A PhotoJourney of Pain: Our World of Dreams Does Not Include Police Carrying Guns
February  2009

Or this title: Time to feel the Momentum of the Movement: We Must Unite to Stop Police From Carrying Guns

or The Breeze of Revolution... No More Cops With Guns



An Open Letter to the World Regarding the Worldwide Police Killings of Unarmed People

To print out the 10 page PDF version of this article please click here.


By T. Love

This article was posted for educational reasons courtesy of the Peace Communities Solidarity Blog found at www.SaveThePoorBrownChildren.org or http://www.SaveThePoorBrownChildren.blogspot.com - and it is  a public group blog with an emphasis on feminism, women's empowerment, financially disadvantaged children, marginalized people's voices and direct action worldwide. The Peace Communities Solidarity Blog is the Media Outreach Blog of the Peace Communities Online Community < www.PeaceCommunities.org > a not-for-profit project started by the Mutualist project, created at Z Media Institute (founders of Z Magazine). T. Love is a Black Feminist activist and writer whose social justice writings have been featured in Street Roots, featured on Womanist-Musings, featured in the current issue of Natural Learning and featured in the current issue of Slingshot and many more radical activist publications, websites and journals worldwide. T. Love's personal profile page and personal blog on the Peace Communities is found by clicking here.
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This article was posted for educational reasons courtesy of the Peace Communities Solidarity Blog found at www.SaveThePoorBrownChildren.org or http://www.SaveThePoorBrownChildren.blogspot.com - and it is  a public group blog with an emphasis on feminism, women's empowerment, financially disadvantaged children, marginalized people's voices and direct action worldwide. The Peace Communities Solidarity Blog is the Media Outreach Blog of the Peace Communities Online Community < www.PeaceCommunities.org > a not-for-profit project started by the Mutualist project, created at Z Media Institute (founders of Z Magazine). T. Love is a Black Feminist activist and writer whose social justice writings have been featured in Street Roots, featured on Womanist-Musings, featured in the current issue of Natural Learning and featured in the current issue of Slingshot and many more radical activist publications, websites and journals worldwide. T. Love's personal profile page and personal blog on the Peace Communities is found by clicking here.

Over 33 People in Texas, Most of Them Black, One Dead, Have Been Exonerated by Modern DNA Testing... After Serving 10-27 Years in Jail
Monday, February 9, 2009



The Letter From the Innocence Project of Texas is why the Innocence Project is so Awesome. The article, published just a few days earlier from NPR is just another example of why the entire Prison Industrial Complex is so criminal... particularly to people of color.

by The Innocence Project of Texas

The Innocence Project of Texas is pleased to announce that yesterday afternoon Judge Charlie Baird formally cleared Timothy Cole's name and exonerated him of a sexual assault he was convicted of committing back in 1986.

timcole.jpg, image/jpeg, 300x461

This event marks the first posthumous DNA exoneration in Texas history, as Timothy Cole passed away in 1999 while incarcerated for the crime.

Our organization is honored to have represented the Cole family in their quest to reclaim the name of their eldest son and brother. Timothy Cole, who served as a role model for his entire family, was a man of extraordinary integrity. And yesterday, just a few minutes after 5:00pm, Judge Baird recognized that "his reputation must be restored." The Judge also elaborated by stating that this is the saddest case he has ever seen during his 30 years of experience.

We here at IPOT would like to thank Judge Baird for his decision to hold a hearing in this case. Without the support of his court, one that is truly dedicated to seeing justice done, we would not have been able to get Timothy the exoneration that he has always deserved.

If you would like to make a donation to the Innocence Project of Texas in Timothy Cole's name, please visit http://ipoftexas.org/contribute/donors/

If we all work together, we CAN make a positive change in the criminal justice system.

Thank you,

Natalie Roetzel
Executive Director
Innocence Project of Texas

ipoftexas.org

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Family Of Man Cleared By DNA Still Seeks Justice

by Wade Goodwyn

February 5, 2009, The family of a man convicted of rape will be in an Austin, Texas, courtroom Thursday to try to clear his name — joined by the woman whose testimony helped imprison him.

In 1985, Timothy Cole was a student in Lubbock when he was arrested and accused of being the Texas Tech rapist. A string of coeds had been raped, and the young African-American man from Fort Worth, who'd never been in trouble with the law before, was convicted largely on the eyewitness account of one rape victim.

