I’m writing this as a reaction to the aftermath of a friendship — shortlived, at one month — extinguished over, well, socialism. An arugment over socialism and Jesus. Questions around what to do with the homeless. Or how to treat and deal with those rough sleepers as well as those homeless in a van and those about to be without a steady home?

I have not taken a vow of poverty, per se. In the end, I am a selfish writer, who just happened to be a selflish writer, teacher, actvisit and social worker over decades. I never wanted to have to wake up in the middle of the night worried about the law, about the IRS, about where the rent would be coming. I have had those feelings, and maybe even now, some of those feelings are certainly laughable compared to what people hitting the high seas wake up to, as they attempt to make it to UK or France, Italy or Greece, or other places, like the USA.

Just today:

“The U.S. Coast Guard has suspended its search for dozens of migrants who are feared dead after their boat capsized off the coast of Florida Saturday. Five bodies have been found, while 34 people are still missing. One survivor was rescued earlier this week as he clung to the hull of the sinking boat, which had departed from the Bahamas.”

So, this fellow I have been involved with in a sort of fellowship, well, I guess I pushed him over the edge. I talked about what we can do to assist the homeless, and of course, that is part and parcel, what can we do to be mindful of us all.

I was riffing with the front page news here:

Newport officials’ hands are largely tied when it comes to problematic camping. A federal circuit court ruling that found criminalizing camping on public property, if other options are not available, violates the Eighth Amendment and a pair of bills passed by the state legislature effectively nullified many current provisions in Newport’s city code.

The Newport City Council is now working toward passing a new, compliant ordinance.

Employees at a Bayfront restaurant have lodged multiple complaints about an encampment on nearby public land, saying an occupant was stealing trash cans and creating a health hazard. There were two tarp tents next to the business, one in an adjacent grassy area and one in the parking lot. The latter was cleared, and the city posted a notice of nuisance littering on the former, advising that the site would be cleaned Jan. 25 (it had not been as of Jan. 26).

I was not pushing the idea that these sorts of encampments are great, that the neighbors should be happy about them. The question is, “What can we do about it, about them?”

I live in a tourist community, one with great struggle, and the housing issue is huge. Yet, there are big homes, vacation homes, where people come for a month or two out of the year. There are huge gaps between those who have and those who do not. Then there are aging people with equity in their homes, and well, social security, and, hanging on. But there are so many older white people in this community who just are bitter. They pick one side of the messed up political theater, and then go for it. Pro-Trump this, Love Biden that. Bottom line, though, most are very very pro-pro capitalists, beyond sanity.

I confronted this Jesus-quoting friend with the idea that we need in Lincoln County more social services, more communty-based services, more ways to help even the most messed up, possiblly drunkest and drugged out dudes living on the streets, defecating in parking lots, and vandalizing. Am I for that? Nope. But this End Times friend went on and on how he knew some fellow in California who had more money in his bank account just by panhandling and scamming, who came off as homeless, even though this fellow had some flop from which he was renting and living.

Of course, the End Times fellow made the grand leap of, “there are plenty of people like that.”

Well, scammers and daylight thieves, of course there are countless ones in USA, and elsewhere. THIEVES of Capitalism. Millions. The One Percent, and their Eichmann’s. Even government bureaucrats. The biggest scam and rip off is perpetrated by the rich. From the car manufacturers, to the car salesmen, to the oil companies, the road builders. Until we live in a world where public transportation doesn’t work, or is for, perception all massaged by Mad Men, loosers. And, there are no army of real homeless scammers who panhandle by day, and live in luxury at night. They . . . do . . . not . . . exist . . . in . . . any . . . significant . . . numbers.

There are so many homeless, or those labeled “housing insecure,” that the true picture of how bad off we are now and going into the future, here, in USA, and then elsewhere, that would blow people away, if the mainstream media were to do the real job of journalism. Millions and millions, who are struggling. Many have been beaten down early by rapist fathers, drugging mothers, absolute horrific conditions. Cops, criminals, crass capitalism, exploitation, and just not enough love and no aunts and uncles doing the old magic of “it takes a village.” Many were born with cognitive issues tied to the bad gestation and epigenetics. Then, there goes reading and comprehension. Early, grade 1, and then things start slipping. Many are born with a hundred strikes against them. Beautiful children, Hallmark version children. But they are on a pathway to addiction, to dropping out, to not having the persistence to learn. The dream hoarders are not coming to the rescue, because, like my friend, taxation (what a poor thing, in capitalism, taxing to pay for war and to spend on the rich’s projects) is a dirty word.

Even this fellow, not a socialist, not one of the poor, and here we are, Brookings Institute. Not that I am a big fan of the rich and the elite and scholars talking about this issue or many hundreds without the real people who are the subjects of their work, at the table. Gee, the poor:

Capitalism does that — it eats the weak, poor, vulnerable. Capitalism makes money on the poor, on the masses, on those in precarity, now, in lockdown, and before.

But this fellow was mad, because I am not a believer, which he first liked about me before today’s conversation. Today, I had to say, we have to do big things to solve big issues, and that homeless rough sleepers, miscreants, even guys and gals who are petty criminals, dirt producing humanity, we have to do something. And having ordinances to remove them is not the answer.

The problem is that some people who believe in the tenets of Christ, or what have you, who do not like the temples or the churches, who see hypocrits everywhere in all the denominations, well, I agree with them. But I also know that believing that the climate crisis was foretold in the Old Testament, or that we are headed to a one world communist government, as foretold in the Bible, and that the wrath of God shall make today’s virus pandemic and floods and wildfires look like walks in the park, well, the issue for me is that, it is their Bible Born Belief System, but BBBS is, again, not transferable to some of us who believe life on earth is hell for many, but we have to do the work of, even if it is Sysiphis, attempting to solve the problems.

Yes, the cards have always been stacked against us. The issue is that Bible Thumpers, and those who want only the simple written down words of Jesus Christ and zero look at religions, and even great thinkers like MLK, Jr., or the Berrigans, or Tutu or Thick Nhat Hanh, they are disregarded by BBBS folk because the simple message of their Christ is that this life is nothing, and that there will be a New Jerusalem, a reckoning, and that this worldly life is just a step toward a new world, a forever world, one of purity. (source)

And so, while he knows I am not a religious person, not a god believer, or god follower, he said he liked my fellowship. It was just that I called him on the homeless scammers bullshit, and that we have to come together as a society to systemically work on all of the frayed safety nets. And I stated, that socialism — not Leninism, not Russian Soviet Unionism, or Chinese communism — is the only way forward. And he got made, stated that he worked 12 hour days, seven days a week, for years, selling cars, even telling me he missed out on spending time with his growing daughter, that he does not feel all that work means he has to give up all his stuff and live on the streets with the rest of them. That is what many think socialism is.

Even those like this fellow who professes he doesn’t consume the news, and tells me he and his wife have an agreement NOT to talk politics or religion, since she is a Marxist and not an End Times BBBS-er. Again, he was in California for years, around cars salesmen, around golfers, around rightwingers, who to this day would think his version of Christ and the next world is silly.

I was told, “Jesus wasn’t against making money. He was against those who used money certain ways.”

Again, what hedge fund would Jesus invest in? Which Pharma company wouldJesus invest in? Which company, Cargil or Bayer crop would Jesus invest in? Which water-sucking, pesiticide-loving golf course would Jesus golf on?

Would Jesus (not that I agree that he actually existed) be a socialist?

In Rendering Unto Caesar, Lawrence Reed, president emeritus of the libertarian-leaning Foundation for Economic Education, writes that Jesus was not a socialist in that he promoted voluntary giving and charity rather than the mandatory taking by government (taxes).

That is it, now, is it not? My friend decries the mega-churches, all the fancy trappings of pastors and priests, but he believes Jesus would be fine with multimillionaires and billionaires. So, you get the bucks doing this or that bad bad thing, but you then can give up, through charity, with voluntary giving, some of it for charity, and that’s fine. I disagree with that, but the problem is that anti-socialists have no concept of a world that is truly democratic, respectful of ecology, children, women, old and young, a world that is non-violent. These people who state they have no need for news, and hold the bible as their guide, well, they still are products of everything they reject. They are political, and they are sucked into their culture, their upbringings and their circumstances. I reminded him that social security is a type of socialism, but he states it is just something HE paid into, as if it was just a big bank accounty waiting for him.

I wish BBBS-ers would have discussions outside the very narrow frame of this Christ’s adages and sayings.

Here, “Father John Dear, longtime peace activist and former director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, recalls the lives and impact of his close friends Thich Nhat Hanh and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who corresponded with him regularly. Thich Nhat Hanh, the world-renowned Buddhist monk, antiwar activist, poet and teacher, died Saturday at the age of 95, and South African anti-apartheid icon Archbishop Tutu died last month at the age of 90. Dear is the former director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, which first brought Thich Nhat Hanh to the United States in the 1960s, and is now executive director of the Beatitudes Center.” (source)

OK, we’ve lost two giants in this last month: Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Thich Nhat Hanh. I was so blessed to know both of them. And now we have to step up to the plate. You know? I knew that they gave every single day of their lives for peace and justice and creation, fearlessly. And they believed they could do this even when they were young. We have to do the same thing, and, as Tutu said, keep at it ’til the day we die. We need people who are committed to building a global movement of nonviolence for justice, disarmament and creation, the likes of which the world has never seen, way beyond Tutu and Daniel Berrigan and Thich Nhat Hanh, to save the planet. As Dr. King said, it’s no longer violence or nonviolence; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence. So, I hope people can take heart from these two great giants and step up to the plate and, you know, model peace and nonviolence in their personal lives and relationships, and go forward to build this movement to abolish war itself and racism and poverty and nuclear weapons and environmental destruction, and bring about a new culture of peace and nonviolence. That’s the best thing we can do to remember them.

John Dear is an amazing fellow, still alive, talking of the power of the Vietnamese monk who just died:

And I got to know him through Daniel Berrigan and being the executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. It was FOR, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, that brought Thich Nhat Hanh to the United States in 1966 on a speaking tour. And it was the genius of this great hero, an unknown peacemaker friend of ours, John Heidbrink, who recognized in him the greatest voice of peace coming from Vietnam. It was brilliant. And part of the tour, Heidbrink said, “I need to take him to meet the three most important religious leaders in the United States — Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton and Daniel Berrigan,” who were all intimately involved with the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

So, he does that. He takes Thich Nhat Hanh to meet Dr. King. I think they met in Chicago. And Dr. King was floored. You can read it in his speeches with — about Thich Nhat Hanh and statements later saying he basically had never met anybody like Thich Nhat Hanh, such a gentle monk. And don’t be fooled by Thich Nhat Hanh, because he was a person of steel. He was so solid. He was so strong and firm. And King recognized that immediately. And it’s hard to unpack the impact that Thich Nhat Hanh had on the United States and in mobilizing not just everybody, but these great figures, to really speak out for an end to the War in Vietnam, beginning with Martin Luther King, who held a press conference with him that day. They later met in Geneva. And Martin Luther King nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize, the only person Martin Luther King nominated for the Peace Prize. And they had breakfast together, and Thich Nhat Hanh said beautiful things to him. He said later that just being with Dr. King, not just the power of the great person’s rhetoric but in his ordinary humanity — he said, “Martin, you are a bodhisattva to the world,” which is an awakened Buddha. And no one had talked to Martin Luther King like that.

He had the same influence on Thomas Merton, who wrote an amazing statement, that “I am closer to” — this was in 1966. “I’m closer to Thich Nhat Hanh than most Americans, certainly most church people, including most of the monks in my monastery. Thich Nhat Hanh and I see things exactly the same way. Nhat Hanh is my brother.” Remember, he’s the enemy, Thich Nhat Hanh. We’re bombing and killing Vietnamese. And what people don’t know, and you heard it on the clip you played, but Thich Nhat Hanh knew 1,000 monks by name who were killed. Think about what that would do to you as a person, something that I always thought of when I was with him. — Father John Dear

And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves (Matthew 21:12).

Well, which Bible quotes point to Jesus’ socialism? I don’t see any quotes pointing toward supporting monoplies, or oligarchies, military industrial complexes, or disaster capitalism. 6 Bible Quotes That Are Blatantly Socialist — Not that we need article after article on Jesus’ supposed modern day reflections, since he was in a very very different place, time and world, more than two thousand years ago.

Here’s the full story behind this quote, which describes a famous scene that’s depicted in the painting above.

In a temple in Jerusalem, Jesus’s disciples had gathered to celebrate Passover. Merchants and money changers in the temple offered some commercial services. They sold doves to be sacrificed and offered to exchange money into the currency needed to pay temple dues.

But they didn’t do so in a way that Jesus considered ethical. They cheated customers, charged prohibitive fees, prioritized profit over ethics, swindled believers, and exploited the poor.

(According to scholars, these temple merchants also colluded with the aristocracy to profit off of poor people’s poverty — they charged interest when lending money from the wealthy to poor people who were in severe debt, thereby making enormous profits.)

Jesus was incensed that these merchants had the gall to turn the temple into what he called a “den of thieves.”

So he expelled them from the temple and literally turned the tables.

This event is regarded by scholars as being the catalyst that triggered his crucifixion. It convinced his enemies that he was a rabble rouser — he presented the danger of inciting revolutionary sentiment among the poor, exploited masses.

The story illustrates that Jesus held radical (i.e., socialist) ideas about the inherent dissonance between commerce and spirituality, and the exploitative nature of profit-making endeavors, such as charging interest, which he viewed as a grave sin.

I understand my friend’s position here on the coast. I understand how he feels life on earth is nothing, that the real blessing is in one master, Jesus Christ. I understand this friend’s background, and the torments he’s had, and that he seems to have some peace around this belief system. But, then, how do people like me interact, someone who, if I take some of the stuff face value, out of the “bible,” as socialistic, and then the true believer hates the word itself, and hates Marxism, how do I navigate that?

IN a big burst of anger, my friend slammed a DVD onto a parking lot, a DVD he was giving to me to look at. He was made, and, well, he moved on, got in his car, and drove off. My words, “Well, we are so different. We come from two entirely different worlds,” those seem okay but yes, harsh for someone trying to find fellowship with me, a man of this world, one embedded into all things around me, and unfortunately, those things are all tied to politics. Even the beaches I hike on and the plastic waste, or the Coast Guard, or the dogs crapping on the wrack lines. Or the smell of the paper mill in Toledo making it 25 miles south to my town. Yep, but I can absorb beauty in the stuggle for life, my own sanity, life itself, even those dirty, defecating, neighborhood-disrupting souls out there. Making the news.

What to do about . . . . fill in the blank______________________________. And, then, imagine that guy, that “son of god,” what he might do.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth (Matthew 5:5).

And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more (Isaiah 2:4).

Jesus: To one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also, and from one who takes away your cloak do not withhold your tunic either. Give to everyone who begs from you, and from one who takes away your goods do not demand them back. And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them (Luke 6:27).

No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despite the other. You cannot serve both God and wealth (Matthew 6:24).

Jesus: I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God (Matthew 19:23).

And, yes, And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves (Matthew 21:12).

Liberation Theology in Latin America

Christian Socialism in which we talk about similarities and differences between the the teachings of Jesus and the ideals socialism espouses.

The Good News According to Matthew

The Plowshares Eight: Thirty Years On

Anti-war Christ

The Socialist Anti-War Tradition: Leading the Fight Against War and Imperialism

Dorothy Day’s granddaughter sentenced to prison for nuclear base break-in

The Sermon on the Mount: A Manifesto for Christian Anarchism

Charging Interest

The Challenge and Spirituality of Catholic Social Teaching

What Is the Meaning of “A Camel Going Through the Eye of a Needle”?

Thanks to, “Jesus would not approve of capitalism and our blind worship of billionaires” by Stephanie Leguichard

To reiterate: we are locked in the elite’s sick and perverted game of stealing from us all, and they defecate on us all, in countries, on farms, in towns and cities.

Let’s listen to Michael Hudson:

Michael Hudson: The Federal Reserve and Treasury painted the U.S. into a corner with its Quantitative Easing to save the banks and brokerage houses after 2008. The policy succeeded in supporting and even raising real estate prices, and providing arbitrage opportunities to borrow at low rates to buy higher-yielding stocks and bonds, vastly increasing the magnitude of financial wealth. This has been especially the case since the pandemic, creating an estimated trillion dollars in “capital gains” (including short term arbitrage) for the wealthiest One Percent.

What seemed to be the financial death trap was the prospect of rising interest rates ending the free lunch of interest-dividend arbitrage, and easy mortgage money. The threat was to reverse the asset-price run-up. We already are seeing that in recent weeks as stocks plunged to reflect the rise in Treasury bond rates.

