overused . . . traumatized . . . PTSD . . . C-PTSD . . . our children are dying!

Every child in the U$A needs two, three weeks, on the coast, in forest, with elders, with First Nations, with Salmon and Whale stories, with fires and talking circles and learning how to do beadwork and smoke salmon and boil mussels. Every child needs to see the world is way beyond the black mirror (phone), beyond the project the Jewish Masters of Software/Surveillance/Crypto Internet of Bodies/AI/VR/AR Hell they have in store for the masses. Way beyond the hell the Gentiles and Religious Ones have set upon the masses, too. School to prison pipeline? School to addiction pipeline.

Out here, in Siletz and Alsea Native land, we have this odd gesture: a former slave, from the south, bought his freedom for $1000 and ended up west, here, in Waldport, and he established the first school, the first everything, in a way, and now, more than a hundred years later, the park in town is dedicated to his name, Louis Southworth, and the play fields will have this bronze statue overlooking the play. See, “You Can’t Have Your Mule and Forty Acres, Too!”

This then dovetails back to the Wisconsin fun, my series on my short stay in Wisconsin, there as triage and first responder for my new friend, well, friend for more than 12 months, but first time having a face to face with KK in his home state.

Ten years total in prison and jails. $100,000 thrown away into the criminal injustice system, to the laywers, etc. Drinking and driving. And, I was his driver, since it will literally take thousands upon thousands of dollars to even try to get his driver’s license.

He’s on supervision, now the past three years. His arrest — the alleged crimes — just evidence of more shit storm predicated on a bad judge, conflation by cops, over-charging, small-town cop shop, DA, and judges. He made the front page of the newspaper in River Falls. He appeared like the worst iteration of a white ISIS. All wrong.

I have permission to ghost write his memoir, which thus far has been here in four parts, with a hell of a lot of me thrown in. His granddaughter is okay with her life pathway being put out here in WWW-Landia. It’s a tale of many traumas. Not unusual, but unique to her, and so emblematic of more decay in our systems for youth, for families, evidenced by all the crap of these realities of our lack of nuclear family — for many many reasons, including all that goes with Chlamydia Capitalism.**

**Chlamydia Capitalism is the process of oligarchs working with the Citizens United Koch-US Chamber of Commerce sorts to figure out how to rape the country, individuals, families, and entire regions. So, a place like Wisconsin, called the Arkansas of the North, has hundreds of dairy farms and corn and soy and hay operations to feed the milk producers (manure and urine producers, too) and on the surface, it seems as if some people are doing well, fulfilling the calorie rich American Dream/Nightmare. Literally, the list: pain when urinating, unusual vaginal discharge, pain in the tummy or pelvis, pain during sex, bleeding after sex, bleeding between periods.

Now scale this up to consumer and retail and merchants of war capitalism is about pain, in the ass and stomach. Bleeding after eviction, foreclosure, repossession. Unusual mental and physical discharge because of inflammatory capitalism. This Chlamydia Capitalism takes its toll on generation after generation. Sure, syphlitic capitalism is also another more dramatic form, where our brains and nervous system fails because of this predatory-casino-zombie-usury capitalism. The disease is a reminder of how pernicioius Shock Doctrine/Economic Hit Men capitalism is in the body politic and citizenry at large. **

Above, K and Ivy, grandfather and granddaughter, 65 and 19 respectively. Wisconsin born and bred.

He feels responsible for Ivy hanging on by a thread, spiritually. You know, heroin, cocaine and fentynal in solution and shot up in her precious delicate veins. You can read high end stuff all over the place, in libraries and on the Internet, on the why’s and what’s and how’s and where’s and how’s of this rural addiction: “Differential drug use patterns among sexually abused adolescent girls in treatment for chemical dependency” (source)

A sample of 444 girls admitted to adolescent chemical dependency treatment was divided into four groups based on sexual abuse experiences. Girls who reported intrafamilial abuse, extrafamilial abuse, or both, were compared with nonvictims in terms of alcohol and drug use histories. Prevalence and frequency of alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine did not differ significantly among the groups. However, all sexual abuse victims were significantly more likely to regularly use stimulants, sedatives, tranquilizers, and hallucinogens. Sexual abuse victims also reported earlier onset of alcohol and drug use, more self-medication, and more use to escape family problems.

Or, “Substance abuse among sexually abused adolescents and their families.”

The concurrence of substance abuse and history of sexual abuse among adolescents has prompted this study of substance abuse patterns among families of adolescents who report incest or extrafamilial sexual abuse. A total of 3,179 ninth-grade students in a rural midwestern state completed a survey that included questions about individual and family substance abuse. Adolescents who had been sexually abused were more likely to report substance abuse for themselves as well as for members of their immediate families. They were also more likely to report that they used substances because of family problems, school problems, and because they were sad, lonely, or angry. Adolescents reporting a parent with an alcohol or a drug problem were more likely to use cigarettes, marijuana, alcohol, or “speed.” Adolescents experiencing extrafamilial abuse reported more alcohol abuse and more alcohol-related problems than those who experienced incest. There were similar reports of parental and familial alcohol and drug problems among these experiencing incest and those experiencing extrafamilial abuse. Those with drug-abusing parents, however, were most likely to report some kind of sexual abuse history. (source)

I spent time with Ivy, and she was fighting her aunt’s from-the-right-place-in-her-heart attempt to take Ivy into her house and keep her there isolated andthen get her into a drug treatment program in River Falls. Ivy left a program two days before her “graduation” a few months ago. “I didn’t do it for myself,” she told us. “I know I will have to do any recovery for myself, at the right time.”

Homeless, on the streets, couch surfing, missing in action. Typical stuff.

Scars, man. Rejection by her mother: “I wish you were never born.” And, after Kelly’s wife died, Ivy’s grandmother, the words, “I wish it was you instead of her who died.”

Ivy intimated that she was molested and was raped, young. Generational trauma, and school shit, the entire state of bad education, bad peer groups and a shit-load of ruined youth, you know, that Midwest glow.

It’s textbook, typical of “research” on what the state of this or that region is tied to youth and drug abuse:

Though often perceived to be a problem of the inner city, substance use and misuse have long been prevalent in rural areas. Rural adults have higher rates of use for tobacco and methamphetamines, while prescription drug misuse and heroin use has grown in towns of every size.

Substance use can be especially hard to combat in rural communities due to limited resources for prevention, treatment, and recovery. According to The 2014 Update of the Rural-Urban Chartbook, the substance use treatment admission rate for nonmetropolitan counties was highest for alcohol as the primary substance, followed by marijuana, stimulants, opiates, and cocaine.

Factors contributing to substance use in rural America include:

• Low educational attainment
• Poverty
• Unemployment
• Lack of access to mental healthcare
• Isolation (Rural Health Information Hub)

Some powerful shit: Just 2 milligrams of fentanyl, the small amount that fits on the tip of a pencil, can be lethal depending on a person’s body size, tolerance and past usage

There are no unicorns or rainbows in Wisconsin: However, there are rainbow-colored fentanyl tablets.

In Chlamydia Capitalism, we have stop gap measures, band-aids, those non-holistic and zero systems thinking “things” that are not solutions at the core: all those things that do employ people, are part of the Complex, that is, the profit-making operations sucking us blind; stuff that’s traded on some stock market or exchange. It is expensive being poor and it makes millionaires out of those exploiting the poor. Narcan. (Emergent, the maker of the opioid overdose antidote Narcan, said in a statement Thursday that it is aiming for an out-of-pocket price of less than $50 for its nasal spray product now that the US Food and Drug Administration allows for over-the-counter sales.)

The story behind a granddaughter goes to the mother, Kelly’s daughter. Whatever is tragic there, with Ivy’s mother, carries into the gene code, epigenetics.

It is still being studied:

My trauma research team quickly trained health professionals to evaluate and, if needed, treat the women. We monitored them through their pregnancies and beyond. When the babies were born, they were smaller than usual—the first sign that the trauma of the World Trade Center attack had reached the womb. Nine months later we examined 38 women and their infants when they came in for a wellness visit. Psychological evaluations revealed that many of the mothers had developed PTSD. And those with PTSD had unusually low levels of the stress-related hormone cortisol, a feature that researchers were coming to associate with the disorder.

Surprisingly and disturbingly, the saliva of the nine-month-old babies of the women with PTSD also showed low cortisol. The effect was most prominent in babies whose mothers had been in their third trimester on that fateful day. Just a year earlier a team I led had reported low cortisol levels in adult children of Holocaust survivors, but we’d assumed that it had something to do with being raised by parents who were suffering from the long-term emotional consequences of severe trauma. Now it looked like trauma could leave a trace in offspring even before they are born. (How Parents’ Trauma Leaves Biological Traces in Children: Adverse experiences can change future generations through epigenetic pathways”)

I’ve heard stories before going to Wisconsin (and Kelly told me his own tied to going to Kansas for a late term abortion). One tragedy after another in rural America. Drinking and fornicating. Late term abortions. Then, fathers having to drop thousands of dollars and go to another state to abide by a daughter’s eight month fetal abortion.

The story goes national, here, now:

After the Roe v. Wade decision made abortion legal in the U.S., George Tiller drew attention from anti-abortion advocates for being one of only a few physicians in the nation who provided late-term abortions.

“Shrewd and resourceful, Dr. Tiller made himself the nation’s pre-eminent abortion practitioner, advertising widely and drawing women to Wichita from all over with his willingness to perform late-term abortions, hundreds each year,” the New York Times wrote in an article published after his death.

“Trust Women” was the motto of the late Wichita physician and abortion provider, who kept performing late-term abortions even after one anti-abortion extremist fire bombed his clinic and another shot him five times.

Abortion opponents also blockaded Tiller’s clinic and threatened his life.

But Tiller kept providing abortions until an anti-abortion extremist tracked him down and assassinated him at age 67 in 2009 during a Sunday service at the church he attended. (source)

Tiller has been quoted by many that late term abortions are tragedies, serious, that this sort of unimaginable situation is so tragic that a woman should never get herself in this position again. That this was a new lease on a woman’s life. Tragic. Of course, the trauma of whatever enrages women carries on and certainly two or three abortions are normal for many in this situation, including those who visited Tiller’s clinic.

The epigenetic pathway discussion is rarified and genuine, but in WIsconsin, where does it go when the family is immolated with pain, with dysfunction (terrible term), community standards that call for drinking and drowning? A smart young woman like Ivy is working at Walmart, and she is still deep in her addiction, and when I asked her if she enjoys life, she said she does. She said she has not harmed anyone in this life of shooting up, addiction. She said she hasn’t stolen for this addiction. Nor has she prostituted herself.

Her story is a story of many quilts in America. And, knowing her and her aunts and her uncles and her grandfather, and knowing what childhood trauma does, and the peer pressure, and the zoning out and checking out many youth in USA fall into, we have a recipe of over-incarceration, under-treating, so many prognastications on what to do or what the causes are, and then broken social services, underfunded treatment and lack of school counselors, and then an entire society that is so superficial and uncaring and mean and sarcastic and snarky, we have entire regions of the country where we have one lost generation after another, one family at a time!

I took this shot in Hanoi years ago, and I wonder what is up with the child now, as he is now a young adult. What of the epigenetics of Vietnam bombed and brutalized by the Best and the Brightest Generation? Intergenerational trauma. I didn’t see many homeless and drugged out youth in my months there.

I know in America — holding these Americans with puffed up chests going around thinking this is the center of the universe, and that you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and if you fail, and if you self-destruct, then let the dog-eat-dog Chlamydia Capitalism take hold — crumbling is part of the big picture.

Part One: Here. Part Two: Through the Looking Glass — Meth, Fentynal, Unbelievable Dread of Living in Wisconsin. 3rd Part: Dual Diagnosis: The ‘Other’ America Failing; Part Four, Would You Leave Your Pet Monkey Alone with this Guy? And, an interview with “Haeder Infusion” (Fifth Part) : Q & A Wisconsin: Inside the Eye of the Storm.

Kelly’s story is one of a kid being sexually assaulted young and then falling into self medication: booze. He never went into the Meth hell of rural Wisconsin, or urban Minn. Never did cocaine or heroin or pills to kill his pain.

He did have a psychiatrist, who worked in a prison, Stillwater, Minn., a man who helped Kelly with his generational trauma, the rape he experienced in Merrill at age 13. His name was Ivan W. Sletten, and Kelly is honorific toward the man, who got Kelly on various medications to stave off the suicidal thoughts, depression, fear, anxiety. Kelly tried maybe thirty different drugs in an attempt to carve out new thinking and feeling process for broke Kelly.

“The DEA shut him down, got his license revoked. He died six months after that. He was doing innovative things with medications, and that was what was controversial int he eyes of the rotten DEA. I saw his clinic, in Stillwater, Minn. The lobby was filled with the dregs of society . . . hurting people . . . broken people. They were not drug seekers, but rather looking for help as they all were dealing with this and that mental pain. Trauma. Hell holes of not their own making.”

That was then, and here, from a 1962 newsletter:

Intersections, man:

Psychiatrist and Champion of Social Responsibility. Dr. Ivan Wayne Sletten died on January 30, 2014 of complications from pneumonia and related health issues. He was 84 years old and was born on March 9, 1929.

Back in the 1960s, Ivan Sletten was part of pioneering work with electronic data processing for psychiatric disorders at the Missouri Institute of Psychiatry in St. Louis, Missouri. He would go on in private practice for two decades, serving with compassion many patients in St. Louis, Missouri and Stillwater, Minnesota.

He practiced in Stillwater, Minnesota until his retirement in 2013 at age 83. Dr. Sletten was a champion of the less fortunate in this world. For decades he supported those who worked for social justice. In the last 15 years in Minnesota he focused on injustices in the criminal justice system, especially on drug law reform. He also provided financial support for research on multiple sclerosis.

“With malice toward none, and charity for all…..”, from Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, were the words he lived by every day of his life. He is survived by four children, Ingrid, Paul, Karen and Mark, his sister Loretta Wittig and eight fabulous grandchildren: Nick, Kate, Arthur, Lucas, Lilly, Gwen, Morgan and Evan. His beloved wife Grace Lorraine Sletten (Zastrow) preceded him in death in 2005.

His children wish to acknowledge their love and appreciation for his cherished companion, Marie Buttrey, who made the last years of his life full of joy and fun.

Dr. Sletten graduated from the University of Wisconsin medical school in 1955. He took his training in psychiatry at the University of Minnesota. He published more than 100 articles in his lifetime, and was a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. Dr. Sletten received many awards in his lifetime for social causes. These organizations include NAMI, American Psychiatric Association, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Multiple Sclerosis Society.

Kelly talks much about the kindness of the man, how he came all the way up to a prison Kelly was locked up in to see how he was doing. The Correctional Officers gave him hell, and he took off his feeding tube in order to get through the security gate.

The family has been hollowed out, bombed to smithereens. Self-imploding, genetic lineage, the entire systems of oppression and atomization. Kelly’s family is like millions: hanging on by a thread!

asking KK about life, where he was, how he got here, where his past intersects with his insanity and sanity . . . philosophical, and archetypical

“If we allow the pieces of our culture to lie scattered in the dust of history, trampled on by racism and grief, then yes, we are irreparably damaged. But if we pick up the pieces and use them in new ways that honor their integrity, their colors, textures, stories—then we do those pieces justice, no matter how sharp they are, no matter how much handling them slices our fingers and makes us bleed.”

—Deborah A. Miranda

---

This is Devil’s Churn, just down the road from my home, Waldport, Oregon. In and out, in and out. King tides attract the tourists and photographers. A grandpa, 62, tried jumping over the rocks, but fell in and the Coast Guard found his body a few miles out to sea.

Kelly K told me about a tornado that came crashing through Merrill a few years ago. Some fellow found himself pulled up and trafficked hundreds of yards away, deposited, unhurt, one hell of a trip.

In some sense, Kelly is that tornado, the tsunami, that king tide, or at least a product of so much turbulence that his story, and all the intersections of his life and his friends and family’s lives, tie into the story of a dream deferred and Requiem for a Nightmare.

Hold fast to dreams

For when dreams go

Life is a barren field

Frozen with snow.

– Langston Hughes

More of the dream:

“Harlem”

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore–

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over–

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?”

― Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems

1. How would you define your life say to a granddaughter. Keep it simple.

Ivy, Jayda, Damien, Braden, Jacob, Chelsey, Courtney, Cassidy, Kyle, Hailey, grampa would define his life in the terms of the biblical parable of the talents. My talents have been wasted. I was the best, and the brightest, since before I hit skool. Straight A’s without effort. Musically gifted, and obsessed. But, the educational system raped me, the legal system raped me, just as bad as a perverted old man. But, talents don’t just disappear.

They manifest themselves no matter where you are. So, my talents were directed, not towards fame, and fortune, and “success”. They were directed at my partner, my progeny, my parents, my community, not writ large, but in the fine print.

I have no regrets. I don’t want my legacy on the big screen. I look for in in the faces, and the words, of each fellow traveler that I have the opportunity to introduce myself to.

