Showing that BP's gusher in the ocean floor was just short of deliberate

Did they intend for the rig to explode and the hole to spew oil? Of course not. That means they lose money. But they did consistently ignore safety-related warnings that would necessitate them shutting down their operation, however shortly, in order to address the obvious problems indicating an impending explosion. They knew this was a potential, increasingly likely scenario, and they did nothing but keep drilling and pulling out oil:

The documents show that in March, after several weeks of problems on the rig, BP was struggling with a loss of “well control.” And as far back as 11 months ago, it was concerned about the well casing and the blowout preventer.

On June 22, for example, BP engineers expressed concerns that the metal casing the company wanted to use might collapse under high pressure.

“This would certainly be a worst-case scenario,” Mark E. Hafle, a senior drilling engineer at BP, warned in an internal report. “However, I have seen it happen so know it can occur.”

The company went ahead with the casing, but only after getting special permission from BP colleagues because it violated the company’s safety policies and design standards. The internal reports do not explain why the company allowed for an exception. BP documents released last week to The Times revealed that company officials knew the casing was the riskier of two options...

In April of this year, BP engineers concluded that the casing was “unlikely to be a successful cement job,” according to a document, referring to how the casing would be sealed to prevent gases from escaping up the well.

The document also says that the plan for casing the well is “unable to fulfill M.M.S. regulations,” referring to the Minerals Management Service...

On Tuesday Congress released a memorandum with preliminary findings from BP’s internal investigation, which indicated that there were warning signs immediately before the explosion on April 20, including equipment readings suggesting that gas was bubbling into the well, a potential sign of an impending blowout.

A parade of witnesses at hearings last week told about bad decisions and cut corners in the days and hours before the explosion of the rig, but BP’s internal documents provide a clearer picture of when company and federal officials saw problems emerging.

In addition to focusing on the casing, investigators are also focusing on the blowout preventer, a fail-safe device that was supposed to slice through a drill pipe in a last-ditch effort to close off the well when the disaster struck. The blowout preventer did not work, which is one of the reasons oil has continued to spill into the gulf, though the reason it failed remains unclear...

The documents show that in March, after problems on the rig that included drilling mud falling into the formation, sudden gas releases known as “kicks” and a pipe falling into the well, BP officials informed federal regulators that they were struggling with a loss of “well control.”

On at least three occasions, BP records indicate, the blowout preventer was leaking fluid, which the manufacturer of the device has said limits its ability to operate properly.

“The most important thing at a time like this is to stop everything and get the operation under control,” said Greg McCormack, director of the Petroleum Extension Service at the University of Texas, Austin, offering his assessment about the documents...

Bob Sherrill, an expert on blowout preventers and the owner of Blackwater Subsea, an engineering consulting firm, said the conditions on the rig in February and March and the language used by the operator referring to a loss of well control “sounds like they were facing a blowout scenario.”

This is an open-and-shut case of capitalist negligence. We're gonna need a lot of ropes for this one. I would pay dearly to watch these motherfuckers hung in their suits. Maybe we can dip them in oil, set them on fire, and then hang them with steel cables, as ropes would burn off very quickly. Wait, no, that's good, stick with the ropes. We will dip them in oil, set them on fire, hang them with ropes, let them hang for a second until the rope burns off, just to add agony, then watch them writhe on the ground until they die.

BP's"top kill" procedure to plug the hole did not work

At all. In the least. Still blowing thick, deep black oil. Not surprising, given the track of failures behind them:

The abandonment of the top kill technique, the most ambitious effort yet to plug the well, was the latest in a series of failures. First, BP failed in efforts to repair a blowout preventer with submarine robots. Then its initial efforts to cap the well with a containment dome failed when it became clogged with a frothy mix of frigid water and gas. Efforts to use a hose to gather escaping oil have managed to catch only a fraction of the spill.

And you know what? They aren't going to stop it until they drill a new well, which will take until August:

BP has started work on two relief wells, but officials have said that they will not be completed until August...

That's at least another 180 million gallons of oil that will blow out, making it top out at easily over 300 million gallons. But remember, as Tony Hayward said, the Gulf of Mexico is real big, so it doesn't matter much.

In the meantime, don't expect too much, as they are basically throwing things at it and seeing what sticks:

A technician who has been working on the project to stem the oil leak said Saturday that neither the top kill nor the “junk shot” came close to succeeding because the pressure of oil and gas escaping from the well was simply too powerful to overcome. He added that engineers never had a complete enough understanding of the inner workings of drill pipe casing or blowout preventer mechanisms to make the efforts work.

“Simply too much of what we pumped in was escaping,” said the technician, who spoke on condition of remaining unnamed because he is not authorized to speak publicly for the company.

