if you read the headlines and then critically parse the underbelly of it all, there is no reason in hell the pitchforks are not poison-tipped and ready for drone delivery to the Merchants of Death
Oh, no, just a little spin on Bing and Yahoo and NYT, just the headlines, and then skimming through, and a poor boy’s head will explode.
Juxtapose the entire dementia of those War Lords and Blood Lust folk in Fortune 5000 Land, and then read what the bankers (bailed out and buttoned down felons) have to say about “the economy,” and then listen to the creeps of AI LaLaLand (it’s more than just getting old and young useless eaters shuffled to the container hotels — think more warfare, SWAT-fare, control, drone-delivered disease-drug-dementia), and a poor boy might want to just pick up an ax and chop up the local fiber optic trunk line.
Anything to fuck up the system.
Here, the Links:
Carbon lies — money money — trillion$ — to be made on carbon removal; more Parkinsons on line for us all, thanks to pesticides; no more loans; discarded cloths in Chile seen from satellite; most “homes” bought up in Bay area purchased by LLc’s; white collar workers beware of the robots; New Mexico fracking putting that cancer causing PFAS in the baby’s water; Gates and Epstein — blackmailing story with Gates’ 19 year old Russian Bridge (cards) champion.
That food crisis, and then the Green New Death Deal, and ecosystems collapsing, and hell, the Alberta Canada fires and the volcano eruption in Mexico, yet we have Bumbling Biden and Busted McCarthy walking the Hiroshima death mile and smiling and meeting the Prince of Darkness in Isra-Hell for more bombs for UkroHell.
Food = Fertilizers Good/Bad/Ugly/Gotcha = Schizophrenia for a darn young boy!
The high prices also pushed many farmers deeper into debt. Farmers from Cameroon to the U.S. say they are still spending three times as much on fertilisers as they were a few years ago. And in countries where fertilisers are heavily subsidised, the price spike has saddled governments with huge debts. In India alone, the central government’s expenditure on fertiliser subsidies last year surged from US$9.8 billion to US$17.1 billion. People are paying the price for the fertiliser industry’s price gouging.
The costs are also rising for the planet. Chemical fertilisers are a major source of environmental pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, with nitrogen fertilisers alone accounting for one out of every 40 tonnes of annual emissions. New reports from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation and Earth4All, a global collective of leading scientists and economists, make it clear that steep and immediate reductions in global fertiliser use are required to avert catastrophic climate change
Money on war, murder, pain, poverty, hunger, cancer, incarceration, eviction, foreclosure, fleecing, grifting, come on now, the news is telling you the system is so fucked up that you should have zero tolerance for any of them, from the killer cop roaming the streets for more DWIMBA —driving while indian mexican black asian — and the code inspector fining the family who plants a front yard garden or builds a tiny home next to the regular home, to the college president and his/her coaches grifting big time, to the real estate agent charging charges for the charges, then to the judge who is stripped of ethics but full of Judge Judy Sadism, then to the overworked DAs extracting plea agreements from guilty and innocents, to the shit-face public defender who naps during trials, to all those teachers jumping ship, to the Gen Z and Baby Boomers hating on each other, to the incredible blightness of being Media, MSM, Legacy Press, the unjournalist journalists.
Ahh, equal opportunity Goebbels and Girls and Boys from Brazil, a la high tech:
“Ousted Google ethics executive sees A.I. as a ‘gold rush’ where ‘the people making money are not the ones in the midst of it’”
Timnit Gebru has all the hallmarks of a Big Tech star: a master’s and Ph.D. from Stanford, engineering and research roles at Apple and Microsoft, before joining Google as an A.I. expert.
But in 2020 her time co-leading the ethical A.I. team at the Alphabet-owned company came to an end, a decision triggered by a paper she wrote warning of the bias being embedded into artificial intelligence.
Bias is a topic that experts in the field have raised for many years.
In 2015 Google apologized and said it was “appalled” by its photos app—powered by A.I.—labeling a photograph of a black couple as “gorillas.” (source)
Man oh man, the sewers, the stormwater drainages, the homeless, the rough sleepers, the couch surfers, the useless eaters-renters-drivers-workers, and the amazing storm clouds on the horizon, and we are here, with dirty Monarchs, dirty War Lords, dirty Politicos, dirty Bankers, dirty Media, dirty Law Enforcers, dirty Marketers, dirty Educators, dirty Entertainers, dirty Scientists, dirty Wall Streeters, all of them, selling our countries down the drain.
And so, Independence Day, Armistice Day, Memorial Day, Flag Day, all those Veterans Day fandangos, here we are, just shitting in our own graves:
Millions on alert:
[Photo: Millions in Mexico warned to prepare for evacuation as Popocatépetl volcano spews ash]
Oh, Canada:
A deluge of rainfall in Western Canada is an opportunity to make real progress in fighting Alberta’s wildfires, an official said Monday.
There are 81 wildfires in forest protection areas, with 23 considered out of control. More than 945,000 hectares have burned and more than 10,000 Albertans remain under evacuation orders.
At a news conference, Alberta Wildfire information unit manager Christie Tucker reiterated what an extraordinary wildfire season this has been — the most active spring on record, surpassing the last set in 2019 when 615,000 hectares burned.
“I know we’re all relieved to see some rain today and we hope for more to come,” Tucker said.
“This could be a turning point for the firefighters working out there on the fires.” (source)
Oh, those Bidens and McCarthy Familias, and the Nuland-Blinken-Yellen-Kagan-Garland-Sherman Hummus Familia, too.
Do we have big problems in USA-Klanada!
Arizona, California and Nevada on Monday proposed a deal to significantly cut their water use from the drought-stricken Colorado River over the next three years. The $1.2 billion proposal is a potential breakthrough in a stalemate over how to deal with a rising problem that pitted Western states against one another. The plan would conserve an additional 3 million acre-feet of water from the 1,450-mile river that provides water to 40 million people in seven U.S. states, parts of Mexico and more than two dozen Native American tribes. Cities, irrigation districts and Native American tribes in the three states will receive federal funding in exchange for temporarily using less water. (source)
Well well, the photo of the year, our Governor for the 51st State, UkroNaziLandia:
If this isn’t a foul taste in your mouth, then,
Shit, billions in ZioAzovNaziLensky’s hidden bank accounts, villas here and there, and then this Anglo Saxon shit storm, kyping the bathrobes: “Liz Truss has been hit by a bill of more than £12,000, which included items like bathrobes and slippers that went missing from her grace-and-favour country home.
The disgraced ex-Prime Minister has reportedly been ordered to reimburse the Cabinet Office after the items disappeared following “summer parties” she held at Chevening estate.” (source)
Oh, the summer book reading list, too: “CIA May Be Regarded Around World as a Rogue Elephant, But Operatives Can Still Churn Out Books that Make Themselves Look Like Heroes” (source)
Well, the summer blues will be filled with big bad bears:
When the U.S. Forest Service needed a symbol to draw the nation’s attention to the danger of wildfires, Uncle Sam just wouldn’t do. Bambi, despite his success in a popular Disney movie, wouldn’t do either.
Only Smokey Bear – a little bear cub who was found after a forest fire 72 years ago Saturday – could do the job.
1937
President Franklin D. Roosevelt launches a national campaign to reduce forest fires. Posters featuring Uncle Sam as a forest ranger tell people “Our forests – Our fault.”
1942
A Japanese submarine surfaces off the coast and fires on an oil field near Santa Barbara. Damage is minimal, but officials realize Los Padres National Forest is at risk. With resources at a premium during wartime, fire safety becomes an even higher priority.
1944
Disney makes a one-year deal to loan Bambi and his friends to the forest fire prevention campaign. The campaign is a success, but ad executives realize they need an animal symbol of their own.
AUG. 9 A new campaign is launched, featuring a bear. The first poster, drawn pro bono by illustrator Albert Staehle, shows a character he calls Smokey pouring water on a campfire. He says he started with a raccoon but thought it looked too much “like a bandit.”
1947
The very successful Smokey Bear campaign continues in the postwar years with the new slogan, “Only you.”
1950
MAY 9 A group of firefighters narrowly escapes disaster near Capitan, New Mexico, by taking refuge on a rock slide as the fire burns over them.
Afterward, they find a bear cub – his fur singed and his paws badly burned – clinging to a charred tree. Named Hotfoot Teddy, the cub is nursed back to health by a New Mexico game warden and his family.
JUNE 27 Now famous, the cub is flown to the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., to become the living embodiment of Smokey Bear. The U.S. Postal Service eventually gives Smokey his own ZIP code when he begins receiving up to 13,000 letters a week.
1952
A song, “Smokey the Bear” – written by Steve Nelson and Jack Rollins, the same guys who wrote “Peter Cottontail” and “Frosty the Snowman” – becomes a big hit. Rollins adds “the” to Smokey’s name to make the lyrics fit better. As a result, a generation or two of children grow up calling the character “Smokey the Bear” instead of just “Smokey Bear.”
MAY 23 Congress passes the Smokey Bear Act, taking Smokey out of the public domain and preserving the trademark for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. More important, the move earmarks revenue from sales of Smokey toys and memorabilia for fire prevention awareness efforts.
1971
A new cub, Little Smokey, joins Smokey in the National Zoo. He, too, was born in a New Mexico forest and rescued from starvation by park rangers.
1975
MAY 2 Smokey, old and arthritic and still suffering from his injuries, is officially retired from public service. Little Smokey is officially named his successor as “Smokey II.”
1976
NOV. 9 Smokey dies at age 26. His remains are flown back to near where he was found in New Mexico. More than 250 people attend his memorial service. Two days after the funeral, an obituary runs on Page 1 of the Wall Street Journal.
1979
Smokey Bear Historical Park is completed near Capitan, New Mexico, at the grave of the original Smokey. The park includes a museum.
1990
AUG.11 Smokey II dies.
2020
While both Smokey and Smokey II have died, the character lives on. Recent ads feature Smokey seeking out people who exhibit safe behavior and rewarding them with – what else? – a bear hug.
+—+
So the summer comes on strong, as Americanos sip their beer, booze, wine coolers:
Sitting back and looking for NASCAR and Netflix movies, backyard BBQ-ing, while Nero Fiddles and the Goy-Jew World of Elitism Destroys More of the Planet.
All just dust to the wind, these stories:
Climate Change
While climate change has effects that vary by location, everyone is feeling it one way or another. Most ecosystems can probably adjust to climate change up to a point, but other stressors (like the other issues mentioned here) limit this adaptation ability, especially in places that have lost a number of species already. Particularly sensitive are mountain tops, prairie potholes, the Arctic, and coral reefs. I argue that climate change is the number one issue right now, as we all feel the more frequent extreme weather events, the earlier spring, melting ice, and rising seas. These changes will continue to get stronger, negatively affecting the ecosystems we and the rest of biodiversity rely on.
Land Use
Natural spaces provide habitat for wildlife, space for forests to produce oxygen, and wetlands to clean our freshwater. It allows us to hike, climb, hunt, fish, and camp. Natural spaces are also a finite resource. We continue to use land inefficiently, turning natural spaces into cornfields, natural gas fields, wind farms, roads, and subdivisions. Inappropriate or nonexistent land use planning continues to result in suburban sprawl supporting low-density housing. These changes in land use fragment the landscape, squeeze out wildlife, put the valuable property right into wildfire-prone areas, and upset atmospheric carbon budgets.
Energy Extraction and Transportation
New technologies, higher energy prices, and a permissive regulatory environment have allowed in recent years for a significant expansion of energy development in North America. The development of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing has created a boom in natural gas extraction in the northeast, particularly in the Marcellus and Utica shale deposits. This new expertise in shale drilling is also applied to shale oil reserves, for example in the Bakken formation of North Dakota. Similarly, tar sands in Canada have been exploited at much-accelerated rates in the last decade. All these fossil fuels have to be transported to refineries and markets through pipelines and over roads and rails. The extraction and transportation of fossil fuels imply environmental risks such as groundwater pollution, spills, and greenhouse gas emissions. The drill pads, pipelines, and mines fragment the landscape (see Land Use above), cutting up wildlife habitat. Renewable energies like wind and solar are also booming and they have their own environmental issues, particularly when it comes to positioning these structures on the landscape. Improper placement can lead to significant mortality events for bats and birds, for example.
Chemical Pollution
A very large number of synthetic chemicals enter our air, soil, and waterways. Major contributors are agriculture byproducts, industrial operations, and household chemicals. We know very little about the effects of thousands of these chemicals, let alone about their interactions. Of particular concern are endocrine disruptors. These chemicals come in a wide variety of sources, including pesticides, the breakdown of plastics, fire retardants. Endocrine disruptors interact with the endocrine system that regulates hormones in animals, including humans, causing a wide array of reproductive and developmental effects.
Invasive Species
Plant or animal species introduced to a new area are called non-native, or exotic, and when they rapidly colonize new areas, they are considered invasive. The prevalence of invasive species is correlated with our global trading activities: to more, we move cargo across the oceans, and we ourselves travel overseas, the more we carry back unwanted hitchhikers. From the multitude of plants and animals we bring over, many become invasive. Some can transform our forests (for example, the Asian longhorned beetle), or destroy urban trees that have been cooling our cities in the summer (like the emerald ash borer). The spiny water fleas, zebra mussels, Eurasian water-milfoil, and Asian carp disrupt our freshwater ecosystems, and countless weeds cost us billions in lost agricultural production.
Environmental Justice
While this one is not an environmental issue in itself, environmental justice dictates who feels these issues the most. Environmental justice is concerned with providing everyone, regardless of race, origin, or income, the ability to enjoy a healthy environment. We have a long history of unequal distribution of the burden posed by deteriorating environmental conditions. For a multitude of reasons, some groups are more likely than others to be in close proximity to a waste disposal facility, breathe polluted air, or be living on contaminated soil. In addition, fines levied for environmental law violations tend to be much less severe when the injured party is from minority groups. (source)
Then, hold onto your seats — while people in Yemen, Sudan, most African nations, around the world are struggling just to get clean water and decent food, the nanotechnologists are on the job:
We present the results of our 14th horizon scan of issues we expect to influence biological conservation in the future. From an initial set of 102 topics, our global panel of 30 scientists and practitioners identified 15 issues we consider most urgent for societies worldwide to address. Issues are novel within biological conservation or represent a substantial positive or negative step change at global or regional scales. Issues such as submerged artificial light fisheries and accelerating upper ocean currents could have profound negative impacts on marine or coastal ecosystems. We also identified potentially positive technological advances, including energy production and storage, improved fertilisation methods, and expansion of biodegradable materials. If effectively managed, these technologies could realise future benefits for biological diversity. (source)
We haven’t solved shit concerning all those issues that we faced globally in 1946 onward, but we have these DNA biobatteries in the pipeline:
Many photonic and electronic devices rely on nanotechnology and nanofabrication, but DNA-based approaches have yet to make a significant commercial impact in these fields even though DNA molecules are now well-established as versatile building blocks for nanostructures. As we describe here, DNA molecules can be chemically modified with a wide variety of functional groups enabling nanocargoes to be attached at precisely determined locations. DNA nanostructures can also be used as templates for the growth of inorganic structures. Together, these factors enable the use of DNA nanotechnology for the construction of many novel devices and systems. In this topical review, we discuss four case studies of potential applications in photonics and electronics: carbon nanotube transistors, devices for quantum computing, artificial electromagnetic materials, and enzymatic fuel cells. We conclude by speculating about the barriers to the exploitation of these technologies in real-world settings. (source)
Summer reading while USA-Canada-EU-UK-Five Eyes-Isra-Hell plan for more weaponry. Do not believe for one second these biobatteries are about feeding, clothing, sheltering, educating the world.
Americanos, Anglo Saxons writ large, and the Chlamydians under that Western Perverse Spell in their constant Stockholm Syndrome-Shifting Baseline Disorder
The stench is far and wide when one opens up the crusty eyes on a glorious Sunday AM here in beach city Oregon.
Endless insanity of the Donkey and Elephant putrid politicos, that is for sure, and I never partake in the dirty meth needles the MSM serves up on Sunday talk/new/public affairs (sic/sick) shows (Big Brother in size 2 shoes).
I can saunter over to the New Woke Times, the Common Nightmare site, the CNN news wrapped up fish head headlines, Yahoo or Bing crap tidbits, what have you, and get that Chlamydia smear all over my lips, nose and brain. Takes days to clear up. Just one Sunday morning.
Forget about it. We are in the endless “Stella Hey Stella” mode: Listen to the Americano, or that Cocaine Cowboy Penis Piano Man Zelensky yell to Stella, US, U$A, Isra-Hell, U-Inbred-Kingdom, Klanada, EuroTrashLandia, hell, even Vatican City, “More guns, more Benjamins, more more more, or the world will be without Zelensky.”
Maybe we all coulda been a contender:
Okay, here, tangent number 999:
Man oh man, drink your CocaCola in the morning, kiddos:
The Coca-Cola Co. has picked the town of Webster to build a $650 million fairlife milk production facility. The move is expected to create up to 250 jobs.
The 745,000-square-foot facility will be built on property on Tebor Road and is expected to break ground in the fall, state officials say. The production facility is scheduled to be operational by the end of 2025. (Rochester Beacon)
“Consumer demand for fairlife products is at an all-time high, and a new production facility will allow us to significantly increase capacity and deliver fairlife to even more households across the country,” says Tim Doelman, fairlife CEO. As we continue to grow in the Northeast, Webster’s proximity and access to best-in-class dairy farmers make it an excellent location to support our next phase of growth in the region and beyond.”
The company’s products are made through an ultrafiltered milk process that removes the lactose and much of the sugar and leaves behind more of the protein and calcium. Coca-Cola, a strategic partner in the venture since it was launched, acquired fairlife in 2020.
Again, these Sunday Morning “news” pieces are stipped bare, complete PR spining, amazing ugly lies of the non-journalists coming from non-journalism schools that advertise their bullshit journalism.
Ya see any pushback in the story above on Killer Coke/FairLife(Lie) in Rochester? Nah. No one saying this is corporate welfare, corporate monopoly, corporate crime. Nothing about the dead white cancer causing, addictive shit that they peddle as ultra filtered? All probiotics screened out, and the sugar crap product of those udders on dead and dying cows, fed soy and corn meal and other unnatural elements including roadkill, in their evolutionary line, never will the un-journalists venture in that line of thought, just how deadly that creamy shit is.
Sacred Cows? There are a billion products and services (disservices) the corporate criminals have put on their shelves, with corporate lawyers, with PR spinning Bernays-bred Goebbels-in-Skinny-Jeans and Drag Queen Wigs as the protection racket.
[Photo: More than half (50%) of U.S. milk is produced by 3 percent of dairies. DAVID SILVERMAN/GETTY IMAGES]
Darn, just more Toothless in Wisconsin latency here, on Sunday.
In Wisconsin, several dairy operations are now facing opposition to plans to expand their herds. Porous karst soils in the parts of Wisconsin where a significant portion of dairy expansion is occurring present some unique environmental issues. Run-off from dairy farms and other agricultural activities has seeped into aquifers and elevated levels of nitrogen, in some instances to unsafe concentrations; in one recent case, the Wisconsin Department of Justice levied a $65,000 fine against a dairy operation for contaminating groundwater. (source)
And all that entails — cheese, milk, ice cream, the lot of the shit: I remember this shit while I was working in Spokane and on the board of the Washington Sustainable Farm and Food Network,
In one of the larger cases of manure pollution in recent years, an estimated 15 million gallons of manure, water, and other matter spilled in 2010 into a slough that drains into the Snohomish River in Washington state, when a berm on a dairy farm’s manure lagoon failed.
Here, more of the evidence:
Greater dairy consumption, for instance, may increase levels of insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I), which promotes cell proliferation and has been associated with higher risks for several Greater dairy consumption, for instance, may increase levels of insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I), which promotes cell proliferation and has been associated with higher risks for several types of cancer. Potentially, female sex hormones present in cow’s milk (such as oestrogen and progesterone) may have a role in the increased risk of breast cancer, whilst saturated and trans-fatty acids from dairy products may increase the risk of liver cancer. For the majority of Chinese people who do not produce enough lactase, dairy products may also be broken down into products that affect cancer risk.types of cancer. Potentially, female sex hormones present in cow’s milk (such as oestrogen and progesterone) may have a role in the increased risk of breast cancer, whilst saturated and trans-fatty acids from dairy products may increase the risk of liver cancer. For the majority of Chinese people who do not produce enough lactase, dairy products may also be broken down into products that affect cancer risk.
Dr Maria Kakkoura, Nutritional Epidemiologist at Oxford Population Health, and the first author of the study, said: ‘This was the first major study to investigate the link between dairy products and cancer risk in a Chinese population. Further studies are needed to validate these current findings, establish if these associations are causal, and investigate the potential underlying mechanisms involved’. (source)
Oh shit, more and more lies and Big Brother components coming across my feeds. Gotta get this diatribe out NOW.
[Note: In this collection of sardonic and synergistic diatribes, radical teacher and writer Paul Haeder confronts six decades of America’s great slide into the intellectual muck that is today’s neoliberal morass. In these literary incantations, the iconoclastic Haeder fights against the trappings of a world gone mad while simultaneously contemplating the missed chances of his own life. Collected over a decade of writing for the radical blog Dissident Voice, the wide range of essays vary in stylistics, shifting voices and points of view, but are all underpinned by Paul’s fearlessness. They come crashing together to spark a rarefied bonfire of truth rising from the ashes of propaganda and doublethink. Reimagining Sanity: Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber is a white-water rapid rush, a free-fall into the heart of American darkness. (Paul Haeder Reimagining Sanity)]
Okay, the germ/kernal of my attack on the Chlamydia Capitalists: Australian pigs. Here, you can go down under too, in some of the news feds, and luckily for me, we have over at Dissident Voice, Binoy Kampmark, a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge, and now lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne, on story there, again, just more and more emblematic of Capitalism, and Police State Mentalty, the Power of Badge, Gun Uniform. If you are not disgusted with this, then you need to see a doc doing lobotomies:
The Australian-based Police Accountability Project notes the significant risks that arise from Tasers “when used on vulnerable groups or in particular ways.” By giving police such devices, the likelihood of their use, “rather than negotiation, containment, retreat and de-escalation” increases.
Peter Cotter, NSW Police Force Assistant Commissioner, tried to justify the actions of the officer in question. “At the time [Nowland] was tasered she was approaching the police.” Was it at breakneck speed? No. “It is fair to say at a slow pace.” This dementia-suffering terror was also using a walking frame, bound to strike fear in any law enforcement figure. “But she had a knife,” insisted Cotter, miraculously elevating the level of risk. “I can’t take it any further as to what was going through anyone’s mind when he used the Taser.”
Other details were offered. Two officers, after being called to the address at 4.15 a.m., found Nowland with “a steak knife with a serrated edge that she had obtained from the kitchen area of the nursing home a couple of hours earlier.” Negotiations followed – as if Nowland’s state warranted a lengthy conference with paramedics and the police. She duly “approached the doorway where the police were at that stage, and the officer, the one officer, discharged the Taser.” Nowland fell to the floor. Hit her head. Lost consciousness. “The injury that she suffered as a result of hitting her head on the floor has rendered her bedridden at the moment,” stated Cotter.
Shit-dog, where oh where are the real humans in uniform, in the room? This is a triple layer of appaling. The idea of a steak knife pulled on me, even now, age 66, with a shit load of judo, wrestling, grappling and some fist fighting through my 30s, this is laughable, sick, that hulk beer-drinking cops “down under” wouldn’t even use a modicum of defensive grappling or self-defense. A fucking steak knife? Christ, even the dirty Australians, with their junkets to Israel to learn new subduing and restraining and crowd busiting, they have to have some spine left and just work with this woman who is 95 goddamaned years OLD.
Ahh, so, that is the values system of One Eye Blind in the Five Eyes, Hateful Australia, wanting more nuke subs and war with China. This is it, boys and girls, for 2023. Look at the un-man man, police chief:
[Photo: Wimp, worthless, and I can’t say more or I’ll be accused of sexism and racism: Peter Cotter, NSW Police Force Assistant Commissioner, takes part in a press conference on May 19.]
The facility’s website describes the lodge as a 40-bed aged care facility with private rooms and en-suites, staffed by registered nurses, enrolled nurses and carers.
Thaler said the community want to know why police thought it was necessary to Taser a frail, elderly woman who was known to have dementia and couldn’t possibly have posed a threat.
“There’s simply no excuse for it. But it’s happened. We want to know why and how,” he said.
Now now, the entire West, the Sunday dumbdowning shows, all of this parade of parasites in both parties, in FinTech, in Finance, Real Estate, the billionaires giving BJ’s to Zuckerberg who supposedly got back another $44 billion more in amassed mass murdering money for his hundreds of billions portfolio this year, the entire shit show that is vapid and vacant America and the Vassals Following the American Chlamydian Capitalism, how can anyone ever stomach a second’s worth of worthlessness?
I think that most of us instinctively avoid people with mental illness.
I think in many ways what my films are about is that search for my grandpa’s dentures: for that humanizing narrative that bridges the gap between “us” and “them” to arrive at a “we.”
I’ve been around cops a lot of my life — police beat reporter starting off young, 19, in Tucson for the college daily and the other rags I worked with. I am white, so, most of the fuckers bullshitted with me around misogyny, racism, bigotry, the other anti-human shit.
