Paul Haeder, Author

writing, interviews, editing, blogging

beware the seasonal Zionists!

As Mohammad Alsaafin notes, the thousands of Palestinians – and an unknown numbers of Israeli and other foreign captives — killed by Israeli bombings,

“did not have to die—not just because Israel could have refrained from targeting civilians, which it has clearly refused to do, but because the contours of the deal announced Wednesday have been on the table for weeks.”

On Oct. 26th, Hamas official Ali Barakeh laid out the terms for a proposed hostage exchange similar to those reached this week. “We are ready to let them all leave,” Barakeh told the Washington Post. That same day, senior Qatari negotiator Mohmmed al Khulaifi said that he believed “all civilian hostages” could be freed if Israel would pause its bombardment of Gaza. (Aaron Mate)

But back to LaLaLandia and Fancy Fucking Holidays Coming Upon Us.

Toddlers and guns and saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line and Israel and USA killing the messenger , , , . etc.

Should children be allowed to play with toy guns? Experts weigh-in  following outrage over Prince George photographs | The Independent | The  Independent

‘The IDF is one of the state’s most important values,’ a mother explains why she brought her family to shoot a sniper’s rifle at the Armored Corps museum. But a frustrated soldier admits: ‘I have no idea why they’re doing it’

Kids on Tanks and Selfies Galore: Israelis Celebrate Independence Day at Gun  Show - Israel News - Haaretz.com

Remember all those queer as teets on a bull movies of the tough guys, the rugged individuals, those Indian Killers or those Fillapino Killers and Killing the Japs and all those Krauts and, well, you know how many wars the USA has spun and spun, and directed in country, out of country, proxies my ass — there are always boots on the ground and key-hole satellites and AWACS and directed lines of sight for the missiles of the “other” bought and paid for by the people, from, well, look at the top military killer lords of war and see which countries they hail from.

These are very sick people, the Jews of Israel:

Sadists, one and all: Oh, those skull caps are the Jewish Version of the Mormon Undergarment — their fucking apartheid and genocide helmets.

Fucking hell, the Industry, Hollywood, well, we know who runs it, or goddamn really nearly runs it:

US Army Philippines War poster

Cagney or that fucking Zionist fascist Sean Fucking Penn?

James Cagney In the Movies : From A to Z – Mike's Take On the Movies
Sean Penn in Ruben Fleischer's 'Gangster Squad' - The New York Times

This is in the blood, mixed with our collective DNA, and all my buddies writing on Substack, or those podcasters, all those academic types, all those artists, all those hopeful ones have NO FUCKING real personal and in the trenchs and ground-truthing IDEA how warped Israel and USA are.

Japanese Mass Suicides - Nuclear Museum
American troops are depicted as a bunch of savages.

Gazans? Not yet a million! No worries! Monsters:

At the end of World War II, the U.S. opened camps of its own, where perhaps a million German prisoners died in secret.

Rheinwiesenlager Guard
Allied Camp Surrendering Germans

Then you have this puke Jewish kid/adult, Steven Spielberg making more crap, alas, Saving Fucking Private Motherfucking Ryan? Add that to the thousands of propaganda films the Jews and non-Jews spread throughout the land and across the globe to justify millions, tens of millions, hundreds of million slaughtered.

Howard Zinn maintains that Private Ryan is yet another example of military propaganda: war films being used to show that service in the cause of war is noble, just, and heroic. And Zinn points out-as mentioned above-that the United States was not entirely free from reproach in its conduct of the Second World War. (pretty fucking tepid, Zinn, RIP!)

Footage from:

Saving Private Ryan (1998), Dir. Steven Spielberg

Battleship Potemkin (1925), Dir. Sergei Eisenstein

Triumph of the Will (1935), Dir. Leni Rienfenstahl

Nation’s Pride (2009), Dir. Eli Roth – Part of

Inglorious Basterds (2009), Dir. Quentin Tarantino

Top Gun (1986), Dir. Tony Scott

Fury (2014), Dir. David Ayer

Call of Duty WWII TV Spot (2018), Cre. Activision

Lone Survivor (2013), Dir. Peter Berg

The Patriot (2000), Dir. Roland Emmerich

Glory (1989), Dir. Edward Zwick

The Pianist (2002), Dir. Roman Polanski

Schindler’s List (1993), Dir. Steven Spielberg

That Justice Be Done (1945), Dir. George Stevens

Paths of Glory (1957), Dir. Stanley Kubrick

The Hurt Locker (2008), Dir. Kathryn Bigelow

Das Boot (1981), Dir. Wolfgang Peterson

Apocalypse Now (1979), Dir. Francis Ford Coppola

Catch 22 (1970), Dir. Mike Nichols

The Pacific Part Nine (2010), Dir. Tim Van Patten

Nazi Concentration and Prison Camps (1945), Dir. George Stevens

Music from:

Saving Private Ryan Soundtrack – John Williams

For educational purposes only.

It was a fucked up flick, but most of them are, John Fucking Wayne or Eastwood or the Brits and that shit show.

But remember: The rest of the world, like Gaza, all of Africa, Latin America, Middle and Far East, the fucking JUNGLE

r/europe - Head of EU Diplomacy Josep Borrell: "Europe is a garden. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle. The jungle could invade the garden"

Josep Borrell: “Europe is a garden. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle. The jungle could invade the garden”

One could, when talking about War films, reference the oft used quote from the great French filmmaker Francois Truffaut:

“Every film about war ends up being pro-war”.

The Horror, The Horror is the Jewish State of Jewish Israel.

The film (Thin Red Line) consistently centers around humanity, everyone’s humanity, something which is a key aspect of the justification for war. The leaders who initiate the war expend immense resources and time ensuring that their nation/people have sufficiently dehumanized those they are fighting against. This is done in many different ways, and there is a whole series of discourse on this and how it works and how it is reproduced. But it is a key aspect of how soldiers and armies function: dehumanize the enemy and frame them as simply the enemy, the obstacle to overcome on the path to victory, and violence becomes easier.

The Thin Red Line rejects this completely and refuses to engage in it. It instead backtracks completely. It focuses on the humanity of everyone involved. The fear. The anger. The love. The pain. The calm moments of simply living. The Japanese defending the island. The locals living on the island. The Americans who have to kill them.

An anti-anti-war film? Shit! Fucking Americans, man, the most dangerous place on earth for almost three hundred years. 2076 here we come:

Threats and assaults toward Jewish, Muslim, pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian students on college campuses have been on the rise since the Oct. 7 terror attacks on Israel and the counterattacks in Gaza that have followed.

But at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, students from those same groups told NBC News they still feel safe and credit, in large part, the college’s novel approach to the issue: talking about it.

Sophomore Ramsey Alsheikh, a Muslim and son of a Palestinian refugee, remembers on Oct. 10 walking into his class on the 1967 war between Israel and Arab states. The class included Jewish, Muslim and Christian students and they had been discussing Arab and Israeli relations all fall; now those issues were playing out once again, in real time.

From left, Dartmouth students Roan Wade and Kevin Engel are members of the Palestinian Student Coalition.

Jesus Fucking Christ, there are no sides here. The discussion is about genocide and collective punishment and . . . but in America, we are the world’s terrorists, and even in limp-wristed college classes, the slime and shit still sticks to these snowflakes.

Take a look at this pig below. Imagine, young people wanting to be a PIG!

One of the fastest-growing jobs in the U.S. is fighting crime on the internet. 

With more companies moving online, cyberattacks are on the rise, and drastically so. The FBI has seen a 300% increase in reported cybercrimes since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

As the threat of cyberattacks grows, so does the demand for cyber security experts. from  Companies have an ‘incredible need’ for this in-demand skill, says Google exec—and it pays over $100,000 a year

Dancing monkeys of Pakistan found to have highly elevated levels of stress hormones

Ahh, “A pair of veterinary medicine specialists at the University of Glasgow has found that the famous dancing monkeys of Pakistan have highly elevated levels of stress hormones. In their study, published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, Mishaal Akbar and Neil Price Evans, obtained and tested fur samples from tamed captive dancing monkeys in Pakistan and compared the level of stress hormones in them with similar monkeys living on a primate sanctuary in Florida.”

Imagine the stress hormones spiking in Gaza’s children, men, pregnant women, grandparents? Yemen? No studies on those folk conducted by Fauci? By RFK, Jr. By CDC? By Pfizer?

In photos: Israel leaves trail of destruction in Gaza after 48 days of bombing

As the truce between Hamas and Israel takes effect on Friday, Palestinians inspecting their neighbourhoods find their city in ruins and wounded civilians sheltering at al-Shifa hospital are still waiting for a way out by Mohammed al-Hajjar

gaza-city-displaced-24-nov-2023-mee

Fucking sick people those Jews/Zionists in the Jewish/Zionist State of Jewish/Zionist Israel:

There is something in Israeli society, a gruesomeness, a quality of bravado, of arrogance, certainly, but it is stupendously hollow and empty — and this emptiness is part of the horror. The habitual dishonesty, this unsettling sense the Israeli spokesperson or solider WANTS you to know he or she is being insincere. Social media sites like TikTok or Instagram are flooded with IDF soldiers. Many women, sometimes drunk. Or pretending to be, to ease the flatness of these confessional performances. (actors are always doing at least two things, one of which is forgetting who they are).

This is Israeli performance art. The weight of dead children is impossible to carry. Things *will* emerge, they *will* surface. The social and the individual cannot carry this weight, this guilt, this shame. Not even the most fanatical and indoctrinated. Stripped of the ceremonial trappings of sacrifice (see Mayan or Aztec or Dahomey or the Great Death Pit in the ancient city of Ur) this is a technologically mediated frenzy of human sacrifice, the reality of which makes it even worse. Now, the Israeli military has a high percentage of female soldiers.

They are the ersatz *male* soldiers needed for this cast, for this spectacle. For there is precious little actual fighting. This is another video screen war. Drones, and fighter jets, indiscriminately dropping bombs on the very most vulnerable areas of Gaza. It was telling that several IDF soldiers planted (sic) an Israeli flag atop the Haifa Hospital, staged much like the iconic photo from Iwo Jima. Resorting to such kitsch propaganda is for their own benefit, not anyone else for nobody else believes it. The Israeli state has increasingly absorbed American Zionists, settlers mostly, though only part time (seasonal zionists as Shahed Bolsen puts it). They are tourists experiencing something *authentic* and exotic. They are also provincials, and largely from big urban centers. They are bourgeois by class, and uncharacteristically for Jews in general, unsophisticated. And they do not want to fight. (John Steppling)

Just caught a glimpse of this racist shit below playing on a TV close bya — almost all Hollywood movies are racist to the core like this shit show, Donnie Brasco: This is the Typical American, don’t fool yourself with the queer mafia theme.

Palestinian Prisoners, Israel Prison Service Agree on Hunger Strike  Suspension During Ramadan - Palestinians - Haaretz.com

How could an extremist party like Otzma Yehudit become so influential? On the face of it the leading figures in this party are deeply unappealing. Ben-Gvir himself is an overweight, sloppy fat little man, who appears unkempt and sweaty — he is not the stereotype for charismatic. Nor is anyone else in the party leadership. And the settlers who comprise the bulk of this party refuse military service and get paid a rather generous annuity from the state. And all this has puzzled me. (John Steppling)

They laugh at the Palestinians:

A Palestinian family walking in destroyed neighbourhoods in Gaza City on 24 November 2023 (MEE)

Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, or Benny Gantz or even Netanyahu are terrified of being seen as effeminate. The entire Zionist *hasbara* is meant to shock. There is a misogyny at work in this artificial feeling abusive tone. This is relatively new. The IDF supplies countless TikTok accounts, all of which create content meant to shock and offend. Adorno said those artists who attempt to shock through conscious tastelessness are led by taste itself to reject aestheticism, which is just the vulgar apotheosis of taste itself. (Steppling)

Watch David Sheen’s lecture here.

Side note — Just stream of consciousness here, folks:Remember the fucking crazy ABSCAM, Ab-Scam, what have you?

The film “American Hustle,” slated to open Friday, chronicles a con operation accented with late-’70s excess — revealing dresses, candy-colored suits, and the regalia of an Arab sheik.

It was inspired by a real-life FBI sting operation known as Abscam — a conflation of Abdul and scam — in which agents posing as wealthy Arabs with suitcases full of cash tried to bribe public officials. When the dust settled, three New Jersey Democrats — U.S. Sen. Harrison Williams, U.S. Rep. Frank Thompson and Camden Mayor Angelo Errichetti, who was also a state senator — were among the congressmen, Philadelphia City Council members and others indicted and sent to jail.

But don’t expect “American Hustle” to be a recounting of the machinations that ended so many political careers. The real-life events amounted to a political tragedy — and opportunity — that reshaped New Jersey’s political landscape in ways that continue to this day.

Was it fair?

Abscam was a reprehensible operation, said George Amick, Capital Talk columnist for The Times of Trenton.

“For the FBI to create crimes that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise, and to target politicians like Frank Thompson and Harrison ‘Pete’ Williams, whose conduct always had been above suspicion, was an abuse of the investigative and prosecutorial power that should have been directed at people who were doing illegal things on their own initiative,” said Amick, longtime editorial writer for The Times.

The operation was engineered by FBI agent John Good as a way of netting big fish. He was coached and abetted by Mel Weinberg, “an admitted con man who made a deal to help plan and manage the sting in order to escape indictment for mail fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy,” recalled Amick.

[Photo: Myron Fuller with members of the New York Major Case Squad who worked with him on the ABSCAM investigation (the agent wearing the head covering is not the undercover agent who portrayed the Arab businessman).]

Still from 60 Minutes, left, and from American Hustle.

Rosenfeld (played by Bale) is based on Mel Weinberg, who did in fact start out as an owner of dry-cleaning and glass-installation businesses. (Yes, he really smashed windows to drum up demand.) Like Rosenfeld, Weinberg soon moved on to front-end scams, whose general strategy will be familiar if you’ve ever replied to an email from a stranger overseas: I’ve got big money for you if you pay me small money first. Using the name London Investors, Weinberg opened a lavish office and cultivated an air of exclusivity and legitimacy with the help of his mistress. (He told customers they could reach him and his associates in international capitals at fancy hotels—which happened to be the ones that would accept phone messages without indicating whether anyone of that name was registered there.) Targeting clients desperate for loans they couldn’t get otherwise, he would offer to help them secure one for a nonrefundable upfront fee, and you know the rest.

Weinberg, like Rosenfeld, grew nervous when Abscam began to implicate not just public officials but the mob. The dirty middle men who offered to secure approval for casino licenses on the sheikh’s behalf gradually revealed that the mob was coming to control the gambling business in Atlantic City, as it had in Las Vegas. Weinberg did not savor the notion of testifying against the Mafia. But the investigation did not result in indictments for any organized-crime figures—and none of those mobsters, so far as I can tell, knew Arabic, as one does in the film. Weinberg was able to show his face in the Abscam trials as the star witness. He is alive, resides in Florida, and is nearing his 90th birthday.

Everything in Jew Jew Land Here in the States is Fake, a Set-up, a Scam, Three Card Monty, PayDay Loan Sucker Born Every Nanosecond.

Repeat: Everything in Jewish and American culture is a scam, people running from truth and history to invent their own lies, their own truth, their own propaganda. But truth is in those photos: And the stress hormone levels out the roof. And the suicides.

A Palestinian family walking in destroyed neighbourhoods in Gaza City on 24 November 2023 (MEE)
The gate of the damaged headquarters of the Palestinian legislative council in Gaza pictured on 24 November 2023 (MEE)
gaza-people-walk-ruins-after-israel-strikes-24-nov-2023-mee
A man standing at the yard of a UN school that was used by Israeli soldiers during the fighting with Hamas but is now vacated, 24 November 2023 (MEE)
A wounded Palestinian man sitting outside the emergency department of al-Shifa hospital on 24 November 20233 (MEE)
Wounded civilians on hospital beds at al-Shifa medical complex on 24 November 20233 (MEE)
Wounded children among dozens who are still at al-Shifa hospital as of 24 November 2023 (MEE)
A man carrying the coffin of a dead child in Gaza City, on 24 November 20233 (MEE)
The destroyed front of a wedding dress shop in Gaza City, on 24 November 20233 (MEE)
A damaged mosque pictured inGaza City as a result of Israeli air strikes, 24 November 2023 (MEE) 

LIES and MURDER: Israeli October 7 posterchild was killed by Israeli tank, eyewitnesses reveal

You do not rebound from this as a passive viewer, all of us, some of whom continue to look surprised, like emotional and intellectual deer caught in the white light of the Whiskey Pete they drop from the air: Are you fucking kidding? Millions have died at the hands of the MIC, the bankers, the gangsters in Israel, the Israel-Firsters, the likes of which are that fucking piece of cowardice shit Bernie Sanders. Even today, NOPE, the fucking human stain still can’t join three other Jews in office “calling for a ceasefire.”

White phosphorus in Mosul: Amnesty reports warns civilians at grave risk |  news.com.au — Australia's leading news site

In army jargon, white phosphorus rounds are known as “Whiskey Pete” or “Willie Pete”—the army radio pronunciation of the letters “WP.” Fcukers!

Monsters. Viral breeding grounds for more monsters, progeny or followers, all worthless human stain.

24 House Lawmakers Call for Gaza Ceasefire, Citing Violation of Children's  Rights | Democracy Now!

The United Nation’s top aid official, Martin Griffith, describes Gaza as “the worst ever” crisis that he has witnessed.

“I don’t think I have seen anything like this before,” Griffith remarked. “It’s complete and utter carnage.”

Former senior Pentagon analyst Marc Garlasco likewise describes as Gaza “beyond anything that I’ve seen in my career.” With so many large bombs hitting a small and densely populated area, a historical precedent could only be found “back to Vietnam, or the Second World War,” Garlasco says. As the New York Times notes, after ordering hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to leave their homes in northern Gaza for supposed refuge in the south,

“Israel has continued to carry out airstrikes across the south with large munitions: 1,000- to 2,000-pound bombs.”

The scale of US complicity in the carnage grows with each passing day. On top of providing weaponry and diplomatic cover, the US has given Israel the GPS coordinates of medical facilities and humanitarian groups that Israeli forces have ended up bombing, according to Politico. The US claims that this location data was shared to help Israel avoid hitting these sites; instead, it appears that Israel has seen them as targets. Aid officials also report that Israel is abandoning deconfliction practices that were previously used to protect humanitarian groups. Despite this, the Biden administration is loosening the already the lax controls on US military support for Israel, according to The Intercept.

WASHINGTON, DC, UNITED STATES - 2019/03/26: Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel seen speaking via video to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) during the Policy Conference in Washington, DC. (Photo by Michael Brochstein/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

[Palestinian women and a child walk past rubble following Operation Cast Lead in the northern Gaza Strip on Jan. 23, 2009. Photo: Olivier Laban-Mattei/AFP via Getty Images]

Palestinian women and a child walk past a destroyed house in the Israeli-bombed Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip on January 23, 2009. A Hamas delegation from Gaza crossed into Egypt for talks to shore up the ceasefire with Israel which ended a 22-day assault on the coastal strip, a border official said. Israel and Hamas have observed their own ceasefires since January 18 when Israel ended Operation Cast Lead leaving a trail of devastation and 1,330 Palestinians dead, according to doctors. Egypt is trying to secure a durable ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and the reopening of crossings. AFP PHOTO/OLIVIER LABAN-MATTEI (Photo credit should read OLIVIER LABAN-MATTEI/AFP via Getty Images)

Monsters!

Oct 12-18, 2006 — Inlander

Last caribou in lower 48 US states all but extinct: 'The herd is  functionally lost' | Canada | The Guardian

“I look at the guy with three kids to feed, a wife, a car payment, and you have to take what you can from him,” Sprengel says. “Not many choices exist for him.”

We to crawl out of the overhang of dried-out lichen, thick fir and Western red cedar into a rockslide where Two-Mouths Creek spins into a crystal clear pool. We can see the granite scarring where raging spring runoffs have etched the basin over the centuries.

The sun catches the water in a jade explosion of resting pools and tumbling sluiceways. Just a few miles back, in the shadows covering the single-track trail into the Selkirks, a gangly black bear raced across an overgrown logging road. Nuthatches twirled songs just above our heads. Squadrons of yellow jackets dive-bombed our sweaty bodies.

Mark Sprengel plops down in the sun, chugs some water and chews on trail mix.

“It’s a special spot,” he says. “My wife insists that I get people on this trail, and I’m torn, really, between keeping it little-known and getting more people to see exactly what we have up here.”

For three decades, Sprengel has worked almost ever angle of conservation, environmentalism and wildlife advocacy as forestry advisor and now executive director of the Selkirk Conservation Alliance.

“I honestly think I could die now with a sense of gratitude that I lived my life doing what I’ve wanted to do by receiving these incredible gifts in nature,” says the 58-year-old ex-Michiganite.

