Why Are Things As They Are?

We Say Fight Back!

Ralph Chapin wrote Solidarity Forever, January 17, 1915
www.iww.org/history/icons/solidarity_forever/1

Above, now on sale

Steve Conn (leader of the Detroit Teachers Wildcat)  Wins Presidency of Detroit Federation of Teachers by slim margin  The Detroit Federation of Teachers membership on Saturday elected as their new president the decades long nemesis of the outgoing leader.

Steve Conn, who has taught math in Detroit Public Schools since 1986, most recently at Cass Technical High School, defeated Edna Reaves, executive vice president of the local and associate of longtime Detroit Teachers leader Keith Johnson, who is retiring after six years as DFT president.

“I’m stunned at this moment,” Johnson said Saturday evening after the results of the run-off election were announced. “I’m gravely concerned about the future of this union. Steve has a single answer to everything and that is strike, walk out, protest. He doesn’t understand that whether ou disagree with someone or dislike them, you still have to work with them to move this district forward.”

Johnson described Conn as his nemesis of nearly 30 years. He said that while Reaves lost the presidency other candidates on the United Teacher Rights slate won their respective offices….

The DFT results released Dec. 7 showed Reaves, the leader of the United Teacher Rights slate with 390 votes for president. Conn, the candidate for the Equal Opportunity Now/By Any Means Necessary slate, received the second-most votes with 300.

On Saturday, Conn garnered 614 votes and Reaves 599. (4000 members)  www.detroitnews.com/story/news/education/2015/01/17/detroit-teachers-union-results-expected-saturday/21926931/

City of Bloomington Charges 10 Mall of America Protestors (video embedded)

Ten participants in the mass demonstration at the Mall of America in protest of police brutality were charged Wednesday for their roles in what Bloomington authorities say was an unlawful rally.

Authorities say the 10 organized the Dec. 20 gathering. They face an array of misdemeanor charges, including public nuisance, trespassing and disorderly conduct.

The large-scale demonstration drew between 1,500 and 2,000 people to the Mall of America rotunda in protest of recent grand jury decisions that cleared white police officers in the deaths of unarmed black men in Missouri and New York.

The protest lasted more than two hours on one of the busiest shopping days of the year.

Twenty-five other people arrested on the day of the protest are expected to be charged, Blomington authorities say.  www.twincities.com/localnews/ci_27319209/mall-america-black-lives-matter-demonstration-35-face

West Virginia School Workers fought Anti-science, and Won  For a little while there, it looked like West Virginia was getting ready to teach its students to doubt the overwhelming majority of scientists who say climate change is a real thing. Now, maybe not. Yesterday, after an outcry from science education advocates, the state school board reversed course.

To start from the beginning: The state’s school board voted in December to adopt the Next Generation Science Standards, a framework that 26 states, including West Virginia, helped develop for nationwide use. The standards require students to look at and analyze evidence that humans are causing global warming. But one climate skeptic on the board feels this aspect of the curriculum is misleading; it “presupposes that global temperatures have risen over the past century, and, of course, there’s debate about that,” he told The Charleston Gazette. Hmm.

So, at his urging, the school board revised the standards to sow doubt about whether things are getting warmer (there is no scientific debate about this—they are) and whether humans are causing it (there is almost no scientific debate about this either—we almost certainly are).

Students were to learn about Milankovitch cycles—changes in Earth’s orbit around the sun, one explanation for global warming popular among the mostly non-scientist community that doesn’t believe humans are responsible. (In fact, instead of explaining warming, Milankovitch cycles actually suggest that the earth’s temperatures should, at the moment, be stable or cooling.)

When the news broke that the standards had been quietly altered, it was met with a general outcry from educators inside and outside of the state, as well as parents. West Virginia University’s faculty senate voted unanimously to request that the school board reverse the changes.  www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/01/west-virginia-teaches-climate-change

Reminder of the publication of:

cup.columbia.edu/book/hubert-harrison/9780231139106

and the publication of To End All Wars, A Graphic Anthology of Anti-War Action

Defiance against one thousand lashes and a decade in prison  The 31-year-old Saudi Arabian writer and creator of secularist website Free Saudi Liberals was originally arrested for insulting Islam and showing disobedience in 2012, and was brought to court for several charges including apostasy. Badawi avoided the death penalty as a high court threw out the apostasy charge in 2013.

Badawi received his first set of lashes after Friday prayers outside the Al-Juffali mosque in Jeddah, which Amnesty International says will continue every Friday for the next 19 weeks. He is due to be given his second set tomorrow evening.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vd3dh9sy2SE

On top of the lashes and a 10-year jail term, Badawi has been ordered to pay a fine of 1million riyals (£175,000).  Part of the punishment, which has been enforced at a time when the debate about Islam and freedom of speech continues to rage, was in part down to “parental disobedience”. It is a crime to disobey your father in Saudi Arabia, and Badawi’s father reportedly went on TV to renounce his son.

