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By Laura Gottesdiener, Waging Nonviolence

This article originally appeared at Waging Nonviolence.

Yesterday was a bad day for pretty much anyone who cares about racial equality, voting rights, police violence and that vague thing we call “justice.” But leave it to the brilliant Angela Davis to turn the blow into a rallying cry to counteract violence — both institutional and intimate.

First, here’s what happened. After an intense lobbying campaign by the police union — officially called the Fraternal Order of Police; you’ll see why the name is important later — the senate blocked President Obama’s nomination of Debo P. Adegbile to be the chief of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Adegbile, who headed the NAACP’s legal defense fund for years, was tarred by the police’s union, and subsequently by Democrat and Republican senators alike, for having helped represent journalist and Black Panther member Mumia Abu-Jamal in an appeal of his death sentence for allegedly killed a Philadelphia police officer.

No matter that Adebgile and the team won the appeal. Or that Abu-Jamal’s case is riddled with inconsistencies. Or that Adebgile has been a leading champion of voting rights and civil rights for decades.

Appearing on Democracy Now! this morning, Baruch professor Johanna Fernandez, editor of the forthcoming “Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu Jamal,” explained that the effort to block Adegbile’s nomination is part of a broader campaign to protect the impunity of police departments — and police brutality — at all costs.

In other words, the Fraternal Order of Police sent a pretty clear signal: Don’t f*ck with the cops, or they’ll f*ck with you.

So, what we’re really talking about is violence: who has the right to use it with impunity, and — more broadly — who has the right to exert violent control over others. And once we start talking broadly about violence, especially two days before International Women’s Day, it’s important to examine how intimate violence and institutional violence are intertwined to create a thoroughly unjust society.

Appearing later in …read more

Source: ALTERNET

By Ayesha Adamo, AlterNet

I remember the day I heard about Ashley Alexandra Dupré—the mysterious woman in sunglasses standing at the epicenter of the storm surrounding Eliot Spitzer. I remember hoping, so thoroughly and however unjustly, that she would turn out to be brilliant in a way that no one could deny: a Harvard coed, a virtuoso pianist, the next Joan Baez or Maya Angelou…anything at all that might make her the kind of hero who would be able to force America to take a good look in the mirror and understand the hard choices it puts before its greatest minds and sharpest talents when they lack financial means.

Ashley wasn’t that sort of hero. Nor should she have been: she was her own self, living her life as she saw fit. But surely there was some young woman—or man—up to the challenge of taking this rather prevalent archetype—the exceptionally talented youth with no money and plenty of hard choices—into the public eye.

As it turns out, the hero I was waiting for was Belle Knox, the Duke University pornstar, who has arrived on the scene in the past few weeks like Veronica Franco in the midst of the Counter Reformation, blade in hand and ready for a duel of ideas.

Why Veronica Franco, you might ask? Because in 16th century Venice, education was afforded to women of upper class nobility, and rarely to female citizens. Courtesans were the exception to the rule, and were paid to be equally sharp in jousts of the intellect and jousts of bedroom swordplay, giving them the rather exclusive opportunity to be educated well beyond the class they were born into. Veronica Franco was one such courtesan: a sex worker and an esteemed published poet. The two occupations were not mutually exclusive, and it is the former that afforded the education and social opportunities required for the latter.

When we think that sex workers of Veronica Franco’s day were among the very few women of modest beginnings who could acquire an education to …read more

Source: ALTERNET

By Mark Morford, San Francisco Chronicle

You do not mess with blind faith.

Just a humble reminder. You do not question the dully codified stories of Christianity, or challenge them, or offer even remotely refreshing, alternative storylines with anything resembling intelligence, or humor, or deep intellectual curiosity.

What are you, a masochist? To do so would imply there is something to be gained, some sort of cultural progress to be made in the realms of the exhausted – but still deeply paranoid and very simpleminded – Christian faith, when there most certainly is not. Besides, you want to make lots of money, right? Of course you do.

Do you know who understands this overarching rule perfectly? Mark Burnett, the goliath TV producer who single-handedly destroyed the modern world by popularizing reality TV. Burnett and his wife, “Touched by an Angel” actress Roma Downey, know exactly how sucker-able are the vast majority of the world’s Christians. Because they’re evil that way. Smart. I mean smart.

So smart are the Burnetts that they recently hacked together a terrifically lousy movie about the life and times of Jesus, called Son of God. They made it by cobbling new footage with bits of last year’s 10-hour History Channel miniseries on the Bible that was already quite perfectly lousy but still really popular because, you know, Jesus.

