This is a rite of passage that needs to go the way of the Dodo.

Mercenaries, and now, we have a blue blood son, grandson to Robert Kennedy, heading out to Ukraine with some sad sack ideas about what he in the name of Hell is going to do in that country?

Yep, RFK Jr., let out the news recently, on Megyn Kelly. The newspapers picked it up:

“He felt that he shouldn’t be arguing about it unless he was willing to have skin in the game and take his own risk,” Kennedy said on “The Megyn Kelly Show” of his son’s decision to go to the war-torn country.

Kennedy said his son signed up for the Foreign Legion at the Ukrainian Embassy and was a drone pilot before he was promoted to a “machine gunner.”

“He didn’t have any military experience and kind of talked his way into the unit,” he added. “He’s been in firefights, mainly nighttime, and a lot of artillery fights with the Russians.”

“He had a job for a law firm, a really good law firm in Los Angeles, and I was looking forward to him living with me for the summer,” he said of his son’s initial plans.

When probing him further about Conor Kennedy’s plans, his son said, “I’m not going. I want to talk to you. I don’t want you to ask me what I’m doing.”

“I was like, ‘Um…,’” he explained. “And he said, ‘I will explain it to you at some point, but I do not want you to ask me now, and if you could just respect that it would mean a lot to me.’ So I did.”

We can discuss what the role of parenting has to do with bringing up children who might find it necessary to shot at people to get skin in the game. Now, Conor is 28, that is, 28 years old, not months, yet as a teacher of many souls over four decades, I can say he is most certainly arrested developed (so many American men are), and this whole idea of having skin in the game is beyond insane. Kind reader, what were you doing at age 28? Wanting skin in the game? Which game? Hmm, I went to Central America before age 28, and I was working with refugees in Arizona in my 19 to 21 years of age time frame. I was involved in journalism, too, young, at 17, and then reporting on some things like El Salvadorans perishing in the desert near where I was headquartered, and some on the drug tunnels down also near Bisbee. Also, reporting on the military putting up aerostat balloons along the border to try and capture undocumented workers. I even did a story on some of those Posse Comitatus folk, the border patriots (sic) who went out there armed and lock ‘n’ loaded.

Nope, no blue blood in my line. Yep, plenty of military around me with an old man in cryptology in the Air Force and then Army. Germany, France, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, etc.

Yes, and I am named after a grandfather who was a WWI pilot in the Germany navy-air force, flying triple-wing planes. He was in post-WWI Germany, seeing the wheelbarrows of  Deutsche Marks for a loaf of bread. He also — before the German loss — in the Battle of Jutland, on a ship, the Rostock, that was hit and distressed with hundreds dead. He floated on the flotsam of war and watched the battle ensue and then the two sides with white flags came into the war theater to pick up the wounded and dead.

And, of course, I had Irish and Scottish and English and Canadian family in that war, but also in WWII. Uncle Ian was on a submarine for the British, and German family members on the Russian front, and alas, relatives who survived the bombing of Dresden.

Yeah, I heard stories Paul Haeder, who ended up in Iowa and South Dakota as the last of seven brothers who finally ended up hitting Ellis Island. Paul found work as a former lieutenant impossible — coal mining and working the food trains shooting fellow Germans, per the Pinkerton outfit.

Skin in the game. Hmm. So, growing up on air force bases, army post and outside Paris, on SHAPE and NATO compounds, I was truly interested in the stories of men and women, and the accounts of dudes who were in Vietnam, or hanging onto my old man’s Korea stories and his recalling about what happened in Vietnam, though he was pretty much a zipped up mouth on those wars. He worked in NATO caves in France and Germany, as a signal corps warrant officer, and we all in the family had to have FBI-level background checks.

I wonder what a 13-year-old is doing learning about Black Panthers, Cesar Chavez, Che Guevara, and much much more? That was me. I learned about Ho Chi Minh from some of my older sister’s friends who had come back from Vietnam, mentally wounded, hooked on smack, some wounded physically, and most anti-American, anti-War.

No blue blood in my family.

Look, yes, I am trauma informed, and this image, or these two, are full of context and whatever this Conor believes in, in terms of killing humans, Russians, and some of them, if he was a drone operator, civilians, that would be an interesting discussion and debate.

So, listening to RFK, Junior, Conor’s dad, I stuck with him throughout the wide-ranging two-hour Megyn Kelly interview, which in my mind is less of a journalistic interview and more of the same old celebrity cultish thing a multimillionaire Kelly was doing (interviewing) with another multimillionaire, RFK, Jr.

I wrote this to a fellow writer I respect, and who publishes many amazing pieces. He’s a bit older than I am, I believe. Here:

Yeah, ECC, we have this fascination with blue blood, the Kennedys, Bush, those coming out of Ivy League schools, who are millionaires who hang with billionaires. 

His son, well, has to be judged on what he was doing, and alas, Ukraine is the most corrupt nation in the world, in some sense. So, there are many issues tied to what the quality of his character is.

He’s a mercenary, and this is war porn. He wasn’t even in any military. He talked his way into the Mercenary Legions. Lied. Oh, he is an athlete, which is a big Kennedy thing. 

The entire thing will give this kid a cleared pipeline to multi-millions, and his book will be coming out soon, Oprah-approved, soon.

The kid (man, age 28) wouldn’t even tell his parents where he was going, what he was up to. That is something deeply troubling to me because I have friends and a spouse who have been estranged by their children. There are Facebook groups with the title “Mothers of Estranged Children.” Many of these women were just hard working single mothers, and something snapped in the children. There are 70 year old women who have never met children’s children, and even great grandkids. This is pretty deeply ingrained in my own background in trauma informed case management with homeless civilians and veterans and those hooked on drugs and those just released from prison. 

I’m 65, been to Central America as a journalist, covered the US-Mexico border, been with US military as a college instructor at the Sergeant Major Academy at Fort Bliss. My old man was in 32 years. Air Force and then Army. Clandestine stuff, crypto stuff. We ended up in the Azores and then Germany and France and UK. I got to see and hear a lot of stuff. I am, was early, anti-military on so many leels

Very young (13) I was already seeing the destruction of the world through the military state, through corporate malfeasance, through the professional managerial class, and the lawyer class.  This kid (man) at this age, 28, is really going to be part of the problem for socialists and social-environmental-cultural warriors like myself, and anyone who might come up as decent, smart and thoughtful adults in our current generation. We have a lot of work to do, and putting one’s effort into machismo, into this trip into a corrupt place, thinking Putin is a Gangster, well, what sort of upbringing did he have?

FYI: In the Megyn interview RFK admits he got the mRNA, and so did his children, 7.

Whew. Amazing, no, ECC. 

Trauma, man. So much trauma in the Kennedy family. Epigenetic, and who the hell knows what kind of trauma is in Conor’s immediate family. I am trauma informed, so I can’t judge too much on that level.

Then, Aaron and Gabor Mate, an older interview, on the trauma, the mental illnesses and pain that propelled people to believe in Russia Gate. 

Thanks, ECC. A real interview with you one of these days?

Here’s the show’s lo down blurb:

Megyn Kelly is joined by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., author of “A Letter to Liberals,” to discuss COVID pandemic orthodoxy, the need for discussion and debate, the elimination of freedoms due to the COVID pandemic, Dr. Fauci demanding blind faith in authority, the important issue of whether the COVID vaccines prevent transmission, myocarditis risk from COVID and from vaccines, rise in “unexplained” deaths in a post-COVID vaccine world, the truth about how many lives COVID vaccines saved and lost, the lack of important data needed to understand the rise in deaths post-COVID, what Fauci said about vaccines that could have an adverse effect before the COVID vaccines were available, the absurdity of the new booster which was only tested on eight mice and no humans, Pfizer’s involvement in the Trump administration, Alex Berenson and tech censorship, RFK’s disbanded “vaccine safety” commission, Scott Gottlieb and our supposed medical elite, American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendations, problems with the VAERS system, personal backlash from family and friends, his views of Donald Trump then and now, Herschel Walker and our politics today, the war in Ukraine, American imperialism, RFK’s personal connection to the war as his son Conor was fighting in the country, and more.

Look, these issues need to be discussed. In the interview, there is discussion about Trump, about politicians’ public lives versus private lives, and how we weigh the bad people perpetrate in their families, in their own house and jobs, their personal personas, against the good their policy and governance might come off as part of their public life. My writer friend was upset that RFK, Jr. calls Putin a thug and gangster, while at the same time, RFK JR does speak out against the cancel left, against the war drumming and against the endless pit of money and arms for nothing to ZioLensky. Kennedy laments that there is $7 a gallon of gasoline in California, equating that to the war/Putin (?), but really, the USA is (has been for decades) in a major free-fall, and, people are struggling with double-triple-quadruple cost of living, i.e. food, coffee, drugs, and now Pfizer, who got the jab approved by CDC for children’s yearly vaccination, well, they also announced the company will be upping the price of the dirty jab, to $110 a shot, which is four times the current price.

I wonder what these lawyers working for these outfits have in terms of skin in the game? Will they head to Yemen to see what it’s like to have USA-UK supplied bombs to Saudi Arabia. Skin in the game in Haiti stealing that country’s resources and stealing the coffers? Which skin in the game will the American put forth who wants to know what it is to take on a stand on any issue psychologically and intellectually without having to put one’s ass in the game?

It is a blue in the face routine now attempting to talk about Nuland and Maidan, about the Donbass and the ethnic cleansing? All of the history of Putin wanting diplomacy, wanting to be part of the Eurozone, to be on good terms with Germany, and to advance nuclear weapon decommissioning.

The thuggery RFK Jr. and Conor Kenndy espouse about Putin, is is a million times more informed and sensible than Biden or Blinken is not just bizarre, but it is based on NO SKIN in THAT GAME.

Here, trauma, and what exactly is-was-continues to go on in the minds of Russia Gate freaks:

GABOR MATÉ: What does it say about American society that so many people are actually enrolled in believing that this man could be any kind of a savior? What does that say about the divisions and the conflicts and the contradictions and the genuine problems in this culture? And how do we address those issues?

You can look at that. Or you can say there must be a devil somewhere behind all this, and that devil is a foreign power, and his name is Putin, and his country is Russia. Now you’ve got a simple explanation that doesn’t invite you or necessitate that you explore your own pain and your own fear and your own trauma.

So I really believe that really this Russiagate narrative was, on the part of a lot of people, a sign of genuine upset at something genuinely upsetting. But rather than dealing with the upset, it was an easier way to in a sense draw off the energy of it in to some kind of a believable and comforting narrative. It’s much more comforting to believe that some enemy is doing this to us than to look at what does it say about us as a society.

I mean there was a massive denial of the actual dynamics in American society that led to the election of this traumatized and traumatizing individual as President, number one.

AARON MATÉ: Because you think Donald Trump himself is traumatized?

GABOR MATÉ: Oh, Donald Trump is a clearest example of a traumatized politician one could ever see. He’s in denial of reality all the time. He is self aggrandizing. His fundamental self concept is that of a nobody. So he has to make himself huge and big all the time and keep proving to the world how powerful and smart, what kind of degrees he’s got and how smart he is. It’s a compensation for terrible self image. He can’t pay attention to anything, which means that his brain is too scattered because it was too painful for him to pay attention.

What does this all come down to? The childhood that we know that he had in the home of a dictatorial child disparaging father, and a very weak

AARON MATÉ: Fred Trump, his father.

GABOR MATÉ: Who demeaned his children mercilessly. One of Trump’s brothers drank himself to death. And Trump compensates for all that by trying to make himself as big and powerful and successful as possible. And, of course, he makes up for his anger towards his mother for not protecting him by attacking women and exploiting women and boasting about it publicly. I mean, it’s a clear trauma example. I’m not saying this to invite sympathy for Trump’s politics. I’m just describing that that’s who the man is. And the fact that such a traumatized individual can be elected to the position of what they call the most powerful person in the world speaks to a traumatized society.

And like individuals can be in denial, a society can be in denial. So this society is deeply in denial about its own trauma, and particularly in this case about the trauma of that election. So one way to deal with trauma is denial of it. The other way is to project onto other people things that you don’t like about yourself.

Now, it’s only a matter of historical fact. And no serious person, no serious student of history can possibly deny how the United States has interfered in the internal politics of just about every nation on earth.

There is lots of skin in the game for all of us surviving in various stages and steps trauma. How many countries has the USA bombed, sanctioned, proxied, and stolen from? That is another fun thing, right, visiting those countries and donating some mutual aid support — skin in the game — by planting trees, feeding children, digging water systems. But putting on combat gear and playing tin soldier with live rounds and drones, hmm, that is an interesting skin in the game.

Here, Jim Chambers, from the rich and famous Cox news-cable family, he too went to Ukraine, Donbass, as a reporter:

When I asked him about his perspectives on the conflict now, versus when he made the decision to come over, his repeated emphasis was that he had been “extremely uninformed” when he was still in Alabama and relying on the narrative being spun by Western media. “I can tell you that I was very surprised to see most women and children still at home and living normally in all the major Ukrainian cities I went to. And when I was detained here in Donestk, it was the first time I had been able to speak to any Russians or Russian-speakers from Donbass. There’s a side of the story that we’re not getting in America.” He noted that even from his cell in Donetsk, he had been hearing constant explosions, every day, coming from Ukrainian shelling of the city, something he had never anticipated. “Nothing in the Western media shows you that this is a civil war, and one that’s been going on a long time.” He didn’t go as far as disavowing the Ukrainian state, or endorsing the Russian “special military operation,” but he repeatedly said to me, “If I had known the truth about what was going on over here, I would never have made the decision to come. I regret it.”

Feelings of sympathy for a man in a life-and-death predicament, who at face value seems to have been duped into his decision, above all else, are completely understandable. But some on the Donestk side of the conflict aren’t shedding many tears for him, or for similar detainees. Russell “Texas” Bentley is a U.S.-born veteran of the DPR armed forces, having served from 2014 to 2017, and he is a resident of Donetsk. Bentley shared with me his thoughts on Drueke and those like him.

“Yeah, a lot of these punks were just too big for their britches, and that’s almost forgivable. But what they wanted to do was come here to kill, and if the shoe had been on the other foot, they wouldn’t have hesitated. I was behind Ukrop [Ukrainian] lines twice, and didn’t fire a shot either time. Every single battle I was ever in was defensive. We held a position, and the Ukrops came to attack us, and they’d have killed us all if they could have. So, it will be an educational experience for them, hopefully give them a bit of a head start in their next life.” (source — ‘I Regret’ Being a Mercenary in Ukraine: Conversation with U.S. POW Detained in Donbass)

Here is Texas Russel Bentley: From Texas to Donbass: Meet the American fighting Ukrainian fascists

I used to show lots of movie clips to my students in Texas, New Mexico, Washington and Oregon. Lots of controversial (sic) books, and tons of articles and professional journal studies. Controversial, in their face, and much of it was during Reagan’s illegal wars, Panama, Bush One and Kuwait and Iraq, Bush Two, Iraq, Clinton, even Obama. Many many complaints about exposing youth and older students to things that went boom in their heads. Everything was on-limits, no holds barred. We talked, debated and then I got students to research and think critically and with the right tools of rhetoric, a la centuries of clear thinking, proposing, comparing and contrasting, looking at causes and effects, all of the ways we classify, argue, persuade, define and connotate and how we engage in those techniques of propaganda, and how to get through with objectivity and then what powerful tools narrative writing can give us. Pat Tillman, Conor, ever see him?

Here, the full movie, free, on You Tube. The Pat Tillman Story.

Look, RFK Jr. did say that we are imperfect, that is, the human race. He was stating how Hershel Walker can be candidate X, antiabortion vis-à-vis policy, but in his own life, having been a part of abortions with his spouses and partners, that is just the contradictory way of politics. It all makes sense as a Catholic who believes in redemption. I am not going to knock that. Conor, becoming a high priced lawyer one day, well, maybe he will do great things for humankind.

Maybe doing the mercenary thing in Ukraine will give Conor better perspectives. Now, Russel Bentley, I have had email exchanges with him. Yes, he has hit some of the same places I have hit — El Paso, Tucson, etc. He went to Donbass, and he married a Ukrainian-Russian, and he lives in the Donbass and reports from the Donbass. Yes, he sent me his memoir:

Robert Kennedy said he is not doctrinaire or hard-headed, and that he learns and changes over time. He repeats how he was working as an environmental lawyer, and that he was part of Riverkeeper, for which there are over 350 rivers around the world with a keeper testing water, supporting the river life and acting as a pied piper for a healthy river. He was suing over poisons in the rivers, mercury. He stated that he was dogged by some women at one of his talks. One woman gave him a stack of briefs and reports on mercury preservatives in Vaccines and other issues tied to vaccine injuries. The vaccine fight he was not a part of for years, until persistent citizens and a medical doctor brought it to his attention. I understand that old saw, “No one is perfect . . . Homo Sapiens is a messy, troubled species.”

That’s a given And we all have skin in the game when it comes to peace, life, truth, and reconciling our own trauma with healing and loving thy neighbor. The whole Putin is a Gangster thing is interesting, for sure, and alas, Capitalists Are Gangsters, sure, I get to deploy that one all the time. Murder Incorporated, the Value of Nothing, the Sociopathic Rich, and so much more I can also utilize as descriptors of the USA, then and now. Did Conor take in that book, War is a Racket? Did he weigh Butler’s words with the reality of Russia wanting Minsk II to be abided by before signing up for weaponizing his idea of skin in the game? What was Nuland doing in Kiev? Biden and Hunter? Are we all going to default on redemption for any sin? That we are all imperfect souls? Did Conor have real deep talks with people outside the frame of Putin is a Gangster?