But by now, 14 years after the Obama bailouts and QE rescue of insolvent banks, a new condition has emerged: a vast sum of private capital seeking to move out of the financial markets. Many of the most astute One Percent is taking their money and running – into private equity and real estate.

The result is that housing prices are soaring as private capital is out-bidding owner-occupant home buyers. While the latter face rising mortgage-interest rates, private capital finds the likelihood for both current rental income and capital gains to be a much better bet than the stock and bond market. The result will not be a decline in real estate prices, but a decline in home-ownership rates as a shift to rental housing occurs. The financial class is becoming the new absentee landlord class.

Lower stock prices will spur a similar private-capital wave of corporate takeovers, posturing as “rescuers” of the economy. The aim will be short-term asset stripping, of course (that is the business plan of private equity), but it will consolidate ownership in the hands of a financial elite. And to the extent that state and local budgets suffer from the downturn, sell-offs of public land and infrastructure also will transfer property and its rent-extracting opportunities into hands – not with borrowed credit but for all-cash, the cash that QE policy and tax favoritism has brought into being in the past 14 years.

So, to the extent that there are bankruptcies, this will have the usual result: consolidation and concentration of wealth ownership. The non-financial economy’s structure is being transformed – under the slogan of individualistic free markets.

For meat, eggs and other farm produce, the farmers are not receiving higher prices for their crops and produce. The middlemen are gouging out more fees for themselves, thanks to the monopoly position of Cargill et al.

We are on the brink of war because of Obama, Bush, Trump and Biden. Because of the elite. Because of neocons and neoliberals. Because of USA and Israel. Because of Zionists and Christian Zealots. Because of the Gilded Class. Because so many chosen people of the Ivy League, of the financial class, of the deep state look down on the 80 percent of the world (or maybe even some of themselves, part of the 99 Percent) look down on the world. So many of these elites, these leaders, are, in one sense, living out some awful end times themselves. But bringing it to us, in rapid fashion. They are not Jesus freaks, not lovers of Merton, never lovers of Day or Berrigan. They are the killers, the capitalists. And, yes, if you have an army, if you trade in the shekels of lords of war, if you are in it for the control, the space constellation of satellites, for the control of human agency, for gene editing and soul stealing, then, you are, I suppose, what Jesus, if he was a real guy, and if he was around, would be debating out in the open. Decrying. And, attacking.

But, here we are, discussing the “not real,” though, and we are left with the work on earth, and now work on the moon (Musk’s rocket is crashing into the moon — who voted him god of luna?) and on mars. This is probably one of a million things a “Jesus/Messiah” would discuss at the roundtable — who gives them the right to do this?

“So it has been following a somewhat chaotic orbit since February 2015,” Berger added.

Space observers believe the rocket – about four metric tonnes of “space junk” – is on course to intersect with the moon at a velocity of about 2.58km/s in a matter of weeks.

Bill Gray, who writes software to track near-Earth objects, asteroids, minor planets, and comets, has said the Falcon 9’s upper stage will very likely hit the far side of the moon, near the equator, on 4 March.

In a real world, yep, “The right questions: what the candidates should be asked.” This from a journalist, who turned 100 today — Morton Mintz. What would Jesus ask the candidates at the debates? Haha.

I actually wish him and his wife and his circle really good things in the coming years. I do. His BBBS — Bible Born Belief System — works for him. He also works for a homeless shelter in our county, which is good. I also think gaining fellowship outside proscribed arenas, like meeting someone on the street or in an informal way, is difficult, especially for men, males. Now. I understand that losing that is a lost opportunity. But this is not unusual. And, maybe we demonstrated, the two of us, that males with different opinions can’t find fellowship around ideas. A community of purpose, community of place, a community of beliefs, those are difficult to cultivate.

That’s how the cookie crumbles. Sure, I am saddened.

Larry (right): “Well, what happened was that the work slowed up for her. I don’t know, she was making pretty good money… Everything happened so fast and we didn’t know what to do. We were panicking and everything. We should’ve focused probably during the first time that we got the eviction notice. But, she was going through a lot things…” Lizette (left): “I’ve been trying to balance life, literally, emotionally, financially, socially, everything. I don’t where to go now. I don’t have a place to stay, a job. I’m getting to be homeless probably tonight because I’m getting evicted. So, we are trying to get out from our situation, but we are down there.” Photography courtesy of David Blumenkrantz and the One of Us project.

“A lot people can’t tell that we’re homeless, only because we keep clean clothes and we go places where we can clean our clothes and we shower on a daily basis.” — Mary Ellen & Deshaun. Photography courtesy of David Blumenkrantz and the One of Us project.

Spot Light on Poverty!

The assault on not just our land, air, soil, food, but on our minds continues daily at breakneck speed, and again the question is, But who voted to approve these obscenities?

Example One —

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force awarded SpaceX a $102 million five-year contract to demonstrate technologies and capabilities to transport military cargo and humanitarian aid around the world on a heavy rocket. 

The contract is for the rocket cargo program, a new project led by the Air Force Research Laboratory to investigate the utility of using large commercial rockets for Department of Defense global logistics.

Greg Spanjers, rocket cargo program manager, said in a statement to SpaceNews that the contract formalizes a government-industry partnership to help “determine exactly what a rocket can achieve when used for cargo transport, what is the true capacity, speed, and cost of the integrated system.”

The contract, awarded Jan. 14, was not announced by the Air Force and was first reported by AviationWeek.com. 

This is the largest contract awarded to date for rocket cargo. U.S. Transportation Command in 2020 signed cooperative research and development agreements with SpaceX and Exploration Architecture Corporation (XArc) to study concepts for rapid transportation through space. The command last month also signed a CRADA with Blue Origin.

We have no public transportation. Imagine that, no true connected public rail system to move people, and goods around the US, Mexico and Canada. Instead, we have a shortage of 18-wheel long-haul drivers. Again, who voted for a completely dirty, inefficient, rotting system of rednecks crisscrossing the continent in dangerous and grid-locking 18-wheelers? So, the “industry” (be careful of that moniker) states there is an 80,000 shortfall of drivers right now!

When driving alongside a semi-truck, you don’t really expect to look over and see a teenager behind the wheel. That could potentially change in the near future, should a bipartisan infrastructure bill pass the U.S. Senate.

The Developing Responsible Individuals for a Vibrant Economy Act, also called the DRIVE Safe Act, has been introduced as part of an effort to fill the long-lasting trucker shortage with drivers as young as 18 years old.

Then, more mercenaries recruited for big bonuses: Make that the disgusting US Army,

You know how messed up the USA is, from A to Z, and the news continues to illustrate the dying empire. Paying punks to enlist in the killing machine!

FORT CAMPBELL, KY — The U.S. Army is offering its largest bonus ever for new recruits with up to $50,000 available to qualified individuals who sign on for a six-year active-duty enlistment.

The total incentive package for a new recruit is based on a combination of incentives offered for the selected career field, individual qualifications, length of the enlistment contract, and the ship date for training.

In the past, enlistment incentives for full-time soldiers could not exceed $40,000.

The Army is competing for the same talent as the other services as well as the private sector and must have the ability to generate interest in the current employment environment, according to Maj. Gen. Kevin Vereen, who leads U.S. Army Recruiting Command in its mission to fill full-time and part-time vacancies in about 150 career fields in the regular Army and the Army Reserve.

“This is an opportunity to entice folks to consider the Army,” said Brig. Gen. John Cushing, who serves as the deputy commanding general for operations under Vereen at USAREC. “We’ve taken a look at the critical (military occupational specialties) we need to fill in order to maintain the training bases, and that is where we place a lot of our emphasis.”

And, yes, we are on the Corporate Plantation, and Biden is one example of plantation master deluxe: Story, On the Biden Plantation

Biden is nothing if not consistent and transparent. He does see himself as the boss who tells Black people that they shouldn’t complain. As he famously said in the December 2020 meeting, “If it doesn’t count for y’all to hell with y’all!” 

But now the bloom is truly off the rose. The campaign lies and the failure to address the covid pandemic make it difficult for all but the dead enders to support Biden and vice president Kamala Harris. The Black political class will fulfill their role and continue to put lipstick on the pig. The people aren’t fooled though and they won’t turn out in the numbers needed to keep democrats in control of congress. Although democratic control means very little. The military industrial complex gets $770 billion in funding regardless of who is in control. Biden has pledged not to provide medicare for all and he didn’t even present a public option for health care. As for claims that the democrats are more environmentally friendly, Biden has approved more oil and gas drilling permits on public land than the Trump administration did.

Biden is hoisted on his own petard of obedience to the ruling class. Black voters get little more than improved twitter posts. Then again, when Kamala Harris writes drivel such as, “Because of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, America is moving again. That’s what infrastructure is all about: getting people moving,” one wonders if even that is true. — Margaret Kimberley’s is the author of Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents  

Yeah, Ralph Nader did get on the Amy George Soros Goodman hour today, Democracy Now. He did attempt to illuminate. He is, of course, marginalized by both Democrats and Republicans.

RALPH NADER: Well, the two-hour news conference was deliberate. I think he wanted to show his stamina. And he had a great opportunity to communicate a lot of important things, which he didn’t do.

By the same token, the media did not make itself proud. It had a very narrow range of questions, and huge areas were never asked. They never asked about climate disruption and the Republican opposition to doing anything about it. They didn’t ask about the military budget, where Congress gave Biden $24 billion more than the Pentagon even asked for. They didn’t ask about the drain on the Treasury from hundreds of billions of dollars of corporate welfare, which is a kind of corporate socialism. They didn’t ask about the corporate crime wave that is ripping off consumers and exploiting labor in this country and has been reported around the country. And he didn’t raise those questions, either.

They raised the antitrust issue — he raised it, properly, for meatpacking companies controlling and the pricing of meat products. But no one asked him: Well, if he’s so keen on antitrust and anti-monopoly policy, why isn’t he demanding larger budgets? There are very few federal antitrust cops on the corporate monopoly beat at the Federal Trade Commission or the Department of Justice.

Most interestingly, the press didn’t ask about what his attorney general is going to do to prosecute Donald Trump. We’ve written letters to Merrick Garland listing one criminal federal statute after another that he openly and brazenly violated, including political events on the White House lawn, which is a crime under the Hatch Act. No answer whatsoever. No special counsel being appointed to investigate and recommend prosecution of this criminal recidivist Donald J. Trump, who has never seen a law that he hasn’t violated.

So, if you look at the big picture, it was a very disappointing press conference from both sides — the issues that Biden didn’t raise and the dittohead-type narrow range of questions from the media. (source)

He has to beat those dead horses, multiple times, year after year . . . dead horses tied to the fact there are no real journalists in the legacy media, and that there are no cops working the FTC or DoJ. He is spot on, but he never gets on NPR or PBS or Fox or CBS. Nader is spot on about Republicans being fascistic and messianic. Worse:

And the reporters didn’t take him to task there. The reporters, either they’re not doing their homework or they’re full of taboos. I mean, they never raise the corporate supremacy over our country. There isn’t a single agency in the federal government that isn’t influenced maximally by corporate lobbies. And Congress is swarmed by corporate lobbies. You have 500 drug company lobbyists full-time assigned to Congress, and there are 535 members of Congress. And these corporations are strategically commercializing every aspect of our society, commercializing childhood, strategically planning the tax system, the food system, the health system, fighting global warming remedies, the fossil fuel industry, ExxonMobil. They’re planning our genetic inheritance. Commercializing childhood should be a left-right issue, conservative issue. The press never asks about it. The self-censorship of the press is overwhelming. That’s why we have to have a more independent media.

We have to have — I mean, look at the coverage of Ukraine. As Katrina pointed out, if our country was invaded in a span of 40 years from the north, with 50 million casualties, what do you think we would do? Do you think we would just station troops on the northern border? We would have taken over the northern country and annexed it. And that’s why dictator Putin can get away with what he’s doing now, in terms of public opinion of the impoverished Russian people, is because they remember. They have their casualties in their families from the western frontiers, started with Napoleon.

And here we are, expanding a military alliance for arms sales for the military-industrial complex, because, as was pointed out, a condition of joining NATO is to buy the F-16 and other weapons in Eastern European countries. NATO is a military alliance organized against the Soviet Union. And now they’re expanding it in Eastern Europe and putting troops there. It’s, here we go again, a completely preventable conflict. What Putin really wants is Ukraine never to join NATO, no strategic offensive weapons in the Ukraine. He’s asking for ending strategic weapons in Europe — that is not going to happen.

But the press asks war-inciting questions. NPR asked it. David Sanger asked it. They asked war-inciting questions. It’s like Vietnam all over again. It’s like Iraq all over again. They don’t ask peace-inciting questions about diplomacy. And this is a dangerous situation, and the press just isn’t doing its job. It isn’t just Biden.

He can’t communicate how the GOP is opposed to everything that’s defined as human. You don’t make moral appeals to the GOP, like Senator Warnock just did. You show that they are opposed to sending $250 and $300 monthly checks to 65 million children, which has stopped now, and the GOP will not expand it. I mean, that’s a good political item to communicate to the American people. Those 65 million children come from conservative and liberal families who are both deprived. He doesn’t know how to communicate. The GOP knows what it wants. It’s messianic. It’s fascistic. It’s driven. And the communication from the Democrats, from the DNC to the White House, is weak. It’s anemic. And the public senses that.

Finally, a story NOT covered in legacy media or left wing media. Ralph doesn’t get it yet. He still believes in his book title, how billionaires will save the world.

He’s dead wrong. And, here it is, again, social impact investing, and the soul of humanity, especially youth, sucked up by the ultra rich and investment teams for their data and their compliance — The Internet of Bodies and Human Capital Futures Bets In Brazil

In the coming years, global financiers, will attempt to meld dynamic pricing and mobile payments with biometric digital identity, Internet of Body sensors, and blockchain smart contracts and then weave it all into an expansive spatial web meant to control our social and economic relations in both the material world and, through digital assets, rights and privileges, in the Metaverse, as well. Click here to listen to an interview I did with Bonnie Faulkner of Guns and Butter that goes into more detail about how impact investing connects to digital twins, and mixed reality.

Surely it is twisted to view communities as resource deposits of untapped data, but that is the logic of end-stage capitalism. The infrastructure needed to scale human capital finance profit are ICT (Individual Communication Technology) devices including phones, tablets, and inexpensive computers like chrome books; wearable technologies and biosensors; and 5-6G used in combination with data-dashboards that verify impact data against predictions and success metrics laid out in the terms of the deals. These are all things one finds in recreation centers in the United States now, and given inroads made by the Aspen Institute, Stanford, Harvard and the like, they will very likely become standard issue in the favelas, too. Not because any of it is good for children, but because the children’s data has value, and their compliance has value.

The Metaverse will be populated by compliant avatars. Beyond social impact, the conditioning of the young to cyborg life is going full throttle. Meanwhile for portfolio managers, children’s futures are just tranches of investment – data commodities. It’s only business.

Most people I talk with do not have the bandwidth or wherewithal to understand this next stage, end stage, capitalism, which is fascism, inverted totalitarianism, all bunched up in a world of chaos, all drawn and quartered on the backs of us, vis-a-vis all these scams of Build Back Better variety, or UN’s sustainability goals and Universal Basic Income propaganda, and the 4IR and WEF — the fourth industrial revolution is part and parcel of the Great Reset. This sort of stuff Alison writes about does get under many of our skins, but for the most part, I know so many people who have given up, who think that we all are data mined anyways, that we have all our info in the banking-IRS-DMV-insurance-medical-education superhighway of giving up all agency, anyway, so what’s the big deal we are being tracked, and what’s the big deal that our kids are being watched and what’s wrong with our ovaries and prostates and such being monitored by the Internet of Bodies and Nano-Things when we just have to lean back and enjoy this new world?

It is hard work drilling down, peeling back, and looking at ourselves in the black mirror of technology. But it has to be done.

If this graphic BELOW doesn’t bring chills to your spine, then you are one of the Zombies, or colonized, stuck in some suspended intellectual animation:

Danny writes a short but decent piece at Black Agenda Report — The Biden-Harris Administration is a Political Expression of the Empire’s Crisis of Legitimacy

Caveat — I don’t believe all the figures, all the bullshit of CDC, FDA, Pharma. All the Covid-19 deaths here, no vaccine deaths there crap. The entire systems is a house of cards, smoke and mirrors, manipulated numbers, and a continuing collusion operation. If you haven’t doubted the narratives of Fauci and CDC and Pfizer, and the million bucks given to Pfizer’s CEO, and all the systemic censorship, then you will not get the above story about harnessing our youth, their minds, and their bodies by the very same people running the covid show.

Danny:

COVID-19 continues to spread with rapid ferocity across the United States. On January 14th, the U.S. surpassed 850,000 COVID-19 deaths. More deaths from the pandemic have accumulated under President Joe Biden than his predecessor, Donald Trump. Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’s lack of competence in addressing the pandemic has damaged the credibility of the administration. The Biden administration’s approval rating has fallen to 33 percent , a 22 percent decrease from a year ago.

