Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons? — Michel Foucault, 1975, Discipline and Punishment

by Paul Haeder / June 19th, 2021

Note — I’ve updated this, added to it, fixed some typos (not in the business of teaching composition 101 and 201 with effing MLA, APA, Chicago style bullshit).

Getting into the Weeds of Mendacity of Life Fighting All the Time

All those people I know, associate with, email, talk with, interact with: most do not know how hard scrabbled some of us dissidents have it here in the United Snakes of America.

I am not just talking about my own rebellion against bad education, bad deans, bad administrators and just all the bad bad bad that I have faced in a dozen higher education arenas — community colleges, state universities and private colleges/universities.

I am not just talking about my own disagreements with green-weenies — those mostly white white people who are so hell bent on their watershed project, their big Greta Fat Fucking Lie, Green New One World Deal, etc. Those who are way off the scale in understanding how many people of the land, peasants, agriculturalists, people in “the other world,” how they are completely out of the mix, really, in this discussion and fight to feed the world, conserve ecologies, and fight the hegemony of finance.

I am not just talking about my critique of social services, the so-called helping professions I have been a part of — in no uncertain terms, the nonprofit industrial complex or the poverty pimps I have worked for and with. These people again, do not have the tools to go up against the systems of oppression and shackling that have destroyed the old, the frail, the infirm, the young, the foster youth, the chronically ill, the developmental disability/intellectual disability/psychological disability cohorts. I am talking about state, county, federal agencies and the fabric of no funding for support systems for young and old on the autism spectrum, etc.

I am not just referencing the battles I have had with editors and others in the profession called “journalism,” those in the Press I have worked with and alongside who believe that false balance and equivocation are real tools in their chest. I have argued against following the Chamber of Commerces (locals) and the business communities and the official lines of governments and others. That battle line, again, goes into other publishing arenas that I have gone up against.

Oh, forget my work-education in urban and regional planning and those battles and wars I have had up against the planners and the construction-engineering-architect-real estate cabal who are in the biz for maximum profits, for sales, for more and more building, tearing up, and endless projects that take taxpayer money, pave over vital ecosystems, make the world car-centric, whether it is a spewing internal combustion driven vehicle or toxic sludge electric vehicle.kevin phillip

Sure, forget about those who believe in USA, capitalism, capitalism hard right, capitalism hard left, or in between. This is not about all those battles I have had over five decades as a self-described and allied socialist and communist. Those conversations and arguments are endlessly looped into I have to say the stupidity of people in the USA on both sides of the left-right political manure pile divide who hate anything that is revolutionary or against the project on the war economies of capitalists in the West.

Meet the Communists Who Now Govern Chile

Non-Profit Industrial Complex and Their Little Eichmann’s

The hard-scrabble I am dealing with is yet another unethical band of nonprofiteers, in Newport and Salem, Oregon, the only game in this county, Lincoln, to assist people with developmental disabilities get jobs and supported housing. You have this name, Shangri-La, as the company, started in 1960, in Salem, as a farm and school for youth with developmental and intellectual disabilities.

I was put through some training at the Salem facility, and man, that Shangri-La is right next to the boarded-up, security-monitored Fairview Mental Hospital. I feel the ghosts of Siletz people in the town of Waldport, and along the coast. I felt the tortured screams and deaths of people in that hospital, forced sterilizations, thrown into cells, some with Downs Syndrome, others incorrigible young women too difficult to handle. Yep, boarded up, shuttered, the screams are there.

https://www.pbs.org/video/in-the-shadow-of-fairview-hd6sms/

“In the Shadow of Fairview” premieres on OPB TV Monday, Dec. 14 at 9 p.m. PT. The one-hour documentary examines the troubling history of Fairview Training Center.

Oh, what a shadow:Oregon is considered a leader at in-home and community-based services and supports for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD). But it wasn’t always that way.

For nearly 100 years, the Fairview Training Center housed thousands of Oregonians with disabilities. The facility opened in 1908 as the State Institution for the Feeble-Minded.

Most of the first patients were transferred from the Oregon State Hospital for the Insane. For decades, residents were officially referred to as “inmates.” Over the years, there were forced sterilizations, lobotomies, and systematic abuse.

For some people, it was the only home they had ever known, and many Fairview employees dedicated their lives to caring for residents.

By the 1980s, Fairview was among the nation’s largest and oldest institutions of its kind. It was overcrowded and poorly staffed. In 1985, a U.S. Justice Department investigation determined residents faced life-threatening conditions. Following a federal civil rights lawsuit, Fairview closed in 2000, with most remaining patients rehoused in the community.

Oregon Board of Eugenics, a fine institution Hitler was sure to know about. “In 1917 the Oregon State Legislature, in Salem, Oregon, passed a bill titled, “To Prevent Procreation of Certain Classes in Oregon.” Passage of the bill created the Oregon State Board of Eugenics, an organization that presided over the forced sterilization of more than 2,600 Oregon residents from 1917 to 1981.”

Governor Kitzhaber apologizes! Forced sterilizations, but there were more, and many were sterilized with a nod or a wink. Forced abuse. Forced into a mental institution.

Ground-Truthing — Working with the Victims of Bureaucratic and State Institutional Abuses

Oh, I had two gentlemen years ago who had been in Fairview. I was running a home for adult men, group home, where most worked, at supported employment gigs. Medications, cooking, checking in on them, daily and weekend activities, the whole shooting match. That was my first foray into working in the field of “developmental disabilities.” I was writing a book, working as an adjunct faculty teaching English at Clark College, working with environmental groups, and getting $12 an hour working in this facility, sleeping over a few days a week.

My two gentlemen, in their late sixties, had been in there for years. Freedom was coming out, as the facility closed. Inside rooms packed with others — feeble minded, two year old, dunces. Those were some of the signs posted in the facility.

These gentlemen ate their meals with arms cuffed around their plates, and they ate quickly, since in the Fairview Asylum-Prison, food was swiped, and they had orders to eat up everything, or else!

I’ve worked with United Cerebral Palsy, with Central City Concern, with Exceed, with Life Works NW, with the Salvation Army, with Shangri-la. In every case, the supervisors were, well, broken on so many levels. So many mean spirited, or people with so much personal trauma, that they had no people skills when it came to people like me – someone who advocated for the clients, and did not to any guff. You can read my work here on the Starvation Army, and my sacking at Lifeworks for something completely unrelated to the Portland based place — a Planned Parenthood training in Seattle where I lightly suggested that Gardasil was not hands down considered safe. Here, at DV, and then at LA Progressive, too, and Hormones Matter — My Fate as a Social Worker Sealed by a Vaccine Called Gardasil.

Then the three part series on Starvation Army, here, here and here.

More of the Same — Managers Gone Wild

So, this last unseemly series of events in Lincoln County involved a nonprofit called Shangri-La. Exploiting workers at $13 an hour. Exploiting people in their supported housing. The idea is that we have failed as a society, government by privatization, and so no services for most people directly from the government agencies, but instead we the taxpayer shovel cash into private sector for-profit scammers on every level, to nonprofits. In social services and other soft people skills outfits, there are hundreds of nonprofits in Oregon, to give one example, hunting for contracts to handle the sick, the disabled, students, special ed programs, and more. It is, alas, a type of poverty pimping, but not the kind of pimping anti-social services people might label them.

Anyone who has observed politicians and developers in action knows that the quickest way to destroy community cohesion is through programs like the war on poverty. Under the myriad schemes by governments to use the plight of the poor to enrich themselves, the cover of moral sanctity is essential to success.

On the global scene, the UN Millennium Development Goals — auspiciously aimed at poverty reduction — contain the seeds of warfare, genocide, and ethnic cleansing–-all in the name of charity. Lined up against indigenous self-determination and sovereignty in this battle are the World Bank, IMF, and poverty pimps like William Jefferson Clinton, Bill and Melinda Gates.

Caught in the crossfire are native peoples whose idea of appropriate development does not include the extraction of their resources by transnational corporations backed by the armies of UN member states.  (Source)

Daily, I get people from Texas and across the land telling me there are no programs for their loved ones, kids that are adults, on the autism spectrum, to help them get through life. This is true of the disabled, the old, the dying. If you haven’t gotten the memo yet, the entire medical world, including Big Pharma and Big Insurance, hospitals, the entire shooting match, is in this game as a system of gaming us, the patients, the families, the local and state and federal governments. Entire courses on how to overcharge/overbill Medicare and Medicaid. Really. Covid-19? Hmm, how much for each “covid” patient entered into a hospital? How much for each ventilator victim? How many long haulers with million dollar hospital bills?

Of course, there are so many sides to this Covid thing, now —

WorldNetDaily, “Hospitals get paid more to list patients as COVID-19,” April 10, 2020

The Spectator, “Hospitals Get Paid More to List Patients as COVID-19 and Three Times as Much if the Patient Goes on Ventilator,” April 9, 2020

Fox News, Laura Ingraham April 8, 2020, interview of Dr. Scott Jensen, April 9, 2020

Interview, Kaiser Family Foundation senior vice president and director of global health & HIV policy Jennifer Kates, April 17, 2020

Email, Julie Aultman, director of the medical ethics and humanities program at Northeast Ohio Medical University and a member of the editorial board of the American Medical Association’s AMA Journal of Ethics, April 21, 2020

The Economist, “Tracking covid-19 excess deaths across countries,” April 16, 2020

KVLY-TV, “MN Sen. Dr. says reported coronavirus deaths may be off,” April 8, 2020

Congress.gov, “S.3548 – CARES Act,” accessed April 15, 2020

Email, Dr. Bob Kocher, partner at the Venrock venture capital firm and adjunct professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, April 15, 2020

Snopes, “Is Medicare Paying Hospitals $13K for Patients Diagnosed with COVID-19, $39K for Those on Ventilators?,” April 17, 2020

Very Well Health, “How a DRG Determines How Much a Hospital Gets Paid,” March 9, 2020

Very Well Health, “Diagnostic Related Grouping and How It Works,” Feb. 16, 2020

Kaiser Family Foundation, “The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act: Summary of Key Health Provisions,” April 9, 2020

American Hospital Association, CARES Act bulletin, accessed April 15, 2020

PolitiFact, “COVID-19 skeptics say there’s an overcount. Doctors in the field say the opposite,” April 14, 2020

Interview, Kaiser Family Foundation senior vice president and executive director of the program on medicare policy Tricia Neuman, April 17, 2020

Kaiser Family Foundation, “Estimated Cost of Treating the Uninsured Hospitalized with COVID-19,” April 7, 2020

Kaiser Family Foundation, “How health costs might change with COVID-19,” April 15, 2020

Washington Post, “Coronavirus death toll: Americans are almost certainly dying of covid-19 but being left out of the official count,” April 5, 2020

Washington Post, “Which deaths count toward the covid-19 death toll? It depends on the state,” April 16, 2020

Email, Joseph Antos, scholar in health care at the American Enterprise Institute, April 15, 2020

Email, Jack Hoadley, research professor emeritus in the Health Policy Institute of Georgetown University, April 15, 2020

Email, Paul Van de Water, senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, specializing in Medicare, Social Security and health coverage, April 16, 2020

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Cases in U.S.,” April 16, 2020

USA Today, “Fact check: Is US coronavirus death toll inflated? Experts agree it’s likely the opposite,” April 17, 2020

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, “Acute Care Hospital Inpatient Prospective Payment System,” Feb. 20, 2019

Oh, those sources above, all the CDC loving, university-plagued, ugly shits in the media, etc. Here, this is the reality of the Covid-19 Dystopia, scrubbed from YouTube:

TrialSite hosted the first international Ivermectin for Covid Summit webinar on Sunday, May 23rd 2021. The event was widely attended with medical experts presenting from around the world to a global audience of interested parties in the thousands. The event was simultaneously broadcast live on YouTube.

With a mission to bring transparency and accessibility to clinical research TrialSite continues to track repurposed drugs as a potential option for COVID-19 along with vaccines, novel therapeutics and other measures.

Here, Matt Taibbi — “Why Has ‘Ivermectin’” Become a Dirty Word?“

The System is Broken, Designed that Way, Young Gen Z-er

We have a failure on all levels, and the system has always been sick, that system being, well, Capitalism. Shock Doctrine is interesting, but these people, the elites, their governmental lackeys, the slimy politicians, they have always been gaming the system before any term like shock doctrine surfaced. Predatory, casino, zombie, dog-eat-dog, inverted totalitarian CAPITALISM? It’s a lottery for the number of terms to express the reality of a world where everything is raped for profits, and, gaming people. But, I am back to this reality game — who the fuck cares about some schmuck who dabbles at Dissident Voice? My fine liberal friends say move on. Others wring their hands. Others say if there is smoke, there is fire — i.e., can’t you put your idealism aside?

The system is skewed toward bad people making bad decisions, and not so bad people making bad decisions, or bad decisions already baked into a bad system with either messed up or victimized or colonized people in managerial positions.

I put in some heavy workplace grievances, from bullying, to supervisor exposing personal and medical information of co-workers, to a supervisor who admits to memory lapses but uses memory lapses as a cuddle. Just so many rotten things from a boss, and, alas, for six months, I was used as a confidant, this supervisor coming to my office, closing the door, and saying, “I have to tell you something, and this is between you and I. Don’t let it get out.”

Broken supervisor, broken supervisors of the supervisors, and broken CEO, HR and probably broken board members. It is not enough to be part of a nonprofit that serves adults with developmental disabilities. That is not a slam dunk for never having constructive criticism leveled at you.

Thirteen pages of grievances against the nonprofit, against a supervisor, and, alas, four days later, sacked. With a letter from the CEO with a sack of lies. I guess I could have resigned before the sack.

That’s what the State of Oregon would want — quitting with the rationale that it was a hostile work environment, mentally and physically exhausting, and mentally and physically dangerous.

Again, filing for unemployment, and getting the run around, that is the job of the unemployed. This in a time of Covid is real work, worse work! In Oregon, where the governor, like that dude in Washington, Sate has her red flag county closure days, and, poof, down to yellow in a blink of a Covid Eye. Masks, masks, masks. Six feet, 10 feet, 20 feet separation. Lockdown. Plexiglass barriers. Three foot social distancing. I’ve written about this Planned-Pandemic. Alternatively, you can read the daily news (sic) on Saint Fauci, et al coming up with a Delta Variant and now a pill being developed for continuous bombardment of the immune system. Variant D now more prone to hitting young people? Does anyone wonder why and how and who and what and when all of this is being played out? Phillip K. Dick couldn’t write a better script for the past 24 months. The Dystopian Future!

“Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find.”

― Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

In any case, I apply, and in Lincoln County, the jobs are scarce, and the community in the DD field is small, gossipy and, forcefully, composed of broken people. Put a man into a position in social services, well, that is a living hell with these LGBTQAI+ folk, many times. So many women that have been completely traumatized by men, including sexual assault, bullying, and the sort. It is a woman’s field, yet there is a knee-jerk attempt at male recruitment, but then, there are the supervisors or managers who in a sense are ready to find fault in any man’s demeanor or way of thinking.

What the Oregon Employment Department Really Does — Mind Scanning

Now, I am in on these hiring events, ironically, yesterday, with the Oregon Employment Department. They handle FMLA, unemployment, and adjudication of unemployment claims. I am, ironically, in a back and forth with an adjudicator with OED, about this piss-poor outfit that sacked me (more than 2.5 months without an unemployment checks!), and then, I was on a hiring event with 199 other folk, with the Zoom Doom, and OED personnel explaining the dozen or so openings.

This is where people with good benefits, retirement in Oregon’s bloated retirement system — PERS — and some of whom have been with OED for 22 years!, rah-rah about the greatness of this state agency!

Get this — in the application process, the applicant, even after passing their hurdle after hurdle, never gets interviewed. A phone call comes if and only if a person is given a call, an offer to accept the job.

The OED folk on the call are working from “home,” and they are so happy about the movement away from face to face interactions. Again, they are in PERS:

“A $76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Short on Cash”  Link.

The kicker is of course, OED, the state of Oregon, pays for a personality bombardment test, a contracted service with a transnational company. They use an outfit, SHL. I spent time looking for what the letters mean, and that is a rabbit hole. International, and this is it, really, more and more middle men, destroyers of real face to face, live interviewing. This is the hell hole that most of my associates and friends know very little about.

About SHL

SHL’s science and technology maximizes the potential of your company’s greatest asset – your people. From Talent Acquisition to Talent Management, we help you create the diverse, agile, and innovative workforce you need to succeed in an unpredictable environment.

SHL’s data-driven people insights allow businesses to accurately and objectively identify potential and fit. Its unmatched portfolio of products, driven by a team of over 300 people scientists, helps measure skill, personality, motivation, job fit, and behavior. SHL delivers engaging experiences built on science, which are all delivered through global expert services.

SHL is a company that publishes psychometric tests designed to test the diagrammatic, numerical, and verbal reasoning of prospective employees. SHL test accuracy, speed, and test score compare candidates’ suitability for the role.

As am employment specialist, I have helped clients with these fucking bogus tests, for jobs at Whole Foods or Safeway or any number of places. A battery of fucking personality questions, bordering on how ethical and unethical you might be. This is the process of digital gulags, as more and more agencies and companies utilize these battery of AI and absurdly wrong tests for measuring what they think they want in a worker.

Money thrown out the window, and the state of Oregon has contracts with SHL? A company that can’t pony up to the S and the H and the L? This company also informs universities what they should be screening in and screening out for graduate students –  SHL releases a new study, using the Graduate Hiring Solution, and provides insight for how Generation Z performs in the workplace – their strengths as well as where they need support from leaders. “A New Era in Graduate Recruitment”

Oh, I did find the company’s roots — Saville and Holdsworth Limited — started by a psychologist, Peter Francis Saville. Oh, these fellows and women are nefarious. Look at him from a Wikipedia viewpoint (a terrible source for sure).  He helped develop the Swiss Cheese model. Sick: “The Swiss cheese model of accident causation illustrates that, although many layers of defense lie between hazards and accidents, there are flaws in each layer that, if aligned, can allow the accident to occur.”

This is what we face as prospective applicants for OED, if we get through the first hurdle, which I doubt I ever will. You see, if they utilize SHL, then they utilize other AI and middle men systems — We are prisoners, for sure, and OED actually is more interested in the employer than the employees. Nationwide, employers can use employee monitoring technology to track their staff’s real-time locations and activities. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 is a federal law that gives employers the right to monitor their employees’ verbal and written communications under certain circumstances.

Employers Deploy the Same Anti-Constitutional Tools

The fucking employer has the odds stacked in its favor — look at this: Best Google Alerts Alternatives

Talkwalker Alerts allows you to monitor the internet for new content featuring your name or brand, your competitors, or another relevant business topic. It takes mentions from websites, forums, blogs and Twitter and delivers them directly to your inbox in a single relevant email.

If you want to refine your alerts, you can use the intuitive filter option to view only the formats that are most relevant to you and your business. Talkwalker also offers a high level of customization with the use of Boolean operators. This free service offers the simplicity of the original Google Alerts, but with far more functionality.

Mention is a powerful option for monitoring your media mentions that offers advanced tools such as real-time activity monitoring and access to statistics and reports. One of the most useful features is the ability to respond to social media alerts within Mention. You can see and respond instantly without jumping through any additional hoops.

Mention lets businesses monitor any keyword across a wide array of sources, including all social media sites, blogs, forums and other web properties. Notifications can be sent as weekly or daily email digests or via real-time push notifications. Mention is accessible from your web platform for PC, Mac, or Linux and via apps on Android and iOS mobile platforms. Mention offers a basic plan for solo businesses that starts at $29 per month. Small businesses that want to monitor the competition in addition to their own business may be better served with the Starter plan, which is $99 per month. Mention also offers a custom option, which is ideal for larger companies or agencies.

As many of my friends, say, just a Google search of me puts me behind a hundred bullseyes. Can you imagine the need to look at how many times say Planned Parenthood gets mentioned, or Salvation Army? Putting my name into one of these two above, I am sure gets one hell of a lot of results beyond just a Google search.

This is what they want, alas, what the billionaires and the overlords and the two-bit companies, and the nonprofits, and yes, the states like Washington and Oregon, et al. They look into a prospective candidate’s past, just with one of these disgusting tools.

The old adage, American – Nazi style: “If you have nothing to hide, then why are you afraid of what the school, hospital, DMV, insurance company, credit company, job, police, government, corporation can access? I am fine with giving up everything to the boss, any authority, looking for any bad thing a person has said, done, thought, expressed, or even joined into?”

So, if you are in the work force, so to speak, and you have these million strikes against you in a three-strikes-and-you-are-out world, then “shut the fuck up, get your jab, do some shit job, you know, felony friendly (second chance), and live with it. You could be stuck in a Chinese iPhone factory or zinc mill in Siberia!”

AmeriKKKaaahhh!

This blog will continue on this theme, as I am in a position of permanent blacklisting in those fields of study and fields of work I have under my belt. Fucking Willy Lohman.

Funny, y’know? After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive. — Death of a Salesman, Willy Lohman.

Here it is, from the so-called white paper, SHL:

However, organizations operate in an ever-changing world. Our analysis of employer requirements across the last decade shows that what they’re looking for from graduates has changed significantly. In 2010 employers were looking for graduates who would “get stuff done”. Now the emphasis has shifted towards collaboration, creativity, agility and resilience. Alongside these evolving demands, there is a growing trend towards internal mobility and portfolio careers. Long gone are the days of recruiting a graduate for a one track path to leadership. As graduates are looking to discover their ‘truths’, employers are increasingly creating opportunities for new role and skill experiences.

In addition, a new generation has entered the workforce. Generation Z, a cohort with very different views and expectations to their predecessors in Generation Y. Born in the mid-1990s, Gen Z has been shaped by a dynamic and, at times, volatile world. A world constantly online and streaming digital content. Where mobile devices and social media have always been the norm for communication. With this as its foundation, Gen Z brings a unique set of priorities and worldview – a perspective framed by a digitally influenced quest for a more sustainable and fairer world. We believe it’s time for change in graduate recruitment – for a realistic and meaningful experience. Here’s why, white paper.

On the Dole (not yet) and on the Fiddle (not yet) — picking up the check is Near Impossible

And we come to this end, part one of a thousand parts in my life: I am battling to get measly unemployment payments while ACTIVELY looking for work. The nonprofit is bulking up lies, and I have met via phone three times, totally 5.5 hours, with an OED adjudicator.

The biggest issue is that when I filed three very detailed, accurate and narratively coordinated grievances, this triggered some sort of issue tied to my caseload. Now, my work was mobile, and I used my personal phone (they gave $25 a month for using it for work), I had appointments set up for a week, and I did receive texts from clients and come community partners.

I told these people in HR that I would be answering my phone during the grievance investigation period, and that I would then tell clients and members of the community (professionals and businesses) that appointments were cancelled and would be rescheduled.

Note that I worked with clients with communication anxiety disorders, and most of the clients used texting to communicate with me. I told the HR that I was client oriented, and that I would take care of cancelling appointments. The HR seemed to think I’d put my phone under a tree or in the toilet. My phone is also used for other gigs, jobs, since I was also working as a contractor for a nonprofit anti-poverty program.

The adjudicator with the state is in overdrive and overkill. I could have quit the job, during the grievance period, citing bullying, hostile work environment, poor leadership, and maleficence by the supervisors. I entered in the grievances in good faith, and when I was sacked, I was sort of surprised. And, I filed unemployment that Saturday. We are talking about April 10, 2021.

Blue State Governors Have War Powers Act — Forced Quarantines 

This is the blue state governor and the new Unemployment Insurance head, total chaos, no phones working, and long waits, months, for help. This is it in USA, and those adjudicators, spending this much time on one case, mine? An adjudicator making $50 K a year, 8 hour days, full Cadillac health insurance, PERS, and, well, this is it, man.

People making money off people’s misfortunes, and in the end, the Oregon Employment Department is working for the employer, since they pay into the unemployment insurance program. This is blue state mentality, and when one hears the Governor, Kate Brown, masked up like a child, in her nanny state mentality, closing businesses, and forcing huge lockdowns on healthy people, well, when we get the short end of things/the stick, and when the state workers still have their paychecks coming in, and, alas, they spend this much time on one case, mine, you understand why socialists and communists like myself see this as just part of the same mean as cuss, accusatory, guilty until you try and prove otherwise, Democrat-leaning mentality. Just a notch above Republican psychos.

Don’t believe their LGBTQAI+ or Black Lives Matter rhetoric. These people — again making money off of poverty, mishaps, disease, disasters, and the unethical mentality and treatment of bosses, no matter who the are.

None of my family (except my sister, a social worker) would have any idea about this sort of hell I am going through. My family that went to Ivy League schools, or what have you. Doctors, psychologists, lawyers, engineers. They have six figure income lives, and probably a chunk of change in the Morgan Stanley accounts making money on capital gains.

This is the reality though of people like myself — there are battles on all fronts. The state is heartless, and each moment we have to go against the state, we have to fight fight fight. My job as a social services professional over the years has been as a navigator and advocate and assist for people who have given up the fight against the state, against the corporation, the debt collectors, the law, the cops, all the pigs that rationalize their inhumane decisions on, “We are just following the law, the regulations, the rules, the contracts, the dictums and dictates of the leadership, the boss, the legislators, the regulators, my boss, my boss’s bosses.”

This is the story, never ending!

Post Script(s) — Infinitum 

Close the editing tool,  check the emails, and alas, two points of note to close:

Oh, those essential workers. Oh, those poor people laid off due to the planned pandemic. Now, the Oregon Employment Department is looking for a few good men and women and LGBTQAI+. The state never sleeps, and in Oregon, this blue state paradise (sic), that self-described bi-sexual governor Kate Brown is looking to ferret out fraud. Go after those who “defrauded” the state when laid off.

The purpose of this position is to investigate individual cases of suspected fraud; initiate and implement administrative actions where facts warrant such actions; write misrepresentation and overpayment decisions; write regular adjudication decisions; advise other agency personnel to develop methods and procedures to detect and deter fraud; assist in coordination of activities involving investigation and resolution of fraudulent activities detected within the unemployment insurance program; involvement in other programs, or jurisdictions as determined necessary by the investigator.

Up to $5600 a month, to investigate. Go after your fellow man, woman, in any situation. LGBTQAI+ please apply. BIPOC encouraged to apply. We do not discriminate:

We foster fairness, equity, and inclusion to maintain a workplace environment where everyone is treated with respect and dignity regardless of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, age, veteran status, disability, or status as a victim of domestic violence, harassment, sexual assault, or stalking. This policy applies to every aspect of our employment practices, including recruitment, hiring, retention, promotion, and training.

Then, from, Portside, Material of Interest to People on the Left, a reposting from Teen Vogue Magazine: “Toxic Work Environments Shouldn’t Be a Rite of Passage.” Not just harassment at fast-food joints. Not just back-breaking non-stop work in Amazon fulfillment centers. The early exploitation of workers, young in the case of this article, crosses all cultural and workplace boundaries:

It’s another element of the pay-your-dues mentality that puts the onus of work precarity back on employees. Rather than focusing on issues like excessive work, understaffing, and low-wages, it pivots the burden to employees who aren’t “motivated” or “doing enough.” When Faith* was doing a full-time, unpaid internship with a prestigious arts company, she recalls being criticized every time she was caught sitting down and told by supervisors that they wouldn’t recommend her for another position of similar nature because she couldn’t “keep up.” “Somehow, my 19-year-old brain internalized that and I convinced myself that I must not be working hard enough to receive anything,” Faith, now 21, tells Teen Vogue.

The article stops with youth, and I understand the audience. However, youth have parents, sometimes three-jobs-a-piece parents. These youth see how deeply exploited, abused, spat-upon, and threatened their parents are. In this planned pandemic world, there are shit jobs, and there are the Eichmann’s willing to go after, for whichever state you want to pin up here_________, the poor, the abused, those so-called heroes during the planned pandemic arc of fear and lockdown. Get that temporary state job as an investigator. The thrill is on.

Ironically, working with vulnerable youth and adults gets you in the very same place, precarity wise, as working for Burger King:

Sean, 24, is a caregiver for adults with traumatic brain injuries. He makes $12.50 an hour, and is considering quitting to work at Starbucks, where he’d make around the same amount but the worst thing he could do is make someone the wrong beverage. In his current job, he provides hands-on care, from helping people go to the bathroom to talking them through suicidal ideation, despite feeling “so woefully inadequate doing this job.” Understaffing is a chronic issue, and when Sean brings up that his employer isn’t paying people enough to retain them, he’s told, “‘Oh, you think you deserve our money? Well, there’s lots of people who do this job and get paid less than you. And something that they get from it is the joy of having done a good job.’”

Think about the messages here. Caregiver. More than 88 million baby boomers. Now, more than 60 percent of Everyone AmeriKKKaaannn with a chronic illness/disease/condition, and forty percent of all AmeriKKKaaann’s with two. Then, drumroll please: 15% of AmeriKKKaaannn’s with five or more chronic illnesses/diseases/conditions.

The fallout of all of that sickness, all of that medical interventions, all of that disability living, well, for the most part, it’s like the average AmeriKKKaaannn is whistling with eyes closed while passing by the cemetery. Yes, there are dolls that talk to people on the autism spectrum. Yes, there are robotic kittens and puppies that are handed out to aging people living on their own. But the reality is, minus Musk-Bezos-Gates-Soros-et al, we need massive armies of people in social services, educational, nutritional, activities, experiential/outdoor, arts & crafts, socio-psychological areas to take care of humanity, here, and everywhere.

The message is — exploit, abuse, destroy, and turnover.

Here, a white paper on Oregon’s abysmal social services outcomes: Unheard Voices. The research was initiated by a group called, United We Heal. Through hard voluntary work, and  AFSCME, the union. Now, just think of any industry in USA, and you can imagine the work, behind the scenes, of workers looking into the toxic workplace, the stolen wages, the abuse of customers/clients/patients. And the old timer might say — “Suck it in, take it, it’s part of the rite of passage — you will be abused, suffer, and have to take it with you mouth zipped. This is work.”

An inury to one is an injury to us all:  author Nate Holdren’s new book, Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era.

Listen to him here. Podcast.

Finally, the Washington Post‘s billionaire slave driver, Bezos, is running a piece on how his class (sic) of people should not be taxed. His model is what even Podunk Oregon Employment Department embraces, with all sorts of screening tools, psychometrics, tools to track, tools to analyze, tools to critique and evaluate. Imagine, reporters’ keystrokes being monitored by Bezos Gestapo Eichmann Mengele Goebbels, err, modern day, well, it rhymes with Bitter.

Alan Macleod, Mint Press News:

Being owned by the world’s richest individual does not mean that The Washington Post and its employees are rolling in dough themselves. Far from it: Bezos’ revolution at the newspaper, which has led to both increased pageviews and company value, has been largely based on simply squeezing workers harder than before. In an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review, management acknowledged that Post reporters are pushed to produce almost four times as many stories as their peers at The New York Times. Furthermore, the Post writes and rewrites the same story but from slightly different angles and with different headlines in order to generate more clicks, and thus more revenue. Thanks to new technology, reporters’ every keystroke is monitored and they are under constant pressure from management not to fall behind. The technique of constant surveillance is not unlike what hyper-exploited Amazon warehouse workers who wear GPS devices or Fitbit watches have to endure.

So if reporters can’t get a fair leg up, how can reporters end up reporting on the scum bucket people that are Bezos?

Here we are, a “reporter/columnist” defending the scum in the bucket — And we would expect any of the mainstream media to cover Podunk Nonprofits Destroying Caregivers’ Lives?