I recommend reading, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). The book, and now, a 2022 German movie of the book:

“But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony — Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?”

― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

Yes, banned.

Remarque’s novel saw censorship outside of Germany as well. In the United States, the English translation was banned in Boston on grounds of obscenity; and in Chicago, U.S. customs had seized any volumes which had not been expurgated. Austrian soldiers were forbidden to read the novel, Czech military libraries removed copies from their shelves, while Italy banned the novel entirely due to its anti-war, pacifist agenda. Despite its success, or perhaps because of it, Remarque had his German citizenship revoked and was forced into exile. Just before the onset of World War II in Europe, Remarque and his wife left Switzerland for the United States. They became official U.S. citizens in 1947. (source)

Now? The sides, that is, the many sides, to Ukraine and Nazis and Bandera and Zelensky and Coups and USA and CIA, and then, Putin and Russian demands for stopping the existential threat of NATO moving east and east with all their bombs bursting in air. John Pilger stated it correctly recently:

Much of this propaganda originates in the US, and is transmitted through proxies and ‘think-tanks’, such as the notorious Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the voice of the arms industry, and by zealous journalists such as Peter Hartcher of the Sydney Morning Herald, who labeled those spreading Chinese influence as ‘rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows’ and called for these ‘pests’ to be ‘eradicated’.

News about China in the West is almost entirely about the threat from Beijing. Airbrushed are the 400 American military bases that surround most of China, an armed necklace that reaches from Australia to the Pacific and south east Asia, Japan and Korea. The Japanese island of Okinawa and the Korean island of Jeju are loaded guns aimed point blank at the industrial heart of China. A Pentagon official described this as a ‘noose’.

Palestine has been misreported for as long as I can remember. To the BBC, there is the ‘conflict’ of ‘two narratives’. The longest, most brutal, lawless military occupation in modern times is unmentionable.

The stricken people of Yemen barely exist. They are media unpeople.  While the Saudis rain down their American cluster bombs with British advisors working alongside the Saudi targeting officers, more than half a million children face starvation.

This brainwashing by omission has a long history. The slaughter of the First World War was suppressed by reporters who were knighted for their compliance and confessed in their memoirs.  In 1917, the editor of the Manchester Guardian, C.P. Scott, confided to prime minister Lloyd George: ‘If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow, but they don’t know and can’t know.’ (‘Silencing the Lambs — How Propaganda Works‘)

Below, for the local newspaper, the Newport News Times. (without the images, etc.) Fourth Thursday in November, so either Wed. or Friday, or they will not publish it. Below that, more on this reprehensible genocidal black death Black Friday day!

The First No-Thanks Thanksgiving

Trigger Warning (noun): a statement at the start of a piece of writing, video, etc., alerting the reader or viewer to the fact that it contains potentially distressing material

This hoopla around Turkey Day —  this so-called Big Box Store Shuffle and Great American Pig-out Thanksgiving — is a National Day of Mourning.

I was not my history teacher’s favorite student in high school when I wrote essays on my country’s hypocrisy of football, apple pie and Thanksgiving while never facing the genocide against Native Americans. I was called a traitor, self-loathing white and un-American when I pointed out the war against the Indians didn’t officially end until 1924, more than thirty years after the massacre at Wounded Knee (1890).

When I was teaching in El Paso, I got mired in a push to commemorate the “first” thanksgiving here, in Paseo del Norte. El Paso laid claim to the first undocumented/illegal settlement in North America in the form of Conquistadors and Friars.

In 1598 the Spanish explorer, Don Juan de Oñate, and his army established the first European colony in North America. The settlement was located at San Gabriel near Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, 30 miles north of Santa Fe.

I’ve been there, and the double-edge sword of breaking bread and pavo (turkey) with the Spanish interlopers is quaint for the people of El Paso looking for tourism bucks.

However, like the Plymouth Rock celebration of 1621, this Texas one represents a foreboding of genocide. I’ve been to that “celebration.” This El Paso organization declared this first Thanksgiving took place, near San Elizario, Texas. Oñate and his battalion of soldiers, Franciscan missionaries and colonists, celebrated their safe arrival on April 30, 1598.

That same year, the Spanish colonial governor de Oñate put 507 Acoma on trial. Women between 12 and 25 were enslaved for 20 years at the Pueblo of Ohkay Owingeh. Men over age of 25 had one foot cut off, and younger men were enslaved for 20 years. Oñate was later tried for excessive cruelty.

Switching to my Canadian roots, I absorbed more revised history. As a kid, I learned of that country’s treatment of native peoples since my mother was a journalist in Vancouver who reported on stories about Canada’s maltreatment of their First Nations. On September 30, 2021 Canada established a statutory holiday observation of Orange Shirt Day. This is a remembrance of missing and murdered children from residential schools as well as a process of healing for survivors.

It’s sort of a truth and reconciliation moment to raise consciousness about the residential school system and its impact on Indigenous communities for over a century. Hundreds of children were buried in unmarked graves at just one residential site, where my sister lived, Kamloops, BC. Thousands of other graves are located throughout Canada.

Then, in my Arizona high school days, I was “adopted” by some Apache friends and their families. Starting then – as their aunties and uncles were active in the American Indian Movement and Red Nation – I’d been to various events decrying the Plymouth Rock myth. For me, since age 15, Thanksgiving has been a Day of Mourning for Indigenous Peoples who were devastated by settler colonialism and imperialism.

The National Day of Mourning protest was founded by Wamsutta Frank James, an Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribal member, and other Indigenous men and women. In 1970, Wamsutta had been invited by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to speak at a banquet commemorating the 350th anniversary of the arrival of the Pilgrims. The organizers of the banquet thought Wamsutta might deliver an honorific tribute singing the praises of the American settler colonial project. He was not about to “thanks” the Pilgrims for bringing “civilization” to the Wampanoag.

The speech that Wamsutta wrote, which was based on historical fact instead of the hollow fiction, portrayed in the Thanksgiving myth asked fundamental questions: What are the foundational myths of the United States? Who created them and who is erased and harmed?

He detailed how the English before 1620 brought diseases that caused a “Great Dying.” They took Wampanoag people captive, selling them as slaves in Europe for 220 shillings apiece. The Pilgrims robbed Wampanoag graves immediately upon landing in Massachusetts. Yes, there was a meal provided largely by the Wampanoag in 1621, but it was not a “thanksgiving.” Rather, the first official “thanksgiving” (not including the San Elizario one) was declared by the Puritans (not the Pilgrims) in 1637 to celebrate massacring hundreds of Pequot men, women and children on the banks of the Mystic River in Connecticut.

When the organizers of the celebration read the speech, they suppressed it. One of the more powerful messages in it was a collective message of Native American pride: “Our spirit refuses to die,” wrote Wamsutta. “Yesterday we walked the woodland paths and sandy trails. Today we must walk the macadam highways and roads. We are uniting… We stand tall and proud, and before too many moons pass we’ll right the wrongs we have allowed to happen to us.” (RIP, James, an elder of great weight)

Much of these histories – massacres of women and children, the enslavement of men, the amputation of feet, and the death of children ripped from families and forced into these “schools” – cannot be taught in K12, as there are no “trigger warnings” strong enough to “protect” youth from the truth. I’ve had young people complain to administrators for the negative and horrific stories a substitute brings to the high school class.

Going back to mythologies and Disneyfied presentations of history is not just retrograde; it’s dangerous. Having faculty like myself being charged with “teaching anti-white critical race theory junk” is also McCarthyite.

Thank goodness for some of my activist friends in El Paso who years ago did some statue editing: they chopped off the bronze foot of Don Onate as he is poised on a Spanish steed high above his slaves. The foot has never been found.

Part Two

Amazing curriculum,

The revised edition of Native People of Wisconsin introduces students to the historical background, cultural traditions, and treaties negotiated by the eleven federally-recognized Indian Nations in the state today, the Brothertown Indians, a group still waiting to regain federal recognition, and urban Indians. This is serious material, the only mandated subject in social studies instruction in Wisconsin.

Author Patty Loew is a member of the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Ojibwe Nation, who based Native People of Wisconsin on the research done for Indian Nations of Wisconsin, now in its second edition, which is written for a general audience. She strongly feels the responsibility to help students gain knowledge of Indian Country from a Native perspective and from the perspective of each major tribal group represented in Wisconsin’s current population.

The authors of this accompanying teacher’s guide want you to feel confident and comfortable teaching about Native people even if you don’t have much firsthand knowledge. Of course, you and your students have been inundated with images of Indian people, and it’s important that you help your students separate the reality from the stereotypical or mythical, positive and negative. We are happy to direct instructors to real stories from Native communities in videos produced by The Ways: Stories on Culture and Language from Native Communities Around the Central Great Lakes. This online educational resource is a production of Wisconsin Media Lab. The videos are integrated into many of the activities we’ve included and are linked to their corresponding activities in the Table of Contents. Educators may use this video content in conjunction with these Student Activities: Learning from My Elders; Food That Grows on the Water; Oneida Language & Culture; Boarding Schools; Native Songs and Dances (source)

Yet, if this post were to be read by the same people reading my short piece, the one above, with the post’s title, “The First No-Thanks Thanksgiving,” which I hope will appear in the Newport News Times, what kind of backlash would I receive?

Tons of writers or bots or both calling me a kook or loony or anti-business or self-hating when I weigh in on various alternative news sites.

Bottom line is we need more nuance, more critical thinking, and more people who can be counter-intuitive and have several theses, sometimes contradictory, while holding onto strong ethical frame works. I can be for the Declaration of Human Rights, a la United Nations, but I can also be opposed to many of the UN’s programs, people, representatives.

I can see the amazing forward thinking of say The Earth Charter, but I can also think hard about systems, how we need more than a charter, and we need true communism with people power, planet power, thinking and acting globally but also living and organizing and doing locally and regionally.

How can we not engage positively with this?

Preamble — Earth Charter

We stand at a critical moment in Earth’s history, a time when humanity must choose its future. As the world becomes increasingly interdependent and fragile, the future at once holds great peril and great promise. To move forward we must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny. We must join together to bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace. Towards this end, it is imperative that we, the peoples of Earth, declare our responsibility to one another, to the greater community of life, and to future generations.

Alas, though, any sort of collective and creative and earth and people centric thinking will be attacked. Any thinking around just what happened to Native Americans over the course of almost 600 years, that is not heretical.

Just what was that Union Pacific Railroad all about? Mr. Durant, getting how many millions of acres for that transcontinental feat? How many millions of buffalo slaughtered on “shot from the comfort of your railcar” Indian Killing, err, Buffalo Killing, trips?

The telegram arrived in New York from Promontory Summit, Utah, at 3:05 p.m. on May 10, 1869, announcing one of the greatest engineering accomplishments of the century:

The last rail is laid; the last spike driven; the Pacific Railroad is completed. The point of junction is 1086 miles west of the Missouri river and 690 miles east of Sacramento City.

The telegram was signed, “Leland Stanford, Central Pacific Railroad. T. P. Durant, Sidney Dillon, John Duff, Union Pacific Railroad,” and trumpeted news of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. After more than six years of backbreaking labor, east officially met west with the driving of a ceremonial golden spike. In City Hall Park in Manhattan, the announcement was greeted with the firing of 100 guns. Bells were rung across the country, from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco. Business was suspended in Chicago as people rushed to the streets, celebrating to the sounding of steam whistles and cannons booming.

Back in Utah, railroad officials and politicians posed for pictures aboard locomotives, shaking hands and breaking bottles of champagne on the engines as Chinese laborers from the West and Irish, German and Italian laborers from the East were budged from view. (source)

Oh, that was General Sheridan’s concept of Total War, which he utilized heading to Atlanta: three hundred miles of immolated towns, farms, livestock, crops, everything. He now was with President Grant attempting to take care of the “Indian Problem.” Imagine that, more than 120 years ago, utilizing the concept of destroying great people like the Lakota using psychology as a weapon.

Harper’s Weekly described these hunting excursions:

Nearly every railroad train which leaves or arrives at Fort Hays on the Kansas Pacific Railroad has its race with these herds of buffalo; and a most interesting and exciting scene is the result. The train is “slowed” to a rate of speed about equal to that of the herd; the passengers get out fire-arms which are provided for the defense of the train against the Indians, and open from the windows and platforms of the cars a fire that resembles a brisk skirmish. Frequently a young bull will turn at bay for a moment. His exhibition of courage is generally his death-warrant, for the whole fire of the train is turned upon him, either killing him or some member of the herd in his immediate vicinity.

I just finished the eight-part series, The American West, a Robert Redford production. Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Wyatt Earp, Custer. Durant is also a character in the dramatized documentary. Seeing John McCain yammering away about Native Americans in this series takes some acid reflux pills, but then, Tom Selleck, and Kiefer Sutherland and Burt Reynolds?

Producers Stephen David and Tim Kelly:

What prompted you to explore the West in your latest series?

Stephen: We found that after the Civil War – the series focuses on the 25 years after the Civil War – the country was broken and divided, but 25 years later we wound up with this unified country with the same good-bad similarities going on throughout the country. Big business ran things. The American spirit that we have today came from this 25-year period. The lawman, the outlaws, the Army, the Native Americans – everything that was mixed up in this time period – contributed to who we are today.

Tell us what we can expect from the episodes.

Tim: You can expect an unknown story of the West and how the West was settled. It’s a lot of names that you know with a lot of unknown stories. You’ll see the way everything was connected and how the push West was shaped by the Civil War and the opportunity that was available. It’s a very personal story. It focuses on a group of people who aren’t necessarily directly connected, but the effect of what they do is seen throughout the West and how it is formed. There’s also focus on the Native Americans. It’s a mix of outlaws, politicians and Native Americans and the roles they played settling the West.

Yeah, I was a reporter in Tombstone, for the University of Arizona lab paper, The Tombstone Epitaph. I then was a graduated BA/BS working in Bisbee, Cochise County and along the border on both sides of the dividing line.

I was a reporter and teacher and activist in El Paso, and Las Cruces, and had tequila and empanadas on the grave of John Wesley Hardin in Concordia Cemetery.

In the mix, of course, with all these documentaries and dramas the Native Americans are either completely washed out of these stories, or set into a white man’s milieu. I’ve studied graduate courses on “planning in the West,” you know, urban and regional planning. Looking at the West as a unique place in the USA, with a large chunk of the planning course looking at water, Indian sovereignty, and more.

“One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.”

― Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water

Boom and bust, the West. In 2022, the West is all about sinking and shrinking waterways and reservoirs and fires and population influxes and the same snake oil salesmen I ran into in Tucson and throughout Arizona, New Mexico and West Texas.

I am a red man. If the Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man he would have made me so in the first place. He put in your heart certain wishes and plans, in my heart he put other and different desires. Each man is good in his sight. It is not necessary for Eagles to be Crows.

–Sitting Bull, Hunkpapa Lakota chief. God Is Red: A Native View of Religion by Vine Deloria

They want us to give up another chunk of our tribal land. This is not the first time or the last time. They will again try to gain possession of the last piece of ground we possess.

— Sitting Bull, speech against Sioux Bill of 1889

Private security for an arts director in Oregon, that Sundown State? This is the insanity of Biden-Trump-Obama-Carter-Bush-Clinton’s Land.

When Nataki Garrett began to receive death threats early this year, she said her impulse was to retreat.

“When this first happened, I actually tried to isolate myself,” said the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) artistic director in an interview with NPR. “The act of threatening is supposed to make you feel isolated. And it does.”

But isolation isn’t an option when you run one of the country’s oldest and biggest non-profit theater companies. (source)

To reiterate: The white sickness. Insane race, the Anglo Saxons and Caucasians.

“Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.” (Susan Sontag, Partisan Review, Winter 1967)

This is truly the reality of USA, and the white world. Yeah, worker solidarity, class consciousness, but there ain’t nothing good about the disease of racism against Blacks and Africans a la Britain, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, France, Canada, Italy, Germany, USA.

This is the 21st Century, so-called progressive, pot-head, keep it weird, antifa Oregon:

Garrett, though the most prominent, isn’t the first person in OSF’s long history to suffer such attacks in a state founded on exclusion laws that kept Black people out for decades. In 2016, for example, actress Christiana Clark posted a video on Facebook after a passing cyclist reportedly said to her: “It’s still an Oregon law. I could kill a Black person and be out of jail in a day and a half. Look it up. The KKK is alive and well here.” (source)

I see so much racism on the blogs, in the comments sections, and even as I saunter down the road. And, racism, well, James Baldwin:

“It comes as a great shock to discover the country which is your birthplace, and to which you owe your life and your identity, has not in its whole system of reality evolved any place for you. … What white people have to do,” Baldwin said once, “is try to find out in their hearts why it was necessary for them to have a nigger in the first place. Because I am not a nigger. I’m a man. If I’m not the nigger here, and if you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you have to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that. Whether or not it is able to ask that question.”

James Baldwin (source)

Yet, oh, yet, there is another insanity, in these blue-war-love-ukrainian-nazi states: Absolute disgust of heterosexual white men. Men who may be against the narrative, which means against Trump-Biden-Harris-Obama-Capitalism-MIC-Stocks-Bonds-Mandates. Have this flag up, and, bam, total ghosting, shadow banning, canceling and end of conversation:

Source? Roots Action.

The United States is the leading provider of weapons to the world, and the practice of providing weapons to countries in crisis has proven disastrous, including Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Expanding NATO to Russia’s border and arming Russia’s neighbors threatens something worse than disaster. The United States is toying with nuclear war.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt played significant roles in orchestrating the political crisis that led to a violent coup overthrowing Ukraine’s elected President. Nuland not only exclaimed “Fuck the EU!” on that recorded phone call, but she also seemed to decide on the new prime minister: “Yats is the guy.”