I love all you kids.I just want you to be truly happy.

2. Booze did you in, in many ways. Talk about the power of booze in a man’s life, yours.

Booze. Alcohol. Adult beverages. Drink. I can only speak intelligently about the effects of alcoholic beverages upon THIS man’s life.

I have made many observations of “alcoholics” in the course of a lifelong battle with alcohol. Many treatments. Many AA meetings. No meaningful relationships were found in all of those years in the AA sober society.

It’s a god damn cult, people. I have been around beer for as long as I can remember.

Running around at gramma’s with all the cousins, when we got thirsty it was a swig of dad’s beer, or a pull off the garden hose. No Pepsi for the kids. Beer for the adults though.

Anyway’s I always chose the hose.Didn’t like Old Style. After I was molested, all my childhood mates evaporated. I was a solo act. Until Rod Messerschmidt, appeared at my tennis court, by Franklin skool, and I had my first friend.

He was trash. From the wrong side of the tracks. So people said. Turned out his dad was a pedophile. Rod introduced me to alcohol in a party setting, with people my own age, and miraculously, I wasn’t afraid anymore. I could laugh again.

I was drinking with the dregs of Merrill youth, and I felt like I was home. But, first the boy took the drink, they the drink took the boy, and the man, and everyone, and everything that loved him. I learned to hate what I had become. And, I fought it.

But, I always ended up losing the fight. Sometimes by early knockout. Sometimes I’d get all the way to the 15th round. But, I always went down.

I resorted to Antabuse to stop from getting drunk. It works, until I stop taking the pills.

I’ve read everything that I could find about alcoholism, to no avail.

Then, in Waupun prison, Cheri sent me a book that I had requested, by Dr. Lance Dodes, and the control that alcohol had over me, began to slip away. I came face to face with the rape that I had memory holed for over forty years. I explored it, and studied on it, alone, for the remainder of my prison sentence.

Then, I came home, and shared my revelation with Cheri. And, she became my therapist, my friend, my confidant, the one who held me when I would cry about the wasted life. The best friend anyone ever had.

Alcohol, what is it good for? We used to give geriatric patients a beer at night, cause it was supposed to be good for them. But, it you find a kid who prefers beer and whiskey, to Pepsi, or juice, or water, there’s a kid that needs some lovin’.

And, if you find an adult who says beer tastes better than a glass of cranberry juice, they’re straight up, full of shit. I’m good with a little pot smoking. A little mushrooms now and then, for mind expansion, and music appreciation purposes.

The rest of that shit, legal, or otherwise, is poison. And, it will rob you of your happiness, and your oh so precious time. Do I have an occasional beer, or shot of tequila, or glass of chocolate milk (Bailiey’s)? Yes.

Self-medication. No longer compulsion. I am a blessed human being for having received this reprieve.

3. What legacy would you like to give a friend, say, me, any friend?

Legacy for a friend? For my friend. With the exception of Beth, you are the only friend that I’ve got, according to my calculations. Seven months ago, I lost the best friend I have ever known.

A severed finger tickles, compared to the pain of losing Cheri. Since she went “interstellar”, and even before, you have been the rock, upon which I have built my foundation. Admire is a word that I have thrown around. Venerate is another excellent selection.

A talk-walker. I thought that they went extinct. You have conducted your life, at least what I know of it, in a fashion that I would be proud to claim as my own history.

My legacy, in tribute to you, and to Fishbone, would be, for me to be, that medic, that man, who dresses the worlds, who brings nourishment, both for the body, and for the spirit, of my brothers, and my sisters, and all of the children, my children, all of them, my grandkids.

Not a butler to the well heeled. A servant, to those who have been trod upon, and had the audacity, and the wherewithal, to keep on surviving. Those are my people. The red people, the brown people, even some of the white people.

I want to be lovable because of my works, not because of my wealth. I want a sick baby, and a frightened mother, to smile because I had a hand in doing something decent.

I want that to be my legacy. I’ve been flailing around, trying. But, I know that I can do better.

4. What are some of the happy memories growing up before booze?

Happy memories before booze: Playing tennis against my parents, two against one, at Stange’s park, in Merrill. Playing cards, with my mom, and dad, and splitting some Pepsi’s, and pretzels, and chips, or Fritos. Shooting hoops, at my friend, Billy Utech’s house, in my Keds, that I took a beating for.

All alone. Refining my long jumper. Moving like Jerry West. Hair slicked back.

Used some of dad’s Vitalis.

And, snowmobiling. Me, and mom, and dad, and all the rural folk, and their kids. Farm kids, and me, the kid whose eyes blow up, and starts sneezing at a picture of a farm.

And, dad’s summer slow pitch games. Same kids. Shooting pool for a dime a game.

And, Captain Kangaroo. And, Mr. Magoo. And, Red Skelton. And, the Beatles. And, my little record players. I wore one out with my 45s. And, Stevie Loos. An adopted kid.

One of two. The disappointment. A true friend. I was never good enough as a kid. I knew that I was ugly.

Always. Small kid. Not big enough to be Gale Sayers. Maybe I could be the Incredible Hulk. He was a good guy. A soft heart. Just like Sonny Liston. Then I could be big and strong, like what was desired, and approved of, and fawned over. Not a kid who read books, and played tennis.

I was the man on a snowmobile though. Size didn’t matter. Pretty badass on the courts too. I have a secret weapon that no one has adopted yet, that I know of. And, I’m not sharing, just in case. I salvaged my Prince racquet, from the garbage truck. Is that enough? I can probably come up with a little more, if I dig real deep.

5. What were happy memories with booze?

I have no happy memories with booze. Maybe some comradely with juveniles over some rock and roll records, but I sensed, early on that I shouldn’t be drinking this stuff.

It was making me someone I didn’t like anymore.

7. Do you have a philosophy life? Expand.

My philosophy of life? Time, is the most precious asset that we have. And, we never know when our time account is about to be overdrawn. Some folks gets decades deposited. Some get minutes. Spend as much of that currency doing thinks that make you happy.

Laugh. For god’s sake laugh. And, sing. Sing out loud. Learn the words. Or, make up your own. Don’t hum. At least not for long. Sing out loud. Share your voice. Be a legend.

A legend whose legacy is kindness.

6. Why is Wisconsin the way it is – tough individuals, racist, in denial, very hard-edged American?

8. What’s wrong with America? Keep it simple, I know it’s a book length response.

What is wrong with America? What is wrong with Wisconsin? Big stuff there Paul.

A lot is not going to be detailed. Brainwashing. The screens. The bombardment of lies, and manipulations.

The boxes that we hide in. I never feel more alive, than when I am outside. I am a part of nature. Not, apart from nature. That’s why WE loved camping so much. Why is america, and whizz-con-sin, so ugly, so mean, so filthy? The Anglo culture that poisoned this continent. When the red man prevailed here, this place was a paradise.

Now, it is a toxic landfill.

Once there was harmony between man, and his environment. Now, there is abuse, for the green. The dirty green. God damn money. Money over your brother. Your sister.

Your dog. The bison. The bear. The wolf. The cow. The chicken. The pig.

And, there needs to be more music. Not celebrity. Not pop, rock, country, star. Music.

And, irony. And, satire. Let’s laugh at ourselves, and then get about the business of not doing that stupid shit again. And medicine. Nurture, and heal our sick and wounded fellow travelers. And, nurture, and heal ourselves, in the process.

9. The power of letter writing to your wife. Explain.

10. The power of books coming to you and you reading them in prison. Explain.

Letter writing to Cheri. I dove a heavy dose of that, during every incarnation. And, a lighter dose of that, even when I’m not incarcerated. Letters are my way of speaking to you, when you are not in the room with me, and I have something to say to you. And, letters are precise.

There’s no playing a game of telephone when you’re writin’ letters.As partners for over forty years, Cheri, and I, talked at length every day. Iron bars, and cement walls aren’t going to stop that. Yeah, cellmates of mine used to marvel as I would crank out 14, 28, 42 pages. Day in, and day out. Lots of pens. Lots of legal pads. Lots of stamped envelopes.

It’s who I am. Same with the books. Twenty, twenty-five books at a clip. Heavy laundry bag, walking from the property office, back to the cell block. Those books saved my life. I was dying in there. Wrongly accused, and convicted. I was going insane. I wanted to kill people. Not shoot them either. I wanted to beat them with a roofing hammer. To some guys in the joint, my nickname was “the hammer”.

So fucking angry. So fucking enraged. The hundreds of books were an escape from my reality.

Then, Cheri sent me the book that tamped down all of that hate. Clarence Darrow. “Resist Not Evil.” That book gave me a new outlook, that permitted me to endure a nightmare.

Books have always been important to me. I bet that they always will.

Sanford and son threw out a few books, that were in a grey igloo bag, that I really want back.

I want Rachel Carson back, too. Instead, I’m going to join the confederacy of dunces, and finish the journey the Cheri and I began talking, together.

11. What does family mean to you?

Family? Family is who I am supposed to look out for. I’m the patriarch of this family, and dads, and grampas, and brothers, have wisdom to impart, and scuffed knees to attend to. They have explanations to share, and misunderstandings to resolve. As it was, when I had my spine operation, almost eleven years ago, so it is today, in the aftermath of my hand surgery.

Not a word from those who I identify as my family. It’s a hurtful thing. I do the opposite.

Maybe I am crazy. But, I’ll never stop. Doing otherwise would feel wrong. Even thinking about doing otherwise feels wrong.

Family is loneliness.

12. What will be the next iteration of your life, 65 onward?

The next iteration of my life? I don’t know. But, I better figure it out soon, cause I’m dying over here.I’m going down, if I continue like this.

13. Three lessons you would impart your granddaughter Ivy now and/or if and when she stops using?

Three lessons for Ivy. Always a number with you people. Rate your pain, on a scale of one to ten. Rate your satisfaction, one to ten. How about, it hurts like a motherfucker, and your customer service sucks!!!

Ivy, you are poisoning yourself for a reason. What is that reason(s)? Dig deep. Explore.

Go all the way back. Find that injury. Then, go to people, that you trust. That want to help you, and are equipped to do so. And, spill your guts. Put it all out there.

Cry.

Scream.

Swear.

Shake your fist, at the unfairness of it all.

And, then go about loving yourself. Be loving to Ivy. Be with those for whom loving Ivy is automatic. Go back. Find that child. The one who is still innocent. Remember what made that little girl smile, laugh, sing You’ll know when it is, because you will have felt safe then. Before the sick people got their hands on you.

Then, pursue the dreams of that small child, and you’re on your way. And, always call on your grampa. He’s the best friend that you’ve got. And, he’s pretty smart. You’ll probably have to change playgrounds, and playmates. If you hang around in the barbershop, sooner or later, you’re going to get a haircut. And, don’t believe anything that the government tells you.

Same with TV.

Find things out for yourself.

Or, ask grampa. We can find out together.

I love you Ivy.

Is that three?

******************************************end of the Q & A*******************************************

**

Note: I went to Wisconsin to meet a friend. Yeah, there were things on the agenda: get his camper-pick-up truck looked at for hail damage. Get him out and about. Get to wMerrill, from River Falls, his place of residence. Get some handle on the unbelievable hoarding situation he was in. Get up to Merrill to help with some honoring of the deceased wife-friend-soulmate. Friendship. My wife encouraged me to head up there too, so I had a calm and smart person help with my decision.

The hoarding deal turned into more chaos as we hired on a small outfit out of Minneapolis to do the bagging and hauling. That was a disaster. The Moores self-referenced themselves as Sanford and Son, as both the son, running the outfit, and the dad, as a helper, are African American.

The shit show was precipitated by K’s incapacitation, the un-and-dis-organized stuff packed in all the rooms, and then our own absences for some of the days, and of course the inability of the hired on crew to get their shit together, i.e. being on time (hours delayed) and listening and reading our directs for what not to take, as well as what to take.

It was hard getting those books taken away to some dump. Books Kelly read in prison, sent to him from his wife. Books that the prisons he was locked up in refused to take. Even the chapels refused to take the books. Every sort of book tied to enlightenment — Rachel Carson, Howard Zinn, and Gore Vidal, to name only a few of hundreds.

The letters — sometimes three a day — he sent to his wife and for which she saved. All gone. He has no need to keep them. Hundreds of them, in the clutter, the mess, with mice running all around.

Also note that we are in the process of contacting his graddaughter to see if her story is something she is okay with being in a small blog. You never know what will come back to haunt her.

The trauma in the family is tough. I look at this as a memoir. Anti-memoir. Kelly’s. Through me, the conduit. All is kosher for me, now, put into writing.

Here’s even the local rag printing my memoir writing class informaiton:

“The art of remaking-retelling a story”

The last few years on planet Earth have been pregnant ones: People facing existential crises and a world seemingly going to hell in a hand basket. SARS-CoV2 and lockdowns are SELCE’s in all our lives: significant emotional life-changing events!

As a writer on the coast, I’ve found subjects for a column, “Deep Dive – Go Beneath the Surface with Paul Haeder” (Oregon Coast Today) endless. We have deeply interesting people.

That’s my wiring. A young journalist of 17 who “hard-scrabbled” into desert haunts in Arizona and throughout Mexico, discovering people’s narratives — wherever they are in their proverbial walkabouts — highly compelling.

It’s a form of biographical parachuting, and a kind of thievery — entering people’s worlds, getting to know them fast and furiously, and then capturing those facts and memories in creative nonfiction.

I’ve been doing this stealing for almost 50 years. With that eclectic pedigree, I hope to see a few interested writers here in Lincoln County signing up for my community education class, Memoir Writing, at OCCC’s Waldport campus.

The title is just one stone in the cairn of stories I hope we as a class can share.

My first gig teaching the art of creative memoir writing occurred when I was young, 29, with the Center for Lifelong Learning at UT-El Paso. In that community/continuing education class, I helped shepherd amazing life forces of 15 students in the first session:

• a Dachau survivor who ended up in El Paso as a doctor;

• a former colonel in the Army who was in the Bataan Death March;

• a criminal defense attorney who defended rough dudes, including narcotraficantes along the U.S.-Mexico border;

• a female truck driver of over 50 years who saw all of the U.S., Canada and some of Mexico as a long-hauler;

• a young guy who won $1.5 million in a state lottery but ended up opening up two clinics in Juarez to treat the poor;

• a doctor who worked in Guatemala and El Salvador performing cleft palette operations pro bono.

We came together as survivors, and some of the better memoir and anti-memoir pieces flowed from regular folk: a farmer of chilies, a lady who raised seven kids who all went onto college, a construction company owner who learned how to read after he made his first million, at age 50.

For this Tuesday, 2 to 3:30 p.m. class, we will explore how people in this neck of the woods got here at the edge of the Cascadia Subduction Zone. I believe in the Mission Impossible opener as a frame for this laid-back class: Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to uncover some of the layers of your spiritual-intellectual-emotional-historical life onion.

I like what Lidia Yyuknavitch says about the process of writing self: “I think our identities — the ones we live in the real world — are really made partly from stories that we build up around ourselves, necessary fictions, so that we can bear the weight of our own lives. We like to call these ‘truths’ or ‘facts’ or ‘selves,’ but I maintain that they are fictions. Fictions for instance called ‘mother’ or ‘wife’ or ‘lover’ or ‘teacher’ or ‘writer.’”

For my premiere long-form column, Deep Dive, I went into the life and aspirations of a great white shark scientist who did open water research of these sharks in waters off South Africa, Dyer Island. Then, the column took off because, a) I was open to any sort of human being living in Lincoln County who had a story to tell. The stories came at me like a tsunami. Not all were of made-for-TV-movie intensity. However, the common theme in these more than 35 pieces is “perseverance under adversity.”

And, b), it takes time to listen in order to uncover. Carol Van Strum is another gem I wrote about — she fought the aerial spraying of herbicides in her Five Rivers’ area and wrote a book, “A Bitter Fog,” to capture this battle.

We will work on each student’s individual projects — some will want book length tell-alls, and others will want a life compressed into a few dozen pages. The best part of this memoir writing course is we will experiment.

There are other ways to skin a cat, so to speak. We can resist the universal desire to uncover a dirty pile of secrets. We can write with a level of frankness, and candidness.

That sort of writing can “welcome talk, but not cover all the personal details.”

The “I” in this form of expression is fluid: we have to discover ways to bring in the reader, and deliver the reader a conversation. Some in the class will want to capture a life SELCE. That’s fine. Others will want to explore the meaning of life through their own eyes.

This includes how we all “get through” by deploying universal truths. For some of us, we need to get that down on paper: an essay, fiction story, an entire book? The goal is the same — writing “self.”

Our mission is to share and wordsmith, so the class gets down to brass tacks — writing ourselves into something others might respond to positively and with a keen sense of their own lives.

For information, go to https://oregoncoast.edu/communityed

Paul K. Haeder is a novelist, journalist, educator and author of “Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam,” Cirque Press.