Biden and Harris are political expressions of the American Empire’s crisis of legitimacy. The crisis has reached an acute stage that neither Biden nor Harris is capable of managing without significant political consequences. This has led to a number of cringe-worthy public relations moments for the administration. In an NBC News interview , Kamala Harris expressed that the administration would not change course on its COVID-19 strategy. “It is time for us to do what we have been doing and that time is every day,” said Harris. When Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked about the myriad of problems facing the Biden administration, she responded with the following : “I think that having worked in the White House before, you do hard things in White Houses . . . and could certainly propose legislation to see if people support bunny rabbits and ice cream, but that wouldn’t be very rewarding for the American people.”

Such rhetoric does not exactly exude confidence from an administration that claimed it would “Build Back Better” out of the Donald Trump administration. The truth is that Biden’s promise to “Build Back Better” was always a branding exercise. Biden’s ineptness is a reflection of the historic decay of the Democratic Party. After eight years of Obamamania, Democratic Party elites gambled their political capital on the sale of non-stop fear of Donald Trump to their constituents in order to soothe their wounded psyches following the embarrassment that was the 2016 election. Biden struggled to gain credibility in the 2020 primary from the outset but was finally given the elite’s blessing to take the reins of the Democratic Party’s sinking ship.

Are We the Sum Total of Our Life, Theirs, Inside Our Darkest Thoughts?

by Paul Haeder / January 19th, 2022

There is no such thing as an ending. At the conclusion of any work of art, just like at the conclusion of any experience, what we arrive at is a site of interpretation. Every reader commits a creative act at that site. Every reader creates a version of their own artwork within their act of reading. No author can ever succeed at holding a singular ending in place, stable, unwavering.   — Lidia Yuknavitch

Telling one’s story is never easy. But it is the staff of life. A story, a memoir, anti-memoir, a story of a people, of a tribe, of a family, of a nation. We can have stories that are collectively anthropological, like Guns Germs and Steel (The Fates of Human Societies — previously titled Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years — a 1997 transdisciplinary non-fiction book by Jared Diamond. In 1998, Guns, Germs, and Steel won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book. A documentary based on the book, and produced by the National Geographic Society, was broadcast on PBS in July 2005)

We can have Debt: The First 5,000 Years ( David Graeber lays out the historical development of the idea of debt, starting from the first recorded debt systems in the Sumer civilization around 3500 BC. In this early form of borrowing and lending, farmers would often become so mired in debt that their children would be forced into debt peonage).

Or, Das Kapital, also known as Capital: A Critique of Political Economy  is a foundational theoretical text in materialist philosophy, critique of political economy and politics by Karl Marx. (Marx aimed to reveal the economic patterns underpinning the capitalist mode of production in contrast to classical political economists such as Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill. While Marx did not live to publish the planned second and third parts, they were both completed from his notes and published after his death by his colleague Friedrich Engels. Das Kapital is the most cited book in the social sciences published before 1950.)

But we all have read famous and not so famous people’s accounts of their lives, with some autobiographical hitching post, or some life changing event or series of events to define that person as an individual. With that, we hope as writers that we can find audience.

That the reader(s) will infer their own place in the world around what events and what creative expression of those events have done to shape us, the writer.

It is a given almost to a tee that places like Dissident Voice and myriad other places on the Internet or once just in print have facilitated the concept of story, of narrative, of frames. Here, at Dissident Voice, just reading Edward Curtain’s pieces, one can see that narrative for him ties into commentary and philosophical musings in the current societal dynamics.

Story is all we have, really, and memory is what we attempt to reclaim, even though memory is faulty. Forgetting is part of the human condition, or should be, as a way of not going crazy with all the bad and horrible things that have happened to us, that we have perpetrated and that are befalling the world.

We are in our own funhouse, or madhouse. We are the sum total of all events. However, we do not deal with the sum total, that is for sure. I remember the time with John Francis, and I read his books, talked to him on the phone and interviewed him in person as he was brought to Spokane to some of the colleges I was associated with as a speaker.

Planet Walker he called himself, and he decided early on, witnessing an oil spill under the Golden Gate bridge, to stop using fossil fuel transportation and to stop talking, a vow of silence, but that went on for almost two decades. Please, watch below.

Or, if you have bandwidth, listen to some of my old radio shows put up on my personal blog, here — Podcasts, including John Francis.

I’ve been with hundreds of people as a journalist and writer, and many more as a young person who has had the benefit of growing up and traveling around places like BC, Canada, Azores, UK, Ireland, many parts of the USA, before age 13. I took those early days of listening to elders’ stories into my own avocation and beat-up career as a writer. My work may have featured their work on some environmental or social justice issue, or even in in my beat reporting as a newspaper journalist. But the drilling down, and the real conversations were always about “me,” the person in some state of evolution. So many wanted to give life to their previoius lives, to families, to their own trauma and lamentations. They always wanted to frame themselves, and to give me, a writer, some sense of depth to who they are.

Here, some narratives of mine still alive on the worldwide death net:

“Finding Fringe,” Portland, Street Roots.

Real Change News, Seattle.

Only partial list of my magazine beat, “Metro Talk,” Spokane Magazine.

The Pacific Northwest Weekly Inlander. Again, partial list.

I certainly have had great people like Terry Tempest Williams and David Suzuki and Winona LaDuke provide me and millions of their readers collectively their narratives, their own steps in their very multilayered and dynamic lives. Those three are global people, and that adds to the shine of their pedigrees and their own place in our lives as readers and participants of their work, words and sightlines to the future.

Scroll down on my blog here and listen to my interview of Suzuki.

That is it, a future understood by ground truthing the past, and that is gathered through our pasts, “their” pasts, through the connectedness of their own lives, young and now, and with our own collective interconnectivity no matter how disconnected the powers that be want us to live in their own chaos.

Reclaiming the Sacred, Reclaiming the World, Reclaiming Land, Language, History. Reclaiming Ourselves. This is the process of living in the world, living inside the hell hole of Capital, but being part of the world around us, understanding the history of so much dedigration, holding the amazing amounts of pain inflicted by governments, families and societies. Doing that is where story begins, even if it stays as foundational and never ends up in the actual literature of memoir writing.

I am teaching a memoir writing class, upcoming. Here on the Oregon Coast, during a time of the Omega-cron, under the gray clouds of the fear project of Capitalists and the Felons of Profits. It is a community education class, and I get a few shekels for the class of six currently signed up, right now. Below is an Op-Ed just published in the Local Rag, Newport News Times.

I have hitched my own writing to my own life, the journeys, the far off worlds in my mind tied to the walkabouts, the odd journeys I have undertaken to live in the world.

Here, “Bird Stamp,” a short story, but while made up, there is so much memory and memoir-like inflections. It’s won some awards. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Here’s the text from the old newspaper where I worked — Pacific Northwest Weekly Inlander. 

I am always collecting people, themes, their words, their lives, and that is through their rag-tag, sometimes, stories. Here at DV, I have had readers take the effort to send me a note, via email, sometimes in snailmail, about something I wrote that triggered their own push to tell, to story-tell. The emails have come from around this continent and the world. Seventeen years thus far.

Here is one that just came in:

“Naive Documentary (-ies) Makers Barely Scratch the Surface!”

Hey Friend! I used to live in Portland. I emailed you once. Thought we might meet up. Never happened. I’ve returned “home.” Frankfort KY. Trying an unlikely reconciliation with my brothers, both ‘trumpetateers.’ Oh well. It’s late. Very late. I’m 77. I’ve not got long, or at least not as long as I had. I haven’t been reading you recently. You lay it on thick, brother. If I may … today, though, I liked the catchy title and didn’t see your name on it. Read it though and thought: shit! this sounds like Paul. And there was your name at the bottom. Pure poetry. I thought hell this should be a pome–poem. You’re a cage rattler. Mine. I owe 1/4 million in student debt; declared bankruptcy 3 times and could another, but I’m so poor the debt collectors can’t seem to touch me (only in america!); a convicted felon (fighting with NYC cops back in the ’70s)–of course if I’d been black I’d be dead or … at least spent my suspended sentences on Rikers; jail bird, nonetheless: a year in military prison for refusing orders to the US war on Vietnam; a sight for sore eyes: a former transwoman–now a non-binary something or other; definetly a member of the 20%.

John

Ah-ah. The life captured in one paragraph, and if John was here and had the inkling, he’d be one hell of a student writer in the class, someone who could teach me a thing or two.

And, of course, how do we, the Americans, get those people like John above captured in the hearts and minds of us, the citizens, when the media is controlled by six companies, publishing is controlled by even foreign monopolies, and most movies every made now are perverted, broken down things, poor written, and right there at the warped end of things? People with a Hollywood or East Coast bias who see the John’s of the world as, well, useless, never want their real stories. Yet those stories are of us, the 80 percent, and need to be aired, read and discussed. Those elites deeming what is not of storytelling worth. Great survivors who might even not end up as minor characters set on a street, riffraff, homeless, poor and broken.

That is what Studs Terkel fought against, and he went into the lives of the people of his time, of his city, of this country.

That memoir writing is also couched in struggle, overcoming it, and in rare memoirs, not overcoming it. Anti-memoir memoir — fictionalized.

Memoirs are different from autobiographies because they are about specific moments in time instead of offering a look at a chronological period of time. Fictionalized memoirs are different from standard memoirs because of the inclusion of fiction or fictional writing techniques. If the names or places of a memoir are changed to protect those involved, then this would be classified as a fictionalized memoir.

+–+

I think we understand our own life experiences in narrative terms. If you consider that idea for a moment, we are walking novels. No one has a pure identity. Everyone has an identity made from everyone they’ve ever known and loved or hated, and from every experience they could process and withstand, happy or sad, arranged in memories, otherwise known as stories.

So writing my anti-memoir meant creating a composition and inventing narrative forms to convey some experiences from my life.

And writing a novel meant creating a composition and inventing narrative forms to convey some experiences—some imagined, some real—from life. The only difference involved the fact that some content doors remained closed in nonfiction, but even that’s a hoax. I opened them anyway.

I’m thrilled the two books can co-exist now. In some ways they complete one another. Fiction multiplies the possibilities of nonfiction. Nonfiction deeply informs the fiction writer’s desires and impulses and limitations. In a way, nonfiction is simply a snapshot of the edges around any given writer’s imagination. —   Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir The Chronology of Water,

My own story collection, fiction, is all about fusing memoir and new journalism with hard hitting fiction. Order it from Cirque Press — keep our press alive. At Cirque Press, you will see 28 books by writers, and many books are poetry collections and novels and some memoirs. All are tributes to finding self.

Building community is so important, especially at this time. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to publish with Cirque. You do so much more than publish books. You support your authors individually and collectively and work hard to create connection. Leah Stenson, author, Life Revisited

My work there, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam. Review here at DV by Linda Ford and Street Roots by Emily Green.

The art of remaking-retelling a story

Paul Haeder, Newport News Times, 1/19/22

The last few years on planet Earth have been pregnant ones: People facing existential crises and a world seemingly going to hell in a hand basket. SARS-CoV2 and lockdowns are SELCE’s in all our lives: significant emotional life-changing events!

As a writer on the coast, I’ve found subjects for a column, “Deep Dive – Go Beneath the Surface with Paul Haeder” (Oregon Coast Today) endless. We have deeply interesting people.

That’s my wiring. A young journalist of 17 who “hard-scrabbled” into desert haunts in Arizona and throughout Mexico, discovering people’s narratives — wherever they are in their proverbial walkabouts — highly compelling.

It’s a form of biographical parachuting, and a kind of thievery — entering people’s worlds, getting to know them fast and furiously, and then capturing those facts and memories in creative nonfiction.

I’ve been doing this stealing for almost 50 years. With that eclectic pedigree, I hope to see a few interested writers here in Lincoln County signing up for my community education class, Memoir Writing, at OCCC’s Waldport campus.

The title is just one stone in the cairn of stories I hope we as a class can share.

My first gig teaching the art of creative memoir writing occurred when I was young, 29, with the Center for Lifelong Learning at UT-El Paso. In that community/continuing education class, I helped shepherd amazing life forces of 15 students in the first session:

• a Dachau survivor who ended up in El Paso as a doctor;

• a former colonel in the Army who was in the Bataan Death March;

• a criminal defense attorney who defended rough dudes, including narcotraficantes along the U.S.-Mexico border;

• a female truck driver of over 50 years who saw all of the U.S., Canada and some of Mexico as a long-hauler;

• a young guy who won $1.5 million in a state lottery but ended up opening up two clinics in Juarez to treat the poor;

• a doctor who worked in Guatemala and El Salvador performing cleft palette operations pro bono.

We came together as survivors, and some of the better memoir and anti-memoir pieces flowed from regular folk: a farmer of chilies, a lady who raised seven kids who all went onto college, a construction company owner who learned how to read after he made his first million, at age 50.

For this Tuesday, 2 to 3:30 p.m. class, we will explore how people in this neck of the woods got here at the edge of the Cascadia Subduction Zone. I believe in the Mission Impossible opener as a frame for this laid-back class: Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to uncover some of the layers of your spiritual-intellectual-emotional-historical life onion.

I like what Lidia Yyuknavitch says about the process of writing self: “I think our identities — the ones we live in the real world — are really made partly from stories that we build up around ourselves, necessary fictions, so that we can bear the weight of our own lives. We like to call these ‘truths’ or ‘facts’ or ‘selves,’ but I maintain that they are fictions. Fictions for instance called ‘mother’ or ‘wife’ or ‘lover’ or ‘teacher’ or ‘writer.’”

For my premiere long-form column, Deep Dive, I went into the life and aspirations of a great white shark scientist who did open water research of these sharks in waters off South Africa, Dyer Island. Then, the column took off because, a) I was open to any sort of human being living in Lincoln County who had a story to tell. The stories came at me like a tsunami. Not all were of made-for-TV-movie intensity. However, the common theme in these more than 35 pieces is “perseverance under adversity.”

And, b), it takes time to listen in order to uncover. Carol Van Strum is another gem I wrote about — she fought the aerial spraying of herbicides in her Five Rivers’ area and wrote a book, “A Bitter Fog,” to capture this battle.

We will work on each student’s individual projects — some will want book length tell-alls, and others will want a life compressed into a few dozen pages. The best part of this memoir writing course is we will experiment.

There are other ways to skin a cat, so to speak. We can resist the universal desire to uncover a dirty pile of secrets. We can write with a level of frankness, and candidness.

That sort of writing can “welcome talk, but not cover all the personal details.”

The “I” in this form of expression is fluid: we have to discover ways to bring in the reader, and deliver the reader a conversation. Some in the class will want to capture a life SELCE. That’s fine. Others will want to explore the meaning of life through their own eyes.

This includes how we all “get through” by deploying universal truths. For some of us, we need to get that down on paper: an essay, fiction story, an entire book? The goal is the same — writing “self.”

Our mission is to share and wordsmith, so the class gets down to brass tacks — writing ourselves into something others might respond to positively and with a keen sense of their own lives.

For information, go to https://oregoncoast.edu/communityed

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

Isn’t it really puzzling that “a large portion of U.S. aid to Israel is classified”? — Grant F. Smith, “Ten ways the Israel lobby ‘moves’ America,” 7/25/2016

Israel’s Influence: Good or Bad for America? An analysis of the history, size, scope and activities of Israel affinity organizations and their increasingly negative—but little known—impact on all Americans.

Do a deep dive and look into all those upper echelon Admin folk, all of them, and their attitudes about people, us, the regular schmucks. Really, have the guts to parse into that. Billionaires in the shadows, and multimillionaires up front and center. The elite, the controllers, the gatekeepers, the amazing beautiful people, the moneyed and the influential. Ivy League, banking and Wall Street pedigrees, million dollar loans, free helping hand up to hedge funds, fiat money, houses, paid board memberships, speaking fees in thehundreds of thousands of dollars for each Power Point or TED Talk like Goldman Sachs wine and dine club.

Have you ever seen a pauper in administrations? Have there ever been poor people put on these committees? How many states utilize the voices of us, the 80 percent, in charrettes, committees, white papers, research tasks, meetings, sounding boards, public engagement workshops?

You ever going to see an amputee caused by, diabetes, with double jowls and threadbare clothes being interviewed by the stenographers of the rich, US mainstream-corporate media? Below, from Scheer Post, a reprinted story on this guy. Not the one who is the vampire asleep to the right. We are talking about the guy with the curly hair. Another worthless human. But, he is ruling the roost and running society into the gutter, in his own specialized way. He’d never go toe to toe with anyone who might question the entire drama of the planned pandemic and the suicidal responses by everyone making a buck off the show. EVERYONE. Conflict of Interest is a requirement for the job in DC!

