May 28, 2011

Adam Kokesh and others arrested at Jefferson Memorial. For dancing.



Thomas Jefferson is rolling in his grave right now.

Is Bin Laden really dead?

does it matter?





So a lot of people now, on the far left and far right, are clamoring to see the photo of Bin Laden’s headwound.

And since our government has a long history of bald-faced lying to us, it’s understandable that people don’t trust anything the government says.

Afterall, the film “Wag the Dog” was based on the real life PR campaign undertaken by the Pentagon during the first Gulf War in Iraq.

And we found out about the “wag the dog” moments during the second war in Iraq, with the bogus rescue of Private Jessica Lynch, and the falsified accounts of Pat Tillman’s death.

In the immortal words of the zen sage George W Bush, “ya fool me once, shame on, shame on you. Fool me twice... Fool me, can’t get fooled again.”

So if Bin Laden had been dead for years from kidney failure, and he’s been used as a boogeyman to justify the war on terror and the insane clampdown on our civil liberties, and they’re lying now to save face for the fact that he’s been dead for years, or to make us feel like we won a victory, and the reason he as buried at sea is because there never was a body, and the reason why they won’t release the photos is because there are none, given that that assumption is true, what are we being lied to about?

The fact that the boogeyman is dead? If this means that I can get on an airplane without having my balls fondled;
If that means we bring our troops home from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, and close down the 700 military bases around the world; if that means that we stop viewing our neighbors with suspicion that they might be a terrorist; that instead of mistaking Arabs for Terrorists we go back to just mistaking them for Mexicans, if we can shake the existential fear of terrorism from our national psyche and start behaving like mature adults instead of lashing out in fear at everything that moves like dogs owned by Michael Vick, then I’m comfortable with being lied to about this.

If my parents told me when I was a kid that if I didn’t do what they told me to the boogeyman would get me, and then later, when I refused to fall asleep at night because I was scared, they told me that they searched under the bed, found the boogeyman, and killed him, is that wrong?

What do you think?

May 27, 2011

The One Percent

h/t to K.E. Harleston

The One Percent


1/8

2/8

3/8

4/8

5/8

6/8

7/8

8/8



And as a finisher:
Dennis Trainor's video "Anti-Obama rage is justified-- when will the poor threaten to kill and eat the rich?"

May 17, 2011

Jon Stewart: "That was fast!" The revolving door between gov't and lobbyist firms



And just so you know, FreePress.net has something you can do about it:

click here

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Another Bizzare Email exchange with an Evangelical Apathetic

The Lizard:
I just wanted to let you know you're wrong about the upcoming democratization of society and media because of the advent of the Internet. People say this every time a new media technology comes around, they said this about the printing press in the 1500s, and radio technology. The Internet will be no different, especially now that (any effective form of) network neutrality is pretty much dead, it will be the same as cable television and corporate radio. I tell people it's just better to accept reality as is rather than futilely trying to fight against it.

Hopefully what I said was useful here.


The Punk Patriot:

I'm sorry, what is this in response to?


The Lizard:

My apologies for not being specific. I'm referring to the whole "decentralized" authority and democracy you promote, with the likes of Douglas Rushkoff.


The Punk Patriot:

Um. Okay...

I find it really odd that I get so many emails from people who tell me that I should just give up. I'm not sure why this is.
I've succeeded too many times in life to give up. I've seen too many fights end with victory to throw the towel in.

I know that my efforts are well spent, and I'm not sure what folks like yourself are thinking you will achieve by emailing me and telling me to give up and become despondent.

So why don't we try this: You give up, I'll keep fighting. Sound fair?

Eli Pariser: The internet is creating isolation and "Information Junk Food"

May 16, 2011

The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is Invisibly KILLING YOU

The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is willing to put the lives of thousands at risk, entrusting Uranium Conversion to unskilled temp labor.



Via the United Steel Workers

In this video, GRITtv's Danya Abt and cinematographer Zac Halberd traveled to Morris, N.J., to talk with workers from United Steelworkers Local 7-669, who have been locked out by Honeywell Corp. for nearly a year. The members recently came to Honeywell headquarters to exercise their rights as shareholders.

The 228 skilled uranium workers have been locked out of the nation's only uranium conversion facility since June 28, 2010. Watch the GRITtv segment, then sign our petition calling on Honeywell to bring back the experienced USW workers by clicking here. Please pass it on!




The invisible hand of the Free Market is invisibly trying to kill you.

May 8, 2011

Maine Green Independent Party 2011 State Convention: Sarah Bigney of the AFL-CIO

To whomever put up those posters, YOU GOT PRESS!

So as you know, I designed this poster, and asked people to put it up around their towns.
I know of at least one person that did this, and just a few towns over from my own!
Thank you anonymous hooligan for doing that! You got press coverage! Check it out:

(go to page 4)


Why this is so cool: People are working together, anonymously, through the internet, spilling into the real world, and are achieving message amplification and multiplication together.
One person designs a poster, somebody else puts a bunch of copies of it up (huge copies! They are like 3'x5'!), and a third person writes an op-ed piece in a newspaper about it.
And the kicker is, none of them even know one another.
That, to me, is amazing.

