Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's Blog: The Most Revolutionary Act , page 1135
October 29, 2017
Chicago: Teachers Barred from Teaching in Public Schools Now Teaching in Charters
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According to Inspector General Nicholas Schuler, more than 160 Chicago Public Schools employees who were barred from the district because of alleged abuse, misconduct or poor performance were found working in new jobs at city charter and contract schools.
In Chicago, the fabled “Dance of the Lemons” shuffles ousted public school teachers to charter schools. Wait a minute! I saw “Waiting for Superman.” I though that dance was only for all those “bad” public school teachers.
“More than 160 Chicago Public Schools employees who were barred from the district because of alleged abuse, misconduct or poor performance were found working in new jobs at city charter and contract schools last year, according to a report from the district’s inspector general.
“The list included three workers who were fired or resigned and blocked from being re-hired at CPS because of sexual abuse accusations, according to the report, which was released Tuesday. Twenty-two were put on a “Do Not Hire” list “due to improper corporal punishment or physical abuse of students,” according to the report.
“Nearly 80 others were blocked from returning to the district due to incompetence or violating…
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How Did Fracked American Shale Gas Become the Solution To Puerto Rico’s Electrical Nightmare?
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Proposal to build LNG plant with federal support turns Puerto Rican disaster into bonanza for America’s failing fracking industry.
[SEE: Two-person energy firm’s $300 million contract to rebuild Puerto Rico’s electrical grid ; Questions arise about Whitefish company’s Puerto Rico contract ]
Colonel Noel Zamot, Commandant of The Air Force Test Pilot School, after his Fini Flight at Edwards AFB, CA. June 13, 2012. AFFTC Aerial Photographer Christian Turner.
Puerto Rico’s painful power recovery gets a new director
Hannah Northey, Peter Behr and Blake Sobczak, E&E News reporters
PREPA, backed by the governor, Rosselló, has called for a $470 million offshore liquefied natural gas port on the island’s south coast to receive LNG shipments from U.S. shale gas reserves.
Whitefish Energy Holdings LLC shared images yesterday of work on power towers and lines in Manati, Puerto Rico. @WhitefishEnergy/Twitter
A federal emergency manager has been placed in charge of the tortuous efforts to restore electric power in Puerto Rico five weeks after Hurricane Maria struck, amid mounting criticism…
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October 28, 2017
Mutual Aid Disaster Relief: Grassroots Disaster Response
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Grassroots disaster response will be more and more necessary as we see more catastrophes – infrastructure, economic, and ecological collapses – and as corporations and governments seek only to capitalize on the crises.
Growing the Movement for Mutual Aid: Invite Trainers & Prepare Your Community for Grassroots Direct Action Disaster Response
By Mutual Aid Disaster Relief on It’s Going Down
Climate Chaos is happening. Adaptation and preparation are essential. Grassroots disaster response will be more and more necessary as we see more catastrophes – infrastructure, economic, and ecological collapses – and as corporations and governments seek only to capitalize on the crises.
That is why we created Mutual Aid Disaster Relief (MADR) – an organization inspired by Common Ground, Occupy Sandy, the Standing Rock Water Protectors, and the long history of diverse grassroots direct actions seeking to make a better world possible.
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A Case of Judicial Murder?
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In the so-called Boston Marathon bombing, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was defended by court-appointed lawyers who did not do their job. His chief counsel had powerful exculpatory evidence available, yet she forcefully asserted that he was guilty in her opening statement, never used the exculpatory evidence at trial, and did not even ask for a verdict of not guilty in her final argument to the jury. In view of his prior CIA links, I have always believed he was a patsy just like Lee Harvey Oswald.
By John Remington Graham
October 27, 2017 “Information Clearing House” – I have been asked many times why I have intervened in the federal prosecution of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the young man who was convicted and sentenced to death in the Boston Marathon bombing case where two brothers, on April 15, 2013, allegedly detonated pressure cooker bombs on Boylston Street in front of the Forum Restaurant that killed or maimed many people.
As I wrap up my career of fifty years as a member of the bar, including service as a public defender in state and federal courts, co-founder of an accredited law school, and chief public prosecutor in Minnesota state courts, I am apprehensive that my country might be entering into an era of judicial murder.
Judicial murder is the practice of designing a trial to get a guilty verdict, regardless of the facts, and a death sentence carried out…
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Why is the US at war in West Africa?
