Why Are Things As They Are?

We Say Fight Back!

IVAW in Chicago, December 2013

Education for Revolution a special issue collaboration of the journals Works & Days and Cultural Logic has just been launched. networkedblogs.com/SrLbJ?ref=nf

US judge releases dying civil rights lawyer convicted of aiding terrorism  A federal judge has granted Lynne Stewart, a prominent former civil rights attorney who was convicted of aiding terrorism, a “compassionate” release from prison because she is dying of cancer.
Stewart, 74, has been serving a 10-year sentence for her 2005 conviction on helping a client, blind Egyptian cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, smuggle messages from prison to Egypt’s Islamic Group, which the U.S. government had listed as a terrorist organization.    america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/1/1/us-judge-releasesdyinglawyerconvictedofaidingterrorism.html

The Little Red Schoolhouse

Testing the Common Core  The education world is scrambling to avoid its own version of a full-scale HealthCare.gov meltdown when millions of students pilot new digital Common Core tests this spring.
Technological hiccups, much less large-scale meltdowns, won’t do: The results of the Common Core tests will influence teachers’ and principals’ evaluations and other decisions about their jobs. Schools will be rated on the results. Students’ promotion to the next grade or graduation from high school may hinge on their scores. And the already-controversial Common Core standards, designed to be tested using a new generation of sophisticated exams that go beyond multiple-choice testing, may be further dragged through the mud if there are crises.  Read more: www.politico.com/story/2013/12/common-core-testing-problems-seem-inevitable-101568.html#ixzz2pVjex3fs

Berliner: Effects of Inequality and Poverty vs. Teachers and Schooling on America’s Youth  –The research question asked is why so many school reform efforts have produced so little improvement in American schools. The answer offered is that the sources of school failure have been thought to reside inside the schools, resulting in attempts to improve America’s teachers, curriculum, testing programs and administration. It is argued in this paper, however, that the sources of America’s educational problems are outside school, primarily a result of income inequality. Thus it is suggested that targeted economic and social policies have more potential to improve the nations schools than almost anything currently being proposed by either political party at federal, state or local levels.    www.susanohanian.org/show_research.php?id=544

Shocker! Minnesota Teaching Ranks Segregated!  AND—A federal survey from 2008, the latest data available, found that nationwide, just 17 percent of educators were minorities while 40 percent of the country’s students were children of color.    www.twincities.com/localnews/ci_24808352/can-minnesotas-achievement-gap-be-closed-by-diversifying

NM Paper Warns Vs Test Opt-outs School boards and the state Public Education Department should be more willing to listen to the concerns of teachers and parents who say the testing has gone too far. But parents should think carefully about all the potential consequences before deciding to opt out of those tests.    www.lcsun-news.com/las_cruces-opinion/ci_24798520/editorial-right-balance-needed-school-testing

Enrollment an F for Michigan’s Bad Bank School System  Kenneth Wong, a professor of education at Brown University who has researched statewide recovery school districts across the nation, cites the EAA’s 24 percent drop in enrollment from fall 2012 to fall 2013 as a significant sign of trouble.
The district and its leaders should pause and consider whether they are matching the right educational partners and services with students in a city with high poverty and illiteracy, he said.
“This is a strong warning signal as to whether to keep this going. The leadership team would really have to make a strong argument ‘if you give us another two years,’ ” he said.
“Why is this justified to go forward?” From The Detroit News: www.detroitnews.com/article/20131230/SCHOOLS/312300023#ixzz2pVdV0sI9

FINANCIAL ANALYSIS OF iPADS IN SCHOOLS This a financial analysis of the quoted financial data on iPads and Apple as published in Bloomberg BusinessWeek in the article “The iPad goes to School.”