Nearly two decades later, a jailhouse confession by another man prompted new DNA testing in the case. Those tests proved that Cole was innocent, that he should be exonerated and released. But in this case, that proved impossible.

It was Sunday night, March 24, 1985, and Texas Tech sophomore Michele Mallin had just returned to her dorm room after a weekend visiting her relatives. It was getting late when she remembered that she needed to move her car to a legal parking spot.

"I thought, well, I'll just run over there and do that real quick — it was almost 10 o'clock. Then I'll come back and get ready for bed," Mallin says.

As she finished moving her car, a black man appeared and told her he was having car problems. Did she have any jumper cables?

"Then all of a sudden, he just opened the door of my car and forced himself in and then he put a knife to my throat at the same time," says Mallin, who is white. "He pushed me over into the passenger seat and started to drive away and stared telling me,' Stop screaming,' because I was screaming my head off, 'or I'm going to kill you.'"

Mallin feared for her life as the man drove her out of Lubbock to a vacant lot. But she was strong, athletic, a virgin — and determined to stay that way.

"I just couldn't fight him," she says. "As much as I tried, I couldn't. He was just stronger than me physically."

Her attacker had one very distinguishing characteristic. "He smoked the whole time," she says she told authorities "from the get-go."

A chain-smoking, African-American rapist who used a knife. That was the man the Lubbock police should have been looking for. But it was a nonsmoking, asthmatic black man they eventually settled on.

No Physical Evidence

Cole had enrolled at Texas Tech for the 1985 spring semester. One of his friends worked at a Mr. Gatti's pizza parlor near campus, and Cole would often wait for him there. The restaurant was just a few blocks from where Mallin was raped. The police took a Polaroid photograph of Cole and showed it to her.

"Yeah, I was pretty confident, I never really wavered," Mallin says. "I really honestly believed that they found the right guy and I had picked out the right guy." She says she assumed the police had other physical evidence.

But there were holes in the prosecution's case. No physical evidence tied Cole to the crime. Although the rapist drove the car extensively, Cole's fingerprints were not found in the vehicle. Cole also had a solid alibi: At the time of the rape, he was studying in his apartment while his brother was having a card party in the living room. Several young people testified at trial that Cole was in the apartment with them all evening.

The district attorney attacked Cole's witnesses as brash, slick liars who would say anything to save their friend. In the end, the jury believed Mallin, and Cole was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

As he sobbed in his jail cell crying out that he was innocent, another inmate, Jerry Wayne Johnson, was listening.

Johnson was in jail over charges that he had raped two women. One victim was a 15-year-old white girl he brazenly snatched right out of her high school. Johnson had held a knife to her throat as he drove her to a vacant lot outside of Lubbock. He also was a heavy smoker.

Johnson had been following Cole's trial closely, because he was the man who raped Mallin. In an interview with the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, Johnson describes listening to Cole's anguished cries that night.

"I just looked over and was just kinda looking at him. I didn't say nothing to him," he says.

The idea that it was Johnson who raped Mallin seemed to occur to everyone except Lubbock law enforcement. His name was brought up repeatedly during Cole's trial, but it had no effect on the jury.

A Confession That Came Too Late

After Cole was convicted, the real rapist quietly waited for the statute of limitations to run out. Then, in 1995, Johnson wrote a letter to the district court in Lubbock in which he confessed to raping Mallin. He got no reply. So he wrote another letter asking for an attorney so that he could legally confess. Again, he was ignored.

Johnson eventually wrote to the former Lubbock district attorney who prosecuted the case, Jim Bob Darnell, and asked for his help. There was only silence in reply. By 2007, Johnson, who was still in prison, tracked down what he thought was Cole's address. He assumed Cole was out on parole and mailed his confession.

Cole's mother, Ruby Session, opened the letter. "My son read it. I couldn't sit down, I couldn't eat. I couldn't walk. I wanted to go outside. I wanted to stay inside. I was beside myself," she says.

In the end, Johnson's confession came too late. In prison, Cole had struggled to get adequate medical treatment for his asthma. He was found unconscious in his cell twice and revived in hospital emergency rooms. Then on Dec. 2, 1999, Cole was again found unconscious. He died before the prison got him to the hospital. He was 39 years old.

