Free Gregory Koger

Gregory Koger is an ex-con and a revolutionary communist…and none of that should matter in the slightest. He’s also a person who was beat up, handcuffed, maced, arrested, and now faces the prospect of a three year jail sentence for the crime of holding up his iPhone to take pictures of police harrassment. Koger is the young man who was documenting Sunsara Taylor’s protest of the behavior of the Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago (which, by the way, ought to change their name to drop the first word), and who, oddly, was manhandled and arrested for taking videos of the event, while Taylor herself, who was doing all the talking, got away relatively unhassled.

Koger has now been convicted of trespassing, and will be sentenced on Wednesday. The whole thing has been Kafkaesque — it’s the most hysterical, overblown response to a guy taking a picture of a public event that I’ve ever heard of, and it’s a slap against everyone’s personal freedoms.

Here is the statement from Sunsara Taylor:

There is no justice in the outrageous conviction of Gregory Koger on charges of trespass, resisting arrest, and battery for the “crime” of videotaping a statement I gave at the “Ethical” Humanist Society of Chicago after they dis-invited me from a long scheduled presentation I was to give on November 1st, 2009. Gregory Koger is not only innocent of all charges he has now been convicted of, he is a righteous and beautiful human being who all people seeking to live an ethical life should support as well as learn deeply from.

How is it that Gregory Koger came to be my videographer last November at the “Ethical” Humanist Society of Chicago?

Gregory’s struggle to understand the source of his own long and bitter experiences of injustice and dehumanization as a young man led him to conclusions that were about much more than himself.

How many young men these days put their bodies on the line to defend the doctors who provide the right to abortion women need to even have a chance at a decent and equal life?

Gregory traveled to Kansas to defend Dr. Leroy Carhart when Carhart was declared “Enemy #1” by the same forces who had long-persecuted the recently murdered Dr. George Tiller.

How many Americans these days take responsibility for stopping the torture committed by the U.S. government in our names, not only under Bush, but also under Obama? How many who claim to oppose the wars and occupations by the U.S. government of Iraq and Afghanistan do more than complain under their breath and then change the channel or turn the page?

Gregory donned the orange jumpsuit of Guantanamo detainees in public protests and he marched against these wars, determined to make his opposition felt by people everywhere, including our sisters and brothers across the globe.

How many white people even notice, let alone stand up against, the systematic police terror and brutality that is a fact of life for youth, especially Black and Latino youth, in the inner cities everywhere?

Gregory went to the Southside of Chicago to speak out against a spate of police shootings of young Black men. He has consistently exposed the disproportionate incarceration and violence experienced by Black people in the criminal justice system.

It is through his activity in these realms, as well as his work with the Prisoners Revolutionary Literature Fund to get revolutionary literature into the U.S. prison system that now holds more than 2.3 million human beings, that I came to know Gregory. It was his interest in morality and ethics, in philosophy and revolution, as well as his passion for film that led him to volunteer for me the weekend I was scheduled to give a talk titled, “Morality Without Gods,” at the “Ethical” Humanist Society of Chicago.

The themes of my talk, which drew on the theoretical framework developed by Bob Avakian in his book, AWAY WITH ALL GODS! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World, examined the basis for a morality that is rooted neither in the brutality and ignorance of Biblical times nor the narrow-minded individualism and relativism of modern U.S. capitalism. I posed the need for a morality that both reflects and serves the struggle to bring into being a world free of all forms of exploitation and oppression, a communist world, a world where everyone contributes whatever they can to society and gets back what they need to live a life worthy of human beings.

The irony is bitter; when it comes to “morality without gods,” it is difficult to think of a starker living contrast than that between Gregory Koger and the conduct of the “Ethical” Humanist Society of Chicago.

I recount all this not only to demonstrate how deeply immoral it is that the “Ethical” Humanist Society of Chicago, spearheaded by their president Matt Cole, has viciously and vengefully persecuted Gregory Koger. I recount this to make clear that it is not only Gregory who will suffer due to this outrageous and unjust verdict, but that all those who are victims of the many injustices and oppression that Gregory fought against will also suffer.

