untethered

Who’s going to wade through garbage to find your body after the police are gone?

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) – The body of a missing woman was found in a Corvallis landfill Tuesday morning, according to Washington County Sheriff’s Office.

Authorities identified the woman as 27-year-old Kaylee Birdzell, who was reported missing on Friday. WCSO said they received information on Sunday that Birdzell’s body was put into the garbage of a local apartment complex near SW 180th in Aloha.

Detectives tracked the trash to Benton County and worked with waste management teams to comb through the landfill and found her body in the Coffin Butte landfill in Corvallis. On Wednesday, officials determined her cause of death as homicide.

“Deputies spent several hours combing through the garbage and were able to locate the body of Ms. Birdzell yesterday morning, said Danny DiPietro, Communications Sergeant for the Washington County Sheriff’s Office.

Birdzell’s boyfriend has been arrested in connection with the murder.

Authorities identified the suspect as 31-year-old Fabian Albert Hernandez, who police said was in a relationship with Birdzell. WCSO said he was arrested on Sunday for unrelated charges of identity theft and fraudulent use of a credit card.

I wonder if the identity theft charge indicates Hernandez is here illegally.

The sheriff’s office added Hernandez now faces additional charges including second-degree murder and abuse of a corpse.

“As you can imagine, when you hear a story like this, it’s unfathomable. But they made sure that they were as detailed as possible and followed up on the leads, and unfortunately, the information that they heard was true,” DiPietro said.

Police abolitionists never address the problem of criminal investigation–who and what replaces police detectives and crime solving? The reality is the restorative justice model–and a large part of the population is served by a district attorney adhering to the philosophy–that prioritizes keeping criminal convicts in the community has no interest in solving mysteries that end with Black! and brown perps in jumpsuits.

For the time being crime is still being investigated by capable, serious people–until they’ve been mostly replaced they are the fumes on which order is running.

Tha Community v The Public

When Portland starting slashing away at police services in 2020 to appease the police abolitionist insurgency holding the city hostage with nightly BLM rioting, it started with three programs abolitionists had long been after, because they’re responsible for putting the most Blacks! in jail (and, not coincidentally, preventing the most crime): the gang unit, school cops and the city’s contribution to policing the city’s transit.

As the city saw its homicide rate explode, with the vast majority of murders by gun–and knucklehead–the gang unit was partly reconstituted under a new set of rules within months. Schoolchildren and teachers are presumably still on their own in dealing with black bullies. There’s always online elementary school, ads for which have recently appeared on city buses. Speaking of the condition of our transit, this progressive city’s pride, it has predictably (though no one here dared actually predict it, of course) suffered; violence on trains and buses is making it hard to retain drivers:

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — On the same day TriMet announced they’re facing its worst hiring issues and staff shortages in its history, one of its drivers was assaulted on the 75 Bus Route near Hawthorne and Cesear Chavez boulevards.

Dispatch audio recorded the driver saying she was hit on and spit by Michelle Hamberg, who records show has several charges of interfering with public transportation, including third-degree assault in January.

“Operator assaults are on the rise,” said Shirley Block, the president of ATU Local 757.

ATU Local 757 says Wednesday’s assault was one of seven it has tracked on the transit system this month. The Multnomah County District Attorney’s office reports 50 open cases of felony assaults in the TriMet system.

It’s a constant in America that Black! criminal violence and bad behavior degrades public transit, like most pubic spaces, a contradiction between two progressive passions: mass transit and Black! privilege (as “civil rights”). But Portland, despite affecting a vibrant and essential Black! history as part of the broader history of the city and state’s Legacy of Racism and White Supremacy, has never had a large enough Black! population to degrade life as much as most bigger cities. Not for a lack of trying, as you see.

The past two years of vastly reduced policing have seen an increase in Black! criminality and audacity in public (if you live in a city with a significant Black! population you’ve seen it: traditional obnoxious Black! behavior in public–“white”–spaces has noticeably increased since 2020 ushered in the Racial Reckoning). But in Portland the twin problems of mental illness and drug abuse match or exceed the problem of Black! malice. No mean feat. Let’s hear it for the Crazies and Druggies.

The city’s transit authority, Trimet, is cancelling projects as revenue drops. Transit ridership is down, staff is short and lines are being cut. But, rest assured

 While most of the affected lines currently see low ridership, TriMet took a balanced and careful approach with an eye on preserving service in areas with high concentrations of people with low-incomes and communities of color.

