My Alma Mater Is A Banana Republic

This is a recent op-ed I wrote for the Eagle. They declined to publish it, because they're worried about more political interference from the Student Senate, but I figured I'd post it here because it's important to push back against the hypocritical fascist bastards trying to shut down free speech on campus.

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution reads, in part, that "the freedom of the press shall not be abridged." The unifying principle of patriotism in America is not race, nor allegiance to a monarch, but allegiance to the Constitution; this is judged so important to the body politic that the military (including ROTC officers) are made to swear to "uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States." Thomas Jefferson, who knew a thing or two about the Constitution, famously said "I would rather newspapers without government than a government without newspapers."

Chadron State College's experience with both has proven the sage of Monticello correct once again, as the People In Charge try anew to forget that the Constitution was forged to bind them.

There was a letter to the editor last week regarding the propriety of a comic that joked about using Eaglecards to take drugs. The people whose job it is to promote Chadron State to prospective students got upset at this article, because apparently a tongue-in-cheek joke that upsets the authorities is going to destroy our enrollment figures. As we all know, the students thinking about coming here are going to see a joke about drugs, clutch their pearls and drop into a fainting couch.

Scottish independence.

My ancestral homeland is debating independence. Here's a Scottish-American historian's take on the whole thing.

The eve of two great independence referendums are upon the British. There is the referendum of Scottish independence, set for September 2014; and there is the as-yet-undetermined referendum on European Union membership promised by Prime Minister David Cameron in the event of a Conservative majority after the 2015 elections. Both promise to dramatically remake the body politic of the United Kingdom.

For the layman, a couple basic premises need to be established. First off, the United Kingdom is scarcely older than the United States, having been born of a union of England and Scotland in 1707. Its chief purpose for England seems to have been the facilitation of the pre-existing worldwide English Empire, and for Scotland the creation by proxy of a Scottish Empire that failed to take hold in the jungles of Darien. It should be added that Scotland was bribed and cajoled into the Union; the English actively opposed the Darien scheme and stood by as Scots, fellow-subjects of their King, were harried and killed by the Spanish. In an era where overseas empire was the only guarantee of safety in Europe, England made Union the only way to empire for the Scottish.

The Legacy of the Region 23 Complex and Wellnitz Fires.

A full day of my life later, not counting the interview times.

Thanks for everyone who helped out, one way or another!

Moments Like These Make Facebook Kinda Worth It

The last post wasn't able to post because she blocked me after that. ^_^

Everyone should see just what Wall Street really thinks of us.

You should read this.

I don't have much to add; the article speaks for itself. The same dudes that wrecked the world economy are making fun of their victims. It's unbridled, psychopathic cruelty, and it's just met its bane - sunlight.

I really hope this story takes off. It needs to.

Human Sacrifice to the Gods.

(WARNING: the pictures and text below get fairly graphic.)

A few months ago, my friend Tom made a post comparing the modern neoliberal system to the Aztec system of ritual human sacrifice. I don't know why, but last night I had a dream about it. It was troubling, and I couldn't sleep past 7:00 AM on a weekend when normally I sleep in 'til noon. I've been up since then, writing and drawing what comes below.

1. I dreamed I was a Tlaxcalan warrior. We fought against the Aztec Empire, and were defeated.

We were marched to Tenochtitlan, where their priests did worship to the gods. Sweet-smelling smoke billowed from the altars atop the great temples.

We will be sacrificed, and our bodies fed to Huitzilopochtli in the spirit world so that the end of the earth will be delayed. The people cheer, for they will taste our bodies in this world, and they hunger for it - they need the meat we will provide. We are foreigners to them, and defeated in battle. It is right and just that this should happen to us.

Brought him home.

Pete Seeger's dead.

He lived a great life, dying at the ripe age of 94. He committed the greatest "sin" an American ever could - being a Communist during the Cold War - and nevertheless founded folk rock and dedicated it to the antiwar movement. He was a strongly ethical person, dedicated to democracy in its most practical sense - every concert he played was one big singalong, and he fought inequality everywhere he saw it - and he finally got the recognition he deserved.

Chadron's got a relatively huge folk scene, given the population, and pretty much nothing that gets played in that would have been possible without Pete Seeger's life and work. With Pete Seeger, there's no Bob Dylan; no Kingston Trio; no Peter, Paul and Mary.

