Excerpt of an email I just received for the 3rd time from an... indymedia-related video person in Denver:

Become the Media!

Get your very own Colorado Indymedia press badge,
plus a shocking array of information on events,
maps to find actions, indymedia projects, workspaces, and parties.

oh yeah. dude. especially those parties.

sigh.

• 10:51 watching a DIY Days panel video #
• 13:10 uploading new fotos from new mexico trip to flickr: www.flickr.com/photos/steev #
• 17:25 dealing with a cascade of afternoon emails! not spam, even! #
• 17:31 amazed how many people misspell the word "yay" - or are they really trying to say "yeah," and misspelling that? hmm. #

I've been working hard on Death and Taxes, including some stop-motion animation to help illustrate the connection between our money and war. Playing with toy soldiers, plastic tanks, stacks of dollar bills and piles of coins. The results so far are pretty cool. Tons of work to go though. Still trying to get the whole film done by early November, but we'll see.

A cowardly troll from Phoenix took exception to my characterization of the Tucson Weekly on my blog post the other day, indicating that I was a whore because I've availed myself (or more accurately my causes) of publicity thanks to the Weekly and yet I complain about that same publication.

I'm pretty much done sparring with this jerk but he/she sparked an interesting train of thought that I want to follow for a moment. What exactly is a whore? Besides the literal, sex-work definition, I assume that what was meant is a signification like this one from Wiktionary: "A person who is unscrupulous, especially one who compromises their principles for gain."

Well, as I've often observed, pretty much nobody is pure. In this un-free society where everyone is locked in a web of greed and fear and necessity, constructed by capitalism and fascism, pretty much the only people not compromising their principles for gain are those that have none. For instance, by that definition,

Though it's now about a month old, there's an excellent article in the New Republic about what's wrong with the border wall. For a right-of-center magazine, they do a good job of laying out all the important points, and conclude that "Most experts on all sides of the immigration debate agree that the border fence is a political band-aid for a larger policy problem." Another great quote at the end that they cite, from Cecilia Mu

A couple weeks ago I posted about a local struggle between the forces of grassroots human rights and the forces of corporate-media-backed racist/sexist/xenophobic hatred. This is just a quick update to mention a couple things: first, recall that hate-jock "Jon Justice" made some horrid little videos in which he molests a giant pinata/sexdoll of Garcia. The schmuck took down the videos after he realized how damning they were, then his employer got YouTube to remove the re-posts that Derechos re-uploaded to YouTube, on copyright grounds. Well, now they've reposted them again to a different site that apparently isn't caving in as easily to such specious legal threats. The 2 vids are here and here. They are also embedded on a post from local progressive blog, "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion." In fact they seem to be reposted so many places that Journal Broadcasting will probably have trouble censoring them all. There are also transcripts of the 2 videos and other information on the Derechos site.

I also wanted to point out a few other references to this conflict, like a recent post on Feministing that mentions the situation, and cites some great feminist bloggers' analyses of the DJ's hate acts, saying it better than I could. And the Phoenix New Times' Feathered Bastard, known for regularly frying Sheriff Arpaio and other local facists, blogged expertly about it. I like how he refers to the hate-jock as "Jon Just-An-Ass."

Also worth griping about is the regularly worthless (except for the comics and Savage Love column) Tucson Weekly's coverage of the story - they mentioned it twice the week it started (in the editor's first-page babblings, and longer blurb further in), and once again the next week, and in all 3 instances, 3 different writers all used the phrase "paraded around" to describe what Garcia did with the Arpaio pinata head. The Weekly's take on the story is somewhat neutral, not really taking sides too strongly, their point being that everyone involved was just being kinda silly (oh except that John Hoffman, another schmuck from the talk-radio world who apparently works with the Weekly's racist asshole-in-residence Tom Danehy, said in his "guest commentary" that Garcia was being "tyrannical." Huh?). Besides the use at all of the rather un-objective, connotative term "paraded" you have to wonder about the repeated use of that exact same wording. Was there a staff meeting at the Weekly where dumbshit editor Jimmy Boegle told everyone to always use "paraded"? Were other words like "walked," "marched" or "ambled" tried by the other 2 writers and discarded by the proofreaders as being not inflammatory enough (I've seen the video they keep mentioning and I think any of those other terms, amongst a host of others, would be accurate to describe Garcia's actions)?

