from the poor and needy in Britain refusing potatoes because they don’t have the pounds, to pay for boiling them, to ZioLensky wanting 1,000 missiles per day

I’m finishing up a “children’s book.” It’s longish. Kati the Coatimundi Finds Lorena. It’s about a precocious (actually, super smart) 12 year old, Lorena, who is in a wheelchair (paraplegic) who ends up finding out the family trip to Playa del Carmen back to San Antonio, Texas, brought with them a stowaway animal — a coati. Yep, the world of the 12 yeare old is full of reading, drawing, smarts. Yep, the girl and the animal can communicate with each other. Yep, lots of struggle with being “the other,” and, well, it’s a story that I hope even keeps grandma on the edge of her seat, or at least wanting to read more and more. She is a mestizo, too. We’ll see how that goes with the woke folk. I think I have a former veterinarian who is retired and now is working on illustrations, art. We shall see where this project heads?

Under this veil of creativity, of course, it’s difficult to just meld into pure art when the world around me is very very pregnant with stupidity, injustice, despotism, and Collective Stockholm Syndrome. Being in Oregon, being in a small rural area, being in the Pacific Northwest, being in USA, now that also bogs down spirits.

It’s really about how stupid and how inane and how blatantly violent this so-called Western Civilization has become. The duh factor never plays in the game, because, a, the digital warriors writing stuff like this very blog are not engaged with centers of power, influence or coalescing. Then, b, so many people are in their minds powerful because witht he touch of a keyboard, they can mount an offensive on or against facts . . . or deeply regarded and thought out opinions. So, then, c, everyone has a right to their opinion . . . . that is how the American mind moves through the commercial dungeons their marketing and financial overlords end up putting the.

No pitchforks? How in anybody’s room temperature IQ does this make any sense? Demands for daily procurement of weapons for imbalanced, losing, and Nazified Ukraine?

It is about the food, stupid, okay, Carville?

So, before we move on, this is a communique from the G7 summit of the world’s biggest economies. And, no, EU and USA and Canada, not prepared for the Russian offensive’s affect on global food security. Alas, March 24, the G7 leaders agreed to use “all instruments and funding mechanisms” and involve the “relevant international institutions” to address food security, including support for the “continued Ukrainian production efforts.”

Ukraine has told the US that it urgently needs to be supplied with 500 Javelin anti-tank missiles and 500 Stinger air defense missiles per day, CNN reported on Thursday, citing a document presented to US lawmakers.

Western countries have been sending weapons and military gear to Kiev but President Volodymyr Zelensky says it is not enough to fend off the Russian attack that was launched a month ago.

CNN quoted sources as saying that Ukraine is now asking for “hundreds more” missiles than in previous requests sent to lawmakers. Addressing the leaders of NATO member states via video link on Thursday, Zelensky said he had not received a “clear answer” to the request of “one percent of all your tanks.” (source)

And, again, this is not blasphemy? Imagine, this “leader” and those “leaders,” smiling away during what is the 30 seconds to midnight doomsday clock. Smiling while Ukraine kills humanitarian refugees, while the biolabs putteri on in deep freeze (we hope), and while the food prices are rising. Gas cards in California, and food coupons in France?

In a normal world, a million pundits would be all over this March 24 group/grope photo. Smiles, while we the people have to watch billions go to ZioLensky and trillions more shunted to these world leaders’ overlords?

As I alluded to in the title — the mighty warring UK, with the highrises in London, with those jet-setters and those Rothschild-loving royal rummies, it has food banks set up for the struggling, working class, and, alas, the gas is so pricey that people can’t boil spuds! Bring back the coal stoves!

These are leaders? The elites? The best of the best?

In an interview with the BBC Radio 4 Today program on Wednesday, Richard Walker said the “cost of living crisis is the single most important domestic issue we are facing as a country.” He cited reports from some food banks that users are “declining products such as potatoes and other root veg because they can’t afford to boil them.” Walker suggested that the UK government could implement measures to take the heat off retailers. He urged that the energy price cap on households could be extended to businesses, which he said would translate into some £100m in savings on consumers. He also called on authorities to postpone the introduction of the planned increase in national insurance, as well as some new environmental taxes. (source)

The operative words are “crumbling,” and, then, “malfescence,” and then, “hubris,” and then, “bilking.”

I just heard some inside stuff from someone working for a high tech company. I can’t get into too much about that, but here, these “engineers” in electronics or in data storage systems, they are, again, the height of Eicchmanns, but with the added twist of me-myself-and-I. Their expectations are $180,000 a year, with six weeks paid vacation, stocks, and, well, the eight-hour day.

I don’t think the average blog reader gets this — we are not talking about celebrities, or the executive team for Amazon or Dell or Raytheon. Yep, those bastards pull in millions a year, like those celebrities, the pro athletes and the thespians of note, or muscians. These are people who are demanding those entry payrates who have not empathy for the world around them. Sure, they believe they have kids to feed, and they might rah-rah the Ukraine madness (that, of course, means, more diodes, batteries, computer chips, communication systems, et al for the monsters of war), but they laugh at the idea of real people with real poverty issues getting a check from Uncle Sam.

These are the everyday folk. I harken to the Scheer Report, tied to this fellow: It’s almost surreal and schizophrenic to valorize this fellow. Here, his bio brief, Ted Postol, a physicist and nuclear weapons specialist as well as MIT professor emeritus, joins Robert Scheer on this week’s edition of “Scheer Intelligence” to explain just how deadly the current brinkmanship between the U.S. and Russia really is. Having taught at Stanford University and Princeton prior to his time at MIT, Postol was also a science and policy adviser to the chief of naval operations and an analyst at the Office of Technology Assessment. His nuclear weapons expertise led him to critique the U.S. government’s claims about missile defenses, for which he won the Garwin Prize from the Federation of American Scientists in 2016. (source)

I’ll go with Mr. Fish, as his illustration, even though it has words, speaks volumes —

It all begs the question, so, now this weapons of war fellow, this US Navy advisor, physcist, he is now having his coming to Allah-Jesus-Moses moment? He gets it so wrong, and, one slice of the Ray-gun play, well, he also misses the point that people brought up in the warring world, and those with elite college backgrounds, or military and elite college backgrounds, and those in think tanks, or on the government deep or shallow state payroll, those in the diplomatic corps, those in the Fortune 5000 companies, the lot of them, and of course, the genuflect to the multimillionaires and billionaires, they are, quite frankly, in most cases, sociopaths.

But, here, a quote from his interview with Robert Scheer:

And unfortunately, most of what people believe—even people who are quite well educated—is just unchecked. You know, only if you’re a real expert—and these people were not, in spite of the fact they viewed themselves that way—do you understand something about the reality of what these weapons are about. And so basically, to use a term that gets overused a lot, I think the deep state in both Russia and the United States—more the United States than Russia, at least as far as I can see—the deep state in the United States mostly, basically undermined the ideas and objectives of Ronald Reagan. And of course Gorbachev was facing a similar problem in Russia. 

So there’s these giant institutions inside both countries. They’re filled with people who, at one level, honestly believe these bad ideas, or think they are right; and because they think they are right, and they convince themselves that it’s in the best interest of the country, what’s really going on, it’s in their best interest as professionals but they mix up their best interest with the interest of the country. They, these people take steps to blunt the directives of the president, and basically the system just moves on without any real modification, independent of this remarkable and actually extraordinarily insightful judgment of these two men. (source)

We know Reagan’s pedigree, and we know the millions who have suffered and died under his watch. And his best and brightest in his crew, oh, they are still around. Imagine, that, Trump 2024. Will another war criminal and his cadre of criminals rise again to national prominence. He will be seeking counsel:

Then, alas, the flags at the post office, half mast, yet again and again and again — Today, that other war criminal:

Go to minute 59:00 here at the Grayzone, and watch this woman (Albright) call Serbs disgusting. Oh well, flags are flapping once again for another war criminal!

Sure, watch the entire two hours and forty-five minutes, and then try and wrap your heads around 1,000 missiles a day on the road to Ukraine, and no-boiling spuds in the UK. And it goes without saying, that any narrative, any deep study of, any recalled history of this entire bullshit affair in the minds of most Yankees and Rebels, they — Pepe Escobar, Scott Ritter, Abby Martin, et al — are the fringe. Get to this one from Escobar, today:

A quick neo-Nazi recap

By now only the brain dead across NATOstan – and there are hordes – are not aware of Maidan in 2014. Yet few know that it was then Ukrainian Minister of Interior Arsen Avakov, a former governor of Kharkov, who gave the green light for a 12,000 paramilitary outfit to materialize out of Sect 82 soccer hooligans who supported Dynamo Kiev. That was the birth of the Azov batallion, in May 2014, led by Andriy Biletsky, a.k.a. the White Fuhrer, and former leader of the neo-nazi gang Patriots of Ukraine.

Together with NATO stay-behind agent Dmitro Yarosh, Biletsky founded Pravy Sektor, financed by Ukrainian mafia godfather and Jewish billionaire Ihor Kolomoysky (later the benefactor of the meta-conversion of Zelensky from mediocre comedian to mediocre President.)

Pravy Sektor happened to be rabidly anti-EU – tell that to Ursula von der Lugen – and politically obsessed with linking Central Europe and the Baltics in a new, tawdry Intermarium. Crucially, Pravy Sektor and other nazi gangs were duly trained by NATO instructors.

Biletsky and Yarosh are of course disciples of notorious WWII-era Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, for whom pure Ukrainians are proto-Germanic or Scandinavian, and Slavs are untermenschen.

Azov ended up absorbing nearly all neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine and were dispatched to fight against Donbass – with their acolytes making more money than regular soldiers. Biletsky and another neo-Nazi leader, Oleh Petrenko, were elected to the Rada. The White Führer stood on his own. Petrenko decided to support then President Poroshenko. Soon the Azov battalion was incorporated as the Azov Regiment to the Ukrainian National Guard.

They went on a foreign mercenary recruiting drive – with people coming from Western Europe, Scandinavia and even South America.

That was strictly forbidden by the Minsk Agreements guaranteed by France and Germany (and now de facto defunct). Azov set up training camps for teenagers and soon reached 10,000 members. Erik “Blackwater” Prince, in 2020, struck a deal with the Ukrainian military that would enable his renamed outfit, Academi, to supervise Azov.

It was none other than sinister Maidan cookie distributor Vicky “F**k the EU” Nuland who suggested to Zelensky – both of them, by the way, Ukrainian Jews – to appoint avowed Nazi Yarosh as an adviser to the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Gen Valerii Zaluzhnyi. The target: organize a blitzkrieg on Donbass and Crimea – the same blitzkrieg that SVR, Russian foreign intel, concluded would be launched on February 22, thus propelling the launch of Operation Z. (Source: “Make Nazism Great Again — The supreme target is regime change in Russia, Ukraine is just a pawn in the game – or worse, mere cannon fodder.”)

In the minds of wimpy Trump and wimpy BIden, or all along the line of the Harris-Jill Biden line, these white hombres are “our tough hombres.” Send the ZioLensky bombs, bioweapons, bucks, big boys. Because America the Ungreat will be shaking up the world, big time.

So, I slither back to the writing, finishing up my story about a girl, a coati, Mexico, what it means to be disabled, and what it means to be an illegal animal stuck in America, Texas of all places, where shoot to kill vermin orders are a daily morning conversation with the oatmeal and white toast and jam.

If only the world could be run by storytellers, dancers, art makers, dramatists, muscians everywhere. Here, a great little thing from Lila Downs — All about culture, art, dance, language, food, color. Forget the physicists, man. And the electrical and dam engineers.

If you do not understand Spanish, then, maybe hit the YouTube “settings” and get the English subtitles.. In either case, magnificent, purely magnificent!

just following the money of one military murder equipment company is worth a million words about disaster-shock-insider-death Capitalism

Quote — “The US will likely end up supplying Ukraine with Switchblade loitering munitions. The system poses a real threat. Nevertheless, the Russian military will likely use the tactics we saw in Syria to neutralize this threat.”

And, well, it is tax time, and these beasts of a nation — Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, MSM — they rally around the military offensive murdering complex for, well, billions thrown at the Nazi regime of Ukraine. And I have to pay more taxes on my subpar wages? Give me a few of those drones, please! Billions of dollars thrown at the most corrupt and evil of them all (well, there are many evil ones, so see this as hyperbole). One contract with this outfit, AeroVironment. Looking into that company, I find its current president to be an interesting man:

Wikipedia — Nawabi is an Afghan sub clan mega Barakzai the majority of this clan played an important role during the Barakzai dynasty – such as Ismail Khan Nawabi.

The name Nawabi is borrowed from the Arabic, being the honorific plural of Naib or “deputy”. The name Nawab is mostly used among South Asians. In Bengal it is pronounced Nowab. The English adjective nawabi (from the Urdu word nawwābī) describes anything associated with a nawab.

He says AeroVironment is a great place to work because: “There is no place like AeroVironment where a group of honorable, smart, and hardworking people can make such a big and positive impact on our lives and society. I am excited and honored to lead such a team in order to help all of our 3 stakeholders Proceed with Certainty.”

WAHID NAWABI

Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer

Yes, the face of the military murdering complex is a smile, a wink, and even a diversity statement validation.

As President and Chief Executive Officer at AEROVIRONMENT INC, Wahid Nawabi made $2,524,773 in total compensation. Of this total $632,319 was received as a salary, $535,513 was received as a bonus, $0 was received in stock options, $1,333,024 was awarded as stock and $23,917 came from other types of compensation. This information is according to proxy statements filed for the 2021 fiscal year. President and Chief Executive Officer. AEROVIRONMENT INC

So, the wink and a nod, all those stock options, all of that base pay, all of it, all predicated on, hmm, contracts. Yes, US GI Joe fed contracts. And, well, a contract is a contract, whether Mario Puzo is writing about it, or if one of the slick female heads of the war complex companies is drafting and signing it. This is one company, which I have previously discussed is really not just one in Santa’s Serial Murder workshops, but one represents dozens of companies (contracted) relying on those contracts for these drone with payloads: wires, optics, diodes, motherboards, paint, metal, gears, etc. Kamikaze drones, what a lovely thing to be proud of, and this company is just one of thousands that makes money off of blood.

The officials told the outlet that the White House is currently considering supplying Ukraine with Switchblades, as part of a new package of military aid. However, they noted that no decisions on the matter have been made, yet.

There are two available variants of the loitering munition, the Switchblade 300 and the 600. The 300 was designed to target personnel and unarmored vehicles. It has a range of 10 kilometers and an endurance of 10 minutes. The larger 600 was designed to destroy armored vehicles, like battle tanks. This version has a range of 80 kilometers and an endurance of up to 20 minutes. (source)

Please kind reader, look at these people — the website of their team: Aerovironment. For me, they are scary people, for sure, in that they are the paper-pushers, and state college grads in engineering, the marketers, the CPAs and the HR folk. These are what I have faced my entire life teaching — people who have no reservation making money selling drugs that kill (Big Pharma) or booze that kills or anything that kills, both human or environment. Look at their biographies on the About Us page. This is the banality of evil, I am afraid, much much deeper engrained than Hannah Arendt could have conjured up because there is no “great war,” great global war against Nazis and fascists, as in WWII.

“Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.”

I’m not sure she was thinking of the tyranny of capitalism, of western consumerism, of a world where most First World folk eat, drink, sleep oil. A world that is run by business men and business women. I do not think she was in the know of how pernicious the marketing of lies and evil doing was under the guidance of a fellow Jew, Edward (Freud) Bernays. But she was onto something:

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

You see, the totalitarianism is in the marketing of these spoils of war, and the war minders, and the war industry. Look at this company’s founder, Paul MacCready. Check him out on Wikipedia — Paul B. MacCready Jr. (September 25, 1925 – August 28, 2007) was an American aeronautical engineer. He was the founder of AeroVironment and the designer of the human-powered aircraft that won the first Kremer prize. He devoted his life to developing more efficient transportation vehicles that could “do more with less.”

