…and my fellow humans are numb to the world, as their small world comes crashing down . . .

I went to the community meeting. Around 25 people there, listening to two guests around a community bill of rights, for Lane County (Oregon). You know, the people, citizens, having the say on who and what can come into their communities.

‘…A say in what can and cannot be sprayed on their food, land, bodies, water, soil….’

I’ve done this before, and I’ll cut and paste that old piece below from Spokane.

Infanticide, first, in Gaza. Hell on Earth, not because this hasn’t happened before in history, but because we are here now, 2023, with Telegram and instant videos. We are supposedly ruled by the Chosen People of Israel and the Blinken-Nuland-Yellen-Garland-Kagan-Dirty-Hellion-Bargain.

Those dirty White House Thugs look like cancerous Homo Bellum. Rotting faces, slag for eyes, like a George Soros or Larry Fink or Larry Summers.

HELL on earth.

Oh, the Monster, the Oppen-Monster-Heimer:

“If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” So said Curtis LeMay after America obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki with two atomic bombs in August 1945.

There has been great difficulty in estimating the total casualties in the Japanese cities as a result of the atomic bombing. The extensive destruction of civil installations (hospitals, fire and police department, and government agencies) the state of utter confusion immediately following the explosion, as well as the uncertainty regarding the actual population before the bombing, contribute to the difficulty of making estimates of casualties. The Japanese periodic censuses are not complete. Finally, the great fires that raged in each city totally consumed many bodies.

The number of total casualties has been estimated at various times since the bombings with wide discrepancies. The Manhattan Engineer District’s best available figures are:

TABLE A: Estimates of Casualties

Hiroshima Nagasaki

(Pre-raid pop.) 255,000 195,000

Dead 66,000 39,000

Injured 69,000 25,000

Total Casualties: 135,000 64,000

Hydrogen bombs, or just plain old Greek Fire!

Fire, whether from Jewish Whiskey Pete (white phosphorus) or U$A napalm, it kills kills civilians.

Katsumoto Saotome, 87, came to the door of his home in the outer reaches of Tokyo wearing a herringbone blazer, a black wool scarf tucked neatly into a vest and a black beret that he reckons makes him look like Che Guevara, the guerrilla leader in the Cuban Revolution. Saotome has practiced radicalism of a much quieter kind, insisting on preserving memories that many may prefer to forget.

Seventy-eith years ago, less than 10 miles from where he now lives alone in a low-lying neighborhood known for its moderate rents, Saotome (pronounced SAH-oh-toe-meh) survived the brutally effective American firebombing of Tokyo. Over the course of nearly three hours, an attack by the United States Army Air Forces killed as many as 100,000 people — more than some estimates of the number killed the day of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. But while the Japanese public — and the world — rightly remember Hiroshima as a living symbol of the horrors of nuclear war, the Tokyo firebombing is generally regarded as a footnote in any accounting of the war in Japan.

The flag of infanticide:

+—+

I am sick to my stomach, but I soldier on: because the corporations, their lawyers, their hitmen, their PR spinners, their pimped-out politicians and lawmakers, all the Eichmann’s and Faustian Bargain Basement Mother Fuckers, they kill us with 10,000,000 cuts daily. We are firebombed by their sanctions, rules, fines, tickets, evictions, eminent domain, fees, taxes, interest rates, non-disclosure agreements, contracts, code enforcements, bust, arrests, bonds, bails, foreclosures.

Read closely how death is measured outside of the implosions in Gaza.

Exposure to Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals and Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus in Later Life

Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), one of the most common chronic metabolic diseases, involves a complex interaction among genetic, epigenetic, and environmental risk factors. The incidence and prevalence of T2DM are rapidly increasing globally. In recent years, increasing body of evidences from both human and animal studies have displayed an association between exposure to early unfavorable life factors such as endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) and the prevalence of T2DM in later life. The exogenous EDCs can lead to disadvantageous metabolic consequences because they interfere with the synthesis, secretion, transport, binding, action, and metabolism of endogenous hormones. EDCs also have long-term adverse effects on newborns, children, and adolescents by causing increased susceptibility to T2DM in adults. This review summarizes the most recent advances in this field, including diabetes-related EDCs (bisphenol A, phthalates, chlordane compounds, parabens, pesticides, and other diabetes-related EDCs), EDC exposure and gestational diabetes mellitus, prenatal and perinatal EDC exposures and T2DM, adult EDC exposure and T2DM, transgenerational effects of EDCs on T2DM as well as the possible diabetogenic mechanisms.

So in my tiny neck of the woods, where a Danish guy with 260 acres which he just clear-cut is shooting for helicopter spraying of poison on the land so the weeds go bye-bye and the Scotch Broom, et al go bye-bye. And the timber industry lies, gets tax abatements, and has a propaganda wing here paid for by Oregon taxpayers!

For the past couple of decades, tens of thousands of people living in rural Sri Lanka have been devastated by kidney failure due to unclear causes, also known as CKDu. Similar incidences of mysterious kidney diseases have emerged in tropical farming communities around the world.

A massive field study of the wells supplying drinking water to the Sri Lankan communities, conducted by researchers at Duke University, has identified a possible culprit — glyphosate, the active compound in Roundup, the most widely used herbicide in the world. (source)

It’s global, the death and slow death and disease by 10,000,000 cuts, as Gaza burns and the UkroNazi’s burn burn burn.

Chronic fucking disease: Glyphosate, Hard Water and Nephrotoxic Metals: Are They the Culprits Behind the Epidemic of Chronic Kidney Disease of Unknown Etiology in Sri Lanka?

Progress has been made in recent years, but much remains to be done. Here are some examples of incremental advances in the fight to end herbicide use in Oregon forestry under the recent Private Forest Accord:

• In early 2022, the EPA banned use of chlorpyrifos on food and feed crops, and starting Jan. 1, 2024, new Oregon Department of Agriculture rules will disallow most uses of the insecticide, including spraying on forestlands.
• In 2020, then-Governor Kate Brown helped catalyze the Private Forest Accord between some environmental groups and the timber industry. Later that year, that negotiation resulted in the Oregon Legislature passing Senate Bill 1602, which increased buffers for streams and improved the system for electronic reporting and notification of neighbors within a mile of areas to be sprayed by helicopters.

But those new rules did not require any reductions in the frequency or amounts of pesticides sprayed. Environmentalists and impacted communities want the practice significantly reduced or banned altogether, and the Oregon Chapter Sierra Club will continue to work for that change. (source)

+—+

More slogging on. Here, my piece a long time ago about community bill of rights movement in Spokane when I had one of a dozen gigs surviving:

The right to community

Envisioning a new Spokane puts ‘business as usual’ on chopping block

[Photo: Local farmer Brian Estes, foreground, stands with Kai Huschke, campaign director of Envision Spokane and leader of Proposition 1 at Estes’ Vinegar Flats garden. (Paul K. Haeder / Down to Earth NW Correspodent)]

Here’s one credo that scares guys like Frank Schaeffer, son of evangelist Francis Schaeffer and author of “Crazy for God: How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back.”

“God’s Word gives women respect and respectability which they had never enjoyed in any other culture, and we must do what we can to preserve biblical standards. But it establishes the man as the head of the house.”

Now replace the word “man” with “corporation” and you have what amounts to what many in the world – not just the U.S. – see as the dictum of the 21st century: Corporations are the head of our house.

Many are fighting back this imbalance of power and justice, including grassroots groups. Via Campesino, the Transition Cities movements, even foodies are fighting the corporate “infection” to preserve rights to safe, non-genetically modified, animal-cruelty free food.

One local impetus to give people more say in how neighborhoods form and evolve is on Spokane’s November ballot. Envision Spokane, which gained 25 percent of the yea votes in 2010, is returning.

Kai Huschke, campaign director of Envision Spokane and leader of Proposition 1, cites several past movements in the U.S. to gain citizen rights – like abolishing slavery and giving full citizenship to people of color. He references a quote from Abigail Adams, urging her husband John in 1776 to treat women as equals in the Declaration of Independence:

“We are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”

A second quote,

“I saw clearly that the power to make the laws was the right through which all other rights could be secured” came in 1884 when 32-year-old Elizabeth Cady Stanton – joined by Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth – spoke at a women’s rally to gain the constitutional right to vote.

Huschke compares U.S. women getting the vote in 1920 after dozens of defeats to the heavy lifting he and his supporters must do to get a community bill of rights approved.

“Many would say that what we have today is a corporate state,” Huschke said. “Living within the corporate state there are no remedies to protecting safety, health, and welfare of communities. Adopting amendments to the Spokane’s home rule charter puts in place remedies to protect and nourish neighborhoods, river and workplaces. These amendments acknowledge our protections and that the power is with the people where it comes to significant impacts to neighborhoods and river.”

The 10 amendments to the 2009 bill of rights were defeated, Huschke said, by corporate bucks to the tune of $400,000 from Spokane Home Builder’s Association, Associated Builders and Contractors and other unlimited pro-growth groups.

Recently, the local GOP’s executive committee voted to oppose the 2011 proposition. That doesn’t faze Kai.

“The rhetoric will get turned up as the powerful, monied interests make claims about property rights being under attack and costs if the Community Bill of Rights is adopted. The same stuff was said in 2009,” he said.

“I’ve talked to people who voted against it in 2009, who said once they took the time to read it they would’ve voted yes. If I have to ask anything of Spokane voters, it’s to cover your ears and read what’s being proposed.”

When you have the Greater Spokane Incorporated throwing weight and money behind an anti-Community Bill of Rights movement, it’s easy to see the greater good.

“Spokane is long overdue in recognizing the value of our neighborhoods, our river, and workplaces,” Kai said. “We have a golden opportunity to show how to build a sustainable community. By honoring and protecting our assets we put ourselves in a position advocating for health and welfare over profit for profit sake, that other communities aren’t even close to considering.”

The history of communities gaining power back from outside agitators, carpetbaggers or corporate conglomerates is tied to public health and safety, centered around bad corporate behavior like factory farms’ waste ponds causing human and animal health issues; coal companies’ slurry lakes leaking millions of gallons of waste into rivers; quarry works that foul water; or energy companies that pollute the air along the Houston to Baton Rouge corridor where asthma and cancers are sky-high, according to CDC studies.

A community movement similar to Envision Spokane recently rose up against the energy lobby to put brakes on exploitation of shale deposits. The process known as hydraulic fracturing to get at natural gas fouls the water and has been implicated in earthquakes. Arkansas has temporarily stopped this process.

The Spokane Community Bill of Rights has its roots in a larger, more holistic frame – the Rights of Nature, something that sticks in the craws of GOP party loyalists, Chambers of Commerce and business interests.

Bolivia’s Law of the Rights of Mother Earth was enacted by President Evo Morales January 2011. It addresses that country’s natural resources as “blessings” and grants Earth rights to life, water and clean air; the right to repair livelihoods affected by human activities; and the right to be free from pollution.

Bolivia has established a Ministry of Mother Earth, a sort of global ombudsman whose job is to listen to nature’s complaints voiced by activists and others, including the state.

“If you want to have balance, and you think that the only (entities) with rights are humans or companies, how can you reach balance?” says Pablo Salon, Bolivia’s ambassador to the U.N. “But if you recognize nature has rights, and (if you provide) legal forums to protect and preserve those rights, you can achieve balance.”

Kai understands the power of people bicycling safely in Spokane with engineering and land use changes guided by citizens. He sees the power of community gardens and programs like Riverfront Farm putting disadvantaged youth to work in farming and landscaping experiential learning experiences. He sees corporations destroying community-based tools to fight their shock doctrine of financial wizards, disturbances created by climate change, or volatility of food and energy.

Communities under the current regulatory system are poorly suited to manage under the current political system, Kai insists. It’s clear that even presidential aspirants like Mitt Romney can end up tongue-tied when a citizen at a rally asked about the power and rights of corporations: “Corporations are people, my friends.”

For Envision Spokane’s backers this line of logic is a slap in the face of our own bill of rights and democratic institutions tied to a government of the people, by the people and for the people. Kai said this effort is a vital one.

“The assault on public workers from corporate interests has been daunting. There is no reason not to believe that this attack won’t carry into the private sector. In the spring the Spokane City Council passed a resolution supporting collective bargaining for city employees. The Community Bill of Rights would protect that right with binding law for all unionized city workers. There is a power grab happening across the country, and Spokane needs to make sure it protects its workers.”

[Photo: Kai Huschke is building a straw bale house in the Vinegar Flats area near the Vinegar Flats community garden area. (Paul K. Haeder / Down to Earth NW Correspondent)]

(The previous column is the opinion of columnist Paul K. Haeder and doesn’t necessarily reflect the opinions of Down to EarthNW, The Spokesman-Review or the Cowles Company.)

That was 2011!!

Twelve fucking years ago.

Today?

+—+

Community Rights,  Agency Capture, Corporations as People?

“I’m not expecting to see the world I envision, but I don’t want to be a foot soldier for corporations.”

– Michelle Holman.

I’m at the Waldport  Central Oregon Coast Fire and Rescue (10/15) with twenty-two other residents listening to Holman and David Tvedt  discuss the work of Lane County Community Rights.

It is a room full of gray-haired men and women, anxious to hear from these two gray panthers on their work to codify a bill of rights for Lane County citizens to write laws.

I’ve been in this rodeo before – El Paso, Seattle and  Spokane, where I covered the work of Envision Spokane, a bill that would’ve enshrined on voters the right o determine the community’s health, safety and welfare.

I was hosting a radio show focused on sustainability, social justice, and environmental stewardship. I had two regular news columns – in the weekly and a monthly magazine. I was sustainability coordinator for the community college.

It was a lot of work getting people out to participate in events around clean water, clean air, food,  transportation and ecosystems.

My biggest goal after codifying guest authors, film festivals, teach-ins, and Earth Day festivals was to get the so-called “younger generation” involved. It was somewhat easy since I taught at Gonzaga and SFCC, and had cohorts at Whitworth and WSU and Eastern Washington University.

Even so, I had to solicit help from local musicians, local restaurants, and merchants for entertainment, food, swill and swag.

Here, today, years later, I am in a room with older folk who are concerned to aerial spraying  of herbicides on a clear cut along Beaver Creek. Tvelt has been working on forest issues since 1970. His degree in forestry informs his fight to galvanize common sense into forest management and logging.

For many in the audience they learned about the value of forests– mixed species of trees, shrubs and even weeds – as a way to help with water flows.

Hard logging reduces water flow because organic matter, downed trees and other forest dynamics are eradicated by timber companies. Tvelt  recalled taking a chain saw on a four-foot downed log for a clearway on a path near Sweethome whereupon the cut produced “a full-blast flow of water . . . like a water spigot was turned on.” It lasted for two minutes.