Biden Urged to Fire Covid Response Chief Over ‘Damning’ Failures

Zients was born in Washington, D.C. and raised in Kensington, Maryland. His family is Jewish. Zients graduated from the St. Albans School prep school in 1984 and received a degree in political science from Duke University, graduating summa cum laude in 1988

CDC freak?

Walensky was born Rochelle Paula Bersoff in Peabody, Massachusetts, to Edward Bersoff and Carol Bersoff-Bernstein, a Jewish family. She was raised in Potomac, Maryland.

Vet science guy who is head of Pfizer —

Bourla was born and raised in Thessaloniki, Greece. His parents, who were Sephardi Jews, were among the 2,000 of 50,000 Jews in Thessaloniki to survive the Holocaust; According to Bourla, his mother was allegedly minutes away from execution by firing squad when she was spared via a ransom paid to a Nazi Party official by her non-Jewish brother-in-law, while his father happened to be out of the Jewish ghetto when the residents were taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp and went into hiding, never to see his parents again.

Then, the disasterous war mongers —

Blinken was born on April 16, 1962, in Yonkers, New York, to Jewish parents, Judith (Frehm) and Donald M. Blinken, who later served as U.S. Ambassador to Hungary. His maternal grandparents were Hungarian Jews. Blinken’s uncle, Alan Blinken, served as the American ambassador to Belgium. His paternal grandfather, Maurice Henry Blinken, was an early backer of Israel who studied its economic viability, and his great-grandfather was Meir Blinken, a Yiddish writer.

Sherman was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to a Jewish family. Her father, Malcolm Sherman, was a Marine originally from Philadelphia. While she was in elementary school, her family moved to Pikesville, Maryland, and Sherman attended Pikesville High School. Sherman attended Smith College from 1967 to 1969, and graduated from Boston University in 1971 in the field of sociology and urban studies. In 1976, she earned a master’s degree in social work from the University of Maryland. She subsequently began her career as a social worker, before going into politics.

Even Kamala Harris, still, with these elites discussing her marriage — from Jerusalem Post: It is not surprising that the Jewish community is excited to be represented on the Biden-Harris ticket. Political leanings of the community aside, Kamala Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, is a member of the tribe, and two of Joe Biden’s children are married to someone who is Jewish.

But sadly, the Jewish community is a bit selective in celebrating interfaith marriage. If it brings us a Jewish second gentleman, we will cheer. But interfaith marriage is still taboo to many, and an Orthodox or Conservative rabbi would not have been allowed to preside over the Harris and Emhoff wedding.

American Jews want to celebrate the Jewish ties of any famous person while still discriminating against the relationships that tie these individuals to the Jewish community.

J Post article.

A tribe indeed, according the WikiPedia page (referrency the above early life bios), and then the JP! What do people’s families and educations and influences and religious and economic narratives and tribes have to do with their worldview? Interesting! Jewish newspapers in Israel highlighting, well, their tribe’s participation in Criminal Capitalism — Jewish Members of the 117th Congress

1. White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain
2. Secretary of State Antony Blinken
3. Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen
4. US Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides
5. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas
6. Member of Council of Economic Advisers Jared Bernstein
7. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry/Cohen
8. COVID-19 Czar Jeff Zients
9. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky
10. US Attorney General Merrick Garland
11. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines
12. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Ruth Sherman
13. Science and Technology Adviser Eric Lander
14. Deputy National Security Advisor Ann Neuberger
15. Deputy CIA Director David Cohen
16. Deputy Health Secretary Rachel Levine
17. US Special Representative for Iran Robert Malley
18. Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff
19. Thomas Nides likely to be US ambassador to Israel,

Biden says —

“They will tell me what I need to know, not what I want to know.” They. Who are they, the big they, the tribe of “they,” or the elite “they,” or those who would bow and kneel to the big war criminal deluxe, Kissinger? That is certainly emblematic of how rotten the spines are in the ruling class (sic). One tribe, and it maybe Catholic, or Jewish, bringing into the fold the others. The Others from Another Mother!

I am always intrigued by the press and the leaders in the generalized Jewish community who make sure to point out the who’s who in the Jewish “tribe” as they all it. Hollywood, medicine, physics, finance, money. Here, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, headline — Here are the 37 Jewish members of Congress

Michael Bennet, Colorado
Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut
Ben Cardin, Maryland
Dianne Feinstein, California
Jon Ossoff, Georgia (freshman)
Jacky Rosen, Nevada
Bernie Sanders, Vermont
Brian Schatz, Hawaii
Charles Schumer, New York
Ron Wyden, Oregon
Jake Auchincloss,
Massachusetts
Suzanne Bonamici, Oregon
David Cicilline, Rhode Island
Steve Cohen, Tennessee
Ted Deutch, Florida
Lois Frankel, Florida
Josh Gottheimer, New Jersey
Sara Jacobs, California
David Kustoff, Tennessee
Andy Levin, Michigan
Mike Levin, California
Alan Lowenthal, California
Elaine Luria, Virginia
Kathy Manning, North Carolina
Jerry Nadler, New York
Dean Phillips, Minnesota
Jamie Raskin, Maryland
Jan Schakowsky, Illinois
Adam Schiff, California
Brad Schneider, Illinois
Kim Schrier, Washington
Brad Sherman, California
Elissa Slotkin, Michigan
Debbie Wasserman
Schultz, Florida
Susan Wild, Pennsylvania
John Yarmuth, Kentucky

And, another fine mess we are in, Olly — A who’s who of the powerful, the Peter Principle pirates, the reverse social Darwinism befefactors, and the criminals now being preened as statesmen and heroes. One guy — the influencer war criminal:

Welcoming War Crimes: The Normalization of Henry Kissinger

On Thursday February 2nd, the Institute of Politics will host “A Conversation with Henry Kissinger.” On its website, the IOP describes the controversial statesman with two titles:

“Henry A. Kissinger

Chairman, Kissinger Associates, Inc.

56th United States Secretary of State”

They neglect a third, more accurate label: War Criminal.

During his brief tenure at the forefront of U.S. foreign policy, Kissinger got a lot done. In his first two years in office, he helped Richard Nixon sabotage Vietnamese peace talks for his own political gain, expanded that war into Laos and Cambodia (the destabilizing effects of which would pave the way for the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the death of up to two million people), and advocated the bombing of, in his own words, “anything that moves.”

In 1971, Kissinger backed Pakistan in its war against Bangladesh despite evidence of massacre and rape. In ‘73, he orchestrated a military coup against the democratically elected Allende regime of Chile, installing in its stead the violently oppressive Pinochet dictatorship. And in ‘75, the then-Secretary of State lent his tacit support to President Suharto of Indonesia―himself a despot already responsible for the mass killings of hundreds of thousands―in the deadly conquest of East Timor. Kissinger himself, in proposing an intervention in Cyprus, summed up his philosophy best: “The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.”

Appalling though this all may be, Kissinger’s most enduring legacy is subtler in its malignance. The foreign policy of Henry Kissinger is defined, above all, by an utter contempt for human life and absolute pursuit of “American interests.” For every one of Kissinger’s crimes that goes unpunished and for every bit of praise he receives, the belief that the United States can do whatever it wants with the rest of the world is further concretized. Behind every thoughtless, disastrous intervention since then―behind the mujahideen and the Contras, behind the Iraq war and the El Mozote Massacre―is the work of Henry Kissinger.

When the IOP invites Henry Kissinger to the Harvard Kennedy School with no representation of opposition views, they are doing more than “hosting a conversation.” They are providing a platform for the insidious belief that the lives of others, particularly those of poor people of color in the “developing” world, are mere pawns in the pursuit of American ends. Like telling a racist joke, the harm of this “conversation” is not merely in the act itself, but also in the seeds that it sows in our cultural consciousness―the legitimization that it confers.

end quote!

This never ends, these remade war criminals, these banking thieves, these Panama Papers thieves of the ultimate category — national killers.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s remarks about Israel’s dominance of big data, connectivity and artificial intelligence: “With the click of a button, you can bring down nations to their knees very rapidly… Because every system can be hacked”! PM Netanyahu’s Remarks at the Cyber-Tech Conference

“Well here is another fine mess you to me into!”

Ahh, the tribe of the Ivy League, the Council on Foreign Affairs, Davos, Alpine Institute, World Economic Forume, Skull and Bones Club, Bilderberg, et al.

There can be no other work in journalism than to uncover who is in control, and who controls the controllers. No other way to say this, but we need to not have this softball childish celebrity Q & A or whitewashing crap that has turned into celebrity TV-Cable mush, or the comics making idiotic journalistic attempts at commentary. We need these people exposed, and we need to have the guts to look into their paymasters, their spying armies, and if they are proud of their Catholic roots, their Harvard sheepskin, their rugby pals down under, their own upbringings and family lines and ties. Then we need to get at them, and bring them down, by any means necessary. Cuz whitey’s not just on the moon, but in the ether, inside nanochips, going to Mars, sinking digital teeth into everything, into all manner of humanity. Whitey is Going Transhuman, and Whitey on the Moon aint nothing like Whitey in your Brain, in your Chip, in your blood!

W.E.B. DuBois : ‘To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.’

This documentary is not news, and then, of course, it’s Trump in office blather, too. As if UK, Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Spain, Portugal are havens for social and people and environmental justice. How Poor People Survive in the USA — vapid.

The documentarian is done, really, through the auspices of Euro trash context, POV, narrative framing. Contrarily, you have to be in the mix, in the middle, from the chambers of power, schools, colleges, social work, to real journalism, and into the mess personally, with daily fear of losing the job and seeing savings go go go. That is the slippage in the death spiral of USA.

This is a Reservation/Rez society. Boarding School Society. Celebrity Cults. The big time military propaganda operation going back 70 years until it’s embedded in every system. Confusion. Mystical hatred/subservience while praying for that blue-eyed, blond hippie Jesus.

Dirt poor, and loving Trump.

College student loans at $100K ,and loving AOC and Biden.

The enemy for me, and I’d say for 80 percent of USA, is that grouping — colonized Eichmann’s, the upper classes, the dream hoarders, the intelligence/knowledge workers, the higher ups in education-medicine-incarceration-pharma-law-energy-banking-data collecting-surveillance-real estate-Chamber of Commerce-AI-science-ag-retail-logistics-transportation, and then, MIC, congressional military complex. Join the mercenary forces, and lucky you, get your teeth pulled and a GI Bill.

Bullshit.

Ahh, my old platform to rail against the system — LA Progressive! Terminal Velocity no More! Or here! Paul Haeder. I’ve asked why the stuff I send and publish elsewhere is no longer getting up on LA Progressive. No answer!

Again, this documentary is broken (above), but that is documentary making, most times — focused, rarified, gatekeeping on steroids, with people on the projects not deep systems thinkers, and a willingness to leave out a lot.

Missing:

1. Tens of millions on the edge of the cliff of evictions, foreclosures, endless bad jobs, in the car or van, bunking up with family or friends, while working for middle managers who do not care, and the upper management and the billionaires and millionaires who are sociopaths.
2. Inflammation — Capitalism is a complete, holistic, top-down disease, creating inflammation in the veins, brain, organs, belly. But worse — cuts the thinking process, deforms the mutual aid ethos, destroys collective action, kills the ability to squat and reappropriate wealth, land, whatever.
3. The rat race of those with a roof over their heads that continue to fuel prescriptions, Disneyland la-la-land thinking, buy-buy-buy, watching sports-stars-musicians, I got mine, you better fight to get yours
4. This country, USA, is the rotting roots and DNA of Europe, of that narrator above. These are not real people, and they are so sculpted in news speak, in privilege.
5. This documentary doesn’t get to the fabric of colonization of cities, schools, the bullshit of privatization, and this wacky religious and wacky elitist country of Indian Removal, Enslavement then and now, and Nomadlands.
6. Americans are children, and that is thanks ton the Media, the Boss, foolish k-6 education, and, well, we are here now, 355 million, and this is pre-covid crazies.

Oh, hell, the list is a thousand points long: Stan Brock, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. This is one fellow, and great heart, but in a world of Space Suits, Billionaires and Yachts, Lies Casted in Media-Banking-Digitalization, well, one guy. “He founded Remote Area Medical in 1985 to give people in need essential health care. Since then, RAM has provided free dental, vision and basic health care to more than 740,000 people.”

Here, the documentary on RAM —

During the U.S. debate about healthcare reform, the media reporters and news crews and filmmakers failed to put a human face on what it means to not have access to healthcare. Remote Area Medical fills that gap; it is a film about people, not policy. Focusing on a single three-day clinic held in the Bristol Motor Speedway in Tennessee, Remote Area Medical affords us an insider’s perspective on the ebb and flow of the event, from the tense 3:30 a.m. ticket distribution that determines who gets seen to the routine check-ups that take dramatic turns for the worse, to the risky means to which some patients resort for pain relief. We meet a doctor who also drives an 18-wheeler, a denture maker who moonlights as a jeweler, and the organization’s founder, Stan Brock, who first imagined Remote Area Medical while living as a cowboy in the Amazon rainforest, hundreds of miles from the nearest doctor. But it is the extraordinary stories of the patients, desperate for medical attention, that create a lasting impression about the state of modern health care in America.

This can’t be ramped up, taken to the ultimate level? It’s socialism, brothers and sisters, the only way. Forget the hate that the right and the middle of the road have against socialism. They will ply the words of “one world government.” Or, the “government controlling us.” They will talk about Universal Basic Income. They will say it is brainwashing, and communism, and, well, that socialism means all rights are taken, managed, given to and taken away by some master groups of dictators. Again, bullshit brainwashing against the real solution. Socialism.

That is, you know, vaccine passport, no. But, there is no Forced Healthcare for All. No, Take Over the Empty Lots and Buildings for Massive Rehousing for All in Need. No guerrilla farming, nothing. Because, well, Capitalism is All about “We are all champions. We are all the New Eve and Adam.” This exceptionalism is what has detroyed many in the 80 percent. Many. They will work and think and do things against their own well-being. When you are a lost dog in this country, a limping stray, a hungry desperate pooch, well, you will jump to the master, run for the beasts of slapping, kicking, yelling, and hitting.

Under the table, curled up, belly and organs exposed as its tail is between the legs.

Inflammed —

Moreover, they point out how modern medicine has often missed these necessary connections—to our global detriment. What is needed is “deep medicine,” which, according to the authors, “requires new cosmologies, ones that can braid our lives with the planet and the web of life around us.” 

Rupa Marya and Raj Patel spoke to YES! about the ravages of colonialist capitalism, the failures of modern medicine to treat them, and, most importantly, how a “deep medicine” approach can heal us all.

*This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Sonali Kolhatkar: Is the title of the book, Inflamed, a metaphor for what is happening to our planet and its living systems?

Rupa Marya: It’s not at all a metaphor. It’s a description of what’s happening inside of our bodies and around us on the planet and our societies. The inflammatory response is the body’s ancient evolutionarily conserved pathway to restoring its optimal working condition when it’s been thrown off by danger or damage or the threat of damage. (Source, Yes Magazine)

No jobs, no good jobs, decayed systems, penalties, bad credit, criminal offenses, drugs, booze, and bodies torn young with multiple chronic diseases, many many diseases.  

This is the system that the beautiful people in the sciences, in technology, in the Reset Star Chamber, all of those hoarding money and the opportunities, they want these people on UBI, held as data pools — body snatchers, mind snatchers, attention snatchers, activity snatchers, all part of mining people, putting us, them, the 80 percent, in the cloud, in algorithms, in data banks, all mashed up for social impact — do as we say, follow what we command, eat-drink-think like we say, and you will get the tokens, man, the money, the slice of a 200-square-foot-per-person habitat. No pets allowed. 

Yeah, my mother’s home country, and my grandparents emigration country, Canada. And, Yves’ piece, “Fighter Jets Useless against Real Security Threats.”\

“It’s never enough” said former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien about military spending. “They always want more.” (Jay Hill, in the House of Commons,  quoting then Prime Minister  Jean Chrétien from an article by Stephanie Rubec in the Ottawa Sun, October 20, 2003.)

Now, oh, $19 billion for these fighter-offensive jets, and that is for the paying out on the lot price, not the tens of thousands a day or month to keep them aloft.

I never believed the crap about Canada being the Hippie, Pacifist, Land of Peacemakers and Peaceniks. I have seen the Canadian military in several places, including Saudi Arabia, and I even was a college instructor at the NCO Academy in Texas where Canadians were in the program for their last Command Sgt. Major stripe.

But then, even those “follow the science” atrophysicists and space scientists are in the game for, well, money, making what they can because they can, and for, well, the military side of things.

