…they are not just seeing us as useless, but they treat us like feedlot fodder, filling us up with roadkill, poisonous chemicals and data, and general junk until the slaughter house — slow death

The good old days, with this good old boy, fourth-generation cattleman, feedlot practitioner: Almost 20 years ago, my article, and then a documentary a decade old, and we are fucked.

• Cattle: Around 1.5 billion cattle are raised worldwide.
• Pigs: There are roughly 1 billion pigs on the planet.
• Chickens: The number of chickens is significantly higher, estimated at around 26 billion.

Cowboy Critic

By Paul K. Haeder

“Hello, my name is Howard Lyman and I am a recovering meat eater … dairy consumer … factory farmer.” Something for an Oprah show? Dr. Phil’s forte?

The Oprah reference is an accurate one for Lyman, the former operator of a super-industrialized livestock lot and dairy farm, now author (Mad Cowboy and No More Bull, both co-written with Glen Merzer) and advocate of vegetarianism, animal rights and stewardship of the land through sustainable agriculture. It was during an April 1996 Oprah show that the fourth-generation Montana cattleman — now living in Ellensburg — “let the cattle out of the bag” by confronting a spokesman for the National Cattleman’s Beef Association about the practice of feeding vegetarian ruminants their own kind. He suggests that the practice is a bizarre cannibalistic ritual set upon the industrialized meat-raising system to satisfy greed and the bottom line.

On the show, Lyman asserted that he and thousands of other cattle operators had been feeding their herds dead cows — downer cows put down because of cancer, viral diseases, genetic anomalies and mysterious neurological ailments — mixed with parts from butchered cows, including pulverized cow manure.

The proverbial cow pie hit the fan when it was acknowledged that this practice had rendered America’s beef supply susceptible to Mad Cow disease (BSE, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy), which had already taken its toll in the United Kingdom just a year earlier. Lyman, known as the “Mad Cowboy” or the “Vegan Rancher,” continues to speak out about abuses in industrial dairy and beef operations like the one he ran outside Great Falls, Mont.

Lyman saw the light after more than 20 years of using road-kill and slaughtered cows as ground-up feed. After hundreds of gallons of antibiotics. After daily chemical fogs to douse flies — the No. 2 bane of feedlot operators “after bovine diseases in their various forms.” In the feedlot business, that pesky fly takes a toll on huge operations because of all those cattle unnaturally crammed into one small space.

“With every cow in a pen producing 25 pounds of manure in a day,” Lyman says, “the flies can get so thick that they actually threaten a cow’s ability to breathe.”

“Better farming through chemistry” was Lyman’s mantra before his transformation, so he attacked the insect problem on an industrial scale.

“Early in the morning I would fill up a fly fogger with insecticide and spray great clouds of it over the whole operation,” Lyman writes in his book. “The insecticide would of course fall into the feed and the water of the cattle, as well as on the trees and the grass and the crops.”

To Oprah — and Court

Lyman’s story hinges on his early years working with his grandfather and father.

“At 8 or 9 I began milking cows and branding calves,” he writes. “At 10 I learned how to castrate calves. At harvest time, I’d work long past dark cutting the grain. I’d rake hay and stack it, and I learned to drive a tractor and a team of horses. I worked every day of the year but two: July 4th and Christmas.”

Then he went off to college, leaving the 540-acre spread to his father and cancer-stricken older brother.

At the College of Agriculture at Montana State, Lyman was thrown into classes taught by chemists and academicians “without an hour’s worth of real farming experience among them.” It was the dawn of pesticides, herbicides, hormones and antibiotics.

In the early 1960s, his father was barely making ends meet; Lyman was going to take over the family business only if he could employ Big Ag’s bag of tricks. “My father had no choice,” he says. “He handed over the farm. But as he shook my hand on the deal, he had a few short words for me. He told me I was wrong.”

Eventually, Lyman saw the big picture when he scooped up that fourth-generation Lyman farm dirt and found it to be a lifeless, oily smelling, grey media for all the chemicals.

Jump ahead 20 years and picture Lyman in the Chicago studio of Harpo Productions. The audience is aghast at the commentary this ex-rancher is giving. Oprah and her brethren are freaked out by the prospect of that mad cow prion in the food supply, ready to attack humans — as it was doing in England.

Two months later Oprah, Harpo Productions and Lyman were hit with a “food disparagement” suit by Paul Engler, a Texas feedlot operator, and other Texas cattlemen as plaintiffs.

In 1998, Oprah, her production company, lawyers and Howard Lyman ended up in Amarillo, the first individuals sued under the Texas Food Disparagement Act. Her show went on, from Amarillo.

On Feb. 26, 1998, the jury found in favor of Lyman and Winfrey. No disparagement of beef. No damages levied.

Hold the Beef

Lazy R Ranch cattleman Maurice Robinette gets a kick out of Lyman’s claim to fame: “You have to hand it to him … he’s really found an interesting niche — vegetarian cattle rancher.” Robinette’s a third-generation Cheney cattleman with several university degrees who sees a future in responsible and sustainable cattle ranching. He runs 80 pairs of cattle and another 100 yearlings out of his Cheney operation. He also is Eastern Washington’s coordinator for the Washington Sustainable Food and Farming Network.

Robinette — who heads up Spokane’s Sustainable Agriculture Leadership Team, which helps local, small farmers — is battling against industrial farming, genetically modified crops, the huge bio-tech and ag giants, and the practice of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs).

The reformed Lyman tips his hat to men like Lazy R’s owner for raising beef the old-fashioned way — grass-fed, with no hormones or antibiotics applied, in a manner that protects the soil and abates the impacts on the entire ecosystem.

Oh, the readers who think ice core science and wetlands biology and wave energy research and coral reef bleaching reports and heating atmosphere studies and shifting jet streams analyses and weakening of ocean currents articles, and deforestation and desertification essays, all of that research is motivated by some fucking George Soros and World Economic Forum goddamned conspiracy to stop growth and to turn us into compliant Soylent Green eaters.

So, that Exxon conspiracy?

A comprehensive, peer-reviewed academic study of ExxonMobil’s internal deliberations, scientific research and public rhetoric over the decades has confirmed empirically that the oil giant misled the public about what it knew about climate change and the risks posed by fossil fuel emissions, the authors said on Tuesday.

The paper confirms the findings of a 2015 investigative series by InsideClimate News that was based largely on the company’s internal records, and also of independent work published by the Los Angeles Times. That reporting ignited investigations by state attorneys general that are still in litigation.

“On the question of whether ExxonMobil misled non-scientific audiences about climate science, our analysis supports the conclusion that it did,” Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes of Harvard University wrote in the study, published today in the scientific journal Environmental Research Letters.

Across the board, the paper found “a systematic discrepancy between what ExxonMobil’s scientists and executives discussed about climate change privately and in academic circles and what it presented to the general public,” the authors said.

“ExxonMobil contributed quietly to the science and loudly to raising doubts about it,” they wrote.

The authors explicitly rejected Exxon’s main defense, which was to claim that journalists were “cherry picking” the company’s record and that its positions had always been in step with the state of the science. The company often said that anyone who read the full documentary record would see matters Exxon’s way.

The Harvard researchers said their task was to accept Exxon’s challenge to review the full record. Among the documents they examined were dozens cited in ICN’s work, as well as more than 50 scientific papers Exxon frequently mentioned in its own defense and its issue advertising.

Supran and Oreskes called their conclusions “an expansive, quantitative, independent corroboration of the findings of investigative journalists.”

In an interview, Supran said the evidence was unambiguous.

The authors reviewed 187 public and internal Exxon documents over the past four decades, including many that were brought to light by ICN’s reporting.

In one finding, they judged that 83 percent of peer-reviewed papers written by company scientists and 80 percent of the company’s internal communications acknowledged that climate change is real and caused by humans. But among Exxon’s advertisements on the editorial pages of The New York Times, a proxy for communications aimed at a broad public audience, only 12 percent acknowledged climate change as real and human-caused, while 81 percent expressed doubt.

Yep, these people, who actually are well informed but organized in a ruckus society kind of way, they are the protestors.

Do you see protestors doing the same thing — gluing hands to cars, defiling stupid fucking paintings in the Smithsonian, burning tires on roads, throwing rotting tomatoes at senators’ and congress people’s townhouses and cars?

Yeah, all those climate change derangement fucks, man, all over Substack, etc. It’s amazing how they believe oil and coal and natural gas are king. We are of course hooked, but we also are being led down the death march of millionaires and billionaires and your local blue collar pukes and your statewide white collar Eichmanns determining the dirty air, water, soil, food, products and media in your small community, or large one.

You like this fucking headline, then, climate change deniers?

Evaluation of Atrazine and Glyphosate Literature Reviews Analyzing and Comparing the Science and Politcs in the United States, Europe and Argentina

Climate Chage Deniers, Rejoice:

You can’t have your Wheaties without eating Atrazine, man:

Glyphosate exposures in food and in the environment need much more scrutiny, according to a group of 20 doctors and scientists who put their concerns in writing last month:

“Should the public be assured of the safety of glyphosate? We think not…” the group wrote. “We urge the public not to be duped by chemical company apologists who attempt to obscure independent scientific findings that threaten a highly profitable product.”

In 2015, the World Health Organization confirmed that glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller, is a probable human carcinogen, based on strong evidence linking it to non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Since then, 140,000 glyphosate-exposed cancer victims have filed lawsuits against Bayer. The company is expected to pay $16 billion in jury awards and settlements by the time all the cases have been adjudicated.

Cancer is just one risk of glyphosate contamination.

Recent research from the UC Berkeley School of Public Health shows that childhood exposure to glyphosate is linked to liver inflammation and metabolic disorder in early adulthood, which could lead to liver cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease later in life.

Glyphosate was found in 99 percent of pregnant Midwestern women tested by the Indiana University School of Medicine between 2013 and 2016. Higher maternal glyphosate levels in the first trimester were associated with lower birth weights and higher NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) admissions.

Sure, those climate change deniers just love their fucking masters below:

The toxicity, management, politics, economics and governance of pesticides are interrelated, with compounding detrimental impacts that require thorough analysis. According to Pesticide Action Network,

” Aſter World War II, chemical companies needed a market for wartime inventions and pesticides were put to work in the fields. In the decades that followed, trade and development policy — coupled with savvy marketing by chemical companies — effectively developed an entire model of industrial agriculture.”

Old news, that SARS-CoV2 biolab work, and then the stuff of Doctor Mengele, Terrorists of Biological Science in Tel Aviv, and Japanese Unit 731. (Read that old news of gain of function, genetic splicing, CRISPR report, which is the white man’s Oppen-Monster-Heimer DOMINATION.

And so we come back to THIS:

Don’t just repudiate….rescind the Doctrine of Christian Discovery!

Steven T. Newcomb (Shawnee, Lenape) is a scholar, educator, author, journalist, film producer, public speaker and workshop leader/facilitator. He is internationally recognized for his more than four decades of research and writing on the origins of federal Indian law and international law dating back to the early days of Christendom, most notably focused on the religious doctrine now known in history as the Doctrine of Christian Discovery. Steve and Tiokasin discuss the Vatican’s formal repudiation of the Doctrine in March 2023. Steve is the author of “Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery” (Fulcrum Publishing, 2008 and Chicago Review Press) and a Producer of the 2015 documentary film, “The Doctrine of Discovery: Unmasking the Domination Code” directed and produced by Sheldon Wolfchild (Dakota). http://originalfreenations.com/

.

An Original Nations’ Examination of “Freedom,” “Human” and “Human Rights”

By : Steven Newcomb August 14, 2023

In our view, the claim of a right of domination, and the behaviors that follow from that claim, are the main cause of the global problems we all face. This is why opposition to that claim is a potentially unifying theme for homo sapiens.