Once again - "engineers never had a complete enough understanding of the inner workings of drill pipe casing or blowout preventer mechanisms to make the efforts work." Wow. They don't understand the equipment they are using. Good idea, especially when working with such a volatile and destructive material as petroleum.

Also, the New York Times is still lying about how much oil is coming out of there:

He said it would capture most but not all of the oil leaking from the well, which is believed to be gushing 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day.

We know it is much more than that. Much, much more.

Oil industry threatens the president and you

They are relentless as well as remorseless. Such is the march of capital.

"An extended moratorium on safely producing our oil and natural gas resources from the Gulf of Mexico would create a moratorium on economic growth and job creation," said Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, the main U.S. trade association for the oil and natural gas industry...

The ban, Gerard said, will hurt growth "by undercutting our nation's access to affordable, reliable, domestic sources of oil and natural gas..."

Gerard said he understands the frustration many feel toward the industry, but he said lawmakers should reconsider any decisions that would limit access to domestic sources of oil.

"This issue is much larger than the oil industry since access to affordable energy impacts every sector of our economy, every state in our nation and every American family," he said...

The ban could also mean layoffs in the energy industry, particularly in the Gulf Coast region, according to API. The group said 150,000 jobs are at risk if deep water production is significantly reduced over a period of five years.

"Deepwater is where the new action is in the Gulf," said API spokesman Bill Bush. "If that's shut down, there could be serious jobs impacts."

First, the US imports around 70% of its oil. So it only produces about 30% domestically. And of that, 30% it is only 30% that comes from offshore drilling. So the US only gets 10% of its oil from domestic offshore drilling. Not very much. At all. Fuck it.

Capitalists throw around the word "jobs" like Zionists with "anti-Semite." As soon as you make a point with them, they threaten and smear you so that you fuck off real quick.

Really though, if jobs are truly lost from stopping offshore oil production, too bad. Has to happen sooner or later - that oil ain't gonna be there forever. And that's what oil companies are ultimately in the business of - running themselves out of business, although they don't tell anyone that. Or themselves, really. But anyway, sometimes you just have to find something else to do, especially when you are a cog in the most profoundly destructive industry/line of work/business the world has ever known. Slave traders had to do it, much of the German military had to do it after World War II, even people selling Yugos had to do it. It sucks for the politically-celebrated "little guy," but such is life. Hopefully, one day, slaughterhouse workers will have to do the same.

BP's hole in the floor of the Gulf of Mexico is still gushing

Watch their oilvision to witness it. Around three million gallons a day, despite BP and the government's ass-covering lies. Today must be day 40, I believe. 120,000 million gallons of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Eclipsed the Exxon Valdez spill, previously the worst in US history, in four days.

It's not so bad though:

BP CEO Tony Hayward told Britain's The Guardian newspaper that the spill was small in proportion to the Gulf.

"The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume," Hayward said.

WHY HASN'T SOMEONE TRIED TO PLUG THE HOLE WITH THIS PIECE OF SHIT YET?

Chris Oynes

This man has responsible for heading the arm of an agency that permitted BP's profound neglect to turn into a catastrophe, the fallout of which will take a very long time to understand.

He announced his retirement recently, taking off a month earlier than he had planned.

What a coincidence that the section of the Minerals Management Service he oversaw (the one responsible for regulating offshore drilling) is coming under increasingly heavy scrutiny in the wake of the unaccidental man-made disaster.

Paying off federal oil rig inspectors in the Gulf of Mexico

There is no way BP was not involved in this.

The oil "spill" was no "accident."

This shit is nearly unbelievable, until you realize that we are greedy pieces of shit who ultimately don't care about much:

Federal inspectors overseeing oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico accepted meals and tickets to sporting events from companies they monitored, the Interior Department's inspector general concluded in a report released Wednesday.

In one case, an inspector in the Minerals Management Service office in Lake Charles, Louisiana, conducted inspections of four offshore platforms while negotiating a job with the company, the report states. Others let oil and gas company workers fill out their inspection forms in pencil, with the inspectors writing over those entries in ink before turning them in.

Some in the same office accepted tickets to the 2005 Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl, a college football bowl game in Atlanta, Georgia. One inspector told an office clerk, "Everyone has gotten some sort of gift before at some point" from companies they regulated, according to the report.

LET OIL AND GAS COMPANY WORKERS FILL OUT THEIR INSPECTION FORMS IN PENCIL. Gee, wonder how the fucking oil rig blew up.

Some more gems:

The Lake Charles investigation was launched shortly after another scandal emerged from within the MMS. A September 2008 inspector general's report found regulators in the agency's Colorado office received improper gifts from energy industry representatives and engaged in illegal drug use and inappropriate sexual relations with them...

