“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” Thoreau
Oh, it could be they’re thin-skinned, but it is definitely censoring, or prior restraint, and certainly it is a wimp of a system of having these stories republished from all over the liberal spectrum and then having someone like me as a malcontent, really, just facing off the studpity of stories that were written and discussed, oh, 30 years ago, 20, that is, covered then by better writers but are not bubbling up in the new or latest concerned journalists?
It’s what is the new normal even with web sites/blogs that defend Julian Assange and attack so-called cancel and censuring culture, but in turn, they cut off writers like myself because I am pugnacious, critical and do not follow the middle of the road party line.
It’s bizarre, really. I can’t comment on Chris Hedges stuff, or Mr. Fish’s amazing cartooning, or anything from Tom Dispatch, or what Robert Scheer does on his podcast. Petty but more than sad. Very pernicious.
You see, it’s how the stories continue to be curtain peekers, laying out what is wrong, how things all over the subject matter spectrum are collapsing, but they never have people quoted who have deep calls to action. No radical thinkers, who want tires in the streets, burning. Shutting down this shit hole. And, alas, god forbid if I make fun of the writers and those who might be quoted in the pieces.
Sheer Post has people on decrying suveillance culture or capitalism, but oh, the algorithms they deploy to block me from getting comments posted. They just do not get sent, so Sheer Post is using ISP lookers, and seeing my name, and even when I use other accounts, they still prior retrain.
Here, my retort to, “America, Land of the Dying? Alarming Study Shows US Killing Its Own Population” (Source)
Oh, these grand sweeping articles, with nowhere to go. Imagine that, you are what you eat, what you think, what you do, what you breathe, what you drink, what you hear, what you see . . . . Imagine that, the chemicals produced by the Trust the Science pathogens, daily, and the synergistic effects of those debilitating and life shortening cocktails. Imagine that, salt-fat-sugar and empty calories, and sedentary living. Imagine that, grass fields and crop fields sprayed with animal-freezing and culling toxins that end up in baby’s umbilical cord and bottles.
Imagine that, a country run by old dead thinkers and young neoliberal I-got-mine elites. No dental clinics in every census track area. No free medicine. No preventative medicine. Horrific schools, K12, treating youth like prisoners. All the perverse thinking and chatter of the elites, the celebrities, the de-creative forces of Holly-Dirt and the Press.
Without revolution, without actually grabbing these felons, one and all, and putting them through hell, reappropriating the bucks and power, without that, and without killing lobbies, killing the forces of the polluters, top to bottom, we will continue to be the Big Mac, Homo Plasticpithecus. We will continue to read these pieces, but by god, no call to action.
As if the writing here is unique, blessed with unique takes on things we activists and teachers and writers have been harping on for decades.
Where are those lawyers who are the blitzkrieg forces that will sue you if you say their products kill, maim, degrade, poison us? How many Cheeseburger Bills will we continue to see? How many Exxon lawsuits will gouge entire countries for pointing out that company’s theft of resources and poisoning of ecosystems and people?
Put the pieces together. Insert stronger voices in these pieces. Quit the fake equivocation and false balance and so-called objective yammering.
Vandana Shiva anyone? Alice Waters, anyone? How many more people can you get to help your limp piece bring light and life to a revolution of spirit? Young people dying? Oh, that’s right, the CDC is it, Fauci is it, as more and more scientists, doctors, others are showing just what is happening with MMR and mRNA shots all at once in little Johnny and Jane.
Trust the science? Trust the law? Trust the press? Trust the cops? Trust the military? Trust the educators? Trust the doctors? Right!
The point is that an endless stream of these stories have hit my email box and the magazine racks for decades. I also wrote pieces on social and environmental justice, urban planning, the environment, social work, homelessness, etc. For now, though, we need deeper understanding that there are other paradigms and others working to pull down the system.
The same old readers of these articles are not in the mix, and most are at home, doing their thinking and their prognosticating and complaining in some middle class or above retirement thing, or just not engaged in deep community change.
We are in a period where the haves have, and some of the haves have enough, or they feel, like the Romney’s, that they are middle class, you know, middle of what? Again, the 80 Percenters in the USA have about 8 percent of the so-called/deemed wealth. It’s the Point Zero Zero One and the One Percent and then their soldiers of fortune and professional managerial class who collectively, respectively control, 28 percent, 40 percent and then 24 percent of the wealth. For the 92 or there abouts percent of USA wealth.
A few at the top hoarding, but their Eichmann’s, their hit men and hit women, their abiding supporters and upper management and upper echelon professionals and technocrats etc, they are ruining the world, us.
So, now, I meet people who are in the middle class, but they want to see what the expensive homes look like. They talk a lot about their overvalued home they have been in for 30 years, with this and that Marth Stewart refab-rehab-update-makeover what they spend a shit load of time on, thinking about and occupying themselves doing. The hope is to sell the place for $800,000, say in the case of Lake Oswego in the Portland, OR, area, and then move into a smaller town, say, Longview WA, and get a place, comprable, for $500 K and then use the $300K for the nest egg while collecting Social Security and utilizing 401 Ks and pensions or something to that effect.
Criticizing President Barack Obama’s tax policy, the former Bain Capital CEO said he would promote one that helps “those who have been hurt by the Obama economy.” (source)
And this piece of human stain, who is embraced by the human stains in the Democratic Party, hates middle class folk:
Of course, Romeny has more than a cool hundred million since he made that stupid statement. Think half a billion, or more. Remember when Mitt gave his half-consumed hot chocolate to the barista at Seattle’s Best in a Borders Bookstore in Provo and said it was good and he could have it. No monetary tip, from the freak of a Mormon, but his spit upon drink!
Romney spent some time in the coffee shop as his wife browsed through books before they were called to leave.
On their way out, Ann throws away her half-consumed hot chocolate, but Mitt approaches the counter. “I know you guys can’t sell this again, but I was wondering if one of you guys wanted the rest of my hot chocolate.”
“No thanks,” one of the other baristas told him, wondering if this was some sort of bizarre joke.
Henry David Thoreau’s memoir of his secluded time there was published. ‘Walden‘ was a seminal work of early environmentalism and a celebration of the individual’s spirit: Aug 09, 1854.
“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.”
“We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”
“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.”
“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.” ― Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Last week, Republican Senator Ron Johnson called for ending Social Security and Medicare as entitlement programs, instead transferring them into the discretionary budget where they would be gutted.
Johnson’s proposal follows a similar call by Florida Senator Rick Scott, who earlier this year called for putting Social Security and Medicare up for renewal every five years.
Social Security and Medicare spending is allocated as mandatory spending, funded by workers’ payroll taxes, to prevent them from being pillaged. Transferring these programs to the discretionary budget would mean their abolition, slashing US life expectancy as millions of retirees die in poverty and from preventable disease.
Seymour Fogel, “The Wealth of the Nation,” commissioned for the Social Security Board Building, Washingon DC in 1938.
“If you qualify for the entitlement, you just get it no matter what the cost,” Johnson said. “And our problem in this country is that [mandatory spending takes up] more than 70% of our federal budget, of our federal spending.” (WSWS Source)
And, another not-a-peep from anyone of national or international value or fame or . . . . This is the death of cult countries, as we are distracted by football, actors, Trump & Company, Pelosi and LLC, BIden/Harris Blackface Histrionics.
We shall become Ukraine!
We shall sell off every asset, every human waking and sleeping moment, to the highest lowly elite bidder. The elected officials are like turpintine-crazed hornets. Yet, no pitchforks.
You think a Bezos or Koch or Bloomberg or Gates or Buffet or et al would latch onto this madness and decry the even mention of gutting the people’s already lowly Social Security and Medicare? They are leeches with golden alimentary canals:
These above and the other 3,000 plus their families, their associates, their Eichmann’s and hitmen, they are the enemies of the world. Then, you get the thugs in suits, the Ivy League or Some-Sort-of-Frat-Boy League graduates who end up in office, as electeds, who follow the secretive and overt marching orders of the people above who invent coalitions, lobbying battalions, work groups, foundations, NGOs, and media-press affiliations that are willing to say, “There Will Be Blood.” To the very last Ukrainian, Russian, Chinese.
Ameicans are so confused, so traumatized, so tied into hoping that over-valued home, sold, will be the nest egg for retirement. This is how 50 and 60 somethings see the world. They are not in the trenches demanding HANDS off those social safety nets, those ENTITLEMENTS. They will turn blue in the face yelling about white Biden should run in case Trump should run, and they say Trump is Still the President but He Should Run in 2024.
Like a Breaking Bad Game of Thrones, all these armchair pundits inside the Beltway, on the two coasts, with many amatuers in flyover states regaling over the very top 20 listed above, as heroes, as saviors, as job creators, as their own kings of their own wealth, thank you very much, and one day too,, my grandson might be a millionaire by age 29, and daughter head of a Military Offensive Private-but-publicly-funded-industry.
I met a young couple, with a two year old son, and they were vacationing on the coast, and the dad is a consultant in forestry, and the mom is a recently branded surgeon. They seemed nice, but when we talk about forests, the spraying of chemicals on communities — human and non–human — and when we talk about a crisis in medicine, the sacking of ER doctors, etc., they of course lament, but again, me-myself-my-child-I prevails, because in school, success is not in true community lifting, team work, but in individual guts, persistence and pullling oneself up by the bootstraps (and impossible feat unless you are Bruce Lee).
And don’t believe the myth about the tepid water turning to boiling water with a frog lulled into boiling death.
If you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will (unfortunately) be hurt pretty badly before it manages to get out — if it can. And if you put it into a pot of tepid water and then turn on the heat, it will scramble out as soon as it gets uncomfortably warm.
The folly of allegories, and then, always atributing negative human things to animals, like:
sly as a fox; loan shark; wiley coyote; rabid dog; snake in the grass; bloodthirsty wolf; followers like sheep; leech; bloodsucker; blind as a bat; slow as a turtle, sloth; stings like a wasp; deadly as a . . . fill in the animial/nature blank.
Yet, this humanity, man, this collective fear, the group think, the clustering and tribalism and xenophobia and, well, it’s not the frog lulled in warm-to-boiling water, but rather, the human baby-stepped out of a job, or lulled by distractions, fleeced slowly but surely by usury, dumbfounded by the small and big lie, warped by patriotism, taught to be his or her or their worst enemy.
We are the frogs, the sheep and the lemmings, because we make up those insipid stories to shield ourselves from the fact that we have let the billionaire and warring and criminal and perverted classes take hold of our futures, our wombs, our seven generations out. Then, we allow the human stain like those Republicans mentioned above wanting to gut Social Security and Medicare, and then with the Democrats who want no more Russia-Russians-Slavs, to live in peace, when they should be facing the old chopping block.
This is a declaration of war on all the people — gutting entitlements instead of ramping them up, and then all the fixes off the table while giving money to the most currupt and Nazi-like land, Zelenskistan, with no debate. This is the distracted and delluded and denigrated West.
While lawmakers haven’t struck a deal yet on spending for the coming fiscal year, increases backed by the armed services committees point to national defense spending that could approach or exceed $850 billion, versus the $802 billion Biden requested.
Rep. Anthony Brown (D-Md.), a House Armed Services Committee member who voted in favor of the topline increase, noted the swiftness of the deliberation over the topline. “In the committee, there was almost no debate,” he said.
Runaway inflation, arming Ukraine in its fight against Russia and growing concerns about China’s military have beaten arguments that the Pentagon should seek tradeoffs and make due. And as lawmakers of all political stripes look to secure cash for weapons and equipment built in their districts, bipartisan backing for steady defense spending has also weighed heavily on the Democrats’ spending agenda. That upward trend will almost certainly accelerate if Republicans sweep the midterm elections. (source, Politico)
More people in line at food banks, more people turning off the A/C and then the heat, more people huddled in a corner with sterno and three year old can ‘o beans. Scrolling through the black mirros, picking up dopamine hits from Candy Crush 6.0, TikTok, the entire suite of electronic, digital, mind-warping addictive and human-denying stuff we read and watch on the black mirror, while we have no pitchforks sharpened, no tar vats boiling, and no hotel down pillows gutted for what is the only solution to the crimes of this decade, this century, this moment, this day, this season, here and now, as the list goes on and on and on.
The life-death struggle has been televised, digitized, gain of functionized, chemicalized, commercialized, weaponized, devised now, in the past and for the future:
The old days in my planning graduate classes, looking at community, population growth, unchecked growth, builing and paving, and the “if you build it/dam it/wind turbine it/ solar panel it/ Disneyfy it, they will come.
Oh, the fertility problems from environmental factors, and the mRNA shots and boosters and now cocktail of MMR and DPT and mRNA at birth. Get little Johnny to have small testices, lower sperm, and well, little Jane will have no workable hormone system, and then Johnny and Jane will be on the austism and sexuality/gender spectrum until we are in that mess (not to the Eugenics Queens and Kings, some of whom are listed above in the Top 20 Evil list).
Here from another blog I am subscribed to: laughlyn
On an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT topic, this was posted yesterday by SVT, Sweden’s main public news broadcaster, on our trusty old teletext service:
The last headline reads: “Fertility in Sweden at low levels: Covid [shots] one of the explanations”. “Wow”, I thought. The correlations are so glaringly obvious that our mainstream media are raising the issue? But the actual article said absolutely nothing on this purported cause.
And moments after I (and the three or four of the aforementioned 90-year-olds who still use the teletext service) had caught this little gem, the subline was also edited into reading “couples’ priorities were changed by [the shots]”.