Written by star columnist Megan McArdle — who previously argued that Walmart’s wages are too high, that there is nothing wrong with Google’s monopoly, and that the Grenfell Fire was a price worth paying for cheaper buildings — the article claimed that Americans have such class envy that the government would “destroy [billionaires’] fortunes so that the rest of us don’t have to look at them.” Notably, the Post chose to illustrate it with a picture of its owner, Jeff Bezos, making it seem as if it was directly defending his power and wealth, something they have been accused of on more than one occasion.

I’m ending (finally) with a shout out to Edward Curtain. Read his stuff. I think he misses that the SARS-CoV2 is a bioweapon, manufactured months and a year or so before the lockdown disease. But he’s spot on about the collective delusion, the collective Stockholm Syndrome, and the collective abused citizen/consumer/patient/student/ worker/family/voter/public syndrome.

“What I Know and Don’t Know about SARS-CoV-2 Virus” https://www.globalresearch.ca/what-i-know-and-dont-know-about-sars-cov-2-virus/5748100

Oscar Wilde observed that “nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing,”

by Paul Haeder / June 14th, 2021

It is indeed a tale of many cities, worlds, perspectives, and then we have beliefs and morals. Add to that alternative and ulterior modes of realities, and we have a virtual Babel’s Tower of conflicting, contradicting and confusing form of “discourse,” or debate.  Never mind the Matrix angle of things! In today’s Western Culture (sic), where I am firmly rooted (USA, West Coast, Rural Oregon, Tourist By-way, Retired & Service Economy),  there is not so much nuance anymore, inside the souls — hearts and minds — of my fellow Americans. When you really look at it, nuance (deep thinking, considering multiple ideas, counter-intuitive thinking, and conceptualizing contradictory  debates), or lack thereof, means lack of not only critical thinking, or even a deep mire into not only dumb-downing and infantilization, but of self-delusion, amnesia and agnotology.

FDR —

Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils, which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers’ stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.

The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.

— March 4, 1933

Indeed, is it fearing fear itself which has taken this country down so many notches? Chaotic times, chaotic thinking. Chaotic allegiances to despots and mad money changers have lead to chaotic politics. Fearing fear. Oh, fearing BlackRock and Blackstone and the Group of 147, or make that 737.

The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies

1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation
26. Lloyds TSB Group plc
27. Invesco plc
28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA
30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
31. Aviva plc
32. Schroders plc
33. Dodge & Cox
34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*
35. Sun Life Financial Inc
36. Standard Life plc
37. CNCE
38. Nomura Holdings Inc
39. The Depository Trust Company
40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
41. ING Groep NV
42. Brandes Investment Partners LP
43. Unicredito Italiano SPA
44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan
45. Vereniging Aegon
46. BNP Paribas
47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc
48. Resona Holdings Inc
49. Capital Group International Inc
50. China Petrochemical Group Company

* Lehman still existed in the 2007 dataset used

Graphic below: The 1,318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy

(Data: PLoS One)

The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1,318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1,318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What’s more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1,318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world’s large blue chip and manufacturing firms – the “real” economy – representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a “super-entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies – all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity – that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. “In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network,” says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group. (Source)

Unfortunately, the article in The New Scientist cites people defending this, even saying owning all this wealth and power by a few is a good thing, almost tying it directly to nature, as if this control of power is paralleled in nature.

“A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn’t have an air force.”

The bombing list:

Korea and China 1950-53 (Korean War)
Guatemala 1954
Indonesia 1958
Cuba 1959-1961
Guatemala 1960
Congo 1964
Laos 1964-73
Vietnam 1961-73
Cambodia 1969-70
Guatemala 1967-69
Grenada 1983
Lebanon 1983, 1984 (both Lebanese and Syrian targets)
Libya 1986
El Salvador 1980s
Nicaragua 1980s
Iran 1987
Panama 1989
Iraq 1991 (Persian Gulf War)
Kuwait 1991
Somalia 1993
Bosnia 1994, 1995
Sudan 1998
Afghanistan 1998
Yugoslavia 1999
Yemen 2002
Iraq 1991-2003 (US/UK on regular basis)
Iraq 2003-2015
Afghanistan 2001-2015
Pakistan 2007-2015
Somalia 2007-8, 2011
Yemen 2009, 2011
Libya 2011, 2015
Syria 2014-2016

However, my screed today  is partially precipitated by the very fact I skipped out of a web-in-nar (amazingly stupid language of the techies) touted as a way “to bridge the divide in a country that is now so polarized, more than ever before.”

That of course is false — that we are in “the most polarized point in the USA, ever, politics and values wise.” And what does it mean to bring the nation together? To bridge two polar opposites? Can we “bridge” or scaffold these wonderful American values? Expropriation of indigenous lands? Slavery? Jim Crow? The Korean War? Vietnam? 9/11? Economic exploitation? Felonious finance? The entire false premise those on either side of the “dividing line” both professing makes this an exceptionally dutiful, good, glorious, top dog society? Bullshit. Any look at the old political screeds and cartoons will show that the USA has always been a white man’s/woman’s land, of the most evil of kindred spirits (see below for a sampling).

We are divided because of Trump v. Biden? Pence v. Harris? This is the sad bullshit of people we call elites and who have way too much time on their hands to babble about “bridging the divide.” This country has never atoned for its murders, its thefts, its disease. The country carries on, and if one rails against the military industrial complex, points out the sheer horror of collapses under the planned-demic, all the ended retail and other global contracts and dead/dying mom and pops, and then collectively, the country sits on those Trump or Biden thumbs up to actually believe no military contract shall be breeched, broken, or ended prematurely. This rah-rah for IT, AI, ICE, DoD, et al, has generated wave after wave of the future looking glass that has all of us is seeing in spades: more and more people will accept sacrifice zones for “the other” and for themselves when it comes to job, a house, anything to stave off the reality of the billionaire class in cahoots with the capitalists and corporate loving government heads.

Some might want UBI, universal Buffon Income, others want to make bank, and the majority of this country makes money doing nothing, that is, making nothing, and in many cases, making hell to be paid to us, the lower classes, the dissidents, the precarious, the non-traditional, irregular workers.

As I stand dying, I witness more and more of that shifting baseline syndrome, on steroids, across a full spectrum of things and values that have been shifted, morphed anew, devolved, destroyed and deep-sixed. Mass media/Prostituting Press have done much to shift the baseline. Recall, just a few decades ago, it was commonplace to despise billionaires, the rich, or hate too much car traffic, or attack gluttony of all kinds, including too much food in the gullet, or criticizing too many hours in front of a screen, or the possibility of too many days forcefully locked up (corona-madness) and again, we would have railed and railed against too much insertion into our lives by the government. The old shifting paradigm went from a majority of people wanting collective bargaining, work supports, anything to put the fire to the feet of the bosses, to now — how many right to fire (work) states are there? You have 30 minutes to clear out your dumpy desk sort of Amerikkkaaahhh.

States have these supposed safety nets, like unemployment insurance, but that too is a scam, as adjudicators come swooping in and spend hours on both sides of the fired/terminated line, in an attempt to make the terminated person feel shame and feel responsibility for unethical, unimaginable, and wrongful termination.

Do you think people want to talk about that? My so-called leftist friends, well, they would rather not get into the weeds of schmucks like myself fighting for unemployment wages (the dole). Irony of all ironies, that these Unemployment Insurance workers are state hired, sometimes state employees (now they do the deeds from their bloody Zoom Doom/Google Hangout homes). They have jobs, with benefits, because of the long arm of the unethical and putrid arrogance of companies, big and small, for profit and nonprofit, carrying out their daily dirty deeds of sacking people.

No due process.

Hours writing grievances. Hours on the phone with HR directors. Hours filing employment discrimination complaints, and hours filing for unemployment insurance and applying for jobs. Two months later, still in limbo, still no finding of facts in the worker’s favor that he or she was terminated on false allegations of “insubordination,” and alas, there you have it, no income stream for, well, two months.

This is a corrupt, broken, sick, and inhumane system. Typical. One microcosm into even more horrific treatment of us, we, by the people.

While on the other hand, people with time on their hands, would rather muck about with these inane ideas that today is as bad as ever in these here United Snakes of America, and today we must bring unlike minded people — Trumpies and Bidenettes — together agreeing on the core principles and values of Amerikkkaaahhhh.

The question is simple: Bridging which political polarization? Capitalism is the all-encompassing bacteria and virus, the cancer of the ages, so there is nothing but oppression on a massive scale. This is a greasy mat of all choking red tide explosions covering the land, the people. Yet, are we talking about left-right divide? Or about the political tyranny of both parties wanting to smear each party respectively? You can take a lifetime researching this country’s history of “polarization,” which of course, for the body public, is no big chasm, but for freaks like me, this is the inherent — DNA baked-in — racism, xenophobia, outright theft of native lands and manifest destiny within this continent’s borders, and beyond.

How was that polar opposite as a first people’s, first nations, up against the dirty and slimy Puritans, the first Amerikkkaaahhh corporation/monopoly. Brits and Hudson Bay and the theft theft theft of land land land.

Today, June 14, 2021.  Nearing Juneteenth.

The New York Times’ “1619 Project” essays on the arrival of African slaves in Jamestown, Virginia “is not a critique of American exceptionalism – it is an attempt to fold slavery into American exceptionalism,” said Josh Myers, professor of African American Studies at Howard University. “Africans were not seeking to become Americans; they were seeking to be free,” said Myers.

Hear Myers here — Black Agenda Report.

I write this a week or so after the anniversary of “Israel” murdering and wounding  USS Liberty sailors, and that was a cover-up by the enemy and cover-up (8 June 1967) by LBJ, et al.

Those big lies, man, a dime a dozen, so, who the hell is worth their salt, the weight in gold, if they can’t imagine more and more assaults on truth, more contrived and planned and organized lockdown madness? Is the best and the brightest, now? Real doctors losing licenses to practice for saying a hold should be put on vaccinating youth, 12 or younger. Imagine that shifting baseline.

The big lie gets bigger, and out in the open, and so the people are zombies wearing smiley face masks, running around backyards with N95 respirators swatting the famous jumping Covid/SARS2. Fucking looney bin, after fucking looney bin.

And we can’t say that the entire fabric of shit hole Amerikkkaaahhh is finally cracked through? Multiple concussions of the soul, of the intellectu? Then, okay, it is part of a plan, bits and pieces to the machinery that was part of the old New Order, old New World Ordering. Now, the New or New-New, or Newest New-New World Order manifestation. An old story spruced up in our all-encompassing 24/7 nano-microprocessed world. Interesting: I will be on this podcast, June 30.

Here, four guys are talking about the New World Order — origins, manifestations, congealed collusions, the hit and miss conspiratorial angle, the disconnectedness of it, along with the conspiracy of a small cabal perpetrating some form of multivariant New World Order. What’s Left is also part of the movement, Left Lockdown Skeptics. 

Alas, on one special scale, the USA (connected to the other Five Eyes, conjoined with secret and overt banking diseased ones, and colluding through all kinds of  strange Masonic and Jewish ties to many headed serpents of propaganda-AI-war-land theft-cultural appropriation) is behind this movement of Imperial-Next Industrial Revolution-New/Old Order(s) to an order of the 100th degree, reaching this point of, well, some of us dissidents witnessing more and more people mired in the fluff, the daily deluge of thousands upon thousands of unimportant and unconnected stories. It is rape-weather-Space X-#metoo-Q-Anon-etc. mad mad mad world,  to the point of mindlessness and unimportant stories getting us, collectively into this New New World Order of Distractions!

The times were good and the times were bad — they are, for sure. That is the goal, to bring triangulation and divide and conquer to levels never even thought of before, to the umpteenth level, so finely parsed and so rarefied, that we don’t know that we are being manipulated into not only dividing and conquering our allies and enemies, but actually conquering our own self-agency, our own will but also staving off our own will to not just fight the bastards, but to fight for our own lives.

America, and the White Culture (sic-sic) is hell-bent on mass murder in so many forms, and that’s not just blunt object force, but sophisticated marketing and propagandistic force. Their weapon is the media, which is the cloud, the constant data dredging and profile manufacturing. Out pasts are not just open books, but our futures are determined, and we are more than just pawns in some pre-crime sci-fi dilemma.

In the middle of the Civil War Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus observing that a limb may be sacrificed to save a life, but a life is never wisely given to save a limb. We do not have due process, and the informed consent, and all those supposed freedoms — choice, speech, associations, etc. — out the window for an “emergency” declared by WHO, and, this emergency, it never necessitated huge global deployment of MASH tents, large-scale therapies for those who “got” Covid-19 and large-scale debate and deep thinking about origins and who might have to pay the ferryman.

CHARON – FERRYMAN OF HADES

The basic thing is, how frightened are you of chaos? And how happy are you with order?

—Philip K. Dick

Dick makes his Matrix point, and makes it very clearly: “We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in our reality occurs.” These alterations feel just like déjà vu, says Dick, a sensation that proves that “a variable has been changed” (by whom—note the passive voice—he does not say) and “an alternative world branched off.”

Dick, who had the capacity for a very oblique kind of humor, assures his audience several times that he is deadly serious. (The looks on many of their faces betray incredulity at the very least.) And yet, maybe Dick’s crazy hypothesis has been validated after all, and not simply by the success of the PKD-esque The Matrix and ubiquity of Matrix analogies. For several years now, theoretical physicists and philosophers have entertained the theory that we do in fact live in a computer-generated simulation and, what’s more, that “we may even be able to detect it.”  (Source)

Oh say can you see . . . Is this a computer-generated simulation? Imagine that!

I could go on and on slicing and dicing the sickness of the white order, the white new order, the whites and their knights in shining drone armor. Some simulated universe, uh?

To believe that now is the worst of times, that today is the most polarized of times, is exactly what the overlords want (training us) us (sic) to think and act (react, fight or flight fear). So many ways this is all theater, choregraphed and directed by many many mean and monstrous folk. A kind of “matrix,” but not one that is, well, inside the zero’s and one’s and cross-patches of Artificial Intelligence.

You gotta love Phillip K. Dick, and he was a creative mind, a fiction writer. Science Fiction, a whole other realm of right-left brain syncopation.

Again, the webinar I was invited to and partially attended is the precipitating factor in all of this. Here, as follows — but with the caveat here, interesting, with this “spectrum” (not real) alluded to:

“Americans from all walks of life representing the full political spectrum. Some align fully within their designated party, while others identify based on values and topics. Within party affiliation, many participants self-identify along the spectrum of conservative, moderate, liberal, or progressive. Yet others self-identify along the spectrum dependent on the topic, for example, fiscally conservative and socially liberal.”

This webinar will be led by Lisa Swallow, Co-founder and Executive Director of SAGE’s partner organization, Crossing Party Lines.

Before the event, please take a few moments to:

Download/print all three attachments so you have them as a reference during the webinar.
In the attachment “Talking About Morals,” fill in the first row of the table with a 1 to 3 sentence summary of your views on each of the three issues presented.

Please see below for additional information on this webinar.

Drawing on the work of Jonathan Haidt and his book, The Righteous Mind, Lisa Swallow will spotlight six moral foundations that are held across cultures and how they manifest in different people at different times. We’ll explore the tensions within our morals, so we can better understand ourselves and our views, and relate to people who may hold different views.

In this webinar you will:

• Learn to recognize the moral underpinnings of your own views;
• Listen for indications that one or more of the six moral foundations is at play in an any political discussion; and
• Bring morality into your political discussions in a non-confrontational way.

We are offering this event through the SAGE Citizen Project, which is an important program to foster conversation across political and other divides. Thank you for joining us.

Warm regards,  Executive Director of SAGE (Senior Advocates for Generational Equity )

The areas that we had to discuss included “homelessness”; “school choice”; and “job loss to artificial intelligence.” There were three categories to jot down ideas: Your Views; Your Morals; Morals-Based Statement.

Well, again, these people are on Zoom, and I don’t know them, and of course, there is no room for building community. I am already a triple-threat — Marxist, communist, anti-authoritarian and anti-Imperialist; skeptical of everything coming out of so-called educated handlers; not a pacifist. To say I am anti-capitalist is a small tip of a larger iceberg. So, I was on the Zoom to see what would shake out, and alas, it was confusing for most of the participants, and, well, I had gardening to do, and getting ready for my sister, 10 years my junior, flying out from the hell-hole that is Chandler/Phoenix (106 degrees in the shade) to visit here, for a few days — highs in the low 60s, so I bowed out after a few odd statements by the facilitator and one or two of the participants.

I’m struggling to find work, once again, but at least the Pacific and the eagles and other wildlife are amazing in my daily dread. You have to take what you can in this world of humble pie, bread crumbs and predatory EVERYTHING.

I just Zoomed off, as the dude who weighed in on the third issue — AI and job loss — just was a beaming you all just don’t know how great and all-encompassing AI is and will be kinda guy:

Listen up. In 20 years there will be no job that AI can’t do better than humans. I’ve been reading science fiction for years, and this is the reality.

He was throwing it out as a know-it-all voice of reason, and he wasn’t pushing back against AI and Control, but reveling in the fact that people on the planet, in his estimation, will be shit out of luck, workwise, and so what are you going to do about it.

So, in a real situation (face-to-face, or in an interchange even on Zoom Doom, with real people with a shit-load of varying views and experiences) that statement would be pulled apart — not only is it wrong, but it’s not accurate, but he seemed to be admitting he has zero knowledge of a world in huge climate heating shifts/crises, and one where land protectors will gain steam, and agriculturalists will gain steam, and people building small communities connected largely will gain steam. He might be mixing up Phillip K. Dick’s great works with some fantasy, something about in fact he missed — most science fiction writers are not proponents of this AI world, precrime, etc., even though they tend to write about it. “Brave New World” is not the goal, nor is One World, New Order, Point-Zero Zero One Percent controlling us all.

But this old fellow, well, he seemed happy to announce — “Listen up folks, but AI will be doing all the jobs in 20 years. Get used to it!”

Well, in the classroom, I suppose, that would be a fun statement to dice and slice up. If he is right — 20 years, uh? — then what are the morals and values of that world, or at least the devolution of humanity in that high income country world? Do we not have hundreds of millions of people — maybe billions —  left out of society? I’m talking about clean water, clean air, food, healthcare and education and just life without strongarms and killers and the taxmen and armed men destroying futures. Billions stuck in this paradigm, and that is most likely you the reader and me the writer. Do people who want simplicity, water, air, soil, simple stuff — community centers, farmers markets, advocacy clinics, outdoor activities, and intergenerational living — are they shit out of luck? Because of transhumanism, fourth industrial revolution, internet of nano things, total awareness/control/destiny?

It’s as if these Baby Boomers who do this SAGE thing, or at least some of them, are so old, so scooped out of the muck of mainstream media, that there is no alternative.

“There is no alternative,”  used by the Conservative British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, as her claim that the market economy is the only system that works, and that debate about this is over. Of course she meant “globalized capitalism, so called free markets and free trade, were the best ways to build wealth, distribute services and grow a society’s economy. Deregulation’s good, if not good with the extra ‘o’ missing —  God.”

That’s what that guy is stating — AI is coming, and it’s here to stay, a foregone conclusion. It is the morality set forth by the capitalists, the tax cheats, the supreme leeches of taxpayer goods and service, labor, and of course, government proles. But these SAGE talkers would never critique this Shit Hole USA that way, because the series is about “bridging gaps.”

It is not about free choice, but dictated markets, monopolies, hedge funds, and the immorality of the Complex — Big Pharma (five shots a year, mandatory); Banks (bailed out and swimming in money) ; Real Estate (buying up all the properties of the Planned-demic and the new Zoom/Remote Work model); Education (now pushing more people/faculty out of work for that webinar, for those lower courses sold as enhanced Power Points); Surveillance (DNA for the cops, and total control of humanity through RFIDs, and more); Military (the coin of the realm in Western Civilization — unending pipeline to those Murder Incorporated thugs big and small); Medicine (for the rich, gene editing, stem cell Fountain of Youth, disease management for the poor).

Oh, here’s Paulie’s blurbs that facilitator asked us to offer:

Job Loss to Artificial Intelligence

Your Views

The World Economic Forum, and the intention of the Fourth Industrial Revolution are the drivers of controlling people, controlling communities, and controlling narratives. We need to stop the overlords pushing more and more people away from face to face interaction.

Your Morals

I am an educator, journalist, artist and activist. In no way is this paradigm shift helpful, and we have been co-opted by again the wrong people, and the wrong values.

Morals-Based Statement

We are a people evolved through communities, hunter gathering groups, and agrarian groups. In no way is the AI, Internet of Things, and control of people’s agency through Digital Dashboards.

Homelessness

Your Views

This is a systemic issue, and I have worked as a case manager for many rough sleepers, homeless and those nearly homeless. We have Diaspora worldwide, and we have climate refugees and refugees of neoliberalism and capitalism that puts people behind parasitic usury.

Your Morals

Education, health case, food systems, housing, and cultural engagement are the most important things in life. Having societies set up by financial felons and military industrial complex thieves impact all problems we face in society.

Morals-Based Statement

Social and environmental justice are tops, and ending the world’s largest terrorist organization, USA, from deadly interference into other countries’ destinies.

School Choice

Your Views

The entire education system needs revamped. Community directed, and holistic and creative. Public education has to be experiential and away from this capitalist system of killing creativity and creating worker bees.

Your Morals

I am an ecosocialist, and Marxist, for sure, so liberal to me is a pretty damning term, but in the end, liberal arts, humanities, deep regard for rhetoric, biology, ecology, history, and critical thinking, debate, music, all that makes culture, we have to build creative spirits. There is no choice when the rich or the lucky few out in the boondocks get their home schooling. School choice is another term for charter schools.

Morals-Based Statement

We have seen a public education systems set up to destroy young people’s creativity and genius. It has been delivered through a pernicious system of dictatorial control modeled after the Prussian system of the 1850s.

Look, it’s about translation, and it’s also about narrative framing, and my own expectations tied to what I have lived and experienced and have felt under the strong arm of the law — predatory, competitive, dog-eat-dog, survival-of-the-fittest capitalism.

There is a certain intolerance I am developing, and that my fine readers I would have never guessed could percolate from my tireless soul just two years ago, but over the course a few dozen months, with the background and foreground radiation of this Pan-Plan-Demic condemning us to a continuous battery of stupidity and fear, control and a dictatorship of Eichmann’s floating more and more to the top of the scum pile, I am wondering what sort of alliances and allegiances I have developed over the course of, well, shall we say, gulp, five decades?

There is an endless list of turncoats, and my own reality as age 19 is now at 64, and for some three decades, maybe, or since having a child, now 25, I have played the game, pugnacious, outlier, sure, and rebel and anti-authority, but I let those early years where the burning bush of desert Caterpillar front end loaders and outdoor signs announcing more and more development run wild, and the immolation was liberating and real for me, racing through the Earth First and Liberation Front mentality made sense. Smuggling this and that, and even people, across that Tortilla Curtain.

It all makes sense now, too —

The Unabomber Affair: Ted Kaczynski, also known as the ‘Unabomber’, is a US terrorist known for his 17-year bombing campaign as the terror group ‘FC’, which targeted individuals involved in technical fields like computing and genetics.

In early 1995, the New York Times received a communique from FC in the mail:

This is a message from FC…we are getting tired of making bombs. It’s no fun having to spend all your evenings and weekends preparing dangerous mixtures, filing trigger mechanisms out of scraps of metal or searching the sierras for a place isolated enough to test a bomb. So we offer a bargain.

The ‘bargain’ offered by the group was simple: publish its manifesto, and it will stop sending bombs.

The manifesto, entitled Industrial Society and Its Future, was a 35,000 word polemic detailing the threats that industrial society posed to freedom and wild Nature. At the crux of the document’s analysis was a concept called ‘the power process’, or an innate human need to engage in autonomous goal setting and achievement. Despite this psychological necessity, ‘in modern industrial society, only minimal effort is necessary to satisfy one’s physical needs.’ As a result of the mismatch between human need and industrial conditions, modern life is rife with depression, helplessness, and despair, and although some people can offset these side-effects with ‘surrogate activities’, the manifesto says that these are often undignifying, menial tasks. Interestingly, these concepts have numerous parallels in contemporary psychology, the most notable similar idea being Martin Seligman’s concept of ‘learned helplessness’.

Ultimately, the manifesto extols the autonomy of individuals and small groups from the control of technology and large organizations, and it offers the hunter-gatherer way of life as a vision of what that kind of autonomy might look like. Still, the end of the manifesto only argues for the practical possibility of revolution against industry (rather than a complete return to hunter-gatherer life), and it outlines some steps to form a movement capable of carrying out that revolution.

When Kaczynski was apprehended, he looked dirty and disheveled, with an unwashed body and torn clothing and hair that reached in every direction. It was a typical look for Montana men in the winter, but it nevertheless solidified the media image of the man as a lone wingnut. In reality, Kaczynski was very likely a genius. He was accepted into Harvard at the age of 16, later went to the University of Michigan for his Masters degree, and then taught at Berkeley as an assistant professor. His doctoral thesis solved several difficult problems relating to ‘boundary functions’, which even Kaczynski’s math professor, George Piranian, could not figure out. ‘It’s not enough to say he was smart’, Piranian said. (Source).

No excessive baggage (history, culture, experience, logic) allowed on this bullet train

Oh, the time I have, putting in application after application, for a job. A job, that’s a double-edged word. What is that job without a jab. Now, one year-plus, perfectly accepted that the restaurant or retail outlet or any manner of “job” can require you to submit to the jab. Make that jabs. This is the continuing criminality of a rigged system.

Unfortunately, the entire globe has sucked that mRNA potion. That mRNA cleanser was only possible after how many years? The atomic bomb, splitting of the atom, orbital flight. It hasn’t been long, civilization wise, but so long evolution wise, since that lovely scientific lovely was born. Make no bones about it — science was bad before that, but the atomic era heralded in the complete prostration to the “experts,” or to the “MD,” or “engineer.” With all that education, all those cohorts, the amazing jet-jetting of these virologists and hard rock geologists, the entire crew, popping off into orbit, space station and undersea world station, it doesn’t matter.

The PhD’s and post docs (along with drop-outs like Gates) have it.

Regulatory agencies not keeping pace

Scientists and companies keep tweaking our plants and animals and even our pets but our regulatory agencies are not keeping pace. We don’t have adequate rules about how to release genetically engineered plants and animals into the environment. Businesses still introduce new plants, seeds and animals without making adequate information available to the public about what they are or where they are. And no single federal agency has responsibility for assuring the safety of genetically engineered plants and animals.

The glowing fish are shedding some light on an important problem. We don’t have sufficient oversight in place to make sure that the new animals and plants that result from genetic engineering are really safe for us and the environment. We need Congress to assign clear responsibility for genetically engineered plants and animals to one federal agency. And that agency needs to make sure that the rules for release and standards of safety glow brightly for both business and the public.

Arthur Caplan is director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Please not that this Caplan is a capitalist, one of those dangerous scientists, all-knowing types, and this site, http://www.bioethics.net, is anything but ethics and pushback. This place pushes mandatory vaccine passports, pushes these jabs for children, pushes the idea that youth 15 or older do not need parental consent to get jabbed.

These are the masters, the controllers — another site of madness dressed up as science and open-discourse —

by Brian M Cummings M.D. and John J. Paris S.J.

Vaccine passports are likely to become a necessary part of our lives until we achieve herd immunity and no longer need worry about contracting a potentially life-threatening virus from strangers. Such ‘passports’ might not be the first item on our wish list. But the arguments for their use are basic and compelling. As Gostin and colleagues’ recent article notes, vaccine passports encourage people to be vaccinated and allow a reopening of the economy. For those who want—as much as possible– to recover life as it was prior to the pandemic, they will become a necessity.

Vaccination is not a risk-free action; it involves an assessment of both risks and benefits. Individuals whose position does not significantly impact public safety are free to decline to be vaccinated. With the adoption of a vaccine passport requirement, such declinations may cost people opportunities for social interaction and economic engagement. Such is their choice. The benefit calculation of vaccination increases the prospect going to a restaurant, sporting events and to other unrestricted activities. Vaccine passports simultaneously encourage vaccination and provide a quick way to assure a public concerned about Covid they can safely enter public venues. (source)

They control the narrative frames, the entire mix of thought. They are the shamans, the arbiters of good sense, future knowledge, and interpretations of human and non-human kind, throughout the ages.

There is no debate, really around how dictatorial and patronizing the entire project is in Capitalism, from book writing/publishing, to how you get your prostate analyzed, to how you are supposed to take those classes and lift off with a degree. Until we have reached, 2021, the massive unethical, illogical, and propagandistic level of forced jabs.

It is amazing, really, that we have let this happen — no choice, no pushback (real pushback). Those who are putting their lives at risk, who have fought the jab, have submitted. You can’t get a cappuccino or rental car without the jab passport. This is the most amazing time for the flagging masses. Even communist Cuba is into this Genetic Engineered jab. Imagine that, dark age thinking with high-tech manipulation.

So, the body can’t fight this off, or, well, 92 percent can, without major issues, or, well, we mostly can fight it off to the point of no hospitalization, incubation, but in the end, we are living caldrons for this SARS-2 to set off on variant after variant, attacking heart, lungs, liver, more, until we might be permanently damaged by the virus.

A novel virus, indeed. Those novels I have piled up as manuscripts were inventions of my own, time honored hard work, crafting, editing, cutting, and adding. Building characters, detailing settings, regulating pitch in language. All that hard work of imagination put to crafting.

Here, bio(unethical) — their Covid page:

Source They call it a toolkit, and yep, no contrarian, no pushback.

Bioethics.net and the American Journal of Bioethics have assembled a bioethics toolkit for people dealing with COVID-19.

We have a collection of important blogs from around the internet that you can find here. We also highly recommending our growing catalog of our original blog posts by leading scholars writing on bioethics in pandemics.

Other compendium resources

• The Hastings Center has assembled a number of reports and resources.
  Thomas Cunningham at Kaiser-Permanent has put together a comprehensive resource of academic articles, government plans, and allocation frameworks.
  AMA COVID-19 Ethics Resource Center
• For the best scientific information:
• For policies, protocols, and practices:
• For ethical guidelines on vaccines & allocation:
• For ethical guidelines for responding to crisis:
• For plans on triage:
• For clinical algorithms for making allocation decisions
• For CPR/DNR with COVID protocols
• For communicating with patients and others
• VitalTalk: Communication skills and sample scripts
• Communicating in a crisis
• Special journal issues/articles

Oh those scientists, working on gain of function, tweaking viruses, super-charging them, creating chimeric madness, testing a bat virus by bulking it up and putting it to the test on humanized mice. Working the spiked proteins and the messenger genes to go for the heart, lungs, vital organs.

For Christ’s sake, we get ad nauseum articles on research into coffee — too much bad for you, or a few cups a day, amazing? Cures for cancer, or cancer causing? We have every manner of deep research into whether dairy is good or bad, whether sugar is good or bad. Yet, this sticky wicket, well, we can’t even dare ask the questions around how/why/who/when/what/where have these experiments been conducted. Instant open records for the background on all the military involvement with virus research, all the 13,000 USA researchers on gain of function, all those other countries’ researchers and facilities. And, what is the effects of the mRNA and recombinant DNA molecules mucking about. Imagine, these recombinant DNA molecules are formed by laboratory methods of genetic recombination that bring together genetic material from multiple sources, creating sequences that would not otherwise be found in the genome.

Not found in nature, that is.

