Note: I was not on Facebook, Telegram, Gmail, the dumb phone for 24 hours! Whew, less stress in one day equaling thirty days of stress with all that crap I check out since I am a writer, journalist, educator and non-consumer of mainstream or stupid stream media!

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The Covid Insnaity stopped face-to-face fun of Special Olympics fun, i.e. sports, until this year, so I was asked to be the basketball coach. For Lincoln County, we had more than 20 athletes show up, and we did the practices and mentoring.

We decided to turn those 20 athletes into three teams — two five-on-five teams, full court, and then skills athletes, who can shot the ball and dribble, but are not up to the task of full court running back and forth.

Here is the Tiger Sharks, one of the teams, coached by Eric and Donna =

Look, it was not about the medals — gold, silver, bronze and fourth place. But, my team, the Mighty Penguins, well we got a bronze, but more importantly we got the sportsmanship award:

My specific team, Mighty Penguins, are young, for sure, and at the state competion there were many teams from bigger cities and counties, and to my surprise, there were some teams of adults in their 30s and even fifties. Tall and aggressive players.

Our team did well against two of these teams with six foot four folk they played against. We were fouled a lot. But we had fun, and I attempted to make things fun.

Yeah, some of the coaches — there were like five or six for the teams we went against — were loud, demanding, taking this way too seriously. And the fouls, and the body checks, all of that, my team had not experienced because during our drills and practices we learned how to move, get into offensive formations and defensive formations. No heavy NBA basketball crap.

Our players actually stopped a lot of shots, dribbled well, tied up some of the start players, did get to shoot a lot of foul shots, and just stayed in and had fun.

Bronze is fine, but outstanding sportsmanship winner was icing on the cake. They all seemed to know that was the diamond in the rough award.

The irony for me is when doing these public events, I see the number of folk in the stands cheering on and those coaches and volunteers having their own stressors, their own battle with disease and quality of life issues. And, yes, there are dozens of disabilities, as in intellectual and developmental, learning, too, that are not just the luck of the draw and throw of the dice. Not just some hereditary i.e. genetic family line of this or that birth developmental disability.

So much is tied to environmental factors, and, yes, that includes food, air, water and the chemicals switling around food, air, playing fields, in the water, and, yes, just how many vaccinations should people get or should babies receive and then call it enough?

On top of the cards the babies and youth are dealt, we have more and more people so out of shape, so overweight, so hobbled by chronic diseases tied to the food, water, and air they take in. All the dirty food, all the dirty chemicals in candy, drinks, and what about that high fructose corn syrup and soy and GMOs in EVERYTHING?

This equation of synergistic effects, and what about the brain-gut connection, and the swarm of anxiety and fear and PTSD, and the reality of Capitalism as Immune Suppressing Disease, or inflammatory diseases?

We have a society that is broken on a thousand levels, truly, and alas, even those born with fewer neurological and physiological challenges, we have so many immune suppressors and immune inhancers and so many unstudied chemicals that are bombarding the fetus, the mother, the sperm, the babies, us all?

Chronic disease affects health and quality of life. Still, it also is a significant driver of healthcare costs and has a related impact on business, such as absenteeism and presenteeism. Nearly 60% of adult Americans have at least one chronic disease. Chronic conditions like diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular disease are the leading causes of death in the United States. More than two-thirds of all deaths are caused by one or more of five chronic diseases: heart disease, cancer, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and diabetes.

Kennedy is ON this: But try to put RFK Jr.’s name in a Google Gulag search. It is more than just algorithms. It’s slander, it’s memory hole, it’s Orwell on Steroids.

“The greatest crisis that America faces today is the chronic disease epidemic in America’s children.” – Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (source)

Who Are the Not So Superstars?

One of my athletes, we’ll call Donnie, has quite the life story. Again, we are working with people who were diagnosed with some form of disability tied to developmental developing in the fetus and then outside. Many times the disability is diagnosed in schools. Many disabilities tied to learning, and alas, I have been trained to work with adults with disabilities, in their actual foster home, where they pay some rent, have their own rooms, have kitchen responsibilities, and people live there 24-7 to assist them with medications, getting to work, and just supporting their lives.

Then, trained with United Cerebral Palsy organization, again, supporting adults with everything, but specifically to get into the job market.

Lots of places I got “courses” on the entire suite of how to work well with people with PD, ID, DD. Many clients were homeless, many were stuck in bad biological homes, and some in foster home after foster home.

So, many amazing people I have worked with, met, broke bread with, and laughed and cried with. Too many to count, and alas, since I am an outsider everythwhere I go, I am not in the mainstream, in terms of accepting authorities, old and tried paradigms, and those attached to top down thinking and organizing. Radical left, I guess, or communist.

I come to places with way too many hats worned, I guess, and that is intimidating, speaks to some secret bias or prejudice foisted upon me, and a set of lenses that allow me to look in while I am also inside.

Plenty of stories I have written about those places, and plenty of stories written about the poor treatment of my clients, and then, me, being sacked, or me having to move on.

But Donnie, man, atypical, and typical in an odd combination. He’s 55, and I found out he was from Davis, California, but he is Serbian, that is, his biological mother came to Pennsylvannia with parents, from Bosnia. Donnie speaks a little Serbian (he says while on the court, when he misses a shot, he talks to himself in Serbian). He has five other siblings, and he tells me that they all came from other fathers but the same mother.

He has amazing memories of California, Special Olympics, all sorts of competitions, and he is only 5 foot 1. He smokes, and he turns 56 in May. He came up to Oregon a few years ago, and many people I have talked to said he was living in a tent on a beach near the new Beer Joint, Pelican. He said they were fine with him kipping there. He says he’s now with a sister in a trailer, but he braved the hard winds and rain for six months.

Amazing life, navigating the life of a kid who left his family, his foster family, too, to live with friends, and friends’ families. He has been to football games in Pennsylvania and really went on and on about live concerts (rock) he has attended. He survives, and he has been a rough sleeper, and here he is, 55, heavy smoker, running up and down the court with his fellow teammates. The oldest guy out there, besides me, his coach!

His story needs telling, and I need to get deeper into his life, maybe talk to his siblings, and others who know him. I have to believe his belief system, what he’s seen, what he has experienced. Again, in USA, it’s all about celebrity, or classless people Thinking about this freak show: “In an extreme social experiment, six singles yearning for a lifelong partnership agree to a provocative proposal: getting married the moment they meet.”

These people, both the show creators and the idiots agreeing for their 15 episodes of fame, quite the commentary on the chosen elites putting this crap together and the poor fools who want to be filmed and followed around in their stupidity: Note the “social experiment” terminology of this blurb. MK Ultra, Milgram Experiment, Covid Lockdowns, 9/11, the entire mess of these “eggheads” messing around with human nature, all for a container ship of shekels.

This is the behavioral experiment of Madison Avenue, Edward Bernays, CIA, Milton Friedman, all the other rabbi-mentored elites running neocon central, finance and FIRE central, that is, Finance Insurance Real Estate, and really pulling the wool over the heads of us, the herd, the plebs, the prols, the misbegotten victims of their experiments on colonizing minds, money and municipalities.

Those little things: Brave in the Attempt: Special Olympics and Disabilities Awareness Month, March is National Disabilities Awareness Month by Paul Haeder / February 23rd, 2023

Oh, there are disabilities porn out there, lots of junk on watching youth and adults with DD looking for a date, and then lots of weird stuff on homeless camps. Hell, you get Nomadland, too, that ball of crappy wax.

But that’s Hollywood!

Here you go, my Lincoln County:

Part I

Behind the faces of Lincoln County’s homeless: Part II

(Editor’s note: This is part one of a two part series on Lincoln County’s homeless population)

 Part One:

LINCOLN COUNTY — The tip of the proverbial iceberg when it comes to homelessness is what the average person sees on Newport’s streets — mostly men, some women, seeking a public or private building’s overhang to get out of the rain.

Many on the streets are disheveled, struggling with mental health issues and addiction. Others are not so easily identified as homeless people.

Creating a permanent warming shelter is one stop-gap measure the Newport Working Group on Homelessness has been grappling with for more than a year.

On Feb. 5, more than 20 people filled the cramped space in the Avery Building, where Department of Human Services offices are co-located with other agencies, to move this group into achievable goals.

Outside the DHS office, fighting against the gale force rain, many of these house-less people were on the covered concrete pad that leads up to the offices housing SNAP and TANF DHS workers.

They were seeking a dry space and companionship.

I asked one fellow — he said he goes by Fred, age 47 — what he wants immediately as a homeless citizen.

“Look, I see families out there with kids in tents. That’s just not right. I am OK living in the woods, but even a dude like me wants something, some place, to get out or the rain and cold. Even some simple open carport like structure, man. Nothing fancy. They should be all over the place.”

We talked about portable toilets, even cold-water taps and sanitary soaps.

“Look, with this virus over in China, coming here … you think the powers to be would think about sanitation,” he said. “I guess the solution is to let us die off in the woods … or ship us off to come sort of camp.”

Task force with teeth?

Inside the Avery Building, a city council woman, the Lincoln County Sheriff, a plethora of social services leaders, private citizens and others coalesced to try to come up with a plan and priorities. The agenda to create safe transitional housing, welcoming and effective car camping regulations, policies for tent camping areas and siting a warming shelter is daunting. Also on the agenda was the big slice of the pie — addressing health and health-related issues.

Community Service Officer Jovita Ballentine, with the Newport Police Department, and Lincoln County Sheriff Curtis Landers were among the group wondering how all this money spent on services for these so-called “frequent users” of the ER really helps people with mental health issues who spend their days hanging out at such places as the Newport Rec Center.

For Landers, mental illness and addiction are the root causes of the homeless that police agencies run into on a daily basis.

For Samaritan House director Lola Jones, helping homeless get out of the elements and into programs to assist them into permanent housing are part of a bigger picture. She reiterated that the task force is not a panacea for all the underlying issues why people end up homeless.

Amanda Cherryholmes, Lincoln City manager for Communities Helping Addicts Negotiate Change Effectively (C.H.A.N.C.E.), was quick to push back on the myth that more homeless services in an area will bring more homeless into the community. Cherryholmes cited counterarguments to that belief. She also pointed out that car camping allowances and even some concerted effort to have designated spaces with portable toilets and storage facilities don’t address the fact “most people can’t afford to keep their car running when temperatures hit the low 30s or below.”

Also at the meeting was a board member of Grace Wins Haven. Betty Kamikawa, board president, made the point that many in Newport and Lincoln County say, “Hotels are struggling because of Airbnbs. The vacation rentals have caused so many people to become homeless.”

I met people at Grace Wins after the task force adjourned. For Kamikawa and the Haven director, Traci Flowers, the crisis of unhoused individuals in Lincoln County is growing out of proportion to the solutions.

Shelter us from the storm

“We need more shelters first,” Flowers said. “Too many people think the homeless are one type of individual. They are not.” That belief creates huge conflicts within social services agencies, nonprofits, religious organizations and for the homeless themselves.

Cherryholmes wants a more robust assessment of people coming into shelters and transitional housing. “We need to figure out what services the individual needs. Each one has different needs,” she said.

She militated against the idea just any individual should end up in a warming shelter or in car camping arrangements. “There are two distinct groups — families and young people needing shelter, and then single men.” She pointed out that having a sexual offender among a group of homeless in a communal setting is not a good idea. There are some brighter horizons in the mix. Some churches are stepping up to the plate.

Tiny homes, relaxing zoning

Pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, Kelsey Ingalls, on her Feb. 2 church blog, discussed one small effort to avail the housing shortage: six cottages on church property.

“We formed the exploration team that is undertaking a feasibility study to form a partnership with Habitat for Humanity of Lincoln County and other local service agencies to help meet the housing needs of homeless, single-parentfamilies,” wrote Ingalls. “The exploration team is looking into the idea of building six, two-bedroom/one-bath cottages on the southeast corner of the church campus. We are proposing a circular village layout with front porches and a central common area. Supportive services would be provided by our local service agency partners.”

Before the task force convened, Blair Bobier, regional director of Legal Aid Services, sent out an email framing the impetus behind the Newport Working Group on Homeless.

“There are many service providers who agree that some form of a ‘coalition’ model is an important next step towards addressing homelessness in our community,” said Bobier. “In other places, one form of this model included a regular meeting of elected officials and law enforcement, along with service providers, to ensure that there was sufficient coordination among involved parties. As has been pointed out, here in Newport, the Lincoln County Affordable Housing Partners is a great example of service providers coming together on a regular basis — along with developers, government officials and members of the faith community — to exchange information and work towards common goals.”

With this large brain trust in one room, and the compassion and passionate solutions-driven people commenting on what needs to be prioritized, it’s clear Newport and Lincoln County at large have many hurdles to overcome as homelessness, and housing precarious situations are growing.

Relaxing zoning laws and rolling up sleeves will help develop coordinated efforts to get people out of the cold, screen people through various social services resources and begin to help coastal communities look at the long-range health of affordable housing in this coastal area.

“Over the two years operating, Grace Wins has had over 2,000 clients coming through. Some stay a while. The fact is by this September there will be no winter shelter, as the commons will be torn down. Nothing for the homeless and the farmers market,” Kamikawa said.

Since Housing and Urban Development no longer funds states for shelters, the onus is on states, counties and municipalities to grapple with the steadily growing problem.

(Part two in this series will appear in a future edition of the News-Times)

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Part Two:

(Editor’s note: This is part two of a two-part series on Lincoln County’s homeless population)

What’s inside (their character) when people find themselves outside?

I run these information sessions for a social capital pilot project here in Lincoln County. I had an op-ed on the program in the News-Times last year (“It Takes a Mini-Village,” Sept. 10, 2019).

For all my work attempting to get people — households, individuals on their own, etc. — to sign up for a stipend of $800, I am finding a large case of paranoia, reluctance to share and an atomized population.

A rural county like Lincoln has the appeal of being out in nature or on your own acre, but in reality, everything a city needs, a rural county needs.

The automatization of society is probably the most difficult challenge to educators, social service workers, even employers. It creates fear, isolation and self-effacement.

“To be uprooted means to have no place in the world recognized and guaranteed by others; to be superfluous means not to belong to the world at all.” said Hannah Arendt, political scientist and philosopher (1906-1975).

Isolated individuals do not make up a healthy democratic society. Part of the reason any city the size of Newport is grappling with more direct services for homeless people is to stem that survival-of-the-fittest mentality in order to help people form some sort of communal bonds and deep connections to their communities.

Part of the Task Force on Homelessness is to grapple with what many might see as low-hanging fruit — getting a warming shelter up and running in Newport so there is a permanent place to not only help the homeless during the cold, but also a place where more resources and possible case management might occur.

Unfortunately, many people see the homeless as completely dysfunctional and/or hooked on substances creating a person unable to function as a contributing member of society.

I’ve had many conversations with many people in Lincoln County who are precarious — some living in fifth wheels and their cars. Others are doubling and tripling up housing situations not conducive to raising school-aged children.

In addition, I talk to people in my own community, Waldport, who are both visible to the community and talkative about their homeless situations. There are Terry, Brooks and John (a pseudonym), who I end up conversing with about their own state of homelessness.

All three men are on the streets, but the three of them present themselves as very different humans in their houseless circumstances.

John has lived on the streets for seven years. He tells me he wanted to be a novelist when young. He is outside the Waldport library drinking coffee from the patron appreciation cookies and coffee event the library is hosting.

“Look, most of the services come with a big bunch of terrible things,” he said. “The warming shelter has some bad people there. It’s not a place for families. And women! They have it worse as homeless.”

He’s thoughtful, careful and willing to talk. In some ways, John is jaded by his experiences on the street.

Terry is from Oklahoma, and he jokes about “having a few daily” just to stay warm. He looks and presents himself differently than John. I talk to Terry outside the post office, where he is there looking for some changes.

“I have family down in Oklahoma,” he said. “I choose to be out here, don’t get me wrong.”

Terry is funny, mercurial and presents himself as eccentric, but he has grimy clothes and the stench of alcohol on his breath.

All three men tell me they’d be open to a longer conversation, more in depth, and they even say they’d have a few things to tell any task force or politician around homelessness.

John and Brooks reiterate they are known in the community and assisted with food and a few odd jobs. One businesswoman tells me she gets a “How are you today, miss?” from Brooks regularly. People in Waldport tolerate the three in their community, on the surface.

Many I meet attribute homelessness to laziness, boozing and just downright mental illness. But a true picture of individuals facing homelessness is so much more complicated than that simplistic connotation.

What comes first, homelessness or mental illness? This question pervades conversations in many iterations, but in the end, falling on hard times — loss of a job, physical illness, divorce, eviction, bankruptcy and/or a combination of these — can put a so-called contributing member of society, the workforce, into a quick spiral of unpaid bills, shredded safety nets, a loss of family or social capital.

Mental illness is a result of many varying factors, but ending up in your car with a dog and spouse and a child can be a tsunami of fear, self-loathing, impenetrable lack of confidence and anger. If you have a chronic illness that demands medical attention, the crisis is compounded exponentially.

Running a permanent shelter costs money

Without financial support and volunteers, a shelter is a pipe dream.

“We have to have financial support,” said Samaritan House director Lola Jones at a recent meeting of the Task Force on Homelessness.

Cynthia Jacobi, Newport City Council member, said recently she is hopeful that HB–4001 will spur serious discourse on what to do about the homeless population in relationship to cities having the tools to allow for shelters. House Speaker Tina Kotek (D-Portland), has introduced a $120 million proposal to allow cities to more easily site homeless shelters. Kotek also wants a statewide emergency declaration on the homeless problem.

Jacobi, too, sees the need for immediate mitigation and a shelter for this emergency-sized problem here in Newport.

Kelsey Ingalls, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Newport, on her blog tells her congregation a chilling fact most social services agencies in Lincoln County also shudder to contemplate — there’s a 17 percent homeless rate in our local schools. How a community frames the idea that nearly one of every five students doesn’t have stable housing while the county is home to many second-home residents will be important.

Several compelling stories about people who are homeless and dying due to exposure to the elements were discussed at the meeting: according to Betty Kamikawa, an 87-year-old Lincoln County resident was found dead in her car. She had been in an apartment living with her disabled son. Electrical wires were eaten through by rats. She had no electricity. She was evicted. She had a stroke while living in her car with her son.