The full text from PortlandDailySun.me


Two separate acts of graffiti. Two mixed messages for Portland.



By Bob Higgins

For the few that did not stay up until the wee hours of Monday morning, the news that Osama Bin Laden had been killed in a raid on a compound in Pakistan came as a shock. For at least one Portland resident, it didn’t.

This half-witted knucklehead grabbed a can of spray paint, and decided to do a little graffiti action all over the exterior walls of a mosque on Andersen street.

To the person that did it, I express this simple message. You are a congenital idiot. Your actions made about as much sense as painting the word “pedophile” on the walls of a church. If you want to scare residents of this neighborhood, show them your I.Q. score. Your dumb move ranks you as about as intelligent at those knuckleheads who protest at funerals.

The Somali and Bantu population in Maine moved here to get AWAY from the Taliban and Al-Queda elements, remember? You just showed them that stupidity travels faster than tolerance.

Another graffitti showed up on Tuesday morning. Less than 36 hours after the announcement Sunday night, the overpass on Forest Avenue and I-295 was plastered with at least a dozen posters, each about 2feet by 5 feet. Huge lettering read “Bin Laden Dead — Troops Come Home.”




I happened to see that one on my way into work. My brother caught me at the bus stop, and offered me a lift into town. My first reaction on seeing those posters was simple. I reflected to myself that wow, it really didn’t take long [after the news of Bin Laden's death] for 9 years of frustration about kids coming home in boxes to make someone get their message of frustration out.

I popped down after work to get a photo, and just seven hours later all the signs had been ripped down and shredded on one side of the street, save one. Apparently, whoever tore those down was unwilling to play “frogger on Forest” to get to the other side to rip those down.



Two messages, one of hatred and one of hope. One water-blasted by a city contractor, one destroyed by someone who apparently likes kids getting shot at.

Some history for you, the reader. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter signed an “aid agreement” with the initial group that would become the Afghan insurgency. We would pass them aid, and supplies, and hopefully, they would manage to suck Soviet troops into what US Secretary of State Zbigniew Brzezinski called “The Afghan Trap.”

Eventually, that group became funded by Reagan and Bush. It was a 9 year long war that killed 14,453 soldiers. Eventually, Gorbachev saw that there was no winning, and decided to pull his troops.

Nine Years. We’ve been at it for nine and a half, lost 2538 people, and had over 10 thousand wounded. Somebody call that former Secretary Of State and ask him about that whole “trap” thing.

Two messages, both politically “unacceptable.” One more so than the other, as it involves hate speech. One torn down because if you don’t “support the troops,” you are scum.

Last week, I was watching this older movie “Gardens of Stone,” a grim story of the burial detail at Arlington National Cemetery. In it, one character wants to get to Viet Nam, to where the “action” is. He relates a story of a helicopter coming back covered with arrows, laughing at the indigenous people using such crude methods. He gets straightened out buy a tough old sergeant. “Can you win against an enemy that is willing to fight you until all that is left is bows and arrows?”

This week, with the killing of Bin Laden, perhaps we as a country have had that “Aha!” bow and arrow moment.

Both messages were similar in this single respect. No matter how we as a city pride ourselves for being included on “best this and that” lists, we still have not learned much.

(Bob Higgins is a regular contributor to The Portland Daily Sun.)




The people who put up the posters made a video and linked to it on the blog post where I first posted the design. A video news release (VNR) perhaps?

May 6, 2011

Inconsistencies in the Osama Bin Laden story

First thing I want to know:

If it's true what they first said, that they have facial imaging technology to confirm that their target was indeed Osama, and the folks in the Whitehouse really did see the whole thing go down as it happened, why are the details of the story changing every time they tell it?

First version of events: Osama lived in a multi-million dollar mansion, there was a firefight, and Osama went down guns blazing. He hid behind a women and used her as a human shield. She was killed. He was killed.

Second version of events: Osama lived in a relatively expensive house in the suburbs. There was a firefight, but Osama wasn't armed, but had to be killed, because he violently resisted arrest. The lady in question wasn't actually killed, she was injured when a stray bullet hit her in the leg. She was later taken to a hospital.

Third version of events: Osama lived in a concrete chicken coop. Only one person fired a gun, he was killed. Everybody else was disbursed throughout the house, but were unarmed. They were either shot and killed or arrested. The lady in question was actually shot and killed, but Osama didn't hide behind her, she used her own body to protect him out of her own free will.

Now there are weird bastard child versions of all three events floating around news agencies on the web.

These are all drastically different versions of what happened. Drastically different. If a 10 year old kid told me a story like this and changed the details around as much as the White House has, I would tell that kid to his face that I thought he was lying to me.

