Global
Version:1.0 StartHTML:0000000167 EndHTML:0000004253 StartFragment:0000000500 EndFragment:0000004237
Here in Kabul, Sherri Maurin and I are guests of the Afghan Peace Volunteers’ recently formed live-in community for young women. Hollyhocks in the garden reach as high as the second floor of our living space. Rose bushes, morning glories and four-o-clocks have bloomed, and each day we eat tomatoes, mint and green onions plucked from the well-cared for garden. The water source is a hose and tank outside, (there’s no indoor plumbing) so that’s where dishes and clothes are cleaned. The latrine is also outside, --and unfortunately we’re sharing it with playful neighbourhood cats, but otherwise Zarghuna, Zahidi and Zahro complete almost every detail of housekeeping, each day, by 7:00 a.m.
Two additional rooms are filled with sewing machines and tables used by a group of local seamstresses.
Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism & Wrecked the Middle Class By Ian Haney Lopez
Review by Marilyn Howard
Election night 2008 was a heady mixture of triumph, hope, disbelief and pride. A black man had been elected to the presidency of the United States of America! (In the interest of full disclosure, I have to be honest and admit I never thought I would live to see the day.) Who can forget the sight of Oprah Winfrey laying her head on the shoulders of a total stranger, or the tears being shed by the old civil rights warrior Jesse Jackson? That the eve of his first inauguration fell on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day merely added to the belief that many Americans thought we had finally banished that old bugaboo, racism, and stepped into a post-racial America. They were as wrong as two left shoes. America has never been in a post-racial society; racism had merely been swept under the carpet.
Our Hometown Heroines gave a long lesson in adding up point totals on August 16 in a double header that resulted in a pair of triple digit wins against the Cincinnati Roller Girls and their B-team the Violent Lambs. Both the All Stars and Gang Green were in top form both offensively and defensively as they launched towards wins with astronomical totals.
OHRG All Stars vs Cincinnati Roller Girls
The first jam of the first half of the first bout set the tone for the entire bout. Penalties gave OHRG jammer Smacktivist both a track advantage and a power jam right from the beginning which she deftly exploited for three grand slams and an opening 16 to 1 score.
OHRG's defense was in top form throughout the half. The solid walls of made by the All-Stars blockers yielded little and allowed the All-Stars near total control of the pace. Cincinnati's jammers only achieved lead jammer status in six out of nineteen jams. In the remaining thirteen jams Cincinnati only managed to score in two. Lead jammer status only availed Cincinnati four scoring jams.
Our kills are clean and secular; theirs are messy and religious.
“In their effort to create a caliphate across parts of Iraq and Syria,” CNN tells us, “ISIS fighters have slaughtered civilians as they take over cities in both countries.
“In Syria, the group put some of its victims’ severed heads on poles.”
Stomach-churning as this is, the context in which it is reported – as simplistic maneuvering of public opinion – numbs me to its horror, because it quietly justifies a larger, deeper horror waiting in the wings. To borrow a phrase from Benjamin Netanyahu, this is telegenic brutality. It’s just what the U.S. war machine needs to justify the next all-out assault on Iraq.
“In another instance caught on camera,” the CNN report continues, “a man appears to be forced to his knees, surrounded by masked militants who identify themselves on video as ISIS members. They force the man at gunpoint to ‘convert’ to Islam, then behead him.”
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/794/369/516/african-solidarity-for-palestine/#sign
We, the undersigned African scholars and scholars of Africa, hold that silence about the latest humanitarian catastrophe caused by Israel’s new military assault on the Gaza Strip—the third and most devastating in six years—constitutes complicity. Member state of NATO which mounted an air war on Libya ostensibly to protect civilians in Benghazi have been by and large quiet about the fate of civilians in Gaza. World governments and mainstream media do not hold Israel accountable for its violations of international law. We, however, as a community of scholars have a moral responsibility to do so.
President Obama may want us to sympathize with patriotic torturers, he may turn on whistleblowers like a flesh-eating zombie, he may have lost all ability to think an authentic thought, but I will say this for him: He knows how to mark the 50th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin fraud like a champion.
A new film called Wisconsin Rising is screening around the country, the subject, of course, being the activism surrounding the mass occupation of the Wisconsin Capitol in 2011. I recommend attending a planned screening or setting up a new one, and discussing the film collectively upon its conclusion. For all the flaws in Wisconsin's activism in 2011 and since, other states haven't even come close -- most have a great deal to learn.
The film tells a story of one state, where, long ago, many workers' rights originated or found early support, and where, many years later, threats to workers' rights, wages, and benefits, and to what those workers produce including education in public schools, were aggressively initiated by the state's right-wing governor, Scott Walker.