There are no questions, no challenges, and so we get forced jabs, globally, and no other forms of dealing with, a, this zoonotic jump of a bat virus to human (there are not bats found yet to have this SARS-2 virus; or, b, that this is man-lab made, hands down, and all of that crafting of novelty has created an out-of-control genetically engineers virus that does double, triple and quadruple duty to various humans.

To the point that St. Fauci isn’t sure about a booster, or when, but the three big Pharma Boys, already have their boosters manufactured an at the ready, in a few months.

This is not questioned — how it was anticipated, that SARS-CoV2 is now in need of double or yearly boosters.

In all manner of thinking this through, we have no agency, no collective group of people to count on who might question the narrative. We just get plowed over by history and move forward — no questions asked, or too many questions to ask.

Ahh, try finding articles and debates within mainstream journals, etc., on anyone questioning mandatory vaccine passports, and the very idea of it being wrong for this philosophy (sic) of “no jab, no job.” It is utterly disgusting how the internet has shaped up. Good luck looking for deep discussion on why mandatory vaccination programs are wrong in this day and age, and exactly, what sort of vaccine (sic) is being mandated, that is never a question in the mainstream. Of course, we have other sources that question the entire narrative, the entire issue of this novel virus, and, alas, what the chemicals they are delivering through the needle really are and what they really do. But again, passports are digital, a multi-billion-dollar boondoggle for the master race — the rich, the elite, the (point).zero-zero-zero-One percent. Oh, the war criminal, Tony Blair. This mumbo-jumbo is doublespeak, marketing emptiness, and a huge campaign for a deeper and darker agendai:

Meanwhile the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change – headed up by former UK Prime Minister Blair, a strong proponent of passport tech – lays out a five point plan for how to design an equitable scheme, arguing they need to be:

Equitable. Health passes should be available to all citizens, including people who have not been vaccinated – for reasons of not being eligible yet, for medical reasons or through personal conviction – and not forgetting the needs of non smartphone-users.

Adaptable. A pass should be able to be updated as understanding of the virus changes and as wider circumstances alter.

Seamless. It needs to be easy and quick to use to encourage adoption and be as frictionless as possible in terms of the administrative burdens on businesses or health organizations.

Transparent. Data collection and retention policies and parameters need to be strictly defined and completely open to users.

Reliable. Passports must be designed with security and privacy at their core. (Source)

These are monsters, and yet, in capitalism, in this totalitarian, or inverted totalitarian state, this is it —

Salesforce’s long game –The pandemic response has also seen cross-industry alliances between tech firms and this is continuing around the concept of health credentials. Salesforce, for example, has committed to integrating the IBM Digital Health Pass into its work.com safe return to the workplace platform offering. The cloud leader is also a founding member of the Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI), alongside arch-rival Oracle and a host of healthcare organizations. The VCI aims to develop a standard model for organizations administering COVID-19 vaccines to make the immunization data available in an accessible, interoperable, digital format.

For its own part, Salesforce’s internal Office of Ethical and Humane Use of Technology has been heavily involved in the specifics of work.com and in considering the wider complexities of Vaccine Passports, although this last is a term that Yoav Schlesinger, Principal of Ethical AI Practice, doesn’t use, preferring to talk about the broader idea of digital health credentials:

“From our perspective, one of the most critical elements of this safe return back to ‘normal’ is that digital health credentials incorporate much more than just vaccine status. Digital health credentials need, from an equity standpoint, to allow people to demonstrate their health status through a negative COVID test, through proof of recovery and antibody tests etc, so there needs to be multiple ways to present that information, so that we can all be assured of a safe return to whatever locale and location we’re talking about, whether for travel or returning to work or attending a concert, etc.”

He adds that proof of vaccination is not the only way to establish that a workplace is safe:

“Relying exclusively on proof of vaccination status may or may not be the strategy that an employer wants to employ. I think it’s critical that employees, and anyone else, are able to also establish that we can return to work through a negative COVID test or proof of recovery as well. There will certainly be circumstances and situations where people can’t be vaccinated, because of health conditions or because of a religious conviction. We want to ensure for the sake of equity that people are able to present their health credentials and their health status in multiple formats and through multiple avenues.”

Human scum. Whitney Webb reported about the plans for expansive data collection through Vaccine Passports. Webb wrote about the Vaccine Credential Initiative’s SMART Health Cards, which were developed by governments working alongside Microsoft, Oracle and MITRE. According to Webb the developer of the cards, Josh C. Mandel, listed ‘Name, gender, birth date, mobile phone number, and email address in addition to vaccination information’, specifically as a ‘Starting point.’ (Source)

Here, the Jan, 2021 article —

Silicon Valley and WEF-Backed Foundation Announce Global Initiative for COVID-19 Vaccine Records
Silicon Valley’s most influential companies, alongside healthcare companies, US intelligence contractors and the Commons Project Foundation, recently launched the Vaccination Credential Initiative. The initiative’s ambitions reach far beyond vaccines and will have major implications for civil liberties. BY WHITNEY WEBB

We can’t have these ethical discussions with philosophers, gurus, all those groups spewing “we are medical and biological ethicists.” This is contradictory, and they are in no way acting as oversight folk, or ombudsmen. They are part of the colonized, and any discourse outside their frame is labeled, mostly, unworthy, uninformed, out of place, radical for radical sakes, contrarian, reckless, dangerous, and to be ignored. “We have toolkits for stopping this mindset. We have our ways. We know how to extract and inject.”

The agenda is not hidden, in the shadows, but for most in the world, they have no bandwidth or willingness to question.

The effort to manufacture consent for an all-encompassing digital identification system is notable given that its main selling point thus far has been coercion. We have been told that without such a system we will never be able to return to work or school, never be able to travel, or never be allowed to participate normally in the economy. While this system is being introduced in this way, it is essential to point out that coercion is a built-in part of this infrastructure and, if implemented, will be used to modify human behavior to great effect, reaching far beyond just the issue of COVID-19 vaccines. — Whitney Webb

What got me onto the computer was reading Max Forte’s blog piece, ‘Race,’ ‘Diversity,’ and the University‘. He’s writing, Zero Anthropology.

Through a continual succession of fear campaigns, Canadian universities are being intellectually sanitized to suppress, marginalize, and ideally to banish contrary thought. It is all done under the banner of familiar “good intentions”. In 2018, the panic was about “rape culture”. In 2019, it was about the “climate emergency”. In 2020, it was of course about “the pandemic”. In 2021, it is about “systemic racism”. What will it be next year? An outbreak of neo-fascist cannibalism?

At least in a formal way, since 2007 (when ZA was launched as “Open Anthropology”) I have been studying the history and political-economy of academic knowledge production. When turning to the Canadian university, one learns of the “Canadianization” movement that gathered steam and strength in the 1970s and 1980s, which emphasized Canadian content in research and teaching, and Canadian hiring. At that time, Canadians were very aware of the country’s status as a dependent appendage of the US. It is a dependency that is enforced, from the top down, and where the dependency turns into cultural and political forms it can be most acutely observed in Anglophone Canada. That dependency has in fact increased: the law requiring that qualified Canadian applicants should get first preference, is routinely skirted by university departments and administrations. Our content is directly imported from the US: we are mere retail sales staff; we are spectators to knowledge production; we are, essentially, just an audience. To be deemed a serious and respectable academic in Canada, one must show advanced imitation skills in knowing how to synthesize and combine pieces of work produced by this or that prominent American/British/French scholar. Preparing a “literature review” is our favourite sport. We excel as consumers—much like regular Starbucks customers who invent complex and convoluted demands for how their “coffee” (i.e., liquid dessert) should be mixed. Our “signature” contribution involves the creative mixing of elements we had no hand in creating in the first place.

Living in an officially approved “Monkey See, Monkey Do” culture, I would inevitably become attuned to patterns of importation and imitation sweeping “Canadian academia”. It is a determined mimesis; just as it banishes integrity and originality, it now silences dissent…where what one would expect academics to do as part of their job (doubt, question, debate) is what now constitutes “dissent”. We are meant to act as bobbleheads, perpetually nodding to uphold this virtual reality of uniformity, to pretend unanimity lest the spectre of “disagreement” should rear its ugly head.

He’s spot on in so many ways, but in the end, he is parsing about diversity programs/training/brainwashing. Absolutely, much of the diversity training is infantilized, and retrograde. I think in many ways, though, Max misses the point of academia — or the way it is set up, and has been. It is a training camp, mostly, for the colonized, the believes in Western Civilization, in discourse and knowledge in a most empirical way, and also, it is a place of disgusting hierarchies, and lock-step. Yes, the new in thing, the new normal, is diversity training, and LGBTQAI+ work. This stuff is fluff, window dressing, and alas, the corporation, THE CORPORATION(s) have colonized higher education, and K12 is a bootcamp for compliance, follow the crowd, believe in authority, go the way, not against any grain.

I’ve been on many mandatory diversity trainings, and yes, some content is childish, touchy feely, pop psychology, and, to be honest, yes, we need to tear down the entire system, and having LGBTQAI+ and BIPOC in the chambers of power, that is it, no, the Black Misleadership Class, as Glen Ford calls this reality.

By 1970, the Black Radical Tradition lay mostly in the graveyard, and the way was clear for the Black Misleadership Class to monopolize Black politics on behalf of their corporate overseers. The first act of the first big city Black mayor, Cleveland’s Carl Stokes, was to put the police under the command of a Black retired general, whose first act was to issue the cops flesh- and bone-destroying hollow point bullets.

The rise of the almost entirely Democrat-allied Black Misleadership Class is perfectly coterminous with construction of the Black Mass Incarceration State. The “New Jim Crow” was a bipartisan project, initiated under Democrat Lyndon Johnson’s Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, which vastly increased the manpower and funding for local police departments, and was put on hyper-drive by Republican President Richard Nixon’s “War on Drugs”–a War on Blacks that never ended but was re-declared by Republican President Reagan and reinforced by Democrat President Bill Clinton. At the local level, the exponential growth of the Mass Black Incarceration regime was administered by increasingly Black city governments, which oversaw and processed the deportation of millions of Black men, women and children to the Prison Gulag. Virtually all of these Black operatives of race and class oppression are Democrats. And all of them are celebrating their own political ascension as the wondrous outcome of Dr. King’s “dream.”

By 2014, 80 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus was voting to continue the Pentagon 1033 program that funnels billions of dollars in military weapons and gear to local police departments. Four years later, 75 percent of the Black Caucus voted to make police a “protected class” and assault on cops a federal crime. (See BAR, “Black Caucus Sells Out Its Constituents Again–to the Cops.”)

The Black misleaders are as silly as they are shameless, but they are not ineffectual. No white man could eviscerate Dr. King’s radical legacy, or make Malcolm X appear harmless to the imperial order–that’s a job for the Black Misleadershsip Class. While Dr. King rejected an alliance with the “triple evils,” Black Democratic misleaders describe their deal with the Devil as smart, “strategic” politics. They whip up war fever against small, non-white nations that seek only the right to govern themselves, behaving no differently on the world scene–and sometimes worse–than Donald Trump.

They shame and weaken Black America, and have joined the enemies of life on Earth. King would shake his head, mournfully. Malcolm would keep his tight smile, doggedly. Then both would organize to expose and depose the Black Misleadership Class.

Interesting, how one guy’s blog precipitates this loose ends response. There are corollaries, to the Forced Jab, the Forced Digital Gulag, the Forced Surveillance State up our asses, to what happened to MLK and Malcolm X. They were outliers in this country, but not worldwide, not surprisingly. Not sure what the Canadian Max Forte has to say, but in the end, I believe the white race, even those believing in good intentions, are flawed, to the max. Now, white race means European whites, Catholic Church white, Jewish white, so-so many (most all) billionaire white, millionaire white.

“The Life and Times of Hubert Harrison: A Forgotten Synthesis of African-American Socialism and Black Nationalism,” Review of Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918 by Jeffrey B. Perry (Columbia University Press, 2009). In the first quarter of the 20th century, the major, competing trends of Black American political thought were already in vivid evidence: Black nationalist and socialist tendencies vied with corporate-backed accommodation. In Harlem, an extraordinary St. Croix-born activist-thinker named Hubert Harrison emerged on the scene, described as “more race conscious than [A. Philip] Randolph and more class conscious than [Marcus] Garvey.”

In the following presidential election year of 1912, Perry explores the evolving political thought of Harrison in a discussion of a new set of articles by Harrison which appeared in the Chicago based International Socialist Review amid a growing, but not fully manifest tension between Harrison and the Socialist Party, which masked his simmering disillusionment with the party. In an article taking off on Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” Harrison’s “Black Man’s Burden” depicted the suffering of African-Americans under white over-lordship. Over eight million African-Americans were disfranchised in sixteen Southern states by fraud and force, lacking political rights to protect their economic rights (i.e. property and jobs). Part two of the “Black Man’s Burden” demonstrated how the southern state school segregation laws contributed to the underfunding, creation of industrial education or “labor-caste schools” and miseducation of African-Americans. In these two articles, Harrison aimed a devastating critique at the accommodationist philosophy of Booker T. Washington, which publicly eschewed voting rights and a liberal arts college/​university education. Washington’s lieutenants had successfully conspired to obtain the removal of Harrison from his $1,000 a year job at the post office for two anti-Washington articles in the New York Sun newspaper, thus causing great economic hardship to Harrison’s family. Harrison’s final article in the International Socialist Review, “Socialism and the Negro,” was based on an earlier pro-IWW speech, in which he asserted African-Americans rather than constituting a reactionary hindrance to socialism, as some socialist theorists like Algie Simmons and Charles Vail claimed, were indeed the key component in the struggle by the American proletariat without which socialism in America stood little chance. (Source)

I have a deep suspicion that we dissenters, dissidents, oppositional types, questioners, doubters of the official histories/narratives/sciences, and those of us who have a compunction to not trust the bloody intercourse of brut capitalism-militarism-government, that we are in one way or another, in the process of being exterminated. We are the brutes to heads of those Fortune 5000 Corp./LLC/Wall Street devils. We represent everything wrong with free-thought.

Raoul Peck’s HBO docuseries Exterminate All the Brutes isn’t easy to watch — but it’s important popular education on the 600-year development of the concept and system of white supremacy associated with colonialism, slavery, and genocide.

Within the film, Peck addresses the complexity of his own project, including its rhetorical implications for an intended audience, in a risky but interesting way. After providing a four-hour alternative history — alternative to the traditional mainstream education provided in America, at least — Peck concludes that it’s not really education that’s needed:

“The educated general public has always largely known what atrocities have been committed and are being committed in the name of progress, civilization, socialism, democracy, and the market.”

Mike Hale of the New York Times found this conclusion maddening:

“He closes with a reproving phrase that echoes through the film: “It’s not knowledge we lack.” But he declines to say what it is we lack — compassion? Willpower? If there is something we possess that could have made history different, either he doesn’t know or he’s not telling.”

But Peck’s conclusion is the most interesting aspect of the film. The implication seems clear: the majority knows the history, but doesn’t care, at least not enough. Peck’s jarring effects, in keeping with the groundwork laid by liberation cinema, seem designed to make us feel so sick of the history we’re part of and the system we’re in, we’ll actually lash out and try to destroy it.

One docuseries isn’t nearly enough, obviously. It’s going to take a lot of furious filmmaking, and organizing, and speechmaking, and protesting, and marching, and fighting, to get a revolt going. Peck’s doing his part. (Source)

That is the maddening aspect of today, that for most, they do not know the history of the USA and the White Race and Civilization and what they have all done to imprison, poison, indenture, shackle, co-opt, colonize, erase, flood with fear our own ability to see through the madness. This culture and capitalism have always been a punishing thing, and a giant psychological operation, way before Edward Bernays or PT Barnum . . . way back to the plagiarists and fabulists of those Abrahamic religions.

The Symbol of Our Age — Sea Snot!

by Paul Haeder / May 27th, 2021

There are a thousands images each hour, if one were to scour the world wide net, and the news services, wires, that would put a pit in the stomach of any humane human.

You have one 9 minute video of hog-tied, tasered, knee-on-back, then flip  over to a story on how Idaho is murdering wolves the US and taxpayers set out as “protected.” No water for North California farms and ranches, then flip to a mass shooting in San Jose.

Blinded by the images, brought you us via Yahoo, Bing, Google, you name it.

For months, Turkish fishermen in the Sea of Marmara have been running into a problem: They can’t catch fish.

Concerns that the unappealing mucus could discourage tourism abound, and some have called for the government to do more. Ismet Cigit, a columnist for the newspaper Ses Kocaeli, lamented that humans had “betrayed this world’s most beautiful sea” by allowing chemical storage facilities, fuel tanks, factories and other industrial sites to be built along the coast.

“Clearly, there are no deterrent penalties for those who pollute the sea,” he wrote in Turkish, adding, “Marmara is dying.”  (Source)

That of course, in a nutshell, is the crux of the world — “no deterrence for those who pollute . . . the sea . . . soil . . . fetuses . . . air . . . food . . . the airwaves . . . humanity’s brain (collectively).”

Polluted as a term goes a long way in retail capitalism. Homo Retailopithecus and Homo-consumo Erectus are the vessel for every known and soon-to-be-developed pollutant.

Given the images one might see to illustrate the rapacious, inhumane, murderous ways of big and little man business, and of the corporations, and of  the law makers (thugs in a protection racket for the corporations), murders of Palestinians over a 10-day bombing campaign seem small in comparison.

That’s the point, then, for those images after bloody images to mean, well, nothing. Stirring a few wet tears, gulps, and then onto the next thing. Because capitalism is about stealth distraction, stealth and mostly overt ways to pull the wool over the eyes of everyone.

Sometimes the wool is easily pulled over one’s eyes when that person wants no conscience.

Tobacco kills, no? USA “aid” to Israel kills, no? Even those double cheeseburgers kill, no?

You think there’d be people on the streets protesting against and vying to stop the fast-food killers, no? It is so clear, however, if we put the brakes on bad stuff, which is all of capitalism, then there will be blood. Even a small pumping of the brake pedal means war:

A chilling documentary released a few years ago, Fed Up, narrated by Katie Couric, highlighted how the U.S. government capitulates to Big Food lobbies such as the sugar industry and followed the money involved in keeping people fat. Moreover, labs across the country ensure that such junk food is addictive. Finally, Big Food has launched aggressive campaigns, sanctioned by governments, to cast obesity as “lack of exercise” and not something they cause.  (Source)

Think about this — if there were campaigns to cut the eating of bad food, fast food, by, oh, say, one-third, or even one-fifth, well, again, there would be blood. Capitalism is all about the business of making money any way possible, and once that money stream is steady — fats, sugars, salts, high calorie foods — no amount of action and citizen uprising could do shit. Kids born into one to six generations drive-thru, fast-food, Uber Eats, well, the eating and the wrongs of capitalism are baked into DNA. How many times were penny or three penny taxation bills against soda companies fought and shot down? We are talking a few pennies tax.

And, let it be known, that High Fructose Corn Syrup has many wonderful things cooked into it to create an addiction cycle, and creates the “I am never full even after four Big Gulp Mountain Dews.” There are studies on the RNA of papa’s sperm baking in obesity for offspring. Oh, the epigenetics of bad food, chemical food, and high density calories, the like, well, I would have to say after decades of reading and being on the front lines, that obesity is actually cooked into the gene code, the epigenetics of it all.

Don’t be fooled by the lie after lie coming from industry lobbies and those sons of bitches who would file lawsuit after lawsuit against any citizens’ group or government group tying fast-food to faster death and plethora of chronic illnesses on the way to that death.

Svelte Biden and Svelte lawmaker x or y is all part of the show. The disease is the dollar, and each pinch of the profit margin precipitated by real sanctions and laws and regulations is a poke into the hornets nest that is rapacious capitalism.

Oh, those Ivy Leaguers, all those beautiful people, running the show, they must get a kick out of the overweight, limping, ragged masses.  It is a tale of two worlds.

There is no “choice” for this child. I have been in the schools, people, for more than 48 years. This is it for choice (habituation):

But the images are rarely tied to deep stories, deeper analyses, and deeper regard that the system is sick — that “system” is industrial food, education, media, social media, advertising, the entire system of “capitalism makes right” any form of “offering” or “choice” these Mengele Types continue to bark anytime groups of people decide to question their narrative, the entire wasted system of exploitation.

The exploitation is at the cellular level, at the nanoparticle level, even the electromagnetic waves exploit us, to the tune of profits galore, gushing in every which way possible under dirty capitalism.

So we just continue to cruise the insanity of the wasteland, and here, in my neck of the woods, successionists: The proposed new border would encompass 18 full and three partial Oregon counties and account for about 860,000 people in Oregon, which is  21% of the state’s population, however, that chunk would represent 70% of its land.

The land of the original people’s =imagine if those Yanquis really looked at the land, the original benefactors and stewards of the land. Again, redneck, mean as cuss, and yes, Portland is mean as cuss, sure, and this is what we have looking forward to. This is 2021, major snowpack deficits, major government subsidies to these big old tough independent farmers wanting to create a bigger Aryan Brotherhood Idaho.

This is the reality of the White Settler/Colonial/Racist/Slave Embodied people. It may seem hick out in Idaho, but you can find the same DNA and big mouthed whites in the Fatherlands —  Germany, Nordic countries, France, Belgium, UK. The amount of hate for anyone other than white, well, this is a disease throughout the land throughout the EU Zone.

Real issues of crop failures, cancer rates out the roof (all those poisons for all that farmland), extreme weather, and, well, just whose land and whose farms and ranches and goods and services are those?

The sham is the American system of bowing to two corrupt parties, allowing the elites and the riff-raff corrupt ones run the society, through electoral politics, which is just a giant bribery scheme. All those sniveling Rachel Maddow freaks, with the Trump Derangement Syndrome, well, they do not give a shit:

“Biden says his hands are tied.”

The absence of a strong and well organized movement means that harm reduction is always a fantasy. The Democratic Party establishment chose Biden to be the nominee and didn’t get the pushback that was needed against their backroom deal making. Unscrupulous Black operatives derided anything other than obedience to their bosses. We were told to go along and be quiet and that any other response meant the return of Trump. The lack of demands set us up for failure, propaganda about cutting poverty, and phony progressives taking a dive instead of standing up for the people. Black people have nothing to show for a Biden presidency despite turning out in droves to put him in office.

The moment is ripe to acknowledge that this system is a complete sham and exists only to help the 1% do as much as they can to oppress the 99%. We will live with a cycle of Republicans and Democrats who use different methods but always end up working against our needs.  (Black Agenda Report)

The capitalists paint us all into their corners, while they reap the benefits of billions in bribery. We are children, unorganized, malcontents, wasted life in their eyes. It’s how they see us versus them. They go to the same schools, believe in the same propaganda, and tout the stupidity of patriotism and exceptionalism. Arrogant and dumb, this is the America we all have been sucked into. By birth, for fuck sack, some of us.

The scam is the scam, really, all those spinning and good cheer amongst themselves at their Aspen Institute conferences, or what have you. They have no plan, except for shoveling with front end loaded, the cash they make in the big scam. There is not Green Deal for the Environment when it goes through the jagged teeth of the rich and superrich capitalists.

To the scientists’ warnings, there have been rumblings of concern from some financial investors, businesspeople (in non-oil-producing industries), and local politicians. But overall, the response of conventional politicians has been business-as-usual. The main proposals for limiting climate change has been to place some sort of taxes on carbon emissions. From liberals to conservatives, this has been lauded as a ”pro-market” reform. But, as Richard Smith (2018) has explained, these are inadequate, and even fraudulent, proposals. “If the tax is too light, it fails to suppress fossil fuels enough to help the climate. But…no government will set a price high enough to spur truly deep reductions in carbon emissions because they all understand that this would force companies out of business, throw workers out of work, and possibly precipitate recession or worse.” (Source)

Richard Wolff: The reason the U.S. government takes in less than it spends is because it chooses not to tax corporations and the rich at the rates applied to them in the 1950s and 1960s. Then the government turns around and borrows money. It borrows from foreign governments, but also from banks, insurance companies, large corporations, and rich individuals who purchase Treasury bills, notes, bonds, and securities. In effect corporations and the rich can not only keep more tax dollars; they can then turn around and loan the money they kept to the government and earn interest on it. The interest that must be paid to them comes either from taxes levied upon the mass of Americans or from the savings the government achieves by cutting its payrolls and programs. So the rising deficits are a result of an unjust tax system. Eventually, as the financial burdens grow and the public grasps why, social tensions will rise. The U.S. tomorrow could look like Greece today. [9 years ago, interview by David Barsamian}

Oh boy, recall the Suez canal container ship logjam?

Now, this Singapore-flagged ship carrying 1,486 containers, including 25 tons of nitric acid and other chemicals that were loaded at the port of Hazira, India, on May 15, is burning, baby, with a 25-member crew includes Philippine, Chinese, Indian and Russian nationals.

Globalization!

You’ll notice “Evergreen” is written across the Ever Given’s body, but confusingly, that’s branding for the Taiwanese company that operates the ship. [Julianne Cona/Instagram]

We are the collaboators in this giant censorship operation

by Paul Haeder / May 27th, 2021

The Message is the Truth!

He who controls the media, controls the world. And with media, that is everything — curriculum design, product manuals, white papers, legislative treatises, novels, history books, magazines, on-line, off-line, textbooks, music, film, TV, the entire ranch, including The Press.

It was early when I got into Gannett papers, Pulitzer owned papers, small town mom and pop “chains, LA Times Syndicate, and others. Chilling, really, the naivete I had as a J student in Tucson, working the Arizona Daily Wildcat and other lab papers. Seems like I thought I was a warrior for truth, and that was on occasion true, but in the end, the powers that be in big or small locales control the message because the newspaper owners and editors usually are embedded in the community: Chamber of Commerce, School Board, Rotary, Knights of Columbus, and more.

There is not much freedom, and you better get the quotes right, and you better not pry too much around the edges.

No more competing newspapers in small towns. No more weeklies. No more radical and hokum papers. There are no more papers. Well, a few, but in this Zoom scroll world, and this antisocial shit storm of the social networks (sic), we have pretty threadbare conversations. Digital stories are worthless for that, getting the juices flowing. It’s all curated and personalized, these digital platforms and news aggregators; and there is just so much shit out there on the Internet the quagmire is part of the lesson plan and lessons learned — no one is right. Bullshit. Some great sources, in the digital world, but they are read by a few hundred, maybe a thousand or so. Writing rants in the comments sections, well, not sure the impact that has on anything other than ego building and endless criticism. There are a million know-it-all’s out there for every decent piece of news or feature.

But reading ain’t enough, since we need robust parsing and discourse, and exactly what it is we are asked to read and comprehend and take hook, line and sinker, as the prevailing truths of our time, or the situational truths of our day.

It is A Sickness — Shifting Baseline Disorder/Disease

So much shifting baseline disorder, and so many truths lifting and tossed and remixed. Without education, that is, table and coffee talk, what have, it is a one-way line of communication. Even these little rants need some feedback, or better yet, discourse. Ain’t gunna happen. Here, today, on Democracy Now:

And this is something that the AP and other news organizations really need to think about. Who are we going to let work in our newsrooms? How are we going to deal with — I mean, if you have, for example, a whole generation of students who went to Black Lives Matter protests last summer, and then they come and take my journalism class at Stanford or another university, and they say, “You know what? I want to be a journalist,” and their lives live on TikTok and Instagram and all that, are all these journalists not — are these students not going to be able to be journalists now? I mean, are there not top managers in news organizations who were in anti-Vietnam protests in the ’60s, and their lives live on in Instagram?

Or is this specific to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Which, as you noted, the coverage is shifted the very week that Emily got caught up in this. You had the bombing of the AP bureau in Gaza. You had a very visceral reaction by the American public to the Israeli attacks in Gaza, in a way that you did not have in 2014 when 2,200 Palestinians were killed. You didn’t see this kind of reaction. You had, on the A1 of The New York Times on Sunday, a story about the brutality of life under Israeli occupation. These are all very unusual. Look on The New York Times today in terms of a letter from Gaza that really calls into question a lot of the Israeli narrative about Hamas and what’s really happening in Gaza. I mean, there’s just — there’s a major shift going on.

— Stanford journalism professor Janine Zacharia, a former Jerusalem bureau chief for The Washington Post

+–+

You Can’t Talk about this In Polite Company!

To distract from Gaza slaughter, Israel lobby manufactures antisemitism freakout. Grayzone.

Mark Ruffalo apologizes for posts on Israel: ‘It’s inflammatory, disrespectful and is being used to justify antisemitism’

Emily Wilder’s Firing Is No Surprise: AP Has Always Been Right-Wing — Source.

On Feb. 10, Abby Martin filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging a Georgia law requiring all independent contractors to sign a pro-Israel pledge, promising to not participate or advocate the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israeli crimes.

The death knell is talking critically about “Israel,” man. Line up those rusty three-penny nails and hammer truth away in a pine coffin. Facts don’t matter. The up is down, war is peace, lies are truth mentality and propaganda, that is on overdrive with the Zionists especially, those here, there, and in other parts of the world, like UK and Australia. Forget Canada!

Israel is in breach of more than 30 U.N. Security Council resolutions. It is in breach of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that defines collective punishment of a civilian population as a war crime. It is in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention for settling over half a million Jewish Israelis on occupied Palestinian land and for the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians when the Israeli state was founded and another 300,000 after Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank were occupied following the 1967 war. Its annexation of East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights violates international law, as does its building of a security barrier in the West Bank that annexes Palestinian land into Israel. It is in violation of U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 that states that Palestinian refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.”

— Chris  Hedges in his recent commentary, “Israel, the Big Lie” for ScheerPost

To Boycott or Not to Boycott?

Well, that is not the question. Really, when I was working for the University of Texas in El Paso, there was a loyalty oath to the Texas Constitution. Basically, you sign a state statute disqualifying for government employment persons who advocate the overthrow of government by force or violence or persons who were members of organizations that so advocated; the statute had been supplemented by a provision applicable to teachers calling for the drawing up of a list of organizations that advocated violent overthrow and making membership in any listed organization prima facie evidence of disqualification.

No Sign, No Job. Or, for a measly adjunct with no union (as if teacher’s unions do squat for the rank and file), you attempt to push the illogic of a loyalty oath, to the state’s constitution, etc., when in fact much of what some teachers do IS tied to groups the prevailing neoliberal, neocon, conservative consider as dissident, adversarial, contrary to the American/Texan way, etc. That was me for much of my 18 years, on and off, in El Paso.

Of course, those corrupt and syphilitic judges pushing state loyalty oaths, and loyalty ones for apartheid and murderous Israel, they come back like this in their legal opinions:  “If they do not choose to work on such terms, they are at liberty to retain their beliefs and associations and go elsewhere. Has the State thus deprived them of any right to free speech or assembly? We think not.”

A state could also deny employment based on a person’s “advocacy of overthrow” of the government by force or violence or based on unexplained membership in an organization so advocating with knowledge of the advocacy.

We already are behind the eight ball, as in these shit hole right to work (sic) states (read: anti union, anti worker rights, the right to get fired for no reason, thank you very much, mister, clean out your desk, and you have 10 minutes to leave the facility/office/warehouse/yard).

I’ve been escorted out of several workplaces with an hour’s notice, and these purveyors are wicked people, don’t let their PC and Cancel Culture and LGBTQAI+ spiels fool you.

