General George Washington, the Red Baron of the 1776 war against British rule.
Monthly Archives: July 2019
Jokes about Trump’s claim that Washington took over the airports in 1776 will rival Kelly Conway’s claims about the ‘Bowling Green massacre.’
In August 2000, ninety animal rights activists were arrested in Minneapolis, Minnesota for protesting a conference advocating experiments on live animals. At least 800 riot cops were deployed to encircle us & prevent us from protesting. When it was clear that they intended to assault us, I attempted to negotiate with the officer in charge to prevent an attack. When they refused to negotiate, I stood up in the middle of the cordon & gave a speech to the hundreds watching from outside the police line. I explained that our right to protest had been taken away, that we wanted no confrontation with the police & would leave the area as the police deemed appropriate. That made it difficult for the police to attack us with the truncheons they were brandishing. But they arrested 90 of us, nearly half of whom turned out to be undercover agents, & put us on trial. Amy Klobuchar, a Democratic candidate for president, was the county attorney in charge.
When I attempted in 2009 to get part-time work as a substitute teacher in Texas, the Board of Education informed me that the FBI had flagged my criminal record for the use of a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) making me ineligible for work. I have been refused other jobs since then because of that FBI flag although I have no criminal record because the judge at my trial threw out all the charges & chided the county for bringing legal action. When I contacted the FBI, I asked what WMD they accused me of using. They refused to say. I sarcastically chided them for letting an accused terrorist walk the streets for nine years without interrogation, a formal accusation, or prosecution. They refused to remove that flag from my criminal record.
It’s quite expensive to get an FBI flag removed from your criminal record so I approached Colleen Rowley who by then had become a national celebrity as an FBI whistleblower. She refused to help me remove that flag but admitted she was the FBI legal counsel who made the decision to put it on my record in the first place. In 2002, two years after she falsely accused me of using a WMD, she wrote a public letter to then FBI Director Robert Mueller which reveals the conservatism of her whistleblowing politics & protests the Iraq War on the basis of the false accusation of WMD. So what explains Rowley’s metamorphosis in the space of two years from falsely accusing me of using a WMD to protesting the false accusation against Iraq for using a WMD?
Rowley is now a respected leader of the corrupted US antiwar movement. She is an ardent Assad & Putin supporter, supports Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians, & blithers on endlessly to mock Russiagate. Her politics remain conservative, libertarian, detestable.
(Photo of Rowley from CNN)
Putin visited Pope Francis at the Vatican yesterday where they reportedly had a “cordial” discussion on the wars in Syria & Ukraine. Syrian activists organized a #tellPutin social media campaign urging Pope Francis to take a stand against Syrian & Russian carpet bombing of Idlib. But when it comes to war, occupation, genocide, Pope Francis is a case study in the politics of ambiguity. He’s a master of proffering empty gestures to the oppressed & solidarity to the power elite.
Since becoming pope in 2013, he has often expressed concern about the conflict in Syria, called for ceasefires, held prayer vigils, & exchanges regular diplomatic messages with Assad. But when it comes to the war in Syria, Pope Francis speaks in passionate abstractions & makes no condemnations. Pope Francis cannot be called equivocal since in 2016 he appointed archbishop Mario Zenari as the papal envoy to Syria & as a new cardinal (the highest office in the church which makes him eligible to be pope). Zenari is a boldfaced supporter of the Assad regime who celebrated the fall of Aleppo to regime forces in 2016 & who posed for photos with Kinana Allouche, a reporter for pro-Assad Syrian TV who posted selfies of herself radiantly smiling in front of the corpses of Assad opponents.
Putin came & left the Vatican. There was no “clash of world views” as the NY Times claimed, particularly on the issue of homosexuality. Whatever distinctions there may appear to be are merely rhetorical. Pope Francis talks a good line on war, occupation, genocide but always manages to render solidarity to repressive regimes.
(Photo from Help Refugees)
During his speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC celebrating the American revolution against British rule between 1775 & 1783, Trump said “Our army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports.” The first successful airplane flight was not until 120 years later in 1903. Good thing the Bill of Rights allows us to call him stupid.
Read the hilarious tweets in response to Trump here:
Who knew my candidacy offended Facebook’s community standards!?
(Notice to Rizwan Raheem on Facebook)
This Syrian man & these children are not terrorists. The young man is 24-year-old Omar al Dimashqi (a name he took on for security purposes), a media activist from the Damascus suburbs who died June 23rd in a Turkish hospital from wounds sustained in a car bomb as he traveled to Idlib. May he Rest In Peace.
(Photo from Lina shamy on Twitter)
Trump’s policy of stuffing refugee children into concentration camps is in accordance with UK policy of separating children from their families. There are no reports on the conditions of child detainment in the UK but they are likely more like prisons or warehouses than boarding schools. Now it is reported that China separates Uyghur children from their families in order to break them from their language, religion, & culture. That is the same policy used in Canada, the US, & Australia where indigenous children were kidnapped from their families & institutionalized to “civilize & Christianize” them.
(Photo of Uyghur children from Uyghur American Association)
Since I often squawk about misidentifying photos, it is embarrassing to me to say that I posted about Assad’s gulag using a photo from a Syrian solidarity site without vetting it. Dumb move! When corrected by two readers, an image search shows the photo has been wrongly used by many publications & social media sites. It’s not certain which gulag the photo is from so I removed it & replaced it with an image of Assad’s gulag from the 25,000 photo album called the Caesar collection by a military photographer who defected from Syria. FB censors removed that image saying it violated their standards of nudity although the genitals were covered in the photo. Instead, I have replaced the images with a video about the Caesar collection which shows the monstrous crimes committed on an industrial scale in Assad’s gulag.