Why Are Things As They Are?

We Say Fight Back!

The Rouge Forum 2013 will be held at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI on May 16-19.
The theme of this RF2013 is “Winning the Class Struggle Against Corporate Education Reform”
The Rouge Forum brings together academic presentations and panel discussions, performances, community building, and cultural events.
Join us in Beautiful Downtown Detroit!    http://rougeforumconference.wordpress.com/

Congratulations to Gil Gonzalez on the Release of

www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1QGw5Bs6V4

General Strike in Greece  and Marches World Wide As workers around the world observed the international Labor Day holiday with demonstrations and rallies, thousands of Greeks walked off their jobs on Wednesday in the second general strike against government austerity measures this year, shutting down tax offices, leaving state hospitals to operate with emergency employees and disrupting public transportation. The Greek protest came as workers in Asia, including Bangladeshis infuriated by the lethal collapse of a garment factory, demonstrated in cities including the capitals of Cambodia, Indonesia and the Philippines. In Istanbul, riot police officers sprayed throngs of people with water and tear gas as they gathered for a rally, defying an official ban.
Labor unions in Spain called for rallies in more than 80 cities, news reports said, while protests were also scheduled in Portugal. In France, the bitterly divided labor movement called for hundreds of demonstrations across the country, with rival union confederations holding separate marches. www.nytimes.com/2013/05/02/world/europe/greeks-stage-general-strike-against-austerity.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y

Happy Birthday!

The Little Red Schoolhouse

Did We Remind that the Education Agenda is a War Agenda? Navy Loves STEM schooling Although women make up about half of the United States workforce, they represent just 24 percent of careers in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). In order to correct this, major nonprofit groups have been organizing STEM enrichment camps for middle- and high-school girls, driven by the philosophy that more women will pursue STEM careers if their interest is piqued at an early age.
But recently, some girls-only STEM programs have gone beyond fostering interest in science and math among the next generation of women. Branches of the U.S. military – in particular, the Navy – have increasingly been using these programs to market the military to girls as young as 11 and 12.  http://comdsd.org/article_archive/NavyandSTEMeducation.html

Segregated Capitalist Schooling in the Corporate State Here’s a fact that may not surprise you: the children of the rich perform better in school, on average, than children from middle-class or poor families. Students growing up in richer families have better grades and higher standardized test scores, on average, than poorer students; they also have higher rates of participation in extracurricular activities and school leadership positions, higher graduation rates and higher rates of college enrollment and completion.
Whether you think it deeply unjust, lamentable but inevitable, or obvious and unproblematic, this is hardly news. It is true in most societies and has been true in the United States for at least as long as we have thought to ask the question and had sufficient data to verify the answer.
What is news is that in the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially.
One way to see this is to look at the scores of rich and poor students on standardized math and reading tests over the last 50 years. When I did this using information from a dozen large national studies conducted between 1960 and 2010, I found that the rich-poor gap in test scores is about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago.

Another Shocker–School Reform Related to Poverty (but never to capitalism itself) That pattern of poor performance was compounded by the fact that what little growth school districts enjoyed accrued heavily to higher-income and white students, not to the low-income and minority students who were supposed to benefit. Closing schools neither improved student outcomes nor saved districts money, and even the strong charters in these three cities delivered more mixed benefits than commonly reported. This is a critical story that, despite the public data, will come as a surprise to many: these supposedly successful reforms are doing little good and more than a little harm….Perhaps most troubling, in some cases, no students really gained ground; rather, increases were due simply to changes in the composition of the student body. Disaggregation of the data showed this to be the case with respect to both reading and math scores among fourth graders.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/04/29/the-gap-between-school-reform-rhetoric-and-reality-in-3-cities/

Detroit School Boss from Failed Government Motors (who fired every teacher) declares “Mission Accomplished”  and is praised by DFT Keith Johnson, president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers, said: “There were those in Lansing that wanted him to blow this district up, and he thought about the kids and the impact upon them, so he decided rather than to blow it up to fix it up.”
From The Detroit News: www.detroitnews.com/article/20130503/SCHOOLS/305030363#ixzz2SSG7ZbhL