The Maidan protests were violently escalated by neo-Nazis and by snipers who opened fire on police. When Poland, Germany, and France negotiated a deal for the Maidan demands and an early election, neo-Nazis instead attacked the government and took over. The U.S. State Department immediately recognized the coup government, and Yatsenyuk was indeed installed as Prime Minister.

The people of Crimea voted overwhelmingly to secede, and that — rather than the coup — has been labeled “aggression.” Ethnic Russians have been massacred by constant shelling from Kiev’s U.S.-NATO backed Army, while Russia has been denounced for “aggression” in the form of various unsubstantiated accusations, including the downing of Flight 17.

It’s important to recognize Western interests at work here other than peace and generosity. GMO outfits want the excellent farming soil in Ukraine. The U.S. and NATO want a “missile defense” base in Ukraine. Oil corporations want to drill for fracked gas in Ukraine. The U.S. and EU want to get their hands on Russia’s “largest supply of natural gas” on the planet.

We routinely recognize the financial corruption of the U.S. government in domestic policy making. We shouldn’t blind ourselves to it in matters of foreign policy. There may be a flag waving, but there is nuclear war looming, and that’s a bit more important.

Yet, these words above put me in the crosshairs. Questioning the Winter 201 virus planned pandemic game, or the DARPA virus meddling, or the gain of function work by Western and Eastern scientists, or any blip of knowledge that anything tied to NIH or biological labs is part of the military and thuggery complex. I’ve been told to go to Russia when I declared that Biden or Trump or Desantis or Clinton, all the same side of the same dirty shekel. Source: Leftists Denounce Rampant Decommunization Attempts in Eastern Europe

Oh, even Jill Stein, smeared and probed and rendered impotent by the McCarthyites in the USA. Mention Stein, and they all go on and on about how she works for Putin and she got Hillary out, Trump in:

Recall, she was called an anti-vaxxer questioning the total insanity of jabs kids and babies get in the USA. She’s a doctor, medicine, but in AmeriKKKa, that doesn’t count in this Inverted Totalitarian world:

This is 20 years ago, about how fascist the USA was becoming, in the Bush-Iraq murdering incorporated:

The war on Iraq has so monopolized public attention as to obscure the regime change taking place in the Homeland. We may have invaded Iraq to bring in democracy and bring down a totalitarian regime, but in the process our own system may be moving closer to the latter and further weakening the former. The change has been intimated by the sudden popularity of two political terms rarely applied earlier to the American political system. “Empire” and “superpower” both suggest that a new system of power, concentrated and expansive, has come into existence and supplanted the old terms. “Empire” and “superpower” accurately symbolize the projection of American power abroad, but for that reason they obscure the internal consequences. Consider how odd it would sound if we were to refer to “the Constitution of the American Empire” or “superpower democracy.” The reason they ring false is that “constitution” signifies limitations on power, while “democracy” commonly refers to the active involvement of citizens with their government and the responsiveness of government to its citizens. For their part, “empire” and “superpower” stand for the surpassing of limits and the dwarfing of the citizenry.

The increasing power of the state and the declining power of institutions intended to control it has been in the making for some time. The party system is a notorious example. The Republicans have emerged as a unique phenomenon in American history of a fervently doctrinal party, zealous, ruthless, antidemocratic and boasting a near majority. As Republicans have become more ideologically intolerant, the Democrats have shrugged off the liberal label and their critical reform-minded constituencies to embrace centrism and footnote the end of ideology. In ceasing to be a genuine opposition party the Democrats have smoothed the road to power of a party more than eager to use it to promote empire abroad and corporate power at home. Bear in mind that a ruthless, ideologically driven party with a mass base was a crucial element in all of the twentieth-century regimes seeking total power.

Representative institutions no longer represent voters. Instead, they have been short-circuited, steadily corrupted by an institutionalized system of bribery that renders them responsive to powerful interest groups whose constituencies are the major corporations and wealthiest Americans. The courts, in turn, when they are not increasingly handmaidens of corporate power, are consistently deferential to the claims of national security. Elections have become heavily subsidized non-events that typically attract at best merely half of an electorate whose information about foreign and domestic politics is filtered through corporate-dominated media. Citizens are manipulated into a nervous state by the media’s reports of rampant crime and terrorist networks, by thinly veiled threats of the Attorney General and by their own fears about unemployment. What is crucially important here is not only the expansion of governmental power but the inevitable discrediting of constitutional limitations and institutional processes that discourages the citizenry and leaves them politically apathetic. (“Inverted Totalitarianism: How the Bush regime is effecting the transformation to a fascist-like state” by Sheldon Wolin)

Thusly, 2003 is so old, so passe, so mothballed into the memory hole of the agnotologists. Sheldon Wolin? What? Who? Two hours?!@ Sheldon Wolin was born in 1922, and died 11 months after this video was finished.

thank god for eels, marine science, the probing minds of people who want the world to be better

Yeah, met this guy, Mork X Twain, at a parts shop. He was in his planetary orbit, and his home-van was disabled in Newport, at a Burger King parking lot. I told him I’d drive him to his van, try a jump and then from there, who knows? So, there you have it — a van he lives in, gong from Newport to the Bay Area, and he said he’s 82, and estranged from his children but has contact with grandkids.

He says he’s writing a collection of essays, tied to the next planetary synergy. China, Russia, Trump and other issues, and he wants a grand socialism, and he’s pretty smart, and who knows what that life was before 82, before he adopted Mork from Mork and Mindy, X from Malcolm X, and Twain, from Samuel Clemmons. He has not phone, and he gave me a PO Box at a copy-postal center in Lincoln City.

I collect stories, and whew, I get embroiled in some interesting narratives of people who are traveling through the slipstream that is life.

I’m thinking about my sister, Roberta, who hit the pavement near Kamloops, when she was 23, on her way on her new Harley to Tucson. Two other people were on their bikes, and some asshole fell asleep at the wheel, and crossed the line and ended Robbie’s life.

What could have been, and my mom and I went to Hyde, Alaska to be with her boyfriend and friends and bury her ashes in the ocean. I was 20 years old. My younger sister was 10. My old man was on his way to Saudi Arabia. US military.

I’m on this beach a lot, following the tide charts, looking for agates, jasper and plenty of birds. Time to think, time to get caught up in my own slipstream, aging out of this American Life, and, alas, thinking about just how damaged the world is around me, and then, de facto, how damaged I am now absorbing plenty of wins and losses, ups and downs.

Then those eels. Amazing, really, “First direct evidence of adult European eels migrating to their breeding place in the Sargasso Sea,” (source, Scientists Track Eels to Their Ocean Breeding Grounds in World-First).

All the way to the Sargasso sea, these reverse anadromous fish ( which migrate from the sea up — Greek: ἀνά aná, “up” and δρόμος drómos, “course” — into fresh water to spawn, such as salmon, striped bass, and the sea lamprey), called, catadromous fish migrate from fresh water down — Greek: κατά kata, “down” and δρόμος dromos, “course”) into the sea to spawn, such as eels.

The point of pointing out these incredible animals, eels, is the point of that human compassion and passion, where people study earth, the amazing life histories of the very animals we take for granted, and those we eat, too. And, I was a kid with my family in the Azores where European eels ended up on their way from UK, say, or Germany, to the Sargasso Sea to breed.

A sharp decline in European eel (Anguilla anguilla) numbers since the 1980s has only made the task all that much harder, and more urgent.

But don’t underestimate these enigmatic creatures. European eels migrate between 5,000 and 10,000 kilometers (3,100 to 6,210 miles) to spawn at sea, after which their larvae drift back towards land and the relative safety of rivers.

Using satellite tags, the researchers behind this latest discovery obtained tracking data from 21 female European eels as they navigated the last leg of their epic journey, southwest from the Azores, a volcanic archipelago in the North Atlantic Ocean, far west of Portugal.

Contrast these amazing biologists and such, with the absolute amount of trauma we — Homo Sapiens, Homo Consumopethicus, Homo Retailerectus, inflict on our own species. This war here, this famine here, this corporation poisoning this land there, these murderers and thieves doing what they can to be at the top of their manure piles.

Simple calculus, but Homo Anglo-Saxon-Bellum will do what it has to, with the puppet masters of folks like Nuland, Kagan, Blinken and Super Goy Zionist goading and propping up this actual subhuman, ZioLensky.

So it’s difficult to absorb the news of these neocons, these billionaires, these propagandists, these lockdown impresarios, these AI-VR-AR surveillance panopticons, and then take some respite in the woods or on a beach, but it is a must, to detoxify, like an elimination diet, finding which inflammatory ingredient culls joints or flurries brain fog.

The fog is great, in what is the 21st Century’s Sadistic, Broken, Chaotic, Propagandistic, Orwellian New Normal, ranging from SARS-CoV2 gain of function hell, that DARPA darling, to the lockdowns and forced vaccinations (sic), ghosting, confiscation of PayPal accounts and money, to stealing billions from Russia, Venezuela, Iran, and now, even, this nuclear saber rattling by the USA and the Dirty Bomb Boy ZioLensky, and the almost complete empty-headed bending over for their masters in Europe.

Here, that Neocon-Neoliberal cloning:

The latest edition of the aforementioned articles was recently released and titled “Renewing America’s Advantages: Interim National Security Strategic Guidance.” Perhaps, the president, who will sign it, is a devout Catholic because the document starts with a confession, which in Judeo-Christian tradition is a necessary step to obtain forgiveness: The U.S. will no longer resort to military coups when it wants to replace a regime in a foreign country.

Biden – or the authors Blinken, his Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who is Robert Kagan’s wife, and Kathleen Hicks, deputy secretary of defense, also an Obama alumnus but not a neocon because she is a true conservative from the Henry Kissinger contingent – promises to chart a new route for the U.S. in international politics in the first three pages of the document. But the document then continues describing how the new U.S. administration will follow the beaten path devised by the Bush-Obama-Trump teams.

“I confessed all the sins committed before on behalf of my country, my Lord,” it reads, like a psalm, leaving the U.S. free to commit the same sins for future presidents to repent for. The Biden administration admits that previous administrations failed to use democracy to impact the policies of foreign countries they opposed, falling back on military coups and interventions, often soliciting them.

The U.S. is known for its controversial stance on Latin American coups and we, in Turkey, understand the Latin American people. Biden personally begged the White House not to issue a statement of support for the civilian government on the fateful night of July 15, 2016, hoping that “our boys could still prevail.”

Let bootlickers like CNN’s Fareed Zakaria and the New York Times’ David Brooks cheer the “changes the Biden team started implementing already” as we witness the administration attempt to implement the same military policy in the Middle East.

The document says that “we do not believe that military force is the answer to the region’s challenges,” but Biden’s National Security Coordinator for the Middle East, Bret McGurk, had already begun fortifying the military garrisons he was building in Syria until he was stopped by Trump.

No wonder the 7,000-word new national security bible features the term “diplomacy” 10 times but the tally for “military” is double!

This man, both, foreground and the Biden Background, are 21st Century monsters:

But this is Halloween, so more monsters:

Her hubby, Robert Kagan:

Not sure how these headlines and images play in the minds of Ukrainian cannon fodder: “Biden Appoints Five Jews to Top Posts, Boy, Are their Mothers Proud“
By David Israel

Here is one reaction from American Jewry: “We are proud of the fact that this slate of nominees includes multiple Jewish Americans and others whose family history represents the rich tapestry of American society,” the Jewish Democratic Council of America (JDCA) said in a statement. “Their understanding of our past will help build a stronger future.”

That response reflects pride that Jews have risen high in the government ranks, and that the new appointees’ understanding of Jewish values will infuse policy.

Contrast that with a tweet from Makor Rishon editor-in-chief Hagai Segal: “There is no need to attribute too much importance to the appointment of Jews in Biden’s administration. There are also a lot of Jews in J Street,” Segal wrote, in reference to the left-wing lobby that has played a leading role in legitimizing and mainstreaming harsh criticism of Israeli policies by both elected and nonelected US officials.(source)

Again, the fog of Western Civilization and the degrading lack of diplomacy and the hard liners in USA, and the militaristic attitude, and the racism against Russia/Russians, all of this is important, for sure, and who knows what percentages mean, what diversity loading can achieve, and what we are thinkers and radicals can do with Anti-Russia people in our midst, the Anti-Chinese attitudes in this society, the amazing Anti-African American racism, and, well, Anti-Semitism, too, which is not even close to being smart and against Israel’s apartheid state, and Zionism gone amok. Below, overtly skewed, but then, we do not have open discussions amongst radicals and socialists on what the Biden Cabinet is and what it means to USA and the world.

Very interesting, the power of that occupied land to set the torches ablaze in the world, but these folk never get the mic:

In keeping with Israel’s policy of maintaining WMD ambiguity, Israel “has never made a public policy statement on biological weapons (BW)” and is reluctant to participate in regional and international fora on WMD disarmament. Preferring to address disarmament and arms control in a regional context, Israel has not signed the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Conventions (BTWC), and believes that progress in advancing the treaty’s goals in the region would require significantly improved political stability, discourse, and confidence building in the region. However, Israel has taken steps to strengthen its export control regulations on dual-use biotechnologies and is also examining ways to improve security at sensitive Israeli laboratories. In terms of BW research, development, and deployment, Israel maintains reticence and ambiguity about its activities and capabilities. However, Israeli defensive BW research regularly appears in open publications. The U.S. government offers conflicting assessments of Israel’s BW activities. Given the overall scarcity and ambiguity of official assessments and policy statements, reconstructions of Israel’s BW history, status, and capabilities can provide only partial and interpretive depictions.

Cohen focuses on a two-decade period from about 1950 until 1970, during which David Ben-Gurion’s vision of making Israel a nuclear-weapon state was realized. He weaves together the story of the formative years of Israel’s nuclear program, from the founding of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission in 1952, to the alliance with France that gave Israel the sophisticated technology it needed, to the failure of American intelligence to identify the Dimona Project for what it was, to the negotiations between President Nixon and Prime Minister Meir that led to the current policy of secrecy. Cohen also analyzes the complex reasons Israel concealed its nuclear program—from concerns over Arab reaction and the negative effect of the debate at home to consideration of America’s commitment to nonproliferation. Israel and Chemical/Biological Weapons: History, Deterrence, and Arms Control by Avner Cohen. Israel and the Bomb, exactly!

Again, priorities, and amazing how rotting the Homo Sapiens have become, from our tribal roots, our hunter and gatherer roots, to this, really, trillions for Blackrock, for Oil, for War, and so much of the Complex — military-medical-pharma-mining-chemical-media-entertainment-legal-ag-prison-surveillance-finance-banking COMPLEX. Crazy days, man: “America’s western water crisis is so bad that Colorado is going to start drinking recycled sewage: Colorado’s water quality agency unanimously approved regulating direct potable reuse. It’s pending a final vote in November.” (source)

[Eric Seufert, owner and manager of 105 West Brewing Co., poses for a photo at his brewery room Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2022, in Castle Rock, Colo. He brewed a test batch of beer in 2017 with water from recycled sewage. AP Photo/Brittany Peterson]

Oh, that incredible lightness of being. Ismael, the book, the ape (gorilla):

Why “Mother” Culture?

Culture is a mother everywhere and at every time, because culture is inherently a nurturer—the nurturer of human societies and lifestyles. Among Leaver peoples, Mother Culture explains and preserves a lifestyle that is healthy and self-sustaining. Among Taker peoples she explains and preserves a lifestyle that has proven to be unhealthy and self-destructive.

If culture is a mother among the Alawa of Australia and the Bushmen of Africa and the Kayapo of Brazil, then why wouldn’t she be a mother among the Takers? (To confirm the notion that “culture is a mother everywhere,” check foreign language dictionaries for the word CULTURE. In languages that recognize “masculine” and “feminine” nouns—French, Italian, Latin, and so on—the noun CULTURE is invariably feminine.) [source]

Working tribally, as a community, small scale, cooperative, versus totalitarian everything. Below, November 1998 Daniel Quinn and biologist Alan D. Thornhill met in dialogue with a small group in Houston, Texas, to forge a new tool designed to unseat the unexamined conventional wisdom that typically shapes all discourse on the subject of population. This program, Food production and Population Growth, is that tool.

Video and podcasts.

What is that end game. Pretending we have hope. Derrick Jensen a long time ago: End Game. If we do not go through a voluntary transformation, what do we do? Imagine all minerals, metals, plastics, time and energy put into those weapons, and then the dead, the dying, the witnesses. Can civilization be sustainable?

This toxic culture, and trauma, and Gabor Mate does it well in his books, and here on The Real News Network, Chris Hedges:

No matter where you stand on Donbass, on Ukraine, on the Nazis, on Minsk II, it’s the trauma trauma trauma that will continue with each generation, young and old and unborn. Deadly.

Criminal:

And, what was the Agent Orange’s gift that keeps on giving?

From 1962 to 1971, the U.S. Air Force sprayed nearly 19 million gallons of herbicides in Vietnam, of which at least 11 million gallons was Agent Orange, in a military project called Operation Ranch Hand. An additional quantity (1.6 million gallons has been documented) of herbicides was applied to base perimeters, roadways, and communication lines by helicopter and surface sprayings from riverboats, trucks, or backpacks. Herbicide operations in Vietnam had two primary military objectives: (1) defoliation of trees and plants to improve observation, and (2) destruction of enemy crops. (Veterans and Agent Orange: Health Effects of Herbicides Used in Vietnam)

Old ideas in the 20th century from the apartheid terrorist state, Israel:

The Israeli army used chemical and biological weapons during the 1948 war, including poisoning water wells in several Palestinian towns, original documents stored in the Israel State Archive, as well as other archives revealed.

