Why Are Things As They Are?

We Say Fight Back!

Registration Form and Details on the Rouge Forum Conference  Rouge Forum 2012
June 22-24 at Miami University (Oxford, OH)   rougeforum2012.wordpress.com/registration/

Congratulations to the Labadie Collection of Radical Works! 100 Years

View selected items from the world’s foremost archive of international radical social protest movements. “Social protest movements often involve intense passion, so expect to see some edgy and offensive items on display,” says Labadie Collection curator Julie Herrada.
The Labadie Collection is the world’s largest publicly accessible research collection covering just about every 19th, 20th, and 21st century protest movement that can be documented on paper, from the French Revolution to Occupy Wall Street. It has served as a resource for thousands of people the world over, from high school students to seasoned researchers, from young activists in search of their roots to documentary filmmakers unearthing eye-catching images. Books, serials, manuscripts, pamphlets, photographs, audio recordings, posters, and political buttons are all part of this eclectic group of materials.  
www.lib.umich.edu/audubon-room/events/labadieexhibit

The Commune, March 1871

www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2s9dOtEj2w&feature=related

An Invitation to Fight Capitalism  (graphic  text is here  http://www.thenewsignificance.com/2011/06/05/ezequiel-adamovsky-anti-capitalism/)

Portugal: Transport Workers Strike The Lisbon subway and some of Portugal’s major rail and ferry routes were shut down Thursday as workers staged a strike to protest labor law changes and austerity cuts.    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/world/europe/portugal-strike-disrupts-transportation.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail0=y

The Little Red Schoolhouse

Failed Oil Warrior Condi Rice and Ruling Class Pals Declare,” Our Education agenda is a War Agenda” he nation’s security and economic prosperity are at risk if America’s schools don’t improve, warns a task force led by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Joel Klein, the former chancellor of New York City’s school system….According to the panel, 75 percent of young adults don’t qualify to serve in the military because they are physically unfit, have criminal records or inadequate levels of education. That’s in part because 1 in 4 students fails to graduate from high school in four years, and a high school diploma or the equivalent is needed to join the military. But another 30 percent of high school graduates don’t do well enough in math, science and English on an aptitude test to serve in the military, the report said.     The panel makes three main recommendations:
—Adopt and expand the common core initiative to include skill sets critical to national security such as science, technology and foreign languages;
—Structural changes to provide students with more choices in where they can go to school, so many students aren’t stuck in underperforming schools;
—A national security readiness audit, prepared by governors working with the federal government, that can be used to judge whether schools are meeting national expectations in education.      http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iLNRIoD1IYG3j8RvE-NUm2oKmzdQ?docId=2b2e388bd8414e8ebc9afe912147c7fb

The Full Education Agenda as a War Agenda CFR bi Partisan Report www.cfr.org/united-states/us-education-reform-national-security/p27618

The Giant Test Cheating Ponzi Scheme Suspicious test scores in roughly 200 school districts resemble those that entangled Atlanta in the biggest cheating scandal in American history, an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows.    The newspaper analyzed test results for 69,000 public schools and found high concentrations of suspect math or reading scores in school systems from coast to coast. The findings represent an unprecedented examination of the integrity of school testing.
The analysis doesn’t prove cheating. But it reveals that test scores in hundreds of cities followed a pattern that, in Atlanta, indicated cheating in multiple schools.
A tainted and largely unpoliced universe of untrustworthy test results underlies bold changes in education policy, the findings show. The tougher teacher evaluations many states are rolling out, for instance, place more weight than ever on tests.
Perhaps more important, the analysis suggests a broad betrayal of schoolchildren across the nation. As Atlanta learned after cheating was uncovered in half its elementary and middle schools last year, falsified test results deny struggling students access to extra help to which they are entitled, and erode confidence in a vital public institution.  http://www.ajc.com/news/cheating-our-children-suspicious-1397022.html