Saudis, faced by mass protests, delay floggings The Saudi authorities did not administer the second round of blows as scheduled on Friday. But the case of the writer, Raif Badawi, has nonetheless drawn new attention to the Saudi government’s harsh treatment of dissidents for acts that are considered anything but criminal in the West.

Adding to the scrutiny of Saudi Arabia’s legal system are the rise of the Islamic State extremist group, which, like Saudi Arabia, claims to rule according to Shariah, and the attack on the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo for its satirical portrayals of the Prophet Muhammad, an act considered criminal in Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi government, which has joined the United States-led air campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, condemned the violence in Paris as a “cowardly terrorist attack which is incompatible with Islam.” But at home, Saudi rulers strike hard at those who question how they apply Islam to governance, rights groups say.

“There is just no tolerance for any kind of domestic dissent or activism,” said Adam Coogle, a researcher for Human Rights Watch. “They have made it a red line and a zero-sum game, where anyone who crosses that line will be dealt with.”

Adding to the scrutiny of Saudi Arabia’s legal system are the rise of the Islamic State extremist group, which, like Saudi Arabia, claims to rule according to Shariah, and the attack on the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo for its satirical portrayals of the Prophet Muhammad, an act considered criminal in Saudi Arabia.  www.nytimes.com/2015/01/17/world/caning-of-saudi-blogger-is-delayed-amid-protests.html

The Little Red Schoolhouse

Obamagogue to the Nationalist “Test Resistance”: Stuff it  As a new Congress gets to work to rewrite the 2002 federal education law known as No Child Left Behind, the Obama administration is drawing what Education Secretary Arne Duncan calls his “line in the sand”: The federal government must continue to require states to give annual, standardized tests in reading and math. In a speech scheduled for Monday at an elementary school in Washington, Duncan is expected to insist that any new law retain the trademark of No Child Left Behind, requiring that every public school student be tested annually in math and reading in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school, and also be tested in science at three points during those years.     Read more: www.sj-r.com/article/20150109/News/150109534#ixzz3OYTHbETK

Arne (still employed–note to NEA sellouts and Lily thinks “he’s a good person”) also raises a finger to the Empire’s Test Resistance  the secretary of education, Arne Duncan, insisted on Monday that the administration would not back away from annual testing for students and performance evaluations of teachers based in part on the results of the tests.

In a speech on Monday to outline the administration’s priorities for a revision of No Child Left Behind, the signature Bush-era education law, Mr. Duncan said that “parents, teachers and students have both the right and the absolute need to know how much progress all students are making each year towards college- and career-readiness.”  www.nytimes.com/2015/01/13/education/arne-duncan-says-administration-is-committed-to-testing.html

above NEA boss Eskelsen and Arne Duncan (see NEA/Dems book party below)

Nearly 20 Nationalist “Civil Rights” Groups Back the Obamagogue/Duncan School-war agenda  

Supported and Submitted by:

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, American Association of University Women

American Civil Liberties Union, Children’s Defense Fund

Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund

Easter Seals, The Education Trust

League of United Latin American Citizens, Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund

NAACP, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund

National Center for Learning Disabilities, National Council of La Raza

National Urban League, National Women’s Law Center

Partners for Each and Every Child,  Southeast Asia Resource Action Center

United Negro College Fund  www.civilrights.org/press/2015/esea-reauthorization-principles.html

Perpetual School Lockdown in San Diego  Schools throughout San Diego have taken on a new look in recent months since tall chain-link fencing has been installed to secure campus perimeters in the name of safety.

Residents in some areas have complained to the San Diego Unified School District that the metal fencing is over the top, making schools look more like prisons that centers of education. Others say they feel safer knowing that students and teachers might be less vulnerable to potentially dangerous intruders.  www.utsandiego.com/news/2015/jan/11/fences-spark-discussion-on-school-safety-effort/

Majority of US School Kids live in Poverty  For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation.

The Southern Education Foundation reports that 51 percent of students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade were eligible under the federal program for free and reduced-price lunches in the 2012-2013 school year. The lunch program is a rough proxy for poverty, but the explosion in the number of needy children in the nation’s public classrooms is a recent phenomenon that has been gaining attention among educators, public officials and researchers.  www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/majority-of-us-public-school-students-are-in-poverty/2015/01/15/df7171d0-9ce9-11e4-a7ee-526210d665b4_story.html

Flim-Flammer Deasy(with that fake doctorate)  Gets a New Job–at Broad! An I-Pad for Everyone for starters—Dr. John E. Deasy, who led improvements that propelled student achievement and high school graduation rates to historic levels in the nation’s second-largest school district, will be consulting for The Broad Center for the Management of School Systems as a superintendent-in-residence.