In so many ways, MacCready represents the best and the brightest, the hope for mankind, the genius of the American System, the work ethic, with the heavens (sky, as he was an atheist) the limit.

That is it, really — the biography of a military industrial complex tool of death, all started in the twinkle of a 15-year-old MacCready eye when he was designing planes and gliders. Now? Every sort of munition and payload. Heck, why not drone carrying bugs with viruses?

Dark Side of Delivery: The Growing Threat of Bioweapon Dissemination by Drones —

The Ravages of the Millionaires

Oh, you can pull a million images and a million newsbriefs from the Internet to illustrate the powerful and their stupidity and their absolute disdain for the rest of us.

She laughs when asked about refugees, this time, from Ukraine. She is laughing about being in either the west or east flank, in Poland. Look, she’s a multimillionaire. (Today, here, one source, RT, banned, RT!)

They all are, those old policy makers, those politicians, those diplomats — mulimillionaires. With a pronouncement, a flip of the hand, they can say, “We deem all Russian things off lmits.” Imagine the power, and then those countries like China, so-called all powerful, accepting some of the sanctions, for now. USA is one tough hombre.

So, then, the $5 a gallon for gasoline. Again, the multimillionaires, the Greta’s “I Am Aspergers” Thornberg, they can all applaude the hurt locker their leaders are unleashing on the common folk, and we know Greta’s parents are, well, millionaires (with a small “m”). Actors! Whew!

Wheat prices, doubling? Electricity, doubling? Food shortages and food tripling? That is, doubling and tripling of the price of these items. When you are a multimillionaire like Biden or Harris, when your pay is taxpayer dredged paycheck, when you have an all-expenses-paid suite of benefits, when you have insider trading information, when you have full-spectrum health care, when you have accountants and CPAs and financial advisors in the backrooms assisting you. When you are making these funny jokes and imbecilic comments, well, you still have a fun life, no matter if the gallon goes to $5 or $7 a gallon.

But then, think of granny. Think of her meds going up. The foodstuffs going up. And if she has a leak under her sink, or if she has a puddle of mud outside the door along the pathway out, and if she has a car that needs some new used tires, and if she needs to visit friends once and a while one-way, 120 miles, and if she has a cat that needs teeth pulled, and if she dares thinks about seeing an ailing sister across the country via a plane, oh, well, let’s laugh at the pain she is now under. You know how much a plane ticket is? From podunk town Oregon to Virginia, or Florida? Do the math, and then these left and right politicians and corporate leaders can say, “Suck it up. It’s only $5 a gallon for gas. Look what those blonde and blue eyed ones in the Ukraine are suffering. Suck it up for a Ukraine refugee.”

Let’s have a great laughing circle jerk as sanctions kill, and lies and mass incompetence murder, and massive war profiteering wounds, and where massive Covid19 profiteeting creates death and mental instablity, and as massive stock trading on those futures and those offensive weapons companies grow grow grow, while the Kamala Harrises of the world, really get into the cackling mood. All those multimillionaire laughing hyenas:

Let’s hear about Elon Musk’s latest creepy surrogate childbirth. Let’s hear about this $1 million and that $20 million shoved down some redneck university football coach’s mouth while the college students are under another load of debt.

Let’s laugh it all off, the reality of this war, or that incursion, this sanction/that sanction, or that weaponized economic movement toward more of the gilded laughing class, that Hyena Laughing Multimillionaire Chorus. We can have Stephen Colbert help us laugh? Where’s Jon Leibowitz Stewart and Sean Penn when we need them? We need their multimillionaire advice, ASAP, and their laughs!

Imagine, all those months and years The Putin warned against all that EU-Nato-UK-USA aggressive shit coming to Russia’s borders. All those times he petitioned, nyet, nyet, nyet!

Shifting now to make an analogy — Now, interestingly, I have been invovled in a SWAT killing, that is, one of our clientsv– homeless veteran — had a suicidal moment alone, in his truck, with a handgun. Roads cordoned off. Everything around the Portland Salvation Army’s facility lock-downed. News at Six and Headlines at Ten there. Massive police armed presence. Armored trucks and gun turret vehicle, and then, of course, all guns drawn and three nifty SEAL trained snipers.

They gave him two and a half hours to get his shit together, and then, bam, 13 shots, seven to the body. He was handcuffed and lived. He was by himslef. Suicide Not By Cops.

Or, just yesterday, in the rural community where I scratch out sanity:  “Police shoot, kill suspect after alleged bomb threat during standoff”

Another two-hour standoff. And, then, bullets to the head. Imagine that. I have been around cops most of my life, and I was a city and rural reporter, newspapers, that is, and covered the cop beats — local, feds, military, county. I have interviewed FBI, and I have been in some K9 units for both city and military cops. The bottom line is — there is absolutely a one in a million chance someone who threatens cops in a standoff in his car yelling “bomb, bomb, bomb” has a bomb. Absolutely Zero chance, really. Lots of TV shows and Netflix series, aside.

So, Putin gives the world, the EU, the UK-USA-Five Eyes, Nato, what, a month, a year, several years, eight years warning about needing those missiles and other weapons off of Ukraine’s soil?

Nothing like the Monroe Doctrine, which states that there shall be no military or no nothing allowed in the Western Hemisphere, err, in the US’s Neighborhood, i.e. backyard!

That old soft shoe — survival of the fittest or most riches or best placed bribes. That loving spoonful, here, all those pensioners, all those with multiple chronic illnesses, all those people in housing that is falling apart, all those loans hobbling folk. Choices between medications, or food. This is the country, man, USA, this is it for the epitome of exceptionalism.

Those $57 billion in loans the other laughing hyena, Zelensky the Comic, that’s what he wants forgiven. Laughing, while demanding more weaponry, more billions. That’s the jig is up game when you are a testing lab (country) for GMOs, drugs, and, well, bioweapons.

It’s funny stuff, the billions he has in Costa Rica (maybe) and the mansion in Florida ($28 million valued). These are laughing matters, and VP Harris is just one in a long line of laughers in the multimillionaire category; or for those in the billionaire’s “mile high screw the hundreds of millions of us club,” the laughing is incredible, cowboy hats and all!

This is serious, and no laughing matter, unless you are Nuland and Biden and Harris and the US’s spy agents: “Documents expose US biological experiments on allied soldiers in Ukraine and Georgia” by Dilyana Gaytandzhieva! Ahh, that funny “fake news.” Now, Colbert, let’s all line up and laugh!

Again, granny and the kiddos. When I was working as a reporter in Southern Arizona, I did a couple of pieces on the O’Malley Clan — a group of people, many in the same family, who would take their panel trucks and pick-up trucks and go to trailer parks and low income housing tracts and get old people to pay for roofing, for gutter work, for all sorts of things that the O’Malley Clan said needed fixing. Then, up on the roof, and a five gallon white can of paint later, leaky roof fixed. A cool $800 cash for a $75 five gallon of roof sealant. This is the style of the American who sees PT Barnum as a god, that sucker born every second, man oh man, that god.

Of course, States Attorney General had some squads trying to break up those O’Malley rings, but imagine, now 42 years later, and the amount of pure scam, pure fraud, pure bilking, pure rip-off, pure lying and chronic cheating that have cascaded into the American culture.

The amount of multiple millions stolen from granny and from kiddo is out the roof, out of the sky. And those Laughing Politicians and All Those Amazing Celebrities, all of them, just rah-rahing the sancitons, the price of oil going up up up, all the strain and weathering on common people who can’t afford what’s going on in their Circle Jerks.

The blame is on capitalism, on predatory and casino capitalism. The Gilded Agers, the deep state, all those Eichmann’s making money with the blood of granny and kiddo on their hands.

The laughing all the way to their offshore banks — and then, well, DeltaCron will be coming to a neighborhood around Halloween.

Those bioweapons, man:

Every day, every moment of these scams, these false flags, this depravity of Empire USA, all of those things, shit, it is, as McGovern and Mearsheimer and Matlock say, this is not a done deal, MSM.

Those chickens have come home to roost and roost and crap and crap:

A revealing Portside article of Feb. 14 describes how 36 American states either have or are seeking to pass laws that censor the teaching of both local and national history so as to tell a traditional, Eurocentric story. This effort seeks to deny the demonstrable facts about the role racism has played in shaping social and economic development since the nation’s inception. Against this trend, 17 U.S. states have moved to officially expand their history and social studies curriculum to make it more racially and class inclusive.

We should state clearly that the teaching of such a culturally approved official history has always been pursued in the United States, and is indeed not just an American tactic. It is a ubiquitous practice in much of the world. As public education evolved in the American colonies during the 19th century, it had specific goals: (1) to make the young as literate and skilled as necessary for an evolving capitalist economy and (2) to teach political loyalty. If in this effort there was any reference to or concern for “the truth,” it was allegedly to be represented by the daily repetition of the Lord’s Prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance.  — Lawrence Davidson

[ The “En L’An 2000,” or “Life in Year 2000” by Jean-Marc Côté depicts the futuristic culturization of humanity. (Françoise Foliot , Wikimédia France, Paris, CC BY-SA 4.0) ]

But, again, it’s the old lady down the lane. The man and child living in their RV, and it is the person just trying to live out a life with few things having no one willing to come out and saw up the downed tree and patch the hole in the side of the house. Little homes with roof bids at $20,000!

Those lovely places, Israel, now Ukraine, where money is stuffed, again, down those Hyenas’ mouths while the land here is more and more susceptible to waves, winds, rising oceans, inundation.

Pacific Northwest coastal communities are at risk from earthquakes, including “The Really Big One”, tsunamis, sea level rise, landslides, erosion, and increased precipitation. Stretching from Cape Mendocino, California through Oregon and Washington to Vancouver Island, Canada, these Cascadia communities are calling for “a coordinated research agenda among universities, governmental agencies, NGOs, and others” to help them achieve resilience to these coastal hazards. (Event, March 16) 

Yet, here we are, the war, the Putin, after how many years stating that EU-UK-USA-Five Eyes-Nato to stand down.

Pity the Nation

Pity the nation whose people are sheep

And whose shepherds mislead them…

Pity the nation oh pity the people

Who allow their rights to erode

and their freedoms to be washed away

– Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Scott Ritter:

I see the same template in play again today when it comes to the difficult topic of Russia. Like every issue of importance, the Russian-Ukraine conflict has two sides to its story. The humanitarian tragedy that has befallen the citizens of Ukraine is perhaps the greatest argument one can offer up in opposition to the Russian military incursion. But was there surely a viable diplomatic off ramp available which could have avoided this horrific situation?

To examine that question, however, one must be able and willing to engage in a fact-based discussion of Russian motives. The main problem with this approach is that the narrative which would emerge is not convenient for those who espouse the Western dogma of “Putinism,” based as it is on the irrational proclivities and geopolitical appetite of one man — Vladimir Putin.

The issue of NATO expansion and the threat it posed to Russian national security is dismissed with the throw-away notion that NATO is a defensive alliance and as such could pose no threat to Russia or its leader. The issue of the presence of the cancer of neo-Nazi ideology in the heart of the Ukrainian government and national identity is countered with the “fact” that Ukraine’s current president is himself a Jew. The eight-year suffering of the Russian-speaking citizens of the Donbass, who lived and died under the incessant bombardment brought on by the Ukrainian military, is simply ignored as if it never happened. (Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.)

Wow! A picture says a million words from 100 million misinformed people:

more and more people on all sides of the Nato-Russia-Ukraine have zero idea how blunt those weapons are and what it means to have militaries . . . the Military Industrial Complex is, well, complicated since it is embedded into almost everything!

Recall all those shoot-to-kill orders in the USA and other places where, say, people protest the murder of MLK, and then, bam, there are fires, broken windows, overturned cars and then people smash and grabbing baby food, baby diamons, baby sized stereos. That is the law of the land, right — once an emergency is “called” by the powers that be, the pigs (cops, another blunt force pounding the citizens nail) get to come in, with National Guard, too, and find their targets.

US cops and The Guard and other enforcers have the right to shoot to kill someone breaking into a Starbucks stealing a load of coffee or the cash register. Shooting to kill some kids taking a $300 tv.

In 1967, Miami police Chief Walter Headley used the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” during hearings about crime in the Florida city, invoking angry reactions from civil rights leaders, according to a news report at the time.

“He had a long history of bigotry against the black community,” said professor Clarence Lusane of Howard University.

“The NAACP and other black organizations had for years complained about the treatment of the black community by Miami police. At this hearing, in discussing how he would deal with what he called crime and thugs and threats by young black people, he issued this statement that the reason Miami had not had any riots up to that point, was because of the message he had sent out that ‘when the looting starts, the shooting starts,’ ” Lusane said.

Headley was head of the police force for 20 years and referred to his “get tough” policy on crime during a 1967 news conference as a war on “young hoodlums, from 15 to 21, who have taken advantage of the civil rights campaign. … We don’t mind being accused of police brutality.”

Oh, the law of the land. We are the beasts, and they — the authorities, those in mayor’s and governor’s offices — have ultimate powers to shoot to kill. Mandates, forced masking, all the powers of agencies to put new laws on the books, and there we are.

What is that humanitarian crime, the outcome on the people of Yemen, Syria, blockades on Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua? What are those reverberations? A few extra dollars for a kilo of maiz? Fifty cents more for a gallon of gas? Water bills doubled? Food off the shelves, and buyer beware — shortages (contrived or perceived)? That is Ukraine, and the warnings by Putin, whether he’s Putin the Dictator or not, were there. Who is to blame for Ukranian Comic Billionaire President’s Great Last Stand? Zelensky, I believe, and the USA, and, yep, Putin invaded, in his form of cleaning up the bad hombres. You got it, UNHCR?

Yet, oh yet, how many Panama Papers and other leaks:

What are the Panama Papers? A guide to history’s biggest data leak

What is Mossack Fonseca, how big is it, and who uses offshore firms? Key questions about one of the biggest ever data leaks:

• Kubrick to Cowell: Panama Papers expose offshore dealings of the stars
• How the world’s rich and famous hide their money offshore
• All the Panama Papers revelations so far

It is Putin, no?

[The Panama Papers began in the old-fashioned way: a leaker contacted the Süddeutsche Zeitung, in Munich, eventually offering up millions of documents]

Pandora Papers: Ukraine leader seeks to justify offshore accounts/ Files obtained by ICIJ claim Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his partners established a network of offshore companies in 2012.

Shit, Ukraine, Russia, Nato, US-UK, and all the fear porn, war porn, and we have this going on while the world cancels vodka and cats and anything Russian:

Drawn from across the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia, participants at the Forum examined policymaking that drives defence-economic trends. The event was centred on a concentrated afternoon of plenary sessions, while also offering an unparalleled opportunity for bilateral and multilateral meetings, both public and private, on national defence policies, structures and capabilities.

The IISS Riyadh Defense Forum took place at the Ritz-Carlton, Riyadh, on Saturday 5 March 2022, and was deliberately scheduled to precede the inaugural World Defense Show. The Forum was an invitation-only event for ministers of defence procurement, chiefs of defence, defence-procurement senior officers and officials, and global business leaders, who wish to engage in the Middle East and understand the dynamics of policymaking as it affects international defence industry and capability. 

These are serious folk, at the top, high end college degrees, lots of internships with the elite, and they are the lords of discipline, lords of finance, lords of who lives and who dies. They are the umbrella for all that is the military industrial/finance/extraction/resource COMPLEX. And even the non-Caucasians-Anglos-Whites, they believe that the white “race” is the “race” that deserves, well, more than the exceptionalist tag.