Sprengel ended up in Priest River 30 years ago on a whim, trying to find a remote piece of land for building a cabin and getting into nature. It took him less than a year to rally around the cry for conservation of Priest Lake, the Selkirks and the little-known woodland caribou that forage through the region.

Sprengel’s line of work, however, is fraught with detractors, who see the Selkirks — also home to grizzlies, Canada lynx, wolverine, fisher, bull trout, wolves, bighorn sheep and coastal and boreal plants — as prime for intensive logging, resort development, road building and off-road motorized recreation.

To some of his neighbors, his work gets whittled down to one simple descriptor — filer of lawsuits.

But there’s more to it than that. Sprengel has to keep board members informed, he has to raise money to keep his effort going — and he has to work with the Idaho Department of Lands and the U.S. Forest Service, as well as resort owners and groups that really don’t like his work, like the Idaho State Snowmobile Association.

Occasionally, things get personal. In business meetings, in the local press and during one-on-one public encounters with business owners and with those he labels as “motorheads,” Sprengel’s been cussed at and his physical well-being threatened. But he hasn’t shrunk from the fight yet, and the battle has only intensified.

“The Selkirks are under assault from all sides,” Sprengel says. “As Aldo Leopold said, the real obstacle to protecting wild country is ‘the still unlovely human mind.’ The schemes of developers will never end until we are willing to question and challenge the philosophical premises of our society. This is an integral component of our mission.”

And SCA has inserted itself into a wide range of issues, from protecting woodland caribou to attempting to ban jet skis from Priest Lake.

PriestLake-WaterQuality

Caribou Country

The Selkirk/Priest Lake area represents a rarity in the lower 48 states — it has the same species of wildlife and flora that Lewis and Clark encountered 200 years ago, including the woodland caribou.

Sprengel himself, along with several biologists and pilots, have spotted woodland caribou trekking through this area over the years. The caribou’s apparitional character propels it into an area for a few years of calving and feeding, and then the herd moves on. Most sightings have taken place from a prop-driven plane.

The beauty of this particular herd — hooked into the Selkirk range covering northeastern Washington, North Idaho and southeastern British Columbia — is its tenacity in holding on despite a dwindling range. Sprengel and others, however, don’t think they’ll be able to beat the odds for long. Based on the reports, three dozen caribou are hanging by a hoof in the Selkirk Caribou Recovery Area.

On our hike, we continue up a little-known area toward an alpine lake. We encounter variations of species of sedge, arrow-leaved groundsel, lupine, arnica, Indian hellebore, western pasqueflower, white marsh marigold and paintbrush dazzle.

We’re going to visit one of SCA’s recent success stories. State officials agreed with the SCA to block off snowmobile access to this trail leading high up to where caribou, moose, grizzly bear, lynx and native bull trout spend their lives.

We move quickly up a hard-going trail, and — lo and behold — even with the double-layered gauntlets of concrete barriers across the trailhead four miles behind us — we encounter fresh motorcycle tracks.

“You have to give it to this guy for his tenacity,” Sprengel says of the rogue motorcyclist while showing me a washed-out section of soil and a slide into critical cutthroat trout breeding areas of Two-Mouth Creek.

Selkirk Range : Climbing, Hiking & Mountaineering : SummitPost

Because of the woodland caribou’s less-than-complex constitution, the winter diet puts caribou in a precarious balancing act of living on a little. Females are gestating or calving during part of the winter, so human intrusions on snowmobiles can do great harm to mother and calf, Sprengel says.

And recently federal judge Robert Whaley agreed, banning snowmobiling in the Woodland Caribou Recovery Area of the Idaho Panhandle National Forest.

Mucking for Milfoil

Later, we make our way along the west side of Priest Lake for a rendezvous at Granite Creek Marina, where resort co-owner Melissa Quilter has donated time, a power boat and gasoline for milfoil monitoring of more than a dozen parts of the lake.

Along the way, Sprengel discusses the struggle environmentalists have when they face the all-growth-is-good mentality of a place like Priest River. When the discussion shifts to Eurasian milfoil, Sprengel says it has, surprisingly, become a bridge-builder between the SCA and local resort owners.

“No one is for milfoil,” he says with a laugh.

SCA’s volunteers, the Idaho Eurasian Milfoil Taskforce and resort operators like Melissa Quilter and her husband Mike are motivated to stop the spread of the aquatic plant, which was first found in the Pacific Northwest in 1965 in a lake near Seattle. Waterfront property owners and others living near Priest Lake are forming coalitions to combat the invasive weed, which can upset the ecological balance of a lake.

Using herbicides such as 2,4-D or Sonar is one controversial method to try to combat the weed — state and local officials started using herbicides to treat milfoil on Lake Pend Oreille this past summer.

While we spend hours on the lake carefully raking and diving for samples, it becomes clear that even a noxious weed that everyone hates may stir up even more controversy. While we pull up samples of Eurasian milfoil at places like Bear Creek Bay and near Kaniksu Resort, and after hitting other locations such as public boat launches at Cavanaugh Bay and Indian Creek State Park, it appears to us that one way milfoil gets churned up and spread is by jet skis and wave runners.

Quilter says she would like to see restrictions placed on how many and where personal watercrafts are allowed on the lake; Sprengel would like to see them banned altogether on Priest Lake.

Grappling With Growth

Sprengel has calibrated almost every aspect of the land he hikes.

“I wanted to learn how to build a house using hand tools,” he says of his first project. That was 28 years ago, and the primitive place he built has been expanded after he tied the knot seven years ago with Deborah, a surgical nurse who commutes to Sandpoint from their Hoodoo Mountain retreat. After more than 28 years, the house now has flush toilets, hot water and a propane stove — but no electricity.

In addition, Sprengel has worked in factories and as a ranch hand, logger and carpenter. But he still laments the fact that he still can’t go into a room of loggers and fit in.

“You’re outed immediately,” he says, adding that he agrees with them more often than anyone would think and sympathizes with them always. He also thinks everyone who has lived in the area for very long is asking the same questions about all the growth that is coming into the Priest Lake/Selkirk area.

Sprengel says more and more people are questioning what has been conventional wisdom for years, that “growth is inevitable … any kind of growth is good for the economy … humans selling, renting, fixing and renting snowmobiles trump any kind of wildlife or science supporting it.”

That, of course, puts Sprengel on a collision course with developers and business groups who want more land for trophy homes and sprawling lakeside subdivisions.

While he disagrees with the inevitable social, cultural and environmental impacts of all these people moving into the Priest Lake area, he can still muster sympathy for loggers — some of whom have come to him saying they’d love to make their living demolishing old lumber roads.

“I look at the guy with three kids to feed, a wife, a car payment, and you have to take what you can from him,” Sprengel says. “Not many choices exist for him.”

He hopes bridges can be built, but he’s pragmatic and sanguine, too.

“As a culture, we’ve lost touch with our bodies,” Sprengel says. “We don’t know what good pain is — what marching up a steep hillside feels like. We need to start speaking forcefully, no matter who we offend.”

[Priest Lake history told through just-released photo collection]

…some folk use TODAY, as a day of fucking thanks? Jesus Christ, can they just keep their mouths zipped while 20,000 and counting are murdered in Palestine and starvation is a’coming?

There is no fucking feast, no fucking Thanks to be Given, in the land of milk and honey and massively militarized citizens. Not just fucking pigs, and all the Blue Lives Matter Shoot Trayvon Again If He Twitches or Move backers. Not just the cancel culture creeps looking for one mis-placed colon or semi-colon or genitilia or pronoun. Not just the fools believing in some sort of sanity in the next run of human stain vying for Most Dangerous Man/Woman/They in the World, POTUS?

Look at that hole, that Thanks Giving:

Israel Palestinians

One of my friends, who was one of my composition students in Spokane, he had a tough time at Thanks-Fucking-Giving. A young marine, just finished up Battle of Falluja, and he was out with a crew to pick up wounded and a dead soldier on this hallowed day.

He came back, with his real buddy in a body bag, and his two friends/comrades airlifted because of various torn limbs.

Jake just wanted to shower and hit the cot, chill out, put on loud music, close his eyes, and do what he could to relieve the trauma. Imagine that, a Marine who was forced to use uppers and steroids, who was forced to shoot to kill anyone with hands up or down in Falluja — man, teen, woman, grandparent, dog, what have you.

Yeah, it was the way, man. Kid from Spokane. Wrestler. Mom’s side Mexican. Old man a career Air Force dude. He wanted his son to go into the AF for easier duty. Jake answered honestly on the drug question: “Have you used pot in the past year?” He could have said no, but he was honest — “Yeah, about nine months ago at a wrestling party. The stuff was passed around, and I was certainly exposed to it passively and I might have puffed a couple of times from a bong.”

No way, Jose. No fly-boy school for you. Instead, he jumped into the Marines. Not so much that he was a patriotic guy, or dumbed down. He was hitting mental and physical walls in Spokane. He wanted more activity, action, and the propaganda was blaring 24/7 that going in would be serving the world, fighting Terror.

Big mistake. He went in around Thanksgiving, and then two Thanksgiving’s later, he brought his buddy back in a body bag in parts. Before that, in Falluja, he told the class a story when I had them write a narrative essay — SEE, significant emotional (life changing) event. I had some parameters, but basically it as a green light for anything.

Jake had many SEE’s, both positive (state champ in heavyeight wrestling; ending up in Mexico on his grandfather’s horse ranch) and negatives.

He was in a Stryker. The higher up team leaders told any team in a vehicle to not stop. Honk twice, flash the lights, but DO not STOP.

And, so, Private Jake was in the vehicle, a woman was crossing the road with a bag of bread and produce, and the Jar Heads honked, flashed headlights, and then just put peddle to the metal.

Bang, crack, pop, and, decapitation and woman’s body stuck under the vehicle’s manifold or exhaust.

The woman’s head was rolling into the gutter, and so, the vehilce DID stop, and Jake was ordered to go “pick up that fucking bitch’s head and bring it back while we fucking pull her fucking body out from under the rig. Just put the fucking cranium next to her pathetic body.”

He told the class how he felt: “Look, I’m a white guy, but my mom’s Hispanic and my grandparents are pretty dark Mexicans. This woman — he decapitated head — looked like my grandmother. Mi Abuela. Do you get it? They ordered me to bring the head back and just drop it next to the body. They all had weapons drawn — like there was going to be some Blackhawk Dawn shit — but we were in a neighborhood. This is crazy. I had buddies who said they rolled over kids. Fucking kids because they didn’t get out of the road quick enough. You don’t see these fucking stories on CNN or the local FOX station.”

Trauma. Forever trauma if you are human.

And that Thanks-Fucking-Giving? He was ordered to show up at the mess and NOT stay in his hootch. He was ordered to EAT with the officers, and to Stand and Salute the Commander in Chief (Cocaine Bush) on a live feed on the compound’s 70 inch TV screen.

“You’re not pussying out and crying in your beer, soldier. This is a national day of thanks, and the chaplain will be talking, and then President Bush is addressing us all. You can fucking deal with your fucking angst when you get shipped home. No fucking room for that here.”

Thanks-giving, Fallujah:

I'm an Iraq War veteran and a hardcore wargamer. Here's what's wrong with  'Six Days In Fallujah'

A fucking video game, ready for Xmas?

“Today, I woke up to learn that Six Days in Fallujah is back. After becoming mired in controversy, development on the game was stalled and it was canceled in 2009. Now it’s slated to be released sometime this year.

The original development studio went out of business but the game’s found a new home with developer Highwire Games and publisher Victura.

 I’ve scoured articles from today and 2009/2010 to find an appropriate description of the game and why it exists. Peter Tamte, the game’s creator, seems to sum it up best in a 2009 Joystiq interview:

As we’ve watched the dialog that’s taken place about the game, there is definitely one point that we want people to understand about the game. And that is, it’s not about the politics of whether the U.S. should have been there or not. It is really about the stories of the Marines who were in Fallujah and the question, the debate about the politics, that is something for the politicians to worry about. We’re focused now on what actually happened on the ground.

The game’s been dubbed a ‘survival’ game and a ‘first person shooter.’ The creators, to this day, maintain the game’s purpose is to tell the tale of the brave men and women who fought in the war, from the US perspective. But “what actually happened on the ground,” can’t really be shown in a video game. At least not unless that video game faces civilian death head-on.”

Imagine now, with the dirtiest of the dirty, Israel, the IDF, the almost 100 percent of Jews in Israel wanting genocide, retribution, clearing of Arabs from Gaza. Compared to Fallujah.

My friend’s/student’s hatred of Thanks-Giving goes deep. He goes out hiking and camping and takes with him some pretty hi-powered rifles and shoots empty oil cans and rusty propane tanks.

I know he’s fucking pissed and angry now with this hell hole more of his military “comrades” are perpetrating. Jake got thrown in the drunk tank, and I bailed him out and let him slide in my college classes I taught. I even got him to come with me to a conference in Seattle on engaging students in a time of war. I intereviewed him on stage, and then gave my spiel. We got to hang out with the guest speaker, the headliner, David Zirin.

That was a highlight, a positive SEE he told me.

He had a hell of a time, though, from that point on; and called me in Spokane while he was standing on the Monroe street Bridge ready to jump. Shit, the shit he dealt with. Plus, all those uppers and all those steroids messed with his testosterone levels. Mood swings, massive alcoholism, pills, coke.

He ended up in a plumber apprenticeship, but that boss was a coke head, and they always made my big friend crawl under houses to do the digging and R & R.

He’s been off the bottle for three years. He finished a electrician’s apprenticeship. He’s working and living in Spokane. Some fucking Thanks-Giving.

He didn’t jump:

Monroe Street Bridge | Spokane Historical

Neither did this fucking War Criminal:

Did President Bush Pose with a Plastic Turkey? | Snopes.com

Happy Fucking Thanksgiving:

For Iraqis, War Is Not a Game – Foreign Policy

Fucking Fallujah Selfies:

Fallujah fight stalled by fierce fighting, civilian concerns

In the documentary, which is a follow-up to the Emmy Award-winning FRONTLINE film Once Upon a Time in Iraq, U.S. Marines, journalists and ordinary Iraqis share their experiences of what would become the bloodiest battle of the war, and how its consequences have reverberated for two decades. 

As the documentary recounts, after insurgents in Fallujah killed four U.S. contractors and strung their bodies from a bridge, coalition forces planned an operation to clear the city of Al Qaeda and warned civilians to leave.

“The Americans threw down leaflets for us to read,” Nidhal Abed, who lived in Fallujah with her family, says in the documentary. “They’d drop them at night from planes and we’d find them on the ground in the morning. They said, ‘If you can get out, then go.’”

But many weren’t able to leave — Abed and her family included.

“The people who left had money, but we had nothing,” Abed says. “They could afford cars and had places to go outside the city. We didn’t have relatives to go to, so we had to stay and ask for God’s mercy.”

In the above excerpt, Abed describes what it was like to be a civilian family stuck in Fallujah as U.S.-led coalition forces closed in and the city was bombarded.

“About a week before they invaded Fallujah, the American army dropped the worst of the worst on us. Not just on Al Qaeda, but on the innocent people,” Abed says. “When we went to look for the bodies of our relatives, we found them crushed and flattened.”

It was a time of intense fear. “We were sitting with our kids, afraid of being attacked any moment,” Abed remembers.

Her first child, Mustafa, was two years old at the time.

“He was very young. He couldn’t understand. When there was bombing, he’d shake,” Abed says of her son. “He’d run and cling to me and my mother.”

“That was,” Abed adds, “before he was injured.”

Abed and her son’s story unfolds in full in Once Upon a Time in Iraq: Fallujah, a vivid accounting of the battle that left their lives — and those of many others — forever changed. Around 700 Iraqi civilians were killed over the course of the 2004 fight for Fallujah. Eighty-two U.S. servicemembers died during the street-by-street, house-by-house effort to clear Al Qaeda from the city, making Fallujah the deadliest battle involving U.S. Marines since Vietnam — and a defining chapter of a war that would continue for years to come. 

Battle of Fallujah - 2004, Iraq : r/CombatFootage

Ahh, the money makers: According to U.K.-based Campaign Against Arms Trade, British companies provide 15% of the materials for the F35 stealth combat aircraft, which Israel is currently using to bomb Gaza. Suppliers for the F35 stealth fighter jets also include: U.S., Canada, Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, Australia, Belgium, Germany, Turkey, Italy, Netherlands, and France. (Jessica B at Mintpress)

Also sections on Spain, Belgium, and South Africa! Plus a spreadsheet of the international supply chain for the US F-35 stealth fighter, one of the aircraft Israel is using to bomb Gaza. Lockheed Martin’s MLRS M270 rocket launcher, which was used inside Gaza for the first time since 2006, was built in Europe by an international consortium of companies from France, Germany, Italy, and the U.K.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute provided data on arms sales from Europe to Israel between 2013 to 2022 to EuroNews, showing Italy and Germany had supplied Israel’s military with weapons now being used on the ground in Gaza. It also said Germany had sent more than 1,000 tank engines to Israel. As of Nov. 2, Germany’s government has exported $323 million in arms to Israel — nearly 10 times more than it sent to Israel last year.

The Czech Air Force landed at the Israeli Hatzerim Air Base on Oct. 22. Military aircraft from the U.S. and Italy landed at Israeli Netavim Air Base in the last month. And a U.S. Air Force plane arrived to the Israeli Tel Nof Air Base on Nov. 16.

Several British Air Force planes have traveled to Tel Aviv from the U.K.’s Akrotiri military base in Cyprus in the last week. A plane belonging to arms manufacturer BAE Systems also arrived to the airbase recently.

Spanish newspaper, El Mundo, revealed that a Spanish mercenary is assisting Israeli forces in Gaza. Pedro Diaz Flores has been pictured there with the Israeli occupation forces. He previously fought in Ukraine, having become involved in the war through the neo-Nazi Azov Brigade.

“So I came for economy, for money. They pay very well, they offer good equipment and the work is calm. It is 3,900 euros [$4,187] per week, complementary missions aside,” Flores told El Mundo.

In October, British newspaper Socialist Worker — along with other publications — received an “advisory notice from the Defence and Security Media Advisory Committee to not publish information related to British special forces operating in the Middle East.

“Reports have started to appear in some publications claiming that UK Special Forces have deployed to sensitive areas of the Middle East and then linking that deployment to hostage rescue/evacuation operations,” the D-notice said.

The Socialist Worker noted how the Daily Mail reported that the U.K.’s Special Air Service is on “standby in Cyprus” to rescue British hostages held captive in Gaza.

Additionally, Palestinians in Gaza have disclosed they’ve encountered soldiers with American flags on their uniforms. In the below video clip from Quds News Network, a Palestinian man tells an Al Jazeera reporter that his brother spoke in English to a male soldier donning an American flag on his uniform while trying to flee the strip. These claims remain unsubstantiated and it’s possible that soldiers with dual Israeli-U.S. citizenship are wearing an American flag patch without the Israeli military’s permission.

A woman stands alone with a placard

From Electronic Intifada: ‘Al Jazeera’s bureau chief in Gaza Wael al-Dahdouh was live on air when he heard the worst possible news: His family had been attacked by Israel.

His wife Amna, son Mahmoud, daughter Sham and grandson Adam were all killed.

It has been almost a month since the massacre yet Wael has not had any space to grieve. He has continued reporting with great courage on the genocide being inflicted on his people.

“The pain of loss can never be described,” he said in an interview. “It was unbearable but I am a different person because of the profession I hold. I fully believe that God has pearls of wisdom and he is the one who provides a man with patience and strength.”

Wael believes that by documenting Israel’s crimes, he is fulfilling a duty to his family.

“I was determined to return to work and appear on the screen out of loyalty to their blood and the blood of all the martyrs. I refused to let the occupation achieve its goal of shattering this voice. So I overcame my pain to appear to the world again and convey my message and the message of every Palestinian suffering in Gaza.”

“Absolute horror”

Wael has witnessed all five of the previous major Israeli attacks on Gaza since December 2008.

“The 2023 war on Gaza is an absolute horror,” he said. “It is totally different and undoubtedly the bloodiest, the most destructive and the most monstrous. Throughout all the wars we have seen violence, destruction and injuries. But none comes close to this level of brutality and bloodshed.”

While Israel has bombed residential buildings without warning on many occasions, it is doing so far more frequently this time.

“It’s the first war when electricity was fully cut off, water was wholly cut off, and when crossings were completely closed for more than 25 days, preventing aid from entering the Strip,” he said.

I asked Wael when there will be peace and liberty in Gaza.

“When the occupation ends,” he said. “The occupation means aggression and the continuation of these painful images of destruction, horror and hardship. Its end will mean the return of Gaza, Palestine, and the Arab region to the hugs of peace, freedom, love, calm, security and every beautiful thing.”

Aged 53, Wael has no retirement plans despite everything that he has endured. He vows to keep working “no matter the cost.”

Journalists have paid a heavy price during this current war. More than 50 have been killed.’

…So I say, no thanks to Substackers telling me/readers “Happy Thanksgiving.” Matt Taibbi, Lee Fang, Sherman ALexie (Spokane Indian), Mickey Z, et al. Why? This is a foolish day to send out wishes. To readers, man, subscribers.