I’ve been thrown down by cops as a 16 year old long hair on my motorcycle, and I have been arrested, too, protesting wars wars wars, and also thrown around by two pigs in El Paso when I was sheltering patients going into a Planned Parenthood clinic for, no, not abortions, but counseling.
But in Spokane, where I did my gigs from 2001-2011, Otto is his name (I started my own learning and certifications around developmentally and intellectually disabled folk beginning in 2013 — you can read a shit ton of my work tied to social work with homeless, ex-cons, military veteran, foster youth, homeless and drug addicted). Otto sticks with me.
Within 10 seconds after Otto Zehm entered the now infamous Zip Trip, a white-haired police officer brandishing a baton rushed up behind him. Zehm, a developmentally disabled janitor, retreated and was knocked to the floor. He raised a two-liter Diet Pepsi bottle to defend himself from Officer Karl Thompson’s blows. He was tased and hogtied as he struggled on the floor.
“All I wanted was a Snickers!” he shouted. Zehm died two days later in a Spokane hospital.
Spokane police defended Thompson’s actions. They claimed that Zehm “lunged” and “attacked” Thompson that night in March 2006.
The dementia is in those sad sacks of humanity, from Pelosi to Feinstein, from Nuland, Yellen, Kagan, to then Biden, Harris, Jill and Hunter, the lot of them, from AOC (she wants to deplatform Trump, that’s her gig?), to every Tom Dick & Harry in Hollywood:
Worthless, monsters, and they are the enemy.
The “crisis talks” are part of a heavily stage-managed, bipartisan operation, including a manufactured default deadline, to enable “progressive” Democrats to cover for Biden and vote for massive cuts while concealing the corporate interests and imperialist war aims that are being served.
Virtually nothing is said about the sources of the spiraling national debt—including $113 billion in military aid to Ukraine and a record $1 trillion defense budget in 2022, combined with hundreds of billions to rescue failing banks and their wealthy depositors. The lying propaganda surrounding the debt crisis likewise ignores the fact that spending caps imposed by the Obama-Biden administration beginning in 2011 have already sharply cut outlays for essential social needs ranging from health care and education to food stamps, rent and home heating assistance, the environment and occupational health and safety.
Following Tuesday’s White House meeting between Biden and the top leaders from each party in the House and Senate, both sides praised the talks and declared their mutual commitment to avoiding a default and pushing a bipartisan budget deal through Congress before the debt exceeds the current legal limit.
Biden cut short his trip to Asia to attend the G-7 summit in Japan, skipping planned stops in Papua New Guinea and Australia, in order to return to Washington on Sunday. Before departing on Wednesday, he said, “I’m confident that we’ll get the agreement on the budget and America will not default.”
In previous remarks on Republican demands for tougher work requirements for low-income recipients of Medicaid, food stamps and what remains of the federal welfare program (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families—TANF), Biden noted that as a senator during the Clinton administration he had voted for work requirements for welfare and indicated he was open to tightening such requirements for those receiving food stamps. (source)
Ahh, so, then, every fucking blue and yellow Nazi flag I see, Rage, man, RAGE. I spit at:
I have now thrown out some of the old people friends with the bathwater, so to speak, those idiots who yammer and yammer on about the Cocaine Penis Pianist ZioAzovLensky being the next-new David and Winston Churchill. They are more than just vapid, more than followers of the dead, more than Zombified and Disneyfied. They are more than just misdirected fools. They are part of the problem, even those old people I used to associate with in literary circles.
The Dictator Who Is Now In Every Boardroom-Bedroom-Billiards Room, ZioAzovNaziLensky:
On January 24, following several prominent corruption scandals, including two major investigations involving the embezzlement of funds, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced “personnel decisions” across different government ministries and within Ukrainian law enforcement. Zelensky also announced that state officials would be banned from traveling internationally for non-government purposes following a report that a now-former top prosecutor vacationed in Spain despite a martial law that bans Ukrainian men ages 18 to 60 from leaving the country without permission.
A thousand stories, yet the old people I am throwing out with the bathwater, have zero tolerance for anything outside their Stockholm Syndrome lives, outside their dementia chlamydia capitalist LIVES.
Fucking Grammy Awards? Who owns the music business? Come on, a little hummus with that response?
[Photo: Zelensky gives a video address at the 2022 Grammy awards in April.]
Meanwhile in January 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a civil forfeiture complaint—the fourth against him—which alleges that Kholomoisky and Gennadiy Bogolyubov, who owned PrivatBank, one of the largest banks in Ukraine, embezzled and defrauded the bank of $5.5 billion which went missing.
The two allegedly obtained fraudulent loans and lines of credit from 2008 through 2016 and laundered portions of their criminal proceeds using an array of shell companies’ bank accounts, primarily at PrivatBank’s Cyprus branch, before they transferred the funds to the U.S. where they continued to launder them illegally through an associate operating out of offices in Miami.
Churchill and ZioAzovNaziLensky?
Churchill floated “Keep England White” as a campaign slogan for the 1955 election. Perhaps most damning is the recollection of Churchill’s friend, the politician Violet Bonham Carter: when asked his opinion on China in 1954, he reportedly replied, “I hate people with slit eyes and pigtails”.
Churchill’s view that “Indians breed like rabbits” was surely relevant to his decision not to deliver food supplies to Bengal during this famine as a matter of urgency.
From Cuba to India, Sudan to South Africa, Ali provides extended extracts from Churchill’s letters and memoirs to show a consistent enthusiasm for European imperialism and a profound disgust for those he felt should be ruled over.
For instance, when the 22 year old Churchill discovered the mutilated bodies of British soldiers in northwest India (today Pakistan), he denounced the Pashtun perpetrators in his diary as “miserable and brutal creatures” and “pernicious vermin”. There was no reflection on the violence the British army had carried out on the Pashtun or why British rule might be resisted. Churchill is portrayed as the epitome of Rudyard Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” justifying all acts of military cruelty as part of a perceived civilising mission. (source)
When we going to see the book, Ukraine’ Zelensky and His Crimes, Hate of Russians, and Ponzi Schemes from Hell?
It all leads up to me throwing out the old people with the bathwater, because they will not entertain shit when it comes to another view of ZioLensky, or even Jill & Joe & Hunter Go to the Bank!
For example, Hunter was paid $50,0000 a month for five years (approximately $3 million) to serve on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, even though he had no experience or credentials in the energy field and never visited Ukraine for company business during that period.
Hunter’s appointment was allegedly part of a scheme to pressure the Ukrainian government (which at the time was desperately seeking billions in U.S. loans) to shut down an investigation into Burisma’s owner, Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, who was suspected of money laundering, tax evasion, and corruption.
Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani claim that Hunter earned his $50,000 a month from Burisma by having his father—then Barack Obama’s Vice President—tell Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire chief prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was spearheading the investigation into Zlochevsky’s affairs—otherwise the U.S. would not approve the loans.
Did you forget about Hunter the artist after all those cocaine and prostitute masturbation videos some of us got to see from his laptop?
As reported in Artnet, art critic Scott Indrisek, former editor-in-chief of Modern Painters magazine, said that, “Hunter’s paintings … remind me of … art for dermatologists’ waiting rooms.” He also compared the paintings to a screensaver and told the Washington Post, “It’s the most anonymous art I can imagine … somewhere between a screen saver and if you just Googled ‘midcentury abstraction’ and mashed up whatever came up.”
Little wonder that the White House is embarrassed at the prospect of this art sale, since it has provoked allegations that it is just another attempt by Hunter to trade on his father’s name and high public office—as he has been accused of doing in his previous questionable business dealings overseas, which have sparked the current investigation into Hunter’s finances by the Department of Justice.
But Joe Biden won’t try to stop Hunter from selling his paintings.
Instead, he is giving him a green light. Under a special “ethics protocol” worked out between the White House and the Georges Bergès art gallery, there will be no objection to Hunter’s paintings being sold for up to $500,000—as long as all buyers’ identities are kept secret from the public, and presumably from Hunter himself.
This is supposed to protect the government from those who might want to buy access or special treatment. But it will do exactly the opposite. Since the buyers will be anonymous, “you won’t be able to follow the money,” as pointed out by The Art Newspaper.
The problem that underpins most other problems in modern times is that human minds are highly hackable, and that the science of hacking them at mass scale has been advancing since Bernays over a century ago. This is what keeps people consenting to the destructive and exploitative agendas of the powerful against their own interests.
The question is, Will you stand by and watch a 95-year-old frail woman get assaulted by goons in uniforms?
Right before I moved to that pathetic city, Seattle:
A suicidal young woman plunged from a Seattle bridge after being urged to “jump, bitch” by angry commuters.
The drivers who jeered and taunted the woman had been caught in a traffic jam as police closed lanes and tried to talk her to safety.
Yesterday the woman was in a serious condition in hospital with a spinal fracture and chest and abdominal injuries after her 150ft fall into a canal.
The police were dismayed by the behaviour of drivers. “They were swearing at her and telling her to jump,” a spokesman, Clem Benton, said yesterday. “It’s not something that has happened before in my experience.”
He said the taunts included obscenities which he did not want to repeat. “Obviously when you have an individual in some type of crisis, yelling for her to jump is very insensitive to a person’s life.”
The woman, 28, who works as a political lobbyist in Olympia, Washington, had stopped her car on the Ship Canal Bridge in Seattle early on Tuesday morning in a distressed state. She climbed on to the edge of the bridge, where she sat down. Rush-hour traffic was halted for three hours as police attempted to talk her down and tried to contact her boyfriend.
Finally, after jeers from the delayed commuters, she stood up for the first time and jumped into the canal. She emerged from the water feet first and was rescued by police divers. She was taken to hospital where she was initially described as critical.
There have been 10 previous suicide attempts from the bridge since 1966.
“We were amazed that she jumped,” Lieutenant Richard Schweitzer told the Seattle Times. “It’s unusual for people to spend that much time talking to negotiators before leaping.”
Yesterday her boyfriend’s family issued a statement saying that “she is a wonderful woman. Please keep her in your thoughts and prayers.” Police said it was unlikely that she would face charges.
The action of the commuters is in contrast to Seattle’s image as an easy-going and broad-minded city. With its wealth from the industries of Boeing and Microsoft, it frequently tops surveys in money magazines of the most desirable places to live.
this memoir is a personal journey of love for a strong mother … to the land of the rising sun … and a new pathway out of conscientious objector status
Every war is a war against children.
–Egalntyne Jebb, founder Save the Children a century ago.
These introductions to people I have, that is, keyholing into their lives, immersing into their dreams and sharing their gifts of living, learning their avocations, and then welding connections to my own life with theirs have happened this way many times over the course of decades:
“I found your website through something of a circuitous route. I first listened to a Courage to Resist podcast interview with Dan Shea and got interested in his story and background. A Google search took me to your interview with him for LA Progressive. From your bio, I did another search and first found some of your Dissident Voice stories and finally landed on your website, where I spent the next few hours.
I especially got caught up in the “Autobiography Through Many Lenses” page. The very mention of Henry Miller, napalm, Mark Twain (on autobiography being the truest of all books), ancestors from Ireland, and good God Malcolm Lowry (truly one of my favorites!) was enough to make me want to pore through everything of yours I could find.”
So it goes, and then the book comes to me as a PDF and then a hard copy.
So, we’ll see if the good lord’s willin’ on this review, if I get something right, and do not immerse it all in my POV: “If the good Lord’s willing and the creek stays down I’ll be in your arms time the moon come around.” (Johnny Cash)
The linchpin for me is his refusal to go to THAT war, and some of his narrative, the memoir, deals specifically with those times. He also went from American, Western American, to Japanese. THAT war (sic): During the Vietnam War more than 170,000 men were officially recognized as conscientious objectors. Thousands of other young men resisted by burning their draft cards, serving jail sentences or leaving the country.
THAT war: United States’ military involvement in the Vietnam War began in February 1961 and lasted until May 1975. Approximately 2.7 million American men and women served in Vietnam. During the war, more than 58,000 servicemen and women lost their lives.
“One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.”
―Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water
“I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind-of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough) any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware even that they are deceiving one another.”
— Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human
Family for Robert Norris is everything, and he starts spinning tales about his grandfather Frederick, born in Union County, Pennsylvania. He moved around, from Minnesota to North Dakota and then to White Salmon, WA, and that’s where Robert’s mother grew up, with the history of the Columbia River, Celilo Falls before the river was dammed up, coursing through her DNA.
Interestingly, his mother Kay talked to Norris about Kyoko Nakagawa, a Japanese-American girl who was her best friend until World War II broke out and the Nakagawa family was shipped to an internment camps.
“I was in high school at that time and remember well the events of that day and the days and months that followed. There were so many things I didn’t learn about until many years later. One of my very best friends in high school was Kyoko and we spent many lunch hours together gigglin’ and talkin’ about our futures. We’d usually exchange sandwiches because mine were on homemade bread and hers were on the store bread put out by Wonder Bakeries. We thought we were being so sneaky and clever to exchange our sandwiches. How young and naive we both were. I think when I was a junior in high school, I went to school one mornin’ and couldn’t find Kyoko. I didn’t know what happened to her. I was very hurt to think she left and didn’t say goodbye.
“I thought all her family were so nice. They had a home on the river and I remember I got permission to walk down there to see if she was sick and there was nobody home. Everything was gone. I found out a long time later that she and her family had been transported to an internment camp for Japanese in Idaho. I did try very hard and seriously to track her down and finally did only to find out that she died in childbirth just after her family was released from the camp after the war. I felt very sad for a long time after that.”
This man, Robert Norris, with his deep regard for the family, especially for his strong and adventuresome father, ended up deep in Japanese culture in the 1980s, becoming a language teacher, and then marrying a Japanese woman. He’s called Japan his home for more than 40 years.
He’s there now, in Japan, writing me emails, and his life now is slow, he says, with old age and some medical issues from the past catching up to him now.
I can hear those metal bars slamming: The date the cell doors slammed on him was in September, 1970:
“A military policeman places handcuffs around my wrist and leads me to a patrol car waiting to take me to the base prison. Jerry and Midge Kelly follow me to the patrol car.
I force a smile and say, ‘It could have been worse.’
Jerry shakes my had. Midge says, ‘You were very brace on the stand. I was proud of you. Make sure you write us.’
I get into the patrol car. A cloud of dust rises behind the car as it lurches toward the prison. I crane my neck for a final look and see Jerry and Midge grow smaller through a brown haze until they’re tiny specks in the distance.”
My name is Robert W. Norris. I’m a Pacific Northwest native, Vietnam War conscientious objector, and longtime expat resident of Japan. I’m one of those guys who took that 1960s jingoistic catchphrase “America, love it or leave it” seriously and ended up in Japan back in 1983.
[…]
From there it was on to the video interview with David Rovics. Imagine my surprise when I heard you mention that you and your sister had inherited some land near White Salmon, Washington. I mean, my mother grew up there and graduated from Columbia High School in 1943! Small world, indeed.
So that brings me to the reason I’m writing to you. My life story and tribute to my mother was published in January by Tin Gate, a U.K. hybrid publisher of memoirs, travel books, and biographies. I hope I’m not being presumptuous in thinking you might be interested in looking at it with an eye toward a possible review, or perhaps passing it along to others who might be interested in whatever happened to some of us old-timers who told the military to fuck off way back when. The following summary is from the book’s back cover.
“‘The Good Lord Willing and the Creek Don’t Rise: Pentimento Memories of Mom and Me’ traces the trials, tribulations, and unbreakable bond of two Pacific Northwest characters. Kay Schlinkman grows up on the banks of the Columbia River in the 1930s and 1940s. She overcomes a small logging town’s ostracism in the late 1950s for her divorce, excommunication by the Catholic Church for remarrying, severe criticism and rejection for defending her son’s refusal to go to war, and the burden of paying off her second husband’s gambling debts. She takes night classes to become qualified as a legal secretary in her fifties and continues to work until she’s seventy-eight.
“Robert Norris goes to military prison as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, embraces the counterculture upon release, wanders the world in search of his identity, and eventually lands in Japan, where he finds his niche as a university professor, spends two years as the dean of students, and retires as a professor emeritus. Despite their separation by the expanse of the Pacific Ocean, Robert and Kay maintain a lifelong commitment of love, respect, and support that enriches both their lives. This story provides a heart-warming example of how far a mother and son can go in maintaining their bond against all odds. A must read for all mothers and sons, and for those who’ve wondered what the road less traveled would’ve been like had they taken that first step.”
—Robert Whiting, author of “Tokyo Underworld” and “You Gotta Have Wa,” wrote,
“A most impressive achievement by a highly talented writer…an emotionally powerful memoir that spans nearly a century and several continents. Riveting and rich in detail with passages that evoke Hemingway and Maugham, it draws you in and doesn’t let up. For Japanophiles, the sections on life in Osaka and Kyushu offer important lessons on cultural assimilation. You come away from this book with gratitude to the author for having written it and respect for a life well lived.”
—Michael Uhl, author of “Vietnam Awakening” and “The War I Survived was Vietnam,” wrote,
“A bumpy, coming-of-age tale set in the logging country of the Pacific Northwest, dosed with a mother’s love, transforms an alienated young man into an expat and ultimately an emeritus professor in Japan. Robert W. Norris crafts the stages of this extraordinary journey—punctuated with a turn as a Vietnam War resister—in a narrative style that is both graceful and seamless.”
His book, the stories, the backdrops, all the encounters with his mom, before getting into the military hell we all hope those like Robert never have to get into, and those were the draft days, and, alas, he joined the US Air Force. Not going to college and living and working in Humbolt County, he was sure he’d be drafted and end up in Vietnam and dead, or dying.
The Air Force or Navy were options for he and his buddies, Troy and Shannon, sign up for the bombing brigade, the dirty Air Force. He made the Arcata all-county basketball team, but the boy Norris was depressed, disinterested.
Here, another salvo from Robert to me after I tsunamied him with emails a yard or so long.
Paul,
Thanks so much for such a quick and great reply and all the links! Wow, I now have my reading set for the next few days. I’ve already gone over a couple of the Finding Fringe stories (great stuff) and the attached interview with Emily Green. Interesting that you mentioned the documentary “Sir, No Sir.” While working on the initial draft of my book, I queried the director David Zeiger and he kindly provided a nice blurb.
I’ll write a better letter later, but I wanted to send you the PDF first and ask for a phone number. Neither Amazon nor IngramSpark will allow me to order an author copy if I don’t have a phone number to provide the shipping company in case they need to contact the recipient of the package. Amazon allows P.O. Box numbers it seems, but IngramSpark doesn’t; they require a street address. Also, this PDF is large at 23 MB (there are about 20 pages of pictures), but most of the email addresses I’ve sent it to have handled it OK.
Thanks, too, for agreeing to read the book and for the offer of doing an interview. I really appreciate it. I’ll check out Cirque’s site and see if I can come up with an idea or two to pitch to them. I’ve had a little bit of success in having excerpts put up on a couple of Boomer sites, with another excerpt (from an earlier novel) to be published around Easter in Psychedelic Press (a U.K. journal dealing in research about the history, culture, philosophy, and science of psychedelics and other drugs) and yet another in the summer peace issue of BeZine, a literary rag out of Israel focusing on peace and spirituality.
OK, so here’s the PDF. I’m also enclosing a cover pic. I think you’ll agree my mom was pretty good-looking! Looking forward to getting a phone number (and street dress if that’s OK) so I can order an author paperback copy to send. I’m about to dig into the link on the Japanese poets writing about Fukushima.
Warm regards,
Robert
Ahh, that military life, short-lived, but here, in living color from the memoir:
While the majority of airmen return home on leave and report to other bases for their technical training after basic training, the others chosen to be military police (the most despicable and lowest career field in the Air Force) and I have to remain at Lackland for ten more weeks of specialized training. The hand of irony has played a cruel trick. Country bumpkin that I am, I’ve joined the Air Force thinking I’ll never have to carry a weapon, but now I’m to be trained in the art of combat and the use of deadly weapons. I know I can never kill another human being. It’s always been and still is an abstraction. Besides, I lack the courage even to use my fists to defend myself. The very thought of violence makes me sick to my stomach. I pass through the training without incident. But during those days of martial arts training; war games; kitchen labor called K.P.; stripping, cleaning, loading, firing, and handling of M-16 rifles, .38 pistols, hand grenades, bayonets, and knives; the classes on crowd dispersal, first aid, attack upon and retreat from an enemy, arrest and seizure, drugs, communism, terrorist activities, patriotism, military police history; and the propaganda the instructors use to inculcate the soldiers into submission and obedience, there grows within my heart an inchoate attitude of rebelliousness. It lies dormant, simmering below the surface, waiting silently for the right moment to emerge from its hiding.
For a while, however, the Air Force succeeds in brainwashing me. One image sticks in my head: a drill instructor during a training session in the use of a truncheon screaming at me in front of a gymnasium full of military police trainees. “Goddamn it, Norris! You dumb shit! You’ve got a left-handed stick! I told you to get a fucking right-handed stick. Now get your ass over to that pile and bring me a right-handed stick!”
“Yes sir,” I bark, turning redder each time I return to him with another “left-handed stick.” Finally, it dawns on me that all the sticks are the same. A wave of shame passes through me. For the rest of the military police training, the drill instructors call me Left-Handed Stick.
But the Air Force Base in Yuba City is not cloistered from the world:
During this time, I’m thinking about Vietnam and having a gut feeling that the war is wrong. Although we’re not allowed to take anything other than our guns and military equipment on The Good Lord Willing and the Creek Don’t Rise 116 the line, I smuggle a portable radio and earphones and listen to the lyrics of popular songs instead of just the melodies—songs by Bob Dylan, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and all the others protesting the war. I’m also reading the underground newspapers that are finding their way on base and contain antiwar, anti-government stories about the My Lai atrocity, the shooting of Ralph Bunch at the Presidio, and the hysteria running rampant on American college campuses. All the little irritating items of military brainwashing and propaganda gradually build up inside of me. Things I’ve taken for granted before now make me bristle. There’s the time three of us guards are called before the squadron sergeant after roll call, and he reads us our rights and charges each of us with defecation on duty. “What’s defecation, Sarge?” I ask. “It’s taking a shit inside the marked line you are NOT supposed to enter, only guard, and you know that only the flight crew are allowed inside that line, and last night one of you smartasses took a FUCKING SHIT inside that line and right under the cockpit—that’s what DEFECATION means!” the sergeant screams. “You’ve got to be shittin’ me,” I say. The sergeant doesn’t think my remark is funny. There on the table as exhibit A for the prosecution is the big, black turd, hard as a rock, found the day before under the cockpit of the bomber I walked around for half my shift before changing to another place to guard. They’re actually planning to court-martial one of the three of us who was stationed on that post during the night and use the turd as evidence. It’s the final straw in realizing that military life isn’t for me. From that day on, I can’t keep my mouth shut in pointing out the inconsistencies and lies whenever I spot them. I miss haircuts and am constantly reprimanded for my shoddy appearance during inspections. I lose days off and am forced to undergo crowd control practice in case we’re called upon, like the National Guard, to break up a civilian demonstration. I know my sympathies would be with the demonstrators. I begin to think that if there really is an enemy, it’s the military. If the situation ever really comes up, I’ll cast aside my weapons and join the other side.
My order to fight in Southeast Asia comes through. I’m given thirty days leave before having to report first to a base in Texas for a month of intensive war training and later to a base in northern Thailand near the Cambodian border. This happens shortly after Nixon escalates the war into Cambodia, where B-52 bombers are now dropping tons of napalm. When I leave Beale Air Base for the start of my thirty-day leave, I know I’ll never make it to Texas.
He gets out of spending five years total in prison, and after six months, when he’s out, his only constant was his “mom’s complete and unconditional love and support.” He of course was dazed and confused, and he ends up on this journey of kicking around, mixing with counterculture, blue collar work, slaving in mills, hitchhiking, then to New York and following a one-way flight to Luxembourg, leaving behind the country of his birth, “the country I no longer felt a part of, venturing forth with no itinerary, just the hand of fate to guide me.”
He does the hippie trail through Europe, ending up in places he only dreamed of as a baseball-playing kid in Humbolt County, California. Paris, Spain, Greece.
The journey had given me an answer to what I’d been seeking since my court martial. The single sentence [ “I don’t feel I’m mentally or physically capable of killing another human being”] I uttered in response to my order to fight in the Vietnam War had saved four and a half years of my life and instilled in me an inchoate awareness of the power of language. The experiences in Europe had now reinforced that awareness and stimulated a need to express myself. I now had a purpose. I’d try to become a writer. I’d learn the craft. Through the writing, I’d rid myself of the confusion and derangement that clung to me so tightly.
Ahh, so the communication is back and forth, between me in Oregon, with some land in White Salmon I mention — his mother’s stomping grounds and Robert’s as well, as sort of an unusual glue — and he in Japan. Another long one from me, to him, and here is his measured and kind response, and I won’t fill in all the contextual asides:
Hey Paul,
Hope you’re doing OK. I’ve spent parts of the last few days going through some of the links you sent, as well as following down the rabbit holes of other links on those pages. Some fascinating stuff to read, a welcome change from the corporate drivel that comprises the majority of English reading material available in Japan.
