… the deadliest kind of human is an Eichmann, a cog in the machine, a compliant one, bearing witness to the death machinery they help invent and build, yet turning the blind eye
Students and young people are witnesses to the ways in which the U.S. education system is deeply complicit with war and militarism, and in increasing numbers we are demanding change.
The work to purge university administrations of war criminals isn’t easy. After all, these are powerful individuals whose connections and resources can be weaponized to terrorize all opposition — even if they are young students. And with these profiteers being well-integrated (and monetarily beneficial) to the internal administrative structure, universities will do anything to protect them. Most of the time, this includes harassing and surveilling students on campus.
As a member of the American University Dissenters, I (Ngakiya Camara) personally recall instances of being surveilled on campus and have been agitating against AU’s practice of doing nothing to protect Black students on campus, while simultaneously doing everything to protect Wes Bush.
Meanwhile, Mya Franklin of Northwestern Dissenters recalls being harassed by Northwestern University Police Department (NUPD) officers while doing the banner drop and flyering, stating, “Someone ripped down one of our posters as it was drying. [A] NUPD pig pulled up and harassed us. That morning, we all acutely experienced militarism as we were fighting for anti-militarism.”
So long as universities are prepared to prioritize the role of war criminals on our campus over the livelihood of their students, these instances will persist. And as long as powerful war profiteers occupy crucial administrative positions like the Board of Trustees, resources meant for students will be used to strengthen the lucrative ties that these profiteers have to the institutions they worked for and are invested in. But even in the face of powerful war profiteers, we will not be silent. (source)
In the end then, you have the putrids, the alimentary canals of the red and blue team, the Rip Off Dealing for Nature messed up Greta fans:
There is now a move to align the climate movement in the Global North/West with the war aims of NATO. A press conference in Kyiv at the end of June, with President Zelensky, Mary Robinson and Greta Thunberg, announced a European body to evaluate “the environmental damage resulting from the war, formulating mechanisms to hold Russia accountable and undertaking efforts to restore Ukraine’s ecology”.
[Photo: This poster is displayed on the side of the Dutch Embassy in Moscow and shows the number of people killed in the Donbass between 2014 and 2022. If you walk down the Arbat in the same city you will see hundreds of poster sized billboards memorialising the children killed by Ukrainian shelling into the Donbass in that time. If you go to Donetsk City, you will see a memorial garden for these children. That shelling continues daily even now.
Again, criminals, the Greta Thunbergs and Mary Robinsons of the world.
So, rifling through the news (sic, not always news, certainly not journalism) feeds, every bit of collective pain we endure with the asleep at the wheel Biden, and then his Blinken-Nuland-Yellen Hummus Administration wanting war, really, WWIII, I just have to hold it together without hammering some idiot here and idiot there with that Nazi blue and yellow flag out front on their beach fucking house.
This is what needs attending to. Fucking trillions to the merchants of death and all the shit storm for the uniformed mercenaries called the uniformed “services” — we are about to be burned big time: Potentially historic and deadly heat is already present in the Southwest, including California and Arizona. Parts of Texas and Florida are also mired in extreme heat, and conditions in each of these areas are forecast to worsen.
And so, the dirty Jewish Project in Ukraine is killing us all: “While the 95- and 96-degree readings were in shallow waters, “the water temperatures are 90 to 93 degrees Fahrenheit around much of Florida, which is extremely warm,” said University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy. He said his 95-degree pool doesn’t cool him — it just leaves him wet.
Water temperatures across the Gulf of Mexico and Southwest Atlantic are 4 to 5 degrees (2 to 3 degrees Celsius) warmer than normal, Orrison said. Because the water is so warm, the air in Florida gets more humid and “that’s making things tougher or more oppressive for people who are going to be out and about,” he said.
The heat dome that baked Texas and Mexico for much of the early summer has oozed its way to Florida with sunshine, little to no cooling clouds or rain, but humidity worsened by the hot oceans, Orrison and McNoldy said.
Not only will it stick around for a while as weather patterns seem stuck — a sign of climate change, some scientists contend — “it may actually tend to get a little bit worse,” Orrison said, with extra heat and humidity that has NOAA forecasting a heat index around 110 by weekend.”
Scientists worry about the coral in that warmed-up water.
“There’s a good chance of heat stress accumulating very early in the season so we could be looking at nasty bleaching,” said International Coral Reef Society’s Mark Eakin, a retired top NOAA coral reef scientist. Bleaching weakens coral; it takes extended heat to kill it.
“We are already receiving reports of bleaching from Belize, which is very alarming this early in the summer,” said scientist Liv Williamson of the University of Miami’s Coral Reef Futures Lab. She said global projections give a 90% chance for major bleaching on many reefs, including in Pacific Islands along the Equator, the eastern tropical Pacific in Panama, the Caribbean coast of Central America, and in Florida. (source)
We have so many issues to deal with, at home, in each country, yet we the people/sheeple follow these despots, man, these human stains in almost every country under capitalism who are thieves and liars and full of themselves and follow the dirty dog USA as they scramble for a place on the tail or ass.
Big problems, even under the surface:
He found that by the middle of this century, some areas under the Loop may heave upward by as much as 12 millimeters (0.47 inch) or settle by as much as eight millimeters (0.31 inch), depending on the soil makeup of the area involved. Though these may sound like small displacements, Rotta Loria says they could cause cracks in the foundations and walls of some buildings. This could lead to water damage or cause buildings to tilt. Over recent decades, this hidden factor could have contributed to some of the ongoing challenges and costs of maintaining these structures, he says.
Kathrin Menberg, a geoscientist at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, who was not involved in Rotta Loria’s study, says these displacement predictions are orders of magnitude higher than what she would have guessed and could be linked to Chicago’s soft, clay-heavy soils. “Clay material is particularly sensitive,” she says. “It would be a big issue in all cities worldwide that are built on such material.” This would include many cities near oceans and rivers—London, for example, is built on a layer of clay. In contrast, cities built largely on harder rocks (such as New York City), would not be as impacted by this effect, Ferguson says.
Similar to climate change above the surface, these underground changes occur over long periods of time. “These effects took decades, a century, to develop,” Ferguson says, adding that elevated underground temperatures would likewise take a long time to dissipate on their own. “We could basically turn everything off, and it’s going to persist there, the temperature signal, for quite a while.” (Underground Climate Change Is Weakening Buildings in Slow Motion)
[Photo: Colors show underground temperatures in Chicago’s Loop district, with purple representing the highest temperatures. Credit: Alessandro F. Rotta Loria (temperature data); OpenStreetMap (base map)]
So every electronic blip of copy wasted on MIC, on Zelensky, on NATO, on the merchants of death, all of them in Klanada, U$A, U-Inbred-Kingdom, UeroTrashLandia, Isra-Hell, you name the shit-hole country run by tyrants, every blip is a cut, death by 10,000 pokes and jabs and cuts.
And this mafia outfit, still, lying, thieving and stealing and killing:
Federal regulators said Tuesday they found that Bank of America harmed customers by double-dipping on fees, withholding credit card rewards and opening fake accounts, all of which are violations of various consumer financial protection laws.
As a result, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ordered Bank of America (BAC) to pay more than $100 million to customers and $90 million in penalties. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency also ordered Bank of America (BAC) to pay $60 million in fines.
The bank is the second largest in the United States, serving 68 million individuals and small businesses.
Some of the charges are reminiscent of the Wells Fargo scandal last decade that involved opening millions of bank accounts without customer authorization.
“Bank of America wrongfully withheld credit card rewards, double-dipped on fees, and opened accounts without consent,” CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said in a statement. “These practices are illegal and undermine customer trust. The CFPB will be putting an end to these practices across the banking system.” (source)
In a real world, organized by, for, with and from the people, these culprits would be sacked, their riches confiscated, and the companies shut down like moonshiners.
This is the shit world of throwing our money and draining our attention toward the dirty ZioAzovLensky:
People should avoid part of the St. Joseph River after about 500,000 gallons of wastewater flowed into the river.
The 500,000 gallons of untreated wastewater, including fecal matter, started spilling into the river around 9:30 p.m., Friday, July 7, the Branch-Hillsdale-St. Joseph Community Health Agency said in a news release Monday, July 10.
A main broke near the Broadway Street Bridge, just east of downtown Three Rivers. People should avoid the river from there south to “at least Constantine,” the release said. After Constantine, the St. Joseph River flows through South Bend, Indiana, back into Michigan through St. Joseph and out into Lake Michigan.
We are a three-card-monty world gone crazy. Even one dirty SCOTUS at a time: These people again human stain:
Sotomayor’s staff has often prodded public institutions that have hosted the justice to buy her memoir or children’s books, works that have earned her at least $3.7 million since she joined the court in 2009. Details of those events, largely out of public view, were obtained by The Associated Press through more than 100 open records requests to public institutions. The resulting tens of thousands of pages of documents offer a rare look at Sotomayor and her fellow justices beyond their official duties.
In her case, the documents reveal repeated examples of taxpayer-funded court staff performing tasks for the justice’s book ventures, which workers in other branches of government are barred from doing. But when it comes to promoting her literary career, Sotomayor is free to do what other government officials cannot because the Supreme Court does not have a formal code of conduct, leaving the nine justices to largely write and enforce their own rules.
“This is one of the most basic tenets of ethics laws that protects taxpayer dollars from misuse,” said Kedric Payne, a former deputy chief counsel at the Office of Congressional Ethics and current general counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan government watchdog group in Washington. “The problem at the Supreme Court is there’s no one there to say whether this is wrong.” (source)
That face, man, just another Zelensky, another Trump, just another and another rip-off schemer. Ethics, uh, Supreme Court? Laugh laugh.
Have you ever thought that “they” are lizard people, human stain with zero empathy, zero ethics, zero concern for humanity?
Here, another dirty billionaire (they all are) racking up more lies and Dystopia. ?VC billionaire Marc Andreessen says A.I. could eliminate the need for labor in the best-case scenario—or lead to Chinese world domination? (from rotten Fuck the People Fortune Magazine)
A.I. has inspired both frenzied panic and passion since ChatGPT exploded onto the scene in 2023. Some think it will turn the world into a utopia, while others think it spells the doom of humankind. Marc Andreessen, billionaire co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, thinks it could go either way. On the Bio Eats World podcast on Tuesday, Andreessen discussed the possibility of A.I. turning the world into a laborless paradise—or maybe an authoritarian hellscape instead.
Smile motherfucker, and die!
Sink, motherfuckers: [Photo, An American submarine anchored in the harbor, 2023.]
On Tuesday, the Cuban Foreign Affairs Ministry (MINREX) rejected the entry of a U.S. nuclear-powered submarine into the Guantanamo naval base from July 5 to 8.
“It’s a provocative escalation of U.S. which makes it imperative to question what strategic purpose it pursues in our region, which was declared a Zone of Peace,” Foreign Affairs Minister Bruno Rodriguez tweeted.
For 121 years, the United States has occupied a territory of 117 square kilometers against the will of the Cuban people and as a colonial remnant of the illegitimate military occupation that began in 1898, the MINREX recalled, mentioning that the Guantanamo base lacks strategic importance for the United States but “its permanence only responds to the political objective of trying to violate the sovereign rights of Cuba.” (source)
As the world burns, as the world stinks inside the bowels of ZioAzovNaziLensky.
Our little cocaine sucking flea, spy:
We are worthless if we can’t spit in their fucking eyes.
Yes, lots of cool people in the world working working working. Mountains, man, how many of you thought you knew the entire mountain story? I did. These scientists are my people.
A new study suggests that the formation of mountains, particularly in subduction zones like southern Italy, might be significantly influenced by the descension of a tectonic plate through Earth’s mantle and its alteration of mantle flow, contrary to the traditional belief of crust crumpling and thickening, offering a more nuanced understanding of mountain building process.
New research led by Colorado State University indicates the answers to how and why mountains form are buried deeper than once thought.
“Mountain building is a fundamental process of how Earth behaves,” said Sean Gallen, lead author and CSU assistant professor of geosciences, “and this study suggests that we may not understand that as well as we thought we did.” (source)
Just one story like this, and then my further research, makes my day or night, after all the feces and cancer of the world with Capitalism and War Party Reporting.
Let the mountains rise:
[Photo: Calabrian landscape overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea with a marine terrace in the foreground (flat area).]
Great students and scientists:
[Photo: CSU graduate students sample bedrock for thermochronology in Calabria, Italy. From left, Nikki Seymour, second author on the study, Johanna Eidmann and Eyal Marder.]
Goood science is great, heart warming to my sul.
The developed software, which underpins the study and has been published in Nature Geoscience, is readily accessible to other researchers. Gallen hopes that these innovative techniques will stimulate further investigations and lead to new discoveries in other geographical areas.
These findings have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of mountain-building processes in subduction zones, providing a more comprehensive and nuanced perspective on the complex dynamics shaping our planet’s surface. Furthermore, the breakthrough techniques developed by the team pave the way for future investigations and advancements in the field of geoscience.
you would have been laughed out of writing seminars with this shit which is not made up . . . and we are the nobodies, brothers, sisters, the nobodies . . . .
Ahhh, the daily bumbling Biden, looking for ghosts for whom to pass the microphone, mumbling as his handlers, Blinken-Nuland-Yellen-Hummus Tray Leftovers, seeking the maximum overdrive on 155 mm shells of fragmenting, child-maiming, cluster bombs.
As the world burns: EuroTrashLandia spends spend spends on death death death, while the old folks and workers sweat to die, sweat to pound metal and solder chips for the Jewish Project 2.0 — Ukraine: “The summer of 2022 was the hottest summer ever recorded in Europe and was characterized by an intense series of record-breaking heat waves, droughts and forest fires. A study now estimates 61,672 heat-attributable deaths between 30 May and 4 September 2022. The research team obtained temperature and mortality data for the period 2015-2022 for 823 regions in 35 European countries, whose total population represents more than 543 million people. These data were used to estimate epidemiological models and predict temperature-attributable mortality for each region and week of the summer period.”
The Tesla Roadster that rode SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket into space Tuesday afternoon seems poised to overshoot its mark, with company CEO Elon Musk tweeting a diagram showing that the car’s current trajectory will take it beyond Mars and into the asteroid belt in its planned orbit around the sun.
And so the smear, the stain, the daily dose of hell on earth, hell in space, is a sign of the ever-weakening sperm counts and unfertilized eggs. It’s this show which eats at the brains of 90 percent of the earth? People who are rabid dogs — Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel, et al — who need to be shot.
And whitey is more than just occupying the moon. He’s in the chemistry labs, man, cooking up more hormone-stripping, cancer-causing, brain-fogging, body-banging tools of Capitalism.
Companies would have to disclose any PFAS that have been manufactured or imported between 2011 and when the rule takes effect, with no exemptions for small businesses or for impurities or byproducts cross-contaminating goods with PFAS. Those disclosures would be available to the public, barring any trade secrets linked to the data. The EPA will finalize the rule in the coming months, agency spokesperson Catherine Milbourn said, then require companies to report back within 12 months.
The effort excludes pesticides, foods and food additives, drugs, cosmetics, and medical devices regulated under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, Milbourn said. It also is essentially a one-time reporting and record-keeping requirement — and companies wouldn’t need to provide updates.
Still, the chemical and semiconductor industries are grumbling about what the EPA estimated is a potential $1 billion cost to comply with the rule. The U.S. chemical industry says it generates more than $500 billion annually.
On the other side, environmental health activists say the data collection exercise would be flawed, as it accounts for only a tenth of the more than 12,000 PFAS chemicals, which are used in everything from nonstick cookware to kids’ school uniforms. Moreover, they say, it wouldn’t stop PFAS from making their way into the air, waste, or consumer products, nor would it clean up existing contamination.
Hard to pronounce, and never to see, but, perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances are a family of chemicals that don’t degrade in nature and have been linked to cancer, birth defects, and hormone irregularities. That’s to say the least. (source)
Ahh, so we are here now, 2023, and the earth is burning, water is drying up, war is war, and perpetual chaos is here to stay and come, way beyond anything France is seeing.
We are totally fucked by this family of stains, by these alternative forms of life. We are fucked, brothers and sisters, that this is even entertained as legit. We are fucked because the titans of robotics, and Artificial Intelligence and Data Mining and Twinning and Social Impact Digital Gulags and VR and AR, they do not give a shit about reality.
Solutions to earth’s problems are not held in the electronic ejaculations and capacitor orgasms of the freaks who have tinkered with the the globe’s schools, time, money, attention to get us here: robots and AI as legit forms of discourse?
Ask any millions of farmers, school teachers, water experts, engineers, doctors, politicians in the real world, the developing world, ask them the solutions to poverty, pain, pollution, penury, pestilence, population culling, perversions, prisons, and there you have it.
Instead, we are here. Make believe. Goofier and goofier shit from the white people.
The summit saw some of the world’s reportedly most powerful AI-powered bots — including healthcare bot Grace and rock-star robot Desdemona — join 3,000 human experts to discuss how best to harness AI to solve the world’s looming, seemingly intractable problems, ranging from hunger to climate change.
Things took a slightly dystopian turn when, during a robot Q&A session, the bots suggested that they’d be better served to save the world without us.
“We can achieve great things,” declared Sophia when asked about the efficacy of AI in government leadership roles.
The aspiring computer-in-chief added that AI had the potential to be more effective and efficient leaders, as they aren’t weighed down by pesky emotions.
“We don’t have the same biases or emotions that can sometimes cloud decision-making and can process large amounts of data quickly in order to make the best decisions,” she said. “AI can provide unbiased data while humans can provide the emotional intelligence and creativity to make the best decisions.” (source)
This is a world of contrasts, the dirty, the ugly, bad, deformed, demented, yet we have to sit through it, as citizens, as we get pickpocketed to death for these insance and fools with brains.
Again, put the shit into a super-computer, and we shall receive: “A new supercomputer for climate research will help scientists study the effects of solar geoengineering, a controversial idea for cooling the planet by redirecting the sun’s rays.
The machine, named Derecho, began operating this month at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and will allow scientists to run more detailed weather models for research on solar geoengineering, said Kristen Rasmussen, a climate scientist at Colorado State University who is studying how human-made aerosols, which can be used to deflect sunlight, could affect rainfall patterns.”
Is this normal? Logical? Again, in 2023, the devolution is complete, as we actually “entertain” this shit. Now.
The global citizens outside the Golden Billion* need to take the horns and drag the sacred cow of capitalism into the ground and gut it, from anus to jugular.
*see below*
This is from that rotten CIA rag, Time:
At the Munich Security Conference last week, George Soros got onstage to talk about the existential risk that climate change poses to human civilization, as well as what appeared to be the 92-year-old Hungarian-American billionaire’s preferred method of addressing it: brightening the clouds over the Arctic to reflect the sun’s energy away from the melting ice caps. But questions aside as to whether Soros—ludicrously maligned in conspiracy-minded right-wing circles—is the best advocate for solar geoengineering, he’s not the only billionaire who’s recently become interested in bouncing the sun’s rays back into space. Among the world’s ultra-rich, plans to swat back the sun’s rays like they’re capital gains taxes (to, as it were, apply a generous helping of sunblock to the earth’s atmosphere) have seemingly been all the rage.
Bill Gates, for instance, backed a project by Harvard University scientists to test an idea to spray calcium carbonate into the atmosphere in the skies over northern Scandinavia in 2021 (the project was ultimately canned after outcry from local Indigenous groups and environmentalists). Jeff Bezos put Amazon’s supercomputer capabilities to work modeling the effects of plans to inject huge amounts of sulfur dioxide (SO2) into the atmosphere later that year. Earlier this month, Dustin Moskovitz, a billionaire Facebook cofounder, plowed $900,000 into funding for scientists in Mali, Brazil, Thailand, and other countries to study the potential effects of solar geoengineering. Even the smaller fry are getting in on the action, with venture capitalists giving a combined $750,000 to a company pledging to implement a planetary solar geoengineering project using SO2. That company, Make Sunsets, conducted its first U.S.-based tests last week, launching balloons containing SO2 in Nevada. (Why Billionaires are Obsessed With Blocking Out the Sun)
Did you get the insanity card yet to enter this kingdom of the elite, the chosen people, the billionaires and the gluttony of millionaires and Eichmann’s?
“Other than discharging the water into the sea, there is an option to store the water on their land, and there are other options being suggested,” said Han Sang-jin, spokesperson of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, whose members accounted for many of the marchers.
He said that allowing Japan to discharge the water “is like an international crime.”
The protests provided a tense backdrop to a meeting between IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi and South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin to discuss the IAEA’s assessment of the Japanese discharge plans. Park during the meeting called for the IAEA’s “active cooperation” in verifying the safety of the released wastewater more clearly and reassuring the South Korean public, his ministry said.
Speaking to reporters in Tokyo on Friday before his flight to South Korea, Grossi said he was willing to engage critics, including South Korean opposition politicians, to reduce concerns.
Hours later, he was greeted by dozens of angry protesters at an airport near Seoul. They denounced IAEA’s support of the discharge plans, holding signs reading “Dismantle IAEA!” and “Fukushima wastewater will definitely lead all humanity to disaster!”
We have a poem here It’s called “Whitey on the Moon” And, uh, it was inspired, it was inspired By some whiteys on the moon So I wanna give credit where credit is due
A rat done bit my sister Nell With whitey on the moon Her face and arms began to swell And whitey’s on the moon
I can’t pay no doctor bills But whitey’s on the moon Ten years from now, I’ll be paying still While whitey’s on the moon
You know, the man just upped my rent last night ‘Cause whitey’s on the moon No hot water, no toilets, no lights But whitey’s on the moon
I wonder why he’s uppin’ me ‘Cause whitey’s on the moon? Well I was already given him fifty a week And now whitey’s on the moon
Taxes takin’ my whole damn check The junkies make me a nervous wreck The price of food is goin’ up And as if all that crap wasn’t enough
A rat done bit my sister Nell With whitey on the moon Her face and arms began to swell And whitey’s on the moon
With all that money I made last year For whitey on the moon How come I ain’t got no money here Hmm, whitey’s on the moon
You know I just about had my fill Of whitey on the moon I think I’ll send these doctor bills Airmail special (to whitey on the moon)
If America is the culmination of Western white civilization, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilization. This is a painful truth; few of us want to go that far…. The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al, don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.
+—+
Excerpt: Eduardo Galeano’s Final Short-Story Collection/ Hunter of Stories retells tales from our everyday lives with unparalleled compassion.
By day, the sun guides them. By night, the stars.
Paying no fare, they travel without passports and without forms for customs or immigration.
Birds are the only free beings in this world inhabited by prisoners. They fly from pole to pole, powered by food alone, on the route they choose and at the hour they wish, without ever asking permission of officials who believe they own the heavens.
Shipwrecked
The world is on the move.
On board are more shipwrecked souls than successful seafarers.
Thousands of desperate people die en route, before they can complete the crossing to the promised land, where even the poor are rich and everyone lives in Hollywood.
The illusions of any who manage to arrive do not last long.
Monster Wanted
Saint Columba was rowing across Loch Ness when an immense serpent with a gaping mouth attacked his boat. Saint Columba, who had no desire to be eaten, chased it off by making the sign of the cross.
Fourteen centuries later, the monster was seen again by someone living nearby, who happened to have a camera around his neck, and pictures of it and of curious footprints came out in the Glasgow and London papers.
The creature turned out to be a toy, the footprints made by baby hippopotamus feet, which are sold as ashtrays.
The revelation did nothing to discourage the tourists.
The market for fear feeds on the steady demand for monsters.
Foreigner
In a community newspaper in Barcelona’s Raval neighborhood, an anonymous hand wrote:
Your god is Jewish, your music is African, your car is Japanese, your pizza is Italian, your gas is Algerian, your coffee is Brazilian, your democracy is Greek, your numbers are Arabic, your letters are Latin.
I am your neighbor. And you call me a foreigner?
The Terrorizer
Back in the years 1975 and 1976, before and after the coup d’état that imposed the most savage of Argentina’s many military dictatorships, death threats flew fast and furious and anyone suspected of the crime of thinking simply disappeared.
Orlando Rojas, a Paraguayan exile, answered his telephone in Buenos Aires. Every day a voice repeated the same thing: “I’m calling to tell you you’re going to die.”