Hey Detroit! JP Morgan is your Friend, your Friend, your Friend Gov. Rick Snyder joined Detroit Public Schools this morning in announcing $1.5 million in grants from JPMorgan Chase to turn three schools in southwest Detroit into community centers with added social services.
JPMorgan Chase has committed a $1-million grant to Southwest Solutions, a local nonprofit agency, to provide an array of services at Western International High School, Harms Elementary and Maybury Elementary over the next three years that would include financial literacy, screening for eligibility for benefits and home repair loan programs.
The services will work in tandem with the state Department of Human Services’ Pathways to Potential program that last year placed DHS caseworkers, called success coaches, in schools to identify resources and assistance to students and families. Western will get a new success coach.
“This is an exciting day,” Snyder said.
The funding will help to bolster DPS’s new five-year strategic plan announced earlier this month that aims to turn schools into community centers that could provide social services for up to 12 hours every day. The strategic plan is part of an effort to attract and retain students. DPS is down to 50,000 students, about a third the size the district was a decade ago.   www.freep.com/article/20130429/NEWS01/304290094/Detroit-schools-get-1-5-million-grant-JP-Morgan-Chase

No $ for Early Childhood Ed, but Millions for Karzai A new report released Monday shows that funding for preschool programs across the country fell by an unprecedented $500 million in the 2011-12 school year as enrollment stalled and more programs saw a drop in quality than improvement.
The report also says that in 2011-12, the latest year for which information is available, only 28 percent of all 4-year-old children in the country were in state-funded preschool programs, and 15 states actually reduced pre-K enrollment. D.C. public schools served more 4-year-olds in preschool than 15 states with programs, and more 3-year-olds than all but five states, it says. (See D.C., Virginia and Maryland reports below.)    http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/04/29/study-preschool-funding-sees-unprecedented-single-year-drop/

Al Jazerra on Capitalist Education and Reform Failures Multiple research in the US has shown that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. And now the Equity and Excellence report, commissioned by the US Congress, says the US education system is largely to blame.  The study says: “Ten million students in US’s poorest communities … are having their lives unjustly and irredeemably blighted by a system that consigns them to the lowest-performing teachers, the most run-down facilities, and academic expectations and opportunities considerably lower than what we expect of other students.”
So what has become of the American dream? Despite growing up with economic hardships do you still have the opportunity for prosperity and financial success through hard work?
It is a notion that President Barack Obama recently alluded to in his inaugural address: “We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American; she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.”
However, the report on education says that in no other developed country has the system stacked the odds against so many of its children.
To discuss this, Inside Story Americas is joined by guests: Sean Reardon, a professor of education and sociology and author of The Widening Income Achievement Gap; Mary Bruce, a senior education adviser for the public policy firm, Civic Enterprises; and Sylvia Allegretto, the co-chair for the Centre on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the University of California.”It’s a shocking state right now. We have one in four children in this country living in poverty, increasingly children lack housing, healthcare and basic food security in some cases in concentrated and segregated areas, and then we are spending less money in schools in the education of those who are the least able to get education outside of school. This builds up a kind of inequality that doesn’t exist in most of the industrialised nations around the world.”   www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestoryamericas/2013/02/201322211124074638.html

