Christians want me to believe that society is “decaying” because their god is increasingly being taken out of public and political life. They cite things like the fact that it is now against the law to force kids to pray in school—to whose god I wonder—as proof that we’re becoming less moral. As a Black person, this offends me to the highest degree. You mean to tell me that you think that our society is on the decline in terms of morals and values? Do you really think I was born last night? Let me tell you one got damn thing, a society founded on the enslavement of Blacks, the annihilation of Native Americans, and the subjugation of women, ALL ON YOUR GOD’s WATCH, is not one that is just now decaying. It started out that way. If we had slavery, the walk of tears, and rampant sexism while your god was firmly in public and political life; do you really expect me to believe that things are somehow worse because you and your god aren’t privileged in society? If anything, the less power and privilege given to your god—and the often ignorant people who oppose other people’s freedom and equality in the name of your god—has been BETTER for our society. How many times have people who believe in god opposed an end to slavery, women’s right to vote, interracial marriage, integration, women’s reproductive freedom, and most recently gay marriage? ALMOST ALL THE TIME. One thing I don’t have—making me a very dangerous freedom fighter—is short term memory. I remember. And I know what has taken place under your god’s watchful and indifferent eye. My advice to you all who believe in god, and want it to have unrestricted access in public life, is to find another fool. Because this is one Black atheist who will not stand for no bull shit.
Sole’s album No Wising Up No Settling Down is due for release on 01 May 2013. You can pick it up now from Bandcamp for $9.
You can like Sole on Facebook or follow him on Twitter.
Alejandra Ramirez from Prefix Mag on No Wising Up No Settling Down:
With No Wising Up No Settling Down set to drop May 1, Sole is back to offer his social and political commentary on his rising discontent with the international state of affairs. And he has given his fans the opportunity to stream the album in full, below.
The Denver rapper comments on anything from his growing distaste towards ignorant hypocrites, the relevancy of the Internet generation, and the repercussions of capitalism. He even finds himself vicariously voicing his modus operandi that parallels the anarchist philosophy of feminist Emma Goldman.
His feral delivery marinates the chopped and screwed beats to a pulp, as he sounds like a triggered activist voicing his convictions to the discontented, burgeoning class. But in No Wising Up No Settling Down, Sole receives a little assistance from his friends like the 90’s reminscent Hood Internet and the glittered gold production of Gold Panda and DJPain1. Stream the album below as well as his tour dates.You can preorder the album here.
I Think I’m Noam Chomsky
Report: Obama Officials Authorized New ‘Cybersecurity’ Warrantless Surveillance Program, Fresh Immunity Given to ISPs →
Yesterday, in a disturbing report published on CNET, new documents obtained by EPIC reveal that Obama administration officials have authorized a new government program involving the interception of communications on Internet service providers, including AT&T—one of the key players in the NSA warrantless wiretapping program.Under long-standing federal law, the government needs to use legal process to compel service providers to hand over customer communications, yet reportedly, the government is promising these companies they will not to prosecute them for violating US wiretapping laws if they hand over the information voluntarily. And the secret surveillance authorization seems quite broad, touching on huge swaths of private, domestic activity:
The secret legal authorization from the Justice Department originally applied to a cybersecurity pilot project in which the military monitored defense contractors’ Internet links. Since then, however, the program has been expanded by President Obama to cover all critical infrastructure sectors including energy, healthcare, and finance starting June 12.CNET reported also that the National Security Agency (NSA) and Department of Defense were “deeply involved in press for the secret legal authorization” further underscoring widespread worries that the military may be given access to Americans’ personal information through cybersecurity operations. The report comes as Congress is debating CISPA, a dangerous bill that carves a “cybersecurity” loophole in all our privacy laws.
CISPA passes U.S. House: Death of the Fourth Amendment?
CISPA will allow private sector firms to search personal and sensitive user data of ordinary U.S. residents to identify “threat information,” which can then be shared with other opt-in firms and the U.S. government — without the need for a court-ordered warrant.
This means a company like Facebook, Twitter, Google, or any other technology or telecoms company, including your cell service provider, would be legally able to hand over vast amounts of data to the U.S. government and its law enforcement — for whatever purpose it deems necessary — and face no legal reprisals.
And despite numerous amendments and changes, there are no requirements that personal data, such as health records or banking information, should be anonymized before sharing it with the government.
…
The Bill will also amend the National Security Act to allow U.S. intelligence services to hand over classified information to entities and people that do not have security clearance. The idea is that this will be used in order to help companies fight back against and prevent cyberattacks on their systems in the future.
I Self Devine’s The Sound of Low Class Amerika was released on 08 May 2012. You can buy it directly from Fifth Element, from iTunes (Regular, Deluxe, Instrumentals), or from Amazon.