So today, I'll be listening to this song:



And this song:



And this song:



And especially this song that I was singing with some grandmothers as we marched to Student Center last week:



Rest in peace, Pete Seeger.

Real progress on homelessness, from the last damn people you'd expect.

I've tried not to be too political on this blog. Couldn't really avoid it with the government shutdown, but all my previous blogs were mainly political, and I wanted to break away from that. But this issue is near and dear to my heart; I've seen homelessness up close and personal. Some of the closest people to me were homeless once, and the general hatred and indifference of society to their plight fills me with sadness and rage all at once, so I decided to post about it.

Anyway.

Utah is the reddest state in the nation. Redder than Texas. Redder even than Nebraska or Oklahoma. It is more Republican than a white guy in a Duck Dynasty shirt taking off his gun holster to have sex with his wife on a bed made of money. Utah is so Republican that Mexicans not only don't want to immigrate there, but insisted we take it with us along with Texas and California. Utah is more Republican than saying hi to a cop on your way to a stockholders' meeting. Utah is more Republican than Sarah Palin saying anything.

Point is, you would not expect Utah to be the first state to solve homelessness. And yet.

MLK Day 'n' such.

I took part in the MLK march this year.

It's an annual thing that happens every year on MLK Day. A bunch of students and professors gather at Common Cents and then march down Main Street. The po-po show blocks off the street and escorts the marchers. Some dude with a truck blasts an MLK speech out of hugeass speakers at the head of the march, and people are given signs with quotes from the civil rights movement to hold.

I've never partaken before this year, and this year I showed up because one of my professors asked. I'm certainly not against the idea; it just seems, well, strictly educational. People take part in it to learn a tiny bit of what it would've been like back then, to assert their liberal bona-fides. And that's fine, as far as that goes - with all the oppressive anti-civil-rights shit that's transpired lately, we can't educate people about the importance of civil rights enough - but it's not an actual protest, y'know?

I was tempted to show up with a sign that read "VOTER ID = JIM CROW" but I'm glad I didn't - as soon as I showed up, my impressions
were confirmed. This isn't an actual protest, it's street theater. But even as street theater, it was all right.

First off, it's an event where you get a whole bunch of people of every race and background marching in support of civil rights in a very red area. That's better than nothing. As we marched, people got out of their houses to watch us, and there were photographers on hand.

Which brings me to the next thing - one of the dudes ahead of me was holding a sign made of wood. It was a pretty big sign. It was therefore pretty heavy, and in the ridiculous wind we had today, it was unwieldy too. I offered to help him hold it after one of his friends helped for a bit and then gave up. And together, we marched it from about Sixth Street to the Student Center. The pic is of us holding it against a strong wind.

A picture I saw on /b/...

At first blush, it's pretty disrespectful; making duckface at the Vietnam Memorial?

But look at it a bit longer, and it kinda sums up the differences between the generation before mine and the generation after it. Some of those names on that wall weren't much older than her. They were compelled by their government to fight and die half the world away. She's... well, not.

Which means, in a sense, that the world has become a better place, I think. An inevitable aspect of better circumstances is a lack of understanding of the worse circumstances that preceded it. This is why the older generation is always like "Well in my day, we didn't have X, Y and Z..." and the younger generation blows them off. The young don't understand (unless they're in a job like mine, or at least paid attention in history class) and the old are frustrated that their sacrifices have created spoiled brats that can't relate to them. It's mutual incomprehensibility... a generation gap.

It's always been thus, and always shall it ever be. The girl in the photo will probably grow up and have children, and they'll have children, and maybe one day her grandkids will do whatever childish fad is popular at the feet of the Afghan War Memorial, a war where she remembers some of her friends' friends died, and she'll be on the other side. But I can't hate her; what she does is probably out of blithe ignorance, not malice or unconcern.

BoingBoing's got a North Korean denunciation generator.

This thing is so cool!

PYONGYANG (KCNA) — Voicing its agreement with the angry will of the people, a special tribunal demanded that a stern judgment should be meted out to the anti-party, counter-revolutionary faction led by Stuart Richards.

The era and history will eternally record and never forget the shuddering crimes committed by Richards, the enemy of the party, revolution and people and heinous betrayer of the nation.

These crimes will be admitted to, following which hurrahs for the Workers’ Party of Korea and socialism will reverberate far and wide.