Interesting way to spin it, I think. There’s a correlation between the covid shots and a (hopefully temporary) reduction in fertility, no way to argue anything else. But getting out in front of this, the marketed hypothesis will seemingly be that young couples simply postponed having kids simply because they’d received these treatments.
What are these anti-social security, anti-medicare-for-all, pro-war, pro-kiss-a-criminal-billionaire all about?
Eugenics!
And, golly, the Russians are finding that the Ukrainian POWs, when check up on by medical teams, has pathogens in their blood, showing 16 times the occurance and rates than what might be “normal” in Ukraine. Oh, golly, Hunter Biden and those Bioweapons Labs, DARPA and DoD approved and sanctioned.
And that is what we are fixated on, including:
Perhaps you’ve heard the recent “news” that Beyonce had to change some of her lyrics because they were “offensive.” A headline in Jeff Bezos’ Washington Postblared: “Beyoncé used ‘ableist’ slur in a new song. After uproar, she’s deleting it.”
The word in question is “spaz.” It’s viewed by some as a slur because it allegedly mocks people with spastic paralysis. (Mickey Z, source)
While ZioLensky bombs a huge nuke plant, we worry about words.
On August 7, the Zelensky’s regime committed a new act of nuclear terrorism at the energy infrastructure facilities of the Zaporozhye NPP to create a humanitarian catastrophe in the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, the Russian Ministry of Defence claimed.
The attack was carried out at about midnight. The AFU used the Hurricane MLRS. Fragments and a rocket engine fell 400 meters from the operating power unit of the station. Striking elements damaged administrative buildings and the adjacent territory of the storage. A voltage surge at the plant caused smoke on the open switchgear of the station. The security system turned off the power supply. As a result of the Ukrainian shelling, the Kakhovskaya high-voltage line, which provided electricity to the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions, was damaged.
The Homo Consumopithecus, Homo Plastipithecus, Homo Infantilerectus, that’s what they are doing, sitting in the slow slow burn of the nuclear Armageddon.
Bruce Lee said, “I don’t fear the man who has 10,000 kicks, I fear the man who has practiced 1 kick 10,000 times.”
And there is cultural and retail and consumer insanity doing the same thing over and over and over expecting different results, as in doing the same wrong thing over and over, or, following the wrong ways over and over, and expecting different results is, well, sort of insane.
Or that system of thinking, SOPs, the working rule book for this system of extraction, destruction, razing, paving over, polluting, degrading, destroying, developing, and diseasing is what rules the insanity of the systems of oppression.
Imagine that, no, this system, and the underlying cause and effect, effect and cause in an endless back and forth cause drawn by effects. Beach renourishment is this terminology of sanity. Amazing Orwellian PR spinning. That is, taking sand from off the wrack line, offshore, to dump and plow on the beachhead, because, well, seas pull and push, pull and push, and reorient the actual beach architecture. Rising seas, and then, of course, coastal luxuries and development (human) means that the beaches have to have sand and weight and dimension to be a usable beach. Commercial, and now, we figured out that mangroves and wetlands and deltas and sand hold back the big waves of storms.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers discovered around 300,000 tires underwater as they were surveying an area to draw sand from for the latest renourishment project.
One generation’s problem is another’s problem sort of solved, insanely, and that sort of solve becomes the next generation’s problem. Or in the case of us, we see the problem sort of solved at age 20 and see the solve/solution becoming a bigger problem.
The tires were likely part of an artificial reef placed by the state in the 1970s or 1980s that have since drifted down the coast. Patricia Smith with the NC Division of Marine Fisheries says there could be more than half-a-million tires along the shoreline even though the practice of using tires for that purpose ended in the 80s.
“Over the years some of these tires have drifted off of the artificial reefs,” said Smith. “Some of them have washed ashore, when they do that we pick them up we get them disposed of properly.”
The tires underwater, however, are too expensive to remove. That means the Army Corps of Engineers working on the project will have to work around them to find enough sand. (Source)
So, hurricanes, and big surge storms, all of that, eroding those beaches. Now, sand is like oil is like gold is like data. Those 500,000 tires are now of a magnitude of 1,000 or more times globally, just dumped, not strategically dumped for “artificially reef building (sic)”.
Yeah, invest in plastics, young man. That solution (sic) that never was but now is the problem on a multiple level scale:
Most folks who work to end our plastic habit focus on the environmental impacts — such as trash, oil use, and manufacturing emissions. All important. EWG looks at it from another angle, too: the plastic pollution inside us. In you. In newborn babies. (Source)
Plastic pollution is an environmental, wildlife, climate, human health, and social justice issue. Hormone distrupter. Brain barrier crosser. Gut killer. Blood leveler. Diabetes and brain fog and, well, what a sane solution, sort of.
The great garbage patch:
How compliant are we stuck in Capitalism, stuck in this western cultural lie of elites – them are better, us — we are dependent upon them – elites. How we in modern civilization draw on acceptance, and seeing us as them, and them as the other.
Here, “I came back home a little afraid for my country, afraid of what it might want, and get, and like, under pressure of combined reality and illusion. I felt—and feel—that it was not German man that I had met, but Man. He happened to be in Germany under certain conditions. He might, under certain conditions, be I.” —Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free
Here are the section headings for Mayer’s book,
Section headings from the article discussing Mayer’s book and how relevant it is now — They Thought They Were Free by Joshua Styles.
Overcoming Decency
“Even if many Germans did not harbor anti-Semitic prejudices (at least not initially), the forced separation of Jews and non-Jews created a devastating rift in German society, tearing the social fabric and paving the way for tyranny. In our day, the separation of the masked and unmasked, the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, has divided populations around the world like nothing we’ve experienced in our lifetimes. And the global scale of this separation has perhaps not happened in recorded history.”
Our Own Lives
Our Own Fears
Our Own Troubles
The Tactics of Tyrants
The Common Good
“governments across time have used the “common good” as an excuse to consolidate power and implement authoritarian measures that under normal circumstances would be rejected….Tyrants understand how to exploit our desire to care for others. We must understand their tendency to exploit our good will. Indeed, to understand this tactic and to resist encroachments on liberty is the way to preserve the actual common good. Tragically, many people do not realize that they have been exploited—that their desire to work for the common good has become obedience without question”
Endless Distractions
Science and Education
“‘Trust the science.’ Or so we have been told the past two years. Yet another tactic used by authoritarians across time is the appeal to science and expertise….over the past two years, ‘science’ has meant whatever the public health authorities claim to be true, regardless whether the claims are supported by evidence. In fact, much of this so-called science has proved to be demonstrably false”
Suppressing Speech and Encouraging Self-Censorship
Uncertainty
Gradually, Then Suddenly
“Think back to March 2020. We should have resisted then. We should not have tolerated stay-at-home orders or various (and even non-sensical) restrictions on local businesses and private life. Governments had already gone too far. And then came the masks, and some said that masks were the hill. Individuals who shared these concerns were derided as fanatics and conspiracy theorists, but they were right”
Reading, “The Patrescene: When men hold the power, humanity fades” by Amy Irvine.
Yes, this is so true, though today, unfortunately, with Western Culture, warring, the war against children, nature, land, soil, air, water, food, trees, people, we do not have that clear deliniation that we have had over time: “When men hold all the power, we are dumbed down; we die.“
SO, without getting into the Military Industrial Complex’s female CEOs and the war drumming by so many women in the EU to send more Ukrainians to the front, to the grinder, and the Hillary and Albright situation, this writer does hit sparks:
Our hands bloodied and bodies bent beneath the weight of an animal ten times our size, a thing we stalked and killed together because together there was nothing we couldn’t do. Things were fairer. We were fed. This is not some romantic revision of our beginnings; it’s in bones and relics and rock art. The earliest shamans were female. Many of the handprints stenciled into the walls of Europe’s famous painted caves are female. The remains of an early big game hunter just unearthed in the Americas are also female. Or maybe the ancient ones thought of these bodies in a less binary way. Maybe the binary is to blame as much as the seed.
The fossil record reveals that, a half million years ago, the brain size of both our African and Eurasian human ancestors burgeoned. This is the longest and arguably most successful era, the time of hunter-gatherers. A time when there was materially more energy for females and their offspring—not only is more food available but females also have equal part in the acquisition and distribution of nutrients and calories. In such a society, maternal and child health are valued and, in turn, the species thrives—so calorie-demanding brains grow bigger. But the stauncher the patriarchy, the higher the death rates of mothers and children. When men hold all the power, we are dumbed down; we die.
Yes, I hammer it hard on how insane the people I have worked with and worked for have been, and how traumatized they are, but how traumatizing they become. I have worked in fields that are dominated by women — college English teacher, social work, environmental sustainability, writing, journalism, literary editing. Truly, I have to say that capitalism has that uncanny ability to chronically disease people, both male and female. It is inflammatory, it is dehumanizing, it is violent and dog-eat-dog, and it is based on white supremacy, racism, the ability to steal souls and sell them for a pound of gold. To see the white disease come into a land and steal and subjugate. It is amazing to see how much the world’s native and indigenous people have suffered under that formula of pain.
I expect the Orionpiece to be creative, soul crafting, and not always centered in the reality of our politics, geo-politics, and the hell on earth this country has unleashed on the rest of the world. Just being an American or a Brit or Canadian or European unleashes pain from centuries ago, now and into the future.
Here, another piece from the Summer Orion:
The real Age of Dominion would come much later. After the Crusades, in which Christians first unleashed large-scale violence against non-Christians. After the adoption of mercantilist conquest and slave-based racial capitalism. After the emergence of the scientific revolution. In other words, after the West had constructed a dominant and dominating culture, devoted above all to extracting and accumulating: Land. Power. Wealth. All of this conquest and extraction justified by patriarchy, white supremacy, an arrogated license to conquer or kill the infidel. And, eventually, by scriptural passages that seemed to give humans ownership of the natural world. ( The Age of Dominion by John Biewen)
So it comes back to tires, and back to plastics. And, in that summer issue is an interview of Handmaid Tale’s Atwood. Of course, we get the masking, and we get those concepts of what woke is, and, then, the fragile generation, and while I like Solnit on many levels, we do get into the LGBTQ stuff, and see thinks that the USA will be non-white majority in two decades, and somehow the world will be good. I can’t believe Solnit has to bring in Putin, and alas, these are captured conversations.
It is so-so much more complicated than these dichotomies, and so sad that Solnit and Atwood equate their belief system to their understanding or misunderstanding of USSR and Soviet Union and Russia. Amazing. Oh well, some of the good with the bad. Here you go.
It is interesting to have these short essays (see below, “Two Days in August”) in the local twice-a-week newspaper where local events, school sports, the police log, food and dining and art and human interest stories line up next to long obituaries and funny pet stories.
It’s me barking up the wrong tree, for sure, and I wrote this as a way to bring light to the dark days that unleashed, as the title tells, 28,000-plus days of conspiracies. If you can murder Japanese in two cities, experimenting (sic) with uranium and plutonium bombs on civilians, you can carry out any number of other terroristic programs. You can have hit squads getting guns for coke, or you can murder your own president, or you can fake the Gulf of Tonkin, or you can help murder Allende in Chile, or you can drop plague-laced insects and rodents into Korea. The beat goes on, until the chickens come back to roost.
Imagine all the people seeking some light in the dark corridors of pancaking buildings — World Trade Center Towers — and a pancaking Building Number Seven that sustained zero hits.
These bombs did not end the war or save hundred of thousands of American soldiers’ lives.
You can fool yourself believing we are enlightened, exceptional, but how does that really happen, this collective fooling?
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Chinese Proverb
That is an ancient one, but in a world with Hearst and Pulitzer and Facebook and CIA and FBI infiltrating media, the press, academia, and with amazing stealth and concerted zest of a bad-bad education system (K12) that turns youth and creative souls into drudgery, into compliance, into non-thinkers, into sheep, we are not fooling ourselves. It’s in the DNA, until we get the Ivy League and elite colleges around the world producing (like an assembly line) neoconservatives, neoliberals and truly predatory folk, and now, folk who are not thinkers, not creative and who are compliant to the corporations, the lobbies, the others in the Deep State and the Deep Morass of Money.
The topics of the day, in 2022, are now virtrual landmines. You can’t talk about sex, drugs, religion, politics, science, policy, international issues, pharmacuticals, medicine, abortion, education, social work, military spending, culture, the current generation and next one. Or, you can bring these topics up, but be ready for closed minds and mean discourse and broken debates. Yelling and shouting and hating and breaking ranks and estrangement and isolation and locked down thinking, and reaching the metal ceiling of prejudice, bias and backward thinking.
[sinking of the Lusitania]
[attack of the USS Liberty by Israel]
[Building Seven]
[Tuskegee syphillis experiment (sic)]
[illegal bombing of Cambodia]
[Gulf of Tonkin False Flag]
[Colin Powell nad yellow cake lies]
[18 years in prison for telling the world about Israel’s illegal nuke program]
[murder of Salvador Allende]
[Che]
So, all of that, all those precursors to plutonium and uranium bombs, and since then, we get the picture. Even Robert F. Kennedy Jr is getting in on the fascism with a new short book:
Of course, Naomi Wolf did that fascism accounting years ago:
We are still in the Kill the Messanger mode:
And here we are, the Press, the so-called liberal media, dead on arrival with this hero:
Here it is, my 1,000 word column coming out Friday, August 5, Friday, per the editor’s guarantee.
Two Days in August
By Paul Haeder
I recognize August 6 and 9 as evidence of my country’s cruelty to humankind.
How many News Times readers remember the classroom drills: Duck and Cover? That was the mantra for me growing up in the 1950s and ‘60s. The US and overseas schools ran these nuclear attack drills all the time.
Students now practice active shooter lockdowns and room clear protocols in case of an unruly, violent fellow student.