We can parse it all up over at Mint Press News —

“We are living in dangerous times. All around the world, intense military actions are taking place. Last week alone, Russia launched a huge military invasion of Ukraine; Saudi Arabia carried out dozens of strikes on Yemen; Israel launched a wave of deadly missile attacks against Syria; and the United States restarted its bombing campaign in Somalia.

These four deadly incidents happened concurrently. Yet judging by media coverage, it is highly unlikely that many will even be aware of the final three. A MintPress News study of five leading Western media outlets found that overwhelming attention was paid to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while the others were barely mentioned, if at all.”

THE OUTRAGE MACHINE — It’s Different, They’re White: Media Ignore Conflicts Around the World to Focus on Ukraine

We can see story after story about the humanitarian suffering in Ukraine, on the road. And, yet:

Al-Attar and her friends were baffled but they had no choice other than to continue on foot.

Along the way, an endless stream of vehicles filled with Ukrainians queued on the road to Poland. Cars were moving at a snail’s-pace and so people opened their homes to fellow Ukrainians, Meryem Saber, also part of the group, told Al Jazeera by phone from Warsaw.

“They offered them [Ukrainians] food, water, and a place to rest,” said the 21-year-old Moroccan pharmacy student. “But when they saw us, they’d just turn their faces.”

“They [Ukrainians] kept coming from the comfort of their cars, while we were left shivering in -10 degrees Celsius. They had no qualms seeing us walk in the snow and through woods with our luggage. It was so unkind and condescending,” al-Attar said as her voice shook.

The African Union (AU) says it is “disturbed” by reports that African nationals in Ukraine are been prevented from safely crossing the border to flee the raging conflict in the country.

In a statement late Monday, the pan-African body said: “[A]ll people have the right to cross international borders during conflict, and as such, should enjoy the same rights to cross to safety from the conflict in Ukraine, notwithstanding their nationality or racial identity.”

“They” all knew this would happen — the people left to their own devices. The billionaire Ukraine leader, well, he gets 100,000 weapons to distribute, and he gets billions in weapons, and, well, they knew this would happen: Women, children, the old, the sick, fending for themselves. That was the gambit. Make people BEFORE the hammer of Russian military madness started. We know the over racism of those Slavic countries, and of any white country, any France or Spain, any Britain or Italy. And yet, the South, the so-called Third World, they will come to other countries, out of desperation. That is the hammer of these weapons. Please, look at the people, the beautiful million-dollar smile people, at this arms summit:

But first the stuff they hawk:

What is sold?
The Grimmett Report describes items counted in the weapons categories as follows:

Tanks and Self-propelled Guns:
This category includes light, medium, and heavy tanks; self-propelled artillery; self-propelled assault guns.

Artillery:
This category includes field and air defense artillery, mortars, rocket launchers and recoilless rifles — 100 mm and over; FROG launchers — 100mm and over.

Armored Personnel Carriers (APCs) and Armored Cars:
This category includes personnel carriers, armored and amphibious; armored infantry fighting vehicles; armored reconnaissance and command vehicles.

Major Surface Combatants:
This category includes aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, frigates.

Minor Surface Combatants:
This category includes minesweepers, subchasers, motor torpedo boats, patrol craft, motor gunboats.

Submarines:
This category includes all submarines, including midget submarines.

Guided Missile Patrol Boats:
This category includes all boats in this class.

Supersonic Combat Aircraft:
This category includes all fighter and bomber aircraft designed to function operationally at speeds above Mach 1.

Subsonic Combat Aircraft:
This category includes all fighter and bomber aircraft designed to function operationally at speeds below Mach 1.

Other Aircraft:
This category includes all other fixed-wing aircraft, including trainers, transports, reconnaissance aircraft, and communications/utility aircraft.

Helicopters:
This category includes all helicopters, including combat and transport.

Surface-to-air Missiles:
This category includes all ground-based air defense missiles.

Surface-to-surface Missiles:
This category includes all surface-surface missiles without regard to range, such as Scuds and CSS-2s. It excludes all anti-tank missiles. It also excludes all anti-ship missiles, which are counted in a separate listing.

Anti-ship Missiles:
This category includes all missiles in this class such as the Harpoon, Silkworm, Styx and Exocet.

[Source, Richard F. Grimmett, Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations, 2004-2011 , A Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, August 24, 2012, p.82]

This is just a partial list of things the Complex forces down the throats of the innocents. Trillions, not a trillion a year, but trillions. And Zelensky knows, Putin knows, Boris knows, Biden knows, Macron and Trudeau know.

Five Eyes my ass —

In 1972, a historical officer at the NSA produced a “Memorandum for the Record” entitled,

“Historical Note on the UKUSA COMINT Agreement,” which provides further insight into the formation of the agreement. It begins by noting that “[t]he question occasionally arises as to the governmental levels at which the UKUSA COMINT Agreement was authorized or approved” but quickly clarifies that “the President of the United States authorized an agreement in this field, and that the British Foreign Minister must have been aware of it.” (Compare that with, for example, the statement by David Lange, the former prime minister of New Zealand, who remarked that “it was not until I read [the] book [“Secret Power” by Nicky Hager, which details the history of New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau] that I had any idea that we had been committed to an international integrated electronic network.” He continued that “it is an outrage that I and other ministers were told so little, and this raises the question of to whom those concerned saw themselves ultimately answerable.”)

This is secret power, and all those people in the arms market, they are beyond the law, beyond humanity, beyond even the dictators like Biden or Putin, Goldman Sachs or Deutsche Bank.

There will be two responses to this book. One will be to take the easy course of dumping on Hager. He is quite small and can easily be dumped on. The other will be to challenge the existing assumptions and to have a rational debate on security and intelligence. I have always enjoyed taking the easier course but we may have been the poorer for it. — David Lange, Prime Minister of New Zealand 1984–89 from the book, Secret Power!

How many bloody warnings from Russia does it take to screw in a missile launcher? How many years of this had to go on. Now, the pundits, the rotten racists, all those anit-this and pro-that folk. Normal (they never were normal) conversations are back to “you for Putin by questioning the Ukraine narrative, then you need to be cancelled and worse.”

The warnings from Russia to not put more weapons into Ukraine, all of that, no matter how rotten Putin is, and he is rotten. Rotten like, now, let’s get that list going, and it is long. Think of all world leaders. Starting with those running the 5 eyes. And then just work your way through the alphabet of “countries,” those running the show, those with millions and billions stashed away while people are starving, homeless, unemployed. Yachts? Offshore accounts? Multiple residences?

Yet the average person needs that cut-out enemy, Russia. The insanity of it all, and it is insane. But again, the war profiteers, the mercenaries, the looters, the ones thieving and derailing humanity.

Then, there is Lindsay Graham, who is saying what Harris VP is thinking or Hillary State Department Clinton says about Putin.

These are not people, and, of course, that assassination team, who would they be, and that court of law, that international criminal court of law, who would that be? Positing the idea that any looters and war profiteers and gougers and those impeding anyone from fleeing harm’s way — anyone culling people’s bank accounts, anyone denying medical care, food, housing, or shutting off the gas, or water, anyone coming to the house at 2 am to repossess (sic) sofa, van, tools, any of it, all those great mouse warriors working the collection rackets, all of them nickle and diming and dollaring us all out of our money, with FEES, Hidden CHARGES, penalties, tolls, service charges, tickets, FINES, TRIPLE taxation, INTEREST rates, repossessions, foreclosures, evictions, court-lock-up-legal bills.

That is where we are at, now —

2022 SPEAKERS — FIRST PLENARY SESSION: Regional defence policy and economics in a global context

Fenella McGerty, Senior Fellow for Defence Economics IISS

Emile Hokayem,Senior Fellow for Middle East Security IISS

• 
• HE Ahmad Abdulaziz Al-Ohali, Governor, General Authority for Military Industries (GAMI), Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
• 
• Kang, Eun Ho, Minister of Defense Acquisition, Defense Acquisition Program Administration, Republic of Korea
• 
• Lord Grimstone of Boscobel KtMinister of State (Minister for Investment), Department for International Trade and the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, United Kingdom
• 
• Jed Royal, Deputy Director, Defense Security Cooperation Agency, United States

On January 17, Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis, writing for the website Declassified UK, disclosed that the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a nonprofit corporation funded by the U.S. Congress, had ploughed more than 2.6 million pounds into seven independent British media groups over the last five years.

The media groups included openDemocracy, the Media Legal Defence Intiative, Thompson Reuters and Bellingcat—which is known for promoting disinformation lending support for regime-change operations in countries such as Russia and Syria.

Though supporting the work of the Jimmy Carter Center to secure fair and transparent elections, the NED has been involved since its founding in 1983 in trying to undermine or remove governments independent of Washington, including democratic ones in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela.

Philip Agee, the late CIA whistleblower, wrote in the 1990s that “nowadays, instead of having the CIA going around behind the scenes and trying to manipulate the process by inserting money here and giving instructions secretly and so forth, they have now a sidekick, which is this National Endowment for Democracy, NED.”^[1]

Who’s Who of Hawks — The Blob!

If the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) Is Subverting Democracy—Why Aren’t Some of the Left Media Calling It Out?

By Jeremy Kuzmarov  March 4, 2022

“The list of the NED’s past Board members reads like a who’s who of neo-conservatives, Russophobes, regime-change specialists, and war hawks who constitute what Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes famously called “the Blob”—or foreign policy establishment. The list includes”:

• Henry Kissinger
• Victoria Nuland
• Zbigniew Brzezinski
• Frank Carlucci (Reagan’s Defense Secretary and key figure associated with the assassination of Patrice Lumumba)
• Madeleine Albright
• Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (extreme right-wing former congresswoman from Florida)
• William Burns (current CIA Director)
• General Wesley Clark
• Norm Coleman (Republican supporter of the Iraq War who became Senator after his progressive opponent Paul Wellstone’s plane crashed)
• Sally Shelton-Colby (late wife of CIA Director William Colby, former head of the murderous Phoenix operation. She served as treasurer of the NED in the mid 1980s)
• Paula Dobriansky (State Department official who is the daughter of Ukrainian Nazi and holds sympathies with the far right)
• Jean Bethke Elshtain (pro-war philosopher who advised President George W. Bush)
• Francis “the end of history” Fukuyama
• Richard Holbrooke
• Fred Iklé (member of the Project for the New American Century)
• Winston Lord (Kissinger associate and President of the Council on Foreign Relations from 1977 to 1985)
• Anne-Marie Slaughter
• Paul Wolfowitz

These are the cogs, the fodder, in the system — remember, that hammer is something else. Baby-killing hammers: Private army, private security, for-profit murderers, guns and bombers for hire, mercenaries, looters of lives! All legal. As legal as napalm and White phosphorus :

So. High end, beautiful people at these arms conferences, and all those connects with Ivy Leaguers and the London schools, all those vaunted people with shine on their shoes, they are, again, the lords of the world, and they love war, love love love war.Love: A war of words, a war of images, a war against people, against systems, against ideas, against land, against anything that might go up against their bottom line, which is MAKING money ANYWAY possible, with as MANY ways to HIDE the dirty PROFITS.

Some Chechen and Georgian volunteers also filmed themselves offering to fight for the Ukrainian military even before Zelensky said he would be accepting the foreign volunteers.

The private contractors also told MEE that they heard that Russia had also deployed infamous Russian state-linked private Wagner forces to the Ukrainian front. Wagner mercenaries are known for their far-right views.

The contractors said it was smart for Ukraine to accept foreigners with military experience, especially ex-special forces. “You cannot beat the Russian special forces in urban warfare with an armed general public,” the second contractor said. “They [foreign fighters] would be effective against Wagner as well.”

However, the contractor said he wasn’t personally planning to go to Ukraine.

“I started to work in this industry to make a lot of money,” he said. “You wouldn’t have a lot of luck against the Russian special forces, Wagner or the Chechens in an urban war.”

They are winning, the Googles, the Facebooks, the New York Times, and the lot of them:

Jonathan Cook: “It is simply astonishing how many western journalists, including normally cautious BBC reporters, are shamelessly fawning over young women building Molotov cocktails on the streets of Ukrainian cities like Kyiv.

Western journalists’ difficulty containing their identification with, and support for, Ukraine’s civilian ‘resistance’ must be maddening to Palestinians in tiny Gaza!

It’s suddenly sexy to make improvised explosives – at least, if the media consider you white, European and ‘civilised‘. “

It is worth it, no, these war hawks, with multiple millions in hidden accounts, in real estate, in the market?

In 1996 Madeleine Albright said on national TV that 500,000 Iraqi children dead from sanctions was “worth it”. A few months later she was confirmed by the US Senate as Secretary of State and nobody even questioned her about this statement. Transporting 500,000 first graders would take 6,667 school buses, making a line more than 50 miles long. Albright’s father, Josef Korbel, was also the mentor of Condoleezza Rice.

The hammers are people, Russians on tanks, at the helm of just a tank, with orders from the military industrial complex. This is their war, those companies’ big profit war. Make no bones about it — a million parts in that tank. Who is making all that stuff? Many hundreds of companies. Then the marketers, and the HR departments, and then the salespeople, the executive teams, all the parts makers, etc., etc. That is the Military Industrial Complex. Each part embedded with another company here, another investment portfolio there. Sort of like the life cycle of a thing, but in this case, the Military Industrial Complex Embedded Sources of Weapons!

But then, one tank shell in Gaza, shot by the other Hammer, the Israeli mercenaries:

So it goes — as Vonnegut says. What would Jesus Do? What would MLK Jr. do? How is it legal and ethical to go after EVERYTHING Russian? How is that fair? How is it truly fair to look at people’s names, decide they are Chinese, or Chinese American? Oh, remember they did the same to Mexicans and Mexican-Americans? Remember they did that Vietnamese refugees in this country? Remember they did it to anyone who might be from the Middle East after September 11, 2001?

What do we make of this tribalism, the elitism, the flavor of a company, the roots of a corporation, the identities? How many check boxes on those diversity questionnaires at the end of a job application?

It is compelling to see who delivers the news, who controls the media, if there is some small grouping of self-identifying people controlling the message? Pointing out that there is a perponderance of males in a company, or white males, or what have you, that is telling, no?

This is what I wrote in response to an Edward Curtian piece on how the New York Times is going after RFK, Jr. It was a musing. RE: “The New York Times’ Disgraceful and Deceitful Attack on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.” :

Good stuff, Edward, today, looking at the attack on RFK, Jr by, lo and behold, NYT? There are so many elephants in the room when it comes to who controls not just money and media and science and medicine and education and law and such, real estate and financial schemes in America, UK, Klanada, Australia, EU. Who controls the narratives? It does matter the color of one’s skin, in the USA, I believe, and those people’s backgrounds and ethnic influences and histories. Malcolm X was Malcolm as the sum of all his parts, making him amazingly human. But we look at him from a very magnified lens. So why not that same lens behind how we are supposeed to look at just “one” current event, Ukraine? We have mainstream commercial media looking at any number of places from focused lense, on all countries in Africa or Latin America, but do we have those writers and prognosticators of that country’s origin? Nope.

Here, a different and refreshing view point of view:

Black Alliance For Peace —
“For African and Colonized Peoples, to Understand Ukraine: De-center Europe and Focus on Imperialism”

But the Kennedys are not going to cross the other rubicon, that is, where this power emenates from, really. You look at one newspaper, NYT, and that guy, that man who writes about how a homosexual movement in the USA needs kick-starting, Adam Nagourney (Out For Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America).

But we are the sum total of all our parts, and who we have as family, as mentors, as spiritual guides, as financial advisers, as influencers, as historical linchpins, all of that matters for Blacks, for Latinx, for German Americans, for African-Americans, et al. And with those who identify themselves as ethnically and racially and culturally Jewish. White Jewish!

