reverie, altruism & nostalgia.

The bombing you didnt hear about

U.S. pilot makes a mistake and drops a bomb on an Afghan wedding, killing 30. This happened today as well.

LINK TO STORY

(Source: treebeard-the-anarchist, via alejjj)

24,255 notes

Dec
15

Mike Huckabee says removing God from schools is to blame for shooting

“We’ve systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools have become a place for carnage because we’ve made it a place where we don’t want to talk about eternity, life, responsibility, accountability?”

Are you fucking kidding me? Ugh Fox News never ceases to piss me off.

10 notes

Nov
03

bulletinaweave:

THE ‘OTHER SIDE’ OF SANDY NOT SEEN ON TV OR IN NEWSPAPERS. Sandy also struck CUBA, HAITI AND THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC Images that you will not see in the newspapers or on TV. There are now many more homeless people in Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic suffering from the ravages of hurricane Sandy passing through their respective nations, prior to the hurricane also pummeling the east coast of the United States. In solidarity with all people, in light of the loss of their homes and loved ones, we must also speak out for them. Pain and suffering does not care about borders and true compassion has no flag to wave. Our hearts are with all who are impacted by this international tragedy. Please become more informed and support the efforts of groups attempting to help lives everywhere, who know no borders. Image of Orlando Barria (EFE) in the La Barquita, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, October 26, 2012 (A.E.L.L.A.)

Oct
31

349 notes

Oct
05

mohandasgandhi:

globalpost:

MUMBIA, India — On July 9, a group of men attacked a girl after she stepped out of a club on a busy street in Guwahati, Assam. A reporter, who was later joined by a cameraman, filmed the entire incident, and a local television channel released the footage the following day.
The girl was molested, burned, and beaten for at least half an hour. The men tried to strip off her clothes. The girl fruitlessly begged bystanders, passersby, and the men filming for help – nobody put a stop to it.
Read more at GlobalPost

We should all refuse to live in a world where the cries for help from a woman being sexually assaulted are ignored.

Aug
04

hlaefdigebecena:

face-down-asgard-up:

anarcho-queer:

Police Tasered 12-Year-Old For Crying After He Tackled Her Mother Over Traffic Ticket Warrants
A 12-year-old girl is recovering after being Tasered in a St. Louis Victoria’s Secret while police officers were trying to arrest her mother over warrants for traffic tickets.
The mother is now demanding an investigation, even though police insist their actions were appropriate.
Dejamon Baker showed KSDK the wounds on her chest and stomach from the Taser probes.
“This one goes in my chest,” the girl explained. “It was stuck in there so she had to keep on pulling trying to pull it out.”
“I had fell on the floor and I couldn’t control myself I just kept on shaking and stuff.”
A spokesperson for the police department said that Baker had interfered while officers were trying to arrest her mother, Charlene Bratton, for outstanding warrants due to unresolved traffic tickets.
“He said, put your hands behind your back. I said for what,” Bratton recalled. “Next thing you know he tackled me down on the ground.”
Both Baker and Bratton deny that the 12-year-old girl interfered with the arrest.
“I was just crying. I guess he got mad because I was crying or something, then he just took it out and just Tased me,” Baker insisted.
Bratton added: “He should have had enough control to tell her to get back instead of pulling out his gun, I guess he was nervous or whatever, and Tasing people.”
The police spokesperson said that the officer’s actions were justified, and advised Bratton to contact the department’s internal affairs division to launch an investigation.

Are you fucking serious

I HATE PEOPLE

Jun
05 When award-winning West Virginia anti-coal activist Maria Gunnoe went to Washington, D.C. last week, she was prepared for obstructionist tactics. She was prepared to face icy stares and hard questions from Republican lawmakers. She was not prepared to be branded a pedophile.
By Today in WTF: GOP Ally of Big Coal Smears Environmental Activist With Kiddie Porn Accusation. (via motherjones)

155 notes

May
28

What the actual fuck you guys. This shit really happens in real life. Naked homeboy completely mauled off the other guy’s face. You guys. HE ATE HIS FACE. (x)

May
28

motherjones:

This video of a student being shocked for hours at the Judge Rotenburg School for psychologically and mentally troubled kids could be the thing that finally shuts it down.
Jennifer Gonnerman’s 2007 devastating exposé led to local and state investigations, but so far it’s been able to stay open.

