hateful policies preventing Mexican carpenters from doing America’s work & college creeps lying about, well, college

Aristotle: “All human beings by nature desire to know.”

I know, I know, every time I get onto the Zoom Doom thing with the Chronicle for Higher Education, the entire experience is dirty beyong dirty. Today, it was more bizarro people yammering about “talent search challenges for getting people to go into higher education.”

Three women went into their experiences recruiting and screening potential college hire-ons. The language coming from these people belies the vapidity of our times. Now, well, one woman said, “we have 30 people applying for one job, compared to a few years ago when 300 applied for one job.” I almost puked.

Of course, she was all about the HR aspect of things, stating that now, she has to go through fewer unskilled or unmatched skilled people than before. As if all these untalented and unqualified people applied for faculty positions. Arrogant, unfeeling, and happy in their roles watching the ship sink.

This entire “thing” was all about HR-speak, and the shallowness of their conversation and the Dystopian proposals they lay out are just signs of the shifting baseline disorder times.

They are happy about hybrid work, about kicking down the useless 9 to 5 timeframe for work, and are happy that work can be done at home, 8 am to 8 pm, or later, if need be.

Then, two males came on, and they are the Linked-In creeps, which sponsors these talks. Microsoft, now, owns Linked-In. Linked-In does staffing/hiring now, and alas, many of the universities and colleges are using hiring and staffing services like Linked-In to do the real work of hiring and screening.

One of the fops stated that colleges are way behind the times, technologically, and that getting courses and admin work on line, in hyper-remote ways, is the only way forward. You know, these monsters who believe the bricks and mortar campuses are just dinasaurs.

This is just one of a million types of superficial and back ass wards thinking, or unthinking comments:

Online schools are mushrooming everywhere these days, and it’s not that hard anymore to tell the genuine ones from the diploma mills. A number of online institutions have established strong brand names and reputations for themselves, and even with traditional brick and mortar big guns like MIT jumping on the online education bandwagon, it stands to reason that place-based higher education is losing the importance and prestige it once held.

The death of brick and mortar colleges will likely be long, slow, and painful, but here are ten reasons why we should consider speeding up the process and abolishing them right now:They’re way too expensive for most people.

Yeah, so throw the baby out with the bathwater:

[The German phrase] had its first written occurrence in Thomas Murner’s (1475-1537) versified satirical book Narrenbeschwörung (1512), which contains as its eighty-first short chapter entitled “Das kindt mit dem bad vß schitten” (To throw the baby out with the bath water) a treatise on fools who by trying to rid themselves of a bad thing succeed in destroying whatever good there was as well. In seventy-six rhymed lines the proverbial phrase is repeated three times as a folkloric leitmotif, and there is also the first illustration of the expression as a woodcut depicting quite literally a woman who is pouring her baby out with the bath water […].

Instead of stepping back, reforming, retrofitting, stopping the lunacy of capitalism eating everything, including those babies in the bathwater, we have these creeps, lowly ones, middlings, who have bought into the Fortune Magazine lies of — “we have to just accelerate AI-AR-VR-CGI-Twinning-Robotics since the cat’s out of the bag, and we will just have to deal witht he negative consquences of a Dystopian, anti-human, anti-community world.”

Well, they don’t quite say it that way, but you read my last Substack, so enjoy these liars: You Never Can Pick Your Poison in Capitalism

This is how “THEY” think:

Or, they go to France and talk about their Power with Twitter: Fucking double dose of creepy.

Ahh, it’s just given, like gravity, or the H and O times two in Water. The billionaires are stupid but gods,

Ahh, so this is how the disrupters work, and that Chronicle Zoom Doom just shows how co-opted these HR and Hiring Creeps and the Admin Class are. Well, let’s see. Hmm, face to face, bricks and mortar and using typewriters, no phones and tablets and laptops allowed, I can teach a shit load of great things, outside and in the community with paper and pencil:

This is a foregone conclusion, no? Death of education, death of ethics, death of philosophy, death of families, death of agency, death of freedoms and rights, but we can lie, steal, plagiarize and pollute.

No need to read between the lines with this student’s arrogance and self-importance. He’s lying too, since he pushes the supposed step by step process of ChatGPT (fucking another polluted term in our language) helping him with a paper. Ahh, it is plagiarizing, for sure, and, bam, the arrogance. Not that college teachers do not need huge kicks in the butt, and the liberal arts, well, major lashes to the butt. But that’s not the point here:

Look at any student academic-integrity policy, and you’ll find the same message: Submit work that reflects your own thinking or face discipline. A year ago, this was just about the most common-sense rule on Earth. Today, it’s laughably naïve.

There’s a remarkable disconnect between how professors and administrators think students use generative AI on written work and how we actually use it. Many assume that if an essay is written with the help of ChatGPT, there will be some sort of evidence — it will have a distinctive “voice,” it won’t make very complex arguments, or it will be written in a way that AI-detection programs will pick up on. Those are dangerous misconceptions. In reality, it’s very easy to use AI to do the lion’s share of the thinking while still submitting work that looks like your own. Once that becomes clear, it follows that massive structural change will be needed if our colleges are going to keep training students to think critically.

The common fear among teachers is that AI is actually writing our essays for us, but that isn’t what happens. You can hand ChatGPT a prompt and ask it for a finished product, but you’ll probably get an essay with a very general claim, middle-school-level sentence structure, and half as many words as you wanted. The more effective, and increasingly popular, strategy is to have the AI walk you through the writing process step by step. You tell the algorithm what your topic is and ask for a central claim, then have it give you an outline to argue this claim. Depending on the topic, you might even be able to have it write each paragraph the outline calls for, one by one, then rewrite them yourself to make them flow better.

As an example, I told ChatGPT, “I have to write a 6-page close reading of the Iliad. Give me some options for very specific thesis statements.” (Just about every first-year student at my university has to write a paper resembling this one.) Here is one of its suggestions: “The gods in the Iliad are not just capricious beings who interfere in human affairs for their own amusement but also mirror the moral dilemmas and conflicts that the mortals face.” It also listed nine other ideas, any one of which I would have felt comfortable arguing. Already, a major chunk of the thinking had been done for me. As any former student knows, one of the main challenges of writing an essay is just thinking through the subject matter and coming up with a strong, debatable claim. With one snap of the fingers and almost zero brain activity, I suddenly had one. (source)

Ahh, now, Homer, the gods, the entire poem, now how do teachers teach it and shepherd thinkers across all disciplines to look at the work? Oral fucking poems, man, and so, the hard work is getting bricks and mortar colleges to get under the skin of this concept: Homer’s Iliad chronicles the ten year siege of Troy, and Odyssey chronicles one man’s ten year attempt to return home after Troy.

Ahh, war, war mongers, battles, existential battles, what does heroism and tragedy mean in today’s world? What do we miss as modern readers of an oral poem? What sort of elements of modern history tie into Home’s works? You can’t return home, or can you, and what is home in an atomized, broken, capitalistic, denuding, neutering/spaying society? You get the picture.

So, I was outside with the cable guy. Man in his thirties, and we talked about fiber optics, and I watched him install fiber (thin as a human hair) and splicing it to the current five line telephone line so we can have faster modems and more junk and stuff coming down the pipeline.

He looks like a rugged Val Kilmer, and he is from Albuquerque, having moved out here when he was 20 after his father died of cancer and Hep C, after getting a blood transfusion after a saw accident. “They didn’t screen blood back then, so he got Hep C, and liver damage and liver cancer.”

Dead at 58, and so the mom and young son moved to Yachats, of all places.

The work he does is with both copper and fiber optics. I watched the machine, the splicing, the ins and outs of the process. The machine, splicer, is computerized, fragile to the rain out here. We were talking about what happened fiber optic wise after Puerto Rico’s hurricane that the systems — phone, communication — were devastated and my Val Kilmer said spicers — fiber optics splicers, people — were getting $80 a splice, not an hour. Some of the independent contractors were splicing lines at 300 a day. Imagine that bill, imagine that.

“Look at me, with no college education. I like this job, and, the rain is worth it, and while I miss New Mexico’s food, I am happy with the scenery here.”

Alas, I asked about a son or daughter, and he stated he and his wife have a son, five, diagnosed with Autism, and while he’s getting more verbal in the schema of things and he’s sort of getting a few more social skills/cues, there is a daily trial and tribulation tied to getting the boy into some form to meet the fucker up neural normal world.

[Photos: Puerto Rico before the stupid USA’s Trump brought paper towels.]

In the midst of an active hurricane season, Puerto Rico has suffered yet again. Thanks to Fiona, which crashed into the territory a few days before Ian hit Florida, we were without critical services like electricity, water, hospitals and fuel supplies. Fiona’s destruction was a sharp reminder of the life-threatening effects of Hurricane Maria, which caused $90 billion in damage five years ago. More than 30 people died because of Fiona and as we recover from yet another destructive hurricane, our leaders have ignored the planning and preparedness lessons made clear by Maria.

After Maria, the U.S. federal and Puerto Rico local governments promised an increased level of resilience by strengthening existing infrastructures following the usual central-planning approach and solutions. But Hurricane Fiona has been yet another reminder that our strategy to build resilience in Puerto Rico is wrong, and that the leaders who espouse it are making decisions based on a philosophy that centers on the wrong things. They are rebuilding 20th-century electric grids, and water, sanitation and other infrastructure as they were before Maria hit; this will not work. Private companies cannot be relied on to provide resilient infrastructures. Rethinking how we approach planning and preparedness will make the archipelago a more viable place that benefits Puerto Rican people without straining budgets. (source)

Ahh, the privateers, the merchants of death, the merchants of debt, private companies, and then, what, $80 for each fiber optic splice? This is fucking lunacy.

And, so, colleges are shooting themselves in the foot, hand, neck, head, brain, and this country of unlimited and blank check to the UkroNaziLandians and now for more and more $$$ to the merchants of death CEOs and offensive weapons and gear and etc. and more satellite and softare and computing war gear, we are not getting the homes fixed or built.

Ahh, these pencil necks, these Linked-In do nothings, rad digital and on-line gods, know nothing about the world:

Despite the slowing of immigration inflow to the U.S., the share of foreign-born workers in the US construction labor force has been rising since the housing recovery began. Immigrant workers now account for close to one in four workers, a record high share that was reached for the first time in 2016. The story behind the rising share of immigrants in the construction labor force during the housing recovery is twofold – an unusually slow, delayed and reluctant return of native-born workers and a much faster and robust comeback of immigrant workers. Close to 1.7 million native-born workers left the construction labor force during the housing downturn, and the vast majority on a net basis, over 1 million, had not returned to the industry as of 2018. In sharp contrast, the number of immigrant workers in construction has now returned to the 2006 level.

The share of immigrants is even higher in construction trades, reaching 30%. Concentration of immigrants is particularly high in some of the trades needed to build a home, like carpenters, painters, drywall/ceiling tile installers, brick masons, and construction laborers – trades that require less formal education but consistently register some of the highest labor shortages in the NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (HMI) surveys and NAHB Remodeling Market Index (RMI).

In some states, reliance on foreign-born labor is even more pronounced. Immigrants comprise close to 40% of the construction workforce in California and Texas. In Florida, New Jersey and New York, close to 37% of the construction labor force is foreign-born and in Nevada, one out of three construction industry workers come from abroad. (source)

Notice the verbiage — jobs that “require less formal education.” What does that mean? Formal education equates to what, college, trade school, apprenticeships?

So, my Val Kilmer cable guy from New Mexico said he started off young thinking he’d be the next YouTube star, and then he tried working on cellular phones, and even the call centers, but he is happy now with Pioneer Cable.

From the 2010 Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville, Virginia, Matthew Crawford discussed his book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work.

Link.

“The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect in the world. But the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away. His well-founded pride is far from the gratuitous “self-esteem” that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

I suppose it all boils down to the masters controlling destinies, and no matter how powerful the urge is to be Matthew and have a motorcycle shop, we are in a Brave New World where the billionaires and the Fourth Industrial Revolutionaires and WEF-ers, want control, man, control.

Here, from Matthew Ehret’s latest: “Roosevelt vs. Keynes’ New Deal and the Battle of Bretton Woods” Believe it or not, this piece ties into indirectly how we are being shaped by perverse people, whose roots go back. Contrast Keynes and Churchill with FDR.

“Galton’s eccentric, sceptical, observing, flashing, cavalry-leader type of mind led him eventually to become the founder of the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists, namely eugenics.”

-John Maynard Keynes on Galton’s Eugenics, Eugenics Review 1946

“I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”

– Winston Churchill to the Peel Commission, 1937

“There never has been, there isn’t now, and there never will be, any race of people fit to serve as masters over their fellow men… We believe that any nationality, no matter how small, has the inherent right to its own nationhood.”

– Franklin Delano Roosevelt, March 1941

“They who seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers call this a new order. It is not new and it is not order.”

– Franklin Roosevelt

enter the presstitutes, and alas, it’s not some new-fangled term, cuz yellow journalism is a very very old game

Oh, yes, what to believe, whose history to take in whole cloth, how skeptical can we be in Chlamydia Capitalism?

No one believes almost anything these day, that seems to be the highlight of this blog today, a short one, albeit. Or, why would “they” be putting their own children and children’s children at risk by creating damaging, deadly things. They, the big wigs, are good guys, our neighbors, our friends.

“They” being “them,” the billionaires and techno-aires, the millionaires and those inventing each nanosecond something “new under the sun” for which to make a profit . . . find validity . . . for which to use their brain power . . . in order to do their genius things unfettered (but well funded). They are just vaunted, special star chamber people.

They are built “to do/make/produce/cook/launch/cook up/tear down/construct/splice/improve/scale up — “What can we do to ‘improve’ or develop or produce or maufacture or invent anything? And how can we mash more organic compouds togehter for more organic chemicals, more compounds to make the plastics lighter, smoother, less breakable, more tough, and more easily replaceable by more plastic?”

Lot’s of what’s and how’s in science (sic) but never ever WHY? Never ever WHO gets the benefit and who gets the downside of stated scientific, technocratic, managerial, bureaucratic, massive scaling up of it all?

When they, the billionaires and marketers and lobbyists and lawyers and CPAs and economists and math whizzes cover for the What and How folk, we end up with a continuing criminal enterprise. And scientists and mechanics and engineers and technologists always think they are doing the better good for the betterment of us all.

So we are here, with no overarching and overriding WHY’s. Why the hell do we need, want, should want, should need, ever need item or service x, y, z, infinity? But you can’s even go against these monsters.

Short for strategic lawsuits against public participation, SLAPPs have become an all-too-common tool for intimidating and silencing criticism through expensive, baseless legal proceedings.

Anti-SLAPP laws are meant to provide a remedy to SLAPP suits. Anti-SLAPP laws are intended to prevent people from using courts, and potential threats of a lawsuit, to intimidate people who are exercising their First Amendment rights. In terms of reporting, news organizations and individual journalists can use anti-SLAPP statutes to protect themselves from the financial threat of a groundless defamation case brought by a subject of an enterprise or investigative story. (source)

Those SLAPP laws are for by and large reporting, investigative reporters. In a world where the Presstitutes are self-censoring, self-killing story after story, and when they, journalists, fight for the man, the corporation, the military, the lesser (sic) of two evils POTUS, hell, why have enemies?

You want to question cracker plants, question HFCS (cooked high fructose corn syrup) plants, large animal production plants, or where oil spills take place, question those outfits, expect the long and short arm of the law and the lawyers to come and get you:

Helen Yost, a 62-year-old environmental educator, has been a committed activist for nearly a decade. She says she spends 60 to 80 hours a week as a community organizer for Wild Idaho Rising Tide. She’s been arrested twice for engaging in non-violent civil disobedience.

Yost may not fit the profile of a domestic terrorist, but in 2014 the FBI classified her as a potential threat to national security. According to hundreds of pages of FBI files obtained by the Guardian through a Freedom of Information Act (Foia) lawsuit, and interviews with activists, Yost and more than a dozen other people campaigning against fossil fuel extraction in North America have been identified in domestic terrorism-related investigations. (source)

Try photographing a dairy in Wisconsin. Try being on that public road and photography a military installation.

The pigs of capitalism (and other pigs) go after us with ZEALOTRY: Blood ponds!

Some say that words have no meaning, only uses. What France’s Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said about those who oppose giant water reserves for agricultural irrigation borders on political obscenity and comes across as a clear declaration of war against environmentalists.

History shows that the first shots of a war or a revolution are always semantic. According to Mr. Darmanin, France will be threatened by armies of eco-terrorists ready to set the country on fire in the name of their dangerous ideology and their sectarianism. Nothing less.

This slanderous accusation against activists who, in their immense majority, do nothing else than follow a long tradition of disobedience against big corporations, was carefully considered by the government. With a double purpose: dictating its values by forcing its vocabulary on us, as it was then shared by media and social media; and pushing us to use the word rather than to debate the limits of our agricultural model. We know that speaking and thinking using the words of the adversary is already surrendering. We must therefore restore their true meaning in order to give our political action meaning. (source)

Oh, they will come after you FBI-CIA-SWAT-NSA hit man style:

[Photo: Paris’ covert action, code-named Opération Satanique (Operation Satanic), sank the 131-foot ship in Auckland Harbor, killing 35-year-old Portuguese photographer Fernando Pereira and leaving his eight-year-old daughter Marelle fatherless. The goal of the July 10, 1985 attack was to stop Greenpeace’s flagship vessel from sailing to Moruroa atoll and joining a peace flotilla of New Zealanders and Tahitians to protest at France’s South Pacific nuclear test site.]

To commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Rainbow Warrior’s demise, Auckland-based Little Island Press has published the fifth edition of Robie’s 1986 classic Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior. A book launching is scheduled for today, not far from where the Rainbow Warrior was bombed by state terrorists. The event will include Greenpeace’s “Courage Works,” a special Rainbow Warrior anniversary photography exhibition.

Robie was aboard the Rainbow Warrior during its fateful final mission, evacuating islanders from Rongelap atoll in the Marshall Islands, which had been irradiated on March 1, 1954 “when the Americans exploded the H-bomb Bravo on Bikini atoll,” as Robie wrote in Eyes of Fire. “The bomb was a 15-megaton giant, more than 1,000 times as powerful as the bomb which devastated Hiroshima.” Robie covered “Operation Exodus,” as the Greenpeace ship transported roughly 350 Marshallese atomic exiles from contaminated Rongelap to Mejato and Ebeye at Kwajalein atoll in May 1985.

Because Robie had spent two-and-a-half months aboard the Rainbow Warrior reporting for top regional outlets — including Radio Australia, Radio New Zealand, New Zealand Herald, New Zealand Times, The Australian and Fiji-based Islands Business — he had the scoop. Robie won New Zealand’s Media Peace Prize in 1985 and published the original Eyes of Fire the following year.

Recounting the 1985 attack, Robie told Earth Island Journal: “The first limpet mine blew a hole in the engine room on the starboard side of the Rainbow Warrior big enough for a bus to drive through. The second bomb crippled the aft propeller and shaft. My cabin was almost adjacent to that of Fernando Pereira, the Portuguese-born Dutch photographer who lost his life.”

“I managed to go on board some time later after the [Rainbow Warrior] had been refloated and towed across to Devonport Naval Base dry dock on the other side of Auckland’s Waitemata Harbour,” he continued. “I inspected my old cabin and the second bomb had lifted the whole of the floor into a giant egg-shaped hump and the bunks were a wreck. I wouldn’t have stood a chance if I had been asleep in the cabin.”

We in any revolutionary movement, in the West, cannot depend on fair and honest reporting. It has gone way past Yellow Journalism. Journalism today is steeped in PSYOPS, in what American Exceptionalism is all about: unfair labor practices, cover-ups, proxy wars, internal wars, witch hunts, book banning and burning, our way, or the highway.

Yep, mocking us all, with Operation Mocking Bird.

And, remember how the mainstream media raked Gary Webb over the coals?

After Gary Webb spent more than a year of intense investigative reporting and weeks of drafting, his editors at the San Jose Mercury News decided to run his three-part series late last August, when the nation’s focus was divided between politics and vacation. The series, DARK ALLIANCE: THE STORY BEHIND THE CRACK EXPLOSION, initially “sank between the Republican and Democratic Conventions,” Webb recalls. “I was very surprised at how little attention it generated.”

