july 2014 rabble rouser of the month ... and more ...

eric garner, staten island

photo: New York Daily News

east coast, big city cops don’t exactly have the best reputations when it comes to human rights. in the late 1990s particularly, NYPD was on a roll with the broom handle torture of abner louima, the 41-bullet death of unarmed amadou diallo, or the abuses of women in central park while the cops watched.  if you wonder how NYPD could ever top those horrific acts, consider that it may be because they keep trying. 
      eric garner was wanted for selling single, untaxed cigarettes. the guy was 43-years-old, with four kids. his neighbors in staten island refer to him as a big happy teddy bear. and given his reaction at the beginning of the melee, the cops had numerous previous experiences with him.  it seemed, however, that the cops were intimidated by eric becoming upet that they were harrassing him again. so, they strangled him to death on the sidewalk. 
      unless someone is trying to kill the cops, cops don’t need to come with rediculous force.  unless the guy is jack the ripper, they really don’t need to take such a dangerous person off the streets. while it may be wrong to sell cigarettes illegally, it is not a capital crime. and if it were an executable offense, the undercover cops in the video are not the judge, jury, and executioner.  how much worse do problems like gang activity and anti-american sentiment exacerbate over generations when four kids grow up without a dad because he did the horrific crime of selling cigarettes?  those kids should rightly grow up pissed off and want to seek vengeance, in the same way that police actions overseas create “terrorists”.  you can only lead by example and as long as the NYPD puts on the aggressive monster costume, they will only be creating aggressive monsters and opposition to them.
     also, ramsey orta, the man who took the video of the incident, is facing all kinds of trouble as a backlash and should get some credit for his own rabble rousing duty of filming police in action, which in and of itself is illegal for some reason. when will people learn to stop trying to control other people?  humans have proven throughout all history that they do not wish to be controlled. but throughout all history, people also show a propensity to let power go to their heads. people are not allowed to feel irritated or harrassed by that? they also are not allowed to record videos of it happening?  the incident was ruled a homicide after all.  why shouldn't people be able to have evidence to prove that?

runners up

flags of brooklyn.

in brooklyn, some mystery person performed a daredevil feat of pretty legendary proportions. in the middle of the night, they climbed the brooklyn bridge and then climbed various flagpoles to paint the flags to white. this harkens me back a couple months, when a teenager had a runner-up status for getting past four layers of security to climb to the top of the world trade center in the middle of the night.

obviously, there are many conservatives who want to teach a stern lesson to various bad boys for comitting these vandal acts. however, something much greater needs to be considered. if a teenage boy or other unknown miscreant can get past the world-class security to ascend to the tops of some of the most hallowed landmarks of modern christianity, then how safe are we as americans on the whole? even after knowing from years of experience that people were trying to blow up the world trade centers in the first place, it still ultimately happened anyway.

in time, we are fairly defenseless. how competent is the united states at stopping an aggressor? only time will tell, but based on these minor actions of relative hilarity, i would suppose that time is not too far away. the evidence here suggests we have very poor security forces for these new towers of babel. if we can’t protect these pillars of the american psyche, what can we protect? i am going to go just a short step out on a limb to suggest the main thing protecting us from foreign invaders is our military technology. however, our access to that technology is dependent on our ability to pay the corporations that produce the bigger and better weapons of mass destruction. and the united states is not exactly doing well currently in the world’s marketplace.


what happens when the money finally runs out? our government is going to have a hard time keeping these obscene military contracts and the corporations will move on to the next highest bidder. then how much will we be able to defend the nation? these actions by random miscreants just trying to prove something have proved something. when we run out of money, we’re fucked because we can’t even protect ourselves with money.


anon_0x03

deface page of the British National Party (BNP) website

a computer hacker has never won a rabble rouser award, though their actions are pretty audacious, take some knowledge and skill and can certainly be used for a greater good. the kenyan government has often been victim of cyber grafiti. it’s just that very few westerners have even known because by and large westerners don’t know or care what goes on in africa. anon_0x03 hacked into various government websites and banking websites to expose the massive amounts of corruption going on in the country. conservatives still have to villanize the hacker (because they always need a bad guy). but there are three relatively easy ways to stop such a villianous action from occurring. 1. the kenyan government can invest in a modern network that can’t be hacked into so easily. 2. they can do a better job of rumor control or 3. perhaps the most basic and simplest way, they can stop the corruption. they can stop ripping off the country to stuff money into accounts of the richest military leaders.

