you rub elbows with the most cringe-worthy, elite-drenched, out-to-lunch over the top One Perecenters and their Little and Big Eichmanns, that some of that smear is bound to cause bacterial overgrowth
Oh, yeah, that Nightline: Greenfield, or Koppel, the Jewish Elites, alas, this is a REAL ECHO chamber:
Oh, that false balance, the Ted Koppel shit show, having on an expert in marine ecosystems describing coral bleaching and ocean acidification, tied to climate heating and CO2 pollution, and then the slick, coiffed expert in marketing and spin from Exxon, shooting holes in the scientist’s hard work, peer reviewed studies and his cadre of a thousand other scientists working on global heating.
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In the three months since Moran, Cynthia McFadden and Martin Bashir took the helm of a revamped “Nightline,” the ABC program — faster, far from frivolous but in some ways shallower — has enjoyed modest ratings success. Yet there has been considerable carping about the abandonment of the Ted Koppel tradition.
“Because of the tremendous shadow that Ted and the 25 years of that program still casts on the whole industry, establishing ourselves and who we are is still a challenge in the industry and with critics,” says Moran, a former White House correspondent. “The audience is getting it. . . . Because Ted and ‘Nightline’ were such an icon, any change disturbs people in our business.”
McFadden says the criticism “stings” because some of it is true.
“Sometimes we’ve deserved the knocks,” says McFadden, who also co-anchors “Primetime.” “We haven’t gotten the balance right every night. It’s very much a work in progress. . . . Sometimes we don’t give things quite enough time.” McFadden says it’s also fair to question “whether we’ve had on a few too many Hollywood types in the run-up to the Oscars.”
With its flashy Times Square studio, “Nightline” has evolved into a journalistic smorgasbord. The program isn’t serving up empty calories, but some stories seem to be of the reduced-fat variety. For all of its strengths, “Nightline” now seems difficult to distinguish from a dozen other newsmagazine or cable shows.
Still, the early returns are encouraging for ABC. For the week of Feb. 13, “Nightline” was up 3 percent in total viewers — to 3.7 million — over a year earlier, and 14 percent in the key 25-to-54 demographic. The program still trails Jay Leno and, most nights, David Letterman.
In reinventing “Nightline,” James Goldston, the British-born executive producer, also cites Koppel’s “long shadow. What one does following Ted was a complicated issue. . . . Was there an audience for the show without Ted?”
Asked if American audiences can sit still for half an hour on one subject, Goldston says that “people lead busy lives” and have no tolerance for news reports that are longer than necessary.
Oh, the good old days when I was still working for newspapers as journalist: A Red, for sure, I was, but I kept that to a low rumble most the time since calling oneself communist is/was akin to saying I was/am a mass murderer. Here, that freak show, Koppel, 1988: (source) . . . Kaplan, Koppel, Greenfield, Goldston Chomsky, well, you get the picture, for me, thirty -plus years ago.
Concision my ass. Circumcision!
JERUSALEM —
Newscaster Ted Koppel was relieved because the whole affair passed without physical violence.
Palestinian political scientist Saeb Erakat was frustrated because he thought he had been reduced to jousting with windmills.
And Ehud Olmert, a rightist member of the Israeli Knesset (Parliament), was delighted at what he saw as a public relations victory.
That’s how three key participants summed up their feelings after what “Nightline” producers described as an unprecedented “town hall” meeting between Israelis and Palestinians. The ABC news show was broadcast live from Jerusalem into American homes Tuesday night (early Wednesday here).
“If we had truly understood what we were trying to do here today, we would never have done it,” Koppel told a lopsided, mostly invited studio audience estimated at nearly 700 Jews and more than 100 Arabs.
All had risen well before dawn to travel to the Jerusalem Theater, pass through tight security checks and take their seats facing a backdrop designed to make the stage look as if it were just outside the walls of the capital’s historic Old City.
The “Nightline” crew had hoped to have at least 250 Palestinians in the audience and fewer Jews in order to more accurately mirror the population mix in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip territories that Israel has occupied since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
However, as a Palestinian journalist noted, “People were not happy with the idea, particularly after Abu Jihad was killed. That turned off a lot of people who were interested in coming.”
The journalist referred to the April 16 assassination of Khalil Wazir, the top military commander for Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, who was more commonly known by the nom de guerre Abu Jihad, or “Father of Holy War.” While the Israeli government refuses to comment on responsibility for the killing, sources here have confirmed that it was ordered by senior government ministers and carried out by a combined army, air force, navy, and Mossad intelligence agency force.
Oh, then, more Jews, Conan, and NPR, National Propaganda Radio, asking Koppel questions, ten years ago:
KOPPEL: Neal, I hate to do it, but you’ve set me up for this. No. I guess that I’m more of a pessimist than an optimist, and I’m sure we’ll get lots of good people calling in – I hope we do – who will explain to me how wrong I am and why I’m wrong. There’s not a great deal that does give me optimism right now.
I am not hugely optimistic about the nature of communication in this country. I think we have trivialized communication to the point that everything now is reduced to snippets of thought. We respond in nanoseconds to one another. Reflection, thought are increasingly becoming a thing of the past. So no, I don’t mean to be, you know, a total fool about this. I’m sure there are many wonderful things that are still going on.
And as an immigrant who came to this country at the age of 13 from England, I love the United States deeply. I wouldn’t live anywhere else in the world, for anything. But that’s precisely why I’m so pessimistic and why I’m so depressed by it. (source)
Duh, of course I am going to look at the Beltway, the East Coast, the movers and shakers, the insiders, the rulers of media, the guests on that media, the entire bread and circus aspect of it. I mean, really, a Jew asking another Jew about the Palestine “issue”?
This was lightly precipitated by the Grayzone trying to get stuff out of a weasel: The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) contacted The Grayzone to dispute our characterization of their organization as a CIA cutout. Listen to the highly revealing conversation that ensued with the NED’s communications director.
So, this communications (sic) director of the National Endowment for Democracy is clueless, but clueless is a very good position to be in today, when stupidity and press flak crap make the grade in today’s flippant world. Note who this person is, Aun:
[EXPERTISE: BRANDING, CONTENT STRATEGY, PUBLIC RELATIONS, STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS AND MARKETING.]
Leslie Aun brought experience from both the corporate and nonprofit sectors to PRB, where she led all communications activities, including public relations, marketing communications, branding and advertising, editorial services, video and graphic design, and thought leadership from 2019 to 2022.
She began her career as a print and broadcast journalist with media outlets, including Federal Times, The Washington Business Journal, WTOP Radio, and WUSA Channel 9, before holding senior-level communication positions at such organizations as MCI Communications, Sodexo, Special Olympics International, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, and Venture Philanthropy Partners. As vice president of communications for the World Wildlife Fund, she led the team that won the Public Relations Society of America’s Silver Anvil Award of Excellence in the field of public relations for her work as managing director of Earth Hour, one of the largest and most successful public events for climate change in history, with more than one billion participants from around the world. Most recently, Aun headed up communications for Keolis North America, a global operator of public transit systems, and has consulted for NPR, Discovery Learning Alliance, and Snagajob.com.
A former adjunct faculty member and frequent lecturer at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies, Aun has served on the boards of numerous organizations, including Pennsylvania State University’s Sustainability Institute. A native of the Washington, D.C., area, she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in government from the University of Virginia’s College of Arts and Sciences.
Oh, come on, come on. Listen to her vapidity, her denials, her out of touch with the NED nothing burger. Is Max Blumenthal really surprised?
No surprise there, Blumenthal:
We also demanded to know whether NED had instituted guidelines which prevented it from funding anti-democratic and violent actors like the coup leaders and political arsonists we detailed. In one particularly revealing exchange on the topic, Blumenthal asked Aun, “How is it pro–democracy to support mobilizations that seek to remove elected leaders?”
“Isn’t that sort of what democracy is?” she fired back in a tacit admission that her organization views foreign meddling and support for violent putschists abroad as an intrinsically democratic act.
At a loss for answers, Aun resorted to a Red Scare-style insinuation: “I’m just curious, are you supporters of the Belarusian government, of [the] Ortega government, of the Chinese government?” she asked. “I mean, those are all governments that you are working, writing — you’re supportive of, like from an editorial perspective?”
After our call with Aun, we provided her with our questions in writing. Despite repeated promises over the phone and in follow-up emails to furnish the information we requested, the NED has not done so for over 50 days since we first engaged with Aun.
That is the simple background, but look at how WikiCIApedia starts Max’s entry: “Blumenthal is the editor of The Grayzone website, which is known for its apologetic coverage of authoritarian regimes such as the Chinese, Russian, Syrian, and Venezuelan governments, as well as denial of the Uyghur Genocide and other atrocities committed by these regimes.”
That is the Beltway, brother. Aun’s and Koppel’s and all those hasbara folk your family probably rubbed elbows with.
That Beltway, that Georgetown, that Virginia:
IN 2002, FORMER Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and his wife attended an elegant dinner party hosted by Barbara Walters. Other participants included Time editor Henry Grunwald, one-time ABC Chair Thomas Murphy, and Peter Jennings, then the anchor of ABC “World News Tonight.”
At one point in the evening, as New York magazine recounted, Jennings addressed Kissinger and asked him, “How does it feel to be a war criminal, Henry?”
Kissinger did not respond. However, Grunwald informed Jennings that this inquiry was “unsuitable.” Walters, who considered Kissinger “the most loyal friend,” later said, “I tried to change the subject, but it was a very uncomfortable moment. [Kissinger’s wife] Nancy reacted very strongly and hurt.”
First, the people at the top of American society absolutely love Henry Kissinger. He is their beloved compatriot, and they are anxious to protect his delicate feelings.
Second, Jennings sincerely believed that Kissinger was a war criminal and, unusually, was willing to say this in private. Yet he didn’t have the courage to say this in public, to his audience of tens of millions of Americans. Presumably he then would no longer be invited to these sorts of parties.
Third, Kissinger’s fancy, famous, rich pals will not exactly dispute that Kissinger is a monster. Rather, bringing it up is an embarrassing social faux pas, like, say, mentioning how everyone knows that your buddy is cheating on his wife, who is sitting next to you. Why would you want to spoil the mood just when we’re all feeling toasty from the Chambertin Grand Cru and having such a lovely time?
This is the cesspool, that DC:
The District of Columbia, or Washington, DC, is the seat of the United States federal government, the U.S. capitol, and home to 20 colleges and universities. While DC is considered only the 20th most populous city in the nation, hundreds of thousands of commuters flood in from both Virginia and Maryland for work each week to this world political capital. Headquartering 177 foreign embassies, DC hosts the Institute of World Politics, a graduate school of national security and international affairs.
The bulk of the city’s postsecondary institutions fall into two categories, public or private not-for-profit, and are distributed evenly amongst three types: research universities, master’s universities (like the aforementioned Institute of World Politics), or special-focus institutions. The oldest institution in Washington, DC, is Georgetown University, which was founded in 1789, and the same institution also claims the title of oldest Jesuit and Catholic university in the US. The largest public institution title goes to the University of the District of Columbia, while the largest by-enrollment is George Washington University. Four universities operate satellite programs in the capital, and those are Arizona State, Brown, New York, and Pepperdine. When it comes to special-focus institutions, Gallaudet University is one such and teaches classes in both English and American Sign Language (ASL).
With 25% of the city’s population employed by the government, it’s unsurprising that three of the universities in Washington, DC, are maintained by the US Government, including the National Intelligence University. To be close to the federal government, many organizations are headquartered in DC, including many law firms and lobbying firms; there are also six law schools accredited by the American Bar Association. DC is also known for medical research and is home to three medical schools, as well as research institutions, including the Washington Hospital Center
Oh, those college towns:
Los Angeles, California – 230
New York City, New York – 200+
Chicago, Illinois – 148
Boston, Massachusetts – 118
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – 115
To explain why The Grayzone has referred to the NED as a “CIA cutout,” Blumenthal pointed Aun to a declassified document showing Ronald Reagan’s CIA director, William Casey, proposing the creation of a US government-funded “National Endowment.” The National Endowment for Democracy was born just months after Casey circulated the document to cabinet level Reagan officials. A cutout, Blumenthal explained during the call, is “an organization spun out as an initiative of that entity and which performs the work or advances the agenda of that entity.”
False Balance occurs when one tries to treat two opposing positions as equally valid when they are simply not. If one position is supported by an abundance of evidence while another is entirely bereft of it, it is profoundly misguided to afford equal air‐time and coverage to both positions.
Equivocation is a mode of speech adopted when the speaker wishes to avoid a direct answer to a question but is unwilling to resort to telling a lie. The result is a mode of speech at least partly designed to obscure communication rather than achieve clarity. However, determining what is equivocation is complex, not least as it can show attributes close to that expected when making a nuanced argument that takes account of lack of information or current controversies about the issue. This suggests the equivocation is much a product of how a given speech is interpreted by the observer.
Concision as seen in media studies, concision is a form of broadcast media censorship by limiting debate and discussion of important topics on the rationale of time allotment.
And, then, just plain zero attention is another grand thing in today’s media:
In an article published by Medium on August 22, 2022, independent journalist Deborah L. Armstrong reported on the blacklisting of Roger Waters, co-founder of the iconic rock band Pink Floyd, by Ukrainian nationalists.
In early August, Rogers was featured on a 90-minute CNN special where he publicly criticized the US government’s role in the Russia-Ukrainian war. Waters explained that the war hinged on “the action and reaction of NATO pushing right up to the Russian border, which they promised they wouldn’t do when [Mikhail] Gorbachev negotiated the withdrawal of the USSR from the whole of Eastern Europe.” The musician went on to say that Russia had a right to Crimea because the people living on the peninsula were mostly Russian.
Shortly after making these statements, the musician was blacklisted by the Ukrainian government and criticized by its allies in US corporate media.
As Armstrong reported, the Kiev-based Myrotvorets website has labeled Waters an “Enemy of Ukraine.” The website claims Waters is spreading “anti-Ukrainian propaganda,” as well as collaborating in plans to legitimize Russia’s annexation of Crimea, which would challenge Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
Waters is not the only person listed on Myrotvorets. Currently, the database includes thousands of journalists, activists, and anyone else who is declared an “Enemy of Ukraine.” Additionally, those who are listed on the site have had their home addresses, personal phone numbers, and banking information leaked online. Some people featured on the list have been harassed, threatened, assaulted, or killed as a result of the doxing. Those who have been killed are identified with the word “liquidated” (ЛИКВИДИРОВАН in Ukrainian) over their profile photo on the Myrotvorets website.
Daria Dugina, a Russian journalist, was killed in a car bomb attack on August 20, 2022, not long after a red stamp appeared across her database profile. It is believed that she was targeted because her father, the philosopher Alexander Dugin, was believed to have been a strong influence on Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Russian government maintains that Dugina was murdered by a Ukrainian nationalist. Dugina is not the only person on the list to have been killed. In 2015, journalist Oles Buzina and a deputy in the Ukrainian parliament, Oleg Kalashnikov, were killed only days after their information was leaked on the Myrotvorets website.
In 2016 more than 4,500 journalists and media agents were stationed to report in the Donbass territory. Investigators claim that Myrotvorets employees hacked into the Ministry of State Security of the Donetsk People’s Republic’s database and stole the phone numbers, email addresses and home addresses of foreign journalists stationed in the Donbass territory. The Myrotvorets organization accused the journalists of “collaborating with terrorists” because they were reporting on the war from non-Ukrainian held territories.
As of October, 2022, no major US corporate news outlets have covered the story, but Armstrong’s piece was picked up by several independent sites, including Monthly Review Online, The Grayzone, and Covert Action Magazine.
So it goes, so it goes, Russia-Gate:
“Promoting Falsehoods and Marginalizing Truth-Tellers: WaPo’s Revelations About Russiagate Reporting Failures Typify Legacy Media Failures”
The Washington Post’s coverage of a January 2023 study arguing that the post-2016 coverage of Russia election meddling may have been overblown, reveals a corrosive trend in legacy news media where the personalities and outlets that perpetuate inaccurate or false news are rewarded, and the truth-tellers who expose legacy media lies are marginalized and ostracized.
The Washington Post cited a newly published academic study from the New York University Center for Social Media and Politics that concluded there was no evidence that the content suspected of being generated from Russia meaningfully impacted voters in the 2016 election. The authors wrote “we can’t find any relationship between being exposed to these tweets and people’s change in attitudes.” However, the Post was quick to point out that the study focused on Twitter and there was still the possibility that Russian content on other platforms such as Facebook (now Meta) could have tilted the election. However, there is no solid evidence to confirm such a claim and other previous studies by media scholars Emil Marmol and Lee Major, as well as Nolan Higdon of Project Censored, found Facebook’s reach was also minimal. They were not alone.
The study the Post referenced was hardly revelatory as even more researchers had drawn the same conclusion as early as 2016. Harvard University’s Yochai Benkler and his colleagues pointed out there was no empirical evidence that online content shifted electoral votes in 2016 and noted that cable news proved to be arguably far more influential. All of these studies found that the content from Russia was minimal in scope and influence when compared to the digital content disseminated by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s multi-million dollar presidential campaigns, which were further boosted by billions of dollars in free coverage from legacy media. Meanwhile, seasoned journalists such as Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Aaron Maté noted the flimsy sources and baseless claims so-called “mainstream” media were relying on to convince audiences that Russia tilted the election. Rather than analyze these arguments, corporate media outlets just shot at the messengers.
So, some flak for NED, some woman who has spent her career spinning and branding and mushing up and mashing down and furthering the propaganda and marketing ploys of various non-profits, she is just one in a million getting big bucks to do nothing, that is, to do a lot:
Ahh, we don’t know if Russia attacked Ukrainian arms depot because “we wouldn’t be allowed to report on that . . . “ That fucking media.
The entire mess goes back to Koppel and his variety show:
Caitlin Johnstone: “To be clear, when I say CFR is immensely influential, I mean it is immensely influential. Its membership spans throughout the major media institutions of the western world, and it once hosted a panel where a former State Department official who was also an editor of Time Magazine openly endorsed the practice of using propaganda on Americans to influence how they think.”
Another Jewish elite, from the East Coast: Stengel was born in New York City into a Jewish family, and raised in Westchester County. He attended Princeton University and played on the Princeton Tigers basketball team as part of the 1975 National Invitation Tournament. He graduated magna cum laude in 1977. After college, he won a Rhodes Scholarship and studied English and history at Christ Church, Oxford.
Ahh, Rhodes, Princeton, Westchester County. Hmm, those East Coast Blues!
Caitlin: “So to be perfectly clear I will not be supporting or cheerleading any candidate in this election. Not because I don’t think Australians have a right to involve themselves in US politics (we absolutely do), but because US presidential elections are a performance designed to trick Americans into thinking they have any meaningful control over the major decisions that will be made by their government. They’re the unplugged video game controller you give your baby brother so you can stop him from whining to play without actually letting him.”
Fucking hilarious:
The Americans; and Greenfield and Chomsky and all of them know how to fool a bunch of Goyim:
What a joke, expecting a media spinner — Aun — to have ANY knowledge of her own non-profit. Different languages, Max, that you and Aun speak. Same city, same backgrounds, but . . . .
And that is it, no, with the governor of the 51st state, *elensky?
Our new governor:
Those headlines which get ZERO airplay: “Ukrainian Regime Led by Media Darling Volodymyr Zelensky Kidnaps Student Dissidents, Bans Opposition Parties, Shuts Down Independent Media, Commits Egregious War Crimes and Imposes Regressive Labor Laws” By Dmitri Kovalevich
Again, if you need air sickness bags, here you go:
as we slide more toward Bedlam and Babylon, a Tower of AI-VR-AR Babel rises
Bedlam? (Modelled after a mental asylum . . . When it was rebuilt in 1676, London’s Bethlem Hospital was the most opulent mental asylum the world had ever seen – from the outside. Inside, it was another matter entirely.)
[Photo: The hospital may have looked like a palace, but treatment of patients was hardly ideal, as shown in this etching of William Norris in 1814 (Credit: Wellcome Library, London)]
Indeed we are in a controlled demolition, a programmed and set upon Tower of Babel rising, falling, rising, and falling and rising again :
And so there is so so much out there, from TikTok, to Netflix, to SmartPhones, and then beyond the unending media trolling creating these stories, these humans (sic) who joke about killing Russians, and money well spent:
“Lindsey Graham calls ‘Russians dying’ the ‘best money US has spent’ in a meeting with Zelensky: US senator Lindsey Graham dubbed ‘Russians dying’ as ‘the best money’ the US has spent during a meeting with Ukraine’s President Zelensky on Friday (26 May).
Footage from inside the room where it took place shows Graham joking with Zelensky that it’s ‘free or die’, as Ukraine requested more ‘long-range weapons’ to aid the ongoing invasion.
In a statement after the meeting, he said he expected the Ukrainian counter-offensive to ‘yield results’.”
Again, these are words of a murderer, two of them, and full-stop, my world is one where these murderers, and those pushing murder onto more crazy and empty headed people to commit, adopt and approve of this murder, should be, well, taken out.
For fuck’s sake, dudes and dudettes, do you approve of this unelected governor of an un-resolved 51st state, Ukraine, laughing it up about “free or die” in their remarks?
Come on, wimps, just bend a bit toward humanity, toward what you should do if you see men pounding a lady with a puny steak knife with taser high voltage wires?
Chromebooks reach their “death date” when they are no longer capable of receiving operating system updates. Replacing them straps district budgets and harms the environment.”
This dirty Capitalism, Chlamydia Capitalism, has built in assassin genes, shelf lives, preprogrammed obsolescence! Chromebooks, basic laptops programmed by Google that are primarily used for connecting to the Internet and running simple programs, have a notably shorter lifespan than other devices. Each is hardwired with a so-called “death date,” a predetermined date when they can no longer carry out operating system updates and consequently stop enabling students to navigate to secure websites even as the devices themselves still function.All of Google’s devices will expire in an average of four years, according to a recent report focused on the impacts of technology turnover by nonprofit advocacy organization CoPIRG.
Google and Samsung, and now, tech manufacturers like HP, Acer, Dell, and Lenovo offer their own versions of Chromebooks! “With a collection of about 78,000 Chromebooks for both students and staff, Denver Public Schools as invested more than $18.3 million in Chromebooks since 2021, about half using bond money and the rest from federal COVID relief funds, according to figures the district provided.”
All of this is pure Merchandizing Death, not just Graham and Zelensky Murder Incorporated Hit Squads and Assassin Drone Squadrons Killing Anyone of Russian “stench,” but also the death of people’s spirituality, spirit, soul, intellect, hope, through this killer stuff, Chromebooks. Hard-wired end of life Zoom School.
Snake oil and Charlatan Mojo?
It’s a no brainer why there is addiction, why the opioid crisis is a crisis. For fuck’s sake, this is lawyer, Californication Robert Kennedy Junio, blathering about a work camp style in fascist Italy, today?
Five years on the farm, and if you don’t do your chores and work for free and stay chained up when we say you stay chained up, then, watch out, brothers and sisters.
These all relate — Murdering Russians with USA Money, a Good Deal, Best Deal Behind Door Number Two; then, this criminal enterprise, this end of teaching/teachers/bricks and mortar for the Dirty Chromebook and WWW and insipid junk in these machines as well as a behavior experiment in compliance and acceptance of all things digital; and then this upsidedown world of RFK, Jr. (and I am 100 percent on record stating anyone going for the POTUS, anyone with a campaign, today, anyone getting press for POTUS aspiration, all of them are THE ENEMY).
But think about the stupidity of the lawyer Kennedy saying 100,000 opioid deaths a year is twice the number of those young boys dying in Vietnam over a 15 year period. What the fuck is that? Young boys? Hmm? US bombing, use of chemical weapons, napalm and phosphoric bombs as well as the ground operations of the US army caused the death of 3 million Vietnamese in the Vietnam war.
Work camps. Forced labor. Five years in a lock-down. Whew. RFK, Jr. touts this shit:
But the reality is, what causes addiction? Production? Working for criminals? War?
A well in My Lai
Mass murder of civilians by American soldiers in My Lai, Vietnam 1968
The city of Novi Sad for NATO bombing
Coalition F-15E aircraft during Operation Inherent Resolve
Afghanistan: Operation Enduring Freedom began on October 7, 2001
++—++
Ahh, so what is the root of Babel, or this Bedlam, of this Insane Doublespeak, Newsspeak, Equivocation, false balance, stacked deck, agnotolgy? Propaganda 101, and when we looked at these in my many dozens (hundred-plus) of classes I taught, well, now, what can we do NOW to get a Haeder Faculty Member Fired? There are more rhetorical devices and constructed ways to induce stupor or stupidity or blind ignorance or blind rage, but here, a short list for First Year Composition List.
PROPAGANDA TECHNIQUES TO RECOGNIZE:
1. NAME CALLING or STEREOTYPING: Giving a person or an idea a bad label by using an easy to remember pejorative name. This is used to make us reject and condemn a person or idea without examining what the label really means. Examples: “Republican”, “Tree-Hugger”, “Nazi”, “Environmentalist”, “Special-Interest Group”.
2. VIRTUE WORDS or GLITTERING GENERALITY: These words are used to dupe us into accepting and approving of things without examining the evidence carefully. Examples: “Natural”, “Democratic”, “Organic”, “Scientific”, “Ecological”, “Sustainable”.
3. DEIFICATION: This is when an idea is made to appear holy, sacred, or very special and therefore above all law. Any alternative or opposite points of view are thereby given the appearance of treason or blasphemy. Examples: “God-given right to…”, “Mother Earth”, “Gia”.
4. TRANSFER: Transfer is when a symbol that carries respect, authority, sanction, and prestige is used along with and idea or argument to make it look more acceptable. Examples: American Flag, University Seal, Medical Association Symbol (or something that looks like it). This method is also called GUILT- or VIRTUE-BY-ASSOCIATION.