Transit was not completely abandoned by law enforcement–Mayor Wheeler pulled Portland’s contribution to the transit detail, still staffed by officers from other municipalities such as county sheriffs (who I’m sure are very appreciative of the city’s action). Trimet has its own police–a total of 21 cops despite budgeting for 64. Ridership is down, cops are fewer and bad behavior is up.

So Trimet is preparing to put more police on trains. This has the abolitionist side up in arms. Someone leaked a memo to the citys abolitionist free weekly The Portland Mercury:

TriMet plans to increase transit police on and around the transit system in part due to an alleged increase in drug use on buses and MAX trains, according to an internal agency memo. The increase in transit police and other security officers will not exceed the agency’s budgeted positions, according to TriMet.

On July 27, TriMet sent a memo to employees titled “What to Know About Drug Inhalation on System” that noted the surge of fentanyl use in Oregon over the past three years. Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is 50 to 100 times more potent than heroin and significantly cheaper to produce. Health experts believe that increased access to fentanyl has contributed to the 41 percent increase in overdose deaths in Oregon over the past year—nationally, overdose deaths climbed 16 percent in the same time period.

According to the internal agency memo that was shared with the Mercury, the increase in fentanyl use has led to more frequent use of drugs in public spaces, including on and around TriMet buses and trains. Employees have been “understandably concerned about how exposure to smoke from this drug use may affect their health and ability to pass drug tests,” according to the memo, so TriMet has made two changes—a new policy to air out buses and an increased frequency of transit police “enforcement missions.”

(…)

According to TriMet spokesperson Roberta Altstadt, the agency wants to increase the number of transit police officers on the TriMet system to handle a variety of “nuisances,” not just drug use. While the agency has a budget for 64 security officers, only 21 of those positions are currently filled.

We don’t know what’s in the entirety of the memo but The Mercury’s report focuses on alleged “misinformation” regarding fentanyl.

The health risks of being exposed to secondhand fentanyl smoke are low. A study by the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention—which is cited in the TriMet memo—found that exposure to fentanyl smoke creates little to no detectable fentanyl exposure.

Misinformation around fentanyl inhalation, however, is prominent online and fueled in part by the federal government. In 2016, the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) claimed that two police officers experienced a fentanyl “overdose event” after inhaling secondhand fentanyl smoke, incorrectly stating that exposure to secondhand fentanyl or absorption of the drug through the skin can trigger a fatal overdose. While the DEA later pulled the statement, a 2019 study found that the DEA announcement was a key part of fueling “fentanyl panic” online.

Whether or not fentanyl “contact overdose” is a fallacy I don’t know. But it still seems reasonable to spare riders the secondhand smoke of an often fatal drug. Is the notion of a “contact high” bogus also? Is the criterion for allowable now: will not produce overdose?

Trimet surveyed riders in 2020 as it “reimagined public safety”; though it seems the biggest concern in those heady days when the city was held hostage by BLM rioting was Black! and brown sensitivity about the sight of police (some might call it “fragility”):

For some riders, increased security presence can be a comfort. For others, transit police and other security staff are perceived as a threat on public transit. 

Following the murder of George Floyd and inception of the 2020 protests for racial justice, TriMet launched a significant effort to “reimagine public safety” on transit, garnering survey responses from 13,000 riders and developing a committee to make recommendations to the agency. Discrimination against non-white and low-income riders by transit security was a rider concern long before the racial justice protests, although TriMet points to two independent studies that indicated no racial bias in TriMet fare enforcement and citations. Those two studies, however, were performed with incomplete data.

In the reimagining public safety surveys, riders overwhelmingly said they wanted an increase in unarmed support services on TriMet, which prompted TriMet to remove six transit police positions and reallocate the money towards a new Safety Response Team—TriMet safety employees who carry backpacks full of snacks, dry socks, hand warmers, and other supplies to hand out to riders in need. Safety Response Team members, while barred from giving out citations for code violations, are also intended to deter poor behavior just by being present and visible on the transit system.

To Maia Vásconez-Taylor, an organizer with bus rider advocacy group Bus Riders Unite, it’s inaccurate to assert that increasing the presence of armed transit police puts all riders at ease.

The Mercury found a bus driver sympathetic to their point of view:

“TriMet keeps trying to make itself palatable for the West Hills techies that drive their Teslas to work anyway,” he said.

The bus driver said that he doesn’t anticipate the new airing out policy to work like the agency envisions. According to the operator, any TriMet policy that requires the bus to delay its schedule leads to riders getting upset with drivers who are required to follow the policy.

“Even if it’s for a really good reason, [riders] don’t care—they need to get where they’re going,” the operator said. “It’s clearly a policy that was done by somebody who never actually worked the job.”