Putting a face on, and a story behind each homeless person might get the average person to think about how he or she can support a shelter and permanent housing solution as well as volunteering some hours each month to stem the tide of tragedies like this one.

Grilling Newport City Councilor

I decided to ask a Newport City Councilor, Cynthia Jacobi, some questions on homelessness and next steps.

Paul Haeder: What role do you see citizens joining the Homeless Task Force?

Cynthia Jacobi: I’m the city liaison to the Homeless Work Group/coalition.

PH: What role do you see citizens joining the Homeless Task Force?

CJ: I see the role of citizens in the new homeless coalition work group (as yet without an official name or title) as coming forth with the best ideas tailored for our community. Social services, government entities, law-enforcement, interfaith community and concerned citizens can all have a voice in shaping these policies.

PH: Why are you involved?

CJ: I have always felt a strong sense of social justice. I see families with more than one parent working who still cannot afford safe and decent shelter. Sometimes the cost of an illness, a car repair or other unexpected costs forces the choice between buying groceries or paying rent or utility bills. Children in unstable situations are especially vulnerable. As a wealthy society, in good conscience we cannot say there is no room at the inn. We have the means to house all of our population.  With strong leadership and compassion, I know we can do this.

PH: Will the task force cover larger issues?

CJ: There are so many overlapping issues: the new Oregon State House Bill 4001, which may be a game changer in zoning, and funding. All coastal communities have been addressing the short-term rentals impact on housing inventory for working folks. It is a valid suggestion to have a study on the actual impact economically and socially of STRs. For example, does the room tax cover expenses of police and fire departments, wear on roads, etc.?  Who would finance this study? The City of Newport has been instrumental in building Surfview, the 110-apartment complex for lower-income citizens. This will open by summer. This was accomplished with a complex partnership of public and private funds, and the leadership in local city and county government. Need to do more of this.

PH: What role do you see mental health services playing in this move to have both temporary homeless facilities (a night facility) and also a warming shelter?

CJ: My understanding is that the county mental health providers have formed outreach teams that will go directly to unsheltered people, assess their needs and provide services and contacts for assistance.

PH: Car camping at churches and nonprofits and governmental parking areas with some sort of case management and oversight seems like a good first step in getting the housing insecure into a system of evaluation and moving ahead with housing options. Is this the biggest and easiest priority now?

CJ: I think the quickest way to make an impact is to allow safe, supervised car camping in Newport.  Newport Planning Commission is in the process of examining our ordinances to allow car camping in certain defined areas. Along with oversight, outreach teams and case management, this is the easiest first step to create safe shelter areas. Women, children and seniors living in their cars are especially vulnerable. At the very least, they need a safe place to stay at night. We can do this. I heard anecdotally that much of the seasonal help lives in their cars and rents small storage lockers for belongings.

PH: Do you know anyone personally or within a family circle who have been or are housing insecure, or homeless?

CJ: Personally, I have a few family members who have experienced bad luck, poor choices and mental illness causing them to live in unstable conditions. My husband, Gary, and I have volunteered at the overnight shelter.  We have met people displaced from their previous long-term housing, people who can’t afford rent, people who are disabled. A common problem is affordability when working folks have to pay the first month, the last month, a damage deposit and utility hook ups. Before any of this can happen, there is background check costing $50 per adult for each application, even to be placed on a waiting list. While realizing that landlords must be protected, this situation seems unfair. How many working families can afford $2,500 and more up front?

PH: What role do businesses and the chambers have in helping get some sort of affordable housing for the very people who clean the fish, serve the food, chop the veggies, clean the hotels, etc.? Can we get a roundtable together, where we bring a large brain trust together to attack the housing insecurity and the street homeless issues as a multi-pronged problem to solve?

CJ: As far as the responsibilities of businesses and chambers of commerce, some businesses have stepped up to help their workers. In particular, one of the fish plants has purchased motels and converted them to longer-term living quarters. In the last few years, Newport has lost three large economy motels: one deteriorated and was bulldozed, one burned and the fish plant bought another one. These motels were often used as emergency shelters with vouchers by government agencies.

Note: Paul Haeder works in Lincoln County for an anti-poverty nonprofit, Family Independence Initiative, through State of Oregon County DHS funding. His new short story collection, “Wide Open Eyes — Surfacing from Vietnam” was just published by Cirque Press. He’s worked as a case manager for veterans, foster youth and others facing homelessness, substance abuse and employment hurdles. 

Finally, a guy I still break coffee with: living off the grid, in a forest, working for the homeless!

Against the grain, this coastal man searches for universal human rights

FINDING FRINGE | Living modestly in the forestland of Lincoln County, David Peltier believes in breaking the cycle of poverty and ending isolation

FINDING FRINGE | Living modestly in the forestland of Lincoln County, David Peltier believes in breaking the cycle of poverty and ending isolation

by Paul K. Haeder | 19 May 2020

“A country should be defended not by arms, but by ethical behavior.”

— Vinoba Bhave

Out of the blue, an email: “Paul, I’ve been reading your stuff on the homeless situation, and I wanted to get a hold of you. Here’s my phone number. I have been involved with the homeless community for many years in Lincoln County. I’d like to talk.”

David Peltier, 65, hails from Milwaukee, Wis. Anyone living and traveling from Yachats to Depoe Bay might recognize him peddling his bike along Highway 101.

In a nutshell: He’s still in command of his faculties, he can marvelously recall a collection of experiences and stories on a path less well worn, and he is the steward of 30 acres just north of Waldport. 

A periodic column profiling unconventional Oregonians who push the boundaries of social order.

He’s been on the Oregon Coast for almost two decades, living in a 1984 Pace Arrow, 23-feet of “luxury” with no electricity or running water. 

Last year, the Lincoln County sheriff ordered him to evict five individuals barely making it from his property.

A couple, with the wife going through cancer treatments, started off in a tent on his land but then moved up to a motor home. Other narratives like the couple’s are rooted to Peltier’s land. 

However, the code enforcers and Lincoln County Planning Department stepped in. 

Peltier, like hundreds of others in Lincoln County, has seen our county fall into one crisis after another crisis before the coronavirus lockdown. The collateral damage includes low-paid service workers, single parents, aging people unable to afford rent and few who could afford buying a home somewhere not as expensive as those in our neck of the woods.

Sheltering hearts know it takes a village (or a county)

Homeless, underemployed, disabled, medically fragile, psychologically vulnerable and veterans all pay the price of an economic system that not only leaves them behind, but puts impediments in their survival, Peltier said.

He called it punitive functionality. Then there are those who cook our food, change the bedding in hotels, devein shrimp and hammer nails who are one paycheck away from living in their vehicles.

Emergency shelters are critical components of an effective crisis response system that moves them to transitional housing and in many cases away from home precarity. Peltier has been advocating for a permanent transitional living system to support his brethren for more than four decades. 

We talk about what social scientists call “rough sleepers” who occupy public space and how so many dictates of social control over their lives — and their destinies — are Orwellian. 

“Dancing to the beat of a different drummer” is a lightweight way of defining Peltier’s life. He’s traveled across the U.S., Ireland and parts of Europe. We swapped perspectives on the relationship between distinct forms of social control including “regulation” and “criminalization” of street populations, as well as those who just fall into homelessness because of some crisis, trauma or significant emotional event.

Hearts, minds and hearths 

I worked in Portland with many agencies to assist people living on the street. The high number of prohibitions on homeless folks using public spaces to lie down, to perform personal hygiene like washing and showering, and store personal belongings is chilling. The built environment in many cities is designed to be less conductive to these “undesirable” (yet human) activities. 

Add to that the surveillance and policing of targeted areas, and we have a situation where people who need all these safety nets get nothing but harassment, fines and jail.

I met Peltier at his forestland during this insane time of lockdown that the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has brought to Oregon. He gave me a tour of his 25,000 trees, and he pointed to a few stands of cedar. Peltier knows this property like the back of his hand. He’s been on it for 18 years.

Labeling Peltier with terms like “quite a character” and “eccentric” wouldn’t be an insult.

My dedication to this column is to find people who set down roots (or spread out roots); have unusual narratives (pasts); and who have incredible journeys (continuous) through this cacophony we call life on spaceship Earth.

Judging a book by its cover might propel the average person observing Peltier entering Ray’s grocery store in Waldport for a few items to label him “homeless” and “oddball.”

“I’m a people person, and I like to see people happy,” he said. 

We were looking at three abandoned camper trailers on his land. It’s zoned for forest conservation, but Peltier would like to see that designation fall away to allow him to circle a few trailers and build some microhomes to give homeless people a chance at a roof over their heads, a dry bed and some respite from street life.

Collector

In some ways, Peltier and I are alike; we’ve run into many interesting, and in some cases “famous,” people in our lives. Time and again, during my interview, David explained intersections with interesting, mindful and intellectual minds.

He took me on his travels to Harvard University, where he audited a class from Professor Gene Sharp — who was inspired by Gandhi and founded the Albert Einstein Institution to advance the study and use of strategic nonviolent action as an alternative to violent conflict.   

Sharp’s first book, “Gandhi Wields the Weapon of Moral Power: Three Case Histories,” inspired Peltier to dig deeper into the land movement in India. 

I touched a few photos of the young Peltier, in places like Greenwich Village, on his motorcycle, and he showed me a few old posters confirming his travels and travails. A book by Sharp was signed: “To David, a pacifist and humanist warrior in arms.”

Four decades later, Peltier is right on point: “I believe in cooperative communities. Intentional communities with tiny houses and intergenerational connectivity. Young people want to farm.”

We both articulated this new-old paradigm of getting off the destructive path of consumerism and casino capitalism. He sees 3,000-acre communities that are biodynamic, with learning and healing centers tied to community-based ethos, one that includes all the biotic and geological community.

One way to solve the precarious housing and food security issues raging like wildfire across the land would be thousands of these agrarian communities where serious, deep Native American and global Indigenous learning could be coupled with many forms of the digital realm.

He ventured into another influence — Vinayak Narahari “Vinoba” Bhave — who was a spiritual leader, considered the first nonviolent resister to the Britishers in his country. He was a reformer of Independent India who initiated, Peltier explicates, what became the Bhoodan movement.

Peltier was jazzed about the idea of this Indian persuading wealthy landowners to willingly loan small shares of their land to people. He traveled across India convincing landowners and landholders to give small parcels to the downtrodden. Over a span of 20 years, more than 4 million acres of land was shared across the country through this movement.

Too many rich, too many heartless rich

“I’ve been homeless. More and more, poverty is becoming prevalent in the country. The wealthy need to step up to the plate and help. People need land and a way to live closer to food, nature,” Peltier said. 

Breaking the cycle of poverty and ending isolation are components of Peltier’s ethos. He also understands that simple things like warm healthy food and a clean bed can do wonders to turn people around. “It’s not rocket science.”

We both agree that turning this country around is the only way forward, to not only protect the growing number of vulnerable people, but to strengthen the nation. 

“There are almost a thousand billionaires in the U.S.,” Peltier said. (The U.S. remains the country with the most billionaires, with 614, followed by greater China, including Hong Kong and Macao, with 456, according to Forbes’ 2020 count.) 

“We are at a critical point, not only in Lincoln County, but in the country. Poverty and homelessness are symptoms of sick political and economic systems,” he said. 

“Being is a spiritual proposition. Gaining is a material act. Traditionally, American Indians have always attempted to be the best people they could. Part of that spiritual process was and is to give away wealth, to discard wealth in order not to gain.” 

– Russell Means 

Peltier talked about a young woman and her 3-year-old who lived in a small trailer on his property. “She lost housing in Seal Rock. She had suffered a stroke and sepsis. A lot of single parents like her are in similar situations.”

He illustrated how the homeless are hidden people:

“If you were driving up to Newport and saw a little girl on the side of the road crying, most anyone would stop and offer assistance. However, those same people don’t stop, don’t see those homeless people.”

I checked out a letter Peltier wrote to the editor, published Dec. 5, 2019, in the biweekly newspaper, Newport News Times. He wears his heart on his sleeve:

“Our community enjoys great wealth, and yet many people struggle and suffer. Our community must have a warming shelter so that we can save lives. We have many people who have medical needs, housing needs and employment needs, and we still have no warming shelter in south Lincoln County.

“Our cold weather is here. January is our tough month. I am asking for a donated house so that we can assist a family, or a veteran, or a disabled person or even an elder.

“I will work for donations and I will staff this shelter. A donated house can allow us to actually help people. We can obtain a tax-deduction for the donor. We finally have a nonprofit that is willing to advance our cause.

“I attended recently the Lincoln City Planning Commission meeting in city hall. This is for a conditional use permit for the Lincoln City Warming Shelter/Chance Inc., which is run by some very dedicated people — Sharon Padilla and Amanda Cherryholmes.” 

Unfortunately, the warming shelter was closed with 18 days still left on the agreement during the cold wet weather. Additionally, Lincoln County has no plans for a shelter opening up in the fall of 2020.

I am part of the Working Group on Homelessness Taskforce working with more than three dozen stakeholders on the very real issue of lack of housing, lack of leadership for allowances for car camping, and the big elephant in the room: no homeless shelter for the entire county. Many attending these meetings (before the lockdown) expressed both exasperation and passion about our county’s homeless. 

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HOUSING RURAL OREGON: Searching for shelter in Lincoln County 

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Peltier ventured back into his life during the interview: He was a kid growing up in Milwaukee. His father was a lawyer for Miller Brewing Co., and he called his mother “an Irish beauty who was bipolar.”

He told me he rode the rails short distances starting at age 7. He’s hitchhiked to California. He was part of the June 12, 1982, Mobilization for Survival — a 1 million-plus gathering in New York City against nuclear proliferation. 

Here’s 27-year-old Peltier hanging with Pete Seeger; Peter, Paul and Mary; Jackson Browne; James Taylor. He stayed at the Maryhouse (part of the Catholic Worker Movement to support the homeless). He talks of hearing Dorothy Day speak. He’s met Dolores Huerta who worked with the United Farm Movement and Cesar Chavez. 

On David’s pretty threadbare Facebook page, he lists on his “about me” the following:

• I’m a frumpy middle aged over educated curmudgeon … lol
• University of Wisconsin at Sundara Ecology
• Former Grunt at CONTRUCTION
• Studied Ecology at University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Studied Biology and Cooperative Development at University of Wisconsin
• Studied Peaceful social change methods at Harvard University
• Went to Whitefish Bay High School
• Lives in Waldport, Oregon
• From Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin

Those formative years logged at the University of Wisconsin, a hotbed of intellectualism and political activism, including protests against the Vietnam War, cemented in him his liberal politics. 

He told me he could recall several campus demonstrations headed up by Karleton Armstrong, who, with three others, blew up the ROTC armory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on Aug. 24, 1970. It was a protest against the university’s research connections with the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. The four perpetrators went underground, and three eventually resurfaced, tried and convicted for the death of a university physics researcher and injuries to three others.

Open hand — antidote against hard-fisted policies 

For Peltier, his life is embedded in nonviolent protest and helping vulnerable people through outreach and direct support. He’s embedded in nonviolent social change, and he considers himself a catalyst of sorts in getting nonprofits going. He helped with the funding drives for Arcata House (established in 1991) in Humboldt County, Calif. Its mission is tied to the foundation of housing as a human right. 

This dovetails with Peltier’s life philosophy, and he knows he is in a place of precarity himself. He has no political power in the community and holds no great wealth. He owns no vehicle and depends on the Waldport Library to access the internet. 

Who he is and how he lives are counterintuitive to almost everything this country espouses as successful and deems legitimate under capitalism.

“We humans can be magical. We can do great things,” he said. “I’m out in the world all the time. I think like the aboriginal people of Australia who say they are never lost in their walkabouts.”

“The Irishman,” as Peltier calls himself, gravitates toward so many world cultures, but still he returns to Native American wisdom and history. He met Russell Means in South Dakota, one of the big actors in the American Indian Movement. He also met Phillip Deer, a Muscogee Creek, who was the spiritual leader for the movement.

During my life, I have had the opportunity to meet great people and bring them to my community college classrooms. Winona LaDuke was just one of many I befriended. 

Having done substitute teaching in K-12 districts in three states, I know people like Peltier and others are needed agents of change and catalysts of learning in the public school system.

Unfortunately, our teach-to-the-test and Google Chromebook-dominated public schools would never have the intestinal or intellectual fortitude to have speakers like Peltier come to campus.

Even on a public community college campus in Spokane, where I taught in 2008, when LaDuke opened a talk with her tribe’s benediction — “Aaniin Ninda-waymuganitoog” (hello my relatives) — her presence ruffled some feathers. 

Shortly after LaDuke spoke, stating, “In the end, there is no absence of irony: The integrity of what is sacred to Native Americans will be determined by the government that has been responsible for doing everything in its power to destroy Native American cultures,” two white faculty members stood up, mumbled, “We don’t need to hear more white male bashing,” and bolted out of the room.

No electricity, running water, but memories galore

Peltier takes all this sort of chaos and patriarchal meanness in stride and realizes he has more hope than most fighting for the homeless. He has worked for 54 years of his life, much of that doing construction and cement work. He realizes that few people would see him as successful under the constraints of how Americans define accomplishments.

That’s OK with him. 

“Look,” he said, “I know if you stick me in any town in the U.S. without a dime and nothing but the clothes on my back, in a week’s time, I will have money and housing.”

Those are lessons all K-12 students should learn and hear. But no public school principal or superintendent would allow such a character on their campus. The irony is not lost on Peltier.

“Instead of a punitive approach, we have to be proactive. It’s a human right to have housing. What better lesson to engage young people in that belief,” he said.

Food, shelter and caring for your neighbor, imagine that in the school system, beginning in kindergarten all the way through to graduation.

“I’m already a rich man: I have land. I have a great family. I have a great education. I am a white male of privilege,” Peltier said. “I know we have to turn around our country.”   

