A prominent gay rights advocate and soldier being discharged under the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy barring openly gay members of the military from serving openly was arrested after chaining himself to the fence of the White House Thursday.The Advocate notes:

Following a Human Rights Campaign rally for DADT repeal at Freedom Plaza in Washington, Choi and Pietrangelo led about 100 protesters to the White House, where the two then proceeded to handcuff themselves to the gates. Pietrangelo was discharged from the military under the gay ban, while Choi’s discharge is pending. Choi is the founder of Knights Out, a West Point alumni organization supporting LGBT soldiers.

United States Park Police spokesman Sgt. David Schlosser told The Advocate that both men were taken to Park Police’s Anacostia station for processing, where they were charged with failure to obey a lawful order. Choi and Pietrangelo will be held overnight and are scheduled to appear in D.C. Superior Court on Friday.

Choi told rally attendees, according to the report: “You’ve been told that the White House has a plan. But we learned this week that the president is still not fully committed. … Following this rally, I will be leading [the protest] to the White House to say ‘enough talk.’ … I am still standing, I am still fighting, I am still speaking out, and I am still gay.”

[Read more at the Raw Story]

In a scene reminiscent of non-violent civil rights confrontations from the 1960s, Ohio Tea Partiers quickly turned ugly when facing off with health care advocates in front of Ohio Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy’s office Tuesday.

In shocking video taken by a Columbus Dispatch reporter Doral Chenowith, Tea Party protestors mock a seated counter-protestor with a sign indicating he has Parkinson’s disease. They then proceed to hurl wadded up bills at him shouting, “I’ll decide when to give you money!”

See and read more on the Columbus Dispatch

Wikileaks presents a “threat to the U.S. Army” and publishes “potentially actionable information” for targeting military personnel, according to a classified intelligence report posted on the whistleblowing site.

The 32-page report entitled Wikileaks.org — An Online Reference to Foreign Intelligence Services, Insurgents, or Terrorist Groups? indicates the government’s concern that “current employees or moles” within the Defense Department or the U.S. government “are providing sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.” To stop this, the 2008 report had suggested a campaign to expose and punish those who leak to the site, which was founded in 2007 by Chinese dissidents, journalists and mathematicians.

“Wikileaks.org uses trust as a center of gravity by assuring insiders, leakers, and whistleblowers who pass information to Wikileaks.org personnel or who post information to the website that they will remain anonymous,” according to the report. “The identification, exposure, or termination of employment of or legal actions against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others from using Wikileaks.org to make such information public.”

Read More on WIRED’s Threat Level

It is worth continuing to explore the role of the International Socialist Organization and its political line expressed in Socialist Worker. As the class conflict becomes more two-sided, groups such as the International Socialist Organization will—regardless of the intentions of individual members—play a crucial role in protecting the existing system.

When one sees the ways in which the International Socialist Organization (and other groups like them such as Socialist Action and the Workers’ International League) play left defending attorneys of the trade union bureaucracy and middle class reform organizations (who play a crucial role in defending the Democrats who push many of the same policies as the Republicans) you can see a straight line drawn from the fake left to George W. Bush.

Full Article at Black Sun Gazette

“It takes a different value system if you wish to change the world,” Jacque Fresco said to a sold out crowd of over 800 in New York City’s Upper West Side.

Though he may not need to convince these people, many his ardent followers, it will indeed take a restructuring of the mind for those unfamiliar with Fresco’s work to realistically accept the ideas he proposes of a new global society that has given up money and property in favor of a shared, sustainable, technology-driven community.

The caustic skepticism can already be heard, critics crying out with pointed fingers, decreeing communism, socialism, insanity! But as Fresco himself will tell you, communism is still just another system with banks and social stratification. The kind of world he imagines for the future is much different. To ease the transition, The Zeitgeist Movement provides a wealth of dizzying information detailing why a new global system is not only preferred, but necessary, and just how we can get there.