She pointed out that Randall Luthi, its [Mineral Management Service] previous director, left at the end of the Bush administration to become president of the National Ocean Industries Association, the trade association that represents offshore drillers.

Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.

BP corporate policy views workers as one of the three little pigs

Really. And then they assessed which pig's housing was the least financially risky. Then people died as a result of it.

The people running this company should be ashamed; I doubt they are. Either way, they should be set on fire.

BP refusing to clean up Louisiana marshes

This is pretty much the most important place on land that's fucked right now. This is the source of so much life and is so delicate. And BP is doing NOTHING.

Got milk?

Cause this is where it comes from.

The logical and necessary result of viewing life as a commodity.

We can't die off fast enough.

Filthy fucking BP trying to get its lawsuits dismissed with a judge they bought

The oil industry bought this judge a long time ago. Our legal system allows for BP to have the more than 100 lawsuits already filed against them adjudicated by one judge, one of their picking. Guess who they picked. Would not be at all surprised if they were allowed to have their way.

Helping BP

If you've got any thoughts on how they could do things a little differently (and who doesn't), here's how you can offer contributions, courtesy of the BP website:

Do you have ideas to help us?:
+1 281 366 5511

It only takes a minute, and there's a real person on the other end. Sure, what you say probably won't reach the top, but you can help build an atmosphere of incredibly low morale within the company among low-level employees and managers, which would eventually reach the top.

Fucking corporate lies

You have 20,000 people working the cleanup? GET MORE. NOW. FUCK YOUR PROFITS, FUCK YOUR INVESTORS, FUCK YOUR BOARD OF DIRECTORS. FIX IT MOTHERFUCKER. I hope the piece of shit gets an ulcer that eats through his ribcage.

"I probably should apologize to folks that we haven't been giving more data on that," Suttles said when asked why it took so long for BP to announce it had suspended the top kill. "It was nothing more than we are so focused on the operation itself."

YOU SHOULD ALSO PROBABLY FUCKING KILL YOURSELF AND ALL PEOPLE RESPONSIBLE FOR RUNNING THE COMPANY.

Where are suicide bombers when you need them? People wasting their time trying to blow up a truck in Times Square. Get a real fucking target.

BP's hole in the floor of the Gulf of Mexico is now blowing muddy oil

Congratulations. You're doing a fine job.

Don't forget to check BP's disastervision for the latest on their struggle to address a problem for which there are really no short-range solutions, as no one bothered to think that far ahead (there was too much money to be made too quickly to wait on the technology to address a "what if" situation). And that is 100% their fucking fault.

Watch James Carville get really mad at BP

This is fun. Sure, he's way too sympathetic to Obama (Carville is a professional Democrat), but it's nice to see someone get really pissed at BP on television. I think at least 70% of it is genuine. Which is high, especially for a political strategist/politician maker. Mary Matalin seems to be even more legitimately disturbed, maybe 85%. You never know though; I tend to view electoral politics in much the same light as professional wrestling.

Thanks to BP for helping us to get there faster

So much life on earth (still, despite our best efforts) to wipe out before we win the war.

Here is a big shout out to BP, Halliburton, Transocean, the federal government, the president and the Coast Guard for doing a whole lot of nothing while the Gulf of Mexico is silenced. I would like to give a less immediate, but perhaps more broad mountain of gratitude to the oil industry the world over, automobile manufacturers, industrialists, capitalists and state capitalists of all stripes, the airline industry, purveyors of all things plastic, and once again, the federal government, for ensuring that all this continues unabated and that all the appropriate pieces of shit get the subsidies and infrastructure they need to keep fucking the planet. Great teamwork!

Ruined.

Once again, I would like to reiterate that I hate us.

Try not to be poor, black, stuck in Harlem and sick

Cause Harlem Hospital might not take such good care of you:

Nearly 4,000 tests for heart disease performed over the last three years at Harlem Hospital Center — more than half of all such tests performed — were never read by doctors charged with making a diagnosis, hospital officials acknowledged Tuesday.

The echocardiogram tests, a type of ultrasound used to evaluate heart muscle and valve functions, were ordered by doctors at the hospital. The tests were stored on a computer and basically forgotten, officials said.

Nice. Pretty sure that wouldn't happen at Beth Israel.

It's typical of New York's ghettoes though. It's an old, long story where the poor, and particularly the black and Puerto Rican (Central Harlem, the area Harlem Hospital serves is definitely poor and black/Puerto Rican) have perpetually had the worst access to health care and the health care to which they do have access is subpar at best. It's really hard to feel that there isn't a racial neglect/institutional racism component to this.