First- $50,000,000/30,000=$1,666.66 each not $678.00 as later quoted. Second-10,000,000 iPads in schools in the U.S. X $599 = $389,000,000

10,000,000 X $770=$500,500,000
10,000,000 X $1,598 = $1,038,700,000
Amount approved by the LAUSD Citizens Oversight Committee
10,000,000 X $2,355 = $1,530,750,000
Amount approved by the LAUSD Citizens Oversight Committee

Apple will sell 78,000,000 iPads this year

Apple sold 10,000,000 iPads to students in 2013

10,000,000 X $599 = $5,990,000,000
10,000,000 X $770 = $7,770,000,000
10,000,000 X $1,598 = $15,980,000,000
10,000,000 X $2,355 = $23,550,000,000

50,000,000 K-12 students in the U.S. X $1,598 = $79,900,000,000

The industry states that education is a $167,000,000,000 market, what do they have in mind for the difference of more than ½ to steal also? If you do not run the numbers you know nothing.

They give the base numbers just not the division to individual units and that is how you know what it costs to compare.    susanohanian.org/show_research.php?id=541

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

There Goes Falluja Black-clad Sunni militants of Al Qaeda destroyed the Falluja Police Headquarters and mayor’s office, planted their flag atop other government buildings and decreed the western Iraqi city to be their new independent state on Friday in an escalating threat to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, whose forces were struggling to retake control late into the night.    www.nytimes.com/2014/01/04/world/middleeast/fighting-in-falluja-and-ramadi.html?hp&_r=0

Iraq: AQ Rising, US Arming Puppets  The United States is quietly rushing dozens of Hellfire missiles and low-tech surveillance drones to Iraq to help government forces combat an explosion of violence by a Qaeda-backed insurgency that is gaining territory in both western Iraq and neighboring Syria.  some military experts question whether the patchwork response will be sufficient to reverse the sharp downturn in security that already led to the deaths of more than 8,000 Iraqis this year, 952 of them Iraqi security force members, according to the United Nations, the highest level of violence since 2008.
Al Qaeda’s regional affiliate, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, has become a potent force in northern and western Iraq. Riding in armed convoys, the group has intimidated towns, assassinated local officials, and in an episode last week, used suicide bombers and hidden explosives to kill the commander of the Iraqi Army’s Seventh Division  and more than a dozen of his officers and soldiers as they raided a Qaeda training camp near Rutbah.
Bombings on Christmas in Christian areas of Baghdad, which killed more than two dozen people, bore the hallmarks of a Qaeda operation.
The surge in violence stands in sharp contrast to earlier assurances from senior Obama administration officials that Iraq was on the right path    www.nytimes.com/2013/12/26/world/middleeast/us-sends-arms-to-aid-iraq-fight-with-extremists.html?hp&_r=1&

Obamagogue Cuts Vets Pensions The plan to trim pension increases for working-age military retirees such as Preston is by far the most controversial provision in a bipartisan budget deal approved by Congress and signed last week by President Obama.
The cut is small — a one-percentage-point reduction in the annual cost-of-
living increase — but it has provoked outrage among veterans, some of whom argue that the country is reneging on a solemn pact. And even though lawmakers, especially in the GOP, fulminate about the need to cut the cost of federal health and retirement benefits, many have vowed to roll the cut back when Congress returns to work next week.    www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/younger-veterans-outraged-by-budget-cuts-to-their-pension-benefits/2013/12/30/c43cbbec-6f02-11e3-b405-7e360f7e9fd2_story.html?hpid=z1

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

www.luxist.com/2009/03/31/german-billionaire-takes-discreet-possession-of-megayacht/
German Billionaire Takes “Discreet” Possession Of Megayacht  German screw tycoon Reinhold Würth might not be so popular with his employees right now. Würth recently took possession of his beautiful new yacht, the 280-foot “Vibrant Curiosity” at a time when his company is laying off workers. The billionaire (#93 on the Forbes 2009 list) has, according to Spiegel Online, ordered 1,250 of his 5,000 employees in Germany to reduce their working hours and take a 15 percent pay cut as of April 1.
At the $100 million yacht’s launch party, Reinhold Würth is said to have asked guests at the yacht’s launching party to be “discreet.” The yacht has a master stateroom, VIP stateroom, three double VIP staterooms and two double guest cabins and can zip along at 18.5 knots.

