almost 10 years ago, and may she rest in power!

Mae-Wan Ho (Chinese: 何梅灣; pinyin: Hé Méiwān; born 12 November 1941, Hong Kong; UK citizen – April 2016) was a geneticist known for her critical views on genetic engineering and neo-Darwinism. She has authored or co-authored a number of publications, including 10 books, such as The Rainbow and the Worm, the Physics of Organisms (1993, 1998), Genetic Engineering: Dream or Nightmare (1998, 1999), Living with the Fluid Genome (2003) and Living Rainbow H2O (2012).

Paul Haeder: Where is the GMO debate now worldwide?

Mae-Wan Ho: The GMO debate should be over by now, at a time when the agronomic failures of GM crops are there for all to see (particularly in the United States, which has more than 40% of global GM crops planted) together with serious health and environmental impacts from scientific studies that fully confirm what farmers have been experiencing in the fields for years (ISIS Special Report [1] Ban GMOs Now). But all that is being smothered by a massive campaign of dissimulation perpetrated by even traditionally respected science magazines (see [2] Scientific American Disinformation on GMOs, SiS 60).

A measure of how desperate the GM proponents are is the recent decision of the journal editor to retract a thoroughly peer-reviewed paper – the famous Séralini study – published a year ago, basically because it found serious health impacts in rats fed GM maize and/or exposed to Roundup herbicide compared to controls. An open letter has been posted for signing to demand reinstating the paper and pledging to boycott the publisher unless and until that is done ([3] Open Letter on Retraction and Pledge to Boycott Elsevier, SiS 61). The letter has already attracted thousands of signatures from around the world. Please sign on and forward widely. We need to stop this unprecedented censorship on scientific knowledge and information crucial to public health and well-being.

PH: Why are GMO labeling initiatives failing in the USA?

MWH: The GMO labelling initiatives are failing in the USA because people are still being told lies and half-truths that GM products are no different from their non-GM counterparts. There has been saturation coverage in the media, not just in the USA but worldwide. Most people are not fooled, which is why GM crops are still confined to 28 countries with over 90% within just 5 countries after 20 years of commercial growing. But people do need to understand the dangers for themselves.

PH: What’s your biggest reservation about GMOs?

MWH: GMOs are not only inherently unsafe, they are highly unsustainable, and most of all, obstructing the shift to non-GM organic, agro-ecological farming already taking place in local communities and countries around the world, which have proven to increase yields, mitigate climate change, and more able to adapt to climate change (see [4] Food Futures Now *Organic *Sustainable *Fossil Fuel Free, ISIS Special Report and [5] Paradigm Shift Urgently Needed In Agriculture). I have a recurrent nightmare of aliens from outer space landing on our planet in the not too distant future finding a wasteland filled with giant cockroaches. That’s what could happen if we are all forced and tricked into growing GM crops.

PH: Is science at a crossroads, as you say, vis-a-vis the retraction of the Séralini article?

MWH: Yes, I think this sordid act is symbolic. The Séralini study is not the only scientific evidence of harm from GMOs and herbicide, as mentioned earlier, nor the only published paper to be retracted recently (see [6] Over 1170 Condemn Retraction and Pledge Elsevier Boycott, SiS 61). I was nearly a victim myself for a paper explaining why artificial genetic modification is inherently hazardous [7]. The order to withdraw it most likely came from the publisher. Fortunately, the editors apparently stood their ground and reinstated my paper. If we don’t stop such practice now, it really could mean the end of science. One scientist actually said to me: “it chills me to the bone to think they could do this.” Incidentally, our Open Letter [3] attracted so many signatures within the first days that the pro-GM trolls began to attack us by constantly sending in fake signatures, so we have had to double check every one. Would you trust people who fake and lie and suppress research results from you to tell you what food is safe to eat?

PH: What can the average citizen do to get involved in the GMO debate?

MWH: Take it upon yourself to understand the science behind genetic engineering, expose the lies and half-truths you’ve been told; that’s how to learn real science, and it is fun. Don’t be intimidated by the ‘experts’. Run informal teach-ins (combined with organic fests). Involve your whole family. Think of imaginative ways to explain things to other people. Scientists themselves are not very good at that, me included. I am still trying my best.

PH: How has science from your experience changed over the years?

MWH: I am still a scientist in love with science. That was what motivated me to be a scientist in the first place. I am still inspired about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, the ‘big questions’. Nowadays, this sense of wonder and excitement is lost. No one asks big questions anymore, they want to know how to exploit nature rather than living sustainably with nature.

