Local News

The History of an Abolitionist Church: Bristol Hill Congregational UCC

Submitted by Chris Clemens and Luke Myer @ ExploringTheBurnedOverDistrict.wordpress.com (photos: Exploring the Burned Over District) on Thu, 2013-05-16 20:47

Bristol Hill Congregational United Church of Christ – Volney, NY

original article here: https://exploringtheburnedoverdistrict.wordpress.com/2013/05/11/bristol-hill-congregational-united-church-of-christ-volney-ny/

Bristol Hill Congregational United Church of Christ

Bristol Hill Congregational United Church of Christ

Chris and I get all sorts of excited when we learn of a new place to see or possibly a free tour of some giant ball of yarn.  We consider it a win win if we learn of a free church tour because then we just look to see what else there is to see around the church and go and make a day of it.  Believe it or not, we do learn of free church tours every so often, but it is a rare gift when an entire county opens its doors for free tours.  This is exactly what happened a few weeks ago in Oswego County, but let me explain a bit.  Not every single place in the county was open for a free tour; instead a list of designated places was available for tours and was spread across several small towns within the county.  Chris had called a representative from Oswego County and had the list mailed to us several weeks in advance and we narrowed down our list of things to see to make it more manageable.  The one site that stood out more than any other was the Bristol Hill Congregational United Church of Christ (hereby referred to as Bristol Hill Church for short), located in the small Town of Volney, NY.

Manhattan Square Park Mural Erased

Submitted by Mike Governale @ RochesterSubway.com on Thu, 2013-05-16 08:12

original article here: http://www.rochestersubway.com/topics/2013/05/manhattan-square-park-mural-erased/

Kristen Cavanaugh]
I haven’t been able to find anyone who knows exactly when this mural was painted, but it’s been a fixture in Manhattan Square Park external link for at least 30 years, says Charles Moreland, Executive Director of Rochester Parkour external link. The outdoor venue has been mostly abandoned for the past 10 years, but its concrete walls and irregular geometry make it ideal for practicing the fine art of Parkour. Charles’ group can often be found moving throughout the park. Yesterday Charles noticed the mural had been covered with a fresh coat of gray paint…

Have you seen these guys?

Submitted by Rochester Indymedia on Thu, 2013-05-16 07:25

The RPD's policies and procedures for ADA compliance: Are they doing a good job?

Submitted by Rochester Indymedia on Wed, 2013-05-15 21:08
Below are some key points stated in the policies and procedures, of the Rochester Police Department, for people with disabilities. In this case, we've highlighted the issues specifically dealing with people with mobility impairments.

Here they are...

and...

flyer for Benny Warr rally

Submitted by Rochester Indymedia on Wed, 2013-05-15 20:44


bennywarr.pdf

"Not Guilty!" Benny Warr Arraigned

Submitted by T. Forsyth on Tue, 2013-05-14 19:02

On May 14, 2013, Benny Warr entered Judge Stephen Miller's courtroom flanked by his lawyer, Charles F. Burkwit, his wife, Nina (pronounced nine-ah), and other family members and supporters. The proceedings got underway promptly at 9:30am with Warr's arraignment first on the docket.

 

When Judge Miller asked Warr to enter a plea, Warr, in his baritone voice, said, “Not guilty.”

 

In The City Off The Grid - Building Sustainable Communities

Submitted by AlBrundage on Mon, 2013-05-13 00:25

"The Human Face of War"--a workshop

Submitted by T. Forsyth (w/video from Dawn Revette) on Fri, 2013-05-10 12:09

On April 27, 2013, Kathy Kelly, Noor Mir, Sarah A.K. Ahmed, Rooj Alwazir, Fidaa Abuassi, and Mohammed Abbas presented a workshop titled "The Human Face of War" at the Resisting Drones, Global War and Empire convergence in Syracuse, NY.

Part 1 is video of each panelist describing their particular experience.

Watch Now!

Part 2 is the discussion that occurred but in audio format rather than video.

"A Policy of Full Spectrum Dominance" a workshop at Resisting Drones, Global War and Empire convergence

Submitted by SusanGalloway on Thu, 2013-05-09 18:48

On April 27, 2013, Bruce Gagnon presented a workshop titled "A Policy of Full Spectrum Dominance"at the Resisting Drones, Global War and Empire Convergence in Syracuse, NY.