It is incumbent upon all who care about the truth, who care about justice and the human spirit, who care about freedom and rights of the most oppressed and exploited in this country and worldwide, to not only join in insisting that Gregory be immediately released on bail and his conviction overturned, but to learn from Gregory’s example and step up their own involvement in the struggle for human emancipation.

WHAT YOU CAN DO:

  • Immediately send statements of support for Gregory to the defense committee AdHoc4Reason@gmail.com

  • Donate money for the appeal. Go to the defense committee website for more information

  • Show your support at the sentencing hearing on September 8.

  • More information will be coming; keep in touch with the Ad Hoc Committee at AdHoc4Reason@gmail.com

The conviction was insane to begin with, but imprisoning a social activist for the crime of photography is simply beyond the pale.

Drop the charges and free Gregory Koger.

Time to revoke Disney’s ownership

Disney has always been aggressive about extending their copyright to the various Disney characters — they keep going to congress and getting more years tacked on. It’s clearly past due that we should revoke all that (come on, Ol’ Walt died when I was in 4th grade, and I don’t care if his cryogenically frozen head is occasionally revived to dispense marching orders and consume baby brain smoothies). As evidence, I present to you the latest atrocity from the Disney channel, “Disney Blam!” What they do is take classic old Disney cartoons from the 40s, 50s, and 60s and ‘update’ them by adding obnoxious voiceovers. The narrator yells out grating descriptions of what’s going on visually, shouts “BLAM!” too frequently, and adds slo-mo instant replay to scenes where characters get bonked on the head. Really. It has to be seen to be believed.

Don’t you feel dumber for having watched that? Or at least, that Disney Corp. thinks you’re an idiot?

Why, in my day, I remember when we could expect five year olds to be able to watch these with comprehension, without some jerk on the soundtrack pointing out “BLAM! He got hit in the head with an anvil!” It’s not as if these things were ever intellectually subtle, you know.

Stop the disease before it spreads to Tex Avery and Chuck Jones! The Idiocracy will have arrived when the media overlords decide that Roadrunner cartoons need a play-by-play for their audiences to appreciate them.

(via Jhonen Vasquez)

Congratulations to Phil Plait!

I just saw the premier of his new show, Bad Universe, and it was lots of fun…and he’s a very entertaining host. I do have a few questions, though.

  • Why does he hate Sydney so much?

  • He was blowing things up right and left, and he was just talking about little rocks. What’s he going to do when he has shows about black holes or supernovae?

  • Hey, where was the biology? Most species don’t go extinct by way of astronomical disasters, so the explosions are a bit unrepresentative of how the universe is likely to destroy us.

Curl up and die already, HuffPo

Jebus, but I despise that fluffy, superficial, Newagey site run by the flibbertigibbet Ariana. I will not be linking to it, but if you must, you can just search for this recent article: “Darwin May Have Been WRONG, New Study Argues”. I don’t recommend it. It sucks. Read the title, and you’ve already got the false sensationalism of the whole story down cold.

It’s actually an old and familiar story that doesn’t upset any applecarts at all. There is a well-known concept in evolutionary theory of an adaptive radiation: a lineage acquires a new trait (birds evolve flight, for instance), or an extinction removes all competition and creates an opportunity for expansion (the dinosaurs are wiped out and mammals expand rapidly into vacant niches), and presto, new species and diversity abounds. For a really obvious example of this phenomenon, look to Darwin’s finches: one or a few species are storm-blown to an isolated chain of islands, and they gradually speciate to take on many roles.

See? No shock, no strike against evolution, or even against Darwin’s version of evolution. To claim otherwise is simply stupid.

Now the paper in question seeks to quantify the expansion of taxonomic diversity with the appearance of large-scale ecological opportunities, and concludes that competition and refinement by natural selection has not been the major driver of diversification, but that reason we have thousands of species of mammals and even more species of birds is more a consequence of chance and opportunity than strong competition. It’s a reasonable result, but not cause for a revolution; lots of us have been advocating for the importance of chance in evolution for many years, and it’s unsurprising that non-selective mechanisms of evolution will generate new diversity from a single species in an open, competition free field.

Bugger the awful Huffpo. One of the scientists, Sarda Sahney, has a nice blog with a sensible discussion of the paper. Read that instead.

Could Virginia Heffernan possibly be more wrong?