For most of my adult life as a teacher and journalist, it has been an uphill battle trying to inform my fellow Americans about history. One sticking point includes the ignorance of the great sacrifices Russia made in defeating the Nazi’s. To this day, I have 60-year-old friends who think the Second World War was won by the US and believe the number of casualties and deaths suffered country by country puts the US on top of the death toll.
That baseline, much of what Americans get wrong about that war, Russia, Europe, the US’s role in things – to include the hatred the British and Americans had toward the Soviet Union, and what reparations really were about – keeps Americans locked in a magical thinking La-La Land.
Before we get to “The Bomb,” here’s the WWII count: Soviet Union – military deaths, 8,800,000 to 10,700,000; total deaths including civilians, 24,000,000. For the United Kingdom they had 383,600 military killed and 450,700 combined military and civilians. For the United States the totals, respectively, are 416,800 and 418,500.
Shifting to the two bombs the US dropped on Japan, I call these moments in August 1945 days that should live in infamy – the needless bombing of two “virgin” Japanese cities that did not end the war with Japan but rather was “a message to the Soviet Union.”
I was a college instructor for various military organizations, including at the US Army’s Sergeants Major Academy. I had career soldiers cry reading their personal essays aloud: narratives about their own childhood traumas, and sometimes the trauma of battle. I’ve had military students challenge my background and knowledge of world history and the history of both World War I and II.
Some of them, however, backed me up when I taught about the reality of why President Harry Truman dropped the bomb twice on Japan.
Using the atom bomb to vaporize a Japanese city was the stratagem to intimidate the Soviets and coerce them into making concessions with respect to postwar arrangements in Germany, Poland, and elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe. Just a few weeks after those two bombs destroyed two Japanese cities, Truman’s secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, declared that “the atom bomb had been used because such a demonstration of power was likely to make the Soviets more accommodating in Europe.”
Truman’s message to the world concerned the US’s unmatched power by dropping the atom bomb on a big city. However, some of the scientists involved in the development of the bomb, in the Manhattan Project, lobbied to have the bomb dropped on an uninhabited Pacific Island.
This is our history: Truman did not want a weapon-to-end-all-weapons tro misfire or fail completely. He wanted the bomb to be dropped, unannounced, on a virgin city. The capital, Tokyo, was out of the question since it already had been flattened by “conventional” bombing.
Our war department was strategic: by early August 1945, there were only ten Japanese cities with 100,000 or more inhabitants that remained more or less unscathed by bombing raids.
Imagine: Hiroshima and Nagasaki qualified for this inhumane experiment. The bomb was ready to be deployed before the USSR got involved in the Far East. Hiroshima was flattened on August 6.
The Japanese did not react with an immediate unconditional capitulation because while the damage was great, it was not greater than the March 9 and 10, 1945 attack by thousands of bombers on Tokyo that caused more destruction and killed more people than that “virgin” target of Hiroshima.
The surrender of Tokyo did not occur by August 8 – three months after the Germans surrendered in Berlin. The USSR declared war on Japan and the Red Army attacked Japanese troops in Northern China on August 8, 1945.
A second bomb, just one day after the Soviet Army battled Japanese in the Far East, was dropped. On August 9, another “virgin” city, Nagasaki, was destroyed by Truman’s bomb. Many Japanese Catholics perished. A former American army chaplain later stated: “That’s one of the reasons I think they dropped the second bomb. To hurry it up. To make them surrender before the Russians came.”
This chaplain might not have been aware that among the 75,000 human beings who were instantaneously incinerated, carbonized and evaporated in Nagasaki were many Japanese Catholics as well an unknown number of inmates of a camp for allied POWs, whose presence had been reported to the air command, to no avail.
The myth of how the Japanese were defeated or surrendered was embedded in Americans when I first taught classes in 1981, and then in 2000 when I taught at the NCO Academy, in 2011 when I taught in Seattle at a Jesuit school, and in 2022 when my friend argued with me about who and how the war was won.
Admiral William Leahy, in command of U.S. Pacific forces, said, “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade.” Sixty-five Japanese cities were in ashes. General Dwight D. Eisenhower said in a Newsweek interview: “The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
Japan capitulated not because of the atom bombs but because of the Soviet entry into the conflict. Those 226,000 mostly civilian Japanese perished in two cities because the US wanted to send a message to the USSR.
Seventy-seven years later the US is deploying a similar military stratagem in Ukraine.
I just finished the Chris Hedges piece on Daniel Hale, the brave young man held in containment, a federal prison with limited communication, and zero treatment for his PTSD.
Hale, a 34-year-old former Air Force signals intelligence analyst, is serving a 45 month prison sentence, following his conviction under the Espionage Act for disclosing classified documents about the U.S. military’s drone assassination program and its high civilian death toll. The documents are believed to be the source material for “The Drone Papers” published by The Intercept,on October 15, 2015.
These documents revealed that between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations drone airstrikes killed more than 200 people — of which only 35 were the intended targets. According to the documents, over one five-month period of the operation, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. The civilian dead, usually innocent bystanders, were routinely classified as “enemies killed in action.”
Here you go, the interview Hedges did of Hale’s lawyer:
And, my comments this morning, August 1, since I like to flare up the Scheer Post middlings:
Ahh, the heroes in America are many times locked up, locked down, locked in, locked backwards. As we can see, Hale was in it for the money, as he was another one of those millions of aimless youth, American youth, but also modern youth, culled by the monsters of capitalism and consumerism and pay pay pay for any sort of forward “success.”
Judges! What human stain. I doubt many readers of Scheer Post have dealt with them, but I have, as a case manager for homeless folk, with outstanding tickets and fines, warrants for their arrests for not paying fines (tickets) tied to loitering or trespassing, etc. Then those monster judges in rape trials. Or, just the dude with Tim DeChristopher, who protested BLM land lease sales by holding up Bidder 70 sign during a bidding event. The judge said, “If you would have been contrite and admitted the error of your ways, I would have given you six weeks, time served.” Instead, two years in federal prison. This is the thuggery of American injustice. Imagine that, homeless people in jail for unpaid bills.
Debtors prison on steroids.
Ahh, old people who poured fake blood on missiles, hell, throw the book at them. Put them in prison so they can die.
Here, female radicals — you want to see injustice from long ago up to now?
And so it comes down for Hale and millions like him that Faustian bargain. Do things for the shekel, and in this predatory dog-eat-dog,, king-of-the-hill society, oh, you’ll do almost anything to survive and thrive.
I taught at several colleges, English, writing, rhetoric, where drone programs are hailed as the next great thing. Young women and men taking those classes. All the bells and whistles and toys. This is the sickness of modern society. Drone in Israel, drones in Turkey, drones in Yemen, drones in USA, drones in Canada, drones in Ukraine, drones in Russia.
I know it is tangential, but look at Biden then, ’93, and now. Mister Expand the Death Penalty 57 different new ways. Listen to his thuggery, his inarticulate way, that old Ivy League stupidity, and another loser killer with a worthless law degree. He relishes putting predators in prison.
These are the monsters, those who need sterilization, who need to go the way of the Dodo.
The USA is no different than Midnight Express . . . Black Site USA! Despicabable as the general population does selfie’s overlooking a cliff where fellow AmeriKKKans slide off in a storm.
You know, Hale, the drone kid, the one who blew the whistle on the murdering of civilians by the USA, under the auspices of the great male-female-LGBT soldiering on for criminal capitalism. He was featured prominently in the award-winning documentary National Bird, a film about whistleblowers in the US drone program.
I reference Tim DeChristopher, Bidder 70.
“Have you ever read Franz Kafka’s The Trial?”
That is the first thing that Patrick Shea, a member of jailed climate activist Tim DeChristopher’s legal defense team, says to me when I call him this morning to ask him about reports that DeChristopher has been pulled out of his minimum security camp at Herlong federal prison in California and thrown into isolated confinement in an 8 x 10-foot cell. His latest crime? Sending an email to a colleague with a “threat” to give back a $25,000 donation to his legal defense fund because DeChristopher, one of the most principled people I have ever encountered, discovered that his donor was exporting U.S. manufacturing jobs. (source)
Amazing people, these young men, for sure. But, the reality is young men have not only slipped through the cracks, but the cracks — decent real hands on education, community engagement mentoring, outside land love, male and female rendezvous bonding, hiking, growing, playing schools, ending the violent images, the crap on TV, the smart deadly phone crap, the hard porn, the war porn, intergenerational learning, mentoring, engaged within community boards, planning, politics — were created by accident and intentionally through the United States of Lies, Propaganda, War, Terror.
I saw beginning before my college teaching in 1983 how men in school, many of them, just did not get along. Not all of them, but since 1983, there have been studies on the great American Male Quit. There are recruitment tricks and white papers and studies on getting men back into school, back into liberal arts, back into engaged learning within multidisciplinary and multigenerational and both sexes learning.
This is not male bonding:
Tyler Durden On Adverstising: “Advertising Has Us Chasing Cars And Clothes, Working Jobs We Hate So We Can Buy Shit We Don’t Need.”
Here other quotes from Chuck Palenick’s book:
“You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”
“You know how they say you only hurt the ones you love? Well, it works both ways.”
“You are not special. You’re not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We’re all part of the same compost heap. We’re all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”
“The things you used to own, now they own you.”
“Today is the sort of day where the sun only comes up to humiliate you.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
So, from the neoliberal, pro-Democratic Party, Chronical of Higher Education, several latest articles ringing the emergency bell on the men failing in college:
“No, the Boys Are Not Doing Just Fine: Men trail women from grade school through college. That’s a real problem.”
Quoting:
Gender gaps in higher education do not appear out of nowhere. To a large extent they reflect the disparities in the K-12 education system. Girls outperform boys at every stage, and in almost every subject. According to my analysis, two-thirds of the students graduating high school with a GPA in the top 10 percent of the distribution are female. The ratio is reversed at the bottom. (Source)
“The Problem Nobody’s Talking About: Men have trailed women in degree completion for decades. Why aren’t colleges doing anything?”
For decades now, men have trailed women in college completion. Barely 40 percent of men earn a bachelor’s degree in four years, compared with just over half of women, federal data show. Even fewer Black and Hispanic men graduate on time — 21 percent and 32 percent, respectively.
But the pandemic, which has led to a disproportionate enrollment decline among male students, is expected to deepen the divide. Nationwide, male enrollment has fallen 8.6 percent over the past two years, while female enrollment has dropped by 6.5 percent, according to the National Student Clearinghouse. There were nearly three million more women enrolled in college this spring than men. (source)
Here, one of the images in this story: Oscar Joya, here at the ice-cream shop where he’s worked since 2018, has dropped out of the U. of Washington twice.
It is complicated, and of course, toxic masculinity is real and overblown at the same time, and we know the toxic Hillary Clinton laughing at a world leader being murdered with a knife poked up his rectum. Gaddhfi. And the four dress-earing women running the top military offensive weapons companies. You get the picture, that there are so many mean, wrong, dangerous women.
My own work in education as an educator, then in sustainability circles and then in social work has seen me come face to face with damaged women, damaged straight and bi-sexual and queer women who had come after me for being male. Being too, well, my voice, too deep. Absurdity and dangerous until we have crises in education and social work and nursing and foster care and day care. No men, or few. And then the men are resentful, zip up their lips when microaggressions and macro-aggressions rule the day.
I never zip my mouth, and when someone declares, “this is a safe place,” I sort of believe them. I have been fired for advocating adults with developmental disabilities, foster youth in programs supporting them from 16 to 21, and alas, from other gigs. My work in education as been part-time, precarious, and so when no classes are given to me the proceeding semester or quarter, I have been fired.
“Your voice is too male . . . you have a real male worldview . . . your experiences seem to be almost macho . . . you have no idea how women respond to a male colleague . . . . “
So, we have men and women, boys and girls, who never see male workers in social work, medicine, education. My K12 sub jobs included youth telling me that I was the first “boy teacher we have had . . . . Can you be our teacher?”
Now, there are ways to nuance the information here from the above article:
“Men arrive with the attitude that college is about partying, competitive heterosexual sex, not preparing for academics, and breaking the rules,” he said.
Colleges also come in for their share of the blame, with critics accusing them of creating environments that are hostile to young men. They argue that a focus on gender equity and sexual-assault prevention has led to the censoring of speech deemed “politically incorrect,” and to the treatment of young men as predators.
“I feel that college is not geared toward us,” said Thomas Efrem, a junior at the University of Washington who is part of the Brotherhood Initiative. “There’s a lot of rhetoric against the patriarchy — I get it, but it feels like people point the finger at us.”
Efrem said that when he tries to challenge the conventional wisdom around issues related to gender equality, offering research to support his points, professors and students shut him down.
“There’s a lot of narrative pushing, and I don’t like that,” he said.
Colleges have also come under fire for offering programs and seminars — some student-driven — aimed at freeing young men from the pressures and constraints of traditional masculinity, often referred to as “toxic masculinity.” To college’s conservative critics, such training amounts to emasculation, an attempt to “reprogram” college-aged men to behave more like college-aged women.
But the idea is to not throw out of hand these comments. These are perceptions, feelings, and these men’s points of view. As educators, we should embrace a lot of things, many of which run counter to our own thinking, philosophy, lives, and backgrounds.
Below is my piece for September’s Newport News Times tied to those goofy “the month of [blank] is national [blank] commemoration month.”