Reading The Times of Israel featuring an American who ended up in Israel for 5 years, I have no problem seeing through the narrative of this hyper-intellegient guy who worked on the telescope to end all telescopes, James Webb — Space is changing. Webb is just the start, says ex-Israeli who was in from its dawn

This fellow is on a turbo charged pathway to militarize space — They are chauvanistic and driven by their own version of what the world needs. Space, commercialization of space. Tourism in Space. Alas, Internet of Things, Internet of Nanothings, Internet of Bodies and Brains. These guys do not see the intended and unintended consequences of their avocations and passions and lusts.

The next big leap, for me, is to think about how to leverage the emerging space infrastructure, stuff like Starship [SpaceX’s planned interplanetary rocket] or Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, which has a really large doubling or even tripling of fairing size, so you could launch major modules and very large mirrors. Those are game changers.

Or perhaps we could connect astronauts in a habitat in low Earth orbit to an orbital transfer vehicle to get out to L2.

There are all kinds of architectural paradigms we can envision for leveraging where we are today and where we see things headed that would be paradigm shifts.

Space has a bright future. (Former NASA engineer, Raytheon engineer, and, well, DARPA and Israel Space Agency executive Michael Kaplan)

He went to Israel because of his son’s leanings toward Christianity, a no-no for a Jew:

It was the fall of 2009. I’m living in Boulder, Colorado. The base of the Rocky Mountains is right outside my window. I moved here to work for Ball Aerospace. I left Ball and went to work for Boeing on planetary missions. Everything was great.

But my younger son was an undergraduate at the time and was getting interested in converting to Christianity. He’d gotten involved with a fraternity that was convincing him — he’s talking about messianic Judaism.

I asked friends what I can do to shake him up a bit. They said, “Take him to Israel.” I’d never been to Israel before. I’ve thought about it, but it was always either Israel or Yellowstone, Israel or the Grand Canyon. It never made it to number one on my list, which is probably true for most American Jews.

[Illustrative: North American Jewish immigrants to Israel arrive in a special flight on behalf of the Jewish Agency and the Nefesh B’Nefesh organization, at Ben Gurion airport in central Israel, on July 23, 2013. (Yossi Zeliger/Flash90)]

So I planned a trip. I talked to my rabbi and other people about how to have a spiritual, meaningful adventure. Their first advice was, “Don’t stay at hotels. Find rooms to rent in people’s houses. You’ll have more of a connection.”

I wanted to wake up the Jewish part of my son’s soul.

To make a long story short, it didn’t work on him, but it sure worked on me. I went home and friends said they’d felt a shift in me. I’m not religious but I’m spiritual. I didn’t know what aliya was. I met with my rabbi, and she said, “Oh, you’re going to make aliya.” I said, “I don’t know what that is, but I’m thinking of moving to Israel.”

This has become more and more the Jewish question, really. All those ISRAEL firsters wanting more land for the interlopers, Jews, in Palestine. And they are something else, the Zionists, that Nuclear Armed State. Something else.

Closer Scrutiny Reveals How Close To State Power Sacha Baron Cohen Really Is – – MintPress reviewed documents and spoke to a former CIA agent who worked with Sacha Baron Cohen to reveal how the famed actor worked with the national security state to sell America’s wars.

Israel’s New Air Force Head Talks Scared and Tough on Iran: He Has Little Reason to be Either — Two things prevent an all-out war between Israel and Iran. The first is that Israel knows that attacking Iran will end in a total Israeli defeat. The second is Iran’s exercise of discipline in the face of ongoing threats by both the U.S. and Israel. by Miko Peled

There are connections, here, to the elites, the chosen ones, the Israelites, the American Jews, the power chambers, all the mess that is control, fewer and fewer powerful controlling the scene, the banking, the Internet of Things, AI, space, medicine, pharma, and, well, entertainment. We talk about the Palestine Question. We talk about the Black Question. The Undocumented Immigrant Question. The Iranian Question. The Chinese Question? The Russian Question? Catholic Question. The Priest Question? But when we talk about the Israel Question, or, in the case of Israel, the Jewish-First Question, well, we get flummoxed as haters, as antisemites.

It is interesting to see the interconnections, the connectivity, the realm of the land in the areas of finance, investing, computing, AI, surveillence, and, well, power. ns

It is an upside down world, where seeking some sort of peek behind the curtain of tribalism, those tribal roots, that becomes verboten.

These are vital tasks, getting under the skin of the dark forces afoot to control humanity. And, I know, that sounds so hyperbolic, but it isn’t: the elites are investing in soul mining, mind crafting, data thievry, body snatching. Really — Some interesting history here:

In 1493 Pope Alexander VI issued a Papal Bull of Demarcation that split rights to claim the new world between Spain and Portugal. That agreement was revised by the Treaty of Tordesillas the following year, pushing the pole-to-pole meridian further west to 370 leagues beyond the Cape Verde Islands.  That adjustment meant Portugal was entitled by Papal decree to dominate and colonize lands discovered by Pedro Alvarez Cabral six years later, those became the nation of Brazil.

Catholics weren’t the only Europeans enriched by the abundance wrested from indigenous lands, Jewish people benefitted as well. Infrastructure investments that for centuries were directed into minerals and agricultural products are today being applied to the capture of behavioral data for human capital valuation. The colonial interests that built Brazil’s sugar empire are again on the scene, which is not surprising given that communities of faith are hubs for social service delivery. For that reason, they are poised to serve as ready-made channels through which global capital can bring industrial-level poverty management to scale. The sugar connection interests me, because I explored the idea of hypothecation and mortgaged human life and data collection in the so-called “community school” model in the context of sugar refineries in a post a wrote a few years back.

Sir Ronald Cohen is a key figure in global impact investing. A Harvard MBA and the father of British venture capital, Cohen fled to the UK with his family from Egypt in the 1950s. He is Jewish, in fact his wife’s now deceased father was Yossi Harel of the Exodus, but moves fluidly among all circles in his role conducting the symphony of the global technocratic social impact transition. Cohen has appeared at the Vatican’s social impact conferences as well as conferences on Jewish venture philanthropy at Fordham University in New York. Ronald Cohen collaborates with Omidyar Network, an organization working on many fronts to remake Brazil as a data-driven society suited to the global impact economy.

Again, Cohen, The Comic —

Coming from one of England’s most notable families, the young Sacha was privately educated at a number of schools in the southeast of the country before going on to study history with a focus on antisemitism at Cambridge University. Other family members – who have chosen distinct spelling for their surname – include Professor of Developmental Psychology at Cambridge Simon Baron-Cohen, playwright Dan Baron-Cohen, filmmaker Ash Baron-Cohen, and composer Erran Baron Cohen.

Even from an early age, Sacha was reportedly obsessed with the Jewish state. “He was very Zionist, very involved in Habo,” recalled one friend, referring to Habonim Dror, a left-wing Zionist group of which he was a member. Others remembered him as “a very nerdy, very funny, Israel-oriented guy” who went to live on a kibbutz in his youth. He appears to idolize Shimon Peres, traveling to meet him in 2012 and sharing quotes from the former Israeli president on his social media accounts. Peres, of course, oversaw the genocide of Palestinians in 1948, attempted to sell nuclear weapons to Apartheid South Africa, and carried out the ethnic cleansing of the Galilee region.

The pro-Israel propaganda was turned up to 11, however, in “The Spy,” a 2019 miniseries drama Baron Cohen produced himself and played the title character. Directed by former IDF paratrooper Gideon Raff, “The Spy” lionizes Mossad agent Eli Cohen, who goes deep undercover, embedding himself in Syrian high society, providing intelligence to the Jewish state crucial for its victory in the 1967 Six Day War against its neighbors. To this day, Israel illegally occupies Syrian and Palestinian land captured in 1967.

The series is a relentless celebration of Mossad and Israel, contrasting them with the barbarity of their neighbors. As The Daily Dot’s review of the show commented, the overriding message was “Cohen good/Syrians evil.” The Washington Post also noted that “The Spy” was a central part of a wider Mossad recruitment drive. Eli Cohen was a real historical figure and a hero to many of the most passionate Zionists. Sacha remarked that he sees himself in Eli and claimed that what they do is rather similar. (Source)

Will any of these people, goyim or Jew, Muslim or Hindu, any of them, stop the madness of militarism and oppression and the dirty dealings of a Global-in-scale Mafia? Money hoarding? Planetary destruction?

And then, there is Jon Leibowitz, err, Stewart —

Speaking with The Problem staff writers, Jay Jurden and Henrik Blix, on the Dec. 1 podcast, Stewart called their attention to the appearance of the goblins who run the Wizarding World’s leading financial institution, the Gringotts Wizarding Bank. “Talking to people, I was like … ‘Do you know what those folks that run the bank are? Jews!’ … That’s a caricature of a Jew from an antisemitic piece of literature and J.K. Rowling looked at that and went, ‘Can we get these guys to run our bank?'” 

Stewart was specifically referring to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious antisemitic text that dates back to the early 20th century, and features flagrantly offensive Jewish caricatures that are still glimpsed in racist propaganda today. Remembering his experience watching the Harry Potter films in theaters, Stewart says he was shocked to recognize similar imagery in a major studio blockbuster. 

“It was one of those things where I saw it on the screen, and I was expecting the crowd to be like ‘Holy s***, she did not — in a wizarding world — just throw Jews in there to run the f****** underground bank,'” Stewart said. “And everybody was just like: ‘Wizards!'” 

In his Twitter thread, Shimunov shared the scene that Stewart may have been referencing, which appeared in the film franchise’s first installment, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, directed by Chris Columbus. He also called attention to the “Jewish stars” that allegedly appear at the bank in the first film and were left out of future installments. 

But then Leibowitz steps back on his yammering about antisemitism — Jon Stewart Says J.K. Rowling Is Not Anti-Semitic After ‘Harry Potter’ Comments Go Viral

CRUCIAL QUOTE

Stewart said Wednesday, “I do not think J.K. Rowling is anti-Semitic. I did not accuse her of being anti-Semitic. I do not think that the Harry Potter movies are anti-Semitic.”

TANGENT

Rowling, who Forbes ranked as the world’s second-highest paid author in 2020 with $60 million in earnings over the previous 12 months, has faced criticism for comments denounced by some as transphobic. The British author will not appear on the upcoming HBO Max special commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Harry Potter movie franchise’s debut, believed by some to be related to the franchise’s three main actors speaking out against Rowling’s statements on transgender people.

So here we are, stuck in this upside down world, of transgender comments blacklisting RK Rowling, and then, the Entertainment Giant Jon Leibowitz, able to yammer about his people, and then, the damage is done. Apology? It’s all part of the marketing of Jon Leibowitz Stewart.

Blasting into space, a race away from dealing with humanity’s, ecology’s, cultures’ problems. Jokes and military. Hollywood and CIA. What a lovely combo.

And here is the verbiage —

“The influencers featured include groundbreaking roboticists, founders of high-tech companies and medical experts. They are CEOs, professors, and astronauts, working to improve our world, from building nanostructures to forging pathways to the stars. These women steer the course of engineering toward far-reaching and exciting horizons. They are at the top of the engineering field today, as leaders and innovators; transforming the profession and inspiring future engineering students.”

This is the new normal in S.T.E.M. these X & X chromosome warriors are on the move to supplant civil liberties, supplant mother nature, supplant privacy laws, to do the work of the star chamber elites. Beware of this big push, for Mothers and Females working on AI, this moral economy. Beware.

Track and Trace — for financial markets.

Investing in tracking feces, tracking health, tracking the vaccine folk.

Blockchain, track and trace, trace and tokenize, track and trace and survellience data gathering tools.

From Alison McDowell —

While society was marching through its manufactured hysteria, we have James Bullard, CEO of the St. Louis Federal Reserve, telling CBS “Face the Nation” viewers that the economy will be there for them after it’s all over, but we should anticipate a world where universal daily testing is the norm. He doesn’t say “in-home” tests, but that is clearly the plan. Now we have dozens of app / QR enabled home “testing” kits. We know that based on the centrality of the Internet of Bodies to the Fourth Industrial Revolution this will evolve into biosensors data-mining our bodily fluids from swabs, finger pricks, and eventually smart toilets. I encourage you to spend some time going through the website of the Toilet Board Coalition, launched in 2015. You’ll learn a lot about the “sanitation economy” and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. (Source – “The US Federal Reserve Told Us in April 2020: Expect Universal Daily Testing If You Want to Participate in Society”)

Oh, Canada, err, GulagKlanada —

“You and I, as citizens of Canada, have the right to travel anywhere in Canada, and even leave Canada. That’s a right! Enshrined in the supreme law of Canada,” explained Peckford. “It’s amazing when you look at what’s going on now to think, that the government would even attempt to violate these things.” — The last surviving architect of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms condemned the “callous” and “unconstitutional” abuses of the 1982 Charter by Canadian governments in the name of the so-called COVID pandemic. Brian Peckford, the former premier of Newfoundland, spoke out strongly against the transgressions performed against each citizen’s Charter rights via vaccine mandates and other COVID-related measures, in a video seminar hosted by pro-freedom group Action4Canada Wednesday evening.

Remember how enthusiastic those parents were in the 1990s onward for thos robotics challenges for seventh graders? Oh, the Dystopia:

So, then, now, 2022, we are deep into the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and we are nothing more than dirty species, useless breathers, breeders, eaters, defecating souls, terrible things, but wait? There’s oil in those bodies. Data. Digital gold. Amazing, the rapidity of this AI War on humanity, and nature.

Our food chain —

Above the fold of Symbotic’s website, the trademarked phrase “reinvent the warehouse, reimagine the supply chain” greets visitors. The robotics software company just completed a merger with a special purpose acquisition vehicle (SPV) created by Softbank to take it public in a $5.5 billion deal with Walmart, which partnered with Rick Cohen’s technology side business to roll out an “Industry-Leading Supply Chain Automation System” in July.

Born into the grocery business fortune established in 1918 by his grandfather, Israel, the third generation food distribution magnate is the sole proprietor of C&S Wholesale Grocers Inc. – the largest wholesale grocery supplier in the world. Described as “the biggest company no one has ever heard of”, C&S presides over one of the single most important links in the global supply chain, distributing virtually everything found in your supermarket aisles to more than 7,700 stores through its 49 distribution centers across the country. 

Cohen keeps a very low profile. C&S doesn’t even put the company logo on its trucks and despite being one of the richest men in the world, he is usually left out of the wealth ranking lists put out by publications like Forbes. The last time any details about his personal fortune made it into the news back in 2013, his net worth was calculated at $11.2 billion. (Source)

And so here we are, first, vaccine passports, then the health data of billions of people, and that is the kernel of these fascists’ goal to scale up everything on the daashboard, the Internet of Things, Internet of Bodies, with the ultimate goald of financialization of the body x 7.2 billion x trillions of data bits. This is the happiness AI will give us — How (Artificial) Intelligence Will Lead to Our Happiness

From SoftBank, which is No Country-World for Unvaccinated/Unlinked. SoftBank.

Artificial intelligence is transforming every business, every aspect of our lives in much the same way the internet has over the past 25 years. And like the internet, AI is important not only on its own but also for how it enables so many other technologies. The centrality of AI to so many other technologies is why SoftBank Group Corp. (SBG) has made AI the core of its investment philosophy, including its strategy around the COVID-19 pandemic.

The pandemic has cast light on some of the needs that AI can help address. The pandemic has also sped up digitization and adoption of new technologies. For example, researchers around the world used AI to analyze data, significantly shortening design cycles for vaccine development. AI is being used in other areas of medicine, too, such as to find new treatments and speed up diagnoses for cancer. It can also improve the administrative side of healthcare by automating tasks, providing chatbots to help patients stay on track with medications or regimens, or getting information to doctors faster. It’s changes like these that SBG is working to accelerate.

SO, those Crytp Corrals! The Best Intentions of Sir Ronald Cohen: Building the Crypto-Corrals of Social Investment

And, finally, leaping from S.T.E.M. leaders, to the big picture, this one should take you time to read and to make the connections of how far back this concept of human control, human capitalization, human bioterror goes. On Cyberpunk, Sumer, Synagogues and Vending Machine Government

Institutionalized faith traditions can be viewed as among the oldest forms of “programming:” from chants to tablets to books to televangelism and now AI as intercessor between humans and their creator. Neal Stephenson’s 1992 cyberpunk novel SnowCrash, the book that coined the term Metaverse and brought the idea of avatars into popular use, goes into this concept in some detail. The plot revolves around a powerful Texan, L. Bob Rife, who made a fortune in telecommunications and intends to take hold of the consciousness of the world through faith-based viral programming.

