Don’t Throw Me in the Briar Patch

Only a couple years ago we made a video, after seeing an email from the private prison people asking for a guarantee from the state for 90% occupancy. Think about that for a minute, then watch our video from the Media Action Network. How can the state save money when they have to guarantee to the corporation they will keep the prisons full? The taxpayers need to get in touch with their reps and tell them we’ve had enought of this BS from the private prisons group.
 

Video by AJ Oscarson and Jason Lee.

Idle No More versus War On Terra


Rap News skewers environmental destruction of Canada and Australia, as alien invasions competing for first place in “War on Terra”, praises IDLE NO MORE for rising against non-indigenous expropriation of the “Commonwealth”.

Any surprise that China, McDonalds and ad world would be averse to sunshine?

Advertizing creatives Doug Nichol and John Benet made a wonderful behind-the-scenes “making-of” as they filmed two commercial spots for McDonalds China, and neither their client nor their employers are pleased. The title SUNSHINE works on several levels and hopefully this will be the social engineering industry bridge-burner to jailbreak their every[ad]man inner artist.

DPD violence against Occupy Denver on Oct 29, filmed at gunpoint, shows first raid was deliberate provocation


OCCUPIED DENVER- Patrick shot this video in the thick of the action of October 29, which covers the initial arrests at Civic Center Park. It unmasks first DPD raid as a deliberate provocation, sent aimlessly into thick of crowd to make arbitrary arrests. Footage begins from early moments of protesters asking police not to bring weapons into peaceful assembly, without success.

Chris Hedges speaks about MoveOn as if we all know it’s a reprehensible .org


So the uninitiated are left to guess. “Reprehensible” is a mighty harsh condemnation. Is MOVE ON reprehensible for having arisen from the alarm against a Republican’s illegal war, but now it keeps silent about a Democrat’s? Are they reprehensible for trying, like the many pro-Dem grassroots networks, to co-op the anti Wall Street message? The good news is that Chris Hedges doesn’t think any of the liberal establishment will be able to commandeer OCCUPY WALL STREET, which he calls a movement too big to fail.
 
My own disgust is with MoveOn’s vanguard strategy to champion the issue of forgiving student loan debt. Not a terrible idea of course, but the call paints students who support OCCUPY WALL STREET to be only motivated by selfish reasons, creating a wedge between students and the working class. If student loan relief is something Obama can then champion, MoveOn sweeps them back into his orbit, and away from the radical occupiers.

Eduardo Galeano on students and their enthusiasm: keeping the Gods inside

Via Adbusters and AcampadaBCN: Eduardo Galeano interviewed in Plaza Catalunya, Madrid, in the midst of the student protests in Spain:

I was in El Sol, and here I am seeing a reecounter.The same energy of dignity and the same enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a Vitamin E, “E” for enthusiasm, which comes from a little Greek word whose hidden meaning is: “keeping the Gods inside”. And every time I see that the gods are inside, inside one person or more, in things, in nature, in mountains and rivers, I realize that’s what was waiting to convince me that life is worth living.

So I am very happy to be here, as I was in El Sol, because this is a testament that life is worth living. That living is much, much more than political pettiness, who wins or loses. And it’s much more than one’s personal life too, than what you can lose or win. That all matters very little in this other world that awaits you, this other world that is possible. It’s in this world’s belly.

This is a pretty rotten world. The world we’re born in is not very hopeful, but there is another world in this one’s belly that is waiting. It’s a different world, and the labour will be hard. It’s not easy for it to be born. But one thing is sure, it’s beating in this world we have here.

There’s another world beating inside this present one. I see it in these spontaneous demonstrations. Here in Plaza Catalunya and in El Sol in Madrid, which I’ve fortunately been able to follow. I know that there are many more and they are a testimony.

Some ask me: “Well, what’s going to happen? And how will all this end up?”

I simply answer what comes from my own experience and say “Well, nothing.”

I don’t know what will happen, and I don’t really care. I’m concerned about what’s happening now. I’m concerned with present time. And what this present time tells us of another possible time yet to come. But what that will be in the end, I don’t know.

It’s as if I were to ask myself that every time I fall in love, when I experience a deep, true love. When I feel I am alive and wouldn’t care if I died while it’s happening.

So, well, love is like this. It’s infinite while it lasts! It’s important that it be infinite while it lasts. Not to plan everything as if one were part of a bank budget. Let’s see, how much is the balance, the total… What is he expecting?! Probabilities.

Let’s ask the statistic gods… There’s “Standard & Poors,” which has a pretty eloquent name, because it means “Average and Poor.” Let’s see what awaits us, “average or poor”?