It dips into that arena of Intergenerational love and thinking and duty. I also talk about men, too. Working these small-town newspaper essays demands I balance and know my audience. There will not be another Paul Haeder reading my stuff, so I have to pull back on the radicalness that we all should have been embracing from cradle to cradle. Truly. I can’t really expose the double- and triple-standards of the people I have worked with, locally, where I was fired and where I had to quit because of unprofessional, mean-as-cuss, limited-thinking females. I’ve written about those experiences all over the place, including here, Dissident Voice, LA Progressive and even Hormones Matter: Check out the three-part series on my case management hell and Planned Parenthood-Seattle here.
For now, a peak into small-town Newport/Lincoln County/Waldport/Yachats/Lincoln City:
National Intergenerational Month — Talking about Trees
September’s here, the month that brings in Fall. Looking at the national holiday list 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 thirty and forty years my junior.
I have deep conversations with some of the houseless rough sleepers in Waldport: guys that are in their thirties 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’ve 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 from my column at Oregon Coast Today. 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 say 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 thirties, 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 printing huge 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.
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 my wife and my 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 I 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 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 cypr
The End
Daniel Hale: “I am here to answer for my own crimes and not that of another person,” he said at his sentencing. “And it would appear that I am here today to answer for the crime of stealing papers, for which I expect to spend some portion of my life in prison. But what I am really here for is having stolen something that was never mine to take: precious human life. For which I was well-compensated and given a medal. I couldn’t keep living in a world in which people pretended things weren’t happening that were. My consequential decision to share classified information about the drone program with the public was a gesture not taken lightly, nor one I would have taken at all if I believed such a decision had the possibility of harming anyone but myself. I acted not for the sake of self-aggrandizement but that I might some day humbly ask forgiveness.” (source)
After his sentencing on Tuesday July 26, 2011, Tim Dechristopher gave a 35 minute statement to the judge. Grist has published the entire statement on their website, here is an excerpt:
Thank you for the opportunity to speak before the court. When I first met Mr. Manross, the sentencing officer who prepared the presentence report, he explained that it was essentially his job to “get to know me.” He said he had to get to know who I really was and why I did what I did in order to decide what kind of sentence was appropriate. I was struck by the fact that he was the first person in this courthouse to call me by my first name, or even really look me in the eye. I appreciate this opportunity to speak openly to you for the first time. I’m not here asking for your mercy, but I am here asking that you know me.
Mr. Huber has leveled a lot of character attacks at me, many of which are contrary to Mr. Manross’s report. While reading Mr. Huber’s critiques of my character and my integrity, as well as his assumptions about my motivations, I was reminded that Mr. Huber and I have never had a conversation. Over the two and half years of this prosecution, he has never asked me any of the questions that he makes assumptions about in the government’s report. Apparently, Mr. Huber has never considered it his job to get to know me, and yet he is quite willing to disregard the opinions of the one person who does see that as his job.
There are alternating characterizations that Mr. Huber would like you to believe about me. In one paragraph, the government claims I “played out the parts of accuser, jury, and judge as he determined the fate of the oil and gas lease auction and its intended participants that day.” In the very next paragraph, they claim, “It was not the defendant’s crimes that effected such a change.” Mr. Huber would lead you to believe that I’m either a dangerous criminal who holds the oil and gas industry in the palm of my hand, or I’m just an incompetent child who didn’t affect the outcome of anything. As evidenced by the continued back and forth of contradictory arguments in the government’s memorandum, they’re not quite sure which of those extreme caricatures I am, but they are certain that I am nothing in between. Rather than the job of getting to know me, it seems Mr. Huber prefers the job of fitting me into whatever extreme characterization is most politically expedient at the moment.
In nearly every paragraph, the government’s memorandum uses the words lie, lied, lying, liar. It makes me want to thank whatever clerk edited out the words “pants on fire.” Their report doesn’t mention the fact that at the auction in question, the first person who asked me what I was doing there was Agent Dan Love. And I told him very clearly that I was there to stand in the way of an illegitimate auction that threatened my future. I proceeded to answer all of his questions openly and honestly, and have done so to this day when speaking about that auction in any forum, including this courtroom. The entire basis for the false statements charge that I was convicted of was the fact that I wrote my real name and address on a form that included the words “bona fide bidder.” When I sat there on the witness stand, Mr. Romney asked me if I ever had any intention of being a bona fide bidder. I responded by asking Mr. Romney to clarify what “bona fide bidder” meant in this context. Mr. Romney then withdrew the question and moved on to the next subject. On that right there is the entire basis for the government’s repeated attacks on my integrity. Ambition should be made of sterner stuff, your honor.
Mr. Huber also makes grand assumptions about my level of respect for the rule of law. The government claims a long prison sentence is necessary to counteract the political statements I’ve made and promote a respect for the law. The only evidence provided for my lack of respect for the law is political statements that I’ve made in public forums. Again, the government doesn’t mention my actions in regard to the drastic restrictions that were put upon my defense in this courtroom. My political disagreements with the court about the proper role of a jury in the legal system are probably well known. I’ve given several public speeches and interviews about how the jury system was established and how it has evolved to its current state. Outside of this courtroom, I’ve made my views clear that I agree with the founding fathers that juries should be the conscience of the community and a defense against legislative tyranny. I even went so far as to organize a book study group that read about the history of jury nullification. Some of the participants in that book group later began passing out leaflets to the public about jury rights, as is their right. Mr. Huber was apparently so outraged by this that he made the slanderous accusations that I tried to taint the jury. He didn’t specify the extra number of months that I should spend in prison for the heinous activity of holding a book group at the Unitarian Church and quoting Thomas Jefferson in public, but he says you should have “little tolerance for this behavior.”
But here is the important point that Mr. Huber would rather ignore. Despite my strong disagreements with the court about the Constitutional basis for the limits on my defense, while I was in this courtroom I respected the authority of the court. Whether I agreed with them or not, I abided by the restrictions that you put on me and my legal team. I never attempted to “taint” the jury, as Mr. Huber claimed, by sharing any of the relevant facts about the auction in question that the court had decided were off limits. I didn’t burst out and tell the jury that I successfully raised the down payment and offered it to the BLM. I didn’t let the jury know that the auction was later reversed because it was illegitimate in the first place. To this day I still think I should have had the right to do so, but disagreement with the law should not be confused with disrespect for the law.
Scholar Tony Martin (RIP) Discussed Jewish Influence, and the Slave Trade, too
A number of Black people who have come under attack from the Jewish community have been charged with anti-semitism. This is not a new situation. Pan-Afrikan activists and historians have consistently come under attack for challenging the legitimacy of the State of Israel and highlighting the role of Jews in the Trans-Atlantic Enslavement of Afrikan People. Baba Tony Martin was one such Professor, who would incur the full wrath of the Jewish lobby in America when he dared to add the book, “The Secret Relationship Between Black and Jews” written by the research department of the Nation of Islam – to his History syllabus. Baba Martin documented the history of the attack in his book “The Jewish Onslaught” and then delivered many presentations on the subject. We share this in the hope that it might inform others on the history of this battle.
The long essay on Black-Jewish relations, primarily in the United States, by a professor of African American History who became embroiled in controversy over his classroom use of a book detailing the well- documented Jewish role in the Atlantic slave trade. “The Jewish Onslaught” discusses, among other things, the increasing attacks of Jewish organizations on Black leaders and scholars, the alleged halcyon period of a Black-Jewish alliance, the Jewish role in the slave trade and the Jewish attack on Afrocentrism.
Now, the precipitating event around this quick blog post is the email I got from a guy in Illinois who reads me and thought I might have some soft shoe magic in the realm of publishing, drama, literary arts, etc. Funny thing happened on the way toe the forum uh? So, this guy, a cement guy (mason) who lives on a farm and is around age 62 and he’s retired but became interested in 9/11 and building free-falls and that Infamous Building Number Seven and the building’s owner, Larry Sliverstein, who seems to have already had plans for the building to be brought down, which we call, demolished, for a new state of the sustainability art, safest building in the world, designed by Jewish architects and engineers in Israel. The plans were there well BEFORE the September event, 911. Then, bam, the building pancaked, with no hit by any airline. So, interesting, no? Oy vei!
My email pal, he wrote a play, about three brothers, working class, albeit, and Goyim, talking about the World Trade Center and the free fall love of those buildings pancaking into hell. And, the Silverstein case of Number Seven. This guy has been emailing me, and I’ve been responding, for months. I’ve talked with him via phone, too, and alas, he has a few people looking at the script, and he even enlisted Ed Asner’s interest, and Ed even recorded himself reading part of the intro. Ed was interested in the script, but alas, age and death took him out too soon to be a part of this mason’s deal to have a play produced. He’s also open to a movie. Good luck on that one, I keep reminding him, you know, who controls the media?
From the YouTube crap above, a commentator, Winston Smith:
Lucky Larry!! Not only did he not attend his daily Windows on The World breakfast on 9/11 but his son and daughter, who also worked in the towers, did not show up that day. That’s what I call foreknowledge, I mean luck.
Who could look at the facts of the 911/anthrax attacks and not realize they were domestic crimes carried out by the same individuals? No one who’s objective and has taken even a cursory look at the facts could come to that conclusion.
56:03 (No mention of why his children didnt go to work that morning). In fact, Building 7 The Solomon Brothers Building was 350 feet away from the North Tower and had damage to its southeast corner and scattered fires that burned most of the day. Fire of course cannot bring down a Type 1 building. No steel-framed skyscraper has ever or can possibly come down in the manner of a controlled demolition, (of WTC76) without it having been one. Period.
Building 7 had 58 perimeter and 40,000 tons of steel in its structural support system. Had even one of those perimeter columns been left intact we would have seen an asymmetrical collapse.
It is beyond ludicrous and a spit in the face of every victim and every broken heart that has resulted from these unprecedented acts of treason, for this criminal to make such claims, knowing full well that it, like the Twin Towers, was destroyed through controlled demolition. You will not hear him address the molten steel and iron (See FEMA BPAT App. C which documents molten structural steel), the evidence of thermite (RJ Lee, USGS and Harrit et. al. 2009), the 100 day fires, the insanely excessive temperatures recorded from these underground fires, the 1,120 missing bodies, the pulverized concrete, the 1,200′ radial debris fields the towers left, the complete dismantling of their superstructures and all the rest of the thoroughly documented facts that prove the demolition of those buildings.
Now, there is so much to cover with the September 11, 2001 conspiracy. So so much, and I was and still am helping this fan of mine with the play understand the power of the media, press, dramatic arts, film, etc. Again, listen to Tony Martin above to understand the pervasive censorship. Read Gilad or others,
It takes a lot of backgrounding to help this bricklayer understand what he is up against in his attempt to unmask the Jewish or Israel involvement in 9/11:
Given that Gilad Atzmon and Shlomo Sand are both former Jews who have provided criticism of Jewish identity politics, it may be illuminating to understand why the organized, kosherized, Palestinian “solidarity community” embraces Sand while rejecting and disavowing Atzmon.
Atzmon’s initial reaction to his own “disavowal” was characteristically humorous, with him stating that he has only ever operated as an individual, and cannot be kicked out of any groups because he never belonged to any to begin with.
At any rate, it is well-known and easily observable that the Zionist-controlled solidarity discourse, whose primary mouth-piece is “Electronic Intifada”‘s Ali Abuminah, is deeply compromised and functions as a gatekeeper establishment, i.e. it seeks to censor “politically incorrect” ideas, while simultaneously providing weak, ineffectual criticism which ignores all of the key issues which would actually end the occupation of Palestine. Atzmon, a very successful jazz artist in his own right, as well as is the saxophonist on the latest Pink Floyd album, has remarked that “Electronic Intifada has reduced Palestinian resistance to an electronic board.”
In general, the Solidarity movement bears the unmistakable fingerprints of the Jewish left (which operates hand-in-hand with the jewish right), manifesting in a relentless need to convince their faithful but somnambulant following that Zionism has nothing to do with ‘Jews’ and Jewish culture, that these are two completely separate, non-intersecting spheres. The result of this programming is an ideological collective of curiously vociferous people whose top priority, above and beyond Palestinian liberation, is to never offend the Jews. These people can be seen on social media, energetically laying out their talking points to convey the image that “Zionism is the only problem,” Jews and Jewishness are positive and peaceful concepts, and are adamant that Jews and Jewish culture are outside the parameters of what can be considered socially acceptable criticism. They try to set us up to fail to address the real problem, which is Jewish exclusivity and Jewish ethno-centrism, something that has been endemic and definitive of Jewish culture for thousands of years before Zionism was even invented. (source)
The reality is a cover-up, and multiple cover-ups, well, the big lie and the cancerous lie are better lies to propagate:
For years now, I’ve known there was something wrong when my well-meaning anti-Zionist Jewish friends found it necessary to join Jewish anti-Zionist groups opposing Israel. In the US, Jewish Voice for Peace, in Canada, Not in Our Name; in Britain, Jews Against Zionism — every country has its group, usually more than one. “I am a Jewish witness against Israel,” I would be told. Sounds good, even brave. Sand’s latest deconstruction of Jewishness and Israel, How I Stopped Being a Jew (2014), makes it clear why my suspicions were well founded.
Barely 100 pages, it is a page-turner, a precis of his earlier more scholarly works, arguing that the romantic, heroic age of Jewish nationalism, as embodied in the creation of a Jewish state, is coming to an end. Israel will not disappear, but it is an anachronism, an embarrassment in the postmodern age. A reminder of the horrors of Nazism, but not as the Zionist crafters of the “holocaust industry”, or “holocaust religion”, would have it. The Zionist project is exposed by Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Gilad Atzmon, Israel Shamir and many more Jewish critics as reenacting the same policies of yesteryear. A flawed answer that is doomed, “an insidious form of racism“.