Wells and springs are drying up in summers and in many cases year round. Pressure on watersheds can be located directly to the growth of human populations. Additionally, clear cutting and other heavy logging practices reduce the natural flow of things. This is not rocket science, and the memo on this was written decades ago.

The community meeting centered around spraying of chemicals. The News Times has run stories, letters to the editor and editorials debating acreage along Beaver Creek scheduled for helicopter herbicide application.

 It’s no secret that our state’s timber industry’s practice of spraying herbicides — all of them dangerous to humans, fish and animals — has been highly controversial for decades. Studies show that up to 40 percent of the pesticides sprayed onto forestland by helicopters is blown off course from its targets (drift).

These toxic sprays — used by the timber industry to kill insects, weeds and vegetation in areas that have been clear cut — drift onto land on or near homes, farms, streams and lakes.

While many of the inert ingredients and specialized mixes are industry secrets, the main pesticides include triclopyr, chlorpyrifos, Diuron and 2,4-D (one of the so-called “Agent Orange” chemicals).

Study after study has show all of these singularly or synergistically are linked to diseases and health issues, including respiratory problems, liver and kidney damage, miscarriages, and cancer.

Regulating how much poison should be allowed in food, air and water is antithetical to Michele Holman’s ethos. She’s lived 47 years in the Coast Range, tossing out the activist script of going to the state capitol to beg for redress on any range of environmental concerns.

“I got tired of the retort, ‘It’s legal . . . well settled in law.’ Just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s just.”

Agency capture, lobbying influence, campaign meddling/contributions, and propaganda on a massive scale work in favor of rich corporations, whether it is Boeing and planes or Weyerhaeuser and logging.

A recent push is for a community rights movement to catch like wildfire throughout the state. Protect Lane County Watersheds is spearheading the Rights of Nature law (supported by CELDF, Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund) to protect drinking water and watersheds throughout the county.

The old adage, ‘you can’t fight city hall,’ has dangerously morphed into: “Corporations are considered people, so you can’t stop them from doing business as usual because they have equal rights . . .  and then some.”

I’ve been studying these chemicals for decades. Rosemary Mason from England is an amazing researcher who does on the ground work as well as collates hundreds of scientific field studies on that infamous weed killer used on clear-cut’s – glyphosate. You can read a journal article like this one, “The Effects of Clearcutting and Glyphosate Herbicide Use on Parasitic Wasps in Maine Forests.”

Or, a recent Duke University report, “Roundup Ingredient Connected to Epidemic Levels of Chronic Kidney Disease.” You can spend years digging through the science that never gets in front of mainstream media’s unwatchful eye.

Citizens involved in Stop the Spray at Beaver Creek are concerned for their health, as well as the health of children, grandchildren and the entire life web of our ecosystem.

Countless studies which are looking at pesticides and herbicides produce chilling findings: “For the past couple of decades, tens of thousands of people living in rural Sri Lanka have been devastated by kidney failure.”

This massive field study of the wells supplying drinking water to the Sri Lankan communities, conducted by researchers at Duke University, has identified a possible culprit — glyphosate.

When it’s in your backyard, the alarm goed off. Chilling: November 14 is World Diabetes Day. Here we go again, more reading: “Exposure to Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals and Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus in Later Life.”

Community Rights Fight: State and Federal Preemption

One of the first things an elected official does upon taking office is to swear an oath to uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution. Unfortunately for local communities and the environment, the Commerce Clause, which gives Congress the power “to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states …” is an integral part of that constitution. According to the Cornell School of Law, “Congress has often used the Commerce Clause to justify exercising legislative power over the activities of states and their citizens, leading to significant and ongoing controversy regarding the balance of power between the federal government and the states. The Commerce Clause has historically been viewed as both a grant of congressional authority and as a restriction on the regulatory authority of the States.”

Imploring Oregon Governor Kate Brown to say “NO” the aerial spraying or to Jordan Cove’s LNG project is literally asking her to violate her oath of office and assumes she has plenary authority (or the balls) to stand up to federal preemption. She does not.

The Community Doesn’t Have the Legal Authority to Say “No”!
The existing structure of law ensures that people are blocked from advancing their rights, governing their own communities and acting as stewards of the environment, while protecting corporate “rights” and interests over those of communities and nature.

Community Rights work is a paradigm shift. It moves away from unsustainable practices that harm communities by moving towards local self-government.

Today, policy-makers have told communities across the country that they don’t have the right to make critical decisions for themselves. They’re told they cannot say “no” to GMOs or aerial spraying. They’re told they cannot say “yes” to sustainable food or energy systems.

Through the Community Rights Movement, communities are working with CELDF to create a structure of law and government of the people, by the people, and for the people. That structure recognizes and protects the inalienable rights of natural and human communities.

… oh it is in your face, more or less, on alternative websites, over at Telegram, but the monsters are not just bikini-wearing Zionists with shiny AR-15’s and banana clips

The murderers are many, not just the Zionist Racists Encapsulated in their AmeriKKKan tanks:

Oh, it is not just Jews or Jews-Wannabe’s:

Or the Schumer Slime or Biden Viruses:

Graphs: Stephen Semler is cofounder of Security Policy Reform Institute, a grassroots-funded US foreign policy think tank.

Now now, these are lies of omission, because the military budgets listed and the workers accounted for and all of that is a sham.

REPEAT: Universities, colleges, junior colleges, bolts-burgers-bytes-bridges-buttons-bread, and now go through A to Z and find all the stuff, all the retail stuff, all the stuff made with/by/for/in oil, and then take it all out to the maximum arena — how much does a tank cost beyond the unit cost? Beyond this? Although the total cost of a single four-person Abrams tank can change, the figure can top $10 million per unit when training and maintenance is factored in, according to data from Reuters. The tanks, part of a new $400 million package, will be purchased through the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative.

Beyond the singular price:

Think of the embedded/embodied energy and engrained/enabled hell on earth these machines produce? Think of all the PR and legal firms, all the contract law firms, all the civil servants and their lobbying friends and all the countless human lifetimes wasted on rationalizing for these machines. Forget about just one child throwing one stone at this one monster machine, and the value we should be putting on his lifetime in that fucking open air concentration camp, Gaza, or anywhere?

You pasty faced Five Eyes and Israel Eye loving putrid zombies, you think you want your grandchildren in Madison, Wisconsin, or Peoria, Illinois having a tank, or entire battalion of tanks, rumbling down your kids’ streets, in their school parking lots, and how about a little target practice over at the Catholic Cemetary?

That’s right, Israel, with trillions from USA struggling fucking taxpayers, has their own TANK: [Merkava … Major contractors include: the El Op Electro-Optic Industries subsidiary of Elbit Systems which is responsible for the fire control system; the Israel Defence Force which carries out main construction and system integration and testing; Israel Military Industries for the supply of the main gun, ballistic protection and munitions; Imco Industries for the electrical systems; Urdan Industries for the hull, main turret and castings; and IAI Ramta for protection components.

The main part of the tank production, the construction of the hull and integration of all the systems is carried out in the Israel Defence Force workshop.]

$3.5 million (Merkava IV) (for delivery to the IDF) $4.5 million (Merkava IV) (2014 price for sales to other countries)

This morning we woke up to a painful message from our Arabic translator in Gaza.

This is an excerpt:

“Nothing that happens here is reassuring.

I left my home and took refuge in another place in search of safety, but even the new place is not safe: there is no electricity, no water, no food, no internet, and no security.

My cousin and two of my students were killed, danger still looms, and the smell of death emanates from everywhere.

I cannot guarantee that I will see your response to my message, as I may have been killed too. I hope that you will always remember me.

Please help spread the truth: they target innocent people, and falsely claim that they are targeting Hamas, and that Hamas takes innocent people and civilians as human shields.

What Hitler did to them, they are now doing to us.

I hope that I will live until this nightmare ends and one day I will be able to tell you that I am fine.”

+–+

“If olive trees knew the hands that planted them, their oil would become tears.”

— Mahmoud Darwish

Another poet, alive:

The Palestinian Nakba — or catastrophe — happened decades ago, but the people of Palestine continue to suffer under Israeli colonialism, asserts writer and poet Mohammed El-Kurd. Following the air strikes of May 2021, the people of Gaza City have had their homes destroyed or occupied, facing homelessness and heartbreak. But change is still possible, says El-Kurd, as people protest and pressure their leaders to act. In a moving speech at the UN’s event for the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, he called for justice, liberation and a free Palestine in his lifetime.

Watch Mohammed take apart the dirty white ugly Anglo Saxon putridity:

Ahh, the Chuck Schumer and Kamala Emhoff shit hole, their fucking Isra-HELL:

The State of Israel was conceived at the turn of the 20th century in Eastern Europe by a group of elite European Jews who launched a movement called Zionism that sought to establish a physical nation state exclusive to Jews. It was a typical settler colonial enterprise, complete with the narrative of a divine mandate and a non-existent or savage indigenous population, central to which was the myth that Jews of the world formed a singular people, favored by God, who were returning to their singular place of origin – Palestine – after a three thousand year absence.

Although it was a project conceived in Europe by Europeans and for European Jews, they lacked sufficient numbers to build a population large enough to conquer the indigenous Palestinian population. Thus, recruitment of Jews from the surrounding Arab world was a necessary inconvenience. They did so through propaganda and by creating false flag terror incidents (bombing of synagogues or Jewish centres) in order provoke an exodus of Arab Jews. A prime example of this happened in Iraq, where the oldest Jewish community in the world had lived for millennia as contributing members of Iraqi society, and who prospered, contributed to the arts and the economy, and participated in government. 

But these Jews were not embraced as brethren by European Zionists. Zionism was decidedly colonial, and that meant that Jews of the Arab world were seen as incomplete, barbaric, dirty, uncivilised. Za’ev Jabotinsky, one of the forefathers of Zionism said, “We Jews have nothing in common with what is called the Orient, thank God. To the extent that our uneducated masses [Arab Jews] have ancient spiritual traditions and laws that call the Orient, they must be weaned away from them, and this is in fact what we are doing in every decent school, what life itself is doing with great success. We are going in Palestine, first for our national convenience, [second] to sweep out thoroughly all traces of the Oriental soul.”

Watch it: Israel’s Great Divide — LINK

Are Jews of Middle Eastern, North African and Spanish descent discriminated against in Israel?

Israel is a nation of immigrants, and first-generation Israelis comprise only 32 percent of the population.

Integration into Israeli society has been one of its main political goals and, under the leadership of founding prime minister David Ben-Gurion, Israel was going to be “the great Jewish melting pot”, but it has come under severe strain almost since its inception in 1948.

The schools, K12, the lunch counters, the bars, the Walmarts, all those endless Zombie Citizens of the Homo Retail-Consumopithecus Variety, all things in our material and daily exchanges ARE LIES.

The military industrial complex is the ENTIRE shooting match, in the USA. In Churches, at Family Unions, EVERYWHERE.

Here, a book I am recommending for my memoir-writing class:

Or, here, two Jews talking about GAZA: Miko Peled On Israel’s GENOCIDAL War On Gaza

On George Soros Big Pharma Goodman’s Democracy Now:

I honestly do not know what to tell you. It feels to me as though we are living in the very first few days of an unfolding genocide. I mean, not only are Israeli politicians and journalists alike and global forces calling for the annihilation of the Gaza Strip, for bombing it into the Stone Ages, declaring that they are interested in inflicting damage and not really precision, but these images that we are — these images that we are seeing coming outside of the Gaza Strip are so harrowing and devastating that one wonders — one wonders how much bloodshed, how much Palestinian death is necessary for people to realize that violence begets violence and that the occupation and the colonization of Palestine, the blockade of the Gaza Strip needs to end for all of this violence to end.

I mean, I am incredibly angered that word-of-mouth, unverified reports of, quote-unquote, “rape and decapitation,” which obviously draw on Islamophobic tropes, have garnered more and more political and global outrage than those very images, than a video of a nurse announcing and screaming in distress that her husband has been killed in an Israeli airstrike. And, you know, the PR strategy of the Israeli regime throughout all of this has been to invoke those Islamophobic sentiments, like calling it Israel’s — quote-unquote, “Israel’s 9/11.” And media outlets and journalists who have taken on this framing without any questioning not only work to equate the violence of a besieged, politically isolated group like Hamas with the violence of al-Qaeda and ISIS and so on, but they are also doing the dirty work for Israelis. They are preemptively justifying the genocide of hundreds and thousands of Palestinians. They are justifying a brutal onslaught that is about to come globally. And that should be alarming.

I mean, we have seen this unfold during 9/11. We have seen this unfold in history, the utilization of Islamophobia, the dehumanization, the constant dehumanizations of Palestinians, the refusal to see them as human beings who have the right to resist and to defend themselves and to be angry and to want the right to self-determination and to not want to live in siege anymore. All of this refusal to see all of this is contributing, is contributing to this oncoming onslaught, where Israeli politicians can just call Palestinians “human animals,” can just say that they are not really concerned with saving anyone, can threaten to bomb aid envoys coming in from Egypt. This should be concerning to everybody around the world. It is terrifying times we are living in.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And this whole issue [inaudible] hostage situation, as well. Hamas has reported that in one of the bombing attacks, some of the hostages were killed along with those Hamas militants who were guarding them. What do you think the Israeli government posture will continue to be on this issue of the hostages?

MOHAMMED EL-KURD: I mean, so far Hamas has said that they are willing to release all of the female detainees, if Israel is going to release the 36 Palestinian female prisoners currently lingering in Israeli prisons, but the Israeli government has refused to negotiate. In fact, Israeli ministers, like Smotrich, have said that they could not care less about the hostages, and their goal is to inflict as much damage as possible on the besieged Gaza Strip.

And I also want us to get one thing correctly: Holding 2 million people under blockade is a very serious hostage situation. This is what we’re dealing with, the fact that the Israeli regime has been holding Palestinians in Gaza as hostages to exert political pressure on groups like Hamas. The fact that a quarter, 25%, of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prison are held without detention — are held without trial or charges is a hostage situation. The fact that even in death, Palestinian corpses are held in mortuary chambers to be used as bargaining chips is a hostage situation. But time and time again, we are shown by the world its double standards. We are told that the only violence that matters is the violence inflicted upon Israelis, and the only lives that matter are the lives of Israelis. Palestinians have been living as hostages for the past 16 years in this blockade. That must, must end. And it is incumbent upon us as journalists to make this context clear.

A de-zionised, liberated and democratic Palestine from the river to the sea; a Palestine that will welcome back the refugees and build a society that does not discriminate on the basis of culture, religion or ethnicity. 

This new state would labor to rectify, as much as possible, the past evils, in terms of economic inequality, the stealing of property and the denial of rights. This could herald a new dawn for the whole Middle East.