However, Cindy Sheehan from the list of quasi-famous Substackers had good words today.

Yes, we are here in the U.S. on stolen land made possible by genocide and there are many parts of the world where human loss is incomprehensible: I NEVER lose sight of that and I am always striving for peace and accountability. However, I do practice gratitude in my own daily life to help keep me strong for the struggle (and to keep my own self accountable).

+—+

Indigenous and pro-Palestinian activists in the US have replaced Thanksgiving celebrations with a fast in a show of solidarity with the victims of Israel’s bombing and siege of Gaza.

Freedom to Thrive, a group focused on prison abolition in the US, organised the ‘Fast For Gaza’ to stand “in solidarity with the people of Gaza” as part of wider campaign “in solidarity with the right of colonized people to resist.”

According to the group,

“we have chosen November 23rd, the fourth Thursday in November, in recognition that the ongoing genocide in Gaza is a continuation of the same setter colonial violence experienced by Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island.”

Yeah, thankful that my 27 year daughter is alive and a strong empath caring woman, who sucks up the hardships of the world, the environment. Her mind and eye are right there looking squarely at the spread of suburban sprawl in Spokane, it’s destruction. She even cares about a single tree getting felled in the urban forest, and a single street kid (AKA homeless) dealing with the cold.

A special thanks to my wife who has deal with the death of a rather dark character of a father — spent 1.5 months doing all the care for him while he died of chemo-cancer. She also lost her younger brother two years ago. And some estrangement from a 25 year old daughter the past three years has been hell. She is my soul mate, and that’s saying a lot since I am a guy who sees the world through possibly a pantheist’s lens, or atheist’s. She has to put up with me, man.

Her mother is in our driveway in a trailer, she just haven lost her husband to brain cancer in June. Thanks to her for being there for her daughter.

I’m thankful for my sister who has been a social worker for decades, working with battered women, battered families, & the poor and the down in their luck.

Her daughter is now a doctor, so I am thankful for my niece’s presence in the world. Thanks to friend in Waldport who has survived and pushes through 4.5 years of domestic violence/abuse and a near death experience from her ex who attempted to strangle her. (I’ve written a series of those stories about DV and her experiences in the local rag and Substack and Dissident Voice.)

Thanks to my buddy in Wisconsin, and he has been the subject of Substack pieces — Toothless in Wisconsin. Thanks to him for hanging in there through the death of his spouse and the estrangement his family has perpetrated upon him, from granddaughters, daughters, and in-laws, et al. A new old buddy.

Thanks to a few Jewish friends who keep me in check for my anti-Israel/Jewish thing hitting me. Jews who are absolutely pissed, saddened and angry about Israel now, Israel then, even Israel the Nakba Nation 1948.

תודה — Toh-dah) . . . Shukran — شكراً

…only 355 million of us, AmeriKKKans, but it always seems as if the world revolves around Un-United $nakes of AmeriKKKa

Humanity. Bathing that loved one. Even the one who showed less than love.

From my memoir writing class, and we have our last session of the eight week gig this Friday. Nothing earth shattering, but you know what? Yep, each intersection we have with people can indeed give us a sense of the place, of life, of the dynamics of what it is to be a real human in a world of hell. Think Isra-Hell.

The piece one student just sent me, from a memoir writing class I have run:

Vibrant to Cradle by BD

     Forty-two years ago, we came into each other’s lives;, you didn’t care for me, you didn’t think I was the one for your first-born son. You were hesitant to accept my two daughters from my first marriage. I was from California, land of drugs and free sex. “I am not divorced yet, but I am dating your son. Your son is only twenty-five years old, and I am twenty-nine.”

      Our first family gathering was in 1981. This was my introduction to the family at “The Camp”, in S**, Louisianna, with so many friends and family, including K’s high school and college friends, aunts, uncles and cousins, brothers and sister, grandmothers and any other friend that came out to meet us.

My girls were five and seven, the most outgoing and adorable girls, loved this new place, the second home or as they call it a camp. K’s dad with his hunting gun out and on the hunt for water snakes, gators and wild boar, the ATVs were all out and in use, the boats for water skiing awere docked and ready. K and his siblings were all champion water skiers.

Me, I was from the beaches of sunny California, home to surfing and itty-bitty bikinis. I was all of all of one hundred pounds, with waist length hair and wearing what I would normally wear: a bikini.  I was very confident as his girlfriend, and after the stares and whispers, and  judging how I looked, I was accepted by all but C***, K’s mother.

     This non-acceptance went on for many almost 40 years;  sure she was cordial, and guarded, but she was the queen matriarch that one dare not challenge. Well, I was strong, opinionated and politely held my own. K’s dad, siblings and relatives loved me. We were married on a beautiful yacht at Sunset in Channel Islands, California. C*** was proud, but it was hard to express her feelings toward me.

     In 1984 K and I presented our tiny baby girl to the family. Their first grandchild, C*** was included in their life, but C*** was standoffish to our baby, C*** as well.

      Why am I writing this? C***, the white-haired elegant woman is staying with us, here, in Oregon, on the coast; she is nearing ninety years old. She is frail, so much different than just like last year. She eats just a few bites of food each day. She continues to go to church, but today, this woman came to me and asked me to bathe her. This strong proud southern belle asked me to assist her for the most personal and intimate of requests.

 I ran the water making sure the temperature was warm enough for her frail body. She sat on the shower stool as I gently used the water wand to wet her body. I soaked the washcloth with soap and water and gently washed her back. In my head, I was crying and angry and touched all at the same time. Afterwards, she hugged me and thanked me and said, “I love you”, all those years were just washed away.

The end++++

+—+

Teacher’s comments: “Nice. All those years washed away. Amazing you have this moment to share with yourself, your family and me, or your class. I think diving deeply into emotions, into the now, and even this could be part of your memoir, since she’s mother in law, and how did C***react to your entire ordeal as a 15 year old unmarried pregnant girl and the years of secrecy? There you have it, then, more practice pulling out those pearls of emotion and wisdom, even this late in the twilight of your life, B***. Good work. Sorry for the red-lining. Old English teacher habits die hard! *PKH

You know, B . . ., et al, the quick writing response you did to work with some writing prompt or tagging an emotion swirling around, or that hair up your proverbial you-know-what is really powerful is how you said it, wrote it, and the purity of the written words raw and fresh and unedited. So, honestly, all those redlines and technical comments I made are not going to improve the impetus and poignant nature of what you wrote.

I read it aloud — your version — to several women just hours ago  — 52 and 75 years respectively. They were moved, and told me they can really relate to what you wote. Both had their bathing days with some bad folk, father here, brother there, and that act for so many to foregive and to give mercy where undeserved. So I read it aloud with my crazy poet’s and radio voice. Used your style to brush over the written comma splices and run-ons. Your words. They loved it. It moved them. One had tears in their eyes. They stayed with it and did not run away from my booming fucking voice.

Thanks for sharing. Paul

+—+

Old stuff here:

 — David Suzuki

 Or, (  https://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/the-nature-of-things )

+–+

. — Jeremy Scahill

https://theintercept.com/staff/jeremy-scahill/  )

Or,  

+–+

 — Sonia Shah

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/2/27/climate_crisis_coronavirus_infections_disease_outbreaks )

Or,

 +–+

Jesus, someone captured me here in Newport: A sort of poetry slam. Shit, I never gave permission to have my sorry ass up on You-CIA-Tube!

+–+

Interview here with an ex-friend:

 ( https://dissidentvoice.org/2020/11/on-the-streets-in-union-halls-on-the-frontlines-have-guitar-will-travel/ )

Later. Listen to Sonia on TED and get a sense of her biography, memoir, and her work on malaria.

+—+

Bonus — Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia – a Film by Nicholas Wrathall

Watch this film, MAN. REALLY.

Try this one: Eugene McCarthy.

There are no answers
in this park, said the captain
of the guard.
Then give us our questions
say the boys and girls.
– Eugene McCarthy, “Grant Park, Chicago”

There are things I do that no one will be left to understand.

– Charles Péguy, Le Mystère des saints Innocents

Gene McCarthy: Alone in the Land of the Aardvarks is a full-length documentary film about Minnesota Senator Eugene J. McCarthy, an American poet and politician who in 1968 ignited a new force in American politics. Here, 11 minutes!

Another McCarthy (look at the Trump mentor, below, Roy Cohn) but not the same family, McCarthy:

BACK TO a real hero in this fucked up political landscape, sold out by the DEMON-Craps.

Watch this one —- Gene McCarthy: Alone In The Land of the Aardvarks is a feature-length documentary film about Minnesota Senator Eugene J. McCarthy, a poet and politician who in 1968 changed the landscape of American politics.

As we mark the 50th (55th year) anniversary of the most tempestuous year in our country’s recent history, the man who stood at the epicenter of that year’s upheaval remains an enigmatic figure. Senator McCarthy’s 1968 Presidential campaign was an audacious challenge to the incumbent president of his own party over the issue of the American war in Vietnam, providing a voice to grassroots movements and inspiring a new generation of citizens – especially college students – to political action and civic engagement. Yet the hope stirred by his campaign’s early electrifying success was soon beset by conflict, despair and violence, as 1968 would suffer the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy, the Chicago Police Riots of the Democratic Convention, and the election of Richard Nixon as President with the escalation of the war for another six years.

But Gene McCarthy was more than a player in that pivotal year of American history, and his story extends far beyond 1968. His intellect and philosophy of social justice were grounded in his small town roots on the Minnesota prairie, and refined by Benedictine traditions in the rural collegiate atmosphere of Saint John’s University. Over decades of public service – both within the establishment and as an exiled critic – he produced a wealth of political literature, delivering his provocative ideas with signature wit and style, and he accumulated a remarkable body of work as an accomplished poet. Yet even many of today’s politically-active citizens remain unaware of the significance of Gene McCarthy and his embodiment of values that are glaringly absent from contemporary political discourse, more often than not mistaking him for the notorious symbol of the 1950s anticommunist witch hunts, Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy.

Today, against an ever-rising tide of public cynicism and frustration with American politics, Gene McCarthy’s legacy of commitment to participatory democracy and Constitutional principles is carried on by a new generation of students fostered by The Eugene J. McCarthy Center for Public Policy and Civic Engagement at Saint John’s University. His lifelong pursuit of a politics of reason and hope was as imperfectly realized as any human endeavor, sometimes due to the very attributes that shaped his idealism. As one supporter remarks, “He may have disappointed us, but he never betrayed us.” With a nuanced perspective and a complex poetic tone, this film is a story told “in the key of Gene” and set against the backdrop of the Midwestern landscapes that produced this remarkable American. (source)

+—+

More, later!

But, that Hanford, that Oppen-Monster-Heimer:

fukushima_disaster 620

The Bomb and the End of Sanity

Einstein’s Voice

“Bamboo poles for sale!
Bamboo poles for sale!”

While I am reading the newspaper, reclining
in the afternoon on a summer’s day,
I hear the sing-song cry of a man selling laundry poles.*

The atomic bomb, Little Boy, was dropped on Hiroshima
at 15 minutes and 17 seconds past 9:00 a.m.
August 6, Tinian Time.
It is said
when the news reached Einstein,
who had contributed to the Manhattan Project,
he just uttered a groan:

Oy vey!

And
in similar words in a will
he wrote five months before his death:
If I had my life to live over again,
I would like to be a tinsmith or a traveling salesman,
not a scientist or a teacher.

Bamboo poles for sale!
Bamboo poles for sale!
Bamboo poles for sale!

No one seems to be buying any bamboo poles.
Outside the windows
the sky is clear, like in Hiroshima.

Oy vey!

Did he turn at the street corner?
The voice of the traveling salesman, Einstein,
is fading further away.

— Hiroyoshi Komatsu
 

it’s an upsidedown world, all this retailopethicus disease, while the “third” world is decimated by capitalism, thugs, despots, banks, and sanctions . . . forget about the virial and TNT bombs!

I’ll do a little soft landing for you all with this National Day of Mourning or Sorrow or Genocide. Pretty tough for the 20,000 already splattered by Israel.

Two years ago:

LINK. Seven Hours.

Thanksgiving is a lie. Let’s celebrate the food instead. #7 Indigenous Foods Day, and a Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address (Substack = Valerie Vande Panne)

The Thanksgiving myth is bullshit. World class bullshit, as George Carlin might say. But still total bullshit. 

Let’s start with the fact the fourth Thursday of November national holiday was, in fact, created by Abraham Lincoln in the midst of the Civil War.  His proclamation read like a prayer:

… with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged…

As relevant today as it was then. 

For many, the fourth Thursday of November is

“a celebration of a litany of injustices — genocide, oppression, erasure, ecocide, cultural appropriation, colonization, imperialism, capitalism, institutional racism, and more,” as friend and White Mountain Apache chef Nephi Craig writes

Craig proposes an alternative: Indigenous Foods Day, as most of the traditional Thanksgiving meal food is Indigenous.

And, it is delicious: Turkey, pumpkin, cranberries, squash, corn — they’re all native to North America.

Celebrate the Indigenous foods where you are at. 

Think micro-regionally: What food is native to where you live? What has been growing where you live since before Europeans stepped off the boat? Chili peppers, tomato, chocolate, potato and so much more are native to North America.

Since I started celebrating Indigenous Foods Day, I’ve had many amazing and surprising meals, including feasts of lobster in Boston, grouper in St. Augustine, venison in Detroit, and perhaps the best fish of my life in Cameroon (you can eat Indigenous, native, micro-regionally, and hyper-local just about any where on Earth). All these feasts were accompanied by amazing dishes of local, native seeds, nuts, fruits, and veggies—and drinks and desserts, some sweetened with maple syrup, or apples or citrus.

+—+

War Criminal Pardoning Liberty and Bell? FUCK.

Biden pardons turkeys amid concerns about eating | TheFencePost.com
Credit: White House

Fucking Freaks.

Credit: Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library
Credit: White House

From War Criminals to ‘that’ Holly-Dirt, those people who own or run Holly-Dirt give us third grade reading level bullshit daily, nanosecond by nanosecond:

'Happy Days,' “The First Thanksgiving” (1978)
‘All in the Family,’ “The Little Atheist” (1975)

But it gets worse: College. Higher Education. Instead of the hell we have created in Palestine discussed, or even a boycott of “thanks no thanks giving,” we being Americans, we being academics, we being taxpayers, we fucking live the lie DAILY.

WE ARE FUCKING CHILDREN. RUN BY fucking THIRD-GRADE LEVEL fucking nannies. This is higher education? FUCK!

They’ve stayed in five-star hotels. They’ve had paparazzi training. They’ve walked a red carpet and met the president of the United States himself.

Now, they will be making their way by car to the college towns in their home states, where they’ll live out their golden years. When they finally arrive at their destination, they do so in style: in crates large enough to fit a Great Dane and embossed with the presidential seal. Waiting for them are the scientists who have been dying to meet them.

They are the presidentially pardoned turkeys. Having been saved from the dinner table, they will now be able to pursue a life at college.

Where Do Turkeys Go After Pardons? College. By  Claire Wallace

Donovan Barlow, 10, gets a close up look at Peas and Carrots at Gobblers Rest on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, Va., Wednesday, Nov. 21 2018. In an annual Thanksgiving tradition, President Donald Trump on Tuesday pardoned the pair of meaty turkeys from the holiday table.

Waiting for them in Minnesota are faculty and graduate students eager to look after Liberty and Bell in their new home: a large enclosure with its own day-night cycle, temperature set at 70 to 72 degrees, and access to food and water (they like their water cold, according to Luna Akhtar, a microbiologist who will in be charge of their care).

All of this preparation, of course, may need to be altered. Each turkey has its own personality, Akhtar says, and will let you know if it’s uncomfortable. Turkeys tend to like fresh food, but when it comes to their wood-shaving bedding, they prefer a bit of age, because the older it gets, the softer it feels.

Purdue students (from left) Ashlynn Smith, Jenna Boewe, Serena Wesley, Lisa Escobar-Torres, Annye Troyer, pose with Peanut Butter and Jelly at Purdue University.

Peanut Butter and Jelly, the pardoned turkeys from 2021 who now live at Purdue University, also have their own preferences and personalities.

“Peanut Butter definitely wears the pants,” Gregory Fraley, an associate professor in the department of animal sciences, says. “He’s a little bossier. Jelly just kind of hangs out.”

+—+

While GAZA starves! Oh, the Jewish-First/Israel-First New York Times has a feature on hot shots. Of course, no anti-capitalist cited saying that, well, maybe more than $16 an hour should be the norm for, well, wildland fire fighters?

Nah, not when we have to hear about the syphilis of a Sam Altman going over to Microsoft.

In footage from one rally, Sarandon tells the crowd:

“People are questioning, people are standing up, people are educating themselves, people are stepping away from brainwashing that started when they were kids.”

She encouraged attendees to

“be strong, be patient, be clear and stand with anybody who has the courage to speak out” and thanked “the Jewish community who’s come out to have our backs”.

Susan Sarandon losing her agent for posting some comments about a ceasefire. That’s the news to print?

Three firefighters, wearing blue helmets, sit in the back of a truck bed while it is driving through a forest.

Base pay for entry-level federal firefighters is $16 an hour — far less than the amount earned by California state fighters, who battle many of the same blazes.

“They are the premier firefighting force in the U.S.,” said Evan Pierce, who helped write a University of Washington report on firefighter salaries. “But they are working longer and in more dangerous conditions — for less pay.”

Many firefighters are pulled from the ranks of our private prison system, and they get less than $16 an hour. Think $3 an hour.

FILE: Palestinians waving national flags wait aboard small boats off the port of Gaza City on May 30, 2010, to greet the so-called 'Freedom Flotilla.' (MAHMUD HAMS / AFP)

Ahh, while the USA gets stuffed and starved: We shall see boats straffed and sunk by Israel.

Remember the U.S.S. Liberty, not the turkey?

Approximately 1,000 boats will gather in Turkey on Wednesday before heading toward Gaza in an attempt to break the Israeli blockade and disrupt maritime trade coming into Israel during the war with Hamas, in an apparent repeat of similar attempts from over a decade ago.

In an interview with Turkish news website Haber7, Volkan Okçu, one of the organizers of the protest, indicated the boats will carry 4,500 people from 40 countries, “including anti-Zionist Jews.”

Among the 1,000 vessels would be 313 boats filled with Russian activists, and 104 filled with Spanish activists, he said. Only 12 Turkish vessels will join the flotilla, he told Haber7.

Ahh, this is the West. FUCK. It’s not just bombs and white phosphorous that kill: Millennials say they need $525,000 a year to be happy. A Nobel prize winner’s research shows they’re not wrong. With news (sic) like this, how can the rest of the world survive this rapacious mentality, this superficiality, this sickness?

Two women laughing outside a store

Men said they needed to earn $381,000 annually, while women said $183,000 would make them happy.

A 2023 study coauthored by another Nobel Prize recipient Daniel Kahneman found that happiness can improve with higher earnings of up to $500,000 a year, supporting the millennial survey respondents’ predictions.

“In the simplest terms, this suggests that for most people larger incomes are associated with greater happiness,” Matthew Killingsworth, a senior fellow at Penn’s Wharton School and coauthor of the study, said.

+—+

Believe me, there will be no revolution with these pukes manning the helm. Maybe they will be saying, “I’ll give you my last taxpayer dollar for public health, public education, public welfare, public safety when you pry it from my cold, dead LGBTQA+ Cis-gender hands.”

Pin on Country

We are so fucked, no? Military is the way, so do not think you and I are not part of the entire Military Thievry Industrial Silicon Valley Et Al Complex:

In 2019, the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, which generates $36 million in state and local taxes and represents a large portion of the local economy, said its top concerns include encroachment on groundwater, suggesting that shortages of its sole source of potable water could force it to shut down and move away.

“Without the base, there’s no Ridgecrest,” Lemieux said. “We have to have more water.”

Draining the aquifer would also sink Ridgecrest’s hopes of a bustling future of new homes, restaurants, and businesses for the 5,900 scientists, engineers and contractors employed at China Lake, which is undergoing about $4 billion worth of upgrades prompted by the 6.4. 5.4 and 7.1 magnitude quakes that rocked the area in 2019.

“I don’t see Ridgecrest turning into the next Las Vegas or Victorville, but it could benefit from some additional development,” said Carol Thomas-Keefer, general manager of the groundwater authority.

“More importantly,” she said, “the pipeline is a solution to a chronic problem: Wells are going dry because folks are tapping the aquifer’s supply of fresh water faster than it is being returned to the basin naturally by rain and snowmelt off the Eastern Sierra Nevada range.”

drought

Desperate for water, a desert city hopes to build a pipeline to the California Aqueduct

And how many days can a Gazan live on dirty, salty or zero freshwater? Nah, not good table talk this Thursday.