I’m not a bus driver but I’ve ridden one, and I know there’s a broad swath from”don’t care” to “will endure.”

Vásconez-Taylor said that the new policy to air out the buses is already having the opposite effect herTriMet is hoping for. Vásconez-Taylor recently heard from a rider who saw someone smoking drugs on a TriMet bus. While the experience was concerning, another rider convinced others not to alert the bus driver because they didn’t want the driver to stop and air out the bus for 15 minutes, delaying the late night bus trip. 

“It’s going to stop people from reporting the usage,” Vásconez-Taylor said. 

That’s undoubtedly true. As with every change imposed by the “reimagining” of law and order, it imposes on the citizen new adaptations to new degradations. Your bus is filled with fentanyl smoke? Just breath deep and think of Justice.

Shot through the nose and you’re to blame…

The Daily Mail reports a woman was shot through the nose driving down a Portland street during the daytime. Turns out she drove through the middle of a gunfight between people on opposite sides of the street (this appears to be a common set-up, gangstas shooting at each other across a busy street); she auto-bombed a gunfight. A local news station covered the story but it appears to have been mostly ignored by local media. I must admit my sympathy is somewhat tempered by learning the woman works in Human Resources.

A Ukrainian woman living in crime-ridden Portland has shared a bloody video of her bullet-shattered face after being caught in a grisly shooting crossfire in broad daylight. 

Katie Guzenko, 27, was driving in her car during the afternoon when she was suddenly shot. The bullet shattered the glass, pierced through her nose and then out again through the driver’s side window.

Horrific footage from July 20 shows the woman hyperventilating with her own crimson blood gushing over her face before she realizes what has happened to her. 

She immediately got out her phone and recorded her wounds. Why do people have to do that? What’s wrong with us?

Yes, I would have done exactly the same thing.

Ted Wheeler has declared a state of emergency around gun violence. I thought he’d already done that. I’m probably thinking of the state of emergency addressing homelessness. Maybe this is a “double secret probation”-like state of emergency. A little known codicil in the city charter, perhaps.

The day after Katie’s horrific ordeal, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler declared a state of emergency over gun violence and set a goal to reduce shootings and gun-related deaths in the city by 10 per cent over the next two years. 

Katie told city commissioners: ‘Ted Wheeler‘s plan to decrease gun violence by 10 per cent in two years is an incredibly low target when comparing it to how much it’s increased…

Portland police data shows that in 2019, there were an average of 30 shootings a month – but now the number of shootings in the city has reached 112. 

Ten percent over two years against an increase approaching 100 percent is admirably modest; a realistic attempt not to return Portland to its pre-BLM peacefulness, but just to tamp down somewhat the new normal of violent exuberance gripping Black! Portlanders in the “racial reckoning”. As the local “crime is not really up” gang here would tell you, chances of you getting a spontaneous horizontal nostril drilled out courtesy of a stray .40 caliber bullet are infinitesimal already, and getting smaller with Ted’s new determination.

Time to work on that tan…

In a sane world such shameful stupidity would merit condemnation of the group responsible. Portland is rotten with self-proclaimed, tax-funded Black! leaders, and not a single one has ever to answer for the behavior of “the community”–in which, more often than not, they have little support or even name recognition. They tend to be recruited and put forward by the city’s progressive power brokers.

The intensely pro-Black! anti-police culture that’s taken over the city means we’ve embarked on an experiment of sorts, to see how far into chaos indulgence of Black! mayhem will take you. How much ruin is in a city? Portland seems determined to find out.

So I see a relationship between the above story and this report of a Portland non-profit offering monthly basic income payments to 50 Black! families (links and reverential capitalization etc of “Black!” added):

Black! Resilience Fund , a program of Brown Hope, a nonprofit started by social justice activist Cameron Whitten in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, began accepting applications Aug. 1 for an initiative to provide up to 50 Black! families with a guaranteed basic income of up to $2,000 a month for three years. [if you “identify as Black!, African American, or African” apply here]

Whitten secured a matching grant of $100,000 from the Oregon Community Foundation and is seeking to raise a total of $500,000 this summer. He says other large foundations are receptive to the concept of granting low-income families a monthly payment, an idea some economists have long supported and one that presidential candidate Andrew Yang highlighted in 2020.

The awards are income-based and vary by family size: from $1,000 for a single adult up to $2,000 for a family with three or more children.

More than 7,500 people applied in the first 24 hours after the program went live Aug. 1. “It’s a sign of the overwhelming need out there,” Whitten says.

How many tax dollars are finding its way into this grift I don’t know.