Among the things that really grabbed my attention this time were your review of the documentary “The People vs Agent Orange,” the related article “A Spray by any Other Name: Agent Orange or Clear-cut Agent?” “Wrestling the Blind, Chasing Apache Horses, and Unpacking the Vietnam War,” and your interview with David James Duncan. As you wrote in one of those articles, “I easily segue from one massive war crime after massive war crime — the American War Against Vietnam — to a small rural county in Oregon,” I too often connect what on the surface seems to be a completely unrelated thing or idea to another. As a reader, I like to read that kind of style. As a writer, I think it conveys an uninterrupted and natural flow. Maybe I just took too many hallucinogens in my youth! Anyway, here are some thoughts.
You may have mentioned him only once or twice, but I constantly had Henry Miller on my mind while reading your articles. So much so that I dusted off the cover of his The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (which had been sitting untouched on my bookshelf for a good 25 years) and started reading it again with great pleasure. It’s amazing how so little has changed in the U.S. since he wrote that book back in 1940 and ’41. In the midst of ranting about how fucked up and doomed America is/was, he still, like a magician, pulls out a gem of a phrase on almost every page that makes the reader practically double over with laughter. I once worked as a cook for a restaurant owner who had lived in Big Sur in the 1950s, ran a kind of trading post, and would barter with Miller, who was always broke, and would end up giving him bags of groceries for rough draft manuscripts of whatever Miller had pounded out on his typewriter that day. This dude was Irish-American, in his 60s at the time, had a plump and red nose from too much booze, and told great tales that got better with each embellishment. I first met him when I was down to my last $20 and drinking a beer at his bar. When I told him The Colossus of Maroussi was my favorite Miller book, he hired me on the spot. I ended up working for him for about a year and a half. He taught me everything he knew about cooking, a skill that became my main source of income for the next five years as I wandered throughout much of the U.S.
Next up, that documentary “The People vs Agent Orange.” To tell the truth, I hadn’t thought much about Agent Orange for years, not since the use of depleted uranium “bunker busters” in Iraq and the resulting cancers, birth defects, etc. among Iraqi children in the ensuing years. Since about 2005, however, it seems someone I knew well or from a distance has died almost every year from some Agent Orange-connected cancer. Occasionally, I’ve wondered if I’d’ve died myself by now if I’d followed my order to fight in the war. In a sense, military prison saved my life. My job had been guarding B-52 bombers and I know I would’ve been one of the airmen who had to spray the perimeters of Southeast Asian bases with that poison to keep the jungle from encroaching on and overgrowing the fence lines.
I was in other parts of the States when the spraying of Oregon forests began. I was in southern Humboldt County (working for that Irish-American) in 1977-78, but the only helicopters flying above the forests then were the ones doing surveillance on the marijuana farmers. They didn’t spray anything; they merely landed on the property and sometimes busted the larger farms, that is, until the farmers starting shooting at them.
The fact that much of the documentary took place so close to where I grew up intrigued me greatly. After reading your review, I had to watch it. It wasn’t easy, but I managed to get my hands on a copy. My wife and I watched it a couple of nights ago. Jesus! What a gut punch! Like so many, my wife was aware of what Agent Orange was and the horrible damage it had done (still does) in Vietnam, but she thought its use was limited to that part of the world and that time. Wrong!
This is indeed an international problem, right up there with the Fukushima disaster (by the way, those poems in that book were quite powerful, too). Even though the Independent Lens program was sponsored by and shown on PBS, the only place I could find that had it available was for Amazon Prime customers. Why is it so limited in availability? Is PBS also intimidated by the corporate power wielders and so won’t distribute it widely? It should be required viewing (and actively discussed) in classrooms worldwide.
I finally resorted to using a VPN and accessing a couple of pirate sites. Even among those sites, it seemed a dead end. Just as I was about to give up, however, I found one place that actually had a pretty good quality file that I was able to download. I plan to make a few DVD copies and distribute them among a couple of academics I’m still in touch with. Being retired seven years now and having not kept up any correspondence with most of my former colleagues since the pandemic started, I don’t have many contacts anymore, but still this is information that needs to have a wider audience. It was sad to learn that the French court threw out Tran To Nga’s lawsuit.
You kicked off the “Wrestling the Blind” story with Robert Bly asking you when you first saw yourself as strong as or stronger than your old man. The complicated relationship I had with my dad was in my thoughts the whole time I was engaged with the story (which is a beautiful one, by the way). My dad was a World War II hero who piloted a P-38 in over 70 combat missions out of England. How he survived was a miracle. After the war, he and his brother and dad started a lumber mill and redwood logging business in Humboldt County. For the next 25 years, he was heavily involved in the American Legion (and helping to destroy almost all the old growth redwoods!). Although not political by nature, he followed his family’s guidance and always voted Republican and hung out mainly with other loggers and John Birch Society types. I had an idyllic childhood in the redwoods and spent most of my time fishing, playing baseball, and doing all the things country boys love to do. Until my parents divorce put an end to all that. The script was set. I was destined to rebel against whatever he had hoped for my life. When I became a conscientious objector (from within the military, to boot) to the Vietnam debacle, my actions, thoughts, and appearance all constituted an affront to everything he’d considered sacred in life. Of course, all this stuff takes up a good portion of the first half of my book, but that story of your trip in the desert with your dad was almost like looking into a mirror of my relationship with my dad. Particularly the parts about how you two bonded over wrestling. In my case, we bonded over basketball, or I should say he was proud of my skills (I made the all-county team my senior year) and even though we could never get on the same page about political shit, we could always communicate meaningfully about sports.
Another one: by the time I hit 15, my dad didn’t know me, either. I still had a couple of years to go before my hair hit shoulder length, but some of my buddies were growing their hair out at that age and Dad’s comments were always about how they were turning into girls and sissies, the inference being he didn’t want to see me with long hair. Like you, I didn’t consider until way too many years too late that my dad’s reluctance to talk about his war experiences might’ve been his version of PTSD. And the first time I really noticed his vulnerability was on a rare trip home from Japan (escorting some Japanese students on an American homestay program). His hairline had receded greatly (he was in his 70s by then), his eyes appeared softer and kind of milky, and his handshake had become weak. You wanna hear something ironic? He died at the age of 89 on June 6th, D-Day, the one day of the year (in his 30s and 40s) when he’d actually mention casually that he’d flown with the invasion of Normandy and also a few days later with an escort squadron flying cover as Churchill crossed the English Channel.
I admired the way you ended that story — “Bly was right. The moment the war lifted from my heart, I saw my old man. Just a guy waiting for daylight, waiting for fish.”
Lastly, it was great to read your interview with David James Duncan. That was done quite a long time ago (2008). To me, your questions had a bit of a provocative ring to them, as if you were demanding definitive answers to complex questions about life, activism, and the future of our planet and humankind’s place on it. DJD sounded like someone on the verge of Buddha-hood (or maybe a character out of a Hermann Hesse novel), what with his calm acceptance of everything and the insanity surrounding him. The image I got reminded me of that cartoon showing a searcher of the truth struggling to scale a mountain to find the Buddha and finally at the summit sees him and gasps, “Oh Great One, please tell me, what is the answer to mankind’s struggle to find meaning in life?” The Buddha peers down at him, points a finger at the opposite direction, and replies, “My friend, you’ve climbed the wrong mountain. The Buddha you seek is over there on that other mountain.”
Do I have a weird interpretation of what I see and read, or what? Anyway, here are a few DJD quotes from that interview that made me smile.
“There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that cultures decay, and that life’s end is death.”
“Mother Teresa spoke with the heart of a wild salmon when she said, ‘God doesn’t ask us to win. He only asks us to try.’ I’m in the business of trying. I leave the scorecard to the Scorekeeper.”
“When small things are done with great love, it is not a flawed you or me who does them: it’s just love. I have no faith in any kind of political party, left, right, or centrist. I have boundless faith in love. The only spiritually responsible way I know to be a citizen, artist, or activist in times like ours is by doing a daily and nightly, faith-driven skein of small things, each of them done with all the love I can muster.”
“I trust my hands more than my mind. My hands are enlivened by my lungs and heartbeat and by the Earth and by Spirit directly. Only indirectly are they guided by the mind. My aging hands have done so much cool stuff it staggers my mind.”
“He (Cesar Chavez) didn’t demonize those who caused this suffering. His life of love and service is the opposite of a World Bank project or a papal decree or a government program. It was grass roots love. Love from the ground up, not the top down. Love with the mud of the fields all over it.”
Duncan’s novel The Brothers K is one of my all-time favorites. It has many parallels with family and other people in my life, as well as my own experiences — Seventh Day Adventist parent, conscientious objection to the Vietnam War, baseball, a father who was a logger, siblings who traveled entirely different life roads, and the town of Camas (which is on the Columbia River, not that far from White Salmon, Washington, where my mother grew up), and much more. When I finish The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, that’s the next book I plan to reread.
So, all in all, thank you Paul for giving me much to think about and providing a bit of literary enjoyment to balance out all the other shit that’s happening around us. If you’ve actually read this far, thanks for that, too. You take care, OK?
Robert
I think Robert knows that this review of his work will not be some bullshit LA Times crap or Kirkus reviews milquetoast. The memoir is his life, his concerted effort to get from pre-birth to now, in Japan, and then finding meaning in a journey which is always galvanized by his love of and interest in his mother’s life, who was still in the USA while Robert made his way to Japan, doing part-time work as an English Teacher, and then eventually language school fulltime work, and then teaching for a college, a deanship, getting an advanced degree and becoming now retired, emeritus.
Ahh, as a battler and endless communicator and ranting fool, I hit Robert with another email, and here, again, his thoughtful response:
Hi Paul,
Thanks for letting me know the book arrived in one piece, and thanks for all the recent links. My aging body and mind don’t move very quickly these days, so I’ve taken my time in checking out some of your media recommendations. At this stage of the game, I don’t want to burden myself with information overload. I’m afraid Japan’s stick-its-head-in-the-sand approach to the world has rubbed off a bit on me. 🙂
What I have read has given me a better indication of why most of my American friends, contacts, and relatives (not that many left in all three categories) seem so frustrated and filled with rage these days. Much of that, it seems to me, comes from a deep disappointment in “the system” and a feeling of having been deceived by everything they’d been inculcated into believing was sacred — American exceptionalism, the so-called American Dream, the righteousness of capitalism, the sanctity of Christianity, the worship of Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, and Babe Ruth, and on and on. Everything, in fact, that Mark Twain and Henry Miller spat on in their different times.
Granted, on this side of the pond there has also been a rapid increase in violence, murders, alcoholism, suicide, and depression in the last few years, but it’s nothing to compare with the States. I still feel relatively safe whenever I leave the house. Of course, that might be different if I were living in Tokyo or Osaka, but here in Kyushu things are relatively calm. Okinawa, Taiwan, and all the potential for the start of World War III are not that far away and in the back of people’s minds, but for the most part people don’t talk about it much. It’s the ol’ “see no evil” approach (until it affects someone directly, that is).
One thing that caught my attention while reading your own and other recommended stuff is the issue of “sensitivity editors/readers” and the related issue of book banning in Florida and other red states. I’d seen a little bit about this here and there over the past couple of years, but nothing in detail. Your substack article sent me on a search and I was amazed at what a big issue this is becoming. The danger here is the tendency for this kind of thing to catch fire with all sides on the political spectrum. Again, I refer to Henry Miller and his reasons for leaving the States to live abroad in the 1930s, George Carlin’s later rants on the idiocies of American culture and political thought, and Groucho Marx’s quote on group behavior: “I’d never want to be a member of a group that would have me as a member. They must be crazy.” Or something along those lines. If nothing else, that about sums up my philosophy of shying away from any religious or political affiliation. Somehow, I’ve managed to make it this far in life without relying too much on group-think or support. I plan to do my best to continue forward (limping, of course, and assisted by my trusty cane) in the same manner. Of course, I’ll always listen to and think about what others believe and rationalize about their own behavior, but I’m not going to be signing up for their activities anytime soon.
You mentioned earlier that you’d like to do a Zoom chat. Sure thing. I can’t promise any usable quotes (the ol’ noodle seems to switch on and off these days at a pace I can’t control — somewhat like a pitcher who has control of his pitches one day and can’t find the strike zone the next day). Probably more than trying to share political philosophies, I think it’d be more fun to simply share stories from the different places and eras we’ve experienced and survived. I’ve got a few things to take care of over the next couple weeks (e.g., I have to try to change internet providers as my current website has no security certificate and is deemed “not secure” — not that a lot of people drop by, but the browser warning probably scares off 90 percent of those few curious visitors), but any time after that would be fine. There’s a 16- or 17-hour time difference, so we’d have to take that into consideration.
Take care, Paul. Try to get some rest from time to time. We ain’t spring chickens anymore. I’m amazed at how you can keep up such a rigorous writing pace. That’s all for now.
I sent Robert a long list of open ended questions, and we’ll see how he receives them. The interesting part of the book is Robert’s second trip there heading to Iran (Turkey) and Afghanistan, and he ended up in India, too. His so-called around the world walkabout and flowing love of learning about people, keeping an open mind, asking questions, and shutting up to hear others’ biographies.
Here, a slice from Robert’s journey, when he is about to head back to the USA:
I usually visited Rolf in the evenings. We’d prepare a dinner of rice with raisins and lamb meat, then retire to the top of the bus to smoke some hashish, watch the stars, and discuss life. One night, I told him about my journey from Paris to Afghanistan and the various adventures I’d had.
“So what have all these experiences taught you? You seem to me to be more of an observer of men than an active participant in their affairs,” Rolf said.
“I suppose you’re right about that,” I said. “The one political stand I made landed me in jail and I’ve spent a good portion of my life since then trying to rationalize what I did. This journey I’ve taken has carried me halfway around the world in search of something I can’t put a name on. I know I don’t care much for capitalism. I have an attraction for some form of socialism, but I can’t commit myself to what I don’t understand. Idealistically, it seems the best answer to man’s inability to live together peacefully, but socialism, too, has a history of violence and upheaval. It’s all pretty hard to figure out. What do you think?”
Rolf considered my question for a moment, scratched his head, then said, “Socialism, communism, Marxism, all these ‘isms’ have no soul. They’re connected only in terms of class struggle and a fight for equality in the production and consumption of material goods. In that sense, they’re not so different from capitalism. What about the spiritual struggle? Islamic Marxism? It’s a joke! It’s just another form of cultural imperialism that would force people to conform to a standardized way of thinking and behaving. “Democracy, individual freedom, human rights? Also a bunch of rubbish that can never be inflicted upon impoverished nations and peoples. What do uneducated peoples know about such things? They think only about where the next meal comes from. It doesn’t matter what form of government they live under. It seems to me, there’s only one reality and that’s mankind’s inability to organize itself. I think we have to accept man’s weaknesses, his greed, his stupidity. And love him for it all. No one can possibly know what the answers to life are until after we die. It’s like the preacher said, ‘All is vanity and a striving after wind.’
“You can’t save the world alone or through any ideology or ‘ism.’ That’s the only truth I know. Oh sure, you can chase after a spiritual path. Become a Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist if you must. But you won’t find any answers there, either. I’ve tried. The world’s religions are just a bunch of exclusivist groups, too. Stick with science, knowledge, the art of survival. Study languages, communicate, make life interesting for yourself, that’s what I try to do. Here, go on, have another hit off the pipe. Concentrate on the moment, look at the stars, appreciate what is here and now. If you’re meant to find any answers, they’ll come to you in due time.”
What prescient and profound advice for the beaten-down young man, Robert, a babe in the woods who was put through the ringer by the military and the judicial forces. I have a feeling these words from Rolf, whether they are sort of silly to me, are deeply embedded in his consciousness.
After the second trip through Europe and Asia, he ended up working in the USA, cooking, even on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. All of that in condensed form is covered in the book.
While memoir is an amazing form, not a pure autobiography, that is, more of an enlightened journey, a walkabout, a talk with the writer’s own ego and intellect and self/muse, Robert attempts to reconstruct those days, those moments, the dialogue, his thoughts, other’s thoughts. We are with him, and in many cases it feels like a journalistic recalling of events. Again, this man coveres his great grandfather, the journeys there in the Norris Family, Pennsylvannia Dutch, and into the New America, the tough life of hard work and his mother’s own emancipation from a sexist and closed world for women to venture into male territory.
This is not anti-memoir, for sure, and this search for his identity throughout his life is compelling, and this piece, this big tome is surely a Mother’s Day gift, an act of love, a tribute to his mother’s deep cut into his life. Her imprint on him and his words. This woman vaulted above the strictures of American, Lutheran, Catholic, misogyny.
Here, a quick look at anti-memoir: from Yiyun Li, author of Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life
A memoirist is always trying to connect with the reader and to make sure that the reader reads the memoir – reads the subject of the memoir, that is, the author – in the right way, on the writer’s terms. That’s what makes me hesitate to want to write a memoir or to call what I have written a memoir. I think if a writer does not set out to challenge herself in her work, her foundation is a little off.
Is that what you mean when you say, ‘One cannot be an adept writer of one’s life’? Because you’d have to start by admitting that there is no such thing as a consistent and stable ‘I’?
That’s a crucial point – if you write without questioning your own life, without questioning your ‘I’, the book that you write is not going to be one we can trust. But if you write while questioning yourself – constantly questioning that ‘I’ – that book will reflect many of the conflicts you experience. That makes it a very messy tale, much messier than a memoir with a neat arc. But, you see, you can’t pretend your life is a ‘neat’ story or even a ‘good’ story – life isn’t a good story. If you try to make it into one, you are simplifying too many things. (source)
You as the reader will get stepping stones, big lily pads from which to travel with Robert on his life, the ups and downs, sweeping thoughts, focused intrigue, all the trials and tribulations, and his own life in Japan, the struggle there, language and culture crashing like an earthquake basalt tipping over.
He comes to love a woman, her family, the home that is Japan, and his mother comes to Japan and becomes both enamored of and engaged in the language, learning, an open hand to understanding her own life throught the lens of where her son embarked, disembarked and then set down roots.
Robert’s stand against fighting, against killing, against using a weapon was remarkable in his time or in fact during any time in history:
When Harold Bing was in Winchester Prison, there was one wing for male criminal prisoners, one for women and two for conscientious objectors. The conditions for COs were exactly the same as those for criminal prisoners, but COs did succeed in getting prisons to offer a vegetarian diet. Vegetarianism was common among COs, as it had an obvious affinity, particularly with humanitarian pacifism. CO prisoners were allowed a very limited number of censored letters, though one of the COs interviewed by IWM said ‘filling the notepaper was quite an art’ because there was nothing to say after months or years in prison. They had no calendars, no newspapers, and few visits – those visits they did receive were through a grille. They were limited to a few books from the prison library at infrequent intervals, but after a while COs were allowed to have books sent in under the condition that they donate them to the prison library once finished with them. Later CO prisoners were impressed to find prison libraries stocked with titles by William Morris, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and other writers of the left. Here, Bing recalls the constrained and degrading conditions of prison life. (source)
It might not be difficult for Robert living in Japan, a culture before he showed up that has been militaristic to the max, imperial to the max, and now, the country is building up military once again, another flavor of the Nazism of Ukraine and UK and USA, and alas, they, Japanese, do not all agree, but it is a country that seems cemented over in terms of defying the powers that be. Robert takes a country one person at a time. Here, the nutshell of Japan’s march to war:
Japan is undergoing the most significant changes to its security strategy since the end of World War II. In late 2022, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s government approved three policy documents—the National Security Strategy (NSS), the National Defense Strategy and the Defense Buildup Program—that propose a significant expansion of Japan’s military capabilities and a major increase in military spending over five years. The documents enable important modifications of the senshu boei (exclusively defence-oriented policy) that Japan has followed since 1946, not least allowing Japan to participate far more actively in collective self-defence with the United States and to substantially increase its ability to project force beyond its borders.
And to be THAT Japan, the vassal of the West, USA, in its hate toward China, what terrible times, really, and that is a question I posed Robert, who is in his 70s, has had medical issues for years, and seems to be happy and content with not rocking boats and rattling cages. You’ll see again, people are people, wherever he ventures. That is his chi.
Without further ado, here’s the interview, in his words, unadulturated:
1. What do you miss most about your mother?
Her smile, which could light up a room, her infectious giggle, her stories, and the warmth of her hugs.
2. What do you believe have been the most transitional and emblematic changes in your character as you have become an ex-pat of Japan?
I’ve become much more accepting and patient. Too many times, especially in my early years in Japan, I would react to things people around me did or said based on my limited and direct interpretations of Japanese into English in my head. Without having the cultural advantage of knowledge of nuances in intonation, idiomatic language, sarcasm, gestures, and even levels of politeness, there were often huge differences in what was really being conveyed and what I thought was being conveyed. I committed many cultural faux-pas.
Eventually, I learned to pay attention to how native speakers interacted with one another. I tried as much as possible to copy what they said and did in certain situations. The concept of wa, or harmony, is indispensable to the functioning of Japanese society. Individualism is accepted but not necessarily encouraged. When you think about it historically, it’s easy to understand. I mean, you’ve got a country with 120 million people crammed into the space of California, and probably 70 percent of that land space is mountainous and uninhabitable. People in most cities are piled one on top of another like sardines in a can. In order to survive, they have to be able to put up with a lot. In that sense, I’m lucky that we live in a somewhat rural area with plenty of space and greenery.
When I finally got around to noticing in detail how Japanese really communicated on a daily basis in public and in private, as well as trying to accept things as they were instead of judging, I found my own life improved and I had a lot less stress, despite still not understanding 100 percent of everything that was going on.
3. What does it mean to you to be a conscientious objector?
That’s a bit of a loaded question, wouldn’t you say? If I tried to answer it with some kind of philosophical or religious tenet, I’d probably come across as a self-righteous and condescending asshole.
To me, it’s really just a matter of common sense. I’ve never felt the need to align myself with one particular group or way of thought in order to express the importance of nonviolence. I’m not against the idea of using force to protect myself or others, but just the idea of violence, whether verbal or physical, let alone killing, especially in the name of one’s government or tribe, makes me sick to my stomach.
In one form or another, I think we’re all conscientious objectors at heart. In retrospect, most people come to see wars as senseless and insane. It’s never a matter of one side being more righteous than another. Even today, we see a tendency to point fingers at perceived perpetrators of criminal acts and claim the superiority of what our government tells us is reality and truth. In the case of what’s going on in Ukraine, I think we should do what we can to provide support to those young men refusing to kill on either side, Russian or Ukrainian.
4. What key lesson in your early years, post prison, up to way before Japan, did you gain as both personal philosophy and a way to move forward with your life?
My journeys across the U.S. and Europe in 1973 and around the world in 1977 resulted in my having less fear of the unknown and more trust in total strangers. From the moment I first stuck out my thumb while hitchhiking on the highway leading out of my hometown, I had nothing but positive experiences. This newfound faith was in a sense akin to Bob Dylan’s line in that song “Like a Rolling Stone”: “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” By throwing away any worry of not having to follow a plan and basically casting my fate to the wind, I opened myself up to experiences, places, and people that would ultimately lead me to a multitude of adventures, opportunities, discoveries, friendships, and an appreciation for living life in the moment.
5. What if you had not gotten called up for overseas duty but were still in the Air Force? Would you be a much different man, thinker, and person if none of that happened to you? Explain.
I’ve never been one to dwell on “what if” situations. I’ve always tried to move on and deal with the consequences, good or bad, of whatever fork in the road I’ve chosen. At any rate, I probably wouldn’t have naively entered the Air Force if there hadn’t been a war going on or an eventual draft notice coming with my name on it. I can’t imagine myself as still being in the Air Force. As I see it now, that was simply one path I traveled early on in life that led to the next path. I’ve come to accept all the paths I’ve walked as necessary and natural in the arc of my life story.
6. Truly, Japanese culture-people-history is so much different than the history of your birth country and your mom’s place of birth and death. A few contrasts you think would be worthy of prominence in this interview?
I’ve lived in Japan for so long now that I hardly ever think in terms of comparisons or differences between the countries. Besides, even if I tried to make comparisons, they would be outdated as the images I have in my brain about the States are mainly from the 1960s and 1970s. I’m stuck in a time warp. What I have noticed about Japan is no different from observations I made on my journeys through other countries in the 1970s. People everywhere go about their daily lives in much the same way. They’re concerned with putting food on the table, health, family, and all the rituals of working, celebrating, grieving, showing appreciation, getting high, entertaining, and taking care of one another. If you are open to them, they’ll open their arms to you.
7. Is there anything you like about the US foreign policy, US government? if not, why, and if so, expand.
I like that the U.S. is often way ahead of most other countries when it comes to helping out in times of a natural disaster. The main thing I don’t like is the U.S. having military bases in almost every country on the planet. I mean, come on! Think of how much good all the money wasted on military expenditures could be used for in battling poverty, disease, crime, pollution, all the things that will probably wipe us out as a species.
8. Being a young man when you grew up and came of age, well, so different than now, as an 18-year-old. Give us some insight into what you think is different now being a young man growing up compared to 1965 to 1975 in your case?
When I was an 18-year-old, we got much of our news from just three different TV news stations. My generation was probably influenced more by the music we listened to, the underground newspapers and magazines we read, and the movies we watched than anything else. I think we had time in those days to digest and discuss the issues that concerned us.
With the advent and ubiquity of today’s social media, news is aimed at and consumed by insulated tribes at a break-neck speed. Memes and 30-second Tik-Tok videos present issues that are gobbled up and replaced within minutes. It sometimes seems as if critical thinking has disappeared. Young people have to contend with too many forms of media demanding their attention 24 hours a day. No one seems to have the concentration or time necessary to read slowly and carefully and think about something that doesn’t reinforce the opinions they’ve already had formed for them.