But when it comes to the New York Times, well, how those editors and op-ed writers and reporters identify, hmm, is that not open for discussion? Is looking at Kamala Harris’s family a racist move? No. So, is looking at the New York (mostly Jewish) Times from a staff to staff family background lens antisemetic? It is informing of a lot of things, Edward.

I am struggling big time in my own world, and write for DV and other places —

Women’s History Month is About the Human Race

And I have been put on David Horowitz’s list of liberal, communist and anti-Israel faculty.

Decades ago.

These staffers at the NYT, interestingly enough, overwhelmingly represent a very rarefied grouping of folk. How does one’s family and heritage and upbringing and education and geograpic and geopolitical influence, well, influence us?

I think it is difficult for folks even like me — I believe in radical socialism, democratic, and people centered — even to begin to look at the backgrounds of folk, even those in power positions at the vaunted NYT, without getting that Red Badge of Upside Triangle of Being labelled Anti-Jewish?

Look at the list, not necessarily just the source: And what’s that say about this one fellow with the NYT (Some, of course, call it, The Jew York Times, as a pun, and then as a bigoted aspersion) who goes after RFK, Jr.? Why is Adam on a rampage? Think hard about WHO he is, versus who Kennedy is. Again, New York City is unique in many ways in the USA, with a high number of Jewish identifying folk there. The calculus of who gets the job, who gets into the media, who gets onto the NYT’s staff directory, well, that is complicated, but it is who you know, and all about networking, too. But again, when we do a Wikipedia search of people to find out about them, where they come from, their roots, their identifcations, it makes for an interesting discussion to ponder influences and to ponder narratives, BUT it has to be a discussion that must be set forth as an open forum, not some racist or bigoted frame, and that includes no shouts of anti-Semitic.

I am not sure of the 100 percent accuracy of this list of the New York Times staff who identify as Jewish, but again, this newspaper isn’t just a New York City paper, so the influences count. Who’s who? Why? What worlds do they come from? Why they are the way they are? How do they think? Where are their influences?

<a href="http://&lt;!– wp:paragraph –> <p>https://defence.pk/pdf/threads/how-does-new-york-times-lie-about-china-and-its-health-care.599428/page-2</p&gt; How Does the New York Times Lie About China and Its Health Care?

Peace be with you, Paul Haeder

Ahh, who are the neoliberal, neocon, neofascist HAMMERS? They are all there out in the open!

… a rich, fertile, beautiful land, capable of satisfying all the needs of its people – It could be paradise on earth if it belonged to the people, not to a small owning class

It’s a no-brainer everyday should be women’s appreciation day. Sure, we have these Hallmark milestones in the country – Black History Month, Native American Culture Month and now, March, Women’s History Month.

[Death toll in Bangladesh garment factory fire rises – CBS News Nov.25, 2012 ]

My own roots are embedded with strong independent women mentors. For my Scottish grandmother, she came over to Canada as a teen and worked all her life as a cook, nanny, hospital nutritionist. She played the stock market on low wages and set up her only child with some decent funds.

My mother was a single mother with my half-sister. She went from Vancouver — where her husband was a playboy with a gambling problem who had the “mafia” after him — to Flagstaff, then to Hermosa Beach, and then she married my father. Mona, my mom, was the central force of several military wives groups in places like Paris, France, Munich, Germany and Tucson.

My aunt Edna came from England to Massachusetts with two other women from the old country. They opened up an ice-cream shop in Northampton, and then eventually got deep into the restaurant field setting up a high end eatery called The Whale Inn.

I went there on vacations, recalling the stories of Liz Taylor and one of her husbands having a marriage reception there.

I absorbed stories of my German great grandmother Elfrieda who as a midwife in North Dakota and Minnesota delivered hundreds of babies. Another relative, an aunt, survived the allied bombing of Dresden with her five children. She helped an entire neighborhood live by scurrying them into an abandoned warehouse cellar she had used for potatoes and cauliflower.

The first women’s day in the USA – Feb. 28, 1909 — occurred a year after the Manhattan garment workers’ strikes when 15,000 women marched for better wages and working conditions. Most of them were teenage girls who worked 12-hour days. Then, in 1911, in one factory, Triangle Shirtwaist Company (where female employees were paid $15 a week in sweatshop conditions: low level lighting, in tight conditions at sewing machines) 145 female workers were killed in a fire. This pushed lawmakers to finally pass legislation meant to protect factory workers through stringent safety measures.

[Triangle Factory Fire Photograph by Granger]

Fast-forward to today: I’m teaching a memoir writing class at OCCC-Waldport with mostly women in attendance. Memoirs are different than autobiographies, and this publishing arena is now greatly populated by women memoirists. All three “textbooks” I use in the class were written by women. Additionally, Mary Karr’s The Liars Club, and Cheryl Strayed’s, Wild, are two memoirs we reference.

Time and time again, memoir writing classes I’ve facilitated in Texas, Washington and here have been predominately attended by women who for all intents and purposes are the keepers of the family history.

Throughout my career as educator and journalist, I have seen more and more women take the lead in many fields. One magazine article I published focused on the graduating class at Washington State University’s veterinarian sciences program. All those DVM graduates were women.

The dean of the school stated there is an active recruiting campaign to get “more men into the field.” Imagine that, women undertaking vet sciences, which in 1950 was almost exclusively a male-dominated field.

The reasons for the shift in gender representation are complicated, but one truism stands: Veterinarian sciences is largely a pet field, one where communication with pet owners is vital. It is a field where the patient is actually the human. From field, to barn, to yard, to house, to bed – that’s the shift in the veterinarian field, as illustrated by our dogs and cats.

It begs the question: Are men as empathetic and responsive to the patient’s owner’s psychological and spiritual needs as women?

One of my areas of study, marine sciences, has seen a break in the male domination to sometimes a 50-50 representation of women in some grad programs.

But there are still rough waters: In 2019, on World Oceans Day, the theme was “gender and the ocean.” According to Robin Nelson, a biological anthropologist at Santa Clara:

We frame science as this idea that folks with the best ideas, folks who are willing to work hard, are those who are going to succeed. But absent safeguards protecting vulnerable scientists, she said, those folks who could be super talented, wonderful scientists get pushed out of our fields.

Peter Girguis, an oceanographer at Harvard University, echoes this:

In the absence of gender equality, we’re doing mediocre science.

In 1980, President Jimmy Carter proclaimed “Women’s History Week” in March to coincide with International Women’s Day. Seven years later, Congress declared all of March to be “Women’s History Month.”

There are problems with “a month,” as Kimberly A. Hamlin, an associate professor of history at Miami University in Ohio and author of Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener, states:

But Women’s History Month unintentionally reinforces the prevailing idea that when women do something, it is called ‘women’s history,’ and when men do something it is called ‘history.’ Women’s History Month also allows state school boards and curricular committees to feel as though they are including women without doing enough to update textbooks and state standards, ultimately undermining the very goals that reformers and historians aimed to achieve with the designation.

I clearly remember when I was the only “guy” in the women’s literature class I took at the University of Arizona where I eventually received a BA and BS. I learned so much about women in history, not just female writers.

We are talking 102 years ago when the 19th amendment granted some women the right to vote (a number of other laws prohibited Native American women, Black women, Asian American women, and Latinx women from voting, among others).

In that lit class, I learned a bit of historical misstatement: What was deemed the first expedition to sail around the globe on a voyage to study and sample the world’s oceans occurred in 1872. Of the 243 people on board the Challenger, not one was a woman.

However, it wasn’t the first. Nearly a century before the Challenger voyage, a woman — Jeanne Baret — sailed around the world on a scientific expedition of her own. She disguised herself as a male assistant on a 1766 voyage led by a French explorer to document plants and ecosystems in distant countries. Baret is the first woman on record to have circumnavigated the globe.

“7 Countries With Horrific Sweatshop Situations”

+–+

To continue with the piece above, which will be in the local rad, out here in Lincoln Co, Oregon (Central Coast), I have to put in some work of a feminist and radical, Linda Ford:

Elizabeth McAlister, in jail since April, remains steadfast, modest and unassuming. She hesitates to give interviews. She did write after her arrest about why she resists the Empire’s weapons: ‘We came to Kings Bay Submarine Base animated by the absurd conviction that we could make some impact on slowing if not ending, the mad rush to the devastation of our magnificent planet.’

Such sentiments, such absurd convictions, that anyone can interfere in the Empire’s global destruction, have to be punished. Such female dissenters have to be jailed and silenced. There should be no more silence surrounding America’s women politicals. Whether considered terrorist threats because, like Aafia Siddiqui, they are part of a group deemed an enemy race; or considered terrorist threats because, like Elizabeth McAlister, they resist and expose America’s global domination—such women will be made political prisoners of the Empire.

— “Women Politicals of the American Empire” by Linda Ford (DV)

“In The Eye of the Beholder: USA History of Imprisoning Women Politicals” (DV) Part One of review and discussion of Linda G. Ford’s Women Politicals in America: Jailed Dissenters from Mother Jones to Lynne Stewart

&

“Long Live the Armed Struggle!” (DV) Part Two of book review, and … The Revolution Will Not Be Televised or plugged onto Twitter, or in the Streets with Your Placards, or Sending in ‘Save the Whale’ Postcards

I was born a protester … My mother had to go to the school a lot and talk to the principal.

— Dorli Rainey (In conversation with author Paul Haeder)

I am being jailed because I have advocated change for equality, justice, and peace. … I stand where thousands of abolitionists, escaped slaves, workers and political activists have stood for demanding justice, for refusing to either quietly bear the biting lash of domination or to stand by silently as others bear the same lash.

— Marilyn Buck, at her 1990 sentencing (epigram in Linda Ford’s book, Women Politicals in America: Jailed Dissenters from Mother Jones to Lynne Stewart)

*Quote from, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. In Spokane, WA, 19 years old. She went to lumber camps in Montana and Washington, speaking at IWW meetings. She stated she fell in love with her country.

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This is not a blanket endorsement of all women, all of those of the female persuasion not having baby blood on their hands. In capitalism, the male dominated death machine is easily transferred to the other sex.

[ Women in Defense, a career development and networking organization affiliated with the National Defense Industrial Association, a leading industry group. ]

Offensive-polluting-skin peeling-depleted uranium fed-bunker busting-napalm spreading-TNT concussions Industries, described by the misnomer as Defense Industries (Edward Bernays would be smiling), they have garnered the woke label with their CEOs in pant suits and skirts: Definitely do not ask these women over to babysit — that is, if the baby is not blue-eyed, blond, white or of the red-white-and-blue variety.

As of Jan. 1, the CEOs of four of the nation’s five biggest defense contractors — Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and the defense arm of Boeing — are now women. And across the negotiating table, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer and the chief overseer of the nation’s nuclear stockpile now join other women in some of the most influential national security posts, such as the nation’s top arms control negotiator and the secretary of the Air Force. (How Women Took Over the Killing Machine, AKA, MIC!) 

It’s a watershed for what has always been a male-dominated bastion, the culmination of decades of women entering science and engineering fields and knocking down barriers as government agencies and the private sector increasingly weigh merit over machismo.

And, as Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson told POLITICO, it’s also the result of “quieting that little voice in your head that doubts whether you can do that next job or take on that special assignment.”

But turn yourself blue trying to convince the Norte Americanos that war is bad, that when Nazi’s get supported by the USA in places like, err, Ukraine, that THAT in itself is really that region’s issue, and that missiles and guidance systems and bioweapons and cluster bombs, the lot of it, guided by these hailed women above, well, they do the bloody work the same, whether the CEO is male or female. Though, I have to say, all this macho stuff pushed down the Marvel Comic Book bred Norte Americanos, for decades, you know, the Charlie’s Angels jujutsu and now the Black Double Oh Seven, it has done the job of convincing redneck women that their role in this game is to, well, kill babies descriminately and indescriminately.

Because they are baby killers!

Yet, feminists should not view this ​“rise” of women as a win. Feminism, as the most recent wave of imperial-feminist articles shows, is increasingly being co-opted to promote and sell the U.S. military-industrial complex: a profoundly violent institution that will never bring liberation to women — whether they are within its own ranks or in the countries bearing the greatest brunt of its brutality. As Noura Erakat, a human rights attorney and assistant professor at George Mason University, put it in an interview with In These Times, women’s inclusion in U.S. military institutions ​“makes the system subjugating us stronger and more difficult to fight. Our historical exclusion makes it [appear] desirable to achieve [inclusion] but that’s a lack of imagination. Our historical exclusion should push us to imagine a better system and another world that’s possible.” — (“Against the Feminist-Washing of US Militarism“)

Here, the real heroes, a la women:

[Global Witness report points out that women who act as social leaders are the main victims of murder for carrying out their work. / Photo: Global Witness NGO ]

Finally, put a dress on this person. A little bit of eyeliner. High heels. Hmm, replace one criminal, a male, with a female criminal, and we still have criminalty:

“Exclusive: The Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed
How US military spending keeps rising even as the Pentagon flunks its audit.”

“Holding U.S. Treasurys? Beware: Uncle Sam Can’t Account For $21 Trillion.”

Or not:

Meet the first female 3-star general in the US military]

I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a colour photograph of God Almighty — and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable.

What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Bennington College Address (1970)

Something compelling and sad about that life. Kurt. Born and raised in Indianapolis, (1922-2007). Iconic. More than Slaughterhouse Five.

I remember the reading, at UT-El Paso, my first year in the English graduate program — why that, and I was working for newspapers, had a language gig, one-on-one, in Juarez with a Mexican engineer working for Packard Electric. I was deep into writing stories and a novel. Lots of cross border ruckus stuff. Drugs and some other cross-the-tortilla-curtain smuggling. That was October 19, 1983. Two feet from fame.

It may have just been a coincidence it was a Homecoming event, but he was there, speaking to graduate students in a classroom. Then after the reading, a party. The obligatory party.

Wine, whisky, tequila. Kurt was looking for Pall Malls, and I had two packs ready — cheap cigs from Juarez. I brought a bottle of mescal, with the worm, and we talked — me, Vonnegut and two other folk. But he and I talked face to face. I had no fear, no compunction to put anyone on pedestals, and we talked about Dresden and some of my life.

I grabbed Dixie cups, threw some lime wedges into each one and poured me, Kurt and the two other people shots of the agave drink.

These guys and gals are many times inquisitive about the people who parachute into their lives — young people, like myself. Twenty-six and with a donkey cart full of stories already. I had family who surived that bombing in Dresden — in fact, my Canadian mom, divorced from my German father, had the sugar, salt, flour and grease ceramic flower containers that were buried for safekeeping in Dresden. They survived that bombing.

Vonnegut never survived that role he played as a captured US soldier picking up the carcuses of the dead in Dresden.He was deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was imprisoned in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse, schlachthof fünf (5). He survived the allied bombing.

We’re talking several days of heavy bombers from US Air Force and RAF, up to 1,350 aircraft in total, with their payloads ready for factory, neighborhood, family and town — 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices. Like all UK-American bombing, a firestorm ensued, which destroyed more than 1,600 acres of the city and more than 25,000 were killed with so many more wounded, and yet more psychologically scarred.

Kurt was one of those who never recovered. His book, Slaughterhouse Five, took years to write, coming out in 1969. It is an anti-war book. I saw him again 20 years later, in Spokane, at a reading and then, the proverbial party afterwards. Pall Malls he still chain smoked. This crowd was a bigger crowd, and I remember having that chance to go over to him and rejiggering his memory. The party in one of the faculty’s houses in New Mexico. Two horses and the fields of giant green chiles growing. And the bottle of worm-blessed mezcal.