The Guardian reports a donor-funded American volunteer mercenary group is training Ukrainian recruits with no military experience in “five or ten day crash courses”. The recruits are being rotated in small numbers out of combat units where they’re already deployed due to Ukraine’s heavy losses.

In the heart of the Donbas, a group of eight highly experienced western ex-military personnel are delivering an intensive 10-day training course for 40 new Ukrainian recruits who have been pulled straight from the fighting.

As the battle for Ukraine’s east grinds on, soldiers in the Donbas have been taking heavy casualties in a vicious artillery battle. Ukraine’s professional fighting force, who have been defending the eastern frontline since 2014, are severely depleted. Since 24 February new recruits have been surging to the frontline, many with shockingly little training.

The recruits on the course have a patchwork of equipment: different weapons, fatigues and body armour of varying quality. Aged between their early 20s and mid 50s, the men are of all shapes, sizes and levels of fitness.

One in 10 was in the military before the war and they have had very little formal training, explains Andy Milburn, founder of the Mozart Group, a new private security company that’s tasked itself with training Ukrainian soldiers…

Ukrainian soldiers are given five- or 10-day crash courses in basic weapon handling, marksmanship, fire and manoeuvre and battlefield tactics that would ideally take six months to teach. The trainers have taught thousands of troops to speak to recruits via two interpreters, which Milburn says is not enough for the job but they have struggled to find people with the necessary skills.

Ukraine is not Afghanistan but this invokes memories of the military’s failed effort to train up an Afghan army. And while the Ukrainian recruits likely have more motivation and amenability to Western training, they’re being fed into the meat grinder of a heavy casualty war, against a military power, whereas Afghan Army flunkies were at risk of the relatively rare terrorist attack, and could melt back into the countryside more easily if they changed their mind. So the Ukrainian’s commitment to our war enthusiasm will be tested more severely than the average hapless Afghan’s.

But there are encouraging signs of civilian Ukrainian cruelty toward Russian sympathizers, if you want to see Russia put in its place. Maybe Ukrainians prove uniquely nasty in war–as nasty as the slavophobia to which neocons and others are granting them an exception for the moment would normally presume–and we find this production has legs. Wouldn’t that be good for the effort on behalf of Ukrainian freedom!

Ukraine’s shortage of capable fighters also has to mean more American munitions are ending up on the black market–I think it’s naive to think equipment that can’t be used in the battlefield will simply sit idle, in the most corrupt country in Europe, in wartime.

I don’t know who The Mozart Group is, but their leader Andy Milburn works for the Middle East Institute, a think tank that secretly accepted twenty million dollars from the United Arab Emirates, no doubt to do totally objective research and analysis.

If Milburn’s MEI benefactor wants you to know the UAE is misunderstood, his Mozart Group wants you to know likewise are the Azov Brigades victims of slander:

ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine—Three special-forces platoons from the Azov Regiment, a Ukrainian volunteer militia, fanned out in the woods outside this southern city to practice shooting and ambush tactics they plan to use against invading Russian forces.

After their regiment’s hard-fought but losing battle against Moscow’s forces in the port city of Mariupol, the men training here said they are determined to retake the lost ground and expel the Russians from Ukraine. They are also working hard to shake their reputation as a far-right movement.

“Don’t believe Russian propaganda,” said Vyacheslav Rodionov, 29 years old, a flutist with the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra who now leads a unit of about 20 Azov fighters. “They will bullshit Azov as much as they can, call us Nazis—the real Nazis are the Russian army.”
******

Andrew Milburn, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who founded the Mozart Group, which is helping to train the Azov fighters at their request, says that moving inexperienced people to the battlefield swiftly is a challenge. “Given just 120 bullets, how do you get a guy who has never fired a weapon to a point where he is consistently hitting the target?” he said.

They are so inexperienced that one of them shot himself in the foot during a training session last month, according to Mozart Group trainers.

“It takes more time than we have,” said Mr. Milburn. “But they’re definitely motivated.”

“a flutist with the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra”! You can’t make this stuff up! Well, you or I can’t make it up.

Yesterday I saw a small car caravan in downtown Portland protesting the Chinese government. Cars outfitted all with the same well-made banners seeking to “end the evil CCP [Chinese Communist Party]”, driven by Asian people (capably enough, dispelling old calumnies about Bad Asian Drivers), drew a few curious stares. The professional quality of the cars’ outfitting suggested this was not a spontaneous grass roots demonstration. “End the CCP” and “the evil CCP” are phrases that turn up elsewhere and appear to be the result of a centralized campaign to foster fear and resentment of China here. Here’s a petition you can sign to “end the evil CCP” (how it works I don’t know; maybe a billion signatures means the clouds part and the sun shines down on Xi retiring, the CCP disbanding and drag queens fanning out through China to mend and heal).

