OVO

Specialist Sean Baker was asked to don a prisoner jump suit and pretend to be an uncooperative prisoner in Guantánamo Bay. The five other soldiers who were part of the exercise were told he was an actual uncooperative prisoner in Guantánamo Bay, one who had already assaulted a guard. They beat and choked him until they saw the US uniform under the jump suit (they had ignored his use of the code word to stop the exercise and they had ignored him repeatedly saying “I’m a U.S. soldier”). He has had seizures ever since.

The military first concluded there was no misconduct involved in his injuries. When Specialist Baker told his story to a television news program, ‘Maj. Laurie Arellano, a spokeswoman for the Southern Command, questioned the extent of Mr. Baker’s injuries and told reporters that his medical discharge was unrelated to the injuries he had suffered in the training drill. In fact, however, the Physical Evaluation Board of the Army stated in a document dated Sept. 29, 2003: “The TBI [traumatic brain injury] was due to soldier playing role of detainee who was non-cooperative and was being extracted from detention cell in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, during a training exercise.” Major Arellano acknowledges that she misstated the facts and says she had been misinformed herself by medical personnel. She now says the medical discharge was related in part – but only in part, she says – to the “accident.”‘ (NY Times) And the media outlets that had previously reported Specialist Baker was a malingerer? Very few if any have updated their stories.

So here’s to specialist Baker. Married, with a teenage son, unemployed, taking nine forms of medication and still having seizures. The military gave him a medical discharge and if he’s lucky enough to get rated as 100% disabled he will recieve the princely sum of $2,100 a month – at maximum. That’s how the U. S. military treats its own.

Have you paid imaginary funds into pleasant? See for yourself the imagininary return on your imaginary investment at blogshares.

There is no such thing as an invisible pain ray and the United States Government doesn’t have one.

Here in the future we make blogs. But between 1987 and 1992 I published a zine the old fashioned way: by stealing office supplies and photocopies from a friend’s place of employment. The result was called OVO. OVO was the first to publish several essays by Hakim Bey that later appeared in his book T.A.Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone. OVO published work by Mike Diana long before his work drew the attention of State and Federal employees. Photographs of body piercing appeared in OVO two years before the Modern Primitives issue of Re/Search. The phrase ‘phone tag’ appears in print for the first time in the first issue of OVO. ‘Liberating Wednesday’ by PM, author of bolo’bolo, appears here for the first (and only) time; this is nearly a decade before and fifty-two times more radical a suggestion than today’s Buy Nothing Day. Crop circles and the Men in Black are referenced at a time when they were still obscure. The first appearance of Ride Theory in print occurs in Ignatz Topolino’s contribution to OVO. And OVO was aware enough of the outer edges of scientific ethics to mention gene patents in the same year they first were granted.

I have spent the past two years scanning, editing and annotating those zines, and now they are ready for you to download for free in PDF and Open Office format. The entire collection, over five hundred pages, is offered into the public domain. So go get your copies of OVO today!

Bill Cosby said: “‘These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids – $500 sneakers for what? And won’t spend $200 for ‘Hooked on Phonics’ [...] They’re standing on the corner, and they can’t speak English. I can’t even talk the way these people talk: ‘Why you ain’t, why you is. ‘… And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. And then I heard the father talk. Everybody knows it’s important to speak English except these knuckleheads.’” Link pulled from Hammer of Truth, which has a pretty and effective layout.

A goodly amount of The Medium is the Massage is online.