May
24

tw3news:

US Kills 5 Afghan Kids
The way in which the U.S. media ignores such events speaks volumes about how we perceive them
May 08, 2012 “Salon“ — Yesterday, I noted several reports from Afghanistan that as many as 20 civilians were killed by two NATO airstrikes, including a mother and her five children. Today, the U.S. confirmed at least some of those claims, acknowledging and apologizing for its responsibility for the death of that family:

The American military claimed responsibility and expressed regret for an airstrike that mistakenly killed six members of a family in southwestern Afghanistan, Afghan and American military officials confirmed Monday.
The attack, which took place Friday night, was first revealed by the governor of Helmand Province, Muhammad Gulab Mangal, on Monday. His spokesman, Dawoud Ahmadi, said that after an investigation they had determined that a family home in the Sangin district had been attacked by mistake in the American airstrike, which was called in to respond to a Taliban attack… . The victims were the family’s mother and five of her children, three girls and two boys, according to Afghan officials.

This happens over and over and over again, and there are several points worth making here beyond the obvious horror:
(1) To the extent these type of incidents are discussed at all — and in American establishment media venues, they are most typically ignored — there are certain unbending rules that must be observed in order to retain Seriousness credentials. No matter how many times the U.S. kills innocent people in the world, it never reflects on our national character or that of our leaders. Indeed, none of these incidents convey any meaning at all. They are mere accidents, quasi-acts of nature which contain no moral information (in fact, the NYTarticle on these civilian deaths, out of nowhere, weirdly mentioned that “in northern Afghanistan, 23 members of a wedding celebration drowned in severe flash flooding” — as though that’s comparable to the U.S.’s dropping bombs on innocent people). We’ve all been trained, like good little soldiers, that the phrase “collateral damage” cleanses and justifies this and washes it all way: yes, it’s quite terrible, but innocent people die in wars; that’s just how it is. It’s all grounded in America’s central religious belief that the country has the right to commit violence anywhere in the world, at any time, for any cause.
At some point — and more than a decade would certainly qualify — the act of continuously killing innocent people, countless children, in the Muslim world most certainly does reflect upon, and even alters, the moral character of a country, especially its leaders. You can’t just spend year after year piling up the corpses of children and credibly insist that it has no bearing on who you are. That’s particularly true when, as is the case in Afghanistan, the cause of the war is so vague as to be virtually unknowable. It’s woefully inadequate to reflexively dismiss every one of these incidents as the regrettable but meaningless by-product of our national prerogative. But to maintain mainstream credibility, that is exactly how one must speak of our national actions even in these most egregious cases. To suggest any moral culpability, or to argue that continuously killing children in a country we’re occupying is morally indefensible, is a self-marginalizing act, whereby one reveals oneself to be a shrill and unSerious critic, probably even a pacifist. Serious commentators, by definition, recognize and accept that this is merely the inevitable outcome of America’s supreme imperial right, note (at most) some passing regret, and then move on.
(2) Yesterday — a week after it leaked that it was escalating its drone strikes in Yemen — the Obama administration claimed that the CIA last month disrupted a scary plot originating in Yemen to explode an American civilian jet “using a more sophisticated version of the underwear bomb deployed unsuccessfully in 2009.” American media outlets — especially its cable news networks — erupted with their predictable mix of obsessive hysteria, excitement and moral outrage. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer last night devoted the bulk of his showto this plot, parading the standard cast of characters — former Bush Homeland Security adviser (and terrorist advocate) Fran Townsend and its “national security analyst” Peter Bergen — to put on their Serious and Concerned faces, recite from the U.S. Government script, and analyze all the profound implications. CNN even hauled out Rep. Peter King to warn that this shows a “new level” of Terror threats from Yemen. CNN’s fixation on this plot continued into this morning.
Needless to say, the fact that the U.S. has spent years and years killing innocent adults and children in that part of the world — including repeatedly in Yemen — was never once mentioned, even though it obviously is a major factor for why at least some people in that country support these kinds of plots. Those facts are not permitted to be heard. Discussions of causation — why would someone want to attack a U.S. airliner? – is an absolute taboo, beyond noting that the people responsible are primitive and hateful religious fanatics. Instead, it is a simple morality play reinforced over and over: Americans are innocently minding their own business — trying to enjoy our Freedoms — and are being disgustingly targeted with horrific violence by these heinous Muslim Terrorists whom we must crush (naturally, the solution to the problem that there is significant anti-American animosity in Yemen is to drop even more bombs on them, which will certainly fix this problem).
Indeed, on the very same day that CNN and the other cable news networks devoted so much coverage to a failed, un-serious attempt to bring violence to the U.S. — one that never moved beyond the early planning stages and “never posed a threat to public safety” — it was revealed that the U.S. just killed multiple civilians, including a family of 5 children, in Afghanistan. But that got no mention. That event simply does not exist in the world of CNN and its viewers (I’d be shocked if it has been mentioned on MSNBC or Fox either). Nascent, failed non-threats directed at the U.S. merit all-hands-on-deck, five-alarm media coverage, but the actual extinguishing of the lives of children by the U.S. is steadfastly ignored (even though the latter is so causally related to the former).
This is the message sent over and over by the U.S. media: we are the victims of heinous, frightening violence; our government must do more, must bomb more, must surveil more, to Keep Us Safe; we do nothing similar to this kind of violence because we are Good and Civilized. This is how our Objective, Viewpoint-Free journalistic outlets continuously propagandize: by fixating on the violence done by others while justifying — or, more often, ignoring — the more far-reaching and substantial violence perpetrated by the U.S.
(3) If one of the relatives of the children just killed in Afghanistan decided to attack the U.S. — or if one of the people involved in this Yemen-originating plot were a relative of one of the dozens of civilians killed by Obama’s 2009 cluster bomb strike — what would they be called by the U.S. media? Terrorists. Primitive, irrational, religious fanatics beyond human decency.

