(I’ve been trying to work on Pt II of my ‘Climate Change Tipping Point Realities v. COP21 Paris Pt I’ I posted the other day, but this must take precedence. I love social justice movements. And by the way: fuck you, Rahm Emmanuel.)
“Black Lives Matter and minimum wage protests are taking place on Black Friday, the kick-off of the Christmas shopping season. Chicago, Illinois remains the center of the anti-police brutality deaths, while Walmart employees are targeting the retail giant.” via RT. (Laquan McDonald, especially)
https://twitter.com/Polly_evro/status/670306408496308226
Reuters, with video below
‘#NotOneDime: African Americans aim to show their power with shopping boycott; Campaign, which began last year in wake of killing of Michael Brown, calls for participants not to spend any money on 26-30 November’, the Guardian
WTF?: ‘Active shooter reported at Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs’
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
‘Three dead after gunman storms Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado’
• Two civilians and police officer killed after hours-long standoff
• The gunman, who was armed with a rifle, has been arrested
• Some staff escaped by hiding in the building’s special ‘safe areas’
““This clinic is part of the Planned Parenthood Rocky Mountains affiliate, which was featured in one of the highly-edited smear videos released this summer. Since that video, the affiliate has seen an increase in protesters and death threats against one of their doctors.
“Although anti-abortion groups may condemn this type of violence when it happens, the way that they target and demonize providers contributes to a culture where some feel it is justifiable to murder doctors simply because they provide women with the abortion care they need.
“Since 1977, there have been 8 murders, 17 attempted murders, 42 bombings, 186 arsons, and thousands of incidents of criminal activities. The last abortion provider was murdered in 2009 when NAF member Dr George Tiller was assassinated in his church in Wichita, Kansas.”
Sounded like the Mag Mile got shut down on Black Friday, or so Father Pfleger was saying. If true, good for them. Long overdue to stop business-as-usual in Chicago long enough for the privileged to look at their creations.
On the Colorado Springs shooting, sort of inevitable considering the propaganda that comes out of that place. But once again, none dare call it fundamentalist-inspired terrorism conducted by a “lone wolf”. No questions about who put him up to it or what church was preaching and advocating this sort of action. Next shoe to fall: the psychological profile that excuses it all and makes it seem a one-off event. Nothing to see here; just a middle-aged white man with a bunch of guns. How you gonna profile that in Colorado?
you nailed it.
http://www.chris-floyd.com/Articles/2535-racist-compassion-the-magical-pigmentation-protection-against-terrorism.html
Word. Black Mountain, North Carolina, loner. Why Colorado Springs?
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/fb4270f0dfe64eb690ec5a195dc2fcaa/gunman-custody-after-attack-planned-parenthood-clinic
well, you’ve nailed it, n anticpated correctly the next shoe coming. c springs home of ted haggard and a zillion fundie Xianist churches via asheville, NC. yep: poor mentally ill man suffering X Y and Z deprivation’. note: “Russell and others said the only companion they saw with Dear was a mangy dog, who looked to be in such bad shape they called animal control because they worried he was beating it.”
“no religigious affilliations, but a rude stick cross above his shack’s door”…or close. yeah, the breitbart edited tapes must have had something to do with it. “bioethics? nah. let’s have that stem cell conversation, please.”
was it the gurdian piece that reminded reader that it was abortion that caused the heinous and idiotic cory gardener’s win over udall?
our daughter and her family live in the springs, ay yi yi. hubbie gave up street preaching for fight club, speaking of ‘ay yi yi’. ;-)
The words “calculated stochastic terrorism” come to mind.
masoninblue has called out Carly Fiorina for her insistence on seeing mutilated babies in the “expose” that Breitbart and co. ran. As bad a propaganda piece as they did, they did not stoop so low as to intersperse mutilated baby pro-life footage. Fiorina is manufacturing (or experiencing) false memories. And every politician who repeats the same lies is playing along. After McVeigh and Rudolph, they know exactly what they are doing.
i’dd add that she’s manufacturing the consent of her apparent base (?). i do keep forgetting the names is the R candidate field.
pardon me if i’m wrong, but i may have seen a headlines on our msn email provider to the effect that : ‘the shooter was misunderstood and alienated’ and ‘had mentioned baby parts’ as he was arrested.
your term seems to mean (at the GOS): “Stochastic terrorism is the use of mass communications to stir up random lone wolves to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.