Condo Explains How She Ran the NYTimes in her day White House officials favor two primary tactics when they want to kill a news article, Condoleezza Rice, the former national security adviser, testified Thursday: They can essentially confirm the report by arguing that it is too important to national security to be published, or they can say that the reporter has it wrong.

Sitting across from a reporter and editor from The New York Times in early 2003, Ms. Rice said, she tried both.

Testifying in the leak trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former C.I.A. officer, Ms. Rice described how the White House successfully persuaded Times editors not to publish an article about a secret operation to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program. James Risen, a Times reporter, ultimately revealed the program in his 2006 book, “State of War,” and said that the C.I.A. had botched the operation. Prosecutors used Ms. Rice’s testimony to bolster their case that the leak to Mr. Risen had harmed national security.

Ms. Rice’s account also threw a light on how the government pressures journalists to avoid publishing details about United States security affairs. It is a common practice that is seldom discussed.

Under President George W. Bush, the White House urged reporters to withhold accounts about many of the most contentious aspects in the war on terrorism: the existence of a secret prison in Thailand, the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation and detention program, warrantless wiretapping and government monitoring of financial transactions.

The Obama administration has persuaded reporters to delay publishing the existence of a drone base in Saudi Arabia, the name of a country in which a drone strike against an American citizen was being considered, the fact that a diplomat arrested in Pakistan was a C.I.A. officer and that an American businessman was working for the agency when he disappeared in Iran.

Mr. Sterling is charged with revealing classified information to Mr. Risen.  www.nytimes.com/2015/01/16/us/politics/condoleezza-rice-testifies-on-urging-the-times-to-suppress-leak.html

Iraq 3–O how the profits will flow: Tanks! Tow Trucks! Troops! More!    The current American war in Iraq is a struggle in search of a goal. It began in August as a humanitarian intervention, morphed into a campaign to protect Americans in-country, became a plan to defend the Kurds, followed by a full-on crusade to defeat the new Islamic State (IS, aka ISIS, aka ISIL), and then… well, something in Syria to be determined at a later date.

At the moment, Iraq War 3.0 simply drones on, part bombing campaign, part mission to train the collapsed army the U.S. military created for Iraq War 2.0, all amid a miasma of incoherent mainstream media coverage. American troops are tiptoeing closer to combat (assuming you don’t count defensive operations, getting mortared, and flying ground attack helicopters as “combat”), even as they act like archaeologists of America’s warring past, exploring the ruins of abandoned U.S. bases. Meanwhile, Shia militias are using the conflict for the ethnic cleansing of Sunnis and Iran has become an ever-more significant player in Iraq’s affairs. Key issues of the previous American occupation of the country — corruption, representative government, oil revenue-sharing — remain largely unresolved. The Kurds still keep “winning” against the militants of IS in the city of Kobani on the Turkish border without having “won.”

In the meantime, Washington’s rallying cry now seems to be: “Wait for the spring offensive!” In translation that means: wait for the Iraqi army to get enough newly American-trained and -armed troops into action to make a move on Mosul.  That city is, of course, the country’s second largest and still ruled by the new “caliphate” proclaimed by Islamic State head Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. All in all, not exactly inspiring stuff.  www.tomdispatch.com/post/175943/tomgram%3A_peter_van_buren%2C_the_military-industrial_complex_in_iraq/

 

From “To End All Wars” Noted far above.

Zombifying Veterans allegations of rampant overmedication, retaliatory management practices and preventable overdose deaths at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Tomah, Wis., that The Center for Investigative Reporting revealed last week.

In the story’s wake, the VA has begun “actively reviewing allegations of retaliatory behavior and overmedication at the Tomah VA Medical Center,” said agency spokesman James Hutton. He said the facility’s chief of staff, psychiatrist Dr. David Houlihan, has been temporarily reassigned to the VA regional office while an internal investigation takes place.

The CIR story reported that the number of opiates prescribed at the Tomah VA had more than quintupled between 2004 and 2012, even as the number of veterans seeking care at the hospital declined. It included details of the August death of a 35-year-old Marine Corps veteran, who overdosed while in the hospital’s inpatient psychiatric ward.

U.S. Rep. Ron Kind, the Wisconsin Democrat whose district includes the hospital, issued a news release Monday saying: “The allegations made in this report are extremely serious and require immediate action,” and had scheduled a tour of the hospital.

Documents show Kind first heard about the problems in August 2011, when his office received an anonymous letter from a VA employee.

“The use of narcotics is escalating at such a high rate that it is scary,” the employee wrote. “We are losing great professionals who want to help these veterans and we are losing hope for change unless someone looks into the matter. Houlihan is dangerous and needs to be stopped.”  www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-tomah-va-reaction-nw-20150115-story.html

Thousands of female veterans are struggling to get health-care treatment and compensation from the Department of Veterans Affairs on the grounds that they suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder caused by sexual trauma in the military. The veterans and their advocates call it “the second battle” — with a bureaucracy they say is stuck in the past.