The new genetics, for example, is enchanting; it is completely different from the old obsolete genetics that motivated genetic engineering and genetic modification [7]. It has turned conventional genetics upside down. Instead of a one way flow of information from DNA (the genetic material) to traits (biological function) to the environment, there is a circular feedback from the environment and the organisms’ experience that marks out which genes are to be expressed or not, even changing the genes themselves. I call this natural genetic modification. It is an intricate molecular dance of life that is essential for survival. Natural genetic modification is done with finesse and precision by the organisms themselves, without damaging the genome. In contrast, artificial genetic modification done in the laboratory by genetic engineers is crude, imprecise, uncontrollable, and ends up scrambling and damaging the genome with totally unpredictable effects on safety. It also interferes inevitably with the natural genetic modification process, and that is ultimately why artificial genetic modification is inherently hazardous.

I would love to see more new genetics research being done. Instead, most postdocs and graduate students are trapped into doing mindless, soul destroying genetic modification when they should be doing exciting research on how and under what circumstances natural genetic modification takes place.

PH: Why has the narrative around precautionary principle tied to GMOs turned into anti-science rhetoric coming from both scientists and the media?

MWH: There is a great deal of misunderstanding about the precautionary principle. It is absolutely based on scientific evidence. It is not anti-science at all, far from it. It just says that where there is scientific evidence for a hazard, the fact that the evidence may not be conclusive is not to be used as an excuse for ignoring the hazard. I would argue that in most cases, it leads to creative, imaginative solutions and alternatives. Critics are using it as a refuge for weak mindedness and lack of imagination. Prof Peter Saunders from ISIS has written what many people regard as the best article on the subject some years ago [8] Use and Abuse of the Precautionary Principle (ISIS News 6). A recent article answering the critics of the precautionary principle is also compelling reading [9] Caution Needed for the Precautionary Principle (SiS 61).

PH: GE-GMO capitalists seem to have the upper hand, as all marketers have — just push through with the product, get it into every corner of society, and, a decade later, or earlier, well, it’s so pervasive that it’s normalized and the average citizen accepts the new normal. Is this true?

MWH: It is a subtle psychological warfare, and some critics actually play into their hands. They hype up the GM technology to be just the most powerful thing in the world, or that ‘the genie is out of the bottle’ and it is already everywhere, so resisting it is useless. This leads people to feel absolutely powerless and paralysis sets in, which is exactly where they want you to be. That is why it is so important to understand the science for oneself.

The new genetics tells us we can reverse things if we take care of the environment, build a healthy soil without pesticides and other agrochemicals, and we can get rid of the pests, the diseases, very likely even the bad genes, and get the good genes back.

PH: What is your work?

MWH: My own research work is centered on the big question — what is life — Schrödinger posed in 1941. I pioneered an interdisciplinary way of understanding life in two books, both best-sellers for the publisher, the first having gone through 3 editions and multiple reprints [10, 11] (The Rainbow and the Worm, The Physics of Organisms and Living H2O the Dancing Rainbow Within). I am very pleased to receive the 2014 Prigogine Medal for that work ([12] ISIS Director Wins Science Award, SiS 61). My inaugural lecture title is “Circular Thermodynamics of Organisms and Sustainable Systems” [13] to be delivered in Sienna in Italy at a conference on sustainable cities; for ‘circular thermodynamics’ read ‘circular economy’ of nature. The lecture is on how to live sustainably with nature by integrating and building ourselves into the circular economy of nature.

Erwin Schrödinger Physics

Best known for his cat thought experiment, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887 – 1961) contributed significantly to fields of wave mechanics and wave equation. In 1933, he co-won the Nobel Prize for Physics for the introduction of Schrödinger’s wave, which is still widely used in modern quantum theory.

PH: There seems to be a big disconnection between nature and industry, technology, economics?

MWH: Spot on. That’s the reductionist science way. I have spent my whole life recovering the organic holistic science that really enables us to live sustainably with nature where knowledge is all of a piece (art, science, music, philosophy in one), and we are immersed within nature. The organic, holistic way is not only sustainable; it is very joyful and sustaining. It gives us all the strength and vitality of nature as well as all her beauty and inspiration.

PH: Climate change is the big game changer, and seems to be the underpinning of the pro-GMO industries and sciences. Discuss how non-GMO farming might be the answer to some of the changes we will face because of climate change — i.e. hotter, wetter, dryer, irregular weather.