March 14th, 2010 was the second annual celebration of ZDay. Coordinated by The Zeitgeist Movement, ZDay is an educational event geared toward raising awareness of the movement. While 337 sympathetic events occurred in over 70 countries worldwide, NYC was home to the main event, a 6-hour live web cast presentation with lectures from the movement’s key figures, and 30 different countries represented in the audience.

So what exactly is The Zeitgeist Movement? Not even two years old, the movement declares itself as the activist arm of The Venus Project, an organization started in the 1970s by Fresco and his partner, Roxanne Meadows. The Venus Project distributes resources promoting Fresco’s vision of an improved society, with the main component being a resource-based economy, rather than a monetary-based one. In Fresco’s resource-based economy, the world’s resources would be considered as the equal inheritance of all the world’s peoples, and would be managed as efficiently and carefully as possible through focusing on the technological potential of sustainable development. It is toward this idea that The Zeitgeist Movement works to educate and inform people.

The movement’s founder, Peter Joseph, came to notoriety with his 2007 internet film sensation, Zeitgeist, and it’s 2008 successor, Zeitgeist: Addendum. While many people may find it hard to digest the idea of a world without currency, Joseph’s argument that our economic system is the source of our greatest social problems was supported with valuable evidence…

[continues at Huffington Post]

In one chair sits a rural retiree, his financial security shot in the slump, a humble Southerner who’s never thought much about politics. In another seat is a born Northerner, an inner-city native, a relative of a civil rights giant. And nearby, circling a table, are an economist, an artist, a onetime John McCain supporter and a long-haired guy who’s rich in Woodstock memories.

Meet these members of the Coffee Party Movement, an organically grown, freshly brewed push that’s marking its official kickoff Saturday. Across the country, even around the globe, they and other Americans in at least several hundred communities are expected to gather in coffeehouses to raise their mugs of java to something new.

They’re professionals, musicians and housewives. They’re frustrated liberal activists, disheartened conservatives and political newborns. They’re young and old, rich and poor, black, white and all shades of other.

Born on Facebook just six weeks ago, the group boasts more than 110,000 fans, as of Friday morning. The Coffee Party is billed by many as an answer to the Tea Party (more than 1,000 fewer fans), a year-old protest movement that’s steeped in fiscal conservatism and boiling-hot, anti-tax rhetoric.

This new group calls for civility, objects to obstructionism and demands that politicians be held accountable to the people who put them in office…

[continues at CNN]

Here is another chapter from Russ Kick’s classic bite-size Disinformation book 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know, published in 2003.

For more on Russ Kick, check out his website, The Memory Hole.

_____________________________________

In order to guard citizens against the whims of the King, the right to a trial by jury was established by the Magna Carta in 1215, and it has become one of the most sacrosanct legal aspects of British and American societies. We tend to believe that the duty of a jury is solely to determine whether someone broke the law. In fact, it’s not unusual for judges to instruct juries that they are to judge only the facts in a case, while the judge will sit in judgment of the law itself. Nonsense.

Juries are the last line of defense against the power abuses of the authorities. They have the right to judge the law. Even if a defendant committed a crime, a jury can refuse to render a guilty verdict. Among the main reasons why this might happen, according to attorney Clay S. Conrad:

When the defendant has already suffered enough, when it would be unfair or against the public interest for the defendant to be convicted, when the jury disagrees with the law itself, when the prosecution or the arresting authorities have gone “too far” in the single-minded quest to arrest and convict a particular defendant, when the punishments to be imposed are excessive or when the jury suspects that the charges have been brought for political reasons or to make an unfair example of the hapless defendant …

Some of the earliest examples of jury nullification from Britain and the American Colonies were refusals to convict people who had spoken ill of the government (they were prosecuted under “seditious libel” laws) or who were practicing forbidden religions, such as Quakerism. Up to the time of the Civil War, American juries often refused to convict the brave souls who helped runaway slaves. In the 1800s, jury nullifications saved the hides of union organizers who were being prosecuted with conspiracy to restrain trade. Juries used their power to free people charged under the anti-alcohol laws of Prohibition, as well as antiwar protesters during the Vietnam era. Today, juries sometimes refuse to convict drug users (especially medical marijuana users), tax protesters, abortion protesters, gun owners, battered spouses, and people who commit “mercy killings.”