Judy Atwood-Bell was just a 19-year-old Army private when she says she was locked inside a barracks room at Fort Devens in Massachusetts, forced to the cold floor and raped by a fellow solider.

For more than two decades, Atwood-Bell fought for an apology and financial compensation from VA for PTSD, with panic attacks, insomnia and severe depression that she recalls started soon after that winter day in 1981. She filled out stacks of forms in triplicate and then filled them out again, pressing over and over for recognition of the harm that was done.

The department labels it “military sexual trauma” (MST), covering any unwanted contact, including sexual innuendo, groping and rape.

A recent VA survey found that 1 in 4 women said they experienced sexual harassment or assault. And the problem is growing more pressing because female veterans represent the military’s fastest-growing population, with an estimated 2.2 million, or 10 percent, of the country’s veterans. More than 280,000 female veterans have returned home from deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.   www.washingtonpost.com/politics/female-veterans-battling-ptsd-from-sexual-trauma-fight-for-redress/2014/12/25/f2f22d8e-7b07-11e4-b821-503cc7efed9e_story.html

www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3D3Vuo98o4

Navy as Mafia  A Malaysian defense contractor pleaded guilty Thursday in a corruption scandal of epic proportions, admitting that he bribed “scores” of U.S. Navy officials with $500,000 in cash, six figures’ worth of sex from prostitutes, lavish hotel stays, spa treatments, Cuban cigars, Kobe beef, Spanish suckling pigs and an array of other luxury goods.

Leonard Glenn Francis, a businessman who charmed a generation of Navy officers while resupplying their ships in Asia, admitted in federal court in San Diego to presiding over a decade-long corruption scheme involving his Singapore-based firm, Glenn Defense Marine Asia.

The investigation has steadily escalated into the biggest corruption case in the Navy’s history, with Francis admitting that he bilked the service out of tens of millions of dollars by overcharging for food, fuel and basic services. Five current and former Navy officials have pleaded guilty so far, and prosecutors have made it clear they are targeting others.

Fourth Navy Official Pleads Guilty–bribery  A Navy captain on Thursday became the fourth and highest-ranking Navy official to plead guilty to federal charges in a still-widening bribery scandal involving a Malaysian shipping contractor.

Capt. Daniel Dusek, the former commander of an amphibious assault ship, pleaded guilty to bribery conspiracy for accepting free trips, meals and prostitutes from Leonard Glenn Francis, a Malaysian contractor known as “Fat Leonard” who has been charged with overbilling the Navy by more than $20 million.

Mr. Francis, who has been fighting the charges, was scheduled to appear in federal court in San Diego later on Thursday for a change-of-plea hearing. If he pleads guilty, his cooperation could further expand an investigation that has embarrassed Navy officials and exposed serious vulnerabilities in its contracting systems.

Charles Tiefer, a former member of the federal Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan and a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law, said that if Mr. Francis were to plead guilty in an effort to receive a lighter sentence, he would have to offer prosecutors something substantial in return, including information about any other Navy officials who might have been involved.

Like other Navy officials already charged in the case, Captain Dusek helped steer warships to ports where Mr. Francis’s company, Glenn Defense Marine Asia, could gouge the Navy for supplies and dockside services, prosecutors said.

According to the charges filed against Captain Dusek on Thursday, Mr. Francis once emailed an associate that Captain Dusek was “a golden asset” in routing aircraft carriers to “our fat revenue” ports.

The document said Mr. Francis’s company had supplied Captain Dusek with luxury hotel rooms for nine nights in the Philippines and Hong Kong along with prostitutes in both places.

Mr. Francis was arrested in September 2013 and was charged with inflating hundreds of billings since at least 2009. At 6 feet 3 inches and 350 pounds, he was known within the Navy for hosting dinners at luxury hotels across Southeast Asia for senior Navy officers, where he often would hand out boxes of cigars and drop the names of admirals he knew.

But even though emails obtained by criminal investigators show that several ship crews and contracting officials had complained about his “gold-plated” fees from 2009 to early 2011, the Navy still awarded his company $200 million in contracts in June 2011, giving him control over servicing warships at many ports in the Pacific.

Records show that Mr. Francis submitted lowball bids to win the competitive contracts and then began pumping out fake invoices to inflate his billings.

A fifth Navy officer, Cmdr. Michael Vannak Khem Misiewicz, has pleaded not guilty to charges that he accepted bribes from Mr. Francis. He was indicted last week on seven additional counts of bribery.

Two of Mr. Francis’s employees, including one who is a retired Navy lieutenant commander, have also pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges and have been cooperating with the authorities.