City by City Ponzi Cheat Breakout www.ajc.com/news/cheating-our-children-list-1397020.html

Corruption is not a Fluke in Capitalist Schooling. Corruption is an Integral Part of Capitalism A former Pontiac school official accused of stealing $236,000 from the district spent some of the money on luxury vehicles and a Chicago shopping spree and got taxpayers to foot the bill for his law school tuition, according to the FBI. He also got his close friend a job with the district, according to court records.
The allegations against former Pontiac associate superintendent Jumanne Sledge were included in a search warrant affidavit unsealed Wednesday in federal court.
The affidavit offers an unprecedented look into the public corruption case involving a cash-strapped school district and offers details on the 40-year-old Bloomfield Hills resident’s personal life.
“It just makes your stomach drop. It’s sickening, the abject impunity with which this guy went about spending money that should have gone to the most needy in our community — children that need schooling,” lawyer Deborah Gordon said.
Gordon represents former interim superintendent Jonathan Brown, who sued the district last month in Oakland County, alleging he was fired after uncovering fraud and misuse of district money.   www.detroitnews.com/article/20120322/SCHOOLS/203220378/FBI-Ex-Pontiac-school-official-misused-funds?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

California State University System to Eliminate 20,000 + Students + Uncounted Faculty ( a get out the vote ploy) California State University will accept no new admissions for the spring semester of 2013 – with a few exceptions – as part of a drastic cost-cutting strategy to reduce enrollment by about 16,000 students next spring, officials said Monday.
Another 20,000 to 25,000 qualified students could be barred from attending CSU in the 2013-14 academic year if voters reject a proposed tax measure that hasn’t yet qualified for the November ballot.  http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/03/19/BAPL1NN1KR.DTL

The Corporate State University of 2102 (with overwhelming faculty consent)Yet for everything we see of the homeland security campus, there is a good deal more that we miss. Behind the riot suits, the baton strikes, and the pepper-spray cannons stands a sprawling infrastructure made possible by multimillion-dollar federal grants, “memoranda of understanding” and “mutual aid” agreements among law enforcement agencies, counter-terrorism training, an FBI-sponsored “Academic Alliance,” and 103 Joint Terrorism Task Forces (which provide “one-stop shopping” for counterterrorism operations to more than 50 federal and 600 state and local agencies)… At a time when entire departments and disciplines are facing the chopping block at America’s universities, the Department of Homeland Security has proven to be the best-funded department of all. Homeland security studies has become a major growth sector in higher education and now has more than 340 certificate- and degree-granting programs. Many colleges have joined the Homeland Security and Defense Education Consortium, a spinoff of the U.S. Northern Command (the Department of Defense’s “homeland defense” division), which offers a model curriculum to its members.    www.tomdispatch.com/post/175519/tomgram%3A_michael_gould-wartofsky%2C_class_of_2012_meet_the_class_of_1984/#more

What Happens when Kids do not Show up to learn to be loyal and obedient to capital? Busted! A truancy crackdown Friday around the Denby High School area on the city’s east side picked up at least 16 students and brought them to the local police precinct in handcuffs, police said.
The effort was part of Mayor Dave Bing’s Youth Violence Prevention Initiative. One component of this initiative is Operation Safe Passage, which is supported by local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, including the U.S. Department of Justice, Wayne County Sheriff’s Office and Detroit police, local nonprofits and Detroit Public Schools. Operation Safe Passage, approaching its one-year anniversary in April, has intervened with 100 students, Detroit Police Department Sgt. Eren Stephens said.     www.detroitnews.com/article/20120323/SCHOOLS/203230438/Detroit-police-sweep-Denby-area-students-skipping-school-handcuff-16?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

“The state that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards, and its fighting by fools.”
― Thucydides

