This stuff against Muslims is really exploding out of control & it continues to focus on women & “jihadists.” One of the worst purveyors is none other than western so-called leftists who sound exactly like Fox News.

We know from the anti-Muslim ban protests that the overwhelming number of people around the world reject that kind of war & fear-mongering. So we just stay the course & continue to defend religious liberty, refugee & immigrant rights, & oppose war. That’s it.

Just hoping there’s no Muslims in North Korea.

(Sarcasm alert)

Who could have imagined that one day the western left would think like Fox News & be led by former CIA & FBI agents? And they say there’s nothing new under the sun!

This repost from March 11, 2015 may be worth highlighting in the context of Duterte’s war on the poor. Those his death squads target live in these sub-human urban slums, most of them displaced by rural neoliberal scorched earth economics expropriating farmers & farm workers & replacing them with agribusiness plantations. The war on the poor is a war of extermination because they are no longer useful to capitalism & stand in the way of urban scorched earth policies.
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Syngenta is a Swiss agribusiness company (in competition with Monsanto, Dow, Bayer, & Dupont) that produces genetically-modified seeds, herbicides, pesticides, insecticides, fungicides–the entire menu of toxic chemicals they lather on the global food supply. To further its economic interests, it lathers US political candidates & organizations with lobbying money–$1,150,000 in 2012. To promote its image in community service, it’s begun to sponsor an annual photography contest on the theme of “Scarcity-Waste” to address their claim that the world faces “increasingly limited resources.” That claim of course is used to justify population control/eugenics programs & explain away the massive unemployment & immigration rates. They just announced the 2015 winners.

Later this year, the 2015 winning photos will be touring, including in several cities in Brazil. Could that be a Syngenta gesture of “no hard feelings” for the 2007 shootout where their hired goon squad killed one protester & injured several other landless farmers of the Landless Workers’ Movement protesting land grabs?

Syngenta also has operations in the Philippines where agribusiness has destroyed the livelihoods of millions of farmers & driven them into urban slums. That must be why this photo is one of the 2015 finalists–another act of contrition to mask their crimes. The photo is of the slum surrounding Smokey Mountain dump site in Tondo, a district of Manila, Philippines.

Smokey Mountain was a landfill site since the 1950s & in forty years became a smoldering potpourri of toxicity & disease where unemployed scavenged for recyclables. In response to international notoriety, the Filipino government stopped delivering trucks of garbage there in 1995 & declared it closed but without providing alternative employment or housing to the 30,000 residents of the area.

Syngenta has lots of connections to the Asian Development Bank (ADB), a financial institution involved in establishing neoliberal agribusiness in the Philippines & elsewhere–& not just agribusiness but the entire panoply of neoliberal austerity & impoverishment of working people. The ADB boasts of the microenterprises their largesse has helped establish in Tondo, including cooperatives for masonry services, handicrafts, a commercial water-supply service, & an eco-laundromat. Those employed are now between 200 & 300. Maybe a couple hundred more–but what about the other 29,700 unemployed scavengers?

Without a public housing project, what the Filipino regime & neoliberal institutions established is essentially a refugee camp surrounded by garbage dumpsites–because though Smokey Mountain is closed they continue to dump landfill in the area. Residents call it Happy Land–a name ironically derived from what local dialects call smelly garbage: hapilan.

As part of neoliberal austerity, there are no health facilities in Happy Land where the tuberculosis rate is one of the highest in the world & when chemical vapors & rotting unmentionables from the landfill create massive respiratory, skin, intestinal, & other catastrophic health problems.

Happy Land has become one of the sites in the world attracting slum tourists–a phenomenon rooted in privilege, racism, & white supremacy. The accounts of some of those tourists speak of the “poor but happy,” of the delight at seeing a white visitor–or they pity-monger.

The militancy of many slum residents in the Philippines belies the accounts of the ADB, the public relations factory of the regime, the rancid accounts of slum voyeurs. We stand in solidarity with them & hope that soon working people in more privileged countries will get off their leaden asses & become part of putting an end to neoliberal plunder.

(Photo by Lasse Bak Mejlvang)

You look smarter if you ask why Kashmir is under attack by brahman nationalists than why Kashmiri youth are becoming Muslim extremists.

Talking about Muslim extremism is the scratch & sniff test for war-mongering, Muslim-hating, colonialism, genocide. We’re talking in Kashmir, Syria, Palestine, Myanmar, & several other countries.

