There’s so much to unpack when it comes to propaganda propagating a society, or in this case, the collective west, that is collectively insane. Amazing is not really the operative word, since there are so many allusions to “good Germans” throughout the collective west, even before Hitler and Bernays and Goebbels and hasbara.

We’ll get to the Covid test in a minute, but the idea of exacting image management and agnotology and black is white, lies are truth mentality has taken off with algorithms and censoring and the onslaught of Google and Deep State and Corporate State seeding the world with a system of dumbdowning by a 1,000,000,000 managed internet hits and mass hysteria.

Zelenskyy has been using 3D imagery to deliver speeches all over the world by using a hologram.

Zelenskyy’s “participation” in world events using a hologram has been reported by several renowned media outlets, as can be seen below.

A hologram is created through holography, a photographic technique which records the light scattered from an object and displays it three-dimensionally.

Images, and the Mass Incarceration Media Management Show:

Oh, these image management boys and girls:

It’s taken off like gangbusters with the few and the mighty controlling 90 percent of “media,” i.e. publishing (including k12 books) and radio and TV and cable and the Holly-Dirt manufacturers of lies, half-truths, multimillionaire thespians who end up acting in politics. All the world’s a stage for coiffing the reality of the poor masses, us, we useless eaters-breeders-breathers-shitters.

Then, with this total absorption of Hollywood images, the marketing ploys, the perceived, planned, hoped for complete transition from citizens to consumers to data zombies to useless to nobodies, we can have this sort of audacity, in my local rag. All full-page rainbow colors and all:

Imagine that, driving in Newport, while seeing all those employee solicitations plastered up on the local Burger King and Pizza Hut billboards, seeking drive-thru help or pizza dough assistants, for $16 an hour plus signing on bonuses and a 30 percent discount on fat, salt and sugar, man.

I’m not sure what the Burger King/Pizza Hut Covidian Madness Requirements are for those teens or Baby Boomers lining up for this gig, to actually get hired with background checks, drug checks, and vax checks, but I know the school district requires SARS-CoV2 experimental jabs, and CDC proof of it, to walk the halls of the school or help those kids on the teether ball court.

Note, the hourly wage for substitutes has been set by a staffing agency working hand in glove with the district — $14.07 an hour. When I was substituting, well, I’d get $18 an hour, and that included pay for a full day if I pinch-hit a couple hours after the morning bell rang. That was $140 for six hours work! Not anymore!

I’d meet the school secretary, get signed in, and then that was it —  look at the absent teacher’s notes for the day and then greet the 3rd graders and the math classes in the high schools, music room sub, or special education sub. Even PE and even all sorts of classes K12.  Now, the poor souls getting $14 an hour have to jump through the staffing agency hoop, a company out of Tennessee:

And this another aspect of the smoke and mirrors game of Western Society — the staffing agencies, the middlemen and middlewomen just making bank by adding on to all the daily costs of living, of surviving, with their powerful Salesforce apps and servers, all of that, taking over teaching, for the time being, until it all goes on-line, in home “learning”:

Over the last 22 years, we have innovated education staffing to provide dynamic solutions to school districts and professional opportunities to passionate educators. Our team serves over 4.5 million students with a pool of 80,000 substitute and permanent employees throughout 33 states. Internally, the ESS team is comprised of 650 individuals with a passion for education working together to ensure our 900 partner districts experience valuable education every day.

This is the big rip-off, the taxpayers’ spending trillions over the years to establish/prop up public education, schools, busses, college prep programs, all those state colleges and junior colleges, all those school districts throughout the land, so that one day the PT Barnum’s of the world can come in and swoop up and take some munches out of that public-private partnership bs.

I have never seen journalists question this rip-off scheme because, a, journalism has always been on life-support, always there as a town barker and nice guy in the business story realm, and, b, because “going deep” journalistically means going deeper into how immersive the rip-off schemes are in U$A.

I’ve written about my bad times here in Lincoln County, about the spinelessness of ESS, and, well, each criticism of these systems puts another nail into my useless eater-breather-shitter life:

Again, I think the biggest question in maybe in economics and politics of the coming decades will be what to do with all these useless people?

The problem is more boredom and how what to do with them and how will they find some sense of meaning in life, when they are basically meaningless, worthless?

My best guess, at present is a combination of drugs and computer games as a solution for [most]. It’s already happening…

I think once you’re superfluous, you don’t have power.

– from a TRANSCRIPT at Rielpolitic Alexandra Bruce, “Brave New World: Yuval Noah Harari asks, “What to do with all these useless people?”

Harari goes on to outline a transhumanist vision of the future in which brain-computer interfaces make our footedness in the material world obsolete, human relationships become meaningless due to artificial substitutes, and the poor die but the rich don’t.

Wesley J. Smith points out:

Transhumanism, boiled down to its bones, is pure eugenics. It calls itself “H+,” for more or better than human. Which, of course, is what eugenics is all about.

Alarmingly, transhumanist values are being embraced at the highest strata of society, including in Big Tech, in universities, and among the Davos crowd of globalist would-be technocrats. That being so, it is worth listening in to what they are saying under the theory that forewarned is forearmed.

“Transhumanism is pure eugenics” at Evolution News, April 27, 2022

Big issues, no, for the 21st Century of Fourth Industrial Revolution, Web 3.0, Social Impact Bonds, pay for success, blockchains, twinning, and so-so much more that the average gumshoe journalist just can’t dig deep because it will upset the entire playing field they so badly need to get a sense of sanity from the insane. But reporting on insanity is what we need in a time of Transhumanism and Covidian Cults?

Try this out for size:

When you enter the “invest in kids bonds” door knowing there are plans to create asset-backed securities in toddlers and trade them (and perhaps short them) on global markets, the single-minded interrogation of cryptocurrency exchanges and NFT rip-offs feels woefully inadequate. If the stakes weren’t so high, it might be amusing to watch folks who’ve been swimming in the shark-infested waters of financial derivatives for years point fingers decrying crypto-Ponzi-schemers. Calls for better regulation and professed empathy for those who lost their savings to fraudulent digital money schemes ring a bit hollow once you realize many of the panelists’ livelihoods are intertwined with the same financial interests, journalism outlets, and think tanks that were enmeshed in the crash of the global economy via toxic-real estate debt products. These are the same folks who are now in the process of developing the risk modeling, tokenomics, and APIs needed to run the smart “Ricardian” contract, “sustainably resilient,” open-air prison. — Alison McDowell, Wrench in the Gears

“What Stage Are We On? Immersive Storytelling, Hegelian Dialectic, and Crypto-Spectacle”

Read what the billionaire class and the techno gurus are after, and it’s data, man, tracking us, every blink, twitch, hiccup, burp, step, defecation as well as every purchase, every debt, every desire, to create the ultimate robotics, AI. It’s universal basic chump income blathering, man, and it is that World Economic Forum adage on steroids: “You’ll own nothing but be happy.”

Go here, too, for more:

So, as a real journalist, I have experienced that old time religion of lack of bandwidth, lack of humane reporting, the lack of looking at many sides, and coming out the other end of a story with, well, some solutions that are not the black-and-white game of divide and conquer. False balance, equivocation, relying on diploma-ed and credentialed sources, fear of litigation, the whole nine yards of mainstream journalism requiring an inverted triangle of information, i.e., the lede and important stuff at the top, and the superfluous and unimportant stuff (sic) at the bottom. Of course, it is the stuff at the bottom that IS important.

Case in point: I did the story on 13 Salvadorans found dead in the Organ Pipe National Monument along the US-Mexico border. Newspaperman. Yeah, the hurly burly of all those cops, helicopters, forensics wagons, and a young reporter who happened to have friends working with refugees of El Salvador (and Chile and Guatemala) and who actually did some assistance with the so-called underground railroad. You know, assistance that would have gotten me fired and banned from journalism, even got me arrested, as in, well, helping undocumented folk get from point a to point be in my pick-up truck.

When the grisly scene came into play, and with my background in that work, of course I got a hold of some folk working to assist those coming into the USA for sanctuary and political asylum. Of course, I knew a few academics and authors who had been writing about the dirty schemes of the Salvadoran government, businesses, military and police who were exacting hell on common people, on farmers, and on labor unionists with the material support and intellectual help of USA!

That bottom-of-the-inverted triangle “stuff” was fought over, parsed, edited out, and eventually cut, as the newspapers I worked for was all about the facts, ma’am, if it bleeds, it leads, just get the information from the officials on the spot.

You know, don’t upset the local readers, don’t go into “that” political stuff, and don’t bring in guys and gals from universities all the way from Cochise County, Arizona, to Chicago in your stories?

That was in the early 1980s.

It’s gotten worse. And, I have found over the years that journalists are intimidated by or enamored by the scientists, the reef biologists, the astrophysicists, the dudes and gals mixing up the chemicals, designing the motherboards, and trading derivatives.

Journalists are also tone deaf to history, to backgrounding, and, alas, if the motherships are New York Times and Washington Post and another dozen or so papers sprinkled around the U$A, then that modelling has what has tainted the media, The Press.

How disturbing it is to see the fornication of corporations and media, how disgusting it is to see what is and is not off limits in the reportage arena.

Source: Sheepdog Bernie Sanders site!

Then, in book publishing? Fewer and fewer books of importance.

This prefatory bit I’m etching in hyperbole before introducing a piece on how the “left” failed the Covid reporting test big time is my angst, for sure, and my ability to see the big picture(s), even if they are holograms and 4 D chessboards in the entire propaganda game. Systems thinking, and while much about capitalism is boorish and raw and just plain usury and scamming and parasitic, there are some complicated and very technical aspects of how finance is moving into your local community, your neighborhood, your lives. BlackRock? Who controls the world?

CEO Larry Fink built a shadow government of former agency officials in a bid to become Hillary Clinton’s Treasury secretary. That didn’t stop Fink from becoming part of the main private-sector advisory organization to Donald Trump until that panel disbanded after Charlottesville.

Alas, though, we’d expect that non-legacy journalists, or those who were once in the Mainstream who are now leftist, supposed anti-monopoly, anti-corporation, skeptical beyond skeptical of any governmental narrative reporters, that they would have peeled back the onion peels on this SARS-CoV2 bioweapon, and then question the funny juiced-up cocktails that we call the mRNA jab.

You’d think that the censoring of doctors, scientists, just plain deep thinkers and activists on the lockdowns, the mandates, the failure to get the data from the Moderna’s and the Pfizer’s on these bizarre untested and rapidly released jabs would pique their interest.

Instead, many went blank, called millions of us as poorly informed, conspiracy theorists, anti-this and anti-that dupes. Imagine that, journalists who question empire, question the United Fruit Company, question authority, Vietnam, Weapons of Mass Destruction, the MIC, FIRE, and who want to look deep into the well that is American Manifest Destiny and Exceptionalism, that they would flip like dying dogs, or either go blank on the virus front, or even patronize those of us who have the gumption to look into the origins of that “virus” and who have the interest in understanding what a great reset is, and how a pathogen and mass hysterical and controlled media on that front can people to submit to these fascist things. Typical leftist yammering:

“I got my vaccinations, but I understand that some people who might have personal or whatever beliefs have the right, I guess, to not get forcefully jabbed. Well, yeah, I got the jab because the information just came to me in a dream -haha. I understand science and I understand how much smarter these virologists are, and, heck, a conspiracy of them producing products that would be bad for us, or cause deaths, or that the decent governmental employees would cook up fakes on all this, get real? I get why people might not want to have blood transfusions because of their religion, or not get this vaccine, but for the greater good of all, really, this is a pandemic. We have to follow the science. Sometimes the government-law has to intervene if the Jehovah Witness parent is putting their kids in jeopardy with this inane superstition about blood transfusions and keeping them on life support. Get real, and be part of our collective society.”

So, yes, I only have a BS in marine biology from a long time ago, and, yes, only a masters in Rhetoric and another one in urban and regional planning, and only years underwater diving, and decades as a many-venue journalist, and many decades teaching college, and many years as a sustainability coordinator, and, well, so, if I doubt the narratives around Event 201 and Gates and gain of function lies and what those bio-labs in Canada and USA and even Ukraine and former Soviet Union region are actually up to; and if I delve into many many sources tied to what the hell is going on with corona virus, bats, civets, and SARS, and what the history of Japan’s Unit 731 is, and what the history of biological warfare (ARPA and DARPA) and what is in the minds and labs (Plum Island, Fort Detrick) of U$A, well, again, lefties, liberals, Democrats: “Shut the f#@% up and just do what a good citizen should do . . . your commie countries are doing it too . . .  China, Nicaragua, Cuba . . . so take off that tin foil hat and just relax and take it as it is: these scientific things, these mRNA clipping things, this incredible advancement in the science of working with RNA and DNA, well, it supersedes your ability to understand where these big Pharma outfits are coming from. Shut up, and if you doubt any of this, then you are, well, akin to a Trumpian or Q-Anon or just a plain wacko antivaxxer, man. Embarrassing.”

Sure, everything else written about exposures of this bizarre multiple front narrative is verboten:

No Doubting Thomases here:

RNA for Moderna’s Omicron Booster Manufactured by CIA-Linked Company

Since late last year, messenger RNA for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines, including its recently reformulated Omicron booster, has been exclusively manufactured by a little known company with significant ties to US intelligence. (source)

Sinister, man, and I will not belabor the point here citing even a dozen of the hundreds of sources I have read that look at what was being cooked up in labs, from North Carolina to Toronto to Wuhan, and on and on. Bill Gates? The media? Big pharma? The media? Pathogens dropped on the Chinese in Korea in 1950? Right, the record of scientists and MIC working hand in hand is wonderful!

This billionaire is a murder incorporated, continuing criminal enterprise booster:

In October, 2019 Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who, together with his wife, runs the richest and most powerful foundation in the world, co-organized a simulation exercise on a worldwide corona epidemic. Videos were posted documenting the exercise. But intriguingly Gates now denies such an exercise ever took place.

Why? On April 12, 2020, Bill Gates said in an interview to the BBC, “Now here we are. We didn’t simulate this, we didn’t practice, so both the health policies and economic policies, we find ourselves in uncharted territory.”

This is the same person who, just six months before the outbreak of the pandemic, organized a series of four role-playing simulations of a corona pandemic with very high-ranking participants. Event 201 was a simulation of a corona pandemic conducted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum and Johns Hopkins University in October 2019.

Participants from the private and public sectors were presented with a scenario, not unlike the one that has unfolded in reality, and discussed what needed to be done. There are official videos of the four meetings and a best-of-video scenario presentation and discussion by the participants, who are members of a pandemic control council in the role play. (source)

Enough already. Here, Mister Harrington’s piece which does question those journalists which I have cited many many times concerning US and global policies that are screwing us over royally. With permission from Harrington, to reprint over at Dissident Voice, where it was originally found at, Brownstone Institute.

Why did the Left Fail the Covid Test So Badly?

By Thomas Harrington

Like every other important social phenomenon, propaganda regimes have historical genealogies. For example, a very strong case could be made that the ongoing, and sad to admit, largely successful Covid propaganda onslaught under which we now live can trace its roots back to the two so-called demonstration wars (the Panama Invasion and the First Gulf Conflict) waged by George Bush Sr.

The American elites were badly stung by the country’s defeat in Vietnam. In it, they rightly saw a considerable curtailment of what they had come to see as their divine right since the end of WWII: the ability to intervene as they so fit in any country not explicitly covered by the Soviet nuclear umbrella.

And in their analysis of that failure, they correctly alighted to the role that the media—by simply bringing the tawdry and ignoble reality of the war into our living rooms—had played in undermining citizen willingness to engage in such fruitless, costly and savage adventures in the future.

With his massive military build-up and heavy support of proxies in Latin America in the eighties, Ronald Reagan took the first steps toward recovering this lost elite prerogative.

But it was not until the administration of George Bush Sr. and the two conflicts mentioned above that, as he himself exultantly put it in the wake of his pitiless slaughter of some 100,000 poorly equipped Iraqis, “We’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.”

Bush knew what he was talking about, and it wasn’t necessarily, or even primarily, military force or prowess.

What had largely limited Reagan to proxy wars during eight years in office were two things. The first was a citizenry that still had fresh memories of the debacle in Southeast Asia. The second, and arguably more important one was a press corps with on-the-ground familiarity with the reality of these conflicts that continued to challenge him on both their morality and strategic efficacy.

Bush and his team, which as you’ll remember included one Richard Cheney at Defense, made remedying this “problem” of war-hesitancy one of the central aims of his presidency. As Barbara Trent suggests in her remarkable The Panama Deception, experimenting with new media management techniques was not a strategic sideshow of the conflict, but rather its prime goal.

The Panama invasion was followed in quick succession by the Gulf War, where press coverage put heavy emphasis on the opinions of US military figures and their explanations of the technical genius of American-made military technology. In this way, the war was presented to Americans as a sort of exciting video game characterized by flashes of light in the night and precision attacks devoid of any bloodshed and death.

This process of desensitizing of the media, and from there, the American people to the horrendous human effects of war-making culminated in the revolting spectacle, on January 30th, 1991 of reporters chuckling along with General Norman Schwarzkopf as he joked while showing them videos of supposed “smart bombs” killing people like ants from the safety of 30,000 feet.

Having received no coordinated pushback from anyone with power about this degrading treatment of human life and the American people, they tripled down and went full Manichaean after September 11th.

Why not?

With Reagan’s repeal of the fairness Doctrine in 1987 and Bill Clinton’s Telecommunications Act of 1996 never had the media been a) concentrated in so few hands b) so beholden to the government regulation for the continuance of the super-profitability generated through this consolidation c) debilitated by the internet-induced collapse of the newspaper business model and thus d) less obligated to the reflect take into account the concerns and interests of a broad spectrum of the American people.

It was now truly, as George Bush Jr said, a matter of “You’re either with us or against us,” us of course being the war-making government (including the Deep State) along with its slavishly loyal media mouthpieces. If like Susan Sontag—who whether you like her or not, was a very bright and highly accomplished thinker—you believed the maniacal presumptions of the US response to September 11th were flawed, and said so, you could in this new environment, expect to be the object of well-coordinated attacks on your character.

Never once did the administration call for restraint in such attacks, nor did any administration figures remind people of the importance of the supposedly American value of everyone’s right to be respectfully heard.

Seeing the exhaustion of the Bush brand after the Iraq debacle, the Deep State switched party allegiances in the run-up to the 2008 election. And it has stayed firmly on the side of the so-called “left” ever since, encouraging the use of Bush-Cheney-style government-media mobbing against those who might dare to question the motives of the sainted warmonger Obama, or, say, the “logic” of trying to reduce the problems of racism by promoting it through identity politics.

The efficiency of such mob-style takedown tactics was greatly enhanced by the dramatic expansion of social media platforms in the Obama and Trump years.

It is no exaggeration to say that a person born in 1990 or later has little if any understanding of what it means to disagree in detail and in good faith with someone whose political and/or social ideals are different than their own. Nor what it means to feel obligated to respond to the claims of others with careful factual refutations.

What they do know, because it’s mostly all that they have seen from their “betters,” is that to argue is to seek the destruction of one’s interlocutor, and failing that, to make sure his or her arguments are impeded from circulating freely in our shared civic spaces. The ever-increasing dialectical poverty of those who have been socialized and educated in this environment is evident to anyone who has served as a classroom instructor during the last quarter century.

A sanctuary for the weary
While most people seemed to want to pretend that nothing new was happening, that the collaboration between media and government had always been this extreme, many of us did not. We had memories. And we knew the “field of thinkable thought” was dramatically smaller in 2005 than in 1978. And we knew it had become much, much smaller in 2018 than it was in 2005. In our search for answers we turned to media critics and scholars of media history. We also turned to the writings of journalist-activists with both interest and insight into these matters.

When it came to this last group, I found myself drawn principally to what might be termed leftist anti-imperialists. Reading them, I widened my understanding of how elites and their chosen “experts” manage information flows, and constantly seek to shrink the parameters of acceptable opinion on foreign policy issues.