That would be tough. She’s written a diatribe in the NY Times on the Pepsico debacle, and it isn’t just that she doesn’t like many of the scienceblogs (including yours truly), but that she gets the facts wrong.

This was just bizarre.

I was nonplussed by the high dudgeon of the so-called SciBlings. The bloggers evidently write often enough for ad-free academic journals that they still fume about adjacencies, advertorial and infomercials. Most writers for “legacy” media like newspapers, magazines and TV see brush fires over business-editorial crossings as an occupational hazard. They don’t quit anytime there’s an ad that looks so much like an article it has to be marked “this is an advertisement.”

Errm, many of the early departures in the wake of Pepsico were science journalist/bloggers — and the impression I got was that they were more concerned about the ethics of advertorials than the pure science bloggers. And the problem with the Pepsico blog was that it was an ad that looked much like an article but wasn’t marked “this is an advertisement”.

There is much in her rant that is clearly outrage that some of us (uh, yours truly again) have no sympathy for religious excuses, or indulge in “religion-baiting” as she calls it, but I’ll pass over that — atheist-haters are dime-a-dozen, and it’s not even particularly notable. But this final bit is absurd and discredits her completely: she lists some blogs she favors for her version of ‘science’.

For science that’s accessible but credible, steer clear of polarizing hatefests like atheist or eco-apocalypse blogs. Instead, check out scientificamerican.com, discovermagazine.com and Anthony Watts’s blog, Watts Up With That?

The first two are fine, but seriously: the pretentious weatherman who jiggers the evidence and makes up stuff about climate to deny the facts? If only she would have also mentioned a creationist blog or two, it would have made my day.

Skip Heffernan’s ignorant noise. David Dobbs has a more judicious reply.

Help NPR beat FOX News

Helen Thomas vacated her front row seat in the White Press (under ignominious circumstances, unfortunately), and now it’s up for grabs. The White House Correspondence Association is going to decide whether to give it to NPR, Bloomberg, or, appallingly, Fox News. Sign the petition. Slap down the right-wing propaganda organ and insist that a legitimate news organization like NPR get the seat.

WikiLeaks does humanity a service

It’s amazing: WikiLeaks has just dumped over 91,000 classified documents from the Afghanistan war on the web. Just like that, we get an actual look at what’s been going on over there, unfiltered by the traditional media, and definitely not given a rosy patina by Fox News. Fox New is, of course, treating this as a serious blow to their worldview — which isn’t surprising, since reality does great damage to Fox. US Government sources also condemn the release, since it exposes the failures of militarism, and militarism is what the government and its profitable contractors have committed themselves to.

I think it’s wonderful. Truth is an essential part of accurately assessing the war.

And the war isn’t going well. There are tales of atrocities on both sides, civilians being murdered by both sides, backhanded deals by Pakistan with both the US and the Afghan insurgents, and an increasing number of attacks — we aren’t winning at all.

The other shocking bit about this revelation is that it wasn’t done by any of the established media organizations — it took a stateless, independent organization to actually break the barriers to information that other media companies respect. Now, of course, Spiegel, the Guardian, and the NY Times are doing a fine job of analyzing the deluge of information…but once upon a time, we might have expected investigative journalists to do that work. I guess it’s cheaper to hire a Judith Miller to massage government propaganda than to actually dig into the facts.

This sad fact about the news disappointed me.

Ask yourself: Why didn’t Wikileaks just publish the Afghanistan war logs and let journalists ’round the world have at them? Why hand them over to The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel first? Because as Julien Assange, founder of Wikileaks, explained last October, if a big story is available to everyone equally, journalists will pass on it.

“It’s counterintuitive,” he said then. “You’d think the bigger and more important the document is, the more likely it will be reported on but that’s absolutely not true. It’s about supply and demand. Zero supply equals high demand, it has value. As soon as we release the material, the supply goes to infinity, so the perceived value goes to zero.”

I have a very low opinion of most journalists — it’s a career in disrepute, given the sad state of media affairs, especially with the pathetic state of television news. I glanced at some of the programming going on now, and most of what I saw were mannequins arguing over whether it was right to release these documents, rather than any substantive discussion of the horrors contained within them.

But I will say this: Julien Assange is a hero who is doing a great service to both rescue and revolutionize honest journalism.