Caution: Dangerous Pedagogy!

Do NOT try this at home!
It was IMMENSELY controversial when it first appeared, in national television, in the '70s.

Ms. Jane Elliott's "brown eyes, blue eyes" experiment in 1970 (the third one after her first in 1968). This "Eye of Storm" documentary was made by William Peters in 1970 for ABC News and later included in the documentary "A Class Divided" (1985), which included a class reunion (of 1984.)
The most telling moment is when Russell used "brown eyes" as a derogatory term to call John name, only a couple of hours through. Though, the experiment was too short to allow it to get to the point when a "brown-eyes" person does so to another fellow "brown-eyes" person.

Via Wiki:

While there are variations of the story, the exercise Elliott developed for her third grade class in Riceville, Iowa was a result of Martin Luther King’s assassination. According to one biographer, on the evening of April 4, 1968, Elliott turned on her television to find out about the assassination. One scene she says that she remembers vividly is that of a (white) reporter, with the microphone pointed toward a local black leader asking "When our leader (John F. Kennedy) was killed several years ago, his widow held us together. Who's going to control your people?" She then decided to combine a lesson she had planned about Native Americans with the lesson planned about King for February’s Hero of the Month. To tie the two, she used the Sioux prayer "Oh Great Spirit, keep me from ever judging a man until I have walked a mile in his moccasins."^[1]
The following day she had a class discussion about the lesson, and about racism in general. She later said: "I could see that they weren’t internalizing a thing. They were doing what white people do. When white people sit down to discuss racism what they are experiencing is shared ignorance." She states her lesson plan for that day was to learn the Sioux prayer^{[clarification needed]} about not judging someone without walking in his/her moccasins and "I treated them as we treat Hispanics, Chicanos, Latinos, Blacks, Asians, Native Americans, women, people with disabilities."^{[clarification needed][citation needed]}
The original idea for the exercise came from Leon Uris's novel Mila 18, published in 1961, about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. One of the ways the Nazis decided who went to the gas chamber, according to the novel, was eye color.
Because most of Elliott's 8-year-old students were, like her, born and raised in a small town in Iowa, and were not exposed to black people outside of television, she felt that simply talking about racism would not allow her all-white class to fully comprehend racism's meaning and effects.^[1]

Wild Fire Season, First of the Year, in the Mountains South East of Santa Fe

FIRE!: There is a reason there is a fire burning over 1,000 acres and growing in Pecos Canyon. While the high winds that blew down a power line are apparently to blame for sparking the fire, the continued high winds, the 3rd consecutive year of drought, plentiful fuel in the region and prohibitive conditions for air drops of retardants have made this a manual firefight for now until conditions improve. Prayers and rain would both be appreciated.
We've had LESS than an inch of precipitation since OCTOBER, 2012.

Fire Season is officially upon us. There is a potentially BAD one burning in the Sangres around Pecos, near the community of Tres Lagunas. Mostly vacation homes and camping facilities.
The Albuquerque Mayor and other municipal officials in neighboring municipalities have closed the Bosque (riverside forest) along the Rio Grande.
I HOPE the feculent, reeking tool in Santa Fe, the carpetbagging culo governor, has the sense to close STATE facilities. Locals may keep abreast of the current situations by visiting THIS PAGE: http://nmfireinfo.com/. The feds have closed the Cibola Nat. Forest.
Woody'z advice: Stay the fuck outta the woods, watch what you're doing.

Thanks to Garret Vreeland (@dangerousmeta) for sharing this early picture of the Tres Lagunas wildfire burning in the Santa Fe NF just north of Pecos. The picture was captured around 7:32pm MDT Thursday, May 30th from a roadblock in Pecos Canyon. Additional pictures are available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/garret/8897060171/lightbox/

Shoot!

 

In The Terror Dream: Fear & Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, Susan Falludi alleges that among the primary factors underlying USer gun goonery are two which, though reaching far back into historical time and circumstance, still were implanted so deeply in the psyche of the USer male as to constitute almost a separate epistemological sphere entirely.

(T)he nation that in recent memory has been least vulnerable to domestic attack is also a nation haunted by a centuries-long trauma of assault on its home soil. For nearly two hundred years, our central drama was not the invincibility of our frontiersmen but their inability to repel invasions of non-Christian, nonwhite "barbarians" from the homestead door. To conceal the insecurity bred by those attacks, American culture would generate an ironclad countermyth of cowboy swagger and feminine frailty, which has been reanimated whenever the nation feels threatened. On September 11, Americans were once again returned to an experience of homeland terror and humiliation. And, once again, they fled from self-knowledge and retreated into myth.

 In the aftermath of the 9/11 tragedies, which to some degree illustrate BOTH aspects of her thesis, Falludi argues that the cultural fealty to owning and possessing and shooting guns, especially among white males, stems from the fear borne by their ancestors of two, deadly events: "Indian" raids and slave revolts.
 
Throughout the colonial period, "settlers" expanding the Europeans' domain on the frontier were constant and fairly easy prey for tribal "insurgents" pushing back against the encroachments of the whites. Save the last bullet for your wife or girl-child.
 
The fear of slave revolts have recently been shown to have played a large role in the existence and drafting of the Second Amendment. 
 