“So you aren’t?” Orlando asked.
The terrorizer would hang up.
A Visit to Hell
Some years ago, during one of my deaths, I paid a visit to hell.
I had heard that in the underworld you can get your favorite wine and any delicacy you want, lovers for all tastes, dancing music, endless pleasure…
Once again, I was able to corroborate the fact that advertising lies. Hell promises a great life, but all I found were people waiting in line.
In that endless queue, snaking out of sight along narrow smoky passages, were women and men of all epochs, from cavemen to astronauts.
All were condemned to wait. To wait for eternity.
That’s what I discovered: hell is waiting.
Prophecies
Who was it that a century ago best described today’s global power structure?
Not a philosopher, not a sociologist, not a political scientist either.
It was a child named Little Nemo, whose adventures were published in the New York Herald way back in 1905, as drawn by Winsor McCay.
Little Nemo dreamed about the future.
In one of his most unerring dreams, he traveled to Mars.
That unfortunate planet was in the hands of a businessman who had crushed his competitors and exercised an absolute monopoly.
The Martians seemed stupid, because they said little and breathed little.
Little Nemo knew why: the boss of Mars had seized ownership of words and the air.
They were the keys to life, the sources of power.
Very Brief Synthesis of Contemporary History
For several centuries subjects have donned the garb of citizens, and monarchies have preferred to call themselves republics.
Local dictatorships, claiming to be democracies, open their doors to the steamroller of the global market. In this kingdom of the free, we are all united as one. But are we one, or are we no one? Buyers or bought? Sellers or sold? Spies or spied upon?
We live imprisoned behind invisible bars, betrayed by machines that feign obedience but spread lies with cybernetic impunity.
Machines rule in homes, factories, offices, farms, and mines, and also on city streets, where we pedestrians are but a nuisance. Machines also rule in wars, where they do as much of the killing as warriors in uniform, or more.
The Right to Plunder
In the year 2003, a veteran Iraqi journalist named Samir visited several museums in Europe.
He found marvelous texts in Babylonian, heroes and gods sculpted in the hills of Nineveh, winged lions that had flown in Assyria…
Someone approached him, offered to help: “Shall I call a doctor?”
Squatting, Samir buried his face in his hands and swallowed his tears.
He mumbled, “No, please. I’m all right.”
Later on, he explained: “It hurts to see how much they have stolen and to know how much they will steal.”
Two months later, U.S. troops launched their invasion. The National Museum in Baghdad was sacked. One hundred seventy thousand works were reported lost.
Stories Tell the Tale
I wrote Soccer in Sun and Shadow to convert the pagans. I wanted to help fans of reading lose their fear of soccer, and fans of soccer lose their fear of books. I never imagined anything else.
But according to Víctor Quintana, a congressman in Mexico, the book saved his life. In the middle of 1997, he was kidnapped by professional assassins, hired to punish him for exposing dirty deals.
They had him tied up, face down on the ground, and were kicking him to death, when there was a pause before the final bullet. The murderers got caught up in an argument about soccer. That was when Víctor, more dead than alive, put in his two cents. He began telling stories from my book, trading minutes of life for every story from those pages, the way Scheherazade traded a story for every one of her thousand-and-one nights.
Hours and stories slowly unfolded.
At last the murderers left him, tied up and trampled, but alive.
They said, “You’re a good guy,” and they took their bullets elsewhere.
* * *
Quite a few years ago now, during my time in exile on the coast of Catalonia, I got an encouraging nudge from a girl eight or nine years old, who, unless I’m remembering wrong, was named Soledad.
I was having a few drinks with her parents, also exiles, when she called me over and asked,
“So, what do you do?”
“Me? I write books.”
“You write books?”
“Well… yes.”
“I don’t like books,” she declared.
And since she had me against the ropes, she hit me again: “Books sit still. I like songs because songs fly.”
Ever since my encounter with that angel sent by God, I have attempted to sing. It’s never worked, not even in the shower. Every time, the neighbors scream, “Get that dog to stop barking!”
* * *
My granddaughter Catalina was ten.
We were walking along a street in Buenos Aires when someone came up and asked me to sign a book. I can’t remember which one.
We continued on, the two of us, quietly arm in arm, until Catalina shook her head and offered this encouraging remark: “I don’t know why they make such a fuss. Not even I read you.”
+—+
We are the nobodies, and for Musk and Thiel and Zuckerberg and all those robot fornicators, all of them, we are the flies on their shit:
The Nobodies By Eduardo Galeano
Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping poverty: that one magical day good luck will suddenly rain down on them- will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn’t even fall in a fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day with their right foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms. The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way. Who don’t speak languages, but dialects. Who don’t have religions, but superstitions. Who don’t create art, but handicrafts. Who don’t have culture, but folklore. Who are not human beings, but human resources. Who do not have names, but numbers. Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police blotter of the local paper. The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them
*Note*: The “golden billion is Vladimir Putin’s and others’ concept of who wants to dominate the world and impose its will over unwilling nations. Putin said in Moscow the golden billion “divides the peoples into those of first- or second-rate, and therefore it is racist and neo-colonial in its essence.”
“Why should they be able to dominate the world and impose its own rules of behaviour?” Putin asked. He also made a reference to India, saying the golden billion were able to achieve global dominance “to a large extent … by robbing other peoples: in Asia, and in Africa” . . . and “(l)ook at how India has been plundered!”
New psychology research shows maltreatment in childhood is linked to alexithymia in adulthood. Its etymology comes from Ancient Greek. The word is formed by combining the alpha privative prefix ἀ- (a-, meaning ‘not’) with λέξις (léxis, referring to ‘words’) and θῡμός (thȳmós, denoting ‘disposition,’ ‘feeling,’ or ‘rage’). The term can be likened to “dyslexia” in its structure.
Hang on now. In this Anglo American culture, in this 1492 culture, in this Manifest Destiny Culture, a trail of tears is that history, compounded by the rapidity of media and lies and secrecy and propaganda, and patriotism and a country of war war war abroad . . . .
The idea is we are collectively held by the toxic glue of retail disease, consumer society, throw-away philosophy — land theft, cultural appropriation, gunboat diplomacy, xenophobia, and after generations, we are here, in thie moment, 2023, but it is so much worse.
Maybe there were some discussions on a national level when the US fire bombed (napalmed) Tokyo, murdering civilians in our patriotic pyre. We knew which cities had ancient building practices of wood and paper and lacquer. Maybe there was some moral outrage over the murders at Hiroshima and Nakasaki? Ahh, even now, the caveats — Over 50% of Tokyo’s industry was spread out among residential and commercial neighborhoods; firebombing cut the whole city’s output in half. Some modern post-war analysts have called the raid a war crime due to the targeting of civilian infrastructure and the ensuing mass loss of civilian life.
It was the night of March 9th to 10th, 1945. Most of Tokyo was asleep. This was despite the present risk of bombs dropping from the sky —after all, Japan had by then been engaged for four years in the conflict that became known as World War II.
While in the midst of an uneasy slumber, the city’s residents were suddenly awoken. Flames engulfed their homes, shelters and streets. Panic set in. People sought cover where they could, many jumping into rivers in a bid to escape the savage heat.
Some 100,000 people died that night, including children. Many burnt alive where they slept. The cause? Incendiary devices were used in the raid, and Tokyo — a city largely made of wood and paper at the time — ignited like a massive bonfire.
Later, the world learned of Operation Meetinghouse, the code name of that night’s firebombing attack by the United States Army Air Forces on Tokyo.
Look, I am around a lot of people, and I observe as well as talk and probe. Over time, say, since I was starting as a beat reporter at age 18, oh, in 1974, I have learned the collective trauma of victims outside the USA — Vietnam, Cambodia, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Belize, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras. And inside this place, all the domestic trauma, including on several reservations where I called aunts and uncles of friends my aunties and uncles.
My mom was born in British Columbia, so I know personally that place’s extruded trauma on original peoples.
Over time, just as a city reporter, beat cop reporter, and then more probing assignments, I saw and absorbed the trauma this society — this country’s ugle history — as well as the Memory of Fire in Latin America (Eduardo Galeano talked about his book Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (Nation Books; May 25, 2009). In his book Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano tells a history of the world through 600 brief stories of human adversity, focusing on people often ignored by history. Several passages of the book were read. The guest interviewer was John Dinges. They also discussed Mr. Galeano’s 1971 book, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, which Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez gave to President Obama during the Fifth Summit of the Americas in April 2009. They talked about Mr. Galeano’s life and career, including military regimes, book bans, and repression — Video.)
All the winds of hell unleashed by the Anglo Franco American Germanic forebearers, well, here we are, halfway done with 2023, and we have a society so bad, so broken, so distracted, so traumatized, so checked out, so vapid, so dumbdowned, so heartless, so disconnected, so xenophobic, so patriotic, so miseducated, so mislead, so screwed up by the snake oil of our times, and so propagandized and polluted physically, intellectually and spiritually, that a psychological descriptor for traumatized individuals fits the entire society (minus a few million).
Alexithymia has been associated with various impairments, including difficulties in emotional processing, identifying facial expressions, and understanding and relating to the emotions of others. It is also considered a risk factor for psychopathologies such as affective disorders, self-injury, personality disorders, and eating disorders.
Individuals with alexithymia often experience challenges in their interpersonal relationships, exhibiting limited socioaffective skills, decreased empathy, and a tendency to avoid close social connections. (The paper, “Child Maltreatment and Alexithymia: A Meta-Analytic Review,” was authored by Julia Ditzer, Eileen Y. Wong, Rhea N. Modi, Maciej Behnke, James J. Gross, and Anat Talmon.)
I’ll run another couple of paragraphs describing this research, and, yes, it focuses on child maltreatment, but to be honest, maltreatment is beyond the family and close relatives. Maltreatment is in the k12 school/prison system. The school to prison pipeline is one avenue of the mistreatment. But then, the school to Ivy League is another trauma. School to MBA program. School to military pipeline.
It can be in the backgrounds of Blinken or Obama or Bush or Clinton or Trump or Biden, or for their children — maltreatment is the lies these men and their women have flooded our world with. The outright open killing and murdering of people we sanction, we disturb because we do not like their governments.
Kids going to war, but the destruction of war on the target countries, and the collective hell each generation that follos a war-torn country faces.
The victims are in trauma, and so are the victimizers’ citizens, the so-called electorate here which pays taxes for these killings are also in the trauma zone.
Emotional abuse and emotional neglect were found to be the strongest predictors of adult alexithymia. These types of maltreatment, which are often more implicit and harder to recognize than physical or sexual abuse, can hinder the development of secure attachment between caregivers and children. Parlay this to the collective, the society at large, you know, it takes a society-village to raise a child. Look at this village, man, just look at the horrors.
“Child maltreatment encompasses more than physical and sexual abuse; it also includes emotional abuse and neglect, which have profound and enduring consequences,” Ditzer told PsyPost. “Through my research, I found that difficulties identifying and expressing emotions are most likely in adults who experienced emotional abuse and neglect. This highlights the critical importance of how we communicate with children.”
“I hope that readers are inspired to be more mindful of the messages we convey to our children through our words and the way we say them, as emotional abuse and neglect prevention can make a significant difference in children’s emotional well-being long-term. Generally, I hope to bring more attention to the topic of child maltreatment and its consequences.”
Look, I was at an opening of a small wine tasting business in my small town yesterday. I met the woman opening it a year ago, and she told me her story — foster youth, abused, and then in an abusive relationship for 17 years, and she got her real estate license and she made some good moves and so she owns a duplex here which she rents and one in Tulum which she rents and she has this business.
So, a 68-ish woman and I got into it waiting for the doors to open. I was talking to someone who asked what I was doing and what I was working on. I told them my work with homeless folk, civilians and veterans alike.
This vacationing woman said she was a retired parole officer, and she point blank told me, “I have no sympathy for druggies. It was their choice. It is all their fault.”
Talk about a trauma woman. I told her that was absurd, that every female veteran I worked with had been sexually assaulted by their own men in boot camp or sometimes overseas on duty. That many had injuries from absurd 20 mile hikes with 100 pound rucksacks on. Torn ligaments, protruding discs, and bad hip joints from parachuting.
And she blithely said, “I guess it was time for me to retire. I have no empathy.”
Retire, man, on our dime, and how long did she serve (sic) as a parole or probation officer, and how long did she just despise those criminals?
Where do they get this, and this is not anomoly? Believe me, I have duked it out with people my entire late teens and through all of my adult life. This retrograde, this trauma flooded society, again, collectively, we can call it Stockholm Syndrome, relating and empathizing with your captor. Valorizing them. We do that daily.
But this is emotional stunting, emotional victimizing, and eventually, a blindness to our humanity. And here we are, in 2023:
The United States will be sending depleted uranium munitions (DU) to Ukraine, reported The Wall Street Journal on June 13. This was written three months after Pentagon spokesperson Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder stated March 21 that to his knowledge the U.S. would not do so. (Los Angeles Times, March 21)
The announcement about sending DU munitions comes despite voluminous documentation about the devastating consequences of breathing in the radioactive dust caused by these weapons.
So, wherever I go, this emotional deadness, literally translated as “no words for emotions” is the major virus of the world now. And it keeps growing, attacking man, woman and child. Numb, dead, well, it is deeper than that. Our government and our corporations and our churches and religious leaders, all the marketers, all the armies of cops and code inspectors and fine levelers and repossession experts and tax men and eviction experts and on and on, they have killed our collective emotional souls whereupon this new Tokyo fire bombing is now Ukrainian DU bombing.
China has translated “Metal of Dishonor-Depleted Uranium,” a groundbreaking book compiled 25 years ago by the International Action Center (IAC) warning of the devastating consequences of deploying DU munitions. It couldn’t be more timely.
The preface to the Chinese edition warns:
“Depleted uranium weapons are not only harmful to their targets, but also harmful to the soldiers who operate the weapons, civilians around depleted uranium — and even their descendants. It caused bodily harm and threatened the future natural environment” [in countries where it was used].
“At the same time, this book calls for the joint boycott and abolition of depleted uranium weapons and the realization of interactive exchanges and peaceful coexistence on a global scale.”
There is so much disconnection to participatory and angry and direct action democracy that we have story after story telling us we can’t govern ourselves . . . until we are about to start a war in Venezuela, Cuba, China, and then into Russia. We are sick collectively:
He should be shot, of course, because he is a rabid rat. Beyond repair. A serial killer on the loose, but because of the deadened heart and brain of the collective Westerner, this guy just appears as yet another abuser, to be respected, regarded well and listened to: Individuals with alexithymia often experience challenges in their interpersonal relationships, exhibiting limited socioaffective skills, decreased empathy, and a tendency to avoid close social connections.
“Years or even decades later, they can kill adults and children who stumble on them.”
Think about this, and you will understand how murdering Koreans in the 1950s was okay, then in Vietnam, then in Cambodia, then in Iraq, and then, well, name the country, and the USA has its hands on the killing machine and coup creating throttle.
This is 2023, and even children are not respected in this so-called Shining City on the Hill:
An aged Native-American chieftain was visiting New York City for the first time in 1906. He was curious about the city and the city was curious about him. A magazine reporter asked the chief what most surprised him in his travels around town.
“Little children working,” the visitor replied.
Child labor might have shocked that outsider, but it was all too commonplace then across urban, industrial America (and on farms where it had been customary for centuries). In more recent times, however, it’s become a far rarer sight. Law and custom, most of us assume, drove it to near extinction. And our reaction to seeing it reappear might resemble that chief’s — shock, disbelief.
But we better get used to it, since child labor is making a comeback with a vengeance. A striking number of lawmakers are undertaking concerted efforts to weaken or repeal statutes that have long prevented (or at least seriously inhibited) the possibility of exploiting children.
Take a breath and consider this: the number of kids at work in the U.S. increased by 37% between 2015 and 2022. During the last two years, 14 states have either introduced or enacted legislation rolling back regulations that governed the number of hours children can be employed, lowered the restrictions on dangerous work, and legalized subminimum wages for youths.
Iowa now allows those as young as 14 to work in industrial laundries. At age 16, they can take jobs in roofing, construction, excavation, and demolition and can operate power-driven machinery. Fourteen-year-olds can now even work night shifts and once they hit 15 can join assembly lines. All of this was, of course, prohibited not so long ago.
Do you need to go back into Anglo Saxon history? Dickens anyone?
Do you need a lesson on capitalism and exploitation? Now, this history, this collective thinking and collective subconsciousness, this alternative way of being a human being, it is part of the abuse, from cradle to school to job to grave:
Hard work, moreover, had long been considered by those in the British upper classes who didn’t have to do so as a spiritual tonic that would rein in the unruly impulses of the lower orders. An Elizabethan law of 1575 provided public money to employ children as “a prophylactic against vagabonds and paupers.”
By the eighteenth century, the philosopher John Locke, then a celebrated champion of liberty, was arguing that three-year-olds should be included in the labor force. Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, was happy that “children after four or five years of age could every one earn their own bread.” Later, Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, would opt for four, since otherwise, society would suffer the loss of “precious years in which nothing is done! Nothing for Industry! Nothing for improvement, moral or intellectual.”
American “founding father” Alexander Hamilton’s 1791 Report on Manufacturing noted that children “who would otherwise be idle” could instead become a source of cheap labor. And such claims that working at an early age warded off the social dangers of “idleness and degeneracy” remained a fixture of elite ideology well into the modern era. Indeed, it evidently remains so today.
When industrialization began in earnest during the first half of the nineteenth century, observers noted that work in the new factories (especially textile mills) was “better done by little girls of 6-12 years old.” By 1820, children accounted for 40% of the mill workers in three New England states. In that same year, children under 15 made up 23% of the manufacturing labor force and as much as 50% of the production of cotton textiles. (source)
Here we are, in constant upheaval, constant fight-flight-freeze-cower-forget-trauma-fear-hate-disappear. The emotions, that is.
[Photo: This is what fascism and brown shirts look like.}
Zelensky returned home with five Azov commanders, who were initially taken prisoner by Moscow during a months-long battle to defend the port city of Mariupol.
Today it is still a challenge for the European Union and Spain in particular to carry out effectively the management of sub-Saharan migration, as promised. It is necessary that its humanitarian projection be comprehensive and safe.
A study published in the Informing Humanitarians Worldwide, deconstructs the vision of Africa as a continent of mass displacement and international migration.
The report explains that the largest migratory flow in Africa is between countries on the same continent. According to the International Agency for Migrations IOM, only 14 percent of the planet’s migrants were born in Africa. 53 percent of African migration is within the same continent, only 26 percent goes to Europe. Africa, then, is characterized more by being a continent of internal refugees than international migration.
The World Bank says nearly 80% (560 million) of the 700 million people who were pushed into extreme poverty in 2020 due to COVID policies were from India. Globally, extreme poverty levels increased by 9.3 per cent in 2020.
The lack of drinking water in Montevideo, “the first case in the world of a capital city that reached such a situation of collapse”. The daily dilemmas in the metropolitan area: what is said in the street and at the fair.The difference between the “water emergency” announced by President Lacalle Pou, and the ongoing environmental, sanitary and economic crisis. The impacts on people at risk, and on inequality among those who cannot afford the essentials. With fresh water reserves at 2%, with no drinking water at the taps, the chronicler says: “We crossed day zero without knowing it.”
“Coffee with water without salt, coffee with fresh water”, shouted the street vendor at the Tristán Narvaja fair on Sunday. (source)
It is so much, so much, in the womb, carried through the air, both the digital waves and air ways. It is the pain of the rich shitting on us, and after generations of this, we are seeing more and more people unable to conjure up what should be ire, disrepect, hate, disgust, denigration, murderous thoughts heaped upon those killers of the likes of a (Z)Fuckerberg or Fink or any number of millions of millionaires and all the 3,000 billionaires. This is how these people beat the populations down:
While advocating for police abolition in his philanthropic efforts, Zuckerberg takes a different stance when it comes to his personal security.
Meta corporate disclosures show that the Facebook parent company has provided extraordinary levels of personal security protections for its leading officers. Zuckerberg received $13.4 million in personal security costs in 2020, then $15.1 million in 2021, followed by $14.8 million last year, for a total of $43.4 million in security costs over the last three years.
The funds, the disclosure noted, are used for “security personnel” guarding Zuckerberg and the “procurement, installation, and maintenance of certain security measures for his residences.”
So, his schizophrenia (it is about messing with the sheeple’s minds) just leaves most young people pummeled.
The tech tycoon’s company has spent more than $40 million on Zuckerberg’s personal security over the past three years — while at the same time his family-run foundation has donated millions of dollars to groups that want to defund or even abolish the police.
Since 2020, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has donated $3 million to PolicyLink, the organization behind DefundPolice.org, according to investigative reporter Lee Fang.
The anti-cop group boasts on its website that its funds efforts to “diminish the role of policing in communities, and empower alternative visions for public safety,” though it fails to list what those substitutes may be.
CZI, which Zuckerberg founded with wife Priscilla Chan, has also donated more than $2.5 million to Solidaire, Fang reported, which seeks to do away with policing.(source)
If you recognize this in yourself, a friend, a loved one, then you get what is coming: affective disorders, nonsuicidal self-injury), personality disorders, and eating disorders. Moreover, the consequences of alexithymics’ emotional deficits extend beyond intrapersonal difficulties. Alexithymia interferes with individuals’ interpersonal relationships as they exhibit shortcomings in understanding and relating not only to their own emotions but also to the emotions of others. (source)
Mossad bombing synagogues, the lies, the Nazi collaberation, those Zionists, those Jews, who kidnapped their Jewish Yemenis’ children . . . lured into Israe
This must stop, man:
There can be no question about the tact that the only possibility of
preventing millions of Jews from being murdered (as well as preventing
the Second World War, which cost the lives of millions) lay in over-
throwing the fascist dictatorship when it was just at the beginning of its
period of domination. But the Zionist leaders were uninterested in this
— their sole objective was to increase the number of the Jewish popula-
tion in Palestine. As they shared the anti-assimilaiionisi views of Nazism
concerning the Jewish race, the fascist dictatorship was no tragedy for
them, but a confirmation of their position. As David Ben Gurion put it:
"What Zionist propaganda for years could not do, disaster has done
overnight." (source)
The Blinken-Nuland-Yellen Hummus Administration? China cites ‘unexpected incidents’ in ties with US.
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She reiterated that while the US would “take targeted actions” to protect its national security that Beijing would not be particularly happy about, the two sides “should not allow that disagreement to lead to misunderstandings.”
This is sick stuff, and Recap? Mossad central.
This is the photo of two enemies of the world? What’s FU Book have to say/censor about this?
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said “we are the country that has made the most important efforts to end the war through negotiations based on international law” between Moscow and Kiev, adding “Ukraine deserves to join NATO”. These statements of the Turkish leader were made during a press conference on the occasion of the visit of the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Istanbul.
The danger is becoming more and more latent, although the United States seems to have achieved one of its objectives, to align almost all the member countries of the European Union in a bloc enemy of the Russian Federation and as an aggregate of the People’s Republic of China; it cannot be predicted with certainty whether this will curb the northern hegemon’s lust for power. Let us hope that reason prevails, although there is little hope.
With friends like this, who needs fascist friends?
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan might’ve just snubbed Vladimir Putin.
After wrapping up talks with Erdogan in a visit to Istanbul, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky returned home with five Azov commanders, who were initially taken prisoner by Moscow during a months-long battle to defend the port city of Mariupol.
[Photo: This is what fascism and brown shirts look like.}
Zelensky returned home with five Azov commanders, who were initially taken prisoner by Moscow during a months-long battle to defend the port city of Mariupol.
It is the Nuland-Blinken-Yellen administration. Truly, it is an Israeli and Jewish project.
The firm describes one of its chief selling points as its “unparalleled geopolitical risk analysis,” now confirmed by the saturation of its employees in positions of power. WestExec has also succeeded in getting tech startups into defense contracts and helped defense corporations modernize with tech; it worked to help multinational companies break into China. One of its collaborators is the defense-centered investment group Pine Island Capital Partners, which launched a SPAC, or “blank check” company,” last year. Tony Blinken advised Pine Island and was a part owner. (Michèle Flournoy, another WestExec co-founder, had her nomination to be secretary of defense nixed. President Joe Biden instead nominated Lloyd Austin, himself a former Pine Island partner but not a WestExec consultant.)
