Sad news to report today. Utah Phillips — folk singer, anarchist, pacifist, and Wobbly story-teller — has been forced to retire from touring by a severe heart condition. The Wobblies in Minneapolis-St. Paul are organizing a benefit concert to help him live a decent life and defray his overwhelming medical bills. Here’s a press release with the details. Spread the word, especially to anyone you know in the Twin Cities.

• Utah Phillips Benefit Concert
• Saturday, December 15th — 6 PM
• Eagle’s Club — 2507 E. 25th St.

The Golden Voice of the Great Southwest has a bum ticker:

U. Utah Phillips, a former NPR host who was blacklisted in the state of Utah after an unsuccessful bid for U.S. Senate in 1968 on the Peace and Freedom party ticket can be described as a raconteur extraordinaire, a radical historian well-versed in the sorrowful details of the bloodiest social justice struggles of the last century, a hobo, and one hell of a musician whose songs can break your heart and bring your blood to a boil.

Sadly, Utah Phillips has recently been forced to quit performing because of Cheyne-Stokes – a respiratory condition that causes severe disturbances in breathing and debilitating heart irregularities, leaving him with no means of support.

So on Saturday, December 15th, come join friends, admirers, and kindred misfits at the Eagle’s Club (2507 E. 25th St) at 6 PM for a benefit concert featuring:

• Duluth’s own favorite son, Charlie Parr (6 PM sharp)
• alt-country rocker Bernie King
• the sad folkie from North East, Gabe Barnett
• fiddle player Mary Dushane
• the mustachioed man who can tell you a story whilst entangling you in a lasso, Pop Wagner (& friends)
• the Joan Baez of the Twin Cities, Maureen McElderry
• a couple who actually hung out with Bob Dylan and aren’t just making it up to sound cool, Judy Larson & Bill Hinckley
• classically-trained guitarist gone folkster, Phil Heywood
• the pit bull of folk, Paul Metsa
• who’s-your-daddy-Papa John Kolstad
• the mysterious bearded man who plays so well that it requires a different Hawaiian shirt each time, Dakota Dave Hull
• and Peter Lang whose talent needs no corny bi-line in a press release.

So come on down to the Eagle’s and give a little back to a man whose part in the struggle for justice and whose gifts as a story teller and musician have kept the oral and musical traditions of resistance alive and kickin’!

This event is sponsored by the Twin Cities General Membership Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World.

Utah Phillips can be contacted through No Guff Records. He has a podcast available through his website. CDs of his songs and stories can be ordered through CD Baby or directly through No Guff Records. (Either way you order, most of the money will go directly to Utah.) If you’re not already familiar with Utah Phillips’s music and stories, I especially recommend We Have Fed You All For A Thousand Years and his two collaborations with Ani DiFranco, The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere and Fellow Workers.

This sort of thing is precisely what state Leftists constantly use to indict privatization, and extend into a general denunciation of free market ideology — even though it’s actually just government outsourcing, not free markets, and even though the obvious recklessness, criminal incompetence, nepotism, cronyism, corruption, and brigandry of the private-public partnerships in question are all the direct and obvious result of the way in which these contractors are still firmly attached to the political processes of expropriation, redistribution, and sovereign immunity within a bureaucratic, monopolistic State apparatus. In short, a perfect illustration not of free markets or the socialization of the means of production, but of the crudest and most ruinous forms of tax-funded privateering.

Three good recent articles on learning and unschooling in the home:

• David Friedman (2007-12-04): Home Unschooling: Theory

  Our approach starts with the fact that I went to a good private school, my wife to a good suburban public school, and both of us remember being bored most of the time; while we learned some things in school, large parts of our education occurred elsewhere, from books, parents, friends, projects. It continues with some observations about the standard model of K-12 schooling, public and private:

  1. That model implicitly assumes that, out of the enormous body of human knowledge, there is some subset that everyone should study and that is large enough to fill most of thirteen years of schooling. That assumption is clearly false. Being able to read and do arithmetic is important for almost everyone. Beyond that, it is hard to think of any particular subject which there is a good reason for everyone to study, easy to think of many subjects outside the standard curriculum which there are good reasons for some people to study.