May Day 2013 photos

Submitted by AlBrundage on Thu, 2013-05-09 00:35

May Day or International Worker's Day comes to Rochester May 1 2013.  Marchers met at Washington Square Park and marched up East Ave to the Workers United headquarters.  Speakers from various labor and civic groups spoke at both locations. 

Photos in gallery

Video coming soon!

Disabled Man Assaulted by RPD While Waiting for Bus

Submitted by T. Forsyth, video: Shakur Muhammed on YouTube.com on Wed, 2013-05-08 22:13

On May 1st, 2013, Benny Warr was waiting for the bus in his wheelchair at the intersection of Bartlett St. and Jefferson Ave., near his home. As he was waiting for the bus, a Rochester police cruiser rolled up to the intersection. The officers exited the car and according to Warr, asked him what he was doing.

"I told them I was just waiting for the bus. I was being polite," he said to me in a brief phone interview today.

The next thing Warr knew, he had a face full of mace and three officers punching and wrestling him out of his wheelchair where he was further kicked and beat while on the ground. A savvy citizen, who goes by the handle Shakur Muhammed on YouTube, started recording the incident with her phone just before Warr was violently forced from his chair.

"Clean Up - Cook Out" event for Vee Henry in response to ATF foreclosure battle

Submitted by Take Back The Land on Wed, 2013-05-08 21:03

EVENT: Saturday, May 11 at 12pm,  "Clean Up - Cook Out" event  for Vee Henry in response to  ATF foreclosure battle

Location: 395 Maple St, Rochester

 

        A year ago Virginia "Vee" Henry promised her dying brother Buddy that she would carry on his dream of creating a homeless shelter and youth outreach program in his two story building at 395 Maple Street in Rochester.  Since then, a perfect storm of city cost-saving measures, privately executed tax liabilities, and the possible machinations of a mysterious but well-connected real-estate investor challenged that dream.  But Vee Henry's dedication has not wavered.  This Saturday, May 11 at 12pm, Henry will be hosting a volunteer "Clean Up - Cook Out" event at her beleaguered building at 395 Maple St, Rochester, where volunteers will be repairing some of damage done to her property by vandals during her year long foreclosure battle, and Vee will be available for questions about her case.

Gender Justice, Inclusion, and the Problem with Language for the Women's Equality Agenda in New York State

Submitted by Kaitlin Legg on Wed, 2013-05-08 12:31

original article: http://upandrise.tumblr.com/post/49938349690

The NY Women’s Equality Agenda is a policy initiative that NYS Governor Andrew Cuomo announced early in 2013. NY Women’s Equality just unveiled this new video. I invite you to watch the video, read my response below, and share your own response.

Green Party Responds to State of the City Address

Submitted by Green Rochester on Tue, 2013-05-07 09:11

Monday night, Mayor Tom Richards gave an exciting presentation about the
State of the City.  We, the candidates of Green Rochester, feel that the
Mayor presented an excessively positive vision for a City that is
struggling with some very serious issues.  The speech was light on
specifics and had virtually no mention of the underlying root cause of so
many of Rochesters problems: poverty.  Last weekend, Green Rochester
candidates spent time at the Carl Street Urban Farm Project, on the city's
northeast side. The residents of that neighborhood did not paint the same
rosy picture.

We recognize that Rochester is a city beset by many systemic problems,
including poverty, unemployment, homelessness, and a school system
struggling to serve its most basic functions.  According to Green Rochester
candidate for Mayor, Alex White, "Investing $1.7 billion over 3 years in
various development projects has not solved any of these problems.
Poverty, homelessness, and infant mortality are all higher, while our
graduation rate is lower."

City Council Candidate, David Atias added, "Everyone understands what the
problems are. But the people currently running the show seem to think that
the solutions need to come from outside our own community.  We have the
resources to do what needs to be done, but we keep giving them away to
people who don't live here."

"Youth Organizing Against War" a workshop at the Resisting Drones, Global War and Empire convergence

Submitted by T. Forsyth on Tue, 2013-05-07 08:45

On April 27, 2013, Ben Kuebrich, Amelia Ramsey-Lefevre, Claire Bach, Brian Tackett, and Rachel Cary presented a workshop titled "Youth Organizing Against War" at the Resisting Drones, Global War and Empire convergence in Syracuse, NY.

Watch Now!

Jalil Muntaqim: Blog #20 Blow-Back?!