At any rate, firearms seem to be an almost exclusively White, Male preoccupation. People of color, who might conceivably have experience with the usefulness of firearms in community defense, not so much--though they may just be remaining tactically silent about it.
 
I was raised around weapons. I had a .22 at age 13. I was not a hunter, but I had a knack for shooting. I shot expert marksman on worn-out, range-battered .30cal carbines in the Air Force in 1964. On a bet one time, I shot a magpie out of the air with a .22, at about 100 yards. I won $50, but I still see that poor damn bird falling. That's the only critter I ever killed with a gun, and I still regret it.

Camel Rock

This formation is called, for obvious reasons, "Camel Rock." 
     It is a landmark on the hiway (285) north out of Santa Fe, about 10 miles from town, on the Tesuque Pueblo Reservation, and conveniently situated JUST across the highway from the Pueblo's eponymous Casino. 
     Mi amiga, Maria, attributes the image to Toby Roybal. (I'm guessing the image was recorded through a polarized filter; it seems "enhanced." But that's just me.) It sure is striking. 
     (An informant has subsequently informed me that the image, with its almost flat, sharp, hard edges and vivid colors probably is an example of "High Dynamic-Range Imaging." )
     Makes sense to me.
     If one was a youth growing up in the Pojoaque Valley, north of Santa Fe, as I did, it was a rite of pre-driver's license passage to ride one's bicycle to Camel Rock. My sister, who had a horse, rode there frequently, a distance of about six or seven miles as the crow flew. 
     It was half again that on the road, against a steepish grade, and on a really dangerous strip of road, with semis flying by a few inches from the shoulder, which was littered with sherds of broken glass from the beer bottles the local borrachos delighted in pitching haphazardly from their vehicles on their erratic travels.

Mr. D & the Skeptic

I somehow missed this one, back a while ago. A classic:
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Paul Mooney Ruffles Some White Feathers

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The Brickbat of Surreality, Dec 3, 2013:

Here's some cheery news!

Dims in the Senate are divided over whether and how much to fuck us poor serfs and peons over. Some--the moderates--think only a little is necessary; others, the conservatives--think a LOT is called for.

Interestingly, nobody, least of ALL Sir Barry, the Capitulator, thinks they shouldn't fuck us at all.  

Learned Helplessness
 Why do the Masters of the Universe bother to fuck around with the little people in such trivial ways, like slashing the safety net and opposing universal health care? It seems counter-intuitive. It seems you'd want a happy, healthy workforce. But your intuition would steer you wrong.

Because it is in their interest to have insecure, ill-paid, desperate workers toiling in fear of losing their jobs.

Gutting the safety net has the entirely advantageous consequences (to the Owners) of driving us proles more deeply into the debt of the oligarchs and bosses. Without a safety net of ANY kind, the "people" will be back in the situations of vassalhood, being UTTERLY dependent on the "mercy" of the master. The feudal power of life and death will once AGAIN be theirs by right.

The Owners of the country do NOT want their proles, serfs and vassals to enjoyl ANY security.

Therefore, universal health care (e.g.) is anathema, because control over access to health care gives the Owners tremendous leverage over the workers.

If the workers feel insecure, they won't organize,or resist, or oppose management other ways, for fear of retaliation and loss of jobs. An insecure work-force can be far more easily bullied into accepting reductions and limitations. Therefore ANYTHING the Owners can do to stimulate fear, unease, or insecurity is GOOD for them. A FRIGHTENED or INSECURE worker is a docile, malleable, exploitable worker.

Toothless Avatars
Almost every week the Office of soi disant "socialist" Senator Bernie Sanders issues another broadside against the capitalist, consumerist corpoRatocracy. Last week it was his "progressive deficit reduction plan." Bernie's role is mainly theatrical, keeping in mind that the whole thing is civic kabuki. He's a stock character. The Owners keep Bernie and his ilk (Kucenich, hitherto; Grayson, etc.) around to blunt criticisms that the body is a lock-step, rubber-stamp for the best interests of  the Owners, Oners, and Oiligarchs.

"How can you claim we're all dancing to the same tune, that all our opinions are the same?" they ask, with an innocent shrug.. "Look at Bernie Sanders. John McCain. They're mavericks!"

But this is a species of the now familiar refrain: "With a Black man in the White House, how can you say Murka's still a racist culture?" argument.

Read my lips!

Fungible!
Oil, that is.

Once it's out of the ground, and in the global, commercial stream, there's really no way of knowing who it belongs (or belonged) to. So oil from the tar sands in Alberta, transported down a pipeline across the exact middle of the USofA for refinement and/or transshipment to China or India or Europe is exactly the same as any other oil. It's all part of a huge, sloshing pool of international oil. It is, literally, the lifeblood of the world economy. Without it, everything stops, within about a week.

Why does ANYONE think that there is ANYTHING more important than OIL?

Corollarily, why does ANYONE think ANYONE will do ANYTHING to interrupt the production, dsitribution, and sales of OIL?

The pipeline is a done deal, one way or another.

As is fracking,and deep-water drilling.

NOTHING will stop/prevent the further degradation of the life-world as long as it runs on hydrocarbons.

 The whole fucking mammalian life-spher e is in danger, but if it gets in the way of getting more hydro-carbon/petro chemicals, NOBODY gives a shit!