Gitxsan Unity Movement Against Enbridge Pipeline Asks for Solidarity

• http://gitxsanagainstenbridge.com/
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• http://vancouver.mediacoop.ca/
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A Judge in Smithers this morning has issued arrest warrants for the Gitxsan United Chiefs and everyone involved in the Gitxsan Unity Movement blockade against the Enbridge Pipeline. RCMP are currently gathering downtown and the chiefs are getting ready to be arrested, this is a call out from them, for your support.

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B.C. judge at wits’ end, compares Gitxsan protests to Caledonia

Globe Mail. Warrior Publications. May 14:

Rarely has a judge been as blunt and outspoken in his condemnation of police and government and their reluctance to enforce the rule of law in this country. In fact, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Mark McEwan is so frustrated with the RCMP’s unwillingness to end an aboriginal blockade in the northern part of the province, he compared the situation to one of the most notorious native standoffs in Canadian history – Caledonia.

And underlying the judge’s remarks is the often tenuous relationship that exists between first nations and a common law that can be foreign to their way of doing business.

Mr. Justice McEwan made his pointed observations at a recent hearing into the occupation of the offices of the Gitxsan Treaty Society – the ruling body of the Gitxsan First Nation – that has been under way in Hazelton, B.C. since Dec. 5. It was ignited over an endorsement of the planned Enbridge pipeline project that a society member unilaterally entered into with the company.

Upset with the move, a group of Gitxsan chiefs decided the society no longer had the authority to represent them. They had the group’s offices boarded up and have since refused to allow any society member from entering. On Dec. 7, the society got an injunction against the occupation – one that gave the RCMP “operational discretion” in terms of how and when it moved in to end the standoff.

Five months later, the RCMP still hadn’t done anything, which is how the matter ended up in front of Judge McEwan, who quickly expressed his exasperation over how the matter has been handled to this point.

And it was early on that he invoked memories of Caledonia, the infamous Six Nations occupation of an Ontario housing development that police and government allowed to drag on for more than four years.

Judge McEwan said that by not wading in and making their presence felt in continuing protests of this nature, governments are simply avoiding hard decisions. And what the hands-off policy does, he insisted, was compound the problem.

“If the court’s order then is stuck in somebody’s back pocket, which is what seems to happen, you know, then what have you got?” asked the judge. “You’ve got the court stamping its feet and nobody bothering to enforce it. That’s what happened in Caledonia. Caledonia is a disgrace.”

When one lawyer referenced the anger the Ontario Court of Appeal expressed over the hesitation by police to end the Caledonia occupation, Judge McEwan said: “That’s what we’ve got here.” He added that he was concerned about “being Judge [David] Marshall,” the jurist who ended up at the centre of much of the Caledonia dispute.

Judge McEwan didn’t stop there.

He asked the lawyers before him whether they understood how “demoralizing and undermining to the whole idea of the rule of law it is to have people carry on in a community flagrantly in violation of both the Criminal Code and a court law – and a court order.” He dismissed the RCMP’s concerns about moving in and inciting violence.

“The police give you this huge, ‘Oh, no … it will be horrifying … it will be terrible if they just go in and do their job,” said the judge. “Often it isn’t.” He said that policing in Canada is in a “dire condition” if the order to end the Hazleton occupation can’t be carried out because of the resistance of a handful of protesters.

And on it went. Judge McEwan sounded like a man at wits’ end. Or rather, a judge fed up with people looking to the courts to do the job of others. In this case, the lawyers for the society are asking the court to effectively rule the occupiers in contempt – before the RCMP have even tried to enforce the order.

Nor did the judge have much sympathy for the occupiers. When a lawyer representing the group suggested the court needed to be careful in dealing with the matter because the Gitxsan adhered to a different governance model than the one that existed in the non-aboriginal world, the judge snapped.

