August 6, 2012

I was at the Hare Krishna Festival of the Chariots at Venice Beach today and missed news of

the Oak Creek Sikh Temple mass shooting. I only found out about it just now when I got home.

Not sure what commonalities if any Sikhs have with Hare Krishna believers, but I can tell you that the Krishna folks my wife and I met today were a uniformly beautiful people. The chariots were absolutely beautiful and the women's dresses and makeup were absolutely breathtaking. The Krishnas had a kitchen set up at Windward Circle providing free meals to anyone who wanted one, no questions asked and no proselytizing whatsoever (other than a genially offered 'Hare Krishna').

I"ll do a separate post about the Festival later (complete with some of my wife's awesome photos), but I really don't understand how or why anyone would do such a hateful thing to such a self-effacing group of people. I'm really starting to get sick of America and my fellow Americans. This country has very few redeeming virtues left, imo.

August 5, 2012

This country is terminally sick: Mitt has an IRA worth $100 million AND

people, including as many as 16 million children, are going hungry every day.

My God, there should be rioting in the streets. I'm talking major civil insurrection here.

I am speechless. I am aghast. All I can say is "What. The. Fuck?"

August 1, 2012

Welcome to Anaheimistan:

Bringing the war home.

July 31, 2012

Hey kids

*****************

5 seconds after this photo was taken, the demonstrator was attacked by the Anaheim cops shown and arrested. Eyewitnesses said he appeared to have broken no law.

July 30, 2012

Arrests Made in Latest Anaheim Shooting Protests

Source: NBC News (Los Angeles, CA)

Tensions rose again Sunday as demonstrators protesting Anaheim police shootings clashed with police and several arrests were made.

Up to 300 demonstrators protested as tensions surrounding recent officer-involved police shootings there entered their second week. Details about the arrests were not immediately available.


. . . .

Police in riot gear and on horseback formed a line outside police headquarters as the picket lines grew. Police are maintaining vigilance against the potential for violence.

"The initial group that was here concerned about the police incidents have said their piece and have moved on," said Anaheim Police Sgt. Bob Dunn. "What you're seeing left here is the people who are more interested in disruption and possibly vandalism or violence."

Read more: http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Tensions-High-as-Protesters-Picket-Anaheim-Police-164216966.html

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Oh yeah, people "who are more interested in disruption". What a typical fucking pig.

July 30, 2012

Anaheim and awesome advocacy journalism (not-MSM):

~snip~

However, the struggle against structural violence and state-sponsored murder requires honesty. We have to embrace the fact that many incidents of police brutality do not fit nicely into comfortable narratives for middle-class sensibilities. We have to stop trying to turn people into martyrs for the “liberal cause”, and embrace the reality that some of the people murdered by the state were first preyed on by policies like the “War on Drugs” and the prison-industrial complex. Many of the people who wore the “I Am If Troy Davis” t-shirts would cross the street if they saw him and his friends walking towards them. A lot of people who sympathize with the Anaheim community would clutch their purses if they had seen Manuel Diaz walk by. You can’t wrap their stories up nicely and put a bow on them. These are stories of pain and survival in a culture where murder could meet you around any corner. In such a context, and after being ignored for so long, the uprisings are often visceral and intense.

In Dallas, a man named James Harper was killed by police on Tuesday. His mother cried out, “He’s dead over a sack of weed, that’s a damn shame. He’s 31 years old, he’s gone. I won’t see my son no more.” This mother’s tears should be no less devastating just because her son participated in the drug trade. There is a tacit assumption amongst well-meaning people that if the person sold drugs, and was murdered by police, then they deserved their fate. The simple truth is that murdering citizens is not a necessary aspect of policing. As I’ve argued before, in 2011 the entire German police force only fired 85 bullets at civilians, 49 of which were warning-shots. Ultimately, in the U.S. the issue isn’t the murdered or beaten individual, it’s the violence and the institutions that enable it.

~snip~

http://www.orchestratedpulse.com/2012/07/peace-killing-stop-calm-anaheim-solidarity-violent-world/

Be sure to read the final quote from Desmond Tutu's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.

July 30, 2012

Why does CA Governor Jerry Brown not say anything about what is going down

in Anaheim? There, a police force has essentially declared war on the people and constituted itself as a 21st-century death squad. And Brown says absolutely nothing, zip, NADA. Just like he said absolutely nothing, zip, NADA when the Oakland Police Department almost killed a couple Occupy Oakland protesters.

And Jerry Brown is supposed to be on our team. He is abso-friggin-lutely pathetic and I shall never vote for him again or any voter initiatives he promulgates.

July 29, 2012

Why the fuck?

July 28, 2012

An anarchist manifesto for a post-capitalist world:

This is one of the of the more thought-provoking essays I've read this year. I've read other of Graeber's works on Occupy Wall Street, but this one's scope is far larger and deserving of a wide read:

"A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the standard false promises that children are always given (about how the world is fair, or how those who work hard shall be rewarded), but to a particular generational promise—given to those who were children in the fifties, sixties, seventies, or eighties—one that was never quite articulated as a promise but rather as a set of assumptions about what our adult world would be like. And since it was never quite promised, now that it has failed to come true, we’re left confused: indignant, but at the same time, embarrassed at our own indignation, ashamed we were ever so silly to believe our elders to begin with.

Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now? Even those inventions that seemed ready to emerge—like cloning or cryogenics—ended up betraying their lofty promises. What happened to them?"

http://www.thebaffler.com/past/of_flying_cars

Thought I would post a link to it here for maximum exposure. Highly recommend. Graeber's comments about contemporary academia and corporate life are simply devastating.

July 26, 2012

Is COINTELPRO still in play? One suspicious sign:

"On Monday, the ANSWER Coalition was highlighted in the mass media for our role supporting the protests in response to the outrageous police attack in Anaheim. ANSWER placards and signs were highly visible in media photos and video. ANSWER volunteers were interviewed by mainstream media outlets.

That night, the ANSWER office in Los Angeles was broken into, ransacked and robbed. All of our computers, ten total, were stolen, in addition to all of our sound equipment and our bullhorns — the things essential to organizing and conducting protest actions. We had many other losses too and our files were ransacked . . . . "

read more: http://www.answercoalition.org/national/news/answer-los-angeles-office.html

I would not put it past rogue officers in the LAPD to have done this to support their murderous pig brothers in Anaheim. But hey, who knows?