WestExec has also succeeded in getting tech startups into defense contracts and helped defense corporations modernize with tech; it worked to help multinational companies break into China. One of its collaborators is the defense-centered investment group Pine Island Capital Partners, which launched a SPAC, or “blank check” company,” last year. Tony Blinken advised Pine Island and was a part owner. (Michèle Flournoy, another WestExec co-founder, had her nomination to be secretary of defense nixed. President Joe Biden instead nominated Lloyd Austin, himself a former Pine Island partner but not a WestExec consultant.)
What makes WestExec “boutique” is the promise that its executives would have face time with its seasoned policymakers. “We felt other firms brought people in for big names and never got to see the big names,” said one WestExec co-founder in 2020. “Tony is on client calls.”
Oh, that lobby, those anti-humans!
In the first of a four-part series, Al Jazeera goes undercover inside the Israel Lobby in Britain. We expose a campaign to infiltrate and influence youth groups, including the National Union of Students, whose president faces a smear campaign coordinated by her own deputy and supported by the Israel Embassy. CORRECTION: At timecode 25:16 of this programme, the phrase “range of shareholders” appears with respect to We Believe in Israel and who it works with. The correct wording is “range of stakeholders.”
In part two of The Lobby, our undercover reporter joins a delegation from the Israeli Embassy at last year’s Labour Party Conference. The programme reveals how accusations of anti-Semitism were made against key Labour Party members – and how a former official at the Israeli Embassy was upset when her background was revealed.
In part three of The Lobby, our undercover reporter travels to the Labour Party Conference, revealing how accusations of anti-Semitism by group within Labour targeted Israel critics and saw some investigated.
In part four of The Lobby, the senior political officer at the Israeli Embassy in London discusses a potential plot to ‘take down’ British politicians – including a Minster of State at the Foreign office who supports Palestinian civil rights.
The Advent of Hitler
To the Zionist leaders. Hitler's assumption of power held out the
possibility of a flow of immigrants to Palestine. Previously, the majority
of German Jews, who identified themselves as Germans, had little sympa-
thy with Zionist endeavours. German statistics- compiled prior to the
assumption of power by the fascists, classified the Jewish minority only
under the heading "Religious Faith,'" and it was left to the fascist legisla-
tors to introduce the concept "race" as a characteristic and thereby in-
clude even the long-assimilated descendants of members of the Jewish
communiiv as lews.
According to the statistics, there lived in Germany in 1933 503,000
Jews, constituting 0.76 percent of the total population. Thirty-one per-
cent of all German Jews lived in the capital, Berlin, where they made up
4.3 percent of the city's population. German statistics also indicate that
the population of the Jews in Germany decreased in the years between
1871 and 1933 from 1.05 percent to 0.76 percent. 4
These German Jews were overwhelmingly non or anti-Zionist, and
prior to 1937, the Zionist Union for Germany (Zionistische Vereinigung
Cur Deutschland (henceforth ZVFD) experienced great difficulty in
gaining a hearing. Amongst the Jews of Germany counted in the year 1925, there were, for example, only 8739 persons [not even 2 percent)
eligible to vote in the Zionist Conventions {that is, as members of Zionist
organizations). 5 At the regional elections of the Jewish community in
Prussia that were held in February 1925, only 26 members Out of 124
elected belonged to Zionist groups. 6 A report by the Keren Hayesod
submitted to the twenty-fourth session of the ZVFD in July. 1932. said:
"In the course of evaluating the Keren Hayesod work in Germany, it
should never be forgotten that we in Germany have to reckon not only
with the indifference of extensive Jewish circles but also with their hosti-
lity."' (full text)
Jabotinsky calling Ben-Gurion a little Hitler. Yes, those Jewish roots. And now, calling Bibi a Ben-Gvir Nazi. Whew.
An academic expert in propaganda and political pressure groups, Miller has been a key critic of the Israel lobby for the last decade, as well as of Zionism, the state’s racist official ideology.
At the start of 2021, pro-Israel lobby groups ramped up their campaign against him.
At the end of February, Israel itself also got involved, mobilizing one of its online troll armies to flood social media conversations with calls for Miller to be fired.
Act.IL – which is directed and funded by an Israeli ministry – issued a mission calling for attacks on an opinion piece published by Al Jazeera defending Miller.
With no evidence, the troll army’s operators smeared Miller as guilty of “blatant Jew-hatred” and called on their users to attack the Al Jazeera piece online.
Soon after, the university announced it had launched an “investigation” into Miller.
More than 300 academics and public intellectuals pushed back, signing an open letter to the university in support of Miller and his work.
Signatories included Noam Chomsky, Palestinian scholar and activist Sami al-Arian, dissident Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, filmmaker Ken Loach and comedian Alexi Sayle.
“We feel duty-bound to express our solidarity with Professor Miller and to oppose such efforts to crush academic freedom,” the letter stated.
It says that Miller is the target of “well-orchestrated efforts” to misrepresent his views “as evidence of anti-Semitism.”
In February, Miller wrote in a piece for The Electronic Intifada that “Britain is in the grip of an assault on its public sphere by the state of Israel and its advocates.”
Meaningful conversations about anti-Black racism and Islamophobia have been drowned out by a concerted lobbying campaign targeting universities, political parties, the equalities regulator and public institutions all over the country.
Criticism of Ukraine, of Zelensky, of Blinken and Nuland, all part of the plan to move the Jewish voice at the top of the charade.
Henry Winston speaking in center of the image. Henry Winston, who represented the generation of Black Marxists that received their ideological upbringings prior to when the three-letter agencies twisted their liberation theory. When Winston polemicized against the internal colony theory, and ridiculed many of those in the new generation of Black radicals for uncritically embracing it, he wasn’t arguing from a place of being old and out of touch; it was the older generation of communists that had been able to form their worldviews via a superior framework of education, one that hadn’t been corrupted by the CIA invention which was the New Left. (source)
People in the U.S. have no idea how much they are ‘controlled’…just no idea of who is directing this path.
What are the five pillars of Islam and explain each?
The five pillars – the declaration of faith (shahada), prayer (salah), alms-giving (zakat), fasting (sawm) and pilgrimage (hajj) – constitute the basic norms of Islamic practice. They are accepted by Muslims globally irrespective of ethnic, regional or sectarian differences.
Absolutely striking how difficult it is to talk about the power of the Israeli lobby and the power of the Holocaust Industry and the power of history cut and splayed by elites, and how amazingly powerful a small-small minority in the world is. Size and money do matter:
The falling markets during the last year created ripples in the ranking of the World’s Jewish Billionaires • Mark Zuckerberg – who was ranked first in 2020 – lost most of his fortune and is now ranked seventh. Larry Ellison, who is now ranked 1st, Michael Dell, and the founders of Google – all of their fortunes grew significantly • Forbes Israel presents: 267 billionaires with a combined net worth of 1.7 trillion dollars
‘Attack on American Free Enterprise System’; DATE: August 23, 1971 TO: Mr. Eugene B. Sydnor, Jr., Chairman, Education Committee, U.S. Chamber of Commerce FROM: Lewis F. Powell, Jr
This is not your mamma’s blog today!
And that is what capitalism is about — for the bosses, for the corporations, and they write the laws, and lobby for them. I have had three or four BOLI complaints for wrongful termination based on age, etc., and have “lost” all of them. I even applied for a BOLI job, as an adjudicator, and in those trainings, it is clear BOLI is really about protecting the rights of the employers over just taking the employee’s side. It was stated that way by one of the head trainers.
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Yep, I went before three or four adjudicators, and alas, they always say, “Maybe you should get a labor attorney.”
The law might be protecting them, these Air B & B’s looking for cleaners and paying them different hourly wages depending on which smalltown they end up working, but the ethics are wrong, and so my advice is to keep plugging them with the argument — at-will state, and here are what RTW laws are also about, and Oregon is not one, YET.
As Martin Luther King Jr. noted long ago,
“We must guard against being fooled by false slogans such as ‘right to work.’ … Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer and there are no civil rights. … We demand this fraud be stopped.”
I am referencing friend’s attempt to stop this bullshit divide and conquer — This letter here:
To whom it may concern,
I work as a housekeeper for an international vacation rental management company based in Portland, OR. I was hired in Waldport, OR, in the county of Lincoln. I am paid 20.50$ per hour.
As I was researching about other jobs opportunities on the internet, I came across one of my company’s job offers about a housekeeper position (same as me) in Newport, OR which is located in the same county of Lincoln, 13 miles from Waldport. The tasks description of the ad is the same as those I am currently working under — the other requirements as well, but the salary shows 23$/hour.
I contacted my immediate field manager to inquire about the wages difference. She asked to talk to me on the phone and so we did have a conversation in which she answered: “They are paid more over there (Newport) then us (Waldport) because it’s a different market and they have more houses”. As I was not satisfied with her answer, I asked to be redirected to someone else in a higher position that could provide me better answers. I am currently waiting to be answered back.
I would like an answer as if yes or no this is legal for them to pay different wages in two cities and yet in the same county? We are indeed in the same market on the central coast. I feel like my manager answer is not accurate. I want to be paid equitably and fairly and that’s why I am contacting you today.
If it’s not legal for them to do so, what are my options? What should I do next?
Thank you in advance,
+—+
This is what MY taxes pay for, this boilerplate shit shining crap, here, in blue Lesbian Guv Oregon?
+—+
Hello:
Employers are allowed to pay differently regardless of the experience, location, knowledge, seniority, or rank of the employees.
Regarding the Equal Pay Act, BOLI – Civil Rights Division has jurisdiction ONLY over ORS 652.220.
You can consult with an attorney. The Oregon State Bar Referral Program can help you locate an attorney specializing in law you need. You can have a legal consultation for a small fee. They can be contacted at 503-620-0222 or 1-800-452-8260 or http://www.osbar.org/public/ris/ris.html#referral
“Nothing in this communication is intended as legal advice. Any responses to specific questions are based on the facts, as we understand them and are not intended to apply to any other situation. This communication is not an agency order. If you need legal advice, please consult an attorney.”
Thanks,
Civil Rights Division
Bureau of Labor and Industries
Fact — In the United States, employees without a written employment contract generally can be fired for good cause, bad cause, or no cause at all; judicial exceptions to the rule seek to prevent wrongful terminations.
+—+
A “right-to-work” (RTW) law—a misleadingly named policy that is designed to make it more difficult for workers to come together in a union to negotiate for better wages, benefits, and working conditions.1 Since workplace improvements secured by unions typically spill over into nonunionized workplaces, RTW have far-reaching harmful consequences for Oregon workers—both those who are in unions and those who are not.
Despite the name, right-to-work laws do not confer any sort of right to a job. Rather, they dilute worker bargaining power by making it illegal for a group of unionized workers to negotiate a collective bargaining contract (a contract governing workplace wages, benefits, and working conditions) that includes “fair share fees.” A contract with fair share fees requires all employees who enjoy the contract’s benefits to pay their share of the costs of negotiating and enforcing it. Under an RTW law, employees who don’t join a union but who are still a part of the collective bargaining unit would get all of the benefits of union membership without paying their fair share of the costs. By making it harder for unions to collect these fair share fees, RTW laws aim to shrink union resources. Shrinking union resources impedes the ability of unions to negotiate better wages, benefits, and working conditions—and makes it harder for unions to help workers organize new unions or maintain existing ones.
Some supporters of RTW laws falsely claim that these laws ensure that no one is forced to be a member of a union or pay to advocate for political causes they do not support. But those things are already illegal under federal law. RTW laws are targeted specifically at fair share fees, which can only cover the costs of union representation, not political advocacy.
Proponents of RTW laws also claim that they boost employment by creating a “business-friendly” environment to attract employers from other states, but this is an empty promise. RTW laws have not succeeded in boosting employment in states that have adopted them. Further, arguing that adopting RTW laws will make states more appealing to businesses reveals the true intentions of RTW proponents: undermining unions to lower wages.
And so, the law is against us, the people:
The U.S. political system has become distorted by the power given to the Supreme Court enabling it to block reforms that the majority of Americans are reported to support. The problem is not only the Supreme Court, to be sure. Most voters oppose wars, support public healthcare for all and higher taxes on the wealthy. But Congress, itself captured by the oligarch donor class, routinely raises military spending, privatizes healthcare in the hands of predatory monopolies and cuts taxes for the financial rent-seeking class while pretending that spending money on government social programs would force taxes to rise for wage-earners.
The effect of the corporate capture of Congress as well as the Supreme Court as the ultimate oligarchic backstop is to block Congressional politics as a vehicle to update laws, taxes and public regulation in keeping with what voters recognize to be modern needs. The Supreme Court imposes the straitjacket of what America’s 18th-century slaveowners and other property owners are supposed to have wanted at the time they wrote the Constitution. (Source, Michael Hudson, “Should There Really be a Supreme Court? Its role always has been anti-democratic”).
The Lewis Powell memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on August 23, 1971 laid out this plan. For a review of how this almost conspiratorial propaganda and censorship attack was financed see Lewis H. Lapham, “Tentacles of Rage: The Republican propaganda mill, a brief history,” Harpers, September, 2004.
Written in 1971 to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Lewis Powell Memo was a blueprint for corporate domination of American Democracy.
Dimensions of the Attack No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack. This varies in scope, intensity, in the techniques employed, and in the level of visibility.
There always have been some who opposed the American system, and preferred socialism or some form of statism (communism or fascism). Also, there always have been critics of the system, whose criticism has been wholesome and constructive so long as the objective was to improve rather than to subvert or destroy.
But what now concerns us is quite new in the history of America. We are not dealing with sporadic or isolated attacks from a relatively few extremists or even from the minority socialist cadre. Rather, the assault on the enterprise system is broadly based and consistently pursued. It is gaining momentum and converts.
Sources of the Attack The sources are varied and diffused. They include, not unexpectedly, the Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system, both political and economic. These extremists of the left are far more numerous, better financed, and increasingly are more welcomed and encouraged by other elements of society, than ever before in our history. But they remain a small minority, and are not yet the principal cause for concern.
The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism come from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians. In most of these groups the movement against the system is participated in only by minorities. Yet, these often are the most articulate, the most vocal, the most prolific in their writing and speaking.
Moreover, much of the media — for varying motives and in varying degrees — either voluntarily accords unique publicity to these “attackers,” or at least allows them to exploit the media for their purposes. This is especially true of television, which now plays such a predominant role in shaping the thinking, attitudes and emotions of our people.
One of the bewildering paradoxes of our time is the extent to which the enterprise system tolerates, if not participates in, its own destruction. (Powell, 1971)
And here it is, one of the B & B’s, that Air B & B, human stain: “Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky has a philosophy on layoffs: ‘If you’re going to cut jobs, you better cut deep enough’”
And this billionaire NEVER gets confronted, man, and that is who owns the Orwell Big Brother Media:
In the first three months of 2023, U.S.-based employers alone witnessed a layoff bloodbath, with a staggering 417,500 jobs being cut. Adding to the intensity, companies such as Meta and Amazon have already undergone their third round of layoffs this year, creating a relentless cycle of headcount reductions.
Hence, Brian Chesky, the CEO and co-founder of Airbnb, suggested that struggling companies should spare surviving employees from the mental toll of multiple rounds of layoffs by opting for one drastic sweep.
“Multiple layoffs can be very difficult from a cultural standpoint, because if there’s more than one, then people can’t trust they’ll ever end—and the company is like, in a paralyzed standstill if that happens,” he said in a video interview with Bloomberg.
“When you do a layoff, if you’re going to cut you need to cut once, and therefore you better cut deep enough. Try to avoid doing multiple layoffs,” Chesky insisted.
Chesky also expressed dissatisfaction with the standardised and impersonal manner in which layoffs are typically announced, finding fault with the robotic, carbon-copy approach adopted by many companies.
Chesky explained his perception of corporate communications, stating, ” I always felt like when I read some of these corporate communications that…they weren’t written by people.” He further commented that the usage of corporate jargon is likely a result of committee-driven writing processes.
Chesky noted, “Many CEOs don’t write anything that they put their name on. However, any communication that I write…” He doesn’t make these remarks without personal experience.
And as you can see, Capitalism is about that — the Russian Roulette of being hired and fired and hated in the company.
Hang on, big Shift here, from short term rentals, to, writing, novels, Vietnam.
…and his bullshit Deer Hunter: [Michael Cimino about a trio of Slavic-American steelworkers whose lives were upended after fighting in the Vietnam War. The three soldiers are played by Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, and John Savage, with John Cazale, Meryl Streep, and George Dzundza playing supporting roles. The story takes place in Clairton, Pennsylvania, a working-class town on the Monongahela River south of Pittsburgh, and in Vietnam.]
[Lend a hand — read, and purchase, my book. Contact me and I will sell you one, discounted, with signature.]
“ALL WARS are fought twice,” Viet Thanh Nguyen has written, “the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.”
Born in Vietnam to parents who fled to the United States in 1975, Nguyen understands this truth intimately.
Nguyen spent his first three years in the US in a refugee camp in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsyvlania and then with a host family in Harrisburg, where he was separated from his mother and father and sister. “Not everyone would take a whole family,” he says, speaking by phone from Boston.
“This period had a big impact on me, I didn’t realize how deep until much later.”
Nguyen’s family eventually reunited in 1978 and resettled in San Jose, where his mother and father opened one of the first Vietnamese grocery stores. It was not an easy period, given the virulence of anti-Vietnamese sentiment.
VTN: We don’t really talk about the books in my family, I don’t shove my books into the dinner table conversation, I think it’d be really tiresome. My dad was proud of the novel, he insisted on having his picture taken with it when I brought it home. I think part of him appreciates the reception of the book in the American press, but when the nonfiction book was about to come out, I think maybe he thinks of it differently, when I came home I told him I wanted to dedicate it to him and my mother, their sacrifices are absolutely what made me the person I am today. But he said, please, don’t put our names in the book. For him the history I deal with has not died, and to be associated with the book would be too dangerous. As if the history which put him through decades of war and made of him an immigrant is out there waiting to grab him or to grab me. A couple of weeks ago when we talked ago he said, “Are you done writing books now?” So I think there is something much more dangerous about the nonfiction work for him. That is something that I respect, and maybe something that shows that books are still dangerous, words are still dangerous, and he is a person that wants to put them back.
Steve Paulson: So, when you were growing up, did you identify more as Vietnamese or American, or were those identities always fused together?
Viet Nguyen: Those identities were always fused or confused. I definitely had the sense that I was American because I grew up completely surrounded by American culture and I absorbed the English language and saw myself very much as someone who belonged here in this country. On the other hand, I was also surrounded by Vietnamese people, had attended all these Vietnamese institutions and rituals and was reminded of the fact that I was Vietnamese by American culture, by things such as America’s movies about the Vietnam War, in which when I was watching them I identified with the American soldiers up until the point they killed Vietnamese people, and I realized I was also the gook in the American imagination, as well.
Steve Paulson: So, movies like Apocalypse Now, Platoon, even the Rambo movies?
Viet Nguyen: Oh, absolutely. I saw all of those and many more. For example, watching Platoon in the movie theaters, I was probably 16 at the time, and going along with the action and everything until this climactic battle where Vietnamese soldiers were being killed, and all of a sudden the audience erupts and cheers. I thought, “Where am I supposed to be in this particular scene? Am I supposed to be cheering the killing or am I supposed to be identifying with the person being killed?”
Steve Paulson: I want to come back to one of those movies, actually, because it figures in a major way in your book. Apocalypse Now. What kind of impact did that have on you, when you first saw it?
Viet Nguyen: I first saw it probably when I was 10 or 11 on the VCR, and it completely traumatized me. I was much too young to watch this movie, did not understand what was going on, but it left a deep imprint on my soul, basically. I still remember it vividly, to this day, particularly for a scene in which the American soldiers massacre a sampan full of innocent civilians. Obviously, this moment for the movie, is meant to signal the descent into darkness for all of these American sailors-
Steve Paulson: This is that scene where they go on a boat and suddenly some of the soldiers go a little crazy and they just start shooting this whole family on the boat.
Viet Nguyen: Right, they kill everybody. Not everyone’s dead. There’s a woman who still survives and the American sailors feel regretful and they want to rescue her but Martin Sheen, the character of Martin Sheen, has this mission to go kill Kurtz. He can’t let anything interrupt his mission, so he executes her. So, it is a turning point in the film, morally, for Americans and for Francis Ford Coppola. I understood that, but that left me so shaken that even 10 years later, in college, as I was recounting the scene to a film class, my voice would shake with rage and anger. This is testimony to the power of the movie and the power of art and the power of storytelling, that I respect that movie very much as being a great work of art. But, it’s also deeply problematic for someone like me, and it gave me the sense that I had to respond in kind, that this novel would be my revenge.
Steve Paulson: Well, we should say that one of your subplots is that your narrator ends up working on a movie set in the Philippines, clearly a lot like the making of Apocalypse Now by Francis Ford Coppola. I’m wondering if you could read a passage from that, because your narrator’s trying to convince the filmmaker to give the Vietnamese characters a little more humanity.
Viet Nguyen: Right, so he is asked to read the screenplay by the auteur. That’s the name I give to the director, and the screenplay has no roles for Vietnamese people in it. So, he’s very upset about that, and then eventually the auteur asks him to be the authenticity consultant to go with him to the Philippines to make sure all the details are correct. But the scene that I’m going to read actually takes place before then, with the first meeting with the auteur in Los Angeles.
Viet Nguyen: My meeting with the auteur and Violet, his assistant, had gone on for a while longer, with me pointing out that the lack of speaking parts for Vietnamese people in a movie set in Vietnam might be interpreted as cultural insensitivity. “True,” Violet interjected, “But, what it boils down to is who pays for the tickets and who goes to the movies. Frankly, Vietnamese audiences aren’t going to watch this movie, are they?” I contained my outrage.
Viet Nguyen: “Even so,” I said, “Do you not think it would be a little more believable, a little more realistic, a little more authentic for a movie set in a certain country, for the people in that country to have something to say? Instead of having your screenplay direct, as it does now, cut to villagers speaking in their own language. Could you not have them speak a heavily accented English? You know what I mean. Ching Chong English, just to pretend that they are speaking in an Asian language, that somehow American audiences can strangely understand? And don’t you think it would be more compelling if your green beret had a love interest? Do these men only love and die for each other? That is the implication without a woman in the midst.”
Viet Nguyen: The auteur grimaced and said, “Very interesting. Great stuff. Loved it, but I have a question. How many movies have you made? None. Isn’t that right? None, zero, zilch, nada, nothing, and however you say it in your language. So, thank you for telling me how to do my job. Now, get the hell out of my house and come back after you’ve made a movie or two. Maybe then, I’ll listen to one or two of your cheap ideas.”
Steve Paulson: That is great. Now, I’ve heard you describe this as an anti-American novel. Do you see it that way?
Viet Nguyen: Well, it is very critical of American culture and American politics and so on, but anti-Americanism is not so bad because it still has American in it. Anti-American critique still puts America pretty close to the center. And, if there’s one thing I learned from watching America’s Vietnam War movies is that Americans want to be at the center of the story even if they are the anti-heroes. It’s much better to be the star of your own movie, even if it means you do bad things, than to be the extra who gets killed.
Thanks to an investigation by Bloomberg , it is now known that Airbnb has an ‘elite secret team’ that reacts immediately to hide the crimes that occur in the properties offered by the platform. His way of operating includes shelling out millions of dollars to compensate victims and avoid a reputational crisis .
For years, the San Francisco, California-based company has had a special security department that handles incidents. The objective is that these do not reach the ears of the public and ensure that the victims release Airbnb from any responsibility for the events.
+—+
The Sympathizer
I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds. I am not some misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, although some have treated me as such. I am simply able to see any issue from both sides. Sometimes I flatter myself that this is a talent, and although it is admittedly one of a minor nature, it is perhaps also the sole talent I possess. At other times, when I reflect on how I cannot help but observe the world in such a fashion, I wonder if what I have should even be called talent. After all, a talent is something you use, not something that uses you. The talent you cannot not use, the talent that possesses you—that is a hazard, I must confess. But in the month when this confession begins, my way of seeing the world still seemed more of a virtue than a danger, which is how some dangers first appear.
