browser [is.gd/r18EVD].
===*===*===
InDIYpendent Media
Spotlight from the Northbay Uprising Media Collective
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Recommended Radical Newsletters:
* Popular resistance: Daily Movement News and Resources (popularresistance.org): Lift The Veil; See Reality, Take Action [archive.is/j6hV2]
* Revolutionary Organization of Labor, USA (ROL, USA) Newsletter #96: May-June 2016 [archive.is/Q9jiD]
* Nuclear Resister E-Bulletin (2016-04, nukeresister.org) [archive.is/39jTf]. In this E-bulletin:
- Jeff Dietrich, Dennis Apel and David Omondi begin 2 & 4 month prison sentences for Vandenberg missile protest
- Military veterans arrested blocking Creech Air Force Base
- More arrests at Creech Air Force Base to stop drone warfare
- NATO 3 defendant Jared Chase gets more prison time
- Judge declares arms fair blockaders not guilty!
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ACTION CALENDER
A list of gatherings, workshops, and educational events in the greater Bay Area region
[indybay.org/calendar] [occupyoakland.org/calendar]Afrikatown's Very Own Anti-Trespassing Block Party
[facebook.com/events/1003812813020073/]
Saturday, May 28th, at 1pm
Qilombo 2313 San Pablo Ave, Oakland, California 94612 [510-338-6349] [info@)theholdout.org]
Bulldozers, eviction notices and now TRESPASSING? We are starting to think there is a conspiracy against black community building.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯As usual, Afrikatown are throwing a BIG BLOCK PARTY to celebrate our community and neighbors and the fact that we are sticking to our promise to fight gentrification in Oakland. We deserve it, you deserve, so let’s celebrate that undeniable fact.
The property owner served Afrikatown a preliminary injunction for trespassing (to be effective May 24th!) We urgently need your support for legal fees as well as the powerful punch of having everyone in town on our side.
Save the date: Saturday, May 28th!
This fundraiser will support potential court/legal costs!
We will have STATIONS such as:
*Homemade pizza from our cobb oven (pick your own garden ingredients)
*Petting Zoo with our chickens (who don’t want to be trespassed either)
*Shirt silkscreen
*Permaculture 101 and herbalism
*Healing: Massage & Reiki
*Pennies for Afrika: Learn more about current Afrikan liberation & unification efforts!
AND MORE!!
hit our line for any questions or to table/host a station
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THROUGH THE WIRE - An Evening in Support of Political Prisoners
Saturday May 28th, 2016 7:00pm
At the International Capoeira Angola Foundation [2443 Magnolia st. Oakland CA]
Join the Bay Area Anti Repression Committee for an evening of food, speakers and music to support long term Political Prisoner, Romaine "Chip" Fitzgerald, and to build solidarity around US Political Prisoners.
Sliding Scale $5-15 No one turned away for lack of funds
There will be food, drinks, and screenprinting (bring a t-shirt!).
This space is wheelchare accessible
Childcare provided.
This event is organized by the Bay Area Anti Repression Committee, for more information please visit [antirepressionbayarea.com]
Speakers include member of All of Us or None, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and the Political Prisoner Committee of the National Lawyers Guild. Speakers will present on political prisoners from the Black Power, Puerto Rican Independence and American Indian Movements and discuss why it is important as radicals and activists to support political prisoners.
Live Music will start at 9:30 -
- Ras Ceylon [facebook.com/Ras-Ceylon-91677385259], emcee, educator and organizer bringing revolutionary music, a hip-hop meets reggae dynamic and explosively conscious lyrics.
- Alia Sharrief [facebook.com/AliaSharrief],a Muslimah in Hiphop demanding respect on the mic while combatting stereotypes through her music.
- Dio Ganhdih facebook.com/dioganhdih]: Queer indigenous lyricist, visual artist, rapper from NY
- Tongo Eisen-Martin: Poet, movement worker and educator who has organized against mass incarceration and extra-judicial killing of Black people throughout the United States. His latest book of poems is titled, "someone's dead already" was nominated for a California Book Award.
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"War Is A Lie" Peace and Justice tour! With Cindy Sheehan and David Swanson
Join David and Cindy to mark the publication of the new 2nd edition of War is A Lie, which counters the theory that war is an inevitable part of human nature.
David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host, director of [WorldBeyondWar.org] and campaign coordinator for [RootsAction.org]. He blogs at [DavidSwanson.org] and [WarIsACrime.org]. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. He is a 2015 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee.
Cindy Sheehan is an author, world famous peace activist, mother and grandmother. She hosts The Soapbox radio show [cindysheehanssoapbox.blogspot.com]
May 29, Oakland, CA
3 to 4 p.m., David Swanson interviewed by Cindy Sheehan, at Diesel: A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue at Kales (near Manila), Oakland, CA
May 29, Berkeley, CA
7:00 to 9 p.m., David Swanson "War Is A Lie", with Cindy Sheehan, at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, sponsored by the BFUU Social Justice Committee and Codepink Golden Gate. 1924 Cedar St. @ Bonita, Berkeley, CA
Event page [is.gd/w18NGO]
May 30, Fresno, CA
2 to 4 p.m., David Swanson and Cindy Sheehan at a Peace Fresno event
Community United Church of Christ
5550 N. Fresno Street, Fresno, CA 93710
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TUESDAY, MAY 31, 2016 7 – 9 pm. Report Back from Venezuela by the Task Force on the Americas. An update on current political situation and women’s empowerment, including food sovereignty projects. Teri Mattson, Exectutive Director of Task Force on the Americas, will do a power point presentation followed by Q&A. Sliding Scale $7 – 20 requested. No one ever turned away due to lack of funds. Volunteer help with chair set up and take down and after event clean-up is much appreciated! [facebook.com/events/1745127829043544]
You Won't Believe What We Saw In Socialist Venezuela (11:54) WeAreChange YouTube Channel 4-04-16. [youtu.be/UOQb7Y5QVO8] Posted Notes: “In this video Luke Rudkowski and Jeff Berwick travel down to Caracas, Venezuela to give you a report on how people live in socialism. We not only give you a detailed update on life in Caracas but a complete social and economic breakdown of the situation on the ground.” You might as well be working for the corporate elite if you show no compassion or understanding of the uplifting and literacy of the poor that was won by sharing the oil wealth without nationalizing everything else but the oil. They still have a "free capitalist press"...
I think we will get a much better interpretation of what is going on with US destabilization of countries like Venezuela, Ukraine, Syria, etc in Fellowship Hall on May 31st.
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June 11th International Day of Solidarity with all Anarchist Political Prisoners [is.gd/cfu4L1]
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Trash the TPP
Saturday, June 11, 10 AM - Noon
Trash the TPP meets to push back against the Trans Pacific Partnership, a "trade" deal that threatens our welfare, the environment and our democracy. More info: [meetup.com/Trash_the_TPP/]
Peace and Justice Center, 467 Sebastopol Avenue, Santa Rosa
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Sonoma County Taxes for Peace
Sunday, June 12 , 4:30 PM
We meet to educate and support around resistance to War Taxes. Contact Ruth Paine for info: (707) 576-6654. Also see [nwtrcc.org]
Friends House, Commons B living room, 684 Benicia Dr, Santa Rosa
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Veterans for Peace monthly meeting
Monday, June 13, 7-9 PM
Veterans For Peace is an international organization made up of military veterans, military family members, and allies. We accept veteran members from all branches of
service. We are dedicated to building a culture of peace, exposing the true
costs of war, and healing the wounds of war. For more info,
visit: [www.veteransforpeacesonoma.net] or email [VFPChapter71@)gmail.com]
Santa Rosa Vets Memorial Building, 1351 Maple Ave., Santa Rosa
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JUNE 15th Global Day of Action Demanding Justice for Berta
To all organizations, social and popular movements and to the civil society of the world:
The death of Berta Caceres has filled us with indignation. Pain is with us, but also accompanies us the strength of his thought and work and the need of justice. The principles she fought are the ones that will save this humanity, so we ask and call you to participate in a protest action in which our voices unite to demand justice for Berta Caceres, justice for Gustavo Castro, justice for COPINH and justice for the Honduran people.On June 15 in Honduras organizations and social movements, institutions, ordinary people will march to demand the immediate establishment of an independent research group that, in a transparent, thorough and comprehensive way, investigate the murder of our sister and companion.
This day we want our sisters and brothers in other countries of the world to join us conducting protest actions against the embassies of Honduras in their countries demanding the following:
1. The immediate establishment of an independent research group led by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to clarify this vile crime and ensure the prosecution of all those responsible.
2. The immediate and definitive cancellation of the concession granted to DESA company, constructor of the Hydroelectric Project "Agua Zarca" in Rio Blanco.
The actions taken by the Honduran government and its agencies do not lead to justice, on the contrary are ensuring that this crime go unpunished.
Let's get together and put an stop to death, impunity and injustice.
With the ancestral force of Berta, Lempira, Mota, Etempica and Iselaca we raise our voices full of justice, freedom, dignity and peace!
Justice for Berta is justice for the world!
Let us Wake up, humanity, we are out of time!
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Shut Down Nazi Rally!
[facebook.com/events/1727446437527487/]
Sponsored by AntiFa Sacramento [antifasac.weebly.com]
Get ready for Sacramento on Sunday, June 26th. The Golden State Skinheads, Traditionalist Workers’ Party, the KKK, and other groups are holding a rally at the State Capitol [archive.is/vLWM2]. Be there. This is shaping up to be the largest white power rally on the west coast in some time.
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Petaluma Progressive Festival
Sunday, July 31, noon-5:00 PM
Note, this annual event is typically held in September and this year is being held in July!
This year the San Francisco Mime Troupe returns! Featured Speakers to be announced.
Free event! For more information visit: [progressivefestival.org]
Walnut Park 201 4th St., Petaluma
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Veterans For Peace Annual Convention
at Clark Kerr campus of University of California Berkeley, CA
Aug 11-15, 2016
[facebook.com/events/515549201948082]
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Remembering the Kellogg Briand Pact
Aug 27
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International Day of Peace
Sep 21
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First SOAW bi-national convergence
Oct 7-10
at the U.S./Mexico border in Nogales, Arizona
[is.gd/CbG7kX]
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Armistice Day in your city
Nov 11
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ACTION HEADLINES!
Stories are reviewed and provided by Northbay MDS Committees and Affiliates
BAY AREA SOLIDARITY
Updates on campaigns for Peace, Justice, & Freedom across the greater Bay Area, Norcal, and Socal
* (2016-05-21, Ras Ceylon), attached video (.mp4) [is.gd/ieqgVW]. Honor to share sum #wordsoundpower 2day @ #malcolmxjazzartsfest in #thetown this piece #yearofthemartyr is livicated to my brotha/comrade #ElHajjMalcolmElShabazz (grandson/namesake/1st male heir of #ElHajjMalikElShabazz) & all our fallen souljahz..prayerz up..it was hella good 2 build wit the People 2day..this event is always like a family reunion & we find it necessary to speak/act on commanding right/forbidding wrong in our community..by any means! #Justice4MalcolmShabazz #Justice4EmAll #RiseInPower #CodeofCulture #MalcolmXDay #Power2thePeople #Forwardtothe50th
2day's 16th annual Malcolm X Jazz Arts Festival was a blessing..we continue 2 honor the legacy of #ElHajjMalikShabazz / #MalcolmX Sunday in #SFC 3rd/Palou in #TheBayview 1-5pm wit a powerful lineup of live music & Kenneth Harding Jr Foundation's regular Community Feeds @ Kenny's Plaza, SF hosted by Idriss Stelley Foundation (ISF)
* (2016-05-22, Ras Ceylon), attached video (.mp4) [is.gd/y3Mbu1]. The 2nd annual #MalcolmXdaySF was powerful!! Give thanks 2 all the organizers & community that came out 2 honor #ElHajjMalikElShabazz 2day in SFC..this a clip of the 2nd single off my upcoming @a_rush produced solo album #ifearnotman & 1nce again my ahk Jabari @minister_of_confrontation rocked wit us mA! #repost @iambrotheramir My good brother @rasceylon rockin the mic at Malcolm X Day in the Bayview #malcolmx #bayview #muslim #mariowoods #alexnieto #freethemall #justice #malcolmshabazz
* "Ras Ceylon at Malcolm X Day SF" video (.mp4) [is.gd/JqBtjt]
* (2016-05-22): Chairman Fred Hampton Jr. and The Black Panther Party Cubs! Field Marshall Geo Freedom, Anton Carroll, Shogun Mensah Clappin
THIS is the presence of BLACK POWER!
#VANGUARD
#FreeEmAll
For all the people, ah people service announcement !!
[reverbnation.com/controller/audio_player/download_song/25950717]
from HurriKane Da Poet [reverbnation.com/hurrikanethat1Poet]
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* "Big Nazi on Campus: How well dressed racists are coming to a college near you" (2016-05-15, itsgoingdown.org) [archive.is/4yjnf]
* "Anti-Fascists patrol and cover up Neo-Nazi posters in Berkeley" (2016-05-22, itsgoingdown.org) [archive.is/ngAPO]: On Friday, May 6th, around 20 white nationalists, Neo-Nazis, and fascists associated with Identity Evropa (IE) and the National Policy Institute (NPI) held a rally at UC Berkeley with police police protection [archive.is/4yjnf]. IE and NPI are part of the growing “Alternative Right” [archive.is/ZOZyB], which includes academic “scientific racists” [archive.is/VClln], pro-rape Men’s Rights Activists [archive.is/h6BRN], proponents of the ‘Dark Enlightenment’ [archive.is/OBcdz], and others opposed to ideals of egalitarianism, feminism, and working-class solidarity. These ideas have gained ground under Trump’s campaign and proponents have used it as a point of intervention. Ultimately, their aim is to create an all white fascist state on the North American continent along the lines of the Confederacy [archive.is/0yI01], based on these ideals of anti-egalitarianism and white supremacy.
In the following two weeks since the rally, posters from Identity Evropa [archive.is/PMvil] have begun to be seen popping up around the UC Berkeley campus [archive.is/2irqF], both along the well trafficked streets of Shattuck, Allston, Euclid, and University Ave and in the neighborhoods around the campus. All of these posters were quickly ripped down, many of which were found and destroyed by individuals not associated with any group or crew, but who were opposed to the fascist and white supremacist views of IE. It seems that news of the white supremacists actions on campus has reached enough eyes and ears to bring several people in on the task of destroying the flyers. After an expose story on the May 6th rally [archive.is/4yjnf] was shared on facebook and twitter several thousand times, posts began to appear on Indybay showing ripped down and destroyed propaganda.Seemingly in response to the destruction of their work, on twitter the person running the IE account, most likely Nathan Damigo [archive.is/cX3CD], (view his facebook here [archive.is/PUY5Y]), a Neo-Nazi youth organizer who currently lives in Northern California and was present at the recent UC Berkeley rally, have put up collections of pictures that seems to imply that they are only increasing their activity.
* "Nazi fliers found on vehicles in midtown Sacramento Fliers target Muslims, Mexicans" (2016-05-10, kcra.com) [archive.is/qlGfD]: Fliers that propagate a Nazi agenda were placed on vehicles parked in midtown Sacramento Tuesday, police said.
The fliers were found on vehicles parked in the 2500 block of J Street. Police said the fliers had “hate speech” toward two groups.
The fliers are titled “The Hundred Little Death Camp Policy” and target Muslims and Mexicans. The fliers say: since all ways have been exhausted “to prevent the genocide of white peoples by both Islam and Mexico . . . we are now forced to fight fire with fire.”
It goes on to call upon people following the pan-Aryan platform to exterminate Muslim and Mexican forces.
“If you have not secured a body dump site, do so now! Kidnap, rob, torture for information and execute all Muslims and Latinos. Leave no survivors,” the flier said.
Sacramento police are working to find the source of the fliers.
* "His kampf: Police determine ex-Sacramento neo-Nazi behind hateful fliers distributed in Midtown; Greg Withrow arrested in Oroville on probation violation" (2016-05-12, newsreview.com) [archive.is/fyRBN]
* "Oroville man accused of distributing hate-speech fliers arrested; Sacramento police determined fliers didn't violate law" (2016-05-10, kcra.com) [archive.is/JmP3V] [begin excerpt]: Over the past week, Sacramento police and the FBI determined Gregory Withrow, 55, was responsible for making and distributing the fliers, police said.
Although the fliers were "inflammatory and offensive," officers determined that "neither their content nor their distribution constituted a violation of the law," according to investigators
However, Withrow was arrested because he was in violation of his probation conditions, police said. [end excerpt]
* "The hundred little death camp policy" (2015-05-09) [archive.is/aVfdW]:
- See Wikipedia: Greg Withrow - "The Hundred Little Hitler Policy".
- See the book: "A Hundred Little Hitlers", aka "Operation Warlords - Phase Two"
- See The History Channel's "Gangland" episode "Hate Nation". Season: disc three.
- See Operation Warlords. Portland murder trial. White aryan resistance.
As America escalates our war upon Islam and tensions rise towards open hostility between the United States of America and Mexico, our preliminary tests of the hundred little death camp policy have proven both successful and lethal. We shall now expand our death camp program throughout North America, as well as Europe and the Russias. On the date of October 26, 2013, a lawsuit was dispatched to the convention on the prevention for the crime and punishment of genocide: address: Carnegieplein 2, 2517 KJ: The Hague, by Gregory Steven Withrow. The lawsuit concerns itself primarily with the illegal; invasion of America by Mexico and the accrument of the genocidal effect of White peoples in America caused by the Mexican "Reconquista". A hate crime.
- See: Youtube: Greg Withrow: "Introduction to The Sun" and "The Lightning and the Sun" (2012).
The lawsuit also concerns itself with American banking activities that secretly support the 'DAESH', aka: Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. aka: ISIL aka: Islamic State, aka: ISIS. —and the premeditated genocide of the Syrian, Iraqi, Yazidi peoples and peoples of the Christian faith which began to occur in mid-2014.
- See: Terrorist Banks: The Bloomberg Report.
the following embassies were notified in October of 2013: Russia, Germany, Greece, Sweden, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Japan, Mexico, etc.
On the date of 3/12/2014, just prior to the rise of isis, the fbi, then working with the southern poverty law center (SPLC), sent an FBI Task Force to the residence of Greg Withrow at 2691 Pinecrest rd, with a warrant signed by Federal Judge Allison Claire to confiscate and cover-up these acts of genocide while acting under the color of the crimes against humanity.
Craig Lloyd Blankfen, CEO Goldman Sachs. Ben Shalom Bernanke, former CEO of the Federal Reserve. CEO J. Richard Cohen. The SPLC. And President Enrique Nieto of the Progressive Revolutionary Institution of Mexico (PRI).
- See Mathew Heimbach: White Student Union. The White Genocide Project.
- See FBI case #214-sw-0417 and file #260n-sc-34533.
In that all peaceful legal remedies have either been or interfered with to prevent the genocide of White peoples by both Islam and Mexico, as well as the United States Department of Justice, we are now forced to fight fire with fire. The hundred little death camp policy is hereby activated as a Pan-Aryan platform and is greenlighted, to expand across North America, Europe and the Russias for the express purpose of exterminating all Muslims and Mexican forces within the before mentioned territories and the overthrow of the capitalist system towards the establishment of an White Aryan resource based economy. All such white resistance groups and lone-wolves are to coordinate under the umbrella organization of the hegemony of racially unified states (HORUS). If you have not secured a body dump-site, do so now! Kidnap, rob, torture for information and execute all Muslims and Latinos. Leave no survivors.
