rebelpleb

"A call for justice shouldn't warrant an apology."

RIP Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and the thousands upon thousands of black men and women executed with impunity every day in this all too racist nation. Photo of banners outside of Spike Lee's Forty Acres Studios in Brooklyn, NY, Courtesy NPR

White male newscaster interviews white male cop who killed a black male. White male newscaster does not pose any difficult questions, though claims he does, and simply lets white male killer cop speak his publicist-prepared nonsense. White male killer cop dresses up in proper white-collar white male uniform of blue dress shirt and slacks to appeal to the fearful white audience. This is called media propaganda and it runs rampant in American news. The George Stephanopoulos interview of Darren Wilson only revealed one of two things: either Wilson is a moronic racist with huge ego issues or, if his words are to be believed at face value, he is a moronic incompetent cop who should be relieved of his duties immediately because he has no clue how to handle any simple situation without murdering someone. Either way, this man shows no shame, no guilt, and no remorse for having killed another person in what should have amounted to a non-incident, so he fails as a human being. The likely expla...

Image courtesy cnet.com The same day news spread that 29 year-old right-to-die advocate Brittany Maynard had ingested the barbiturates prescribed to her by her doctor and had made her choice to die with dignity a couple of days prior, another story hit the news. Nineteen year-old Lauren Hill, also a terminally-ill young woman, scored her first, and possibly only, basket of her life in her college basketball game. Apparently, Lauren has only weeks to live. Lauren was also diagnosed with an untreatable glioma, much like the one that lead to Brittany’s death. Lost amid the tragically sad human-interest angle of these two stories is the question paramount in my mind: why did these two healthy, vibrant young women at the beginning of their adult lives contract these deadly brain tumors and why is no one discussing this question? Rather than suffer the excruciating pain of therapies (radiation and chemotherapy) that would do little to prolong her life but cost much in terms of...

  Happy Indigenous People's Day! As an Italian-American who is closely tied to my ancestry and cultural heritage, I find it appalling that many Italian-Americans chose to exalt this tyrannical, genocidal psychopath. Not much has changed in over 500 years if we still excuse or condone the actions of Columbus and continue to whitewash the numerous genocidal events that encompass the history of the U.S. I hope that we may continue to supplant this horrid day (not to mention the upcoming Thanksgiving) with holidays that reflect those who should be honored and holidays that reflect the truth. For inspiration, here is a story from Seattle's decision to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People's Day. It's LONG, LONG overdue: Native Americans cheer city’s new Indigenous Peoples’ Day

While $15/hr is barely a livable wage in any large city in the United States, it is a start. First, the recently-elected socialist city council member in Seattle, Kshama Sawant, helped enact legislation to raise the minimum wage in that city. Now, it seems that New York may follow suit. Granted, $15 is barely a minimum wage in NYC, let alone a livable wage, but let the fight begin. Perhaps we can move from $15/hr to the $21/hr that should be the minimum wage if it kept pace with overall growth of the U.S. economy since 1968. And by the time any new legislation is implemented, we will probably need at least a $25/hr minimum wage. Imagine that. 

Courtesy: Environmental Health News In a September 2014 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association , Dr. Mary-Claire King – the woman who first discovered the so-called breast cancer gene BRCA1 – and her colleagues suggested that all women should undergo routine medical screening for this gene as well as BRCA2 .   Of course, it seems reasonable that women should know if they carry these mutant allele forms of these genes, because the mutant genes confer a greater risk for breast cancer and ovarian cancer in women who have the mutants than in women who do not. There has been some discussion about Dr. King’s proposal in newspapers and on the radio , but the dialogue inevitably has two tremendous pieces of the cancer puzzle missing: cause and prevention. In fact, too much cancer information tends to be myopic, neglecting to mention essential elements of the global portrait of cancer etiology. Conventional wisdom about cancer tends to end up promulgating...

Corporate capitalism has plundered the earth, poisoned its beings, and created massive inequality. There is no more room for it on a sustainable planet.