The documents showed that Israeli political and military leaders and some scholars were partners in the decision, and had even planned to poison the waters in Cairo and Beirut, but changed their mind at the last minute. (source)

Send in the clowns, and ask: What Toilet Would ZioLensky Order?

San Francisco’s local government expects to spend up to $1.7 million to build just one public toilet – hardly a drop in the bucket for a city that gets thousands of complaints annually of feces on its sidewalks – and the project will take an estimated three years to complete.

Imagine how the Jews in Israel must feel about this fact: “After a three-and-a-half-year legal battle waged by the Gisha human rights organization, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories has finally released a 2008 document that detailed its “red lines” for “food consumption in the Gaza Strip.”

The document calculates the minimum number of calories necessary, in COGAT’s view, to keep Gaza residents from malnutrition at a time when Israel was tightening its restrictions on the movement of people and goods in and out of the Strip, including food products and raw materials. The document states that Health Ministry officials were involved in drafting it, and the calculations were based on “a model formulated by the Ministry of Health … according to average Israeli consumption,” though the figures were then “adjusted to culture and experience” in Gaza.” (source)

Oh, the horror, the heart of darkness, those ZioLensky followers and facilitators. How’s that food going to taste when another Chernobyl is unleashed by these crazy, insane, misanthrope Ukrainians? Sick.

The Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, the largest facility of its kind in Europe, is located on the shore of the Dnepr just outside the city. Ukraine wants it bombed.

These monsters in the Collective West, man, will do anything, just anything: The Pentagon has modelled a situation in which the Kakhovka dam would be blown up and what consequences it would have for the region

“Bankova took these calculations into account and agreed to missile attacks on it (the dam),” write Ukro experts who have access to the political backstage of the Ukrainian authorities.

In 1985, specialists of the All-Union Design and Research Institute “Gidroproekt” analyzed the consequences of a hypothetical failure of the Kakhovka reservoir dam. Naturally, in Soviet times these data were kept behind seven seals.

In 2004, the Kherson newspaper “Hryvna” published an article “We are not ready for local apocalypse”, which revealed details of the secret report of the Hydro project. If the dam explodes, millions of tons of water will hit Kherson with a speed of 24.4 kilometers hour and a wave height of 1 meter. In as little as 2.5 hours, a fairly sharp rise in level to 4.8 meters would follow. The flooding will last for three days and will completely destroy the regional center.

There Will Be Blood, Guts, Shit

there are birds

dropping from the sky

black birds and cranes

no more storks

the bees and moths died

years ago

+–+

but men with guns

short actors like Zelensky

barrel chested Azov Nazis

they will photo shop

birds in the air

holograms of themselves

fighting with hunting

rifles scary Russian soldiers

+–+

those Ukrainians kill brothers,

sisters, children who eat

the handouts of war

with Russian labels

this is the new abnormal

in the 21st Century

+–+

as if the Declaration of Human

rights were burned with books

now, murdering civilians

placing them in a C.I.S.

movie stage, film at 10

Ziolensky, thespian

+–+

begging for more murder

he will appear on the cover of Time

inside Vogue, will write his memoir

when he sends Ukrainians, Goyim

one and all, to the meat grinder

+–+

there are no shitters working

in Ukraine, and food is measely

since planting is circumvented

by the dark art of

propaganda, and war

+–+

no birds to peck out eyes

just the Ukrainian sky

that shitty flag, blue

on top of yellow

flying in my neighborhood

tattered, ridiculous

even the Jews in Oregon

root for the Nazis

+–+

no more sparrows

no more ducks

all avian species of note

grabbed up by dirty

Ukrainian soldiers

cooked over diesel fires

the sky sooty

like the minds of ZioLensky

and his Western handlers

anti-Democrats stippling the world of rights and freedoms!

Amazing, this Greek billionaire, Big Pharma King, Money-First, Jewish-Second, Mengele-Third Albert Bourla just not giving a shit!

After Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla refused to show and answer questions in front of the special COVID committee of the European Parliament, Janine Small, president of Pfizer’s International Developed Markets, took his place in the hearing that took place on October 10, 2022.

She received many questions from the committee members, which, in majority, she did not specifically answer.

When asked about the “redacted” version of the contract, she said that they can’t disclose the whole contract because they have interests to protect.

When asked if they tested if their injections are stopping the transmission of the virus, she said that they did not. (source)

SARS-CoV2 the variant’s variant-producing gain of function, cleaved furin . . . .

We need that honey badger to take on these globalists!

Kanye West: bank JP Morgan Chase cuts ties with rapper . . . . These boys and girls own the spigot, the tap, the sink, and all:

Walter Kirn: The first story that caught my interest was this feint by PayPal, in which they announced a new policy that it would allow them to fine you or grant themselves $2,500 from your account if you were caught spreading “misinformation.” They quickly reversed to that. It was a little bit like a flasher in the park, quickly opening his raincoat to show you the ugliness, then closing it again and saying he didn’t mean to.

Then there was Kanye West, who had a very garrulous week. He was on Tucker Carlson. He was on Twitter. He was making a lot of noise. And one of his remarks apparently caused JP Morgan Chase to close his account. And that’s a hell of a big account. Then, you know, you had Alex Jones fined a billion dollars for his Sandy Hook defamation. You also had a story the Wall Street Journal reported about the ongoing orgy of insider trading on the part of our government officials. None of them are being de banked, and none of them are having their E*TRADE accounts closed, it seems. So, this financial censorship, or the financial engineering of social thought and direction, seem to be a meta-story for the week.

Matt Taibbi: My knowledge level about Kanye West is zero. He was married to a Kardashian or something?

Walter Kirn: He was married, he’s had a famous divorce.

Matt Taibbi: But then he gets de-banked by JP Morgan Chase. And that was the moment where I started paying attention, because I covered this subject. Chase has an extraordinary history of not getting rid of real problem clients. In fact, they were criminally charged and fined nearly half a billion dollars, if I remember correctly [editor’s note: they were actually fined $1.7 billion by the Justice Department and $461 million by FinCEN] for not getting rid of Bernie Madoff as a client when they knew he was a problem. The funniest part of that story was that when Chase figured out that there was something wrong there, they didn’t notify the world. They didn’t release him as a client. They just withdrew their own investments in Bernie and BLM Enterprises, which was Bernie Madoff’s fund. There’s social conscience for you!

From the FinCen release about Chase and its Madoff accounts.

Matt Taibbi: Chase has a history beyond Madoff, for violation of anti-money laundering rules, which means they were not properly vetting where their depository money came from, which is the problem across the industry. They also have a history of race based discrimination. They had to pay a pretty significant fine a couple of years ago for mortgage discrimination, where they were accused of charging blacks and Hispanics more for mortgages than white clients. And then they turn around and they’re claiming to be shocked, shocked, by the behavior of Kanye West, to the point where they’re going to take away his banking services. That’s troubling to me for a couple of reasons. One, because you wonder, are my services in the hands of some bureaucrat at a bank, who’s judging what I do in my private life? It’s also just so hypocritical.

Oh, capitalism, in your face, and that small town who sold out to a Mall company in 2017 all full of blackberry weeds and raccoons:

Tiller residents lament the absence of tiny Oregon town’s new corporate owner

By Janet Eastman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Southern Oregon’s tiny town of Tiller drew worldwide attention five years ago when people learned the news, from the BBC network to Fortune magazine, that they could buy a Shangri-La along the South Umpqua River.

The asking price of $3.85 million bundled together 257 contiguous acres that included most of the downtown as well as pioneer Aaron J. Tiller’s homestead and forested hilltops with water rights and about 2 million board feet of merchantable timber.https://da5436c9f6c22c7bb7d931d31dd377f9.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html?n=0

After a year of negotiations, the new owner, Global Shopping Mall, based in Garden Grove, California, signed the deed in September 2018, and continues to remain quiet about preservation and development plans. Tiller Town Corporation was registered as an Oregon business on Aug. 17, 2021.

In 2019, representatives from Global Shopping Mall announced to some of the 250 residents at a meeting in the town that they wanted to broadcast a virtual outdoor experience around the globe, capturing the verdant, remote and mostly unoccupied setting an hour’s drive from Crater Lake National Park.

When told Tiller didn’t have high-speed internet or cellphone service, the owners declined to supply it, said residents.

Today, locals lament the town’s absentee corporate owner, and that unbridled raccoons and unchecked blackberry bushes are overtaking the structures.

“It seems sad nothing has happened yet,” said former owner Rick Caswell, whose late father, Richard Caswell Sr., purchased Tiller tax lots over four decades, zoned for rural commercial, industrial, residential and agricultural use.

Sort of emblematic of Capitalism? Private ownership of cities, now they’d have charter cities, too, no?

I believe millions of people are being pressured to be on the move, because it serves the interests of power to normalize biometrically-managed social instability as the disruptive potential of Web 3.0 materializes. Last year the Charter Cities Institute prepared a white paper proposing their solution as an improvement over the current horror of refugee camps where families may languish for years. In the introduction, the author Sarah Doyel states that data from the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees indicates the number of displaced people has almost doubled over the past decade from 43 million to 80 million. Each of those people is a potential impact opportunity for global investment portfolios. (“Charter Cities, Refugee Labor, and The Learning Economy – Synthetic Pretenders Part 15A“)

Here ya go, the Charter Cities manifesto, PDF!

So the beat goes on and on. The follies:

Israel to the rescue . . .

A senior Israeli official reportedly also said that a private Israeli firm was giving Ukraine satellite imagery of Russian troop positions. 

Ukraine’s Ambassador to Israel Yevgen Korniychuk has previously called on Israel to sell to his country the Iron Dome, the Jewish state’s indigenous effective short-range projectile defense platform. 

“We need Israeli assistance… I mean that we need the military-technical support; we need an Iron Dome,… which will allow us to save our civilian women and children from the shelling of the Russian missiles in our territory,” he said in June. 

Alas, the same globalists, eugenicists, and billionaire thugs are running the Covid Incompetence and the Charter Cities Scam.

There’s so much to unpack when it comes to propaganda propagating a society, or in this case, the collective west, that is collectively insane. Amazing is not really the operative word, since there are so many allusions to “good Germans” throughout the collective west, even before Hitler and Bernays and Goebbels and hasbara.

We’ll get to the Covid test in a minute, but the idea of exacting image management and agnotology and black is white, lies are truth mentality has taken off with algorithms and censoring and the onslaught of Google and Deep State and Corporate State seeding the world with a system of dumbdowning by a 1,000,000,000 managed internet hits and mass hysteria.

Zelenskyy has been using 3D imagery to deliver speeches all over the world by using a hologram.

Zelenskyy’s “participation” in world events using a hologram has been reported by several renowned media outlets, as can be seen below.

A hologram is created through holography, a photographic technique which records the light scattered from an object and displays it three-dimensionally.

Images, and the Mass Incarceration Media Management Show:

Oh, these image management boys and girls:

It’s taken off like gangbusters with the few and the mighty controlling 90 percent of “media,” i.e. publishing (including k12 books) and radio and TV and cable and the Holly-Dirt manufacturers of lies, half-truths, multimillionaire thespians who end up acting in politics. All the world’s a stage for coiffing the reality of the poor masses, us, we useless eaters-breeders-breathers-shitters.

Then, with this total absorption of Hollywood images, the marketing ploys, the perceived, planned, hoped for complete transition from citizens to consumers to data zombies to useless to nobodies, we can have this sort of audacity, in my local rag. All full-page rainbow colors and all:

Imagine that, driving in Newport, while seeing all those employee solicitations plastered up on the local Burger King and Pizza Hut billboards, seeking drive-thru help or pizza dough assistants, for $16 an hour plus signing on bonuses and a 30 percent discount on fat, salt and sugar, man.

I’m not sure what the Burger King/Pizza Hut Covidian Madness Requirements are for those teens or Baby Boomers lining up for this gig, to actually get hired with background checks, drug checks, and vax checks, but I know the school district requires SARS-CoV2 experimental jabs, and CDC proof of it, to walk the halls of the school or help those kids on the teether ball court.

Note, the hourly wage for substitutes has been set by a staffing agency working hand in glove with the district — $14.07 an hour. When I was substituting, well, I’d get $18 an hour, and that included pay for a full day if I pinch-hit a couple hours after the morning bell rang. That was $140 for six hours work! Not anymore!

I’d meet the school secretary, get signed in, and then that was it —  look at the absent teacher’s notes for the day and then greet the 3rd graders and the math classes in the high schools, music room sub, or special education sub. Even PE and even all sorts of classes K12.  Now, the poor souls getting $14 an hour have to jump through the staffing agency hoop, a company out of Tennessee:

And this another aspect of the smoke and mirrors game of Western Society — the staffing agencies, the middlemen and middlewomen just making bank by adding on to all the daily costs of living, of surviving, with their powerful Salesforce apps and servers, all of that, taking over teaching, for the time being, until it all goes on-line, in home “learning”:

Over the last 22 years, we have innovated education staffing to provide dynamic solutions to school districts and professional opportunities to passionate educators. Our team serves over 4.5 million students with a pool of 80,000 substitute and permanent employees throughout 33 states. Internally, the ESS team is comprised of 650 individuals with a passion for education working together to ensure our 900 partner districts experience valuable education every day.

This is the big rip-off, the taxpayers’ spending trillions over the years to establish/prop up public education, schools, busses, college prep programs, all those state colleges and junior colleges, all those school districts throughout the land, so that one day the PT Barnum’s of the world can come in and swoop up and take some munches out of that public-private partnership bs.

I have never seen journalists question this rip-off scheme because, a, journalism has always been on life-support, always there as a town barker and nice guy in the business story realm, and, b, because “going deep” journalistically means going deeper into how immersive the rip-off schemes are in U$A.

I’ve written about my bad times here in Lincoln County, about the spinelessness of ESS, and, well, each criticism of these systems puts another nail into my useless eater-breather-shitter life:

Again, I think the biggest question in maybe in economics and politics of the coming decades will be what to do with all these useless people?

The problem is more boredom and how what to do with them and how will they find some sense of meaning in life, when they are basically meaningless, worthless?

My best guess, at present is a combination of drugs and computer games as a solution for [most]. It’s already happening…

I think once you’re superfluous, you don’t have power.

– from a TRANSCRIPT at Rielpolitic Alexandra Bruce, “Brave New World: Yuval Noah Harari asks, “What to do with all these useless people?”

Harari goes on to outline a transhumanist vision of the future in which brain-computer interfaces make our footedness in the material world obsolete, human relationships become meaningless due to artificial substitutes, and the poor die but the rich don’t.

Wesley J. Smith points out:

Transhumanism, boiled down to its bones, is pure eugenics. It calls itself “H+,” for more or better than human. Which, of course, is what eugenics is all about.

Alarmingly, transhumanist values are being embraced at the highest strata of society, including in Big Tech, in universities, and among the Davos crowd of globalist would-be technocrats. That being so, it is worth listening in to what they are saying under the theory that forewarned is forearmed.

“Transhumanism is pure eugenics” at Evolution News, April 27, 2022

Big issues, no, for the 21st Century of Fourth Industrial Revolution, Web 3.0, Social Impact Bonds, pay for success, blockchains, twinning, and so-so much more that the average gumshoe journalist just can’t dig deep because it will upset the entire playing field they so badly need to get a sense of sanity from the insane. But reporting on insanity is what we need in a time of Transhumanism and Covidian Cults?

Try this out for size:

When you enter the “invest in kids bonds” door knowing there are plans to create asset-backed securities in toddlers and trade them (and perhaps short them) on global markets, the single-minded interrogation of cryptocurrency exchanges and NFT rip-offs feels woefully inadequate. If the stakes weren’t so high, it might be amusing to watch folks who’ve been swimming in the shark-infested waters of financial derivatives for years point fingers decrying crypto-Ponzi-schemers. Calls for better regulation and professed empathy for those who lost their savings to fraudulent digital money schemes ring a bit hollow once you realize many of the panelists’ livelihoods are intertwined with the same financial interests, journalism outlets, and think tanks that were enmeshed in the crash of the global economy via toxic-real estate debt products. These are the same folks who are now in the process of developing the risk modeling, tokenomics, and APIs needed to run the smart “Ricardian” contract, “sustainably resilient,” open-air prison. — Alison McDowell, Wrench in the Gears

“What Stage Are We On? Immersive Storytelling, Hegelian Dialectic, and Crypto-Spectacle”

Read what the billionaire class and the techno gurus are after, and it’s data, man, tracking us, every blink, twitch, hiccup, burp, step, defecation as well as every purchase, every debt, every desire, to create the ultimate robotics, AI. It’s universal basic chump income blathering, man, and it is that World Economic Forum adage on steroids: “You’ll own nothing but be happy.”

Go here, too, for more:

So, as a real journalist, I have experienced that old time religion of lack of bandwidth, lack of humane reporting, the lack of looking at many sides, and coming out the other end of a story with, well, some solutions that are not the black-and-white game of divide and conquer. False balance, equivocation, relying on diploma-ed and credentialed sources, fear of litigation, the whole nine yards of mainstream journalism requiring an inverted triangle of information, i.e., the lede and important stuff at the top, and the superfluous and unimportant stuff (sic) at the bottom. Of course, it is the stuff at the bottom that IS important.

Case in point: I did the story on 13 Salvadorans found dead in the Organ Pipe National Monument along the US-Mexico border. Newspaperman. Yeah, the hurly burly of all those cops, helicopters, forensics wagons, and a young reporter who happened to have friends working with refugees of El Salvador (and Chile and Guatemala) and who actually did some assistance with the so-called underground railroad. You know, assistance that would have gotten me fired and banned from journalism, even got me arrested, as in, well, helping undocumented folk get from point a to point be in my pick-up truck.