Webb needn’t have worried. His story subsequently became the most talked-about piece of journalism in 1996 and arguably the most famous–some would say infamous–set of articles of the decade. Indeed, in the five months since its publication, “Dark Alliance” has been transformed into what New York Times reporter Tim Weiner calls a “metastory”–a phenomenon of public outcry, conspiracy theory, and media reaction that has transcended the original series itself.

The series, and the response to it, have raised a number of fundamental journalistic questions. The original reporting–on the links between a gang of Nicaraguan drug dealers, CIA-backed counterrevolutionaries, and the spread of crack in California–has drawn unparalleled criticism from the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. Their editorial decision to assault, rather than advance, the Mercury News story has, in turn, sparked critical commentary on the priorities of those pillars of the mainstream press.

Yet in spite of the mainstream media, the allegations generated by the Mercury News continue to swirl, particularly through communities of color. Citizens and journalists alike are left to weigh the significant flaws of the piece against the value of putting a serious matter, one the press has failed to fully explore, back on the national agenda.

DRUGS AND CONTRAS REDUX

Although many readers of theMercury Newsarticles may not have known it, “Dark Alliance” is not the first reported link between the contra war and drug smuggling. More than a decade ago, allegations surfaced that contra forces, organized by the CIA to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, were consorting with drug smugglers with the knowledge of U.S. officials. The Associated Press broke the first such story on December 20, 1985. The AP’s Robert Parry and Brian Barger reported that three contra groups “have engaged in cocaine trafficking, in part to help finance their war against Nicaragua.” Dramatic as it was, that story almost didn’t run, because of pressure by Reagan administration officials (see “Narco-Terrorism: A Tale of Two Stories”CJR, September/October, 1986). Indeed, the White House waged a concerted behind-the-scenes campaign to besmirch the professionalism of Parry and Barger and to discredit all reporting on the contras and drugs. (source)

All of this rant was precipitated by reading a fellow Substacker:

This article linked from Newsweek claims, based on a fake report from Kiev, that the Patriot can shoot down the hypersonic Kinzhal.

This if from Don Hank’s Substack, quoting him:

One of the many problems with this report is that, while Ukraine claims to have shot down 6 Kinzhals on May 16, Russia did not fire that many. Russia rarely fires more than one of these expensive missiles at a time.

Further, the unpredictable meandering trajectory and enormous hypersonic speed of this missile makes it impossible to shoot down. So far, none have ever really been intercepted — Ukrainian lies to the contrary.

It is to Newsweek’s shame and disgrace that none of its journalists even tried to do a skeptical sci-tech-based investigation of this obviously fake news from Ukraine. The report of the shoot-down is tantamount to a travel reporter claiming Eskimos are hunting rhinos at the North Pole using pea shooters.

Other mainstream outlets are no better. The recent Pentagon leaks show that the US has been vastly under-reporting Ukrainian war casualties while vastly over-reporting Russian casualties for several months now.

Here again, there is no excuse for this shoddy reporting of war casualties, because it has been known for some time, even to Western military experts, that the Ukrainian forces are firing one artillery shell to every 10 shells fired by the Russians, and that the Russians have overwhelming air superiority – in fact, Ukraine has actually had no air force to speak of since Feb 24. Russia destroyed all major Ukrainian air fields on the very first day of the special military operation and knocked out all but a handful of Ukrainian military aircraft. Plus, Russia keeps destroying air defense systems, with the latest instance having been reported on May 16 with the destruction of a Patriot system in Kiev.

So, seriously, does it take a genius to figure out that Ukraine can’t prevail over Russia? Conversely, doesn’t it take an incompetent fool of a journo to keep repeating the Ukraine lie that Russia is losing?

I mean, sure, US news media can always blame Ukrainian fakes for contaminating Western news reports, but there is no law written requiring all US intel agents and news sources to regurgitate every report that comes out of Ukraine while dismissing as fake every report from Russia!

If the grassroots ever grows a brain, US msm will all lose most of their readership and subscribers.

The Ukrainians denied the Patriot system was destroyed, of course, but Western officials are admitting it happened and are assessing the extent of the damage.

Again, Deep Green Resistance or whomever, we shall be attacked, by the Media and the MSM Media, Legacy Media, all part of the DNA of Operation Mocking Bird:

The FBI also focused its attention on DGR organizing at Western Washington University, which hosted a lecture in 2011 by two of the group’s members, Max Wilbert and Dillon Thomson. Information about the lecture, titled “Environmentalism for the New Century,” and about the professor who hosted it was included in the FBI files. Wilbert, who attended WWU, is also a member of DGR’s board of directors.

As part of the investigation, the FBI met with the university’s police department to “discuss possible Deep Green Resistance presence on the WWU campus”. The FBI also said it would attempt to determine whether any of the professors in the environmental sciences department were involved in the “DGR movement”. (source)

Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were Williarn Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Tirne Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the  LouisviIle  Courier‑ Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps‑Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald‑Tribune.

By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.

Oh, those old op-ed’s:

And, so, now, from the 1950s on, and especially now, how’s that looking, those Mocking Birds?

The CIA even ran a formal training program in the 1950s to teach its agents to be journalists. Intelligence officers were “taught to make noises like reporters,” explained a high CIA official, and were then placed in major news organizations with help from management. “These were the guys who went through the ranks and were told ‘You’re going to he a journalist,’” the CIA official said. Relatively few of the 400‑some relationships described in Agency files followed that pattern, however; most involved persons who were already bona fide journalists when they began undertaking tasks for the Agency.

The Agency’s relationships with journalists, as described in CIA files, include the following general categories:

■ Legitimate, accredited staff members of news organizations—usually reporters. Some were paid; some worked for the Agency on a purely voluntary basis. This group includes many of the best‑known journalists who carried out tasks for the CIA. The files show that the salaries paid to reporters by newspaper and broadcast networks were sometimes supplemented by nominal payments from the CIA, either in the form of retainers, travel expenses or outlays for specific services performed.  Almost all the payments were made in cash. The accredited category also includes photographers, administrative personnel of foreign news bureaus and members of broadcast technical crews.) [source]

Look at the CIA New York Times Language:

The deck is always stacked against anyone threatening the status quo.

Animal‐​welfare activists have scored much publicity success by releasing hidden‐​camera videos that they say document the mistreatment of animals at farms and slaughterhouses. Now, at the behest of farm interests, lawmakers in Iowa, Florida, and Minnesota are proposing laws seeking to criminalize the making and even possession of such videos. According to the New York Times, the Iowa bill, which has passed the lower house of the legislature in Des Moines:

….would make it a crime to produce, distribute or possess photos and video taken without permission at an agricultural facility. It would also criminalize lying on an application to work at an agriculture facility “with an intent to commit an act not authorized by the owner.”

Equating taking photos of farms or weedy land, to manslaughter, old Florida.

If you enjoy taking pictures of the Florida countryside, you should probably go get it out of your system before July 1. After that date, it may be a felony.

State Senator Jim Norman (R-Tampa) recently introduced S.B. 1246, which would make it illegal to create any image of a “farm or other property where legitimate agricultural operations are being conducted” without the written consent of the owner. (I assume the “illegitimate agricultural operations” he’s thinking of are marijuana farms, but maybe he’s got a neighbor with some really bad landscaping.) Also, “farm” is defined to include “any tract of land cultivated for the purpose of agricultural production, the raising and breeding of domestic animals, or the storage of a commodity,” which appears to mean that ranches, warehouses, and lots of other places, would be off-limits whether or not they are connected with an actual “farm” in the common sense of the word.

You’ll have to be pretty careful where you point your lens in Florida if this nonsense passes. Assuming you were still inclined to visit or live in Florida at all.

Remarkably, as written the bill declares this to be a first-degree felony, which under Florida law carries a penalty of up to 30 years in prison. Fla. Stat. § 775.082(3)(b). This would make taking a picture of a farm without permission a more serious offense in Florida than manslaughter. (source)

Ag Gag Laws, and you will not see the Manslaughtering Mainstream Media do deep stories defending our right to do any number of peaceful demonstrations against the Predatory=Penury=Polluting=Perverse Capitalism. The language, man, the language, as in “Green as the New Red.”

Criminalizing Compassion: How Ag-Gag Legislation Lets Corporations Set the Laws of the Land

Here you go, and Will Potter is not in the news because of tons of threats.

That was then: “The deputy director of the Trump campaign in Washington state has promised to introduce new legislation that would punish protest as a felony if it causes “economic disruption” and hurts corporate profits.

The proposed “Preventing Economic Terrorism Act” marks a radical expansion of legislation that was once used to criminalize environmentalists as “eco-terrorists,” and could be used against a wide range of social movements and anti-Trump protesters.

State Sen. Doug Ericksen, the author of the bill, says protests that block highways or roads ”such as recent Black Lives Matter protests, or the indigenous movement at Standing Rock against the Dakota Access Pipeline”are “economic terrorism.” 

In a statement on his website, Ericksen also says that the bill won’t be limited to protesters. It will include those who “fund, organize, sponsor or otherwise encourage others to commit acts of economic terrorism.”

“We are not just going after the people who commit these acts of terrorism,” Ericksen said. “We are going after the people who fund them. Wealthy donors should not feel safe in disrupting middle class jobs.” (source)

these nerds, geniuses, chess champs, disruption thugs, all of them are anti human, anti planet, anti the people, planet, plants and phyla writ large-

From Mickey Z, though being a socialist and communist in the purest sense is about building community, not CASH, plain and simple:

To question capitalism is not the same as endorsing any other current “ism.”

To blindly accept capitalism is to ignore the reality that what we call capitalism survives due to the socializing of corporate costs and the privatizing of corporate profits.

To question capitalism is to look beyond the next fiscal quarter, beyond national boundaries, and beyond corporate propaganda.

To blindly accept capitalism is to pretend that technology is neutral, humans can “control” nature, and the playing field is even.

To question capitalism is to have a new vision for the future that extends well beyond today’s closing bell on Wall Street.

To blindly accept capitalism is to prize shareholders over solidarity and commodities over communities. (source)

Which poison pill will you be taking to make it in Chlamdyia Capitalism? Loopholes, man, loopholes perpetrated by lab coats, MDs, PhDs, JD’s and CEOs and Lobbies, and the entire might of the Complex:

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Simple formula — food should be nourishing and safe to eat.

But more than 10,000 chemicals are allowed in food sold in the U.S. Some are direct additives, such as preservatives like butylated hydroxyanisole, or BHA, and butylated hydroxytoluene, or BHT, which are intentionally added to processed food. Others are so-called indirect additives, like heavy metals, which contaminate food during processing, storage and packaging.

Almost 99 percent of food chemicals introduced since 2000 were greenlighted for use by food and chemical companies, rather than properly reviewed by the Food and Drug Administration. Many of these widely used chemicals are associated with major health harms, including increased risk of cancer, developmental harm and hormone disruption.

Better dying with Chemistry, and it’s plastics, man, plastics is the future!

EWG’s Dirty Dozen Guide to Food Chemicals: The top 12 to avoid

Oh, even if you eat good food, the Capitalists get ya’!

PBDEs

Polybrominated diphenyl ethers replaced the first generation flame retardants, polychlorinated biphenyls, which were banned in the U.S. for their toxicity in 1977. Predictably, PBDEs have also come under scrutiny for adverse health and environmental impacts, as well as questionable effectiveness. Ubiquitous in the home, PBDEs are found in furniture, TVs, computer, and electrical equipment. An alarming 2010 study suggested that children with higher prenatal exposure to PBDEs score lower on tests of mental and physical development between the ages of one and siX.

PFCs

Perfluorinated compounds, which can make materials resistant to stains, oil, and water, are found in clothing, cookware, fast food wrappers, microwave popcorn bags, and carpets. (Teflon and Scotchguard, for instance, are derived from PFCs.) Since they don’t degrade organically, they persist in the environment and accumulate in living tissue. Health concerns include toxic fumes from heated nonstick pans causing “Teflon flu” (which can kill pet birds!); stainless steel and cast iron could be safer alternatives.

Toluene

A solvent used to make paints, paint thinners, fingernail polish, lacquers, adhesives and rubber, toluene is toxic to the nervous system, though it’s less bad than the highly carcinogenic benzene, which it largely replaced. Some people huff it to get high, which is just about the stupidest thing imaginable, since inhalation can cause (in addition to euphoria and dissociation) fatigue, confusion, temporary hearing or color vision loss, severe lung damage and even death.

Parabens

The purpose of parabens is preservative, to kill bacteria and fungi, and they’re present in a host of personal care products: shampoos, moisturizers, shaving gels, lubricants, cosmetics, deodorants and toothpaste. They’ve even added to food. The problem is that parabens have been found in breast cancer tumors, and are known to mimic estrogen, the hormone that drives that disease. Reproductive toxicity is also suspected. In light of these concerns, some products have gone paraben-free, and are labeled as such.

Glyphosate

Brought to market in the 1970s by Monsanto, which gave it the ruggedly suggestive name Roundup, glyphosate is an herbicide that kills almost anything growing. Instantly popular with farmers, it really took off with the introduction of genetically modified “Roundup Ready” seeds, which grow into glyphosate-resistant crops that enable less discriminant spraying. Roundup is also sold to ordinary homeowners, for use against yard weeds.

Unsurprisingly, a chemical that’s toxic to plantlife doesn’t seem to be good for animals: birth defects have been observed in rats and frogs exposed to glyphosate. Human harm has not been conclusively demonstrated, but some argue that Roundup’s presence in the food supply and environment is contributing to the prevalence of several diseases. The development of herbicide-resistant superweeds is also a concern.

Tetrachloroethylene

Also known as Perc, or just dry-cleaning fluid, tetrachloroethylene is as almost as tough on the nervous system as it is on stains. It’s classified as a probable human carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and studies have also shown that it significantly increases the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease. One researcher found that the children of dry cleaners are 3.5 times more likely than other kids to develop schizophrenia.

Bisphenol A

Known as BPA for short, bisphenol A is used to make hard plastics, including the materials for water bottles, sports equipment, DVDs, medical and dental devices and eyeglass lenses. It’s also used in the lining of metal food and beverage cans, as well as in the thermal paper on which receipts are printed. In other words, it’s everywhere, including in our bodies: it leaches into substances we consume and is absorbed through our skin. And its effects on animals, at levels below the EPA’s limit for human exposure, are pretty awful: adverse changes to reproductive organs and tissue, including predispositions to cancer, as well as neural and behavioral impacts on non-human primates. A recent FDA ban on the use of BPA in baby bottles was denounced by the Environmental Working Group as “purely cosmetic,” since the chemical is still present in food packaging.

Triclosan

An antimicrobial agent, triclosan was originally intended for use in hospitals, but soon found its way into a wide variety of consumer products: toothpaste, cutting boards, shoes, trash bags and antibacterial soaps. As a result, triclosan is now in all sorts of places it shouldn’t be: in the bile of wild fish exposed to wastewater, in human breast milk and in nearly 75% of urine samples tested in 2008.

Triclosan penetrates the skin and enters in the bloodstream, where its effects on people are unknown. But it’s been shown to mess with the endocrine systems of several different animals, and to interfere with human muscle cell function in vitro. The benefits of using it in soap have been questioned; the FDA says there’s no evidence of triclosan’s upside, apart from an anti-gingivitis effect demonstrated by Colgate Total toothpaste. And some studies have raised the possibility that widespread use of triclosan could contribute to microbial resistance to biocides.

Phthalates

These plasticizers are all over the place. One billion tons are produced each year, and they go into (among other things) children’s toys, pharmaceutical tablets, shower curtains, adhesives, food packaging and fragrances used in all manner of cleaning products, personal and otherwise. What’s troubling: phthalates are easily released into the environment, and they seem to act like hormones in the human body. Possible consequences include (in males) genital deformities, sterility and diabetes, and (in females) premature births, early puberty and breast cancer. Links have also been found with allergies and asthma. (SOURCE)

Oh, darn, those silly republicans and democrats, oh, silly me, they are out to watchdog us, we the people who voted for the sociopaths, and bird dog thoses sons of bitches and bitches of fathers to take care of us. (Blood samples matter, and POPs last for, well, cradle to grave. You and I voted for that , right?)

Oh, aspiration, and that’s the Nazi-Backing EU, with glee for all the depleted uranium shells, all those bombs bursting in air, all that censorship, all that billions going to the Nazi Regime, all the work to blow up Russia and create suffering, vis-a-vis sanctions. That EU and that Europe and those UK-ians, and all those fascists in EuroTrashLandia, and those Killer Five Eyes, and the rest of them, wanting to destroy people through sanctioning IV bags and medicines.

Do not believe this crap: New EU restrictions to ban around 12,000 substances have been proposed in what the European Environmental Bureau has called the world’s “largest ever ban on toxic chemicals”, but changes in regulation can be incredibly slow moving. “There is a long way to go but with the new EU chemical strategy and European Green Deal, we are hopeful that things can improve a lot. But even then, that would take a long time before that change is visible in your blood, I’m afraid.”

The ‘precautionary principle’ could be translated into everyday words as ‘better safe than sorry’. It means that, when scientific evidence about something is uncertain, and there are reasonable grounds for concern about harm, decision-makers should err on the side of caution and avoid risks. With chemicals, the development of new substances outpaces research on their negative impacts. This is why it is important to proceed with caution.

These geniuses do not care, and disaster and inflammatory and disease capitalism, all of the merchants of death and dying, all those huksters, the shekel lovers, all those scammers, the grifters in high and low places, they are right there for the kill.

Yep, I just wrote a Substack on mother’s day, the toxic shit that schools teach, the broken social media, girls and boys who look at genitals at age four and get groomed for whatever “they” are after, what, LGBTQIA+ (an abbreviation for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, intersex, asexual, and more. These terms are used to describe a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. See below for a more detailed definition of each term, from GLAAD’s LGBTQ Media Reference Guide.)

Enjoy the alphabert soup droul: LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, TRANSGENDER, QUEER, QUESTIONING, INTERSEX, ASEXUAL, +PLUS

Oh, we know the plus (+) is added devaluing of humanity, and the conversations prompted by the elite, the beautiful people, the war mongers and the retail mercenaries, ahh, that PLUS:

The ‘plus’ (+) is used to signify all of the gender identities and sexual orientations that letters and words cannot yet fully describe.eop

So while the beautiful people get their for profit non-profit and NGO money from the hundreds of outfits, like the Soros “foundations,” et al, we are living in a dystopia.

Brought to us by the nerds, the disruption experts, the sociopaths.

Come on, protest?

Nah, never. All this distraction, all those tools in the social media book, all the Chromebooks, all the black mirrors, all the eye scanning, how much of the little 2 x 4 phone screen covered the rods and cones of humanity to lobotomize . . . all of that is cooked up by the prodigies, those chess geniuses. And may they all turn to glass, really, neutron bomb? E-coli in their greens? Botulism in their Kombucha? A little toxin from that lovely octupus? A snail?

Box jellyfish for Gates and Musk?

Funnel Web Spider for Thiel, Soros, Buffet?

Shit dog, a cone snail for the Biden-Bush-Trump and all extended families of the Billionaire Cartel?

A little snake venom for all of Media and Holly-Dirt, the biggest liars on the planet?

Shit, all the times I’ve been with the stone fish. That little venom extracted for all the Military Mercenary Industrial Complex heads and not-so-heads of that shit show?

I’ve had these guys in my hands many times: For all FIRE-men and FIRE-woman? Finance Insurance Real Estate moguls and their Eichmanns’?

Fucking A, for the blue-ringed octupuses, in Australian waters, that shit hole anal cavity for the US of A:

Think of the golden billion, and their leaders and movers and shakers, all those merchants of death, disease, dystopia, dirt and derangement.

I learned how to isolate botulism cells, the bacteria, and, well, with a little petri dish love, hmm, how much could I make?

• Clostridium botulinum is a bacterium that produces dangerous toxins (botulinum toxins) under low-oxygen conditions.
• Botulinum toxins are one of the most lethal substances known.
• Botulinum toxins block nerve functions and can lead to respiratory and muscular paralysis.
• Human botulism may refer to foodborne botulism, infant botulism, wound botulism, and inhalation botulism or other types of intoxication.
• Foodborne botulism, caused by consumption of improperly processed food, is a rare but potentially fatal disease if not diagnosed rapidly and treated with antitoxin.
• Homemade canned, preserved or fermented foodstuffs are a common source of foodborne botulism and their preparation requires extra caution.