Two years ago last March, however, my sense of intellectual kinship with this subset of thinkers suddenly became very strained. We were facing what I immediately recognized as the largest and most aggressive “perception management” campaign in recent times, and perhaps in the history of the world. One, moreover, that was utilizing all the techniques employed during the previous two to three decades to insure citizen allegiance to US war-making.

And yet in the face of it, almost all my go-to people on propaganda analysis had little or nothing to say. And when I sent contributions outlining my doubts about the congruity of the emergent Covid discourse to places that had generally welcomed my analyses of pro-war propaganda, suddenly there was hesitation on the other end.

And the passage of time cured nothing. Indeed, the only things these people said down the road; that is, if they addressed Covid at all, was to underscore the unprecedented severity of the situation (a very questionable assertion) and harp on Trump’s supposedly disastrous handling of it.

There was virtually no daylight between the opinions of these people and the feckless liberals they, as true-blue leftists, always claimed to disdain. And on it went, for the entire two years of the Covid panic.

A week or so ago, John Pilger, arguably one of the brightest and more persistent leftist analysts of establishment propaganda, published “Silencing the lambs: How propaganda works” on his website and then a number of progressive news outlets.

In it, he repeats all sorts of well-known ideas and concepts. There’s a reference to Leni Riefenstahl and how she believed the bourgeoisie are those most amenable to influence campaigns, a reminder of Julian Assange’s horrendous and undeserved fate, much deserved praise for Harold Pinter’s absolutely extraordinary if largely ignored Nobel acceptance speech, an intelligent discussion about how our media studiously refuses to tell us about anything that went on between Russia and the West, and Russia and Ukraine between 1990 and February of this year.

The underlying thesis of the piece is that while emitting and constantly pushing elite-approved messages are key elements of propaganda, so too is the strategic disappearance of essential historical realities and truths.

All good stuff. Indeed, all themes that I have written about with frequency and conviction over the years.

Toward the end piece Pilger asks the following rhetorical question:

When will real journalists stand up?

And a few lines later, after providing us with a list of where to find the few outlets and journalists that do know what they are doing when it comes to the elite’s informational misdirection plays, he adds:

And when will writers stand up, as they did against the rise of fascism in the 1930s? When will film-makers stand up, as they did against the Cold War in the 1940s? When will satirists stand up, as they did a generation ago?

Having soaked for 82 years in a deep bath of righteousness that is the official version of the last world war, isn’t it time those who are meant to keep the record straight declared their independence and decoded the propaganda? The urgency is greater than ever.

Reading this final flourish while remembering the lamb-like silence of John Pilger in the face of the sustained Covidian onslaught of institutionalized lies and Soviet-grade censorship, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

And when considering that virtually all those he endorses as exemplars of propaganda-savvy journalism—people such as Chris Hedges, Patrick Lawrence, Jonathan Cook, Diana Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone all of whose work I have frequently and enthusiastically championed over the years—took the same cud-chewing path, the sense of farce only grows.

The same can be said of most all of the outlets (Grayzone, Mint Press News, Media Lens, Declassified UK, Alborada, Electronic Intifada, WSWS, ZNet, ICH, CounterPunch, Independent Australia, Globetrotter) who portray themselves as being wise to the wiles of elite-sponsored influence operations.

Who, the question thus occurs to me, is actually living in a “a deep bath of righteousness” that impedes the ability to access the truths that lie beyond the “official version” of our past and present?

Who is failing to respond to the presence of fascistic tendencies in our midst?

If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was John and his merry band of crack propaganda dissectors.

Is it that hard for them to see the shadow of fascism in the now heavily documented collaboration between the US government and Big Tech in censoring opinions that go counter to the government’s and Big Pharma’s desired discourse on Covid?

Is it really difficult for them to see the presence of the same dark forces in the US government’s insouciant abrogation of the Nuremberg principle relating to informed consent and medical experimentation?

Are they not troubled by the fact that the experimental vaccines that were sold to the population on the basis of their ability to stop infection do not do that? Or that this was known to anyone who read the FDA briefing papers published when these injections were unleashed on the public?

Does this count as a major “propaganda problem” worth looking into?

Do they care about the millions of people who lost their jobs over these lies, and of course the government’s abject disdain for the longstanding statutory right to object to medical treatment on religious grounds?

As long-time mavens of foreign policy, have they looked into the mafia-like nature of the vaccine contracts forced upon sovereign countries around the world?

Being the great sleuths of information-hiding that they are, did it raise any suspicions in them when Pfizer sought to keep all clinical information relating to the vaccines under wraps for 75 years?

And being the good progressives they are, did the enormous upward transfer of wealth that took place during the years of the Covid state of exception trouble them?

Did it light any suspicions that all this hullabaloo might not just be about health?

Have they organized support groups and action plans for the billions of children around the world whose lives were thrown into chaos by the useless quarantine and masking that was foisted upon them, and who, in all likelihood will never recover the years of developmental progress lost to this program of senseless cruelty?

I could go on.

As far as I can tell, the answer to all these questions is a resounding “NO!”

I am truly grateful for all that John Pilger and his companions in the leftist propaganda dissection cadres have taught me over the years. But as Ortega y Gasset said, a public intellectual is only as good as his ability to remain at the “height of his times.”

Sadly, this group of otherwise talented individuals has failed this test, badly, over the last two-plus years. As much as it may pain them to hear this, they have shown themselves to be much more like the “clerics” that Julien Benda rightly castigated in 1927 after they lost their moral bearings and their critical acuity before the massive propaganda onslaught used to promote the senseless slaughters of World War I.

Why these professional uncoverers of camouflaged realities of our times suddenly decided to unsee what was happening before their eyes is a job for future historians.

But if I had to hazard a guess today, I’d say that it had a lot to do with all the usual human things like fear of losing friends and prestige or being seen by ideological enforcers on their side as going over to the enemy. All of which is fine and understandable.

But if that is the case, isn’t it too much to publicly admit now that you missed the boat on this important story?

And if you can’t manage that, could you at least have the sense to stop issuing sermons on topics like “how propaganda works” for a good long while?

Author bio: Thomas Harrington, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is Professor Emeritus of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, where he taught for 24 years. His research is on Iberian movements of national identity and contemporary Catalan culture. His essays are published at Words in The Pursuit of Light.

Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean drinking water makes you an activist, and why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesnt make a corporation a terrorist.

–Winona LaDuke, “Canadian Oil Companies Trample on Our Rights” by Winona LaDuke, progressive.org. June 18, 2013.

Water is life. We are the people who live by the water. Pray by these waters. Travel by the waters. Eat and drink from these waters. We are related to those who live in the water. To poison the waters is to show disrespect for creation. To honor and protect the waters is our responsibility as people of the land.

–Winona LaDuke, “The Winona LaDuke Reader: A Collection of Essential Writings”, p.55, Voyageur Press (MN)

I just caught the First Voices Radio show with, Marley Shebala (Diné and A:shiwi) — investigative journalist, photographer, videographer and blogger. In the Diné way, she is Tó’aheedlíinii (Water Flows Together clan), her mother’s clan, and born for Cha’al (Frog clan), which is her father’s clan. Her mom is from Lake Valley, New Mexico, which is in the eastern part of the Navajo Nation and next to Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. Her father is from the Pueblo of Zuni, New Mexico. And so her home towns are Lake Valley and Zuni. “Marley Shebala’s Notebook” is her website where she provides current news coverage of the Navajo government and Navajo communities on and off the Navajo Nation.

She talked about her work as a journalists and activist. There were some comments included near the end from Native folk about exactly what this Columbus-Indigenous Day means. It’s a start, a way to ask Native Americans what it means to be in this country now, and the history of their treatment.

“The word Shinkolobwe fills me with grief and sorrow,” says Susan Williams, a historian at the UK Institute of Commonwealth Studies. “It’s not a happy word, it’s one I associate with terrible grief and suffering.” (source)

Just caught the First Voices Radio show with, Marley Shebala (Diné and A:shiwi) — investigative journalist, photographer, videographer and blogger. In the Diné way, she is Tó’aheedlíinii (Water Flows Together clan), her mother’s clan, and born for Cha’al (Frog clan), which is her father’s clan. Her mom is from Lake Valley, New Mexico, which is in the eastern part of the Navajo Nation and next to Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. Her father is from the Pueblo of Zuni, New Mexico. And so her home towns are Lake Valley and Zuni. “Marley Shebala’s Notebook” is her website where she provides current news coverage of the Navajo government and Navajo communities on and off the Navajo Nation.

Once Upon a Mine: THE LEGACY OF URANIUM ON THE NAVAJO NATION

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The host of the show, Tiokasin:

We have to stop with the idea of creating peace on earth and begin with creating peace with Mother Earth. We’ve tried the first alternative for thousands of years, but look where that has led us; now is the time of the Original Ways, the Native ways, after all … it is coming this way – that we all must make peace with Mother Earth – there is no more altering the native way.

Marley talks about the uranium coming from her tribe’s lands, and how the people of her tribe were told “the uranium would give people jobs.” Nothing about those bombs dropped on two Japanese cities. She states that when that immolation occurred, the elders and others were totally distraught about what they played a part of.

Then there is the Congo — “The forgotten mine that built the atomic bomb”

[During the Cold War, the US supported a military coup by Mobutu Sese Seko as it was eager to prevent Shinkolobwe falling into Soviet hands (Credit: Getty Images)]

The story of Shinkolobwe began when a rich seam of uranium was discovered there in 1915, while the Congo was under colonial rule by Belgium. There was little demand for uranium back then: its mineral form is known as pitchblende, from a German phrase describing it as a worthless rock. Instead, the land was mined by the Belgian company Union Minière for its traces of radium, a valuable element that had been recently isolated by Marie and Pierre Curie.  

In no other mine could you see a purer concentration of uranium. Nothing like it has ever been found – Tom Zoellner

It was only when nuclear fission was discovered in 1938 that the potential of uranium became apparent. After hearing about the discovery, Albert Einstein immediately wrote to US president Franklin D Roosevelt, advising him that the element could be used to generate a colossal amount of energy – even to construct powerful bombs. In 1942, US military strategists decided to buy as much uranium as they could to pursue what became known as the Manhattan Project. And while mines existed in Colorado and Canada, nowhere in the world had as much uranium as the Congo.

This says it all now, no, about how horrific the Anglo Saxons have treated the so called underdeveloped world, which is really the overexploited world.

And now, the ZioLensky is demanding from those underdeveloped Black nations fealty:

“African nations [must] stand by international law, territorial integrity, and peace,” not only by condemning the strikes on Kiev, Odessa, Dnepr, Kharkov, Rovno, Lviv, and Ivano-Frankovsk, but also by opposing with a UN vote Moscow’s “annexation” of the formerly Ukrainian territories, his message demanded. (source)

Now, the USA, is part of that global terror network, working with UK, Five Eyes. Native Americans have paid the ultimate genocidal price of the Anglo Saxons:

The longest war in history, as we see it as America’s real longest war was the conflict against Indigenous Americans, called the American Indian Wars, which most historians characterize as beginning in 1609 and ending in 1924 or 313 years, mainly over land control.

The USA is in on the killing machines, dropping nukes on civilians, the bombing of civilians in Germany, and Japan.

In February 1942, the British abandoned their “precision bombing” strategy. For the rest of the war, the British concentrated on the systematic widespread destruction of German cities by RAF nighttime air raids, a strategy called “area bombing.” One reason the British took this fateful step was to “dehouse” the German people, which hopefully would shatter their morale and will to continue the war.

The clearest demonstration of the destructiveness of British area bombing occurred in 1943 during three night raids on Hamburg, Germany. On the second night of bombing, something unexpected happened. The fire bombs dropped by 731 RAF bombers started thousands of fires. They merged to create a huge firestorm, sucking up oxygen and generating hurricane force winds. Many who did not burn to death were asphyxiated in underground bomb shelters. The firestorm killed more than 40,000 people in one night.

When the United States entered the war in Europe, its Army Air Corps had better fighter-plane support and bombsights than the RAF. It could maintain its longstanding policy of daytime precision bombing. The Americans believed that the most effective way to destroy the enemy’s ability to continue the war was to strike specific targets like aircraft factories and oil refineries.

Following German rocket attacks against London late in the war, almost 800 RAF bombers bombed Dresden, a center of German art, architecture, and culture. It had been untouched by previous Allied bombing raids. The attack’s stated purpose was to disrupt German troop transports to the Russian front. But at least 35,000 civilians died, mainly by inhaling toxic gases created by the second major firestorm of the war. American bombers killed more civilians the next day when they had difficulty hitting their targets through all the smoke.

Firestorms in Japan

After Germany surrendered in May 1945, America wanted to quickly end the war against Japan. As plans went ahead for a costly invasion of the Japanese islands, Major General Curtis LeMay took command of the bombing campaign against Japan, which had started in late 1944. Having studied British area-bombing tactics, LeMay decided to adopt them in a final effort to force the Japanese to surrender.

On the night of March 9-10, 1945, LeMay’s B-29 bombers attacked Tokyo, a city of 6 million people. Nearly 600 bombers dropped 1,665 tons of fire bombs on the Japanese capital, destroying 16 square miles of the city. The resulting firestorm killed 100,000 people, more than died at Hiroshima or Nagasaki from atomic bombs a few months later. Most of the victims were women, children, and old men. The B-29 crew members put on oxygen masks to keep from vomiting at the smell of burning human flesh.

LeMay’s planes continued firebombing Tokyo and more than 60 other Japanese cities in the following months. He thought he could end the war quickly by destroying Japan’s economy and crushing the morale of the Japanese people. LeMay argued against using atomic bombs. He believed that his firebombing tactics would force Japan to surrender before American forces were scheduled to invade the homeland. (source)

So, there is not much to celebrate when we think about this Anglo-Saxon world, and we know the British were in on bombing the bridge in Crimea, and the Nord Stream 1 & 2. All part of the treatment of indigenous people in Indian, Amazon, Congo, Turtle Island, wherever.

“Before Ukraine blew up Kerch Bridge, British spies plotted it.”

On Becoming Human: This discussion was conducted in 2005 for The 11th Hour by Leila Conners. The discussion covers Trudell’s worldview that encompasses his call for humans to return to their intelligence and their humanity to forge a pathway forward. His responses to the questions now seem prophetic.  John Trudell was a Native American author, poet, actor, musician, and political activist. He was the spokesperson for the United Indians of All Tribes’ takeover of Alcatraz beginning in 1969, broadcasting as Radio Free Alcatraz. During most of the 1970s, he served as the chairman of the American Indian Movement, based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. After his pregnant wife, three children and mother-in-law were killed in 1979 in a suspicious fire at the home of his parents-in-law on the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes Duck Valley Indian Reservation in Nevada, Trudell turned to writing, music and film as a second career. He acted in films in the 1990s. The documentary Trudell (2005) was made about him and his life as an activist and artist.

Here, the Anglo-Saxons, the USA, out of balance with not just nature, but against humanity!

U.S. laboratories created, developed and operating under Pentagon leadership are scattered throughout Africa, Latin America and practically all the countries that made up the former Union of Socialist Republics. It is estimated that at least 200 biological research laboratories worldwide are financed by Washington.

The presence of U.S. specialists in the construction of chemical and biological weapons, especially in post-Soviet territory, is part of the evidence of the objectives of U.S. administrations to carry out a policy of maximum pressure against the Russian Federation. In these facilities, U.S. agencies are working on creating and modifying pathogens of deadly diseases, for their probable use, either in the military field or in sabotage actions within the broad field of the so-called hybrid wars. Both the UN and various international conventions, aware of their capacity and ease of destruction, have established regulatory agreements to prevent their use and proliferation. However, this decision does not prevent Washington from plaguing the world with research centers aimed at creating weapons of mass destruction (WMD). (source)

And then, on the same community station, I heard about water, man. “Did you know that bottled water purchases can predict political involvement? Join Food Sleuth Radio host and Registered Dietitian, Melinda Hemmelgarn, for her interview with Manny Teodoro, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lead author of The Profits of Distrust: Citizen-Consumers, Drinking Water, and the Crisis of Confidence in American Government. Teodoro discusses the connections between the rise of the commercial drinking water industry, distrust in and failure of government, and broader withdrawal from civic life.”

We are talking about just lead in our water pipes. Over 50,000 water districts in the USA. And, a trillion dollars to fix those pipes. The worst water is on reservations in the USA. Forget about those overexploited peoples, those indigenous peoples.

Historically speaking, we went from being Indians to pagans to savages to hostiles to militants to activists to Native Americans. Its five hundred years later and they still cant see us. We are still invisible.

–John Trudell

“When Columbus got off the boat, he asked us who we were. We said we’re the Human Beings, we’re the People.

Conceptually the Europeans didn’t understand that, it was beyond their conceptual reality. They didn’t see us. They couldn’t see who we were.

Historically speaking, we went from being Indians to pagans to savages to hostiles to militants to activists to Native Americans. It’s five hundred years later and they still can’t see us. We are still invisible.

They don’t see us as human beings, but we’ve been saying to them all along that’s what we are.

We are invisible to them because we are still the Human Beings, we’re still the People, but they will never call us that. They taught us to call ourselves Indians, now they’re teaching us to call ourselves Native Americans. It’s not who we are. We’re the People.

They can’t see us as human beings. But they can’t see themselves as human beings. The invisibility is at every level, it’s not just that we’re tucked away out of sight. We’re the evidence of the crime. They can’t deal with the reality of who we are because then they have to deal with the reality of what they have done. If they deal with the reality of who we are, they have to deal with the reality of who they aren’t.

So they have to fear us, not recognize us, not like us.

The very fact of calling us Indians creates a new identity for us, an identity that began with their arrival. Changing identity, creating a new perceptual reality, is another form of genocide. It’s like severing a spiritual umbilical cord that reaches into the ancestral past.

The history of the Indians begins with the arrival of the Europeans. The history of the People begins with the beginning of the history of the People.

The history of the People is one of cooperation, collectivity, and living in balance. The history of the Indians is one of being attacked and genocide, rather than a history of peace and balance. The history of the People under attack, the Indians, in an evolutionary context, is not very long, it’s only five hundred years.

The objective of civilizing us is to make Indian history become our permanent reality.

The neccessary objective of Native people is to outlast this attack, however long it takes, to keep our identity alive.”

John Trudell, Happy Columbus Day Everybody. 

Patrick Duffy of ‘Dallas’ Fame Lists Oregon Ranch for $14 Million

Imagine a world where smart cohesive thinkers come together and work with these multimillionaires and get some break on the property and then get a community going there: people who want to learn how to farm-raise animals; how to preserve foods; how to construct tiny homes and microhomes; how to grow food; how to heal; and how to bring together so many types of people who want to heal trauma and get better. I am not just talking about those rough sleepers you might run into, AKA, homeless, many times men of all ages, opting to get off the bureacratic grid. Not just folks who are really down and out, or who just want to be left alone. Although many of those would fit well on a property like this — a river there, ponds, fields, trees, and central outbuildings.

I’ve written about this before — “All the World’s a Stage … Except in our Own Backyards! All it takes is a cool seven million smackeroos to build that field of dreams”

Here, the low down via the realtor —

• $6,945,000.
• 205 +/-  acres zoned AF-5
• Includes 49 Acre Campus with 6+ Buildings totaling approx. 130,000 SF:
  1. Expansion Hall- Administration Building with Auditorium, Classrooms and Offices
  2. Harmony Hall- Girl’s dorm with 67 rooms, 7 offices, lounge, chapel, commercial kitchen, dining room, bath suites, etc. and attached 3-bedroom Dean’s house
  3. Devotion Hall- Boy’s dorm with 49 rooms (19 rooms need sheetrock finished and painted), apartment with kitchen, bath suites, rec room, lounges, etc. and attached 5-bedroom Dean’s house
  4. Gymnasium/Music Building with Stage
  5. Science Classroom Building with Library
  6. Industrial Arts Building with Auto Shop, Wood Shop and Welding Shop
• Extensive Updates during current ownership include:
  1. Administration Building has newer metal roof, updated windows, new insulation, remodeled auditorium and meeting rooms, new HVAC, electrical service and lighting
  2. New windows, high efficiency hot water system, new HVAC, new kitchen appliances and walk-in refrigerator, insulation, paint, lighting and carpeting in Harmony Hall (Girl’s dorm)
  3. New windows, insulation in 49 rooms plus new sheetrock in 30 rooms of Devotion Hall (Boy’s dorm)
  4. New and repaired roofs and new electrical services
• Domestic water system and sewage system for campus
• Includes separate 4.69 acres (Tax Lot 1301) with Spring and water rights– domestic water source for campus
• Adjacent 151 +/- acres well suited for low density residential development with 30 LA water co-op certificates
• Vineyard soils & Beautiful Views
• South Fork Hill Creek flows through property
• Rural location approximately 14 miles south of Hillsboro near Gaston
• Washington County
• Tax Lots 2400 & 1532, Sec 5, Tax Lots 400, 2400 & 2500, Sec 5c and Tax Lot 1301, Sec 16, T2S, R3W, W.M.