*******************************************end of memoir writing story****************************

Blitzed with Blatz:

The ten states with the highest alcohol consumption per capita (in gallons) per year are:

1. New Hampshire – 4.67 gallons
2. District of Columbia – 3.77 gallons
3. Delaware – 3.52 gallons
4. Nevada – 3.42 gallons
5. North Dakota – 3.16 gallons
6. Montana – 3.1 gallons
7. Vermont – 3.06 gallons
8. Idaho – 2.94 gallons
9. Wisconsin – 2.93 gallons
10. Colorado – 2.88 gallons

TOP 15 COUNTRIES ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION

1. Seychelles: 20.50 litres
2. Uganda: 15.09 litres
3. Czech Republic: 14.45 litres
4. Lithuania: 13.22 litres
5. Luxembourg: 12.94 litres
6. Germany: 12.91 litres
7. Ireland: 12.88 litres
8. Latvia: 12.77 litres
9. Spain: 12.72 litres
10. Bulgaria: 12.65 litres
11. France: 12.33 litres
12. Burkina Faso: 12.03 litres
13. Portugal: 12.03 litres
14. Austria: 11.96 litres
15. Slovenia: 11.90 litres

It’s USA Today, more fake-faux-fucked up news (sic) but a broken grandfather clock is correct twice a day: “These are America’s drunkest states”

2. Wisconsin

• Adults drinking excessively: 24.5%
• Alcohol-related driving deaths: 36.9% (8th highest)
• Adults in fair or poor health: 14.0% (13th lowest)
• Drunkest metro area: Green Bay, WI

Some 24.5% of adults in Wisconsin report binge or heavy drinking — the second largest share of any state and well above the comparable national share of 18%. Drinking alcohol regularly over long periods of time can lead to many serious ailments later in life such as liver cancer and even dementia. Despite high rates of excessive drinking, Wisconsin has a relatively low premature death rate. For every 100,000 residents, about 300 will die before the age of 75, less deaths than in most other states.

++—++

I don’t buy the floundering statistics, and alas, Wisconsin has some synergy, really, with the cheese and dairies and the cold and the drug use and the MS and ALS frequency and the aging population, the other aspects of life and death in a Chlamydia Capitalist world.

Wisconsin and Meth:

According to the Rusk County, Wisconsin, Department of Health and Human Services, drug-related child abuse and neglect investigations have increased dramatically over the past four years.

“County health services is dealing with cases where there are children in these homes, they have removed some children from the homes,” Wallace said. “cases are pending with them. But it does affect the whole county in a whole because everyone who lives here has to deal with that issue.”

Looking at some of those numbers from the Rusk County Department of Health and Human Services: of the current open child protective services cases, 67% are open due to safety concerns related to drugs. The current out-of-home care placements where children have been removed due to concerns around drugs is 92%

And with all things in Chlamydia Capitalism, contradctions, grant retardation, lack of funding, pissing contests, territorial stupidity, and more, keeps everything in reverse gear.

Due to grant guidelines, more than $60 million in state and federal dollars that have been released to combat opioid misuse cannot be used to mitigate this new crisis.  

Health care providers say they should be granted flexibility in how they use these funds. 

“It should be the providers who are in the trenches every day that should have a voice in determining what the needs are,” says Saima Chauhan, clinical team manager at Journey Mental Health Center in Madison. “We’re the ones every day … seeing individuals and families that are suffering so tremendously from the effects of addiction.” 

Morrison says widespread addiction to pain pills and heroin prompted Congress to direct a “historic investment” to combat the opioid epidemic. According to federal budget figures, Congress has appropriated at least $6 billion in the past five years for prevention, treatment and research.  

Wisconsin has received $63 million in federal grants specifically targeted to opioid prevention and medication-assisted treatment, according to the state Department of Health Services.   (source)

All part of the narrative of each and every family, home, neighborhood, school, place of work, marriage, and hospital. Addiction is right there in the Homo Retailopithecus DNA.

Kelly’s story is sort of Mary Karr’s story, or hell, how many others in the business of memoir writing? The True Story Behind Wild

Memoirs. A hell of an adventure:

“A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.”

―Mary Karr,The Liars’ Club

“My goal in high school was to stay out of the penitentiary, so if I can go from there to here, you guys can all be gainfully employed. Yeah, your parents are clapping.’ — Commencement address.

a few more photos of the Wisconsin for ‘This is Your Life’ Bullshit! … a 10-part series now (goddamn, I hope not!)

Dog and Dude: A holy place in Merrill…

The fellow after he had surgery on an almost decapitated index finger (more on that story, too, to add to the pathetic nature of things up north for this guy). River Falls, Wisconsin, where the Shop-Ko closed down so you can’t even buy new underwear in town, a college town, no less (where is Zelenksy when we need help?)

Fellow and grandkid in Rhinelander, a city in and the county seat of Oneida County, Wisconsin, United States. Its population was 7,735 at the 2000 census. Rhinelander is the home of the Hodag. He’s here with his granddaughter, again, Wisconsin: IV drug abuser, for sure, but at 19, hanging on, as her own life is one tragedy and one trauma and one PTSD blight after another. But she is not the sum total of her addictions, nor her family’s dysfunctioins, but again, the beautiful people like the Obama’s or Clintons or the 5 percent in the Golden Billion Party, they would like to see KK and his granddaughter at the bottom of the sea:

Hodag: In American folklore, the hodag is a fearsome critter resembling a large bull-horned carnivore with a row of thick curved spines down its back. The hodag was said to be born from the ashes of cremated oxen, as the incarnation of the accumulation of abuse the animals had suffered at the hands of their masters.^[1] The history of the hodag is strongly tied to the City of Rhinelander where it was claimed to have been discovered. The hodag has figured prominently in early Paul Bunyan stories.

The fun stuff of some of us in the Golden Billion Chlamydia Club.

Now, look up “the golden billion” on Google CIA Gulag, or anywhere, and the search results are anti-Putin to the max. Amazing how quickly the stupid Hollyood drenched fucks in the world, the elite, freakshow barkers, the Republicans and Democrats, the Ivy League and the Minor League, the Merchants of Death in and out of Uniform, the pure ignorance of it all, how this country, and other Disnyefied and Marvel Comic Books dumbdowned in the Collective Perverse West have turned into puffy empty cheese puffs.

Now, it’s hard to see the down on their Chlamydia Capitalist luck folk in Wisconsin or Wyoming would ever ever see themselves down on their luck, let alone part of some billion person juggernaut of death to the rest of the world, but WE are:

The idea of total domination of the ‘golden billion’ is racist and neocolonial, dividing the peoples into first and second-rate, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday, speaking at the Strong Ideas for a New Time forum.

“The model of total domination of the so-called golden billion is unfair. Why should this ‘golden billion’ of all the population on the globe dominate over everyone and impose its own rules of behavior? Based on the illusion of exceptionalism, it (this model – TASS) divides the peoples into those of first or second-rate, and therefore it is racist and neocolonial in its essence, while the globalist, allegedly liberal ideology underlying it, is more and more acquiring the features of totalitarianism, restraining the creative search and free historical creativeness”, the Russian president stressed.

According to Putin, the impression is that the West simply cannot offer the world a model of the future. “Of course, this ‘golden billion’ became golden for a reason. It has achieved a lot. But it not only took such positions thanks to some implemented ideas, to a large extent it took its positions by robbing other peoples: in Asia, and in Africa,” the head of state pointed out, “Indeed, it was like that. Look at how India has been plundered”.

Therefore, the Russian president continued, today the ‘golden billion’ elites are panically afraid that other world centers can present their visions of global development.

So, fear and loathing and beer and speed balls and running and gunning and living in a flophouse, the whole nine yards of destitute but on a Smart Phone, all of that Western putridness, it is exemplified for me in little bouts of tangential tributes to the suffering, of good people like KK, and his granddaughter, Ivy.

We all might be looking at glowing Wisconsin cheese curds and milk with U$A on its bipolar, addicted to pain trajectory of wanting more war so the perverts of power get off on the killin’.

For now, all I can do is upload and unload:

“That means a new civilization model for emerging economies like China and Argentina because they want to rise up peacefully (…) I think we are in the new civilization age.”

—Wang Wen from the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies stressed the need for Russia to rediscover China – finding “mutual trust in the middle level and elites level”. At the same time, there’s a sort of global rush to join BRICS, from Saudi Arabia and Iran to Afghanistan and Argentina. (source)

You will not be getting any discourse on the real world from Wisconsin beer lovers or Iowa bacon hoarders or LA Falsies or SF Transitions or NYC Apple Cores, what have you. The name of the game is the golden billion is getting the golden shower treatment by the elites, the Goyim Ghouls and their ZioJewish Fascist Masters.

Talk in towns far and wide is about the game, the Friday night highlights, or who got thrown in jail, or some talk about the deals at Costco and the next cruise ship run before the next DARPA (now Ukraine and USA cooking up those bioweapons in those ferret and monkey labs) fun locks down the planet, where the Golden Billion already have mostly shut down their heads, their thinking. Car wrecks and mall shootings. Weather reports and the price of eggs and where’s the toilet paper now?

Ahh, the old town hall for the ‘township’ of Merrill:

Another holy house bites the dust:

Some light in those eyes left:

More coming up.

third part of this disharmony on ‘What’s Wisconsin got to do with us/U$A?’

Incarceration. America. Wisconsin. A story of Kelly, 65, and his dog, Eldee, 10.

Part One and then Part Two.

There are few people I know — green-leaning democrats, Trump-leaning republicans, and a smattering of plenty of archetypes in between — who will dance more than a few seconds looking at prison, drunken life, needle drug seeking, poverty, family dysfunction, estrangement, toothlessness, and opinionated guys down on their luck and with no material assets to speak of, though he has a home, a camper pick-up and loads of musical instruments and equipment.

He isn’t third-eye blind by this Chlamidyia Capitalism. He’s an atheist, but like many, he digs some of the bible to dig at those thumpers who put the leather-bound good-book above all else (sort of).

6:17–19, NIV. “Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share.

Before we move further, sure, why is it Chlamidyia Capitalism, which all intents and purposes is the disease version of Predatory-Disaster-Usury-Casino-Exploitive CAPITALISM.

Chlamydia trachomatis (/kləˈmɪdiə trəˈkoʊmətɪs/), commonly known as chlamydia, is a bacterium that causes chlamydia, which can manifest in various ways, including: trachoma, lymphogranuloma venereum, nongonococcal urethritis, cervicitis, salpingitis, pelvic inflammatory disease. C. trachomatis is the most common infectious cause of blindness and the most common sexually transmitted bacterium.

Different types of C. trachomatis cause different diseases. The most common strains cause disease in the genital tract, while other strains cause disease in the eye or lymph nodes. Like other Chlamydia species, the C. trachomatis life cycle consists of two morphologically distinct life stages: elementary bodies and reticulate bodies. Elementary bodies are spore-like and infectious, whereas reticulate bodies are in the replicative stage and are seen only within host cells. (source)

So, think about it: KK was born under a bad sign, sort of — Merrill, Wisconsin. Pubs and Bars, and then churches. One hundred combined total for a town of 9,350 in Wisconsin.

Mill jobs that are back-breaking, dangerous, mind numbing. Sort of the syphillis version of Chlamydia’s cousin.

People from outside Turtle Island — Those of German descent are most numerous, followed by those of Irish, Polish, Scandinavian (primarily Norwegian), and British heritage. Persons of German ancestry are widely distributed but are more concentrated toward the east and in Milwaukee. Irish groups are found mainly in Beloit, Fond du Lac, and Sturgeon Bay.

We are talking around 1850 when these undocumentated and illegal immigrants flowed like a proverbial STD plague into Indian Country. The Indians at the Time of Contact, 1600-1850

That is the foundation to this country’s many hundreds of ailments, certainly tied to murder, theft, rape, miseducation, plunder, medical malpratice, corruption that all those immigrants somehow had on their skin. The Chlamydia of Exploitation which caused so much blindness in the hearts and souls of those early interlopers.

Now? Generations later, the children are confused in their Zoom School Delirium, while others are destined to liver damage, collapsed veins, toothless smiles, and so many mental ailments.

Dual Diagnosis is tied to addiction treatment — booze, drugs, what have you. With a co-occurring problem, rooted in the brain: Of the 21 million people in the U.S. with a substance use disorder, 8 million also live with a mental illness. It’s more than 21 million, but for now, the top mental illnesses are: Mood disorders that often co-occur with substance use disorders include:

Bipolar disorder

Major depressive disorder

Dysthymia disorder (persistent low mood for at least 2 years, accompanied by 2 or more symptoms of depression)

Anxiety disorders commonly diagnosed with alcohol or drug dependency include:

Generalized anxiety disorder

Obsessive-compulsive disorder

Social anxiety disorder

PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder)

Other mental health conditions that may co-occur with substance abuse can include ADD, ADHD, schizophrenia and personality disorders.

Now now, I know it is difficult to see the rape of the Indians as part of the mental disorders listed above, but I have to say it goes deep into the DNA, so looking at Wisconsin or the so-callled Midwest, what I experienced in eight short days was entire groups of people, families, with so many bloody items packed in their baggage.

Before I move into Kelly’s specific social and spiritual work house shit, it is good to see what We/They/The Germans, Irish, Brits, Scandinavians, Poles, et al, did:

Native American cultures had occupied the Upper Midwest for centuries before whites arrived in the region. The invading whites were properly impressed by the thousands of burial mounds then to be found in the southern portions of the region, left behind by the extinct Hopewellian and Mississippian cultures. The Indians encountered by the whites at the time of contact depended upon fishing and hunting for a livelihood and spoke the Iroquois, Algonquin and Siouan languages. The European presence to the east had by then transformed Indian life. Indians became dependent upon guns and other western goods (and, often, got western diseases in the bargain). They warred with each other for primacy in their trade with the Europeans. Huron dominance of the Upper Great Lakes and eastern trade, and the Hurons themselves, were destroyed by the Iroquois in the mid-seventeenth century. The Sioux had been forced to move west by the Chippewa. Indians formed alliances with one and then another colonial power as power shifted from one to another. Charles Langlade, a half-white Indian leader known as the father of Wisconsin, helped the French defeat Braddock and the British; then fought with Burgoyne and the British against the Americans, and then lived out the balance of his life as an American. Remnant tribes huddled together. Stockbridge Indians, moving west from Massachusetts, lived with the Oneidas in central New York, before moving (with some Oneidas) to Green Bay, where they negotiated with resident Winnebago and Menominee Indians to win the right to establish a settlement.

There was talk of setting aside part of what became the Northwest Territory as an Indian reserve or even as a state with all the perquisites of other states. Such talk ceased as white settlement approached the area. In each of the Upper Midwest states, whites assumed title to one stretch of Indian land after another, in breathtakingly short order, as that land became accessible to them. The white advance often culminated in a final desperate stand on the part of the Indians, as seen on a large scale in the uprising led by Pontiac (1763-66) and again in that led by Tecumseh (1811-13), and on a lesser scale in the Black Hawk War (1832) in Wisconsin and the Sioux Uprising (1862) in Minnesota. Often friends among the whites, in applying one or another “white” remedy to the Indian “problem,” were as destructive to Indian ways of life as were their avowed enemies. The defeated Indians were finally exiled from territory coveted by the whites, to reservations within the Upper Midwest states or to remote western areas devoid of white settlers. Once the wars and resettlements were over, significant numbers of Indians remained in each of the three states, on the reservations and in the cities. In fact, in the recent past their numbers have increased dramatically. The white debt to the Indians in the exploration and settlement of the region is indirectly evidenced in the abundance of Indian place names for every feature of the landscape.

Amazing, the trail of tears whites have generated throughout the globe. Exile from their own lands. Land theft, and this little two paragraph “something” above yammers about white debt reflected in Indian names for roads, shopping malls, lakes? (source)

Kelly showed me spots in Merrill. I have the photos, and I haven’t uploaded them all yet. One telling image is of him in front of a seven story building, subsidized apartments now, where when Kelly was 13 and a paper boy, he went to one of his clients to collect money, and, the pedophillia, the dirty rape of a boy, occurred by a man who later became a foster grandparent.

For the boy, and for the man, and then, for the newspaper, which technically was Kelly’s employer, a tale of different tales unfolded. Of course the boy is not believed, and there wasn’t even a slap on the wrist for the old man.

This is the quagmire of generational trauma, the dual diagnosis, the co-occurring mental pain and trauma caused by that very act of child abuse, rape, played out a thousand times a day in the world.

He told me it took him just a few months ago to understand the seeds of his own self-destruction with booze. Drinking and driving and busted. Plenty of years sober. Not a fan of the 12-step higher authority deal of AA.

Depression, anxiety, bipolar, who knows what else, seeded at age 13, but scabbed over, over time. You kind of have to get on living, and surviving, and so Kelly did do that, and meeting his Cheri 44 years ago, well, even though she lived without him for a decade total, and even though Kelly went from clean and sober to busted and locked up after drinking and driving, she was a driving force in his life.