Ahh, my friend Tassos, in El Paso, a Greek Merchant Marine, formerly married to a Mexican, had a restaurant I worked with on many occassions, and this shit happened to the poor fellow:

Skordalia, a dip consisting of potatoes, garlic, cucumbers and sometimes yogurt, was served Friday and Saturday at the restaurant, which voluntarily closed pending the completion of an investigation.

EL PASO, Texas, April 12, 1994 — Fourteen people who ate a garlic and potato-based dip at a Greek restaurant remained hospitalized Tuesday in what officials said may be the worst outbreak of botulism in Texas history.

The 14 were among 30 people who ate the dip at Tassos Greek Cuisine and Seafood Restaurant, said El Paso city-county Health and Environmental District director Dr. Laurance Nickey. (Sources)

In any case, the Anarchist Cookbook was just a little superficial primer for some fun things to hack the system BACK then.

Even that fellow asked for redemption:

In a federal prosecution in Maryland, Ali Saboonchi was charged with violating U.S. export restrictions on trade with the Islamic Republic of Iran. After his smartphones and flash drive were seized at the U.S.-Canadian border on July 18, 2013, Saboonchi moved to “suppress the fruits of warrantless forensic searches” at the border. This motion required U.S. District Judge Paul W. Grimm to address the American practice of border searches of incoming passengers:

[I]n practice, officers are expected to use their discretion to focus on more likely evidence of contraband or criminality — to ensure that what appears to be a diary is not actually The Anarchist Cookbook, and to move on.

To people versed in radical literature, The Anarchist Cookbook is well-known. Written by a 19-year-old anti-war activist named William Powell and published by a controversial New York house in 1971, it became a bestseller in radical circles and is still available on the internet. It contains diagrams and instructions on how to construct various explosive devices, and (based on its content) was apparently aimed at people interested in conducting guerilla warfare in the United States.

Powell died recently, but not before a documentary filmmaker caught up with him in France, where he had been based for several decades while doing good things around the world. The footage of his interview indicated that Powell had not read or touched the book since he wrote it almost 50 years ago and that he had renounced it and its ideas, hoping it would go out of print. The problem for Powell is the sense that his book inspired several notorious terrorists, both right- and left-wing, over the last several decades. Powell was visibly pained by this realization, and died shortly after the interview. (check out the article)

Now now, this is all personal choice, and some of us learned how to take apart and put together all sorts of weapons. Some of us learned how to use C-4 and how to arm Claymore mines. Dynamite and other weird stuff. For the bankers and millionaires and billionaires? Never, it seems, just mall and school shootings. Insane.

But the bottom line is, these geniuses are worse than cold-blooded sicarios.

Forbes, a dity lying rag:

“Google Is About To Turn The Online Publishing Industry Upside Down”

So, this Substack is soon to be gone, thanks to the Fascists at Google:

The company plans to change the way it presents search engine results by using artificial intelligence. And, at the risk of overstating the potential consequences, it will be like dropping a nuclear bomb on an online publishing industry that’s already struggling to survive.

[Photo: Dirty rotten female, Cathy Edwards, Google’s vice president of engineering, in a screenshot from the company’s … [+]” “GOOGLE / YOUTUBE”

Here, Fox News:

“The scientist said that the best thing to do now is to “put as much effort into developing this technology as we do into making sure it’s safe” – which he says is not happening right now.”

This is it, then, constant bombardment of these sociopaths telling us, we poor peasants, we poor Dystopian fools, that we shall be fine if we allow for the elites, the Eichmann’s big and small, to determine the world in their Demented and Dystopian way. Plus, they all are WELFARE cheats, getting R & D, hoards of workers, funding, tax breaks, etc. etc. from US, the dying taxpayer.

[Photo: These are MONSTERS, Geoffrey Hinton speaks during The International Economic Forum of the Americas (IEFA) Toronto Global Forum in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on Thursday, Sept. 5, 2019. ]

Look at this piece of shit, we hope, future botulism eater:

[Photo: Sundar Pichai thinks A.I. will cause a “big societal labor market disruptions.”]

Yeah, stop the toxins, stop the poisons, stop the AI-VR-AR poison and toxin developers now:

“Twenty years ago, when people exactly predicted what tech automation would do, there were very specific pronouncements of entire job categories which would go away. That hasn’t fully played out,” Pichai said. 

Pichai isn’t the only tech CEO who thinks A.I. will have a major impact on the labor force. IBM’s CEO Arvind Krishna said earlier this week that A.I. could do “30% to 50%” of the repetitive office work. He added that if machines can do those tasks, it “frees up employees to take on higher-value work.” In his own company, Krishna said they were beginning to automate key tasks, and have been able to shift from 700 people doing HR-related manual tasks, to just 50.

And Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has previously told Fortune that today’s workforce should be prepared to work “hand in hand with A.I.”  He added in a statement this week that A.I. could unlock potential on a large scale. 

That’s fucking Fortune Magazine, the trade magazine for Faustians, Goebbels, Eichmann’s, Friedmans, Bernays, the lot of the disaster lizard people, Mengeles: That fucking Forbes:

“Forbes magazine’s new majority owner is a 28-year-old billionaire who made his money in self-driving car tech.”

…. Sociopath Central, piece of human stain, again, where or where is the botulism vinaigrette

Austin Russell, a 28-year-old automotive technology tycoon, acquired an 82% stake in Forbes Global Media Holdings, parent of the well-known business magazine.

The deal values the company at close to $800 million, the parties said in a statement Friday. The seller, Hong Kong-based Integrated Whale Media Investments will retain a minority stake. The Forbes family will not, though Steve Forbes will remain involved.

Russell is the chief executive officer of Luminar Technologies Inc., which provides antonymous driving technology to the automotive industry. The company, which has a $2.1 billion market capitalization, posted sales of $40.7 million last year and isn’t profitable.

Then, of course, gila monsters, box jellyfishes, cone snails, purple octopi sushi for the worst of the worst in his field, Gay, Hateful, Welfare Queen, a la LGBTAQ++, Peter fucking Thiel: “Palantir Technologies Inc. (NYSE:PLTR) Is About To Turn The Corner”

We feel now is a pretty good time to analyse Palantir Technologies Inc.’s (NYSE:PLTR) business as it appears the company may be on the cusp of a considerable accomplishment. Palantir Technologies Inc. builds and deploys software platforms for the intelligence community in the United States to assist in counterterrorism investigations and operations.

Here, this human stain, into AI, and he is the man, man, into surveillence capitalism deep, anal deep:

Digital media outlet Gawker declared bankruptcy and put itself up for sale after it was ordered to pay $140 million in a lawsuit for publishing the sex tape of wrestler Hulk Hogan. Hogan’s lawsuit was financially backed by Silicon Valley billionaire and Trump supporter Peter Thiel, who was outed as gay by a now-defunct Gawker blog. The case is now the focus of a new movie premiering at the Sundance Film Festival. We speak to Brian Knappenberger, the director of “Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press.” He previously directed “The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz” and “We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists,” about the hacker collective Anonymous.

Again, Judaism Central, Thiel: Journalists are trained to look for stories behind the stories. The reporters investigating the Hulk Hogan sex tape and the sale of the Las Vegas Journal-Review, however, found something unprecedented: billionaires covertly using their fortunes to silence the media. Nobody Speak explores what Peter Thiel’s financial support of the lawsuit against Gawker and Sheldon Adelson’s shadowy purchase of Nevada’s largest newspaper mean for future of journalism, the First Amendment, and the power of the ultra wealthy.

Have fun with this fucker, and send me any requests on Gila Monster poison fun, or, well, brown recluse spider venom, concentrated, or, shit, Mohave rattler miling, I’ve had them all in my hands, milked one of them.

I can’t get the nukes and neutron bombs for these Microsoft fucks, but shit, a little bit of dioxin, some, well, DARPA shit?

[News clip]: JD Vance will be the next Republican Senator, a victory for Peter Thiel who spent millions backing JD Vance.

But Thiel wasn’t always on top of the world. In 1996 Peter Thiel was lost — a law school graduate and the author of a middling book on the dangers of diversity.

[Peter Thiel]: The problem of racism, sexism, other forms of oppression have been vastly exaggerated.

But then he found something: venture capital. In just a few short years Thiel took a million dollar investment from friends and family and created a massive amount of wealth for himself. Lots of tech founders say they’re going to change the world — it’s a big part of the VC schtick — but Thiel is different.

You tell me that you aren’t at least hoping for a little bit of Greek potato dips gone bad for these million or so mother fuckers killing us, man:

“Billionaire Peter Thiel wants unfettered corporate power and the destruction of government institutions. This election got him closer than ever.”

This is not aberration.

We should all be honey badgers. Fuck these self-driving, AI crack cocaine loving, motherless mother fuckers. Have some fun, guys and gals and ze’s and zeh’s.

no amount of insane barkers, PT Barnums, Snake Oil salesmen/women/thems can ever top the elites’ plans for ‘Soylent Green is Us!’

You can rubber neck a million times a day until you are Gumby. Rubber necking the news, the deep analyses, the books and studies and journal research articles. You needn’t go far to understand the value “they” put on us, the useless eaters, breeders, breathers, shitters, urinators, sleepers.

So how far will this story go with the Team Red/Blue/White in this impending circus of whores, pimps, Johns/Janes, sicarios known as POTUS politics?

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Will we get Liz Pocahontas Warren to come to her super predator capitalist rescue?

Bernie or Obama to the rescue?

“We need a strong military, it is a dangerous world,” Sanders told voters in Iowa.”

“The first Black U.S. president, Barack Obama, was among the most aggressive defenders of white supremacy in history.”

Oh, that socialist (sic).

During his recent Democratic primary campaign, Sanders contrasted his policy proposals with the more hawkish ones put forth by former Secretary of State and presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton, so his involvement in a costly project for the military industrial complex may seem to clash with his rhetoric. In a February article called “Bernie Sanders Loves This $1 Trillion War Machine,” The Daily Beast took the senator to task for this very thing.

“The socialist trumpets his antiwar record,” the article said. “But he doesn’t mind expensive war machines — if they’re based in his home state.”

All of them are clueless in their Chlamydia Capitalism, as if the disease has rotted both brain and heart. There is no need for a soul in today’s digital gulag, but these people, up and down the aisle, are Eichmann’s. Imagine anyone looking hard at the 70 Percenters — you know, seventy percent of the earth covered in oceans. And what they, the seas, do for the globe? Nah, these chlamydians have more merchants of death and their Eichmann’s and small tendrils of shit-storm capitalists to please.

Nah, this ain’t big news like who will get the neon and wheat and PayDay loan contracts in the rump state of UkroNaziLandia.

Over the past century, says Pauly, the greatest pressure on marine life has been overfishing, which has caused huge declines in fish numbers. That could change. If we get overfishing under control, he continues, climate-related pressures will pose the biggest problem for marine life in the coming decades. A 2021 paper showed that the oceans are already committed to a fourfold greater oxygen loss, even if CO2 emissions stop immediately.

If you chart out the trends in warming and oxygen loss, the cataclysmic endpoint for the ocean thousands of years from now would be “a soup that you that you cannot live in,” says Pauly. The ocean already has sporadic hypoxic zones, he says, “but you could imagine all the dead zones of the world coalescing into one, and that is the end of the thing.” If we don’t get a handle on greenhouse gas emissions, he says, “we have to expect this to happen.” (source)

Nah, it’s about biopsy meat and cricket flour, thanks to the billionaires and dirty scientists aiding and abetting this global murder incorporated plan:

Yep, hear those crickets?

I’m dealing with my wife’s mother’s husband’s decline. Big time. No longer allowed to be in the big hospital on the hill, OHSU in Portland, his discharge orders will not allow him to head home just with this 74 year old woman dealing with his 220 pound frame, his inability to transfer himself, and even with a lift, the last weeks of his life he will need care, two on one at least.

Benefits gone for long term care, as most readers know, is the third step in this casino-usury-predatory-PayDay Loan Capitalism. This bankrupts families, and this great ugly Chlamydia Capitalist shit hole, with zero intelligent people in office, in the neocon group, in elite schools, you name, dumb and mean and rabid and full of chlamydia from so many intercourses with the devils — billionaires and millionaires calling the prostitution ring shots— will let the profiteers make bank — you know, $6,000 a month for bedpan and IV servicing and crappy food and overworked staff and abuse on top of abuse.

The systems in place are there only for the 5 percent in terms of Cadillac services and then for the 10 percent, Lexus services, and then the other 5 percent, the Prius services. The rest of us eats shit. Broken down Ford Pinto rusting somewhere:

Death, dying, and then in their boardrooms and Zoom Rooms and Webinars, they chant, “they are useless breeders and from useless broken families”; and it is our fault that the atomized and vapid families are scattered like cricket flour in the winds. The PSYOPS of media-media schools-schools workplace-workplaces family bullshit-family bullshit just takes us further into the collective dellusion, facilitating this rotting away of the soul and mind and body with these Chlamydia Capitalists running roughshod over our lives.

We’re now into the weeds of Income Cap Trusts and elder lawyers and getting social security checks handled by an elder attorney (not for free) to get Medicaid to kick in for the guy whose SS income is just barely over the absolute dead in your tracks federal povery level standard (sic). That Medicaid – – the one the blue and red teams want evicerated, and of course, Team Biden/Jill/Hunter wants more for the war(s) and is predicting the end of Social Security too.

If you don’t hate a Ukrainian yet, then you are full of the stuff, chlamydia and syphillis. Capitalism will rape you, poison you, and murder you from the inside out.

Man oh man, where is SCOTUS and Liz and Bernie when we need them to take their attention away from the Pandora Papers, Villa-Owning, Money-Hiding, Cocaine-Using Jewish Nazi Comic El President?

But a ProPublica investigation — based on court documents, property records, company training materials and interviews with 48 former franchise owners and dozens of homeowners who have sold to its franchises — found HomeVestors franchisees that used deception and targeted the elderly, infirm and those so close to poverty that they feared homelessness would be a consequence of selling.

If this one story, or the one about the dying world — the oceans losing O2 — doesn’t get to you, then, well, the syphillis from Chlamydia Capitalism’s whores has overtaken you.

One HomeVestors franchisee falsely claimed to a 72-year-old woman suffering from a hoarding problem that city code enforcement officers would take her house, according to court documents. An Arizona woman said in an interview that she was forced to live in her truck after trying unsuccessfully to cancel the sale of her home. One court case documented the plight of an elderly man in Florida who was told if he sold his condo he could continue living there temporarily. But he spent his final days alive waiting to be evicted when — after the contract was signed — the franchise owner informed him the homeowners association rules didn’t allow it.

“You were always lying to them. That’s what we were trained,” said Katie Southard, who owned a franchise in North Carolina. “There was a price that you could pay, but you would always go lower and tell them that was the price you could pay.”

Even when homeowners believed they were being taken advantage of and tried to back out of deals, franchise owners sued or filed paperwork to block a sale to another buyer. Some homeowners fought from hospital beds to keep their properties. At least three died shortly after signing sales contracts; a fourth died after three years of worrying about money. Their families told ProPublica that they are convinced the stress of losing their houses contributed to their loved ones’ deaths, though all had been ill or infirm.

That this is allowed in the unfree and dirty dealing free market is telling of how dirty the politicians are, how prostituting the population is, how deep the Eichmann is Our Hero mentality runs through the culture:

Who started this outfit, out of Texas, who are the employees who have regrets and those who go balls to the wall to extract every bloody cent out of vulnerable people? And, now, this outfit is managed by two rabbi-influenced folk:

Enjoy these pieces of decent journalism while they last . . . Know your enemies rabbi- influenced upbringings:

HomeVestors’ general counsel, Anthony Lowenberg; Maren Kasper, managing director of Bayview Asset Management, the investment management firm that bought HomeVestors in 2022

Again, Criminal Chlamydia Capitalism thrives in this dirty country of land theft, broken treaties, small pox seeded blankets, reservations, Beat the Indian/Savage Out of the Child Schools, and the constant hell Chlamydians put those people and their own people — us, gthe 80 Percenters — through. Should be illegal, no? No?

HomeVestors of America boasts that it helped pioneer the real estate investment industry. Founded in 1996 by a Texas real estate broker, the company has developed a system for snapping up problem properties — and expanded it to nearly 1,150 franchises in 48 states.

Unlike real estate agents, house flippers operate in a largely unregulated space. Real estate agents have a fiduciary responsibility to represent a homeowner’s best interests in negotiations, which is defined in state laws, licensing requirements and an industry code of ethics. But in most states, flippers don’t need a license.

WWJS. Who Would Jesus Swindle? WMSFTP? Would Moses Steal from the Poor? You get the picture, Allah and Buddha.

Capitalism runs on that flavor, that killer flavor of the day, of the nanosecond. Swindlers and Swines. Sicarios and Sycophants. Grifters and Godlessness.

A country of mass shootings, or smaller ones, is run by thieves and thespians, for sure, selling the Big Pharma Tap Dancing Bear of Lies:

Psychiatric treatment and psychiatric drugs are the common denominator of the growing number of shootings and other acts of violence, which are soaring right along with the soaring prescribing of psych drugs. 

CCHR International is asking the public to sign its petition calling on U.S. lawmakers to immediately open an investigation into the role of psychiatric drugs in school shootings and similar acts of violence, given that data supporting this link has to date been ignored by the U.S. government and mental health agencies.

The latest and the latest killing in a mall?

Here’s how analyst Michael Tracey sarcastically summed it up:

If a non-white person is a “white supremacist,” does that mean he believes in his own innate racial inferiority? @mtracey

Leave it to Tracey to expose the imbecility of a meme that defies reason but to which the media clings like the Holy Grail. It’s actually shocking that anyone can take this type of verbal hucksterism seriously when, in fact, the whole “non-white white supremacist” thing is one of the most absurd concoctions of all time. It’s pure gibberish.

So, where should we look for answers? Where can we find rational explanations for these sporadic acts of violence? (source = “Drugged-Up and Ready to Kill — Is there a link between Psychiatric Meds and Mass Shootings?” by Mike Whitney.

[Photo: Children were among the 8 people killed at an Allen, Texas, mall by a gunman who was terminated from the Army ]

You will not get the Pharma Felons of the Fancy Mainstream Media to do stories on this aspect of all those school and mall and random shootings.

Close to 17% of Americans are taking psychiatric drugs with side effects such as acting aggressively, being angry, or violent and acting on dangerous impulses...

Psychotropic drugs are hardly helping when their side-effects include worsening depression, new or worsening anxiety, agitation or restlessness, panic attacks, new or worsening irritability, acting aggressively, being angry, or violent, acting on dangerous impulses, an extreme increase in activity and talking (mania), and other unusual changes in behavior or mood.

“Rather than helping the individual, psychotropics alienate, and push them into more and more potentially dangerous behavior,” states the president of the Florida chapter of CCHR, Diane Stein.

This situation was so egregious that in 2004, the Federal Drug Administration issued a “black-box” label warning indicating that the use of certain antidepressants to treat major depressive disorder in adolescents may increase the risk of suicide, homicide, and other acts of violence.

A study entitled Prescription Drugs Associated with Reports of Violence Towards Others… declared … In the 69-month reporting period we identified 484 evaluable drugs that accounted for 780,169 serious adverse event reports of all kinds…. The violence cases included 387 reports of homicide, 404 physical assaults, 27 cases indicating physical abuse, 896 homicidal ideation reports, and 223 cases described as violence-related symptoms.” “Psychiatric Drugs and Side Effects – The Unseen Hand Behind Violence in America“, Citizens Commission on Human Rights

Nah, just doesn’t make sense in a country that has that engineering degree to offensive weaponry military industrial complex company pipeline plumbed and ready:

Then, so, how much rubber necking is a young or old man to do in this crumbling, decayed and structurally violence and venomous country do? Will Substack readers and FU Book fanciers get on the bandwagon and begin yelling at the top of their lungs about each and every Chlamydia Capitalist Crime he or she can name and research?

a million blips daily across the wire service, across the transom of hell, will get you snookered quickly if you have a brain!