Military order validated. Code #766v.
by order of: Greg Withrow, founder: Aryan Youth Movement; White Student Union; USA Skinheads of 1978. Founder: Aryan Assassins. Founder HORUS.
We Fight for a New Golden Age! A New Golden Dawn!
Copy and re-distribute.
* "Psychology and Ideology of a Racist" testimony of Gregory Withrow, Consultant on Racist Ideology, for the "Hate Violence in California - State and Federal Responses to Hate" Senate Investigation (1993) (.pdf, beginning at pg. 61, document pg. 52) [is.gd/xjAa1i] [begin excerpt]
SENATOR LOCKYER: Mr. Withrow, do you want to come up?
MR. GREGORY WITHROW: Thank you very much, Senator. It's an honor to be here.
My parents were first cousins. I was raised as a matter of eugenics, genetics, or so my father felt. I was raised for one purpose, and that was to terminate people like you.
I've heard a lot today. I've heard a lot of discussion of what the problem is. We know what the problem is. Failing is to understand what the racist is.
You have several types of racism: supremacists, segregationists, separatists, genocidalists, and total irrationalists. You cannot deal with him on an intellectual basis. Hitler said, "We think with our blood." Mussolini said, "Racism is 90 percent emotional, 10 percent intellectual." You cannot reach them on an intellectual basis.
I've read on page 36 about the prison terms and I wish I had more time to review this. I believe those are correct. That is one good avenue of punishment for racists who commit hate crimes. Those are racists who are irredeemable. There's really no hope for them. In fact, they will probably come back out of prison even more hateful. In fact, many racist groups recruit many of their most hard-core racists out of prison.
SENATOR LOCKYER: Mr. Withrow, why don't you perhaps tell us in a little more detail your own personal experience and involvement with some of these groups.
MR. WITHROW: I was raised by my parents and my father. I was raised in Nazi camps. I was raised for one purpose, and that was, quote/unquote, "the total extermination of all subhuman non-Aryan peoples from the face of the North American continent; men, women, children, without exception or appeal." There is no reasoning with that.
SENATOR LOCKYER: And when you say Nazi camps, what's that like?
MR. WITHROW: That would be anywhere from going out on a picnic-like setting and being indoctrinated with philosophy to shooting weapons, learning how to build weapons, learning how to kill and so forth. Basically, I was trained to be a killing machine.
One of the aspects of my training was to build, which you are now dealing with, a youth movement that is what you call a hate movement. I began the White Student Union in 1978, the Aryan Youth Movement also, and along about that time we began making contact with the Oy Movement or Skinhead Movement in England through Tom Metzger of the White Aryan Resistance.
This is called a hate movement. I tend to disagree. It is a fear movement. Before I ever learned to hate I learned to fear. I learned to fear people of other races and I learned most of all to fear people of my own race.
In previous times there were older people recruiting younger people. Today it is peer pressure. A gang-like mentality occurring amongst many different ethnic groups on a peer level.
My fear was realistic. I could only be reached on an emotional level. I knew one emotion or two: fear and hate. A third emotion entered my life, that of love, and for that I was tortured by my so-called brethren skinheads. My throat was cut, my jaw was broken in four places, my nose was broken, my ribs were broken. My hands were shattered as nails were driven into them. And I was told I would die as a -- I can't use the word -- Jew. It was a Black couple that saved my life.
SENATOR LOCKYER: And what provoked that attack?
MR. WITHROW: What provoked that attack was falling in love and wanting out of the movement. Once you're in you can't really get out. What a lot of people fail to understand -- there are people raised as
Christians, there are people raised as Jews, there are children at this very moment being raised as racists. They know no other type of philosophy. They do not wish to disappoint their peers, they do not wish to disappoint their parents. They have a one-track single mind of thinking. If you interfere with that form of thinking, which is primordial in its thought and therefore it is reactionary and irrationalist in its nature, you have contaminated their purity. Attempts to contaminate their purity are anathema to the way of their thinking; therefore, they will attempt to destroy you.
The best way to fight fire with fire is to centralize and that is to begin to create a centralization or a data collection agency of these groups and their motives, their motivations, and a better understanding of where they are truly coming from and how they think.
As far as punishments are concerned, there are racists that are redeemable. However, there have been few avenues left open for racists to quit to go to. When I quit, no one wanted me. Who wants a bald-headed, tattooed swastikaed, hate-filled kid?! Who wants that person? But I wanted something more out of life as I began to realize there was more than just hate and fear in this world. I am one of those kids that played video games. I am one of those children raised to hate.
It is paramount to leave openings for people that wish to get out. If they only had the chance they would probably flee, but the fear factor, not the hate factor the fear factor is in them. I feared for my life and I almost lost it. Many of these others also fear for their lives if they don't carry forth orders or carry forth what I would call their programming, because these are machines. These are automatons. They have lost, basically, their souls. They are hollow shells. And all they have left is the color of their skin. That's what they defend.
SENATOR LOCKYER: Mr. Withrow, you were raised in Southern California?
MR. WITHROW: I was raised in Northern California, sir, near the Sacramento-Roseville area.
SENATOR LOCKYER: Was that where the groups were that you were involved with?
MR. WITHROW: I was taken to several different places throughout the state as a child. I was forced to do many things, including, I'm sorry to say, fighting other Black children. If I did not I would be beaten myself; hence, the fear factor again instilled in me. Painting swastikas. And finally it went on to organizing groups that went out and literally have bombed, committed murders, have done great destruction to this society.
SENATOR LOCKYER: Do you have any way to estimate the number of people involved in those activities in California that you saw or heard about from your own experience?
MR. WITHROW: You would have to understand the break-up of the racists. Again, there are varying types of racists which I explained. I think you're referring to your more hard-core fanatical racists that wouldn't care about coming in here with an Uzi and blowing you all away.
SENATOR LOCKYER: No, or that would engage in violent activity.
MR. WITHROW: Correct. I would estimate this to be numbering between around 1,500 to 2,500 throughout the state. And that's quite a few. But what we have is what was begun several years ago, the hundred little Hitler policy and this was to create a hundred leaders or potential leaders. Say, if one
gets arrested or knocked off there'd be another to take his place. Hence, you'd have what are called crews: groups of three or four, five, working in random activities and these are individual selves. So you have a hand of selves but this one doesn't know what this one is doing, and on the other hand, they don't even know what's going on. But they are all acting independently towards the same goal. As comical as it may sound, they plan to take over the White House, take over the country, exterminate all the bad white people first and then get rid of the rest. That includes you and me and probably about 150 million other Americans. As comical as that may sound they are set on doing this because of their fanaticism and their irrationalism. And people do die. Even if one person dies in this comic tragedy, even if one person dies that is one too many.
ASSEMBLYWOMAN LEE: Let me just ask you this, and I think it's important we all realize what you're saying and I really appreciate your being here and laying this out for us because what you're talking about are activities and training and the violence that is occurring here in the State of California, the most diverse state in the country. This is not the South of the United States. I wanted to ask you, through your work do you know or have investigated what is occurring in Mississippi and in Alabama and South Carolina and the southern states where those of us here in California always point to as being the most hostile environments when really what you're revealing to us today is that we need to really deal with this entire state.
MR. WITHROW: This entire state, this entire nation and, in fact, this entire world. As the Nazi group is growing again, regaining substance in Germany, you have people here in California printing literature up for them, because it is illegal to print it in Germany, and sending it to Germany. And Germany funding the Nazi groups here in California. It is a worldwide thing. Our nation is our race. They do not see land boundaries. They see racial boundaries. The thing is bigger in scope than many can imagine. It is not limited to one city here or a small town there.
I have met another type of racist altogether that absolutely sickens me, and this man, we have been trying to pursue for over ten months. He is a molester, a white man, a molester of little Black girls. This is what he does. The police station in the city where I come from know about it. They caught him recently with a shotgun in his car. There is a little girl here right now that has been victimized. She is to be my future step-daughter who has been victimized by this man.
Here are the laws! I don't see them being enforced. I'm going nuts trying to put this man behind bars. This is just one racist. This is one type of racism. An irrational, sick type of racism. He sees little Black girls as less than human, animals for his own sexual pleasures. That is another type of irrationalist racist that should be dealt with. I have so much to say and I've been waiting for so long to say it.
SENATOR LOCKYER: Would you comment on what the specific efforts were to recruit youth?
MR. WITHROW: Specific efforts are, one, peer pressure. That is, a group coming up to somebody and say a white kid is afraid of walking down the street that is predominately Latino or Asian or Black and a group of whites coming over and saying, Hey, join us and we'll protect you. The same old gang mentality.
But it goes deeper than that. There are people literally raised this way. I just did the Jenny Jones show a couple of months ago in which there were six children on there. Their parents were on there saying, We are raising our children deliberately to be racists, and the children said when God -- this is their irrationalism when God tells them to go out and kill they will kill. There's no security in this building. You think hate violence in California. You're talking about a very dangerous subject. These people do harm other people. They do kill other people. And they do plan schemes.
SENATOR WATSON: May I ask you a question on the planning of the scheme. Is your movement that you came from connected to those young men who threatened the First AME Church in Los Angeles?
MR. WITHROW: Exactly the point. It is based on the old idea of the confederacy. They are loosely knit random groups headed by a charismatic leader which are instigated through talk shows such as "Race and Reason", phone message machines, computer networks, video games, all types of literature and they are instigated and angered to the point and feared to the point where they go out and commit and plot some type of crime. Most are spontaneous. You're talking about a group of guys, some girls, getting drunk and going out and beating up some innocent person on the street and taking their money and saying, We do this in the justification and the name of the race. Then you have your more diabolical charismatic leaders that plan on bombings, murders, mayhem, and all it takes is one. One. Hitler could have gone out and shot one Jewish person and got his anger out that way but we know what he did.
SENATOR MARKS: What got you to change your opinion that you have changed from?
MR. WITHROW: As an irrationalist, as I said I knew two emotions: fear most of all and hate was the secondary subsidiary product of that. I encountered a woman who gave me what I can only describe as unconditional love.
Her parents fled Nazi Germany. They adopted Judaism although they were of Germanic decent and so they had to flee Nazi Germany. They had a child here in America and she was intrigued by my philosophies. Never before would I hold a meaningful dialogue with anyone but I found her arguments to be or her debate to be most intriguing and it made me begin to rethink -- frontal lobe up here -- rethink and re-evaluate what I was doing. I was given love, pure and simple. I know you want it brief. I was given love. That helped change me. I was given an avenue out through the Anti-Defamation League. They helped remove the swastikas off my back through laser surgery. They opened their hearts to me. They gave me an avenue out.
This avenue must be expressed more so that these kids that are -- a lot of them are homeless, they live in gangs, they take crank which are called muscle, they drink heavily, and they go out and they commit crimes. Methamphetamine is crank. If only they saw an avenue out. Just like the ghetto person in Harlem or the Latino person in L.A. wants an avenue out. I had an avenue out and I took the shot and here I stand before you saying we have to have more avenues out.
The punishments, many of them in this, what I have read, I agree with. There should be added punishments. Some of these people that may seem redeemable, if they desecrated a synagogue they should be forced to clean it. They should maybe help tutor African Americans, Latinos, Jews. They should be forced possibly to go and pray in that very synagogue that they desecrated.
If, as I child, I had been brought into a synagogue, if I had been brought amongst African American people in a wholesome environment, I may have turned out to be a different person altogether. That is a preventive measure before these kids even become racists or are indoctrinated on the peer pressure level. Once they're indoctrinated you begin to lose your grip and once you begin to lose your grip, even if one more is recruited, that may be the one that decides to assassinate you, Mr. Bill Lockyer.
SENATOR MARKS: Aren't you afraid that some of the people that you were associated with will retaliate against you?
MR. WITHROW: They already have and I'm shaking in my shoes right now. But I am here because this must be done. My life, the life of my fiance, the life of that child depend on it. Your lives as well. I have to do this. I have to stop the monster I've created.
SENATOR TORRES: Mr. Withrow, I appreciate, as all of us do, you having the courage to be here today. Love intervened for you. I would like to believe that God intervened for you.
[end excerpt]
* "Charlotte Observer: Girls Must Overcome ‘Discomfort’ of Seeing ‘Male Genitalia’ in Locker Rooms" (2016-05-21, culturalmarxism.net) [archive.is/4QQ8h]
---
* "The Right to Stay in a Healthy Community" (2016-05-24, 1021 NewsWire):
Already threatened by corporate pollution and facing displacement by soaring housing prices and real estate speculation, more than 200 Oakland residents gathered for a day of food, fun, music and resistance Saturday, May 21 at West Oakland’s Defremery Park.
The community picnic, sponsored by a coalition of No Coal in Oakland, the West Side Missionary Baptist Church, the Sierra Club and SEIU 1021, happened just weeks before the Oakland City Council is scheduled to vote June 27 on whether to allow a polluting coal export facility at the Port of Oakland. The Council will also vote on a proposal to place “Renters Protection” ordinance on the November 2016 ballot going before the council June 7. The event was aimed at organizing support for banning coal in Oakland and giving tenants rights.
Already the victim of the Oakland Port’s diesel truck fumes and the even dirtier cargo ship emissions, West Oakland has the highest asthma rates in the country. Now a big-time local developer and former Oakland Port Commission president, Phil Tagami, who has political and financial ties to then-Oakland Mayor and now Governor Jerry Brown [archive.is/CP3LB], wants to double down on that poisonous legacy by shipping millions of tons of Utah coal through the West Oakland community en route to the port.
After most picnic attendees had their fill of hamburgers, hot dogs and the fixings, the day’s emcee, Reverend Ken Chambers of the West Side Missionary Baptist Church, introduced state Senator Loni Hancock (picured above), who has authored four bills now in the legislature to ban the use of public funds for building coal export terminals in California ports.
Hancock noted that state pension plans have been divested from coal as a bad investment in what she called “a dying industry.” She called on the Oakland City Council not to use public money on a project that will hurt the public.
Hancock also pointed out that although an Environment Impact Project (EIR) had been done on building a new port terminal on the former Army Base, it did not at that time include coal, so no study on its health affects and other impacts has been done, and no mitigations to them have been required.
Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates warned that the port project would have far-reaching impacts, with the coal trains dragging pollution through other communities along the tracks. He said he and the mayors of 10 other Alameda County cities had written an open letter to the Oakland City Council opposing the project.
Those backing the proposed coal export facility cite the false promise of jobs for the community, as well as Tagami’s threat to sue the city if he doesn’t get his way to make gazillions while poisoning the community and profiting from the single worst contributor to global warming.
Derrick Muhammed, Secretary-Treasurer of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10, told the gathering that the vast majority of the jobs associated with the coal facility – loading the ships and building the terminal – would be done by the union longshoremen and union construction workers. He questioned what jobs in the community the developer and project proponents were talking about, and why they would promise this would bring them [archive.is/H3mO4].
“The coal supporters want to use the need for employment in our community to trick people into supporting this poison project,” Muhammed said.
Even though the longshoremen would get the jobs loading the coal, Muhammed’s Local 10 has taken a position against building the facility since it would add pollution to their community, be unhealthy work for them, and contribute to climate change.
Ms. Margaret Gordon, co-founder of the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project and long-time community organizer, had one simple message for coal supporters from Oakland to Utah.
“Keep it in the ground!’ she said.
Meanwhile, Oakland’s long-time residents are being forced out of their homes by the housing cost boom spilling across the bay from San Francisco, fueled by the explosive growth of tech companies. In response, housing and neighborhood activists, along with labor unions and faith community supporters, have drafted a Renters Protection ordinance to limit rent increases and extend “just cause” eviction rights.
But when the coalition presented the measure to the City Council to be placed on the November ballot, several council members responded with stalling tactics, showing an unwillingness to allow the measure to go before voters, even though, or perhaps because, polls show overwhelming support for it, upwards to 80% approval.
“Housing costs have gotten so ridiculously high in Oakland that although I have a good job with the city’s Public Works Dept., the only way my daughter and I can stay in the town I was born and raised in and work in is to share a house with my extended family,” said Ivan Satterfield, an SEIU 1021 member who spoke on the issue at the event.
Get involved:
- Tuesday, June 7 the Oakland City Council will debate whether to place the Renters Protection Ordinance before voters on the November 2016 ballot. Members are encouraged to attend the meeting wearing their purple and speak before the Council advocating that Oakland citizens get the chance to weigh in on housing rights.
- Monday, June 27 the Oakland City Council will debate and decide the fate of the Port’s coal export terminal. Members are encouraged to attend the meeting wearing their purple and speak before the Council advocating a ban on coal in Oakland.
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BAY AREA SOLIDARITY: Updates on campaigns across the Nation!
[LeftForum.org]
* " ‘Rage, Rebellion, Revolution’: Left Forum kicks off in NYC" (2016-05-20, rt.com) [archive.is/1ZlmL]* "Left Forum Conference" (2016-05-20, veteransforpeace.org) [archive.is/mu6EY]:
Left Forum convened the largest annual conference of a broad spectrum of left and progressive intellectuals, activists, academics, organizations and the interested public.
United for Peace Left Forum 2016: Rage, Rebellion, Revolution: Organizing our Power!
Theresa Shoatz (daughter of BPP political prisoner Russell Maroon Shoatz), Patrick McCann (immediate past national president, Veterans For Peace), and Noelle Hanrahan, Prison Radio correspondent presented workshop: Tear Down the Prison Walls!
* "Žižek at Left Forum: ‘Terrorists, rapists, & criminals among refugees, but who cares?’ " (2016-05-23, rt.com) [archive.is/eKAip]
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from (itsgoingdown.org), an anarchist online news journal:
- Chicago May Day Report Back [archive.is/qT1rL]
- Seattle May Day Report Back [archive.is/HyP9L]
- May Day across North America [archive.is/bUaJP], a list of actions
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* " “You Are Appreciated”: My Memories of Afeni Shakur" (2016-05-18, by Akinyele Umoja, theblackscholar.org) [archive.is/Hkbmm]
===*===*===
TOWARDS REVOLUTIONARY SOLUTIONS
* CCDSLinks: Radical Ideas for Radical Change (2016-05-20) [archive.is/evQhx]: Fighting the Right Can Also Open Doors for Socialism
* "A Socialist on City Council: A Look at the Career of Kshama Sawant; The case of Kshama Sawant shows that no matter how good the candidate, business as usual rules in elected office" (2016-05-16, counterpunch.org) [archive.is/WpDZu]
===*===*===
CHICANO POWER! LUCHA PARA LA NUEVA AZTLAN!
* (2016-05-24) [archive.is/yEPAp]: Exposing Driscoll's for what they are. A union busting, slave wage corporation which exploits our people in the fields. Racism, sexism, workers abuse, slave wages, no wages, modern day child slavery, pesticide and hazardous chemicals being exposed to the people who pick your food. Sexual assaults and rape in the fields to the women. Inadequate housing, inadequate bathroom breaks and bathrooms. No water for field workers and modern day slavery. No health services when it comes to medical, dental and vision. Farm workers voices are being oppressed with violence. Boycott Driscoll's! Vote with your money. We don't want your blood berries! Driscoll's exploitation border to border
#WatsonvilleBrownBerets
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SOLIDARITY WITH THE NEW AFRICAN NATION!Black Power! Revive the Community! Defend the Nation!
