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Thoughts and Prayers for Trump’s Hollywood Star

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Oh dear. Increasingly but mystifyingly, it seems some people are unhappy with their “president.” On Wednesday, a group of immigration protesters from Rise and Resist closed down 5th Ave. in front of Trump Tower, chanting “If you take the kids, we take the streets.” A number of them were arrested in the first of evidently more planned acts of civil disobedience to protest the Trump regime’s failure to reunite thousands of immigrant families in the wake of their grotesque child kidnappings. And hours earlier, at around 3 a.m., a lone but resolute patriot took a pick-axe to Trump’s long-dubious, frequently vandalized star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, obliterating it once and for all.

Witnesses said a man walked up to the star with a guitar case, pulled out the pick-axe, and had at it. He was evidently far more effective than James Otis, who in 2016 also took a shot at it, getting three years probation, community service and a fine for his act of patriotism; the star, for which Trump paid $30,000, has also been defaced with obscenities, dog poop and a mini-wall to keep out Mexican rapists and CNN reporters.   [Read more…]

Earl McNeil: No Justice! No Peace! Riot Police Summoned for National City Council Meeting

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Another week has gone by without the National City Police Department coming clean about what happened to Earl McNeil, who never regained consciousness after being taken into custody on May 27. He passed on at UCSD Medical Center on June 11.

The man may be dead, but he’s not been forgotten. The story of his arrest and the lack of transparency about what happened afterward have begun to attract national attention, thanks to the persistence of community activists.

The fourth consecutive protest at a National City Council meeting brought police in riot gear from six agencies around San Diego County. Platoons of cops marched up and down outside the meeting, forcing the two dozen or so demonstrators off the sidewalks for no apparent reason.   [Read more…]

Flames of Ignorance and the Wisdom of the Snail | Seeds of Rebellion, Part 3

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After wandering through the Schools for Chiapas Mayan Food Forest incubator in Part I, and witnessing the resistance by the First Peoples of southern Mexico to powerful corporate and governmental forces intent on destroying their autonomy and culture in Part II, we conclude with a look back to a past marvelous and shameful and towards a future carved on the shell of a snail.

“The diet of the people here before the Spanish conquest was so much more than corn and beans,” explains Paco Vazquez, a coordinator with Prodmedios, a media company based in San Cristóbal that empowers local communities all over Mexico to tell their own stories using a wide variety of media. Raised on the outskirts of what was once the Aztec capital, Paco is a direct descendant of the Nahuatl water architects who constructed the floating gardens and aquaculture the Spanish marveled at, and then destroyed. Five centuries have transformed a city once laced by clear running canals into a diesel-choked metropolis; so Paco knows something about lost knowledge.   [Read more…]

The MS-13 Gang, A Straw Man for Republican Racism

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By Hunter / Daily Kos

Donald Trump’s support is based on racism. And the racism is based on Republican conspiracy theories. And those conspiracy theories are now, thanks to White House propaganda, taking root within his racist, gullible base.

A majority of people who voted for President Donald Trump consider criminal gang MS-13 a threat to the United States, a new poll finds, indicating the Trump administration may be succeeding in inflating the perception of the gang’s national risk.

Specifically, 85 percent of Trump voters call MS-13 a “very” or “somewhat” serious threat to the United States, and roughly half of them are worried MS-13 is going to target them or their families personally, which is a ludicrous, asinine theory based entirely on Trump-peddled propaganda. Before Trump’s team settled on “MS-13” as their stand-in for Violent Ethnic People Coming To Get You, it would be a fair bet to say that precious few among Trump’s base would even know what MS-13 was. Now half of them are worried that MS-13 is hiding under their floorboards.   [Read more…]

ICE IS – The Break with Michelle Wolf | Video Worth Watching

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ICE IS – a tradition since 2003. Seemed like a good idea at the time. But then who could have predicted the likes of “Kjirstjen Njielsjen” or Donald Trump … You know it’s a problem when, as Alternet reports, ICE agents themselves have written to Secretary Nielsen asking to have ICE reorganized so that they don’t have to be part of it.   [Read more…]

Resistance at Comic-Con: Voting is a Superpower | Progressive Activist Calendar July 20 – 30, 2018

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Local Indivisible chapters have joined forces with democracy-loving cultural celebrities at this year’s Comic-Con as it stages its 48th annual exposition of comics and related popular artforms in San Diego.

A team of more than fifty people has been recruited to register voters for the 2018 midterm elections inside and outside the San Diego Convention Center.  Indie comic book publisher Matteo Pizzolo of Black Mask Studios has partnered with Indivisible to reach guests from all across the country using an app that facilitates online registration.