People waiting outside a clinic with masks on

Ahh, go call the midwife. Once, the NIH in Britain was amazing. Now? We got that Israel-First company, Palantir, Peter Thiel’s evil spawn, wanting to set up shop in the UK: Peter Thiel-cofounded Palantir will overhaul the U.K.’s public health service in a deal worth up to $413m—and people are worried

So, Gaza and Zero running hospitals. As Richard Medhurst rightly states: “The word ‘nazi’ should be now replaced with ‘israeli’ since the israelis are so much worse than the nazi’s. They at least attempted to cover it up, but the Israelis laugh and are in the open.’

Making a profit from Illness | THE DIRTY WAR ON THE NHS | John Pilger Health System Documentary!!

And we can send Whitey to the Moon, to Mars, even send Chinese and Japanese to the Moon, but we can’t do what? Fix a burst appendix, for “free”?

Lyrics — Whitey on the moon

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or.

I’ve written about this, many times. AMR.

“With incidence of anti-microbial resistance on the rise, the threat posed by superbugs to human health is increasing,” co-author Tina Joshi, an associate professor in Molecular Microbiology at the University of Plymouth, said in a statement. “But far from demonstrating that our clinical environments are clean and safe for staff and patients, this study highlights the ability of C. diff spores to tolerate disinfection at in-use and recommended active chlorine concentrations.”

In their study, Joshi and colleagues exposed dormant spores of C. difficile to three clinically in-use concentrations of sodium hypochlorite (bleach). The spores were then put on surgical scrubs and patient gowns and examined under a scanning electron microscope to establish if they had undergone any changes after the bleach treatment. And what they found was shocking.

The spores were completely unaffected. Indeed, the high concentration bleach used in hospitals was no more effective at damaging the spores than plain water. (This is big stuff, antimicrobial resistence: The Looming Superbug Crisis—And How to Beat It)

Gaza? Sudan? Hmm.

Nurse cleaning hospital

All those dollars and human lifetimes expended for financial weapons and cutlural weapons and weapons of mass and medium destruction.

Good money spent well!

For more than 50 years, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has given the Israeli state invaluable experience in controlling an ‘enemy’ population, the Palestinians. It’s here that they have perfected the architecture of control, using the occupied Palestinian territories as a testing ground for weaponry and surveillance technology that they then export around the world.

The Palestine Laboratory shows in depth and for the first time how Israel has become a leader in developing spying technology and defence hardware that fuels some of the globe’s most brutal conflicts — from the Pegasus software that hacked Jeff Bezos’s and Jamal Khashoggi’s phones, and the weapons sold to the Myanmar army that has murdered thousands of Rohingyas, to the drones being used by the European Union to monitor refugees in the Mediterranean who are left to drown.

In a global investigation that uncovers secret documents, based on revealing interviews and on-the-ground reporting, Antony Loewenstein shows how, as ethno-nationalism grows in the 21st century, Israel has built the ultimate tools for despots and democracies.

+—+

Congested air conditioning units on a building on May 21, 2012 in Mumbai, India.

Yet, there are some things in the science community, all the research, that have the world in mind. We need cooling, man, with Wet Bulb Temperatures rising rising rising: ‘Electrocaloric’ heat pump could transform air conditioning

Heat pumps are ubiquitous in the form of air conditioners. Scientists just invented one that avoids harmful refrigerant gases.

Black-and-white photo showing silhouettes of children playing in fountain.

What is wet-bulb temperature?

One question a lot of people are asking is: “When will it get too hot for normal daily activity as we know it, even for young, healthy adults?”

The answer goes beyond the temperature you see on the thermometer. It’s also about humidity. Our research is designed to come up with the combination of the two, measured as “wet-bulb temperature.” Together, heat and humidity put people at greatly increased risk, and the combination gets dangerous at lower levels than scientists previously believed.

+—+

Finally, just stay glued to Electronic Intifada or Middle East Eye, Press TV, Telesur. Oh, that anniversary, today? — Kennedy Assassination: “CIA-Did-It” Theorists Are Covering for Israel

Sorry to rain on your Turkey Day Parade!

It is inconceivable that Counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton directed the whole operation. But if he was not following orders from Richard Helms — and there is not a single piece of evidence that Helms knew of the assassination —, under whose direction or influence was he operating? That is an easy one: besides Counterintelligence, Angleton headed the “Israeli Desk”, and he had more intimate contacts with the hierarchy of the Mossad than with his own. He loved Israelis as much as he hated Communists — apparently believing that one man could not be both. Meir Amit, head of Mossad from 1963 to 1968, called him “the biggest Zionist” in Washington, while Robert Amory, head of the CIA Directorate of Intelligence, called him a “co-opted Israeli agent.”

While Counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton was disgraced in the U.S. after his forced resignation, he was honored in Israel. After his death in 1987, according to the Washington Postfive former heads of Mossad and Shin Bet and three former Israeli military intelligence chiefs were present “to pay final tribute to a beloved member of their covert fraternity.” Among the services he rendered Israel, “Angleton reportedly aided Israel in obtaining technical nuclear data.

Never has the Anglo-American political class been so out of touch with millions of ordinary people as they give carte blanche support to Israel’s mass atrocities

This is “just California.

Were colonial invasions encounters, whether those of yesterday or those of today? Shouldn’t they be called rapes or violations instead?

tumblr_nvxrnk7azr1qaz9lto1_1280.jpg.jpe

The first Indigenous People’s Day was proclaimed on October 12, 1992, the quincentennial of the infamous voyage of Christopher Columbus to this hemisphere. At the 1990 Continental Gathering of Indigenous Peoples in Quito, Ecuador participants from 120 different nations collaborated to write:

“The Indians of America have never abandoned our constant struggle against the conditions of oppression, discrimination and exploitation which were imposed upon us as a result of the European invasion of our ancestral territories.”

The Italian explorer, Columbus, sailing under the flag of Spain, is credited with the “discovery of a New World,” although his expedition had sought a passage to Asia, a very old part of the world. As the late Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano points out in this powerful essay from the The Progressive in October 2007, our hemisphere is still dealing with the curse of Columbus.:

Were colonial invasions encounters, whether those of yesterday or those of today? Shouldn’t they be called rapes or violations instead?

The Curse of Columbus

Did Christopher Columbus discover America in 1492? Or was it the Vikings before him? And before the Vikings, what about the people who lived there? Didn’t they exist?

Official history relates that Vasco Núñez of Balboa was the first man who saw both oceans, standing on a peak in Panama. Were the inhabitants of that area blind?

Who gave maize and potatoes and tomatoes and chocolate and the rivers and mountains of America their names? Hernán Cortés? Francisco Pizarro? Were the people who were already living there mute?

We have been told, and still are, that it was the pilgrims of the Mayflower that populated America. Had it been empty before?

Because Columbus didn’t understand what the Indians were saying, he concluded that they didn’t know how to speak. Because they wore no clothes, were gentle, and gave away everything they had, he concluded they lacked the capacity for reason. And because he was certain of having discovered the Orient by the back door, he believed they were Indians from India.

Afterwards, during the second voyage, the admiral promulgated an act establishing that Cuba was part of Asia. The document of June 14, 1494, stated as evidence that the crew of the three ships recognized it as such. Whoever said otherwise was given thirty lashes, fined 10,000 maravedíes, and had his tongue cut out.

The notary, Hernán Pérez de Luna, attested, and the sailors who could write signed at the bottom.

The conquistadors demanded that America be something it wasn’t. And they treated the Americans as if they were what they imagined the pagans of the Orient to be.

Christopher Columbus said he saw on the shores of Cuba sirens with men’s faces and chicken feathers, and supposed that not far from there men and women had tails.

In Guyana, according to Sir Walter Raleigh, there were people with eyes in their shoulders and mouths in their chests.

In Venezuela, according to Pedro Simon, there were Indians with ears so long they dragged on the ground.

In the Amazon, according to Christopher of Acuña, the natives’ feet were shaped backwards, heels forward and toes behind, and according to Pedro Martín de Anglería, women mutilated one breast to be able to fire their arrows better.

Anglería, who wrote the first history of America, though he never set foot there, also affirmed that in the New World there were people with tails, and these tails were so long the natives could sit only in chairs with holes.

The Black Code prohibited the torture of slaves in the French colonies. But it wasn’t to torture them but to educate them that slaves’ masters whipped their backs and cut their tendons when they fled.

The Laws of the Indians, which protected those in the Spanish colonies, were quite moving. But the gallows and pillory set up in the center of every Main Square were even more affecting.

The reading of the Request for Obedience was very convincing. This occurred on the eve of the assault on each village. It explained to the Indians that God had come to the world and left St. Peter in his place, and that the successor of St. Peter was the Holy Father, and that the Holy Father has shown favor on the Queen of Castilla, who rules all this land. For this reason, they should go from here or pay tribute in gold, and if they don’t or if they stay, war would be declared on them, and they would be made slaves along with their wives and children. But the Request was read in the middle of the night from the mountain in Spanish and without an interpreter, in the presence of the notary but no Indians, as they were asleep, miles away, and hadn’t the faintest idea what was awaiting them.

Until not long ago, October 12 was Race Day.

But does such a thing even exist? What is race but a useful lie to exploit and exterminate one’s neighbor?

When the U.S. entered the Second World War, the American Red Cross decided that the blood of black people would not be accepted in its blood banks. Has anyone seen, by chance, black blood?

Afterward, Race Day became the Day of Encounter.

Were colonial invasions encounters, whether those of yesterday or those of today? Shouldn’t they be called rapes or violations instead?

Perhaps the most revealing episode in the history of the Americas occurred in 1563 in Chile. Indians besieged the fortress of Arauco, depriving the Spanish of food and water, yet Captain Bernal refused to surrender.

From the stockade he screamed out,

“There will be more and more of us!”

“With what women will you make them?” the Indian chief asked.

“With yours. We will make them bear children who will be your masters.”

The invaders called the original Americans idolaters because they believed that nature is sacred and that we are the brothers and sisters of all those with feet, paws, wings, or roots.

And they called them savages. But they were not wrong about this. The Indians were such savages that they ignored the fact that they had to obtain a visa, a certificate of good behavior, and a work permit from Columbus, Cabral, Cortés, Alvarado, Pizarro, and the pilgrims of the Mayflower.

Eduardo Galeano, was an Uruguayan writer and journalist. His books include The Open Veins of Latin

Top 5 reasons to NOT celebrate Thanksgiving, November 2020 | Institute for  Critical Animal Studies (ICAS)

British media organisations and journalists working for them have struggled for decades to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict accurately and impartially. Supporting what we all observed with our very own eyes and ears, research has demonstrated categorically over the years how Israeli narratives and viewpoints dominate the Middle East output of most mainstream media organisations in Britain, leading to the silencing, erasure and dehumanisation of the Palestinians.

+—+

Here, a piece that may not end up in the rag.

They Are Children; Propaganda Can’t Redefine ‘Genocide

By Paul Haeder

For some of us journalists and teachers who have friends and connections to Gaza, to Palestine, we are not easily dissuaded by the mainstream narrative around Hamas and the Zionist State of Israel. We are still heartbroken by the carnage.

It’s not a Pearl Harbor moment for Israel, and ironically,  Dec. 7  is the start of Hanukah. We are approaching Christmas and Kwanzaa, too, and for Muslims, December is a holy month: Eid al-Fitr is often celebrated with feasts, gifts, and special prayers. Other important December holidays for Muslims include the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, known as Mawlid al-Nabi, and the Day of Ashura, which is a day of fasting and reflection.

Ironically, we have human rights day December 10 and International Solidarity Day December 20. I write this on the day  we see a more concerted form of sadism in the genocide: On November 18, the Israeli military  delivered on the promises made by the country’s leaders to render Gaza uninhabitable for its 2.3 million Palestinian residents, most of them refugees.

“Civilians are facing the immediate possibility of starvation,” the head of the World Food Program said on Thursday, with the organization adding that Gaza’s “entire population is in desperate need of food assistance.

It makes sense that people in the USA are not just misinformed, but miseducated and basically drawn & quartered by the mainstream media’s incredible bias and stenography for “government sources.” The press illiteracy of the average and not-so-average citizen is disheartening for me, a journalist through and through.

I’m not citing extreme experts, authors and journalists who give a much different perspective on what happened on Dec. 7 and the context of what led up to the Hamas attacks. We have ten thousand known bombed to death, and we have disease, dysentery, gut ailments killing many; water and refrigeration cut off? No bread to eat (Israel bombed all of Gaza’s bakeries).

It’s dangerous to me and the rest of the informed world how uneducated and fascistic our leaders are, these so-called elites with Yale, Harvard and big university degrees. They have no excuse for ignorance, and propaganda is like a virus which rears its temperature-spiking head constantly. The facts are there, even coursing through the algorithms of Google, Facebook and Bing.

You want to read a Jewish man’s position on the genocide Israel is perpetrating? He had a stake in arguing for Israel to return those occupied territories stolen after 1967. Moshé Machover is  the last surviving signatory of the statement below, published on 22nd September 1967 in Haaretz, Israel’s leading progressive Zionist newspaper.

 “Our right to defend ourselves from extermination does not give us the right to oppress others. Occupation leads to foreign rule. Foreign rule leads to resistance. Resistance leads to repression. Repression leads to terror and counter-terror. The victims of terror are mostly innocent people. Holding on to the occupied territories will turn us into a nation of murderers and murder victims. We must leave the occupied territories immediately.”

Inform yourselves, please. I have decades under my belt as a journalist – even landed a degree in newspaper journalism and I’ve worked over decades for many newspapers, magazines and one radio station. The media illiteracy and dumb-downing are atrocious, even among “college educated folk” who turn a blind eye to history, to off-the-mainstream-discourse, to outlets and independent journalists actually working in these “areas” of the world.

Look up Beirut-based journalist Rania Khalek, host at BreakThrough News, and see the hundreds of interviews she’s conducted with dozens of amazingly smart and in-the-know folk. You want to hear Abby Martin, an American journalist, who just interviewed Roger Waters from Pink Floyd? Martin’s gut wrenching story “Gaza Fights For Freedom” can give you a primer to the atrocities of Israel against this open air prison they “created” for 2.3 million Palestinians. Gaza is a five mile by 25 mile hell hole.

This newspaper will run letters, and certainly we might get a “counter” Viewpoint to mine. There is no other side to what the IDF is doing to Gaza. It’ss dropping USA bombs on a completely closed, 125 square mile home to children, old people, schools, almost a dozen hospitals, and adults.

They are not combatants, the children that have died in hospitals because the electricity and fuel and medicines and food have been cut off.

Three prominent Palestinian human rights groups said that the full force of one of the world’s most powerful militaries is being unleashed against a “captive civilian population … under the voyeuristic gaze of the international community.”

Go to the Electronic Intifada and watch their roundtables covering this atrocity. Read. Search this out on the web.

Ian Pappé is a leading critic of the Israeli occupation, a professor of history and the director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter. His books include “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” “A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples” and “The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge.”

Please, find his interviews and books, so you can educate yourself, your neighbors and vapid representatives.

 “This is a massive operation of killing, of ethnic cleansing, of depopulation,” says Pappé.

He’s Jewish, Israeli and had served in Israel’s military. Secure the release of the more than 200 hostages held by Hamas is to agree to an all-for-all swap for the thousands of Palestinian political prisoners held by Israel, including many women, children and elderly people.

“This is the only way to release the people who were taken.”

+—+

I sent the above to the local newspaper where I have gotten traction with my viewpoints. I know the editor. I’ve done special and free work for them. I am not sure it will run. Here, some archived stuff. Then do this in Google-Gulag: Paul Haeder Newsport News Times.

I have to pussyfoot around issues in the local rag. Newport has some of those LGBTQA backers, and lots of smart (PhD sorts) living here because of the marine scinces and NOAA and the place to retire. Do they lean toward Biden-Harris. Sure, and then you have Trump-Pence leaners. Both side of the same coin, for sure.

But calling for a Ceasefire is what all high school teachers should be highlighting for their youth. It’s the non-violent option. But calling for more bombing, straffing, white phosphorous dumping? That would seem like a Virginia Tech situation, no?

Here’s what runs in the rag, and I’ve written about this sad sack of a “teacher” and whatever else he labels himself as, but this is one of several prompts for me to write something counterveilling the stupid and the hate:

A ceasefire creates perverse incentives

In a recent piece published in the News-Times (“Gaza: ceasefire now!” Nov. 3 edition), Newport resident Gilbert Schramm called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza as a solution to the terror attack that claimed the lives of over 1,400 Jews in Israel on Oct. 7.

On its face, this solution seems like a logical one. We are told, after all, that a ceasefire is the only way to end the “cycle of violence.” Sadly, calls for an immediate ceasefire create no lasting peace — only perverse incentives. A real, lasting peace comes only with the complete destruction of Hamas.

Schramm argues that Hamas is urging Palestinians to stay in Gaza to prevent their “ethnic cleansing” by Israel. This is patently false. Hamas instructs Palestinians to ignore Israeli pleas to flee Gaza because the continued presence of innocent civilians is all that prevents the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) from eviscerating Hamas tomorrow. This is because Israel specifically takes actions to avoid collateral damage.

The headquarters for Hamas leadership was deliberately constructed under the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City for this purpose. Hamas knows that any attack on their headquarters will claim the lives of thousands of innocent Palestinians — an attack that would be used in thousands of TikTok videos as evidence that Israel is actually the genocidal party. Those calling for a ceasefire draw moral equivalence between a democratic state that takes active measures to limit civilian casualties in their attacks on military targets, and a terror state, which deliberately targets civilian areas in an attempt to maximize casualties.

Schramm laments the deaths of more than 7,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children. We should all mourn these deaths. But we must lay blame at the feet of the party most responsible: Hamas. Protocol I of the Geneva Convention expressly prohibits the use of human shields. Indeed, the entire purpose of the Geneva Convention is to maximize the protection of innocent civilians in war.

Recently, TikTok and Instagram were awash with news that an IDF aircraft destroyed a Gazan ambulance, allegedly killing 15 — if totalitarian terror state Hamas is to be believed. Unsurprisingly, Hamas has been using ambulances to smuggle combatants in and out of warzones, which is prohibited under Rule 29 of Customary International Humanitarian Law. Under such circumstances, an ambulance is therefore a lawful target. The decision to put women and children in front of genocidal, Jew-hating terrorists is not Israel’s. A ceasefire only incentivizes Hamas to use more Palestinians as human shields and only invites more casualties. If the goal is fewer Palestinian deaths in Gaza, then Hamas must be forcefully excised. 

Most Americans are well-meaning in their desire to see the conflict in Gaza come to an end. But Israel’s retaliatory response to the horrific rape and murder of 1,400 Israelis is not perpetuating a “cycle of violence.” It is justifiable self-defense against a genocidal terror state hellbent on the total eradication of the world’s Jews. Anything less invites more of the same by Hamas.

Ben Ryan is a social studies teacher at Newport High School. He also serves as the Lincoln County Education Association’s west area director.

And so here we are with this fucking fool teaching high school and then some fucking LC director of an education association he lists as well.

What a piece of human agnotology. And as a TEACHER, who doesn’t understand what Nakba is, what genocide is, and his history is so threadbare, I wonder if he’d even be able to sit and listen to a high school student rebut his ignorance and his call to kill people in hospitals and schools.

Yep, millions across the world calling for a ceasefire are all wrong, man.

This miseducator is attacking another resident’s simple and non-radical commentary and call for ceasefire:

Gaza: ceasefire now!

By Gilbert Schramm

(Information stated was current as of Oct. 26)

A few days ago, an Israeli army spokesman uttered one of those absurdly ironic statements that are typical in the current conflict. He argued that Israel “had to attack Hamas” because they were “living on Israel’s doorstep.” When you steal someone’s house and evict them with brutal violence, it is not surprising to find them on your doorstep. Does that justify exterminating them or justify driving them into a different neighborhood? Most civilized people would say not.

Egypt is getting roundly criticized for not opening their Rafah border crossing. Their reasons are quite clear. First, they don’t want 2 million Palestinian refugees living on their border with Israel, and they don’t want to have continued Palestinian resistance staged from within their borders. That would inevitably lead to another Israeli/Egyptian war. Their second reason is perhaps more principled — they refuse to collaborate in the further ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. This is why Hamas itself is urging residents of Gaza to remain. It is largely why they do remain.

In 1948, Israel brutally ethnically cleansed the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin. For years, Israel claimed that Arab authorities told Palestinians to flee. Israel claimed that their flight made the land Israel’s by default. There is no clear record of Arabs telling Palestinians to leave, but no Arab government wants to open themselves to the same false claims or manipulation.

There have been a lot of comparisons to 9/11 with regard to the Hamas attack and the Israeli response. It might give some much-needed perspective to rely on comparisons with smaller numbers. During a 10-year period in the mid 2000s, Palestinian rockets killed about 20 Israeli civilians. That is around two people a year. That is about how many Israeli people are killed yearly by snake bites. It is less than the number killed in the U.S. by fireworks as we celebrate Fourth of July (a single day). No one has ever called on the U.S. Air Force to stop Fourth of July celebrations. One credible article I just read said the recent number of deaths caused by Palestinian rocket fire was about one per 142 rockets. The number of rockets in 2011 was about 1,483 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/05/13/faq-hamas-missiles/). The situation is getting worse but is hardly an “existential threat” as Israel claims, and it certainly doesn’t justify the horrific force Israel is bringing to bear on Gaza.