Oilvision

Watch it spew. Watch as we kill the earth a little bit more.

"I was born on planet earth
at a drastic time full of plastic mirth
and everyday I've seen increasing signs
and you would too if you'd opened your eyes
you had a chance you did not try
so now it's time to watch it die"

Helping to solve disappearance of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964

If this is true, it rules. A lot. And makes me really happy, picturing some racist piece of shit who thinks he's real tough being reduced to a sobbing pile of fear in minutes.

The notion that Scarpa strong-armed a Klan member into giving up information about one of the most notorious crimes of the civil rights era has been talked about in mob circles for years.

It supposedly happened during the search for civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, who were beaten and shot by a gang of Klansmen and buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Miss. The case was famously dramatized in the movie “Mississippi Burning.”

Investigators struggled for answers in the early days of the case, stymied by stonewalling Klan members.

In 1994, the New York Daily News, citing unidentified federal law enforcement officials, reported that a frustrated J. Edgar Hoover turned to Scarpa to extract information. The Daily News said the New York mobster terrorized an appliance salesman and Klansman already under suspicion in the case and got him to reveal the location of the bodies.

Schiro testified Monday that she and Scarpa traveled to Mississippi in 1964 after he was recruited by the FBI. She said they walked into the hotel where the FBI had gathered during the investigation, and the gangster winked at a group of agents. She said an agent later showed up in their room and handed Scarpa a gun.

She said Scarpa helped find the volunteers’ bodies by “putting a gun in the guy’s mouth and threatening him.” She said an unidentified agent later returned to the room, gave Scarpa a wad of cash, and took back the weapon.

By any means necessary.

The oil hemorrhage is never going to end

It's been well over a month now, and don't you know that hole in the ocean floor is still blowing over a million gallons a day into the Gulf of Mexico with no end in sight. Actually, you know what, never mind that. It does not matter how much oil is coming out of the hole:

BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.

“The answer is no to that,” a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. “We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.”

Whatever the case, for the last week, BP has been sucking out 126,000 gallons a day, at most, which I'm sure will find its way into cars very soon. Amazing that they are still making money off of this thing. Fucking company needs to be shut down, deploying any and all means available.

To stop oil from coming to the surface (addressing the aesthetics of the matter), they're using dispersants underwater, which are known to be toxic. Aside from their intensely poisonous nature, BP is making a new problem - vast underwater oil clouds, "including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots." Great news.

While the oxygen depletion so far is not enough to kill off sea life, the possibility looms that oxygen levels could fall so low as to create large dead zones, especially at the seafloor. “That’s the big worry,” said Ray Highsmith, head of the Mississippi center that sponsored the mission, known as the National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology.

This is already the worst single-event environmental disaster this country has ever seen. It will go down as one of the worst in the world. And no one seems to be able to do anything about it.

I finally figured out why the U.S. is occupying Iraq

It's to rid the world of those gay little boy terrorists.

Piece of shit gored through the chin

THROUGH the chin, not in it. Amazing. Fuck this guy. I'm glad he didn't die; living this way will be much worse for him. Unfortunately, the bull was killed shortly after. At least he died a dignified death. A real martyr.

You had it coming, asshole. I wish I could send you an "I'm happy" card. Jah knows how many bulls he killed for "sport." I look forward to your lifetime of pain.

Check out these beautiful pictures (and the seemingly unperturbed spectators):

Looks like you can see part of his tongue on the bull's horn in that last shot. Very nice.

If only the bull could have grown twenty thousand horns and dealt with every person in the arena accordingly.

Another day, another Rand Paul story

Did you know that the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is nobody's fault? It's true, because Rand Paul says so, and if you disagree, you are "really un-American." Poor, poor multi-billion dollar corporations. Someone has to speak up for the voiceless. This guy is amazing. As though what matters is who pays for the cleanup. That's pretty fucking low on my list of concerns.

I guess this is that progress that everyone talks about, towards a peak of human intelligence and equality.

Here's a related video news story about how the dispersant BP is using is toxic to anything living and that the amount of oil gushing out of that hole in the ocean floor is at least 1,680,000 gallons per day and as much as 4,200,000 gallons a day. Four million, two hundred thousand. That means it eclipsed the paltry 11,000,000 gallons of the Exxon Valdez spill, previously the worst oil spill in the country's history, in less than seven days, at most.

Watch that twenty inch pipe in action:

So this guy walks into a bar...

and then gets kicked out strictly for being black, and the new Republican senatorial candidate (as in he won the Republican primary and it's now between him and the Democratic candidate, come November) from Kentucky, Rand Paul (Ron Paul's son, yes that Ron Paul) says (through what he refuses to say) that it's ok. This is what suave racism looks like. This man is a white supremacist in a business suit. And he tells you it's not a big deal.