You can like I Self Devine on Facebook or follow him on Twitter.
Edwin Ortiz from HipHopDX on The Sound of Low Class Amerika:
Fueled by his disdain for today’s societal ills within America, the album’s blunt stance strikes like a hammer, with tracks like the Brother Ali-assisted “Living Under Siege” and “Conditioned” giving listeners a taste of the hypocrisy that is occurring. Not one to hold his tongue, “Power” sends shots at oppressive organizations that have used their authority unjustly, letting them know their reign is over. Things hit a high point on “Cold Anger,” a record that finds I Self Devine in his element: “If you protest, you a terrorist / If you want justice, you’s a militant / If you proud of your people you a racist / Unpatriotic, no faith regardless / At war, inner turmoil / Conflict coding, tension boil / Police state, search and seize / No p-c, its eroding freedom / Note to the banks, your accounts is freezing / ‘Cause you criticize how your country’s scheming / Opening your mail and your email, all in your details / No privacy what I see now / The new enemy is anyone who wants control of their destiny / Just ignorant shit, off my penmanship / Get stripped of my citizenship / Fuck it.”
…
The Sound Of Low Class Amerika is honest, radical music with a purpose that will keep the listener’s mind in fifth gear. Even more so, it’s a refreshing break from the usual talk of stacking paper and bedding the baddest bitches. I Self Devine once again shows he has the skills to match his counterparts over at Rhymesayers. Making this a consistent theme is his next test.
P.L.X.T.X’s (pronounced “Pluto”) new album Selective Mutism LP was released on 05 April 2013. You can get a free digital download or a physical copy of the CD for $5 from Bandcamp.
You can like P.L.X.T.X on Facebook, follow him on Twitter, or follow him on Soundcloud.
From Jef With One F from HoustonPress on Selective Mutism:
Obstinately, it’s an anti-war record dealing largely with the United States’ drone-strike policy. The sounds of war and death serve as the preamble, with a track of synthetic missile strikes following an intro that is nothing but the phrase, “Can you see/hear me, death from above?” backmasked over and over again.
…
The bulk of Selected Mutism is typical of Munoz’s approach to music. The lyrics are tonelessly shouted and endlessly repeated over an assault of harsh industrial beats and noise. Musically, it’s far more melodious than his EP Time, but it remains brutal, mechanical noise that engages a listener much the same way Batman engages The Joker.
It’s all a rage against oppression, the silence that death brings. As Munoz screams up at the sky in tracks like “War” and “Death Squads!” it’s clear that he’s expressing a repressed passion that manifests as an inability to speak normally. His lyrics reflect the anguish of people being burnt up by murder plains in their last moments of life struggling to stay alive.
Editor’s note: Because P.L.X.T.X’s live show is something to see, I’ve included a live video of his performance in Galveston, TX on 25 January 2013.
White Out: Media Heap Suspicion On Brown People In Boston Marathon Bombing [Racist "Revenge" Attacks follow] →
WASHINGTON — Hours after the Boston Marathon bombing, there was alreadyInternet chatter that a “Saudi national” was the suspect. Police raided the apartment of Abdulrahman Ali Alharbi, a 22-year-old student from Saudi Arabia, as he was recovering from the blasts in a Boston hospital.
Next, CNN’s John King raised the alarm about a more elusive “dark-skinned male” who the TV reporter said was in custody on Wednesday.
The following day, the New York Post got more specific. It slapped pictures of two young men on its front page, calling them “Bag Men” and identifying them as persons of interest to federal authorities. One was Salah Barhoum, 17, a Moroccan American middle-distance runner.
And then there was news that a man in Bronx, N.Y., who was born in Bangladesh was beaten up for supposedly being “a f*cking Arab” by a group of men who wanted retribution for the marathon bombing.
A Palestinian woman near Boston also reported being the victim of a hateful assault on Wednesday, when a man hit her and yelled, “F*ck you Muslims! You are terrorists! I hate you! You are involved in the Boston explosions.”
What all of these people have in common is that they’re innocent of the bombing. They also happen not to be white.
For the most part, the response to the marathon bombing has brought out humanity’s better angels. Deserved attention has been shed on the heroic efforts of bystanders like Carlos Arredondo and the many first responders who rushed to help the injured.
But it has also served as a depressing reminder that the racial profiling that increased against men of Middle Eastern, Arab and South Asian descent after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks continues to infect the public response to terrorism.
It may turn out that the Boston Marathon bombers are Arab. But they could also be white, black, Native American, Asian or Hispanic. While CBS News tweeted Wednesday that a “white male” was a possible suspect, most people subjected to the speculation grinder have been non-white — all before the FBI on Thursday released photos of two racially ambiguous suspects.