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

War Means Work and $$$: Building Tanks the Military Doesn’t Want Built to dominate the enemy in combat, the Army’s hulking Abrams tank is proving equally hard to beat in a budget battle.
Lawmakers from both parties have devoted nearly half a billion dollars in taxpayer money over the past two years to build improved versions of the 70-ton Abrams.
But senior Army officials have said repeatedly, “No thanks.”
It’s the inverse of the federal budget world these days, in which automatic spending cuts are leaving sought-after pet programs struggling or unpaid altogether. Republicans and Democrats for years have fought so bitterly that lawmaking in Washington ground to a near-halt.
Yet in the case of the Abrams tank, there’s a bipartisan push to spend an extra $436 million on a weapon the experts explicitly say is not needed.
“If we had our choice, we would use that money in a different way,” Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army’s chief of staff, told The Associated Press this past week.
Why are the tank dollars still flowing? Politics.
Keeping the Abrams production line rolling protects businesses and good paying jobs in congressional districts where the tank’s many suppliers are located.
If there’s a home of the Abrams, it’s politically important Ohio. The nation’s only tank plant is in Lima. So it’s no coincidence that the champions for more tanks are Rep. Jim Jordan and Sen. Rob Portman, two of Capitol’s Hill most prominent deficit hawks, as well as Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. They said their support is rooted in protecting national security, not in pork-barrel politics.     From The Detroit News: www.detroitnews.com/article/20130428/POLITICS03/304280328#ixzz2RnM2pwQd

Tens of Millions of $ From CIA to Gangster Afghan Karzai For more than a decade, wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president — courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency.  ll told, tens of millions of dollars have flowed from the C.I.A. to the office of President Hamid Karzai, according to current and former advisers to the Afghan leader.
“We called it ‘ghost money,’ ” said Khalil Roman, who served as Mr. Karzai’s deputy chief of staff from 2002 until 2005. “It came in secret, and it left in secret.”   www.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/world/asia/cia-delivers-cash-to-afghan-leaders-office.html?emc=tnt&tntemail1=y&_r=1&

Karzai: The Money Will Keep Flowing from CIA The C.I.A.’s station chief here met with President Hamid Karzai on Saturday, and the Afghan leader said he had been assured that the agency would continue dropping off stacks of cash at his office despite a storm of criticism that has erupted since the payments were disclosed.  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/world/asia/karzai-said-he-was-assured-of-cash-deliveries-by-cia.html?emc=tnt&tntemail1=y

Who Lost Afghanistan? If the lawlessness, poverty, and endemic corruption of Afghanistan are indicative of anything, it is that the multi-billion dollar efforts to restore stability in the region have been an abject failure.
As the scheduled 2014 reduction of American-led NATO troops moves closer, the occupying forces leave behind a state where none of their initial goals have been realized.
The Afghan central government is weak and hopelessly corrupt, the national armed forces are disorganized and resentful of foreign presence, the Taliban still wield notable influence, women remain extremely marginalized, Afghans are trapped in abject poverty, and the occupiers themselves continue to shoulder the responsibility for heavy civilian causalities.
Tens of billions have been poured into Afghanistan over the past decade, but the fact is that official figures of aid and financial resources spent in the country on paper do not come close to what was actually doled out to US proxies.
Reports confirm that tens of millions of US dollars in cash were delivered by the CIA in suitcases, backpacks and plastic shopping bags to the office of Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai since his installation in 2004.
The report states that the ‘ghost money’ paid to Karzai’s office was not subject to oversight and restrictions placed on official American aid or the CIA’s formal assistance programs, and much of it went to “warlords and politicians, many with ties to the drug trade and in some cases the Taliban.”
The report also cites an anonymous US official who claimed, “The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan was the United States.” These revelations should not only raise the eyebrows of US taxpayers – the disingenuous reality of American funds finding their way into the pockets of the Taliban should raise blood pressures.   rt.com/op-edge/afghanistan-corruption-failure-stability-835/

Below, War Criminal Pals Laugh at the People of the World

Bill Blum on the Terrorists What is it that makes young men, reasonably well educated, in good health and nice looking, with long lives ahead of them, use powerful explosives to murder complete strangers because of political beliefs? I’m speaking about American military personnel of course, on the ground, in the air, or directing drones from an office in Nevada.
Do not the survivors of US attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya and elsewhere, and their loved ones, ask such a question?
The survivors and loved ones in Boston have their answer – America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That’s what Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston bomber has said in custody, and there’s no reason to doubt that he means it, nor the dozens of others in the past two decades who have carried out terrorist attacks against American targets and expressed anger toward US foreign policy. 1 Both Tsarnaev brothers had expressed such opinions before the attack as well. 2 The Marathon bombing took place just days after a deadly US attack in Afghanistan killed 17 civilians, including 12 children, as but one example of countless similar horrors from recent years. “Oh”, an American says, “but those are accidents. What terrorists do is on purpose. It’s cold-blooded murder.”   williamblum.org/aer/read/116