Eva Bartlett is circulating a list of reasons to support Assad–almost all of which are anti-Muslim because the audience she appeals to finds that persuasive. Another reason is that Syria is more Western in culture than other Arab countries & of course Western culture is superior in every way. Nothing makes that more evident than the sophisticated military capacity of Western bombers to reduce entire cities to rubble by remote control. Once Syria goes full monty Western, it can stop using barrel bombs & go nuclear.

Once Assad & his allies have gotten rid of all the Muslims (his father already got rid of all the Jews) it will be the perfect setting for Bartlett & David Icke to lead their Christian army with a regiment of hobbled, toothless socialists along side white supremacists & fascist goons & battalions of blood-thirsty libertarian lunatics in the apocalyptic battles they envision against the reptilian Illuminati of Jewish bankers who run the world & are trying to establish world fascism. Very much like the Zombie Apocalypse on meth & of course carrying placards of Assad, Putin, & Trump.

Generalisssimo Bartlett is a cogent thinker & has left nothing out of her considerations. The pièce de résistance of arguments justifying the carpet bombing of civilians is that Assad has banned genetically modified seeds to “preserve human health.” Should that be filed under “Assadists grasping at straws” or under “Proof that Assadists were probably dropped on their heads as small children”?

Photo is Generalissimo Bartlett.

Last month, Dan Demetriou, a philosophy professor at the University of Minnesota-Morris, posted on FB that “leftist-driven” refugee & immigration policies are an “existential threat to the US & other advanced western nations.”

This is what he said: ““100% of illegal immigrants lower confidence in the rule of law & add people & workers & students we don’t need. They on average have IQs lower than natives & low skills. They are harmful to an economy about to automate, especially when it is a welfare state. …”

“And refugees are way worse, as most adhere to a religious-political cult with repulsive values at war with the west from its inception. No country who has taken the current crop of refugees has made it work. No school with many refugees or illegals is a good school. None of their neighborhoods are safe. Not everyone has an extra $100k to avoid them.

“What an insult to our kids, our educators, to suggest for a moment that a 20 yr old, raised in rubble & taught to hate you, gays, Christians, Jews, women’s rights, & western liberalism would be as good an American as your kid.”
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Now here’s the good news. His post evoked outrage on campus from students, administrators, & teachers prompting them to organize a teach-in to support refugees & immigrants & he continues to get a lot of flack from around the country.

Here’s what’s interesting about the University of Minnesota at Morris, Minnesota. It began in 1887 as a boarding school for Native Americans called the Morris Industrial School for Indians. This was during the high point of the US army wars of extermination against Indian tribes west of the Mississippi. Minnesota history is filled with gruesome accounts of massacres & forced confinement on reservations. Racism & social control of Indians were part of the curriculum, making them averse to leaving reservations to go there so it never grew & has no illustrious history in the education of Indians.

In 1910, it became a school of agriculture because of its location in a major farming district, & didn’t become part of the U of M system until 1960. Although it is now a liberal arts college, agriculture remains one of its primary orientations because Morris is a center of agribusiness with thousands of Mexican & Central American migrant workers.

The ironies are replete in the statement of this racist meathead. First, that he teaches philosophy but exhibits the cognition skills of a lump of primordial slime; second, that he is the ungrateful interloper on former Indian territory; & third, that the dumb-ass couldn’t eat were it not for the thousands of undocumented immigrants who pick his food.

Like Rania Khalek after him, he screamed bloody murder that he was being victimized & vilified & his free speech denied when people rebutted his racism in no uncertain terms.

This is the poster from the February 20th teach-in at the U of M-Morris in response to Dumb-ass Demetriou.

It’s a pity Australian Tim Anderson wastes those impressive academic credentials writing simple-minded diatribes against baby Omran & the White Helmets. It would be a useful contribution to understanding psychosis to investigate why he does. Where did he get all that hate?

Was the confusion that I said the Kashmiri woman stone thrower “threw like a girl”? We’re talking feminist here. In baseball, throwing like a girl may not cut it. But in politics, throwing like a girl means bringing it home.

Found this article I wrote in my FB memories from March 10, 2015 titled “Forced Sterilization, Eugenics, & the Social Control of Women.” This is not an issue of historic interest but has not ceased to be an issue since racism & colonialism turned this planet upside down. It affects the reproductive lives of black & brown women everywhere & should be a central concern of feminists, women, & human rights activists everywhere.

http://songsoptokkblog.blogspot.com/2015/03/mary-scully.html