MWH: Climate change is definitely happening. There is no denying it. No, most scientists who alert us to the dangers of GMOs are not climate deniers (those saying that climate change is not happening at all) or climate sceptics (those who don’t believe human action has anything to do with climate change). Please don’t conflate GMOs with climate change. I often tell climate sceptics or deniers that being sustainable is good whether you believe human action is causing climate change, or whether you believe climate change is happening, because we are running out of all kinds of resources, so renewables are in. Circular economy is in.

There is evidence that the predominantly GM crop system in the US is failing badly [14] (US Staple Crop System Failing from GM and Monoculture, SiS 59), and not just because of the recent drought, which decimated harvests [15] (Surviving Global Warming, SiS 60).This is not surprising, as GM crops are industrial monocultures, only more so. The numerous successes and benefits of organic, agro-ecological farming are no longer in doubt: more yields, more organic matter and carbon sequestration in the soil, more fertile soils, more water retention capacity (hence more resistant to drought) more nutritious, health promoting, more resilient to floods and hurricanes, more profitable, and less energy use, hence less carbon dioxide produced [4, 5]. We mustn’t let GM crops spoil our chance for surviving global warming and all climate extremes it will bring.

This interview is an extended version of one that first appeared in DissidentVoice.org. Paul Haeder has been a communications, English and journalism instructor since 1983, and during that time he’s been a journalist in Arizona, Texas, Mexico, Central America, Vietnam and now in Washington State.

References

1. Ho MW and Sirinathsinghji E. Ban GMOs Now, ISIS Special Report, ISIS, London, 2013. https://www.i-sis.org.uk/Ban_GMOs_Now_-_Special_ISIS_Report.php
2. Ho MW, Sirinathsinghji E and Saunders PT. Scientific American disinformation on GMOs. Science in Society 60, 2-3, 2013.
3. Becker HA, Clark EA, Cummins J, Davidson RM, de Guzman LE, DelGiudice E, Dotson RS, Exley C, Haffegee J, Ho MW, Huber DM, John B, Mason R, Mendoza T, Novotny E, Oller JW, Palmer J, Pollack G, Pusztai A, Samsell A, Saunders PT, Shiva V, Sirinathsinghji, E, Swanson N, Seneff S, Tomlijenovic L, Zamora O. Open letter on retraction and pledge to boycott Elsevier. Science in Society 61 (to appear).
4. Ho MW, Burcher S, Lim LC, et al. Food Futures Now, Organic*Sustainable*Fossil Fuel Free, ISIS/TWN, London/Penang, 2008, https://www.i-sis.org.uk/foodFutures.php
5. Ho MW. Paradigm shift urgently needed in agriculture, UN agencies call for an end to industrial agriculture & food system. Science in Society 60, 4-9, 2013.
6. Ho MW and Saunders PT. Over 1170 condemn retraction and pledge Elsevier boycott. Science in Society 61 (to appear).
7. Ho MW. The new genetics and natural versus artificial genetic modification. Entropy 2013, 15, 4748-81 (open access).
8. Saunders PT. Use and abuse of the precautionary principle. ISIS News 6, September 2000.
9. Saunders PT. Caution needed for the precautionary principle. Science in Society 61 (to appear).
10. Ho MW. The Rainbow and the Worm, the Physics of Organisms, World Scientific and Imperial College Press, 1993, 2nd ed 1998, 3rd ed. 2008. https://www.i-sis.org.uk/rnbwwrm.php
11. Ho MW. Living H2O, the rainbow within (introducing Living Rainbow H2O, World Scientific and Imperial College Press, 2012 ). https://www.i-sis.org.uk/Living_H2O.php
    “ISIS Director wins science award”, Science in Society 61 (to appear).
12. Ho MW. Circular thermodynamics of organisms and sustainable systems. Systems 2013, 1, 30-49 (open access).
13. Sirinathsinghji E. US staple crop system failing from GM and monoculture. Science in Society 59, 12-13, 2013.
14. Ho MW. Surviving global warming, localized food & energy systems in nature’s circular economy. Science in Society 60, 16-17, 2013.

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Death by a Thousand Cuts: When the Cures of Big Pharma are Worse than the Diseases

The more chemicals, drugs, vaccines, additives, toxins they make, the more difficult it is to escape from big business’ straight-jacket  

by Paul Haeder / November 17th, 2017

The vaccine debate and prying into Planned Parenthood’s Standard Operating Procedure are two arenas I have not gravitated toward. Genetically-engineered crops, industrial farming, confined feeding operations (CAFOs), dams killing wild salmon, these are my fortes.