This essay reveals why, from an Original Nations’ Perspective, the term “human,” in the Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian sense, as traced to the Vatican papal bulls of the fifteenth century, means “living under domination,” which in turn changes our understanding of the term “freedom.” We will explain why the international framework of human rights is not designed to liberate Peoples from the claim of a right of domination.

Peoples who were labeled and categorized as “barbarous,” “infidel,” “heathen,” “pagan,” and “savage” by the ancient political powers of Western Christendom, are still being labeled and categorized in that manner by the present-day successors of those political powers. It’s a tradition held together by means of, for example, active Supreme Court precedents that have those labels and categories embedded in them.[3] Those labels and categories are rooted in the past and ongoing in the present.

Domination has been defined as “living under the arbitrary will of another, [or] having to conform one’s actions to a will external to one’s own.”[4] This essay will explain that the claim of a right of domination is a hidden dimension of the terms “barbarous” and “human.” We have identified this covert dimension by studying fifteenth century Vatican papal bulls that labeled our non-christian Peoples “barbarous” and called for the oppression (“deprimantur,” in Latin) of our Original Nations and Peoples.

An Original Nations’ Examination of “Freedom,” “Human” and “Human Rights” By : Steven Newcomb August 14, 2023

Listen now, climate change deniers.

+—+

‘One of the gravest threats we face’

Let’s start first with the “biodefense” rationale—which as bioweapons expert Sam Husseini explains, is just a euphemism for biowarfare:

“Governments that participate in such biological weapon research generally distinguish between ‘biowarfare’ and ‘biodefense,’ as if to paint such ‘defense’ programs as necessary. But this is rhetorical sleight-of-hand; the two concepts are largely indistinguishable. ‘Biodefense’ implies tacit biowarfare, breeding more dangerous pathogens for the alleged purpose of finding a way to fight them. While this work appears to have succeeded in creating deadly and infectious agents, including deadlier flu strains, such ‘defense’ research is impotent in its ability to defend us from this pandemic.”

Since the technology was developed, genetic engineering has played a central role in U.S. and international biowarfare.

Michael J. Ainscough, in a 2002 paper titled: “Next Generation Bioweapons: The Technology of Genetic Engineering Applied to Biowarfare and Bioterrorism,” wrote that the “history of warfare and the history of disease are unquestionably interwoven.”

Ainscough, a medical doctor, Air Force flight surgeon and one-time diplomat of the American Preventive Medicine in Aerospace Medicine, argued that “organisms with altered characteristics are the ‘next generation’ of biological weapons:

“In this century, it is widely predicted that advances in biology and biotechnology will revolutionize society and life as we know it. At the same time, [this technology], which can be used to create biological weapons, will be one of the gravest threats we will face.”

Genetic engineering technology has evolved since Ainscough wrote on the subject two decades ago. Today, scientists warn that the newer gene-editing and synthetic biology technologies pose even greater risks in the realm of biowarfare.

Toby Ord, senior research fellow at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, told GM Watch that the risks posed by these newer gene editing technologies are among “the highest existential threats we face.” As GM Watch reports:

“Ord’s concerns about gene editing being used to genetically modify a pathogen are shared by the U.S. intelligence community. In fact, in 2016, the technique was added to the list of ‘weapons of mass destruction and proliferation’ by the top U.S. intelligence official for this very reason. The late Stephen Hawking also thought the genetic engineering of viruses had created the risk of a lethal ‘own goal.’ And by ‘lethal’ he meant not just as deadly as the current pandemic, but something that could make the planet completely uninhabitable for humans.”

‘Research that panics people, without actually learning much—if anything’

The other rationale for gain-of-function research, “biomedical” research, sounds less nefarious. But it ranks low on both the plausibility and ethics scales.

In 2017, after learning that the Trump administration had lifted the “pause” on gain-of-function research that had been instituted under Obama (in 2014), Marc Lipstich, an epidemiologist who directs the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard School of Public Health, spoke out.

Lipsitch told the New York Times that recent gain-of-function experiments “have given us some modest scientific knowledge and done almost nothing to improve our preparedness for pandemics, and yet risked creating an accidental pandemic.”

In a recent interview with Organic Consumers Association, Jonathan Latham, who has a PhD in virology and directs the Bioscience Resource Project, said this about the risks vs. the benefits of gain-of-function research:

“You’ve shown that you can make a pandemic-type virus in the lab. But on a global scale, it is potentially disastrous but a scientifically trivial demonstration. These people are doing research that panics people, without actually learning much—if anything.”

So why create a “pandemic-type virus” in a lab, if the risks far outweigh the benefits?

The public-facing rationale, Latham suggests, is this: By creating highly transmissible, potentially deadly (on a massive scale) viruses in a lab, researchers can study how to respond should such a virus ever evolve in nature and infect humans.

But Latham rejects that argument. Why? Because it involves a whole lot of guessing about how a virus might evolve in nature:

“People can say they’ve made a pandemic virus in a particular set of cells, that’s their scientific finding, and that’s what they publish. But the natural world doesn’t say that it has to evolve in those kinds of cells. It could come from a different species via another backbone, with a different spike. Are they going to do these experiments forever? Creating pandemic viruses, simply to generate research funds?”

And that, suggests Latham—the prospect of landing huge government grants—is the primary motivation for most gain-of-function research. Even though that research could potentially wipe out a huge percentage of the human race, in return for little if any benefit.

‘Hundreds of accidents, safety violations and near-misses’

The risks scientists assign to gain-of-function research are grounded in facts, not speculation. Labs, including in the U.S. and China, have poor track records when it comes to ensuring that potentially lethal, genetically engineered viruses won’t escape.

“Inside America’s Secretive Biolabs,” an investigative report published in May 2015 by USA Today, revealed reports of hundreds of accidents, safety violations and near-misses at biosafety labs—and that was just in the U.S. (In April of this year, the Washington Post reported on memos relating to safety lapses at the Wuhan Virology Lab, in Wuhan, China, the lab where COVID-19 was most likely created).

A follow-up USA Today news report on biolab safety issues, published in June 2016, prophetically likened the combination of risky gain-of-function research and lax safety measures to a “screenplay for a disaster movie.”

In October 2019, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health published the Global Health Security Index, which warned of the “increased potential threat of accidental or deliberate release of a deadly engineered pathogen, which could cause even greater harm than a naturally occurring Pandemic.”

The report also concluded, prophetically, that most countries, including the U.S., are woefully ill-prepared to address pandemics.

Scientists sounded alarms, years before COVID-19

In July, 2014, 327 international scientists signed a consensus statement calling for a moratorium on gain-of-function research, or what the group called “Potential Pandemic Pathogens.”

Citing biolab safety lapses, the Cambridge Working Group wrote:

“For any experiment, the expected net benefits should outweigh the risks. Experiments involving the creation of potential pandemic pathogens should be curtailed until there has been a quantitative, objective and credible assessment of the risks, potential benefits, and opportunities for risk mitigation, as well as comparison against safer experimental approaches.”

The Obama Administration took note, and in October 2014, shut down all U.S. funding for new gain-of-function research pending a thorough risks-benefits analysis.

But some gain-of-function research projects already in progress were allowed to continue. And then in December 2017, under the Trump Administration, the National Institutes of Health lifted the moratorium, paving the way for U.S. taxpayers to once again fund research that some scientists believe poses an existential threat to life on earth.

‘Exquisitely designed to infect humans’

Despite widespread efforts to convince a concerned public that COVID-19 occurred naturally, jumping from a bat, perhaps through a pangolin, eventually to humans, that narrative doesn’t withstand the scrutiny of scientists who have been studying, and opposing, gain-of-function research for decades.

Even the Chinese government has now admitted that COVID-19 did not arise from the Seafood Market in Wuhan, China.

In May, a team of Australian scientists studied COVID-19 and concluded that the virus targets humans more potently than any of the tested animal species. The study’s lead author, Nikolai Petrovsky, told one media outlet that COVID-19 is “exquisitely adapted to infect humans.”

GM Watch recently reported that Rutgers University Professor Richard Ebright, a biosecurity expert who has been speaking out on biosafety issues for nearly 20 years, suspects an accidental lab release led to the COVId-19 pandemic.

Stuart Newman, professor of cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical College in Valhalla, New York and co-author of Biotech Juggernaut, referred GM Watch to papers going back 20 years on engineering coronaviruses. Newman told GM Watch:

“Even most biologists are not aware that virologists have been experimentally recombining and genetically modifying coronaviruses for more than a decade to study their mechanisms of pathogenicity.”

Given the evidence, given the warnings, given that the risks far outweigh the benefits and given the urgency, all governments should immediately shut down gain-of-function experiments.

Not just Jews Working on Military testing:

Sewage in Palestine?

The JDAM bombs include precision-guided 1,000 and 2,000-pound “bunker-busters.”

“It turns earth to liquid,” said Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon defense official and a war crimes investigator for the U.N. “It pancakes entire buildings.”

Washington has donated 100 BLU-109 bombs to Israel that are meant to penetrate hardened structures before exploding, the report said.

The 2,000-pound BLU-109 bomb was specifically designed to kill civilians by penetrating hardened targets below the ground where families may be taking cover. A delayed-action fuse detonates the 550 pounds of high explosive tritonal, ensuring complete destruction of the location.

Tritonal

Tritonal is made up mostly of 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene, known as TNT. It accounts for a large portion of the explosives-related contamination in Gaza. TNT presents various health and environmental concerns. Potential symptoms of exposure may include irritation of the skin and mucous membrane, liver damage, jaundice, cyanosis, peripheral neuropathy, muscle pain, kidney damage, cataract, dermatitis, leukocytosis, anemia and cardiac irregularities. (NIOSH 2016)

The most likely routes of exposure to TNT are from drinking contaminated water or skin contact with contaminated surface water or soil. Potential exposure to TNT also occurs through inhalation, or by eating crops grown in contaminated soil (ATSDR 1995) The European Chemicals Agency, ECHA says this substance may cause cancer, is suspected of damaging fertility or the unborn child, and is suspected of causing genetic defects.

General Dynamics has made fantastic profits peddling this deathly substance. The company employs more than 100,000 people worldwide and generated $42.3 Billion in revenue in 2023, more than the annual gross national income of most nations on earth. (115 nations.)

A kind of false circular reasoning holds that manufacturing weapons for use in Israel by Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and others is good for the American economy. Actually, the weapons are provided to Israel at U.S taxpayer expense while the product of the munitions adds nothing of positive value, like building hospitals or rebuilding crumbling infrastructure in the U.S. or Gaza.

The explosive compound RDX helped make America a superpower. Now, it’s poisoning the world’s water and soil. ProPublica

The explosive charge in many conventional bombs often consists of RDX. Gazans may be exposed if they breathe RDX fumes from explosions. People may also be exposed to RDX by drinking contaminated water or by touching contaminated soil. RDX is associated with Liver Injury, Edema, Anemia, Hemosiderosis and Spinal Diseases.

The Holston Army Ammunition Plant in Kingsport, Tennessee. This ammunition plant is the only remaining manufacturer of RDX in the United States, and for years dumped as much as 68 pounds of RDX directly into the Holston River each day.

A combine harvests corn grown on the former Cornhusker Army Ammunition Plant near Grand Island, Nebraska. Chemicals from decades of operations at the plant contaminated the groundwater beneath it, spreading all the way to the taps of residents of Grand Island.

Dennis Mudloff, now 64, worked on the grounds of the former Cornhusker Ammunition Plant for twenty years, drinking from well water near the site of the old explosives building. Mudloff’s doctors say his numerous neurological and other health problems are likely caused by his exposure to the explosive RDX in drinking water.