For the Israeli Sand, the Jewish “national” identity is a fraud (an Israeli identity is fine); the only viable Jewish identity is a religious one, and as a nonbeliever, he logically concludes, “Cogito, ergo non sum.”
Gilad Atzmon takes Sand’s logic further. He tore up his Israeli passport, becoming an ex-Israeli as well as an ex-Jew.
What’s so wrong with a secular, ethnic Jewish identity? Well, it can be based on only one of two things: persecution (being “forced” into being a Jew whether one likes it or not, as in the Nazi’s racial laws) or being “born” into the Jewish people. The former is no longer an issue and the latter is full of holes, and based on a dangerous myth. (source)
Read the scholar, Kees Van der Pijl, or look him up on the Internet for videos. Most have been censored, and his work on video is not in English:
Dr. Alan Sabrosky, former director of Studies of the US Army War College and emeritus research chair at that institution, concludes, 9/11 was a Mossad orchestrated operation. However,
Mossad did not do it alone. They needed local help within America (and perhaps elsewhere) and they had it, principally from some alumni of PNAC (misnamed Project for a New American Century) and their affiliates within and outside of the US government who in the 9/11 attacks got the”catalytic event” they needed and craved to take the US to war on Israel’s behalf. (source)
Back to Tony Martin: Martin made a startling assertion concerning slave ownership by Jews: “Using the research of Jewish historians, the book suggests that based on the 1830 census, Jews actually had a higher per capita slave ownership than for the white population as a whole.” The Secret Relationship does in fact approach making that suggestion, and since the claim would appear to be a pivotal one, it is worth examining. (source)
Everything, we are told, changed in September of 2001. It has been twenty years since the terror spectacle of 9/11. On this grim anniversary, we offer some big picture analysis—a series of articles reflecting on the extent to which everything did and did not change as a result of 9/11. Begun months ago, and building on years of scholarship by the authors, the occasion is all the more salient given some strange synchronicity. Specifically, we have just witnessed the fall of the U.S. puppet regime in Kabul. And in the wake of this spectacle, the Biden administration announced plans to declassify information pertaining to the FBI’s investigation into the Saudi role in the attacks.
These events highlight the fact that despite all the investigations and research around the events of September 11, 2001, much remains obscured. As such, this series presents a deeper exploration into the tragic events and catastrophic consequences of 9/11. In this first installment, we examine how the U.S. for decades has utilized Islamic terrorists as assets for its own ends. In Part 2, we look at how CIA figures actively prevented other government agencies from exposing the al Qaeda presence in the U.S. prior to the attacks. In the third and final article, we explore the deep political and historical implications of the U.S. government’s “emergency” powers in order to offer some conclusions about 9/11. (source)
I don’t have the patience to rewrite a lot of things from these articles on Acae demica, and turn them into quotations here from this piece, so find it yourself:
Academic Corruption, the Israel Lobby, and 9/11, or, Why I have resigned from my emeritus status at the University of Sussex by Kees Van der Pijl
Van der Pijl also talks about the Covid Planned Pandemic here:
Pandemic of Angst: Elite strategies to control the masses as democracy is dismantled, Kees van der Pijl – NOT The BCfm Politics Show presented by Tony Gosling
Here we go, RIMA – Relações Internacionais e Marxismo – “The politics of fear: 9/11, MH17, Covid19”
Here, since Google CIA YouTube takes it all down (Video unavailable: Playback on other websites has been disabled by the video owner)
Again, Tony Martin’s book, The Jewish Onslaught: Despatches from the Wellesley Battlefront
When money, power and influence are used to revise history by erasing ugly truths, the world needs courageous and informed truth-tellers like professor Tony Martin to correct the record, by every means necessary, even if it endangers his life, career and reputation. This was an eye-opener for me, regarding the ruthless, high-stakes world of political lobbying. (source)
So my mason in Illinois who is Catholic and believes all beings can find redemption, is a knee-jerk fearful of criticizing too many actions by and connectivity with a Zionist and Jewish mindset kinda guy. Here, a tribute to Tony Martin, PhD.
As an intellectual member of the Unity Nation scholar-warrior coterie, Martin along with Steve Cokely, Khallid Abdul Muhammad and Leonard Jeffries Jr. documented the Black Holocaust at Howard University on April 19, 1994. For their research and scholarship regarding the methodical plunder, displacement, enslavement and unlawful premeditated massacre of Africans along with the systematic impact of such atrocities, the Unity Nation coterie faced an economic, political and cultural onslaught by those who advanced a Eurocentric historiography of the world. Therefore, Martin was considered to be a polemical scholar due to his relentless and warranted intellectual dissension against belligerent academic and societal forces. His intellectual dissension against belligerent forces came full circle during the 1990s as he became the target of several libel suits and vituperative attacks. As a consequence and riposte to deliberate provocations, Martin published “The Jewish Onslaught: Dispatches From the Wellesley Battlefront,” which some considered the best polemic by any human being since the 1829 publication of David Walker’s classic “An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World.”
Jeffries, the last living member of the Unity Nation coterie, said, “Dr. Martin is truly a great scholar and extraordinarily spirited human being who left an enduring intellectual legacy because he had a sacred mission to the production of knowledge and maintenance of Pan-African values, interests and principles.”
Martin’s scholarship Garvey, the Caribbean and Pan-Africanism is commendable and must be advanced by the next generation of Black scholars. May the ancestors be with him when we look for him and the Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey in the whirlwind. (“Look for me in the whirlwind: Controversial Caribbean scholar Tony Martin dies” by Amsterdam News, January 24, 2013)
“Not all addictions are rooted in abuse or trauma, but I do believe they can all be traced to painful experience. A hurt is at the centre of all addictive behaviours. It is present in the gambler, the Internet addict, the compulsive shopper and the workaholic. The wound may not be as deep and the ache not as excruciating, and it may even be entirely hidden—but it’s there. As we’ll see, the effects of early stress or adverse experiences directly shape both the psychology and the neurobiology of addiction in the brain.” ― Gabor Mate, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
Sure, Gabor has a way with trauma, and his own life as a Jew in Hungary, young, and his mother giving him to a neighbor for a few weeks to protect the young Gabor from the Nazis, that is what Gabor sees as both early childhood trauma and epigentic trauma.
The documentary focusing on the Canadian is good. Alas, he is also part of a group attempting to heal, but for a fee. All sorts of access to Gabor, extended conversations, and ways to work with trauma.
There are other ways to also see how the world works, how people in both the West and the Global South are dealing with microaggression and macroaggression after aggression. Of course, patriarchy, capitalism and many variations on that theme are killing the human soul, the human body, from pre-birth to seven generations out. Trauma is also the synergy of chemical x mixed with chemials a,b,c on. Imagine that, a world where we barely talk about Rachel Carson, why the eagle egg thins out and why the sperm counts drop, but then, we are in a world of constant organic chemistry alchemy. The countless science going into products to make them sleeker, thinner, cooler, softer, harder, bigger, smaller, less flammable, more flammable, more slippery, less stinky, more glowing, better looking, easier to digest, more aromatic, less shiny.
That is the Faustian Bargain we all have engaged in, for our new species, Homo Consumopithecus, Erectus Plasticus. That bargain also involved a world of more complicated diodes and self-replicating genetically engineered stuff, a world where computing and virtual reality and augmented reality and artifiial intelligence and machine learning, all of that, we have accepted in our toys and in our mundane jobs, but then we shudder to think of the truly monsterous matrix and biopiracy we have allowed the data hogs and the surveillence soldiers to deploy to control our lives.
So, yes, adverse childhood experiences make sense, and it is a scale, a way to look at children who are struggling in school, and sometimes as a predictor of what might befall a student who has seen daddy put in jail, mommy hooked on booze, seen the repo man come into the home, found the beat up Ford Taurus hooked up to a tow truck for lack of payment. You know, just in a home with chaos, violence between parents, and then add up homelessness, and their own abuse, i.e. physical and sexual.
The devil, though is in the details of what ACEs really mean to the titans of finance, to the masters of social impact investing, on the Fourth Industrial Revolutionaires:
“Factors associated with adverse childhood experiences in Scottish children: a prospective cohort study” (source)
Pay for success or social impact partnership: Return on investment for social impact, as in the cost of special education, or what is the cost of depression. All that money attached to issues, but they want to tie in money and making money on those profiles — pre-crime — to preemptively fix you when you ARE not broken! Investing on disaster (disaster capitalism) or investing on your childhood or household or prison sentence. Scary stuff.
Beware of Kaiser Permanente and Silicon Valley and Futures Markets and Hedge Funds and Human Capital Markets. Making money on trauma? Prenatal shit, too.
These are nefarious human beings. These are the Inquisition’s offspring, in skinny jeans and fancy pant suits. The human capital market is contradictory in terms of health and mental care. Making money, man.
Here, Alison:
What concerns me about ACEs is the “scoring.”
Why should a standardized rubric developed under the auspices of one of the largest managed healthcare systems, Kaiser Permanente, label clients and structure the way a doctor, therapist, social worker, or educator can care for them? How did this tool come to have such a far reach, and whose interests will it ultimately serve?
Is a reliance on “scores” an intentionally-constructed framework that allows providers to limit their scope to “fixing” individuals and families rather than advancing a more radical approach whereby systemic causes of community trauma, trauma rooted in our country’s deep racist history, can be acknowledged, holistically assessed, and begin to be ameliorated?
And finally, will this “scoring” system be used to transform the treatment of childhood trauma into a machine for “pay for success” data speculation?
I believe it will.
A September-October, 2017 article for Academic Pediatrics, “Financing Mechanisms for Reducing Adversity and Enhancing Resilience Through Primary Prevention,” shows why ACE interventions will be an extremely attractive investment option for predatory social entrepreneurs. The authors note interventions that “prevent or mitigate the effects of ACEs can have impact across multiple sectors including: behavioral health, general health, child welfare, and “future criminal justice.” Every sector represents potential profit for investors. It appears there’s a lot of money in trauma remediation.
The paper references work done by the Washington State Institute on Public Policy (WSIPP) in which sophisticated cost/benefit models were created that estimate future cost savings across sectors so that the savings can be used to repay investors. WSIPP is one of eight data labs, operating under the purview of the NYU Gov Lab. Among the policy recommendations presented in this paper were: 1) setting “a conceptual framework to understand and account for outcomes across a broad range of public and private investment” 2) “validating metrics to estimate society costs and benefits” 3) adopting integrated budgets that combine health and social welfare finance and 4) disseminating information about innovative policies and finance mechanisms like “pay for success.”
The bottom line is that investors see children who have been harmed as potential sources of vast quantities of “impact” data, since the damage inflicted upon them extends across so many domains. The fact that the harm is so pervasive is, sickeningly, what makes so profitable. Interoperable databases are key to the program. All the data must be pooled in data lakes to claim the future cost offsets that enable the profit taking. WSIPP and its counterparts have been key collaborators in developing a national data architecture upon which impact investment markets will be built. More details in my post “Interoperable Data To Fuel Human Capital Hedge Funds.” (Adverse Childhood Experience Scores: Part of the “Pay for Success” Plan?)
More on this later. But for now, it comes back to ground truthing. The father-in-law tipped over at home, had a headache, slurred speech, so 911 was called, EMT’s came out, and the idea was maybe a stroke.
He already has ambulatory issues with a genetic issue with his feet and legs (he’s 79, was a truck driver, and he is in his Seventh Day Adventist world) and he has a hip replacement that went south, both because of that traumatic sawing of bone event, and I suppose because he didn’t “do” the hard end rehab program.
He is also a veteran, so he loves the VA since just four years ago, at my urging and assistance, got on that welfare-socialist gravy train. Good resources for equipment, rehab, and a listening nurse or PA.
That was a month ago, and they found the 2-inch mass in his frontal right lob, and he went under the knive a week ago, and the gliobpastoma was the result. Stuck in a Kaiser hospital, and alas, he “tested” positive for the Bioweapon Covid19, so did his wife and his visiting son (from Amerian Somoa) and grandson (from Texas).
Stuck in a hospital, and no visitors, and there you have it. Now, he has been shifted to a rehab place, and he again, tested positive for Bioweapon Covid19, and so, two days there, no visitors because he is in a “Covid19 wing of the national for-profit rehabilitation unit (Regency).
My wife and I live three hours from Portland area, and we wanted to visit her mother and this husband, but the lockdown is in effect (he’s been jabbed four times, his wife three but Jonesing for the 4th one).
My fear is the reality of 2020 and 2021. The horror stories of families separated from loved ones who ended up dying alone in a hospital. This is the madness of these mandates and these rotten dictatorial systems. ALL of it.
The trauma (mental) of this fellow in a rehab clinic, locked down, and he has opted for chemo therapy and radio therapy. The predicted lifespan for this 79 year old, according to surgeon and cancer specialists and his primacy care doctor is a year.
One year lifespan. Do not return to sender. Do not expect a refund. And, the radiation, and the poison pill or IV, those treatments (they will have to be at the VA, so transportation is an issue, as in $), what will those medical interventions do to his mind, his mental capacity, his neuro net? What about the gut and the pain and confusion and amazing body-complete aches and heaves?
Yeah, we all say we would not do this, go through this hell, for another 12 months? Or, really, the diagnosis is one year without the poisons? I am not sure they have had that conversation, since I am not a lynchpin in their lives.
Of course, the father-in-law is looking toward getting back to his small apartment and his fragile wife helping with the catheter and comode and transfering from hair to toilet to shower to bed.
It aint going to happen. He thinks he’ll be back on his scooter and tooling around Costco, etc. He believes he’ll be back dragging his legs and feet using a walker, to the curb, to the family handicap van, etc.