Or maybe all the authors associated with the rag are just lazy? Well, at any rate that's 4 more pieces of evidence (3 for each instance and 1 for the repetition) in my ongoing case that the Tucson Weekly is a hopeless piece of trash.

Well, folks, in case anyone still doubted it, the new border wall planned for Texas is literally becoming a reality as of a couple weeks ago. The physical start of this sad and ludicrous atrocity (which, even more saddening, is already pretty much done here in Arizona) is in Mission, Texas. Tireless border activist Jay Castro has put up a bunch of photos from there, of a first protest against this first bit of Texas wall. He also has an impressive collection of shots from all over the rest of the border.
Apparently there's also construction started in Granjeno, Texas on the combination levee-wall project, the corrupt deal that Hidalgo county made with DHS.

Tucson author Charles Bowden, expert on the border, the drug war, and the southwest environment, has been busy lately - He's coming out with a new book called "Exodus," about the immigration situation, and an article in Orion magazine is a sort of abstract of it, apparently (the same title also graced an article he did for Mother Jones a couple of years ago that touched on a lot of similar points). His basic point, in a word, is that immigration is unstoppable (which reminds me of a quote from someone interviewed in yet another documentary about the border wall, the trailer of which I viewed yesterday: "imagine someone built a wall between you and your bank. You'd find a way to get to your money.").

He also appears in, of all places, the latest issue of GQ, where he summarizes the recent drastic upswing of violence, from horrible to hellish, in Ciudad Juarez, thanks to Presidente Calderon's new, bloody, but useless war on Mexico's narcos.

The killings have the cold feeling of butchery in a slaughterhouse, and they are everywhere: done in broad daylight, on streets, in markets, at homes, and even in Wal-Mart parking lots. Women, children, guilty, innocent

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Unconventional Denver, the group of radical activists that has been organizing protests against the Democratic National Convention this September, has issued an offer, which contains the best idea I've heard of in a while regarding this upcoming act of political theater and associated protest theater: They're offering to "call off all protests during the convention if the city, federal government and the DNC agree to redirect the current $50 million earmarked for heightened security during the DNC and invest it in Denver communities."

What a great concept! Better yet, how about calling it off ANYWAY, and using the money you WOULD have spent on bus tickets, gasoline, spraypaint, sign materials, pot, beer, cool activist t-shirts, black hoodies, black bandanas, etc, and funnel THAT cash into Denver communities, and/or your own communities if you plan on travelling to Denver from afar?

And wouldn't it be hilarious if all the riot pigs showed up armed for a superrumble, and the streets were completely empty? Wouldn't the city feel stupid for spending that 50 million?

But no, you'll probably go ahead and run around the streets chanting and yelling and dancing and sewing new patches on your Carharts, and give our overlords all a reason to make people feel so glad that they spent that money on more guns and tear gas. A win-win situation: the rulers get to point at another excuse for strict security measures, and y'all get another huge summer street party and formative experience.

Rock on, everyone!

A local shock-jock bigot, Jon "Justice," from local hate radio station 104.1 "The Truth" has started a feud with Isabel Garcia and Derechos Humanos, an immigrant-rights group in Tucson that took part in a big protest against racist, fascist sheriff Joe Arpaio a couple of weeks ago when Arpaio appeared at a book signing.

(in)Justice has initiated a campaign to get Garcia fired from her day job as Pima County defender. In turn, Derechos has started a grassroots effort to get advertisers to drop their support of the radio station. The pendejo DJ even did a horrible video in which he harassed and molested an effigy of Garcia on camera - it's so offensive I can't even watch the whole thing. Then he tried to hide this evidence by taking the video offline, but Derechos managed to save it and repost it.

Derechos asks everyone to continue the so-far quite successful fight to notify advertisers of the hate-filled broadcasts that their advertising dollars are supporting.

A point was made by Mr. injustice in a later video that his antics with the Isabel Garcia pinata were the same as what the kids at Barnes and Noble did with the pinata of Arpaio, but this is simply not true. The simple and ritualized beating-in-effigy of a public figure, a brutal cop who has terrorized, killed and tortured hundreds of people, is perhaps admittedly a little crass and a poor choice of tactics, but that kind of demonstration is is an accepted and somewhat traditional form of protest, quite different from the creepy and sexualized symbolic abuse of a latina woman that this white racist DJ has performed for his racist gabacho fans. And despite his denials, he understood this, too late, that this was the case, and tried to hide it. He must be punished.