And what the hell do I care what awaits us?

Help this Settler-Zombie video go viral before totalitarian zombiehood spreads

Israeli West Bank Settler lunges at Palestinian youthOMGoodness, finally a settler video to go viral. There’s no bashing of Palestinian heads, no brandishing of guns, no drunken West Bank Settler mob on the rampage, nothing Youtube can censor, it’s pure comic theater! Here is a proverbial fat bully lurching as best he can, goading, coaxing, even screaming primordially, itching to pummel the young Palestinian cameraman who stays nimbly out of reach.

The scenario is spelled out in the Youtube comments, the cameraman is trying to document his friends’ efforts to tend their West Bank land, while Israeli Settlers repeatedly force police confrontations which result in the area being declared “militarized” and thence, theirs. While the cameraman observes, an angry settler who is already trying to allocate the land for his vineyard decides to run him off with brute force.

The ZOMBIE characterization describes Deutch’s particular Lurch-like lack of agility, but the relentless advance is a disturbing body language of Israeli Settler aggression. The hopped-up settlers move upon Palestinians with the confidence that their victims are unarmed and dare not strike back, that the Palestinian can presume that their attackers might have guns, and that sympathetic policemen have the the Israelis’ back. So yes, when it’s an able-bodied young settler advancing at a clip, clapping his fist, looking to draw blood, the effect is less comic.

Obviously, most settler videos are violence porn. Not this one — if you ignore what would have happened had Moshe Deutch got his mitts on him. That footage of course would not have survived.


Be sure to watch the follow-up, where a younger settler arrives at a gallup to reinforce Moshe Deutch’s stalled advance. The cameraman is forced to run, then looks on as the settlers slash all four tires of his car. It’s the high price he pays, but he’s got the West Bank’s Funniest Home Video.

West Bank Settlers intimidating unarmed Palestinian farmers

UK C4: the Killing Fields of Sri Lanka

The UK’s Channel 4 has aired a documentary about Sri Lanka’s extermination of the Tamil Tiger rebels, including thousands of the Tamil population. Refugees were gathered into no-fire safety zones, then camps, even hospitals, a strategy it turns out, of concentrating people to more easily target them with artillery fire. Doc is below:

Dutch TV interview with Julian Assange


Julian Assange has been doing lots of interviews –strange the US media isn’t asking. We’d rather dissect the minutia of Loughner’s rants, to an incomprehensible end, rather than connect the dots with Wikileaks. What pretext do Americans grant the corporate media that we do not expect them to seek out and interview Assange?

John Pilger – The War You Don’t See

We call it the Iraq War, as we did the Vietnam War, but America’s wars aren’t so-named in the host countries. It’s the Iraq Invasion, not War, and Afghanistan Invasion really, now Occupation, Decimation and Holocaust. Journalist filmmaker John Pilger subscribes to the theory that if a public is let to see the horrors of war, it will refuse to participate. His new documentary THE WAR YOU DON’T SEE traces US and UK efforts since WWI to propagandize war. Amid interviews with news bureau chiefs who he holds culpable for hyping war, Pilger shows censored footage which could have turned public opinion. I have to wonder if a simple sequence of an Iraqi home subjected to a US raid, in particular the focus on a young daughter’s anxiety, would not have broken just enough American hearts.

Rap News and Wikileaks thumb noses at US junta and its News World Order

I’d say Juice Media’s Hugo Farrant and Wikileaks’ Julian Assange are showing up the powers that be. Catch today’s episode of Rap News:

Some may imagine kindred discontents at MSNBC and the Daily Show, but Jon Stewart’s chatting up Obama tonight couldn’t make the facade plainer. Developments this week with the Iran War Logs from Wikileaks and here, from fellow Aussies at Juice Media, show the next generation aims to derail US military state propaganda with impunity.

O’REILLY: The number of people in the Middle East
              opposed to Democracy has swiftly decreased.

RUMSFELT: Yeah, by a million at least!

Black is Back at the United Antiwar Conference: breaking the Obama Spell


Black Agenda Report‘s Glen Ford speaking at UNAC in Albany: “A real movement breeds a culture of resistance, a widely held belief that it is right to resist, that it is virtuous to speak truth to power. That culture of resistance is what made Black America the most reliably progressive antiwar demographic in the United States. It was not that black people were smarter than anybody else, we were just less confused. We had a better and clearer idea of who the enemy was.”

Also, here’s a letter from activist lawyer Lynne Stewart, whose sentence was recently extended from two years to ten, for giving assistance to an incarcerated “terrorist.”