Paul Haeder, Author

unending minute by minute examples of human stain rich (pieces of shit) parading around like heroes

Unbelievable these culprits who make national news feeds, yammering their fascist leanings. Whether it is the putrid criminal Bezos and his ejaculation into near space, or some actor like Sean Penn demanding all on his acting and production crew to be hit with the Emergency Use jab, to an earth-circling parade of scum in office, out of office, CEOs, managers, supervisors, and those who follow the money to do ANYTHING for the sadist rich. All for their shekels. They could be butt to groin, circling the earth two times, 50,000 miles. That’s how many of the capitalist dictators and their el capitans there are. Like a trail of human termites, eating the very souls of us, we the people of earth, i.e., the salt of the earth.

Headline: “Sean Penn won’t return to ‘Gaslit’ set unless all cast and crew get mandatory Covid vaccinations”

On Saturday, Rolling Stone published a major scoop: Actor Sean Penn traveled to northwestern Mexico to speak with Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera — “El Chapo” — the notorious leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel. It was El Chapo’s first (and perhaps last) press interview as a free man. At the time of the visit, El Chapo was a fugitive in hiding, but the day before the article went live, Mexican marines, with support from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and U.S. Marshals, captured him after “a fierce gun battle.”

Mexico’s Attorney General Arely Gomez has said that Penn’s face-to-face meeting with Guzmán “was an essential element” in the operation that led to the fugitive drug lord’s apprehension.

Look at these two multimillionaire sell-outs. White as the bare ass of an Irish baby, but they will tell the Haitians how to live, run their lives, etc. Here he is below that in Israel, loving that Israel aid (sic).

On his first visit to Israel, American actor and humanitarian activist Sean Penn declared that the work of his nonprofit J/P Haitian Relief Organization has succeeded largely because of its cooperation with volunteers from IsraAID-The Israel Forum for International Humanitarian Aid.

“The indirect impact of IsraAID is that everything that JP/HRO has accomplished would not have existed without the inspiration and support that they provided,” said Penn, the keynote speaker at IsraAID’s November 30 conference in Tel Aviv, “Can Haiti Grow? Haiti and Israel Partners in Recovery and Development.”

Following the program, IsraAID introduced Penn to representatives of eight Israeli startups that offer technologies in agriculture, water and solar power to developing nations.

Israel & Colombia: Mercenary Allies – Part 2
By Dan Cohen –For Colombians, a different Israeli is well-known for his role in the death squad rampages that have plagued the country since the 1980s. While Eitan was advising President Barco, an Israeli mercenary named Yair Klein arrived in Colombia and began training narco-paramilitaries in how to defeat the FARC insurgency.

Israel & Colombia: Mercenary Allies
By Dan Cohen — On April 6, 1984, a group of men dressed in police uniforms arrived at the home of Milcíades Contento in the town of Viotá, Colombia. Contento was a peasant, communist and member of the Patriotic Union (UP), a newly-formed experimental political party born out of the 1985 peace negotiations between the conservative President Belansio Betancourt and the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. The men seized Contento, tied him up and dragged him away.

New investigation reveals role of Israeli operatives in Colombia’s “political genocide”
By Dan Cohenr — On April 6, 1984, a group of men dressed in police uniforms arrived at the home of Milcíades Contento in the town of Viotá, Colombia.

New Investigation Reveals Role of Israeli Operatives in Colombia’s “Political Genocide”
By Dan Cohen – Known as the “Red Dance,” the systematic murder of the Patriotic Union remains one of the most extreme cases of political violence in Latin America and new evidence suggests that it was concocted by one of the most decorated spies in Israeli history. BOGOTA, COLOMBIA — On April 6, 1984, a group of men dressed in police uniforms arrived at the home of Milcíades Contento in the town of Viotá, Colombia.

Fuck Penn, fuck them all, supporting ANYTHING coming out of murderous Israel.

These two fuckers, Leonardo and Sean, combined net worth on the books, that is, a la scum-bucket lying Internet, err, $300 MILLION, but they, like the other felons in their elite perverse pool, use offshore accounts, have devalued valuable land, and a million financial scams that would make the Swiss blush.

Shmuley Boteach to honor Sean Penn

This is who Penn is, and now, everybody, he states, must be forced to have the fake vaccination for his shit show:

“He who is greedy of gain troubles his own house, but he who hates gifts will live.” —Proverbs 15:27

“As a rabbi, I am particularly grateful to the Adelsons.” —Shmuley Boteach

Shmuley Boteach promotes himself as “America’s rabbi” and “the most famous rabbi in America.” A man of many hustles, he has inserted himself as political liaison to far-right pro-Israel casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, close confidante of Senator Ted Cruz, spiritual guide to Michael Jackson, pal of Oprah Winfrey, soulmate of Eli Wiesel, buddy of Senator Cory Booker, star of his own reality TV show, and bestselling self-help author of Kosher Sex. This month Boteach scrambled between a meeting with Donald Trump, whose candidacy for president he recently endorsed, and a ritzy gala for his own organization, thrown on the solemn Holocaust Memorial Day, at which he bestowed special honors on the former “Baywatch” star Pamela Anderson and Yoko Ono, among other dignitaries.

Boteach has also managed to leverage his wide-ranging connections into a gig as a columnist for the New York Observer. The weekly newspaper is owned by Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who is married to Ivanka Trump, touted by her father as among his closest political advisers. Jared Kushner’s father Charles is a wealthy real estate developer and convicted felon who has contributed to Boteach’s non-profit, the World Values Network, known until recently as the Jewish Values Network. (Source)

These white monsters/devils are who the Holly-Dirt elite run with —

Over the weekend, the United States and other members of the so-called Core Group threw their support behind Henry, who will become Haiti’s seventh prime minister in four years. Monique Clesca, a Haitian pro-democracy advocate based in Port-au-Prince, says despite the polarization and turmoil in the country, it is ultimately up to Haitians to find a political solution. ​​”It is not up to the United States State Department to tell us who should be the prime minister of Haiti,” Clesca says. “It is offensive. It should not be done. It is unacceptable.”

MONIQUE CLESCA: My thoughts, in hearing — after hearing Ned Price, is, they haven’t talked to us. They haven’t — how can — such arrogance of a State Department spokesman to say they are speaking on behalf of the Haitian people. No, I believe the Haitian people are able to speak for themselves. And we have been speaking for ourselves for the last three years during this crisis, demonstration after demonstration. How many demonstrators have been killed? No one listened to what we’re saying.

And now what we’ve been saying is, “Let us pause. Let us sit down. And, Haitians, talk together, come together and find a solution.” It’s not going to be like magic that it’s going to be done. There is such polarization. There is such mistrust. But we must do this. (Source)

Here is an amazing pushback on the Jewish-run, Democracy Now —

DAHOUD ANDRE: Yeah. I want to point out first that this is exactly three years since the major uprisings that happened in the country in 2018, July 6, 7th, when the IMF had demanded that Haiti, the government of Haiti, raise fuel prices. And some of these prices were doubled. And the puppet government that Jovenel Moïse headed, they did this in the middle of a soccer game between Brazil and Belgium. And the idea was that Brazil would win and that it would be euphoria, and the people wouldn’t mind. They wouldn’t notice. They wouldn’t be — they would be celebrating Brazil’s victory. And fate had it that Brazil lost shamefully. And immediately after the game ended, uprisings all over the country. So, it’s important to note this date, this anniversary, and that Jovenel Moïse would be killed on this anniversary.

But also, I want to point out what Kim Ives is calling the revolutionary forces of the G9 and Jimmy Cherizier, these are criminals. These are people that are responsible for killing, massacres in poor neighborhoods in the country. These are people — and a lot of people find it amazing, unbelievable, that Kim Ives and his newspaper, Haiti Liberté, would be defending, trying to make people believe that these are revolutionaries — these are the people who are throwing 78-year-old elderly folks off of buildings, burning them alive — that these are the people who are going to save us.

The audience should understand, yes, Martelly was handpicked by the Clintons as a puppet, as someone who would do their bidding and join the campaign. It was obvious that the Clintons, Bill Clinton, who was running the CIRH to supposedly rebuild Haiti “back better” — same slogan that Joe Biden used in his recent campaign — that they would find that this is the person who would be — a degenerate, someone — I know that this program has done much about Martelly, so I don’t want to even go there. But what is important is that Martelly handpicked Jovenel Moïse.

And Jovenel Moïse, who was a crook, an indicted, fake entrepreneur, was put in directly by the U.S. government again. And in that position, he was a reliable puppet to, first, Donald Trump, to the point that he betrayed Haiti’s historic relationship with Venezuela in recognizing Juan Guaidó as legitimate head of Venezuela. And Jovenel Moïse had the nerve to say that with the most recent legislative elections in Venezuela, he would not recognize them because there was not enough popular participation. And this is someone who, by their own numbers, got about 500,000 votes in a country of 12 million people.

So, I need to say that the Haitian people loathed Jovenel Moïse and Martelly, the PHTK government, because they are the tools of the United States, to impose the will of the United States on the people. And they arm these street gangs. They finance these massacres in the poor neighborhoods, that are supportive of, I should say, President Aristide, the Lavalas government. And they just felt — and this was Martelly’s position — he clearly said, so long as the heavyweights — meaning the United States, the U.N., the OAS, the Core Group — supported him and Jovenel Moïse, nothing could happen to them. And this is what we have seen: the support, the unequivocal support, of the United States to the PHTK government, who was killing the Haitian people and stealing the resources of the country. (Source)

https://www.democracynow.org/2021/7/7/haitian_president_jovenel_moise_assassination

So, the largest health care system in Arizona, Banner, is forcing ALL employees to jab-up, by November, “or look for new work.” So, as one health care system goes, all the health care systems go. Mask up, Johnny Boy. This is how these culprits go.

The planned pandemic itself (and the global military deterrent exercise called “quarantine”) has only accentuated the gravity of a crisis that puts the crisis itself in crisis (by highlighting only the consequences, one can see a new and more ruthless transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich of the world, making it possible to disappear even the middle class worldwide; for under the logic of acquired debts, whether at the individual or national level, the whole world is facing an economic drain unprecedented in world history: in 2020 alone, the global unemployment rate exceeded the rates of the “great depression”, the product of a worldwide bankruptcy at all levels, for the exclusive benefit of transnationals and gigabanks, causing the debt to reach, in that year alone, 23 trillion dollars, bringing the global debt to 282 trillion, that is, 355% above the world’s GDP. This means that the world is leveraged three times over its own production, with no hope of a quick economic recovery, since production itself (and also services) are, in many countries, paralyzed; the “pandemic” continuity will only provoke new tax burdens on already unbalanced economies; for the global “economic health” to recover and not be “contaminated” with defaults, the health of the world’s population will be sacrificed.

A world does not enter into crisis by itself but because the collapse of its vital principles is what unleashes the loss of all the basic references of its own systemic consistency. If capitalism needs crises to accelerate its own dynamics of dispossession and destruction -known as development- what does it mean that we are in crisis, when the crisis has become a way of life? (Source)

I spoke with a 74 year old in a parking lot at our local food co-op. The Subaru still had that “Biden” bumper sticker, right near the exhaust pipe (man, the image of Joe Biden and Donald Trump next a spewing exhaust pipe and hot catalytic converter just don’t go away). I asked the lady why, after saying hello, with all that Biden has proven to any leftist who voted for him that Biden is as a bad a demented hombre as the rest, she would still have the insipid bumper sticker plastered on the old station wagon. She said it was her spouse’s car, that it was his idea. She and I talked about forest issues, how bad the Oregon state is, like a Florida transplant, Jew or Goy, with a hundred cancers removed from the face. She was disheartened, but felt she still had to have hope, citing Winona LaDuke. Citing the concept that we old timers have to fight and we will lose and lose, but it is for the lesson, the under girder to build momentum for younger and younger generations.

I emphasized that usually, a discussion, or my comment face to face with someone about a Trump or Biden bumper sticker, would illicit stupidity, either from a logger or from some ex-hippie or neoliberal liberal, to the point of most definitely bringing up Trump or Obama in their argument — “At least he isn’t Trump/Obama.”

That is the most meaningless statement yet, from so-called liberals, “anything is better than Trump.” There are of course hundreds of like sayings coming from the mouths of hard-core democratic party adherents. The so-called ex-hippies are the worst of the lot.

WINONA LADUKE: You know, this is a new pipeline project going in, but they’re crossing like 69 rivers, and 22 of them with this thing called the HDD, which is a super phallic, horrible drill system, the high direction drill — horizontal direction drill. And so, what happens is that they’re drilling like underneath the rivers, and they hit an aquifer, and they shoot out into — or they hit a seam that shoots out into the river, in some spring that they didn’t know about, and all of a sudden you’ve got a bunch of, like, toxic bentonite, all kind of crazy stuff at the bottom of the river.

And, you know, the thing is, is like the Shell River is a pristine river, crossed five times by Enbridge, hit by industrial agriculture like R.D. Offutt. And it has the largest mussel population in the Upper Mississippi River. It has this huge and beautiful mussel river, hence the name Shell River. And those guys don’t last through frac-outs, you know? Just the Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of Interior, you know, all of these agencies are looking aside as Biden seems to approve the tar sands pipeline. And you can’t do both.

WINONA LADUKE: Yeah, sadly, Deb Haaland has not stepped up on this. And the Biden administration certainly has chained her to their position. You know, it’s tragic. You know, there’s no federal environmental impact statement on this project. It wouldn’t pass the climate test. It’s exactly — it’s even bigger than Keystone. So, if Keystone wouldn’t pass the climate test, why would this pipeline pass the climate test, let alone the water impact? This is a fifth of the world’s water. Enbridge is in the middle of the water wealth of our territory, you know, the heartland of the water. And the Army Corps of Engineers and Department of Interior, no agency has stepped up to protect the waters of the people of Minnesota, the Anishinaabe, trust responsibility, nor any of the waters of this territory.

And, you know, it’s so disappointing that the Biden administration is throwing Indigenous people under the bus, the water under the bus — you know, there’s no new water — and that everybody is tolerating more and more arrests, as if, you know, that’s how it goes these days — we just keep arresting people because we think our project’s a great thing. You know, I’m so disappointed in the Biden administration, in Deb Haaland, you know, in every agency. I’m so disappointed that they are destroying our planet so a Canadian multinational can make a buck at the end of the tar sands era. (Source)

I was asked to appear on What’s Left?, a podcast put on by three fellows, all identifying as socialist, and all concerned about the shut down of critical thinking, alternative narratives and questioning. In many cases, What’s Left? could be questioning the scientism of today’s Corona Craziness, and then looking at the madness of the Lockdowns, and then for sure looking at the censoring of medical treatments — life saving ones — by mass media, left media and by so-called leftists.

A great idea turned into a regular twice-a-month discourse with a guest and these three dudes — Eduardo, Kenny and Andy.

Here, recent shows:

• JUL 17, 2021 — Biden’s Sleight of Hand in Afghanistan
• JUL 10, 2021 — Abolish the Police! I Mean, Defund the Police! Never mind, Fund the Police!
• JUL 3, 2021 — Haeder’s Reimagining Sanity – Batty Bioweapons, 5G, Star Wars
• JUN 26, 2021 — The Lowdown on Higher Ed
• JUN 19, 2021 — Secret Societies and the New World Order
• JUN 13, 2021 — What is the New World Order?

Even Kenny was interviewed a while back on the show — What’s Left? interviews Kenny Zepeda on his journey from Guatemala to the United States and from liberal reformist to socialist revolutionary. Previous What’s Left? Episodes Kenny on revolts in Chile and Latin America Kenny on Climate Change Nicaragua and Fake Socialism What’s Left? Kenny Z.: The Revolutionary Road

Their first episodes dealt with myriad of issues — beginning August 2018

• Sacrificing Everything for Nike
• Prison Strike 2018!
• Interview with a Pro-Capitalist Anarchist
• What’s Left of Abortion Rights?
• Is the U.S. Turning to Fascism?

As teachers, Andy & Eduardo have been dealing with lockdowns and Zoom doom rooms for educating (sic) youth. They are dealing with fellow teachers who have taken the Covid-19 pill that has turned them into Covidians.

They are concerned about the censorship of leftists who might question the bioweapon theories, or promulgate them, citing USA DARPA and other nefarious actors in higher ed, industry, etc.

The Jab, Star Wars, and the Bubble Net of Digital Gulags

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

That was May 22, 2021. The episode was great, far-ranging and with my own brand of frenetic fervor, and, alas, it was taken down from YouTube:

“Pulled from YouTube”: Mantra of Our Age by Paul Haeder / July 13th, 2021

I am of the opinion that people have the right to decide whether to accept vaccines or not, especially since these are experimental vaccines … My concern is I know there are risks but we don’t have access to the data … We don’t really have the information we need to make a reasonable decision.

— Dr. Robert Malone, “Inventor of mRNA Interviewed About Injection Dangers“

Now, I will give readers the entire interview I did with them, via email, here, to give the reader a decent look at three very different men and their narratives, their avocations, their work now, and what makes them tick as socialists-Marxists.

They have moved into the Fourth Industrial Revolution to what is a new world order?

For me, I was asked to handle the ungainly topics of DCovid-19 as a bioweaponized monster, possibly put into the world intentionally by USA, and then 5G and 6G, what that means to public and environmental health, and then tying in the militarization of space as part and parcel part of the pogrom.