This from 2017. We are cooked, climate change deniers.

The Bomb That Went Off Twice

Although Syria has long complained of Israel’s use of Napalm, we don’t have evidence of its use in Gaza, although we know the Israelis are using White Phosphorus, another frightening incendiary weapon. It is extremely toxic to humans.

Gazans are exposed to white phosphorus by breathing in air that contains the chemical or by swallowing water or food contaminated with it. White Phosphorus is a chemical made from phosphate rocks. Manufacturers use white phosphorus to make products like bombs, computer chips and rat poison. It’s a brave new world.

White phosphorus bombs can cause injuries that are more serious and harder to treat than injuries from conventional bombs. White phosphorus causes very painful burns. People have reported seeing smoke coming from their injury as the white phosphorus continues to burn in their skin. It’s evil. Because white phosphorus dissolves easily in fat, it is absorbed through the skin and into the body, where it can cause damage to the kidneys. liver, and heart.

As Nada Majdalani explained, Gaza is entering its rainy season. Rainwater washout of bomb sites contaminates nearby waterways, their sediment, and the aquatic life people consume.

Pesticides

Israel has a history of spraying heavy doses of pesticides along the buffer zones with Gaza to deprive potential ‘terror elements’ of cover, but farmers in Gaza say their crops and livelihoods are damaged.

We saw Israel’s lax enforcement regarding PFAS and brominated fire retardants, so it is not surprising that the nation is swimming in pesticides. Environmental and Health agencies designed to protect public health are instead subservient to the corporate national security state.

The use of pesticides and insecticides in Israeli agriculture is among the highest in the world, another factoid for the BDS folks. The most contaminated fruits and vegetables are: apples, leafy vegetables, wheat, barley, strawberries and grapes.

It’s not surprising that Israel also has among the highest rates of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in the world. Israeli children are widely exposed to organophosphate pesticides.

There aren’t any grownups in the Israeli room. We are witnessing the maturing of a rabid fascist state. Israel is leading the way to a new world order! Addressing the rise of the far-right in America, Noam Chomsky explains,

“The ground is well prepared for the rise of neofascism to fill the void left by unremitting class war and capitulation of the mainstream political institutions that might have combatted the plague.”

For tens of thousands of years, our Original Nation ancestors lived truly free here on this Turtle Island continent (“North America” ) with our own unique languages, values, and Sacred Responsibilities to care for our homelands. Our Ancestors used their free existence to evolve for us, their future generations, systems of Spiritual Understanding, Knowledge, and Wisdom. They were able to maintain a deep relationship with and an abiding appreciation for all Life, especially the Waters of Life, without which nothing can live. Our songs and ceremonies, our stories, our agricultural practices are all directed toward the accentuation and furtherance of Life.

However, centuries of unrestrained domination, which Christian Europeans call a “human” existence, have culminated in the waters of Mother Earth and our own bloodstreams being poisoned by carcinogenic and neurologically destructive toxic chemicals. The effect of this toxicity on the mind also needs to be taken into account. All this has happened as a result of a “human” economics of unbridled militarism, corporate gluttony, and greed.

The ecosystems of the planet have been horrifically impacted, while poverty and abuse have proliferated everywhere. The suffering caused by poverty and degradation is contrasted with a massive accumulation of wealth and power by the masters of the domination system. The wealthy and the powerful create the appearance of “green,” “healthy,” and “democratic” solutions, which are measures that merely reinforce the existing patterns of militarism, colonization, authoritarianism, and suppression.

During the past five centuries, the vast majority of the original old growth forests on this Turtle Island continent (“North America” ), which our ancestors nurtured, have been cut down, along with much of the rainforests to the South. Massive numbers of species have been wiped out. Genocide—the intention to destroy, in whole or in part, an entire nation or people—was committed against the Buffalo Nation, and against our Original Nations throughout this Western Hemisphere.

Here’s the list: Domination Vocabulary.

• invade
• capture
• vanquish
• conquer
• conquest
• subdue
• subjugate
• subordinate
• subject
• subjected
• subjection
• reduce
• reduction
• rule
• sway
• diminish
• colonize
• colonizing
• colonization
• civilization
• civilizing (which means dominating)
• mission
• domestic
• dependency
• dependant
• crown
• empire
• imperial
• dominion
• dominium
• domanus
• dominus
• deprimantur (which means to push down, press down, weigh down, hold down)
• dominorum
• sovereignty
• Government

The word “governments” appears in the papal bull of 1493 [The Bull Inter Caetera (Alexander VI.), May 4, 1493]. There’s a sentence that says, “We trust in Him”—capital H on him so we know who that’s talking about or we think we do but there’s no name, it’s just a Him so maybe we don’t—“from whom empires and dominations”—dominationes in Latin—“and all good things proceed”.

Fucking bloody hell, folks . . . a billion robots of the Semen Drip Musk Variety and Total Awareness, i.e. US Trump Alligator Alcatraz Digital Gulag GITMO in every country in the 14 Eyes Net

A decent man, a friend, in Wisconsin, was upset yesterday, man at that big-bountiful-for- the- rich- cunt- Trump bill that “passed” yesterday, in the White Man’s Mad “house.”

Hating the people, man: Goes back to FDR*, man, and then Reagan on steroids, and then, Brandies Memo, and then Reagan, the soulless death ray, and then Gore and Billy Boy and then Bush and his 1,000 points of light from bullet holes in common sense safety nets, and then the Jewish Mossad Operation of the Century, the past century, even though it was 2001. The W Room Temp IQ Bush, and then Bomb them/Deport Them Obama, then Trump Trump Trump trumping that, Biden with his Genocide, and then Trump trumping again. *(see Alan Nasser’s How Franklin D. Roosevelt Botched Social Security — 2013 article)

Shanking a few republican congressmen would be a start. While they are pissing their Viagra fucking urine somewhere, anywhere, weeks before, in their home states, in their fucking beer and rib joints, well well, now that would be a trillion more heroic than Mitch Snyder or Aaron Bushnell.

“Anyone who thinks anyone is on the streets by choice is saying that out of a bed; a warm, comfortable home with a roof over their heads, money in their pocket and food in their stomachs.” – Mitch Snyder

Here, I will give the Snyder historical perspective via long article. If you don’t time for the read, then move on down to the Alligator pens.

1981 saw Ronald Reagan take residency in the White House after defeating incumbent Jimmy Carter. On the streets of Washington, D.C., a persistent issue became increasingly more strident. Reflecting on the period, WAMU host Kojo Nnamdi remarked, “We began to see large numbers of panhandlers appearing on the streets of Washington.”^[1] According to U.S. General Accounting Office, rising unemployment, a decrease in services for those suffering from mental illness, and “cuts in public assistance and the decline in the number of low-income housing units” had increased the homeless population.^[2] The Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated between 250,000 and 350,000 persons were homeless nationwide. D.C.’s Community for Creative Non-Violence (CCNV), a homeless advocacy organization, put forth a more startling figure: between two and three million.^[3] In comparison to what would come later, these diverging statistics would be one of the more minor disagreements between the Federal government and CCNV.

CCNV was founded in 1970 by a chaplain and students at the George Washington University for grassroots organizing and direct action in Washington, D.C. Initially, the collective’s attention was directed at protesting the Vietnam War.^[4] Following the War’s end, the CCNV turned its attention to homelessness.^[5]

By the close of the decade, a dynamic leader would bring international attention to the group. Mitch Snyder was the product of working-class Brooklyn, New York. After going to prison for car theft, he began studying under Daniel and Philip Berrigan, priests imprisoned for destroying draft records.^[6] Influenced by the Berrigan brothers’ activism, Snyder found his life’s purpose in Catholicism steeped in social justice. Upon his 1972 release, Snyder brought his anti-war idealism to Washington, D.C., what he believed to be the best place to “try and create a more political center.”^[7] After the withdrawal of U.S. forces, Snyder’s moralistic energy was perfect for the CCNV.^[8] He quickly rose to become the face of the organization by the early 1980s.

Faced with a growing homeless crisis, the Reagan administration made a surprising policy decision in 1983. Vacant federal buildings became available to “local governments and charitable organizations” for use as emergency shelters at a “cost basis.” The properties included thousands of HUD and Department of Defense owned structures across the country, including 425 D Street NW, a federal building last used by the University of the District of Columbia.^[9]

As Susan Fennelly, Mitch Snyder’s companion and fellow CCNV activist later related, “One of our community members, Justin Brown, found an old UDC building at Second and E, Northwest, that the General Services Administration had up for auction.^[10] Homeless advocate Susan Baker, wife of Reagan’s Chief-of-Staff James Baker, had previously helped CCNV secure surplus food from military commissaries for the homeless.^[11] So, with Baker’s help, CCNV signed a $1 dollar lease on the building in January 1984, for use as a temporary shelter.^[12] With this agreement, CCNV and the Government entered into a unique arrangement, to say the least. Aside from being a federally-owned building, the neglected structure sat on prime real estate. A short walk from Union Station and the U.S. Capitol, 425 D Street NW provided CCNV with a Metro-accessible location, close to services and within earshot of Congress.

While securing the lease was a huge step, conflict soon emerged. Having sat vacant for some time, the building was in dire need of repair so Snyder and CCNV pushed the government to renovate. The building did not have a sprinkler system and falling plaster exposed pipes. There were only four showers serving between 600 and 800 persons a night according to Snyder’s estimates.^[13] Government officials argued that they were not responsible for upgrades under the terms of the 1983 policy decision, and dug in.^[14]

In September 1984 Snyder began a hunger strike to try to force the government’s hand to make repairs before the winter. Snyder told reporters, “People’s lives are at stake, many more than mine. I don’t want to die but there is no better way than this that I could serve the people out on the streets.”^[15] As his body began to falter, Snyder held tight to his demands: $5 million in federal money to renovate the shelter. Federal officials reiterated that “they did not intend to respond to Snyder’s demands.”^[16] Both publicly and privately, officials urged him to end the strike. But as the strike languished, Mitch Snyder was becoming more of a political controversy. Reagan officials desperately wanted to end the strike before the November 6 election, and avoid Snyder’s death.^[17]

On November 4, just two days before the election, 60 Minutes was set to air a report on Snyder’s hunger strike. With public opinion leaning towards Snyder, and pressure from House Speaker Tip O’Neill, negotiations resumed. Snyder and Fennelly along with Susan Baker worked out a deal with Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret M. Heckler and Harvey Vieth, chairman of the HHS’s Task Force on Food and Shelter for the Homeless.^[18]

That same day, an emaciated Mitch Snyder was rushed to Howard Hospital. While hospitalized, HHS Secretary Hecker called to inform Snyder that President Reagan had personally approved the agreement while en route to a campaign stop aboard Air Force One.^[19] With the strike over after 51 days, Heckler announced that “the administration pledges to turn the decaying, vermin-infested facility into a ‘model physical shelter structure to house the homeless . . . to be used as long as a critical need exists.'”^[20] It was curiously open-ended language.