Recently, a lone gunman in a small town in Maine killed about 18 local residents with a legally purchased gun. It would have taken 2,556 Hamas rockets to kill all those people in Maine. The gunman did in an hour what it would have taken 10 years of Hamas rockets to accomplish. Yet there are no U.S. airstrikes in Maine. That would be madness!

Meanwhile, the death toll inflicted on Palestinian civilians in Gaza continues to grow astronomically. Over 7,000 Palestinians are now dead. Apparently, over 3,000 children are among them (dismembered somewhere in the rubble). How many more victims need to die before Israel reaches its mysterious “redemption point?” It is time to stop this madness.

The U.S. and Israel argue that a ceasefire would “only help Hamas.” The truth is it would mostly help the civilian population of Gaza, most of whom had nothing to do with the horrific Hamas attack. It would also help the hostages and the countries they come from by giving their negotiators time to arrange their release. It would even help Israel by giving their people time to hold back before committing their nation to a horrific, historic mistake.

In recent days, most of the leaders of Israeli intelligence and the military have taken responsibility for their failures. The exception is Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. He has led Israel for 13 years. His aggressive policy has been an abject failure and has probably created far more extremists than he ever eliminated. There is no sane reason the US should continue to support this approach.

It is time to let humanitarian aid into Gaza and to enforce a ceasefire now. A serious long-term peace deal should quickly follow. Period.

Gilbert Schramm is a resident of Newport.

Smalltown Newspapers Struggling to Exist & Readerships Dwindling … So Don’t Rock the Boat . . .

That high school Gestapo boy, Gentle Ben, what a typical example of the bad “educator” in the Gulag of K12.

Listen up welfare cheat, Mister Ryan.

Oh, those stupid Americans: What’s this idiot talking now, Tuesday, to his youth about National Day of Mourning for Turtle Island? Klanada? He going to scoff at this?

LINK.

Jews with guns?

Female Israeli settlers practice firing weapons at the settlement of “Pnei Kedem”, near the occupied West Bank in September. (Flash90)

Jew kids in the Jewish State of Occupied Palestine?

Settler children. One drinking wine, one holstering a machine gun and another aiming a pistol at onlookers

Fucking LA: local gun shop owners say concerns fueled by the bloody conflict have led to a surge in sales in Southern California, with many Jewish people arming themselves for the first time.  

jewish-settler-kids-guns.jpg

Jewish himself, Charles Jasper, Director of Aegis Private Security which also provides gun training, told KTLA’s Jennifer McGraw that his business has doubled since the war began.  

“The idea that people can go door-to-door, terrorists can go door-to-door with impunity and not face hard resistance is something difficult to process, especially as an American,” he said.  

In Studio City last week, the home of a Jewish family was broken into by a man threatening to kill them while hurling anti-Semitic insults. The victim, who is nine months pregnant, told KTLA that the intruder first kicked in the door to their master bedroom. Her husband fought with him while she called 911. 

Officers arrived and found him armed with a kitchen knife, Key News reported. He was taken into custody without further incident and shouted, “Free Palestine” and “Brown Lives Matter” as he was cuffed and placed in a police cruiser, Key News video shows.

Store owners said they’re seeing an influx of Jewish and Israeli Americans, many of them women, arming up in case they’re the next target here at home.  

“We’re having a gun. That’s the only way I feel I will be safe in my house now,” one woman, who did not want to be identified or appear on camera, told McGraw.  

The woman, who said she fears for her family, has been anti-gun until now.  

Gun sales up among Jewish and Israeli communities
A woman seen at a firing range in this undated file photo.

“I mean, in the past, the thought would’ve never crossed my mind,” she said. “Now it’s not only do I want my husband to figure this out, but I think we’re all going to be trained on how to use the gun. I don’t want history to repeat itself. I want my family here. I want my kids here. I want my kid’s kids to be here.”  

At Burbank Ammo & Guns, manager Eric Fletcher said they’re up 75% in firearm safety certification tests, selling near 200 this year so far, compared to just 45 at this time last year.  

Guns for the Palestinians?

So, yet another shit letter in the News Times:

You can’t ignore the terrorism and atrocities

Gilbert Schramm frequently writes columns that represent only the far Oregon left and another reason much of the state wants a divorce from Portland-type liberals.

His column on Gaza (“Gaza: ceasefire now!” Nov. 3 edition) is typical of so many other liberal voices who ignore the terrorism and atrocities Hamas inflicted. Babies that were beheaded and women and children that were intentionally targeted, yet do gooder liberals say stand down.

Israel is right in doing everything it can to terminate Hamas, and it does not need others telling it what to do.

Greg Brown, Newport

The right to EVERYTHING?

These people and the lies, and then this do-gooder liberal shit, and anti Portland shit? Oh, the Un-United $nakes of AmeriKKKa-IF.

LINK.

Do these racists wake up just with the hate hate hate embedded inside? Then a fucking High School teacher, what’s his game? He going to broach this book, since it is social studies and dealing with high school aged youth’s lives?

Cover of Dreaming of Freedom book shows illustration of child reaching for key hanging from orange tree

The horror of childhood under occupation

Harrowing —

Dreaming of Freedom begins with the story of 14-year-old Yazan al-Shrbati, one of the most harrowing narratives in the book.

Yazan lives on Shuhada Street in Hebron, formerly the commercial heart of Hebron’s Old City but now severely restricted to Palestinians for the benefit of Israeli settlers. Yazan recounts his brutal assault by Israeli settlers while walking by himself in the street and his subsequent arrest by the Israeli military, despite the fact that he had done nothing to provoke the attack.

Like all the children in the book, Yazan says that his experience of imprisonment has changed him. As well as the physical violence Yazan endured during his arrest, when Israeli soldiers kicked him and hit him in the head, he was subjected to psychological pressure during his detention.

“I was taken to the interrogation room, not knowing why, as I was the victim of an assault,” the boy states. “The interrogator tried to make me say something. I refused, insisting on my innocence. I was still trying to work out how bad my wounds were after the beatings [by] the settlers and the police.”

Human rights laws and norms do not apply under occupation, as these children are painfully aware.

One child describes their home being stormed by Israeli soldiers, another recounts a summons to an interrogation center. Under occupation, no one can ever truly feel secure.

The story of Ayman Abbasi, a 16-year-old from occupied East Jerusalem, is especially poignant.

Ayman was imprisoned several times — the first when he was just in ninth grade — and was released from prison to serve an open-ended house arrest that lasted for 10 months. He was then sentenced to 18 more months in prison and was forced to turn himself over to the prison authorities.

Ayman did not live to the see the publication of Hashim’s book; in November last year, he was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers.

Long-term consequences —

Hashim is careful to present her child subjects as honestly as possible rather than idealizing them. Nor does Hashim romanticize the consequences of rebellion against the occupation, for which Palestinians pay a high price.

Ammar Adeli, a child prisoner who took part in numerous acts of resistance against the occupation, drops out of school after repeated arrests. He cannot find a job due to the high unemployment in the West Bank and is isolated from his family.

The long-term impact that arrest and detention has on children — such as dropping out of school, psychological trauma and unemployment — are central themes of their post-prison experiences.

Yet none of the children profiled in Dreaming of Freedom express a desire to leave their homeland. Their shared experiences of arrest and imprisonment, however, reinforce the sense that they are trapped in a system not of their making that dictates the terms and conditions of their lives.

Most amazingly, the children still have hope. When he explains how he coped with imprisonment, Muslim Ouda explains,

“despite the miserable conditions in the cells, I would still try to draw a bright picture of my future, using my innocent imagination, in which there is no occupation.”

Alia Al Ghussain is a British-Palestinian currently based in London.

We do not have many educators left, man, in this warehousing of youth in prison settings called Public Schools, and then the homeschooled Zionists, and then the Charter School CristoAzovZion’s?

Yeah, that fucking Jewish State of Israel. You think Oct. 7 was bad? The entire Jewish state of Occupied Palestine must be ended.

Mays Abu Ghosh was revising for a college exam during August 2019 when Israeli soldiers broke into her home late at night.

Accompanied by dogs, the troops told her father to wake up the family and gather everyone in one place.

Then they entered Mays’ room and ordered her to switch on her mobile phone and computer. She refused to do so.

After she disobeyed the order, Mays had to get dressed in the presence of some female soldiers. Her bedroom and that of her parents were then ransacked by the troops.

Handcuffed, Mays was brought from her family’s home in Qalandiya refugee camp to the military checkpoint also in Qalandiya – an area separating occupied East Jerusalem from the remainder of the West Bank.

From there she was transported to the Russian Compound, an Israeli detention center in Jerusalem. Mays was held in that center for more than a month, during which time she was repeatedly tortured.

Painful—

“The most severe thing was three days in a row without being allowed to sleep,” Mays, 23, said. “I had to stay in a chair and if I closed my eyes, a soldier would come over and shout at me. I was slapped in the face continuously.”

Mays was forced to stand and bend her knees, with soldiers pressing hard on her shoulders. She had to remain in such painful positions for long stretches of time.

Her shackles were so tight that her hands and feet started to bleed. When Mays got her period, the interrogators “deliberately delayed” giving her sanitary pads, she said.

“I still have various pains – in my back, feet and head – because of the torture,” she recounted.

As well as abusing her physically, Mays’ interrogators subjected her to psychological pressure by threatening that other members of her family would be arrested and that their home would be destroyed.

Mays, a journalism student at Birzeit University in the West Bank, has been persecuted because she refused to accept Israel’s occupation of her homeland.

She was charged with being part of Qutub, a left-wing student group deemed “unlawful” by Israel.

Among the other charges against her were “contact with an enemy.” That related to her participation in a conference held in Lebanon on the right to return of Palestine’s refugees.

Around 50 people – mainly students – were arrested in the West Bank around the same time as Mays.

Some Israeli journalists rushed to label those arrested as “terrorists.” Press stories linked the arrests to a killing next to an Israeli settlement.

Yet as Gideon Levy, a veteran journalist with the Tel Aviv daily Haaretz, wrote, “almost none” of those arrested were suspected of having anything to do with that killing, “not even indirectly.”

“Huge sense of loss”—

After spending 33 days in the Russian Compound, Mays was brought to Damon, a prison located in a forest beside the city of Haifa inside Israel.

She was kept in a cell with six other women.

When it was summer, the heat in the cell was unbearable. During the winter, Mays tried to endure the bitter cold by covering herself with three blankets.

Mays was determined that her imprisonment would not break her spirit. She kept her mind active by reading novels and books on sociology and culture.

Some of the books read by prisoners – particularly those considered political – were confiscated by Israeli guards in Damon.

Mays was held behind bars for 15 months. She was eventually released late last year.

Her release came a month before her 16-month prison sentence expired. But she had to pay a $600 fine in order to be freed from jail.

The Abu Ghosh family has suffered greatly at the hands of Israel’s military occupation.

In early 2016, Mays’ brother Hussein was shot dead by an Israeli security guard. It was alleged that he and another young man who was killed had carried out a stabbing attack, fatally injuring an Israeli woman.

A few months later, the apartment where the family lived in Qalandiya was demolished by Israel in an act of collective punishment. They had to move to an apartment on another floor of the same building as a result.

Another of her brothers, Suleiman, was arrested soon after the 2019 raid in which Mays was taken captive. He was placed under administrative detention – imprisonment without charge or trial.

“My family feels a huge sense of loss and instability,” said Mays. “Even my little sister – a 5-year-old named Iliya – wets her bed because she remembers the time the Israeli army came to raid our home and arrest me.”

Mays is fully aware that there is nothing unique about the way she has been treated. In prison, she met many others who have been locked up for far longer than she was.

Approximately 10,000 Palestinian women have been arrested or detained under Israeli military orders over the past five decades.

Thirty-seven Palestinian women were being held in Israel’s prisons or detention centers at the end of January.

Mays is back studying now – although she has to follow her classes online because of the COVID-19 pandemic. She is hoping to graduate from Birzeit later in 2021. (Amjad Ayman Yaghi is a journalist based in Gaza.)

“Prison was an obstacle to my education and my career,” she said. “But I am still going to work as a journalist. I will not allow my imprisonment to be a dark chapter in my life.”

Fucking Jewish State of Isra-Hell: Tourists!

Sun, gun and wine: tourists taste life of Israeli settlers

Darn, that Jewish State of Israel and the JFK assassination?

. . . this is the death of our world, really, with older and meaner and Kissinger-like fascists getting their cake to eat us TOO.

And, yet, the One Percent and the Point Zero Zero Zero One Percent, are eating us alive. Soylent Green?

The richest 1% of humanity is responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66%, with dire consequences for vulnerable communities and global efforts to tackle the climate emergency, a report says.

The world faces twin crises of climate breakdown and runaway inequality. The richest people, corporations and countries are destroying the world with their huge carbon emissions. Meanwhile, people living in poverty, those experiencing marginalization, and countries in the Global South are those impacted the hardest. Women and girls, Indigenous Peoples, people living in poverty and other groups experiencing discrimination are particularly at a disadvantage. The consequences of climate breakdown are felt in all parts of the world and by most people, yet only the richest people and countries have the wealth, power and influence to protect themselves. With that power comes huge responsibility.

Never ever is the word WAR put into the equation. Or, Military Rampant Felonious Complex Assaults On Humanity is that ever spoken of, uh?

White House says Biden is fine after tripping on sandbag and falling on stage at Air Force ...

Goddamn, we are fucked. The gardener for POTUS. PLEASE.

Being There movie review & film summary (1979) | Roger Ebert

President Joe Biden is celebrating his 81st birthday on Monday, as questions about age continue to dominate the 2024 election.

Biden is the oldest commander in chief in U.S. history. If reelected, he will be 82 at the start of his second term and 86 when it ends.

Former President Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner, isn’t far behind at 77 years old. But Biden has so far faced more scrutiny over his age than Trump, though both have experienced noticeable blunders on the campaign trail.

+—+

Not a criminal, no, Joe? Not a thug, no, Joe? Not a rascist, Joe? Not an accused rapist, Joe? Not a thief. Mister President? Not a laughing skeleton saying he had put more crimes on the books for the death penalty, no, Joe? Nah, he’s a great human kind of Dirty Dealing Democrat.

Blood on his hands: Four of the five prisoners are eligible for federal executions because of the 1994 crime law Biden wrote and shepherded to passage while he was the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The federal death penalty was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Furman v. Georgia in 1972. When it was reinstated in 1988, only those convicted of murder in federal court while engaging in containing criminal enterprise were eligible for the death penalty.

Ahh, more fascists in the driver’s seat, this time, Argentina:

What did this admirable character ride to the throne on? The role of the state in the economy should be minimized. The national currency should be replaced by the US dollar, the Central Bank of Argentina should be abolished, as well as many ministries. Legalization of substances, prostitution, free sale of weapons. Abolition of all government subsidies and social safety nets for workers. Refusal to join BRICS. Freezing relations with Russia, China and Brazil. He is said to communicate with his dead dog through a medium. He also asks dead politicians for advice.

Who better to be president of Argentina?

Of course, for all his railing against the elite “caste” (la casta) Milei is no anti-establishment candidate, and has won the election with the support of key right-wing establishment politicians. The main leaders of the traditional bourgeois right wing, former president Macri and defeated presidential candidate Bullrich, threw their lot behind Milei for the run-off, in the hope of being able to play a decisive role in his eventual government.

Meanwhile, the most far-sighted capitalists and international capital favoured Massa, whom they considered more capable of carrying out the policy they need (namely, a harsh monetarist shock against the working class), because of the links his movement has with the trade union bureaucracy, through which they hoped he could keep the masses under control. They fear Milei’s brash approach could provoke a social explosion. They are not wrong. (source)

JM Image Javier Milei Twitter

[Milei is an extremely reactionary politician but he does not represent the coming to power of fascism]

Now, get sane and listen to this Abby and Alana talk. Makes you proud these Americanos came out okay. Yessirree!

But, Abby and Alalna, remember: American Jews are Zionists, 7 out of 10. Or, 7.5 out of 10. A sick tribe, man.

In early November, the American Institute ‘Jewish Electorate’ conducted measurements of public sentiment in the diaspora and came to two main conclusions.

1) An overwhelming majority (74%) of American Jews approve of President Biden’s handling of the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

2) In the presidential race, American Jews clearly prefer Biden (68%) over Trump (22%).

Interestingly, in the entire Jewish community there is only one group that likes Trump: Orthodox Jews.

Then, bankrolling the murder machines, thanks very much taxpayer.

HSVTOL propulsion technology.

And, near homelessness is increasing, housing insecurity, national infrastructure is at a D-minus, but we just bend over and take it in the proverbial taxpayer’s rear, while those fucking parents just love Johnny and Jane getting those engineering and coding and EE and software and robotics degrees!

+—+

As Top War points out, DARPA has been particularly prescriptive about the requirements for the SPRINT demonstrator. DARPA demands that the aircraft must be able to reach a top speed of at least 400 knots (460 mph/740 km/h) at altitudes between 15,000-30,000 feet (4,500-9,000 meters) and have a payload capacity of at least 1,000 pounds (454 kg). It should also be scalable for different mission types and have a flight time of at least 90 minutes, with a range of at least 230 miles (370 km).

The propulsion and control methods requirements are not specified for the demonstrator aircraft. However, it needs to have the capabilities of high-speed cruising, hovering in austere environments, and launching or landing on unprepared surfaces such as parking lots, highways, or fields.

These are the tools of the fucking penis envy shits, male and female.

US Defense unveils new vertical take-off, landing aircraft competitors

Oh, all those black budgets, all those fused academic-private industry-government agency-DoD-CIA-Israel-Et Al programs that have screwed humanity for decades.

The Pentagon Advanced Research Agency DARPA and the Special Operations Command; CIA Labs also promotes and enables scientific research initiatives by providing workforce development expertise in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, national security, and intelligence. Additionally, CIA Labs promotes and enables partnerships for development of technology. In-Q-Tel now engages with entrepreneurs, growth companies, researchers, and … “In-Q-Tel, CIA’s Venture Arm, Invests in Secrets”.

Endless proxies, endless budgets! Until the last Ukranian or Gazan or Russian or Chinese or . . .

Back at it with another fucking Marcos and more death upon the Philippines:

“Mark Twain commented on the Philippine war: We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable patriots; subjugated the remaining ten millions by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket; we have acquired property in the three hundred concubines and other slaves of our business partner, the Sultan of Sulu, and hoisted our protecting flag over that swag. And so, by these Providences of God—and the phrase is the government’s, not mine—we are a World Power.”

Howard Zinn,A People’s History of the United States

May be an image of 2 people, the Oval Office and text that says 'Û SREPUBLIC ANTI-WAR/ANTI-IMPERIALI PHIL US Primes the Philippines for War on the People's Republic of China'

I heard from a friend who works with a 29 year old, cleaning homes for an Air B & B, , and she said she is so broken by the events of the world that she just wants to quit her job, leave her husband and just curl up into a ball. That is the plan, Man. The media, the schools, the neighbors, the entire background noise of this shit hole country, you just pick it all up by osmosis. Pick it up, all, that is, the Exceptionalism and hubris and the best in the west, with all those fucing supidifyingly stupid flicks, Batman versus Superman, what have you, man, we are troglodyts, empty heads, blackened hearts, and we are the BIPOC uncle Toms and Oreo’s, the LGBTQA+ rah rah groups for the Ukrainian Nazis and Banderaistas. THe plan is to do the freeze or fear routine, the collective anxiety, and the fear porn is poverty, climate, chemicals in fetuses, edge of nuclear war, and on and on, even the shit on the streets of San Fran or Portlandia. Fear fear fear, and the 24-7-365 shit show that is TV-Cable-Online “news,” it does a number on the kids and the grannies. She’s paralyzed by all that which is happening in the world? Not sure which “what’s happening in the world is just making me so afraid” she is referring to, but let’s give her this: Millions facing deadly disease because of displacement because of war because of the military murder complex selling fucking despots and government tools of civilian death!i

1.2 million of the displaced have fled to neighboring countries. The remaining 4.8 million remain displaced within the national borders, adding to the 3.7 million Internally Displaced People (IDPs) already uprooted from their homes in the previous conflicts before this war. This makes Sudan “the country with the largest number of displaced people,” according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Amid what the UN Security Council also described on Thursday as “the world’s largest displacement crisis,” the WHO has reported at least 2,525 suspected cases of Cholera/Acute Watery Diarrhea (AWD) in five States as of November 9, with a fatality rate of over 3%. The OCHA warned last week that the disease is likely to spread to eight of Sudan’s 18 States by December, putting “more than 3.1 million people” at risk of infection.

+—+

Gazan children bombed with those USA-Jewish bombs bursting in air, or on schools and hospitals, or the endless saber rattling with China, and then North Korea, and here we are: unrepresentative misleadership, a government on the run, but chasing the shit out of us, the citizens.