5. TESTIMONIAL: When some respected celebrity (or alternatively someone generally hated) claims that an idea or product is good (or bad). This technique is used to convince us without examining the facts more carefully.
6. PLAIN FOLKS: This is a way that a speaker convinces an audience that an idea is good because they are the same ideas of the vast majority of people like yourself. Examples: “This is the will of the People”, “Most Americans…”. Another example would be when the speaker tells a story about a family or people that are “just like you” to reinforce the speaker’s point of view.
7. BAND WAGON: This common propaganda method is when the speaker tries to convince us to accept their point of view or else we will miss out on something really good. The Band-Wagon technique is often used in advertising. Examples: “This is the wave of the future”, “Be the first on your block”, “Act Now!”. You might ask yourself “What if I was the only one on my block because no one else was interested (duped)?”.
8. ARTIFICIAL DICHOTOMY: This is when someone tries to claim there are only two sides to an issue and that both sides must have equal presentation in order to be evaluated. This technique is used to dupe us into believing there is only one way to look at an issue, when in fact there may be many alternative viewpoints or “sides”. Like most propaganda techniques it simplifies reality and therefore distorts it, often to the advantage of the speaker. A classic example is the “intelligent design” versus “evolution” controversy.
9. HOT POTATO: This is an inflammatory (often untrue) statement or question used to throw an opponent off guard, or to embarrass them. Examples “Have you stopped beating your spouse”, “When will you pay the taxes you owe?” The fact that it may be utterly untrue is irrelevant, because it still brings controversy to the opponent.
10. STALLING or IGNORING THE QUESTION : This technique is used to play for more time or to avoid answering a pointed question. Examples: “More research is needed…”, “A fact-finding committee is working on this issue…” “I am calling for an investigation on this failure..” When asked about a tax increase possibility a senator replies: “I have always met the obligations I have to those I represent.”
11. LEAST-OF-EVILS is used to justify an otherwise unpleasant or unpopular point of view. Example: ‘”War is hell but appeasement leads to worse disasters”.
12. SCAPEGOAT: This often use with Guilt-by-association to deflect scrutiny away from the issues. It transfers blame to one person or group of people without investigating the complexities of the issue. Examples: “George W. Bush got us into Iraq”, “President Reagan caused the national debt”.
13. CAUSE AND EFFECT MISMATCH: This technique confuses the audience about what is really cause and effect. In fact the causes of most phenomena are complex, and it is misleading to say just one of the following: “Tuberculosis is caused by bacteria”, “Tuberculosis is caused by un-regulated capitalism that creates poor working conditions”, “Tuberculosis is caused by a lack of effective antibiotics”.
14. DISTORTION OF DATA or OUT OF CONTEXT or CARD STACKING or CHERRY PICKING: This technique is used to convince the audience by using selected information and not presenting the complete story. Examples: “A study was done that showed eating peanut butter causes liver cancer” (the fact that later the study was later shown to be flawed or funded by the peanut butter haters and therefore suspect, is not revealed). A variation would be “Raising the speed limit to 65 mph resulted in many fewer traffic fatalities”. Such statements need to be checked with how many people were driving before and after the change in speed limit. Fewer people may be driving after the speed limit change, even though the fatality rates (deaths per 100,000) may be higher, leading to the overall result of fewer fatalities.
15. WEAK INFERENCE (or False Cause): Weak inference is when a judgment is made with insufficient evidence, or that the conclusion does not necessarily follow from the evidence given. For example: Ducks and geese migrate south for the winter, therefore all waterfowl migrate south for the winter. Or, most rich folks vote republican, therefore most people who vote republican are rich.
16. FAULTY ANALOGY: This is when a comparison is carried to far. Example: “The economy is following the same path as right before the great depression, therefore we will experience a stock market crash soon!” SLIPPERY SLOPE would be an example of faulty analogy. Slippery slope makes the argument that a shift in one direction will continue to lead to extremes (ex. smoking pot will lead to heroine addiction). It is not necessarily so.
17. MISUSE OF STATISTICS: Some examples: Average results are reported, but not the amount of variation around the averages. A percent or fraction is presented, but not the sample size as in “9 out of 10 dentists recommend…”. Absolute and proportional quantities are mixed as in “3,400 more robberies occurred in our town last year, whereas other cities hand an increase of less than one percent”. Graphs are used that, by chopping off part of the scale or using unusual units or no scale, distort the appearance of the result. Results are reported with misleading precision. For example, representing 13 out of 19 students as 68.42105 percent.
18. FEAR: “Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.” — Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
19. ad hominem ATTACK (also called Deflection): You attack the messenger, instead of the argument or evidence that is presented.
20. tu quoque ATTACK: Pronounced too-kwo-kwee. This technique is when you respond to your opponent by accusing them of committing a logical fallacy or propaganda technique instead of addressing the claim of your opponent’s argument and evidence. Ex. “You too are using fear as a propaganda technique”
21. Preemptive Framing: “Frame an issue before other people get a chance to” (George Lakoff – On the Media Jan 2017) Ex. “The only reason the hacking of the poorly defended DNC (Democratic National Committee) is discussed, is that the loss by the Dems was so big that they were totally embarassed” -Donald Trump. When in fact the Dems did not lose big, nor was is their fault that they got hacked.
22. Diversion: When a major issue comes up that is embarrassing or threatening, so a diversion is created so attention is directed away from the issue.
++—++
Now, it is not to say we can’t parse our own propaganda, and the merits of critically looking at arguments, debates, and seeing how lawyers manage ethos, pathos, logos, and how we have the ability to dig deep into ideas and emotions and the collective as well as the individual perspectives and points of view and language and discourse and contexts to determine how and why and what people disagree on, those merits rank high.
Shit dog, I have studied this in graduate urban planning course, and have taught variations on a theme of the underlying principles: Systems Thinking for Social Change by David Peter Stroh. There is a lot of psycho-babble, a lot of systems language, much emphasis on change and consensus harmony. Certainly the Wikipedia definition makes more sense if applied correctly: Systems thinking is a way of making sense of the complexity of the world by looking at it in terms of wholes and relationships rather than by splitting it down into its parts. It has been used as a way of exploring and developing effective action in complex contexts, enabling systems change.
However, we all are framing things from our cultural biases, or our own critical significant emotional events generating some interesting strata, all those events in the womb leading up to the school, throughout life, carving into us. The brain of the human is very very malleable and mutatable. It’s been evolving to forget, to screen, to invent, and to amplify or deattenuate. And there are inbred peoples, that is, people who have a very thin margin of diversity in their familial lines, and that too has generated some interestingly cohesive and colluding mental states, emotional states and so-called consistently common IQs within family lines.
Well, we don’t want to get too weird, but, yes, we do inherit stature, ear lobes, eye color, hair, and, well, disposition and various emotional states. Are we the product of the sins of our fathers/mothers?
Who knows the direct and indirect ethos, pathos and logos of say being a Hillary and Bill offspring, or an offspring of Zuckerberg and Chan?
The dad of three shared sweet photos of the couple with the newborn, soaking up the first few moments with their baby girl.
“Welcome to the world, Aurelia Chan Zuckerberg! You’re such a little blessing,” he captioned the post.
Zuckerberg and Chan, who are Co-Founders and Co-CEOs at CZI [RE: The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative was founded in 2015 to help solve some of society’s toughest challenges — from eradicating disease and improving education, to addressing the needs of our local communities. Our mission is to build a more inclusive, just, and healthy future for everyone.] , are also parents to daughters August, 5, and Maxima “Max,” 7.
The Bezoses of the world have no need to be paid a salary. Bezos’ Amazon wages have long been set at the middle-class level of around $80,000 a year.
For years, there’s been something of a competition among elite founder-CEOs to go even lower. Steve Jobs took $1 in salary when he returned to Apple in the 1990s. Facebook’s Zuckerberg, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Google’s Larry Page have all done the same.
Yet this is not the self-effacing gesture it appears to be: Wages are taxed at a high rate. The top 25 wealthiest Americans reported $158 million in wages in 2018, according to the IRS data. That’s a mere 1.1% of what they listed on their tax forms as their total reported income. The rest mostly came from dividends and the sale of stock, bonds or other investments, which are taxed at lower rates than wages.
Now, who said this?
“Well, look, you can take — steal — all the money from the rich. I mean, multimillionaires, billionaires, us, and, that’s around 4,000 billionaires and a hefty 20 million multimillionaires. Take it all, and from Blackrock, from those Fortune 5000 companies. I guarantee, in five years, we will get all that money back from you. Go ahead, give me a stat: ‘One billion women around the world can’t access loans, markets, business training, or even open bank accounts. And when they can, other barriers stand in their way, such as gender-based violence and grueling household work. … This lack of opportunity perpetuates the cycle of poverty and hunger in their communities.’ Okay, then another stat — ‘ a majority of the world’s population (56%) continued to live a low-income existence, compared with just 13% that could be considered middle income by a global standard’ — so that’s what Seventy Percent of the World poor and low income. Hell, give the other 25 percent our wealth. That’s 95 percent of the world given all our wealth, and sure, land, holdings, what have you. I guarantee, that in five years WE will get all of that back. Hands down. All of it. And, with interest. All of it. Sure, the land and companies will be shit storms, all fucked up, broken down, useless, kaput. But just let the billionaires — the smart ones, the elite, the uber geniuses and quick on our feet ones — and their minions who are multimillionaires because we have given them a chance to work with and for us get tp work on fleecing you all. All that money, all of it, all back in our pockets. Hell, just one family, those drug dealers, the Sackler Family, take them for example. Hit them with 99 percent fines and taxes. What, forty members of that family. Here, more stats — ‘In 2016, the remaining 40 members of the Sackler family were worth $13 billion, which makes them the 19th richest family, according to Forbes. Since then, the figure has shifted due to litigation and settlement fines. As of September 2021, Bloomberg estimated that the Sackler family’s wealth had dropped to about $11 billion.
According to a CNBC report in March 2021, members of the Sackler family had written in letters to the U.S. House Oversight Committee that family members on the board had assets of only about $1.1 billion.
If the figure above ($11 billion) is accurate and the family pays out the $6 billion it agreed to as part of the recent settlement, it could drop the Sackler family’s net worth to $5 billion or less.’ —-
Do you get it? These forty, no matter how screwed up some of them are, including in-laws, etc., the Sacklers will amass a fortune in five years starting today, much more than what you all think you could have taken from them.
You’d be eating nettles and running around with leprosy and fornicating in the bushes and trying to start fire with rocks without us. Hahaha.”
Okay, that was poetic license, but I have heard it before — “Take my millions and millions away, and I bet in five years I or my offspring will get it all back from you. You’d be on a bender, like those Lottery Winners. Useless stuff. Yachts that end up sinking. Esates with no plumbing. Foreclosed on properties. You’d cocaine and prostitute yourself back into poverty. And I’d have it all back, from my investments in private prisons, booze, cigarettes, insurance, PayDay loans, Porn Hub, Walmart, health care, you name it, I’d be back fleecing you in no time.”
The world’s 85 richest individuals possess as much wealth as the 3.5 billion souls who compose the poorer half of the world’s population, or so it was announced in a report by Oxfam International. The assertion sounds implausible to me. I think the 85 richest individuals, who together are worth many hundreds of billions of dollars, must have far more wealth than the poorest half of our global population.
How could these two cohorts, the 85 richest and 3.5 billion poorest, have the same amount of wealth? The great majority of the 3.5 billion have no net wealth at all. Hundreds of millions of them have jobs that hardly pay enough to feed their families. Millions of them rely on supplements from private charity and public assistance when they can. Hundreds of millions are undernourished, suffer food insecurity, or go hungry each month, including many among the very poorest in the United States.
Most of the 3.5 billion earn an average of $2.50 a day. The poorest 40 percent of the world population accounts for just 5 percent of all global income. About 80 percent of all humanity live on less than $10 a day. And the poorest 50 percent maintain only 7.2 percent of the world’s private consumption. How exactly could they have accumulated an amount of surplus wealth comparable to the 85 filthy richest?
Hundreds of millions live in debt even in “affluent” countries like the United States. They face health care debts, credit card debts, college tuition debts, and so on. Many, probably most who own homes— and don’t live in shacks or under bridges or in old vans— are still straddled with mortgages. This means their net family wealth is negative, minus-zero. They have no propertied wealth; they live in debt.
Millions among the poorest 50 percent in the world may have cars but most of them also have car payments. They are driving in debt. In countries like Indonesia, for the millions without private vehicles, there are the overloaded, battered buses, poorly maintained vehicles that specialize in breakdowns and ravine plunges. Among the lowest rungs of the 50 percent are the many who pick through garbage dumps and send their kids off to work in grim, soul-destroying sweatshops.
The 85 richest in the world probably include the four members of the Walton family (owners of Wal-Mart, among the top ten superrich in the USA) who together are worth over $100 billion. Rich families like the DuPonts have controlling interests in giant corporations like General Motors, Coca-Cola, and United Brands. They own about forty manorial estates and private museums in Delaware alone and have set up 31 tax-exempt foundations. The superrich in America and in many other countries find ways, legal and illegal, to shelter much of their wealth in secret accounts. We don’t really know how very rich the very rich really are.
Regarding the poorest portion of the world population— whom I would call the valiant, struggling “better half”—what mass configuration of wealth could we possibly be talking about? The aggregate wealth possessed by the 85 super-richest individuals, and the aggregate wealth owned by the world’s 3.5 billion poorest, are of different dimensions and different natures. Can we really compare private jets, mansions, landed estates, super luxury vacation retreats, luxury apartments, luxury condos, and luxury cars, not to mention hundreds of billions of dollars in equities, bonds, commercial properties, art works, antiques, etc.— can we really compare all that enormous wealth against some millions of used cars, used furniture, and used television sets, many of which are ready to break down? Of what resale value if any, are such minor durable-use commodities? especially in communities of high unemployment, dismal health and housing conditions, no running water, no decent sanitation facilities, etc. We don’t really know how poor the very poor really are.
Millions of children who number in the lower 50 percent never see the inside of a school. Instead they labor in mills, mines and on farms, under conditions of peonage. Nearly a billion people are unable to read or write. The number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world’s population. So poverty is spreading even as wealth accumulates. It is not enough to bemoan this enormous inequality, we must also explain why it is happening.
But for now, let me repeat: the world’s richest 85 individuals do not have the same amount of accumulated wealth as the world’s poorest 50 percent. They have vastly more. The multitude on the lower rungs—even taken as a totality—have next to nothing.
forty hard years of lobotomizing, dumbdowning, infantilizing, and PSYOPS direct and covert operations by the Edward Bernays of the World have gotten us here:
Trillions for Ukraine. Christ, this is 2019, from The Nation, not exactly radical: “Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine/ Five years after the Maidan uprising, anti-Semitism and fascist-inflected ultranationalism are rampant.” By Lev Golinkin
Before the Russian invasion, CIA reports linked him to an oligarch so dirty and so mired in “significant corruption” that the State Department banned him from entering the U.S.
But now CIA propaganda portrays Zelensky as nobler than Winston Churchill and saintlier than Mother Theresa.
Will the Real Volodymyr Zelensky Please Stand Up
Sorry, but it does matter who controls the levers of power, the narrative, the engines of Press-Propaganda-Entertainment. As well as, politics, marketing, education?
Jews will attack Roger Waters, of Pink Floyd, and they will get countless thousands of lies published in countless broken media outfits immediately. Just Google-Gulag search: Roger Waters and Berlin Fascism. Hate, pure lies, and the hasbara and powerful Jewish hatred of thinking.
Israel’s foreign ministry later criticized Waters on social media, tweeting on May 24: “Good morning to everyone but Roger Waters who spent the evening in Berlin (Yes Berlin) desecrating the memory of Anne Frank and the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.”
I am sorry to say that the Jewish folk I have been reading about, listening to, and researching throughout my decades, even from day one of college onward are indeed a clear and present danger. They hate Russia, Russians, and anyone who might dare question the UkroNazi Proxy War with Russia, started, oh, hell, way before 2014.
Self-proclaimed Jewish criminal, Kolomoyskyi is the dirty banker and the dirty funder of Zelensky:
But, read this Jewish rag in Isra-Hell, Haaretz | World News/ “Ukraine Enlists Jewish Leaders to Lobby Israel for Arms”
Ukraine recently requested air defense systems and training from Israel, saying that Iran would use the deployment of its weapons systems in Europe to refine their capabilities. Still, Israel maintains that it would not send military assistance to Ukraine
A senior Ukrainian official close to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called on world Jewry to push Jerusalem to arm his country with defensive weapons on Wednesday, only two days after Moscow warned Israel that supplying military equipment to Ukraine would “destroy the political relations between the two countries.”
Of course, I am disgusted by any racist group calling on “all Jews worldwide to continue the murder of Russians and Ukrainians in Donbass, and now, throughout Ukraine and into Russia.
This is merchant of death war mongering, and it has to stop, stop first by calling a Jewish Fascist a Jewish Fascist when you come in contact with him or her or them: Here, more lies, blatant valorizing of a corrupt and criminal man, Zelensky!
1. The most important Jewish leader in the world (source)
The past week has turned us all into experts on Ukraine, now at the center of every conversation. Did you know how big it is? (When you lay it over the U.S. map, it stretches from New York to Chicago.) Who knew that we were actually using the Russian city names and not the Ukrainian ones (it’s Kyiv, not Kiev; Lviv, not Lvov; and Kharkiv, not Kharkov). And their president—did you know that he is Jewish?
Volodymyr Zelensky is probably the most admired Jewish leader the world has to offer right now. Before entering politics in 2018, Zelensky was a popular comedian (and you can’t get any more Jewish than that); he does not often speak about his Jewish identity, but he has never tried to hide it. In a country like Ukraine, which is still struggling with a painful legacy of antisemitism, Zelensky’s Jewishness has always been present.
For Jews across the world, Zelensky is now a source of pride: a young, inexperienced leader who is putting his life at risk for his people by leading a nation of 40 million people in opposing a ruthless Russian aggressor.
In his inauguration speech, Zelensky famously told lawmakers not to hang his portrait on their walls. “I do not want my picture in your offices: The president is not an icon, an idol or a portrait. Hang your kids’ photos instead, and look at them each time you are making a decision.”
True to form, Zelensky maintained his unassuming, direct style when crisis hit. His video messages, posted several times a day, have been helping reassure the Ukrainian people. He spoke from his office and from the streets of Kyiv, even as Russian troops closed in on the capital, and when the fighting intensified, Zelensky candidly shared with all Ukrainians the fact that he has been marked by the Russians as “target number one” and that his family is “target number two.” But when the U.S. offered to evacuate him from Kyiv to somewhere safer, he responded: “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.”
I’m writing this column on Sunday, as Russian forces, bogged down and weakened by courageous Ukrainians armed with AK-47s, Molotov cocktails, or sometimes just a large pole they picked up on the side of the street, still threaten the capital. Zelensky is leading the effort to save his nation, though most foreign intelligence services still think he’s fighting a losing battle.
So, this piece of shit Ukraine and Zelensky and the US and UK, with their Kill List, all brains have been thrown out the window, or the voice of reason is where?
This is how ZioAzovLensky rolls, and even the corrupt CIA-controlled Wikipedia has some facts here on the murderous Jews, Zelenksy’s mother ship, historical grounding, who called themselves Zionists, but I know very few Jews who are not ZIONISTS:
A successful paramilitary campaign was carried out by Zionist underground groups against British rule in Mandatory Palestine from 1944 to 1948. The tensions between the Zionist underground and the British mandatory authorities rose from 1938 and intensified with the publication of the White Paper of 1939. The Paper outlined new government policies to place further restrictions on Jewish immigration and land purchases, and declared the intention of giving independence to Palestine, with an Arab majority, within ten years. Though World War II brought relative calm, tensions again escalated into an armed struggle towards the end of the war, when it became clear that the Axis powers were close to defeat.
The Haganah, the largest of the Jewish underground militias, which was under the control of the officially recognised Jewish leadership of Palestine, remained cooperative with the British. But in 1944 the Irgun, an offshoot of the Haganah, launched a rebellion against British rule, thus joining Lehi, which had been active against the authorities throughout the war. Both were small, dissident militias of the right-wingRevisionist movement. They attacked police and government targets in response to British immigration restrictions. They intentionally avoided military targets, to ensure that they would not hamper the British war effort against their common enemy, Nazi Germany.
The armed conflict escalated during the final phase of World War II, when the Irgun declared a revolt in February 1944, ending the hiatus in operations it had begun in 1940. Starting from the assassination of Baron Moyne by Lehi in 1944, the Haganah actively opposed the Irgun and Lehi, in a period of inter-Jewish fighting known as the Hunting Season, effectively halting the insurrection. However, in autumn 1945, following the end of World War II in both Europe (April–May 1945) and Asia (September, 1945), when it became clear that the British would not permit significant Jewish immigration and had no intention of immediately establishing a Jewish state, the Haganah began a period of co-operation with the other two underground organisations. They jointly formed the Jewish Resistance Movement.
The Haganah refrained from direct confrontation with British forces, and concentrated its efforts on attacking British immigration control, while Irgun and Lehi attacked military and police targets.[6] The Resistance Movement dissolved amidst recriminations in July 1946, following the King David Hotel bombing. The Irgun and Lehi started acting independently, while the main underground militia, Haganah, continued acting mainly in supporting Jewish immigration. The Haganah again briefly worked to suppress Irgun and Lehi operations, due to the presence of a United Nations investigative committee in Palestine. After the UN Partition Plan resolution was passed on 29 November 1947, the civil war between Palestinian Jews and Arabs eclipsed the previous tensions of both with the British. However, British and Zionist forces continued to clash throughout the period of the civil war up to the termination of the British Mandate for Palestine and the Israeli Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948.
Within the United Kingdom there were deep divisions over Palestine policy. Dozens of British soldiers, Jewish militants, and civilians died during the campaigns of insurgency. The conflict led to heightened antisemitism in the United Kingdom. In August 1947, after the hanging of two abducted British sergeants, there was widespread anti-Jewish rioting across the United Kingdom. The conflict caused tensions in the United Kingdom–United States relations.
Putin and Russians and those of us who actually want Russia to have a safe border, peace, and zero NATO interference, see Zelensky and his Jewish Lords — Kagans, Nuland, Blinken, Yellen, Sherman, Garland, and hundreds of others in the Biden White House and thousands of others in the Military Industrial Expanded Complex and millions more in the world of turning a dollar on death — as the ENEMY. Murderous, conniving, hateful, slick enemies numero uno. Violence and terror, that is right up Zelensky’s alley, and this war that UK and USA and Five Eyes and EU have unleashed will not end soon. Expect those weapons that USA taxpayer footed the bill for to bring down some commercial airlines in a neighborhood near-by soon.
We are a soiled Western Culture, and we have seeded the rest of the world with our feces — high tech, low tech, money, land theft, pollution, exploitation, consumerism, throw-away mentality, sanctions, blood lust, coups, supporting depots, money laundering and gold theft and assets removal. Loans from Hell, and alas, here we are, in a putrid world, two days before the big Monday Holiday, Memorial Day, and we straddle syphilitic monsters running the world and our own populous generally marked for death, marked as marks, by the billionaires, the fleecers and those Zionists and Israel-Firsters who have sold us down the Ukrainian toilet.
But leave it to the Paranoid Former Nazis and the disgusting ADL and AIPAC and Mossad loving Israelis to attack us all attacking them:
“The depiction of an unhinged fascist demagogue has been a feature of my shows since Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ in 1980,” Roger Waters said.
“I have spent my entire life speaking out against authoritarianism and oppression where I set it… My parents fought the Nazis in World War II, with my father paying the ultimate price,” he said.
“Regardless of the consequences of the attacks against me, I will continue to condemn injustice and all those who perpetrate it.”
Waters is a well-known pro-Palestinian activist who has been accused of holding anti-Jewish views. He has floated an inflatable pig emblazoned with the Star of David at his concerts. The singer denies the anti-Semitism accusations, saying he was protesting against Israeli policies, not Jewish people.
Ah, those old days, which now would be both considered hate speech and also ground down by the ugly media and the uglier mainstream fools in college, in towns, every where.
Yep, it is a piece of shit piece of cloth representing so so much death, murder, hate, and racism:
And, well, and, who writes the narrative of Ukraine, of Zelensky, of the Jewish Apartheid State supporting the Nazis under Zelensky?
Will one vapid bought and brainwashed media person get on with knowledge:
Here, over at Dissident Voice:
Journey to St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Crimea
by Dan Kovalik and Rick Sterling / May 25th, 2023
At the end of April of this year, the two of us ventured together to Russia. We went with the purpose of fact-finding and also to make a point that we do not believe that Russia should be isolated from the world through sanctions and travel bans.
At this moment, Russia is more isolated from the West than it has ever been, quite possibly in history. As just one example, while V.I. Lenin was able to famously travel from Finland via train to St. Petersburg, even during the height of WWI, the train from Finland to Russia ceased operating after February 24 of 2022. And indeed, it was through Finland that we decided to travel to Russia, simply because there are now very limited ways to travel there. Thus, while for years, even during the Cold War, one could easily fly directly from the US to Russia on Aeroflot and other airlines, that is no longer possible due to sanctions. Now, one can only fly there through Serbia, Turkey or the UAE, but those flights are quite expensive.
And so, we ended up choosing to fly to Helsinki, Finland and have a Russian friend who has a non-Russian passport (Russians with only Russian passports cannot travel to Finland) drive from St. Petersburg to pick us up. This turned out to be more easily said than done as our friend’s car broke down at the Finnish/Russian border. And so, we took a very expensive, three-hour cab ride to the border, met up with our friend and crammed ourselves into the cab of a tow truck to drive the remaining three hours to St. Petersburg – a quite inauspicious beginning to our journey.