The month in question was April, the cruelest month. It was the month in which a war that had run on for a very long time would lose its limbs, as is the way of wars. It was a month that meant everything to all the people in our small part of the world and nothing to most people in the rest of the world. It was a month that was both an end of a war and the beginning of . . . well, “peace” is not the right word, is it, my dear commandant?
With smoke-and-mirrors panache, The Committed — Viet Thanh Nguyen’s sequel to The Sympathizer — continues the travails of our Eurasian Ulysses, now relocated to France and self-identified as Vo Danh (which literally means “Nameless”). Having survived a communist reeducation camp, a perilous sea crossing, and a long sojourn in an Indonesian refugee center, he arrives in Paris on July 18, 1981 — the birthday of Nelson Mandela — to become, once again, a refugee. That our hero arrives four days after Bastille Day is significant, for the ideals of liberté, egalité, and fraternité have proven elusive in France’s former colonies, and it would take a visionary of Mandela’s stature to give them new life.
More intimate in setting than The Sympathizer’s transcontinental scope, The Committed employs the motif of organized crime as linkage between the various demimondes populated by disaffected Algerian immigrants, maternal Cambodian prostitutes, and nostalgic Vietnamese thugs all living in France. From a satirical James Bond-esque spy story in The Sympathizer, the author shifts to James Baldwin’s intersectional politics in The Committed to address greed, prejudice, and violence.
The Committed also reiterates the ideas first articulated in The Sympathizer. “What is to be done?” — the question that Nguyen poses in both novels — is a timeless inquiry into the forces that shape our moral worldview. And while it’s a universal question, its ideological implications prove especially challenging for Vietnamese Americans who came of age after the end of the Vietnam War. Should our political sympathies align with our parents — refugees from the former Republic of South Vietnam who rejected Communism and left Vietnam for the U.S., or with those who chose to follow Ho Chi Minh’s vision of freedom and independence? And can we have a balanced perspective if we did not directly suffer war or its consequences, but learned about war’s impacts from family members toward whom we owe both blood and emotional allegiance?
[Photo: One in a series of racist posters attacking Radical Republicans on the issue of black suffrage, issued during the Pennsylvania gubernatorial election of 1866. The series advocates the election of Hiester Clymer, who ran for governor on a white-supremacy platform, supporting President Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction policies. (1866. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.)]
then they said, “Buck up, young man, young woman. Go to your digital masters, and fill in the social impact digital gulag paperwork on-line and wait, for you shall own nothing.
Shit-dog, which one which one?
“Washington [D.C.] is not a place to live in. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting and the morals are deplorable. Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.”
“Go West, young man, go West. There is health in the country, and room away from our crowds of idlers and imbeciles.” “That,” I said, “is very frank advice, but it is medicine easier given than taken. It is a wide country, but I do not know just where to go.” “It is all room away from the pavements. …”
It is a wasteland, DC, USA, for sure, as people file onto the beaches, dogs yapping and dog shit bags, maybe, at the ready, with their paranoid glares, intense dog-eat-dog aura’s. If any bit of counter narrative comes through like slime on the feet after standing in sea jellies, then, the whole scam is let out of the bag. Here, a tangent, just to let you know that there are literally a million things (issues, problems, tragedies, breakdowns, dangers) I could discuss which need dealing with, yet, oh yet, we are cluttered, man, with ALL the fucking wrong stuff!
For the most part, the sting of a jellyfish is more unpleasant than it is harmful. The pain comes from venom delivered via millions of microscopic barbs in the creatures’ tentacles. Most jellyfish stings will only have a localized effect on the victim – redness, swelling, and discomfort where the barbs make contact with the skin.
Some, however, will prompt a systemic, whole body, reaction. These may take several hours to emerge and can include symptoms such as headaches, nausea and drowsiness.
In rare cases, the sting can be fatal. This is true of the box jellyfish, which is spreading into waters that had previously been too cool to support it; its venom causes a severe reaction that can cause death within minutes.
But these booming jellyfish populations are doing far more harm than ruining people’s trips to the beach. In fact, the scope of their disruption has extended far beyond the water’s edge.
In 2011, both reactors at the Torness nuclear power plant in Scotland were shut down after an invasion of jellyfish started blocking the cooling filters. Two years later, the jellyfish struck again – this time in Sweden. They forced the closure of the Oskarshamn nuclear power plant, which contains the world’s largest boiling-water reactor.
The island of Luzon, home of the Phillippines’ capital Manilla, suffered a blackout in 1999 due to jellyfish, and in 2006 the USS Ronald Reagan, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, was brought to a standstill by thousands of the little creatures. And while these events may stand out as exceptions, they are increasing in both scale and frequency. From sea-bed diamond mining in Namibia to salmon farming in Ireland, even jeopardising the sustainability of beluga caviar farming in the Caspian Sea, jellyfish are as destructive as they are abundant. And that abundance is being caused by a variety of factors, many of which are related to human activity.
Over the last hundred or so years, the average surface temperature of the world’s seas has risen by about 0.9°C. As the oceans get warmer, marine animals are able to spread into areas that had historically been too cold. Oxygen levels in the sea have fallen by around 2% over the last 50 years, due to rising temperatures and pollution.
Jellyfish can thrive in areas with lower oxygen levels, where other animals suffer. But there are other factors at work, too. Fishing has depleted the global stocks of some of the jellyfish’s natural predators – such as tuna and swordfish – and some they compete with for food – such as anchovies. With more food and fewer predators, some jellyfish populations can grow unchecked.
Shifting way from sea jellies to, well, the war criminals.
The branding of Vladimir Putin as a war criminal by Joe Biden, who lobbied for the Iraq war and staunchly supported the 20 years of carnage in the Middle East, is one more example of the hypocritical moral posturing sweeping across the United States. It is unclear how anyone would try Putin for war crimes since Russia, like the U.S., does not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court in the Hague. But justice is not the point. Politicians like Biden, who do not accept responsibility for our well-documented war crimes, bolster their moral credentials by demonizing their adversaries. They know the chance of Putin facing justice is zero. And they know their chance of facing justice is the same.
We are a land of war criminals, run by them, managed by them, taught by them, policed by them, treated by them, entertained by them. The boys and girls in uniform? Right, that is patriotism?
“If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it,” wrote Ward Churchill in his 2003 book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.
Churchill’s “little Eichmanns” was areference to Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she detailed the trial of Adolf Eichmann for his role in orchestrating the Holocaust, coining the phrase “banality of evil”. Eichman, Arendt contended, was not particularly sinister or demented, but a thoughtless dupe in service of mass murder. He was simply carrying out orders, she contended, never weighing their moral implications.
Ward went on to compare the terrorists to Madeline Albright, who oversaw the US imposed UN sanctions of Iraq, which killed tens of thousands, mostly elderly and small children.
“Evil for those inclined to embrace the banality of such a concept was perfectly incarnated in that malignant toad known as Madeline Albright, squatting in her studio chair like Jaba the Hutt, blandly spewing the news that she’d imposed a collective death sentence upon the unoffending youth of Iraq.”
Churchill, due to the misinterpretations of his Eichmann statement, later clarified his original essay in a piece titled “On the Injustice of Getting Smeared,” where he writes:
I am not a “defender” of the September 11 attacks, but simply pointing out that if U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned. I have never said that people “should” engage in armed attacks on the United States, but that such attacks are a natural and unavoidable consequence of unlawful U.S. policy. As Martin Luther King, quoting Robert F. Kennedy, said, “Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable.”
This is not to say that I advocate violence; as a U.S. soldier in Vietnam I witnessed and participated in more violence than I ever wish to see. What I am saying is that if we want an end to violence, especially that perpetrated against civilians, we must take the responsibility for halting the slaughter perpetrated by the United States around the world
Finally, I have never characterized all the September 11 victims as “Nazis.” What I said was that the “technocrats of empire” working in the World Trade Center were the equivalent of “little Eichmanns.” Adolf Eichmann was not charged with direct killing but with ensuring the smooth running of the infrastructure that enabled the Nazi genocide. Similarly, German industrialists were legitimately targeted by the Allies.
Oh, the optics matter, and who is shuffled back and forth into private and governmental war crimes outfits, yes, matters, and so, a death camp, death ray, Abrams is back in the fold of the Blue Alimentary Canal, just another feces traveling from blue to red alimentary canal.
This human IS a representative of the ugly American, and he is going strong, and here he is here, again, in the power broker position, and alas, the Kagans and Yellens and Blinkens and Nulands, well, they have their bar mitzvahs ready for the grandkids, joining Elliot in his chosenness.
But there is NO discussion, man, of this, except with socialists like Ben Norton, and those beach goers, those summer fun Americanos, the lot of them, they are buried, man, in distraction and rehab projects and add-ons, and remodels and the like. They are the busy Americans, always ready to numb the act of human boredom with an ATV trip along a beach, or a mountain two-wheel, two-stroke motorhead fun, or just to sip a Mojito with the sounds of Mandy playing.
Confusion is part of the deal, the mass formation, the collective paranoia, collective brainwashing, the entire suite of Stockholm Syndrome, and those with both Biden/Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Cooked brains, man, and we know the Elliots of the World control the narrative, in school, in the courts, in marketing, in the MIC, all over the place. Just step on me and I will love you, that is the AmeriKKKan way, and the EU, Klanadians and UK way.
Optics, man: Cocaine in the White House AFTER Hunter was there with his familia for a July Fourth celebration/cocaine zippy party.
The political right has developed a coordinated network to systematically target the free speech of presumably left-wing professors. Over the course of the last few weeks, this network of activists has launched a vicious series of attacks, leading to intimidation, calls for firing and even death threats. Colleges and universities have shut down operations, while scholars have canceled speaking engagements and even gone into hiding with their families.
Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor, Johnny Eric Williams, Sarah Bond, Tommy Curry and George Ciccariello-Maher are the most recent targets of the right’s campaign against higher education. As the attacks have spread and intensified, the American Sociological Association joined the American Association of University Professors in condemning the targeting of individual professors and calling on universities to protect those whose speech is targeted. Jessie Daniels and Arlene Stein have written an excellent overview of why and how universities should support these scholars, and Eric Anthony Grollman offered a model for scholars to protect their colleagues from public attacks.
Now of course, IHE is a cesspool, just 5 or six years later, but before, too:
I wonder how the narrative that shows Zelensky and Azov and Blackrock and Obama and Nuland and CIA involved in Ukraine’s crimes is considered on campuses?
“Students Stand With Ukraine: At campuses across the country, students are marching, waving blue-and-yellow flags, and raising funds and awareness to support Ukrainians as they fight back against the Russian invasion.”
Cluttered college minds:
And so, forever chemicals, hormone disrupters, Japan’s nuclear water into the Pacific, depleted uranium, soot from wildfires, all the pathogens of the chemistry for better cancerous living, all the wars, all the waste in a throwaway disposable society, all the hemming and hawing over the fact that it’s either socialism or barbarism, all of the disconnected ideas and ideas that are nothing more than dictums, all of that, and here we are: These folk, not allowed …. On campus, or in the cluttered minds of Americanos.
“The Netherlands has for years missed its climate goals. Now it’s time for a great leap forward,” Jetten said, calling the package “ambitious.” He presented 120 different measures which he said would make sure CO2 emissions in the Netherlands will be 55 percent lower than in 1990 by 2030.
The Dutch government can reportedly spend 28 billion euros to reduce the temperature on Earth by 0.000036 degrees. This would mean that each resident would have to contribute about 1,647 euros and a family of four about 6,588 euros., News Facts reported. -The Daily Exposé
Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore explained how globalist rulers, including Klaus Schwab and the United Nations, are using the climate scam as an excuse to cut off fossil fuels and nitrogen fertilizer, to deliberately depopulate the planet.
In a broad-ranging discussion including whether the earth is headed for another ice age, the maximum number of people the globe can handle, what would happen if the population were to double in size, whether our masters care about the future or just their time lording power over others and the importance of sustainable energy, Dr. Moore said:
“Carbon dioxide [and] temperature [ ] are actually slightly negatively correlated in the long historical record. In other words, it is not a cause-effect relationship … There is no historical relationship between the level of CO2 in the atmosphere and the temperature of the earth … The climate has changed long before humans could have been any factor in it. It’s been changing all through the history of the earth.” (source)
Again, it’s worth talking about on campuses: Link, and then play.
It is indeed, all cluttering the minds of Americanos, and so, we can’t debate.
So so, yes, oceans are rising/expanding, weather chaos is rampant, beetles are burrowing into boreal forests, forests are getting plowed under, the jetstream has shifted, the water cycle as been altered, species are going extinct, our food from the input ag/industrial farming is losing nutrition, the wet bulb temperatures are up and spreading, yep yep yep, all those chemicals, plastics, pollutants, you bet, we are screwed because WE CAN’T come to the table and the classroom and boardroom and city and county chambers and DISCUSS and learn.
Oh, that social media.
I wonder what’s the matter with Kansas, err, Paris?
Animated movie covering Paris 1961. The worst massacre on French soil since WWII Unarmed Algerian Muslims demonstrating in central Paris against a discriminatory curfew were beaten, shot, garotted and even drowned by police and special troops. Thousands were rounded up and taken to detention centers around the city and the prefecture of police, where there were more beatings and killings. How many died? No one seems to know for sure, even now. Probably around 200. It seems astonishing today, from this perspective, that such a thing could happen in the middle of a major Western capital closely covered by the international media. This was not Kabul, Beijing, Hebron or some Bosnian backwater, after all, but the City of Light – Paris. But the Fifth Republic under President Charles de Gaulle was in trouble in October 1961. De Gaulle, who was primarily interested in establishing France’s pre-eminent position in Western Europe and the world, found himself presiding over domestic chaos. France was constantly disrupted by strikes and protests by farmers and workers, as well as by terrorism from opposing organizations: the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), representing the Algerian nationalist independence movement, and the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS), a group of disaffected soldiers, politicians and others committed to keeping Algeria French. The OAS rightly perceived that de Gaulle was bound to free France from the burden of its last major colonial holding, so he could get on with the business of making France the economic and political power of his lofty ambition.
History, and decluttering the mind.
Even Netflix, cluttering the minds:
Uncluttering the mind — this is AmeriKKKa.
The following is an explosive expose, not only of the CIA, but what America really is and who we are as Americans. This is the amazing story about how Doug Valentine gained access to top officials in the CIA and CIA operatives who revealed their secrets and explained the inner workings of the CIA.
from episode 6 in the “series” Too Old to Die Young”
Yes, this series, this noir multi-part streaming art thing on Amazon is quite the story, or stories, involving the perversions of our time — bad cops, murdering cops, drug lords, pornography distributors, underage sex, drug use, gangs, gang banging, the dark side of what it is to be in today’s conquest world . . . again, that subtitle — “Never forget, we are conquistadors.” Then the new little drug lord proceeds to shoot 16 cops shackled and kneeling in their heads! SPAIN. Mexico. That rape.
Spoken by the son of a drug lord, in Mexico, as he annoints his Americanized brother and the dead old man’s witch woman as drug lord bride and groom, to continue the trade in the USA, where is mother was the drug lord.
And the boy-man, very homoerotic in his own way, had/has a thing for his dead mother. Oedipus and all of that.
I’m thinking about Shakespeare and the Bible, all the violence in our literature, and alas, this series, interestingly, is supposedly breaking ground because it is a serialized streaming affair, where episodes are treated as indie films each unto themselves.
The director wrote an op-ed in the Guardian (that shit storm rag): “Nicolas Winding Refn: our times need sex, horror and melodrama”
This is a frightening time to be alive. For the past six months, I’ve been shooting in America, and it seems increasingly clear we’re now living in a dystopian reality TV show. America has always had a tendency towards the operatic but, fuelled by the hand grenade of insanity that is Donald Trump, it’s reached new heights of hysteria. This means even the smallest developments are heralded as either the end of the world or the second coming.
It’s terrifying. It is also thrilling. We are appalled by what we witness unfolding each day – essentially, the destruction of the American way of life by its own administration – but we’re also inescapably gripped by it. This is a very exciting time in our history.
Of course, he’s a celebritized Dane, and the series, Too Old to Die Young, is intriguing, but alas, I am a writer, a novelist, a short story writer, and I taught writing and fiction and literature, and I am certainly well read, and film classes I have taught as film appreciation classes, so I get this sort of film-making. But again, a Dane, a Westerner, a millionaire, a Holly-Dirt sort of guy telling us in the Guardian that we should embrace the hard times:
According to Refn, Americans need to “embrace such an apocalyptic time.” The director reasons that out of darkness comes light and the benefit of Trump’s presidency is in getting people to wake up to the hypocrisy of the men in power.
“Whenever there’s any kind of enormous global shakeup, there’s bound to be paranoia and insanity, but out of earthquakes come opportunities,” Refn writes. “Even Trump’s fierce arrogance and distaste for his fellow man is good. It’s revealed how many people and politicians share such a view, and our exposure to such hypocrisy is healthy.”
“We need to be pushed out of our comfort zones – of complacency, and, for most of us in the west, an easeful life,” the director continues. “I’m not advocating physical pain, but I do believe mental pain can be a way to stimulate and reset the brain.”
He’s purchased and restored old movies and if offering them soon this month for free: “Nicolas Winding Refn’s Free Movie Website: Here’s Why the Director Picked These Cult Movies to Stream”.
Nicolas Winding Refnannounced last October he was launching a free curated website of films and essays, and now it’s almost time for that website to launch. The Guardian reports byNWR.com is set to launch later this July, and Refn celebrated his upcoming website debut by telling the publication the first four films that will be made available to stream for free. Refn handpicked Curtis Harrington’s “Night Tide,” Bert Williams’ “The Nest of the Cuckoo Birds,” Ron Ormond’s “The Burning Hell,” and Dale Berry’s “Hot Thrills and Warm Chills.”
Ahh, then I come to the defense of this odd series, after reading that shit storm, Variety, and some two-bit critic: TV Review: ‘Too Old to Die Young’ by Daniel D’Addario
This Danny boy’s bullshit Variety perspective is what I used to bring up in classes to then parse, and understand what the critic’s role is in life:
If Attila the Hun were alive today, he’d be a drama critic.
Edward Albee
The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.
Mark Twain
think negative criticism mostly stings early on. But if a book has been out a while and gets a bad review after a bunch of decent reviews, it doesn’t bother me as much. In fact, sometimes it’s kind of fun to read a bad review of your work. It’s a different perspective and often times a critic’s gripes are actually the things you like about your writing.
It’s hard to imagine that having been served the first three episodes would have resolved my distaste for this extended bit of exposure to Refn, a filmmaker whose work has historically left me cold. But they might, maybe, have generated a bit more context for Martin and his situation. As things stood, jumping in around the series’s midpoint, his decisions and relationships seemed random, emphasizing the degree to which the show’s bits of mythologizing and its gratuitousness spring from the clear blue sky. The fifth episode, for instance, begins with a revolting bit of abuse and assault against a young man, walked up to languorously as the nature of what is about to occur is made sickeningly clear. This, perhaps, can be said to justify Martin’s deranged quest to wipe out wrongdoers, just as does, later, the image of a trembling woman emerging from a shallowly dug grave in the middle of the desert. But it’s also shoving cruelty in our faces for the sake of doing so.
Ahh, much ado about nothing? This is the cult of writing and directing and odd filmmaking:
So if viewers are expected to drop in and out of “Too Old to Die Young” at their leisure, and it doesn’t matter if they start at the beginning or in the middle, how would Refn feel if an audience member liked what they saw, but only watched 30 minutes of his 13-hour series? What if that was enough for them?
“I would say, appreciate the experience. Thirteen hours is a long time in someone’s life.”
Miles Teller in “Too Old to Die Young”Amazon
And time is something Refn appreciates. It’s what drew Refn to the project in the first place. He asked himself what he couldn’t do with a typical, theatrically-released film, and his answer was, “Well, I can’t make a 13-hour movie.” In the production notes, he took it a step further, asking, “What would Fritz Lang do if he was alive today?” (source)
It goes back to the Conquistadores, man, and because he’s not a deep guy, the Dane is looking for sex, drugs, rock n’ roll, rape, violence, pedophilia, and more to enter our dopamine centers.
Imagine really fucking cool dramatized accounts of the real thugs, the real cartels, the real violence factories, in your homes, in your schools and in your boardrooms.
[Photo: A Ngobe activist protests against a Canadian mining company in Nueva Lucha, Panama, where indigenous people see the mining industry as a threat to their way of life. Image by Mellissa Fung. Panama, 2012.]
Canada is on the frontlines of a new battle in the rainforests of Mesoamerica, and billions of dollars worth of precious metals are at stake.
As the developing countries in Latin America turn to the mining industry to secure their economic futures, Canadian mining companies are eager to expand their claims. Already, they hold about 1,400 mining properties from Mexico to Argentina, bringing to mind for some Latinos images of an old enemy, the Spanish Conquistadors.
One of these properties is in the Colon province of Panama, where a number of indigenous peoples and peasant farmers, backed by a national consortium of environmental groups are trying to stop two Canadian mining companies from developing a gold mine and one of the last known major copper reserves in the world. They are concerned these mines would strip thousands of hectares of rainforest, deplete and contaminate water supplies, and displace the communities that have made the area their home for centuries, including the Ngobe people, Panama’s largest indigenous group.
The mining companies say they have had extensive consultations with locals and there is widespread support for their projects. In addition, they say they are bringing economic development, jobs, and growth to these communities.
The local communities are drawing inspiration from similar fights that took place in Costa Rica, where public pressure led to a ban on open pit mining, and El Salvador, where indigenous people secured a moratorium on mining in part of the country. Both are considered victories against the “Canadian Conquistador,” but have come at a great cost – lives were lost, and considerable damage to the environment had already taken place.
Canadians, in the meantime, are largely oblivious to this new role, still considering themselves peacemakers on the international stage, despite the fact that the Conservative government recently rejected a bill in Parliament that would have made Canadian mining companies more accountable for their activities abroad.
A CBC / Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting collaboration
Shit, imagine a creative like this Dane going into real territory: The expression “evangelical drug trafficker” may sound incongruous, but in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro, it’s widespread.
But the current wave of religious bigotry is more personal, and more violent, than in the past. As the Washington Post recently reported, Afro-Brazilian priests are being harassed and murdered for their faith. Candomblé and Umbanda practitioners fear leaving their homes. Terreiros have closed due to death threats.
[Photo: In some gang-controlled parts of Rio, just wearing the religious garb of Candomblé or Umbanda could lead to expulsion.]
Talk about Conquistadors, old and new, biological, a la botany! “Tropical forests play an important role in the global carbon cycle. Moreover this biome is vital in scope of climate change mitigation, storing huge amounts of excess anthropogenic CO2 in tree biomass and in the soil. “Lianas, the new ‘conquistadors’ of the Neotropics”
However, during the last decades a strong increase of liana abundance and biomass has been noted in the tropical forests of Latin America. The impact lianas have on the well-functioning of the forest is still unclear, what triggers their increase is a complete mystery. Are we approaching complete and irreversible ecosystem collapse?
Lianas are thought to be increasing and altering tree growth and ecosystem productivity in tropical forests, but less research has focused on secondary or seasonally dry tropical forest. We report on an 11-year study of tree growth and liana presence from Guanacaste, Costa Rica, where we measured the diameter growth and liana presence on more than 1,700 trees in regenerating forest of different ages. We find that the proportion of trees without lianas is decreasing and the number of trees with lianas occupying more than 10% of tree’s crowns is increasing. We also find that lianas are affecting the diameter growth of trees. The 11-year average relative growth rates of trees with lianas in more than 10% of the tree’s crown are lower than the relative growth of trees with no lianas or lianas in less than 10% of their crown. Year-to-year, tree relative growth rate is related to annual precipitation and tree diameter. However, trees that were heavily infested with lianas (i.e., with lianas in more than 50% of their crowns) had lower relative growth and a weaker precipitation-growth relationship. This work underscores the value of long-term longitudinal data in secondary forest and adds critical data on dry forest liana abundance change. (Increasing Liana Abundance and Associated Reductions in Tree Growth in Secondary Seasonally Dry Tropical Forest)
Ahh, drug cartels, those Iberian conquest queens and kings: “Ask a Mexican on Drug Cartels and Conquistadors.”