Following the strike’s end, CCNV set about to create the model shelter. Architect Conrad Levenson was hired to draft plans with an emergency grant of $17,500 from the National Endowment for the Arts. Levenson and his team developed a plan that would cost between the original $5 and $10 million.^[21] In addition to services like an infirmary and welcoming aesthetics, the proposed design would make the building ADA compliant.^[22]

Once again, however, the Federal government had different ideas. In May 1985, the General Services Administration and the Task Force on Food and Shelter for the Homelessness countered with an offer of just under $3 million for a bare bones, barracks-style overhaul of the building. CCNV rejected what Snyder deemed a “patch job.”^[23] With the Government and CCNV at an impasse, all bets were off and the General Services Administration announced that the building would be demolished.^[24]

With negotiations stalled, it looked as though CCNV had been given the Federal styled, bureaucratic runaround. Even more ominous for CCNV, HHS Secretary Margaret M. Heckler, who had brokered the November 1984 deal, was on her way out. She would begrudgingly accept the position of Ambassador to Ireland in October of 1985.^[25] Heckler’s Chief-of-Staff, C. McClain Haddow became the new point-person on negotiations with CCNV and his contempt for Snyder and CCNV was clear.^[26] “We call him ‘Hollywood Mitch’ because all he really cares about is the attention he gets.’“^[27] The comment was made in reference to a deal that Snyder had signed for a TV movie about his hunger strike, starring Martin Sheen. The proceeds from the film were to benefit CCNV.^[28]

Time seemed to be running out on CCNV’s model shelter. With July 10, 1985 announced as the day the “squalid” shelter would close, CCNV was informed it would have to vacate so that demolition proceedings could move forward. In response, CCNV turned to the courts. “We have lots of lawyers, and I don’t think we’ll have any difficulty finding a judge who can slow this process down so that it will take six months or a year,” threatened Snyder.^[29] His words turned out to be prophetic.

Speaking before a House panel on August 1, 1985, Snyder stated the obvious, that if the 800 bed shelter were to close “its residents will be forced to sleep in parks and abandoned cars because there are not enough beds in other District shelters.”^[30] Empathetic yet impartial, U.S. District Judge, Charles Richey ruled that the shelter could close, if an alternate site could be provided. In his ruling he stated, “No less than the President of the United States should treat this as a national emergency . . . in order that the full impact of the nation’s resources can be brought to bear to eliminate this national disgrace.”^[31] In line with the ruling, the federal Department of Health and Human Services announced that funds promised by President Reagan allocated to renovate the CCNV shelter would be given to the “District government for alternative housing.”^[32]

The alternative the Feds identified was the former Department of Defense War College in Anacostia Park.^[33] To run the facility, the Federal officials selected the D.C. Coalition for the Homeless. CCNV was quick to shine light through the gaping holes in this proposal to move the homeless away from vital services to isolated National Park Service land in Southeast, Washington, D.C. As one shelter resident explained, there were obvious benefits to the 425 D St. NW location: “A lot of the churches around here give away clothes and food. They don’t do it like that in Anacostia.”^[34] Similarly, Ward 8 citizens criticized the new plan as “just another attempt to dump unwanted facilities on an area of the District that has been dumped on too much.”^[35]

On Kojo Nnamdi’s Evening Exchange, Mitch Snyder participated in a roundtable which included Lawrence Guyot of the D.C. Coalition for the Homeless. Guyot compared Snyder to Jim Jones and called for him to release the residents of the CCNV shelter to the Anacostia facility. Snyder deftly responded “You are being used—as a wedge between us and the administration. You’re gonna have to move out of the way and when you do, we’re gonna face the administration head on and…we’re gonna push ‘em right out of this damn city ‘cause they are the most vile, vulgar, insensitive, inhumane, human beings we’ve ever seen and you shouldn’t let them use ya.”^[36]

When the Coalition vans arrived at the CCNV shelter to transport residents to Anacostia they were met with opposition and left with fewer than ten people.^[37] In December 1985, U.S. Marshals posted eviction notices, but Snyder and residents vowed to remain. C. McClain Haddow warned the standoff could end violently citing the number of CCNV shelter residents who were Vietnam War vets—men who, in his words, “specialized at doing one thing: killing people.”^[38]

Thankfully, the eviction and violence never came. Mayor Marion Barry stepped in and announced that D.C. police would not assist Federal Marshals in pushing out the shelter residents. On December 28, 1985 President Reagan halted the evictions paving the way for renovations to finally begin. It would take another two years, two more hunger strikes and the publicity from the movie starring Martin Sheen, but a $6.5 million renovation was unveiled at a ribbon cutting in February 1987.^[39] The revamped facility had 600 beds, a new kitchen, a new dining area and additional showers.

It was a victory, but for Snyder, only a partial one. He worried that the renovated shelter would not suffice to meet Washington’s needs. “We still have to come up with another $5 million in the next 60 to 90 days if we’re going to have the rest of the building renovated by winter.”^[40] The battle to shelter the homeless in the nation’s capital would continue.

Epilogue

The story of Mitch Snyder and CCNV was brilliantly preserved in Ginny Durrin’s Oscar-nominated 1988 documentary, Promises to Keep. The film shows Snyder and CCNV engaged in an unrelenting struggle with the U.S. government. After the numerous emotionally-taxing scenes, the story ends on an uplifting note—a completed model homeless shelter. The looks of joy and relief on the faces of CCNV personnel are powerful.^[41]

Sadly, however, for Mitch Snyder the creation of the model shelter did not bring personal happiness. On July 5, 1990, he was found hanged in his room, two days after he was last seen alive. Notes lamented his failed romantic relationship with Carol Fennelly and the D.C. Council’s recent moves to weak emergency shelter laws.^[42] Councilman John A. Wilson spoke of the extreme burnout Snyder may have felt, eerily before his own suicide by hanging, “I think America is hard on sensitive people, and I think Mitch was an extremely sensitive person who took his successes and failures personally.”^[43]

Learn more

In 1987, a Fort Wayne, Indiana television station did a special report on homelessness in America. Reporter Ken Owen traveled from Fort Wayne to Washington, D.C. to interview Mitch Snyder along with Indiana politicians, including then-Senator Dan Quayle.

REMEMBER THOSE DAYS, man? Now, the reality was that in 1980s money, fucking food, went a long long way. You had semi-shitty Greyhound buses and mass transit in urban areas. Compared to now, no matter how hateful that fucking war criminal-validated fucking Contra Freedom Terrorist Reagan was, we had his goons and the web of crack cocaine also to thank.

That hero, Webb:

“Dark Alliance” was originally published in three parts from August 18 to 20, 1996, in the San Jose Mercury News and carried on its hightech Mercury Center website.9 This was significant because it marked the first time for a US newspaper to make use of the new technology known as the Internet as part of a major news investigation.

Webb had wanted to use the newspaper’s website particularly to show the hard evidence and detailed documentation he had amassed as a way to counterbalance what he called the “high unbelievability factor” of his investigation—a true story that the public would literally find too hard to believe unless it was documented in great detail.

And that is where the next significant aspect of “Dark Alliance” comes in: it was the first news media investigation to expose the links between the CIA, the contras, and the rise of crack cocaine use in the United States.

Other journalists, most notably Associated Press (AP) reporters Brian Barger and Robert Parry in the mid-1980s, had reported on the ties between the CIA and large-scale cocaine trafficking by the anticommunist paramilitary forces in Nicaragua known as the “contras.”

In his “Dark Alliance” investigation a decade later in the summer of 1996, Webb provided the crucial missing piece of the puzzle: what happened to the powdered cocaine once it had been smuggled into the United States by Nicaraguan contra supporters and turned into dried “crack” cocaine, and how the money made from such crack sales on American streets made its way back to the contras in their

CIA-sponsored campaign to overturn the new socialist government of Nicaragua. While “Dark Alliance” did not implicate the CIA in specific incidents of drug smuggling into and within the United States—a point Webb was always clear in publicly emphasizing—his series did present strong circumstantial evidence that the CIA at least knew of the cocaine smuggling into the US by the Nicaraguans and did not act to stop it. As Webb also demonstrated in “Dark Alliance,” some US government agencies went as far as offering bureaucratic cover and legal protection to some of the most infamous cocaine traffickers in the Western hemisphere.

Webb had specifically documented in his series how the crossing of paths of three main characters—Nicaraguan wholesale drug traffickers Norwin Meneses and Danilo Blandón, along with a young African-American street-level drug dealer named “Freeway” Rick Ross—had eventually led to an outbreak of crack cocaine use and abuse in Los Angeles that then spread to other US cities, hitting African-American communities the hardest.

Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series was also significant in the way it was treated by the influential Big Three newspapers. Instead of building on Webb’s groundbreaking investigation and moving the story forward, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times attacked the “Dark Alliance” series for often self-serving reasons and sought to tarnish both Webb’s credibility as a journalist and his investigation. This was unprecedented, certainly in contemporary US press history. (source)

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And what did all that crack and coke do to poor communities? To the rich cocksuckers?

“It was originally 100-to-1, meaning that you got essentially 100 times the amount of [prison] time for crack than you would for the same substance in powder form. That was reduced to 18-to-1 around 2010. But it still exists. With all that we know about crack, with all the compassion that we have now for addicts, we still haven’t moved far enough to eliminate that disparity entirely.”

On how the crack epidemic came to an end

let’s celebrate the fact that the crack epidemic is over. Let’s celebrate the fact that we survived it without a whole lot of intervention from the government and that it was young people who made the decision to not continue the trend.

Dominic X. Ramsey

The crack epidemic ended not because the drug warriors rode in on white horses or because Nancy Reagan said, “Just Say No.” The crack epidemic ended because the next cohort of young people who would have used crack looked around at their communities and saw the devastation and said, “Not for me.” And I think a really important thing to underline, is that .. we didn’t celebrate that. So let’s celebrate the fact that the crack epidemic is over. Let’s celebrate the fact that we survived it without a whole lot of intervention from the government and that it was young people who made the decision to not continue the trend. And that’s not according to me. That’s according to research by the Department of Justice, where they surveyed the hardest hit cities around the country and interviewed young people and said essentially “Why? Why aren’t you doing crack?” And they said, “That whole world is too scary.”

On the difficulty of telling this story

In covering Black America, I’ve also had to cover a lot of tragedy and hear a lot of traumatic things from people. And I had always prided myself on being able to kind take it in and to process it and turn it into something beautiful and meaningful and not be affected. But after five years of putting together this book, I was completely wrecked. I lost 40 pounds. I had a heart tremor where I was getting palpitations and had to wear a heart monitor. Every loud noise scared me. My nerves were completely shot. …

I had to take seriously what had happened and what had happened to the people that I talked to, and how seriously impactful those events were in their lives and how the stuff that I went through impacted me. I was a kid having to get down on the ground when I heard gunshots. And that was just a normal thing: You’re in the middle of play, you hear gunshots, you get on the ground, you get back up and you keep playing. Having my first bike stolen by a crack addict and the fear of having to go home and explain that to my mom, that I had given somebody my bike to fix and he never came back with it. That stuff lived in me and it needed to be excavated.

I want to say that that I’m doing much better now, including having gained the weight back, unfortunately. But I think the message from that for me is that lots of us that lived through that period, we still have some stuff that we have to deal with. We need to ask our family about that aunt or uncle who kind of disappeared and nobody talks about. We need to first learn their stories, then lift their stories up as a part of our stories. … We won’t heal until we make sense of the crack epidemic — not as this aside, but as a part of who we’ve been and what we’ve been through.

An award-winning investigative reporter, Gary Webb (1955–2004) is best known for his Dark Alliance series that linked a Northern California drug ring with the CIA and the United States’ burgeoning crack epidemic. When the story first appeared in 1996 on the website of the San Jose Mercury News, it became an unprecedented internet sensation, receiving up to 1.3 million hits daily. The report was the target of a famously vicious media backlash that ended his career as a mainstream journalist. When Webb told the whole story in the book Dark Alliance, some of the same publications that had vilified him retracted their criticism and praised his courage in telling the truth about one of the worst official abuses in our nation’s history. Others, including his own former newspaper and the New York Times, continued to treat him as an outlaw. Before joining the Mercury News, Webb cut his journalism teeth at the Kentucky Post and Cleveland Plain Dealer. He is the co-recipient of an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award (for a story at the Post about links between the Kentucky coal mining industry and organized crime) and a Pulitzer Prize (as part of a team at the Mercury News covering the 1988 San Francisco Earthquake). Dark Alliance won the 1999 Firecracker Alternative Book Award in the Politics category, and was a finalist for the PEN/Newman’s Own First Amendment Award. In 2014 Webb’s story was adapted into the major motion picture Kill the Messenger. His death in 2004 was ruled a suicide.