With Johnson's letter in hand, Cole's family went to the media. In response, the Lubbock D.A.'s office announced it would run modern DNA tests. When the results came back, it was Jerry Wayne Johnson's DNA on the swabs in the rape kit, not Timothy Cole's.

The Innocence Project of Texas sought relief in court to clear Cole's name, but no judge in Lubbock would grant them a hearing. Darnell, the former district attorney who later became a local family court judge, did not respond to repeated requests for an interview. However, he told the Lubbock paper that he regretted what happened to Cole.

'I'll Always Feel Guilty'

It took a state judge in Austin to review the facts and grant a hearing for relief, which begins Thursday. Although Lubbock law enforcement has declined to testify, Mallin will. She plans to take the stand and ask that Cole be exonerated in death.

"I still feel guilty. I'll always feel guilty about it because, I mean, my testimony sent a man to prison and he ended up dying there," Mallin says. "Even though I know I did everything I could in my heart of hearts to do the right thing, still that happened. But I know the police are responsible and the D.A., too, because they knew things I didn't know."

So far this decade, 34 men in Texas, most of them black, have been exonerated by modern DNA testing. They spent 10, 15, 20, even 27 years wrongly imprisoned for rape before being released. No such remedy is available for Cole, a bright, likeable young man who got along well with everyone and who, in the spring of 1985, had his whole life ahead of him.

End of Article.

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Below is an Excerpt From The Group Critical resistance. I have attended one of their awesome workshops at the Life After Capitalism conference in New York and it was awesome.

Love for the people,

-T

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The Christian Bale Injustice, the Murder of Marcella Sali Grace and The Power of Music
Sunday, February 8, 2009

Dear friends, Companeras and allies working for a better world,

I want to share with you the common thread that ties together... the Christian Bale injustice... the brutal rape and murder of Social Justice Activist Sali in Oaxaca, Mexico... over 500 women raped and killed in Juarez Mexico... and an Awesome Social Justice Song made by a Punk Band. By now many people already know how Christian Bale, Star of Batman, American Psycho, and many other movies, flipped out and went completely ballistic on an employee in July 2008 with a hostile tirade and even worse, tried to use his multimillionaire celebrity power to demand to have the man fired. Unknown to Bale, the entire tirade was caught on audio and remixed into one of at least three Popular songs and remixes and released widely around the beginning of February 2009. On Tuesday, February 3rd, I posted a story titled "Social Justice In Hollywoood- Very Rare, But Very Good When It Happens-3 Different Remixes of Christian Bale caught on tape going ballistic."[1] and I, along with many other people worldwide, encouraged other people worldwide to circulate the story, the audio and the music. By people worldwide circulating the audio, news of the incident grew very fast, and yet there were still literally countless, outspoken fans and supporters of Christian Bale throughout Hollywood [3] and even numerous people on popular feminist forums [2] of all backgrounds who still felt that Christian Bale's actions were somehow excusable.

That was to be expected because he has a huge fan following since he is a male in a world ruled by patriarchy where such inexcusable behavior and outbursts by men are incorrectly accepted and justified as a sign of their rational frustration and such outbursts by women are incorrectly diagnosed as irrational mental instability.

I thoroughly explained how circulating those Christian Bale remixes were a a social justice issue, related to censorship, celebrity/millionaire hierarchy and domestic abuse as well as related to the power of exposing the truth using audio and Music to bring buried and forgotten issus to the public attention. Those of us who felt that Christian Bale's actions were inexcusable and out of order beyond belief and who circulated that music without end were vindicated and justified in doing so less than 4 days later on Friday, February 6th.

News Reports state: "It was on the morning of February 6th, 2009 that Christian Bale [after listening to DJs replay snippets of the tape -- in which Bale loses his temper at Hurlbut, director of photography, for walking in his sightline while he was in the middle of shooting a scene -- and mock him about it all week]....that Bale called into FM radio station KROQ with a mea culpa."

"I was out of order beyond belief," a contrite Bale told KROQ disc jockeys Kevin Ryder and Gene "Bean" Baxter. "I acted like a punk. I make no excuses for it. It is inexcusable."