I’d like to see someone develop an audio or video app that would read stuff like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and every ten pages or so take a break with a hip-hop or rap song or whatever music is popular at the moment and then summarize the contents of what was just read and ask you what you thought. That would be cool.
9. What about writing resonates with you, your spirit, your intellect that you can share with say readers who are not wired that way.
Originally, I came to writing as a means of exploring the confusion I felt about life, family, meaning, everything I didn’t understand in my youthful angst. I can’t say it led to any profound revelations, but it was cathartic. My exposure to young hippie artists, musicians, and poets during my first journey to Europe in 1973 influenced me enough to want to explore a means of expressing myself. At the time, the lives of those people seemed so fulfilling.
I think my mother’s influence played a strong role, too. As far back as I can remember, she was always playing music, writing poetry, painting scenes of nature, and expressing herself in many other ways. Her eyes always lit up when she was involved in something artistic. I guess I ended up just trying to follow her example. Writing has given me great satisfaction in life, and whenever I’m in a state of confusion, frustration, depression, or even excitement, I put pen to paper. At the end of a writing session, I always feel somewhat relieved and even interested in where some of the thoughts and descriptions came from.
Mom used to say, “Try making some lemonade out of the lemons in your life. You might find yourself feeling better.” I think the answer is as simple as that. No harm in trying, and it’s a helluva lot better than drinking yourself to death in order to forget.
10. You know where I stand politically and ethically. Japan is not my cup of tea in terms of the history of hate and mayhem with China, Korea, and in the Pacific, etc. And now, Japan is so aligned with the dirty USA, so I can’t really muster up a great theoretical love of the place. But, you do love your wife, the people who shepherded you and those you have shepherded. Riff with this.
That’s it right there. The people. Again, maybe this stems from my journeys as a young man, but I found that as long as I was open to others without any preconceived notions based on any country’s history or on the things I’d heard or read about it, people anywhere would be open to me. We should always separate the people of any country from their government’s actions or policies. We shouldn’t judge individuals without trying to communicate with them first.
I’ve shared drinks, meals, pipes of various substances, and time with people from many different countries who had reason to hate me simply because I was American and my generation or my ancestors had been responsible for the suffering of their people. Or even some of them personally. In some cases, it was the other way around.
The fact is we were able to communicate somehow without judgement. At some point, I’d learned how to be a good listener. I didn’t try to force my feelings or beliefs on them, and they didn’t try to force theirs on me. We expressed ourselves — sometimes with the help of interpreters, sometimes not — but what seemed to matter most in those moments of attempts at communication and understanding was the sincerity of the individuals involved. In my case, Japan was never an ultimate planned destination. I could’ve just as easily ended up in Greece or Spain or someplace else. As it turned out, fate intervened and I ended up here. I was lucky things turned out the way they have.
It may sound corny, but I really believe, more now than ever before, that we are all members of one family. I don’t think of myself as an American; rather, I think I’m a world citizen. If the human race can’t ever fully grasp that we’re all connected and dependent on one another, then I’m afraid we’re doomed.
Concerning that, a George Carlin quote comes to mind. In one routine about how he thought people trying to save the planet was bullshit, he said he thought that the earth didn’t give a shit about us human beings and it’d be just fine after we self destructed. He said, “The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.” I think he’s right. In the overall scheme of things, the existence of the human race is really inconsequential.
11. What do you want people to know about your mother — key points — from and after reading the memoir?
Her compassion and her capacity for total and unconditional love. Her courage, curiosity, tenacity, sensitivity, perseverance, insatiable thirst for knowledge and understanding, and dedication to family. Her stubbornness, self-sacrifice, generosity, strength, zest for life, and the joy she gave others simply by being with them. Do you want me to continue? I can go on and on. Good Lord, how I loved that woman!
12. What gives you hope?
Children at play. Children who know they are loved. Parents in the kitchen preparing healthy meals for loved ones.
13. What presents you with the half-empty glass scenario, and if you always see it half full, then riff, discuss.
Watching corporate news programs gives me a bad case of seeing the glass as half empty. Looking at great paintings, reading great literature and poetry, listening to favorite music, hearing children laugh, eating healthy and delicious foods — these things bring back an awareness of the beauty of life and a “glass half full” viewpoint. Mom used to call herself a “cock-eyed optimist.” I think I inherited that characteristic from her.
++—++
For those readers who want to get under the skin of a regular guy, who was growing up in California with a strong mother in the 1960s, with a family connected to one another, and then of course, with those so-called ‘black sheep,’ including many skeletons in various closets, following a pathway from naivete to enlightenment, to immersing into an Asia society, to being one with the language and one with his wife’s roots, the reader will find much to explore here. Alcoholism within an uncle’s life , missing in action relatives, divorce (his mom’s), and a legacy of stories and narratives from his mother and her family, the book Robert Norris wrote has an undying commitment to family, his mother, her legacy. His mother is infused in his answers above in the Q & A.
Go to his website, poke around, and email the fellow. It will be worth the time.
And that creek’s rising: Hurricane Katrina, put that great NOL underwater in five minutes:
If the Good Lord’s Willing/ Song by Johnny Cash
… If the good Lord’s willing and the creek stays down I’ll be in your arms time the moon come around For a taste of love that’s shining in your eyes If the rooster crows at the crackin’ of the dawn I’ll be there just as sure as you’re born If the good Lord’s willing and the creeks don’t rise
… I’ll comb my hair down, brush my teeth Shine up, slick up, dress up neat Get everything looking just right ‘Cause I want to look pretty when I see you tonight Just as sure as the rabbits are a jumping in the hollow I’ll be there, you can bet your bottom dollar If the good Lord’s willing and the creeks don’t rise
… If the good Lord’s willing and the creek stays low I’ll be there a knockin’ at your door With a hug and a kiss for the one I idolize
… I’ll wear my suit, my Sunday best I’ll be there lookin’ my best If the good Lord’s willing and the creeks don’t rise
… I’ll feed the mules and stop the hogs Feed the cows and chop all the logs Get all of my working done ’cause tonight we’re gonna have lots of fun Just as sure as there ever was a preacher man I’ll be there with a ring for your hand If the good Lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise
++—-++
Digging the variations on a theme, that Norris title:
“God Willin’ & The Creek Don’t Rise”
Lyrics, a la Ray LaMontagne
Caroline,
In the mountains the sun sets up in ribbons so high, it’s like I don’t never wanna get old… don’t ever wanna die. We been seein’ steady rain, ’bout to drive us all insane, nearly lost a few head up in the pines. At night, when some of the boys get to talking up their girls back home, you know I tell ’em there ain’t none as fine as mine. I can hear old Chapman sayin’ come morning we’ll break the range, be pushin’ hard now for the plains.
I close my eyes and I can see you… I close my eyes and I can feel you here. God willin’ an the creek don’t rise, I’ll be home again before this time next year. Though I fear this fever won’t break…
hateful policies preventing Mexican carpenters from doing America’s work & college creeps lying about, well, college
Aristotle: “All human beings by nature desire to know.”
I know, I know, every time I get onto the Zoom Doom thing with the Chronicle for Higher Education, the entire experience is dirty beyong dirty. Today, it was more bizarro people yammering about “talent search challenges for getting people to go into higher education.”
Three women went into their experiences recruiting and screening potential college hire-ons. The language coming from these people belies the vapidity of our times. Now, well, one woman said, “we have 30 people applying for one job, compared to a few years ago when 300 applied for one job.” I almost puked.
Of course, she was all about the HR aspect of things, stating that now, she has to go through fewer unskilled or unmatched skilled people than before. As if all these untalented and unqualified people applied for faculty positions. Arrogant, unfeeling, and happy in their roles watching the ship sink.
This entire “thing” was all about HR-speak, and the shallowness of their conversation and the Dystopian proposals they lay out are just signs of the shifting baseline disorder times.
They are happy about hybrid work, about kicking down the useless 9 to 5 timeframe for work, and are happy that work can be done at home, 8 am to 8 pm, or later, if need be.
Then, two males came on, and they are the Linked-In creeps, which sponsors these talks. Microsoft, now, owns Linked-In. Linked-In does staffing/hiring now, and alas, many of the universities and colleges are using hiring and staffing services like Linked-In to do the real work of hiring and screening.
One of the fops stated that colleges are way behind the times, technologically, and that getting courses and admin work on line, in hyper-remote ways, is the only way forward. You know, these monsters who believe the bricks and mortar campuses are just dinasaurs.
This is just one of a million types of superficial and back ass wards thinking, or unthinking comments:
Online schools are mushrooming everywhere these days, and it’s not that hard anymore to tell the genuine ones from the diploma mills. A number of online institutions have established strong brand names and reputations for themselves, and even with traditional brick and mortar big guns like MIT jumping on the online education bandwagon, it stands to reason that place-based higher education is losing the importance and prestige it once held.
The death of brick and mortar colleges will likely be long, slow, and painful, but here are ten reasons why we should consider speeding up the process and abolishing them right now:They’re way too expensive for most people.
Yeah, so throw the baby out with the bathwater:
[The German phrase] had its first written occurrence in Thomas Murner’s (1475-1537) versified satirical book Narrenbeschwörung (1512), which contains as its eighty-first short chapter entitled “Das kindt mit dem bad vß schitten” (To throw the baby out with the bath water) a treatise on fools who by trying to rid themselves of a bad thing succeed in destroying whatever good there was as well. In seventy-six rhymed lines the proverbial phrase is repeated three times as a folkloric leitmotif, and there is also the first illustration of the expression as a woodcut depicting quite literally a woman who is pouring her baby out with the bath water […].
Instead of stepping back, reforming, retrofitting, stopping the lunacy of capitalism eating everything, including those babies in the bathwater, we have these creeps, lowly ones, middlings, who have bought into the Fortune Magazine lies of — “we have to just accelerate AI-AR-VR-CGI-Twinning-Robotics since the cat’s out of the bag, and we will just have to deal witht he negative consquences of a Dystopian, anti-human, anti-community world.”
Or, they go to France and talk about their Power with Twitter: Fucking double dose of creepy.
Ahh, it’s just given, like gravity, or the H and O times two in Water. The billionaires are stupid but gods,
Ahh, so this is how the disrupters work, and that Chronicle Zoom Doom just shows how co-opted these HR and Hiring Creeps and the Admin Class are. Well, let’s see. Hmm, face to face, bricks and mortar and using typewriters, no phones and tablets and laptops allowed, I can teach a shit load of great things, outside and in the community with paper and pencil:
This is a foregone conclusion, no? Death of education, death of ethics, death of philosophy, death of families, death of agency, death of freedoms and rights, but we can lie, steal, plagiarize and pollute.
No need to read between the lines with this student’s arrogance and self-importance. He’s lying too, since he pushes the supposed step by step process of ChatGPT (fucking another polluted term in our language) helping him with a paper. Ahh, it is plagiarizing, for sure, and, bam, the arrogance. Not that college teachers do not need huge kicks in the butt, and the liberal arts, well, major lashes to the butt. But that’s not the point here:
Look at any student academic-integrity policy, and you’ll find the same message: Submit work that reflects your own thinking or face discipline. A year ago, this was just about the most common-sense rule on Earth. Today, it’s laughably naïve.
There’s a remarkable disconnect between how professors and administrators think students use generative AI on written work and how we actually use it. Many assume that if an essay is written with the help of ChatGPT, there will be some sort of evidence — it will have a distinctive “voice,” it won’t make very complex arguments, or it will be written in a way that AI-detection programs will pick up on. Those are dangerous misconceptions. In reality, it’s very easy to use AI to do the lion’s share of the thinking while still submitting work that looks like your own. Once that becomes clear, it follows that massive structural change will be needed if our colleges are going to keep training students to think critically.
The common fear among teachers is that AI is actually writing our essays for us, but that isn’t what happens. You can hand ChatGPT a prompt and ask it for a finished product, but you’ll probably get an essay with a very general claim, middle-school-level sentence structure, and half as many words as you wanted. The more effective, and increasingly popular, strategy is to have the AI walk you through the writing process step by step. You tell the algorithm what your topic is and ask for a central claim, then have it give you an outline to argue this claim. Depending on the topic, you might even be able to have it write each paragraph the outline calls for, one by one, then rewrite them yourself to make them flow better.
As an example, I told ChatGPT, “I have to write a 6-page close reading of the Iliad. Give me some options for very specific thesis statements.” (Just about every first-year student at my university has to write a paper resembling this one.) Here is one of its suggestions: “The gods in the Iliad are not just capricious beings who interfere in human affairs for their own amusement but also mirror the moral dilemmas and conflicts that the mortals face.” It also listed nine other ideas, any one of which I would have felt comfortable arguing. Already, a major chunk of the thinking had been done for me. As any former student knows, one of the main challenges of writing an essay is just thinking through the subject matter and coming up with a strong, debatable claim. With one snap of the fingers and almost zero brain activity, I suddenly had one. (source)
Ahh, now, Homer, the gods, the entire poem, now how do teachers teach it and shepherd thinkers across all disciplines to look at the work? Oral fucking poems, man, and so, the hard work is getting bricks and mortar colleges to get under the skin of this concept: Homer’s Iliad chronicles the ten year siege of Troy, and Odyssey chronicles one man’s ten year attempt to return home after Troy.
Ahh, war, war mongers, battles, existential battles, what does heroism and tragedy mean in today’s world? What do we miss as modern readers of an oral poem? What sort of elements of modern history tie into Home’s works? You can’t return home, or can you, and what is home in an atomized, broken, capitalistic, denuding, neutering/spaying society? You get the picture.
So, I was outside with the cable guy. Man in his thirties, and we talked about fiber optics, and I watched him install fiber (thin as a human hair) and splicing it to the current five line telephone line so we can have faster modems and more junk and stuff coming down the pipeline.
He looks like a rugged Val Kilmer, and he is from Albuquerque, having moved out here when he was 20 after his father died of cancer and Hep C, after getting a blood transfusion after a saw accident. “They didn’t screen blood back then, so he got Hep C, and liver damage and liver cancer.”
Dead at 58, and so the mom and young son moved to Yachats, of all places.
The work he does is with both copper and fiber optics. I watched the machine, the splicing, the ins and outs of the process. The machine, splicer, is computerized, fragile to the rain out here. We were talking about what happened fiber optic wise after Puerto Rico’s hurricane that the systems — phone, communication — were devastated and my Val Kilmer said spicers — fiber optics splicers, people — were getting $80 a splice, not an hour. Some of the independent contractors were splicing lines at 300 a day. Imagine that bill, imagine that.
“Look at me, with no college education. I like this job, and, the rain is worth it, and while I miss New Mexico’s food, I am happy with the scenery here.”
Alas, I asked about a son or daughter, and he stated he and his wife have a son, five, diagnosed with Autism, and while he’s getting more verbal in the schema of things and he’s sort of getting a few more social skills/cues, there is a daily trial and tribulation tied to getting the boy into some form to meet the fucker up neural normal world.
[Photos: Puerto Rico before the stupid USA’s Trump brought paper towels.]
In the midst of an active hurricane season, Puerto Rico has suffered yet again. Thanks to Fiona, which crashed into the territory a few days before Ian hit Florida, we were without critical services like electricity, water, hospitals and fuel supplies. Fiona’s destruction was a sharp reminder of the life-threatening effects of Hurricane Maria, which caused $90 billion in damage five years ago. More than 30 people died because of Fiona and as we recover from yet another destructive hurricane, our leaders have ignored the planning and preparedness lessons made clear by Maria.
After Maria, the U.S. federal and Puerto Rico local governments promised an increased level of resilience by strengthening existing infrastructures following the usual central-planning approach and solutions. But Hurricane Fiona has been yet another reminder that our strategy to build resilience in Puerto Rico is wrong, and that the leaders who espouse it are making decisions based on a philosophy that centers on the wrong things. They are rebuilding 20th-century electric grids, and water, sanitation and other infrastructure as they were before Maria hit; this will not work. Private companies cannot be relied on to provide resilient infrastructures. Rethinking how we approach planning and preparedness will make the archipelago a more viable place that benefits Puerto Rican people without straining budgets. (source)
Ahh, the privateers, the merchants of death, the merchants of debt, private companies, and then, what, $80 for each fiber optic splice? This is fucking lunacy.
And, so, colleges are shooting themselves in the foot, hand, neck, head, brain, and this country of unlimited and blank check to the UkroNaziLandians and now for more and more $$$ to the merchants of death CEOs and offensive weapons and gear and etc. and more satellite and softare and computing war gear, we are not getting the homes fixed or built.
Ahh, these pencil necks, these Linked-In do nothings, rad digital and on-line gods, know nothing about the world:
Despite the slowing of immigration inflow to the U.S., the share of foreign-born workers in the US construction labor force has been rising since the housing recovery began. Immigrant workers now account for close to one in four workers, a record high share that was reached for the first time in 2016. The story behind the rising share of immigrants in the construction labor force during the housing recovery is twofold – an unusually slow, delayed and reluctant return of native-born workers and a much faster and robust comeback of immigrant workers. Close to 1.7 million native-born workers left the construction labor force during the housing downturn, and the vast majority on a net basis, over 1 million, had not returned to the industry as of 2018. In sharp contrast, the number of immigrant workers in construction has now returned to the 2006 level.
The share of immigrants is even higher in construction trades, reaching 30%. Concentration of immigrants is particularly high in some of the trades needed to build a home, like carpenters, painters, drywall/ceiling tile installers, brick masons, and construction laborers – trades that require less formal education but consistently register some of the highest labor shortages in the NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (HMI) surveys and NAHB Remodeling Market Index (RMI).
In some states, reliance on foreign-born labor is even more pronounced. Immigrants comprise close to 40% of the construction workforce in California and Texas. In Florida, New Jersey and New York, close to 37% of the construction labor force is foreign-born and in Nevada, one out of three construction industry workers come from abroad. (source)
Notice the verbiage — jobs that “require less formal education.” What does that mean? Formal education equates to what, college, trade school, apprenticeships?
So, my Val Kilmer cable guy from New Mexico said he started off young thinking he’d be the next YouTube star, and then he tried working on cellular phones, and even the call centers, but he is happy now with Pioneer Cable.
From the 2010 Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville, Virginia, Matthew Crawford discussed his book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work.
“The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect in the world. But the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away. His well-founded pride is far from the gratuitous “self-esteem” that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.” ― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work
I suppose it all boils down to the masters controlling destinies, and no matter how powerful the urge is to be Matthew and have a motorcycle shop, we are in a Brave New World where the billionaires and the Fourth Industrial Revolutionaires and WEF-ers, want control, man, control.
Here, from Matthew Ehret’s latest: “Roosevelt vs. Keynes’ New Deal and the Battle of Bretton Woods” Believe it or not, this piece ties into indirectly how we are being shaped by perverse people, whose roots go back. Contrast Keynes and Churchill with FDR.
“Galton’s eccentric, sceptical, observing, flashing, cavalry-leader type of mind led him eventually to become the founder of the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists, namely eugenics.”
-John Maynard Keynes on Galton’s Eugenics, Eugenics Review 1946
“I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”
– Winston Churchill to the Peel Commission, 1937
“There never has been, there isn’t now, and there never will be, any race of people fit to serve as masters over their fellow men… We believe that any nationality, no matter how small, has the inherent right to its own nationhood.”
– Franklin Delano Roosevelt, March 1941
“They who seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers call this a new order. It is not new and it is not order.”
enter the presstitutes, and alas, it’s not some new-fangled term, cuz yellow journalism is a very very old game
Oh, yes, what to believe, whose history to take in whole cloth, how skeptical can we be in Chlamydia Capitalism?
No one believes almost anything these day, that seems to be the highlight of this blog today, a short one, albeit. Or, why would “they” be putting their own children and children’s children at risk by creating damaging, deadly things. They, the big wigs, are good guys, our neighbors, our friends.
“They” being “them,” the billionaires and techno-aires, the millionaires and those inventing each nanosecond something “new under the sun” for which to make a profit . . . find validity . . . for which to use their brain power . . . in order to do their genius things unfettered (but well funded). They are just vaunted, special star chamber people.
They are built “to do/make/produce/cook/launch/cook up/tear down/construct/splice/improve/scale up — “What can we do to ‘improve’ or develop or produce or maufacture or invent anything? And how can we mash more organic compouds togehter for more organic chemicals, more compounds to make the plastics lighter, smoother, less breakable, more tough, and more easily replaceable by more plastic?”
Lot’s of what’s and how’s in science (sic) but never ever WHY? Never ever WHO gets the benefit and who gets the downside of stated scientific, technocratic, managerial, bureaucratic, massive scaling up of it all?
When they, the billionaires and marketers and lobbyists and lawyers and CPAs and economists and math whizzes cover for the What and How folk, we end up with a continuing criminal enterprise. And scientists and mechanics and engineers and technologists always think they are doing the better good for the betterment of us all.
So we are here, with no overarching and overriding WHY’s. Why the hell do we need, want, should want, should need, ever need item or service x, y, z, infinity? But you can’s even go against these monsters.
Short for strategic lawsuits against public participation, SLAPPs have become an all-too-common tool for intimidating and silencing criticism through expensive, baseless legal proceedings.
Anti-SLAPP laws are meant to provide a remedy to SLAPP suits. Anti-SLAPP laws are intended to prevent people from using courts, and potential threats of a lawsuit, to intimidate people who are exercising their First Amendment rights. In terms of reporting, news organizations and individual journalists can use anti-SLAPP statutes to protect themselves from the financial threat of a groundless defamation case brought by a subject of an enterprise or investigative story. (source)
Those SLAPP laws are for by and large reporting, investigative reporters. In a world where the Presstitutes are self-censoring, self-killing story after story, and when they, journalists, fight for the man, the corporation, the military, the lesser (sic) of two evils POTUS, hell, why have enemies?
You want to question cracker plants, question HFCS (cooked high fructose corn syrup) plants, large animal production plants, or where oil spills take place, question those outfits, expect the long and short arm of the law and the lawyers to come and get you:
Helen Yost, a 62-year-old environmental educator, has been a committed activist for nearly a decade. She says she spends 60 to 80 hours a week as a community organizer for Wild Idaho Rising Tide. She’s been arrested twice for engaging in non-violent civil disobedience.
Yost may not fit the profile of a domestic terrorist, but in 2014 the FBI classified her as a potential threat to national security. According to hundreds of pages of FBI files obtained by the Guardian through a Freedom of Information Act (Foia) lawsuit, and interviews with activists, Yost and more than a dozen other people campaigning against fossil fuel extraction in North America have been identified indomestic terrorism-related investigations. (source)
Try photographing a dairy in Wisconsin. Try being on that public road and photography a military installation.
The pigs of capitalism (and other pigs) go after us with ZEALOTRY: Blood ponds!
Some say that words have no meaning, only uses. What France’s Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said about those who oppose giant water reserves for agricultural irrigation borders on political obscenity and comes across as a clear declaration of war against environmentalists.
History shows that the first shots of a war or a revolution are always semantic. According to Mr. Darmanin, France will be threatened by armies of eco-terrorists ready to set the country on fire in the name of their dangerous ideology and their sectarianism. Nothing less.
This slanderous accusation against activists who, in their immense majority, do nothing else than follow a long tradition of disobedience against big corporations, was carefully considered by the government. With a double purpose: dictating its values by forcing its vocabulary on us, as it was then shared by media and social media; and pushing us to use the word rather than to debate the limits of our agricultural model. We know that speaking and thinking using the words of the adversary is already surrendering. We must therefore restore their true meaning in order to give our political action meaning. (source)
Oh, they will come after you FBI-CIA-SWAT-NSA hit man style:
[Photo: Paris’ covert action, code-named Opération Satanique (Operation Satanic), sank the 131-foot ship in Auckland Harbor, killing 35-year-old Portuguese photographer Fernando Pereira and leaving his eight-year-old daughter Marelle fatherless. The goal of the July 10, 1985 attack was to stop Greenpeace’s flagship vessel from sailing to Moruroa atoll and joining a peace flotilla of New Zealanders and Tahitians to protest at France’s South Pacific nuclear test site.]
To commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Rainbow Warrior’s demise, Auckland-based Little Island Presshas published the fifth edition of Robie’s 1986 classic Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior. A book launching is scheduled for today, not far from where the Rainbow Warrior was bombed bystateterrorists. The event will include Greenpeace’s “Courage Works,” a special Rainbow Warrior anniversary photography exhibition.
Robie was aboard the Rainbow Warrior during its fateful final mission, evacuating islanders from Rongelap atoll in the Marshall Islands, which had been irradiated on March 1, 1954 “when the Americans exploded the H-bomb Bravo on Bikini atoll,” as Robie wrote in Eyes of Fire. “The bomb was a 15-megaton giant, more than 1,000 times as powerful as the bomb which devastated Hiroshima.” Robie covered “Operation Exodus,” as the Greenpeace ship transported roughly 350 Marshallese atomic exiles from contaminated Rongelap to Mejato and Ebeye at Kwajalein atoll in May 1985.
Because Robie had spent two-and-a-half monthsaboardthe Rainbow Warrior reporting for top regional outlets — including Radio Australia, Radio New Zealand, New Zealand Herald, New Zealand Times, The Australian and Fiji-based Islands Business — he had the scoop. Robie won New Zealand’s Media Peace Prize in 1985 and published the original Eyes of Fire the following year.