  2. It implicitly assumes that the main way in which one should learn is by having someone else tell you what you are going to study this week, what you should learn about it, and your then doing so.

     ….

  3. A related assumption is that you learn about a subject by having someone else decide what is true and then feed it to you. That is a very dangerous policy in the real world and not entirely safe even in school–many of us remember examples of false information presented to us by teachers or textbooks as true. A better policy is to go out looking for information and assembling it yourself.

• David Friedman (2007-12-04): Home Unschooling: Practice

  When our daughter was about ten there was a class, lasting somewhat over a year, in math. It started assuming the students knew nothing, ended with the early stages of algebra. That is pretty much all of the formal instruction either of them had. In addition, we required them to learn the multiplication tables, which are useful to know but boring to learn. That, I think, was the closest thing to compulsory learning in their education.

  How did they get educated? They both read a lot, and although some of the books they read were children’s books, pretty early they were also reading books intended for adults. … But the largest part of their education, after reading, is probably conversation. We talk at meals. We talk when putting one or the other of them to bed. …

  What is the result? Our daughter will enter college knowing much more about economics, evolutionary biology, music, renaissance dance, and how to write than most of her fellow students, probably less about physics, biology, world history, except where it intersects historical novels she has read or subjects that interest her. She will know much more than most of them about how to educate herself. And why.

• Heart @ Women’s Space/The Margins (2007-12-05): Raised in the Revolution: Radical Women Homeschooling Boys

  There are quite a number of youngsters being homeschooled in progressive families, including by radical feminists and lesbian feminists. I have been homeschooling for 24 years now; my two youngest, Sol, 12, and Maggie, 9, are still being homeschooled and have never gone to a regular school. It's an interesting thing, raising children away from the sexism, racism, classism, lesbophobia, and other destructively socializing influences of school kids and school hierarchies of all kinds, with a commitment to seeing to it that your children spend time with with others who are being raised as they are. V's son, shown in the video, goes to Brother Sun camp at the Festival every year, a camp for boys ages 5-10 years. My daughter, Maggie, goes to Gaia girls each August. In settings like this, children raised in the revolution find encouragement and support.

  V has graciously given her permission for the posting of this video. I will allow comments but want to remind everyone that V is a real person to me, a member of a women's community I value. I'd ask you to keep that in mind in commenting. V's son, Parker, is giving a report about his friend, Alix Olson, also a member of the Michfest community. Watch it all the way through the different "takes" — I think you'll enjoy it!

  None of us involved really knows what the results of this quiet revolution we have undertaken will be. But, that is the way with all revolutions– they take on lives of their own which are outside of any individual's immediate control. I do find reason to feel hopeful about the potential for change in the world which resides in this particular revolution, for so many reasons. I am about to blog its dark side, as I have before, but before I do, I wanted to post this.

There are still plenty of shopping days left to buy the perfect Happy birthday, Jesus! gift for all the fetus-guerrilla-warfare enthusiasts (or the neo-surrealists) in your family:

(Via Jessica @ feministing 2007-12-05.)

Cops in America are heavily armed and trained to be bullies. In order to get control of situations that they forced their way into, they routinely hurt people, use force first and ask questions later, and pass off even the most egregious violence against harmless or helpless people as self-defense or as the necessary means to accomplish an unnecessary goal. In order to coerce compliance with their arbitrary orders, they have no trouble electrifying small children, alleged salad-bar thieves, pregnant women, or an already prone and helpless student who may have been guilty of using the computer lab without proper papers on hand. They are willing to pepper spray lawyers for asking inconvenient questions and to beat up teenaged girls for not cleaning up enough birthday cake or being out too late at night. They are willing to shock you and leave you lying on the side of the highway in order to make sure they can serve you with a dubious traffic ticket. It hardly matters if you are an 82 year old woman supposedly benefiting from a care check, or if you are sound asleep in your own home, or if you are unable to move due to a medical condition. It hardly even matters if you die. What a cop can always count on is that, no matter how senselessly he escalates the use of violence and no matter how obviously innocent or helpless his victims are, he can count on his bosses to repeat any lie and make any excuse in order to find that Official Procedures were followed. As long as Official Procedures were followed, of course, any form of brutality or violence is therefore passed off as OK.