The consequences have been brutal for some of the innocent people caught in the frenzy.
Alharbi had “every inch” of his apartment searched by law enforcement, with authorities seen lugging away bags of items from his home. Residents in his building called it “a startling show of force.” His roommate was questioned for five hours.
“I was scared,” the roommate, Mohammed Hassan Bada, 20, of Saudi Arabia, told the Boston Herald.
Meanwhile, Alharbi was recovering from shrapnel wounds in a hospital. News outlets later reported that he was a witness, not a suspect, and “was apparently in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
CNN’s “dark-skinned male” never materialized, as it quickly became clear that its report of an arrest was wrong. PBS journalist Gwen Ifill said she found it “disturbing” that a television network was allowed to characterize a supposed bombing suspect in such a way.
Barhoum had his world turned upside-down when he saw himself on the cover of the New York Post.
“It’s the worst feeling that I can possibly feel. … I’m only 17,” he said. His mother, meanwhile, felt “sick and upset.”
Barhoum went to the police on Wednesday to clear his name, after he noticed photos of himself getting tagged on social media. He was unable to compete in the marathon, but decided to go and watch. Federal authorities told ABC News that they were passing around his picture to find more information — as they no doubt were doing with pictures of many of the people photographed on Monday.
Later Thursday, after a public outcry over its cover image, the New York Post ran a follow-up story clarifying that authorities said the two “bag men” had “neither had any information or role in Monday’s attacks at the Boston Marathon.”
The rush for indictment and revenge has also taken a toll on Abdullah Faruque, 30, the Bronx man who was beaten up for having brown skin and looking “Arab.” He was assaulted by three or four men outside an Applebee’s on Monday, just hours after the bombing.
“One of the guys asked if I was Arab. I just shook my head, said like, ‘Yeah, whatever.’ I didn’t even know that [the] Boston [bombing] happened because I had a busy day,” Faruque explained to the New York Post.
“Yeah, he’s a f*cking Arab,” responded one of the men, before the group jumped him. They dislocated his shoulder and left him semiconscious.
Heba Abolaban, who lives near Boston, was assaulted and harassed on Wednesday. Abolaban told Malden Patch that while she and her friend, who were both wearing hijabs, were walking with their children, a man came up and punched her shoulder and accused them of being involved in the Boston Marathon bombing.
“I did not say anything to him,” Abolaban said. “Not even that we aren’t terrorists. … He was so aggressive.”
… Talal Alyan, an Arab American student, launched an online campaign on Thursday demanding that the New York Post apologize for its coverage.
“We demand an apology from the New York Post for identifying a Saudi Arabian national as a suspect for the Boston Marathon bombing despite having no evidence,” read the petition, which had more than 6,600 signatures as of Thursday evening. “The New York Post based their conclusion that the wounded marathon runner was a suspect only on the fact that he was an Arab. The New York Post needs to apologize to the falsely accused and the broader Arab and Muslim community.”
Still, Barhoum was uneasy at being targeted, while others around him in the marathon crowd weren’t.
“The only thing they look at is my skin color and since I’m Moroccan, I’m kind of dark,” said Barhoum. “Last night I couldn’t sleep. Just thinking about the consequences. What are people going to say and what the result is going to be.”
“A legal fight over the government’s use of a secret surveillance tool has provided new insight into how the controversial tool works and the extent to which Verizon Wireless aided federal agents in using it to track a suspect.
Court documents in a case involving accused identity thief Daniel David Rigmaiden describe how the wireless provider reached out remotely to reprogram an air card the suspect was using in order to make it communicate with the government’s surveillance tool so that he could be located.
Rigmaiden, who is accused of being the ringleader of a $4 million tax fraud operation, asserts in court documents that in July 2008 Verizon surreptitiously reprogrammed his air card to make it respond to incoming voice calls from the FBI and also reconfigured it so that it would connect to a fake cell site, or stingray, that the FBI was using to track his location.
Air cards are devices that plug into a computer and use the wireless cellular networks of phone providers to connect the computer to the internet. The devices are not phones and therefore don’t have the ability to receive incoming calls, but in this case Rigmaiden asserts that Verizon reconfigured his air card to respond to surreptitious voice calls from a landline controlled by the FBI.
The FBI calls, which contacted the air card silently in the background, operated as pings to force the air card into revealing its location.
In order to do this, Verizon reprogrammed the device so that when an incoming voice call arrived, the card would disconnect from any legitimate cell tower to which it was already connected, and send real-time cell-site location data to Verizon, which forwarded the data to the FBI. This allowed the FBI to position its stingray in the neighborhood where Rigmaiden resided. The stingray then “broadcast a very strong signal” to force the air card into connecting to it, instead of reconnecting to a legitimate cell tower, so that agents could then triangulate signals coming from the air card and zoom-in on Rigmaiden’s location.