Nine Years in, More Barbarism in Iraq As Iraq prepares to showcase itself to the world next week with a highly anticipated gathering of Arab leaders, a string of suicide attacks and car bombings on Tuesday morning offered a bloody reminder that insurgent violence still wreaks havoc with the country’s tenuous stability.   The attacks killed at least 43 people in a half-dozen cities across the country, security officials said, from a Shiite pilgrimage site in the south to a disputed, ethnically diverse center of Iraq’s oil wealth in the north. More than 100 people were wounded, and while there were no immediate claims of responsibility, the scale and synchronicity of the bombings were nearly identical to previous attacks by the Sunni insurgent group Al Qaeda in Iraq.   www.nytimes.com/2012/03/21/world/middleeast/bomb-attacks-in-iraq.html?ref=global-home#commentsContainer

Barbarized American Invader Terrorist Made Two Trips on Killing Spree U.S. investigators believe the U.S. soldier accused of killing 17 Afghan civilians split the slaughter into two episodes, returning to his base after the first attack and later slipping away to kill again, two American officials said Saturday.  This scenario seems to support the U.S. government’s assertion — contested by some Afghans — that the killings were done by one person, since they would have been perpetrated over a longer period of time than assumed when Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales was detained March 11 outside his base in southern Afghanistan.
But it also raises new questions about how Bales, who was formally charged Friday with 17 counts of premeditated murder and other crimes, could have carried out the nighttime attacks without drawing attention from any Americans on the Kandahar province base.     www.nytimes.com/aponline/2012/03/24/us/politics/ap-us-us-afghanistan-bales.html?ref=global-home

US General Allen: Troops to be in Afghanistan for Foreseeable Future The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan on Thursday said he believes American troop withdrawals should stop in 2013, keeping at least 68,000 by 2014 in contradiction of Obama administration plans to have combat troops out by that year.    http://news.antiwar.com/2012/03/22/top-us-commander-in-afghanistan-troop-withdrawal-should-stop-next-year/

Army Tried to Scrub American Troop Terrorist from Web Besides waiting nearly a week before identifying the Army staff sergeant accused of killing 16 Afghan villagers, the U.S. military scrubbed its websites of references to his combat service.
Gone were photographs of the suspect, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, as well as a recounting in his base’s newspaper of a 2007 battle in Iraq involving his unit, a report that quoted him extensively.
But they weren’t really gone.
Given the myriad ways that information remains accessible on the Internet, despite the best efforts to remove it, the material about Bales was still out there and available, such as in cached versions of Web pages. Within minutes of the Pentagon leaking his name Friday evening, news organizations and others found and published his pictures, the account of the battle – which depicts Bales and other soldiers in a glowing light – and excerpts from his wife’s personal blog. So why did the Pentagon try to scrub Bales from the Internet in the first place?
The military said its intention in removing the material wasn’t to lessen the Army’s embarrassment over the horrific attack – nine of the victims were children – but to protect the privacy of Bales’ family.    http://www.military.com/news/article/army-tried-to-delete-bales-from-web-after-arrest.html

above, the battle of Marciano

Asia Times on the Failed Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan ( A government that is losing to an insurgency is not being outfought, it is being outgoverned.- Bernard Fall)  The presence of a large number of foreign troops is seldom welcome by any people. Americans might remember reading of their forbears’ annoyance at the presence of British troops back in the 18th century – and they were not really foreign, yet. Today, a large number of US troops in another country, especially a traditionalist one, presents significant problems.
The rank and file of the US military are drawn from a swaggering, coarse, and often violent youth culture. Trained for war and away from familial restraints, they do not all act responsibly out in the field or just outside the perimeter of an operating base.    http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/NC20Df01.html