* 2016 Black Power Tour in Oakland at Lil' Bobby Hutton Park! L.A and Oakland Chapters together! [archive.is/91gtL], more photos [archive.is/it3c1] [archive.is/4CIZE].
* [archive.is/JBWYC]:
Peace and Black Power Family,
Welcome to the Black Survival and General Civilization Class hosted weekly by the National Minister of Defense of the Black Riders Liberation Party Min King Samir Shabazz broadcasting live weekly on Do Tha Knowledge Radio. This class we will be dealing with a degree of Black survival and general civilization class. This series is designed for those among us who seek to prepare themselves for the inevitable task of emergency preparedness emergency response and survival against the harsh conditions and demands associated with living off the grid. Join us every Wednesday at 1:30pm PST 3:30pm CST 4:30pm EST. Call in live to phone number 713-955-0707 and press 1 with your questions and comments for the host or our premiere guest.
* (2016-05-23) [archive.is/jAs4u]:
#messagetomyfolks# It's real out here.
[BrlpArkansas@)gmail.com]
BLACK POWER!!! ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!!!
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* (2016-05-24) [archive.is/gsXBo]: Body Of An Atlanta , Georgia Black Male Found Hanging In Beachwood, Ohio. (REAL PHOTO) Still Think This A Game ? They Claim "Suicide"
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* "The Invisibility of Black Autism Clinical bias and ignorance have led generations of clearly autistic black children to be diagnosed with ADHD or even "mental retardation" instead" (2016-05-17, undark.org) [archive.is/I5xu4]
===*===*===
STUDENT POWER!
information collected by the Committee to Defend Public Education!
* "SFSU Ethnic Studies and Asian American Studies Cohorts respond to the hunger strike agreement. 'We ask allies, faculty, staff, and students to sign on and to continue putting pressure on administration until we have a sustainable and thriving College' " (2016-05-17):
ETHS and AAS Graduate Cohorts
College of Ethnic Studies
San Francisco State University
1600 Holloway Ave.
San Francisco, CA 94132
May 17th, 2016
This is a public statement to the campus, allies, and SFSU administrators.
Recently President Wong and the student hunger strikers reached an agreement that led to a sustained $482,806 increase to advancing the college of ethnic studies, as well as an additional $250,000 toward the 2016-2017 academic year. With this money we now have the funding for sustaining the salaries of 2 full time tenure track faculty positions in the Africana Studies department. Race and Resistance Studies was granted departmental status and 2 courses have been created and dedicated toward Pacific Islander Studies. In addition, we were granted resources toward hiring a full time development officer and grant writer, as well as more work study positions and a complete restructuring of our current MA curriculum. We deeply appreciate the resilience and tenacity of the hunger strikers and thank them for their efforts and sacrifices. However, although our movement has made some incredible gains, we are still concerned with how and why certain important items were omitted from the agreement.
To begin, we assert that the "cooling off" period that the students were issued and agreed to is a tactic to suppress dissent on campus, as well as an attempt to silence this much broader movement working to defend and advance the College of Ethnic Studies. These four students alone do not fully represent Third World Liberation Front 2016; they are a part of a much larger movement of undergraduates, graduate students, staff, and faculty that have adopted the struggles of the original Third World Liberation Front formed on this college. Despite making progress on a few of our original demands, we still are a united front that will not be silenced so long as we continue to remain under resourced and underfunded.
The Ethnic Studies and Asian American Studies MA programs, in our view, continue to be seen as a "cash cow" for the university, in that the resources dedicated to our programs are generally low and the quality of education provided is lackluster. The MA programs are only expected to provide tuition dollars but not necessarily a rigorous education and necessary financial support for its students, many of whom work full time and have other work or family requirements. MA students in Ethnic Studies and Asian American Studies are active community members and are expected to return to their communities with more tools and training to carry out the values of the College of Ethnic Studies as leaders. Yet despite the importance of graduate education to the College of Ethnic Studies, the university administration leading up to this current budget fight proposed that the MA programs be cut. Graduate students were told that faculty ought to teach larger lectures rather than smaller seminars as to better the cost-benefit of the College. In the neoliberal university, MA programs in the College of Ethnic Studies are both underfunded and understaffed and then accused of being unable to meet the scholarly expectations that a ?top level? university should be able to. We believe that this underlying logic that the administration has viewed the College of Ethnic Studies had not changed despite the agreement made.
In this regard, we refuse the administration's management and demand that our MA programs see more resources, which includes the original demands for a new communal space, funding support to do research and professional development, and challenge the administration to provide funding for the development of MA programs and graduate level courses in American Indian studies, Africana studies, and Latina/Latino studies. The MA students expect more than the status quo and see the importance of intellectual development alongside community activism. The administration has thus far failed to meet our demands to advance the graduate programs.
The Arab & Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas initiative (AMED), now housed within Race and Resistance Studies (recently given departmental status for the new academic year), was told that they would be in meetings with the president over the next 5 years to develop and reinstate 2 tenure-track faculty positions, and a staff position. These specific demands were not met and the funding from this agreement will not be not sufficient to cover its growth. The program has no budget and no staff with only one faculty member despite a growing academic Minor, an active public educational program, and a strong and growing commitment to Arab and Muslim communities, Indigenous communities, and other communities of color. We demand to know why the university will not reinstate AMED positions for the upcoming academic year. The advancement of AMED is crucial, especially in this moment of a heightened anti-Arab and Islamophobic environment. Even at SFSU, Palestinian students and allies have been targets of Zionist backlash, including calls to their places of work, homes, death threats via social media, and other tactics to push punitive action from the university. This backlash came following a student protest of a campus event featuring Nir Barakat, the mayor of Jerusalem, a war criminal who has played a key role in advocating for further arming settlers in Jerusalem, leading to increased attacks on both African migrants and Palestinians in the forms of lynchings and stabbings. Contradicting the will of student organizers, the following day President Les Wong wrote a letter of apology to Barakat for the protest, and even invited him back to campus, reaffirming his zionist stance. Over the last 5 years alone, Palestinian and Muslim students on campus have been subject to federal investigation, demonization, and attacks from outside Zionist entities. AMED faculty has also been targeted by outside groups who falsely accused her of unfounded claims. The university however did not come to her support for a whole academic year. Instead, as he did now, the university president issued a statement affirming Zionist charges, thus leading to an escalation of that attack. The General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS) has constantly had to fight for their own space and right to function as any other student organization would. We only write all this to emphasize and contextualize the importance of a larger AMED program and why this cannot be put off for another 5 years. AMED, since its creation, has been a safe space for Arabs, Muslims, and Palestinians to develop.
The agreement proposes only two Pacific Islander studies classes with a promise to develop a department over the next 5 years. We ask this of administration: why have you only offered funding for two classes at the lowest possible lecturer pay when there has been considerable work and effort by Pacific Islander students on this campus toward creating an entire Pacific Islander studies department? Furthermore, we are disturbed by the lack of Pacific Islander voices in making these decisions and highlight the necessity of having professors that represent these communities. Pacific Islander communities are critically underrepresented and are often a forgotten voice in higher education. Although there have been lasting coalitions between Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders on common struggles, the racial categorization of "Asian-Pacific Islander" (API) is one that homogenizes the two groups, and allows for the tokenizing and invisibilization of a fast growing Pacific Islander community. This in turn misclassifies Pacific Islander communities in the academic world, making many not eligible for scholarships that assist underrepresented communities, since they are not seen as an underrepresented group. This "API identification" has very real consequences, a scholarship could be the determining factor whether someone goes to college or not. Currently Asian Americans are much more likely to receive a bachelor's and advanced degrees compared to their Pacific Islander counterparts. Again, we stress these points to contextualize why it?s necessary that a full Pacific Islander studies program, is established immediately, with an ultimate goal of making it a department. The university should not make the same mistake in limiting their own ability to help underrepresented communities by refusing to establish a program dedicated to the advancement of their communities. Structural frameworks for creating a comprehensive Pacific Islander studies program, with the intention of making it a department, are available. We have seen these models work for different studies programs and departments which currently exist. These communities deserve much more than just two classes, and the demands of our Pacific Islander community must be heard.
We want to re-emphasize that we made some important gains, but the funding necessary to sustain and advance our college will not come out of this agreement. The May 11th agreement represents less than 10% of the original ask and many of our demands have not been met. The president claims that he has unwavering commitment to the advancement and expansion of the college, however those words will remain empty as long as he continues to silence our underrepresented students. If you support us as a College then you will meet our demands regarding AMED program for the next academic year, disinvite Nir Barakat, denounce these ongoing intimidation tactics utilized by Zionist groups, develop a program with an ultimate goal of departmental status that satisfies and doesn't just pay lip service to the Pacific Islander community on this
campus, and give us sufficient funding to sustain the growth of the Ethnic Studies college.
We should not have to sacrifice certain communities for the advancement of others, that is antithetical to the teaching, spirit, and ethics of Ethnic Studies. We recognize that the different struggles indigenous communities and communities of color face are interlinked, and that our liberation is tied. That cannot be achieved by throwing each other under the bus, fighting over the limited funding we have. We ask that students, staff, faculty, and allies sign onto this statement and we encourage allies, alumni, and the entire campus body to continue to put pressure on administration to demand for an even stronger ethnic studies. This battle for ethnic studies is about more than just one department, one community, employment, or programs, it's about all of us. This is about our ability to build a movement and to have institutions that advocate and push for the continued growth of historically marginalized communities, taught by and for those most impacted by larger structures of power and oppression. This fight is far from over.
Signed,
The Ethnic Studies and Asian American Graduate Cohorts of the SFSU
College of Ethnic Studies
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WORKER'S POWER!
information collected by the Worker's Defense Committee [is.gd/VOkmLr]
* "10,000 Underpaid Workers to Flood McDonald’s Shareholder Meeting Demanding $15, Union Rights; Biggest-Ever Series of Protests at Golden Arches’ HQ to Kick Off with Strike by Chicago Fast-Food Workers; Time for Soaring Profits, Stock to Translate to Higher Pay" (2016-05-23, fightfor15.org) [archive.is/E02p7]
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* Free Handouts for Organizers (Labor Notes):
Visit [labornotes.org/secrets] and you’ll find 42 downloadable handouts from our new book, Secrets of a Successful Organizer, easy to print out for your next steward training or pass around to co-workers.
Check out these handouts from Lesson 1, "Attitude Adjustment," which will help you and your co-workers develop an organizing attitude.
- How the Boss Keeps Us Disorganized
- What's the Real Problem
- Aim for the Bullseye
- Exercise: Draw Your Own Bullseye
- Your Legal Rights to Organize
All hand outs are archived at [is.gd/bCP8Bf]
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* "AT&T Grievance Strikes Sweep California" (2016-05-20, Labor Notes Troublemakers Dispatch):
When a contract expires, its no-strike and binding arbitration clauses are no longer in effect. That means a union that's working without a contract can strike over grievances [archive.is/Fy1op].
Communications Workers at AT&T in California are doing just that. Locals there have held several grievance strikes since their contract expired in April. One grievance focused on managers creating a hostile work environment. Another was over the company's refusal to provide documents required by the contract to protect union members.
Another creative tactic at AT&T: union members are tapping dimes, in unison, during meetings with management to protest the 10-cent wage increases offered in negotiations. They're also conducting informational pickets before work and adopting Verizon Wireless stores in solidarity with their brothers and sisters who are on strike on the East Coast.
You too can "Adopt-a-Store" in solidarity with 39,000 striking Verizon workers.
- Adopt a Verizon Wireless corporate store and organize a group to picket and leaflet there twice a week for two to three hours. If you are interested, e-mail or call Dan at [dan@)labornotes.org] or [617-599-3026]. He'll put you in touch with organizers.
- Join an Active Picket: Go to [standuptoverizon.com] or call your Local CWA or IBEW union office to check which Verizon Wireless stores have an active picket line and when.
- Spread the Word on Social Media: Like the Stand Up to Verizon Facebook page [facebook.com/standuptoverizon]. Share Twitter postings [twitter.com/CWADistrict1].
- If you're joining or organizing pickets, take pictures, and e-mail them to [StandUpToVerizon@)CWA-Union.org].
- Sign the petition: [standuptoverizon.com/petition]
- Other Ideas? E-mail other ideas for strike solidarity to [dan@)labornotes.org].
* "Local Unions Take Lead in Verizon Strike Solidarity" (2016-04-29, labornotes.org) [archive.is/1sUCY], photo caption: Telecom union locals across the country are stepping up to show solidarity with the strike at Verizon and Verizon Wireless. Photo: CWA Local 3121.
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* "Taking a Stand for Vital Services" (2016-05-24, 1021 NewsWire):
More than 300 nurses, 911 Dispatchers and other San Francisco employees converged on City Hall to demand Mayor Ed Lee take the necessary steps to ensure adequate staffing to avert an unnecessary crises in San Francisco on May 19, 2016.
Although the City and County of San Francisco describes itself as a “unique city that offers residents access to many services,” the mayor’s and Board of Supervisors’ priorities in its $9 billion budget are leaving many of those services short staffed, jeopardizing the health and safety and the growing needs of its population.
So the city workers rally highlighted the impacts of that low staffing in various departments throughout the city. The 911 dispatchers, who direct fire, police and medical emergency services, highlighted how, due to understaffing, the department must log more than 100 hours of mandatory overtime on a daily basis, leading to fatigue and threatening public safety. In Medical Surgery, Psychiatric and Emergency Departments at San Francisco General Hospital, nurses pointed to diversion rates over 60%, more than half of patients being moved around San Francisco to other facilities because of inadequate staffing there.
At the end of the rally, members of the nurses bargaining team entered City Hall and brought a petition to the mayor’s office signed by nurses demanding safe staffing at General Hospital.
"We need to assure the public that we have the staff and capabilities to take care of them when they need us," said Aaron Cramer, an RN in the hospital’s Intensive Care Unit.
Watch a brief video of the City Hall action [youtube.com/watch?v=mfoC9TyWlKY].
Sasha Cuttler, R.N., Ph.D., a nurse at San Francisco General Hospital and on the steering committee of the Service Employees International Union Nurse Alliance of California, had this op-ed piece on the consequences of understaffing at San Francisco General Hospital published in the San Francisco Examiner May 12, 2016 [archive.is/OxunP].
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===*===*===
COMMUNITY FASCISM WATCH
* "Someone Demonstrated The True Value Of Votes … By Throwing Them In A Dumpster" (2016-05-18, by Lily Dane) [is.gd/9GDVNJ]
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The following article mentions a "controversy" in connection with a public agency's awarding of a public transportation contract to a foreign company named Transdev Services Inc., but the article does not mention what that controversy is. The company awarded the contract is connected to religious extremism, support for death squads conducting ethnic cleansing, and other human rights abuses across the world, yet those officials of the agency who awarded the contract have no ideological problem with the company's action, showing an indication of community fascism as they knowingly push public tax-dollars to the company involved in ethnic cleansing.
* "Spiffy new VINE buses are turning heads" (2016-05-23, napanews.com) [archive.is/qLYNj] [begin excerpt]: The Napa Valley Transportation Authority in February put the contract to operate the VINE system out to bid. Agency Executive Director Kate Miller said three companies responded – current operator Transdev Services Inc., MV Transportation and National Express.
An agency selection team evaluated the bids and recommends awarding the contract to Transdev. Miller said Transdev wasn’t the lowest bidder. The lowest bidder had its general manager leave and the general manager is a critical component of the evaluation.
More details will emerge when the Napa Valley Transportation Authority board of directors in July awards the contract. A new contract would be for five years, with two one-year options. The existing Transdev contract expires on Aug. 29.
Awarding a contract can be a cause for controversy.
In 2009, the board of directors awarded the contract to Transdev — then called Veolia — even though staff recommended MV Transportation. The board had originally awarded the contract to MV Transportation in 2008, then rescinded the award because of a procedural error and put the contract out to bid again. [end excerpt]
===*===*===
Documenting human-rights abuse by domestic security agencies
NORTHBAY COPWATCH
[NorthbayCopwatch.blogspot.com] [copblock.org] [wecopwatch.org] [filmingcops.com]
* "It’s Police Appreciation Week — Here Are 8 Cops Who Risked Their Jobs And Lives To Expose Corruption" (2016-05-16, by Claire Bernish) [archive.is/p9lZU] [begin excerpt]: Retired Philadelphia Police Captain Ray Lewis has become well known in activist circles for standing against the dark turn toward violence and corruption by departments nationwide in recent years. During the Occupy protests, Lewis appeared, in full uniform, denouncing what amounts to the corporate takeover of policing in America. “It’s an oppressive organization now controlled by the one percent of corporate America,” Lewis asserted. “Corporate America is using police forces as their mercenaries.” [end excerpt]===*===*===
NORTHBAY COPWATCH: Domestic Security Agencies and private-sector partners
* "Tech titans are busy privatising our data; When Facebook and Google finally destroy the competition, a new age of feudalism will arrive" (2016-04-24, theguardian.com) [archive.is/Wf12H]
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* "The FBI’s secret biometrics database they don’t want you to see" (2016-05-22, rt.com) [archive.is/Qqmwd]
---
* "LA Times Reporter Caught Falsifying Articles with CIA" (2014-09-08, nationofchange.org) [is.gd/7mRMC8] [begin excerpt]: In violation of journalistic ethics and the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, former Los Angeles Times reporter Ken Dilanian allowed CIA handlers to edit his articles prior to publication and reported false information to manipulate his audience. Responding to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, the CIA released hundreds of pages documenting the agency’s dubious relationship with national security reporters. Operating under a glaring lack of oversight, the CIA has been exploiting establishment journalists since its inception. [...]
Other reporters suspected of compromising their journalistic integrity include CNN’s Barbara Starr, Bret Baier of Fox News,Dina Temple-Raston of NPR, former L.A. Times reporter Robert Kaplan, Thom Shanker of The New York Times, Lesley Stahl of CBS News, Andrew Sorkin of The New York Times, Mark Moyar of The Wall Street Journal, Lara Logan of CBS News, Eric Schmitt, of The New York Times, Tom Ricks of ForeignPolicy.com, S.A. Miller of The Washington Times, formerWashington Post contributor Andrew Exum, Dexter Filkins of The New Yorker, and Perry Bacon, Jr. of NBC News.
Bearing a sordid history of torture, domestic surveillance, kidnapping, assassinations, and co-opting journalists, the CIA continues to operate without oversight. After the CIA hacked into computers belonging to the Senate Intelligence Committee, CIA Director John Brennan was caught lying about the crime and making false accusations against the oversight committee. Operating with impunity, the CIA continues to compromise American journalists and commit further atrocities without fear of consequence. [end excerpt]
---
* "Secret Bush-era blacklist delays Muslim citizenship applications - lawsuit" (2016-05-20, rt.com) [archive.is/XgqzC]
---
* "Satellite imagery mobile app for government" (2016-05-09, orbitlogic.com) [archive.is/YRaxM] [begin excerpt]: Orbit Logic announced today that their SpyMeSatGov iPhone app is now available on the Geoint App Store (https://apps.nga.mil) for any U.S. government or authorized user. SpyMeSatGov provides real-time imaging satellite awareness and on-demand access to EnhancedView commercial satellite imagery archives. The mobile app includes the ability to browse and select available commercial satellite images for any location. The selection and download of archived imagery can be completed in seconds, delivering high resolution satellite images for any location on demand. [...]