After Mr. Francis was arrested, the Navy also stripped two admirals of their access to classified information amid accusations of inappropriate contact with Mr. Francis. Neither of the admirals has been charged in the case.  www.nytimes.com/2015/01/16/us/fourth-navy-official-pleads-guilty-in-bribery-scandal.html

At Least 400 More US Killer Troops to Syria on Side of “Moderate” jihadists  The U.S. military will deploy 400 trainers and hundreds more troops in a train-and-equip mission for Syrian rebel forces, the Pentagon said Friday.

The American troops will be deployed starting in early spring on six- to eight-week missions in three countries — Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia — as part of the Obama administration’s plan to expand training for moderate Syrian rebels.

Those groups are battling forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and extremist groups such as ISIS, as well as others linked to al Qaeda.

The mission would be led by the military and complement a modest CIA training program, based on what was authorized by the White House more than a year ago….

The trainers focused on Syria will join up to 3,000 American troops that were authorized by President Barack Obama last year to act as anti-ISIS fighters in Iraq, which shares a border with Syria. American involvement in the battle against ISIS has been more robust in Iraq, where the government has requested assistance. American planes have conducted numerous bombing missions in both countries.

This new training program is meant to help “moderate Syrian fighters” target ISIS. The moderate fighters are also at war against al-Assad, whom the Obama administration also wants to see defeated. But in her statement, Smith didn’t mention al-Assad as a target of the U.S. training mission.  www.cnn.com/2015/01/16/us/syria-rebel-training/

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

Almost half of the world’s wealth is now owned by just one percent of the population, and seven out of ten people live in countries where economic inequality has increased in the last 30 years. The World Economic Forum has identified economic inequality as a major risk to human progress, impacting social stability within countries and threatening security on a global scale.

This massive concentration of economic resources in the hands of fewer people presents a real threat to inclusive political and economic systems, and compounds other inequalities – such as those between women and men. Left unchecked, political institutions are undermined and governments overwhelmingly serve the interests of economic elites – to the detriment of ordinary people.  www.oxfam.org/en/research/working-few

In the Land that the Traitor Mandela Forged, the 2 richest have more than the poorest 26.5 million  South Africa remains the most unequal country in the world with the two richest South Africans (Johann Rupert and Nicky Oppenheimer, according to Forbes) having wealth equal to the poorest 50 percent (i.e. 26.5-million people) of the country, according to an Oxfam global inequality report.

• Only 360 of highest earners in South Africa pay their fair share of taxes.

• Inequality in South Africa is worse today than at the end of Apartheid.

• R350-billion flows out of South Africa illegally through corporations.

• Land reform is increasing inequality and about 35 000 farmers create 80 percent of all produce. A few large corporations have a massive influence.

• Unemployment is biggest driver of poverty in South Africa. Poverty is most severe amongst the elderly, young adults and children.

• One in four South Africans right now are hungry with nothing to eat. www.702.co.za/articles/634/south-africa-s-two-richest-people-have-wealth-equal-to-the-poorest-26-5-million

Jamie Dimon thinks banks are over-regulated and under seige  As JPMorgan Chase reported sluggish earnings and potential new legal costs on Wednesday, its chief executive, Jamie Dimon, lashed out at regulators and analysts, including some who are calling for the breakup of what is the nation’s largest bank.

The bank announced that both its revenue and profit were down during the fourth quarter of 2014, with few bright spots across its many business lines.

The bank’s profits were also dragged down by $1 billion it put aside to deal with a government investigation of wrongdoing on its foreign currency trading desks. The bank has also begun preparing for new rules that are expected to be tougher on JPMorgan than any other financial firm.

During conference calls with reporters and analysts, Mr. Dimon sounded like a chief executive under siege.

“Banks are under assault,” Mr. Dimon said in the call with reporters. “In the old days, you dealt with one regulator when you had an issue. Now it’s five or six. You should all ask the question about how American that is, how fair that is.”

This is not the first time that Mr. Dimon has publicly criticized the new scrutiny and rules that banks have dealt with since the financial crisis. But in the past, Mr. Dimon was often confronting skeptics from outside the banking world. On Wednesday, he faced off against several industry analysts who questioned whether the costs associated with JPMorgan’s heft are outweighing the benefits.  dealbook.nytimes.com/2015/01/14/jpmorgan-chase-profit-declines-7-percent/?_r=0

The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement

Terrorist attack used to build fascist movements in East and West At least 3.7 million people, including world leaders, marched in anti-terrorism rallies in Paris and elsewhere in France on Sunday, French officials said, calling the massive gathering in the nation’s capital the largest in France’s history.

The day was emotional and peaceful, a gesture of unity just days after Islamic extremists slaughtered 17 people.

World leaders joined French President Francois Hollande, including British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. The day also brought together an unlikely duo at the rally: Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

A photographer captured Merkel leaning her head gently on Hollande’s shoulder….

For the guards and police officers who lost their lives in last week’s attacks in France, there were signs reading “We are all cops.”