It is not always easy to stick to your moral compass, but if it does point north – towards decolonization and liberation – then it will most likely guide you through the fog of poisonous propaganda, hypocritical policies and the inhumanity, often perpetrated in the name of ‘our common Western values’. (Ilan Pappe)

Fuck these monsters:

Here, from Scott Ritter, and he will be further emblazoned with the racist and anti-Semite labels:

Moshe Dyan, the Israeli Chef of Staff, was in attendance, and delivered a eulogy which has gone down in Israeli history as one of the defining speeches of the nation. “Early yesterday morning,” Dyan began, his voice carrying over the crowd of mourners, “Roi was murdered. The quiet of the spring morning dazzled him and he did not see those waiting in ambush for him, at the edge of the furrow.”

Let us not cast the blame on the murderers today. Why should we declare their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate.

It is not among the Arabs in Gaza, but in our own midst that we must seek Roi’s blood. How did we shut our eyes and refuse to look squarely at our fate, and see, in all its brutality, the destiny of our generation? Have we forgotten that this group of young people dwelling at Nahal Oz is bearing the heavy gates of Gaza on its shoulders?

Beyond the furrow of the border, a sea of hatred and desire for revenge is swelling, awaiting the day when serenity will dull our path, for the day when we will heed the ambassadors of malevolent hypocrisy who call upon us to lay down our arms.

Roi’s blood is crying out to us and only to us from his torn body. Although we have sworn a thousandfold that our blood shall not flow in vain, yesterday again we were tempted, we listened, we believed.

We will make our reckoning with ourselves today; we are a generation that settles the land and without the steel helmet and the canon’s maw, we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home. Let us not be deterred from seeing the loathing that is inflaming and filling the lives of the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who live around us. Let us not avert our eyes lest our arms weaken.

This is the fate of our generation. This is our life’s choice—to be prepared and armed, strong, and determined, lest the sword be stricken from our fist and our lives cut down.

The young Roi who left Tel Aviv to build his home at the gates of Gaza to be a wall for us was blinded by the light in his heart and he did not see the flash of the sword. The yearning for peace deafened his ears and he did not hear the voice of murder waiting in ambush. The gates of Gaza weighed too heavily on his shoulders and overcame him.

The speech is notable for its open recognition of the hatred of Israel on the part of the Palestinians imprisoned in Gaza, as well as the source of their hatred, and understanding regarding the legitimacy of the Palestinian emotions.

But it is also unapologetic about the righteousness of the Israeli cause, regardless of the legitimacy of the Palestinian cause. Israel, Dyan said, cannot be settled without the “steel helmet and canon’s maw.” War, he said, was Israel’s “life choice,” and as such Israel was condemned to a life of militarized diligence, “lest the sword be stricken from our fist and our lives cut down.” (Why I no longer stand with Israel, and never will again)

Ritter came late to the party, and he and I are on opposite sides of so many things, even though I have been around military longer than he has, and fuck my own background in the Army. I have always been a socialist (age 13), a communist for 40 years. But late to the party — i.e. supporting Palestine — is much better than the genocidal mentality of the Empire. The irony is he says he stood with Israel?@#$%&.

Oh well, a leather neck Marine comes late to the Party.

[Photo: Palestinian children killed by Israeli bombs, Gaza, October 2023]

And, so, USA accepts how many killed by disease and famine and uncleared landmines, okay with Blood Diamonds, Blood Cell Phones, Blood Electric Vehicles?

The trickling of death caused by Klanada-U$A-EuroTrashLandia-U…inbred…Kingdom-Five Eyes-Isra-Hell, not so dramatic and sick in your face as this, uh?

Over 6,000 guided bombs dropped on Gaza. Six days, 1,000 bombs dropped, on a 5 by 25 strip of land. No Smart Fucking Bombs there. Total implosion of babies, children, pregnant women, men, old, young, disabled, in hospitals.

But again, it’s the USA, the taxpayer, the fucking populaces of the world:

Read this: Gazan Cry to the World

“We are alone. Screaming. Dying. We have never seen such inhumanity, ever. Shame on every country watching us die. Shame on every group, every single person who is doing nothing. France, Germany, every country bans us, does not regard us as human. We are alone. We are legitimate, we are fighting for our homes, for our very life. We have fought for many countries – we fought for you in African, Arabic, European countries– are you fighting for us? We will not live under inequality, with indignity, we will not live under apartheid, colonialism, fascism – we will live with equality and freedom in our own land.

We are fighting to share equally in humanity.

In 30 years we will look you in the eye, and we will know if you stood with us.”

– Majed Abusalama, 13 October, 2023

Oh, those late to the party jar heads no?

Julie Webb-Pullman is a journalist and human rights investigator who lived in Gaza for nine years. She has also lived and written on Cuban, Mexican, Venezuelan and El Salvadorean issues.

What will we respond, how will we answer, now, tomorrow, next year? A genocide is being committed as I write, a genocide of growing proportions under the noses of every corrupt western politician, every African, Asian and Arabic leader, even at the behest of some of them.

Depraved and demented Biden pouring weapons into “Israel” by the planeload, massing gunboats in the Mediterranean to eradicate more, more, more Palestinian women and children. Shameless Sunak, cheering on the slaughter from the sidelines. European countries criminalising anyone daring to stand up in the street and say YA BASTA – or even those saying nothing, just holding a Palestinian flag. The weak and self-interested Arab countries shaking the blood-soaked hands of Palestine’s oppressors without flinching, without a second or even first thought for the now-thousands of Palestinian dead, let alone doing even one concrete thing to prevent more deaths and suffering in the coming minutes, hours, days, weeks…

What can be said, when hospitals, refugee centres, homes and entire streets are being bombed into oblivion? When health, civil defence, media workers are literally dying to do their job? When dozens of entire families have been utterly eradicated from the face of the earth? When “child’s play” is not pick-up-sticks, but “pick up the severed limbs of your friend/mother/sister” following an Israeli air-strike? How are we letting this happen? How are WE letting this happen?

Because we are. We have collectively allowed the cancer of Zionism to metastasise, until it has normalised and its grossness now threatens the very notion of humanity. The tentacles of colonialism and fascism are strangling not only Gaza and Palestine, but also any fanciful western illusions of our “civilisation”: equality, human rights, freedom, dignity.

There is no dignity in standing by while our governments fail to hold the Zionist apartheid state accountable, not only for this current genocide but also for their past atrocities, the impunity for which has led us here. There is no dignity in failing to hold our own governments accountable for their complicity.

There is no equality in insisting that “Israel” has the right to self-defense while denying Palestinians, whether Hamas or otherwise, that same right.

There is no freedom for any of us, until and unless Palestine is also free.

Here, Pappe:

Sanctions! 1,5000,000 — Iraqis.

Fucking Zionist pigs:

One million Afghan children may die from starvation over the next several months, according to the United Nations. Nearly 23 million Afghans are facing “crisis levels of hunger” and 8.7 million are on the “brink of starvation.” This mass hunger has rendered millions of Afghans on the “verge of death,” according to UN Secretary-General António Guterres. Alongside looming mass starvation, Afghans face below-freezing temperatures, severe shortages of life-saving medical supplies, and extreme poverty, making conditions in Afghanistan among the gravest of human rights crises on Earth.

This is not a natural disaster, nor is it the result of conflict internal to Afghanistan. This a human-made humanitarian catastrophe. United States-made, specifically.

These are the numbers and statistics the Blinken Family, the Nuland Family, the Yellen Family, the Garland Family, the Kagan Family and Biden Family LOVE:

More Afghans are poised to die from U.S. sanctions over the next few months alone than have died at the hands of the Taliban and U.S. military forces over the last 20 years combined — by a significant margin.

FUCK THE USA, FUCK CANADA, FUCK EUROPE, FUCK ISRAEL, FUCK UK . . . and FUCK US ALL!

There Will be Blood — Unrepresentative Inverted Totalitarian Democracy Shall Get its Pounds of Flesh!

subheading, headline in Oregon newspaper — “ODOT to Oregonians: Highways are going to be less safe this winter”

And this is acceptable? I head some Yahoo at the local grocery store, a checker, going on and on about what the USA should do, militarily, to China. This is the age of Trump-Biden-Bush-Obama and the Masters that Rear Their Ugly Heads Over and Over and Over — Nuland and Kagan, and Blinken, anyone?

This is political and economic and statutory pornography of the highest order:

“We encourage area communities and travelers to prepare (for) the possibility of extended delays, closures, more chain restrictions, and varying degrees of traction as they navigate roads,” ODOT says.

“With smaller budgets for staff and materials needed to plow, sand, and deice, the potential for traffic jams and crashes increases. Incidents will take longer to clear,” ODOT says. “We strongly recommend travelers carry a fully stocked emergency kit, including a phone charger and weather-appropriate clothing, and refuel or recharge their tanks often.”

That is Oregon government saying we are cutting back on road safety. There’s no upside. (source)

You can parse THIS one aspect of D-minus state, city, county, national infrastructure and then look at those cold dead eyes of the Republicans and Democrats and the Libertarians and the Non-Voters at 43, 000, 000.

Acceptable loss of time, life, livelihoods. Stuck in a mountain pass. Every man and woman and child for him or her or them selves.

Until we get stupidity, scientism, selective ignorance: From Today’s local Rag, Newport News Times. “Not sand, science”

I wish to respond to Ping and Johnson’s letter (“Some facts about glyphosate,” Sept. 22 edition) with additional context and more information on the topic of glyphosate.

I’ve spent the last 17 years of my professional career supporting Oregon’s natural resource industries, largely on issues related to pests and pesticides. For over 14 years, I worked for Oregon State University. I have authored and co-authored academic papers, including a paper on pesticide risks in The Lancet Planetary Health. I am no stranger to the scientific process. I am also well aware of the controversy surrounding glyphosate, and the astounding level of misinformation characterizing the issue.

In response to the three points raised by Ping and Johnson, I offer the following:

1) Every regulatory body around the world that has evaluated glyphosate within the context of its use has found it to be safe when used as intended, including the U.S., the EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the list goes on.

So, back and forth, back and forth, and the truth is never in the hands of agricultural lobbying outfits pushing GMOs and GEs and killer pesticides and weed killers.

For the past couple of decades, tens of thousands of people living in rural Sri Lanka have been devastated by kidney failure due to unclear causes, also known as CKDu. Similar incidences of mysterious kidney diseases have emerged in tropical farming communities around the world.

A massive field study of the wells supplying drinking water to the Sri Lankan communities, conducted by researchers at Duke University, has identified a possible culprit—glyphosate, the active compound in Roundup, the most widely used herbicide in the world.

The results of the study were published in Environmental Science and Technology Letters on September 13, 2023.

Roundup is a glyphosate-based herbicide used to control weeds and other pests. Because it is supposed to break down in the environment within a few days to weeks, its use is relatively under-regulated by most public health agencies. But when glyphosate encounters certain trace metal ions that make water hard—like magnesium and calcium—glyphosate-metal ion complexes can form. Those complexes can persist up to seven years in water and 22 years in soil.

“It was always thought that this chemical would break down very quickly in the environment, but it seems to stick around a lot longer than we expected when it complexes in hard water,” said Nishad Jayasundara, the Juli Plant Grainger Assistant Professor of Global Environmental Health at Duke. “We have to consider how glyphosate is interacting with these other elements, and what happens to glyphosate when you take that into your body as a complex.”

In certain agricultural areas of Sri Lanka, the high, dry climate combined with its geological formations creates the perfect conditions for hard water. It is also in these regions that CKDu has reached epidemic levels, with as many as 10% of children aged 5–11 years exhibiting signs of early onset kidney damage.

Jayasundara, who is from Sri Lanka himself, believed that glyphosate may play a role in CKDu incidence because of the region’s hard water, even though Sri Lanka has banned use of the herbicide. To test his hypothesis, Jayasundara teamed up with environmental chemist Lee Ferguson, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Duke and his Ph.D. student Jake Ulrich. In collaboration with Mangala De Silva, a professor at the University of Ruhuna, Sri Lanka, the Duke team sampled more than 200 wells across four regions in Sri Lanka. (source)

The tricks of the trade include obfuscate. When the money makers, the profiteers, merchants of death, attempt to read articles like this, they implode: Tipping the Balance of Autism Risk: Potential Mechanisms Linking Pesticides and Autism & Autism genes are selectively targeted by environmental pollutants including pesticides, heavy metals, bisphenol A, phthalates and many others in food, cosmetics or household products

They interfere with hormonal regulation and the development of the human body (Leemans et al., 2019). In vivo studies have shown that DDT, glyphosate, and other pesticides reduce the T4 (thyroxine hormone) levels in serum, and reduce transthyretin proteins, required for T4 transport. (Toxicity analysis of endocrine disrupting pesticides on non-target organisms: A critical analysis on toxicity mechanisms)

Gaza and Extermination?

Show description:

“After Hamas’s attack in Israel on Saturday, the Israeli massacres of Palestinians in Gaza have skyrocketed. This genocidal ethnic cleansing has scarcely been reported by mainstream media at any time in its 50 year history, let alone at a time when western media and politicians openly support a religious war against Palestine. So we’re giving a platform to three Palestinian voices to share their story.

We speak with Refaat Alareer, a Palestinian academic currently sheltering 15 children in his Gaza apartment, Yumna Patel, the Palestine news director for Mondoweiss, and Muhammad Shehada, a Palestinian writer from Gaza.

Their stories of bombings, murder, cruelty, and lies from the Israeli government and malicious rumors from US media and politicians are difficult to hear, but so important when they’re being silenced everywhere else.

“The American public and the general public around the world is being sold a genocide,” they tell us. “We are being convinced through the rhetoric of Israeli politicians, the US president, and US state department spokespeople that Palestinians, specifically Gazans, are not human. They are trying to wipe Gaza off the map.”

And while the deaths of Israelis must be covered and mourned, the West’s hypocrisy and double standard on the value of life is clear.

“I have never seen the amount of profiles and interviews with the families of victims than I’ve seen of mainstream media interviewing these Israeli families. I have never seen this level of attention paid to one singular Palestinian.”

Israeli children matter. Why don’t Palestinian children matter? “No attention is being paid to the killing of 270 children just in the span of three or four days.”

Refaat, Yumna, and Muhammad share their frustration and disgust with “the fact that our government and the President of the United States is repeating dehumanizing genocidal language, repeating these unsubstantiated claims.”

And sadly, we may not be able to hear their voices for long. Refaat, calling from Gaza with the sounds of bombs exploding in the background during the interview, warns that resources are running low. “But in a couple of days, maximum a week or two, if things don’t change, we’re looking at a total blackout, no coverage, no media, no internet. Not that Israel cares, and mainstream media is complicit.”

Hear them speak, and share the interview to spread their message. At a dangerous time, we thank you for continuing to support Useful Idiots and our guests.”

Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate cover the latest from Gaza as Israel demands 1.1 million civilians leave the northern area of the besieged enclave in expectation of a regime change war, and US, UK and French ships arrive at the coast.

The state of Oregon can’t even get snow plows and sand and deicer, or workers. This is capitalism collapsing on the taxpayer, while trillions are thrown at meat grinders, that one in Ukraine and now the one in Gaza.

Or chemicals, defended, man.

Impacts of pesticides on our health

Pesticides are poisons and, unfortunately, they can harm more than just the “pests” at which they are targeted. They are toxic, and exposure to pesticides can cause a number of health effects. They are linked to a range of serious illnesses and diseases from respiratory problems to cancer.

Exposure

Exposure to pesticides can occur in many ways. Farmers and farm workers can be exposed to pesticides in agriculture through the treatment of crops, plants and grain stores. Rural residents living next door to farms can be exposed to pesticide drift. Exposure can also occur in forestry, professional and domestic pest control, through the treatment of wood with preservatives, the treatment of boat hulls with anti-fouling agents, and the treatment of livestock with anti-parasitic preparations, e.g. sheep dip. In our towns and cities we are exposed to pesticides through the spraying of amenities, such as our parks, pavements and playgrounds. Many people buy pesticides off the shelf for home and garden use. And finally, pesticide residues found on, and in, our food also puts us at risk.

Should you be concerned?

Acute toxicity

Pesticides can be acutely toxic. This means that they can cause harmful or lethal effects after a single episode of ingestion, inhalation or skin contact. The symptoms are evident shortly after exposure or can arise within 48 hours. They can present as:

• respiratory tract irritation, sore throat and/or cough
• allergic sensitisation
• eye and skin irritation
• nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea
• headache, loss of consciousness
• extreme weakness, seizures and/or death

Chronic (or long term) toxicity

Pesticides can cause harmful effects over an extended period, usually following repeated or continuous exposure at low levels. Low doses don’t always cause immediate effects, but over time, they can cause very serious illnesses.

Long term pesticide exposure has been linked to the development of Parkinson’s disease; asthma; depression and anxiety; attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD); and cancer, including leukaemia and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

It’s all about Israel, 1.0 and no 2.0 (BlackUkroLandiaRock).

Special to the Newport (OR) News Times : Part three of Three-Part monthly series on domestic abuse

I’m in the courtroom at the plea bargain hearing – aka diversionary sentencing. My friend is there – strong, professionally dressed, with her mother who had come a long way out of state to support her daughter. Behind my friend is her tribe – nine women who she has come to call friends over the course of a year. There are two men in the courtroom also supporting her.

The accused is in an orange jumpsuit with arms shackled to his waist.  Two sheriff’s deputies are in the courtroom watching over him.

He has no one there for support. His defense attorney looks nervous, with reddened face.

The judge calls my friend to the witness stand where she begins reading her victim impact statement. I’ve been to many of these sorts of hearings – I know not all judges are attentive. This judge, however, is moved by the survivor’s words – all four pages, single spaced. It’s her story, and the words are directed at the accused, her husband.

He forces a gaze away from his powerful voiced wife during her catharsis.  The people supporting her have tears in their eyes. Her mother is distraught hearing the details of these four and a half years of hell.

Near the end of her testimony, these words ring so true now that she’s a survivor, no longer his victim:

“The person you assaulted that night exists no more. I am in process of regaining all the self confidence you took away from me, taking back control over my life and healing from all the trauma you caused me. Make no mistake — you can’t fool me anymore. Although you’ve shaken me to my core, you didn’t succeed in killing me; I am now growing stronger than ever.

That’s my biggest victory. I am finally seeing you for the monster that you are. I am standing up for myself. Unlike you, I never sought vengeance. By now, I only want you to take accountability and be held legally responsible for what you did to me. I am finding myself much more peaceful knowing exactly who and what I was dealing with. I know you know exactly what you did to me that night and how much you’ve abused me over the years, and it’s going to haunt and torture your consciousness forever, no matter how drunk you get. YOU will have to live with those thoughts after this day.”

The judge commends the survivor for her strength, for her composure and for her ability to move ahead in her life. Not surprisingly, the defendant shows no remorse; in fact, he makes no statement or any attempt at an apology.  He is emotionless.

Universal Abuse

There are around twenty folk at the Samaritan Education building where My Sister’s Place is hosting the legal services people with Catholic Charities. The discussion is domestic abuse and immigration. We listen to a Romanian lawyer and one from Columbia, originally. They work on asylum cases and special visas for those fleeing the hell of emotional, sexual, emotional abuse. As well as the economic and physical intimidation and threats. Stalking and manipulation of children also occur with folks who are undocumented and attempting to get a green card.

We get the alphabet – VAWA, U Visas, T Visas and SIJS, to name a few. Respectively, we have Violence Against Women Act; serious crimes & sex trafficking U & T visas; Special Immigration Juvenile Status.

This arena is a WHOLE other set of stories, but the bottom line is that ironically my friend who is the subject of this piece is a married woman who sought a green card during the marriage, and with the abuse, the husband threatened her with pulling away his support of her application. He contacted the immigration officials working on my friend’s case to renege his support of a green card.

I did get the survivor to contact the Arizona social worker during her fleeing to Arizona March  2022. Heild’s experience is deep:

She was the Director of Services for the first nonprofit directing a 16-bed safe home as the domestic abuse provider in Northern Pinal County , AZ — CAAFA, Community Alliance Against Family Abuse. She supervised the staff but also directed a 24-hour hotline, support groups and worked in legal advocacy.

Both Heild and Amber agree that community outreach, fundraising and volunteer programs are vital in terms of shifting the culture at large to support services and advocacy for victims of domestic abuse.

Limitations exist, according to Heidi:

“DV programs are for the most part short term solutions – average stay in a shelter 2-3 months, not enough time to deal with trauma, find housing and other basic needs. Most victims seeking shelter and services are lacking support, childcare, financial support and are considered economically vulnerable.”

The Story Never Ends – Victim to Survivor to Hero

My friend the survivor wants to tell – write her story. She advocates even now for other women fleeing abusive partners. She is out of one limbo and in another as the legal separation – divorce – from this fellow is another stage in her complete break from the abuser, his family, and friends.

She knows this series is about how abuse fits into the entire scheme of things, and my own take on her story is my take. Her story is hers to tell, and while a memoir is a worthy forum or medium, who knows where she will be in half a year, a year, five years from now.

“I’ve taken back my power,” she states. Even her opening of her statement contextualizes her life with an abuser and others’ lives: “I see clearly now. I see how you gained control over the years and how you targeted me from day one. By shining so bright – me the independent, multi-lingual, smart business owner — I had what you never had. You saw in me a powerful but vulnerable well intentioned human being, and you took advantage of it as all abusers do. You never treated me as your equal. I was the perfect victim for you.”

Each step she takes is a power step, even though she has to march through a minefield of the possibility of her abuser breaking no-contact orders and fighting for every penny in a divorce.

“I’m a different person now that I finally broke the cycle,” she tells me. “I may never be ‘that’ woman I was when he first met me, but I am reclaiming the strength qualities and moving into a new version of me.”

+–+

The first National Domestic Violence Awareness Month occurred in 1987, so this October, check out local social services agency pages, but most pointedly, go to the My Sister’s Place Facebook page or their web site [https://www.msplincolncounty.org/ ] for the activities in our area tied to DV awareness and celebration of the survivors and their families.

NOTE: So, the following statement, in some form that was talked about but never written by the surivor, almost ended up in the newspaper with the survivor’s name as the final signature line, but this entire fucking broken system ontop of broken system she survived has straffed the soul and fiber of the survivor, pushing her back into victim mode/mood.

This is my putting my boots to the ground, putting my feet into her boots, my words, if I was the victim to survivor. And, still today, we have people on all sides of the political and intellectual divide still asking:

Moving from Victim to Survivor to New Life

I appreciate Paul Haeder and Newport News Times for the three-part series on Domestic Violence – August 8, Sept. 24, Oct. 13). Readers received a small view into the complications and complicities involved in battered wife syndrome.

The articles were definitely “trauma-informed.” Alas, though, I am writing this as the unnamed victim in this case. I am from Canada, I met the abuser five years ago in Guatemala, where I was a thriving business owner in Antigua.

I wanted a life of adventure and travel, and so, as a 33-year-old, finding this man seemed to be a great next step in my life.

I was wrong. I was targeted. I was manipulated. I was threatened, verbally abused, and fell into the trap of the yo-yo – leaving for a day or few weeks, but being roped back by my abuser who cried, plead, and promised to change.

I was in a sort of mental cage, a prison, and a Stockholm Syndrome.

On Nov. 12, he attempted to murder me, and was charged after the deputies had to break into our bedroom where he locked himself. I was shaking, with my dog, and without a phone as he threw my lifeline into the blackberry bushes.

The grand jury indicted him on 11 charges. He was put in jail on $750,000 bail.

My life from that point on was a dichotomy of me finding strength to begin divorce procedures, working with the DA on the upcoming trial, and working two jobs, landing a really amazing counselor, and understanding those almost five years of BWS.

I have to say that a few friends here, my sister and the investigating deputy were the only ones who did not let me down. The rest of the individuals and systems failed me. This failure speaks to the larger issue of domestic violence charges and trial and divorces landing the survivor back into a re-victimization role.

I’m not going to list specific names of those who failed me, and I have to believe I am not the only victim who has been failed in Lincoln County. The Das office failed me by slowly breaking down and opting for some odd plea agreement and fear of going to trial. Our tax-payer supported public defender failed me and other DV victims by doing her job by attempting to break me down and smear my reputation. The victims advocates were not deeply ensconced in trauma informed methodology.

My divorce lawyer failed me by only really jumping into the divorce trial a day before the actual proceeding. She was disorganized, inarticulate, and unfocused.

The judges failed me, too, including the judge who found that my years with this abuser, my supporting him in his deep alcoholism and sick days (four our of seven each week), my own concussion at the hands of this husband, all the threats and my sweat equity on the house in Waldport we built was worth a $27,500 asset award (sic) to me.

Even one of the judges failed me when I attempted to get a protective order/restraining order on my abuser’s mother who was harassing me and threatening to take my dog away. He found two out of the three precedents in my favor, but the last one stopped him from awarding me protection from an out-of-control mean mother-in-law.

I will be leaving this county soon. I have my dignity shredded, but I am mending through self-reflection, a close circle of friends and family support and my counselor who has been a lifeline for me to understand how and why I stayed in this abusive relationship and what I can do to move on with life to never be taken in by a narcissist and misogynist.

Does it take two to be part of a domestic abusive marriage? Yes, and it takes more than two. I was too hopeful, too willing to try and try again, I isolated myself, letting my family and friends down without letting them the true nature of this man’s abuse and threats.

Our patriarchal society played a part in my yo-yo behavior. The media and Hollywood also pushes some sick prejudices against women fighting back. And, unfortunately, the legal system, the mental health community, the so-called advocates, lawyers, and other “support” services have failed me.

Let it be known that I was VERY involved in my cases. The one judge at the plea agreement lauded me for being a strong, powerful woman. She listened to my four-page victim impact statement and seemed moved.

This is not about the final judgment —  the money, lack thereof — but for me, with my “green card,” I now face financial challenges. My big dog is my friend and emotional support, so I’m glad the mother-in-law failed to take the dog from me (she gifted him as a puppy almost three years ago).

I will be journaling and possibly writing my memoir tied to this very unsettling and emotional significant events in my life. I’m not yet forty years old, and I have so much positive energy moving on. I will never forgive this abuser, and I will always be looking behind my back from time to time, for PTSD is a never ending mental state, even in remission.

I write this to the Lincoln County community – advocates, stakeholders, families, women, all the people who believe in justice and restitution and restorative justice: beware of broken systems that will entangle you in compassionless or incompetent pencil pushers and overworked lawyers and prosecutors. Get a counselor, for sure, quickly, and steel yourself for a threadbare system that fails victims time and time again.

… and they can call us cockroaches, human animals, subhumans, rats, but a Jew who does that is bringing the wrath of their wandering who-ness to the table…

You can parse this here, but not there.

In schools? Palestine flag is not called hate speech.

You can’t call the Israeli Monsters, monsters, or you will be deplatformed and possibly stripped of job, money, banking, home, family.

Listen to this human scum. Go to 12:29 and listen to this human stain, this piece of war crime criminal.

LINK.

These MSSM, mainstream sycophant media, all of the human stain calling for turning Gaza into a parking lot, and this is what? AmeriKKKan and now Jewish First, Israel Also First, hatred.

Newsweek senior editor-at-large Josh Hammer* issued a call Saturday night for massive ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza.

His plan is to force Palestinians in Gaza – many of whom are there because their families were expelled by Israel and Zionist militias in 1948 – into Egypt.

*These are Jewish values: [Josh Hammer was born in Westchester County, New York to a Jewish family. He graduated from Duke University in 2011 with a Bachelor of Science degree in economics.] All of them, Jared Kushner, David Brooks, Yellen, Garland, Nuland, Blinken, Kagan. JEWISH terrorists, carte blanc.

And so how is this normal thinking, how is this journalism, how is this anything but hate speech?

Then the fucking racist dirty rabbis? Listen to this scum:

Hammer then notes, “The 2005 Israeli disengagement from the Gaza Strip has already been solidified as one of the very worst mistakes in Israeli history (along with ceding the Temple Mount to the Jordanian waqf after the Six-Day War, the disastrous lack of preemptive action before the Yom Kippur War, the Oslo accords, and the failure to write a physical constitution at the state’s founding).”

Rabbi Ben Packer, a racist who grew up in Virginia and took Duke University graduate Stephen Miller to the occupied West Bank years before Miller went to work for President Donald Trump, joined Hammer in raging at the 2005 Gaza withdrawal.

Packer, director of the Jerusalem Heritage House, wrote Sunday on Facebook to excoriate former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, an anti-Palestinian war criminal, for moving Israeli troops and settlers out of Gaza.

“As was predicted by many, including many rabbis, the ‘disengagement’ from Gaza has been a colossal failure to bring any semblance of peace and stability. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to dig up Ariel Sharon’s body and shoot what’s left of it at Gaza.”

Sharon was a war criminal, but that’s a horrifying idea, particularly coming from a religious leader who interacted with Duke and UNC students and works with many young people today. (source)

This is so disgusting, insane, off the rocker. These blood lust Jews!

Palestinian Center for Human Rights director Raji Sourani on just how far Israel has already gone in Gaza.

“The Israelis have lost their minds,” said Sourani. He then added, “They are annihilating entire families.”