I know this seems narcissistic, but the guy remembered me, recalled that night, and the drinking of the agave fermented elixir. He asked about that mezcal again. I repeated that I had just come back from Mexico a few years earlier, and spent time in Oaxaca where there are thousands of acres of agave plants (200 varieties) grown for tequila and mezcal. I told him about how the curanderos and even the narcotraficantes use the liquor in their ceremonies and baptismals, as in vetting their sicarios in the drug runners mafia. Hired killers.

Some of what we talked about went back to El Paso, and then he kept asking me about my life in Mexico, and the booze. He wondered why this time I hadn’t brought a bottle of the mezcal with the gusano (worm) sunk at the bottom. I told him that tequilas were becoming trendy and boutique brewed. I said that mezcal was becoming popular too, thanks to the marketing of it in Mexico on the international stage.

He told me he recalled being really inebriated, and that he had some crazy dreams. “No hangover inthe morning. I so wanted to call you to let you know you were right. The dreams and the lack of headache.” He laughed hard, smoke pouring out of his mouth around bedraggled teeth.

His memory was jarred, and he laughed at something he remembered out there in El Paso. He liked the wild west aspect of the town, and the good Mexican food, and he liked the mix of people. Almost all the students who listened to him were of Mexican descent. The department — English Department — wasn’t 87 percent Latino (like the town), but we did have a few in our ranks. The school itself drew people from around Mexico, Latin America and Africa. Engineering. Nursing. Mining. Not many documented or undocumented immigrants were rooting for their children to go get a useless degree in English literature or creative writing. For the most part. In Spokane he was railing against Bush and Cheney. The neocons. He was only a few years from his untimely death.

He and I talked intensely (as intensely as Kurt could be because he always had that raspy laugh, like a two-stroke lawnmower engine choking down, barely hanging onto a spark). he laughed a lot. But when it came to Bush and war, he was serious. He talked a lot about Bush. He asked about El Paso. He asked about my own threadbare travels and even more threadbare writing (paid publishing) career (sic).

I told him the Mexican saying — “Para todo mal, mezcal, y para todo bien, también; y si no hay remedio litro y medio” — For all bad, mezcal, and for all good, as well; and if there is no remedy, liter and a half.

He asked how the hell I got from Mexico and El Paso to Spokane, to Gonzaga. I tried to squeeze in as much as I could before our talk was overcome by hangers on, the groupies. I told him that even now, after 20 years, I was still teaching as an adjunct, and that I was still organizing part-timers in a union. I also told him I was fiddling around another degree, a masters in urban and regional planning. He know who Jane Jacobs was. The two of them lived in New York, and Kurt was also a fan of her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. He too was against the Robert Moses’ project to kill the Village, with the Lower Manhattan Expressway.

This all is percolating inside after watching the Weide documentary, Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time. The life of this man, and the life of his family, is laid out, but RObert Weide had an unusual relationship with Vonnegut — more than two decades of friendship. Lots of letters back and forth. The project about this man’s life. Weide was a fan of Vonnegut in high school. He became a filmmaker, and he wanted to capture Kurt’s life in film. This too took Weide a lifetime to produce. It’s a compelling piece, one that is about Kurt, about his failings and his features, about what his kids have to say about Kurt the dad. The ups and downs and ups and downs of his literary life. He was obsessed, and he was almost always a writer.

In so many ways, the movie is about a man out of his own time. He was too old for the Love and Peace Generation, but they adopted him with his iconic books held deep in their souls. Many Vonnegut fans were fans, having never really read his work. I’ve read six of his books, not all of the ones he wrote. I was happy about his books, but I wasn’t obsessed.

Watching this flick, I have a deeper regard for the man, for the country he believed in (one I never believed in) and his world which was big and large on one level, but in many ways, very finite and small. He was a New York and East Coast guy, and he was an icon, a guy who actors and painters and celebrities went to. In his presence, he was a simple guy. I never thought of him as literary. I have been in the company of many literary folk, poets, novelists, journalists.

This is why I adore the time I had with Kurt — limited, two feet from his fame, and now part of the fabric of my own tattered quilt. My life. Failures, mostly, in the literary sense. And this is still stuck in my craw, but I am more resigned with that fact. Timing, disposition, vision, limitations, focus, and a dream. His background is so different from my own. His parts to his whole so different than mine. I’d say nothing we have in common. Nothing, really, but writing, or the knowledge that that is a private and profound thing — to write, to make up and to be a journalist too.

In the documentary, there is a real loneliness that reverberates in this guy’s life. Watch it if you can. About a time long gone. In the context of now, too, with Nazi’s in Ukraine, with the American ghostlands, all the same actors he railed against with the Bush Family and the wars. But, a man like Vonnegut, while immense on many levels, still believed in a lot of goodness in people. Even those in politics. He held a belief that someone was good, something was good about Clinton, and this was before Obama. I can only guess what he would have thought about that charlatan, that war criminal.

They all are. And, now, seeing the propaganda machines in the USA, around the Western world, in the UK and EU, and down under, in Australia, it must be said that the same criminals who bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they are the same ones fomenting war and hatred with the psychological operations. With the corporate-legacy-mainstream-commercial media part and parcel of their slick Goebbels-Edward Bernays lying game.

Amazing to see the script flipped, and the USA supporting Nazi’s, and the complete revamping and reqriting of history. Putin as Hitler. What a fucking sad time. He never knew one brother who died in World War Two. Relatives killed and wounded. What a creepy country, and it is also my mother’s birthplace, Canada, that is creepy. My grandparents from UK, Scotland, that part of the world creepy. And, well, those Germans, what are those countrymen saying about Putin? Hitler and Putin? It makes no sense. My family was forced onto the Russian front as German conscripts. My grandfather was a pilot in World War I.

Talk about a sick bile in my throat.

Slaughterhouse Five, and the Nazi’s, and the Allies. One in the same.

Imagine the time I could have spent with Kurt if I had had the chance to pull him aside, take him to Chihuahua, spend a week with him in Mexico. Imagine the education I would have gotten, and the one Vonnegut would have gotten.

Sometimes that slipstream comes from a place of mythology, a dream, some biscuit of exceptionalism. All the soured lies of history. But Vonnegut knew that. He wrote about that. Kids in high school were assigned those books. Breakfast of Champions. Cat’s Cradle. Mother Night.

Bly —

Bly’s Call to Duty

By Paul K. Haeder

Each of his poems puts a chink in the armor of the war makers. Robert Bly’s Friday night appearance at SFCC will be part touchstone for peace and part riling-up of the audience to bear witness and take action.

Bly, a preeminent American poet whose 80-year-old voice and intellect have helped to sculpt an important vision of literary art and cultural reclamation, will speak as part of Spokane Falls Community College’s “Lit Live!”

While Bly is a sought-after voice of reason and lyrical charm, his poetic pulse has been stimulated by a life alone, working far from the rarified atmosphere of college or university settings. His roots are in Mansfield, Minn., and in the furrows of hard-working immigrants where his reverence for land and people germinated.

Translator of such great poets as South America’s Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo and Antonio Machado, India’s Ghalib, Spain’s Lorca and Jim & eacute;nez, and Norway’s Rolf Jacobsen and Olav H. Hauge, Bly’s output of articles, essays and criticism is matched by his more than 40 books of poetry.

Enwrapped in solitude, Bly spins ruminations shaped by other cultures, other poets — as in “Meeting the Man Who Warns Me”:

I dream that I cannot see half of my life. “I look back, it is like the blind spot in a car./ So much just beyond the reach of our eyes, what tramples the grasses while the horses are asleep, the hoof marks all around the cave mouth…/ what slips in under the door at night, and lies exhausted on the floor in the morning.

Also slated for the Music Auditorium stage on Friday night are four male drummers, pounding animal skins as a tribute to “the wild man” in Bly’s Iron John. His 1991 book examines the dichotomy between Savage Man, who is both wounded and inflicts wounds on earth and humankind, and Wild Man, the shaman-healer, Zen priest or woodsman. In Iron John, we have a book about men and the lost energy of visions, fairy tales and the male drumbeat of power and depth. It’s a book of healing and reaffirmation of soul.

Bly also helped redirect the creative surge of Modernism’s influence on poetry by unraveling his words and lines into what Victoria Frenkel Harris has called “incorporative consciousness.” Bly believes that the poet or creative thinker must go “much deeper than the ego … at the same time [becoming] aware of many other beings.” In a sense, he believes that “leaping out” of the intellectual world and into what we intuitively hold as our own realities best explores the paradoxes of two worlds: the world of our psychic pain, and the world in which we must adjust to observing the rules.

Bly came to prominence during the Vietnam War era — a time that tore at the psychic integration of American culture. He recalls how controversial his work was then: “Most of the English teachers in the universities hated our doing ‘political poems,’ as they were called. That still happens,” he recently said about those heady days of the ’60s. “When I’m at a reception at a university these days, an English professor may come up to me and ask: ‘How do you feel now about those poems you wrote during the war?’ They want me to disown the poems. I say, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t write more of them.'”

Bly, along with David Ray, created the group American Writers Against the Vietnam War. The first important protest volume was A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War (1966), edited by Bly and Ray.

In one of his poetry collections, The Light Around the Body, Bly cast a beacon of hazy light upon the symbiotic relationship of poverty and racism and the country’s involvement in the Vietnam War.

But now, in 2006, with the stink of Abu Ghraib and Falluja still enveloping Mr. Bush’s war, Bly speaks with singular impetus in his recent work, The Insanity of Empire: A Book of Poems Against the Iraq War. “The invasion of Iraq is the biggest mistake any American administration has ever made,” he says. “The most dangerous and greatest confrontation is between twentieth-century capitalist fundamentalism and eleventh-century Muslim fundamentalism,” he writes.

For aficionados of the poetic form, The Insanity of Empire embodies both Bly’s disdain for immoral governments and Bly as an the artful practitioner of the ghazal, an Arab poetic form:

I don’t want to frighten you, but not a stitch can be taken/ On your quilt unless you study. The geese will tell you/ A lot of crying goes on before the dawn comes.

SFCC’s literary publication, Wire Harp, and the endowment for Lit Live! will not be the only beneficiaries of Bly’s incantations on Friday night (50 percent of the gate goes to the endowment). Conscious Living — a local business that creates events including the annual Celebrating Body, Mind and Spirit Expo and A Psychic Affair — is partnering with SFCC.

As a reminder of Bly’s continuing relevance, consider that he’s an anti-war activist of long standing. In the Dec. 9, 2002 issue of The Nation, Bly was one of the first to beat the earth drum against the impending war, in his poem, “Call and Answer”:

Tell me why it is we don’t lift our voices these days/ And cry over what is happening. Have you noticed & r & The plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting?/ I say to myself: “Go on, cry. What’s the sense/ Of being an adult and having no voice? Cry out! See who will answer!”

Poet Robert Bly reads from The Insanity of Empire on Friday, March 10, from 7-10 pm, including Q & amp;A and book-signing. Tickets: $20; $30, at the door; free, SFCC students. SFCC, Music Auditorium, 3410 W. Fort George Wright Dr. Call 624-1873.

Leaning into the Memoir Writing

by Paul Haeder / February 21st, 2022

Below, an assignment: 

Find some object you hold near and dear. Something that can leap you into backward narrative. Something to hold you as a memoir writer, going back, reflecting back. That thing, you can hold or touch. You find meaning in it. And, that object holds stories. Try and do this under ten pages. 

I plugged the community/continuing education class I designed for the local community college, Oregon Coast, CC, here, at the locak twice-a-week rag: “The art of remaking-retelling a story” (Newport News Times)

I’m big on writing narratives. Almost every person I have met and spent time with has told me their story. That story is sometimes a series of disconnected events. Many time people open up, and tell me about significan emotional events (SEE’s) that changed their lives, one way or another.

And, it’s never that simple, no, the death of a child or a newfound love. Change occurs over time, and that event changes through the seive that is memory. How I was when confronted by federalies in Chiapas 40 years ago is a different story and memory landscape now compared to then, when I was telling all my buddies/compas about that event at Palenque.

So, below, I took the assignment I gave the 7 students to heart. Except, I was angry, I was riffing off of something completely unrelated to the assignment at first: I was asked to review a new novel, in manuscript form, from a fellow who is getting it published. And, man, after reading 200 manuscript pages of the 350 total, I was ready to punch out the world.

Without giving away the author and the press, here is that email to one of my editor friends:

Howdy —  I really do hope you didn’t tell the author I was a “for sure thing” to review his novel. I’m sorry to say that what I’ve been reading thus far (200 pages) I can’t really do any good as a positive reviewer. I know we crossed this bridge before, me having major hiccups with the work of another book (that other novel, remember)  . . . and I know you all have this book in the line-up.

But, shit, guys, I just can’t get into the book at all. I am not going to give you a big rush of negative comments about the bad dialogue, the incongruent characterization, the cut-out characters, and the dead-end plot, and the absolutely wrong way to start a book, and all the dialogue to move along a story, and the lack of verisimilitude. Look, I know I am just a flunky out here in Oregon, but I have been in the fiction game, even with all the rejections over the years, for a very long time. I’ve taught fiction, too. And, I am a deep reader of fiction. I was not expecting Ivan Doig or Jim Crumley or Tom McGuane or Robert Stone, you know, but, seriously, I can’t find anything literary about the book, and I can’t find much to say that would make a review helpful for him or as a way to highlight your new Press’ addition. You know I want to help you all, but there isn’t a  decent poetic or literary hook in it, nor is there a hellava plot, nor is there a helluva cast of characters. There is no electrical charge in the writing.

I hate to do this to you since you both have been good at going with my stuff, and publishing my work in the past. I just wouldn’t be able to pull this one off, without it being just a marketing promo, and I know you do not want that from me. I am sure Mr. S has a following and a slew of people ready to read this book. That bodes well for potential sales, for sure.

I want to be honest and upfront, since I respect you both. I am not your man in Havana for this project. While I have reviewed a hundred books for the El Paso Times years ago, I remember Leslie Ulman giving me a Pam Houston book to review, since she was a guest at UTEP, that is, a visiting author. A friend of hers, as well. I know my clear look at and pugnacious reviewer’s response to that book, once it hit the newspaper (and was syndicated out further afield), caused some rumbling and grumbling with Leslie and Pam, but shit, I didn’t do a hatchet job on it — just some cogent and pithy writing myself as reviewer to point out some of the westerny sort of overkill.

Mr. S’s book is what it is — you all have him on contract and you all have it planned for publication. I just do not want to do a heavy heavy heave ho of my own principles as well as disregarding my own history as a writer and reviewer by attempting something positive. I could have a hell of a fistfight with the book, but that’s not what you all are after.

I see K is on the jacket with kudos. He seems to be your man, really, for this assignment.

I’m not being snarky or elitist or any of that, as you well know me.

It’s not a good book, guys. Not well written. It’s canned dialogue. Cliche. Off the mark. Boring. Not going anywhere. And, yes, he was a journalist, but I can tell you these folk in the book are not real, and as you know, fiction has to be more than pedestrian recording of events. One of the rules is to not move the plot and story and tension with dialogue. That’s most of the book. So much is bad in the book.

Yet, there is that adage that one person’s cup of tequila is another person’s buttermilk. I gotta stick with tequila.  Others love the heavy tasteless milk.

Thanks for thinking of me.

Good luck with it and to him.

It’s not just a slam dunk me writing that critism above. Really. I’ve been hawking my long form, that is, novels, short story collections, essay collections, for a very long time. New York agent named Jack Ryan, and he went to bat for, and he was also waylaid by many a female editor who thought my stuff was too male, too regional, too dark. The list goes on. Cancel culture 1986-2010.