Now, I believe Andy at first gravitated to me because I am an unapologetic communist, and that is a refined term in some sense since I’m not espousing a communism that has been bastardized by USA, by the media, even by some history.

Tolerance is another buzzword, and for all those gigs I worked where I questioned the management, the deans, the presidents, provosts, the managers, the editors, et al, well, this country is propaganda central, wink and a nod, smoke and mirrors, and triangulating those who doubt the goals of management and the leadership — triangulating us out of the discussion, the discourse, hence, the death of critical debate/thinking/questioning.

Now, I don’t see on What’s Left?, 163 episodes, a deep look at some of these shenanigans, in the world, and not just Rogue State USA. Israel.

That in a nutshell is the death knell:

Here, a far-ranging discussion on Israel and on the Covid program:

Listen to  Julianne Romanello, Gilad Atzmon, and Jason Bosch go deep into “ideological and spiritual thoughts that have turned our world into an open air prison.” This sort of show, well, scrubbed, and right along the lines of looking at this concept of “chosenness, and then at the work of Leo Strauss, Athens & Jerusalem, Noahide fundamentals, the origin of Zionism and many other crucial topics most intellectuals insist to avoid…”

These are the times, but they were the times for me a long time ago, when I was 13, questioning cruise ships knocking over coral reefs, or bulldozers destroying the Sonora, or the Vietnam War narratives, and it just continued every place I ended up as a worker: the people “in power” are lunatics, for the most part. On one level, sure, let’s do some trauma informed care, but in the end, this society’s underbelly  — USA, Canada, UK, Europe and Australia — has to be questioned!

Education, since all of us are educators, that is, with the What’s Left? reference, is amazingly entrenched in indoctrination and deadening of critical thinking:

Check out an interview of Andy on Left Lockdown Skeptics — “Fighting lockdown in California: A US teacher speaks”

Q & A for Paul Haeder

Paul Haeder: What is “What’s Left?” and how did it come about?

Eduardo: Oh golly… I think, for me, it started back in 2017 in the aftermath of the “Unite the Right rally” in Charlottesville as I was attempting to politically make sense of the times and debate a childhood friend of mine on a public social platform. I had watched many Oxford debates before and wanted to do something similar. I really thought my friendship was on the line. Fortunately, Andy had come along at that time and shared with me he was interested in taking our own café political discussions online. So, we had a long conversation about the idea of “What’s Left?” and it’s intention. Something we both agreed on early on was to have open, honest discussions about our personal politics and ideas. We wanted to create a space for alternative points of view that challenged the mainstream Left. We had noticed there was a growing tribalistic way of thinking on the Left that seemed to cancel all deviant political discourse. Hence, “What’s Left?” came into being.

Andy: Eduardo and I started “What’s Left?” 3 years ago.  For me, I had been politically frustrated at not having an outlet for discussing my own political ideas and thoughts that came up as events happened.  At the same time, I watched YouTube channels on groups of friends who would get together and review movies or video games.  They seemed to have fun doing that and I approached Eduardo about trying to do the same thing but with politics.  I have always enjoyed talking with Eduardo and I trusted him to be passionate and honest about his beliefs (just as I was trying to be).  It has been both rewarding and fun despite YouTube’s censorship nonsense.

Kenny: I joined the show a couple years ago. I first joined Andy and Eduardo in a conversation about the events unfolding in Nicaragua in 2018. From then on, I participated as an occasional contributor regarding Latin America related topics until I was approached to contribute on a weekly basis.

PH: “What’s Left?” is composed of three hosts. Can each of you share your background?

Kenny: I’ve been a restaurant worker and a manager at a small mom and pop restaurant in San Francisco, CA. most of my working age life. I grew up in Guatemala until the age of 12 when we emigrated to California. Much of what has informed my road to Marxism has to do with lived experiences such as migration from Guatemala to the U.S. A , my father’s dealing with immigration and eventual  deportation, attending public school in San Francisco, entering and dropping out of UC Berkeley, growing up around sex work, growing up in a U.S. backed military dictatorship in Guatemala among other things. The search for answers that actually make sense has shaped my life and led me to Marxism.

Eduardo: I was a “cross cultural kid” having lived in México with all of my tías/tíos, abuelitos and primos, then as I got older went to public school in San Francisco, CA. I would study in San Francisco then spend my rather long summers back home. It was an atypical Latino experience of back and forth. I cannot say I had the common undocumented Latino experience for most families in the USA. I mean most families are not crossing the border over skies multiple times a year. So, it shapes one in a way. But I would say my 18 years as a Jehovah’s Witness had the most impact in my life. I would read forbidden literature late into the wee hours, be curious of all things deprived of me and learned never to trust ANY person, organization or ideology claiming to be the “right way.” I will say it fulfilled my desire to be of service to others. It was just an awful sort of service of conversion. Although, I did teach many illiterate people how to read over that time. I found another way to fulfill that void when I witnessed the massive anti-war protests of 2003 and joined the school walkouts. From there it was joining many Lefty movements and campaigns, such as supporting progressive candidates. I think my skills as an organizer and activist of rallies and protests, though, were sharpened by Occupy Wall Street and protests against GMO companies. Those experiences have influenced the way I think and do things. If I had to label myself, I would say I am anarchist-leaning-syndicalist-Leftist-libertarian. If you have an issue with that mouthful, too bad.

Andy: I am a school teacher in San Francisco (who lives in Oakland).  I have been teaching science (physics and chemistry) for over 20 years.  I have been a Marxist for that long as well.  I have been in socialist organizations and active in my union over that time.  Currently, while still active in my union, I am pretty much a solo communist trying to find a political community to work with.  “What’s Left?” has been a big part of rebuilding that community.

PH: What for you are some of the more compelling topics and issues you all have covered?

Andy: I think the one episode that stands out for me is our interviews with Eric Lerner (part 1 and part 2) challenging the notion of the Big Bang as a theory that explains our current universe.  This was such a surprising issue for me and uprooted a core premise of my beliefs in an area that caught me completely off guard.  At the same time, it explained the nagging sense I had that there was some real problems with these things like dark matter and dark energy.  So these episodes, for me, symbolize the way my world has been continually shifted and uprooted as I take this political journey with Eduardo and Kenny.  It also symbolizes my attempt to use truth as my North Star, not ideology.

Eduardo: Oh there are so many. But I think I’ll go with what has recently changed me in many ways. The topics around the Internet of Things with Alison McDowell, and, what I call “my COVID journey”, the reopening schools debate as well as the vaccines. It’s been a rollercoaster and re-traumatising being rejected and attacked on a personal level from friends on the Left who disagree with everything we have recently discussed. I also realize we have to discuss unpopular topics or say more than “We oppose Trump!”.

Kenny: For me, the show has been instrumental in processing and dissecting a number of topics, but most especially everything related to the pandemic. I’ve been particularly captivated by the fast encroachment of tech into our lives and the implications it will have for dissenting working class voices.

PH: What topics would you like to cover in the future on “What’s Left?”

Kenny: I’d love to continue covering relevant topics to fellow workers, in ways that are accessible and not elitist, in the hopes that we can spark interest in thinking outside the parameters chosen by our ruling class. I would definitely love to continue tracking the implementation of the techno-fascist world being built in the name of social justice with rhetoric of inclusion. I’d love to continue processing the implications of current events outside the mainstream manufactured narratives.

Andy: “What’s Left?” has really been a labor of love, and we have pretty much been able to interview the people and cover the subjects we want. I would say that I hope that it can increasingly become a locus of organizing for me as I try to build a community of parents, teachers, activists and even students who are prepared to join me in fighting the implementation of the 4th industrial revolution in education. I also look forward to the day when Kenny

Eduardo: We have to continue covering on-the-ground worker’s experience and any significant mobilization. However, if it’s slow and there isn’t much going on currently, I’d like to delve into more labor history and revolutions. Hopefully that will inspire more workers to organize.

PH: Your channel has experienced a lot of censorship with YouTube taking many of your videos down and threatening you with “community strikes”. How has this affected your channel? How has it affected you personally?

Eduardo: The ruthless censorship of YouTube and big social media platforms is outrageous. I don’t understand how we can criticize China and North Korea for their censorship when we have it going on here as well. The recent strikes on our channel have been eye-opening. I just don’t get why it hasn’t been for others. I wish our channel could reach more people. Unfortunately, we started at a time when the play of algorithms has been used against us. On a personal level, sometimes it feels discouraging because I imagined we would reach more people. Andy and I discussed from the beginning, though, that our intention wasn’t to gain “followers” or “subscribers” for popularity contests. I just hope our political conversations reach more folks as we see people really relieved to have found us when they write to us on our blog. They feel connected and not so alone anymore.

Kenny: I suspect that regardless if we are straight up taken down, the algorithm gods will manage our content’s diffusion. In my perspective, this is only the beginning of the even more dystopian doctored sense of ‘reality”. YouTube’s censorship hasn’t affected me personally in any significant way. At least not now. I expected it in some form or another. It does shed some light into the fast approaching dystopian future. The censorship and political isolation in my community is another story.

Andy: YouTube’s censorship is bullshit. It has definitely been a disruption to getting our message out on YouTube, but from what I understand, even without the censorship, YouTube’s ‘algorithm’ has kept our channel in check. But, I think one good thing about it (if you can call it that) is that it has forced me to really challenge my beliefs in pushing me to speak my beliefs in the face of censorship or isolation. Of course, I want our channel to be seen by more people, but not at the expense of us staying true to our vision of “What’s Left?” is a place where people can speak honestly. So, I am going to stick with honesty and let YouTube decide for themselves if we can do so there. If not, I am content with the idea that we will find other places to have our discussions.

 PH:  Given the sort of culling of discussion and debate and information flow back and forth being by the elites, What would you tell students who might ask you why all the websites and podcasts and videos are coming down.

Andy: As a teacher, my political focus has always been on organizing and talking with other adults (co-workers and parents). The best way to help students organize is to be a model for them in my pursuit of getting us adults to wage a fight for our collective liberation. I have found this road a difficult one, but I do not think I can teach my students anything about the fight for our own liberation unless I engage in that pursuit with my fellow workers right now. I do talk with students who ask me about my beliefs but I rarely use the classroom as a vehicle for getting my politics out there, although I will facilitate discussions when they come up to see what students’ ideas are.

Eduardo: I think there are enough great episodes from Black Mirror to ease the conversation into the idea that we are increasingly approaching a dystopian future if we don’t organize to intervene. From there, I would share and facilitate discussions around the culling of our political freedom of speech. But I think it goes beyond the classroom. So many educators want to contain or effect change within the confines of the classroom. We have to organize together alongside them to create the change we want to see.

Kenny: I’m not a teacher/educator. I’ll sit this one out.

PH: If you were stuck with a stranger on an elevator and could only talk briefly, how would you describe the core of your political beliefs?

Kenny: I’m highly suspicious of power and strongly believe in the power of community. I think capitalism rewards antisocial behavior and it’s inherently coercive. Capitalism cannot be contained  with legislative reform as advocated by liberal ideology. I think we live in a world technologically capable of sustaining organized human life and only a socialist revolution can and must take over the wealth workers create for the good of the masses and away from the truly privileged few. Capitalism, through its inherent violent and competitive nature, cannot bring about a world of peace and abundance for the masses. Only a revolution that suppresses wage slavery and other coercive and destructive mechanisms of capitalism can change the course of the cataclysm ahead of us. The profit motive must be obliterated out of production. What we produce must serve life, NOT  profit.

Andy: I am a Communist. I believe the collective working class is the only force that can make a revolutionary change of our current system, Capitalism. Capitalism is the organized theft of our labor by a minority and is at the root of virtually all the problems we see in society today, war, racism, sexism, environmental destruction and the deep isolation and alienation all workers feel. The only way out of this is a socialist revolution that eliminates the profit motive for production and establishes  worker’s rule through mass working class democracy.

Eduardo: I am an anarchist-syndicalist-Leftist-libertarian-anti-capitalist. I don’t claim to have the answers. I don’t know what is the best approach. I am skeptical of many things. But what I do know is that the current system that we are living in isn’t working for us. It’s detrimental and we are going to suffer greatly if we don’t put a stop to this system. I believe we have to organize as workers and see that the Leftist identity politics isn’t getting us anywhere. We can’t be shutting down or shutting out other people because of their political positions. We have to challenge them and we have to continue sorting it out together… but by working together.

PH: Are you a pacifist, and if so, why, and if not, then what, and why?

Eduardo: I want to say yes. I dream of a world where our revolution could be achieved in such a way. Unfortunately, I am struggling seeing how that could become possible. The capitalist class and all people with power have waged violence on us. They have started this fight and are willing to massively destroy us if we don’t defend ourselves. I still have a lot of conflicting feelings over this topic.

Kenny: “For the oppressor, peace is the absence of a response to their violence.” I think history has been sanitized to make us believe fundamental change arrives through Disneyfied  slogans and appealing to the morality of the oppressor. Capitalism is inherently violent, and it attempts to have a monopoly of violence in the hands of the police/military  and other coercive institutions. If we pretend to rattle the cage of power, we have to be ready to respond to the unleashing of the institutions built to protect a violent system. We have to be able to contend with their monopoly of violence. My mother taught me to exhaust all the means necessary to avoid violence, but she also taught me some abusers can only be pushed out of the way by punching them in the face when you must.

Andy: No. I believe we will ultimately need to be armed to liberate ourselves from Capitalism. A class war will be necessary and I do believe violence has a role in workers’ experience of liberation (such as anti-colonial struggles or anti-occupation resistance).  We live in a system where two great classes are in opposition to each other (Capitalist and Worker), and we live under their violent boot every second of every day that Capitalism exists.  This system will require violence to uproot it.  The better we are organized, the less violence required, but we must recognize our struggle as a war if we are to understand both the stakes and the seriousness of the struggle we are engaged in.

PH: Where do you see the world in 20 years?

Andy: I believe in the possibility of working class revolution, but currently I don’t believe we will make it happen in time.  I think Capitalism is headed to its 3rd global war which will embroil China, United States, Russia, Europe, and India as the major players in a life and death struggle to see who will control the globe (and secure maximum profits, resources and markets for itself).  Unless stopped (and I believe working class revolution is the only way to stop this inevitability), we will have a war that will go nuclear and kill billions and likely destroy the world enough to push all of us back into feudal existence at best.  I think some of the sci-fi depictions we see in “The Road” or “Mad Max” are pretty good descriptors of where things are headed.  That’s what I see for us in the next 20 years unless we do something to stop it.

Kenny: I think we need a global workers socialist revolution with the most decisive battle happening in the economic north. The U.S., the world’s dominant hegemon,  is being challenged and will continue to be challenged as it overextends itself. All empires suffer a violent end. The U.S. threatens to bring the entirety of organized human life down with it. Cooperation in capitalism is only a tenuous illusion. The illusion of cooperation will be exposed as the major powers come into a competitive clash under the pressures of dwindling resources and markets.

Eduardo: It’s unfortunate that I don’t think the world will get any better if we don’t do something about it now. My view is quite grim. Alison McDowell has been on our show many times and has shown us how fast the fourth industrial revolution is accelerating. I fear we are losing a part of ourselves, our humanity. But I think we each have to continue this lucha one step at a time.

PH: Define what it means to be a human?

Eduardo: To be human is to be of service, to think, to understand we are linked and interconnected. In the USA there is a strong selfish individualistic culture. Where I am from people live together communally as families and neighbors for years, if not forever. I fear we have lost that in many ways here. I think we can only come to an understanding by building those long-term relationships to understand such values as compassion, care and love beyond our immediate selves.

Andy: Being human means being free to both express yourself, be yourself and through that find out who you truly are.  But humans are social, so society must be free to have free associations so that a community can likewise be free to find and express itself through the free participation of its individual members.  At the root of being human is being free to be yourself and free to associate with whomever best fits your true self.

Kenny: Being human is the ability to understand processes beyond our individual survival. Being human is the ability to understand how our destinies are inter-connected  with other life forms. Being human is the recognition that we are social beings and that our individual well being rests on the well being of our communities and our environment both locally and globally.

PH: What does community mean to you?

Kenny: Community is a pillar of humanity.

Eduardo: Bees come to mind. I mean I can think of many animal examples we could admire for their systems of communities. We can be more than that. I think we would not allow much of what is happening, such as the destruction of our environment, the occupation of lands and other profit-driven acts if we felt that pull and tie to one another. If we work together, if we think of all our comrades/companions, we would build a stronger and brighter future.

Andy: A community is a set of people I trust enough to be my true self with.  A community is a collection of people who make worthwhile the sacrifice of my time and abilities to make that community stronger and more able to bring the best out of all of its members.  A true community celebrates and strengthens its individual members and is strengthened and celebrated by the individuals who compose it.

PH: What have been some of your biggest influencers in your life to have gotten you where you are now? And, exactly where are you now?

Andy: Politically, my development as a Marxist who tries to blend my ideas (theory) with practice, I would say my friend, Brian Belknap, has been the most significant influence.  Personally, there are many people I could cite, but I think I would put my decision to engage in counseling over the last 15 years as the most significant decision to help me integrate my current self with my past self and integrate my political self with my personal self.  In terms of historical political influences, I would put the major ones as Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Rosa Luxemburg as the biggest influences who help me orient myself as I try to make my way in the confusing journey of trying to change the world.