"On the tape, Bale threatens to have Hurlbut fired, but the actor apparently [????] 'later' [???] backed off on this demand. Bale summarized the threat as "hot air" during the KROQ interview. He also added pointedly, "I heard a lot of people say I think I'm better than anybody else. Nothing could be further than the truth."

Wonder how they got that impression? It probably was that now infamous Christian Bale piercing scream of anger yelling: "Do you know who the fuck I am?...I am the Mayor of Fuckington" that gave people the 'wrong' impression!

So Christian Bale issued a full apology... and, in addition... backed off from his recorded threat and 'demand' to have an employee fired and potentially ruining the man's entire career with his celebrity power... but it took over 6 months from the date when that injustice occurred in July 2008. Yet it took less that 7 days of people circulating the audio and music before there was justice and he issued a full apology on February 6th, 2009.

So people are slowly becoming aware of the power of people have when they spread information and spread audio and music! You can now see how powerful circulating a social justice issue on the Internet can be and how fast justice can be achieved in regards to a long forgotten issue. The incident with Christian Bale spotlighted an injustice that took place in July 2008, over 6 months ago, and yet saw the light of justice within 7 days with information, audio and music circulated.

This brings me to the subject at hand. It was less that 6 months ago, in September 2008, that well known social justice activist Marcella Sali Grace, known to friends as Sali, was brutally raped and murdered in Mexico and authorities are trying to cover it up despite numerous witnesses. This is inexcusable and even worse, it is inexcusable that mainstream media throughout the world and especially here in the USA (where we all have the ability to influence the media) are ignoring the story. More and more evidence suggests that authorities in Mexico are not only ignoring the crimes... but taking part in these crimes [4].

So now there is a new song [4] that has been created about a far more pressing issue... that has been buried for far too long... that we need everyone to circulate so that we can see justice not only for Sali, but for the hundreds and hundreds of Mexican women and increasing numbers of American activists women being killed in Mexico! The term Femicide was coined in the 1820's and is defined as the mass murder of women simply because they are women. It is now being used to vividly describe the brutal rapes and murders of over 500 young women [citation 4 in English] and [citation 5 in Spanish] in the U.S.-Mexico border in the city of Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas. Sali's brutal rape and murder took place in other parts of Mexico outside of Juarez but that only makes this issue that much more of a crisis because we can clearly see how the femicide is expanding and increasing!

We also need hop-hop DJ's and creative musicians to create more and more and more art, music, skits and more songs of protest about the mass murder of the women of Juarez and about Sali! If you know of more art and music and videos about the women of Juarez please add it to the comment section here:

http://savethepoorbrownchildren.blogspot.com/2009/02/i-will-remember-marcella-sali-grace-you.html

If you know of more (Spanish language) art and music and videos about the women of Juarez please add it here:

http://savethepoorbrownchildren.blogspot.com/2009/02/en-espanolme-acordare-te-acuerdas.html


Thanks you everyone for you time. I know you are all busy with a worsening economy but taking a few moments to circulate this can truly save the lives of many people!


I Will Remember, Marcella Sali Grace. [Me Acordare, Marcella Sali Grace.]
Remember, Marcella Sali Grace. [Acuerdate, Marcella Sali Grace.]

I Will Remember, Juarez, Mexico, Women. [Me Acordare, Juarez, Mexico, Mujeres]

Remember, Juarez, Mexico, Women. [Acuerdate, Juarez, Mexico, Mujeres.]

The lack of investigation into these murders and the lack of justice for these women is inexcusable and and out of order beyond belief. Now that the Mexican government has shown that they won't investigate, pressure needs to be placed on people throughout the world, in your local towns, in your media contacts, to cover the story, by TV, radio, Internet, blogs and much, much more until there is justice. And just like the incident with Christian Bale, we look forward to the glorious day when the Government Officials in Mexico (and the mainstream media throughout the world and especially in the USA) admit that their lack of investigation and attention to these increasing rapes and murders is "inexcusable and out of order beyond belief."