This seems to be of a part with a campaign to escalate hostilities with China that includes Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. It’s important to note Pelosi is third in line to replace our faltering president, behind the roundly ridiculed Kamala Harris. One conspiratorial explanation for Pelosi’s visit and apparent kidnapping of US foreign policy is she’s preparing for assuming the office.

With Taiwan moving closer to the US (the current government and elite of the island nation can’t possibly be eager to swallowed up by China) there is a very dangerous play in effect: the peaceful reunification of Taiwan with China becomes less and less possible, as the US drives the two farther apart. This cannot end well and those who pay the highest price will be the Taiwanese people.

Like Ukraine, we are positioning Taiwan to fight to the last man to maintain the “liberal” global order.

Hello Daddy, hello Mommy

Here I am in

Camp Mad Commie

–Allan Sherman, Camp Granada (lyrics slightly altered)

One more from the 2020 Budding Roses anarchist camp for kids curriculum.

In today’s class kids will learn about “Transformative Justice” which, among other things, prepares them to accept their inevitable beatings from black bullies without involving the authorities, using an “Interactive Zine on Transformative Justice, Conflict Resoultion and Bullying.”

At first I read “transformative justice” as “restorative justice”, but they’re not quite the same thing. Restorative justice is a disingenuous reforming legal philosophy offered as a punishment-free alternative to the punitive justice system, which it deems to be state-perpetuated violence originating in “white supremacy”. Restorative justice offers in place of punishment (perhaps deliberately vague) ideas about mutual aid and “community based” solutions. The “we protect us” refrain commonly heard at antifa marches and riots invokes this sentiment (and after hearing it in person I flashed back to the “you’re one of us” scene in Todd Browning’s Freaks). I guess you’re out of luck if you don’t wish to be in the same close “community” with antifa and BLM.

Restorative justice has one goal, all else is rationalization: the reduction of the black (sorry: Black!) prison population and eventual abolition of police and prisons in defense of Blacks! Restorative justice offers itself as an alternative to punitive justice which it calls “state violence” in a cycle of violence with roots in colonialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, ad naseam ad infinitum. Naturally law enforcement is where they propose to “break” the “cycle” of violence.

One common restorative justice alternative to prison is submitting criminals and their victims to what sound like intervention-style face-to-face meetings, where victims explain to slack-jawed Jamals the hurt they’ve caused, and get Jamal’s apology as restitution, in lieu of seeing Jamal jailed. Cynically restorative justice proponents argue this puts victims back “in the equation” (as “stakeholders”, along with criminals)–when the notion of “victim’s rights” is anathema to restorative justice, and is the reason George Gascon recently cut victims out of probationary hearings.

Victims are a big problem for restorative justice and it’s better if they’re out of public sight–and if criminals are out of their sight. Gascon’s action would seem to violate at least one of the Crime Control Act of 1990‘s “victim’s bill of rights” provisions: “the right to reasonable, accurate, and timely notice of any public court proceeding, or any parole proceeding, involving the crime or of the release or escape of the accused”. Through its adherent prosecutors restorative justice has made gains in ending cash bail, infamously.

Restorative justice turns on its head the criminal justice system’s traditional bias, placing criminal welfare above that of the victim.

Restorative justice is practiced here in Portland by District Attorney Mike Schmidt, who said he would have liked to “bak[e] in some more restorative justice” into prosecutions of violent BLM/antifa rioters–if he was inclined to prosecute their crimes in the first place:

“I’d be baking in some more restorative justice,” Schmidt said. “And maybe even more community involvement in the resolution of these cases … to kind of honor the fact that they were there protesting and wanting to be heard. And then creating a venue where they could do that as part of some sort of negotiated dismissal.”

Restorative justice is the banner of the host of Soros-supported district attorneys presiding over the rollback of law and order in places like L.A., Chicago, New York and until recently Chesa Boudin’s San Francisco. Most or all of these prosecutors have hired outside attorneys to run “justice integrity” units to undo the past convictions of a more severe justice system. Here Mike Schmidt spoke for rolling back Oregon’s Measure 11, a Clinton-era crime bill mandating minimum sentences for violent crimes. The law stands for now.

Which is great for Schmidt because just a few months after speaking against the measure he was able to throw the book at a right wing political demonstrator, landing him in prison for ten years for paint-balling and bear-spraying antifa aggressors in downtown Portland–using Measure 11 to trigger mandatory minimums. Two more right-wingers are presently charged and facing the same strategy. No talk of “healing” or “restitution” here–and no bail leniency either, as Schmidt’s deputies, suddenly sounding like law-and-order prosecutors, invoke the concepts conspicuously absent from restorative justice: public safety and, with their excessive sentences, deterrence.