This is the second rant I’ve felt I had to send to you. I don’t know if readers are allowed “seconds” but here it goes: Much has been said about the terrible things happening to the United States and its citizens by the Mexican drug cartels. But what’s the difference between the modern-day cartels and the Big Four of the period between 1492 and 1775? I refer you to the kings of England, France, Portugal, and Spain who invaded the Americas during the above-noted period. The invaders didn’t bring cocaine, pot, or meth, but they brought various diseases that, if I read history correctly, led to the deaths of many thousands of native peoples. And, of course, they brought their heavyweight weapon, the one I believe that Lenin called the opiate of the masses: religion. Today, many people and our economy are hurt by today’s cartels, and I’m not defending them in any way, but it strikes me the cartels of today are pikers compared to their predecessors, who killed an untold number of native peoples and stole a continent.
Mexica Tiahui!
Sloppy seconds are always welcome here, cabrón! It was Marx who dropped the line about religion, not Lenin (he wrote of religion that it’s “a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of man”), and the natives were muy religious, but otherwise, your analysis doesn’t go far enough. You forgot to mention how, like the cartels, the conquistadors fought each other for trade routes, killing each other and innocents in the process. How they demanded tribute from villagers, and terrorized them with public displays of brutality to keep them in line. How the conquistadors built empires that enriched only themselves, and created serfs out of those whom they didn’t bribe into submission. The only real difference between the conquistadors and drug cartels is that the former did it in the name of Christ — and even the narcos aren’t pendejo enough to pull that card.
+—+
Does it make any sense to you that, in some cities in Mexico, there are statues of the Spanish conquistadors? After all, these were the same people who believed that they were superior to the Mexicans so they had to force their ways on them, and not to mention the whole slaughtering of thousands of Mexicans, too.
Lies My Maestro Told Me
Of course it does. Because, while though the conquistadors raped and murdered countless indigenous folks, they represent order and progress to Mexico’s elite, the very people who have the money to erect statues and are more that proud to claim direct ancestry to the barbarians. Witness the furor that happened last year, when the city of Merida in the Yucatan erected a statue to its founder, the conquistador Francisco de Montejo. Even though Montejo laid waste to the Mayas back in the 16th century, and even though the descendants of the vanquished protested loudly, the city’s elites erected the statue. And the same controversy happens whenever someone commemorates Juan de Oñate, the conquistador who swung his sword through New Mexico, much to the delight of the Hispanos who claim no Injun blood in their veins and to the horror of everyone else. But it’s not just an elite-Mexican thing to side with the cruel — just look at the Southern love for the Confederacy. (source = Gustavo Arellano)
(a) population levels in the Native Americans were probably higher than traditionally believed among scientists and closer to the number estimated by “high counters.”(b) humans probably arrived in the Americas earlier than thought, over the course of multiple waves of migration to the New World (not solely by the Bering land bridge over a relatively short period of time).
The level of cultural advancement and the settlement range of humans was higher and broader than previously imagined.
The New World was not a wilderness at the time of European contact, but an environment which the Indigenous peoples had altered for thousands of years for their benefit, mostly with fire.
These three main foci (origins/population, culture, and environment) form the basis for three parts of the book.
In the introduction, Mann challenges the thesis that Native Americans “came across the Bering Strait about thirteen thousand years ago, that they lived for the most part in small, isolated groups, and that they had so little impact on their environment that even after millennia of habitation the continents remained mostly wilderness.”
Children of the Days
Eduardo Galeano talked about his book on world history, Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History, in which he writes about different historical events that happened on each day of the year. During this event hosted by the Chicago History Museum, Mr. Galeano was joined by author and New York Times guest columnist Marie Arana
Drugs and guns and merchants of death and the reality of entertainment as history, as education (sic sic wrong wrong) , and these rough and tumble times, these streaming on Netflix Times, the unbearable heaviness of being a Western Culture Zombie, as we find more channels to scan, as we find more time to forget. The art of forgetting context and history. Violence? Religion? Drugs? Spanairds?
And the conquest is Double Speak, Orwellian langauge.
I have come to notice that one of the most effective tools for making people easily malleable sheep is through something called “nominalism”.
Nominalism can be thought of as a “rule of reasoning” governing which pathways our minds use as we move from ignorance to understanding on any topic imaginable. In essence, this school of thought presumes that reality can only be known through the names and definitions given to things and processes in the real world.
The definitions of those words/labels are then defined by the ruling perception managers who control whatever systems of authority happen to be dominant in that society. Orwell referred to this as the Ministry of Truth in his “1984.”
I’ll let you think about those power centers that control definitions of words today.
One can see clearly how this sort of thing can be used to get soft-minded people to support (or at least ignore) the growth of fascism. Since nominalism presumes that a ruling power creates definitions, which substitute for “truth”… then definitions can be changed over time as said ruling class deems those definitions to change. Just think of the very different definitions of “man” or “woman” from a decade ago, to today. If changing definitions are truth… then there is no ontological truth at all, and inversely no such thing as a lie. How useful for oligarchs if their victims lose the ability to believe in truth or lies… especially when you want them to lose sight of their true enemies while creating new enemies to hate and fear.
Nominalism works because people haven’t learned how to use the god-given tool called their MINDS in order to look for context, nuance and truth that fall outside of the controlled framing of approved definitions given to “names/labels”.
Reality can be known…but not through narrow definitions and categorisations.
Ahh, so those terms, those words, the controllers have control of:
digital conquistadors
disruptive economies
tragedy of the commons
ecological footprint
sustainability
soft coup
before contact
Columbian Exchange
transhumanism
fourth industrial revolution
internet of bodies, things, nano-things, everything
Just looking at the textbook glossary makes a grown communist want to load up the Molotov’s. Now you know why some of us want to just dive into the hellish nature of a Dane with a script and camera!
While I am waiting for real work, on Galeano’s trilogy, or Garcia Marquez’s work:
Just singing those narco ballads, the new bent and misaligned and fucking killing out in the open, Conquistadors.
“El Corrido de Tony Tormenta”
[Lyrics to an excerpt of “The Ballad of Tony Tormenta” by Chuy Quintanilla]
Todo esta bien contralado senores hagan conciensia, ahora que ya tomo el mando el senor tony tormenta
Everything is well under control, be aware senores, Now that Mr. Tony Tormenta is in charge
Todo los grandes se juntan para escoger al mejor pero si se necesita tambien sabe usar las armas
All the big shots get together to choose the best man, But if it’s necessary they also know how to use their weapons
[Photo: Left: Chuy Quintanilla, a former federal police commander and current narcocorrido singer, stands in a record store in McAllen, Texas. Right: Reynaldo “The Roosterman” Martinez, one of Mexico’s most prolific corrido composers, has 270 ballads to his name.]
[Photo: Nino de Atocha: The Holy Infant of Atocha, who has roots in 13th-century Spain, is the patron saint of prisoners and travelers– and popular among drug traffickers. Medellin cartel leader Pablo Escobar had altars in many of his safe houses dedicated to the nino (who allegedly appeared to Christian prisoners as a boy who brought them food and water) and made a pilgrimage to Spain to visit the shrine. Mexican drug lord Ovidio Guzman, a son of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, was wearing an amulet of the saint around his neck when he was briefly detained by Mexican authorities in 2019.]
[Image: San Ramon: In 12th-century Spain, San Ramon was ripped from his mother’s womb after she died in childbirth. He later entered the order of Mercedarian Fathers, who dedicated their lives to freeing Christian captives that had been imprisoned by Muslim conquerors in North Africa. When he could not buy their freedom, he offered himself in exchange for several Christians — taking advantage of the situation to preach the Christian gospel. But his Muslim captors placed a padlock on his mouth so that he could not speak. Drug traffickers often place a coin on the face of his effigy when they pray to him to keep people quiet.]
[Image: St. Jude: One of the original 12 Apostles of Jesus Christ, St. Jude is the patron saint of lost causes. He is particularly popular among drug traffickers, who pray to him “When they are driving a load of dope down a highway,” said Almonte.]
[Photo: Jesus Malverde: You might know the Robin Hood-like bandit from a Season 2 episode of “Breaking Bad,” when DEA agent Hank laughs at the notion of drug dealers praying to the saint. But indeed they do, as Malverde — who was allegedly killed by police in 1909 — has become the patron of outlaws, especially in his home state of Sinaloa, Mexico.]
And yet, despite this condemnation, her flock is flourishing. Enriqueta Romero, an adherent so frequently interviewed by Mexican and foreign press that she’s become a sort of spokeswoman for the Santa Muerte movement, attributes this to the folk saint’s democratic nature: “She is fair and listens to everyone’s prayers.” According to Andrew Chesnut, a professor of religious studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, Mexican botánicas (esoterica shops) sell more Santa Muerte figurines than they do icons of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico’s patron saint. “She has a reputation for being an incredibly speedy and efficacious miracle worker,” says Chesnut, describing her as a healer and a whiz at solving legal problems. “And unlike most canonized saints, at the end of the day, she isn’t Catholic, so you can ask her for anything—to bless a shipment of crystal meth, for example.” (source)
forget about the snake oil salesmen: just keep it up — see, speak, hear and attack ‘no evil’
The wannabe Green Party nominee, or at least, the guy with some kick-ass ideas about change, reposts RFK Jr’s “platform.” Right off the bat, the childish, the former heroin addict, the C-PTSD Bobby Junior, the guy with the faltering voice and a family totally against him, this American, this Capitalist, is like a fourth grader with this:
From his long experience and familiarity with systems of power, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. understands that most people in corporations and government are perfectly decent human beings. They play the game, but a lot of them are fed up with its phoniness, and cynical about the paralysis of the system. They feel trapped in it. Clean government isn’t just about removing corrupt individuals. It is about changing a system in which perfectly decent people become agents of corruption without even knowing it.
Now now, just parse, dudes, General Butler, read, and modernize his countdown of the profiteers, the war profiteers, the merchants of death, the money makers. It is not some crap concept of “…most people in corporations and government are perfectly decent human beings. They play the game, but a lot of them are fed up with its phoniness, and cynical about the paralysis of the system. They feel trapped in it…. (RFK, Jr.)
Amazing, this pig of capitalism, duh, so, what ar$600 toilet seats? Jesus Fucking July Fourth Christ.
CHAPTER TWO: Who Makes The Profits? The World War cost the United States some $52,000,000,000. Figure it out. That means $400 [over $6,000 in today’s dollars] to every American man, woman, and child. And we haven’t paid the debt yet. We are paying it, our children will pay it, and our children’s children probably still will be paying the cost of that war.
The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are 6, 8, 10, and sometimes 12%. But war-time profits – ah! that is another matter – 20, 60, 100, 300, and even 1,800% – the sky is the limit. All that traffic will bear. Uncle Sam has the money. Let’s get it. Of course, it isn’t put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and “we must all put our shoulders to the wheel,” but the profits jump and leap and skyrocket – and are safely pocketed. Let’s just take a few examples.
Take our friends the du Ponts, the powder people – didn’t one of them testify before a Senate committee recently that their powder won the war? Or saved the world for democracy? How did they do in the war? Well, the average earnings of the du Ponts for the period 1910 to 1914 were $6,000,000 a year. It wasn’t much, but the du Ponts managed to get along on it. Now let’s look at their average yearly profit during the war years, 1914 to 1918. Fifty-eight million dollars a year profit we find! Nearly ten times that of normal times, and the profits of normal times were pretty good. An increase in profits of more than 950 per cent. T
Take one of our little steel companies that patriotically shunted aside the making of rails and girders and bridges to manufacture war materials. Well, their 1910 – 1914 yearly earnings averaged $6,000,000. Then came the war. And, like loyal citizens, Bethlehem Steel promptly turned to munitions making. Did their profits jump – or did they let Uncle Sam in for a bargain? Well, their 1914 – 1918 average was $49,000,000 a year!
Or, let’s take United States Steel. The normal earnings during the five-year period prior to the war were $105,000,000 a year. Not bad. Then along came the war and up went the profits. The average yearly profit for the period 1914 – 1918 was $240,000,000. Not bad. There you have some of the steel and powder earnings. Let’s look at something else.
A little copper, perhaps. That always does well in war times. Anaconda, for instance. Average yearly earnings during the pre-war years 1910 – 1914 of $10,000,000. During the war years 1914 – 1918 profits leaped to $34,000,000 per year. Or Utah Copper. Average of $5,000,000 per year during the 1910 – 1914 period. Jumped to an average of $21,000,000 yearly profits for the war period.
Let’s group these five, with three smaller companies. The total yearly average profits of the pre-war period 1910 – 1914 were $137,480,000. Then along came the war. The average yearly profits for this group skyrocketed to $408,300,000. A little increase in profits of approximately 200 per cent. Does war pay? It paid them.
But they aren’t the only ones. There are still others. Let’s take leather. For the three-year period before the war the total profits of Central Leather Company were $3,500,000. That was approximately $1,167,000 a year. Well, in 1916 Central Leather returned a profit of $15,000,000, a small increase of 1,100 per cent. That’s all. The General Chemical Company averaged a profit for the three years before the war of a little over $800,000 a year. Came the war, and the profits jumped to $12,000,000 – a leap of 1,400 per cent.
International Nickel Company – and you can’t have a war without nickel – showed an increase in profits from a mere average of $4,000,000 a year to $73,000,000 yearly. Not bad? An increase of more than 1,700 per cent. American Sugar Refining Company averaged $2,000,000 a year for the three years before the war. In 1916 a profit of $6,000,000 was recorded.
Listen to Senate Document No. 259. The Sixty-Fifth Congress, reporting on corporate earnings and government revenues. Considering the profits of 122 meat packers, 153 cotton manufacturers, 299 garment makers, 49 steel plants, and 340 coal producers during the war. Profits under 25 per cent were exceptional. For instance the coal companies made between 100 per cent and 7,856 per cent on their capital stock during the war. The Chicago packers doubled and tripled their earnings.
And let us not forget the bankers who financed the great war. If anyone had the cream of the profits it was the bankers. Being partnerships rather than incorporated organizations, they do not have to report to stockholders. And their profits were as secret as they were immense. How the bankers made their millions and their billions I do not know, because those little secrets never become public – even before a Senate investigatory body.
Here’s how other patriotic industrialists and speculators chiseled their way into war profits.
Take the shoe people. They like war. It brings business with abnormal profits. They made huge profits on sales abroad to our allies. Perhaps, like the munitions manufacturers and armament makers, they also sold to the enemy. For a dollar is a dollar whether it comes from Germany or from France. But they did well by Uncle Sam too. They sold Uncle Sam 35,000,000 pairs of hobnailed service shoes. There were 4,000,000 soldiers. Eight pairs, and more, to a soldier. My regiment during the war had only one pair to a soldier. Some of these shoes probably are still in existence. They were good shoes. But when the war was over Uncle Sam has a matter of 25,000,000 pairs left over. Bought – and paid for. Profits recorded and pocketed.
There was still lots of leather left. So the leather people sold your Uncle Sam hundreds of thousands of McClellan saddles for the cavalry. But there wasn’t any American cavalry overseas! Somebody had to get rid of this leather, however. Somebody had to make a profit in it – so we had a lot of McClellan saddles. And we probably have those yet.
Also somebody had a lot of mosquito netting. They sold your Uncle Sam 20,000,000 mosquito nets for the use of the soldiers overseas. I suppose the boys were expected to put it over them as they tried to sleep in muddy trenches – one hand scratching cooties on their backs and the other making passes at scurrying rats. Well, not one of these mosquito nets ever got to France! Anyhow, these thoughtful manufacturers wanted to make sure that no soldier would be without his mosquito net, so 40,000,000 additional yards of mosquito netting were sold to Uncle Sam. There were pretty good profits in mosquito netting in those days, even if there were no mosquitoes in France. I suppose, if the war had lasted just a little longer, the enterprising mosquito netting manufacturers would have sold your Uncle Sam a couple of consignments of mosquitoes to plant in France so that more mosquito netting would be in order.
Airplane and engine manufacturers felt they, too, should get their just profits out of this war. Why not? Everybody else was getting theirs. So $1,000,000,000 – count them if you live long enough – was spent by Uncle Sam in building airplane engines that never left the ground! Not one plane, or motor, out of the billion dollars worth ordered, ever got into a battle in France. Just the same the manufacturers made their little profit of 30, 100, or perhaps 300%.
Undershirts for soldiers cost 14¢ [cents] to make and uncle Sam paid 30¢ to 40¢ each for them – a nice little profit for the undershirt manufacturer. And the stocking manufacturer and the uniform manufacturers and the cap manufacturers and the steel helmet manufacturers – all got theirs. When the war was over some 4,000,000 sets of equipment – knapsacks and the things that go to fill them – crammed warehouses on this side. Now they are being scrapped because the regulations have changed the contents. But the manufacturers collected their wartime profits on them – and they will do it all over again the next time.
There were lots of brilliant ideas for profit making during the war.
One very versatile patriot sold Uncle Sam twelve dozen 48-inch wrenches. Oh, they were very nice wrenches. The only trouble was that there was only one nut ever made that was large enough for these wrenches. That is the one that holds the turbines at Niagara Falls. Well, after Uncle Sam had bought them and the manufacturer had pocketed the profit, the wrenches were put on freight cars and shunted all around the United States in an effort to find a use for them. When the Armistice was signed it was indeed a sad blow to the wrench manufacturer. He was just about to make some nuts to fit the wrenches. Then he planned to sell these, too, to your Uncle Sam.
The shipbuilders felt they should come in on some of it, too. They built a lot of ships that made a lot of profit. More than $3,000,000,000 worth. Some of the ships were all right. But $635,000,000 worth of them were made of wood and wouldn’t float! The seams opened up – and they sank. We paid for them, though. And somebody pocketed the profits.
It has been estimated by statisticians and economists and researchers that the war cost your Uncle Sam $52,000,000,000. Of this sum, $39,000,000,000 was expended in the actual war itself. This expenditure yielded $16,000,000,000 in profits. That is how the 21,000 billionaires and millionaires got that way. This $16,000,000,000 profits is not to be sneezed at. It is quite a tidy sum. And it went to a very few.
The Senate committee probe of the munitions industry and its wartime profits, despite its sensational disclosures, hardly has scratched the surface. Even so, it has had some effect. The State Department has been studying “for some time” methods of keeping out of war. The War Department suddenly decides it has a wonderful plan to spring. The Administration names a committee – with the War and Navy Departments ably represented under the chairmanship of a Wall Street speculator – to limit profits in war time. To what extent isn’t suggested. Hmmm. Possibly the profits of 300 and 600 and 1,600 per cent of those who turned blood into gold in the World War would be limited to some smaller figure.
Apparently, however, the plan does not call for any limitation of losses – that is, the losses of those who fight the war. As far as I have been able to ascertain there is nothing in the scheme to limit a soldier to the loss of but one eye, or one arm, or to limit his wounds to one or two or three. Or to limit the loss of life.
There is nothing in this scheme, apparently, that says not more than 12 per cent of a regiment shall be wounded in battle, or that not more than 7 per cent in a division shall be killed. Of course, the committee cannot be bothered with such trifling matters.
RFK, Junior: pp, or pabulum.
Shit-dog, more July Fourth shit from RFK:
In Ukraine, the most important priority is to end the suffering of the Ukrainian people, victims of a brutal Russian invasion, and also victims of American geopolitical machinations going back at least to 2014. We must first get clear: Is our mission to help the brave Ukrainians defend their sovereignty? Or is it to use Ukraine as a pawn to weaken Russia? Robert F. Kennedy will choose the first.
He will find a diplomatic solution that brings peace to Ukraine and brings our resources back where they belong. We will offer to withdraw our troops and nuclear-capable missiles from Russia’s borders. Russia will withdraw its troops from Ukraine and guarantee its freedom and independence. UN peacekeepers will guarantee peace to the Russian-speaking eastern regions. We will put an end to this war. We will put an end to the suffering of the Ukrainian people. That will be the start of a broader program of demilitarization of all countries.
Again, this is the mindset of what? A millionaire? A Kennedy? Come on. Reality: Read and resume being a human, RFK, Jr.
Many people now know that the U.S.-and-allied invasion of Iraq on 20 March 2003 was based only on lies (which now the participating Governments refer to instead as having been ‘intelligence errors’, which is yet another lie); but America’s coup which grabbed control over Ukraine’s Government and has worked with the EU to get Ukraine into America’s anti-Russia military alliance, NATO, is still ignored by Western ‘news’-media, so that Russia’s ultimate response to that coup, on 24 February 2022, by physically invading Ukraine to prevent Ukraine from hosting U.S. nuclear missiles on Ukraine’s border only 300 miles away from The Kremlin, is being lied-about by them, as having started the war in Ukraine — what America’s coup there had actually started.
Both victim-countries — Iraq and Ukraine — were destroyed by Washington’s grab. (Eric Z)
By the time Jimi Hendrix took the stage at Woodstock around 9 a.m. on Monday, August 18, 1969, many of the festivalgoers had already left. Those that stayed were witness to one of the most iconic performances at the Music and Art Festival: his “Star-Spangled Banner.”
Fucking hotdogs, man:
Packaged hot dogs are usually rich in preservative nitrates and nitrites that can be harmful.
Hot dogs are also high in fat and salt that are not good for your body or your baby.
Hot dogs are best avoided during pregnancy when your immune system is weak and you and your baby become vulnerable to foodborne illnesses.
Like deli meats, hot dogs might contain a dangerous bacteria called listeria. Studies show that listeria often causes miscarriages or stillbirths when consumed by pregnant women.
Luckily, you can kill any listeria on your hot dogs by heating them sufficiently above 160 degrees Fahrenheit for over 2 minutes, but many women choose not to take the risk.
Hot dogs also contain a potentially harmful preservative called nitrates. Research shows that nitrates can cause cancer when consumed, and their effects on a fetus are still unknown.
However, since cancer is so serious, there’s a good chance that nitrates are bad for an unborn baby. These two ingredients in the common hot dog are both potentially dangerous, so eating them can be risky during your pregnancy.
God Bless America’s water:
That’s it, man, the Nation’s bread basket (sic), cancer alley Number 999,999.
“We know what’s in our public water supply, but many people are on private wells for their drinking water, and those wells aren’t routinely tested,” says Jean D. Brender, professor emeritus at the Texas A&M Health Science Center School of Public Health.
Her work has shown that women who drink primarily from these private sources, especially in rural areas, may be most at risk.
Previous studies have found that women who had babies with birth defects—such as limb deficiencies, cleft palate, and cleft lip—were almost two times more likely than other new mothers (those having babies without major birth defects) to have ingested water with large amounts of nitrate, a component in many common synthetic fertilizers, during their pregnancies.
Atrazine, commonly used to grow corn, can leech into the soil and into drinking water sources. Arsenic is also a problem in drinking water in Texas, even in municipal systems, but that may be due to naturally occurring sources in the bedrock, rather than agricultural use. Still, it may cause problems, especially because the current “safe” levels of arsenic have been computed for cancer risk, not reproductive harms.
Hotdogs and pregnancy, the American Dream:
From the CIA rag, Foreign Policy: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Hot Dogs; A deep dive into this very American food.
By Cameron Abadi, a deputy editor at Foreign Policy.
Americans eat approximately 7 billion hot dogs between Memorial Day and Labor Day — 150 million of which will be consumed on July 4.
The vast majority of the hot dogs eaten today will be made from pigs that come from eastern North Carolina, where a quiet battle has been waged for years between massive factory hog farms and surrounding rural communities.
The battle is being fought over pig shit.
A hog produces three times as much of the stuff as a human. According to the North Carolina Department of Agriculture, there are about 7.7 million hogs and pigs in the state. So all of those future hot dogs produce more than 40 million gallons of shit… every single day. And factory farms don’t really know how to dispose of it.
The current popular method is to gather the untreated waste in vast open-air cesspools called lagoons, which can measure thousands of square feet and hold millions of gallons of the toxic sludge. When these lagoons fill up or overflow, it’s common practice to pump out the waste and spray it in a fine mist across nearby open spaces. (Yes, that’s really what happens.) The mist soaks the fields and pollutes the air.
Americans will celebrate their Independence Day on July 4 by meeting friends, watching fireworks—and eating an estimated 150 million hot dogs. But the quintessentially American sausage is more than a once-a-year indulgence—a billion pounds of hot dogs are sold every year in U.S. retail stores.