May
20

lifeisliterallylimited:

A non-government school teacher shouts slogans during a protest in Dhaka May 15, 2012. Bangladeshi police on Tuesday used water cannon and batons to disperse hundreds of non-government school teachers who were taking part in the protest while detaining at least fifteen. The protesters were demanding for the nationalization of their jobs and a pay rise in line with government primary school teachers, according to the Non-Government Primary Teachers’ Association. REUTERS/Andrew Biraj

Mar
25

theblacksophisticate:

87% Of People Stopped And Frisked By The NYPD In 2011 Were Black And Hispanic
The Wall Street Journal reports that NYPD’s Stop-and-Frisk reached an all time high last year (2011) with just about 684,330 stopped and questioned. What is more alarming is that 87% of those folks happen to be Black and Hispanic Latino. Here are some stats:
And who was it that got stop-and-frisked the most? 92 percent of those stopped were males, and 87 percent of those stopped were black or Hispanic, a glaring disparity considering blacks and Hispanics make up only 59 percent of the city’s population.
Just 12 percent of those stopped were arrested.
“Last year alone, the NYPD stopped enough totally innocent New Yorkers to fill Madison Square Garden more than 30 times over,” NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman said in a statement. “It is not a crime to walk down the street in New York City, yet every day innocent black and brown New Yorkers are turned into suspects for doing just that. It is a stunning abuse of power that undermines trust between police and the community.”
(via kemetically-ankhtified)

Go ahead. Please try to tell me that racism in American society isn’t relevant anymore.

Mar
24

California State Universities are planning to drastically restrict enrollment for Spring 2013

13 campuses have plans to freeze enrollment all together (starting this spring) and 8 are only accepting a few hundred community college transfers. This is due to the $750 million budget cut the CSU system have been facing this past year. Depending on whether or not Jerry Brown’s initiative passes in November (which, if unsuccessful, imposes an additional $200 million cut to the system), Fall 2013 applicants may be waitlisted for enrollment as well. What’s more outrageous is that two CSU presidents (who now have $300,000+ salaries) just received hefty increases in pay. (x)

“It’s something that’s going to affect many thousands of students and it’s not the direction we want our system and higher education in California going in,” Washington said. “Students are given a set of guidelines and goals when they’re in high school telling them what they need to do to go to college and now our state isn’t acknowledging that anymore.”

More articles:

While individual campuses have closed enrollment in the past, such a move has never been imposed across the entire system, which is the largest four-year university operation in the country…343,000 - Number of full-time students to which the chancellor and campus presidents have agreed to limit campus enrollments. (x)
“This administration is transforming this university into the image of a pro-profit system,” Lillian Taiz, president of the California Faculty Association, told trustees. “Your administrators are carrying CEO type salaries while you push exorbitant student fees.” (x)

2 notes