The news daily is like death by a thousand cuts for me tied to new studies on collapsing ecosystems, indigenous people fighting against mines and other extractive industries, and more and more on climate change/global warming.

I never thought I’d be embroiled in a fight for my livelihood because I questioned the rampant vaccination of girls (and now boys) with the Merck marketed HPV vaccine, Gardasil. To date, more than 270,000,000 doses have been distributed worldwide, this HPV vaccine (World Health Organization’s Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety) distributed by both GlaxoSmithKline and Merck versions. There are scientists who say the human papillomavirus is not the cancer threat posited by the drug manufacturers and their paid-off doctors;  that most immune systems can fight off the HPV; that the vaccine only hits two of the more than 40 different HPV phenotypes.

My story with HPV vaccine started when I was in a Planned Parenthood training last month, a mandatory course for social workers titled Fundamentals of Sex Ed. For a total of possibly 30 seconds out of a 16-hour two-day training (I was kicked out after day one, eight hours worth), I voiced my opinion about the potential risks associated with Gardasil.

The opinion was put down on a slip of paper, then, and thrown in with dozens of other comments from the 40 participants. This is in Seattle, one of the bigger Planned Parenthood locations, and the comments I made were specifically sold to us all as “an anonymous forum.” I went further with two more comments on the slips of paper — about 60 words answering this first day evaluation question: “What could Planned Parenthood have done differently today in the training?”

I am really disappointed that Planned Parenthood in Seattle is so lock-step in line with Big Pharma. Especially in the case of Gardasil, which is a vaccine that has gotten tens of thousands complaints about it. Anyone, including my 16- to 21-year-old clients, could easily Google ‘Gardasil Dangers’ and find a plethora of very disturbing and legitimate information about its dangers. I wish Planned Parenthood showed more critical thinking and independent pedagogical standards, including informed consent.

Less than two hours after the training, I was called at my hotel room by my supervisor from Portland, who let me know:

The Planned Parenthood trainers said they do not want you back for the second day of training. I am putting you on administrative leave. I am looking into what happened in Seattle. Do not return to the office until further notice.

That was October 15, and I have since been terminated, have been on the job market, am attempting to collect a few weeks of unemployment assistance, have a lawyer investigating my case, and started writing about my case on multiple forums. You can read my posts “My Fate as a Social Worker Sealed by a Vaccine Named Gardasil“; “Planned Parenthood, A Vaccine, Double-think Alive and Well in the World of Non-profits“; “Gardasil and the American Bald Eagle – What Would Rachel Carson Do?”

The Sordid History of the HPV Vaccine

I have collected a hundred reports, articles, documentaries and blogs tied to the HPV vaccine, which has been in use since 2006. Here are just few: How Much Does the Vaccine Cost?, Sacrificial Virgins, Gardasil Did It/ Fue el Gardasil. The treasure trove is enlightening, intimidating, depressing and validating. Every drug and chemical in the world should have this amount of scrutiny, and yet, the depressing part is that once something is introduced into our systems of medicine, food production/ processing, and modern industrial existence, the unintended consequences and synergistic downsides are more difficult to elevate to a level of grave public concern.

The PR firms, legal teams, government agencies, law makers, and politicians all have a stake in the game with trillions of dollars in profits at stake. In fact, the pharmaceutical industry is the single largest contributor (number two being insurance industry) to congressional accounts in the United States, spending almost 2.5 billion dollars the past decade in lobbying efforts, more than double the spending of the defense industry. This is, of course, in addition to the many billions more spent on marketing their products to both consumers and directly to physicians.

The issues whirling around Gardasil represent a microcosm of all that is wrong with our healthcare industry. It is difficult at best and impossible for most to speak out against the power purchased with these multi-billion dollar budgets; in many cases, Big Pharma is killing us with their practices, marketing and products. If you are a citizen, a consumer group, a watchdog agency or journalist going against the grain, the road to hell is paved with threats, lawsuits, and vitriol. We are labeled conspiracists, Luddites, anti-science extremists and crazies or nuts. Death by a thousand cuts!