That was August 2021. I have had many intersections with places like that, where there is raw land, established multiple room buildings, with commercial kitchens, and gardens, even equistrian building, rivers and springs, and alas, up for sale, and, in the scheme of capitalism and the end rot of nonprofit do-gooders and the inability to get things going that would actually help people, including adults and families who have faced housing challenges, and then also bringing together students, and retirees, and others to create a triple-healing community where people live, eat, think, create and recreate together. In a wooded and riverside area!

There are literally tens of thousands of opportunities like the one listed above, and also that 395-acre ranch Duffy has put on the market.

In capitalism, in county coding, in the scheme of things, getting anything this creative off the ground is almost impossible. You know, getting maybe art students and social worker majors and others out there to do theses in situ with the very people and situations they may have studied.

Encampments, visiting elders, and permanent housing in the form of tiny homes, with tons of support, and then, of course, mental and physical health practitioners, nurtritionists, farmers, and construction gurus.

The template is easy to produce, and that letter I wrote to Jeff Bezos’s ex, McKenzie Scott Tuttle, in reference to another property for sale in Oregon, 200 acres, for $7 million:

+–+

Dear McKenzie Scott-Tuttle:

RE: Satellites of Tierra Firma – Some Look to Mars and the Moon, We Look to Soil Here

& Medicine Wheel of Healing, Growing, Learning, Living

People and land need healing which is all inclusive – holistic.

                 — Allan Savory

 Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

                — Nelson Mandela

Reverence is an emotion that we can nurture in our very young children, respect is an attitude that we instill in our children as they become school-agers, and responsibility is an act that we inspire in our children as they grow through the middle years and become adolescents.

                — Zoe Weil, p. 42, Above All Be Kind: Raising a Humane Child in Challenging Times

Oh, the naysayers tell me and my cohorts to not even try to break into the foundation you run, that this concept of having Mackenzie Scott Tuttle even interested in becoming a placeholder for an idea, and for this land that a group of visionaries see as an incubation collective space for dreams to become reality.

We place our hopes in your ability to read on and see the vision and plans driving this solicitation, this ask. And it is a big ask.

This is figuratively and literally putting the cart before the horse. Here we have 200 acres, and the vision is retrofitting this center that is already there, Ananda,  into a truly holistic healing center, youth run, for a seven generations resiliency and look forward ethos of learning to steward the land, learning to grow the land, toward biodynamic farming, all mixed in with intergenerational wisdom growing.

We are seeing this, as stated above, as a medicine wheel. A circle of integrative thinking, education, experimentation and overlapping visions of bringing stakeholders from around the Pacific Northwest (and world) into this safe harbor. There are already facilities on this property as you can see from the real estate prospectus. There are 120 rooms in a great building. There are outbuildings, a gymnasium, barns, and spring water.

It is unfortunately up for sale, and the danger there is a developer with a keen eye to massive profits and turning a spiritual and secular place of great healing and medicine wheel potential into “dream homes” for the rich.

Good land turned into a gated community? We are asking your philanthropy to take a deep dive into helping put this property on hold from those nefarious intentions and allow our group to develop this circle of healing – education across disciplines, elder type academy mixed with youth directed programs; farming; food production; micro-home  building and construction facility; trauma informed healing.

Actually, more. Think of this as a community of communities.

Young People Need Hope, a Place (many places) and Leadership and Development

So many young people are done with Industrial and Techno Capitalism. They know deep down there is more to a scoop of soil than a billion bacteria, and they want to be part of healing communities.

We are proposing the Foundation you have set up invest in this property, as a placeholder for our development plan – actually it is an anti-developer plan. This property will be scarfed up for a steal, by, land and housing developers who want McMansions out here in this incredible eco-scape. Just what we do not need in the outlying areas of Portland.  Or in so many other locations across this country.

We are a small group ready to do what we can to get food growers and producers at the table to invest in intellectual and sweat and tears capital to make this 200 acres work as a living community of new farmers, people living and learning on the property, incubating ideas for, we hope, to include a micro-home building project, crops, vineyards, learning centers for farming and preserving, marketing and engaging in food healing.

We come at this with decades around food systems, learning from Via Campesina/o or Marion Nestle, Alice Waters, Winona LaDuke, Rachel Carson. We believe in biomimicry, that is, learning how nature settles scores, survives and thrives. We come at this as deeply concerned about ecological footprints, life cycle analyses, the disposable culture and the planned and marketed obsolescence.

We are also coming at this as educators – earth teachers, who know classrooms in prison like settings, with rows of desks, do not engender creative and solutionaries– young people ready to go into the world, even a small community, with engaged, creative and positive ways to deal with climate chaos and the impending shattering of safety nets, including biological and earth systems “nets” and “webs.”

This property is unique, as all of our earth is. This is firstly Kalapua land, first, and that is the Grande Ronde and Siletz, as well as the Atfalsti, too. We call it Gatson, near Hillsboro, Oregon, but the land is the essence of the spirit givers of this continent before “discovery.”

Rich, in the wine country of the new people to this region, this land is about applying our ethos and yours, Ms. Scott-Tuttle, toward a real healing, a real stewardship and real intergeneration ethos around carrying the wisdom of tribes and growers and educators to the youth. We believe women are at the center of many of the themes already listed – farming, educating, healing, human stewardship.

Think of this project as the cart before the horse because the old system, the horse, was always the money, the source of power, and with power comes strings attached. The people involved in this project are looking to have a multistoried community of farmers, learners, youth learning trades and people skills, as well as elders, both Native and new arrivals, to understand that a farm is more than that, as well as a vineyard is more than the sum of the grapes. It is about a reclaiming of the sacred – soil, air, photosynthesis in a truly sustainable fashion.

The only “green washing” we can imagine this project will carry forth is the washing of the greens, the other harvests, in tubs of clear spring water.

Some of us on this project have traveled to other parts of this continent, and spent time with coffee growers and understand that shade grown coffee and beyond fair trade are the only elements to a truly fair and equitable system. Train the people of the land, who are the true stewards, to not only grow, but to roast and market the bounty. Grow the community with water projects, irrigation, schools, and globalized sharing of people, visitors.

This project needs a placeholder, to keep the land out of the insane real estate market. We will do the rest, we solutionaires. There are so many growers and investment angels who want to be part of the Seventh Generation solution.

Clearly, the lessons for people to be in this 200 acre community, farm-soil-healing satellite, are lessons you, Ms. Scott-Tuttle,  the fiction writer, know, which you capture deftly with Luther Albright. The world for young people in the Pacific Northwest is that crumbling home and crumbling dam of Albright. The healing we need is more than the structures and infrastructure. It is inside, at the heart of the soul of imagination. Some of us on this project are soliciting from your charity a placeholder purchase of the property are tied to the arts, believing STEAM is the only way forward, and that S.T.E.M. is lifeless and dangerous without the A – arts. We believe the true voice of people are those who believe in asking “what should we do” rather than what is currently on superchargers – “What Can We Do?”

We realize that for many young people, politics have failed them. Many youth I speak with and work with, believe this country is in the midst of an empire of chaos in steep decay. Alternatives to the decay is building communities that would fit the model here on 200 acres – agro-ecological farming; nutritional centered living; housing; long-term care assistance; youth directed entrepreneur projects; bringing in local and state businesses leaders to be part of a design from the grassroots up.

The catch for most of the youth we have engaged is —  to paraphrase and level  a composite point,” We are ruled by an elite class of individuals who are completely out of touch with the travails of the average American.” This simple statement is packed full of context and frightening reality for millions of students and adults who feel disconnected and neutered by both government agencies and corporate policies.

First, who wants to be “ruled” by anyone? That we have this class system of elite, middle managers, the elite’s high ranking servicers, and then, the rest of the citizens, the so-called 80 percent who have captured less than the overall 10 percent of “wealth” in this country. The very idea of an elite out of touch, or completely out of touch speaks to an ignorance that is dangerous to the world, to the 80 percent, and also speaks to a possible planned ignorance. That we have millions of amazing people, to include nonprofits, community-led organizations, educational institutions, journalists, and others, who can speak to what those “travails” are, and yet, the elites failing to grasp those challenges, or failing to even acknowledge them, this is what many believe is the decay of this society.

This may not sit well with you or your philanthropy, but we as a group have dozens of years experience working with K12, higher ed, farming groups, social services/mutual aid movements, and have systems thinking in our backgrounds, and we underscore youth and community-driven projects and designs. This medicine wheel/circle land trust we are asking you to consider with a follow up meeting, well, this is the only way to a model-driven set of safety nets to move into some challenging times for this Empire in a world that is no longer USA centric.

We are solutionaries, that is, we look for solutions by taking apart problems and then applying holism and deep experimentation in design, but using tried and proven systems that do work.

Healthy food, healthy relationships to culture, people, nature, healthy work, worthy work, with an eye always on the arts. Just as a farming and tiny home community, where biodynamic farming and food preserving and from nail to roof to complete tiny home design are part and parcel the key elements for this community to thrive under, well, there are no better classrooms and transferable skills.

Some of us have seen youth and adults learn the crafts needed to design, plan, buildings, and market tiny homes that would be used to seed communities that are, again, centered around farming, centered around healing, centered around Native American healing, and local community values. A young woman who finishes the hands-on learning of building a tiny home – with windows, skylights, plumbing, furnishings, electricity ready, all of that which a home entails – is a remarkable, valuable person. All those skills, again, like a medicine wheel, teach deeper lessons, and transferable skills.

This is what this property would also “house.”

All Tied Together – School, Outdoors, People, Action, Solving Food Insecurity and Housing

The should is an educational-farming-entrepreneur-solutions incubator on these 200 acres. Proving that this could be one of a thousand across the land. There are literally thousands of similar properties around the US, within their own cultural-community-ecological-historical milieus, but again, this project is one that Luther Albright would have thrived inside as a “New Engineer for Growing Communities,” as opposed to river-killing dam builder.

Our earthquake is here now, with all measure of tremors and aftershocks —  that is the climate chaos, wildfires, food insecurity, and alas, the New/New Gilded age of deep inequities that are criminal, as you well know, Ms. Scott Tuttle.

Here, the cart (before the horse):  this amazing collective piece of land and buildings with a multiversity of spiritual under girders . The horses are ready, but they need the cart, the home, the fabric of incubation. Those stallions and mares are engaged, ready, who are willing to take a leap of faith here and risk being outside the common paradigm of predatory and consumer-driven capitalism that has put many millions in a highly precarious position.

It’s amazing, the current system of philanthropy which forces more and more people to beg for less and less diverse money for fewer and fewer truly innovative ideas. Funding a project like this is a legacy ad-venture, the exact formula we need (scaled up to a 1,000 different locales) to break the chains of Disaster and Predatory Capitalism. We need that “capital,” the cart, to help those stallions and mares to break for the field of ideas and fresh streams of praxis.

There are any number of ideas for sustainability communities. Co-ops, growers groups, or mixed communities for young and old to exchange knowledge, capacity, growth, sweat equity —  called intergenerational living. This is about a pretty inventive suite of concepts and practices:

• learning spaces, inside and outside
• buildings to develop micro home (unique, easily packaged and ready to put together) manufacturing and R & D
• food systems – farming of sustainable food, herbs and those vines
• husbandry
• learning food systems, from farm to plate
• ceramics, painting, music, dance, theater and writing center
• speakers’ bureau
• farmers,  restaurateurs and harvesters with a stake in the community
• healing center
• Youth directed outdoor education and experiences
• sustainability practicum’s for students
• low income micro home housing
• day care center, early learning center

How does this make any sense to a billionaire, who has devoted her life to “giving away” half of her wealth in her lifetime? Well, we see this project – this land-property – as a legacy for many of the avocations and interests (passions) you have articulated over the years. Your vision and commitment to education and women-centered projects are admirable. This is one of those projects.

There is that emotional and sappy Movie, Field of Dreams, and the statement – “if you build it, they will come.” We have found that over the years teaching in many places – Seattle, Spokane, Portland, El Paso, Auburn, Mexico – that young people and nontraditional students want mentoring, leadership and the tools to be mentors and leaders. They need the cart before the horse can herald in the new ideas, and the new way to a better future. If the classroom and master facilitator allows for open growth, unique student-led ideas and work, well, that person has BUILT the field of dreams from which to grow.

There are so many potentials with this project, and it starts with the land, holding it as a Scott-Tuttle placeholder. From an investment point of view, as long as you have people wrangling other people and professionals to get this satellite of sanity, the medicine wheel with many spokes radiating out and inward, the property increases in monetary value. Land is sacred, but just as sacred are the ideas and the potential that land might germinate and grow. It is the reality of our country – too few control too much. We see it in the infamous “Complex” – not just military, but, Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Media, Big Business, Big Education, Big Medicine, as well as private prisons, for profit social services, AI , and Big Tech, so called Surveillance Capitalism.  Who in the 80 percent has the funds to purchase a $7 million project?

Big ideas like this cooperative land medicine wheel (a first of many satellites) might be common, but the web of supportive and cohesive things tied to this property is unusual, to say the least. With the failing of small businesses throughout the area, with the food insecurity for women, children and families, with the housing insecurity, added to debt insecurity —  with all those insecurities young and old face, this project could be the light at the end of many tunnels.  We have connections to Oregon Tilth and Latinx Farmers, and large biodynamic vineyards. We have connections to women’s veteran groups, to aging in place experts. We have connections to trauma healers and growers and interested folk who know construction and design. Additionally, the Pacific Northwest, from Puget Sound to Gold Beach, OR, is full of innovators, and those include the dozens of colleges and universities just in these two states – Oregon and Washington. We intend to trawl for investors – farms, food purveyors, wineries, restaurants, schools and various college programmers – to put into this project. A soil plot to test perennial wheat, a al the Land Institute, to Amory Lovins, Novella Carpenter, and so many more, finding a place of integrated living, ag, permaculture and ever-evolving cultural understanding of the finite planet we are on.

We are hopeful, even under the current Sixth Extinction.

It is telling, this entomologist and educator’s perspective after three decades of teaching:

Diana Six, an entomologist for 30 years who teaches at the University of Montana, took her students to Glacier National Park on a field trip and reported the following:

Life doesn’t just deal with this. When I went up Glacier with my students a few weeks ago, the flowers were curling up. At some of the lower elevations, glacier lilies were shriveled, lupins didn’t even open. The flowers should extend for another three weeks and they’re already gone. Any insects or birds that depend upon them, like bees or hummingbirds, are in trouble, their food is gone. Bird populations have just baked… People seem to think of extinctions as some silent, painless statistic. It’s not. You look at birds that can no longer find fish because they’ve moved too far off shore. They’re emaciated; they’re starving to death. We are at the point that there’s nothing untouched.

How contradictory and illustrative that this student experience took place in a “protected national park.”

Referencing how climate change impacts life, Diana said:

Somewhere along the way, I had gone from being an ecologist to a coroner. I am no longer documenting life. I’m describing loss, decline, death.

We are hopeful that our youth can document life on this Medicine Wheel Land Satellite, and instead of  describing “loss, decline, death,”  this one satellite can help individuals to describe resurgence, restoration, holism, and growth. A model, like the one we propose, could be the incubator and inspiration for other similar projects throughout the land. So many empty buildings, so many abandoned farms, so much good land about to be grabbed up by McMansion developers, or those who have no vision toward a resilient and communitarian existence.

We are thinking of a medicine wheel since so many people can utilize the Farm, from horse therapists, to gardening as trauma healers; from alternative medicine experts, to restaurants with a connection to growers. This is Tierra Firma Robusta, for sure, with so much potential to integrate a suite of smart, worldly, localized and educational programs, permanent, long-term, and short in duration.  This would be the linchpin of inspiration, an incubator for similar projects, and we’d make sure that the Philanthropy you head up would be in some form of limelight – imagine, a billionaire placing a property with a deep spiritual history into a land trust of perpetuity. I know another billionaire has purchased farmland and is now the largest farm land holder in the US, but this one here we propose would fit an entirely different model, having nothing to do with industrial farming, genetic engineering and monocultures. Like all good societies, the cornucopia of life and backgrounds and people and land is what makes them dynamic, healthy and resilient, as well as fair.

We propose a grand idea, but we need that field of dreams, that field, that farm, before we can engage a hundred people to be part of this medicine wheel of land healing and hope.

Please let our team discuss this further. Truly, we have both the passion and persistence to get this Medicine Wheel of Healing Farm Community to an unimaginably vibrant level. Will you be part of our field of dreams?

Sincerely,

Paul Haeder

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Here’s the photo layout for this place, on a website called, Mansion Global.

Imagine, the Rich and Famous, a site (there are hundreds) to sell mansions, castles, private jets, yachts, and more.

Getting access to McKenzie or Duffy or any of these star chamber superstars is one issue, but then getting through the red tape, the endless litigation, all the NIMBY retrogrades complaining, and really, getting people to sign onto a community-centered project, one where a lot of sweat equity is expelled, it is so so tough in predatory, dog-eat-dog capitalism. Getting the project off the ground, and getting the resources to keep it sustainable, well, that is the $1 Billion Question.

We are scattered, atomized, factionalized, silo-centric, contrarian. Hyper competitive, dog-eat-dog, and letting the rich and the connected and the bureaucracies of bad government run things, most people have no center, no ability to move along great ideas and projects.

This is primo property for any mutlilayered approach to trauma healing, getting young and old to do something as in a going concern tied to making tiny home kits, etc.

As they purchased adjacent properties over the years, they acquired eight more houses and several pastures that are rented out to local ranchers. One of the homes was demolished, six are rented to tenants, and one is used as the ranch manager’s house, according to Mr. Duffy.

“We became a working ranch but not with our own animals,” he said. “It added the most beautiful, bucolic sense of the place.” 

A homestead that dates back over 100 years still sits at the entrance to the property, he said. In it he found an old stove, which he restored and put in the main house. But the majority of the roughly 390 acres remains wilderness. The property now has approximately 2 miles of river frontage, according to Mr. DeVries. 

These villages or centers are easy to build, in the ten or twenty houses max. But imagine, on land, growing food, working in soil, campfires at night.

Again, not just chronically homeless, but people who are about to be homeless. Imagine an amazing community, a pop-up village, a sort of “charter town,” without the negative implications of “charter anything” involved. For every 100 households of renters in the United States that earn “extremely low income” (30 percent of the median or less), there are only 30 affordable apartments available, according to a 2013 report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition. It is getting worse, and people are burned out on capitalism. Easily designed, that mock up below. Imagine that as one of several nodes on the Duffy Property.

Efforts to break through the red tape and raise money to house the homeless almost always pay off for a community. Even the most expensive tiny-house projects—such as a new, ambitious $6-million campaign to build a 200-person tiny-house park this year in Austin, Texas—can’t rival the cost of homelessness to taxpayers, which was more than $10 million per year in Austin, for example, as YES! reported in December 2013.

“Chronically homeless people—people who have disabilities and are homeless for long periods of time—can be very expensive to systems of public care,” explains Roman. In 2007, the National Alliance to End Homelessness compiled three studies showing that it costs the same or less money to provide permanent housing as it does to allow people to remain homeless. In Denver, Colo., a housing program for the homeless reduced the costs of public services (including medical services, temporary shelter, and costs associated with arrests and incarceration) by an estimated $15,773 per person per year, saving taxpayers thousands of dollars.