[Saint Petersburg streets are busy from early morning til late at night. This photo taken at 11:30pm]
St. Petersburg (Leningrad)
Our first several days were spent in St. Petersburg, formerly “Leningrad.” We stayed strategically at the Best Western in Uprising Square – so named by the new Bolshevik government in 1918 to commemorate the Great October Revolution of 1917. In the Square is located the Moscow train station which we used to great effect during our journey, as well as the Leningrad Hero-City Obelisk. The Obelisk commemorates Leningrad’s designation as one of 13 “hero cities” in the Soviet Union which distinguished themselves for their exceptional sacrifices in resisting the Nazis during WWII. Two other cities we visited on our trip (Moscow and Sevastopol, Crimea) are also honored with this designation, as is Kiev, Ukraine and of course Volgograd (formerly “Stalingrad”).
During our stay, the city of St. Petersburg sure seemed more like Leningrad, for it was beginning to be decked out in red flags with hammers and sickles and stars to commemorate both May Day and Victory Day over the Nazis on May 9. We were told by long-time residents that the ubiquitous display of such symbols of the USSR was something new (at least since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991), and was spurred on by Russia’s Special Military Operations beginning in February of 2022. It appears that the Russian people, and the Russian government as well, are looking to the legacy of the Soviet Union as a source of strength, pride and unity during this time of war – a war that they view, we believe quite rightly, was forced on them.
The newly released Russian Federation “concept” on foreign policy states quite explicitly that Russia’s current foreign policy is informed by the two main objectives and successes of the USSR – the defeat of Nazism and global decolonization. Certainly, on paper at least, this belies the claim of some Western leftists that Russia is motivated in its relations with other nations by imperialist concerns.
[Dan takes his turn playing guitar on St Petersburg street at 11 pm]
While in St. Petersburg, we visited the site of the terrorist attack which claimed the life of Russian journalist Vladlen Tatarsky and wounded over 30 others, at least 10 gravely. The attack involved the bombing of a cafe in the picturesque University district of St. Petersburg along the Neva – a soft target if there ever was one. The cafe remains closed, and three sets of memorials for Tatarsky are set up around it, consisting of flowers and photos. Of course, the Western press has tried to do everything it can to justify this vicious attack upon civilians, writing off Tatarsky as “pro-Kremlin” and “pro-war” (as if the Western press can’t be fairly characterized as “pro-war” and “pro-Pentagon”) and simply glossing over the numerous other civilians wounded in the assault as collateral damage.
[Rick and Dan at the site where Russian journalist was killed]
Moscow
As planned, we left St. Petersburg by train to Moscow after several days. We took the faster “Sapsan” (Falcon) train to Leningrad Station in Moscow (it is still called that). The train ride, reaching 120 mph, was smooth and comfortable. We sat across from two Russian women, one of whom was quite friendly. She told us of her son who lives in Boston and who, quite sadly for her, she hasn’t seen in years. She kept sliding over hard candy to share with us. And, when she saw Dan nervously biting his nails, she kindly handed him her nail filer for him to use. This type of sharing on the train is quite common in Russia as we would continue to discover on our journey.
[Rick with train compartment companions.]
Moscow too was being decorated for the May 9 Victory Day celebration. Red Square was sealed off from the public to prepare for the event, and the city was on high alert for possible terrorist attacks, one of which would come while we were in Russia with the drone attack upon the Kremlin itself. Despite the fears of attack, Muscovites were out on the streets day and night. Both Moscow and St. Petersburg were incredibly vibrant – much more so than our cities back home which are still feeling the effects of the lockdowns during the pandemic. Gorky Park was particularly lively with throngs of families with children enjoying the spring weather, swings and slides. Colorful tulips were in full bloom.
From appearances, Russia largely did not appear to be a country at war. However, everyone we talked to confided in us about their concerns for the war – for the loss of life on both sides, the fact that it was lasting much longer than people had expected, and the danger that the war could expand into a greater conflagration. Some Russians expressed their fear that nuclear weapons would end up being used before this was all over, though they believed that the US would be the first to launch them. At the same time, the Russians showed their usual stoicism in the face of such dangers, with one family with whom Dan had dinner stating almost matter-of-factly that “Russia has always had difficult times, and it will have them again.”
After several days in Moscow, and our hopes for visiting the Donbass falling through, we took the long, 27-hour train ride to Crimea – a region now fully in the crosshairs of the proxy war.
Arriving in Crimea
Ukrainian President Zelensky says he will “take back” Crimea. US leaders Victoria Nuland and Jake Sullivan say they support him. Indeed, Sullivan recently suggested Ukraine is free to use the F-16 fighter jets in attempting to “recapture” Crimea.” We traveled to Crimea to see the situation and learn details of how and why Crimea seceded from Ukraine in 2014.
A highlight of the train ride was passing over the new 12-mile long Kerch Strait bridge which connects mainland Russia to the Crimean peninsula. As our train approached the bridge, we could see that saboteurs had been active. There was a fuel tank on fire in the near distance. A couple passengers did not want us to photograph this, probably thinking it gives publicity to the enemy.
As we departed the train in Crimea at the beautiful station in the Capitol city, Simferopol, the loudspeakers on the platform greeted us with traditional Russian songs.
We then drove the roughly two hours to Yalta where we stayed while in Crimea. Along our drive, we saw the giant mosque which the Russian government is building along the highway in an area where Tatars, who generally practice the Islamic faith, protested to have land to live and worship. The Tatars had been persecuted during WWII as suspected collaborators and forcibly removed from Crimea to other Soviet Republics.
A number of Tatars have moved back to Crimea over the years and now make up about 12 percent of the population of Crimea. Meanwhile, about 65 percent of the Crimean population is ethnic Russian and about 15 percent is Ukrainian, though about 82 percent of the population overall speaks Russian on a daily basis.
As we were told while in Crimea, one of the first things President Putin did after Crimea returned to Russia in 2014 was to try to make good relations with the Tatar community by “rehabilitating” them from the claims of collaboration made by Stalin government, giving them the land they protested for, providing them with modest monetary reparations and building them the new Mosque.
Historical Background
All in all, we spent five days seeing the sights and meeting people in the capital Simferopol, Sevastopopol and Yalta. We were guided by translator and native Crimean Tanya. In the past, Tanya worked for US Aid for International Development (USAID), teaching Russian to US Peace Corps volunteers.
Crimea has a rich agricultural sector. It was severely hampered after Ukraine dammed the canal bringing fresh water from the Dnieper River. After Russian forces intervened, they removed the dam and agriculture is once again thriving. Crimean cities are busy with the streets and sidewalks full. In the parks, there are teens skate boarding and seniors playing chess.
The situation in Crimea is emblematic of the Ukraine crisis overall. In both Crimea and the Donbass (eastern Ukraine), the majority of people are ethnically Russian, their native language is Russian and they voted overwhelmingly for the elected but overthrown President Yanukovich.
From the 15th century Crimea was part of the Ottoman Empire. It became part of the Russian Empire in 1783 after the army of Catherine the Great defeated the Turks.
In 1921, Crimea became the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic as part of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic.
In 1954, Soviet Premier Khrushchev designated Crimea to be part of the Ukraine republic. This was done without consulting the Crimean people but it was not a major change since they were all part of one country, the Soviet Union. As we were told in Crimea, “Nobody could imagine the Soviet Union breaking up.”
As the Soviet Union was breaking up, Crimeans held a referendum in January of 1991. They voted overwhelmingly (94% in favor) to become the “Autonomous Republic of Crimea” and to separate from Ukraine. There was contention with Kiev and ultimately it was agreed that Crimea would be autonomous but within Ukraine. There was desire but not the urgency to secede from Ukraine at this point.
The desire to separate from Ukraine became more urgent in late 2013 and early 2014 as Crimeans watched with alarm as Russophobic ultra-nationalist and neo-nazi groups increasingly dominated violent protests in Kiev’s Maidan plaza. The book To Go One’s Own Way documents how the Crimean parliament and presidency issued statements, pleas and warnings about the threat to Ukrainian unity beginning in November 2013.
As we discuss in an upcoming article, the government of Ukraine reacted to the Crimean referendum to reunite with Russia quite punitively, and it continues to punish the Crimeans for their decision. At the same time, Russia has actively invested in the peninsula and made major improvements in the overall infrastructure there. In light of the foregoing, it is safe to say there are relatively few Crimeans who ever wish to return to Ukraine.
every waking and sleeping moment is run by the juice flow, cloud servers, electricity, diodes, capacitors, microchips, batteries, wires and EMFs a la 4, 5, 6 G, and forget about those satellites
[Photo: Ludd, drawn here in 1812, was the fictitious leader of numerous real protests. Granger Collection, New York.}
The question is, To be or not to be or not to be . . .
(from Hamlet, spoken by Hamlet)
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.
Rolling out Smart Phone City, our 51st state’s govenor, *elensky: Here, highlights from Lily Lynch’s recent blog: Ukraine’s ‘state in a smartphone’.
Notice the language — run like an IT company, Smart Phone city, exporting digitalization, you only need two seconds to become an entrepreneur’ and ‘30 minutes to found a limited liability company;
to ensure widespread adoption of the app, the government produced a miniseries with well-known Ukrainian film stars – creating what Fedorov calls ‘the Netflix of education’, particularly for those in rural areas and the elderly;
Diia eVorog (‘eEnemy’), civilians can use a chatbot to report the names of Russian collaborators, Russian troop movements, the location of enemy equipment and even Russian war crimes. Such reports are processed through support services at Diia; if deemed legitimate, they are submitted to the headquarters of the Ukrainian armed forces. At first glance, the interface looks like a video game;
that positions Ukraine as a technological powerhouse forged in war;
it was announced that by 2030, Ukraine intends to have become the first country to go entirely cashless and have a court system governed by AI;
As Zelensky noted at a recent Diia Summit, ‘A computer has no friends or godfathers, and doesn’t take bribes’;
Residents of Diia City will also benefit from a ‘flexible employment model’, including the introduction of precarious ‘gig contracts’, hitherto nonexistent in Ukraine;
Power announced that an additional $650,000 would be provided to ‘jumpstart’ the creation of Diia-ready infrastructure in other countries. On Tuesday, Power said these would include Colombia, Kosovo and Zambia;
When the Clinton State Department introduced the notion of ‘digital diplomacy’ – with one senior advisor telling NATO that ‘the Che Guevara of the 21st century is the Network’ – it already rang hollow;
It reflects the impoverishment of the Western liberal-democratic imagination, unable to deliver a convincing or desirable vision of the future, on- or offline;
IT is about freedom’, the narrator says. ‘All you need is a computer to invent a great variety of things.’
Lynch: “Wearing the Silicon Valley uniform of blue jeans, a T-shirt and a headset mic, strutting the stage like he was delivering an impassioned TED talk, Ukraine’s 31-year-old Digital Transformation Minister Mykhailo Fedorov explained the many features of the country’s pioneering mobile application. Thanks to Diia, he said, Ukraine would be run less like a country and more like an IT company, soon becoming ‘the most convenient state in the world’. USAID Administrator Samantha Power echoed this aspiration, noting that Ukraine – long known as the breadbasket of the world – was now ‘becoming famous for a new product . . . an open source, digital public good that it will give to other countries’. This would be achieved through the transatlantic partnership between the two nations. ‘The US has always exported democracy’, Fedorov said, ‘now it exports digitalization.’
When Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president in 2019, he promised to transform Ukraine into a ‘state in a smartphone’, making most public services available online. A digitalization agenda of this kind was virtually unprecedented, dwarfing ‘e-Estonia’ in both the speed of its rollout and the scale of its ambition. The programme’s crown jewel was Diia, launched in February 2020 with ample support from USAID. US funds reportedly amounted to $25 million for ‘the infrastructure underpinning Diia’ alone. Additional grants have come from the UK, Switzerland, the Eurasia Foundation, Visa and Google. The app is now used by some 19 million Ukrainians, about 46% of the country’s prewar population.”
+++——+++
The question is: Our we all part of this conspiracy? We use this fucking electronic computerized typewriter with millions of gigs of storage, and tied to the fiber optics, trolling the vast world wide net of information, so are we too the enemy? We communicate with cellular phones, so are we feeding the monster, the ghosts in machnines, the ghosts of the CIA and Mossad and MI6 who want us all handcuffed and monitored? We have our medical information Zoomed at home, and we bank on line, take Snap Shots of old fashioned checks to deposit, so are we responsible for our imprisonment?
We laugh at the Chromebook jokes our k12 students make. We love Hobbits in the next and next Lord of the Rigns, and drool over Cruise and his CGI pecs in Mission Impossible streamed on our tiny black mirror at bedtime while asking Alexa the best place to get Civet feces washed coffee. Are we the enemy?
We all pay for this gulag creation, from IRS chasing small potatoes like me, to the big bad killers of Julian Assange. We all have our nano-breaths fogging up our black mirrors that are now part of the ZioAzovNaziLensky’s wet dreams of tracking us ALL. First, try it in Estonia, Moldovia, Ukraine, then, the world!
Here’s a hell of a deal for USA taxpayer LLC, CIA: For $1 put in, $15 coming back.
It’s open, in the air, Wiki-CIA-Pedia: “In-Q-Tel (IQT), formerly Peleus and In-Q-It, is an American not-for-profit venture capital firm based in Arlington, Virginia. It invests in high-tech companies to keep the Central Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence agencies, equipped with the latest in information technology in support of United Statesintelligence capability. The name “In-Q-Tel” is an intentional reference to Q, the fictional inventor who supplies technology to James Bond.
In-Q-Tel has stated that the average dollar invested by In-Q-Tel in 2016 attracts fifteen dollars from other investors.”
It is a fascist’s, oligarch’s, racist’s wet dream:
I just do not think most radicals and revolutionaries and anti-imperialists and those for Russia’s right to defense, peace, accords, treaties, independence, get it, get how overarching these madmen and madwomen are, with their armies of nerds, eggheads and academics and STEM gurus. Watch this shit storm:
These are the end times, for sure, for guys like me, using this shit storm computer, doing my snap-shot deposits, who pays for IRS interest fines on old unaccounted for 1099s which one of my Gig employers failed to send me. Deplorable, man, not me, not them, but those are the facts, ma’am, just the facts:
For ZioAzovUkrainians, this is reality: eVorog (‘eEnemy’), i.e. RUSSIANS (or anyone looking beyond the dirty tricks of Mossad and DARPA and Blackrock and Tel Aviv, London, Brussels, DC) are THE enemy, and will be blasted on a computer video game app that ties into the security-finance-survelliance state actors, including Google-JP Chase Morgan-BlackRock-Blackstone-Vanguard!!!
Then after the app IDs us, well, then, send in the cocaine cowboy clown’s assassin drones, or just old fashioned black-booted SS or IDF or SBU kicking in the door and targeting with the latest Israeli-made sniper weapon.
From Lynch:
When Russian forces destroyed numerous TV towers, Diia launched broadcasting services to ensure an uninterrupted stream of Ukrainian news sources. Ukrainians can also register destruction to property from Russian military strikes, which the government says will guide the country’s post-war reconstruction. Beyond the introduction of these useful wartime services, Diia has rolled out an array of ‘civil intelligence’ features. With Diia eVorog (‘eEnemy’), civilians can use a chatbot to report the names of Russian collaborators, Russian troop movements, the location of enemy equipment and even Russian war crimes. Such reports are processed through support services at Diia; if deemed legitimate, they are submitted to the headquarters of the Ukrainian armed forces. At first glance, the interface looks like a video game. Icons are illustrated as targets and army helmets. After users submit a report about the location of Russian troops, a muscle-flexing emoji pops up. When they submit documentation of war crimes, they click an icon of a drop of blood.
You have to take a short leap from Ukraine to the WEF, Fourth Industrial Revolutionaries, Transumanism Backers, and understand how the Power of AI to Control Us all is their goal, but we have to leap backward in order to look at why leadership is so disconnected, so transhumanist, so censorious, so Farenheit 451, so Brave New World, so Lord of the Flies, so 1984, so eugenics drenched. These people are in their own world, but their polarized colored glasses and Stem cell smoothies are killing us, even those of us who believe in full stop/time out/precautionary limits on their machinations, on their scientific disgust, on their world of more and smaller and quantumized this and nano-tech that, CRISPR-flogging us all into oblivion.
These people, the policymakers, CEOs, politicians, lobbyists, they live in their own smeared up bubble of hubris and hasbara. They are the Frankenstein masters.
And that propensity is particularly dangerous when leadership groups have become both selfish and short-termist. There really was once upon a time some people who went into government service for the service part, and not for the revolving door and networking. There was also a time, before the rise of global elites, where the powerful had ties to particular physical communities and some took interest in their betterment. In other words, while there were plenty of self-promoting and mediocre people at the helm, there were often enough in the room who were concerned about long-term risks to put a check on the worst behavior. (US Geopolitics: Believing Impossible Things)
There are no ethics, really, when the stage is set at places like CIA-DARPA-DoD-FinTech Stanford, or name the one of a thousand universities, even community colleges:
(Introductions by Professor Rob Reich, President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, and grad student Margaret Guo end at 13:52.) Twin revolutions at the start of the 21st century are shaking up the very idea of what it means to be human. Computer vision and image recognition are at the heart of the AI revolution. And CRISPR is a powerful new technique for genetic editing that allows humans to intervene in evolution. Jennifer Doudna and Fei-Fei Li, pioneering scientists in the fields of gene editing and artificial intelligence, respectively, discuss the ethics of scientific discovery. Russ Altman moderated the conversation.
[Stanford’s Fei-Fei Li and Jennifer Doudna of UC Berkeley will discuss the ethics of artificial intelligence and CRISPR technology. (Image credit: Getty Images)]
These high-tech, anything goes in science corrupt folks:
Since last fall, allegations of image manipulation in scientific papers for which Tessier-Lavigne is listed as an author have spurred questions about his decades-long scientific career. While members of Stanford’s Board of Trustees and several outside legal and scientific experts review the claims of scientific misconduct, Tessier-Lavigne has remained at the helm of one of the world’s premier research institutions.
His unusual position as president-under-investigation mirrors an unusual public-relations approach. Instead of staying silent, as many embattled leaders do during an investigation, Tessier-Lavigne has vocally defended his actions, criticized the student newspaper in harsh terms, and cast himself as a faculty member first and president second.
Some experts in higher ed and science have raised their eyebrows at the president’s tack. In embracing a defensive posture, critics say, he may have compromised his role as a community leader.
So, some egghead with the all that AI love and the other egghead with all the valorizing of CRISPR, they have zero weight in a discussion on the ethics of their Frankensteins, their creations, but in the world of controlled oppositions, controlled MSM, the media spinners in Academia who never scratch truth or rebelliousness, with of all of those secret private security bullet proof legions protecting bankers, millionaires, billionaires, the lot of them at Davos or Aspen, we will never get what we need — real debates with real revolutionaires, whether the beautiful people do or do not call us all Luddites.
Here, from the Stanford student newspaper, god love them:
Meanwhile, Tessier-Lavigne continues to evade questions. After a recent event with Colombian president Gustavo Petro, Tessier-Lavigne was approached by a Daily reporter about his research. To two questions, Tessier-Lavigne responded with silence: “Why did you publish Alzheimer’s research you knew wasn’t reproducible?” and “What was the decision-making process behind not retracting that paper?” To a third question, “What do you have to say to people who are wondering why there are so many allegations of research misconduct from your lab?” Tessier-Lavigne told the reporter, “very nice to see you and look forward to corresponding.” (source)
There are so many studies on this fact, how research is not reproducible. And, the solution to this? Yep, AI: Currently, researchers that have the most-cited or most popular studies in “high-impact” journals get rewarded — even though the methods may not be reproducible. In a recent piece in Issues in Science and Medicine, former Lown Institute VP Shannon Brownlee and National Institutes of Health researcher Bibiana Bielekova propose using machine learning algorithms to identify articles by their rigor, reproducibility, and societal impact, rather than their popularity or number of citations. This could incentivize better research methods while illuminating future research paths that are most likely to bear fruit.
Science as ideology. We think we follow science, but we are following blind ideology. Academic research has many problems. One is the replication crisis starting around 2005. In medical and biological sciences, 85 percent of research papers are not replicable/reproducible.
Did we overreact to “the virus” in 2020? Did we march out mRNA too quickly? Or, were those mRNA “things” way advanced in the pipeline? Well, it was in the plan. And if you put “it” (“Event 201” … or … “Moderna as already working on mRNA corona before 2019”) in a search box in Pharma-CIA-FinTech-DARPA Google, you will get pure deniability:
In October, 2019 Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who, together with his wife (now ex-wife), runs the richest and most powerful foundation in the world, co-organized a simulation exercise on a worldwide corona epidemic. Videos were posted documenting the exercise. Find them. Gates now denies such an exercise ever took place.
Why? On April 12, 2020, Bill Gates said in an interview to the BBC, “Now here we are. We didn’t simulate this, we didn’t practice, so both the health policies and economic policies, we find ourselves in uncharted territory.”
This is the same person who, just six months before the outbreak of the pandemic, organised a series of four role-playing simulations of a corona pandemic with very high-ranking participants. Event 201 was a simulation of a corona pandemic conducted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum and Johns Hopkins University in October 2019.
Participants from the private and public sectors were presented with a scenario, not unlike the one that has unfolded in reality, and discussed what needed to be done. There are official videos of the four meetings and a best-of-video scenario presentation and discussion by the participants, who are members of a pandemic control council in the role play.
It is true that if a little less emphasis had been placed on opinion manipulation, more attention could have been paid to health and economic policy. One of the four meetings was entirely devoted to this. But health and economic policies did get discussed. Gates can hardly have forgotten that.
The video on control of public opinion is the most interesting one, as it helps to put in perspective the efforts in this regard, which we are currently experiencing. One participant tells us that Bill Gates is financing work on algorithms which comb through the information on social media platforms to make sure that people can trust the information that they find there.
And the Chinese participant, the head of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control muses about ways to counter rumours that the virus is man-made. Remember, this exercise took place in October 2019, before the current pandemic broke out. (source)
So are we “anti-science” and “anti-knowledge” and “anti-civilization” if we QUESTION from the bottom of our intellects? Luddites? Am I blind?
Am I a Luddite: According to the article by Richard Conniff:
As the Industrial Revolution began, workers naturally worried about being displaced by increasingly efficient machines. But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”
The original Luddites lived in an era of “reassuringly clear-cut targets—machines one could still destroy with a sledgehammer,” Loyola’s Jones writes in his 2006 book Against Technology, making them easy to romanticize. By contrast, our technology is as nebulous as “the cloud,” that Web-based limbo where our digital thoughts increasingly go to spend eternity. It’s as liquid as the chemical contaminants our infants suck down with their mothers’ milk and as ubiquitous as the genetically modified crops in our gas tanks and on our dinner plates. Technology is everywhere, knows all our thoughts and, in the words of the technology utopian Kevin Kelly, is even “a divine phenomenon that is a reflection of God.” Who are we to resist?
“The original Luddites would answer that we are human. Getting past the myth and seeing their protest more clearly is a reminder that it’s possible to live well with technology—but only if we continually question the ways it shapes our lives. It’s about small things, like now and then cutting the cord, shutting down the smartphone and going out for a walk. But it needs to be about big things, too, like standing up against technologies that put money or convenience above other human values.” (source)
Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any kind. Not for internal perfection, but for external combinations and arrangements, for institutions, constitutions, for Mechanism of one sort or other, do they hope and struggle. Their whole efforts, attachments, opinions, turn on mechanism, and are of a mechanical character. — Thomas Carlyle (source)
…. and yet, the weathering of existence in Capitalism, the immune system hijacking of media-politics-propaganda-blase leadership, we all are inflammed!
I’ve been helping navigate the legal system my friend from another country, green card in hand, and a husband who attempted to suffocate her to death. The people in both camps — defense and prosecution — are interestingly together bedfellows, working the “system” hard, juggling which judge is this or that (pro- or con-), and using all the ugliness of a legal system that is stacked against, well, JUSTICE for one, JUSTICE for all.
Her case gets delayed, and delayed, and the accused is still in jail, awaiting a trial, and then new (sic) evidence pops up, and alas, more moves by defense team (at taxpayer’s expense) rallies to get the case delayed but hoping for the release of the accused from jail.
That hasn’t happened, but the entire mess, from last November’s 911 call, to all of it, from restraining orders, all the lawyer talk for divorce and prosecution, grand jury, sheriff’s deputies, the harassment of in-laws, all that, plus the waiting game, the hyper-vigilance, to going over from day one of life, all of her life, her parents’ role in her life, friends, situation, decisions, all the why’s why’s why’s, and then, finding herself, under the fear, the trauma, the suicidal ideation, all the yo-yo leave-stay-come back-leave-stay-come back of this psychological hell, all of that has weathered her tremendously. I see it.
Not so much vicarious trauma for her, but first-hand, and then repeated, and generational, and the trauma of this abuser and his own life trauma and Breaking Bad family line, the mean cuss father, and well, self-numbing, self-slobbering boozing.
Trauma, and then, just the prosecution and the defense of it all. Ahh, two agencies in Oregon, fighting for $$: OPDS and ODAA.
“The clients you represent through contracts with OPDS have been found indigent and unable to afford their own attorney or costs associated with defending themselves and their families against the accusations brought by the State,” Singer wrote in a Dec. 28 letter announcing the decision. “Neither the clients themselves nor OPDS is responsible for paying fees to learn what evidence the State has regarding its allegations.”
District attorneys have largely objected to the policy change.
Michael Wu, executive director of the Oregon District Attorneys Association, referenced a Nov. 30 letter to OPDS asking that they continue to pay for discovery until after the 2022 legislative session.
“Prosecutorial resources are already stretched by a historic backlog of cases resulting from widespread court closures across the duration of the pandemic,” the ODAA letter states. “We again request that you delay this action long enough for the issue to be addressed by the 2022 Legislature.”
Singer said he supports local prosecutors being properly funded, especially to defray the costs of providing constitutionally-mandated discovery.