Kenny: My mother has always advocated for the marginalized by putting her well being in harms ways. She influenced me by showing up for others and for justice. My mother inspired me to speak against inhumane and despicable acts and to side with the weak and abused while advocating for myself. Even though she never engages in theory, my mother has always been a communist in practice. A passionate enemy of maliciousness.

Eduardo: Oh so many… Noam Chomsky helped me make sense of world politics. How wars, greed and power trips make these empires run the world. Christopher Hitchens gave me a way to leave my former Jehovah’s Witness life. Subcomandante Marcos, from the Zapatista movement, was an inspiration early on and provided the hope that class/native action can happen. Though small, they have achieved something that you won’t find anywhere in the USA. I think these are the top three figures that have paved the way for me.

Note from Andy: We’d like to thank Paul Haeder for the opportunity to share our story and our thoughts on Dissident Voice.  If you like what we have to say and want to talk to us on “What’s Left?” feel free to contact us at:  https://what-s-left.webnode.com/contact/

Without promotion, something terrible happens — nothing: P.T. Barnum

I talk about this a lot — the valuelessness of celebrity culture, and how rampant that disease is with corporate TV, corporate news (sic), corporate music, corporate sports, corporate entertainment in general, movies specifically. But ‘celebrity culture’ is also part and parcel the Media valorizing war criminals, left and right, and that’s not just a coke head Bush and his paint by numbers shit, or Kissinger giving Clintons a greasy kiss. Not just all the former heads of CIA, FBI, DNC, Republican Party, or x, y and z human stain who has broken the law, big time or little Eichmann like. It includes putting on pedestals the millionaires, the tech-triumphalists, anyone with a bank or company or two bits of nonsense focused on “Wall Street or Big This or Big That” wisdom (sic) in the realm of the next and the next big thing.

Back to the old adage, Gandhi, who was not perfect, no god, for sure, but, simple stuff here:

Wealth Without Work

Pleasure Without Conscience

Knowledge Without Character

Commerce (Business) Without Morality (Ethics)

Science Without Humanity

Religion Without Sacrifice

Politics Without Principle

And so it goes — the way of Facebook, Google, CGI, 80 solid years of professional marketing propagandists working with psychologists who have been working with military psy-op specialists, working with big PR firms, all the alphabet soup groups in the USA government, all those think tanks, and universities, plying their trades of pulling the next and the next big lie off, and smoke and mirrors. Neuro science mixed in with pharmacy, media, behaviorism, Pavlov, and the entire Suite of manipulations the average person succumbs to in daily life at work, at play, in school, in church, in the super store, everywhere!

Until we are here — 66% of Republicans in southern US & nearly half of West Coast Democrats want to secede from country as division grows

And does anyone want to go back to my thousands of articles and pull out the major top 100, or even 20 issues of our age and the future that we have to tackle, solve, mitigate and prepare for, yet, this is the great United Snakes of America, floundering, and the divide and conquer anthem set down by the manipulators of the world in order to spread the wealth to more and more elites, which means fewer and fewer real global Homo Sapiens.

Juxtapose that with the ultimate cruise, now, costing up to $1.2 million for a suite as part of this disgusting reality of a world gone mad — a “big trip” can also be a “big splurge.” Itineraries and prices for world cruises vary widely although the Viking Ultimate World Cruise is competitively priced, starting at $92,990 per person (a little over $379 a day). Luxury cruise company Six Star Cruises just announced one of the world’s most expensive cruise packages: a 123-day voyage across 11 countries that features overnight stays in some of the world’s most luxurious hotels, helicopter transfers, and first-class flights. The package costs a whopping $1.2 million (£1 million) per couple. To put that into perspective, that’s almost $10,000 a day.

And there are no pitchforks, no vats of hot glue or tar, no barrels of porcupine quills or feathers at every dock and corner at the ready for when these these sub-humans show their faces in public? This is what capitalism does — it numbs the collective brains of consumers, citizen zombies, the downtrodden, the sucker is born every second fool who valorizes this shit when it should be patently made illegal! But capitalism means ANYTHING is legal (again, a thousand stories of a million rip offs and forms of murder and theft and perversions and enslavement vis-a-vis capitalism), and we are in an era where fucks are fighting for their right to have “Fuck You” on their vanity car license plates, while these same fucks are fucking having fits over a soccer player kneeling, or what have you.

Then you have this capitlaist, lying untalented fool, yammering more of the CIA-Mainstream Muck lies about Cuba — fucking looney, that she would get airtime:

This is full of lies, yet this idiot gets Estefan air time: “The Cuban-born pop star wrote an impassioned plea in both English and Spanish alongside a video showing demonstrators taking to the streets in Cuba. Some of the video clips show people getting arrested by police and other acts of violence.

“My heart hurts for the Cuban people on the island & what they’ve already gone through for over 62 years. … But now they are saying ENOUGH,” the singer wrote. “Despite the beatings, the murders & incarcerations, the abuses of power, the starvation & the attempted destruction of their spirits! They need our support & that of the democratic & free countries of the world.”

The reality is so far from these millionaires’ insipid propaganda leaks. They need adult diapers for the feces they leave behind.

Here, truth —

Confronting Interference, for an End to the Blockade and Respect for Cuba’s Sovereignty

We address Parliaments, Parliamentary Friendship Groups and legislators, to spread our truth in the face of the immense and brutal political-media operation against Cuba, oriented and financed from the United States, deployed through social networks, with automated patterns with hundreds of thousands of tweets and a similar number of followers, with the intensive use of robots, algorithms, and newly created accounts for the occasion; all with the support of international media and transnational information companies.

They have incited violence, crime, disorder and social indiscipline, while totally and scandalously misrepresenting to the world our reality as part of the Unconventional Warfare oriented and financed from the United States against our country, to achieve a change in the system that freely and sovereignly elected our people, as endorsed by the Constitution approved on April 10, 2019 by 86.85% of those who exercised the vote, in a democratic election and with broad popular participation.

With absolute shamelessness, they have spread around the planet manipulated images of events that have occurred in other countries in order to reinforce, as their manuals demand, that there is no governability in Cuba, that there is national chaos, at the same time that they spread news of an internal repression that does not exist.

I just finished the Paul McCartney thing, McCarthy 3, 2, 1. Cute, in a geriatric way. Rick Rubin and Paul do some insipid reminiscing. All fine and dandy, sure. On one level, in a few activated parts of my brain, but the other parts of my brain? Yep, can’t sit still.

Sure, I am 64, Paul is 80, and well, he is worth $1.2 billion. Even Yoko Ono is worth over $700 million. Again, we spend so much time on these people, with their faltering lives, their big bangs in pop culture, all of that, all a money train straight to the elite, the few, the minority few. Again, there is no relevance in who they are, when it comes to attempting to be voices for US, the simple intellects, workers, fighters, revolutionaries, and those just struggling to make $2.5 dollars a day.

Paul did say the best concert he ever saw was in Nigeria…. That he wept at the concert — That is, he was 50 years ago watching and listening to Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti, who was a Nigerian multi-instrumentalist, bandleader, composer, political activist, and Pan-Africanist. He is regarded as the pioneer of Afrobeat, an African music genre that combines traditional Yoruba with funk and jazz.

Look at this man. He outshines any of the white rockers, and that seems to be the case with Black musicians, Africans, Afro-Caribbeans, African-American, any of them:

So, being a communist, a revolutionary, a radical, an outcast, sure, I enjoy those silent moments, music being one, a universal connector, yes. But when you think of the money stuffed into these celebrities’ pockets, and then their managers’ brief cases, then their publicists’ bank accounts, and the record companies’ coffers, this is what has destroyed the world, really — watching people make music when we all can make music, art, dance, drama, literature. And then, they come off as spokespersons for the world. Estefan? A fool, uninformed, stupid and a tool of those thugs in Florida.

More tripe — Biden and Republicans!

“We stand with the Cuban people and their clarion call for freedom and relief from the tragic grip of the pandemic and from the decades of repression and economic suffering to which they have been subjected by Cuba’s authoritarian regime,” read a statement from the White House. “The Cuban people are bravely asserting fundamental and universal rights…The United States calls on the Cuban regime to hear their people and serve their needs at this vital moment rather than enriching themselves,” it added.

But even this unqualified support for the demonstrations was not enough for many in the Republican Party, who presented President Biden as a secret communist sympathizer. Mayor of Miami Francis Suarez demanded that the United States intervene militarily, telling Fox News that the U.S. should put together a “coalition of potential military action in Cuba.” Meanwhile, Florida Congressman Anthony Sabbatini called for regime change on the island and demanded that the U.S. execute the communist leadership.

The explicit goal of the American blockade — active since 1960 — is to “decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and [the] overthrow of [the] government,” in the words of then-Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Lester D. Mallory.

“The U.S. has overtly and continuously said that the goal of the embargo is to destroy Cuba’s economy so that the government will collapse. So it’s not just reasonable, it’s obvious that the U.S. has some kind of hand in this,” Professor Aviva Chomsky, of Salem State University and author of “A History of the Cuban Revolution,” told MintPress.

Any sane person can go to one of hundreds of news (sic) aggregator sites, and pick up on limitless hubris, misinformation, fake news, and just a snap-shot of the deformed thinking and perverse actions of people tied to war-capitalism, tied to the sinking ship of fools that is USA Empire.

Fun stuff for me is a bloke living in New Zealand wrote me and thanked me for my writing, and, well, we have had a back and forth email thing. I won’t divelge who he is, but in a nutshell, he is 64, like me, and had had his days in LA, in Idaho, and Germany and other places. He’s brewing beer in NZ. He offered to have me come over and throw in on rehabilitating his 110 year old building for his brew-pub.

Around ’82 or so I was in a book store, Book Soup, on Sunset Blvd. with my girlfriend – and soon to be first wife – VM. I saw a book with a cool looking military jet (SR-71) on the cover and it got my attention. Don’t judge a book by …. you know.

It was “Deterring Democracy”. I had by chance discovered Noam Chomsky.

Deeper I fell into what was becoming a passion for learning about man’s inhumanity to man – and to women.

I realize now that this has been going for over 40 years! I’m 64 now. Time flies!

Hey this is just a flow of stuff and I am not a writer so you’re on your own as far as this rant making any sense.

Anyway the reading led me to stumble on sites like Counterpunch a few years back. Finding a mistake in one of his articles I contacted Jeffrey St. Clair and started a brief dialogue with him. On a road trip through Oregon I had planned to stop by and say hi but, you know how things go sometimes… No time for side trips on that journey.

A lot of the stuff I found at Counterpoint resonated with me and just made me search for more and eventually I built this big list of bookmarks. Dissident Voice is one I hold in high regard. I had a great idea during lockdown about a “Peoples Great Reset”. I contacted Colin Todhunter and discussed briefly my idea with him. Nice guy that Colin. He encouraged me to go forward. Of course as usual, life got in the way and I got busy making a living and the moment slipped by. Every idea has its’ moment and they don’t always occur at the perfect time.

That’s not too big a deal because when I encounter issues that burn in me and build concern enough for me to act, I usually can just wait a day or three and keep my eyes open while reading, and someone somewhere will feel the same way and will do something about it. The pressure diminishes when I find others are just as exercised as I am. Go figure.

I don’t recall where I ran across your work but it was a while ago and I liked the flow.. Then later, I saw something you wrote about signs on peoples lawns during election time in the  Trump days and how polarized things were getting in the Northwest. A car was damaged I think? That sound familiar? I also found one of yours about getting the land for Dodger stadium and the people living in Chaves Ravine. That’s the one I sent to my brother in law. Was that you?

A Flag; a Violent MAGA Family; a Brick through the Window!

No, no si se puede, hombres: That’s how the cookie crumbles!

Colonial Mentality

By Fela Kuti

Colo-mentality
He be say you be colonial man
You don be slave man before
Them don release you now
But you never release yourself
I say you fit never release yourself
Colo-mentality
He be say you be colonial man
You don be slave man before
Them don release you now
But you never release yourself
He be so
He be so them dey do, them dey overdo
All the things them dey do (He be so!)
He be so them dey do, them think dey say
Them better pass them brothers
No be so? (He be so!)
The thing wey black no good
Na foreign things them dey like
No be so? (He be so!)
Them go turn air condition
And close them country away
No be so? (He be so!)
Them Judge him go put white wig
And jail him brothers away
No be so? (He be so!)
Them go proud of them name
And put them slave name for head
No be so? (He be so!)
Colo-mentality now make you hear me now
Colo-mentality!
Mr. Ransome you make you hear
Mr. Williams you make you hear
Mr. Allia you make you hear
Mr. Mohammed you make you hear
Mr. Anglican you make you hear
Mr. Bishop you make you hear
Mr. Catholic you make you hear
Mr. Muslim you make you hear
Na Africa we dey o make you hear
Na Africa we dey o make you hear
Colo-mentality hear
Colo-mentality hear
Mr. Ransome you make you hear
Mr. Ransome you make you hear
Na Africa we dey o make you hear
Na Africa we dey o make you hear
Colo-mentality hear
Colo-mentality hear
Colo-mentality!

This is the “country” questioning Libya, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Palestine, African nations wanting democracy and socialism, Latin American countries, you name it, this is it!

Versus:

1) White multimillionaires working for billionaires who work for multibillionaires whose main objective is total control of all forms of human exchanges, from school, to family, from work to recreation, from medicine to nutrition, all of it, through their evil orifices.

What do we give the world now, those of us in the 80 percent in Western countries, 90 percent in other countries? Strong, single-doze Nazi eliminating cyanide capsule at the ready for the moment of voluntary (extinction)?

That’s where we are at — more and more people realizing there is no Bruce Willis or Arnold Schwarznegger or Wonder Woman or Batman to come to the rescue. And rescuing is what this entire world is in need of, but first, damn the rich, damn the banks, damn the militarists, damn the lawyers, damn the banks again, damn the hedge funds, damn the real estate folk, damn the insurance companies and damn the monopolies.

After a stint in the army, Knight started reading books about how overpopulation would imminently lead to food shortages and famine (a thesis soon disproved, of course, by the Third Agricultural Revolution). He joined a movement called Zero Population Growth, which wanted every couple to stop breeding after they’d had two children, and at 25 he secured himself a free vasectomy by letting a student doctor use him for practice. But eventually, Knight decided that simply limiting human population growth would never be enough: even a much smaller human population would continue to crowd and defile everywhere it occupied. And so, in the late 1980s, after settling in Portland, Oregon, Knight founded the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. “Our message is simple,” he claims, “we encourage people to stop procreating so the biosphere might return to its former glory, and everyone already here will be able to live life more abundantly.” (Source)

This is what Bill Gates, Kissinger, the Israeli Jews, World Economic Forum, and so many of the other elites, eugenicists, the Trumps or Bidens, Clintons or Obamas, want. Every leader at the Aspen Conference, all those Davos Dillingers, all the people on foreign affairs councils, this or that ancient or not-so-ancient lobby or group run by the Rockefellers, BlackRock, Blackstone, Goldman and Sachs, you name it, they want useless eaters, breeders and breathers gone. Ended. Taken out. Forever extinct!

But not gone before they can squeeze every last dime out of us, and our progeny and their progeny. We have these lunatics like Wyatt Earp going into space, we have more wealth made by billionaires during the planned pandemic than anyone in the mainstream could imagine. Faltering housing, fault lines in our infrastructure like Grand Canyons, food systems/farms drying up, no fuel for firefighting tankers, but plenty for Ships Ahoy, war games, endless container ships, endless DoD bullshit. Imagine, that is the Biden-Trump-Obama-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Reagan moment: a society, all the states, thousands of municipalities, on the ropes. All the huffing and puffing caused by capitalism.

Here is how it works — I just interviewed for two different jobs: housing case manager and family navigator. WOrking with housing insecure people in Oregon, in this rural county, in this place where the sea hits the sun and a shit-load of tourists, but no housing. All the STR’s (short term rentals) with dozens of folks partying in a three-day loves fest putting big time pressure on the communities septic and sewage and water and road systems. No housing, and alas, the job with the nonprofit is to work with people who qualify for Section 8 (HUD) housing, yet, well, no housing, waiting lists of three or more years, and a need growing and growing and growing. The other job is working with families/parents in the CPS system — child protective services. Helping them stay out of the cycle of losing children to foster care. Navigating.

We all need navigators in this cirrhosis society, daily –fined, triple taxed, repossessed, evicted, penalized, fees stacked up two stories, add-ons, tolls, service charges, tickets, court costs, and, well, so much more. Try getting through the medical system. Try getting through Social Security. Try getting a sty taken care of. Try getting the car serviced without being ripped off. Try just living in the PT Barnum world of everyone is a sucker, and everyone has a right to rip you off, buyer beware, too bad for granny losing her trailer to a scammer.

This is what those bastards want, and do I have to delineate who the bastards and pricks are?

