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WilliamPitt
WilliamPitt's Journal
WilliamPitt's Journal
April 29, 2014
Upon which I SMASH ALL OF THE THINGS
Memo to every gomer out there who got fucked over by their high school's failure to teach Civics and never bothered to figure this out on your own:
HEY DICKHEAD.
The First Amendment protects your freedom of speech from one (1) thing: GOVERNMENTAL INTERFERENCE with you speaking your mind.
If you go into a bar and bellow NI*GER NI*GER NI*GER FUCKING NI*GER and get your ass handed to you for it, that's not a Free Speech 1st Amendment issue, you fucking useless hopeless dumbfuck dickwad puddle of tepid Fail, because the bar is NOT THE GOVERNMENT. That's the marketplace working it out.
Sterling fans have taken to Twitter with ERMAHGERD HIS FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS gibberish. Read the fucking Bill of Rights, you piddling Derp-riddled reason why we can't have nice things.
The NBA is NOT THE GOVERNMENT.
Your right to free speech ends exactly where I can fuck you up for life in public for being a dumbass.
I am not the government, either. Read a book, you clown car.
Dumb Twitter Users Rage Against Death Of The First Amendment
http://deadspin.com/twitter-users-rage-against-death-of-the-first-amendment-1569415262
April 29, 2014
TAKE MY MONEY RIGHT NOW LET ME SEE THIS MOVIE
New 'Godzilla' trailer from Asia holy crap holy crap holy crap holy crap
TAKE MY MONEY RIGHT NOW LET ME SEE THIS MOVIE
April 29, 2014
http://www.pdaillinois.org/site/content/though-battling-terminal-illness-tim-carpenter-still-busy-moving-congress-left
PDA was founded after the '04 Kucinich campaign. Tim had been fighting cancer since the day I met him ten years ago, but he never slowed down, never let his illness keep him from the activism he devoted himself to because he loved this country so much.
As I sit here in my sorrow, it strikes me that no one I've ever known was so perfectly named as he was. Tim Builder. Tim Crafter. Tim Maker. Tim Carpenter.
Take your rest, old friend. You have more than earned it.
On edit: David Swanson on the passing of Tim Carpenter: http://warisacrime.org/content/tim-carpenter-will-be-badly-missed#.U1_Uc84MxAA.facebook
Tim Carpenter, co-founder of Progressive Democrats of America, passed away last night.
http://www.pdaillinois.org/site/content/though-battling-terminal-illness-tim-carpenter-still-busy-moving-congress-left
PDA was founded after the '04 Kucinich campaign. Tim had been fighting cancer since the day I met him ten years ago, but he never slowed down, never let his illness keep him from the activism he devoted himself to because he loved this country so much.
As I sit here in my sorrow, it strikes me that no one I've ever known was so perfectly named as he was. Tim Builder. Tim Crafter. Tim Maker. Tim Carpenter.
Take your rest, old friend. You have more than earned it.
On edit: David Swanson on the passing of Tim Carpenter: http://warisacrime.org/content/tim-carpenter-will-be-badly-missed#.U1_Uc84MxAA.facebook
April 28, 2014
Game of Thrones fans: Peter Dinklage. Because Peter Dinklage.
http://www.danbarham.com/dinklage/
April 25, 2014
(Photo: William Rivers Pitt)
Weaponized Cops and the Future of Freedom
By William Rivers Pitt
Truthout | Op-Ed
Friday 25 April 2014
On Tuesday, in a PR move that makes the GOP's embrace of Cliven Bundy seem like genius by comparison, the New York City Police Department took to social media in a doomed attempt to get snuggly with the general population. The NYPD asked people on Twitter to share their positive experiences with New York cops via the hashtag #myNYPD, and for a few heartbeats, all was rosy...until it wasn't.
Because someone posted their picture of a Black kid screaming in pain while getting hammered into a car hood by three armored cops.
And someone else posted their picture of a Black woman getting lit up by two armored cops while a third cop in an officer's uniform tore the hair from her head with a look on his face that said he knew he was doing God's good work.
And someone else posted their picture of a cop putting his knee to the neck of a small and clearly helpless dog above a caption that read, "The dog was reaching for a gun."
And someone else posted their picture of a beefy cop with his fist cocked and rage painted across his big White face, said picture capturing the moment just before the cameraperson was punched.
And it went on, and on, eventually spreading across the country and the world, until #myNYPD became a repository for just about every documented incident of police brutality on the planet over the last three years.
Tricky tricky tricky, that social media thing. Given the NYPD's well-documented deplorable behavior toward non-white people for generations, toward protesters going well back before the 2004 Republican convention, and most especially upon the advent of the Occupy movement, combined with the fact that modern telephonic technology pretty much makes everyone a photojournalist these days, one would think that whoever is in charge of the NYPD's Twitter account would not be stupid enough to bait that particular bear.
Nope, and too late. Can't un-ring the bell.