HE FUCKING DOES NOT SUPPORT THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964.

And then goes on to say that anyone discussing it is "not an issue...a red herring...a political ploy...brought up as an attack weapon from the other side."

This is such insane bullshit. He views segregation and physical, exclusionary discrimination as "free speech." They aren't even related. Segregation and the refusal to serve people in a place of business based on race, gender, sexuality, or whatever, is not in any way related to speech.

The entire time, he keeps reiterating that discrimination, segregation and racism are "a stain on our history" and other such bullshit. He also "would have marched with Martin Luther King." Then he goes on to lie and sanitize King, like people so often do, and says that most of the things that Dr. King was fighting "were laws, he was fighting Jim Crow laws, he was fighting legalized and institutionalized racism." True, he did fight those things, but he also went after things that were not inscribed in law, such as segregated housing, a lack of jobs (after all, the famous August 28th, 1963 "I have a dream" speech was given at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom) and the Vietnam War among many.

According to Rand Paul and his continual use of a "free speech" defense, the issue is that black people would go into restaurants and the waiter would say, "Hey, nigger, what do you want?" when in reality, the waiter said, "Hey, nigger, get out," which had definite physical consequences for disobedience. The former represents a free speech issue. The Civil Rights Act had nothing to do with speech. It had nothing to do with prohibiting "hate speech" as Paul cites. Segregation was physical and economic, not verbal. Fucking stupid.

Then he keeps talking about how if you maintain the federal laws that force owners of restaurants, stores and whatever else to serve black people, you have to also force them to allow people to carry weapons of any and all varieties into bars. What a fucking ridiculous reduction. Here is a very simple way to look at that - refusing service to people demonstrably harms them in a variety of ways. Refusing to allow guns into a business harms no one.

The Civil Rights Act did not say that if you own a business, you now have no rights. It said if you own a business, you now have no right to exclude people based on physical traits.

The only real reason people support shit like this (segregation) is because they will never be the ones excluded. What kind of place is going to say, "Hey, rich white piece of shit, get the fuck out of here, your kind's not wanted!"? The Crimethinc Convergence? A black nationalist bookstore? Perhaps a basement show? No place a rich white piece of shit would want to go, that's for sure.

Additionally, a refusal to serve is not an issue that stops there. It means that people cannot buy things that they need, it means that people are prohibited from doing things that they enjoy, and it means, fundamentally, that groups of people, based entirely on physical traits, are excluded from many aspects of daily life. They become second-class citizens, at best. Refusal to serve also creates extensive economic problems, because people are not able to earn money (a place that won't serve black people sure as hell isn't going to pay them a decent wage) and thus are not able to spend it.

Finally, segregation is not dead. Far from it. Read Denton and Massey's American Apartheid.

Maniacs on pedestals

Mr. Wells said he could not yet say how much oil had been captured or what percentage of the oil leaking from a 21-inch riser pipe was now flowing into the 4-inch-wide insertion tube. “We want to slowly optimize it to try to capture as much of the oil and gas as we can without taking in a large amount of seawater,” he said.

“This is all part of reinventing technology,” Tom Mueller, a BP spokesman, said on Saturday. “It’s not what I’d call a problem — it’s what I’d call learning, reconfiguring, doing it again.”

As Utah Phillips said, these people have addresses.

Don't worry about anything, everything is actually improving

Despite increasing populations, burgeoning pollution, global warming, a hole in the ozone layer, virtually all bodies of water being tainted, increasing human-driven extinction, the several genocides over the last century, nuclear warfare, biological warfare, America's explosive prison population (380,000 in 1975, well over two million now, the highest rate of incarceration in the world, with black people eight times as likely to be jailed than white people, meaning that one in three black people will be imprisoned at some point), rising oceans, disappearing islands, destruction of coral reefs, nuclear power with its essentially permanently destructive/dangerous fuel/by-products, globally increasing factory farming, globally increasing corporate genetically modified monocrop chemical farming, vanishing rainforests, profound overfishing and the advent of mountaintop removal mining, among other things, the New York Times, and I'm sure a ton of other capitalist cheerleaders, can still push a book whose essential message is that for the rest of this century, “Prosperity spreads, technology progresses, poverty declines, disease retreats, fecundity falls, happiness increases, violence atrophies, freedom grows, knowledge flourishes, the environment improves and wilderness expands.”

Wow. Wow, wow wow.