Israel Goes to war with Syria The Syrian government immediately blamed Israel for the explosions, whose power appeared to far outstrip that of any weapons in the rebels’ arsenals. Israeli officials refused to confirm that Israeli forces had carried out the strikes, which the Syrian deputy foreign minister, speaking on CNN, called “an act of war.”
With much still unexplained about the effects and motivations of the attack, it rattled the region, which has lived in fear that the Syrian war will lead to a wider conflict.    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/06/world/middleeast/after-strikes-in-syria-concerns-about-an-escalation-of-fighting.html?ref=global-home&_r=0

Israel and Depleted Uranium Shells Israel used “a new type of weapon”, a senior official at the Syrian military facility that came under attack from the Israeli Air Force told RT.
“When the explosion happened it felt like an earthquake,” said the source, who was present near the attack site on the outskirts of Damascus on Sunday morning.
“Then a giant golden mushroom of fire appeared. This tells us that Israel used depleted uranium shells.”   rt.com/news/syria-israel-uranium-air-strike-847/

Obamagogue Marching into the Syria Quagmire The White House is once again considering supplying weapons to Syria’s armed opposition, senior officials said Tuesday. Such a decision would be a policy shift for the Obama administration, which has stepped up its nonlethal aid but stopped short of lethal weaponry and has expressed reluctance about greater military entanglements in the Syrian civil war.  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/01/world/middleeast/bomb-in-central-damascus.html?ref=global-home&_r=0

Canada Betrays US War Resister A female soldier in the U.S. Army who fled to Canada after becoming ‘disillusioned’ with the Iraq War has been sentenced to 10 months in prison.
During a two-week leave in 2007, Private First Class Kimberly Rivera crossed the Canadian border to avoid having to complete a second tour of duty in Iraq.
Rivera, 30, was a wheeled-vehicle driver in Fort Carson’s 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team and served in Iraq in 2006.
At a court martial on Monday the mother-of-four said she had became ‘disillusioned’ with the U.S. mission and pleaded guilty to two counts of desertion and a bad-conduct discharge.
The Colorado Springs Gazette reported that when judge Colonel Timothy Grammel asked Rivera how long she remained absent, she replied: ‘As long as I possibly could, sir. … I intended to quit my job permanently.’
After fleeing to Canada, Rivera applied for refugee status but was denied.
Read more: www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2316966/Kimberly-Rivera-pleads-guilty-desertion-sentenced-10-months-jail.html#ixzz2SSUzCyRT

Rule Britania! Back to the Gulf The UK army is planning to build up a strong “shadow presence” in the Gulf, marking a return to the seat of its old imperial power, a UK think tank said. The Arab Spring and security fears over a nuclear Iran are among the reasons for the move.
The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) published a report titled ‘A Return to East of Suez? UK Military Deployment to the Gulf’ on Monday morning, analyzing a shift in UK policy that is driven by a “fear of what is happening in the Middle East.”
The report stressed that on the surface, the increased military presence would not mirror the imperial foothold Britain once held in the region.
The military intends to build up a strong shadow presence around the Gulf; not an evident imperial-style footprint, but a smart presence with facilities, defense agreements, rotation of training, transit and jumping-off points,” the report said.   rt.com/news/uk-suez-military-presence-546/

