The Southern Poverty Law Center is fighting for students at Hardin County High School in Tennessee who were banned from displaying support for LGBT rights in any way.
Isabella Nuzzo and other students were told by an assistant principal that they could not wear rainbows or any other symbols of gay rights because those symbols “advertise or promote sex.” Wait, what?
The group also said the assistant principal terminated a student organized “Week of Pride” event to show support for gay rights and threatened students with suspension, class failure and disqualification from graduations.
“I and many other students were really upset with the school for shutting down free speech about a topic I feel strongly about,” Nuzzo said in the release. “I love my gay friends and life is hard enough without being judged for who you are or for believing in equality.”
I hope SPLC takes this up with a lawsuit, because this is absurd. A rainbow signifies sex? Really? Not only does this perpetuate the flawed but repeated idea that sex is bad bad bad and should never be talked about at school, it likens LGBT rights to purely sexual matters. This deserves attention, and this school deserves a national reality check.
What complete idiots. Suggest everyone in that school take to wearing buttons that say Genesis 9:13 (I will set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be the sign of a covenant between me, and between the earth.)
That ought to fix the know-nothings. What are they going to do, ban Bible Verses in the heart of the Bible Belt?
Google Fined $25,000 For Stealing People’s Private Information
Google intentionally hindered a federal regulator’s probe into its Street View cars’ accidental grabs of personal information off of Wi-Fi routers, according to the investigating agency.
Google’s penalty: A measly $25,000 fine.
The Federal Communications Commission said in a report filed late Friday that Google repeatedly gave the agency the cold shoulder when it was trying to determine whether Google had engaged in any wrongdoing.
Google admitted in late 2010 that it had inadvertently collected unsuspecting people’s information.
Prying out more detail proved exceedingly difficult for the FCC.
Google “deliberately impeded and delayed” the investigation by failing to respond to information requests, the agency said.
It added: “Google apparently willfully and repeatedly violated Commission orders to produce certain information and documents that the Commission required for its investigation.”
Those of you who follow the news and international events will recognize the name. It pops up at least every six months in relation to some massacre of civilians or another…
The 15 Deadliest Corporations: #15 Dyncorp
This privatized military company is often hired by the U.S. government to protect American interests overseas — and so the government can claim no responsibility for Dyncorp’s actions.
Dyncorp is best known for its brutality in impoverished countries, for trafficking in child sex slaves, for slaughtering civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for training rebels in Haiti. Among some stiff competition, mercenary Dyncorp may be the deadliest and most evil corporation in the United States.
While obviously this could be an issue here as well, I’d pitch issues like this as a HUGE part of why New Yorkers should eat locally from one of the dosens of local greenmarkets in the city. These practices are, at the very least, MUCH LESS widespread in local agriculture than elsewhere.
occupyallstreets:
Whistleblowing Wednesday: Children As Young As Six Harvest 25 Percent of U.S. Crops
Knowing the farmer who grows your food has become an important tenet of the modern food movement, but precious little attention is paid to the people who actually pick the crops or “process” the chickens or fillet the fish. U Roberto Romano’s poignant film, The Harvest/La Cosecha (2011), being screened across the country for Farmworker Awareness Week (March 24-29), informs us that nearly 500,000 children as young as six harvest up to 25 percent of all crops in the United States.
What’s illegal in most countries is permitted here. Child migrant labor has been documented in the 48 contiguous states. Seasonal work originates in the southernmost states in late winter where it is warm and migrates north as the weather changes. Every few weeks as families move, children leave school and friends behind. If you’ve had onions (Texas), cucumbers (Ohio or Michigan), peppers (Tennessee), grapes (California), mushrooms (Pennsylvania), beets (Minnesota), or cherries (Washington), you’ve probably eaten food harvested by children.
This isn’t a slavery issue, or an immigration issue per se. What’s remarkable is that most of the migrant child farmworkers are American citizens trying to help their families. This is a poverty issue and it gets to the heart of what we, as consumers, see as the “right price” to pay for food.
Children earn about $1,000 per year for working an average of 30 hours a week, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. When you consider that the average annual pay for a migrant family of four is $12,500-$14,500, it’s apparent why some families feel they have no choice but to bring their children into the fields with them. Half of these kids will not graduate from high school because they’re always moving around, perpetuating the cycle of poverty that caused them to be day laborers in the first place.