“I’m up to my eyeballs in Gitxsan governance,” he said. “Once you lose control of a situation and you’re stuck with coming to court, it’s got to have some shape that the court can address.”

The hearing continues next week.

It’s refreshing when judges speak their mind and don’t attempt to hide their feelings behind legal bafflegab. In this case, Judge McEwan is absolutely right: The courts have given the RCMP the authority to end the occupation and it should do just that. If it takes some nudging, gentle or otherwise, from B.C.’s justice minister to get the RCMP to overcome its shyness and do its job, then so be it.

It shouldn’t be a judge’s responsibility.

via New Hazleton BC: Arrest Orders Given Today for Gitxsan Unity Movement Against Enbridge | GREY COAST ANARCHIST NEWS.

Pentagon Wants to Master the Science of Propaganda

Mark Twain once tried to distinguish between the storyteller’s art and tales that a machine could generate. He observed that stringing “incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities,” was the province of the American storyteller. A machine might imitate simple formulas behind yarns, but never quite master them.

The Pentagon’s freewheeling research arm is hoping to prove Twain wrong. Darpa is asking scientists to “take narratives and make them quantitatively analyzable in a rigorous, transparent and repeatable fashion.” The idea is to detect terrorists who have been indoctrinated by propaganda. Then, the Pentagon can respond with some messages of its own.

The program is called “Narrative Networks.” By understanding how stories have shaped your mind, the Pentagon hopes to sniff out who has fallen prey to dangerous ideas, a neuroscience researcher involved in the project tells Danger Room. With this knowledge, the military can also target groups vulnerable to terrorists’ recruiting tactics with its own counter-messaging.

“Stories are important in security contexts,” Darpa said in an Oct. 7 solicitation for research proposals. Stories “change the course of insurgencies, frame negotiations, play a role in political radicalization, influence the methods and goals of violent social movements.” The desire to study narratives has been simmering for a while in the Defense Department. A Darpa workshop in April to discuss the “neurobiology of narratives” added momentum to this project.

In the first 18-month phase of the program, the Pentagon wants researchers to study how stories infiltrate social networks and alter our brain circuits. One of the stipulated research goals: to “explore the function narratives serve in the process of political radicalization and how they can influence a person or group’s choice of means (such as indiscriminant violence) to achieve political ends.”

Once scientists have perfected the science of how stories affect our neurochemistry, they will develop tools to “detect narrative influence.” These tools will enable “prevention of negative behavioral outcomes … and generation of positive behavioral outcomes, such as building trust.” In other words, the tools will be used to detect who’s been controlled by subversive ideologies, better allowing the military to drown out that message and win people onto their side.

“The government is already trying to control the message, so why not have the science to do it in a systematic way?” said the researcher familiar with the project.

When the project enters into a second 18-month phase, it’ll use the research gathered to build “optimized prototype technologies in the form of documents, software, hardware and devices.” What will these be? Existing technology can carry out micro-facial feature analysis, and measure the dilation of blood vessels and eye pupils. MRI machines can determine which parts of your brain is lighting up when it responds to stories. Darpa wants to do even better.

In fact, it’s calling for devices that detect the influence of stories in unseen ways. “Efforts that rely solely on standoff/non-invasive/non-detectable sensors are highly encouraged,” the solicitation reads.

via Darpa Wants to Master the Science of Propaganda | Danger Room | Wired.com.

The enemy behind the gates

Gated communities for the lower middle classes as well as the rich are little frontier towns with their own sheriffs, suspicious of every outsider

by Rowland Atkinson and Oliver Smith

George Zimmerman, who shot Trayvon Martin at a gated community in Sanford, Florida, in February, is to be charged with second-degree murder. The case, in which Martin, an unarmed black teenager, died, reminds us how young African-American males face prejudice and heightened risks of death or harm.