Obamagogue’s Endless War Economy Last Friday, March 16, President Obama issued a creepy Executive Order. Entitled “National Defense Resources Preparedness,” it authorizes the President and cabinet officials to take over crucial aspects of the national economy not only during emergencies but also in peacetime.The order relies on a Korean War-era statute, the Defense Production Act of 1950, to further entwine the domestic industrial economy with the military. It talks of fostering “cooperation between the defense and commercial sectors.”
The stated purpose is to strengthen “the domestic industrial and technological base” so as “to ensure it is capable of responding to the national defense needs of the United States.”  This amounts to putting the economy on permanent war footing, even when there isn’t an emergency.For instance, the Executive Order talks of the need for the economic base “to satisfy [defense] requirements in peacetime and times of national emergency.” And cabinet officials are authorized to “issue regulations to prioritize and allocate resources . . . to promote the national defense, under both emergency and non-emergency conditions.”
It amounts to a sweeping reassertion of Presidential authority. It reasserts the President’s authority “to require acceptance and priority performance of contracts or orders . . . to promote the national defense over performance of any other contracts or orders.”
And it then delegates this extraordinary power to cabinet heads.   www.progressive.org/permanent_war_economy.html

Pay No Attention to the Loud Noises. All is Well in Peaceful Iraq Al-Qaeda’s front group in Iraq has claimed responsibility for a wave of attacks that killed 46 people across the country this week, and said the violence exposes how weak government security is ahead of the upcoming Arab League summit in the capital, Baghdad.
The statement by the Islamic State of Iraq, posted on a website on Wednesday, said its “Sunni lions” targeted the plan of the “fool government preparing” for the summit.
Attacks on Tuesday struck Shia pilgrims in the holy city of Karbala, set cars on fire near a police headquarters in Kirkuk and targeted security forces and government officials in Baghdad.   www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2012/03/2012321145733544106.html

Mali and the US Trained Coup Leader A US Africa Command official confirmed on Friday the leader of military coup d’état in Mali has visited the US on several occasions, receiving professional military education.
Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo participated in the America’s International Military Education and Training program, sponsored by the US State Department, Public Affairs representative Patrick Barnes revealed to The Washington Post.
Foreign officers are handpicked for the program by US embassies in respective countries. The Malian army is very small, consisting of only 7,000 personnel. With the given small number of officers in this army, it is no wonder that Sanogo had a good chance to get to the US.   www.rt.com/news/mali-coup-american-trained-377/

Nobody will be Charged for Murders of 24 in Pakistan The United States military has decided that no service members will face disciplinary charges for their involvement in a NATO airstrike in November that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, an accident that plunged relations between the two countries to new depths and has greatly complicated the allied mission in Afghanistan.   www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/world/asia/us-plans-no-disciplinary-charges-in-strike-that-killed-24-pakistanis.html?_r=1&ref=global-home

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8U9tpRtF4Fs

Taibbi–the Long Con is Still on–this time the Reload Here’s yet another form of hidden bailout the federal government doles out to our big banks, without the public having much of a clue. This is from the WSJ this morning: Some of the biggest names on Wall Street are lining up to become landlords to cash-strapped Americans by bidding on pools of foreclosed properties being sold by Fannie Mae… While the current approach of selling homes one-by-one has its own high costs and is sometimes inefficient, selling properties in bulk to large investors could require Fannie Mae to sell at a big discount, leading to larger initial costs. In con artistry parlance, they call this the ‘reload.’ That’s when you hit the same mark twice — typically with a second scam designed to ‘fix’ the damage caused by the first scam. Someone robs your house, then comes by the next day and sells you a fancy alarm system, that’s the reload.       In this case, banks pumped up the real estate market by creating huge volumes of subprime loans, then dumped a lot of them on, among others, Fannie and Freddie, the ever-ready enthusiastic state customer. Now the loans have crashed in value, yet the GSEs (Government Sponsored Enterprises) are still out there feeding the banks money through two continuous bailouts.
One, they continue to buy mortgages from the big banks (until recently, even from Bank of America, whom the GSEs were already suing for sales of toxic MBS), giving the banks a permanent market for home loans.
And secondly, they conduct these quiet bulk sales of mortgages, in which huge packets of home loans are sold to banks at a “big discount.”
By now we’ve come full circle. Banks create the loans, make money selling them off on the market at high prices, then come back and buy them again when they’re low. When the GSEs are in the middle of this transaction, it makes mortgage lending a basically risk-free proposition: Banks get paid for creating home loans and they end up owning valuable property on the cheap, but in between, they offshore the market risk to a government entity and/or to the idiot individual who bought the home mortgage in the first place.