 

Paul Haeder has been a journalist since he was 17. He crisscrossed Latin America, Europe and Vietnam. He eventually landed in the Pacific Northwest, now residing on Oregon’s Central Coast. He is a social worker for veterans, foster youths, adults with developmental disabilities and those in homeless circumstances, and others battling addiction and recently released from prison. Haeder is a prolific writer of poetry, short fiction, memoir and environmental polemics. He is also the site director in Lincoln and Jefferson counties for an anti-poverty initiative through Family Independence Initiative.  His latest book, “Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam,” is a collection of intertwined short fiction based on his own work in Vietnam 25 years ago. 

for Lisa on her 53rd**

you look into dreams
those chambers of memory warped
bent images on broken mirrors

these you say are an umbilical
to another layer of spirit
maybe matter in the quantum sense
consciousness that flies like
a giant moth looking for stellar light

now you follow roads back
understanding origins, faded photographs
songs long forgotten still emanating
from those souls, beings

where you find voice
and decide there are second births
maybe more, an infinity in the expansion
of universe and time, other lives
reincarnations, reverberating
as we age, as we count years

a countdown, from vigorous youth
to the haggard essence of living, weathering
a mother, daughter, sister
wife for the ages, alone in that task
these hard times rolled up like wet masa

as you push and pull tamale
dough, hold husks, roll
each fold and turnover
a woman going back

to another place, history recalled
these birthdays rattle a forward
glance, as we – you – unfold
new memories, stories of old
histories stored so your next
birth is one of abundance

**Note: **Gabor Mate and so many others talk about the trauma in our society, including that which can be leveled at our capitalist system. Alas, families are part of that trauma/trauma bond. This woman for which this poem is written is a tribute to her own rising above the death of a younger brother on her birthday one year ago. And, alas, (I’ve written about it here at Dissident Voice, daughters deciding [sic] to estrange from mothers.), she too passes her birthday now without her 25-year-old daughter sending sweet nothings to her and keeping mom up to date on her life just 100 miles away in Portland. This is a growing phenomenon.)

I’m attempting to concentrate on the Consortium News “feature” covering Sy Hersh. The Committee for the Republic was hosting investigative reporter Seymour Hersh at the National Press Club in Washington Tuesday evening at 7 pm EDT to speak about his Nord Stream reporting. “Watch it live exclusively on Consortium News.”

This is a dog and pony show, and this fellow, Sy, is on a repetitive roll (I’ve heard him on six or seven shows, hoping for something new, but he isn’t that sort of guy — very repetitive, and the interviewers are somewhat fearful of just interrupting him to get him back on task, whew). And while he thinks he’s snarky and cool about it, the amount of shit coming out of his mouth sometimes around this or that autobiographical musing is amazing. You can’t interview Hersh, and you can’t have a conversation with him. He will go on for 15 minutes, or more, before a questioner can get a question in.

He puts down people’s questions. He is arrogant. He is not funny in any Jewish Lenny Bruce way. He’s old, behind the times, and a type of dinosaur. The Nordstream story is nothing grand, for sure. We all knew what happened BEFORE the Sy Substack, and there were plenty of speculative ideas of who did the pipeline bombing. Sy Hersh is an exceptionalist, and he loves this country, and he thinks it has the best and brightest people on earth. I’m not sure I believe his diver down story. But the bottom line is that it was USA that did it, benefitted from it, and all the gloating, man, that too speaks volumes of all those trashy countiries in Europe. Celebrating this sabotage.

He doesn’t go deep into other sources in his life, and the people at this event, this talk or rehash — seeminly all gray hairs, all white, and mostly male — just go on and on how this fellow is the best investigative journalis ever, whatever that means. This sort of pedestal hoisting is bizarre. Think of all the stories, like Gary Webb’s, and a million others, from other countries, but Hersh is the winner among none others.

These people are asking Hersh him what he thinks about this and that, and it’s just a drunken brawl where Sy is the all-knowing reportrer beyond all reporters, and, now he tells us the right movement — Right Wing, that is — is a problem in Russia, and all reporters are missing it. It’s going to be the next big thing hurting Russia and Putin.

I get so bored with these sorts of people who really don’t ask questions, but have this confirmation bias and really are asking dead end queries, and this Sy can’t listen, can’t talk in a back and forth way, can’t talk with humans who are as smart or smater than he is. It’s as if he’s been stuck in a cave when it comes to a lot of things..

From World War Two, onward, that’s Hersh, and he laughs at his own rants, and his continuing with his type of conversation as Soliloquy is sometimes pointless.

He goes on and on about working for the New Yorker and NYT. Being from a working class family. Being a copy boy. He’s so American, so out there, and he just flows on and on with this or that piece of history, and he’s in a hurry to talk about what he knows about history, and he is allowed to just go on and on, with tangents, all over the place.

An hour and twenty-four minutes. His biggest observation is how the press has to protect the people who end up as undisclosed sources.

Ritter does a little soft-shoe here, The Nord Stream-Andromeda Cover Up

In a report to the United Nations, both Denmark and Sweden said that the damage done to the Nord Stream pipelines was caused by blasts equivalent to the power of “several hundred kilograms of explosive.”

It should be noted that underwater pipelines like those used in Nord Stream are designed to withstand proximal explosions from devices up to several hundred kilograms in size. Indeed, in locations such as the Baltic Sea, where unexploded military ordnance from multiple world wars abounds, the threat of a drifting device striking a pipeline and detonating is quite real.

Computer modeling shows that a 600-kilogram high explosive charge detonated approximately 5 meters from a 34mm-thick steel pipeline filled with gas would not compromise the structural integrity of the pipeline.

Imagine that, this guy, Sy, has a spedcial SEAL Team source, or someone, and he got the low down on two divers from Panama, Florida, and a large Norwegian ship, and a recompression chamber. In some ways, Hersh is a bit confused about diving, tri-mix, depth, etc.

That is the duh we knew months ago, and then there are stories about underwater drones, tested in that area, big drones, torpedo drones,with explosives, and with telemetry and the ability to set an explosive, or series of explosives. Directed explosives. Duh.

Divers? Well, maybe, maybe not. But we have this story, and there is no interest in the pipeline, theft of Russia’s gold and assets, and the fact that Sy’s America now has always been this America, and worse.

Doug Valentine:

CIA, man, no SEAL Team:

So, Hersh is limited, and these events are sort of aberations. Here’s a fun fact:

“A growing body of evidence suggests that the US would blow up the global economy to prevent China from laying claim to Taiwan’s semiconductor factories.
Former White House National Security Advisor Robert C. O’Brien has hinted at a sinister US contingency plan in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Rather than see Taiwan’s semiconductor factories fall into the hands of the Communist Party of China, the US and its allies would simply pull a Nordstream.” (Source)

This is the history of the Anglo Saxons, UK or USA, and the Five Eyes controlling the world, and now Japan wants to join. And nuclear submarines for Australia, and Sy is breaking a pipeline story? Oh, it’s so much more worse than that.

Obstruction of Justice: How the British Government Protected 8,000 Soldiers of the Waffen-SS Galitsia Division

Amid the continued support given to the fascist politicians and military of Ukraine by western governments, many people are asking how such a betrayal of the sacrifices of the Allies in World War Two could take place. However, what most people are unaware of, in large part due to an ever-more corrupted media, is that these governments have a shocking history of protecting the perpetrators of some of the most terrible crimes of that war. One of the most egregious examples of this practice of shielding war-criminals from justice was confirmed in 2005 with the declassification of British Home Office papers showing that the British government protected at least 8,000 members of the Waffen-SS Galitsia Division from the justice that awaited them in the Soviet Union. (source)

Yeah, a trite saying, for sure, but what does it mean when it comes to green, sustainable design, permaculture, all sorts of building and planned community magic?

Capitalism: The Elephant in the Room (another person I worked with, i.e. Democracy School, riverkeeper, Center for Justice, Rights of Nature — Thomas Linzey)

I definitely do not want to question the deep drive for the people I met recently working on these things called land-art generator concepts. One book, Land Art as Climate Action, was on the Maritime Museum theater piano.

We were there, and it was just a handful of folk (I always wonder how difficult and why it is that there are no young people at these events, i.e. we have OSU Hatfield Marine Sciences and a Community College and 11 K12 campuses), to listen to three presenters tied to a local community experiment on land regeneraton on a former diary, 18 acres, with two creeks and ponds, near an amazing larger creek, Beaver. Well, that who the host was, and two out of town guests, Bob and Dave, came in to bring their specific messages to the audience.

This bio-centric, new ideas hub is near Eddyville, on the Oregon Coast, but inland. I was mulling around the museum after viewing an opening of photography, drone photography, here on the coastline.

This was New Ledo Hub‘s public coming out event, and the coordinators of this place have interesting backgrounds

Melissa Cliver is the curator of the Newledo Inventor Spotlight. She is excited to help community organizations and regenerative creators develop their own events, happenings and inventions.

Nicole Cousino is an entrepreneur, regenerative planner and creative strategist. Her background includes mission based startups, documentary film, industrial design, permaculture, and sustainable sanitation.

One of the guests was Robert Ferry, co-director of Land Art Generator, which is an experimental design organization, looking at renewable energy which can be beautiful.

The third presentation was with David Stone, inventor, with degrees from Purdue and doctorate from University of Arizona.

His claim to fame is ferrock,  created from a mixture of steel dust waste and silica, both of which are byproducts. When mixed with ferrous rock and water and exposed to carbon dioxide, this mixture hardens as a result of a chemical reaction between the steel dust waste’s iron and carbon dioxide from the air. As the iron in the steel dust waste absorbs carbon dioxide, iron carbonate is formed and the material continues to harden. The resulting product is strong, durable, quick to set, and carbon neutral.

Stone created this building material in 2002 as an experiment-gone-wrong. According to some news sources, Stone was researching how to prevent iron from rusting and hardening, ferrock was initially abandoned by Stone. After figuring out how to manufacture ferrock with the help of Tohono O’odham Nation Reservation and $200,000 in Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grants, the University of Arizona was issued a patent for ferrock in 2013.

The Eddyville hub is about bringing idea makers and inventors to the land for a community conversation, learning, sharing. The farm has a vision of biointensive farming and on site living. It’s in its infancy, and the impetus for these two women is about “practitioners and farmers working on early stage innovations in our four focus areas: farming, energy, shelter and waste.”

Regenerative is the keyword, the overarching concept, operating system, and a philosophy.

Of course, I’ve worked on these issues educational wise, as a sustainable coordinator, as a sustainability editorialists, columnists, radio show producer and activist.

Green building, and the LEED certification, and then net zero architecture:

Many cool places I have gone to as a journalist include no-till farming operations, new ways to deal with that deadly crop, wheat, small farming organic and CSA operations. Dozens of amazing authors on my radio show — David Suzuki, Tim Flannery, author of Against the Grain:

James Howard Kunslter, Novella Carpenter, Richard Heinberg, David Helverg, and so many others. Air, water, ocean, fresh water systems, urban design, and of course, localized economy, or slow money.

All this stuff stuffed in my noggin, and nowhere to go, except these screeds.

There’s the Food Forest, too, in Seattle.

“A forest of food planned for Jefferson Park” by Paul K. Haeder | September 14, 2011

Water chestnuts, breadfruit, dragon fruit and medicinal palms: In just two years, all this could be harvested two and a half miles from downtown Seattle.

Organizers of the Beacon Hill Food Forest want to turn a city-owned seven-acre site west of Jefferson Park into a community garden where residents can grow their own food.

Beacon Hill resident Glenn Herlihy, a garden designer, got the idea from a design class he took in 2009.

“We picked Jefferson Park and came up with a design to pass the class,” he said.

To make the plan a reality, Herlihy and his neighbors have launched Friends of Beacon Hill Food Forest.

Group members tout the area’s ample sun exposure as an ideal location for growing food and envision an array of crops that reflects the area’s ethnic and cultural diversity.

The group has backing from the City of Seattle. In March, the Department of Neighborhoods awarded Beacon Food Forest a $22,000 grant to hire a consultant and pay for outreach and conceptual designs.

Project organizers held two meetings, in June and July, to gather support and input from the community. To publicize the first one, organizers mailed notices printed in five languages to more than 7,000 households, Olson said.

About 70 people attended the group’s most recent community meeting.

Concepts for the garden include zones, with space for fruit and nut trees, wild areas and more manicured landscapes.

“There are a lot of hungry and out-of-work folk on Beacon Hill. Think of this as low-cost organic gardening.”

. . . and I was a board member of Washington Food and Farming Network: … and one project, Farm to School Program,  strengthens local and regional food communities across the State by increasing opportunities for schools to purchase Washington-grown food, helping our farmers get access to school markets, and helping our kids get access to fresh, local food.

I’ve written magazine pieces on the variety of food and sustainability and localizing projects in Washington and thereabouts.

Quillisascut helps create connections: Teacher workshop help students symbolically and literally plant seeds

Francene Watson, one of the Quillisascut brethren, and WSU doctoral student and teacher, is developing place-based education tied to gardens. She’s been working with second graders, making sure that each school has a greenhouse, composting program, and garden.

WSU College of Education Instructor Justin Hougham helped establish for the 2010-2011 school year a program entitled Palouse Pollinators: School garden Series for Teachers and Learners.

“This project is based on the simply query: What if everyone could learn the wonders of sowing seeds, nurturing plants, and learning how to cook produce fresh from the garden?” Hougham stated.

The Quillisascut attendees learned how to talk to bees, lift food from soil, draw shadow from the apricot trees needing strong harvest hands. They learned the thermal dance of a bread and pizza oven that always reminds me of my days growing up on Portugal’s Azores islands.

They were there to inculcate change in their instruction. I’ve been to the farm years ago, before a book was written about it, before a video was made.

Scroll down to this image and listen to Rick talk about his farm: My Podcasts/Radio shows!

I am not digressing, just enhancing. This is what all those ideas are about, but they’ve been in place for decades, and alas, the Lockdown, the death of tens of thousands of small restaurants, things have changed. Here, a slice of the story from a long time ago:

Eating Close to Home

We all know how eating out at a local restaurant can affect our temperaments, our wallets, even our waistlines. But how many see the act of dining out as a step toward sustaining the livelihood of some local cheese maker or grain producer? Or as a political statement that determines sustainability for the environment?

“The most important relationship I have in my restaurant is with the farmer,” says Tamara Murphy, well-versed chef, co-owner of Seattle’s Brasa Restaurant, and keynote speaker on Dec. 5 at the Spokane Athletic Club as part of the Farmer-Chef Connection, a gathering of 100 local chefs, ranchers, farmers and retailers galvanized to strengthen the fabric of local and seasonal food networks.

Murphy has spent 16 years in Seattle at two restaurants building these relationships with food producers. Her stated principle is to “go out of my way to learn about the farmers.” She believes knowing the people who catch the fish, make the cheese, raise the livestock, craft the wine and grow the produce helps her to concoct food creations that taste better.

Sustainability, food security, and protecting the small farm/ranch way of life were issues undergirding the event.

“I’d love to see a day when local food producers and chefs come together and understand each other’s craft,” says Pete Tobin, instructor at the Culinary Academy of Spokane Community College.

“Sustainability means bringing the farmer to the chef,” says fourth-generation farmer Fred Fleming of Shepherd’s Grain. Growing Eastern Washington wheat means bringing the chef to the farm and onto the combine, but Shepherd’s Grain’s second mandate is to bring the farmer into the kitchen to see how hard chefs work.

The Farmer-Chef Connection was sponsored by Chefs Collaborative, Ecotrust, WSU-Spokane County Cooperative Extension, American Culinary Federation and the Washington State Department of Agriculture.

Visit http://www.portlandcc.org, http://www.agr.wa.gov/marketing/smallfarm, http://www.wafarmersmarkets.com, http://www.ecotrust.org and http://csnar.wsu.edu

And, then, more on the Misterly’s: “Living Slower, Eating Better”

I’ll continue mixing it up with Friday night’s talks (3/10/2023). First a caveat: I’ve done so many thousands of hours of doing, of organizing for, of participating in, of writing about, of educating and mentoring with students, of interviewing for that big tent show called “sustainability.” Water footprint, ecological footprint, wild salmon recovery, beaver restoration, cradle to cradle manufacturing, green building, net zero architecture, and dozens of other projects far and wide.

Whew, do I have multiple perspectives, and it still comes down: where do cultures come into the picture?

Like I said, I was just going to a photo show here in Newport, and alas I went to this event by accident. I talked with David Stone before the presentations, and we swapped ideas around ecosocialism, education, Tucson, and how he and his spouse are considering Silver City as a move.

I’ve cut my teeth on education, and how the classroom has always been the bad place, the place of deadening ideas, and that the K12 experience is like a prison or locker room  fight and mutual admiration and intense bullying experience. All tied to 30 fixed desks and chairs pointed toward the Drill Sgt, err, teacher.

K12, the place where consumerism, lock-step capitalism, throw-away mentality get cemented. There are not simple tweaks. The entire system has to be scrapped, and turned into community and societal and environmental and music and arts and hands-on biology and place making. That takes money, shifts in the capitalist mentality of divide and conquer, and of course, it’s revolutionary . . .  really deep learning and participation.

Having a David Stone get grants and obtaining these higher education degrees is great, but it’s top down in its own way, and while he is doing good things, the scale is small-small-small.

He went to Purdue for two degrees, and he told me he studied philosophy, buthe ended up in Tucson working on an environmental sciences doctorate.

Now, the big thing is for me THE PEOPLE who are rarely put front and center in this equation of sustainability, you know, billions on planet earth getting short shrift while a smaller and smaller swatch of overlords determine banking, investing, consumerism, goods and services, food, water, air, that is, what happens to those vital components of life on earth.

We are talking about a massive scaling up of all these supposedly sustainable systems. And, having them, using local materials and local knowledge and native wisdom and tribal and cultural philosophy,  drive communities into resilience, robust rootedness, and a sense of working and acting and doing local while also connecting to other localities, in this sense, a global outlook, without the deadly concept of globalization.

It has to be multigenerational, many levels of thinking, and of course, god forbid, a more levelling of who gets what, and who doesn’t. Haves and those haves not.

We also must not forget that we are made of oil, man — food, clothes, cars, trains, planes, consumer goods, locomation, more. So we are the folk with oil in our veins, and 10,000 chemicals swirling around solo killers and synergistic death by 1,000 chemical cuts.

Hormone disruptors, immune discombobulation, and so many brain-gut issues, wherein we have societies polluted from fetus to old person. Chronic illnesses, low spern count, metobolic and psychiatric issues, all tied to that elephant in the room.