Submitted by Jalil A. Muntaqim from Attica Prison on Tue, 2013-05-07 07:47
Blog #20
 
 
Blow-Back?!
Reading the Saturday, April 13, 2013, issue of the New York Times, I came across an article, “Rights Groups, in Letter to Obama, Question Legality and Secrecy of Drone Killings,” byline Scott Shane. The nine-page letter sent to Obama by the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, Human Rights First, Open Society Foundations, the Center for Constitutional Rights and other groups challenged the U.S. so-called counterterrorism campaigns. A week earlier, I saw a photo of 8 Afghani children wrapped in their funeral shrouds to be buried after succumbing to a U.S. drone strike on a community, allegedly to kill an Islamic militant. When I read the article concerning the photo, it discussed the anguish of the parents of these children, asking the question why were their children killed. The story brought to mind the many babies that were killed by Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma bombing. I thought about the police bombing and killing men, women and children of the MOVE family in Philadelphia, and I thought about the babies/children being killed (although disproportionately) between Zionist Israeli and Islamist Palestinians. Needless to say, there are far too many babies/children being victimized in these geo-political or domestic conflicts.

Brofiling: white privilege radically changes the appearance of Tsarnaev bros

Submitted by brofiling on Mon, 2013-05-06 15:29
the Tsarnaev brothers are white guys. They are white. The FBI’s own wanted poster for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev lists his race as “white”, but you would never know it from the cover image on The Week.<br /> Hold up the cover to someone else, and ask them how many white people they can see on the cover. Chances are they will identify Gabby Giffords on the top left and the image of the Boston policemen (all white men) on the top right, but how about those two guys in the center? Nope, not a chance that anyone would say these caricatures look white.<br /> Why? Because in addition to being white they are also “Muslim”, which is the current dehumanizing “Other” label that whiteness has constructed as a sanctioned target for violence in US popular culture.<br /> This is how white privilege works in media representations and everyday life: when the criminal suspects are demonstrably white men, seize upon any aspect of difference and magnify it such that they become Othered, non-white, and menacing. If it is too hard to do so, simply dismiss them as aberrations and isolated cases of insanity. This is also how white culture, specifically the process of whiteness in conjunction with white privilege, portrays several non-white identities, including those that are now considered white but at one time were decidedly not so. For example, see here for how the Irish were depicted as violent apes or lazy drunks in the late 1800s to early 1900s.<br /> Addendum, posted 4.29.13:<br /> As Tim Wise said on April 18, there are consequences for these kinds of things. Here are a few reasons why this is important:<br /> Making white criminals who are Muslim appear to be more ‘brown’ than ‘white’ has serious consequences for brown people. Indeed, as we saw right after the Boston bombings, people that simply “looked” brown and Muslim were profiled and assaulted. Two men were escorted off a plane in Boston simply for speaking Arabic and thereby somehow making passengers “uncomfortable”. A Bangladeshi man in NYC was beaten up because he looked ‘Arab’. And this affects women too: a Muslim woman doctor in Boston who wears a headscarf was attacked by a man while she was out walking with her baby. And the white Muslim wife of the older brother has been demonized for simply being a Muslim American woman, especially after Ann Coulter called for women who wear hijabs to be arrested.<br /> People have pointed out to me that The Week Magazine’s cover images are regularly caricatures/sketches of the main events of that week’s news. I know this—I read their print edition every week, and all their previous cover images are available online. But there are two main problems with this argument: (a) why caricature them in a way that makes them so explicitly ‘darker’ and ‘Arabized’ in their appearance? Contrast the way they look on that page with the other white faces on that same page—would anyone say that these men look ‘white’? So why is the caricature done in such a ‘racializing’ way? How is this any different from the more overt media racism that was used by Time Magazine (h/t @sarahkendzior), for example, to make OJ Simpson appear way more menacing? And (b) if The Week is simply trying to put a caricature of criminals who committed mass violence on their cover, then here are the covers for the weeks when Newtown happened, when Aurora happened, and when Tucson happened — where were their ‘racialized’ caricatures of Adam Lanza, James Holmes, and Jared Loughner? How come the ideologies and ethnicities and religions of those particular mass criminals were not profiled?<br /> And so here is the more subtle consequence: when white criminals are treated as if they are just aberrations, and when white criminals who are Muslim are portrayed as more brown than white not just by The Week but by mainstream propaganda outlets like Fox News, then the problems of white supremacist violence and extremism become hidden, unaddressed. When analyzed carefully, research has shown that right-wing extremism causes more deaths in America than “jihadist” groups. Also, of the terror attacks/plots since 1995 in America, 56% of them were by right-wing extremists and only 12% by Islamist/jihadist groups — and yet the DHS was told to back off reporting on that or on analyzing right-wing violence for fears of backlash from conservative political groups.<br /> So, my main point is that such a willful blindness hurts ALL people.<br />

brofiling: white privilege radically changes the appearance of Tsarnaev bros

This is how brofiling actually works in real life. The Week Magazine ran with this image as their cover sketch.