At the core of the novel is the nam-shub of Enki, a Sumerian incantation with magical force. According to legend, the trickster Enki, god of water and creation, let a mind virus loose on humanity. Before that time, all beings of the universe shared a common language. When the nam-shub came into the world that universal language was lost, like the Tower of Babel. Also lost was the spiritual programming that came through Asherah, one of the three goddess of the Canaanites and mother of all living things whose worship was closely associated with trees and wooded groves. Humanity was forced to develop its own intellect and capacities beyond what was offered by Asherah through the priests. (Source)

What does this all mean, this going back four thousand or more years to bring us up to speed on how Mossad and Jewish elites and Catholics and the like are ramping up control of the sheep, or cattle? Minds and bodies remade for militarizing thinking, being, nature. Yes, it seems like the good intentions of healing poverty, sickeness and environmental degradation, but it is not! Again, a very narrow group of people — billionaires, millionaires — are deciding the fate of our own spiritual reckoning, our physical and biological movements. This was anticipated a long time ago, and a guy like SnowCrush cyberpunk novelist Neal Stephenson seems surprised his Dystopia was taken to heart and taken as a template for things to come. That was 1992 — But now? It’s all about millions. Movies. Speilberg, whomever. He’s just another pawn.

Way back in 1992, author Neal Stephenson published his breakthrough novel, Snow Crash, a cyberpunk exploration of then-futuristic technologies: mobile computing, virtual reality, wireless Internet, digital currency, smartphones, and augmented-reality headsets. The book famously opens with a breakneck car chase as the main character, Hiro Protagonist (it’s something of a satire), races to deliver a pizza on time. It’s a literal life-or-death scene as our harried gig-economy driver races his GPS-enabled electric car through the streets of Los Angeles before he runs out the clock and risks angering the mob. TaskRabbit “independent contractors” can surely relate.

Twenty-five years later, Stephenson’s cult classic has become canon in Silicon Valley, where a host of engineers, entrepreneurs, futurists, and assorted computer geeks (including Amazon C.E.O. Jeff Bezos) still revere Snow Crash as a remarkably prescient vision of today’s tech landscape. Among the the more prophetic inventions in the book is something Stephenson called “the Metaverse”—the same sort of wireless, online virtual-reality experience that Facebook, Google, Samsung, and practically every other major tech company are now competing to commercialize.

In an interview, Stephenson told Vanity Fair that he was just “making shit up.” But the Metaverse isn’t the only element of Snow Crash that has earned him a reputation as a tech Nostradamus. He’s credited with predicting everything from our addiction to portable technology to the digitization of, well, everything, and you can thank him, not James Cameron, for bringing the Hindu concept of “avatar” into the everyday language. Google Earth designer Avi Bar-Zeev has said he was inspired by Stephenson’s ideas, and even tried to get the author to visit his office when he was working on Keyhole, an app suite that later served as a basis for Google’s mapping technology. “He wasn’t interested in visiting Keyhole, or didn’t have time. My best guess is that he was somewhat tired of hearing us engineering geeks rave about Snow Crash as a grand vision for the future. That may have something to do with Snow Crash being a dystopian vision.”

Dystopian or no, Stephenson’s vision of the future is almost here, and at least one tech company virtual-reality start-up Magic Leap, has snapped up Stephenson in an official capacity—he became its Chief Futurist in 2014. Here, with the benefit of 25 years of hindsight, Stephenson talked to the Hive about the differences between augmented and virtual reality, how to create a convincing Metaverse, and why social media is driving us apart.

And, of course, Vanity Fair, another pawn reader, and never ever take it to the next level. Confront this guy with his milquetoast responses. Ahh, the hipsters — “Dystopian or no . . . he talked about the differences between augmented and virtual reality, how to creat a convincing Metavers and why social media is driving us apart.” These guys are not in the biz to do anything but what, write, fictionalize? Nah, he is Chief Futurist of 2014. He is the slippery conduit for what has been taken place. And, alas, he did not build the systems we are now at — fingerprint toilets tracking your every biological dump — but he will not speak out against these wonder boys and girls. He just accepts this as progress.

Shit!!

Of course, this is the CoV2 OmegaCron test. This is the test that will determine how many Twinkies gulped, how many cigs smoked, how much bad this or that is going into your body. And the data? Gold, digital gold man!

These are snooping, snitching, massive canceling, censorious times.

I just talked with a friend who is in San Francisco who has been working hard as a science teacher. He has opened up the curriculum, has worked to be in his school’s union and he has just gotten married. That’s 55, now, and he has to step down from teaching since the school teacher mandates for California are going into effect Jan. 4 or thereabouts.

He might be against mandates because a mandate is oppressive, a dead-end to critical thinking, critical engagement. The mandates, the masking, the social distancing, the forced PCR tests, the constant fear-fear-fear. He sees what this has done to teaching, teachers, students and staff.

But the cat is out of the bag, because the National Union and his state union all are on the same sheet of Moderna-Pfizer-Fauci music. For a science nerd, someone who ended up in physics at Harvard, who has undertaken teaching high school students science, including physics, well having a one size fits all formula,  without a scientific robust challenge to any theory, sticks in his craw.

Criminalizing thought, that’s what this Planned Pandemic is about: no pushback. We have talked, and I have been the liberal arts dude, with some notion that critical thinking can only be gained from liberal arts within the system of education. STEM is fine, but not in a vaccum. How we got here, today, how we are products of the history of everything.

Here, Hedges and Lowkey, and I am not sure of Hedges’ position on the vaccination mandates, and Lowkey, well, who knows. But the interview is powerful in that both talk about the prison industrial complext, and about education, and about deep thinking, truly. Literacy beyond being a serf of the ruling class and the warehouse employment class system.

Education as a key component of resistence.  Resistence and pushing back on the corporate, elite paradigms. And some of those elites and oppressive paradigms are in academe/academia.

The discussion of topics in science is also something we talked about, how there are off-limits discussion, and we talked about how teachers in the old days, if they were valuable and valient and honorable and truly mentors, that they were honored. That students and parents looked at teachers as guides, as facilitators of inquiry, learning. Showing the stepping stones to life long learning. As elements in the pathway from youth to participatory democracy. Giving an open hand to youth as a place of dissident thinking.

But the pressure from this gentleman’s school district, the union, the honchos, is to vax up, mask up, and booster up. Schools, where the least vulnerable are being forced to take not one, not two, but many shots in this grand experiment of the SARS-MERS-CoV2-DARPA kind.

As if refusing to get a vaccination, when he is healthy, and capable of doing his own health screens at home. Imagine, how much the landscape of the Delta, Omicron and now Omega-crons have changed. How it is now a cold, or where oh where do the variants go? The seesaw, yo-yo, 180-degree turnaround of the science. Follow the science.

And he is not going to be forced to vax. And, his 20 years teaching in public school is now ended. i am not sure how much he gets from the 20 year “pension/retirement,” but he state’s it’s like collecting his unemployment. He has just taken a job as a very very small school.

Charter school A tuition freen charter school covering 7th and 8th grade. Two hundred students. Mostly African-American and Latinx youth. And, my friend says, right now, there is a don’t ask, don’t tell approach to Corona Madness.

You know, no mask mandates, but option. No tracking of health records. No mandates for jabs.

Yet. This is Dec. 30, 2021. The courts have ruled against workers, and the mandates for businesses in places like WA, OR and CA are about to go wide and far. So, he is now ending his public education career.

Newly married, my friend is thinking that he is only biding his time. That the charter school, private, with parents and youth, BIPOC, and in liberal (sic) San Fran-Oakland area will be subject to the mandates.

He tought he’s be retiring at 62 with a semi-decent pension. He doesn’t want to leave the Bay area because he has to. He knows the clock is ticking. He talks of creating a pod of other like-minded teachers to open up a free school. Tutoring.

He knows that I look at things asymetrically. That the reality is this is a universal vaccination, testing, digital dashboard (health, banking, jobs, education, purchases, etc)  future. You can’t get a job without being a member of the test-shot-record-big data frame. No subsidized housing without test-shot-record-big data. Proof of life, test-shot-record-big data frame, for your college course. This proof of compliance, test-shot-record-big data frame, for getting health insurance. Move this test-shot-record-big data frame to car insurance, even getting a driver’s license. Social seruit? Proof of this test-shot-record-big data cohersion compliance.

And, what if these smart students ask my smart friend, their teacher, about virus research, about big tech, about the politics of climate change, and, well, about other things that might go contrary to the test-shot-record-big data frame of things? Questioning any number of paradigms and theories and cultural expectations and prejudices and blindspots? And, these youth, many want to know what they should do after high school? How many will go from a charter school to a public school? How will they navigate mandates? And, what about what to major in if they go to college? Would all those years of school, from age 6 to 22, or to 24 or 28, be worth it? What is the value of things now and what about the future?

We talked about how young people this age want answers, want leaders, want direction, demand options and want to work with alternative solutions to today’s problems, and we know today’s supposed solutions will be problems of tomorrow.

Even questions about climate change, globalization, and where this CoV2 came from. Lab experiment gone bad? Intentional outbreak? These youth are smart.

Elaine DeWar —

These kids want answers, and they want to rumble in the jungle, truly, with smart teachers willing to take risks, willing to lead.  Yet, we are in sniping times. We are in superficial thinking times. Black v. White times.

So where oh where do we go with teaching, and now, Charter Schools, and that is one messed up economic and education and investment model in most cases — Dissident Voice, Shawgi Tell!

He talked about getting farther away from urban centers, into red counties, red states, as a way to insulate himself from the inevitable. He is a Marxist, and that has been his huge disappointment — how the left has abandoned questioning authority, science, elites, agendas, mass media, propaganda, prevailing commercial interests, and more!

Of course, we could be dealing with Ayotzinapa, and the Mexican oligarchs and narcos and others hating these rural normal colleges where young people go to learn how to teach in order to teach youth and communities  how to stand up to the powers. Resistence. Worker rights. Land rights!

Mexico: Documentary looks at lives of 43 missing Ayotzinapa students — A documentary will premier this week at Mexico City’s Cineteca Nacional on the lives of the 43 missing Ayotzinapa students. Filmmaker Rafael Rangel says that the full-length documentary, “A Day in Ayotzinapa 43”, featuring first hand accounts of the events and interviews with classmates and family members of the disappeared students, aims to boost awareness of another reality of Mexico that often remains hidden from the broader public.

So it goes — we can always find other people’s realities much more dramatically harsh than our own. And, teachers get these shots for other things, and, well, there is so much swirling around about how the bat virus got to this highly infectious state, who had the blood and feces of people who got infected almost a decade ago, who was funding the gain of function research. So so much, here, rightly set straight into a world of skepticism.

But, all of them in on it — the vaccination paranoia is real, and the stories, well, we are in a time of shut down, zero critical thinking, echo chambers, and this is a military propaganda campaign.

How many more shots are we to take now that we are in this Virus World?

Here, Sonia Shah, who I interviewed several times in person in Spokane on the stage and in my radio studio. We are talking Jan. 2020. This is a time capsule moment, since so much has changed in two years:

The number of coronavirus cases has overtaken that of the 2003 SARS epidemic. Officials and scientists are racing to track the path of the virus and develop a vaccine. Twenty-two countries have reported finding people sickened with the virus. The WHO has announced a “public health emergency of international concern.”

We’re in a relatively new era of infectious disease outbreak, said prominent science journalist Sonia Shah. Diseases are sequenced faster and tracked more accurately than ever before – but they also arise more frequently, as humankind and nature collide often and with greater intensity.

Shah knows her way around infectious disease outbreaks – along with the public health, epidemiology, and social consequences surrounding them. She’s the author of the 2010 book The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years, along with 2016’s Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond.

She sat down with Direct Relief this week to talk about the likely scope of the coronavirus outbreak, the public health response – and the potential impacts.

Direct Relief: Your book, Pandemic, is a look at the major contagious disease outbreaks of modern history, including Ebola, MERS, and SARS. Considering what you’ve seen so far, how does the new coronavirus outbreak compare to other infectious disease outbreaks – in transmission, scope, or public perception?

Shah: It’s obviously one that’s causing a lot of alarm, and there’s been a very vigorous public health response, so in some ways that makes it unusual. There are a lot of outbreaks of a disease where you don’t see a big public health response, so I think that’s actually a positive.

China is doing a lot to contain it. And I think you can debate whether all those measures are worthwhile or not, but there’s no lack of attention to this outbreak.

Direct Relief: How are the epidemics of modern history different from those of, say, the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic? Why are there more frequent disease outbreaks, and what are the challenges of fighting them in the modern world?

Shah: About 60% of these new pathogens that we’re seeing, that have come out in the last 50 years or so, they derive from the bodies of animals. About 70% of those derive from the bodies of wild animals.

And that’s because people and wild animals are coming into novel, intimate contact. That allows the microbes that live in their bodies to cross over into our bodies.

Ebola, Zika virus, SARS, West Nile virus – there are any number of novel pathogens that have emerged in the past few decades that come from the bodies of animals.

Animals and people are coming into new kinds of contact because of a variety of reasons, the biggest one being that we are essentially destroying so much wildlife habitat.

What that means is a lot of animals are going extinct, but the ones that remain have to crowd into ever-tightening little patches of habitat that we leave for them. That’s more frequently not in some distant, intact forest. Instead, it’s our farms and gardens and our towns and cities.

Direct Relief: Are we better at fighting infectious disease over the past couple of decades?

Shah: I think there are some ways in which we’re getting better. The fact that we had a diagnostic for this new coronavirus so fast, that’s amazing, and that means that you can track it.

I think in terms of scientific collaboration, discovery of how these pathogens work, diagnostics, and genotyping, those are happening a lot faster now as the technology gets better. We just have so much more knowledge.

But then I think there are valid questions to be asked about whether we’re using that knowledge effectively. Just because we can know that this novel coronavirus is causing this pneumonia – not some other pathogen – is that actually helping us to contain it, or not?

I don’t think we know the answer to that question yet, and we won’t for some years, until after this whole thing blows over and we have time to analyze how it went down.

We saw this in Haiti with the cholera outbreak after the [2010] earthquake. Cell phones were relatively new at the time and it was possible for people to map how cholera was spreading just based on cell phone data.

They could see, “OK, it’s coming down this road, it’s going to be going down this trucking route, it’s probably going to lead to this village in the next week or two.”

All of that…was amazing, scientifically, but it didn’t actually help anyone prevent cholera from breaking out. We knew it was coming, but it happened anyway.

Direct Relief: Why do you think this virus has inspired such a media frenzy and such widespread fear?

Shah: I think there are some good reasons. One is that it’s similar to SARS – it’s a coronavirus, like SARS – and we know that SARS was very virulent and it spread pretty well and it got pretty far. It got to dozens of countries really rapidly and killed 800 people, and this virus is in the same family.

That said, it’s a pretty big family. There are some coronaviruses that are very mild and some that are very virulent, so just the fact that it’s in that family of viruses doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to kill a lot of people.

And I think the other good reason is that it’s respiratory. There isn’t a lot of evidence that we know how to control the spread of respiratory illnesses. Seasonal flus every year take out hundreds of thousands of people.

We try. We have vaccines, we tell people to wash their hands, we tell people to stay home when they’re sick. Do they make any headway at all? It’s hard to know. With the huge scale of flu every year, it would be hard to argue that those measures actually work.

Direct Relief: If coronavirus continues to spread into a pandemic on the level of SARS, what are the likely long-term economic and social impacts?

Shah: There’s going to be huge economic fallout from this. It’s only just starting. SARS had a huge economic impact, and that wasn’t nearly as widespread as this thing will probably be. China is clamping down on its trade routes and travel routes. How do you function in a global economy without China? We don’t know.

All of these outbreaks, when they go global, just show us again and again how interconnected we are, and how much we really rely on each other for all of our essential services.

Direct Relief: Why do you say it’s going to be bigger than SARS?

Shah: Well, because it’s only just starting. New outbreaks are being seeded right now. We know 5 million people left Wuhan before the travel restrictions were put into place, and that’s a lot of people.

Each of those people could seed new outbreaks if they are carrying the virus, and I think we’re seeing the first signs of that.

It appears to be carried by people who are non-symptomatic. That means it’s going to be really hard to contain it. I don’t think we’re anywhere near the peak or end of this thing. If it goes on on the current trajectory it’s going to be bigger than SARS.

[The virus is] not necessarily more deadly. It always seems more virulent at the beginning, because all you see are the worst cases. So as we get more information, it will probably become clear to us that it’s less virulent than we originally thought, but that doesn’t mean it can’t have a huge toll.

Because if something’s really catchy, even if it’s only slightly more deadly than a regular flu or respiratory illness that we’re used to, a lot of people can get sick and can die.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Science, and science journalists. Interesting — “The Coronavirus in Context: A Q&A with Sonia Shah, Author of ‘Pandemic’”

How does my friend field questions from youth who are on the Internet, who are on social media and the dark web and so on? How does the world shape up with all these curriculum controls, when at times, our times seem chaotic, and fearful? Youth are directionless. Attacked by Democrats and Republicans.