Prosperity is a problem (exploitation of resources in fundamentally unsustainable ways, taking way more than we need, living in artificial ways, producing nearly unimaginable amounts of waste, the necessary disparities in wealth that one must have for prosperity - workers, servants, beneficiaries, ruling class, etc.), and technology is THE problem.

Technology is how we got here. FUCK. All of this ever-"advancing" technology (more specifically, human use of it) is the source of this destruction, this pollution, this annihilation, and all the things that will come that we do not yet understand - the unforeseen consequences of our "intelligence."

Technology doesn't really solve anything, except how to best fuck something up.

What a great message for the today's world - "go on with whatever you're doing, everything will be more than fine, it will be great." This is so fucked. Have fun with that.

Relying on the argument that "people have always said that the world is going to shit and it hasn't" is majorly flawed in two primary ways - first, they were right. Today's planet is in remarkably worse shape than anyone could have predicted even a hundred years ago. Secondly, people predicting that we are fucked (I am one of them) have the privilege (an ironic term, to be sure) of looking back and ahead in a time that is demonstrably worse, especially in an ecological sense, than at any point in human history. And we are only accelerating from this point, as we have been for several hundred years, most markedly since World War II.

I fucking hope I am wrong. I really do. I want to be wrong about this, but I feel it deep within that I am not. We are fucked, and we are taking out a whole lot more with us on our way out.

Pigs in New York are still racist

As per their training. This story is so fucking old. No matter how many people get shot, beaten down, maimed, violated and locked up for bullshit like selling weed, it doesn't change in meaningful ways. Years and years of the same bullshit for being black and Puerto Rican in New York:

Blacks and Latinos were nine times as likely as whites to be stopped by the police in New York City in 2009, but, once stopped, were no more likely to be arrested.

NINE TIMES. But arrested just the same. They carry the suspicion of being guilty. The police explain it on their reports as looking guilty. Not kidding.

Of the reasons listed by the police for conducting the stops, one of those least commonly cited was the claim that the person fit the description of a suspect. The most common reason listed by the police was a category known as “furtive movements.”

Do you know what "furtive moments" means? Furtive means characterized by stealth or looking shifty. So they got stopped and frisked for looking like they were up to something. Well here's a fact - they were up to something. They were trying to avoid getting hassled by some pig fuck. Cause they know it's coming. It's a self-perpetuating cycle.

The pigs say, "you look guilty of something, so we will hassle you." The people say, "why are you hassling us, we didn't do shit." The people become quickly accustomed to getting fucked with by pigs on the streets, in businesses, in their homes, and on the subways, so they get anxious when the pigs come around, and look hyperaware, because they know they have a good chance (nine times the chance, as it turns out) of getting bothered and violated. Then the pigs use that awareness as a justification to bother them. I'm reminded of Tupac at this time - "Instead of a war on poverty, they've got a war on drugs so they police can bother me." So fucking true.

Here's some more bullshit about how they generally don't even claim to have a legitimate justification for fucking with someone:

In examining the stated reasons for the stops, as checked off by police officers on department forms, the center found that about 15 percent of the stops last year cited “fits a relevant description.” Officers can check off more than one reason, but in nearly half the stops, the category called “furtive movements” was cited. Nearly 30 percent of stops cited a category called “casing a victim or location”; nearly 19 percent cited a catchall category of “other."

Read what the crazy pigs try to sell us about their martial law-style tactics:

The police officials argue that the widespread use of the tactic has forced criminals to keep their guns at home and allowed the department to bank thousands of names in a database for detectives to mine in fighting future crimes.

Forced criminals to keep their guns at home? If you are going out with the intent to commit a crime with a gun, you are going to take your fucking gun. You got your mind on whatever the hell it is you are about to do, not whether or not a pig is going to frisk you. Also, FIGHTING FUTURE CRIMES. Do you understand how troubling that is? They plan on "fighting future crimes" by stopping random people on the street now who look guilty of something. Holy shit.

This is probably the best part. Although they stopped and frisked only 53,000 white people compared to the 490,000 black and Latino people last year, white people were more likely to be arrested and have weapons on them.

But once stopped, the arrest rates were virtually the same. Whites were arrested in slightly more than 6 percent of the stops, blacks in slightly fewer than 6 percent. About 1.7 percent of whites who were stopped were found to have a weapon, while 1.1 percent of blacks were found with one.

Also, there is nothing wrong with having a weapon on you. Self-defense is not a violent act.

I know that people rush to defend this crap. People love pigs, people love the government, or at least the idea of it and its form and ideology, and don't want to talk about how fundamentally flawed the economic and social systems they built are. They say really short-sighted things like "black people commit more crimes," a statement which is problematic for a variety of reasons, such as what counts as "crime" (selling drugs does, gambling people's mortgages does not - that actually gets you rewarded) and the fact that it completely ignores why poor people commit crimes.