Just so it is said, clearly and unambiguously: the Tsarnaev brothers are white guys. They are white. The FBI’s own wanted poster for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev lists his race as “white”, but you would never know it from the cover image on The Week.

Getting to know the anarchists

Submitted by Phil Ebersole on Mon, 2013-05-06 15:17

original article: https://philebersole.wordpress.com/2013/04/26/getting-to-know-the-anarchists/

Back in the day (which was before people used the expression “back in the day”), I was reasonably satisfied with the society I lived in. I thought there were four possible ways to organize society—free-market democracy, socialist democracy, Communism and fascism.   The dividing line between the first two and second two was democracy vs. dictatorship; the dividing line between the first and last and the middle two was capitalism vs. socialism.

For me, the key dividing line was between democracy and dictatorship.  I was satisfied with free-market democracy, but open-minded about social democracy.   I recognized the existence of poverty, racism and other social ills, but I thought the United States and other democratic countries were steadily overcoming these wrongs.

Nowadays Communism has vanished from the map of history, and state socialism is fading.  But the forward progress of our free-market democracy has ceased.  Instead we are stuck in a state of perpetual war, perpetual martial law and perpetual economic decline, with impunity from the law for the financial and governmental elite and a police state for everyone else.   There is no longer a bright dividing line between our present system and fascism.

I was wrong in my assumptions about how things were, and I need to rethink my philosophy.  I want to learn more about anarchism, a philosophy based on individual liberty and voluntary cooperation, outside my four-box matrix..

Did the RPD pull a gun on a man videotaping from his porch?

Submitted by Davy V. on Mon, 2013-05-06 15:11

Did Rochester, NY Police officer Pull his Gun on Man After Forcing him Into his Home and Threatening to Arrest him for Video Recording?

By Davy V.

Original article can be found here: http://davyv.blogspot.com/2013/04/did-rochester-ny-police-officer-pull_27.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DavyV+%28Davy+V.%29

Rochester, NY Police officer:
"If you come out here again I am arresting you!"

At first, the 3 minute and 54 second dark, and somewhat grainy video looks like some ordinary footage of police cruisers, with flashing lights on, at the scene of what looks to be a motor vehicle accident, in Rochester, NY on March 9th.

However, around the 2 minute and 5 second mark of the video, things quickly change.

It is at that point that a Rochester Police officer can be heard telling the man who is recording the video, "Get inside why are you still standing here I know you hear me."

The man, who is in his North Street home, replies, "I understand you and I'm standing in my house and I'm filming an accident that has occurred", when the RPD officer interrupts him and says "Sir I need you to go inside you are standing here and I need you to go inside."

Then RPD officer, who is briefly seen in the video, then shoves the man inside his home as he continues to yell at the man to go inside.

The officer then slams the man's door shut while while yelling "If you come out here again I am arresting you!"

1st Monday Mayhem: Taking a Closer Look at the Women's Equality Agenda!

Submitted by Flying Squirrel Community Space on Sat, 2013-05-04 16:42

This month we'll be discussing the Women's Equality Agenda!

The Women’s Equality Agenda will help ensure that New York’s 10 million mothers, daughters, sisters and wives get a fair shake. This groundbreaking legislative agenda will level the playing field and break down barriers so women can more fully and equally participate in society.

The Flying Squirrel Community Space collective has invited KaeLyn Rich to give a presentation about the agenda. She is the new Director of the Genesee Valley Chapter of the New York Civil Liberties Union and was formally the community affairs coordinator at Planned Parenthood of the Rochester/Syracuse Region, where she was responsible for legislative advocacy, government relations, coalition building and the regional campus organizing program. KaeLyn has also worked at Services to Aid Families, a rape crisis/domestic violence program in Oswego and serves on several local non-profit boards.

After KaeLyn's presentation, the community is invited to engage in conversation about the agenda.

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