Are you hearing voices in your head yet? You can’t make this shit up as a fiction writer:

When the new 20-dollar bill is issued in 2030 it is scheduled to have on one side a portrait of Harriet Tubman, the fiery abolitionist who made over a dozen clandestine trips south to free enslaved people and later served as a scout for the Union Army during the Civil War. The back of the bill is supposed to have a statue of the slaveholding 7^th president, Andrew Jackson, who was one of the principal organizers of the genocidal campaigns against Native Americans. It is a bit like Germany issuing a bill with Ann Frank on one side and Adolf Eichmann on the other. This schizophrenia reflects the bifurcation within the country where the dwindling majority of whites often embrace the so-called white replacement theory, seeing in the effort to honor the nation’s diversity and own up to the sins of white supremacy, a campaign to erase them. (Source)

The complete insanity of every aspect of America, and UK, and Klanada, and EU, well, it makes one want to puke and go Postal. But listen to those voices.

I was temporarily banned on Facebook today for posting some great music for commemorating the great victory the Soviets gave the world in defeating “those Nazis.” As opposed to the Nazi’s that have seeded themselves into USA, Klanada, EU, Israel (a new sort of Zionist Nazi) and throughout the Land of those Boys from Brazil.

Enjoy this song, Sacred War, 78 years later:

And in India?

Or this from a You Tube listener:

“We were taught this song, in English, at our primary school in Scotland back in the 1940’s. We loved it. When I left school, I went to Australia but never lost the urge to see the mighty Volga. I had to wait nearly 50 years but finally made it and rushed down the bank to dip my hands in its waters. Once I was back on the bus I explained why I had held them up for a few minutes and sang the song in English to the Russians on board. They had not realised that the song about “their” river was known so well outside Russia.”

Or Robeson, my hero: murdered by the CIA-MK ULTRA. Long live communism! Song of the Volga Boatmen.

Oh, the stupidity of thinking Paul attempted suicide:

JS: Robeson had been summoned multiple times to testify before the U.S. Congress about his ties to subversive groups, questions about his membership in the Communist Party.

Newsreel: The growing menace of communism arouses the House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee. Among the well-informed witnesses testifying is J. Edgar Hoover, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mr. Hoover speaks with authority on the subject.

Edgard Hoover: The Communist Party of the United States is a fifth column if there ever was one. It is far better organized than were the Nazis in occupied countries prior to their capitulation. They are seeking to weaken America just as they did in their era of obstruction when they were aligned with the Nazis. Their goal is the overthrow of our government. (Source)

Say it all about this fascist country:

Paul Robeson, the black actor, singer, and political radical, may have been a victim of CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb’s MK-ULTRA program. In our last issue we noted Gottlieb’s death and outlined his career of infamy. In the spring of 1961, Robeson planned to visit Havana, Cuba to meet with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. The trip never came off because Robeson fell ill in Moscow, where he had gone to give several lectures and concerts. At the time it was reported that Robeson had suffered a heart attack. But in fact Robeson had slashed his wrists in a suicide attempt after suffering hallucinations and severe depression.The symptoms came on following a suprise party thrown for him at his Moscow hotel.

Robeson’s son, Paul Robeson, Jr., has investigated his father’s illness for more than 30 years. He believes thathis father was slipped a synthetic hallucinogen called BZ by US intelligence operatives at the party in Moscow. The party was hosted by anti-Soviet dissidents funded by the CIA.

Robeson Jr. visited his father in the hospital the day after the suicide attempt. Robeson told his son that he felt extreme paranoia and thought that the walls of the room were moving. He said he had locked himself in his bedroom and was overcomeby a powerful sense of emptiness and depression before he tried to take his own life. (source)

Fucking Jewish Gottlieb, from WikiCIApedia: Gottlieb was born to Hungarian Jewish immigrant parents Fanny and Louis Gottlieb in the Bronx on August 3, 1918. His older brother was plant biologist David Gottlieb. A stutterer since childhood, he earned a master’s degree in speech therapy from San Jose State University after retiring from the CIA. He was born with a club foot, which got him rejected from military service in World War II but did not prevent his pursuit of folk dancing, a lifelong passion.

With a country that hallucinates on stupidity, where dumbdowing is the core curriculum, where the school to prison pipeline is one angle, but then, the engineering school to military defense pipeline is another, we are surrounded by dupes and by heathens.

[Photo: New Haven students enjoy a Lockheed Martin flight simulator at a career fair on Feb. 19, 2020. Lockheed is not only one of the world’s biggest weapons manufacturers, but one of the biggest employers of software engineers in North America. “Inside Lockheed Martin’s Sweeping Recruitment on College Campuses: The engineering degree to defense industry pipeline.”]

How can sane people not become insane, just the drip-drip-drip of death by a thousand mililiters of pure hubris, bullshit, propaganda, PSYOPS, marketing, and erasure.

It’s in the bloodline:

That fucking bloodline:

The grotesque medieval spectacle that was the coronation of “King” Charles is an egregious, bare-fisted insult to all those African people around the world who suffered, and continue to suffer, from the crimes of slavery and colonialism under the British Crown. The celebration of the coronation of Charles by some African people around the world is a nasty reminder that mental slavery still continues and the Negro mind has yet to be decolonized . What is there to celebrate? A sallow, curdled, amoral, and imbred family of ne’er-do-wells who live off the public purse and reap the benefits of centuries of slavery and savagery, genocide and degeneracy?

Of Charles’ namesakes – Charles I and Charles II – the first Charles authorized the trade in African people to the Americas, the second Charles expanded that trade . While Charles I was knocked off the absolute monarchical perch and publicly beheaded, ending once and for all the belief in the Divine Right of Kings, the latest Charlie continues to inherit the African dividends of his predecessors. (Yo, Chuck: The South Africans want their stolen diamond, “The Great Star of Africa,” back immediately!) (source)

Indeed, so, we are hearing voices now, and like Robeson, even with genius level thinking and articulation, we are just bones to dust in the minds of these freaks of nature — neocons, Zionists, Anglo Saxons, Nazis, Isra-Hellions.

Insane indeed in their world:

Ahh, Eduardo: Insane, no?

The big bankers of the world, who practise the terrorism of money, are more powerful than kings and field marshals, even more than the Pope of Rome himself. They never dirty their hands. They kill no-one: they limit themselves to applauding the show. Their officials, international technocrats, rule our countries: they are neither presidents nor ministers, they have not been elected, but they decide the level of salaries and public expenditure, investments and divestments, prices, taxes, interest rates, subsidies, when the sun rises and how frequently it rains. However, they don’t concern themselves with the prisons or torture chambers or concentration camps or extermination centers, although these house the inevitable consequences of their acts. The technocrats claim the privilege of irresponsibility: ‘We’re neutral’ they say.

Eduardo Galeano

These beautiful people want us locked up, like Robeson: “Policies such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s CARE Court and numerous “anti-camping” ordinances are reinterpreting existing legal protections to allow for the removal and detention of people who are unhoused and deemed mentally ill, under threat of involuntary commitment or even conservatorship.” (source) Psychiatric Incarceration Isn’t Treatment — It’s Violence, Survivors Say!

Go to Mad in America:

Mad in America’s mission is to serve as a catalyst for rethinking psychiatric care in the United States (and abroad). We believe that the current drug-based paradigm of care has failed our society, and that scientific research, as well as the lived experience of those who have been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, calls for profound change.

Our non-profit organization promotes such change in several ways:

(1) We publish a webzine, madinamerica.com, that provides news of psychiatric research, original journalism articles, and a forum for an international group of writers—people with lived experience, peer specialists, family members, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, program managers, journalists, attorneys, and more—to explore issues related to this goal of “remaking psychiatry.”

(2) We produce podcasts on MIA Radio that features interviews with researchers, activists and leaders in the lived-experience community that similarly explore themes related to “remaking psychiatry.”

(3) We run Mad In America Continuing Education, which hosts online courses taught by leading researchers in the field. These courses provide a scientific critique of the existing paradigm of care, and tell of alternative approaches that could serve as the foundation for a new paradigm, one that emphasizes psychosocial care, and de-emphasizes the use of psychiatric medications, particularly over the long-term.

(4) We provide support to a network of MIA Global affiliate sites in nine countries.

We believe that this mix of journalism, education and societal discussion can provide the seed for a much-needed remaking of mental health care in the United States and globally. It is evident that our current “brain disease” model is flawed in so many ways, and we believe that it needs to be replaced by a model that emphasizes our common humanity, and promotes robust, long-term recovery and wellness.

We also believe it is important to provide readers with the opportunity to add their voices to this discussion. We encourage readers to leave comments (see our posting guidelines), and to submit personal stories and op-ed submissions.

We welcome feedback and comments on how we can improve this website, and continue to build an online community that can be a societal force for change. (source)

Are we hearing voices yet?

The Hearing Voices approach was originated through the work of Marius Romme and a woman to whom he was providing treatment, Patsy Hage.  Not only did Patsy directly challenge Marius to expand his thinking and accept her experiences as real, but he also witnessed the power of peer support first hand when he observed her and others receiving treatment at a local hospital impacting one another simply by taking the space to talk frankly and non-judgmentally with one another about hearing voices.  Since that time, Marius and his wife and colleague Sandra Escher, have written several books and made many appearances to talk about what has grown out of that initial learning, ultimately forming the foundation of this International movement.

This society is all about simulation, degradation, debunking our own humanity, and throwing all in for the technocrats and scientists who DO NOT have humanity, and their SOP is money money money. Grants, fame, fawning over. Until we are inhuman.

Hearing voices yet?

How about that inner voice which says THEY are the enemy and YOU are a human?

You feel the eye upon you?

You ant some sanity on May 9? Putin:

“Happy Victory Day!

Happy holiday that commemorates the honour of our fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers who glorified and immortalised their names by defending our Fatherland. They saved the humankind from Nazism through immeasurable courage and immense sacrifice.

Today, our civilisation is at a crucial turning point. A real war is being waged against our country again but we have countered international terrorism and will defend the people of Donbass and safeguard our security.

For us, for Russia, there are no unfriendly or hostile nations either in the west or in the east. Just like the vast majority of people on the planet, we want to see a peaceful, free and stable future.

We believe that any ideology of superiority is abhorrent, criminal and deadly by its nature. However, the Western globalist elites keep speaking about their exceptionalism, pit nations against each other and split societies, provoke bloody conflicts and coups, sow hatred, Russophobia, aggressive nationalism, destroy family and traditional values which make us human. They do all that so as to keep dictating and imposing their will, their rights and rules on peoples, which in reality is a system of plundering, violence and suppression.”

The Western Civilization is mentally ill:

Caitlin resonate with you:

This civilization is so mentally ill that you’ll get treated like a gibbering lunatic for expressing the most sane and rational opinions anyone can possibly express. Something as basic as “The world’s most powerful government should stop ramping up nuclear brinkmanship on multiple fronts” will get you treated like a kook, when really it’s so obvious and common sense it shouldn’t even need to be said. That’s how crazy mass-scale brainwashing has made everyone.

❖

I will never support any form of capitalism, because no form of capitalism — real or hypothetical — will ever have an answer to the problems of ecocide and the need to care for the needful.

Every capitalism-based solution that has ever been proposed for these problems is self-evidently ridiculous; the notion that privatizing the natural world can preserve oceans and rainforests is infantile nonsense that’s refuted by all of human history, as is the notion that the needful can be cared for solely by voluntary charity. No intellectually honest person believes this is true. No ancap who’s thought hard enough about ecocide and caring for the needful sincerely believes that capitalism can address these problems. At their most honest, they’ll say that ecocide and starvation are necessary sacrifices that must be made for the freedoms and conveniences they want to have for themselves. (source)

I am seeing the death of agency, the total immune compromising aspect of Capitalism, that Chlamydia Capitalism, as inflammatory disease par excellence! Old men and women in cancer wards, getting the poisons of our time, the pure death $6000 a month care home, places of death . . . . That smile, man, of each and every one of those two-bit criminals called politicians, judges, adjudicators, DAs, CEOs, middle managers, the Eichmann’s Big and Small, the finance insurance real estate crime syndicates, all cartels, all sircarios, all buttoned down mass murderers. You know the history of this country, of war, of that country, UK, of war . . . .

Why oh why don’t Zebras get Ulcers?

Then, of course, it all goes to the Value of Nothing, sum zero game:

Inflamed: Deep Medicine And The Anatomy Of Injustice’ reveals a critical observation — that inflammation repeatedly connects poor health and structural injustice, ACTIVIST, FILMMAKER  and bestselling author Raj Patel was dressed as a genetically modified tomato when he met Rupa Marya MD, more than a decade ago. Marya says the communities she and Patel have each had the chance to witness and work with, informed the story they told in their book

“… which is that our bodies, our societies and our planet are being damaged through the same cosmology that has severed our relationships with each other and to the web of life that keeps us healthy.”

“Are you hearing those voices yet? You better listen!

+–+

“Among the people of your culture, which want to destroy the world?”

“As far as I know, no one specifically wants to destroy the world.”

“And yet you do destroy it, each of you. Each of you contributes daily to the destruction of the world. Why don’t you stop?”

I shrugged. “Frankly, we don’t know how.”

“You’re captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live.”

---

“I’m telling you this because the people of your culture are in much the same situation. Like the people of Nazi Germany, they are the captives of a story.”

“I know of no such story.”

“You mean you’ve never heard of it?”

“That’s right.”

Ishmael nodded. “That’s because there’s no need to hear of it. There’s no need to name it or discuss it. Every one of you knows it by heart by the time you’re six or seven. Black and white, male and female, rich and poor, Christian and Jew, American and Russian, Norwegian and Chinese, you all hear it. And you hear it incessantly, because every medium of propaganda, every medium of education pours it out incessantly. And, hearing it incessantly, you don’t listen to it. There’s no need to listen to it. It’s always there humming away in the background, so there’s no need to attend to it at all.”

---

“A German who couldn’t bring himself to take a place in Hitler’s story had an option: he could leave Germany. You don’t have that option. Anywhere you go in the world, you’ll find the same story being enacted, and if you don’t take a place in it you won’t get fed.”

“True.”

“Mother Culture teaches you that this is as it should be. Except for a few thousand savages scattered here and there, all the peoples of the earth are now enacting this story. This is the story man was born to enact, and to depart from it is to resign from the human race itself, is to venture into oblivion. Your place is here, participating in this story, putting your shoulder to the wheel, and, as a reward, being fed. There is no ‘something else.’ To step out of this story is to fall off the edge of the world. There’s no way out of it except through death.” (Ishmael)

Misogyny, the power dynamic, the roots of a male bully, the pure hatred of a wife or intimate partner, all of the baggage of men in this society playing the macho game, play into death!

“If I die, I don’t want other women to suffer what I am suffering. I want them to be listened to.” — Maria Teresa Macias (source)

My friend’s about to get put through one wringer after another wringer. After four years of torment, the yo-yo of leaving the abusive husband, even for months, but coming back, she finally had that breaking point: she was almost suffocated to death by this husband, this murderer-want-to-be.

Months have passed since the guy ended up busted in jail, indicted too, but there is no plea deal, and the trial starts soon.

My friend comes from a family that is not into the nefarious side of things, and the ugly, cheating, conniving American landscape is not their everyday life. The people in their lives apparently are not psycho-sociopaths, narcissists, violent ideation freaks.

Throughout the six months leading up to the criminal trial — she feels that SHE is the one on trial — she has covered much territory on her own feelings and what others have to say. Some stupid, uncaring and uninitiated crap coming from the mouths of not just people who know what happened, so called laypersons, but also from people in the judicial system, just add to the crime of stupidity of the masses and the dum-downing of the culture and hidden misogony.

She’s on a one-two punching out of this hell fight by sticking with the criminal case and filing for divorce and sticking that one out, too. There are no guarantees he will end up in prison, and the divorce in Oregon is tricky. You can’t bring up what he did to her for five years in a divorce case.

The law in Anglo Saxon USA is busted, fucked up.

Time, money, restraining orders, her own anxiety, her luck getting a decent counselor and the various levels of pure stupidity and hellish thinking bombarding her to the question of why she stayed with him the first, second, I don’t know how many more times she actually left him (and returned), this plays are hard hand on emotions.

She’s from Canada, and she ended up meeting this pig of a human in a Central American country. She had it made, having been in this country for several years, and opening up her little cafe which was the toast of the town among ex-pats.

“I wasn’t looking for anyone to get serious with, or even date.”

This is how these monsters work the playing field — they prey on the perfect mark.

From 1980 to 2008, nearly 1 out of 5 murder victims were killed by an intimate partner (Cooper & Smith, 2011). In fact, available research shows that women are more likely to be killed by an intimate partner (husband, boyfriend, same-sex partner, or ex) than by anyone else (Catalano, 2013; Violence Policy Center, 2015). Approximately 2 out of 5 female murder victims are killed by an intimate partner (Cooper & Smith, 2011). In 2013, fifteen (15) times as many females were murdered by a male they knew than were killed by male strangers. For victims who knew their offenders, 62% were wives, common-law wives, ex-wives, or girlfriends of the offenders (Violence Policy Center, 2015). (source)

She knows now what she was dealing with then, but those red flags are not always in your face. She now sees there were dozens of red flags with this guy. That reality gets her down, suicidal, and at times, she just wants to flee.

Freeze, fight, flight.

Want some red banners flapping in the storm sky? These may include one or more of the following:

• A hatred of or hostility toward women. An entrenched culture of misogyny can manifest in some individuals as social exclusion, adherence to gender roles, sex discrimination, hostility, patriarchy, male privilege, belittling of women, disenfranchisement of women, violence against women and sexual objectification, and is thought to be one of the supporting factors for partner abuse to continue.
• Cruelty toward animals. An abuser may use harsh punishments or completely neglect pets or other animals they encounter, or put them at unnecessary levels of risk such as leaving a dog tied up with no shade or water. 
• Jealousy. This often comes under the guise of caring so much about their partner, before morphing into a more stalking nature—asking who you’re with, where you’re going, etc.
• A controlling nature. Again, abusers will say this is in concern for your well-being. But soon, it can escalate into telling you what you are allowed and not allowed to do. 
• Inability to admit fault, take blame. This also looks like blame-shifting. Everything is someone else’s fault or the blame is constantly shifted to a partner. Abusers often think the world is against them and they are a victim of their circumstances. 
• Desperation to move the relationship quickly. If a new partner confesses their love for you after the second date, asks you to move in together after a week, uses words like “soulmate” or says they’ve never met anyone like you or that you were meant for each other, this can be a red flag. Abusers often want to isolate victims or make them emotionally dependent on them as quickly as possible.
• Hypersensitivity. Many abusers get easily upset over any inconvenience or personal slight. Something as minor as a partner suggesting a different restaurant for dinner can be made out by an abuser as an attack on them. 

The guy is a product of his sadistic and stupid father who beat him and fed him and his brother alcohol young. Daddy was some macho pilot, Top Gun fool of a military flight jockey, Vietnam, and eventually, this daddy got murdered by his second wife, for, well, your guess is mine.

This guy, my friend’s husband, is classic broken arrogant white boy, football player, up to a point footballer, and college fraternity type. A real hatred of women and triple hatred of true liberal thinking. Borish, know it all, and it is amazing, still, for me, after decades dealing with domestic violence in many forms in my various jobs, that anyone of her caliber would see anything attractive about him.

In a Central American country, as someone with some money from his old man’s death, murdered by his stepmother, this abuser had gotten the royal treatment of a king in this place, as he had the money to throw around/away . . . money for booze . . . and he looked down on the Spanish speakers, and his six-foot frame towered over the Mayan-derived people. The ex-pat communities in other countries are sour and sick and harmful to the cultures and countries. Perfect audience for guys like this abuser.

The white guy — the Yanqui — who had disposable money and time — got a pass from the poor people of these third world countries. Happens all the time.

++—++

Abuse is not a mental illness nor is it caused by a mental illness. Many individuals who live with mental health issues do not abuse their partners.