Here is an anonymous comment emailed to me, and it’s endemic of the HPV vaccination controversy involving thousands of victims (and deaths) ascribed to the vaccination doses given these young girls and women:

I’ve been extensively investigating vaccines for 23 years and I believe that vaccines are one of the biggest contributors to the childhood epidemics of chronic disease. Over half of the kids in this country have been diagnosed with a chronic illness. Not only is it not prudent to mandate vaccines, it is in violation of informed consent and an affront to parental rights. The rush to get Gardasil (and all vaccines) approved is about one thing: $$$. Gardasil is not mandatory though in any state. It’s recommended but not mandatory – yet. It’s one of the most dangerous vaccines and should be completely avoided.

Whether it is vaccines, medications, agricultural or industrial chemicals, questions of safety are rarely tolerated. I knew this from my background in environmental studies, writing and activism. Even so, I was caught off guard by these recent events.

Toxic History and Citizen Action: The Fight Never Ends

I cut my teeth as a budding reporter in Arizona working on issues tied to sprawl, city and county politics, the cop shop, and more as a community journalist for several dailies. I also ate up journalism from other great venues, including one that links tangentially to the Gardasil story. It was on the Love Canal case (a neighborhood near Niagara Falls, NY) in the 1970s. Love Canal’s toxic history began when Hooker Chemical Co. used an abandoned canal from 1942 to 1953 to dump 21,800 tons of industrial hazardous waste (‘Love Canal’ still oozing poison 35 years later).

Later, the slurry was “capped,” and then hundreds of homes and a school were built on top of it. A harsh winter in 1977 with several meters of snow resulted in a spring melt seeping into the buried 16-acre canal which forced chemical waste into groundwater and to the surface, oozing into yards and basements (Superfund).

Residents began complaining of miscarriages, urinary and kidney problems and mental disabilities in their children. A quiet mother and homemaker began putting pieces together and contacted scientists and state government agencies.

Headlines like this anchor what she did as just a common person: “Lois Gibbs, a housewife leads the charge for evacuation, compensation and warns against resettling the area.”

That case led to the formation in 1980 of the Superfund program, which helps pay for the cleanup of toxic sites (From homemaker to hell-raiser in Love Canal).

As I have set up this series with environmentalist-scientist Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, this fourth article around this controversy (for DV) dovetails with environmentalist Lois Gibbs. How insane is it that she revisited the Love Canal site on the 35th anniversary in November 2013 and witnessed a new generation of mothers and fathers locked into lawsuits with Occidental Petroleum Corp., the new caretaker of the land, again, because of the toxic soil and health implications for them and their families (Happy Birthday, Love Canal). Rashes, stomach sickness, fainting, seizure. Insanity, the ooze that Gibbs tied to birth defects was recapped (mitigated) with new homes built where those in Gibbs’ old neighborhood had been demolished.

It was so weird to go back and stand next to someone who was crying and saying the exact same thing I said thirty-five years ago, Gibbs said.

More than 1,000 tons of contaminated soil are being now being shipped to an incinerator in Lincoln, Nebraska (Love Canal soil going to Kimball incinerator). We don’t know who said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results,” but Albert Einstein did say, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

Like Carson, Gibbs penned a few books – Dying from Dioxin (1995); Love Canal The Story Continues (1998); Love Canal: and the Birth of the Environmental Health Movement (2010) – and founded an organization fighting toxins:

The Center for Health, Environment & Justice which supports a nationwide network of more than 300 local community groups to achieve critical policy impacts at the local, regional, statewide and national levels. The communities we serve are largely rural, low-wealth or working class—the kind of areas where toxic chemicals, polluting facilities and other environmental dangers are sited.

Get Lit with Literature!

The biggest influences for me in regard to social justice and the power of collective action came to me through the arts, poetry and literature, at a young age. For me, the game changer was considering Herman Melville’s short story, Bartleby the Scrivener, or Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation, when without moving from his privacy, Bartleby, in a singular mild, firm voice, replied, ‘I would prefer not to.’

— Herman Melville

The mind of man is capable of anything–because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage–who can tell?—but truth–truth stripped of its cloak of time.

— Joseph Conrad

This very concept of those willing to kill and maim and conquer for a profit came to bear quickly after reading Conrad and so many other thinkers. The idea, though, of this strange man, Bartleby, basically intoning his manager, “I would prefer not to,” symbolizes one of the world’s most powerful phrases. “I would prefer not to.” How many among us can say the same when faced with ethical challenges.

Fact is Stranger than Fiction

What I am finding in my own nascent life tied to Gardasil and Planned Parenthood is a type of bearing witness, knowing there are deeper and more layered and nuanced ways of looking at the mad men in advertising, marketing, propaganda and more existential ways of contemplating the insanity of unlimited growth, the consumer assault and battery from the merchants of death.