CIA’s Frank Snepp on the Vietnam Syndrome Thirty-eight years ago last week, I was among the last CIA officers to be choppered off the U.S. Embassy roof in Saigon as the North Vietnamese took the country. Just two years before that chaotic rush for the exits, the Nixon administration had withdrawn the last American troops from the war zone and had declared indigenous forces strong enough, and the government reliable enough, to withstand whatever the enemy might throw into the fray after U.S. forces were gone.That’s the same story we told ourselves in Iraq when we pulled out of that country in 2011. And today, as American troops are being drawn down in Afghanistan, we’re hearing variations on the same claims once again. Yet security remains so fragile in both Iraq and Afghanistan, it is impossible not to worry that we are deluding ourselves and that we failed to learn the most important lessons of Vietnam.One major ingredient of both the Afghanistan and Iraqi experiments was the use of American dollars to buy off insurgents, wean them from their Al Qaeda or Taliban suitors and win the indulgence, however grudging, of the leadership in Kabul or Baghdad. Such payments may help ensure a lull in the violence to allow U.S. forces to withdraw. But the enduring fallacy of such tactics was made clear in Vietnam.  http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-snepp-lessons-of-vietnam-20130505,0,5276212.story

Jeffrey St Clair and the Game of Drones At last we know. The mysterious legal authority for Barack Obama’s killer drone program flows from another administration with an elastic interpretation of executive power: that of Richard Nixon.
In a chilling 16-page dossier known simply as the White Paper, one of Obama’s statutory brains at the Justice Department cites the 1969 secret bombing of Cambodia as a legal rationale justifying drone strikes, deep inside nations, against which the United States is not officially at war.
This startling disclosure is drafted in the antiseptic prose of an insurance adjuster announcing the denial of a claim based on a pre-existing condition. Yet, the bombing of Cambodia (aka Operation Menu), which involved more than 3,000 air strikes, was almost universally acknowledged as a war crime. Now the Obama administration has officially enshrined that atrocity as precedent for its own killing rampages.
Since Obama’s election, the CIA has overseen nearly 320 drone strikes in Pakistan alone, killing more than 3,000 people, as many as 900 of them civilians. Among the dead are at least 176 children. Assassination was never this easy, never so risk-free. At last we know. The mysterious legal authority for Barack Obama’s killer drone program flows from another administration with an elastic interpretation of executive power: that of Richard Nixon.  http://www.counterpunch.org/

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

It just keeps getting worse. The 17 nations of the euro zone saw another rise in joblessness. In March, it rose to a seasonally adjusted rate of 12.1 percent, up from 12 percent in February and 11 percent from March 2012. The rate for the 27 nations of the European Union held steady from the previous month at 10.9 percent, but it was up from 10.3 percent in the same period last year.
Compared with last year, 1.8 million more working-age Europeans are unemployed, according to Eurostat. This means 26.5 million working-age Europeans are idle, including 19.2 million in the euro zone.
The worst-hit nations are the usual suspects, the ones that have been hit hardest by the sovereign debt crisis that has sent the entire region into its most protracted recession on record. They are:
Greece at 27.2 percent;
Spain at 26.7 percent; and
Portugal at 17.5 percent….The number of Europeans under the age of 25 who have no jobs stands at 23.5 percent for the EU and 24 percent for the euro zone. The worst-hit countries for youth unemployment are:
Greece at 59.1 percent;
Spain at 55.9 percent; and
Italy at 38.4 percent.  http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_PUBLIC/3-30042013-BP/EN/3-30042013-BP-EN.PDF

Capital at Work–Suicide Rises From 1999 to 2010, the suicide rate among US citizens between the ages of 35 to 64 soared by 30 percent, to 17.6 deaths per 100,000 people. Is a void of democracy in the economic system driving Americans to become their own worst enemies?
Suicide now ranks higher than death by automobile: in 2010, there were 33,687 deaths from motor vehicle crashes compared with 38,364 suicides.
Although suicide tends to be viewed as a problem inflicting teenagers and the elderly, the recent study shows a marked rise in the number of suicides among the Baby Boom generation (a demographic group born between the years 1946 and 1964, when the annual birthrate rose dramatically in the US).  http://rt.com/op-edge/us-corporate-power-suicide-crisis-817/