Yes, that room had mellow people, for sure, and my presence probably puts a downer on the hippie thing. I have had this debate since I started teaching at the college level starting in 1983. We needed a Russel Brand in the midst, and I was that before Russell Brand, as a teacher and events MC/organizer.

So many of the greenies I worked with were meanies, not funny or fun, and way too fascistic in their hatred of the Population Bomb (sic) and all those ecosystems dying off because of those other deplorables. Before Hillary’s moniker for 49 percent of the folk in the USA.

The issue here is how do we get young people in on this? Stone wondered how it was that when enviornmental sciences and ecology classes were hot in the Sixties and early ’70s, how it is now we have more and more people — young people — not interested in these holistic fields. It’s not to say there aren’t young women going into marine biology and vet science. But the bottom line is that academic is colonized, and almost every inche forward, in almost all departments and fields, there is a legion of Capitalist “interests” bastardizing and corrupting all fields.

John Steppling writes about this waning of ethics, philosophy and so-called classical liberal education. Here, his latest:

And since the enclosure of the commons the human psyche has been undergoing a gradual but inexorable reshaping. The contemporary mind is one is now bereft of experiential understanding. Desire itself is commodified and somehow obscured. Today fertility statistics suggest a waning of erotic desire, and birth rates have plummeted. The irrationality of capitalism has resulted in the manufacturing of useless technologies while simultaneously destroying traditional farming, traditional education and the erasing of knowledge and of history itself. Technology has contributed to the loss of literacy and to a culture of acute depression and anxiety. (“Rebuilding Jerusalem“)

[…]

Today, technology, meaning primarily digital technology, is playing a prominent role in what I have called (and Johan Eddebo has called) the shrinking of experience. But certainly there are others. Universities report nobody is signing up for post graduate degrees in English literature or philosophy, but there is a waiting list for business departments.

We have a society flipping over like live minnows in a hot frying pan. We have science as religion, i.e. so called climate change, and then we have contradictions en mass. Anti-intellectualism, and then stiff arm salutes to the industrialists, the AI-VR-AR gurus, and then, we are here, at an ecological and sustainability presentation and no young people were in attendence, and no one from the general public, it seems, showed up.

Stone is a smart guy, and he is perplexed at the same time, why the environmental movement and majors have not taken off. THe first organized Earth Day was 1970, and what we have is a complete mess, with the industrialists, the chemical-oil-mining-lobbing-smelting-priming-big ag corporations taking over those famous COP conferences (COP 2 just happened in Eygpt).

There are more than 600 fossil fuel lobbyists at the Cop27 climate conference, a rise of more than 25% from last year and outnumbering any one frontline community affected by the climate crisis.

There are 636 lobbyists from the oil and gas industries registered to attend the UN event in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. At Glasgow, the figure was 503, which outnumbered the delegation of any single country. This year the only country with a larger delegation is the United Arab Emirates, hosts of Cop28 next year, which has 1,070 registered delegates, up from 176 last year.

At Cop27, “the influence of fossil fuel lobbyists is greater than frontline countries and communities. Delegations from African countries and Indigenous communities are dwarfed by representatives of corporate interests”, said the group Kick Big Polluters out, which campaigns against the influence of fossil fuel lobbyists at the climate negotiations.

Capitalism is at war with nature, humanity, air, space, bodies, minds, hearts. And that is always the elephant in the room, and we are in a world of hurt with 9 billion people, many billions needing clean water, toilets, fridges, fans.

While the great white hopes of USA, Canada, Europe are colonizing the earth with techno fixes, which are not fixes at all, but fixed and stacked card decks, all for the Faustian Bargains, the Eichmann Effect, for the dog and pony show of Edward Bernays, and we then end up here, with 18 acres and no mule, and these kind and wanting people attempting to find meaning in their lives and hoping to generate a new way of thinking, even though it is not new at all, and we have all been caught up in Western Civilization as the answer, when we are the problem.

Most colleges produce either arrogant or self-important folk who are ready and armed to lecture to the rest of the world.

That elephant and gorilla in the auditorium include the two-headed monster of Capitalism & War, and while David Stone said we might be called Homo fluescere/ignis/flamma  (fire) since we evolved as a species to burn things, cook things, to run heat and flame onto everything, from internal combustion engines to jets to campfires to every thing we touch in our waking and sleeping lives, we are actually the war makers. If it’s metal, or wood, or plastic, or even cotton or corn, the amount of flame — fossil fuel — is what runs the world. Cutting off the commons, that’s war, and war against hunters and gatherers and simple pastorialists.

His invention is this harding rock, and it’s made up of say iron dust and ground up glass and water, mixed in, to create these slabs of tough material, tougher than concrete, i.e. Portland cement. Imagine that, I’ve writen about the fact that everything is concrete, and more concrete worldwide is pured than all other materials combined.

This ferrock Dave has been messing with in Tucson.

This stuff needs CO2 to harden, cure, so the idea is this sequesters carbon dioxide, which for the people at this event is a deadly gas, all pumped up in the climate change-global warming game. There are so many alternative theories around climate chaos, and a world without ice, but CO2 is a market, man, carbon credits, and alas, what about the people, the ones in India who need an ice box, sewer treatment, basic “things” to lift up the masses of people who live in highly air polluted cities with out of the root wet bulb kiler temperatures?

The goal is seven-fold: recycling, carbon capture, green materials, sustainable building, renewable energy, resilient communities, climate change adaptation all leading to Clinton’s blurb — “It’s the economy, stupid — jobs.”

Years ago, yes, I talked with Mike Renolds, “Garbage Warrior”, about his earth ships. 

Amazing, stuff, but again, small-time, baby.

These are innovators, dreamers, solutionaries in one sense, and sincere. But that Homo flamma, well, let’s call us Homo bellum. War war war. Imagine that, at an event, no mention of STOP the arms to Ukraine, and no chants, Push Your Legislator for Peace Talks NOW.

Because we are the Empire of Lies, Chaos, Terror, War, and with those four deadly sins, add to it, Empire of Amnesia, Infantalizing, Disneyfication, Mass Formation, Collective McDonaldization and Amazonification. Image that, perception is reality, and then we are here, the other elephant in the room = US military multiple complexes.

Then, now, read this contortionist crap here: “Impending Defeat for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” By Ronald Bailey for HumanProgress

These people NEVER take into account the growing number of humans living with chronic disease, and they never see the reality of the loss of land, home, agency, culture, and then, they see the world from a capitalist point of view, even believing that we fight better more efficient wars (combat) with fewer soldiers and all this high tech wonder.

That hopey dopey thing.

Like I said, these people I met on Friday are not evil or mean and are certainly well meaning. But it’s baby steps, botique stuff, small-scale projects that are amazing, but the big picture is a very big picture indeed, and that control of wealth, education, health outcomes, spirit, science, economies, languages, thought, philosophies, oh, what a terrible place we have come to where each waking and sleeping nanosecond is being tracked, pulled and pushed into soon-to-be-released data mining, digital dashboards, compliance on EVERY level, man. Touch that spark plug in the new auto, and the car police will shut you down. Any and everything will be on the CCTV to the 10th level.

Any discussion about 5 G or the EMF’s curculating throughout the land and space, any discussion about theories and other ways of seeing how the overlords are killing us softly, all of that will be on the data dashboards and we shall pay the price — the ultimate price: sanctions, lost bank accounts, poverty, in the streets, and full of anger and hate to the point of the thought and physical and medical police taking us down, one at a time, en mass.

It makes sense that thoughtful and hopeful people would dive deep into these 18-acre projects, and more power to them.

Additionally, I love these competitions.  The Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI) helps design renewable energy infrastructures that are also beautiful places for people. The goal of the Land Art Generator is to accelerate the transition to post-carbon economies by providing models of renewable energy infrastructure that add value to public space, inspire, and educate—while providing equitable power to homes around the world. Cities are invited to commission Land Art Generator Initiative projects.

But solar and wind will not run the world as the world is being run, and gas and oil — all  those vast pockets and fields and enormous sources — are being found daily and shall be consumed. African nations, and now, the Alaskan fields, and, yep, there are so many bad things from this oil extraction, refining, combustion, and the armies of haters working for the billionaires and multimillionaires are not going away, but that trip to the coral reef sanctuary off Belize, it’s all powered by oil, mining, smelting, fabrication, all the moving and finishing, the transporation, all of that, with the power of THE FLAME.

Aspirational, but not realistic:

As we prepare for the emergence of the truly post-carbon city, renewable energy technology is having (or should be having) a profound influence on the way that developers, architects, landscape architects, engineers, planners, designers, and artists are approaching every new project opportunity. The city of the very near future will be defined by the ever-present energy harvesting and generation infrastructures of a decentralized and resilient grid, changing the visual landscape in ways not seen since the advent of the automobile.

In his 1986 film, True Stories, David Byrne remarks that major highway interchanges are the cathedrals of the 20th century. The reference is meant to be interpreted as an ironic reflection on their brutal ugliness and disregard for human scale. Will renewable energy infrastructures be the cathedrals of the 21st century? And if so, will they be an inspiring reflection of the highest aspirations of human culture, or will they be the butt of jokes in future films that lament their contribution to aesthetic and cultural discord? (Special editorial by LAGI co-founders Elizabeth Monoian and Robert Ferry)

Oh, the competing theories and perspectives are never in the same room, siloed, and bastardized as some tinfoil conspiracy thing:

Geoengineering Watch?

From flash freezes to flash floods, climate intervention operations are nothing less than weather warfare. The climate engineers are chemically cooling the continental US wherever and whenever they have enough atmospheric moisture available. Endothermic reacting elements are seeded into cloud canopies to initiate manufactured winter weather operations, flash surface cool-downs are the result. Patented processes of chemical ice nucleation cloud seeding are creating “snowstorms” of frozen material at lower elevations that would otherwise have received only rain. The frozen material that falls often has very different characteristics as compared to naturally nucleated snow. At their discretion the climate engineers can then manipulate warmer moisture flows of atmospheric moisture into regions buried under chemical snow, flooding is the result. What will it take to awaken the masses to the climate intervention operations? The latest installment of Global Alert News is below.

Oh, that elephant in the room: The United States of America and its vassals messing with climate earth. War against not just the planet per se, but war against weather:

Much of what the Turks have now said corresponds to this. Turkish officials have said there was a light effect just before the earthquake. They also said that Americans with portable radar systems were in the area and are to be blamed for it.

So – yes: it is theoretically possible that the Turkish earthquake, terrible as it is, was triggered artificially. But you can’t prove it.

It now seems possible to “manage” the jet stream that defines the boundary between warm and cool air in geographic regions, or to manipulate the large vapor flows that carry rain from the tropics to temperate zones, causing droughts or floods. Natural events or instabilities such as monsoons, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc. in the atmosphere can be amplified by “energizing”. Injecting oil into tectonic faults or creating artificial earth vibrations with electromagnetic pulses can trigger earthquakes. (Rosalie Bertell)

Zeitpunkt: Could the weather weapons be responsible for climate change?

CVW: Yes, of couse. Climate is the wrong word anyway. Climate is a worldwide system dependent on the sun and the position in the solar system. Climate cannot be changed. You can change the weather. With existing technology, you can change the weather continuously. Due to the northward shift of the jet stream, it becomes hot in the northern hemisphere and, with the southward shift, ice cold there even in summer. Then there is the dying of the ozone layer: this is the layer that envelops the earth and intercepts the electromagnetic waves coming from the sun. Despite the agreement to ban CFC gases, the ozone layer is still severely depleted. New holes have been added, also over the North Pole and the entire northern hemisphere. As a result, the radiation hits the ground pure and directly, it changes the DNA of the plants, destroys plankton and the harvest. This is a result of radioactive contamination, most recently from Fukushima, and weather technologies and space travel. But this is not discussed publicly.

Check it out — “Was the Earthquake in Turkey and Syria Man-made?”

‘These are the people we are dealing with, man. And, RIP, Rosalie Bertell, the so-called environmental nun, was an American environmental scientist and winner of the Right Livelihood Award – a renowned personality. More than 23 years ago she wrote the book “Planet Earth. The Latest Weapon of War”, in which she denounces, among other things, exactly this possibility and practice:

The military use of technologies that can control and trigger the weather, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. Rosalie Bertell died in 2012. But she has a successor: Claudia von Werlhof, professor emeritus for political science and women’s studies in Innsbruck, critic of patriarchy and author of numerous books, became Bertell’s “deputy in the German-speaking world.”’

Man we have so many battles to fight against those elephants and gorrilas in the room!

Shit! Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025 US Air Force!

There is fear, man, and that is what rules the West.

Fear makes thinking harder, yet there is an urgent need to think and to question every aspect of our current situation. The philosopher, which Agamben truly embodies, is a figure that must be heeded.

— Nina Power, Roehampton University

Agamben’s book title emphasizes a vital but all too often unappreciated question. By way of answer, he worries that we are collectively and individually in a very dangerous place that, contrary to popular opinion, has little to do with a virus or pandemic.

— T. Allan Hillman, University of South Alabama

We have been betrayed!

Paul Haeder’s been a teacher, social worker, newspaperman, environmental activist, and marginalized muckraker, union organizer. Paul’s book, Reimagining Sanity: Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber (2016), looks at 10 years (now going on 17 years) of his writing at Dissident Voice. Read his musings at LA Progressive. Read (purchase) his short story collection, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam now out, published by Cirque Journal. Here’s his Amazon page with more published work Amazon. Read other articles by Paul, or visit Paul’s website.

Tax time is coming around for the year, 2022 = The Year of Water Tiger, and that Zoidiac went completey 180 degrees the other way:

The 2022 year of the water tiger promises a year of positive changes. Your business will be stable, and finances will flow smoothly throughout the year. This year is favorable for new love and relationships. However, you are advised to make savings that might be needed in the future.

You might know where I am going with this. My spouse and I will pay through the nose taxes. The complete rip-off of our household. Recall, we pay taxes on other things daily, and alas, we get double and triple taxed so Warren Buffet can say this shit:

Buffett’s secretary since 1993, Debbie Bosanek, sat next to her boss just hours after being invited by the president to the State of the Union address, where the president made her the face of tax inequality in America. Bosanek pays a tax rate of 35.8 percent of income, while Buffett pays a rate at 17.4 percent.

“I’ll be a fair amount higher, 8 or 9 points higher,” Buffett said of his own tax rate in an appearance on CNBC Monday. “But the differential between me and the rest of the office, not just my secretary but the rest of the office, was greater than that. It’ll be closer, but I’ll probably be the lowest paying taxpayer in the office.” (source)

Nah, most people reading this will say he earned his money, right? And, well, Capitalism means we listen to the hoarders, the economists, the bankers, the pie in the sky billionaires: Jaime Dimon, Larry Summers, Michael Bloomberg, Bezos, Soros, Larry Fink, and, well, that list is short but in the multiple trillions of dollars of thievery. If you do not have a dart board or bullseye, then get one to take out some of that anger.

You know what Europe is mired in now — a war economy (sic) which is no economy at all. Building drones to kill kindergarteners? Buttons for those flak jackets? Diodes for those missile payloads?

You don’t need me to link all the stories on how the UK and Europe in general is suffering 40, 60 and 100 percent increase in food bills, let alone the tripling of energy costs. Go do you Google Gulag search yourself.

Here, a little history:

Europeans are getting poorer, do you care?

So, now, the European plan is to bring back conscription, killing fields, armed services service, you know, since these Macron’s and Scholtz’s and the others are such self-sacrificing millionaires. This is what they want?

So, sure, this is an undercount = Roughly 20 percent of the federal budget is dedicated to defense and security, which can be understood as the percent of tax dollars spent on the military. Look, the VA is a behemoth, and this is an undercount, too = There’s $161.3 billion (an increase of $8.6 billion or 5.7 percent) in mandatory funding in 2022 for benefit programs inclusive of Compensation and Pensions, Readjustment Benefits, Housing and Insurance.

Oh, so all that untreated C-PTSD, all the chaos in veterans and their families’ lives. All the overpolicing, the courts, all of that, tied to MILITARY.

Strike up the band:

A parable, to begin: in 2016, the 136 military bands maintained by the Department of Defense, employing more than 6,500 full-time professional musicians at an annual cost of about $500 million, caught the attention of budget-cutters worried about surging federal deficits. Immediately memos flew and lobbyists descended. The Government Accountability Office, laying the groundwork for another study or three, opined, “The military services have not developed objectives and measures to assess how their bands are addressing the bands’ missions, such as inspiring patriotism.” Supporters of the 369th Infantry Regiment band noted that it had introduced jazz to Europe during World War I. How could such a history be left behind? A blues band connected effectively with Russian soldiers in Bosnia in 1996, another proponent argued, proving that bands are, “if anything, an incredibly cost-effective supplement” to the Pentagon’s then $4.5 billion public affairs budget.

When the dust cleared, funding for the bands was not cut, because the political cost entailed in reducing the number of them by, say, half would have been enormous. The resulting $250 million in annual savings, on the other hand, while a significant sum for most government agencies, would have produced the almost unnoticeable difference of three one-hundredths of one percent in the Pentagon budget. (source)

Every bead of sweat in the USA goes into the military, spying — from DoD, NSA, CIA, FBI, all those police units from Seattle to Selma, all the universities with contracts with DoD, et al, all the crap, the junk on computers, all those software applications, pharma to viruses to ecological studies, all of it, beyond freeways and highways and waterwags and airwaves, all of it is tied to the military, so screw that 20 percent of your tax dollar going to military offense. It’s more like 60 percent.

And, you can’t separate this onion, man. All the billetting, building, burgers, buttons, bombs, all of it, the USA taxpayer foots that bill.

We have thrown tens of billions at Israel, in direct taxpayer money, and then these black budgets, and then, alas, it all comes down to Israel selling back what we GAVE them: Again, these figures are undercounts, so we need to multiple by 10: To date, the United States has provided Israel $158 billion (current, or non-inflation- adjusted, dollars) in bilateral assistance and missile defense and . . . ..