This is what occurs when Bin Laden releases a video that stirs random extremists halfway around the globe to commit a bombing or shooting.
This is also the term for what Beck, O’Reilly, Hannity, and others do. And this is what led directly and predictably to a number of cases of ideologically-motivated murder similar to the Tucson shootings.”
but the larger question is who responds to that sort of bilge, eh? i’m just not seein’ the case of ‘more control’ as a fix for any of this. but then, i tried to make a longer case of that after sandyhook.
nice to see you; best to both you and miz thd.
Who responds too that sort of bilge is indeed the question. The DAESH propaganda by reports appeals to (1) outrage over the current state of Islamic politics and secularism; (2) sense of historical moment of an emerging caliphate restoration (al Quaeda began that trend of trans-national Islam); (3) attraction to the power of brutality as means.
The Anti-Abortion propaganda seems to appeal to: (1) outrage over killing widdle biddy babies; (2) sense of abortion as a sign of American and Christian moral decline; (3) the threat of women’s autonomy; (4) the threat to male power in potential restrictions on guns; (5) the urgency to do something before one’s guns are taken away.
Those seem like slightly different templates that have the same ability to unlock action of people in certain states of being, states of consciousness, or mental states. Once the template fits, the process seems to unfold with the same dynamics.
The template of DAESH appears to appeal to young men; the anti-abortion template appears by contrast to appeal to slightly older loner males up to late middle age.
i like your bullet points on daesh, but i’d add ‘outrage at the occupation of their holy lands’, and ‘treatment of palestinians’ to the mix.
your template on alleged ‘abortion patients’ and clinics seem right, save for the civilians assassinated weren’t there for abortions, though some coverage stories have diverged.
but i’d still need to find refuge (cold comfort) in alice miller’s ‘poisonous pedagogy’ as the root cause, not only for this shite, but mass murders and the Empire’s ease with waging war without end…as central to all of it.
i’d guess you’ve read it, and it may be redundant, but it’s a post that i saved after the fact (as i didn’t pre-load it into the café before opening it for bidness.
i don’t follow Daesh propaganda but several other people have asserted that Israel/Palestine doesn’t figure in their ideology AT ALL. and that in itself is very significant. if true.
in any case, it’s not difficult to see why kids from wherever would sign up. Capitalism has zippo to offer anyone, certainly not global youth, one-half of whom in the 16-24 yr old range are doing NOTHING with regard to career or education. no job, no school. (so much for capitalist efficiency. the most creative, energetic, and above all idealistic time of life completely wasted.) even if burger flipping is an option, why not go ride on a tank for ISIS? just for the adventure of it? or spend your life in Wal Mart watching orgies of consumerism filled w/Sartrean nausea at the unfolding of Being-in-the-World as nothing more than the unveiling of a huge toxic, radioactive garbage dump. Capitalism is so boring and tedious, why the hell not re-up with IS today?
(no, i’m not advocating joining ISIS. in case these posts ever come up when i’m hauled away to the FEMA camp.)
There are a lot of fantasy and agendas in what people write about the Islamic State. I think it was Franklin Lamb who interviewed an IS leader soon after their sweep through Iraq where they discussed the six year plan for the liberation of Palestine and al-Quds. The interesting point the interview revealed was that the IS saw the Palestinians as unfit to join with the IS until they had destroyed Hamas eviscerated the PA and shed their petty nationalist goals then submit to the IS to build the Caliphate.
This is a huge undertaking because there is no Palestinian State as a goal just Palestine, a part of the Caliphate. The ongoing individual attacks on Israelis not sanctioned or organized by Hamas or the PA may be a sign of that plan taking shape.
maybe.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/30/israel-and-isis-needed-a-thorough-accounting/
I’ll read your link and I recommend you read Uri Avnery’s at the same CP especially note his last paragraph.
I’ve read a number of Norman Pollack’s posts and agreed with some of what I could decipher of his writing but this post makes me think he has succumbed to the Pod People and lost his mind.
His reporting, as fact, that an Israeli officer was captured in Iraq fighting with the Islamic State is a sign his wiring is fouled and his reasoning is compromised. The rest of his confabulations about Israel working with or for the rebels or the IS read like they were copied from SANA or Fars News poor quality propaganda.