…
The actions described by Rigmaiden are much more intrusive than previously known information about how the government uses stingrays, which are generally employed for tracking cell phones and are widely used in drug and other criminal investigations.
The government has long asserted that it doesn’t need to obtain a probable-cause warrant to use the devices because they don’t collect the content of phone calls and text messages and operate like pen-registers and trap-and-traces, collecting the equivalent of header information.
The government has conceded, however, that it needed a warrant in his case alone — because the stingray reached into his apartment remotely to locate the air card — and that the activities performed by Verizon and the FBI to locate Rigmaiden were all authorized by a court order signed by a magistrate.”
While the head honchos at the HRC are making 6 figure salaries from donations to support ‘marriage equality’, hundreds of thousands of LGBTQ youth are homeless and are purposely ignored by mainstream gay organizations. The ‘fight’ for same sex marriage has proven to be a profitable business for gay ‘non-profit’ businesses, so it’s no wonder why gay marriage overshadows all other LGBTQ issues. After all, helping the needy results in smaller pay.
Supporting gay marriage doesn’t mean you support the queer struggle. In fact, most ‘allies’ and even a large portion of more fortunate queers don’t know the facts about LGBTQ homelessness, violence against trans* people, high unemployment, discrimination, etc, nor do they bother to research it. They are just concerned about their favorite gay celebrities being able to tie the knot.
If you care about the queer struggle, take a minute of your day to familiarize yourself with some of the disturbing statistics:
- 20- 40% of homeless youth are LGBTQ. In comparison, the general youth population is only 3-10% LGBTQ.
- LGBTQ youth are twice as likely to experience sexual abuse before the age of 12.
- LGBTQ youth, once homeless, are at higher risk for victimization, mental health problems, and unsafe sexual practices. 58.7% of LGBTQ homeless youth have been sexually victimized compared to 33.4% of heterosexual homeless youth
- LGBTQ youth are roughly 7.4 times more likely to experience acts of sexual violence than heterosexual homeless youth
- LGBTQ homeless youth commit suicide at higher rates (62%) than heterosexual homeless youth (29%)
- At least 20% of ALL transgender people will be homeless sometime in their life.
- 29% of transgender people reported being turned away from a homeless shelter due to their transgender status.
Please consider taking action to help combat LGBTQ homelessness. I suggest making a donation to the Ali Forney Center or volunteering at your local LGBTQ homeless shelter.
LGBTQ Intimate Partner Violence (IPV), or Domestic Violence, occurs within the LGBTQ community at the same rate as heterosexual couples.*
Moreover, LGBTQ victims are regularly “rebuffed by helping professionals, who cannot believe that IPV could occur between individuals of the same gender.”*
The problem is serious: “45% of LGBT victims were denied services when they sought help from a domestic violence shelter and nearly 55% were denied protection orders.”*
In fact, “only one in five LGBT survivors receive victim assistance.”*
Victims of IPV within the LGBTQ community are reluctant to seek aid and police help due to the fear of being re-victimized by first responders, service providers, and judges.”*
Moreover, they face systematic discrimination when they do seek aid because “laws and programs are regularly created around gender stereotypes that are discriminatory and detrimental to LGBTQ victims.”*
The inclusion of LGBTQ victims within the new Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) will help with some of these issues. As ThinkProgress notes:
- VAWA now contains a nondiscrimination clause that prohibits LGBT victims from being turned away from services like traditional shelters on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.
- VAWA now explicitly names LGBT people as an underserved population, which allows organizations serving LGBT victims of domestic violence to receive funding from a grant program that focuses specifically on underserved populations.
- VAWA now allows states, at their discretion, to use certain grant funds to improve responses to incidents of domestic violence among LGBT people. This bolsters law enforcement, prosecution, and victim service efforts within states.
While we take this week to focus on marriage equality, we should also focus our efforts on recognizing and preventing IPV within these couples and communities.
Visit the GLBTQ Domestic Violence Project and donate or volunteer. They have a 24-Hour Hotline for victims to receive assistance: 1-800-832-1901
Visit the National Domestic Violence Hotline and donate. Their 24-Hour Hotlines are 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) or 1-800-787-3224 (TTY).
The nationally recognized Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center is a great resource for help and information. Many cities have organizations that cater to the LGBTQIA community, such as New York’s Anti-Violence Project.
Remember, with the passing of LGBTQ inclusion within VAWA, you can no longer be turned away from shelters based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
Please reach out to family and friends with this information. Domestic violence or intimate partner violence does not only occur to heterosexual couples. Find out if you are being abused.
