Lakota Situation Summary for the Rainbow Family

THE LAKOTA PEOPLE AND THE BLACK HILLS:  A SITUATION SUMMARY FOR THE RAINBOW FAMILY

This educational document was requested by members of the Rainbow Family to share among those who are not understanding of the situation in the Black Hills and with the Lakota Oyate.

THE LAKOTA HAVE JURISDICTION

The matriarchal Tetuwan Lakota Oyate have never relinquished nation status. The assertion of sovereign Lakota political, economic, and cultural identity within our territory has been continually maintained through our matriarchal system and other customary political and cultural institutions like treaty and judicial councils, elder societies, and warrior societies. This is the real Lakota.

The Lakota People have the right to assert independent status and sovereign jurisdiction over our territory under International Law such as the 1961 and 1969 Vienna Convention on Treaties, 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and in U.S. law under…

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Good Grief

John Sutherland

The painful privilege of policing is to see all of life – in all its vivid, unedited extremes.

And, after any length of time in this line of work, there might be a danger that you start to lose the capacity to be shocked; that having seen and heard so much, you somehow become immune to it all.

But that just can’t be so – and working life continues to throw up circumstances that leave you almost speechless.

A couple of years back – during my time as Southwark Borough Commander – local officers responded to allegations of a serious sexual assault on a teenage boy. He had been confronted by a suspect armed with a knife, demanding his mobile. On discovering that he had no phone, the assailant then forced him into the stairwell of a nearby block of flats. And raped him.

It happened in a public space…

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California is flush with cash. So why the warnings to prepare for recession? – LA Times

I went to Eurka, CA for the past two days.  Partly for a gig and to check out the town.

One of the ways I judge a town is by its library. The same way I judge a restaurant by its bathroom, I judge a town by its library.

I parked by Starbucks and walked the many blocks to the Library.

To tell this story I cannot do it in order, because it was a bit of a epiphany moment.

The library in Eureka. CA does not open until 10AM. That is very late opening for a library.  The thing is I noticed that the Library in Crescent City also open a late 10AM.

I was a bit shocked that I had just walked so far and the Library was closed. I was telling no one in general how appalling it is that the library was closed at such a late time in the morning. And noticing this very strikingly beautiful homeless chick grabbing a paper to read on the steps. Rolling her eyes and giving a manufactured surprised look as if to warn me to not speak up.   Then this guy pops his head out of a thin wooden door to blow his nose right there where I stood! Now I am shocked and appalled. I ask him the time and tell him to not blow his nose right there on me He became uppity and asked. “Don’t you have a phone?” then said, “I did not blow my nose on you, I blew it in this tissue!” Well, I explained that polite children blow their nose in the bathroom, not in close proximity to someones face  That I had five phones and I asked him for the time, moreover that late opening libraries are a poor reflection on a city and I judge cities on their libraries. His guilt was snappily  retorted, “Don’t judge a book by its cover! It’s 9:15.” and briskly retreated behind the door shutting the door with more force than necessary.

I knew he could still hear me and explained in the modern world designers work hard on the covers and one does and can judge a book by its cover! Moreover, having an elaborate Gentleman’s Club right next to the Library, while the Library languishes, just will not do for me!

Let me tell you about the Gentleman’s Club. 

The name of the club is the Ingomar Club. When I asked about it before visiting the library I was told it was a gentleman’s club. Well, I knew there is not enough money, nor enough fancy women here to sustain a gentleman’s club ie a strip joint! So they meant a men’s only club. A club that allows men of certain criteria to cohort together. In this case, it is the meager wealthy of Humboldt and surrounding areas for the most part I say meager wealth because I have worked in security services at the Augusta National.

It is no less ostentatious, due to the fact that the Augusta National pays minimum wages and does not pay staff during their golf tourney.

Here is the Ingomar Club’s tax filings for 2004- 2012. As shown they are far far from wealthy or elite. Yet, they maintain this self-made shrine to ostentatious wealthy elitism.  while the infrastructure and society crumbles around them.

Moreover, a horrid pissing on the grave of the very man who had the mansion built   Though erased from the historical account is the a humble detail shared with me from a local, be it myth or legend, how Mr. Carson built the structure during an economic down-turn so he could employ and keep his workers during an economic down-turn.

In other words, a community project to benefit the community. This story of the Carson Mansion is reinforced by the lack of plans and the whimsical mismatched nature of the mansion.