Sadly the Times of Israel was the only paper to unwrap the tinfoil from this turkey of a fable starting with the fact that the picture used by these nitwits, as being the captured officer, was Benny Gantz the recently and still retired CoS of the IDF.
“There is no direct connection between IS terrorism around the world and the Palestinian national struggle for statehood. But if they are not solved, in the end the problems will merge – and a far more powerful IS will unite the Muslim world, as Saladin once did, to confront us, the new Crusaders.”
there’s no direct connection b/c there’s no connection at all. and the subsequent sentence, i guess anything’s possible. seems a pretty fantastic flight of fancy though. it’s hard to imagine a set of circumstances in which either Israel or, more importantly, the Palestinians allow this to happen.
If you have read Avnery’s writing on the Idea of the Caliphate and its power to transcend petty nationalist ideas of a Western style Palestinian State or any other Western imposed ideas on in the ME you might begin to understand what is and may be happening there.
Palestinians especially young Palestinians have grown up with the iron fist of the Israeli occupation, watched the corrupt PA enforce that occupation for the Israelis and watched the West do nothing to support the Palestinian State but arm their enemy. Hamas has managed to get many Palestinians killed while trying to make deals with Israel and the West between rocket attacks and reprisals. The reality that Palestinians face is that Israel will never allow them to have anything more than isolated Bantustans sans any power or unity so anything they might get must be taken not begged for.
You’re correct that the Palestinian elites and the Israelis will try to crush this Idea by killing more Palestinians but Powerful Ideas are hard, maybe impossible to kill.
You can always count on the Democrats to never let a dead body or bodies go to waste and jump on it to make some political points against the GOP. They may have made fools of themselves this time if the reports about this shooter are verified, an Independent voter registered as a woman in Colorado, I don’t know about the Trans-activist claim or if this is at all accurate but if true it certainly changes the political complexion of this tragedy.
I read a really sleazy apologia for Obama, Clinton and Sanders not condemning Rahm for his actual crimes and cover-up of a murderer in Chicago, at another site, but at least Bernie felt righteous enough to jump on the dead bodies in the Springs and pass judgment on the GOP.
Based on the history responses to violence against providers of women’s healthcare, it seems likely that the D’s would make lame statements about gun control and the R’s would scream about “baby parts” regardless of the gender identification of the perpetrator.
In any case:
http://gazette.com/clerical-glitch-causes-speculation-about-colorado-springs-shooting-suspects-gender-identity/article/1564656
“Ryan Parsell, El Paso County’s chief deputy clerk and recorder, said his office incorrectly recorded Dear’s gender in October 2014, leading to the issuance of both a driver’s license and voter’s registration card erroneously identifying him as a woman.”
The important information released was that this shooter was not a Republican nor was he affiliated with any Rightwing anti-abortion group at least as far as we now know. The rest of the claims will make those who use them look foolish but they will be useful for the fringe anti-abortion/gay wingnuts on the internet.
The crude anti-abortion rhetoric and persistent political attacks by the Right which Sanders and other Dems are using as reasons for their political attacks don’t seem to be very effective at producing this type of armed attacks on abortion providers, this is the first in six years so this conflation is weak and reeks of political opportunism.
This conflict is not going away but most people support a women’s right to choose, under some guidelines, including some Republicans and opposed by some Democrats.
The Democrats at the state Governor level have proven to be so incompetent, corrupt and such liars that they can’t get elected so people who may support abortion rights vote for Republicans who will restrict abortion services but can’t make them illegal.
It’s too late and probably too much to expect from politicians but if abortion/reproductive health services had been incorporated into the hospital system not private clinics they might have been better protected and isolated from political and personal attacks.
ballasting your point:
“A group of 100 reproductive health experts are preparing to publish an open letter asking hospitals to start providing more abortion care. According to TIME, which obtained a copy of the letter in advance of its publication in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the OB-GYNs are ultimately urging hospitals to “reverse a decades-long trend that has isolated abortion providers from the mainstream medical community.”
Right around the time that Roe v. Wade first legalized abortion, the medical community assumed that hospitals would perform the majority of abortions in the country, and freestanding clinics wouldn’t bear much of that burden. In the four decades since, the exact opposite has happened.