One increasingly popular means for out-of-control cops to force you to follow their bellowed orders is by using high-voltage electric shocks in order to inflict pain.Tasers were originally introduced for police use as an alternative to using lethal force; the hope was that, in many situations where cops might otherwise feel forced to go for their guns, they might be able to use the taser instead, to immobilize a person who posed a threat to them or to others, without killing anybody in the process. But in practice, police culture being what it is, any notion of limiting tasers to those situations very quickly went out the window. Cops armed with tasers now freely use them to end arguments by intimidation or actual violence, to coerce people who pose no real threat to anyone into complying with their instructions, and to hurt uppity civilians who dare to give them lip. Among civilized people, deliberately inflicting severe pain in order to extort compliance from your victim is called torture; among cops it is called pain compliance and is considered business as usual. So shock-happy Peace Officers can now go around using their tasers as high-voltage human prods in just about any situation, with more or less complete impunity. In comments at The Agitator, Robert, referring back to John Gardner’s taser assault on Jared Massey, gets the situation exactly right:

Seriously though, I'm much more worried about being tased by some overzealous cop that has had a bad morning than I am about being assaulted by a real criminal. Maybe I just read this blog too much.

MikeT makes a good point. Take the video of the guy stopped in the construction zone. Granted, arguing with a cop is stupid (you've got a pretty good shot at getting tased), but how would people have reacted if the guy had turned around and the cop took out his nightstick and gave the guy a couple of kidney shots with it?

Cops’ contemptuous indifference to anything other than their own domineering control of the situation, and their hair-trigger readiness to start shocking in order to coerce compliance, has led to predictable results over and over again. In California, a gang of three cops pepper-sprayed, and tasered, and beat the hell out of a 17-year-old non-verbal autistic teenager for failing to obey commands that he didn’t have the linguistic capacity to understand. In Alabama, a gang of cops tasered a man who was unable to respond to their commands because he was half-conscious from a diabetic episode. And this week, in Wichita, Kansas, a gang of cops forced their way into a deaf man’s house, found him coming out of the bath wearing nothing but a towel around his waist, and promptly immobilized him with painful electric shocks for failing to follow bellowed commands that he could not hear. At the time he was shocked, Donnell Williams was holding his hands to his ear and yelling I can’t hear!

As always, The Incident Is Being Investigated. But the people doing the investigating are more cops, i.e., people who have a personal and professional interest in making sure that they and their buddies aren’t subject to any particular kind of standards whatsoever in the use of force. Here’s how that’s going:

Officers were worried about their own safety because at the time it appeared Williams was refusing to obey their commands to show his hands. That’s when they shot him with a Taser.

Deputy Chief Robert Lee of the Wichita Police Department says, This one occurred on the worst of calls, that being a shooting. The first few minutes getting control of the scene are very, very important.

Once the facts were all sorted out, officers repeatedly apologized to Williams. Police wish it never happened, but with the information they had at the time, their choices were limited.

Do I wish there would have been some way they were notified in advance this gentleman was hearing impaired? I certainly do. No one is happy with the way it worked out, says Lee.

— Michael Schwanke, KWCH (2007-12-03): Hearing Impaired Man Tased by Police

In other words, nothing is going to happen as long as the cops can manufacture the flimsiest possible excuse that a half-naked man with no pockets or anywhere else to conceal a gun might be posing a threat to the safety of several cops with their weapons already drawn, or that they just had no way of knowing that a man is deaf when he’s pointing to his ears and yelling I can’t hear! Gosh but the boys in blue feel mighty sorry, but of course they’re not going to do anything about the fact that they tortured an innocent man over a complete mistake.

In real life, outside of government power trip la-la land, if you or I did something like that we would be expected to take some minimal responsibility and pay to make it right for the victim of our fuck-up, even if our options seemed mighty limited at the time. But since these guys are on the State’s official goon squad, some crocodile tears and an Oops, my bad will have to do.

(Story via Radley Balko 2007-12-04.)

Further reading:

• Radley Balko, The Agitator (2007-12-04): Taser files
• GT 2007-11-30: Oops. Our bad.
• GT 2007-11-11: Taser first, ask questions later
• GT 2005-04-26: Peace Officers