Here, just one organization:

In a wooded area behind Ithaca’s commercial strip, there is a location known as “the jungle.” Here, individuals experiencing homelessness gather and make what home they can. Second Wind’s journey began when our founder, Carmen Guidi, started to build relationships with the residents, bringing pizza and listening to their stories. It was when one of his new friends, who had been asking for help, committed suicide that Carmen knew he needed to do more. Acting as an advocate, Carmen was able to find housing for all but nine men.

With his own money, Carmen purchased campers to provide shelter for the men who were still in The Jungle come winter. He placed these on his land and paid for the utilities, but it became clear that living in campers in the winter was still uncomfortable and very expensive. Through a process of collaboration, Second Wind evolved from campers to cottages and became an official 501(c)(3). Programs have expanded to include a house for women and a formalized Homeless Crisis Alleviation team. In 2020 the “cottages” was dropped from our DBA to better represent all that Second Wind does. Each of the projects we manage is further described on their own pages under the “About Us” tab.

​Second Wind’s vision is to house and walk with people towards restored lives. To this end, SW seeks to improve the relationships with self, family, and the larger community. Accomplished by our mission to

• ​Provide housing, support, and encouragement to homeless and at-risk people in our community.
• Mentor residents in life skills needed to reintegrate into society and, when possible, family life.
• Practice living as good neighbors by building relationships amongst residents and the surrounding community.
• Sustain relationships and support residents who have moved on from Second Wind.
• Future projects include an on-site community center, a multi-unit house for women, and a multi-bay work garage.

Here, a higher end way to age and die in place.

Even some churches are attempting to get into the act!

Churches across the US are building tiny houses on spare land to accommodate homeless people, The Associated Press reported.

A number of faith leaders are working with nonprofits and affordable housing organizations to create the micro homes. They typically have a single bedroom and a small kitchen area and are being built on vacant land belonging to churches. 

Tiny homes are becoming an increasingly popular solution to help tackle the homelessness crisis. More than half a million people were homeless in the US in 2020, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness’ most recent report, and 70% of those were individuals. (source)

Of course, that was 2020, and now we see Europe in the sewer for what has been happening with the U$A dictating how EuroTrashLandia will slide into more and more recession, joblessness, and homelessness. Finland ends homelessness and provides shelter for all in need

Yes, adults, seniors, so to speak, are in very precarious positions:

Why Are Seniors Homeless in America? (source)

Over the years, the number of homeless seniors aged 65 years and older in the U.S. has been increasing. Homelessness among older people aged 50-60 years is also increasing. Not all seniors have enough income and money saved to pay for a safe and stable place to live and other necessities such as food, utilities, and medication.

Homeless elders can face many challenges—especially health issues. Many don’t have enough money or insurance coverage to go to the doctor and get treatment. Some don’t trust health care and social services providers. Accessing public assistance programs can also be daunting to homeless elders. Some get discouraged by application processes, have a hard time getting to places to receive care and services, and refuse help.

The key to stable housing for older people and seniors is preventing eviction. State and local departments of social services often help with housing emergencies for the elderly and by providing housing for low income seniors. In many communities, religious organizations help homeless senior citizens by providing emergency housing assistance, case management, and money management services to maintain housing and prevent homelessness.

And,

In May of 1990, the Citizens Committee for the Homeless, a Santa Cruz County nonprofit, began a new project by opening the gates of an organic garden on Pelton Avenue.

The Homeless Garden Project would provide job training and meaningful work in a therapeutic environment. The Homeless Garden Project began as a place to provide sanctuary, refuge, and meaningful work within the healing space of the organic farm. Blossoming over time and furthering the project’s benefits, the farm harvests have provided an opportunity to support our vision and community through our CSA program, farm stand, and crafts, which are sold at our local Santa Cruz stores and on-line.

We are genuinely humbled by the profound transformations our trainees make in our program, and the generous support provided by our community. Our purpose-driven nonprofit has proven to be a benefit to our neighbors in need, our community, and our environment. We couldn’t have done this without the continual generosity and support of our donors, volunteers, and CSA members. We are so grateful for each one of you.

international bat awareness week leading up to Halloween

Lately, I’ve been thinking about bats. A few dozen have been flying around our Waldport, Oregon, Cyprus tree: California Myotis, Fringed Myotis, and the Big Brown Bat. Near White Salmon, WA, I have seen dozens of  Silver-Haired Bats, flying low to the ground on 20 acres we own.

This creature accounts for almost a third of all mammal species (more than 1,400). Bats are both talisman and a bright memory in these dark times.

Recall: Bats and the SARS-CoV2 used to be the talk of the town, beginning March 2020. More than 90 coronas have been found in bats. (The origins of SARS-CoV2 is even speculated recently by writer and thinker, Jeffrey Sachs as a lab origin virus.)

Background: I was in Vietnam years ago to help survey forest and jungle.

However, I’ve had bats in my life since age six months. In the Azores, there is one native bat. My sister and I lived with parents who worked at the Air Force base.  We were on the island for five years.

Bats roosted in the rafters of the garage where my father stored our 1957 Chevy.

I watched bats at dusk from my bedroom window.

Memoires listed: earthquakes, fish, amazing bread, melodic Portuguese language, mold, and bats.

Our nanny had a bent-over fisherman uncle  who let us play on his potato farm. In the evening, with the rice, tuna, warm bread and big glasses of Sangria for the adults and blood-red grape juice for the kids, we’d sit outside and watch a thousand bats echolocate above the forest.

One day Gloria’s tio showed us a big green glass jar with a tin lid.

I saw a creature flapping around.  He showed me my first bat up close. I was three. I learned later, when I really got into bats, that species  — Azores noctule (Nyctalus azoreum), the only endemic mammal on the island.

Another bat lives on the islands —  the greater mouse-eared bat (Myotis myotis) – but this species is not native, first arriving as a stowaway on cargo ships.

For more than six decades, I’ve been fascinated with this species, Chiroptera, which means “hand-wing.” Imagine the bones in a bat’s wing working like those of the human arm and hand, but bat finger bones are super elongated and connected by a double membrane of skin to form “the wing.”

In the 1990s, I lived in bat caves with  British and Vietnamese scientists working on biological surveys, called transects.

We climbed limestone mountains, looking for caves. We worked near Laos.

The 23-year-old Scotsman who led the bat survey was dubbed  “wild man.” I was 36 years old, and the rest of the team was much younger.

Except for Hanoi biologist, Dr. Viet (37).

I was in Vietnam the same age my cryptographer father was there as a Big Red One CW4. He was shot when the helicopter he was in came under fire. The pilot took one between the eyes. My old man’s bullet ended up two inches from his heart.

He never liked talking about Vietnam. By the time I made it to Vietnam, he had been buried, the victim of a heart attack.

I know he would have been blown away that his son was traveling in Vietnam with scientists. He listened to my stories of scuba diving in Mexico, Baja and Central America with a kind of awe.

He liked my yarns.

I ended up in places in Vietnam he never explored.  I hiked, rode in buses and boats, and then did the entire length of the country on a motorcycle. Dr. Viet was a guide for me, navigating me through the hundred plus Vietnamese words I knew.

Today, I am wrestling with fundamental questions as a writer and teacher. Working with words, concepts, spirituality, philosophy and aging, I know why people are seeking solitude and a reimagining of where they are going the rest of their lives.

Bats also bring me to philosophical reflection. I just finished a 1974 essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” by Thomas Nagel. He’s looking at perception, and how as a species, sight-abled humans have a lack of words and mental constructs getting a blind person to understand the color red.

The same goes for scientists attempting to know what it is “to be” and “to experience” like a bat.

If you have been with bats in caves like I have, you know they are alien forms.

Nagel: “But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat.”

The same could be said about people.  How impossible it is for me to know what it is to be a woman and to experience pregnancy and childbirth.  Conscious experience is “a widespread phenomenon.”

Here I am, in a time of corona, lockdowns, mandates, vaccinations, thinking about bats. And the conscious experience. Yet I can’t really be in the bat’s world, or experience it. We can’t know what it’s like to be a 1,000 year old bristlecone pine. Or to be a European bee in a hive.

I’m reminding myself daily to follow this admonition:  “Before I judge a man, I need to walk a mile in his shoes.” Or, before calling a bat “vermin,” people need to image what it’s like to fly using sonar flapping with hand-wings.

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Aside Note:  Oct. 24-31 is Bat Week, an annual, international celebration of the role of bats in nature! If your thing isn’t bats, many groups and organizations also recognize these for the month:  Adopt A Shelter Dog; Antidepressant Death; Breast Cancer Awareness; Celebrating The Bilingual Child; Down Syndrome; Dyslexia; Eat Better, Eat Together; Emotional Intelligence;  Global Diversity; Head Start Awareness; Health Literacy; Long-Term Care Planning!

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In Oregon, there are 15 bat species,  and eight of those are Oregon Conservation Strategy Species. Strategy Species are those having small or declining populations, are at-risk, and/or of management concern.

In our sister state south, California, count that as 25 species of bats. Additionally, there are 45 species of bats in the United States and Canada. Of those California Dreaming animals, bats 24 of these are in Southern California, which has the largest and smallest known bats found in the United States.

Bats can can eat their weight in insects nightly. They are incredible pollinators. No, the cheetah isn’t the fastest mammal. The Brazilian free-tailed bat can reach speeds up to 100 mph, making it by far the fastest mammal on Earth.

That flying fox (genus Pteropus) also called a fox bat, includes about 65 species mostly found on tropical islands from Madagascar to Australia and Indonesia and in mainland Asia. Most species are primarily nocturnal. Flying foxes are the largest bats, some attaining a wingspan of 1.5 metres (5 feet) with a head and body length of about 40 cm (16 inches).

I was under a papaya tree in Vietnam. It was dusk. I was in shorts and barefooted. I had just come down from an alpine forest area with our crew. Lots of cobras on the path heading back to camp. I had a huge bowl of super strong tea, sipping it while listening to the forest churn out amazing nighttime symphonies.

Civets, amphibians, gibbons, odd barking from the deer endemic to Vietnam. Insects. And the guys and gals around a smokey fire talking, and some zither music from a radio. I was the snake guy, and assisted with the bat studies. I had just caught a green viper and photographed it twenty different ways. The Vietnamese scientists wondered what sort of wild man I was as I jumped up and down limbs to wrestle these snakes, towel wrapped around wrist, another around my neck, ready to pin head down with my special short stick.

It was a long half a year, with lots of rain, mud, many river crossings (I was also one of the logistics guys, taking one of our three motorcycles into 26 river crossings to a village 10 miles down the mountain for tuna, cigs, beer and ramen, eggs, rice).

The tree seemed pretty shadowy, and when I leaned into it, as I was looking up for stars or a moon, there, those leaves just started trembling, and, poof, about 40 fruit bats lifted up, like something out of Hollywood, to make it simple. All over the space above my head. Scattered like frenzied folks.

One of those hundred moments in my life where my young verbiage, kick ass and bitchin’, came back calling.

I’ve written a lot about Vietnam, about the work, the ideas, about wounds of my father and friends and countrymen seemingly huge, but compared to the Vietnamese suffering, our are scratches. Trauma. Homeless veterans. Science and biology. Ecology. Travel. Photography. Deep trawling of people in Vietnam. Friendships. And, a short story collection, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam.

Here, Part 1, “Bat Caves and Vietnam – More than Just a War Log” 

& Part 2, “Deep Country, Bats, the Riot of Life in Viet Nam’s Cities”

I want you to guard against those who demand that you die just to prove something. It is not that I advise you to respect your life more than anything else, but not to die uselessly for the need of others… for you still have many years ahead of you. Many years of joy and happiness to experience. Who else but you can experience your life?

― Bao Ninh, author of Sorrow of War

It’s a different world, now, and it was different leading up to the pre-Planned Pandemic, pre-Trump/Biden Lunacy, pre-cancelling everything contrary to dead-end narrative, pre-end of real journalism. Now, I find few who want to know about other people, about lives lived, about philosophies gained through reading, schooling, schools of hard knocks, and people hate nuance, and forget about engaging them in deep discussion about animals, really, species like bats, man, scary in the minds of clueless folk.

Things have changed since the infection of Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden . . . . The United $tates of America is the Empire of Lies, Empire of Chaos, Empire of Murder, hands down, and we don’t need Pepe Escobar or Jonathan Pilger or others to tell us that. But the seed of this evil runs deep infecting everyday conversation.

I was with a guy who is helping me on house construction, and he has true Trump Derangement Syndrome, and alas, talking about DeSantis in derogatory ways, I told him I have Zero love of Pelosi or Desantis, et al. I let him know that I am hard left socialist, and definitely leaning toward communism. Ukraine, and, no, Biden is not a great guy or president. I told him that both parties are equally corrupt, and alas, this is a country of casino, predatory, shock doctrine, disaster, parasitic capitalism, with a big “C” for corrupt-criminal, abided by and promoted by both Republicans and Democrats. He told me that if I am communist, and love that so much, then I should move to Russia. Wow.

There’s a 69 year old Democrat for you.

And again, in rural, Pacific beach Oregon, few want to know about anything other than their little world of self-imposed trauma, confirmation bias, and the black-white world of triple downing on the dumbdown Kool Aid mix.

Obama Derangement Syndrome and Trump Derangement Syndrome. Whew.

I’m thinking about Rogue State, Blum’s work, and how the U$A deems what or who is human, and now, in this up is down, war is peace, lies are truth world of the Mainstream Presstitutes, the lockstep of journalism almost everywhere never digging, or looking astray, and the deplatforming, gaslighting and criminalization of independent thinking. Sort  of determining who shall live, and who shall  be exterminated.

The protagonist-narrator of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 novel The Sympathizer has a thing for squid. (Think less calamari, more American Pie.) The bastard son of a Vietnamese maid and a French priest, he discovers at the age of thirteen that he has a peculiar fetish for masturbating into gutted squid, lovingly—albeit unwittingly—prepared by his mother for the night’s meal. Unfortunately for him, squid are in short supply in working-class Saigon in the late nineteen-fifties, and so he is forced to wash the abused squid and return them to the kitchen to cover up his crime. Sitting down to dinner with his mother late one night, he tucks into one of those very same squid, stuffed and served with a side of ginger-lime sauce. “Some will undoubtedly find this episode obscene,” he concedes. “Not I!” he declares. “Massacre is obscene. Torture is obscene. Three million dead is obscene. Masturbation, even with an admittedly nonconsensual squid? Not so much.” He should know. By the time he is narrating the novel, he has lived through the Vietnam War as an undercover communist agent in South Vietnam, has sought asylum in America, and is now living as a refugee-cum-spy in Los Angeles.

The Sympathizer was published in 2015—three years after Kill Anything that Moves—but it could just as easily have been written as a prompt for historian turned investigative journalist Nick Turse. Indeed, Turse’s central aim in Kill Anything that Moves is to expose the unparalleled obscenity of the Vietnam War: unparalleled both in terms of the devastating scale and variety of harm done and the diabolical levels of premeditation on the part of the U.S. military. Historians of the Vietnam War, as much as the American public, have traditionally remembered the massacre at Mỹ Lai—in which upwards of five hundred unarmed Vietnamese civilians were hacked, mowed down, and violated by the American military—as an outlier in an otherwise largely acceptable war (at least in terms of American actions). But as Vietnam veteran and whistleblower Ron Ridenhour explains, and Turse quotes approvingly, Mỹ Lai “was an operation, not an aberration.” (source)

Bats as vermin, pests. Entire bat roosts murdered with one dynamite stick thrown into a cave. Double and triple taps. Splats. Bats emblematic of peoples the U$A deems as vermin, less than. Many of those splats are in the Global South, BIPOC!

Bioindicators. Bats. Truly:

The earth is now subject to climate change and habitat deterioration on unprecedented scales. Monitoring climate change and habitat loss alone is insufficient if we are to understand the effects of these factors on complex biological communities. It is therefore important to identify bioindicator taxa that show measurable responses to climate change and habitat loss and that reflect wider-scale impacts on the biota of interest. We argue that bats have enormous potential as bioindicators: they show taxonomic stability, trends in their populations can be monitored, short- and longterm effects on populations can be measured and they are distributed widely around the globe. Because insectivorous bats occupy high trophic levels, they are sensitive to accumulations of pesticides and other toxins, and changes in their abundance may reflect changes in populations of arthropod prey species. Bats provide several ecosystem services, and hence reflect the status of the plant populations on which they feed and pollinate as well as the productivity of insect communities. Bat populations are affected by a wide range of stressors that affect many other taxa. In particular, changes in bat numbers or activity can be related to climate change (including extremes of drought, heat, cold and precipitation, cyclones and sea level rise), deterioration of water quality, agricultural intensification, loss and fragmentation of forests, fatalities at wind turbines, disease, pesticide use and overhunting. There is an urgent need to implement a global network for monitoring bat populations so their role as bioindicators can be used to its full potential. (source)

And yet, most people are not batty about bats. Most people have their preconceptions, their biases, their outright misinformation about bats, and all those prejudices about bats vis-a-vis Hollydirt, Hollywood, sorry, and literature, and myth.

Truly, we, the common socialists, the ones pushing for community-directed governance, who know k12 needs to be facilitated in the out of doors, with hands on earth, and deep learning with languages, music, poetry, biology/ecology, we are the solutions. All things solved with food, water, art, hearth and home, and deep thinking. With intergenerational cohesion. I am just a guy who has studied agrarian-centered cultures, who has traveled far and wide, and who was immersed in six languages other than my primary language, English. Immersed in dozens of different cultures and perspectives. But we common socialists, us International Workers of World wobbly types, we are the bats, the indicator species, the splat. Not worthy of life.

Debs, another leading person, who is considered splat, collateral damage. (source)

Expendable, sacfricial lambs. Bats.

Yet bats have defined me, as has all those dives around the world. As well as ground truthing in Guatemala or working as a newspaperman in Bisbee. All those thousands of college students I have worked with over five states. The work in prisons. A thousand published pieces, from newspapers, magazines, and more. My radio show: Tipping Points: Voices from the Edge.

And more, but I want to think like a bat, be a bat just for one night along the Laos border, skimming the sky for mosquitos, moths and flying sticks.

That would be a true transmogrification.

The level of censurous behavior, and the level of electronic cancellation, well, in this digital modern (sic) world, so-called Western Civilization has reached that inner fascist in all the country’s players.

What, 73% in one poll (can’t trust those polls) say more money for UkriNaziLandia. Cognitive dissonance, and Kool-Aid Deluxe for the majority of Klanadians, USA-Trash-Landians and EuroTrashLandians.

Then the headlines: Bing Shit,

Elon Musk, US ponder ways to help Iranians under internet blackout

Finland shuts borders with Russia as conscription age men flee Putin order

Brett Favre pushed for funding while knowing potential illegality

Thousands of Hells Angels members heading to Stockton for Sonny Barger’s funeral

The founder of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club in Oakland died this past summer

Russian police block mobilization protests, arrest hundreds

Judge rules that Arizona can enforce near-total abortion ban

Judge Kellie Johnson ruled Friday that a 1901 ban can be enforced

Iran will make ‘proportional’ response to Ukraine reducing ties

Georgia to replace voting machines in a county after ‘unauthorized access’

Police detained more than 700 people, including over 300 in Moscow

In terms of the so-called massive amounts of Russians protesting mobilization, Scott Ritter calls it right: He grew up in a military family, and when young, he detested the draft heroes who risked everything to not fight in the illegal war against Vietnam. He has since matured, he said, and takes his hat off to those Americans who fled to Canada and did the right thing, since mother America wasn’t being attacked from 7,000 miles away. Russia, on the other hand, has to have its homeland defended, and those mobilized already have military service, and 80 percent of them will not see battles.

Protecting the homeland is much different than murdering farmers.

“No Viet Cong ever called me nigger” was already being used by black anti-war protesters in early 1966. On February 23, within a week of Ali’s “no quarrel” comment (which, remember, was not followed by the n-word comment), “No Viet Cong ever called me nigger” was spotted on a poster at an anti-war demonstration in New York. The the phrase appeared repeatedly at various protests during that year. It is unknown who thought of it first (although Stokely Carmichael and John Lewis have been cited as possible originators), but there’s no evidence it was Ali.