What went wrong, Cool Hand Luke? Family? Mother? Community? The fucking Cunt-tree?

Cool Hand Luke and the Captain (Stephen Bibi Trump IDF et al), Failure to communicate?

Denaturalize . . . MAGA people all need to be shanked if they can’t get into the food and fun at socialist re-education/ new education/ real education camps.

They all should be shanked, MAGA and Demon-crats. SHANKED.

Get your fucking mind right, cunt deplorables, all of you still apologizing for Trump, all of you motherfuckers yesterday in my town of Waldport all lined up 6 am for July 3 10 pm mother fucking fireworks, dudes.

I took a client to my house, BBQ, watched Ford v. Ferrari movie and ate homemade stuff, and luckily, we have a balcony that looks out to the sea, so we watched the motherfucking bombs bursting in air.

When I drove him home north, 15 miles, the fucking roads were packed and the little town of 2,300 was crowded.

Fucking patriotism? Fucking tourists out for some fucking House Negro fun? The bill had just passed, and this is how the world of Consumer and Costco and Crocodile Tears US Mercenary A celebrates?

Get your mind right, Captain Trump. Let’s shank any and all people who are part of the death and gulag machine:

And so the educated ones are working in the fields, man, and how many motherfuckers are happy, gleeful that the egg heads and smart ones and the college boys and girls in the sciences have to be belly up like crack users or meth users or Purdue Pharmacy users or fentynal users?

QUOTING: The grant funding I receive from various sources covers part of my salary, which is guaranteed by the state because of my tenured position. But many states, including Hawaii, Texas and Ohio, are now considering bans and limits on tenure. If this were to happen in California, I would be particularly at risk given that my work focuses on health-disparity topics that are being targeted for cancellation: HIV, global research ethics and supporting emerging faculty members who are conducting research into the challenges faced by aging adults in minority groups.

It would be naive to think that this won’t affect the job market: I expect many researchers to lose their salaries, jobs and health-care insurance as grants and funding dry up. This is already starting to happen. Frankly, it’s time for many scientists to start thinking about a career change, or at least how they might diversify their income streams to protect themselves against a loss of funding or a period of unemployment.

Many think that the current challenges will be reversed after a few years, but that is a long time to be without an income. And even if most scientists were able or willing to move abroad, it’s unlikely that there would be enough overseas funding to make up for cuts to science here in the United States.

One way to protect against these cuts might be to develop other streams of income while still pursuing a scientific career. Each of us has things we are good at apart outside scientific area of expertise. For example, my family and I have planted fruit trees and grown tomato plants, and we keep chickens that lay eggs, and my network allows me to sell those products. Other colleagues are generating cash from pet sitting and copyediting, working as a paid nanny or a personal chef, picking up paid teaching opportunities in schools and consulting for community-based organizations.

If you’re a US researcher, now is the time to establish a plan B — The scale of funding cuts in the United States means that countless scientists will lose their jobs. It would be naive not to start thinking about alternative career paths.

DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY MAGA’s are so happy with the reality of the headline above? 99.999 Percent of them. So, start shanking the politicians and the fucking MAGA. One deplorable pol and voter at a time.

Tesla’s Optimus prototype, still tele-operated in demos such as a laundry-folding video, lags Boston Dynamics’ Atlas but could sell for under $20,000 once mass-produced, Musk says.

The Congressional Budget Office pegs Trump’s bill as a $2.4 trillion deficit add-on, largely via tax cuts favoring higher earners. Musk insists only “radical productivity gains” will bridge that gap.

Read your fucking Fuck You Book and see how many millions of moms and pops, aunts and uncles, grannies and gramps are posting this cunt’s fucking Cool Hand Luke on Steroids Prison Camp?

[The first group of migrants has been sent to Guantánamo, but legal challenges loom]

Shank a uniformed ANYONE?

[Sailors and Coast Guardsmen erect tents for a migrant holding facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. President Trump has directed the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security to prepare for 30,000 detained migrants.]

Yeah, David Swanson is a winner: But non-violent what against these cocksuckers who are in the process of making Soylent Green 6.0?

The Impeachment Problem by David Swanson /

I wish U.S. academics would spend less time fantasizing choices between various murders with trollies, or playing games with theories about how greedy robots might do diplomacy, and more time on the impeachment problem.

The United States has an impeachment problem. Impeachment was put into a Constitution that made no mention of, allowance for, or plans to survive the existence of political parties. Presidents are now generally not impeached for any abuse or outrage unless there is one party that doesn’t itself engage in that same abuse or outrage and that party is in the majority in the House. The use of a sex scandal for the impeachment of Bill Clinton was part of the process of destroying the impeachment power, but we’re now probably past sex scandals, for better or worse. We’re reduced to obscure or even fictional offenses, or physical attacks on Congress Members. And even those can be impeachable only when the non-presidential party has a House majority. And even then, the same party would have to have a two-thirds majority in the Senate to get a conviction, since a president’s party’s members will do virtually anything a president commands.

This impeachment problem, unless it is solved, effectively means that a popular nonviolent movement to oust a lawless dictator from the throne on Pennsylvania Avenue must turn out the entire government and start over. The reason the proper course is not the one everyone has been conditioned to mindlessly follow, namely waiting for a distant election, is the same reason impeachment was put into the Constitution: some abuses and outrages should never be tolerated. They do too much massive damage, and they set precedents that are very hard to undo. When Bush-Cheney and then Obama were allowed to finish out and not be removed, warmaking became more acceptable than ever, as did warrantless spying, lawless imprisonment, torture, murder by missile, etc. Criminal thuggery became firmly a policy choice, not an impeachable or prosecutable offense — unless of course you’re not the president. The top impeachable offenses by Bush are in this list of 35. Partway into the Obama presidency, I documented his continuation of 27 of those 35.

The Trump-Biden-Trump era has iced the cake of acceptable and legalistic monstrosities. In 2019, RootsAction put together a list of 25 articles of impeachment for Trump:

Violation of Constitution on Domestic Emoluments
Violation of Constitution on Foreign Emoluments
Incitement of Violence
Interference With Voting Rights
Discrimination Based On Religion
Illegal War
Illegal Threat of Nuclear War
Abuse of Pardon Power
Obstruction of Justice
Politicizing Prosecutions
Collusion Against the United States with a Foreign Government
Failure to Reasonably Prepare for or Respond to Hurricanes Harvey and Maria
Separating Children and Infants from Families
Illegally Attempting to Influence an Election
Tax Fraud and Public Misrepresentation
Assaulting Freedom of the Press
Supporting a Coup in Venezuela
Unconstitutional Declaration of Emergency
Instructing Border Patrol to Violate the Law
Refusal to Comply With Subpoenas
Declaration of Emergency Without Basis In Order to Violate the Will of Congress
Illegal Proliferation of Nuclear Technology
Illegally Removing the United States from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty
Seeking to Use Foreign Governments’ Resources Against Political Rivals
Refusal to Comply with Impeachment Inquiry

One could go on piling up the articles of impeachment or documenting their continuation and expansion. But what’s missing is not the documentation. Here’s a guy who incited violence at his campaign events prior to his first stint on the throne. RootsAction proposed his impeachment for open financial corruption on his first inauguration day. The case was beyond solid, and has been built up ever since. Every weapons shipment for genocide by Biden, Trump, or a harmoniously bipartisan Congress violates numerous U.S. laws. The corruption is gradiose, fantastic, megalithic. The wars, the lies, the kidnappings by masked thugs, the environmental destruction, the promotion of bigotry and hatred — it’s a festival of flagrantly overly justified grounds for removal from office. But what’s missing is the will to make removal happen. On June 24, a huge, happy, bipartisan majority voted not to impeach Trump for making himself a king, just 10 days after huge demonstrations all across the country denouncing Trump for having made himself a king.

I’m afraid of what will happen instead of impeachment. President Kennedy said that those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. And there is nobility in that idea. But there is no such thing as making nonviolent revolution impossible. And the powers of nonviolent action are virtually unknown in U.S. culture. Mildly objecting to mass murdering foreign people is a lot for us. The notion that we might actually learn from the successes of foreign people could be asking too much. And so the vast panoply of options between demanding impeachment and hitting Capitol Police officers with flag poles may be lost on too many of us. It may be lost on us beyond our ability to recognize the absurd insufficiency of choosing between two disastrous candidates every four years. We may realize what a scam this so-called democracy is, but not realize our latent power to take it over without counterproductive violence. That does not bode well.

• First published at DavidSwanson.org.

The white plague man, the plague:

Shank whomever you can, dudes:

ANd so the literal cunts of the White Man Rapist in Chief’s White Man’s House are on duty: Shank ‘em.

Spy chief Tulsi Gabbard is on the hunt for “deep state” leakers — prompted at least in part by damaging reporting that undermined the White House’s case for an immigration crackdown.

Her leak investigation, however, may already be running afoul of the law, a Senate Intelligence Committee member said this week.

Gabbard failed to notify Congress about her search for leakers despite a law requiring her to do so for “significant” disclosures, Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, said at a Wednesday hearing.

King, who caucuses with the Democrats, said he thought there was no question the law had been triggered.

“If it was important enough to tweet it, it would seem to me it was important enough to notify this committee,” King said.

“If it was important enough to tweet it, it would seem to me it was important enough to notify this committee.”

King’s comments underscored how Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has managed to alienate committee Democrats at the same time as she has drawn public criticism from President Donald Trump.

Under the disclosure law, Gabbard is also supposed to provide the committee with an initial damage assessment of significant leaks, laying out what kind of harm they have supposedly caused the government. She also has yet to do that, King said.

Attorney General Pam Bondi distributed plans inside the Justice Department last week to scrap rules protecting journalists and their sources from surveillance and subpoenas over unflattering coverage and leaks. Bondi’s memo leaked to the press immediately.

“This Justice Department will not tolerate unauthorized disclosures that undermine President Trump’s policies, victimize government agencies, and cause harm to the American people,” reads the memo, citing recent leaks to the New York Times, Washington Post, and Reuters as examples of the kind of reporting that would no longer be tolerated. “I have concluded that it is necessary to rescind [former attorney general] Merrick Garland’s policies precluding the Department of Justice from seeking records and compelling testimony from members of the news media in order to identify and punish the source of improper leaks.”

Eliminating these rules is the latest signal of a looming threat to reporters, who could face subpoenas and search warrants for daring to publish information that President Donald Trump would prefer kept secret. Journalists who resist legal demands to disclose their sources could face fines or even jail time.

But it didn’t have to be this way.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has repeatedly claimed that the U.S. government deported a cannibal that “ate other people” and then, while on a flight from the U.S., became so “deranged” that he began to “eat himself.”

Noem first shared the dubious tale late last week during an interview with Fox News’s Jesse Watters. The Cabinet secretary said that a U.S. marshal “off-handedly” told her about a cannibal on a “planeload of illegals.” When Noem asked, “What do you mean he was a cannibal?” the marshal replied: “He started to eat his own arms.”

Watters probed further. “Was this bad hombre handcuffed to something and he was trying to chew his arm off so he could escape, or was he just hungry?” he asked. “You know, what bothered me the most is that this U.S. Marshal just said it like it was normal,” Noem replied, adding, “He said he was literally eating his own arms. That is what he did. He called himself a cannibal and ate other people and ate himself that day.”