Where To or To Not Live The Pacific Northwest has a good reputation nationwide–the two most popular of the 21 prominent cities we asked about in our national poll last weekend are Seattle and Portland, OR. 57% of American voters see Seattle favorably and only 14% unfavorably, edging out Portland (52-12) by three points on the margin.
The most unpopular is Detroit, which only 22% see positively and 49% negatively. Americans have net-negative impressions of only two other of these cities, and both are in California: Oakland (21-39) and Los Angeles (33-40). In February, PPP found California to be the least popular state in the union. It does have the 11th most popular city, though: San Francisco (48-29).
Between the pack are Boston (52-17), Atlanta (51-19), Phoenix (49-18), Dallas (48-21), New York (49-23), New Orleans (47-24), Houston (45-22), Salt Lake City (43-20), Philadelphia (42-22), Baltimore (37-24), Las Vegas (43-33), Chicago (42-33), Cleveland (32-25), Washington, D.C. (44-39), and Miami (36-33).  http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2012/04/american-cities-favorability-poll.html

The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement

above, the militarized invasion of Watertown.Terrorism, which seeks to replace a social movement with a weapon, typically blows back on those the terrorists claim to represent. Local example of the not so distant past: Weathermen.

Solidarity for Never

This

www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvoEFKZqT44

Did not have to become this

A few weeks ago, as Valery Gergiev and his Mariinsky Orchestra tested the acoustics of their new $700 million theater here, they played one of the most dramatic selections in the symphonic repertory: the rousing finale of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.  “That movement has enormously big brass and percussion,” Mr. Gergiev recalled, “and I asked them to play a little bit harsher than usual, to let us see what the limit of the hall is. First I had them play too soft, then too loud.”
Navigating between extremes has not been just an acoustic experiment, but also the challenge of the 2,000-seat theater itself, which formally opens on Thursday with a gala concert. Called the Mariinsky II and connected to the original, ornate 19th-century Mariinsky Theater by a pedestrian bridge over a canal, it is the first new Russian opera house to aspire to international significance since the time of the czars.
It has accordingly been the object of tremendous scrutiny, particularly after more than 10 years of development, three architects — or four, depending on how you count — and a government-financed budget that exploded to nearly 10 times the initial estimate.  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/02/arts/music/mariinsky-ii-is-set-to-open-in-st-petersburg.html?ref=global-home

Cuba: Bosses are Workers Now of state employees bused in before dawn to observe International Workers’ Day, there was a novel, and increasingly favored, breed: entrepreneurs whose private businesses the government is counting on to absorb thousands of the state workers it considers redundant and hopes to shed.
Their presence — albeit limited — at one of the most important fixtures in the Castro-era calendar reflects the shifting economic mix in a country where, for decades, private enterprise was anathema and the state officially provided everything anyone could need, from a job to the sugar people put in their coffee.
But the state’s ability to do that has declined significantly over the years, with salaries and subsidies like food rations unable to cover even basic needs.
“This is a way of showing solidarity with the workers and of showing that we, too, are workers,” said Orlando Alain Rodríguez, a former sommelier at a state-run hotel who opened a restaurant on a busy intersection in downtown Havana nine months ago. www.nytimes.com/2013/05/02/world/americas/on-may-day-in-havana-a-nod-to-capitalism.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y

More Proof: Concessions Don’t Save Jobs and Bosses only Want More I think it’s fair to say that the men sitting across the table from me Monday afternoon were not terribly happy with my recent work.
Bob Schoonover, president of Service Employees International Union, Local 721, and Art Sweatman, a shop steward and tree trimmer for the city of Los Angeles, found much to dislike in my April 23 column. That’s the one in which I said public employee unions need to make a few more concessions.
“We did a whole bunch, and we saved the city a whole bunch of money,” said Schoonover, who speaks like a boxer working the bag, one jab after another.   www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0501-lopez-seiu-20130430,0,2862767.column