For Muslims in France who want to convey that the ideology embraced by the Muslim gunmen does not represent the whole of the faith, signs read “We are all Muslims.”

For everyone, no matter their race, class or ethnic background, signs that said “We are all French” were held up with pride.  www.cnn.com/2015/01/11/world/charlie-hebdo-paris-march/

Guantanamo as a Torture Test Lab More than 13 years ago, as the US government struggled to figure out what to do with hundreds of “suspected terrorists” it either captured or acquired in exchange for bounties, someone in the Bush administration floated the idea of shipping them to the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay.

“It’s the legal equivalent of outer space,” one official remarked.

A young Justice Department attorney named John Yoo agreed. He wrote a legal memo for the Pentagon’s top attorney on December 28, 2001 and explained that while the lease agreement gave the US “complete jurisdiction and control” of Guantanamo, it was still outside American sovereignty due to its location in Cuba. In other words, neither US nor Cuban courts would have jurisdiction over detainees held there if they tried to challenge the legality of their detention.  …

according to a new report, there was an ulterior motive for setting up Guantanamo: It was the ideal long-term interrogation facility, a “battle lab” where detainees would be subjected to untested interrogation methods and “exploited” for their intelligence value in what turned out to be a massive “experiment.”

The claims in the 66-page report, “Guantanamo: America’s Battle Lab,” prepared by Seton Hall Law School Center for Policy & Research and shared with VICE News, aren’t new. In 2009, the Senate Armed Services Committee released the findings of its investigation about the treatment of detainees in custody of the US military and reached similar conclusions.

But the Seton Hall study, co-authored by the university’s adjunct professor and senior research fellow Joseph Hickman, a former Guantanamo guard who challenged the military’s narrative surrounding the June 2006 deaths of three detainees – the government called them suicides, Hickman came to believe they were murders – makes a much stronger case. The report relies exclusively on internal government and military documents and statements public officials have made since Guantanamo opened 13 years ago to show how the detention facility “was covertly transformed into a secret interrogation base designed to foster intelligence’s curiosity on the effects of torture and the limits of the human spirit.”  news.vice.com/article/how-guantanamo-became-americas-interrogation-battle-lab

NSA/CIA/FBI/Merc Mass Spying on everything is good and necessary  A federal study released on Thursday concluded that there was no effective alternative to the government’s “bulk collection” of basic information about every telephone call made in the United States, a practice that civil rights advocates call overly intrusive.

Last year, after the former intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden revealed details of the government’s vast data-collection enterprise, President Obama asked intelligence agencies to assess whether there was a way to get at the communications of terrorism suspects without sweeping up records of all calls made and received inside the United States, including their length and other identifying information.

On Thursday, the National Academy of Sciences, in a detailed report that brought together communications and cybersecurity experts and former senior intelligence officials, said that “no software-based technique can fully replace the bulk collection of signals intelligence.” But it also concluded that there were ways to “control the usage of collected data” and to make sure that once it is in the government’s hands, there are stronger privacy protections.

The findings came a year after Mr. Obama announced modest reforms to practices of the National Security Agency that had been revealed by Mr. Snowden, including doing away with a huge government-run database of phone records and instead relying on separate databases managed by phone companies.

Eventually, those records will be held only by providers like AT&T and Verizon. But the change has not happened yet, as officials try to figure out how they would search, with court orders, information they do not have on their own computer systems. Government officials have been clear that the transition will take considerable time.   www.nytimes.com/2015/01/16/us/politics/report-finds-no-alternative-to-bulk-collection-of-phone-data.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

How FBI-Junkie Agent pulled it off –like nobody noticed—-FBI agent Matthew Lowry checked out Item 1B4 from the evidence room at the bureau’s Washington field office on an August morning in 2013. He wrote “to lab” on a log sheet to explain why he was taking drugs that had been seized in an undercover operation dubbed Midnight Hustle.

But it was nearly a year later when he delivered the drug package to the lab. For 10 months, court records show, the heroin had gone unaccounted for and unmissed. When the package made it back to the FBI office in September, it weighed 1.1 grams more than when it had been seized.

Someone had tampered with the contents, prosecutors said later.

The package is one piece of a tale that has unfolded in recent months — the case of an FBI agent who, by his own admission, repeatedly stole heroin from evidence bags for his personal use.  www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/fbi-files-tell-how-addicted-agent-was-able-to-get-the-drugs/2015/01/15/a8206bf6-8203-11e4-81fd-8c4814dfa9d7_story.html

Solidarity for Never

Rich Pals and Pols Dance and Drink and Laugh at Ranks while at NEA’s Boss’ Book Party about “rebels”  Picture a stuffy Washington book party, with its stilted, earnest conversations and tiny glasses of chardonnay. That was definitely not the scene at Wednesday night’s fete for National Education Association President Lily Eskelsen Garcia at Chinatown restaurant Oyamel.