Biggest issues with youth is “the GAD” — generalized anxiety disorder. Big problems with the dirty water, dirty air, polluted food, contaminated oceans and repulsive airwaves and entertainment rackets.

My friend is on his journey, and he is fighting for his small family’s survival. This is not what many of us thought would play out in our lives in our 50s and 60s, but in reality Western Lives/Western Culture/ Western Priviledge has come at a price — all those billions of people we have stolen futures from. Capitalism. Repacious consumerism. Rapacious tourism. Wars, war machines, subjugation by proxy.

From 10 years ago — Haeder and Real Change News, Seattle!

Drawing on Plato and Malcom X, West said the death process is part of real education — paideia — a concept developed by Socrates that means deep, critical thinking.

It is the antithesis of contemporary culture: “The problem in American society is we are a culture of death-denying, death-dodging… a joyless culture where pleasure-seeking replaces what it means to be human.”

Fresh from a trip to Occupy Seattle earlier in the day, West praised the movement, which he said represents “a deep democratic awakening where people are finding the courage to find their voice.”

Greed has corroded society, he said.

“Market moralities and mentalities — fueled by economic imperatives to make a profit at nearly any cost — yield unprecedented levels of loneliness, isolation and sadness. Our public life lies in shambles, shot through with icy cynicism and paralyzing pessimism. To put it bluntly, beneath the record-breaking stock markets on Wall Street and bipartisan budget-balancing deals in the White House, lurk ominous clouds of despair across this nation.”

West said that in this age of fear, economic instability and employment challenges, young people must learn “to have a love of wisdom, love of your neighbors and love of justice.”

Such love, embedded in our cultural and social justice traditions, is powerful, he said.

“That Coltrane love, that subversive love. It’s there in the Occupy Wall Street movement. … When it’s organized and mobilized, love is a threat.”

Alas, privatizing schools, for investment and control, especially children, BIPOC, to militarize and technotize their minds, is the goal. Check out this site:

And, here, again, Alison McDowell, on monetizing poverty, struggle, students, for not just social control, but Internet of Bodies control.

A quick walk around the Bing News feed block — this discordance isn’t, and the news, is not, and these pieces are orchestrated. They run on rubber necking, ambulance chasing, and fear fear fear. Below, quoting headlines and leads:

A bankruptcy judge has extended temporary protections against opioid-related litigation for the Sackler family members who own Purdue Pharma until Feb. 1 after another judge overturned the OxyContin maker’s bankruptcy settlement this month.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is monitoring or investigating 92 ships for COVID-19, a factor that could add to travelers’ worries as they consider whether or not to embark on an upcoming cruise.

But the fact that the CDC is monitoring or investigating a ship does not mean there is a widespread COVID-19 outbreak on board. Even with stringent vaccination, testing and masking, among other protocols, it is fairly common for coronavirus cases to emerge among passengers and crew on cruise vessels.

3 planes are flying potatoes into Japan to help tackle the country’s shortage of fries, which has caused McDonald’s to ration servings

New Mexico Indigenous leaders are concerned about a proposed multimillion-dollar transmission line that would cross what they consider sacred lands.

The transmission line planned by the U.S. government would bring more electricity to Los Alamos National Laboratory as it looks to power ongoing operations and future missions at the northern New Mexico complex that include manufacturing key components for the nation’s nuclear arsenal.

According to the UC Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Lab, this snowstorm surpassed December 1970 as the snowiest December ever recorded by the institute Monday afternoon — and as of Tuesday, is nearing the mark for snowiest month ever recorded since 1970 — with more than 202 inches falling this month. The record was 238 inches in the month of January 2017.

Then, my friend, Joe from Merced, the farmer, sent the great story here:

Well, now we can see those same tactics being deployed in the U.S.

New York City was the first large metropolitan area to require vaccination identification cards to enter restaurants, bars, dining establishments and various public and private venues.  Now comes the enforcement part.

Watch this video below to see the New York Police Department (NYPD) start deploying vaccination police, and making arrests of people who do not present papers to prove their status. WATCH:

Obviously, this is not a beginning, as I quickly quipped:

Oh, those pigs in schools, those Vice Principals, those “resource officers.” All those videos of them throwing down girls, boys, kids with developmental disabilities. This is a perfect next step for the pigs — back of the bus, no whistling at white girl or we will Emmett Till you. I have been threatened with a gun and with fists several times for not standing for the national anthem. And, when I burned USA-Israel-Nato flags, I was cold-cocked. Turn my back on a speaker in public? I’ve done that, quietly, and have been confronted by rent-a-cops and pigs. I’ve pushed back at TSA checkpoints and have been delayed almost an hour for a flight.

Marched off campus several times. Marched out of jobs with my box of belongings several times. Yeah, this is the theater of fascism, and depending who you might be (me) that feeling of fascists ready to knock me down, taze me, march me out with police escort and even get handcuffed and cited, well, it’s been in my life since age 16 during my first public protest. 

Tear-gassed and pepper sprayed in Seattle at Occupy Seattle protest. More of this shit.

Here, from Wolf Street —

Note the immense increase in the wealth for the 1% households, following the Fed’s money-printing scheme and interest rate repression in March 2020.

A household is defined by the Census Bureau as the people living at one address, whether they’re a three-generation family or five roommates or a single person. In the third quarter, there were 127.4 million households in the US, per Census estimates.

Those top 1% households were the primary beneficiaries of the Fed’s policies during the pandemic. And they have hugely benefited since the Financial Crisis. They benefit the most when the Fed prints money (QE), which is designed to inflate asset prices, which benefits those that hold the most assets the most. This is not a secret. It’s the official policy of the Fed and the desired outcome of these official policies is officially called the “Wealth Effect.”

Billionaires got more billions, half of Americans got peanuts.

The Fed doesn’t provide separate data on the truly rich (the 0.01%) and the Billionaire Class, a distinct class in American society whose members often get named in the media with specific titles that have “billionaire” in them. They’re the prime beneficiaries of the Fed’s monetary policies.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the top 30 US billionaires are worth a total of $2.23 trillion. On average, that amounts to a wealth of $74.5 billion per billionaire among the top 30 richest US billionaires. Three months ago, each of the top 30 US billionaires at the time was worth on average $69.2 billion. So, over the three-month period, the average billionaire among the top 30 US billionaires each gained $5.3 billion in wealth.

But the bottom 50% households, that huge mass of Americans, on average gained just $6,900 in wealth over the third quarter. And the wealth disparity between the top billionaires and the bottom 50% exploded.

You can kill someone with reckless usage of percentages. If I give a homeless person $5, and he already has $5 in his pocket, I increased his wealth by 100%. But he still is homeless and still doesn’t have any wealth. Percentage increases are touted as a way to show that the wealth at the bottom increased, when in fact, it increased by only peanuts because the bottom 50% have so little and even a big percentage increase is still nearly nothing, compared to the billionaire class.

Over the past quarter, the average wealth of the top 30 US billionaires increased by 7.6%, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index. This amounts to an increase of $5.3 billion per billionaire. This is a huge amount of money for one person to gain due to inflated asset prices in one quarter.

The average wealth at the bottom 50% increased by 14% during the quarter. But this amounts to only $6,900, further blowing out the wealth disparity between them and the billionaires by the billions per household!

Within each category of wealth, the range of wealth is huge. The top 1% range from those who’re just run-of-the-mill wealthy to those who’re worth tens of billions of dollars. The bottom 50% range from the desperately poor to those who’re comfortable with a modest house, a small 401k, and some durable goods, and weighed down by lots of debt.

Good news for workers, for us, on the roads? Bullshit. San Diego’s TuSimple Reports Successful 80-Mile Autonomous Truck Test

What a nation —

The Spanish teacher killed in Fairfield, Iowa, in November didn’t have much of a chance to see it coming, prosecutors allege. The two 16-year-old suspects watched her every move, waiting for the right moment to strike.

The allegations were part of a Dec. 23 court filing against Jeremy Goodale, one of the two teens charged in the brutal killing of Nohema Graber, 66. Prosecutors have charged Goodale and Willard Miller, both students of Graber’s, with first-degree murder and conspiracy. They are both being tried as adults.ADVERTISEMENT

According to the court filing, first reported by the Associated Press, Goodale and Miller mapped out Graber’s daily schedule, analyzing when she’d be out on her daily walk. On Nov. 2, prosecutors say, the two ambushed her and brought her to the woods to kill her. They later returned to better hide her body, prosecutors allege.

Graber was reported missing before her body was found later that day under a tarp at a park, with her cause of death listed as “inflicted trauma to the head.”

What could go wrong, now?

The Czech Republic has started disposing of 80,000 laying hens after the country reported an outbreak of bird flu of the H5N1 type at a poultry farm in Libotenice last week.

Out of the 188,000 birds from the farm, located some 60 kilometres north of Prague, more than half of them died over the Christmas holidays, followed by an additional 8,000 since December 27.

Veterinarians estimate that they will cull the rest of the poultry and destroy around one million eggs by Wednesday.

The dictator speaks —

 Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert, said Monday the nation should consider a vaccination mandate for domestic air travel, signaling a potential embrace of an idea the Biden administration has previously eschewed, as Covid-19 cases spike.

Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief science adviser on the pandemic response, said such a mandate might drive up the nation’s lagging vaccination rate as well as confer stronger protection on flights, for which federal regulations require all those age 2 and older to wear a mask.

And so this is just five minutes reading ledes and grabbing the pathetic pieces of fake news, bad news, repeated news, no-news, echo-chamber news, one-sided news, and that’s not journalism at all, if the kind reader would just delve into what it means to be a questioning reporter and researcher. Question all these stories, but then connect the stories, the people behind them, follow the money, go behind the dirty power-grabbing curtain, and ask why, who, what, where, when, how.

Oh, I am about to start a non-fiction piece on my time in Vietnam and Laos, in bat caves. Yep, those bat caves. Sitting, standing, collecting bats, piss in the air, guano on the rock, eating our meals in the cave, and, oh, sleeping in the caves studying bats. The bloody Brits running this biodiversity transect, well, I had gloves, and I even had to get a series of rabies shots before leaving Washington State. Bats, readers, and a crazy time. Read my short story collection, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam: Please purchase it!

I CAN FEEL THE fear — fear of infections,” Tian Junhua said as he gazed wide-eyed at a clump of bats clinging to the wall of a dark cave. “Because when you find the viruses, you are also most easily exposed to the viruses.” Tian, a researcher for the Wuhan Center for Disease Control who was featured in a 2019 video released by the Chinese state-owned media company SMG, described his work tracking down viruses from bats in remote caves as “a true battle, only without the smoke of gunpowder.”

Around the globe, the scientists who study the animal origins of infectious diseases are treated with similar reverence. In its documentary “Virus Hunters,” National Geographic tells the story of an American band of researchers who risk their lives in search of bats carrying Ebola in an abandoned Liberian mine shaft. “You are getting aerosolized urine, aerosolized feces, but also, if you’re killing the bats, you’re then exposed directly to their blood as well,” professor Christopher Golden says as the animals screech around him and eerie music plays in the background. The risk, it seems, is part of what makes these anti-outbreak efforts so thrilling — and the people who perform them so heroic.

Michael Hoffman’s Twilight Language: “The majority of Americans have been processed as initiates. They are ‘Masons on sight,’ i.e. members of the secret society without knowing it . . . The alchemical processing of humanity is ahead of schedule. People are becoming less human and far more numb and easily misdirected, as the Reign of Dead Matter appears on the horizon.”

+–+

Much has been written about this “American nuclear tragedy.” Public health was secondary to national security. The Atomic Energy Commissioner, Thomas Murray, said, “Gentlemen, we must not let anything interfere with this series of tests, nothing.”

Again and again, the American public was told by its government, in spite of burns, blisters, and nausea, “It has been found that the tests may be conducted with adequate assurance of safety under conditions prevailing at the bombing reservation.” Assuaging public fears was simply a matter of public relations. “Your best action,” an Atomic Energy Commission booklet read, “is not to be worried about fallout.” A news release typical of the times stated, “We find no basis for concluding that harm to any individual has resulted from radioactive fallout.” (from Terry Tempest Williams, “Clan of the One-Breasted Women“)

Facebook’s new name, Meta (Metaverse), means “dead” in Hebrew! Oh, the irony? But first, nature’s ecosystems —  

“Kuletz, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist who has been observing birds in Alaska since the late 1970s, said she’s never before seen the large-scale changes of recent years. In 2013, the dead birds did not show signs of being emaciated, but in 2017, hundreds to thousands more began to wash up dead on beaches with clear signs of starvation.” (LA Times)

Los Angeles Times, staff writer Susan Rust wrote, “Forces profound and alarming are reshaping the upper reaches of the North Pacific and Arctic oceans, breaking the food chain that supports billions of creatures and one of the world’s most important fisheries.”

The news, of course, just gets worse. You see, the SARS-MERS-DARPA planned pandemic, inflation, climate change, Trump LLC, all of that, and, well, let’s look deep at making human bodies machines, using biology, bacteria: “Physical Channel Characterization for Medium-Range/Nano-Networks using Flagellated Bacteria” by Maria Gregorib, Ignacio Llatsera, Albert Cabellos-Aparicioa, Eduard Alarc´ona (source)

Abstract
Nano-networks are the interconnection of nano-machines and as such expand the limited capabilities of a single nano-machine. Several techniques have been proposed so far to interconnect nano-machines. For short distances (nm-mm ranges), researchers are proposing to use molecular motors
and calcium signaling. For long distances (mm-m), pheromones are envisioned to transport information. In this work we propose a new mechanism for medium-range communications (nm-µm): flagellated bacteria. This technique is based on the transport of DNA-encoded information between emitters and receivers by means of a bacterium. We present a physical channel characterization and a simulator that, based on the previous characterization, simulates the transmission of a DNA-packet between two nano-machines.

And we have faith in science. This science? You have to look deeply at the patents, too, so read the article cited below by Stephers, and then hit the comments with links and research galore. Yeah, we trust the science. This phrase is bonkers. We have stiff-arm saluted S.T.E.M. to the point of insanity, and what you can read in this article is all about 5 G and 6 G and total transhumanism. Think 2050. Those of us who might be alive and attempting to not comply, well, the idea is this shit, this delivery system, can be aerisolized, all the digital viruses, all of it, brought to unknowing humanity through, well, contrails, chemtrails, or just the food and clothing and crap in machines, i.e. electronics, off-gassing and out gassing. This is the Mount Everest moment in plain sight — if it’s there, then we have to climb it. If we can, then we have to do it. Sure, trust those scientists, all of them with precautionary principles heaped up and immolated. No concerns about the actual unintended consequences. All driven by profit, not for public good, or public serevice. Sure, those scientists, trust ’em.

As if the world, the average Joe and Jane, really have the bandwidth for all of this, scouring these deep articles, the entire story retold, worked, and then connected, with critical thinking, i.e. systems thinking. With Corona-H1N1-SARS-MERS fear factor, militarized and weaponized, on genetically altered, spliced, steroids.

Universal vaccines? Boosters to just be allowed to take a crap in a public restroom? This is beyond Dystopia. U of O and OSU, here in Oregon, demanding boosters. There you have it, two science institutions (trust the science) mandating beyond vax for young and old. Mandates are here to stay.

Then think about these contrasting stories, no — marine life collapsing, globally, and then, the human body used for, hmm, did you get this? Energy. It only gets worse. Human data collecting, human energy tapping. This, again, is being done by “trust the science” gals and guys. Those scientists~!

These are the roaring 20’s, quite the times, for sure, and so many people are heads-in-the-sand Homo Consumopithecus subspecies. Yet, the big boys, the Billionaires, the Technocrats, the investors, and Hedge Funders, all those Top of the Line Epstein Kinda Guys in Nonprofits, FOundations and universities, they have the 19 percent of the population: big bucks for a recent graduate of a state tier one college or Ivy League joint — $300,000 a year, plus bonuses of $60K each year, and, stock options.

The little elves in InSanity Claus’s house of futuristic horrors, doing the dirty deeds for the money. Again, to be repeated — The Point Zero Zero One Percent own 30 Percent, and the One Percent Own 32 percent, and then the 19 Percent own 30 percent. Oh, the irony, the masses, that is, owning 8 percent of wealth (sic) while at the economic-scientific-surveillence-cultural whims of these master race folk.

I see the $300,000 K a year 40 year olds. I see the people in these Hi-Tech companies raking in the bucks, and they are in star chambers, no matter which category of tech they occupy. The key words now are renewable energy. Renewables, which are not renewable, and never were.

