For those of you who don’t know what the ASVAB is, it sands for Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. It is the primary method that career monitors in the military use to determine where a uniformed individual will work within the military system. It is more or less a standardized test, similar to ACT or SAT, but it asks technical questions that determine one’s competency for mechanical, electrical, language, and other skills. I scored higher on mine than most, and so I was presented with a range of options which are not available to all enlistees. Because of my scores, I was able to basically pick my job, and my first duty station and was enlisted at the grade of E-2 rather than E-1. Sad to say most enlistees don’t get any deal like this, and most are lied to about that fact.
Here’s a happy story of the effect that a couple kids can have on the official, government-sanctioned process of turning the youth into cannon fodder. Apparently, the school (probably secretly) in this story decided to collude with the military, and perhaps had put some prestige on the line. When some kids found out about it, and said no way, they were actually able to make a difference. I don’t vouch for the veracity of this story, but even if it never did actually happen, (and instead is the creation of a zealous counter recruiter) so what. It gives us yet another tactic that we can use in undermining the recruitment efforts of our government.
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/horton.php?articleid=10055
November 24, 2006
Teens Frustrate Military Recruiter’s ASVAB Scam
by Scott Horton
With MySpace.com bulletins and a handful of homemade flyers, two teens have struck a blow against the American Warfare State, Lindale, Georgia Division.
On a Friday afternoon the 17th of November, 17-year-old high school seniors Robert Day and Samuel Parker decided to act after Day overheard some teachers at Pepperell High School saying that first thing Monday morning the school’s juniors would be made to take the ASVAB military aptitude test. Often administered under the guise of a career aptitude test, the ASVAB’s purpose is to better equip the State to prey on young people tricked or pressured into taking the test. According to Debbie Hopper of Mothers Against the Draft, it is often given under the pretext of being a “career placement” test. (In some cases it has in fact been used that way, no doubt in an attempt to legitimize what many Americans regard as not legitimate: the use of government schools as military recruiting grounds.) The school board answered a concerned email from Parker’s mother with a suggestion that the test is not mandatory but “customary.” Sane Americans might ask, “Where, in Prussia?” Read the rest of this entry »
Ladies and Gentlemen, get your passports because we’re going to Canada! That’s right, for the first time in recent memory (maybe forever) you are now required to present a passport to reenter the country from Canada! What will these wacky fascists in the Department of Homeland Security think of next?! This law only applies to American nationals, who are, of course most likely to be turists (Bushism for Islamicists in general), and not foreign nationals, who represent the single most dangerous threat the law is supposed to be protecting our glorious christian white republic from. If these individuals truely hate our freedoms, we don’t have to worry, cause soon we won’t have any left.
So get your passport and lets cross the longest undefended boarder today! Supernova Earth will be with you the entire way with analysis of what this law means as well as tips that you too can use to gum up the facist system in airports.
Who loves ya, Baby?! Download Supernova 19 today!
Check it out. it’s a down and dirty election post mortem. Naturally, I didn’t cover all the topics I would have liked, but I can talk about politics for days, and you all would likely get bored. So, you can listen to me talk for 30 minutes and feel that you have an election recap that you can count on, light on the punditry and heavy on the truth.
Here’s the Link for Supernova 18- Election deCap
Nuff Said!
I don’t really care who rules the country: I don’t rule it and so I am a malcontent. It really makes no objective difference in my life who is the Secretary of Defence.
But it does in a lot of lives of individuals who are disproportionately minority, poor, and urban. Don Rummsfeld has a lot of blood on his hands. He is responsible for the deaths in Iraq up to this point. He has accordingly fallen on his own sword and he is resigning. He will likely be replaced by a former spook from the CIA named Bob Gates.
This is the first honorable thing this man has done since he has been in office of Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush.
He is the biggest loser.
Here are some dirty tricks covered by cable and corporate news sources. All of these are mere hearsay that the cable news networks picked up on and reported on because it makes coverage more exciting, to think there were all this shenaniganery all over the place. All times listed are in MST, from here in Missoula.
MSNBC reported between 8am and 9am that voters were being called by telephone messages reminding them to vote, but giving them deliberately incorrect information such as time, date and place of the election. Additionally, something was said about cards with mischaracterizations of issues and then pictures of democratic candidates on them, apparently (and I didn’t catch this whole report) trying the Dems look bad, but the republican analyst on televison said it was just a tool to give people motivation to go out and vote (and apparently was not supposed to be discovered outside of republican circles.)
Read the rest of this entry »
from the AP
MANAGUA, Nicaragua - Daniel Ortega, the revolutionary Marxist who battled a U.S.-backed Contra insurgency in the 1980s, was closing in on Nicaragua’s presidency, appearing Monday to have defeated four opponents with promises that he was a changed man.
Electoral officials had yet to release final results from Sunday’s vote, but preliminary results and two of the country’s top electoral watchdog groups all gave Ortega about 40 percent of the vote. That was more than enough to avoid a runoff against Harvard-educated banker Eduardo Montealegre, who trailed by at least seven percentage points.
Read the rest of this entry »
Ladies and Gentlemen, I am pleased to present Supernova 17. In this show we talk about your duties when you go to the polls Tuesday, the stupidity and predictability of Sadaam Hussein’s guilty verdict (and the expected, but unwanted sentence to hang accidently imposed by an “independent” Iraqi judicial system, against the interests of the United States), and Chavez getting all uppity again over the upcoming election in his country, and America’s predictably jingoistic response. At the end, we play a tune from Red Champion (this link goes to their Myspace Page), who is possibly the single greatest (as in best) band from Rapid City South Dakota. This song has cussing in it, but it is probably nothing you never heard before.