Detroit Boss Wants to Cut Retiree Bennies 82 Percent  A city retiree committee charged with negotiating health care and pension cuts is “frustrated” that Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr has renewed a plan to reduce benefits as much as 82 percent starting March 1.
But the emergency manager’s spokesman said Friday the city is forced to let retirees know what plan might take effect in less than two months if mediation talks don’t result in an agreement.
From The Detroit News: www.detroitnews.com/article/20140103/METRO01/301030076#ixzz2pVcdLQuG

Barbarism Rising  Detroit— A man killed by his wife and a 91-year-old who was carjacked were among at least eight killings and 20 shootings in the city since Sunday.
The husband’s death is the first reported homicide of 2014.
An argument between the husband and wife flared up at 12:22 a.m. Wednesday in the 12000 block of St. Patrick on the east side, police said.
“The 37-year-old … husband accused (his) 42-year-old wife of being unfaithful to him,” according to the Detroit Police 24-Hour Major Crime Summary. “An argument began. (The husband) shot (his wife) in the neck and then she wrestled the gun away from him and shot him.”
Detroit Police Officer Nicole Kirkwood said the man died from his wounds. “The woman is in critical condition,” she said.
The first shooting of 2014 happened 10 minutes after midnight, when a homeowner confronted a man who was standing in front of his neighbor’s house in the 11600 block of Robson, police said.
“The 53-year-old male walked outside … and confronted the suspect, telling him not to stand in front of his neighbor’s house,” the police summary said. “The armed suspect then fired one gunshot, striking the complainant in the stomach and then fled on foot in an unknown direction.”
The New Year’s Day mayhem included a woman who was shot about 2 a.m., when she reportedly asked her neighbor’s guests, who were having a New Year’s Eve party, to move from in front of her house in the 10500 block of Wayburn on the east side. A man whipped out a gun and fired several shots, striking the woman in the head and ear, before driving away in a silver 1990 Ford Taurus, police said. From The Detroit News: www.detroitnews.com/article/20140103/METRO01/301030073#ixzz2pVRyNLRj

The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement

Obama signs NDAA 2013 without objecting to indefinite detention of Americans  President Barack Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013 on Wednesday, giving his stamp of approval to a Pentagon spending bill that will keep Guantanamo Bay open and make indefinite detention for US citizens as likely as ever.
The president inked his name to the 2013 NDAA on Wednesday evening to little fanfare, and accompanied his signature with a statement condemning a fair number of provisions contained in a bill that he nevertheless endorsed.
The NDAA, an otherwise mundane annual bill that lays out the use of funds for the Department of Defense, has come under attack during the Obama administration for the introduction of a provision last year that allows the military to detain United States citizens indefinitely without charge or trial for mere suspicions of ties to terrorism.    rt.com/usa/obama-ndaa-detention-president-288/

Bob Avakian and Cultists go Wild For Gold Mao Statue!  Thousands of admirers of Communist China’s founder Mao Zedong flocked to his hometown Wednesday to bow before his graven image ― including one statue of solid gold ― before his 120th birth anniversary.
Pilgrims from across the country lit firecrackers and offered flowers in Shaoshan, where Mao was born 120 years ago Thursday, to celebrate a man blamed for tens of millions of deaths but widely viewed as the father of modern China.
“He is a great leader who sacrificed his interests so we could be liberated,” said retired teacher Fu Mengnan, after prostrating herself on the ground in front of a giant bronze statue of the leader.
“I have an image of Chairman Mao at home, and bow in front of it every morning and evening,” the 56-year-old added. “I think he is a Buddha, and I am wishing him happy birthday to show that I’ll never forget him.”   www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20131226000649