As we dig deeper, and sometimes it is an entire different train of digging, we see that WE have to connect these disparate dots. Take this piece, for instance — “The Stench of Digital Dung: Virtual Variants, Trigger Events, and Blockchain Cults” (Source) This is not some conspiracy, Phillip K. Dick nightmare. This is already in the works, has been for decades, and now is supercharged with the fear-fear-fear of the average Joe and Jane, as the media monsters ram the same narratives of CORONA this, and DELTA that down the throats of fucked up Westerner. Read the person’s research and the comments section — Stephers!

Nearly one century ago, Lewis Mumford observed in his magnum opus, Technics in Civilization, that great advances in technology and society come from the intersection of complementary and mainly technological revolutions. Mumford assigned a label . . . to each of history’s modern eras. The first, with its ‘collection of inventions and ideas introduced from about AD 1000 into the eighteenth century,’  Mumford labeled the ‘ecotechnic phase’ . . . The second era, the Industrial Revolution, characterized by advances in ‘materials and power sources,’ he termed the ‘paleotechnic phase’ . . . His own time, the 1930s, which witnessed a flowering of innovation from ‘new alloys, electricity, and improved means of communication,’ he labeled the ‘neotechnic phase,’ (neo, of course for new).

To extend that taxonomy, we propose ‘neurotechnic phase,’ (the Greek root neuron meaning nerves) for the coming long era of growth. 

We now enter humanity’s first era of a networked, ubiquitous, and intelligent infrastructure. We do in fact live in time of a ‘new normal.’ But instead of our future being one of perennial slow growth and technological stagnation, it will be just the opposite. The reality is that we, and our children, and grandchildren, live at the beginning of the long neurotechnic phase of civilization, the most exciting and promising time in history.” (p. 327-328)

~ Mark P. Mills, The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and a Roaring 2020s  

We have these multiple narratives spinning out there, in the ether, on TV, in the flicks, all over, including blogs and some prescient books. But the masters love the conspiracies, the delving below the surface. They have the patents, and the designs for everything the average person I talk to either do not believe (seeing it as Sci-Fi) or, they take it with the “oh-well, nothing I can do about it” slab of meth.

These people are out in the open, no shame, trust us gals and guys, trust the science, regalling over the take over of society, all sectors of it. That we are in their massive experiment on every level, well, that is icing on their genetically modified cake.

There are people out there digging —

There is digital dung  floating around in the ether these days, defined and applied as: symbolic, subliminal clues placed in open sight by the sorcerous system through public rituals, which unconsciously mirror the digitized infrastructure being built inside and around us — by humans, yet not for humans, as it ultimately serves the technological non-human master (the “AI beast”). Accordingly, we do not beneficially reap what we sow, as we increasingly become digitized, remotely-programmable serfs indentured to the Singularity.

Unless you have been living under a rock, undoubtedly, you have heard of one iteration of digital dung. It’s called Omicron. You may have thought it was only the name of a deviant (cough cough, I mean, variant), or an anagram of moronic or oncomir. Word play seems to have had a renaisssance since this mischievous deviant appeared on the scene. I suppose that’s a good sign. Some of us have been playing with words for many years, and it is kind of nice to see others joining in on the decoding amusement. Funny thing, though, there is one underhanded and unremitting thread that I have noticed, which seems to have been omitted from public awareness, and thus, deserves unraveling. Once you see it, I suspect you may not unsee it. Further, you may start to detect the curious pattern elsewhere. Let’s dip our toes into de-occulting this, shall we?

This is super fucked up as the SARS-MERS bioweapon unfolds, hobbles all, and then all these other issues. Climate and earth change. Rising tides is not even taught to youth in schools. Assholes in the Republican Party, et al, wanting to strike the history of racism and police state and slavery and subjugation and Native Land stealing, all the ugly Empire Murdering History of USA. No way, in K12. They have been doing this for a century. Book banning? Come on. Been around forever.

So, how can Americans understand the complexities of climate warming, resource collapsing, biological death, with the Transhumanism agenda? They want their kids in STEM, in tech, doing drone making, drone programming. They want their kids to get $200K a year jobs tweeking nano-things. They want their lives to be followed, from birth canal to grave, FitBit watches, colon micro computers, all systems tracked and monitored and sent to the New Constellation, into Cloud Servers. They have no idea what this Faustian Bargain is. Until we are here, with some scientists hitting the fire alarm, but these guys and gals are laughed at, by, well, of course, the Billionaires, the CEOs and the Republicans. I am not talking about a New Deal for Nature. Green New Deal. Of course not.

Introduction

In the reality Of many realities How we see what we see Affects the quality Of our reality We are children of Earth and Sky DNA descendant now ancestor Human being physical spirit Bone flesh blood as spirit Metal mineral water as spirit We are in time and space But we’re from beyond time and space The past is part of the present The future is part of the present Life and being are interwoven We are the DNA of Earth, Moon, Planets, Stars We are related to the universal Creator created creation Spirit and intelligence with clarity Being and human as power We are a part of the memories of evolution These memories carry knowledge These memories carry our identity Beneath race, gender, class, age Beneath citizen, business, state, religion We are human beings And these memories Are trying to remind us Human beings, human beings It’s time to rise up Remember who we are— John Trudell, 2001, What It Means To Be A Human Being, song recording: These Memories, Star Ancestors

Yet for some scientists, it isn’t easy to reconcile how a system in balance could so quickly go off the rails, even if some species adapt and thrive as others struggle.

“For me, it’s actually very emotional,” said Rick Thoman, the University of Alaska climate specialist, recalling his elementary school days, when he read Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” and other stories from the Arctic.

“The environment that he described, the environment that I saw going through National Geographics in the 1970s? That environment doesn’t exist anymore.”

This is so serious, that the average human watching TV, doing the 8 to 5 pm routine, finding their masks and mandates just a-okay, well, this contrasting narrative — nanotechnology-Internet of the Human Body and then the collapsing world, i.e., seas dying — it just is not of great interest for the average millionaire media mutt, or that $300 K a year STEM soldier, in terms of framing life, framing life aspirations, framing the future when they are all still living in a dream world of technology coming to save the day, when in fact, it is all that technology, from the internal combustion engine onward, that has fucked us up. BIG TIME.

Researchers are focused on ice — or the lack of it — because the frozen ocean is the foundation of the region’s rich ecosystems. It not only keeps the waters beneath it cool, but a layer of algae grows on the underside of these ice sheets — the key to the entire food web.

For eons, as the sun moved south in autumn and the temperatures dropped in the high latitudes, Arctic sea ice thickened near the North Pole. At its edges, it reached its frosty fingers into the inlets along the Chukchi and Beaufort seas, winding its way south through the Bering Strait and into the northern Bering Sea. By March, the northern Bering Sea was typically a vast field of white ice, its edges marked by broken sheets that had been pushed into a vertical position by whipping winds and churning currents below.

But for the last 50 years, as the region’s warm stanzas have increased in duration and intensity, that seasonal ice has dwindled.

The entire shooting match is done with technology, with CRISPR, with the techno-medical fascists wanting more and more research and work around bodily control. And under whose watch? Who said this was fine? This is a script that has been played out since lead in the paint and asbestos in the crib was acceptable? Who approved the better living-dying through chemistry? Who said these scientists got it right, ever? How dare the reader think they know those sorts of scientists. You do not. If Fauci is the New Saint/Angel of Death, then, the reader is more than masked and isolated. Delusional? Or demented!

Here, Terry Tempest Williams, and in this Harvard Divinity School lecture, catch the part where she talks about the biologist at the Mariposa Grove (stand of giant sequoia) actually hearing the trees tell her, speak to her — “We are suffering, we are dying, can you hear us?” Really. A scientist. This happened many times when she was in the Grove. So, this biologist got her team to do a full biological rendering — soil, hydrology and core analysis, the entire suite of biological tests, and they found the trees — 3,000 years old — were dying from over a centuries of pavement, compaction of the roots, no ability to take nutrients to the rest of the trees. Millions of people trampling on the earth. See — Saving Yosemite’s giant trees by ripping out the pavement

Go to minute 37 or 38. Listen. Listen like the biologist. After five years, millions spent — now, a sacred place, with a sign: Can you Hear the Trees?

Imagine, there is no reverence for the human terrain, evidenced by the centuries of poisons, the millenia of weathering by fuedalism and capitalism and war war war. Imagine, 2021 coming to an end, and we have fascism on steroids — not just the racists of Trump-Landia, but the fascism of Biden Build Back Better, hobbling and murdering the peoples of the world with military death equipment and sanctions and you name it.

Tempest Williams talks a lot about her Utah, the uranium, the bomb tests, her family, in an essay, “Clan of the One-Breasted Women,” in her book, Refuge. I’ve been with Terry 15 years ago, in Spokane, where I worked with her and students when she appeared at two or three campuses: she was at two community college campuses where I taught: Spokane Falls Community College and Spokane Community College. She may have appeared at Gonzaga, where I taught. And Whitworth University, where I did not teach but had connections to.

Terry is a political and environmental activist, but the land has sculpted her words. The family and the contradictions of that Mormon upbringing. She is embedded in the original people’s who are the Utes, where she lived, Utah. She has traveled the world, and she has fought wars, fought the mechanized and brutalizing wars of military armies, and the wars against land, people, nature. I have no idea how much she knows about the Fourth Industrial Revolution. I don’t know what her stand is on mandatory vaccines, and if she really has the bandwidth to have dug deep into the poisoning of the world by her government, mine, through pathogens, viruses, through bacterial war, through the dark forces of gain of function science, splitting genes, rapidly morphing an animal virus into a super virus able to go into the human respitory system.

It is a lot of information, and she is a star of sorts, in the literary world. She was open with me, and I was clear with her about the failings of systems, including the exploitation of myself and others as precarious just-in-time part-time faculty at the very schools she was a guest writer. We talked about militancy, and she definitely was open to me, a writer, engaged in so many things for a decade in Spokane, and she knew from our talks I was serious about sustainability, and not the kind with the billionaires and the money grubbers calling the shots. We talked about land, nature, and the people. How the people have to be part of the equation for any land ethic, any environmental policy.

On one hand, sure, I am for bioregional planning, national cooperation, and really ecosocialism — retrenchment from highly impacted areas, and a policy of getting envirogees to be helped. To redo the entire things we have come to accept in predatory, parasetic, destructive capitalism. Yes, that means global cooperation, and not one world government, or anything tied to what World Economic Forum et al have in mind for complete digital gulag life, universal basic income, and this transhumanism.

I know Terry, if we had a deep conversation, would be railing against this transhumanism, this 6 G of 60,000 satellites in space controlling the Internet of Things, the Internet of Biological Things, the Internet of Micro Things. IoT, IoBT, IoMT. I know her, and this discussion has to be tied to the virus, to the Omicron, to the stupidity and hellish mentality of lockdowns, forced vaccinations, forced monitoring, etc. But the onion is a gigantic onion, with millions of layers. How much time does a superstar writer have to pull back the layers?

Here, the reality of the Clan of the One-Breasted Women, the first two pages. Not so far afield from the Clan of the mRNA Universal Yearly Triple Vaccination Men, Women and Children.

It is a lot — Pandemic Parallax View — Apprehending the False Promise of Biosecurity: Unmasking Usurpation by Fear Merchants David T. Ratcliffe, rat haus reality press, 1 Nov 2020 (in process – last updated: 27 Jan 2021)

Here, more grist for the mill —

[B]iosecurity has shown itself capable of presenting the absolute cessation of all political activity and all social relations as the maximum form of civic participation…. At issue is an entire conception of the destinies of human society from a perspective that, in many ways, seems to have adopted the apocalyptic idea of the end of the world from religions which are now in their sunset. Having replaced politics with the economy, now in order to secure governance even this must be integrated with the new paradigm of biosecurity, to which all other exigencies will have to be sacrificed. It is legitimate to ask whether such a society can still be defined as human or whether the loss of sensible relations, of the face, of friendship, of love can be truly compensated for by an abstract and presumably completely fictitious health security. — Giorgio Agamben, Biosecurity and Politics, 11 May 2020

Connect those dots. Science in the employ of the military, those bomb tests in the West, the Downwinders, etc. Terry read my piece in the Spokane Living Magazine: Nuclear Narratives (Part two) And here, Dissident Voice — Hanford — From Nagasaki to Fourth-Generation Spokanites Or Part One, here.

Here, connect the nefarious science of nuclear power, nuclear weapons, the mining, the environmental impacts, the superfund clean up, the death by a million cuts. Science. Scientists. The Clan of the Chronic Illness Children!

The Clan of One-Breasted Women by Terry Tempest Williams

I belong to a Clan of One-Breasted Women. My mother, my grandmothers, and six aunts
have all had mastectomies. Seven are dead. The two who survive have just completed
rounds of chemotherapy and radiation.

I’ve had my own problems: two biopsies for breast cancer and a small tumor removed
between my ribs diagnosed as “a borderline malignancy.”

This is my family history.

Most statistics tell us breast cancer is genetic, hereditary, with rising percentages attached
to fatty diets, childlessness, or becoming pregnant after 30. What they don’t say is living
in Utah may be the greatest hazard of all.

We are a Mormon family with roots in Utah since 1847. The “word of wisdom” in my
family aligned us with good foods–no coffee, no tea, tobacco, or alcohol. For the most
part, our women were finished having their babies by the time they were thirty. And only
one faced breast cancer prior to 1960. Traditionally, as a group of people, Mormons have
a low rate of cancer.

Is our family a cultural anomaly? The truth is, we didn’t think about it. Those who did,
usually the men, simply said, “bad genes.” The women’s attitude was stoic. Cancer was
part of life. On February 16, 1971, the eve of my mother’s surgery, I accidentally picked
up the telephone and overheard her ask my grandmother what she could expect.
“Diane, it is one of the most spiritual experiences you will ever encounter.”

I quietly put down the receiver. Two days later, my father took my brothers and me to
the hospital to visit her. She met us in the lobby in a wheelchair. No bandages were
visible. I’ll never forget her radiance, the way she held herself in a purple velvet robe and
how she gathered us around her.

“Children, I am fine. I want you to know I felt the arms of God around me.”

We believed her. My father cried. Our mother, his wife, was thirty-eight years old.
A little over a year after Mother’s death, Dad and I were having dinner together. He had
just returned from St. George, where the Tempest Company was completing the gas lines
that would service southern Utah. He spoke of his love for the country, the sandstone
landscape, bare-boned and beautiful. He had just finished hiking the Kolob trail in Zion
National Park. We got caught up in reminiscing, recalling with fondness our walk up
Angel’s Landing on his fiftieth birthday and the years our family had vacationed there.

Over dessert, I shared a recurring dream of mine. I told my father that for years, as long
as I could remember, I saw this flash of light in the night in the desert — that this image
had so permeated my being that I could not venture south without seeing it again, on the
horizon, illuminating buttes and mesas.

“You did see it,” he said.

“Saw what?” I asked, a bit tentative.

“The bomb. The cloud. We were driving home from Riverside, California. You were
sitting on Diane’s lap. She was pregnant. In fact, I remember the day, September 7, 1957.

We had just gotten out of the Service. We were driving north, past Las Vegas. It was an
hour or so before dawn, when this explosion went off. We not only heard it, but felt it. I
thought the oil tanker in front of us had blown up. We pulled over and suddenly, rising
from the desert floor, we saw it clearly, this golden-stemmed cloud, the mushroom. The
sky seemed to vibrate with an eerie pink glow. Within a few minutes, a light ash was
raining on the car.”

I stared at my father.

“I thought you knew that,” my father said. “It was a common occurrence in the fifties.”
It was at that moment I realized the deceit I had been living under. Children growing up
in the American Southwest, drinking contaminated milk from contaminated cows, even
from the contaminated breasts of their mothers, my mother — members, years later, of
the Clan of One-Breasted Women.

It is a well-known story in the Desert West, “The Day We Bombed Utah,” or more
accurately, the years we bombed Utah: above ground atomic testing in Nevada took place
from January 27, 1951, through July 11, 1962. Not only were the winds blowing north,
covering “low-use segments of the population” in Utah with fallout and leaving sheep
dead in their tracks, but the climate was right. The United States of the 1950s was red,
white, and blue. The Korean War was raging. McCarthyism was rampant. Ike was it, and
the cold war was hot. If you were against nuclear testing, you were for a communist
regime.

Much has been written about this “American nuclear tragedy.” Public health was
secondary to national security. The Atomic Energy Commissioner, Thomas Murray, said,
“Gentlemen, we must not let anything interfere with this series of tests, nothing.”

Again and again, the American public was told by its government, in spite of burns,
blisters, and nausea, “It has been found that the tests may be conducted with adequate
assurance of safety under conditions prevailing at the bombing reservation.” Assuaging
public fears was simply a matter of public relations. “Your best action,” an Atomic
Energy Commission booklet read, “is not to be worried about fallout.” A news release
typical of the times stated, “We find no basis for concluding that harm to any individual
has resulted from radioactive fallout.”