Even better, many of the banks/investors who buy these home loans back from Fannie/Freddie will rent out their properties instead of reselling them, which can vastly increase their revenue streams. From the WSJ:  http://www.opednews.com/populum/linkframe.php?linkid=147426

Black Agenda Report: Obamagogue and the Magic Wand What are the people who tell us President Obama hasn’t got a “magic wand” really saying? That we have no right to expect a president to use the power of his office to address mass incarceration, the housing, foreclosure, student and consumer debt crises, or end our murderous colonial wars around the world? That we’re immature and unsophisticated to demand or expect much of anything more than his pretty black face in that big white house?  …Besides, our black misleadership class warns us, even when they tell us the same or bigger lies than Republicans tell us, even when they campaign for jobs and peace but wage war and cutbacks in office, even when they’re lying through their teeth to us about “clean coal,” “safe nuclear energy,” and the need to close neighborhood schools and replace experienced black teachers with mostly white temps, Democrats are simply better than Republicans. Always have been, always will be. After all, they’re not ignorant white supremacists, are they?
Let’s get real. Whenever anybody, in or out of office repeats that “magic wand” line, what they mean is that people have no right to demand peace or jobs or justice. They mean that people expecting, demanding or fighting for these things are fools, losers, and if their demands make the president and his party look bad, race traitors when they’re black or white racists if they’re anything else. How much clearer can it get? Only the immature and politically unsophisticated expect any sort of political involvement to change things.    http://blackagendareport.com/content/barack-obama-democratic-expectations-and-magic-wand

www.youtube.com/watch?v=SswuEGdnFp8&feature=related

Biggest Gender-pay Gap? Wall Street Female personal care and service workers, which include butlers, house sitters and shoe shiners, earned $1.02 for every $1 their male counterparts made in 2010, according to census data compiled by Bloomberg. That job category was the only one of 265 major occupations where the median female salary in the U.S. exceeded the amount paid to men. The six jobs with the largest gender gap in pay and at least 10,000 men and 10,000 women were in the Wall Street-heavy financial sector. Cali Carlin reports on Bloomberg Television’s “InBusiness With Margaret Brennan.” (Source: Bloomberg)    http://www.bloomberg.com/video/88496286/

The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement

www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOUfPyT9V0o

Even the Cops can’t Keep Track of the Spies– Drug lords targeted by Fast and Furious were FBI informants When the ATF made alleged gun trafficker Manuel Fabian Celis-Acosta its primary target in the ill-fated Fast and Furious investigation, it hoped he would lead the agency to two associates who were Mexican drug cartel members. The ATF even questioned and released him knowing that he was wanted by the Drug Enforcement Administration.
But those two drug lords were secretly serving as informants for the FBI along the Southwest border, newly obtained internal emails show.     www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-fast-furious-20120322,0,3334424.story

Behind Capital–Violence. Cops Attack (“Clear”) Zucotti Park, again Scores of Occupy Wall Street protesters were arrested on Saturday night as police officers swept Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan and closed it.
Dozens of demonstrators sat down and locked arms as officers moved in about 11:30 p.m. The protesters chanted “we are not afraid” as the police began pulling people from the crowd, one by one, and leading them out of the park in handcuffs.  http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/17/arrests-made-as-protesters-mark-occupy-wall-streets-six-month-anniversary/

A Short Take on the Koni Spectacle Commercializing War Crimes richgibson.com/konyi.htm

Solidarity Fornever

The Coming Failure of the UAW to Extort Dues from UAW Workers, Selling their Labor to Bosses The United Auto Workers union is soliciting signatures of support from workers at Volkswagen AG’s U.S. factory, an escalation of its effort to establish a foothold outside the Detroit automakers.