Recounting the 1985 attack, Robie told Earth Island Journal: “The first limpet mine blew a hole in the engine room on the starboard side of the Rainbow Warrior big enough for a bus to drive through. The second bomb crippled the aft propeller and shaft. My cabin was almost adjacent to that of Fernando Pereira, the Portuguese-born Dutch photographer who lost his life.”
“I managed to go on board some time later after the [Rainbow Warrior] had been refloated and towed across to Devonport Naval Base dry dock on the other side of Auckland’s Waitemata Harbour,” he continued. “I inspected my old cabin and the second bomb had lifted the whole of the floor into a giant egg-shaped hump and the bunks were a wreck. I wouldn’t have stood a chance if I had been asleep in the cabin.”
We in any revolutionary movement, in the West, cannot depend on fair and honest reporting. It has gone way past Yellow Journalism. Journalism today is steeped in PSYOPS, in what American Exceptionalism is all about: unfair labor practices, cover-ups, proxy wars, internal wars, witch hunts, book banning and burning, our way, or the highway.
Yep, mocking us all, with Operation Mocking Bird.
And, remember how the mainstream media raked Gary Webb over the coals?
After Gary Webb spent more than a year of intense investigative reporting and weeks of drafting, his editors at the San Jose Mercury News decided to run his three-part series late last August, when the nation’s focus was divided between politics and vacation. The series, DARK ALLIANCE: THE STORY BEHIND THE CRACK EXPLOSION, initially “sank between the Republican and Democratic Conventions,” Webb recalls. “I was very surprised at how little attention it generated.”
Webb needn’t have worried. His story subsequently became the most talked-about piece of journalism in 1996 and arguably the most famous–some would say infamous–set of articles of the decade. Indeed, in the five months since its publication, “Dark Alliance” has been transformed into what New York Times reporter Tim Weiner calls a “metastory”–a phenomenon of public outcry, conspiracy theory, and media reaction that has transcended the original series itself.
The series, and the response to it, have raised a number of fundamental journalistic questions. The original reporting–on the links between a gang of Nicaraguan drug dealers, CIA-backed counterrevolutionaries, and the spread of crack in California–has drawn unparalleled criticism from the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. Their editorial decision to assault, rather than advance, the Mercury News story has, in turn, sparked critical commentary on the priorities of those pillars of the mainstream press.
Yet in spite of the mainstream media, the allegations generated by the Mercury News continue to swirl, particularly through communities of color. Citizens and journalists alike are left to weigh the significant flaws of the piece against the value of putting a serious matter, one the press has failed to fully explore, back on the national agenda.
DRUGS AND CONTRAS REDUX
Although many readers of theMercury Newsarticles may not have known it, “Dark Alliance” is not the first reported link between the contra war and drug smuggling. More than a decade ago, allegations surfaced that contra forces, organized by the CIA to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, were consorting with drug smugglers with the knowledge of U.S. officials. The Associated Press broke the first such story on December 20, 1985. The AP’s Robert Parry and Brian Barger reported that three contra groups “have engaged in cocaine trafficking, in part to help finance their war against Nicaragua.” Dramatic as it was, that story almost didn’t run, because of pressure by Reagan administration officials (see “Narco-Terrorism: A Tale of Two Stories”CJR, September/October, 1986). Indeed, the White House waged a concerted behind-the-scenes campaign to besmirch the professionalism of Parry and Barger and to discredit all reporting on the contras and drugs. (source)
All of this rant was precipitated by reading a fellow Substacker:
This article linked from Newsweek claims, based on a fake report from Kiev, that the Patriot can shoot down the hypersonic Kinzhal.
One of the many problems with this report is that, while Ukraine claims to have shot down 6 Kinzhals on May 16, Russia did not fire that many. Russia rarely fires more than one of these expensive missiles at a time.
Further, the unpredictable meandering trajectory and enormous hypersonic speed of this missile makes it impossible to shoot down. So far, none have ever really been intercepted — Ukrainian lies to the contrary.
It is to Newsweek’s shame and disgrace that none of its journalists even tried to do a skeptical sci-tech-based investigation of this obviously fake news from Ukraine. The report of the shoot-down is tantamount to a travel reporter claiming Eskimos are hunting rhinos at the North Pole using pea shooters.
Other mainstream outlets are no better. The recent Pentagon leaks show that the US has been vastly under-reporting Ukrainian war casualties while vastly over-reporting Russian casualties for several months now.
Here again, there is no excuse for this shoddy reporting of war casualties, because it has been known for some time, even to Western military experts, that the Ukrainian forces are firing one artillery shell to every 10 shellsfired by the Russians, and that the Russians have overwhelming air superiority – in fact, Ukraine has actually had no air force to speak of since Feb 24. Russia destroyed all major Ukrainian air fields on the very first day of the special military operation and knocked out all but a handful of Ukrainian military aircraft. Plus, Russia keeps destroying air defense systems, with the latest instance having been reported on May 16 with the destruction of a Patriot system in Kiev.
So, seriously, does it take a genius to figure out that Ukraine can’t prevail over Russia? Conversely, doesn’t it take an incompetent fool of a journo to keep repeating the Ukraine lie that Russia is losing?
I mean, sure, US news media can always blame Ukrainian fakes for contaminating Western news reports, but there is no law written requiring all US intel agents and news sources to regurgitate every report that comes out of Ukraine while dismissing as fake every report from Russia!
If the grassroots ever grows a brain, US msm will all lose most of their readership and subscribers.
The Ukrainians denied the Patriot system was destroyed, of course, but Western officials are admitting it happened and are assessing the extent of the damage.
Again, Deep Green Resistance or whomever, we shall be attacked, by the Media and the MSM Media, Legacy Media, all part of the DNA of Operation Mocking Bird:
The FBI also focused its attention on DGR organizing at Western Washington University, which hosted a lecture in 2011 by two of the group’s members, Max Wilbert and Dillon Thomson. Information about the lecture, titled “Environmentalism for the New Century,” and about the professor who hosted it was included in the FBI files. Wilbert, who attended WWU, is also a member of DGR’s board of directors.
As part of the investigation, the FBI met with the university’s police department to “discuss possible Deep Green Resistance presence on the WWU campus”. The FBI also said it would attempt to determine whether any of the professors in the environmental sciences department were involved in the “DGR movement”. (source)
Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were Williarn Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Tirne Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the LouisviIle Courier‑ Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps‑Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald‑Tribune.
By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.
Oh, those old op-ed’s:
And, so, now, from the 1950s on, and especially now, how’s that looking, those Mocking Birds?
The CIA even ran a formal training program in the 1950s to teach its agents to be journalists. Intelligence officers were “taught to make noises like reporters,” explained a high CIA official, and were then placed in major news organizations with help from management. “These were the guys who went through the ranks and were told ‘You’re going to he a journalist,’” the CIA official said. Relatively few of the 400‑some relationships described in Agency files followed that pattern, however; most involved persons who were already bona fide journalists when they began undertaking tasks for the Agency.
The Agency’s relationships with journalists, as described in CIA files, include the following general categories:
■ Legitimate, accredited staff members of news organizations—usually reporters. Some were paid; some worked for the Agency on a purely voluntary basis. This group includes many of the best‑known journalists who carried out tasks for the CIA. The files show that the salaries paid to reporters by newspaper and broadcast networks were sometimes supplemented by nominal payments from the CIA, either in the form of retainers, travel expenses or outlays for specific services performed. Almost all the payments were made in cash. The accredited category also includes photographers, administrative personnel of foreign news bureaus and members of broadcast technical crews.) [source]
The deck is always stacked against anyone threatening the status quo.
Animal‐welfare activists have scored much publicity success by releasing hidden‐camera videos that they say document the mistreatment of animals at farms and slaughterhouses. Now, at the behest of farm interests, lawmakers in Iowa, Florida, and Minnesota are proposing laws seeking to criminalize the making and even possession of such videos. According to the New York Times, the Iowa bill, which has passed the lower house of the legislature in Des Moines:
….would make it a crime to produce, distribute or possess photos and video taken without permission at an agricultural facility. It would also criminalize lying on an application to work at an agriculture facility “with an intent to commit an act not authorized by the owner.”
Equating taking photos of farms or weedy land, to manslaughter, old Florida.
If you enjoy taking pictures of the Florida countryside, you should probably go get it out of your system before July 1. After that date, it may be a felony.
State Senator Jim Norman (R-Tampa) recently introduced S.B. 1246, which would make it illegal to create any image of a “farm or other property where legitimate agricultural operations are being conducted” without the written consent of the owner. (I assume the “illegitimate agricultural operations” he’s thinking of are marijuana farms, but maybe he’s got a neighbor with some really bad landscaping.) Also, “farm” is defined to include “any tract of land cultivated for the purpose of agricultural production, the raising and breeding of domestic animals, or the storage of a commodity,” which appears to mean that ranches, warehouses, and lots of other places, would be off-limits whether or not they are connected with an actual “farm” in the common sense of the word.
You’ll have to be pretty careful where you point your lens in Florida if this nonsense passes. Assuming you were still inclined to visit or live in Florida at all.
Remarkably, as written the bill declares this to be a first-degree felony, which under Florida law carries a penalty of up to 30 years in prison. Fla. Stat. § 775.082(3)(b). This would make taking a picture of a farm without permission a more serious offense in Florida than manslaughter. (source)
Ag Gag Laws, and you will not see the Manslaughtering Mainstream Media do deep stories defending our right to do any number of peaceful demonstrations against the Predatory=Penury=Polluting=Perverse Capitalism. The language, man, the language, as in “Green as the New Red.”
Criminalizing Compassion: How Ag-Gag Legislation Lets Corporations Set the Laws of the Land
Here you go, and Will Potter is not in the news because of tons of threats.
That was then: “The deputy director of the Trump campaign in Washington state has promised to introduce new legislation that would punish protest as a felony if it causes “economic disruption” and hurts corporate profits.
The proposed “Preventing Economic Terrorism Act” marks a radical expansion of legislation that was once used to criminalize environmentalists as “eco-terrorists,” and could be used against a wide range of social movements and anti-Trump protesters.
State Sen. Doug Ericksen, the author of the bill, says protests that block highways or roads ”such as recent Black Lives Matter protests, or the indigenous movement at Standing Rock against the Dakota Access Pipeline”are “economic terrorism.”
In a statement on his website, Ericksen also says that the bill won’t be limited to protesters. It will include those who “fund, organize, sponsor or otherwise encourage others to commit acts of economic terrorism.”
“We are not just going after the people who commit these acts of terrorism,” Ericksen said. “We are going after the people who fund them. Wealthy donors should not feel safe in disrupting middle class jobs.” (source)
these nerds, geniuses, chess champs, disruption thugs, all of them are anti human, anti planet, anti the people, planet, plants and phyla writ large-
From Mickey Z, though being a socialist and communist in the purest sense is about building community, not CASH, plain and simple:
To question capitalism is not the same as endorsing any other current “ism.”
To blindly accept capitalism is to ignore the reality that what we call capitalism survives due to the socializing of corporate costs and the privatizing of corporate profits.
To question capitalism is to look beyond the next fiscal quarter, beyond national boundaries, and beyond corporate propaganda.
To blindly accept capitalism is to pretend that technology is neutral, humans can “control” nature, and the playing field is even.
To question capitalism is to have a new vision for the future that extends well beyond today’s closing bell on Wall Street.
To blindly accept capitalism is to prize shareholders over solidarity and commodities over communities. (source)
Which poison pill will you be taking to make it in Chlamdyia Capitalism? Loopholes, man, loopholes perpetrated by lab coats, MDs, PhDs, JD’s and CEOs and Lobbies, and the entire might of the Complex:
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Simple formula — food should be nourishing and safe to eat.
But more than 10,000 chemicals are allowed in food sold in the U.S. Some are direct additives, such as preservatives like butylated hydroxyanisole, or BHA, and butylated hydroxytoluene, or BHT, which are intentionally added to processed food. Others are so-called indirect additives, like heavy metals, which contaminate food during processing, storage and packaging.
Almost 99 percent of food chemicals introduced since 2000 were greenlighted for use by food and chemical companies, rather than properly reviewed by the Food and Drug Administration. Many of these widely used chemicals are associated with major health harms, including increased risk of cancer, developmental harm and hormone disruption.
Better dying with Chemistry, and it’s plastics, man, plastics is the future!
Oh, even if you eat good food, the Capitalists get ya’!
PBDEs
Polybrominated diphenyl ethers replaced the first generation flame retardants, polychlorinated biphenyls, which were banned in the U.S. for their toxicity in 1977. Predictably, PBDEs have also come under scrutiny for adverse health and environmental impacts, as well as questionable effectiveness. Ubiquitous in the home, PBDEs are found in furniture, TVs, computer, and electrical equipment. An alarming 2010 study suggested that children with higher prenatal exposure to PBDEs score lower on tests of mental and physical development between the ages of one and siX.
PFCs
Perfluorinated compounds, which can make materials resistant to stains, oil, and water, are found in clothing, cookware, fast food wrappers, microwave popcorn bags, and carpets. (Teflon and Scotchguard, for instance, are derived from PFCs.) Since they don’t degrade organically, they persist in the environment and accumulate in living tissue. Health concerns include toxic fumes from heated nonstick pans causing “Teflon flu” (which can kill pet birds!); stainless steel and cast iron could be safer alternatives.
Toluene
A solvent used to make paints, paint thinners, fingernail polish, lacquers, adhesives and rubber, toluene is toxic to the nervous system, though it’s less bad than the highly carcinogenic benzene, which it largely replaced. Some people huff it to get high, which is just about the stupidest thing imaginable, since inhalation can cause (in addition to euphoria and dissociation) fatigue, confusion, temporary hearing or color vision loss, severe lung damage and even death.
Parabens
The purpose of parabens is preservative, to kill bacteria and fungi, and they’re present in a host of personal care products: shampoos, moisturizers, shaving gels, lubricants, cosmetics, deodorants and toothpaste. They’ve even added to food. The problem is that parabens have been found in breast cancer tumors, and are known to mimic estrogen, the hormone that drives that disease. Reproductive toxicity is also suspected. In light of these concerns, some products have gone paraben-free, and are labeled as such.
Glyphosate
Brought to market in the 1970s by Monsanto, which gave it the ruggedly suggestive name Roundup, glyphosate is an herbicide that kills almost anything growing. Instantly popular with farmers, it really took off with the introduction of genetically modified “Roundup Ready” seeds, which grow into glyphosate-resistant crops that enable less discriminant spraying. Roundup is also sold to ordinary homeowners, for use against yard weeds.
Unsurprisingly, a chemical that’s toxic to plantlife doesn’t seem to be good for animals: birth defects have been observed in rats and frogs exposed to glyphosate. Human harm has not been conclusively demonstrated, but some argue that Roundup’s presence in the food supply and environment is contributing to the prevalence of several diseases. The development of herbicide-resistant superweeds is also a concern.
Tetrachloroethylene
Also known as Perc, or just dry-cleaning fluid, tetrachloroethylene is as almost as tough on the nervous system as it is on stains. It’s classified as a probable human carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and studies have also shown that it significantly increases the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease. One researcher found that the children of dry cleaners are 3.5 times more likely than other kids to develop schizophrenia.
Bisphenol A
Known as BPA for short, bisphenol A is used to make hard plastics, including the materials for water bottles, sports equipment, DVDs, medical and dental devices and eyeglass lenses. It’s also used in the lining of metal food and beverage cans, as well as in the thermal paper on which receipts are printed. In other words, it’s everywhere, including in our bodies: it leaches into substances we consume and is absorbed through our skin. And its effects on animals, at levels below the EPA’s limit for human exposure, are pretty awful: adverse changes to reproductive organs and tissue, including predispositions to cancer, as well as neural and behavioral impacts on non-human primates. A recent FDA ban on the use of BPA in baby bottles was denounced by the Environmental Working Group as “purely cosmetic,” since the chemical is still present in food packaging.
Triclosan
An antimicrobial agent, triclosan was originally intended for use in hospitals, but soon found its way into a wide variety of consumer products: toothpaste, cutting boards, shoes, trash bags and antibacterial soaps. As a result, triclosan is now in all sorts of places it shouldn’t be: in the bile of wild fish exposed to wastewater, in human breast milk and in nearly 75% of urine samples tested in 2008.
Triclosan penetrates the skin and enters in the bloodstream, where its effects on people are unknown. But it’s been shown to mess with the endocrine systems of several different animals, and to interfere with human muscle cell function in vitro. The benefits of using it in soap have been questioned; the FDA says there’s no evidence of triclosan’s upside, apart from an anti-gingivitis effect demonstrated by Colgate Total toothpaste. And some studies have raised the possibility that widespread use of triclosan could contribute to microbial resistance to biocides.
Phthalates
These plasticizers are all over the place. One billion tons are produced each year, and they go into (among other things) children’s toys, pharmaceutical tablets, shower curtains, adhesives, food packaging and fragrances used in all manner of cleaning products, personal and otherwise. What’s troubling: phthalates are easily released into the environment, and they seem to act like hormones in the human body. Possible consequences include (in males) genital deformities, sterility and diabetes, and (in females) premature births, early puberty and breast cancer. Links have also been found with allergies and asthma. (SOURCE)
Oh, darn, those silly republicans and democrats, oh, silly me, they are out to watchdog us, we the people who voted for the sociopaths, and bird dog thoses sons of bitches and bitches of fathers to take care of us. (Blood samples matter, and POPs last for, well, cradle to grave. You and I voted for that , right?)
Oh, aspiration, and that’s the Nazi-Backing EU, with glee for all the depleted uranium shells, all those bombs bursting in air, all that censorship, all that billions going to the Nazi Regime, all the work to blow up Russia and create suffering, vis-a-vis sanctions. That EU and that Europe and those UK-ians, and all those fascists in EuroTrashLandia, and those Killer Five Eyes, and the rest of them, wanting to destroy people through sanctioning IV bags and medicines.
Do not believe this crap: New EU restrictions to ban around 12,000 substances have been proposed in what the European Environmental Bureau has called the world’s “largest ever ban on toxic chemicals”, but changes in regulation can be incredibly slow moving. “There is a long way to go but with the new EU chemical strategy and European Green Deal, we are hopeful that things can improve a lot. But even then, that would take a long time before that change is visible in your blood, I’m afraid.”
The ‘precautionary principle’ could be translated into everyday words as ‘better safe than sorry’. It means that, when scientific evidence about something is uncertain, and there are reasonable grounds for concern about harm, decision-makers should err on the side of caution and avoid risks. With chemicals, the development of new substances outpaces research on their negative impacts. This is why it is important to proceed with caution.
These geniuses do not care, and disaster and inflammatory and disease capitalism, all of the merchants of death and dying, all those huksters, the shekel lovers, all those scammers, the grifters in high and low places, they are right there for the kill.
Yep, I just wrote a Substack on mother’s day, the toxic shit that schools teach, the broken social media, girls and boys who look at genitals at age four and get groomed for whatever “they” are after, what, LGBTQIA+ (an abbreviation for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, intersex, asexual, and more. These terms are used to describe a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. See below for a more detailed definition of each term, from GLAAD’s LGBTQ Media Reference Guide.)
Oh, we know the plus (+) is added devaluing of humanity, and the conversations prompted by the elite, the beautiful people, the war mongers and the retail mercenaries, ahh, that PLUS:
The ‘plus’ (+) is used to signify all of the gender identities and sexual orientations that letters and words cannot yet fully describe.eop
So while the beautiful people get their for profit non-profit and NGO money from the hundreds of outfits, like the Soros “foundations,” et al, we are living in a dystopia.
Brought to us by the nerds, the disruption experts, the sociopaths.
Come on, protest?
Nah, never. All this distraction, all those tools in the social media book, all the Chromebooks, all the black mirrors, all the eye scanning, how much of the little 2 x 4 phone screen covered the rods and cones of humanity to lobotomize . . . all of that is cooked up by the prodigies, those chess geniuses. And may they all turn to glass, really, neutron bomb? E-coli in their greens? Botulism in their Kombucha? A little toxin from that lovely octupus? A snail?
Box jellyfish for Gates and Musk?
Funnel Web Spider for Thiel, Soros, Buffet?
Shit dog, a cone snail for the Biden-Bush-Trump and all extended families of the Billionaire Cartel?
A little snake venom for all of Media and Holly-Dirt, the biggest liars on the planet?
Shit, all the times I’ve been with the stone fish. That little venom extracted for all the Military Mercenary Industrial Complex heads and not-so-heads of that shit show?
I’ve had these guys in my hands many times: For all FIRE-men and FIRE-woman? Finance Insurance Real Estate moguls and their Eichmanns’?
Fucking A, for the blue-ringed octupuses, in Australian waters, that shit hole anal cavity for the US of A:
Think of the golden billion, and their leaders and movers and shakers, all those merchants of death, disease, dystopia, dirt and derangement.
I learned how to isolate botulism cells, the bacteria, and, well, with a little petri dish love, hmm, how much could I make?
Clostridium botulinum is a bacterium that produces dangerous toxins (botulinum toxins) under low-oxygen conditions.
Botulinum toxins are one of the most lethal substances known.
Botulinum toxins block nerve functions and can lead to respiratory and muscular paralysis.
Human botulism may refer to foodborne botulism, infant botulism, wound botulism, and inhalation botulism or other types of intoxication.
Foodborne botulism, caused by consumption of improperly processed food, is a rare but potentially fatal disease if not diagnosed rapidly and treated with antitoxin.
Homemade canned, preserved or fermented foodstuffs are a common source of foodborne botulism and their preparation requires extra caution.
Ahh, my friend Tassos, in El Paso, a Greek Merchant Marine, formerly married to a Mexican, had a restaurant I worked with on many occassions, and this shit happened to the poor fellow:
Skordalia, a dip consisting of potatoes, garlic, cucumbers and sometimes yogurt, was served Friday and Saturday at the restaurant, which voluntarily closed pending the completion of an investigation.
EL PASO, Texas, April 12, 1994 — Fourteen people who ate a garlic and potato-based dip at a Greek restaurant remained hospitalized Tuesday in what officials said may be the worst outbreak of botulism in Texas history.
The 14 were among 30 people who ate the dip at Tassos Greek Cuisine and Seafood Restaurant, said El Paso city-county Health and Environmental District director Dr. Laurance Nickey. (Sources)
In any case, the Anarchist Cookbook was just a little superficial primer for some fun things to hack the system BACK then.
Even that fellow asked for redemption:
In a federal prosecution in Maryland, Ali Saboonchi was charged with violating U.S. export restrictions on trade with the Islamic Republic of Iran. After his smartphones and flash drive were seized at the U.S.-Canadian border on July 18, 2013, Saboonchi moved to “suppress the fruits of warrantless forensic searches” at the border. This motion required U.S. District Judge Paul W. Grimm to address the American practice of border searches of incoming passengers:
[I]n practice, officers are expected to use their discretion to focus on more likely evidence of contraband or criminality — to ensure that what appears to be a diary is not actually The Anarchist Cookbook, and to move on.
To people versed in radical literature, The Anarchist Cookbook is well-known. Written by a 19-year-old anti-war activist named William Powell and published by a controversial New York house in 1971, it became a bestseller in radical circles and is still available on the internet. It contains diagrams and instructions on how to construct various explosive devices, and (based on its content) was apparently aimed at people interested in conducting guerilla warfare in the United States.
Powell died recently, but not before a documentary filmmaker caught up with him in France, where he had been based for several decades while doing good things around the world. The footage of his interview indicated that Powell had not read or touched the book since he wrote it almost 50 years ago and that he had renounced it and its ideas, hoping it would go out of print. The problem for Powell is the sense that his book inspired several notorious terrorists, both right- and left-wing, over the last several decades. Powell was visibly pained by this realization, and died shortly after the interview. (check out the article)
Now now, this is all personal choice, and some of us learned how to take apart and put together all sorts of weapons. Some of us learned how to use C-4 and how to arm Claymore mines. Dynamite and other weird stuff. For the bankers and millionaires and billionaires? Never, it seems, just mall and school shootings. Insane.
But the bottom line is, these geniuses are worse than cold-blooded sicarios.
“Google Is About To Turn The Online Publishing Industry Upside Down”
So, this Substack is soon to be gone, thanks to the Fascists at Google:
The company plans to change the way it presents search engine results by using artificial intelligence. And, at the risk of overstating the potential consequences, it will be like dropping a nuclear bomb on an online publishing industry that’s already struggling to survive.
[Photo: Dirty rotten female, Cathy Edwards, Google’s vice president of engineering, in a screenshot from the company’s … [+]” “GOOGLE / YOUTUBE”
Here, Fox News:
“The scientist said that the best thing to do now is to “put as much effort into developing this technology as we do into making sure it’s safe” – which he says is not happening right now.”
This is it, then, constant bombardment of these sociopaths telling us, we poor peasants, we poor Dystopian fools, that we shall be fine if we allow for the elites, the Eichmann’s big and small, to determine the world in their Demented and Dystopian way. Plus, they all are WELFARE cheats, getting R & D, hoards of workers, funding, tax breaks, etc. etc. from US, the dying taxpayer.
[Photo: These are MONSTERS, Geoffrey Hinton speaks during The International Economic Forum of the Americas (IEFA) Toronto Global Forum in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on Thursday, Sept. 5, 2019. ]
Look at this piece of shit, we hope, future botulism eater:
[Photo: Sundar Pichai thinks A.I. will cause a “big societal labor market disruptions.”]