The reason to live, even has she suffered small cell lung cancer. He had purpose, a mate, a listener, someone who shared the dream of camping and getting out of the swamp of Wisconsin memory hell.

They had taken trips, and loved the West, loved the Souix Nation’s history, loved the Red Man. At the benediction or unveiling of the monument marble bench at the Merrill Cemetary, there were items especially special to Kelly and his mate: bronze bison, mason jar of farmland pickles, violin, quilt with bisons, glass map of North Dakota, family pictures, flowers, and Mountain Dew.

This town is like many of the towns throughout the Midwest. Where my spouse is from, Kansas, she said “it’s flat and bland just like Kansas . . . bars everywhere.” She said the cemeteries in my photo collection from this Wisconsin trip are better kept up. “In Kansas, even with Civil War monuments and gravesites, the weeds and grass are all overgrown. Nobody cares. Many are on private property so they don’t give a damn about the dead . . . or remembering the dead from long ago.”

KK showed me the dead at two cemeteries. Showed me guys who died young, some sick, others violently. The town of Merrill is sagging, somewhat forgotten, and alas, the memories, they are hard, like hardening of the arteries hard.

He is fine with me inserting photos of his family, the gravesites, the town, and even KK himself. Here he is with Eldee, the fat dog that stayed with his wife thdt

I haven’t even gotten to the prison time, the incarceration, the time he was on the lamb, on the run, having just had enough of the legal or criminal injustice system. That AWOL from a furlough did in fact, hurt his wife, as she was harassed by cops, their place — their home — was broken into by the cops, and the finale was when they finally traced Kelly back to the River Falls home, after being on the run in places Like Florida, and elswwhere.

I’ll end on some happy notes: a poem I read, wrote for the bench dedication ceremony, and two I did not write but read:

A Song of Rejoining

by Paul Haeder

love of one man

collector of heart songs

she held quilts of love

folded her history like

kneading pie crust

she held on long, traveled

deep within, breaking chains

family ghosts always present

yet she is a bright

star, you see in a summer

meteor shower

thinking of this mother,

wife, grandmother, friend

she is here holding up visions

a bench for visitors

a warm breeze in Merrill

the echo of her being

For the Anniversary of My Death

by  W. S. Merwin

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day   

When the last fires will wave to me

And the silence will set out

Tireless traveler

Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer

Find myself in life as in a strange garment

Surprised at the earth

And the love of one woman

And the shamelessness of men

As today writing after three days of rain

Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease

And bowing not knowing to what

Motherhood

by Medora C. Addison

Standing alone at the ocean’s edge,
Eager and unafraid,
You are the child I used to be,
Playing the games I played.

Now I have only a coward’s heart,
Holding you all too dear,
Learning at last that love shall teach
The fearless how to fear.

You are so little against the sky,
Eager and unafraid—
Oh, little son by the ocean’s edge,
I am afraid, afraid!

+—+

And, this short Part Three is best finished off with a Bukowski poem, sort of gritty, sort of filled with the death of drugs and drinking and old men and other men, in a flophouse. Emblematic of a life that could have been for Kelly but he fought that. Here we are, in 2023, and I went to Wisconsin to be a friend, to develop a friendship, and help out a little bit. I benefitted from the adventure.

Flophouse

by Charles Bukowski

you haven’t lived
until you’ve been in a
flophouse
with nothing but one
light bulb
and 56 men
squeezed together
on cots
with everybody
snoring
at once
and some of those
snores
so
deep and
gross and
unbelievable-
dark
snotty
gross
subhuman
wheezings
from hell
itself.
your mind
almost breaks
under those
death-like
sounds
and the
intermingling
odors:
hard
unwashed socks
pissed and
shitted
underwear
and over it all
slowly circulating
air
much like that
emanating from
uncovered
garbage
cans.
and those
bodies
in the dark
fat and
thin
and
bent
some
legless
armless
some
mindless
and worst of
all:
the total
absence of
hope
it shrouds
them
covers them
totally.
it’s not
bearable.
you get
up
go out
walk the
streets
up and
down
sidewalks
past buildings
around the
corner
and back
up
the same
street
thinking
those men
were all
children
once
what has happened
to
them?
and what has
happened
to
me?
it’s dark
and cold
out
here.

a tale of five cities, towns, rural townships . . . a start for this series that is going off the rails!

I just left from River Falls, Wisconsin, to Minneapolis-St. Paul, as the mighty Mississippi River, full of stringy whitecaps, seems to be that river going down, brothers and sisters, going down in so many ways, to the Gulf of Mexico through the flyover states of big ag, little big men, and women continuously told to stay away from well water, and keep the exposure on the back forty to a minimum when the spraying takes place.

My last episode in this series was all about KK, Kelly, taking me into his hoarding nightmare house to meet the Elde weiner dog, ten years old recently, and sometimes for days the only mammal in person Kelly talks to.

He just turned, 65, and his wife is gone, and that’s a forty-four year story, and he told me that one quarter of his life has been behind bars. All that time incarcerated, and his wife had to deal with the the legal trash, the lawyers, and the judges, and getting money for this and that court case.

“The last case broke us. Literally broke me and Cheri, financially. The heart was also broken .”

He’s a long hair and bearded guy, toothless, and he is a guitar and bass guitar freak. He showed me the bass he had in prison, and that’s a $300 limit on what inmates can have for such devices.

Toothless in Wisconsin. America. The first time was when he had the shit kicked out of him by another inmate. Imagine, showing up, sitting at a table, told, “That’s my table, dude.” And, Kelly, who he is and who we all should be, told the guy, “Last time I looked your name wasn’t on the table. And, I pay taxes in this county, so the table is the jail’s and county’s property, and since I pay taxes here and you don’t (he as from another Wisconsin locale), I assume I have the right to sit here just like anyone else.”

The one minute and thirty nine seconds of this big guy kicking Kelly’s face did the job, that is, mangled his face, eye-socket and ear, and knocked out teeth.

The prison system puts dental work on the back burner, so over the years in the prison system, Kelly has had tooth after tooth pulled, rather than suffering the dignity of decent dental work.

This psychopath happened to be black, and Kelly was pursuing a case against him. The White Brotherhood in one prison wanted him for the Aryan Nation fun, but Kelly refused that shit. What a crapper of a deal if he had that on his paperwork when going to trial.

America and formative years, that’s the ticket to a life of rebellion. Kelly’s smart, ended up going to college and matriculating, did auditing work for the River Falls college. He was not a happy camper with all the bullying in Merrill’s schools, and the neglect of a hard-assed old man — turned him into a runner, that is, running the streets.

Again, this is the bar scene, the small town drinking and drowning, out in the middle of nowhere. Nowhere to dance the high life, so the social scene for young bucks and gals is all about jumping into those bars for companionship, even if sometimes the local color is retrograde and ignorant and just plain old aged sharp cheddar racist and sexist and politically backward.

He listed off the number of people in his graduating class (KK did not finish school, went to a treatment program in Winnobego, one year, and he eventually just did the GED and got that high school diploma) who are dead.

Imagine, one fellow was working a window making mill, and his mother had died, and he was left with a son-of-a-bitch father, drunk and abusive, so when this guy lost his job, he couch surfed. Friends who also ended up crashed on the side of the road, perfectly unhurt by the collision, but knocked out cold and who died by exposure.

Another one of this guy’s friends as WWD, walking while drunk, and, bam, he was weaving into the darkened road, and he was killed.

Two couches down.

The kid with the window making job, now jobless and homeless, lived in the woods. In tents. Literally in the woods way up here in the almost great white north. This is a small town with 53 bars and 40-some churches, and VFWs, and the like, but whatever pain and PTSD and trauma he had, pushed him to live on his own, in the literal woods.

We’re not talking about Oregon Cascades or what have you woods, but gnarly woods, picnic areas and campgrounds, and that was yet another story of drunkenness and hardship.

They found the guy in pieces downriver after this fellow must have slipped in and went through the small dam.

Others — alcoholics — dead at 30, from heart attacks, others with liver disease, and others in prison for drunk driving homocide wilting away inside.

The power of booze and beer to bring tailgaters together to see the Vikings and Packers, all those hockey games, all the excuses to fire up a barbeque and pull out kegs, it is powerful.

This is not an easy legacy to break away from. KK did not belong, and when he came back from the treatment program, he too got a job in the window factory.

He as clean and sober for a while, but loneliness got the best of him. Here is a factory that threw a mandatory New Year’s Party, controlling the drinking, and controlling who would be showing up in the morning for work.

“Drink and party, on the company’s time, but quitting time means you quit at ten after midnight and then get some rest, sober up, and show up for the job the next morning.

I’ve talked with many cops and head sheriffs and police chiefs over the decades. In Spokane, where there are many down and outers, the Spokane County jail for that Sheriff is the largest mental health facility east of Seattle. That’s of course a play on the concept, because the county jail is no psych ward, no social work haven. Drugs, drinking and slow learning and terrible literacy swell the jail cells. Undiagnosed and untreated and unaddressed fetal alcohol syndrome is a number one reason adults offend. That is the disease of mother’s drinking during pregnancy. Babies coming out with a spectrum of mental and learning and spiritual diseases.

Babies turn into teens who turn into adults. Running and gunning. Making all the wrong decisions, and then drug and booze abuse, and alas, feeding a habit takes money, so the next best thing is breaking into places for stuff to pawn.

Homeless in Spokane, homeless in Wisconsin, homeless in America.

I got a lot of people in Wisconsin asking me if Portland is really that bad. You know, the constant blare of the ignorant “if it bleeds/burns/blows up, it leads” sort of thing with Mainstream Corporate TV.

So, while the kids in Merrill or River Falls or Tomahawk or in all the small towns learn how to cook meth, or at least learn how to run and gun and use and party, I’m asked about Portlandia.

How many prisons are in the state? Let’s see, the same demographics of Minnesota, but twice the number of incarcerated. Private prisons. You know, the beautiful people in LA or New York, hell, anywhere where the sun shines 330 days a year, with their investment portfolios hot with private prison stocks, the ugly reality of casino-disaster-prey capitalism:

Wisconsin currently spends about $1.5 billion dollars on its prisons, incarcerating people at around double the rate of nearby states. Despite this high cost, inmates in Wisconsin prisons often lack sufficient medical care and food, much of which is purchased with money sent from friends and family on the outside or with the inmate’s own meager wages ($0.20 – $0.80). (source)

A tale of many cities, no? The ones that have and don’t have. And what is it in those possessions? No hard and clean and clear and creative and loving father, mother, aunt and uncle, in some variations on a theme.

White America is as terribly broken as Black America. And, the beautiful people, like the Bidens in their $2.5 million home in Delaware, and other haunts, or the Trump freak show with his multi-million dollar haunts, no matter which whipping down party you align with (so sorry you see the world in blue state and red state demarcation), hence, throwing deplorable as a noun, descriptor, out to the world, whether it is Obama or Bill Cosby lecturing “their” people about what it takes to be a better human, or whether is is Romney or Clinton looking at “those people,” the forty percent who do not contribute, or those who are in the deplorable category, or the super predator, whatever these racist Trump or Biden bumblers and followers believe, we are in that world, here, up close in Wisconsin.

Eight days and countless hours listening to and speaking with and interrogating Kelly give me a better sense of the poison pills in this state than I am sure most Wisconsin beautiful people, academics, politicians could muster up from their high horses.

Biden in 1993 speech pushing crime bill warned of ‘predators on our streets’ who were ‘beyond the pale’ — Watch and Listen!

Ahh, until the last Ukrainian, err, until the last deplorable, that is, these fellahs and felines propose. The country is so mixed up, so broken from family to family, from the top to the bottom (just different tales of different rotting cities and mindsets) that we are living in a nightmare, where the ugly Americano is arming for more death, more killing, in Ukraine or in Taiwan. Americans can’t really just go through life in a Stepford Wife-Hubby way without paying the ferryman.

Kelly’s family — kids and grandkids and kids who call him pops — all battling the scars of addiction: from meth to currently doing fair on some level, but slamming the drinks, slamming the mind with sometimes superficial stuff.

I met people here who were gracious, and the graveside thing I help officiate for his wife’s memorial monument bench, they wanted to know more about me, showed respect and opened up their kitchen and hearts to me.

No complaints there, for sure.

And, yes, many broken people, from adults to grandchildren. Again, for me, people are amazing in many ways, that is, how they go from down and out, of in Kelly’s case, ten years in, some of the time in county lockup for OWI — operating a vehicle while intoxicated. He owns up to those. However, the prison time, that’s a whole other story upon story of misjustice, ugly local cops and bad prosecutors and judges mean as cuss.

I do not want to insult any of his clan, and writing about this, well, explosing folk, his family, Kelly is fine with that. Relishing what might come out of my noggin.

We laughed a lot, and in many ways the sickness of it all is funny in a sicko way, but writing this now, I’m a bit anorexic in terms of replicating the humor. A lot of funny moments with Kelly’s virtually messed up series of events in his life.

I came up here to be a friend, and I do not know how much good I did, so this is not about exploiting anyone’s pain, man, so if I turn on some humor, let’s go with it, okay, kind reader who is from the KK clan?

There are many answers to the ills of society, of the sick warring, wicked, narcissistic American society. Defund the military, defund the politicians, defund the predatory retail and consumer hell.

Cigarettes and chew and booze, and the story is one of endless immediate gratification, and pain pain pain, and unattended trauma, untreated families. Estrangement in America, in capitalism, is the ugly gift that keeps on giving.

Yeah, the n word and the s word for blacks and Latinos is common up here. Amazing how this country is really not anti-racist or integrated. The show must go on, though, since this superficial society, throwaway society to the core, will never ever be just and ever will be whole.

Gods and monsters and mindless moments, ennui, cities and tales, and a hundred different archetypes of variations on a hellish theme. Sometimes the salving of past addiction is buying junk, boob jobs, endless 7,000 square foot trophy homes. Sometimes a blue collar or green thumb millionaire is exposed to the hell and horrors of addiction, and the increasing number of lost and misbegotten folk.

Atomized in Wisconsin.

I’m at the MSP airport. We know who is working the booths and wheelchairs and kitchens and mini-stores here. BIPOC. A better world than, what, Ghana? A better world than Juarez? I will be bringing a few dandy talks with a guy from Ghana, a rasta man working in this bi-state as a medical equipment guy, for a large outfit.

His name is Kwame, and of course, his intersection with me is tied to the medical equipment at Kelly’s hoarder’s paradise. We talked. Kelly talked. We talked about work, jobs, and Kwame is 61 and ready to leave the entire state of insatiable USA and head for “the islands,” somewhere, tropical, with a rasta and Bob Marley attitude. Nothing fancy, small apartment, and out of the rat race of America. With his shitty social security. That’s enough for him.

Stories, unfolding tales of many cities, and that is it in America. So many people want out of the horror.

Stay tuned for more in this series. Sorry I went off topic, but I can get right back on that train to heaven, train wreck through America, tale of the cities.

first of three parts . . . what’s love got nothing to do with it in Wisconsin

“Are you the people with that black pick-up with the white camper?”

He’s a short red-bearded white cop standing over me and my friend, KK (initials to be revealed soon). We are in KK’s hometown, Merrill, Wisconsin, population 9,300.

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“What’s up, officer?”

“We have a complaint from a resident who says you were on his property taking pictures of his house and a juvenile daughter.”

So begins the morning in Merrill, or at least, after a few hours of photographing with a borrowed Canon KK’s old haunts, his schools, churches, and, yep, the house he grew up in. It was 9 am when I got him to stand on the sidewalk to photograph KK in front of the small house where he spent his youth. It was his grandparents’ home. Small, sort of shotgun clapboard style no with faded vinyl siding.

Four shots, and we took off, turned for some of the street scenes where he played, and, then we moved on our with the pick-up and my shutterbug disease.

I call these drive-by shoots, so we drove and then stopped, posed, and then shot film. He is a 65 year old who I met on the “internet” who has been a good friend, a good reader of my stuff, including books, for more than a year. His wife died in October 2022, in River Falls, where they moved to decades before leaving both of their hometowns, Merrill. Merrill is his and his deceased wife’s birthplace and family locales. Bad memories for KK, and I don’t know about his wife, Cheri.

“The owner of the home accused you have trespassing, stepping on his lawn and photographing his teenage daughter. He is wanting you arrested.”

Welcome to America, and sure, I knew I’d get out of this stupidity, but what flashes in my mind is the mindlessness of America, the flyover states’ policing and politics, the rural places with contradictory “values,” old sagging towns with closed businesses, tired homes, and more which I will cover in this series. Lots of strip malls and drive-thru food joints you see all over America.

“I’m a journalist, and I have been taking photos of Merrill the past few hours, and I can tell you we did not go on the lawn, and I was photographing KK who is from Merrill. I saw no girl in a window, and there is no girl in a window in the four shots I took of a guy out in front of his childhood house.”

“The house owner said his daughter was upstairs, wondering what you were photographing and said you photographed her.”