• cops
• judges
• insurance companies
• hospitals
• schools
• anything military
• anything AI
• prison complex
• privatized everything
• the rule makers
• politicians
• the rich
• the wannabe rich
• the super rich
• dictators
• despots
• captains of industry
• captains of cartels
• royalty
• propagandists
• racists
• supremacists
• banks
• auto industry
• utilities
• fossil fuel companies
• chemical companies
• drug companies
• scientists without ethics
• wealth without work

These jobs, for me, 64 going on 65, are 18.00 an hour gigs, one is part-time, so no benefits, and, the other, well, 8 to 5, on my own, dealing with some really abused, desperate, end-of-their-rope people. But I am doing god’s work, so many say. Imagine that crock of shit.

I’m quickly penning this because I got a call from my daughter, who I have written about recently here and elsewhere. She is in Spokane, she has friends getting evicted or with rents going up. The fires around her city, in Washington State, tankers being grounded, and one big tanker out of commission for the Pacific Northwest. Imagine that, the Big Bold Credit Card Joe Biden, and his elites, the poison ivy leaguers, the bankers, the rich and those with family connections, bold people, lovers of capitalism, lovers of neoliberalism Imagine that, no food system security, no water delivery security, no medicine, no electricity security. It is a two bit Jerry Springer show on every level.

Hell, why not a postal employee? That too I have applied for, at, yes, $18.97 an hour. Working 50 hours some weeks, on call, flex, wherever needed. Yet, in the news, more small post offices in this county and in rural counties in Oregon, closing. Again, third world traveler, man.

I disagreed with many things my old man thought and did during 31 years in both AF and Army, enlisted and then officer. But, he was always for the USPS, always for free health care, always for free or near free higher education, always for unlimited and more in number libraries, and for systems in place to protect granny from being ripped off, by, well, hundreds of scammers. Throw the lock and key away for people like Trump and Biden, but, oh, when they become (sic) commander in chief, well, my father played that patriotic card. He was out and out against monopolies, and he came from German roots, farmers moved to South Dakota and Iowa. Turning in his grave, man: “Investigation shows scale of big food corporations’ market dominance and political power”

This is it, man, USA capitalism. No second, third, a dozen tankers in the ready? Oh, Bezos and Musk and Branson, all those space shots, all those container ships, all those military pieces of junk, all of it, that’s what we need, yet, our flimsy Trump-Biden world is littered with this shit. Trump, now in Florida, where the mayors of cities there want the USA to murder, bomb, invade, well, Cuba. Imagine that! To bit USA.

Yet, I’ll hear these shit-faces like Matt Taibbi or Glen Greenwald or any number of others citing Tucker Carlson as some sort of centerfold for freedom of the press. All the dead-end mainstream media they attack, sure, dead from the neck, but these fellows in the news and yammering on about who writes the news and parsing the news readers, they are again, Romans fiddling in their underwear while entire systems and fabrics of their own communities BURN.

I try to tell my daughter that, yes, I failed on the teaching perseverance front with her, and that she is wired differently, and that an empath is a very tough person to be. Every slight to humanity, or animals, she take personally. I did too, but I was a blazing journalist, educator and general muckrakers. For a 25 year old who despises the racist country, sees the disgusting ways of the rich, has to see one white man/white woman gain political power after another, she is not exactly in a great place to “compete tooth and nail, arm to arm, pistol against pistol, rip-off scheme after rip-off scheme” in this polluted society.

Now of course a large swath of people in USA laugh at these images below, and there is no hiding the fact that the Republican party is one sociopathic sick pukey party, and the democrats are major war mongers and capitalists. For how many generations have the white people laughed at civil rights movements, laughed at our Indian brothers and sisters being slaughtered, laughed at the slaves and children and great-great-great child of slaves. Business as usual!

World-renowned linguist and political dissident Noam Chomsky, in a public conversation we [Amy Goodman] had in April, we talked about climate change, nuclear weapons, North Korea, Iran, the war in Syria and the Trump administration’s threat to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. We also talked about Noam Chomsky’s new book, Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power. Hundreds of people packed into the First Parish Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for our public conversation.

Amy Goodman: I wanted to ask you about this comment that you made that the Republican Party, you said, is the most dangerous organization in world history. Can you explain?

Noam Chomsky: I also said that it’s an extremely outrageous statement. But the question is whether it’s true. I mean, has there ever been an organization in human history that is dedicated, with such commitment, to the destruction of organized human life on Earth? Not that I’m aware of. Is the Republican organization—I hesitate to call it a party—committed to that? Overwhelmingly. There isn’t even any question about it.

A couple of weeks ago —about a week into Trump’s term, the clock was moved again, to two-and-a-half minutes to midnight. That’s the closest it’s been since 1953. And that means extermination of the species is very much an—very much an open question. I don’t want to say it’s solely the impact of the Republican Party—obviously, that’s false—but they certainly are in the lead in openly advocating and working for destruction of the human species. I agree that’s a very outrageous statement. So I therefore simply suggest that you take a look at the facts and see if it has any merit or if it just should be bitterly condemned. That’s up to you. My view, the facts are pretty clear.

Listen to Hudson. This is the reality of this perverse economic system. Listen!

Hudson: You mentioned that financiers write the rules for their own benefit. These rules are called constitutions and bodies of law. Pro-financial laws have been the distinguishing feature of Western civilization since classical antiquity. That represented a sharp break from earlier Near Eastern practice. Greece and Rome didn’t have kings, at least after the kings were overthrown by Rome’s oligarchy early in its history. So the elites succeeded in blocking the tradition of Near Eastern monarchies cancelling personal debts and preventing an oligarchic financial class from emerging.

That is what makes Western civilization so different from everything that went before. Because without kings, without strong central government, or what the Greeks called tyrants, the oligarchy gained control, and managed democracy by a number of political tricks. Like the pro-boule in Athens, the Roman Senate could decide what the public assembly was allowed to discuss. Rome’s oligarchic constitution let everybody vote, but a rich landowner’s vote counted for hundreds of times more than the vote of most people. It was much like the United States today, where the donor class’s campaign contributions to U.S. politicians far overshadow what most voters want. The political rules in the United States reflect the donor class rather than democracy, just as in ancient Rome.

Jussi: Okay, then we take the other way around: What do neoclassical economists say the role of government is?

Hudson: To disappear and relinquish its power to the banks and the One Percent. The only role of government is to do what it did in Rome: to assassinate popular leaders who advocating cancelling the debts or redistributing the land. The role of the state for neoliberals is to protect the oligarchy from the people, to prevent real economic democracy and roll back everything that the 19th century was fighting for: creating a parliamentary democracy in order to free economies from the rentiers. You roll back reforms. Essentially they want neo-feudalism, so we don’t have to call it fascism. We can call it neo-feudalism. They want to put things the way they were back in the 12th century.

Jussi: Wow, it seems like it’s going backward, to say the least. So, what should the economy’s role be, according to classical economics?

Hudson: Well not only according to, but in reality. It should prevent rent seeking. The basic idea of an efficient economy is to minimize unearned income, because somebody has to pay this unearned income. If you have landlords charging whatever they want, if you have banks inflating the price of property – so that people have to pay in America up to 43 percent of their income for a government guaranteed mortgage – then you’re going to be priced out of the world market. So a good economy would prevent rent seeking. It would tax away the economic rent, which otherwise would be pledged to the bank, and it would regulate monopolies. Most important money and credit should be public utilities. So it shouldn’t be privatized.

The problem today is the rentier sectors: landlords, monopolists, and the oil and mining natural-resource rent recipients. All these sectors are backed by the banks. It’s the banks and the financial sector that are the mother of trusts.

If you keep money and credit in the public domain then credit will be extended for purposes that actually help promote prosperity, not that counteract it. Government money creation by deficit spending is spent into the economy for labor, for industry to build infrastructure, for productive purposes. Privatizing bank credit siphons off income from the economy. At issue is what’s going to be the priority: the host or the parasite? Governments should help the host, not the parasite.

I let my daughter know that there are billions of people who do not buy the USA, who despise the elites’ agendas, and millions in the USA who do not buy capitalism. We are in a Gulag, like what we might call a digital prison of the near future: we have always been in the prison of debt, and the point zero zero one percent are working for the one percent with the 19 percenters, Eichmann’s, big and small, destroying people, planet, life.

There is no planet “b/let it” be for us, but the Theil and Musk and Gates and Bezos types, there will be transhumanism, muck on the moon, and madness on mars. Their goal is living without useless eaters, breathers and breeders! Whitey on Mars!!

Lyrics — Whitey on the Moon

A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey’s on the moon)

I can’t pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)
Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still.
(while Whitey’s on the moon)

The man jus’ upped my rent las’ night.
(’cause Whitey’s on the moon)
No hot water, no toilets, no lights.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)

I wonder why he’s uppi’ me?
(’cause Whitey’s on the moon?)
I was already payin’ ‘im fifty a week.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Taxes takin’ my whole damn check,
Junkies makin’ me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin’ up,
An’ as if all that shit wasn’t enough

A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face an’ arm began to swell.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)

Was all that money I made las’ year
(for Whitey on the moon?)
How come there ain’t no money here?
(Hm! Whitey’s on the moon)
Y’know I jus’ ’bout had my fill
(of Whitey on the moon)
I think I’ll sen’ these doctor bills,
Airmail special
(to Whitey on the moon)

Of course, duh, the USA would never ever use insects, poisons, toxins, bacteria, prions, viruses, and nucleotides (and propaganda) to exact economic and human revenge on the USA’s list of enemies!!!!!

But first, here we have more of these sick billionaires, and of course, we have to hear about and see it:

From the goofier and more goofy Democracy Now:

British billionaire Richard Branson rocketed to 53 miles above the Earth on Sunday in a test flight of his privately funded Virgin Galactic space plane. Branson’s trip above the atmosphere came just days before the world’s richest person — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — is set to fly to the edge of space aboard his self-funded New Shepard rocket. This month Bezos stepped down as Amazon’s CEO, in part to focus on his rocket company, Blue Origin, as it struggles to compete with billionaire Elon Musk’s privately held SpaceX corporation. In response, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders told The New York Times, “You have the richest guys in the world who are not particularly worried about earth anymore. They’re off in outer space.”

Old Sanders just can’t muster up much more than that limp-wristed comment: “You have the richest guys in the world who are not particularly worried about earth anymore. They’re off in outer space.” . And, where are the millions decrying these billionaires’ sick narcissistic and polluting schemes, their illegal alien launches into space, the 5G and 6 G satellite metastasizing telecom Gestapo digital prison?

In a February article called “Bernie Sanders Loves This $1 Trillion War Machine,” The Daily Beast took the senator to task for this very thing.

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

Oh well, this is the cooption of Capitalism, that complex, that INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX:

• big pharma
• big business
• big banking
• big finance
• big medicine
• big education
• big media
• big AI
• big real estate
• big insurance
• big retail
• big prison
• big surveillance
• big chemical
• big extraction
• big publishing
• big aerospace
• big mining
• big ag
• big telecom
• big military
• big business
• big hedge fund

… INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX. All those hyphens, for the Military Industrial Complex!!!

Thanks to DARPA, Air Force F-35s Could Soon Have Drone Copilots And do we think that bio-toxins, bacteria, viruses, poisons, any manner of scientific inventions, might be delivered via drone? Not on our watch, right? Bullshit!

Biological Experiments are war crimes

Article 8 of The Rome Statute of The International Criminal Court (ICC) defines biological experiments as war crimes. The US, however, is not a state party to the international treaty, and cannot be held accountable for its war crimes.

Here, “Why Fort Detrick Lab Should Be Investigated for COVID-19 Origins Tracing.”

Read it. Of course, many obvious things are lacking in the piece. First, the USA has a deep history of toxins, bioweapons, ecocide poisons, assassination programs, viral dump, experiment (sic) after experiment (sic) messing with the United States’ and the other Five Eyes’ enemies.

Of course this is a bioweaponized virus. Messed with on the DNA level. Messed with through the auspices of the best and the brightest medical teams, scientists, virologists, et al. So, we murdered Salvador Allende, train death squads, cook the books on yellow cake uranium and WMD’s, all of the false flags, all of the economic sanctions, all the Madeleine Albrights and J. Edgar Hoovers and the Dulles Brothers, et al.

The US Air Force has been specifically collecting Russian RNA and synovial tissue samples, raising fears in Moscow of a covert US ethnic bio-weapons program.

Source: fbo.gov

The WHO experts assessed the lab-leak hypothesis when they visited Wuhan and found no evidence, and the speculation on its possibility in a Wuhan lab should have ended by now. In the meantime, we should put a question mark on other hypotheses, such as other labs around the world, Zeng said.

Zeng said the US is afraid of WHO’s inspection in the same way it was done in China, Zeng said.

The US, the only country obstructing the establishment of a Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) verification mechanism, has systematic problems, Zeng said, adding that the US is afraid that the investigation into its labs would lead to more of its dirt being dug out.

The Pentagon Bio-weapons

This is how the USA works, and how the scientific community works, and there is just the no-brainer of, well, how quick was the mRNA vaccination (sic) developed? The timing of the planned pandemic. The patient zero in Wuhan is bullshit. The wet market theories are bullshit. BSL-4 moon suits and outside air sources, but masking, bullshit.

So much has happened over the past year that it may be hard to remember what life was like pre-COVID. But let’s flash back to December 2019, when the idea of social distancing, compulsory masking and lockdowns would have been met with disbelief and outrage by most Americans.

At that time, most were blissfully unaware of the pandemic that would change the world in the next few months. It wasn’t until December 31, 2019, that the COVID-19 outbreak was first reported from Wuhan, China,1 and at this point it was only referred to as cases of viral pneumonia, not a novel coronavirus.2 I say “most” because it seems some people may have been aware of something lurking much earlier than it appeared.

In confidential documents3 revealed by the U.K.’s Daily Expose, Moderna, together with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), sent mRNA coronavirus vaccine candidates to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill December 12, 2019 — raising significant red flags. As The Daily Expose reported:4

“What did Moderna [and NIAID] know that we didn’t? In 2019 there was not any singular coronavirus posing a threat to humanity which would warrant a vaccine, and evidence suggests there hasn’t been a singular coronavirus posing a threat to humanity throughout 2020 and 2021 either.”

COVID-19 Vaccine Candidate Was Released Prior to Pandemic

The confidential disclosure agreement relays a material transfer agreement between the providers — Moderna, NIAID and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The providers agreed to transfer “mRNA coronavirus vaccine candidates developed and jointly-owned by NIAID and Moderna” to the university’s investigator.5

“The material transfer agreement was signed the December 12th 2019 by Ralph Baric, PhD, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and then signed by Jacqueline Quay, Director of Licensing and Innovation Support at the University of North Carolina on December 16th 2019,” Daily Expose noted.

At this point, some backstory information is more than relevant. We know with great certainty that researchers at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) had access to and were doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, and manipulating them to become more infectious and to more easily infect humans. We also know that they collaborated with scientists in the U.S. and received funding from the National Institutes of Health for such research.

Baric, who signed the material transfer agreement to investigate the mRNA coronavirus vaccine candidate before there was a known COVID-19 pandemic, pioneered techniques for genetically manipulating coronaviruses, according to Peter Gøtzsche with the Institute for Scientific Freedom,6and these became a major focus for WIV.

Baric worked closely with Shi Zhengli, Ph.D., the director of WIV’s Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases, also known as “bat woman,” on research using genetic engineering to create a “new bat SARS-like virus … that can jump directly from its bat hosts to humans.” According to Gøtzsche:7

“Their work focused on enhancing the ability of bat viruses to attack humans so as to ‘examine the emergence potential.’ In 2015, they created a novel virus by taking the backbone of the SARS virus replacing its spike protein with one from another bat virus known as SHC014-CoV. This manufactured virus was able to infect a lab culture of cells from the human airways.

They wrote that scientific review panels might deem their research too risky to pursue but argued that it had the potential to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks. However, the value of gain-of-function studies in preventing the COVID-19 pandemic was negative, as this research highly likely created the pandemic.”

Moderna Gets Emergency Use Approval for COVID Vaccines

The rest of the story, as the saying goes, is history. December 12, 2019, Amy Petrick, Ph.D., NIAID’s technology transfer specialist, signed the agreement, along with Dr. Barney Graham, an investigator for NIAID, whose signature is undated.8 May 12, 2020, just months later, Moderna was granted a fast-track designation for its mRNA-1273 vaccine by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. According to Moderna’s news release:9

“mRNA-1273 is an mRNA vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 encoding for a prefusion stabilized form of the Spike (S) protein, which was selected by Moderna in collaboration with investigators from Vaccine Research Center (VRC) at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a part of the NIH.”

December 18, 2020 — about one year after the material transfer agreement was signed — the FDA issued emergency use authorization for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine for use in individuals 18 years of age and older.10 June 10, 2021, Moderna also filed for emergency use authorization for its COVID-19 shot to be used in U.S. adolescents aged 12 to 17 years.11 Yet, we still have no answers to some glaring questions: (read more, here, Source).