All of this is of little to no concern for Hammer. Continuing with his colonial vision for Gaza, he wrote:

“After that, Israel must formally re-annex Gaza. The 2005 disengagement was a catastrophic mistake that needs to be reversed. After re-annexation, there will need to be a military occupation to ensure it does not go off the rails once again. Israeli security and intelligence apparatuses should then ensure the installation of a puppet regime (not Hamas, but crucially, also not the Palestinian Authority), likely led by some sort of Arab Zionist faction.”

[Fucking human feces: Rep. Jake Auchincloss Supports Gaza Bombing Despite Captive American and Israeli Civilians – The Intercept]

Fucking Stain!

[They need to be shot, truly, rabid, viral, poisoned vermin these politicos: “US and Israel should bomb Iran,” Senator Lindsey Graham]

This is the great open free democratic U$A: [Republicans are escalating their rhetoric to call for actions to “eliminate,” “eradicate” and “level” the Hamas militant group — no matter what it takes — as Washington plots more assistance to Israel in the wake of recent attacks.

“This is sick, and we have to treat sick people the way they deserve to be treated and eliminate them,” former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who’s running for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, said on Fox News on Wednesday morning.

“Do whatever the hell you have to do to defend yourself. Level the place,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told Fox News on Tuesday night.

“Hamas must be eradicated & Israel must respond DISPROPORTIONATELY to this & to any futures attacks from any enemy,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) tweeted Monday.

Such rhetoric marks a contrast to the Biden administration’s calls for leaders in Jerusalem to conduct a “proportionate response” to the attacks, though the White House so far won’t say if there are any lines Jerusalem shouldn’t cross.

…

[Stephen Gardner hosts independent Journalist Max Blumenthal to discuss the coming hot war as the United States and Israel gear up to attack Hamas. Hezbollah and Iran are ready to pounce to back Hamas and get back at US for blocking $6 billion in frozen funds. Hostage Negotiations have begun with many countries involved. Hamas is a gang within Palestine that wants to attack Israel. Palestine suffers because of the actions of Hamas. Blumenthal tries to explain the complex relationship of Palestine and Israel while not desecrating the horrible attack events this past week.]

Here, people calling a dirty Jewish Zionist a Dirty Jewish Zionist:

Even on a comedy show, the reporting and perspectives are a million times more cogent and on target than ALL the fucking mainstream sycophant media:

Reports describing the violence during the recent assault by Hamas fighters on Israel have been nothing short of shocking. Also shocking, however, has been the treatment of Palestinians for more than half a century by Israeli occupiers. Guest host Craig Jardula and Americans’ Comedian Kurt Metzger talk to professor and author Norman Finkelstein about the failure of Palestinian efforts at nonviolent protest and the nearly non-existent options available to Gazans under blockade.

Oh, the dirty rotten criminals, and, darn, back to how many? Is it 500,000 killed and wounded in Ukraine, counting Russians, Civilians (mostly in Donbass) and of course the meatgrinder pressed into service, one week wonder government issue pathetic old men thrown into a UkroNaziUniform with a shitty automatic weapon and seven punds of ammo, gun, water, food?

Join a discussion which featured retired Colonel Jacques Baud, Senior Swiss Military Intelligence Officer, former NATO worker in Ukraine and award winning author of “Ukraine Between War and Peace” “Putin: Master of the Game?” and Governing by Fake News among others. Organized by the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute and the Canada Wide Peace & Justice Network. Moderated by Tamara Lorincz, Member of the Canadian Voice of Women for Peace and WILPF Canada.

Jacques with five languages, decades of experience, negotiating, with the UN, in Ukraine, Sudan, Libya, and not a fucking Mainstream Sycophant Media piece of human stain could get him on their three minute wonder shows, because the MSSM and the Blinken-Nuland-Yellen-Kagan-Garland Show is all about yelling or inarticulate articulation.

Toe to toe? With a diplomat who is a retired colonel, not from the Cheetos Cadres of American Military, but from Belgium.

The final solution, man, coming from Goyim in U$A and Jew from ZioNaziLandia!

Kill the Gazan Kiddo!

Germany, ghettos, Jews, and now, Jews and Germans, all for famine:

Low Key’s Terrorist taken down from his channel. (Lowkey taken down from YouCIAJewTube!) But here!

How one expert says the Israel-Hamas war could expand as Lebanon, Syria launch rockets – Israel has mobilized more than 300,000 reservists as it prepares for a potential ground offensive in Gaza. Israeli and Hamas officials have said at least 2,100 people have been killed on both sides.

Every drop of blood I FUCKING PAY for in this DIRTY USA fucking shit hole.

does it matter if it’s Fox or NBC or NYT or WSJ or these Fake Fakes Like The Nation because an open air prison, Gaza, and Palestine, not recognized a people, are not AT WAR with Israel

They are in their waders with $500 fishing poles fishing for salmon.

The boaters with fancy boats of a $100,000 with three engines are throwing crab pots over the side to continue in their numbness.

Locals are pounding and sawing away with their Better Homes and Gardens projects.

Piles of piles of candy in stores awaiting the poor AmeriKKKano children’s dash in the streets for Halloween.

Radio stations are talking about football and upcoming Fall fun.

Muscle cars and 35-foot RVs travel highway 101 looking for the next photo shoot to deadened their ennui.

My spouse is away from home assisting a cancer-ridden father as the TV blares and blares and blares the lies of Jewish Pride and Israeli Supremacy. FOX, sure, but no different thatn CBC,CBS, ABC, MNBC, NPR, PBS.

Two aircraft carriers made in the USA are heading for the Mediterranean.

Endless manure heaps of half-mind politicians yakking and war drumming and virtue signaling.

Fuck this country. Of course, Israel should be, well, you know where I stand there. Think of the dodo!

Evil dirty USA there, stripping my shallow roots from some sort of sane life, with SS less than a welfare sad sack, roads crumbling, two-year waits to get a primary doctor, prices not up 6 percent, but 300 percent (you want me to repeat the number of items I have purchased in the past three years that have tripled in price?).

Israel has free health care for the Jews, and USA funnels $5 or $10 billion or more a year into Israel, and we get what?

Remember those crocodile tears for the Jews in ghettos, the forced starvation, the concentration camps?

Fuck these Rachel Maddows these Sean Penns these Blinkens these Kamala I Married a Jewish Man Harris’s.

Is this what happened? Early Saturday morning, Hamas launched an air-sea-land surprise offensive from Gaza into Israel. Its operation responded to an extraordinarily violent year that followed the rise of Israel’s most-extreme-ever right-wing government: a year when Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed more than 200 Palestinians; locked thousands more to languish in military prisons; intensified assaults on West Bank villages like Jenin and Huwara; kept 2 million Palestinians under a blockade of Gaza that has left only an estimated 4 percent of households able to access clean drinking water; and attacked Palestine on symbolic levels, as when the anti-Palestinian Justice Minister Itamar Ben Gvir led multiple intrusions into the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem with the express aim of bringing one of the holiest sites in Islam under Israeli sovereignty.

I will be teaching a class Friday, memoir writing, and the students will talk about their lives, the plans for some sort of writing project tied to their lives. We will probe each person’s motivation, consideration about who and where they are now; perceptions of life now, going back, and learning from the hard knocks and trials and tribulations and those so-called high points.

Does my wife’s father, who is steeped in anti-liberal education, anti-diversity thinking, anti-BIPOC mentality, anti-communism hatred, anti-socialism digust, anti-multipolarism stupidity; steeped in racism and sexism, who believes in some bearded blue-eyed guy in the sky with his shepherd’s hook looking over his war-mongering, child-bombing mob of believers.

It is a world of babble, two distinct languages living in this hell hole — all of them, democrats, republicans, libertarians, they speak mush, mishmash of lies, propaganda, scripted words, empty ideas, false histories, and just mean as cuss words. I have so many problems and challenges even to get them to listen!

These recreating Americans, these K12 schools vacating/rotorooting minds; these Mad men and Mad women looking for the next sale on 12-roll three-ply toilet paper and beef short ribs and Arizona Tea, they do not care. And to get them to care, whew, that is the question, and with so many of them colonized by bad air, bad water, bad food, bad media, bad entertainment, bad schooling , bad politicking, bad legislation, bad judges and juries, it is that shit show for sure. A CHALLENGE. Talking to a brick WALL.

Vijay:

Who knows how many Palestinian civilians will be killed by the time this report is published? Among the bodies that cannot be taken to a hospital or a morgue, because there will be no petrol or electricity, will be large numbers of children. They will have hidden in their homes, listening to the sound of the Israeli F-16 bombers coming closer and closer, the explosions advancing toward them like a swarm of red ants on the chase. They will have covered their ears with their hands, crouched with their parents in their darkened living rooms, waiting, waiting for the inevitable bomb to strike their home. By the time the rescue workers get to them under the mountains of rubble, their bodies would have become unrecognizable, their families weeping as familiar clothing or household goods are excavated. Such is the torment of the Palestinians who live in Gaza.

A friend of mine in Gaza who has a 17-year-old child told me on the first night of this recent spell of Israeli bombing that his child has lived through at least ten major Israeli assaults on the Palestinians in Gaza. As we spoke, we made a list of some of the wars we could remember (because these are Israel’s wars, we are using the Israeli army names for their attacks on Gaza):

• Operation Summer Rains (June 2006)
• Operation Autumn Clouds (October-November 2006)
• Operation Hot Winter (February-March 2008)
• Operation Cast Lead (December 2008-January 2009)
• Operation Running Echo (March 2012)
• Operation Pillar of Cloud (November 2012)
• Operation Protective Edge (July-August 2014)
• Operation Black Belt (November 2019)
• Operation Breaking Dawn (August 2022)
• Operation Shield and Arrow (May 2023)

Each of these attacks pulverizes the minimal infrastructure that remains intact in Gaza and hits the Palestinian civilians very hard. Civilian deaths and casualties are recorded by the Health Ministry in Gaza but disregarded by the Israelis and their Western enablers. As the current bombing intensified, journalist Muhammad Smiry said, “We might not survive this time.” Smiry’s worry is not isolated. Each time Israel sends in its fighter jets and missiles, the death and destruction are of an unimaginable proportion. This time, with a full-scale invasion, the destruction will be at a scale not previously witnessed.

The Savagery of the War Against the Palestinian People Vijay Prashad | 11 Oct 2023

Proportional Force? Here’s from West Point, Articles of War!

In addition to being codified, the rule of proportionality has a specific scope. It applies in a particular context, in the conduct of hostilities and prescribes a specific type of proportionality: the balance of interests. It also determines the elements to be weighed. The rule of proportionality requires that the anticipated incidental loss of human life and damage to civilian objects should not be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage expected from the destruction of a military objective. The balance is composed of, on the one hand, the military advantage expected from the destruction of a military objective, and on the other hand, the incidental damage caused by the military intervention, i.e., the harm to civilians and civilian property.

The limited circumstances to which the rule of proportionality applies demonstrate its specific scope. The rule applies only when a military objective (legitimate target) is the object of an attack and incidental damage is foreseeable. Moreover, the rule applies only to an attack. Not every military operation in an armed conflict constitutes an attack.

Finally, the proportionality rule operates according to an “all-or-nothing” (p. 24) model. This means that once the conditions for its application are met, it must be complied with in full. The principle of proportionality, on the contrary, offers variable solutions since it operates according to the “plus-or-minus” (p. 427) scheme. Principles are norms that require something to be achieved to the greatest extent possible according to the factual possibilities and within the limits imposed by other competing principles. They are “optimization requirements”(p. 47) characterized by the fact that they can be satisfied to varying degrees and the appropriate level of satisfaction depends not only on factual, but also on legal and political possibilities. Rules, on the other hand, are either satisfied or not satisfied, with no room for discretion. They are called “fixed points” (p. 2) in the field of factual and legal possibilities.

We remembered all the miseries, all the injustices, our people and the conditions they lived, the coldness with which world opinion looks at our cause, and so we felt that we will not permit them to crush us. We will defend ourselves and our revolution by every way and every means.

George Habash (1926-2008)

It’s always in the lawyer’s fucking dirty briefcase:

There has been an increasing number of armed conflicts, and others looming on the horizon, that should cause us to pause and think about why and how we go to war. The list is long: Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iran, Syria, North Korea, etc. One especially poignant method of analyzing our decisions to go to war that has not received much attention is based on the Just War doctrine. The overarching principle behind the Just War doctrine is proportionality: this doctrine observes that (1) any sovereign undertaking a war should measure its response in proportion to the claimed wrong, and (2) the means used to carry out that war should be proportionate to the desired goal. The doctrine was developed by early philosophers who were concerned with the unprincipled, and often brutal, way that sovereigns of their time went to war.’

So while the Fox News and Face the Nation lobotomies continue, the average Democrat and Republican, will never ever see this:

LINK

Does this headline mean anything to barbarians, Jews in Israel? UN slams Israeli siege on Gaza as violation of international law

It’s a siege on children (400 dead, murdered so far) and 1,500 total killed/murdered by Israel, and thousands injured and wounded, and the electricity is but, the Internet is cut, no drugs, equipment, no food. The wounded, dying and dead, those numbers increasing by the minute as F-15’s and F-16’s carpet bomb.

Starvation:

[Photo: Germany created the Warsaw ghetto to imprison and starve more than 400,000 Jews during World War II. ]

Eighty years ago, deep inside a Warsaw ghetto cemetery, Israel Milejkowski gathered fellow physicians with whom he co-authored a clandestine “hunger disease” study.

“What can I tell you, my beloved colleagues and companions in misery. You are a part of all of us,” said Milejkowski, a member of the ghetto’s Jewish Council and the head of its health department.

During the previous summer, many of the secret group’s 23 members had been “resettled,” a German euphemism for murder in the gas chambers of Treblinka.

[Jewish doctors’ secret study of Warsaw ghetto starvation rediscovered 80 years later ]

And today, in Occupied Palestine? “The Israeli military made precise calculations of Gaza’s daily calorie needs to avoid malnutrition during a blockade imposed on the Palestinian territory between 2007 and mid-2010, according to files the defence ministry released on Wednesday under a court order.

Israel says it never limited how many calories were available to Gaza, but critics claimed the document was proof the government limited food supplies to put pressure on Hamas.

At the height of the blockade Israel also maintained a list of foods that were permitted and banned from Gaza.

Major Guy Inbar, an Israeli military spokesman, said the calculation, based on a person’s average requirement of 2,300 calories a day, was meant to identify warning signs to help avoid a humanitarian crisis, and that it was never used to restrict the flow of food.”

Every Major or Colonel or General or Captain or soldier in Israel, they lie, and they are racists.