The conversation when from here and there, and we gave up our IDs, and alas, yeah, KK is an ex-con (with air quotes), ten years behind bars total, six in prisons throughout Wisconsin. He’s known in these parts, and he’s still on paper, which means he is on “supervision,” not allowed to leave the state, and his name and his “crimes” would be coming up on the ID check.

I went outside, to the camper, and pulled out the Canon. The shots showed I was on the public access, sidewalk and road, and there is no peeping woman in any photograph looking at these aliens. KK stayed on the sidewalk. I shot him there.

America. The big burly guy/father followed the cops who went around town looking for this camper/pick-up truck combo, a unique looking rig. They spotted us at the local restaurant, The Pine Ridge.

America. This guy came up to me, as the cop was facing me, and while I showed him the photos in question; this guy, the so-called victim, pulled out his phone camera and started filming me and the cop.

America. “I’m telling you if they come back and start photographing my house, I will shoot them. I’ll shoot anyone coming onto my property.”

“Well, we’ll deal with that if that happens.”

“I’m not fucking joking. I will get my rifle and shoot the sons of bitches.”

America. After he went back to the five other police vehilces, I gave the cop the old thought exeperiment: “So, in this little Wisconsin town, you have people shooting anyone going onto lawns, with all these homes with no fences, no signs about no tresspassing, you really think I am supposed to believe you can arrest me for stepping on a lawn and photographing my friend’s old childhood home?”

America. “Well, it is tresspassing.”

“So you have a lot of shootings in Merrill? Especially in the summertime when kids and teens and their dads and aunts and uncles might be throwing frisbees and balls for dogs and then errant throws and tosses might get a ball or frisbee near the house and some innocent ball player retrieving it by some window or wall?”

America. “It’s trespassing to step on someone’s property and you can get arrested.”

America. “So Merrill has a lot of arrests for kids and dads trespassing? You bust dogs pooping on property, too?”

America. “So, you did background checks on us, what about this guy?”

“Yes.”

“And, you found some ‘interesting’ things in his background?”

The cop smiled. “Yep, there are some rough things in his past.”

America. “So, put the shoe on the other foot. Now, if I was in this parking lot, and say, none of this happened, but I started photographing the parking lot, the cool sign, and then this guy with his Duck Dynasty beard, I know this asshole would go after me hard, no questions asked. I’ve been around the block, around many parts of the world, worked in prisons, and I KNOW for a fact this punk would go after me for photographing him in a public place. Just like he just did with me.”

America. The cop smiled, nodded his head. “Look, think about it, officer. If say I was in Madison, on a street around the university, and had buddies and me tossing footballs, and maybe me photographing them, and then one ball ended up on a lawn, the home owner/resident could call the cops and have us arrestred? And then this shoot to kill crap, you think in a university town the cops would be allowing this? The city’s lawmakers, they’d be okay with college students or faculty or whomever getting arrested for going after a loose beachball or softball off the lawn?”

America. “I’ve never been a policeman anywhere but here, in Merrill. I don’t know about other cities’ ordinances.”

America. Ahh, imagine the headlines: “Trick or Treaters Shot in Merrill, Wisconsin, after a dozen home renters pulled out AR-15s and Glocks and started firing away.” Or, “Local Photographer Dies after Homeowner Plugs him Between the Eyes for Photographing old Historic Home.”

America. And, it only gets worse. “Look, we will be keeping him here until you all get on your way to make sure he doesn’t follow you. Are you done photographing in that area of town?”

America. “I am photographing bridges, pubs, old fronts of buildings, and more. And, we have a graveside service at the cemetary at one. His wife just passed last October and there is a monument marble bench in the graveyard and 20 family members showing up. I’m officiating it.”

America. “Well, we’ll keep him here. You should be fine. The cemetary is a good mile from his house.”

America. “So, this guy wanted to have you ticket us?”

“Actually, he wanted us to arrest you both for trespassing and stalking his daughter.”

America. “You know this is bullshit, really. Smalltown Wisconsin, and I take other small towns in this cheesehead state have similar values, similiar ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ ordinances.”

“Well, he lives in a sketchy part of town and they are worried about their stuff in the yard and on porches.”

America. Shoot to protect the barbeque and patio furniture.

City of Parks. Well, the next iteration of this first part deals with The City of Bars.

“At one time there were 53 bars in Merrill,” KK said. “I knew them all. That’s what people did when I was growing up. They still do, but there aren’t that many now. Many closed up.”

Bars and churches, on every street corner. All Aboard, Gesundheit, and so many run-down joints and holes in the wall, even back when KK was taking fast cars and noisy motorcycles through town to push the oppressiveness out of his skin. His first take down by the law was when he was 16. Booze.

America. The Chatterbox, Hub Inn, Newwood Tap, Ali Baba’s, Dee’s Bear Den, Northway Club, Hinz’s Cork and Dine, 1-900 Club, Beacon Bar, Dick and Shirl’s, Victory Lane.

The victory in this town is working in bone numbing mill jobs, living in a town of killing deer and yanking walleyes from the lakes and rivers, beatings at home, knuckling the young ones in the head, and, drinking at those favorite watering holes.

America. The best Friday Fish Fries are had at those booze joints. Hamburger runs, deep-fried Wisconsin cheese curds, and puffy fries. Bars. Pubs. Clubs. Lounges.

America. In Eagle River north of Merrill, we have the Pioneer, where you pay a buck for an ashtray to smoke inside, so the collected tray fees are used if anytime the bar gets cited for allowing cigs and combustion inside.

America, the land of Disney thinking, cutesy names, and one’s legacy emblazoned on some Blatz or PBR lighted sign, passed from generation to generation.

Merrill, America: Plowman’s Playhouse, Mid-City Tap, Frish’s Place, Clubs 64 or 107, Club Morder, Gail’s Place, Urban Darlene’s, E and K Tap, The Robber’s Roost, Corner Bar, Avenue Bar, Gil’s Bar, Ballyhoo’s, Trophy Bar, Legion Lounge, Rock Island Resort and we can’s forget S & S Bar — Social and Sick. This one gives money gained from liver damage and all night with the boys and a $100 tab to the local hospital. You know, smoke up a pack of Kools, down whiskey a-go-go, and then at the end of the year, S & S’s proprietors hand over some of that mullah go to cancer education, treatments, what have you.

America. Drink, carouse, stay away from the kids, pound back the beers and shots, yell at the top of your lungs how you are right, and the America is about might makes right, aervednd then, maybe, just maybe, a head-on collision with a tree. Or pond. Death by exposure, drowning, all in a night’s bar hopping.

KK got wrapped up into drinking young. Nature and nurture. He’s more than just a smart guy, and he holds a boyhood with no interest in school, a whipper snapper in math, and alas, that teacher who wacked him on the head many times while he struggled to do division. That was grade three.

Imagine, years later, he’s working as a CNA, and lo and behold, this monster teacher is in memory care, in need of bathing and all that. She called him “my sweet Kelly.” All those math division wacking sessions long dust to the wind roiling him her Merrill brain. From sadistic teacher to broken brained old lady dying in a care facility.

So when we traversed this town, one he moved away from decades ago, the lights of nostalgia and nightmares came pulsating out. He knows every nook and cranny, every business that was, every place where he hung out at after ditching school. And the bars.

So when the fuzz came buzzing into our Pine Ridge Diner, more than just flashbacks were surfacing. He, KK, haven been fighting the law all his life, with a total of 10 years behind bars, he shook his head and laughed.

Since I was the accused perpetrator — photographer — I calmly dealt with the cops and their stupidity. Five or six cop vehicles, and big bearded bruisers holding onto their flak jackets and holsters.

Yeah, the illogic of having cops tell me I should have knocked on the guy’s door at 8:30 am on a Saturday, well, this is America. Imagine, I shot 130 pics in a two hour period. Courthouse, churches, cool architecture, funky yards, Trump and Go Brandon signs next to a white cross, you know, all that artsy fartsy stuff. The thought experiment is this: So, a photographer has to knock on what, a dozen, two dozen, more doors? Ask permission to shoot a man standing in front of the old broken down home?

I’ve talked with a few people about this, and hands down they say this is absurd, and then all the photos they took in places like Juarez or throughout the world. Kids and chickens. Three-legged dogs next to a woman hanging out clothes. Vietnam or Venice.

America. You will have the cops come blazing in to interrogate you about photo shoots. We are talking shoot and dash.

Yeah, the guy’s got a rough background, i.e., criminal background. But still, an ex-con was yelling and spitting that he wanted me arrested. A 66 year old guy from Oregon.

America — Friendliest place on the planet.

A sidenote to this is I just opened up my phone call log, and there is a message from the investigating officer. He wanted to let me know that when we drove off by him standing with the accuser, it was the pissed off father who returned back and wanted to apologize for his threats and bullshit. He was, again, Duck Dynasty addled, and no matter how many people reading this think I should have or could have might have done this or not done that, it’s all in a day’s work for me, and while the dramatic overtones may sound as if I am frazzled, well, I am not.

America. Within thirty minutes of the guy’s threats and his bullshit filming me with his toy phone, well, he apologized, and wanted the cop to let me know he was just overprotective and that there was a past, that is, some past incidents with his two daughters. I just listened to the cop’s message, two days later.

America. Triggered. Triggers. Trigger locks. Unlocked trigger locks. Rapid-fire triggers. Triggers all lined up while the weeds take over the yard and the Walmart shit piles up.

America. Wisconsin. Shooting ranges all over the place. Golf courses and shooting ranges. And a shitload of shit factories, that is, dairies.

America. Dairies and fields of GMO corn and soy. You gotta get the cows fed. Shit factories, those daity cows. America. What to do with the shit? America. America Don’t Take No Shit from Anyone (bumper sticker I saw on the highway).

America. Hair triggers and trigger brains. Lots of shit.

Graveyards and dairies. So, some of those 53 Merrill haunts are gone, turned into chiropractor offices. One’s a florist. Old, sagging boarded up. You have to look closely for a bright beacon coming from a foggy window. “No Coors Served Here!”

Those cemetaries are loaded with German and Polish names. Wisconsin, the state with the most beer:

From grain to glass—a complete illustrated history of brewing and breweries in the state more famous for beer than any other
 

Few places on Earth are as identified with beer as Wisconsin, with good reason. Since its first commercial brewery was established in 1835, the state has seen more than 800 open and more than 650 close—sometimes after mere months, sometimes after thriving for as long as a century and a half. The Drink That Made Wisconsin Famous explores this rich history, from the first territorial pioneers to the most recent craft brewers, and from barley to barstool. 

From the global breweries that developed in Milwaukee in the 1870s to the “wildcat” breweries of Prohibition and the upstart craft brewers of today, Doug Hoverson tells the stories of Wisconsin’s rich brewing history. The lavishly illustrated book goes beyond the giants like Miller, Schlitz, Pabst, and Heileman that loom large in the state’s brewing renown. Of equal interest are the hundreds of small breweries across the state started by immigrants and entrepreneurs to serve local or regional markets. Many proved remarkably resistant to the consolidation and contraction that changed the industry—giving the impression that nearly every town in the Badger State had its own brewery. Even before beer tourism became popular, hunters, anglers, and travelers found their favorite brews in small Wisconsin cities like Rice Lake, Stevens Point, and Chippewa Falls. Hoverson describes these breweries in all their diversity, from the earliest enterprises to the few surviving stalwarts to the modern breweries reviving Wisconsin’s reputation as the place to find not just the most beer but the best.

Within the larger history, every brewery has its story, and Hoverson gives each its due, investigating the circumstances that meant success or failure and describing in engaging detail the people, the technology, the marketing, and the government relations that delivered Wisconsin’s beer from grain to glass.

America. Americana: things associated with the culture and history of America, especially the United States.

This is part one to KK’s magical mystery re-tour of Merrill, the roots of where the hell started for him. I’ve been in small towns in Mass. and Delaware and New Jersey, for sure, and the bars and pubs and wreckless legacy of cops owning booze joints, all of that, it’s been taught to me early. As a traveler. I’ve seen the idiocy of men and women plastered in Edinburgh and Dublin. And in Hamburg and Munich.

Limey monsters in British Honduras and now Belize slamming drinks and spewing the shit of military men high on rum and beer. Yeah, one of the worst times was when my former wife and I were in Athens, and the four Brits — military on R & R — in the room adjoining went from toasting and hoisting to singing and yelling to actually beating the shit out of each other, the walls pounding, some of the pictures in our hotel room crashing down.

KK isn’t that kind of a drinker, but the drinking started for a dark hidden reason, and that too will be explored in part two. Booze, meth, fentynal, the whole nine yards of America.

Smalltowns in rural America, shuttering some of the businesses. Farms going belly up. Big bruiser Germanic men, brothers and fathers, working the manure and the milking machines. Endless winds and chill and snow and rain. Hot as hell in the summer. A lot of flat land. Marshy land and swamps all over.

Guns and butter, Wisconsin. America. One kid with higher ambitions, locked into a mold for a while, a product of father beatings as a kid, beatings by teachers, the kid, KK, always throwing in to protect the bullied fat boys. Wisconsin. Ten years behind bars in more than a dozen shitholes, from county lock-ups to state correctional institutions.

KK fought the law, and the law waylaid him.

I met KK a year ago when he tracked me down via email. Reading my stuff over at DV, and alas, I learned about his River Falls life, his wife of 41 years struggling with small cell lung cancer. And she eventually succumbed to the cancer. More about that in parts two and three.

“How did you meet him?” some have asked. “You are flying all the way to Wisconsin for eight days to see a fellow you never met, some guy with a shady past?”

Yeah, and that’s also in parts two and three. Why I came, and what transpired, again, more microcosm of the flagging United States of Go Find Bradon and Trump Derangement Syndrome . . . America, my first time in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

America. Trigger warnings. Meth and cancer, family estrangement, pedophilia, violence, hoarding what you have, endless cycles of have’s and have’s not.

America. On the surface, all fine and dandy in those cul-de-sac hoods and on those thousand acre farms. Soy and corn. A belly full of toxins and a belly full of Friday Fish Fry and Old Milwaukee. But boy, so many addiction clinics, so many lost grandkids on meth.

America. Where oh where are the Red Nations?

• Brothertown Nation

• Forest County Potawatomi

• Ho-Chunk Nation

• Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin

• Stockbridge-Munsee Community Band of Mohican Indians

• Oneida Nation

• Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa

• Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa

• Lac Du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa

• Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa

• Sokaogon Chippewa Community (Mole Lake Band of Lake Superior Chippewa)

• St. Croix Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin

That’s a whole other story, Red Nations, USA. America. Trigger Warnings. Tribes. Prisons and PBR. Endless mud pits and manure ponds. Wisconsin Cheese, the Best in Show. Where are the tribes?

TBC. Wisconsin First Nations.

never ever will the small things, those beautiful small things like OUR communities’ vibrancy and resiliance, be discussed by big wigs

[Photo: Area mayors pleading for state help to plug funding gaps included, left to right, Rod Cross of Toledo, Susan Wahlke of Lincoln City and Dean Sawyer of, Newport.]

Amazing, no, that in Newport, part of Lincoln County, Oregon, having this big confab, of people, citizens and “stakeholders” alike wondering what the state of the state of decay is as it plays out in Salem (OR capitol) and the blue-red divide — Portlandia gets the votes, while the eastern part of Oregon is vying to break-away into Greater Idaho. We are that, THAT un-united snake$ of ameriKKKa.

The Oregon Legislature’s Joint Ways and Means Committee has been hosting a series of public hearings across the state, and the committee brought its roadshow to Newport last Friday, where a crowd of around 350 people filled the Newport Performing Arts Center.

Activists, mayors, schoolteachers, community leaders, a doctor, a sheriff and a judge were among scores of supplicants who sat before the high-powered legislative panel to plead for a share of the proposed $32.1 billion state budget. The delegation, chaired by Sen. Elizabeth Steiner, included 22 senators and representatives, divided evenly and spread behind a table on the PAC stage. (source)

Because Capitalism IS a casino, disaster, predatory, zombie, usury, inverted totalitarian economic system, then the elephant in the room is, again, you want Socialism or Barbarity, or Savagry or Socialism, give that discussion a spin.

You can’t have your cake and eat it too. That is, we can’t have seven, ten or more cities in one region competing for arts, entertainment, conferences, etc. We can’t have logs from Lincoln County on trucks heading east while trucks from Georgia with logs going west to Oregon. That old Minute Maid and Tropicana real thought experiment: orange juice concentrate tankers, one coming from Florida, heading for California, the other from California heading into Florida.

We have convention center after convention center vying for concerts, events, fun giant car shows and circuses. Yeah, how is that working out? Everything is privatized, and the socialized costs paid by USA taxpayer is given to the Fortune 10,000, big and small, this and that.

We are here, on crumbling Highway 101, and the weather has been hail, grapple, snow, rain, and alas, we are in a food-health care-services-construction desert, that is, everything costs twice or thrice more than that real cancerous place, the greater (sic) Phoenix area.