• Narcissistic Personality Disorder. This presents as a lack of empathy, constant seeking of validation, arrogance or grandiose behavior. Narcissists will belittle others to appear superior, exaggerate their talents and monopolize conversations to make others feel inferior. 
• Borderline Personality Disorder. This mental health disorder, once again, doesn’t cause abuse, but its traits can certainly perpetuate abusive choices. Borderline personality disorder is defined by self-image issues, difficulty managing emotions or behaviors, an intense fear of abandonment or instability, frequent mood swings, impulsiveness and inappropriate anger.  
• Psychopathy. A person defined as a psychopath feels no guilt, shame or remorse. More concerning, a psychopath’s brain actually shows an increased response in the ventral striatum, an area known to be involved in pleasure, when imagining others in pain, reports ScienceDaily. 
• Antisocial Personality Disorder. This is sometimes called sociopathy. These individuals share many similar traits to psychopaths—feeling no remorse, not understanding the difference between right and wrong—and also like the feeling of dominating others and having power and control. Unlike psychopathy, which is thought to be genetic, sociopaths are made through a traumatic event in their past. “Sociopaths can be predators, so you may naturally feel uncomfortable being alone with them,” says Bill Eddy, licensed clinical social worker. “You may suddenly get the feeling that you want to get out of a situation. Go, and ask questions later. (source)

“Maya Angelou once said, ‘When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.’ If we think about that in the context of potential abusive partners, then we need to look no further than some of the words they choose to speak.”

These fellows are manipulative and mean, but know how to cover up all of that hatred in public situations. But not for long. This fellow ordered the book, Rape of the Mind, and listened to the anti-women podcasters of the day. He called women bitches and cunts. Worse. He was/is two-faced. He would never listen to this fellow:

Ted Bunch, the co-founder of A Call to Men, says one of the keys to pulling men and boys out of the dangerous pipeline of misogyny is to understand where it starts. A Call to Men partners with schools, companies and professional sports organizations to promote what it calls “healthy masculinity:” concepts like kindness, respect for others, and an understanding that, in a patriarchal society, men have an opportunity to use their power to protect.

“(Misogyny) teaches men that aggression, violence, and the domination of others is somehow embedded in their DNA,” Bunch says. “It’s not. It is the way men are socialized. In a male-dominated patriarchal society, all are taught that women and girls have less value, or that on some level they are the property.” (source)

Now, the small rural county where I live and where I met the victim, and who is winding through the legal system, it is like so many other counties — mostly female judges, female DAs and ADAs, female victims rights workers, et al. The system is clogged with broken people’s issues, from substance abuse, to broken laws derived from the substance abuse — thieving, burglaring, motor vehicle citations, trespassing, and alas, the violence that comes with booze and hits of whatever drug is available.

My friend is not feeling great about all the busllshit she has gone through — the mother of the son, a warped human in her own right, doing her warped stuff showing up months ago from out of state at night, threatening her, and more crap, like threatening to take her dog away (a gift from the mother-in-law) to her.

This is how these people roll, these dysfunctional but sociopathic people work — it runs in the family, and they scam, do insurance fraud stuff, and so much more. This fellow has a record, and he’s squirmed out of other charges. He’s hoping to go to trial and intimidate the victim, his wife, who he attempted to kill by putting a pillow on her head and forcing his big body down onto her.

She is wondering what sort of personality she has developed over the years to have allowed her to stick with this abuser. She wonders what this battered wife syndrome is. She wonders why so many people even in the “system” have little understanding of how this abusive situation is complicated by a hundred different “things”, that the women are targeted, that the men are after so many power dynamics, and in fact, many would like to see their first kill of a woman.

A kill could be a suidice, too, whatever gets these guys off on pain and torment.

In 1933 Meerloo began to study the methods by which systematic mental pressure brings people to abject submission, and by which totalitarians imprint their subjective “truth” on their victims’ minds. In “The Rape of the Mind” he goes far beyond the direct military implications of mental torture to describing how our own culture unobtrusively shows symptoms of pressurizing people’s minds. He presents a systematic analysis of the methods of brainwashing and mental torture and coercion, and shows how totalitarian strategy, with its use of mass psychology, leads to systematized “rape of the mind.” He describes the new age of cold war with its mental terror, verbocracy, and semantic fog, the use of fear as a tool of mass submission and the problem of treason and loyalty, so loaded with dangerous confusion. The “Rape of the Mind” is written for the interested layman, not only for experts and scientists. (source)

A rape of the mind, as in battered spouse perpetration, is not far from physical rape:

Men’s sexual aggression toward women is a pervasive problem in U.S. society. Between 25–57% of men report having perpetrated a sexually aggressive behavior against a woman since the age of 14 (Abbey, Jacques-Tiura, & LeBreton, 2011; Abbey, McAuslan, & Ross, 1998; Davis, Kiekel et al., 2012; Koss, Gidycz, & Wisniewski, 1987; White & Smith, 2004). These acts range from verbally coerced sexual contact to physically forced penetrative sex, with verbal coercion and the victim’s incapacitation the most commonly reported tactics. This wide range in prevalence rates has been explained by differences in the scope of tactics and types of sex included in the survey as well as the procedures used to insure participants’ privacy (Abbey, Parkhill, & Koss, 2005; Tyler, Hoyt, & Whitbeck, 1998). Many of these acts do not fit legal definitions of sex crimes, and researchers avoid using language in their surveys that label these acts as crimes. Nonetheless, most of the studies cited above use phrases such as “when you knew she was unwilling.” Thus, when participants provide an affirmative response, they recognize that they made a woman engage in sex against her wishes. (source)

Look. There are hundreds of influencers and dozens of famous misogynists out there making a buck and recruiting millions in their fucking hate game. The guy my Canadian friend hooked up with is prime pickings for this hate. He has constantly put down women, and, yes, my Canadian friend is not that sort of warped woman, actually. She is independent, a feminist of sorts (more so NOW). How did she get wound around the guy’s pinky? Oh, what an evil web men weave, and it goes deep, real deep into patriarchy and pornograpy and perversion and war and toxic masculinity and blind patriotism and violence and cops and steroids and war TV-Video.

While espousing motivational messages about fitness and financial well-being, controversial influencer Andrew Tate is also a self-described misogynist who advocates male supremacy and celebrates violence against women. Even though he’s been banned from TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, he’s gained a massive online following from video clips posted by fans that garner millions of views and shares. On Twitter, he has more than 4 million followers.

The 36-year-old American-born, British-raised former kickboxing champion was arrested on December 29 in Bucharest, Romania, on charges of rape and human trafficking. Tate employed as many as 75 women in a webcam business; some have accused him of imprisoning them and forcing them to perform sex work. Many of his fans are expressing support for his plight, arguing that Tate is a positive force on men and that the Romanian government is trying to silence him for telling the truth. Tate has encouraged that view. As he was being led away in handcuffs, he could be heard telling cameras that “the Matrix has attacked me,” and he tweeted, “It seems every generation’s great revolutionaries suffer from unfair imprisonment.”

Unfortunately, the Canadian’s country’s overlord, UK, is rife with misogyny, from the bars to the barristers:

Violent offenders who committed attacks in front of children, threatened victims with knives or were convicted of multiple offences are among those spared jail in recent months, according to court records for England and Wales.

The cases were prosecuted under a new law brought in last June that made strangulation and suffocation specific offences in the Domestic Abuse Act. Before the new offences were created, strangulation was often treated as common assault, which carries a maximum six-month sentence. Those convicted under the new law can be jailed for up to five years. (source)

So many thousands of studies on domestic abuse, and strangulation is a big one: “Non-fatal strangulation is an important risk factor for homicide of women”

So, this bloke’s defense attorney is court appointed, and I know where she went to law school. She is using some bullshit gold digger offense in his defense. My friend filed divorce proceedings when the fucker was in jail — three days afterward. You know, to get the healing ball going. Get the law to see that she is breaking ties with the fucker on all levels.

Just that action for the defense lawyer points in her mind that the charges filed against the accused (the cops filed the charges and the DA filed them in more legalistic perpetuity and the grand juror agreed to indict, so tthe victim had nothing to do with specific codes and penalties) were motivated by money?

This guy is a deadbeat, with bank accounts only in his name, and with the house in his name, and secret this and secret that, and money coming in from inheritence, this guy is not flush with cash. They are married, and he did all the things an abuser does to isolate a woman.

Again, the female defense attorney (court appointed, in private practice) is utilizing the stacked deck against the victim — for some sick reason, in this rule of law, Anglo Saxon based shit storm legal system, my friend can’t bring up past incidents of abuse by the guy, unless, I suppose, he takes the stand.

Then, ADA is not a ball buster, so there is that. One plea set out was prison time, five years, but then no counter plea from the defense, which in my mind tells me this guy’s doing his sway the jurors bit — thinking he can sway the jurors with his white man’s charm.

He wants to kill a woman. That’s what he said to my friend, and another person was on the phone with her and heard that statement from him. He loves these Tate fellows, and the other guys, who, Cohen, what have you. Pure hateful men.

This guy hates his mother, hates women in general, and he goes to bars and throws around money for rounds, and unfortunately, we are a broken country, dumb as hell, and that includes women, so many of them fall for this bullshit having some attention paid to their clevage or cute eyes from some pathetic pair of balls and a dick.

Feminism is a specific thing, and it’s anti war, anti capitalism really, so the flip side of the pigs out there are nanny freaks, who insist on any narrative outside their PC box to be censored. Does Tate get a green light since we are in that free speech mode? Algorithms here and there, and what the hell about real discourse?

This is not an aside: The Twitter Files: The Censorship Industrial Complex with Matt Taibbi. I am so against the flip side of Tate. The chlamydia capitalists on both sides of the bacterial manure pile of red-blue politics are both dangerous and fascist. Taibbi isn’t some redneck of misgynist. Take a look here:

But the point is that the judicial system accuses the accuser of lying, and the law hobbles a victim of domestic abuse. The restraining order she had to file against him and his family, more crap. The trial is coming up, but she has not been prepped, and word is she will a few hours the day before the trial starts.

Witnesses for the abuser could be drinking buddies who can say they never saw abuse while in the husband and wife’s company? That’s it in America, as a defense? Any fourth grader knows an abuser can charm on the outside, can hide their hate, in public, but then go irrate in private. That’s how it works.

Crime victim advocates are not all there, emotionally and chutzpah wise. The deputies are running around like chickens with heads cut off. Meth, booze, child abuse, theft, homelessness.

This punk thinks because he has some undergraduate degree and since he now has been off booze for six months (he is a total alcoholic, with liver disease, and more) that the jurors will see him as reformed? Time served in county lock-up? Lessons learned? Reformed? Rehabilitated? He has almost a dozen charges against him. He’s been in jail, with a big bond he never attempted to pay, because he doesn’t need much to survive . . . and he wants to run, flee. He has never had a legitimate job, and alas, there is a good chance he thinks he’ll get to run, and live off inheritence mullah, in a country with brown people, or anywhere his type is treated like a king on the outside but reviled on the inside.

I do know that the profile of an abuser with his past, his family line, his way of thinking doesn’t look good for restorative justice. He has a past relationship where the woman wanted/want nothing to do with him and his verbal abuse. One day when a woman gets out of a relationship and then out of the legal shit, she sees that it has been a nightmare, and she wonders how the fuck she could have been with THAT man for THAT long.

It’s C-PTSD, and in the end, many women never get into another relationship, and some get right back with those fucks who are targeting women who have been abused. The rest of their lives they do not trust almost anyone. Fear, anxiety, hyper vigilance, all of that, and counseling, so can we sue the fuck out of an ex=husband abuser?

The judicial system here and on the otherside of the pond kills those who come forth to report domestic abuse. “Offenders convicted under new law in England and Wales spared jail, analysis carried out by the Observer show.”

This is not hyperbolic — “Behind the Veil: Inside the Mind of Men Who Abuse/ Domestic violence and unmasking the terror of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” And this isn’t just pop-psychology: “How Abusers Speak: Listen for these words that could spell control, or much worse”

This story will be continued.

terminal velocity is for me the head-first, feet-pointed, straight into the miasma of all our hell’s — otsukaresama deshita.

Then you come out one end of the worm hole jitter bugging, while part of your brain is squeezed into black hole nothingness which is for me the whole of it all, the big picture stitched into your narrative, kind reader, and fused with mine.

Until there is a galvanizing force. Again, who and why is big for me, here at ‘Terminal Velocity,’ or elsewhere because the reader is in fact the captain of the ship of words and pasted together sentences that come hurly burly from my noggin’.

So the microcosm, the representative things, all come crashing into my psyche as I attempt to do just “normal” stuff.

Duh, little town of Newport, Oregon, and here we have Founders’ Day Parade, with Highway 101 closed down for the procession of vehicles and fire trucks and horses to file through with bundles of candies to throw at the spectators.

Shit, the triggers were galore, if I was really seated with any form of deep running PTSD: all the U$A flags lining both sides of the road; meeting at the Walmart parking lot for float decorating; all the rah-rah cops and sheriffs; even that coast guard rescue helicopter overhead.

I threw in with the Special Olympics since I am a coach for the Lincoln County contingent. I would have been on the road to Portland, to attend to my wife’s mother’s husband, 78, at OHSU, with the second major glioblastoma surgery cut getting infected, and back to the hospital. We delayed that 150-mile trip a day. That’s a death sentence, the form of brain cancer, and he opts for heroic measures at age 78. He is basically bed bound, and incontinent, and then his wife is 24/7 caretaker. What a hell of a life at age 75 and 78. He had a 104 temperature, and the fine print on the surgical procedure said an infection was possible for the bone flap they cut out to get to the cranium and gray matter while digging out the array of cancer mats, sort of like mats of seaweed in the ocean. The flap is now cut away, out, and a mesh has been inserted, and the fellow lost who he was and was catatonic for a few days, and alas, doctors shooting him up with the most power antibiotics and steriods, the solution, that combo has brought him around a bit, but he’s not the same old father-in-law.

Surgeries and hospital stays totaling $180,000 each time, and then the skilled nursing aftercare, all of it on our dime, US taxpayers (not Zelensky) vis-a-vis the VA and Medicare. The resonating feature is, shit dog, give me my .357 magnum and, bam-oh-bam. Or, if I had some sort of other terminal cancer? One-way trip to Belize or even Cozumel, and then a quick swim with scuba tank to 200 feet, and bye bye regulator and hello barricuda and dark, deep arm trench.

Or, extra pills, extra tequila, a little bit of this and that for the last few meals, a line of cocaine as long as a garter snake, and then seppuku without the sword.

I’m looking at the people on the side of the road, and they are a funny mix of folk, and there is a curious brokenness in their eyes, and their frames and faces all have similar cracked DNA and addiction and post-addiction hues. I am their friend, for sure, but with another turn of the cheek, shit, I see this in Wisconsin, everywhere, there are some sad sacks for Americanos: many are stunted, failure to thrive folk, and others are just huge, loggers and worker bees. The Mexicans and Guatemalans here are short and their broods are facing lots of weight issues. The candy shit is representative of the sweet coated know-nothing of society.

These people are the ones the elites, the beautiful ones, the Poison Ivy Leaguers see as universal marks — Soylent Green is Food, or useless eaters, useless beings, deplorables, but for now, marks, since the systems of oppression are set up to gouge every last dime from the forty-seven percent (remember Romney and his 47 Percent Solution?)

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it — that that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. … These are people who pay no income tax. … [M]y job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” (source)

Ahh, those payroll taxes we all fucking pay. Ahh, all those combinations of state, local, sales, gas and property taxes we all pay. Ahh, all those fines, fees, tolls, penalities, tickets, add-ons, all of that, working for peanuts. In 2011, 78,000 tax filers with incomes between $211,000 and $533,000 paid no income taxes; 24,000 households with incomes of $533,000 to $2.2 million paid no income taxes, and 3,000 tax filers with incomes above $2.2 million paid no income taxes.

Yes, those Clinton-Obama-Trump-Biden-Romney-et al deplorables, useless eaters, we sit on the curb and wait for the parade of cars, trucks, cool souped up vintage wheels . . . and the candy! It’s a hell of a society, no tribes, just amorphous groupings of people who toil, work, have their small values, and are the fodder, man.

Here, Australian Caitlin Johnstone says it clearly what the Romney’s and bigger fishes in their shit pond want for us:

Your rulers do not care what race you are. They do not care if you are gay, transgendered or nonbinary. They do not care how many bullets you are allowed to have in your gun. They do not care whether you are allowed to have an abortion or not. They do not care if you are racist, sexist, ableist, ageist, xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic or fatphobic. They do not care about diverse representation in politics or media, and they do not care about any lack thereof. All they care about is that we all keep thinking, speaking, working, consuming and voting in ways which keep them rich and powerful and keep us poor and powerless. And they will happily keep us arguing as intensely as possible about the things they do not care about so that we don’t turn our attention to the things they do care about.

This doesn’t mean those other issues aren’t real concerns, and in fact our rulers stand everything to gain by exacerbating the injustices involving issues they don’t care about in order to keep attention in those convenient areas. But the solution to the problems our rulers don’t care about is the same as the solution to the problems our rulers do care about: overthrow our rulers. (source)

No fucking phalanx of “Go Jew Zelensky” signs today. No Nazi flags of the blue and yellow vintage. No “My Heart in Ukraine” shit out there on Highway 101. I wonder why? But all of us, even a man lost of tribe like me, in permanent terminal velocity, have zero power to pull any levers.

I did see this one later in my smalltown at the blues, bike and beer festival:

I stood in the road while his fancy SUV took off, with my own finger in the air. Just wanting a conversation. No way, Jose.

This world is la-la land, immediate gratification, people in their 50s who are giddy over Disney cruises, who wear fucking Kansas City Chiefs sweatshirts.

Booze, beach, bikes. As we continually get screwed blued and tatooed by the overlords.

Wisconsin Afterglow

I’ll continue forward and backward with the Wisconsin Fear Porn, for sure, coming up, but not today (you must be bored by now with all my bantering). You have read the many parts to this pasted together Wisconsin life in many parts. This Wisconsin fellow, KK, is amazing, and he is on the tightrope:

My decompression now is getting some of this shit off my chest, and to regroup, as both KK and a fellow, Robert, have emailed me some things regarding the series and my own presence up north in Wisconsin. Vital words from two men, fellows in the slipstream of life. Mostly women do this memoir and self-referential stuff, and it’s me shedding light on thoughtful words from two blokes. Enjoy:

Here, from Robert Norris, who is in Japan, and I am still winding around to finishing up his memoir and writing some good words about his life, man, and the conscientious objector Norris, his Vietnam tornado of broken dreams and new history . . . the linchpin in his book, but his life is more than that time in prison, and he is more than the sum total of being a resister. Mother, man, mother!

He’s deeply ensconced in Japanese language, the culture, and he is there as an ex-pat, but so much more, having married a Japanese woman. He will not be upset that I include his most recent email to me, since it reveals only goodness and concern and deep analysis about himself, the word, and witnin him.

Hey Paul,

In Japanese, there are many formulaic expressions that lend themselves to a wide variety of interpretations, nuances, and uses, all depending on the tone of voice, the social circumstance, the intonation, the tense, and the addition (or lack) of prefixes and suffixes. One of them is “o-tsukare-sama deshita.” The expression came to my mind a lot while reading your recent Substack series about KK and Wisconsin.

Hey Paul,

In Japanese, there are many formulaic expressions that lend themselves to a wide variety of interpretations, nuances, and uses, all depending on the tone of voice, the social circumstance, the intonation, the tense, and the addition (or lack) of prefixes and suffixes. One of them is “o-tsukare-sama deshita.” The expression came to my mind a lot while reading your recent Substack series about KK and Wisconsi

Just the other day, I got an email from one of the consultants who works for my company. She had spent 12 hours at our client’s office, involved in various meetings. When I read about her long and tiring day, my first reaction was that I really wanted to tell her otsukaresama deshita. However, because she is American and doesn’t speak Japanese, this was not possible. And I struggled a bit with how to say it in English.  Finally I had to separate it out into its two key components — acknowledging that she had done something very tiring, and thanking her. So my message became: “Wow, that was a long day. You must have been exhausted! Thanks so much for your hard work.”  That served the purpose, but to be honest wasn’t quite as concise and elegant as the Japanese original.