“SpyMeSatGov makes it easy and quick to get and exploit satellite imagery on mobile devices.” said Alex Herz, President of Orbit Logic. “SpyMeSatGov provides real-time situational awareness and puts EnhancedView imagery in the hands of the government field personnel in seconds.” [end excerpt]
---
* "SNOWDEN ARCHIVE ——THE SIDTODAY FILES" (theintercept.com), introduction [archive.is/uSiq9]: IDtoday is the internal newsletter for the NSA’s most important division, the Signals Intelligence Directorate. After editorial review, The Intercept is releasing nine years’ worth of newsletters in batches, starting with 2003. The agency’s spies explain a surprising amount about what they were doing, how they were doing it, and why.
The Intercept’s first SIDtoday release comprises 166 articles, including all articles published between March 31, 2003, when SIDtoday began, and June 30, 2003, plus installments of all article series begun during this period through the end of the year. Major topics include the National Security Agency’s role in interrogations, the Iraq War, the war on terror, new leadership in the Signals Intelligence Directorate, and new, popular uses of the internet and of mobile computing devices.
Along with this batch, we are publishing the stories featured below, which explain how and why we’re releasing these documents, provide an overview of SIDtoday as a publication, report on one especially newsworthy set of revelations, and round up other interesting tidbits from the files.
📥DOWNLOAD THIS BATCH [https://is.gd/RbyPTP]
* "The Intercept Is Broadening Access to the Snowden Archive. Here’s Why" (2016-05-16, theintercept.com) [archive.is/H1GLQ]
* "The Most Intriguing Spy Stories From 166 Internal NSA Reports" (2016-05-16, theintercept.com) [archive.is/sHdvk]
* "NSA Closely Involved in Guantánamo Interrogations, Documents Show" (2016-05-16, theintercept.com) [archive.is/Xl7Cy]
* "What It’s Like to Read the NSA’s Newspaper for Spies" (2016-05-16, theintercept.com) [archive.is/NawwR]
* "How We Prepared the NSA’s Sensitive Internal Reports for Release" (2016-05-16, theintercept.com) [archive.is/jzXFX]
* "SIGINT Development: A Network of Discovery Networks" (2003-06-11) (.pdf) [https://is.gd/awHYXh]:
SIGINT Development (SIGDEV) is the set of multidisciplinary analytic and discovery activities performed to anticipate, discover and/or enhance exploitation of current and emerging foreign communications and non-communications systems, enabling NSA/CSS to satisfy intelligence needs. An iterative process, it is an element of all of our jobs, which underpins the maintenance of our technical health, responsiveness, and ensures the continuing success of the SIGINT system.
Organizationally, SIGDEV Strategy and Governance (SSG) provides strategic direction and oversight of SIGDEV initiatives and activities throughout the enterprise, while the three centers -- Target Analysis Center (TAC), Network Analysis Center (NAC), and Target Technology Trends Center (TTTC) -- develop tools and techniques and trends information that enable SID to know and own the target and its communications.
The SIGDEV mission extends well beyond the corporate elements. If the SIGINT Directorate's SIGINT authorities govern your work role, then SIGDEV is probably an element of your job, and you are part of this growing network of discovery networks. To be successful, SIGDEV leverages the skills, talents and expertise of the individual people, and capitalizes on the capabilities of our international SIGDEV partners as well as industry and academia. The SIGDEV community is transforming SIGINT by teaming to forge new alliances across the corporation, the nation and the world to meet the challenges of understanding and exploiting today's complex networks and to more fully serve our national security mission.
In the past few months alone, the SIGDEV community has worked together to:
- Stand up the Iraq Terrorism Development Center - a collaborative partnership that includes the Office of Counterterrorism (CT), Geospatial Exploitation Office (GEO), Office of Middle East North Africa (MENA), the Collection Requirements and Strategies Center (CSRC), the Meade Operations Center (MOC), and the Army Technical Control and Analysis Element (ATCAE), and which draws on expertise throughout the SIGDEV Community. The ITDC develops leads on terrorists and former regime targets in Iraq with a goal of helping NSA/CSS increase intelligence production against these targets and to assist CENTCOM in its operational planning.
- Assume operational responsibility for the activities of the Meade Operations Center (MOC).
- Accept a significant role in filling gaps identified this fall at the SIGINT Site Commanders Operational Review .
- Sponsor a High-Powered Cordless Phone conference in October that attracted nearly 500 participants from around the world.
- Expand the remit of the Joint International Topics Cell (JINTAC) from a bilateral agreement supporting counter terrorism, to a Five Eyes collaborative effort covering additional transnational problems: counterproliferation and international crime and narcotics.
- Develop three new Communities of Practice: SIGINT Reporting, Complex Systems Analysis, and Filtering and Selection on the SIGDEV Learning Portal expanding 24/7 access to authoritative information on SIGDEV policies, tools, techniques and evolving technologies.
DYNAMIC PAGE -- HIGHEST POSSIBLE CLASSIFICATION IS TOP SECRET // SI / TK // REL TO USA AUS CAN GBR NZL DECLASSIFY ON: 20320108
===*===*===
NORTHBAY COPWATCH: Five-Eyes, and other transnational partners
* "#NATSEC2016: Concerns about foreign policies of the top candidates" (2016-05-18, by Alex Ward, warontherocks.com) [archive.is/Lb6kM] [begin excerpt]: Your humble #NatSec2016 writer recently commented that Trump’s feud with the United Kingdom is ill-advised. After all, it’s our closest ally. Brits go to war with us; they share intelligence with us; they share our values; and they usually have the same foreign policy objectives. At a time when things are rocky for the British government, scoring an own goal like this was really not a good way to shore up the “special relationship.” But we know what Trump thinks about allies. And Trump expects a poor relationship with Cameron, so he may be trying to ensure that he’s right in the end. [end excerpt]
---
* "Caught by the fuzz: Spain’s ‘muzzle law’ sees woman fined over ‘All Cats Are Beautiful’ bag" (2016-05-24, rt.com) [archive.is/tl7Ql]
===*===*===
from the Committee to
FREE 'EM ALL!
[PoliticalPrisonersUSA.blogspot.com]
End the Drug War! Stop Jim Crow! Close the Torture Chambers! [solitarywatch.com] [facebook.com/incarceratedworkers] [supportprisonerresistance.noblogs.org] [denverabc.wordpress.com] [prisonlegalnews.org] [prisonbooks.info] [nycabc.wordpress.com] [powmedicaljustice.com] [sacprisonersupport.wordpress.com]. Become a Human Rights Pen Pal! [link].
* "He Killed Two FBI Agents. Or He Was Framed. After 40 Years, Will Obama Free Leonard Peltier?" (2016-05-18, motherjones.com) [archive.is/Nz9qw]
---
* "Major Tillery Has New Evidence Exposing His Frame-Up Conviction And Needs Your Financial Support; Major Tillery Needs Help To Get This Evidence into Court!" (2016-05-20, justice4majortillery.blogspot.nl) [archive.is/m6lbe]: Major Tillery has new evidence that he was framed for a crime he did not commit. Over thirty years ago Tillery was falsely convicted for a 1976 pool hall shooting murder and assault, and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.
Major Tillery is completing investigative work to file a post-conviction petition based on new evidence of his innocence, police corruption and gross prosecutorial misconduct.Major Tillery needs your financial help and support to make the final push to get this new evidence into court.
Donate Here: www.JPay.com
Code: Major Tillery AM9786 PADOC
The Philadelphia assistant DA (ADA) against Major Tillery was the notorious Barbara Christie—numbers of her cases were reversed because of gross prosecutorial misconduct. At Tillery’s trial, the surviving victim did not testify. Police had his statement exculpating Tillery, but ADA Christie and the judge wouldn’t let it into evidence. There was no ballistics or any other physical evidence. The ADA had a lying witness who testified against Tillery at his trial — nine years after the shootings. The DA coerced and made promises for this so-called witness to avoid state prison time on his pending eight cases in exchange for lying testimony!
The trial took place during the last days of the siege and firebombing of the MOVE Osage Avenue home in May 1985. The prosecution claimed that Major Tillery was part of an organized crime group, and falsely described it as run by the Nation of Islam. This prejudiced and inflamed the majority white jury against Tillery, to make up for the absence of any evidence that Tillery was involved in the shootings.
During the decades of his imprisonment Tillery has advocated for other prisoners challenging solitary confinement, lack of medical and mental health care and the inhumane conditions of imprisonment. He began and won the lawsuit, Tillery v. Owens, that forced the PA DOC in 1990 to end double celling (4 men to a small cell) at SCI Pittsburgh and later resulted in the closing and then “renovation” of that prison.
A year ago Major Tillery stood up for Mumia Abu-Jamal and demanded the prison Superintendent John Kerestes get Mumia to a hospital because “Mumia is dying.” For defending Mumia and advocating for medical treatment for himself and others, prison officials retaliated. Tillery was shipped out of SCI Mahanoy, where Mumia is also held, to maximum security SCI Frackville and then set-up for a prison violation and months in solitary confinement. An international campaign succeeded in getting Tillery back into general population. Major now has a retaliation lawsuit filed against the PA Department of Corrections and is also fighting for Hepatitis C treatment.
Major Tillery is now 65 years old. He has liver problems, arthritis and rheumatism, back problems, a continuing itchy skin rash and active Hepatitis C. He’s done hard time, mostly in solitary confinement in max prisons, for over thirty years for a crime he did not commit.
Major Tillery is now fighting to overturn his frame-up conviction and win his freedom. His investigation is on-going. He has new leads. Major Tillery needs your financial support to complete this investigation and get his legal papers filed in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas. He needs this financial help right now. The clock is ticking on getting his new evidence filed in court.
Please support Major Tillery’s legal effort to end over thirty years imprisonment for a crime he did not commit.
Donate Here: JPay.com;
code: Major Tillery AM9786
Pennsylvania Department Of Corrections
Write Major Tillery AM9786
SCI Frackville 1111 Altamont Blvd.
Frackville, PA 17931
Call prison officials
- Dept. Of Corrections Secretary John Wetzel [717-728-4109]
- Superintendent SCI Frackville Brenda Tritt [570-874-4516]
and Demand:
- Decent medical care for Major Tillery!
- Stop the Retaliation Against Major Tillery. He should be exonerated for the false charges of drug possession and this misconduct removed from his record.
- Transfer Major Tillery from SCI Frackville back to SCI Mahanoy or to another facility in eastern Pennsylvania to remain near his family.
Call/E-mail your support and questions to:
- Kamilah Iddeen [717-379-9009], [Kamilah29@)yahoo.com]
- Nancy Lockhart [843-412-2035], [TheWrongfulConviction@)gmail.com]
- Rachel Wolkenstein, Esq. [917-689-4009], [RachelWolkenstein@)gmail.com]
---
* "Two more San Jose jail guards arrested on brutality charges" (2016-05-24, bayareanewsgroup.com) [archive.is/BB2i8]
---
* "3rd largest jail in US sued for 'wealth-based' detention system" (2016-05-24, rt.com) [archive.is/W1CuQ]
---
* "Hammering for Peace" (2016-05-24, commondreams.org) [archive.is/e54nD] [begin excerpt]: Last winter, at the Voices home/office in Chicago, we welcomed two friends who were in town for a Mennonite church gathering focused on the symbol of beating swords into plowshares. Their project embraces a vision from the biblical “Book of Isaiah” which longs for the day when “they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they study war anymore.” Our friends quite literally enact this vision. They use saws to cut guns and rifles in half and then hammer on the broken weapons, turning them into useful tools for gardening and light construction. [...]
As one of the manufacturers with the largest share of the global Unmanned Aerial Systems market, (18.9%), Northrop Grumman profits immensely from peddling complex weapon systems often designed to be eyes in the skies monitoring targets for assassination. This kind of surveillance and extrajudicial execution generates intense anger and backlashes in other lands. It also promotes proliferation of robotic weapons. But the U.S. military and acquiescent institutions encourage us to feel that we've been made safer by complex weapons of destruction, and we should instead be frightened of a young woman wielding a sledgehammer to break a plate glass window.
On May 24, Jessica Reznicek, will go to trial in Nebraska for her action. She has chosen to go “pro se,” – to defend herself. Courts in the U.S. seldom allow the necessity defense. If the judge in Jessica’s case does so, Jessica could try to defend herself saying she acted to prevent a greater harm. She could establish that the U.S. government consistently provides Northrop Grumman with lavish funding, devoting immense resources of materials and scientific ingenuity to the study of war, all desperately needed elsewhere. Northrop Grumman steadily experiments in perfecting the high-tech advantage of an empire bent on endlessly dominating the world through endless war. [end excerpt]Photo caption: Jessica Reznicek arrested outside of Northrop Grumman Corporation in Nebraska.
---
* "Whistleblower Revelations Expose 'Lie' that Snowden Had a Choice; Author Mark Hertsgaard tells Democracy Now! that Edward Snowden 'had no choice' but to go public with leaks" (2016-05-23, commondreams.org) [archive.is/lWo9h]
* "How the Pentagon punished NSA whistleblowers; Long before Edward Snowden went public, John Crane was a top Pentagon official fighting to protect NSA whistleblowers. Instead their lives were ruined – and so was his; Snowden calls for whistleblower shield after claims by Pentagon source; Pentagon source goes on record against whistleblower program" (2016-05-22, theguardian.com) [archive.is/2ZoPp]. Whowhatwhy.org writes: Read an excerpt of Mark Hertsgaard's new book revealing the speciousness of the argument that Snowden or other whistle-blowers can follow protocols without being destroyed professionally, personally, or financially. Hertsgaard highlights extended interviews with another NSA whistleblower, John Crane. For the first time publicly he reveals wrongdoing by the NSA's and DoJ's railroading of former NSA official and whistleblower Thomas Drake.
---
* "Brit, 22, who fought ISIS with Kurdish forces may face terror charges" (2016-05-19, rt.com) [archive.is/l5dI3]
===*===*===
WOMYN POWER!
END PATRIARCHY! COMBAT MISOGYNY!
* "Two-thirds of women in UK cities report being harassed or attacked" (2016-05-19, rt.com) [archive.is/JuKjo]
---
* "Each and everyone against femicide: against violence against women, feminist organization" (by Gema Ortega, member of The Lump-Feminist Action Libertaria, in the Republic of Chile) machine translated [archive.is/wwLT7]
===*===*===
articles recommended by the
SAN PABLO BAY ECOLOGICAL PRESERVATION ASSOCIATION
Campaigns, info, and more [SanPabloBayEPA.blogspot.com]. Science [discardstudies.com]
* "Caltrans Threats to Forests, Wetlands and Native Culture Remain on BACH's Agenda" (2016-05-19, Bay Area Coalition for the Headwaters BACH) [archive.is/N6prf], with updates on:
- Richardson Grove
- Smith River / Del Norte Caltrans Project
- Other Threats on the Smith River: Strip Mining
... and more!
---
* "Activists stir debate over reported weed killer in wines" (2016-05-23, napavalleyregister.com) [archive.is/r7mSm]
---
* "Russian researchers developed an ecological method for cleaning lakes from oil" (2016-05-16, National Research Tomsk State University, tsu.ru) [archive.is/AoYWK]
---
* "Protesters to Urge Federal Officials Not to OK Offshore Fracking in California" (2016-05-24, biologicaldiversity.org) [archive.is/XviZt]
---
* "Barium leaches directly from fracked rocks, study finds" (2016-05-24, phys.org) [archive.is/RDQDV]
---
* "Pipeline company blamed directly for Refugio Beach, Calif., oil spill" (2016-05-21, UPI Newswire) [archive.is/BYMyE]
---
* "House Science Committee Wants to Protect Exxon from Environmentalists" (2016-05-19, greenpeace.org) [archive.is/TBgUn]
---
* "Protesters Tell Feds: 'Keep It in the Ground' at Utah Oil, Gas Lease Sale; Dozens Call for Bold Climate Leadership at 'Climate Auction' " (2016-05-17, biologicaldiversity.org) [archive.is/pWZIe]
---
* "Oil and Gas Quakes Have Long Been Shaking Texas, New Research Finds; Waste disposal from fracking has been the recent culprit in causing man-made earthquakes, but industry has likely been triggering them for decades, study says" (2016-05-17, insideclimatenews.org) [archive.is/ymcjM]
* "Humans have been causing earthquakes in Texas since the 1920s" (2016-05-18, jsg.utexas.edu) [archive.is/r3GRc]
---
* "Farms a major source of air pollution, study finds" (2016-05-16, news.agu.org) [archive.is/8dmaV] [begin excerpt]: Emissions from farms outweigh all other human sources of fine-particulate air pollution in much of the United States, Europe, Russia and China, according to new research. The culprit: fumes from nitrogen-rich fertilizers and animal waste combine in the air with combustion emissions to form solid particles, which constitute a major source of disease and death, according to the new study. [end excerpt]
---
* "Hundreds of natural gas leaks identified in major US cities – study" (2016-05-20, rt.com) [archive.is/tXxtw]
---
* "Chemical Reform Law Falls Short in Protecting Public Health, Environment" (2016-05-24, ewg.org) [archive.is/w72DM]
---
* "Wyoming GOP Law Criminalizes Collecting Evidence Of Pollution On Public Land" (2016-05-15, reverbpress.com) [archive.is/yImwB]
---
* "Distinction Between Genetic Engineering and Conventional Plant Breeding Becoming Less Clear, Says New Report on GE Crops" (2016-05-17, nationalacademies.org) [archive.is/XCuNg]
---
* "Polluted Dust Can Impact Ocean Life Thousands of Miles Away, Study Says" (2016-05-16, news.gatech.edu) [archive.is/85LUT]
---
* "Killer Nile crocodiles are in Florida – and no one knows how they got there" (2016-05-20, rt.com) [archive.is/J5SD4]
---
* "Privatizing America’s Public Land How the Raid on Malheur Screened a Future Raid on Real Estate" (2016-05-17, by William deBuys, intro from tomdispatch.com) [archive.is/uRzHl]
===*===*===
SAN PABLO BAY EPA: Health and the Human Ecology
Monopolists enforce a regime that does not recognize the natural right to health and life. Info [detoxproject.org].
* "No, the UN has not given glyphosate a 'clean bill of health' " (2016-05-17, theecologist.org) [archive.is/cwSmQ]
* "Group Of Farmers Files Lawsuit Against Monsanto Claiming Roundup Gave Them All Cancer" (2016-05-18, by Baran Hines) [archive.is/ihZhG]
---
* "MSM Can’t Understand Why Consumers Want Non-GMO Despite Industry Science" (2016-05-20, by Brandon Turbeville) [archive.is/vBmWz] [begin excerpt]: Take the infallible NRC as an example. The organization which professes to stand for independent scientific research is instead packed full of industry scientists, GMO promoters and millions of dollars of donations from major biotech companies. In fact, the NRC has been described as having a revolving door of staff directors who move back and forth between the federally chartered organization and Big Ag corporations.