A few more headlines from the story reflected above —

Chemical and Biological Weapons: The US Government Waged a War Against its Own Citizens
COVID-19: All Truth Has Three Stages
COVID-19 and the CIA’s Biological Warfare on Cuba
Dreams of Extermination in Puerto Rico: U.S. Biological Warfare and the Legacy of Dr. Cornelius Rhoads

Salisbury attack reveals $70 million Pentagon program at Porton Down

Dilyana Gaytandzhieva – April 30, 2018

The Pentagon has spent at least $70 million on military experiments involving tests with deadly viruses and chemical agents at Porton Down – the…

The Pentagon Bio-weapons

Dilyana Gaytandzhieva – April 29, 2018

The US Army regularly produces deadly viruses, bacteria and toxins in direct violation of the UN Convention on …

August 31, 2005

“[T]hese Falls, which have fallen further, which sit dry
and quiet as a graveyard now? These Falls are that place
where ghosts of salmon jump, where ghosts of women mourn
their children who will never find their way back home…”

— Sherman Alexie, from “The Place Where Ghosts of Salmon Jump”

One of the greatest contrasts for area residents is how the river Spokane is so powerfully sculpted by nature yet so disembodied from its recent past. The Children of the Sun tribe less than 70 years ago made great snatches of Chinook and Coho near where the Maple Street Bridge funnels SUVs and trucks in an endless stream of belching metal. 

Sherman Alexie, best known for Smoke Signals and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, and a member of the Spokane tribe, does more than lament the loss of the salmon runs. He is confrontational and “in the face” of corporate and political forces that deem salmon as “a fish of diminishing value.” 

For Alexie and Spokane tribal elder Pauline Flett, and for groups like Salmon for All and Save Our Wild Salmon, it’s a no-brainer to bring back the clear waters and an abundance of native fish to a river like the Spokane and a river system like the Columbia/Snake. 

For some Northwest salmon people, such as Grey Owl, a Southern Cheyenne artist and cultural guide living on the Nez Perce reservation, river and subsequent fish contamination means early, hard deaths.  

“Even supposing that we exclude some nefarious government plot to study them,” Grey Owl said, “it is certainly not beyond the realm of possibility that the government was not as careful in the ‘60s about what Hanford released, including radioactive water used to cool the reaction, into the Columbia. Just in our small little Native community here, all salmon people, there is a high incidence of cancers, tumors, and unexplained cysts.” 

For salmon and salmon people — including various Inland West and Pacific Coast tribes and non-tribal commercial and recreational fishermen — they recognize three pivotal river systems that incubate and release salmon into the Pacific for the world to enjoy. The Sacramento, Yukon and Columbia/Snake systems are the genetic conveyor belts of wild salmon. For many, these river systems must be unleashed, free of mining and agricultural bleed-offs, and set in riparian and forest cover where clear-cutting is a long-vanished 1900s technology.

More than 45 local, regional and state organizations make up a coalition supporting breaching four dams on the lower Snake River: Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental, Little Goose, and Lower Granite. 

Groups like Friends of the Earth, Trout Unlimited, Northwest Sportfishing Industries Association, American Rivers, NW Energy Coalition, Sierra Club, Earthjustice, Washington Trollers Association make up a cadre of lobbying, informational and advocacy groups poised to support bringing down the four dams. 

Save Our Wild Salmon (SOS), as part of the coalition’s main group pushing dam removal, focuses specifically on restoring salmon in the Snake River. Kell McAboy, three years in the trenches as Eastern Washington organizer for SOS in Spokane, has been a vocal public protector of the Snake River and its salmon. 

“When thinking about removing the four dams in the lower Snake River, not only is it the best bet for the salmon, it’s the best bet for people. There are more than 200 dams in the Columbia Basin, making it the most constipated watershed on earth.”

The main issues McAboy and others in the coalition see as their stumbling blocks are transportation, farmers and the mythology of having an inland seaport at Lewiston, 900 miles upstream from the Pacific Ocean.  

“The issue comes down to transportation,” McAboy says. She noted that rail and eighteen-wheeler transportation links can be revitalized in order to move the wheat and other goods the current barges on the dammed Snake provide. 

As part of her duties with SOS, McAboy has organized tours of the Snake River, the four dams and free-flowing rivers like the Clearwater and Salmon. Her organization and the coalition at large are connected to a non-profit group, LightHawk, which has planes and pilots at the ready to take people into the air so they might see the environmental impact of dammed rivers from aloft.  

“From the air, the people get a unique perspective of how a free-flowing river and the impounded river look like,” McAboy said. 

It’s clear when one starts looking at this “to breach or not to breach” debate that there is a definite dichotomy between east and west Washington. Most people for breaching have zip codes set west of the Cascades, while those opposed are from the Inland Northwest. 

One strategy Jill Wasberg from SOS in Seattle sees as a way to put flesh and bone on those everyday people who have lost livelihoods and cultural connections because of the death of the natural, large salmon runs, is to foster a sense of story — a narrative lynchpin so the pro-dam breaching stakeholders in this “Save Our Dams” versus “Save Our Salmon” gain voice. 

She and others in SOS — with offices in Portland, Seattle, Washington D.C. and Spokane — are interviewing people for a video and publication venture called “The Stories Project.” Wasberg hopes to capture the history, cultural identity and economic value. 

Bill Kelley, professor in Eastern Washington University’s Urban and Regional Planning Program, promotes an on-going dialogue “about what constitutes community.” Kelley stresses that a definition of ecology — including river and salmon recovery — should include a “place for humans [and] their needs and desires in balance with ecological capacities.” 

“I worry that when our passionate advocacy is too shrill and when our science and comprehensive planning, with all of its complexity, can’t be illustrated in simple and compelling and human terms,” Kelley said, “that we turn off our citizens when we most need to be turning them on.” 

As EWU professor, Kelley coordinates undergraduate and graduate students in projects with various communities and constituencies to help them decide how their rural and undeveloped land and their urban space can give them a sense of stewardship and self-determination. 

More than 85 rapids and falls will reappear on the Snake River if the dams are removed, McAboy notes. This will result in thrusting volumes of water and no more fattened impounded pools where salmon face nigh nitrogen loads, bacteria and viruses, longer journeys back to the Pacific estuaries, and unnaturally warm waters. Cold, fast-flowing water will push salmon smolt out to sea as nature designed.  

Many biologists see breaching and habitat recovery as the only credible salvation to regenerating wild salmon stocks to numbers where sustainability occurs. If breaching is finally approved as the best, most prudent and eventually the most economically sane solution, the four main barriers will be gone, allowing 140 miles of the main stem of the Snake to open up.  

This in turn will free hundreds of miles of tributaries in Eastern Washington, Idaho, Oregon and Wyoming for salmon to return full of sperm and roe to breed hundreds of millions of fry that will live and die, leaving millions to transmogrify into river-loving fry and estuary-seeking smolt. Most salmon return to and live in oceans, either close to shore or thousands of miles out to sea, for two to seven years before the evolutionary switch clicks on to return to their gravel beds. 

Dave Johnson is a passionate fisheries scientist with the Nez Perce tribe who works to refine and harmonize a dozen tribal hatcheries as a way of supplementing the wild salmon that have been cut off since the Snake River dams came on line in the 1960s and ‘70s. For Johnson, his tribe and others have “a right to fish in all those streams.” 

There seems to be a card up the sleeve of various Northwest tribes, including the Nez Perce. “The Nez Perce are not just some historical artifact,” said David Cummings, Nez Perce legal counsel. Cummings notes that the courts system is just one of several tools; yet treaties signed 1855 and 1856 with tribes of the Washington Coast, Puget Sound and Columbia River stated that while tribes ceded most of their land (1.34 million acres compared to the current 750,000 for just the Nez Perce tribe, as an example), those treaties gave exclusive rights to fish within their reservations and rights to fish at “all usual and accustomed places . . . in common with citizens.” 

For Cummings, the 1974 “Boldt Decision” reaffirming tribal rights to 50 percent of the harvestable fish “destined for tribal usual and accustomed fishing grounds” is sort of a cultural and environmental ace in the hole.  

Cummings notes that the treaty carries with it a right to restoration of wildlife, including the riverine ecosystem and water quality.  

There is a genetic, dietary, and cultural connection to salmon and sustainable harvests. Johnson is one of more than 200 scientists who advocate breaching the four lower Snake dams. 

Pacific Northwest salmon for a million years have struggled to recreate their genes by leaving salt water to go upstream. By the millions, wild Coho, Chinook, sockeye, pink, chum, King and others had returned in their respective fall, summer and spring runs. The wild salmon of the Columbia drove their fasting bodies through scablands, falls, and heat to return to their birthing riffles more than 900 miles inland from the Pacific to Eastern Washington and Oregon and deep into Idaho and Wyoming. 

That was before the eight federal dams that are the gauntlet stopping the Inland West’s salmon from spawning. 

The parallel struggle of overcoming obstacles — now dams — that anadromous fish and the tribes of the Northwest share is telling. 

For 10,000 years, Indian tribes rendezvoused at the lower Columbia River’s Celilo Falls. Traders from as far away as Central America gathered with thousands of others from dozens of tribes. 

Fast-forward a few thousand years to the Lewis and Clark Expedition as Clark comments on the hundreds of thousands of salmon they came across: “The multitude of this fish. The water is so clear that they can readily be seen at a depth of 115 or 120 feet. But at this season they float in such quantities down the stream the Indians have only to collect, split and dry them on the scaffolds.” 

The Dalles dam in 1956 impounded the river, mucked up the cascades and free-flowing nature of things, and inundated the sacred Celilo Falls. 

The four lower Columbia dams have been technologically manipulated to allow for safer passage of salmon running to the spawning beds and to allow the smolts to be flushed more safely to sea. The process for the lower Snake River dams, however, is more daunting and less technologically successful. 

Most of this country’s 75,000 dams were pounded, cemented and erected into the paths of ancient free-flowing rivers before humans, especially at the political level, saw the big picture of negative biological, cultural and economic impacts of this river-jamming technology, notes Lizzie Grossman, author of the book, Watershed: The Undamming of America. 

Grossman read from her just published book at Auntie’s Bookstore in Spokane on July 29, emphasizing how “in the past ten years people all over the country have been looking at waterways — how their local creek or river was ignored and abused.” There is a strong sense of wanting the rivers back, including breaching dams.  

“America has spent most of its first two centuries turning its rivers into highways, ditches and power plants,” Grossman states. “Now, slowly, we are relearning what a river is and how to live with one. . . . Reconsidering the use of our rivers means examining our priorities as a nation. It forces us to rethink our patterns of consumption and growth and may well be the key to reclaiming a vital part of America’s future.”  

“A dam can disrupt a river’s entire ecosystem, affecting everything from headwaters to delta,” Grossman puts into her book’s Forward. “So removing a dam, large or small, is not an easy process. . . . Dam removal alters the visual contours of a community. It is a very public enterprise and is almost always controversial, involving political decisions and civic debate.”  

A hodgepodge of liberal environmental and politically conservative groups is pushing to gain political support for the Salmon Planning Act, which states that dam breaching is an option if all other routes to wild salmon species and habitat recovery fail to generate sustainable, healthy levels. 

The executive director of Northwest Sportfishing Industry Association, Liz Hamilton, sees dam breaching from a died-in-the-wool capitalist point of view. Her own Republican Party roots and her membership’s conservative bent belie a dynamic most people do not associate with endangered species causes.  

“Our industry lost 10,000 jobs in the northwest,” she noted as a consequence of the construction of the eight dams. “Fear mongers have led this issue: ‘If we don’t breach, every single salmon will die.’ On the other side, we’ve heard, ‘If we do breach, we will lose our jobs and way of life.’” 

Hamilton sees her group and the coalition’s biggest challenge to convince people of the economic and cultural benefits of breaching dams as psychological. “People fear change. People have to see a future. If they don’t see themselves in it, your average citizen will not respond.” 

Hamilton knows salmon restoration is costly. But she sees the Snake River system as a thousand miles of nearly pristine spawning habitat. Hamilton and her coalition lobby people to see a future many resist: removal of the four Snake River dams. “Without the dams we can still transport wheat. We can still generate electricity. We can still irrigate crops. The pressures that people put on the land will still be there when the dams are removed. . . . The cheapest thing to do is unblock a blocked culvert.”  

The General Accounting Office reported that more than $3.3 billion in taxpayers’ money was spent by more than a dozen agencies the past 20 years to try and mitigate declines in Columbia River basin salmon runs. On top of that, tens-of-millions have also been spent by state and local governments. 

This waste of money has paid for ill-conceived measures and technologies to try and help the fish survive the dams — 34 years of barging fish around dams. Snake River sockeye, Chinook salmon and steelhead were granted “protection” in 1991, ’92, and ’97 respectively through the Endangered Species Act. 

Hatcheries have produced more than 90 percent of 2001 salmon and steelhead. Hatchery salmon are not the goal for the diverse environmental and scientific communities because of various issues, including disease, weak genetic lines, and stifling of biodiversity in its natural state. If wild salmon are not rejuvenated, many predict that by 2017 several indigenous populations will become extinct. 

Additionally, RAND, a conservative “think tank,” completed a report in September 2002 that posits dam removal on the lower Snake will not bring with it economic turmoil. In fact, the RAND report shows how 10,000 long-term jobs might very well be created and centered right in the economically hard-hit communities that make up the Inland Empire. 

Remove dams and help create livable wage jobs and revive a weak Inland Empire economy while preserving sustainable and abundant salmon? The answer seems obvious to most, but for those who resist, there is the 1855 treaty and Boldt decision which cost U.S. taxpayers upwards of $10 to $60 billion paid to the tribes for destroying their salmon and habitat.  

“The salmon are our relatives,” Grey Owl said. “The salmon are of this land just as we are. We both share a connection to this land that is hardwired into our DNA. They teach us many spiritual lessons such as the circle of life, giving of yourself to help others, and that our life’s purpose should be to help someone else live.” 

August 12, 2005

As climate cooled 40 to 20 million years ago, streams and rivers decreased in nutrient productivity, and so the sciences says that freshwater fish went anadromous and developed a sea-going life cycle as oceans became rich sources of food.

In this part of the America, the salmon’s evolution linked and adapted to the changes in topography. For millions of years salmon have been here in abundance. In the past 100 years, human evolution in the Pacific Northwest has brought some species of salmon to extinction and has impoverished the continued existence of a sustainable salmon ecosystem.

Salmon have been part of the lifeblood of peoples from Finland, Ireland, Norway, Russia, to Japan and British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest. Salmon sustain the life of a forest, and this species is the link in the natural gear work and framework of an ecosystem that has grown because of the returning spawning salmon.

From the nitrogen in grizzlies’ bones and hair, to the nitrogen in valley-bottom forests, and nutrients fed to gargantuan trees growing along salmon rivers, the salmon has delivered the lifeblood to the forest.

Of course, this is all ancient history. Wild salmon are threatened, and the techno-fixes devised by one of the most creative creatures on earth will be the salmon’s demise.

A twist to the plight of the salmon is now easily accessible to readers. In Seattle recently, David R. Montgomery, geomorphology professor at University of Washington, cast two intertwining threads of history, Europe’s and New England’s, to show how both salmon histories have been repeating themselves in Washington, Oregon and northern California for more than a hundred years. His quick-paced and humorous style helped to compress his book, King of Fish: The Thousand-year Run of Salmon (Westview Press, 2003), which is part science, part history and part folklore concerning salmon and this species’ struggles and the repeated failings of human action and inaction to “save” it.

“In coming to understand the forces shaping the rivers and mountains of the Pacific Northwest, I learned to see how the evolution and near extinction of salmon is a story of changing landscapes,” he stated.

Montgomery was one of many presenters at a conference on sustainability titled, “Building Community, Healing the Planet,” a two-day affair set squarely in the bedrock of conglomerated fields that see connections and links between human society, the environment, economics, and global ethical alliances as vastly more important in solving such problems as global warming, pollution, habitat degradation, human population explosion, inequitable economies, and over-consumption than the current Western paradigm of exponential growth in markets and technologies as solutions to growing global problems.

Montgomery, however, focused on a single topic, deadeye targeting fish and the interrelationship of three distinct human histories.

The cry of “Salmon in Danger!” is now resounding throughout the length and breadth of the land. A few years, a little more overpopulation, a few more tons of factory poisons, a few fresh poaching devices . . . and the salmon will be gone – he will be extinct.

— Charles Dickens, July 20, 1861

Interestingly, Montgomery draws from the genetic slough in a literary riptide where inventive and clearly literate writers swim: David Quammen, Barry Lopez, Richard Bass, Annie Dillard, Jim Lichatowich and David James Duncan and others have set themselves squarely inside the biotic world, allowing the rich poetry of imagery and laments drive what they write.

Montgomery’s written words dip into that same current, and his book is clearly a story of his own wonderment of geological chronology set against historical time. He gives us an overlay of the practices of migration and settling and harvesting and industrializing as well as meshing the original “old” salmon’s 40 to 20 million year evolutionary period to produce a parental species 6 million years ago that is the forebear of all modern salmon species.

Wild salmon advocates know the heuristic of the “four H’s” and each one’s relationship to the decline of salmon: Harvest (over-fishing); Habitat (mining, logging, agriculture and human land development); Hydro-dams; and Hatcheries (add to that farms/aquaculture).

Montgomery chisels a fifth H — the history of human intersection with the salmon’s evolutionary history. It’s an old story of human culture — that malleable and far-spreading diverse set of laws and actions that are passed onto other generations — T-boning right smack into the biological harmony of salmon’s persistency in nature, a consistently challenging realm of the king of fish.

His book covers the similar human patterns of change to river systems in Great Britain 300 years ago and in 19th Century New England, to those now occurring in the Pacific Northwest. The Pacific salmon (five main species) evolved under the shattered light and verdant shadows of old growth forests. They weathered and adapted to thrive under the stressors of floods, volcanic eruptions, and other major natural disturbances over millions of years. The biological trajectories of Atlantic salmon and Pacific salmon, however, have been shaped by very different conditions of topography.