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Between 2006 and 2010 the deployment of US special forces troops in Africa increased 300 per cent. However, from 2010 to 2017 the numbers of deployed troops exploded by nearly 2000 per cent, occupying more than 60 outposts tasked with carrying out over 100 missions at any given moment across the continent.
by Eddie Haywood
Pambazuka News | October 19, 2017
Reuters
Between 2006 and 2010 the deployment of US special forces troops in Africa increased by 300 per cent. From 2010 to 2017 the numbers of deployed troops exploded by nearly 2000 per cent, occupying more than 60 outposts tasked with carrying out over 100 missions at any given moment across the continent.
The October 4 killings of four US Green Berets in Niger has provided a rare glimpse into the far-reaching American military operations throughout the African continent which have been conducted almost entirely in secret.
Pentagon officials on Friday told reporters that the ambush was carried out by a self-radicalized group supposedly affiliated with ISIS. The Pentagon additionally admitted that at least 29 patrols similar to the one that was fatally ambushed have been carried out by American soldiers in Niger.
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What Causes Civilization to Collapse?
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Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive
Jared Diamond
Penguin Books (2005)
Book Review
This book was very different from what I expected. I anticipated an account of the environmental mismanagement that caused the collapse of prehistoric civilizations such as Easter Island. Collapse is actually a detailed historical analysis of a wide spectrum of both failed and successful societies. In addition to Easter Island, Diamond also covers the vanished Anazazi civilization in New Mexico, the Mayan civilization, the Viking settlements of Iceland (which persists to the present day), Greenland and Vineland (present day Newfoundland and New Brunswick), pre-1853 Japan, the New Guinea highlands and modern day Rwanda and Australia (the modern society he describes at highest risk for collapse).
Diamond’s thesis is that the ability of any society to meet the survival needs of its members depends on certain basic preconditions. He maintains historical forest management is the most critical – deforestation features in every historical collapse he mentions. Forests are not only essential to provide fuel for cooking, heating and refining metal, but loss of forest cover leads to soil erosion and destruction of topsoil, as well as decreased rainfall and fresh water shortages.
In some societies Diamond analyzes, collapse was the direct result of environmental mismanagement. In others, the odds of survival were extremely low to begin with, due to low rainfall, a cold or windy latitude or poor soils. In many cases, a political factor such as war, lack of external supports (eg trade), overpopulation and/or a greedy ruling elite diverting resources to luxuries were important contributing factors.
The section I found most interesting concerns the New Guinea highlanders, who (prior to the arrival of Europeans) maintained an environmentally sustainable civilization via bottom up direct democracy for over 46,000 years.
October 27, 2017
Smart Meters causing tidal wave of mysterious illnesses that strike people in their own homes
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The World Health Organization has classified microwave radiation (produced by cellphones, wifi, cellphone towers and smart meters) as a 2B carcinogen, and based that declaration on studies that have linked cell phone radiation to brain tumors.
Rangitikei Enviromental Health Watch
An article here from healthnutnews.com Kiwis, see this site for local information on health risks stopsmartmeters.org.nz There is a page on the latter site providing testimonies of people whose symptoms stopped following removal of SMs. (Note here they are frequently called Advanced Meters). See our Smart Meter pages also.
EnvirowatchRangitikei
The Article from Health Nut News:
In recent years there have been increasing reports that “smart meters” – the digitized electric meters that are designed to send usage figures to power companies wirelessly – are causing a range of health issues among a growing portion of the population where such devices are in use.
RELATED ARTICLE:
Energy company shutting off power of residents opposed to smart meters
In fact, notes the EMF Safety Network, a growing number of people from around the world are beginning to report health problems they believe are related to an…
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WikiLeaks offers $100k for unreleased JFK documents
US President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade shortly before his assassination in Dallas. © AFP
WikiLeaks is offering $100,000 for previously unreleased JFK assassination files that show evidence of criminal activity or a bungled investigation.
The whistleblower website made the announcement on Friday, after previously unseen intelligence files regarding the killing of US President John F Kennedy were released by the US National Archives. Some 2,891 new records related to the president’s 1963 shooting in Dallas were available to the public on Thursday. However, a number of files remain under lock and key due to fears they could harm US national security.
Although the US National Archives says the remaining documents will be published on a rolling basis “as soon as possible,” WikiLeaks is encouraging people with access to such files to come forward sooner rather than later. The organization is offering $100,000 to anyone who leaks information about the JFK case.
However, there are stipulations for the reward, which the whistleblower site specified online: “WikiLeaks issues a $100,000 reward for the withheld JFK documents should they show violations of laws, inefficiency, or administrative error.”