+—+

Sorry, I am dusting off phrenology books. These fucking Onservatives and Republicans and Trumpies and female rabid rats all have many things in common with their looks, their eyes, their brows, their cheek and jawbones.

SHANK them ALL.

Bad characters, for sure, and those death star of David’s and Crusades crosses on their fucking chests.

Well, Phrenology for Our Times — MAGA, Cool Hand Luke’s Captains, and cunts like this:

Bound to hate, kill, and stir the Room Temperature head of TRUMP and Comp.

Key Takeaways

• Phrenology, or craniology, is a now-discredited system for analyzing a person’s strengths and weaknesses based on the size and shape of regions on the skull.
• The Viennese physiologist Franz Joseph Gall invented phrenology in the late 18th century. His student, Spurzheim, and Spurzheim’s student, Combe, would alter and popularize phrenology throughout Europe and the United States.
• According to phrenology, there are anywhere between 26 and 40 distinct regions, or “organs,” in the brain associated with mental facilities. The bigger the region relative to the rest of the skull, the more Gall believed it was used.
• Phrenology, even at the peak of its popularity, was controversial and garnered immense criticism for reasons ranging from the methods of Gall’s experiments to its supposed promotion of materialism and atheism. Modern MRI studies have provided a rigorous argument against phrenology.
• Although Gall believed that the phrenological structure of brains was fixed, his successors contended that these traits were malleable. This provided justification for phrenology as an early biological theory of crime as well as in educating those of lower classes about their position in society by 19th-century advocates.
• Despite its defunct status, phrenology has greatly influenced the development of neuroscience, notably the idea that certain functions are controlled by certain regions of the brain and the existence of white matter.

SHANK them ALL: VD spreads his Vance seed:

Archaeologists have uncovered evidence that Neanderthals rendered fat from bones 125,000 years ago — 100,000 years earlier than oldest known fat rendering by modern humans. Thousands of bone fragments and other remains from Neumark-Nord in Germany suggest a large-scale operation in which animals were purposely transported to the area. “The social organization might be different, the technology might be different, but how you have to live in such a landscape to make your living and to survive and prosper is absolutely comparable to modern hunter-gatherers,” says zooarchaeologist and study co-author Lutz Kindler.

speaking with Dan Kovilak about his co-authored book, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change

Another rousing talk with a true socialist, Dan Kovilak, from Pittsburgf, here, pre-airing on my Radio Show, Finding Fringe on kyaq.org. Here’s today’s (July 1) link to the show which will air Sept. 10 —LISTEN: Dan Kovilak and Paul Haeder talking about Syria, regime change, all those spooks and kooks.

Surprisingly, it all comes down to Oscar Romero for Dan who voted for or supported Ronald Ray-Gun the first terrorist go-around:

Coming of age, he stated, at age 19 when he traveled to Nicaragua, and he’s been on that socialist and communist path since, now at age 57 with kiddos living the life in Pittsburgh.

He’s written books that will get anyone in trouble if they showed up at a mixed company event , or No Kings rally staffing a table with his books piled up high.

We talked about the Syria book, for sure, but then the case of regime change, well, Vietnam, anyone? El Salvador, folks?

Reagan’s legacy: President Ronald Reagan in 1982; Archbishop Oscar Romero, assassinated in March 1980, and the four American Catholic missionaries murdered in the same year by the Salvadoran National Guard: Maura Clarke, Jean Donovan, Ita Ford, and Dorothy Kazel.(Reagan: Michael Evans / The White House / Getty Images; Romero: Bettmann; bottom: courtesy of the Maryknoll Sisters.)

Dan told me he has a lifesized statue of Saint Oscar Romero in his house, and the Catholic kid from Pittsburgh transformed into a Columbia University graduate of law and running into the Belly of the Beast of one of Many Proxy Chaos countries of the Monroe Doctrine variety — Colombia.

I’m 11 years older than Dan, and so my baseline is much different, for sure, and this prick, man, this prick was always a prick to me: Carter’s administration rejected Saint Óscar Romero’s pleas not to provide military aid to the Salvadoran junta before he was assassinated

From the CIA pages of Wikipedia: He/Kovalik worked on the Alien Tort Claims Act cases against The Coca-Cola Company, Drummond Company and Occidental Petroleum over human rights abuses in Colombia.^[3] Kovalik accused the United States of intervention in Colombia, saying it has threatened peaceful actors there so it may “make Colombian land secure for massive appropriation and exploitation”.^[6] He also accused the Colombian and United States governments of overseeing mass killings in Colombia between 2002 and 2009.^[7]

Oh, remember those days, no, when I was young teaching college at age 25: Oh yeah, BDS CocaCola? Right, brothers, right sisters:

“If we lose this fight against Coke,
First we will lose our union,
Next we will lose our jobs,
And then we will all lose our lives!”

“If it weren’t for international solidarity,
We would have been eliminated long ago. That is the truth.”

— Sinaltrainal VP Juan Carlos Galvis —

Note: More Stream of Consciousness on my part: Sickly Sweet: The Sugar Cane Industry and Kidney Disease/ Ariadne Ellsworth | June 7, 2014

We are the world’s supreme terrorists, Dan and I agree. And, while we have BDS for Israel, think about it = BDS for UnUnited Snake$ of AmeriKKKa? How’s that Coke doing for you? Boycotting Walmart, Starbucks, Exxon, BP, Coke, etc. Ain’t going to have a revolution boycotting plastic bottles of water.

Ahh, one company, and it’s all about killer sweetened soft drinks, and the outsized influence on politics locally and nationally and internationally.

Almost Thirty Years ago, this book was published: The atrocities perpetrated on hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans by graduates of the US Army’s School of the Americas will not come as a surprise to many. For the uninitiated, however, this book is sure to be an eye-opener. How many of us remember, every time we read of plunder, torture, and murder by corrupt military regimes in Central and South America, that almost all of them employ officers trained in these “arts” at Fort Benning’s SOA, and that their clandestine education is funded by our tax dollars? In School of Assassins — vital reading for anyone who still harbors delusions about America’s role abroad — the author records the history of the school and its graduates. More important, he shows how the school’s very existence is a hidden consequence of the imperialistic foreign policy shamelessly pursued by our government for decades, all with the express purpose of maintaining world dominance. Nelson-Pallmeyer offers ideas for ways to work toward closing the school, but he suggests that the true task ahead of us is continual, active opposition to the death-bringing hunger for power and control — not only in the public arena, but in our personal lives.

+—+

Moving back into Dan’s new book, with coauthor Jeremy Kuzmarov.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Oliver Stone

Introduction

Chapter 1: The First U.S. Regime Change in Syria—The Early Cold War

Chapter 2: Back to the Future: Long-Term U.S. Regime-Change Strategy

Chapter 3: The Arab Spring and U.S. Interference in Syria

Chapter 4: Voices from Syria

Chapter 5: Charlie Wilson’s War Redux? Operation Timber Sycamore and Other Covert Operations in Syria

Chapter 6: Strange Bedfellows: The Multi-National Alliance Against Syria

Chapter 7: Shades of the Gulf of Tonkin: Chemical Weapons False Flag

Chapter 8: A War by Other Means: Sanctions and the U.S. Regime-Change Operation

Chapter 9: The White Helmets: Al Qaeda’s Partner in Crime

Chapter 10: The Liberal Intelligentsia Plays Its Role

Chapter 11: Syria After the Western-backed Al Qaeda Triumph—As Witnessed by Dan Kovalik

Epilogue

Here’s the first paragraph’s of Oliver Stone’s forward:

Foreword by Oliver Stone

Another nation has fallen to the predations of Western interventionism. This time, it is Syria, a once beautiful and prosperous country, which has been home to peoples of different religions and ethnicities who lived together peacefully for centuries. That peaceful coexistence was purposefully destroyed by the U.S. and its allies who decided to effectuate regime change by inciting sectarian violence and supporting terrorist groups whose explicit plan was to set up an extremist religious Caliphate intolerant of all other religions.

Quite tragically, the terrorist group Al Qaeda, now named HTS, has taken over Syria and is now in the process of setting up such a Caliphate. Part of this process entails the mass slaughter of religious minorities, such as Alawites and Christians, and the kidnapping of young women from these groups who are raped and enslaved.

It would be shocking to know that this is all happening with the full connivance of modern, Western nations, except for the fact that we have seen this all before—most notably, in Afghanistan where the U.S. supported religious extremists to overthrow a secular, socialist government and to lure the USSR into the “Afghan trap,” in the words of Zbigniew Brzezinski. Years later, the Soviet Union is gone, Afghanistan is now being ruled by the Taliban, and the offspring of the terrorist groups the U.S. supported in Afghanistan—namely, Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda—is now flourishing more than ever as the ruling group of a major country.

Oil oil oil, and anti-USSR and anti-socialist fervor, man: Here, those 9 steps toward regime change deployed in Syria — bloody sanctions kill more than physical bombs.

From Dan and Jeremy’s first chapter:

Direct Quoting: The U.S. State Department actually took credit for Assad’s overthrow. Spokesman Matthew Miller stated on December 9, 2024 that U.S. policy had “led to the situation we’re in today.” It “developed during the latter stages of the Obama administration” and “has largely carried through to this day.”[1] The regime-change operation in Syria was openly advertised even earlier, when General Wesley Clark was told during a visit at the Pentagon after 9/11 that “we’re going to attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years—we’re going to start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.”[2]

The methods that were utilized to oust Assad fit a long-standing regime-change playbook that had been applied in many of the countries listed by Clark. This playbook involves:

a) a protracted demonization campaign that spotlights the dastardly human rights abuses allegedly committed by the target of U.S. regime change. This demonization campaign enlists journalists and academics and highlights the viewpoint of pro-Western dissidents while maligning politicians, journalists or academics who voice criticism of U.S. foreign policy or who are against the regime-change operation (the latter being derided as “dictator lovers” or “apologists”).[3]

b) National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and United States Agency of international Development (USAID) funding of civil society and opposition groups and opposition media with the aim of mobilizing support of students and young people against the government.

c) a program of economic warfare designed to weaken the economy and facilitate hardship for the population that will push them to turn against their leader.

d) CIA financing of rebel groups and fomenting of protests or an uprising that aims to elicit a heavy-handed government response that can be used to further turn domestic and world opinion against the government.

e) a false flag is often necessary in which paid snipers dressed up in army or police uniforms fire on protesters. Blame is cast on the targeted government when it urges restraint. Chemical or biological warfare attacks are also staged in order to rally Western opinion in support of “humanitarian” military intervention.

f) drone warfare, bombing, and clandestine Special Forces operations using Navy Seals and private mercenaries. The light U.S. footprint approach will avert antiwar dissent at home.

g) enlisting third country nationals and proxy forces to carry out a lot of the heavy lifting and many of the military or bombing operations to ensure plausible deniability.

g) enlistment of disaffected minority groups who are paid to fight against government forces.

h) whitewashing of the background of rebel forces who are presented in the media as “freedom fighters” or “moderate rebels” and not the terrorists and Islamic extremists or fascists that they usually are.

i) accusing the government of enlisting foreigners to put down the rebellion when the rebellion itself has been triggered by foreign mercenaries financed by MI6/CIA/Mossad.