He did say something very close to it in 1967, when he told an interviewer:

“My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father. … Shoot them for what? How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail.”

And he said something very similar later when he talked to the journal Black Scholar in 1970:

“I met two black soldiers a while back in an airport. They said: ‘Champ, it takes a lot of guts to do what you’re doing.’ I told them: ‘Brothers, you just don’t know. If you knew where you were going now, if you knew your chances of coming out with no arm or no eye, fighting those people in their own land, fighting Asian brothers, you got to shoot them, they never lynched you, never called you nigger, never put dogs on you, never shot your leaders. You’ve got to shoot your ‘enemies’ (they call them) and as soon as you get home you won’t be able to find a job. Going to jail for a few years is nothing compared to that.’”

Oh, the undiplomatic West, compared to Russia’s 50 year veteran at diplomacy. It is embarassing, the collective West, really.

Read Lavrov’s speech to the Un-United Nations: Here.

Dear Madam President

Dear colleagues

Ladies and Gentlemen,

We are meeting at a difficult and dramatic time. Crisis phenomena are mounting and the international security situation is rapidly deteriorating.

Instead of honest dialogue and searching for compromises, we have to deal with disinformation, crude staging and provocations. The West’s line undermines trust in international institutions as organs of reconciliation of interests and in international law as a guarantee of justice and protection of the weak against arbitrariness. Negative trends in concentrated form can be seen within the walls of the UN, which emerged from the wreckage of German fascism and Japanese militarism and was created to promote friendly relations between its members and to prevent conflicts between them.

What is at stake today is the future of the world order – that is clear to any unbiased observer. The question is whether it will be an order with one hegemon forcing everyone to live by his notorious “rules” that benefit only him. Or will it be a democratic, fair world – without blackmail and intimidation of the unwanted, without neo-Nazism and neocolonialism. Russia firmly chooses the second option. Together with our allies, partners and like-minded people, we call upon ourselves to work towards its implementation.

Gone is the unipolar model of world development that served the interests of the “golden billion”, whose super-consumption for centuries was ensured by the resources of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Today, the formation of sovereign states, ready to defend national interests, leads to the formation of an equitable, socially oriented and sustainable multipolar architecture. However, objective geopolitical processes are perceived by Washington and the ruling elites of Western countries that are fully subordinate to it as a threat to their dominant position.

The U.S. and its allies want to stop the flywheel of history. Once, by declaring victory in the Cold War, Washington elevated itself to the rank of a messenger of God on earth, who has no obligations, but only “sacred” rights to act with impunity – as and wherever. Any state can be declared a zone of such actions – especially if it did not please the self-proclaimed “masters of the world”. We all remember how the wars of aggression were launched against Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Libya, far from American shores, under far-fetched pretexts, which took many hundreds of thousands of civilian lives. Were any of these countries really affected by the legitimate interests of the West? Were English or the languages of other NATO member states, Western media and culture banned there? Have the Anglo-Saxons been declared “subhumans” and used heavy weapons against them? What are the results of U.S. adventures in the Middle East? An improvement in human rights and the rule of law? Stabilization of the socio-political situation? An increase in the welfare of the population? Name a country where Washington has intervened forcefully and where life has improved as a result.

I am here on the Oregon Coast, and that impolite, undiplomatic, truly insane black-white thinking is pervasive. I see it here in rural Oregon, and I see it throughout the land, with my dealings with so-called editors in California and back East. I see this sickness permeating the minds of people. The pro-Vaccination At Any Cost cluster-fuck heroes, and the absolute racist and backward mentality of folk who interview me for jobs, but pass-pass-pass. A hundre passes, almost since 2011.

Oh, yeah, what shall I do? Erase everything I have written that’s on the Internet, since I am anti-authority to the max, anti-smug supervisor lording over me or anyone else. How dare we have real conversations in our jobs, and in social services, it is their way or the highway, or in education, the most fragile of fuckers caving with the slightest contrarian in their midst. Oh, the writing and journalism profession is just dying dying and really part of the One Percent, maybe Five Percent, making a living, and many others just publishing crap, milquetoast, and getting some tenure track gig teaching MFA students who are in debt debt debt for the dream of becoming, who, the next . . . . . Look up the top new novelists in the past five years.

Lock step against Russia, against history, against free and uncensored journalism or essay writing. Imagine all those above with UkroNazi Flags on their Subarus, Priuses or Apple laptops.

PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide. We champion the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world. Our mission is to unite writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible.

Founded in 1922, PEN America is the largest of the more than 100 centers worldwide that make up the PEN International network. PEN America works to ensure that people everywhere have the freedom to create literature, to convey information and ideas, to express their views, and to access the views, ideas, and literatures of others. Our strength is our Membership—a nationwide community of more than 7,500 novelists, journalists, nonfiction writers, editors, poets, essayists, playwrights, publishers, translators, agents, and other writing professionals, as well as devoted readers and supporters who join with them to carry out PEN America’s mission.

You won’t find PEN America condemining Ukraine’s coup, or the demonization of Russian language, Russian artists, Russian writers, or those in Ukraine who take a different path in the Special Military Operation. This is from 2014, almost three eons ago.

Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault

The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin

By John J. Mearsheimer

September/October 2014

According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe. In this view, the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 merely provided a pretext for Putin’s decision to order Russian forces to seize part of Ukraine.

But this account is wrong: the United States and its European allies share most of the blame!

Even the trendy Useful Idiots with Aaron Mate and Katie Halper has a guy on that makes sense, and tells it like it is, at around 13 minutes into this podcast:

Researcher and writer Dr. Ben Abelow, a scholar who lobbied Congress on nuclear arms policy, joins Useful Idiots to explain, as his new book argues, how the west brought war to Ukraine.

“The goal of the US,” Abelow says, “is not to save Ukrainians but to degrade Russia’s military until they won’t be able to fight in the future. And while some say stopping Russia is a humanitarian goal, the way one would degrade Russia’s military is to keep an extended war going and fight to the last Ukrainian.”

Abelow analyzes the history of this cold war, the aggression by each side, and the hypocrisy of the argument that Ukraine has a sacrosanct right to join NATO.

“The right to join NATO is the right to place a western military arsenal on Russia’s border. If Russia made a military alliance with Canada or Mexico, US leaders would not be talking about their right to do so.”

And on this week’s news of Putin announcing military escalation and giving a thinly-veiled threat of nuclear war, Dr. Abelow warns:

“I hope it’s taken seriously.”

Of course, Putin did not threaten nuclear way, and this referenda going on in those eastern parts of Russian Ukraine, means, if they all go for Russian annexing, means that the border of Russian will be extended, and alas, Russia faced that existential threat even more. Attacking the civilians there, murdering like Ukrainians do, will be an attack on Russia.

Oh Russia, putting the motherland so close to their bases, Nato/USA/TrashLandia

Who is the Empire of Lies, Chaos, and Existential Threat to the World?

Camp Hope, the largest homeless camp in the state of Washington, is taking a financial toll on the city of Spokane. After nine months of the encampment being up, it’s cost taxpayers over $400,000 so far.

So, the beat goes on, as we see those in these camps as only the tip of the iceberg. I am in a rural county, on the Pacific Coast, and these out of towners are buying up beach-view property at $400K just for the sand, and then, a $1.4 million (minimum) house that should be, well, $260 K anywhere else.

Hotels galore. Restaurants. Even a national high end Oregon Coast Aquarium. Pelican Brewry and then Rogue Beer and Whiskey and a lot of joints selling crab cakes, halibut and any number of other seafood delicacies. A county with 11 schools, and a couple of hospitals (Samaritan, Lincoln City and Newport).

Oh yeah, the Price Parade.

But there is that underbelly — people can’t afford to live here making $15 an hour, or even $20. The medical staff rent hotels and do three-day shifts and then head back to the main hospital complex of Samaratin in Corvallis.

No one to sous chef, no one to wait tables, no one to strip hotel bedding, no one to, well, teach the kids. There is a teacher shortage, and a substitute instructor shortage. Even the bus drivers have to be imported and put up in hotels.

This is the reality of this despicable country, USA. Every dime I spend on taxes, I feel the bile purcolate up since the taxes are going for, well, trips to the UK for the burial of that queen (flags halfmast for her?). How many demented democrats will be there for photo ops? And at taxpayer expense? And, then each penny of mine given to the racist, fascist regime of Morty ZioLensky (just a nickname, since he is a public figure with a few dozen millions or more in the bank, so, he can take it), it’s awonder I haven’t gone the proverbial “postal.” Imagine, we have water issues in this country, we have a need for $12,000 eletrcial transformers (they were $2K just three years ago). We have private ambulance service here. If I were to be on my bicycle and rammed by a forty-four magnum RV with Tesla in tow, my life flight (if there were even solid pieces of me left) would be in the tens of thousands. No dental clinics, and again, we have visiting doctors and specialists. Some of the medical work we have to go through we have to find transportation a few hours away to Corvallis or Salem or Eugene.

Lovely to read these pieces: “Ukraine Is the New Israel” (source); “Ukraine Seeks F16s, Patriot Missiles, & Leopard Tanks – Russian Ops in Ukraine” (source); “Ukraine: The CIA’s 75-year-old Proxy” (source)

“Zelensky rings New York Stock Exchange bell as Euro dips below dollar”

Here, an even more pathetic and sick game of Morty and Company: “Zelensky Will Request More Weapons Directly at Conference With Top US Arms Makers” (sources) It takes a pot smoking comic to highlight this:

Western support for the Ukrainian war effort will have long-lasting consequences for U.S.  foreign policy in the world.  The impact will most certainly be felt in the Middle East region and especially in Israel.

But the U.S. and NATO’s generous economic and military aid for Ukraine’s war effort must be making Israel nervous. 

Unlike Gulf regimes, which merely buy Western protection, Israel is dependent on U.S.  military largesse for its salvation.  Ukraine is today the ultimate Western cause: never has any state received such military aid from the West and no state has so galvanized Western public opinion. (Notice Western media’s disregard for the opinion of the people and governments of Africa, Asia and Latin America, who do not support the sanctions against Russia. Only Westerners’ opinions seem to count). 

To be sure, Israel has since its inception received tremendous coverage and support from the West — and still does in the wake of World War II and the founding of the state of Israel atop the Palestinian homeland.  Since then the U.S. — among other Western countries — has armed and financed Israel’s  offensive wars. 

Oh, the money money money wasted on these perversions, and here, another piece about why I have always hated the Ukraine under Nuland-Kagan-Biden-Obama Coup: “NATO-Backed Atlantic Council Proposed Apartheid Israel as a Blueprint for a Hyper-Militarized Ukraine” (source)

Just forty days after Russia’s military campaign began inside Ukraine, Ukrainian President Vlodymyr Zelensky told reporters that in the future, his country would be like “a big Israel.” The following day, one of Israel’s top promoters in the Democratic Party published an op-ed in NATO’s official think tank exploring how that could be executed.

Zelensky made his prediction while speaking to reporters on April 5, rejecting the idea that Kiev would remain neutral in future conflicts between NATO, the European Union, and Russia. According to Zelensky, his country would never be like Switzerland (which coincidentally abandoned its Napoleon-era tradition of nonalignment by sanctioning Russia in response to its February invasion).

“We cannot talk about ‘Switzerland of the future,’” the president informed reporters. “But we will definitely become a ‘big Israel’ with its own face.”

For those wondering what a “big Israel” would actually look like, Zelensky quickly elaborated on his disturbing prophecy.

“We will not be surprised that we will have representatives of the Armed Forces or the National Guard in all institutions, supermarkets, cinemas — there will be people with weapons,” Ukraine’s president said, predicting a bleak existence for his citizens. “I am sure that our security issue will be number one in the next ten years.”

Though the web post was based on comments Zelensky made to reporters, the president’s office mysteriously excised a section of his remarks in which he declared a future Ukraine would not be “absolutely liberal, European.” Instead, along with his vision for a heavily militarized Ukraine, the post emphasized Zelensky’s readiness to join NATO “already tomorrow.”

Oh. So, $100 billion to Ukraine, for, well, the new Israel. Of course, we can’t forget that Morty ZioLensky is a good good friend of Israel, and his billionaire buddies are dual Ukraine and Israel citizens (sic). Israel will have a big hand in Ukraine, if Russia is defeated. Imagine that, a country with wheat, resources, and a few million goyim used to test weapons (cannon fodder) and drugs (30-plus bioweapons plants thus far) and digital currency and total awareness of the human person, 24/7 surveillence, total control of mind, body, thoughts, travel, and, well family planning. You think this is just poking fun at things? Research the connections Israel will and has made to Ukraine.

If this insanity by mainstream press, by Republicans and by Democrats is not recognized even by the so-called socialists, then, this USA has effectively drunk the Morty Zio-Lensky Kool-Aid (Johnstown, here we come):

Yet, my old haunt, Spokane, is dealing with homelessness — not necessarily the houseless population in this county looking for work, but not finding affordable housing. I am talking about folks I have worked with for years as a social services specialists. Trauma, one two many significant life tragedies or slippages, substance reliance, broken families or non at all at birth, failed education, policing, social work systems. Tens of millions in the country that have a felony,, have unresolved depression, have a slew of physical, psychological, spiritual and adulting problems.

In Spokane, there is a Camp Hope, which is just a spit of land with tents and broke RVs, where down-in-their-luck folk can stay for a while. Yep, violence, rapes, thefts, complete human breakdown.

The war zone is in each person’s head, and the battles they face are daily, in the dozens. Of course, the politicians and business owners and the homeowners want this camp to end. The garbage and security (cops and then private security) have cost the City $400,000.

“The reason they’re still in the camp and their biggest obstacle for getting out is no life skills,” said Maurice Smith, a homeless advocate.

So for now, they’re stuck, all 600 of them, each with a unique story, in a community that’s growing bigger by the day.

“I would like to get housing and get my own place to get me out of here,” Chavez said.

Seventy-seven percent of people say what got them into Camp Hope were family issues followed by loss of income. So, where would they go if they don’t want to go to a shelter, and if or when this camp is cleared?

According to a new survey, every single one of them would go to a tiny home, something the city and county don’t offer. (source)

Yeah, every penny, every second of publicity and vapid propaganda expelled on Morty ZioZ and his regime and the lies of Morty being a hero and Russians being the monsters, all of those pennies from heaven (US taxpayer) for food, salaries, for boots, for publicity campaigns, every penny, I wish tens of million pro-war Americans would choke on.

Is there a housing crisis? Is there a substance abuse crisis? Is there a health crisis (healthy boys and girls with myocarditis after the bio-weapon phase three innoculation? Are there nurses wanting to unionize (we have two hospitals, Lincoln City and Newport, less than 25 miles apart, but Newport is unionized and Lincoln City nurses are attempting to unionize)? More and more young men are dying of 40-hour straight on a fishing boat, and then, bam, dead in the shower (meth is a big promoter of 40-hoiur straight world’s most dangerous catch!

Of course, the housing crisis, the medical crisis, the homeless crisis, the debt crisis, the health crisis, the education crisis, the sewage-bad water-terrrile air-rotten food-shitty public transportation crises all can be solved.

Just get the capitalists out of the way. Bye-bye J.P Morgan Chase, bye-bye Gates, bye-bye Warren Buffet. Bye-bye Biden and Trump and TV News and Holly-dirt and the COMPLEX, not the Matrix — chemical company-oil company-banking-insurance-finace-prison-pharma-AI-VR-digital-media-law-arms-military-judicial-surveillance COMPLEX.

Teach the bloody kids that they can join together. Teach the kids how to squat. Teach the kids first responder skills. Teach the kids how to build, duh, tiny homes, and hoe a garden, and put up preserves. Teach the children how to read, how to HACK the system. Teach them at home, if you have to. Teach them that the American Dream is a Nightmare, yohow t he kid. Teach them that a requiem for a dream is the reality the COMPLEX is heading them toward:

Messy, man, trying to be human and humane. You can’t feed homeless folk sandwiches and bottled water without the Pigs coming at you with batons and tasers and Glocks.

Sickness prevails in these Un-United Snakes of Amnesia:

[Volunteers with Tampa Food Not Bombs are defiant as police have decided to enforce an ordinance that prohibits them from feeding homeless people in a park without a permit. ]

Look hard at the chubby white woman, the Pig-Cop in Tampa. This is what the Little Eichmann looks like. This is what the snitch of Germany looks like. This is the normalization of insanity looks like. The police are not here for US, that has been made clear. Do you need a thousand George Floyd captured i-Phone murders by pig to prove that? Just this shows it all. Feeding people is illegal.

Leave No Trace, a movie about a veteran and his daughter living in there own version of home. These camps bulldozed over by forest rangers and cops.

I lived in Estacada, where the film is partially set. And, I worked with several organizations going into Oregon’s woods and forests looking for veterans (many vets want solitude, in the woods with dog and extended tribal family, and no cops, officials, and noise from cities. You know, PTSD infused humanity from war, or just the war of being in boot camp and abused in the US military.

Sort of getting their techniques from Apartheid Occupied Palestine?

Oh, these monsters:

That Israel, and those pigs: “Two decades of Israeli-US police cooperation includes training in racial profiling, counter terrorism and suppressing protests”

Mazel tov:

Dehumanizing us, the people, the 80 Percent, and even the upper 20 percent, as many of the protestors in the USA are in the 20 Percent Category of Wealth, and they too get yanked, spit upon, hog-tied, and neck kneed and face sucker punched by the pigs, trained by well, Israel, in some cases (the Seattle and Portland pigs I dealt with were trained over there, and sometimes the thugs from Occupied Palestine, the Zionist Murderers, they come on over to train our Goyim Guys and Gals in the PD.

So how difficult is it to buy up land, dig a well, get communities gathered around agriculture, mental and physical health healing, and to do the work of building micro-homes? Oh, darn, read this piece — my piece — Dissident Voice: “All the World’s a Stage … Except in our Own Backyards! . . . . All it takes is a cool seven million smackeroos to build that field of dreams”!

A dream of two hundred acres, gone, gone and sold to a developer. Kids should have been put at the front of this:

Students at FutureForward at Washington Square are building the first of five tiny homes to house young people that are aging out of the foster care system and have nowhere else to go. When children age out of foster care, they become ineligible to receive state assistance with housing, food and medical care under the foster care system, leaving them at risk for homelessness.

Watch the video here!

The solutions are there — end this sick political system. End the sick media system. End the military. This is disaster after another for young and old to have to endure under Biden:

So unlike Ukraine, to be clear, sir, US forces, US men and women would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion?” the interviewer Scott Pelley asked again.

“Yes,” reiterated Biden.

How much collective trauma can the Kool-Aid drinkers take, and their offspring, and their students, and their neighbors? How much of this piled upon piles of trauma can this country take?

“Bill Clinton denies blame for Ukraine crisis”

So, Camp Hope isn’t old Hope, Arkansas, where Bill arose from? There is no si se puede or MAGA or Putting People First , Kinder, Gentler Nation, Prosperity and Progress, Let America Be America Again, Reform, prosperity and peace, Stick it to the man by voting for a woman, Build Back Better (look at the marketing crap from presidential campaigns!)

Here’s mine:

Let the youth do it. Let the youth lead. Let the youth and the old and sick have the table. Let the ideas and creativity of young folk build a communitarian and socialist society. Let the young people take the reins of power. Get out of the way of our children. No more lipless white men and women telling the young and the disenfranchised what they should and need to do. Make the old follow the youth. Give young People the Power.

but then, we live in a country where Biden and Mitch, and everything in between are running on empty IQ . . . .

So, the local newspaper, Newport News Times, shows its tough colors, with some syndicated cartoon that, well, again, is almost like 1942 with Japanese running with coke bottle bottom glasses from the brace USA.

The unbelievable lies and half-truths and amnesia and agnotology in the Western World are running a failing empire which seems like a rabid poodle under Biden and Company (is there a hare, err, Harris in the house/White House).

In the end, the unHoly See, that criminal organization, is back at it at What Bombs and Weapons Would Jesus Use (WBWWJU)?

Supplying Kiev with weapons may be a morally justified thing to do under certain conditions, Pope Francis said on Thursday when asked about nations arming Ukraine.