when you piss off the people with relatively little means to do anything about it, who also have nothing much less to lose, you set yourself up to victimized. when you piss off the majority of the people by stealing all the resources, you set yourself up for a war in which you are heavily outnumbered by desperate people. your chances to succeed in such a scenario are not great. one would think that someone smart enough to have control of a state would have been smart enough to have figured that out long ago. as with the last nominee, quit letting miscreants underscore your vulnerabilty. and don’t make them out to look like the bad guy when they are only defending themselves against your bad actions.


threaten, la grande

from Threaten's facebook page 

i really love to go for the local guys, i love to support rock and rollers, and especially love the feeling of revival in the metal world. all those things combined would have made threaten an automatic winner in most other months. but the story of eric garner was too upetting. the fate of our livelihoods is too concerneing. there were simply too many injustices to keep up with this month of july. but for the person that wants a more light-hearted story, try checking out the union county fair’s talent show and the lack of an appearance by threaten.

the fair didn’t want threaten to perform, so they apparently referenced an alleged obscure state rule that disallows drums. could the band have played without their drummer? perhaps they would have met the rule and been allowed to perform, though my feeling is that another convenient rule would have been found to stop the proceedings. realistically, though, threaten could not play without their drummer.

the first thing to consider is how integral the drummer is to metal. in most genres of music the drummer is a dispensible position. indie rockers strangled darlings have never had a drummer. idaho’s longest running act, hillfolk noir replaced their drummer with a suitcase years ago. most any country band has the drums so low in the mix that the drummer is basically only used for show. in metal, and often in punk, the scenario is completely different. the timing patterns are faster and take a rare breed of specimen. there would have been no metallica without lars ulrich, just like slayer is a joke without dave lombardo. very similarly, threaten’s drummer is the heart of the band. so, no, they can’t go on stage without their drummer.

but the more important thing to consider, why the hell can’t you have a drummer in a talent show? playing drums doesn’t take talent? drums are too loud? tey take too much to set up? if this were winter time, does that mean a little kid couldn’t play “little drummer boy”? whatever the answers, i expect only an evasion of the fact that threaten kicks too much ass and scares the fair committee. if the talent show would’ve given that answer, maybe threaten would have won this month’s award in the same way that sun blood stories won february’s award.

what threaten will win is a blue ribbon. since my oregano won a blue ribbon at the same fair, i am going to pass that award on to threaten for their exclusion from the fair. besides, i have so much oregano that i can’t use, they can come piss on it if they want.


rabble rouser hall of fame


sharpeville massacre (march 21, 1960)

Photo: Peter Magubane 

south africa’s apartheid years rivaled any nation’s discrimination practices. for at least a couple hundred years, internal passports were required for black people to move about the country. white people were the only who were allowed to be employers, white people were the only who were allowed to live in urban areas. discrimination extended to pretty much any non-white person. legislation from the 1920’s and 1940’s furthered the use of pass laws, until the frequent and deadly anti-pass campaigns of the african national congress and pan african congress were openly and actively defiant in the 1950s. on march 21, 1960, 5000-7000 black protesters went to the police station to offer themselves up for arrest without their passes. with only about 20 police on duty, reinforcement officers came, but so did more protestors. some say the crowd turned hostile. the police were armed with rifles and machine guns, the crowd with rocks and fists. the scenario favored the police, as they were able to kill 69 people in total.

huge protests resulted and south africa sustained a pretty damaged reputation in the human rights world. by the next year, south africa departed the commonwealth of nations, as it would be the beginning of a long end of discrimination practices in south africa. the entire pass system was finally repealed in 1986 and apartheid offically ended in 1994. in 1996, president mandela chose sharpeville as the site for signing the constitution of south africa. today, march 21 today is a public holiday in honor of human rights, as well as unesco’s international day to end racial discrimination.











r.i.p :: johnny winter






jimi & johnny at thescene club, 1969





Johnny winter was an abino twin of edgar winters. the two grew up in middle class america with the normal clean country music for white people, until johnny heard the radio that the family maid listened to. with his albino condition, johnny found himself on similar margins of society as black people. he found more to relate to with black culture and black music. he played a crazy fast fiery blues guitar, which transfixed so many people that johnny became the first white person inducted into the blues hall of fame. he got into rolling stone magazine, and then onto stage at woodstock. producing albums for muddy waters, johnny winters was a walking legend at a young age and lived out many of the problems associated with success. crafty as ever at the end, johnny winter has a new album that was scheduled to be relased in early september, “step back”