Yeah, stop the toxins, stop the poisons, stop the AI-VR-AR poison and toxin developers now:
“Twenty years ago, when people exactly predicted what tech automation would do, there were very specific pronouncements of entire job categories which would go away. That hasn’t fully played out,” Pichai said.
Pichai isn’t the only tech CEO who thinks A.I. will have a major impact on the labor force. IBM’s CEO Arvind Krishna said earlier this week that A.I. could do “30% to 50%” of the repetitive office work. He added that if machines can do those tasks, it “frees up employees to take on higher-value work.” In his own company, Krishna said they were beginning to automate key tasks, and have been able to shift from 700 people doing HR-related manual tasks, to just 50.
And Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has previously told Fortune that today’s workforce should be prepared to work “hand in hand with A.I.” He added in a statement this week that A.I. could unlock potential on a large scale.
That’s fucking Fortune Magazine, the trade magazine for Faustians, Goebbels, Eichmann’s, Friedmans, Bernays, the lot of the disaster lizard people, Mengeles: That fucking Forbes:
“Forbes magazine’s new majority owner is a 28-year-old billionaire who made his money in self-driving car tech.”
…. Sociopath Central, piece of human stain, again, where or where is the botulism vinaigrette
Austin Russell, a 28-year-old automotive technology tycoon, acquired an 82% stake in Forbes Global Media Holdings, parent of the well-known business magazine.
The deal values the company at close to $800 million, the parties said in a statement Friday. The seller, Hong Kong-based Integrated Whale Media Investments will retain a minority stake. The Forbes family will not, though Steve Forbes will remain involved.
Russell is the chief executive officer of Luminar Technologies Inc., which provides antonymous driving technology to the automotive industry. The company, which has a $2.1 billion market capitalization, posted sales of $40.7 million last year and isn’t profitable.
Then, of course, gila monsters, box jellyfishes, cone snails, purple octopi sushi for the worst of the worst in his field, Gay, Hateful, Welfare Queen, a la LGBTAQ++, Peter fucking Thiel: “Palantir Technologies Inc. (NYSE:PLTR) Is About To Turn The Corner”
We feel now is a pretty good time to analyse Palantir Technologies Inc.’s (NYSE:PLTR) business as it appears the company may be on the cusp of a considerable accomplishment. Palantir Technologies Inc. builds and deploys software platforms for the intelligence community in the United States to assist in counterterrorism investigations and operations.
Here, this human stain, into AI, and he is the man, man, into surveillence capitalism deep, anal deep:
Digital media outlet Gawker declared bankruptcy and put itself up for sale after it was ordered to pay $140 million in a lawsuit for publishing the sex tape of wrestler Hulk Hogan. Hogan’s lawsuit was financially backed by Silicon Valley billionaire and Trump supporter Peter Thiel, who was outed as gay by a now-defunct Gawker blog. The case is now the focus of a new movie premiering at the Sundance Film Festival. We speak to Brian Knappenberger, the director of “Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press.” He previously directed “The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz” and “We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists,” about the hacker collective Anonymous.
Again, Judaism Central, Thiel: Journalists are trained to look for stories behind the stories. The reporters investigating the Hulk Hogan sex tape and the sale of the Las Vegas Journal-Review, however, found something unprecedented: billionaires covertly using their fortunes to silence the media. Nobody Speak explores what Peter Thiel’s financial support of the lawsuit against Gawker and Sheldon Adelson’s shadowy purchase of Nevada’s largest newspaper mean for future of journalism, the First Amendment, and the power of the ultra wealthy.
Have fun with this fucker, and send me any requests on Gila Monster poison fun, or, well, brown recluse spider venom, concentrated, or, shit, Mohave rattler miling, I’ve had them all in my hands, milked one of them.
I can’t get the nukes and neutron bombs for these Microsoft fucks, but shit, a little bit of dioxin, some, well, DARPA shit?
[News clip]: JD Vance will be the next Republican Senator, a victory for Peter Thiel who spent millions backing JD Vance.
But Thiel wasn’t always on top of the world. In 1996 Peter Thiel was lost — a law school graduate and the author of a middling book on the dangers of diversity.
[Peter Thiel]:The problem of racism, sexism, other forms of oppression have been vastly exaggerated.
But then he found something: venture capital. In just a few short years Thiel took a million dollar investment from friends and family and created a massive amount of wealth for himself. Lots of tech founders say they’re going to change the world — it’s a big part of the VC schtick — but Thiel is different.
You tell me that you aren’t at least hoping for a little bit of Greek potato dips gone bad for these million or so mother fuckers killing us, man:
We should all be honey badgers. Fuck these self-driving, AI crack cocaine loving, motherless mother fuckers. Have some fun, guys and gals and ze’s and zeh’s.
no amount of insane barkers, PT Barnums, Snake Oil salesmen/women/thems can ever top the elites’ plans for ‘Soylent Green is Us!’
You can rubber neck a million times a day until you are Gumby. Rubber necking the news, the deep analyses, the books and studies and journal research articles. You needn’t go far to understand the value “they” put on us, the useless eaters, breeders, breathers, shitters, urinators, sleepers.
So how far will this story go with the Team Red/Blue/White in this impending circus of whores, pimps, Johns/Janes, sicarios known as POTUS politics?
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Will we get Liz Pocahontas Warren to come to her super predator capitalist rescue?
Bernie or Obama to the rescue?
“We need a strong military, it is a dangerous world,” Sanders told voters in Iowa.”
“The first Black U.S. president, Barack Obama, was among the most aggressive defenders of white supremacy in history.”
Oh, that socialist (sic).
During his recent Democratic primary campaign, Sanders contrasted his policy proposals with the more hawkish ones put forth by former Secretary of State and presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton, so his involvement in a costly project for the military industrial complex may seem to clash with his rhetoric. In a February article called “Bernie Sanders Loves This $1 Trillion War Machine,” The Daily Beast took the senator to task for this very thing.
“The socialist trumpets his antiwar record,” the article said. “But he doesn’t mind expensive war machines — if they’re based in his home state.”
All of them are clueless in their Chlamydia Capitalism, as if the disease has rotted both brain and heart. There is no need for a soul in today’s digital gulag, but these people, up and down the aisle, are Eichmann’s. Imagine anyone looking hard at the 70 Percenters — you know, seventy percent of the earth covered in oceans. And what they, the seas, do for the globe? Nah, these chlamydians have more merchants of death and their Eichmann’s and small tendrils of shit-storm capitalists to please.
Nah, this ain’t big news like who will get the neon and wheat and PayDay loan contracts in the rump state of UkroNaziLandia.
Over the past century, says Pauly, the greatest pressure on marine life has been overfishing, which has caused huge declines in fish numbers. That could change. If we get overfishing under control, he continues, climate-related pressures will pose the biggest problem for marine life in the coming decades. A 2021 paper showed that the oceans are already committed to a fourfold greater oxygen loss, even if CO2 emissions stop immediately.
If you chart out the trends in warming and oxygen loss, the cataclysmic endpoint for the ocean thousands of years from now would be “a soup that you that you cannot live in,” says Pauly. The ocean already has sporadic hypoxic zones, he says, “but you could imagine all the dead zones of the world coalescing into one, and that is the end of the thing.” If we don’t get a handle on greenhouse gas emissions, he says, “we have to expect this to happen.” (source)
Nah, it’s about biopsy meat and cricket flour, thanks to the billionaires and dirty scientists aiding and abetting this global murder incorporated plan:
Yep, hear those crickets?
I’m dealing with my wife’s mother’s husband’s decline. Big time. No longer allowed to be in the big hospital on the hill, OHSU in Portland, his discharge orders will not allow him to head home just with this 74 year old woman dealing with his 220 pound frame, his inability to transfer himself, and even with a lift, the last weeks of his life he will need care, two on one at least.
Benefits gone for long term care, as most readers know, is the third step in this casino-usury-predatory-PayDay Loan Capitalism. This bankrupts families, and this great ugly Chlamydia Capitalist shit hole, with zero intelligent people in office, in the neocon group, in elite schools, you name, dumb and mean and rabid and full of chlamydia from so many intercourses with the devils — billionaires and millionaires calling the prostitution ring shots— will let the profiteers make bank — you know, $6,000 a month for bedpan and IV servicing and crappy food and overworked staff and abuse on top of abuse.
The systems in place are there only for the 5 percent in terms of Cadillac services and then for the 10 percent, Lexus services, and then the other 5 percent, the Prius services. The rest of us eats shit. Broken down Ford Pinto rusting somewhere:
Death, dying, and then in their boardrooms and Zoom Rooms and Webinars, they chant, “they are useless breeders and from useless broken families”; and it is our fault that the atomized and vapid families are scattered like cricket flour in the winds. The PSYOPS of media-media schools-schools workplace-workplaces family bullshit-family bullshit just takes us further into the collective dellusion, facilitating this rotting away of the soul and mind and body with these Chlamydia Capitalists running roughshod over our lives.
We’re now into the weeds of Income Cap Trusts and elder lawyers and getting social security checks handled by an elder attorney (not for free) to get Medicaid to kick in for the guy whose SS income is just barely over the absolute dead in your tracks federal povery level standard (sic). That Medicaid – – the one the blue and red teams want evicerated, and of course, Team Biden/Jill/Hunter wants more for the war(s) and is predicting the end of Social Security too.
If you don’t hate a Ukrainian yet, then you are full of the stuff, chlamydia and syphillis. Capitalism will rape you, poison you, and murder you from the inside out.
Man oh man, where is SCOTUS and Liz and Bernie when we need them to take their attention away from the Pandora Papers, Villa-Owning, Money-Hiding, Cocaine-Using Jewish Nazi Comic El President?
But a ProPublica investigation — based on court documents, property records, company training materials and interviews with 48 former franchise owners and dozens of homeowners who have sold to its franchises — found HomeVestors franchisees that used deception and targeted the elderly, infirm and those so close to poverty that they feared homelessness would be a consequence of selling.
If this one story, or the one about the dying world — the oceans losing O2 — doesn’t get to you, then, well, the syphillis from Chlamydia Capitalism’s whores has overtaken you.
One HomeVestors franchisee falsely claimed to a 72-year-old woman suffering from a hoarding problem that city code enforcement officers would take her house, according to court documents. An Arizona woman said in an interview that she was forced to live in her truck after trying unsuccessfully to cancel the sale of her home. One court case documented the plight of an elderly man in Florida who was told if he sold his condo he could continue living there temporarily. But he spent his final days alive waiting to be evicted when — after the contract was signed — the franchise owner informed him the homeowners association rules didn’t allow it.
“You were always lying to them. That’s what we were trained,” said Katie Southard, who owned a franchise in North Carolina. “There was a price that you could pay, but you would always go lower and tell them that was the price you could pay.”
Even when homeowners believed they were being taken advantage of and tried to back out of deals, franchise owners sued or filed paperwork to block a sale to another buyer. Some homeowners fought from hospital beds to keep their properties. At least three died shortly after signing sales contracts; a fourth died after three years of worrying about money. Their families told ProPublica that they are convinced the stress of losing their houses contributed to their loved ones’ deaths, though all had been ill or infirm.
That this is allowed in the unfree and dirty dealing free market is telling of how dirty the politicians are, how prostituting the population is, how deep the Eichmann is Our Hero mentality runs through the culture:
Who started this outfit, out of Texas, who are the employees who have regrets and those who go balls to the wall to extract every bloody cent out of vulnerable people? And, now, this outfit is managed by two rabbi-influenced folk:
Enjoy these pieces of decent journalism while they last . . . Know your enemies rabbi- influenced upbringings:
HomeVestors’ general counsel, Anthony Lowenberg; Maren Kasper, managing director of Bayview Asset Management, the investment management firm that bought HomeVestors in 2022
Again, Criminal Chlamydia Capitalism thrives in this dirty country of land theft, broken treaties, small pox seeded blankets, reservations, Beat the Indian/Savage Out of the Child Schools, and the constant hell Chlamydians put those people and their own people — us, gthe 80 Percenters — through. Should be illegal, no? No?
HomeVestors of America boasts that it helped pioneer the real estate investment industry. Founded in 1996 by a Texas real estate broker, the company has developed a system for snapping up problem properties — and expanded it to nearly 1,150 franchises in 48 states.
Unlike real estate agents, house flippers operate in a largely unregulated space. Real estate agents have a fiduciary responsibility to represent a homeowner’s best interests in negotiations, which is defined in state laws, licensing requirements and an industry code of ethics. But in most states, flippers don’t need a license.
WWJS. Who Would Jesus Swindle? WMSFTP? Would Moses Steal from the Poor? You get the picture, Allah and Buddha.
Capitalism runs on that flavor, that killer flavor of the day, of the nanosecond. Swindlers and Swines. Sicarios and Sycophants. Grifters and Godlessness.
A country of mass shootings, or smaller ones, is run by thieves and thespians, for sure, selling the Big Pharma Tap Dancing Bear of Lies:
Psychiatric treatment and psychiatric drugs are the common denominator of the growing number of shootings and other acts of violence, which are soaring right along with the soaring prescribing of psych drugs.
Here’s how analyst Michael Tracey sarcastically summed it up:
If a non-white person is a “white supremacist,” does that mean he believes in his own innate racial inferiority? @mtracey
Leave it to Tracey to expose the imbecility of a meme that defies reason but to which the media clings like the Holy Grail. It’s actually shocking that anyone can take this type of verbal hucksterism seriously when, in fact, the whole “non-white white supremacist” thing is one of the most absurd concoctions of all time. It’s pure gibberish.
So, where should we look for answers? Where can we find rational explanations for these sporadic acts of violence? (source = “Drugged-Up and Ready to Kill — Is there a link between Psychiatric Meds and Mass Shootings?” by Mike Whitney.
You will not get the Pharma Felons of the Fancy Mainstream Media to do stories on this aspect of all those school and mall and random shootings.
Close to 17% of Americans are taking psychiatric drugs with side effects such as acting aggressively, being angry, or violent and acting on dangerous impulses...
Psychotropic drugs are hardly helping when their side-effects include worsening depression, new or worsening anxiety, agitation or restlessness, panic attacks, new or worsening irritability, acting aggressively, being angry, or violent, acting on dangerous impulses, an extreme increase in activity and talking (mania), and other unusual changes in behavior or mood.
“Rather than helping the individual, psychotropics alienate, and push them into more and more potentially dangerous behavior,” states the president of the Florida chapter of CCHR, Diane Stein.
This situation was so egregious that in 2004, the Federal Drug Administration issued a “black-box” label warning indicating that the use of certain antidepressants to treat major depressive disorder in adolescents may increase the risk of suicide, homicide, and other acts of violence.
A study entitled Prescription Drugs Associated with Reports of Violence Towards Others… declared … In the 69-month reporting period we identified 484 evaluable drugs that accounted for 780,169 serious adverse event reports of all kinds…. The violence cases included 387 reports of homicide, 404 physical assaults, 27 cases indicating physical abuse, 896 homicidal ideation reports, and 223 cases described as violence-related symptoms.”“Psychiatric Drugs and Side Effects – The Unseen Hand Behind Violence in America“, Citizens Commission on Human Rights
Nah, just doesn’t make sense in a country that has that engineering degree to offensive weaponry military industrial complex company pipeline plumbed and ready:
Then, so, how much rubber necking is a young or old man to do in this crumbling, decayed and structurally violence and venomous country do? Will Substack readers and FU Book fanciers get on the bandwagon and begin yelling at the top of their lungs about each and every Chlamydia Capitalist Crime he or she can name and research?
a million blips daily across the wire service, across the transom of hell, will get you snookered quickly if you have a brain!
Are you hearing voices in your head yet? You can’t make this shit up as a fiction writer:
When the new 20-dollar bill is issued in 2030 it is scheduled to have on one side a portrait of Harriet Tubman, the fiery abolitionist who made over a dozen clandestine trips south to free enslaved people and later served as a scout for the Union Army during the Civil War. The back of the bill is supposed to have a statue of the slaveholding 7th president, Andrew Jackson, who was one of the principal organizers of the genocidal campaigns against Native Americans. It is a bit like Germany issuing a bill with Ann Frank on one side and Adolf Eichmann on the other. This schizophrenia reflects the bifurcation within the country where the dwindling majority of whites often embrace the so-called white replacement theory, seeing in the effort to honor the nation’s diversity and own up to the sins of white supremacy, a campaign to erase them. (Source)
The complete insanity of every aspect of America, and UK, and Klanada, and EU, well, it makes one want to puke and go Postal. But listen to those voices.
I was temporarily banned on Facebook today for posting some great music for commemorating the great victory the Soviets gave the world in defeating “those Nazis.” As opposed to the Nazi’s that have seeded themselves into USA, Klanada, EU, Israel (a new sort of Zionist Nazi) and throughout the Land of those Boys from Brazil.
Enjoy this song, Sacred War, 78 years later:
And in India?
Or this from a You Tube listener:
“We were taught this song, in English, at our primary school in Scotland back in the 1940’s. We loved it. When I left school, I went to Australia but never lost the urge to see the mighty Volga. I had to wait nearly 50 years but finally made it and rushed down the bank to dip my hands in its waters. Once I was back on the bus I explained why I had held them up for a few minutes and sang the song in English to the Russians on board. They had not realised that the song about “their” river was known so well outside Russia.”
Or Robeson, my hero: murdered by the CIA-MK ULTRA. Long live communism! Song of the Volga Boatmen.
Oh, the stupidity of thinking Paul attempted suicide:
JS: Robeson had been summoned multiple times to testify before the U.S. Congress about his ties to subversive groups, questions about his membership in the Communist Party.
Newsreel: The growing menace of communism arouses the House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee. Among the well-informed witnesses testifying is J. Edgar Hoover, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mr. Hoover speaks with authority on the subject.
Edgard Hoover: The Communist Party of the United States is a fifth column if there ever was one. It is far better organized than were the Nazis in occupied countries prior to their capitulation. They are seeking to weaken America just as they did in their era of obstruction when they were aligned with the Nazis. Their goal is the overthrow of our government. (Source)
Say it all about this fascist country:
Paul Robeson, the black actor, singer, and political radical, may have been a victim of CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb’s MK-ULTRA program. In our last issue we noted Gottlieb’s death and outlined his career of infamy. In the spring of 1961, Robeson planned to visit Havana, Cuba to meet with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. The trip never came off because Robeson fell ill in Moscow, where he had gone to give several lectures and concerts. At the time it was reported that Robeson had suffered a heart attack. But in fact Robeson had slashed his wrists in a suicide attempt after suffering hallucinations and severe depression.The symptoms came on following a suprise party thrown for him at his Moscow hotel.
Robeson’s son, Paul Robeson, Jr., has investigated his father’s illness for more than 30 years. He believes thathis father was slipped a synthetic hallucinogen called BZ by US intelligence operatives at the party in Moscow. The party was hosted by anti-Soviet dissidents funded by the CIA.
Robeson Jr. visited his father in the hospital the day after the suicide attempt. Robeson told his son that he felt extreme paranoia and thought that the walls of the room were moving. He said he had locked himself in his bedroom and was overcomeby a powerful sense of emptiness and depression before he tried to take his own life. (source)
Fucking Jewish Gottlieb, from WikiCIApedia: Gottlieb was born to Hungarian Jewish immigrant parents Fanny and Louis Gottlieb in the Bronx on August 3, 1918. His older brother was plant biologist David Gottlieb. A stutterer since childhood, he earned a master’s degree in speech therapy from San Jose State University after retiring from the CIA. He was born with a club foot, which got him rejected from military service in World War II but did not prevent his pursuit of folk dancing, a lifelong passion.
With a country that hallucinates on stupidity, where dumbdowing is the core curriculum, where the school to prison pipeline is one angle, but then, the engineering school to military defense pipeline is another, we are surrounded by dupes and by heathens.
How can sane people not become insane, just the drip-drip-drip of death by a thousand mililiters of pure hubris, bullshit, propaganda, PSYOPS, marketing, and erasure.
It’s in the bloodline:
That fucking bloodline:
The grotesque medieval spectacle that was the coronation of “King” Charles is an egregious, bare-fisted insult to all those African people around the world who suffered, and continue to suffer, from the crimes of slavery and colonialism under the British Crown. The celebration of the coronation of Charles by some African people around the world is a nasty reminder that mental slavery still continues and the Negro mind has yet to be decolonized . What is there to celebrate? A sallow, curdled, amoral, and imbred family of ne’er-do-wells who live off the public purse and reap the benefits of centuries of slavery and savagery, genocide and degeneracy?
Of Charles’ namesakes – Charles I and Charles II – the first Charles authorized the trade in African people to the Americas, the second Charles expanded that trade . While Charles I was knocked off the absolute monarchical perch and publicly beheaded, ending once and for all the belief in the Divine Right of Kings, the latest Charlie continues to inherit the African dividends of his predecessors. (Yo, Chuck: The South Africans want their stolen diamond, “The Great Star of Africa,” back immediately!) (source)
Indeed, so, we are hearing voices now, and like Robeson, even with genius level thinking and articulation, we are just bones to dust in the minds of these freaks of nature — neocons, Zionists, Anglo Saxons, Nazis, Isra-Hellions.
Insane indeed in their world:
Ahh, Eduardo: Insane, no?
The big bankers of the world, who practise the terrorism of money, are more powerful than kings and field marshals, even more than the Pope of Rome himself. They never dirty their hands. They kill no-one: they limit themselves to applauding the show. Their officials, international technocrats, rule our countries: they are neither presidents nor ministers, they have not been elected, but they decide the level of salaries and public expenditure, investments and divestments, prices, taxes, interest rates, subsidies, when the sun rises and how frequently it rains. However, they don’t concern themselves with the prisons or torture chambers or concentration camps or extermination centers, although these house the inevitable consequences of their acts. The technocrats claim the privilege of irresponsibility: ‘We’re neutral’ they say.
Eduardo Galeano
These beautiful people want us locked up, like Robeson: “Policies such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s CARE Court and numerous “anti-camping” ordinances are reinterpreting existing legal protections to allow for the removal and detention of people who are unhoused and deemed mentally ill, under threat of involuntary commitment or even conservatorship.” (source) Psychiatric Incarceration Isn’t Treatment — It’s Violence, Survivors Say!
Go to Mad in America:
Mad in America’s mission is to serve as a catalyst for rethinking psychiatric care in the United States (and abroad). We believe that the current drug-based paradigm of care has failed our society, and that scientific research, as well as the lived experience of those who have been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, calls for profound change.
Our non-profit organization promotes such change in several ways:
(1) We publish a webzine, madinamerica.com, that provides news of psychiatric research, original journalism articles, and a forum for an international group of writers—people with lived experience, peer specialists, family members, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, program managers, journalists, attorneys, and more—to explore issues related to this goal of “remaking psychiatry.”
(2) We produce podcasts on MIA Radio that features interviews with researchers, activists and leaders in the lived-experience community that similarly explore themes related to “remaking psychiatry.”
(3) We run Mad In America Continuing Education, which hosts online courses taught by leading researchers in the field. These courses provide a scientific critique of the existing paradigm of care, and tell of alternative approaches that could serve as the foundation for a new paradigm, one that emphasizes psychosocial care, and de-emphasizes the use of psychiatric medications, particularly over the long-term.
(4) We provide support to a network of MIA Global affiliate sites in nine countries.
We believe that this mix of journalism, education and societal discussion can provide the seed for a much-needed remaking of mental health care in the United States and globally. It is evident that our current “brain disease” model is flawed in so many ways, and we believe that it needs to be replaced by a model that emphasizes our common humanity, and promotes robust, long-term recovery and wellness.
We also believe it is important to provide readers with the opportunity to add their voices to this discussion. We encourage readers to leave comments (see our posting guidelines), and to submit personal stories and op-ed submissions.
We welcome feedback and comments on how we can improve this website, and continue to build an online community that can be a societal force for change. (source)
The Hearing Voices approach was originated through the work of Marius Romme and a woman to whom he was providing treatment, Patsy Hage. Not only did Patsy directly challenge Marius to expand his thinking and accept her experiences as real, but he also witnessed the power of peer support first hand when he observed her and others receiving treatment at a local hospital impacting one another simply by taking the space to talk frankly and non-judgmentally with one another about hearing voices. Since that time, Marius and his wife and colleague Sandra Escher, have written several books and made many appearances to talk about what has grown out of that initial learning, ultimately forming the foundation of this International movement.
This society is all about simulation, degradation, debunking our own humanity, and throwing all in for the technocrats and scientists who DO NOT have humanity, and their SOP is money money money. Grants, fame, fawning over. Until we are inhuman.
Hearing voices yet?
How about that inner voice which says THEY are the enemy and YOU are a human?
You feel the eye upon you?
You ant some sanity on May 9? Putin:
“Happy Victory Day!
Happy holiday that commemorates the honour of our fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers who glorified and immortalised their names by defending our Fatherland. They saved the humankind from Nazism through immeasurable courage and immense sacrifice.
Today, our civilisation is at a crucial turning point. A real war is being waged against our country again but we have countered international terrorism and will defend the people of Donbass and safeguard our security.
For us, for Russia, there are no unfriendly or hostile nations either in the west or in the east. Just like the vast majority of people on the planet, we want to see a peaceful, free and stable future.