So, really, putting out a review of this book was not possible for me without really evicerating the words, the plot, the entire book, which for me would be a public spiritual homocide. That’s not in my inner core, though I can be super critical and pugnacious when it comes to, well, beautiful people, or those who have made it and are resting on their laurels.

Here, a quick note from the editor in response to my decline —

Paul,

This is the most magnificent decline I have ever read! So glad you are here to keep us honest.

Others had troubles with the book too.

For some reason, I just liked the narrator, but overall that’s probably not enough.

So it goes. This world we live in, the one we always have lived in. Lives interrupted, derailed, denuded, and of course, enhanced by surviving.

Funny how my students are opening up after just three sessions, sharing all manner of things that they want to add to their larger memoir. Here, a bit of Memoir 101:

Memoir vs Autobiography Basics

1. Autobiography usually covers the author’s life — the entire life up to the point of the writing, while memoir focuses only on a part of the author’s life.

There are going to be exceptions to every point on this list, but generally speaking, autobiography aims to be comprehensive, while memoir does not. Autobiographers set out to tell the story of their life, and while some parts will get more detail than others, they usually cover most or all of it.

I do use Mary Karr’s work, the Art of Memoir, in the class. And, Tritine Rainer’s Your Life as Story. 

Here, just one slice of the definition and connotation:

Okay, so here we go with my two hour entranced writing, to get it, that bad read, off my chest or out of my system.

And I sent it to the editor, and he came back with this:

Loved the essay.

Reminds me of the time my girlfriend Lois and I drove from Tucson to the coast in a lark. We picked up a hitchhiker in Big Sur. We dropped him off at a compound of Hobbit cabins in the hills above the surf where his father – Stephen Stills’ dope supplier – gifted us the most potent weed I’d ever smoked. One puff and I fell down on the ground paralized. He said he wanted to give me a couple bags in thanks for bringing his son home,  but I was paranoid with the paralysis. Lois helped me walk to his cabin where we would get our “reward.” He opened a wooden trunk that I was sure held a shotgun that would start a Manson-like killing spree beginning with Lois and me. Instead we got three or four bags of this wild dope that later in our circle in Tucson was called “killer weed”and taken out and smoked on only the most sacred occasions.

 

Okay, then, you the reader now have me the writer in your sights. Enjoy the flow of memoir, in this “literary” essay. God help us all!

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Grizzly Country, a .44 magnum, a Thrown- Away Suitcase, a Cleveland Woman’s Life Scattered — By PK Haeder

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.

— opening line, The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley

“Did you hear? Catina is going to Mexico with some guy with long hair and earrings in both ears in his old pick-up truck. Can you believe that?”

Not the best opening line for a book but I couldn’t get it out of my head all the way up to that Last Good Kiss bar in Missoula where James Crumley had invited us to sip Patron.

My girlfriend’s North Dakota cousin’s words couldn’t top this: An orange Samsonite suitcase was the gaping open evidence of some meth-ed out former boyfriend who snatched the dark-haired woman in a Montana town and found a lonely path frequented by bruins in order to dump her body along with all her earthly belongings somewhere in that dark dripping night in Big Sky country.

Okay, not Jim Crumley prose, but I wasn’t writing it, just thinking it after we found the two high school yearbooks wet from the afternoon drizzle. The mud that led to our dry campsite held a couple of dozen color snapshots spread around like flattened lives. There was a cool leather fringed leather jack, two pairs of jeans laid out like a running ghost. The lacey underwear I saw first. Half was left in the suitcase, the other half flung around where the case spilled open.

We were twenty miles from Missoula, after heavy tequila toasts with Crumley, and we were in THAT pre-Mexico pick-up truck with the small camper snuggly attached holding all our gear. We wanted to have a campfire, hot coffee and flapjacks in the morning.

It was getting dark, and bear prints were around this mess of scattered things in a woman’s life. Two pink bras, a Jimi Hendrix t-shirt, a bunch of personal letters in envelopes bound by hair bands. This was 1985. There were no cell phones. We were out in the boondocks. It was just me and my girlfriend. We both were friends of Crumley since he was both a professor and my thesis advisor atf UT-El Paso of all places.

[You Can’t Go Home Again]

We had been in his classes, and we taught alongside him as graduate students. He wanted the thrill of Juarez and the West Texas mountains. He was a heavy drinker, liked coke and he dated students. I was able and ready to get him the white stuff. He liked my wild man freedom. He was especially curious about my work in a refugee center helping Central Americans – mostly Guatemalans – get political asylum.

The word was he got sacked (not rehired for his year-to-year visiting writer contractor) because some students complained old Dancing Bear Jim came to the workshops three sheets to the wind. That was 1984, before #metoo. There were accusations of dating graduate students, not a no-no, but at UTEP, with a prude of a president, these rumors were enough to get the writer fired.

My girlfriend, Catina, wasn’t really freaking out at the sight of the splayed suitcase. She had a few theories about why this woman’s personal belongings were about. There was a domestic violence sort of vibe I could feel, the light was diminishing in May, and large snowflakes floated down from the purple sky. I was more paranoid than Catina. I knew I had to be the asshole that might have to pull out both guns and get our asses out of some fucking Gary Gilmore situation. Back then, in my 20s and 30s, I courted such things, literally and in my mind.

“You know, it looks like this girl just tossed this suitcase out as if she was jettisoning part of her life. You know, high school years, busted friendships. Fuck, high school can be like a mind fuck. The shitty girls and the rape-minded motherfucking football players. I guarantee, this girl did not just have the one suitcase. But this one, with photos and journals and letters, that’s my theory. One life gone, a new life in Montana. Maybe Canada. There’s no foul play.”

I liked the way Catina plotted out a story from her personal point of view. I would have never thought of a scenario so close to the female perspective.
We came to Crumley, to get my thesis approved, and now, here, after drinks and buffalo burgers, to see bears. Hell, wasn’t that the irony, Dancing Bear and all, his novel? Make no bones about it, we saw two brown bears when we approached the muddy road down into this killer of an empty campground. Grizzly Campground was the name. It was part of Rock Creek, located in the Ranch Creek drainage. Several campsites bordered the creek, and we picked this one. We had it all to ourselves, and we were high and drunk, and we wanted to pitch a tent, and then this scene unfolded like ball lightning in our veins, right there where we were about to pitch our tent.

I still had a revolver and lever action pair of weapons on my mind. The four-inch buck knife on my leg, well, just for cutting apples and cheese.
We barely touched some of this girl’s things, and we agreed to not rifle through the personal notes and journals. Not just yet. As I said, I had two guns in the camper, and Catina had camped with her Colorado family all over the west her whole life. We were not afraid of wild things. Just men with uppers, booze and sinister thoughts in their blood.

We were in awe of the ferns, the boggy smell reminded me of my mom’s birthplace in British Columbia. Then there was that amazingly metallic and citrus odor in the air, fresh conifer growth. And the water heartbeats of a nice clear creek hitting boulders. We could see the quicksilver flow idraping rocks, granite heavy with moss and lichen.

“Hell, I guess we have to let the cops know about this when we head out. But for now, it’s fire, tent, booze.”

Catina took a few Missoulians and spread them out over the scene of some crime. It was a crime in anyone’s books – to chuck personal correspondence and two high school yearbooks into the mud. Making camp was a quiet time for us, a rarity. Catina was in her thoughts. Her own family demons. I was just stunned with the possibility of having to do some sort of bullshit thing if anyone returned to the scene of the scattering. A crime? My theory was the opposite of Catina’s.

I got the half full bottle of Juarez tequila from the back, tucked in a nice colorful serape from Juarez we were going to gift to Crumley. I took swigs from the bottle. Warm, dry earthy draws back to hot desert. Being up here — with Crumley, and thinking about my own prodigious dance with booze, drugs, adventure and recklessness never seemingly coming come to a bad end, even when I got in a few pickles out in the wilderness with no gas and a hot motorcycle I had to push to find someplace to put down a bedroll — I was invincible with my girlfriend and my guns.

Man, the time I was 18 with my scuba buddy Brian, in the Sea of Cortez, and we had just run out of gas after hours of diving and snorkeling (he continued to say, I told you so . . . we should bought another gas tank). Shit, I told him to stay put, and I went madly swimming toward a marlin fisherman who also happened to be out in the middle of the Sea of Cortez near Tiburon Island. I swam and swam with rocket fins and snorkel-mask. I got there in 30 minutes.

Typical for me: Bad situation turned into a free tow, a party at their condo and still my buddy complained, as he stayed in the one room hotel and pouted. Tequila, steaks, amazing stories, and even getting laid. That’s what running out of fuel in a 16 foot barely-sea worthy boat will get you.
Or get me.

I had promised Catina’s parents back in El Paso that no harm would cometof her on this camping trip. The clearly anxious and chaotic nature of the Samsonite toss and the large area of disarray felt like a foreboding.
Yeah, my own 23-yea- old sister came to mind when the fire was roaring with the agave spirit burning my esophagus. Barely dead a few years.

Roberta was wild, adventurous and killed driving her Harley out of Kamloops south to see me, our sister, mother and father in Arizona. Call us the half brother and half sister. The Army stepdad was on his way out of the country to Saudi Arabia. Robbie insisted on coming down by road, to Tucson, with two male buddies on their rides.

That was 1978 when we got the call that she had hit the pavement after some fucker passed out at the wheel and crossed the lane into her bike.
Another set of adventures, a burial, a wake, after a crazy sea plane into Hyder, Alaska. My mother was there, with her fragile lungs, coming into Alaska on a cold night, which was bright in June. I was her escort, the only other family there. I met her biological dad Rod there, a guy I had met years earlier in Vancouver, when my sister sent me a bus ticket to visit her.

As I write this (and almost everything), her squash blossom turquoise bracelet is by me, sort of a talisman, a reminder, or some ethereal message bugging me to keep plugging away. Here I am sixty-five writing about a forest haunting when I was 28.

Those years, man, 28, Crumley had my book, something I thought would sell: the great American novel set in Mexico. That was what centered in my head then, and even now, almost 40 years later, it’s like a rheumatoid disease, a stupor at times, enchanting me into believing I have the impetus still, now, to push through all the bloody hurdles and walls to get something big published.

That disease lasted for 30 years since that week with Crumley. It’s untreatable. It’s terminal for some. I am one of the unlucky suckers still believing in some fucking New York publishing miracle.

We got the tent set up, as snow slowly powdered the ground. The campground was amazing, the greenest, most jungle like since we had been camping in deserts, along the north rim of the Grand Canyon. In Utah. In New Mexico. Coming from El Paso, we decided to hit the Colorado route.

But this, Grizzly Campground we claimed to ourselves. Hours with Crumley and then my interview at the Missoulian (I never got the job – a dozen out of work PhDs in Missoula looking for writing work, even newspaper work, way ahead of me on the prospect list). We were heading to Livingston, to Chico Hot Springs, to hang out with Crumley and the director of some film Jim was helping script-fix.

The guy – director of Black Beauty, I think — had an option on Dancing Bear and The Last Good Kiss. Time magazine had just done a piece on the up and coming noir writers, and Crumley was one on that list as a killer detective fiction guru. He was from Texas, did shit in the Army, got an MFA from the Iowa writers workshop, and learned from Richard Hugo to study Raymond Chandler in order to become fluent and real and poetic as a novelist.

At 28 with my own suitcase full of real life, adventures, travels, I was an admirer but not a fan boy, really, of the complete Crumley, though he did resist paying taxes as a protest against the Vietnam War. I was all life, fiction, journalism, politics and considered myself left of Che.

That suitcase, the fire Catina had stoked well, the waning light, the creepy icy white on all the ferns and low limbs of amazing conifers made for a Crumley noir setting. Then, juxtaposed with our own plans to take this Datsun pick-up all the way to Guatemala loaded with scuba gear and typewriters. Then, we’d be heading to the Yucatan after hitting every Mexican state. Stories for the two dailies in El Paso. Rolls of film sent to the editors.

There is something about the personal belongings of someone – a woman’s make-up accouterments, the undergarments, the letters, hair brush and berets – spread out all over the place in the open. No tire tracks to speak of, except ours. And, to be sure, I did make a head-lamp and hand-held flashlight recon of the area within a mile of the camp.

The idea Catina had was she just lost it. Threw the shit away in a rage. Something about the past, all those journals and yearbooks. Mind you, we had not rifled through anything yet, and we did not pull things out of the suitcase. We did, however, bring the scattered remains of the orange travel case back to the center of the dirt road.

The newspapers were getting covered in snow. We were shivering. The tent was perfect near the fire. I drank Juarez tequila and Catina sipped a bottle of merlot. Granola and gouda we consumed while we were deep in our literary and gumshoe thoughts.

The pile of belongings I kept pointing the strong flashlight at (actually, a diving light, with a huge veronica of bright beams) — the covered-up life of this woman. And, I saw eyes, in the distance. Bear whiskers. We had the food in the camper sealed up. We tried to keep crumbs away from everything. Nothing in the tent would attract a bear. I even had a big can of bear spray. And the fucking .44 magnum and 30.30 Marlin.

There were bears out there. That’s what we came for, but we didn’t count on the broken suitcase and a life strewn all over the place.

There was some essence of Cherri Halister the next morning. That’s what her name was. We looked hard and long in the yearbooks. She was there, circled, with “The best one at the party. . . . three-fisted drinker . . . why do we have to graduate now, now that we are just becoming friends?” Other tributes and benedictions from her graduating friends. She looked like Barbara Hershey – Remember her, in The Last Summer, Boxcar Bertha, The Baby Maker? Catina knew Barbara, and of course, later, she did Hannah and Her Sisters, and played Mary Magdalena in The Last Temptation of Christ.

Hell, my younger sister Heidi was an extra in a movie with Charlton Heston, The Last Hard Men. Barbara Hershey took a liking to my kid sister. Heidi was nine years old; it was shot at Old Tucson, the movie lot that burned down. I took her to the set many times. I watched Heston and Hershey plod along in some of the scenes that needed the old western cutout town. I told Catina that, and she laughed, telling me that I would be famous one day for being just this far on the edge of fame – she put both her hands out and sized up that fame around 18 inches.

She was right.

This is a place I never heard of, Mayfield High School, in Cleveland. The Wildcats. The year books were for 1968 and 1969. If she was 18 upon graduation, this Cherri Halister would be 34 when we found her stuff all over the forest.

We were entranced by the pile of belongings, but I had pangs of paranoia that something bad really did happen to her . . . or some fuckers might be coming back. I had the Ruger holstered on my hip and the Marlin fully loaded and on the front seat of the Datsun.

I sort of knew those two firearms would be added props for the story I was going to tell Crumley, and all the friends I had back in El Paso, in Tucson, and doctor family back east. Guns, long-haired guy with earrings in both ears, a blue Datsun king cab pickup, a girlfriend who knows how to get a campfire going in sleet and rain, and some flagging belief that a guy like Crumley would actually help me get a novel published.

Sure, a few hours with Peter Fonda and some other notables at Chico Springs was filed away in my Irish storytelling satchel. Crumley introduced me to him. Then the lore of, well, Richard Brautigan who, after meeting Thomas McGuane (another Montana writer), he would eventually visit Montana’s Paradise Valley and buy a 40-acre ranch in Pine Creek, near Livingston. All that lore, man, and yet, the trip, the entire trip we made was punctuated by Cherri’s disappearance.

We did stop at Deer Lodge and call the Sheriff about what we found. I did rip-off a photo of her: a nice color photo of Cherri Halister, at a pool, in a blue bikini. She must have been around age 16 or 17. Nothing creepy. Just a captured moment in time, when she looked like a really young and budding Barbara Hershey.

When that suitcase was still in her family’s garage. When the light of life was just seeping a bit out of her young life. Barbara Hershey would have been jealous of Cherri. She looked like a star.