“If they’re not being properly funded to defray these costs, I’ll sit at the table with them at the Legislature and support their request for funding. But they need to get that funding directly from the Legislature, not through the public defense system,” he said.
OPDS and ODAA are scheduled to discuss fees later this month.
It takes courage to help child and adult victims of sexual abuse, assist survivors of acts of terrorism and mass violence, fight fires that may have taken people’s lives, or respond to shootings and other crime scenes. It also takes commitment to do this work despite the personal, physical, emotional, and mental impact it can have. (source)
Again, everything in Capitalism is broken, and as Lloyd Ratheon Austin gets trillions more for his Mafia, we in the world of the 80 Percent are screwed, and that third-hand putrid economic and structural violence smoke filling our already screwed first-hand trauma burn in our lungs, well, think of death by a thousand vicarious traumas.
A recent study showed that Oregon needs roughly 1,300 more full-time attorneys – or roughly three times the number it currently has – to represent everyone charged with a crime who cannot afford a lawyer.
Oregon differs from other states in that it relies entirely on contracts with public defenders rather than keeping them on staff. The agency currently has about 100 firms on contract.
[…]
According to Oregon’s public defense agency, violating the constitutional right to legal counsel and a speedy trial has serious consequences, including wrongful convictions, threats to public safety, and an increase in the number of cases returning to trial years after a conviction.
Until July 2022, attorneys who contracted with the agency on an hourly rate made $105 per hour for murder cases. Since then, the agency bumped up the rate to $158 per hour for attorneys taking on cases of people in custody. Now, the agency will implement a tiered hourly rate, ranging from $125 to $200 depending upon the seriousness of the case, regardless of whether or not the person is in custody. (source)
Ahh, so all the charges, all the traffic stops, all the fines, the harassment of people for bad checks and bad lawns, and, yes, many accused are over-charged and innocent, ahh, just getting into the criminal justice system as a WITNESS or VICTIM will age you. However, in Domestic Violence cases, the reality is that once the cops are called, there is a very high chance of that woman being truly afraid of being, well, murdered. Say, what, you want data? Read the other pieces here:
The Oregon legislature approved release of the $100 million in special purpose appropriation funds which will be broken up like this:
$70.3 million for the Criminal Trial Division
$14.6 million for Nonroutine Expenses
$5 million for Court Mandated Expenses
$10.2 million for the Juvenile Division
Some lawmakers voted against releasing these funds because they thought it was too much money, but the vote ultimately passed.
“It’s a mess,” Senator Peter Courtney said. “When we deal with right to counsel…it’s not Republican or Democrat.” (sources)
+—+
And so it goes — trauma . . . second hand trauma . . . care giver trauma . . . trauma informed care . . . PTSD . . . C-PTSD . . . latency PTSD . . . collective PTSD . . . mass hysteria . . . mass … formation … psychosis: MASS FORMATION!
Psychosis is when people lose some contact with reality. Mass formation psychosis is when a large part of a society focuses its attention to a leader(s) or a series of events and their attention focuses on one small point or issue. Followers can be hypnotized and be led anywhere, regardless of data proving otherwise. A key aspect of the phenomena is that the people they identify as the leaders – the one’s that can solve the problem or issue alone – they will follow that leader(s) regardless of any new information or data. Furthermore, anybody who questions the leader’s narrative are attacked and disregarded.
There are four key components needed for an environment to experience a mass formation psychosis: lack of social bonds or decoupling of societal connections, lack of sense-making (things don’t make sense), free-floating anxiety, and free-floating psychological discontent. Free-floating anxiety is a general sense of uneasiness that is not tied to any particular object or specific situation.
So, vicarious trauma, and vicarious trauma training (which the victims assistance people in my county just went through), it is all part of a decaying society, from heavy caseloads, to vicious retrogrades who want all people dead, locked up, without safety nets, and it is there, within the care givers, stuck in their top down lives as workers, with these sychophants above, and the money money money and defunding and threats of budget cuts, and the caseloads out the roof, and the more and more people living Breaking Bad lives, truly, a society that has been scoured of intelligence, agency, community purpose, and, alas, has been put into a Netflix and Facebook Isolation Screen Scrolling Black Mirror Chamber, what can we expect then, this TRAUMA TRAUMA TRAUMA?
GAD, man, General Anxiety Disorder? What the fuck is that?
Vicarious Trauma: “It takes courage to help child and adult victims of sexual abuse, assist survivors of acts of terrorism and mass violence, fight fires that may have taken people’s lives, or respond to shootings and other crime scenes. It also takes commitment to do this work despite the personal, physical, emotional, and mental impact it can have.”
It gets multilayered:
Vicarious trauma was first identified in 1980s as the “cost of caring” (Figley, 1982). It is sometimes referred to as “compassion fatigue” (Perlman & Saakvitne, 1995). Symptoms can parallel those of PTSD – re-experiencing, numbness, avoidance, and persistent arousal (Figley, 1996).
Professionals working with survivors of trauma (e.g. sexual assault) report changes to how they see the world – for example, that the world is not just or safe (Salston & Figley, 2003). Professionals with previous trauma histories show significantly higher secondary trauma symptoms than those with no trauma histories (Folette, Polusny, & Milbeck, 1994).
Definition of Vicarious Trauma
▪ The emotional residue of exposure to traumatic stories and experiences of others through work; witnessing fear, pain, and terror that others have experienced; a pre-occupation with horrific stories told to the professional (American Counseling Association, 2016)
▪ Sometimes referred to as “secondary traumatization, secondary stress disorder, or insidious trauma” (ACA, 2016)
▪ Included in the DSM-5 as part of the cluster of “trauma and stressor-related disorders”
▪ Vicarious Trauma is not the same as “burnout”
Definition of Compassion Fatigue
▪ Beyond empathy, it is also known as secondary traumatic stress (STS), a condition characterized by a gradual lessening of compassion over time.
▪ Can happen quite quickly (as opposed to vicarious trauma or burnout) and is responsive to evidence-based treatment interventions
Definition of Controlled Empathy
▪ Constant monitoring of emotions so as to not react to stories and testimony, absorbing the information without showing emotion
▪ Requires vigorous neurological activity
• Autonomic empathy – involves both sides of the brain, reacting to stories with appropriate emotion, allows brain to react, release tension
• Controlled empathy – taking control of the empathic response and taxing the right hemisphere of the brain
Definition of Burnout
▪ Long term stress reaction and process that occurs among professionals who work with people in some capacity (Freudenberger, 1974; Maslach, 1982; Maslach and Schaufeli, 1993)
▪ Can be brought about by workplace conflict, overload of responsibilities, perception of inequality and inadequate rewards, and consistent exposure to traumatic materials (Chamberlain and Miller, 2008)
▪ Emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment
▪ Feelings of being emotionally overextended, depleted or self-doubt
▪ Increasing disillusionment (Edelwich and Brodsky, 1980)
▪ End result – depersonalization and apathy (source)
So, we are all products of trauma, and many traumas, indeed. The collective trauma, and vicarious trauma, man oh man, just watching the news, or watching the lips moving on a Trump or Biden or Harris or Pence. Our fucking history, and the instantaneous cruel work of pigs of NaziLandia and Racism and Misogyny!
Imagine the lifestyles and fortunes and perversions of the rich and famous constantly bombarding youth, and chipping away at the middle class wanting more hoarding.
Imagine the devaluing of human life that the perverse at the top, in the EU or Israel or USA, UK, you name the society, imagine that constant hatred of the weak, infirm, poor, misbegotten, old, disabled, bad Zip Code useless breather and eater and worker, imagine that collective and deep-veined trauma, pulling us apart one stroke and diabetes case at a time?
Some wisdom in trauma, according to Mate: It’s 90 minutes!
Yet, oh yet, Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers:
“If you get gored by a rhino, you’re going to have a stress response,” Robert Sapolsky said. “There’s no amount of meditation you can do that’s going to prevent that. It doesn’t matter what your self-esteem is like.
“But if you think about mortality and global warming, if you think about how you’re going to pay the bills, if you think about how you got rejected back when (and) you’re always going to fail … if you get mired in the real stress of human psychological turmoil, we differ enormously as to how readily we can keep things in perspective.”
Dennis Anderson, a mental health counselor in Spokane, used Sapolsky’s “Zebras” book instead of a traditional textbook in a class about stress and coping he taught for EWU’s psychology department.
By explaining to therapy patients what’s happening to them on a physiological level – whether it’s a result of anxiety or marital or financial problems – he can help provide a reason to change, he said, especially considering the long-term health effects of stress.
Sometimes people don’t realize long-term stress persists in the “background” of daily life, Anderson said. Meanwhile, those glucocorticoids are pounding away.
“They think of stress as you get fired from your job, or you get in a car wreck – you get in these big things that happen to us,” he said. “But all these little micro-stressors – you’re living paycheck to paycheck, you’re working in an environment that is a hostile environment – it recedes into the background. It becomes, ‘Oh, that’s what normal is.’ ” (source)
Yet oh yet, I see daily the families, the individuals in a township, the big time news, or the state news, or the global news, how destructive these people are in dog-eat-dog world of “I’ve got mine, good luck getting yours” mentality. The endless eugenics of Capitalism, of war as a method of depopulation, of sanctions and stopping medicines to people, to humans. It was all worth it, this Jewish war monger, right?
So, Sapolsky was in Spokane, on my radio show, and at Eastern Washington University, talking to the crowd. And so was this monster, with a huge speaker’s fee of $75,000 for a puny school to dish out?
People ask me how I can rant and rail and deploy polemics and look at the underbelly of life and systems and civilization ALL the time? Come on, it is part and parcel some of our existences. Do I soak in and absorb and inhale all that supposed vicarious trauma? Or, do I relish the people who are there pushing and prodding and pulling and digging and emoting and expressing what the underpining of our decaying society is about?
Do I need emotional air sickness bags when I explore the darker realm, the entire Fortune 5,000 realm, the realm of geniuses who do and make and ask what and how, but never WHY? Sure, air sickness bag is for temporary stomach trauma.
You betcha, seeing Gates or Thiel or Nuland or Zelensky or the 400 top showboaters in DC, or anyone on Wall Street, or, well, you understand all the who’s in the world that produce vomitus.
The endorsement of Kissinger by Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and, eventually, by Clinton, has normalized him, making his views a central part of American statecraft by casting him as a fount of establishment gospel—a gospel that preaches the value of American humanity and accepts as necessity the casual destruction of other people and places. Normalization of this sort, also perpetuated by figures in the media, policy experts, and academics, is dangerous. It transforms the deplorable into the acceptable. Donald Trump is now trying to make such a shift; there is no guarantee that he will fail. Kissinger offers a lesson in how to succeed, by never disavowing and never apologizing, and by relentlessly persuading others of the legitimacy of his diplomacy. (Author and refugee: Viet Thanh Nguyen in The Atlantic 16 Nov 2016)
Is it all vicarious, and am I seeing my body break down at 66 because of all the exposure to the toxins of Capitalism Hasbara/Propaganda/Media/Miseducation? Who the hell knows, and stress is stress, and sure, I am always on the run, fight or fight or fight, and never freeze or flight. But that is just me, and a few million others I know are out there.
Does this shake me to the core? This killer is 100 years cold today!
Oh, come on. If you have been a human your whole life — age 13 or 60 — you know what is real and what is foul.
Go on the dark side and read a hero, Doug Valentine:
The book in essence recounts Valentine’s journey of discovery—as if in a Joseph Conrad novel—about the dark side of the U.S. empire.
Valentine’s political awakening occurred at the age of fourteen on the day JFK was assassinated when he told his father excitedly that they had caught the culprit. Douglas Valentine, Sr., responded in a rather kindly voice: “The guy they got didn’t do it, Doug. You can count on that.”
[…]
Valentine tells a story about how the OSS recruited a Kiowa Indian and Japanese Nisei with connection to the leader of the Black Dragon Society, a paramilitary ultra-nationalist group, for a suicide mission into Nagasaki which was obliterated by the atomic bomb on August 9, 1945, along with 400 allied prisoners of war.
Valentine sees the mission as a parable for how U.S. intelligence agencies manipulate minority groups and use right-wing criminals—who are discarded or killed with little thought after their utility has run out.
This modus operandi fits a long trend in U.S. history going back to the Indian Wars and slavery, an inescapable part of the country’s DNA.
Valentine writes that the United States, like all of North and South America, is “brimming with hungry ghosts invisible to its militant Christian nationalists—the millions of indigenous people who were slaughtered and African-Americans who were enslaved and lynched.”
There are also the ghosts of millions of Southeast Asian peoples whom the same militant Christian nationalists believed were “better dead than red,” along with the millions of victims of the drug trade that the CIA oversaw through the Cold War. (sources)
Read him. You WILL not get VICARIOUS trauma by being informed. Really!
“The gazelle and the lion are enemies only in the minds of the Takers. The lion that comes across a herd of gazelles doesn’t massacre them, as an enemy would. It kills one, not to satisfy its hatred of gazelles but to satisfy its hunger, and once it has made its kill the gazelles are perfectly content to go on grazing with the lion right in their midst.”
“We’re not destroying the world because we’re clumsy. We’re destroying the world because we are, in a very literal and deliberate way, at war with it.”
“Once you learn to discern the voice of Mother Culture humming in the background, telling her story over and over again to the people of your culture, you’ll never stop being conscious of it. Wherever you go for the rest of your life, you’ll be tempted to say to the people around you, ‘how can you listen to this stuff and not recognize it for what it is?’”
Australians, err, Brits, err, Europeans, err, Canadians, err, Americanos, all cut from the same heads on spikes cloth — Tasering Old People to Dreaming!
[Oliver Cromwell’s head was placed on a spike and erected in the 17th century. A drawing from the late 18th century.]
These are the forefathers/mothers of this shit hole Anglo Saxon World:
Looks like one of my aunts in Surrey:
Clare Nowland, 95, has died in hospital one week after she was allegedly tasered by a police officer at a New South Wales nursing home.
NSW Police confirmed the 95-year-old’s death in a statement on Wednesday night.
“The tasering is such an extremely brutal act at her age at 95 and with her body size, she fractured her skull and had a large brain bleed,” he said on Monday.
“The community is also reeling, messages are pouring in through my social media channels… there’s an enormous outpour.
“A newspaper in Brazil covered this story, there is care for all over the planet pouring into our little town.”
Cooma priest Mark Croker also visited Ms Nowland in hospital on Sunday to deliver mass, the Daily Telegraph reported.
“She looks peaceful, she’s not conscious but she certainly looks comfortable… They say the last of your senses to go is your hearing, so we know she can hear us,” he told the publication.
“The thing with Clare is the dementia hadn’t completely taken hold, you could still have a conversation with her… she might get a bit confused, but that’s an age thing.” (source)
There are millions of people tortured, splayed, spiked, evicerated and gutted.
Here are some peace activists:
So, the old lady dies, and I am sure it is big news in Aussie-Land, for sure.
But the WWIII is being pushed by a Germany of Old, and other Nazi-Drenched countries:
Russia is preparing a superstrike
The chairman of the presidium of the All-Russian organization “Officers of Russia”, Major General Sergei Lipovoy, in a conversation with Tsargrad, assessed the rumors about the creation of an elite special forces unit “Storm” by Russia to strike at important and complex targets and battles with F-16s.
This is no longer news. Our Aerospace Forces have been working on this for a long time, and we are taking measures adequate to the current situation. If NATO has now put forward a serious armored group against us and is creating an air fist, then we must respond accordingly. Therefore, a decision was made to create such a grouping that could successfully work both against the air component and against the ground. On the territory of Ukraine there are a large number of armored vehicles of various types – we will have to dispose of them,
Lipova stated.
He called it a rhetorical question how long it would take for this disposal. According to the assumptions of the major general, much less than for the training of Ukrainian pilots to use the F-16. At the same time, Russia has all the necessary resources.
“We, unlike NATO, unlike Ukraine, have everything necessary for this,” summed up the source of the “First Russian”. (source)
It makes sense that a Taser is used on an old lady, with a puny steak knife, with big hulks of cops ready to probably break a neck artery.
Then, it goes to the next and the next level, until we have the Putrid Pigs of Capital pushing for a strike on Russia. Now, why is it that Nazi-fied Germany and Nazi-fied Poland and then all the other NATO numb nuts not legit targets for a country that is being attacked by these said countries?
How to spin the murder of an old lady, no? How will that spin by the racists and thugs of Anglo Australia? Before that, let’s remind ourselves of the dirty Zelenksy: From Prof Michel Chossudovsky!
Absolutely stunning,
An Astute Intelligence Op.
A Russian Jew transformed into a Nazi?
See the video below.
***
Zelensky is Jewish. He supports the Nazi Azov Battalion, the two Nazi parties, which have committed countless atrocities against the Jewish community in Ukraine.
He belongs to a Russian-Jewish family. He was brought up as a native Russian speaker, who until recently was not fluent in Ukrainian.
And now this Jewish-Russian proxy president wants to “ban everything Russian”, including the Russian language, the Russian media, the teaching of Russian in the schools.
He has been instructed by Washington to lead Kiev’s Neo-Nazi government, which is portrayed by the U.S. mainstream media including the NYT as a democracy.
Zelensky also plans to ban Russian composers including Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Borodin, Glinka, Rimsky-Korsakov, and many more.
Meanwhile, the Kiev neo-Nazi regime (supported by US-NATO) has endorsed the writings of Stepan Bandera as well as Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
Zelensky has also betrayed his family. Many of his relatives were the victims of the Nazi holocaust.
In a twisted irony, days before he assumed office, “he …laid flowers on the grave of his grandfather, Semyon Ivanovich Zelensky, who fought in the Soviet Union’s Red Army during World War II”.
It was May 9 — Victory Day in Ukraine — and a day of “thanksgiving,” he wrote in a Facebook post.
“[Semyon] went through the whole war and remain[s] forever in my memory one of those heroes who defended Ukraine from the Nazis,” he wrote. “Thanks for the fact that the inhuman ideology of Nazism is forever a thing of the past.
Thanks to those who fought against Nazism — and won.” (quoted in Washington Post, emphasis added)
High Treason.
My Grandfather: “one of those heroes who defended Ukraine from the Nazis”.
What a liar and a criminal,
Sponsored by America and Europe, Zelensky is promoting Nazism in Ukraine.
That Australia, which is part and parcel the project of Conquest, Spain, Germany, UK, USA, Canada, Portugal:
Some of the other remains held in the boxes at Mitchell (which I’m not permitted, out of deference to the dead, to open) belong to Indigenous Australians who died in colonial institutions – jails, hospitals and asylums – and, scarcely cold, were “anatomised” (a benign euphemism for butchery). Thousands more, who might have died naturally and remained buried, were exhumed en masse.
The collection of bodies at Mitchell is central to a shameful, bleak, little-known narrative that begins at colonisation and reverberates through Australia’s unsettled national sovereignty. It extends discomfortingly into the 20th century, and resonates today as an element of ongoing trauma in Aboriginal communities.
It is also a story about those who created an extensive body-parts market in Australia and in leading institutions around the world. Until the mid-20th century, Australia’s Aboriginal people were seen as something of a missing link to the prehistoric; as late as 1945, Arnhem Land people were likened to Neanderthals, their bodies studied just like the other fauna that officialdom considered them to be. The renowned amateur anthropologist Charles Mountford promoted a 1945 lecture tour about Aboriginal people in Arnhem Land under the title Australia’s Stone Age Men, drawing on a stereotype that had defined the work of Darwinists and phrenologists for 150 years. Phrenology, best described as a pseudo or even voodoo science “of the mind”, had created its own prolific market for the body parts – especially heads – of Australian and other indigenous people since the late 18th century. Long after phrenology was widely discredited, Aboriginal skulls were still sought and displayed with the same benign sentiment that one might attach to animal remains. Mountford’s expedition removed hundreds of skeletons from sacred sites in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. Many made their way to the Smithsonian in Washington DC and were only returned, after considerable resistance, in 2010. (“The bone collectors: a brutal chapter in Australia’s past/ The remains of hundreds of Aboriginal people, dug up from sacred ground and once displayed in museums all over the world, are now stored in a Canberra warehouse. When will they be given a national resting place?”)
[Photo: A picture of OnYong, the last full-blood man of the Ngambri people of the Limestone Plains. He died at the end of a rival’s spear. Settlers dug him up and fashioned a sugar bowl from his skull. By TY Balcombe, circa 1850, Mitchell Library.]
Now now, this old lady will be buried, maybe, not just a potter’s grave or museum box, we hope.
[Photo: rnhem Land in the Northern Territories, where Aboriginal skeletons were removed from sacred sites. Photograph: Richard I’Anson/Getty Images/Lonely Planet Images]
Ahh, which Utopia is it for? Full movie link on Vimeo: LINK.
Tasers. Amazing the infantilization of this sort of weapon: The Taser was first developed in the mid-1970s by American inventor Jack Cover. Taser is an acronym for Tom A. Swift Electric Rifle (the Tom Swift books about an inventor of amazing gadgets were a childhood favorite of Cover) and is a brand name for the device, which is manufactured by Taser International.
They are deadly, combined with the pigs/cops other techniques:
Reuters now has documented a total of at least 1,081 U.S. deaths following use of Tasers, almost all since the weapons began coming into widespread use in the early 2000s. In many of those cases, the Taser, which fires a pair of barbed darts that deliver a paralyzing electrical charge, was combined with other force, such as hand strikes or restraint holds. (source)
So, the Brits sent the convicted (most not murderers but first time offenders) to New South Wales: New South Wales, a state in southeast Australia, was founded by the British as a penal colony in 1788. Over the next 80 years, more than 160,000 convicts were transported to Australia from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, in lieu of being given the death penalty.
Oh, those convicts: “It should be observed that Australia’s richest man – ever – was ex-convict Samuel Terry, the ‘Botany Bay Rothschild’. Tapping in to the urban consumer culture by importing goods and running pubs were both highly successful ways of accumulating wealth and Terry and his wife Rosetta Pracey successfully exploited both strategies. When Thomas Bigge came to town in 1820 he heard that Terry held 1,450 head of cattle, 3,800 sheep, 19,000 acres of NSW, and that he supplied more mortgages than the Bank of New South Wales (of which he was one of the largest shareholders). At his death in 1838 he was worth 3.39% of the colony’s gross domestic product, the equivalent today of over $24 billion (Rubenstein, 2004).
Terry was not alone in forging a fortune, but it was certainly easier for a convict to make good in the early years of NSW than in the later phases.” (source)
Ahh, the society based on theft, murder, torture, rape: The Cult of Forgetfulness. DOes that ring true of so much history today? I wrote about that in today’s AM substack, and there is the Agnotolgy.
Like many settler colonies with evolving frontiers, there has been a continuous undercurrent of sexual violence in Australian history. From the first establishment of European settlements in Australia, forced sexual relations perpetrated by white settlers have remained relatively unspoken about in recollections of the Australian frontier experience, regardless of the victim’s race.
The term ‘the Great Australian Silence’ was first coined in a 1968 lecture delivered by anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner. Stanner utilised the term to address the manner in which certain critical areas of Indigenous and non-Indigenous history, including invasion, dispossession and massacres, had generally been ignored by Australian historians as part of a long-term structural trend, otherwise known as the ‘cult of forgetfulness’. (source)
Yurlayurlanya. Now, go to Wikipedia, and it’s hundreds of names and tribes: This list of Australian Aboriginal group names includes names and collective designations which have been applied, either currently or in the past, to groups of Aboriginal Australians. The list does not include Torres Strait Islander peoples, who are ethnically, culturally and linguistically distinct from Australian Aboriginal peoples, although also an Indigenous Australian people.
Typically, Aboriginal Australian mobs are differentiated by language groups. Most Aboriginal people could name a number of groups of which they are members, each group being defined in terms of different criteria and often with much overlap.[citation needed] Many of the names listed below are properly understood as language or dialect names; some are simply the word meaning man or person in the associated language; some are endonyms (the name as used by the people themselves) and some exonyms (names used by one group for another, and not by that group itself), while others are demonyms (terms for people from specific geographical areas).
Over the last three decades a rich seam of Indigenous life-writing has emerged in Australia, much of which (since it is an essentially female phenomenon) is devoted to Aboriginal women’s recollections of working as housemaids in white people’s homes. During the same period Aboriginal domestic service during the first half of the twentieth century has become the focus of extensive investigation by a new generation of Australian historiographers. The relationship settler Australians had with their Aboriginal servants was, both sets of textual evidence attest, for the most part, controlling, sadistic and deeply rooted in feelings of racial superiority. It bore, in other words, more than a passing resemblance to that which flourished under regimes of formal enslavement in other parts of the world. (source)
Clare Nowland. Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith:
Heads on Spikes. F-16’s. Oh, Australia, the vassal.
Read all about the vassal state: USA, Australia Militarizing PNG: Softly swallowing sovereignty, rendering a vassal state; An independent geopolitical perspective by Dominic Navue Sengi
For the last few weeks, I’ve seen a film bring together Aboriginal people all over Australia. The buzz around Utopia – a documentary by John Pilger – has been unprecedented. Some 4000 people attended the open-air premiere in Redfern last month – both indigenous and non-indigenous Australians – and yet little appeared in the media about an event that the people of Redfern say was a ”first”. This silence has since been broken by a couple of commentators whose aggression seemed a cover for their hostility to the truth about Aboriginal people.
When I watched Utopia for the first time, I was moved to tears. Three times. This film has reminded me that the great advantages I enjoy today – as a footballer and Australian of the Year – are a direct result of the struggles and sacrifices of the Aboriginal people who came before me.
Utopia honours these people, so I think the very least I can do is honour Utopia and the people who appeared in it and made it.
It takes courage to tell the truth, no matter how unpopular those truths may be. But it also takes courage to face up to our past.