US President John F Kennedy died on November 22, 1963, after he was shot while traveling through Dallas in an open-top car. The accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself shot two days after the presidential killing while being escorted from Dallas police headquarters. The events spawned a number of conspiracy theories, forcing the US government to drip-feed intelligence and investigative information to the public in the subsequent years.
The new documents reveal Oswald had been watched by the FBI in the weeks before he is said to have pulled the trigger on Kennedy. The documents also show that the Soviet Union feared the killing was part of a conspiracy lead by “ultra-right” US nationals to spark an all-out war between the two countries, while a British newspaper was tipped off 25 minutes before the incident. . .
Source: WikiLeaks offers $100k for unreleased JFK documents
Access to Alternative Sources ‘Made Mainstream Media Lose Their Credibility’
Sputnik – October 26, 2017
The results of a poll commissioned by Sputnik and conducted by Ifop in the US have revealed that the majority of Americans believe that their mainstream media unfairly cover international and domestic events. Foreign journalists have explained why the MSM have lost the trust of their audience.
“The results of the survey clearly demonstrate that the US mass media enjoy less and less credibility among Americans. People do understand that newspapers and broadcasters in their country have become a tool in the hands of big businesses and politicians. There is another issue, however, that with all the understanding, people are not immune to the influence of these media sources,” Professor Julián Jiménez, Spanish blogger and mass media analyst surmised to Spanish website Sputnik Mundo.
He referred to the recent poll commissioned by Sputnik and conducted by Ifop, the renowned French pollster, which revealed that as many as 59 percent of Americans think that MSM media coverage of international and domestic affairs is biased, untrustworthy and is heavily influenced by politicians and big business.
According to the expert, the Spanish also share this distrust of the national media, neither believing in the objectivity and independence of their domestic media. At the same time, the general public can be heard repeating word-for-word the lies they hear about Russia, Venezuela or Catalonia from the very same media sources they have admitted they don’t trust.
Professor Jiménez suggested that the level of distrust towards the mass media in the EU is even higher than that in the US, however, very few Europeans are eager to spend their time on searching for alternative information or to dig for the truth.
“I think there is a direct link between the decline in trust towards the national media in the US and the EU and the campaign which has been launched against RT and Sputnik. These two media sources provide far more objective and comprehensive coverage of national and international events, unlike the one-sided and predictable reporting of the mainstream media,” he told Sputnik.
That is why the authorities and mainstream media use various absurd pretexts to hinder the access of these two outlets to the western audience, the expert explained. It has reached the point where El Pais, the most circulated daily newspaper in Spain, has accused RT and Sputnik of instigating the Catalan crisis in its attempt to undermine their reputation. This is a particularly dangerous line to take because while people are being put on the wrong scent, the real problems that initially ignited this conflict will only worsen. And these are purely internal problems and not engineered from abroad, he concluded.
Fernando Martínez, a journalist from the Dominican Republic, who worked for a long time in the US, has offered his opinion on the results of the survey, suggesting that the mainstream media, including in the US, have lost their competitiveness now that many diverse sources of information around the world are available for free.
According to the reporter, before the spread and the development of the Internet, the US was able to easily dominate the world’s media agenda by using simple tricks – half-truths or half-lies. . .
Source: Access to Alternative Sources ‘Made Mainstream Media Lose Their Credibility’
October 26, 2017
Total Disobedience when Spanish State Takes over Catalonia + CNT Statement
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Catalan separatists are mobilizing a human shield and a Civil Disobedience Campaign to block efforts by the Spanish authorities to take control . Tens of thousands plan to concentrate around the regional government’s headquarters in Barcelona’s Gothic quarter and the nearby parliament building.
CNT and CGT Statements Below
shared from Dear Kitty. Some blog
”A Nation-state is always divisive and repressive, but as the only possibility for more freedom and justice, then of course we support these aspirations and endeavours”.
Spain annuls Catalan self-government, prepares military rule from Madrid
By Alex Lantier: Three weeks after the savage police crackdown on the October 1 Catalan independence referendum, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy announced the invocation of Article 155 to strip Catalonia’s regional government of its powers. In its place, Madrid is to install an unelected government in Barcelona backed by the Spanish army, Guardia Civil paramilitary police and other police units.
The implementation of Article 155 will inevitably involve the Spanish regime in a violent confrontation with broad masses of the Catalan population, where there is deep opposition to Madrid’s turn to dictatorship. 
As Rajoy’s Council of Ministers formulated…
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