But of course, they didn’t stop there. The Burnetts recently travelled the country, shilling this new hunk of spiritual Valium to pastors, churches and shopping malls in hopes of pre-selling millions of tickets, safe in the the knowledge that devout Christians will see just about anything that reassures (but never, ever challenges or advances) their faith, no matter how poorly made, intellectually insulting or terminally boring it might be.

Sexy. Hunky. European. Heavily sedated. Nice hair. Bland as dishwater. Praise!

Are they right? Of course they’re right. There is tremendous money to be made endlessly reinforcing what the masses have already been told to believe, in keeping millions addicted to the very same drug they’ve been taking for …read more

Source: ALTERNET

By Nick Divito, Courthouse News

The owner of Oheka Castle — America's second-largest private home and an inspiration for “The Great Gatsby” — cheats his workers on wages and tips, a class action claims in Federal Court. The lawsuit comes a week after the castle's owner was shot in the head on the castle's grounds by a masked gunman who remains at large.

     Named plaintiff Michael Ernano, who worked as a server and bartender at the popular wedding destination, sued Gary Melius, his sons-in-law John Anthony Dipetra and Fabian Santibanez, and the castle's catering company, Oheka Management Corp.

     The castle, which according to the lawsuit is valued at more than $43 million, was one of the inspirations for F. Scott Fitgerald's novel and was used as the setting for Orson Welles' 1941 film “Citizen Kane” as the palatial estate, Xanadu.

     With 32 guestrooms, the castle hosts catered events for as many as 400 diners, and can accommodate up to 1,000 guests, according to the lawsuit.

     ”Along with the incredible opulence of Oheka Castle comes a hefty price tag reaping substantial revenues for defendants Gary Melius and the Oheka Entities,” the complaint states.

     ”On an episode of the reality television program, Bridezillas, one bride-to-be mortgaged her house in order to finance her fairy tale wedding at the enchanting Oheka Castle.”

     According to the complaint, Melius has boasted that revenue came to $3.6 million in 2011 and hoped to increase that to more than $3.8 million in 2012.

     ”Despite earning millions from the labor of their servants, behind the castle walls,” the lawsuit states, Melius and his team “keep more of those revenues for themselves and cheat workers of wages and tips.”

     Ernano claims that he and other workers were not paid for overtime worked, nor for all the hours they worked, that they were not paid in a timely manner, and that their tips were stolen.

     Ernano claims castle managers required workers to carry over their overtime hours into subsequent weeks to …read more

Source: ALTERNET

By April M. Short, AlterNet

All those flower children who said, “Dropping acid/dancing with Lucy/a dose of this stuff melts your worries away, man” weren’t (just) tripping, after all.

The results of the first clinical study of the therapeutic use of LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) in humans in more than 40 years were published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease this week. They show that LSD can promote statistically significant reductions in anxiety.

Swiss psychiatrist Peter Gasser and his colleagues conducted the double-blind, placebo-controlled study, sponsored by the non-profit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). They tracked 12 people who were near the end of life as they attended LSD-assisted psychotherapy sessions. Eleven of the 12 subjects had never taken LSD prior to participating in the study.

“My LSD experience brought back some lost emotions and ability to trust, lots of psychological insights, and a timeless moment when the universe didn't seem like a trap, but like a revelation of utter beauty,” said Peter, an Austrian study participant.

The study was approved by SwissMedic, the Swiss authority responsible for authorizing and supervising all therapeutic products, in December 2007. The first subject was enrolled on April 23, 2008, and the last long-term follow-up interview was conducted on Aug. 8, 2012.

In his report, Safety and Efficacy of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide-Assisted Psychotherapy for Anxiety Associated With Life-threatening Diseases, Gasser concluded that the study subjects’ anxiety “went down and stayed down.” The results also indicate that LSD-assisted psychotherapy can be safely administered in these subjects, and Gasser wrote that the results warrant further study into the potential of LSD-assisted psychotherapy.

MAPS noted in a press release that there is “considerable previous human experience using LSD in the context of psychotherapy.”

Between the 1950s and early '70s, psychiatrists, therapists and researchers administered LSD to thousands of people as a treatment for alcoholism, as well as for anxiety and depression in people with advanced-stage cancer. However, since then LSD has been strictly controlled. In the U.S. it is listed as a Schedule I substance, which indicates that it …read more

Source: ALTERNET