Cancer?

So, you pick Central Coast of Oregon, for lifestyle, and air, and, well, you have to put up with broken sewer systems and three times the cost for milk and gasoline than the cancer of Arizona:

We have people wanting pieces of that federal and state $$$ pie, but in the end, the elephant in the room is, well, “How much can these local and state and federal representatives throw at war, at merchants of death, at big Pharma Thugs, at finance and insurance and Wall Street and hedge finance? How many tax breaks/abatements/giveaways do THEY get, and how hard is it to place our community as well as 20,000 other communities onto the radar of the policy makers, to see that our important issues, people, communities and places of common purpose are worthy of sustainablity? Look at the list of folk wanting some recognition and discussion:

Familiar community leaders took the stage under the PAC spotlights, including Lincoln County Sheriff Curtis Landers and Lincoln County District Court Judge Sheryl Bachart, who argued for more staff to manage the “safe release” of those incarcerated back into the population.

Lesser-known voices called for equal consideration, including elementary school teacher Tamara Madden, who urged the panel to fully fund a $10. 3 billion, K-12 education budget. She said money is needed to stop the “revolving door” employee crisis, especially among support staff including cafeteria workers and janitors.

In all, 61 people gave testimony, while those left out were told to submit written statements. Rep. David Gomberg, who represents Lincoln County’s House Dist. 10, said the declarations underscored how “small towns face big expenses.” He was not unduly optimistic, however.

“I’ve had some success in bringing home dollars by using my seniority, knowledge of the process and a little bit of legislative guile,” he said after the event. “But it’s going to be tough this year because the federal money is no longer flowing into Oregon.”

Again, we talk about Mulvaney and Bud and Trump and Biden and Twitter and Ukraine-USA War Leaks and celebrities of every stripe, including that freak Mulvaney and freak Kid Rock. This is what we TALK about, and K12 is vapidly sinking to new miseducation lows.

It is all divide and conquer, but also distraction(s) to the max, the endless EMFs and pixels and screen scrolls, all the flips of the dumb phone screens, all those Substack crap-o-la blogs, navel gazing shit (and some is good, but really, how many lifetimes do we have finding the diamonds in the rough?), all the endless manure of Mainstream Mush Masturbating for MIC Media, all those so-called hip and edgy folk with Podcasts, all those shows, all of it, this is more than just taking space and time and human breath away from everyday people. It is the fodder, it is the endless ether, the drone and drab and supercillious crap that actually gets deeply embedded into the zeitgeist but also into the gray matter collectively, in the womb and near the tomb.

It all connects, those endless millions of hours dedicated to USA, Ukraine, twenty years of hate spat out and tossed sat China and Russia and Cuba and African nations and and (and) and___________________. It all calcifies in the glands of most americanos and all americanos’ hormones are rushing in all the wrong places, until, we have DSM-V pages of maladies accounting for our mass fear, and entire books of contraindications and intended and unintended consquences of the dirty and mold and fungus and viruses, and bacteria and prions and poisons and chemicals that are all part and parcel the American Way, from smalltown Newport to big time New York City.

Endless dysfunction, endless Americanism, endless stupidity around who we are as a nation, which is definitely a country of horror, terror, thefts, murders, beheadings, starvations, poisonings of the wells, shocks and awes, hit squads, black jack booted goons, Mafia’s, Gangs of New York/LA/Chicano et al. It is a country that now threatens to send in the Merchants of War to Mexico, and it all is ALL connected to the fact local communities are dragging, suffering, smeared into almost non-existence.

“Once you call 911, your journey will be long, challenging and fraught with hurdles”

The cops want more cops, the sheriff wants more SWAT participants, the courts want more prosecutors; the system is broken, as little rural Lincoln County has high levels of meth addiction, homelessness, Domestic Violence, untreated psychiatric issues, broken development disabilities situations, aging not so well in place, and this is it, man, a community meeting, with lawmakers, and the bottom line is:

Keep on doing the same dirty thing, and expect miracles: “Local officials repeated a common theme, telling legislators that rising costs outstripped their limited budgets.”

Bigger than just show me the money:

Ahh, YIMBY or NIMBY, that is the question, until that elephant in the room is shampooed and manicured and stomping us all to death:

Ironic, that CIA-controlled, the dirt bag TV-Cable monster, NBC, CNBC, all of them, putting this one out:

They just don’t know how many trillions are dedicated and stolen for the Military Industrial Complex. It goes so much deeper than “just” the end producte, whether a flak jacket or Humvee or jet or missile or satellite. Believe you me, it’s all the R & D, all the colleges and universities, all the PR, legal outfits, services, goods and services, from buttons to bullets, and this country is tied to war war war. The average price of a gallon of gasoline, counting all the costs, external and personal, is around $27 a gallon. War, sanctions, digging, pollution, harm to planet, people, community; cancers and culled economies. Hit men for Shell, BP, Exxon, and endless insurance scams, the cars costing $80,000, those microchips, those highways, the amazing amount of work one has to do to keep tires treaded and oil clean and the damn engine running, w/ tune ups, the endless time spent in an ICE or EV (internal combustion engine or electric vehicle) as our lives are sucked away. Fracking, embedded energy, wars wars wars.

Yeah, more than $27 a gallon when you count the nations broken, destroyed by oil monarchs and oil tycoons.

Again, if you build your society on tourism, on Air B & B, on endless vehicles coming in and toilets and washer machines flusing and dumping, then here we are:

Startling news emerged with many requests, including how 400 units of affordable housing have been stalled by a faulty sewer system in Lincoln City. Mayor Susan Wahlke told the panel the town’s infrastructure, which serves 40,000 tourists “on a busy weekend,” could fail at any moment.

The horizona ain’t pretty when we throw money at celebrities, junk, over-priced and under-quality medicine, and the war war war . . . . Tax giveaways and the rich hoarding it all.

For transit, the infrastructure grades range from a B in rail to a D-. Five category grades — aviation, drinking water, energy, inland waterways, and ports — went up, while just one category — bridges — went down. In 2021, stormwater infrastructure received its first grade: a disappointing D. Overall, 11 category grades were stuck in the D range, a clear signal that our overdue infrastructure bill is a long way from being paid off. (source)

Not that I have faith in engineers, civil engineers, who are also part and parcel embedded in America the free, the brave, the best. Remember NOL, and that lie? Find my two parts to the story of, The Storm, as in Katrina!

On Haeder’s blog, in the Podcast arena, scrolling down looking for these images!

Arrogant, macho, idiots, the US Corps of Engineers, and engineers in general. And they went after Ivor van Heerden, after him at the university where he taught.

Look, I was at Good Samaritan Hospital, for my spouse’s colonoscopy. We had to travel 90 minutes one way to get it done, and that meant an overnight stay. And, she opted for being knocked out, which I did not opt for when I had my age 50 screening (in Europe, the majority do not get put under, either). So, one doctor with the drugs, and then the gastro doctor. It was, again, another teachable moment.

Yep, that screening costs us, insured, whatever, from $2,800 to $4,700. She had four nurses, and then in the operating arena, maybe two docs, two nurses and then an endoscope assistant/nurse.

Ahh, the lovely coast, and the lack of everything, because it’s all about the US Chamber of Commerce, bed and breakfasts, short term rentals, endless lines of people hunting for tidepools, taffy, t-bones, tequila and toasty beach fires.

One of her nurses, a male, he was proud of his military service, his bullet in the foot (he said he had a corpsman status … a hospital corpsman is an enlisted medical specialist of the United States Navy, who may also serve in a U.S. Marine Corps unit), proud of his 19 years at the hospital, and proud of his entertainment center, sons and teaching them about Naco Libre and Jack Black. He said he was on the USS Nimitz, aircraft merchant of death ship, and how when Whitney Houston sang the racist national anthem for what, the Stupor Bowl, how there wasn’t a dry eye on the deck.

He’s another arrested developed 40-something, with tattoos all over, and yammering about Rambo and Jack Black (he said the guy, Black, sang the second best Anthem after Houston).

Lisa Marie Presley came up, and I said, “Yeah, too bad she’s gone.” Here we go, a guy with 100% service connected VA benefits, with a job that pays $120K, Cadillac health insurance, this is what he said: “I have no sympathy for her. She was a drug addict. When I came back from war, I didn’t use drugs. I bought a crotch rocket (motorcycle) and then when that was too dangerous, I started walking.”

Ahh, so I did push back, saying, “Yeah, I was a social worker for veterans, most on some form of self-medication, and all my female vets had been raped by their own men, so, nah, I have a different take on drug abuse.”

This fellow is just chopped liver in the scheme of things, but think about millions upon millions of boy-children raising other boys (their own). Imagine that, boys hearing a medical services guy, a nurse, who has zero sympathy or empathy for drug users. At Good Samaritan.

The USA in a nutshell, well, there are so many nutshells out there, teachable moments for me. It’s not surprising or upsetting to me, because it is par for the course, since I was probably younger than 13, man.

Man Lost of Tribe? Me? Come on, get over it. Imagine that, a nuke-powered merchant of death ship with 5,000 sailors on it. There’s the rub, no? How much to run it, to fix it, to outfit it, to treat the injured, to pay the sailors, to feed and clothe and air condition them? How much do we pay for their de-enlisting and then coming into society with those “I give a fuck about people who are addicted to drugs and die” attitudes.

Yeah, a guy who loves that insipid overpaid poor acting talentless Jack Black, no, overweight by MD standards (this nurse was carrying too much BMI himself) and, damn, I know about stories of Black snorting and doing speedballs and downing mass quantities of Chris Farley booze.

Who is living in a van down by the dump, or by the highway, or alley (no, not a river)? Oh, veterans, those poor ass achey-breaky hearts. Addicts. Here’s a high school teacher and coach, making fun, man, making fun of the down and out.

Well, we know how comic Chris died: On December 18, 1997, Farley was found dead by his younger brother John in his apartment in the John Hancock Center in Chicago. He was 33 years old. An autopsy revealed that Farley had died of an overdose of a combination of cocaine and morphine, commonly known as a “speedball”.

“I’m not laughing at me. I’m laughing at this person who’s committing so much who’s two feet away from me,” Sweeney said, adding that it has happened more often doing improv than her time at the legendary NBC comedy show, with the notable exception of the Farley sketch.

“When Chris Farley did the ‘down by the river’ Matt Foley, I was in that. They had to cut around me because I was laughing. Because it was like I had the best seat in the house for the funniest friggin’ thing that was happening on the planet.”

Can Americans ever be genuine, or is it just in our fucked up dimwit, TV Boob Tube Shit, Disney and McDonalds, Sesame Street and Tele Tubby, the endless drip drip drip of Holly-Dirt and Masterpiece Theater.

There are no Bruce Willis moments for our ocean communities, for sure. No Build Back Better. We are screwed, man, soap on a rope, rope a dope, all of it, we are screwed because we do not strike them all.

How much will the next war be? No better than D-minus from the engineers! More more war pornography. Watch three fellows you will NEVER see on your TV. This is scary, brothers and sisters. No Bud Lights here!

simple breaking bread in the AM with Carol Van Strum pulls this writer into yet another focus

Yes yes, as if I need more focus. I have never been called myopic, and I tell almost everyone now that even if we share hashbrowns and eggs, there is a good chance the conversation will trigger in me HOT (higher order thinking) and I will be off to the races, whether just polemics or combo polemics, stream of consciousness and journalism!

You got this piece from me recently, A Real-life Toxic Avenger, on Substack and around the internet:

We met at a local restaurant overlooking the Alsea river and Port of Alsea, a tiny bunch of docks. We met because she was coming in from Five Rivers, some 35 minutes away, with her old Subaru to get the brakes replaced. I invited our friend from Canada who I have been working with on that old time religion, Domestic Violence = Here again, on Substack, “Once You Call 911, Your Journey Will Be Long, Challenging and Fraught with Hurdles/ National Victims Rights Awareness week end of April”

So, two women, one from Canada, the other from New York, one 38, the other 82, met because a year ago the Canadian emailed me out of the blue and asked for help to leave her abusive husband: typical domestic abuser, and that means, charming to men, has a college degree, is macho and hates hates women, including his own mother.

Carol took my friend in on her 14 acres, and the dog, and then March 28 my Canadian friend headed out after I got her to a rental car place in Corvallis to Prescott, her last known place as a green card applicant and now she’s a green card holder. Big lab dog, and in a car heading from the Coast of Oregon to Arizona.

The seesaw life of the abused victim means they rarely leave the first time and stay gone/put. This is more than five years of this woman’s life, and it seems as if it — the abuse, the back and forth, even trips back to Quebec and then to Dominican Republic to salve wounds with a friend, and then the make-up sessions with this piece of human stain — defines her now, and her powerful independent life before the abuser came into her life in Guatemala (he’s a gringo) seems a distant memory. History. She had her own mini-restaurant in Antigua, and was there for four years, employing people and was sort of the toast of the expat part of the demographic in Guatemala.

It was a quick catch-up for Carol with my Canadian before she got to get some Chiropractor work as part of the state’s victims’ compensation fund, to include eyeglasses and counselling and other things of that sort.

We’ll catch up with that soon. In a later column.

Opinion | A letter a day for 15 years and 9 months

FINDING FRINGE | A mother’s love reaches into the bowels of the Oregon penal system to keep her son afloat

This story is about Carol dealing with a son, mixed race, having to face 15 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. Carol fought the poison sprayers on her property, where dogs, animals, humans and her own children got sick sick sick after the forest service-approved crap was sprayed on weeds growing along ditches some of which had running water.

Dead frogs and tadpoles and sick dogs and sick kids. The story gets worse, worse than some Michael Clayton story, or Dark Waters, for sure:

Yep, her kids were killed in a very suspicious house fire:

….here, from my story on her, A Real-Life Toxic Avenger:

Even that tragic story isn’t simple — there is evidence the four children, old enough to babysit each other, perished in a house while Carol was next door at a neighbor’s house. The fire marshal indicated it was suspicious, potentially the result of arson. Carol has her suspects.

All the legal wranglings have reinforced my chronic intolerance of lies. Ditto the never-ending battle against poisons — that is an industry that could not exist without lying about its products; therefore, it should not exist.

Carol’s life on many levels, including her work to prevent chemicals entering into our watershed, as well as her personal physical and spiritual peaks and valleys, could be made into a movie. I asked Carol what she gathers from these trials and tribulations.

One person can’t save the world, or even see the other side of it. When I was four years old, I set out to see the world — thinking it was a special place like the World’s Fair with carousels and Ferris wheels. After the cops found me asleep in a pile of leaves by the street, my mom asked why I had run away. I told her I didn’t run, I walked, because I wanted to see the world, and she laughed and said, ‘It’s been right here all the time — the world begins at home.’ Lessons you never forget. I can’t save the world but I’ll fight tooth and nail to save this little corner of it.

So how do I go from suspected murdering of four human beings, her children, to something more light-hearted. The weather?

Carol’s talking about how last year there were no pollinators — bees, bumblebees, and other flying insects. Cold snap, then budding and leafing, and then more cold until the valley she lives in had no fruit — pears, apples, plums, cherries. She’s proud of those trees man.

She related just today how the trees are budding, and now one day last week, with a freak storm of hail and snow, a bumblebee was stunned in the snow. She inspected it, saw it move just a bit, and she then went to the old house, returned with lettuce leaves and made a tent.

“Well, when I returned an hour later, the bumblebee was gone. I hope it survived.”

The frogs were out two months ago with a warm period. Then the cold, hail, atmospheric rivers, and the rare snows all over the place. Carol related that in her old house she found a frog, attempted to capture it, but it went to the wood pile. She didn’t want to squash it.

She made a sign: “Please be very careful of the frog in the wood pile.”

We joke about how her little slice of heaven, like Walden Pond, is a microcosm of the world at large: insectpocalypse and the shifting of weather, local climate and growing conditions.

Of course, we talked about her own battle with an abusive husband, who wanted to take everything from her when she was in her 40s during the divorce. Her lawyer, which she could not afford, stated: “What’s more important to you? Getting some of the assets or your children?”

She fought for those kids and ended up with nothing, but the kids, everything. That is another pathway old people like Carol have put up with.

We also talked about those neighbors, on plots of land, near her place. Aging in place, and as those in Carol’s world aged, as bones and muscles degrade, no matter how much exercise they get, they are vulnerable. Many women are living alone out there in Five Rivers:

I did a story on a Waldport scientist working on watersheds, on salmon river-creek restoration. Near Carol’s place: Fish Do Grow on Trees

Tidal wetlands are important habitats for salmon and a diversity of other fish and wildlife species. They also trap sediment, buffer coastal communities from flooding and erosion and perform other valued ecosystem services. — Hayduk

Age, man. I talked with an urban planner when I was getting my master’s in urban and regional planning. We looked at cohorts and population growth graphs. How a place like Boulder, Colorado, where the hippies hit it in the 1960s is now what, ten times the population of 1950:

And boom it did. The 1950s were a period of rapid growth. Federal census figures in 1960 proved that in one decade–from 1950 to 1960–Boulder nearly doubled its population figure of 19,999 to a new one of 37,718. Boulder’s population in 2023 is estimated to be 106,213, covers city area of 27.366 sq mi.