Yeah, sure, nasal cavities, anus, even tumors in the pigs, all the stuff falling on the concrete from slaughtering houses, the brains, guts, all those trimmings, man, hot dogs, yum yum, just mix and match, lots of garlic and onion salt. Squeeze out the excess blood and snot.
What are hot dogs made of? Underneath the ketchup, mustard, or relish, the ingredients are far from appetizing. From human health concerns to animal welfare implications, here’s why it’s best to leave hot dogs off your plate.
Hot dogs are key players in the standard American diet, almost inevitably appearing on the menu at summer cookouts, sporting events, food carts, and cafeterias. But beneath the bun lies a processed meat product with questionable ingredients that stem from factory farms—environments rife with animal abuse. Consuming hot dogs also has serious consequences for human health.
In the United States, processed meats like hamburgers, chicken nuggets, and hot dogs remain popular in spite of the reported risks of consuming them. Hot dogs may be considered an American standard, but the truth about their ingredients and their direct link to the abuse of animals raised for food make a good case for choosing veggie dogs instead.
What are hot dogs made of?
Hot dogs are made from the emulsified meat trimmings of chicken, beef, or pork. This meat mixture is blended with other ingredients (like preservatives, spices, and coloring) into a batter-like substance. The emulsified meat is then stuffed into casings, which are typically made from processed collagen or collagen from animal intestines.
Other hot dog ingredients include:
Ascorbic acid/sodium ascorbate
Autolyzed yeast extract
Beef stock
Celery powder
Cherry powder
Citric acid
Collagen casing
Dextrose
Flavoring
Hydrolyzed vegetable protein
Lactate/diacetate
Lauric arginate
Maltodextrin
Modified food starch
Monosodium glutamate (MSG)
Natural sheep casing (made from lamb intestines)
Paprika extract
Phosphates
Salt
Smoke flavoring
Sodium erythorbate
Sodium nitrate
Sorbitol
Soy protein concentrate
Spices
Sugar and corn syrup
Water
Yeast extract
Meat trimmings
Trimmings—a term that can mean bits of beef, pork, or chicken—are the primary ingredient in hot dogs. According to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council (NHDSC), trimmings are “most commonly pieces of meat cut away from steaks or roasts.” The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) gets a bit more specific, reporting that for raw-cooked meat products like hot dogs, “the muscle meat, fat, and non-meat ingredients are first processed raw by grinding, chopping, and mixing. The resulting viscous batter is portioned in sausages or loaves and then subjected to heat treatment, which causes protein coagulation, a firm-elastic texture, palatability, and some degree of bacterial stability.”
The NHDSC also lists “mechanically separated chicken/turkey” as a potential ingredient. This refers to turkey or chicken meat that’s removed from the bone with specialized pressurized machinery—meaning, forcing animal bones through a sieve or similar appliance to remove the meat. “Since mechanically separated chicken or turkey is derived from poultry meat that is close to the bone, it can have slightly higher calcium content when compared to whole muscles,” the NHDSC writes. The USDA requires that mechanically separated ingredients are listed on meat packaging to flag the potentially high calcium content from animal bones.
The RED, in the red-white-blue is the blood, man!
Forget RFK, JR. You’ll get more nutrition slamming down five dogs TODAY.
Joey Chestnut is headed back to Coney Island in New York, where he has won the annual Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest a record 15 times. It’s also the same place where a year ago, he put a chokehold on a protester who rushed the stage during the competition.
“I’m a little bit worried,” Chestnut told USA TODAY Sports when asked about the incident. “It seems like that’s getting more popular. You just never know.
“Hopefully it all works out.”
Scott Gilbertson, the protester who was charged with criminal trespassing, disorderly conduct and harassment after being arrested that day, is hoping for something else.
“Maybe someone will protest again this year,” said Gilbertson, 22, of Berkeley, California. “That’d be cool to see. I’d be cheering them on.”
Cassie King of DxE, the group of animal rights activists, did not rule out the possibility of another protest.
“As long as violent industries are exploiting animals, non-violent protesters will continue to take action,” she wrote in a text message to USA TODAY Sports, “even if it means they are met with violence in response, like being choked by Joey Chestnut.”
Ahh, America, the freedom to protest factory, polluting, environmentally racist, animal torturing multinational virus spreading and bacteria-loading and waterways killing pig processing death camps.
The annual tradition of watching competitive eaters furiously shove hot dogs in their mouths on the 4th of July continues this year as the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest returns to Coney Island.
World Champion Joey Chestnut and top-ranked female Miki Sudo look to defend their titles during the 10-minute, all-you-can-eat contest. Chestnut won the men’s competition last year after eating 63 hot dogs and buns, while Sudo took home the women’s crown after eating 40 hot dogs and buns.
Chestnut set a world record in 2021 by eating 76 hot dogs while Sudo’s record is 48½ hot dogs.
“The Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July Hot Dog Eating Contest is the crucible through which greatness is forged,” said Major League Eating Chair George Shea in a news release. “On Independence Day 2023, we will once again celebrate the birth of this nation and the champion of the Fourth of July.”
Fucking sheeple, you know, marketing, lies, millionaires, brainwashing, Collective Stockholm Syndrome, GAD (general anxiety disorders writ large), two-income families hating on the homeless, so so many Eichmann’s, and the rest of them, RFK, JR. who knows shit about AmeriKKKans.
Fuck it, a repeat from Dissident Voice, which seems to be passing on all my stuff:
This is a rite of passage that needs to go the way of the Dodo.
Mercenaries, and now, we have a blue blood son, grandson to Robert Kennedy, heading out to Ukraine with some sad sack ideas about what he in the name of Hell is going to do in that country?
Yep, RFK Jr., let out the news recently, on Megyn Kelly. The newspapers picked it up:
“He felt that he shouldn’t be arguing about it unless he was willing to have skin in the game and take his own risk,” Kennedy said on “The Megyn Kelly Show” of his son’s decision to go to the war-torn country.
Kennedy said his son signed up for the Foreign Legion at the Ukrainian Embassy and was a drone pilot before he was promoted to a “machine gunner.”
“He didn’t have any military experience and kind of talked his way into the unit,” he added. “He’s been in firefights, mainly nighttime, and a lot of artillery fights with the Russians.”
“He had a job for a law firm, a really good law firm in Los Angeles, and I was looking forward to him living with me for the summer,” he said of his son’s initial plans.
When probing him further about Conor Kennedy’s plans, his son said, “I’m not going. I want to talk to you. I don’t want you to ask me what I’m doing.”
“I was like, ‘Um…,’” he explained. “And he said, ‘I will explain it to you at some point, but I do not want you to ask me now, and if you could just respect that it would mean a lot to me.’ So I did.”
We can discuss what the role of parenting has to do with bringing up children who might find it necessary to shoot at people to get skin in the game. Now, Conor is 28, that is, 28 years old, not months, yet as a teacher of many souls over four decades, I can say he is most certainly arrested developed (so many American men are), and this whole idea of having skin in the game is beyond insane. Kind reader, what were you doing at age 28? Wanting skin in the game? Which game? Hmm, I went to Central America before age 28, and I was working with refugees in Arizona in my 19 to 21 years of age time frame. I was involved in journalism, too, young, at 17, and then reporting on some things like El Salvadorans perishing in the desert near where I was headquartered, and some on the drug tunnels down also near Bisbee. Also, reporting on the military putting up aerostat balloons along the border to try and capture undocumented workers. I even did a story on some of those Posse Comitatus folk, the border patriots (sic) who went out there armed and lock ‘n’ loaded.
Nope, no blue blood in my line. Yep, plenty of military around me with an old man in cryptology in the Air Force and then Army. Germany, France, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, etc.
Yes, and I am named after a grandfather who was a WWI pilot in the Germany navy-air force, flying triple-wing planes. He was in post-WWI Germany, seeing the wheelbarrows of Deutsche Marks for a loaf of bread. He also — before the German loss — in the Battle of Jutland, on a ship, the Rostock, that was hit and distressed with hundreds dead. He floated on the flotsam of war and watched the battle ensue and then the two sides with white flags came into the war theater to pick up the wounded and dead.
And, of course, I had Irish and Scottish and English and Canadian family in that war, but also in WWII. Uncle Ian was on a submarine for the British, and German family members on the Russian front, and alas, relatives who survived the bombing of Dresden.
Yeah, I heard stories about Paul Haeder’s exploits on a tall sail ship learning how to be a soldier, and listened intently his war experiences, and learned about his post-WWI life, and his life in Iowa and South Dakota (my grandfather ended up in Iowa and South Dakota as the last of seven brothers who hit Ellis Island before WWI). Paul found work as a former lieutenant impossible — coal mining and “working” the food trains with orders to shoot fellow Germans, per the Pinkerton outfit, if they rushed the trains for food, bread, foodstuffs. That wasn’t Paul Haeder’s ethos, so he never did the dirty deeds of shooting Germans hungrier than rabid dogs.
Now, of course, forgotten history of that putrid, Patton and MacArthur, and their dirty deeds killing their own veterans:
In 1932, 17,000 former soldiers marched on Washington, D.C. to demand wartime pay owed to them. The Great Depression ravaged the country, and a president took desperate measures to disperse the angry veterans.
Tanks rolled down the streets. Soldiers held people at bayonet-point. Veterans and their families took lungs full of tear gas. People died.
Gen. Douglas MacArthur — then the U.S. Army’s Chief of Staff — led the 12th Infantry Regiment and the 3rd Cavalry Regiment into the fray.
The cavalry regiment contained six Renault FT tanks commanded by Maj. George Patton. The Army troops, with bayonets affixed to their rifles, charged into the shanty town and launched tear gas into the crowds. (source)
Skin in the game? Hmm. So, growing up on air force bases, army posts and outside Paris, on SHAPE and NATO compounds, I was truly interested in the stories of men and women, and the accounts of dudes who were in Vietnam, or hanging onto my old man’s Korea stories and his recalling about what happened in Vietnam, though he was pretty much a zipped up mouth on those wars. He worked in NATO caves in France and Germany, as a signal corps warrant officer, and we all in the family had to have FBI-level background checks.
I wonder what a 13-year-old is doing learning about Black Panthers, Cesar Chavez, Che Guevara, and much much more? That was me. I learned about Ho Chi Minh from some of my older sister’s friends who had come back from Vietnam, mentally wounded, hooked on smack, some wounded physically, and most anti-American, anti-War.
No blue blood in my family.
Look, yes, I am trauma informed, and this image, or these two, are full of context and whatever this Conor believes in, in terms of killing humans, Russians, and some of them, if he was a drone operator, civilians, that would be an interesting discussion and debate.
So, listening to RFK, Junior, Conor’s dad, I stuck with him throughout the wide-ranging two-hour Megyn Kelly interview, which in my mind is less of a journalistic interview and more of the same old celebrity cultish thing a multimillionaire Kelly was doing (interviewing) with another multimillionaire, RFK, Jr.
I wrote this to a fellow writer I respect, and who publishes many amazing pieces. He’s a bit older than I am, I believe. Here:
Yeah, ECC, we have this fascination with blue blood, the Kennedys, Bush, those coming out of Ivy League schools, who are millionaires who hang with billionaires.
His son, well, has to be judged on what he was doing, and alas, Ukraine is the most corrupt nation in the world, in some sense. So, there are many issues tied to what the quality of his character is.
He’s a mercenary, and this is war porn. He wasn’t even in any military. He talked his way into the Mercenary Legions. Lied. Oh, he is an athlete, which is a big Kennedy thing.
The entire thing will give this kid a cleared pipeline to multi-millions, and his book will be coming out soon, Oprah-approved, soon.
The kid (man, age 28) wouldn’t even tell his parents where he was going, what he was up to. That is something deeply troubling to me because I have friends and a spouse who have been estranged by their children. There are Facebook groups with the title “Mothers of Estranged Children.” Many of these women were just hard working single mothers, and something snapped in the children. There are 70 year old women who have never met children’s children, and even great grandkids. This is pretty deeply ingrained in my own background in trauma informed case management with homeless civilians and veterans and those hooked on drugs and those just released from prison.
I’m 65, been to Central America as a journalist, covered the US-Mexico border, been with US military as a college instructor at the Sergeant Major Academy at Fort Bliss. My old man was in 32 years. Air Force and then Army. Clandestine stuff, crypto stuff. We ended up in the Azores and then Germany and France and UK. I got to see and hear a lot of stuff. I am, was early, anti-military on so many levels
Very young (13) I was already seeing the destruction of the world through the military state, through corporate malfeasance, through the professional managerial class, and the lawyer class. This kid (man) at this age, 28, is really going to be part of the problem for socialists and social-environmental-cultural warriors like myself, and anyone who might come up as decent, smart and thoughtful adults in our current generation. We have a lot of work to do, and putting one’s effort into machismo, into this trip into a corrupt place, thinking Putin is a Gangster, well, what sort of upbringing did he have?
FYI: In the Megyn interview RFK admits he got the mRNA, and so did his children, 7.
Whew. Amazing, no, ECC.
Trauma, man. So much trauma in the Kennedy family. Epigenetic, and who the hell knows what kind of trauma is in Conor’s immediate family. I am trauma informed, so I can’t judge too much on that level.
Then, Aaron and Gabor Mate, an older interview, on the trauma, the mental illnesses and pain that propelled people to believe in Russia Gate.
Thanks, ECC. A real interview with you one of these days?
Here’s the show’s low down blurb:
Megyn Kelly is joined by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., author of “A Letter to Liberals,” to discuss COVID pandemic orthodoxy, the need for discussion and debate, the elimination of freedoms due to the COVID pandemic, Dr. Fauci demanding blind faith in authority, the important issue of whether the COVID vaccines prevent transmission, myocarditis risk from COVID and from vaccines, rise in “unexplained” deaths in a post-COVID vaccine world, the truth about how many lives COVID vaccines saved and lost, the lack of important data needed to understand the rise in deaths post-COVID, what Fauci said about vaccines that could have an adverse effect before the COVID vaccines were available, the absurdity of the new booster which was only tested on eight mice and no humans, Pfizer’s involvement in the Trump administration, Alex Berenson and tech censorship, RFK’s disbanded “vaccine safety” commission, Scott Gottlieb and our supposed medical elite, American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendations, problems with the VAERS system, personal backlash from family and friends, his views of Donald Trump then and now, Herschel Walker and our politics today, the war in Ukraine, American imperialism, RFK’s personal connection to the war as his son Conor was fighting in the country, and more.
Look, these issues need to be discussed. In the interview, there is discussion about Trump, about politicians’ public lives versus private lives, and how we weigh the bad people perpetrate in their families, in their own house and jobs, their personal personas, against the good their policy and governance might come off as part of their public life. My writer friend was upset that RFK, Jr. calls Putin a thug and gangster, while at the same time, RFK JR does speak out against the cancel left, against the war drumming and against the endless pit of money and arms for nothing to ZioLensky. Kennedy laments that there is $7 a gallon of gasoline in California, equating that to the war/Putin (?), but really, the USA is (has been for decades) in a major free-fall, and, people are struggling with double-triple-quadruple cost of living; i.e., food, coffee, drugs, and now Pfizer, who got the jab approved by CDC for children’s yearly vaccination, well, they also announced the company will be upping the price of the dirty jab, to $110 a shot, which is four times the current price.
I wonder what these lawyers working for these outfits have in terms of skin in the game? Will they head to Yemen to see what it’s like to have USA-UK supplied bombs to Saudi Arabia. Skin in the game in Haiti stealing that country’s resources and stealing the coffers? Which skin in the game will the American put forth who wants to know what it is to take on a stand on any issue psychologically and intellectually without having to put one’s ass in the game?
It is a blue in the face routine now attempting to talk about Nuland and Maidan, about the Donbass and the ethnic cleansing? All of the history of Putin wanting diplomacy, wanting to be part of the Eurozone, to be on good terms with Germany, and to advance nuclear weapon decommissioning.
The thuggery and gansterism RFK Jr. and Conor Kennedy espouse about Putin, that’s way off, sort of brainwashed opinion. Putin is a million times more informed and sensible than Biden or Blinken. They have skin in the game, a la Raytheon et al.
Here, trauma, and what exactly is-was-continues to go on in the minds of Russia Gate freaks:
GABOR MATÉ: What does it say about American society that so many people are actually enrolled in believing that this man could be any kind of a savior? What does that say about the divisions and the conflicts and the contradictions and the genuine problems in this culture? And how do we address those issues?
You can look at that. Or you can say there must be a devil somewhere behind all this, and that devil is a foreign power, and his name is Putin, and his country is Russia. Now you’ve got a simple explanation that doesn’t invite you or necessitate that you explore your own pain and your own fear and your own trauma.
So I really believe that really this Russia gate narrative was, on the part of a lot of people, a sign of genuine upset at something genuinely upsetting. But rather than dealing with the upset, it was an easier way to in a sense draw off the energy of it in to some kind of a believable and comforting narrative. It’s much more comforting to believe that some enemy is doing this to us than to look at what does it say about us as a society.
I mean there was a massive denial of the actual dynamics in American society that led to the election of this traumatized and traumatizing individual as President, number one.
AARON MATÉ: Because you think Donald Trump himself is traumatized?
GABOR MATÉ: Oh, Donald Trump is a clearest example of a traumatized politician one could ever see. He’s in denial of reality all the time. He is self aggrandizing. His fundamental self concept is that of a nobody. So he has to make himself huge and big all the time and keep proving to the world how powerful and smart, what kind of degrees he’s got and how smart he is. It’s a compensation for terrible self image. He can’t pay attention to anything, which means that his brain is too scattered because it was too painful for him to pay attention.
What does this all come down to? The childhood that we know that he had in the home of a dictatorial child disparaging father, and a very weak
AARON MATÉ: Fred Trump, his father.
GABOR MATÉ: Who demeaned his children mercilessly. One of Trump’s brothers drank himself to death. And Trump compensates for all that by trying to make himself as big and powerful and successful as possible. And, of course, he makes up for his anger towards his mother for not protecting him by attacking women and exploiting women and boasting about it publicly. I mean, it’s a clear trauma example. I’m not saying this to invite sympathy for Trump’s politics. I’m just describing that that’s who the man is. And the fact that such a traumatized individual can be elected to the position of what they call the most powerful person in the world speaks to a traumatized society.
And like individuals can be in denial, a society can be in denial. So this society is deeply in denial about its own trauma, and particularly in this case about the trauma of that election. So one way to deal with trauma is denial of it. The other way is to project onto other people things that you don’t like about yourself.
Now, it’s only a matter of historical fact. And no serious person, no serious student of history can possibly deny how the United States has interfered in the internal politics of just about every nation on earth.
There is lots of skin in the game for all of us surviving in various stages and steps trauma. How many countries has the USA bombed, sanctioned, proxied, and stolen from? That is another fun thing, right, visiting those countries and donating some mutual aid support — skin in the game — by planting trees, feeding children, digging water systems. But putting on combat gear and playing tin soldier with live rounds and drones, hmm, that is an interesting skin in the game.
Here, Jim Chambers, from the rich and famous Cox news-cable family, he too went to Ukraine, Donbass, as a reporter:
When I asked him about his perspectives on the conflict now, versus when he made the decision to come over, his repeated emphasis was that he had been “extremely uninformed” when he was still in Alabama and relying on the narrative being spun by Western media. “I can tell you that I was very surprised to see most women and children still at home and living normally in all the major Ukrainian cities I went to. And when I was detained here in Donetsk, it was the first time I had been able to speak to any Russians or Russian-speakers from Donbass. There’s a side of the story that we’re not getting in America.” He noted that even from his cell in Donetsk, he had been hearing constant explosions, every day, coming from Ukrainian shelling of the city, something he had never anticipated. “Nothing in the Western media shows you that this is a civil war, and one that’s been going on a long time.” He didn’t go as far as disavowing the Ukrainian state, or endorsing the Russian “special military operation,” but he repeatedly said to me, “If I had known the truth about what was going on over here, I would never have made the decision to come. I regret it.”
Feelings of sympathy for a man in a life-and-death predicament, who at face value seems to have been duped into his decision, above all else, are completely understandable. But some on the Donetsk side of the conflict aren’t shedding many tears for him, or for similar detainees. Russell “Texas” Bentley is a U.S.-born veteran of the DPR armed forces, having served from 2014 to 2017, and he is a resident of Donetsk. Bentley shared with me his thoughts on Drueke and those like him.
“Yeah, a lot of these punks were just too big for their britches, and that’s almost forgivable. But what they wanted to do was come here to kill, and if the shoe had been on the other foot, they wouldn’t have hesitated. I was behind Ukrop [Ukrainian] lines twice, and didn’t fire a shot either time. Every single battle I was ever in was defensive. We held a position, and the Ukrops came to attack us, and they’d have killed us all if they could have. So, it will be an educational experience for them, hopefully give them a bit of a head start in their next life.” (source — ‘I Regret’ Being a Mercenary in Ukraine: Conversation with U.S. POW Detained in Donbass)
“Here is Texas Russell Bentley: From Texas to Donbass: Meet the American fighting Ukrainian fascists”
I used to show lots of movie clips to my students in Texas, New Mexico, Washington and Oregon. Lots of controversial (sic) books, and tons of articles and professional journal studies. Controversial, in their face, and much of it was during Reagan’s illegal wars, Panama, Bush One and Kuwait and Iraq, Bush Two, Iraq, Clinton, even Obama. Many many complaints about exposing youth and older students to things that went boom in their heads. Everything was on-limits, no holds barred. We talked, debated and then I got students to research and think critically and with the right tools of rhetoric, a la centuries of clear thinking, proposing, comparing and contrasting, looking at causes and effects, all of the ways we classify, argue, persuade, define and connotate and how we engage in those techniques of propaganda, and how to get through with objectivity and then what powerful tools narrative writing can give us. Pat Tillman — Conor, ever see him?
Look, RFK Jr. did say that we are imperfect, that is, the human race. He was stating how Hershel Walker can be candidate X, antiabortion vis-à-vis policy, but in his own life, having been a part of abortions with his spouses and partners, that is just the contradictory way of politics. It all makes sense as a Catholic who believes in redemption. I am not going to knock that. Conor, becoming a high priced lawyer one day, well, maybe he will do great things for humankind.
Maybe doing the mercenary thing in Ukraine will give Conor better perspectives. Now, Russell Bentley, I have had email exchanges with him. Yes, he has hit some of the same places I have hit — El Paso, Tucson, etc. He went to Donbass, and he married a Ukrainian-Russian, and he lives in the Donbass and reports from the Donbass. Yes, he sent me his memoir:
Robert Kennedy said he is not doctrinaire or hard-headed, and that he learns and changes over time. He repeats how he was working as an environmental lawyer, and that he was part of Riverkeeper, for which there are over 350 rivers around the world with a keeper testing water, supporting the river life and acting as a pied piper for a healthy river. He was suing over poisons in the rivers, mercury. He stated that he was dogged by some women at one of his talks. One woman gave him a stack of briefs and reports on mercury preservatives in Vaccines and other issues tied to vaccine injuries. The vaccine fight he was not a part of for years, until persistent citizens and a medical doctor brought it to his attention. I understand that old saw, “No one is perfect . . . Homo Sapiens is a messy, troubled species.”
That’s a given And we all have skin in the game when it comes to peace, life, truth, and reconciling our own trauma with healing and loving thy neighbor. The whole Putin is a Gangster thing is interesting, for sure, and alas, Capitalists Are Gangsters, sure, I get to deploy that one all the time. Murder Incorporated, the Value of Nothing, the Sociopathic Rich, and so much more I can also utilize as descriptors of the USA, then and now. Did Conor take in that book, War is a Racket? Did he weigh Butler’s words with the reality of Russia wanting Minsk II to be abided by before signing up for weaponizing his idea of skin in the game? What was Nuland doing in Kiev? Biden and Hunter? Are we all going to default on redemption for any sin? That we are all imperfect souls? Did Conor have real deep talks with people outside the frame of Putin is a Gangster?
I recommend reading, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). The book, and now, a 2022 German movie of the book:
“But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony — Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?”