Similarly, I recently had another team member who has been wrangling a very difficult client, and had spent three hours hashing out the details of an upcoming program with her. I know that this particular client is quite demanding and indeed can be very tiring to deal with. So again I really wanted to say otsukaresama deshita, but knew that wouldn’t be understood by this colleague who does not speak Japanese. So I settled for “I know it takes a lot of energy to deal with this client. Thanks for having the fortitude to work with her for so long at one sitting.”

Thinking about these two examples, I think that otsukaresama deshita is a great case-in-point of how Japanese can compact lots of meaning into a short phrase, whereas it takes a lot more words in English to say the same thing. And also that depending on the situation, the exact words that would be most appropriate to use in English can be very different. I think that this is something that makes English particularly difficult for Japanese speakers, who have handy expressions like this available in their native language.

To accurately render otsukaresama deshita into English, it is important to include both those elements of acknowledging the tiring situation and expressing thanks. I heard recently of a Japanese expatriate working in the U.S. who only did the former, and on top of it the way he said it struck the wrong cord. He had blurted out to an American colleague “You look tired!” but rather than being taken as the sympathetic statement he meant it to be, instead it felt strange to the recipient (and led them to feel concerned about their appearance). “I’m sure that you’re feeling tired after how hard you worked on that.” would have been more effective phrasing for the “acknowledgement of likely tiredness” portion. And including the thanks part is also important.

It’s actually quite a complicated construction. The “o” part is an honorific prefix; “sama” is an honorific suffix. “Deshita” conveys the formal past tense form of a noun. The root part of “tsukare” comes from a verb for “become tired.” The expression can be used simply as a greeting among colleagues or when parting after working together. It can be a means of thanking someone for putting in a long day or of deep appreciation for someone who has struggled through an arduous ordeal. It can even be used sarcastically when you want to tell someone you’re not satisfied with the work they’re doing. I did a little searching on the Net about its usage and found this:

I use it here in its most sincere and appreciative sense because I don’t have an English equivalent for expressing my admiration for the efforts, friendship, and commitment you put into piecing the Substack series together. Many parts of the series, especially in the first two articles, resonated as strongly with me as your piece on the wrestling trip with your dad did a while back.

Among the things that stick with me the most:

Merrill and all its bars reminded me of the Humboldt County, California logging towns I grew up in and all their bars and associated problems and how so many of my friends ended up as green chain pullers, timber fallers, logging truck drivers, mill workers, what have you. For many, the 1970s in particular saw the advent of a “redneck hippie” lifestyle that revolved around working 60-70 hours a week and using up all that overtime pay on inhaling, snorting, guzzling, tippling, and toking every substance known to man in their few off-time hours. A large portion of my best buddies in high school are now six feet under. I was one of the lucky ones who made it out, but not before almost destroying my own liver and other parts of the mind and body.

And yeah there are a few Indian massacre stories connected to those towns, too. In fact, Bret Harte, the 19th century writer, was literally run out of Arcata for writing a story in the local newspaper that exposed the slaughter of supposedly up to 200 Wiyot Indians by a local vigilante group. Details on this story can be found at https://www.historynet.com/bret-hartes-voice-for-the-wiyots/

Nice touch at the end of episode three — mixing your poem with one by Medorra Addison and another by Bukowski.

Good thoughts included in “Freedom of the Press Means Having a Press in the First Place.”

Of all the stuff I read, there’s one phrase you used that kind of sums up everything: “Toothless in Wisconsin. America.” I can’t get that out of my head, that and all the accompanying details that led to KK becoming so.

Random thought from an older reader’s point of view: You are at your most powerful when your journalistic instincts take over — the dialog, the give and take with the people around you, the details of the environment in the moment, the smells, the sounds, the summary of ideas and thoughts discussed, descriptions of other people’s movements and gestures. It’s all there. Your choices in subject matter convey the message. When you start on a rant, it’s usually engaging in the beginning, but occasionally in your excitement, anger, frustration, or whatever emotional wave you’re riding at the moment, you begin to take the reader down a completely different road. Proustian, yes, but sometimes with an abruptness that confuses the reader a bit. Not that I don’t like being led on a new and intriguing adventure, but in a sense, you’re preaching to the choir and the choir doesn’t really need to be convinced. They’re going to ride with you till the end anyway. For older readers like myself, there’s already a permanent fatigue from carrying the weight of decades of similar anger, disappointment, frustration, etc. that comes from dealing with whatever system holds us in tow and is leading us toward the abyss. What we look for now when we commit ourselves to concentrating on a piece of writing is a little balance and even dark humor to lift us up and give us a shot of courage to find the energy to do battle one more time.

But really that’s just a minor thing, an insignificant critique. Just finished reading the most recent piece “Scar after Scar” and got a lot out of it.  Good strong ending — yeah, like almost everyone I know, hanging on by a thread. That pretty much sums up the state of affairs for the lot of us. Sorry about going off on my own tangents. I actually started out with the intention of telling you that I finally got my website a secure connection. New domain name at

Robert Norris!

If you’re still up for a video call one of these days, I’m free most anytime other than Tuesdays. That’s my physical therapy day for trying to keep these aging, arthritic joints from freezing up entirely. It doesn’t cost much and is one of the benefits of having paid into the teachers’ union here for nearly 30 years. Japan’s social security net is still functioning but just barely and probably not for much longer. If you want to put a face and a voice to the person behind these ramblings, there’s a link on my website’s “Media” page to a recent YouTube interview I had with the editor of a journal in India. You might get a chuckle.

That’s it for now. I need to take a nap. “O-tsukare-sama deshita.” Write back when you get a chance.

Robert

+—+

Ahh, schucks, you know this sort of communique warms the communist cockles of my heart. And, “them’s fighting words” also seems to percolate from my 148-mph terminal velocity sum a bitch freefall mind when I get yanked on the chain about my diatribes, my stream of consciousness and those so-called rants, taking the reader astray.

Just kidding, since Robert is a comrade, for sure, and I am not as touchy as I appear. Drama school, man, call it the Gonzo Method Acting School, a la, much animas thrown in, with doses of real communistic zeal.

Helen Mirren, the Oscar-winning actor, has criticised drama schools for “stifling” the natural instincts of young actors.

The star, who appears in a series of online acting masterclasses, told the Observer: “I’m very ambivalent about drama teachers and the classes that people go to. I think people’s instincts are crushed by bad drama teaching. I’ve watched it happen.”

While acknowledging that people “can be really opened” by drama training, she said that others suffer because “individuality is stifled”.

“It’s so often that the people who are actually the best are the ones who are thrown out of drama school because they’re idiosyncratic. They’re peculiar. They don’t fit any nicely tied-up box. In fact, they are the most interesting artists,” she said. “I’ve known people who were thrown out of drama school for not conforming to what the school felt was going to be a viable option in the profession.” (source)

Here, a little shit piling on over at Ed Curtain, who I love as a writer, but then, the RFK, Jr, for President thing kills the older man. “Although Scarred by Violence, We Must Not Be Scared into Silence”

It’s the old saw, “My Man is the Man Now for the Job of POTUS.” I know I speak another language in every venue I end up in, but here, some of the back and forth on that piece:

Ed Curtain says:

May 4, 2023 at 7:40 pm

Stop the bullshit, Paul. You applied for a job with RFK, Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense and are pissed off. Resentment is not appealing.

Paul K Haeder says:

May 4, 2023 at 11:23 pm

Oh, no, Ed. I needed a job, and I am a journalist, and so I applied and did my duty. The job was not about RFK, and I thought I’d be an asset. You know, they wanted me on toxics, environment, pollution.

Nothing about backing or bashing RFK or pharma.

Now now, thanks for the working class shout out. I do not resent CHD or RFK. Are you kidding? I am a communist, dude, and nothing the democrats and/or republicans have served up as hell in my neck of the woods is good.

So, you are now telling the world that my points are illegit because I applied for a journalism job that happens to be with CHD?

It was clear I was applying for science writing, which I have done.

Now, if I sequestered myself from everything American and USA, then I’d have a hard time taking Benjamins for anything I do.

Now, if I got the job, and then this happened (see belo), I’d say adios, CHD.

Goddamn, Ed, now you are an armchair psychiatrist?

Enjoy your man, his CHD.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/gFRUHxhneGA?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

And, alas, I am done with you and your attack on me. What pathetic treatment of a commentator who doesn’t have the gobsmacked disease for any of these multimillionaire charlatans.

Sad,

Allan says:

May 5, 2023 at 1:07 pm

“I am a communist [i.e. a thirsty totalitarian]”, and personnel is policy. So it does not matter what you imagine your “science writing” credentials and skills to be. You’re so radioactive that CHD and RFK would have be foolish and desperate to hire you for anything, even stuffing envelopes for the next fundraiser. And now, thanks to so-called AI, one can obtain tweakable science writing without associating directly and publicly with a thirsty, burrowing commie.

Art Costa says:

May 5, 2023 at 4:17 pm

Red Herring.

Paul K Haeder says:

May 5, 2023 at 6:43 pm

Are you just dead? Ahh, radio …. active, that should be up RFK’s alley since he wants nuke energy to bring about this digital dashboard/social impact Brave New World.

I’ll take a Communist Mayor over probably all of your yokels, Allan . . . .

+–+

“Grigny isn’t often in the news for good reasons. The poorest city in France, this banlieue south of Paris is marked by massive unemployment and abandoned housing estates. For much of French media, Grigny is the very image of a “no-go zone”: one of its sons, Amedy Coulibaly, murdered four people at a Kosher supermarket in the 2015 terrorist attacks.

Yet there is also a fight to save the city from its plight — led by local mayor Philippe Rio, a member of the French Communist Party. In 2017, he organized the “Appeal from Grigny,” signed by hundreds of other mayors calling for investment in the banlieues. His innovative social programs and a COVID response based on locally issued emergency food vouchers this year saw him handed the biennial “best mayor in the world” award.

The prize given by the World Mayor Foundation hadn’t gone to a Communist before (and even this time around it was co-awarded to Rotterdam’s mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb, a member of the Dutch Labour Party). But Philippe Rio’s administration has also had a wider impact in his homeland, especially through its lifelong education programs and its success in geothermal energy production, which has slashed residents’ bills.

+–+

Yeah, totalitarian.

RE:Jacobin!

+–+

PHILIPPE RIO:

I’ve been a member of the PCF since 1995 — since the last century. I’m often asked what it means to be a Communist. But I remember why I joined the party back then — and looking at France, today I’d have twice as much reason to join a movement whose guiding star is indignation against injustice.

I am myself a product of municipal-level communism. I’ve never been around what’s happening at the “top” of society, but rather the work of all those invisible activists — blue-collar workers, employees, and public servants — who devote their free time to helping others live better. It was they who trained me up in the life of associations, first of all on the sports field, which is about the people who give their time and money to helping you play in a football match.

We don’t exactly have oil to tap. But we do have geothermal energy, and we do have a totally different vision.

In this context, you experience magnificent things, even if you come from a poor background like mine. My dad was an unemployed worker, my parents experienced the downgrading of the working class, and sometimes there wasn’t even much to eat. So I had the food aid and the Secours Populaire [a grassroots solidarity initiative], including from the Communist town hall.

It’s probably too long for a knee-jerking funny guy like you, but give it a spin:

Selling RFK Jr. On Next-Gen Nuclear Part 2

Alas, I am breaking Robert’s Rule, here, going off the rails, tangents galore, way-way stream of battered brain syndrome consciousness, but that’s how I am wired, sort of, now, while yelling at those windmills, or wind turbines, something out there ready for the Haeder Raider Effect. I still got my .357 magnum and double barrel 12 gauge.

If you get a chance, read the piece on this Mayor:

Philippe Rio

The Communist Party has its victories and defeats. Life’s like that — there are no strongholds and no election wins are guaranteed. We have to pick ourselves up and continually reinvent ourselves.

It’s true — today the working class has changed. But I can assure you, the poor are still here. When people ask me, what’s the difference, Philippe, between when you lived in Grande Borne forty years ago and today, I say it’s that then there was 5 percent unemployment and now the figure is 50 percent. With its renewed hunger to capture wealth, liberal society is also creating poor workers.

In France, mayors are the most respected politicians. People have a more positive image of us than MPs, whether they vote for us or not. So we have a special responsibility as a last defensive dam of the Republic, in a moment where people no longer believe what the president or national representatives say. That’s also why we’re working on proposing national solutions, to answer the questions people are asking me face-to-face. That means confronting the challenge of the social transition, but also ecological transition. As a nice line by Nicolas Hulot puts it, that means connecting the problem of the end of the world to the problem of how people can make it to the end of the month.

[No Monster here, photo credit!]

Now, KK, Kelly, sent me this kind, comrade sort of email, and I reproduce it here to emplify his humanity, and he did get my own forwarding of Robert Norris’ email to me last night, and, here, more humanity precipitated by that Norris email, even or especially because HE IS TOOTHLESS IN WISCONSIN.

Paul: I was thinking about family, last night. And, when I think about my past, going all the way back to a severed finger, I have a revelation about family. My family consists of people named Paul, and Lisa, and Jojo, and now, Robert.

People who seem to at least give a god dam.

I’ve tried to covey to you, just how extraordinary that I think that you are. Talk-walker is the highest praise that I know of. A man of his word. A rarity in my experience.

Your generosity, in deed, and in your expressions of humanity, while unusual, are par for the course in the way that I have tried to conduct myself, with folks that I have taken an interest in, and pity upon.

Maybe I admire in you, what I admire most in myself. I see what Robert is saying about preaching to the choir. And, we are definitely on the same page when it comes to employing dark humor.

The chaos of our eight days has been replaced by stone silence. Not a voice to be heard since Tuesday. Except for a wary, crooked lawyer, that is. That’s not really a human voice anyway. Just kind of a bot, making sounds.

I know that Elldee (the weiner dog) really enjoyed your time with us. He appreciated having some lovin’ from someone besides the old man. He hovers now, always wanting to be next to me, on working his way onto my lap. His bed on the floor isn’t cutting it anymore.

I don’t know if I have adequate expressed my deeply felt gratitude for your friendship, manifest in so many ways. Your visit, a manifestation of your friendship, writ large, is but the tip of the iceberg, in the myriad of ways that you have propped up this tired old man.

Your humanity, towards this broken thing called Kelly, has been bearing fruit, for what seems like years now. Day in, and day out. The notebook that I gave to you, exemplifies how it has been between you and I.

I want to be able to stand on my own two feet. But, I’m not sure if I was made that way. Maybe before Fishbone (Cheri, his deceased wife) came along. Maybe then I could face the world alone. But, when she became part of me, I found a new, and better way of living. In concert. Self sacrifice, that felt so good. Not a sacrifice really. A joy. My pleasure.

Having children only expanded, and intensified those feelings. But, the flip side is loss, and rejection. In spite of all the beatings, both literal, and figurative, I always had a spark. Determination. The will, and the energy, to overcome anything. I was beat down, but I was never tired. Now, I feel, not tired, but exhausted.

And, when I look at the photos that you took, I see tired, exhausted. I don’t see the fight in that face, anymore. I see a person marking time, and not resisting the end of his time. Maybe not welcoming it, but then again, maybe hoping for a conclusion.

I’ve been trained well.

The tendency is to call myself a weakling. A crybaby. A wimp.

Those tropes don’t get through anymore.

I feel like crying, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. I have a right to be sad.

If someone says that I don’t, then either they’re crazy, or I am. And, if I am crazy, then I embrace my craziness, and embrace what feels real to me. The sounds of silence.

This iPhone typewriter doesn’t even have the decency to light up the room with the sounds of ideas, like a real typewriter.

All I hear is tinnitus.

I’m proud of having figured out how to play the few CDs that I have remaining. I accomplished something worthwhile. The Clockwork Angels album. A big concert for Fishbone, and I. Our only VIP show. Give the album a listen. Especially, The Garden, and Wish Them Well.

I wonder if I’ll ever mimic Geddy Lee, ever again? Of course I wonder. I’ve been with the bass, as long as I’ve been with Fishbone. When I would tear it up, on the stage, Fishbone was there, having joy for me, seeing me in my element. Nailing it. Every note. I was playing for everyone, but always for her.

And, later, for Molly. The infant. Screaming into the microphone. How we all laughed. “That girl’s got some pipes on her. Get her in the band.”

And, now it feels like it’s all dead. I’ve waited for over ten years for all of the kids to come around. It’s been a wasted ten years. I don’t think that I have another ten to spare.

But, my love for these kids just won’t go away.

Please tell Robert that I really appreciate him reading, and listening, and relating. And, I appreciate you for telling this part of my story. Even if no one is listening, still.

Finally, someone is offering a look at reality, instead of a contrived, exploitative, narrative. And, it’s not mine.

It’s a fresh pair of eyes doing the talking.

Kelly

++—++

Need I say more? They — both Kelly and Robert — say it all:

And, a short story, as a kicker, referencing Norris’ letter above, Bret Harte:

“The Outcasts of Poker Flat” by Bret Harte

John Oakhurst was a gambler. He had lived in the small western town of Poker Flat for only a short time. He had defeated many people at cards. He had also won a lot of their money. For that reason alone, he was not well liked.

On the morning of November twenty-third, eighteen fifty, he saw some men talking as he walked down the main street of town. As he came near, they got quiet. He said to himself, “Hmmm, I guess they are talking about me. And that can’t be good.” Oakhurst was right. Some of the town’s leaders had met secretly and decided to force some people to leave. They thought Poker Flat would be a better place to live if those people were gone.

Besides Oakhurst, two women of low morals were led to the edge of town. They were the “Duchess” as she was called, and “Mother Shipton.” A man called “Uncle Billy” was added to the group. He was known to drink too much. Some people thought that he had also stolen some gold. They had no proof. But that did not matter. Uncle Billy was just no good, and he had to go. The “outcasts” were told that if they ever came back, they would be killed.

So, the four of them slowly rode out of town. The “Duchess” cried and said she would probably die on the road. Mother Shipton and Uncle Billy cursed. “Mother” said she would like to “cut the heart out” of the people who done this to them. But John Oakhurst rode in silence. He thought all of life was a gamble. He had just run into some bad luck. That was all.

The outcasts were headed for Sandy Bar, a camp not too far away. But it was high up in the cold Sierra Mountains, and the path was anything but smooth. Around noon, Mother Shipton became so tired she fell off her horse. She said that was as far as she was going today. Oakhurst tried to make them move on because they had no food or fuel. But the three would not listen. Instead they began to drink alcohol that Uncle Billy had hidden. Soon they were quiet and asleep.

Oakhurst did not drink. He stood nearby and watched them. He began to think about his life and about how lonely he was. Yet he was stronger than his three companions. He could have left them there and set off alone. But he did not.

Then, he heard someone call “John Oakhurst.” A young man named Tom Simson came riding up. The gambler knew Tom. They had once played cards and Oakhurst had won. But after the game, he told young Tom that he was too easy to beat. And he gave him back his money. Tom said Oakhurst would be his friend for life.

Tom was not alone. From behind a tree came his new wife, a girl named Piney Woods. Her father had not wanted her to marry Tom. So they had run away. Tom told Oakhurst that he had a little food. He also showed him an old log house just off the path. Years of harsh weather had nearly ruined it. But it was all they had, and it would have to do. The women could spend the night in there. The men would make a fire and sleep on the ground by the door.

The night seemed to pass quickly. But the weather became colder. The wind increased, and it began to snow. Oakhurst had a bad feeling. He turned to where Uncle Billy had slept, and found him gone. He had left the others and even taken their horses. Oakhurst said Uncle Billy had probably gone for help. But he knew better. The group of five decided to wait for the snow to stop before traveling farther. They no longer had horses. From here on, they would be on foot.

By the third day out from Poker Flat, the snow had gotten deep. They could no longer see the path. Food was running low. Everything around them was white and cold. One week later they still had not moved. The snow had continued to fall and was deeper than ever. And it continued to fall. It formed a prison they could not escape. Still, they could see smoke rising from the warm fires in the houses down below in Poker Flat. The site seemed especially cruel.

But the little group of outcasts tried to keep up their spirits. They tried to stay as warm as they could. They sat together by their own open-air fire. And Tom Simson pulled a small accordion from his pack. Piney Woods played the instrument. They all sang songs. The music took on a defiant quality, a quality of resistance. But the outcasts had to listen to the sad cries of their mostly empty stomachs. The hunger got worse with each passing day.