When the grisly scene came into play, and with my background in that work, of course I got a hold of some folk working to assist those coming into the USA for sanctuary and political asylum. Of course, I knew a few academics and authors who had been writing about the dirty schemes of the Salvadoran government, businesses, military and police who were exacting hell on common people, on farmers, and on labor unionists with the material support and intellectual help of USA!

That bottom-of-the-inverted triangle “stuff” was fought over, parsed, edited out, and eventually cut, as the newspapers I worked for was all about the facts, ma’am, if it bleeds, it leads, just get the information from the officials on the spot.

You know, don’t upset the local readers, don’t go into “that” political stuff, and don’t bring in guys and gals from universities all the way from Cochise County, Arizona, to Chicago in your stories?

That was in the early 1980s.

It’s gotten worse. And, I have found over the years that journalists are intimidated by or enamored by the scientists, the reef biologists, the astrophysicists, the dudes and gals mixing up the chemicals, designing the motherboards, and trading derivatives.

Journalists are also tone deaf to history, to backgrounding, and, alas, if the motherships are New York Times and Washington Post and another dozen or so papers sprinkled around the U$A, then that modelling has what has tainted the media, The Press.

How disturbing it is to see the fornication of corporations and media, how disgusting it is to see what is and is not off limits in the reportage arena.

Source: Sheepdog Bernie Sanders site!

Then, in book publishing? Fewer and fewer books of importance.

This prefatory bit I’m etching in hyperbole before introducing a piece on how the “left” failed the Covid reporting test big time is my angst, for sure, and my ability to see the big picture(s), even if they are holograms and 4 D chessboards in the entire propaganda game. Systems thinking, and while much about capitalism is boorish and raw and just plain usury and scamming and parasitic, there are some complicated and very technical aspects of how finance is moving into your local community, your neighborhood, your lives. BlackRock? Who controls the world?

CEO Larry Fink built a shadow government of former agency officials in a bid to become Hillary Clinton’s Treasury secretary. That didn’t stop Fink from becoming part of the main private-sector advisory organization to Donald Trump until that panel disbanded after Charlottesville.

Alas, though, we’d expect that non-legacy journalists, or those who were once in the Mainstream who are now leftist, supposed anti-monopoly, anti-corporation, skeptical beyond skeptical of any governmental narrative reporters, that they would have peeled back the onion peels on this SARS-CoV2 bioweapon, and then question the funny juiced-up cocktails that we call the mRNA jab.

You’d think that the censoring of doctors, scientists, just plain deep thinkers and activists on the lockdowns, the mandates, the failure to get the data from the Moderna’s and the Pfizer’s on these bizarre untested and rapidly released jabs would pique their interest.

Instead, many went blank, called millions of us as poorly informed, conspiracy theorists, anti-this and anti-that dupes. Imagine that, journalists who question empire, question the United Fruit Company, question authority, Vietnam, Weapons of Mass Destruction, the MIC, FIRE, and who want to look deep into the well that is American Manifest Destiny and Exceptionalism, that they would flip like dying dogs, or either go blank on the virus front, or even patronize those of us who have the gumption to look into the origins of that “virus” and who have the interest in understanding what a great reset is, and how a pathogen and mass hysterical and controlled media on that front can people to submit to these fascist things. Typical leftist yammering:

“I got my vaccinations, but I understand that some people who might have personal or whatever beliefs have the right, I guess, to not get forcefully jabbed. Well, yeah, I got the jab because the information just came to me in a dream -haha. I understand science and I understand how much smarter these virologists are, and, heck, a conspiracy of them producing products that would be bad for us, or cause deaths, or that the decent governmental employees would cook up fakes on all this, get real? I get why people might not want to have blood transfusions because of their religion, or not get this vaccine, but for the greater good of all, really, this is a pandemic. We have to follow the science. Sometimes the government-law has to intervene if the Jehovah Witness parent is putting their kids in jeopardy with this inane superstition about blood transfusions and keeping them on life support. Get real, and be part of our collective society.”

So, yes, I only have a BS in marine biology from a long time ago, and, yes, only a masters in Rhetoric and another one in urban and regional planning, and only years underwater diving, and decades as a many-venue journalist, and many decades teaching college, and many years as a sustainability coordinator, and, well, so, if I doubt the narratives around Event 201 and Gates and gain of function lies and what those bio-labs in Canada and USA and even Ukraine and former Soviet Union region are actually up to; and if I delve into many many sources tied to what the hell is going on with corona virus, bats, civets, and SARS, and what the history of Japan’s Unit 731 is, and what the history of biological warfare (ARPA and DARPA) and what is in the minds and labs (Plum Island, Fort Detrick) of U$A, well, again, lefties, liberals, Democrats: “Shut the f#@% up and just do what a good citizen should do . . . your commie countries are doing it too . . .  China, Nicaragua, Cuba . . . so take off that tin foil hat and just relax and take it as it is: these scientific things, these mRNA clipping things, this incredible advancement in the science of working with RNA and DNA, well, it supersedes your ability to understand where these big Pharma outfits are coming from. Shut up, and if you doubt any of this, then you are, well, akin to a Trumpian or Q-Anon or just a plain wacko antivaxxer, man. Embarrassing.”

Sure, everything else written about exposures of this bizarre multiple front narrative is verboten:

No Doubting Thomases here:

RNA for Moderna’s Omicron Booster Manufactured by CIA-Linked Company

Since late last year, messenger RNA for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines, including its recently reformulated Omicron booster, has been exclusively manufactured by a little known company with significant ties to US intelligence. (source)

Sinister, man, and I will not belabor the point here citing even a dozen of the hundreds of sources I have read that look at what was being cooked up in labs, from North Carolina to Toronto to Wuhan, and on and on. Bill Gates? The media? Big pharma? The media? Pathogens dropped on the Chinese in Korea in 1950? Right, the record of scientists and MIC working hand in hand is wonderful!

This billionaire is a murder incorporated, continuing criminal enterprise booster:

In October, 2019 Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who, together with his wife, runs the richest and most powerful foundation in the world, co-organized a simulation exercise on a worldwide corona epidemic. Videos were posted documenting the exercise. But intriguingly Gates now denies such an exercise ever took place.

Why? On April 12, 2020, Bill Gates said in an interview to the BBC, “Now here we are. We didn’t simulate this, we didn’t practice, so both the health policies and economic policies, we find ourselves in uncharted territory.”

This is the same person who, just six months before the outbreak of the pandemic, organized a series of four role-playing simulations of a corona pandemic with very high-ranking participants. Event 201 was a simulation of a corona pandemic conducted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum and Johns Hopkins University in October 2019.

Participants from the private and public sectors were presented with a scenario, not unlike the one that has unfolded in reality, and discussed what needed to be done. There are official videos of the four meetings and a best-of-video scenario presentation and discussion by the participants, who are members of a pandemic control council in the role play. (source)

Enough already. Here, Mister Harrington’s piece which does question those journalists which I have cited many many times concerning US and global policies that are screwing us over royally. With permission from Harrington, to reprint over at Dissident Voice, where it was originally found at, Brownstone Institute.

Why did the Left Fail the Covid Test So Badly?

By Thomas Harrington

Like every other important social phenomenon, propaganda regimes have historical genealogies. For example, a very strong case could be made that the ongoing, and sad to admit, largely successful Covid propaganda onslaught under which we now live can trace its roots back to the two so-called demonstration wars (the Panama Invasion and the First Gulf Conflict) waged by George Bush Sr.

The American elites were badly stung by the country’s defeat in Vietnam. In it, they rightly saw a considerable curtailment of what they had come to see as their divine right since the end of WWII: the ability to intervene as they so fit in any country not explicitly covered by the Soviet nuclear umbrella.

And in their analysis of that failure, they correctly alighted to the role that the media—by simply bringing the tawdry and ignoble reality of the war into our living rooms—had played in undermining citizen willingness to engage in such fruitless, costly and savage adventures in the future.

With his massive military build-up and heavy support of proxies in Latin America in the eighties, Ronald Reagan took the first steps toward recovering this lost elite prerogative.

But it was not until the administration of George Bush Sr. and the two conflicts mentioned above that, as he himself exultantly put it in the wake of his pitiless slaughter of some 100,000 poorly equipped Iraqis, “We’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.”

Bush knew what he was talking about, and it wasn’t necessarily, or even primarily, military force or prowess.

What had largely limited Reagan to proxy wars during eight years in office were two things. The first was a citizenry that still had fresh memories of the debacle in Southeast Asia. The second, and arguably more important one was a press corps with on-the-ground familiarity with the reality of these conflicts that continued to challenge him on both their morality and strategic efficacy.

Bush and his team, which as you’ll remember included one Richard Cheney at Defense, made remedying this “problem” of war-hesitancy one of the central aims of his presidency. As Barbara Trent suggests in her remarkable The Panama Deception, experimenting with new media management techniques was not a strategic sideshow of the conflict, but rather its prime goal.

The Panama invasion was followed in quick succession by the Gulf War, where press coverage put heavy emphasis on the opinions of US military figures and their explanations of the technical genius of American-made military technology. In this way, the war was presented to Americans as a sort of exciting video game characterized by flashes of light in the night and precision attacks devoid of any bloodshed and death.

This process of desensitizing of the media, and from there, the American people to the horrendous human effects of war-making culminated in the revolting spectacle, on January 30th, 1991 of reporters chuckling along with General Norman Schwarzkopf as he joked while showing them videos of supposed “smart bombs” killing people like ants from the safety of 30,000 feet.

Having received no coordinated pushback from anyone with power about this degrading treatment of human life and the American people, they tripled down and went full Manichaean after September 11th.

Why not?

With Reagan’s repeal of the fairness Doctrine in 1987 and Bill Clinton’s Telecommunications Act of 1996 never had the media been a) concentrated in so few hands b) so beholden to the government regulation for the continuance of the super-profitability generated through this consolidation c) debilitated by the internet-induced collapse of the newspaper business model and thus d) less obligated to the reflect take into account the concerns and interests of a broad spectrum of the American people.

It was now truly, as George Bush Jr said, a matter of “You’re either with us or against us,” us of course being the war-making government (including the Deep State) along with its slavishly loyal media mouthpieces. If like Susan Sontag—who whether you like her or not, was a very bright and highly accomplished thinker—you believed the maniacal presumptions of the US response to September 11th were flawed, and said so, you could in this new environment, expect to be the object of well-coordinated attacks on your character.

Never once did the administration call for restraint in such attacks, nor did any administration figures remind people of the importance of the supposedly American value of everyone’s right to be respectfully heard.

Seeing the exhaustion of the Bush brand after the Iraq debacle, the Deep State switched party allegiances in the run-up to the 2008 election. And it has stayed firmly on the side of the so-called “left” ever since, encouraging the use of Bush-Cheney-style government-media mobbing against those who might dare to question the motives of the sainted warmonger Obama, or, say, the “logic” of trying to reduce the problems of racism by promoting it through identity politics.

The efficiency of such mob-style takedown tactics was greatly enhanced by the dramatic expansion of social media platforms in the Obama and Trump years.

It is no exaggeration to say that a person born in 1990 or later has little if any understanding of what it means to disagree in detail and in good faith with someone whose political and/or social ideals are different than their own. Nor what it means to feel obligated to respond to the claims of others with careful factual refutations.

What they do know, because it’s mostly all that they have seen from their “betters,” is that to argue is to seek the destruction of one’s interlocutor, and failing that, to make sure his or her arguments are impeded from circulating freely in our shared civic spaces. The ever-increasing dialectical poverty of those who have been socialized and educated in this environment is evident to anyone who has served as a classroom instructor during the last quarter century.

A sanctuary for the weary
While most people seemed to want to pretend that nothing new was happening, that the collaboration between media and government had always been this extreme, many of us did not. We had memories. And we knew the “field of thinkable thought” was dramatically smaller in 2005 than in 1978. And we knew it had become much, much smaller in 2018 than it was in 2005. In our search for answers we turned to media critics and scholars of media history. We also turned to the writings of journalist-activists with both interest and insight into these matters.

When it came to this last group, I found myself drawn principally to what might be termed leftist anti-imperialists. Reading them, I widened my understanding of how elites and their chosen “experts” manage information flows, and constantly seek to shrink the parameters of acceptable opinion on foreign policy issues.

Two years ago last March, however, my sense of intellectual kinship with this subset of thinkers suddenly became very strained. We were facing what I immediately recognized as the largest and most aggressive “perception management” campaign in recent times, and perhaps in the history of the world. One, moreover, that was utilizing all the techniques employed during the previous two to three decades to insure citizen allegiance to US war-making.

And yet in the face of it, almost all my go-to people on propaganda analysis had little or nothing to say. And when I sent contributions outlining my doubts about the congruity of the emergent Covid discourse to places that had generally welcomed my analyses of pro-war propaganda, suddenly there was hesitation on the other end.

And the passage of time cured nothing. Indeed, the only things these people said down the road; that is, if they addressed Covid at all, was to underscore the unprecedented severity of the situation (a very questionable assertion) and harp on Trump’s supposedly disastrous handling of it.

There was virtually no daylight between the opinions of these people and the feckless liberals they, as true-blue leftists, always claimed to disdain. And on it went, for the entire two years of the Covid panic.

A week or so ago, John Pilger, arguably one of the brightest and more persistent leftist analysts of establishment propaganda, published “Silencing the lambs: How propaganda works” on his website and then a number of progressive news outlets.

In it, he repeats all sorts of well-known ideas and concepts. There’s a reference to Leni Riefenstahl and how she believed the bourgeoisie are those most amenable to influence campaigns, a reminder of Julian Assange’s horrendous and undeserved fate, much deserved praise for Harold Pinter’s absolutely extraordinary if largely ignored Nobel acceptance speech, an intelligent discussion about how our media studiously refuses to tell us about anything that went on between Russia and the West, and Russia and Ukraine between 1990 and February of this year.

The underlying thesis of the piece is that while emitting and constantly pushing elite-approved messages are key elements of propaganda, so too is the strategic disappearance of essential historical realities and truths.

All good stuff. Indeed, all themes that I have written about with frequency and conviction over the years.

Toward the end piece Pilger asks the following rhetorical question:

When will real journalists stand up?

And a few lines later, after providing us with a list of where to find the few outlets and journalists that do know what they are doing when it comes to the elite’s informational misdirection plays, he adds:

And when will writers stand up, as they did against the rise of fascism in the 1930s? When will film-makers stand up, as they did against the Cold War in the 1940s? When will satirists stand up, as they did a generation ago?

Having soaked for 82 years in a deep bath of righteousness that is the official version of the last world war, isn’t it time those who are meant to keep the record straight declared their independence and decoded the propaganda? The urgency is greater than ever.

Reading this final flourish while remembering the lamb-like silence of John Pilger in the face of the sustained Covidian onslaught of institutionalized lies and Soviet-grade censorship, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

And when considering that virtually all those he endorses as exemplars of propaganda-savvy journalism—people such as Chris Hedges, Patrick Lawrence, Jonathan Cook, Diana Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone all of whose work I have frequently and enthusiastically championed over the years—took the same cud-chewing path, the sense of farce only grows.

The same can be said of most all of the outlets (Grayzone, Mint Press News, Media Lens, Declassified UK, Alborada, Electronic Intifada, WSWS, ZNet, ICH, CounterPunch, Independent Australia, Globetrotter) who portray themselves as being wise to the wiles of elite-sponsored influence operations.

Who, the question thus occurs to me, is actually living in a “a deep bath of righteousness” that impedes the ability to access the truths that lie beyond the “official version” of our past and present?

Who is failing to respond to the presence of fascistic tendencies in our midst?

If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was John and his merry band of crack propaganda dissectors.

Is it that hard for them to see the shadow of fascism in the now heavily documented collaboration between the US government and Big Tech in censoring opinions that go counter to the government’s and Big Pharma’s desired discourse on Covid?

Is it really difficult for them to see the presence of the same dark forces in the US government’s insouciant abrogation of the Nuremberg principle relating to informed consent and medical experimentation?

Are they not troubled by the fact that the experimental vaccines that were sold to the population on the basis of their ability to stop infection do not do that? Or that this was known to anyone who read the FDA briefing papers published when these injections were unleashed on the public?

Does this count as a major “propaganda problem” worth looking into?

Do they care about the millions of people who lost their jobs over these lies, and of course the government’s abject disdain for the longstanding statutory right to object to medical treatment on religious grounds?

As long-time mavens of foreign policy, have they looked into the mafia-like nature of the vaccine contracts forced upon sovereign countries around the world?

Being the great sleuths of information-hiding that they are, did it raise any suspicions in them when Pfizer sought to keep all clinical information relating to the vaccines under wraps for 75 years?

And being the good progressives they are, did the enormous upward transfer of wealth that took place during the years of the Covid state of exception trouble them?

Did it light any suspicions that all this hullabaloo might not just be about health?

Have they organized support groups and action plans for the billions of children around the world whose lives were thrown into chaos by the useless quarantine and masking that was foisted upon them, and who, in all likelihood will never recover the years of developmental progress lost to this program of senseless cruelty?

I could go on.

As far as I can tell, the answer to all these questions is a resounding “NO!”

I am truly grateful for all that John Pilger and his companions in the leftist propaganda dissection cadres have taught me over the years. But as Ortega y Gasset said, a public intellectual is only as good as his ability to remain at the “height of his times.”

Sadly, this group of otherwise talented individuals has failed this test, badly, over the last two-plus years. As much as it may pain them to hear this, they have shown themselves to be much more like the “clerics” that Julien Benda rightly castigated in 1927 after they lost their moral bearings and their critical acuity before the massive propaganda onslaught used to promote the senseless slaughters of World War I.

Why these professional uncoverers of camouflaged realities of our times suddenly decided to unsee what was happening before their eyes is a job for future historians.