Especially if that kid had a long history of lying to me.
Like about how Saddam Hussein sought significant quantities of yellowcake uranium from Niger.
Like the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
Like the circumstances around Pat Tillman's death.
Like the Jessica Lynch "rescue."
Like how in the 1990s iraqi military pulled kuwaiti babies out of incubators and threw them onto bayonets. [pdf]
Like that flight 93 was shot down (or that it was crashed by the passengers? Or was it both?)
Like the Anthrax attacks after 9-11 being from Saddam Hussein (it was from a US military base.)

I don't fault conspiracy theorists for thinking everything the government says is a deception. Our government faces a crisis of legitimacy, like the boy who cried wolf.

Second thing I want to know:

Why is it that we're so goddamned surprised that Pakistan's ISI "didn't know" where Osama was? Really? Because it was reported in mainstream news a long time ago, that Pakistan's ISI was letting Al Qaeda use their training camps. Yeah. ISI training camps were Al Qaeda training camps. We knew this BEFORE the wikileaks report, in which we learn our own government knew this was true, and has known for some time.

Why don't these news reporters get off their ass and do FIVE MINUTES of investigation of their OWN NEWS AGENCY REPORTS. BBC anchors are wondering aloud why Pakistan didn't know where Osama Bin Laden was. And the BBC reported that Mohammad Atta's paymaster was an official in the ISI. And the BBC reported that the ISI's camps were used be Al Qaeda.

Here's an article from the NYTimes in July of last year, that all but says this was the case.

This film, "Aftermath: Unanswered Questions" was one of the first "truther" films. It was produced by the Guerilla News Network, a pioneer in internet based news, the organization has since gone defunct. But their material is still floating around. There is conjecture in this film, and also lots of facts. One fact reported on in this film, is that the ISI and Al Qaeda trained at the same camps. Wikileaks confirms this.



Third thing I want to know:

This is all looking shady as fuck. The Pentagon is paying money to Pakisatn's ISI, and the ISI is giving money to Al Qaeda.
Is it that the Pentagon is THAT STUPID? Quite possibly. We have been, after all, paying off the Taliban in Afghanistan in order to move weapons and supplies to our troops who are fighting with... the Taliban.

But it's easy with just the few facts and anomalies here, to make an assumption that 9-11 was a self-inflicted wound either on purpose or on accident, or that the story of Osama Bin Ladens death is a "Wag the Dog" moment. There is also no actual proof of that. But you have to ask yourself:

WHAT THE FUCK?!

May 3, 2011

The State Bank of North Dakota



Mainers! Email / call / lobby your representative and tell them you support LD 1452, a bill to create a state bank!

Jeremy Scahill on the death of Osama Bin Laden

via Jeremy Scahill over at TheNation

h/t to @jischinger



On Democracy Now! this morning, The Nation's Jeremy Scahill explains that Osama bin Laden's killing in Pakistan yesterday is not necessarily a cause for celebration: the United States used the man who launched the September 11 attacks on America as a reason to "declare war on the world," Scahill says. In response to September 11, "Iraq was invaded, a country that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda, nothing to do with bin Laden. The United States created an Al Qaeda presence in Iraq by invading it, made Iran a far more influential force in Iraq than it ever would have been. We have given a grand motivation to people around the world that want to do harm to Americans in our killing of civilians, our waging of war against countries that have no connection to Al Qaeda and by staying in these countries long after the mission was accomplished... This is a somber day, when we should be remembering all of the victims: the three thousand who died in the United States and then the hundreds of thousands that died afterward."

May 2, 2011

Bin Laden maybe dead, but he is still winning the war on terror

‎"The slaying of multitudes should be mourned with sorrow. A victory should be celebrated with the funeral rite." - Tao Te Ching 31


Bin Laden is dead. But does this mean that we've won the "War on Terror?"

We, as a nation, never tried winning the “war on terror” by simply acting like adults and going about our business.

We, as a nation, never tried winning the “war on terror” by staying true to the supposedly American values of freedom, openness, and tolerance.

I remember a time when the only reason you had to get in line at the airport was so somebody could check that you had an airplane ticket. That seems insane today. Or is it that so much of our world today is insane, that sanity seems a perverted deviation from the new normal?

Bin Laden may be dead, but we’ve changed. We’ve changed a lot.

America has become a twisted monster; we are wrought with suspicion. Our identity has become tied to violence. Our foreign policy has become based on war.

We have become callous to murder.
We have become callous to torture.
We have forgotten the rule of law.
We have forgotten “innocent until proven guilty.”
We have forgotten the things we stood for as a nation.
We have lost our fundamental identity as freedom-loving people.
We have been thoughtlessly willing to give up our innate liberty for false promises of security.
We have become infantalized.
We have become monsters.

The biggest blow on September 11th, 2001 was not the WTC or the Pentagon. It was the psychic wound we inflicted on ourselves and our national identity.

Bin Laden may be dead, but he is still winning the war on terror.

And he’s winning by quite a lot.

Bin Laden Dead, Troops Come Home



Please distribute this image widely. Print it out on 8x11 and stick up up in public places maybe.