Food and Water Watch also presents evidence [archive.is/3zeb8] that the NRC regularly provides scientific conclusions on agricultural issues that are heavily watered down and mostly based on industry science. Indeed, while major corporations involved in the biotech industry and pro-GMO academics are welcome in the NRC, critics are shunned.
According to Food and Water Watch (.pdf) [https://is.gd/FE2Dn1], [begin excerpt]: With the NRC’s 2016 report, more than half of the experts selected to participate in the project have apparent conflicts, such as receiving research funding from industry, developing GMOs (or patents), consulting for industry or working for industry-funded organizations… Some of these scientist also have promoted GMOs in the media or lobbied government regulators in favor of GMOs. [end excerpt]
Food and Water Watch also reveals similar conflict-of-interest when it comes to animal agriculture.
Food and Water Watch states, [begin excerpt] Corporate influence at the NRC is by no means limited to the work that the group does on GMOs. In 2014, the NRC undertook an investigation into how to improve “sustainability” in animal agriculture through research and development. The NRC took corporate funding and recruited industry scientists to produce this report, with Monsanto, Tyson, Smithfield, the National Cattleman’s Beef Association and other industry groups involved.
In this instance, the NRC appeared to function as a private, for-hire research contractor, lending its name to a report that had both industry funders and authors – and that made findings that largely support industry’s goals in animal production. Industry advocates can use the report, which bears the prestigious NRC name, to defend controversial industry practices, which has already occurred. [end excerpt]
[end article excerpt]
---
* "Activists, Teachers, Parents and Youth Tell McDonald’s: End McTeacher’s Nights, Stop Using Teachers as Marketing Agents; 30,000 Petition Signatures Delivered to McDonald’s Executives" (2016-05-24, citizen.org) [archive.is/sXoA0]
---
* "100x Reporting Limit Aluminum, 3x Barium In Sacramento Rain Tests: Chemtrails / Geoengineering" (2016-05-18, Cassius Kamarampi) [archive.is/axWt6]:
Thanks to Stop Spraying us San Francisco [stopsprayingus-sf.com][facebook.com/GlobalMarchAgainstChemtrailsAndGeoengineering], 2016 rain tests were finally performed in the geoengineering hotspot of Sacramento, California.
This is where I saw (and experienced the symptoms of) the worst chemtrails I’ve ever seen. Above is a picture of the sky in Sacramento on March 15th.
According to Stop Spraying us San Francisco [archive.is/QRQ4y] [begin excerpt]:
Aluminum was found at almost 100 times reporting limits – an astonishing 4,700μg/L – in Sacramento rain collected May 5th, 2016.
Lisa DeFinis writes “This sample was collected on 5/5/16 at approximately 10AM in Sacramento, CA, by the airport. We had just suffered 2 days of extremely heavy spraying and it was raining and hailing at the time. I collected it in a sterile cup that I had purchased for this.”
Barium was over three times the reporting limit (64μg/L) while strontium was more than double its reporting limit (44μg/L) [archive.is/t1va2].
Thank you Lisa. If anyone else has noteworthy rain/snow/whatever analyses, please send them to me. If you’d prefer to be anonymous, I can take your name and/or address off it, but I feel it’s best to be open. We have nothing to hide – it’s the other team who conceal, mislead and outright lie. Ours is the side of truth, and I’m happy to be able to say yes, I want clean fresh air untainted by their evil crap. [end excerpt]
The rain tests were taken near the airport, shown here on the map in North Sacramento [archive.is/w9uc7].
Photographic evidence, rain tests, all of this should obliterate any shred of skepticism that geoengineering is occurring here.
If you need more to ponder over, just take a look at Yosemite being decimated by it [http://www.eraofwisdom.org/yosemite-decimated-geoengineeringchemtrails-video/]. Nuclear physicist J. Marvin Herndon’s study theorizing about aerosolized coal fly ash being the base material for geoengineering would be good reading material (.pdf) [http://nuclearplanet.com/2173.pdf]. You could read “The Geoengineering Escalation of 2016,” Era of Wisdom’s contribution in documenting the easily observable escalation of geoengineering activity since about January 2016 [http://www.eraofwisdom.org/geoengineering-escalation-2016-chemtrail-flu-explodes-alt-media/].
To comprehend this it helps to have firsthand experience smelling and tasting them, so pay close attention to what your nose detects every day and please share this with as many people as possible.
Here are more videos of geoengineered skies in Sacramento.
- [https://youtu.be/SL1C0vVWIYo]
- [https://youtu.be/lq6Tzz93Xco]
* "Atmospheric aerosols can significantly cool down climate" (2016-05-19, uef.fi) [archive.is/HEqDg]. Photo caption: The study also showed that current traffic and industry induced aerosol emissions cool down the climate. However, their cooling effect on the global temperature is significantly smaller than the warming effect of current greenhouse gas emissions. Nevertheless, it would be possible to harness, for example, global airline traffic and ship traffic for the purposes of atmospheric temperature regulation by increasing the sulphuric concentrations of fuels.
* "Retreat of the ice followed by millennia of methane release" (2016-05-13, cage.uit.no) [archive.is/3DkcU]
* "Unstable East Antarctic Glacier Has Contributed To Sea Level Rise in the Past" (2016-05-19, news.utexas.edu) [archive.is/tGCnN]
* "Hundreds of Millions of Lives Threatened by Glacier Meltdown; The "sleeping giant" poses a major threat to hundreds of millions of people living in coastal areas around the world" (2016-05-19, telesurtv.net) [archive.is/Y3yzh]
* "Increased vegetation in the Arctic region may counteract global warming" (2016-05-07, lunduniversity.lu.se) [archive.is/tYLBR]
* "Iron fertilization won't work in equatorial Pacific, study suggests" (2016-05-16, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University) [archive.is/TNro9]
---
* "Warning: Your hospital may kill you and they won’t report it; Medical error in hospitals is the third leading cause of death in the U.S. after heart disease and cancer --- an estimated 210,000 to 400,000 deaths a year" (2016-05-09, kurzweilai.net) [archive.is/hpmdo]
===*===*===
articles recommended by the
NO NUKES! campaign
[StopNuclearDeath.blogspot.com] [nuclear-news.net] [nukeresister.org] [nukefree.org]
* "Legal Action to Shut Down Indian Point; Emergency legal filing to the NRC demands reactor 2 not restart, immediate shut down of reactor 3" (2016-05-24, foe.org) [archive.is/33Z7Z]
---
* "600 tons of melted radioactive Fukushima fuel still not found, clean-up chief reveals" (2016-05-24, rt.com) [archive.is/Zx9od]
---
* "NuclearPowerDaily info alert: Holtec and NSFC share first-hand insight into nuclear decommissioning" (2016-05-24, NuclearPowerDaily.com): At an average cost of $750 million to decommission one nuclear reactor, those responsible for plant closures manage vast budgets, workforces and sub-projects.
Holtec, one of the industry's foremost experts in nuclear plant decommissioning, has shared its hands-on experience with plant shutdowns in a recent interview with Nuclear Energy Insider.
Get your complimentary copy of the interviews here
The interviews will provide you with:
- An overview as to why Holtec has identified nuclear decommissioning in the US as a growth market and what future opportunities lie ahead for service providers in the space
- Research by Jim Hamilton from the National Spent Fuel Collaborative into the role of federal, state and local stakeholders in the decommissioning of nuclear facilities
===*===*===
articles recommended by the
SAN PABLO BAY SOVEREIGNTY Think-tank
[SovereignSanPabloBay.blogspot.com] [permaculture.org]
* "How to Create a Free Farm Stand in Your Community" (2015-02-03, shareable.net) [archive.is/GKxch]
* "How Transition Palo Alto Brings Sharing and Community to Silicon Valley" (2016-04-25, shareable.net) [archive.is/EhbHf]
---
Beddington Zero Energy Development (BedZED) is a housing development in London.
Designed to create zero carbon emissions, it was the first large scale community to do so.
* "Milestone in solar cell efficiency by UNSW engineers; Milestone in solar cell efficiency by UNSW engineers; Australian engineers have edged closer to the theoretical limits of sunlight-to-electricity conversion by photovoltaic cells with a device that sets a new world efficiency record" (2016-05-17, newsroom.unsw.edu.au) [archive.is/tX2ot], photo caption: Dr Mark Keevers with one of the spectrum splitting, four-junction mini-modules developed at UNSW.
* "Solar power getting cheaper in the United States" (2016-05-19, UPI Newswire) [archive.is/6RO6D]
* "Clean energy coming, but cheaper rates?" (2016-05-23, americancanyoneagle.com) [archive.is/3Pqx3] [begin excerpt]: PG&E customers in Napa County’s five cities will be getting notices in coming weeks from their new energy provider, Marin Clean Energy, about a planned switch, but it remains to be seen if the change to MCE will be cheaper for local ratepayers.
The cities of Napa, American Canyon, St. Helena and Calistoga, plus the town of Yountville, have had their applications to join MCE approved. Napa County was already an MCE member.
When local city councils voted in 2015 to apply for MCE membership, they were told by the clean energy provider that their rates were competitive with PG&E’s, and at times were even cheaper.
But a decision in Sacramento at the beginning of this year made MCE’s mission of offering competitive, renewable energy more challenging, Alex DiGiorgio, community development coordinator for MCE, told the American Canyon City Council last week.
The rise of community-choice aggregation organizations like MCE, CleanPowerSF, Sonoma Clean Power and others has cut into PG&E’s market share, causing the utility to lose money.
To help PG&E recover some of its lost revenue, the California Public Utilities Commission approved PCIA (Power Charge Indifference Adjustment) rates that PG&E is allowed to charge to customers who switch to MCE and others like it.
“Some people think (PCIA) stands for ‘Protecting Corporate Interests and Assets,’” said DiGiorgio, “which it doesn’t.”
In January, the California Public Utilities Commission approved a significant increase in PCIA, or exit rates, which has upped the bills of MCE customers and reduced the promised cost savings that came with switching from PG&E.
“Right now MCE’s generation rates are 14 percent lower than PG&E’s generation rates,” DiGiorgio told the council. “The wrinkle is there is an exit fee that is charged to all community-choice customers and that exit fee was increased by 95 percent at the beginning of this year.” [end excerpt]
---
* "Open-Source, DIY Machine Recycles Household Plastic Into New Products" (2016-04-26, shareable.net) [archive.is/bcxjd] attached video [https://youtu.be/8J7JZcsoHyA]
===*===*===
NORTHBAY ENTHEOGENIC FREEDOM
[NorthbayEntheogen.blogspot.com]
* "This is your brain on the war on drugs" (2016-05-20, medium.com) [archive.is/js9PP] [begin excerpt]: Since Nixon’s famous proclamation in 1971 for “an all out offensive” in the war on drugs, the US government has funneled a trillion dollars into the effort. What do we have to show for the spoils of this war? Addiction rates have remained stable for the past decade, while over half the population of our federal prisons enter for drug related offenses. Perhaps the war on drugs has failed because it fundamentally fails to understand addiction itself. As neuroscience makes new ground on the inner workings of drugs in the brain, it is time for us to take a much needed brain’s eye view of addiction to better understand how to best combat it. To fundamentally re-think our approach to addiction requires we understand not just the experience of drug reward but the role that our environment and context play in the cycle of use. [end excerpt]
---
Cannabia: A collection of items from the current state of cannabis freedom in the Northbay -
===*===*===
articles recommended by the Committee for
ANIMAL RIGHTS
Protect Earth's Sentient Life!
* "Record fine levied against biotech firm for research-animal abuse" (2016-05-23, rt.com) [archive.is/9eyaA]
===*===*===
ANIMAL RIGHTS: Save the Whales!* "Navy Allowed to Kill or Injure Nearly 12 Million Whales, Dolphins, Other Marine Mammals in Pacific" (2016-05-16, truth-out.org) [archive.is/krEF7]
===*===*===
UNITED STATES FASCISM WATCH
Documenting the process of fascism and for whom it benefits. [UnitedStatesFascism.blogspot.com] [exposefacts.org]
* "CEOs Paid 335 Times Average Rank-and-File Worker; Outsourcing Results in Even Higher Inequality 2016 Executive PayWatch highlights Mondelez International’s Pay Inequality" (2016-05-17, PayWatch.org) [archive.is/yihNM]
---
* "So, You Thought Bank Of America Would Be Punished For Role In 2008 Crisis? Think Again" (2016-05-24, Claire Bernish) [archive.is/MUrBO]
---
* "Ryan Disliked by Republicans; Trump Could Hurt Down Ballot" (2016-05-11, publicpolicypolling.com) [archive.is/MJZMt], full report (.pdf) [is.gd/IAoSoC].
whowhatwhy.org writes [archive.is/JytOc]: Poll Shows Once Again That GOP Voters Live in a Different Country. Many Republicans live in a world in which Barack Obama is a Muslim born in Africa. A truly stunning poll has shown that a lot of GOP voters also live in an alternate reality with regard to the performance of the economy. 64% of Republicans claim that the unemployment rate has increased under Obama, even though it has dipped significantly. And 57% of Republicans believe that the stock market has gone down, even though it has doubled while he was in office.
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* "House Republicans Rig Hearing to Block Consumers from Going to Court" (2016-05-19, wallstreetonparade.com) [archive.is/jGzq3]
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* "US Government's Own Report Shows Toxic TPP 'Not Worth Passing' ; 'This report indicates the TPP will produce almost no benefits, but inflict real harm on so many workers' " (2016-05-19, commondreams.org) [archive.is/IqIQ6]
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* "Congressional Hearing Goof Pulls Back The Curtain On How Washington Really Works; Here’s a hint: It was lobbyists" (2016-05-18, huffingtonpost.com) [archive.is/njTtz] [begin excerpt]: Everyone knows Washington can be a virtual echo chamber, but a pair of witnesses at a congressional hearing this week took things a little too far.
Two experts called to speak about a controversial Medicare regulation submitted written testimony to a House subcommittee Tuesday that included identical and near-identical passages outlining their opposition to a plan that would cut how much physicians get paid to administer medicines to patients in their offices.
It’s usual for witnesses on the same side of an issue to share a point of view. It’s not normal for them to use the exact same words to articulate it.
So how did this happen? Not surprisingly, lobbyists were involved. [end excerpt]
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* "The Bruenig Firing: ‘Civility’ As A Tool To Control Political Dissent" (2016-05-23, shadowproof.com) [archive.is/Uetx4]
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* "Report Shows “Respected” NRC Scientists Bound To Big Ag" (2016-05-19, by Brandon Turbeville) [is.gd/R4BEsW]
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* "US is ‘under-incarcerated,’ should lock more people up – GOP senator" (2016-05-20, rt.com) [archive.is/Lb2Q8]
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* "Michigan Corporations to Pay $0 in Taxes This Year, Despite Crises in Flint and Detroit; Under Michigan's tax code, businesses will "effectively contribute nothing to the state coffers" this year—while Flint residents pay for poison water and lawmakers defund Detroit schools" (2016-05-19, commondreams.org) [archive.is/rrpBE]
---
* "Right-wing Illinois governor censors criticism in quest to become ‘dictator’ " (2016-05-20, rt.com) [archive.is/5UrJw]
* "What Will Local Control Hypocrisy Cost The GOP in North Carolina?" (2016-05-18, ourfuture.org) [archive.is/xoEBs]
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* "Will the Radical War on Science Transform America? Fatal Combination: Big Oil, Right Wing Politicians, Corporations, an Ignorant Public" (2016-05-18, by Peter Dale Scott, whowhatwhy.org) [archive.is/M7HKd]
* "Recipients of Koch Machine Largess in 2016, So Far" (2016-05-18, truth-out.org) [archive.is/YoJxs]
David and Charles Koch caricatures
Photo credit: DonkeyHotey
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* "How we lost our way: South by Southwest's squandered potential; WhoWhatWhy visits one of the largest cultural influencers of our time" (2016-05-17, whowhatwhy.org) [archive.is/QWpil] [begin excerpt]: More people, it seemed, were eager for the latest in “personal experiences,” sampling orgasmic new heights of gaming, meeting angel investors, getting in on the newest Uber or Airbnb. When they could be bothered to even look up from their various digital devices. The keynote speakers, if you were among the fortunate to get in to hear them, were the President of the United States and the First Lady.
I attended one panel after another praising strategies and gizmos that would apparently enhance one’s performance if not personal branding.
There was a certain desperation in the air — a terror of irrelevancy. [...]
Everywhere I looked were logos and brands, people offering to teach us new ways to market stuff that we didn’t know we needed until these people told us we did.
To be sure, a small slice of the programming was high-minded and dedicated to the environment, social justice, and inventions that actually matter. But that was truly a twig bobbing in a sea of froth.
And, I must add, one kind soul accepted my rather late proposal for a panel on the media and democracy — although, when I got there, the sign on the door erroneously announced a different subject, and the panel seemed to have gotten lost amid the vast number of simultaneous competing offerings and the general exhaustion. The small audience looked like they were having their minds blown by a vigorous counter-culture discussion.
Look: SXSW is huge — and I caught a number of noteworthy films, saw a few intriguing technological advances, got a few new ideas, met pleasant enough people. But c’mon. It’s getting a little late in the day. We need to head in a whole new direction and not obsess on a better way to make cookies. We need less consumerism. And definitely less stuff. More boldness, more edge, more willingness to challenge orthodoxies to their face. The much-vaunted “disruption” — about something more than headphone efficiency. [end excerpt]
---
* "After 40 Years Of Secrecy, United States Admits Saudi Arabia Owns $117 Billion Of Its Debt" (2016-05-24, Amando Flavio) [archive.is/PiuHy]
===*===*===
USA FASCISM: "Libertarianism & Constitutionalism" to benefit private bureaucracies
Derrick Michael Reid (totalitariandemocracy.com) [archive.is/KbHkh]
---
Ironically, the following advertisement was for a "Libertarian" company who wants you to depend on their products for "survival"...