Ahh, the language of hate, covered over, dissected by Aboriginal Poetry:
Understand Old One
What if you came back now To our new world, the city roaring There on the old peaceful camping place Of your red fires along the quiet water, How you would wonder At towering stone gunyas high in air Immense, incredible; Planes in the sky over, swarms of cars Like things frantic in flight.
– Oodgeroo Noonucal
Maybe Clare will forever be remembered if we burn photos of her:
I shared with Leane an observation by Yankunytjatjara/Kokatha poet Ali Cobby Eckermann from his essay in Fire Front, a First Nations collection edited by Alison Whittaker. At an Aboriginal Writers Retreat in 2009, some of the best poems he heard were thrown into a campfire. “The campfire is a vessel that holds many of our stories,” he writes.
“That’s right,” Leane replied. “They were put into the air—released to the air. They’re still in the air, not dissipating. First Nation literature goes into the campfire and into the air and into the song and into the water.”
As we finished our conversation, I pictured Eckermann’s verses going out into the universe, expanding and purifying the silence between our words. (source)
Let her live in another world, walkabout: Everywhen & Dreaming
According to most traditions, the human spirit cannot be destroyed, even after the body dies. Instead, it becomes one with elements of nature called the everywhen. Researchers have not managed to successfully translate the term Everywhen – or Dreaming. It roughly means that nature and ancestral spirits share a close connection. The Dreaming also exists beyond space or time.
This Dreaming is a wide-ranging way of life. Part of the human spirit remains behind close to where the person died. It may then turn into a dangerous but short-lived ghost. The other part of the soul is the immortal spirit that joins the Dreaming. (source)
if it’s good for business, bring it on, anything goes in Chlamydia-Syphilitic Capitalism
You get the old soft shoe routine: PT Barnum, Snake Oil salesmen, PayDay Loan Sharks, Treaty Breakers, Indian Women, Children, Elderly Killers.
It’s the business of servicing the pioneers. Don’t get too cozy with the idea that those pioneers were all god-fearing, law abiding, great examples of fairness and grit.
Don’t get all warm and fuzzy about the armies of thieves and insurance scammers and foul meat hucksters and robbers and robber barons coming through the land and picking at it like frenzied vultures on a deer.
Remember this human stain, oh, yes, purely steeped in the madness of money-marketing-plagiarism-smoke & mirrors and outright visual and audio murder by a thousand advertisements and a million seconds of his idea of fun, the circues:
Leslie Moonves can appreciate a Donald Trump candidacy.
Not that the CBS executive chairman and CEO might vote for the Republican presidential frontrunner, but he likes the ad money Trump and his competitors are bringing to the network.
“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” he said of the presidential race.
Moonves called the campaign for president a “circus” full of “bomb throwing,” and he hopes it continues.
“Most of the ads are not about issues. They’re sort of like the debates,” he said.
“Man, who would have expected the ride we’re all having right now? … The money’s rolling in and this is fun,” he said.
“I’ve never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going,” said Moonves.
“Donald’s place in this election is a good thing,” he said Monday at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco. (source)
I look at his face, and definitely have much more respect for vultures.
Imagine, all that copy in the dirty New Yorker on this human stain: the huckster and his $120 million severance package. And these stains are in charge of “news”? Farthest from the truth.
Ahh, one of my buddies sent me a couple of news blurbs, one being:
“Surgeon General: ‘Growing Evidence’ Social Media Harms Kids’ Mental Health”
There is “growing evidence” that the use of social media by kids and adolescents could be detrimental to their mental health, according to the U.S. surgeon general. Dr. Vivek Murthy is sounding the alarm about the negative effects of social media on the mental health and well-being of young people, amid what he calls “a national youth mental health crisis.”
In a new advisory issued Tuesday, Murthy highlighted the “significant” public health challenge posed by the use of social media by U.S. youth — specifically those between the ages of 10 to 19, who “are undergoing a highly sensitive period of brain development.”
“Nearly every teenager in America uses social media, and yet, we do not have enough evidence to conclude that it is sufficiently safe for them, especially at such a vulnerable stage of brain, emotional, and social development,” Murthy said in a statement.
He urged policymakers and tech companies, as well as families of young people in the U.S., to take immediate action to “maximize the benefits and minimize the harms of social media platforms” and create “safer” and “healthier” environments for young users.
Fun stuff in Mister Rogers Neighborhood. Hmm, 10,000 bottles of chemicals on the wall, and, who the fuck knows what one chemical does to the fetus, to development, let alone two together in synergistic fun, let alone dozens working on the old (fetal) endocrine system?
And so, with the tap-tap-tap of TV, of everything on the boob tube from time immemorial, through to the violent sexual assaulter Les of CBS, all of them, with their, “if it bleeds, it leads” mentality, with their, “gotta get the money anyway possible,” and so we have a Surgeon General warning about social media?
Is that because the kids are on it so much, that there is pure vapidity in the black mirror scrolling? Or, is it because there is so much venom on it, so many ways to morph a young mind into thinking 2 is 3 and down is up? Is it the eye candy effect, and the marketing Edward Bernays effect, getting pregnant women to take a puff or a gulp? Here, a little of the Freudan power of billboards and magazine layouts:
You betcha Bernays and Les are cut from the same cloth. And servicing those mean, violent, Indian hating pioneers? You betcha there were legions of hucksters and thieves working their black arts.
They call this piece of human stain, the Original Influencer: Bernays the Barbarian!
Ahh, the Harvard historian and those Pilgrims Progress, in Smithsonian Magazine, written by a Rosenbaum, who I am sure would never ever see the savagery of Isra-Hell akin to the original people’s in Turtle Island being splayed:
“In truth, I didn’t think anyone sat around erasing it,” Bernard Bailyn tells me when I visit him in his spacious, document-stuffed study in Harvard’s Widener Library. He’s a wiry, remarkably fit-looking fellow, energetically jumping out of his chair to open up a file drawer and show me copies of one of his most-prized documentary finds: the handwritten British government survey records of America-bound colonists made in the 1770s, which lists the name, origin, occupation and age of the departing, one of the few islands of hard data about who the early Americans were.
“Nobody sat around erasing this history,” he says in an even tone, “but it’s forgotten.”
“Conveniently?” I ask.
“Yes,” he agrees. “Look at the ‘peaceful’ Pilgrims. Our William Bradford. He goes to see the Pequot War battlefield and he is appalled. He said, ‘The stink’ [of heaps of dead bodies] was too much.”
Bailyn is speaking of one of the early and bloodiest encounters, between our peaceful pumpkin pie-eating Pilgrims and the original inhabitants of the land they wanted to seize, the Pequots. But for Bailyn, the mercenary motive is less salient than the theological.
“The ferocity of that little war is just unbelievable,” Bailyn says. “The butchering that went on cannot be explained by trying to get hold of a piece of land. They were really struggling with this central issue for them, of the advent of the Antichrist.”
Suddenly, I felt a chill from the wintry New England air outside enter into the warmth of his study.
The Antichrist. The haunting figure presaging the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelation plays an important part in Bailyn’s explanation of the European settlers’ descent into unrestrained savagery. The key passage on this question comes late in his new book when Bailyn makes explicit a connection I had not seen before: between the physical savagery the radical dissenting Protestant settlers of America wreaked on the original inhabitants, and the intellectual savagery of their polemical attacks on the church and state authorities they fled from in Europe—and the savagery of vicious insult and vile denunciation they wreaked upon each other as well.
“The savagery of the [theological] struggle, the bitterness of the main contenders and the deep stain it left on the region’s collective memory” were driven by “elemental fears peculiar to what was experienced as a barbarous environment—fears of what could happen to civilized people in an unimaginable wilderness…in which God’s children [as they thought of themselves] were fated to struggle with pitiless agents of Satan, pagan Antichrists swarming in the world around them. The two [kinds of struggle, physical and metaphysical] were one: threats from within [to the soul] merged with threats from without to form a heated atmosphere of apocalyptic danger.”
Ahh, Bailyn, a Jewish fellow, died in 2020 at 98. Rosenbaum, also Jewish, writes some pretty disgusting things about those of us who see the Zionist and Jewish Aparthied state as wrong wrong wrong:
But it’s not an impossibility. Try to imagine a world in which Israel no longer exists. After a heart-stopping moment you move on, thinking: If it hasn’t happened by now … And sure, the entire world has essentially turned on the Jewish state, driven by the false narratives of the hate-Israel types, and it’s clear there will be relatively few mourners internationally if it should happen. Things have become so turned around that hating the Jewish state has been a way for the world to absolve its guilt at allowing the slaughter of the Jews a few decades ago. Just like Hitler did, they will find a way to blame it on the Jews for bringing it on themselves. I guarantee it; the apologists for genocide have prepared the way by slandering the Jewish state for #GenocideinGaza while ignoring the explicit call for genocide in the Hamas charter. (source)
Ahh, so, thus far, I have been wading my toes into Jewish waters, for sure, with Les, Ron and Bernard being proud successful Jews witht he gift of gab and the platforms from which to articulate. The discussion (hateful) that Ron makes in that piece quoted form above is again retrograde and revisionist. Have at it. All song and dance and again, more elite and filtered fodder from a specific group of people in America who have found the golden calf.
But is it the social media that the surgeon general really knows about? Is it the movies, the history, the KKK side and the Elite side of this society where so many in the middle have been enslaved and abused and held hostage to the grand experimentation of Chlamydia Capitalists?
Remember, dear Surgeon General, “sleep and boredom and focus and reality are our enemies,” according to the monsters of social media, FU Book, Google, TikTok, YouTube, the lot of them, including the CBS ads and constant billion dollar giveaway to Trumps or Bidens or any of them.
Former Facebook president Sean Parker admitted thatsocial media apps are about “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology” and that they “understood this consciously and did it anyway”.
All of them, the lot of them, they never ASK why? Why go ahead with this shit, but WHY do we need this crap, WHY would you want to add to the already distracted society? WHY WHY WHY? Apes with nukes, man.
We are their experiments, in every sense of the word, and they never ask why — more satellites in space, more chemicals on the wall, more free beer on Memorial Day weekend, more more more, and geez, those new-fangled plastics and nanoparticles. All those CRISPR fun things. Oh, why oh why?
Only one other organization, the company Acceligen, has received FDA approval for a gene-edited animal. In 2020, FDA made a low-risk determination for products made from “Slick-Haired Cattle” that are gene-edited to have coats that increase the animals’ resilience to higher temperatures. Other companies have received FDA approval for genetically-modified animals, but for transgenic approaches, which involves a different technology that inserts DNA from outside species into the genome of an organism.
Gene-editing is an emerging technology that works only within a species’ DNA and can make changes that could come about naturally or through traditional breeding practices. Dr. Oatley hopes his work will improve public perception of gene-edited foods.
Google that: “WSU and gene edited pig meat” or any combination thereof, and you will find all positive, PR spinning, WSU-originated shining stories why the process is great for human kind.
Ahh, Surgeon General, anything about those influencers in the human tragedy of knowing too much and not enought questioning WHY?
Then, the crux of it all, really: dancing and sipping and eating and partying while tens of thousands get ground up in the meatgrinder of Ukraine, and then, shit dog, how many are dying from starvation, hunger, disease, structural violence, economic sanctions, a thousand cuts of weathering, the planned pandemic, all of that, fun stuff?
Facebook?
Facebook has a new hardware product called Portal, a video sharing device which has Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa built-in, and it is the first physical product released from Building 8.
“Whether you’re moving around the kitchen or chasing the kids through the living room, Portal’s Smart Camera adjusts to follow the action,” the website reads.
According to Facebook’s job listings, “Building 8’s goal at Facebook is to create and ship new, category-defining consumer hardware products that are social first. To do so at scale. And to power this with a breakthrough innovation engine modeled after DARPA. As a team of world-class experts, we drive innovation in the areas of augmented and virtual reality, artificial intelligence, connectivity, and more – and operate on aggressive, fixed timelines with extensive use of partnerships in universities, and small-large businesses.”
DARPA stands for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, whose mission is “to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security.” (source)
Sure, I voted for these Eichmann’s, NAZI-bred folk, doing what? You know about it, right, reader?
In mid-2003, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched an ambitious program aimed at recording essentially all of a person’s movements and conversations and everything they listened to, watched, read and bought.
The idea behind the LifeLog initiative was to create a permanent, searchable, electronic diary of entire lives. Not only would a lifelog immortalize users, in a sense, it would also contribute to a growing body of data that military researchers hoped would contribute to the development of artificial intelligence capable of thinking like a human being does. (source)
All of this precipitated by Judge Judy. I was listening to a friend who was sipping tea and listening to Judge Judy out-takes, and man oh man, we are in Judge Judy Land, are we not, with the Tribe of People from Zionism and Judaism giving us the stiff upper cut.
Any news fromthe Surgeon General about this form of sadism on TV, and I have been around a hundred plus Judge Judy types in education, journalism, literary arts, higher ed, union organizing, social work, even in the environmental field, and in urban and planning circles, as well as journalism.
Judith Sheindlin occupies a nearly divine perch in television. The 5-foot-2 family-court judge — known for her black robe, lace collar, and acid tongue — has been doling out tough-love legal verdicts since the Clinton administration, and the approach has paid off. She brought in a whopping $47 million a year for just 52 days a year of filming at CBS, and she has held onto the sort of cultural cachet that has eluded many of her contemporaries.
Following a public dispute with CBS — said to be over money and, improbably, Drew Barrymore’s talk show — “Judge Judy” wrapped in spring of this year. Amazon quickly stepped in, paying Sheindlin an estimated $25 million for 120 new episodes of “Judy Justice,” which the company hopes will serve as a cornerstone of its IMDb TV free streaming service. The deal was reportedly the largest-ever first-season order of a single show by a streamer. “Judy Justice” launched on Monday.
In a recent New York Times interview, Sheindlin said that while her robe would change color for the new show — from black to a deep maroon — she intended to keep the legacy of the original production going, including her hard-nosed, moralizing style. “I bring eyeballs because, at least for one hour a day, people see that someone is holding the line,” she said. “I’m unafraid to call out irresponsible, un-American behavior. If we settle for mediocrity, we get what we deserve.”
But some of Sheindlin’s former colleagues, dating back to the mid-aughts until the show wrapped, say she failed to hold the line against racism, sexual harassment, and abuse at her own show. An Insider investigation involving interviews with 16 former “Judge Judy” employees, as well as a review of thousands of pages of court records, has found that Sheindlin’s long-standing executive producer and director Randy Douthit has repeatedly been accused of sexually harassing employees, making inappropriate sexual comments to female staffers, offering preferential treatment to staffers he found attractive, and ordering junior producers to bring fewer Black litigants on the show.
The former employees who spoke to Insider described an unrelenting high-pressure environment behind the scenes at the show. They accused Douthit and his deputies — the supervising producer Victoria Jenest and the co-executive producer Amy Freisleben — of fostering a workplace culture in which staffers were pitted against one another, threats of termination were frequent, drinking during work hours was not unusual, cases were manipulated to artificially increase the drama, and a vicious contempt for litigants who appeared before Sheindlin was common.
Nah, WHY Judge Judy, WHY TV kills brain cells, and, nah, WHY elites with gigs at MSM rags, legacy media, even those in the Halls of Poison Ivy League schools like Harvard are being steered by some interestingly tribal know it alls?
Then, this stuff, a piece from a Russian, seeing all the fun and games in St. Petersburg, while men die on the battlefield and families are murdered in Donbass.
I sent this to a friend, Toothless in Wisconsin (read the Substack series) !
His comments?
Had a 40 minute discussion with a die hard 88 year old River Falls republican, about…. a lot. Nine- eleven to Hoover. Capitalism. Covid, and who really got the “stimulus”.
Unbowable, and unyielding. Won’t answer a difficult question. Been waiting for a late cab, for an hour. Gonna piss in the gutter, soon.
How appropriate in the days leading up to “memorial day”. When I spoke with the eighty-something USA republican, yesterday, and brought up Russian casualties in World War Two, and juxtaposed those numbers with American losses, the old fool had no answer, but to challenge my numbers. When I bring up invasions of Russian soil, he countered with 9-11. Then we went to false flags, and physics, and he was on his way directly. There are none so blind.
One with a mouth full of pearly whites can still be toothless. Takes guts to be an honorable defender of others.
Everything on MSM and everywhere, really, just broken, and I wonder how the surgeon general deals with his own dead-brain? Social media? Nah, elitism and tribal control of media, marketing, finance, AI, and social media, publishing, TV, and history books? Any do no harm there?
Later, Haeder . . . . Quoting:
Vladlen Chertinov, writer and journalist, former military commissar:
“On May 10, the Ukrainian side distributed two videos made from a drone. They depict the suicides of two Russian soldiers. On one, a fighter, who finds himself in a hopeless situation, blows himself up with a grenade, on the other, he shoots himself from a machine gun. What and who were these people thinking about before deciding to do something that strengthened their spirit? After all, they probably could have surrendered, but they chose death.
These shots now do not go out of my head when I see a peaceful life: cafes and restaurants crammed with visitors, crowds of fans going to Zenit, the smelt festival, posters inviting to concerts, and soon also Scarlet Sails. It feels like there are two Russias: one is dying at the front, and the other, as if nothing had happened, is enjoying life. The first dies for the second.
On May 13, I looked at the Internet poster and found out that in the remaining days of the month 62 musicals, 163 shows and 103 stand-ups will be held in St. Petersburg. It just doesn’t fit in my brain.
Most of all, stand-ups achieve – performances in the style of the Comedy Club, when several bullies, as a rule, of mobilization age, laugh on stage, and their humor, as a rule, is below the belt, and even with drug addict overtones. “Black stand-up”, “Stand-up top comedians”, “Petersburg stand-up”, “Adult stand-up”, “Premium stand-up”, “Fresh stand-up”, when there is not enough imagination, just “Another stand-up” will do – their name is legion. And the audience during these stand-ups, sitting at the tables, eats and drinks something. In general, some joke with a blunt end, others neigh and guzzle. And others die. There is tragedy, and here is comedy.
From the above, I personally have associations with the fall of the Roman Empire.
Approximately on the same days when both of our nameless soldiers committed suicide in battle, the fashion designer Valentin Yudashkin was buried. All the media have been talking about it. The singer Pugacheva came to Russia, who, together with her husband Galkin (recognized as a foreign agent in Russia), condemned the special operation, and in front of her at the funeral, the press secretary of the supreme commander in chief, leading this very special operation, bowed and kissed her hands. How can you put it all in your head? And … combine in one country.
Then it turns out that our soldiers fight and die for this too. So that Pugacheva and Sobchak, spitting on Russia during the war, could return to it with impunity whenever they want. They are fighting for the same Yudashkin, holder of the Order of Honor and Order of Merit for the Fatherland, who, according to some reports, has not filed tax returns since 2015 and owes the state millions of rubles. But the state did not delicately disturb Yudashkin, and the press secretary of the president, Dmitry Peskov, personally came to his funeral.
They are fighting for the head of the Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina, who with impunity allowed the West to rob Russia of 300 billion dollars, and quietly withdraw the money of Western companies arrested in response from the country.
They are fighting for Sberbank, which after 2014 invested billions of dollars in Ukraine and indirectly financed the Armed Forces of Ukraine, while refusing to work in the Russian Crimea, and opened the first regional branch there only 14 months after the start of the SVO.
They are fighting for businessmen who drive up the price of bulletproof vests. For corruption in the defense industry, which continues even during the SVO, as recently announced by the head of the investigative committee, Bastrykin.
And this anti-list of those with whom our “Motherland begins” can be continued endlessly.
In my opinion, it is much more difficult for our soldiers today than for their grandfathers and great-grandfathers during the Great Patriotic War. Because they knew: behind them – the whole people, the whole huge country, “stand up for a mortal battle”, turned into a single military camp. On the world and death is red. And today they die in loneliness and obscurity.
It is already clear that in recent years our government has made many serious mistakes that cost the country and people dearly. And the fact that today the government is deliberately lulling the people into a peaceful life, in my opinion, is another big mistake. Another loss of precious time, comparable to the Minsk agreements and the freezing of the Russian Spring in 2014.”
+++——+++
Ahh, those Krauts and those Chosen People:
According to former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Minsk agreement served to buy time to rearm Ukraine. “The 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give Ukraine time,” Merkel told the weekly Die Zeit. “It also used this time to become stronger, as you can see today.” (source)
WWJJD?
Bring it on, What Would Judge Judy Do? Runs shivers down my spine, and I have extra air sickness bags from Southwest Airlines, so all is well here tapping on my laptop.
Terminal Velocity: Man Lost of Tribe is a reader-su
if you read the headlines and then critically parse the underbelly of it all, there is no reason in hell the pitchforks are not poison-tipped and ready for drone delivery to the Merchants of Death
Oh, no, just a little spin on Bing and Yahoo and NYT, just the headlines, and then skimming through, and a poor boy’s head will explode.
Juxtapose the entire dementia of those War Lords and Blood Lust folk in Fortune 5000 Land, and then read what the bankers (bailed out and buttoned down felons) have to say about “the economy,” and then listen to the creeps of AI LaLaLand (it’s more than just getting old and young useless eaters shuffled to the container hotels — think more warfare, SWAT-fare, control, drone-delivered disease-drug-dementia), and a poor boy might want to just pick up an ax and chop up the local fiber optic trunk line.
Anything to fuck up the system.
Here, the Links:
Carbon lies — money money — trillion$ — to be made on carbon removal; more Parkinsons on line for us all, thanks to pesticides; no more loans; discarded cloths in Chile seen from satellite; most “homes” bought up in Bay area purchased by LLc’s; white collar workers beware of the robots; New Mexico fracking putting that cancer causing PFAS in the baby’s water; Gates and Epstein — blackmailing story with Gates’ 19 year old Russian Bridge (cards) champion.
That food crisis, and then the Green New Death Deal, and ecosystems collapsing, and hell, the Alberta Canada fires and the volcano eruption in Mexico, yet we have Bumbling Biden and Busted McCarthy walking the Hiroshima death mile and smiling and meeting the Prince of Darkness in Isra-Hell for more bombs for UkroHell.
Food = Fertilizers Good/Bad/Ugly/Gotcha = Schizophrenia for a darn young boy!
The high prices also pushed many farmers deeper into debt. Farmers from Cameroon to the U.S. say they are still spending three times as much on fertilisers as they were a few years ago. And in countries where fertilisers are heavily subsidised, the price spike has saddled governments with huge debts. In India alone, the central government’s expenditure on fertiliser subsidies last year surged from US$9.8 billion to US$17.1 billion. People are paying the price for the fertiliser industry’s price gouging.
The costs are also rising for the planet. Chemical fertilisers are a major source of environmental pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, with nitrogen fertilisers alone accounting for one out of every 40 tonnes of annual emissions. New reports from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation and Earth4All, a global collective of leading scientists and economists, make it clear that steep and immediate reductions in global fertiliser use are required to avert catastrophic climate change
Money on war, murder, pain, poverty, hunger, cancer, incarceration, eviction, foreclosure, fleecing, grifting, come on now, the news is telling you the system is so fucked up that you should have zero tolerance for any of them, from the killer cop roaming the streets for more DWIMBA —driving while indian mexican black asian — and the code inspector fining the family who plants a front yard garden or builds a tiny home next to the regular home, to the college president and his/her coaches grifting big time, to the real estate agent charging charges for the charges, then to the judge who is stripped of ethics but full of Judge Judy Sadism, then to the overworked DAs extracting plea agreements from guilty and innocents, to the shit-face public defender who naps during trials, to all those teachers jumping ship, to the Gen Z and Baby Boomers hating on each other, to the incredible blightness of being Media, MSM, Legacy Press, the unjournalist journalists.
Ahh, equal opportunity Goebbels and Girls and Boys from Brazil, a la high tech:
“Ousted Google ethics executive sees A.I. as a ‘gold rush’ where ‘the people making money are not the ones in the midst of it’”
Timnit Gebru has all the hallmarks of a Big Tech star: a master’s and Ph.D. from Stanford, engineering and research roles at Apple and Microsoft, before joining Google as an A.I. expert.
But in 2020 her time co-leading the ethical A.I. team at the Alphabet-owned company came to an end, a decision triggered by a paper she wrote warning of the bias being embedded into artificial intelligence.
Bias is a topic that experts in the field have raised for many years.
In 2015 Google apologized and said it was “appalled” by its photos app—powered by A.I.—labeling a photograph of a black couple as “gorillas.” (source)
Man oh man, the sewers, the stormwater drainages, the homeless, the rough sleepers, the couch surfers, the useless eaters-renters-drivers-workers, and the amazing storm clouds on the horizon, and we are here, with dirty Monarchs, dirty War Lords, dirty Politicos, dirty Bankers, dirty Media, dirty Law Enforcers, dirty Marketers, dirty Educators, dirty Entertainers, dirty Scientists, dirty Wall Streeters, all of them, selling our countries down the drain.
And so, Independence Day, Armistice Day, Memorial Day, Flag Day, all those Veterans Day fandangos, here we are, just shitting in our own graves:
Millions on alert:
[Photo: Millions in Mexico warned to prepare for evacuation as Popocatépetl volcano spews ash]
Oh, Canada:
A deluge of rainfall in Western Canada is an opportunity to make real progress in fighting Alberta’s wildfires, an official said Monday.
There are 81 wildfires in forest protection areas, with 23 considered out of control. More than 945,000 hectares have burned and more than 10,000 Albertans remain under evacuation orders.
At a news conference, Alberta Wildfire information unit manager Christie Tucker reiterated what an extraordinary wildfire season this has been — the most active spring on record, surpassing the last set in 2019 when 615,000 hectares burned.
“I know we’re all relieved to see some rain today and we hope for more to come,” Tucker said.
“This could be a turning point for the firefighters working out there on the fires.” (source)
Oh, those Bidens and McCarthy Familias, and the Nuland-Blinken-Yellen-Kagan-Garland-Sherman Hummus Familia, too.