OPEN AIR PRISON. And, the children and old people, the babies and the disabled and pregnant women and sick ARE not soldiers: Gaza: Israel’s ‘Open-Air Prison’ at 15: Israel, Egypt Movement Restrictions Wreak Havoc on Palestinian Lives

Human Rights Watch: Israel’s sweeping restrictions on leaving Gaza deprive its more than two million residents of opportunities to better their lives, Human Rights Watch said today on the fifteenth anniversary of the 2007 closure. The closure has devastated the economy in Gaza, contributed to fragmentation of the Palestinian people, and forms part of Israeli authorities’ crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution against millions of Palestinians.

Israel’s closure policy blocks most Gaza residents from going to the West Bank, preventing professionals, artists, athletes, students, and others from pursuing opportunities within Palestine and from traveling abroad via Israel, restricting their rights to work and an education. Restrictive Egyptian policies at its Rafah crossing with Gaza, including unnecessary delays and mistreatment of travelers, have exacerbated the closure’s harm to human rights.

“Israel, with Egypt’s help, has turned Gaza into an open-air prison,” said Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch. “As many people around the world are once again traveling two years after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Gaza’s more than two million Palestinians remain under what amounts to a 15-year-old lockdown.”

Israel should end its generalized ban on travel for Gaza residents and permit free movement of people to and from Gaza, subject to, at most, individual screening and physical searches for security purposes.

And, 3-7-7-0-0-0. Remember that number, as USA feeds death machines to Saudi Arabia. Its modern, high-technology arsenal makes Saudi Arabia among the world’s most densely armed nations, with its military equipment being supplied primarily by the United States, France, and Britain. 377,000!!!

The war in Yemen has killed an estimated 377,000 people through direct and indirect causes. Over 150,000, including tens of thousands of civilians, have been killed in fighting, including the Saudi-led bombing campaign, while many more have died of hunger and disease in the humanitarian crisis caused by the war.

[Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) is a UK-based organisation working to end the international arms trade.

The arms business has a devastating impact on human rights and security, and damages economic development. Large scale military procurement and arms exports only reinforce a militaristic approach to international problems.

In seeking to end the arms trade, CAAT’s priorities are:

• to stop the procurement or export of arms where they might:
  • exacerbate conflict, support aggression, or increase tension
  • support an oppressive regime or undermine democracy
  • threaten social welfare through the level of military spending
• to end all government political and financial support for arms exports
• and to promote progressive demilitarisation within arms-producing countries. ]

…the era of censorship; Big Brother and Sister and Robot; planned pandemic; cleaved furins; Blinken-Yellen-Kagans-Nuland-Garland White House waging total war!!!!

Recent research has revealed that nearly half a million years ago, ancient human ancestors, predating Homo sapiens, were already engaging in advanced woodworking.

Well well, what will future scientists or AI robots be studying from our day and age?

[On Monday, the Environmental Protection Agency put out a statement that several community systems in the state had stopped supplying drinking water and that the agency was monitoring for potential contamination. And on Friday, state officials in North Carolina said they were monitoring hog lagoons and working with water treatment plants and water systems “and responding to any releases or issues that impact public water supply.”

In an interview with Science, microbiologist Rachel Noble said that while “municipal systems have regular testing protocol,” it will still take time to get results for larger systems as well as the approximately 900,000 households that get their drinking water from private wells.

“To be safe, people should stick to bottled drinking water until their well can be tested,” Noble told Science.]

[Recent examinations of the health and environmental impacts of mountaintop mining – stripping the tops off of mountains to extract coal – has the practice looking pretty guilty. It apparently spikes birth defects, worsens chronic conditions like heart disease, and ruins land, and it doesn’t look like it will be clearing its name anytime soon. And PNAS has added one more strike to the list with new research that further demonstrates how mountaintop mining erodes long-term water quality and causes deformities in aquatic life. ]

[The key has been demonstrating the differences between conventional crude and tar sands oil. “We were one of the leading groups to look at the unique risks tar sands oil poses during extraction, refinement, and transportation via rail and pipeline,” Droitsch says. Tar sands extraction emits up to three times more global warming pollution than does producing the same quantity of conventional crude. It also depletes and pollutes freshwater resources and creates giant ponds of toxic waste. Refining the sticky black substance produces piles of petroleum coke, a hazardous by-product. “This isn’t your grandfather’s typical oil,” she says. “It’s nasty stuff.” ]

[If you find yourself driving down South Kolb Road in the Arizona city of Tucson, you’ll find the houses give way to a much more unusual view; rows of military aircraft, still and silent, spread out under the baking desert sun. On and on, everything from enormous cargo lifters to lumbering bombers, Hercules freighters and the F-14 Tomcat fighters made famous in Top Gun.

This is Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, run by the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (309 AMARG). It’s home to some 4,400 aircraft, arranged over nearly 2,600 acres (10.5 sq km). Some look like they were parked only a few hours ago, others are swathed in protective coverings to keep out the sand and dust. Inside the facilities’ hangars, other planes have been reduced to crates of spare parts, waiting to be sent out to other bases in the US or across the world to help other aircraft take to the air again. To those who work here, Davis-Monthan is known by a far less prosaic name, one more in keeping with the Wild West folklore from Arizona’s earlier days. They call it The Boneyard.]

[The worst oil spill in history, the Gulf War oil spill spewed an estimated 8 million barrels of oil into the Persian Gulf after Iraqi forces opened valves of oil wells and pipelines as they retreated from Kuwait in 1991. The oil slick reached a maximum size of 101 miles by 42 miles and was five inches thick. ]

[LARGEST WW1 CEMETERY

After Tyne Cot, other large WW1 cemeteries include Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery, Belgium (10,786 burials), and Serre Road Cemetery No.2, France (7,137 burials).

LARGEST WW2 CEMETERY

The largest CWGC cemeteries commemorating World War Two casualties are the Reichswald Forest War Cemetery in Germany (7,671 burials) and El Alamein War Cemetery in Egypt (7,368 burials).

LARGEST WAR CEMETERY IN BELGIUM

The largest CWGC in Belgium is Tyne Cot Cemetery (11,978 burials). The next largest are Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery (10,786 burials) and Poelcapelle British Cemetery (7,478 burials). ]

+—+

Oh the legacy of modern man, and I could include a thousand images of a thousand different examples of the hell on earth homo bellum and homo economicus and homo consumpethicus has unleashed on the world.

Versus =

[“My father was 79,” says Donaldo Gomez, who lives in the steep Andes Mountains of Colombia. “He wasn’t sick a day in his life. And then he gets killed by a mine!”

Gomez, whose father died in 2003, lives in an area that was once swarming with guerrillas. When the Colombian army moved into the region a few years ago, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, planted land mines to try to stop them. The same thing happened in many parts of the country.

As a result, some 11,000 Colombians have been killed or injured by mines over the past 25 years. These days, only Afghanistan racks up more annual land mine casualties: 451 people killed and injured in the past year. Colombia’s total for deaths and injuries last year was 285, including 45 children.]

Not Built by Homo sapiens – Scientists Discover “Extraordinary” 476,000-Year-Old Wooden Structure

Try out my podcast (just a radio show recorded and saved) here = Link

Look for this book by Richard Wrangham

Cooking is a human universal that must have had widespread effects on the nutrition, ecology, and social relationships of the species that invented it. The location and timing of its origins are unknown, but it should have left strong signals in the fossil record. We suggest that such signals are detectable at ca. 1.9 million years ago in the reduced digestive effort (e.g., smaller teeth) and increased supply of food energy (e.g., larger female body mass) of early Homo erectus. The adoption of cooking required delay of the consumption of food while it was accumulated and/or brought to a processing area, and accumulations of food were valuable and stealable. Dominant (e.g., larger) individuals (typically male) were therefore able to scrounge from subordinate (e.g., smaller) individuals (typically female) instead of relying on their own foraging efforts. Because female fitness is limited by access to resources (particularly energetic resources), this dynamic would have favored females able to minimize losses to theft. To do so, we suggest, females formed protective relationships with male co‐defenders. Males would have varied in their ability or willingness to engage effectively in this relationship, so females would have competed for the best food guards, partly by extending their period of sexual attractiveness. This would have increased the numbers of matings per pregnancy, reducing the intensity of male intrasexual competition. Consequently, there was reduced selection for males to be relatively large. This scenario is supported by the fossil record, which indicates that the relative body size of males fell only once in hominid evolution, around the time when H. erectus evolved. Therefore we suggest that cooking was responsible for the evolution of the unusual human social system in which pair bonds are embedded within multifemale, multimale communities and supported by strong mutual and frequently conflicting sexual interest.

Ahh, coal.

Barack Obama’s pledge to cut carbon emissions has not stopped North Antelope Rochelle mine in Wyoming. In fact, production is booming – and climate change is off the agenda. The Guardian’s Suzanne Goldenberg gets a rare look inside the biggest coal mine in the world.

And it’s all about sitting in your heated or air conditioned home, that office a la Zoom and five huge screens and powerful microprocessors and all that shake rattle and roll in the cloud. Fuck.

Data centers are booming. Their need for power is causing utilities to retreat on green energy =

[ChatGPT cause data centers to consume about 500 milliliters of water each time a user poses 5 to 50 prompts or questions. Considering that the chatbot has been the fastest-growing tech site visited on earth since the creation of the internet, that’s not an insignificant amount of water, prompting experts and environmentalists to ring alarm bells. As they race to capitalize on a craze for generative AI, leading tech developers including Microsoft, OpenAI and Google have acknowledged that growing demand for their AI tools carries hefty costs, from expensive semiconductors to an increase in water consumption.

But they’re often secretive about the specifics. Few people in Iowa knew about its status as a birthplace of OpenAI’s most advanced large language model, GPT-4, before a top Microsoft executive said in a speech it “was literally made next to cornfields west of Des Moines.]

Oh, those anthropologists like Wrangham, what dreams come true for humanity. Then all these techno-fascists? Mengele on steroids.

Ahh, the Jewish Legacy, a world without them?

We remembered all the miseries, all the injustices, our people and the conditions they lived, the coldness with which world opinion looks at our cause, and so we felt that we will not permit them to crush us. We will defend ourselves and our revolution by every way and every means.

George Habash (1926-2008) [ The Wise Man, The Doctor’; 1 August 1926 – 26 January 2008), was a Palestinian Christian politician and physician who founded the Marxist–Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). George Habash. جورج حبش General Secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. ]

A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor.

Nelson Mandela (1918-2013)

The Israeli military’s firing of white phosphorus shells over densely populated areas during the Gaza offensive “was indiscriminate and is evidence of war crimes,” Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report on Wednesday.

“In Gaza, the Israeli military didn’t just use white phosphorus in open areas as a screen for its troops,” said Fred Abrahams, a HRW senior emergencies researcher.

“It fired white phosphorus repeatedly over densely populated areas, even when its troops weren’t in the area and safer smoke shells were available. As a result, civilians needlessly suffered and died.”

Entitled “Rain of Fire: Israel’s Unlawful Use of White Phosphorus in Gaza,” the 71-page report provides “witness accounts” and “presents ballistics evidence, photographs, and satellite imagery, as well as documents from the Israeli military and government.”

…carpet bombing health clinics, apartment blocks, and shutting down the electricity, water, and fuel . . .

Watch it: Link. [The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Wyatt Reed cover the surprise attack from Gaza that has momentarily overwhelmed Israel’s military and shocked the world. They will follow events from there, including the unfolding Israeli assault on Gaza and the international response.]

Going back in Zionist Murder History. Genocide. Seventy-five years ago, Zionist militias tore through Palestinian villages, massacring the villagers and expelling those who remained alive, to clear the way for the creation of the state of Israel.

An estimated 15,000 Palestinians were killed and hundreds of thousands fled their homes to live as refugees in other parts of Palestine or neighbouring countries, an event known by Palestinians as the Nakba – “the catastrophe”.

So leave Gaza? Swim into the sea? It has always been a terrorist project, Israel.

Going back back back to the gene code of Zionist-Jews in Palestine: Genociders.

IN EXAMINING ASPECTS OF THEIR ROLE IN THE ULTIMATE CREATION OF A JEWISH STATE, IT IS CONCLUDED THAT:

(1) JEWISH TERRORISM AGAINST BRITISH AND ARABS DID CONTRIBUTE HEAVILY TO THE REMOVAL OF THE BRITISH FROM PALESTINE, THE ABANDONMENT OF THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS MANDATE AND THE CREATION OF A JEWISH STATE OF ISRAEL;

(2) THERE WERE NO PRACTICALLY AFFORDABLE ALTERNATIVES TO YIELDING THE MANDATE AVAILABLE TO THE GOVERNMENT OF GREAT BRITAIN BECAUSE OF THE COHESIVENESS OF THE TERRORISTS AND THEIR SOPHISTICATION; AND

(3) THERE IS NO TRUE CONCLUSION AS TO WHETHER OR NOT THESE DISSIDENT GROUPS POSED A THREAT TO THE STATE OF ISRAEL AS PERCEIVED BY THE RULER AT THAT TIME, DAVID BEN-GURION; HOWEVER, MUCH THEY HAVE POSED A THREAT TO THE PERSONAL POWER OF BEN-GURION, IT IS CONCLUDED THAT THEY PLAYED A SIGNIFICANT PART IN THE CREATION OF THE JEWISH STATE. A BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCE NOTES ARE PROVIDED.

And the Mainstream Jewish Run-Controlled-Curated-Edited Media will tap dance to the song:

Deir Yassin was no mistake, according to Israeli historian Ilan Pappé.

“Depopulating Palestine was not a consequential war event, but a carefully planned strategy, otherwise known as Plan Dalet, which was authorised by [Israeli leader David] Ben-Gurion in March 1948,” Pappé wrote. “Operation Nachshon was, in fact, the first step in the plan.”

The massacre unleashed a cycle of violence and counterviolence that has been the pattern since. Jewish forces have regarded any Palestinian village as an enemy military base, which has paved way for the blurred distinction between massacring civilians and killing combatants, according to the historian.

Early in the morning of April 9, 1948, commandos of the Irgun (headed by Menachem Begin) and the Stern Gang attacked Deir Yassin, a village with about 750 Palestinian residents. The village lay outside the area assigned by the United Nations to the Jewish State; it had a peaceful reputation. But it was located on high ground in the corridor between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Deir Yassin was slated for occupation under Plan Dalet. The mainstream Jewish defense force, the Hagana, authorized the irregular terrorist forces of the Irgun and the Stern Gang to perform the takeover. In all over 100 men, women, and children were systematically murdered. Fifty-three orphaned children were literally dumped along the wall of the Old City, where they were found by Miss Hind Husseini and brought behind the American Colony Hotel to her home, which was to become the Dar El-Tifl El-Arabi orphanage. (source: deiryassin.org)

Natan Yellin-Mor (Jewish) responded to the massacre:

When I remember what led to the massacre of my mother, sister and other members of my family, I can’t accept this massacre. I know that in the heat of battle such things happen, and I know that the people who do these things don’t start out with such things in mind. They kill because their own comrades have being killed and wounded, and they want their revenge at that very moment. But who tells them to be proud of such deeds? (From Eyal Naveh and Eli bar-Navi, Modern Times, part 2, page 228)

One of the young men of the Deir Yassin village reported what he has been told by his mother:

My mother escaped with my two small brothers, 1-year old and 2-years old. My aunts and their small children were also with her. When the Jews met them on the road, they wanted to kill my small brothers and my aunts’ children. My mother and my aunts started to beg them and said: ‘We will give you all the gold and money we have, but do not kill our children.’ The Jews did not respond to them and they killed my brothers and my cousins. They said: ‘Now, go away and tell everyone what you have seen.’