Anyway that’s restorative justice. Transformative justice is restorative justice applied beyond the criminal justice system. Some using the phrase see the “restorative” model as having been co-opted by “the state”–as woke prosecutors adopt it and cringing governors release Black! inmates en masse.

This 2007 paper argues–very indirectly–for including child sexual abuse and domestic violence in the restorative justice model. Domestic violence and exploitation of children puts not only a lot of Black! men away, the abuse of children often implicates mothers. From the restorative point of view this exacerbates the criminal justice system’s “breaking up” of Black! families, perpetuating the cycle of violence and incarceration in which Black! autonomy–and law enforcement–must not be allowed to play a part:

Section One explains Transformative Justice and argues the need for liberatory approaches to violence, in particular child sexual abuse. This section speaks to the urgency of addressing child sexual abuse as part of our liberation struggles, both as a specific form of violence that reflects and perpetuates multiple forms of oppression and as one that is exploited by the Right. A liberatory approach to child sexual abuse uniquely positions us to resist this exploitation…

Section Three proposes a set of practices to address child sexual abuse in a transformative way. Practices of Transformative Justice include: building a Collective, preparation and capacity building, naming and defining child sexual abuse, conducting assessment, developing a safety strategy, supporting healing and resilience, holding accountability, working for community transformation as well as strengthening collective resistance.

The Conclusion offers next steps toward integrating Transformative Justice into intimate, activist and community networks, as well as massbase and community organizations and the sexual and domestic violence sectors.

But again and always the real bottom-line goal is to lower the number of Blacks! in prison, damn the consequences. That includes contriving ways to keep child sexual predators out of jail and in the home. Which of his dozen baby momma’s homes Jamal wants to remain in on a given day is his business.

It all makes the Transformative Justice zine for kids that much creepier.

I found profoundly sad this mock advice column educating the bullied white kid that the black bullies towering over and literally punching down at him, are actually punching up! In “transformative” America for whites the beatings begin in the nursery and continue until the day you die (after you die if you’re anyone of stature):

“Thank you for writing, Jimmy! Good luck with the physical rehab!”

Just as the common man on the street has to take a little violence now and then to Break the Cycle of Violence, so do the kiddies. Sorry Jimmy, but you and your inability to fight are the very fount of the “school to prison pipeline”.

Time is short so I won’t investigate my theory Harry Styles has committed a cardinal sin by posing for pictures eating watermelon (upper center above). It appears he did this to promote a song, but including the triggering (no?) image of a white male smiling over a slice of watermelon here can be no accident. Anyway, he gets to be the foil to Billie Eilish’s anti-heroine in this bizarre vignette/exercise demonstrating the wisdom of not calling the cops for violent assaults.

The result of questionnaire divides the kids into “A’s” and “B’s”, with the latter proponents of “punative” justice–the misspelling is consistent throughout. Now imagine being in the “B, punative justice” category at Rad Camp.

No anarchist work is complete without some ugly art invoking the Indigenous.

Alternatives to calling a cop:

Black-on-black violence in schools is a main source of the “school to prison pipeline”, and so it too must be endured. So appears to be the gist of the zine’s “gossip column”.

The wisdom of children.

Third time’s a charm for diving into the 2020 “Budding Roses” antifa summer camp curriculum for kids grades 3 to 9, conveniently posted online due to Covid and devoted entirely to critical race theory and police abolition due to George Floyd.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our 2020 Summer Camp was a Summer Kit full of activities that campers could do remotely while still facilitating learning and conversations about race, gender, the environment, disability justice, youth activism, and more. We created these kits in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and countless other victims of police brutality—and the subsequent uprising led by Black youth across the country.

Knowing that this was a vital time for youth to be learning, processing, and raising their voices, we focused the majority of our kits on anti-racism. Our goal was to promote collective problem solving on issues of policing, abolition, and community safety by providing supplies and guidance to our campers. The activities in our kits are a combination of original curricula developed by Budding Roses organizers, original activities developed by local radical organizations, and resources borrowed and credited from national educators, authors, and organizers.

We are uploading these activities here to make them easily accessible to anyone who shares our goals of liberatory education and youth empowerment.

We’ve seen the Black Lives Matter at School coloring book, the “As Black as Resistance, For Kids” course and the anarchists’ version of Scared Straight, “Prison Industrial Complex From Critical Resistance”. All the activities are implicitly struggle sessions; today’s “White Supremacy Reflection” selection is explicitly that.