As Israel has become a global leader in certain niche defense technologies, Israeli defense exports to the U.S. market have grown substantially.17 According to one report, the U.S. military purchased $1.5 billion worth of Israeli equipment in 2019, representing a five-fold increase from two decades before.18 In addition to the U.S. purchase of Iron Dome (see below), the United States has purchased, among other items, the following Israeli defense articles: Trophy active protection systems for M1 Abrams tanks, enhanced night-vision goggles, laser range finders for the U.S. Marines, helmets for F-35 fighter pilots, wings for the F-35, and a system of towers,
electronic sensors, radars, and cameras for use along the U.S.-Mexican border. The U.S. Army is currently evaluating whether to purchase Rafael’s SPIKE Non-Line of Sight missile to be mounted on AH-64E Apache Helicopters. (limited source)

Here, The Cost of Israel to US Taxpayers

Even excluding all of these extra costs, America’s $84.8 billion in aid to Israel from fiscal years 1949 through 1998, and the interest the U.S. paid to borrow this money, has cost U.S. taxpayers $134.8 billion, not adjusted for inflation. Or, put another way, the nearly $14,630 every one of 5.8 million Israelis received from the U.S. government by Oct. 31, 1997 has cost American taxpayers $23,240 per Israeli.

It would be interesting to know how many of those American taxpayers believe they and their families have received as much from the U.S. Treasury as has everyone who has chosen to become a citizen of Israel. But it’s a question that will never occur to the American public because, so long as America’s mainstream media, Congress and president maintain their pact of silence, few Americans will ever know the true cost of Israel to U.S. taxpayers. (source)

Again, lies, since aid to Israel in the form of, well, cultural, education, scientific, is in fact MILITARY aid since that country is full-fledged military society, bombing Syria as I write this, bulldozing Palestinians into the ground.

Then, the Ukraine project? How much has the USA and its vassals thrown into Ukraine since 2000?

Oh, yes, tax time, and I have a tax preparer in Arizona, and she’s okay in terms of some knowledge about the world, but she watches Maddow and CNN and CNBC, and she is Jewish as is her husband, so she has told me she is not up on Ukraine and Russia but that propaganda and fake education that is in the air, 24/7, all of that has created colonized minds, even smart ladies like this tax lady. And, while she goes through our measley tax forms and measley losses in our retirement accounts, I am seething mad, man, seething. Our county is depressed economically, as are hundreds and hundreds of counties throughout the land, but we foot that thief’s bills — Zelensky:

• Military aid (discussed separately below);
• Humanitarian assistance (discussed separately below);
• Economic support to the Ukrainian government, which goes directly to the Ukrainian government to allow continuing operations since the war has disrupted its own mechanisms for raising revenue; and
• U.S. government operations and domestic costs related to Ukraine, which covers the increased expenses to government agencies for operations like moving embassy personnel and prosecuting war criminals. It also includes $2 billion for support to energy companies, particularly the nuclear industry, to offset higher supplier costs. Some observers might exclude the energy subsidy as only tangentially related to the war in Ukraine. This tabulation includes the item since the administration categorized it as Ukraine related. (again, a propaganda and cover-up operation, pro-pro war, pro-pro-pro Ukraine — CSIS)

This YouTube on the infection of war and military in Hollywood is superficial, not deep, not the whole ugly taxdollar picture:

There is so much lying about what is happening in Ukraine, that those lies — PSYOPS of the highest level, and those presstitutes, the stenographers for the military and neoliberal cabal of Nuland-Blinken-Kagan Family-Sherman-Yellen-Garland-Biden-Power et al, they have colonized the American mind, man. And Europe.

Imagine, the largest industrial terrorism in a while, against Nordstream, and Sy Hersh covering it with plenty of others before him covering it, as an operation done by USA Inc., and now, we get these USA and German newspapers saying the pipeline was blown up by Oceans 6. With a billionaire’s yacht. Amazing how much money we the taxpayer pay in taxes and then feeding the dirty machines of Amazon Studios, Showtime, Hulu, Netflix, HBO, the lot of them with their sick and propagandistic and pro=pro=pro War and CIA crap, that now, we have Ocean’s Six.

Here’s a good but wordy look at that lie: Russia Captures East Bakhmut, Zelensky Admits Importance: Intel: Nord Stream Attack 6 Guys (actually, the story says, one woman) & A Boat

All of this crap is paid for by you and me, my spouse and my daughter. On and on and on.

While neighboring Lithuania decided to reinstate conscription in 2015, and Estonia never abolished it, Latvia chose no change. Classes on national defense were introduced in schools, along with summer camps for practical skills.

My goddamned tax dollars, with my measley social security checks, $3.60 a gallon for gas, $4 for a dozen eggs, and, well, taxes taxes and taxes for our house since the money is going to, well, Vanguard and Blackrock and pipsqueaks like ZioLensky and Bibi.

Look at this crap from the Intercept, Sept 2022:

Ukraine is on track to become the largest recipient of U.S military assistance in the last century. But questions surround the policy.

Because the assistance is drawn from a variety of sources — and because it’s not always easy to distinguish between aid that’s been authorized, pledged, or delivered — some analysts estimate the true figure of the U.S. commitment to Ukraine is much higher: up to $40 billion in security assistance, or $110 million a day over the last year. This assistance is believed to be playing an important role in the advances Ukraine is making in an ongoing offensive to retake territory seized by Russia earlier this year; the cities of Kupiansk and Izium are reported to have just been liberated. What is clear is that the volume and speed of the assistance headed to Ukraine is unprecedented, and that legislators and observers are struggling to keep up.

I have seen where my tax lady is PSYOP-ed into delusional thinking: I saw two “reports” putting Ukrainian soldier losses at 100,000 and Russian losses at 180,000. Amazing this crap still flies around. Ukraine lost the war in April 2022. The mercenary forces of NATO and USA and other demented countries have thrown junk and killer junk at Ukraine. USA is spending money on AWACs and satellite time and so so much on this war.

Taxes, taxes, taxes. And we thrown money at Europe, and gut Europe at the same time. Here, more of the insanity: “Max Blumenthal interviews Heinrich Bücker, founder of Berlin’s COOP Antiwar Cafe, about his prosecution at the hands of the German state for publicly denouncing Germany’s military aid to a Ukrainian government that reveres World War II-era Nazi collaborators and incorporates neo-Nazi battalions into its military. Bücker also discusses that state of the German antiwar movement as it gathers momentum following mass protests after the February 24 first anniversary of the Ukraine proxy war.”

These are our allies, though we bugged German politicians’ and military personnel’s phones, and then the Nordstream, man. This is what my taxes pay for:

“U.S. journalist Seymour Hersh says, “they can’t be that stupid” in reaction to NYT’s article claiming a “pro-Ukrainian group” carried out the Nord Stream attacks.”

UPDATE – U.S. journalist Seymour Hersh says, "they can't be that stupid" in reaction to NYT's article claiming a "pro-Ukrainian group" carried out the Nord Stream attacks. pic.twitter.com/SB2RK9Xekk

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) March 8, 2023

And so, am I mad as hell and can’t take it anymore?

And under Biden Incorporated, how many more agents hired for the IRS? “Do you make $75,000 or less?” tweeted House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. “Democrats’ new army of 87,000 IRS agents will be coming for you—with 710,000 new audits for Americans who earn less than $75k.”

The Inflation Reduction Act, a landmark climate, health care and tax package that passed the Senate on Sunday and is expected to head to Biden’s desk after the House approves it on Friday, includes roughly $78 billion for the IRS to be phased in over 10 years. A Treasury Department report from May 2021 estimated that such an investment would enable the agency to hire roughly 87,000 employees by 2031. But most of those hires would not be Internal Revenue agents, and wouldn’t be new positions.

In the incendiary words of Radical Women founder Clara Fraser, whose 100th birthday would have been this month:

“It is time for swift-striking gender insurgency. Time for women guerrillas, [21st] century Amazons, mad shrieks of protest, and careful mobilization of political battalions. Goddammit, sisters: Let’s get revolutionary. Let’s understand that the private profit system is at the bottom of all this horror, and let’s catapult ourselves on to the mainstage of history.”

— from “Revolution, She Wrote”

International WOmen’s Day — Russian pilots!

удачи — udachi — good luck!

The National Guard congratulated women in the Lugansk region on March 8, Women’s Day!

#8M23: “By rebelling, we sow popular peasant feminism, build food sovereignty, and organize against crises and violence!”

To mark International Women’s Day, The Black Agenda Review is pleased to reprint “Dedicated to Women in Struggle,” an editorial from a 1974 special issue of the newsletter African Agenda: A Voice of Afro-American Opinion . African Agenda was published from 1972 to 1977 by the African-American Solidarity Committee, a Chicago-based coalition of Black radicals committed to the anti-imperialist struggles in Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia, and to the fight for Black rights within the United States.

On many holidays recognizing people’s struggles and their leaders — for example, the civil rights movement and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — the present-day celebrations are both sweet and sour.

The only reason for formal recognition is that protests and struggle made it so — and this is a victory. But the other, “give it the side-eye” part is that the actual history of how they originated is covered up in pink ribbons.

The blood, sweat and tears that were shed have been washed away.

If you can’t HATE Israel for the Nakba, then look deep inside your cold heart.

If you can’t HATE Israel for their Apartheid State, then you need to go back into some history books.

If you can’t hate Zionist Jewish provactuers in the Israel-First USA camp, then you are the problem,, not the solution.

These are evil people with their law degrees, MD degrees, PhD’s, MBA’s, PharmD’s, EduPhD’s . . . . You want a complete list?

+–+

A Texas Elementary School Speech Pathologist Refused to Sign a Pro-Israel Oath, Now Mandatory in Many States — so She Lost Her Job

A major attack on the First Amendment: No credible advocate of free expression can remain silent about this “free speech exception for Israel.”

In mobilization throughout the country, the National Day of Struggle of Landless Women has already mobilized 22 states and the Federal District, with marches, occupations of land and public bodies and a series of pedagogical camps. In at least three states, Rio Grande do Sul, Pará and Piauí, there were cases of repression by the police apparatus and private security against mobilizations.

The most emblematic case occurred in Belém, when the Landless Women were harshly repressed by the Military Police, when they approached the Legislative Assembly of Pará to negotiate their agendas. The PM, under the order of President ALEPA, used pepper spray and physical force against the demonstrators. At least one of the participants in the act had to be hospitalized.

Mulheres Sem Terra denounce the various forms of patriarchal and racial violence, which have affected people in vulnerable conditions and made victims, such as the cases of femicide, LGBTIphobic murders and suicides that have been experienced in recent years. In this way, they also announce the willingness to build emancipated human relationships, free from all forms of violence.

“We need to maintain and expand popular organization, because this is a Government in which rights will have to be defended and conquered on a daily basis, both in dialogue and in struggle. We demand the repeal of EC 95, the New Secondary School, the Labor Reform and many other agendas, which will only be possible to be implemented with a lot of struggle and grassroots organization”, explains Lucinéia.

God, I was watching Jimmy Dore and his minion going after some creep of a journalist (sic) who created some Google open source document for women to place the names of men who they accuse of all sorts of “crimes” or “assaults,” both verbal and physical.

Dore goes off on this woman, and he does that a lot, against women in particular, and while he has free speech and the poetic license of half-assed comedy and pretty shallow knowledge about the world, there just seems a tinge or two of misogyn. It’s being 66 and haven been on dozens of teams and in many more dozens of workshops and conferences where guys like Dore have hit the metal ceiling of depth, of understanding the reality of hateful men, violence and what happens on the ground, and certainly in other countries.

If the goofballs celebrity females and goofball journalists and communications handlers in the USA and Europe now are doing goofy stuff, but the reality is the entire culture tied to the blue-red political line and the dumbdowning and the infantalization and the Disneyrfication of the Collective West is rotting.

Here’s a female hero beyond heroes:

She said “Don’t side with Skynet, Terminator!”, a message that was repeated by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), which posted the footage on Twitter.

Maryana Naumova, in a video message addressed to Schwarzenegger that was posted on Twitter by the Russian MFA on Monday morning (21st March), said in Russian, with English subtitles, that he should not “side with Skynet” and mentioned the deaths of children in eastern Ukraine, which she attributed to the Ukrainian army.

Her message to Schwarzenegger, in the nearly seven-minute video, says in full: “Dear Mr Schwarzenegger, I’m sure you remember me.

“In 2015, at the Arnold Classic competition in the USA, I, a 15-year-old girl from Russia, set a world record by lifting a barbell weighing 150 kilograms.”

“You were congratulating me, asking about Russia, and I was crying with joy. You seemed so thoughtful, kind and smart to me. You left me an autograph on the sleeve of your branded jacket, and it remained with me, as a good memory of our meeting. To set this record, to lift a barbell at that time, was a matter of honour and a huge responsibility for me.

“I carried for you, Mr Schwarzenegger, letters and photos from the children of the warring Donbass, which by March 2015, I had already visited twice. Yes, I could not stay at home, in Moscow, when Ukraine declared war on Donbass, when for my peers from Donbass, the school bell meant not only a school break, but also the beginning of shelling and bombing. In every school where I performed and talked with the children, I talked first of all about you, about my idol both in sports and in life.

“An ordinary boy from a poor Austrian family became a famous athlete, then a movie actor, then a politician – and all this thanks to sports and dedication.

“Of course, those Donbass children knew and watched your films. I told them that in the spring of 2015 I will be going to the USA again for competitions, and maybe I’ll see you.

“And those children, ordinary schoolchildren from the Lugansk and Donetsk Republics, started to write letters and send photos with a request to give them to you. They were telling the Terminator how they live in the war, asking for help, asking for the simplest advice – how to play sports in such difficult conditions, how to develop, how to become a successful person.

“The Donetsk children saw you as a strong hero who they hoped would be able to protect them. I printed out the photos, translated the letters, handed you an envelope and said, ‘Arnold, I was recently in Donbass with a humanitarian sports mission, there is a war going on there, and children, schoolchildren, asked me to hand over these letters for you.’

“You said then, ‘Ukraine, yes, yes, I know. I’ll take a look, I’ll work on it’, and handed the envelope to your assistant.’

“Mr Schwarzenegger, I watched your message to my fellow Russians. Obviously, you didn’t ‘work’ on the letters I gave you, even though you promised.

“You are a wonderful motivator, athlete and actor, you are really loved in Russia, but your message is based on some other invented reality. It often happens in the movies.

“But the truth about what happened, Arnold, is in the letters that have been kept by your assistants since 2015. The true reality, Arnold, is on the ‘Alley of Angels’ memorial, in Donetsk, where everyone can read the names of children who were killed by bullets and bombs of the Ukrainian army.

“And the reality is, Arnold, that your Terminator not only did not protect, did not help, did not save the children of Donbass, but did not even read their letters and did not try to understand the situation.

“Mr Schwarzenegger, I have visited Donbass more than 20 times since 2014, I have visited the most dangerous combat zones there. I have visited more than 120 schools, talked to thousands of children, held more than a hundred children’s sports events, even though I am an ordinary Russian girl, not an iron fearless Terminator warrior.

“In your message you tell about your father, who did not like Russians and who, along with the Nazis, came with weapons to my Russian, then Soviet, land.

“You say that there is no Nazism in Ukraine, you tell about the Jewish president of Ukraine, and that Russian bombs are allegedly destroying Ukraine now.

“Arnold, sometimes it is very difficult to understand, being thousands and thousands of kilometres away from us, but you still have those letters and photos from 2015, don’t you? In fact, you could just come and see everything in person, you are a brave man.

We can remind ourselves of the despicable folk of the female persuasion in CEO position, MIC leaders, etc. More chilling than a M. Night Shyamalan flick, these two in a room with booze, pizza, children, and a Doomsday Clock! The room is being lit with lanterns fueled with the suet of children. And, Soylent Green is FOOD! Henry and Hillary!

Hero:

“The greatest challenge of the day is how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us.”

–Dorothy Day

Enemy:

This says so much about the Jewish Project in Ukraine. Amazing, no, that Bandera Land, that Nazi Land, and here two Jewish “freaks” shake hands while the USA coffers empty out. Yellen and Company are NOT interested in the American Goyim and his/her/their problems.

Her father’s daughter, not a hero, but the enemy.

Her father Ernst Albrecht, President of the German state of Lower Saxony from 1978 to 1990, brought unrehabilitated Nazis into his administration and carried out a black-flag terrorist operation designed to discredit the left-wing Red Army Faction.

In the wake of the Russo-Ukrainian war, terms like “European values” have come back into the mainstream. One of the people who has been most responsible for this is Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission who is now a nearly omnipresent figure in the media.

Hero in Nicaragua:

Viva Nicaragua. If you missed this, then watch and listen: One Year Ago,

Max Blumenthal interviews Sonia Castro, lead advisor to the President of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, on the Sandinista government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Castro explains why, despite heavy criticism, her government did not follow World Health Organization guidance to lock down the population and instead kept schools and businesses open. She also discusses her government’s guidance to prescribe off-patent early treatments against Covid and its ongoing, Cuban and Russian-assisted national vaccination campaign. This interview was conducted in Managua in February 2022.

As opposed to this shit show of a woman: Many pose this stupid question: Why don’t we make Politicians take tests like lawyers, doctors, and a majority of other careers?

Yeah, we are doing great with those Ivy League grads from MBA programs, law schools, medical schools, et al.

So this fake PhD English teacher, nah, never gave an exam or test or final essay assignment in her life. RIGHT.

Now, again, Haley wouldn’t pass a general knowledge and ethics and cultural literacy and basic environmental and world perspectives test, nor would ANY of them, including school marm Jill.

Biden is broke, but so was Clinton, and what about Bush on Coke? What about Ford on Trippy Dippy Land? Nixon? Oh, JFK did what to Marilyn? They are ALL sick puppies because they do not have the licks and the ticks and the deep philosophies of what it means to be human and humane.

+–+

More media drivel: First lady Jill Biden pushed back on concerns about President Joe Biden’s age and dismissed a proposal by Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley for politicians over age 75 to take a mental competency test.

“Ridiculous,” the first lady said, responding to Haley’s proposal during an interview with CNN, which will air as part of “CNN Primetime: Jill Biden Abroad” at 9 p.m. ET on Monday.

Asked if her husband, who would be 82 at his inauguration if he’s reelected, would consider taking such a test, Jill Biden said, “We would never even discuss something like that.”