Speaking to journalists on his plane as he returned from a three-day trip to Kazakhstan, the pope explained that motivation played a key part in judging whether an action was morally acceptable or not.

Selling weapons to another nation can be “morally acceptable if done under the conditions of morality,” he said. But an arms shipment “can be immoral if done with intentions of making more war” or to profit from it in some way, he added, as quoted by the Catholic News Service.

And so, this hit list, the kill list, you know, not the one playing tunes and rock and roll, what about that, Francis? This is a few months ago, and I heard Eva yesterday, and she is absolutely afraid of returning to Canada, err, Klanada :

RT had me on yesterday to discuss Ukraine’s kill list & my entry on it. I highlighted Canada’s cozy relationship with Ukraine, including with the Nazi battalions, Chrystia Freeland’s Nazi-collaborating grandpa , and why I feel safer living in Russia than I would were I back in Canada where Ukrainian nationalists & Nazi supporters run rampant and could easily harm or kill me. I also spoke of how while independent Canadian media reached out to me for an interview, concerned about the kill list entry & my safety, Canadian state-funded media, CBC, reached out to me to attempt to set me up for an interview for what I assume is their pending smear piece on me–and that the CBC journalist’s email to me made zero mention of Ukraine’s kill list, but what he did mention (my participation in a tribunal on Ukraine’s war crimes) could only have come from him reading my entry on Ukraine’s kill list as that tribunal was not widely publicized in English or by myself, but is on my kill list entry. Thus he & CBC prioritize pushing war propaganda over addressing Ukraine’s kill list which threatens the life of a Canadian journalist.

It is absolutely impossible to talk with people about what is Ukraine, what was the Nuland-Kagan-Neocon coup was in Ukraine, 2014, and what is war and what are war crimes, and what are banned weapons, and what are civilian targets versus targets with military staging in civilian neighborhoods.

It is more than cognitive dissonance. It is the fatigue of a bad country, USA, doing so many bad things over the course of decades, including all those billions of bombs and bullets expended on human beings, but let’s start with US’s war with Vietnam.

Is that Pope available for criticism against USA for what is happening now in Afghanistan?

Afghans are not the people of a lesser God. Each human being came to this world with an identical biological process and each mother has suffered similar pains. The human being is the most precious thing in this universe. Everything else in this universe is meant to serve human beings, whether it is animals, plants, minerals, Sun, Mountains, Water, Oxygen, etc., all are to serve humankind in a different way.

Four decades of wars, conflicts, and unrest have put Afghanistan into misery. Whether it was the Afghan war against former USSR occupation in the 1980s, the internal political struggle among factions of Taliban or mujahedeen, or the US-led war on terror from 2001 till 2021, all was disastrous for the people of Afghanistan.

Afghanistan has been suffering through a grave humanitarian crisis that worsened after the fall of Kabul. According to UN reports, Afghanistan could face “universal poverty,” with 97% of Afghans living below the World Bank-designated international poverty line of $1.90 a day. Estimated 362,000 people need humanitarian assistance following the June 2022 earthquake that hit Paktika and Khost provinces. Victims of malnutrition in Afghanistan include 1.1 million children under five and 0.8 million pregnant and lactating women. Two-thirds of the country is in a critical and catastrophic situation for water scarcity.

Selling Afghan male children to become cheap labor and pushing girls into forced marriages has become more common. Some of them are smuggled to Europe and America and misused as sex workers too.

The Health system in Afghanistan is exhausted and has left millions of Afghans with mounting health needs. Hospitals were destroyed, and Doctors and paramedic staff migrated to other countries. The nation is in severe need of health care.

An estimated 677,000 people have been driven out of their homes this year. Either to live in various camps inside Afghanistan or forced to flee to other countries and live the rest of life as miserable refugees.

Economic decline, drought, and high food prices have resulted in 18.9 million people (45% of the population) to be facing a crisis or food insecurity from June to November 2022. (source)

But then, the small time news in the big time newspapers, or the big time news in the small town newspapers, it is all minced, diced and stripped of sense and logic and intelligence. So I end with the thought experiment: If I had 12 people I could gather up in my County (Lincoln) to protest all the arms to Ukraine, all the terrorism used by Morth ZioLensky, all the lies of media and journalism, all the great people working in Donbass and other parts of Ukraine trying to be there, objective, cataloguing what is on the ground. Just a small gathering at a park with flyers, copies of news accounts, maybe some videos looping on TV sets, showing that there are other voices and journalists out there wanting truth, wanting to cut through not just the fog of war, but the shit of a dying empire and insane coalition (EuroTrashLandia) putting nails in their supposed enemy’s coffin, Russia and the Russian people.

Maybe the 12 of us get an ad made up and come up with the money to run it in the Newport News Times? Hmm, would they run the ad, and, what sort of story, if any, would their reporters do on this little group of people — maybe all of us smart, former daily reporters, faculty, who knows? There would be outrage, big time, if a story appeared with unadulturated quotes. Try looking for images on Google of protestors against arms to Ukraine. You will not find any!

Hundreds of “weapons for Ukraine” images like this:

And this bumper sticker (if I believed in bumper stickers for my rotting vehicle) would get my vehicle smashed.

But then, the drag queen show must go on, and this is in that same local newspaper:

Now, if I were to do that, hmm, as a straight white male, you know, in public, or at an event or in a classroom, what sort of reaction would I receive after faking-feigning caress my “breasts”? Imagine that, and I have zero concern about drag shows (of course I’ve been to them), but this is the local newspaper, and alas, the Pride Parade and events are being super promoted here (and I wonder how many LQBTQA will be putting Ukraine flags on their falsies and g-strings?) in the newspaper. Huge ads from the Newport Pride Community. Constant letters to the editor in support of some gay nephew or lesbian daughter and her transgender kids.

The point isn’t to dismiss the gay pride stuff, but the point is juxapositioning of one topic against a bigger and more global and concerning topic: The USA and the Morty ZioLensky destroying people and a country to fit some sick capitalist agenda in Ukraine. And, for pigs like PM Truss, telling all who will listen, that she is okay with pressing the nuclear button against Russia.

Yeah, how about those protests, uh? Nope. All the greenies and all the Biden Backers and all the Clueless Trumpies, they want China and Russia and Cuba and Iran and Venezuela GONE.

Here, the Pride schedule in the local yokel rag:

I am talking about more than two months leading up to today pusing the gay price events and pushing LGBTQA+ as a really really big event!

Well, oh darn — who is really listening to the truth, to other perspectives, like from, Andrei Martyanov?

How many people will be in on this interview just minutes away?

Both Max Blumenthal and Scott Ritter are called Putin Apologists, and both are on Ukraine’s kill list!

In an article in Consortium News, “Chuck Schumer’s War on Free Speech,” on Aug. 3, Scott Ritter focused on Senate Majority Leader Schumer, noting first that in the debate over H.R. 7691, when Sen. Rand Paul proposed appointing an inspector general to monitor the way the $40 billion being handed over to Ukraine would be spent, Schumer called the request “repugnant,” as an effort to “obstruct Ukraine funding.” Rand Paul then ended up on the hit list.

Ritter then addressed the fact that Schumer’s opponent in the November election, LaRouche candidate Diane Sare, was also smeared by the hit list:

Diane Sare was singled out by the Schumer-funded, State Department-supported Center for Countering Disinformation as an “information terrorist” who should be prosecuted as a “war criminal” because of her public stance challenging the narrative about the Ukraine conflict.

That’s right—Chuck Schumer helped create the organizational structures which have attacked the reputation of a challenger for his Senate seat, threatening her with political violence and more for the “crime” of challenging Schumer on the issue of Ukraine. (source)

Up is down, war is peace, kill lists are honorific lists, and bombs are bread!

Roger Waters added to Ukrainian hit list (SOURCE)

Gulls Swooping in and Stealing Ice Cream

for Makenna

by Paul Haeder / September 11th, 2022

just read stories how gulls
shape shift wings
anticipating bailing out, bombing in
after French fries on a pier
behind-the-back Dairy Queen
thievery

a child is like the shape shifter
she’s one person, one flight
wing early in life, then wings
change for higher heights

she’ll glide high over father
or in times of trauma
swoop in like a falcon
she’s there one moment
and gone, grown up

estranged by winds of time
adulting they call it now
shiny things away from parents
like crows picking through
jewelry, buttons

a child sometimes soars
away, long journeys like albatross’s
eons gone, over seas and oceans
as the parent loses hardy feathers
father not able to stoke and turn

left with tire-mashed Big Mac
or parking lot Skittles
while child is in full adulthood
able to drag air, lift body
make unhuman moves
hoping one day she
never loses wing power

always eyeing the big bag
of caramel popcorn
some silly kid with green
hair holds right there
for easy gull pickings

while father hops on
one good leg near the
waste bin, proud of
daughter gull, sad for time
long gone in those old
winds of his youth

Estrangement

There are so many Meet-up and Facebook groups that attest to family estrangement. Mothers who have lost contact with sons and daughters because of legitimate family dynamic concerns, but mostly because of unknowable reasons.

There is this decoupling society has engaged in for five or six decades. There are so many single mothers, so many children of divorce, so many kids having babies. There is so much infantilization mixed with brutality. There are so many ways a man might stay a boy, and a woman might turn into an unfeeling mother.

However, I have talked with folk in their 70s who have not heard from sons and daughters, and part of that estrangement includes grandkids. One person has been on the outs because she dared question the innoculation Covid-19 thing deemed by corrupt government and Big Pharma as safe. Even just asking for an outisde play date with two grandchildren, these heartless adult offspring turned the older woman and her husband down. Not a reason for estrangement.

Here, some typical basic psycho-babble about what to do if one is estranged from offspring:

Remember that shutting a person out is a response to anxiety and a family that is overly entangled with one another. Your actions or lack of action didn’t cause this. Cutting off is a way people manage anxiety when they don’t know a better way. The love and caring is there; the ability to solve differences is not. You did not make your child to turn away. That was her decision. It may have been a poor one, but it was the best she could do at the time. Try to get your focus off of her at least 50 percent of the day, which will make a difference.

Your pain is real. Be mindful and compassionate of it, but don’t allow it to define or overwhelm you. Put the focus on what you have control of: your own life. (source)

Then, the basic five tips:

Five Tips When Estranged and Cut Off From Your Child

1. Get Support

2. Don’t Cut off in Response

3. Don’t Feed the Anger

4. Listen to Your Child Without Defending Yourself

5. Focus on Yourself, Not Your Child

The reality is that over the course of the past 20 years, American society has tripled its screwed-up reality. Atomizing of town, family, state, school, workplace and family. Then, the hyper me-myself-and-I selfishness in this constant self-exploration, the big issue to seek self-esteem to the max, at the expense of relationships. There is a cancelling in American society that goes way back, and we’re talking a hundred years, maybe. What you can and can’t talk about, rarified and real.

Then what other education are we/they getting? K12 has always been insipid, tied to turning students into automons or compliant or wicked managers. Here John Taylor Gatto, in a Truthout article recognizing his work upon his death:

“Traditional education can be seen as sculptural in nature, individual destiny is written somewhere within the human being, awaiting dross to be removed before a true image shines forth. Schooling, on the other hand, seeks a way to make mind and character blank, so others may chisel the destiny thereon,” —Gatto, The Underground History of American Education

Much of Gatto’s writing is focused on the basic yet often overlooked distinction between schooling and education. At the heart of his work is the simple yet radical suggestion that mass schooling, a 19th-century European import to the U.S., is not the modern manifestation of the ancient concept of education but, rather, its diametric opposite.

In his magnum opus, The Underground History of American Education, Gatto traces the material roots of mass schooling back to the economic and ideological demands of a burgeoning industrial capitalism in Europe. Against the narrative of mass schooling as a noble attempt to educate the starving, backward masses, he exposes its true motive as a glorified daycare system for the children of parents newly coerced into wage labor.

With the destruction of the commons in Europe, self-sustaining production systems and their accompanying home-based education practices were obliterated in the quest for profits derived from the labor of a new industrial proletariat. Children who used to learn practical skills by working alongside their families and communities were forced into monotonous factory work with the advent of the industrial revolution. After child labor laws were introduced in the 19th century and extended in the 20th, the state had to find something to do with these unoccupied working-class children. (source)

There is that group-think, that disempowering, that consumeristic mentality that K12 schooling creates. There are all the massive experimentations going on the past 70 years with un-educators determining what should be taught, how, why, and when. The siloing of society, the so-called specialization in some professions, all of the dedicated time spent watching TV and scrolling the black mirror of the smart phone, all the wasted effort of schools to put the round peg into the round hole, that too has added to this time of estrangement from parents. The warehousing of old people — those with no big bank account — into care homes, and then the older generation doing their own thing in this sick :65 is the new 40″ crap the marketers kept jamming down our throats, that too hasn’t helped bring people — families — together.

The fake empowering of cancelling out any bad mojo or bad this or that in one’s life has also allowed for more parents being estranged by sons and daughters.

It may look like the average family in USA, per the Amazon Prime and Netflix-Hulu perverted plot lines, is doing okay, or is somehow fairing okay, but the reality is we have generation gaps, racial gaps, ethnic gaps, gender gaps. We have LGBTQA+, and fake wokenss, and this persisting radical conservatism in this society. Rampant schizophrenia, you know, the supposed party of the anti-war crusade, supposed youthful vigor of launching an anti-authority ethos, well, that’s all flipped and tripped around:

In 1923, the British novelist D. H. Lawrence offered a grim assessment of America and Americans:

“All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

Nearly 50 years ago, surveying both the wreckage of the 1960s and centuries of archives, the brilliant historian Richard Hofstadter acknowledged that

“Americans certainly have reason to inquire whether, when compared with other advanced industrial nations, they are not a people of exceptional violence.” (source)

One can imagine that the Covid shot, the confinement, the Trump v. Democrats fighting, all of the Proud Boy and BLM shots across the bows of all those families add to the the issues tied to estrangement. These estrangement support groups are mostly women, single mothers in many cases, who had “to be it all” for the family, and so, the children of divorce lash out at the disciplinarian, the care-giver, the mother figure, and all the work a single mother has to do to keep both ends of the candle burning, to do as much to be both parents, that takes its toll.

But now, in this time of schizophrenia, this bombardment of propaganda from ALL aspects of young people’s living, it has created mass confusion. Not a drop out mentality always, but a desire to be away from the broken family, the broken parent, the mother demanding too too much, or the mother who failed to give one hundred percent attention to the child.

Here, Gabor Mate, who I have referenced in the past tied to what trauma is, and how addiction is a very broad aspect of the human condition. Mate talks about that parental-child estrangement. Additionally, Dr. Gabor Mate’ discusses the multi-generational effect of stress on a child who experiences traumatic emotions from their parents, beginning with pregnancy.

And a documentary, Erasing Family, but tied more to the court battles of child custody, etc.

Are you a child who has rejected or is rejecting one of your parents whom you once had a loving relationship with? Are you being kept from one of your parents? Do you believe your parent is faulty, dangerous, did not fight hard enough for you, deserted you? Do you have one wonderful parent and one rejected parent? Have your parents been involved in a family court battle which increased the hostility and stress in your lives?

YOU ARE NOT ALONE. YOU ARE NOT AT FAULT!

Erasing Family is a documentary exposing the effect on children and their parents when a broken and adversarial court system pits parents against each other, emotionally and financially bankrupting parents and families.

YOU NO LONGER HAVE TO CHOOSE A SIDE!! The only way to learn the truth is to spend time with your rejected parent. No parent is perfect. They are doing their best to love you from their own perspectives and unresolved trauma’s.

THERE IS A WAY TO HEAL YOUR RELATIONSHIP! It will require courage and effort, yet will release you from a prison of faulty or misrepresented perceptions. Most importantly you will be free to love and be loved again by both sides of your family.

Friends and family members who are witnessing this: Show these children the Erasing Family documentary trailer. Encourage them by speaking the truth about how their rejected parent loves them. Unresolved parental and family emotional cutoffs results in generational mental and physical health diseases.

Again, plethora of groups on Facebook, and then, this one, April 25, A Case for Parental Alienation

It’s just not right, really, how family has been broken and parsed and, yep, family is where hatred and bigotry and racism starts, for sure, and the reality is that in American society, there are way too many arrested developed adults getting into the family thing, sort of keeping up with the Joneses, thing. Unprepared for parenthood, and the country is anti-family, when you consider the hell of childcare expenses, the hell that is navigating the education system, and the hell of commercialization and privatization of everything — unfettered, casino, predatory, disaster capitalism.

Family leave? Bereavement leave? Social workers in the schools? The asburdity of psychiatry for young folk? How many influences are tagging young people? How broken are the adults in this society?

Again, all sorts of circumstances around why a child, and adult child that is, would want to cut ties with a parent. For those not involving physical and sexual violence, many cases involve parents that were too demanding, a mother too aloof, or a mother with her own anxiety. Many mothers treat their daughters like friends, confidants.

But estrangement can last a very long time. The lack of mediation in our lives shows up on all levels, including hardcore Democrat and hardcore Republican having no system or coalescing of their shared humanity to share anything in common. The fact is that schools are failing on many levels, some of which are outside the actual school system’s responsibility — the grotesque popular culture, the grotesque comsumerism, the grotesque obsolescence, both planned and perceived. The bizarre wars between the genders, the wars between generations.

We are estranged from community, estranged from sisterhood and brotherhood, estranged from wildlife, true wildlands, estranged from the inner musician-artist-caregiver inside ourselves because this society is so transactional, so deadened to the human and humane needs of people in small and large groups.

Again, Gabor Mate:

The essential condition for healthy development is the child’s relationship with nurturing adults. Hold On to Your Kids, co-authored with the eminent developmental psychologist Dr. Gordon Neufeld, provides insight into the environmental factors necessary for healthy child development, how these conditions are increasingly under threat in today’s society, and how parents and teachers can maintain their leading position in face of the multiple challenges posed by modern culture. (source)

My Case

I am not estranged from my only child, but I am geographically an eight hour one way drive to see her. She is into her own mental-psyche-spiritual roadwork tied to her need for adult therapy. There are all sorts of expectations she thinks I have of her — she should have been, could have been, would have been kind of projection onto me. So, estrangement for me isn’t the issue — she talks to me (not as often as I would like) and she is smart and articulate, and texts and sends emails. She is in/on her journey, and I understand that I may think with all my worldly experience and training and practice I kind of know what it’s like to be in her shoes, but that is not necessarily true. i don’t.

The poem above I sent to her, along with a letter letting her know that I am here for her, and that I want that to be a two-way street. Actually, a highly self-actualized guy like me has a need to be with a young person, for sure. I need some loose ends tied up, and I am seeing the horizon of my life getting closer and closer for sure to the big sundown.

But I know of personally close people who are in the midst of estrangement from daughter or son. It is devastating, since those people in my life are not spring chickens, so having a lack of contact with a child — albeit adult — is really a cold shriveling aspect of motherhood: carrying this child, feeding the child, and being the child’s all-emcompassing caregiver-nurse-confidant-friend-authority figure, and then being cut off is mind-altering. Traumatic. Illogical. Mean.

Yet as the mother, she has to compensate, listen, let the child attack the mother’s parenting skills. An adult child puts all the anxiety and her own misplaced trauma onto the mother. Cutting off is the easy way, the pathetic way, the so cancel culture way. It is emblematic of rot at the core of the American mentality, the core sickness in this warring, superficial, plotting, backstabbing, mean culture. Throw-away society at its most demeaning and hurtful.

Why take it to the next and the next level of complete shutting out? We have the most perverse people in the Biden Administration, fools and undiplomatic, asses and arrogant, shallow and self-important, and we see thousands — just in Ukraine — dying because of the American — and European and Canadian — arrogance and stupidity. Some of that has to rub off on each next and next cohort. Banning books and banning people and banning ideas and banning speech and banning cultures, that is part and parcel part of what seeds this estrangement mentality. We have no diplomacy, no negotiation, no mediation!