At midnight on the tenth day, Mother Shipton called Oakhurst to her side. She said, “Give this to the young ones.” In a bag was all her food. She had not eaten for days. She had saved the food for the others. She turned quietly to the wall of the log house, and died.

John Oakhurst began to think that none of them would live out the storm. He gave Tom Simson a pair of snowshoes and asked him to try to walk back to Poker Flat for help. He guessed it would take Tom at least two days, if not more, to get there. Tom kissed his new bride and left on foot. Soon he was out of sight. The Duchess and Piney were surprised, and frightened, when Oakhurst also turned to leave. “You’re not going, too,” they cried. He said, “Only a little way. I need to find us some help.”

At that time of year, daylight did not last long. When night came, Oakhurst had not returned. The two women were too hungry, weak, and cold to even add more wood to the fire. They passed the stormy night holding each other close. And that is the way they were found the next morning when help arrived from Poker Flat. They had frozen to death during the night.

The rescuers from town said that they had been right to force the outcasts to leave Poker Flat. But they never thought the punishment would end up like this. Justice was one thing, but freezing people to death was not their aim. And then they thought of the gambler. Where was he? What had happened to him? They searched as best they could. And then, they found him.

Under a tall tree a playing card was stuck into the wood by a knife. On the card was written: “Beneath this tree lies the body of John Oakhurst, who had some bad luck starting the twenty-third of November, eighteen fifty. He handed in his cards on the seventh of December, the same year.”

Oakhurst sat there, cold and still. They said he looked peaceful. A single bullet from a small hand gun nearby had ended his life. John Oakhurst had been both the strongest, and the weakest, of the outcasts of Poker Flat.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Fin++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

overused . . . traumatized . . . PTSD . . . C-PTSD . . . our children are dying!

Every child in the U$A needs two, three weeks, on the coast, in forest, with elders, with First Nations, with Salmon and Whale stories, with fires and talking circles and learning how to do beadwork and smoke salmon and boil mussels. Every child needs to see the world is way beyond the black mirror (phone), beyond the project the Jewish Masters of Software/Surveillance/Crypto Internet of Bodies/AI/VR/AR Hell they have in store for the masses. Way beyond the hell the Gentiles and Religious Ones have set upon the masses, too. School to prison pipeline? School to addiction pipeline.

Out here, in Siletz and Alsea Native land, we have this odd gesture: a former slave, from the south, bought his freedom for $1000 and ended up west, here, in Waldport, and he established the first school, the first everything, in a way, and now, more than a hundred years later, the park in town is dedicated to his name, Louis Southworth, and the play fields will have this bronze statue overlooking the play. See, “You Can’t Have Your Mule and Forty Acres, Too!”

This then dovetails back to the Wisconsin fun, my series on my short stay in Wisconsin, there as triage and first responder for my new friend, well, friend for more than 12 months, but first time having a face to face with KK in his home state.

Ten years total in prison and jails. $100,000 thrown away into the criminal injustice system, to the laywers, etc. Drinking and driving. And, I was his driver, since it will literally take thousands upon thousands of dollars to even try to get his driver’s license.

He’s on supervision, now the past three years. His arrest — the alleged crimes — just evidence of more shit storm predicated on a bad judge, conflation by cops, over-charging, small-town cop shop, DA, and judges. He made the front page of the newspaper in River Falls. He appeared like the worst iteration of a white ISIS. All wrong.

I have permission to ghost write his memoir, which thus far has been here in four parts, with a hell of a lot of me thrown in. His granddaughter is okay with her life pathway being put out here in WWW-Landia. It’s a tale of many traumas. Not unusual, but unique to her, and so emblematic of more decay in our systems for youth, for families, evidenced by all the crap of these realities of our lack of nuclear family — for many many reasons, including all that goes with Chlamydia Capitalism.**

**Chlamydia Capitalism is the process of oligarchs working with the Citizens United Koch-US Chamber of Commerce sorts to figure out how to rape the country, individuals, families, and entire regions. So, a place like Wisconsin, called the Arkansas of the North, has hundreds of dairy farms and corn and soy and hay operations to feed the milk producers (manure and urine producers, too) and on the surface, it seems as if some people are doing well, fulfilling the calorie rich American Dream/Nightmare. Literally, the list: pain when urinating, unusual vaginal discharge, pain in the tummy or pelvis, pain during sex, bleeding after sex, bleeding between periods.

Now scale this up to consumer and retail and merchants of war capitalism is about pain, in the ass and stomach. Bleeding after eviction, foreclosure, repossession. Unusual mental and physical discharge because of inflammatory capitalism. This Chlamydia Capitalism takes its toll on generation after generation. Sure, syphlitic capitalism is also another more dramatic form, where our brains and nervous system fails because of this predatory-casino-zombie-usury capitalism. The disease is a reminder of how pernicioius Shock Doctrine/Economic Hit Men capitalism is in the body politic and citizenry at large. **

Above, K and Ivy, grandfather and granddaughter, 65 and 19 respectively. Wisconsin born and bred.

He feels responsible for Ivy hanging on by a thread, spiritually. You know, heroin, cocaine and fentynal in solution and shot up in her precious delicate veins. You can read high end stuff all over the place, in libraries and on the Internet, on the why’s and what’s and how’s and where’s and how’s of this rural addiction: “Differential drug use patterns among sexually abused adolescent girls in treatment for chemical dependency” (source)

A sample of 444 girls admitted to adolescent chemical dependency treatment was divided into four groups based on sexual abuse experiences. Girls who reported intrafamilial abuse, extrafamilial abuse, or both, were compared with nonvictims in terms of alcohol and drug use histories. Prevalence and frequency of alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine did not differ significantly among the groups. However, all sexual abuse victims were significantly more likely to regularly use stimulants, sedatives, tranquilizers, and hallucinogens. Sexual abuse victims also reported earlier onset of alcohol and drug use, more self-medication, and more use to escape family problems.

Or, “Substance abuse among sexually abused adolescents and their families.”

The concurrence of substance abuse and history of sexual abuse among adolescents has prompted this study of substance abuse patterns among families of adolescents who report incest or extrafamilial sexual abuse. A total of 3,179 ninth-grade students in a rural midwestern state completed a survey that included questions about individual and family substance abuse. Adolescents who had been sexually abused were more likely to report substance abuse for themselves as well as for members of their immediate families. They were also more likely to report that they used substances because of family problems, school problems, and because they were sad, lonely, or angry. Adolescents reporting a parent with an alcohol or a drug problem were more likely to use cigarettes, marijuana, alcohol, or “speed.” Adolescents experiencing extrafamilial abuse reported more alcohol abuse and more alcohol-related problems than those who experienced incest. There were similar reports of parental and familial alcohol and drug problems among these experiencing incest and those experiencing extrafamilial abuse. Those with drug-abusing parents, however, were most likely to report some kind of sexual abuse history. (source)

I spent time with Ivy, and she was fighting her aunt’s from-the-right-place-in-her-heart attempt to take Ivy into her house and keep her there isolated andthen get her into a drug treatment program in River Falls. Ivy left a program two days before her “graduation” a few months ago. “I didn’t do it for myself,” she told us. “I know I will have to do any recovery for myself, at the right time.”

Homeless, on the streets, couch surfing, missing in action. Typical stuff.

Scars, man. Rejection by her mother: “I wish you were never born.” And, after Kelly’s wife died, Ivy’s grandmother, the words, “I wish it was you instead of her who died.”

Ivy intimated that she was molested and was raped, young. Generational trauma, and school shit, the entire state of bad education, bad peer groups and a shit-load of ruined youth, you know, that Midwest glow.

It’s textbook, typical of “research” on what the state of this or that region is tied to youth and drug abuse:

Though often perceived to be a problem of the inner city, substance use and misuse have long been prevalent in rural areas. Rural adults have higher rates of use for tobacco and methamphetamines, while prescription drug misuse and heroin use has grown in towns of every size.

Substance use can be especially hard to combat in rural communities due to limited resources for prevention, treatment, and recovery. According to The 2014 Update of the Rural-Urban Chartbook, the substance use treatment admission rate for nonmetropolitan counties was highest for alcohol as the primary substance, followed by marijuana, stimulants, opiates, and cocaine.

Factors contributing to substance use in rural America include:

• Low educational attainment
• Poverty
• Unemployment
• Lack of access to mental healthcare
• Isolation (Rural Health Information Hub)

Some powerful shit: Just 2 milligrams of fentanyl, the small amount that fits on the tip of a pencil, can be lethal depending on a person’s body size, tolerance and past usage

There are no unicorns or rainbows in Wisconsin: However, there are rainbow-colored fentanyl tablets.

In Chlamydia Capitalism, we have stop gap measures, band-aids, those non-holistic and zero systems thinking “things” that are not solutions at the core: all those things that do employ people, are part of the Complex, that is, the profit-making operations sucking us blind; stuff that’s traded on some stock market or exchange. It is expensive being poor and it makes millionaires out of those exploiting the poor. Narcan. (Emergent, the maker of the opioid overdose antidote Narcan, said in a statement Thursday that it is aiming for an out-of-pocket price of less than $50 for its nasal spray product now that the US Food and Drug Administration allows for over-the-counter sales.)

The story behind a granddaughter goes to the mother, Kelly’s daughter. Whatever is tragic there, with Ivy’s mother, carries into the gene code, epigenetics.

It is still being studied:

My trauma research team quickly trained health professionals to evaluate and, if needed, treat the women. We monitored them through their pregnancies and beyond. When the babies were born, they were smaller than usual—the first sign that the trauma of the World Trade Center attack had reached the womb. Nine months later we examined 38 women and their infants when they came in for a wellness visit. Psychological evaluations revealed that many of the mothers had developed PTSD. And those with PTSD had unusually low levels of the stress-related hormone cortisol, a feature that researchers were coming to associate with the disorder.

Surprisingly and disturbingly, the saliva of the nine-month-old babies of the women with PTSD also showed low cortisol. The effect was most prominent in babies whose mothers had been in their third trimester on that fateful day. Just a year earlier a team I led had reported low cortisol levels in adult children of Holocaust survivors, but we’d assumed that it had something to do with being raised by parents who were suffering from the long-term emotional consequences of severe trauma. Now it looked like trauma could leave a trace in offspring even before they are born. (How Parents’ Trauma Leaves Biological Traces in Children: Adverse experiences can change future generations through epigenetic pathways”)

I’ve heard stories before going to Wisconsin (and Kelly told me his own tied to going to Kansas for a late term abortion). One tragedy after another in rural America. Drinking and fornicating. Late term abortions. Then, fathers having to drop thousands of dollars and go to another state to abide by a daughter’s eight month fetal abortion.

The story goes national, here, now:

After the Roe v. Wade decision made abortion legal in the U.S., George Tiller drew attention from anti-abortion advocates for being one of only a few physicians in the nation who provided late-term abortions.

“Shrewd and resourceful, Dr. Tiller made himself the nation’s pre-eminent abortion practitioner, advertising widely and drawing women to Wichita from all over with his willingness to perform late-term abortions, hundreds each year,” the New York Times wrote in an article published after his death.

“Trust Women” was the motto of the late Wichita physician and abortion provider, who kept performing late-term abortions even after one anti-abortion extremist fire bombed his clinic and another shot him five times.

Abortion opponents also blockaded Tiller’s clinic and threatened his life.

But Tiller kept providing abortions until an anti-abortion extremist tracked him down and assassinated him at age 67 in 2009 during a Sunday service at the church he attended. (source)

Tiller has been quoted by many that late term abortions are tragedies, serious, that this sort of unimaginable situation is so tragic that a woman should never get herself in this position again. That this was a new lease on a woman’s life. Tragic. Of course, the trauma of whatever enrages women carries on and certainly two or three abortions are normal for many in this situation, including those who visited Tiller’s clinic.

The epigenetic pathway discussion is rarified and genuine, but in WIsconsin, where does it go when the family is immolated with pain, with dysfunction (terrible term), community standards that call for drinking and drowning? A smart young woman like Ivy is working at Walmart, and she is still deep in her addiction, and when I asked her if she enjoys life, she said she does. She said she has not harmed anyone in this life of shooting up, addiction. She said she hasn’t stolen for this addiction. Nor has she prostituted herself.

Her story is a story of many quilts in America. And, knowing her and her aunts and her uncles and her grandfather, and knowing what childhood trauma does, and the peer pressure, and the zoning out and checking out many youth in USA fall into, we have a recipe of over-incarceration, under-treating, so many prognastications on what to do or what the causes are, and then broken social services, underfunded treatment and lack of school counselors, and then an entire society that is so superficial and uncaring and mean and sarcastic and snarky, we have entire regions of the country where we have one lost generation after another, one family at a time!

I took this shot in Hanoi years ago, and I wonder what is up with the child now, as he is now a young adult. What of the epigenetics of Vietnam bombed and brutalized by the Best and the Brightest Generation? Intergenerational trauma. I didn’t see many homeless and drugged out youth in my months there.

I know in America — holding these Americans with puffed up chests going around thinking this is the center of the universe, and that you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and if you fail, and if you self-destruct, then let the dog-eat-dog Chlamydia Capitalism take hold — crumbling is part of the big picture.

Part One: Here. Part Two: Through the Looking Glass — Meth, Fentynal, Unbelievable Dread of Living in Wisconsin. 3rd Part: Dual Diagnosis: The ‘Other’ America Failing; Part Four, Would You Leave Your Pet Monkey Alone with this Guy? And, an interview with “Haeder Infusion” (Fifth Part) : Q & A Wisconsin: Inside the Eye of the Storm.

Kelly’s story is one of a kid being sexually assaulted young and then falling into self medication: booze. He never went into the Meth hell of rural Wisconsin, or urban Minn. Never did cocaine or heroin or pills to kill his pain.

He did have a psychiatrist, who worked in a prison, Stillwater, Minn., a man who helped Kelly with his generational trauma, the rape he experienced in Merrill at age 13. His name was Ivan W. Sletten, and Kelly is honorific toward the man, who got Kelly on various medications to stave off the suicidal thoughts, depression, fear, anxiety. Kelly tried maybe thirty different drugs in an attempt to carve out new thinking and feeling process for broke Kelly.

“The DEA shut him down, got his license revoked. He died six months after that. He was doing innovative things with medications, and that was what was controversial int he eyes of the rotten DEA. I saw his clinic, in Stillwater, Minn. The lobby was filled with the dregs of society . . . hurting people . . . broken people. They were not drug seekers, but rather looking for help as they all were dealing with this and that mental pain. Trauma. Hell holes of not their own making.”

That was then, and here, from a 1962 newsletter:

Intersections, man:

Psychiatrist and Champion of Social Responsibility. Dr. Ivan Wayne Sletten died on January 30, 2014 of complications from pneumonia and related health issues. He was 84 years old and was born on March 9, 1929.

Back in the 1960s, Ivan Sletten was part of pioneering work with electronic data processing for psychiatric disorders at the Missouri Institute of Psychiatry in St. Louis, Missouri. He would go on in private practice for two decades, serving with compassion many patients in St. Louis, Missouri and Stillwater, Minnesota.

He practiced in Stillwater, Minnesota until his retirement in 2013 at age 83. Dr. Sletten was a champion of the less fortunate in this world. For decades he supported those who worked for social justice. In the last 15 years in Minnesota he focused on injustices in the criminal justice system, especially on drug law reform. He also provided financial support for research on multiple sclerosis.

“With malice toward none, and charity for all…..”, from Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, were the words he lived by every day of his life. He is survived by four children, Ingrid, Paul, Karen and Mark, his sister Loretta Wittig and eight fabulous grandchildren: Nick, Kate, Arthur, Lucas, Lilly, Gwen, Morgan and Evan. His beloved wife Grace Lorraine Sletten (Zastrow) preceded him in death in 2005.

His children wish to acknowledge their love and appreciation for his cherished companion, Marie Buttrey, who made the last years of his life full of joy and fun.

Dr. Sletten graduated from the University of Wisconsin medical school in 1955. He took his training in psychiatry at the University of Minnesota. He published more than 100 articles in his lifetime, and was a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. Dr. Sletten received many awards in his lifetime for social causes. These organizations include NAMI, American Psychiatric Association, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Multiple Sclerosis Society.

Kelly talks much about the kindness of the man, how he came all the way up to a prison Kelly was locked up in to see how he was doing. The Correctional Officers gave him hell, and he took off his feeding tube in order to get through the security gate.

The family has been hollowed out, bombed to smithereens. Self-imploding, genetic lineage, the entire systems of oppression and atomization. Kelly’s family is like millions: hanging on by a thread!

asking KK about life, where he was, how he got here, where his past intersects with his insanity and sanity . . . philosophical, and archetypical

“If we allow the pieces of our culture to lie scattered in the dust of history, trampled on by racism and grief, then yes, we are irreparably damaged. But if we pick up the pieces and use them in new ways that honor their integrity, their colors, textures, stories—then we do those pieces justice, no matter how sharp they are, no matter how much handling them slices our fingers and makes us bleed.”

—Deborah A. Miranda

---

This is Devil’s Churn, just down the road from my home, Waldport, Oregon. In and out, in and out. King tides attract the tourists and photographers. A grandpa, 62, tried jumping over the rocks, but fell in and the Coast Guard found his body a few miles out to sea.

Kelly K told me about a tornado that came crashing through Merrill a few years ago. Some fellow found himself pulled up and trafficked hundreds of yards away, deposited, unhurt, one hell of a trip.

In some sense, Kelly is that tornado, the tsunami, that king tide, or at least a product of so much turbulence that his story, and all the intersections of his life and his friends and family’s lives, tie into the story of a dream deferred and Requiem for a Nightmare.

Hold fast to dreams

For when dreams go

Life is a barren field

Frozen with snow.

– Langston Hughes

More of the dream:

“Harlem”

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore–

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over–

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?”

― Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems

1. How would you define your life say to a granddaughter. Keep it simple.

Ivy, Jayda, Damien, Braden, Jacob, Chelsey, Courtney, Cassidy, Kyle, Hailey, grampa would define his life in the terms of the biblical parable of the talents. My talents have been wasted. I was the best, and the brightest, since before I hit skool. Straight A’s without effort. Musically gifted, and obsessed. But, the educational system raped me, the legal system raped me, just as bad as a perverted old man. But, talents don’t just disappear.

They manifest themselves no matter where you are. So, my talents were directed, not towards fame, and fortune, and “success”. They were directed at my partner, my progeny, my parents, my community, not writ large, but in the fine print.

I have no regrets. I don’t want my legacy on the big screen. I look for in in the faces, and the words, of each fellow traveler that I have the opportunity to introduce myself to.

I love all you kids.I just want you to be truly happy.

2. Booze did you in, in many ways. Talk about the power of booze in a man’s life, yours.

Booze. Alcohol. Adult beverages. Drink. I can only speak intelligently about the effects of alcoholic beverages upon THIS man’s life.

I have made many observations of “alcoholics” in the course of a lifelong battle with alcohol. Many treatments. Many AA meetings. No meaningful relationships were found in all of those years in the AA sober society.

It’s a god damn cult, people. I have been around beer for as long as I can remember.

Running around at gramma’s with all the cousins, when we got thirsty it was a swig of dad’s beer, or a pull off the garden hose. No Pepsi for the kids. Beer for the adults though.

Anyway’s I always chose the hose.Didn’t like Old Style. After I was molested, all my childhood mates evaporated. I was a solo act. Until Rod Messerschmidt, appeared at my tennis court, by Franklin skool, and I had my first friend.

He was trash. From the wrong side of the tracks. So people said. Turned out his dad was a pedophile. Rod introduced me to alcohol in a party setting, with people my own age, and miraculously, I wasn’t afraid anymore. I could laugh again.

I was drinking with the dregs of Merrill youth, and I felt like I was home. But, first the boy took the drink, they the drink took the boy, and the man, and everyone, and everything that loved him. I learned to hate what I had become. And, I fought it.

But, I always ended up losing the fight. Sometimes by early knockout. Sometimes I’d get all the way to the 15th round. But, I always went down.

I resorted to Antabuse to stop from getting drunk. It works, until I stop taking the pills.