This is trauma, for me and for my wife and for his wife and for the grandson who had never met the granddady for his 24 years of life until the cancer diagnosis and his father footing the bill to have him come out to Sandy, OR. The son, 53, did not spend much time with this father, who is now ailing and has an expiration date, AKA medical diagnosis.
I get why people who read my stuff all over the internet, including Dissident Voice, might not get into the nitty-gritty of personal lives, my own vagaries of living, or the ground truthing I attempt to do while still tying into that with my belief that we as a nation and globe we have to throw off the chains and do some hard hard work about getting back to our tribal selves, the neo-tribal selves. Oh, yes, eco-socialism, retrenchment, global thinking, global cooperation, true human to human work. Away from the elites, the rich (there shall be no billioniaires or multimillionaires).
It’s getting complicated, though, not going along with the so-called progressives who want mandates, forced vaccinations, and of course, these impact bonds, these systems of holding poor people and struggling people accountable vis-a-vis the investors and the social impact pogroms. On Dissdient Voice, we have those who think carbon dioxide as we spew has no effect on climate, and then we have others talking about the climate emergency.
We have so many emergencies, and these medical issues will be hitting more and more people, not just indirectly with the aging Baby Boomers, but witht the anxiety, self-harm, the childhood trauma leading to destructive behavior, addiction, obesity, workaholic behavior. The constant stream of negative news, the war drums, the incompetent Western governments, the Nazis and right wing conservative anti-human, anti-ecology movement, the openly dumb censoring and cognitive dissonance of the fake progressives wanting control, mandates, and pusing techno fascism of the Google Types.
We will not see the revolution televised:
Poverty, sickness, community decay, environmental disaster will not be solved by the billionaires, the investors, the bloody idiots investing in “the developing child.”
And, more people moving to Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona will not solve a bloody thing: Imagine that, one generation’s damming of the river, flooding the desert for unchecked growth is another generation’s major major problem. Water, baby, water, and Lake Mead! The largest reservoir in the United States, is a critical source of water for 25 million people across seven states as well as some of the country’s largest agricultural valleys.
Here are the 10 states with the fastest growth rates:
And, the Gates Formula for land grabbing. These are real struggles: “This website contains news about the global rush to buy or lease farmlands by agribusiness, governments and financial investors — and people’s resistance against it. Its purpose is to serve as a resource for those monitoring, researching or organising around the issue, particularly activists, non-government organisations and journalists. It was initially set up by GRAIN, to share evidence of the new global farmland grab documented in Seized: The 2008 land grab for food and financial security.”
It call comes down to family, no, the battered family, the epigenetic trauma, the cities and towns flagging, the infrastructure crumbling, the fires and droughts, the heat waves, the inflation, and of course, broke medicine, and the for-profit model of everything. And the question: Who will undergo the chemo and radiation and bed-riddennes and non-ambulatory life stuck in a hospital bed and rehab or hospice for that one year lifespan?
The costs, man, mental, familial, the community impact. And, just the bills, man, the hospital bills.
How much?
How much money does a brain tumor surgery cost? For patients not covered by health insurance, the typical cost of brain tumor treatment can range from less than $50,000 for a small benign tumor in an accessible location that can be treated with surgery alone up to $700,000 or more for a malignant tumor that must be treated with some combination of surgery, radiation ….The median total direct cost of patient care was $91,000, with radiotherapy and imaging costs being the most expensive (approximately $14,000 each). The majority of direct costs were incurred in the first four months of treatment with a plateau in costs beyond 1 year, reflecting the poor survival of this disease.
Oh, so much in the news, in the stupendous news of the UK and EU and USA and Klanada and Ukraine. So much news about Japan wanting nukes, wanting the rising sun again. So so much about how dead the lands are becoming. First it was those cold winters and sanctioning Russian gas, but now, temperatures in Lisbon and Madrid, hitting 116 F!
The chaos is the message, and the messangers are the most corrupt, the most incapable of seeing systems of oppression — capitalism — running a scheme to drain every cent from the 90 percent of the world, and from 80 percent of the Western world.
But it comes down to krill, first, yet another canary in the mineshaft: “Climate Scientists Stunned to Find Atlantic Plankton 90% Gone; Marine Life, our Oxygen Imperiled!”
Yeah, air, that thing we need to live. Water, sun, air, food. Not on the Billionaires’ agendas. And now that the Amazon rainforest is coming close to being a carbon emitter, versus a carbon sink, and now that sea grasses are being mowed down by pollution, heating waters, acidification, well, air and ocean bounties, going, going, gone …on the capitalism at any cost cutting block.
Yet, oh, yet, we will debate the cocaine consumption of Zelensky versus Hunter Biden’s prostitution and crack habits; we’ll look at the decaying brain of Biden and the amped up super-predator brain of another aging fool, Trump. We will see the inept EU, Nato, UK, Canada, USA, all those at the top (sic), go on and on about nothing. Even the perverted George Soros, he gets quoted these days along with war criminal deluxe, Kissinger:
“We have a fund in Ukraine, and it turned out to be one of the best. I also want to mention that there is one person who has been very deeply involved in Ukraine and that is Biden.” (Source)
So, which image is more important to the world? Krill, or the felons pictured in all the news, including that one above ?
Many leftists will deny the climate crisis. Amazing fools, and tools, really. No, there will be no shift from hydrocarbons to solar and wind. That is a fact. Yes, the sea rise will affecting billions as ports will be inundated. Ports. Think about everything that comes and goes in capitalism and commerce — ports, cities, people.
Those temperatures in Spain and Portugal? In Seattle a few years ago, thousands died, and that was a 20 day stretch of heating. Air conditioning, man. Electricity, where’s that in Trump-Bidenstan? So, the fears of a cold German winter are not there yet since the heat and death waves are coming NOW. Take a look at ZioLensky’s world below.
Yeah, it is fear factor Number 999. Monkeypox and Ninja Covid and Nukes to Ukraine, and war with China, and Israel looking for a new Davidstan (think Ukraine). Yes, heat wave 2022, an echo of heat wave 2015.
The heat and wet bulb temperatures in the Middle East, India, Austin? Oh, those 142 degree ground temperatures. Normal, or easily weathered. Green weenies and Coal-mouthed Capitalists and Mike Pence Armaggedon Freaks, it’s all the same to them: the world as a chessboard, the world as a game of thrones, the world as shark tank and dog-eat-dog.
This is the holy map of the next Armaggedon fear pron:
But again, it’s the bees, man, or the krill. How many bees have you seen in California, in Oregon, in Washington? Come on, is this the Insect Apocalypse? I have tomato and pepper plants that are not getting pollinated. This is it for the world of despotic Goldman Sachs and Black Rock and Black Stone perversions.
“There are lots of tiny little things in this world that hold aloft everything that we value,” said Oliver Milman, an environmental author of a new book called The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World.
A world without insects is a world we don’t want to live in, Milman told Vox. Yet we don’t seem to pay these critters much attention — even as many of them slip toward extinction. Science is increasingly showing that insects, on the whole, are declining quickly, he said. Some populations have fallen by more than 70 percent in just a few decades. (source)
So, again, the value of nothing, that value of missiles destroyed in their canisters. The value of Ukraine armed forces and Nazi forces bombing schools, maternity wards, city blocks, markets, homes. The value of bumbling Biden and Killer King.
These are horror show images above. Absolutely, horrific images of dudes who need extinction NOW.
And the guy with 20 books, and yet no one listens. In fact, his most recent book was written by himself, in English, and only published in Germany, translated into that language. He teaches at University of Washington-Seattle, so a 100 students at a time is not a game changer!!
Oh, darn, now almost everything Ward broaches in this interview is spot on, or at least in need of huge global discussion and mitigation now. I do not agree with his assessment of SARS-CoV2 masks, and the interviewer is of course another lite-lite liberal college teacher who yuks it up about, nonchalantly, getting more of the fringes on the left and right out of the WWW, that science needs to be science, and get all the hot spot algorithms, while the rest of us get deplatformed or junked into cyber jail. The book in question is titled, The Flooded Earth. Imagine, US book publishers saying, “It won’t sell.”
Here, the show notes with subtopics and running times:
00:45 – Peter Ward website and books 03:00 – We need a little bit of CO2, but it’s easy to have too much CO2 04:20 – Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe (co-written with Dan Brownlee) 04:40 – Excessive heat and mortality 05:12 – Volcanic activity responsible for past CO2 spikes 05:40 – Previous mass extinctions 05:57 – Non-animal mass extinctions 07:18 – Uneven atmospheric heating 08:00 – Ocean currents and how they work 08:51 – Hydrogen Sulfide (H2S) 09:12 – Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum 10:25 – Fossil fuel availability 10:50 – Under a Green Sky 11:50 – The Gulf Stream 13:22 – What lives at the bottom of the ocean? 15:13 – Shallow ocean grasses and climate 19:11 – Oxygen in the ocean has dropped 2% 20:20 – North pacific ocean increasing acidity 20:48 – Billions of sea creatures died during summer ‘21 heat wave 23:11 – 30% of houses in Seattle have air conditioning 23:50 – Positive feedback loop 25:00 – We are highly attuned to smell hydrogen sulfide 25:45 – 400 ppm of hydrogen sulfide will kill a human 28:25 – Fred Hutchinson Institute 28:50 – Warm blooded animals are more sensitive to H2S than cold blooded 29:45 – Atlantic meridional overturning circulation has slow 15-20% in the last 30-40 years 31:56 – We’ve lost 15% of the Amazon, if we lose 20% it will tip into a carbon source 34:10 – In the last 20,000 years sea level rise has gone up 450 ft 34:30 – How many of the world’s ports are built 3ft above sea level 34:52 – Wet bulb temperature + *Factual Correction – Higher wet bulb temperatures do not prevent sweating, it makes sweating less effective 36:15 – What temperature can mammals still reproduce at 40:10 – Eric Steig 41:48 – Social media algorithms encourage polarization and extremes 44:25 – 40% of students at the University of Minnesota are using some mental health aid 45:39 – A switch to renewables completely will not fix all of our issues 45:45 – The energy Americans use outside of the body is 100x the amount they eat 46:08 – 20% of Americans lost everything during COVID 48:13 – The Flooded Earth 48:41 – Northern Europe most at risk for sea level rise 49:46 – Rice is the number one food source for the largest portion of people 49:53 – Bangladesh rice crop destruction via salinization 53:31 – Sam Wasser 55:58 – Giant clams are replacing ivory 57:23 – We’ve lost 50% of animals since the late 1960s 57:55 – 5,500 mammal species and 10 million other species we share the earth with 59:07 – Save the Nautilus 1:01:25 – 25 million dollars worth of clams being shipped to China 1:01:49 – Giant clams are extinct in many places 1:03:23 – We’ve underpaid for the main income to our economies 1:03:30 – We can shift away from GDP as measure for success 1:04:49 – Male libido and the exotic trade market 1:06:25 – Pangolin scales second most trafficked item 1:12:10 – Human biases and drives 1:12:31 – We are energy blind 1:13:00 – Emergence 1:13:40 – Elephants have evolved to be tuskless because of the ivory trade
Sea level rise will happen no matter what we do. Even if we stopped all carbon dioxide emissions today, the seas would rise one meter by 2050 and three meters by 2100. This–not drought, species extinction, or excessive heat waves–will be the most catastrophic effect of global warming. And it won’t simply redraw our coastlines–agriculture, electrical and fiber optic systems, and shipping will be changed forever. As icebound regions melt, new sources of oil, gas, minerals, and arable land will be revealed, as will fierce geopolitical battles over who owns the rights to them. — Peter Ward!
Yet, trillion$ for War. Trillions for Surveillence. Trillions about to be pick-pocketed from humanity from the likes of the techno wizards and the WEF, Davos men and women, Klaus $chwab and Gate$ and Company. Truly, look at the stuff over at Silicon Icarus and Wrench in the Gears. The tsunami is flooded earth and super-heated cities. But in the meantime,
The following will make most vomit. Young World Leader. Nazism. Orwellian.
My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology. Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs. Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it. They live different kind of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages.
Once in a while I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. Nowhere I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.
All in all, it is a good life. Much better than the path we were on, where it became so clear that we could not continue with the same model of growth. We had all these terrible things happening: lifestyle diseases, climate change, the refugee crisis, environmental degradation, completely congested cities, water pollution, air pollution, social unrest and unemployment. We lost way too many people before we realized that we could do things differently.
Now, I ran into this sort of colonized and corrupted thinking as a college teacher. Even as a sustainability coordinator, who was always against the grain of so called green building this and New Urbanism that. Smart Growth and Tiny Homes. These people have not just drunk the Kool-Aid; they mix up their own conctions of this shit. These people are drones, broken, bought and sold, and the WEF is their colonizer. So is 350.org, and Greta and Naomi Klein and the others in green pornagraphy hunger games.
No compare the insipid quote above by this co-ed with this guy’s words and his article:
LONDON — According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, an economy is “the system of trade and industry by which the wealth of a country is made and used.” For the last few centuries, this system has been dominated by the paradigm of capitalism, in which the private owners of capital, and not the state, control the trade of goods and services.
The slave trade and plantation economy of the early colonial period in America were among the original manifestations of this economic paradigm, as the European propertied classes asserted their newfound power over dwindling tributary systems and the interim feudal arrangements were replaced with John Locke’s quasi-religious notions of private property, which would come to conquer Western economic theory for the next three hundred years.
Today, that paradigm has exhausted the moral justifications its proponents have relied upon to maintain its supremacy and the naked truth of capitalism’s rapaciousness is laid bare, once again, as wealth inequality skyrockets while millions sink into poverty and resource wars continue to ravage entire nations across the world.