In early March, the UAW started passing out authorization cards for workers to sign in an early formal step needed for union representation, workers at the factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, told Reuters.
UAW President Bob King has said organizing U.S. plants run by foreign automakers, known in the industry as transplants, is crucial for the union’s survival.
After three decades of declining membership, the UAW faces a financial crunch that has been exacerbated by the U.S. economic downturn. This has forced America’s richest union to sell assets and dip into its strike fund to pay for activities.    http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/23/us-uaw-vw-idUSBRE82M00M20120323

The Torment and Demise of the United Auto Workers Union as Performed by the Auto Bosses, the Labor Leaders, Counterfeit Radicals, Fictional Revolutionaries, and All Those Who Know They Are Not Innocent Either clogic.eserver.org/2006/gibson.html

The Counterfeit Tax Fight of CTA, CFT In California CFT and CTA/NEA are carrying on a shadow boxing match over whose proposal is a better method to fool school workers into ballot boxes and the interim electoral frenzy that leads up to the vote. NEA will likely put 60 million dollars into the campaign, and hundreds of thousand of volunteer hours–people filtered away from real unionism, school workers and other unionites becoming tools of their own oppression.
Last year, the California Teachers Association spent more than $6 million in their electoral shams, with nearly nothing going on.
The two unions’ main problems are (1) locking down support for the demagogue, Obama, and his wars, and bailouts–as well as the NDAA and Arne Duncan’s expansion of schools as human munition factories.
(2) The state affiliates have problems, like the shifts to “right to work” laws in states that would radically reduce union tops’ dues income (when unionites say “save collective bargaining, they really mean, “save our chance to force people to pay dues—a la Wisconsin, they have always been prepared to give up everything else). The unions were never created by majority state wide citizen votes, but by direct action on the job. But the last thing the union bosses want is a mass of class conscious workers so the last thing they are planning to do is shut down states that pass those laws.
California has a real budget problem that both CTA and CFT address in counterfeit fashion, below.
Third, the union bosses need to create an illusion of local action where there is really no action, like the Moveon scheme to train 100,000 people in “Non-violent” action—as distinct from the direct action that is necessary, mass strikes and general strikes, student strikes, and mutinies in the military. Moveon, a Democratic Party front, like Truthout, also serves as a bodyguard of illusions, preserving capitalism and its shaky empire.   richgibson.com/taxfight.htm

Fake Unions Betray Members on Millionaires’ Tax in CA (don’t strike, vote) This winter the California Federation of Teachers (CFT) sent tremors of hope through its ranks by announcing it was going to spearhead an attempt to place an initiative on the California ballot — appropriately called the “Millionaires Tax” — that would raise taxes only on millionaires (3 percent on those making more than $1 million; 5 percent on those making more than $2 million). The initiative carefully specifies that the money it raises — if it gets on the ballot — will go to public education on all levels (36 percent for K-12 and 24 percent for colleges and universities), social services for children and seniors (25 percent), public safety (10 percent) and infrastructure (5 percent). To qualify for the ballot, somewhere in the order of 800,000 petition signatures are required.    http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/03/21/the-unions-the-millionaires-tax-and-the-road-to-success/

East Coast Longshoreman Fight to Stay White The longshoremen’s union defied government officials again on Tuesday, insisting that the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor had no authority to demand that all hiring be done without discrimination and refusing to even send a representative to state its case at a commission hearing.
The union’s refusal to certify the fairness of its hiring process was the latest setback to the commission’s campaign to diversify a work force that is predominantly white and male. Some of the union locals that supply workers to the companies that load and unload cargo ships are more than 80 percent white, according to commission members   www.nytimes.com/2012/03/21/nyregion/longshoremens-union-in-new-york-defiant-over-diversity-plan.html?_r=2