[Photo: Bullet-riddled cacti are seen in Deir Yassin, where more than 100 Palestinians, mostly women, children and the elderly, were massacred by Irgun-Stern raiders, April 1948.]

The behavior of the Zionist gangs was meant to spread terror and fear among Arabs and to force them to leave their villages. When Zionist gangs attacked the village of Zir’in on the night of April 20, 1948, as they charged they screamed: “Kadima, kadima (go ahead, go ahead) Deir Yassin, Deir Yassin.”

And so is it 250 or 600 murdered?

According to a 1948 report filed by the British delegation to the United Nations, the killing of “some 250 Arabs, men, women and children, took place in circumstances of great savagery”.

“Women and children were stripped, lined up, photographed, and then slaughtered by automatic firing and survivors have told of even more incredible bestialities,” the report said. “Those who were taken prisoners were treated with degrading brutality.”

And so the Holly-Dirt virus in Media, Press, just shows its dirty bloody head: We can very clearly see Neil Postman’s analyses and predictions being vindicated in real time here. The conflict is being recast in terms of impoverished myth through the lens and discursive methods of entertainment.

This youtube video is a perfect example. (source)

The spectacular title looks like exactly the splash intro screen of some TV movie or netflix show, accompanied by dramatic and somber music that’s conducting our emotions. It’s produced and designed as entertainment, and it’s accordingly directed to the appetites and the emotions rather than the intellect.

The lines between entertainment, war and mass media are not just blurred. They practically don’t exist anymore.

The intro is followed by what’s most aptly described as a snuff movie, showing the dramatic, serious but oh-so-necessary Israeli retaliations on targets in Gaza, with the narration explaining the legitimate pretext while more somber and weepy music tugs at your heartstrings.

We then actually get to listen to almost all of Netanyahu’s agitprop speech, naturally set to more sentimental music, which effectively serves to legitimize not only the Israeli response, but its stated intentions towards expanded retaliation. (source)

Explore a database of destroyed Palestinian villages on PalestineRemix.com

Despite this shift of blame, leading human rights organisations like Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International have labelled Israel itself an apartheid state.

“We reached this determination based on our documentation of an overarching government policy to maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians,” HRW said in 2021.

“As recognition grows that these crimes are being committed, the failure to recognize that reality requires burying your head deeper and deeper into the sand,” it added. “Today, apartheid is not a hypothetical or future scenario.”

…. but it pays so well exploiting the masses, making shekels on the poor, jumping land claims on the agrarians, spiritually mutilating the masses with their knives a 10 million cuts

It always surpirses me with the humanity, the humane nature of most of the people I get to know, that is, who I seek out and get to get under their skin.

It can be dreadful being me, an antagonizer, agitator, unhappy in LaLaLandia, confrontational, oppositional, devil’s in the details and how the sausage is made advocate.

It is in the art, man, the sheer volume of passion and creative creation’s best where we find, or at least I do, the point between inhumanity and leaping poetry, people who can leap above station, caste, class, econonmic strata, ethnicity, national origin.

Yet, so much of “we” are those roots, those passages from the very beginning, Sub-Saharan Africa to “here.”

A single root mother, or several branches?

The oldest fossils from early humans come from Africa, and the first modern humans likely came about around 315,000 years ago. Between 300,000 and 100,000 years ago, evidence of modern humans was spread throughout the continent—more support for the multiple origins theory, Scerri tells Nature News. Had humans originated in one spot, the oldest artifacts would be found there, with increasingly more recent remains found at sites emanating from the origin, but that is not the case, she tells the publication.

European milfoil or zebra mussels or flotsam, jetsam, lagan, and derelict shipwreck. [Photo: Stone tools from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, where the earliest modern human fossils were discovered.]

This forensics proposition is compelling on one level: “A view from Mota Cave in Ethiopia, where archaeologists found the remains of a 4,500-year-old human. Kathryn and John Arthur

An ancient skeleton found face down in an Ethiopian cave has enabled scientists to sequence one of the first ancient African human genomes.

The sequenced genes are helping to define a wave of Eurasian migration back into Africa that now appears twice as large as previously believed—even if the reasons for the migration remain a mystery.

“This back migration of Western Eurasians to Africa was a very large, one-off event, it seems,” says study coauthor Marcos Gallego Llorente of the University of Cambridge. “Its genetic signature got to every corner of Africa.”

All humans trace their genetic roots back to Africa, but some modern Africans have a surprisingly large percentage of Eurasian ancestry due to the Eurasian backflow, a previously known migration from the Near East and Anatolia into the Horn of Africa.

However, heat is an enemy of DNA preservation, and until now, most genomes of ancient Homo sapiens have emerged from Earth’s cooler regions. With no ancient African genomes in hand, scientists had to work backward with modern genes, attempting to peel off more recent changes to reveal older genomes and produce a genetic baseline.

Teasing out a starting point this way has been a challenge. Events like the backflow migration, along with later population movements around Africa, have scrambled genetics across the continent. Still, working with modern genomes, geneticists had estimated that the Eurasian return to Africa happened some 3,000 to 4,000 years ago.” (source)

We are seekers, in the pure sense of wanting to know roots, origins, commonalities, our shared humane humanity.

HE DIED later than Socrates and Aristotle, but a man who fished along the coast of southern Africa is the closest genetic match for our common female ancestor yet found.

If you trace back the DNA in the maternally inherited mitochondria within our cells, all humans have a theoretical common ancestor. This woman, known as “mitochondrial Eve”, lived between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago in southern Africa. She was not the first human, but every other female lineage eventually had no female offspring, failing to pass on their mitochondrial DNA. As a result, all humans today can trace their mitochondrial DNA back to her.

Within her DNA, and that of her peers, existed almost all the genetic variation we see in contemporary humans. Since Eve’s time, different populations of humans have drifted apart genetically, forming the distinct ethnic groups we see today. (Found: closest link to Eve, our universal ancestor . . . . A man who died in 315 BC in southern Africa is the closest relative yet known to humanity’s common female ancestor – mitochondrial Eve)

Fascinating, this quest for Eve, for fire. I’m going to do a 180 degree brodie here and promote a compelling jazz interpretor, writer, storyteller: Lynn Darroch.

A tale of the Modoc War and Winema, the woman who served as mediator and translator between natives and miners/soldiers/settlers in the brief period in which the world changed completely for the native people of the Klamath Lake area.

Listen to Lynn, which I do on the Portland Jazz station, KMHD.org.

Enchanting. Link to Lynn.

Then, another 180 degree switch, in fact, the genesis of this short blog (rare rare for me me myself myself and I I).

I can’t believe monsters and misanthropes like these share my Eve’s DNA, for sure. And there a millions of these folk throughout “civilization,” the takers, the conquerers, the corrupters, criminals, abusers, and now now, we have to like good thrid grade reading level fools listen to these scum because the third grade reading level writers and TV presenters are enamored: “Warren Buffett Believes The US Has An Obligation To Take Care Of People Who’ve Become ‘Roadkill’ Because Of Circumstances Beyond Their Control — ‘That’s The Obligation Of A Rich Country’“

Roadkill, and those circumstances are planned obselescene, death, exploitation, enslavement, disenpowerment, disenfranchisement, cogs in their machines, the foot soliers for their wars, their capitalist proving grounds, subjects for body-soul-mind experiments in every tool and contracted sickness the Gates and Buffets have jiggered.

CIRCUMSTANCES? Can you believe these sociopaths?

Oh, the horror, the horror, the whores. Here’s the trash heap of 100 brought to us by the trashiest Forbes: Billionaires 2023: The Richest in 2023

A list like this, all those smiling fucking faces, oh those roadkill killers, the ambulance chasers, the titans of poverty making. Useless baggage, 500,000 satellites in space motherfuckers.

Out common ancestor?

Why poverty costs a lot of money for the poor and why the abusers get rich off of it — PayDay loans, courts, hospitals, loan collectors, repossessions, dirty food, dirty housing, fenceline communities, environmental racism, mountaintop removal, gaslands, piles of filth and garbage to pull through.

1. Housing
2. Food and Groceries
3. Transportation
4. Healthcare
5. Financial Services
6. Childcare
7. Communication
8. Taxes

Just read on down, a piece from Alternet, not my cozy little place for radicalism:

Roadkill?

[Contaminated water from the town of Stephens, Wise County Va.]

In this article, we look at the 25 poorest cities in the US that are getting poorer, or growing at the slowest rate. You can skip our detailed analysis of the causes of poverty in these cities and head directly to the 10 Poorest Cities In The US That Are Getting Poorer.

A recent analysis on the 50 Poorest Cities in Every State in the US identified the poorest city in each state in the United States, using last 12 months’ poverty data released by the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2021 American Community Survey.

Fucking ROADKILL. Monsters in that Forbes “top” sociopath rich people, they deserve death. Each stock and bond and product and theft of resource here and there is on the backs and bodies and minds of us, the ROADKILL.

10 of the most dangerous places to be a child

Being Poor Is More Expensive Than You’d Think

Joshua Wilkey This Appalachian Life August 08, 2017

Poor people are cash cows. 

It makes no sense, really. One would think that poor people, by virtue of being poor, would not be profitable customers. However, for many large corporations that target the poor and working poor, there’s big money to be made on the backs of those who have no money. 

At Dollar General Store locations, customers can get cash back on their purchases. This is not novel. In fact, most all retailers these days offer this option. Soccer moms get cash back so they can have lunch money for their children. Restaurant patrons can get money back to leave a cash tip for their servers. I sometimes get cash back at the grocery store so I can buy Girl Scouts cookies on the way out. It’s a simple process. Click “yes” when the little screen asks for cash back, tap the $20 icon, and the cashier hands you some bucks along with your receipt. We’ve all done it. For those who are poor and those of us who are not but who have limited retail options, however, there’s often a sinister catch. 

I noticed this a few years ago, first at Dollar Tree, then at Dollar General. There’s a little asterisk after the standard “would you like cash back?” prompt. The footnote indicates that “a transaction fee may apply.” The transaction fee is usually $1 no matter the amount of cash back. If one opts to get $10 cash back, one is charged a dollar. That’s a ten percent fee, for a service that costs the retailer nothing. It’s just another way for retailers like Dollar General to make a profit off of their customers, many of whom are very often living below the poverty line. 

If an organic grocer or movie theater were charging a fee of this sort, I would likely be annoyed by it, but I wouldn’t be so annoyed that I would write about it. However, the poorest members of our communities do not shop at Whole Foods, and they do not often get a chance to go see the latest blockbuster at the theater. They can afford neither. In fact, they likely do not have either organic grocers or first-run theaters in their neighborhoods. Instead, they have Dollar General. Dollar General’s stores grow like kudzo in rural America. Even if there isn’t a real grocery store in most tiny communities, there’s probably a DG. 

These ridiculous transaction fees are but one example of how corporations make billions of dollars by taking advantage of socioeconomically disadvantaged customers with few options. There are many other examples, though, and politicians continue to allow it at the expense of their poorest and most marginalized constituents.

Payday lending is one of the most sinister ways that large corporations exploit poor people. For those who are not familiar, payday lending goes something like this: People who are running short on money but who have a verified record of regular income (whether it be Social Security, SSI, payroll, etc.) are able to go to payday lenders and receive a cash loan to be repaid on payday. Often, borrowers are unable to repay their full loan balances and simply “roll over” their loan until a future payday, accruing all sorts of fees and additional interest. The annualized interest rate on these loans is often in the triple digits. Yes, that’s right. Sometimes the annual interest rate is over one hundred percent.

In defense of this practice, many payday lenders and their high-dollar lobbyists argue that they are simply offering a service to poor borrowers that said borrowers cannot obtain anywhere else. This is partially true. The poorest members of society have no access to traditional forms of credit. Some even lack access to checking accounts because of low credit scores or a history of financial missteps.

I know some people who make occasional use of payday lending because they genuinely have emergencies arise that they could not address without a short-term infusion of cash. I also know people, including members of my own family, who have been riding the high-interest payday loan merry-go-round for years, and who have paid thousands more back than they have borrowed yet still owe more. In debating the role of payday lending in our communities, it is essential that we take a nuanced approach. Some form of short-term credit is necessary for those mired in poverty. However, it is flat-out immoral that we regulate payday lending so loosely in many places that people end up feeling crushed under the weight of small high-interest loans that they have no hope of ever repaying. Taking out a $1,000 payday loan should not mean a person becomes tied to tens of thousands of dollars in debt.

Another egregious example of corporations exploiting the poor is rent-to-own retailing. Companies like Aaron’s and Rent-a-Center purport to offer a valuable service for the poor. Because those at the bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum are seldom able to save for big-ticket items like appliances or furniture, these retailers offer a pay-by-the-month scheme that often requires no credit check and no money down. The result is that customers pay as much as three times the retail price of the item, assuming they are able to make payments until the item is paid for. When they are not able to maintain the payments, the retailers simply show up to repossess the items.

Like payday lenders, rent-to-own retailers argue that they provide a valuable service to poor consumers. However, many observers, myself included, conclude that some rent-to-own practices are ethically questionable and tend to target vulnerable consumers who need immediate access to essentials like appliances and bedding. In many states, companies are not required to disclose the final price of the items. Instead, they simply tell customers the amount of the monthly or weekly payments. Because companies call the arrangement “rent-to-own,” in many places they are not required to disclose the amount of “interest” customers will pay because it technically isn’t interest. When consumers can no longer afford the payments and have to return the item, they often get no credit for payments they have made even if they have paid substantially more than the item is worth. Many customers never realize that they are paying as much as three times the retail price for their items. Those who do realize it likely have no choice apart from going without a bed or refrigerator.

In some instances, state attorneys general have successfully sued major rent-to-own retailers for violating usury and consumer protection laws. However, because these retailers are covered generally by state laws rather than by federal laws, there exists a hit-and-miss patchwork of regulations. Some consumers enjoy greater protections than others. The only determining factor is their location. Those states with more corporation-friendly attorneys general are unlikely to see any activity that might force retailers to behave more ethically toward their customers, because such enforcements will result in a drop in profitability for the retailers. Many major corporations spend good money to be sure that politicians protect their interests rather than the interests of consumers. Rent-to-own retailers and payday lenders are no exception. The poor, of course, can’t afford lobbyists or political contributions.