Japan: Fascist Ancestor Worship Grows in Mr. Abe’s mind, the country’s newfound economic prowess is a means to an end: to build a more powerful, assertive Japan, complete with a full-fledged military, as well as pride in its World War II-era past. That larger agenda, which helped cut short Mr. Abe’s first stint in office in 2006-7, has again come to the forefront in recent weeks, culminating in his year-end visit Thursday to the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors the nation’s war dead, including several war criminals who were executed after Japan’s defeat. Past visits by Japanese politicians have angered China and South Korea, both of which suffered greatly under Japan’s empire-building efforts in the 20th century.
The latest visit set off swift rebukes from officials in Beijing and Seoul, who accused Mr. Abe of trying to obscure imperial Japan’s atrocities.    www.nytimes.com/2013/12/27/world/asia/japanese-premier-visits-contentious-war-shrine.html?hp&_r=2&

Europe: Fascism Rising There are increasing concerns across Europe that what was once considered far-right and racist is moving toward mainstream political thought. Anti-immigration agendas have led to increased worry from immigrant communities across the European Union. In recent weeks, a new study has shown that at the same time, concerns among Jews of a resurgence of anti-Semitism are strong and growing.
Read more here: www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/12/24/212535/far-right-hate-crimes-creep-back.html#emlnl=Morning_Newsletter#storylink=c

Monarcho-Fascist Qatar and the World Cup Over the past decade, Qatar’s population has soared from 660,000 to more than 2 million. Here’s the catch: Qataris themselves number only around 260,000.
The rest, more than 85 percent of the population, are not citizens. As Professor Mehran Kamrava, an American scholar at Georgetown University’s campus in Qatar, says, they are all migrant workers of varying types.
“There are gradations of migrant workers,” he noted. “I happen to be a white-collar migrant worker, as a professor. But there are lots of people who work in the construction industry. There are also domestic servants, then there are people in the services sector, in the hospitality industry.”
Not to mention the civil service, or even the judiciary. A lot of Qatar’s judges are from Egypt and Sudan.
Qatar’s system of hiring migrant labor — a system used elsewhere in the Gulf region — has come under fire this year. Here’s the harshest judgment you’ll hear. It’s from Sharan Burrow of the International Trade Union Confederation: “Qatar is a slave state.”  www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2013/12/23/256599114/as-world-cup-looms-qatars-migrant-worker-system-faces-scrutiny

Solidarity for Never

Union Joins Boeing Bosses to Make Members vote until Surrender is Won  Members of Boeing’s machinists union on Friday voted by a slim margin to accept the company’s proposal of a long-term contract that will guarantee construction of a new long-range wide-body aircraft in the Puget Sound region, in exchange for significant wage and retirement benefit concessions.
The new contract means Boeing will build a composite wing for the new 777X plane and will assemble the final product in its Everett, Wash., plant. Boeing already has about 80,000 employees in facilities around the Puget Sound region, and the new contract means the 20,000 or so who will work on the 777X will be located in Washington state for at least the next decade.
The vote came two months after the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) rejected an earlier offer from the company by a two-to-one margin. Despite a proposed $10,000 signing bonus, the machinists were furious over a provision in that version of the contract that would have moved their retirement plans away from pensions and toward 401(k)-style savings plans. Angry protests erupted at union halls, and one union leader tore up copies of the contract in front of the media.    www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/01/04/boeing-machinists-agree-to-777x-contract-on-narrow-vote/

UAW Bosses Clean Up as “Buy American” Chrysler Sells itself to Italy Fiat SpA has reached an agreement with the United Auto Workers to purchase the rest of Chrysler Group LLC.
The $4.35 billion deal, which was announced Wednesday, marks the culmination of years of on-and-off negotiations between the Italian automaker and the union, which controls the retiree health care trust that owns a minority stake in the Auburn Hills automaker.
In a message to employees worldwide, Fiat Chairman John Elkann and CEO Sergio Marchionne called it “a historic day” for both Fiat and Chrysler.  From The Detroit News: www.detroitnews.com/article/20140101/AUTO0101/301010062#ixzz2pVWUcyqN