Yet the Atlantic and Pacific salmon share the same fates. Of the tens of millions of Atlantic salmon returning yearly to pre-settled New England, only 1,000 wild Atlantic salmon return to this region’s rivers and streams.

Today, 90 percent of wild Pacific salmon fish runs are gone:

Main Pacific NW Salmon Region Current % of Wild Fish in Runs Compared to 1820

Alaska 106%
British Columbia less than 3%
Puget Sound 8%
Washington less than 2%
Columbia River less than 2%
Oregon 7%
California 5%

I keep forgetting that the Seattle I know is brand-new, a recent addition to the landscape. Though the transformation from impenetrable forest to modern city happened in a geological instant, the dramatic changes that accumulate from daily experiences seem imperceptibly slow by human standards,” Montgomery writes.

As the geologist, he seeks that long-view of the angle of repose, searching for timeline after timeline perspective for some sort of context to explain how salmon have become so imperiled.

Yet, the short view helps Montgomery appreciate human impact: “The primeval forest that blanketed Seattle for 98 percent of the last five thousand years disappeared in a little over a century.”

Early on Montgomery posits a question a reader might ask: A lot of books have been written about salmon. Why write another one?

The fate of salmon is closely tied to changes on the land. The fall of the Pacific salmon is the direct result of both over-fishing and other actions that subsequently reshaped the landscape. The story is not simple. But the basic connections are clear.

Throughout the book the reader explores with Montgomery the history of the “three full-scale” experiments on the salmon’s adaptability to this altered and obliterated landscape, the cause of which is human land use and unchecked development. “The strikingly similar history of salmon across these regions carries clear implications for modern salmon recovery efforts.”

Today, the blame game seems to be the biggest issue head-lined in the media concerning this story of the obscene decline of wild salmon runs in the Pacific Northwest: Some attribute the decline of salmon on Native American fishing. “The timber industry caused it,” yells the fisherman. The land developers blame the commercial fisherman. Salmon-eating sea lions and birds get scathed by some. “Everybody except dry-land farmers blames the dams.”

Without a doubt, after decades of research and field studies, and after thousands of papers and reports have been written, a general agreement within “scientific circles” makes it clear what the primary factors (those four H’s) are in the salmon’s decline.

[A]ctions to stem known causes remain either mired in institutional, corporate, and societal denial, dissipated by spin-doctoring, or thwarted by political agendas and bureaucratic inertia.

But it’s the history that truly makes Montgomery’s book compelling. The first H, harvest, was addressed in 1030 A.D., for example, when Scottish King Malcolm II closed the season for taking “old salmon” (spawners) at the mouth of any river on their way up to spawn.

Regarding habitat, Richard the Lion-hearted of England in the 12th century declared that rivers should be kept free of obstruction “so that a well-fed three-year-old pig could stand sideways in the stream without touching either side” (known as the King’s gap to allow adult salmon to reach spawning grounds).

Concerning hydropower, Robert the Bruce (1318) invoked a fine and sentence of forty days in prison for anyone setting up “fixtures that would prevent the progress of salmon up and down Scottish rivers.”

Montgomery isn’t writing this book to show a one-dimensional salmon advocacy or preach dam-breeching on the Columbia and Snake rivers. He sees salmon as a natural bank account, and an indicator of the entire human and natural systems’ conjoined health.

A sustainable management plan for salmon recovery means restoring habitats, writing off other habitats that are too heavily populated and developed, rehabilitating the wild salmon populations by stopping fishing for a while, restoring floodplains, and hiring and empowering riverkeepers, he professes.

“We have to plan for a hundred years, adapt how we live on and across the land to better conform to how the landscape works, and then enforce the plan and learn from history,” he told the audience.

At the close of his book, Montgomery asks whether the salmon story will end with the right Sixth H: “Will it be hubris or humility?”

My Interview of David James Duncan — Inlander.

July 28, 2005

“A world where the salmon cannot live may be a world in which man cannot live either.”

— Anthony Netboy, The Salmon: Their Fight for Survival

The epic journey of some wild salmon species, from homebred gravel beds in Montana, to the Pacific through veins of rivers and streams that hit desert in Oregon and Washington that then empty into estuaries along Northwest coastal waters, and remarkably their ocean vigil of up to seven years traveling thousands of miles, has been honored with tribal passion, spiritual artistry and a sustainable harvest for thousands of years.

The First Salmon ceremony carried out by dozens of native peoples in the Pacific Northwest celebrate salmon people, Chinook, Sockeye, Kings, who come back to home waters to sustain lives through winter and summer. It’s not just some postmodern trip to lure tourists. The Nez Perce, Yakima, and Spokane peoples are just three of many tribal groups who still connect to the force of the salmon, albeit a dying force thanks to modern man’s industrial and agricultural whims.

The wild salmon story has generated a coalition of groups, both native and non-native, in the Pacific Northwest fighting for the salmon’s imperiled existence against the imbalanced needs of humans that require too much ecologically sensitive land for development; that seek to irrigate deserts to grow non-native crops reliant on river water and petrochemicals; and who want hydroelectricity to grow human settlements which hold to an out-of-whack perception of economic growth as an unending cycle.

The Bush administration, some of whom are laser-guided Christian zealots that talk the talk of Jesus but walk the walk of a corporate liturgy of greed and profit at the expense of sane human-scaled living, considers the science of wild salmon protection and recovery as unnecessary or evil, even in the face of billions of dollars already spent over decades of sound scientific pursuit to deal with the quickly vanishing wild salmon stocks. He and his henchmen mock sound science, denigrate native tribes’ treaties calling for salmon fishing rights, and fail to abide by economic principles that say breeching dams can restore salmon habitat to some sustainable level.

NOAA-Fisheries wants millions of hatchery-bred salmon to be included in the total count of Northwest runs. Timber, mining, agriculture, building and hydropower stakeholders (stockholders as well) are high-fiving each other because of this proposal to ease Endangered Species Act protection for native salmon species.

However, we need to be dealing seriously with: the impounded slack-waters behind the four lower Snake River dams; with the rising summer water temperatures of waterways choked by dams; all the sewage and chemical dumping in these rivers; the over-development of human activity such as unwise housing development and under-regulated agricultural and industrial activity; the storm water surges caused by Pavement City USA; and, maybe most importantly, the death of wetlands and estuaries.

The destruction of the associated habitats that make up the natural drainages and river systems should be this country’s first course of renewal. Wild salmon are this region’s birthright, and twisting science to meet current needs with disregard for future carrying capacities of our environment is the true sledgehammer that will destroy the native species. Politicians, especially those who suck on the crack pipe of economic indicators over the wise necessity of preserving the environment, have no concept of what hatchery and aqua-farmed salmon mutants mean to the vitality of a true wild salmon sustainable population.

Additionally, this myopia will certainly destroy the hatchery fish, eventually, sooner than most technocrats will want to admit.

Hatcheries dilute the gene pool of the native stocks and are certainly in many cases a stopgap measure that enables politicians to shrug off their duty to protect this heritage species, and which further fuels resource extractors spreading their dirty deeds in our last reaches of natural habitats in this region.

Scientists and researchers currently have doubts about “hatchery supplementation” as a course of bringing back salmon runs, “[A] hypothesis which is being tested, but which is not yet scientifically proved or disproved.”

Millions of fingerlings from hatcheries compete for food with the few native species during their life cycle in freshwater streams and during the journey to sea. Hatchery fish that interbreed with wild fish create all sorts of problems that have been brought up time and time again in news articles, editorials and scientific reports. Just reading Jim Lichatowich’s book, Salmon Without Rivers: A History of the Pacific Salmon Crisis, written by a fisheries scientist in the field for three decades, can illuminate for those who know little about the wild salmon their biological reality.

The interconnectedness of wild salmon with the robust preservation of habitats that sustain them and the mutualistic human endeavors are what is missing from Bush’s bonehead anti-science school of illogic. The mentality that advocates “new advanced management techniques that would soon result in salmon without a river” (Washington Department of Fisheries) is the sort of thinking that will move us closer to the complete crash of both wild and hatchery fisheries.

The public — statewide and transnational, connected to shared watershed and biological regions — needs to have greater input on the strategic plans for saving salmon and returning the native habitats to a level that will bring economic advantages to recreation and fishing enterprises and sustainable cohabitation of managed hatchery salmon and robust wild runs.

Sustainability is not a new concept for planning our future, but if we allow policy to be designed and promulgated by the powerful timber, agricultural, hydroelectric, and development lobbies — who do not see the vital interplay and connectivity of this triumvirate of Culture, Economy and Environment that is the superstructure for what some call an Earth Charter — then the Northwest faces losing a truly important link in its distinct environmental, cultural and economic heritage.

An indiscriminate hatchery program treats fish like interchangeable parts in a large machine. The first precaution of intelligent tinkering, counseled conservationist Aldo Leopold, is to save all the parts. Neglecting this precaution, we have unbalanced an intricate system and placed the salmon in danger, Lichatowich states.

Washington Senators Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray joined Representative Norm Dicks and weighed in on the argument at the beginning of May 2004 by sending a letter to the Bush EPA addressing many concerns they and their constituents have about this new unscientific counting system’s implications for salmon and steelhead recovery.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for a timely and ecologically sound response to the Washington politicians’ demands because the Bush administration’s goal is to de-list as many endangered salmon species as possible.

first published a long time ago, in Covid-19 years — September 5, 2005

“You will often meet with characters in nature so extravagant that a discreet poet would not venture to set them upon a stage.”

— Lord Chesterfield

“My strength is from the fish; my blood is from the fish, from the roots and berries. The fish and game are the essence of my life. I was not brought from a foreign country and did not come here. I was put here by the creator.”

— Chief Meninock

Zen and the Art of a Water Ethic

The Buddhist nature, as argued by Chinese philosopher Chan-jan, verifies that even inanimate things possess the essence of being, the spiritual core that connects us all to the universe, a creator. The Buddha spirit is in the stone, the branch, the waterfall. Chan-jan writes, “The man who is of all-round perfection knows from beginning to end that no objects exist part from Mind. Who then is ‘animate’ and who ‘inanimate?’ Within the Assembly of the Lotus, all are present without division.” This tenant is the core of all tribal wisdom for the peoples of the Americas; and for communities throughout the west, including the Northwest, planning strategies have to embrace an old ethic — essentially a new application of old wisdom — if we are to gestate a visionary strategy in our land ethic. Sin-Wit-Kit is from the Yakima meaning, “all life on earth.” These are simple words yet all encompassing. If we are to reestablish that connection to the land that John Wesley Powell, Wallace Stegner, Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry and countless others have written about as they have established the syncopation of nature — land, animals, plants, air, water and people — with cultural harmony and success, then communities in the west, both urban and rural, must go beyond the economic development packages, growth management plans and environmental analyses to build good earth, air and water for people.

We have moved farther and farther away from knowing nature, yet in the same breath we profess closeness to the beauty, the land, and the water that makes the West a split-open geode of varying ecologies, geologies, climates and cultures. Gary Snyder is advocating a new type of pioneer spirit, for humans to “move inside the self as well as reach out in a non-possessive way to the natural world.” Snyder comes from pioneer stock as his paternal grandfather settled in Kitsap, Washington, and his mother’s clan established roots in Texas, Kansas and Colorado. He understands the nature of conquest and how the invaders into Turtle Island continued to fragment their links to the native life, values and way of seeing land:

“As the discriminating self-centered awareness of civilized man has increasingly improved his material survival potential, it has correspondingly moved him farther and farther from a spontaneous feeling of being part of the natural world.”

Gary Snyder’s work in poetry and prose underpins the theme that humanity has to conquer the self and learn to live in harmony with earth and each other; he wants to journey into the self in addition to connecting to the natural world, all seamed to an ethic of non-possessiveness. Bert Almon from Boise State University sums up the ethos of the conqueror, as Patricia Limerick eloquently writes in her book, The Legacy of Conquest, by drawing awareness to the failing of our manifest destiny and harnessing of the wild: “We thought that we had conquered the land, but we discovered that we had defeated ourselves.” Thomas J. Lyon draws a corollary to this by illuminating the idea that the American West is the terminus of Walt Whitman’s Open Road . . . the traveler must “move toward the examined life.”

Awareness is the bedrock of Snyder’s poetry. Seeing into one’s own nature helps us gain the clear perception of the self and the external world. This philosophy must be embraced by the Americans who have moved into the American Western wilderness. What better confluence of wisdom, change and reunification which can help us with strategies for planning in the West than allowing the ancient waters of the land and clans to resurface and define the communities of the 21st century. Will planners be able to re-educate politicians and industrialists and the common citizen to take into account the human ability to experience a “deep sense of communion and communication with nature and with specific non-human beings,” as Snyder writes, by allowing rivers to run free, to run through it all? Can we go beyond the linear analytical and scientific study of nature — a complex, evolving, spiritual and profound circle — in order to re-enter the circle so we can once again sing, dance and greet the salmon, bison and whale?

Can we truly attempt to inculcate the ancient rhythm and earth beats of the free flowing rivers into the pragmatic city and rural planner so he or she might consider the old way and real lay of the land — undammed rivers, creeks and streams — as a dynamic, practical, economic and cultural modus operandi for bringing the West back into harmony with nature, people, spirit? As a poet who sees his language, his song, as the only language to access the shamanistic view “in which all is one and all is many, and the many are all precious,” I believe many out of the 6.5 billion humans living off of the bounty of 57 million square miles of earth will redefine themselves so as to recapture the harmony within and external existence only available through diversity. So we must reeducate so no one goes through the West again without recalling that all land is part of a river basin or watershed. All is shaped by the water that flows over it and through it.

Empire of the Watershed

“To write history without putting any water in it is to leave out a large part of the story. Human experience has not been so dry as that.”

— Donald Worster

A river is so much more than the water coursing toward the sea or lake. A river basin is an orchestrated interconnected shifting of forces: the crumbling, moving banks and beds and the seepage below, the groundwater upon which most communities in the West depend. Meadows, forests, marshes, backwaters are linked to a river’s floodplain. A river is a carrier of hopes, dreams, life and death, as well as sediments, nutritionally rich detritus, and dissolved minerals. A watershed emanates from mountains and hills. Rain and snow drain into rushing streams. Tributaries and groundwaters build the river’s volume. “As they leave the mountains, rivers slow and start to meander and braid, seeking the path of least resistance across widening valleys, whose alluvial floor was laid down by millennia of sediment-laden floods,” Patrick McCully writes in his book, Silenced Rivers. The Oxford English Dictionary puts the definition of a river succinctly: “a copious stream of water flowing in a channel towards the sea … A copious stream of flow of (something) … the boundary between life and death.”

We in the colony of the west have four major “bathtubs”: the Missouri, the Columbia, the Colorado and the Great Basin. The main river in each of the first three basins collects water that falls in its natural boundaries and dumps it into the Atlantic, in the case of the Missouri, and into the Pacific, in the cases of the Columbia and Colorado. With the conquest of the west came the Prior Appropriation doctrine in 1848, and since that day our rivers have been diverted, stripped, dammed, channeled, tunneled and pumped into shadows of their old selves in a water-grabbing scenario that has literally reshaped ecology, environment, culture by exploding populations into areas where the fragility of life — the beauty and the essence of the land — has been pummeled into submission and non-existence.

Features of the Columbia

The Columbia is more than 1,200 miles long, birthed in the Canadian Rockies. The river’s rumbling surge pushes a branch of freshwater more than 400 miles out to sea. These estuary ecosystems are fecund, nurturing one of the more biologically grand portions of the river. The estuarine habitat provides humans with most of the fish catches because these species are tied to this nutrient-rich habitat for part of their life cycles. Snyder puts it simply here in a statement for the Rivers of Words project:

The water cycle includes our springs and wells, our snowpack, our irrigation canals, our car wash, and the spring salmon run. It’s the spring peeper in the pond and the acorn woodpecker chattering in a snag. The watershed is beyond the dichotomies of orderly/disorderly, for its forms are free, but somehow inevitable. The life that comes to flourish within it constitutes the first kind of community.

For the Columbia, where river meets sea, numbers of freshwater and marine fish species thrive in this unique habitat. The sturgeon is an important recreational fish, as well as a stable commercial catch. This web of ecosystems is the feeding and breeding ground for clams, oysters and mussels as well as Dungeness crabs. Over 175 species of birds occupy and intermix with the habitat of the lower Columbia River and the estuary. Blue heron, gull and tern colonies are supported by the river and estuary. Peregrine falcons, hawks, owls, ospreys, and eagles nest and hunt in this diverse habitat. The lower Columbia is also an important area for more than 150,000 birds that migrate along the Pacific Flyway. Shorebirds use the estuary, and wintering waterfowl in the area of 200,000 birds occupy land and islands in the Columbia area.

Nursery and rearing areas for young salmon and steelhead are found in the Columbia River Basin, producing some of the world’s largest salmon runs — 16 to 18 million annually in the past. Changes in the environment, loss of habitat and continuing degradation of the basin account for the huge decrease in salmon runs — wild stocks of salmon, steelhead and sea-run cutthroat trout are virtually gone in some areas. Chum salmon stocks have declined to less than 1 percent of original levels. Habitat for sockeye salmon has declined to less than 4 percent of its historic level.