After all, that is the issue at hand - poor people who happen to be black committing crimes. Stop looking at them as black for a minute and look at them as poor people in deliberately devastated neighborhoods who have virtually no opportunities for escape. What else should they do when they are bombarded with same brainwash consumer shit as everyone else, starve? Welfare gets cut and nothing pops up in its place. Schools are shit, jobs are either non-existent or psychologically destructive. So what do you do? Rob and sell drugs. Gotta get it however you can. Survival of the fittest, as they've always told us.

Policing addresses none of this. It really only makes it worse. Hassle people, which makes them angrier, more resentful, more alienated and even less interested in trying to join contemporary society. Then you send them to jail, where they learn to get along through violence and vice. It fucks you up invariably, and if you stay long enough, you will be completely unable to get by once you are back out. You have shitty prospects for employment (unless, of course, you are a white-collar criminal, whose individual crimes are far more destructive in terms of number of people affected and severity than any mass murderer) and so you go back to street crime. This is not a good answer to any problem.

Overwhelmingly, poor people commit property crimes and crimes in the pursuit of money because they have none and perceive no other way of readily getting it. That will continue to happen as long as their situations do not change. And changing their situations will have to come from outside, because the deep segregation they face (yes, still, today) precludes people in ghettoes from doing a whole lot themselves. They are isolated and on the lowest end of the political power spectrum. Organize them, and you pay. See what the FBI and local pigs did to the Black Panthers for reference.

What's the overall lesson then? Don't be fooled by ideas of change and progress. Just because a whole lot of different kinds of people collude to obscure ugly realities from us doesn't mean that they aren't there.

Vegan power

Literally. Scott Jurek is an ultramarathoner and will run your ass into the ground, well over a hundred miles at a clip. He also eats only plants. And, he is thirty-six years old. Hell yes Scott. He is a monster:

By 1999, he ran his first Western States 100. Formally called the Western States Endurance Run, this is an up-and-down course in the Sierra Nevada with a cutoff time of 30 hours. He set the course record in 2004, 15 hours 36 minutes; won the race seven consecutive times; and in 2005, two weeks after finishing, ran and won the Badwater Ultramarathon, a 135-mile race that begins in Death Valley and ends halfway up Mount Whitney.

So the next time someone tells you that you can't be "healthy" or get appropriate nourishment from a vegan diet, kick them in the shins, then tell them about Scott Jurek.

Knock knock

Who's there?

Concussion grenade.

Concussion grenade who?

Concussion grenade I was just kidding about the knock and BANG now your small child is dead.

Pigs shoot and kill seven year old girl

So, as I was saying the other day about pigs controlling black people:

I don't get it. The police say they didn't do anything wrong. Very confusing.

I did some more reading, and it turns out that a gun shot seven-year-old Aiyana Jones:

"Exactly what happened next is a matter still under investigation, but it appears the officer and the woman had some level of physical contact," [Assistant pig fuck Police Chief Ralph] Godbee said in a statement Sunday. "At about this time, the officer's weapon discharged one round which, tragically, struck 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley Jones in the neck/head area."

I guess the gun wasn't trained properly and went buck wild in all that excitement.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the gun may have gone a little crazy in the wrong house:

"No murder suspect was found in Aiyana's house," [Geoffrey] Fieger [an attorney representing the little girl's family] said in Monday's interview. "In fact, there's an upstairs apartment next door which the police did not have a search warrant for and that is where he surrendered, they went into that house too. But he was not in Aiyana's house."

Fieger claims to have a videotape of the entire event, as it was part of some brainwash cop shit show called "The First 48" for the cable channel A&E. The pigs confiscated the video, but he claims to have received a copy:

"Of course, I have seen the videotape and the videotape vividly portrays the fact that a percussion grenade device was thrown through the front window and a shot was fired immediately from the outside from the porch," he said.

Oh, pigs. When will they learn. It's a trick question, cause the answer is THEY ALREADY HAVE. They can do whatever they want and generally get away with it. "Oops."

I hope that he has the tape and those pigs get nailed to the wall with it.

That same big pig who told us about the gun shooting Aiyana also expressed his heartfelt lack of an apology to her family:

Godbee, in his statement Sunday, said he wished to "express to the family of Aiyana Jones the profound sorrow that we feel within the Detroit Police Department and throughout this community. We know that no words can do anything to take away the pain you are feeling at this time."