Solidarity for a better world,

Love for the people,
-T. Love

p.s.
The links to this article were not covered so that you can easily forward this article by emails! Remember, we must place the Spotlight back on Social Justice Issues before they become worse! Solidarity for a better world. :)



This article was first posted to the Peace Communities Solidarity Blog
< http://savethepoorbrownchildren.blogspot.com/2009/02/christian-bale-injustice-marcella-sali.html >, found at http://www.SaveThePoorBrownChildren.org - a public group blog with an emphasis on feminism, women's empowerment, financially disadvantaged children and marginalized people's voices and direct action worldwide. The Peace Communities Solidarity Blog is the Media Outreach branch of the Peace Communities Online Community
< http://www.PeaceCommunities.org a not-for-profit project started by the Mutualist project, created at the Z Media Institute (founders of Z Magazine) T. Love is a Black Feminist writer whose social justice writing have been featured in Street Roots, the current issue of Natural Learning, the current issue of Slingshot and many more radical activist publications worldwide.



[1] http://savethepoorbrownchildren.blogspot.com/2009/02/social-justice-in-hollywoood-3.html

[2] 0 Comments

[3] http://www.aintitcool.com/talkback_display/39984#comment_2479351

[4] English version: http://savethepoorbrownchildren.blogspot.com/2009/02/i-will-remember-marcella-sali-grace-you.html

[5] Spanish version: http://savethepoorbrownchildren.blogspot.com/2009/02/en-espanolme-acordare-te-acuerdas.html


The punk band Adelit@s, has a short, powerful song they wrote for Marcella Sali Grace who was murdered in Oaxaca. You will hear that the song is in Spanish, but you'll find both the Spanish and English versions of the lyrics are after the link.

Adelit@s - "La Que Lucho" [download]

Sali, in the pic and seen in the video dancing below.

Posted by Peace Communities Solidarity Blog 1:47 PM 0 comments  

Labels: Assault, La Que Lucho, Marcella Sali Grace, Mexico, Oaxaca, Oaxaca de Juarez, Remember, Sali

This article was posted for educational reasons courtesy of the Peace Communities Solidarity Blog found at www.SaveThePoorBrownChildren.org or http://www.SaveThePoorBrownChildren.blogspot.com - and it is  a public group blog with an emphasis on feminism, women's empowerment, financially disadvantaged children, marginalized people's voices and direct action worldwide. The Peace Communities Solidarity Blog is the Media Outreach Blog of the Peace Communities Online Community < www.PeaceCommunities.org > a not-for-profit project started by the Mutualist project, created at Z Media Institute (founders of Z Magazine). T. Love is a Black Feminist activist and writer whose social justice writings have been featured in Street Roots, featured on Womanist-Musings, featured in the current issue of Natural Learning and featured in the current issue of Slingshot and many more radical activist publications, websites and journals worldwide. T. Love's personal profile page and personal blog on the Peace Communities is found by clicking here.

Womanist Musings, A Top 30 Feminist Blogger, Ponders The Award Selection Process - Originally Titled: "Looking at Fem2pt0 and the Feminist Web"
Thursday, February 5, 2009

The below Post Came from the Blog Womanist-Musings that I highly recommend.  You can find the below post by clicking here.

Love for the people,

-T

This article was posted for educational reasons courtesy of the Peace Communities Solidarity Blog found at www.SaveThePoorBrownChildren.org or http://www.SaveThePoorBrownChildren.blogspot.com - and it is  a public group blog with an emphasis on feminism, women's empowerment, financially disadvantaged children, marginalized people's voices and direct action worldwide. The Peace Communities Solidarity Blog is the Media Outreach Blog of the Peace Communities Online Community < www.PeaceCommunities.org > a not-for-profit project started by the Mutualist project, created at Z Media Institute (founders of Z Magazine). T. Love is a Black Feminist activist and writer whose social justice writings have been featured in Street Roots, featured on Womanist-Musings, featured in the current issue of Natural Learning and featured in the current issue of Slingshot and many more radical activist publications, websites and journals worldwide. T. Love's personal profile page and personal blog on the Peace Communities is found by clicking here.
 

Be sure to read my above blog post to read my comments to this below post.