There are some who will argue that the free market, not the federal government, is the best solution to corporations that exploit the poor. However, those at the bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum, especially the rural poor, do not live in anything resembling a free market. Also, it is important that we label the behavior of rent-to-own companies and payday lenders as what it is: exploitation. 

In the hills of Appalachia, poverty is often the rule rather than the exception. One of the most poverty-stricken ZIP codes in the United States is Manchester, Kentucky. Manchester is located in Clay County, which has a population of just over 20,000 people. According to the most recent US Census data available, the per-capita income average between 2011 and 2015 was just $13,802 (less than half the national average) and 46% of the population lives below the poverty line. In Manchester, Rent-a-Center is often the go-to option for poor people looking to buy appliances or furniture. The county has a Walmart, but the nearest discount appliance and furniture dealers are miles away, too far for many to drive. There are some locally-owned options, but few in Clay County are able to pay cash for major purchases given the high rate of poverty and the low rate of employment.

Largest Property Management Companies in the US

11. BH

Number of Units Managed: 106,353

10. Apartment Management Consultants, LLC (AMC)

Number of Units Managed: 132,364

9. FPI Management

Number of Units Managed: 155,000

8. Asset Living

Number of Units Managed: 159,352

7. Pinnacle Property Management Services, LLC

Number of Units Managed: 169,000

6. Cushman & Wakefield PLC (NYSE:CWK)

Number of Units Managed: 172,145

5. Lincoln Property Co

Number of Units Managed: 210,086

4. Greystar Real Estate Partners

Number of Units Managed: 698,257

3. Jones Lang LaSalle Inc (NYSE:JLL)

Number of Units Managed: N/A

Assets Under Management: $76.6 billion

2. Colliers International Group Inc (NASDAQ:CIGI)

Number of Units Managed: N/A

Assets Under Management: $92 billion

1. CBRE Group Inc (NYSE:CBRE)

Number of Units Managed: N/A

Assets Under Management: $143.9 billion

In addition to the rent-to-own retailers, Clay County also has no less than five payday lenders, but only two traditional banks. Conveniently, the primary shopping center in Manchester currently houses a Dollar General, a Rent-a-Center, and two payday lending branches, all within feet of one another. 

In places like Manchester, rent-to-own and payday lending outfits thrive. They do so often to the detriment of the poor folks who frequent their businesses. Those promoting the so-called free market approach might argue that customers are not forced to do business with these types of companies. However, given their dire financial circumstances and lack of available options, poor people in Manchester have little choice. They are excluded from participating in the wider world of commerce, often because of forces beyond their own control.

Manchester is not a rare exception. Particularly in central Appalachia, rent-to-own retailers are often the only option for poor people, and payday lenders outnumber banks by large measure. In addition to being food deserts, many poverty-stricken communities are retail deserts. In the most isolated rural areas in Appalachia, Dollar General is one of the only available retail options. Within ten miles of our house in rural Jackson County, NC, there are four Dollar General stores, and our community isn’t even particularly isolated. Dollar General is the closest store to our home, and my wife and I tend to shop there by default because it is either that or a ten minute drive to the closest grocery store, or worse, a twenty minute drive into town. While we have the resources to go to town any time we want, many of our neighbors do not. The folks in the trailer park down the road often walk to Dollar General because they have few other options. This does not seem much like a free market driven by competition. Therefore, “free market” solutions simply do not work here. 

Dollar General is, I believe, fully aware of the demographics of their shoppers. They know that there are often few ATMs near their locations, and their customers often lack access to traditional banking anyway and end up paying fees of three or four dollars to access their money at ATMs. Especially for people who depend on Social Security or SSI for their income, access to money is an important issue. Dollar General and similar retailers, it seems, understand this. Their solution is not to offer a resource for their customers but to profit from their customers’ limited access to funds. It’s cheaper than an ATM, but it’s a fee more affluent shoppers never have to think about. While there is nothing illegal about this, it is certainly morally questionable.

That’s the thing about the so-called free market. It makes no accounting for moral right or wrong. That, free market proponents allege, is up to the consumers. Poor consumers, however, still need to eat. They still need ovens and beds. Consumer choice and self-advocacy is often, like so many forms of social or political action, a full-stomach endeavor. When one is hungry, one’s ability to be an activist is diminished. When poor people have no choice but to do business with the greedy companies who reap a hefty profit from their customers’ lack of options, those drawing the short straw simply do what they must to survive. Surviving is what poor people do best, and it makes for a miserable life. I know, because I have been there. 

When poor people have little option but to do business with discount retailers who charge cash-back fees, rent-to-own retailers who charge inflated prices, and payday lenders who mire their customers neck-deep in impossible-to-pay-back high-interest loans, they are even less likely to ever escape poverty. The stark reality is that poor people often pay substantially more for essentials – bedding, appliances, housing – than would those of us with means. If my wife and I needed a new washer, we’d shop around for the best deal and go buy it. In fact, we might even buy it from Amazon Prime and get free two-day shipping. When my mother, who lived her entire life in poverty, needed a new washer, she was forced to buy one from a rent-to-own outfit that charged her an outrageous delivery fee and hassled her every time she was even a few hours late on a payment. She probably ended up paying $2,000 for a $450 washer. The poor do not have access to Amazon Prime like the rest of us because they can’t afford a hundred bucks a year to subscribe. They do not get free delivery and obscenely low prices. They get fleeced.

The limited options available to those in poverty are rarely considered by the political ideologues who are so prone to victim-blaming. These retailers, who are all too often protected by state and federal lawmakers from both parties, package their predatory tactics as opportunities. What they are really selling are tickets on yet another segment of the poverty train. The politicians who protect them should be deprived of options and see just how much more expensive it is to survive. They should be ashamed for protecting those who profit from poverty, and those of us who know about it and have the resources to fight back should be ashamed for letting it happen to our neighbors.

And, so, THAT Anniversary too is on my mind: 22 Years Ago, October 7, 2001, US-NATO Invaded Afghanistan: It Was Presented as “Act of Self Defense.” “America Was Attacked by an ‘Unnamed Foreign Power

From silly to serious, these national and international celebration days give pause for serious writers.

Shoot, here are some powerful dates to remember: 9/5, International Day of Charity; 9/8, International Literacy Day; 9/10, World Suicide Prevention Day; 9/16, International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer; 9/18, World Water Monitoring Day.

Rapidly changing global context took a new meaning over the past years, hampering the literacy progress and widening inequalities across world regions, countries, and populations.  In low- and middle-income countries, the share of 10-year-old children who could not read and understand a simple text with comprehension has increased from 57 per cent in 2019 to an estimated 70 per cent in 2022.  

In this context, this year’s International Literacy Day will be celebrated worldwide under the theme, ‘Promoting literacy for a world in transition: Building the foundation for sustainable and peaceful societies’.   

It is incumbent upon the reader to check out national and international days,  weeks and months of recognition. Heck, K12 educators could develop  curricula around deep and not-so-deep topics for each month.

Heck, National Guacamole Day (9/16) might seem like a foodie thing, but in the hands of competent teachers, the details of how the dip is made unravels some seriously environmentally and culturally damaging aspects of the avocado.

Here comes the downer: Up to 20,000 acres of forest are believed to be cleared yearly to facilitate avocado crops. Water: It takes more than 500 gallons of water to grow only 2 pounds of avocados. Yep, transportation and pesticides add to the negative outcomes of a guacamole dip.

My adopted country, Mexico, pays the brunt of the avocado farming: Avocado production is valued at $3 billion annually, ahead of Mexico’s beer and tequila industries. That money has attracted the country’s cartels.

I still have journalist buddies in Juarez and elsewhere covering avocado violence: The thugs’ tactics include “protection fees,” but much worse — cutting down swaths of forest to start their own orchards. Just like the old USA Mafia days, avocado “pickers” have been forced to work at gunpoint for no pay. Trucks full of avocados have been robbed and hijacked.

Cartels even use government databases to find, extort, and kidnap avocado farmers. In some instances, cartels directly take over the farming lands, becoming ‘informal owners’ of the fields or installing avocado orchards on protected woodlands. They ensure they get their share of a thriving industry using force, intimidation, and violence.

When I was teaching college in El Paso,  we adopted a systems thinking approaches to topics. We looked at redistributive justice programs, and restorative conservation. We studied embedded/embodied energy and the  impact of consumer goods and services. We did cradle to grave (life cycle) analyses.

For every great idea, there are a dozen or hundreds of negative/bad consequences.

That was September, but now we’re in October? Banning, and, in some sense, book burning, if you consider being de-platformed and demonetized on the Internet. But here, from my days as a writing and literature instructor in Oregon, Washington, Texas, New Mexico, Mexico:

The American Library Association has tracked attempts to ban or restrict access to books across the United States and “to inform the public about censorship efforts in our libraries and schools.”

Last year the ALA, documented 1,269 demands to censor library books and resources, the highest number of attempted book bans since ALA began compiling data about censorship in libraries more than 20 years ago.. Of the titles entered into this report, the majority were written by or about members of the LGBTQIA+ community or by and about Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color.

Or head over to the Project Censored, and you will understand another form of “censoring” and “banning” of stories that should be at the forefront of our critical debates about our society, our world.

Banned in the USA: Banned Books Week Celebrates its 40th Anniversary as Book Bans and Challenges to Academic Freedom Surge = Link

• -Betsy Gomez is coordinator for the Banned Books Week Coalition.
• -Cameron Samuels is a recent high school graduate and activist from the Katy Independent School District near Houston, Texas. Cameron was named the Youth Honorary Chair of Banned Books Week (the first time the title has been awarded) for actively opposing book banning in the District as a student there.
• -Jordan Smith is the digital editor at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.
• -Nico Perrino is Executive Vice-President at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, formerly known as the Foundation for Individual Rights In Education, an organization specializing in protecting academic freedom.

That’s where I also take my students – projectcensored (dot) org. The Top 25 Most Censored Stories of 2012-2022 actually threads through how broken our reprehensive and participatory democracy is.

Take a look at the ALA’s list of challenged and cancelled books, and then go to Project Censored:

Federal Safety Agency Underreports Deaths of Offshore Oil and Gas Workers; Injustice for Incarcerated Women in Maryland after State Defunds Prerelease Facility; School-Issued Technology Poses ; Surveillance Risks for Students; Facebook’s Blacklist of “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” Stifles Public Debate; Concerns for Journalistic Independence as Gates Foundation Gives $319 Million to News Outlets.

The presentation of the Top 25 stories of 2021-2022 extends the tradition originated by Professor Carl Jensen and his Sonoma State University students in 1976, while reflecting how the expansion of the Project to include affiliate faculty and students from campuses across North America has made the Project even more diverse and robust. The Top 25 stories of 2021-2022 have been selected from several hundred candidate stories submitted by 207 student researchers from ten US college and university campuses.

You’re  biting at the bit to get into stories that were reported by valiant and intrepid reporters at less well known, or so-called alternative media sites, to discover what we need to know about our democracy, our world.

Are you willing to let (sic) educators broach these topics in the school system, i.e. 6-12 classes?

Do your own biases and contexts hold you back from allowing for more critical looks at the world around you?

While the banned books week (Oct. 1-7) is worthy of discussing with your friends and family and children, getting deeper in your lives beyond  your “news” feeds and posts on social media platforms is paramount in making wise decisions based on knowledge and points of view.

In Portland, where I worked for years as educator and social worker, I went to a Peace Park near the Lloyd Center. It’s almost hidden, not a high profile site. But what I gathered from my visits was a reminder of another sort of banning. My friend, a US Air Force combat veteran friend, Rusty Nelson, spoke about peace and alternative ways to serve one’s country at a Spokane high school graduation ceremony.

His message was one of peace and asking students who were graduating to look deeper into the role of the military and politicians in exporting harm to the world, as well as bringing back that harm to the US in the form of damaged soldiers.

In Portland, I worked with soldiers, veterans, many of them homeless and struggling through substance abuse. Their problems occurred through in many cases bad leadership in boot camp. All my female clients had been sexually assaulted by their own soldiers, in the USA and sometimes in combat areas.

As a substitute teacher, here in Lincoln County, I too have felt the knife of banishment. I was asked to leave a class I was teaching when students asked about drug abuse, homelessness, and their role in understanding themes in the books I was directed to help them with – Of Mice and Men and Animal Farm.

Banning, disenfranchisement, ghosting, gas-lighting, marginalizing, manipulating facts, being found guilty without a fair hearing or airing of a situation, those are also the Scarlet Letter moments in this supposed free and open society.

I have to say to Rusty, who was permanently banned from the Spokane School system as an expert and active member of Spokane’s justice community, “Peace out, brother.” He and his wife started the Peace and Justice Action League of Spokane. Here are comments he made in 2016:

“Be creative, kind, considerate. Be involved, outspoken, radical, subversive. Stop worrying about where your next dollar is coming from, and be concerned about where your neighbor’s next breath of fresh air and drink of clean water are coming from, where your child’s next raft of information is coming from, where your next tax dollar is going, your next consumer dollar. Make your needs known to your local officials and be tenacious.”

My older stuff at the Newport News Times: Banning books: An American tradition that should be stopped

Freedom of the press means having a press in the first place

Haeder, Paul, Newport News Times.

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Finally, you will hear nothing in the Mainstream Mush and Muddling and Murdering Press about this reality – Oct. 7, 2001.

Freedom to Lie Press. Here, reality. A Day of Infamy (many many of those for all the countries bombed, invaded, couped, sanctioned by the U$A)!

The legal argument used by Washington and NATO to invade Afghanistan was that the September 11 attacks constituted an undeclared “armed attack” “from abroad” by an unnamed foreign power, and that consequently “the laws of war” apply, allowing the nation under attack, to strike back in the name of “self-defense”.

The “Global War on Terrorism” was officially launched by the Bush administration on September 11, 2001. On the following morning (September 12, 2001), NATO’s North Atlantic Council meeting in Brussels, adopted the following resolution:

“if it is determined that the [September 11, 2001] attack against the United States was directed from abroad [Afghanistan] against “The North Atlantic area“, it shall be regarded as an action covered by Article 5 of the Washington Treaty”. (emphasis added)

In this regard, Article 5 of the Washington Treaty stipulates that if:

“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.” (NATO, What is Article 5,  NATO Topics – NATO and the Scourge of Terrorism, accessed 24 November 2009, emphasis added) [ October 7, 2001. Afghanistan was invaded under the doctrine of “self-defense” ]