===*===*===
USA FASCISM: Dominionism & the "Prosperity Gospel"
===*===*===
USA FASCISM: Military State
* "The US War Machine’s Annual Budget Could Buy Every Homeless American A $1 Million Home" (2016-05-22, by Jay Syrmopoulos) [archive.is/ijGY0]
---
* "Raped in Military—Then Punished; Unjust Discharges Cause Lasting Harm" (2016-05-19, hrw.org) [archive.is/CBXEV]
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* "Will America Set Military Back by Abandoning Russian RD-180 Rocket Engines? The Senate Armed Services Committee calls for halving the US appropriation for the military’s go-to rocket engine, the House Armed Services Committee focuses on replacements, and the White House is determined to veto anything and everything" (2016-05-18, sputniknews.com) [archive.is/M39r3]
* "Abandonment of Russian Booster Engines May Send NASA's Costs Skyrocketing; The Pentagon saying "no" to the further use of Russian RD-180 rocket engines may damage "the financial viability" of NASA projects, according to the Wall Street Journal's Andy Pasztor" (2016-05-19, sputniknews.com) [archive.is/lMHTi]
* "Militerizing Musk; Reusable rocketry needs to be a part of disrupting the A2/AD threat" (2016-05-17, warontherocks.com) [archive.is/GaByf]
* "Elon Musk Just Exposed Billions In Corrupt Pentagon Spending To Weapons Monopoly … Here’s How" (2016-05-16, by Claire Bernish) [archive.is/rDdSA]
---
* "Australian, U.S. HIFiRE rocket achieves Mach 7.5" (2016-05-18, UPI Newswire) [archive.is/zn8SN] [begin excerpt]: The rocket, which reached an apogee, or highest altitude, of about 172.7 miles, is part of a joint research program called HIFiRE, or Hypersonic International Flight Research Experimentation Program. It is being conducted by Australia's Defense Science and Technology Group and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory with Boeing and the University of Queensland providing expert technical design and analysis. [end excerpt]
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* "Airbus Defence and Space opens a ground station in Australia for its Skynet military satellite recently moved over Asia - Pacific" (2016-05-16, airbusdefenceandspace.com) [archive.is/nhD9m] [begin excerpt]: A brand new purpose built satellite ground station has been established in Adelaide, to land Airbus Defence and Space’s Skynet secure military satellite communications. The Australian facility extends an existing chain of teleports in France, Germany, Norway, the UK and the USA, providing global coverage in both fixed and mobile satellite services. This worldwide teleport network provides global coverage for connectivity services by providing the link between the satellite constellation and terrestrial networks for reliable end-to-end connectivity at the highest service levels. [end excerpt]
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* "First CubeSat Built by an Elementary School Deployed into Space" (2016-05-19, NASA.gov) [archive.is/0YjvU], original link [https://is.gd/UM95mp] [begin excerpt]: In 2012, the students from St. Thomas More Cathedral School in Arlington, Virginia lined up in the shape of a space shuttle in the school parking lot and witnessed the flyover of the Space Shuttle Discovery as it was being retired to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. This awe-inspiring vision was an inspiration to the entire school and a catalyst for them to literally reach for the stars. Thus beginning their quest to build a small satellite, called a CubeSat, that would engage students around the world in Earth observations.
Over the next three years, all 400 pre-kindergarten through eight grade students participated in the design, construction and testing of their small satellite. Through this hands-on, inquiry based learning activity the students conducted real world engineering and will operate the St. Thomas More (STM)Sat-1, the first CubeSat built by elementary school students to be deployed in space. [end excerpt]
Photo caption: MinXSS students sharing their CubeSat mission science objectives with NASA Administrator Bolden.
Photo caption: St. Thomas More Students watch as their CubeSat deploys from the International Space Station
===*===*===
USA FASCISM: Two Party Dictatorship
* "Elites vs. Too Much Democracy: Andrew Sullivan’s Afraid of Popular Self-Government; The trouble with Trump isn't because of too much democracy; it's decades of political malfeasance that have made Americans furious" (2016-05-24, billmoyers.com) [archive.is/lELv9]
---
* "How the DNC Just Rigged the National Convention to Destroy Bernie Sanders" (2016-05-06, usuncut.com) [archive.is/NSrVX]
* "How Democrats manipulated Nevada State Party Convention then blamed Sanders for chaos" (2016-05-17, shadowproof.com) [archive.is/ZpZYS]
* "The Week The Entire Media Became Fox News" (2016-05-20, mediaite.com) [archive.is/JhLbm]. After reporting for a week that Bernie Sanders’ supporters threw chairs at the Nevada Democratic Convention, the media has yet to provide video evidence. The story was eventually debunked by NPR [archive.is/Ltk18] and Politifact [archive.is/Po8oS].
* "As Sanders Readies for California, Clinton Announces Primary Process 'Already Done' ; 'We are in till the last ballot is cast,' says Sanders. 'There is no way that I won't be [nominated],' says Clinton" (2016-05-19, commondreams.org) [archive.is/ngLyS]
* "Hillary Clinton lying for 13 minutes straight" [youtube.com/watch?v=-dY77j6uBHI]
* "Clintons took payments from Trans-Pacific Partnership backers last year" (2016-05-18, washingtonexaminer.com) [archive.is/meMFM]
* "Did the Clinton Foundation Have a Storefront Accountant Like Madoff?" (2016-05-24, wallstreetonparade.com) [archive.is/OIN1W]
* "A Harvard MBA Guy Is Out to Bring Down the Clintons" (2016-05-23, wallstreetonparade.com) [archive.is/jkzQC] [begin excerpt]: Remember Harry Markopolos? That’s the tenacious financial expert that pounded on the door of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for years, providing it with detailed, written evidentiary support for the premise that Bernie Madoff, the respected former Chairman of the NASDAQ stock market, was running a massive Ponzi scheme. The SEC never confirmed the fraud before Madoff confessed as he ran out of money in December 2008 because it skipped the most basic of investigation techniques: it failed to verify if real stocks and bonds actually existed in Madoff’s client portfolios. They didn’t.
There’s a new Markopolos in town with that same brand of leave-no-stone-unturned tenacity and he has his sights set on the charity operations of Hillary and Bill Clinton, known as the Clinton Foundation and its myriad tentacles. Ortel’s actions come just as Hillary Clinton makes her final sprint for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States with Bill in tow as her economic czar. Like Markopolos, Charles Ortel does not mince words.
In a 9-page letter dated yesterday and posted to his blog, Ortel calls the Clintons’ charity the “largest unprosecuted charity fraud ever attempted,” adding for good measure that the Clinton Foundation is part of an “international charity fraud network whose entire cumulative scale (counting inflows and outflows) approaches and may even exceed $100 billion, measured from 1997 forward.” Ortel lists 40 potential areas of fraud or wrongdoing that he plans to expose over the coming days.
Like Markopolos, Ortel has an impressive resume. Ortel’s LinkedIn profile shows that he received his B.A. from Yale and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He previously worked as a Managing Director at investment bank Dillon Read and later as a Managing Director at the financial research firm, Newport Value Partners. In more recent years, Ortel has been a contributor to a number of news outlets including the Washington Times and TheStreet.com.
The charges being made by Ortel are difficult to dismiss as a flight of fancy because mainstream media has tinkered around the edges of precisely what Ortel is now calling out in copious detail. [end excerpt]
* "The Latest Available Clinton Foundation Filings Appear Deceptive" (charlesortel.com) [archive.is/aLxhY], full report (.pdf) [is.gd/3L3sNX]
* "The In-Depth Process Begins" (charlesortel.com) [archive.is/T0I4Y], attached letter (.pdf) [https://is.gd/Al2liS]
* "The Real Clinton Foundation Record is Getting Exposed" (2016-05-15, charlesortel.com) [archive.is/FCTAk], attached letter (.pdf) [is.gd/l4Pj6D]
* "A Deep Dive into How the Clinton Foundation Operates Illegally and in Haiti" (charlesortel.com) [archive.is/cemw5], attached letter (.pdf) [is.gd/fO4OXN]
* "It's Time to Press For an Investigation of the Clinton Foundation" (charlesortel.com) [archive.is/Auxoi], attached report (.pdf) [is.gd/TKd53k]
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* "Land Of The Free? Harvard Study Ranks America Worst In West For Fair Elections" (2016-04-21, popularresistance.org) [archive.is/mKLih]
* "This is Australia, not America. You can't 'waste your vote' " page 1 [archive.is/IbGbL], page 2 [archive.is/8RFBO], page 3 [archive.is/NoZfe], page 4 [archive.is/d4YFh], describing a election model suprior to that of the USA, giving insight into why the USA's election model exists as it does... to prevent parties outside the two-party system from participating in government.
===*===*===
USA FASCISM: Artificial Poverty and Starvation
[talkpoverty.org]
* "Disposable Americans: The Numbers are Growing" (2016-05-23, commondreams.org) [archive.is/BS3n2]
---
* "The Age of Precarious: 6 in 10 Americans Living on the Financial Edge; 'The more we learn about the balance sheets of Americans, it becomes quite alarming' " (2016-05-19, commondreams.org) [archive.is/lVntP]
---
* "Elderly Florida man kills ailing wife because medication wasn’t affordable; 86-year-old William Hager is in jail after admitting he shot his wife because her medications were no longer affordable and she was in pain" (2016-05-20, theguardian.com) [archive.is/m0zYF]
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* "Robots to replace middle class professionals within 20yrs – scientists" (2016-05-20, rt.com) [archive.is/17QUd]
* "A robot for ‘soft tissue’ surgery outperforms surgeons; Let's say you're having intestinal surgery. Which do you choose: human or robot surgeon?" (2016-05-04, kurzweilai.net) [archive.is/amuUA]
* "Ex-Googlers rev up plan for self-driving trucks" (2016-05-17, AFP Newswire) [archive.is/ikTFE]
* "Farminator: Robot ranchers replacing humans in agriculture" (2016-05-22, rt.com) [archive.is/VmLr4]
* "Giant 3D printer shaped Dubai’s ‘Office of the Future’ in less than three weeks" (2016-05-24, rt.com) [archive.is/Z9BwV]
---
* "Jamie Dimon and Mike Bloomberg, Two New York Billionaires, Think They Know What Poor Kids Need" (2016-05-17, wallstreetonparade.com) [archive.is/I5vs7]
---
* "Panama Papers Expose Global Elite's Tax Avoidance Schemes; The Panama Papers leak shows how the global elite are bending the rules to hide their money" (2016-05-17, Labor Notes Troublemakers Dispatch): We’re always being told that the U.S. can’t afford to provide health care or free higher education, and that companies can’t afford to pay a living wage. But could it be that we’re broke on purpose—because the global elite are bending the rules to hide their money?
That’s what’s revealed in the Panama Papers, the largest inside information leak in world history. For more than 40 years, a little-known but powerful Panamanian law firm, Mossack Fonseca, has been working with the global 1% to create “shell companies,” or dummy corporations, for the sole purpose of avoiding taxes.
An unnamed source, John Doe, leaked 11 million documents to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which includes 100 media outlets around the world. The journalists spent more than a year sifting through the files before finally publishing reports on the content of the leak and releasing the first of the documents in April.
The global cost of these tax havens is astonishing. “When global elites can offshore their wealth and big companies can artificially shift their profits to Bermuda, there’s one big loser: the middle class, who has to pay extra taxes to compensate the revenue lost by governments,” said economist Gabriel Zucman, author of The Hidden Wealth of Nations [archive.is/B7eUA].
“As a result of all the different schemes like the ones being unveiled by the Mossack Fonseca leak,” The Intercept reports [archive.is/8BZwO], “governments around the world are dealing with at least a one-third of a trillion dollar annual shortfall that must be made up by cutting spending, borrowing, or taxing the rest of us more than they should.”
Already the revelations contained in the Panama Papers have prompted criminal investigations and even toppled governments. Mass protests erupted in Iceland, leading to the resignation of the prime minister, after it was revealed that he and his wife owned an offshore company in the British Virgin Islands [archive.is/LFrhy]. Pakistan’s prime minister and Spain’s minister of industry also resigned, following similar revelations. British Prime Minister David Cameron was forced to admit he had benefited from a tax-avoiding trust fund that his father set up in Panama [archive.is/goKm6].
PANAMA ISN'T UNIQUE -
The law firm also has ties to dozens of wealthy Americans with long histories of fraud and racketeering [archive.is/LPGyh].
But comparatively few U.S. companies and elites have been named in the Panama Papers—because they have access to tax havens right here at home.
The state of Nevada, for instance, has no income tax, and has laws that shield companies from having to be transparent about their operations. So it’s another place where the superrich like to set up shell companies.
In fact, Nevada is listed alongside Panama, the Bahamas, and the British Virgin Islands in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ list of 10 most popular tax havens [https://panamapapers.icij.org/graphs/].
===*===*===
WORLD FASCISM WATCH
Documenting the global economic dictatorship
* "The Facts Show These Five Families Rule The World" (2016-05-23, Claire Bernish) [archive.is/6I0OZ]
---
* "5 major banks rigged $9trn bond market – lawsuit" (2016-05-19, rt.com) [archive.is/Lhlgq] [begin excerpt]: Traders at major financial institutions including Bank of America and Deutsche Bank AG colluded to rig the prices of bonds from government-linked organizations that were bought and sold on a $9 trillion market, a new lawsuit claims.
Five big banks – Bank of America, Credit Agricole SA, Credit Suisse Group AG, Deutsche Bank AG, and Nomura Holdings – were named as defendants in the proposed class-action lawsuit, filed Wednesday by the Boston Retirement System pension fund for city workers. Traders at the banks are accused of secretly communicating with each other via instant messaging and chatrooms to determine what prices they would offer bond customers on the secondary market.
"Only through collusion could a dealer quote a wider spread than market conditions otherwise dictate without losing market share and profits," the complaint said, according to Reuters. "Defendants reaped millions of dollar(s) in profits at the expense of plaintiff and members of the class as result of their misconduct."
The bonds in question – known as supranational, sub-sovereign, and agency (SSA) bonds – are issued by international and regional development groups, organizations sponsored by governments, infrastructure borrowers, and social security funds. Since many of these bonds are backed by governments, they are highly valued. [end excerpt]
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* "USITC Releases Report Concerning the Likely Impact of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement" (2016-05-18, usitc.gov) [archive.is/vkmfw], full report (.pdf) [is.gd/qofUkL]TPP supporters have already started spinning pieces of this report to their advantage.
So what did the USITC say about TPP? The study indicates that in the TPP’s first fifteen years:
- The United States’ global trade deficit would actually increase by $21.7 billion;
- That there would be a decline in output for U.S. manufacturing, natural resources and energy of $10.8 billion
- The TPP’s intellectual property chapter would globalize the worst of US copyright law, limit freedom of expression, threaten internet security and privacy, and adopt harsh criminal sanctions that could be used against journalists and whistleblowers.
---
* "8 Arguments In Support Of Sweatshop Labor; In response to ’90s scandals through the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse, points made by leading economists and journalists including Paul Krugman and Nicholas Kristof at The New York Times" (2013-05-03, buzzfeed.com) [archive.is/z9J0V]
===*===*===
WORLD FASCISM WATCH: #OPDeathEaters
A study of the personal ideologies and social practices of those who benefit from the global capitalist regime. [WorldFascists.blogspot.com]
* "Human traffickers exploit EU migrant crisis to increase child smuggling – EU report" (2016-05-19, rt.com) [archive.is/wc6LD]
---
* "Elijah Wood says sexual abuse of children common in Hollywood" (2016-05-23, bayareanewsgroup.com) [archive.is/LiItJ]: Elijah Wood says sexual abuse of children is fairly common in Hollywood.
The 35-year-old "Lord of the Rings" star, who appeared in his first film at age 8, told the Sunday Times in Britain many of his young peers were "preyed upon."
"Clearly something major was going on in Hollywood," he said. "It was all organized. There are a lot of vipers in this industry -- people who only have their own interests in mind."
"I've been led down dark paths to realize that these things probably are still happening," Wood said, adding his mother protected him from abuse when he was young.
"That's the tragedy of attempting to reveal what is happening to innocent people," he said. "They can be squashed, but their lives have been irreparably damaged," said Wood, who appeared in "Back to the Future Part II" in 1989.
* "Hollywood's Savile scandal: Star of Hobbit films Elijah Wood says Tinseltown is masking a child sex epidemic in its 'seedy' underbelly full of predatory 'vipers' ; Elijah Wood, 35, claims young actors are being abused in Hollywood; He compares it to the infamous Jimmy Savile scandal in Britain; Tinseltown is allegedly sheltering around '100 active abusers' " (2016-05-22, dailymail.co.uk) [archive.is/KSYCM]
* "Elijah Wood Denies Personal Knowledge of Child Sex Abuse in Hollywood" (2016-05-23, hollywoodreporter.com) [archive.is/UJgPT]
===*===*===
information collected by the
SOLANO PEACE, JUSTICE, AND FREEDOM COALITION
[SolanoPeaceJustice.blogspot.com], for justice, dignity and human rights, and an end to the USA's endless wars, in harmony with Principle 1 & 6 of International Law [archive.is/tmncz], the 5 protocols of the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) [archive.is/LhUTj], and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights [archive.is/U1Ota].
* "Hillary the Horrible Hawk" (2016-05-21, Cindy Sheehan's Soapbox podcast) [https://is.gd/7cClrw]
* "Hillary Clinton IS the Most Qualifed to Head the Evil Empire" (2016-05-21, by Cindy Sheehan, cindysheehanssoapbox.blogspot.nl) [archive.is/RKLrl]
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* " ‘Human Suffering Has Reached Staggering Levels’ " (2016-05-17, ipsnews.net) [archive.is/RAQgM] [begin excerpt]:
“Human suffering from the impacts of armed conflicts and disasters has reached staggering levels.”
With these one dozen or few words, the United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, briefly but sharply portrayed the current humanitarian drama, explaining why the UN has decided to hold the first ever World Humanitarian Summit on May 23-24 this year in Istanbul, Turkey.
Secretary General Ban documented his statement with specific figures: nearly 60 million people, half of them children, have been forced from their homes due to conflict and violence.
As if this was not enough, the UN chief talked about another man-made tragedy: “The human and economic cost of disasters caused by natural hazards is also escalating. In the last two decades, 218 million people each year were affected by disasters; at an annual cost to the global economy that now exceeds 300 billion dollars.”
Based on these and other facts, experts and UN high officials labelled the on-going, growing human drama, as the “worst humanitarian crisis since World War II”. [end excerpt]
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HOPELESSNESS CURROUNDED BY SADNESS (local woman returns from refugee camps in Greece
For all media: This is a first hand account from a Sebastopol woman who returned earlier this month after volunteering at refugee camps in Greece with CODEPINK Her contact information is below and she is open to doing interviews re: her experience. Mary Moore
About the author: I recently returned from encampments on the docks of Piraeus (outside Athens), I also visited and volunteered a bit at camps on the northern Greek border with Macedonia. They are places of nothing but pain, hopelessness and chaos. It is my responsibility to tell the story and I hope you will help me. I am a retired nurse and lay midwife, 82 year old grandmother who lives in Sebastopol. I've lived in rural Honduras and Guatemala as a volunteer for 4 years. I've never before seen anything like these camps! Peace, Barbara Briggs-Letson 6795 Walker Avenue Sebastopol, CA 95472 970-819-3005
HOPELESSNESS SURROUNDED BY SADNESS by Barbara Briggs Letson May 3, 2016
Imagine a huge side of a Rubik's Cube, each square a pop tent, lined up, row upon row, dull gray UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) blankets seeping from under tent edges, hung around as extra walls-- this is what I saw in Greek refugee camps. As a CODEPINK delegation of three, we visited two camps on piers at Pireus port, outside Athens. Near Greece's north border with Macedonia, we drove to two camps at gas stations, one beside a hotel, and the famous/infamous Idomini Camp in fields of grass, dirt, mud and standing water after a hail/rain storm.
Imagine single men and families as they sit in tiny tents in the sun or rain with nothing to do, nowhere to go. A few may hold "classes". Others are just not interested or actively don't want to learn. All the activities of daily life, like washing clothes, eating, showering (10 minute limit after waiting in line for an hour at a trailer on a dock at Piraeus), sleeping, charging your phone, toileting in smelly port-a-pots just continue, day after day, week after week, for some, month after month.