So, download Supernova 17 today!
In other news, you all have got to visit this site: National Security Archives. I was pointed toward this site while researching the nonsense that went on in Chile in 1973 and America’s activities in this country, and discovered a VERY valuable resource for finding information about America’s real role in overthrowing governments, destabilizing allies, killing foreign nationals, and repressing the people in our own country. What these people do is go after the government under Freedom of Information Act, and get documents declassified which demonstrate US government culpability in violence both at home and abroad. This is NOT conspiracy theory stuff, my friends. This is the real deal, signed and approved by our own government itself. They publish both analysis of the documents (for the lazy among us) and actual photos of the documents themselves for you to look at them and read them for yourself.
It is a fascinating site, and I have just barely scratched the surface of what they have going on there. So check is out. That’s the National Security Archive (The are not in anyway affiliated with the National Security Agency, but you can bet that people who go visit their site are being monitored by the NSA.)
See ya next time, eatin the pudding.
Source: http://www.iop.harvard.edu//pdfs/survey
/fall_2006_release.pdf
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Esten Perez
November 1, 2006 (617) 496-4009
18-24 YEAR OLDS POISED TO CHALLENGE MIDTERM
ELECTION TURNOUT RECORDS, HARVARD POLL FINDS
President Bush Gets Below-Average Grade of “C-†on Key Issues;
Majority of Likely Voters Favor Switch to Democratic Majority in Congress
Washington, DC – A new national poll by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics (IOP), located at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, finds nearly a third (32%) of 18 to 24 year olds “definitely†plan on voting in the upcoming midterm elections, a proportion that will likely amount to the highest turnout percentage for this age group in any midterm election in the last twenty years. The poll also finds that young people continue to disapprove of the job George W. Bush is doing as President, with the President averaging a grade of “C-â€on seven key issues facing America, with the lowest mark coming on his handling of the War in Iraq (D+). Finally, 18-24 year olds seem to favor a swapping of majority parties in Congress, as a majority of likely voters (52%) said they favor a Congress controlled by Democrats following the November elections.
Read the rest of this entry »
Ladies and Gentlemen: Posted below is a comment from a recent email exchange between myself and an ardent Marxist. Pretty succinctly, it describes my position on Marxism, and I think it does a pretty good job poking holes in Marxist methods. While it is not as polished as most of my writing, remember it is from an email exchange, and was not “for a grade” so to speak.
To protect the innocent, the other side will not be named. Just know that everything except the innitial sentence fragment was written by me.
so long as we rely upon anyone but your own personal gurus, Morales and Chavez (there are probably others),
These are not my personal “gurus”. I don’t follow Chavismo like you follow Marx. I am sorry if you misunderstand. Hopefully I can compose this without too much condescension: I have only always said that these two individuals provide AN example (not THE example, I have NEVER argued this) of what course we could consider for our country. I have never claimed to support a chavista programme for the United States, but I sure support it for Venezuela. The things Chavez does in Venezuela would not work in the United States.
His methods, however, could work and are something we should explore, because we should want to look at ALL options available to us. Similarly, I have always said that where Marx works in the United States, we should utilize his method. Where he does not fit,
just like where Chavez does not fit, we should not use them. I have said it before and will probably say it a hundred times more until you feel the need to stop attacking me because I think seizure of political power (in WHATEVER way possible) before economic power is dealt with is a good idea.
Read the rest of this entry »
Author’s Note: This paper was written for a class concerning the structure of the English Language. While I dont have a date on it precisely, I think it was written in the Spring of 2003. Regardless, with all the mis- and dis-information that has been going on for the last few years, it is hard for us to remember what was really going on just a few years ago. History has been written and re-written so often, that it often helps to go back and look at subjective commentaries from back in the day just to square one’s self with how confused we are as a society. This article is pretty much my own opinion, so read it liberally. - Thank you, William Stodden
Jacques Ellul and the Development of Modern Propaganda
By William Stodden
Section 1- Introduction and Thesis
The United States is at war against “evil doers†once again. This time, the evildoers that occupy the government’s thoughts to the point of obsession are not communists as they have been in the past. They are not the drug smugglers of the 1980’s or 1990’s. They are not the domestic civil rights or peace activists, though these “un-patriotic†individuals are rapidly becoming the new bane of all existence. They are not Libyans, though Libya may have something to do with them. These evildoers are terrorists, and specifically the “terrorist states†or Iraq and Afghanistan, who are according to the government, plotting to use weapons of mass destruction against the United States solely because they hate our freedom.
The above is of course an example of modern propaganda at work which is spread throughout the corporate media by both the government and the executives at corporate media stations for the purpose of getting Americans who would otherwise be disinterested to be in support of the current war against the people of Iraq. The propaganda employed by the government in support and justification of its war is based on a play of fear and hatred of the American people for the people responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center, even though we all know that event and Iraq have nothing to do with one another. The type of propaganda at work here is modern propaganda, as defined by French social scientist Jacques Ellul. This type of propaganda is the common language of both the government and advertisers in selling consumers products, and has nothing to do with the truth about the given product, whether it be the quality of an item or the justness of a war. Read the rest of this entry »