It's not just New York. This eruption of police violence, of police malevolence, is nationwide. According to an Associated Press report from late last year, "Coming soon to your local sheriff: 18-ton, armor-protected military fighting vehicles with gun turrets and bulletproof glass that were once the U.S. answer to roadside bombs during the Iraq war. The hulking vehicles, built for about $500,000 each at the height of the war, are among the biggest pieces of equipment that the Defense Department is giving to law enforcement agencies under a national military surplus program."
According to the ACLU, "Billions of dollars' worth of military weapons and equipment is available to local police departments through grant programs administered by federal agencies such as the Departments of Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security. Until now, this has gone on with very little public oversight. Too little has been known about how much military equipment law enforcement agencies have, why they have it, and how they are using it."
(snip)
(Photo: William Rivers Pitt)
What we have before us is an ominous confluence - decades of profoundly racist "wars" on drugs and crime that inspired both voters and elected officials to slap aside Constitutional law in favor of the ongoing sham of "security," 300 million guns loose across the countryside cocked and locked with the ammo of associated paranoia, piles of war weapons left over from our blood-sodden overseas adventures available to any township that asks for them, combined with and aggravated by the plastic-sheeting-and-duct-tape travesty that is the ongoing "War On Terror" - which has lulled us into believing there is nothing strange or abnormal or threatening about everyday cops driving tanks, wearing body armor and packing heat better suited for a battlefield in our back yards.
Also, and not to be overlooked, is the fact that some people do throw bombs into crowds. It happened, right there on live television.
The rest: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/23303-weaponized-cops-and-the-future-of-freedom
Weaponized Cops and the Future of Freedom
(Photo: William Rivers Pitt)
Weaponized Cops and the Future of Freedom
By William Rivers Pitt
Truthout | Op-Ed
Friday 25 April 2014
On Tuesday, in a PR move that makes the GOP's embrace of Cliven Bundy seem like genius by comparison, the New York City Police Department took to social media in a doomed attempt to get snuggly with the general population. The NYPD asked people on Twitter to share their positive experiences with New York cops via the hashtag #myNYPD, and for a few heartbeats, all was rosy...until it wasn't.
Because someone posted their picture of a Black kid screaming in pain while getting hammered into a car hood by three armored cops.
And someone else posted their picture of a Black woman getting lit up by two armored cops while a third cop in an officer's uniform tore the hair from her head with a look on his face that said he knew he was doing God's good work.
And someone else posted their picture of a cop putting his knee to the neck of a small and clearly helpless dog above a caption that read, "The dog was reaching for a gun."
And someone else posted their picture of a beefy cop with his fist cocked and rage painted across his big White face, said picture capturing the moment just before the cameraperson was punched.
And it went on, and on, eventually spreading across the country and the world, until #myNYPD became a repository for just about every documented incident of police brutality on the planet over the last three years.
Tricky tricky tricky, that social media thing. Given the NYPD's well-documented deplorable behavior toward non-white people for generations, toward protesters going well back before the 2004 Republican convention, and most especially upon the advent of the Occupy movement, combined with the fact that modern telephonic technology pretty much makes everyone a photojournalist these days, one would think that whoever is in charge of the NYPD's Twitter account would not be stupid enough to bait that particular bear.
Nope, and too late. Can't un-ring the bell.
It's not just New York. This eruption of police violence, of police malevolence, is nationwide. According to an Associated Press report from late last year, "Coming soon to your local sheriff: 18-ton, armor-protected military fighting vehicles with gun turrets and bulletproof glass that were once the U.S. answer to roadside bombs during the Iraq war. The hulking vehicles, built for about $500,000 each at the height of the war, are among the biggest pieces of equipment that the Defense Department is giving to law enforcement agencies under a national military surplus program."
According to the ACLU, "Billions of dollars' worth of military weapons and equipment is available to local police departments through grant programs administered by federal agencies such as the Departments of Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security. Until now, this has gone on with very little public oversight. Too little has been known about how much military equipment law enforcement agencies have, why they have it, and how they are using it."
(snip)
(Photo: William Rivers Pitt)
What we have before us is an ominous confluence - decades of profoundly racist "wars" on drugs and crime that inspired both voters and elected officials to slap aside Constitutional law in favor of the ongoing sham of "security," 300 million guns loose across the countryside cocked and locked with the ammo of associated paranoia, piles of war weapons left over from our blood-sodden overseas adventures available to any township that asks for them, combined with and aggravated by the plastic-sheeting-and-duct-tape travesty that is the ongoing "War On Terror" - which has lulled us into believing there is nothing strange or abnormal or threatening about everyday cops driving tanks, wearing body armor and packing heat better suited for a battlefield in our back yards.
Also, and not to be overlooked, is the fact that some people do throw bombs into crowds. It happened, right there on live television.
The rest: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/23303-weaponized-cops-and-the-future-of-freedom
April 22, 2014
Over 20,000 people attended the first Earth Day observance in Philadelphia, April, 1970.