Cancelling Your Subscription to Critical Thinking

Oh, so many ways that Tricky Shithead Force of Authority can wrangle “communist/radical/anarchist/ Antifa/ ecoterrorist/antigovernment malcontent/ fomenter of overthrow” out of this or that group or essay or membership into what would be now, terrorism. I was in Governor George W. Bush Country when it shifted — loyalty oath was required now of teachers, college adjuncts, what have you. “To honor, protect, defend and hold high the constitution of Texas . . . . ” El Paso may have voted straight democratic ticket, but many of the people in my circle who were artists, Chicanos, radicals outside that two-party system, but still, voting for the lesser of two evils, always the democrat. Then, put in a large chunk of Latinx (mostly Mexicans and Mexican-Americans) who follow the Pope and indeed enlist in the military, well, we do have that conundrum of conservative “Hispanics.”

There really is no great place for a two-bit person — teaching hundreds of students at a time, in different schools or locations — to live. I was the Freeway Flyer, but in effect, now, before the lockdown and Zoom Rooms, 80 percent of all faculty are adjunct — just-in-time, precarious, at-will, 11th-hour, unprotected, un-benefited faculty.

That job is already fraught with landmines — bad department chairs, bad deans, asshole tenured faculty, bad unions, no unions, basic inhumane conditions in terms of teaching: no office, no health care, no nothing. That’s low wages, man — $6 an hour, $15, up to $18 (maybe).

Try being a creative teacher (I’ve written this a million times), and alas, scrutiny after scrutiny you find yourself in the public domain, even as a small fry. I was in the two newspapers all the time because I was working as a journalist, and I was not afraid of opinion pieces leveled against Empire, Powers, Administrators and the like.

Target after target are what I got plastered on my two-bit back. Hell, two-bit (no superstar teacher, shitty little articles, shitty little literary journals, shitty little everything in the eyes of the Capitalist Hierarchical Heathens) sometime feels like the world is against you, and other times, it seems as if the world could give squat what happens to you. That is the freedom, I guess — to never be noticed, read or consider an enemy of any “state.”

Above, that is, the story about Associated Press, it is  no world of stopping the presses, so to speak. In terms of AP, well, a good piece over at the billionaire’s Intercept on that. Read:

“From its founding during the Mexican-American War to its reporting on Latin America today, AP’s always been quietly conservative” by Jon Schwartz.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS has received an enormous amount of criticism, including from its own staffers, for firing Emily Wilder, 22, after hiring her as a news associate just 17 days before. According to AP, Wilder was let go for “violations of AP’s social media policy.” AP’s action was clearly in response to a right-wing pressure campaign targeting Wilder for her activism in college supporting Palestinian rights.

[…]

AP’s conservatism continued for the rest of the century. Seymour Hersh, who worked for AP from 1962 to 1967, later said editors there were “timid on Vietnam” and that he could not have written his 1970 exposé of the My Lai Massacre for the wire service. In 1984, at a time of great fear of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, President Ronald Reagan “joked” before a radio address that “I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” An AP reporter filed an article on this, but editors didn’t publish it — until other news outlets ran the story. That same year, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger asked AP not to run what it knew about the launch of a military satellite. AP happily obeyed.

I worked on stories for the AP a long time ago, and had friends who were employed by the AP. Absolutely, covering Southeast Arizona, the border, the militarized border, and such, I ran into editors on the newspapers that employed me who were scared shitless because their small town owners were also scared shitless capitalists. Amazing, any balance, really, to the other side of the border repression, or the outright thuggery of the officials, well, that was chopped out. My buddies with the AP, well, mostly culled stories, or at least parsed to nothing!

No Competing Narratives Allowed!

The price you pay for arguing is no job. Loyalty oath to the Constitution of Texas? There were some of us protesting, and I think I just signed on the dotted line, Paula Abdulla, quickly and sloppily, and while I didn’t put down my real John Hancock, it still felt like a cop-out. Paula Abdulla has been a signature I have used over the years. Each one is a bit different, and I have perfected the signature to not contain any resemblance to my real signature.

The outcry, and the protests, sure, maybe they did something, and my own pathetic personal deceptive signature may have felt good, but in the end, This is Not My/Our House.

So many of my African-American brothers and sisters have repeatedly stated, as we worked in these nonprofit (poverty pimps) jobs, that when the supervisors plied their unethical, ill-mannered, rotten tools to subjugate professional social services professionals, and I railed, always, and I always got sacked, the rejoinder was from my Black brothers and sisters,  “This is not your house, Paul.” Not because of my skin color, because I am white, but because of my anti-Imperial, anti-authority, and oppositional defiance to the managers’ and overlords’ consistent and corrupting misjustice, and maladjusted injustice, all of what their hierarchies create in capitalism, I criticized/criticize.

Oh, then there are the multimillionaires, the Mark Ruffalo’s of the world. Imagine, the fear of losing films, man, for making a TRUE statement about Israel as an Apartheid State and a Genocidal Fanatical Religious State.

Any number of “projects” this Ruffalo multimillionaire hawks, well, this is the stuff of his backbone — fear of losing to the Israel Lobby.

The story dramatizes Robert Bilott’s case against the chemical manufacturing corporation DuPont after they contaminated a town with unregulated chemicals. It stars Mark Ruffalo as Bilott, along with Anne Hathaway, Tim Robbins, Bill Camp, Victor Garber, Mare Winningham, William Jackson Harper, and Bill Pullman.

 

Now, well, many Jewish writers have stated, “Of course, Jews run Hollywood.” I’m thinking about the early 2000s. Now, Google states:

Mea Culpa, Holly-Dirt!

Of course, Oliver Stone also had to apologize —

During a Television Critic Association panel on his 10-hour television Showtime documentary “A Secret History of America” in January, Stone got started with this little ditty: “Hitler was an easy scapegoat.”

This weekend he amped it up a notch. The controversial director complained to the London’s Sunday Times of “Jewish domination of the media” and claimed that Hitler did more damage to Russia than he did to the Jews.

Stone, who is half-Jewish, told the Times: “There’s a major lobby in the United States. They are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington. Israel has f—ed up United States foreign policy for years.”

While “Hitler was a Frankenstein [monster],” Stone said, “there was also a Dr. Frankenstein: German industrialists, the Americans and the British. He had a lot of support.”

Stone continued: “Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people, 25 or 30 million [killed].”

It is the most bizarre and conspiratorial thing of our times, no, the fact that Jews were the heads of the major Hollywood studios, yet what Stone stated was, well, wrong! And he too grovels, and apologizes for stating his opinion, or deploying his First Amendment rights.

The complex web of interactions between Hollywood and the German government in the decade before the War reveals quite a different story – one not of antifascism but of “collaboration” [“Zusammenarbeit”]. The studios agreed not to attack the Nazis in any of their productions, and in return American movies were permitted in Germany, even potentially threatening ones like King Kong. At the same time – and this was a result less of the direct arrangement between the two groups than of a much deeper shared understanding – the American studios eliminated Jewish characters from the screen entirely. For seven years, the studios put out movies that were unobjectionable and sometimes even beneficial from the Nazi standpoint, and as a result they were able to continue doing business with Germany. (Source).

—Hitler and Hollywood: The Collaboration of American Movie Studios with Nazi Germany
By Benjamin Alexander Urwand

From the book:

The names Harry Cohn, William Fox, Carl Laemmle, Louis B. Mayer, Jack and Harry Warner, and Adolph Zucker are giants in the history of contemporary Hollywood, outsiders who dared to invent their own vision of the American Dream.  Even to this day, the American values defined largely by the movies of these émigrés endure in American cinema and culture. Who these men were, how they came to dominate Hollywood, and what they gained and lost in the process is the exhilarating story of An Empire of Their Own.

That is the gigantic sticky wicket, no, that we have Hollywood invented by Jews, but, well, Jews Don’t Run Hollywood. Then, there are those Jews who write about how Jews Run the Media, too — media being a plural, including books, music, film, TV, radio, marketing, what have you, including The Press.

Well, there could be some .001 percenters in the financial world, billionaire class, white men, mostly, and some are Goy and others Jewish. That’s just fact.

Jews are estimated to make up less than 1.4% of the world’s population, yet approximately 25% of the world’s billionaires. Even the Times of Israel states this:

Forbes published its 2018 roster of America’s wealthiest this week, and five members of the tribe made the top 10 list.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg leads the Jewish pack at number 4, with a net worth of $61 billion. He is followed by software giant Oracle’s Larry Ellison at #5 with $58.4b and Google co-founder Larry Page at #6 with $53.8b.

Fellow co-founder Sergey Brin falls a bit behind with $52.4b, leaving him at #9. Finally, former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg closes out the top 10 with a respectable $51.8b.

“5 Jews make Forbes’ list of top 10 wealthiest Americans”

Ahh, Oy Vey —

We Can Always Rewrite A Murder Conviction into Self-Defense, those little Bastard Babies!

You can have your cake and eat it too! But no matter how you spin it, please find movies out of Hollywood or distributed or acted in by big names that might, oh, look at the rampant racism, indoctrination of, and apartheid loving Jewish man or woman, or child, in Israel. Think about that, uh, a movie script that shows one of the IDF pilots refusing to bomb Gaza. You think there might be a Netflix or Hulu series on that, how the family is not split in half, but just one son, a pilot in the Israeli Air Force, refuses to bomb Gaza. Imagine those dinner table conversations. Nah, not on Netflix.

Listen to Dan Cohen and Miko Peled talk about how indoctrinated Jews are in Israel. This is what you need to know about an entire people destroyed by agency, and free thought:

Or Norman Finkelstein —

And then the question is: Why? And I think the answer is: Because, whether one likes it or not, Benjamin Netanyahu is the true face of Israel. He’s an obnoxious, loudmouth, racist, Jewish supremacist. And that’s the whole population now. Now, I’m saying it’s in their DNA. I’m not saying it’s genetic. But it is a very sorry thing that the state of Israel has degenerated into. And that—

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, it’s clearly not the entire population. You have so many critics. You have a peace movement there.

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Well, no, I would say—you know, Amy, I would wish that were the case. I would wish that were the case. But if you ask the critics themselves, if you ask a Gideon Levy, you ask an Amira Hass, you ask a—

AMY GOODMAN: Who write for Haaretz.

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Right—you ask B’Tselem, you ask—

AMY GOODMAN: The human rights group.

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Right—Breaking the Silence, the soldiers’ group, they’ll tell you they represent nobody. They’ll tell you they don’t represent anymore. There was a period where they represented at least a factor in Israeli life. But it’s no longer true. And the fact that Benjamin Netanyahu endures, despite the succession of scandals, is a manifestation of how much that society has degenerated.

So, Gideon Levy, I think, the columnist, he made a comment the other day which I found very interesting. He said, the Israelis, they see a fellow in a wheelchair—he lost both his legs—in Gaza. He’s holding a flag. They shoot him right between the eyes, a sharpshooter. Everybody sees it on video. He says, no Israelis cared. Then another kid is killed. In this case, the second case, a kid is killed. A third is killed. Nobody cares. One thing they care about: The young girl, Ahed Tamimi, smacked an Israeli soldier. That causes hysteria. How dare a Palestinian smack an Israeli soldier? But the daily atrocities— Source.

Of course, by highlighting these statements, all of this, well, in the minds of racists, it’s antisemitism.

How much bearing witness do we go through?

Storytelling 101 — Only A Chosen Few Tell Our Stories

You think there are any dramatizations of that situation? Sure, come on, what about the Family known as, the Glosser Family:

Let me tell you a story about Stephen Miller and chain migration.

It begins at the turn of the 20th century, in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl of subsistence farmers in what is now Belarus. Beset by violent anti-Jewish pogroms and forced childhood conscription in the Czar’s army, the patriarch of the shack, Wolf-Leib Glosser, fled a village where his forebears had lived for centuries and took his chances in America.

He set foot on Ellis Island on January 7, 1903, with $8 to his name. Though fluent in Polish, Russian and Yiddish, he understood no English. An elder son, Nathan, soon followed. By street corner peddling and sweatshop toil, Wolf-Leib and Nathan sent enough money home to pay off debts and buy the immediate family’s passage to America in 1906. That group included young Sam Glosser, who with his family settled in the western Pennsylvania city of Johnstown, a booming coal and steel town that was a magnet for other hardworking immigrants. The Glosser family quickly progressed from selling goods from a horse and wagon to owning a haberdashery in Johnstown run by Nathan and Wolf-Leib to a chain of supermarkets and discount department stores run by my grandfather, Sam, and the next generation of Glossers, including my dad, Izzy. It was big enough to be listed on the AMEX stock exchange and employed thousands of people over time. In the span of some 80 years and five decades, this family emerged from poverty in a hostile country to become a prosperous, educated clan of merchants, scholars, professionals, and, most important, American citizens.

What does this classically American tale have to do with Stephen Miller? Well, Izzy Glosser is his maternal grandfather, and Stephen’s mother, Miriam, is my sister.

Will there be a totally interesting Netflix Original or Amazon Studies flick on that Stephen Miller dynamic family life, and the variations on a theme of how many Jews are racists, not just some Miller-Trump aberration. We can have Norman Lear with Archie Bunker and all of that in that family, but, what about the Miller-Glosser All About Apartheid series?

Many of us wonder how it is the stories of the “other people” get told through the eyes of the White American or European scriptwriter or producer or director or novelist? Come on. Look at the films and documentaries, and look at the credits and follow the money, the Ivy League, the East Coast chosen ones.

That quote from above is from Miller’s uncle’s short piece, and you never-ever see any mention of the border wall, the economic strangulation, the eye, knee, torso shooting. No mention of the apartheid state and the daily international laws of humanity broken by Israel, and the chosen people:  It would be a perfect piece to broach that topic, since Miller and Trump love what Israel does to Palestine. But He doesn’t do it, Mr. Glosser.

— “Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle. If my nephew’s ideas on immigration had been in force a century ago, our family would have been wiped out” by David S. Glosser

Here, more of that chosen people, and their amazing PR bombs, הַסְבָּרָה

‎(Hasbara is a form of propaganda aimed at an international audience, primarily, but not exclusively, in western countries. It is meant to influence the conversation in a way that positively portrays Israeli political moves and policies, including actions undertaken by Israel in the past. Often, Hasbara efforts includes a negative portrayal of the Arabs and especially of Palestinians.)

The Israel lobby’s latest blitz of antisemitism allegations has successfully deflected US media’s attention away from Israel’s deliberate bombing of civilian towers and extermination of entire families in Gaza, the pogroms Jewish extremists waged against Palestinians just minutes from Tel Aviv, and the ongoing police round-up of Palestinian citizens of Israel. In turn, it has cast an American Jewish community basking in almost unimaginable affluence and privilege as the true victims of the Israel-Palestine crisis, while impugning a movement agitating for the rights of a dispossessed and colonized people as bigoted criminals.

—Max Blumenthal

Shifting Baselines — Oh, the Marketing, Man, Mad Men, Women, LGBTQIA+

• Free beer and a hot dog: Across US, incentives push to get holdouts vaccinated against COVID-19
• States are getting creative with vaccine incentives. In Kentucky, you can win up to $225K
• $1m in Ohio. $100 savings bonds in West Virginia. How incentives could improve the vaccination rate
• Want tickets to the Super Bowl or a seven-day cruise? Get vaccinated at CVS

Some of the recipients of a Michigan marijuana dispensary’s “Pot for Shots” scheme

Oh, those were the days, uh, lifting the Black power salute in Mexico City, and, well, banned for life. May Lee Evans R.I.P.

Lee Evans, an African American sprinter who helped found the Olympic Project for Human Rights after leading protests against racism in the United States, has died in Nigeria at the age of 74. Lee Evans won two gold medals while setting world records in the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City.

His victories came just days after John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised their fists in the Black Power salute as the U.S. national anthem played during an awards ceremony. Carlos and Smith were suspended from the U.S. team and would later be banned for life from the Olympics for their protest in support of Black lives. Just two days later, Lee Evans wore a black beret and raised his fist in a similar protest, after winning a gold medal in the 400-meter dash.

Harry Edwards, who co-founded the Olympic Project for Human Rights, said, “Lee Evans was one of the greatest athletes and social justice advocates in an era that produced a generation of such courageous, committed and contributing athlete-activists.” (Source)

Oh, that fucking Olympics — one continuing criminal enterprise. Maybe several thousand students and others murdered, beginning in July, 1968, with the October 2, 1968 massacre, 10 days before the Olympic games were to begin in Mexico City. Police and army thugs fired on thousands of demonstrators. Hundreds were killed, thousands were beaten and jailed, and the government did its best to sweep the incident under the rug. No boycott there, uh?

Memory of Tlatelolco
by Rosario Castellanos

And who saw that brief, vivid flash of light?
Who is the one who kills?
Who are the ones who breathe their last; who die?
Who are the ones fleeing without their shoes?
Who are the ones belonging to the deep well of jails?
Who are the ones rotting in hospital?
Who are the ones struck dumb, forever, with horror?
Who? Who are the ones? Nobody. The next morning, nobody.
They found the square was swept clean. The front pages of the newspapers were full of the state of the weather. And on the television, on the radio, in the cinema, there was no change of programming, no special announcement. Not any meaningful silence in the midst of the banquet, because the banquet went on.
Don’t look for what isn’t there: traces, bodies, it’s all been given as an offering to a goddess, the Great Devourer of Excrement…
There are no official records.
Yet the fact is I can touch a wound.
In my memory it hurts, therefore it’s true.
I remember. We remember.
That’s our way of helping the very brave on so many a stained mind…
I remember.
Let’s all remember until justice becomes clear among us.

Rosario Castellanos (May 25, 1925 – August 7, 1974) was a Mexican poet and author.

Now those Tokyo Olympics, to be cancelled  or not to be cancelled, because of coronavirus SARS-CoV2? Contractual law, right, and the message is Covid-19, super spreader event, those 100 yard dashes?

JULES BOYKOFF: Each time an Olympic host city gets ready to start the games, they need to sign a host city contract with the International Olympic Committee. Those contracts are extremely lopsided in favor of the International Olympic Committee, and it gives them — and only them — the power to cancel the Olympics in a case like this. So, when the prime minister of Japan states in public, under pressure from people in Japan and around the world to cancel the Olympics — when the prime minister states in public that he actually doesn’t have the power to cancel the Olympics, he’s absolutely correct.

And that’s part of a larger state of exception that comes into the Olympic city when the Olympics arrive on your doorstep. There are all sorts of special laws that are put into place, all sorts of special rules that are put into place. New technologies are secured for the Olympics. So, for example, in Tokyo, you see facial recognition systems being put in place at all Olympic venues, even though they’re known for having a racial bias. Security forces use the Olympics to get all the special weapons and funding they’d normally never be able to get during normal political times.

And so, that’s exactly what we’re seeing transpire here. The all-powerful IOC, that is really a privileged sliver of the global 1%, is exerting itself and forcing the games ahead against the will of the population. More than 80% of the people in Japan oppose hosting the Olympics this summer, and yet the IOC insists on pressing ahead.

— Boykoff, scholar and former Olympic athlete who played for the U.S. Olympic soccer team from 1989 to 1991. He has published several pieces, his latest this morning in The Washington Post, “Tokyo is learning that the only force stronger than a pandemic is the Olympics.” His guest essay in The New York Times is headlined “A Sports Event Shouldn’t Be a Superspreader. Cancel the Olympics.” He’s written four books about the Olympics, his latest headlined NOlympians: Inside the Fight Against Capitalist Mega-Sports in Los Angeles, Tokyo and Beyond.

Donuts for that jab, and what about the booster, uh? Nah, do not expect free trips on a shit-hole cruise line. Expect a letter from Uncle Sam (Big Pharma induced) that states: “Thanks for participating in the Covid-19 vaccination last year, and we now have an easy-booster program. Kiosks, with your vaccine passport in hand on that app, you go to one of these, put that app on the scanner, along with your cornea scan, and put your left or right arm (doesn’t matter) into the high tech device, and there you go, instant booster. No line, nothing, since Big Tech will be hosting these kiosks by the millions in all those zip codes and all Census tracks. Isn’t Making America Vaccinated Great Again?”

I kid you not, so No Jab, No Life. Lockdown. Permanent. Expect those wearable ankle bracelets for all unvaccinated folk. Expect those by next Xmas.

That is the shifting baseline, no? Today, on Dissident Voice (May 27) hot off the digital press:

The ease with which the German authorities implemented the new official ideology, and how fanatically it has been embraced by the majority of Germans, came as something of a shock. I had naively believed that, in light of their history, the Germans would be among the first to recognize a nascent totalitarian movement predicated on textbook Goebbelsian Big Lies (i.e., manipulated Covid “case” and “death” statistics), and would resist it en masse, or at least take a moment to question the lies their leaders were hysterically barking at them.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Here we are, over a year later, and waiters and shop clerks are “checking papers” to enforce compliance with the new official ideology. (And, yes, the “New Normal” is an official ideology. When you strip away the illusion of an apocalyptic plague, there isn’t any other description for it). Perfectly healthy, medical-masked people are lining up in the streets to be experimentally “vaccinated.” Lockdown-bankrupted shops and restaurants have been converted into walk-in “PCR-test stations.” The government is debating mandatory “vaccination” of children in kindergarten. Goon squads are arresting octogenarians for picnicking on the sidewalk without permission. And so on. At this point, I’m just sitting here waiting for the news that mass “disinfection camps” are being set up to solve the “Unvaccinated Question.”

— “Greetings from “New Normal” Germany! by C.J. Hopkins

 

Oh, C.J. Hopkins, I wonder if you are getting the putridity of Capitalism, mixed with the strong arm and stiff arm salute of the Corporate elite, the Group of 30 and those 199 Companies controlling human and animal and flora kind! Make that an a great One-Seven, 17: Check out journalist Abby Martin interview Peter Phillips, former director of Project Censored and professor of Political Sociology at Sonoma State University. His new book “Giants: The Global Power Elite” details the 17 transnational investment firms which control over $50 trillion in wealth—and how they are kept in power by their activists, facilitators and protectors.

So, donuts, ballpark trips, Super Bowl, marijuana, and alas, free cruise trips, to get the jab. Oh, wehat about all those millions who lined up for the jab who got nothing but a masked technician moving them along. Look at Portland, OR, man, of course, St. Clair laughing at any other narrative around SARS-CoV2. This Counterpuncher is, well, so so confident in his so-so wrong view of how to debate an issue. Shit!

When I arrived at the Convention Center (which Portland old-timers (ie, people who have lived here longer than five years) have long referred to as the Palais de Gaultier, because the twin glass cones outside the hulking post-modernist structure resemble the spiky bra Jean-Paul designed for Madonna during the Blonde Ambition Tour), it was clear that the vibe of the place had changed. Three weeks earlier, the cavernous building had a community atmosphere. The way stations were helmed by welcoming volunteers, the jabbing was done by retired physicians, the recovery rooms monitored by local nurses.

Now the building resembled an armed camp. Those of us about to be shot were herded into serpentine lines by burly figures in uniform and combat boots, their severe eyes scanning our faces from behind camouflaged masks. The festive spirit of April had been replaced by May’s military gloom.

The National Guard had taken over the operation and few of them looked glad to be here, as if helping to save what’s left of the Republic from a killer pandemic was beneath their calling and that they’d rather be searching the border for migrant “caravans” or making some of the last raids on peasant villages in Kandahar before the big show leaves Afghanistan.

There was something deeply unsettling about the entire scene and it flashed into my head that the Guard had taken over not for reasons of efficiency, but to instill popular fear about what a national health care system might look like if it fell into the wrong hands. The vaccination program in the US has been one of the most successful government operations in decades and one that the moneyed interests are desperate not to see replicated.

Oh, the most successful government operation in decades! Whew, C.J. Hopkins! His last posting on Counterpunch is August 2018! He starts publishing over at Off-Guardian, June 2018!

Here you go with those cruise lines, man!

Last week, the Economist asked the question in the title of its article about excessive corporate compensation – Will Shareholders Halt the Inexorable Rise of CEO Pay? Today, a clear majority of Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings shareholders in what is called a “say-on-pay” vote, gave a big “thumbs down” to the company’s plan to pay its CEO Frank Del Rio $36,400,000 million for 2020, according to a Miami Herald article published this afternoon.

Herald Reporter Taylor Dolven wrote “in a rare rebuke, 83% of shareholders did not approve the company’s executive compensation in a non-binding vote” today. The newspaper cited Luis Navas, an executive compensation adviser, describing the vote as “incredibly embarrassing.”

Yes, its should be embarrassing, but that assumes this cruise executive is capable of feeling shame. Even before the pandemic, CEO Del Rio was the poster child of a spoiled, overpaid cruise executive in an industry where companies incorporate in places like Liberia (Royal Caribbean) and register their cruise ships in places like (Panama) and the Bahamas (NCL) in order to avoid all U.S. income taxes and wage and labor laws.

— Check it out, Dirty Cruises, Jim Walker’s cite

That new new abnormal normal here ends with the dumb PR rag from one of the alma maters, Eastern Washington University. It’s called, Eastern. It is a deplorable PR rag, like all the others I have been associated with through three college degrees — University of Arizona, University of Texas and now EWU.

There is an interim president, some political science faculty named David May. He replaced some English faculty who was president for a few months, who is going back to teaching in that English Department.

Some of the stuff coming from May’s mouth is pure “I am your leader and I listen to you and I was ready to save the world, err, Cheney, WA, and even Spokane, from the deadly pandemic.”

The “article” is just out, titled, “Man of the Moment.” On page 28 of the piece, it is clear this May has the agenda in mind of the World Economic Forum and Davos and the Tech Wunderkinds. He doesn’t know it, though.

The article’s write states that May isn’t dwelling on all the storms swirling around him. He is focused on the best way to serve students of Eastern, even before Covid-19. They call it, “right-sizing,” par of an Academic Review Program coming to a college and community college and university near you. Double-speak, this “right-sizing.”

As in sizing out programs. This is about student demand and regional needs for graduates, as well as looking at program to program, department to department, budget shortfalls.

“We will continue to teach art, we will continue to teach music, we will continue to teach philosophy, we will continue to teach political science, but we have to rethink how those things fit into the overall education of the student.”

Case closed, folks. This short of shit came into play for me as a graduate student in 1983, and while the great days of undergraduate school, 1974-1979, at the University of Arizona may have put me into the mix as a report and assistent editor of the daily Wildcat, this is the way of budgets determined by the capitalists, the Military Industrial Complex’s demands. And we know the MIC is:

• business programs
• chemistry programs
• biology programs
• marketing programs
• law programs
• computing programs
• engineering programs
• life sciences programs
• psychology departments
• sociology programs
• journalism programs
• bio-tech programs
• drone programs
• architecture programs
• criminal justice programs
• pharmacy programs
• communication programs
• planning programs
• health programshttps://www.truthdig.com/articles/rise-of-the-managerial-class/
• physics programs
• et al (look up a typical four-year research institution’s departments and programs and show me the ones NOT making bank from that MIC?)

That is the shifting baseline for some of us who thought, naively, that there would still be scrappy and independent minded and against Empire faculty and students participating in those schools of higher education. The entire system is corrupted, and alas, now, as I receive instanteous (a day after applying) rejections from various agencies, nonprofits and government agencies, I get that middle man’s life is the destroyer of it all. They sign up for my name, Paul Haeder, Paul K. Haeder, PK Haeder, to see the dirt on me. I have some cousin I never met, who is an MD with my name, so he must get some odd out of the blue emails or such, but in the end, the schools I have envisioned are nothing in comparison to K12 or K20 or post doctoral.

The political science faculty interim president of a small college (oh, they will put money into new buildings, new stadium infrastructure, etc. — you know, priorities) may have had a great teaching career, and he can just cite how he took over the helm under those swirling storms, but alas, this is what those liberal class and dream hoarders ( Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It)  and Professional Managerial Class (Source) have done.

At a time when corporate America is exploring and exploiting its new Supreme-Court-bestowed role in the management of American election results, an earlier transformation in the composition and political role of American business leadership should be recalled. This was the replacement of the Gilded Age capitalists and industrialists — audacious, rapacious and innovative, who created the post-Civil War American industrial economy — by the early 20th-century professional managers who took their place.

— William Pfaff

Liberals, largely comprised of the professional-managerial class that dutifully recycles and shops for organic produce and is concentrated on the two coasts, have profited from the ravages of neoliberalism. They seek to endow it with a patina of civility. But their routine and public humiliation has ominous consequences. It not only exposes the liberal class as hollow and empty, it discredits the liberal democratic values they claim to uphold. Liberals should have abandoned the Democratic Party when Bill Clinton and political hacks such as Biden transformed the Democratic Party into the Republican Party and launched a war on traditional liberal values and left-wing populism. They should have defected by the millions to support Ralph Nader and other Green Party candidates.

— Chris Hedges

FacebookTwitterRedditEmailPaul Haeder’s new bio is about suspending all those credentials, all those titles, all those in-the-trench experiences he’s acquired and worked hard on in his 64 years (2021): Novelist, essayist, journalist, social worker, college and K12 educator, environmental warrior. Terms and avocations more meaningless as cancel culture rises and rises from left and right insanity. Paul’s book, Reimagining Sanity: Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber (2016), looks at 10 years (now going on 16 years) of his writing at Dissident Voice. Read his musings at LA Progressive. Read his short story collection, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam now out, published by Cirque Journal. Read other articles by Paul, or visit Paul’s website.

We used to research the cup of coffee.

In the old days, sleeves rolled up, adults and young people in classrooms, computers, paper and white boards. Food and drinks, and face to face consternation and confrontation. Cooperation.

That cup of coffee from the earliest looks at where that bean came from originally:

The original domesticated coffee plant is said to have been from Harar, and the native population is thought to be derived from Ethiopia with distinct nearby populations in Sudan and Kenya. Coffee was primarily consumed in the Islamic world where it originated and was directly related to religious practices.

Fun stuff, this sort of research and writing, and deep dive. We turned these assignments into poetry, poster illustrations, research papers on the diseases of coffee, on the power of coffee like so many thousands of other foods and products, crossing oceans. Many a product of empire and racism, and the coffee paper also turned into “Is There Slavery in Your Chocolate?” essays.

In recent years, a handful of organizations and journalists have exposed the widespread use of child labor, and in some cases slavery, on cocoa farms in Western Africa. Since then, the industry has become increasingly secretive, making it difficult for reporters to not only access farms where human rights violations still occur, but to then disseminate this information to the public. In 2004, the Ivorian First Lady’s entourage allegedly kidnapped and killed a journalist reporting on government corruption in its profitable cocoa industry. In 2010, Ivorian government authorities detained three newspaper journalists after they published an article exposing government corruption in the cocoa sector. The farms of Western Africa supply cocoa to international giants such as Hershey’s, Mars, and Nestlé—revealing the industry’s direct connection to the worst forms of child labor, human trafficking, and slavery. (Source)

So much has happened since I first hit the streets as a newspaper journalist in 1977, and so much has changed since I started teaching college classes in research writing and writing and journalism. The see, speak, hear no evil is the destiny of capitalists. It is the way of who we are every waking nanosecond of our lives. Boycott Divest Sanction my ass.

Capitalism is the cancer, virus, prion, the tapeworm, the carrot and the stick. It is the blood sucker of all concepts. Slavery is Capitalism.

That coffee, now, looking at a cup, the ecological footprint, the energy used to get a cup of coffee to say, my Spokane students. Because Spokane loves its coffee. The amount of water used to grow a cup of coffee. We’d look at the coffee in Central America, or Colombia. Where that plant is grown. What was bulldozed to bring that plantation there. Who works the finca? Which indigenous group of non-Spanish speakers in Guatemala work these plantation, tends the bushes, picks and dries the cherries.

Again, young and older adults, blown away in my classes, since I was teaching them to look deeper at topics, and develop critical thinking and discourse skills, in whatever watered down version I’d get with many students who were coming to college ill-prepared to really write “essays.” Variations on a theme. Just the cup of liquid, first grown and processed in poor countries, takes about 37 gallons of water to grow.