There are so many reasons why “they” don’t hire folks like “me.” Strike up the ageism and sexism band. I am 65, a male, and the jobs I am attempting to get are in the social services arena.

Educational navigator, state and county jobs, even city jobs. The writing is on the wall, in a rural county, and, when I do get interviews, it’s four to six women. Many times the interview is couched with “we are a tight-knit family, a very close team so how do you think you’d be part of that?”

I am a great interview, and I am able to put on a face, bring up interesting connections to my long work experience and my education to each respective job I’ve applied for.

And, that small knit female group is not wanting to have an outsider, someone who doesn’t look like them. These people, to be blunt, are seated inside a nanny mentality, and drawn into paperwork and following procedures to the letter. They are not giving and creative souls. They seem to be pretty one-dimensional. I get through the screening, then the interview, then the email a week or weeks later, which is a form letter, that states:

PAUL — Thank you for interviewing for the position of Permanency Workers (Social Services Specialist 1) Newport . Although you have not been selected for the position, we enjoyed learning about your background and experience in greater detail.

Again, thank you for your time and interest. We encourage you to apply for other opportunities in the future.

Thank you.”

Yep, my mother told me I should have continued at the U of Arizona and got the medical degree. Even a law degree. That was way back when, 19 years of age and having the gift of gab, the gift of testing to a high level, above 89 or 90. Gifts . . . now, at 65, feeling, well, embarassed that, a, I have to look for work with no retirement, in this shit hole country, and in any shit hole state (you name it). Democratic or Republican governor, the scum rises to the top. With so much scum below them. And, b, I am pissed off and in this predictament. And, c, that I even feel this way — useless, a throw-away, disposable, nothing (I don’t feel these for many minutes in a day, but still, feeling this shit is like hot lead down one’s gullet).

All terrible people lifted through the prostitution called politics. There are so many mean, dog-eat-dog, I-got-mine-tough-you-don’t-got-yours fucking Americanos. Yankee or Stars and Bars, most are cut from the same shit-hole Mayflower cloth.

This is the shape of things to come, for many of us, who are self-avowed radicals, willing to say and write and publish things that are definitely outside the bold lines of the center fold of American meanness. American group think. American belonging in the bandwagon. Infantalized. Disneyfied. Now, gGet stuck in a rural arena, with few opportunities, and this is the weekly routine —

• change up the resume
• write a new cover letter
• do an on-line application
• sometimes complete these timed tests, many of which are psycho personality tests — sick stuff
• attest at the end of the application, before hitting submit, that all stuff is truthful, and that they, the prospective employer, has the right to go back into all manner of work and legal and living history

And it is almost impossible during this process, and while consuming corporate, commercial, un-News news, to not get jaded, cynical, pissed off and, well, dejected. Since all the stories are about the beautiful people, the celebrities, all the crap around stars and sports stars. All the felonies committed by politicians, corporate heads, even those in positions of state-county-city government.

There are so many undeserving folk. Yep, we know that. And to hear any manner of these people who get quoted or get the limelight is to hear monsters who have zero idea how the 80 percent live.

Then, to see folks circling their wagons interviewing me only because they may be checking off — “get a white old male in the mix to look like we are diversity mavens” — to have at least three people in the pool. I have had my application stopped because not enought applicants hit the pool. Imagine that.

Then, there’s this blasphemy — more and more staffing firms, the bane of humanity:

Contracting is Worker Exploitation — (source)

Staffing agencies perpetuate this ugly cycle because they make a hefty profit exploiting contractors. Staffing agency recruiters will lie about the length of the contract and specific requirements, they’ll alter resumes without your knowledge, and make little to no effort to find another assignment once a contract ends. Some of these staffing agencies are so unprofessional, they’ve sent me emails meant for other people they’re trying to recruit. Staffing agencies are the worst. They don’t disclose how much they charge a company for a contractor’s services to maximize their profits. For example, for one of my recent contracting gigs, the company paid the staffing agency $60 an hour. I received $40 an hour while the staffing agency received $20 an hour for every hour of my work. The staffing agency received $800 a week for doing practically nothing, while I did all the work. These are the risks of contracting work, but it doesn’t make it right or ethical.

Here, in my neck of the woods, the Lincoln County School District, again, sell outs and they give shit about workers: “ESS is a staffing firm specializing in placing highly qualified staff in daily, long-term, and permanent K-12 school district positions, including paraprofessionals, substitute teachers, and other support staff. The company innovates education staffing to provide dynamic solutions to schools and professional opportunities to passionate educators. ESS provides its employees with the ability to work for schools across the country and competitive training, flexible work schedules, and professional development. The company’s partner schools receive personalized solutions, hands-on management, technology, and program reporting and analytics. ESS was founded in 2000, and its headquarter is located in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, United States. The firm’s expert professionals serve more than 3 million students with a pool of 60000 substitute and permanent employees throughout the United States. ESS provides healthcare benefits and other perks to its employees.”

So these schools, public schools, have sold out their food to profiteers (Sodexo), the janitorial profiteers (Sodexo; Bon Apetite), buses (Student First, et al) and their hiring too, sold out to the profit gougers. Staffing firms and those all-American welfare cheats who look, sound, smell like, well, good people. This is what the average person has to confront.

A national labor phenomenon known as “The Great Resignation,” or “The Big Quit,” began to take hold in January 2021 and has since grown. Millions of workers in the United States have turned the turmoil caused by the coronavirus pandemic into opportunities to rethink their professions and reframe their lives.

The trend is especially pronounced in the accommodation and food services sector, which experienced more than 5 percent worker attrition each month from June to October of last year.

Online, people flooded a Reddit forum called “r/antiwork” for commiseration and solidarity; by year’s end, the page had reached 1.5 million members. In the streets, thousands of unionized workers in manufacturing, health care, and higher education went on strike last fall for fair pay and protections. (source)

So, with two master’s degrees, and three dozen years teaching, and some of that including substituting K12 in Washington and Texas, I have to face jobs where $14.89 an hour, no benefits, on-call, at will, are the options. But add to this paltry pay: a substitute needs to pay a fee to get a substitute certification, which is $350 in Oregon. I even had to take a civics test, here in Oregon, a test that was so fucking easy that, well, another fee to pay in order to get a shitty $14.89 an hour.

You will not hear VP Harris or Jill Biden or Henry Giroux or Chris Hedges writing about this stuff. Believe you me, this is below them, to be blunt. I am part of a legion of older folk caught in several levels or circles of THEIR hell: the arbitrators, the people in high and mid office, making some of the worst decisions ever. We are at the whim of lock-step fearful folk. We are at the beckon call of the most uncreative people on earth. I have seen the antithesis of education, of journalism, of social work, of college teaching in my many decades wandering the planet as a writer who should have gone the route of med school or law.

I’m sixty-five and really part of the growing throw-away contingent of millions in this Western Culture who are just the flesh and blood (and data mines) in a pipeline for more rich and super rich and almost rich people to take their pound of flesh — fees, penalties, late charges, triple taxation, tickets, surcharges, foreclosures, evictions, repossessions, evictions, code infractions, add-ons.

Oh, cry for me, United Snakes of America. Evictions, uh? They — the landlords, the BlackRocks, the BlackStones, the Banks and the Insurance and the Real Estate monsters, they are the Stinkin’ Badges!

Never forget who we are:

But then, forgetting is in the water:

And, you can’t get Whoopied when you got no millions:

Unemployment, on the dole, on the fiddle, under the table, riff-raff, deplorable, welfare king, trash,undesirable,vermin, dreg of society, scum, outcast. Hell, just look at the Chosen People’s movie channels — all those narratives, those Hulu and Netflix and Amazon junk, how they depict (they never really depict real struggle) us commoners, those of us who still have a few good years left to be “contributors,” but for many reasons, will never get the third, fourth, tenth chance.

Remote Area Medical? Shit, we are an underperforming country, intentional, vis-a-vis the corporate whores, the lot of them:

Scale this shit up. Dental clinics, care homes, medical clinics. Free, of course. Reroute that Biden-Trump-Bush-Obama-Clinton war money to what we need: Stan Brock, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom: “A debate over healthcare has been raging nationwide, but what’s been lost in the discussion are the American citizens who live day after day, year after year without solutions for their most basic needs. Remote Area Medical documents the annual three-day “pop-up” medical clinic organized by the non-profit Remote Area Medical (RAM) in Bristol, Tennessee’s NASCAR speedway. Instead of a film about policy, Remote Area Medical is a film about people, about a proud Appalachian community banding together to try and provide some relief for friends and neighbors who are simply out of options.”

Fucking Stan Brock — they don’t make people like him anymore!

I have people worried that as white writers they will be hit with “cultural appropriation” if they write a novel with characters who are not of their own race. You know the deal — writing about barrios, or ghettos or even a mix of people in a big city, people outside the lilly white background of the author.

We know that is balderdash, to put it lightly. The cultural appropriation fear came up in a memoir writing class I teach. Memoirs, which are about people remembering a time in their lives, with significance, tied to themes, they are about the person, and then, through their looking glass and through deep analysis, about how they experience the world. A memoir is what the person, the author, is remembering. So, for instance, I grew up all over the place, but say, when I was three or four, we were in the Azores. Of course I have a right to write about my Portuguese “nanny” (babysitter). Or anything I learn/learned about Portugal.

Wrestling with my Mexican-American friends in high school in Tucson? Doing a sweat with my Apache friends up on the White River Apache Reservation? All the time I was in Central America, or in Mexico? These are off limits to me because I am Irish-German? Bull-shit!

The issue was brouched by a student who was watching that Uncle Tom, Oprah, who had on her show the author of American Dirt. She wrote a novel about — Mexicans coming across the border. She’s white, and she got all the hype, a seven-figure advance, and she said her husband, too, was an undocumented immigrant, but the problem is that fellow is Irish. Lots and lots of hype, publicity, and $$. She was even a headliner for an annual Spokane literary festival, Get Lit, set for April 2020. I was also going to be there as small potatoes writer reading, but both she was cancelled, through her agent and publisher, and the event got hit with the Covid paranoia.

There’s no use in getting into the debate about how she may have done some “brown facing,” or the fact that minority and marginalized and BIPOC writers in the USA get short shafted when it comes to literary notice, literary contracts, big promo’s and the big bucks. I explained to my students that to have a panel of people who have studied cultural appropriration, who know the ins and outs of the bizarre debate about teaching history about blacks, women, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, and such, and how they can debunk these anti-“critical race theory” racists, to have them there, talking, and then giving the students a chance to query and discuss, that is the only way to deal with the actual issue of cultural appropriation.

Here, the background:

Oprah Winfrey will soon host a conversation about “American Dirt,” a novel mired in controversy that’s also the latest selection for her book club.

It’s too little too late. Winfrey should rescind her support now.

In nearly 25 years, only once has the entertainment mogul yanked a coveted book club endorsement. That came in 2006, after James Frey’s memoir about his addiction and recovery, “A Million Little Pieces,” turned out to be far more fiction than fact.

“American Dirt” needs to be the second.

For months, Jeanine Cummins’s novel about a Mexican mother and her young son heading to the border to escape a drug cartel has been widely criticized in Latinx circles for perpetuating what writer and translator David Bowles calls a “pastiche of stereotypes and melodramatic tropes of the sort one might expect from an author who did not grow up within Mexican culture.”

Cummins has long identified as white. In interviews, she now mentions her Puerto Rican grandmother, and some headlines call her “a white Latina.” She says she deeply researched the book, including spending time in Mexico.

Yet this isn’t about how Cummins self-identifies. It’s about a novel fostering stereotypes, and what happens when communities of color get shut out from telling their own stories.

After a publishing industry bidding war, Cummins received a seven-figure advance, and the movie rights have been sold. Her novel received glowing blurbs from Stephen King and John Grisham. She got a major credibility boost from acclaimed Latinx authors Sandra Cisneros, who called the book “masterful,” and Julia Alvarez, who said it’s “a dazzling accomplishment.” All appear on the book’s back cover.

In the ensuing debate, neither Cisneros nor Alvarez have stepped forward to defend a book to which they lent their names and, especially, their reputations. —  Renée Graham Globe Columnist,Updated January 28, 2020

I get where this entire thing comes down to (bad writing, white woman with no real ground-living/ground-truthing). And without shooting myself in the foot, me being a white guy who happens to know where I have been, for whom the people I have been with, what those close relationships I have fostered — with people way outside my demographic — have taught me about them and myself. I get how I stick out like a sore thumb when dealing with academic types, with university types, with those in MFA writing programs. I have been cancelled and delegitimzed my entire life. My stories and my characters in stories are my characters. Having to tell me that I have only the right to write about my own people and gender (heterosexual white as is my family/blood) is absurd. But I get the reactions to this white priviledge in publishing, but I also hate what the MFA Writing Programs have done to writers and writing the past 30 years. I hate the barbaric thinking on both side of this debate. And Oprah? I am an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, and I wonder what Malcolm X might think of the current affairs of this rot-gut country? Billionaire? Oprah? The make or break literary arbiter?

The fact is just two days ago, we get the Oregon news around the education outcomes of Black students in Multnomah County.

Part of why Portland’s Black and Latino students are so vastly underrepresented in advanced courses, parents of color say, is that many teachers, counselors and other educators assume those students aren’t smart or skilled enough to handle the challenge.

Low expectations and a lack of structural support for Black and Latino students also continue to lead to persistently low graduation and college-going rates for those groups, an analysis by The Oregonian/OregonLive has found.

That is true even though the district’s top leaders pledged nearly 2 ½ years ago that they would dramatically boost Black and Latino student achievement by this year.

Despite making up about 7% of the overall student population, Black students represent about 1% of those who took advanced courses this school year and last, district figures show.

And even though Latinos make up about 16% or 17% of district enrollment, they represent about 8% of those taking advanced courses. (“Left Behind: Low expectations, lackluster education for high school students of color in Portland span decades” — Oregonian)\

This is 2022, not 1964 when Malcolm X did his The Ballot or the Bullet speech.

I am not embarassed or ashamed of the white crackers in this country, whether they are dirt poor crackers or rich as kings crackers. Racists, sexists, ageists, they all are a bunch of privileged fools. But they hate. Most people I know of never ever go into a cracker bar with a bunch of Harleys outside. I do. And the shit coming out of these people’s racist mouths is consistent with their country’s history of killing and killing. So embarassed? Why? These people are the nature outgrowth of who they are, where they came from and how they have developed. Bad-bad folks. Yes, there are deplorables, just not the way that white racist Hillary was thinking about!

Just two days ago:

A Kansas principal was allegedly forced to apologize to high school staff after showing them a video about white privilege, KMUW reports.

The incident started in January when Principal Tim Hamblin reportedly showed Derby High School staff a 2011 video focused on the perspectives of Dr. Joy DeGruy. DeGruy, who is a Black author, spoke about her personal experiences with racism and white privilege.

The story was about her being forced to present identification to a grocery store cashier, while her sister-in-law, who has a fair complexion, did not have to do such a thing. The relative ended up calling out the store manager and staff for racism.

“She used her white privilege to educate and make right a situation that was wrong,” DeGruy says in the footage. “That’s what you can do every single day.” (source)

I’ve been in meetings and conferences with DeGruy. An amazing person. Is it just Kansas? The putz apologizes? This is one sick country — and the sickness is deep:

What would Malcolm X think or say? About this shit in this day and age?

What would Malcolm X think about this government overreach, the Klanadians, and who they are, as compared to who the Americans are?

Kanyenkehaka (Mohawk) is from the Tehanakarineh family of the Bear Clan. His home is in Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, but he currently resides at the Six Nations of the Grand River Territory (near Hamilton, Ontario). He is an Onkwehon:we (Indigenous) man and belongs to the Kayenkehaka Nation, not the Canadian or English nation. His people have kept their ways and traditions, and despite generations of mistreatment at the hands of the Canadian government, they remain a separate, allied Nation with their own rights and responsibilities to creation.