Judges and prosecutors will often outright lie about the existence of this power, but centuries of court decisions and other evidence prove that jurors can vote their consciences.

When the US Constitution was created, with its Sixth Amendment guarantee of a jury trial, the most popular law dictionary of the time said that juries “may not only find things of their own knowledge, but they go according to their consciences.” The first edition of Noah Webster’s celebrated dictionary (1828) said that juries “decide both the law and the fact in criminal prosecutions.”

Jury nullification is specifically enshrined in the constitutions of Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Maryland. The state codes of Connecticut and Illinois contain similar provisions.

The second U.S. President, John Adams, wrote: “It is not only [the juror’s] right, but his duty … to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court.” Similarly, Founding Father Alexander Hamilton declared: “It is essential to the security of personal rights and public liberty, that the jury should have and exercise the power to judge both of the law and of the criminal intent.”

Legendary Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay once instructed a jury:

It may not be amiss, here, Gentlemen, to remind you of the good old rule, that on questions of fact, it is the providence of the jury, on questions of law, it is the providence of the court to decide. But it must be observed that by the same law, which recognizes this reasonable distribution of jurisdiction, you have nevertheless the right to take upon yourselves to judge of both, and to determine the law as well as the fact in controversy.

The following year, 1795, Justice James Irdell declared: “[T]hough the jury will generally respect the sentiment of the court on points of law, they are not bound to deliver a verdict conformably to them.” In 1817, Chief Justice John Marshall said that “the jury in a capital case were judges, as well of the law as the fact, and were bound to acquit where either was doubtful.”

In more recent times, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously held in 1969:

If the jury feels that the law under which the defendant is accused is unjust, or that exigent circumstances justified the actions of the accused, or for any reason which appeals to their logic and passion, the jury has the power to acquit, and the courts must abide that decision.

Three years later, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals noted: “The pages of history shine on instances of the jury’s exercise of its prerogative to disregard uncontradicted evidence and instructions of the judge.”

In a 1993 law journal article, federal Judge Jack B. Weinstein wrote: “When juries refuse to
convict on the basis of what they think are unjust laws, they are performing their duties as jurors.”

Those who try to wish away the power of jury nullification often point to cases in which racist juries have refused to convict white people charged with racial violence. As attorney Conrad shows in his book, Jury Nullification: The Evolution of a Doctrine, this has occurred only in very rare instances. Besides, it’s ridiculous to try to stamp out or deny a certain power just because it can be used for bad ends as well as good. What form of power hasn’t been misused at least once in a while?

The Fully Informed Jury Association (FIJA) is the best-known organization seeking to tell all citizens about their powers as jurors. People have been arrested for simply handing out FIJA literature in front of courthouses. During jury selections, FIJA members have been excluded solely on the grounds that they belong to the group.

FIJA also seeks laws that would require judges to tell jurors that they can and should judge the law, but this has been an uphill battle, to say the least. In a still-standing decision (Sparf and Hansen v. U.S., 1895), the Supreme Court ruled that judges don’t have to let jurors know their full powers. In cases where the defense has brought up jury nullification during the proceedings, judges have sometimes held the defense attorney in contempt. Still, 21 state legislatures have introduced informed-jury legislation, with three of them passing it through one chamber (i.e., House or Senate).

Quite obviously, the justice system is terrified of this power, which is all the more reason for us to know about it.