Imagine a warehouse filled with sagging taped-up cardboard boxes overflowing with clothing to sort, fold, size and pile. Not much for small men--is that because so many young men are refugees needing clothing or because those who donate are physically larger? Thousands of sox and shirts, slacks, blouses, t shirts, but not many baby clothes. Bottled water, oranges, piled in the dark dank; "previously owned" stuff floats in an aura of hopelessness.
Imagine refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Africa. Those who arrived before and after March 21st (when Greece/Turkey/EU agreement was reached) have completely different status and process for consideration as refugees or asylum seekers and therefore resettlement. In chaos and confusion there is one point of clarity, those who arrived before March 21 and have ID papers (with photos), have a better chance of resettlement/asylum, though not necessarily to the country of their choice.
Wherever they are living now they have traveled unbelievable paths to get here, are exhausted, have often spent all their money and do not know what the future holds. Fear, disappointment, anger, futility take the place of the vision and promise of a better life in Europe. A Syrian man, in his early 30s, who worked in Damascus as an accountant for Ford described his trip overland through Turkey as much more frightening than the boat trips to the Greek islands featured in our media. He was staying in our Athens hotel, where many families spent a few days between camps and apartment living. A single man, he was unusual in being considered positively; he was being interviewed by psychologists, his body examined for signs of torture.
Many refugees do not like the system, the "camps" where they are placed, the accommodations and food. So they leave, try to move to another camp. One woman, in a steely voice of overwhelming anger, told me she has to bathe her baby in cold water--it seemed to symbolize all that was wrong with this life. Some camps are "open" in that refugees can leave, go into a nearby town, walk in the country and volunteers may enter to help. Other camps are "closed" and refugees are confined. A third category is run by the Greek government, are closed to shortterm volunteers but residents may come and go. As the government takes control of more refugees, they will be housed in rows of large white UNHCR tents set on platforms behind wire fences; we drove by such a camp near Idomini.
Adults usually eat twice a day from trucks/vans which unload a table as a barrier and form women and children in one line, men in another...many more males in the camps than females. In Pireus, each received a black plastic container holding tomatoey-looking sauce with floating potatoes and carrots, one roll, one slab of feta cheese and an orange...provided by the Greek Army. Unappetizing, though nutritionally balanced. Behind the Park Hotel in the north where many volunteers live, people from all over the world chop veggies all morning with love and concern, cook rice in giant pots over propane stoves, add beans and chick-peas, herbs, then truck into the camp around 2:30 to serve in 12 oz plastic cups. Imagine that receiving this food is one of the most interesting things which happens all day. Crowds gather, one's place in the line takes on great importance, there is shoving, hollering, pushing; volunteers stop giving out food until everyone settles.
HOTEL NEAL
Way in the north of Greece, on the border with Macedonia at this place called Idomini, Greek families live in farmhouses and cottages, neat, tidy, often with some grapevines in the yard, just like home in Sonoma County, California. But, at the Hotel Neal, pop tents squat, set up on dusty dirt, row upon row, gathered around a few buildings. Constantly changing, no one knows the number, but probably seven to eight hundred people live here. It is the camp where, we are told, some come to investigate sneaking across, leaving Greece.
Walk with me and join two French young women who volunteer with an NGO, "Northern Lights". Started by a couple of twenty-something Norwegians this group is "in charge" of the camp. They are doing a "census" of "babies", children newborn to three years, going from tent to tent, asking if there are any babies living in that tent. They wear purple vests, hold the many reaching hands of children, always smiling, calmly sorting through confusions as every family has a "baby" (the youngest) or sometimes "babies" are just children.
You and I can hold the hands of children as we walk together....there will be two or more vying for each of our hands, reaching, smiling, wanting the comfort of touch.
Once we discover a child under three years, one young woman writes the mother's name, the other gives Mom a colored post-it to bring to a gathering near the water faucet at six pm. She will receive milk for her child.
In these camps, the smallest thing becomes an event. Whatever volunteers do is interesting, draws observers, usually men who want to be part of things, give information, have a little power. Children gather too, shoving, pushing, laughing, crying. A teenage boy comes up offering another teenage boy in his arms, laughing as he says "baby". A woman calls out, gestures with her hand to say "come here, pay attention to me", inviting us to another tent where there may be a "baby". The volunteers respond in gestures, smiles, French and English that they are following a set path and will be there later. Faces fall in disappointment as families understand that they will not get attention now.
So, at the end of the process, visiting each tent, Northern Lights has a list of all the children in the camp under three years of age. At that moment. And it will probably change before six o'clock when Northern Lights staff are prepared to provide supplemental milk (read formula) for these children.
Here's a twist: formula. After the danger and stress of weeks of travel and poor nutrition, many Moms have diminished or no breast milk. Formula is also "modern", looks like like a good solution. So when formula is available, moms decide to stop trying to breastfeed. But, formula needs to be mixed with water. In bottles. Clean water and clean bottles aren't part of refugee camp reality, so the risk of infection is huge. And imagine living in a tent for weeks or months, on dirt or mud, sad, hopeless, and your baby develops diarrhea. There isn't a clinic at Hotel Neal camp, so the family would have to take a sick baby to the main camp or formula could be a death sentence.
The Northern Lights volunteers asked my opinion, as a midwife, about formula. It is a question worldwide and I've been negative when I lived and worked in Honduras and Guatemala. But here I had, and have, no answer. They had decided to provide it to mothers. I can't quarrel with that choice, but I know the risks and they are deep and scary; there is no good answer. Just as there is no good answer to so many parts of this chaos.
And another twist: trying to understand about "babies" who might be in an emerald-green tent, a volunteer steps toward the partially unzipped opening to peek inside, looking for Mom. Instantly, a small serious boy, maybe six years old, jumps in front of the empty tent opening, legs and arms spread, barring the way, eyes flashing, protecting. Protecting the family's space, protecting anyone who might be vulnerable inside. Close your eyes and picture that little boy and know in the deepest part of your heart, how he is no longer a child, how dangerous that camp is to spirit and life. Yet he and his family now have no choices.
CAMP 1 1/2, PIRAEUS
Outside Athens we spoke with a family from Damascus who were living in Camp 1 1/2, had left camp 1 when it was closed by port authorities two days before. (Greek tourist season approaches and authorities don't want refugees living on the docks where tourists come and go to the islands). He is a pharmacist, she a teacher. Their family is four girls and one boy. Their tent is actually three 2-person tents set up facing each other so they have a little private "courtyard" in the middle. It is tidy; they sleep on (and probably under) UNHCR gray blankets which cover the "floor". The blankets are, I'm happy to tell you, soft. This family has been in Greece several weeks, stayed in a hotel but used up all their money. One little girl cries all the time, hides, nestled into her father's side. The oldest daughter takes two other little ones to the children' s play tent each afternoon to color and draw.
They wait for food distributions, sit in their tents as a family to eat, invited us in, tried to share their food with us. They have no idea what the next day will bring, where they will sleep, for now Camp 1 1/2 is being closed. They have no plan. I don't know why they left their home and country. I do know that it must have been a powerful reason, for they are loving, generous, talented, smart, educated. And I hope that what they are going to is a better life, but I am not at all sure about that.
IDOMINI CAMP
And, then, there is Idomini Camp. It is an "established" camp. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has several buildings for clinics, there are four buildings which look like Army barracks filled to overflow with bunk beds in lines jammed next to each other, covered with the grey UNHRC blankets , overflowing with clothing and belongings. A MSF physician told me they "just come, looking for any place to be", sometimes end up in the barracks.
Across the rutted muddy way, women wait for clothing. THey've become good at waiting, no energy there, just stand in the que. At one morning or afternoon there is one item being given out....pants, or sweater or baby clothes or shirt, or shoes . They come from a nearby dark warehouse where dingy used donated stuff is sorted, sized, piled by volunteers. (That's another story ; we helped in 2 warehouses, sorting clothing and shoes).
There are acres of tents, many afloat in mud, for there was a hailstorm and rainstorm the morning we arrived. And, volunteers in all shapes and sizes from countries all around the world. They prepare and distribute food, play with the children, serve tea 24/7, draw on the pavement with chalk, distribute tents to new arrivals (only at night, though) provide information about the refugee process, smile, hug the children, try to make sense of the chaos and the process which doesn't seem like a process.
Here's a glimpse of that "process." There is a midwives caravan (read camper van) at Pireus' camp 1 1/2 from which I was to go to Camp 2 to talk with pregnant women, check blood pressures and anemia and histories, then was diverted by the process. One Yadziki family of 14 adults and children including a 10 day old infant, was considered "vulnerable" so would receive special opportunity to depart before the mass movement out of 1 1/2. The dad needed to take his papers for all 14 to a specific office on the docks--such a crucial option that the midwife/manager cancelled our morning plan to drive him there. He didn't qualify at that moment, needed to return a t 6:00. But, there was a special meeting at 6:00 for Yadziki families, about how they would be treated; he had a choice and there was no guarantee that one meeting would be a better choice than the other, but it was sure that he had to appear in both places with his one set of papers. Both he and the midwife were impotent.
EKO GAS STATION.
Another process takes place each morning at the EKO gas station outside Idomini. Save The Children Federation provides rice/protein porridge and an orange daily to children 3-12 years of age. Their distribution center is behind the car wash and the volunteer who supervised us had arrived yesterday, so was the most knowledgeable. We were assigned an area of tents, loaded milk crates with food for 15 people each, told to approach a tent, ask how many children, give a container of porridge, a spoon and an orange for each child. We were to go only in pairs, not let refugees "help" by carrying or asking or handing out food, and to stop/leave immediately if bad feeling or anger arose. We were told to look to see how many children were actually in a family, not just believe the mother or father, distribute accordingly. I still have difficulty thinking of not giving a container of porridge to someone who wants/needs it badly enough to lie about the number of children in the family.
Think boredom, hopelessness, impotence, mud, the same unfamiliar food day after day, rain, police presence, anger, disappointment, not knowing. Think of children saying, "hello, friend", grabbing your hand, swinging and pulling, smiling back. Think of a toddler sitting alone in the middle of the road in the horrors of a camp, wailing. Think of caressing his back, speaking quietly in words he doesn't know but words which comfort him, acknowledge his misery, help him stop crying and look at you. Imagine cheering children who play hopscotch or jump rope, smiling at a drawing proudly shown. Think that your presence, just for a few hours, not "doing' anything, is really what you have to offer.
And, if you can't be present, you can be aware of what is happening, you can care. And, if you are so inclined, you can send some money to "Northern Lights" (Northernlightsaid on Facebook) to help them keep going with whatever they are able to do for the humanity at Hotel Neal, Idomini, Greece.
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* (facebook.com/telesurenglish) [archive.is/XgqFl]:
What U.S. imperialism has been doing and still is trying to do to Latin America.
#NeverForget #NeverAgain
And a response...
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* "Tony Blair Admits His Ignorance of Middle East; Immediately Calls for New War ; 'To be honest my understanding of the Middle East is a lot deeper today than it was when I was prime minister quite frankly' " (2016-05-24, commondreams.org) [archive.is/z4mtT]
* "Britain training armed forces of regimes on its own human rights watchlist" (2016-05-23, rt.com) [archive.is/mOshy]
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* "How the NSA Pushed Iraq Invasion" (2016-05-17, accuracy.org) [archive.is/5PHqH]
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Habré was an ally of the Americans at the time. French money even paid for the country’s political police, the feared DDS, who committed torture on an industrial scale, according to Clément Abaifouta, who leads a survivors’ group in the capital N’Djamena. [...]
Abaifouta’s group has spent 15 years trying to bring the former rebel leader – who was deposed in 1990 – to trial. Habré will finally be judged later this month at a special tribunal in neighbouring Senegal, where he had fled into exile.
One of the victims featured in the film, Adimatcho Djamai, who was tortured so badly he spent more than two decades forced to lie on his back, died the day he was due to testify at Habré’s trial.
Haroun said he wanted to cast a light on what he calls “this genocide” largely ignored by the outside world “because it was some business of the blacks” carried out behind closed doors.
The director uses Abaifouta as his narrator, visiting his fellow survivors and gently coaxing the horrific stories of their torture from them.
Abaifouta says he would sometimes wake to find another inmate dead beside him and “be glad that it meant a little more space. That is what we were reduced to” he said. “We were beasts.”
Haroun said most of the people who were rounded up by Habré’s DDS henchmen “were innocent. They were arrested for no reason, the random victims of a bloodthirsty regime.” [end excerpt]
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* "State Dept gets around to outlawing ISIS in Libya, Yemen, Saudi Arabia" (2016-05-19, rt.com) [archive.is/dSpq8]
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* "The West’s Needless Aggression" (2016-05-20, counterpunch.org) [archive.is/5B5EI]
* "Western media lies and distorts in order to confuse the story of sanctions against Russia" (2016-05-23, introduction from newcoldwar.org) [archive.is/qGHrR]
* "US spy plane flew ‘dangerously close’ to passenger jets near Russian border – MoD" (2016-05-23, rt.com) [archive.is/dpcdm], further statements [archive.is/CfEgs].
* "US Builds Up Forces Around Russia, Blames Moscow for Holding on to Nukes; On the eve of his trip to Japan for next weekend's G-7 summit, President Barack Obama told Japanese broadcaster NHK that Moscow is to blame for stalling the process of global nuclear disarmament. Russian geopolitics experts Mikhail Alexandrov and Vyacheslav Tetekin explain why the president's remarks are particularly cynical and disingenuous" (2016-05-25, sputniknews.com) [archive.is/MGgno]
* "Nuts and Bolts solutions to deter a resurgent Russia" (2016-05-17, warontherocks.com) [archive.is/2FWVw]
* "NATO ex-deputy commander's book imagines war with Russia" (2016-05-18, AFP Newswire) [archive.is/rh2Vp]
* "NATO says all should avoid new arms race" (2016-05-18, AFP Newswire) [archive.is/DYeks] [begin excerpt]: NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg on Wednesday called for avoiding a new arms race, as the US-led alliance pushes ahead with its biggest military revamp since the Cold War to counter a more assertive Russia.
Russian intervention in Ukraine and its 2014 annexation of Crimea stung NATO leaders into action after years of complacency and defence cuts following by the fall of the Soviet Union.
Russia however says that it is NATO which is acting aggressively, encroaching on its borders while, worse still, the United States builds a European missile defence shield which undercuts Moscow's nuclear deterrent.
Stoltenberg insisted that while NATO was justifiably boosting its readiness and resources, "it is in everyone's interest to avoid a new arms race."
If NATO was building up its forces, it was also strongly committed to keeping channels for dialogue open with Russia. [end excerpt]
* "NATO finalises build-up details to counter Russia" (2016-05-19, AFP Newswire) [archive.is/7ddcG]
* "US calls for 'robust' NATO posture on eastern flank" (2016-05-19, AFP Newswire) [archive.is/GyZfJ]
* "NATO-Russia relations 'rolling back to Cold War,' Kremlin says" (2016-05-23, rt.com) [archive.is/gZlxw]
* "Putin is being pushed to abandon his conciliatory approach to the West and prepare for war" (2016-05-17, World Post, with the Huffington Post and the Berggruen Institute) [archive.is/OsReH]
* "US hasn’t won a war since 1945 – so why is it poking the bear?" (2015-05-14, by Paul Craig Roberts) [archive.is/6A3Ap]: This is what the arrogant morons who comprise the US government have stirred up: Watch this video for its entire 1 hour 20 minutes, and then ask yourself if Washington is making a good decision by driving us into conflict with Russia [youtu.be/rrSzCnz9Sic].
Americans, being an insouciant people, are unaware that it was Russians, not England’s Wellington, who defeated Napoleon. The Grande Army did not return from Russia. The loss broke the back of French military power.
The German Wehrmacht, which in a few days overran France and drove the British off the continent, was destroyed in Russia by the Red Army. The allied invasion of Normandy encountered only a few under-strength German units deprived of fuel. The German army and all available resources were on the Russian front.
Americans played a small role in the war against Hitler. Eisenhower cleverly waited until the Red Army had defeated Hitler, and then invaded long after the tide had turned against Germany. Today Washington claims credit for winning a war in which Washington’s role was small.
The US has not won a war since the defeat of Japan. The US was defeated by Third World armies in Korea and in Vietnam.
After 14 years in Afghanistan the US has been defeated by a few lightly armed Taliban. After 8 years, half of Iraq is in the hands of the militant Islamic State. Washington has squandered trillions of dollars on wars that Washington has lost, while the US economy and living standards declined as a result of the trillions of dollars wasted on futile wars. The neoconsevative warmongers responsible for this disaster still control both US political parties. These crazed warmongers are driving America to America’s final defeat.
I worked with President Reagan to end the Cold War and to established friendship with the Russians. The George H. W. Bush administration and its Secretary of State James Baker held to the agreement. But all subsequent regimes have violated it. The neoconsevatives displaced the old Republican Establishment and the Reagan Republicans. The neocons have also prevailed among the Democrats, so there is no political competition. Warmongers control US foreign policy.
American police apply the same gratuitous violence to the American population that the American military applies to foreign populations. Abroad the violence has swelled the ranks of those Washington sought to quell. Within the US police violence is turning Americans themselves into enemies. Defeat abroad and at home could be Washington’s future. Violence begets violence.
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* "US Air Force warns it will run out of money for planes by 2021" (2016-05-23, rt.com) [archive.is/tlQr7]
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* "Doctors Without Borders and precariousness of work" (2016-05-15, solfed.org.uk) [archive.is/YQStz]
* "Solidarity with CNT-AIT; Doctors without Borders discriminates" (2016-05-17, fau.org) [archive.is/Yrq4G]: The workplace branch of the CNT-AIT (an anarcho-syndicalist union in Spain) at Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Spain is fighting against the precariousness of its fundraising staff. MSF has been discriminating against migrant workers and has also included performance-related clauses in the contracts of all of its fundraising workers.
MSF has discriminated against two foreign workers. The company had to change the contracts of every worker in 2014. As the company was using temporary contracts in an illegal way, it was forced to give everyone to permanent contracts. Everyone except two foreign workers. These workers only have temporary visa and work permit. They have worked for MSF for three years now. MSF HR told the workers that they didn't want them to use the contract with MSF to get a permanent visa in Spain.
The contracts of the fundraising staff includes clauses related to performance. Fundraisers recruit new members on the streets who in turn pay the fees that finance MSF. Workers are required to recruit an unreasonable amount of members. Many of the fundraisers have faced disciplinary actions for not achieving the target imposed by MSF. Disciplinary actions have even ended in redundancies.
The workers are not going to accept more injustices, abuses, discrimination or unionist repression. On 18 May a first trial will take place related to this case. The FAU calls on MSF to stop discriminating an to get rid of perfomance-related clauses.
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* "Severe Financial Crisis of the IACHR Leads to Suspension of Hearings and Imminent Layoff of Nearly Half its Staff" (2016-05-23, IACHR) [archive.is/Me9oR] [begin excerpt]: The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) is going through a severe financial crisis that will have serious consequences on its ability to fulfill its mandate and carry out its basic functions. The Commission deeply regrets having to report that on July 31, 2016, the contracts of 40 percent of its personnel will expire, and at this time the Commission does not have the funds—or the expectation of receiving the funds—to be able to renew them. The Commission is also very sorry to report that it has been forced to suspend the visits it had planned for this year, as well as its 159th and 160th sessions, which had been scheduled for July and October.