Yeah. I am sure they are investigating real hard….
Boston Police Investigating Officer’s For Choking A Gay Protester
Boston Police is investigating its officers’ response to rowdy duel protests at the Boston Common on Sunday, Tax Day, after a photo surfaced showing “a city officer with his hand around a protester’s neck.” As Daily Kos’ Scott Wooledge reports, the Tea Party-organized event was co-sponsored by the vehemently anti-gay MassResistance and featured Scott Lively, “professional worldwide hunter of homosexuals and top proponent of ‘gay cure’” and a proponent of Uganda’s infamous ‘kill gays’ legislation.
As counter-protesters — including Occupy Boston Queer and Trans Direct Action Working Group — expressed their opposition to Lively’s participation, one of the speakers said from the podium, broadcast across the loud speakers at the Commons, “We will not be silenced by faggots.” Read a first-hand account from the protester roughed up in the picture at Back2Stonewall.
![flapjackstate:
[image: Cornel West holding a sign that says “if only the war on poverty was a real war then we would actually be putting money into it”].
socialistictendencies:
Cornel West being right about everything again](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lyls59CgwX1r9p9sto1_1280.jpg)
[image: Cornel West holding a sign that says “if only the war on poverty was a real war then we would actually be putting money into it”].
Cornel West being right about everything again
(Source: thestreetphilosopher, via stfuconservatives)
![occupyallstreets:
theatlantic:
Living Cadavers: How Bangladesh’s Poor Are Tricked Into Selling Their Organs
After they agree to donate, sellers are tissue tested, and if there is a match, the broker will offer the seller around $1,150. But in most cases, the sellers do not receive anywhere near that amount. The organ brokers tack on extra fees for travel and other logistics, and the sellers make sometimes only half the initial amount — and even then only after the surgery is completed.
The brokers forge fake passports and legal documents to make it appear plausible that the seller is donating to a blood relative. In one case, Michigan State anthropologist Monir Moniruzzaman found a 38-year-old Hindu seller who had to get circumcised to donate to a Muslim recipient. The circumcision was done crudely and only with local anesthesia. “When I was coming back home, the anesthesia stopped working,” he told the anthropologist, “and I felt like it was a nightmare.”
Most of the sellers Moniruzzaman spoke to were taken to India for the surgery, and upon arrival they had their passports confiscated so they could not leave. “One case I found [was] a 23-year-old college student,” he says. “He went to India and realized that he was making a mistake. So he wanted to come back without giving his kidney. The broker hired two thugs — Indian thugs — and they basically beat him and forced him to go to the operation room.”
This man, like all the other sellers, woke up from surgery with a 20-inch long scar around his torso — a constant reminder that he sold part of his body for a few hundred dollars. “We are living cadavers,” another told Moniruzzaman. “By selling our kidneys, our bodies are lighter but our chests are heavier than ever.”
Read more. [Image: Monir Moniruzzaman]
This is sick, the people of Bangladesh have been exploited for too long. The protests last week was massive (100,000 protested in Dhaka). Hopefully they’ll keep it up.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1cvvpj7V61qcokc4o1_1280.jpg)
Living Cadavers: How Bangladesh’s Poor Are Tricked Into Selling Their Organs
After they agree to donate, sellers are tissue tested, and if there is a match, the broker will offer the seller around $1,150. But in most cases, the sellers do not receive anywhere near that amount. The organ brokers tack on extra fees for travel and other logistics, and the sellers make sometimes only half the initial amount — and even then only after the surgery is completed.
The brokers forge fake passports and legal documents to make it appear plausible that the seller is donating to a blood relative. In one case, Michigan State anthropologist Monir Moniruzzaman found a 38-year-old Hindu seller who had to get circumcised to donate to a Muslim recipient. The circumcision was done crudely and only with local anesthesia. “When I was coming back home, the anesthesia stopped working,” he told the anthropologist, “and I felt like it was a nightmare.”
Most of the sellers Moniruzzaman spoke to were taken to India for the surgery, and upon arrival they had their passports confiscated so they could not leave. “One case I found [was] a 23-year-old college student,” he says. “He went to India and realized that he was making a mistake. So he wanted to come back without giving his kidney. The broker hired two thugs — Indian thugs — and they basically beat him and forced him to go to the operation room.”