Big RIVER

Without sufficient water to ensure the survival of anadromous fish, the mutual interests of both the Indians and non-Indians will be defeated. —-Eugene Greene, Sr.

Our communities need to reappropriate the myths, histories and salvation of river culture and the potentiality of growing economies, recreation, cities that have a balance with the diverse nature of rivers and watersheds. A belief in “river keeping” should inoculate our northwest population of water-grabbing energy consortiums, farmers, manufacturers and urban consumers against unchecked and all-out consumptive growth, and it should be woven into a strong fabric of place ethic, place understanding, as Charles Wilkinson points out:

An ethic of place respects equally the people of a region and the land, animals, vegetation, water and air. It recognizes that westerners revere their physical surroundings and that they need and deserve a stable, productive economy that is accessible to those with modest incomes. An ethic of place ought to be a shared community value and ought to manifest itself in a dogged determination to treat the environment and its people as equals, to recognize both as sacred, and to insure that all members of the community not just search but insist upon solutions that fulfill the ethic.

Can planners and communities in general codify a holistic approach to sustaining our growth (with built-in controls tied directly to the stream flows and habitat requirements of unleashed — dam-breached — river basins) while allowing for influxes of populations and industries, into the urban environmental reaches without taking into account the lifeblood of what defines the west (or defines it through the substantial lack thereof): water? Can we hold sacred the force of river ecology and river magnificence while still compensating for our consumer-driven economies that depend on water for this American lifestyle? The answer to these questions rests in a redirection away from the practices and excesses of lifestyle. Denver’s average daily household consumption of water is 750 gallons. Las Vegas averages 350 gallons each day for each resident. More than 60 percent of water used in places like El Paso, Phoenix, Vegas and the like goes for lawns and landscaping. Beef-raising takes from 2,000 to 6,000 gallons of water per pound off the hoof. Microprocessing plants in Albuquerque gobble up 5,000 gallons of water per 8-inch microprocessing chip. We know our needs and our wants, but can we realign the limits of nature, the ethic of our contribution to our place’s harmony?

The second-longest river in the United States is the Colorado, at 1,700 miles; however, its banks are not heavily populated — no big city stands on them. Yet it is one of the most diverted water systems in America. In River: One Man’s Journey down the Colorado, Colin Fletcher speaks of his trips down the Colorado:

Because all but the headwaters flow through the desert, and the river is the area’s prime source of water — that lifeblood of existence on this planet — it has attracted prodigious attention, both political and engineering. We humans now control its flow so iron-fistedly that my friend Philip L. Fradkin called his book about the Colorado A River No More. … It does not grow steadily bigger: after an early maturity it receives no major permanent tributaries. In its final stages — largely but not entirely because of human interference — it tends to taper away. For years on end it may never reach the ocean.

The Wanapum Indians on the Columbia River called it, Chiawana, or ‘Big Water,” and there is evidence of habitation by tribes along the Columbia dating back 10,000 years. They used a systems way of thinking, that is, seeing the whole, recognizing patterns, and learning to act accordingly. They relied on river-to-mountain migration patterns, and their total physical and spiritual existence was tied to the vast water and land ecosystems. Salmon was the tribes’ lifeblood, their subsistence crop — culturally and spiritually linked to the region’s economy.

At the Edge of the Water

A hominid jawbone (Ardipithecus ramidus) and settlement gathering scraps have been excavated from Ethiopia’s Awash River, dating more than 4 million years before the present. Our ancestors foraged the banks of the same lake, and human life developed within the reaches of rivers and lakes. The Tigris and Euphrates, the Ganges, the Yangtze and the Nile; they all provided transportation, fishing, mammal and bird hunting, bathing and drinking before they were diverted for agriculture. They became the sustainers of life and fertility: Mother of the Land. The word for river in Thai, mae ran, translates literally as “water mother.” The floods of the Nile are associated with the tears of the goddess Isis. Ireland’s River Boyne was worshipped as a goddess by Celtics. Of the life sustained by rivers, salmon are associated with much myth, as much as any animal. “The Salmon of Knowledge, legend had it, swam in a pool near the source of the Boyne. Anyone who tasted the fish would acquire understanding of everything in the world, past, present and future.” For the Pacific Northwest natives, “the salmon were superior beings who ascended rivers for the benefit of people, died and then returned to life in a great house under the ocean where they danced and feasted in human form.”

Rivers provide life and death. Irrigation is about 3,000 years old as a technology — in 1900 40 million hectares of cropland were under irrigation worldwide compared to 248 million hectares in 1993. Rivers have served as roadways — “all great historic cultures have thriven through the movement of men and institutions and inventions and goods along the natural highway of a great river,” writes Lewis Mumford. We owe so much to rivers, to the unchained movement of water from landscape to landscape that the world should be imbued with the word “riverscape” in describing our geographic locations. “To trace the history of a river … is to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body,” wrote Gretel Ehrlich.

for every real lock
there is only one real key
and it is in some other dream
now invisible

it’s the key to the one real door
it opens the river and the sky both at once
it’s already in the downward river
with my hand on it
my real hand
and I am saying to the hand
turn
open the river

— W.S. Merwin

Damnation the Dams

For a bit of boasting, Washington lays claim to the fact that the Columbia River is the most hydroelectrically developed river system in the world, with more than 400 dams, producing 21 million kilowatts. It comes from two lakes between the Continental Divide and the Selkirk mountain ranges. It has ten major tributaries: the Kootenay, Okanagan, Wenatchee, Spokane, Yakima, Snake, Deschutes, Willamette, Cowlitz and Lewis. The most important, the Snake, is 1,100 miles long and runs through North America’s deepest gorge, Hell’s Canyon, at 7,900 feet deep.

The world’s rivers are forever altered by dams. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that 70 percent of U.S. riparian habitats have been lost or damaged by damming and diversion. In the Pacific Northwest, more than 100 stocks and subspecies of salmon and trout have gone extinct and another 200 are at risk, mostly due to dams and loss of riparian habitat. The Nile is the world’s longest river at 4,132 miles but because of irrigation facilitated through damming, less than 10 percent of the river’s flow reaches the Mediterranean Sea. Damming has brought significant change to watersheds. Nothing alters a river as completely as a dam. A wild river is dynamic, mercurial, transforming itself and the land and flora and fauna around it. A slack reservoir is the complete opposite of a river. Still versus flow. “A dam traps sediments and nutrients, alters the river’s temperature and chemistry, and upsets the geological processes of erosion and deposition through which the river sculpts the surrounding land,” writes McCully.

Dams and river diversions do not produce new water. The amount of water on earth has remained constant for 2 billion years, and while 70 percent of the earth’s surface is covered with water, only 3 percent is fresh water, and out of that amount, less than 1 percent is easily available for human consumption. Water planners, governments and international agencies have touted the theory that the 21st century will be fraught with wars over water, which in effect justifies water diversion projects and damming. Of course, the pipelines and pumping stations usually are built for the least frugal, the rich, and take away water, power and to the people, from those who use the least amount of water, the poor. Damming can reduce potable water supplies through tainting water quality and evaporation in those huge reservoirs.

The world has 40,000 large dams that have displaced 60 million people, leaving them poorer. An area larger than California — 400,000 kilometers — has been covered up by dams’ reservoirs Excessive irrigation has destabilized the soil through salination. Dam projects force poor nations into huge debt loads that destabilize economies and put more pressure on the poor populations. The World Bank is the largest financial backer of dams, funding 26 dams a year from 1970-85 (now it’s 4 per year, a sign of change on many levels). Malaria and schistosomiasis — incubated in the canals and still waters created by dams — outbreaks kill tens of thousands of people a year.

A dam is a momentary human bash to the midsection of a river. I like to know that, to put it in simple terms, the river will win. Like a rabbit and a tortoise: dams are put up quick, but the constant pressure of the river, beating and whirling, will break through. This is an idea beyond energy watts produced, beyond conserving water for drought. It is the original plan for the flow of water.

–S. H. Semken

Restoration, Healing, Health

Water use in the past 90 years has increased exponentially, and we’ve witnessed a 200 percent increase of per capita water use, accounting for a 566 percent increase in withdrawals from the freshwater sources around the world. This water grabbing has also played a large role in lowering the amount of water available for humans, wild and domesticated animals, and plant life because of the pollution cased by industrial and agricultural methods. Planners and technologists may see the building of dams and diversion systems as ways to neutralize the “war for water,” but evidence shows that the past century’s dam building mania still put 1.3 billion people without access to fresh water, and more than 1.7 billion are without minimal sanitation. Add to that 2.1 billion people without power, and we might draw the conclusion that dam building doesn’t benefit people — the people of the land, of the regions — but rather dams put money into the pockets of corporations, despotic governments, and multinational banking concerns.

So following a land ethic adopted by Stegner, Leopold and Wilkinson, a few questions arise in relationship to human communities and their associations with river systems: Who owns a river? Is access to clean water and adequate food a human right? Is cultural integrity best ensured by environmental integrity? Groups like International Rivers Network and American Rivers have generated great local interest worldwide in facing off the discriminatory practices of dam builders. We have already seen various forms of exploitation in this damming history: displacement of farmers from good alluvial soil (farmers who are subsistence, usually non-white with strong cultural ties to their land). Ray Dasmann sees the ecosystem-based or biosphere-based cultures as the strongest in terms of holding to the land ethic — societies whose life and economies are centered in terms of natural regions and watersheds. Wendell Berry writes about the “unsettling of America” through an economic pogrom penalizing us if we try to stay in one spot and do anything well there. This is the overarching idea of inhabitory people who see their land as sacred … all land is sacred. And urban elites have scoffed at, overtaxed, marginalized and vilified peasants, paisanos, paysan, peoples of the land, as Snyder points out. Now is the time to heal the land and its people by unleashing the river.

As Heraclitus wrote, we cannot step into the same river twice because the river is constantly changing — the very nature of water. As westerners moving into this great landscape, we need to link to our rivers beyond the potentiality of more golf courses and shopping malls. We need rivers as more than emblems; we need healthy watersheds so people can learn to control their own needs, control a community’s growth and urban decay, control the factory farming and unchecked ranching that the west has come to symbolize. Valerie Rapp in her book, Water the River Reveals, discusses many aspects of the rivers of the Northwest in this simple but telling book; the chapter headings reveal much about how the river must be engaged: “Going Upriver,” “The Elegant Connection,” “Disturbance and Resilience,” “Respect and Transformation,” “Broken Connections,” “The Simplified Landscape,” “Uncoupling the Ecosystem,” “The Landscape of Salmon,” “Restoration,” and “Refuge.” Her book ends with a call for a regional vision for rivers and watersheds — linked watersheds:

In the Pacific Northwest, all the rivers are missing at least some pieces. The best we have are the almost pristine rivers, the healthy salmon stocks, the key watersheds. The connection that should bind the pieces together in a resilient web are severed or frayed. But the Pacific Northwest rivers have more pieces than the rivers in the rest of the country. They have enough pieces that healing is possible.

Alternatives to the Same Old River Song

“The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst. The rivers carry our canoes, feed our children. If we sell you our land, you must remember, and teach your children, that the rivers are our brothers, and yours, and you must henceforth give the rivers the kindness you would give any brother.”

— Suquamish Chief Seattle

According to Sandra Postel, international water scarcity expert, water demand in industry could be cut now between 40 and 90 percent with existing methods and technologies. Combine this with a 30 percent drop in water use for cities and between 10 to 50 percent drop in agriculture’s use of water, and we have hope that the future will see more and more self-imposed river saving conservation programs. These conservation measures and technologies do not generally impede economic output or quality of life. Water management is part of a United Nations conference charter established in 1998 for freshwater management policy. The main points include the philosophy of an inhabitory land ethic:

• safeguard the rights of access to water for future generations
• limit water demands
• ensure equitable distribution
• protect the environment
• maximize the socio-economic output of a unit volume of water
• increase the efficiency of water use

Organizations like International Rivers Network develop advocacy and information clearing houses of information about projects worldwide where rivers are being unleashed and water use is being reinvented. They also provide technical assistance and economic aid. Here are just a few of the alternatives to damming and high consumptive demands put on water:

The greatest potential for water conservation in the west rests in increasing irrigation efficiency. More than 70 percent of the world’s fresh water withdrawn from rivers, lakes and underground aquifers is for agriculture uses. Traditional water harvesting technologies include rain- and groundwater harvesting, micro-dams, shallow wells, low-cost pumps, and moisture conserving agricultural practices, all of it sustainable. Permaculture is a sustainable agriculture technique (way of thinking) based on working with natural systems, rather than against nature. Desalination projects don’t lead to displacement of indigenous peoples, changed agricultural lifestyles or serious ecological effects. Recycling wastewater is largely an untapped technology for irrigation and groundwater recharge.

The idea that dams produce irreplaceable energy is one of the toughest to alter, especially in hydroelectricalized Washington, but the U.S. is making progress. Since 1973 we have gotten four times as much new energy from demand management savings as from all expansions of domestic energy supplies put together. That’s $200 billion in savings each year on energy bills. Many other ways to get power or water that cause less damage to ecosystems are available to planners, even as a replacement for their favored large infrastructure projects. Solar is the second fastest growing energy in the world. The earth each year receives 10 times as much energy from the sun as is contained in all the known reserves of coal, oil, natural gas and uranium combined. While wind power may not produce 100 percent of the time, it still could provide a larger proportion of energy in places with good winds. Fuel cells produce electricity, heat and water without combustion by reigning in the reaction of hydrogen and oxygen. Small-scale hydropower projects better serve local economies and help develop local skills. These are small dams — under 10 megawatts — that are less harmful to the environment and surrounding communities. Biogas and ocean power are technologies of the future with much potential. In developing countries most organic waste like dung is burned directly for fuel — biomass energy. Biogas is practical and economical for recycling large amounts of organic waste. Burning biomass puts 700 million women at risk for developing serious health problems in developing countries, according to the World Health Organization (1992). Wave power harnessing devices are already available — economically competitive and efficient as well as clean. One such device used in the United Kingdom is one-third cheaper than coal with the additional benefit of no carbon emissions.

Green Shadows in Water Deliver Our Hope

“Consider this water which flows toward the city. … See how pure and fine it is! But when it enters the city … people wash their hands and faces and feet and other parts with it, and their clothes and carpets, and the urine of all the quarters and dung of horses and mules are poured into it and mixed up with it. Look at it when it passes out the other side of the city! Though it is still the same water, turning the dust to clay … making the plain verdant … disagreeable things have been mingled with it.”

— Rumi

In the process of writing this brief overlay of ideas, I find hope. In just a two-hour look-over of the Internet, I found group after group dedicated to restoring rivers, breaching dams, cleaning up watersheds, reclaiming the land — all with the idea of the Wilkinson land ethic embedded in their mission statements, that balance of human life and nature, culture and economy. One bibliography on dam removal found on-line contains more than 200 sources from around the U.S. and world — titles like “Restoring Southern California Steelhead: Dam. Why Care?” or Instream Flow Protection: Seeking a Balance in Western Water Use or River Dammed, River Redeemed: Dam Removal and Salmon Recovery in the Pacific Northwest point to a new direction, a new ethos (new to the conquerors, not the Chief Seattles) for dismantling the systems and philosophy set forth by the Lords of Yesterday. The IRN list of Washington River Organizations covers more than 220 individual groups fighting for their fisheries, their watersheds, their wild and scenic places.

Native American cultures and environmental practices can be easily linked to other inhabitory peoples around the world. Snyder is one of the leading voices, a poet, “formulating a concept of international bioregionalism based on traditional and innovative practices of inhabitation and re-inhabitation.” Solutions rest with the people who read and continue to understand what Deep Ecology is and how we all must engage ourselves in studying the overlay of other people’s ways of the land (and water) and other countries’ solutions to the watershed management and ecological wholeness. It takes an understanding of the interconnectedness of all lives on this planet, not just a “think locally, act locally” mentality. We can change the course of the rivers’ futures in our lifetimes through belief, discipline and ritual. We must understand the fragility of refuge and the toughness of nature. Leopold tells us we must expand the boundaries to make this new ethic applicable to those of us living west of the 98th meridian: the land as a collection of soil, plant, animal and water ecologies. We are part of the biotic mechanism, and sometimes humanity must make some hard-boiled points — like the trees and water are more important left whole rather than lumber and diverted water. It all connects to the very idea that the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals leads to global warming. Forests and water and species and humanity — it seems like an easy lesson for urban and rural planners to grasp and run with.

It’s all about water in this new Next West of ours, where we can restore old rivers back to new acclaim so we all can have the sense of community the rivers have always led us to believe we could find amongst teeming masses and isolated subsistence farmers. Rivers connect cit to city. Their force generates a connectivity to land, animal, heavens. Most rivers running through cities have been harnessed, muddied, polluted, drained, or pooled. But this movement to break down dams so rapids return, so communities built on or near the river can gain a sense of nature even within a heavily demarcated urban space, seems to take into consideration nature and humanity creating an adjusted or abbreviated livable place. Rivers fulfill their promise to enchant, enrapture and entertain; yet their basic lifeblood provides humans with the vitality of life through the energy inside their very ions. Moving along the river path as recreationists or fishing aficionados or along its banks in public spaces like parks and wildlife zones generates the psychological salving our communities’ need. Major cities throughout the U.S. use rivers as their centers or their boundaries. Rivers are in an hour’s reach of most urban spaces. How can planners not incorporate river thinking in planning our cities’ growth patterns and long-range community health? The river and systems that grow with them prove to be the most unusual solutions to some of the destructive forces of urban decay, sprawl, and sociological abandonment.