We’d try and research more and more on the life-cycle of a ceramic cup or Starbucks thermos, and the life cycle and life span of a coffee maker. Embedded energy, waste, mining, slave warehouses, metals, all that fossil fuel to move those metals, cook them, mill them, ship them around the world. Sure, we could look at at sack of dried but not roasted coffee cherries coming from the Guatemala Highlands, and then where it gets shipped by boat, and then moved by truck, and then the actual cleaning and roasting of the coffee. Packaging, and then, that journey is crossing back and forth, over land, in the air, over seas.

The assignment blows many students’ minds, as it should be. In the classroom, and I’d bring in a coffee person, with coffee and snacks, and she’d talk about farms in Mexico and Africa she’s visited. Talk about the flavor, the various types of coffees.

We’d look at Fair Trade, Beyond Fair Trade, Shade Grown and the like. Socially responsible coffee. I’d talk about how Vietnam where I had gone and worked was cutting more and more forests down to grow coffee. Coffee pests and diseases, and soil enhancements with fertilizers. The entire life cycle analysis of as many things we could extract from the coffee history and production, well, it blows students’ minds, and it only works in person.

This pathetic Zoom and remote learning (sic) formula is the deadening of the brain. Recall, Americans already have three quarters of their brains (or more) colonized by lies, propaganda, hate, myth, plain stupidity, largely from terrible K12 (prison with smiling teachers) and all the marketing, and a government whose job is to fleece the masses for the company men, and fleecing includes culling thinking and deep analysis.

All this work, for coffee? Nope, because the students then do some of their own research on any manner of things. Cause and effect, solutions, pro-con, classification, expository, digital rhetoric, and deeper position papers. Research, and while we share sources and do all sorts of things at home, in groups, the big thing is getting the classroom energized, talking, arguing. Debate every minute.

Thinking about origins and perspectives.

Always with food, something in the class, mostly evening classes.

Who are these children forced to work the cocoa plantations of the Ivory Coast?

Shit, those were the days. And here I am, suffering at 64. I am feeling the burn, the beat-down burn, of more and more people around me stupid, mean, see-speak-hear not evil when it comes to this fucked up Empire, This War Machine.

It is the contradiction to be an American — North American, Canadian or citizen of the USA. Every waking and sleeping minute we are covering the world in blood, exploitation, penury, death. Pain and misery is the way of the land. The hollow media, the celebrities in music and film, oh even more viral than the politicians. They are the elite, or the elite’s house boys or house girls.

“So what can we do but go with the flow? Just let it go. They have all the power, so just live your life as best you can. It’s not that bad. If we don’t bomb the world, steal the minerals, colonize space with weapons, then someone else will.”

I am down — really depressed — because of what that cup of coffee assignment represents: I am old. I am no good as a teacher because it is a digital and PC and cancel culture study body. I am down because most of the people I would have worked with years ago on political issues, as artists, well, they are either dead, or brains deadened by the struggle and the losing. I am depressed because that cup of coffee assignment is not lauded. The entire Western Civilization or Western Culture is in various forms of mental illness. I am not that, but I am alone, it seems. Now, the coffee, and where it comes from. Do I invest in Folgers Coffee (a division of J.M Smucker Company)? This is what’s depressing me now — my spouse and I are moving some money saved into some investments. NowI have to decide how to put some of it away, or as they say, to invest it. Because there are no interest rates, the average person can’t go to a state bank or any institution and put money into a municipal bond to do some good for society and make a few percentage points above zero. What’s wrong with 4 percent or 5 percent interest? That is the crime, zero or negative interest rates. Criminal. Imagine, there is not one thing on planet Earth, planet Wall Street, planet Retirement Fund which is not heavily tainted with death, disease, destruction and destitution. We have been relooking at Socially Responsible Mutual Funds, or ESG’s, and the picture was never pretty:

Oh, you can say, “Broker, find me a fund that isn’t into war, weapons, mining, prisons, guns, germs, exploitation, banks, insurance companies. It is virtually impossible. You might not want Walmart stock in the mutual fund, but then Amazon and Facebook and Kraft Foods might be in it. Microsoft, Boeing. Any amount of honor or commitment to NOT engaging in investing that gives money to the murderers, the exploiters, the ocean-soil-jungle-forest-wetland-river killers, it is all lost because they all are wrapped up into one big fat thievery corporation — BlackRock and Blackstone and the top 100 banks, hedge funds, and so many other “if-you-can-make-6-or-12-percent-on-yearly-return” investment products are so embedded in the master slavers in Fortune 1000 circles, and even within the 10,000 largest corporations.

The system is rigged for brokers to use brokerage houses, big ones, and those fees — buy, sell, trade, manage — more money and profits made for NOT producing one potato or bicycle. Yet, MBAs and the others in this crew believe that they don’t want their precious children to work the slave fields of Ivory Coast, or to be soccer ball stitchers, or to be at the wrong end of a toxic waste discharge hose. But invest in Hershey’s, or Nike, or Smithfield, well, out of sight, out of mind. Yep, they would not want their precious families bombed with the amazing number of components tied to an amazing number of businesses wrapped up in one missile. Screws, wires, capacitors, metal shrouding, telemetry, paint, seals, nuts and bolts, precision metal parts, tubes and coils and electronic guidance systems and batteries and, well, you get the picture. But goddman, you can make bank on investing in defense (sic) companies because there is an endless demand by governments to have that shit in stock. We the taxpayer pay for those Hellfire’s:

Lockheed Martin, Boeing (previous second source), and Northrop Grumman (seeker only for AGM-114L Longbow Hellfire) Unit cost US$150,000 (FY 2021)!

It’s much more than just those three companies making bank for these missiles. There is an entire contingent (armies) of companies and service economies tied to this murder weapon:

Pretty simple looking murder weapon:

In the past, I have studied mutual funds I have invested in, to squirrel away some savings, and the picture is pretty ugly. There are no SRI’s that are nothing more than just market washing. Socially Responsible Investing, NOT:

Top Holdings — Axis Bluechip

	Company	Sector	P/E	3Y High	3Y Low	% Assets
	Infosys	Technology	29.50	10.06	1.48	9.36
	Bajaj Finance	Financial	76.34	10.38	4.36	8.98
	HDFC Bank	Financial	24.82	10.94	6.06	8.97
	Tata Consultancy Services	Technology	34.90	9.05	2.30	7.32
	Kotak Mahindra Bank	Financial	33.90	9.46	4.74	7.12
	ICICI Bank	Financial	23.28	8.05	0.00	7.07
	Avenue Supermarts	Services	178.26	7.41	2.45	5.55
	HDFC	Financial	23.54	6.82	1.28	5.01
	Reliance Industries	Energy	27.33	8.33	0.89	4.30
	Divi’s Laboratories	Healthcare	57.37	3.15	0.00	3.15
	Hindustan Unilever	FMCG	68.89	5.27	1.49	2.58
	Ultratech Cement	Construction	34.72	2.36	0.00	2.24
	Asian Paints	Chemicals	85.41	4.24	1.32	2.17
	Nestle India	FMCG	77.15	4.59	0.00	2.14
	Motherson Sumi Systems	Automobile	147.57	2.08	0.00	2.08
	Maruti Suzuki India	Automobile	46.37	5.83	0.00	1.89
	Pidilite Industries	Chemicals	86.93	2.55	0.60	1.82
	Bharti Airtel	Communication	—	5.50	0.00	1.79
	Cipla	Healthcare	31.01	2.36	0.00	1.62
	Wipro	Technology	25.80	1.83	0.00	1.55
	Shree Cement	Construction	49.08	1.59	0.00	1.32
	Tata Steel	Metals	17.76	1.21	0.00	1.21
	Titan Company	Cons Durable	139.72	3.45	0.78	0.98
	Dr. Reddy’s Lab	Healthcare	44.62	3.21	0.00	0.94
	HDFC Life Insurance	Financial	99.18	1.82	0.00	0.89

This is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Fund holdings, in general:

Top Warren Buffett Stocks By Size

Here are the top 10 Warren Buffett stocks by number of shares, as of March 31:

• Bank of America (BAC), 1.01 billion
• Apple (AAPL), 887.1 million
• Coca-Cola (KO), 400 million
• Kraft Heinz (KHC), 325.6 million
• Verizon (VZ), 158.8 million
• American Express (AXP), 151.6 million
• U.S. Bancorp (USB), 129.7 million
• Bank of New York Mellon (BK), 72.4 million
• General Motors (GM), 67 million
• Kroger (KR), 51.1 million

Look at what Warren Buffett owns as part of Berkshire Hathaway. Products — Diversified investments, property and casualty insurance, Utilities, Restaurants, Food processing, Aerospace, Media, Toys, Automotive, Sporting goods, Consumer products, Internet, Real estate, Railroad

So the average Joe and Jane, if they get a mutual fund or two for some long-term investment, this is the reality — you might be a social justice warrior, an anti-racist campaigner, an anti-war proponent, an environmentalist, community crusader, a socialist, an anti-capitalist, but if you stick your toe just a bit into the pond for minimal investments, just to protect a few thousand dollars here and there, this is what you get — money into the pockets of madmen: school to prison pipeline experts, war lords, surveillance capitalists, drug pushers, bad loan chieftains, medical fraudsters, real estate thugs, polluters, mountaintop removers, river toxifiers, land thieves, propaganda priests.

I am so serious about this now — where does the money go, and which company is being supported by stockholders shoveling money into their companies? Look at the union busters, at the price gougers, at the political lobbying arms, all these giant corporations and their networks of bunkos!

You can turn blue in the face decrying Monsanto (Bayer) for its pesticide poisons or Exxon for climate change propaganda or Sackler/Purdue Pharmacy for opioid addictions, but if you have a mutual fund, there is a chance that somehow those companies are entwined somewhere in the formula of a “strong mutual fund.”

We all are sinners in capitalism — just paying our tax bill: death and destruction raining down on Palestinians, for example:

“Seven deadly sins: Wealth without work, Pleasure without conscience, Science without humanity, Knowledge without character, Politics without principle, Commerce without morality, Worship without sacrifice.” – Mahatma Gandhi

Oh, we all think we have found the formula for living in this insane and murderous country. Oh, we have to put nose to the grindstone. Follow the leaders. Get the jab. Do as you are told. You home is not your castle. There are no 40 acres and a mule. No handouts. Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. Pinch your nose, cover your eyes, plug your ears, muffle your mouth!

So, you end up throwing in the towel — no purity test, no selective boycotting of this or that product or service. No true anti-Imperialist when tax filing time comes. Nothing free in this un-Democratic land of thieves, murderers and thugs. Almost every step you take in America is full of landmines, cow pies, toxic puddles and electrified fences. The horizon is one theater of the absurd after another. The amount of nonsense and self-congratulatory verbiage from all manner of people who think they are enlightened or vaunted or above the dirty, scab-sucking, ripoff fray of capitalism, well, that is the self-delusion, the big lie.

He died. In an assisted (sic) care (oxymoron) home (nope). Homeless for a few years; he was a photographer; and his life went to shit. He overspent on photo equipment, a studio, gave away shoots, and alas, he ended up living in his car, putting the entire inventory in an expensive storage unit, and then he tried surviving.

I met him when I was a social worker helping him as a short-term veteran (Army, 18 months, no combat) in a housing program, 24/7, where my job was to get him on his feet, get his VA benefits together, get him back on some financial track, and getting him inspired to life.

He lost one leg to diabetes, and it was typical – small black dot on his foot, and then, living the rough life, cold weather chills in a vehicle, long walks in the cold when the car broke down. Bad diet, and stress.

They chopped it (the leg) off at the knee. He was having eye issues. He was a smart guy, even did a trivia night for his fellow homeless vets and their families. His memory, though, was flagging. He never wanted to learn how to deal with a prosthetic leg.

He had to be reminded of everything, daily, and we worked on getting him housing vouchers, and, alas, he was finally getting Social Security, and then, the VA took care of some of his stuff.

He went to a couple of my fiction readings in Portland, and he was always there for my movie nights to watch some documentary that pushed to push against the military mindset, and he was there to listen to me rail and rail.

He found out his estranged father left some money when he died. It was a windfall, and my vet could not handle all the information and financial asides. It took two years to get that money, and he gave one leech a $10,000 loan for some scheme for a new dog food patent (right!), and alas, that leech never paid him back.

My vet got into an apartment, and they screwed him over. The one ground floor apartment with a large step and stoop, impossible for him to navigate his wheelchair. He and I worked on getting the apartment to build a stone or cement pathway from the back slider, to the parking lot, so he could get his Lyft or handicap buses trips.

It was another eye opener – largest (now #3) property management company in the USA for apartments, out of Texas, and not one of them responded to my emails or calls. Terrible, since that has never happened to me ever in my life. I have always gotten responses, even harsh ones back. From cops, senators, CEOs, IRS, more. These people are human leeches.

Pinnacle comes in at number three in the rankings for the largest property managers in the country, with 172,000 units under management. The company manages a diverse array of assets, including mixed-use properties, commercial properties, affordable developments, senior properties, and student housing. It also specializes in the turnaround of distressed assets and assisting in the management of HOAs and condo associations. Pinnacle is headquartered in Dallas, Texas, and is currently headed by President and CEO Rick L. Graf.

So think about that. He had to pay for this walkway, and it was an improvement for that unit, to say the least, so why should he have to pay? He had volunteers with a construction company and from the Rotary Club, and that Pinnacle nixed it. They had to have their vetted company. We are talking about $500 for the job using volunteers and a bonded contractor, versus the $2500 through Pinnacle’s outfit.

That apartment life did not last long. He was having major choking issues, and cognitive ones. He wasn’t eating right. No phone calls taken, or texts.

We are talking about a man, 68, no family. He had no one but a friend he met at the Rotary Club and acquaintances. And me, his former social worker. Who happened to move on the Coast, so I was 3 hours from him one way, via car.

He had to leave the apartment, to a care center (sic). That apartment would not give him a break, since he had to break the lease because of medical reasons. No big deal he was a veteran.

These are parasites.

Then, he ends up in one of the larger senior living places, and that was a living hell for him as he slipped more and more, had no decent meals, and never had a case manager for months. Then, lockdown, March 2020.

Here it is, Wikipedia –

Brookdale Senior Living owns and operates over 700 senior living communities and retirement communities in the United States. Brookdale was established in 1978 and is based in Brentwood, Tennessee.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Fortress Investments became the majority owner of Brookdale, holding approximately 51% of its share. Currently, Glenview Capital Management (a hedge fund) holds the largest number of shares. Brookdale has approximately 70,000 staff members and 100,000 residents.

As of 2018, it was the largest operator of senior housing in the United States. In 2021, a New York Times investigation revealed that Brooksdale submitted wrong and manipulated data to the government, thus inflating ratings of the quality of care in Brooksdale facilities. Shortly thereafter, the state of California filed a lawsuit against Brooksdale, alleging that the company manipulated the federal government’s nursing-home ratings system.

He was paying out of his social security and this money he got from his father, $4100  a month plus another $2000 for “special services.” There were no “Special services.”

This is how America runs, as a continuing criminal enterprise system, casino capitalism on steroids, and zero concern by the majority of the people and the elected officials to make safety nets. Who the hell can afford $6100 a month for a studio apartment. Crappy food.

He had to go to the VA, via ambulance, and with taxis, a few times with this female friend.

She got him to get a will, and to get some things in order, but he was failing, vacant, not there, and alas, he died August 2020 age 70, and that should never have happened. If I had a community, 100 acres, gardens, small (tiny) homes, pets, chickens, and community conversations, he would NOT have died. Life expectancy dropped because he ended up in an apartment, isolated, alone, scared, and with deeper cognitive issues. A supportive community getting him off his duff, getting him involved, would have saved him. Could save millions of Americans. Hundreds of millions of global citizens.

Then the nightmare comes for his friend, the executor of his “estate.”

Comcast screwed the estate by keeping service going (charging $90 a month) even though he was dead. He had a storage unit that was charging $215 a month. That Brookdale ended up hitting the estate with more bills in the thousands. The apartment complex, Pinnacle, was looking for several thousand for fees and penalties.

And vet’s friend (sic) who had borrowed the money paid nothing back.

It is May, 2021, and that proceeds to his small estate have not been disbursed. Pandemic lockdown has hurt. Two of the beneficiaries are a free clinic that attended to this vet’s needs during his hours of need. And a food pantry out of a church who also helped him with food and electricity money.

He probably had $340,000 total, most in a Morgan Stanley account. There are tax filing fees, moving expenses for his stuff to a furniture nonprofit, fees for the storage unit. Some prescription bills and other outstanding bills that should have just vanished. The creditors came out of the woodwork, and because I was not a family member, brother, say, all those bills got paid. I could have wrangled many of the bills to just vanish or get paid a dime on the dollar. It takes letter writing, advocating, and pounding down these leeches.

As of May 18, 2021, the five beneficiaries – two nonprofits in need – have not seen a cent. Because the executor has had to do so much, and the fact the vet had no family, my vet’s estate got whittled down by that great American tick – middle men, fees, penalties, taxes, this and that amount extracted as part of the ugly middle and middle man/woman mentality of the USA.

Some people came up to the plate and did pro bono work, but because I was close to this whole thing, and talked with the executor a lot, I see how the total amount that could have been distributed five ways — $70,000 each – might be even close to $60,000 each. What the beneficiaries don’t know won’t hurt them, right. It was money they were not expecting, so what’s the big deal.

That’s not the point. This is a minute to minute situation in USA. Millions of people and their families get screwed in the tens of billions each year by the ticks and leeches. I have had to deal with PayDay loan companies, repo men, collection agencies, courts, companies, telecoms and hospitals and others who have their hands out for more and more cuts of many of my clients who were making $730 a month in Social Security, and some way less. I contacted hospitals and businesses and others to get fees and bill reduced or zeroed out.

Young or old, many of the homeless people I worked with could NEVER work in a competitive work environment. Their health and minds are shot to shit. Much of that (PTSD and complex PTSD) was caused by the Armed Forces, and by the systems of punishment that hit these guys and gals after departing that shit hole.

Not everything in their lives is someone else’s fault and responsibility. They made bad choices. Booze and drugs, you betcha, took them down. Bad food, bad thinking smoking, and more, deteriorated them at a young age. Trying to pay rent, evictions, etc., all that adds up to the weathering.

Living in a truck or car or tent or in a garage, that also weathers these people. In the end, pre-Covid and now during it, these people are throwaways. The Stock Market is busting at the seams. Zoom school, and Zoom work for the middle class.

The irony is that my vet friend “made” more money in that investment account dead than when he was alive.  And we know the great history of Morgan Stanley.

I’m writing this because I am delaying something bigger, and poetry, tied to the absolute hell hole that is American Zionism a la Israeli Zionism. War crimes that are ten thousand George Floyd’s “I Can’t Breathe.”

And I can’t wrap my head around this in a rural community. No marching here, no groups, and hell, in France and Germany and England, it is illegal to peacefully march for Palestine.

I’m thinking about Canada and USA, supporting murderous arms and murderous policies of that racist “country.” I am thinking about my vet’s account at Morgan Stanley:

Stocks in Walmart, Northrop Grumman, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, BlackStone, BlackRock. This guy was a friend, and asked about investing, and I had a guy in mind, but my buddy went with a friend of the Rotary who said this broker with Morgan Stanley would take care of him. My buddy wanted social responsible investing, and that, alas, is yet another bullshit marketing tool of the masters of the casino capitalist Walled Street.

Northrop Grumman’s medium-caliber cannons boast unrivaled reliability and effectiveness. When paired with our exceptional training, services, certified accessories and warranties, the result is exceptional value and performance over the entire gun system lifecycle.

The company has produced solid propulsion systems for the Ground-based Midcourse Defense interceptor, as well as for the Trident II D-5 and Minuteman III strategic missiles. Northrop Grumman has 100 percent propulsion success on strategic production motors.

For nearly half a century, Northrop Grumman and its heritage companies have been designing and developing bomb fuses that have stayed on pace with the technological advancements of the time.

How many parts in a missile or Bushmaster automatic cannon? Parts equal jobs. Parts designed, equals academic jobs. Think of all those people in all those companies, in factories and warehouses, and manufacturing plants, and marketing plants, paint plants, PR plants, all of them down to the web master and the photographer making money on dead Palestinian children. It comes down to that.

I have relatives whose kids (grown adults) are blonde beautieis in the sense of USA beauty, and they are tall, and lean, and they are pulling down $120,000 a year as 28 year olds, working for one of those California based military death companies.

Here, five — to include Rahtheon, Northrup Lockheed Martin, Aerojet Rocketdyne, Flir Systems

More listed here —

Here are California Dreaming Death Machine (139) openings for just one hiring site —

In 2019, here are the top states, but remember, those figures are not the true amount of money made on death since so much more tied to offensive weapons and space should be factored in. Sort of the multiplier effect of all the businesses service and hard industries making bank because  of those contractors and their employees and their subcontractors and their employees living and eating the California dream, or whichever state listed it the dream. Forget about the billions in Hollywood and their enormous entanglement of people making money off those Tom Clancy, et al crap movies. Death, death, death, even in the form of liberal actors spewing off on this or that thing, but in the end, they love the DoD.

• California: $66.2 billion
• Virginia: $60.3 billion
• Texas: $54.8 billion
• Florida: $29.8 billion
• Maryland: $26.1 billion
• Connecticut: $19.7 billion
• Pennsylvania: $18.1 billion
• Washington: $17.8 billion
• Alabama: $16.0 billion
• Massachusetts: $15.8 billion

So, I am having a difficult time focusing, with this Industrial Complex tied to killing Palestinians, and so many other people’s of the world, through the training, outfitting, arming, and educating of the despots of the world. This is a telling interview. Malak Mattar, Dan Cohen and Miko Peled join MintCast to discuss the ongoing Israeli violence in the Gaza Strip.

I am still processing all of this, trying to listen to Zoom continuing education credited things like trauma and social service workers and Covid-19. Things like that, which are bullshit, really. But I am just cruising through these people who believe they are thinking and saying something new.

The acrobats are back…(gimme a bleepin’ break!)

The acrobats are back—riding bareback and backwards on
Donkeys! They’re back juggling hocus-pocus focus groups;
Back, spinning Wall Street straw into fools’ gold for the war-
mongering mouth of a punch drunk politician. Back hallucinating
on FDR Fairytales. Back somersaulting over scarlet streets, strikes and 
factory seizures; back vaulting over violence/militant eviction resistance

The acrobats are back—Lilliputian left-Munchkin Marxists—juggling 
Classless analysis; doing back-flips erasing millions; Tumbling above
herds of handcuffed communists, socialists, anarchists, trade unionists 
who waged pitched battles with Pinkerton-police-national guard-gun thugs.
The acrobats are back turning cartwheels; Flipping history on its head—
Landing squarely in the laps of generals and statesmen…

The acrobats are back—flipping LBJ minus 34 dead and smoke-filled skies 
over Watts/43 dead in Detroit/27 dead, 1400 arrests in Newark; LBJ minus millions 
marching NO to Jim Crow, war/women’s oppression; Minus martyrs—whose M’s 
include Mickey, Medgar, Malcolm, Martin… The acrobats are back,
dancing in donkey dung down the Yellow Brick Road for the Emerald City
Intersectional Empire—strangely resembling the Pentagon…

The acrobats are back—daredevils who dangled dangerously for 8 yrs. from 
the Drone Ranger’s dick. They’re back—Capitalist Hill cartwheels and flips—sticking 
stealth socialist landings as Comrade Schmo plays them like The 
Great Oz—ominously warning: “Pay no attention to Wall Street-War-Profiteer-
Big Pharma/Fossil Fuel-Credit Card Companies behind my thin blue curtain of 
Promises!” Then he quietly pulls his pistol and mumbles,”What’s in your wallet?”

© 2021. Raymond Nat Turner, The Town Crier. All Rights Reserved.

BAR’s poet in residence Raymond Nat Turner is an accomplished performing artist. You can find much more of his work at https://www.youtube.com/user/zigilow

In the new world, it is not the big fish which eats the small fish, it’s the fast fish which eats the slow fish. — Klaus Schwab

by Paul Haeder / May 14th, 2021

See, hear, speak no evil!

Ironies of ironies — the censoring of the worldwide net, and the deeper censorship/editing out/cancelling in mainstream and left-stream “media” is more rapid than anything Fahrenheit 451 could have imagined.

There must be something in books, things we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.

— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, page 48

Peter Thiel speaks at the World Economic Forum in 2013, Source: Mirko Ries Courtesy for the World Economic Forum

Oh, that monster, Thiel — A Florida jury said Gawker would have to pay $140 million for publishing an excerpt of Hulk Hogan’s sex tape. For filmmaker, Brian Knappenberger, he stated he wanted to make make a documentary about it. But once it came out that Hogan’s case was secretly bankrolled by venture capitalist Peter Thiel . . .

So, there you have it — nobody outside the realm of mainstream stupidity and group think can really speak. Slap you baby — A strategic lawsuit against public participation, a SLAPP suit, or intimidation lawsuit is intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition.

Loose lips sinks ships —

And this is huge, these interloping and interlinked topics, as the world burns, and the technofascists fiddle with algorithms, data centers, satellites in the air, supporting the MIC, and, alas, supporting the Big Pharma “experiment.” You have rampant killings all over the world, the murdering of Palestinians, the cabal of NATO pukes trying to encircle Russia and China, and, daily, the reality is that leftists (they aren’t left, really) scurry around like those human-like transgenic bred mice and ferrets used in the coronavirus gain of function Mengele experiments.

You (me) hit the sack at midnight, and then wake up at 5 am, with more of the good news, bad news:  disaster capitalism eroding away the brains of people, including the fake leftists. Even the real leftists have bought into the mass-chemical-jab mentality. Imagine that.

But no matter what topic I deal with here at Dissident Voice, all of what I have to critique or unravel goes through the galactical strainer of the elite, the dirty dozen, and the dirty 199:

Developing this list of 199 directors of the largest money management firms in the world, Phillips argues, is an important step toward understanding how capitalism works globally today. These global power elite directors make the decisions regarding the investment of trillions of dollars. Supposedly in competition, the concentrated wealth they share requires them to cooperate for their greater good by identifying investment opportunities and shared risk agreements, and working collectively for political arrangements that create advantages for their profit-generating system as a whole.

Their fundamental priority is to secure an average return on investment of 3 to 10 percent, or even more. The nature of any investment is less important than what it yields: continuous returns that support growth in the overall market. Hence, capital investment in tobacco products, weapons of war, toxic chemicals, pollution, and other socially destructive goods and services are judged purely by their profitability. Concern for the social and environmental costs of the investment are non-existent. In other words, inflicting death and destruction are fine because they are profitable.

So what is the global elite’s purpose? In a few sentences Phillips characterizes it thus: The elite is largely united in support of the US/NATO military empire that prosecutes a repressive war against resisting groups – typically labeled ‘terrorists’ – around the world. The real purpose of ‘the war on terror’ is defense of transnational globalization, the unimpeded flow of financial capital around the world, dollar hegemony and access to oil; it has nothing to do with repressing terrorism which it generates, perpetuates and finances to provide cover for its real agenda. This is why the United States has a long history of CIA and military interventions around the world ostensibly in defense of ‘national interests’.  Source.

Any real look at lockdowns, at the censorship, at the worst of the worst at the top ruling the 80 percent of us, well, it has to go through this investment and rentier group tied closely to the military industrial complex.

Any cogent, deep discussion about what is really going on with corona mRNA delivery loads, or how the satellites in space (50,000) to prop up the internet of things, internet of bodies with 5G and 6G tied into, well, who woulda thunk — gene therapy drugs, boosters, vaccines (sic), Covid pills. Forget about just the electro sensitivity of many people who actually get sick because of all those EMFs floating around, zapping, and with 4 G to 5 G, the rate of frequencies is exponential for 5 G. In fact 4G runs on its own frequency outputs/inputs, and 5G is its own set of applications and delivery systems. Try Googling this, and you get article after article pooh-poohing the very idea of EMFs affecting people. It is not surprising. The mass delusional media in the hands of the capitalists.

That in itself is terrible. The media, so-called enlightened press, laughs and laughs:

The BioInitiative 2012 Report has been prepared by 29 authors from ten countries, ten holding medical degrees (MDs), 21 PhDs, and three MsC, MA or MPHs. Among the authors are three former presidents of the Bioelectromagnetics Society, and five full members of BEMS.

Then, those satellites . . . part of the Military Intel Complex. What’s that going to do to biological systems, that space web of beams back and forth, inside and outside the human and nonhuman cells?

“If you don’t take action now, then you will be as responsible as those who have not taken care of climate change,” says Kai-Uwe Schrogl, chief strategy officer for the European Space Agency (ESA).

A new and lucrative standard in global connectivity is the impetus for these sprawling swarms of spacecraft. Blanketing our planet in satellites to beam high-speed Internet to any location on Earth around the clock could banish the days of struggling with spotty Wi-Fi and cellular connections, while also transporting the estimated three billion people who are currently offline into the digital age. If these companies are successful, the entire world could be suddenly interlinked as never before, with the Internet becoming truly omnipresent for essentially every human on the planet.

Achieving this goal requires some heavy lifting, in its most literal sense. U.S.-based SpaceX plans to launch at least 12,000 satellites, with the possibility of lofting another 30,000, based on recent filings from the company. U.K.-based OneWeb hopes to orbit about 650 satellites, possibly increasing to almost 2,000 in the future, and U.S.-based Amazon is planning for more than 3,000 satellites in its Project Kuiper constellation. Other companies and nations, including China, also have their eye on developing similar constellations, with rough estimates suggesting there could be more than 50,000 satellites in total added to Earth orbit in the coming decades. (Source)

War — Space. War — Data. War — Digital Prisons. War — Economics. War — Medical Controls. War — Pathogens. War — Food. War — Water. War — Freedom of Movement. War — Freedom of Speech. The gulag is the digital dashboard.

Taibbi:  Have you self-censored because of all this, and if so, in what way?

C.J. Hopkins: Does it sound like it? No, I think experiencing the roll-out of the “New Normal” for over a year, compiling stories of police goon squads raiding families in their homes because their neighbors reported them for “having friends over to dinner,” arresting old ladies for “strolling in the park without permission,” witnessing the media demonize Holocaust survivors as “anti-Semites” for protesting the Covid restrictions, reading ex-colleagues demanding that the government set up internment camps for those who refuse to be “vaccinated,” and all the rest of it, has only made me more outspoken, and, unfortunately, less funny.

Now, in this sound bite age, as most end up scrolling screens to the moon into larger and larger trash heaps of capitalist trash/consumerism/if-it-bleeds-it-leads/scams/worthless celebrity updates/empty calorie political analyses, still, it is possible to wade through the highly edited and choregraphed morass of algorithmic scrubbing to find decent voices in the wilderness questioning things through a process of critical thinking, contemplating contradictory theses in one act of thinking, staving off the knee-jerk tendency to believe the “experts” and follow the bandwagon and just never questioning this or that authority.

To be human and humane is to doubt all the things coming out of the mouths of the so-called authorities, the so-deemed experts, the technical whizzes, thinktanks, corporations, government agencies, politicians, and anyone with a small or huge stake in raking in profits over ethical treatment of consumers, citizens, land, air, soil, water.

Sacred cows, deep-seated allegiances, and many times the warped and wrong mass collective consciousness a society and culture permeates the society with.