I’ve read everything that I could find about alcoholism, to no avail.

Then, in Waupun prison, Cheri sent me a book that I had requested, by Dr. Lance Dodes, and the control that alcohol had over me, began to slip away. I came face to face with the rape that I had memory holed for over forty years. I explored it, and studied on it, alone, for the remainder of my prison sentence.

Then, I came home, and shared my revelation with Cheri. And, she became my therapist, my friend, my confidant, the one who held me when I would cry about the wasted life. The best friend anyone ever had.

Alcohol, what is it good for? We used to give geriatric patients a beer at night, cause it was supposed to be good for them. But, it you find a kid who prefers beer and whiskey, to Pepsi, or juice, or water, there’s a kid that needs some lovin’.

And, if you find an adult who says beer tastes better than a glass of cranberry juice, they’re straight up, full of shit. I’m good with a little pot smoking. A little mushrooms now and then, for mind expansion, and music appreciation purposes.

The rest of that shit, legal, or otherwise, is poison. And, it will rob you of your happiness, and your oh so precious time. Do I have an occasional beer, or shot of tequila, or glass of chocolate milk (Bailiey’s)? Yes.

Self-medication. No longer compulsion. I am a blessed human being for having received this reprieve.

3. What legacy would you like to give a friend, say, me, any friend?

Legacy for a friend? For my friend. With the exception of Beth, you are the only friend that I’ve got, according to my calculations. Seven months ago, I lost the best friend I have ever known.

A severed finger tickles, compared to the pain of losing Cheri. Since she went “interstellar”, and even before, you have been the rock, upon which I have built my foundation. Admire is a word that I have thrown around. Venerate is another excellent selection.

A talk-walker. I thought that they went extinct. You have conducted your life, at least what I know of it, in a fashion that I would be proud to claim as my own history.

My legacy, in tribute to you, and to Fishbone, would be, for me to be, that medic, that man, who dresses the worlds, who brings nourishment, both for the body, and for the spirit, of my brothers, and my sisters, and all of the children, my children, all of them, my grandkids.

Not a butler to the well heeled. A servant, to those who have been trod upon, and had the audacity, and the wherewithal, to keep on surviving. Those are my people. The red people, the brown people, even some of the white people.

I want to be lovable because of my works, not because of my wealth. I want a sick baby, and a frightened mother, to smile because I had a hand in doing something decent.

I want that to be my legacy. I’ve been flailing around, trying. But, I know that I can do better.

4. What are some of the happy memories growing up before booze?

Happy memories before booze: Playing tennis against my parents, two against one, at Stange’s park, in Merrill. Playing cards, with my mom, and dad, and splitting some Pepsi’s, and pretzels, and chips, or Fritos. Shooting hoops, at my friend, Billy Utech’s house, in my Keds, that I took a beating for.

All alone. Refining my long jumper. Moving like Jerry West. Hair slicked back.

Used some of dad’s Vitalis.

And, snowmobiling. Me, and mom, and dad, and all the rural folk, and their kids. Farm kids, and me, the kid whose eyes blow up, and starts sneezing at a picture of a farm.

And, dad’s summer slow pitch games. Same kids. Shooting pool for a dime a game.

And, Captain Kangaroo. And, Mr. Magoo. And, Red Skelton. And, the Beatles. And, my little record players. I wore one out with my 45s. And, Stevie Loos. An adopted kid.

One of two. The disappointment. A true friend. I was never good enough as a kid. I knew that I was ugly.

Always. Small kid. Not big enough to be Gale Sayers. Maybe I could be the Incredible Hulk. He was a good guy. A soft heart. Just like Sonny Liston. Then I could be big and strong, like what was desired, and approved of, and fawned over. Not a kid who read books, and played tennis.

I was the man on a snowmobile though. Size didn’t matter. Pretty badass on the courts too. I have a secret weapon that no one has adopted yet, that I know of. And, I’m not sharing, just in case. I salvaged my Prince racquet, from the garbage truck. Is that enough? I can probably come up with a little more, if I dig real deep.

5. What were happy memories with booze?

I have no happy memories with booze. Maybe some comradely with juveniles over some rock and roll records, but I sensed, early on that I shouldn’t be drinking this stuff.

It was making me someone I didn’t like anymore.

7. Do you have a philosophy life? Expand.

My philosophy of life? Time, is the most precious asset that we have. And, we never know when our time account is about to be overdrawn. Some folks gets decades deposited. Some get minutes. Spend as much of that currency doing thinks that make you happy.

Laugh. For god’s sake laugh. And, sing. Sing out loud. Learn the words. Or, make up your own. Don’t hum. At least not for long. Sing out loud. Share your voice. Be a legend.

A legend whose legacy is kindness.

6. Why is Wisconsin the way it is – tough individuals, racist, in denial, very hard-edged American?

8. What’s wrong with America? Keep it simple, I know it’s a book length response.

What is wrong with America? What is wrong with Wisconsin? Big stuff there Paul.

A lot is not going to be detailed. Brainwashing. The screens. The bombardment of lies, and manipulations.

The boxes that we hide in. I never feel more alive, than when I am outside. I am a part of nature. Not, apart from nature. That’s why WE loved camping so much. Why is america, and whizz-con-sin, so ugly, so mean, so filthy? The Anglo culture that poisoned this continent. When the red man prevailed here, this place was a paradise.

Now, it is a toxic landfill.

Once there was harmony between man, and his environment. Now, there is abuse, for the green. The dirty green. God damn money. Money over your brother. Your sister.

Your dog. The bison. The bear. The wolf. The cow. The chicken. The pig.

And, there needs to be more music. Not celebrity. Not pop, rock, country, star. Music.

And, irony. And, satire. Let’s laugh at ourselves, and then get about the business of not doing that stupid shit again. And medicine. Nurture, and heal our sick and wounded fellow travelers. And, nurture, and heal ourselves, in the process.

9. The power of letter writing to your wife. Explain.

10. The power of books coming to you and you reading them in prison. Explain.

Letter writing to Cheri. I dove a heavy dose of that, during every incarnation. And, a lighter dose of that, even when I’m not incarcerated. Letters are my way of speaking to you, when you are not in the room with me, and I have something to say to you. And, letters are precise.

There’s no playing a game of telephone when you’re writin’ letters.As partners for over forty years, Cheri, and I, talked at length every day. Iron bars, and cement walls aren’t going to stop that. Yeah, cellmates of mine used to marvel as I would crank out 14, 28, 42 pages. Day in, and day out. Lots of pens. Lots of legal pads. Lots of stamped envelopes.

It’s who I am. Same with the books. Twenty, twenty-five books at a clip. Heavy laundry bag, walking from the property office, back to the cell block. Those books saved my life. I was dying in there. Wrongly accused, and convicted. I was going insane. I wanted to kill people. Not shoot them either. I wanted to beat them with a roofing hammer. To some guys in the joint, my nickname was “the hammer”.

So fucking angry. So fucking enraged. The hundreds of books were an escape from my reality.

Then, Cheri sent me the book that tamped down all of that hate. Clarence Darrow. “Resist Not Evil.” That book gave me a new outlook, that permitted me to endure a nightmare.

Books have always been important to me. I bet that they always will.

Sanford and son threw out a few books, that were in a grey igloo bag, that I really want back.

I want Rachel Carson back, too. Instead, I’m going to join the confederacy of dunces, and finish the journey the Cheri and I began talking, together.

11. What does family mean to you?

Family? Family is who I am supposed to look out for. I’m the patriarch of this family, and dads, and grampas, and brothers, have wisdom to impart, and scuffed knees to attend to. They have explanations to share, and misunderstandings to resolve. As it was, when I had my spine operation, almost eleven years ago, so it is today, in the aftermath of my hand surgery.

Not a word from those who I identify as my family. It’s a hurtful thing. I do the opposite.

Maybe I am crazy. But, I’ll never stop. Doing otherwise would feel wrong. Even thinking about doing otherwise feels wrong.

Family is loneliness.

12. What will be the next iteration of your life, 65 onward?

The next iteration of my life? I don’t know. But, I better figure it out soon, cause I’m dying over here.I’m going down, if I continue like this.

13. Three lessons you would impart your granddaughter Ivy now and/or if and when she stops using?

Three lessons for Ivy. Always a number with you people. Rate your pain, on a scale of one to ten. Rate your satisfaction, one to ten. How about, it hurts like a motherfucker, and your customer service sucks!!!

Ivy, you are poisoning yourself for a reason. What is that reason(s)? Dig deep. Explore.

Go all the way back. Find that injury. Then, go to people, that you trust. That want to help you, and are equipped to do so. And, spill your guts. Put it all out there.

Cry.

Scream.

Swear.

Shake your fist, at the unfairness of it all.

And, then go about loving yourself. Be loving to Ivy. Be with those for whom loving Ivy is automatic. Go back. Find that child. The one who is still innocent. Remember what made that little girl smile, laugh, sing You’ll know when it is, because you will have felt safe then. Before the sick people got their hands on you.

Then, pursue the dreams of that small child, and you’re on your way. And, always call on your grampa. He’s the best friend that you’ve got. And, he’s pretty smart. You’ll probably have to change playgrounds, and playmates. If you hang around in the barbershop, sooner or later, you’re going to get a haircut. And, don’t believe anything that the government tells you.

Same with TV.

Find things out for yourself.

Or, ask grampa. We can find out together.

I love you Ivy.

Is that three?

******************************************end of the Q & A*******************************************

**

Note: I went to Wisconsin to meet a friend. Yeah, there were things on the agenda: get his camper-pick-up truck looked at for hail damage. Get him out and about. Get to wMerrill, from River Falls, his place of residence. Get some handle on the unbelievable hoarding situation he was in. Get up to Merrill to help with some honoring of the deceased wife-friend-soulmate. Friendship. My wife encouraged me to head up there too, so I had a calm and smart person help with my decision.

The hoarding deal turned into more chaos as we hired on a small outfit out of Minneapolis to do the bagging and hauling. That was a disaster. The Moores self-referenced themselves as Sanford and Son, as both the son, running the outfit, and the dad, as a helper, are African American.

The shit show was precipitated by K’s incapacitation, the un-and-dis-organized stuff packed in all the rooms, and then our own absences for some of the days, and of course the inability of the hired on crew to get their shit together, i.e. being on time (hours delayed) and listening and reading our directs for what not to take, as well as what to take.

It was hard getting those books taken away to some dump. Books Kelly read in prison, sent to him from his wife. Books that the prisons he was locked up in refused to take. Even the chapels refused to take the books. Every sort of book tied to enlightenment — Rachel Carson, Howard Zinn, and Gore Vidal, to name only a few of hundreds.

The letters — sometimes three a day — he sent to his wife and for which she saved. All gone. He has no need to keep them. Hundreds of them, in the clutter, the mess, with mice running all around.

Also note that we are in the process of contacting his graddaughter to see if her story is something she is okay with being in a small blog. You never know what will come back to haunt her.

The trauma in the family is tough. I look at this as a memoir. Anti-memoir. Kelly’s. Through me, the conduit. All is kosher for me, now, put into writing.

Here’s even the local rag printing my memoir writing class informaiton:

“The art of remaking-retelling a story”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*******************************************end of memoir writing story****************************

Blitzed with Blatz:

The ten states with the highest alcohol consumption per capita (in gallons) per year are:

1. New Hampshire – 4.67 gallons
2. District of Columbia – 3.77 gallons
3. Delaware – 3.52 gallons
4. Nevada – 3.42 gallons
5. North Dakota – 3.16 gallons
6. Montana – 3.1 gallons
7. Vermont – 3.06 gallons
8. Idaho – 2.94 gallons
9. Wisconsin – 2.93 gallons
10. Colorado – 2.88 gallons

TOP 15 COUNTRIES ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION

1. Seychelles: 20.50 litres
2. Uganda: 15.09 litres
3. Czech Republic: 14.45 litres
4. Lithuania: 13.22 litres
5. Luxembourg: 12.94 litres
6. Germany: 12.91 litres
7. Ireland: 12.88 litres
8. Latvia: 12.77 litres
9. Spain: 12.72 litres
10. Bulgaria: 12.65 litres
11. France: 12.33 litres
12. Burkina Faso: 12.03 litres
13. Portugal: 12.03 litres
14. Austria: 11.96 litres
15. Slovenia: 11.90 litres

It’s USA Today, more fake-faux-fucked up news (sic) but a broken grandfather clock is correct twice a day: “These are America’s drunkest states”

2. Wisconsin

• Adults drinking excessively: 24.5%
• Alcohol-related driving deaths: 36.9% (8th highest)
• Adults in fair or poor health: 14.0% (13th lowest)
• Drunkest metro area: Green Bay, WI

Some 24.5% of adults in Wisconsin report binge or heavy drinking — the second largest share of any state and well above the comparable national share of 18%. Drinking alcohol regularly over long periods of time can lead to many serious ailments later in life such as liver cancer and even dementia. Despite high rates of excessive drinking, Wisconsin has a relatively low premature death rate. For every 100,000 residents, about 300 will die before the age of 75, less deaths than in most other states.

++—++

I don’t buy the floundering statistics, and alas, Wisconsin has some synergy, really, with the cheese and dairies and the cold and the drug use and the MS and ALS frequency and the aging population, the other aspects of life and death in a Chlamydia Capitalist world.

Wisconsin and Meth:

According to the Rusk County, Wisconsin, Department of Health and Human Services, drug-related child abuse and neglect investigations have increased dramatically over the past four years.

“County health services is dealing with cases where there are children in these homes, they have removed some children from the homes,” Wallace said. “cases are pending with them. But it does affect the whole county in a whole because everyone who lives here has to deal with that issue.”

Looking at some of those numbers from the Rusk County Department of Health and Human Services: of the current open child protective services cases, 67% are open due to safety concerns related to drugs. The current out-of-home care placements where children have been removed due to concerns around drugs is 92%

And with all things in Chlamydia Capitalism, contradctions, grant retardation, lack of funding, pissing contests, territorial stupidity, and more, keeps everything in reverse gear.

Due to grant guidelines, more than $60 million in state and federal dollars that have been released to combat opioid misuse cannot be used to mitigate this new crisis.  

Health care providers say they should be granted flexibility in how they use these funds. 

“It should be the providers who are in the trenches every day that should have a voice in determining what the needs are,” says Saima Chauhan, clinical team manager at Journey Mental Health Center in Madison. “We’re the ones every day … seeing individuals and families that are suffering so tremendously from the effects of addiction.” 

Morrison says widespread addiction to pain pills and heroin prompted Congress to direct a “historic investment” to combat the opioid epidemic. According to federal budget figures, Congress has appropriated at least $6 billion in the past five years for prevention, treatment and research.  

Wisconsin has received $63 million in federal grants specifically targeted to opioid prevention and medication-assisted treatment, according to the state Department of Health Services.   (source)

All part of the narrative of each and every family, home, neighborhood, school, place of work, marriage, and hospital. Addiction is right there in the Homo Retailopithecus DNA.

Kelly’s story is sort of Mary Karr’s story, or hell, how many others in the business of memoir writing? The True Story Behind Wild

Memoirs. A hell of an adventure:

“A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.”

―Mary Karr,The Liars’ Club

“My goal in high school was to stay out of the penitentiary, so if I can go from there to here, you guys can all be gainfully employed. Yeah, your parents are clapping.’ — Commencement address.

a few more photos of the Wisconsin for ‘This is Your Life’ Bullshit! … a 10-part series now (goddamn, I hope not!)

Dog and Dude: A holy place in Merrill…

The fellow after he had surgery on an almost decapitated index finger (more on that story, too, to add to the pathetic nature of things up north for this guy). River Falls, Wisconsin, where the Shop-Ko closed down so you can’t even buy new underwear in town, a college town, no less (where is Zelenksy when we need help?)

Fellow and grandkid in Rhinelander, a city in and the county seat of Oneida County, Wisconsin, United States. Its population was 7,735 at the 2000 census. Rhinelander is the home of the Hodag. He’s here with his granddaughter, again, Wisconsin: IV drug abuser, for sure, but at 19, hanging on, as her own life is one tragedy and one trauma and one PTSD blight after another. But she is not the sum total of her addictions, nor her family’s dysfunctioins, but again, the beautiful people like the Obama’s or Clintons or the 5 percent in the Golden Billion Party, they would like to see KK and his granddaughter at the bottom of the sea:

Hodag: In American folklore, the hodag is a fearsome critter resembling a large bull-horned carnivore with a row of thick curved spines down its back. The hodag was said to be born from the ashes of cremated oxen, as the incarnation of the accumulation of abuse the animals had suffered at the hands of their masters.^[1] The history of the hodag is strongly tied to the City of Rhinelander where it was claimed to have been discovered. The hodag has figured prominently in early Paul Bunyan stories.

The fun stuff of some of us in the Golden Billion Chlamydia Club.

Now, look up “the golden billion” on Google CIA Gulag, or anywhere, and the search results are anti-Putin to the max. Amazing how quickly the stupid Hollyood drenched fucks in the world, the elite, freakshow barkers, the Republicans and Democrats, the Ivy League and the Minor League, the Merchants of Death in and out of Uniform, the pure ignorance of it all, how this country, and other Disnyefied and Marvel Comic Books dumbdowned in the Collective Perverse West have turned into puffy empty cheese puffs.

Now, it’s hard to see the down on their Chlamydia Capitalist luck folk in Wisconsin or Wyoming would ever ever see themselves down on their luck, let alone part of some billion person juggernaut of death to the rest of the world, but WE are:

The idea of total domination of the ‘golden billion’ is racist and neocolonial, dividing the peoples into first and second-rate, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday, speaking at the Strong Ideas for a New Time forum.

“The model of total domination of the so-called golden billion is unfair. Why should this ‘golden billion’ of all the population on the globe dominate over everyone and impose its own rules of behavior? Based on the illusion of exceptionalism, it (this model – TASS) divides the peoples into those of first or second-rate, and therefore it is racist and neocolonial in its essence, while the globalist, allegedly liberal ideology underlying it, is more and more acquiring the features of totalitarianism, restraining the creative search and free historical creativeness”, the Russian president stressed.

According to Putin, the impression is that the West simply cannot offer the world a model of the future. “Of course, this ‘golden billion’ became golden for a reason. It has achieved a lot. But it not only took such positions thanks to some implemented ideas, to a large extent it took its positions by robbing other peoples: in Asia, and in Africa,” the head of state pointed out, “Indeed, it was like that. Look at how India has been plundered”.

Therefore, the Russian president continued, today the ‘golden billion’ elites are panically afraid that other world centers can present their visions of global development.

So, fear and loathing and beer and speed balls and running and gunning and living in a flophouse, the whole nine yards of destitute but on a Smart Phone, all of that Western putridness, it is exemplified for me in little bouts of tangential tributes to the suffering, of good people like KK, and his granddaughter, Ivy.

We all might be looking at glowing Wisconsin cheese curds and milk with U$A on its bipolar, addicted to pain trajectory of wanting more war so the perverts of power get off on the killin’.

For now, all I can do is upload and unload:

“That means a new civilization model for emerging economies like China and Argentina because they want to rise up peacefully (…) I think we are in the new civilization age.”

—Wang Wen from the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies stressed the need for Russia to rediscover China – finding “mutual trust in the middle level and elites level”. At the same time, there’s a sort of global rush to join BRICS, from Saudi Arabia and Iran to Afghanistan and Argentina. (source)

You will not be getting any discourse on the real world from Wisconsin beer lovers or Iowa bacon hoarders or LA Falsies or SF Transitions or NYC Apple Cores, what have you. The name of the game is the golden billion is getting the golden shower treatment by the elites, the Goyim Ghouls and their ZioJewish Fascist Masters.

Talk in towns far and wide is about the game, the Friday night highlights, or who got thrown in jail, or some talk about the deals at Costco and the next cruise ship run before the next DARPA (now Ukraine and USA cooking up those bioweapons in those ferret and monkey labs) fun locks down the planet, where the Golden Billion already have mostly shut down their heads, their thinking. Car wrecks and mall shootings. Weather reports and the price of eggs and where’s the toilet paper now?

Ahh, the old town hall for the ‘township’ of Merrill:

Another holy house bites the dust:

Some light in those eyes left:

More coming up.