Betraying Bradley Manning Racing to stanch a flow of criticism, the president of San Francisco’s annual gay pride celebration said Friday that the U.S. Army private charged in a massive leak of U.S. secrets to the WikiLeaks website will not be an honorary grand marshal after all.
SF Pride Board President Lisa Williams said in a statement that an employee of the organization had prematurely notified imprisoned intelligence specialist Bradley Manning this week that he had been selected for the distinction, which recognizes about a dozen celebrities, politicians and community organizations each year for their contributions to the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender communities.
“That was an error, and that person has been disciplined. He does not now, nor did he at that time, speak for SF Pride,” Williams said.   sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2013/04/26/wikileaks-suspect-wont-be-san-francisco-pride-parade-marshal/

Spy versus Spy

Difficult visit to a US Spy Center My outing to the facility last Thursday was an eventful one. I can confirm that the National Security Agency’s site is still under construction. It was surprisingly easy to drive up and circle its parking lot. But if you take photos while there, it is — much like Hotel California – very hard to leave….asked. I said that I was. He responded, “You’re going to need to delete those.”
I explained that I was a journalist and that I preferred not to. He insisted, saying we were on restricted federal property and that taking photos there was illegal. Luckily for me, Randy Dryer is not just a university professor but a practicing and long-experienced media lawyer. He explained to the officer who we were, why we were there and that we hadn’t realized we were on restricted property. The officer, who carried a gun and a portable radio, began writing everything we said down in a little green notebook. When the officer insisted again that the photos be deleted, Dryer asked if we could talk to his supervisor.
At this point another uniformed officer pulled up behind us. He came up to the car and went essentially through the same question-asking routine while the first officer, who took our driver’s licenses, walked away from the car to call his supervisor.   www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/03/04/nsa-utah-data-center-visit/2/

When the University of Utah professor who invited me to Salt Lake City to talk to his students asked how I wanted to spend three hours of downtime Thursday afternoon, the super-secret spy center was at the top of my list. The professor, Randy Dryer, was dubious about the value of visiting the construction site, assuming there would be a huge fence that would prohibit us from getting close or seeing anything significant. That turned out not to be the case.

N. Korea Sentences American The United States demanded Thursday that North Korea immediately release an American sentenced this week to 15 years of hard labor on charges of trying to overthrow the government.
The Obama administration is calling for amnesty for Kenneth Bae, State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said. www.washingtonpost.com/world/north-korea-sentences-american-on-charges-he-tried-to-topple-government/2013/05/02/03498dfc-b2dd-11e2-bbf2-a6f9e9d79e19_story.html

The Magical Mystery Tour

Obamagogue Backs Institutionalized Fear of Sexual Pleasure–Attacks Plan B  Ruling The Justice Department filed notice late Wednesday that it will challenge a federal court decision requiring the government to make emergency contraceptives available over the counter to women of all ages.
The move came hours after the Food and Drug Administration approved over-the-counter sales of emergency contraceptives to women 15 and older. Previously, Plan B was available to teenagers younger than 17 only with a prescription. Older women had to request it from a pharmacist.
The Obama administration also asked the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of New York to stay Judge Edward Korman’s early-April ruling, which is set to take effect Sunday.
The administration’s challenge will no doubt reignite a debate over whether young teens should be eligible to obtain emergency contraception without a doctor’s consent, a politically fraught issue that has vexed two presidential administrations and led to the resignation of multiple FDA officials.
“We are deeply disappointed that just days after President Obama proclaimed his commitment to women’s reproductive rights, his administration has decided once again to deprive women of their right to obtain emergency contraception without unjustified and burdensome restrictions,” Center for Reproductive Rights President Nancy Northup, whose organization represents the defendants, said in a statement.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/01/obama-administration-plans-to-appeal-plan-b-ruling/?hpid=z4