But if I had to hazard a guess today, I’d say that it had a lot to do with all the usual human things like fear of losing friends and prestige or being seen by ideological enforcers on their side as going over to the enemy. All of which is fine and understandable.

But if that is the case, isn’t it too much to publicly admit now that you missed the boat on this important story?

And if you can’t manage that, could you at least have the sense to stop issuing sermons on topics like “how propaganda works” for a good long while?

Author bio: Thomas Harrington, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is Professor Emeritus of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, where he taught for 24 years. His research is on Iberian movements of national identity and contemporary Catalan culture. His essays are published at Words in The Pursuit of Light.

Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean drinking water makes you an activist, and why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesnt make a corporation a terrorist.

–Winona LaDuke, “Canadian Oil Companies Trample on Our Rights” by Winona LaDuke, progressive.org. June 18, 2013.

Water is life. We are the people who live by the water. Pray by these waters. Travel by the waters. Eat and drink from these waters. We are related to those who live in the water. To poison the waters is to show disrespect for creation. To honor and protect the waters is our responsibility as people of the land.

–Winona LaDuke, “The Winona LaDuke Reader: A Collection of Essential Writings”, p.55, Voyageur Press (MN)

I just caught the First Voices Radio show with, Marley Shebala (Diné and A:shiwi) — investigative journalist, photographer, videographer and blogger. In the Diné way, she is Tó’aheedlíinii (Water Flows Together clan), her mother’s clan, and born for Cha’al (Frog clan), which is her father’s clan. Her mom is from Lake Valley, New Mexico, which is in the eastern part of the Navajo Nation and next to Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. Her father is from the Pueblo of Zuni, New Mexico. And so her home towns are Lake Valley and Zuni. “Marley Shebala’s Notebook” is her website where she provides current news coverage of the Navajo government and Navajo communities on and off the Navajo Nation.

She talked about her work as a journalists and activist. There were some comments included near the end from Native folk about exactly what this Columbus-Indigenous Day means. It’s a start, a way to ask Native Americans what it means to be in this country now, and the history of their treatment.

“The word Shinkolobwe fills me with grief and sorrow,” says Susan Williams, a historian at the UK Institute of Commonwealth Studies. “It’s not a happy word, it’s one I associate with terrible grief and suffering.” (source)

Just caught the First Voices Radio show with, Marley Shebala (Diné and A:shiwi) — investigative journalist, photographer, videographer and blogger. In the Diné way, she is Tó’aheedlíinii (Water Flows Together clan), her mother’s clan, and born for Cha’al (Frog clan), which is her father’s clan. Her mom is from Lake Valley, New Mexico, which is in the eastern part of the Navajo Nation and next to Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. Her father is from the Pueblo of Zuni, New Mexico. And so her home towns are Lake Valley and Zuni. “Marley Shebala’s Notebook” is her website where she provides current news coverage of the Navajo government and Navajo communities on and off the Navajo Nation.

Once Upon a Mine: THE LEGACY OF URANIUM ON THE NAVAJO NATION

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The host of the show, Tiokasin:

We have to stop with the idea of creating peace on earth and begin with creating peace with Mother Earth. We’ve tried the first alternative for thousands of years, but look where that has led us; now is the time of the Original Ways, the Native ways, after all … it is coming this way – that we all must make peace with Mother Earth – there is no more altering the native way.

Marley talks about the uranium coming from her tribe’s lands, and how the people of her tribe were told “the uranium would give people jobs.” Nothing about those bombs dropped on two Japanese cities. She states that when that immolation occurred, the elders and others were totally distraught about what they played a part of.

Then there is the Congo — “The forgotten mine that built the atomic bomb”

[During the Cold War, the US supported a military coup by Mobutu Sese Seko as it was eager to prevent Shinkolobwe falling into Soviet hands (Credit: Getty Images)]

The story of Shinkolobwe began when a rich seam of uranium was discovered there in 1915, while the Congo was under colonial rule by Belgium. There was little demand for uranium back then: its mineral form is known as pitchblende, from a German phrase describing it as a worthless rock. Instead, the land was mined by the Belgian company Union Minière for its traces of radium, a valuable element that had been recently isolated by Marie and Pierre Curie.  

In no other mine could you see a purer concentration of uranium. Nothing like it has ever been found – Tom Zoellner

It was only when nuclear fission was discovered in 1938 that the potential of uranium became apparent. After hearing about the discovery, Albert Einstein immediately wrote to US president Franklin D Roosevelt, advising him that the element could be used to generate a colossal amount of energy – even to construct powerful bombs. In 1942, US military strategists decided to buy as much uranium as they could to pursue what became known as the Manhattan Project. And while mines existed in Colorado and Canada, nowhere in the world had as much uranium as the Congo.

This says it all now, no, about how horrific the Anglo Saxons have treated the so called underdeveloped world, which is really the overexploited world.

And now, the ZioLensky is demanding from those underdeveloped Black nations fealty:

“African nations [must] stand by international law, territorial integrity, and peace,” not only by condemning the strikes on Kiev, Odessa, Dnepr, Kharkov, Rovno, Lviv, and Ivano-Frankovsk, but also by opposing with a UN vote Moscow’s “annexation” of the formerly Ukrainian territories, his message demanded. (source)

Now, the USA, is part of that global terror network, working with UK, Five Eyes. Native Americans have paid the ultimate genocidal price of the Anglo Saxons:

The longest war in history, as we see it as America’s real longest war was the conflict against Indigenous Americans, called the American Indian Wars, which most historians characterize as beginning in 1609 and ending in 1924 or 313 years, mainly over land control.

The USA is in on the killing machines, dropping nukes on civilians, the bombing of civilians in Germany, and Japan.

In February 1942, the British abandoned their “precision bombing” strategy. For the rest of the war, the British concentrated on the systematic widespread destruction of German cities by RAF nighttime air raids, a strategy called “area bombing.” One reason the British took this fateful step was to “dehouse” the German people, which hopefully would shatter their morale and will to continue the war.

The clearest demonstration of the destructiveness of British area bombing occurred in 1943 during three night raids on Hamburg, Germany. On the second night of bombing, something unexpected happened. The fire bombs dropped by 731 RAF bombers started thousands of fires. They merged to create a huge firestorm, sucking up oxygen and generating hurricane force winds. Many who did not burn to death were asphyxiated in underground bomb shelters. The firestorm killed more than 40,000 people in one night.

When the United States entered the war in Europe, its Army Air Corps had better fighter-plane support and bombsights than the RAF. It could maintain its longstanding policy of daytime precision bombing. The Americans believed that the most effective way to destroy the enemy’s ability to continue the war was to strike specific targets like aircraft factories and oil refineries.

Following German rocket attacks against London late in the war, almost 800 RAF bombers bombed Dresden, a center of German art, architecture, and culture. It had been untouched by previous Allied bombing raids. The attack’s stated purpose was to disrupt German troop transports to the Russian front. But at least 35,000 civilians died, mainly by inhaling toxic gases created by the second major firestorm of the war. American bombers killed more civilians the next day when they had difficulty hitting their targets through all the smoke.

Firestorms in Japan

After Germany surrendered in May 1945, America wanted to quickly end the war against Japan. As plans went ahead for a costly invasion of the Japanese islands, Major General Curtis LeMay took command of the bombing campaign against Japan, which had started in late 1944. Having studied British area-bombing tactics, LeMay decided to adopt them in a final effort to force the Japanese to surrender.

On the night of March 9-10, 1945, LeMay’s B-29 bombers attacked Tokyo, a city of 6 million people. Nearly 600 bombers dropped 1,665 tons of fire bombs on the Japanese capital, destroying 16 square miles of the city. The resulting firestorm killed 100,000 people, more than died at Hiroshima or Nagasaki from atomic bombs a few months later. Most of the victims were women, children, and old men. The B-29 crew members put on oxygen masks to keep from vomiting at the smell of burning human flesh.

LeMay’s planes continued firebombing Tokyo and more than 60 other Japanese cities in the following months. He thought he could end the war quickly by destroying Japan’s economy and crushing the morale of the Japanese people. LeMay argued against using atomic bombs. He believed that his firebombing tactics would force Japan to surrender before American forces were scheduled to invade the homeland. (source)

So, there is not much to celebrate when we think about this Anglo-Saxon world, and we know the British were in on bombing the bridge in Crimea, and the Nord Stream 1 & 2. All part of the treatment of indigenous people in Indian, Amazon, Congo, Turtle Island, wherever.

“Before Ukraine blew up Kerch Bridge, British spies plotted it.”

On Becoming Human: This discussion was conducted in 2005 for The 11th Hour by Leila Conners. The discussion covers Trudell’s worldview that encompasses his call for humans to return to their intelligence and their humanity to forge a pathway forward. His responses to the questions now seem prophetic.  John Trudell was a Native American author, poet, actor, musician, and political activist. He was the spokesperson for the United Indians of All Tribes’ takeover of Alcatraz beginning in 1969, broadcasting as Radio Free Alcatraz. During most of the 1970s, he served as the chairman of the American Indian Movement, based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. After his pregnant wife, three children and mother-in-law were killed in 1979 in a suspicious fire at the home of his parents-in-law on the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes Duck Valley Indian Reservation in Nevada, Trudell turned to writing, music and film as a second career. He acted in films in the 1990s. The documentary Trudell (2005) was made about him and his life as an activist and artist.

Here, the Anglo-Saxons, the USA, out of balance with not just nature, but against humanity!

U.S. laboratories created, developed and operating under Pentagon leadership are scattered throughout Africa, Latin America and practically all the countries that made up the former Union of Socialist Republics. It is estimated that at least 200 biological research laboratories worldwide are financed by Washington.

The presence of U.S. specialists in the construction of chemical and biological weapons, especially in post-Soviet territory, is part of the evidence of the objectives of U.S. administrations to carry out a policy of maximum pressure against the Russian Federation. In these facilities, U.S. agencies are working on creating and modifying pathogens of deadly diseases, for their probable use, either in the military field or in sabotage actions within the broad field of the so-called hybrid wars. Both the UN and various international conventions, aware of their capacity and ease of destruction, have established regulatory agreements to prevent their use and proliferation. However, this decision does not prevent Washington from plaguing the world with research centers aimed at creating weapons of mass destruction (WMD). (source)

And then, on the same community station, I heard about water, man. “Did you know that bottled water purchases can predict political involvement? Join Food Sleuth Radio host and Registered Dietitian, Melinda Hemmelgarn, for her interview with Manny Teodoro, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lead author of The Profits of Distrust: Citizen-Consumers, Drinking Water, and the Crisis of Confidence in American Government. Teodoro discusses the connections between the rise of the commercial drinking water industry, distrust in and failure of government, and broader withdrawal from civic life.”

We are talking about just lead in our water pipes. Over 50,000 water districts in the USA. And, a trillion dollars to fix those pipes. The worst water is on reservations in the USA. Forget about those overexploited peoples, those indigenous peoples.

Historically speaking, we went from being Indians to pagans to savages to hostiles to militants to activists to Native Americans. Its five hundred years later and they still cant see us. We are still invisible.

–John Trudell

“When Columbus got off the boat, he asked us who we were. We said we’re the Human Beings, we’re the People.

Conceptually the Europeans didn’t understand that, it was beyond their conceptual reality. They didn’t see us. They couldn’t see who we were.

Historically speaking, we went from being Indians to pagans to savages to hostiles to militants to activists to Native Americans. It’s five hundred years later and they still can’t see us. We are still invisible.

They don’t see us as human beings, but we’ve been saying to them all along that’s what we are.

We are invisible to them because we are still the Human Beings, we’re still the People, but they will never call us that. They taught us to call ourselves Indians, now they’re teaching us to call ourselves Native Americans. It’s not who we are. We’re the People.

They can’t see us as human beings. But they can’t see themselves as human beings. The invisibility is at every level, it’s not just that we’re tucked away out of sight. We’re the evidence of the crime. They can’t deal with the reality of who we are because then they have to deal with the reality of what they have done. If they deal with the reality of who we are, they have to deal with the reality of who they aren’t.

So they have to fear us, not recognize us, not like us.

The very fact of calling us Indians creates a new identity for us, an identity that began with their arrival. Changing identity, creating a new perceptual reality, is another form of genocide. It’s like severing a spiritual umbilical cord that reaches into the ancestral past.

The history of the Indians begins with the arrival of the Europeans. The history of the People begins with the beginning of the history of the People.

The history of the People is one of cooperation, collectivity, and living in balance. The history of the Indians is one of being attacked and genocide, rather than a history of peace and balance. The history of the People under attack, the Indians, in an evolutionary context, is not very long, it’s only five hundred years.

The objective of civilizing us is to make Indian history become our permanent reality.

The neccessary objective of Native people is to outlast this attack, however long it takes, to keep our identity alive.”

John Trudell, Happy Columbus Day Everybody. 

Patrick Duffy of ‘Dallas’ Fame Lists Oregon Ranch for $14 Million

Imagine a world where smart cohesive thinkers come together and work with these multimillionaires and get some break on the property and then get a community going there: people who want to learn how to farm-raise animals; how to preserve foods; how to construct tiny homes and microhomes; how to grow food; how to heal; and how to bring together so many types of people who want to heal trauma and get better. I am not just talking about those rough sleepers you might run into, AKA, homeless, many times men of all ages, opting to get off the bureacratic grid. Not just folks who are really down and out, or who just want to be left alone. Although many of those would fit well on a property like this — a river there, ponds, fields, trees, and central outbuildings.

I’ve written about this before — “All the World’s a Stage … Except in our Own Backyards! All it takes is a cool seven million smackeroos to build that field of dreams”

Here, the low down via the realtor —

• $6,945,000.
• 205 +/-  acres zoned AF-5
• Includes 49 Acre Campus with 6+ Buildings totaling approx. 130,000 SF:
  1. Expansion Hall- Administration Building with Auditorium, Classrooms and Offices
  2. Harmony Hall- Girl’s dorm with 67 rooms, 7 offices, lounge, chapel, commercial kitchen, dining room, bath suites, etc. and attached 3-bedroom Dean’s house
  3. Devotion Hall- Boy’s dorm with 49 rooms (19 rooms need sheetrock finished and painted), apartment with kitchen, bath suites, rec room, lounges, etc. and attached 5-bedroom Dean’s house
  4. Gymnasium/Music Building with Stage
  5. Science Classroom Building with Library
  6. Industrial Arts Building with Auto Shop, Wood Shop and Welding Shop
• Extensive Updates during current ownership include:
  1. Administration Building has newer metal roof, updated windows, new insulation, remodeled auditorium and meeting rooms, new HVAC, electrical service and lighting
  2. New windows, high efficiency hot water system, new HVAC, new kitchen appliances and walk-in refrigerator, insulation, paint, lighting and carpeting in Harmony Hall (Girl’s dorm)
  3. New windows, insulation in 49 rooms plus new sheetrock in 30 rooms of Devotion Hall (Boy’s dorm)
  4. New and repaired roofs and new electrical services
• Domestic water system and sewage system for campus
• Includes separate 4.69 acres (Tax Lot 1301) with Spring and water rights– domestic water source for campus
• Adjacent 151 +/- acres well suited for low density residential development with 30 LA water co-op certificates
• Vineyard soils & Beautiful Views
• South Fork Hill Creek flows through property
• Rural location approximately 14 miles south of Hillsboro near Gaston
• Washington County
• Tax Lots 2400 & 1532, Sec 5, Tax Lots 400, 2400 & 2500, Sec 5c and Tax Lot 1301, Sec 16, T2S, R3W, W.M.

That was August 2021. I have had many intersections with places like that, where there is raw land, established multiple room buildings, with commercial kitchens, and gardens, even equistrian building, rivers and springs, and alas, up for sale, and, in the scheme of capitalism and the end rot of nonprofit do-gooders and the inability to get things going that would actually help people, including adults and families who have faced housing challenges, and then also bringing together students, and retirees, and others to create a triple-healing community where people live, eat, think, create and recreate together. In a wooded and riverside area!

There are literally tens of thousands of opportunities like the one listed above, and also that 395-acre ranch Duffy has put on the market.

In capitalism, in county coding, in the scheme of things, getting anything this creative off the ground is almost impossible. You know, getting maybe art students and social worker majors and others out there to do theses in situ with the very people and situations they may have studied.

Encampments, visiting elders, and permanent housing in the form of tiny homes, with tons of support, and then, of course, mental and physical health practitioners, nurtritionists, farmers, and construction gurus.

The template is easy to produce, and that letter I wrote to Jeff Bezos’s ex, McKenzie Scott Tuttle, in reference to another property for sale in Oregon, 200 acres, for $7 million:

+–+

Dear McKenzie Scott-Tuttle:

RE: Satellites of Tierra Firma – Some Look to Mars and the Moon, We Look to Soil Here

& Medicine Wheel of Healing, Growing, Learning, Living

People and land need healing which is all inclusive – holistic.

                 — Allan Savory

 Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

                — Nelson Mandela

Reverence is an emotion that we can nurture in our very young children, respect is an attitude that we instill in our children as they become school-agers, and responsibility is an act that we inspire in our children as they grow through the middle years and become adolescents.

                — Zoe Weil, p. 42, Above All Be Kind: Raising a Humane Child in Challenging Times

Oh, the naysayers tell me and my cohorts to not even try to break into the foundation you run, that this concept of having Mackenzie Scott Tuttle even interested in becoming a placeholder for an idea, and for this land that a group of visionaries see as an incubation collective space for dreams to become reality.

We place our hopes in your ability to read on and see the vision and plans driving this solicitation, this ask. And it is a big ask.