The leap from literary/poetic to environmental and science writing was not a high one. I was still reading  writers like Eduardo Galeano, Vonnegut , Ursula Le Guin, Denise Levertov and  Jorge Luis Borges, but I did devour Carson’s Silent Spring when I was 16, and that too put me on a course toward writing literary works, and poetry, as well as becoming a journalist hoping to cover science. Carson was on the staff of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for 16 years and was highly cognizant of the fact the government played a huge role in promoting and defending chemical poisons.

“The crusade to create a chemically sterile, insect-free world,” Carson wrote, “seems to have engendered a fanatic zeal on the part of many specialists and most of the so-called control agencies.”

She believed that she was living in an era …

dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged. When the public protests, confronted with some obvious evidence of damaging results of pesticide applications, it is fed little tranquilizing pills of half-truth. We urgently need an end to these false assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts.

The cross-pollination of a huge marketing campaigns with scientists and medical companies and pharmaceuticals is both bizarre and business as usual. Here, in 2006, from one of those marketing firms:

More than 95 insurance plans–covering 94 percent of insured individuals–have decided to reimburse Gardasil, according to Merck. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has also added the vaccine to its Vaccines for Children Contract, making it available to Medicaid-eligible, uninsured, under-insured, or Native American children up to the age of 18.

Analysts are optimistic about the vaccine’s market potential. ‘It’s very clear that patients are going to be interested in it,’ said John Lebbos, MD, therapeutic area director of infectious diseases at market research firm Decision Resources. ‘From what I’ve seen, it’s going to be a blockbuster.’

Education about the vaccine is going to be a critical piece–due both to a lack of understanding about HPV as well as early controversy that vaccination might lead to teen promiscuity.

Note the terminology of the purveyors of capital and profit-making health care: “vaccine’s market potential” and “it’s going to be a blockbuster.” Words from an MD whose Hippocratic oath states first do no harm!

From the onset of Gardasil, after the fast-tracked shoddy FDA approval (Examining the FDA’s HPV Vaccine Records), Merck deployed the services of one of the world’s propaganda firms, AKA PR outfits:

The PR genius behind all stages of Merck’s HPV and Gardasil campaigns is the PR giant Edelman. The world’s largest independent PR firm, Edelman boasts more than 2,100 employees working in 46 wholly owned offices worldwide, plus the additional resources of more than 50 affiliates. Apparently Merck is hoping that most, if not all the states in the US, will mandate a vaccine against HPV as a pre-requisite for school attendance. And beat rivals to it, before GlaxoSmithKline gets FDA approval for its Cervarix.

In the dozens and dozens of articles in the New York Times, in reports by PR Watch and Judicial Watch, scant few mentioning of the untold physical incapacitation, chronic illness and deaths tied to Gardasil by many citizen groups with some scientists behind the calls to stop the Gardasil-Cervarix mass vaccination program (TruthWiki   US Court Pays $6 Million to Gardasil Victims    Judicial Watch:  a,   b,  c    Are You Concerned Over Genetically Modified Vaccine?  HPV Researchers, Planned Parenthood Win Prestigious Lasker Medical Awards).

But, 11 years ago, even before FDA approval, Merck and Edelman were on the PR war-path beating the cervical cancer drums:

Merck used its deep pockets to make sure that even before the FDA had approved Gardasil, there was a growing awareness of and concern about HPV and its link to cervical cancer. According to Bloomberg News, Merck spent $841,000 for Internet ads alone relating to HPV in the first quarter of 2006 — months before the FDA had even approved Gardasil (Part One: Setting the Stage).

Again, this series on Gardasil-Merck-Planned Parenthood-and-my-termination looks at the funding and ties to non-profits, but also at the new documentaries and court cases illuminating the young girls and women who say they have been injured (and many family members of deceased girls say killed) by the HPV vaccine.

Here’s just one tip of the iceberg in this non-profit collusion with the funders, health care for-profits, and this is a three-part series written for PR Watch in 2017 by journalist Judith Siers-Poisson:

According to their website, “Women in Government is a national 501(c)(3), non-profit, bi-partisan organization of women state legislators providing leadership opportunities, networking, expert forums, and educational resources to address and resolve complex public policy issues.” The campaigns that they feature on their home page deal with kidney health, Medicare preventive services, higher education policy, and the “Challenge to Eliminate Cervical Cancer,” which was publicly launched in 2004.