We believe that any ideology of superiority is abhorrent, criminal and deadly by its nature. However, the Western globalist elites keep speaking about their exceptionalism, pit nations against each other and split societies, provoke bloody conflicts and coups, sow hatred, Russophobia, aggressive nationalism, destroy family and traditional values which make us human. They do all that so as to keep dictating and imposing their will, their rights and rules on peoples, which in reality is a system of plundering, violence and suppression.”
The Western Civilization is mentally ill:
Caitlin resonate with you:
This civilization is so mentally ill that you’ll get treated like a gibbering lunatic for expressing the most sane and rational opinions anyone can possibly express. Something as basic as “The world’s most powerful government should stop ramping up nuclear brinkmanship on multiple fronts” will get you treated like a kook, when really it’s so obvious and common sense it shouldn’t even need to be said. That’s how crazy mass-scale brainwashing has made everyone.
❖
I will never support any form of capitalism, because no form of capitalism — real or hypothetical — will ever have an answer to the problems of ecocide and the need to care for the needful.
Every capitalism-based solution that has ever been proposed for these problems is self-evidently ridiculous; the notion that privatizing the natural world can preserve oceans and rainforests is infantile nonsense that’s refuted by all of human history, as is the notion that the needful can be cared for solely by voluntary charity. No intellectually honest person believes this is true. No ancap who’s thought hard enough about ecocide and caring for the needful sincerely believes that capitalism can address these problems. At their most honest, they’ll say that ecocide and starvation are necessary sacrifices that must be made for the freedoms and conveniences they want to have for themselves. (source)
I am seeing the death of agency, the total immune compromising aspect of Capitalism, that Chlamydia Capitalism, as inflammatory disease par excellence! Old men and women in cancer wards, getting the poisons of our time, the pure death $6000 a month care home, places of death . . . . That smile, man, of each and every one of those two-bit criminals called politicians, judges, adjudicators, DAs, CEOs, middle managers, the Eichmann’s Big and Small, the finance insurance real estate crime syndicates, all cartels, all sircarios, all buttoned down mass murderers. You know the history of this country, of war, of that country, UK, of war . . . .
Why oh why don’t Zebras get Ulcers?
Then, of course, it all goes to the Value of Nothing, sum zero game:
Inflamed: Deep Medicine And The Anatomy Of Injustice’ reveals a critical observation — that inflammation repeatedly connects poor health and structural injustice, ACTIVIST, FILMMAKER and bestselling author Raj Patel was dressed as a genetically modified tomato when he met Rupa Marya MD, more than a decade ago. Marya says the communities she and Patel have each had the chance to witness and work with, informed the story they told in their book
“… which is that our bodies, our societies and our planet are being damaged through the same cosmology that has severed our relationships with each other and to the web of life that keeps us healthy.”
“Are you hearing those voices yet? You better listen!
+–+
“Among the people of your culture, which want to destroy the world?”
“As far as I know, no one specifically wants to destroy the world.”
“And yet you do destroy it, each of you. Each of you contributes daily to the destruction of the world. Why don’t you stop?”
I shrugged. “Frankly, we don’t know how.”
“You’re captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live.”
“I’m telling you this because the people of your culture are in much the same situation. Like the people of Nazi Germany, they are the captives of a story.”
“I know of no such story.”
“You mean you’ve never heard of it?”
“That’s right.”
Ishmael nodded. “That’s because there’s no need to hear of it. There’s no need to name it or discuss it. Every one of you knows it by heart by the time you’re six or seven. Black and white, male and female, rich and poor, Christian and Jew, American and Russian, Norwegian and Chinese, you all hear it. And you hear it incessantly, because every medium of propaganda, every medium of education pours it out incessantly. And, hearing it incessantly, you don’t listen to it. There’s no need to listen to it. It’s always there humming away in the background, so there’s no need to attend to it at all.”
“A German who couldn’t bring himself to take a place in Hitler’s story had an option: he could leave Germany. You don’t have that option. Anywhere you go in the world, you’ll find the same story being enacted, and if you don’t take a place in it you won’t get fed.”
“True.”
“Mother Culture teaches you that this is as it should be. Except for a few thousand savages scattered here and there, all the peoples of the earth are now enacting this story. This is the story man was born to enact, and to depart from it is to resign from the human race itself, is to venture into oblivion. Your place is here, participating in this story, putting your shoulder to the wheel, and, as a reward, being fed. There is no ‘something else.’ To step out of this story is to fall off the edge of the world. There’s no way out of it except through death.” (Ishmael)
Misogyny, the power dynamic, the roots of a male bully, the pure hatred of a wife or intimate partner, all of the baggage of men in this society playing the macho game, play into death!
“If I die, I don’t want other women to suffer what I am suffering. I want them to be listened to.” — Maria Teresa Macias (source)
My friend’s about to get put through one wringer after another wringer. After four years of torment, the yo-yo of leaving the abusive husband, even for months, but coming back, she finally had that breaking point: she was almost suffocated to death by this husband, this murderer-want-to-be.
Months have passed since the guy ended up busted in jail, indicted too, but there is no plea deal, and the trial starts soon.
My friend comes from a family that is not into the nefarious side of things, and the ugly, cheating, conniving American landscape is not their everyday life. The people in their lives apparently are not psycho-sociopaths, narcissists, violent ideation freaks.
Throughout the six months leading up to the criminal trial — she feels that SHE is the one on trial — she has covered much territory on her own feelings and what others have to say. Some stupid, uncaring and uninitiated crap coming from the mouths of not just people who know what happened, so called laypersons, but also from people in the judicial system, just add to the crime of stupidity of the masses and the dum-downing of the culture and hidden misogony.
She’s on a one-two punching out of this hell fight by sticking with the criminal case and filing for divorce and sticking that one out, too. There are no guarantees he will end up in prison, and the divorce in Oregon is tricky. You can’t bring up what he did to her for five years in a divorce case.
The law in Anglo Saxon USA is busted, fucked up.
Time, money, restraining orders, her own anxiety, her luck getting a decent counselor and the various levels of pure stupidity and hellish thinking bombarding her to the question of why she stayed with him the first, second, I don’t know how many more times she actually left him (and returned), this plays are hard hand on emotions.
She’s from Canada, and she ended up meeting this pig of a human in a Central American country. She had it made, having been in this country for several years, and opening up her little cafe which was the toast of the town among ex-pats.
“I wasn’t looking for anyone to get serious with, or even date.”
This is how these monsters work the playing field — they prey on the perfect mark.
From 1980 to 2008, nearly 1 out of 5 murder victims were killed by an intimate partner (Cooper & Smith, 2011). In fact, available research shows that women are more likely to be killed by an intimate partner (husband, boyfriend, same-sex partner, or ex) than by anyone else (Catalano, 2013; Violence Policy Center, 2015). Approximately 2 out of 5 female murder victims are killed by an intimate partner (Cooper & Smith, 2011). In 2013, fifteen (15) times as many females were murdered by a male they knew than were killed by male strangers. For victims who knew their offenders, 62% were wives, common-law wives, ex-wives, or girlfriends of the offenders (Violence Policy Center, 2015). (source)
She knows now what she was dealing with then, but those red flags are not always in your face. She now sees there were dozens of red flags with this guy. That reality gets her down, suicidal, and at times, she just wants to flee.
Freeze, fight, flight.
Want some red banners flapping in the storm sky? These may include one or more of the following:
A hatred of or hostility toward women.An entrenched culture of misogyny can manifest in some individuals as social exclusion, adherence to gender roles, sex discrimination, hostility, patriarchy, male privilege, belittling of women, disenfranchisement of women, violence against women and sexual objectification, and is thought to be one of the supporting factors for partner abuse to continue.
Cruelty toward animals. An abuser may use harsh punishments or completely neglect pets or other animals they encounter, or put them at unnecessary levels of risk such as leaving a dog tied up with no shade or water.
Jealousy. This often comes under the guise of caring so much about their partner, before morphing into a more stalking nature—asking who you’re with, where you’re going, etc.
A controlling nature. Again, abusers will say this is in concern for your well-being. But soon, it can escalate into telling you what you are allowed and not allowed to do.
Inability to admit fault, take blame. This also looks like blame-shifting. Everything is someone else’s fault or the blame is constantly shifted to a partner. Abusers often think the world is against them and they are a victim of their circumstances.
Desperation to move the relationship quickly. If a new partner confesses their love for you after the second date, asks you to move in together after a week, uses words like “soulmate” or says they’ve never met anyone like you or that you were meant for each other, this can be a red flag. Abusers often want to isolate victims or make them emotionally dependent on them as quickly as possible.
Hypersensitivity. Many abusers get easily upset over any inconvenience or personal slight. Something as minor as a partner suggesting a different restaurant for dinner can be made out by an abuser as an attack on them.
The guy is a product of his sadistic and stupid father who beat him and fed him and his brother alcohol young. Daddy was some macho pilot, Top Gun fool of a military flight jockey, Vietnam, and eventually, this daddy got murdered by his second wife, for, well, your guess is mine.
This guy, my friend’s husband, is classic broken arrogant white boy, football player, up to a point footballer, and college fraternity type. A real hatred of women and triple hatred of true liberal thinking. Borish, know it all, and it is amazing, still, for me, after decades dealing with domestic violence in many forms in my various jobs, that anyone of her caliber would see anything attractive about him.
In a Central American country, as someone with some money from his old man’s death, murdered by his stepmother, this abuser had gotten the royal treatment of a king in this place, as he had the money to throw around/away . . . money for booze . . . and he looked down on the Spanish speakers, and his six-foot frame towered over the Mayan-derived people. The ex-pat communities in other countries are sour and sick and harmful to the cultures and countries. Perfect audience for guys like this abuser.
The white guy — the Yanqui — who had disposable money and time — got a pass from the poor people of these third world countries. Happens all the time.
++—++
Abuse is not a mental illness nor is it caused by a mental illness. Many individuals who live with mental health issues do not abuse their partners.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder. This presents as a lack of empathy, constant seeking of validation, arrogance or grandiose behavior. Narcissists will belittle others to appear superior, exaggerate their talents and monopolize conversations to make others feel inferior.
Borderline Personality Disorder. This mental health disorder, once again, doesn’t cause abuse, but its traits can certainly perpetuate abusive choices. Borderline personality disorder is defined by self-image issues, difficulty managing emotions or behaviors, an intense fear of abandonment or instability, frequent mood swings, impulsiveness and inappropriate anger.
Psychopathy. A person defined as a psychopath feels no guilt, shame or remorse. More concerning, a psychopath’s brain actually shows an increased response in the ventral striatum, an area known to be involved in pleasure, when imagining others in pain, reports ScienceDaily.
Antisocial Personality Disorder. This is sometimes called sociopathy. These individuals share many similar traits to psychopaths—feeling no remorse, not understanding the difference between right and wrong—and also like the feeling of dominating others and having power and control. Unlike psychopathy, which is thought to be genetic, sociopaths are made through a traumatic event in their past. “Sociopaths can be predators, so you may naturally feel uncomfortable being alone with them,” says Bill Eddy, licensed clinical social worker. “You may suddenly get the feeling that you want to get out of a situation. Go, and ask questions later. (source)
“Maya Angelou once said, ‘When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.’ If we think about that in the context of potential abusive partners, then we need to look no further than some of the words they choose to speak.”
These fellows are manipulative and mean, but know how to cover up all of that hatred in public situations. But not for long. This fellow ordered the book, Rape of the Mind, and listened to the anti-women podcasters of the day. He called women bitches and cunts. Worse. He was/is two-faced. He would never listen to this fellow:
Ted Bunch, the co-founder of A Call to Men, says one of the keys to pulling men and boys out of the dangerous pipeline of misogyny is to understand where it starts. A Call to Men partners with schools, companies and professional sports organizations to promote what it calls “healthy masculinity:” concepts like kindness, respect for others, and an understanding that, in a patriarchal society, men have an opportunity to use their power to protect.
“(Misogyny) teaches men that aggression, violence, and the domination of others is somehow embedded in their DNA,” Bunch says. “It’s not. It is the way men are socialized. In a male-dominated patriarchal society, all are taught that women and girls have less value, or that on some level they are the property.” (source)
Now, the small rural county where I live and where I met the victim, and who is winding through the legal system, it is like so many other counties — mostly female judges, female DAs and ADAs, female victims rights workers, et al. The system is clogged with broken people’s issues, from substance abuse, to broken laws derived from the substance abuse — thieving, burglaring, motor vehicle citations, trespassing, and alas, the violence that comes with booze and hits of whatever drug is available.
My friend is not feeling great about all the busllshit she has gone through — the mother of the son, a warped human in her own right, doing her warped stuff showing up months ago from out of state at night, threatening her, and more crap, like threatening to take her dog away (a gift from the mother-in-law) to her.
This is how these people roll, these dysfunctional but sociopathic people work — it runs in the family, and they scam, do insurance fraud stuff, and so much more. This fellow has a record, and he’s squirmed out of other charges. He’s hoping to go to trial and intimidate the victim, his wife, who he attempted to kill by putting a pillow on her head and forcing his big body down onto her.
She is wondering what sort of personality she has developed over the years to have allowed her to stick with this abuser. She wonders what this battered wife syndrome is. She wonders why so many people even in the “system” have little understanding of how this abusive situation is complicated by a hundred different “things”, that the women are targeted, that the men are after so many power dynamics, and in fact, many would like to see their first kill of a woman.
A kill could be a suidice, too, whatever gets these guys off on pain and torment.
In 1933 Meerloo began to study the methods by which systematic mental pressure brings people to abject submission, and by which totalitarians imprint their subjective “truth” on their victims’ minds. In “The Rape of the Mind” he goes far beyond the direct military implications of mental torture to describing how our own culture unobtrusively shows symptoms of pressurizing people’s minds. He presents a systematic analysis of the methods of brainwashing and mental torture and coercion, and shows how totalitarian strategy, with its use of mass psychology, leads to systematized “rape of the mind.” He describes the new age of cold war with its mental terror, verbocracy, and semantic fog, the use of fear as a tool of mass submission and the problem of treason and loyalty, so loaded with dangerous confusion. The “Rape of the Mind” is written for the interested layman, not only for experts and scientists. (source)
A rape of the mind, as in battered spouse perpetration, is not far from physical rape:
Men’s sexual aggression toward women is a pervasive problem in U.S. society. Between 25–57% of men report having perpetrated a sexually aggressive behavior against a woman since the age of 14 (Abbey, Jacques-Tiura, & LeBreton, 2011; Abbey, McAuslan, & Ross, 1998; Davis, Kiekel et al., 2012; Koss, Gidycz, & Wisniewski, 1987; White & Smith, 2004). These acts range from verbally coerced sexual contact to physically forced penetrative sex, with verbal coercion and the victim’s incapacitation the most commonly reported tactics. This wide range in prevalence rates has been explained by differences in the scope of tactics and types of sex included in the survey as well as the procedures used to insure participants’ privacy (Abbey, Parkhill, & Koss, 2005; Tyler, Hoyt, & Whitbeck, 1998). Many of these acts do not fit legal definitions of sex crimes, and researchers avoid using language in their surveys that label these acts as crimes. Nonetheless, most of the studies cited above use phrases such as “when you knew she was unwilling.” Thus, when participants provide an affirmative response, they recognize that they made a woman engage in sex against her wishes. (source)
Look. There are hundreds of influencers and dozens of famous misogynists out there making a buck and recruiting millions in their fucking hate game. The guy my Canadian friend hooked up with is prime pickings for this hate. He has constantly put down women, and, yes, my Canadian friend is not that sort of warped woman, actually. She is independent, a feminist of sorts (more so NOW). How did she get wound around the guy’s pinky? Oh, what an evil web men weave, and it goes deep, real deep into patriarchy and pornograpy and perversion and war and toxic masculinity and blind patriotism and violence and cops and steroids and war TV-Video.
While espousing motivational messages about fitness and financial well-being, controversial influencer Andrew Tate is also a self-described misogynist who advocates male supremacy and celebrates violence against women. Even though he’s been banned from TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, he’s gained a massive online following from video clips posted by fans that garner millions of views and shares. On Twitter, he has more than 4 million followers.
The 36-year-old American-born, British-raised former kickboxing champion was arrested on December 29 in Bucharest, Romania, on charges of rape and human trafficking. Tate employed as many as 75 women in a webcam business; some have accused him of imprisoning them and forcing them to perform sex work. Many of his fans are expressing supportforhisplight, arguing that Tate is a positive force on men and that the Romanian government is trying to silence him for telling the truth. Tate has encouraged that view. As he was being led away in handcuffs, he could be heard telling cameras that “the Matrix has attacked me,” and he tweeted, “It seems every generation’s great revolutionaries suffer from unfair imprisonment.”
Unfortunately, the Canadian’s country’s overlord, UK, is rife with misogyny, from the bars to the barristers:
Violent offenders who committed attacks in front of children, threatened victims with knives or were convicted of multiple offences are among those spared jail in recent months, according to court records for England and Wales.
The cases were prosecuted under a new law brought in last June that made strangulation and suffocation specific offences in the Domestic Abuse Act. Before the new offences were created, strangulation was often treated as common assault, which carries a maximum six-month sentence. Those convicted under the new law can be jailed for up to five years. (source)
So, this bloke’s defense attorney is court appointed, and I know where she went to law school. She is using some bullshit gold digger offense in his defense. My friend filed divorce proceedings when the fucker was in jail — three days afterward. You know, to get the healing ball going. Get the law to see that she is breaking ties with the fucker on all levels.
Just that action for the defense lawyer points in her mind that the charges filed against the accused (the cops filed the charges and the DA filed them in more legalistic perpetuity and the grand juror agreed to indict, so tthe victim had nothing to do with specific codes and penalties) were motivated by money?
This guy is a deadbeat, with bank accounts only in his name, and with the house in his name, and secret this and secret that, and money coming in from inheritence, this guy is not flush with cash. They are married, and he did all the things an abuser does to isolate a woman.
Again, the female defense attorney (court appointed, in private practice) is utilizing the stacked deck against the victim — for some sick reason, in this rule of law, Anglo Saxon based shit storm legal system, my friend can’t bring up past incidents of abuse by the guy, unless, I suppose, he takes the stand.
Then, ADA is not a ball buster, so there is that. One plea set out was prison time, five years, but then no counter plea from the defense, which in my mind tells me this guy’s doing his sway the jurors bit — thinking he can sway the jurors with his white man’s charm.
He wants to kill a woman. That’s what he said to my friend, and another person was on the phone with her and heard that statement from him. He loves these Tate fellows, and the other guys, who, Cohen, what have you. Pure hateful men.
This guy hates his mother, hates women in general, and he goes to bars and throws around money for rounds, and unfortunately, we are a broken country, dumb as hell, and that includes women, so many of them fall for this bullshit having some attention paid to their clevage or cute eyes from some pathetic pair of balls and a dick.
Feminism is a specific thing, and it’s anti war, anti capitalism really, so the flip side of the pigs out there are nanny freaks, who insist on any narrative outside their PC box to be censored. Does Tate get a green light since we are in that free speech mode? Algorithms here and there, and what the hell about real discourse?
This is not an aside: The Twitter Files: The Censorship Industrial Complex with Matt Taibbi. I am so against the flip side of Tate. The chlamydia capitalists on both sides of the bacterial manure pile of red-blue politics are both dangerous and fascist. Taibbi isn’t some redneck of misgynist. Take a look here:
But the point is that the judicial system accuses the accuser of lying, and the law hobbles a victim of domestic abuse. The restraining order she had to file against him and his family, more crap. The trial is coming up, but she has not been prepped, and word is she will a few hours the day before the trial starts.
Witnesses for the abuser could be drinking buddies who can say they never saw abuse while in the husband and wife’s company? That’s it in America, as a defense? Any fourth grader knows an abuser can charm on the outside, can hide their hate, in public, but then go irrate in private. That’s how it works.
Crime victim advocates are not all there, emotionally and chutzpah wise. The deputies are running around like chickens with heads cut off. Meth, booze, child abuse, theft, homelessness.
This punk thinks because he has some undergraduate degree and since he now has been off booze for six months (he is a total alcoholic, with liver disease, and more) that the jurors will see him as reformed? Time served in county lock-up? Lessons learned? Reformed? Rehabilitated? He has almost a dozen charges against him. He’s been in jail, with a big bond he never attempted to pay, because he doesn’t need much to survive . . . and he wants to run, flee. He has never had a legitimate job, and alas, there is a good chance he thinks he’ll get to run, and live off inheritence mullah, in a country with brown people, or anywhere his type is treated like a king on the outside but reviled on the inside.
I do know that the profile of an abuser with his past, his family line, his way of thinking doesn’t look good for restorative justice. He has a past relationship where the woman wanted/want nothing to do with him and his verbal abuse. One day when a woman gets out of a relationship and then out of the legal shit, she sees that it has been a nightmare, and she wonders how the fuck she could have been with THAT man for THAT long.
It’s C-PTSD, and in the end, many women never get into another relationship, and some get right back with those fucks who are targeting women who have been abused. The rest of their lives they do not trust almost anyone. Fear, anxiety, hyper vigilance, all of that, and counseling, so can we sue the fuck out of an ex=husband abuser?
The judicial system here and on the otherside of the pond kills those who come forth to report domestic abuse. “Offenders convicted under new law in England and Wales spared jail, analysis carried out by the Observer show.”
terminal velocity is for me the head-first, feet-pointed, straight into the miasma of all our hell’s — otsukaresama deshita.
Then you come out one end of the worm hole jitter bugging, while part of your brain is squeezed into black hole nothingness which is for me the whole of it all, the big picture stitched into your narrative, kind reader, and fused with mine.
Until there is a galvanizing force. Again, who and why is big for me, here at ‘Terminal Velocity,’ or elsewhere because the reader is in fact the captain of the ship of words and pasted together sentences that come hurly burly from my noggin’.
So the microcosm, the representative things, all come crashing into my psyche as I attempt to do just “normal” stuff.
Duh, little town of Newport, Oregon, and here we have Founders’ Day Parade, with Highway 101 closed down for the procession of vehicles and fire trucks and horses to file through with bundles of candies to throw at the spectators.
Shit, the triggers were galore, if I was really seated with any form of deep running PTSD: all the U$A flags lining both sides of the road; meeting at the Walmart parking lot for float decorating; all the rah-rah cops and sheriffs; even that coast guard rescue helicopter overhead.
I threw in with the Special Olympics since I am a coach for the Lincoln County contingent. I would have been on the road to Portland, to attend to my wife’s mother’s husband, 78, at OHSU, with the second major glioblastoma surgery cut getting infected, and back to the hospital. We delayed that 150-mile trip a day. That’s a death sentence, the form of brain cancer, and he opts for heroic measures at age 78. He is basically bed bound, and incontinent, and then his wife is 24/7 caretaker. What a hell of a life at age 75 and 78. He had a 104 temperature, and the fine print on the surgical procedure said an infection was possible for the bone flap they cut out to get to the cranium and gray matter while digging out the array of cancer mats, sort of like mats of seaweed in the ocean. The flap is now cut away, out, and a mesh has been inserted, and the fellow lost who he was and was catatonic for a few days, and alas, doctors shooting him up with the most power antibiotics and steriods, the solution, that combo has brought him around a bit, but he’s not the same old father-in-law.
Surgeries and hospital stays totaling $180,000 each time, and then the skilled nursing aftercare, all of it on our dime, US taxpayers (not Zelensky) vis-a-vis the VA and Medicare. The resonating feature is, shit dog, give me my .357 magnum and, bam-oh-bam. Or, if I had some sort of other terminal cancer? One-way trip to Belize or even Cozumel, and then a quick swim with scuba tank to 200 feet, and bye bye regulator and hello barricuda and dark, deep arm trench.
Or, extra pills, extra tequila, a little bit of this and that for the last few meals, a line of cocaine as long as a garter snake, and then seppuku without the sword.
I’m looking at the people on the side of the road, and they are a funny mix of folk, and there is a curious brokenness in their eyes, and their frames and faces all have similar cracked DNA and addiction and post-addiction hues. I am their friend, for sure, but with another turn of the cheek, shit, I see this in Wisconsin, everywhere, there are some sad sacks for Americanos: many are stunted, failure to thrive folk, and others are just huge, loggers and worker bees. The Mexicans and Guatemalans here are short and their broods are facing lots of weight issues. The candy shit is representative of the sweet coated know-nothing of society.
These people are the ones the elites, the beautiful ones, the Poison Ivy Leaguers see as universal marks — Soylent Green is Food, or useless eaters, useless beings, deplorables, but for now, marks, since the systems of oppression are set up to gouge every last dime from the forty-seven percent (remember Romney and his 47 Percent Solution?)
“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it — that that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. … These are people who pay no income tax. … [M]y job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” (source)
Ahh, those payroll taxes we all fucking pay. Ahh, all those combinations of state, local, sales, gas and property taxes we all pay. Ahh, all those fines, fees, tolls, penalities, tickets, add-ons, all of that, working for peanuts. In 2011, 78,000 tax filers with incomes between $211,000 and $533,000 paid no income taxes; 24,000 households with incomes of $533,000 to $2.2 million paid no income taxes, and 3,000 tax filers with incomes above $2.2 million paid no income taxes.
Yes, those Clinton-Obama-Trump-Biden-Romney-et al deplorables, useless eaters, we sit on the curb and wait for the parade of cars, trucks, cool souped up vintage wheels . . . and the candy! It’s a hell of a society, no tribes, just amorphous groupings of people who toil, work, have their small values, and are the fodder, man.