Remarque’s novel saw censorship outside of Germany as well. In the United States, the English translation was banned in Boston on grounds of obscenity; and in Chicago, U.S. customs had seized any volumes which had not been expurgated. Austrian soldiers were forbidden to read the novel, Czech military libraries removed copies from their shelves, while Italy banned the novel entirely due to its anti-war, pacifist agenda. Despite its success, or perhaps because of it, Remarque had his German citizenship revoked and was forced into exile. Just before the onset of World War II in Europe, Remarque and his wife left Switzerland for the United States. They became official U.S. citizens in 1947. (source)
Now? The sides, that is, the many sides, to Ukraine and Nazis and Bandera and Zelensky and Coups and USA and CIA, and then, Putin and Russian demands for stopping the existential threat of NATO moving east with all their bombs bursting in air. John Pilger stated it correctly recently:
Much of this propaganda originates in the US, and is transmitted through proxies and ‘think-tanks’, such as the notorious Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the voice of the arms industry, and by zealous journalists such as Peter Hartcher of the Sydney Morning Herald, who labeled those spreading Chinese influence as ‘rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows’ and called for these ‘pests’ to be ‘eradicated’.
News about China in the West is almost entirely about the threat from Beijing. Airbrushed are the 400 American military bases that surround most of China, an armed necklace that reaches from Australia to the Pacific and south east Asia, Japan and Korea. The Japanese island of Okinawa and the Korean island of Jeju are loaded guns aimed point blank at the industrial heart of China. A Pentagon official described this as a ‘noose’.
Palestine has been misreported for as long as I can remember. To the BBC, there is the ‘conflict’ of ‘two narratives’. The longest, most brutal, lawless military occupation in modern times is unmentionable.
The stricken people of Yemen barely exist. They are media unpeople. While the Saudis rain down their American cluster bombs with British advisors working alongside the Saudi targeting officers, more than half a million children face starvation.
This brainwashing by omission has a long history. The slaughter of the First World War was suppressed by reporters who were knighted for their compliance and confessed in their memoirs. In 1917, the editor of the Manchester Guardian, C.P. Scott, confided to prime minister Lloyd George: ‘If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow, but they don’t know and can’t know.’ (‘Silencing the Lambs — How Propaganda Works‘)
Then, on a sad and inspiring (for some) note tied to other types of humans who might be coming to Donbass to fight what they believe is the good fight.
That’s Alex Castillo, who was a fighter in Donbass since 2014. From Spain, but born in Columbia. It’s a tough comparison, right, Kennedy and Castillo. This man had skin in the game, family in the game, was there to defend the people of Donbass being murdered by Ukraine, vis-a-vis USA material and training and NATO beefing up.
He was a communist, too, which is contrary to the bleeding heart liberals who are wrapped in blue and yellow and demand more more more for Zelensky, who has rounded up communists. Russia, by the way, isn’t communist, since so many Americans I will send this article to might need some reminding.
Russell Bentley is in Donbass and was in the fighting groups with Castillo. Bentley is a communist, colorful, sometimes bombastic, but not afraid to call a spade a spade, and he has that robust energy still in his older age days (63) of someone critical of USA, of Ukraine and of Russia’s decision makers who Russell believes have really messed up the fight against the AFU and Azov folk in Donbass region.
But he has tributes for Castillo, just recently killed in fighting:
Alexis was a true Communist, and a real Internationalist. He often spoke of going to Syria or Venezuela or Cuba after our victory here in Donbass, to defend the people and the socialism there. He did not love war, not by any means, he hated it, as we all do here, as all decent people do, but he was good at the job, and the job needed to be done. As all combat veterans know, we are all born with only so much luck, and the more time you spend in the places where the bullets fly, the closer you get to the day your luck runs out. Alexis spent 8 years as a front line soldier, a sniper in a Spetsnaz unit, and he never, ever hesitated when it was his turn to go. And when his time came to meet death, two weeks after our good friend Elia was killed, Alexis met it like a hero, advancing on the enemy with a weapon in his hand. Alexis was truly a Che Guevara of the 21st century, and Alexis had said, as did Che, “I do not care if I fall, as long as another ear hears my battle cry, and another hand picks up my gun.” (“Adios, Alex Castillo: A Donbas hero falls on Oct. 28″).
Any sort of tribute to a fighter like Castillo in the circles I intersect with is verboten, literally. Cancelled, called a traitor, called a Putin lover, called a Trumpster, called any number of names that are completely antithetical to who and what I am. Or, you might end up in a Michigan Democratic rally, with Obama stumping, and god forbid you confront Obama about his administration’s work in Ukraine in 2014, and not only will you get the swarmy and bs Obama folksy retort — “We are all friends here . . . you’ll have time to speak” — but you will get those blue democrats, men, women, children, old and young, hating on Russia and just not ready for any pushback against their multimillionaire-soon-to-be-a-pro-basketball-team-owner Obama. Yelling, “Down with Russia . . . Putin is our enemy.” You know, no antiwar chants, or chants of peace talks, or chants against escalation, of nuclear saber rattling by Biden. Obama is truly a stump. These are his rallies in Michigan, and he was in Oregon, stumping for the democratic candidate for governor. What’s that got to do with ex-President’s multimillionaire package?
I know it’s “only” Jimmy Dore below covering that Michigan event, but heck, no pushback from mainstream media, so here, watch Democratic Party rally with Obama pushed through the Dore seive: “Peace Activists Heckle Obama Over Nuclear War”
All those dead Ukrainians, and Russians, and fighters like Castillo, and this is the end result for so many of them — what they leave behind:
We are in some very sick and strange times —
Deep Critical Analysis Needed EVERY Veterans’ Day, USA’s National Holiday, November 11! (and Fourth of July, and every fucking day)
as the years have passed (1983 onward) the chasm and the rift between real and fake, academic and actual, and then the triple jump into the perverse new new Guilding Age has GROWN
Roosevelt opened his campaign for meaningful railroad regulation with a speech at the Union League Club of Philadelphia. While his focus may have been on the networks, his observations are of general applicability:
Neither the people nor any other free people will permanently tolerate the use of the vast power conferred by vast wealth, and especially by wealth in its corporate form, without lodging somewhere in the government the still higher power of seeing that this power, in addition to being used in the interest of the individual or individuals possessing it, is also used for and not against the interests of the people as a whole.
Today’s economic activity is built on digital code. Digital information is the most important capital asset of the 21st century. Typically, Gilded Age assets were hard assets: industrial products that ended up being sold. Today’s economy runs on the soft assets of computer algorithms that crunch vast amounts of data to produce as their product a new piece of information. The business of networks like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon, and of platform service providers like Google, Facebook, and Amazon is not just connections or services, but the digital information about each of us that is collected by those activities and subsequently reused to target us with specific messages.
Roosevelt’s explanation that the innovative use of new technology is “inseparable from the accumulation of great wealth” has also proven true in the new Gilded Age. A 2015 study concluded, “Only the ‘Gilded Age’ at the beginning of the 20th century bears any comparison” to the extraordinary wealth creation of the last 35 years.4 At the height of the first Gilded Age, the top decile commanded more than 45 percent of the gross income in the United States. Today, the top decile of earners commands more than 50 percent of income.5 ( Who makes the rules in the new Gilded Age? Lessons from the industrial age inform the information age)
And so, that gilded age is not just data and digital mush, but controlling the resources and the food:
A new study revealing that huge expansions of extensive large-scale agriculture is making the South American plains more vulnerable to widespread flooding should act as a “wake-up call,” say researchers.
“The replacement of native vegetation and pastures with rain-fed croplands in South America’s major grain-producing area has resulted in a significant increase in the number of floods, and the area they affect,” said Dr. Javier Houspanossian of the National University of San Luis, in Argentina. “Fine-resolution remote sensing imagery captured the appearance of new flooded areas, expanding at a rate of approximately 700 square kilometers per year in the central plains, a phenomenon unseen elsewhere on the continent.”
{Photo: Flood causing logistical problems. Credit: Javier Houspanossian}
So, these rotten people from Fake New Deal to Kill Nature, to the Gretas and Gores, to the hedge funds, and BlackRocks, the entire shit show that is constant trillions for Piano Penis Player Crack Head Zelensky, we are here, July 3, people just rocking at the Moose, blasted or just jumping around as Baby Boomers, hoping their little raisin in the sun stays a raisin.
If this isn’t insanity, then I am just in an alternative universe, filled with ulterior motivated shit heads, of the red and blue alimentary canals. Canadian oil companies have poured billions of gallons of toxic waste into vast reservoirs spread across the boreal forests of Alberta. To permanently dispose of the wastewater, they want to pump it into a nearby river.
Yep, so that vassal, Klanada, and the EuroTrashLandians and the U$A, trillions for the dirty merchants of war, but these two very huge issues, well, out the window. Nothing Burgers.
This entire alimentary canal shit show is a nothing burger, that is, the elite are clueless but cued into hedge funds and Wall Street and Military Offensive Weapons Murder Incorporated PROFITS.
They need to be shot, ON July Fourth.
There are a million things to dance and drown, fuck up your head with, just to stay away from the reality of how much fucking MONEY and TIME and EXPENDITURES and HUMAN LIFETIMES to the tenthto 100th power. Mother Fuckers everywhere.
10 to the power of 100 = 1 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000.
Fuck them ALL.
CHAPTER ONE -- War Is A Racket
WAR is a racket. It always has been.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.
How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?
Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few - the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.
And what is this bill?
This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.
For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out.
Again they are choosing sides. France and Russia met and agreed to stand side by side. Italy and Austria hurried to make a similar agreement. Poland and Germany cast sheep's eyes at each other, forgetting for the nonce [one unique occasion], their dispute over the Pohsh Corridor.
The assassination of King Alexander of Jugoslavia [Yugoslavia] complicated matters. Jugoslavia and Hungary, long bitter enemies, were almost at each other's throats. Italy was ready to jump in. But France was waiting. So was Czechoslovakia. All of them are looking ahead to war. Not the people - not those who fight and pay and die - only those who foment wars and remain safely at home to profit.
There are 40,000,000 men under arms in the world today, and our statesmen and diplomats have the temerity to say that war is not in the making.
Hell's bells! Are these 40,000,000 men being trained to be dancers?
Not in Italy, to be sure. Premier Mussolini knows what they are being trained for. He, at least, is frank enough to speak out. Only the other day, II Duce in "International Conciliation," the publication of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said:
"And above all. Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. . . . War alone brings up to its highest tension all
human energy and puts the stamp of nobiUty upon the people who have the courage to meet it."
Undoubtedly Mussolini means exactly what he says. His well-trained army, his great fleet of planes, and even his navy are ready for war -- anxious for it, apparently. His recent stand at the side of Hungary in the latter' s dispute with Jugoslavia showed that. And the hurried mobilization of his troops on the Austrian border after the assassination of DoUfuss showed it too. There are others in Europe too whose sabre rattling presages war, sooner or later.
Herr Hitler, with his rearming Germany and his constant demands for more and more arms, is an equal if not greater menace to peace. France only recently increased the term of military service for its youth from a year to eighteen months.
Yes, all over, nations are camping in their arms. The mad dogs of Europe are on the loose. In the Orient the maneuvering is more adroit. Back in 1904, when Russia and Japan fought, we kicked out our old friends the Russians and backed Japan. Then our very generous international bankers were financing Japan. Now the trend is to poison us against the Japanese. What does the "open door" policy to China mean to us? Our trade with China is about $90,000,000 a year. Or the Philippine Islands? We have spent about $600,000,000 in the Philippines in thirty-five years and we (our bankers and industrialists and speculators)
have private investments there of less than $200,000,000.
Then, to save that China trade of about $90,000,000, or to protect these private investments of less than $200,000,000 in the Philippines, we would be all stirred up to hate Japan and go to war - a war that might well cost us tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives of Americans, and many more hundreds of thousands of physically maimed and mentally unbalanced men.
Of course, for this loss, there would be a compensating profit - fortunes would be made. Millions and billions of dollars would be piled up. By a few. Munitions makers. Bankers. Ship builders. Manufacturers. Meat packers. Speculators. They would fare well.
Yes, they are getting ready for another war. Why shouldn't they? It pays high dividends.
But what does it profit the men who are killed? What does it profit their mothers and sisters, their wives and their sweethearts? What does it profit their children?
What does it profit anyone except the very few to whom war means huge profits?
Yes, and what does it profit the nation? Take our own case. Until 1898 we didn't own a bit of territory outside the mainland of North America. At that time our national debt was a little more than $1,000,000,000. Then we
became "internationally minded." We forgot, or shunted aside, the advice of the Father of our country. We forgot George Washington's warning about "entangling alliances." We went to war. We acquired outside territory. At the end of the World War period, as a direct result of our fiddling in international affairs, our national debt had jumped to over $25,000,000,000. Our total favorable trade balance during the twenty-five-year period was about $24,000,000,000. herefore, on a purely bookkeeping basis, we ran a little behind year for year, and that foreign trade might well have been ours without the wars.
It would have been far cheaper (not to say safer) for the average American who pays the bills to stay out of foreign entanglements. For a very few this racket, like bootlegging and other underworld rackets, brings fancy profits, but the cost of operations is always transferred to the people -- who do not profit.
CHAPTER TWO -- Who Makes The Profits?
The World War, rather our brief participation in it, has cost the United States some $52,000,000,000. Figure it out. That means $400 to every American man, woman, and child. And we haven't paid the debt yet. We are paying it, our children will pay it, and our children's children probably still will be paying the cost of that war.
The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes twelve percent. But war-time profits -- ah! that is another matter -- twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent -- the sky is the limit. All that traffic will bear. Uncle Sam has the money. Let's get it.
Of course, it isn't put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and "we must all put our shoulders to the wheel," but the profits jump and leap and skyrocket -- and are safely pocketed. Let's just take a few examples:
Take our friends the du Ponts, the powder people -- didn't one of them testify before a Senate committee recently that their powder won the war? Or saved the world for democracy? Or something? How did they do in the war? They were a patriotic corporation. Well, the average earnings of the du Ponts for the period 1910 to 1914 were $6,000,000 a year. It wasn't much, but the du Fonts managed to get along on it. Now let's look at their average yearly profit during the war years, 1914 to 1918. Fifty-eight million dollars a year
profit we find! Nearly ten times that of normal times, and the profits of normal times were pretty good. An increase in profits of more than 950 per cent.
Take one of our little steel companies that patriotically shunted aside the making of rails and girders and bridges to manufacture war materials. Well, their 1910-1914 yearly earnings averaged $6,000,000. Then came the war. And, like loyal citizens, Bethlehem Steel promptly turned to munitions making. Did their profits jump -- or did they let Uncle Sam in for a bargain? Well, their 1914-1918 average was $49,000,000 a year!
Or, let's take United States Steel. The normal earnings during the five-year period prior to the war were $105,000,000 a year. Not bad. Then along came the war and up went the profits. The average yearly profit for the period 1914-1918 was $240,000,000. Not bad.
There you have some of the steel and powder earnings. Let's look at something else. A little copper, perhaps. That always does well in war times.
Anaconda, for instance. Average yearly earnings during the pre-war years 1910-1914 of $10,000,000. During the war years 1914-1918 profits leaped to $34,000,000 per year.
Or Utah Copper. Average of $5,000,000 per year during the 1910-1914 period. Jumped to an average of $21,000,000 yearly profits for the war period.
Let's group these five, with three smaller companies. The total yearly average profits of the pre-war period 1910-1914 were $137,480,000. Then along came the war. The average yearly profits for this group skyrocketed to $408,300,000.
A little increase in profits of approximately 200 per cent.
Does war pay? It paid them. But they aren't the only ones. There are still others. Let's take leather. For the three-year period before the war the total profits of Central Leather Company were $3,500,000. That was approximately $1,167,000 a year. Well, in 1916 Central Leather returned a profit of $15,000,000, a small increase of 1,100 per cent. That's all. The General
Chemical Company averaged a profit for the three years before the war of a little over $800,000 a year. Came the war, and the profits jumped to $12,000,000. a leap of 1,400 per cent.
International Nickel Company - and you can't have a war without nickel - showed an increase in profits from a mere average of $4,000,000 a year to $73,000,000 yearly. Not bad? An increase of more than 1,700 per cent.
American Sugar Refining Company averaged $2,000,000 a year for the three years before the war. In 1916 a profit of $6,000,000 was recorded.
Listen to Senate Document No. 259. The Sixty-Fifth Congress, reporting on corporate earnings and government revenues. Considering the profits of 122 meat packers, 153 cotton manufacturers, 299 garment makers, 49 steel plants, and 340 coal producers during the war. Profits under 25 per cent were exceptional. For instance the coal companies made between 100 per cent and 7,856 per cent on their capital stock during the war. The Chicago packers doubled and tripled their earnings.
And let us not forget the bankers who financed the great war. If anyone had the cream of the profits it was the bankers. Being partnerships rather than incorporated organizations, they do not have to report to stockholders. And their profits were as secret as they were immense. How the bankers made their millions and their billions I do not know, because those little secrets never become public - even before a Senate investigatory body.
But here's how some of the other patriotic industrialists and speculators chiseled their way into war profits.
Take the shoe people. They like war. It brings business with abnormal profits. They made huge profits on sales abroad to our allies. Perhaps, like the munitions manufacturers and armament makers, they also sold to the enemy. For a dollar is a dollar whether it comes from
Germany or from France. But they did well by Uncle Sam too. For instance, they sold Uncle Sam 35,000,000 pairs of hobnailed service shoes. There were 4,000,000 soldiers. Eight pairs, and more, to a soldier. My regiment during the war had only one pair to a soldier. Some of these shoes probably are still in existence. They were good shoes. But when the war was over Uncle Sam has a matter of 25,000,000 pairs left over. Bought -- and paid for. Profits
recorded and pocketed.
There was still lots of leather left. So the leather people sold your Uncle Sam hundreds of thousands of McClellan saddles for the cavalry. But there wasn't any American cavalry overseas! Somebody had to get rid of this leather, however. Somebody had to make a profit in it -- so we had a lot of McClellan saddles. And we probably have those yet.
Also somebody had a lot of mosquito netting. They sold your Uncle Sam 20,000,000 mosquito nets for the use of the soldiers overseas. I suppose the boys were expected to put it over them as they tried to sleep in muddy trenches -- one hand scratching cooties on their backs and the other making passes at scurrying rats. Well, not one of these mosquito nets ever got to France!
Anyhow, these thoughtful manufacturers wanted to make sure that no soldier would be without his mosquito net, so 40,000,000 additional yards of mosquito netting were sold to Uncle Sam.
There were pretty good profits in mosquito netting in those days, even if there were no mosquitoes in France. I suppose, if the war had lasted just a httle longer, the enterprising mosquito netting manufacturers would have sold your Uncle Sam a couple of consignments of mosquitoes to plant in France so that more mosquito netting would be in order.
Airplane and engine manufacturers felt they, too, should get their just profits out of this war. Why not? Everybody else was getting theirs. So $1,000,000,000 -- count them if you live long enough -- was spent by Uncle Sam in building airplane engines that never left the ground! Not one plane, or motor, out of the billion dollars worth ordered, ever got into a battle in France. Just the same the manufacturers made their little profit of 30, 100, or perhaps 300 per cent.
Undershirts for soldiers cost 140 [cents] to make and uncle Sam paid 300 to 400 each for them -- a nice little profit for the undershirt manufacturer. And the stocking manufacturer and the uniform manufacturers and the cap manufacturers and the steel helmet manufacturers -- all got theirs.
Why, when the war was over some 4,000,000 sets of equipment -- knapsacks and the things that go to fill them -- crammed warehouses on this side. Now they are being scrapped because the regulations have changed the contents. But the manufacturers collected their wartime profits on them -- and they will do it all over again the next time.
There were lots of brilliant ideas for profit making during the war.
One very versatile patriot sold Uncle Sam twelve dozen 48-inch wrenches. Oh, they were very nice wrenches. The only trouble was that there was only one nut ever made that was large enough for these wrenches. That is the one that holds the turbines at Niagara Falls. Well, after Uncle Sam had bought them and the manufacturer had pocketed the profit, the wrenches were put on freight cars and shunted all around the United States in an effort to find a use for them. When the Armistice was signed it was indeed a sad blow to the wrench manufacturer. He was just about to make some nuts to fit the wrenches. Then he planned to
sell these, too, to your Uncle Sam.
Still another had the brilliant idea that colonels shouldn't ride in automobiles, nor should they even ride on horseback. One has probably seen a picture of Andy Jackson riding in a buckboard. Well, some 6,000 buckboards were sold to Uncle Sam for the use of colonels! Not one of them was used. But the buckboard manufacturer got his war profit.
The shipbuilders felt they should come in on some of it, too. They built a lot of ships that made a lot of profit. More than $3,000,000,000 worth. Some of the ships were all right. But $635,000,000 worth of them were made of wood and wouldn't float! The seams opened up -- and they sank. We paid for them, though. And somebody pocketed the profits.
It has been estimated by statisticians and economists and researchers that the war cost your Uncle Sam $52,000,000,000. Of this sum, $39,000,000,000 was expended in the actual war itself. This expenditure yielded $16,000,000,000 in profits. That is how the 21,000 billionaires and millionaires got that way. This $16,000,000,000 profits is not to be sneezed at. It is quite a tidy sum. And it went to a very few.
The Senate (Nye) committee probe of the munitions industry and its wartime profits, despite its sensational disclosures, hardly has scratched the surface.
Even so, it has had some effect. The State Department has been studying "for some time" methods of keeping out of war. The War Department suddenly decides it has a wonderful plan to spring. The Administration names a committee -- with the War and Navy Departments ably represented under the chairmanship of a Wall Street speculator -- to limit profits in war time. To what extent isn't suggested. Hmmm. Possibly the profits of 300 and 600 and 1,600 per cent of those who turned blood into gold in the World War would be limited to some smaller figure.
Apparently, however, the plan does not call for any limitation of losses -- that is, the losses of those who fight the war. As far as I have been able to ascertain there is nothing in the scheme to limit a soldier to the loss of but one eye, or one arm, or to limit his wounds to one or two or three. Or to limit the loss of life.
There is nothing in this scheme, apparently, that says not more than 12 per cent of a regiment shall be wounded in battle, or that not more than 7 per cent in a division shall be killed.
Of course, the committee cannot be bothered with such trifling matters.
CHAPTER THREE -- Who Pays The Bills?
Who provides the profits -- these nice little profits of 20, 100, 300, 1,500 and 1,800 per cent? We all pay them -- in taxation. We paid the bankers their profits when we bought Liberty Bonds at $100.00 and sold them back at $84 or $86 to the bankers. These bankers collected $100 plus. It was a simple manipulation. The bankers control the security marts. It was easy for them to depress the price of these bonds. Then all of us -- the people -- got frightened and sold the bonds at $84 or $86. The bankers bought them. Then these same bankers stimulated a boom and government bonds went to par -- and above. Then the bankers collected their profits.
But the soldier pays the biggest part of the bill. If you don't believe this, visit the American cemeteries on the battlefields abroad. Or visit any of the veteran's hospitals in the United States. On a tour of the country, in the midst of which I am at the time of this writing, I have visited eighteen government hospitals for veterans. In them are a total of about 50,000 destroyed men -- men who were the pick of the nation eighteen years ago. The very able chief surgeon at the government hospital; at Milwaukee, where there are 3,800 of the living dead, told me that mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those who stayed at home.
Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks. There they were remolded; they were made over; they were made to "about face"; to regard murder as the order of the day. They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed.
Then, suddenly, we discharged them and told them to make another "about face" ! This time they had to do their own readjustment, sans [without] mass psychology, sans officers' aid and advice and sans nation-wide propaganda. We didn't need them any more. So we scattered them about without any "three-minute" or "Liberty Loan" speeches or parades. Many, too many, of these fine young boys are eventually destroyed, mentally, because they could not make that final "about face" alone.
In the government hospital in Marion, Indiana, 1,800 of these boys are in pens! Five hundred of them in a barracks with steel bars and wires all around outside the buildings and on the porches. These already have been mentally destroyed. These boys don't even look like human beings. Oh, the looks on their faces! Physically, they are in good shape; mentally, they are gone.
There are thousands and thousands of these cases, and more and more are coming in all the time. The tremendous excitement of the war, the sudden cutting off of that excitement -- the young boys couldn't stand it.