Margaritas were flowing, Rep. Jared Polis’s young son was roaming around charming guests, and the guac station was mobbed. Second lady Jill Biden showed up in these boots — and let’s talk a minute about them, why don’t we? Black, over-the-knee, with bold gold zippers. Is it okay to say that “Dr. Biden” was rocking some sexy footwear?  There, we just did.

Even the official program part of the evening was looser than the usual fare, with TV host Roland Martin acting as emcee and unofficial hype man. “C’mon, they’ve got free liquor!” he said at one point, by way of admonishing the crowd (which included Reps. Debbie Dingell and Cheri Bustos and Dem uber-consultant Hilary Rosen) to applaud louder for Garcia and her book, “Rabble Rousers: Fearless Fighters for Social Change.”  www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/reliable-source/wp/2015/01/15/jill-biden-among-the-guests-at-book-party-for-neas-lily-eskelsen-garcia/

New Jersey’s Imperial Teachers Union Finances (via Mike Antonucci)  Having Chris Christie as governor doesn’t seem to have affected the New Jersey Education Association’s revenues, but it certainly affected its political spending. The union sent $1 million to its candidate PAC, $5.5 million to Garden State Forward and $3 million to One New Jersey (both SuperPACs).

Criminal Trial Opens for Alleged CIA Leaker  By prosecutors’ account, Jeffrey A. Sterling was a man with an ax to grind. Upset over losses in his legal squabbles with the CIA, they argued, the former officer leaked classified details to a reporter about an important program to learn about and deter Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

But the way his defense attorneys tell it, Sterling, 47, was a “patriot” who joined the CIA because he loved his country. They argued that he never told any unauthorized person about his clandestine work for the U.S. government, and they suggested that there were a few other people who might not have been so honest….Jurors will have to decide whether Sterling gave classified material to New York Times reporter James Risen for his 2006 book “State of War” and whether that disclosure included secret national security information. At issue in particular is a chapter about an operation, which Risen described as botched, that was meant to sabotage Iran’s nuclear plans.  www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/trial-opens-for-ex-cia-officer-accused-of-leaking-information-on-anti-iran-program/2015/01/13/d72b311e-9b68-11e4-a7ee-526210d665b4_story.html

More on the Enigma Team in 1944, when young Margaret Francis joined the British military, she became part of a historic project now the subject of a major Oscar contender.

Francis, 91, recently saw “The Imitation Game” — nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and memories of her 1 1/2-year stint as an operator of the top-secret “Bombe” decoding machine came flooding back.

“It was an experience that I wouldn’t have missed for anything,” said Francis, a longtime San Diegan. “I feel very privileged to have been part of such a wide organization, (being) a little country girl.”

The film, starring Best Actor nominee Benedict Cumberbatch, profiles mathematician Alan Turing and his efforts to decipher “unbreakable” German codes generated by the Enigma machine during World War II. The scene was Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, England, an hour northwest of London.

Historians figure that the decoding work by Turing, supported by thousands of others including Francis, shortened the war by at least two years and saved millions of Allied lives.

Although she spotted a technical error – the numbers on the Bombe (called “Christopher” in the movie) were actually positioned on the side rather than the front – Francis said Hollywood got the movie mostly right.  timesofsandiego.com/military/2015/01/15/supporting-role-san-diegan-was-wwii-enigma-code-breaker/

The Magical Mystery Tour

Mystical Fanatic With Funny Hat Forgets to Make Wayne Ross Saint, beatifies pretender! 

Pope Francis pressed his call for Sri Lankan reconciliation Wednesday by canonizing the country’s first saint as a model for national unity and visiting the war-ravaged north to pray at a shrine revered by both Sinhalese and Tamil faithful.

More than a half-million people packed the capital’s seafront park for the Mass, with some spending the night under the stars to ensure a good spot. Seemingly rested after a grueling first day of his Asian tour, Francis arrived well ahead of time to greet the crowd, getting off his popemobile to kiss the sick and handicapped.

Bells rang out and the crowd erupted in applause when Francis declared the Rev. Joseph Vaz a saint at the start of the service. Vaz was a 17th century Indian missionary who revived the faith in Sri Lanka during a time of anti-Catholic persecution by Dutch colonists, who were Protestant Calvinists.  www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/pope-presses-sri-lankan-unity-call-with-mass-tamil-visit/2015/01/13/eb600d54-9b99-11e4-86a3-1b56f64925f6_story.html?hpid=z4

Superstitious Zealot Demands That Nobody Criticize His Fantasies Pope Francis says there are limits to freedom of speech, especially when it comes to someone’s religion, in comments that made reference to the deadly attack last week on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Francis defended freedom of speech, calling it a fundamental human right, but said it must not cause offense.