“For all of you who don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, maybe you’re new to this country. They didn’t teach you that Indigenous people own these lands. They’ll tell you that it’s theirs. It’s Canada’s wonderful free place. It was only free because they stole things. I’m talking to all the brown people in the cities that didn’t want to go and support the truckers because they thought they were racist. Well, the Liberal Government’s racist and so is the Conservative Government. The entire government of Canada is racist. And the RCMP are racist. Let’s face the facts the RCMP are just as much a culprit in the in the theft of the indigenous children that got sent to residential schools, because they were the collectors.”

Here, the Latinx calling out “American Dirt”: Myriam Gurba,

Pendeja, You Ain’t Steinbeck: My Bronca with Fake-Ass Social Justice Literature

When I tell gringos that my Mexican grandfather worked as a publicist, the news silences them.

Shocked facial expressions follow suit.

Their heads look ready to explode and I can tell they’re thinking, “In Mexico, there are PUBLICISTS?!”

I wryly grin at these fulanos and let my smile speak on my behalf. It answers, “Yes, bitch, in México, there are things to publicize such as our own fucking opinions about YOU.”

I follow in the cocky footsteps of my grandfather, Ricardo Serrano Ríos, “decano de los publicistas de Jalisco[1],” and not only do I have opinions, I bark them como itzcuintli. También soy chismosa and if you don’t have the gift of Spanglish, allow me to translate. “Chisme” means gossip. It’s my preferred art form, one I began practicing soon after my period first stained my calzones, and what’s literature, and literary criticism, if not painstakingly aestheticized chisme?

Tengo chisme. Are you ready?

A self-professed gabacha, Jeanine Cummins, wrote a book that sucks. Big time.

Her obra de caca belongs to the great American tradition of doing the following:

1. Appropriating genius works by people of color
2. Slapping a coat of mayonesa on them to make palatable to taste buds estados-unidenses and
3. Repackaging them for mass racially “colorblind” consumption.

Rather than look us in the eye, many gabachos prefer to look down their noses at us. Rather than face that we are their moral and intellectual equals, they happily pity us. Pity is what inspires their sweet tooth for Mexican pain, a craving many of them hide. This denial motivates their spending habits, resulting in a preference for trauma porn that wears a social justice fig leaf. To satisfy this demand, Cummins tossed together American Dirt, a “road thriller” that wears an I’m-giving-a-voice-to-the-voiceless-masses merkin.

I learned about Dirt when an editor at a feminist magazine invited me to review it.

I accepted her offer, Dirt arrived in my mailbox, and I tossed it in my suitcase. At my tía’s house in Guadalajara, I opened the book.

Before giving me a chance to turn to chapter one, a publisher’s letter made me wince.

“The first time Jeanine and I ever talked on the phone,” the publisher gushed, “she said migrants at the Mexican border were being portrayed as a ‘faceless brown mass.’ She said she wanted to give these people a face.”

The phrase “these people” pissed me off so bad my blood became carbonated.

I looked up, at a mirror hanging on my tía’s wall.

It reflected my face.

In order to choke down Dirt, I developed a survival strategy. It required that I give myself over to the project of zealously hate-reading the book, filling its margins with phrases like “Pendeja, please.” That’s a Spanglish analogue for “Bitch, please.”

Back in Alta California, I sat at my kitchen table and penned my review. I submitted it. Waited.

After a few days, an editor responded. She wrote that though my takedown of Dirt was “spectacular,” I lacked the fame to pen something so “negative.” She offered to reconsider if I changed my wording, if I wrote “something redeeming.”

In the end, though, it’s Black History Month. Anyone with any worth should listen to Malcolm X’s talk, The Ballot or the Bullet. Goddamn it, listen.

I’m not a politician, not even a student of politics; in fact, I’m not a student of much of anything. I’m not a Democrat. I’m not a Republican, and I don’t even consider myself an American. If you and I were Americans, there’d be no problem. Those Honkies that just got off the boat, they’re already Americans; Polacks are already Americans; the Italian refugees are already Americans. Everything that came out of Europe, every blue-eyed thing, is already an American. And as long as you and I have been over here, we aren’t Americans yet.

Well, I am one who doesn’t believe in deluding myself. I’m not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner. Sitting at the table doesn’t make you a diner, unless you eat some of what’s on that plate. Being here in America doesn’t make you an American. Being born here in America doesn’t make you an American. Why, if birth made you American, you wouldn’t need any legislation; you wouldn’t need any amendments to the Constitution; you wouldn’t be faced with civil-rights filibustering in Washington, D.C., right now. They don’t have to pass civil-rights legislation to make a Polack an American.

No, I’m not an American. I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So, I’m not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver — no, not I. I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.

These 22 million victims are waking up. Their eyes are coming open. They’re beginning to see what they used to only look at. They’re becoming politically mature. They are realizing that there are new political trends from coast to coast. As they see these new political trends, it’s possible for them to see that every time there’s an election the races are so close that they have to have a recount. They had to recount in Massachusetts to see who was going to be governor, it was so close. It was the same way in Rhode Island, in Minnesota, and in many other parts of the country. And the same with Kennedy and Nixon when they ran for president. It was so close they had to count all over again. Well, what does this mean? It means that when white people are evenly divided, and black people have a bloc of votes of their own, it is left up to them to determine who’s going to sit in the White House and who’s going to be in the dog house. (transcript here)

Ahh, some Mexican writers have called this latest book on today’s Mexico, one of the best. Written by, well, Theroux, the old white guy!

Theroux then goes deep into the hinterland, on the back roads of Chiapas and Oaxaca, to uncover the rich, layered world behind today’s brutal headlines.

He meets with the legendary Subcomandante Marcos, leader of the Zapatista movement dedicated to defending the rights of Mexico’s indigenous people. ON THE PLAIN OF SNAKES: A Mexican Journey is replete with adventures, history, discursions on literature about Mexico, stunning descriptions and, running through it all, a deep humanity and respect for the ordinary Mexicans who are his main subject.

Paul Theroux has been called “The world’s most perceptive travel writer”. He is the author of many highly acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Great Railway Bazaar, The Mosquito Coast and Riding the Iron Rooster. We spoke with him last about his book Deep South.

Interview here of Paul Theroux: Source/Podcast.

What would Malcolm X say?

So, what I’m trying to impress upon you, in essence, is this: You and I in America are faced not with a segregationist conspiracy, we’re faced with a government conspiracy. Everyone who’s filibustering is a senator — that’s the government. Everyone who’s finagling in Washington, D.C., is a congressman — that’s the government. You don’t have anybody putting blocks in your path but people who are a part of the government. The same government that you go abroad to fight for and die for is the government that is in a conspiracy to deprive you of your voting rights, deprive you of your economic opportunities, deprive you of decent housing, deprive you of decent education. You don’t need to go to the employer alone, it is the government itself, the government of America, that is responsible for the oppression and exploitation and degradation of black people in this country. And you should drop it in their lap. This government has failed the Negro. This so-called democracy has failed the Negro. And all these white liberals have definitely failed the Negro.

“War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.” ― Smedley Butler, War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America’s Most Decorated Soldier

There are thousands of examples daily in the mainstream and left-stream and right-stream media showing how broken and corrupt this system — capitalism — is.

I’ll look, then, at the war machines, the ugly thieving corporations that suck the life out of our communities, that sag all community safety nets, that kill universal health care, universal dental care, universal housing.

The military, and, yep, BlackRock, and all the other financial murderers.

Anything and everything associated with the military is, well, right smack in the cricle of hell —

Here are the circles of hell in order of entrance and severity:

1. Limbo: Where those who never knew Christ exist. Dante encounters ​Ovid, Homer, Socrates, Aristotle, Julius Caesar, and more here.
2. Lust: Self-explanatory. Dante encounters Achilles, Paris, Tristan, Cleopatra, and Dido, among others.
3. Gluttony: Where those who overindulge exist. Dante encounters ordinary people here, not characters from epic poems or gods from mythology. The author Boccaccio took one of these characters, Ciacco, and incorporated him into his 14th-century collection of tales called “The Decameron.”
4. Greed: Self-explanatory. Dante encounters more ordinary people but also the guardian of the circle, Pluto, the mythological king of the Underworld. This circle is reserved for people who hoarded or squandered their money, but Dante and Virgil do not directly interact with any of its inhabitants. This is the first time they pass through a circle without speaking to anyone, a commentary on Dante’s opinion of greed as a higher sin.
5. Anger: Dante and Virgil are threatened by the Furies when they try to enter through the walls of Dis (Satan). This is a further progression in Dante’s evaluation of the nature of sin; he also begins to question himself and his own life, realizing his actions and nature could lead him to this permanent torture. 
6. Heresy: Rejection of religious and/or political “norms.” Dante encounters Farinata degli Uberti, a military leader and aristocrat who tried to win the Italian throne and was convicted posthumously of heresy in 1283. Dante also meets Epicurus, Pope Anastasius II, and Emperor Frederick II.
7. Violence: This is the first circle to be further segmented into sub-circles or rings. There are three of them—the Outer, Middle, and Inner rings—housing different types of violent criminals. The first are those who were violent against people and property, such as Attila the Hun. Centaurs guard this Outer Ring and shoot its inhabitants with arrows. The Middle Ring consists of those who commit violence against themselves (suicide). These sinners are perpetually eaten by Harpies. The Inner Ring is made up of the blasphemers, or those who are violent against God and nature. One of these sinners is Brunetto Latini, a sodomite, who was Dante’s own mentor. (Dante speaks kindly to him.) The usurers are also here, as are those who blasphemed not just against God but also the gods, such as Capaneus, who blasphemed against Zeus.
8. Fraud: This circle is distinguished from its predecessors by being made up of those who consciously and willingly commit fraud. Within the eighth circle is another called the Malebolge (“Evil Pockets”), which houses 10 separate bolgias (“ditches”). In these exist types of those who commit fraud: panderers/seducers; flatterers; simoniacs (those who sell ecclesiastical preferment); sorcerers/astrologers/false prophets; barrators (corrupt politicians); hypocrites; thieves; false counselors/advisers; schismatics (those who separate religions to form new ones); and alchemists/counterfeiters, perjurers, impersonators, etc. Each bolgia is guarded by different demons, and the inhabitants suffer different punishments, such as the simoniacs, who stand head-first in stone bowls and endure flames upon their feet.
9. Treachery: The deepest circle of Hell, where Satan resides. As with the last two circles, this one is further divided, into four rounds. The first is Caina, named after the biblical Cain, who murdered his brother. This round is for traitors to family. The second, Antenora—from Antenor of Troy, who betrayed the Greeks—is reserved for political/national traitors. The third is Ptolomaea for Ptolemy, son of Abubus, who is known for inviting Simon Maccabaeus and his sons to dinner and then murdering them. This round is for hosts who betray their guests; they are punished more harshly because of the belief that having guests means entering into a voluntary relationship, and betraying a relationship willingly entered is more despicable than betraying a relationship born into. The fourth round is Judecca, after Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Christ. This round is reserved for traitors to their lords/benefactors/masters. As in the previous circle, the subdivisions each have their own demons and punishments.

Here we go, though, daily, the sickness of this country, Biden, Trump, the entire capitalist shithole:

And, so, this is news, that never ever gets criticized by mainstream media, by the thugs in the Press, by all of the pukes that are Americans. War, toys, billions of taxpayer money for this shit:

OPV – the future? Sikorsky and DARPA think so

What does OPV stand for? Optionally-Piloted Vehicle. Sikorsky and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) have been working on a remotely controlled Sikorsky Black Hawk, aptly registered N60-0PV (former UH-60A 79-23298 of the US Army, with msn 70115).

Together with Lockheed Martin they used DARPA’s ALIAS (Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System) programme for a test flight, which took place at Fort Campbell AAF (KY), on 5 February.

Sitting on the runway, one of Sikorsky’s pilots flips the optionally piloted cockpit switch from two to zero, exits the aircraft and walks across the runway.

Not long after, on a clear cold morning, the Black Hawk, with DARPA’s logo, completes a pre-flight check list, starts its engines, spins up its rotors and takes off with no crew onboard. The test flight will take thirty minutes to complete.

Then, of course, the USA and bioweapons, poison weapons, toxins, sound blasts, plasma, etc. How many soldiers have I talked to who were forced to take anti-malarial drugs, vaccinations for sand fleas, anthrax, Gulf War Syndrome, etc. How many experiments do we have in this society? This is the reality of the freak show of USA.

The U.S.’s chemical and biological weapons programs were outgrowths of a Cold War mentality that pursued hegemony at all costs. This was in keeping with the history of the United States as a capitalist society founded upon slavery, exploitation and, war. While these programs were supposedly phased out decades ago, the COVID-19 pandemic has raised new questions about the character of biological and chemical warfare. Claims of a “lab leak” theory that suggest China leaked COVID-19 from its Wuhan Institute of Virology have been thoroughly debunked  and met with concerns about the continued operation of Fort Detrick in Maryland, the epicenter of the U.S.’s biological weapons program. Fort Detrick has been linked to the experimentation of pathogens such as Ebola and Anthrax. (Black Agenda Report)

Then of course, the war lords, the felons, the liars, the polilticians, the media, the entire left-right pukes cruising to have a war with Russia? Now, let’s see, which country murdered millions? Which Germany murdered boys and men in Greece and destroyed villages? Hmm, Germany? That one, or the DNA in the Germans? And what did Cuba do to USA, how many invasions, how many countries did Cuba use to set up murder incorporated?

“Do You Want a War Between Russia and NATO?”

After a strenuous six hours of discussions Putin, predictably, monopolized the eminently quotable department, starting with one that will be reverberating all across the Global South for a long time: “Citizens of Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia have seen how peaceful is NATO.”

There’s more. The already iconic  Do you want a war between Russia and NATO? – followed by the ominous  “there will be no winners”. Or take this one, on Maidan: “Since February 2014, Russia has considered a coup d’état to be the source of power in Ukraine. This is a bad sandbox, we don’t like this kind of game.”

On the Minsk agreements, the message was blunt: “The President of Ukraine has said that he does not like any of the clauses of the Minsk agreements. Like it, or not – be patient, my beauty. They must be fulfilled.” (Pepe Escobar)

The entire premise of war lords, the USA, the UK, the EU, NATO, well, this is it:

Harrowing Drone-Strike Testimony at US Senate/ February 10, 2022/

 ACLU attorney Hina Shamsi came under fire from Sen. Lindsey Graham, while the chair of a Yemeni group offered graphic testimony of airstrikes’ human costs.

The first to do so was Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, who said that former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama “started using drones strikes in Yemen without Congress or the American public ever even having a conversation about it.”

“Successive presidents have unilaterally claimed the power to use secretive war-based rules to kill terrorism suspects in multiple other countries around the world where we were not, or are not, at war,” Shamsi continued. “Despite widespread, credible reports of terrible civilian deaths and injuries, and lacking any strategic assessment of costs and consequences, or an end goal, the executive branch has kept expanding this program geographically, and in the categories of groups and people who could be killed based only on a president’s say-so.”

“The legal justifications are vague and ever-shifting, and virtually no other country agrees with them,” she added. “If any other country launched this program, we would rightly call it an unlawful, extrajudicial, and arbitrary use of force. Yet it is a core component of what Americans now call our forever or endless wars.” (Consortium News)

How many levels or circles of that Hell are we now constructing?

This is it, the lords of finance are the lords of war are the lords of AI are the lords of transhumanism are the lords of digital dungeons for us common folk.

Enough already. Enjoy your Friday, Big Mac’s and all.