Zimmerman is Hispanic, making the case more than a simple reflection of racial hierarchies in US society, and he was the self-appointed neighbourhood-watch leader for The Retreat, a community of 264 homes. The incident was out of the ordinary but touched on concerns about US society’s capacity to harm innocents.

via The enemy within – Le Monde diplomatique – English edition.

more:

Urban life in the US has changed, but familiar themes of race and violence persist. The case raises questions about the aggressive fortress mentality that gated communities can generate. Zimmerman’s misperception of Martin as a potential aggressor may have been influenced by the fact that the encounter happened behind the gates of the community.

News that Zimmerman was to be charged for second-degree murder came on 11 April, a day after the FBI released its annual data on gun-related assault and deaths in the US, which showed that of approximately 12,000 homicides in the US in the past year, two-thirds involved firearms. News reports of murders inside gated communities indicate a tiny problem compared with the overall level of violence in US society. Yet the number of aggravated assaults and incidents of routine domestic violence in neighbourhoods that the affluent have retreated to in order to avoid risks is likely to be underestimated.

The Martin case would seem to be a “breach homicide”, a killing within a gated community, involving someone who does not live inside. Since gated communities are intended to be free from risks from outsiders, residents understandably experience heightened alertness when they see someone they believe to be from “outside”. Yet it is the reverse of the standard breach scenario since the victim was a perceived intruder. Martin was actually visiting a relative inside the community, but what Zimmerman thought he was encountering appears to have been skewed by the place of the encounter (a small gated neighbourhood) and a prejudicial reading of Martin’s race and manner (Zimmerman claimed he was a “real suspicious guy”, “black male” who “looks like he is up to no good”, according to a 911 emergency services recording). Martin’s behaviour may have been caused by Zimmerman’s pursuit and his own attempts to escape unwanted attention.

The Retreat is surrounded by a perimeter wall and fronted by heavy iron gates, with a notice that reassures (or warns) of the presence of a neighbourhood watch. However, unlike many gated communities, there is no 24-hour security guard and the housing prices are comparatively low. Communities such as this exist across the US, and the model is being copied globally, in high- and low-crime contexts.

Police records showed that 50 suspicious persons reports were called in from The Retreat over the previous year, and police had also been called there 402 times, almost two call-outs per household. There were eight robberies, nine thefts and one other shooting over the 12 months before Martin’s death.

The failure to achieve total security will amplify residents’ concerns, worsening fear and suspicion of the unknown or confirming their racialised idea of what an intruder might look like. This explains the implicit support for Zimmerman’s armed patrols of the neighbourhood by the Homeowner’s Association, local police and fellow residents.

the day is coming when apolitical ignorance won’t protect americans from the consequences of their consumerism

“Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.” ~ Pericles

I sit at the Yakitori-ya (BBQ chicken on sticks restaurant) and nurse my beer and a few delicious sticks of chicken. Tanaka san, the neighborhood school English teacher, howls besides me about the decline of Japanese civilization.

“Japanese kids today don’t care about studying English. They don’t want to go to the United States anymore. They are not fascinated by the west. If Japanese kids don’t learn about other cultures, especially the United States, Japanese culture is doomed!” He says.

I think, “Japanese culture is doomed if Japanese kids don’t learn about American culture!?” I laugh and have another sip.

Tanaka san comes from an older generation of Japanese that were born just after the war. He is from the generation that grew up with Elvis Presley and Rock and Roll music. The United States, to his generation of Japanese, represented dreams and freedom. Tanaka san even has posters of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe – American idols from a day long gone past – on the walls of his classroom. But, that’s not what the United States represents to young Japanese people anymore…

I say to him, ”Don’t worry about it, Tanaka san. It’s not the end of Japanese culture and civilization, it is just the end of the United States as you know it. You are just witnessing the fall of the American empire, that’s all.”

Tanaka san stares at me incredulously for the blasphemy emitting from my mouth.