More of the monsters:

USAID’s Samantha Power joined EU and US officials rallied at the Lincoln Memorial at a pro-war demonstration organized by a clique of Ukrainian activists that have described themselves as “true Banderites” and “Right Sektor’s Washington DC branch.”

[Power married to Jewish journalist, Cass Robert Sunstein, also an American legal scholar known for his studies of constitutional law, administrative law, environmental law, and behavioral economics. He is also The New York Times best-selling author of The World According to Star Wars and Nudge.]

Compared to these amazing heroes:

[Photos:The women from Caracas’ Antímano Parish have trained themselves to build homes for their families as part of Venezuela’s Great Housing Mission, created by Hugo Chávez in 2011. (Andreína Chávez Alava / Venezuelanalysis)]

In Caracas, an army of self-trained women are working to build their own homes while they transform the reality around them.

Commodified housing, shantytowns, evictions and homelessness are worldwide realities and no matter how hard corporate media tries to ignore it, this is one of the most glaring horrors of capitalism.

Back to basics — Women kick off a revolution

But the unforgettable turning point that sealed the deal was when the women of Russia touched off a revolution.

On March 8, 1917, striking women textile workers joined other women attacking bakeries over high bread prices in Petrograd, Russia. They implored soldiers to put down their rifles.

Some 90,000 protesters took to the streets demanding “peace, land and bread.”

This was the opening salvo that toppled Russia’s hated czar and in less than a year, the workers, peasants and the poor led by the Bolshevik Party took power in November 1917.

While encircled and under attack by the imperialist powers, they formed the first socialist workers’ state. One of the very first things the new Soviet revolution did was codify women’s equality. (Source)

Spokane – Just the Way Light of Sun Touches the Backs of Earth Volunteers

By Paul K. Haeder

for the people who worked, for the people who shared Earth Day 2010 Takin’ it to the Streets, Spokane!

she came into life from glaciers imploding
basalt columns ripped from geological core
scarring earth, the lift of eagles broken
by the roar of the ice dam fracturing
giant blue heron settled eating purple frogs
they all listened to the roar, even the tribes

artery of river stone, the open wound
clear water, the gapping pools where Coho
settle for energy, in the collecting pools of sun water
where grizzly belly up and rip open dog fish
bigger than children, bigger than myths

this is a memory that isn’t lamentation but clarity
we can believe the history of our biophilia, our grand
hope for some reckoning with the wagers
who would sell every white pine for chopsticks
who would let the goo of arsenic tailings
settle into the bones of gorgeous rivers

you did fight that spasm, oddly enough, that odd nature
in most humans, a day of recapturing the light
when clouds and wind and Douglass fir trapped pheromones
sailed together on Gaia’s wet morning breath,
the buzz of bees harkening in the same fold of time

this is how we live a modern ghost dance
no eulogies any more, just utilitarian ground truthing
hard fought battles to bring the purveyors of greed
to their knees, yet we drink the ferment of this life
in Spokane, making celebration and war one

give each other elbows, the full arm salutation
remember we worked like bees
pollinating a city we see as old, tired, but a future place
where some of us will ghost dance with salmon
and the grandmother lynx, where caribou herds will trample lichen
for miles . . . . we believed and did . . .

. . . so children will gather polished river stones from
the very water in their blood
pure, clean, and more than a dream
because of us, each one of us together.

Posted by Paul K. Haeder at 9:07 AM

++Old days when I was sustainability director and did some Earth Day organizing!

“My colleague Rachel Yehuda studied rates of PTSD in adult New Yorkers who had been assaulted or rapes. Those whose mothers were Holocaust survivors with PTSD had a significantly higher rate of developing serious psychological problems after these traumatic experiences. The most reasonable explanation is that their upbringing had left them with a vulnerable physiology, making it difficult for them to regain their equilibrium after being violated. Yehuda found a similar vulnerability in the children of pregnant women who were in the World Trade Center that fatal day in 2001. Similarly, the reactions of children to painful events are largely determined by how calm or stressed their parents are.”

― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

Oh, I know I sometimes blithely say, “Violence is in the DNA of Americans.” Or, I say, “Americans are colonized, in constant fear, flight, freeze mode because of their intergenerational trauma put upon so many millions here and tens of millions outside the border of U$A.” Or, yep, “Collective Stockholm syndrome brought upon the masses through Disneyfication, McDonaldization and Infantalization.”

I am serious, though, about epigenetic trauma, and if a child witnessing pain, hate, parents shooting up, violently attack each other, poverty, drug use, all of that “stuff,” well, the DNA is in fact changed for the babe, the juvenile, as all those stress hormones — there are dozens and hundreds in concert with all sorts of other bodily functions tied to the gut and brain and cortisol interplay — they morph child into hyper-vigilant and hyper-reactive and possibly hyper-mentally disjointed teens . . . . And then what happens to them in adulthood?

You have to wonder what is in the water, meat, air, soil, Cheetos when we see this in Greece but nothing of the sort in Palestine, Ohio. I am looking at how collectively traumatized Americans are, in so many ways, from education, media, TV, militaristic leaders, linchings, the entire reservation and internment and hateful Gilded Class shitting on us.

Two trains, two countries, two derailments, two different collective responses.

Police said 12,000 people had gathered by the large esplanade in front of the parliament to demand accountability for Tuesday’s head-on collision near the central city of Larissa that has sparked widespread outrage.

At least 57 people were killed and dozens were injured when a passenger train with more than 350 people on board collided with a freight train on the same track in central Greece.

Yikes. This says a thousand things and draws upon a hundred topics in one photo: Freemont, OH protesters?

That’s vinyl chloride train cars derailed and then the company just burned the tankers, instead of paying for a slow pumping out and transfer, lreleasing, well, PCB’s, dioxins, you know, the stuff of Agent Orange. Into the air, all over the place

And so, if this isn’t vitally important to everyday life, to the crimes of Nuland-Kagan Family-Blinken-Garland-Yellen-Albright-Sherman and what occurred in their parents’ and grandparents’ lives, and then passing on those morphed genetic traits to THEM, and now we pay the price for their trauma and misanthropy, well, we are a completely blank society if we can’t get into the streets daily and fight for our rights . . . to NOT look deeply into this, and connect the dots — and there are so many dots, as in why so much hatred of Russia is coming from those Neocons, those people whose family lines were in the Holocaust — we are missing a great opportunity to see what motivates these elites.

A person’s experience as a child or teenager can have a profound impact on their future children’s lives, new work is showing. Rachel Yehuda, a researcher in the growing field of epigenetics and the intergenerational effects of trauma, and her colleagues have long studied mass trauma survivors and their offspring. Their latest results reveal that descendants of people who survived the Holocaust have different stress hormone profiles than their peers, perhaps predisposing them to anxiety disorders.

Yehuda’s team at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the James J. Peters Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Bronx, N.Y., and others had previously established that survivors of the Holocaust have altered levels of circulating stress hormones compared with other Jewish adults of the same age. Survivors have lower levels of cortisol, a hormone that helps the body return to normal after trauma; those who suffered post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have even lower levels.

PARENT’S STRUGGLE, CHILD’S RISK

A variety of studies, many using long-term medical records from large populations, have found that certain experiences affect future descendants’ health risks. —Victoria Stern

Look, these are highly complex studies, if we just use biologic-genetics-endocrine sciences studies. We do not ALWAYS have to rely on DNA material and long-term studies with petri dishes and billions of points of data to UNDERSTAND what happens in a household where parents are criminals, neglectful, mean, violent, unattentive, poor and struggling, never there, always in turmoil.

The Nazi Holocaust? The wiring of the brain man is going to be the hardest to pin down, whereas diabetes is the easiest to connect to parents passing on those traits. But truly, the brain — that gut-serotonin-reuptake connection “thing” does determine brain functioning, cognition, disposition, outlook and personality as well as the deeper psycho-biological formulations of what it is to be a human under a thousand points of stress, both in the womb and under a kitchen table shivering from fear.

What sort of Complex PTSD will never be held to account for those children and parents and all the people bombed by Ukraine in Donbass? In Syria? All those witnesses to / survivors of war, and those who wage war, wage crimes against humanity?

Alley of Angels in Donbass, erected for those victims of the Nuland-Obama-Kagan war on Russians, i.e. Maidan Coup onwards:

So what happens, then, with American Society, whereupon the media and politicians deny history, context, stories, points of view, and necessary peaks into other people’s struggles and lives? What collective amnesia, confusion, memory hole worshipping occur in a society hit with both sides of the invented liberal-conservative line, one that never existed until The Man, The Corporations, found it necessary to make the Asian, Latino, African-American as enemy, as the drain on the Majority’s lives, their concept of peace and neighborhood, their belief in myths. The Majority being The White Man/Woman!

How much early childhood and juvenile and peer trauma can we attribute to a Biden or a Trump or Pelosi or any of these elites who go to elite finishing schools, prep schools, colleges, entering the dungeons of law schools, MBA programs, International Scam institutes? Does an Albright, with her own odd biography tied to her family, get a pass, get some sort of human compensatory feeling for her belief system?

Do we see the pain and the struggle and the conflicting views and her own ego lined up in those wrinkles of life?

“It’s one thing to find out you’re Jewish… but another to find out that relatives had died in concentration camps. That was a stunning shock.”

Madeleine Albright first learned of her Jewish identity when she was 59, two weeks before being sworn in as the first female Secretary of State in U.S. history.

“It was a complicated family story,” she said in an interview.

Investigations by the Washington Post revealed that, although Albright was raised Catholic, her parents were born Jewish. She also discovered that 26 of her family members, including three grandparents, had been murdered in the Holocaust.

Madeleine Albright was born Marie Jana Korbelova in Prague on May 15, 1937, the oldest of three children of Josef and Anna (Speeglova) Korbel. In 1937, Josef Korbel was serving as a press-attaché at the Czechoslovak Embassy in Belgrade. He worked for Czechoslovakia’s first democratic president, Tomas Masaryk, who retired in 1935, and his successor, Edvard Benes.

What sort of triple epigenetic trauma lurked in her brain? Ed Bradley interviewed America’s first female secretary of state in 1997. Albright died today at 84.

Albright, the first female secretary of state in United States history, made the remarks during a 60 Minutes interview. Correspondent Lesley Stahl discussed with the then-United Nations ambassador how Iraq had been suffering from the sanctions placed on the country following 1991’s Gulf War.

“We have heard that half a million [Iraqi] children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima,” Stahl said. “And, you know, is the price worth it?”

“I think that is a very hard choice,” Albright answered, “but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”

I could go deeply into epigenetics, and this Adverse Childhood Events, a tracking system (unfortunately, on the digital data dashboard tied to performance) that does in fact take into consideration the huge uphill battle many youth have growing up in stressful and dysfunctional and non-attentive and violent and poor homes:

Of course, most of my life as teacher, mentor, journalist, social worker, activist has been entwined with the people I teach-mentor-serve-report on-advocate for and where they came from. What about my homeless female veterans? What got them to join the armed services? What caused them to use drugs and end up homeless and end up in my office talking about supports and other avenues of healing and getting a better footing I might have?

All my female clients both civilian and military were sexually assaulted, abused and raped. That trauma is complex because it is never just one blow to the head, one violent forced rape. So many things tied to the context of how and where and who it happened with, and then, the failure of our society to deal with this trauma, the failure of courts, cops and politicians.

Unfortunately, the elite, those Albright kind of folk, except younger and into tech-data-tracking-social impact investing, they are using ACEs for PROFITEERING:

A red flag for me in Gavin Newsom’s “child-friendly” proposed budget was the $45 million he allocated to screen children and adults in Medi-Cal for ACEs. I’m writing this post to express serious reservations I have about the process of developing ACE (Adverse Early Childhood Experiences) scores for people. ACEs are getting tremendous media exposure of late. While I believe this to be a crucial pubic health concern, my fear is that ACE prevention and mitigation interventions will become vehicles for “innovative” finance and will expand profiling of vulnerable populations.

I want to make it clear from the outset that I acknowledge childhood trauma does result in long-term negative health consequences for individuals. I’ve seen it in my own family. I also recognize that systems of structural racism have inflicted stress and violence on communities of color and indigenous peoples for generations, resulting in high rates of chronic illness that make them attractive targets for “social impact” schemes. People have a basic human right to treatment and care, which should not be conditioned on surveillance and having data harvested to line the pockets of social impact investors.

What concerns me about ACEs is the “scoring.”

Why should a standardized rubric developed under the auspices of one of the largest managed healthcare systems, Kaiser Permanente, label clients and structure the way a doctor, therapist, social worker, or educator can care for them? How did this tool come to have such a far reach, and whose interests will it ultimately serve?

Is a reliance on “scores” an intentionally-constructed framework that allows providers to limit their scope to “fixing” individuals and families rather than advancing a more radical approach whereby systemic causes of community trauma, trauma rooted in our country’s deep racist history, can be acknowledged, holistically assessed, and begin to be ameliorated?

And finally, will this “scoring” system be used to transform the treatment of childhood trauma into a machine for “pay for success” data speculation?

I believe it will. (“ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience) Scores: Part of the “Pay for Success” Plan? Feb. 5, 2019, Wrench in the Gears, Alison McDowell)

So, this level of exploitation for profit has flooded the American landscape generatioin after generation, until we are here, in that GAD moment for many — generalized anxiety disorder. Chaos, inertia, cancel society, trigger warnings, up is down, racism is okay sort of thinking.

Until someone like me who has been witness to other people’s direct trauma and who has been a trauma navigator and of course been a teacher too, within gang prgrams, tied to low income communities, prisons, elsewhere considered “on the other side of the railroad tracks” writes about it as a way of making sense of what I have seen and heard, and some of it has been horrific, beyond belief, and in one sense, some of it can’t be repeated even in a Dissident Voice newsletter.

I’ll finish this very superficial treatment of collective trauma and epigenetics with my own flipping through Showtime’s offerings, or what have you. I was attempting with open mind and heart to get into the documentary on Chelsea Manning, “XY Chelsea.”

Look, I am a friend to many communities within the LGBTQA+ grouping, and know the story of Chelsea Elizabeth Manning, born Bradley Edward Manning; December 17, 1987. A whistleblower. This documentary, however, was so self-indulgent, so steeped in a sort of dumbdowned look at a person in constant struggle that it was filled with affectations and was difficult for me to get any traction on it. I have read good accounts about Bradley-Chelsea.

I know Chelsea also got on the Podcast Circuit in March 2022 and said the most idiotic things about Putin, Russia, the SMO, Ukraine. Very very sad case of misinformed person. I won’t link one of those shows here.

So, to get through the midnight hour of insomnia, I found a gem:

Here, the YouTube blurb: Raw and unflinching examination of the courageous and remarkable life of basketball star and social justice activist Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. Born Chris Jackson, he overcame tremendous adversity to reach the NBA and found his true calling when he converted to Islam. His decision not to stand for the national anthem, however, turned him from prodigy to pariah. Told candidly by Abdul-Rauf himself more than 20 years later it’s the remarkable story of one man who kept the faith and paved the way for a social justice movement.

Look, I just came back from coaching the Special Olympics basketball team, and we have one more practice before a March 18 out of town state tournement. I work with these amazing young adults, and I was not about to tolerate at the end of my night this Manning self-indulgence.

ACEs — Manning had boozer parents, in Oklahoma, violent, and of course, poor. Abused and neglected, Bradley was a lost soul, and decided to join the military to get some meaning in his life. Chelsea states in the flick that there are many transgender folk in the armed services. Many reasons. Definitely worth looking into.

Then, well, I knew some of Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf’s story, Chris Jackson growing up in Stars and Bars KKK Mississippi, dirt poor, no father, and a mother who never told him who is father was. His older brother shot squirrels and doves and a pellet gun for food, not fun. They were always hungry.

You have to watch this film, man. It will uplift you, and it will deeply solidify in you, I hope, why this country is so traumatized, deeply spirituall lobotomized, inertia bound in terms of real history, and so so disassociative around who the real enemies are. So many incapable elite human failures pounding the war drums, so many in high and middle office stealing from us, and yet no boiling tar and pokey features and sharpened pitchforks.

Abdul-Rauf, a true hero. The best basketball athlete Shaq ever saw:

He shared how his turning point came one day when he visited his mother’s home.

He opened the refrigerator and it was empty. He went to the restroom to wash his hands. When he leaned on the sink, it collapsed on the floor. That was it.  

After playing for two years at LSU, he told his LSU coach he wanted to play in the NBA.

“My mother is everything (to me)…I got to take care of her,” Abdul-Rauf emotionally said. 

His coach’s response surprised him. He told him it was the best decision he could make.  

He knew if he went pro, he would be able to take care of his mother. So he did. 

In 1990, Abdul-Rauf was the third overall pick of the Denver Nuggets during the NBA draft.

It is a tough one, since I will not be standing for the national anthem this coming March 18, which I have always shown as my own deeply enmeshed protest of the stars and stripes, my own military trauma, and of course, like Mahmoud, my education through Fred Hampton, the Black Panthers, Malcolm X and ten thousand others.

His views about America changed, and he found that his beliefs no longer aligned with what he observed. People he looked up to changed, he noticed.

To protest oppression, he refused to stand for the American national anthem.

It stirred controversy, and some say his stance was the blueprint for what would come 20 years later when 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the anthem to protest racial injustice.

Kaepernick kneeled at a preseason game against the Chargers for the first time on Sep. 1, 2016.

“It sounds cliche, but when I say I was so comfortable with my information, I was so comfortable with my faith and my position. I was so comfortable with my belief in God and how things are going,” Abdul-Rauf said.

His faith was bigger than the game, he said.

This was not the first time he had chosen not to stand for the anthem, but it was the first time someone had noticed. 

It cost him his home, which the Ku Klux Klan burned down, and his NBA career.  

Shit-dog, the deeply ingrained trauma of growing up, and in both Manning’s and Johnson’s cases, an absent father in variations on a theme. Chelsea struggled with identity in Oklahoma, and Mahmoud struggled with a neurological condition, a mind draining and body pounding condition that in fact made him into a god-like basketball player.

Here, my response to Ed Curtain’s latest piece: ‘Quoth the Vultures “Evermore”‘

Great emotional rattling, as always, Ed. Thanks. Cảm ơn!