(AP Photo/Bill Ingraham)
Let This Earth Day Be The Last
By Wen Stephenson
The Nation
April 22, 2014
Fuck Earth Day.
No, really. Fuck Earth Day. Not the first one, forty-four years ago, the one of sepia-hued nostalgia, but everything the day has since come to be: the darkest, cruelest, most brutally self-satirizing spectacle of the year.
Fuck it. Let it end here.
End the dishonesty, the deception. Stop lying to yourselves, and to your children. Stop pretending that the crisis can be “solved,” that the planet can be “saved,” that business more-or-less as usual—what progressives and environmentalists have been doing for forty-odd years and more—is morally or intellectually tenable. Let go of the pretense that “environmentalism” as we know it—virtuous green consumerism, affluent low-carbon localism, head-in-the-sand conservationism, feel-good greenwashed capitalism—comes anywhere near the radical response our situation requires.
So, yeah, I've had it with Earth Day—and the culture of progressive green denial it represents.
(snip)
Because our global crisis—not merely environmental but moral and spiritual—is fundamental: it strikes to the root of who we are. It’s a radical situation, requiring a radical response. Not merely radical in the sense of ideology, but a kind of radical necessity. It requires us to find out who we really are—and, nonviolently, in the steps of Gandhi and King and many others, to act. In some cases, to lay everything—everything—on the line.
And it requires us to be honest, with each other and with ourselves, about the situation we face. We’ll never have a movement radical enough, or humane enough, until we are.
That is, until Earth Day is buried—and a day of reckoning begins.
The rest: http://www.thenation.com/blog/179375/let-earth-day-be-last
Take the ride and read it. It's more than worth it.
Fuck Earth Day
Over 20,000 people attended the first Earth Day observance in Philadelphia, April, 1970.
(AP Photo/Bill Ingraham)
Let This Earth Day Be The Last
By Wen Stephenson
The Nation
April 22, 2014
Fuck Earth Day.
No, really. Fuck Earth Day. Not the first one, forty-four years ago, the one of sepia-hued nostalgia, but everything the day has since come to be: the darkest, cruelest, most brutally self-satirizing spectacle of the year.
Fuck it. Let it end here.
End the dishonesty, the deception. Stop lying to yourselves, and to your children. Stop pretending that the crisis can be “solved,” that the planet can be “saved,” that business more-or-less as usual—what progressives and environmentalists have been doing for forty-odd years and more—is morally or intellectually tenable. Let go of the pretense that “environmentalism” as we know it—virtuous green consumerism, affluent low-carbon localism, head-in-the-sand conservationism, feel-good greenwashed capitalism—comes anywhere near the radical response our situation requires.
So, yeah, I've had it with Earth Day—and the culture of progressive green denial it represents.
(snip)
Because our global crisis—not merely environmental but moral and spiritual—is fundamental: it strikes to the root of who we are. It’s a radical situation, requiring a radical response. Not merely radical in the sense of ideology, but a kind of radical necessity. It requires us to find out who we really are—and, nonviolently, in the steps of Gandhi and King and many others, to act. In some cases, to lay everything—everything—on the line.
And it requires us to be honest, with each other and with ourselves, about the situation we face. We’ll never have a movement radical enough, or humane enough, until we are.
That is, until Earth Day is buried—and a day of reckoning begins.
The rest: http://www.thenation.com/blog/179375/let-earth-day-be-last
Take the ride and read it. It's more than worth it.
April 22, 2014
SUBJECT: THE DEATH OF RICHARD NIXON: NOTES ON THE PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MONSTER.... HE WAS A LIAR AND A QUITTER, AND HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA.... BUT HE WAS, AFTER ALL, THE PRESIDENT.
"And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird."
---Revelation 18:2
(snip)
If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.
These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern -- but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.
(snip)
Nixon's spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives -- whether you're me or Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards or Amy Fisher or Boris Yeltsin's daughter or your fiancee's 16-year-old beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and his whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not a generational thing. You don't even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.
He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.
The rest: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-a-crook/308699/
He Was A Crook: Hunter S. Thompson on the Death of Richard M. Nixon, 20 Years Ago Today
FROM: DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSONSUBJECT: THE DEATH OF RICHARD NIXON: NOTES ON THE PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MONSTER.... HE WAS A LIAR AND A QUITTER, AND HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA.... BUT HE WAS, AFTER ALL, THE PRESIDENT.
"And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird."
---Revelation 18:2
(snip)
If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.
These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern -- but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.
(snip)
Nixon's spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives -- whether you're me or Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards or Amy Fisher or Boris Yeltsin's daughter or your fiancee's 16-year-old beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and his whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not a generational thing. You don't even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.
He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.
The rest: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-a-crook/308699/
Profile Information
Name: William Rivers PittGender: Male
Hometown: Boston
Member since: 2001
Number of posts: 58,179
