Life is Violent: Nice things I can list about Chris Dorner named in the news:
- not a fucking thing
Nice things I can list about this fucking white kid
- he’s a scholarship student, 25K worth
- pre-med
- “nice guy who had a lot of friends who everyone loved”
- “smoked pot” which apparently made him normal
- apparently…
this is important
- Brushing your teeth in capitalism: Getting your own individual sink and toothbrush
- Brushing your teeth in socialism: Having to wait in line to use the collectivized toothbrush with the collectivized sink
Black History Month Magazines: The Black Panther
Not really a magazine, it was a weekly newspaper published by the Black Panther Party from 1967-80. Art directed by Revolutionary Artist and Minister of Culture Emory Douglas, The Black Panther covers were a combination of Douglas’s own powerful illustration, collage, high-contrast photographs, and poster-like graphics.
Many of these covers are courtesy of Babylon Falling and Emory Douglas Art, both great resources for The Black Panter covers, inside pages, posters, and graphics.
In February of 1967, Oakland police officers stopped a car carrying Newton, Seale, and several other Panthers with rifles and handguns. When one officer asked to see one of the guns, Newton refused. “I don’t have to give you anything but my identification, name, and address,” he insisted. This, too, he had learned in law school.
“Who in the hell do you think you are?” an officer responded.
“Who in the hell do you think you are?,” Newton replied indignantly. He told the officer that he and his friends had a legal right to have their firearms.
Newton got out of the car, still holding his rifle.
“What are you going to do with that gun?” asked one of the stunned policemen.
“What are you going to do with your gun?,” Newton replied.
By this time, the scene had drawn a crowd of onlookers. An officer told the bystanders to move on, but Newton shouted at them to stay. California law, he yelled, gave civilians a right to observe a police officer making an arrest, so long as they didn’t interfere. Newton played it up for the crowd. In a loud voice, he told the police officers, “If you try to shoot at me or if you try to take this gun, I’m going to shoot back at you, swine.” Although normally a black man with Newton’s attitude would quickly find himself handcuffed in the back of a police car, enough people had gathered on the street to discourage the officers from doing anything rash. Because they hadn’t committed any crime, the Panthers were allowed to go on their way.
” The Atlantic. The Secret History of Guns (via mollycrabapple)
(via likearosee)
A good definition.
(via gentledom)(Source: larmoyante)
(Source: idterab)
In a New York Times op-ed, K’naan writes about the self-censorship that comes with success and consciousness of a new, widening audience. It’s a fascinating investigation into the power that industry and audience have over the narratives of a genre like rap once it has been welcomed into the mainstream fold.
And K’naan writes it so well… I mean: “When I walked away from the table, there were bruises on the unheard lyrics of my yet-to-be-born songs.” Come on. That’s beautiful.
(via thepoliticalnotebook)
Private For-Profit Prison Company Used In Drug Raids At Public High Schools
In Arizona an unsettling trend appears to be underway: the use of private prison employees in law enforcement operations.
Recent events in the central Arizona town of Casa Grande show the hand of private corrections corporations reaching into the classroom, assisting local law enforcement agencies in drug raids at public schools.
At 9 a.m. on the morning of October 31, 2012, students at Vista Grande High School in Casa Grande were settling in to their daily routine when something unusual occurred.
Vista Grande High School Principal Tim Hamilton ordered the school — with a student population of 1,776 — on “lock down,” kicking off the first “drug sweep” in the school’s four-year history. According to Hamilton, “lock down” is a state in which, “everybody is locked in the room they are in, and nobody leaves — nobody leaves the school, nobody comes into the school.”
”Everybody is locked in, and then they bring the dogs in, and they are teamed with an administrator and go in and out of classrooms. They go to a classroom and they have the kids come out and line up against a wall. The dog goes in and they close the door behind, and then the dog does its thing, and if it gets a hit, it sits on a bag and won’t move.”
While such “drug sweeps” have become a routine matter in many of the nation’s schools, along with the use of metal detectors and zero-tolerance policies, one feature of this raid was unusual. According to Casa Grande Police Department (CGPD) Public Information Officer Thomas Anderson, four “law enforcement agencies” took part in the operation: CGPD (which served as the lead agency and operation coordinator), the Arizona Department of Public Safety, the Gila River Indian Community Police Department, and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA).
It is the involvement of CCA — the nation’s largest private, for-profit prison corporation — that causes this high school “drug sweep” to stand out as unusual; CCA is not, despite CGPD’s evident opinion to the contrary, a law enforcement agency.
“To invite for-profit prison guards to conduct law enforcement actions in a high school is perhaps the most direct expression of the ‘schools-to-prison pipeline’ I’ve ever seen,” said Caroline Isaacs, program director of the Tucson office of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker social justice organization that advocates for criminal justice reform.
“All the research shows that CCA doesn’t properly train its staff to do the jobs they actually have. They most certainly do not have anywhere near the training and experience—to say nothing of the legal authority—to conduct a drug raid on a high school,” Isaacs added. “It is chilling to think that any school official would be willing to put vulnerable students at risk this way.”
CCA, the nation’s largest for-profit prison/immigrant detention center operator, with more than 92,000 prison and immigrant detention “beds” in 20 states and the District of Columbia, reported $1.7 billion in gross revenue last year. This revenue is derived almost exclusively from tax payer-funded government (county, state, federal) contracts through which the corporation is paid per-diem, per-prisoner rates for the warehousing of prisoners and immigrant detainees.