+–+

I was in Vietnam in 1994 and 1996. Working on bat studies, transect of forest near the Laotian border. Age 36, with Brits. My old man was 36 in Vietnam, as a Big Red Army crypto-signal corps guy. He was shot after the bullet hit the Huey pilot dead eye between the eyes.

He surived. I interviewed many Vietnamese, but one woman who ran a Pho shop in Hanoi was really deep. She was an orphan in Hanoi in a Catholic run orphanage. She showed me some wounds on her arms from F-4 Phantom bombing runs. You know, the John McCain drinking hard in Thailand, looking for another prostitute while his family and wife back home worried about him (before he was shot down). I saw photos of the courtyard of this orphanage with the dead bodies of children and a few adult caretakers.

That in a nutshell is the War on Vietnam. The War on Everything.

You list a few wars, leaving out the war that has not been declared over — against Korea.

That “war”:

The three-year Korean War resulted in the deaths of three to four million Koreans, produced 6-7 million refugees, and destroyed over 8,500 factories, 5,000 schools, 1,000 hospitals and 600,000 homes. Over 36,000 American soldiers died in the war.

From air bases in Okinawa and naval aircraft carriers, the U.S. Air Force launched over 698,000 tons of bombs (compared to 500,000 tons in the entire Pacific theater in World War II), obliterating 18 of 22 major cities and destroying much of the infrastructure in North Korea.

The US bombed irrigation dams, destroying 75 percent of the North’s rice supply, violating civilian protections set forth in the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

The Korean War has been called a “limited war” because the U.S. refrained from using nuclear weapons (although this was considered). Yet the massive destruction of North Korea and the enormous death toll in both North and South mark it as one of the most barbarous wars in modern history.

More than 180,000 Chinese troops died in the Korean War, or what Beijing calls the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea.

+–+

Oh, Douglas Valentine, talking about that piece of human stain, Ken Burns, and Propaganda Broadcasting System’s lies and more lies about the great balance of U$A and Vietnam in that CIA conducted “war”:

Douglas Valentine: Expectations for PBS/Ken Burns’ “The Vietnam War” (2017)

Remember, calling people Cong was a racist PSYOP term of the Edward Bernays kind. They never called themselves Viet Cong.

The First Televised War was a book that proved that TV and those newscasts actually increased support for killing fields in Vietnam. You see, while in the country, journalists and videographers took hundreds and hudreds of hours of footage, but those Mad Men in TV turned deeply disturbing and telling and contextualized footage into one minute Dan Rather episodes.

U$A had already been preened to see war as a TV thing, with all those war TV series popping up during the killing fields of Vietnam.

+–+

I spent time with Ly Le Hayslip, and she was a keynote speaker at a 20th Anniversary of the Fall of Vietnam big event I organized in El Paso. She wrote When Heavan and Earth Changed Places, scripted into that Oliver Stone movie, Heaven and Earth. Her life, her struggle with mixed race children in California (you know, those woke ones called them spics and beaners and worse) as a divorced mother (from a US military white guy) and he dignity working to bring light to what the “war” meant to regular people is inspiring.

+–+

I was an English Department faculty, a communist, and when I worked with Robert Bly in Spokane when he read from a book railing against Bush’s war, he made it clear that the English Departments were the most vocally against his anti-War poetry.

He was soothing me in that I too was up against reactionary English Department chairs, many faculty and university provosts and deans.

+–+

Again, I was in Vietnam for more than a year, and I have studied the war for decades. I also was a college instructor at Fort Bliss (literature and composition) and at Fairchild AF Base and at White Sands and elsewhere. I got to know the heart and soul of many of those soldiers who did end up in Vietnam and then off to Salvador and Guatemala with the dirty tricks of the CIA/DoD/NSA.

As Valentine says, CIA is organized crime, but then so is the U$A. I’ve been with sicarios in Juarez and Chihuahua who have shown me more honor and respect than some of the ex-USA soldiers I met in Guatemala continuing the work of dirty economic hit men.

The Vietnam War heralded in eco-cide, PSYOPS, off shoring torture, attacks on food, water, electrical systems. This is where the proving grounds for US Military Complex Inc. really got a foothold.

And here we are today, with a military industrial complext that is vast and so imbedded in EVERYTHING that the average American is clueless that they have death coursing through their own veins and their future offsprings’ veins.

Joan Roelofs, author of The Trillion Dollar Silence, gives a run down at how pervasive US Military Incorporated is:

The Trillion Dollar Silencer investigates the astounding lack of popular protest at the death and destruction that the military industrial complex is inflicting on people, nations, and the environment, and its budget-draining costs. Where is the antiwar protest by progressives, libertarians, environmentalists, civil rights advocates, academics, clergy, community volunteers, artists, et al? This book focuses on how military largesse infests such public sectors’ interests.

“It is perhaps the most fraught question of our time, whatever happened to the anti-war movement? In this provocative and illuminating book, Joan Roelofs penetrates deep into the inner-workings of the vast political economy of war-making, revealing how the arms cartel has consolidated its power, captured our political system, infiltrated the media and stifled dissent. At a perilous moment in history, Roelofs has given us a call to action, loud and clear enough to awaken our anesthetized consciences.” JEFFREY ST CLAIR, Editor of CounterPunch, Author, Grand Theft Pentagon

+–+

Here,

Bruce Weigl in his tellingly brutal and straightforward poem, “Burning Shit at An Khe,” he describes in painful detail the repulsive task of cleaning makeshift outhouses:

I tried to light a match
It died
And it all came down on me, the stink
And the heat and the worthlessness
Until I slipped and climbed
Out of that hole and ran
Past the olive drab
Tents and trucks and clothes and everything
Green as far from the shit
As the fading light allowed.
Only now I can’t fly.
I lay down in it
And finger paint the words of who I am
Across my chest
Until I’m covered and there’s only one smell,
One word.

Even more chilling is “Song of Napalm,” in which he tries to appreciate the wonder of horses in a pasture after a storm:

Still I close my eyes and see the girl
Running from her village, napalm
Stuck to her dress like jelly,
Her hands reaching for the no one
Who waits in waves of heat before her.
***

So I can keep on living,
So I can stay here beside you,
I try to imagine she runs down the road and wings
Beat inside her until she rises
Above the stinking jungle and her pain
Eases, and your pain, and mine.

But the poem continues, “the lie swings back again,” and finally:

. . . she is burned behind my eyes
And not your good love and not the rain-swept air
And not the jungle green
Pasture unfolding before us can deny it.

+–+

My short article, Call of Duty, about Bly:

https://www.inlander.com/spokane/blys-call-to-duty/Content?oid=2128598

+–+–+–+

Ed’s piece:

Quoth the vultures “Evermore.”

On the short roof outside the bedroom window, two black vultures sit, staring in.  They have come to remind me of something.  I put my book down and peer back at these strange looking creatures. The book: Our War: What We Did in Vietnam And What It Did to Us by David Harris.  I had read it when it was first published in 1996 and it has stuck with me, as has the utterly savage U.S. war against Vietnam that killed so many millions, what the Vietnamese call The American War.

I am of the same generation as Harris, the courageous draft resister and anti-war campaigner who died on February 6.  Like him, many of us who were of draft age then have never been able to extricate the horror of that war from our minds.  Most, I suppose, but surely not those who went to Vietnam to fight, just moved on and allowed the war to disappear from their consciousness as they perhaps tried to think of it as a “mistake” and to live as if all the constant American wars since weren’t happening.  As for the young, the war against Vietnam is ancient history, and if they learned anything about it in school, it was erroneous for sure, a continuation of the lie.

But it was no mistake; it was an intentional genocidal war waged to torture, kill, and maim as many Vietnamese as possible and to use drafted (enslaved) American boys to do the killing and suffer the consequences.  It’s Phoenix Program, the CIA’s assassination and torture operation, became the template for Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, CIA black sites, hybrid wars, terrorist actions, etc. up to today.  Harris writes:

[that] . . . . “calling the war a mistake is the fundamental equivalent of calling water wet or dirt dirty. . . . Let us not lose sight of what really happened.  In this particular ‘mistake,’ at least 3 million people died, only 58,000 of whom were Americans.  These 3 million people died crushed in the mud, riddled with shrapnel, hurled out of helicopters, impaled on sharpened bamboo, obliterated in carpets of explosives dropped from bombers flying so high they could only be heard and never seen; they died reduced to chunks by one or more land mines, finished off by a round through the temple or a bayonet through the throat, consumed by sizzling phosphorous, burned alive by jellied gasoline, strung up by their thumps, starved in cages, executed after watching their babies die, trapped on the barbed wire calling for their mothers.  They died while trying to kill, they died while trying to kill no one, they died heroes, they died villains, they died at random, they died most often when someone who had no idea who they were killed them under the orders of who had even less idea than that.

That’s the truth.  Unvarnished.  But such historical truth hurts to consider, for it reminds us that the belief in the U.S.A.’s good intentions is a delusion. The war against Vietnam was immoral, but even that word fails to grasp it.  Pure evil is truer.  And to consider that war on military terms alone, one must accept the fact the U.S. lost the war despite all its military technology.

Time, that truly mysterious bird, forces us back to the past as it perpetually opens to the future – all in the meditative present.  I look out the window and think how each of us lives in the time circles of our days, morning till night and then the same again and again as these small carousels carry us like arrows to the day time runs out for us. Time is a circle and an arrow within a circle and . . . pure mystery. It encloses us. And when we are gone, as is dear David Harris, the circle game goes on and on as yesterday’s wars are resurrected today.  An unbroken circle of human madness.  Yet many carry on in hope because conscience calls.  And now is all the time we have.

I am writing this on Ash Wednesday, the day Christians begin Lent and take ashes on our foreheads to remind us of our mortality – dust to dust.  Six weeks later comes Easter, the Resurrection from the dead, the day of hope.  Six circular weeks celebrated every spring within the circle of every year on a calendar that moves straight ahead with the clicking of the numbers.  Death, hope, and resurrection, even as history suggests it is hopeless to stop wars. That the vultures always triumph.  Yet many carry it on in hope because conscience calls.  And all time is now.

Yes, I look out and the vultures’ gaze reduces me to a cataleptic state for a few moments. Then the thought of David Harris and his book on the table transports me back to the past, while my vulture visitors mouth the words “Evermore, Evermore” to remind me that the same war vultures are here now and are eager for prey in the future.  They devour the dead.  They have never left, just as the truth about the U.S. war against Vietnam has not, if one allows it to sink in. It is a lesson not too late for the learning, for the United States warfare state has continued to wage wars all around the world.  None are mistakes.  It would be a terrible mistake to think so.

Cuba, Iraq, Serbia, Nicaragua, Libya, Syria, Palestine, Chile, Indonesia, China, Afghanistan, Philippines, Yemen, Somalia, Russia via Ukraine, etc. – all intentional and all based on lies.  It’s the American Way, just as it was for Vietnam.

Quoth the vultures “Evermore.”

Like David Harris, I refused to go to the war but the war came to me.  When I became a conscientious objector from the Marines, I avoided killing Vietnamese but their killing by my countrymen has haunted me to this day. Unlike David, who was far more courageous than I, I didn’t go to prison, although I was prepared to do so. But I learned then, and have never forgotten, that my country is controlled by blood-thirsty vultures.

Flying back in time, I remember a conversation I had with a friend on the plane to Marine boot camp at Parris Island, that infamous torture chamber in South Carolina where boys are made into professional killers.  I told him how confused I was since I hadn’t been raised to kill people.  Actually the opposite.  As a good Catholic boy, I was taught to love others, not to kill them.  No one I knew ever said they saw a contradiction.  Yet here I was going to do that.  It was insane.  I kept conflating the slogan “The Marines Build Men: Body, Mind, and Spirit” with the advertising jingle I grew up hearing from the New York Yankees’ announcer, Mel Allen, who would intone the sponsor’s (Ballantine Beer) slogan: remember fans “The Three Ring Sign: Purity, Body, and Flavor – So Ask the Man for Ballantine.”  Then there was the Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost: let us pray; men built by the Marines; purity and impurity, body, God’s body, bodies denied and maimed, killing other bodies, “In the Name of the Father and the Son and… “  It all felt so bizarre and my mind was a confused whirligig of contradictions.  What the hell was I doing on that plane, I thought.  Whose life was it anyway?

October 6, 1966.  Zippo Squads on CBS News, setting fire to peasant huts in Vietnam.  When I was younger, a Zippo lighter seemed so cool and manly.  Silvery and clicky, a cigarette in the corner of my mouth.  A real tough guy.  John Wayne or Humphrey Bogart.

These boys were on a flatbed truck with their plastic guns as they
presented themselves at a Veterans Day Parade

in Albany, Oregon in 1991. This parade was a few months after the U.S.
Military won Gulf War I, otherwise know as “Desert

Storm.” The people at the parade were overwhelmed with joy that the U.S.
had “ won ” another war. Little did they know

that the war was a slaughter. Like Viet Nam, the U.S. War Machine went
berserk with their systematic killing and

destroying infrastructure. Every time you buy a boy a war toy, you
trample his soul. In the film “ All Quiet On The

Western Front,” the key word in this title for me is the word, “ Quiet.”
Soldiers stayed quiet about the horrors of war, as

they were too traumatized to talk about it. The truth is never passed
down to the next generation. When it comes

their time to go to war, they are a patriotic blank slate. The
entertainment of violence in the United States is a

malignant disease. When boys come home from war, they stop growing
emotionally. PTSD is a state of being in

which the emotions have failed to grow to the stature of the intellect.
Without help, it is a slow death sentence.

—Mike Hastie

Memories.  That’s what vultures can do.  One look and you are gone.

In the 1960s, things were simpler.  Although there were many newspapers then, and people read much more, it was television with its few major networks that fixated people.  Unlike today – when there is no military draft, the realities of U.S. wars are hidden from television viewers, and the internet is regularly scrubbed of the grizzly truth of our wars – in the 1960s, bloody images from Vietnam became a staple of the evening news shows.  Harris writes:

We must not forget: it was a more simpleminded age, the information superhighway was still a deer trail, and network television was taken as reality, giving the folks back home a vivid, utterly riveting look at what some of their boys were going through, a kind of visceral access available to no previous generation of Americans.

To accompany those sights and sounds, the folks back home were also given a running explanation of what was going on from their government. And the latter created the war’s second front.  Unprecedented visibility ensured that in this war, the government fought one war in the paddies against its NLF and North Vietnamese adversaries and another over the U.S. airwaves, trying to put the appropriate spin on events and convince America that there really was some important reason for going through all this. There wasn’t enough political support for the war to do otherwise, and television had too much impact. The obvious consequence was that Lyndon Johnson and then Richard Nixon spent a good deal of their energy playing to the cameras, just trying to make the war look like what America thought its wars should look like.

More simpleminded it may have been, but that so-called simplemindedness together with the visual imagery from Vietnam – despite all the government propaganda – did help turn many people against the war despite Nixon’s ruthless ability to keep it running so long.

Everything is different today, except for the propaganda and the wars.  A look back to Vietnam is crucial for understanding what’s happening now, for it makes absolutely clear that the U.S. government has no compunction about killing millions of innocent people for its evil ends, whatever they may be.

Then, it would destroy a village in order to save it; today, it will destroy the world in order to save it.  It is the logic of madmen in the grip of evil beyond description. Yet most people repress the thought that nuclear war is very close.

All the mainstream media headlines about Ukraine echo the U.S. propaganda about the American War against Vietnam.  Just substitute the word Russian for National Liberation Front or Viet Cong.  They are suffering extraordinary casualties.  The tide is turning.  “The enemy was being taught the hard way,” writes Harris, “that aggression does not pay.  We were steadily destroying their capacity to fight . . . . Victory was just around the corner.”

It’s easy to laugh at the parallels until a vulture comes calling.  The seeming unreality of their visitation is only equaled by the delusional nature of what passes for news today.

Quoth the Vultures “Evermore.”

David Harris was right about the 1960s when he said, “All that craziness had compromised the nation’s epistemology, rendering our accustomed patterns of knowing dysfunctional.”  This is true a thousand times over today.  If the ‘60s were simpler times, the digital internet revolution and AI have scrambled many people’s minds into a morass perfectly suited for today’s government lies.  “Not only was it hard to know what was really going on,” he writes of Vietnam, “but it was even hard to know how we would know what was really going on if we stumbled over it.”

Then came a shocking surprise: the Tet Offensive that began on January 31, 1968 when everything became quite clear.  This massive attack by the NFL and VC was “the mother of all such epiphanies.”  All official lies were exposed and any prominent dissenter to these lies about the war had to be eliminated, thus Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated in quick order by the government that would go on for seven more years to wage its genocidal war against the Vietnamese and neighboring Cambodia and Laos.

That was long ago and far away, but it’s worth contemplating.  No one knows what exactly is around the corner in Ukraine.  But then, I didn’t expect two vultures to visit me with their warning.

I’m just passing on their message.  Epiphanies happen.  But so do cataclysms.

All time is now.

Although David Harris has died, he and the many others, such as Randy Kehler,  who were caged in federal prisons for resisting the draft and opposing the war against Vietnam, live on to inspire us to believe that if we resist the warmongers, someday all free birds might chant in unison “Nevermore.”

Here’s their story, a revelatory film about David and those who refused the siren song of evil: The Boys Who Said No

True patriots.

My piece on Mike —

Feds sprayed chemicals into the eyes of a retired ER nurse and veteran

Sure, greenwashing is what Jay called it a long time ago: Greenwashing was first coined in the 1980s by environmentalist Jay Westerveld. The term was in reference to a hotel policy about reusing towels in order to “save the environment,” but in reality, it was just a policy aimed at customers’ environmental sensibilities to reduce laundry costs.

Source: Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries

I was calling this green washing many terms, variations on the theme of greenwashing, such as green-scamming, green-sheening, and eco-porn. Here, a 1992 article, man:

Eco-pornography is the advertising of a product as “environmentally friendly,” when in fact, some unmentioned aspect of the product (or its production and distribution) has notably deleterious effects on the environment. Ecological impact is such a difficult thing to define in terms of the processes of production (as further discussed below), one is hesitant to single out specific corporations as ecopomographers, lest they be unfairly vilified, but it might be informative to mention some egregious examples of false environmental advertising.