The targets for U.S. regime change are inevitably leaders who are independent nationalists intent on resisting U.S. corporate penetration of their countries and challenging U.S. global hegemony. Bashar al-Assad fit the bill for the latter because he backed Palestinian resistance groups and stood up to Israel, aligned closely with Iran and Russia, and adopted nationalistic economic policies.[4] Assad was also growing economic relations with China and refused to construct the Trans-Arabian Qatari pipeline through Syria, endorsing instead a Russian approved “Islamic” pipeline running from Iran’s side of the gas field through Syria and to the ports of Lebanon. According to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., this latter pipeline would make “Shiite Iran, not Sunni Qatar, the principal supplier to the European energy market” and “dramatically increase Iran’s influence in the Middle East and world”—which the U.S. and Israel would not allow.[5]

Oh, that dude who pushed cancer sticks onto women:

Bernays and the Guatemalan Coup:

• In the early 1950s, the UFC, facing land reform policies in Guatemala that threatened their interests, hired Bernays to counter the government’s actions.
• Bernays led a “fact-finding” trip to Guatemala, cherry-picking information to portray the Guatemalan government as communist and a threat to American interests.
• He launched a misinformation campaign to discredit the Guatemalan government, framing the UFC as the victim of a “communist” regime.
• This campaign helped to create a climate of fear and suspicion about communism in Guatemala, which was used to justify the CIA-orchestrated coup.
• The coup, known as Operation PBSuccess, involved the CIA, the UFC, and the dictator of Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza, according to Wikipedia.
• President Árbenz was overthrown and replaced by a military regime led by Carlos Castillo Armas, backed by the US.

Blood For Bananas: United Fruit’s Central American Empire

On March 10, 2014, Chiquita Brands International announced that it was merging with the Irish fruit company, Fyffes. After the merger, Chiquita-Fyffes would control over 29% of the banana market; more than any one company in the world today. However, this is not the first time in history these companies have been under the same name. Chiquita Brands and Fyffes were both owned by United Fruit Company until 1986. The modern merger marks their reunion and continued takeover of the banana market [1]. United Fruit Company was known for its cruelty in the workplace and the racist social order they perpetuated. Though Chiquita and Fyffes are more subtle in their autocratic tendencies, they continue many of the same practices of political and social manipulation as their parent company once did [2].

Advertising has been one of the most prominent forms of manipulation conducted by both the two modern companies and United Fruit. In the mid-twentieth century, United Fruit Company embarked on a series of advertising campaigns designed to exploit the emotions and sense of adventure of a growing American middle class and furthered the racial polarization and political tension between the U.S. and Central America, all for the sake of selling their bananas.

United Fruit initiated its first advertising campaign in 1917. By this time the company had well establish plantations in various countries in Central and South America. All they needed now was to interest the American people in trying new, exotic things in order to sell the bananas they were producing. At this time in American history, it was thought that advertisements should target consumers’ rationale, not their emotions, so United Fruit hired scientists to author positive reviews about bananas whether they were true or not. One of these publications, Food Value of the Banana: Opinions of Leading Medical and Scientific Authorities, offered a collection of articles by prominent scientists that promoted the nutrition value, health benefits, and even taste of the banana [3]. Today we know that bananas are good for us, but in the early 1900s, there was no way for these scientists to determine the nutrition value and other properties they claimed to have researched. However, Americans appear to have believed the scientists, for United Fruit’s banana sales began to soar.

Beginning in the 1920s, everything began to change. A successful young propagandist named Edward Bernays changed American advertising forever [4]. Bernays discovered that targeting people’s emotions instead of their logic caused people to flock to a product. His first experiment in this type of advertising was for the American Tobacco Company. Bernays thought that cigarette sales would sky rocket if it was socially acceptable for women to smoke, so at an important women’s rights march in New York City, Bernays had a woman light a cigarette in front of reporters and call it a “Torch of Freedom” [5]. Soon, women all over the United States were smoking cigarettes. After this initial public relations stunt, companies all over America began using emotionally-loaded advertising. United Fruit was no different. They launched an advertising campaign revolving around their new cruise liner called “The Great White Fleet” [6]. This cruise liner sailed civilians to the United Fruit-controlled countries in Central and South America to appeal to Americans’ sense of adventure and foster a good corporate reputation with the American people. When the cruise liner docked in a country, cruisers often toured one of United Fruit’s plantations. During this tour, the tourists would only be shown small areas of the banana plantations, theatrically set up to present the plantation as a harmonious place to work, when, in reality, it was a place of harsh conditions and corruption [7]. Their advertisements were key in swaying the American people to set out on an exotic adventure with the Great White Fleet. The flyer to the right (Fig. 1) describes Central America as a land of pirates and romance. The advertisement even portrays it as the place where “Pirates hid their Gold.” By giving the American tourists a false sense of the romanticism of Central America, they sold more cruise tickets, and through association, more bananas.

United Fruit’s unethical practices extended far beyond their manipulative advertising. They were also well known for their extremely racial politics in the workplace. They had employees from many different racial groups, and they would pit them against one another to control revolts that would otherwise be aimed at the company [8]. American whites would get the most prestigious jobs, like managers and financial advisers, while people of color got the hard labor. The company made a rigid distinction between Hispanics and West Indian workers. They administered different privileges and punishments to each ethnic group , and if one group were rewarded, the managers told them it was because they worked harder than the other group. If a punishment was administered, management would say it was the other group’s fault [9]. This gave the two groups something to focus their anger on, so they didn’t revolt against the company due to poor working conditions. United Fruit used the Great White Fleet to further these racial tensions. If the name was not obvious enough, all the ships were painted bright white and all the crew members wore pristine white uniforms [10]. The Fleet went so far as to encourage the passengers to wear white. The advertisement to the left (Fig. 2) further embodies the racial tensions experienced by the Americans and the United Fruit laborers. The large, white, American ship dwarfed the small, run-down, brown ship, symbolizing the power and prestige the whites had over the locals. The Central Americans in the corner of the picture are looking in awe of the massive ship, and are dressed in tropical garb to satisfy the need to appeal to the American people’s idealized version of the tropics. This is not only an advertisement, but a work of propaganda.

The United Fruit Company continued to advertise throughout the mid twentieth century until they found a new use for their public relations skills. A politician named Jacobo Arbenz was elected president in Guatemala, one of the Central American countries occupied by United Fruit [11]. Arbenz was a strict nationalist, and all he wanted was for his people to stop suffering in poverty. One of the most prominent issues in Guatemala, at the time, was scarcity of land. When United Fruit invaded Guatemala, they bought out many of the local farmers to acquire land for their plantations. This did not leave room for the peasants, who relied on farming as the sole source of their income. Arbenz created an agrarian reform that took land from the company and gave it back to the poor farmers that needed it [12]. United Fruit was outraged by this reform. They immediately launched a propaganda campaign led by Edward Bernays to convince the United States government and its people that Arbenz was a communist dictator [13]. In a 1953 article by the New York Times, Guatemala was described as “operating under increasingly severe Communist-inspired pressure to rid the country of United States companies” [14]. United Fruit was manipulating the media to make it sound like the agrarian reform was only created because Arbenz was being influenced by the Soviet government to sabotage America’s economic imperialism in Central America. Since it was during the Cold War, association with communists was a serious accusation. The United States’ aggressive stance toward communism encouraged them to take immediate action. The CIA hired civilian militias from Honduras to come into Guatemala and start a war against Arbenz and his followers. United Fruit also convinced U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower to threaten Arbenz because Eisenhower and many other prominent American government officials had stock in United Fruit [15]. With these pressures, Arbenz feared for his life and submitted his resignation.

However, this did not satisfy United Fruit. They wished to make an example of Guatamala, so their other host nations wouldn’t dare oppose them. They had the CIA pay off the Guatemalan military so they would let the Honduras militia win [16]. After the victory, the leader of the Honduran militia, Castillo Armas, was appointed as president of Guatemala and Armas was a puppet of United Fruit Company for the rest of his term [17]. He returned all of United Fruit’s confiscated land, and gave them preferential treatment in all Guatemalan ports and railways. The company continued to influence the media of North and Central America to justify what they had done. They called Armas the “Liberator” and told the inspiring tale of how he freed Guatemala from its communist ties. They also destroyed what was left of Arbez’s reputation by calling him “Red Jacobo,” further tying him to the Soviets [18]. A New York Times article written in 1954 states that, “President Castillo Armas is continuing to act with moderation and common sense,” and “Jacobo Arbenz, anyway, is a deflated balloon, hardly likely to cause any more trouble” [19]. The media praised Armas for his good policy making, yet most of his policies were proposed by United Fruit or the American government. United Fruit and American controlled media also made Armas into a war hero to increase his acceptance and popularity with the Guatemalan people. Arbenz was made to look like an easy defeat to give the American people confidence in the ability of their government to eliminate communist threats.

+—+

Back on track with Dan and Haeder. And so we discussed the genocide, the mass murder, the shifting baseline of acceptance, and how Israel and their Jewish Project for a Greater Tyranical Israel has set down a new set of abnormalities in the aspect of guys like Dan and Jeremy having to bear witness, research the roots of these tyrannical empire building plots, and then write about it and publish books, which for all intents and purposes might be read by the choir.

Again, Dan lost his faculty job at the University of Pittsburg, why?

Russia. Putin Stoogery.

Dan and I talked off the mic about adjunct faculty organizing: He was interviewed 13 years ago on that accord: Interview with an Adjunct Organizer: “People Are Tired of the Hypocrisy”

The debate over the working conditions for adjunct faculty was recently reignited by the death of Margaret Mary Vojtko, a longtime adjunct professor at Duquesne University who was fired in the last year of her life and died penniless. Moshe Marvit talks to Dan Kovalik, a labor lawyer who knew Votjko and has helped to publicize her story.

The debate over working conditions for adjunct faculty was recently reignited by the death of Margaret Mary Vojtko on September 1. Vojtko, who had a long career as an adjunct professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, died penniless after being fired from the university in the last year of her life. Her story served as a reminder of what has become a massive underclass of underpaid contingent labor in academia.

Dan Kovalik, senior associate general counsel of the United Steelworkers, wrote an article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that brought news of Votjko’s death to a wider audience. Kovalik has been working with Duquesne adjunct faculty for several years, helping them organize a union and fight for better working conditions. At the time of Votjko’s death, he was assisting her in a legal fight to keep her job and her independence. I spoke with Kovalik in his office in the United Steelworkers building in Pittsburgh. The interview has been edited for clarity.

Moshe Marvit: Can you describe the working conditions of adjunct faculty?

Dan Kovalik: As I’ve come to learn, and I didn’t realize it until about a year and a half ago when adjuncts approached us to organize, the conditions are just abysmal. The folks that came to me at that time were making $3,000 for a three-credit course. So say you teach a load of two courses a semester, and you have two semesters a year, then that’s $12,000 right there. No benefits. Maybe you get a summer course in there, so maybe you make $15,000 per year. That’s barely enough to live on, especially if you have a family. I know a guy who teaches seven courses per semester to make ends meet at three different universities. They call it a “milk run.”

It had always been my perception that going into the academy would be a great life. You would get a good salary; you would get benefits; you would get the benefit where your kids could go to school for free there or at a reduced rate. Adjuncts don’t get that. I’ve come to learn that 75 percent of all faculty around the country are adjuncts. It’s this kind of dirty secret of the academy.

Meanwhile there are just a few at the top who are doing well. It looks a lot more like the corporate world than like nonprofit education. — DK

I knew about Mary before her firing and her death, and alas, Dan and I are brothers in arms when it comes to freeway fliers, just-in-time adjunct faculty, precarious teachers, 11th hour appointed non-tenure track and non-contracted instructors.

+—+

Get the book, ASAP. Preorder at Baraka Books here.

I will use one chapter from their book, about a person Dan met in Syria, who is a journalist and is emblematic of the power of being Syrian, and in fact, Dan stated that the best and friendliest folk in the world are Syrians, and Lebanese and Palestinian. My experience that the Diaspora of those same folk for me absolutely resonates the same over my 6.6 decades. He dedicated the book to Yara:

In 2021, I twice visited both Lebanon and Syria. What I learned there was quite at variance with what we were being told in the mainstream press. One of the first people I met in Damascus, Syria, was Yara Saleh, a lovely and affable woman who was serving as a reporter and anchor for the Syrian News Channel, an official state news agency.