Do we have big problems in USA-Klanada!
Arizona, California and Nevada on Monday proposed a deal to significantly cut their water use from the drought-stricken Colorado River over the next three years. The $1.2 billion proposal is a potential breakthrough in a stalemate over how to deal with a rising problem that pitted Western states against one another. The plan would conserve an additional 3 million acre-feet of water from the 1,450-mile river that provides water to 40 million people in seven U.S. states, parts of Mexico and more than two dozen Native American tribes. Cities, irrigation districts and Native American tribes in the three states will receive federal funding in exchange for temporarily using less water. (source)
Well well, the photo of the year, our Governor for the 51st State, UkroNaziLandia:
If this isn’t a foul taste in your mouth, then,
Shit, billions in ZioAzovNaziLensky’s hidden bank accounts, villas here and there, and then this Anglo Saxon shit storm, kyping the bathrobes: “Liz Truss has been hit by a bill of more than £12,000, which included items like bathrobes and slippers that went missing from her grace-and-favour country home.
The disgraced ex-Prime Minister has reportedly been ordered to reimburse the Cabinet Office after the items disappeared following “summer parties” she held at Chevening estate.” (source)
Oh, the summer book reading list, too: “CIA May Be Regarded Around World as a Rogue Elephant, But Operatives Can Still Churn Out Books that Make Themselves Look Like Heroes” (source)
Well, the summer blues will be filled with big bad bears:
When the U.S. Forest Service needed a symbol to draw the nation’s attention to the danger of wildfires, Uncle Sam just wouldn’t do. Bambi, despite his success in a popular Disney movie, wouldn’t do either.
Only Smokey Bear – a little bear cub who was found after a forest fire 72 years ago Saturday – could do the job.
1937
President Franklin D. Roosevelt launches a national campaign to reduce forest fires. Posters featuring Uncle Sam as a forest ranger tell people “Our forests – Our fault.”
1942
A Japanese submarine surfaces off the coast and fires on an oil field near Santa Barbara. Damage is minimal, but officials realize Los Padres National Forest is at risk. With resources at a premium during wartime, fire safety becomes an even higher priority.
1944
Disney makes a one-year deal to loan Bambi and his friends to the forest fire prevention campaign. The campaign is a success, but ad executives realize they need an animal symbol of their own.
AUG. 9 A new campaign is launched, featuring a bear. The first poster, drawn pro bono by illustrator Albert Staehle, shows a character he calls Smokey pouring water on a campfire. He says he started with a raccoon but thought it looked too much “like a bandit.”
1947
The very successful Smokey Bear campaign continues in the postwar years with the new slogan, “Only you.”
1950
MAY 9 A group of firefighters narrowly escapes disaster near Capitan, New Mexico, by taking refuge on a rock slide as the fire burns over them.
Afterward, they find a bear cub – his fur singed and his paws badly burned – clinging to a charred tree. Named Hotfoot Teddy, the cub is nursed back to health by a New Mexico game warden and his family.
JUNE 27 Now famous, the cub is flown to the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., to become the living embodiment of Smokey Bear. The U.S. Postal Service eventually gives Smokey his own ZIP code when he begins receiving up to 13,000 letters a week.
1952
A song, “Smokey the Bear” – written by Steve Nelson and Jack Rollins, the same guys who wrote “Peter Cottontail” and “Frosty the Snowman” – becomes a big hit. Rollins adds “the” to Smokey’s name to make the lyrics fit better. As a result, a generation or two of children grow up calling the character “Smokey the Bear” instead of just “Smokey Bear.”
MAY 23 Congress passes the Smokey Bear Act, taking Smokey out of the public domain and preserving the trademark for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. More important, the move earmarks revenue from sales of Smokey toys and memorabilia for fire prevention awareness efforts.
1971
A new cub, Little Smokey, joins Smokey in the National Zoo. He, too, was born in a New Mexico forest and rescued from starvation by park rangers.
1975
MAY 2 Smokey, old and arthritic and still suffering from his injuries, is officially retired from public service. Little Smokey is officially named his successor as “Smokey II.”
1976
NOV. 9 Smokey dies at age 26. His remains are flown back to near where he was found in New Mexico. More than 250 people attend his memorial service. Two days after the funeral, an obituary runs on Page 1 of the Wall Street Journal.
1979
Smokey Bear Historical Park is completed near Capitan, New Mexico, at the grave of the original Smokey. The park includes a museum.
1990
AUG.11 Smokey II dies.
2020
While both Smokey and Smokey II have died, the character lives on. Recent ads feature Smokey seeking out people who exhibit safe behavior and rewarding them with – what else? – a bear hug.
+—+
So the summer comes on strong, as Americanos sip their beer, booze, wine coolers:
Sitting back and looking for NASCAR and Netflix movies, backyard BBQ-ing, while Nero Fiddles and the Goy-Jew World of Elitism Destroys More of the Planet.
All just dust to the wind, these stories:
Climate Change
While climate change has effects that vary by location, everyone is feeling it one way or another. Most ecosystems can probably adjust to climate change up to a point, but other stressors (like the other issues mentioned here) limit this adaptation ability, especially in places that have lost a number of species already. Particularly sensitive are mountain tops, prairie potholes, the Arctic, and coral reefs. I argue that climate change is the number one issue right now, as we all feel the more frequent extreme weather events, the earlier spring, melting ice, and rising seas. These changes will continue to get stronger, negatively affecting the ecosystems we and the rest of biodiversity rely on.
Land Use
Natural spaces provide habitat for wildlife, space for forests to produce oxygen, and wetlands to clean our freshwater. It allows us to hike, climb, hunt, fish, and camp. Natural spaces are also a finite resource. We continue to use land inefficiently, turning natural spaces into cornfields, natural gas fields, wind farms, roads, and subdivisions. Inappropriate or nonexistent land use planning continues to result in suburban sprawl supporting low-density housing. These changes in land use fragment the landscape, squeeze out wildlife, put the valuable property right into wildfire-prone areas, and upset atmospheric carbon budgets.
Energy Extraction and Transportation
New technologies, higher energy prices, and a permissive regulatory environment have allowed in recent years for a significant expansion of energy development in North America. The development of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing has created a boom in natural gas extraction in the northeast, particularly in the Marcellus and Utica shale deposits. This new expertise in shale drilling is also applied to shale oil reserves, for example in the Bakken formation of North Dakota. Similarly, tar sands in Canada have been exploited at much-accelerated rates in the last decade. All these fossil fuels have to be transported to refineries and markets through pipelines and over roads and rails. The extraction and transportation of fossil fuels imply environmental risks such as groundwater pollution, spills, and greenhouse gas emissions. The drill pads, pipelines, and mines fragment the landscape (see Land Use above), cutting up wildlife habitat. Renewable energies like wind and solar are also booming and they have their own environmental issues, particularly when it comes to positioning these structures on the landscape. Improper placement can lead to significant mortality events for bats and birds, for example.
Chemical Pollution
A very large number of synthetic chemicals enter our air, soil, and waterways. Major contributors are agriculture byproducts, industrial operations, and household chemicals. We know very little about the effects of thousands of these chemicals, let alone about their interactions. Of particular concern are endocrine disruptors. These chemicals come in a wide variety of sources, including pesticides, the breakdown of plastics, fire retardants. Endocrine disruptors interact with the endocrine system that regulates hormones in animals, including humans, causing a wide array of reproductive and developmental effects.
Invasive Species
Plant or animal species introduced to a new area are called non-native, or exotic, and when they rapidly colonize new areas, they are considered invasive. The prevalence of invasive species is correlated with our global trading activities: to more, we move cargo across the oceans, and we ourselves travel overseas, the more we carry back unwanted hitchhikers. From the multitude of plants and animals we bring over, many become invasive. Some can transform our forests (for example, the Asian longhorned beetle), or destroy urban trees that have been cooling our cities in the summer (like the emerald ash borer). The spiny water fleas, zebra mussels, Eurasian water-milfoil, and Asian carp disrupt our freshwater ecosystems, and countless weeds cost us billions in lost agricultural production.
Environmental Justice
While this one is not an environmental issue in itself, environmental justice dictates who feels these issues the most. Environmental justice is concerned with providing everyone, regardless of race, origin, or income, the ability to enjoy a healthy environment. We have a long history of unequal distribution of the burden posed by deteriorating environmental conditions. For a multitude of reasons, some groups are more likely than others to be in close proximity to a waste disposal facility, breathe polluted air, or be living on contaminated soil. In addition, fines levied for environmental law violations tend to be much less severe when the injured party is from minority groups. (source)
Then, hold onto your seats — while people in Yemen, Sudan, most African nations, around the world are struggling just to get clean water and decent food, the nanotechnologists are on the job:
We present the results of our 14th horizon scan of issues we expect to influence biological conservation in the future. From an initial set of 102 topics, our global panel of 30 scientists and practitioners identified 15 issues we consider most urgent for societies worldwide to address. Issues are novel within biological conservation or represent a substantial positive or negative step change at global or regional scales. Issues such as submerged artificial light fisheries and accelerating upper ocean currents could have profound negative impacts on marine or coastal ecosystems. We also identified potentially positive technological advances, including energy production and storage, improved fertilisation methods, and expansion of biodegradable materials. If effectively managed, these technologies could realise future benefits for biological diversity. (source)
We haven’t solved shit concerning all those issues that we faced globally in 1946 onward, but we have these DNA biobatteries in the pipeline:
Many photonic and electronic devices rely on nanotechnology and nanofabrication, but DNA-based approaches have yet to make a significant commercial impact in these fields even though DNA molecules are now well-established as versatile building blocks for nanostructures. As we describe here, DNA molecules can be chemically modified with a wide variety of functional groups enabling nanocargoes to be attached at precisely determined locations. DNA nanostructures can also be used as templates for the growth of inorganic structures. Together, these factors enable the use of DNA nanotechnology for the construction of many novel devices and systems. In this topical review, we discuss four case studies of potential applications in photonics and electronics: carbon nanotube transistors, devices for quantum computing, artificial electromagnetic materials, and enzymatic fuel cells. We conclude by speculating about the barriers to the exploitation of these technologies in real-world settings. (source)
Summer reading while USA-Canada-EU-UK-Five Eyes-Isra-Hell plan for more weaponry. Do not believe for one second these biobatteries are about feeding, clothing, sheltering, educating the world.
Americanos, Anglo Saxons writ large, and the Chlamydians under that Western Perverse Spell in their constant Stockholm Syndrome-Shifting Baseline Disorder
The stench is far and wide when one opens up the crusty eyes on a glorious Sunday AM here in beach city Oregon.
Endless insanity of the Donkey and Elephant putrid politicos, that is for sure, and I never partake in the dirty meth needles the MSM serves up on Sunday talk/new/public affairs (sic/sick) shows (Big Brother in size 2 shoes).
I can saunter over to the New Woke Times, the Common Nightmare site, the CNN news wrapped up fish head headlines, Yahoo or Bing crap tidbits, what have you, and get that Chlamydia smear all over my lips, nose and brain. Takes days to clear up. Just one Sunday morning.
Forget about it. We are in the endless “Stella Hey Stella” mode: Listen to the Americano, or that Cocaine Cowboy Penis Piano Man Zelensky yell to Stella, US, U$A, Isra-Hell, U-Inbred-Kingdom, Klanada, EuroTrashLandia, hell, even Vatican City, “More guns, more Benjamins, more more more, or the world will be without Zelensky.”
Maybe we all coulda been a contender:
Okay, here, tangent number 999:
Man oh man, drink your CocaCola in the morning, kiddos:
The Coca-Cola Co. has picked the town of Webster to build a $650 million fairlife milk production facility. The move is expected to create up to 250 jobs.
The 745,000-square-foot facility will be built on property on Tebor Road and is expected to break ground in the fall, state officials say. The production facility is scheduled to be operational by the end of 2025. (Rochester Beacon)
“Consumer demand for fairlife products is at an all-time high, and a new production facility will allow us to significantly increase capacity and deliver fairlife to even more households across the country,” says Tim Doelman, fairlife CEO. As we continue to grow in the Northeast, Webster’s proximity and access to best-in-class dairy farmers make it an excellent location to support our next phase of growth in the region and beyond.”
The company’s products are made through an ultrafiltered milk process that removes the lactose and much of the sugar and leaves behind more of the protein and calcium. Coca-Cola, a strategic partner in the venture since it was launched, acquired fairlife in 2020.
Again, these Sunday Morning “news” pieces are stipped bare, complete PR spining, amazing ugly lies of the non-journalists coming from non-journalism schools that advertise their bullshit journalism.
Ya see any pushback in the story above on Killer Coke/FairLife(Lie) in Rochester? Nah. No one saying this is corporate welfare, corporate monopoly, corporate crime. Nothing about the dead white cancer causing, addictive shit that they peddle as ultra filtered? All probiotics screened out, and the sugar crap product of those udders on dead and dying cows, fed soy and corn meal and other unnatural elements including roadkill, in their evolutionary line, never will the un-journalists venture in that line of thought, just how deadly that creamy shit is.
Sacred Cows? There are a billion products and services (disservices) the corporate criminals have put on their shelves, with corporate lawyers, with PR spinning Bernays-bred Goebbels-in-Skinny-Jeans and Drag Queen Wigs as the protection racket.
[Photo: More than half (50%) of U.S. milk is produced by 3 percent of dairies. DAVID SILVERMAN/GETTY IMAGES]
Darn, just more Toothless in Wisconsin latency here, on Sunday.
In Wisconsin, several dairy operations are now facing opposition to plans to expand their herds. Porous karst soils in the parts of Wisconsin where a significant portion of dairy expansion is occurring present some unique environmental issues. Run-off from dairy farms and other agricultural activities has seeped into aquifers and elevated levels of nitrogen, in some instances to unsafe concentrations; in one recent case, the Wisconsin Department of Justice levied a $65,000 fine against a dairy operation for contaminating groundwater. (source)
And all that entails — cheese, milk, ice cream, the lot of the shit: I remember this shit while I was working in Spokane and on the board of the Washington Sustainable Farm and Food Network,
In one of the larger cases of manure pollution in recent years, an estimated 15 million gallons of manure, water, and other matter spilled in 2010 into a slough that drains into the Snohomish River in Washington state, when a berm on a dairy farm’s manure lagoon failed.
Here, more of the evidence:
Greater dairy consumption, for instance, may increase levels of insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I), which promotes cell proliferation and has been associated with higher risks for several Greater dairy consumption, for instance, may increase levels of insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I), which promotes cell proliferation and has been associated with higher risks for several types of cancer. Potentially, female sex hormones present in cow’s milk (such as oestrogen and progesterone) may have a role in the increased risk of breast cancer, whilst saturated and trans-fatty acids from dairy products may increase the risk of liver cancer. For the majority of Chinese people who do not produce enough lactase, dairy products may also be broken down into products that affect cancer risk.types of cancer. Potentially, female sex hormones present in cow’s milk (such as oestrogen and progesterone) may have a role in the increased risk of breast cancer, whilst saturated and trans-fatty acids from dairy products may increase the risk of liver cancer. For the majority of Chinese people who do not produce enough lactase, dairy products may also be broken down into products that affect cancer risk.
Dr Maria Kakkoura, Nutritional Epidemiologist at Oxford Population Health, and the first author of the study, said: ‘This was the first major study to investigate the link between dairy products and cancer risk in a Chinese population. Further studies are needed to validate these current findings, establish if these associations are causal, and investigate the potential underlying mechanisms involved’. (source)
Oh shit, more and more lies and Big Brother components coming across my feeds. Gotta get this diatribe out NOW.
[Note: In this collection of sardonic and synergistic diatribes, radical teacher and writer Paul Haeder confronts six decades of America’s great slide into the intellectual muck that is today’s neoliberal morass. In these literary incantations, the iconoclastic Haeder fights against the trappings of a world gone mad while simultaneously contemplating the missed chances of his own life. Collected over a decade of writing for the radical blog Dissident Voice, the wide range of essays vary in stylistics, shifting voices and points of view, but are all underpinned by Paul’s fearlessness. They come crashing together to spark a rarefied bonfire of truth rising from the ashes of propaganda and doublethink. Reimagining Sanity: Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber is a white-water rapid rush, a free-fall into the heart of American darkness. (Paul Haeder Reimagining Sanity)]
Okay, the germ/kernal of my attack on the Chlamydia Capitalists: Australian pigs. Here, you can go down under too, in some of the news feds, and luckily for me, we have over at Dissident Voice, Binoy Kampmark, a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge, and now lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne, on story there, again, just more and more emblematic of Capitalism, and Police State Mentalty, the Power of Badge, Gun Uniform. If you are not disgusted with this, then you need to see a doc doing lobotomies:
The Australian-based Police Accountability Project notes the significant risks that arise from Tasers “when used on vulnerable groups or in particular ways.” By giving police such devices, the likelihood of their use, “rather than negotiation, containment, retreat and de-escalation” increases.
Peter Cotter, NSW Police Force Assistant Commissioner, tried to justify the actions of the officer in question. “At the time [Nowland] was tasered she was approaching the police.” Was it at breakneck speed? No. “It is fair to say at a slow pace.” This dementia-suffering terror was also using a walking frame, bound to strike fear in any law enforcement figure. “But she had a knife,” insisted Cotter, miraculously elevating the level of risk. “I can’t take it any further as to what was going through anyone’s mind when he used the Taser.”
Other details were offered. Two officers, after being called to the address at 4.15 a.m., found Nowland with “a steak knife with a serrated edge that she had obtained from the kitchen area of the nursing home a couple of hours earlier.” Negotiations followed – as if Nowland’s state warranted a lengthy conference with paramedics and the police. She duly “approached the doorway where the police were at that stage, and the officer, the one officer, discharged the Taser.” Nowland fell to the floor. Hit her head. Lost consciousness. “The injury that she suffered as a result of hitting her head on the floor has rendered her bedridden at the moment,” stated Cotter.
Shit-dog, where oh where are the real humans in uniform, in the room? This is a triple layer of appaling. The idea of a steak knife pulled on me, even now, age 66, with a shit load of judo, wrestling, grappling and some fist fighting through my 30s, this is laughable, sick, that hulk beer-drinking cops “down under” wouldn’t even use a modicum of defensive grappling or self-defense. A fucking steak knife? Christ, even the dirty Australians, with their junkets to Israel to learn new subduing and restraining and crowd busiting, they have to have some spine left and just work with this woman who is 95 goddamaned years OLD.
Ahh, so, that is the values system of One Eye Blind in the Five Eyes, Hateful Australia, wanting more nuke subs and war with China. This is it, boys and girls, for 2023. Look at the un-man man, police chief:
[Photo: Wimp, worthless, and I can’t say more or I’ll be accused of sexism and racism: Peter Cotter, NSW Police Force Assistant Commissioner, takes part in a press conference on May 19.]
The facility’s website describes the lodge as a 40-bed aged care facility with private rooms and en-suites, staffed by registered nurses, enrolled nurses and carers.
Thaler said the community want to know why police thought it was necessary to Taser a frail, elderly woman who was known to have dementia and couldn’t possibly have posed a threat.
“There’s simply no excuse for it. But it’s happened. We want to know why and how,” he said.
Now now, the entire West, the Sunday dumbdowning shows, all of this parade of parasites in both parties, in FinTech, in Finance, Real Estate, the billionaires giving BJ’s to Zuckerberg who supposedly got back another $44 billion more in amassed mass murdering money for his hundreds of billions portfolio this year, the entire shit show that is vapid and vacant America and the Vassals Following the American Chlamydian Capitalism, how can anyone ever stomach a second’s worth of worthlessness?
I think that most of us instinctively avoid people with mental illness.
I think in many ways what my films are about is that search for my grandpa’s dentures: for that humanizing narrative that bridges the gap between “us” and “them” to arrive at a “we.”
I’ve been around cops a lot of my life — police beat reporter starting off young, 19, in Tucson for the college daily and the other rags I worked with. I am white, so, most of the fuckers bullshitted with me around misogyny, racism, bigotry, the other anti-human shit.
I’ve been thrown down by cops as a 16 year old long hair on my motorcycle, and I have been arrested, too, protesting wars wars wars, and also thrown around by two pigs in El Paso when I was sheltering patients going into a Planned Parenthood clinic for, no, not abortions, but counseling.
But in Spokane, where I did my gigs from 2001-2011, Otto is his name (I started my own learning and certifications around developmentally and intellectually disabled folk beginning in 2013 — you can read a shit ton of my work tied to social work with homeless, ex-cons, military veteran, foster youth, homeless and drug addicted). Otto sticks with me.
Within 10 seconds after Otto Zehm entered the now infamous Zip Trip, a white-haired police officer brandishing a baton rushed up behind him. Zehm, a developmentally disabled janitor, retreated and was knocked to the floor. He raised a two-liter Diet Pepsi bottle to defend himself from Officer Karl Thompson’s blows. He was tased and hogtied as he struggled on the floor.
“All I wanted was a Snickers!” he shouted. Zehm died two days later in a Spokane hospital.
Spokane police defended Thompson’s actions. They claimed that Zehm “lunged” and “attacked” Thompson that night in March 2006.
The dementia is in those sad sacks of humanity, from Pelosi to Feinstein, from Nuland, Yellen, Kagan, to then Biden, Harris, Jill and Hunter, the lot of them, from AOC (she wants to deplatform Trump, that’s her gig?), to every Tom Dick & Harry in Hollywood:
Worthless, monsters, and they are the enemy.
The “crisis talks” are part of a heavily stage-managed, bipartisan operation, including a manufactured default deadline, to enable “progressive” Democrats to cover for Biden and vote for massive cuts while concealing the corporate interests and imperialist war aims that are being served.
Virtually nothing is said about the sources of the spiraling national debt—including $113 billion in military aid to Ukraine and a record $1 trillion defense budget in 2022, combined with hundreds of billions to rescue failing banks and their wealthy depositors. The lying propaganda surrounding the debt crisis likewise ignores the fact that spending caps imposed by the Obama-Biden administration beginning in 2011 have already sharply cut outlays for essential social needs ranging from health care and education to food stamps, rent and home heating assistance, the environment and occupational health and safety.
Following Tuesday’s White House meeting between Biden and the top leaders from each party in the House and Senate, both sides praised the talks and declared their mutual commitment to avoiding a default and pushing a bipartisan budget deal through Congress before the debt exceeds the current legal limit.
Biden cut short his trip to Asia to attend the G-7 summit in Japan, skipping planned stops in Papua New Guinea and Australia, in order to return to Washington on Sunday. Before departing on Wednesday, he said, “I’m confident that we’ll get the agreement on the budget and America will not default.”
In previous remarks on Republican demands for tougher work requirements for low-income recipients of Medicaid, food stamps and what remains of the federal welfare program (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families—TANF), Biden noted that as a senator during the Clinton administration he had voted for work requirements for welfare and indicated he was open to tightening such requirements for those receiving food stamps. (source)
Ahh, so, then, every fucking blue and yellow Nazi flag I see, Rage, man, RAGE. I spit at:
I have now thrown out some of the old people friends with the bathwater, so to speak, those idiots who yammer and yammer on about the Cocaine Penis Pianist ZioAzovLensky being the next-new David and Winston Churchill. They are more than just vapid, more than followers of the dead, more than Zombified and Disneyfied. They are more than just misdirected fools. They are part of the problem, even those old people I used to associate with in literary circles.
The Dictator Who Is Now In Every Boardroom-Bedroom-Billiards Room, ZioAzovNaziLensky:
On January 24, following several prominent corruption scandals, including two major investigations involving the embezzlement of funds, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced “personnel decisions” across different government ministries and within Ukrainian law enforcement. Zelensky also announced that state officials would be banned from traveling internationally for non-government purposes following a report that a now-former top prosecutor vacationed in Spain despite a martial law that bans Ukrainian men ages 18 to 60 from leaving the country without permission.
A thousand stories, yet the old people I am throwing out with the bathwater, have zero tolerance for anything outside their Stockholm Syndrome lives, outside their dementia chlamydia capitalist LIVES.
Fucking Grammy Awards? Who owns the music business? Come on, a little hummus with that response?
[Photo: Zelensky gives a video address at the 2022 Grammy awards in April.]
Meanwhile in January 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a civil forfeiture complaint—the fourth against him—which alleges that Kholomoisky and Gennadiy Bogolyubov, who owned PrivatBank, one of the largest banks in Ukraine, embezzled and defrauded the bank of $5.5 billion which went missing.
The two allegedly obtained fraudulent loans and lines of credit from 2008 through 2016 and laundered portions of their criminal proceeds using an array of shell companies’ bank accounts, primarily at PrivatBank’s Cyprus branch, before they transferred the funds to the U.S. where they continued to launder them illegally through an associate operating out of offices in Miami.
Churchill and ZioAzovNaziLensky?
Churchill floated “Keep England White” as a campaign slogan for the 1955 election. Perhaps most damning is the recollection of Churchill’s friend, the politician Violet Bonham Carter: when asked his opinion on China in 1954, he reportedly replied, “I hate people with slit eyes and pigtails”.
Churchill’s view that “Indians breed like rabbits” was surely relevant to his decision not to deliver food supplies to Bengal during this famine as a matter of urgency.
From Cuba to India, Sudan to South Africa, Ali provides extended extracts from Churchill’s letters and memoirs to show a consistent enthusiasm for European imperialism and a profound disgust for those he felt should be ruled over.
For instance, when the 22 year old Churchill discovered the mutilated bodies of British soldiers in northwest India (today Pakistan), he denounced the Pashtun perpetrators in his diary as “miserable and brutal creatures” and “pernicious vermin”. There was no reflection on the violence the British army had carried out on the Pashtun or why British rule might be resisted. Churchill is portrayed as the epitome of Rudyard Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” justifying all acts of military cruelty as part of a perceived civilising mission. (source)
When we going to see the book, Ukraine’ Zelensky and His Crimes, Hate of Russians, and Ponzi Schemes from Hell?