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This week was the Fem2pt0 feminist web conference.  I was not able to attend but was tweeted a link that included a listing of the top 30 feminist blogs.

http://www.feministing.com/
http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/
http://www.feministe.us/blog/
http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/
http://www.amptoons.com/blog/
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/
http://echidneofthesnakes.blogspot.com/
http://www.now.org/
http://www.plannedparenthood.org/
http://community.livejournal.com/ (1)
http://www.womensenews.org/
http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/
http://www.msmagazine.com/
http://feministlawprofs.law.sc.edu/
http://www.feminist.org/
http://fetchmemyaxe.blogspot.com/
http://guerillawomentn.blogspot.com/
http://www.thecurvature.com/
http://www.guttmacher.org/
http://www.thefword.org.uk/
http://viv.id.au/blog/
http://www.womanist-musings.com/
http://www.blogher.org/
http://www.reclusiveleftist.com/
http://www.ppaction.org/
http://renegadeevolution.blogspot.com/
http://www.naral.org/
http://www.womensmediacenter.com/
http://www.wimnonline.org/WIMNsVoicesBlog/
http://abyss2hope.blogspot.com/

At first I was thrilled to find myself on this list as Womanist Musings is still under a year old.  To find myself listed with such excellent feminist blogs really gave me a shot of confidence. After I got over the initial tee hee look at me, I decided to have a closer look at the above list. 

In the larger group blogs there are women that are of colour however, Womanist Musings is the only individual blog written by a WOC to make this list.  As much as I toot my own horn, I am not arrogant enough to believe that my blog and my voice represent the best of what WOC have to say on the web.  Once this realization became clear to me my happiness turned to bitterness.

I decided to have a look at how the data was complied to generate this list.

• See conversation territories and communities on the social web
  By narrowing the web to its relevant conversation spaces, we can focus on what’s important, we can ignore noise in order to analyse and measure the impact of visible and influential opinions. Seeing also means following conversations wherever they come from or go to. This is why linkfluence also analyses websites and conversations which, outside of communities’ borders, interest the latter’s members.
• Hear conversations
  Beyond listening, there’s understanding. Messages coming from the social web are ordered by linkfluence in order to single out those that are the most read, listened to or viewed, those that are the most commented or referred to. Hearing rather than listening, it’s going way below the surface of conversations to analyse sentiment, arguments, mentioned opinion shapers, topics, semantics fields or the semiotics of the relevant spaces.

Who decides what is and isn’t relevant conversations?   If a womanist blogger decides that her primary focus is race and how it effects her life, does that suddenly make her less feminist?  I believe that considering that feminism has a history of silencing  WOC when we dare to speak about the ways in which race effects our life, this is an extremely important question to ask.  Were there any WOC on the panel that decided what constituted a “relevant” conversation.  Finally, who gets to decide what is and isn’t feminist, considering that perspectives change not only by race, but by class, ability and sexuality.

Peace Communities Now Offers Gift Certificates for Blogging and Writing! Happy New Year Everyone!

Peace Communities is Looking for Partner Organizations to Share Space in Olympia. 

 
Dear friends,

The Freeschool Community of Olympia, serving the Olympia, Washington area for over 7 years, has partnered with several progressive organizations to form the Peace Communities.  Among the many progressive organizations that have joined the Peace Communities thus far are the Mutualist Project members who are members of the Z Media Institute (ZMI) 2007 Alumni, the Olympia Ecovillage/We Invite You, The Beauty of Barter, Imagine Seven, the Organizers of the Fifth Annual A World Beyond Capitalism Conference and organizers of the Do-It-Yourself Multimedia Creation Center.  Peace Communities is looking for More Partner Organizations to work towards Sharing Space in Olympia.  We would like to work with several other organizations or progressive businesses to share the cost of a house, or transform a downtown or West Side warehouse into a shared space (as was successfully accomplished by the Rhizome Collective http://www.rhizomecollective.org ).

The below quote is from the Rhizome Collective wikipedia page: 

"The Rhizome Collective is a consensus-run 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based on Austin, Texas, USA. The collective was founded in 2000 and operates an Educational Center for Urban Sustainability and a Center for Community Organizing." 

"The Rhizome Collective operates out of three warehouses on Allen Street in East Austin. These warehouses and the 1/3 acre (1,300 m²) on which they sit make up the Rhizosphere. In addition to housing the collective, the Rhizosphere is used as a space for the development of urban sustainability practices."

"The Rhizosphere hosts space for organizations such as Austin Indymedia, the Austin Zine Library, the Inside Books Project, which ships reading material to prison inmates, Bikes Across Borders, and Food Not Bombs."