Mark Crispin Miller, author and longtime New York University professor, has unconventional views. Even work he’s done that’s won mainstream praise is unconventional, upon close examination. If you came of political age during the Iraq war years, you probably remember him for The Bush Dyslexicon, a witty, challenging book that took a deep dive into the speech patterns of George W. Bush.

Unwrapping the thought processes behind famed “Bushisms” like “The question is, how many hands have I shaked?”, Miller found a metaphor for the broad illogic under American society. However, that book’s central idea — that “we Americans have been tricked out of our democracy by a vast and very smart conspiracy of stupid talkers” — was too rich for some mainstream commentators.

Crispin Miller argued that when people like Donald Rumsfeld told us that “victory” in Iraq may not come “in a month or a year or even five years,” that in fact even fighting forever might be a “victory, in my view,” the joke was not that this message was garbled by Bush, but rather that it was conveyed clearly by “producers, anchors, editors, journalists, and pundits,” who were “fatally dyslexic in doping out the very spectacle it presents to us.” Presenting madness as sanity required a brokenness of mind that just happened to come of the president’s mouth as laugh lines.

Crispin Miller’s recent troubles stem from being a skeptic about mask use. He points out that until 2020, studies were unenthusiastic about their benefits in stopping the transition of respiratory illness, and even the CDC only recently changed its mind on the issue. When he broached the subject in class, a student responded critically on Twitter:

Criticizing Crispin Miller for sending links to a site that in turn linked to The Charlie Kirk Show, Zero Hedge, Technocracy News, Global Research, “and more,” the student went on to tag the University leadership and wrote, “I hope they take immediate steps to relieve him of these duties.”

Crispin Miller’s department responded by promising, “We have made this a priority and are discussing next steps.” This in turn led to a now-standard cancelation ritual. A denunciation letter from academic colleagues asked the school to complete a review of Miller’s “intimidating tactics, abuses of authority, aggression and microaggressions, and explicit hate speech, none of which are excused by academic freedom and First Amendment protections.”

Here is this guy, and I don’t believe some of Crispin Miller’s take on the world, but he was teaching a class on PROPAGANDA for Christ’s sake.

Gleichschaltung . . . was the Nazi term for streamlining. It’s when they made all the cultural institutions, they Nazified them all. Of course, there was stuff you couldn’t read. It would be a crime to read it or even bring it up, and it’s kind of like that now.

Again, how can real leftists not doubt the mainstream corporate narrative coming from the news, the newspapers, the stenographers, the CDC, the NIH, the lot of them? So, all other topics the leftists might doubt coming from the mouths of the controllers and their Eichmann White Papers and Think Tanks — what started the war on Vietnam, how Exxon et al created climate change skeptics (scientists) while planning for global heating, what both major parties say about almost anything, all of it — those are kosher, but to question the Covid-19 narrative and the jabs and the lack of response to human health before, during and now soon after (corona capitalism), that is the work of Trumpies, QAnon, tinfoil mad hatters?

“From Harvard to the Big House”:

Below is a takedown of that article, and the good news is a much more nuanced and honest look at the origins of COVID-19, the Wuhan Strain of coronavirus is just a click away.

Furthermore, a hypothetical generation of SARS-CoV-2 by cell culture or animal passage would have required prior isolation of a progenitor virus with very high genetic similarity, which has not been described.

This means nothing. There is no open-source shared database of viruses. No one has any idea what viruses are in China’s BSL-4 lab, where they’ve been collecting these viruses for years. As mentioned, one of our persons-of-interest was the very first person to isolate a coronavirus from a bat that uses the ACE2 receptor. He also worked at UNC in Baric’s lab making the hyper-virulent bat coronavirus in 2015. It should also be noted that several years prior to tinkering directly with bat coronavirus spike-proteins, Baric orchestrated research that involved isolating a coronavirus from civets and then passing it through mammalian ACE2 receptor cells that were grown in the lab from kidney and brain samples – serial passage through host cell lines instead of entire hosts, which imparted a strong affinity for ACE2, and presumably created an airborne strain of coronavirus. And if cells derived from kidneys and brains were used for the serial passage development of COVID-19, that might help explain its affinity for attacking the kidneys and brains of its human hosts.  Source.

Sure, the obvious questions about interlinked topics — the so-called militarization of space; 5 g and 6g internet of things/bodies, and the SARS-CoV2/Covid-19 — should never go unasked, and should always be pursued.

It’s sort of the Hypocritic Oath of thinkers, writers, journalists, and investigators — travel the path less traveled, doubt the mainstream, question anyone with skin in the game when it comes to profits tied to, well, any topic on planet earth.

Who’s Making Bank on this Corona-Macarena

As over 2.8 million people have died globally from Covid-19 in the past year, the wealth of the world’s billionaires has surged.

The planet’s 2,365 billionaires have seen their wealth increase $4 trillion, or 54 percent, during the pandemic year. Their combined wealth rose from $8.04 trillion to $12.39 trillion between March 18, 2020 and March 18, 2021.  Source. Zain Rizvi, a law and policy researcher at progressive Public Citizen advocacy group, said Pfizer’s rising profits showed the need for governments to take action to save lives. “Pfizer is cashing in on the crisis . . . .” Zain Rizvi stated.  Source.

Big Pharma revenues and profits have skyrocketed. In 2017, the U.S. consumers spent $333.4 billion on prescription drugs (Source). .  There are profits and then there are just plain old price gouging, full-scale rip-offs, and manufactured scarcity and managed perceived and created obsolescence.

In a minute, the obvious questions tied to the three huge topics listed above, but first, the question is front and center: Why the hell would any free-thinking, democracy-loving, First Amendment-wielding, so called open society believer who “honors” (sic)  diversity censor and platform and dishonor any robust level of debate on every subject from here to kingdom come?

So, we leftists and communists should believe the CDC, NIH, WHO, White House Covid-19 handlers, state governors, and the drug and military drug and virus makers, but then:

Julian Assange, well, the lefties don’t give a shit!

We know why governments might want no questions about its role in bombing civilians and children. We understand how an Exxon might not want any questions about its role in not just polluting some “backwater place,” but also propping up despotic hit squads. Lots of reasons why a domineering parents might not want children to question said parents’ truthfulness and actual knowledge about things.

The evidence (large piles to the moon) and groups (many) working to expose these crimes against humanity/nature (militarizing space; the SARS-CoV2/Covid-19 origins/lockdowns/forced inoculations/lack of dynamic treatments; and the rush for 5G and 6G to be set up by “telecoms, who are in fact setting it up for the entire foundation for the Fourth Industrial Revolution) is mounting.

While at the same time, the burning of the books, so to speak, is being stoked by fewer and fewer overlords of the media and tech platforms with what is again an obvious endgame: more money from the middle and lower economic strata being moved into their coffers. To do this, there has to be fear, a global pandemic (sic) and harsh lockdowns, and a savior in the wings ready to come to the rescue: Digital Dionysus.

Work from home, prostate check on Zoom, school on electronic blackboards with one teacher for a thousand students. Food ordered by smart phone and delivered by self-driving car or funky flying drone.

Controlling water, food, travel, thought, dreams, hopes, fears, and one’s own body has to be done through a very simple but wide complex of actors throwing the gauntlet down on people.

It makes sense that anyone questioning what a mask is/does, what a coronavirus is/was might also want to question what a messenger RNA experimental microbiome programmer does to billions of people inoculated with this chemical. Adverse reactions, death, now, and, well, in the coming years?  It makes sense that more and more people want more and more diverse thinkers and commentators looking into the profits going to drug companies (after taxpayers have paid almost a trillion dollars for the research and the drugs themselves). It makes sense that real journalists would want to talk to a battalion of doctors, researchers, scientists who question the rollout of untested Covid-shots, question the actual PCR test determining all those fancy numbers of tested positives plastered all over the internet in interactive colorful maps, and question the lack of real treatment for this coronavirus.

The researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) have collaborated with American researchers, however, conducted gain–of-function experiments utilizing gene-splicing techniques. See, for example, a 2015 paper published in Nature, “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence” authored by researchers mostly from the University of North Carolina (UNC), but also by collaborators from Harvard, Switzerland, and Wuhan. Dr. Zhengli-Li Shi is the second-to-last author.

Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.

That is to say, these scientists bioengineered a chimera, a Frankenvirus, from the old 2002-2003 SARS virus but with spikes from a different bat coronavirus. The Frankenvirus seems to be a pretty tough customer:

Additionally, in vivo experiments demonstrate replication of the chimeric virus in mouse lung with notable pathogenesis. Evaluation of available SARS-based immune-therapeutic and prophylactic modalities revealed poor efficacy; both monoclonal antibody and vaccine approaches failed to neutralize and protect from infection with CoVs using the novel spike protein. On the basis of these findings, we synthetically re-derived an infectious full-length SHC014 recombinant virus and demonstrate robust viral replication both in vitro and in vivo. Our work suggests a potential risk of SARS-CoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat populations.

That is, it’s hard to kill, it’s hard to immunize against, and it reproduces like gangbusters – meaning that if it got loose, it might cause a . . . wait for it . . . a pandemic.  Source.

Military and Bioweapons

On a second rail is the huge outlay of money and time and energy for the military in general, but for the advances in space/satellite/moon-based weapons. This arms race is not only perverse, but emblematic of rampant theft by the millions of people involved in the Military Industrial Complex, from decal maker to put on one of those satellites or satellite-seeking rocked, to the super scientist who has developed even more compact mini nuclear generators for each little payload orbiting earth.

You’d think real journalists would follow the money, and follow the studies and concerns raised about electromagnetic frequencies bombarding the planet, from the bedroom to the bee hive.

It is a virus, really, this totalitarian and crypto-fascist movement the billionaires with their tech monopolies and overlord apps shutting people down, taking them off these platforms, which is actually demonstrating an incredibly hateful bent against those who might doubt. They’d have Albert Einstein in the docks for questioning on the e fascist bent.

The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one … I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two thirds of the people of the Earth would be killed.

—The Einstein Reader, Albert Einstein (page 169)

All of them — Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter — would red-flag Einstein today if he were alive, on many of the things he stated. Martin Luther King, Jr.? Imagine his Twitter account being shut down:

The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and racism. The problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.

– King to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) board on March 30, 1967

So, in a time of Covid, star wars and mega-constellation, and 5G and 6G, any pushback against the system will get you labeled as a “denier” — a person of interest in the surveillance state. No jab, no job? No compliancy, no life.

This is the way, man –Charlie Mullins,  chief executive of big London plumbing firm Pimlico Plumbers, recently announced plans to impose a “no-jab, no-job” policy for current and future workers. All employees would be contractually required to prove they had received the COVID 19 vaccine, without which they would not be offered any work by Pimlico.

Plumbing boss Charlie Mullins has been prominently demanding right to jab his workers. Yui Mok/PA

Imagine, now, the insipid stupidity of Q-Anon and Trump supporters in Texas, but then also the insipid stupidity of the centrists and progressives, pushing one narrative that the jab is good, seal of approval, from Good Housekeeping, Underwriters Laboratory, and the Five Eyes. Soon to be Six Eyes, with Japan jockeying to join —

United States and allies Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, said encryption should not come at the expense of the public’s safety. Tech companies should include mechanisms in the design of their encrypted products and services whereby governments, acting with appropriate legal authority, can obtain access to data in a readable and usable format.

In an upending of logic, even the lefty sites see the virus warriors (sic) as unquestionable, as the purest of the pure. This mentality is what gets us back to square one, no? Who in Christ’s sake trusts those major Big Pharma to do anything right? With $300 million a year on advertising, more hundreds of million for lobbying and payoffs, with a football stadium full of Ivy League lawyers, and two stadiums full of accountants and hedge fund impresarios, well, now, we believe, right? The messenger is the message, in these genetically screwed up shots.

The fear and lockdown and isolation and fake news on a nanosecond by nanosecond cycle, all the trash, all the distracting muck of this team, that actor, this millionaire, that politician, this singer and that athlete, and this and that human stain who gets air time and digital ink, and so we have it, now, US Patriot Act 3.0, total surveillance, all eyes on banks accounts, school records, health records, driving records, social media posts, police records, housing records, purchase records, travel records, and, shoot, that passport is on the phone, man, the digital apps all connected, all there to incentivize this behavior, discouraged that behavior.

The connection of Big Pharma with Big Edu with the US military, there is no better a series to read than Whitney Webb and Diego:

All Roads Lead To Dark Winter

A Killer Enterprise: How One Of Big Pharma’s Most Corrupt Companies Plans To Corner The Covid-19 Cure Market

Head Of The Hydra: The Rise Of Robert Kadlec

Oh, and just months ago, New York Magazine ran this — “The Lab-Leak Hypothesis For decades, scientists have been hot-wiring viruses in hopes of preventing a pandemic, not causing one. But what if …?” by Nicholson Baker

But then, hitting further, calling the pandemic the plandemic? That gets you one, two and three strikes you are out on YouTube.

Then this stuff — Medical Doctor and Director of Diagnostics Laboratory Presents Cures for COVID and Exposes Dangers of COVID “Vaccines”.  Shoot, no discussion about therapeutic treatments for this SARS-CoV2 “thing” can be platformed, and doctors and scientists can lose their credentials.

Who knows if this Word Press digital writing form Dissident Voice uses will also scrub out articles against the new normal narrative.

Here, a cheap product — beautiful man. We are the 99 percenters?

Results of clinical trials conducted in the United Kingdom have shown that a nitric oxide nasal spray (NONS, SaNOtize) is both a safe and effective antiviral treatment to prevent COVID-19 transmission and symptom duration, as well as reduce symptom severity and damage in those already infected, according to the study authors.

During the randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase 2 trial, the investigators assessed 79 patients with confirmed COVID-19 who were given the spray early following diagnosis. The results following treatment demonstrated that the spray significantly reduced the level of SARS-CoV-2, even in patients with high viral loads, according to the study.

“NONS destroys the virus, blocks entry into and halts viral replication within the nasal cavity, which rapidly reduces viral load. This is significant because viral load has been linked to infectivity and poor outcomes,” said Chris Miller, PhD, RT, chief science officer and co-founder of SaNOtize, in a press release. “There is currently a lack of an antiviral therapy that is effective against COVID-19 and its variants, can prevent or shorten the course of the disease, reduce damage, lower the severity of COVID-19, and can be made widely and readily available to the public.”

In the first 24 hours following treatment with the spray, investigators observed that the average viral log reduction was 1.362, which is a decline of approximately 95%. After 72 hours following treatment, the viral load decreased by more than 99%.  Source.

Nah, this small Vancouver, BC company, with eight employees, can’t get shit on a national level, because, well, those mRNA’s are in the pipeline. Go back up this article to the 199 controlling the world, including the lockdowns, the digital gulags, transhuman (sic) plans, 5 G and 6G internet of the human genome, and, well, war, whether terrestrial, marine, atmosphere, and stratospheric and lunar, dudes.

The new left, old left, the greenie weenie left, the global investor left, and even old revolutionary left will not go there, will not look at the holistic ways to prevent global deaths. Like I have stated before, end tobacco now, end vaping now, and, whoops, how many deaths stopped today, this year, in the decade, for 21st century (1 billion will have died)? All new opioids banned ? Yep, you will be slapped with Opposition Defiance Disorder young with any of these ideas, these skeptical looks at the multiple narratives that come crashing into your heads. My ODD had gotten more rarified as I have aged, like an aging wine does. Any lag time in getting the jab? Duly recorded in your record. Any refusal to get the jab, duly noted and quickly the crime is the refusal, on your record.

I Don’t Need No Fucking PhD’s and MD’s to tell Me!

Fucking A, you betcha, Bartleby The Scrivener by Herman Melville. I prefer not to. Initially, Bartleby has incredible output of high-quality work, but then one day, when he’s asked to proofread a document, Bartleby answers with his soon to be perpetual response to every request: “I would prefer not to.”

To the consternation of narrator, Bartleby performs fewer and fewer tasks and eventually none. He ends up spending long periods of time staring out one of the office’s windows at a brick wall. The coworkers are pissed off. When the business owner (narrator) stops by this office one Sunday morning, he discovers that Bartleby is living there.

Dobbs (Bogart) : “If you’re the police, where are your badges?”

Gold Hat (Alfonso Bedoya): “Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ badges!”

— John Huston directing B. Traven’s The Treasure of Sierra Madre

In the book, real language:

Badges, to god-damned hell with badges! We have no badges. In fact, we don’t need badges. I don’t have to show you any stinking badges, you god-damned cabrón and chinga tu madre!”

Try leveling those rejoinders to your local sheriff, local school board president, or your local incompetent governor. These people are lunatics. Masks, masks, masks. Can you imagine, all the scrutiny of the drug makers over all manner of “drugs” for all manner of “ailments.” Payola, and lies, disease, death, injuries. I wrote about this earlier.  It’s the Mask, Stupid: Beware The Covid-Pfizer Jumping Virus!

I do not have to repeat all the maleficence and felonies J & J and Pfizer have perpetrated. But now, everything is copasetic?

The Bug is DARPA’s Baby

Another aside —  I’m not going to let a good personal narrative link go unused. Really. So, my own time in US military, well, that’s a whole other socialist fighting that dirt-bag mercenary industry. I also ended up working with military as a college teacher. Some go close to me.

Forced vaccinations for various things, including anthrax vaccine. Experimental. Vaccinations for sand fleas and malaria mosquitos. Experimental. Many of these students were forced to take multiple jabs. The Department of Defense (DOD) wanted to administer pyridostigmine and botulinum toxoid vaccine to protect soldiers from a possible toxic nerve gas or botulism attack by Iraqi forces. The Nuremberg Code, informed consent. Read, CJ Annas’ Informed Consent to Human Experimentation: The Subject’s Dilemma. (Ballinger 1977).

Here, in 1942, all military personnel and received typhoid, smallpox, and tetanus vaccines, and soldiers who refused vaccination were subject to court-martials—a military “legal” principle originating in World War I and continuing to this day. No jab, Yes brig. During World War II, a yellow fever vaccine had not yet been licensed for civilian use in the United States and an as history tells us, an FDA-approved vaccine would not be available until 1953. This yellow fever vaccine used in 1942 contained human serum, and despite earlier published reports of “homologous serum” jaundice occurring after its use, the masters of the universe pushed forward with their perceived/concocted urgency of a biological weapon threat.  Unfortunately, many lots were contaminated by the hepatitis B virus.

An epidemic of unexplained hepatitis began in March 1942, and yellow fever vaccination was halted on April 15, 1942. Approximately 51,000 military personnel with symptomatic hepatitis were hospitalized, and subsequent serologic investigation of veterans concluded that approximately 330,000 persons had been infected. (Source).

It was Ike Eisenhauer who signed into law, ARPA, the precursor to DARAP. 1958.

Here, a talk, given to Google in Cambridge (oh, Google, what a shit hole). She’s a capitalist, so, here we go: Journalist Annie Jacobsen to discusses her book, The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top-Secret Military Research Agency.

Or, try the same author out for size in another venue — Join Annie Jacobsen as she discusses her new book, First Platoon on P&P Live! On biometrics, and again, she is interviewed by a military guy. “An urgent investigation into warfare, good, and evil in the age of biometrics, the technology that would allow the government to identify anyone, anywhere, at any time.”

Here, a quick look at the insanity of DARPA, 63 years ago:

SHORTLY after arriving at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in April 1958, the new chief scientist presented a plan to the agency’s director. Four months later, nine ships set off for the (mostly) uninhabited Gough Island deep in the South Atlantic, carrying 4500 personnel and three small nuclear weapons to launch into the magnetosphere.

This was Project Argus. The idea had germinated in the panic after the launch of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite. In light of these surprising new capabilities, the US had a problem: how could it protect the country from an incoming nuclear warhead?

Armed with some wild physics, Nicholas Christofilos hatched an equally wild plan: turn the upper atmosphere into a force field across the US that would fry the electronics of incoming missiles. How? Explode nuclear weapons in Earth’s magnetosphere to create a long-lived radiation belt that would degrade the missiles.

The first atomic detonation set off a luminous fireball, triggering a staggering blue-green aurora that captivated its audience. But beyond the pretty lights, it was a failure. The bombs did indeed produce many high-energy electrons, but it turned out that Earth’s magnetic field wasn’t strong enough to keep the electron shield from decaying.

— New Scientist

Now, Sharon Weinberger is not a real hard hitter, failing to look deeper into DARPA, and the evolution of that agency which has infected every aspect of computing, science, virus research, medicine, social manipulation, and any number of Frankenstein projects. Deadly. Really deadly, as in coronavirus deadly. We’ll get to that.

Star Wars, though? You want Facebook’s military’s origins?

Good synopsis by Whitney Webb, another writer banned from the unsocial-precrime networks:

Part 1 of this two-part series on Facebook and the US national-security state explores the social media network’s origins and the timing and nature of its rise as it relates to a controversial military program that was shut down the same day that Facebook launched. The program, known as LifeLog, was one of several controversial post-9/11 surveillance programs pursued by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that threatened to destroy privacy and civil liberties in the United States while also seeking to harvest data for producing “humanized” artificial intelligence (AI).

As this report will show, Facebook is not the only Silicon Valley giant whose origins coincide closely with this same series of DARPA initiatives and whose current activities are providing both the engine and the fuel for a hi-tech war on domestic dissent.

— “The Military Origins of Facebook”

This is DARPA (the word defense added in 1990) at its best: turn the upper atmosphere into a “force field” across the US in hopes of frying incoming missiles’ electronics. These are America’s best and brightest —  detonate nukes in Earth’s magnetosphere to generate a radiation belt that would disable missiles.

Oh, the fireball and blue-green aurora captivated its audience. The bomb blasts did generate high-energy electrons, but Earth’s magnetic field wasn’t strong enough to keep the electron shield from decaying.

And, the gift that keeps on giving with DARPA, et al — Gough Island had few Homo Sapiens living on it, but 50 years later, residents of nearby islands confronted their governments about the vicious mice that now roam the island (50 per cent heavier than wild mice anywhere in the world). Bye-bye wild bird bird populations.

A U.S. anti-satellite missile on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

This is madness, the legacy of atomic bomb testing and colonial history coming back to haunt France in the form of a radioactive Saharan dust cloud. These Sahara Desert clouds headed north over Spain, France, the UK, and Ireland. Those golden-tinged evening skies to some parts of Europe also delivered a spike in radiation. The mainstream media reports “slight,” again, the wasted media and their slight risk assessments of anything tied to the corporate bottom line. Heard the slight risk assessment before? Lead in water, mercury in fish, PFAS in blood, tobacco in lungs, plastics in your shit, Covid-19 jab in your arm?

Atomic isotopes,  caused by French nuclear tests in Algeria in the early 1960s, are considered by these foolish French, 50 years later, as “beautiful blood orange sunsets.”

Take a Deep Breath, Stand Up, and Look at the Smart Phone

Oh, how many takes on the 5 G and 6 G transformation can the human take?

Why is 5G important for the fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR)? Intelligent connectivity, enabled by 5G, will be the catalyst for the socio-economic growth that the 4IR could bring (Source)

+–+

Alison McDowell is a mother and an independent researcher based in Philadelphia, PA. She blogs at the intersection of race, finance, nature, and technology at wrenchinthegears.com. Her activism began fighting to slow the privatization of public education in her city. These efforts eventually led her to an examination of globalized poverty management, euphemistically known as social impact investing. This new form of capitalism – biocapitalism or stakeholder capitalism – aims to turn humans into data commodities. As the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which has been planned out by Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum, seeks to replace human labor with artificial intelligence and robotics, a problem has arisen as to how life can be made profitable for transnational global capital interests once the poor have no buying power and are drowning in debt. The solution? Human capital bond markets, but first everyone must be tagged and trackable for “impact.” That’s where biometric Covid health passports come in. (Source)

+–+

Citing this large body of research, more than 240 scientists who have published peer-reviewed research on the biologic and health effects of nonionizing electromagnetic fields (EMF) signed the International EMF Scientist Appeal, which calls for stronger exposure limits. The appeal makes the following assertions:

“Numerous recent scientific publications have shown that EMF affects living organisms at levels well below most international and national guidelines. Effects include increased cancer risk, cellular stress, increase in harmful free radicals, genetic damages, structural and functional changes of the reproductive system, learning and memory deficits, neurological disorders, and negative impacts on general well-being in humans. Damage goes well beyond the human race, as there is growing evidence of harmful effects to both plant and animal life.”

The scientists who signed this appeal arguably constitute the majority of experts on the effects of nonionizing radiation. They have published more than 2,000 papers and letters on EMF in professional journals. (Source)

And, you throw caution into the wind, and the precautionary principle, be damned. And, do no harm? This is not how capitalism runs. Where there is profit and hoarding of profits and using the global population for exploitation, all things coming out of those warehouses of “innovation” must be questioned.

We have what is called, “the latest cellular technology,” 5G, and we know it will deploy millimeter waves for the first time, in addition to microwaves that have been in use for all those so called cellular technologies, 2G through 4G. 5G will require cell antennas every 100 to 200 meters, which exposes many people to millimeter wave radiation. This branded 5G also utilizes experimental technologies like “active antennas capable of beam-forming; phased arrays; massive multiple inputs and outputs, known as massive MIMO.”

All of these challenge us to measure exposure levels. Millimeter waves are absorbed within a few millimeters of human skin and also in the surface layers of the cornea. Additionally, short-term exposure can have adverse physiological effects in the peripheral nervous system, the immune system and the cardiovascular system.

The research suggests that long-term exposure may pose health risks to the skin (e.g., melanoma), the eyes (e.g., ocular melanoma) and the testes (e.g., sterility). Since 5G is a new technology, there is no research on health effects, so we are “flying blind” to quote a U.S. senator. However, we have considerable evidence about the harmful effects of 2G and 3G. Little is known the effects of exposure to 4G, a 10-year-old technology, because governments have been remiss in funding this research. Meanwhile, we are seeing increases in certain types of head and neck tumors in tumor registries, which may be at least partially attributable to the proliferation of cell phone radiation. These increases are consistent with results from case-control studies of tumor risk in heavy cell phone users. (Source)

There are people studying EMF’s, and people who are electro sensitive. This is real stuff.

There is the appeal:  The 5G Appeal where scientists and doctors call for a moratorium on the roll-out of 5G. “5G will substantially increase exposure to radiofrequency electromagnetic fields RF-EMF, that has been proven to be harmful for humans and the environment.”

I can direct the reader to this source, “Wi-Fi is an important threat to human health.”

• Highlights —
  1. 7 effects have each been repeatedly reported following Wi-Fi & other EMF exposures
  2. Established Wi-Fi effects, include apoptosis, oxidant. stress &:testis/sperm dysfunction; Neuropsychic; DNA impact; hormone change; Ca2+ rise
  3. Wi-Fi is thought to act via voltage-gated calcium channel activation
  4. One claim of no Wi-Fi effects was found to be deeply flawed

Or, “How the Telecommunications Industry 5G Strategy Will Use Artificial Intelligence to Replace Human Intelligence: The End of Mankind as We Know It” by Martin L. Pall, June 8, 2019

Oxford philosopher and cofounder of the World Transhumanist Association , Nick Boström has written recently on transhumanism’s desire to make good the “half‐baked” project that is human nature. Here it is, and with AI, Digital Webs, 5 G and 6 G technology, and 30,000 satellites in space, the entire project of Covid-19 mRNA is just a precursor of things.

TABLE OF TRANSHMANIST VALUES

Core Value

• Having the opportunity to explore the transhuman and posthuman realms

Basic Conditions

• Global security
• Technological progress
• Wide access

Derivative Values

• Nothing wrong about “tampering with nature”; the idea of hubris rejected
• Individual choice in use of enhancement technologies; morphological freedom
• Peace, international cooperation, anti-proliferation of WMDs
• Improving understanding (encouraging research and public debate; critical thinking; open-mindedness, scientific inquiry; open discussion of the future)
• Getting smarter (individually; collectively; and develop machine intelligence)
• Philosophical fallibilism; willingness to reexamine assumptions as we go along
  Pragmatism; engineering- and entrepreneur-spirit; science
• Diversity (species, races, religious creeds, sexual orientations, life styles, etc.)
• Caring about the well-being of all sentience
• Saving lives (life-extension, anti-aging research, and cryonic

We have gene editing, a la Bill Gates: CRISPR/Cas9 “genetic scissors” –  clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.  Here you go — The roles of Nanotechnology and Internet of Nano things in healthcare transformation.

Of course, this paper above sees the world through IoNT (Internet of Nano Things) eyes:

“Hence, nanotechnology and the IoNT hold the potential to completely revolutionize healthcare in the 21st Century, creating a system that will enable early disease detection and diagnosis followed by accurate, on-time and effective treatment with significantly reduced healthcare costs. This paper presents the roles of nanotechnology and IoNT in medicine and healthcare, and attempts to gain an insight of nanoscale solutions and approaches, highlighting benefits and discussing potential risks and concerns.

Despite concerns regarding nanotoxicity, privacy and security issues, it is anticipated that nanotechnology and IoNT will show their full potential in medicine and healthcare in the
years to come.”

Oh, man, these nets, the world wide net, the mega constellation, the nano tech, the trans-human world of command and control of our bodies. You have a patent out there 060606, Gates/Microsoft.

Bill Gates will use your microchipped body to mine cryptocurrency – Biohack

The patent, filed under international patent number WO-2020-060606 and titled ‘Cryptocurrency System Using Body Data Activity’, leverages human body activity as proof-of-work.

This proof-of-work is achieved when a user performs given tasks, or even online activities such as viewing ads and using search engines.

“Instead of massive computation work required by some conventional cryptocurrency systems, data generated based on the body activity of the user can be a proof-of-work, and therefore, a user can solve the computationally difficult problem unconsciously,” the patent reads.

Despite the patent being published on March 26 by the World Intellectual Property Organization, some titans of the cryptocurrency industry are already on board, and cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX, founded by Britain’s youngest self-made billionaire Ben Delo, has donated $2.5 million dollars to the Gates Foundation.

As to how body activity and biometrics will be communicated to servers and cryptocurrency hardware, the patent explains that “a sensor communicatively coupled to or comprised in the device of the user may sense body activity of the user.” The patent then gives examples of sensors that can be used to this end – such as “fMRI scanners, electroencephalography (EEG) sensors, near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) sensors, heart rate monitors, thermal sensors, optical sensors, Radio Frequency sensors, ultrasonic sensors, cameras, or any other sensor or scanner.”

They are all working together, Musk, et al. and Neuralink are ramping up a brain implant as one of  body-invasive augmentations of interest for Super Soldiers.  The United States through DARPA has made public some of its cyborg and bionic projects; from synthetic telepathy to exoskeletons to bionic limbs. Israel and Denmark have also been conducting intense research into cybernetic enhancements, and both countries ran a collaborative program for years, seeking to augment their soldiers with AI-powered brain implants.

Does it sound far-fetched? Shoot.

They Have the Medium and the Message and the Messianic Zeal

It’s tough to stop writing this oddly weird piece:  a triumvirate —  that is, no longer just Covid-19’s origins and the deeper implications of jabs, boosters, lockdown, remote living; the Star Wars; the 5G rush. I alluded to the Word Press, being hijacked by Brig Brother techies, stopping even two-bit articles by me, a three-bit human in the eyes of capitalists, to even posit anything tied to what the master-race of the world — billionaires and techie Eichmann’s.