It all leads up to me throwing out the old people with the bathwater, because they will not entertain shit when it comes to another view of ZioLensky, or even Jill & Joe & Hunter Go to the Bank!
For example, Hunter was paid $50,0000 a month for five years (approximately $3 million) to serve on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, even though he had no experience or credentials in the energy field and never visited Ukraine for company business during that period.
Hunter’s appointment was allegedly part of a scheme to pressure the Ukrainian government (which at the time was desperately seeking billions in U.S. loans) to shut down an investigation into Burisma’s owner, Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, who was suspected of money laundering, tax evasion, and corruption.
Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani claim that Hunter earned his $50,000 a month from Burisma by having his father—then Barack Obama’s Vice President—tell Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire chief prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was spearheading the investigation into Zlochevsky’s affairs—otherwise the U.S. would not approve the loans.
Did you forget about Hunter the artist after all those cocaine and prostitute masturbation videos some of us got to see from his laptop?
As reported in Artnet, art critic Scott Indrisek, former editor-in-chief of Modern Painters magazine, said that, “Hunter’s paintings … remind me of … art for dermatologists’ waiting rooms.” He also compared the paintings to a screensaver and told the Washington Post, “It’s the most anonymous art I can imagine … somewhere between a screen saver and if you just Googled ‘midcentury abstraction’ and mashed up whatever came up.”
Little wonder that the White House is embarrassed at the prospect of this art sale, since it has provoked allegations that it is just another attempt by Hunter to trade on his father’s name and high public office—as he has been accused of doing in his previous questionable business dealings overseas, which have sparked the current investigation into Hunter’s finances by the Department of Justice.
But Joe Biden won’t try to stop Hunter from selling his paintings.
Instead, he is giving him a green light. Under a special “ethics protocol” worked out between the White House and the Georges Bergès art gallery, there will be no objection to Hunter’s paintings being sold for up to $500,000—as long as all buyers’ identities are kept secret from the public, and presumably from Hunter himself.
This is supposed to protect the government from those who might want to buy access or special treatment. But it will do exactly the opposite. Since the buyers will be anonymous, “you won’t be able to follow the money,” as pointed out by The Art Newspaper.
The problem that underpins most other problems in modern times is that human minds are highly hackable, and that the science of hacking them at mass scale has been advancing since Bernays over a century ago. This is what keeps people consenting to the destructive and exploitative agendas of the powerful against their own interests.
The question is, Will you stand by and watch a 95-year-old frail woman get assaulted by goons in uniforms?
Right before I moved to that pathetic city, Seattle:
A suicidal young woman plunged from a Seattle bridge after being urged to “jump, bitch” by angry commuters.
The drivers who jeered and taunted the woman had been caught in a traffic jam as police closed lanes and tried to talk her to safety.
Yesterday the woman was in a serious condition in hospital with a spinal fracture and chest and abdominal injuries after her 150ft fall into a canal.
The police were dismayed by the behaviour of drivers. “They were swearing at her and telling her to jump,” a spokesman, Clem Benton, said yesterday. “It’s not something that has happened before in my experience.”
He said the taunts included obscenities which he did not want to repeat. “Obviously when you have an individual in some type of crisis, yelling for her to jump is very insensitive to a person’s life.”
The woman, 28, who works as a political lobbyist in Olympia, Washington, had stopped her car on the Ship Canal Bridge in Seattle early on Tuesday morning in a distressed state. She climbed on to the edge of the bridge, where she sat down. Rush-hour traffic was halted for three hours as police attempted to talk her down and tried to contact her boyfriend.
Finally, after jeers from the delayed commuters, she stood up for the first time and jumped into the canal. She emerged from the water feet first and was rescued by police divers. She was taken to hospital where she was initially described as critical.
There have been 10 previous suicide attempts from the bridge since 1966.
“We were amazed that she jumped,” Lieutenant Richard Schweitzer told the Seattle Times. “It’s unusual for people to spend that much time talking to negotiators before leaping.”
Yesterday her boyfriend’s family issued a statement saying that “she is a wonderful woman. Please keep her in your thoughts and prayers.” Police said it was unlikely that she would face charges.
The action of the commuters is in contrast to Seattle’s image as an easy-going and broad-minded city. With its wealth from the industries of Boeing and Microsoft, it frequently tops surveys in money magazines of the most desirable places to live.
this memoir is a personal journey of love for a strong mother … to the land of the rising sun … and a new pathway out of conscientious objector status
Every war is a war against children.
–Egalntyne Jebb, founder Save the Children a century ago.
These introductions to people I have, that is, keyholing into their lives, immersing into their dreams and sharing their gifts of living, learning their avocations, and then welding connections to my own life with theirs have happened this way many times over the course of decades:
“I found your website through something of a circuitous route. I first listened to a Courage to Resist podcast interview with Dan Shea and got interested in his story and background. A Google search took me to your interview with him for LA Progressive. From your bio, I did another search and first found some of your Dissident Voice stories and finally landed on your website, where I spent the next few hours.
I especially got caught up in the “Autobiography Through Many Lenses” page. The very mention of Henry Miller, napalm, Mark Twain (on autobiography being the truest of all books), ancestors from Ireland, and good God Malcolm Lowry (truly one of my favorites!) was enough to make me want to pore through everything of yours I could find.”
So it goes, and then the book comes to me as a PDF and then a hard copy.
So, we’ll see if the good lord’s willin’ on this review, if I get something right, and do not immerse it all in my POV: “If the good Lord’s willing and the creek stays down I’ll be in your arms time the moon come around.” (Johnny Cash)
The linchpin for me is his refusal to go to THAT war, and some of his narrative, the memoir, deals specifically with those times. He also went from American, Western American, to Japanese. THAT war (sic): During the Vietnam War more than 170,000 men were officially recognized as conscientious objectors. Thousands of other young men resisted by burning their draft cards, serving jail sentences or leaving the country.
THAT war: United States’ military involvement in the Vietnam War began in February 1961 and lasted until May 1975. Approximately 2.7 million American men and women served in Vietnam. During the war, more than 58,000 servicemen and women lost their lives.
“One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.”
―Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water
“I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind-of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough) any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware even that they are deceiving one another.”
— Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human
Family for Robert Norris is everything, and he starts spinning tales about his grandfather Frederick, born in Union County, Pennsylvania. He moved around, from Minnesota to North Dakota and then to White Salmon, WA, and that’s where Robert’s mother grew up, with the history of the Columbia River, Celilo Falls before the river was dammed up, coursing through her DNA.
Interestingly, his mother Kay talked to Norris about Kyoko Nakagawa, a Japanese-American girl who was her best friend until World War II broke out and the Nakagawa family was shipped to an internment camps.
“I was in high school at that time and remember well the events of that day and the days and months that followed. There were so many things I didn’t learn about until many years later. One of my very best friends in high school was Kyoko and we spent many lunch hours together gigglin’ and talkin’ about our futures. We’d usually exchange sandwiches because mine were on homemade bread and hers were on the store bread put out by Wonder Bakeries. We thought we were being so sneaky and clever to exchange our sandwiches. How young and naive we both were. I think when I was a junior in high school, I went to school one mornin’ and couldn’t find Kyoko. I didn’t know what happened to her. I was very hurt to think she left and didn’t say goodbye.
“I thought all her family were so nice. They had a home on the river and I remember I got permission to walk down there to see if she was sick and there was nobody home. Everything was gone. I found out a long time later that she and her family had been transported to an internment camp for Japanese in Idaho. I did try very hard and seriously to track her down and finally did only to find out that she died in childbirth just after her family was released from the camp after the war. I felt very sad for a long time after that.”
This man, Robert Norris, with his deep regard for the family, especially for his strong and adventuresome father, ended up deep in Japanese culture in the 1980s, becoming a language teacher, and then marrying a Japanese woman. He’s called Japan his home for more than 40 years.
He’s there now, in Japan, writing me emails, and his life now is slow, he says, with old age and some medical issues from the past catching up to him now.
I can hear those metal bars slamming: The date the cell doors slammed on him was in September, 1970:
“A military policeman places handcuffs around my wrist and leads me to a patrol car waiting to take me to the base prison. Jerry and Midge Kelly follow me to the patrol car.
I force a smile and say, ‘It could have been worse.’
Jerry shakes my had. Midge says, ‘You were very brace on the stand. I was proud of you. Make sure you write us.’
I get into the patrol car. A cloud of dust rises behind the car as it lurches toward the prison. I crane my neck for a final look and see Jerry and Midge grow smaller through a brown haze until they’re tiny specks in the distance.”
My name is Robert W. Norris. I’m a Pacific Northwest native, Vietnam War conscientious objector, and longtime expat resident of Japan. I’m one of those guys who took that 1960s jingoistic catchphrase “America, love it or leave it” seriously and ended up in Japan back in 1983.
[…]
From there it was on to the video interview with David Rovics. Imagine my surprise when I heard you mention that you and your sister had inherited some land near White Salmon, Washington. I mean, my mother grew up there and graduated from Columbia High School in 1943! Small world, indeed.
So that brings me to the reason I’m writing to you. My life story and tribute to my mother was published in January by Tin Gate, a U.K. hybrid publisher of memoirs, travel books, and biographies. I hope I’m not being presumptuous in thinking you might be interested in looking at it with an eye toward a possible review, or perhaps passing it along to others who might be interested in whatever happened to some of us old-timers who told the military to fuck off way back when. The following summary is from the book’s back cover.
“‘The Good Lord Willing and the Creek Don’t Rise: Pentimento Memories of Mom and Me’ traces the trials, tribulations, and unbreakable bond of two Pacific Northwest characters. Kay Schlinkman grows up on the banks of the Columbia River in the 1930s and 1940s. She overcomes a small logging town’s ostracism in the late 1950s for her divorce, excommunication by the Catholic Church for remarrying, severe criticism and rejection for defending her son’s refusal to go to war, and the burden of paying off her second husband’s gambling debts. She takes night classes to become qualified as a legal secretary in her fifties and continues to work until she’s seventy-eight.
“Robert Norris goes to military prison as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, embraces the counterculture upon release, wanders the world in search of his identity, and eventually lands in Japan, where he finds his niche as a university professor, spends two years as the dean of students, and retires as a professor emeritus. Despite their separation by the expanse of the Pacific Ocean, Robert and Kay maintain a lifelong commitment of love, respect, and support that enriches both their lives. This story provides a heart-warming example of how far a mother and son can go in maintaining their bond against all odds. A must read for all mothers and sons, and for those who’ve wondered what the road less traveled would’ve been like had they taken that first step.”
—Robert Whiting, author of “Tokyo Underworld” and “You Gotta Have Wa,” wrote,
“A most impressive achievement by a highly talented writer…an emotionally powerful memoir that spans nearly a century and several continents. Riveting and rich in detail with passages that evoke Hemingway and Maugham, it draws you in and doesn’t let up. For Japanophiles, the sections on life in Osaka and Kyushu offer important lessons on cultural assimilation. You come away from this book with gratitude to the author for having written it and respect for a life well lived.”
—Michael Uhl, author of “Vietnam Awakening” and “The War I Survived was Vietnam,” wrote,
“A bumpy, coming-of-age tale set in the logging country of the Pacific Northwest, dosed with a mother’s love, transforms an alienated young man into an expat and ultimately an emeritus professor in Japan. Robert W. Norris crafts the stages of this extraordinary journey—punctuated with a turn as a Vietnam War resister—in a narrative style that is both graceful and seamless.”
His book, the stories, the backdrops, all the encounters with his mom, before getting into the military hell we all hope those like Robert never have to get into, and those were the draft days, and, alas, he joined the US Air Force. Not going to college and living and working in Humbolt County, he was sure he’d be drafted and end up in Vietnam and dead, or dying.
The Air Force or Navy were options for he and his buddies, Troy and Shannon, sign up for the bombing brigade, the dirty Air Force. He made the Arcata all-county basketball team, but the boy Norris was depressed, disinterested.
Here, another salvo from Robert to me after I tsunamied him with emails a yard or so long.
Paul,
Thanks so much for such a quick and great reply and all the links! Wow, I now have my reading set for the next few days. I’ve already gone over a couple of the Finding Fringe stories (great stuff) and the attached interview with Emily Green. Interesting that you mentioned the documentary “Sir, No Sir.” While working on the initial draft of my book, I queried the director David Zeiger and he kindly provided a nice blurb.
I’ll write a better letter later, but I wanted to send you the PDF first and ask for a phone number. Neither Amazon nor IngramSpark will allow me to order an author copy if I don’t have a phone number to provide the shipping company in case they need to contact the recipient of the package. Amazon allows P.O. Box numbers it seems, but IngramSpark doesn’t; they require a street address. Also, this PDF is large at 23 MB (there are about 20 pages of pictures), but most of the email addresses I’ve sent it to have handled it OK.
Thanks, too, for agreeing to read the book and for the offer of doing an interview. I really appreciate it. I’ll check out Cirque’s site and see if I can come up with an idea or two to pitch to them. I’ve had a little bit of success in having excerpts put up on a couple of Boomer sites, with another excerpt (from an earlier novel) to be published around Easter in Psychedelic Press (a U.K. journal dealing in research about the history, culture, philosophy, and science of psychedelics and other drugs) and yet another in the summer peace issue of BeZine, a literary rag out of Israel focusing on peace and spirituality.
OK, so here’s the PDF. I’m also enclosing a cover pic. I think you’ll agree my mom was pretty good-looking! Looking forward to getting a phone number (and street dress if that’s OK) so I can order an author paperback copy to send. I’m about to dig into the link on the Japanese poets writing about Fukushima.
Warm regards,
Robert
Ahh, that military life, short-lived, but here, in living color from the memoir:
While the majority of airmen return home on leave and report to other bases for their technical training after basic training, the others chosen to be military police (the most despicable and lowest career field in the Air Force) and I have to remain at Lackland for ten more weeks of specialized training. The hand of irony has played a cruel trick. Country bumpkin that I am, I’ve joined the Air Force thinking I’ll never have to carry a weapon, but now I’m to be trained in the art of combat and the use of deadly weapons. I know I can never kill another human being. It’s always been and still is an abstraction. Besides, I lack the courage even to use my fists to defend myself. The very thought of violence makes me sick to my stomach. I pass through the training without incident. But during those days of martial arts training; war games; kitchen labor called K.P.; stripping, cleaning, loading, firing, and handling of M-16 rifles, .38 pistols, hand grenades, bayonets, and knives; the classes on crowd dispersal, first aid, attack upon and retreat from an enemy, arrest and seizure, drugs, communism, terrorist activities, patriotism, military police history; and the propaganda the instructors use to inculcate the soldiers into submission and obedience, there grows within my heart an inchoate attitude of rebelliousness. It lies dormant, simmering below the surface, waiting silently for the right moment to emerge from its hiding.
For a while, however, the Air Force succeeds in brainwashing me. One image sticks in my head: a drill instructor during a training session in the use of a truncheon screaming at me in front of a gymnasium full of military police trainees. “Goddamn it, Norris! You dumb shit! You’ve got a left-handed stick! I told you to get a fucking right-handed stick. Now get your ass over to that pile and bring me a right-handed stick!”
“Yes sir,” I bark, turning redder each time I return to him with another “left-handed stick.” Finally, it dawns on me that all the sticks are the same. A wave of shame passes through me. For the rest of the military police training, the drill instructors call me Left-Handed Stick.
But the Air Force Base in Yuba City is not cloistered from the world:
During this time, I’m thinking about Vietnam and having a gut feeling that the war is wrong. Although we’re not allowed to take anything other than our guns and military equipment on The Good Lord Willing and the Creek Don’t Rise 116 the line, I smuggle a portable radio and earphones and listen to the lyrics of popular songs instead of just the melodies—songs by Bob Dylan, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and all the others protesting the war. I’m also reading the underground newspapers that are finding their way on base and contain antiwar, anti-government stories about the My Lai atrocity, the shooting of Ralph Bunch at the Presidio, and the hysteria running rampant on American college campuses. All the little irritating items of military brainwashing and propaganda gradually build up inside of me. Things I’ve taken for granted before now make me bristle. There’s the time three of us guards are called before the squadron sergeant after roll call, and he reads us our rights and charges each of us with defecation on duty. “What’s defecation, Sarge?” I ask. “It’s taking a shit inside the marked line you are NOT supposed to enter, only guard, and you know that only the flight crew are allowed inside that line, and last night one of you smartasses took a FUCKING SHIT inside that line and right under the cockpit—that’s what DEFECATION means!” the sergeant screams. “You’ve got to be shittin’ me,” I say. The sergeant doesn’t think my remark is funny. There on the table as exhibit A for the prosecution is the big, black turd, hard as a rock, found the day before under the cockpit of the bomber I walked around for half my shift before changing to another place to guard. They’re actually planning to court-martial one of the three of us who was stationed on that post during the night and use the turd as evidence. It’s the final straw in realizing that military life isn’t for me. From that day on, I can’t keep my mouth shut in pointing out the inconsistencies and lies whenever I spot them. I miss haircuts and am constantly reprimanded for my shoddy appearance during inspections. I lose days off and am forced to undergo crowd control practice in case we’re called upon, like the National Guard, to break up a civilian demonstration. I know my sympathies would be with the demonstrators. I begin to think that if there really is an enemy, it’s the military. If the situation ever really comes up, I’ll cast aside my weapons and join the other side.
My order to fight in Southeast Asia comes through. I’m given thirty days leave before having to report first to a base in Texas for a month of intensive war training and later to a base in northern Thailand near the Cambodian border. This happens shortly after Nixon escalates the war into Cambodia, where B-52 bombers are now dropping tons of napalm. When I leave Beale Air Base for the start of my thirty-day leave, I know I’ll never make it to Texas.
He gets out of spending five years total in prison, and after six months, when he’s out, his only constant was his “mom’s complete and unconditional love and support.” He of course was dazed and confused, and he ends up on this journey of kicking around, mixing with counterculture, blue collar work, slaving in mills, hitchhiking, then to New York and following a one-way flight to Luxembourg, leaving behind the country of his birth, “the country I no longer felt a part of, venturing forth with no itinerary, just the hand of fate to guide me.”
He does the hippie trail through Europe, ending up in places he only dreamed of as a baseball-playing kid in Humbolt County, California. Paris, Spain, Greece.
The journey had given me an answer to what I’d been seeking since my court martial. The single sentence [ “I don’t feel I’m mentally or physically capable of killing another human being”] I uttered in response to my order to fight in the Vietnam War had saved four and a half years of my life and instilled in me an inchoate awareness of the power of language. The experiences in Europe had now reinforced that awareness and stimulated a need to express myself. I now had a purpose. I’d try to become a writer. I’d learn the craft. Through the writing, I’d rid myself of the confusion and derangement that clung to me so tightly.
Ahh, so the communication is back and forth, between me in Oregon, with some land in White Salmon I mention — his mother’s stomping grounds and Robert’s as well, as sort of an unusual glue — and he in Japan. Another long one from me, to him, and here is his measured and kind response, and I won’t fill in all the contextual asides:
Hey Paul,
Hope you’re doing OK. I’ve spent parts of the last few days going through some of the links you sent, as well as following down the rabbit holes of other links on those pages. Some fascinating stuff to read, a welcome change from the corporate drivel that comprises the majority of English reading material available in Japan.
Among the things that really grabbed my attention this time were your review of the documentary “The People vs Agent Orange,” the related article “A Spray by any Other Name: Agent Orange or Clear-cut Agent?” “Wrestling the Blind, Chasing Apache Horses, and Unpacking the Vietnam War,” and your interview with David James Duncan. As you wrote in one of those articles, “I easily segue from one massive war crime after massive war crime — the American War Against Vietnam — to a small rural county in Oregon,” I too often connect what on the surface seems to be a completely unrelated thing or idea to another. As a reader, I like to read that kind of style. As a writer, I think it conveys an uninterrupted and natural flow. Maybe I just took too many hallucinogens in my youth! Anyway, here are some thoughts.
You may have mentioned him only once or twice, but I constantly had Henry Miller on my mind while reading your articles. So much so that I dusted off the cover of his The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (which had been sitting untouched on my bookshelf for a good 25 years) and started reading it again with great pleasure. It’s amazing how so little has changed in the U.S. since he wrote that book back in 1940 and ’41. In the midst of ranting about how fucked up and doomed America is/was, he still, like a magician, pulls out a gem of a phrase on almost every page that makes the reader practically double over with laughter. I once worked as a cook for a restaurant owner who had lived in Big Sur in the 1950s, ran a kind of trading post, and would barter with Miller, who was always broke, and would end up giving him bags of groceries for rough draft manuscripts of whatever Miller had pounded out on his typewriter that day. This dude was Irish-American, in his 60s at the time, had a plump and red nose from too much booze, and told great tales that got better with each embellishment. I first met him when I was down to my last $20 and drinking a beer at his bar. When I told him The Colossus of Maroussi was my favorite Miller book, he hired me on the spot. I ended up working for him for about a year and a half. He taught me everything he knew about cooking, a skill that became my main source of income for the next five years as I wandered throughout much of the U.S.
Next up, that documentary “The People vs Agent Orange.” To tell the truth, I hadn’t thought much about Agent Orange for years, not since the use of depleted uranium “bunker busters” in Iraq and the resulting cancers, birth defects, etc. among Iraqi children in the ensuing years. Since about 2005, however, it seems someone I knew well or from a distance has died almost every year from some Agent Orange-connected cancer. Occasionally, I’ve wondered if I’d’ve died myself by now if I’d followed my order to fight in the war. In a sense, military prison saved my life. My job had been guarding B-52 bombers and I know I would’ve been one of the airmen who had to spray the perimeters of Southeast Asian bases with that poison to keep the jungle from encroaching on and overgrowing the fence lines.
I was in other parts of the States when the spraying of Oregon forests began. I was in southern Humboldt County (working for that Irish-American) in 1977-78, but the only helicopters flying above the forests then were the ones doing surveillance on the marijuana farmers. They didn’t spray anything; they merely landed on the property and sometimes busted the larger farms, that is, until the farmers starting shooting at them.
The fact that much of the documentary took place so close to where I grew up intrigued me greatly. After reading your review, I had to watch it. It wasn’t easy, but I managed to get my hands on a copy. My wife and I watched it a couple of nights ago. Jesus! What a gut punch! Like so many, my wife was aware of what Agent Orange was and the horrible damage it had done (still does) in Vietnam, but she thought its use was limited to that part of the world and that time. Wrong!
This is indeed an international problem, right up there with the Fukushima disaster (by the way, those poems in that book were quite powerful, too). Even though the Independent Lens program was sponsored by and shown on PBS, the only place I could find that had it available was for Amazon Prime customers. Why is it so limited in availability? Is PBS also intimidated by the corporate power wielders and so won’t distribute it widely? It should be required viewing (and actively discussed) in classrooms worldwide.
I finally resorted to using a VPN and accessing a couple of pirate sites. Even among those sites, it seemed a dead end. Just as I was about to give up, however, I found one place that actually had a pretty good quality file that I was able to download. I plan to make a few DVD copies and distribute them among a couple of academics I’m still in touch with. Being retired seven years now and having not kept up any correspondence with most of my former colleagues since the pandemic started, I don’t have many contacts anymore, but still this is information that needs to have a wider audience. It was sad to learn that the French court threw out Tran To Nga’s lawsuit.
You kicked off the “Wrestling the Blind” story with Robert Bly asking you when you first saw yourself as strong as or stronger than your old man. The complicated relationship I had with my dad was in my thoughts the whole time I was engaged with the story (which is a beautiful one, by the way). My dad was a World War II hero who piloted a P-38 in over 70 combat missions out of England. How he survived was a miracle. After the war, he and his brother and dad started a lumber mill and redwood logging business in Humboldt County. For the next 25 years, he was heavily involved in the American Legion (and helping to destroy almost all the old growth redwoods!). Although not political by nature, he followed his family’s guidance and always voted Republican and hung out mainly with other loggers and John Birch Society types. I had an idyllic childhood in the redwoods and spent most of my time fishing, playing baseball, and doing all the things country boys love to do. Until my parents divorce put an end to all that. The script was set. I was destined to rebel against whatever he had hoped for my life. When I became a conscientious objector (from within the military, to boot) to the Vietnam debacle, my actions, thoughts, and appearance all constituted an affront to everything he’d considered sacred in life. Of course, all this stuff takes up a good portion of the first half of my book, but that story of your trip in the desert with your dad was almost like looking into a mirror of my relationship with my dad. Particularly the parts about how you two bonded over wrestling. In my case, we bonded over basketball, or I should say he was proud of my skills (I made the all-county team my senior year) and even though we could never get on the same page about political shit, we could always communicate meaningfully about sports.
Another one: by the time I hit 15, my dad didn’t know me, either. I still had a couple of years to go before my hair hit shoulder length, but some of my buddies were growing their hair out at that age and Dad’s comments were always about how they were turning into girls and sissies, the inference being he didn’t want to see me with long hair. Like you, I didn’t consider until way too many years too late that my dad’s reluctance to talk about his war experiences might’ve been his version of PTSD. And the first time I really noticed his vulnerability was on a rare trip home from Japan (escorting some Japanese students on an American homestay program). His hairline had receded greatly (he was in his 70s by then), his eyes appeared softer and kind of milky, and his handshake had become weak. You wanna hear something ironic? He died at the age of 89 on June 6th, D-Day, the one day of the year (in his 30s and 40s) when he’d actually mention casually that he’d flown with the invasion of Normandy and also a few days later with an escort squadron flying cover as Churchill crossed the English Channel.
I admired the way you ended that story — “Bly was right. The moment the war lifted from my heart, I saw my old man. Just a guy waiting for daylight, waiting for fish.”