According to Bob Garfield, ad critic for Advertising Age Weekly, the most offensive environmental advertisement “is a General Motors corporate ad in which [the company is] congratulating America for 20 years of environmental progress. After spending three decades doing everything in [its] power to weaken, inhibit, and delay environmental legislation…,” this ad is arguably misleading. General Motors is not the only auto manufacturer guilty of greenwash. Adweek chose a Toyota commercial in
which a young woman lauds recycling and her Toyota in the same breath, as one of the worst advertisements of 1990. Said Adweek, “The only Earth-minded tie-in…is the woman’s declaration that, until she can save the world, she’ll buy a Tercel and save money.” (source)

This all seems pretty mild, some 32 years later. It is the driving concept of an Al Gore in his 10,000 square foot mansion flying around the world in private jets, going to Davos and the World Economic Forum and COP#Infinity, lecturing us, we the people, on why Styrofoam and regular lightbulbs are bad bad bad. Well, darn, he has several mansions, one in Tennessee and then one in California: Al Gore’s California home consumes more electricity in 1 year than the average US family uses in 21 years.

Now that’s some eco-porn, man. It’s THAT finger, man, you all know it: from cops to teachers, to city council persons to DMV workers, that FINGER.

Man, Liz Warren, another pornographer —

Elizabeth Warren believes that strengthening the “effectiveness” of the U.S. military is consistent with the Green New Deal. Her bill doesn’t demand that the U.S. military be reduced in size or scale.Nor does it mention that the U.S. military is the world’s largest polluter  and user of oil and fossil fuels. Instead of turning the Green New Deal into concrete policy, Warren has placed her attention on renovating the one thousand U.S. military bases that exist domestically and abroad. The so-called “policy wonk” of the 2020 elections appears to be more concerned with creating “green” bombs than a “green economy.”

The U.S. drops a bomb on another nation every twelve minutes . It is no wonder that U.S. military, which serves as the armed body of the state responsible for protecting the interests of Wall Street, fossil fuel corporations, military contractors, and monopolies of all kinds, is treated as a trophy by all sections of the U.S. political class. The U.S. military embodies American exceptionalism claiming to spread democracy and freedom to lands near and far. Holidays such as Memorial Day and Veterans Day are designed to remind Americans of all races and classes that the U.S. is exceptional because of its large military footprint. Instead of seeing this footprint as bombs, sanctions, or deadly raids, Democrat and Republican politicians alike believe that the U.S. military permanently signifies American greatness. (source)

Green bombs, man, and cleaner jet fuel for bombers. That’s the green deal, the eco-porn at its height? Though we have more, as in the figure of the actual “Greens” of Germany:

A motion seeking a ceasefire in Ukraine and another opposing the supply of heavy weapons to Kiev were overwhelmingly rejected by delegates. Green Member of the European Parliament, Sergey Lagodinsky, lambasted the argument of one delegate who warned that Europe would be wiped out after the first nuclear bomb dropped, saying that Ukrainians “cannot defend themselves with sunflowers.”

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock vehemently advocated the delivery of more weapons and heavy battle tanks to Ukraine. “We support Ukraine, not despite the fact that we are a party of peace and human rights, but because we are a party of peace and human rights,” she stated to justify her advocacy of war.

Party leader Ricarda Lang supported her, saying, “I am convinced we have to deliver more weapons, we have to react faster. The time for hesitation is over.”

Well well, recall how Germany “got rid of” coal and smelting and all of that carbon polluting fun stuff. It’s called offshoring your carbon footprint. All those Southern Hemisphere nations (and Russia) do all the cooking, blasting, mining, milling, and welding of Germany’s fancy bridges and highrises. This is Anna:

Now that is real eco-pornography. Not to the max, but really, this is what the greening of the world means — flights to Ukraine, trillions dumped into weapons, trillions put into satellite, trillions here and trillions there, now that is green pimping to the max. You know, keeping the bankers safe with those diesel and gasoline powered metal and titanium battle tanks, missile launchers, helicopters, jets.

Now here is some real violent eco-porn. Just the headline is triggering. A warning: “Green New Army? NATO Wants Eco-Friendly Tanks — NATO’s tanks may be getting solar panels.” (sources sources)

We get the triple pornography, right, as the USA, the US military, occupies one-third of Syria and steals the oil. Now that is icing on the pornography cake. “The United States forces present in Syrian territory without the consent of the government or the approval of the United Nations, today looted a new batch of oil and transferred it to Iraq.” (source)

Man, I am feeling the green in that raping of a country’s resources. And those hootches above, with solar panels? Nah, not any for Haiti, or Syria or Turkey:

Sure, this rant was precipitated by an article from a real “legit” source, Yale 360 Enviornment. Title: “As Millions of Solar Panels Age Out, Recyclers Hope to Cash In.” The entire green pornography has captured the EU, Canada, USA, other outfits of empire until we have the lunacy of solar panels galore, but with the unintended (nah, very intended, very predictable) consequences of unfettered capitalism pushing the dirty panels (check out the lifecycle and embedded energy and external costs of that solar panel — again, stuff has to be mined, moved, milled, smelted, cooked, chemicalize, and shipped AND then, darn, into the landfills they go after 25 years of use) into the entire eco-pornography game.

Next, the panels are ground, shredded, and subjected to a patented process that extracts the valuable materials — mostly silver, copper, and crystalline silicon. Those components will be sold, as will the lower-value aluminum and glass, which may even end up in the next generation of solar panels.

This process offers a glimpse of what could happen to an expected surge of retired solar panels that will stream from an industry that represents the fastest-growing source of energy in the U.S. Today, roughly 90 percent of panels in the U.S. that have lost their efficiency due to age, or that are defective, end up in landfills because that option costs a fraction of recycling them.

You see the trifecta here of green porn? Selling panels as a panacea, of course, that means SELLING (profitting from the so-callled “helping the planet’s climate heating”) the goods, mining the minerals and then, yep, they have an end life cycle, and instead of mandating recycling them and making better and longer (durable) solar panels, it’s let the market pimp, prosttitute, steal, hoard, tax, fine, certify. ALL for profit. What could go wrong, no, profitting from green washing?

Again, the word “value” comes into play with eco-pornography: By 2050, the value of raw materials recoverable from solar panels could exceed $15 billion.

It gets wonky, this LCA just for ONE type of photo-voltaic panel: “Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of perovskite PV cells projected from lab to fab” Ah, note that this is only to the fabrication level. Not all the embedded energy and expelled energy to mine, smelt, move, chemicalize, produce, move, install, AND then uninstall and then either throw away or “recycle.” No cradle to cradle shit here.

Like I said, wonky: “cradle to gate” is yet more of this eco-pornography terminology.

Perovskite photovoltaic cells (PVs) have attracted significant worldwide attention in the past few years. Although the stability of the power conversion is a concern, there is great potential for perovskites to enter the global PV market. To determine the future potential of perovskites, we performed a cradle-to-gate environmental life cycle (LCA) for two different perovskite device structures suitable for low cost manufacturing. Rather than examining current laboratory deposition processes like dipping and spinning, we considered spray and co-evaporation methods that are more amenable to manufacturing. A structure with an inorganic hole transport layer (HTL) was developed for both solution and vacuum based processes, and an HTL-free structure with printed with back contact was modeled for solution based deposition. The environmental impact of conventional Si PV technology was used as a reference point. The environmental impacts from manufacturing of perovskite solar cells were lower than that of mono-Si. However, environmental impacts from unit electricity generated were higher than all commercial PV technology mainly because of the shorter lifetime of perovskite solar cell. The HTL-free perovskite generally had the lowest environmental impacts among the three structures studied. Solution based methods used in perovskite deposition were observed to decrease the overall electricity consumption. Organic materials used for preparing the precursors for perovskite deposition were found to cause a high marine eutrophication impact. Surprisingly, the toxicity impacts of the lead used in the formation of the absorber layer were found to be negligible. Energy payback times were estimated as 1.0–1.5 years.

So for the average greenie, well, this stuff is WAY beyond their “green washing wet behind the ears” knowledge base: “Deposition Process – The PLD process involves the use of high-power laser energy focused on a target to evaporate its surface in vacuum or different low-pressure ambient gas. From: Laser Surface Modification of Biomaterials, 2016

The pornography is also in the rhetoric, the motivations of technologists, technocrats, scientists, the lot of them working on these highly technical projects. It is driven by the bizarrely human quest to see if we can do it mentality. That quest is of course driven by profit motives. Not so much about saving the world.

Dystopia is the end product of having billionaires and collective lobbies of Eichmann’s and Mengele’s and Edward Bernay’s and Tom Friedman’s rule the world, as Top Dog Green Pimps but also Top Green Bordella Owners.

Look how superficial this marketing crap is — “raw materials”. What’s the energy, cultural, economic, and societal outlay for that?

The most commonly used photovoltaics consist of monocrystalline or multicrystalline silicon.  The main negative environmental impact of these panels comes from the production phase and include:

• The energy consumed during production of the panels and the emissions released during production
• Water consumption
• The release of some hazardous byproducts [18].

The environmentally relevant substances released during the production phase of silicon solar panels are fluorine, chlorine, nitrate, isopropanol, SO2, CO2 and respirable silica particles and solvents.

However, over the course of their lifetime, crystalline solar panels generate 9-17 times the energy used to produce them, depending on their placement and efficiency.  Also, depending on the type of PV technology, the clean energy pay back takes place in one to four years.  Once in place, solar systems using photovoltaics are 100% emissions free.  The production of 1,000 kWh of solar electricity reduces emissions by nearly 8 pounds of sulfur dioxide, 5 pounds of nitrogen oxides, and more than 1,400 pounds of carbon dioxide. (follow the money, the financing, the banking, the investing, the scamming of government-taxpayer funds)

Talk about some slick green porn? So all that renewable energy just comes from heaven. Those dams, those solar panels, those wind turbines, all the wires, plastics, rubbers, strategic metals, transportation, MINING. Ccomes from Green Heaven! Whew!

You want to get wonky? I’ve written about this before — the single use shopping bag legislation/laws. The reality is that paper bags are bad bad bad. And, in reality, the single use bags, if used properly, go into a small gabage pail in the house, and many are used as bags for produce in the fridge and for poop/cat liter. Triple reuse power of the bag. Again, unintended consequences. Countless millions of lifetime hours spent just one aspect of greening the economy:

Summary and recommendations The authors are satisfied that they have achieved their goal to provide a comparative assertion among the six types of grocery carrier bags included in the report based on their respective potential environmental impacts. The carrier bags selected were those in most common use in the United States and the underlying data were, as far as is possible, based on United States data.

Our results are based on a study of twelve environmental impact categories. Our results show that reusable LDPE and NWPP bags will have lower average impacts on the environment compared to PRBs if the reusable bags are reused for a sufficient number of grocery shopping trips. However, according to a recent national survey, a majority of consumers do not reuse their reusable bags for this sufficient number of trips, especially for LDPE bags. Moreover, 40% of people forget to bring their reusable bags with them to the store and half the people who prefer NWPP bags used PRBs at their most recent shopping trip. In addition, only 15% of people follow the recommended cleaning procedures to ensure safe use of reusable bags.

Our results also show that Paper bags, even with 100% recycle content, have significantly higher average impacts on the environment than either of the reusable bags or PRBs. Many of the regulations now in place or being considered in the United States encourage consumers to use reusable bags through banning PRBs and imposing a fee on the use of Paper bags. (Californians Against Waste, 2013) (Florida Department of Environmental Protection, 2013) A number of grocery chains in non-legislated areas provide Paper bags and sell various reusable bags. Our results in this study show that these regulations and policies may result in negative impact on the environment rather than positive.

Even though Paper bags come from a renewable resource and are easily recycled, it is likely that they are not the best environmental choice. Reusable bags should only be preferred if consumers are educated to use them safely and consistently, and reuse them enough times to lower their relative environmental impacts compared to PRB alternatives.

Our recommendation, based on our work in this study, is that consumers should be given a choice between reusable bags and PRBs and that any of these should be preferred over Paper bags. Most important is that much more attention should be focused on educating consumers to make an informed choice of which bags to use by providing them facts—facts about reusable bag use, facts about proper recycling or disposal of PRBs, facts about the potential environmental impacts of their choices—based on sound scientific evidence. (check it out — 194 pages just for the PRB — plastic retail bag)

I was a sustainability director for a community college in Spokane, the first in the town with several colleges as anchors there. I did a lot of fairs, talks, teach-ins; I had famous authors come into town to speak, to be on my radio show, and I featured many in my articles for the weekly newspaper and the monthly magazine and a blog with the daily newspaper.

Yeah, I was skeptical of all the rah-rah, and I was lambasted for putting down COPs and Gore and Obama and the so-called new green deal. I even was trained in sustainability education and monitoring. American Planning Association:

When I was in Vancouver, for the Summer Institute for Sustainable education, I was the ONLY person questioning the motives of big outfits like Unilever and Proctor and Gamble and others tied to this “sustainability” initiative. I like being in that position, the outsider, the questioner, ebut really, there can be sort of an emptiness in being around these people at universities, especially the University of British Columbia. I talked to mayors, planners, business leaders, and others who were hyper glassy eyed about sustainability — Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Investing.

Green washing, green pornography, green sheening, and now, green hushing: A trend known as “green hushing” is growing as companies are increasingly choosing not to publicise details of their climate targets in an attempt to avoid scrutiny and allegations of greenwashing, a new study showed. This of course is a double whammy:

“If green hushing becomes a trend, it will make inspiring some of the climate laggards even harder,” she said. “As long as companies are transparent about their progress, and communicate that in a transparent way, then they can’t go wrong.”

The reality is that this is triple-green washing, almost coming back as the dirtiest game in town — killing people: “Why the New Deal for Nature is a disaster for people and planet”

The conservation industry says 2020 is its “super year.”[1] It wants to set aside thirty percent of the globe for wildlife, and divert billions of dollars away from reducing climate change and into “natural climate solutions.”[2] This would be a disaster for people and planet. Conservation was founded in the racist ideology of 1860s USA but it committed thirty years ago to becoming people-friendly. It hasn’t happened. There will be more promises now, if only to placate critics and funders like the U.S. and German governments, and the European Commission, which are paying for conservation’s land theft, murder and torture.[3] More promises will be meaningless. No more public money should go for “Protected Areas” until the conservation bodies recognize their crimes, get rid of those responsible, and hand stolen lands back, with compensation. Conservation NGOs must also stop cozying up to mining, logging, oil, and plantation companies.

And it only gets worse, much worse. Reading articles and watching videos from Alison’s “Wrench in the Gears” can take us all to a more nano-level of the green washing to the max concept, as in profits on data, on wearables, on digital dungeons. Here’s a recent one, but go backwards and catch up on that entire investing and AI-VR-AR scheme: “God’s Eye View Part 6 – Every Man Thus Lives By Exchanging“

You will get very few people going into these weeds:

Based on what I am seeing in the Web3 space, I’m picturing a new NGO culture emerging in which Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), with a pretense of tokenized cooperative governance, manage legions of platform laborers all tied to ledgers and wearable tech. Algorithms weigh individual needs against those of the collective and mete out payments for digital public goods production. Officials, whether they understand it or not, are setting citizens up to become precarious impact commodities for high frequency options trading. One hand washes the other as the masses are made to power the matrix and build out digital empire. Everyone plays their assigned role in the spectacle advancing the plot without wrapping their minds around the game they’re in or comprehending what the stakes are. (McDowell)

More weeds? Silicon Icarus:

Here, a typical piece: “Programmable Freedom – Smart Contracts, Blockchain and the Holy Grail of Central Banking” Let’s call this digital green washing:

The unification of traditional finance and so-called ‘Decentralized Autonomous Organizations’ propels the evolution of legal abstractions to digital standards. These standards, along with their legal counterparts, form the infrastructure for the large-scale control of society through impact finance, revamped educational credentials, digital health records, fake environmentalism, geo-fencing, smart cities, internet-enabled nanotechnology and all of the other crazy ‘use cases’ such technology makes possible. The move towards robust CBDC networks by central banks all over the world, provides even more momentum to this future. (source)

Yikes, I am going deeper and deeper off-topic, except it really isn’t off topic. It’s all about “who makes the money, who controls the food, who controls the data, who controls the ants/prols/Us?”

Elites, man, rubbing elbows with technocrats and coders and geniuses: From Wrench in the Gears:

Adam Smith opens his “Wealth of Nations” with a story of the efficiencies created in a pin factory where workers were assigned discrete tasks along the production line, the division of labor expanded production netting significant profits for the factory owner. Later, in chapter four, Smith writes, “Every man thus lives by exchanging,” a quote inscribed on one side of a luxurious bronze gas lamp located in the atrium just outside the Debate Room at Old Parkland in Dallas, the city’s most elite corporate address. 

Building off energy futures trading, the Dallas old guard is making its move to set up markets in human capital management, led by the Commit! Partnership with Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan standing in the shadows. That lamp stands opposite an elaborately carved portico topped by a large gilded owl. On either side are four paintings. The upper tier shows Watson and Crick and their DNA model on the one side and on the other side Steve Jobs with an orange Apple desktop showing the Pixar movie “Up.” Below is FDR and Eisenhower on one side and Churchill and Truman on the other. What this says to me is that we’re being pulled into a new “war,” a war on consciousness and human agency even as we are being told mythic stories about scientific progress.

Yikes! Thanks Alison!

The last couple of generations has amply demonstrated that meetings of corporate heads, NGOs, politicians, and celebrities are not going to solve the crises of climate and biodiversity. Those attending are amongst the major contributors to the problems, and least willing to accept any change which might threaten their position. They argue over statements that no one actually applies, or even intends to, and which are replete with clauses ensuring “business as usual.” The meetings and declarations attract an enormous media circus, but are akin to the emperor’s workshop, with hundreds of tailors busily cutting suits of such rarefied material that they don’t cover his nakedness. (source)

Cory Morningstar, investigative journalist and environmental activist explains how the Green New Deal for Nature was created by the UN in 2009 to monetise nature and create economic growth, Cory points us to build local resistance, to build strong alliances and to protect our lands, waters and communities with No Deal for Nature.