Reference: Conrad, Clay S. Jury Nullification: The Evolution of a Doctrine. Carolina Academic Press, 1998. • Various literature from the Fully Informed Jury Association (www.fija.org), 1-800-TEL-JURY, P.O. Box 5570, Helena, MT 59604.

_____________________________________

Look for more 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know under the tag “50 Things” on disinfo.com.

[We] were discussing the thousands of citizens who sent emails to NeverGetBusted asking for help regarding krooked kops in their communities. Formerly one of our nation’s top drug enforcement officers, [Barry Cooper] has first hand knowledge of the korruption the American Drug War produces. He knew the constant flow of emails complaining of civil rights violations, specifically the 4th Amendment (unreasonable search and seizure), were true.

Barry Cooper says his arrest last week was in retaliation for his “KopBusting” and was politically motivated:

As hard as it was on my family for myself to go to jail … it’s nothing compared to how hundreds of thousands of families feel every year, because of those raids. Other families do not have the resources nor the experience or the knowledge to safely make it through a raid, so when they’re raided, they can’t and don’t and won’t fight back. So my family is fighting back for those families.

As far as I know, there’s no other human or family exposing cop corruption. The proof that cops will retaliate if you expose them, is our arrest and the raid they conducted on my home. For that exact reason, other families just take it. This happened to my family because I caught and filmed one of their officers stealing drug money.

The absolute … spells doom to everyone when it is introduced into the political realm.

- Hannah Arendt [1]

Democracy in the United States is experiencing both a crisis of meaning and a legitimation crisis. As the promise of an aspiring democracy is sacrificed more and more to corporate and military interests, democratic spheres have largely been commercialized and democratic practices have been reduced to market relations, stripped of their worth and subject to the narrow logics of commodification and profit making. Empowerment has little to do with providing people with the knowledge, skills, and power to shape the forces and institutions that bear down on their lives and is now largely defined as under the rubric of being a savvy consumer. When not equated with the free market capitalism, democracy is reduced to the empty rituals of elections largely shaped by corporate money and indifferent to relations of power that make a mockery out of equality, democratic participation and collective deliberation.

The undoing of democracy as a substantive ideal is most visible in the illegal legalities perpetuated by the Bush-Cheney regime and reproduced under the presidency of Barack Obama that extend from the use of military commissions, the policy of indefinite detention, suppressing evidence of torture, maintaining secret and illegal prisons in Afghanistan to the refusal to prosecute former high-level government officials who sanctioned acts of torture and other violations of human rights. As part of the crisis of legitimation, democracy’s undoing can be seen in the anti-democratic nature of governance that has increasingly shaped domestic and foreign policy in the United States, policies that have been well documented by a number of writers extending from Noam Chomsky to Chris Hedges. What is often missed is how such anti-democratic forces work at home in ways that are less visible and when they are visible seem to become easily normalized, removed

[Read more at Truthout]

Somebody threw rocks through the windows of Williamsburg’s American Apparel last night, in what looks to be a bout of “retail terrorism.”

I called up the store to ask just what happened, and was told that yes, indeed, someone threw rocks inside the store but then they were caught by the police. I asked if they think the leggings assassins were acting maliciously, or just drunks, and they said, “Yea, they wrote that on their blog. They have blogs. Someone took pictures and put them up on a blog.” I asked which blog that was, but they didn’t know.

Update 1-1:44 pm: Heard from a tipster who knows an employee at a nearby establishment. That person’s report from the scene makes it sounds a heck of a lot scarier than just a few kids throwing rocks! Per his recollection, there were about 50 guys dressed all in black, wearing masks, and “causing total mayhem” all along No. 6th St, “dumping out trash dumpsters and setting everything on fire in the streets, and then smashing all the windows of the american apparel.”

There’s actually a message at the end of the video … enjoy (the video was directed by Ron Howard):

I represent a small group of people who have chosen to permanently deactivate from Facebook on March 7th.