As abortion has become increasingly politicized — and as mounting piles of anti-choice legislation make it increasingly more complicated for doctors to perform it — public hospitals and medical schools have shied away from it. Political pressure has convinced many public hospitals to stop providing abortion care. Women’s health advocates began starting their own clinics rather than attempting to navigate the male-dominated health industry. And now, according to Guttmacher, hospitals perform just four percent of the abortions in the U.S.
“In our view, hospitals have disregarded the responsibility that our academic predecessors expected them to assume,” the doctors write in their forthcoming letter. “The savings in lives and money from legalization were soon forgotten and many hospitals now claim they cannot afford to provide abortions even if they wanted to.”
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/08/23/2520131/doctors-pressure-hospitals-abortion/
Although many on the internet are speaking of “domestic terrorism” regarding Colorado, and yet, the major news outlets are calling this an “incident” as per their usual and risible ‘gravitas.’
On a differing scale, Rubio is stipulating that “God’s Law” and which supersedes the Court’s decision regarding Roe v. Wade is his current meme for advocacy. So, what gives with these spurious politicians?
Jaango
hey jaango. let me apologize and say i’ll be back later after resting my eyes. i get these hegg-aches sometimes that are accompanied by sorta c-shaped jagged-edged prisms that are soo hard to see through.
best to you for now.
‘god’s law’. i wonder if right-to-lifers every feel what hypocrites they are? as they applaud the shooter’s having saved the life of ‘the unborn’ (as though that’s the only thing a patient might be doing at a planned parenthood clinic), they freely advocate killing muslims, police murdering rabble POC, and refuse to spend one thin dime to help these ‘beautiful unborn children’ if they are in fact born.
now with so many of the political class touting ‘christian values’, i have no idea how much of it just posturing, but as said in the tweet above concerning the ATLAH marquis: “My bible reads a little differently. Maybe we just use diff versions; idk”.
cripes. i really did see a comment below one piece of coverage, perhaps the guardian one: “what were those women doing having an abortion on black friday??? the paired notions made me nutz!
Hey, WD–when you recover from all the frantic cross-posting activity (which is much appreciated)–I’ve got a couple of WP Admin questions, if you feel up to bothering with them.
1) Is the upgrade ‘worth it?’
And,
2) It appears that ‘new’ WP blogs no longer have an ‘Admin’ hyperlink that connects to what is called the Admin “Dashboard.”
Because of this, there appear to be fewer optional blog settings–such as, personalizing the setting for the blog time zone, polls, etc.
Would you happen to know of a ‘workaround’ for this?
(if there is one)
Or, would you happen to know ‘who’ at WP could be contacted to ask about this.
(I saw that you mentioned that they worked with you on changing some settings.)
Thanks!
Blue
first, have you already gotten a wordpress site? and if so, chosen a ‘theme? there are so many free ones, some are good for some things, but not others. i chose ‘coraline’ three column theme, since it suited what i thought might be useful for the future. the upgrade was worth it to me at the time, but i worry some days that with our (ahem) austerity budget, that i/we may not be able to keep up with the payments, then…wtf?
yes, especally since it’s three column, the videos and tweets looke to in-your-face (or at least mine), and i wanted some influence over that. i will say that tweets seem larger now, but that may be down to a Twitter thang, and i should resize them smaller again.
i wrote this on ‘how to post a diary at café babylon thingie (on the right side bar under ‘categories’ that may help you, but it’s creepily all about using chrome (google) for creating diaries, and being able to access the classic style. yeppers, their help menu in the upper right corner of the page is extensive, from newbie learning to direct contact with the wordpress ‘hug team’ forums or whatever.
hope it helps, blue.
i’m so glad you like the photos and colors, blue. no one’s ever remarked on them, and they are all my own photos from our hill here. iirc, even w/ no upgrade, you can adjust the background colors, and they have a thinge that allows mixing custom colors. oh, the ‘create your own banner slideshow’ was a recently added feature. i love it, and sometimes just refresh it to see other pix ;-)
I wondered if some, or all, of the gallery photos were yours. I thought that I recalled that you had mentioned deer and other critters trapsing through your property–back at FDL. ;-)
Hope you keep adding to them. I see a couple new ones every time I drop by, which is enjoyable.