Words? I can think of a few:

• "The person who shot her will be forced to commit suicide."
• "This has shaken the people in the city government to their respective cores, and as a result, we now plan to reexamine how we go about policing this city, as well as administering its laws."
• "We will prosecute everyone involved in this case, from the judge who approved a bullshit search warrant that allowed the police to knock with a concussion grenade, to the reconnaissance person who got the apartment wrong to the pig who shot her."

Since none of those words will be forthcoming, they could try actually DOING something about it, like stop running around and playing war. Stop giving us cause to call you "pigs." Assholes.

Pigs

Fact.

Fuck Nazi Sympathy

I've been thinking about this subject since yesterday and I figured I'd post a few things.

The first is the lyrics to Aus Rotten's song "Fuck Nazi Sympathy." These are beautiful for their simplicity and truth:

Don't respect something that has no respect

Don't sympathize with something that has no sympathy

Don't understand something that has no understanding

Don't give them freedom cause they're not gonna give you yours

Fuck Nazi sympathy

Next is a quote from Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) on his extensive work with the black freedom struggle in the 1960s, from being a Freedom Rider to his work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Council, particularly working in Mississippi's Freedom Summer and organizing the oppressed, exploited and terrorized black population of Alabama's Lowndes County (known as "Bloody Lowndes" for the astonishing levels of violence that white people maintained to keep black people down and afraid), to his fresh-out-of-jail for the twenty-seventh time (really) proclamation of Black Power during James Meredith's March against Fear:

I never saw my responsibility to be the moral and spiritual reclamation of some racist thug. I would settle for changing his behavior, period. Moral suasion, legal proscription, or even force of arms, whatever it ultimately took, that's what I'd be for.

It's so right on. I don't romanticize or relish the idea of violence. But these Nazis, that's how they make it. You have to meet force with force. And in this case, you have to prevent their highly likely future applications of force (once again, these are people who embrace the Holocaust, there is nothing peaceful or rhetorical about them) with force. Unfortunate but real.

Arrested, facing serious charges for beating down Nazis

This is so fucked up and backwards, but expected: pigs defending white power. Some people involved with a San Francisco protest against Arizona's new anti-immigration legislation got into a fight with Nazis who call themselves the Bay Area Nationalist Anarchists. "Nationalist anarchist" makes no sense, seeing as the fundamental tenet of anarchism opposes nation states. Anyway, they're Nazis. They talk some bullshit about "self determination" and their "tribes," describing themselves as "white separatists." Fucking Nazis. Unfortunately, two of the people who attacked them are up on felony charges. Even more unfortunately, the Nazis weren't hurt very badly.

Nazis have no rights. They surrendered them when they embraced an ideology of extermination and wanton violence. Their very existence is predicated on intimidation of anyone not like them. There should be no confusion about the fact that anyone involved with white power, however they try to rename it, favors the annihilation of all people of color, homosexuals and any other "deviants." See the Holocaust for reference.

Fuck them. And not just in principle. These people need to be kicked off the streets wherever and whenever they appear. They can use their "free speech" as much as they want, but the minute their speech turns to intimidating and wiping out people for being born, anyone threatened by such speech (which is always linked to action) has the right to respond in any way she or he sees fit. I do not give a fuck about what people say is in the Constitution or what the Supreme Court rules - NO ONE has a protected right to build movements that threaten the livelihood, well-being or existence of any ethnic, religious, sexual or racial group based purely on the fact that the people are of that ethnic, religious, sexual or racial group.

Their ideology has nothing to do with defense. In fact, it is extremely on the offensive - can anyone really deny that all people of color have always been oppressed here and that white people have ALWAYS been in charge in this country? Fucking idiots, the government has already done this work for you. YOU ARE THE MAN, WHITE MAN. But it's not enough for a lot of them. Assholes don't even realize there could not be an America without racial minorities. Black people were the fundamental labor force for centuries - they built the country, with their hands and labor. And now, "illegal" immigrants do all the dirty work so you can have cheap shit food at Olive Garden and get your lawn cut. Finally, and most important to people of this persuasion - THE ONLY REASON YOU HAVE THE BENEFITS OF WHAT IT MEANS TO BE WHITE IS BECAUSE FOR FIVE HUNDRED YEARS, EUROPEANS AND EUROPEAN AMERICANS HAVE DILIGENTLY CONSTRUCTED AN OPPOSITIONAL, UNDESIRABLE DEFINITION OF BLACK. Fucking shit.

So anyway, yes, fuck these people, each and every one. Mace, tire irons, ice picks, shovels, knives, guns, pitchforks, letter openers, spoons, axes, rocks, whatever it takes.

As Aus Rotten so elegantly put it, "Don't sympathize with something that has no sympathy. Fuck Nazi sympathy."