Having squeezed every last drop of “value” from the earth, and with no more land to settle or markets to discover, capital’s approaching apotheosis finds it looking for a lifeline by creating a virtual copy of itself, where intellectual property supplants physical property and human biological and behavioral processes are recast as a grotesque form of human labor.
Efforts are now underway to “translate” the real world into a digital counterfeit that can provide financial markets with the figures and statistics it needs to execute the contracts of the incipient human capital markets – an insidious new form of capital assembled from our genetic code and other kinds of data that will form the basis of a financialized wonderland, enforced by blockchain technology and constantly monitored and updated through the burgeoning biosecurity state.
Led by the world’s most powerful hedge funds and transnational corporations, the so-called Great Reset amounts to little more than a campaign to turn humanity into datasets, which they can use to create more profits for themselves and their clients. (Raul Diego)
And, heck, all the flooded landscape, the desertification, the deforestation, all the cold homes in German with stacks of firewood, man. And, where is that global coordination, that working together, that look at shared resources and the vast kingdom of animals that we all should be blessed with and bless?
Here’s a thought experiment, about that pencil, you know the Number 2 lead pencil (not lead). It is written from a libertarian and let the human race just be super creative (sic) in inventing x, y and z tool, technology, any bit of fun. But read into the ingredients of that pencil. That is embedded energy. The writer doesn’t do that, look at embedded energy, but it is an interesting way to see where that simple tool comes from, resource-wise and human activity wise:
Does anyone wish to challenge my earlier assertion that no single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me?
Actually, millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others. Now, you may say that I go too far in relating the picker of a coffee berry in far off Brazil and food growers elsewhere to my creation; that this is an extreme position. I shall stand by my claim. There isn’t a single person in all these millions, including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how. From the standpoint of know-how the only difference between the miner of graphite in Ceylon and the logger in Oregon is in the type of know-how. Neither the miner nor the logger can be dispensed with, any more than can the chemist at the factory or the worker in the oil field—paraffin being a by-product of petroleum.
Here is an astounding fact: Neither the worker in the oil field nor the chemist nor the digger of graphite or clay nor any who mans or makes the ships or trains or trucks nor the one who runs the machine that does the knurling on my bit of metal nor the president of the company performs his singular task because he wants me. Each one wants me less, perhaps, than does a child in the first grade. Indeed, there are some among this vast multitude who never saw a pencil nor would they know how to use one. Their motivation is other than me. Perhaps it is something like this: Each of these millions sees that he can thus exchange his tiny know-how for the goods and services he needs or wants. I may or may not be among these items.
Fascinating, really, in a hyper libertarian way, coming from the voice of that pencil. It starts with that tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon. But as you read, he’s talking about all the mined and milled steel for the saws and the ships and all the oil pumped and refined to move the material. What the lacquer is made of and the graphite is really the “lead,” and the eraser, shoot not rubber. He looks at the pencil mill built with concrete and steel and wood. All the electricty used. But he also looks at all of this in an amazed way, in awe of the processes, all the disconnected workers, mining, milling, cooking, drilling, cutting, moving the various things to bring this pencil to fruition.
And that is the entire supply chain thing, all the goods and services that go back and forth across oceans. Sure, China and Russia are going to rule the iceless Arctic with their already developed ice cutters and infrastructure. That new sea route will cut down on container ship miles by 5,000 miles at trip! Read Pepe Escobar and others looking at that northern world next step in the melting ice.
‘This conjunction of Russia and China’s northern policies around the Polar Silk Road should come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the close strategic friendship between both countries since the 2015 announcement of an alliance between the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union and Belt and Road Initiative. This northern extension of the Maritime Silk Road represents a powerful force to transform the last unexplored frontier on the Earth, converting the Arctic from a geopolitical zone of conflict towards a new paradigm of mutual cooperation and development.
Putin gave a speech at a recent BRI forum stating’:
“the Great Eurasian Partnership and Belt and Road concepts are both rooted in the principles and values that everyone understands: the natural aspiration of nations to live in peace and harmony, benefit from free access to the latest scientific achievements and innovative development, while preserving their culture and unique spiritual identity. In other words, we are united by our strategic, long-term interests.”
‘Weeks before this speech Russia unveiled a bold plan for Arctic development during the conference Arctic: Territory of Dialogue which has since grown in leaps and bounds. This bold plan ties to the “Great Eurasian Partnership”, not only extending roads, rail and new cities into the Far East, but also extending science and civilization into a terrain long thought totally inhospitable. One of the keystone projects driving this program involves the completion of the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) launched as an Indian-Iranian-Russian program in 2002 and which has been given new life in the last several years.’
+–+
More here with Escobar and Danny Haihong,
Well, here, a silly fast-paced look at plankton:
Go back to Peter Ward, and the play notes I listed and boldfaced. He is a great educator, and most of his books are easily read by anyone, except politicians and billionaires. He talks about the beautiful green, wet and dark Puget Sound. How the great trees went all the way to the sea. Big conifers. The first and easiest to cut down, transform into timber, and ship north or south or west or east. And that cutting down of those vital forests gave rise to broad-leafed plants to fill the so-called niche. Decidious, maple and red alder varieties. Broad-leafed, dumping tanin-laced and acidic decaying leaves into the Puget Sounds edges. They lose their leafs in the fall, and those leafs end up in the coastal waters, and lo and behold, high acidity, which has messed with the ecosystems, including sea grasses, vital to carbon sequestration, but more importantly, the hiding and growing places for juvenile marine species. No more sea grasses, no more big fish and invertebrates.
Again, this is not hypersonic missile science or the science of information wars and satellite hacking in UkoNaziLand. Simple biology and water chemistry, most of which is not understood by so many hundreds of millions in the greatest country on earth. Take a look at what I bold faced from the Peter Ward interview. Nothing to shake a stick about. Nothing on the Israel-UK-USA-Ukraine-Nato-EU agenda.
Nero fiddling and financing the ZioLensky while the cities burn. While the lights go out on Broadway. Reset my ass.
It’s truly amazing that the capitalists see the end of the world — human species, I suppose — way before they can imagine the end of capitalism. You know, that perfect system of slavery then, slavery now, and even more draconian slavery for the future. That sort is not based on whips, 15 hours a day toiling, not run by the masters of the Anglo Saxon variety raping and starving. The new-new slavery is capitalism on a digital bender. Food, water, activities, housing (not a house, but housing in the very generic term such as tents or mini-sheds), where one can live, jobs, the like. All will be dictated, and you and I will own nothing!
If the mRNA vax dance has its way, more and more dead bodies, warped minds, sterilized wombs, dropping sperm counts, and zygotes from hell might end humanity, and, well, capitalism will live on in the metaverse, in the global computer. That old eugenics drama — corona bioweapons — but masked up with the Fauci’s and the Gates and those presidents and dictators following the jab jab lies will do it by death through 2 billion jabs.
It’s amazing the lies fed us, and amazing how incredibly stupid we are as a collective. As if this SARS-CoV2 wasn’t/isn’t a fix, isn’t a messed with and serialized and gain of function facilitated “virus.” As if all those true ways to stop viral loads building up in the mucous cavities, in the lungs, in the cells are suddenly treated like snake oil. Imagine that, all the naturopathy and preventative potients, all thrown out the window. How can you get your pudding if you don’t eat your media meat (propaganda)?
Daily, it is me meeting people who have zero idea about world history or about the USA, and I am not just talking about Ukraine and that part of the neighborhood. We are talking about our own neck of the woods, lands stolen by the white man, man. So much mind bleaching occurs in k12. And in higher education!
I hear people talking to me about the visitors here, the vacationers, who just have that entitled disease of myopia. “Yeah, I talk to my customers that not all is rosy here on the coast, that there are homeless people big time. They say, ‘What homeless people? I don’t see any.’ They say that while looking out the window at the bay where several men are hanging out smoking and just chilling. Homeless men. These tourists are looking right through them.”
That’s the issue, no, seeing right through or just not noticing what’s around us. Out of sight, well, this time, In Plain Sight, Out of Mind. What did the original people of Mexico see when those ships entered the tidal shore? Nothing? Because ships were not of their culture, their natural order of things.
(Why did Herman Cortez burn his ships when he invaded Mexico?)
Then, another friend in Vancouver, WA, with his Handy Man service, and business is booming, as in mold and mildew mitigation and tear outs, he’s struggling to pay the taxman, to get all his bills and receipts in order. He’ll never have good credit score (sic) to buy a home. You know, AmeriKKKa, giving missiles and bombs and guns to Ukraine with, well, you get it, no real accounting, receipts, etc. All those things on the dark web, black market, gone. So, my friend will have taxes to pay, and fines, double taxes, penalties, late fees to pay, and weathering admonishments, threats. He finds it difficult to get young men and women to sign on for $20 an hour for all the work he undertakes. So he resorts to hiring, well, some of those very same people mentioned above: the homeless.
Many are carless because of the fact they have had their driver’s licenses revoked for unpaid bills — child support, ourt fines, etc. There are almost 10 million in the USA with driver’s license revocation because of unpaid fines, or unpaid child support. Not because of driving under the influence of whatever.
Debt-related driving restrictions make everyday life impossible. Currently, more than half of U.S. states still suspend, revoke or refuse to renew driver’s licenses for unpaid traffic, toll, misdemeanor and felony fines and fees. The result: millions of people are struggling to survive with debt-related driving restrictions.
License suspensions are the primary way debt-related driving restrictions occur in the United States. However, many states restrict registrations, or other administrative automobile requirements, as a counterproductive means of coercing debt payments for unpaid parking, tolls and other court fines and fees. (Source)
Check out the site,
As I repeat incessently — this is just one of a million things about capitalism that demonstrates the system is not for or about The People, We the People. This is just one of a million absurdities in our system. And there is always a gravy train for endless systems of oppression and bureaucracies and middle men and women. The entire systems of pain and double-pain in the USA is about debt, managing people’s pain, laying on shame and setting forth endless struggle to make it (pay for) in capitalism. So it makes sense in a sadistic way to take away the only viable thing — a car — for these people to get to work to pay these fines or child support.
We know the fines are highway robbery, from the point of origin, to the add-ons and the endless late fees and penalties and handling fees.
Best to listen to Michael Parenti to understand this ugly ugly system, that for many, will never die. Imagine, capitalism will never die! Over the human species dead body.
Here: “If value is to be extracted from the labour of the many, to go into the pockets of the few, this system has to be maintained. The conditions of hegemony must constantly be refortified. And that’s something that no one IBM or General Motors could do for itself… to put it simply the function of the capitalist state is to sustain the capitalist order. And it must consciously be doing that.” Michael John Parenti is a political scientist who was raised by an Italian-American working class family in the East Harlem neighborhood of New York City. He received an M.A. from Brown University and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University.
Here, just the essence of it all, capitalism:
And then, my real profession, in the old days, was journalism. I’ve heard all of my life that journalists are not real, that all of it is yellow journalism, that even the earnest work of a young reporter in a small town is smeared with the Yellow in Yellow Journalism. Bullshit!
This is, of course, a lie, a broad brush stroke lie. Not that journalists are somehow immune from the reality of American Exceptionalism and the Lie after Lie of what this country is and was about. Yes, Mom, Flag and Apple Pie.
Yet, that is not so true, that regular ethical journalists want to lie or damage or invent fake news. When I was learning the craft of journalism, we had a code of ethics. We worked hard as college newspaper reporters and editors to get the news of the campus, publicizing some amazing students and programs and departments, and to get the bead on the city, in this case, Tucson. The neighborhood, the people, the police beat, all the unique things that newspapers can do to publicize the goings on. Yes, school boards and city councils and all the college, in this case, University of Arizona, things that make a university like this one a mini-town, we tried to cover fairly.
We were not after smear campaigns. We were not attempting to do hit pieces on people. We had a code of ethics. Really:
Preamble
Members of the Society of Professional Journalists believe that public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. Ethical journalism strives to ensure the free exchange of information that is accurate, fair and thorough. An ethical journalist acts with integrity.
The Society declares these four principles as the foundation of ethical journalism and encourages their use in its practice by all people in all media.
Seek Truth and Report It
Ethical journalism should be accurate and fair. Journalists should be honest and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information.
“The SPJ Code of Ethics is a statement of abiding principles supported by explanations and position papers that address changing journalistic practices. It is not a set of rules, rather a guide that encourages all who engage in journalism to take responsibility for the information they provide, regardless of medium. The code should be read as a whole; individual principles should not be taken out of context. It is not, nor can it be under the First Amendment, legally enforceable.”
Now, I know of so many other professions with codes of ethics, but so many have few ethics, or the profession is based on unethical foundations. Even as new reporters, we understood power, that is, the powers that are, and that powers that shouldn’t be. The headlines and stories about malfeasance or wrong doing, those could literally kill people. We knew the value of sources, and in our small town journalism work — we worked on a lab paper in Tombstone, Arizona, of all places — we had a duty to the people in that town. Did we want to break stories? Of course. Did we want to uncover wrong doing, or some sensational story? Yep. But our goal was simple news reporting and news writing. We had so many beats, and each beat had it’s own culture — arts, music, sports, entertainment, city, state, police, business, etc. But as students who were paid through student association money and who did not have direct oversight from the journalism department; we took our jobs seriously. We went to conferences, we did internships, we met with all sorts of people to understand the needs and wants of the small town, the big town, etc. We had advertising, and we were a big part of the community’s lifeblood: where communities get their news and information.