In addition to rental space, we will offer the use of free-of-charge shared webhosting space, help designing a website for your group, free-of-charge announcement space in our newspaper, "Natural Learning" with a circulation of 5,000 issues, 24 hours access to a feminist library and a secure room with a women's empowerment audio/video studio equipment.  To see a small list of some of the recording and audio equpment that the freeschool currently has please click here: PDF Flyer or Document Flyer.

 The idea to create a housing and community space collective in Olympia, has been in the research, cost analysis and forming process for almost two years.  It is our desire to now rent a space as early as Spring 2009.  Our next public forum will be held at: 

 Traditions café
 

Forum Title: Creating a Housing and Community Space Use Collective in Olympia.
Location: Traditions Café and World Folk Art, 300 5th Avenue SW, Olympia, WA 98501
Date: Friday, January 30, 2009
Time: 7pm-9pm

Cost: Free. Snacks will be served.

We welcome all individuals, organizations and progressive businesses to participate in these conversations.  We are grateful for help that we receive from all individuals and organizations, however, on order to maintain our education independence we are not accepting applications from government groups, religious groups or multinational corporations.

"If you are interested please send us an email by visiting the Freeschool Community's website at www.Freeschoolunity.org and click on 'contact.'  Thank you.  You can also call us from 11am-11pm, 7 days a week at (360) 539-8008 and we would love to talk with you.

Keep working for a better world everyone.

Love, Solidarity,

-Freeschool Members
www.FreeschoolUnity.org

-Peace Community Members
PeaceCommunities.org

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Did you go to this event? Did you miss this event? Do you want to talk about this event with others? Either way, you can talk about the event, learn more about it, or talk with others who attended it by joining the Freeschool Community's new Peace Communities Social Networking Website and Online Community with Member Profiles, Fully Customizable Themes for your page, Blogs, Discussion Forum, Event Listings, Photos & Slideshows, Custom Video Players, Real-time Activity Stream and much more! Its better than myspace and facebook combined, its free of charge and it has no multinational corporate advertisements. To join Peace Communities please go here: http://www.peacecommunities.ning.com

 

Dear friends,

Radical Caring's Facebook group will be closed within the next 7 days. Peace Communities is now open.

The reasoning behind this are as follows: 

Recently, Facebook has restructured their website to make advertisements larger and unavoidable. And they have also broadened the heinous corporations for whom they will run advertisements. When logging in to your Facebook account, some of you may have recently noticed on the frontpage (before your profile) the sponsor of Facebook was "McDonald's" with their logo larger and more unavoidable than ever.

The best source of information about McDonald’s corruption may be the McLibel Trial < http://www.mcspotlight.org/case > and McSpotlight < http://www.mcspotlight.org >.

The McLibel Trial is the infamous British court case between McDonald's and a former postman & a gardener from London (Helen Steel and Dave Morris). It ran for two and a half years and became the longest ever English trial. The verdict was devastating for McDonald's. The judge ruled that they 'exploit children' with their advertising, produce 'misleading' advertising, are 'culpably responsible' for cruelty to animals, are 'antipathetic' to unionisation and pay their workers low wages.

Ironically, the McSpotlight website currently has this recent update at the top of their webpage: “McDonald's To Pull Out Of UK Primary Schools  - McDonald's is to curtail its presence in UK primary schools as part of a radical overhaul of its national education programme.”

As you can imagine, the idea of having a 'Radical Caring' discussion group on a social network that is sponsored by McDonald's, a multinational corporation that has displayed that they are uncaring about ethics, environmental responsibility… or, quite often, human beings in general, contradicts what Radical Caring stands for.

The Radical Caring main website is here: http://www.radicalcaring.org

Radical Caring is now working with several other groups using an Online Community that we call the Peace Communities. The Peace Communities is part of a growing progressive movement  and project called Mutualist created at Z Media Institute (ZMI).  Peace Communities has been open for only several weeks and already has over twice as many members, from all over the world, as the Radical Caring FaceBook group.  Peace Communities is an Online Community with Member Profiles, Discussion Forums, Event Listings, Photos and Slideshows, Custom Video Players, Real-time Activity Stream and much more found by clicking here: Peace Communities or here: http://www.PeaceCommunities.ning.com

The Radical Caring Facebook group will be closed within the next 7 days and we hope you will join Peace Communities.

Keep up the great work everyone!

Love for all,

-Radical Caring Members