Step 1: Introduction & Definitions

Racism is very harmful to us and our communities. We see it in very obvious ways sometimes, but other times it is not so obvious. These videos and zine will explain some terms like “white supremacy”, “intersectionality” “privilege” and “systemic racism”. While these ideas can seem pretty complicated, we will give you some basic explanations of what they mean here. You can look at these definitions when you are writing your reflection activity.

White supremacy is a false belief that says that white people are better or more deserving than people of other races. It is based in the ideas of colonialism and slavery. It was justified for many years through race science, which scientists later found out to not be true. Many people still believe these ideas, and they can often lead them to treat people of other races very poorly.

Intersectionality is the idea that every person has an identity that is complicated. Our gender, our race, our religious beliefs, and how much money our family has can all affect the way we see the world. These things also affect how other people see us. Our identity is complicated. Our identity has a big influence on the negative and positive things we experience.

Privilege is a concept that you benefit from something based on who you are. If you are treated well for being a man, or being a white person, or being rich or any other thing that gives you advantages for who you are, you have privilege. Having privilege does not mean your life is not hard, or that you are a bad person. It means that society treats you better and you should be aware of that and do what you can to help others be treated fairly.

Systemic Racism means racism, or mistreatment of others based on their race, exists in many systems that we live with every day. These systems like jobs, school, housing, prison, police, and social life all have impacts on how successful we are. Systemic racism does not make things impossible for Black and Indigenous people of color, but it does make them harder, more dangerous and more unfair.

A budding rose does not smell as sweet if going by the name of “white”. Boldface added:

Reflection Questions
Read these questions and think about them. You can just think about them by yourself, you can
talk about them with your family, or you can write out answers to them in your notebook!
Whatever feels best for you. After reading the zine and watching the videos:
● How do you think white supremacy hurts people?
● How do you think systemic racism hurts people?
● What does systemic racism look like in Portland?
● How do you see white supremacy in your school or in your friends?
● What privileges do you think you have? What privileges do you think you don’t have?
● What was the most interesting thing you learned from the zine and videos?
● What did you already know, and what was new to you?
● For white youth:
○ What parts of white supremacy do you see in yourself or in your family?
○ What can you do to stop white supremacy when you see it?
● For BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) youth:
○ How have you been affected by white supremacy?
● What would a world without white supremacy or systemic racism look like?

(Cartoon frogs and zines; antifa needs a Joe Camel, pronouns to be determined.)

It’s important to note how much of the “radical” curricula at Rad Camp is conventional, and the sort of thing that long ago made its way into schools and beyond.

The overlap between conventional wisdom and radical leftism has never been greater–“conventional wisdom” meaning that severely limited speech you see on television, not what I would call the common wisdom–the average person’s appraisal of things–which is some great degree we can’t measure (due to censorship) out of line with “conventional wisdom”.

Antifa and elite are on the same page, even if both are busy writing the other out of the ending.

I bring you more from the 2020 online curriculum of the “Budding Roses” camp for radicalizing kids, grades 3-9, started by Portland anarchists.

Ironically our radical anarchists toed the same line as liberal normies when George Floyd’s overdose became the Mother of All Current Things, and the anarchists’ grim summer camp for kids became no doubt grimmer when they devoted it entirely to the myth of black oppression. Thus the police abolitionist material below. Add the recurring psychological manipulation normalizing and preparing the kids for violence–as “self defense” of blacks (heretofore “Blacks!“; if I could dress the letters up in illuminated bling, I would) and there are only two things happening here: gaslighting kiddie campers about black “oppression” and psychologically manipulating them to be ready to fight and die for Black! “self defense”.

Granted, the potential gain to anarchy of a two-week camp for some tiny number of kids that might make them more likely to rebel in the end, might strike you as no big deal when things are going to hell everywhere already, but the material is telling at least of the ambitions of our “anarchists” and their Establishment frenemies. So let’s have a look and try to do something more than the typical point-and-titter, at Prison Industrial Complex From Critical Resistance.

Critical Resistance (CR) is a national grassroots organization working to abolish the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe.

Critical Resistance wants to abolish all police and prisons and organizes letter-writing campaigns for inmates like they were soldiers at war, because for Critical Resistance they are.

The questionable trope that nobody ever needed a cop before his slave ran away is repeated:

If police are slave patrols prisons are plantations, or something.

I don’t doubt prisons are dehumanizing places, mostly because of the prisoners, but prisons were originally supposed to rehabilitate the penitent, hence the name penitentiary.

The “prison industrial complex” naturally includes immigration enforcement.

