WeAreChange runs into MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell on the streets of Boston where a lot of news agencies were doing live reports. O’Donnell talks about their previous encounters, the importance of the work WeAreChange does and the comments that he has gotten about their other interviews.
Apologies for the sound quality as this was an off the cuff video.
Via WeAreChange… Read the rest
Picture: Richard Adams (CC)
Ever since the tragedy at the Boston Marathon on Monday, I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of karma. Several posts have called out the irony (or Orwellian Doublethink) of the US licking its wounds, while it inflicts similar wounds on innocent bystanders worldwide. Clusterbombs, murdered Afghan and Pakistani wedding parties, “collateral damage” to the civilian population in Iraq, to name a few. I am trying to resist the reductionist conditioning of my western brain that wants to distill the vast cultural complexities of “karma” into a dualist cause & effect dynamic. However, there seems to be something darkly significant to the recent trend of our own innocents being killed by our own citizens. Newtown, Aurora, Tucson, possibly Boston, etc. Anyway, this train of thought led me back to an old classic essay on karma from Robert Anton Wilson. Deepleaf Productions hosts a nice collection of RAW audio & text, and here is an excerpt from Cosmic Trigger:
A Lesson in Karma
Robert Anton Wilson
from Cosmic Trigger – The Final Secret of the Illuminati
Lao-Tse says (at least in Leary’s translation) that the Great Tao is most often found with parents who are willing to learn from their children.
If so, does that mean The Simpsons were right about the 9/11 WTC bombings? You decide…
Via CopBlock:
We now have proof of what peace groups and activists have long suspected: Boston Police officers have worked within the local fusion spying center, the Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC), to monitor the lawful political activity of local peace groups and track their movements and beliefs. This information has been retained in searchable electronic “intelligence” reports bearing labels such as “Groups – Civil Disturbance,” “Groups–Extremists,” “HomeSec-Domestic” under the heading “Criminal Act.”
Looks like those “fusion centers” are indeed the hotbeds of misinformation and civil rights suppression that most of us – including the Senate – assumed that they were.
Read a complete rundown of what the ACLU discovered here.
Picture: Vectorportal, Flickr (CC)
Although ‘scandal’ implies this is some sort of isolated incident, those who follow these sorts of stories know that problems are rife in the War on Crime and the War on (certain) Drugs, with a flawed methodology and biased ideology resulting in thinly-veiled acts of war against minorities and the impoverished classes.
Court administrators in Massachusetts are scrambling to set up special court sessions to address the cases of more than a thousand people imprisoned after being convicted of drug crimes based on lab evidence submitted by Annie Dookhan, the now disgraced former state crime lab analyst. Dookhan herself was arrested last Friday for her fraudulent work at the lab, as the scandal continues to reverberate across the state’s criminal justice system.
According to State Police reports obtained by the Boston Globe, Dookhan has admitted not performing proper lab tests on drug samples for “two or three years,” forging colleagues’ signatures, and improperly removing evidence from storage.
The thing that every subway commuter fears most happened in Boston — a boa constrictor ran loose in the transit system for a month before being caught, after its owner “lost” it. How is it possible to misplace a boa constrictor on the subway? Via the experts on all matters snake-related, Business Insider:
For the past month, a 3-foot-long boa constrictor has been roaming the Boston subways.
Snake-owner Melisa Moorhouse lost her non-venomous boa, Penelope, on a Red Line train on the morning of Jan. 6. She notified police immediately, but they were unable to find the snake. It is legal to transport pets on the MBTA.
Last Thursday the snake was finally found. Red Line attendant Sharon Lynch, a snake owner herself, lured the animal into a box.
From Nick Pell at Red Star Times
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I don’t think a city ever needed a hardcore scene more than Boston. Beantown is a cold city, both the temperature and the population. Whether you’re a Beacon Hill patrician or a Charlestown townie a basic attitude of “fuck you” underlies each and every human interaction. Add to that an influx of obnoxious art school and college kids and you’ve got a recipe for extreme alienation for anyone with a brain and an independent streak.
It’s hard for me to imagine what Boston was like before hardcore dropped. Legend has it that the city was full of, in the eloquent words of Al Barille, “new wave faggots and new romantic bullshit.” I’d like to say that I can’t imagine BU students going to Landsdowne on a Friday night in pirate shirts and Adam Ant-style warpaint, but sadly I can picture such a thing all too easily.… Read the rest
via nymag.com
In a new book called Frozen: My Journey Into the World of Cryonics, Deception, and Death, Larry Johnson, a former executive at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, details what he saw while working at the facility, including the terrible things workers did to the head and body of Red Sox player Ted Williams. According to the Daily News today, it’s gruesome and inexplicable stuff, including an incident the newspaper un-tastefully describes as “batting practice.”
“Johnson writes that in July 2002, shortly after the Red Sox slugger died at age 83, technicians with no medical certification gleefully photographed and used crude equipment to decapitate the majors’ last .400 hitter.”
“Holes were drilled in Williams’ severed head for the insertion of microphones, then frozen in liquid nitrogen while Alcor employees recorded the sounds of Williams’ brain cracking 16 times as temperatures dropped to -321 degrees Fahrenheit.”
“The head was balanced on an empty can of Bumble Bee tuna to keep it from sticking to the bottom of its case.”
“Johnson describes watching as another Alcor employee removed Williams’ head from the freezer with a stick, and tried to dislodge the tuna can by swinging at it with a monkey wrench.”
The technician, no .406 hitter like the baseball legend, missed the can with several swings of the wrench and smacked Williams’ head directly, spraying “tiny pieces of frozen head” around the room.”