Please do not mistake my thrashing for disdain. Maintaining such a lovely blue-collar work of art is honorable. Though a lot less delusion would make it wholesome.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

California is flush with cash. So why the warnings to prepare for recession? – LA Times.

How Popular Music’s Lyrics Perpetuate American Idiocy

Claire Bernish

May 20, 2015

(ANTIMEDIA) A recent study served to confirm the patently obvious: song lyrics for the most popular genres of music are ridiculously obtuse — and getting worse over time. Though this might not be a revelation, the figures are distressing indicators of both an intellectually vapid societal and cultural future as well as its apparent inevitability.

If you’ve already moved away from Billboard music, congratulations, you refuse to be insulted. But if you haven’t, or if you’re concerned about pop culture trends acting as portents of systemic dysfunction, you should probably pay attention. Andrew Powell-Morse of SeatSmart studied the “Lyric Intelligence” of 225 Billboard songs in the Pop, Country, Hip-hop, and Rock genres that spent three or more weeks parked at the top of the charts to analyze any changes over the course of ten years. And change there was.

Ten years ago, the most popular songs read between a third and fourth grade level, but the inanity only increased with time, and after a five-year downward tumble ending in 2014 (the last year of the study), chart-topping hits had a reading level equivalent to second or third grade. Broken into genres, the levels measured just 2.6 for Hip-hop/R&B, a tie of 2.9 for Rock and Pop, and faring best was Country at 3.3 — though declaring a winner in this insipid race to the bottom seems somewhat defeatist. Even further to that point, the most intellectually stimulating song, Blake Shelton’s Country hit “All About Tonight”, measured just 5.8, while wading deeply into the ludicrous was Three Days Grace’s “The Good Life”, at a level equivalent to 0.8 — begging the question, did they have to try to craft lyrics a kindergartner could easily read?

So how did this happen and why is it getting even worse? For the sake of brevity, this is a systemic issue being reinforced across the board by pandemic anti-intellectualism. Some have argued there is no harm in a bit of mindless distraction, but this is incontrovertibly false. When just six corporations control 90% of the media, and 80% of radio stations have identical playlists, mindless content isn’t a choice — it’s a virtual mandate. In this self-propelled cycle of banality, the conglomerates dictate content to be promoted by radio, which in turn pushes it endlessly, creating a false perception that what is being played is due to listener demand. But this insidious marketing ploy is more akin to kidnapping and is every bit as dangerous.

There is a dearth in music options over the airwaves, so when vacuous lyrics are foisted on listeners, they become captives under duress. It is scientifically proven that flexing the intellect can slow cognitive decline, but there has been a cultural shift away from stimulating thought in favor of homogenization and living for the moment, and empty radio content is both symptom and reinforcement of that trend. Society is focused on entertainment, materialism, and self-promotion, and when coupled with a need for instant gratification, it’s really no wonder we’re in such a sorry state. Occasional forays into mindless distraction would be understandable and harmless if they were just forays, but the foundation is faulty due to a sharp decline in quality education at every level.

Education has become the highest form of indoctrination with teachers forced into regurgitating information so their students can pass tests rather than become innovators and original thinkers. And who could blame them? Currently, they’re held to the ridiculous system where their performance is ranked, and salary determined by how those students perform on standardized tests that are, themselves, flawed. As Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, put it, “This country has spent billions on accountability, not on the improvement of teaching and learning at the classroom level.”

An education system based almost solely on taking tests is not only intellectually dimming, it’s stressful — instructors doling out the tests are given a set of instructions for what to do when students vomit on their test booklets. All of this is designed to send students to college where the situation is perpetuated. According to Catherine Liu, a film and media studies professor at the University of California, “We don’t educate people anymore. We train them to get jobs.”

Listen: ‘Reagan’ by Killer Mike on Anti-Media

From a political standpoint, all this ‘dumbing down’ makes sense: indoctrination creates obedience. If music and culture focus on mindless diversion, and education lacks, well, education, then people lack the acuity necessary to question the absurdity of the system. Those who manage to liberate themselves from this mold and have the gumption to question official authority will find a cozy spot on the government’s watch list. So while we bemoan our country’s lack of intellectual prowess, it isn’t by a failure of design.

The author of aptly titled Idiot America, journalist Charles Pierce, thoroughly summed up the issue this way: “The rise of idiot America today represents–for profit mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage in the pursuit of power–the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good.”

Unfortunately, if the lyrics study is a prognostic omen, the epidemic of idiocy will only get worse.

via How Popular Music’s Lyrics Perpetuate American Idiocy.