Mineworkers Union Denounces Sold Out African National Congress and SACP  The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, which calls itself “the biggest union in the history of the African continent,” with 338,000 members, announced Friday after a special congress that it would seek to start a socialist party aimed at protecting the interests of the working class. It was a direct rebuke to the A.N.C., which since its days as an underground movement resisting apartheid rule has portrayed itself as the champion of South Africa’s downtrodden.
“It is clear that the working class cannot any longer see the A.N.C. or the S.A.C.P. as its class allies in any meaningful sense,” Irvin Jim, the union’s secretary general, said at a news conference, referring to the governing party and its partner in government, the South African Communist Party.  …Several government agencies are investigating $20 million in improvements to Mr. Zuma’s private home that were billed as security upgrades but included luxuries like a swimming pool and an amphitheater at government expense, according to a preliminary government report.
More broadly, some in the left wing of the labor movement have denounced the government’s coziness with big business, exemplified by its handling of a wildcat strike by miners in Marikana last year. The government ordered the police to break up the strike, and the police fired upon a group of miners, killing 34 people. The A.N.C.’s deputy president, Cyril Ramaphosa, had been on the board of the platinum mining company whose workers were striking.
“The congress called on President Jacob Zuma to resign with immediate effect because of his administration’s pursuit of neo-liberal policies,” Mr. Jim said, describing Mr. Zuma’s government as “steeped in corruption, patronage and nepotism.”
The call by the union to abandon the A.N.C. has turned what had been fissures in the broad alliance that governs South Africa into gaping chasms that could, in time, end the A.N.C.’s grip on national power. The nation’s broader labor union alliance, Cosatu, and the South African Communist Party form two legs of the stool that has kept the A.N.C. firmly in government since the end of white rule in 1994. The metalworkers’ union is part of Cosatu.   www.nytimes.com/2013/12/21/world/africa/south-africas-biggest-union-pulls-support-for-anc.html?src=rechp&_r=0

UAW Boss Shoots Wife   A 50-year-old woman is recovering Tuesday morning after being shot by her husband in an apparent accident Monday night in a home that property records show is registered to UAW Vice President General Holiefield.According to the Macomb County Sheriff’s Department, a 911 call came into the dispatch office at about 8:30 p.m. about a shooting at a home in the 39700 block of Mazuchet, near the southern portion of the Selfridge Air National Guard Base.From The Detroit News: www.detroitnews.com/article/20131231/METRO03/312310051#ixzz2pVaAYcqY

Spy versus Spy

New York Times Backtracks on Snowden (now a “whistleblower” after columnists denounced him for weeks, demanded his arrest)  In retrospect, Mr. Snowden was clearly justified in believing that the only way to blow the whistle on this kind of intelligence-gathering was to expose it to the public and let the resulting furor do the work his superiors would not. Beyond the mass collection of phone and Internet data, consider just a few of the violations he revealed or the legal actions he provoked:
■ The N.S.A. broke federal privacy laws, or exceeded its authority, thousands of times per year, according to the agency’s own internal auditor.
■ The agency broke into the communications links of major data centers around the world, allowing it to spy on hundreds of millions of user accounts and infuriating the Internet companies that own the centers. Many of those companies are now scrambling to install systems that the N.S.A. cannot yet penetrate.
■ The N.S.A. systematically undermined the basic encryption systems of the Internet, making it impossible to know if sensitive banking or medical data is truly private, damaging businesses that depended on this trust.
■ His leaks revealed that James Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, lied to Congress when testifying in March that the N.S.A. was not collecting data on millions of Americans. (There has been no discussion of punishment for that lie.)
■ The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court rebuked the N.S.A. for repeatedly providing misleading information about its surveillance practices, according to a ruling made public because of the Snowden documents. One of the practices violated the Constitution, according to the chief judge of the court.
■ A federal district judge ruled earlier this month that the phone-records-collection program probably violates the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. He called the program “almost Orwellian” and said there was no evidence that it stopped any imminent act of terror.    www.nytimes.com/2014/01/02/opinion/edward-snowden-whistle-blower.html