Pics from our time in Alaska are the only ones that I could possibly consider using–and we can’t remember where we put them, for safe-keeping!
Over and out . . .
Blue
.
Hey, thanks for the resource–it looks like it will be most helpful.
Got the domain, but gotta figure out which theme will work best (before investing too much time into setting up widgets, etc.).
Really do like your theme–there is an updated version of Coraline now available (so they say). Your color is beautiful, and your header slide show is one of the best that I’ve seen. Absolutely ‘love’ the birds, wildlife, flowers, etc.
Of course, I can probably get by with a more minimalist style/theme, since my blog will be more like a personal journal, than an actual blog.
Anyhoo, I’ll let you know which theme I finally land on. I think I’ll try to avoid an upgrade, initially. I’ve wondered what happens if you fail to make the annual payment. IOW, does the blog just disappear? Or, does it revert to a free version? Dunno.
Have a good one, WD, and Babylonians!
;-D
Blue
“The United States ranks first in rates of homicide of children under the age of four years. Forty-five percent (45%) of all child murders occur in the first 24 hours of life, and thus can be classified as neonaticide.” from the wiki article on neonaticide. the article on the history of infanticide is also useful for pointing out how full of crap these anti-abortion bible thumpers are. if it’s a sin, how come it ain’t mentioned in the big book? how come exposing infants isn’t mentioned? it’s possible the plant silphium (see wiki) went extinct from overuse as an abortifacient in classical antiquity. how come St. Paul doesn’t condemn this use?
people latch onto this abortion thing in the name of “helping children.” it requires no thought about the messy & often terrible world of actual children. you can be a thoughtless zealot in a righteous cause b/c hey, baby killers.
oh and most religious jews, reading the same book (more or less), don’t get the anti-abortion bug but adopt the legal principle that silence=consent.
tell your neighborhood bible thumper to stick this in their pipe & smoke on it for a while. or, you know, get some goddam compassion for women.
startling figures, and how interesting about the silphium.
i’d even add the hypocrisy of prosecuting women who give birth with no access to abortion, leave their newborns at police stations, often even promised as a safe haven. it’s all so sick.
throughout all this i’ve thought of ‘the handmaid’s tale’, and interviews with margaret atwood scoffing at her for even imagining that socio-religious scenario. she’d always get that gleam in her eye and ask: ‘wanna bet?’
perhaps part of the general trend of increasing punishment of the poor. you know, test their households for drugs in order to deny one person SNAP benefits. coke-snorting congresscritters look w/glee on depriving women of health services like they look on w/glee at putting economic refugees into concentration camps (sic) on the southern border. the deprived person is him/herself the evidence of an on-going monstrous crime and so must be further punished or eliminated.
stir in the fact that some higher courts (dunno about SCOTUS) have ruled that ‘religious conscience’ can allow opt-outs for serving customers looking to get morning after pills. also: modern day debtors prisons involved in ‘negro farming’ by way of warrants issued for bullshit ‘offenses’, and tra la la. stuffin’ city coffers by way of fines, and adding to the jails, where fines can then…never be paid. good night nurse. what a country.
funny how “religious conscience” clauses won’t allow me to opt out of taxes (even just the DOD part) or the profit system, whereby my boss makes his money by stealing my labor…back on the chain gang!
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-black-friday-mag-mile-fallout-1201-biz-20151130-story.html
“But their goal of forcing retailers to suffer economic pain on what’s historically the busiest shopping day of the year was a success, according to unhappy store staff and managers who said Monday that Black Friday sales on the Magnificent Mile were 25 percent to 50 percent below projections.
Images of protesters marching down North Michigan urging a holiday shopping boycott dramatically reduced foot traffic while protesters who physically blocked shoppers from entering stores also hurt sales in a big way, according to the retailers, some of whom were critical of the low-key police response.”
wooot! that’s not too shabby an effect, is it, marym? thank you, and for the snippet as well. looks like my temporary subscription has run out already. tiffany’s was apparently closed to some amount of time; i loved those photos.
http://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20151201/downtown/chicago-police-supt-garry-mccarthy-fired-reports
“CHICAGO — After more than four sometimes tumultuous years at the helm of the Chicago Police Department, Supt. Garry McCarthy was asked to resign Tuesday by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who said his top cop had become a distraction amid the furor over the police slaying of a teen.”