This is figuratively and literally putting the cart before the horse. Here we have 200 acres, and the vision is retrofitting this center that is already there, Ananda,  into a truly holistic healing center, youth run, for a seven generations resiliency and look forward ethos of learning to steward the land, learning to grow the land, toward biodynamic farming, all mixed in with intergenerational wisdom growing.

We are seeing this, as stated above, as a medicine wheel. A circle of integrative thinking, education, experimentation and overlapping visions of bringing stakeholders from around the Pacific Northwest (and world) into this safe harbor. There are already facilities on this property as you can see from the real estate prospectus. There are 120 rooms in a great building. There are outbuildings, a gymnasium, barns, and spring water.

It is unfortunately up for sale, and the danger there is a developer with a keen eye to massive profits and turning a spiritual and secular place of great healing and medicine wheel potential into “dream homes” for the rich.

Good land turned into a gated community? We are asking your philanthropy to take a deep dive into helping put this property on hold from those nefarious intentions and allow our group to develop this circle of healing – education across disciplines, elder type academy mixed with youth directed programs; farming; food production; micro-home  building and construction facility; trauma informed healing.

Actually, more. Think of this as a community of communities.

Young People Need Hope, a Place (many places) and Leadership and Development

So many young people are done with Industrial and Techno Capitalism. They know deep down there is more to a scoop of soil than a billion bacteria, and they want to be part of healing communities.

We are proposing the Foundation you have set up invest in this property, as a placeholder for our development plan – actually it is an anti-developer plan. This property will be scarfed up for a steal, by, land and housing developers who want McMansions out here in this incredible eco-scape. Just what we do not need in the outlying areas of Portland.  Or in so many other locations across this country.

We are a small group ready to do what we can to get food growers and producers at the table to invest in intellectual and sweat and tears capital to make this 200 acres work as a living community of new farmers, people living and learning on the property, incubating ideas for, we hope, to include a micro-home building project, crops, vineyards, learning centers for farming and preserving, marketing and engaging in food healing.

We come at this with decades around food systems, learning from Via Campesina/o or Marion Nestle, Alice Waters, Winona LaDuke, Rachel Carson. We believe in biomimicry, that is, learning how nature settles scores, survives and thrives. We come at this as deeply concerned about ecological footprints, life cycle analyses, the disposable culture and the planned and marketed obsolescence.

We are also coming at this as educators – earth teachers, who know classrooms in prison like settings, with rows of desks, do not engender creative and solutionaries– young people ready to go into the world, even a small community, with engaged, creative and positive ways to deal with climate chaos and the impending shattering of safety nets, including biological and earth systems “nets” and “webs.”

This property is unique, as all of our earth is. This is firstly Kalapua land, first, and that is the Grande Ronde and Siletz, as well as the Atfalsti, too. We call it Gatson, near Hillsboro, Oregon, but the land is the essence of the spirit givers of this continent before “discovery.”

Rich, in the wine country of the new people to this region, this land is about applying our ethos and yours, Ms. Scott-Tuttle, toward a real healing, a real stewardship and real intergeneration ethos around carrying the wisdom of tribes and growers and educators to the youth. We believe women are at the center of many of the themes already listed – farming, educating, healing, human stewardship.

Think of this project as the cart before the horse because the old system, the horse, was always the money, the source of power, and with power comes strings attached. The people involved in this project are looking to have a multistoried community of farmers, learners, youth learning trades and people skills, as well as elders, both Native and new arrivals, to understand that a farm is more than that, as well as a vineyard is more than the sum of the grapes. It is about a reclaiming of the sacred – soil, air, photosynthesis in a truly sustainable fashion.

The only “green washing” we can imagine this project will carry forth is the washing of the greens, the other harvests, in tubs of clear spring water.

Some of us on this project have traveled to other parts of this continent, and spent time with coffee growers and understand that shade grown coffee and beyond fair trade are the only elements to a truly fair and equitable system. Train the people of the land, who are the true stewards, to not only grow, but to roast and market the bounty. Grow the community with water projects, irrigation, schools, and globalized sharing of people, visitors.

This project needs a placeholder, to keep the land out of the insane real estate market. We will do the rest, we solutionaires. There are so many growers and investment angels who want to be part of the Seventh Generation solution.

Clearly, the lessons for people to be in this 200 acre community, farm-soil-healing satellite, are lessons you, Ms. Scott-Tuttle,  the fiction writer, know, which you capture deftly with Luther Albright. The world for young people in the Pacific Northwest is that crumbling home and crumbling dam of Albright. The healing we need is more than the structures and infrastructure. It is inside, at the heart of the soul of imagination. Some of us on this project are soliciting from your charity a placeholder purchase of the property are tied to the arts, believing STEAM is the only way forward, and that S.T.E.M. is lifeless and dangerous without the A – arts. We believe the true voice of people are those who believe in asking “what should we do” rather than what is currently on superchargers – “What Can We Do?”

We realize that for many young people, politics have failed them. Many youth I speak with and work with, believe this country is in the midst of an empire of chaos in steep decay. Alternatives to the decay is building communities that would fit the model here on 200 acres – agro-ecological farming; nutritional centered living; housing; long-term care assistance; youth directed entrepreneur projects; bringing in local and state businesses leaders to be part of a design from the grassroots up.

The catch for most of the youth we have engaged is —  to paraphrase and level  a composite point,” We are ruled by an elite class of individuals who are completely out of touch with the travails of the average American.” This simple statement is packed full of context and frightening reality for millions of students and adults who feel disconnected and neutered by both government agencies and corporate policies.

First, who wants to be “ruled” by anyone? That we have this class system of elite, middle managers, the elite’s high ranking servicers, and then, the rest of the citizens, the so-called 80 percent who have captured less than the overall 10 percent of “wealth” in this country. The very idea of an elite out of touch, or completely out of touch speaks to an ignorance that is dangerous to the world, to the 80 percent, and also speaks to a possible planned ignorance. That we have millions of amazing people, to include nonprofits, community-led organizations, educational institutions, journalists, and others, who can speak to what those “travails” are, and yet, the elites failing to grasp those challenges, or failing to even acknowledge them, this is what many believe is the decay of this society.

This may not sit well with you or your philanthropy, but we as a group have dozens of years experience working with K12, higher ed, farming groups, social services/mutual aid movements, and have systems thinking in our backgrounds, and we underscore youth and community-driven projects and designs. This medicine wheel/circle land trust we are asking you to consider with a follow up meeting, well, this is the only way to a model-driven set of safety nets to move into some challenging times for this Empire in a world that is no longer USA centric.

We are solutionaries, that is, we look for solutions by taking apart problems and then applying holism and deep experimentation in design, but using tried and proven systems that do work.

Healthy food, healthy relationships to culture, people, nature, healthy work, worthy work, with an eye always on the arts. Just as a farming and tiny home community, where biodynamic farming and food preserving and from nail to roof to complete tiny home design are part and parcel the key elements for this community to thrive under, well, there are no better classrooms and transferable skills.

Some of us have seen youth and adults learn the crafts needed to design, plan, buildings, and market tiny homes that would be used to seed communities that are, again, centered around farming, centered around healing, centered around Native American healing, and local community values. A young woman who finishes the hands-on learning of building a tiny home – with windows, skylights, plumbing, furnishings, electricity ready, all of that which a home entails – is a remarkable, valuable person. All those skills, again, like a medicine wheel, teach deeper lessons, and transferable skills.

This is what this property would also “house.”

All Tied Together – School, Outdoors, People, Action, Solving Food Insecurity and Housing

The should is an educational-farming-entrepreneur-solutions incubator on these 200 acres. Proving that this could be one of a thousand across the land. There are literally thousands of similar properties around the US, within their own cultural-community-ecological-historical milieus, but again, this project is one that Luther Albright would have thrived inside as a “New Engineer for Growing Communities,” as opposed to river-killing dam builder.

Our earthquake is here now, with all measure of tremors and aftershocks —  that is the climate chaos, wildfires, food insecurity, and alas, the New/New Gilded age of deep inequities that are criminal, as you well know, Ms. Scott Tuttle.

Here, the cart (before the horse):  this amazing collective piece of land and buildings with a multiversity of spiritual under girders . The horses are ready, but they need the cart, the home, the fabric of incubation. Those stallions and mares are engaged, ready, who are willing to take a leap of faith here and risk being outside the common paradigm of predatory and consumer-driven capitalism that has put many millions in a highly precarious position.

It’s amazing, the current system of philanthropy which forces more and more people to beg for less and less diverse money for fewer and fewer truly innovative ideas. Funding a project like this is a legacy ad-venture, the exact formula we need (scaled up to a 1,000 different locales) to break the chains of Disaster and Predatory Capitalism. We need that “capital,” the cart, to help those stallions and mares to break for the field of ideas and fresh streams of praxis.

There are any number of ideas for sustainability communities. Co-ops, growers groups, or mixed communities for young and old to exchange knowledge, capacity, growth, sweat equity —  called intergenerational living. This is about a pretty inventive suite of concepts and practices:

• learning spaces, inside and outside
• buildings to develop micro home (unique, easily packaged and ready to put together) manufacturing and R & D
• food systems – farming of sustainable food, herbs and those vines
• husbandry
• learning food systems, from farm to plate
• ceramics, painting, music, dance, theater and writing center
• speakers’ bureau
• farmers,  restaurateurs and harvesters with a stake in the community
• healing center
• Youth directed outdoor education and experiences
• sustainability practicum’s for students
• low income micro home housing
• day care center, early learning center

How does this make any sense to a billionaire, who has devoted her life to “giving away” half of her wealth in her lifetime? Well, we see this project – this land-property – as a legacy for many of the avocations and interests (passions) you have articulated over the years. Your vision and commitment to education and women-centered projects are admirable. This is one of those projects.

There is that emotional and sappy Movie, Field of Dreams, and the statement – “if you build it, they will come.” We have found that over the years teaching in many places – Seattle, Spokane, Portland, El Paso, Auburn, Mexico – that young people and nontraditional students want mentoring, leadership and the tools to be mentors and leaders. They need the cart before the horse can herald in the new ideas, and the new way to a better future. If the classroom and master facilitator allows for open growth, unique student-led ideas and work, well, that person has BUILT the field of dreams from which to grow.

There are so many potentials with this project, and it starts with the land, holding it as a Scott-Tuttle placeholder. From an investment point of view, as long as you have people wrangling other people and professionals to get this satellite of sanity, the medicine wheel with many spokes radiating out and inward, the property increases in monetary value. Land is sacred, but just as sacred are the ideas and the potential that land might germinate and grow. It is the reality of our country – too few control too much. We see it in the infamous “Complex” – not just military, but, Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Media, Big Business, Big Education, Big Medicine, as well as private prisons, for profit social services, AI , and Big Tech, so called Surveillance Capitalism.  Who in the 80 percent has the funds to purchase a $7 million project?

Big ideas like this cooperative land medicine wheel (a first of many satellites) might be common, but the web of supportive and cohesive things tied to this property is unusual, to say the least. With the failing of small businesses throughout the area, with the food insecurity for women, children and families, with the housing insecurity, added to debt insecurity —  with all those insecurities young and old face, this project could be the light at the end of many tunnels.  We have connections to Oregon Tilth and Latinx Farmers, and large biodynamic vineyards. We have connections to women’s veteran groups, to aging in place experts. We have connections to trauma healers and growers and interested folk who know construction and design. Additionally, the Pacific Northwest, from Puget Sound to Gold Beach, OR, is full of innovators, and those include the dozens of colleges and universities just in these two states – Oregon and Washington. We intend to trawl for investors – farms, food purveyors, wineries, restaurants, schools and various college programmers – to put into this project. A soil plot to test perennial wheat, a al the Land Institute, to Amory Lovins, Novella Carpenter, and so many more, finding a place of integrated living, ag, permaculture and ever-evolving cultural understanding of the finite planet we are on.

We are hopeful, even under the current Sixth Extinction.

It is telling, this entomologist and educator’s perspective after three decades of teaching:

Diana Six, an entomologist for 30 years who teaches at the University of Montana, took her students to Glacier National Park on a field trip and reported the following:

Life doesn’t just deal with this. When I went up Glacier with my students a few weeks ago, the flowers were curling up. At some of the lower elevations, glacier lilies were shriveled, lupins didn’t even open. The flowers should extend for another three weeks and they’re already gone. Any insects or birds that depend upon them, like bees or hummingbirds, are in trouble, their food is gone. Bird populations have just baked… People seem to think of extinctions as some silent, painless statistic. It’s not. You look at birds that can no longer find fish because they’ve moved too far off shore. They’re emaciated; they’re starving to death. We are at the point that there’s nothing untouched.

How contradictory and illustrative that this student experience took place in a “protected national park.”

Referencing how climate change impacts life, Diana said:

Somewhere along the way, I had gone from being an ecologist to a coroner. I am no longer documenting life. I’m describing loss, decline, death.

We are hopeful that our youth can document life on this Medicine Wheel Land Satellite, and instead of  describing “loss, decline, death,”  this one satellite can help individuals to describe resurgence, restoration, holism, and growth. A model, like the one we propose, could be the incubator and inspiration for other similar projects throughout the land. So many empty buildings, so many abandoned farms, so much good land about to be grabbed up by McMansion developers, or those who have no vision toward a resilient and communitarian existence.

We are thinking of a medicine wheel since so many people can utilize the Farm, from horse therapists, to gardening as trauma healers; from alternative medicine experts, to restaurants with a connection to growers. This is Tierra Firma Robusta, for sure, with so much potential to integrate a suite of smart, worldly, localized and educational programs, permanent, long-term, and short in duration.  This would be the linchpin of inspiration, an incubator for similar projects, and we’d make sure that the Philanthropy you head up would be in some form of limelight – imagine, a billionaire placing a property with a deep spiritual history into a land trust of perpetuity. I know another billionaire has purchased farmland and is now the largest farm land holder in the US, but this one here we propose would fit an entirely different model, having nothing to do with industrial farming, genetic engineering and monocultures. Like all good societies, the cornucopia of life and backgrounds and people and land is what makes them dynamic, healthy and resilient, as well as fair.

We propose a grand idea, but we need that field of dreams, that field, that farm, before we can engage a hundred people to be part of this medicine wheel of land healing and hope.

Please let our team discuss this further. Truly, we have both the passion and persistence to get this Medicine Wheel of Healing Farm Community to an unimaginably vibrant level. Will you be part of our field of dreams?

Sincerely,

Paul Haeder

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Here’s the photo layout for this place, on a website called, Mansion Global.

Imagine, the Rich and Famous, a site (there are hundreds) to sell mansions, castles, private jets, yachts, and more.

Getting access to McKenzie or Duffy or any of these star chamber superstars is one issue, but then getting through the red tape, the endless litigation, all the NIMBY retrogrades complaining, and really, getting people to sign onto a community-centered project, one where a lot of sweat equity is expelled, it is so so tough in predatory, dog-eat-dog capitalism. Getting the project off the ground, and getting the resources to keep it sustainable, well, that is the $1 Billion Question.

We are scattered, atomized, factionalized, silo-centric, contrarian. Hyper competitive, dog-eat-dog, and letting the rich and the connected and the bureaucracies of bad government run things, most people have no center, no ability to move along great ideas and projects.

This is primo property for any mutlilayered approach to trauma healing, getting young and old to do something as in a going concern tied to making tiny home kits, etc.

As they purchased adjacent properties over the years, they acquired eight more houses and several pastures that are rented out to local ranchers. One of the homes was demolished, six are rented to tenants, and one is used as the ranch manager’s house, according to Mr. Duffy.

“We became a working ranch but not with our own animals,” he said. “It added the most beautiful, bucolic sense of the place.” 

A homestead that dates back over 100 years still sits at the entrance to the property, he said. In it he found an old stove, which he restored and put in the main house. But the majority of the roughly 390 acres remains wilderness. The property now has approximately 2 miles of river frontage, according to Mr. DeVries. 

These villages or centers are easy to build, in the ten or twenty houses max. But imagine, on land, growing food, working in soil, campfires at night.

Again, not just chronically homeless, but people who are about to be homeless. Imagine an amazing community, a pop-up village, a sort of “charter town,” without the negative implications of “charter anything” involved. For every 100 households of renters in the United States that earn “extremely low income” (30 percent of the median or less), there are only 30 affordable apartments available, according to a 2013 report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition. It is getting worse, and people are burned out on capitalism. Easily designed, that mock up below. Imagine that as one of several nodes on the Duffy Property.

Efforts to break through the red tape and raise money to house the homeless almost always pay off for a community. Even the most expensive tiny-house projects—such as a new, ambitious $6-million campaign to build a 200-person tiny-house park this year in Austin, Texas—can’t rival the cost of homelessness to taxpayers, which was more than $10 million per year in Austin, for example, as YES! reported in December 2013.

“Chronically homeless people—people who have disabilities and are homeless for long periods of time—can be very expensive to systems of public care,” explains Roman. In 2007, the National Alliance to End Homelessness compiled three studies showing that it costs the same or less money to provide permanent housing as it does to allow people to remain homeless. In Denver, Colo., a housing program for the homeless reduced the costs of public services (including medical services, temporary shelter, and costs associated with arrests and incarceration) by an estimated $15,773 per person per year, saving taxpayers thousands of dollars.

Here, just one organization:

In a wooded area behind Ithaca’s commercial strip, there is a location known as “the jungle.” Here, individuals experiencing homelessness gather and make what home they can. Second Wind’s journey began when our founder, Carmen Guidi, started to build relationships with the residents, bringing pizza and listening to their stories. It was when one of his new friends, who had been asking for help, committed suicide that Carmen knew he needed to do more. Acting as an advocate, Carmen was able to find housing for all but nine men.