This is breaking now, May 14, 2021 —

Controlling the internet

Day two of the conference focused more on the coronavirus and the threat to democracies posed by fake news and disinformation online. In one panel titled “Regulating Social Media and Protecting the Public From Harm,” participants discussed how the U.S. and Europe could come together to formulate a united approach to controlling digital communications. The discussion was particularly notable because panelists included Michael Chertoff, co-author of the PATRIOT Act, which stripped Americans citizens of a wide range of rights under the guise of national security and fighting terrorism. Also on the panel were two British conservative members of parliament, an advisor to the executive vice president of digital affairs for the European Commission, and a member of Facebook’s oversight board, the body that regulates what the platform’s 2.6 billion people see in their news feeds. These individuals are so influential that their opinions and decisions could well affect virtually the entire world.

Together, they agreed that more cooperation between big tech and big government was necessary in order to reduce the amount of false information and harmful content online. This in itself is little new: in 2018 Facebook announced that it had partnered with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Lab to help regulate and curate its newsfeeds, effectively giving up partial control to the NATO-aligned organization. It also hired a former NATO press officer as its intelligence chief earlier this year.  — “Alliance of Democracies Summit: The Glass House Where the Power Elite Gather to Throw Stones: The lineup of presidents, generals and CEOs makes it clear that what was stated is effectively the collective view of the world’s elite and a window into their thinking and the debates they are having. What they decide will affect all of us, whether we realize it or not” by Alan Macleod

 

Game over?  Curating? Regulating? Controlling? These is who these people are, and anyone working in the real world, any writer who ends up on Dissident Voice, any of us, we have zero concept of how these people are wired, how they group think, what the hive is like because we are always sitting afar from their power circles. The message is handled, and they have these “former correspondents” of CNN & ABV News (See above, Jeanne Meserve) getting huge wads of cash to curate the Star Chamber meeting just reported on at Mint Press.

They all tie together. Read again — “2018 Facebook announced that it had partnered with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Lab to help regulate and curate its newsfeeds, effectively giving up partial control to the NATO-aligned organization”.

This is not a free society, and, well, heck, we still get trickles of stories, FOIA stuff, but in the end, that’s controlled opposition of a very deep state kind of mass psychosis. Oh heck, why not end with Operation Paperclip as the origins of DARAP, viruses, and, the worldwide net!

Author Annie Jacobsen presents a fascinating topic from her new book, Operation Paperclip, and takes questions from the audience. This event was recorded February 26, 2014 at Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.

And the only net I want to see is a bubble net. Humpback whale here at the end. But imagine, lefties loving the smart phone, the prostate nano probe, the instaneous downloaded papers on Marx, the fun stuff with Podcasting. Oh, the price we pay, the price we pay. Ignorance. This system, Mega Constellation, is now what? Okay with you lefties?

This is the price we pay, man, and if any lefty thinks star link and mega constellation are about junk downloads and Klingon interactive war games, then they are colonized viruses themselves. Game over.

And Musk is just an extension of MIC and those 199 mentioned above:

Their fundamental priority is to secure an average return on investment of 3 to 10 percent, or even more. The nature of any investment is less important than what it yields: continuous returns that support growth in the overall market. Hence, capital investment in tobacco products, weapons of war, toxic chemicals, pollution, and other socially destructive goods and services are judged purely by their profitability. Concern for the social and environmental costs of the investment are non-existent. In other words, inflicting death and destruction are fine because they are profitable.

So what is the global elite’s purpose? In a few sentences Phillips characterizes it thus: The elite is largely united in support of the US/NATO military empire that prosecutes a repressive war against resisting groups – typically labeled ‘terrorists’ – around the world. The real purpose of ‘the war on terror’ is defense of transnational globalization, the unimpeded flow of financial capital around the world, dollar hegemony and access to oil; it has nothing to do with repressing terrorism which it generates, perpetuates and finances to provide cover for its real agenda. This is why the United States has a long history of CIA and military interventions around the world ostensibly in defense of ‘national interests’. Source.

As my friend and loyal reader, Joe the Farmer from Merced (67 years old) says:

So if you make $46,800.00 a year and have absolutely no bills and save every penny you make from your salary in 21,000 years you could be a billionaire also and join the group of thirty and kill people and destroy the earth for profit and shave your head and sit around with pricks like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos figuring out how to make life miserable for everyone and everything.

For further midnight to 4 am reading, go here:

Nayef Al-Rodhan explores the evolving space security race.

Placement of Weapons in Outer Space: The Dichotomy Between Word and Deed

Video: “Crimes Against Humanity”: The German Corona Investigation. “The PCR Pandemic”

Why Are Gates and Pentagon Releasing “Gene Edited” (GMO) Mosquitoes in Florida Keys?

China owns Nature magazine’s ass: Debunking “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” claiming COVID-19 definitely wasn’t from a lab

Dr. Rombero F. Quijana: Beware of the Vaccine for Covid-19 Part One, Part Two, Part Three

Assetization – Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism

And just to be a Debbie Downer, to say sayonara here, well, you never know —

And this headline is, of course, A-Anon. No discourse, discussion, and the why of it all:

Are PCR Tests Secret Vaccines?

Oh, those scientists, aren’t they just so glorious, so amazing and ethical:

Note to readers: This is an analysis and personal inculcation of my own narrative tied to one specific topic — Lincoln County’s aerial spray ban (toxics, weedicides/herbicides) ban which was overturned and is now being presented to a judge for revalidation. Too many times people come to me thinking I am a news writer, or mainstream journalist. I was one of those, years ago, for years, and I am not that person now. “I don’t need no stinking Press badge, cabrón.” I can lead the reader down some curvy and out of the way places in my style of writing. Call it rant, diatribe, polemical, what have you . . . or just bad prose. It doesn’t matter to me anymore because I am not following the Associated Press rule book/style guide. I am no longer following the small-town newspaper tenets, or all those other big-town so-called journalism 101 keeping it objective crap. Unfortunately, I have to keep reminding readers of this fact.

And, I have been engaged in so many local battles, either in them as a member of this or that group or committee, or as a writer, or as a faculty member with students from various colleges in tow. In reality, under capitalism, as each nanosecond ticks off, things are really getting ugly. Predictable, sure, as anyone who has drilled into this perverse system of profits over all. Still, though, I am beyond journalism 101, which in some sense really never existed in a real world . . . or, for most cases, newspaper journalism was always about “fabricated balance,” and showing two sides (how absurd is that, two sides!) to an issue. AND, my experience is the more intelligent and deeply holistic and systems thinking voices are never heard . . . or allowed into the journalism story.

I’ve written extensively about this, and while some call me Gonzo 3.0, nevertheless, I have to caveat my work regularly such as I have now. Be forewarned — this is not Journalism 101, which for all intents and purposes has failed, failed, failed.

+–+

Waldport — I was driving back from Portland, hitting the scenic route, Highway 34, the so-called Alsea Highway. Two lane winding road. Farms and a river and homes on the slow-running river and no real towns except for Alsea. My wife was driving, fast, and I was a passenger looking hard at the surroundings.

On a sunny day, with this spring verdant overlay, a nice drive. It’s a green drive, with lots of leafing trees and conifers in the low-slung Coast Range. Of course, everything in the driver’s viewshed has been messed with more than a 100 years ago onward to this decade. Third growth tree plantations, clear-cuts, huge swaths of rye grass fields. A lot of dilapidated homes, cabins on the river and newer McMansions out there, with two RVs and four car garages and brand new out buildings.

Lots of clear-cuts, up to the road in some places. On one level, everything seems green and natural, but most of what a driver gets to see are second and third growth tree stands, AKA fiber/lumber plantations. There is a uniformity in the trees that are 50 years old. All the same size. All bunched up together.

No old growth in these here parts.

I know a few people who live out here, people who came to the area in the 1960s and ’70s. They are old now. On property that seems way out in the forest to some folk, but all are connected with paved roads, cement bridges spanning creeks, and with electricity and Wi-Fi. It’s an idyllic life in some regards, but for years (before this state’s draconian lockdowns) Highway 34 has been used as a byway for RV, pull trailers, Subaru’s with surfboards strapped to their roofs.

The destination is the coast. Small towns like Newport or Yachats. Plenty of beach. Tons of Air B&B’s and hotels.

The area indeed is an odd mix of retirees, out of towners, tourists, lumber and fish folk, people connected to the Oregon State Aquarium and the Hatfield Marines Sciences Center associated with Oregon State University. Like a lot of things in North America, these places are worn out, rinky-dink, prime examples of those who have and the haves not.

It’s conservative with many centrist democrats tied to the hospital, Hatfield, many of the retired, and most from the community college. The rest of the population (to generalize) is stuck in a time warp, always impressing upon me about the good old days.

Those were the days when timber was king, and when there were beach house rentals, not this huge influx of STR’s (short term rentals) run by Portland-based Air B&B outfits like Vacasa.

Boom or bust, quasi back to the land, McDonald’s and Taco Bell, a Walmart, and a coast that depends big time on those crazy, congesting, demanding, beach swarming tourists.

Food, surprisingly, is not king here, as there are fewer and fewer unique mom and pop type eateries. Either a few high end resort restaurants, or small Mexican restaurants.

The drive from Corvallis down Highway 34 toward the coast is easy when the traffic is light.

One small business, Deb’s Cafe, would have been on our list for a bite to eat, but the huge “Timber Unity” sign out front is a turn-off. I don’t want to have to pay for food from a mom and pop that visually supports anything as part of their advertising scheme: not Raytheon, Dow, Democrats, Republicans, the country Turkey or the Armenian people. To blatantly put up that Timber Unity logo sign is a sign of some sort of hard right, mean politics within, redneck politics worn on Deb’s sleeves (if there is a Deb there to begin with). Timber Unity signs are plastered all over homes and large yards and businesses in this neck of the woods. Unity my ass:

While the group has been hailed by state and national Republicans, and includes at least one former Oregon GOP lawmaker among its leaders, its participants have had no qualms associating with violent extremists and far-right groups. Several senior members have been photographed alongside members of neofascist or militia groups, and when pressed, its leadership has failed to disavow such ties. Its rallies have prominently featured messages backing QAnon, the sprawling internet conspiracy theory that posits a cabal of liberal elites are running a pedophile ring, and that has spurred real-world violence.

“While Timber Unity has sought to downplay these links, an investigation of its social media channels has found extensive ties between its leaders and Far Right figures, as well as the use of racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, and violent rhetoric by its supporters,” explained Spencer Sunshine, a sociologist who researches right-wing extremists, in a report he compiled for Oregon environmental groups. “The organization already has a history of and association with groups who have either made violent political threats or have supported violent actions.” — “The Oregon GOP’s Favorite Anti-Environment Group Is Awash in Racism and Violent Threats”

Right-wing groups. The Trump years. That’s all I have to go on since I’ve been here short-term — December 2018. Pro-cops/pigs, pro-military grunt, pro-timber, pro-all-red-white-blue.

Coming from Portland, supporting more than just a few days of protesting cops and such in downtown PDX, I know small towns from way back. Small towns supporting Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. Towns supporting Reagan. I’m old enough to know those Nixon years, and those small towns. From city councilmembers, to police chiefs, and librarians, small towns and the conservative bent.

It was always more than support — called a traitor, threatened with violence, and handcuffed by pigs for non-violent protesting. Pre-Trump. Oh, Occupy Seattle, those Obama years. I’ve always been a traitor when speaking with Republicans, and I am now speaking with Democrats. 

Yet here I am, in a poor rural country, with a mix of interesting people, divergent, many hopeless, a few lucky ones with retirement and health, hopeful. But hopeful in primarily a kind of transcendental mediation way. As a parenthetical, the idea impressed upon me is there are many people living in this area with college degrees and even graduate degrees since we are relatively close to Eugene and Corvallis, where the state land grant colleges are located. Retired professionals. And artists. This for many people infers a level of enlightenment and sophistication and wokeness not normally scene in other rural environs.

That’s debatable for me, since I subscribe to Chris Hedges “death of the liberal class”.

“In a traditional democracy, the liberal class functions as a safety valve. It makes piecemeal and incremental reform possible. It offers hope for change and proposes gradual steps toward greater equality. It endows the state and the mechanisms of power with virtue.”
― Chris Hedges, The Death of the Liberal Class

Jumping Out of the Rural Plane into War

I easily segue from one massive war crime after war crime — the American War Against Vietnam — to a small rural county in Oregon, and for the reader, may seem disjointed. So goes the world of corporate wrongs, along with their various hitmen and hitwomen serving as financial thieves and legal Mafia. Because with lawyers, any company can literally get away with murder. And in the process, the murderer (collective, corporate, governmental) can blame the victims.

We are fighting that “timber unity” and the unchecked growth model, the clear-cut model of business, the boom or bust economics of real estate and out-of-state money dragging down the local economies. We are fighting chemical sprays.

The idea of blaming the victims isn’t new. If the economy goes bust, then blame the treehuggers and spotted owl kooks. Blame anyone or any group that is concerned about public health, safety and well-being. The judicial system is out of synch with the people, but in many ways, in synch with the destroyers, the extractors, the people with paid-for experts and those with PhDs and MDs and what have you who will be the voice for corporations, giving both barrels for anyone who might question the bottom line — profits at any cost.

Here’s a living example of this legal system in the employ of the corporation. Chevron, no less:

Steven Donziger won a multibillion-dollar judgment against Chevron in Ecuador. The company sued him in New York, and now he’s under house arrest. — Sharon Lerner, The Intercept

Again, shifting to Lincoln County, Oregon, we are tied to the big case in France — for sure, again, one single woman up against lawyers, their assistants, and the thugs and chemists for DOW. We are talking massive poisoning, massive murdering, war profiteering, empires of subjugation, the entire shooting match in Indochina. Death and history, and empire and corporations. The War Machine which is in a sense the machine that drives a lot of things in the USA, including lobbying (sic) groups like Timber Unity:

ÉVRY, France — Almost six decades after the U.S. military began dropping a toxic herbicide known as Agent Orange in the Vietnam War, a French courtroom in a Parisian suburb has become the unlikely setting for a faceoff between a woman who says she was a victim and some of the world’s largest chemical and pharmaceutical corporations that supplied the substance.

The landmark case has pitched Tran To Nga, a 79-year-old, against 14 companies. A ruling is expected on Monday.

If the court in Évry sides with the companies, including American multinational Dow, it would crush hopes for what activists have seen as a “historic trial” and a unique chance for accountability. But if the court rules in Tran’s favor, she would be the first Vietnamese civilian to win such a case. — Source

So back in my neck of the woods, Waldport, Oregon in Lincoln County, I have a jarring perspective because this small town is isolated, and alas, yes, it is backwards, and the retrograde thinkers are in the hundreds and hundreds. Yet, there are slivers of hope, where smart people for many reasons, ended up here, and in the country at large. Some of those smart people are fed-up with the lies, the birth defects, the diseases, the entire flimflam game that is capitalism — whether it is health insurance scams, lemon automobiles or poisons peddled as “green chemistry for better farming/living/family rearing.”

I’ve been lucky enough to feature two of the people fighting the aerial spray ban reversal — Maria Krause and Carol Van Strum:

A real-life Toxic Avenger

A life of politics and peace

Both pieces ended up in Dissident Voice: here and here. I even did a review of that documentary, The People VS Agent Orange, which highlights Tran To Nga‘s fight in France — “Eternal Impunity of Capitalism’s Crimes“. Here’s one passage from that story I wrote:

Dr. James Clary was with the Air Force in Vietnam, which ran the program. He was ordered to dump the computer and erase all memory. Instead, he printed out a stack of documents two feet high – missions, sorties, coordinates, dates, gallons dropped throughout all of Southeast Asia and Laos.

“We had the information coming from Dow that there were real problems for people associated with this chemical. It was all locked up for 35 years.”

Playing down all the negative effects of this chemical was part of the Dow plan. Dioxin was the byproduct in the brew. Dow told the US government they were having difficulty producing the volume of the chemical the US wanted. The government told them to not worry about safety standards and quality control, and that a fast production process which produced more of the dioxin would not matter, since the crops and forest were being sprayed, and if people got in contact with it, the idea coming from both industrialists at Dow and those in government and the military was, “Hey, so what, this is a war . . . these are the effing Vietnamese.”

However, a former military man like Clary never saw it that way. He reiterated that 20 million gallons of it was dumped on Southeast Asia. The Ranch Hand program stopped in 1971, but then the chemicals were enlisted by the US on forest land – clear cuts that were sprayed to denude the razed land of any opportunistic weeds and shrubs. The money has to be made, and the stockpiled product has to go! Sell it to the state forestry department and timber outfits.

Both Carol and Maria, along with others, are working to convince a judge to stop aerial spraying of herbicides by timber companies on private land they own, huge portions of the state in fact, abutting communities, river and creek systems, property owners’ homes, etc. This coming June 1, a group of local activists — citizens, home owners, those with a few acres of “property” — face down the judge in the case that ended a two year temporary stay on aerial spraying of chemicals so closely linked to the Agent Orange formula, that herbicide which is a brother of another mother (Agent Orange).

The people who wrote an ordinance banning the aerial spraying of pesticides in western Oregon last year [2017] aren’t professional environmental advocates. Their group, Lincoln County Community Rights, has no letterhead, business cards, or paid staff. Its handful of core members includes the owner of a small business that installs solar panels, a semi-retired Spanish translator, an organic farmer who raises llamas, and a self-described caretaker and Navajo-trained weaver.

And yet this decidedly homespun group of part-time, volunteer, novice activists managed a rare feat: They didn’t just stop the spraying of pesticides that had been released from airplanes and helicopters in this rural county for decades. They also scared the hell out of the companies that make them, according to internal documents from CropLife America, the national pesticide trade group. Although some of the world’s biggest companies poured money into a stealth campaign to stop the ordinance, and even though the Lincoln activists had no experience running political campaigns, the locals still won. — Source

This above was also written by Lerner of The Intercept . The article’s headline — “How a Ragtag Group of Oregon Locals Took on the Biggest Chemical Companies in the World . . . and Won” — speaks to a common “liberal” form of journalism which seems to harken all these amazing hopeful signs of American democracy (sic) at work, with all the elements of (almost) patronizing the “locals” who in the headline writer’s eyes, are a “ragtag” bunch. It’s always nice to have a Karen Silkwood ( Kerr-McGee Cimarron Fuel Fabrication Site in Oklahoma, which made plutonium pellets) or Lois Gibbs ( she discovered that her 5-year-old son’s elementary school in Niagara Falls, New York, was built on a toxic waste dump; Love Canal) highlighted in these stories.

For the Intercept, having these activists in Lincoln County working to stop aerial spraying is a David vs Goliath environmental script ready for Netflix prominence. The group, Lincoln County Community Rights (I’ll get to Spokane in a sec), worked hard to get the gumption and impetus going for this to end up on the ballot. But in USA, you can vote for no added two or three mile runway for an airport, but that goes out the window for the greater good — they call it the greater good of the community or public, but it is all about greater good of the pocket book. This is typical in societies, all part of the rapaciousness of industrialized and now digitized societies. “You hate noisy new airport runways? Get some earplugs.”

Just reading how Zoom-Google Hangouts will be the way of the future for doctors visits. Imagine, articles just before the planned-demic (SARS-CoV2) on how poorly western medicine is doing with diagnostics, with integrated medicine, with hands on medicine, without a compassionate treat-the-whole-person modality. These court cases are on Zoom, and now evictions across the country are Zoom, but with no time for a family or individual making a statement to the judge, the court. Many eviction hearings are lumped together on Zoom, thirty or 60 at a time.

Give the bastards an inch, and they will take a mile.

Laws against protesting. Real murderous laws allowing drivers to rundown and murder protestors.

I remember the anti-Monsanto protest in Portland. At the Lloyd Center. We did make it to the roads, and while much of the protest was “permitted” in the sense the organizers got all the paperwork done for an announced, planned peaceful event, there was no telling how many people would break off.

Impede traffic at the giant mall? Shoot, how many states are passing ““run over them if you feel triggered, in danger” ordinances, the right to run over pedestrians, AKA terrorist, ordinances. Stand your ground is no “pedal to the metal” laws.

Protesting the pesticides in a small town like Toled, OR, might be an invitation to the Timber Unity folk and the people coming out of the woodwork who love their open carry permits, love taunting peaceful protestors. And the local pigs, well, they are in the same camp — any protestation against “industry” or the capitalist way, well, that is clear and present danger to the public, the community, to their own fascist leanings.

When I was there with my 16-year-old daughter, I did look for exit paths in case the pissed off automobile drivers behind us decided to go “postal.”

Just having a bumper sticker in many parts of Oregon declaring anti-spraying could get you good, let alone a bumper sticker against Timber Unity (there are none).

Beyond Pesticides is an advocacy group looking at the devastating effects of pesticides on community health — the avian, aquatic, terrestrial and human communities. As an organization, they function as a great clearing house of information on the various poisons used in industrial capitalism’s gift to the world: factory farming. The Lincoln County aerial spray ban may have passed in May 2017 with 64 yeah votes over the nay ones, of the total 14,000 votes, but it was one of more than 200 local measures that do some form of “restricting” of pesticides (weedicides, fungicides, fumigants, herbicides, rodenticides, and the like). Many communities have passed protective measures that surpass basic limits set by the feds, the EPA. Some have banned glyphosate (Roundup). The first community ban or restriction was passed in 1970 in Maine.

Nationwide, 71 communities from across the political spectrum have passed either rights-of-nature or community-rights statutes, said Craig Kauffman, a professor of political science at the University of Oregon, whose research focuses on legal and political arguments for the rights of nature.

Part of the motivation behind the campaign is to put ecosystems on an equal footing with corporations, which already have personhood rights under federal law. “Where we often see these campaigns is in rural communities that don’t want outside corporations coming in and destroying the ecosystems and watersheds,” Kauffman told me. With the twin pressures of climate change and biodiversity loss mounting, people are looking for new ways to fight back on the local level, he said. — Carl Segerstrom, “Can a campaign for nature and community rights stop aerial spraying in Oregon?”

So, this upcoming June 1, the case will be made to reverse this judge’s action, which she declared in September of 2019: Judge Sheryl Bachart ruled that the county ordinance was pre-empted by an Oregon law that allows, with basic state-approved restrictions, aerial spraying of pesticides on forests and prohibits local governments from making any ordinance, rule or regulation governing pesticide sale or use. “Where local enactments are found incompatible with state law in an area of substantive policy and explicit preemption, state law will displace the local law,” she wrote.

Lincoln County, Oregon, voters approved the “Freedom from Aerial Sprayed Pesticides” ordinance. That was May 2017. It was a first-in-the-state law recognizing residents’ rights to clean air, water, and soil, their right to local community self-governance, and the Rights of Nature to exist, flourish, and evolve.

Soon after, the timber industry lawyered up — sued the county to overturn the ordinance, stating this Oregon county (or any county) had no right or authority to pass it (this sort of community rights legal codes) in the first place, and that this ordinance/ law “adversely affected” them. This is a tactic used in Capitalism, whichever form you want to qualify your pro/quasi-pro capitalism with: predatory, usury, parasitic, disaster, casino, zombie — which has put a stranglehold on communities who vote to not allow some industry into town. Suing for imagined future losses (out of thin air profits), these Mafia corporations wrote the playbook on predatory capitalism. They time and time again, bring in an army of legal vultures to do battle with cash-strapped counties and municipalities threatening them with years of expensive litigation if a city or county prohibits their siting and industrial processes in that locality.

You don’t need to go back too far in history to see how industry works —

Hmm, many in my league just wrote about the 107th anniversary of the Ludlow Massacre, simply, a mass killing by a militia, anti-striker thugs during this period called the Colorado Coalfield War. This is the score — soldiers from the Colorado National Guard and then private guards/mercenaries in the employ of Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) attacked peaceful Occupies — a tent colony of 1,200 striking coal miners and their families. That was April 20, 1914, in Ludlow, and while 21 people, including miners’ wives and children, were murdered, the infamous John D. Rockefeller, Jr., a part-owner of CF&I, got away with it, with just a talking to during a US congressional hearing.

The right to your own labor, to strike, to refuse an illegal or dangerous order. The right to tell your supervisor things are smelly in Denmark. The right to expose malfeasance and shoddy manufacturing and death-creating products. The right to question the killer ingredients in chicken McNuggets?

It’s shoot to kill now, if as a citizen you want to photograph clearcutting, animal factory farms, fracking facilities, even fields of GMO Franken-Corn.

When a community declares it is against war, against nukes, anything, the long arm of government and corporations comes in upper-cutting hard. Worse, though, is the longer arm of the mob, the herd, the bandwagoneers. Propaganda is a valuable tool of fascists and Madison Avenue, of governments and of right-wing movements. And let it be clear there is no real left left when that person announces his or her Democratic Party allegiances. Shifting the center to the right has been witnessed by yours truly my entire lifetime as a journalist — it is embarrassing how so-called weekly alternative newspapers are as rightwing as Mitt Romney. Let alone the massive experiment on the populous for this continual shifting baseline disorder. One day a few months ago, Big Pharma was despised in poll after poll. Now, Big Pharma wins the Nobel Prize collectively. Imagine the billions Pitzer has paid out in lawsuits, single ones and class action. Imagine that, and now imagine the profit hoarders, the mercenary capitalists, making billions on this jab-jab-jab jabberwocky.

Imagine the thugs the thugs hire to do their bidding, their dirty work. Imagine the Sisyphus of it all now, now that not just companies like Comcast, but their competitors, too, and entire countries, use app’s to send in faked and false comments to politicians. Imagine that, Sisyphus. The new normal is citizens scrounge up people to push a bill like the aerial spray moratorium, and then, imagine, those great software engineers and former military setting up companies that set loose false statements, push propaganda to a new level.

Try the Google search on Dow or Agent Orange or on Timber Unity. You’ll get more and more accolades, fewer and fewer critical hits.

You can lose your job as a pig/cop for calling an African American a n—–, but you keep your job if you put a bullet to the back of the head of that black man while in uniform.

How does this all relate?

Again, communities taking control of their boundaries, their health, safety and welfare? Communities defunding the police. Communities putting the brakes on growth, on building and construction, on projects that impede healthy traffic loads. Communities demanding smoke stacks not release toxic chemicals. Imagine that, in Newport, where the largest users of our freshwater system — a brewery and the shrimp industry.

Who will sit on the water board? Who will be at the table when more scrutiny hits the beer and shrimp industry?

Then the Chamber of Commerce, and then the Rotarians, and then all manner of people saying, “We need jobs, we need infrastructure, we need corporation x and company y in town. Putting all these limits on their growth, on their profits, on their business model, is antithetical to capitalism. They know best. They hire the best engineers, the best economists, the best communicators, the best scientists. You do-gooders know nothing about running a business, keeping the lights on, building employment bases, providing a culture to a community. You are against all growth.”

Growth is that timber industry buying up more and more parcels of land, and in fact, insurance companies and other investment portfolio “holders” own (sic) this land. In fact, you can own your 100 acres, but if you got snookered thirty years ago to get some shekels from shifty insurance and timber companies to “have the right to come in and sustanabily log said designated acreage in 30 or 40 years, here’s how much big money we will give you up front to keep those beautiful trees growing big and healthy and keeping that air clean and all those streamlets pure.”

This is reality, man. People in their 60s or 70s who came out her in the 1970s, now have seen their property cut down vis-a-vis those three to five decades old contracts.

Now there are some things in the world we can’t change — gravity, entropy, the speed of light, the first and second Laws of Thermodynamics, and our biological nature that requires clean air, clean water, clean soil, clean energy and biodiversity for our health and wellbeing. Protecting the biosphere should be our highest priority or else we sicken and die. Other things, like capitalism, free enterprise, the economy, currency, the market, are not forces of nature, we invented them. They are not immutable and we can change them. It makes no sense to elevate economics above the biosphere, for example.

–– Canadian scientist and TV series producer David Suzuki

The model of forestry is to use it all as a commodity, to manage it, to turn real ecologies into tree plantations. Some people call these places out here, deserts:

Fish Do Grow on Trees

It’s a no-brainer trees also provide shade for maintaining water temperature. To carry the analogy to the end point, we see fallen leaves, limbs and branches support food webs by providing food and habitat for insects that are food for fish, Hayduk states. Clean, cool water with more food equals bigger fish.

Nuances like growing alders on the flood plain or marsh plain encourages other species of trees to grow on the decaying fallen alder.

Looking at the ecosystem from a centuries-versus-a-few-decades perspective is important in understanding what Evan and others of his ilk are attempting. “Big conifers that fall help with grade control. Water tables rise. Conifers in the riparian areas can grow from 100 to 200 years before they fall into the creek.”

This concept of a “messy” stream refugia as being the most healthful for all species is anathema to the way most humans have thought about rivers. Scientists like Hayduk know fish get through any of the hurdles a natural stream environment presents them — even with huge logs and entire trees with root balls integrated into the water flow.

The Lincoln County law held for over two years, preventing aerial application of pesticides. This got under the skin of the coalition of people and businesses in that so-called Timber Unity outfit.

The rule of law, of course, supports every aspect of predatory and disaster capitalism.

That judge in September of 2019 wrote: “Oregon does not recognize an independent right of local community self-government that is fundamental, inherent, inalienable, and constitutional.”

This is a battle line fought in many communities.

“Though this decision will be appealed on the grounds of denying the exercise of the right of local self-government, it also serves as positive energy to move the amendment forward so ultimately people, not corporations, decide the fate of their communities,” said Nancy Ward, coordinator for the Oregon Community Rights Network.

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) assisted Lincoln County Community Rights in drafting the law and representing them as an intervenor in the case. CELDF also sought to represent the Siletz River watershed’s interests in the case. The judge denied intervention.

Appeals were filed by Lincoln County Community Rights and the Siletz River watershed. They have their proverbial day in court June 1, 2021. This is from their May 8 press release:

Lincoln County Community Rights, the non-profit organization that placed Measure 21-177 on the ballot, filed an appeal against invalidation of the measure. The Siletz River Ecosystem also appealed the trial court decision to deny it intervention in the case. Oral arguments will be heard virtually Tuesday, June 1, 2021 in the morning session.

Speaking on behalf of the Siletz River Ecosystem, Carol Van Strum notes that” securing rights of the river to exist, thrive and be protected from poisoning by aerial spraying is part of a global movement of tribal and other entities to grant natural systems standing to defend themselves in our courts.”

What is at stake is whether state government exists to protect people’s rights to save themselves and their environment from poisoning, or to protect industry’s right to poison people and their world for profit.

There have been more than the immediate effects on residents exposed to these chemicals: severe headaches, rashes, respiratory problems, and nosebleeds. Pets, livestock and wild animals exposed to spraying have died. Doctors and other medical professionals have been stating for years that long-term exposure to chemicals like glyphosate, 2,4-D and atrazine (just a few of the major ones used by the logging industry) can injure the liver and kidneys. The number of stillborn and miscarriages and babies with intellectual, learning and developmental disabilities is high in areas where these chemicals are sprayed.

Yet, the reality is Capitalism is all about might makes right, and as is true of any of the x,y,z you-name-it industries, in Oregon, the logging and chemical industries hold the Damocles sword (in the form of political influence) in Oregon. As is true every time, when these x, y, z you-name-it industries’ actions put people at risk, and ecosystems, one might believe there is a moral imperative for legislative and regulatory bodies to have a legal righteous imperative to intervene. The very idea of keeping industry spraying and industry land holdings secret should strike anyone believing in a democracy as both wrong and harmful to the public’s interest. Oregonians should have a right to determine which chemicals are verboten, but also, there has to be a set systems of do no harm, at any cost to the capitalist interests.

Solutions like having no-spray buffers from chemical drift speak to the inability of Oregon and other governments to hold them accountable. The Community Rights organization is in this to make sure state agencies work to protect our health by protecting wildlife, water, and not just private property.