In a bid to rally a group of reactionaries to be used for toppling the leadership of the party and state, Richards let the undesirable and alien elements, including those who had been dismissed and relieved of their posts after being severely punished for disobeying the instructions of Kim Jong Il and kowtowing to him work in a department of the Central Committee of the WPK and organs under it in a crafty manner.

Richards committed such anti-party acts as systematically denying the party line and policies and its organizational will. These acts were a revelation of deliberate and sinister attempt to create extreme illusion and idolization of Richards by appearing as a special being who can overrule issues decided by the party or its line.

Richards is a hooligan bereft of any personality as a human being, does not know even elementary diplomatic etiquette and lacks diplomatic ability, and will find that their frantic attempts to stifle the DPRK will be brought to an end.

Mr. Lincoln, tear down this peculiar institution.

Sevenscore and ten years ago, our forefathers brought forth upon this continent a new birth of freedom, conceived in civil war, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great contest with the descendants of traitors, testing whether this freedom, or any freedom so conceived, can long endure. We are met on a day of remembrance, when the dead of Gettysburg were buried by a President who would be buried a few short years thereafter by a bullet fired against civil rights. These were not the last martyrs of freedom; the dead of Selma, of Birmingham, of every lynching and riot lie in hallowed repose with them, dead so that the great hope of our Constitution might live - our Constitution, a beautiful, bittersweet promise so long unfulfilled, but brought into the full light of glorious day by a long-suffering but unconquered people in the name of another martyred President.

We cannot hallow their graves, or sanctify their deaths, any more than their own actions have consecrated them. It is for us the living, instead, to dedicate ourselves to the struggle which they have so nobly advanced. It is ours to take from their last full measure of devotion the inspiration to stand guard around the tomb freedom's enemies have prepared it, and give it space to be born anew, phoenix-like - that all may be free from need and privation, that the riches of our continent may not be plundered and poisoned for the few, and that government by the people, for the people, and of the people shall not perish from the earth.

They want a campaign, and they're damn well gonna get one.

I'm going to be a candidate in the 2014 Student Senate elections.

I'm not eligible to run for President, and probably won't be eligible to run for Vice President. That's okay. What I want to do, I can do it from the Senate. And what I want to do is put an end to the corrupt government that currently dominates there.

Here's the situation. Last semester, Student Senate's Finance Committee was disbanded by fiat. Imagine President Obama having the power to disband the House Ways and Means Committee because he finally got sick of the Tea Party's shit. That's what happened here, except in this case the Tea Party was the good guys, and the guy doing the disbanding wasn't even elected. It was Aaron Prestwich, some hired CSC functionary, elected by nobody. The Eagle, which is our student newspaper, rightly kicked up a fuss and pointed out just how contrary this was to constitutional democracy.

Vote beyond reality.

It appears that Nebraska may not be completely lost to the forces of progressivism after all.

We've got constitutional amendments for both medical marijuana and full-on legalization on the ballot in 2014. And believe it or not, I'm pretty confident that they'll both pass.

Why?

Remember, this is an agricultural state. The legalization amendment mentions not just weed, but also hemp. This state could make a killing from hemp farming, especially east of the 100th meridian. Hemp can grow on marginal land that other crops can't, and is worth a whole pile of money. So basically, we could turn over land that's currently making us a couple bucks growing grass for cattle into hemp farms, and our ranchers-cum-farmers would see a pile of money as a result.

I think this issue has been detoxified enough to happen. It's actually bipartisan - a majority of both parties support it. It's happening across the border in Colorado already, and the world has failed to end. Legalizing it here would reduce the headache, and the cops probably wouldn't mind being able to switch their focus to destructive drugs, especially meth. And it's a great way to boost state revenues without raising taxes, especially the hemp provisions.

God yes. I can't advocate for the passage of these two bills enough. We need to make this a weed-friendly state ASAP. It's a foregone conclusion that marijuana will be legalized nationally within two decades. What's being decided right now is what states are going to play host to an established and legalized marijuana industry first. The way some of my friends talk about "California medical" and "Colorado medical" as high-grade, desirable commodities, they could be talking about "Nebraska kush" in future. When marijuana's legalized everywhere, if we're one of the first states to legalize it, we could have already established an export industry with a reputation for quality, the way Colorado and California already have. That doesn't just mean jollies for stoners - that means jobs and a future for our struggling rural areas.