Although we are all aware of the website’s convenience, we are abandoning Facebook for the Promised Land that was once known as life. In order to demonstrate our acknowledgement of the website’s obvious capabilities, we created an event page using Facebook. You can find it here:

http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=308145337480&ref=ts

On behalf of dwindling humanity in the face of population overload, we cordially invite you to check out the page, and hope that you will consider participating in deactivation on March 7. By gathering many participants in a show of solidarity, we hope to create some awareness and generate mainstream discussion on the true implications of web 2.0.

On the page you’ll find a heated and sometimes hilarious wall-debate outlining many different reasons why one may or may not choose to take up the cause.

Although Facebook is a convenient means to communicate with other people, it does not represent a substitute for human interaction.

Let’s de-clutter our lives and do away with this uselessness together.

Time is running out.

De-complicate, Communicate , Deactivate.

03.07.2010

Hope to see you there.

Animal-rights group PETA is backing off plans for a billboard about pet-population control that poked fun at Tiger Woods’ sex scandal — after hearing from the golfer’s lawyers.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ message would have matched an image of Woods with this ad copy: “Too Much Sex Can Be A Bad Thing … for little tigers too. Help keep your cats (and dogs) out of trouble: Always spay or neuter!”

PETA told the Orlando Sentinel Wednesday that it was searching for an advertiser to put up the “fun, tongue-in-cheek” billboard near Woods’ home in Windermere, Fla., where his November car crash sparked a shocking infidelity scandal that led to last week’s public apology.

But yesterday a PETA spokeswoman said the plan was on hold “in light of conversations we have had with Mr. Woods’ attorneys.”

Americans United for Change and American Family Voices unveiled a new television ad today as part of a ramped up coalitional effort urging Congress to pass President Obama’s financial regulatory reform plan to make Wall Street more transparent and accountable and prevent another financial crisis. The new ad comes as Citi, one of the largest recipients of taxpayer dollars, revealed how Wall Street is fully back to business as usual by announcing plans to create “the first derivatives intended to pay out in the event of a financial crisis.”

More than 200 masked protesters smashed windows, vandalized cars and newspaper boxes and intimidated pedestrians in downtown Vancouver Saturday morning before being confronted and dispersed by police in riot gear.

The anti-Olympics protesters, many dressed in black balaclavas and masks, and carrying a ladder, smashed up to three windows at the Hudson’s Bay store and one at the Toronto-Dominion Bank near the intersection of Granville and West Georgia streets.

The group also sprayed the windows with red paint, were involved in several confrontations with supporters of the Olympic Games, and threw marbles and spat at police before marching down West Georgia Street toward the Bayshore Hotel in Coal Harbour where the International Olympic Committee members are staying.

But as the marchers neared the hotel they were turned back by the Vancouver Police Department crowd control unit and the 2010 Integrated Security Unit at the Cardero Street intersection.

[Read more at CBC News]

Groups opposing the government’s internet censorship plans have condemned attacks on government websites, saying it will do little to help their cause, while Communications Minister Stephen Conroy called them “totally irresponsible”.

Hackers connected with the group Anonymous, known for its war against Scientology, this morning launched a broad attack on government websites.

They are protesting against forthcoming internet filtering legislation and the perceived censorship in pornography of small-breasted women (who are thought to be under age) and female ejaculation.

Several government sites were down and the hackers have promised to follow up by spamming government offices with pornographic emails, faxes and prank phone calls.

Read More: Sydney Morning Herald

From The Raw Story:

Five-dollar registration fee for persons planning to overthrow U.S. government.

Terrorists who want to overthrow the United States government must now register with South Carolina’s Secretary of State and declare their intentions — or face a $25,000 fine and up to 10 years in prison.

The state’s “Subversive Activities Registration Act,” passed last year and now officially on the books, states that “every member of a subversive organization, or an organization subject to foreign control, every foreign agent and every person who advocates, teaches, advises or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States … shall register with the Secretary of State.”