On February 2, 2007, Texas Governor Rick Perry, against the wishes of his conservative base and to the surprise of critics, signed an executive order mandating HPV vaccination for girls entering seventh grade. Then, unfortunately for Perry and Merck, details of his many connections with both Merck and Women in Government became public.

Ellen Goodman of the Boston Globe noted, “It turned out that Perry’s former chief of staff is now a lobbyist for Merck. Did that look bad? Whoa, Nellie. Did it look bad that Merck had funded an organization of women legislators backing similar bills? Whoa, Merck.” USA Today reported that Perry’s current chief of staff’s mother-in-law, Texas Republican State Representative Dianne White Delisi, is a state director for Women in Government. Perry’s wife, Anita, a nurse by training, addressed a WIG summit on cervical cancer in Atlanta in November 2005. Perry also received $6,000 from Merck’s political action committee during his re-election campaign.

In 2004, more than 20 WIG funders were pharmaceutical companies or entities heavily invested in health care issues that could come before state legislators. A short list includes both Merck & Co., Inc and Merck Vaccine, GlaxoSmithKline (which will soon have the second HPV vaccine on the market), and Digene Corporation (which manufactures an HPV test). Other drug interests listed as donors to WIG include Novartis, Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca, Bayer Healthcare, Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb (both the company and their foundation), and Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, also known as PhRMA, one of the largest and most influential lobbying organizations in Washington representing 48 drug companies.

The funders of Women in Government today, as I am looking at their website, are still those big ones listed above and others in the for-profit health care fields.

What comes next will be articles tying Planned Parenthood to the makers of Gardasil, and how the science behind the HPV vaccine is not only faulty, but in some ways corrupted. The influence of these private for-profit drug makers to ruin scientists lives is also a big part of the story coming up (Biologist Peter Duesberg was all but banished from science for his views on HIV)  The next part of the series will look at the cases of young girls damaged and killed and whose cases are being highlighted in documentaries and added to class action and personal liability cases against Merck and GSK.

Part one of the series over at Hormones Matter & DV was getting the reader’s feet wet effort: Gardasil and the American Bald Eagle.  What I am hoping to elicit from this second part is reader’s feedback on the collusion of marketing and science. How do readers see that interplay affecting what they eat, consume, use and purchase? How can a citizen get a handle on all the complicated findings and PR spin and manufactured consent the for-profit world enlists as their marketing schemes?

GMOs, Genetic Engineering, Recombinant Drugs, Vaccines

I end with a lament, since I opened this piece around my background researching and writing about mostly environmental and social justice issues (certainly forced vaccinations in USA and other countries is a social injustice issue). I have many friends and sources in the arena of GMO — genetically modified (engineered) organisms and that giant, Monsanto. In fact, Gardasil is a genetically-engineered virus. The news today exploded with mainstream media touting a new study “clearing” Round-up, also known as glyphosate, of any definitive cancer-causing links.

Of course, this one study is not the final word on cancer and Round-up. One study, versus thousands linking Round-up to all sorts of problems in humans and animals. But then Monsanto is a giant with connected politicians, Supreme Court Justices and PR firms. Monsanto and others like Bayer subsidize entire university programs and departments. Autism and Round-up? Here. Glyphosate in vaccines?

It all ties together, this better living through chemistry-plastics-GE drugs. Even Stephen Hawkins is weighing in on this Genetic Engineering of vaccines.

My friend, who is now deceased, Mae-Wan Ho, submitted to an interview by me a few years ago, and this passage from it elegantly discusses the inherent dangers of GMOs:

The new genetics, for example, is enchanting; it is completely different from the old obsolete genetics that motivated genetic engineering and genetic modification. It has turned conventional genetics upside down. Instead of a one-way flow of information from DNA (the genetic material) to traits (biological function) to the environment, there is a circular feedback from the environment and the organisms’ experience that marks out which genes are to be expressed or not, even changing the genes themselves. I call this natural genetic modification. It is an intricate molecular dance of life that is essential for survival. Natural genetic modification is done with finesse and precision by the organisms themselves, without damaging the genome. In contrast, artificial genetic modification done in the laboratory by genetic engineers is crude, imprecise, uncontrollable, and ends up scrambling and damaging the genome with totally unpredictable effects on safety. It also interferes inevitably with the natural genetic modification process, and that is ultimately why artificial genetic modification is inherently hazardous.

Some writers say “vaccines are the Third Rail for writers. Otherwise totally progressive sites have drunk the Pharma Kool-Aid and [shut down] journalists for simply suggesting that vaccines are neither all safe or all unsafe! Imagine!” (a recent email from a writer answering my questions, preferring to stay anonymous).