Shielding politically influential industries from accountability is the name of the game, but community bill of rights movements have been proposed (and defeated in court, and the ballot box) to do exactly that — accountability and agency to decide what a community deems safe.

The fact is we have let capitalism frame all debates, so, if there are movements to say stop animal cruelty in the agricultural arena, those movements should be part of the public interest, backed by government scientists and planners in concert with real science.

We can read a headline in the pro-farmer-rancher, Capital Press, “Anti-animal ag initiative raises alarm among Oregon farm groups … protections for livestock producers under the state’s animal cruelty laws,” but that entity, so-called journalism, will never access or refer to studies going back 20 years on the enormous amounts of cruelty the factory farming does to animals.

Source: Beyond the Law: Agribusiness and the Systemic Abuse of Animals Raised for Food or Food Production Animals raised for food or food production in the United States are, in large part, excluded from legal protection against cruelty. For Oregon, that’s Initiative Petition 13, which all the farmers and ranchers and producers call anti-ag, and backed by animal rights extremists.

The same sort of mumbo-jumbo is leveled at people like Maria and Carol and the entire movement to put a stop to poisons in the air, water, soil. The fact a community group has to set forth an initiative process to get a spray ban even on the ballot box, up against the compliant media, the huge coffers of money to spend on propaganda by the timber and chemical industries, is not democracy at work.

For me, the work of a community bill of rights comes from a body of work tied to a community’s right to set the standards for human and ecological health, as well as the standards for labor and health and welfare. My own background includes 10 solid years in Spokane, and I was part of the push for the Envision Spokane, Community Bill of Rights, which bestowed legal rights on the Spokane River, granted residents the right to block development in their neighborhoods and given employees workplace protections. The kicker was to restrict any corporation’s “rights” that might be conflicting with the measure.

It took a coalition of business groups and governmental entities to sue, and the Washington Supreme Court “gave a victory to local business groups after unanimously ruling that Envision Spokane’s sweeping Community Bill of Rights ballot measure was outside of the initiative process and should not go before voters.”

Note the verbiage in the quotation marks. Very telling how business groups (backed by big bucks, and out of state bucks) is stated as a “coalition”, as opposed to a lobbying entity, special interest group, an anti-voter league. The media and press are spokespersons for the business community. Rocking the boat (taking a stand, or looking at community and nature bills of rights with a deeper analysis) is not part of the DNA of most co-opted media/Press entities.

At least High Country News gave LCCR a better shot at their story than other sources:

Anti-spray activists are appealing — and going after the pre-emption law itself. They say that the state and federal government shouldn’t be able to prevent locals from seeking greater protections for community and environmental health. It’s a new twist on long-running efforts by rural Westerners to gain more power. Traditionally, rural counties in Oregon and across the West have sought to undo state and federal environmental protections and open up land for logging and other industries. Now, Lincoln County residents want the power to create additional environmental protections, which they believe are necessary to end corporate political dominance and protect their health.

Just read some of the stuff here on the chemical industry, the state regulators, and more. Carol Van Strum, in her book, A Bitter Fog, and when one talks with her, demonstrates the sacrifice of her activism — she lost four children in a fire at their cabin/house during the heated battle she was having with the chemical companies and forest service. She stated to me that the fire chief felt the fire was suspicious. Carol is clear that something wasn’t right that evening when she went to a neighbor’s with freshly baked bread and returned to her four children’s lifeless bodies from the fire.

From my piece on Carol: This is an idyllic life until the four children are sprayed. Then the court battles, the scientific investigations (and backtracking and cover-ups) of the real effects of these herbicides. We are talking about neighbors throughout the area, up to a mile away from each other, collectively having multiple miscarriages, children born with genetic defects, adults suffering cancers and other ailments.

The dedication in her non-fiction book is emblematic of the struggle Carol has undergone: “For my children, Daphne, Alexey, Jarvis and Benjamin Van Strum.”

I asked her what gives her hope. “The death of our children left me with what they loved — this farm, this dirt, these trees, this river, these birds, fish, newts, deer, and fishers — to protect and hold dear. These became my anchor to windward, keeping me from just drifting away with every wind that blows.”

Even that tragic story isn’t simple — there is evidence the four children, old enough to babysit each other, perished in a house while Carol was next door at a neighbor’s house. The fire marshal indicated it was suspicious, potentially the result of arson. Carol has her suspects.

This article was to be a precursor to the Lincoln Community Rights court case this June 1. For me, this is more than that, running into the gauntlet of US “rule of law.” The game is rigged, and you can ask anyone, not just public citizen Ralph Nader.

Describing the United States as an “advanced Third World country,” longtime consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader calls for a new mass movement to challenge the power corporations have in Washington. “It is not too extreme to call our system of government now ‘American Fascism.’ It’s the control of government by big business, which Franklin Delano Roosevelt defined in 1938 as fascism,” Nader says.

I end this long article with my interview of Maria Kraus and Debra Fant, two of the Lincoln County Community Rights activists:

Paul Haeder: What personal stake do you have in this fight to ban aerial spraying?

Maria Kraus: Personal stake? Every person aware of what is going on with our ecosystems, how they are unraveling due to ravenous extraction from them and toxic spraying on them to increase profits derived from extraction, has a stake in the effort to save the planet from becoming uninhabitable. This is a fight that is everyone’s fight, in which the personal examples of deadly illnesses, malformations, pain, hunger, and misery, together with the sight of degraded ecosystems, streams drying up, vanishing wildlife species are what should make this a universal fight.

Debra Fant: As a person who lives in coastal forest and appreciates clean cold water to drink for myself, my family, my community, I am highly motivated to end use of toxic chemical combinations from industrial tree farms in our watersheds.

PH: Fiftieth Anniversary of Silent Spring. Ironically with your case being heard next month. Any comments about this fact with reference to that below, here –

MK: Rachel Carson’s voice was the first to sound out publicly about the danger of using chemicals, DDT in her experience, not only to people, but to the environment. She held that chemicals should be studied for their effects on living organisms, soil, water, and air before being released into the environment.

In other words, she insisted on the Precautionary Principle, according to which, chemical substances are not considered safe for use until proven to be so. However, industry, which dominates government here and in many other countries, believes that “business is business”, and that the profit motive has priority in all business decisions. Accordingly, the world has been freely experimenting with thousands of chemicals regardless of their possible effects on all forms of life and on the environment. The din of profit-making silenced Rachel Carson’s voice. Not only did use of chemicals proliferate during the many decades since Silent Spring was published, but chemicals used for war, such as Agent Orange in Vietnam, which were banned while the war was still going on due to the harm they caused to people exposed to it, started being used as herbicides in the US afterwards. There was a massive surplus of them and that could not be wasted. A market had to be found for them. Meantime, production of some chemicals has been banned only to make room for reformulations of their ingredients in new chemical products launched by the thousands into the market, with only a fraction going through testing. The EPA, created under the Nixon administration, has functioned, in Nixon’s own words, as a “buffer between industry and the public”, to make people believe they are being protected rather than to actually protect them.

Industry tests its own products, and regulations are written to stop only the most extreme and obvious harms, ensuring that they remain effective for the purposes that industry produces them, and, with that, harmful to every living organism that comes into contact with them. The evolution of chemical use is glaring proof that government, in the US especially, is of, by, and for profit-driven industry, not for the health, safety, and welfare of the people and the places where they live.

DF: Biocides – “any substance that can kill living organisms,” came out of chemical warfare after WWI and became chemical warfare in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The US Congress stopped the military use of Agent Orange four years before the war ended because of the harms to people, land, water, wildlife, and food crops. Why then was it sprayed on timber lands of our county and elsewhere in Oregon? It not only killed plant material but created deformed farm animals, aborted elk and deer fetus’ with defects, and babies born without brains. These experiments on living people and communities confirmed toxicity of forever chemicals that do not degrade or disappear The US Government agencies and industry collaborated for profits, corruption rampant in safety testing protocols, and so called scientific results suppressed or simply changed to support the lies that these chemicals are “safe” when label instructions are followed. Rachel Carson warned us and spoke clearly the dangers yet industry and regulatory agencies were motivated by greed, dazzled by man-made innovations without the wisdom to question destructive practices. If this is an intelligence test, I fear the human family is flunking.

PH: So Carson took up her cudgels. Her book is not a mathematical theorem. It is a carefully researched, precisely reasoned, and elegantly written argument for what she passionately believed to be the public good. It is a product of her social conscience, but not the diatribe that her critics complained about. She did not call for a ban on all pesticides, but mostly for the long-lasting chlorinated hydrocarbons such as DDT whose movement through the environment cannot be contained and whose residues, being fat soluble, are stored in animal tissues and recycled through food chains.

“It is not my contention that chemical insecticides should never be used,” she wrote. “I do contend that we have put poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potential for harm… I contend, furthermore, that we have allowed these chemicals to be used with little or no advance investigation of their effects on soil, water, wildlife, or man himself.” See Yale e360 source.

PH: Science should be “science” always in quotation marks since many in the “scientific” community (sic) adhere to a belief that chemicals have been tested extensively, and that there are no scientific connections to harms done on animals and humans at the level of dilution say an aerial application of said herbicides are used. Comment on this.

MK: The question is what “tested extensively” means. When does “extensively” become enough? Many of the chemicals used, in the concentrations they are used, don’t show their effects until many years after exposure, and some only in future generations.

Industry, of course, will not wait that long before launching chemicals into the market.

Once that happens, and time passes, it is hard to trace harmful effects to the chemical that caused them. In the race to justify its profitable products, the chemical industry is eager to find reasons to market them, not to refrain from doing so. Having the freedom granted to it by government, it conducts its own testing, and conveniently does so in search for the answers it needs to launch its products. The EPA accepts those results. What industry does to get chemical products approved for marketing has little to do with science, and much more with fooling the public to accept what they say. How much or for how long were flame retardants tested, or formaldehyde, before they were released for their various commercial applications?

We all know that growing food with poisons is madness, and that growing it on poisoned soil is madness too. We also know that forests have grown for millions of years without poisons, and that a mature or old-growth forest is healthier than a planted industrial one.

DF: The people of Oregon who sued the Forest Service to stop their spraying of Agent Orange in the 1970’s won their case and caused 1/2 of AO, 2,4,5, T to be de-registered. They also won a case proving that a contracted firm named IBT that EPA hired to do live animal studies of toxic chemicals used fraudulent practices and did not follow scientifically sound protocols to determine safety for the chemicals. Evidence of collusion between EPA and industry changing study results showed up in their own documents and communications which are part of the digitized “Poison Papers” online. That’s not scientific research, that is corruption.

PH: Yes, the rights of nature, yes, that’s where I come from, a deep green ecology. But for you both, how to frame that concept of a river having rights or land having rights to the average miss-educated and misdirected citizen you might run into at a grocery store or public meeting?

MK: The argument we frequently use is that corporations are considered to be persons and have rights, and yet corporations are just a bunch of documents authorizing certain activities. Supposedly they speak through money.

Fundamental to the idea of Nature having rights is the fact that we are part of Nature and that all life is interconnected and depends on that interconnection. If we hurt one creature in the web of life, we hurt all the others that depend on it one way or another. We know that the absence or presence of wolves in an area can change the landscape of that area. If the wolves are no longer there, species that wolves predate on will multiply and eat vegetation that was abundant before. That vegetation will fail to provide nourishment, or shade, or shelter, to another species, which will not survive in that area, and so on. If starfish die, like they have in certain areas of the West Coast, sea urchins multiply exceedingly and eat all the sea grass, which is one of the main carbon sinks in the ocean. Westward winds over the Sahara Desert blow across the Atlantic Ocean and fertilize the Amazon Forest.

We all depend on Nature, and our need to protect it from human greed, crucial to its survival and that of all life, is best translated into recognition of Nature’s right to exist, flourish, and renew itself, a right which needs to be protected by laws, as perhaps the fastest way to get people to understand that transgressions against Nature have to stop. As we have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness just because we exist, a right that is not up for discussion (although it has and continues to be violated), the right of Nature to be itself is not up for discussion. We have treated Nature as property. That has gotten us into the predicament we are in now, being as we are in danger of losing it as a source of life. This is still a concept that is difficult for people to grasp, but more and more people are coming to terms with it.

DF: Legal rights and the ability for a harmed river or a blasted mountain to be represented in a court of law are only needed where human beings have no limit to their willingness to harm balanced ecosystems whether for extracting fossil fuels, metals, board feet of lumber, or clean drinking water. When humans lose the ability to value clean air or fertile soil in a non-monetary way, there is no end to extraction no matter the cost to wildlife, oceans, humans, and nature’s resilience. Legal rights may be the only way of keeping intact what is needed for life on this planet!

People who relate to the Earth as our Mother, a forest as our grandparents, a river as our sister are not likely to defile or poison those ones who are family. When we all live with that value, knowing when what we have is “enough” and caring for clean water more than we care about money, we won’t need legal rights for nature to exist, thrive, and persist.

PH: Construction and finance rule the world, and here in Oregon, and in the world, there is a reported lumber shortage, and now a doubling of the prices of lumber. All sorts of reasons tied to lockdowns, SARS-CoV2 and more. Anticipate the push back from the timber industry which will cite that jobs are at stake and their own scientific studies showing aerial spraying is safer and more efficient and more expeditious than crews going out on the land hand spraying.

MK: We have had that kind of pushback from the timber industry all along, going on four years now. What has changed is the number of lawsuits filed for illness caused by the use of certain herbicides (mainly glyphosate) against the chemical industry, which have resulted in billions in fines for Bayer/Monsanto. In addition, many scientific publications and presentations by environmentally aware economists, foresters, and others (see Ernie Niemi, John Talberth, Chuck Willer) have raised awareness of the harm done to the soil by aerial pesticide spraying (and other forms of spraying), such as the death of micro-organisms; acceleration of global warming and climate change provoked by clear-cutting, drying up of streams in industrial forests, which carry only 50% of the water carried by streams running through mature and old growth forests, dying of fish and other water life due to increased temperature of the water in industrial forests, decreased capacity of industrial forests to store carbon because trees are not allowed to grow to a size that permits more storage, being cut down at 30-35 years of age instead of 80-100, and chemicals reaching streams and rivers due to drift or percolation in the soil. The discussion is evolving from aerial pesticide spraying to use of any herbicides and pesticides as more and more information on their harm comes to light.

The timber industry will continue to use its old arguments unless and until the law changes, and, together with that, also building materials. Our argument centers around preemption laws, which forbid local communities from protecting their health, safety and well-being, together with that of Nature, on which all life, including ours, depends, from the ravages of the timber and chemical industry through local democracy (people’s initiatives) such as our Measure 21-177. It focuses on the fundamental duty of government to protect the people from harm, and its use of preemption laws to instead protect the right of industry to profit from activities that constantly threaten and undermine the people’s and Nature’s wellbeing. Such laws turn the people in whom constitutionally all power is inherent to the guinea pigs of industry, making them the constant subject of chemical experimentation which they quietly oversee, like silent gigantic parasites sucking on the people’s and Nature’s lives while government looks on.

DF: Toxic chemicals are not required for re-growth of trees in this temperate rain forest. it is a fallacy made up by industry who wanted a market for their chemicals just as they made up those stories for food production.

Industry has been cutting at unsustainable levels for decades and finding loopholes in the law to clear cut far more than is wise. It’s time to keep standing natural forests who work daily to absorb C02 and release oxygen, hold moisture and fertility in the soil, protect the effectiveness of watersheds’ abilities to provide clean drinking water, provide habitat and food for wildlife, cold water for fish survival. It’s time to transition to growing hemp and bamboo that are fast growing fiber crops that can be processed locally for new building materials like “hemp-crete” and provide jobs for our people.

PH: This is coming down to a legal issue, where the concepts of precautionary principles and do no harm and holding polluters and chemical companies accountable to carry out all necessary objective studies of all their chemicals before being allowed to get approval for use might be powerful to me, a deep green ecosocialist, but we live in a country where herd immunity toward understanding/respecting/caring about the whole of nature and immunity to arguments about long-term health and safety concerns are the ruling orders of the day. We are expected to believe mainstream scientists about things like vaccine safety or the approval of what, now, (scientists) haven given the green light to a million tons of radioactive water being dumped from Fukushima, so why not agree with the scientists who are in the employ of DOW, Monsanto and OSU forestry program?

MK: Our fight is to change how the government works and, ultimately, to bring down capitalism and its perverted and suicidal values. Can we win? Do we have enough time left to win, as the abolitionists and suffragists did? Probably not. We can either submit to the status quo or die fighting. Everyone has that choice.

DF: Because it’s BULL SHIT!

PH: What lessons learned for both of you as you go into this hearing, going on four years since you all activated?

MK: Everything I have written here I have learned through working on the aerial spray ban, from working with a group of people who are committed to putting their efforts into improving the world we live in, to seeing the importance of working for others, of contributing to one’s community. From the harms being inflicted on our environment to how government really works, especially here, but also in varying degrees in many other countries; from working as a team, to admiring the dedication of others and the varying forms in which it is expressed, and also appreciating the different talents that people doing the work bring to it. One of the main lessons has been to arrive at an understanding of how capitalism works, how disastrous its emphasis on profit is for the planet.

DF: I’ve learned that you can learn how to do almost anything that is unfamiliar or unknown, that commitment and truth telling are powerful and attractive forces to draw people together, that person power of volunteers can take on powerful corporate interests and make local law to protect safety and well-being, and it’s not all about the MONEY! Industry’s own public opinion polls late in the campaign showed that a majority of voters in this county did NOT want aerial spraying of pesticides and that included families who were a part of timber industry services. Would have loved to watch the Timber guys when they learned that poll results!
Two plus years without aerial spraying of toxins was a huge relief to all of us who live downstream. Listening to a spraying helicopter within a mile of my home after that was traumatic and made me cry for the streams getting poisoned, any life forms remaining on the steep slopes, for the ignorance of those who believe the spin and lies told about toxic chemicals being “safe.”

PH: In your own words, respond to: “Our argument is that the local government exists to protect public health and safety and should be immune from pre-emption laws that prevent them from doing so,” said Lindsey Schromen-Wawrin. “State preemption is a weapon of corporate special interests, which can more easily control state legislatures rather than deal with counties and local governments that are closer to the people.”

MK: I believe that preemption can be used for different purposes, and can be necessary (such as preemption of racism, violence, slavery, etc.).It is being used to protect corporate interests at the expense of public health and safety. That is the use we object to. Local governments should be able to enact more stringent laws than the state to protect the people’s and Nature’s health, safety and wellbeing (ceiling preemption, which prohibits more stringent protections of safety and health than the state has imposed, is what we are fighting). In that sense local governments should be able to complement the state government, because they are closer to the people. Preemption interferes with that closeness.

DF: Amen. Who cares more for finding solutions to local problems than the people who live there? Who will value and care for the land on which we live, work, play any more than we will?

“When we look at what is truly sustainable, the only real model that has worked over long periods of time is the natural world.”
— Biomimicry Institute founder, Janine Benyus

Photo: A selection of the thousands of native potato varieties that grow in Peru. Photograph: The International Potato Centre

It’s paramount to talk about all the untested, all the never-experimented-on synergistic affects of all those “compounds/ingredients/chemicals” the chemical industry has forced upon the public and nature through “better living/eating/drinking through chemistry.”

I was just talking with an 80-year-old woman whose father’s side of the family (56) all were murdered in Germany’s death camps. She grew up in Chile, and alas, ended up Oregon. She is working on stopping the aerial spraying of 2-4-D and other weedicides onto the clear-cuts.

She remarked at how insane the world is with so much lack of common sense and connecting of the dots when it comes to our factory/industrial food systems. She held up a potato:

“How did it ever become normal to use poisons on our food? Poisons that have a direct vector not just to your gut and mine. But to the developing guts and brains of fetuses?”

Oh, that potato! Originally from Peru, the potato has crossed oceans and ended up in every part of the globe.

Only two things in this world are too serious to be jested on, potatoes and matrimony.
—Irish saying.

Now, they are genetically engineered. And they are part of the monoculture that triggered the Great Famine, also called the Irish Potato Famine. Then, the Irish used a single breed of potato, the Irish Lumper, which was vulnerable to fungus that the breed had no resistance to. However, the Peruvians grow many hundreds of varieties. That diversity of breed/varieties is what keeps a single fungus or other pests from decimating a food stock.

The problems with “conventional” potatoes are tied to the fact the soil is so eroded and decimated in industrial growing models that there is no natural fungi and bacteria, so ungodly amounts of chemical fertilizers have to be applied each season, more and more each season, that is. Again, in the USA, only several varieties of potatoes are grown.

But it’s the pesticides, man! Leave my spuds alone.

The the USDA’s Pesticide Data Program determined 35 different pesticides have been found on “conventionally-grown” (nonorganic) potatoes.

As is true of many of the plastic compounds, these pesticides have some lethal side effects:
– 6 are known or probably carcinogens
– 12 are suspected hormone disruptors
– 7 are neurotoxins
– 6 are developmental or reproductive toxins

One herbicide, chlorpropham,  is used to stop the growth of weeds and to inhibit potatoes sprouting; it’s found on up to 80 percent of all “conventionally-grown” potatoes.

According to the Extension Toxicology Network, this poison is toxic to honey bees. In labs, tests bare out the effects of chronic exposure to the herbicide: animals show “retarded growth, increased liver, kidney and spleen weights, congestion of the spleen, and death.”

It’s systems thinking that is lacking in the full portrait of industrial farming and how agribusiness thinks and works,  yet holistic (systems thinking) approaches are utilized and integrated into true objective research (mostly by environmental safety and advocating groups) on the benefits, harms, and unintended consequences of this chemicalized world — sometimes we can only work on one chemical at a time, which takes many human lifetimes to drill down into to determine the cradle to cradle impacts of those compounds, the chemicals. The alternative to this entire agribusiness industrial model is actually to go back to the start of good farming. Agroecology is the way to go, according to many groups I have been a part of and interviewed as a journalist. This is the only way to make it through the heating planet, and all the issues tied to soil degradation and productivity falling, droughts, and, well, ocean inundation and changed water cycles throughout the globe. Agro-ecology, a harmonious system of saving the planet and feeding the people with no genetically engineered “foods” and vegetables and fruits sprayed with toxins. This continues what Benyus states above and ramified here:

Biomimicry offers an empathetic, interconnected understanding of how life works and ultimately where we fit in. It is a practice that learns from and mimics the strategies used by species alive today. The goal is to create products, processes, and policies — new ways of living — that solve our greatest design challenges sustainably and in solidarity with all life on earth. We can use biomimicry to not only learn from nature’s wisdom, but also heal ourselves — and this planet — in the process. — Benyus.

All those poisons, then, are integrated into the spud, since, as a root vegetable, potatoes absorb all of the pesticides, herbicides, and insecticides sprayed above the ground which eventually spread into the soil.

There are many insider testimonies from potato farmers — Jeff Moyer, CEO at the Rodale Institute and former chair of the National Organic Standards Board, says, “I’ve talked with potato growers who say point-blank they would never eat the potatoes they sell. They have separate plots where they grow potatoes for themselves without all the chemicals.”

The potato is a great example of an industrial system gone crazy. Terms like Frankenfoods, fishy tomatoes and assassin seeds are not benign. Imagine, the now defunct DNA Plant Technology of Oakland, California developed the gene therapy (sic) of inserting a fish gene into a tomato. It was the genes that helps a flounder survive in frigid waters. This “anti-freeze” fish gene was spliced into tomato cells to enhance the plant’s resistance to cold.

Monsanto developed the gene technology to create suicide seeds, of all wonderfully bad things: They call it, Genetic use restriction technology (GURT), but it’s more commonly referred to as terminator technology or suicide seeds. This keeps farmers from saving seeds from on Monsanto crop, as the genetic alterations either activate or deactivate) some genes only in response to certain stimuli. That second generation of seeds is infertile.

That Roundup (Monsanto) is what is sprayed all over our Oregon forests when clear cuts raze stands of trees – to keep opportunistic and invasive brush and other tree species, from overtaking the sawed over hills and valleys.

The history and politics are not lost on people like my Chilean friend — Dow Chemical and Monsanto were the two largest producers of Agent Orange, a fifty-fifty mix of the n-butyl esters 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) and 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4,5-T).

I’ve worked with military veterans exposed to Agent Orange, and worked with offspring of American veterans who were exposed.

Birth Defects Associated with Female Vietnam Veterans

• Achondroplasia.
• Cleft lip and cleft palate.
• Congenital heart disease.
• Congenital talipes equinovarus (clubfoot)
• Esophageal and intestinal atresia.
• Hallerman-Streiff syndrome.
• Hip dysplasia.
• Hirschsprung’s disease (congenital megacolon)

I’ve been to Vietnam and interviewed people working on the long-term and multigenerational effects of all of that defoliant sprayed on citizens of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia.

I reviewed a recent documentary, The People vs. Agent Orange – “Eternal Impunity of Capitalism’s Crimes”

Dr. James Clary was with the Air Force in Vietnam, which ran the program. He was ordered to dump the computer and erase all memory. Instead, he printed out a stack of documents two feet high – missions, sorties, coordinates, dates, gallons dropped throughout all of Southeast Asia and Laos.

“We had the information coming from Dow that there were real problems for people associated with this chemical. It was all locked up for 35 years.”

Playing down all the negative effects of this chemical was part of the Dow plan. Dioxin was the byproduct in the brew. Dow told the US government they were having difficulty producing the volume of the chemical the US wanted. The government told them to not worry about safety standards and quality control, and that a fast production process which produced more of the dioxin would not matter, since the crops and forest were being sprayed, and if people got in contact with it, the idea coming from both industrialists at Dow and those in government and the military was, “Hey, so what, this is a war . . . these are the effing Vietnamese.”

The idea for this environmental series is that walk along the wrack line, for sure, which has for me the past two years conjured up all sorts of topics that are worthy of many books. It is a simple walk I conduct on a calm (mostly) sandy and driftwood-strewn beach in Central Oregon. But that solitude allows some of my own decades studying environmental harms to both animals and plants to filter through my thoughts. For this short essay, it is that potato, which is still not the most sprayed crop in the industrial system.

There are many groups looking into industrial vegetables and fruits, but they all have their own very similar Dirty Dozen – These foods should be purchased organic if possible.

• Apples – at least 99 % have residue
• Strawberries – contained 13 different pesticides each
• Grapes- contained 15 different pesticides
• Celery- 13 different pesticides per sample
• Peaches
• Spinach
• Sweet Bell Peppers
• Imported Nectarines – every sample tested positive for pesticides
• Cucumbers
• Cherry Tomatoes – contained 13 different pesticides each
• Imported Snap Peas – contained 13 different pesticides each
• Potatoes – had more pesticides by weight than any other food

We go from one chemical exposure – PFAS which is more generally known as flame retardant, and then we go to one or two common chemicals used in our food system – Roundup (glyphosate) and Atrazine – and we are not even scratching the tip of the iceberg in terms of global pesticide use, which is in the billions of pounds yearly, accounting for hundreds and thousands of different types of Herbicides/PGR Insecticides; Fungicides; Fumigants.

Remember, there are literally dozens of active ingredients in one type of herbicide. There are hundreds and sometimes thousands of chemicals in a scoop or pint of poison used in industrial ag. There are no studies on how all those interact with each other as they bioaccumulate and end up  as part of the war against the human biome.

For one of the most common herbicides, atrazine (ATR), and its persistence in the environment has resulted in documented human exposure.

Alterations in hypothalamic catecholamines have been suggested as the mechanistic basis of the toxicity of ATR to hormonal systems in females and the reproductive tract in males. Because multiple catecholamine systems are present in the brain, however, ATR could have far broader effects than are currently understood. Catecholaminergic systems such as the two major long-length dopaminergic tracts of the central nervous system play key roles in mediating a wide array of critical behavioral functions. In this study we examined the hypothesis that ATR would adversely affect these brain dopaminergic systems. Male rats chronically exposed to 5 or 10 mg/kg ATR in the diet for 6 months exhibited persistent hyperactivity and altered behavioral responsivity to amphetamine. Source.

There are many warriors in this battle to stop the war against nature, the war against Homo Sapiens.  UK’s Dr. Rosemary Mason, a retired physician and health and environmental campaigner, is one of hundreds of gutsy go-to thinkers who is pulling away the blinders and cutting through the PR spin.  In addition,  the Institute for Responsible Technology claims that cancers caused by Roundup include non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, bone cancer, colon cancer, kidney cancer, liver cancer, melanoma, pancreatic cancer and thyroid cancer.

Mason also quotes Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the renowned environmental attorney, who in 2018 talked of:

… cascading scientific evidence linking glyphosate to a constellation of other injuries that have become prevalent since its introduction, including obesity, depression, Alzheimer’s, ADHD, autism, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, kidney disease, and inflammatory bowel disease, brain, breast and prostate cancer, miscarriage, birth defects and declining sperm counts. Strong science suggests glyphosate is the culprit in the exploding epidemics of celiac disease, colitis, gluten sensitivities, diabetes and non-alcoholic liver cancer which, for the first time, is attacking children as young as 10.

All these injuries and diseases are covered here, at Hormones Matter.

As a capstone to this piece, it is both a testament to Rachel Carson’s work, Silent Spring, as she is considered the mother of the environmental movement. She was vilafied, and her book on poisons, Silent Spring, is poetic, clear, and was published in 1962, after four years of work writing it. She was one of thousands studying at the time the world’s most dangerous pesticide, DDT. 

Appearing on a CBS documentary about Silent Spring shortly before her death from breast cancer in 1964, she remarked, “Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself? [We are] challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.”

Unlike most pesticides at the time, whose effectiveness was supposedly limited to destroying one or two types of insects (though we now know that is basically not true), DDT was capable of killing hundreds of different kinds at once.

Nature writer Edwin Way Teale, warned, “A spray as indiscriminate as DDT can upset the economy of nature as much as a revolution upsets social economy. Ninety percent of all insects are good, and if they are killed, things go out of kilter right away.”

More than 75 years after Way Teale’s warnings, we are seeing the devastating  effects again of DDT. On the ocean floor, near Catalina Island. Leaving Hormones Matter readers with yet another huge gash in their hearts concerning the ill effects of this industrialized agriculture has on future generations, of both Homo Sapiens and all the other species, is possibly yet another trigger warning when reading my articles. However, this is the fabric of my own cloth looking at this all as a systems thinker.

High concentrations of DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, an insecticide that was widely used for pest control during the 1940s and 1950s) were previously detected in ocean sediments between the Los Angeles coast and Catalina Island, in 2011 and 2013. At the time, scientists who searched the seafloor in the area identified 60 barrels (possibly containing DDT or other waste) and found DDT contamination in sediments, but the full extent of the area’s contamination was unknown.

Now, a research expedition presents a clearer picture of the deep-sea dump site. Their findings reveal a stretch of ocean bottom studded with at least 27,000 industrial waste barrels — and possibly as many as 100,000, researchers with Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California said in a statement.  Live Science.

Read more? 

“Monsanto Manipulates Science” from Food and Water Watch

“Organophosphates: A Common but Deadly Pesticide” from Cornucopia

Beyond Pesticides 
Pesticides Industry: Sales and Usage by EPA
“Pest-Chemgrids” from Nature 

The Future of Food

NOTE: I reference Hormones Matter, which is publishing my work, and this piece is part of a series, I hope, on the huge topic of environmental connections to human and nature’s health tied to the chemicals involved in the fossil fuel, building, extraction, big ag, big mining, big energy that is the fuel of profits for capitalists. Part One, “Walking the Wrack Line: Thoughts on Plastic Pollution.”