This man, like all the other sellers, woke up from surgery with a 20-inch long scar around his torso — a constant reminder that he sold part of his body for a few hundred dollars. “We are living cadavers,” another told Moniruzzaman. “By selling our kidneys, our bodies are lighter but our chests are heavier than ever.”
Read more. [Image: Monir Moniruzzaman]
This is sick, the people of Bangladesh have been exploited for too long. The protests last week was massive (100,000 protested in Dhaka). Hopefully they’ll keep it up.
The tragic irony of the island nations that are struggling against encroaching seas is that most of them don’t have much of a carbon footprint. Many residents live without cars or electricity and subsist on food they catch or grow themselves. In fact, countries at the greatest risk from rising seas, such as Kiribati, the Marshall Islands and the Maldives, account for less than 0.1 percent of the total output of carbon dioxide emissions. (Combined, the U.S. and China account for nearly half.) Still, some of these nations are leading the world in reducing carbon emissions.
How nations are coping with rising seas
(via occupyallstreets)
An audit of Apple’s Chinese factories details “serious and pressing” concerns over excessive working hours, unpaid overtime, health and safety failings, and management interference in trade unions.
In the most detailed public investigation yet into conditions at Foxconn factories in China, which assemble millions of iPhones and iPads each year, the independent Fair Labor Association found that more than half of employees had worked 11 days or more without rest.
More than 43% of workers reported experiencing or witnessing an accident at the three plants audited.
Health and safety breaches found by auditors and published on Thursday included blocked exits, lack of or faulty personal protective equipment and missing permits, which the FLA said was remedied when discovered.
Despite several suicides, which raised the alarm two years ago, and an explosion that killed three workers last year, Foxconn still failed to consult workers on safety, with the committees “failing to monitor conditions in a robust manner”, the report found.
The management was found to be nominating candidates for election to worker committees, with the result that “committees are composed not by those who need representation, but instead are dominated by management representatives”. This left workers feeling “alienated” and lacking confidence in safety procedures.
"— http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/mar/30/apple-factories-china-foxconn-audit
Whistleblowing Wednesday: Human Rights Group Exposes Secret CIA Torture Prisons
Human rights campaigners welcomed on Wednesday a report that prosecutors had charged the former head of Poland’s intelligence service for helping set up CIA prisons for al Qaeda suspects in the country at the height of the U.S.-led “war on terror.”
Daily Gazeta Wyborcza, a leading Polish newspaper, said on Tuesday that Zbigniew Siemiatkowski was charged as part of a classified investigation into the matter launched in 2008.
At least two prisoners of the U.S. military jail in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah, have said they had been held by U.S. agents in Poland.
Rights groups say detainees were kept there without court orders and often tortured.
“Poland deserves credit for this step, as the first European state to begin to deal with CIA torture on its own soil,” London-based human rights group Reprieve said and urged Romania and Lithuania to follow Poland’s lead.
Poland’s smaller neighbor, Lithuania, was the first country in Europe to acknowledge it had worked with CIA in establishing two secret detention facilities in 2002-2006.
“Every state that has signed the (United Nations’) Convention Against Torture has an obligation not just to prevent torture but to hold accountable officials who authorize or facilitate it,” said Jameel Jaffer of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Poland has traditionally been one of the staunchest U.S. allies in Europe and has taken part in missions both in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Polish constitution bans torture and imprisonment without court order. Politicians who authorize such activity could be tried in regular courts as well as the State Tribunal, a special court set up to try senior state officials.
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“Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.”— Vladimir Lenin (via ...
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“Often in my lectures when I use the phrase “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe our nation’s political system, audiences...”
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The Dictator and The Zionist - The Trouble with Sacha Baron Cohen.
This morning, Sacha Baron Cohen is on my mind. Not...
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this is a picture of the protest—southwestern students...
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Anonymous asked: He said that about the NDAA BEFORE it had amendments made to it. He also said he would veto SOPA, so I think this is a sign that he at least knows what the internet does and doesn't need. (even if he's kinda daft elsewhere)
The Obama Administration attempted to censor the internet several times before, I call bullshit. Btw, Obama said he would veto the NDAA...
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Recently, Congresswoman Virginia Foxx raised eyebrows when she expressed her lack of sympathy for those who are currently drowning in student debt....
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The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
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“I still say tape or taped instead of record or recorded.”— I’m old