Abolition is the only answer because “we know” the “PIC” is irreformable.  Forgive my racism, but I think it might be that black people are irreformable, at least as long as America continues to indulge their worst impulses in the name of justice.  This is why I say blacks are the nuclear fuel rod of political demagogy, radiating energy in perpetuity through the consequences of their shameful collective behavior.

But nobody listens to me, thank God.

Abolitionists don’t really like police body cams, because they tend to reduce complaints against police.  “Shot spotter” technology also, because police react to shots fired, and abolitionists, until the day all police and prisons are abolished, seek to limit police interaction with their communities, without regard for outdated notions of “community safety”.  Portland is establishing both body cams and shot spotter technology, after some activist grumbling.  

I’m genuinely disappointed there’s no Foucault for Kids project (do anarchists know of bad taste?) but their stress on surveillance in prisons (seems like the worst things that happen to you in prison happen when the authorities aren’t looking, but) reassures me the old pederast is still read by the kids at Critical Resistance.

These guys talk about “squash[ing] political dissent like they know something about it.  Also they seem totally cool with surveillance and the violation of privacy in their squashing of “far right” political dissent.

As my grandfather would have said, had I had a relationship to a grandfather and he had been a saucy old fart, that’s enough shit shoveled for today.

Children in the US are being “groomed” by teachers en masse, and that grooming is political, going well beyond sexualization and introducing ever younger children to “gender” chaos. The deliberate culture of grooming in place now seeks to inculcate children in every aspect of progressive critical demagogy, with of course a strong emphasis on critical race theory.

To instant notoriety a “social justice summer camp” created by Portland anarchists stumbled into the news cycle this week, drawing unwanted attention that, of course, instantly became mortal threats necessitating the donation of money. From the ensuing gofundme:

Help Budding Roses host a fun, free social justice camp for Portland-area youth!

Budding Roses launched in 2017 as a free, radical social justice summer camp in East Portland for youth in 3rd-9th grade. For four summers, we have provided two-week summer camps including workshops on social justice issues, art projects, outdoor recreation, and free meals and school supplies. For the past two years, we created COVID-safe “Camp Kits” and delivered them to 70 families so our campers could continue learning and creating together even while socially-distanced. Now we need your help to host our first in-person camp in two years!

The camp is the product of the “Black Rose Anarchist Federation”, that somehow doesn’t list Portland among its local chapters. BRRN (as they style themselves, for Black Rose/Rosa Negra; their site features Spanish language content) says the two-week event is now “independent” of BRRN, which makes me suspect the camp is getting public funds now, and BRRN has discreetly stepped back.

BRRN is likely associated with Rose City Antifa, Portland’s primary antifa outfit, Portland being a small town and its genuine, committed anarchists not that great in number (I suspect; during the year of near-nightly antifa actions set off by George Floyd’s death the larger gatherings, after the early nights when the low-IQ apolitical knuckleheads looking for thrills went home, tended to top out at about a hundred antifa; from this I infer the total number can’t be much higher than, say, two hundred die-hard antifa in Portland proper).

George Floyd’s overdose necessitated turning Budding Roses’ curriculum over entirely to critical race theory and kitsch in 2020, at the same time Covid–fortuitously for the curious–necessitated taking that curriculum online where virtual versions of the camp’s planned activities can still be accessed. There is a printable Black Lives Matter coloring book:

There is a furious zine where a fork-toothed frog brings together the various resentments and calumnies; nothing is spared:

As Black As Resistance by Zoe Samudzi and William C . Anderson in a zine-style adaptation for kids. Learn about colonialism, anti-blackness, intersectionality, self-defense and more!

First, of course, kids learn new words and “big ideas” about things like violence that sound like they come from Mr Rogers, if he really had been the deadliest sniper in Vietnam and was having flashbacks:

There is more on “self defense” later. But there are lots of new words and “big ideas” still.

In other words, kids must learn to immediately associate circumstances like those below with such as “white supremacy”:

Dumbing down already obtuse theory for kiddies has the effect of distilling it in all its crude hostility for adults; it’s literally “white man bad”:

Your contempt for every aspect of the United States must be complete, Grasshopper:

Having filled the kids up with a dose of extreme anger or profound shame, depending on their demographic, they are introduced to another “new” definition and “big idea” about self defense–violence is “self defense” if one invokes white supremacy or is black:

While “self defense” doesn’t necessarily mean violence, it can mean violence, for which the antifa amphibian wants kids to be prepared, because, wise-up-you-little-fuckers, non-violence “isn’t the world we live in today”. Also, black violence is inherently self defense:

I’ve just started having a look at this point.