Death by numbers: Israel’s membership of the United Nations was approved in 1949. Unlike other states, it was approved conditionally upon Israel complying with Partition Resolution 181 as to the limits of the Israeli State, and UN Resolution 194, allowing the return of refugees. Israel has complied with neither condition. It refuses to define its borders and is today governed by an Apartheid regime that has murdered over 4,500 children in Gaza in the space of one month. Israel’s membership of the UN must be illegal. It should be expelled from the community of nations.

Israeli security fence near Jerusalem separating territory.

Which fucking bad state of affairs is this Air B & B cleaner tapping into? This? Nope.

The Israelis and their US sponsors have created a world where it’s normal to fire on hospitals, journalists and UN workers while killing 5,500 children in 45 days. Rania Khalek will be joined by Prof. As’ad Abukhalil for a special live episode of Dispatches to discuss the genocide in Gaza, western double standards and racism towards Palestinians, Israel’s bad propaganda, and growing resistance from the Middle East to the streets of the US.

LINK.

Maybe if our Air B & B cleaner would tap into Abby Martin or Rania, the world for her would be, well, more forward facing, not retracting, or devolving. We are attempting to beat the systems, to expose the systems, and these two fine women are just a few you Air B & B worker can tap into.

Another leading female voice? Tamara Nassar, the associate editor of The Electronic Intifada, explains how the solidarity movement with Palestine and the consequences of the conflict is affecting the broader political scene in Jordan. LINK.

If this doesn’t run shivers up your spine, then you are a buggered bugger?

It’s painful to watch, and I sent my friend this video of Zionist mercenaries throwing bound behind the back Gazans/Hamas/Citizens/Men (they looked tortured, barefoot, not all blindfolded, but all thrown into a big bulldozed pit and then, two bullets to the head. Yep, mercenaries from Bangladesh, in the employ of the IDF, the Jewish State of Jewish Israel. I will not post it here. It is mass grave making hell, and mercenaries with uniforms supplied by Israel are the very thing that Jewish State of Israel stands for — murder on a scale of old SS and Gestapo and Nazi pogroms.

This photo says it all. Biden is 81, and he gives a fuck about people in Gaza. He and his Jewish White House are all in for “everyone in Gaza is a combatant” smear the IDF of the Jewish State of Jewish Israel is mouthing.

This is the face, the falling body, of the leaders of the world:

Biden Falls Off Bike During Visit to Rehoboth Beach - The New York Times

And then this fucking BIPOC billionaire:

Who the fuck cares about this shit hole, Mrs. Carter’s passing or the POTUS’s Depends Diaper 81st fucking Gorvette Stingray birthday?

The monsters do not care:

And that’s Blinken-Nuland-Garland-Yellen-Kagan and Biden’s Jewish Zionist buddies and in-laws and grandchildren.

The Jewish State of Zionist Jewish Israel kills their own:

Fucking stress management programs for our State Department killers?

In Washington, both Blinken and Acting Deputy Secretary Victoria Nuland have met multiple times with employees from across the department, including those serving in the Near East Affairs and Political-Military Affairs bureaus. The meetings have been emotionally charged and included candid exchanges, and some have been standing-room-only, two sources familiar with them said.

Stress management support groups have been set up for employees stationed in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, as have support groups for American Muslims, Arab Americans and people affected by antisemitism. Mental health resources have also been made available to those affected by the conflict, including a dedicated online hub hosting additional wellness resources.

Blinken has sent workforce-wide messages about his own diplomatic engagements in the region. He is completing a second multi-country tour this week. After stops in Israel, the West Bank, Jordan, Cyprus, Iraq and Turkey, he continued on to Asia.

At least one State Department official is known to have resigned his post in recent weeks. Josh Paul, a longtime employee who worked on arms transfers within the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, posted a letter on LinkedIn spelling out his disagreement with the administration’s decision to provide additional lethal support to Israel, which he called “shortsighted, destructive, unjust, and contradictory to the very values that we publicly espouse.”

Know your enemy. Look into her in the eyes. Then, well, Molotovs, or is that L’Chaim? Goddman, we don’t make heroes like this fellow. Imagine 500,000 AmeriKKKans with 500,000 Molotovs like our man here!

Imagine.

A member of the Sandinastas throws a Molotov cocktail at National Guard headquarters in Esteli, Nicaragua, ...

Dream on, boy, dream on. Tossed at their fucking houses:

Protestors prepare to throw a Molotov cocktail toward police during clashes in 2012 near Tahrir Square ...

Imagine that Stingray?

Anti-government protesters use Molotov cocktails to hold back police during the Euromaidan protests in Kyiv in ...
Biden takes his Corvette and an electric Ford truck for speedy spin

Goddamn, a young old man can dream.

Molotov cocktails were the weapons of choice during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, even on a ...

Easy as one-two-three:

A rioter in Belfast prepares a Molotov cocktail during a 1981 march in support of Bobby ...

The entire Blinken Clan? Bye-bye.

A protestor prepares Molotov cocktails during the May 1968 civil unrest in Paris.
How Tony Blinken's Stepfather Changed the World—and Him - POLITICO

Dream on, boy, dream on, boy:

In Belfast, Northern Ireland, masked men flee soldiers while one remains behind to throw one last ...

Son-of-a-bitch it’s easy as pie:

Weber Molotov Cocktails

All those photos from fucking Fox News-Owned National Geographic: The history of the Molotov cocktail, an iconic weapon of underdogs

Giving tips on the UkroNaziLandians on how to make the cocktail. Irony, man, irony.

And, so, AmeriKKKans, the Brits endorse the Molotov:

During World War II, Britain seized on Molotov cocktails as an important defence against the feared Nazi invasion. In 1940, Tom Wintringham, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War’s international brigades, published a guide to Molotov cocktails in the popular British magazine Picture Post. After providing a recipe for the devices, he told readers how to use them.

“Wait for your tank. When near enough, your pal lights [the] petrol-soaked corner of the blanket. Throw the bottle and blanket as soon as this corner is flaring. (You cannot throw it far.) See that it drops in front of the tank. The blanket should catch in the tracks or in a cog-wheel, or wind itself round an axle. The bottle will smash, but the petrol should soak the blanket well enough to make a really healthy fire which will burn the rubber wheels on which the tank track runs, set fire to the carburetor or frizzle the crew.”

Do not play with these things,” he concluded. “They are highly dangerous.”

Proudly endorsed by fancy art museums.

Molotov Man is the single best-known image by Susan Meiselas, a Magnum photographer who has worked between and interrogated traditions of documentary over her decades-long career. The photograph captures Pablo Aráuz, known as Bareta, a member of the leftist Sandinista resistance during the Nicaraguan popular insurrection, throwing a Molotov cocktail in a Pepsi bottle at the National Guard headquarters in Esteli, one of the last strongholds of governmental power at the conflict’s end. Meiselas’s composition, with its strong convergence of action, silhouette, and defiance, became an icon and, as such, an image that began to move beyond her control as its maker. The Life of an Image: “Molotov Man,” 1979–2009 is the installation piece she created to explore the potency of circulation, revealing the contrasting perspectives that have evolved through the image’s multiple lives.

Meiselas arrived in Nicaragua on June 1, 1978, compelled by news of the assassination of Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, the editor of the newspaperLa Prensa, who opposed the American–supported right-wing dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle. Meiselas first made contact with Carlos Fernando Chamorro, the son of the assassinated editor, and began to accompany local journalists as they reported on student protests. She used her privilege as an American citizen to access the training of Somoza’s National Guard, armed by the United States. Access to both sides was key in order for her to explore, in her words, the “reality behind American foreign policy,” namely its support for violent right-wing dictatorships in Latin America as part of a Cold War strategy to prevent the spread of Communism. (Princeton Museum)

Come on, Nicaragua, send Palestine gasoline for the lights and generators and Molotovs for the Jewish State of Israel Jewish IDF. Immolation of these freaks would be another start:

Joint Chiefs of Staff

the lies, the triple lies, the fake news, the un-news, the relativism, the shifting baseline disorder, the discordance, the dumb-downing, the brainwashing, brain hacking, brain culling is unreal!

Israel’s national broadcaster Kan uploaded this song to X (formerly Twitter) in which Israeli children sing in celebration and support for the Israeli army’s mass extermination campaign of Palestinians in Gaza.

The sweet faces of children make an incongruous accompaniment to the genocidal lyrics.

“Autumn night falls over the beach of Gaza, planes are bombing, destruction, destruction,” the children sing in angelic voices. “Within a year we will annihilate everyone, and then we will return to plow our fields.”

Hitler Youth and the Real Nazi History Behind 'Jojo Rabbit' | Time

One person matters, but to the Jewish State of Jewish & Zionist Occupied Palestine, so-called Israel, gives shit, man.

Those Kibbuitz children are being to relish this photo:

The World Health Organization says al-Shifa hospital is a “death zone,” with waste piled on the grounds, and 291 patients inside and 25 staff, and 32 premature babies.

More than 12,000 Palestinians are now dead, including more than 5,000 children, and 400,000 are said to be fleeing the north of Gaza to the south on a “corridor of humiliation”, but Khan Younis is also under attack by the most modern ordinance fired by that most moral army in the world.

And the Democratic establishment is in lockstep now, supporting the massacres. Joe Biden wrote an Op-Ed in the Washington Post pushing for more bombing in “a war for democracy,” as Palestine Media Action summarizes his argument.

“The Biden administration has… plunged headlong into an abyss of moral depravity by supporting Israel materially in massacring thousands of Palestinians and rendering Gaza uninhabitable, and in condoning its ethnic cleansing within Gaza,” as Rashid Khalidi said at Columbia this week, a piece we published.

Source: A paradigm shift in the hundred years’ war on Palestine? Since October 7, there have been five elements that indicate we may be seeing a paradigm shift in the hundred years’ war waged against the Palestinian people.

Palestinians take control of an Israeli tank after crossing the border fence with Israel from Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023. (Photo: Stringer/ APA Images)

The amount of hatred the USA has for that world, hating all of them — those terrorists, those resisters, those others, those brown people, those radicals, those extremists, those members of ‘the jungle,’ man oh man,:Exterminate all the brutes.

You think not?

Craig Murray, now a human rights activist who was the British ambassador to Uzbekistan and Rector of the University of Dundee.

Murray just wrote the piece “Activating the Genocide Convention” which states:

“There are 149 states party to the Genocide Convention. Every one of them has the right to call out the genocide in progress in Gaza and report it to the United Nations. In the event that another state party disputes the claim of genocide — and Israel, the United States and the United Kingdom are all states party — then the International Court of Justice [also called the World Court] is required to adjudicate on ‘the responsibility of a State for genocide.’”

Murray quotes from the Genocide Convention and cites evidence that Israel is conducting genocide and that the US and British governments are at minimum complicit in that. He then states: “The International Court of Justice is the most respected of international institutions; while the United States has repudiated its compulsory jurisdiction, the United Kingdom has not and the EU positively accepts it.



“If the International Court of Justice makes a determination of genocide, then the International Criminal Court does not have to determine that genocide has happened. This is important because unlike the august and independent ICJ, the ICC is very much a western government puppet institution which will wiggle out of action if it can. But a determination of the ICJ of genocide and of complicity in genocide would reduce the ICC’s task to determining which individuals bear the responsibility. That is a prospect which can indeed alter the calculations of politicians.

“It is also the fact that a reference for genocide would force the western media to address the issue and use the term, rather than just pump out propaganda about Hamas fighting bases in hospitals. …

“I am afraid the question of why Palestine has not invoked the Genocide Convention takes us somewhere very dark. … It is Fatah who occupy the Palestinian seat at the United Nations, and the decision for Palestine to call into play the Genocide Convention lies with Mahmoud Abbas. It is more and more difficult daily to support Abbas. He seems extraordinarily passive, and the suspicion that he is more concerned with refighting the Palestinian civil war than with resisting the genocide is impossible to shake. By invoking the Genocide Convention he could put himself and Fatah back at the centre of the narrative. But he does nothing. I do not want to believe that corruption and a Blinken promise of inheriting Gaza are Mahmoud’s motivators. But at the moment, I cannot grab on to any other explanation to believe in.”

Now, the news “they” attempt to present, which occupies a trillion pixels on the World Wide Wasted Net: Worthless humanity (sic) taking us over the edge.

Fucking inhumane piece of shit, all of them in the AI camp.

War Crimes on Trial: The Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials | The National WWII  Museum | New Orleans

Then this non-news un-News, and what’s it say about the dirty profession, lawyering? So, you are innocent until proven . . . even some of the Hitlerians were tried with some sort of defense at Nuremberg.

David Boies

David Boies, who became one of America’s most prominent lawyers in cases involving Microsoft, the 2000 U.S. presidential election and the fight to legalize same-sex marriage, is stepping down next year as leader of the law firm he co-founded.

The firm’s partnership has been in tumult in recent years in part because of Boies’ representation of controversial clients like disgraced Hollywood movie producer Harvey Weinstein.

The Jewish State of Jewish Zionism? You betcha the lawyers are the rabid rats:

State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman calls on the justice, defense, finance and social welfare ministers to cap the fees of lawyers representing wounded IDF soldiers and those wounded in terror attacks, after reports that some of them are being exploited by unscrupulous legal practitioners.

Illustrative: President Isaac Herzog visits wounded soldiers at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv on November 8, 2023. (Amos Ben Gershom/GPO)

Yep, all part of the Jews in the Jewish State of Jewish Israel, AKA Jewish Zionism: ethnic cleansing and access to more land:

Asked what should happen with Gaza at the end of the war, 32% of respondents said “Israel should remain permanently and renew Jewish settlement”; 30% said the enclave should be “given over to international trusteeship”; 14% said Israel should “maintain a permanent military presence”; 10% percent said it should be “handed over for rule by the Palestinian Authority”; and 14% said they did not know.

The TV anchors said respondents were also asked to make a direct choice as to whether or not they favored a renewal of Jewish settlement in Gaza, and 44% said they were in favor, while 39% were against. This finding was not shown on screen, however.

These are not humans: [A settler gestures from a rooftop at Israeli troops approaching the Jewish settlement of Netzer Hazani, in the Gush Katif bloc of settlements, in the southern Gaza Strip, Aug. 18, 2005, during Israel’s disengagement from Gaza.]

A settler gestures from a rooftop at Israeli troops approaching the Jewish settlement of Netzer Hazani, in the Gush Katif bloc of settlements, in the southern Gaza Strip, Aug. 18, 2005, during Israel's disengagement from Gaza. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

All planned paranoia, all planned controlled opposition(s), divide and conquer, and there you have what the militarists and surveillence monsters want: About 90 percent of Israeli Jews believe that there will be violent clashes between Jewish and Arab citizens in the near future, according to a Hebrew University poll conducted two weeks after the beginning of the Gaza war; about 70 percent of Arabs believe the same.

90 Percent of Jews See Domestic Violence Erupting With Israeli Arabs in  Near Future, Poll Shows - Israel News - Haaretz.com

Everything the Jewish State of Jewish Zionist Israel says is a lie:

[The parents of Israeli soldier Corporal Noa Marciano attend their daughter’s funeral after her remains were recovered near the Al Shifa Hospital during the ongoing Israeli ground operation in Gaza, in Modiin, Israel November 17, 2023. ]

“Israel stepped up accusations of Hamas abuses at the Gaza Strip’s biggest hospital on Sunday, saying a captive soldier had been executed and two foreign hostages held at a site that has been a focus of its devastating six-week-old offensive.”

טנקים משוריינים של צה"ל ב רצועת עזה מלחמת עזה 15.11.2023

A deal to sell hundreds of IDF tanks to Europe was canceled amid the decision to re-increase the armored forces. Israel is buying dozens of D9 bulldozers and adapting them to be autonomous.

In addition to increasing the number of armored vehicles, the Ministry of Defense has recently initiated the urgent procurement of dozens of D9 heavy bulldozers, which perform extensive engineering work, exposing tunnel shafts and opening axes and access roads threatened by explosive devices.

These bulldozers can withstand large amounts of fire, primarily anti-tank missiles and RPGs, while leading the forces’ movement within Gaza. These vehicles have been adapted with metal roofs since the beginning of the war to reduce their vulnerability to attack by explosive drones. Some of the D9 bulldozers are currently undergoing adaptation processes for autonomous or semi-autonomous operations, allowing complex operations in high-risk areas without the need for a driver. A system, called “Panda,” developed in recent years by Alta Systems and the IDF, enables the autonomous capabilities.

The Ministry of Defense has not disclosed the total cost of the system, but recent data from the ministry indicates that since the beginning of the war, it has placed orders totaling NIS 4 billion ($1.08 billion) to defense industry companies.

The chief of Baringa village in a long-sleeved shirt, holds a spear and has a shield propped up on his right leg outside his hut with a crowd of people behind him

I suppose that’s all we have, then, examples of people with fucking balls. Everything to lose. You will not see it here in LaLaSecondAmendmentLandia!

Canoes and local people bathing in the Lomako river in the Democratic Republic of Congo, under trees, with baskets on the sand in front

‘They’ll have to kill me first’: locals in DR Congo oppose plans to drill for oil

Small communities who were not consulted about exploration schemes in protected areas are standing their ground

Darren Woods during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation CEO Summit in San Francisco.

White guy at the podium lecturing the world: CEO Darren Woods says casting Big Oil as villains harms the net zero drive.

Riding high on $65 billion worth of recent acquisitions and a 60% share-price rally during the past two years, Exxon Mobil Corp. Chief Executive Officer Darren Woods delivered a tough message to government officials and executives gathered in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Oh, those fucking amazingly smart killers in charge — white guys at podiums selling us chemicals, AI-VR-MR-AR, mining, oil, pesticides, banking, real estate, big ag-big pharma-big med, media, the law, the prison complex, and so so many more, telling us poor fucks how it should be.

We are fucking stupid fucks to even read this shit?

Alas, we are dumb as fuck: No more tooling around in our souped up Subaru’s and Chargers.

blurred traffic on a highway

The NTSB concluded that intelligent speed-assist technology (ISA) should be standard equipment in all new vehicles to prevent needless deaths. It’s no longer enough, the agency argues, to rely on states to deter driver speeding and recidivism. The agency, which doesn’t have the power to make regulations, is calling on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to mandate the use of this technology going forward.

ISA technology relies on a car’s GPS location and matches it to a database of posted speed limits and onboard cameras to come up with the legal speed limit. Passive ISA systems warn a driver when the vehicle exceeds the speed limit through sound, visuals or haptic alerts, leaving the driver responsible for slowing the car. Active systems might make it more difficult to increase the speed of a vehicle, or even fully limit it from going, above a posted speed limit.

+—+

And you laugh about the Internet of things, Internet of bodies, Internet of nano-things, Internet of Everything?

Here, a shout out to Cindy Sheehan, her latest posting.

On Speaking Truth to Empire on KFCF 88.1 FM independently owned and locally operated since 1975 in Fresno, Dan Yaseen interviews Jeff J. Brown; he is a geopolitical analyst, journalist, lecturer and the author of The China Trilogy, which consists of “44 Days Backpacking in China”, “China Rising – Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations” and “China Is Communist, Dammit! – Dawn of the Red Dynasty”. They discuss the genocidal Israeli bombing of Gaza and the complicity of US, UK, France and Germany in Israeli war crimes.

Here, another Substacker: Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter

Bloomberg reported a few days back that Zelensky told a group of journalists that Russia is allegedly plotting a so-called “Maidan 3”, which the Ukrainian leader candidly acknowledged “is understandable” from the perspective of their strategic interests. This warning comes amidst his spiraling rivalry with Commander-In-Chief Zaluzhny, Time Magazine’s claim that some front-line commanders are refusing his orders to advance, and a former NATO Supreme Commander calling for a Korean-like armistice.

The writing is on the wall that NATO’s proxy war on Russia through Ukraine is on its last legs after summer’s failed counteroffensive soured Western policymakers on the scenario of continuing to indefinitely fund this conflict, which was already an issue even prior to the latest Israeli-Hamas war. With Russia having won the “race of logistics”/“war of attrition” with NATO, the bloc can no longer feasibly maintain the pace, scale, and scope of armed aid to Ukraine, ergo the need for freezing the conflict.

Death, desperation, dystopia, disaster brought to the world by two Jewish Leaders, who have Jewish Backers, and Jewish Backers being both Jewish and Zionist, de facto (because they support Israel, a Jewish Zionist Project through and through). Brought to us by Blinken-Nuland-Yellen-Garland-Kagan running the lunacy of Biden Biden Biden Bomb Bomb Bomb.

Dan Cohen covers this fellow : “the Prophet of Wrath.”