Yara, while working for this channel back in 2012, was kidnapped by the Free Syria Army (FSA) just outside Damascus, and held for six days until rescued in a daring mission by the Syrian Arab Armed Forces (SAA). Yara’s kidnapping and rescue became the subject of a movie which the delegation I was with were invited to watch for its premier. I contacted Yara afterwards to hear her story in her words.

Yara still seemed shaken by her abduction years before. She was thin, almost to the point of emaciation, ate nothing, but chain smoked as she told her story. As Yara explained, she was traveling with a driver (Hussam Imad), a camera man (Abdullah Tabreh) and an assistant (Hatem Abu Yehya) to do a report on the clashes between the SAA and forces which she described as “armed terrorist groups.” She specifically wanted to report on the impact of the burgeoning war and terrorist threats upon the civilian population.

However, while traveling on the road to their destination (a Damascus suburb known as al-Tell), they were stopped by armed men. These armed men detained them, took their possessions, including their phones and money, and beat all of them, including Yara. Yara, a quite small woman, explains that the beatings upon her were quite hurtful. Yara said they decided to kidnap them after discovering that they were with the Syrian News Channel.

They were driven into town and to a location with hundreds of other armed militants. While en route, one of the armed captors held Yara’s head down between her legs.

One of the first questions Yara and her colleagues were asked was about their religious background. All of them were of “mixed” traditions in Yara’s words, and Yara stood out because she wore makeup and did not wear any head covering. I just found out recently that Yara is an Alawite. Yara, like many of her fellow Syrians, sees herself as a Syrian first and that is more important to her identity than being an Alawite. Before the sectarian violence brought to Syria from the outside, Syrians did not wear their religions on their sleeve and didn’t go around asking others what their religion is; that would be considered rude.

The sheikh told them that they all were to be executed because they worked with the Syrian government and because of their mixed religious affiliations. In response to the sheikh’s words, two of Yara’s colleagues, Hussam and Hatem, were taken away to a nearby location. Yara then heard the sound of gun fire. She believed that both of her associates were killed at that time. However, Hussam was shortly brought back, and he told Yara, with tears in his eyes, that he witnessed Hatem murdered in a spray of bullets.

Notably, Yara explained that the fighters who held them openly told them that they were taking orders from someone in Turkey and that they had been told to move them to Turkey. The fighters explained that the plan was to negotiate their freedom with the Syrian Arab Army, and that if the SAA did not give in to their demands, they would kill them. However, when Yara asked one of the fighters if they would be released if the SAA gave them what they wanted, he answered in the negative, saying that they would continue to hold them for leverage to gain more concessions.

In addition, according to Yara, a significant number of the fighters were not Syrian. They were not certain where they all were from, but they could tell by their accents that some were from Saudi Arabia and Libya. (from the unpublished manuscript, Syria: An Anatomy of Regime Change.)

+—+

Listen to the interview I had with Dan. He fielded my more unconventional questions, with an open mind and grace and in the end this radio interview is an organic discussion, or in Dan the Lawyer’s words, “I have no problem with stream of consciousness.”

Link to Podcast: HERE.

I interviewed Max Wilbert. He works for CELDF, and you already got that bonus of me interviewing his Executive Director, Kai.

Max is in the Eugene area, and he has his Biocentric Substack. We talked much about the state of the state of play in capitalism, that capitalism all based on war against the land, species, hogs-cattle, against education, against philosophy, against critical thinking and agency, against Utopian Thought Experiments, against activism, against one child in Gaza or a few tens of millions in Iran.

This is an orgy, this society, an orgy of blood America. And the roots of that go to EuroTrashLandia, and alas, UK. We are the DNA morphed sloughed off crap of the White Race of Paranoia.

Jewish state (sic) of Israel is the dominant reflection of the sickness, and that’s 16 million Jews, man. The Century of the Jew is Hot Hot Wars

We didn’t get into all of that look at the dirty dirty Oppen-Heimer-Monster aspect of Einstein or the lot of them, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Altman, Ackman, Brin, Fink, Schwarzman, et al.

It all started with the steam engine, you betcha. Advance into the black pool of death, oil, and now we are Homo Plasticus, Homo TerraBiteSapiens.

I’ll throw some extra stuff below, but the interview is a winner!

We have all sorts of conundrums, no?

• Is CO2 the culprit, or are we now in a flurry of diseases thanks to the synergistic chemical orchestration of so many toxins — chemicals — working their chronic disease and extended illness magic on the entire world?
• What is resilience? Do we do a complete power shift, and move toward revolution since a world without ice is on the horizon, and those 60 percent of the world near or on the seas will disappear?
• Overshoot?
• Carrying capacity?
• Population bomb?
• Sixth, Seventh, 10th mass extinction?

Several times in the distant past, catastrophic extinctions have swept the Earth, causing more than half of all species―from single-celled organisms to awe-inspiring behemoths―to suddenly vanish and be replaced by new life forms. Today the rich diversity of life on the Earth is again in grave danger―and the cause is not a sudden cataclysmic event but rather humankind’s devastation of the environment. Is life on our planet teetering on the brink of another mass extinction? In this absorbing new book, acclaimed paleontologist Peter D. Ward answers this daunting question with a resounding yes.

Elaborating on and updating Ward’s previous work, The End of Evolution, Rivers in Time delves into his newest discoveries. The book presents the gripping tale of the author’s investigations into the history of life and death on Earth through a series of expeditions that have brought him ever closer to the truth about mass extinctions, past and future. First describing the three previous mass extinctions―those marking the transition from the Permian to the Triassic periods 245 million years ago, the Triassic to the Jurassic 200 million years ago, and the Cretaceous to the Tertiary 65 million years ago―Ward assesses the present devastation in which countless species are coming to the end of their evolution at the hand of that wandering, potentially destructive force called Homo sapiens.

The book takes readers to the Philippine Sea, now eerily empty of life, where only a few decades of catching fish by using dynamite have resulted in eviscerated coral reefs―and a dramatic reduction in the marine life the region can support. Ward travels to Canada’s Queen Charlotte Islands to investigate the extinctions that mark the boundary between the Triassic and Jurassic periods. He ventures also into the Karoo desert of southern Africa, where some of Earth’s earliest land life emerged from the water and stood poised to develop into mammal form, only to be obliterated during the Permian/Triassic extinction.

Rivers of Time provides reason to marvel and mourn, to fear and hope, as it bears stark witness to the urgency of the Earth’s present predicament: Ward offers powerful proof that if radical measures are not taken to protect the biodiversity of this planet, much of life as we know it may not survive.

More than 200 million years ago, a cataclysmic event known as the Permian extinction destroyed more than 90% of all species and nearly 97% of all living things. Its origins have long been a puzzle for paleontologists, and during the 1990s and the early part of this century a great battle was fought between those who thought that death had come from above and those who thought something more complicated was at work.

Paleontologist Peter D. Ward, fresh from helping prove that an asteroid had killed the dinosaurs, turned to the Permian problem, and he has come to a stunning conclusion. In his investigations of the fates of several groups of mollusks during those extinctions and others, he discovered that the near-total devastation at the end of the Permian was caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide leading to climate change. But it’s not the heat (nor the humidity) that’s directly responsible for the extinctions, and the story of the discovery of what is responsible makes for an fascinating, globe-spanning adventure.

Carrying Capacity: Carrying capacity is a well-known ecological term that has an obvious and fairly intuitive meaning: “the maximum population size of a species that the environment can sustain indefinitely, given the food, habitat, water and other necessities available in the environment”. Unfortunately, that definition becomes more nebulous the closer you look at it – especially when we start talking about the planetary carrying capacity for humans. Ecologists claim that our numbers have already surpassed the carrying capacity of the planet, while others (notably economists and politicians…) claim we are nowhere near it yet!

Overshoot: When a population surpasses its carrying capacity it enters a condition known as overshoot. Because carrying capacity is defined as the maximum population that an environment can maintain indefinitely, overshoot must by definition be temporary. Populations always decline to (or below) the carrying capacity. How long they stay in overshoot depends on how many stored resources there are to support their inflated numbers. Resources may be food, but they may also be any resource that helps maintain their numbers. For humans one of the primary resources is energy, whether it is tapped as flows (sunlight, wind, biomass) or stocks (coal, oil, gas, uranium etc.). A species usually enters overshoot when it taps a particularly rich but exhaustible stock of a resource. Like oil, for instance…

The rate of population decline and how far it will fall is hard to predict. That will depend on many things but primarily on if and when globalization collapses. The collapse of globalization will bring about civil strife, border wars, and famine around the world.

I want to call your attention to the green, wild animal, portion of the second graph at the top of this post. Notice the wild animal portion of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass, by 1900, had dropped to about 20% of its historical value. Then by 2000, it had dropped to half that amount. Then by 2050, we expect that 2000 value to be cut in half again.

By 2100, it will very likely all be gone. Well, almost all gone. There will still be plenty of rats and mice and perhaps a few other small vertebrates will still survive, but all the large megafauna, except humans, will be gone. Gone forever… or at least for the next million years or so. It will take that long for new megafauna to evolve after the human population has been greatly reduced to a billion or even a few million people.

But the far distant future is of little concern to us now. The sad fact of the matter is your descendants will live in a world completely free of wild megafauna. There is no way to avoid that fact now, it is already too late to stop the destruction.

WHY?

Yes, why? Why are we destroying the earth’s ecosystem? Why are we driving most all wild animals into extinction? Why have we dramatically overpopulated the planet with human beings? Why did all this happen? However, when you ask why, you are implying that all this had a cause, that someone or some group of people are to blame for this damn mess we have gotten ourselves into.

Was it the early farmers who invented agriculture. Or was it the early industrialists like James Watt or Thomas Edison? Or was it Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, are they the villains that got us into such a damn mess? No, it was none of these people. It was no one person or no group of people. It was not even any revolution like the industrial revolution, the medical revolution or the green revolution. There is no one to blame and there is nothing to blame.

Agriculture enabled the very small early population to expand. The industrial revolution and later the green revolution enabled more people to be fed. The medical revolution enabled more babies to survive and people to live much longer. Our population has exploded simply because it could. We have always lived to the limit of our existence and we always will. It was just human nature pure and simple.

Now many will say that we are now controlling our population, that we have learned how to limit our fertility rate. Well, yes and no. Reference the below chart and table that were produced by the Population Reference Bureau in 2012.

Will just had a kiddo, newborn, and so we had that looming, since I have a 29 year old daughter traumatized by her radical dad her entire life.

The zoomass of wild vertebrates is now vanishingly small compared to the biomass of domestic animals. In 1900 there were some 1.6 billion large domesticated animals, including about 450 million head of cattle and water buffalo (HYDE 2011); a century later the count of large domestic animals had surpassed 4.3 billion, including 1.65 billion head of cattle and water buffalo and 900 million pigs (FAO 2011). Calculations using these head counts and average body weights (they have increased everywhere since 1900, but the differences between larger body masses in North America and Europe and lower weights elsewhere persist) yield estimates of at least 35 Mt C of domesticated zoomass in 1900 (more than three times the total of all wild land mammals) and at least 120 Mt C in the year 2000, a 3.5-fold increase in 100 years (and 25 times the total of wild mammalian zoomass). And cattle zoomass alone is now at least 250 times greater than the zoomass of all surviving African elephants, which in turn is less than 2 percent of the zoomass of Africa’s nearly 300 million bovines (Table 2).

The Earth currently has about 19.6 billion chickens, 1.4 billion cattle, and 980 million pigs being raised as livestock.