There’s even a $5 filing fee.

By “subversive organization,” the law means “every corporation, society, association, camp, group, bund, political party, assembly, body or organization, composed of two or more persons, which directly or indirectly advocates, advises, teaches or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States [or] of this State.”

[Read more at The Raw Story]

A Christian group in Michigan has filed a lawsuit alleging that a package of hate crimes laws named after murder victim Matthew Shepard is an affront to their religious freedom.

Far from the intended purpose of severely punishing criminals who commit unspeakable acts against a persecuted minority group, the religious activists claim the laws are a guarded effort to “eradicate” their beliefs.

Filed by the Thomas More Law Center — which bills itself as the religious answer to the American Civil Liberties Union — the complaint claims that protecting gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people “is an effort to eradicate religious beliefs opposing the homosexual agenda from the marketplace of ideas by demonizing, vilifying, and criminalizing such beliefs as a matter of federal law and policy.”

The suit was placed on behalf of American Family Association of Michigan president Gary Glenn, along with pastors Rene Ouellette, Levon Yuille and James Combs.

Read More: RAW Story

Nick P. at Black Sun Gazette:

Special thanks to Bulldogger for showing me the way to the rabbit hole.

Many readers of Black Sun Gazette are doubtless familiar with Alex Jones, the Austin, TX-based radio show host and film maker. I have long struggled with what to make of Alex Jones. On the one hand, he provides people with difficult to find information about the frightening truth of the American government’s lurch toward police state and global empire. On the other, he is a frothing at the mouth crypto-fascist who seems to do little more than lead people down blind alleys and arguably does more to terrorize people into inaction than anything to spur resistance. Recently, however, information has been brought to my attention that is worth sharing with my reading public. This article is meant to be primarily speculative, though I think that the issues that I raise bear consideration.

Full Article at Black Sun Gazette

A remarkable scenario played out in the American media recently, and beyond the import of the story itself is the quantum shift in public perception that it illustrates.

A pro-cannabis group based in Colorado called for a nationwide boycott of coffee giant Starbucks after activists spotted a Starbucks logo on the website of a virulently extremist anti-drug organization. After intense negative publicity ensued, Starbucks actually felt moved to issue a denial.

Once Mason Tvert of Safer Alternative For Enjoyable Recation (SAFER) called for the boycott, it took only a couple days until Starbucks denied funding the Colorado Drug Investigators Association (CDIA). Starbucks further said they officially took no position on the marijuana issue, one way or the other.

That doesn’t sound so remarkable until you realize that the very nonchalance, the need to be noncommital, is emblematic of the change, the bedrock reality in the politics of marijuana that has already occurred under our feet.

Read More: New Junkie Post

DO WANT ... on Verizon!

4chan site owner m00t has posted to the 4chan blog, and Twitter, that Verizon wireless, are blocking both in and outbound web-traffic to 4chan.

Unlike a recent scare involving AT&T last year, m00t believes that this time it’s for realsies, from the 4chan blog:

Over the past 72 hours, we’ve been receiving reports from Verizon Wireless customers having difficulty accessing the image boards. After investigating, we found that Verizon is dropping traffic to/from boards.4chan.org, only on port 80 (HTTP). No other subdomain/IP/port is affected, which leads us to believe this block is intentional. A call was placed to their support staff last night, and we were told that the ticket would not be looked at until Monday at the earliest, and: “You’ll need the customer to call to request it be unblocked…”

If you’ve been affected by this block, please contact Verizon Wireless customer support. The numbers we were given are: “Verizon Wireless NRB: (866) 298-537″ and “Verizon Wireless DSO: (800) 770-1179″.

Note: Users with mobile browsers that proxy (BlackBerry, Opera) won’t necessarily have issues accessing the boards.

We’ll watch this story with interest as it unfolds, as it could point to the first in what some believe to be an upcoming war for Net Neutrality.

Read More: Sittingnow.co.uk