Rank and File Outs Zombro in San Diego EA (why are so many NEA execs being fired?) A controversial San Diego teachers union leader has been ousted from office at a time when the city school district is scrambling to win concessions from labor groups in an effort to rescind some of the 1,600 pink slips issued to educators last week.
Camille Zombro, vice president of the San Diego Education Association, lost her bid for re-election to teacher Lindsay Burningham, according to a tally of votes posted Tuesday on the association website.
Zombro served as union president from 2006 to 2010, clashing with superintendents and school boards throughout her tenure. She has held the post of vice president alongside union President Bill Freeman, who was re-elected    unopposed.   www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/mar/20/hard-line-teacher-leader-ousted/

The Magical Mystery Tour

Cubans Hide the Children! Papists Coming!

above is future Pope Benedict

French Kill (cannot arrest?) Jihadist Mohammed Merah, a 23-year-old former garage mechanic who claimed responsibility for the brutal slayings of four men and three children, was shot dead on Thursday when security forces stormed the apartment where he had barricaded himself for more than 30 hours.   www.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/world/europe/mohammed-merah-toulouse-shooting-suspect-french-police-standoff.html?_r=3&ref=global-home

Up From the Arab Spring Farce, the New US Allies, the Muslim Bros Muslim Brotherhood officials said on Wednesday that the group was debating whether to field its own candidate in Egypt’s upcoming presidential contest, after failing to persuade several outside figures to run with the group’s backing.   www.nytimes.com/2012/03/22/world/middleeast/muslim-brotherhood-may-offer-presidential-candidate-in-egypt.html?_r=3&ref=global-home

Falsified Culture as a Weapon to Unite those with Opposing Interests Aztec dancers marched up the main street in town, burning fragrant tree-resin incense and blowing conch shells.
They wore their finest headdresses, body paint and ceremonial gowns, arriving at the mountain village of Ixcateopan, Mexico, as they do each year for a festival marking the anniversary of the birth of Cuauhtemoc, the last emperor of the Aztecs and a symbol of noble resistance.
The dancers believe the town’s crumbling ex-church is Cuauhtemoc’s final resting place.
Legend has it that Ixcateopan, in the southern state of Guerrero, is where loyal Aztec warriors smuggled Cuauhtemoc’s bones after his execution on the order of Hernan Cortes in 1525. In honor of the young ruler who heroically stood his ground against the Spanish invaders, the story goes, Cuauhtemoc’s remains were buried in his hometown in 1529 under what would later become the altar of the local church.
Ixcateopan (pronounced Eesh-ka-TAY-OH-pan) guarded its secret for hundreds of years.
The supposed bones of Cuauhtemoc were unearthed in 1949 in a dig led by archaeologist Eulalia Guzman.     www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico-aztec-ritual-20120322,0,6531787.story

Santeria and Dead Babies: Comments from the Papacy? — Leave it to Miami to shock even a reality-TV film crew. The crew was shooting footage at Miami International Airport for an upcoming episode when customs agents found a pair of human fetuses in the luggage of two women returning from Havana.
The fetuses were to be delivered to someone in Miami and used in a Santeria-like religious ritual, according to two people knowledgeable about the case. …The two women explained to U.S. authorities that they received the jar in Havana from a babalao – a Santeria priest – and were asked to deliver it to someone in Miami, the airline industry official told the newspaper.
But they insisted that they did not know what was in the jar, and were not charged with any crimes, Rutland noted.
The rites of Cuba’s Catholic-African religions usually involve the sacrifice of small animals such as chickens and goats
Some also use old human bones stolen from cemeteries. Human fetuses are reputed to be used only by some of the more secretive sects.  www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/03/23/142869/fetuses-found-in-luggage-at-miami.html

Best and Worst Things in the History of the World

And One Member of the Invisible Class: Jamie Dimon of J.P Morgan Chase