“Seriously, that’s what it is, Tanaka san. Japanese kids are not interested in the United States anymore NOT so much because the Japanese kids have changed that much. Kids will always be kids and interested in fun and excitement. Today’s Japanese kids are not interested in the United States because the United States isn’t fun and exciting anymore. It has changed, and not for the better. The United States isn’t a good place full of good dreams.

It used to be that the USA were the good guys, but they are not anymore. The USA and NATO lackeys as well as the UN (which has become a rubber stamp organization for US imperialism) bomb and destroy the homes and families of brown-skinned people all over the world 24/7 and it is obvious to everyone (excepting many Americans).

I also hear that Japanese student enrollment at Ivy League universities is way down. I know for a fact the enrollment in English schools inside of Japan has crashed. I submit to you that it is because of at least three things:

The United States has a very bad image of a country full of crime and a definitive lack of safety

The United States has a very bad image of a country full of abusive police and a police state (TSA, Homeland Security, etc…)

The United States and its people have the image of a nation of over weight war mongers

I’d like to add another one to that list, but I don’t think most Japanese realize this, and that is: Far too many Americans are completely out of touch and ignorant to the extent of the murder the US government and military are involved in, in the name of the American people. The really dumb Americans act like and say, “I’m apolitical.” When, in fact, it is these very same people who are responsible for what that country has become. They can bury their heads in the sand all they want. But they are responsible.

Ha! How can you be apolitical when your country takes your money and uses it to kill children in other countries? That’s like Germans in World War II saying they are apolitical while the Nazis killed minorities and Jews and wiped out entire populations.

“Yeah… But, well, I don’t know about that!” Typical American says.

Since when has ignorance been an excuse?

So this situation is why Japanese kids are no longer fascinated with the USA. I believe it is also a big reason American and western rock artists are no longer popular here. There’s no western artist in the entire world that can sell out the Tokyo Dome today. Japanese artists, on the other hand, sell out multiple nights in a row at the dome.

Whatever happened to western musicians who had a message and something to say? Weren’t politically charged and motivated artists in the sixties moving entire segments of society? They sure were in Japan!

What’s the difference between the artists of those days and today’s American artists? Back in those days, the American military were bombing and killing brown skinned children 24/7, in a few countries, yet American musicians sang about it and protested. They were popular all over the world.

Today, the American military are bombing and killing brown skinned children all over the world 24/7, in a half dozen countries, yet American musicians, for the large part, are in muted silence…They tell me, “I’m apolitical.”

Ha! Yeah, and you American Rock musicians are not popular and don’t sell your music all over the world like you used to either.

I wonder if there is a connection?

via Rock and Roll and a Reason Why American Musicians No Longer Capture the World’s Imagination? by Mike (in Tokyo) Rogers.

600 students poisoned in afghanistan

this is not the first such attack on schoolchildren

Hundreds of schoolchildren were poisoned in the Ismailkhel Mandozai district of southeastern Khost province on Tuesday, an official said.

The incident took place in the Urzi area, where all the 600 students of a middle school were poisoned, education department spokesman Syed Musa Majrooh told Pajhwok Afghan News.

With the exact reason yet to be known, the official believed the students might have used toxic substances. “All students can’t be poisoned at a time by drinking food or water. I believe that some poisonous stuff may have been sprayed in the school.”

Public Health Director Dr. Amir Badshah Mangal confirmed hundreds of poisoned students had been brought to the Khost Civil Hospital. A joint team of public health and education departments has been sent to the area to investigate the incident.

Mangal said the health condition of the students was stable and most of them would be discharged soon.

One of the students, Wali Noor, said he felt giddy and fell to the ground after coming out of his class during the break. Neither he drank water nor ate any food, added the student, who did know what caused the condition.

via the revolutionary association of the women of afghanistan 600 students poisoned in Khost 

see also:

100 girl students apparently poisoned in Takhar

Insurgent threats shut Farah schools

Afghanistan named worst nation to be a mother after Niger

Police: Two children killed in Afghanistan acid attack