The IACHR is alarmed by the fact that this situation will result in the dismantling of areas essential to its mandate. The IACHR is also distressed for the victims, petitioners, and civil society organizations that had planned to participate in hearings, working meetings, and other forums scheduled for the October session. The IACHR also expresses its deep concern because the suspension of sessions has a direct impact on the Commission’s capacity to make progress in processing complaints of human rights violations, since it is during these sessions that the Commissioners analyze, debate, and approve reports on petitions and cases.
Moreover, it is disturbing that thousands of victims of human rights violations will be left unprotected. The total dismantling of some work teams and the cutbacks mean that it is inevitable that the procedural backlog the Commission had been trying to reduce will increase again and will reach a point where it is incompatible with the right of access to justice. The IACHR also deeply regrets having to face an imminent situation in which it could lose valuable employees who have worked tirelessly for the rights of victims and have brought a sense of duty and devotion to the cause of human rights. [end excerpt]
Here is the list of countries that have stopped or severely cut back
their funding to the IACHR -
- Argentina
- Canada
- Colombia
- Mexico (this does not include the Ayotzinapa funding)
- Spain
- Finland
- The Netherlands
Note that while the US is not on the list, its closest allies are. This may well be retribution for the work on Ayotzinapa; Mexico was not happy. The current IACHR Executive Secretary Emilio Alvarez, himself Mexican, was the force behind the Ayotzinapa commission and for months there have been rumors he is being forced out. This may well be what is happening.
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* "Humanity is Against the Coup in Brazil" [archive.is/7HpF6]:
To add to the statement send your name to: [contraogolpenobrasil@)gmail.com]
The undersigned, intellectuals, artists, writers and researchers from all over the world denounce the coup underway in Brazil and stand in solidarity with President Dilma Rousseff who was elected by 54 million Brazilians only one year and a half ago.
This is not a traditional “political trial”, as the Globo Group is attempting to present it. Michel Temer, the visible face of the coup, has already expressed his intentions to bring the private banking sector into the public sphere and to focus in particular on a social policy of austerity for the poorest 5% of the country, which would mean to exclude the 36 million people from the Bolsa Familia. In addition Temer intends to move toward agreements with the United States and the European Union "with or without the Mercosur". In short his perspective is a Government for the elite of his country distanced from the majority and to wipe out forever the experience that the country had under the government of the Workers Party.Temer envisions himself to be the “new Macri” of Brazil, using the new government of Argentina as his model and advancing toward the dismantling of the state rarely seen in Argentina. It is not surprising then that the Foreign Ministry of that neighboring country has shamelessly supported the coup in Brazil under the guise of supporting its institutions. For everything that the coup makers have expressed and with their links to big business we consider the coup of the President de facto Michael Temer illegitimate and illegal. He has long ago proven that he is a corrupt politician who takes his orders from the darkest parts of the predatory oligarchy of that country.
We are appealing to UNASUR to apply the established Protocol stating a Commitment to Democracy adopted by all the countries of the organization that could put the brakes on the deterioration of the democratic thread in Brazil. We also demand that the presidents and governments of the world do not recognize Temer and to demand the return of the legitimately elected President Dilma Rousseff. They should also end the political crisis by calling for an immediate presidential election – made by the President herself – so that the Brazilian people can once again express themselves by democratic means and not by an imposed coup d’état by a questionable and corrupt Congress.
* "Beat Back The Coup" music track (by Marcel Cartier, produced by Agent of Change) [https://is.gd/uHOyUV]: Solidarity with the people of Brazil, facing a parliamentary coup and an illegitimate, anti-popular government of oligarchs, led by Michel Temer.* "Coup in Brazil: Made in the USA; Obama Administration Invokes OAS Charter to Promote Overthrow of Maduro Government in Venezuela" (2016-05-23, by ALAN BENJAMIN):
Speaking at the May 18 meeting of the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States in Washington, U.S. Ambassador to the OAS Michael Fitzpatrick put forward for the first time openly the Obama administration's stance on the unfolding coup against President Dilma Rousseff in Brazil.
Taking strong issue with the OAS ambassadors from Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua -- all of whom have withdrawn their diplomatic missions from Brazil on the grounds that what is taking place in Brazil is a "coup d'etat" and that the Temer interim government is "illegitimate" -- Fitzpatrick stated:
"Any notion of a 'coup' is preposterous. There can be no doubt that in Brazil there is clear respect by the judicial system, the lower House [of Representatives], and the Senate of Brazil's democratic institutions. There is a clear separation of powers and the rule of law. There is a peaceful solution to conflict."
Fitzpatrick even took issue with OAS General Secretary Luis Almagro, who on various occasions had questioned the judicial basis of the impeachment process. Fitzpatrick, echoing various editorials in the Wall Street Journal, went on to welcome Temer's "first steps in helping to bring Brazil out of its recession."
This was a direct reference to Temer's May 12 announcement of measures aimed at slashing workers' pensions and "reforming" workers' collective-bargaining agreements -- all part of the U.S.-promoted structural adjustment plans that have been so destructive to workers and peoples the world over.
An editorial in the Mexican liberal newspaper La Jornada on May 19 stated the following about Fitzpatrick's speech to the OAS: "Just as the United States supported the military coup in Brazil in 1964, it is now supporting the 'parliamentary coup' in 2016." Days earlier, La Jornada had run a front-page story featuring the Wikileaks report that Michel Temer for years had been a U.S. government informant.
But that was not all Fitzpatrick had to say. Speaking about the situation in Venezuela, where the government of Nicolás Maduro is facing a deepening political and economic crisis fostered by U.S.-financed rightwing opposition forces, Fitzpatrick noted: "Whereas in Brazil there is the rule of law, none of this exists in Venezuela, and that is our concern."
Fitzpatrick went on to urge the OAS "to hold Venezuela accountable for its continued violations of the [OAS's] Inter-American Democratic Charter." The last time the U.S. invoked this Charter was in 2009, when a U.S.-backed coup (in fact, orchestrated by then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton), overthrew President Manuel Zelaya.
Not surprisingly, Fitzpatrick failed to mention that the U.S. government in 2002 gave material, logistical and political aid to the perpetrators of the coup that briefly overthrew the elected government of Hugo Chávez. He failed to mention that today the United States is actively seeking to foment a military coup against the government of Nicolás Maduro by continuing to provide tens of millions of dollars a year to opposition groups that are openly and brazenly violating "the rule of law" in a massive destabilization campaign that includes violent street provocations, as well as decapitalization and other forms of economic sabotage that are resulting in huge shortages.
Soon after he was elected president, Barack Obama addressed the April 2009 Fifth Summit of the Americas in Trinidad-Tobago, stating that the "epoch of U.S. interference in the affairs of the nations on the continent is now behind us." He said that the "United States now wants an equal partnership" and that it would no longer "dictate our terms" to the peoples of the region.
Tell that again to the workers and people of Brazil and Venezuela. Tell that to the workers and people of Mexico, Canada and the United States -- whose leaders will be meeting in Ottawa on June 29 at the Summit of Leaders of North America on Security and Cooperation. The meeting is aimed at moving ahead to promote the goals of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement -- that is, the dismantling of all the labor laws, public services and enterprises, and environmental regulations that are deemed to be "barriers to free trade." All these are dictates of the U.S. transnational corporations and of all the U.S. governments in the service of Big Business and U.S. finance capital.
* U.S. Hands off Venezuela and Brazil NOW!
* No to the TPP!
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* "Hands Off Syria" music track (by Marcel Cartier, produced by Agent of Change) [https://is.gd/YizATY]
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Weapons for a New World Order
* (2016-05-24, whowhatwhy.org) [archive.is/WuprS]: Virtual and augmented realities, swarming attack drones and robotic lifeguards were just a few of the technologies displayed at the 2016 Sea-Air-Space Exposition (seaairspace.org) [archive.is/zGk0f]. This promotional video from DefenseWebTV captures the spirit of the event. Day 1: Distributed Lethality [youtube.com/watch?v=3MuaaFhSoZ]. About this photo: Lt. Jeff Kee explores the Battlespace Exploitation of Mixed Reality (BEMR) Lab.
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* "Robots get creative to cut through clutter; CMU Algorithm Balances 'Pick and Place' with 'Push and Shove' " (2016-05-18, cmu.edu) [archive.is/sBXBz], photo caption: CMU's Home Exploring Robot Butler, or HERB, uses new software to sort clutter more efficiently.
* "This five-fingered robot hand is close to human in functionality; Machine learning algorithms allow it to master new tasks autonomously" (2016-05-10, kurzweilai.net) [archive.is/EcePO]
* "Robot's in-hand eye maps surroundings, determines hand's location; Precisely Locating Hand Enhances Manipulation, Inspection Tasks" (2016-05-16, cmu.edu) [archive.is/IJVur]
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* "Artificial intelligence replaces physicists" (2016-05-16, anu.edu.au) [archive.is/Kn2DQ]
* "Machine learning accelerates the discovery of new materials" (2016-05-09, kurzweilai.net) [archive.is/vfuBy]
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* "Using static electricity, RoboBees can land and stick to surfaces New system extends the lives of flying microrobots" (2016-05-19, seas.harvard.edu) [archive.is/T3Eq3]
* "RoboBee: Engineers teach insect drones how to perch on ceiling" (2016-05-20, rt.com) [archive.is/9ngQU]
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* "Ingestible robot operates in simulated stomach; Robot unfolds from ingestible capsule, removes button battery stuck to wall of simulated stomach" (2016-05-12, web.mit.edu/newsoffice) [archive.is/7qwCk], attached video [https://youtu.be/3Waj08gk7v8] [begin excerpt]: The new work, which the researchers are presenting this week at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, builds on a long sequence of papers on origami robots from the research group of Daniela Rus, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
"It's really exciting to see our small origami robots doing something with potential important applications to health care," says Rus, who also directs MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). "For applications inside the body, we need a small, controllable, untethered robot system. It's really difficult to control and place a robot inside the body if the robot is attached to a tether." [...]
Although the new robot is a successor to one reported at the same conference last year, the design of its body is significantly different. Like its predecessor, it can propel itself using what's called a "stick-slip" motion, in which its appendages stick to a surface through friction when it executes a move, but slip free again when its body flexes to change its weight distribution. [end excerpt]Illustration caption: System for remote-controlled clinical procedures via origami-based robot. A patient swallows an iced capsule, which melts when it reaches the stomach, releasing the robot from a folded origami structure. To remove a foreign body (such as a button battery), the physician controls the robot from outside the body via a magnetic field that affects the magnet inside the delivery structure, allowing the robot to push the foreign body into the GI system. The robot can also treat an inflammation by releasing a drug contained in the delivery structure. (credit: Shuhei Miyashita et al./ICRA Proceedings)
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* "Self-healing, flexible electronic material restores functions after many breaks" (2016-05-16, news.psu.edu) [archive.is/F29kl], photo caption: Researchers have developed a flexible electronic material that self-heals to restore many functions, even after multiple breaks. Here, the material is shown being cut in half. The healed material is still able to be stretched and hold weight.
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* "This “nanocavity” may improve ultrathin solar panels, video cameras and other optoelectronic devices" (2016-05-13, buffalo.edu) [archive.is/fjYvX]
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* "Under Pressure: New technique could make large, flexible solar panels more feasible" (2016-05-13, news.psu.edu) [archive.is/9FsAv]
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* "ORNL demonstrates large-scale technique to produce quantum dots" (2016-05-19, ornl.gov) [archive.is/sMcSi]
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* "Scientists create ‘rewritable magnetic charge ice’ " (2016-05-20, newsroom.niu.edu) [archive.is/mEIBL]
* "Physicists create first metamaterial with rewritable magnetic ordering" (2016-05-20, University of Notre Dame) [archive.is/VjZs5], full report (.pdf) [is.gd/G0sJAK]
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* "IBM makes quantum computing available free on IBM Cloud; You can run real or simulated experiments on an IBM quantum processor" (2016-05-03, kurzweilai.net) [archive.is/hmoU5]
* "Primitive quantum computers are already outperforming current machines" (2016-05-13, sciencealert.com) [archive.is/Cg949]
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* "Scientists digitally mimic evolution to create novel proteins" (2016-05-10, kurzweilai.net) [archive.is/zIRIG]
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* "The world’s tiniest, most powerful nanoengine; Could lead to nanorobots small enough to enter living cells to fight disease" (2016-05-03, kurzweilai.net) [archive.is/CO5hF]
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* "Dynamic Dazzle Distorts Speed Perception" (2016-05-19, journals.plos.org) [archive.is/TTqT9], press release [archive.is/FiaKr]
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* "US Army Hopes to Have Laser Weapons on the Battlefield by 2024; With an eye to its future wars, the US military is testing laser weapons, to perfect the latest in energy-based artillery" (2016-05-14, sputniknews.com) [archive.is/9JJ53]
* "US Defense Giant Lockheed Martin Says Ready to Field 'Viable' Laser Weapons; Modern technologies provide for any tactical platforms to be equipped with laser weaponry, the director for Directed Energy Systems at Lockheed Martin said" (2016-03-16, sputniknews.com) [archive.is/QcGcK]
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* "A Digital Rochester Cloak to Fit All Sizes" (2016-05-19, University of Rochester) [archive.is/5nm5x], attached video [www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF8qkoIWH64]
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* "Idea That US's New Destroyer is 'Invisible' is a 'Fairy Tale for Fools' ; The builders of the USS Zumwalt, the US Navy's new next-generation super-destroyer, have promised that the ship would be nearly invisible to enemy radar. Military analyst Viktor Baranets told Sputnik that this simply isn't the case" (2016-05-18, sputniknews.com) [archive.is/Iqw4c] [begin excerpt]: The USS Zumwalt destroyer, set to be officially handed off to the US Navy on Friday at a ceremony in Bath, Maine, has already been touted as the best thing since sliced bread. The ship, set to become the largest and most advanced destroyer in the Navy's fleet, has been described by potential opponents as a dangerous "behemoth nearly undetectable to adversaries until it is too late."
US media, meanwhile, have already called the $4.4 billion, 610-foot, 14.5 ton destroyer as one of the greatest and most advanced warships in world naval history, fawning over its unique angular design and its radar-absorbing materials.
Apart from artillery and anti-aircraft installations, the Zumwalt is equipped with 20 multipurpose missile launchers capable of launching 80 Tomahawk cruise missiles.
Speaking to Radio Sputnik about this new development in global naval design, retired colonel Viktor Baranets, a prominent Russian military commentator for the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, suggested that the new destroyer's price tag is beyond the scope of reason, and its claims to invisibility ludicrous.
"With an annual defense budget of over $600 billion, the Pentagon can take the liberty of conducting various kinds of experiments, including spending $4.4 billion on a single destroyer. By comparison, one US [Virginia-class] nuclear submarine, the newest in the fleet, costs about $2.2 billion. In other words, they used the budget for two nuclear subs to build one Zumwalt. What can be said? Americans love grandiose projects which sometimes go beyond the scope of reason."
Baranets emphasized that the Zumwalt's stealth technology will not be able to fundamentally weaken large military powers' ability to detect the ship.
"With regard to its stealth, this is just a fairy tale for fools. Imagine a colossus with a solid wall the height of a sixteen-story building. Given the capabilities of current weapons using space and aerial reconnaissance, in addition to those of UAVs, this giant washtub cannot remain an inconspicuous target on the sea surface." [end excerpt]
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* "Battelle shows off DroneDefender at Navy Expo" (2016-05-18, UPI Newswire) [archive.is/hT5Pa]
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* "Government Secrets: X-37B Plane In Space For A Year Now, Nobody Knows Its Mission" (2016-05-22, by Amando Flavio) [archive.is/zd46Q]
* "Airbus Defence and Space starts Orion service module assembly; During Exploration Mission-1, Orion will fly more than 64,000 km beyond the Moon; Service module provides power and propulsion for Orion and life support systems for astronauts" (2016-05-19, airbusdefenceandspace.com) [archive.is/ctajJ]
* "India's mini space shuttle blasts off" (2016-05-23, AFP Newswire) [archive.is/NWNus]
* "Space Solutions Conference: Bringing Space to Earth" (2016-05, esa.int) [archive.is/HjNMy]
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* "DIY Insurgency: Emerging technologies threaten the SOF Mission" (2016-05-23, by Joshua Steinman and Joshua Kvavle) [archive.is/i6NDH] [begin excerpt]:
It started innocuously enough. The prime minister-for-life never missed the annual “Liberation Day” parade. With the drums and platoons thundering, nobody noticed as the quadcopter, barely larger than a sparrow, floated down toward the dais, its faint whirr drowned out by the industrial machinery rolling by in formation.
It was at once a child’s birthday present and the summation of millennia of military science. A flying machine postulated long ago by Michelangelo, now equipped with a vial of biological toxin, a GPS chip, microprocessors, and facial recognition software.
The attackers had uploaded the prime minister’s face to the quadcopter’s onboard processor, given it a rough search grid where they expected the target to be located, and then let it loose. The drone found its target, quickly zoomed within a few inches of the man’s face, deployed its payload, and self-destructed. The prime minister and his coterie were dead within the hour.
His remaining lieutenants were at each other’s throats by the end of the day. Their respective clans lobbed accusations at one another on social media, live-streamed protests, and employed smartphone-wielding teenagers as spotters.
By week’s end the country was awash in blood, thrown into a full-scale civil war. Community centers equipped by aid organizations with 3D printers quickly turned into weapons-printing armories. An enterprising college student, sent away to the University of London by her urban middle-class parents, translated a copy of the U.S. Army’s Ranger Handbook into the local dialect and uploaded it to a well-known file-sharing website clandestinely built by locals on top of Wikipedia.
Cryptocurrency donations flowed in from diaspora communities in Europe, funding ad hoc logistics networks ferrying supplies by the pound across the border. It was a 21st-century Berlin Airlift of apocalyptic know-how. Thumb drives with videos describing how to mix explosives from household goods were passed around like candy. Mobile phone-towers, once symbols of modernity (and, to the discerning observer, the reach of domestic and foreign intelligence services) were quickly destroyed. In their place, ad hoc wireless mesh networks popped up around the country built with old 802.11n routers strung up to the sides of buildings, operating without the need for satellite connectivity. [...]
We propose the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) initiate a formal, biannual training event that invites competition between cutting-edge special operations forces and creative members of the public. By allowing technologists to compete against and alongside premier special operators in closed training exercises, we can begin to draw tactics, techniques, technologies, and procedures currently in development in the academic and private sectors into premier special operations units in the U.S. military.
To complete its missions in an increasingly chaotic world, U.S. special operations forces (SOF) must learn to rapidly adopt technologies that may only be months old. Just as machine intelligence transformed the professional chess circuit — today’s top chess teams are human-machine hybrids — so too must SOF evolve and drive emerging capabilities more deeply into its operational elements. [end excerpt]
* "Garage Biotech: New drugs using only a computer, the internet and free online data" (2016-05-05, kurzweilai.net) [archive.is/3Dyvl]
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* "Homo Sapiens 2.0? We need a species-wide conversation about the future of human genetic enhancement" (2016-05-02, kurzweilai.net) [archive.is/oya4Y], attached video [youtu.be/2pp17E4E-O8]
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