That’s it, man, you can’t stop the flow, and alas, that population growth is not just young and boomers coming in. But speaking of the boomers, she said in California on planning committees they (those in their 20s and 30s) never talked about planning cities and communities for this, you know, Boomer boom: 65 years and older. People in their 70s and 80s.

Not that cities are not designed for old people, disabled, but there were no national planners and politicians and law makers looking at AGING in place in the 1980s, or looking at the reality of families atomized, and old people losing spouses, and those as couples, getting old, but still dangerously vulnerable.

Carol has plethora of stories about her sisters, her friends and her neighbors. In fact, Carol is alone, but recently took on a guy, Todd, who is hitting close to age 60, living on a spit of land on her property, in a non-running RV. He is working his ass off helping the older folk with odd jobs, roofing, broken pipes, weeds, wood cutting, all the stuff that happens when you live in the woods.

Many many sad stories came out of our breakfast. One of her sister’s fell off a ladder with her wheelchair bound husband inside the house while his wife was checking on a leak. He called 911, and she was knocked out, and a month later, she was rushed to Seattle (Ellensberg is where they lived) to the same place at another hospital where her husband was being treated for his cancer.

Or one lady who was active and then had to have a hip replacement. The operation failed, her hip seized up, she got a huge cyst around the replacement hip, and alas, the insurance company said the hip was defective, was out of date, and that a new hip would have to come from the same company with a representative of the hip company in the operating room.

She ended up with lung cancer — she was a non-smoker and did not work in factories — a cancer directly caused by chromium which was part of the original hip, defective, which leeched chromium into the blood.

Story after story. This in this society where families do not stick together, where aging is hush-hush, and where the leaders of the society despise the poor, weak, vulnerable.

Carol joked about the robbers in the senate and congress, how they are taken care of for life, that is, with health care, the Cadillac version. We talked about how there should be an age limit for those vying for President (I am against presidents, against this system, definitely want a parlimentary system for this disjointed country, and I want capitalism go the way of the girdle).

She laughed about toilets, because she lived without one for years in this homestead: “I wonder how many toilets are in the White House?”

[The White House has 132 rooms, 35 bathrooms, and 6 levels in the Residence. There are also 412 doors, 147 windows, 28 fireplaces, 8 staircases, and 3 elevators.]

And that other shithole of criminality? [Buckingham Palace has 775 rooms. These include 19 State rooms, 52 Royal and guest bedrooms, 188 staff bedrooms, 92 offices and 78 bathrooms.]

Let the people shit in outhouses, and now that the wasps and bees and other insects are gone, beware of the lurking spiders.

[Photo: In the 1980s, Jordan Merrell often played in the wilderness near his home, located in the Siuslaw Forest in Lincoln County. Jordan was adopted by Carol Van Strum and husband Paul Merrell when he was days old in 1979. (Photos courtesy of Carol van Strum)]

Yep, aging, domestic violence and the criminal injustice system. Carol mentioned a fellow who went to Berkley Law school. That final constitutional law exam, from a quirky professor, demanded an essay on Defining Justice. Three hours of sweating some of the students went through. Her friend answered the prompt in six words:

“Justice is the aesthetics of control.”

He got an A. The fellow ended up working with the EPA, and alas, we don’t make those people anymore.

Such stream of consciousness. And what is justice? To the legal profession it is a set of rules and edicts and legislated dictates and codes written to, darn, protect property and to protect the powerful.

justice (n.)

mid-12c., “the exercise of authority in vindication of right by assigning reward or punishment;” also “quality of being fair and just; moral soundness and conformity to truth,” from Old French justice “justice, legal rights, jurisdiction” (11c.), from Latin iustitia “righteousness, equity,” from iustus “upright, just” (see just (adj.)).

Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit. [“The Federalist,” No. 51]

Meaning “right order, equity, the rewarding to everyone of that which is his due” in English is from late 14c. The Old French word had widespread senses including also “uprightness, equity, vindication of right, court of justice, judge.” To the Greek philosophers (Plato, Aristotle) the notion was of each thing in its proper sphere or serving its proper purpose; inequality of aptitudes and outcomes was implied.

In English c. 1400-1700 sometimes also with a vindictive sense “infliction of punishment, legal vengeance.” As a title for a judicial officer, c. 1200. Justice of the peace is attested from early 14c. To do justice to (someone or something) “deal with as is right or fitting” is from 1670s. In the Mercian hymns, Latin iustitia is glossed by Old English rehtwisnisse. (source)

The reality is that we matriculate way too many lawyers annually; judges are corrupt and disconnected to reality; and the god-given life-time appointments of those SCOTUS criminals is also a bastadization of what the truism of “do the right or fitting” thing.

We are in predatory capitalism, all upheld by laws, by a library’s worth of dictates and codes and rules and precidents, etc. The reality is we are in a Criminal Injustice System, where privatized prisons are the rule, where there are not enough by a factor of 5 defense lawyers, and where $2000 an hour lawyers do win, do draw out case for years, even in class action suits.

The rich make the laws, and that in itself is injustice.

Up is down, wrong is right, war is peace, and lies are history.

Money money for health care? Sy Hersh is just pissing in a pool, as there are many trillions of drops in this corrupt bucket:

The Ukraine government, headed by Volodymyr Zelensky, has been using American taxpayers’ funds to pay dearly for the vitally needed diesel fuel that is keeping the Ukrainian army on the move in its war with Russia.

It is unknown how much the Zalensky government is paying per gallon for the fuel, but the Pentagon was paying as much as $400 per gallon to transport gasoline from a port in Pakistan, via truck or parachute, into Afghanistan during the decades-long American war there.

In one ear, out the other for the average Americano. There are no true liberal arts in education, so where are we now with defining or know what is “justice”?

We coursed through other topics, like a guy I knew, Novick, Steven. Carol’s kids stayed at Steve’s parents’ house, and his brother watched the boys while Carol was in Eugene fighting for her other son, Jordan, from the possibility of incarceration he eventually found himself in. Steve’s family was from Brooklyn, and ended up in Mendocino, CA, where she also lived close by to.

I worked with Novick in Portland on some of the houseless issues. Here is a weird article about Novick and Uber (that son of a bitch ompany).

A new book about Uber contains a dramatic account of the night the ride-hailing company invaded Portland—featuring a furiously obscene Steve Novick.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, by New York Times reporter Mike Isaac, contains several passages featuring the tech giant’s defiance of Portland City Hall in December 2014. In one chapter, excerpted by National Public Radio, Isaac describes the evening when Uber’s diplomatic liaison, David Plouffe, called Mayor Charlie Hales and Novick, the city commissioner running transportation, to tell them the company would operate in defiance of Portland’s rules for taxis.

Isaac describes Novick’s fury.

“Mr. Plouffe, announcing that you’re going to break the law is not civil,” he said, his hook digging into the mayor’s desk in frustration. “This is not about whether we should have a thoughtful conversation about changing taxi regulations. This is about one company thinking it is above the law.”

Now, the two sides found themselves at an impasse. “Get your fucking company out of our city!” Novick yelled into the speaker phone. Plouffe, the charmer, was silent.

That account both reflects and subtly differs from what the key players told WW about the Dec. 4, 2014 phone call. Read WW‘s contemporaneous account of the call here.

Portland officials eventually relented and allowed Uber to legally operate in the city. In 2015, Hales and Plouffe appeared together onstage at TechfestNW for a conciliatory panel interview.

It’s a NYT writer? Everything about the New/Jewish York Times is scum, and alas, I liked Novick, a Jew himself but up against these criminal companies, like Uber, et al. (source)

But The New York Times later revealed that Uber had used a software called “Greyball” to help its drivers evade city regulators while it defied Novick and Hales.

Novick told WW today:

“My tombstone should probably read: ‘He should have stuck to his guns against Uber.'”

Small world, no, me barely in Lincoln County since Dec. 2018, then having my own column in a weekly, covering interesting people, and here I ended up with Carol writing two stories about her, and then, now, in 2023 we’re talking at Salty Dog’s with our eggs and hash and coffee, contemplating these six degrees of separation.

I’m not sure if Carol understands why I’m a communist, and certainly not THAT kind (haha), but she is anti-authority, anti-corporate mentality and she lives what many people would consider off the normal path. Eighty-two, major heart surgery a few years ago, a reader, thinker, and such a positive perspective on her life.

I’ll continue with this sort of Substack personalized leap-frogging from critical global issues — climate chaos, death of pollinators, misogyny, supremacists, patriarchy, racism, incarceration, and domestic violence.

All on that plot of land, where Carol is raising 15 chicks to be egg layers, where she has two dogs, donkeys and a hell of a perspective on Walden. Oh, that small world, no?

Opinion | Ripples of Walden Pond on an Oregon tidewater/ FINDING FRINGE | A traveler and a writer, Wallace Kaufman is a naturalist at heart

Haeder: We called your place your own Walden Pond. Can you elaborate on what that means, since Thoreau covers many aspects of humanity, nature, spirituality and life and ecological forces in the book “Walden”?

Kaufman: Thoreau said he went to Walden Pond to shed the diversions and distractions and surpluses of community life and think more deeply about life and to find “higher laws” — the goal of the English Romantics before him and of his friends in the Transcendental movement. He never found the higher laws, but he was sure he saw them expressed in the world of the pond. Same here for Poole Slough and its forests and marshes. My variant may be that I spend more time looking at this world through the lens of science rather than through personal revelation, which I distrust.

Again, I’m flipping my own script against scientism, against those dogmatic Darwinists, those goofball climate green weenies, and against all that science for capitalism’s sake which has given us death by 10,000 bad products, bad chemicals, bad ingredients, bad air, soil, water, oceans. Yep, science is not my litmus test. Seeing Walden Pond is seeing beyond the water, beyond the indicator species, past the apex species, beyond all layers of muck below the pond. Know all of those biological systems, for sure. Seeing the pond is seeing the enlightenment and spiritual soul of self in the reflection of the water. What about those who came before Puritans and Pilgrims? Native People’s relationship to the pond? The wolf’s relationship to it? And, what about the beaver who actually constructed it?

Oh, I know epigentics, and oh, I know trauma, PTSD . . . oh, I undestand adverse childhood events and their relationship to adulthood. Oh, indeed, we can see the world from many lenses, and this one hour respite with two friends who had nothing in common until they met, until my Canadian friend was with her a day on her property as a safe house from an abuser, says so much more than, believe you me, a semester jam-packed with intellectuals and Brave New World and Farenheit 451 animal farm sort of lord of those flies 1984 background noise.

you get 17 days in skilled nursing with post brain tumor removal before . . . .

Genesis 1:28 – Then God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Well, yes, it is profane, but the point should be made — unless you have a piece of land, some water flowing on it and under it, some decent soil, some brethren, family, you know, dependable family, and extended family, and skills sets that are way beyond some prepper group, and you have to have the typical farmer and rancher who can fix anything and husband anything, and a nursing degree in there coul help,, and, alas, there has to be some of those greenbacks to pay the taxes, the fees, the excise burderns, all the code building costs, so you can have this little slice of heaven without the Blackrocks or even local thug county and state tax collectors at your door — UNLESS you have all of that, pluse creatives in the group, and hard work of communicating and being a tribe of community of purpose, gain, and land ethic, then you will be tossed on the street.

I have a father-in-law with a second skill surgery in six months, that is, surgeons digging in his brain for five hours in an attempt to pull out more cancer masses, that is, the worst of the worst cancers, as Scientific American declares: “New Strategies Take on the Worst Cancer–Glioblastoma; Among the various malignancies that can afflict the human body, few bring with them the dour prognoses of brain tumors”

There are a thousand personal reasons for hanging on and having the quacks open you up once again. The VA and Medicare take care of most of the charges — something like $190,000 MD and surgical and hospital bills added up.

Once released, though, the skill nursing is on the clock. In this case, with his Medicare addition, he has 17 days to improve and move up, that is, back home with his wife, the only person in the game here for this fellow of 78 and she of 75 years on the planet.

That’s 24/7 care person, and she gets 19 hours a week of people coming over so she can do the banking and shopping. The old man is bed and chair ridden, and that clock is ticking until Tuesday, to prove he can arm wrestle his broken body (he has not standing power anymore, for years, before the diagnosis of the big C) into a tranferring situation: from chair to bedside comode; from bed to wheelchair, from wheelchair to toilet.

It’s an apartment, not some big home with handicapped retrofits. The wife is a small of stature woman and he is in the 230 pound range, but losing weight even though he eats well.

There will be chemical therapy, and the radiation, the last one being an in the hospital deal, so eight times they have to get a vehicle to move him from apartment to hospital and back. Supposedly Uber drivers do this for $30 as opposed to $160 for a medical transport.

We live three hours west, on the coast. There are no sibling and grandchildren and children there to swoop them up and take them under their wing. Our home is isolated and not near the VA, but three hourse. Therein lies the problem.

The fact is she worries over every bill, so an $1,800 BILL out of the $180,000 total for the last cancer surgery (they only got 70 percent of it since the rest was “too deep” into the brain where vital functions are controlled), is troubling as they are social security and the one bedroom apartment is $1800 a month.

Making calls, sticking to it, and then having the VA say they will pay the rest helps. Of course, there are ambulance bills, and the VA doesn’t pay for ambulances from one facility to the next, unless that facility is a VA hospital. Now that’s another $660 bill.

The means test she has to fill out is a mountain of paperwork, but alas, she has to do it. Her daughter (my spouse) does what she can here at 130 miles away, but we have our limited salaries and retirement from SS (me) and we living a small bungalow, worthy of us, two, and a cat, but not expandable for a mother and her dying husband.

Yet, like most people, the mother-in-law puts her faith in God, and she loves the USA, loves the military (she’s religious, and Seventh Day) which is weird, and she is stuck.

What would THAT look like if I had a large family, large ideas about land and sustainability, and if the old woman and old man had those families too?

That clock ticking away means that if he can’t get to the john and the chair, then, well, it is foster care home, almost a hospice situation. That means all social security checks he gets for the family will be GONE, going into the private, for-profit adult foster facility, care facility, whatever you want to call it.

What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa?
? — W.E.B. DuBois

I wrote about a client who became my friend here: “Once a US Soldier, Always Wounded, Always Losing!”

So my family members dealing with the brain tumor are not here yet, and will not be here if we have any say in the matter:

I write this because I did spend with my wife up in Portland with the mother-and-father-in-law. And, I reeceived this pathetic news (sic) item in some feed: from some charlatan outfit, Investment News: “Boomers bite back: Don’t blame us for retirement ‘Road to Nowhere’!” The premise is never stated: Savagery and Brutality and Exploitatin and Death by a Thousand Retail-Consumer-Casino Hell Cuts or SOCIALISM.

Well, not too long ago, I posted a column warning future generations not to follow the baby boomers’ lead when it comes to retirement planning. And that pretty much led me straight to a journalist’s version of that fiery place.

Before I plead my case to the boomer community, here’s what happened.

Highlighting a study by the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies that said the median amount baby boomers, or those born between the years 1946 and 1964, have saved for retirement is a totally inadequate $144,000, I wrote that the boomer generation was on the “Road to Nowhere,” even going so far as to reference the lyrics and title of the well-known Talking Heads song.

At the time I wrote, “Sorry to be blunt, boomers, but it’s not just the soundtrack in our heads that’s telling us that you are traveling down a troubled path, it’s the data on our screens, too. Statistics from industry experts clearly show that your financial future is indeed certain — just not in a good way.”

Fine. Admittedly I was being, well, “blunt.” But I was writing as simply and directly as possible for what I believed was a noble reason. That is, to encourage Generation Xers, millennials and Gen Zers not to repeat the mistakes made by their elders.  

And then the boomers lowered the boom … on me!

Emails flooded in, accusing me of ignoring the repeated financial indignities suffered by boomers, a large number of those hardships that weren’t of their own making. (source)

These only scratch the surface:

Responded Thomas: “How are boomers supposed to retire? They’re still raising their adult kids AND adult grandkids who refuse to get out of their house and get on with life! Tell the ‘you get’ generation to stop whining about every little thing, pull themselves up and get on with it already!”

Wrote Wendy: “Because it was active lobbying again and again by the investment firms for policies eliminating pensions. And then there was active lobbying against a government run retirement program for low and middle income people in my state because the financial firms didn’t want competition for fees. Because of that, a lot of elders are already homeless or living in poverty.”

You can read her piece, but it is boiler plate, really. The fact is that wars and war machine and tax havens and tax breaks for the rich and corporations, and the fact we pay for externalities of the dirty-pollution-injuries-destruction-environmental hell capitalism does to the world.

The for=by=because of=with THE people is and has never been a truism in this settle (theft) colonial (enslavement) state (empire of chaos, lies, terror to, for, on THE people).