“It is true we cannot react violently,” he told reporters today on the papal plane en route to the Philippines. “But if Dr. [Alberto] Gasbarri here, a great friend, were to say something insulting against my mother, a punch awaits him.”

Gasbarri, the official who organizes papal trips, was standing next to the pope at the time of the comments.

“You cannot make provocations,” Francis added. “You cannot insult people’s faith.” www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2015/01/15/377493546/pope-backs-freedom-of-speech-but-within-limits

Pope to Cannonize Fanatic Who Helped the Inquisition to Destroy California’s Indians The unpredictable Pope Francis surprised the world again with Thursday’s announcement that he will canonize Father Junipero Serra, the Spanish Franciscan friar who founded California’s first missions, including San Diego de Alcalá. The pope will perform the ceremony when he travels to the United States in the fall.

“In September, God willing, I will canonize Junipero Serra in the United States,” Pope Francis told reporters during a flight from Sri Lanka to Manila. “He was the evangelizer of the West in the United States.”

The announcement of Serra’s canonization raises the possibility of a papal visit to California. He will be in Philadelphia for the World Meeting of Families, which begins on Sept. 22. Pope Francis has been invited to address a joint session of Congress and the United Nations, so visits to Washington, D.C. and New York are likely. In the past, the pope has said that he wants to visit the U.S.-Mexico border, but no additional U.S. stops have been announced….”my relatives are Catholic and a lot of people on my reservation are Catholic, so I am just speaking for myself,” said Stan Rodriguez, a member of the Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel. “But there were missions burned down because of the abuses the clergy were doing to the people. To portray (Serra) as somebody who was a saint, I’m uncomfortable with that. Men, women and children died. Little babies died. It seems to me that they were more concerned with allegedly saving the soul than what would happen to the body.”  www.utsandiego.com/news/2015/jan/15/pope-canonize-junipero-serra/

He Man Woman Hater Opposes Contraception (more dues payers, please) Pope Francis issued his strongest defense yet of church teaching opposing artificial contraception on Friday, using a rally in Asia’s largest Catholic nation to urge families to be “sanctuaries of respect for life.”  www.detroitnews.com/story/news/religion/2015/01/16/pope-asia/21852357/

 

Is this Mohammed?

No! That’s Not Mohammed!

Is this Mohammed?

No! That’s Not Mohammed!

Is this Mohammed?

Is This Mohammed?

Is THIS Mohammed ?

No! That’s Not Mohammed! Nobody knows what Mohammed looks like. Stop it.

The Boko Haram Murderers the satellite imagery provides some much-needed hard evidence — Boko Haram’s attack clearly caused large-scale destruction in Baka and Doro Gowon. It also probably left a significant human toll.  “These detailed images show devastation of catastrophic proportions in two towns, one of which was almost wiped off the map in the space of four days,” Daniel Eyre, Nigeria researcher for Amnesty International, says. “Of all Boko Haram assaults analyzed by Amnesty International, this is the largest and most destructive yet.”  www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/01/14/did-boko-haram-attack-leave-150-dead-or-2000-satellite-imagery-sheds-new-light/

America Mourns. Kid Didn’t Come back from heaven  but he’s still nuts  Alex Malarkey was six years old when a car crash put him in a coma for two months, during which time he said he went to heaven and visited angels. The resulting memoir, co-authored with his father, was a best-seller. But now, five years after its publication, Alex says he made the whole thing up, NPR reports.

“I did not die. I did not go to Heaven,” he wrote in an open letter to Christian books retailers. “I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention.”

Tyndale House, the book’s publisher, is now pulling The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven and all “ancillary products.” Malarkey, now a teenager, says readers should instead turn to the Bible, “which is enough. … Anything written by man cannot be infallible.”  time.com/3671426/malarkey-heaven-book-hoax/

The Best and Worst Things in the History of the World

Education for CLASS Consciousness highlights the Freire deception:

Freire was a devout Catholic. Ridiculous.

He was always complaining about being in exile. Put me in exile in Switzerland with a plum job with the World Council of Churches and you won’t hear a peep.

He was a revolutionary wherever he wasn’t and liberal wherever he was. When he returned to Brazil, he went to work for the hack Lula and complained about the school buildings, not the core of instruction.

He was a plagiarist. See the “Texts of Paulo Freire.” He stole a lot of his material from Dom Halder Camera, a Brazilian trying to defeat communists with liberation theology.

He built a little publishing cult around himself, then insisted, too much, on his own humility.

He sought to mix Che, Lenin, Mao, and others, uncritically. Stupid.

His last wife is/was a gutter racist.

Nobody can fully explain how he goes from Brazil to Chile to Harvard.

Critical consciousness is not class consciousness. That is a dodge–part of the Freire hustle.

He is a dead end. richgibson.com/rouge_forum/CSSE2008/GibsonCSSE2008.htm

www.youtube.com/watch?v=slu1QLBncPU

So Long