Enough said. My piece out in the Friday issue of our coastal rag,

Intergenerational discourse is something we all need

Celebrate Intergeneration Month during September

September’s here, the month that brings in fall. Looking at the national holiday list (that is, celebratory accounting) for September, I notice over 30 “themes” celebrated or commemorated. Here are just a few:

• National Hispanic Heritage

• Childhood Obesity

• Childhood Cancer

• Self-Improvement

• Honey

• Potato

• Pain Awareness

• Intergenerational

• Prostate

Diving into that intergenerational theme, I realize I’ve been intently interfacing with people decades younger than I am. In Waldport, Portland, Spokane, Seattle and Alaska, I have talked with people 30 and 40 years my junior.

I have deep conversations with some of the houseless rough sleepers in Waldport: guys that are in their 30s who have taken to life outside the “norms” of job, home, roots. Much of what I have discovered is trauma piled onto each individual since childhood. I hearken to Dr. Gabor Mate:

“From early infancy, it appears that our ability to regulate emotional states depends upon the experience of feeling that a significant person in our life is simultaneously experiencing a similar state of mind.” (documentary, “The Wisdom of Trauma”).

I met one young guy at a Newport pharmacy who had dreams of being a marine biologist, but whose poor health limited that aspiration.

I’ve got a book out, “Coastal People inside a Deep Dive,” featuring amazing Lincoln County folk. Many of those I featured were both old and young, and every age in between.

Every day I meet amazing young people in various stages of their wonderful evolutions. Many are living with complex PTSD. Others are working through financial strain. Each conversation with someone younger than I takes me to their spiritual home.

Listening is important in today’s age. Many old timers profess that in the old days we listened more, engaged more with people outside our socio-economic and cultural-ethnic backgrounds.

I’ve had deep conversations with Chuck Ellard, who runs Newport’s Pacific Digital printing. I’ve written about him, and he is featured in the Coastal People book. He’s in his late 30s, just had a son, and moved from Logsden to Seal Rock. He sees himself as a vital member of the community, assisting individuals with their framing needs or getting huge printing jobs from the Lincoln County School District.

A young woman who is working in a five and dime tells me of her dreams of being a writer, and wants to major in literature at U of O. A single parent’s health issues forced her to help pay the bills, so she is in a holding pattern working 50 hours a week. She has a real grace in this derailed point in her life.

I’ve been spending a few hours with a “tree man,” an arborist. Tyler Muth is from Waldport, went to school here, and now this 29 year old has his own tree service business. He is tall and lanky. Think of a bearded young Brad Pitt. He’s an identical twin.

Muth likes climbing trees. He respects the tree and encourages people to keep healthy trees. He uses ropes to climb and small chain saws and handsaws. He knows the species of trees, and he is studying for certification through the International Society of Arboriculture.

We talk about Tyler’s years trying to make it as a pro surfer. He likes hitting waves, and he’s surfed up and down the Pacific Coast. He first competed when he was 12. His business, Dr. Hingewood, allows for some free surf time. He’s worked in construction, and he even did a stint for a mobile slaughter house killing and dressing cows. He tired of that job, as he says it got to him: “I don’t like killing animals. I don’t own a gun. I even had a hard time last week killing a fish.”

He’s done some gnarly jobs up in big timber, and those cuts are dangerous. He knows his back cuts (the third and final cut made on the opposite side of the notch). His business name, Dr. Hingewood, ties into how the portion of a tree left uncut — the hinge — can control the direction of the fall.

We talk about family, and he isn’t married and says doesn’t want children. “My freedom and lifestyle would make it difficult to raise a child. I like my freedom to just pick up and go surfing.”

He’s a businessman with a contractor’s license, and he says he has challenges keeping guys on payroll since many just pick up and take off for other gigs, like building wind turbines or commercial fishing.

He is a self-described tree nerd. I’ve written many stories about arborists, urban forestry programs and the value of trees in places like Spokane and Seattle. Out here, Tyler works with mostly private customers, usually with “nuisance” trees.

We both look up at the aging cypress on the neighbor’s property overhanging our backyard. He sees the canopy, the architecture of the tree, the hidden deadwood and fossilized wood in the middle of the trunk.

That sky — those crows, the giant unruly evergreen, blue herons squawking — gets Tyler and me talking. He’s an easy-going man with keen sense of follow-through. I listen; he listens. He tells me about the time a 14-foot great white shark “sort of just appeared” under him while he was surfing off the Oregon coast.

This is the kind of intergenerational discourse we all need. We talk about how men struggle to communicate and to know themselves.

Tyler goes about life with an even keel, he says, and while he isn’t blind to the world, he tells me that he is not so engaged in huge political debates.

“I keep busy. I love trees.” He relishes climbing, figuring out what to cut, and how to get that cut wood down without breaking a patio deck or his own neck.

We both interject our “almost broke my neck” stories. This is intergenerational communication at its best, looking up at a 100-year-old busted up cypress. 

Paul K. Haeder is a novelist, journalist, educator and author of “Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam,” Cirque Press.

Amazing, really, all the money, all the human lifetimes wasted on the Morty ZioLensky’s most corrupt regime, all the oligarchs making money there, and of course, the endless gravy train for the most despicable of souls, those offensive murdering weapons manufacturers and the tens of thousands of other companies with big and little inside tracks to the culling and killing machine that is the USA.

Authorities have traced the cause of a sewage spill that closed RAT Beach in Torrance Wednesday to a residential street in the Palos Verdes Estates, health officials announced. (source)

Of course, it gets bigger, here in LaLa Land, where Morty ZioLensky rings the bell for the New York Criminal Stock Mafia Exchange. Much bigger, and alas, this is coming to a township or city near you. Forget about decades of environmental warriors talking about non-point pollution in our thousands of rivers and waterways.

About 17 million gallons of sewage were dumped into Santa Monica Bay following the failure at the Playa del Rey plant. The resulting odors were later blamed by residents who said they developed rashes, nausea, burning eyes and other symptoms in the aftermath.

The L.A. city attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment. (source)

Beachfront view of the shit about to hit the fan. The hydrogen sulfide is just one issue from the fumes. Raw sewage is the thing of great potentials — heavy metals and SSRIs in the ecosystem, washed up viruses, e coli, and thousands of ever-expaning brain and flesh eating microbes.

Yet, the news is about Ukraine and EuroTrashLandia and the U$A and Klanada. Full-fledged support of war, proxies, economic bombardment, and fake inflation. Here, Richard Wolff does the 101 Econ explanation of what inflation really is: the owners of the businesses and factories deciding it’s time to raise prices to, well, off-set the half-greed to proportionately throw down the full-throttle greed that is capitalism.

It’s only an hour long, and it is definitely basics of capitalism, and, yes, it is NOT the Putin Inflation . . . never was, never will be:

More cognitive dissonance in Chile, where they can’t pass an amazing constition, but they can start squirting more untest crap into pregnant women, et al:

On Friday, Chile’s Ministry of Health (Minsal) announced that the country would start the vaccination of priority groups amid limitations of monkeypox vaccines in the international context. 

RELATED: US: Concerns Are Mounting Due to Escalating Monkeypox Outbreak

Through his official Twitter account, Undersecretary for Public Health Cristóbal Cuadrado said, “We expect to begin the first stage of the inoculation process during October.”

The vaccine to be used for the immunization process in the country will be the Jynneos vaccine from the Bavarian Nordic laboratory. It was obtained through the Pan American Health Organization’s Revolving Fund. 
 
The first stage will include those “close contacts of confirmed cases of monkeypox who are at risk of severe disease, i.e., immunosuppressed people, HIV patients, and pregnant women,” Cuadrado said. (source)

Here, not my favorite, but two Chileans discussing it:

Ariel Dorfman: This was an extraordinary Magna Carta, both because of its origins, in a popular protest, because it was drafted by people who looked like Chile itself, not sort of elite experts who behind closed walls were constantly deciding what others would be ruled by. And it was, as you mentioned, you know, incredibly ecological, the most advanced in the world. It extended democracy in participatory forms in all levels. It legalized — not only legalized abortion but — you know, when I read the constitution, and I’ve read it several times, the one that has just been rejected, what calls attention to myself is the extraordinary tenderness with which it’s been composed and written. It speaks about the glaciers. It speaks about the air. It speaks about the children, over and over again the children. It speaks about the caretakers at home. It speaks about the animals. It speaks about the dogs. It speaks about everything vulnerable that needs to be taken care of. And, of course, it includes there, for the first time, those who have been invisible and exspoliated constantly by the major powers in Chile: the Indigenous populations. It is also an extraordinarily feminist constitution. And I just could go on and on and on. It had 388 articles, perhaps too many.

Well, well, so the beat goes on, in the endless prattling of media, 24/7, beamed up directly into our brains. Here, another story, tied to my local view, at the OSU Hatfield Marine Sciences Center: “HMSC Science on Tap: Ocean Iron Fertilization: Knowns and unknowns.”

Several decades ago, oceanographers first recognized that the addition of iron to surface waters stimulates algal growth in over a third of the ocean. This realization sparked international efforts to understand the role that iron plays in regulating ocean ecosystems and global carbon cycling. How do feedbacks between climate, iron-rich dust deposition, and ocean productivity work? Can humans leverage iron fertilization to offset greenhouse gas emissions or boost fisheries? (source)

In the “old days,” well, there was a precautionary principle, and there was a big skiepticism in the sciences and in anything around geo-engineering and climate and oceans. There were even activists against Genetically Engineering mosquitoes in the millions being released into our ecosystems. There used to be folks concerned about nanoparticles in our foods, and there used to be concern about neurotoxins in pesticides and hormone distrupters in baby’s milk bottle.

David Emerson, a geomicrobiologist at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Maine, told Mongabay in an email that when it comes to iron fertilization there are still “critical questions worthy of research,” such as whether alternative forms of iron would interact differently with phytoplankton and ocean currents. However, he also emphasized the “unknown cost” of ecosystem impacts from large-scale fertilization.

“We shouldn’t do it, unless there are concomitant major reductions in emissions,” he said. “We shouldn’t do it until we know significantly more about how effective it will be. We should only do it if the alternative is major ecosystem/human civilization collapse.” (source)

[Satellite image shows a phytoplankton bloom off Newfoundland, Canada, on Sept. 19, 2019. The bloom occurred unusually late for the region, possibly because of higher temperatures and more sunlight than is typical for that time of year. Image courtesy of NASA.]

But there are still warriors going up against Monsanto, Gates, the 10 controlling corporations of food systems, seeds and GMOs.

New from GRAIN | 08 September 2022

An agribusiness greenwashing glossary

As effective action on the climate crisis could threaten corporate profits, Big Food and agribusiness conglomerates are counting on greenwashing to save them: the marketing strategy where they use misleading information to make it appear as if they and the products they sell are providing solutions to climate change. This confusing and unrealistic set of greenwashing tactics has even made its way inside international fora, especially at UN climate summits.

Building on the claims made by organisations and social movements around the world, GRAIN has prepared a short glossary to demystify these corporate proposals and expose them as false solutions. In a concise way, we aim to reveal who is behind these greenwashing concepts and why they actually deepen the climate crisis and social inequality.

This glossary focuses on corporations’ 10 favourite terms, ranging from “climate smart agriculture”, to “nature-based solutions” and “bioeconomy”. We have accompanied some of those concepts by infographics to help illustrate with irony the main problems generated by this corporate greenwashing. (source)

Here are the offending terms, the propaganda, the amazing work of millions of human lifetimes to lie, deceive, steal, and cobble the world.

Green finance; Bioeconomy; Carbon Farming; Regenerative agriculture; Agriculture 4.0; Climate smart agriculture; Climate smart agriculture; Nature-Based Solutions; Carbon offsets; ‘Net Zero’

Infintisimal, grand, pervasive, from cradle to grave, the bombardment of propaganda and forced and concerted unlearning-unknowin (agnotology), each nanosecond, the world wide web and the dirty perversions of MSM and Holly-Dirt, and those millions and millions working for governments, the average kid or adult, well, he or she just isn’t getting the big or small of it. Logic and ethics are thrown out the window. Precautionary thinking, actions, commitments, well, those things are outside the common person’s way of gong about his or her daily living.

Again, up is down, fat is thin, small is big, lies are truth, money is for nothing. Imagine, Switzerland, now a land of young women with masks and pro-pro war . . . That is the new propaganda frame — getting young people so messed up on their own roots, their own DNA, their own history, that they would fall for this insanity:

Ahh, diplomacy is dead, and while Switzerland is a weapons producer, and a haven for criminal activity (hiddne treasuries of dictators, drug kingpins, government leaders of the free world, for banks, for, well, you know what Switzerland is), here, the take on how to bring Switzerland back to the table as a neutral actor in maybe helping end the proxy war in Ukraine:

It is imperative that president Cassis take note and change his direction. Here is my prescription for Swiss change:

1. Abandon the NATO-leaning partisanship immediately.

2. Withdraw support of war inspired sanctions. Cassis has chosen to support the EU issued sanctions, but not those of Russia. Neutrality demands honoring the sanctions of neither side.

3. Recoil from any Swiss role that might involve facilitating the provision of weapons for use in the war.

4. Recognize that the ultimate decision makers in the conflict are Russia and the United States. It is readily apparent that NATO, the EU, and Ukraine are largely marching to the beat of an American drummer. Switzerland should seek to open negotiations with the principals, Russia and the United States, preferably hosted on Swiss territory.

5. Host the renegotiation of the basic precepts of the Minsk Accords, but this time with Russia and the United States as principals. That would mean achieving a cease fire and finding a mutually acceptable way of somehow incorporating the Donbass republics into Ukraine.

6. Work toward addressing Russia’s publically proclaimed security concerns vis-à-vis Ukraine, including the exclusion from Ukrainian leadership individuals who identify themselves, either by words or actions, with neo-Nazi ideology.

7. Seek agreement from Russia for the conduct of a Swiss-monitored referendum to affirm the current status of Crimea. (source)

And, then, the queen is dead (not really):

Anyone in the UK who imagined they lived in a representative democracy – one in which leaders are elected and accountable to the people – will be in for a rude awakening over the next days and weeks.

TV schedules have been swept aside. Presenters must wear black and talk in hushed tones. Front pages are uniformly somber. Britain’s media speak with a single, respectful voice about the Queen and her unimpeachable legacy.

Westminster, meanwhile, has been stripped of left and right. The Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Labour parties have set aside politics to grieve as one. Even the Scottish nationalists – supposedly trying to rid themselves of the yoke of centuries of English rule presided over by the monarch – appear to be in effusive mourning.

The world’s urgent problems – from the war in Europe to a looming climate catastrophe – are no longer of interest or relevance. They can wait till Britons emerge from a more pressing national trauma. (Jonathan Cook)

And alas, the Democratic Party is soo different than the Republican Party. Imagine this, a hit squad list coming out of Brussels run by Ukraine (probably not Ukraine per se, more like CIA and Mossad and MI6, et al):

The co-founder of “Pink Floyd” is known for his support of imprisoned Wikileaks’ creator Julian Assange, and for his opposition to imperialism and war, as well as for his awesome music, loved by millions around the world.

Waters recently referred to Joe Biden as a “war criminal” on CNN, and said that Biden is “fueling the fire in Ukraine.”

“This war,” the musician stated, “is basically about the action and reaction of NATO pushing right up to the Russian border, which they promised they wouldn’t do when [Mikhail] Gorbachev negotiated the withdrawal of the USSR from the whole of Eastern Europe.”

Waters also said that Crimea belongs to Russia, because the majority of people living on the peninsula are Russian.

The rock star’s views have outraged the pro-NATO crowd and their Nazi friends, as well as the social justice warriors who froth at the mouth in support of whatever the mainstream media declares to be “the current thing.” Waters, who has always been something of a dissident and anti-war, the way all rock stars used to be when rock and roll was still real, is attacked mercilessly by the “woke” crowd, who are intolerant of all who are not in lockstep with their views. (source)

All is fine on the Western Front, and that shit has already hit the proverbial fan. ‘When the shit hits the fan’ alludes to the messy and hectic consequences brought about by a previously secret situation becoming public.

The true origins of the expression “shit hits the fan” are largely undetermined, though some sources suggest that Canada is to blame—it might have come from particularly picturesque Canadian military language of the early twentieth century. Another suggestion is that the idiom is descended from “an old joke”:

A man in a crowded bar needed to defecate but couldn’t find a bathroom, so he went upstairs and used a hole in the floor. Returning, he found everyone had gone except the bartender, who was cowering behind the bar. When the man asked what had happened, the bartender replied, “Where were you when the shit hit the fan?” (source)

Great piece by Eva Bartlet, on the hit list Ukraine supports, and who funds this Mafiosa thing?

“Western Media Continues to Ignore Ukraine’s Public ‘Kill List’ Aimed at Those Who Question the Kiev Regime”!

Bartlet: “Christelle Néant, a French war correspondent reporting from Donbass for the past six and a half years, mentioned to me before the panel began that some of the information on the site is not disclosed to the general public, and is password-locked.”

Néant, who said she’s been receiving death threats for years, spoke of how it impacts her: “Every time I use my car, I check underneath it for any unpleasant surprise,” referring to a potential car bomb. “

I don’t publish any photos with people I live with or love. I have to be vigilant at all times.”

“I’m not a terrorist, not a criminal, I’m just a correspondent. This list must be closed and all of those involved must be held accountable.”

And so it goes, as the people in Jackson, Mississippi still can’t drink the water. The optics here of this white governor, man, the reason for this environmental racism, just can’t be the only bitter taste in my “shit hit the fan” infused mouth:

Ahh, money in shitty water. Privatize, man. Every single time there is a disaster of the making of anti-government, anti-social safety net monsters, they come up with Privatize:

Jackson’s persistent water problems make daily life hard for residents and business owners alike. That includes boil water notices that can last weeks or more. Before the most recent failure, John Tierre, who owns Johnny T’s Bistro & Blues in downtown Jackson, said his business was already losing thousands of dollars due to spending weeks under a boil water notice.

“First, you’re gonna have to start a couple hours early. That’s already labor in itself, whatever you’re paying per hour,” he told the Mississippi Free Press in late August. “You gotta get in and start boiling water for everything that you’re gonna be using in service. Not only do we have to boil water just to wash dishes, for the bar, for glasses, but there’s the $200 or $300 a day in ice purchases, canned sodas, bottled water, things of that nature.”

State officials are discussing a number of possible solutions for a permanent fix, including privatising Jackson’s water system. “Privatisation is on the table,” Governor Reeves said earlier this week. The city’s Democratic mayor, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, has also discussed hiring private contractors to operate and maintain the water system. (source)

Yeah, baby, billions more for Ukraine to run their corrupt system, from USA taxpayers.

Zelensky?

In a significant assault on worker rights in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky last week signed into law legislation that deprives around 73 percent of workers of their right to union protection and collective bargaining.

“For more than 15 months, the Federation of Trade Unions of Ukraine, in solidarity with other trade unions, with support of the international community, actively opposed promotion of the anti-labor draft law,” the Federation (FPU) said in a statement.

The Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine (KVPU) stated, “KVPU will not tolerate a blatant violation of the rights of workers, their constitutional guarantees and international norms and standards.  We will continue the fight for workers’ rights.” (source)

There will be photo shoots, and there will be cannon fodder, and there will be blood, and there will be Zelensky rents to be paid:

That’s $51,000 a month Morty ZioLensky gets for this villa he owns in Italy:

Here we go, from the WSWS, world socialist web site, and these references already got me labeled a commie under a Bush or Trump, and alas, today? All Democrats hate social safety programs, err, nets, err, socialism programs: (Source)

Małgorzata Kulbaczewska-Figat notes that even under the existing labor code, the conditions of workers in Ukraine were atrocious.

“Before the Russian invasion, millions of Ukrainian workers migrated to EU countries (and not only), knowing well that even the poorest of them—Bulgaria and Romania—offered significantly better earnings to an average worker than their homeland.

“Low wages are virtually strangling our economy,” she continued. “In addition, some 20-30 percent of Ukrainian workers are employed ‘unofficially.’

“Even working in a state-owned enterprise, in a critical economy sector, does not guarantee a stable salary, allowing for a decent living.”

