Passing The Torch of Police Brutality: Sean Bell & The Solution

Posted on May 8, 2008

This one is a guest column by Adisa Banjanko, a friend who I met through the Hip Hop Congress some years back. He’s the driving force behind the Hip Hop Chess Federation and author of Lyrical Swords.

Passing The Torch of Police Brutality: Sean Bell & The Solution
By: Adisa Banjoko, The Bishop of Hip-Hop

Though we live dangerous, cops could just/ Arrest me, blaming us, we’re held like hostages- Nas, NY State of Mind

I got my first car when I was 18. “Now when you get pulled over, it’s a serious thing,” my dad said to me before he handed me the keys to a brown Toyota Celica. “You keep your hands on the wheel if you get stopped. Move slowly. If you are going to reach for anything like a wallet you tell him what you are going to do and do it slow. If you move too fast they will kill you.” Read more

Desert Sunrise

Posted on May 7, 2008

Live video of Beltaine’s Fire performing ‘Desert Sunrise’ at the Beale St. Bar & Grill in SF.  Big ups to Cory for shooting the video for us.

Catholic Morality

Posted on May 2, 2008

A news clip on a 40 year old document that’s just surfaced showing that the Vatican overtly and explicitly ordered Bishops to cover up sexual abuse by priests. Way to spread God’s love. fuckers.

and these are the bastards who claim that they have the right to pass moral judgments on the rest of us and that we should look to them for moral guidance! ha!

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – belief without evidence in supernatural beings does not condone moral authority. If anything it should be a huge warning sign that the person/institution in question has forsaken reason in favor of superstition. Religion isn’t the source of morality, it’s the antithesis of morality. Morality requires a conscious effort to determine what’s right and wrong for yourself from one day to the next. I’m absolutely sure there are millions of catholics (and other religious people) who make a conscious effort to do that from day to day despite the influence of their church’s and are throughly moral people in every sense of the word, but it’s pretty clear that the people actually running the show in the Vatican are much less concerned with searching for Truth and doing what’s right then they are with protecting their own power and influence. Some might say that’s an outrageous claim, but the fact that this document was sent to every single bishop in the entire Roman Catholic church and it still took 40 years – and hundreds of thousands if not millions of abused children – to surface is pretty convincing evidence that as an institution the Catholic Church is pathologically incapable of telling right from wrong.