Here, Australian Caitlin Johnstone says it clearly what the Romney’s and bigger fishes in their shit pond want for us:
Your rulers do not care what race you are. They do not care if you are gay, transgendered or nonbinary. They do not care how many bullets you are allowed to have in your gun. They do not care whether you are allowed to have an abortion or not. They do not care if you are racist, sexist, ableist, ageist, xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic or fatphobic. They do not care about diverse representation in politics or media, and they do not care about any lack thereof. All they care about is that we all keep thinking, speaking, working, consuming and voting in ways which keep them rich and powerful and keep us poor and powerless. And they will happily keep us arguing as intensely as possible about the things they do not care about so that we don’t turn our attention to the things they do care about.
This doesn’t mean those other issues aren’t real concerns, and in fact our rulers stand everything to gain by exacerbating the injustices involving issues they don’t care about in order to keep attention in those convenient areas. But the solution to the problems our rulers don’t care about is the same as the solution to the problems our rulers do care about: overthrow our rulers. (source)
No fucking phalanx of “Go Jew Zelensky” signs today. No Nazi flags of the blue and yellow vintage. No “My Heart in Ukraine” shit out there on Highway 101. I wonder why? But all of us, even a man lost of tribe like me, in permanent terminal velocity, have zero power to pull any levers.
I did see this one later in my smalltown at the blues, bike and beer festival:
I stood in the road while his fancy SUV took off, with my own finger in the air. Just wanting a conversation. No way, Jose.
This world is la-la land, immediate gratification, people in their 50s who are giddy over Disney cruises, who wear fucking Kansas City Chiefs sweatshirts.
Booze, beach, bikes. As we continually get screwed blued and tatooed by the overlords.
Wisconsin Afterglow
I’ll continue forward and backward with the Wisconsin Fear Porn, for sure, coming up, but not today (you must be bored by now with all my bantering). You have read the many parts to this pasted together Wisconsin life in many parts. This Wisconsin fellow, KK, is amazing, and he is on the tightrope:
My decompression now is getting some of this shit off my chest, and to regroup, as both KK and a fellow, Robert, have emailed me some things regarding the series and my own presence up north in Wisconsin. Vital words from two men, fellows in the slipstream of life. Mostly women do this memoir and self-referential stuff, and it’s me shedding light on thoughtful words from two blokes. Enjoy:
Here, from Robert Norris, who is in Japan, and I am still winding around to finishing up his memoir and writing some good words about his life, man, and the conscientious objector Norris, his Vietnam tornado of broken dreams and new history . . . the linchpin in his book, but his life is more than that time in prison, and he is more than the sum total of being a resister. Mother, man, mother!
He’s deeply ensconced in Japanese language, the culture, and he is there as an ex-pat, but so much more, having married a Japanese woman. He will not be upset that I include his most recent email to me, since it reveals only goodness and concern and deep analysis about himself, the word, and witnin him.
Hey Paul,
In Japanese, there are many formulaic expressions that lend themselves to a wide variety of interpretations, nuances, and uses, all depending on the tone of voice, the social circumstance, the intonation, the tense, and the addition (or lack) of prefixes and suffixes. One of them is “o-tsukare-sama deshita.” The expression came to my mind a lot while reading your recent Substack series about KK and Wisconsin.
Hey Paul,
In Japanese, there are many formulaic expressions that lend themselves to a wide variety of interpretations, nuances, and uses, all depending on the tone of voice, the social circumstance, the intonation, the tense, and the addition (or lack) of prefixes and suffixes. One of them is “o-tsukare-sama deshita.” The expression came to my mind a lot while reading your recent Substack series about KK and Wisconsi
Just the other day, I got an email from one of the consultants who works for my company. She had spent 12 hours at our client’s office, involved in various meetings. When I read about her long and tiring day, my first reaction was that I really wanted to tell her otsukaresama deshita. However, because she is American and doesn’t speak Japanese, this was not possible. And I struggled a bit with how to say it in English. Finally I had to separate it out into its two key components — acknowledging that she had done something very tiring, and thanking her. So my message became: “Wow, that was a long day. You must have been exhausted! Thanks so much for your hard work.” That served the purpose, but to be honest wasn’t quite as concise and elegant as the Japanese original.
Similarly, I recently had another team member who has been wrangling a very difficult client, and had spent three hours hashing out the details of an upcoming program with her. I know that this particular client is quite demanding and indeed can be very tiring to deal with. So again I really wanted to say otsukaresama deshita, but knew that wouldn’t be understood by this colleague who does not speak Japanese. So I settled for “I know it takes a lot of energy to deal with this client. Thanks for having the fortitude to work with her for so long at one sitting.”
Thinking about these two examples, I think that otsukaresama deshita is a great case-in-point of how Japanese can compact lots of meaning into a short phrase, whereas it takes a lot more words in English to say the same thing. And also that depending on the situation, the exact words that would be most appropriate to use in English can be very different. I think that this is something that makes English particularly difficult for Japanese speakers, who have handy expressions like this available in their native language.
To accurately render otsukaresama deshita into English, it is important to include both those elements of acknowledging the tiring situation and expressing thanks. I heard recently of a Japanese expatriate working in the U.S. who only did the former, and on top of it the way he said it struck the wrong cord. He had blurted out to an American colleague “You look tired!” but rather than being taken as the sympathetic statement he meant it to be, instead it felt strange to the recipient (and led them to feel concerned about their appearance). “I’m sure that you’re feeling tired after how hard you worked on that.” would have been more effective phrasing for the “acknowledgement of likely tiredness” portion. And including the thanks part is also important.
It’s actually quite a complicated construction. The “o” part is an honorific prefix; “sama” is an honorific suffix. “Deshita” conveys the formal past tense form of a noun. The root part of “tsukare” comes from a verb for “become tired.” The expression can be used simply as a greeting among colleagues or when parting after working together. It can be a means of thanking someone for putting in a long day or of deep appreciation for someone who has struggled through an arduous ordeal. It can even be used sarcastically when you want to tell someone you’re not satisfied with the work they’re doing. I did a little searching on the Net about its usage and found this:
I use it here in its most sincere and appreciative sense because I don’t have an English equivalent for expressing my admiration for the efforts, friendship, and commitment you put into piecing the Substack series together. Many parts of the series, especially in the first two articles, resonated as strongly with me as your piece on the wrestling trip with your dad did a while back.
Among the things that stick with me the most:
Merrill and all its bars reminded me of the Humboldt County, California logging towns I grew up in and all their bars and associated problems and how so many of my friends ended up as green chain pullers, timber fallers, logging truck drivers, mill workers, what have you. For many, the 1970s in particular saw the advent of a “redneck hippie” lifestyle that revolved around working 60-70 hours a week and using up all that overtime pay on inhaling, snorting, guzzling, tippling, and toking every substance known to man in their few off-time hours. A large portion of my best buddies in high school are now six feet under. I was one of the lucky ones who made it out, but not before almost destroying my own liver and other parts of the mind and body.
And yeah there are a few Indian massacre stories connected to those towns, too. In fact, Bret Harte, the 19th century writer, was literally run out of Arcata for writing a story in the local newspaper that exposed the slaughter of supposedly up to 200 Wiyot Indians by a local vigilante group. Details on this story can be found at https://www.historynet.com/bret-hartes-voice-for-the-wiyots/
Nice touch at the end of episode three — mixing your poem with one by Medorra Addison and another by Bukowski.
Good thoughts included in “Freedom of the Press Means Having a Press in the First Place.”
Of all the stuff I read, there’s one phrase you used that kind of sums up everything: “Toothless in Wisconsin. America.” I can’t get that out of my head, that and all the accompanying details that led to KK becoming so.
Random thought from an older reader’s point of view: You are at your most powerful when your journalistic instincts take over — the dialog, the give and take with the people around you, the details of the environment in the moment, the smells, the sounds, the summary of ideas and thoughts discussed, descriptions of other people’s movements and gestures. It’s all there. Your choices in subject matter convey the message. When you start on a rant, it’s usually engaging in the beginning, but occasionally in your excitement, anger, frustration, or whatever emotional wave you’re riding at the moment, you begin to take the reader down a completely different road. Proustian, yes, but sometimes with an abruptness that confuses the reader a bit. Not that I don’t like being led on a new and intriguing adventure, but in a sense, you’re preaching to the choir and the choir doesn’t really need to be convinced. They’re going to ride with you till the end anyway. For older readers like myself, there’s already a permanent fatigue from carrying the weight of decades of similar anger, disappointment, frustration, etc. that comes from dealing with whatever system holds us in tow and is leading us toward the abyss. What we look for now when we commit ourselves to concentrating on a piece of writing is a little balance and even dark humor to lift us up and give us a shot of courage to find the energy to do battle one more time.
But really that’s just a minor thing, an insignificant critique. Just finished reading the most recent piece “Scar after Scar” and got a lot out of it. Good strong ending — yeah, like almost everyone I know, hanging on by a thread. That pretty much sums up the state of affairs for the lot of us. Sorry about going off on my own tangents. I actually started out with the intention of telling you that I finally got my website a secure connection. New domain name at
If you’re still up for a video call one of these days, I’m free most anytime other than Tuesdays. That’s my physical therapy day for trying to keep these aging, arthritic joints from freezing up entirely. It doesn’t cost much and is one of the benefits of having paid into the teachers’ union here for nearly 30 years. Japan’s social security net is still functioning but just barely and probably not for much longer. If you want to put a face and a voice to the person behind these ramblings, there’s a link on my website’s “Media” page to a recent YouTube interview I had with the editor of a journal in India. You might get a chuckle.
That’s it for now. I need to take a nap. “O-tsukare-sama deshita.” Write back when you get a chance.
Robert
+—+
Ahh, schucks, you know this sort of communique warms the communist cockles of my heart. And, “them’s fighting words” also seems to percolate from my 148-mph terminal velocity sum a bitch freefall mind when I get yanked on the chain about my diatribes, my stream of consciousness and those so-called rants, taking the reader astray.
Just kidding, since Robert is a comrade, for sure, and I am not as touchy as I appear. Drama school, man, call it the Gonzo Method Acting School, a la, much animas thrown in, with doses of real communistic zeal.
Helen Mirren, the Oscar-winning actor, has criticised drama schools for “stifling” the natural instincts of young actors.
The star, who appears in a series of online acting masterclasses, told the Observer: “I’m very ambivalent about drama teachers and the classes that people go to. I think people’s instincts are crushed by bad drama teaching. I’ve watched it happen.”
While acknowledging that people “can be really opened” by drama training, she said that others suffer because “individuality is stifled”.
“It’s so often that the people who are actually the best are the ones who are thrown out of drama school because they’re idiosyncratic. They’re peculiar. They don’t fit any nicely tied-up box. In fact, they are the most interesting artists,” she said. “I’ve known people who were thrown out of drama school for not conforming to what the school felt was going to be a viable option in the profession.” (source)
It’s the old saw, “My Man is the Man Now for the Job of POTUS.” I know I speak another language in every venue I end up in, but here, some of the back and forth on that piece:
Oh, no, Ed. I needed a job, and I am a journalist, and so I applied and did my duty. The job was not about RFK, and I thought I’d be an asset. You know, they wanted me on toxics, environment, pollution.
Nothing about backing or bashing RFK or pharma.
Now now, thanks for the working class shout out. I do not resent CHD or RFK. Are you kidding? I am a communist, dude, and nothing the democrats and/or republicans have served up as hell in my neck of the woods is good.
So, you are now telling the world that my points are illegit because I applied for a journalism job that happens to be with CHD?
It was clear I was applying for science writing, which I have done.
Now, if I sequestered myself from everything American and USA, then I’d have a hard time taking Benjamins for anything I do.
Now, if I got the job, and then this happened (see belo), I’d say adios, CHD.
Goddamn, Ed, now you are an armchair psychiatrist?
And, alas, I am done with you and your attack on me. What pathetic treatment of a commentator who doesn’t have the gobsmacked disease for any of these multimillionaire charlatans.
“I am a communist [i.e. a thirsty totalitarian]”, and personnel is policy. So it does not matter what you imagine your “science writing” credentials and skills to be. You’re so radioactive that CHD and RFK would have be foolish and desperate to hire you for anything, even stuffing envelopes for the next fundraiser. And now, thanks to so-called AI, one can obtain tweakable science writing without associating directly and publicly with a thirsty, burrowing commie.
Are you just dead? Ahh, radio …. active, that should be up RFK’s alley since he wants nuke energy to bring about this digital dashboard/social impact Brave New World.
I’ll take a Communist Mayor over probably all of your yokels, Allan . . . .
+–+
“Grigny isn’t often in the news for good reasons. The poorest city in France, this banlieue south of Paris is marked by massive unemployment and abandoned housing estates. For much of French media, Grigny is the very image of a “no-go zone”: one of its sons, Amedy Coulibaly, murdered four people at a Kosher supermarket in the 2015 terrorist attacks.
Yet there is also a fight to save the city from its plight — led by local mayor Philippe Rio, a member of the French Communist Party. In 2017, he organized the “Appeal from Grigny,” signed by hundreds of other mayors calling for investment in the banlieues. His innovative social programs and a COVID response based on locally issued emergency food vouchers this year saw him handed the biennial “best mayor in the world” award.
The prize given by the World Mayor Foundation hadn’t gone to a Communist before (and even this time around it was co-awarded to Rotterdam’s mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb, a member of the Dutch Labour Party). But Philippe Rio’s administration has also had a wider impact in his homeland, especially through its lifelong education programs and its success in geothermal energy production, which has slashed residents’ bills.
I’ve been a member of the PCF since 1995 — since the last century. I’m often asked what it means to be a Communist. But I remember why I joined the party back then — and looking at France, today I’d have twice as much reason to join a movement whose guiding star is indignation against injustice.
I am myself a product of municipal-level communism. I’ve never been around what’s happening at the “top” of society, but rather the work of all those invisible activists — blue-collar workers, employees, and public servants — who devote their free time to helping others live better. It was they who trained me up in the life of associations, first of all on the sports field, which is about the people who give their time and money to helping you play in a football match.
We don’t exactly have oil to tap. But we do have geothermal energy, and we do have a totally different vision.
In this context, you experience magnificent things, even if you come from a poor background like mine. My dad was an unemployed worker, my parents experienced the downgrading of the working class, and sometimes there wasn’t even much to eat. So I had the food aid and the Secours Populaire [a grassroots solidarity initiative], including from the Communist town hall.
It’s probably too long for a knee-jerking funny guy like you, but give it a spin:
Selling RFK Jr. On Next-Gen Nuclear Part 2
Alas, I am breaking Robert’s Rule, here, going off the rails, tangents galore, way-way stream of battered brain syndrome consciousness, but that’s how I am wired, sort of, now, while yelling at those windmills, or wind turbines, something out there ready for the Haeder Raider Effect. I still got my .357 magnum and double barrel 12 gauge.
If you get a chance, read the piece on this Mayor:
Philippe Rio
The Communist Party has its victories and defeats. Life’s like that — there are no strongholds and no election wins are guaranteed. We have to pick ourselves up and continually reinvent ourselves.
It’s true — today the working class has changed. But I can assure you, the poor are still here. When people ask me, what’s the difference, Philippe, between when you lived in Grande Borne forty years ago and today, I say it’s that then there was 5 percent unemployment and now the figure is 50 percent. With its renewed hunger to capture wealth, liberal society is also creating poor workers.
In France, mayors are the most respected politicians. People have a more positive image of us than MPs, whether they vote for us or not. So we have a special responsibility as a last defensive dam of the Republic, in a moment where people no longer believe what the president or national representatives say. That’s also why we’re working on proposing national solutions, to answer the questions people are asking me face-to-face. That means confronting the challenge of the social transition, but also ecological transition. As a nice line by Nicolas Hulot puts it, that means connecting the problem of the end of the world to the problem of how people can make it to the end of the month.
[No Monster here, photo credit!]
Now, KK, Kelly, sent me this kind, comrade sort of email, and I reproduce it here to emplify his humanity, and he did get my own forwarding of Robert Norris’ email to me last night, and, here, more humanity precipitated by that Norris email, even or especially because HE IS TOOTHLESS IN WISCONSIN.
Paul: I was thinking about family, last night. And, when I think about my past, going all the way back to a severed finger, I have a revelation about family. My family consists of people named Paul, and Lisa, and Jojo, and now, Robert.
People who seem to at least give a god dam.
I’ve tried to covey to you, just how extraordinary that I think that you are. Talk-walker is the highest praise that I know of. A man of his word. A rarity in my experience.
Your generosity, in deed, and in your expressions of humanity, while unusual, are par for the course in the way that I have tried to conduct myself, with folks that I have taken an interest in, and pity upon.
Maybe I admire in you, what I admire most in myself. I see what Robert is saying about preaching to the choir. And, we are definitely on the same page when it comes to employing dark humor.
The chaos of our eight days has been replaced by stone silence. Not a voice to be heard since Tuesday. Except for a wary, crooked lawyer, that is. That’s not really a human voice anyway. Just kind of a bot, making sounds.
I know that Elldee (the weiner dog) really enjoyed your time with us. He appreciated having some lovin’ from someone besides the old man. He hovers now, always wanting to be next to me, on working his way onto my lap. His bed on the floor isn’t cutting it anymore.
I don’t know if I have adequate expressed my deeply felt gratitude for your friendship, manifest in so many ways. Your visit, a manifestation of your friendship, writ large, is but the tip of the iceberg, in the myriad of ways that you have propped up this tired old man.
Your humanity, towards this broken thing called Kelly, has been bearing fruit, for what seems like years now. Day in, and day out. The notebook that I gave to you, exemplifies how it has been between you and I.
I want to be able to stand on my own two feet. But, I’m not sure if I was made that way. Maybe before Fishbone (Cheri, his deceased wife) came along. Maybe then I could face the world alone. But, when she became part of me, I found a new, and better way of living. In concert. Self sacrifice, that felt so good. Not a sacrifice really. A joy. My pleasure.
Having children only expanded, and intensified those feelings. But, the flip side is loss, and rejection. In spite of all the beatings, both literal, and figurative, I always had a spark. Determination. The will, and the energy, to overcome anything. I was beat down, but I was never tired. Now, I feel, not tired, but exhausted.
And, when I look at the photos that you took, I see tired, exhausted. I don’t see the fight in that face, anymore. I see a person marking time, and not resisting the end of his time. Maybe not welcoming it, but then again, maybe hoping for a conclusion.
I’ve been trained well.
The tendency is to call myself a weakling. A crybaby. A wimp.
Those tropes don’t get through anymore.
I feel like crying, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. I have a right to be sad.
If someone says that I don’t, then either they’re crazy, or I am. And, if I am crazy, then I embrace my craziness, and embrace what feels real to me. The sounds of silence.
This iPhone typewriter doesn’t even have the decency to light up the room with the sounds of ideas, like a real typewriter.
All I hear is tinnitus.
I’m proud of having figured out how to play the few CDs that I have remaining. I accomplished something worthwhile. The Clockwork Angels album. A big concert for Fishbone, and I. Our only VIP show. Give the album a listen. Especially, The Garden, and Wish Them Well.
I wonder if I’ll ever mimic Geddy Lee, ever again? Of course I wonder. I’ve been with the bass, as long as I’ve been with Fishbone. When I would tear it up, on the stage, Fishbone was there, having joy for me, seeing me in my element. Nailing it. Every note. I was playing for everyone, but always for her.
And, later, for Molly. The infant. Screaming into the microphone. How we all laughed. “That girl’s got some pipes on her. Get her in the band.”
And, now it feels like it’s all dead. I’ve waited for over ten years for all of the kids to come around. It’s been a wasted ten years. I don’t think that I have another ten to spare.
But, my love for these kids just won’t go away.
Please tell Robert that I really appreciate him reading, and listening, and relating. And, I appreciate you for telling this part of my story. Even if no one is listening, still.
Finally, someone is offering a look at reality, instead of a contrived, exploitative, narrative. And, it’s not mine.
It’s a fresh pair of eyes doing the talking.
Kelly
++—++
Need I say more? They — both Kelly and Robert — say it all:
And, a short story, as a kicker, referencing Norris’ letter above, Bret Harte:
“The Outcasts of Poker Flat”by Bret Harte
John Oakhurst was a gambler. He had lived in the small western town of Poker Flat for only a short time. He had defeated many people at cards. He had also won a lot of their money. For that reason alone, he was not well liked.
On the morning of November twenty-third, eighteen fifty, he saw some men talking as he walked down the main street of town. As he came near, they got quiet. He said to himself, “Hmmm, I guess they are talking about me. And that can’t be good.” Oakhurst was right. Some of the town’s leaders had met secretly and decided to force some people to leave. They thought Poker Flat would be a better place to live if those people were gone.
Besides Oakhurst, two women of low morals were led to the edge of town. They were the “Duchess” as she was called, and “Mother Shipton.” A man called “Uncle Billy” was added to the group. He was known to drink too much. Some people thought that he had also stolen some gold. They had no proof. But that did not matter. Uncle Billy was just no good, and he had to go. The “outcasts” were told that if they ever came back, they would be killed.
So, the four of them slowly rode out of town. The “Duchess” cried and said she would probably die on the road. Mother Shipton and Uncle Billy cursed. “Mother” said she would like to “cut the heart out” of the people who done this to them. But John Oakhurst rode in silence. He thought all of life was a gamble. He had just run into some bad luck. That was all.
An picture of men at a bar used with one of Bret Harte’s stories in Harper’s magazine in 1902.
The outcasts were headed for Sandy Bar, a camp not too far away. But it was high up in the cold Sierra Mountains, and the path was anything but smooth. Around noon, Mother Shipton became so tired she fell off her horse. She said that was as far as she was going today. Oakhurst tried to make them move on because they had no food or fuel. But the three would not listen. Instead they began to drink alcohol that Uncle Billy had hidden. Soon they were quiet and asleep.
Oakhurst did not drink. He stood nearby and watched them. He began to think about his life and about how lonely he was. Yet he was stronger than his three companions. He could have left them there and set off alone. But he did not.
Then, he heard someone call “John Oakhurst.” A young man named Tom Simson came riding up. The gambler knew Tom. They had once played cards and Oakhurst had won. But after the game, he told young Tom that he was too easy to beat. And he gave him back his money. Tom said Oakhurst would be his friend for life.
Tom was not alone. From behind a tree came his new wife, a girl named Piney Woods. Her father had not wanted her to marry Tom. So they had run away. Tom told Oakhurst that he had a little food. He also showed him an old log house just off the path. Years of harsh weather had nearly ruined it. But it was all they had, and it would have to do. The women could spend the night in there. The men would make a fire and sleep on the ground by the door.
The night seemed to pass quickly. But the weather became colder. The wind increased, and it began to snow. Oakhurst had a bad feeling. He turned to where Uncle Billy had slept, and found him gone. He had left the others and even taken their horses. Oakhurst said Uncle Billy had probably gone for help. But he knew better. The group of five decided to wait for the snow to stop before traveling farther. They no longer had horses. From here on, they would be on foot.
By the third day out from Poker Flat, the snow had gotten deep. They could no longer see the path. Food was running low. Everything around them was white and cold. One week later they still had not moved. The snow had continued to fall and was deeper than ever. And it continued to fall. It formed a prison they could not escape. Still, they could see smoke rising from the warm fires in the houses down below in Poker Flat. The site seemed especially cruel.
But the little group of outcasts tried to keep up their spirits. They tried to stay as warm as they could. They sat together by their own open-air fire. And Tom Simson pulled a small accordion from his pack. Piney Woods played the instrument. They all sang songs. The music took on a defiant quality, a quality of resistance. But the outcasts had to listen to the sad cries of their mostly empty stomachs. The hunger got worse with each passing day.
At midnight on the tenth day, Mother Shipton called Oakhurst to her side. She said, “Give this to the young ones.” In a bag was all her food. She had not eaten for days. She had saved the food for the others. She turned quietly to the wall of the log house, and died.
John Oakhurst began to think that none of them would live out the storm. He gave Tom Simson a pair of snowshoes and asked him to try to walk back to Poker Flat for help. He guessed it would take Tom at least two days, if not more, to get there. Tom kissed his new bride and left on foot. Soon he was out of sight. The Duchess and Piney were surprised, and frightened, when Oakhurst also turned to leave. “You’re not going, too,” they cried. He said, “Only a little way. I need to find us some help.”
At that time of year, daylight did not last long. When night came, Oakhurst had not returned. The two women were too hungry, weak, and cold to even add more wood to the fire. They passed the stormy night holding each other close. And that is the way they were found the next morning when help arrived from Poker Flat. They had frozen to death during the night.
The rescuers from town said that they had been right to force the outcasts to leave Poker Flat. But they never thought the punishment would end up like this. Justice was one thing, but freezing people to death was not their aim. And then they thought of the gambler. Where was he? What had happened to him? They searched as best they could. And then, they found him.
Under a tall tree a playing card was stuck into the wood by a knife. On the card was written: “Beneath this tree lies the body of John Oakhurst, who had some bad luck starting the twenty-third of November, eighteen fifty. He handed in his cards on the seventh of December, the same year.”
Oakhurst sat there, cold and still. They said he looked peaceful. A single bullet from a small hand gun nearby had ended his life. John Oakhurst had been both the strongest, and the weakest, of the outcasts of Poker Flat.
Paul Haeder, Author 