“Today, they cannot exist there,” Brik said about Palestinian militants groups in an October 19 television interview with Channel 14. “And I’ll tell you more than that – if you ask me how the job should be done, to avoid falling into a horrible trap – it needs to be done with discretion and wisdom. First of all, we need to end the life of Hamas and [Islamic] Jihad, among us and next to us. It started today with forming a siege over them, strangling them, separating the north and the south, telling all the citizens – whoever wants to live, go south, if you don’t leave – we consider you part of Hamas, everyone who stays there. On top of that, the siege has to be maintained so that fuel, food and water don’t flow in, let them dry out in their tunnels, and at some point they’ll have no choice but to get out.”

Are you insane yet? More child abuse!

Goddamn, that fucking Hitler Youth, a la Kibbutzim!

Hitler Youth

“The Friendship Song 2023”

Lyrics by Ofer Rosenbaum and Shulamit Stolero

First Stanza:

Autumn night falls over the beach of Gaza
Planes are bombing, destruction, destruction
Look the IDF is crossing the line
to annihilate the swastika-bearers
In another year there will be nothing there
And we will safely return to our homes
Within a year we will annihilate everyone
And then we will return to plow our fields

Chorus:

And we will remember everyone
the pretty and the pure
We will never let our hearts
forget a friendship like that
Love sanctified with blood
You will return and bloom amongst us

Second Stanza:

We have now run out of words
Our soul still cries out
Our soul not only sings
Today our soul also fights
One people
The people of forever evermore
We won’t stop protecting our homes
We won’t be silent
We will show the world
how today we destroy our enemy

Chorus repeats

Lyrics translated from Hebrew for The Electronic Intifada by David Sheen.

+—+

So the children are doomed and doomed and doomers.

+—+

Solidarity in Brooklyn!

[Pro-Palestinian protesters demonstrating in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., Oct. 21, 2023. Photographs by Christopher Lee for Hammer & Hope. ]

S

just for a few hours: out of the insanity of the insane and dementia patients and psychopaths ruling the world, inside and outside of government

Sure, I live along the Central Coast of Oregon. How many times, even in my small memoir writing class I am conducting, to people tell me they are “living on/in the planet’s most beautiful place.”

Just yesterday, two older ladies I met on the beach near my humble abode who were getting too close to a California sea lion. Taking pictures. So, when the animal allows Homo Consumopethicus to get close, there is something wrong.

Big animal, maybe two years old, a male, skinny, and along our Alsea River, where we mostly have 600 harbor seals hanging out on sand spits, their haul out of choice.

Yep, I yelled from a distance, but then I had a conversation with them about wild animals, the sea lions versus seals, and why this fellow needs some space — sick, skinny, fatigued, and probably on his way to mackerel heaven.

One lady’s from Boston, and the other one from Portland, now living here.

I told them about the “Land-Sea Symposium” in the Yachats coming up at 5 pm, part of the Cape Perpetua Collaborative, which sponsors the event.

Cape Perpetua Marine Reserve is one of give where I live, and the blurb on-line I repeated with a bit more force to these two ladies who I was able to get to move away from the sea lion, telling them about 500 feet rule, and how to zoom in with the dumb phone.

“It’s really great to see this kind of community response to the symposium. It shows that people care a great deal about this very special place between the land the sea.”

I went, and I did not see them there (no surprise). But it was my way of decompressing from the constant worry and shame and disgust and revolt and revulsion I have been feeling since Oct. 7, well, make that Oct. 7 1975? Shit, Iran-Contra, all the way through to now, the Hamas attempt at getting hostages free, Thousand of them locked up and tortured by the Jewish State (sic) of Israel’s thugs, well, that’s all of the Jewish Community of Israel, mas o menos.

Here, a perfect opportunity to talk with and listen to scientists and researchers focusing on tide pool creatures, sea stars, grey whales, pollinators and sea birds.

Sponsors offered beer, wine, cider and samples of various ocean-reliant foods. And pizza.

“It’s just a great way to showcase so many of the things going on here,” so says the directot.

North boundary of Cape Perpetua Marine Reserve. /Photo courtesy of Oregon Marine Reserves Flickr

I’ve been here since 2019, and I’ve written about amazing people working on ocean and land and wetlands issues. I’ve become again a naturalists for the American Cetacean Society. I’ve worked with poor people and homeless folk, with developmental delayed clients, and I have had columns in two newspapers, one of which became a book out there on Amazon — Coastal People inside a Deep Dive: stories about people living on the Central Coast and other places in Oregon.

Here’s what we talked about yesterday:

An aerial veiw:

Before the speakers spoke, and before a benediction, and before the one fellow who catered the event read his poem at the end, I talked with many of the folks staffing the tables:

There were others — friends of Otter Rock, Mid-Coast Watershed Council, Sea & Shore Solutions, Concerned Citizens for Clean Air, Highway 101 Pollinator activists, others.

I talked with a young woman staffing the Forest Service table. She had a diorama (small) of a plover and its eggs. We talked, and she is all about outdoor education and public outreach. She is from Minnesota, got her biology degree from U of Wisconsin and she’s doing an internship here on our coast, again, taking science to the kids outside, where the world meets the mind.

Here and There: Day 278 - 5th October 2015 - Dunlins, Red Knots, Black-Bellied Plovers and ...

Total enthusiastic person, and she’s ready to leave in December and end up in McCall, Idaho, with the University of Idaho’s outdoor education school there. MOSS.

McCall Outdoor Science School (MOSS) K12 programs aim to foster the skills and competencies necessary for people to live well in their social and ecological communities. Graduate Student Field Instructors facilitate learning experiences for youth in MOSS programs and practice using inclusive instructional strategies in their teaching practicum. Through hands-on exploration of the environment and guided inquiry, participants observe and investigate the relationships between biological, physical and social systems around them. Our goal is to help participants develop a sense of place, build scientific literacy, and develop effective communication and collaboration skills. Collaborative learning between graduate students and K12 MOSS participants allows for expansive understanding of social and ecological relationships.

I’ve been harping on this for decades — not just one MOSS school in the middle of nowhere, but in EVERY community, in all urban or suburban or rural locals. Funded by the takers, the millionaires and billionaires. It’s the only way to get young people active, turn them into activist thnkers, put revolutionary zeal into their DNA, prepping to be ready to battle the impending slipping ecosystems and weather chaos. To get them away from all the brainwashing, brain-hacking, brain-numbing, brain-slicing techno crap of the AI-VR-AR-MR variety.

I talked to a fellow from Stuttgart, who has been here, USA, with his wife working with the Forest Service, specifically with the Marine Reserves program. He speaks four languages, went to school in Quebec, has a PhD, and he’s loving working in Oregon, a world so different from oppressive Germany that I have seen that twinkle in the eyes many times in Germans transplanted here, and in places like the Sonora or Chihuahua or even Guatemala.

Joan Kittel opened the conference. She’s the person who brought to light the Amanda Trail. Read here: A poem I wrote:

Not Just One of those Tales of Another Dead Indian

bloody feet dampen soil
her DNA cleaved to earth, forced blind trek
called “a march” yet she sees through
darkness, earth torn for steel
guns, rusty crosses, parchment
proof of broken treaties
tears bleeding into wind
signatures of unholy
men worth the indigo
nothing more, promises, lies

before US Military kidnapping, white mountain
man grabbed her
fornicated, child from uncommon
law, but mother thrives
until march of tears
from beachhead south
into basalt canyons
toes bound by scars
stumbling, old blind woman
disappeared, or bones to dust

reality: Amanda De-Cuys was a blind Native American woman of the Coos tribe
who traversed coastal trail 158 years ago, but not by choice.
she fled to Coos Bay, but designated runaway
she was tagged like elk, as US army men
carried-out forced march
seventy-five miles north
daughter left behind with common
law gringo, 12 of them
prodded by uniformed glory
now a land of colonization
a continent crying slow death

in 2022 mostly gray heads
gather at the grotto
rededication of new
bridge, Amanda’s Trail
statue of blind Indian
these people hold court
listen to speakers
the mulch of Oregon
forest like fungi on tongues

Yachats, hippie town
tears of Umpqua, Coos, Siletz, Alsi
forever there, a mist
a new rainbow each time
a new visitor hikes hoping
Amanda’s song is caught
in kingfisher or murre or guillemot
transmigration of natives’
souls

Amanda Trail To Reopen | Oregon Coast Daily News

Kittel: Amanda Trail, and the more recently the Ya’Xaik Trail, were built on a foundation of the truth, building trust between cultures. As such, no person-made or natural disaster will ever obliterate them. They will endure bringing joy and grace to all who walk their paths. (some history)

Joanne takes the pain of the Indians seriously: Professionally, Joanne is a psychotherapist who specialized in treating victims of trauma and perpetrators of trauma. Her work includes those affected by historical trauma. Joanne is a long-term member of View the Future (VtF), beginning with the organization’s earliest days. She has written and presented on the history of the First Nation People who lived in the Yachats Area for thousands of years and their forced March and internment during the 1850s. In addition to VtF, Joanne also participates as a: member and Trails Development Leader of Yachats Trails Committee, Volunteer and Trainer at My Sister’s Place, Member and Vice-chair of Angell Job Corps’ Community Relations Committee, Member of Secure Resources Advisory Committee of Siuslaw National Forest and is a past member of multiple local nonprofit Boards and groups.

The reality is I was the only one of a hundred there with a tribue to Palestine — my keffiyeh proudly wrapped around my neck!

How the Palestinian keffiyeh became a symbol of resistance | Qatar  Foundation

Oh, the Coos and Siletz and Umpqua tribes had their trail of blood/tears/death, marched north, barefoot, 80 miles to the “reservation,” the military station, a prison, here in Yachats in 1860. Genocideal policies of starvation, disease and depression of spirit did the community in. In 1865, oh, those Pioneers, robbed the Coos of 900,000 acres the government “deeded” to them.

Note: The Board of the Cape Perpetua Collaborative and the staff is mostly women — Amber, jamie, Liz, Cheryl, Megan, Ava and et al. This evening was mostly old people in the audience but young people presenting and staffing the tables.

The collaborative was created in 2017, made up of conservation groups, agencies, NGOs to specifically research and conserve the Cape Perpetua area.

Yeah, the Yachats Mayor spoke, and our representative in Salem, 10th district Rep Gomberg, he pontificated. His district includes two marine reserves, including Cape Perpetua. He mentioned how a billion dollar investment in new housing was approved by the state legislature, and as is the common shit of USA capitalism and uniparty politics, there was no funding legislated for sewer and water delivery. Insane. Replicated from state to state.

We are an aging country (infrastructure), blasted into decay by Predatory-Criminal-Usury-Military Captialism. He also talked about how small cities can’t afford millions for dam mitigation or removal and construction. And there are land acquisitions we pay for (taxpayers) to get land “back” from the timber and insurance industries.

One bill of interest is tied to his interestingly open lament: “What is the greatest threat to open land, open beaches, and access to public forests and places?”

Lawyers. One trip over a root, one fall from an overhand, a scratch or broken leg, and the dirty lawyers swoop in like rabid dogs. All the litigation drains state and federal agencies, and even cities and counties face the same fucking dirty capitalist shit – sue sue sue.

There is a bill he is hoping to see get voted on so our open spaces don’t get shut down because of lawsuits draining staffing and servicing: Recreational Immunity legislation.

Okay, the first presenter! Science!

Xerces Blue Butterfly | VS Battles Wiki | Fandom

I talked with Dave Kollen with the Xerces society, named after the butterfly above, last seen north of San Francisco in 1943.

Xerces Gift Center

You betcha I am right there with this conservation movement having done a biological transect in Vietnam and other places to see/research on/write about the health and the sagging ecological connectivity of ecosystems, forests and jungles and reef systems.

He’s a tall guy, sort of a young Walt Whitman, with dry humor, with a country-fied accent, but his presentation hit home —

Pollinators are essential to our environment. The ecological service they provide is necessary for the reproduction of over 85% of the world’s flowering plants, including more than two-thirds of the world’s crop species. The United States alone grows more than 100 crops that either need or benefit from pollinators, and the economic value of these native pollinators is estimated at $3 billion per year in the U.S. Beyond agriculture, pollinators are keystone species in most terrestrial ecosystems. Fruits and seeds derived from insect pollination are a major part of the diet of approximately 25% of all birds, and of mammals ranging from red-backed voles to grizzly bears.

Unfortunately, in many places, the essential service of pollination is at risk from habitat loss, pesticide use, and introduced diseases.

Nerdy? You betcha:

Sure, we can see how pollinators really give us our food:

This Is What Your Grocery Store Looks Like Without Bees (PHOTOS) | HuffPost  Impact

His role in the Society is working on native pollinators, and Oregon has it’s bees — over 800 species. Mostly they are solitary, nesting in the ground or inside dead limbs.

The ground nesting ones (70 percent of all bees in Oregon) face land clearing, persticides, climate change, invasive species, and so much more. Then around 30 percent of bees are renters, cavity nesters.

And, with this fact — 1,000,000,000 pounds of pesticides, fungicides, other-cides used each year — we are in some bad shape. Welcome human chronic illnesses and neurological diseases, by the boat load.

The decline of insects/invertebrates directly connects to a major decline in birds. We are talking about 3 billion birds declined worldwide last year. And most birds depend on eating invertebrates at some stage of their lives.

Coastal Greenish Blue — in the past hundred years, only 30 have been seen, recorded.

Searching for Rare Butterflies on the Oregon and California Coasts | Xerces  Society

Siuslaw Hairy-Necked Tiger Beetle — almost all gone:

Our Western Bumblebee (20 species) has seen a rapid decline sine 1990. Parasites, pesticides, habitat loss, disease and off-road vehicles taking it out as a species in the West.

Western Pearlshell Freshwater Mussel? Unexplained die offs, reproduction rates dropped.

Margaritifera falcata (Gould, 1850) Western pearlshell Bivalvia:  Margaritiferidae SUMMARY

The final push is for no pesticides or so much less pesticide use, sure, that’s what we do in predatory and dog-eat-dog capitalism. Citizens use more pesticides on landscapes than do farmers. The toxicity of these chemicals have destroyed the entire web of life, including apex predators like Homo Consumopethicus.

There are programs I know about and have initiated in the past — Bee Cities and Bee Campuses. Go to Xerces for more info.

Next, Jamie Kish, a Tidepool Ambassador with a comedy streak that makes life fun, learning a hoot. In a word, she was a laugh a minute, and her presentation was hilarious and informative. She’s volunteered since 1999, and has worked at the New York Acquairum, Disney World, and for cruise ships in the Bahamas.

She’s a field guide and program associate. She’s been doing this for three years, and her enthusiasm for these critters and for her work with young and old giving tours of tidepool ecosystems is her dream come true.

“Being up at dawn with the first human footprint on the beach being min, this just does it for me.”

Each species in the tidepool is a character in her own tidepool tales. She is also a photographer. The audience was laughing up a storm as she recalled her work with the species and that includes human species.

This is the respite I was just after. Her biggest thrill is when people about to start her tours ask, “How are the stars doing?”

For the ochre sea stars, that were decimated with wasting disease (a virus), they are coming back big, with thick contellations and big specimens.

Infectious laugh? Jokester? Teacher having fun while students learn a shit load? Yep.

More information on the tidepool ambassador: Check out Jamie’s photography.

Quoting some more background: Between Florence and Yachats lies the Cape Perpetua area, a biodiverse recreation mecca home to lush coastal rainforests and deep cultural history. But past the coastline also lies the largest Oregon marine reserve. The Cape Perpetua Marine Reserve site is a 33-square mile area dedicated to conservation and scientific research. Just like parks and protected natural areas on land, there are multiple benefits of protected areas in the ocean. They conserve ocean wildlife and biodiversity. Marine Reserves sites also serve as living laboratories, where we can learn about marine reserve protections and Oregon’s ocean environment to help us maintain our seas for future generations.

Trained guides provided tidepool tours for small groups and volunteers roamed tidepools to engage with visitors about the local in habitants of the tidepools, Oregon’s marine conservation efforts and to promote marine stewardship. We hosted 2 tours/day over 25 negative tide dates. Guides and volunteers engaged with over 800 people throughout the season, with 140 people signing up for an intimate tour, which included a span of generations. Tour guests were very enthusiastic and appreciative of the program. It was really exciting to have a mix of generations and each tour brought something different in their experiences.

Oregon State University biologist and diver Sarah Gravem motors past Sitka on her way to a kelp forest she is monitoring. Photo by Jake Metzger..
tide-pool-tours-1

Next up? Oregon State University biologist and diver Dr. Sarah Gravem [photo, she motors past Sitka on her way to a kelp forest she is monitoring. Photo by Jake Metzger.]

She followed Kish on stage, and again, fun, laughs and turning science into a learning and entertaining form for the crowd, who was laughing it up as much as they did with Kish’s presentation.

Here, from Alaska’s Native News:

Oct. 6, 2023: A few weeks ago, Sarah Gravem lowered a “ravenous, terrifying predator” from her boat down to the ocean floor off Sitka. Then she released it.

In a slow-motion drama, sea urchins fled as a pizza-size sunflower sea star oozed toward them.

Gravem explained: “I release one right in the middle and watch everybody freak out. It’s not just that they eat them, but they scare them. (Urchins) leave and they don’t come back.”

A biologist and diver at Oregon State University, Gravem is trying to understand whether imperiled sunflower sea stars are beneficial to kelp forests, which have also greatly diminished in the last decade.

Sunflower sea stars — recently decimated from the ocean off western Mexico, California, Oregon and Washington — are like wolves of the kelp forest, eating sea urchins that will overgraze if left unchecked, often with a scorched-earth result.

In Sitka, Gravem’s students and research team members have spent much of the summer working out of the Sitka Sound Science Center. Each morning, they boat out to kelp forests to study the relationship between sea urchins that eat kelp and sunflower sea stars that eat the urchins.

Sunflower sea stars can be as large as a trash-can lid. They grow up to 25 slimy arms. They are one of the largest sea stars and are the fastest, using thousands of coordinated tube feet to move a meter every few minutes. They live 30 years. And they are feared eating machines.

“Anything they can catch, they will eat,” Gravem said over the phone from Sitka as her diving gear dried. “They will shove an urchin inside their stomach and later spit out the empty shell.”

There are not many sunflower sea stars remaining in the Pacific Ocean. Sea star sunflowers are victims of a wasting disease, perhaps a virus, that killed 5.75 billion of them in a recent five-year period. It is difficult to find one today off the coast of California, Oregon or Washington.

“There used to be thousands of them marching around all the time,” Gravem said.

The sudden absence of the sea stars has been bad news for kelp forests off the Lower 48 and has been noticeable all the way up to Alaska, where there has been a 60-80% decline in the last decade.

Gravem, who has studied the sea stars the last five years, recently visited a former kelp forest about a mile offshore of Sitka, where today “there’s not even a scrap.”

Kelp forests are important because they provide fish with places to hide and provide sustenance for many other creatures.

“They’re like trees,” Gravem said, “but they’re even better than trees. Most every herbivore eats kelp.”

Kelp forests disappeared en masse following the staggering loss of sunflower sea stars.

“With no sea stars, sea urchins had gangbuster years,” Gravem said. “Some places, they increased tenfold.”

I’ve written about sea stars and urchins and kelp before. About yet more women PhD’s (or some without doctorates) working on ocean issues, including the benthic zone: One Woman’s Research on Aquatic Bioinvasions, Seaweed, Wave Energy

You want an hour-plus of Sarah explaining the intricacies of that web of life? LINK.

Dr. Sarah Gravem Presents: Star Track: Sea star wasting disease, sunflower sea  star recovery, and... - YouTube
About Me - Sarah Gravem

Next: Drones, geospatial research, PhD candidate, gray whales, OSU, and so we hear from Clara Bird, after Sarah. She was also attempting to be humorous, and I have heard her speak. several times, and I know her work. But for the crowd, the drone footage of those mammals are always awe inspiring.

Clara Bird – Geospatial Ecology of Marine Megafauna Laboratory

The fact is that some drone work is positive, and scientists can get three times the observational capacity from drone footage. Clara’s work is around our special group of gray whales, the Pacific Coast Feeding Group, a unique sub-ground of east Pacific whales. Therea re around212 of them, and they are definitely well studied, photographed, and so many return to our shores, Depoe Bay, especially, so their feces and size and body mass and other aspects of their well being can be studied and compared season to season, year to year.

The whales keep coming and we keep learning: a wrap up of the eighth GRANITE field season.

Here, an hour:

Her biggest work is around 8 different feediseng habits of our Pacific Coast Feeding Group (PCFG). It’s deep biology, looking at sexual dimorphism, resource polymorphism, ontogentic shifts, and individual specialization.

Depth and Body Weight Mass and length and the type of benthic zone they feed in are part of the research she does to complete her PhD next year.

This is kick-ass work, a break from my own work learning how to SURVIVE in this fucked up mess.

53100941854 2a6a052e7a c Image2

I’m a diver, a 66 years old who did the dive bumming at age 15 in the Sea of Cortez. I’ve written tons about that. I am in a different space, now, probably shackeled by all sorts of trauma, direct, vicarious, and my own impediments from moving forward forward where I want to be spiritually and intellectually and philosophically.