“Eventually all things merge into one … and the river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops … under the rocks are the words . . . and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.”

— Norman Maclean

Prince and the Salmon People Study Guide

“I can’t think of anything that harms nature more than cutting down trees and burning them,” said William Moomaw, professor emeritus of international environmental policy at Tufts University.

Oh, the number of top 10 or top 20 stories flooding the cloud servers delivered to us promptly, nanosecond speed, over the fuck-you Three-Face-Book, or on your email server, on the Dumber Dumbed Down Smart (sic) Phone, and of course, on the telly. Imagine, instantaneous fake news, falsified un-News, the entire suite of topics New York Times covers, LA Times feeds, and on and on.

Delivered instantnesouly, and yet, water is getting shut off, electricity is being turned off, roads are buckling, and that old time religion — privatizing everything until all shit breaks loose — determined to give USA a D-minus in infrastructure. Rebar in bridges, dikes, buildings, and the like, going the way of rust, baby. Reinforced concrete, crumbling, and the entire wasteland that is Auto Nation USA, all of that endless trucking back and forth, like a fucking spider web from space, it is what we have in this broke-back country.

I’ve talked with old folks (80 years plus) and with city and county “politicians.” I’ve talked to numerous people who just can’t get that reality out of their craw — so–sosch — ehh-cism ! The end of humanity is, well, on the horizon. Thanks to that Socialism Derangement Syndrome (SDS). It is built into the systems in the USA, and the DNA of USA-USA-USA, well, over generations of murdering Indians, slaves, and that checkerboard of people in countries from sea to oil slick sea, it has turned most of USA into a whack — job: undereducated, under curious about the world around them, dumb as dirt, compliant, cancelling ideas/discourse/thinking/pushback/socialism on all ends of the right-left divide. The wounds in this serial murdering society can’t be cauterized.

There has to be immediate amputation of the gangrenous rot coming from all 50 states. The rot of consumerism/retailism/financialization/indebtedness is spread like a a million species of bacteria and viruses and other diseases that are indeed resistant to any medicine-goop-treatment.

There are so many deplorables, that term that Hillary hacked up, she being one of millions in the deplorable camp of neoliberalism. Deplorables who would gut you for stumbling into them on a sidewalk. Deplorables who are armed to the tooth who would shoot anyone stumbling into their backyard.

Think about it. People at a bloody concussion fest, UFC, chanting USA-USA-USA with this subhuman and his other subhuman followers traipsing into the stadium with their potbellies and juggling jowls as they take a load off their sagging asses in their multi-millionaire seats.

Read the junk here: NYPost.

There is no deep outrage with this sort of optics that runs the USA prime time attention span. No outrage here, that the sweetness of all those sodas have yet more and more of a price, in that shit-hole Florida, run by those shit-hole Diaspora from all over, especially the East Coast, Trump and Company no less.

It is environmental racism, and alas, this stinking country can’t keep the water on, can’t feed the farms with irrigation, can’t give out stinking fans to dying folk in this heat wave. Imagine, all those toys, those trillions to the DoD, and those men and women in uniformed, also called the Armed Forces, where are they? No triage or MASH tents or massive pouring out of USA tax dollars to mitigate and solve the unfolding problems wrought by Capitalism on Crack. Story after story. Burning cane fields, yep, that’s good for the air. And this story was the same in 2001 when I went from El Paso to Spokane: massive fires lit by wheat farmers to burn stubble. Oh, the irony of Capitalism on Crack. Good old time stupidity. But stupidity and compliant people, well, that combo makes them trillions.

Read, ProPublica — Black Snow!

Then these Nordics, these putrid white saviors in Europe touting their carbon neutral smoke and mirrors fake science. Again, tearing down forests, in this case, North Carolina, brought to us by CNN.

Northampton has one of the highest unemployment rates in the state — which almost doubled during the Covid-19 pandemic — and nearly 22% of its residents are living in poverty.

“If the wood products industry and biomass were a way of growing strong rural economies in the southeastern region, these rural communities should be some of the wealthiest on the planet,” said Smith. “We are in the world’s largest wood producing region. But you don’t see any evidence in these rural communities of thriving rural economies. The opposite is actually true.”

Enviva currently employs 98 people at their Northampton facility and pay roughly 37% more than the average wage in the county, the company told CNN in a statement, adding that they strive to hire locally if workers have the right qualifications.

Imagine, the scams, and, in the end, these communities, again, pay the price of environmental racism:

Pretty, unh? Would love to have this in your backyard, right?

The EU, which aims to be climate-neutral by 2050, is set to revise its Renewable Energy Directive this summer and is expected to update sustainability criteria for biomass. Critics hope they will restrict biomass imports from overseas, exclude whole, living trees as “waste product” and properly account for carbon emissions from cutting and burning wood.

But a draft document that surfaced this past spring does not suggest substantial changes are coming for Europe’s directive.

I live in a state where the Democratic weak kneed governor got stiff knees and shut down everything, and this is the reality of stupidity around the planned pandemic. The lack of rural and inner city clinics, and just a lack of a massive movement to treat people with the common cold, gut diseases, the flu, and the bioweaponized SARS-Cov2, that’s what the Kate Brown, self-described bi-sexual, is all about. And, the reality is, this privatized medicine (sic) needs ending. Imagine, ending CEO and CFO and stockholder dividends. Oh, it would be easy to turn hospitals into cooperatives, employee owned outfits. On a sliding scale, before single payer health care.

But the reality that the shinanigans of the hospitals have killed thousands. Not because of the batty virus, but because of delays, and no treatment. Now? Oregonian, read it.

After 18 years as a nurse, much of it in the emergency department, Jeremy Lail considered himself a battle-tested veteran.

But last week, he asked his bosses at Providence Portland Medical Center if he could go on leave. Lail said he’s overwhelmed by the horde of patients seeking treatment at his ER and unnerved at the erratic, angry nature of many of those patients.

“I dreaded going to work,” he said. “I found myself thinking, is this the day someone is going to pull a gun and shoot me? We’re seeing how society can devolve right now. I’ve been dealing with a lot of anxiety and depression.”

For months, hospital workers have wanted nothing more than for the pandemic to end and life to return to some semblance of normalcy. But the much-deserved respite has yet to begin. Instead, a combination of understaffing and a tidal wave of seriously ill patients who have deferred health care for months has made life in the ER as bad or worse than the height of the pandemic.

It’s a recipe for disaster that is unfolding at hospitals across the country: Blend emotionally exhausted caregivers with emotionally disturbed patients, throw in a wave of street violence and the departure of some of the most experienced workers on the wards due to fatigue and burnout, and voila, America has its latest health care crisis.

Many employees argue there is another key ingredient added by the hospitals that makes the end result particularly toxic: A penny-pinching mentality that allows the understaffing to develop in the first place.

Oh, now we can see god in the science of trillions wasted on artificial (sic) suns (sic). You have this sickness, about limitless and green energy sources. Makes no sense, really, when billions are on the brink of starvation, polluted slow and fast deaths. Imagine that, no solutions NOW for farming collapses, fisheries collapses, broke-back poverty and chronic illnesses, and just endless droughts. Nope. We have all these resources and mental lifetimes in the tens of millions working on this?

China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ Brings Nuclear Fusion One Step Closer, Breaking World Record

These stories never-ever look at things from an ethical point of view. From a life cycle analysis view. From the view of the hoards of us, useless breathers-eaters-breeders. This news coming out of Europe or China or Israel or USA, well, no one looks at the reality of how land is desiccating and desertifying. All those satellites for 6 G internet of nanotechnology. None of the real humans are the tables of power looking at, well, all these issues tied to enviornmental racism, structural violence, reparations, land theft, and the like.

Because, these stories will go the way of the stories to dare valorize Palestinians, or debunk the lies of the murderous Jewish Israeli Regime of More Than Just Apartheid:

Another casualty of Israel’s war on truth: ‘Canadian Journalists for Free Expression’ fired a staffer for publishing a routine letter that criticized Israel for killing journalists… By Kevin Metcalf

In May, Israel bombarded Gaza for 11 days, killing 256 Palestinians, including 66 children. [Additional info here.]

In the midst of this attack, hundreds of journalists in Canada signed an open letter calling for fairer coverage of Israel and Palestine. CBC then barred reporters who signed the letter from covering the region, claiming that doing so made them appear biased.

I was one of those who signed the open letter, because I believe the media should report fairly. I also expected there’d be a backlash to the letter within newsrooms, especially at the CBC, due to my own experiences: Years before this letter was released, I was fired from my media job for writing about Israel’s killing of protesters and journalists.

With help from the state broadcaster, over the course of a few weeks in 2018 my career was destroyed and my life’s work was completely uprooted. I now work as a landscaper for a living. (Source)

If my fellow writers haven’t already experienced this, well, not just criticizing Israel or the Jewish mentality of many Jews who are as racist as any Steven Miller or Donal et al Trump LLC.

Try having conversations with people in workplaces about bioweaponized SARS-Cov2. Any discussion about therapies that would have saved hundreds of thousands from oxygen-depleted, intubation death. Cancelled big time. I am an educator, so, that one is out the window to dare question masks and lockdowns. Dare question USA from a truly communist lens? Question Trump? Cancelled. Question Biden? Cancelled. Question the rapaciousness and profit motives of medicine and pharmacy and virology/ Cancelled. Question how some or key points of the company you work for? Cancelled. It’s a sickness this society, so, again, the “Israel Policies Are Monstrous and Murderous” critique gets you cancelled.

Read this science story. Of course, anything tied to all the chronic illnesses, or we call them intellectual-developmental-psychiatric disabilities, is good to see how things can be mitigated (of course, the idea for both left and right elites is to say, “Hmm, useless eater, well, abort-abort.”). But this sort of story below is another form of colonizing. There are millions of people working on learning how the forever chemicals, all the hormone disrupters, all those additives-chemicals-pollutants-particulates-drugs-GMOs-et al, can cause a storm of epigenetic issues down the line, and, yes, autism spectrum disorder is just one area of massive numbers of younger and younger people developing DD-ID-PD disorders. A magnitude of 100.

You will not see these scientists looking for the genetic cause looking at all the synergistic causes of depleted sperm, wombs of wild chemical storms, none of that, of course. Nope. They are getting paid to look deep at all the causes of Autism-Autism like disorders.

An increase in the incidence of Type 2 diabetes, obesity and autism has been reported in Scotland. Similar increases have been seen globally. The herbicide glyphosate was introduced in 1974 and its use is accelerating. The manufacturers claim it to be safe, but none of the Regulatory Agencies are monitoring glyphosate levels in groundwater.

By courtesy of independent researchers around the world we present evidence that glyphosate interferes with many metabolic processes in plants, animals and humans, and glyphosate residues have been found in all three. Glyphosate is an endocrine-disruptor (as are many herbicides) it damages DNA and it is a driver of mutations that lead to cancer. We present graphs from the US which correlate glyphosate application and the percentage of GE soy and corn crops to the incidence and prevalence of various diseases in those on a Western diet. The Pearson’s correlation coefficients are very strong and highly significant for obesity, diabetes, autism, thyroid cancer, liver cancer, deaths from Parkinson’s, Senile Dementia and Alzheimer’s, inflammatory bowel disease and acute kidney failure. We present Cancer Research UK graphs of upward trends in cancer incidences between 1975 and 2009, which are in line with the US graphs.

Other consequences are gastrointestinal disorders, heart disease, depression, infertility, birth defect s and other cancers. The data for the amount of non-agricultural use of glyphosate in the UK appear to be confidential. Parts of South Wales, in former mining areas, Japanese knotweed and Himalayan Balsam abound. The local Council does not hold glyphosate records. Instead it contracts out to a commercial organisation to supply industry approved vegetation management techniques. A quote from the contractor: “The glyphosate we use called round up has a hazard free label.” The level of glyphosate in a river draining from areas of Japanese knotweed was 190 parts per trillion (ppt) and local tap water was 30 ppt. These were of the order of concentrations found in a study in 2013 which showed that breast cancer cell proliferation is accelerated by glyphosate in extremely low concentrations: “potential biological levels at part per trillion (ppt) to part per billion (ppb).”

It’s short. Fifty-six pages. Read it! GLYPHOSATE: DESTRUCTOR OFHUMAN HEALTH AND BIODIVERSITY

Versus: Researchers discover new genetic driver of autism and other developmental disorders

Oh, this is big, no? The Nile? Egypt and Ethiopia? You think this water story is not the issue of our times? Oh, that Artificial Sun will save us. Think water wars all over the planet:

A dispute over the Nile, the world’s longest river, is coming to a head. At stake are the lives and livelihoods of millions of people who depend on its water.

Egypt is objecting to efforts by Ethiopia to start operating a $4.8 billion dam on a major tributary of the Nile, a hydroelectric project that it hopes will power a social and economic transformation of the country, without a binding agreement that preserves Cairo’s rights to the waters.

Then, well, we get to the Zoom Doom story, the post planned pandemic story. Apple of course should be shut down, taken over, and the entire honchos put on that Epstein Island. Or Musk’s. Take your pick of billionaire islands. But this is the new abnormal. Working in your underwear, latte chilled, all those airplane and spider plants, and the puppy underfoot and four-pound beef-lovers pizza at the ready. These people who are threatening to leave Apple, well, I guarantee you they are dream hoarders, Hillary-Kamala lites. Believers in social distancing for life, masks on everywhere, and these are the ones who are ramming digital and cloud and satellite surveillance and AI and robotized tech up our asses.

The state of news (sic):

Apple stood its ground last week in the face of employee protest against its new requirement that they work from home only two days a week. Both the policy–which came directly from CEO Tim Cook–and Apple’s comments about it betray a striking lack of emotional intelligence. That’s a bad idea in today’s tight labor market. The approach is one no small company or startup can afford to take.

Our story begins about a month ago, when Apple announced its new return-to-the-office policy in light of widespread vaccinations and falling Covid-19 infections. In an internal email, Cook announced that, beginning in early September, employees would be required to work in the office at least three days a week. Specifically, those days would be Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, with the option to work remotely on Wednesdays and Fridays.

The headline says it all about this cancel culture stupidity,, using “emotional intelligence as a cudgel: Apple’s Remote Work Policy Is a Complete Failure of Emotional Intelligence: Don’t try this at your company

Finally, the top 10 or whatever stories, prompted by my friend, Joe the Farmer from Merced:

How long will it be before we start seeing adds for front end Protest Protector guard bars for F-150’s, Chevy Silverado’s and the Amerikaner favorite, Dodge Ram? What good fascist could possibly pass up the opportunity to keep protesters blood and body parts from damaging their radiators and having expensive body shop repair bills? I’m sure some enterprising asshole is already marketing “Protest Protectors” as I write this. Only in Amerika. The land of opportunity.

He was reacting to a Counterpunch story, pulling this quote from it:

Talk about “fascism with American characteristics”! “In the wake of last year’s Black Lives Matter protests,” VOX’s Cameron Peters noted last April, “Republican lawmakers are advancing a number of new anti-protest measures at the state level – including multiple bills that specifically make it easier for drivers to run down protesters… If the recent spate of anti-protest measures in Florida, Iowa, and Oklahoma is disturbing on its face, however, context does little to make it better. There is a specific history in the US of the far right using cars as weapons, and it’s not hard to see how bills like the one that is now law in Oklahoma might only make things worse…The most notable example is from August 2017: Heather Heyer, 32, was struck and killed and at least 19 others were injured when neo-Nazi James Alex Fields Jr. rammed a crowd of counter protesters in Charlottesville. Fields has since been sentenced to life in prison…But it’s more than that single incident. According to Ari Weil, the deputy research director for the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, there were at least 72 incidents of cars driving into protesters over a relatively short span in 2020, from May 27 through July 7… Examples aren’t hard to find. There’s even a Wikipedia page specifically dedicated to ‘vehicle-ramming incidents during George Floyd protests.’ And as Weil explained in an interview with Vox’s Alex Ward last year, ‘there’s an online environment that for years has been celebrating and encouraging these types of horrendous attacks’” (emphasis added). From Iowa Nice to Iowa Nazi: a Report from the Friendly Fascist Heartland

These are examples in USA and UK of how we help the sick, tired, overworked, the useless eaters, useless breeders, useless breathers, useless resters: “OH, JOE — The White European and White United Snakes of America and Klanada, they are all worthless scum, and we are useless breathers, useless eaters, useless breeders, useless one and all, unless there are fines/levies/penalties/tickets/violations/tolls/taxes/triple taxations/surcharges/fees-to gouge the poor and lower classes to death in their operating systems.”

15 Inhumane Ways Cities Are Preventing The Homeless From Sleeping In Public Places

https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2019/07/homeless-campers-face-a-new-obstacle-along-portland-roadways-giant-piles-of-boulders.html

New York Post
Cop rolls bike over protester’s head during Breonna Taylor demonstration