I could put in a thousand graphics like this one

Or quote that war monger, multimillionaire (a billion at least) Hank:

Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world. — Henry Kissinger, interview with the Observer, 1983, on his book, Years of Upheaval 

You want to see where that for-with-by-because of the people Capitalism goes?

This is cognitive dissonance, and this society is broken on so many levels. It is a war mongering state, and just this little doozy is emblematic of the Demon-Crats (the Repubicans want war with China and is in a War against the people of the USA, you know, “those” people who are chumps and didn’t save enough!).

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/1Iq1KrXRjxQ?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

I am also in constant argumentation with the beautiful people, the levelers, the milquetowast landed gentry, those with the retirement (state or county and federal) and those with trust funds and houses paid off) who want more more more for the dirty *elensky (Z being banned in UkroNaziLandia) as well as the Orthodox Church!

“Ukraine shells Donetsk during Easter service: A woman was killed and six other people injured after missiles struck near an Orthodox cathedral”

“Hedge funds making billions from Ukraine turmoil – study: Experts blame the organizations for exacerbating the food crisis by “betting on hunger”’

“German arms business booming amid Ukraine crisis: The country reportedly ranked sixth globally in weapons exports in 2022”

It goes back and back and back, arming hundreds of countries, endless profits in the trillions for the Offensive Weapons Merchants of Death and thousands of corporate — big and small — offhoots that make bank on war, war mongering, color revolutions, PR, construction, retail shit, services, etc.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/S50VmdYquYg?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

So, yep, nuclear war is the end game, but before that, we have a history of corruption, murder and theft and graft in UkroNaziLandia:

The Ukraine government, headed by Volodymyr Zelensky, has been using American taxpayers’ funds to pay dearly for the vitally needed diesel fuel that is keeping the Ukrainian army on the move in its war with Russia. It is unknown how much the Zalensky government is paying per gallon for the fuel, but the Pentagon was paying as much as $400 per gallon to transport gasoline from a port in Pakistan, via truck or parachute, into Afghanistan during the decades-long American war there.

What also is unknown is that Zalensky has been buying the fuel from Russia, the country with which it, and Washington, are at war, and the Ukrainian president and many in his entourage have been skimming untold millions from the American dollars earmarked for diesel fuel payments. One estimate by analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency put the embezzled funds at $400 million last year, at least; another expert compared the level of corruption in Kiev as approaching that of the Afghan war, “although there will be no professional audit reports emerging from the Ukraine.”

“Zelensky’s been buying discount diesel from the Russians,” one knowledgeable American intelligence official told me. “And who’s paying for the gas and oil? We are. Putin and his oligarchs are making millions” on it.

Many government ministries in Kiev have been literally “competing,” I was told, to set up front companies for export contracts for weapons and ammunition with private arms dealers around the world, all of which provide kickbacks. Many of those companies are in Poland and Czechia, but others are thought to exist in the Persian Gulf and Israel. “I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there are others in places like the Cayman Islands and Panama, and there are lots of Americans involved,” an American expert on international trade told me.

The issue of corruption was directly raised with Zelensky in a meeting last January in Kiev with CIA Director William Burns. His message to the Ukrainian president, I was told by an intelligence official with direct knowledge of the meeting, was out of a 1950s mob movie. The senior generals and government officials in Kiev were angry at what they saw as Zelensky’s greed, so Burns told the Ukrainian president, because “he was taking a larger share of the skim money than was going to the generals.” (source —”Trading with the Enemy”)

Since I was a toddler, there began a host of freakshows on TV news, in politics, in celebrity “news” that caused gastric rumblings in me. As I became a journalist — newspaper reporter at age 18 — it only got worse, the despicable people in the news, on front pages, and on Ted Koppel or “60 Minutes.”

Add this one this morning:

Truly stomach turning, these criminals, in the People’s (sic) House (sic). But there are millions to despise:

The crimes of presidents:

Chomsky, who himself perpretrates a crime, a spoken crime, a desire to “put it” to fellow (sic) citizens (persona no grata): … see below.

“People who refuse to accept vaccines, I think the right response for them is not to force them to, but rather to insist that they be isolated. If people decide, ‘I am willing to be a danger to the community by refusing to vaccinate,’ they should say then, ‘Well, I also have the decency to isolate myself. I don’t want a vaccine, but I don’t have the right to run around harming people.’ That should be a convention,” said Chomsky.

“Enforcing is a different question. It should be understood, and we should try to get it to be understood. If it really reaches the point where they are severely endangering people, then of course you have to do something about it,” he added.

Speaking on YouTube’s Primo Radical on Oct. 24, Chomsky said that for the unvaccinated people who are segregated from society, how they obtain groceries should be left up to them. “How can we get food to them?” asked Chomsky. “Well, that’s actually their problem.”

Something about that from Kissinger, no?

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/XrwJ34eF5_A?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

So, you have 17 days, until you end up homeless, or in a place where people — that family, that dwingling community — can’t help you. Food prices are up twice or three times the prices in 2019. Not some bullshit 5 percent inflation crap.

Everything has at least doubled in price. That’s 200 Percent inflation, which is just another way to say, “make the profits, the killing now, at any cost to our family, our nation, our fellow We=By-Because of the People!

This is 1974. It’s axiomatic of how my mother-in-law and father-in-law are being treated. Figure out how!

At the convention of the World Food Conference, leaders of the underdeveloped nations hoped to press for changes in international trade relations while U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger hoped to use the conference as a forum to link food shortages to overpopulation. Kissinger tried to put the blame for the food crisis on the oil producing nations and the “energy crisis” they brought about and made it clear that the U.S. no longer plans to provide most of the world’s food aid. The underdeveloped nations did not accept this. They still blame the crisis on the U.S., which they say controls more food than the fuel the oil producing nations control. The U.S. has historically used food as a tool of foreign policy, and with the increasing dependency of the U.S. on the raw supplies of the underdeveloped world, there is growing talk of using food to blackmail nations into adopting population control programs. One such proposal came in Rome by former U.S. government official Richard Gardner, who suggested a “global survival pact” under which rich nations would conserve food, energy, and raw materials in return for commitments by Third World nations to change their suicidal demographic, agricultural and environmental practices. Another proposal was made by Congressman Jerry Litton who said he would introduce legislation banning food aid to any country with above average population growth and which was not doing anything to reduce it. (source)

And, leave it to National Propaganda-Pesticide-Petroleum-Pharm Radio to do this:

Thus employer-based insurance, which started with Blue Cross selling coverage to Texas teachers and spread because of government price controls and tax breaks, became our system. By the mid-1960s, Thomasson says, Americans started to see that system — in which people with good jobs get health care through work and almost everyone else looks to government — as if it were the natural order of things.

But to Thomasson and other economic historians, there’s nothing natural or inevitable about it. Instead, they see it as the profound result of historical accidents. (source)

War Criminal of the Day!

Well, Mister Citi Bank, Senator Bank, that is, and now, VP to President, a long long war criminal in politics.

another echo chamber of academics yammering and never getting deeper with AI’s bad boy/bad girl history [plus the provost of University of Florida, the “first AI university” sponsored the talk]

Can you imagine this Provost of the University of Florida is all happy about and rah-rah for “his” school becoming the first University of Artificial Intelligence, AI?

I’ve been on these webinars before, and I have been in academia for more than three decades, but as a part-time rabble rouser, not in the star chamber of tenure, emeritus professorship or admin class.

Below, Ishwar, VP of research of USC, talks about how great AI is, but that it can’t predict (now) a black swan event like 9/11. Not yet, but soon. Whew. He is a proponent of AI as just another tool, a fork to scoop up steak and a spoon to slurp up soup.

These people are not really on the edge, not asking to be inside the real debate arena, alas, as they are stuck in academia, and they are not outside the box thinkers, since they believe in academics being neutral and good guys, and that marketing and monied interests also are in it for good deeds.

The Non-Profit Edifice Complex is a massive front operation to steer money and power into the hands of the corporate fintech elite, while relegating ordinary people into human data capital commodity outputs for the purpose of tyrannical impact investing and authoritative social engineering.

Watch: Alison McDowell- 4th Industrial Revolution/ Listen in as Alison talks about the evolution of technology.

Then this guy, Puri, is looking at the “density of consumption/energy” — that we are going from ICE to EV, Internal Combustion Engines, versus Electric Vehicles, and which one is more dense, the energy that is, used, given off (embedded and lifecycle analysis were not discussed). First law of thermodynamics, man!

Again, there is no discussion around or about the Fourth Industrial Revolution, no clue about how bad it’s going with the Internet of Bodies; no critique oft the World Economic Forum, of Davos, of the entire finance tech gurus who are making HUGE casino capital money on data trolling, data sharing with alogrithms, with powering up AI to predict who is and who isn’t, who were are and what we should be or not be, that is the question:

• who follows the party line
• who follows the medical line
• who follows the parenting line
• who follows the employee line
• who follows the capitalist line
• who believes in X, y, Z in Capitalism and USA and the great power of the elite

…. the who believes and who follows and who does, also is the reverse, as in WHO DOESN’T do, believe, see, hear, follow, lock-step adhere to.

I posed long questions, and alas, they did not field them. Accordingly, they did not field them completely or with rigour, that is, or maybe just partially they dealt with partial points of contention I broached. I tried to copy the questions I put into the Q & A Zoom room, before the Zoom session was over, but that feature isn’t yet available.

My major premise is that the entire project of K12 and higher education is predicated on the wrong things, and compliance is one of those values, as is following dictates is another place holder of follow the leader crap; and then, what is college but a venue for financiers and monied interests, with these business schools and all the engineering programs added to universities, all antithetical to liberal eduacation, that is arts.

Drawing on Plato and Malcom X, West said the death process is part of real education — paideia — a concept developed by Socrates that means deep, critical thinking.

It is the antithesis of contemporary culture: “The problem in American society is we are a culture of death-denying, death-dodging… a joyless culture where pleasure-seeking replaces what it means to be human.” (source)

It’s as if these panelists are just conduits for/by/with/because of the tools, the materials, the curriculum, and they have hands down stated that AI is here to stay, and whatever comes is there to stay, no matter how “advanced,” so just teach students how to use it.

You know, that argument that “old Einstein did not make the atomic bomb so don’t blame him,” but some of his work and others’ work helped produce it theoretically, therefore, it’s not his fault.

He came to regret taking even this step. In an interview with Newsweek magazine, he said that “had I known that the Germans would not succeed in developing an atomic bomb, I would have done nothing.”

The old/young/yet to be birthed cat’s out of the bag. I did not expect any of the panelists (forget about the college provost who is a rabid dog of capitalism) to have any exposure to revolutionary and rebellious voices:

Alison McDowell continued: “The same thing is being done for natural capital via NFTs or other forms of tokenization. Yesterday, the Bank of International Settlement was presenting on their Genesis Project – green bonds with smart contracts for carbon offsets. All of this requires real time data collection. That impact data can then be repurposed via Ocean Protocol and Singularitynet.io to train AI.  We are building the Singularity with the impact data.”

[Source]

Here, from the Harvard Business Reivew: “AI Regulation Is Coming: How to prepare for the inevitable” by François Candelon, Rodolphe Charme di Carlo, Midas De Bondt, and Theodoros Evgeniou/ From the Magazine (September–October 2021)

Notice there is no discussion about getting the public, the people, the students, the workers, the small business owners, the parents, the old and weak, all of us, in on the discussion, in that big tent, but that’s the dirty me=myself=I=CEO reality of Harvard.

This article explains the moves regulators are most likely to make and the three main challenges businesses need to consider as they adopt and integrate AI. The first is ensuring fairness. That requires evaluating the impact of AI outcomes on people’s lives, whether decisions are mechanical or subjective, and how equitably the AI operates across varying markets. The second is transparency. Regulators are very likely to require firms to explain how the software makes decisions, but that often isn’t easy to unwind. The third is figuring out how to manage algorithms that learn and adapt; while they may be more accurate, they also can evolve in a dangerous or discriminatory way.

Though AI offers businesses great value, it also increases their strategic risk. Companies need to take an active role in writing the rulebook for algorithms

Ahh, regulating and putting a stop to it (AI) and what about studying intended, unintended, and Higher Order of Thinking around that precautionary principle and do no harm aspect of screening anything before it is deployed? Nah.

Finally, the building blocks of AI regulation are already looming in the form of rules like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, which will take effect next year. The UK government’s independent review’s recommendations are also likely to become government policy. This means that we could see a regime established where firms within the same sector share data with each other under prescribed governance structures in an effort to curb the monopolies big tech companies currently enjoy on consumer information.

The latter characterises the threat facing the AI industry: the prospect of lawmakers making bold decisions that alter the trajectory of innovation. This is not an exaggeration. It is worth reading recent work by the RSA and Jeremy Corbyn’s speech [another speech about broadband] at the Labour Party Conference, which argued for “publicly managing” these technologies.

We can continue as we know the ethical discussion around ANYTHING can also be a white wash of the problem:

The quest for ethical AI also could erode the public sector’s own regulatory capacity. For example, after trying to weigh in with a High-Level Expert Group on AI, the European Commission has met with widespread criticism, suggesting that it may have undermined its own credibility to lead on the issue. Even one of the group’s own members, Thomas Metzinger of the University of Mainz, has dismissed its final proposed guidelines as an example of “ethical white-washing.” Similarly, the advocacy group AlgorithmWatch has questioned whether “trustworthy AI” should even be an objective, given that it is unclear who – or what – should be authorized to define such things.

Now now, we have some deep issues to discuss, but the Chronicle of Higher Education in these webinars just can’t get there because they fear outliers, people who are not even in their own camp across the board.

Finally, the document fails to highlight what is truly special about trust-based relations and a trust-based society. While it emphasizes transparency both at the level of fundamental principles and in practices, there seems to be no realization that transparency may not be at the centre of trust-based relations. Indeed, one can argue that one of the distinguishing characteristics of placing trust in others is precisely the willingness to rely on a third party without the ability, or even the need, to check what the other party does. This is not to say that transparency is useless in a trust-based society. But transparency appears to play a complementary role: while most people use AI because they trust it, few people are expected to be inquisitive if there is trust.

On the definition of AI: the definition of AI describes AI as a system that acts in the physical or digital world. But many potential software applications that these guidelines seem to intend to address are not artificial agents. For example, statistical models that provide assistance to human decision makers, without substituting them, do not act in the physical or digital world. Is the guideline not intended to address the concerns raised by those models? Or if so, should the definition of AI be revised?

The above is from Algorithm Watch (imagine that, old folks, something your granfparents would have never imagined):

Trustworthy AI’ is not an appropriate framework

AlgorithmWatch and members of the ELSI Task Force of the Swiss National Research Programme 75 on Big Data comment on the EU HLEG on AI’s Draft Ethics Guidelines

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/qilmO_JcNZk?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

And, back to the top = with support from the University of Florida. Says it all, no, or says something, right?

I posed the idea that a college, like this AI UoF will not be employing faculty who design courses around the idea that AI not only should be regulated, but should possibly have many stops put on it. Nope, no classes on just what do AI and drones do for humanity, when we have 1/3 of people in the world making $2 a day or less. All those death by 10,000 capitalism cuts.

What coursework and research would come out of an AI school? And this guy provost wants all disciplines to be fully embedded in AI technology, and definitely he doesn’t want protestations from people who are not just in the arts but in other departments who see this sinister aspect of big data and all data fed into an AI super computer to get more and more transhumanist like, but futurists who might see this AI order of things is about cloning and replicating what it is to be a human, and how to clone like a human, think like a human, and then, produce the delivery systems of the oligarchs and despots of money and capitalism ways to indeed have more and more control over mind, matter, substance and soul.

That is the issue, too, how this society, these freaks of humanity, want to control nature, the weather, cultures, thinking, people’s actions, beliefs, ideology, their own hope and dreams.

They want all the types of sleepers and defecators and urinators and consumers and writers and creatives and misanthropes and all of us on all those spectrums to be analyzed, retrofitted, controlled by massive human computer brain, globally and in the noosphere. Data collection is more than just scooping up data.

Now, some medical student using facial recognition AI to see or determine if someone is about to have a stroke might be in it for the Florence Nightingale aspect of medicine, but that’s not the point. You, they, have to think beyond their silos.

[AI surveillance rumors: gay adult content creators face sanctions

by Josephine Lulamae Early last month, many gay fetish accounts were charged for distributing online porn to minors, a criminal offense in Germany. Many suspect an automated tool, but no one knows for sure.]

{In Germany, a daycare allocation algorithm is separating siblings

by Josephine Lulamae To allocate this year’s limited number of daycare slots, the city of Münster used an algorithm with a known limitation: it did not direct siblings to the same school. Parents were not pleased.}

[AI and the Challenge of Sustainability: The SustAIn Magazine’s new edition

In the second issue of our SustAIn Magazine, we show what prevents AI systems from being sustainable and how to find better solutions. ]

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