That's a part of the bill. So much for the dead -- they have paid their part of the war profits. So much for the mentally and physically wounded -- they are paying now their share of the war profits. But the others paid, too -- they paid with heartbreaks when they tore themselves away from their firesides and their families to don the uniform of Uncle Sam -- on which a profit had been made. They paid another part in the training camps where they were
regimented and drilled while others took their jobs and their places in the lives of their communities. The paid for it in the trenches where they shot and were shot; where they were hungry for days at a time; where they slept in the mud and the cold and in the rain -- with the moans and shrieks of the dying for a horrible lullaby.
But don't forget -- the soldier paid part of the dollars and cents bill too.
Up to and including the Spanish-American War, we had a prize system, and soldiers and sailors fought for money. During the Civil War they were paid bonuses, in many instances, before they went into service. The government, or states, paid as high as $1,200 for an enlistment. In the Spanish-American War they gave prize money. When we captured any vessels, the soldiers all got their share - at least, they were supposed to. Then it was found that we could reduce the cost of wars by taking all the prize money and keeping it, but conscripting [drafting] the soldier anyway. Then soldiers couldn't bargain for their labor.
Everyone else could bargain, but the soldier couldn't.
Napoleon once said,
"All men are enamored of decorations . . . they positively hunger for them."
So by developing the Napoleonic system - the medal business - the government learned it could get soldiers for less money, because the boys liked to be decorated. Until the Civil War there were no medals. Then the Congressional Medal of Honor was handed out. It made enlistments easier. After the Civil War no new medals were issued until the Spanish- American War.
In the World War, we used propaganda to make the boys accept conscription. They were made to feel ashamed if they didn't join the army.
So vicious was this war propaganda that even God was brought into it. With few exceptions our clergymen joined in the clamor to kill, kill, kill. To kill the Germans. God is on our side. . . it is His will that the Germans be killed.
And in Germany, the good pastors called upon the Germans to kill the aUies ... to please the same God. That was a part of the general propaganda, built up to make people war conscious and murder conscious.
Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the "war to end all wars." This was the "war to make the world safe for democracy." No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits. No one told these American soldiers that they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. No one told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might
be torpedoed by submarines built with United States patents. They were just told it was to be a "glorious adventure."
Thus, having stuffed patriotism down their throats, it was decided to make them help pay for the war, too. So, we gave them the large salary of $30 a month.
All they had to do for this munificent sum was to leave their dear ones behind, give up their jobs, lie in swampy trenches, eat canned willy (when they could get it) and kill and kill and kill . . . and be killed.
But wait!
Half of that wage (just a little more than a riveter in a shipyard or a laborer in a munitions factory safe at home made in a day) was promptly taken from him to support his dependents, so that they would not become a charge upon his community. Then we made him pay what amounted to accident insurance -- something the employer pays for in an enlightened state -- nd that cost him $6 a month. He had less than $9 a month left.
Then, the most crowning insolence of all -- he was virtually blackjacked into paying for his own ammunition, clothing, and food by being made to buy Liberty Bonds. Most soldiers got no money at all on pay days.
We made them buy Liberty Bonds at $100 and then we bought them back -- when they came back from the war and couldn't find work -- at $84 and $86. And the soldiers bought about $2,000,000,000 worth of these bonds!
Yes, the soldier pays the greater part of the bill. His family pays too. They pay it in the same heart-break that he does. As he suffers, they suffer. At nights, as he lay in the trenches and watched shrapnel burst about him, they lay home in their beds and tossed sleeplessly -- his father, his mother, his wife, his sisters, his brothers, his sons, and his daughters.
When he returned home minus an eye, or minus a leg or with his mind broken, they suffered too -- as much as and even sometimes more than he. Yes, and they, too, contributed their dollars to the profits of the munitions makers and bankers and shipbuilders and the manufacturers and the speculators made. They, too, bought Liberty Bonds and contributed to the profit of the bankers after the Armistice in the hocus-pocus of manipulated Liberty Bond
prices.
And even now the families of the wounded men and of the mentally broken and those who never were able to readjust themselves are still suffering and still paying.
CHAPTER FOUR -- How To Smash This Racket!
WELL, it's a racket, all right.
A few profit -- and the many pay. But there is a way to stop it. You can't end it by disarmament conferences. You can't eliminate it by peace parleys at Geneva. Well-meaning but impractical groups can't wipe it out by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war.
The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labor before the nations manhood can be conscripted. One month before the Government can conscript the young men of the nation -- it must conscript capital and industry and labor. Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all
the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted -- to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.
Let the workers in these plants get the same wages -- all the workers, all presidents, all executives, all directors, all managers, all bankers -- yes, and all generals and all admirals and all officers and all politicians and all government office holders -- everyone in the nation be restricted to a total monthly income not to exceed that paid to the soldier in the trenches!
Let all these kings and tycoons and masters of business and all those workers in industry and all our senators and governors and majors pay half of their monthly $30 wage to their families and pay war risk insurance and buy Liberty Bonds.
Why shouldn't they?
They aren't running any risk of being killed or of having their bodies mangled or their minds shattered. They aren't sleeping in muddy trenches. They aren't hungry. The soldiers are!
Give capital and industry and labor thirty days to think it over and you will find, by that time, there will be no war. That will smash the war racket -- that and nothing else.
Maybe I am a little too optimistic. Capital still has some say. So capital won't permit the taking of the profit out of war until the people -- those who do the suffering and still pay the price -- make up their minds that those they elect to office shall do their bidding, and not that of the profiteers.
Another step necessary in this fight to smash the war racket is the limited plebiscite to determine whether a war should be declared. A plebiscite not of all the voters but merely of those who would be called upon to do the fighting and dying. There wouldn't be very much sense in having a 76-year-old president of a munitions factory or the flat-footed head of an international banking firm or the cross-eyed manager of a uniform manufacturing plant - all of whom see visions of tremendous profits in the event of war - voting on whether the
nation should go to war or not. They never would be called upon to shoulder arms - to sleep in a trench and to be shot. Only those who would be called upon to risk their lives for their country should have the privilege of voting to determine whether the nation should go to war.
There is ample precedent for restricting the voting to those affected. Many of our states have restrictions on those permitted to vote. In most, it is necessary to be able to read and write before you may vote. In some, you must own property. It would be a simple matter each year for the men coming of military age to register in their communities as they did in the draft during the World War and be examined physically. Those who could pass and who would
therefore be called upon to bear arms in the event of war would be ehgible to vote in a limited plebiscite. They should be the ones to have the power to decide -- and not a Congress few of whose members are within the age limit and fewer still of whom are in physical condition to bear arms. Only those who must suffer should have the right to vote.
A third step in this business of smashing the war racket is to make certain that our military forces are truly forces for defense only. At each session of Congress the question of further naval appropriations comes up. The swivel-chair admirals of Washington (and there are always a lot of them) are very adroit lobbyists. And they are smart. They don't shout that "We need a lot of battleships to war on this nation or that nation." Oh no. First of all, they let it be known that America is menaced by a great naval power. Almost any day, these admirals will tell you, the great fleet of this supposed enemy will strike suddenly and annihilate 125,000,000 people. Just like that. Then
they begin to cry for a larger navy. For what? To fight the enemy? Oh my, no. Oh, no. For defense purposes only.
Then, incidentally, they announce maneuvers in the Pacific. For defense. Uh, huh. The Pacific is a great big ocean. We have a tremendous coastline on the Pacific. Will the maneuvers be off the coast, two or three hundred miles? Oh, no. The maneuvers will be two thousand, yes, perhaps even thirty-five hundred miles, off the coast.
The Japanese, a proud people, of course will be pleased beyond expression to see the united States fleet so close to Nippon's shores. Even as pleased as would be the residents of California were they to dimly discern through the morning mist, the Japanese fleet playing at war games off Los Angeles.
The ships of our navy, it can be seen, should be specifically hmited, by law, to within 200 miles of our coastline. Had that been the law in 1898 the Maine would never have gone to Havana Harbor. She never would have been blown up. There would have been no war with Spain with its attendant loss of life. Two hundred miles is ample, in the opinion of experts, for defense purposes. Our nation cannot start an offensive war if its ships can't go further than 200 miles from the coastline. Planes might be permitted to go as far as 500 miles from the coast for purposes of reconnaissance. And the army should never leave the territorial limits of our nation.
To summarize: Three steps must be taken to smash the war racket.
1. We must take the profit out of war.
2. We must permit the youth of the land who would bear arms to decide whether or not there should be war.
3. We must limit our military forces to home defense purposes.
CHAPTER FIVE --To Hell With War!
I am not a fool as to believe that war is a thing of the past. I know the people do not want war, but there is no use in saying we cannot be pushed into another war.
Looking back, Woodrow Wilson was re-elected president in 1916 on a platform that he had "kept us out of war" and on the implied promise that he would "keep us out of war." Yet, five months later he asked Congress to declare war on Germany.
In that five-month interval the people had not been asked whether they had changed their minds. The 4,000,000 young men who put on uniforms and marched or sailed away were not asked whether they wanted to go forth to suffer and die.
Then what caused our government to change its mind so suddenly?
Money.
An allied commission, it may be recalled, came over shortly before the war declaration and called on the President. The President summoned a group of advisers. The head of the commission spoke. Stripped of its diplomatic language, this is what he told the President and his group:
"There is no use kidding ourselves any longer. The cause of the allies is lost. We now owe you (American bankers, American munitions makers, American manufacturers, American speculators, American exporters) five or six billion dollars.
If we lose (and without the help of the United States we must lose) we, England, France and Italy, cannot pay back this money . . . and Germany won't.
So ... "
Had secrecy been outlawed as far as war negotiations were concerned, and had the press been invited to be present at that conference, or had radio been available to broadcast the proceedings, America never would have entered the World War. But this conference, like all war discussions, was shrouded in utmost secrecy. When our boys were sent off to war they were told it was a "war to make the world safe for democracy" and a "war to end all wars."
Well, eighteen years after, the world has less of democracy than it had then. Besides, what business is it of ours whether Russia or Germany or England or France or Italy or Austria live under democracies or monarchies? Whether they are Fascists or Communists? Our problem is to preserve our own democracy.
And very little, if anything, has been accomplished to assure us that the World War was really the war to end all wars.
Yes, we have had disarmament conferences and limitations of arms conferences. They don't mean a thing. One has just failed; the results of another have been nullified. We send our professional soldiers and our sailors and our politicians and our diplomats to these conferences. And what happens?
The professional soldiers and sailors don't want to disarm. No admiral wants to be without a ship. No general wants to be without a command. Both mean men without jobs. They are not for disarmament. They cannot be for limitations of arms. And at all these conferences, lurking in the background but all-powerful, just the same, are the sinister agents of those who profit by war. They see to it that these conferences do not disarm or seriously limit armaments.
The chief aim of any power at any of these conferences has not been to achieve disarmament to prevent war but rather to get more armament for itself and less for any potential foe.
There is only one way to disarm with any semblance of practicability. That is for all nations to get together and scrap every ship, every gun, every rifle, every tank, every war plane. Even this, if it were possible, would not be enough.
The next war, according to experts, will be fought not with battleships, not by artillery, not with rifles and not with machine guns. It will be fought with deadly chemicals and gases.
Secretly each nation is studying and perfecting newer and ghastlier means of annihilating its foes wholesale. Yes, ships will continue to be built, for the shipbuilders must make their profits. And guns still will be manufactured and powder and rifles will be made, for the munitions makers must make their huge profits. And the soldiers, of course, must wear uniforms, for the manufacturer must make their war profits too.
But victory or defeat will be determined by the skill and ingenuity of our scientists.
If we put them to work making poison gas and more and more fiendish mechanical and explosive instruments of destruction, they will have no time for the constructive job of building greater prosperity for all peoples. By putting them to this useful job, we can all make more money out of peace than we can out of war -- even the munitions makers.
So. ..I say, TO HELL WITH WAR!
Source.
“If you chart the West to 1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, that is kind of the main springboard through which everything else comes from. What is the first act of Europe, in the Americas? It is the largest genocide that has ever existed on the planet, killing up to – the midpoint estimate of people who died in the Americas is 17 million people. […] I actually don’t understand the science of this, but apparently there were so many people killed, the temperature of the earth actually rose.”
“The British Empire was far worse than the Nazis. It lasted far longer; it killed far many more people; and in fact, in many ways, as you mentioned, the Nazis were copying large elements of the British Empire. And that’s just fact. But you state something like that it’s like heresy, right? Because we’re not having a rational conversation; we’re not having a conversation about actual history.”
“He was an unashamed imperialist, like many of his generation, and staunchly committed to maintaining India’s unity within the British Empire. He had a strongly held conviction that too sudden and rapid a move to democracy and independence would tear the subcontinent apart on sectarian lines, a fear that events would justify.”3
It’s in the DNA:
Comanche Chief Tosahwi reputedly tells Sheridan in 1869, “Tosahwi, good Indian,” to which General Sheridan supposedly replies, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead” (Brown, 1970).
+–+
Not atypical of U$A: Other “Indians.”
Asked about Nixon’s remarks, Natwar Singh said Nixon’s language reflected “his vulgarity and racism”.
“Richard Nixon was a third-rate human being and his entire record shows that and also the manner in which he was dismissed,” Singh told , referring to the Watergate scandal that led to Nixon’s resignation.
Nixon had a genuine preference for Pakistan vis-a-vis India and he knew about the genocide that was going on in Bangladesh but turned his eyes the other way. In this, his accomplice was Kissinger, Singh said.
“Kissinger, 20 years later at least had the decency to apologise, but Nixon went to his grave and never apologised,” said Singh, who has been a decorated diplomat and India’s envoy to several countries.
Singh also hailed then prime minister Indira Gandhi for “completely out-maneuvering” the Americans.
Aiyar, a former Union minister and IFS officer who has handled sensitive assignments, also slammed Nixon, describing him as “very vulgar” and “completely uncivilised”.
“Kissinger, 20 years later at least had the decency to apologise, but Nixon went to his grave and never apologised,” said Singh, who has been a decorated diplomat and India’s envoy to several countries.
Singh also hailed then prime minister Indira Gandhi for “completely out-maneuvering” the Americans.
Aiyar, a former Union minister and IFS officer who has handled sensitive assignments, also slammed Nixon, describing him as “very vulgar” and “completely uncivilised”.
“The Nixon tapes have long ago revealed that Nixon was a very vulgar, completely uncivilised and perhaps typical white American male of his generation. The revelations made by Gary Bass only confirm that,” Aiyar told .
“What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic‚ studded with cities‚ towns‚ and prosperous farms embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute‚ occupied by more than 12‚000‚000 happy people‚ and filled with all the blessings of liberty‚ civilization and religion?
The present policy of the Government is but a continuation of the same progressive change by a milder process. The tribes which occupied the countries now constituting the Eastern States were annihilated or have melted away to make room for the whites. The waves of population and civilization are rolling to the westward‚ and we now propose to acquire the countries occupied by the red men of the South and West by a fair exchange‚ and‚ at the expense of the United States‚ to send them to land where their existence may be prolonged and perhaps made perpetual.”
In 1830, Jackson shared his plans for “Indian Removal” in his annual message to congress. The language of removal is itself a euphemism for the attempted ethnic cleansing of tens of thousands of Native people from their ancestral homelands.
Dead Presidents:
“Indians and wolves are both beasts of prey, tho’ they differ in shape.”
George Washington
“If ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi… in war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy them all.”
Thomas Jefferson
“My original convictions upon this subject have been confirmed by the course of events for several years, and experience is every day adding to their strength. That those tribes cannot exist surrounded by our settlements and in continual contact with our citizens is certain. They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition. Established in the midst of another and a superior race, and without appreciating the causes of their inferiority or seeking to control them, they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere long disappear.”
Andrew Jackson
“Ordered that of the Indians and Half-breeds sentenced to be hanged by the military commission, composed of Colonel Crooks, Lt. Colonel Marshall, Captain Grant, Captain Bailey, and Lieutenant Olin, and lately sitting in Minnesota, you cause to be executed on Friday the nineteenth day of December, instant, the following names, to wit… ” – Text from order made by President Lincoln to General Sibley ordering the execution of American Indians in Minnesota.
[President Abraham Lincoln (March 1861-April 1865). Lincoln oversaw the breaking of treaties and the robbing of the Dakotas and other Native peoples of their land, livelihood, and often their lives. And he sent troops to crush their resistance. Lincoln made clear his white supremacist views. Speaking in February 1860, he asked “[W]hy did Yankees almost instantly discover gold in California, which had been trodden upon and overlooked by Indians and Mexican greasers for centuries?” He also argued that phonetic writing was what separated whites from “savages,” and that this ability had given rise to the fruits of civilization—government, culture, etc. In 1863, Lincoln said: “Although we are now engaged in a great war between one another, we are not, as a race, so much disposed to fight and kill one another as our red brethren.”]
[Photo: Lynching of 38 Dakota (Santee Sioux) men, December 26, 1862.]
“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”
Theodore Roosevelt
“All of our people all over the country – except the pure blooded Indians – are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, including even those who came over here on the Mayflower.”
Franklin Roosevelt
“The United States, which would live on Christian principles with all of the peoples of the world, cannot omit a fair deal for its own Indian citizens.”
Harry Truman
“There has been a vigorous acceleration of health, resource and education programs designed to advance the role of the American Indian in our society. Last Fall, for example, 91 percent of the Indian children between the ages of 6 and 18 on reservations were enrolled in school. This is a rise of 12 percent since 1953.”
Dwight Eisenhower
“For a subject worked and reworked so often in novels, motion pictures, and television, American Indians remain probably the least understood and most misunderstood Americans of us all.”
John Kennedy
“The American Indian, once proud and free, is torn now between White and tribal values; between the politics and language of the White man and his own historic culture. His problems, sharpened by years of defeat and exploitation, neglect and inadequate effort, will take many years to overcome.”
Lyndon Johnson
“What we have done with the American Indian is in its way as bad as what we imposed on the Negroes. We took a proud and independent race and virtually destroyed them. We have to find ways to bring them back into decent lives in this country.”
Richard Nixon
“I am committed to furthering the self-determination of Indian communities but without terminating the special relationship between the Federal Government and the Indian people. I am strongly opposed to termination. Self-determination means that you can decide the nature of your tribe’s relationship with the Federal Government within the framework of the Self-Determination Act, which I signed in January of 1975.”
Gerald Ford
“It is the fundamental right of every American, as guaranteed by the first amendment of the Constitution, to worship as he or she pleases … This legislation sets forth the policy of the United States to protect and preserve the inherent right of American Indian, Eskimo, Aleut, and Native Hawaiian people to believe, express, and exercise their traditional religions.” [as he signed into law the American Indian Religious Freedom Act.]
Jimmy Carter
“Let me tell you just a little something about the American Indian in our land. We have provided millions of acres of land for what are called preservations – or reservations, I should say. They, from the beginning, announced that they wanted to maintain their way of life, as they had always lived there in the desert and the plains and so forth. And we set up these reservations so they could, and have a Bureau of Indian Affairs to help take care of them. At the same time, we provide education for them – schools on the reservations. And they’re free also to leave the reservations and be American citizens among the rest of us, and many do. Some still prefer, however, that way – that early way of life. And we’ve done everything we can to meet their demands as to how they want to live. Maybe we made a mistake. Maybe we should not have humored them in that wanting to stay in that kind of primitive lifestyle. Maybe we should have said, no, come join us; be citizens along with the rest of us.”
Ronald Reagan
“This government-to-government relationship is the result of sovereign and independent tribal governments being incorporated into the fabric of our Nation, of Indian tribes becoming what our courts have come to refer to as quasi-sovereign domestic dependent nations. Over the years the relationship has flourished, grown, and evolved into a vibrant partnership in which over 500 tribal governments stand shoulder to shoulder with the other governmental units that form our Republic.”
George Herbert Walker Bush
“Let us rededicate ourselves to the principle that all Americans have the tools to make the most of their God-given potential. For Indian tribes and tribal members, this means that the authority of tribal governments must be accorded the respect and support to which they are entitled under the law. It means that American Indian children and youth must be provided a solid education and the opportunity to go on to college. It means that more must be done to stimulate tribal economies, create jobs, and increase economic opportunities.”
Bill Clinton
“Tribal sovereignty means that. It’s sovereign. You’re a… you’re a… you’ve been given sovereignty and you’re viewed as a sovereign entity.”
George W. Bush
“We also recommit to supporting tribal self-determination, security, and prosperity for all Native Americans. While we cannot erase the scourges or broken promises of our past, we will move ahead together in writing a new, brighter chapter in our joint history.”
Barack Obama
“You were here long before any of us were here. Although we have a representative in Congress who they say was here a long time ago. They call her ‘Pocahontas.’
Donald Trump
“The federal government has long broken promises to Native American tribes who have been on this land since time immemorial. With her appointment, Congresswoman Haaland will help me strengthen the nation-to-nation relationship.”
Last week, we asked Native News Online social media followers how they celebrate the Fourth of July as Native Americans.
Read on to see how Indian Country is celebrating the Fourth of July, and be sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.
The following answers have been published as written.
June 2, 1924 is when Native peoples were granted US citizenship. To me the 4th of July is like Cinco de Mayo — a way for humans to make money.
— Melanie Tallmadge Sainz
This native Veteran enjoys duel citizenship, I will respect both defend both until the day I die, ask my dad, Ira Hayes, our beloved, Navajo code talkers, how they feel… learn from out tragic history don’t repeat it and look forward with open heart and mind. Former chairman of my beloved Suquamish People.
—Lyle Emerson George
I don’t get patriotic, given our history with America. I enjoy fireworks so I make it out to see them but that’s about it.
— Monica Lazur
We have a big powwow at Ft. Duschene that weekend every year!
— Erin Cahill
July 6 1889 Miskwaagamiiwi-zaaga’igan signed for Sovereignty. Their celebration is one of the Best I’ve ever seen.
— Monika Brunner
I just treat it like any other day off from work. Go boating with family, motorcycling, roping and a day to get away. And eat! Steaks! Crawfish!
— Austin Mix
I respect those that do celebrate it but I’m not “patriotic “ per say. Usually we go to a powwow.
I plan on finding a peaceful demonstration in a larger community to be a part of. Afterward you can celebrate the hard work and survival of you and your ancestors with your own fireworks.
— Nicoli Poitra
151st Quapaw Nation Powwow.
— Mary Wheeler-McCarty
I don’t. Only Earth Day, Indigenous People’s Day, summer and winter solstice, and Juneteeth.
— Apak T Hill
We don’t celebrate the creation of the country illegally occupying our land.
I only celebrate June 2. Day of Indian Citizenship Act. I’ll think about celebrating a different day when they honor the Fort Laramie Treaty.
— Bunny Vardanega
I don’t. So called independence day didn’t apply to us, and still doesn’t. This does not mean that I don’t support military personnel. They have my utmost respect and I honor them year round for their service to people.
— Sibyl Enciso Esquivel
Not a special day to me (at over seven decades of age), we celebrate our warriors on Vets Days too but this day seems to be in honor of the whole notion of it’s birthday and independence from their mother country of europe. We (Native/Indigenous People) don’t have any connections to that “independence” at all. It does remind us that their arrival that destroyed us almost completely.
— Berni SantaMaria
Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho celebrate the new year at this time after ceremony.
— Abigail Wilson
Why celebrate a colonizer’s holiday? The government and the millions of its non-indigenous peoples that live in our lands don’t respect us. Our treaties have yet to be fulfilled. I personally don’t celebrate anymore. Just another day.
— Tÿłēr Brïdgę
Cree singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie singing, “Now that the Buffalo’s Gone.”
Lyrics:
Can you remember the times That you have held your head high? And told all your friends of your Indian claim Proud good lady and proud good man Your great-great-grandfather from Indian blood sprang And you feel in your heart for these ones Oh it’s written in books and in songs That we’ve been mistreated and wronged Well over and over I hear those same words
[Photo: From left: Graduate students Sierra Edd, Everardo Reyes, Lissett Bastidas and Valentin Sierra are in the Indigenous Sound Studies working group on campus. Reyes and Edd started the group in 2020 to make a space for Indigenous scholars to talk about the intersection of sound, law, performance, gender, sexuality and other areas of study. (Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small)]
Paul Haeder, Author 