NSA Police Staters Move To Crack All Encryption Codes In room-size metal boxes, secure against electromagnetic leaks, the National Security Agency is racing to build a computer that could break nearly every kind of encryption used to protect banking, medical, business and government records around the world.
According to documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the effort to build “a cryptologically useful quantum computer” — a machine exponentially faster than classical computers — is part of a $79.7 million research program titled, “Penetrating Hard Targets.” Much of the work is hosted under classified contracts at a laboratory in College Park.   www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-seeks-to-build-quantum-computer-that-could-crack-most-types-of-encryption/2014/01/02/8fff297e-7195-11e3-8def-a33011492df2_story.html?hpid=z1

FISA Court Again Signs Off on NSA Phone Metadata Collection  According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), US FISA courts have once again renewed the NSA’s authority to collect “telephony metadata,” essentially all phone records of all Americans, for an additional three months.
The press release provided no real details about the secret ruling by the secret court, but insisted that it covers “all companies” that have ever been authorized in the past, which likely means all companies in general.    news.antiwar.com/2014/01/03/fisa-court-again-signs-off-on-nsa-phone-metadata-collection/

Major computer security firm RSA took $10 mln from NSA to weaken encryption The National Security Agency arranged a clandestine US$10 million contract with computer security power RSA that allowed the spy agency to embed encryption software it could use to infiltrate the company’s widely used products, Reuters reported.
Revelations provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and first reported in September showed that the NSA created and perpetuated a corruptible formula that was ultimately a “back door” into encryption products.
Reuters later reported RSA became the lead distributor of the formula, installing it into a software tool known as BSAFE that is widely used to boost security in personal computers and other products.
Unknown then was the $10 million deal that set the NSA’s formula as the default method for the security measure – in which random numbers are generated on a key for access to a product – in BSAFE, according to Reuters’ sources. Though the sum of money for the deal seems low, it represented over a third of revenue the relevant division at RSA had made the previous year, according to security filings.    rt.com/usa/rsa-nsa-deal-weaken-encryption-581/

The Magical Mystery Tour

Philly Rapist Protector Priest Released  A Roman Catholic church official who won an appeal of his landmark conviction in the priest-abuse scandal left a Pennsylvania prison on Thursday after 18 months behind bars.
Monsignor William Lynn left the state prison in Waymart in northeastern Pennsylvania, prison spokeswoman Terri Fazio said, and was taken by the Philadelphia Sheriff’s Office to a city jail, where he was to be fitted with an electronic monitoring device.
He will then be released, probably to the custody of a family member, one of his lawyers said. It was not clear late Thursday when that would happen.
The attorney, Thomas Bergstrom, declined to say where in Philadelphia his client will live while prosecutors appeal the Superior Court ruling.
Lynn, 62, was the first U.S. church official ever charged for hiding complaints that priests were molesting children. He was the point person for those complaints in Philadelphia from 1992-2004.
Prosecutors charged him with felony child endangerment. But the appeals court said the law that existed at the time didn’t cover people who don’t directly supervise children. abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/pa-priest-released-prison-thursday-21397464

Welcome to the Principia Discordia  This website is dedicated to bringing the Principia Discordia to the masses, in its original, chock-full-o-pictures form! What’s the Principia, you ask? Well, it’s the Magnum Opiate of Malaclypse the Younger, Wherein Is Explained Absolutely Everything Worth Knowing About Absolutely Anything. Duh!    principiadiscordia.com/

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