We could break a story about the football coach’s unethical practice of pocketing unused travel (airline) vouchers, and we could see how much cost overruns the new engineering building was entailing. Each one of those controversial pieces we spent hours and weeks attempting to get right and not do unnecessary harm. We would report on interesting members of the community, on people who had unusual stories. The newspaper was a source of cultural connection. We strived for accuracy.
We highlighted authors, authors, orators, movers and shakers, community enterprises, members of the community who were unique.
We covered crime and punishment, codes and planning, and took many beads on the life of people, organizations and the community.
Yet, even back in 1977, we knew how some newspapers were bending too close to the leanings and yearnings of big business, or at the owners’s whims. We were concerned about newpapers dying, concerned about editorial decisions that hurt our code of ethics listed above. We believed in newspaper ombudsmen, and we always wanted to learn what other newspapers and what other parts of the country were doing to enhance the community.
Indeed, that was the goal of newspapers, and while everything is bastardized in capitalism and media, and while we knew the CIA infilitrated newspapers decades earlier, and we know that now, newspapers are in most cases, skeletons, and many cities and towns have no newspapers, we still took our roles seriously. We knew that on-line / WWW publications would eat at the soul of newsprint dailies and weeklies. We knew that once lively newspapers or magazines would get bought up by large and mid-sized media groups. Then decimated and sold.
In the end, we still wanted to know. We wanted fairness and accuracy in journalism. We did want to do the stories that few were doing.
Just listen to these three folk. It shows you the robust work of thinkers. In my other professions –education, planning and social work — we do have that level of scrutiny, and self-examination. But here, the journalists look really hard at themselves. I do not find this hard look into my other professions as robust and penetrating.
Virtually nobody trusts what they read any more. The United States ranks dead last among 46 nations surveyed in confidence in the press. Only 29% of Americans say they broadly believe what they read, see or hear in mainstream media. And more than three quarters of the public think that big outlets knowingly publish fake news.
The term “fake news” first came into common usage around the contentious 2016 election, where both the Trump and Clinton campaigns attempted to weaponize the term against their opponents. Clinton claimed that Trump was being buoyed by false information put out by Eastern European bloggers and shared on sites like Facebook, while Trump shot back at her, claiming the likes of Clinton-supporting networks CNN and MSNBC were themselves fake news.
But joining MintPress Senior Staff Writer Alan MacLeod today are two guests who know that fake news and false information have a long history in America. Dr. Nolan Higdon is an author and university lecturer of history and media studies at California State University East Bay. Meanwhile, Mickey Huff is professor of social science, history and journalism at Diablo Valley College in California and the director of the critical media literacy organization Project Censored.
But, now, with the Brave New World of up being down, Nazi being Jewish President, Lies as Truth, I am both disgusted and not surprised at how terrible the propaganda is and how lock step those who follow the lies of society and government have infected so-called traditional journalism. Yes, still, in the local rags, we get news, we get entertainment, but when it comes to the stories of a lifetime — Weapons of No Mass Destruction, World Trade Center 9/11, War for Oil, Cocaine for Contras, all of it — newspapers fail. Local newspapers do not have the guts to question everything.
That failure in journalism is tied to consumerism, capitalism, collective delusion, Stockholm Syndrome Writ Large, Collective Trauma, Agnotology, and the Comic Book Ideology of the common people and the leaders in the USA/UK/Klanda/EU.
The first casualty of capitalism is truth. Capitalism of course relies on deception, thieving, extirpation, extinction, survival of the fittest, divide and conquor, racism, classism, poisoning mind/body/soul/soil. So we lead back to the above, to Michael Parenti. Listen to him.
The young people of the world are not all going to hell in a hand-basket. Really. Amazing journalists blazing trails. This is just one most recent example of attacking truth, the messenger:
“Independent Donetsk-based journalist Alina Lipp of Germany speaks to Max Blumenthal about being prosecuted by the German state for violating new speech codes through her reporting in the breakaway Donetsk Republic. As the only German reporter on the ground in Donetsk, Lipp has exposed Ukrainian forces shelling civilians, attacking a maternity ward, mining harbors, and bombing a granary filled with corn for export. She faces three years in prison if she returns to her home country.”
So, on the homefront, United $nakes of AmeriKKKa, the deluge of news about Ninja omicron variations on a bio-weapons theme, about the droughts throughout the Northwest and Southwest hinterlands, and all the warm fuzzy stuff coming out of the Woke Zombistan of DC, academia, media, well, it’s a lot for the average AmeriKKKan, who is in self-imposed solitary confinement, or hunkered down with bills, repairs, no way out of the circling drain that is Continuing Criminal Capitalism.
I got this from my farmer friend, Joe:
Anyone wondering why Biden isn’t stopping the oil companies from price gouging while the one percent and stock market are making huge profits and the workers keep falling farther behind need to realize that Biden and every president before him don’t work for their interests but for the one percent. The people at the top could give a rat’s ass about everyone else. Total revolution against these bastards, even if it is bloody, is going to be what it takes to rid ourselves of these criminals.
In response to this article:
“The cost of living is tearing us apart Inflation rate in US hits 9.1 percent”
“Inflation is hurting our bottom line all the time,” a worker at the Stellantis (Chrysler) Warren Truck Assembly Plant in Detroit said. “Food, gas and everything else is up. The oil companies are price-gouging, and I don’t understand why Biden isn’t stopping them. I guess it’s because government answers to big business, not us.”
He continued, “The stock market keeps going up, and the shareholders are making lots of profits. This is only widening the distance between us and the top 1 percent, who are making money hand over fist. A little more than 10 years ago, the government bailed out the banks. They did it again when the pandemic hit. Where did all that money go? It went for the big bonuses of the executives and shareholders. Biden is also finding billions for war. They could have bailed us out, but they didn’t.” (source)
Then, of course, my retort, and Joe has received many of my retorts, and read them before in published versions . . . and I’ve personally emailed him about my concept of who is damaging who in the United $nakes of AmeriKKKa.
Yeah, and I wish these guys would stop calling them the One Percent. It’s the 10 and 20 percenters. Plenty of them around here, in rural Oregon, with several million in the bank, cash and assets, and then three homes and an apartment triplex. Sitting on a home, say, a 1928 tear down, purchased for $150,000 in April 2022. Now, it is listed for $299,000. A sagging house on a double lot. In my neighborhood, not exactly the Ritz. Some construction guy, contractor, living in Alaska part of the year.
THESE motherfuckers can handle 9.1 percent inflation. They are our fucking neighbors, not Gates and Zuckerberg and Company. It’s the 20 Percenters, man. They are invested in Wall Street, have gobbled up land and housing, and they have cash and gold and guns.
Now now, we know Biden and the Beltway Bimbos and the Oil Tycoons, and all the Hunter Biden types making (sic) $50,000 a month with coke-prostitutes-Ukrainian gas company criminality, all those people in high tech making a cool $250,000 a year two years out of college, and all the blue collar millionaires, the gougers, the war profiteers, all the happy Americans in the 19 Percent Club, they covet their dough. They are dream hoarders. They are wanting more and more and more of the 80 Percent who are hobbled-held hostage-hijacked by their data-driven, internet of bodies schemes.
You do want to go to the wild side, if you have weeks, to study what’s in store with the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Sixth Domain, the new frontier: Cognitive Domain — A Sixth Domain of Operations. Read Alison’s work and Raul’s work here at Wrenchinthegears and Silicon Icarus!
Here, Alison from that article linked above:
The evolution of artificial agents requires ongoing data transfer from our human experience into the emerging World Sensorium (Global Brain). The desire is that this data be structured to maximize utility and potential for pattern recognition. That means humans, in addition to other beings and objects, need to be assigned unique identifiers, which is why there are so many options bubbling up: ID2020, health passports, digital driver’s licenses, blockchain education transcripts and medical records, crypto play to earn games, and programmable money for refugees. Eventually all those side chains will interlock into comprehensible digitally-twinned individuals and societies.
According to the IEEE authors, their intent is for affective computing to be deployed in such a way as to neither amplify or dampen human emotional experience. It’s strange to contemplate that these engineers really want us to accept and internalize interacting with machines as if they were peers is a sane way to live. Though, if the goal is to nudge us towards a post-human existence, digital mediation of all social and environmental transactions towards some optimization scheme would be in keeping with the de Chardin / Huxley / Vernadsky / Reiser imagined World Brain evolutionary imperative.
The goal of the ghouls is to get all of our money, our data, our capacity to make (sic) them nano-pennies with our every waking, sleeping, urinating, masticating, defecating, blinking, coughing, sniffling, sniffing, listening, touching, thinking, reading, watching, playing, fornicating, day dreaming, breathing, beating moment, and to get us (the next and the next generation — shifted baseline needs-wants-conceptualization) to desire this: Garden storage sheds for family living.
Or this luxury, moving up from the plywood shed for families, to 325 square feet of shit living:
How about a community of these boxes? That’s what World Economic Forum wants, as do George Soros, Bezos, Rockefellers, the entire Davos set, the Aspen Institute wonks, all the people in the IMF and World Bank. Boxed set lives!
My previous post was about Maggie the Artist, in her seventies, healthy but not perfect, wanting to age in place, in a beat-down, broke-back home; in a rural community where you are encouraged to take out $60 a month ambulance service insurance, where food and goods and services are out the roof (remember, that 20 Percent, those blue collar millionaires, and those who charge $1500 labor just for some carpentry . . . and that doesn’t include the materials).
Oh, that Nine-Point-One Percent inflation. We, the 80 Percenters, with no buying power, no power to scarf up a piece of land, or a home, or go into a fixer uppper at the minimum.
But, we are woke, man, woke.
Here’s a decent look at how maligned the USA and EU and Klanada and Australia are tied to LGBT work, tied to getting the world wrapped in a rainbox flag or gigantic scarf.
Oh, that dirty, thieving, Nazi-landia, Ukraine, with the penis piano playing Jewish President, and this is the state of their decline, and why Russia has to end this Nato-stan fucked up world. This is while the ZioLensky Band, including the LGBT Bandaristas, enjoy that bombing of Dombass, you know, homes and markets and schools. That is what Gay Pride is All About — intersectionality and murder!
Image caption,Kyiv’s Pride parade in 2019 was the largest and most peaceful Pride event the country had seen
A petition in Ukraine calling for same-sex marriage to be legalised has gained enough signatures for the president to consider the proposal. The petition has more than 28,000 signatures, meaning President Volodymyr Zelensky now has 10 days to respond. Homosexuality is not illegal in Ukraine, but same-sex marriages and civil partnerships are not recognised.
Christopher Mott of the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy joins Max Blumenthal to discuss his provocative white paper on the Woke Imperium. According to Mott, “The rise of a ‘woke’ activist-driven, social justice-oriented politics—particularly among the members of academia, media, and the professional managerial class—has provided the latest ideological justification for interventionism, and it has become readily adopted by the U.S. foreign policy establishment.”
Yes, wonky, and not exactly close to what we need as ground-truthing here in Oregon, in Lincoln County, and this Christopher Mott is in the Beltway Brigade, and he is not of the regular world, those of us working just to survive, since he has time to do months of research. He’s gay, and he is definitely way against the wave after wave of de-culturalization utilized by US state department.
Read it here! “Woke Imperium: The Coming Confluence Between Social Justice and Neoconservatism”
And, so, now that jobs are shit jobs, we have the soft-shoe Bernays and cognitive warfare wonks getting Johnny and Sally and Juan and Anita to join the Army, USA CIA:
“Raised by two loving and inspiring mothers, Emma excelled in school. But as a college student, she realized the challenge she truly sought required a surprising new direction. See how our Soldiers’ lives could inspire your own”!
But back to living in the USA.
This is the 1928 sagging home. Foundation is sunken. Roof is shot. Windows are askew. Mold. And, the guy who did live there was from California. he cam up a few years ago to help his aging mother who was left living in it. She died, and he ended up living there with a dog, putting his BMW in the garage, heading to California half the year. Finallly, he got that blue collar amigo in Alaska to purchase it. A cool $150,000. He told the seller he’d be tearing it down and putting up a triplex or quadplex.
Lies, and in three months after he purchased it, sat on it from his 5000 square foot home in Alaska, that $150,000 buying price tag went to $299,000. He’s selling it now for $299,000. While sitting on his 20 Perenter Ass. At that price, a Texan or Californian will swoop in, with $1.5 million to buy it, demolish it, and put up something, either an Air B & B type thing, a duplex, or . . . .
Vultures! And I do not intend to impune those amazing creatures!
This is the landscape, here, in the Gringo Land, with endless fake news, fake humanity, fake stories, fake thinking, fake economies. This is the Woke Society that is Asleep at the Wheel. This is the society that has the wait and see sofa loving collective fear factor. It’s Monkey Pox, Nija Corona, Universal Bi-Annual Boosters. No baby formula in the grocery store. That wait and see Stockholm Syndrome.
So, Max (go to 2:14 — hours — in the above Mott interview. Mocking the unbelievable CIA ad for Woke BIPOC non-CIS gender folk) has this interesting researcher on, and the conversation is worth it. Watch that mocking version of the CIA recruitment video here.
Here’s the CIA’s idiotic version: The mocking version, should be the real ad for what the CIA has done and will continue to do to the world with BIPOC and LGBTQA+ happiness.
And, alas, what’s this got to do with Maggie and that 1928 dilapidated home? The housing market? The housing shortage. Blackrock buying up all the foreclosed houses. Buying many houses. Controlling multi-family housing, i.e. apartments?
This is the shit-show of our times. Truly a shit-show! Where the real problems of the day are not resolved, where criminals run free, where the biggest criminal outfit, CIA, is now launching its recruitment 4.0!
Overcoming Decency
Paul Haeder, Author 