Lastly, it was great to read your interview with David James Duncan. That was done quite a long time ago (2008). To me, your questions had a bit of a provocative ring to them, as if you were demanding definitive answers to complex questions about life, activism, and the future of our planet and humankind’s place on it. DJD sounded like someone on the verge of Buddha-hood (or maybe a character out of a Hermann Hesse novel), what with his calm acceptance of everything and the insanity surrounding him. The image I got reminded me of that cartoon showing a searcher of the truth struggling to scale a mountain to find the Buddha and finally at the summit sees him and gasps, “Oh Great One, please tell me, what is the answer to mankind’s struggle to find meaning in life?” The Buddha peers down at him, points a finger at the opposite direction, and replies, “My friend, you’ve climbed the wrong mountain. The Buddha you seek is over there on that other mountain.”
Do I have a weird interpretation of what I see and read, or what? Anyway, here are a few DJD quotes from that interview that made me smile.
“There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that cultures decay, and that life’s end is death.”
“Mother Teresa spoke with the heart of a wild salmon when she said, ‘God doesn’t ask us to win. He only asks us to try.’ I’m in the business of trying. I leave the scorecard to the Scorekeeper.”
“When small things are done with great love, it is not a flawed you or me who does them: it’s just love. I have no faith in any kind of political party, left, right, or centrist. I have boundless faith in love. The only spiritually responsible way I know to be a citizen, artist, or activist in times like ours is by doing a daily and nightly, faith-driven skein of small things, each of them done with all the love I can muster.”
“I trust my hands more than my mind. My hands are enlivened by my lungs and heartbeat and by the Earth and by Spirit directly. Only indirectly are they guided by the mind. My aging hands have done so much cool stuff it staggers my mind.”
“He (Cesar Chavez) didn’t demonize those who caused this suffering. His life of love and service is the opposite of a World Bank project or a papal decree or a government program. It was grass roots love. Love from the ground up, not the top down. Love with the mud of the fields all over it.”
Duncan’s novel The Brothers K is one of my all-time favorites. It has many parallels with family and other people in my life, as well as my own experiences — Seventh Day Adventist parent, conscientious objection to the Vietnam War, baseball, a father who was a logger, siblings who traveled entirely different life roads, and the town of Camas (which is on the Columbia River, not that far from White Salmon, Washington, where my mother grew up), and much more. When I finish The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, that’s the next book I plan to reread.
So, all in all, thank you Paul for giving me much to think about and providing a bit of literary enjoyment to balance out all the other shit that’s happening around us. If you’ve actually read this far, thanks for that, too. You take care, OK?
Robert
I think Robert knows that this review of his work will not be some bullshit LA Times crap or Kirkus reviews milquetoast. The memoir is his life, his concerted effort to get from pre-birth to now, in Japan, and then finding meaning in a journey which is always galvanized by his love of and interest in his mother’s life, who was still in the USA while Robert made his way to Japan, doing part-time work as an English Teacher, and then eventually language school fulltime work, and then teaching for a college, a deanship, getting an advanced degree and becoming now retired, emeritus.
Ahh, as a battler and endless communicator and ranting fool, I hit Robert with another email, and here, again, his thoughtful response:
Hi Paul,
Thanks for letting me know the book arrived in one piece, and thanks for all the recent links. My aging body and mind don’t move very quickly these days, so I’ve taken my time in checking out some of your media recommendations. At this stage of the game, I don’t want to burden myself with information overload. I’m afraid Japan’s stick-its-head-in-the-sand approach to the world has rubbed off a bit on me. 🙂
What I have read has given me a better indication of why most of my American friends, contacts, and relatives (not that many left in all three categories) seem so frustrated and filled with rage these days. Much of that, it seems to me, comes from a deep disappointment in “the system” and a feeling of having been deceived by everything they’d been inculcated into believing was sacred — American exceptionalism, the so-called American Dream, the righteousness of capitalism, the sanctity of Christianity, the worship of Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, and Babe Ruth, and on and on. Everything, in fact, that Mark Twain and Henry Miller spat on in their different times.
Granted, on this side of the pond there has also been a rapid increase in violence, murders, alcoholism, suicide, and depression in the last few years, but it’s nothing to compare with the States. I still feel relatively safe whenever I leave the house. Of course, that might be different if I were living in Tokyo or Osaka, but here in Kyushu things are relatively calm. Okinawa, Taiwan, and all the potential for the start of World War III are not that far away and in the back of people’s minds, but for the most part people don’t talk about it much. It’s the ol’ “see no evil” approach (until it affects someone directly, that is).
One thing that caught my attention while reading your own and other recommended stuff is the issue of “sensitivity editors/readers” and the related issue of book banning in Florida and other red states. I’d seen a little bit about this here and there over the past couple of years, but nothing in detail. Your substack article sent me on a search and I was amazed at what a big issue this is becoming. The danger here is the tendency for this kind of thing to catch fire with all sides on the political spectrum. Again, I refer to Henry Miller and his reasons for leaving the States to live abroad in the 1930s, George Carlin’s later rants on the idiocies of American culture and political thought, and Groucho Marx’s quote on group behavior: “I’d never want to be a member of a group that would have me as a member. They must be crazy.” Or something along those lines. If nothing else, that about sums up my philosophy of shying away from any religious or political affiliation. Somehow, I’ve managed to make it this far in life without relying too much on group-think or support. I plan to do my best to continue forward (limping, of course, and assisted by my trusty cane) in the same manner. Of course, I’ll always listen to and think about what others believe and rationalize about their own behavior, but I’m not going to be signing up for their activities anytime soon.
You mentioned earlier that you’d like to do a Zoom chat. Sure thing. I can’t promise any usable quotes (the ol’ noodle seems to switch on and off these days at a pace I can’t control — somewhat like a pitcher who has control of his pitches one day and can’t find the strike zone the next day). Probably more than trying to share political philosophies, I think it’d be more fun to simply share stories from the different places and eras we’ve experienced and survived. I’ve got a few things to take care of over the next couple weeks (e.g., I have to try to change internet providers as my current website has no security certificate and is deemed “not secure” — not that a lot of people drop by, but the browser warning probably scares off 90 percent of those few curious visitors), but any time after that would be fine. There’s a 16- or 17-hour time difference, so we’d have to take that into consideration.
Take care, Paul. Try to get some rest from time to time. We ain’t spring chickens anymore. I’m amazed at how you can keep up such a rigorous writing pace. That’s all for now.
I sent Robert a long list of open ended questions, and we’ll see how he receives them. The interesting part of the book is Robert’s second trip there heading to Iran (Turkey) and Afghanistan, and he ended up in India, too. His so-called around the world walkabout and flowing love of learning about people, keeping an open mind, asking questions, and shutting up to hear others’ biographies.
Here, a slice from Robert’s journey, when he is about to head back to the USA:
I usually visited Rolf in the evenings. We’d prepare a dinner of rice with raisins and lamb meat, then retire to the top of the bus to smoke some hashish, watch the stars, and discuss life. One night, I told him about my journey from Paris to Afghanistan and the various adventures I’d had.
“So what have all these experiences taught you? You seem to me to be more of an observer of men than an active participant in their affairs,” Rolf said.
“I suppose you’re right about that,” I said. “The one political stand I made landed me in jail and I’ve spent a good portion of my life since then trying to rationalize what I did. This journey I’ve taken has carried me halfway around the world in search of something I can’t put a name on. I know I don’t care much for capitalism. I have an attraction for some form of socialism, but I can’t commit myself to what I don’t understand. Idealistically, it seems the best answer to man’s inability to live together peacefully, but socialism, too, has a history of violence and upheaval. It’s all pretty hard to figure out. What do you think?”
Rolf considered my question for a moment, scratched his head, then said, “Socialism, communism, Marxism, all these ‘isms’ have no soul. They’re connected only in terms of class struggle and a fight for equality in the production and consumption of material goods. In that sense, they’re not so different from capitalism. What about the spiritual struggle? Islamic Marxism? It’s a joke! It’s just another form of cultural imperialism that would force people to conform to a standardized way of thinking and behaving. “Democracy, individual freedom, human rights? Also a bunch of rubbish that can never be inflicted upon impoverished nations and peoples. What do uneducated peoples know about such things? They think only about where the next meal comes from. It doesn’t matter what form of government they live under. It seems to me, there’s only one reality and that’s mankind’s inability to organize itself. I think we have to accept man’s weaknesses, his greed, his stupidity. And love him for it all. No one can possibly know what the answers to life are until after we die. It’s like the preacher said, ‘All is vanity and a striving after wind.’
“You can’t save the world alone or through any ideology or ‘ism.’ That’s the only truth I know. Oh sure, you can chase after a spiritual path. Become a Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist if you must. But you won’t find any answers there, either. I’ve tried. The world’s religions are just a bunch of exclusivist groups, too. Stick with science, knowledge, the art of survival. Study languages, communicate, make life interesting for yourself, that’s what I try to do. Here, go on, have another hit off the pipe. Concentrate on the moment, look at the stars, appreciate what is here and now. If you’re meant to find any answers, they’ll come to you in due time.”
What prescient and profound advice for the beaten-down young man, Robert, a babe in the woods who was put through the ringer by the military and the judicial forces. I have a feeling these words from Rolf, whether they are sort of silly to me, are deeply embedded in his consciousness.
After the second trip through Europe and Asia, he ended up working in the USA, cooking, even on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. All of that in condensed form is covered in the book.
While memoir is an amazing form, not a pure autobiography, that is, more of an enlightened journey, a walkabout, a talk with the writer’s own ego and intellect and self/muse, Robert attempts to reconstruct those days, those moments, the dialogue, his thoughts, other’s thoughts. We are with him, and in many cases it feels like a journalistic recalling of events. Again, this man coveres his great grandfather, the journeys there in the Norris Family, Pennsylvannia Dutch, and into the New America, the tough life of hard work and his mother’s own emancipation from a sexist and closed world for women to venture into male territory.
This is not anti-memoir, for sure, and this search for his identity throughout his life is compelling, and this piece, this big tome is surely a Mother’s Day gift, an act of love, a tribute to his mother’s deep cut into his life. Her imprint on him and his words. This woman vaulted above the strictures of American, Lutheran, Catholic, misogyny.
Here, a quick look at anti-memoir: from Yiyun Li, author of Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life
A memoirist is always trying to connect with the reader and to make sure that the reader reads the memoir – reads the subject of the memoir, that is, the author – in the right way, on the writer’s terms. That’s what makes me hesitate to want to write a memoir or to call what I have written a memoir. I think if a writer does not set out to challenge herself in her work, her foundation is a little off.
Is that what you mean when you say, ‘One cannot be an adept writer of one’s life’? Because you’d have to start by admitting that there is no such thing as a consistent and stable ‘I’?
That’s a crucial point – if you write without questioning your own life, without questioning your ‘I’, the book that you write is not going to be one we can trust. But if you write while questioning yourself – constantly questioning that ‘I’ – that book will reflect many of the conflicts you experience. That makes it a very messy tale, much messier than a memoir with a neat arc. But, you see, you can’t pretend your life is a ‘neat’ story or even a ‘good’ story – life isn’t a good story. If you try to make it into one, you are simplifying too many things. (source)
You as the reader will get stepping stones, big lily pads from which to travel with Robert on his life, the ups and downs, sweeping thoughts, focused intrigue, all the trials and tribulations, and his own life in Japan, the struggle there, language and culture crashing like an earthquake basalt tipping over.
He comes to love a woman, her family, the home that is Japan, and his mother comes to Japan and becomes both enamored of and engaged in the language, learning, an open hand to understanding her own life throught the lens of where her son embarked, disembarked and then set down roots.
Robert’s stand against fighting, against killing, against using a weapon was remarkable in his time or in fact during any time in history:
When Harold Bing was in Winchester Prison, there was one wing for male criminal prisoners, one for women and two for conscientious objectors. The conditions for COs were exactly the same as those for criminal prisoners, but COs did succeed in getting prisons to offer a vegetarian diet. Vegetarianism was common among COs, as it had an obvious affinity, particularly with humanitarian pacifism. CO prisoners were allowed a very limited number of censored letters, though one of the COs interviewed by IWM said ‘filling the notepaper was quite an art’ because there was nothing to say after months or years in prison. They had no calendars, no newspapers, and few visits – those visits they did receive were through a grille. They were limited to a few books from the prison library at infrequent intervals, but after a while COs were allowed to have books sent in under the condition that they donate them to the prison library once finished with them. Later CO prisoners were impressed to find prison libraries stocked with titles by William Morris, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and other writers of the left. Here, Bing recalls the constrained and degrading conditions of prison life. (source)
It might not be difficult for Robert living in Japan, a culture before he showed up that has been militaristic to the max, imperial to the max, and now, the country is building up military once again, another flavor of the Nazism of Ukraine and UK and USA, and alas, they, Japanese, do not all agree, but it is a country that seems cemented over in terms of defying the powers that be. Robert takes a country one person at a time. Here, the nutshell of Japan’s march to war:
Japan is undergoing the most significant changes to its security strategy since the end of World War II. In late 2022, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s government approved three policy documents—the National Security Strategy (NSS), the National Defense Strategy and the Defense Buildup Program—that propose a significant expansion of Japan’s military capabilities and a major increase in military spending over five years. The documents enable important modifications of the senshu boei (exclusively defence-oriented policy) that Japan has followed since 1946, not least allowing Japan to participate far more actively in collective self-defence with the United States and to substantially increase its ability to project force beyond its borders.
And to be THAT Japan, the vassal of the West, USA, in its hate toward China, what terrible times, really, and that is a question I posed Robert, who is in his 70s, has had medical issues for years, and seems to be happy and content with not rocking boats and rattling cages. You’ll see again, people are people, wherever he ventures. That is his chi.
Without further ado, here’s the interview, in his words, unadulturated:
1. What do you miss most about your mother?
Her smile, which could light up a room, her infectious giggle, her stories, and the warmth of her hugs.
2. What do you believe have been the most transitional and emblematic changes in your character as you have become an ex-pat of Japan?
I’ve become much more accepting and patient. Too many times, especially in my early years in Japan, I would react to things people around me did or said based on my limited and direct interpretations of Japanese into English in my head. Without having the cultural advantage of knowledge of nuances in intonation, idiomatic language, sarcasm, gestures, and even levels of politeness, there were often huge differences in what was really being conveyed and what I thought was being conveyed. I committed many cultural faux-pas.
Eventually, I learned to pay attention to how native speakers interacted with one another. I tried as much as possible to copy what they said and did in certain situations. The concept of wa, or harmony, is indispensable to the functioning of Japanese society. Individualism is accepted but not necessarily encouraged. When you think about it historically, it’s easy to understand. I mean, you’ve got a country with 120 million people crammed into the space of California, and probably 70 percent of that land space is mountainous and uninhabitable. People in most cities are piled one on top of another like sardines in a can. In order to survive, they have to be able to put up with a lot. In that sense, I’m lucky that we live in a somewhat rural area with plenty of space and greenery.
When I finally got around to noticing in detail how Japanese really communicated on a daily basis in public and in private, as well as trying to accept things as they were instead of judging, I found my own life improved and I had a lot less stress, despite still not understanding 100 percent of everything that was going on.
3. What does it mean to you to be a conscientious objector?
That’s a bit of a loaded question, wouldn’t you say? If I tried to answer it with some kind of philosophical or religious tenet, I’d probably come across as a self-righteous and condescending asshole.
To me, it’s really just a matter of common sense. I’ve never felt the need to align myself with one particular group or way of thought in order to express the importance of nonviolence. I’m not against the idea of using force to protect myself or others, but just the idea of violence, whether verbal or physical, let alone killing, especially in the name of one’s government or tribe, makes me sick to my stomach.
In one form or another, I think we’re all conscientious objectors at heart. In retrospect, most people come to see wars as senseless and insane. It’s never a matter of one side being more righteous than another. Even today, we see a tendency to point fingers at perceived perpetrators of criminal acts and claim the superiority of what our government tells us is reality and truth. In the case of what’s going on in Ukraine, I think we should do what we can to provide support to those young men refusing to kill on either side, Russian or Ukrainian.
4. What key lesson in your early years, post prison, up to way before Japan, did you gain as both personal philosophy and a way to move forward with your life?
My journeys across the U.S. and Europe in 1973 and around the world in 1977 resulted in my having less fear of the unknown and more trust in total strangers. From the moment I first stuck out my thumb while hitchhiking on the highway leading out of my hometown, I had nothing but positive experiences. This newfound faith was in a sense akin to Bob Dylan’s line in that song “Like a Rolling Stone”: “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” By throwing away any worry of not having to follow a plan and basically casting my fate to the wind, I opened myself up to experiences, places, and people that would ultimately lead me to a multitude of adventures, opportunities, discoveries, friendships, and an appreciation for living life in the moment.
5. What if you had not gotten called up for overseas duty but were still in the Air Force? Would you be a much different man, thinker, and person if none of that happened to you? Explain.
I’ve never been one to dwell on “what if” situations. I’ve always tried to move on and deal with the consequences, good or bad, of whatever fork in the road I’ve chosen. At any rate, I probably wouldn’t have naively entered the Air Force if there hadn’t been a war going on or an eventual draft notice coming with my name on it. I can’t imagine myself as still being in the Air Force. As I see it now, that was simply one path I traveled early on in life that led to the next path. I’ve come to accept all the paths I’ve walked as necessary and natural in the arc of my life story.
6. Truly, Japanese culture-people-history is so much different than the history of your birth country and your mom’s place of birth and death. A few contrasts you think would be worthy of prominence in this interview?
I’ve lived in Japan for so long now that I hardly ever think in terms of comparisons or differences between the countries. Besides, even if I tried to make comparisons, they would be outdated as the images I have in my brain about the States are mainly from the 1960s and 1970s. I’m stuck in a time warp. What I have noticed about Japan is no different from observations I made on my journeys through other countries in the 1970s. People everywhere go about their daily lives in much the same way. They’re concerned with putting food on the table, health, family, and all the rituals of working, celebrating, grieving, showing appreciation, getting high, entertaining, and taking care of one another. If you are open to them, they’ll open their arms to you.
7. Is there anything you like about the US foreign policy, US government? if not, why, and if so, expand.
I like that the U.S. is often way ahead of most other countries when it comes to helping out in times of a natural disaster. The main thing I don’t like is the U.S. having military bases in almost every country on the planet. I mean, come on! Think of how much good all the money wasted on military expenditures could be used for in battling poverty, disease, crime, pollution, all the things that will probably wipe us out as a species.
8. Being a young man when you grew up and came of age, well, so different than now, as an 18-year-old. Give us some insight into what you think is different now being a young man growing up compared to 1965 to 1975 in your case?
When I was an 18-year-old, we got much of our news from just three different TV news stations. My generation was probably influenced more by the music we listened to, the underground newspapers and magazines we read, and the movies we watched than anything else. I think we had time in those days to digest and discuss the issues that concerned us.
With the advent and ubiquity of today’s social media, news is aimed at and consumed by insulated tribes at a break-neck speed. Memes and 30-second Tik-Tok videos present issues that are gobbled up and replaced within minutes. It sometimes seems as if critical thinking has disappeared. Young people have to contend with too many forms of media demanding their attention 24 hours a day. No one seems to have the concentration or time necessary to read slowly and carefully and think about something that doesn’t reinforce the opinions they’ve already had formed for them.
I’d like to see someone develop an audio or video app that would read stuff like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and every ten pages or so take a break with a hip-hop or rap song or whatever music is popular at the moment and then summarize the contents of what was just read and ask you what you thought. That would be cool.
9. What about writing resonates with you, your spirit, your intellect that you can share with say readers who are not wired that way.
Originally, I came to writing as a means of exploring the confusion I felt about life, family, meaning, everything I didn’t understand in my youthful angst. I can’t say it led to any profound revelations, but it was cathartic. My exposure to young hippie artists, musicians, and poets during my first journey to Europe in 1973 influenced me enough to want to explore a means of expressing myself. At the time, the lives of those people seemed so fulfilling.
I think my mother’s influence played a strong role, too. As far back as I can remember, she was always playing music, writing poetry, painting scenes of nature, and expressing herself in many other ways. Her eyes always lit up when she was involved in something artistic. I guess I ended up just trying to follow her example. Writing has given me great satisfaction in life, and whenever I’m in a state of confusion, frustration, depression, or even excitement, I put pen to paper. At the end of a writing session, I always feel somewhat relieved and even interested in where some of the thoughts and descriptions came from.
Mom used to say, “Try making some lemonade out of the lemons in your life. You might find yourself feeling better.” I think the answer is as simple as that. No harm in trying, and it’s a helluva lot better than drinking yourself to death in order to forget.
10. You know where I stand politically and ethically. Japan is not my cup of tea in terms of the history of hate and mayhem with China, Korea, and in the Pacific, etc. And now, Japan is so aligned with the dirty USA, so I can’t really muster up a great theoretical love of the place. But, you do love your wife, the people who shepherded you and those you have shepherded. Riff with this.
That’s it right there. The people. Again, maybe this stems from my journeys as a young man, but I found that as long as I was open to others without any preconceived notions based on any country’s history or on the things I’d heard or read about it, people anywhere would be open to me. We should always separate the people of any country from their government’s actions or policies. We shouldn’t judge individuals without trying to communicate with them first.
I’ve shared drinks, meals, pipes of various substances, and time with people from many different countries who had reason to hate me simply because I was American and my generation or my ancestors had been responsible for the suffering of their people. Or even some of them personally. In some cases, it was the other way around.
The fact is we were able to communicate somehow without judgement. At some point, I’d learned how to be a good listener. I didn’t try to force my feelings or beliefs on them, and they didn’t try to force theirs on me. We expressed ourselves — sometimes with the help of interpreters, sometimes not — but what seemed to matter most in those moments of attempts at communication and understanding was the sincerity of the individuals involved. In my case, Japan was never an ultimate planned destination. I could’ve just as easily ended up in Greece or Spain or someplace else. As it turned out, fate intervened and I ended up here. I was lucky things turned out the way they have.
It may sound corny, but I really believe, more now than ever before, that we are all members of one family. I don’t think of myself as an American; rather, I think I’m a world citizen. If the human race can’t ever fully grasp that we’re all connected and dependent on one another, then I’m afraid we’re doomed.
Concerning that, a George Carlin quote comes to mind. In one routine about how he thought people trying to save the planet was bullshit, he said he thought that the earth didn’t give a shit about us human beings and it’d be just fine after we self destructed. He said, “The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.” I think he’s right. In the overall scheme of things, the existence of the human race is really inconsequential.
11. What do you want people to know about your mother — key points — from and after reading the memoir?
Her compassion and her capacity for total and unconditional love. Her courage, curiosity, tenacity, sensitivity, perseverance, insatiable thirst for knowledge and understanding, and dedication to family. Her stubbornness, self-sacrifice, generosity, strength, zest for life, and the joy she gave others simply by being with them. Do you want me to continue? I can go on and on. Good Lord, how I loved that woman!
12. What gives you hope?
Children at play. Children who know they are loved. Parents in the kitchen preparing healthy meals for loved ones.
13. What presents you with the half-empty glass scenario, and if you always see it half full, then riff, discuss.
Watching corporate news programs gives me a bad case of seeing the glass as half empty. Looking at great paintings, reading great literature and poetry, listening to favorite music, hearing children laugh, eating healthy and delicious foods — these things bring back an awareness of the beauty of life and a “glass half full” viewpoint. Mom used to call herself a “cock-eyed optimist.” I think I inherited that characteristic from her.
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For those readers who want to get under the skin of a regular guy, who was growing up in California with a strong mother in the 1960s, with a family connected to one another, and then of course, with those so-called ‘black sheep,’ including many skeletons in various closets, following a pathway from naivete to enlightenment, to immersing into an Asia society, to being one with the language and one with his wife’s roots, the reader will find much to explore here. Alcoholism within an uncle’s life , missing in action relatives, divorce (his mom’s), and a legacy of stories and narratives from his mother and her family, the book Robert Norris wrote has an undying commitment to family, his mother, her legacy. His mother is infused in his answers above in the Q & A.
Go to his website, poke around, and email the fellow. It will be worth the time.
And that creek’s rising: Hurricane Katrina, put that great NOL underwater in five minutes:
If the Good Lord’s Willing/ Song by Johnny Cash
… If the good Lord’s willing and the creek stays down I’ll be in your arms time the moon come around For a taste of love that’s shining in your eyes If the rooster crows at the crackin’ of the dawn I’ll be there just as sure as you’re born If the good Lord’s willing and the creeks don’t rise
… I’ll comb my hair down, brush my teeth Shine up, slick up, dress up neat Get everything looking just right ‘Cause I want to look pretty when I see you tonight Just as sure as the rabbits are a jumping in the hollow I’ll be there, you can bet your bottom dollar If the good Lord’s willing and the creeks don’t rise
… If the good Lord’s willing and the creek stays low I’ll be there a knockin’ at your door With a hug and a kiss for the one I idolize
… I’ll wear my suit, my Sunday best I’ll be there lookin’ my best If the good Lord’s willing and the creeks don’t rise
… I’ll feed the mules and stop the hogs Feed the cows and chop all the logs Get all of my working done ’cause tonight we’re gonna have lots of fun Just as sure as there ever was a preacher man I’ll be there with a ring for your hand If the good Lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise
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Digging the variations on a theme, that Norris title:
“God Willin’ & The Creek Don’t Rise”
Lyrics, a la Ray LaMontagne
Caroline,
In the mountains the sun sets up in ribbons so high, it’s like I don’t never wanna get old… don’t ever wanna die. We been seein’ steady rain, ’bout to drive us all insane, nearly lost a few head up in the pines. At night, when some of the boys get to talking up their girls back home, you know I tell ’em there ain’t none as fine as mine. I can hear old Chapman sayin’ come morning we’ll break the range, be pushin’ hard now for the plains.
I close my eyes and I can see you… I close my eyes and I can feel you here. God willin’ an the creek don’t rise, I’ll be home again before this time next year. Though I fear this fever won’t break…