Miners, for example, faced delays in payment of wages. “The miners were regularly organizing spontaneous protest actions, including the most desperate move—an underground protest. Another huge underground protest action took place in 2020 in Kryvy Rih, the center of iron mining of transnational importance. A group of workers of KZRK, a formerly state-owned plant consisting of four iron mines and more associated factories, spent more than a month inside mines, demanding a pay rise.”

She cited an expert on labor law who warned that big companies may “artificially split into smaller 250-people entities so that maximum flexibility can be used even by the biggest and strongest employers.”

The fact that the war in Ukraine is being used to impose a brutal increase in exploitation on the already impoverished working class in the country is a further indication of the reactionary character of the conflict. Workers in Ukraine, as well as their brother workers in Russia and the NATO countries, have nothing to gain from this war, which contains the seeds of a world conflagration. Workers in all lands must unite in opposition to the war in Ukraine, which was instigated by US imperialism and its allies as part their drive for world hegemony. (source)

I’ve written about this so much and have gotten students to research some of the direct and indirect topics tied to: Who are your masters, and how far will you go to get and keep a job? One solution for one issue — say, looking at crops and regulating soil wetness with a drone is good, but what are the negative consequences of drone tech and drone community college programs? CIA, NSA, FBI, ATF, Cops, and other deals? Is there always a trade off, you know, Fat Man and Little Boy, the consequences of pursuing “science” with the $$ coming from, well, nefarious sources. Lords of War paying for everything.

And then, this goes way beyond greenwashing, etc. I have had students wanting to get a BS in engineering, say, to do work on drones, which back then (ohe, 20 years ago) was one way to help mitigate climate heating’s negative effects on people, communities, land, crops, ecosystems. You know, all that great work to get satellites into space because satellites will help scientists save the world.

But now? Drones? They are everywhere on the battle field, in the cops’ toolbox, everywhere, and not for the good of humankind, unless that good includes bombing wedding parties, and dropping viruses and other poisons on people.

We looked at many seemingly benign companies, like GE, and back then there was this green component of GE, you know what I am talking about: wind turbines, efficiency, solar panels. So, keeping those engineers working on turbines while creating some existential firewall between the war machines GE makes, that was also a topic we looked into.

So, it was possible you could come out of college with a BS, and end up in GE’s green energy arena, without ever touching base with the military arm of the company. That is the silo of old.

General Electric’s (NYSE: GE) aviation subsidiary secured a nearly $284 million contract with the Defense Logistics Agency to provide helicopter engine supplies to the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force. (2021). General Electric Aviation, Lynn, Massachusetts, has been awarded a maximum $149,693,969 firm-fixed-price, requirements-type delivery order against a five-year subsumable basic ordering agreement (SPE4AX-22-D-9409) for T700 engine supplies. This was a sole-source acquisition using justification 10 U.S. Code 2304 (c)(1), as stated in Federal Acquisition Regulations 6.302-1. This is a five-year contract with no option periods. Location of performance is Massachusetts, with a Sept. 30, 2026, performance completion date. Using military service is Army. Type of appropriation is fiscal year 2022 through 2026 Army working capital funds. The contracting activity is the Defense Logistics Agency Aviation, Richmond, Virginia. 

The U.S. Air Force has awarded GE a $1.58 billion firm-fixed-price contract to supply F110 engines for the Boeing F-15EX Eagle II. This selection makes GE the sole propulsion provider for the U.S. Air Force’s entire planned F-15EX fleet. GE is currently delivering Lot 1 engines for the F-15EX, including two test aircraft currently undergoing flight testing at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.

Again, jobs, jobs and more jobs, but at what price, and how far will young people go in trying NOT to perpetuate the war machine, the killing machines, and then of course, how easy is it to go to school, debate philosophies and cultures and politics, and then attempt to apply some humane ethics to one’s course in life, but then to get a job that is not in any way, shape or form part of the matrix, part of the ugly corporate world of exploitation, penury, and profits at any cost, ethics be damned? The point of education, in my humble opinion, is to dig under the surface of everything, and in the English writing classes I taught — once mandatory for an undergraduate degree — included working on argumentative papers, and research papers with all the elements of rhetoric covered: classification, cause and effect, process, solutions, and more. To question the profession you might be entering into: the work ethics, the companies’ profiles, what the challenges are, what sort of negative and possible illegal things the companies might be involved in. You know, what is the problem in the nursing profession, or education field, or architecture profession, or marketing company? The idea is to find the dirt and find the issues tied to a profession a student might think she or he is going to pursue.

Education now is floundering like it never has floundered, and the higher ups are there as MBAs, institutional managers, those who go take executive courses/seminars to learn how to NOT be educators, and how to learn how to cut personnel costs, and how to be more efficient and what to inject into more and more watered down curriculum to satisfy the CEOs bottom line business needs. Just what do those drone companies want from a student graduating?

What involvement did GE have in nuclear weapons production?

Kelle Louaillier (KL): In 1984 in the United States, thousands of companies were involved in some way in producing parts for nuclear weapons systems. GE produced more parts to more major nuclear weapons systems than any other corporation. GE was involved in the promotion of nuclear weapons to the government and in production since day one, with its role in the Manhattan Project.

Specifically, GE was responsible for the critical components, including, for example, the neutron “trigger” for every US nuclear bomb. Notably, before becoming president, Ronald Regan was a spokesman for GE. (Source)

These are the companies profiting most from war.

1. Lockheed Martin 

• Arms sales 2010: $35.73 billion
• Total sales 2010: $45.80 billion
• Arms sales as pct. of total sales: 78 percent
• Total profit: $2.93 billion
• Total employment: 132,000
• Sector: Aircraft, Electronics, Missiles, Space

2. BAE Systems

• Arms sales 2010: $32.88 billion
• Total sales 2010: $34.61 billion
• Arms sales as pct. of total sales: 95 percent
• Total profit: $1.67 billion
• Total employment: 98,200
• Sector: Aircraft, Artillery, Electronics, Missiles, Military vehicles, Small arms/ammunition, Ships

3. Boeing 

• Arms sales 2010: $31.36 billion
• Total sales 2010: $64.31 billion
• Arms sales as pct. of total sales: 49 percent
• Total profit: $3.31 billion
• Total employment: 160,500
• Sector: Aircraft, Electronics, Missiles, Space

4. Northrop Grumman 

• Arms sales 2010: $28.15 billion
• Total sales 2010: $34.76 billion
• Arms sales as pct. of total sales: 81 percent
• Total profit: $2.05 billion
• Total employment: 117,100
• Sector: Aircraft, Electronics, Missiles, Ships, Space

5. General Dynamics

• Arms sales 2010: $23.94 billion
• Total sales 2010: $32.47 billion
• Arms sales as pct. of total sales: 74 percent
• Total profit: $2.62 billion
• Total employment: 90,000
• Sector: Artillery, Electronics, Military vehicles, Small arms/ammunition, Ships

6. Raytheon (NYSE: RTN)
> Arms sales 2010: $22.98 billion
> Total sales 2010: $25.18 billion
> Arms sales as pct. of total sales: 91%
> Total profit: $1.88 billion
> Total employment: 72,400
> Sector: Electronics, Missiles

Those are 2010 stats, and now, in 2022, there are fewer and fewer young people even attempting to play the thought experiment of what if we could stop the war machines, and then, to do this, connecting every bolt and wire and coat of paint to anything made to produce death, either directly as munitions, or their delivery systems, or even the logistics and intel around war war war.

This is verboten in schools, colleges, truly in many venues, as it is verboten to question the mRNA’s, forced innoculations, forced social distancing, forced mRNA proofs to enter college. Questioning the military murdering machines pushing for more weapons for Nazi Ukraine. There are no more discussions about the true price we pay for USA policy targeting Russia and China. No true discussions about what theft is, grand theft, stealing gold reserves from places like Russia, Iran, Venezuela.

This has all been normalized, especially the past 15 years. Support this country, but still fight for the culture wars, the right to be all or nothing you can be. You have to be pronoun neutral, pro-Anything LGBTQA+ conjures up, and the Amnesia has to be deep.

This is the image that also creeps into students’ brains going to college. This is sick, and alas, multimillionaires like Ellen who complained about being discriminated against early in her career, well, she is rubbing elbows with a war criminal:

Or take it to a non-LGBTQA+ multimillionaire’s absurdity, and go for the Black Absurdity, that Black Misleadereship class.

Thus, all of the cultural wars invented by the Liberal and Neoliberal media, and their sleeper cells — higher education liberal arts fools — get us here, really. But I have shown the power of another war criminal to infect all administrations:

So, forget about it, as they say in Mafia land. You can’t criticize a media darling, a war criminal like Kissinger. Never, and to attempt to bring him up now, in 2022, when you can’t get students to think or rethink or think for the first time the crimes of Ukraine under Zelensky and then way back, too.

You will be kicked out of your part-time job, big time. Most college teachers are part-time, at the beckon call of perverse chairs and administrators.

And why not? College is for corporations telling worthless VPs and Presidents and the phalanx of administrators and deans working the college scam what needs to be taught.

Of course, this quote is from 2009, and the numbers are, well, way low ball. Think of the deaths caused by depleted uranium, all the pollution, the PTSD, the cultural chaos, all of it. The murdering by Bush, even while he hangs out with liberals like Ellen and Obama, well, it keeps on delivering, that death and carnage. How to put a price on a country destroyed by USA bombs bursting in air and economic bombs and CIA bombs never not going off?

Why is a “gay Hollywood liberal sitting next to” the worst war criminal of the 21^st Century? [Noam Chomsky has said the Bush administration’s invasion and occupation of Iraq was the worst war crime of the 21^st Century] President Bush lied about Saddam Hussein having threatening weapons of mass destruction to justify invading defenseless Iraq. “Be kind to everyone?” President Bush’s unnecessary war against Iraq resulted in a reported “1 million dead” Iraqis, “4.5 million displaced, 1 million to 2 million widows, 5 million orphans.  (“Bush’s War Totals,” By John Tirman, The Nation, Jan. 28, 2009)

So here we are, now, the crux of the blog — “Background Checks, Algorithms, and the Re-making of the Abnormal” by Mike Templeton. It’s good, of course, but it doesn’t go far enough. Here, a quote, a long one, contextualizing Templeton’s words/essay:

A great deal of attention has been paid to the problems of carceral injustice and the increasing use of AI for things such as predictive policing. Much of this research has revealed that these digital technologies serve to recreate economic disparities, racism, and other forms of social discrimination while removing the stain of human agency toward a flawed ideal of objectivity. Less attention has been paid to the use of these digital technologies in pre-employment background checks. This essay examines the use of AI and algorithmic data analysis and the ways these technologies and procedures create a caste of humans who are barred from employment and rendered economically invalid. In the final analysis, AI and algorithmic data analysis in the service of pre-employment background checks reproduces Foucault’s human monster in a contemporary form, a human monster that bears the stigmata of digital unpredictability.

More than 90 percent of all new hires are subjected to some type of background check prior to employment. These background checks search criminal history and records, including non-convictions, debt history, credit ratings, and other data that can offer a picture of the financial health of a potential new hire.¹ The idea behind background checks is to ensure the safety of employees and, in the case of schools and hospitals, students and patients. While many states have laws that limit both the reach and use of background checks, the practice of investigating a potential employee’s background is now standard and widespread. In a short piece in the journal Academe, Ann D. Springer explains that universities might be looking for information that would indicate a potential hire’s “character, general reputation, personal characteristics or mode of living.”² A university may deem it important to determine exactly what kind of person they are considering, and this may include that person’s “character.”³ While the point of Springer’s article is to reveal the potential dangers of background checks, she also pins down one of the main issues in performing such checks: “What if an employee commits a crime or breaks the law? An employer who knew of such past bad acts may be held responsible for failing to act on that knowledge, even if future actions were and are difficult to predict.” Liability can consist of many things like the risk of theft in the case of people with a criminal history of crimes against property or people who are so financially unstable they pose a theft risk. Liability could also be physical danger from people who have a history of violent offenses. In terms of how to predict potential danger and liability, this has been elusive, and companies have generally decided to err on the side of caution and refuse to hire anyone whose background check reveals something that could be seen as dangerous. But prediction is the key to understanding how background checks function in contemporary culture.

It is the digital realm that finds the invalid intolerable because the invalid present the type of unpredictability that is intolerable to digital systems. While companies, organizations, and universities advertise the justification that the background check is in the interest of safety, it is in fact the intolerable danger of the unpredictable that must be ferreted out by the background check. The primary reason for adding algorithmic technology to background checks can only be toward the elimination of unpredictability, otherwise a simple rap sheet would suffice. The reason a simple rap sheet is insufficient is that a human being must look a list of past offences and make a judgment call as to the likelihood of future danger, and this would only compound the levels of unpredictability with the addition of a secondary human consciousness. Above all else, the system must control, neutralize, and lockout any threats to absolute predictability. Thus, we have a caste of people who are determined to be invalid by a system that is no longer bound by human consciousness. Since no human makes this determination, the status of invalidity is the fault of the invalid who have only themselves to blame for their behavior, be it bad credit or a felony conviction. In the final analysis, we are left with a caste of untouchables who will forever remain both economically externalized, in that they are forbidden entry into economic viability, yet completely captured and internalized since they are digitally quantified and categorized. Their status as invalid is dependent on a detailed record of their failures and transgressions. It is the invalid who have taken over as the abnormal, the moral degenerates, and the human monsters.

Again, nuance is what I teach, and to be realistic, there are literally tens of millions of Americans who have interfaced with the Law somehow — speeding tickets, civil cases, and even witnesses and even family members of those accused or convicted of a crime. All of those records the Man, The Man, the Boss, is privy to. And, think about another nuance — This Fucking Blog? Look up “Paul Haeder and Anti-Higher Education.” The first page hit on Google, well, enough to get anyone who might be considering me for a job as an educator to think twice about me, and that’s Google, not the Checkr and other sources that can track down my name and then any term tied to it to see what I have written, say, against the fields of education, social work, journalism, teaching, environmental movement, the US systems of, well, suppression and oppression. (About 154,000 results –0.44 seconds — Paul Haeder and Anti-Education).

Now, if you put my name into Orbitt.net, then all the dirty laundry is exposed, or at least, some percentage of the laundry or articles out there since there are 24 pages of my work, only dating back to 2017. If you look me up over at Dissident Voice, well, you can go back to before 2010 and find any number of my commentaries-polemics-rants covering any number of topics with my anti-authority, anti-capitalism filter applied.

Templeton fails to look at this aspect of The Man. He fails to really understand the nature of America, and the very nature of how the worker has no rights, really. CCTV in the workplace? Forced urine tests? Haircut codes? Is it fair or correct or ethical for anyone thinking of hiring me to even dive into all the journalism I’ve done, all the Op-eds I’ve written, all the Dissident Voice pieces I’ve penned? Of course not, but in today’s world, and even the world I was debating with say 20 years ago, the Americans — and this is most people in the world — are perfectly fine with the employer or agency or government looking into your past. Sort of this shit idea of, “If you don’t have anything to hide, then why not let the employer or agency or government use that information. If it’s out there, and you posted it or wrote it, then you have to live with it.”

Some parts of your internet history are public record. This includes your social media profiles that you haven’t set to “private,” personal blog sites and any other information that you post publicly and share online. Because this information is public, anyone can read it, including a would-be employer. The employer doesn’t have to disclose that he’s looking at your public digital footprint, either. Under the Fair Credit Reporting laws, an employer only has to tell you that he’s going to run a background check when he uses a company in the business of compiling background information. If he checks you out himself, he can do it without telling you. (source)

That’s a more mellow quote, really, for what the American believes, both the Republican Leaning and the Democratic Pary leaning. Hell, just yesterday, I was disagreeing with the guy working on my house, and he’s 69, broken big time, and he can’t afford medical care for a bad knee and spinal disc, and he said his home he and his wife had was ripped out from under him after falling for Bush’s loan modification deal in 2008. In the end, though, he constantly berates Trump, DeSantis, and he nary says a negative word against Biden or Pelosi. Everytime a screw breaks, he blames China, and he still believes Putin has entered our electoral system. I told him that the constant rant against Trump goes no where with me, since the rant is equally deserving for the Biden Bumbler. I told him that as a communist, err, socialist, I have studied my position and politics and US domestic and international positions long enough to know a corrupt system when I see it or live under it. He said, “Well, why don’t you move to Russia if you’re communist.”

That is the penetrating oil of this country. A 69 year old, broken down guy who thinks Russia is communist; working odd jobs, and he’s a muscian, too, and he gives me the old heave ho, “Love it or Leave it.”

I reminded him that if Trump gets in, in 2024, that’s his country, and with this love it or leave it mentality, well, the voters — his fellow citizens — have spoken and voted in their parasite, Trump. What then? He said he kill Trump if he gets in in 2024. Literally go after him.

There it is, though, this AmeriKKKa. This place in 2022 that is despicable. Truly, on many levels, and alas, I’m not 105 years old or ninety-something like Kissinger is, but at 65, with a robust anti-establishment and anti-government bent from a socialist POV, I know why we are here. At this late stage capitalism running the 80 percenters into the ground, we have the youth going for more brainwashing.

 

There are many reasons you might blog about your job. You may want to brag about your accomplishments, vent about your cheese-moving coworkers or sociopathic boss, reveal whom you caught with whom on the floor of the server closet or simply recount the day’s events as a way of decompressing.

Whatever your reasons, if you blog, you take on all the liability and employment security risks that come with publishing to a potential readership of a billion people — even though the actual size of your audience may be just a handful of people or no one.

Work Blogging Risks

How is blogging different from just putting up a personal Web site? “The difference is that the easy-to-use tools available for blogging take away the barriers to getting online,” says Rebecca Jeschke, a spokeswoman for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a civil liberties advocacy group.

The danger to blogging about your job comes when you allow no-brainer publishing technology — together with a mistaken sense of anonymity — to embolden you to record observations more appropriate for a private, paper-based journal than a global electronic network.

“People need to think long and hard about whether they’re comfortable blogging about work in an unprotected way,” Jeschke says.

One workplace blogger puts it even more plainly: “When you start a blog, you have to assume you’re going to be found out,” says the anonymous author of Waiter Rant, which chronicles the trials and tribulations of a New York City restaurant server.

Being fired for blogging, which is known as “getting dooced” in the blogosphere, really happens — and when it does, it often gets lots of news coverage. Delta Air Lines, Google, Ladies Home Journal, Wells Fargo and an Ohio congressman are among the employers that have reportedly terminated workers over their blogs. (Monster dot com)

So, all my work going up against many employers, filing appeals to denied unemployment, and then filing with the Bureau of Labor and Industries cases of discrimination for being sacked for being old, a male, and radical, those future employers can tap into using middlemen surveillence services. All the words, all the articles, and some interviews of me in print and on video on the Internet, they too can be found and USED against me. All of that is just fine for prospective employers to scan and skim and the utilize in order to decide if I am a viable candidate for the job.

I’ve written about millions of Americans who have lost their driver’s license privileges because of debts, not because of driving while intoxicated or other driving infractions. Because they owe for court costs, owe for back child support. Their job prospects are pretty grim.

Suspending driver’s licenses as a penalty for non-payment of fines and fees unrelated to public safety is a self-defeating policy. It intensifies pressure on individuals already struggling with job loss and financial hardship, and it adds strain to relations between police officers and the public they serve. It makes the slope of failure even more slippery for millions of the most vulnerable Americans. And it’s the law of the land in 42 states.

So, that means the prospective employer can fish another set of data bases — suspended licenses — and eliminate more people from the workforce. Most jobs require transportation, as they call it, reliable transportation with proof of auto insurance.

Predictable algorithms, and all that soft shoe, again, part of the shifting baseline, now accepted, DNA tests, blood tests, urine tesst, complying with any “background” check, then of course, proof of mRNA, and, there you have it. We’ve gone from a majority of people coveting their privacy to a society that doesn’t care.

A society that doesn’t push back, against their own “party,” since whichever manure party they may be backing is the right manure party. And, then, love it or leave it.

All of the conversations today are dead, since most Americans are colonized by bad education, patriotism, by really bad entertainment, by Legacy Mainstream Propaganda, by the entire hubris of exceptionalism.