Raping Africa In going public, Anthony Musaala has forced the Roman Catholic Church in Uganda to confront a problem it had insisted didn’t exist. And he may stir a debate far beyond Africa’s most Catholic of countries.
The Ugandan priest has been suspended indefinitely by the archbishop of Kampala for exposing what he calls an open secret: Sex abuse in the Catholic Church is a problem in Africa as well as in Western Europe and North America.
The African Catholic Church is fast-growing, pious and traditional. As the church elsewhere forks out billions of dollars to compensate the child sex abuse victims of priests, few African Catholics have questioned the assumption, voiced recently by Ghanaian Cardinal Peter Turkson, that the African church is purer than its counterpart in the West, which is regarded as secular and permissive.
It’s not more pure, says Musaala. He says he has the evidence to prove it.
“The Vatican turns a blind eye because it doesn’t want to be embarrassed about this blooming church. But I think it’s time we had the truth,” Musaala says.  http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-africa-catholic-abuse-20130505,0,4578310.story

Barbarism Rises in Bangladesh Four people were killed and hundreds injured as a rally in the capital of Bangladesh turned violent. Police used tear gas to disperse thousands of Islamist protesters in the streets of Dhaka who demanded execution for “blasphemous” blogging.
“One point, One demand: Atheists must be hanged”, chanted the demonstrators as they marched along at least six highways, blocking transport between Dhaka and other cities and towns.
The demonstrators gathered in the capital’s Motijheel commercial district, amounting to between 150,000 to 200,000 people according to AFP. On their way, they set shops and vehicles on fire, according to police accounts.   rt.com/news/bangladesh-protests-blasphemy-islam-845/

The Best and Worst Things in the History of the World

Kilpatrick Mom on the Hunt for Space Aliens–in Congress Former U.S. Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick said Monday she’s excited about presiding over a week’s worth of testimony about the existence of extraterrestrials.
The Detroit Democrat and mother of former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick signed up with five other former members of Congress to listen to testimony aimed at proving alien contact with Earth and a government effort to cover it up.
“I’ve been interested for a while,” Kilpatrick said before the kickoff of the hearings, known as the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure sponsored by the Paradigm Research Group, a private ET lobbying organization.
The hearing lasts through Friday at the National Press Club and will be the basis for a documentary on UFOs. For her service — listening to about 30 hours of congressional-style testimony — the private group will pay her $20,000 plus expenses.  From The Detroit News: www.detroitnews.com/article/20130429/POLITICS03/304290397#ixzz2SSezNvEH

Exploding the Gun Ban Eight months ago, Cody Wilson set out to create the world’s first entirely 3D-printable handgun.
Now he has.
Early next week, Wilson, a 25-year-old University of Texas law student and founder of the non-profit group Defense Distributed, plans to release the 3D-printable CAD files for a gun he calls “the Liberator,” pictured in its initial form above. He’s agreed to let me document the process of the gun’s creation, so long as I don’t publish details of its mechanics or its testing until it’s been proven to work reliably and the file has been uploaded to Defense Distributed’s online collection of printable gun blueprints at Defcad.org. All sixteen pieces of the Liberator prototype were printed in ABS plastic with a Dimension SST printer from 3D printing company Stratasys, with the exception of a single nail that’s used as a firing pin. The gun is designed to fire standard handgun rounds, using interchangeable barrels for different calibers of ammunition.
Technically, Defense Distributed’s gun has one other non-printed component: the group added a six ounce chunk of steel into the body to make it detectable by metal detectors in order to comply with the Undetectable Firearms Act. In March, the group also obtained a federal firearms license, making it a legal gun manufacturer.
Of course, Defcad’s users may not adhere to so many rules. Once the file is online, anyone will be able to download and print the gun in the privacy of their garage, legally or not, with no serial number, background check, or other regulatory hurdles. “You can print a lethal device,” Wilson told me last summer. “It’s kind of scary, but that’s what we’re aiming to show.”http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/05/03/this-is-the-worlds-first-entirely-3d-printed-gun-photos/?utm_campaign=techtwittersf&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social

The Cheeseburger Revolution

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