It’s sometimes for me (violins, please) rough as shit sticking out like a sore thumb, everywhere (poor me), but here, Saturday, for five hours, some people knew me, and I talked, we talked, a peer, knowing what they know, all the benefits of being a sciency kind of guy/sciency upbringing, plus a STORY Teller, me, which means I pry open quite easily — most of the time — people around me, because I am honest and honestly interested in their passions.

I live through stories. Even sciency ones! Try me. Amazon.

Coastal People inside a Deep Dive: stories about people living on the Central Coast and other places in Oregon

The fellow who is also a member of the Collaberative, Boone Ogden, catered the event, and I talked with him. He conducted the closing of the 4 hour event with a poem he wrote, “Reclaimed, Renamed.”

Good stuff, actually, and the words were full of that, “We Live in the Most Beautiful Part of the World” intonations with the deep nod/sadness/reclamation to the place we took from them, the Indians, the tribes. We name mountains after cartographers, mountains that have been sacred to tribes for centuries, named by them for centuries.

Holy places we turn into strip malls, big homes, parks and eateries. Their graves!

I’ll try and get Boone to send along the poem for reproduction. He blogs at the Chubby Vegetarian. His catering biz is Mandela Catering out of Seal Rock.

Finally? — Recovering the sacred.

I spent time with Winona in Spokane, and brought her to campus and for some of my work around sustainability. Here you go, my out-take:

Grain of Truth by Paul H. Haeder

You probably remember Winona LaDuke as the two-time Green Party vice presidential candidate, running with Ralph Nader in 2000 and 2004. You probably didn’t know that she’s an enrolled member of the Anishinaabeg Tribe from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, where she’s locked in another tough battle — this time against huge multinational corporations that want to change her tribe’s traditional way of life.

At three engagements in Spokane last week, and in some private interviews, LaDuke talked about the need to defend native peoples’ rights to the Earth. And this epic debate can fit into a single grain of wild rice — the Manoominike-Giizis strain, or the “wild rice moon” grown by her people for many generations.

This small grain of plant life serves as a microcosm of the entire sustainability challenge we all face: making sure future generations — all peoples and all species — will have a planet worth living on with ecosystems and resources to achieve spiritual and material prosperity.

LaDuke has proven to be so much more than a media darling — she’s a spiritual guide for her tribe and for the thousands she’s come across along her journey. Mixing humor with a shaman’s intensity, LaDuke has written books like All Our Relations and Recovering the Sacred.

LaDuke sees the Minnesota reservations’ practice of harvesting wild rice as vital:

“The wild rice harvest of the Anishinaabeg not only feeds the body, it feeds the soul, continuing a tradition which is generations old for these people of the lakes and rivers of the north.”

It struck me last week while spending time with LaDuke that her tribe’s battle to keep their wild rice wild, free from genetic manipulation, is a much more far-reaching illustration of what sustainability activists consider the struggle of our times: How to create an America that respects the land.

Many of us think along systemic lines, attempting to understand the steps the globe probably has to take to solve the collapsing systems, both environmental and societal. Yet we need reminding that this struggle to work with a burgeoning global human population — 9 billion by 2050 at the current 1.2 percent growth rate — needs nudging from storytellers like LaDuke.

Her struggle — our struggle — is tied to the biodiversity of wild rice, a sacred food. There are more than 60,000 acres of natural wild rice growing throughout the lakes and rivers of her tribal lands. But there are troubling parallels drawn to what’s happened to the sacred corn of Mesoamerica at the hands of the agri-business multinationals, where corn has been patented, controlled and even turned into what some call Frankenfood.

Domestication and genetic modification of wild rice threatens the genetic integrity of this plant. For more than 30 years, plant breeders have developed wild rice for commercial paddies. So today, most of the wild rice on the market comes from these paddies, almost 70 percent of it from California. “Millions of pounds of California wild rice comes into [Minnesota] to be processed,” says LaDuke, “some of that rice, if genetically engineered, would irreversibly contaminate our manoomin.”

LaDuke’s tenacity in understanding the sacred and reclaiming the wholeness of her people’s food is a valuable lesson for our times. She’s up against the juggernaut of Monsanto and Dupont, the largest seed companies in the world. Monsanto has spent $8 billion in the last few years buying up United States seed companies, while Dupont purchased Pioneer, the second largest seed company in the world.



“This concentration of control over world seed stocks is alarming to farmers on a worldwide scale, especially considering that the closer seeds seem to be held, the fewer there are.”

LaDuke puts all of our struggles into a feedback loop, connecting wild rice in Minnesota to sustainability in Spokane with the goal of creating a more independent, safe and stable food supply. “However you cut the statistics,” LaDuke says, “from the villages of India to the villages of northern Minnesota, there is a marked loss in worldwide biodiversity, and a closer hold on who controls the remaining seeds of the world.”



This issue of control took me back 32 years, to the time I was a newspaper reporter in the middle of a struggle for the soul of a mountain.

Environmentalists were trying to stop my school, the University of Arizona, from building roads and locating a large mirror telescope on Mount Graham, a 10,000-foot sky island sticking out of the Sonora Desert. Mount Graham was named after a white man who rode through the area many years ago, a Colonel James Graham, but for generations the San Carlos Apaches had referred to the entire range as “Pinaleno,” meaning “many deer.” It’s the holiest place for the Apaches, who acquire the power to become medicine men and women through singing and collecting herbs and water on that mountain.

Despite the importance and traditional use of the place, roads were cut and the telescope went up. LaDuke and I talked about that struggle, and she shared many similar struggles currently unfolding in Indian Country and elsewhere.

LaDuke’s power is in her ability to unearth the history of Native people’s struggles — and how that history is relevant today. There has been a lost connection between how the land should be used and how it actually is used — from wild rice in Minnesota to telescopes in Arizona. Reconnecting with the land is another step in the process, as her book puts it, of reclaiming the sacred.

+—+

Until further notice, and more of my rants, here we go: I listened to Oren before the event last night!

This short film is part of 8 short, testimonial films, on the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois.) The Iroquois are embarking on an historic project about the 500-year history of the Iroquois, their relationship with Europe and America and their prophesies that, if heard, can help us navigate the oncoming changes due to climate change. This series of short films is done via their testimony, and creates the space for the Iroquois to tell their story as they strive to uphold the traditions and the legacy of their people while also protecting the central tenents of their people and their relationship and care for the Earth.

This series was created by Tree Media in collaboration with Oren Lyons, Sid Hill and the Haudenosaunee. This series was created with the support of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation and with the support of Executive Producer Oliver Stanton.  For more information: http://www.digitalwampum.org and http://www.treemedia.com

turkeys, more faux Holocaust Industry groups looking for ‘antisemitism,’ and starvation and torture: film at 5 pm, analysis at 10 pm!

I was triggered reading another Substack: The Army is Begging Unvaccinated Soldiers to Return: Army forced to reverse course, as people refuse to enlist by Igor Chudov

My colorful comment goes as follows: “Fuck these jar heads and fucking baby killers and wedding party bombers. Trillions spent on these mercenaries. May they go the way of the dodo. Won’t get a fucking jab but will help murder babies in Gaza? Human stain, from prick Austin all the way down to PFC Gomer.”

It’s a simple fucking comparison. Think of all those tubby girls and boys, all those on the Autism spectrum, all those ready for gender conversion surgery lining up for the red-white-blue uniformed mercenary hit-squad services.

Are we just mentally vacuumed? Out of shape is one way to put it. Think chronically ill, with a shit load of both physical and mental issues. An Army of One? For what now?

Ahh, as the Zionist Jews Do, the rest of the world follows? Soldiers with autism give army rare view into intel, and disorder

“The IDF’s Unit 9900, faced with the Sisyphean task of deciphering satellite images, has begun employing volunteer soldiers on the autism spectrum who have proven adept at decoding the pictures. For the two ex-Mossad agents who started the program, it’s a ‘win-win’ situation.”

Fuck:

[Photo: Master Sgt. Shale Norwitz, 688th Cyberspace Wing, poses for a photo at Robins Air Force Base, Ga., Aug. 2, 2021. ]

Norwitz struggles with Autism Spectrum Disorder and uses his experience to advocate for others who may face neurodiversity challenges in the workplace.

A passenger-filled sedan rolled violently against a dirt median, abruptly halted on its roof and blocked oncoming traffic on the interstate. Master Sgt. Shale Norwitz’s duty to protect and serve took precedence.

Due to his application of military training and a unique diagnosis, Norwitz safely extracted the occupants of the vehicle, led victims away from the wreckage and redirected the flow of traffic.

Norwitz, 5th Combat Communications Squadron noncommissioned officer in charge of Operations Planning, attributed his heroic acts to his military training and neurodiversity.

“I’m on the [autism] spectrum and that makes me good at being a strategic thinker, and contributes to my innovation,” Norwitz said. “This is the stuff that makes us great, but it is something we need reinforcement on.”

Fucking drones, and so, autism is a-okay? Why so many now, in 2023, diagnosed, especially since 1980, with autism? Nah, no big questions there, and in this upside down world, sex conversion surgery loving world, living with intellectual disabilities normal, developmental disabilities and psychological disabilities being the new in, this situation is so much better than figuring out wha the fuck is going on with 1 out of 44 diagnosed with austism, why so many with Fragile X, why so many kids by age 12 have many chronic illnesses, including asthma and ADD-like behavior and nervous tics and diabetes and hypertension and bone deformaties and . . . .

I guarantee most of the people I have worked with, with some level of DD/ID/PD, they are not living the high life in the US Air Force or on Jeff Bezos’ team. They are lucking to get $759 a month in disability social security and some food stamps and a map to the local food pantry! I know, since I work with THEM.

Smiling faces:

Nah, it couldn’t be the PVC lined pipes, all the shit in our water, the plastics in everything, the hormone disrupting and enhancing and devolving shit in the food, in the carpets, in the paint, in the air, on the lawns, on the berries? Nah, not all those shots the kids get by age, hmm, what? Nah, not all of these things working in concert or in discordance to synergistically mess with mama’s eggs and papa’s sperm and the old development fetus. Nah. It’s all about recruiting kids with heart problems and adults with neuro-divergent lifestyles and brain processing.

EWG's “Dirty Dozen” Hormone-Altering Chemicals and How to Avoid Them!  #PPbyTT.Blog – Natural Hormone Health Series – Reasource #2 – Plants Power  Purpose

Happy faces make great drone and AI-VR-AR-MR operators!

“Companies that have fleets, that do land surveillance, geospatial mapping,” said Rouhani. “They have to gain design approvals, production approvals, appliance certification in order to move forward so that’s what we are doing.”

Darcy never looked at autism as a challenge, more like an asset.

“I have a form of spatial intelligence which allows me to visualize complex systems in my mind,” said Rouhani.

Darcy’s business partner, Jocelyn Pritchett, says Darcy’s unique understanding is helping their company soar to new heights.

“She can say, ‘well this is the way my autistic brain sees this and so that’s why I’m approaching it like this,’ and it just makes perfect sense to me,” said Pritchett.

This work is crucial but exceedingly difficult. One lieutenant associated with the program calls the graduates of “Watching the Horizon” among the best decipherers she’s ever come across. The fact that individuals with autism have participated in and succeeded in the program is a testament to the skills and abilities those on the spectrum possess.

Advertisement pasted from the story above:

WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff.

Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-sight, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.

Autism, man:

Wikileaks has obtained and decrypted this previously unreleased video footage from a US Apache helicopter in 2007. It shows Reuters journalist Namir Noor-Eldeen, driver Saeed Chmagh, and several others as the Apache shoots and kills them in a public square in Eastern Baghdad. They are apparently assumed to be insurgents. After the initial shooting, an unarmed group of adults and children in a minivan arrives on the scene and attempts to transport the wounded. They are fired upon as well. The official statement on this incident initially listed all adults as insurgents and claimed the US military did not know how the deaths ocurred. Wikileaks released this video with transcripts and a package of supporting documents on April 5th 2010

This is too scholarly, but: The Romans had a difficult relationship with the kind of luxury and excess that we think of as indicators of moral and social decadence. But in many ways they revelled in such luxury. Readily accepting the financial rewards of empire, they spent huge sums on their own benefits. Whether in the colossal public games in the amphitheatre and the circus, in the opulent imperial bath complexes, or in extravagant private villas, Romans of all social levels delighted in the very best that life was thought to offer. Chapter 1 examines how far the evidence supports this somewhat melodramatic view of Rome by looking at the ways in which luxury spread in the Roman world. It also looks at the ways this growth in luxury compelled the Romans to create new concepts to understand the phenomenon. Luxury was almost never seen as a simple index of increased wealth. Rather, it raised all manner of moral issues among Rome’s ruling classes, many of which long outlived the end of the Roman empire itself. (see references below)

Here, on my morning fucking Bing and Yahoo feeds. We are a fucked society with this discordance hitting our world, our minds, our ears, our eyes!

+—+

The two Jennie-O turkeys from a farm in central Minnesota will make the trip to Washington to be pardoned by President Joe Biden. The two birds were hatched in July and raised in a Jennie-O-owned flock at an undisclosed location.

“Our team and Jennie-O are very proud to raise the presidential birds this Thanksgiving. We have some of the best production professionals in the industry and are honored to be a part in this 70-plus year tradition,” Rojas said.

The 2022 National Thanksgiving Turkeys were Chocolate, a 46-pound fowl, along with Chip, a 47-pounder, both raised at the Circle S Ranch in Monroe, N.C. After their pardon, these two birds were retired to North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where they remain under the care of veterinarians, faculty and students.

[Note: Tens of thousands in Gaza are dying of hunger, man, no electricity, man, nothing, and this shit passes through us like leaky gut crap that it is!]

+—+

Martha Stewart has canceled Thanksgiving.

“Oh I gave up Thanksgiving. I canceled,” she told Kelly Clarkson on “The Kelly Clarkson Show” Wednesday.

Well, actually, nine of Stewart’s guests canceled on her Thanksgiving dinner because someone got sick.

“So I decided, I called up my chef friend and I said ‘We’re not doing Thanksgiving,'” Stewart proclaimed.

Plus, she’d already cooked 14 turkeys for her TV show, and was still due to make one more for the “TODAY Show,” she told Clarkson.

“I am turkeyed out,” Stewart said.

Instead, Stewart will be visiting “about five different homes to taste different courses” after friends invited her to their Thanksgiving feasts.

“Oh my God, those friends must be so stressed out,” Clarkson said.

“Oh, I hope so,” Stewart replied.

[Note: Whores incorporated, and alas, multimillionaire worthless nothings tell us about their fucking belly issues, their fucking menu for National Day of Mourning-Sorrow-Recognition for MURDERING First Nations?]

The United Nations was forced to stop deliveries of food and other necessities to Gaza on Friday and warned of the growing possibility of widespread starvation after internet and telephone services collapsed in the besieged enclave because of a lack of fuel.

[Note: If this doesn’t tell you the world is broken beyond repair, then you are living inside the cavity of a salmonella-laced fucking dead bird.]

[Note:Everything is antisemitism. Everything. Talking about breaking a menorah over Jon Leibowtiz Stweart’s head is way way so anti-this and anti-that.]

Note: Endless blow jobs for these pricks: Billionaires Niel, Saadé and Schmidt Invest in €300 Million AI Lab]

Billionaires Eric Schmidt, left, Rodolphe Saade, center, and Xavier Niel, at ai-Pulse on Nov. 17.

Elon Musk has failed to pay a fine for not taking appropriate steps to remove child sexual abuse content from his platform X – formerly Twitter.

The Australian Federal Police was told the company still owes more than $600,000.

Last month, eSafety Commissioner Julie Grant said the Musk-owned company also needed to pay a fine for failing to respond to questions sent in February.

Elon Musk is facing intense backlash after he agreed with an antisemitic post on X, formerly known as Twitter.  

On Wednesday, an X user made an antisemitic post that accused Jewish people of advocating for hatred against “whites.” Musk replied by writing “you have said the actual truth.” 

In just the first two weeks after Musk bought the site, antisemitic posts increased 61%, according to the Council for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a non-profit that tracks hate speech on the internet. In August, their claims incensed Musk to the point that X filed a lawsuit against the CCDH for allegedly conducting a “scare campaign to drive away advertisers.” Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war last month, the CCDH found that hate speech on the platform only worsened. The group released a report showing that 98% of 200 posts it reported for violating X’s guidelines remained on the site. 

[Note: Japan!! That JAPAN!! What a horror show, what JAPAN did to Chinese. And this mutually beneficial relations is fucking pap — trillions expended on military while their countries burn. Thanks, fucking U$A. New Cold-Hot AI War, 4.0]

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida committed to pursuing mutually-beneficial relations in their first face-to-face talks in a year, a sign that Asia’s two largest economies are looking to patch up strained ties.

[Note: That fucking Marcons and that fucking war criminal Blinken. Oh, green technology at its best, nuclear. How many uranium mines are there in the Philippines?]

The Philippines and the United States on Friday signed a historic civil nuclear cooperation deal, which is seen to help with the country’s energy security by laying the legal basis for the transfer of nuclear equipment and material from the US to Manila.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s behavior while seated next to President Joe Biden during his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping is being questioned online.

[Note: Fucking war criminals, and where’s that anthrax laced Lemon Pledge for the fancy cherry wood table when we need it?]

Biden, Blinken and other members of the Biden administration met with Xi and Chinese government representatives to discuss U.S.-China relations on Wednesday at a historic estate near San Francisco, California, where the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit is taking place this week.

Roman decadence - Wikipedia

Rome’s sick decadence was/is on the backs of slaves, slave laborers, the dispossessed, imported immigrants, theft of food, fuel, family, and a DNA structure that has carried through the ages.

Decadence:

Fucking embarassing fucking ox!

Chronic illnesses, physically unfit, oh, those sullen and blank faces, man oh man, this is an Army of One, All that you can be!

Again, thanks Igor for the piece: on his Substack!

It all begs the question, no, who is in charge of those Operation Warp Speed toxins, those DNA hack shots? Well, I am not going to lay it out and get accused of antisemitism. Shit!

References— Decadence Empire of Old, but Same Old Italy. Number One Destination for AmeriKKKans!

Fucking starve and set disease and lack of medicines plague upon the Gazans, but we got Holly-Dirt!

Goodfellas’ biggest legacy might be the ‘chatty gangster’ character type, which has popped up in many subsequent films, such as The Usual Suspects (Credit: AF archive/Alamy)

We live in a culture where stereotyping and the inclusion of individuality is demanded. A negative word or action against religion, physicality, sexual orientation, or race will cripple a person’s reputation. Friends, associates, and organizations will distance themselves from the pariah, as not to be considered guilty by association. The repercussion is both immediate and feared, and no one understands this more than celebrities.

  • Amy Schumer apologized for a racist joke she used to make about Latino men.
  • Eddie Murphy apologized for his past material about the LGBTQ+ community. Murphy said he was “ignorant,” and he deeply regrets “[…] any and all pain this has caused.”
  • Weird Al Yankovic was “deeply sorry” for using the word “spastic” in the song World Crimes.
  • Jimmy Kimmel, Sarah Silverman, and Jimmy Fallon have all apologized for their past blackface skits.
  • Nikki Glaser apologized for shaming Taylor Swift’s “skinny” body.
  • Jay Leno issued an apology for his past racist jokes about the Asian-American community.
  • Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively apologized for the location of their wedding venue. They said they are “deeply and unreservedly sorry” for holding their 2012 nuptials at a former slave plantation in South Carolina.
  • The Academy Awards demanded that appointed host, Kevin Hart, apologize for the homophobic jokes from his distant past even though he had previously done so.

Sources:

Marcellinus, Ammianus (1963–1964). Res Gestae, J. C. Rolfe, trans., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar

Apuleius, (1989). Metamorphoses, J. A. Hanson, trans., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar

Gellius, Aulus (1961). Attic Nights, J. C. Rolfe, trans., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar

Betts, Eleanor, ed. (2017). Senses of the Empire: Multisensory Approaches to Roman Culture, London: Routledge.Google Scholar

Chaunu, Pierre (1981). Histoire et décadence, Paris: Perrin.Google Scholar

Columella (1954–1955). On Agriculture, H. B. Ash, E. S. Forster, and E. H. Heffner, trans., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar

Dalby, Andrew (2000). Empire of Pleasures: Luxury and Indulgence in the Roman World, London: Routledge.Google Scholar

Elsner, Jaś, and Masters, Jamie (1994). Reflections of Nero: Culture, History, and Representation, London: Duckworth.Google Scholar

Gleason, Maud W. (1995). Making Men: Sophists and Self-presentation in Ancient Rome, Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar

Horace, (1929). Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, H. R. Fairclough, trans., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar

Juvenal, (2014). Satires, S. M. Braund, trans., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar

Livy, (1976). Ab Urbe Condita, B. O. Foster, trans., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar

Morley, Neville (2004). Decadence as a Theory of History. New Literary History, 35, 573–85.Google Scholar

Petronius, (2014). Satyricon, M. Heseltine, trans., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar

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