Using the theme “Voting Is My Superpower”, volunteers in T-shirts and capes are conducting what observers believe is the first time an organized drive has taken place within Comic-Con. The drive is nonpartisan.   [Read more…]

These 16-Year-Olds Are Campaigning for the Right to Vote | Video Worth Watching

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Exciting signs from the D.C area: sixteen-year olds are conducting a campaign—Vote16DC—to lower the voting age to sixteen in the District. Four other nearby cities have already lowered the voting age to sixteen for local and School Board races. The D.C. initiative would lower it for federal elections as well. Sentiment in support of the proposition is building. If this movement is successful in D.C., can we expect to see a similar push here in San Diego?   [Read more…]

Racism 101: White Lady Reporter Wants You to Know Black Lives Matter is Coming to National City to Riot

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“…They are demanding answers and they say they are not going to go away until they get them. The groups say next they plan on collaborating with the National Black Lives Matter group and staging riots in the streets if necessary; that is if the National City Police Department doesn’t release police body worn camera [footage] of an incident where a man died in custody.” —NBC 7 Reporter Wendy Fry

UPDATE: “Never mind” says NBC7. “An NBC 7 article referred to demonstrators staging riots in the streets in their pursuit of information. NBC 7 could not attribute that development to a specific community leader and has corrected the text. We greatly regret the error.”

UPDATED UPDATE: The reporter in question is sorry/not sorry

Protests are sometimes loud. They’re always messy. And they’re emotional. They’re challenging for reporters to cover because of the linguistic shorthand used by activists to make their points. 

NBC7’s Wendy Fry takes the cake for decorating her reporting with racist suppositions drawn from the tumultuous protests ongoing at council meetings in National City.
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60 House Democrats Launch Medicare for All Caucus

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By Jake Johnson / Common Dreams

Adding to the rapidly growing wave of support for Medicare for All at the grassroots and on Capitol Hill, more than 60 House Democrats are forming an official Medicare for All Caucus with the goal of closely examining specific policy components of single-payer and seriously discussing the steps necessary to implement it in the United States.

“This is a sea change from just four or five years ago and people are more likely to see healthcare as a right,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) told ViceNews, which first reported on the formation of the caucus on Wednesday.

Jayapal joined Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), National Nurses United (NNU), and other progressive groups to officially launch the caucus with an announcement Thursday morning. While just over 60 Democrats will be part of the caucus on day one, that number is expected to grow quickly over the next several weeks.
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On Vidkum Quisling’s Birthday, Reflections on Defeating a Trump-Putin Alliance

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“Yay! I get to vote!” isn’t much consolation to somebody living in a tent.

The statements and actions of the President of the United States of America continue to dominate the news following his acquiescence to the ambitions of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Those who have proclaimed the uproar over hell freezing over in Helsinki as a turning point (the ‘last straw’ seems to be a popular euphemism) fail to acknowledge Trumps many enablers. There will be no miracle. The Trump train will continue to roll.

The path for progressives and people with good intentions worldwide is to see Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin as two sides of the same coin. And to understand that a restoration of any of the trappings of traditional Western Democracy cannot occur with a fundamental reorganization of the economy.   [Read more…]

The Invasion of North American GMO Corn and the Price of Resistance | Seeds of Rebellion, Part II

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In Part 1, we met Armando, the Schools for Chiapas coordinator of the effort to restore the ancient Mayan system of sustainable food forests in the regions of Chiapas, Mexico, in consultation with Zapatista educators. In Part Two we explore the mortal threat posed by NAFTA and the heroic resistance to the attempts to culturally, and at times physically, exterminate the First Peoples of southern Mexico.

The mortal threat posed by U.S. corn to the people who first domesticated it is not the cheapness of Midwestern maize but its bio-engineered genetic uniformity. According to a 2017 study by scientists from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), GMO corn from north of the border has infiltrated up to 90 percent of corn tortillas and 82 percent of all corn based products throughout Mexico.

Wind riding GMO corn pollen contaminates non GMO fields with ease leading to a loss of genetic diversity that makes any living system less resilient and at greater risk for catastrophic plagues. And the myriad creatures who live in the rivers and streams that absorb run off from nearby GMO fields when the rains come? Collateral damage, whose numbers and health can only be guessed at.

Super weeds are already appearing in GMO fields in the U.S., descendants of hardy survivors who passed their immunity to Roundup weed killer onto future generations. Loathe to listen to any messages coming from lifeforms not   [Read more…]

A Tiny Home Update: “The New American Dream” in Progress

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By Orlando Barahona

Politics are the Ultimate Porn: The Art of Political Science is about a distilled and formulaic perversion of The People’s ideals: Politicians and bureaucrats do not provide what we want; they teach us how to desire it. Public officials’ speeches and a charismatic delivery do not guide my direction in assembling a business and housing plan for San Diego because they do not offer clarity in describing the steps to achieve its presentation and success.

A very important North County housing summit is about to be hosted in Escondido, California on July 19th, 2018 by the San Diego North Economic Development Council in conjunction with the Housing You Matters Coalition. When I reached the Coalition’s Facebook page I was told all the speakers were booked and thus my revised business and housing plan could not fit in for this event. That is understandable, but not ideal for me, after I have updated and refined my first plan, published here in 2016. Find out more on the event’s page here. I wasn’t offered the possibility to present the plan at any other time.   [Read more…]

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