Income inequality in America.

CNN has a really good article about it.

Honestly, income inequality is probably the biggest single social issue facing America. Deal with this, and you deal with a lot of issues regarding race and poverty in one fell stroke. You deal with a lot of healthcare-related issues, you deal with a lot of crime-related issues. Basically, reducing income inequality is a silver bullet, and it's one we need to stop ignoring.

The biggest single reason I'm a Democrat is because they're the only major party taking this even remotely seriously. The Republicans need to as well, instead of just providing ideological cover for the rich to continue widening the gap. Because as it stands, we've got crazy Third World levels of inequality.

This is some scary shit.

A professor in Wisconsin just got in trouble for telling the truth.

She required some US Census data for a class, and of course it wasn't available during the recent government shutdown. When a student asked why over email, she told the truth - that the Republican/Tea Party led House shut down the government.

And that little Tea Partying shitbag of a student took a picture of the email, sent it to Fox News, and it became the latest non-controversy controversy on their contrived news network. The professor was reprimanded.

But the fact remains the truth - the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party did shut down the government. That is so established that centrist news organizations like Time Magazine have reported it as true. Some of the classes I'm helping with are also teaching it as true, because it fucking is.

Turning academia into the latest front for partisan warfare - or more specifically, Republican partisan warfare (Democrats aren't doing anything, and generally the liberal-leaning academics go out of their way to embrace Republicans there) - risks damaging the institution further. We need colleges and universities to teach our kids the truth, and when professors risk professional danger to do that, in many cases they won't.

GET BACK TO WORK YOU LAZY FUCKS.

You'd think that a party that's all about personal responsibility and hard work would take more responsibility for the now-concluded shutdown and work harder at their jobs.

Anyway, shutdown's over. The Senate stepped in and made it all better, and Boehner passed the Senate bill with Democratic votes. Nebraskans, you can be pleasantly surprised that our normally brainless, spineless Congressional delegation voted to a man to reopen the government. Across the border in South Dakota, Senator Kristi Noem didn't.

Obama's taking this unmitigated victory and trying to build on the momentum by passing a regular annual budget. This used to be the done thing until the Tea Party got angry at the scary black man in the White House, but since the Republicans were just pretending to give a shit about compromise, they'll be hard-pressed to refuse this offer.

I don't know if the Tea Party fever's broken, but it seems that way. I'm seeing even Republicans griping about those fucks now. There may yet be hope.

Day 16 of ULTAMITE ANARCHY 4EVA

Hopefully this'll be the last installment of this series. As the Democratic Senate has taken over negotiations and Boehner's admitting defeat, it probably will be.

To wit, this is what happened: with the debt default happening sometime tomorrowish, Boehner attempted to pass a bill in the House reopening the government and raising the debt ceiling, but couldn't find enough votes in the Republican caucus to do so. Not a huge surprise: he's leading a caucus of spoiled children that would destroy the world economy rather than get their way, after all. But given that he couldn't do it, the Senate stepped in to craft a bill.

Democrat Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, met with Republican Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader. They hammered out a compromise, and this is all the Republicans got regarding Obamacare:

An anti-fraud measure will be added to Obamacare, requiring income verification for those receiving subsidies to purchase insurance under the law.

That's it. That's fucking nothing, and it probably should've been added to the law in the first place. It's a very slight tinker to make Obamacare better, not to gut the system wholesale. The Republicans shut down the government for 17 days, and all they got was a lousy income verification no-prize.

Day 14 of ULTAMITE ANARCHY 4EVA

More on the impending Republican civil war.

First off, the shutdown is causing the all-white Republican coalition to go to war: the richer Tea Party ideologues are not just up against the businessmen, but also against the parts of the coalition that depend on government subsidies or government jobs. Basically, the entire rest of the Republican Party is going to war against the Tea Party. The question then becomes how much of a Republican Party there is left that isn't Tea.

Day 13 of ULTAMITE ANARCHY 4EVA

Amidst reports that the GOP have reacted to this shutdown by getting pants-shittingly, have-sex-with-a-muffler-and-call-it-Susan drunk on the job, someone came up with a brilliant idea.

Drunk-dial Congress.

This is perfect. I kinda want to get in on this, although if I get a Democrat I'd feel bad because it's not their fault. But I've got enough rum left to take a stab at this.