With his own money, Carmen purchased campers to provide shelter for the men who were still in The Jungle come winter. He placed these on his land and paid for the utilities, but it became clear that living in campers in the winter was still uncomfortable and very expensive. Through a process of collaboration, Second Wind evolved from campers to cottages and became an official 501(c)(3). Programs have expanded to include a house for women and a formalized Homeless Crisis Alleviation team. In 2020 the “cottages” was dropped from our DBA to better represent all that Second Wind does. Each of the projects we manage is further described on their own pages under the “About Us” tab.

​Second Wind’s vision is to house and walk with people towards restored lives. To this end, SW seeks to improve the relationships with self, family, and the larger community. Accomplished by our mission to

• ​Provide housing, support, and encouragement to homeless and at-risk people in our community.
• Mentor residents in life skills needed to reintegrate into society and, when possible, family life.
• Practice living as good neighbors by building relationships amongst residents and the surrounding community.
• Sustain relationships and support residents who have moved on from Second Wind.
• Future projects include an on-site community center, a multi-unit house for women, and a multi-bay work garage.

Here, a higher end way to age and die in place.

Even some churches are attempting to get into the act!

Churches across the US are building tiny houses on spare land to accommodate homeless people, The Associated Press reported.

A number of faith leaders are working with nonprofits and affordable housing organizations to create the micro homes. They typically have a single bedroom and a small kitchen area and are being built on vacant land belonging to churches. 

Tiny homes are becoming an increasingly popular solution to help tackle the homelessness crisis. More than half a million people were homeless in the US in 2020, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness’ most recent report, and 70% of those were individuals. (source)

Of course, that was 2020, and now we see Europe in the sewer for what has been happening with the U$A dictating how EuroTrashLandia will slide into more and more recession, joblessness, and homelessness. Finland ends homelessness and provides shelter for all in need

Yes, adults, seniors, so to speak, are in very precarious positions:

Why Are Seniors Homeless in America? (source)

Over the years, the number of homeless seniors aged 65 years and older in the U.S. has been increasing. Homelessness among older people aged 50-60 years is also increasing. Not all seniors have enough income and money saved to pay for a safe and stable place to live and other necessities such as food, utilities, and medication.

Homeless elders can face many challenges—especially health issues. Many don’t have enough money or insurance coverage to go to the doctor and get treatment. Some don’t trust health care and social services providers. Accessing public assistance programs can also be daunting to homeless elders. Some get discouraged by application processes, have a hard time getting to places to receive care and services, and refuse help.

The key to stable housing for older people and seniors is preventing eviction. State and local departments of social services often help with housing emergencies for the elderly and by providing housing for low income seniors. In many communities, religious organizations help homeless senior citizens by providing emergency housing assistance, case management, and money management services to maintain housing and prevent homelessness.

And,

In May of 1990, the Citizens Committee for the Homeless, a Santa Cruz County nonprofit, began a new project by opening the gates of an organic garden on Pelton Avenue.

The Homeless Garden Project would provide job training and meaningful work in a therapeutic environment. The Homeless Garden Project began as a place to provide sanctuary, refuge, and meaningful work within the healing space of the organic farm. Blossoming over time and furthering the project’s benefits, the farm harvests have provided an opportunity to support our vision and community through our CSA program, farm stand, and crafts, which are sold at our local Santa Cruz stores and on-line.

We are genuinely humbled by the profound transformations our trainees make in our program, and the generous support provided by our community. Our purpose-driven nonprofit has proven to be a benefit to our neighbors in need, our community, and our environment. We couldn’t have done this without the continual generosity and support of our donors, volunteers, and CSA members. We are so grateful for each one of you.

international bat awareness week leading up to Halloween

Lately, I’ve been thinking about bats. A few dozen have been flying around our Waldport, Oregon, Cyprus tree: California Myotis, Fringed Myotis, and the Big Brown Bat. Near White Salmon, WA, I have seen dozens of  Silver-Haired Bats, flying low to the ground on 20 acres we own.

This creature accounts for almost a third of all mammal species (more than 1,400). Bats are both talisman and a bright memory in these dark times.

Recall: Bats and the SARS-CoV2 used to be the talk of the town, beginning March 2020. More than 90 coronas have been found in bats. (The origins of SARS-CoV2 is even speculated recently by writer and thinker, Jeffrey Sachs as a lab origin virus.)

Background: I was in Vietnam years ago to help survey forest and jungle.

However, I’ve had bats in my life since age six months. In the Azores, there is one native bat. My sister and I lived with parents who worked at the Air Force base.  We were on the island for five years.

Bats roosted in the rafters of the garage where my father stored our 1957 Chevy.

I watched bats at dusk from my bedroom window.

Memoires listed: earthquakes, fish, amazing bread, melodic Portuguese language, mold, and bats.

Our nanny had a bent-over fisherman uncle  who let us play on his potato farm. In the evening, with the rice, tuna, warm bread and big glasses of Sangria for the adults and blood-red grape juice for the kids, we’d sit outside and watch a thousand bats echolocate above the forest.

One day Gloria’s tio showed us a big green glass jar with a tin lid.

I saw a creature flapping around.  He showed me my first bat up close. I was three. I learned later, when I really got into bats, that species  — Azores noctule (Nyctalus azoreum), the only endemic mammal on the island.

Another bat lives on the islands —  the greater mouse-eared bat (Myotis myotis) – but this species is not native, first arriving as a stowaway on cargo ships.

For more than six decades, I’ve been fascinated with this species, Chiroptera, which means “hand-wing.” Imagine the bones in a bat’s wing working like those of the human arm and hand, but bat finger bones are super elongated and connected by a double membrane of skin to form “the wing.”

In the 1990s, I lived in bat caves with  British and Vietnamese scientists working on biological surveys, called transects.

We climbed limestone mountains, looking for caves. We worked near Laos.

The 23-year-old Scotsman who led the bat survey was dubbed  “wild man.” I was 36 years old, and the rest of the team was much younger.

Except for Hanoi biologist, Dr. Viet (37).

I was in Vietnam the same age my cryptographer father was there as a Big Red One CW4. He was shot when the helicopter he was in came under fire. The pilot took one between the eyes. My old man’s bullet ended up two inches from his heart.

He never liked talking about Vietnam. By the time I made it to Vietnam, he had been buried, the victim of a heart attack.

I know he would have been blown away that his son was traveling in Vietnam with scientists. He listened to my stories of scuba diving in Mexico, Baja and Central America with a kind of awe.

He liked my yarns.

I ended up in places in Vietnam he never explored.  I hiked, rode in buses and boats, and then did the entire length of the country on a motorcycle. Dr. Viet was a guide for me, navigating me through the hundred plus Vietnamese words I knew.

Today, I am wrestling with fundamental questions as a writer and teacher. Working with words, concepts, spirituality, philosophy and aging, I know why people are seeking solitude and a reimagining of where they are going the rest of their lives.

Bats also bring me to philosophical reflection. I just finished a 1974 essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” by Thomas Nagel. He’s looking at perception, and how as a species, sight-abled humans have a lack of words and mental constructs getting a blind person to understand the color red.

The same goes for scientists attempting to know what it is “to be” and “to experience” like a bat.

If you have been with bats in caves like I have, you know they are alien forms.

Nagel: “But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat.”

The same could be said about people.  How impossible it is for me to know what it is to be a woman and to experience pregnancy and childbirth.  Conscious experience is “a widespread phenomenon.”

Here I am, in a time of corona, lockdowns, mandates, vaccinations, thinking about bats. And the conscious experience. Yet I can’t really be in the bat’s world, or experience it. We can’t know what it’s like to be a 1,000 year old bristlecone pine. Or to be a European bee in a hive.

I’m reminding myself daily to follow this admonition:  “Before I judge a man, I need to walk a mile in his shoes.” Or, before calling a bat “vermin,” people need to image what it’s like to fly using sonar flapping with hand-wings.

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Aside Note:  Oct. 24-31 is Bat Week, an annual, international celebration of the role of bats in nature! If your thing isn’t bats, many groups and organizations also recognize these for the month:  Adopt A Shelter Dog; Antidepressant Death; Breast Cancer Awareness; Celebrating The Bilingual Child; Down Syndrome; Dyslexia; Eat Better, Eat Together; Emotional Intelligence;  Global Diversity; Head Start Awareness; Health Literacy; Long-Term Care Planning!

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In Oregon, there are 15 bat species,  and eight of those are Oregon Conservation Strategy Species. Strategy Species are those having small or declining populations, are at-risk, and/or of management concern.

In our sister state south, California, count that as 25 species of bats. Additionally, there are 45 species of bats in the United States and Canada. Of those California Dreaming animals, bats 24 of these are in Southern California, which has the largest and smallest known bats found in the United States.

Bats can can eat their weight in insects nightly. They are incredible pollinators. No, the cheetah isn’t the fastest mammal. The Brazilian free-tailed bat can reach speeds up to 100 mph, making it by far the fastest mammal on Earth.

That flying fox (genus Pteropus) also called a fox bat, includes about 65 species mostly found on tropical islands from Madagascar to Australia and Indonesia and in mainland Asia. Most species are primarily nocturnal. Flying foxes are the largest bats, some attaining a wingspan of 1.5 metres (5 feet) with a head and body length of about 40 cm (16 inches).

I was under a papaya tree in Vietnam. It was dusk. I was in shorts and barefooted. I had just come down from an alpine forest area with our crew. Lots of cobras on the path heading back to camp. I had a huge bowl of super strong tea, sipping it while listening to the forest churn out amazing nighttime symphonies.

Civets, amphibians, gibbons, odd barking from the deer endemic to Vietnam. Insects. And the guys and gals around a smokey fire talking, and some zither music from a radio. I was the snake guy, and assisted with the bat studies. I had just caught a green viper and photographed it twenty different ways. The Vietnamese scientists wondered what sort of wild man I was as I jumped up and down limbs to wrestle these snakes, towel wrapped around wrist, another around my neck, ready to pin head down with my special short stick.

It was a long half a year, with lots of rain, mud, many river crossings (I was also one of the logistics guys, taking one of our three motorcycles into 26 river crossings to a village 10 miles down the mountain for tuna, cigs, beer and ramen, eggs, rice).

The tree seemed pretty shadowy, and when I leaned into it, as I was looking up for stars or a moon, there, those leaves just started trembling, and, poof, about 40 fruit bats lifted up, like something out of Hollywood, to make it simple. All over the space above my head. Scattered like frenzied folks.

One of those hundred moments in my life where my young verbiage, kick ass and bitchin’, came back calling.

I’ve written a lot about Vietnam, about the work, the ideas, about wounds of my father and friends and countrymen seemingly huge, but compared to the Vietnamese suffering, our are scratches. Trauma. Homeless veterans. Science and biology. Ecology. Travel. Photography. Deep trawling of people in Vietnam. Friendships. And, a short story collection, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam.

Here, Part 1, “Bat Caves and Vietnam – More than Just a War Log” 

& Part 2, “Deep Country, Bats, the Riot of Life in Viet Nam’s Cities”

I want you to guard against those who demand that you die just to prove something. It is not that I advise you to respect your life more than anything else, but not to die uselessly for the need of others… for you still have many years ahead of you. Many years of joy and happiness to experience. Who else but you can experience your life?

― Bao Ninh, author of Sorrow of War

It’s a different world, now, and it was different leading up to the pre-Planned Pandemic, pre-Trump/Biden Lunacy, pre-cancelling everything contrary to dead-end narrative, pre-end of real journalism. Now, I find few who want to know about other people, about lives lived, about philosophies gained through reading, schooling, schools of hard knocks, and people hate nuance, and forget about engaging them in deep discussion about animals, really, species like bats, man, scary in the minds of clueless folk.

Things have changed since the infection of Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden . . . . The United $tates of America is the Empire of Lies, Empire of Chaos, Empire of Murder, hands down, and we don’t need Pepe Escobar or Jonathan Pilger or others to tell us that. But the seed of this evil runs deep infecting everyday conversation.

I was with a guy who is helping me on house construction, and he has true Trump Derangement Syndrome, and alas, talking about DeSantis in derogatory ways, I told him I have Zero love of Pelosi or Desantis, et al. I let him know that I am hard left socialist, and definitely leaning toward communism. Ukraine, and, no, Biden is not a great guy or president. I told him that both parties are equally corrupt, and alas, this is a country of casino, predatory, shock doctrine, disaster, parasitic capitalism, with a big “C” for corrupt-criminal, abided by and promoted by both Republicans and Democrats. He told me that if I am communist, and love that so much, then I should move to Russia. Wow.

There’s a 69 year old Democrat for you.

And again, in rural, Pacific beach Oregon, few want to know about anything other than their little world of self-imposed trauma, confirmation bias, and the black-white world of triple downing on the dumbdown Kool Aid mix.

Obama Derangement Syndrome and Trump Derangement Syndrome. Whew.

I’m thinking about Rogue State, Blum’s work, and how the U$A deems what or who is human, and now, in this up is down, war is peace, lies are truth world of the Mainstream Presstitutes, the lockstep of journalism almost everywhere never digging, or looking astray, and the deplatforming, gaslighting and criminalization of independent thinking. Sort  of determining who shall live, and who shall  be exterminated.

The protagonist-narrator of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 novel The Sympathizer has a thing for squid. (Think less calamari, more American Pie.) The bastard son of a Vietnamese maid and a French priest, he discovers at the age of thirteen that he has a peculiar fetish for masturbating into gutted squid, lovingly—albeit unwittingly—prepared by his mother for the night’s meal. Unfortunately for him, squid are in short supply in working-class Saigon in the late nineteen-fifties, and so he is forced to wash the abused squid and return them to the kitchen to cover up his crime. Sitting down to dinner with his mother late one night, he tucks into one of those very same squid, stuffed and served with a side of ginger-lime sauce. “Some will undoubtedly find this episode obscene,” he concedes. “Not I!” he declares. “Massacre is obscene. Torture is obscene. Three million dead is obscene. Masturbation, even with an admittedly nonconsensual squid? Not so much.” He should know. By the time he is narrating the novel, he has lived through the Vietnam War as an undercover communist agent in South Vietnam, has sought asylum in America, and is now living as a refugee-cum-spy in Los Angeles.

The Sympathizer was published in 2015—three years after Kill Anything that Moves—but it could just as easily have been written as a prompt for historian turned investigative journalist Nick Turse. Indeed, Turse’s central aim in Kill Anything that Moves is to expose the unparalleled obscenity of the Vietnam War: unparalleled both in terms of the devastating scale and variety of harm done and the diabolical levels of premeditation on the part of the U.S. military. Historians of the Vietnam War, as much as the American public, have traditionally remembered the massacre at Mỹ Lai—in which upwards of five hundred unarmed Vietnamese civilians were hacked, mowed down, and violated by the American military—as an outlier in an otherwise largely acceptable war (at least in terms of American actions). But as Vietnam veteran and whistleblower Ron Ridenhour explains, and Turse quotes approvingly, Mỹ Lai “was an operation, not an aberration.” (source)

Bats as vermin, pests. Entire bat roosts murdered with one dynamite stick thrown into a cave. Double and triple taps. Splats. Bats emblematic of peoples the U$A deems as vermin, less than. Many of those splats are in the Global South, BIPOC!

Bioindicators. Bats. Truly:

The earth is now subject to climate change and habitat deterioration on unprecedented scales. Monitoring climate change and habitat loss alone is insufficient if we are to understand the effects of these factors on complex biological communities. It is therefore important to identify bioindicator taxa that show measurable responses to climate change and habitat loss and that reflect wider-scale impacts on the biota of interest. We argue that bats have enormous potential as bioindicators: they show taxonomic stability, trends in their populations can be monitored, short- and longterm effects on populations can be measured and they are distributed widely around the globe. Because insectivorous bats occupy high trophic levels, they are sensitive to accumulations of pesticides and other toxins, and changes in their abundance may reflect changes in populations of arthropod prey species. Bats provide several ecosystem services, and hence reflect the status of the plant populations on which they feed and pollinate as well as the productivity of insect communities. Bat populations are affected by a wide range of stressors that affect many other taxa. In particular, changes in bat numbers or activity can be related to climate change (including extremes of drought, heat, cold and precipitation, cyclones and sea level rise), deterioration of water quality, agricultural intensification, loss and fragmentation of forests, fatalities at wind turbines, disease, pesticide use and overhunting. There is an urgent need to implement a global network for monitoring bat populations so their role as bioindicators can be used to its full potential. (source)

And yet, most people are not batty about bats. Most people have their preconceptions, their biases, their outright misinformation about bats, and all those prejudices about bats vis-a-vis Hollydirt, Hollywood, sorry, and literature, and myth.

Truly, we, the common socialists, the ones pushing for community-directed governance, who know k12 needs to be facilitated in the out of doors, with hands on earth, and deep learning with languages, music, poetry, biology/ecology, we are the solutions. All things solved with food, water, art, hearth and home, and deep thinking. With intergenerational cohesion. I am just a guy who has studied agrarian-centered cultures, who has traveled far and wide, and who was immersed in six languages other than my primary language, English. Immersed in dozens of different cultures and perspectives. But we common socialists, us International Workers of World wobbly types, we are the bats, the indicator species, the splat. Not worthy of life.

Debs, another leading person, who is considered splat, collateral damage. (source)

Expendable, sacfricial lambs. Bats.

Yet bats have defined me, as has all those dives around the world. As well as ground truthing in Guatemala or working as a newspaperman in Bisbee. All those thousands of college students I have worked with over five states. The work in prisons. A thousand published pieces, from newspapers, magazines, and more. My radio show: Tipping Points: Voices from the Edge.

And more, but I want to think like a bat, be a bat just for one night along the Laos border, skimming the sky for mosquitos, moths and flying sticks.

That would be a true transmogrification.