Add to my dilemma as a white male, Marxist, 60, dare to complain about anything to do with Planned Parenthood, even this bizarre personal attack on me, as Planned Parenthood Seattle ended up pressuring the former non-profit I worked for to sack me because of my recalcitrance, aggressiveness and non-compliance of a “zeig heil” to all vaccines, manufactured and distributed (sold) by Merck and GlaxSmithKline, not exactly the angels in Big Pharma.

I’ve got compatriots, luckily, at DV, in the writing and voice of Martha Rosenberg —

Of course there are many reasons women may veto the vaccine for themselves or their children. Even though the vaccine is nearly 100 percent effective in preventing precancerous cervical lesions and protects against the two HPV strains that cause 70 percent of cervical cancers and 90 percent of genital warts, it isn’t effective against all HPV strains. It is also not more effective against cervical cancer than a Pap smear and even when it does work, may require a booster. Nor do researchers know how long protection lasts.

The HPV vaccine is also the most expensive of all recommended vaccines at $359.25 for all three doses says Pew Research.

And then there’s the morality issue.

“I was greatly offended that Merck suggests I vaccinate my nine-year-old daughter against an STD,” says Kelley Watson, a mother of two in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park. “Especially insulting to me was that there was never any mention of HPV as being a sexually transmitted disease. It was presented as something women can contract through tampons or nylon stockings — as if men played no part.”

Actually, men’s part in transmitting HPV is beginning to be acknowledged. Last year FDA also cleared the vaccine for boys, in whom the virus can cause genital warts and anal cancer. Even when an individual declines vaccination, his or her chances of infection are lessened as more people, both men and women, vaccinate — a concept called herd immunity.

Thanks to intrepid and thick-skinned writers like Rosenberg, the public might have a chance at getting real news about pharmaceuticals and all the other snake oil and PT Barnum shell games Big For-Profit Medicine pedals. I’ll attempt to be part of that phalanx of writers skeptical of capitalism’s parasitic infestation of things that should not be given to millionaires, billionaires and their financial vultures for profits and rip-offs — education, health, social security, energy, the commons, banking, and community rights to public health, safety and protection. Add the incarceration complex to the mix, and then also think about how infected farming, food, transportation, and telecommunications and media have become through the perversions of big capital and bigger profit schemes of the financial hit men (and women).

Just a year ago, here, Martha’s Counterpunch piece:

They Aren’t All Safe: Pharma is Willing to Look “Unscientific” to Sell Vaccines

Pharma is unwise to cast such parents, of whom there are many, as “nuts.” The degeneration of their child is not their imagination. Also, there is no defensible reason for vaccines to be given all at once to a child, which many say heightens risks. Administering clusters of vaccines–once not given to children–has been called a major, new profit center for pediatricians.

But anti-vaccination activists should also not be absolutist. Would anyone refuse a rabies vaccine after being bitten by a rabid raccoon? A tetanus shot after a serious wound? Would responsible parents deny their child a whooping cough or polio vaccine?

Like all drugs aggressively marketed these days, patients and parents need to do their own research and weigh benefits and risks—never forgetting Pharma’s spotty safety record.

Seems like sanity to me, as a parent, patient and press member!

Dr. Mae-Wan Ho: The Rainbow and the Worm

She saw life unfold in all its splendid colours. Those colors were not only beautiful to look at, but they also told her a lot about the physical processes that took place there. The living cell contains approximately 70% water and it turned out that the processes in and properties of water itself are together responsible for all those colors. Water in living cells behaves like a liquid crystal, which explains the polarization of light going through the cell. This liquid crystal behavior appears to be essential for the chemical processes that run in living cells. This is something that will never be visible with the electron microscope. Ultimately, she concludes that the special properties of water play a major role in the quantum processes that take place in the living cell. All life exhibits quantum coherence. It is the hallmark of life. According to Ho, we see the guiding intelligence of consciousness at work there.

What is quantum coherence?

The quantum wave is an excitation of an immaterial medium. In order to have waves, a the substance of the medium has to be coherent. Which is strange for an immaterial medium. It is striking that if you search for it on the internet you will come across direct relationships with living systems and health. I therefore devoted a special study to it, in which I also came to a better understanding of the efficiency of chlorophyll. I talk about that in my book. After I felt I had a picture of quantum coherence that I could also explain, I dedicated a special page to quantum coherence on my website to it. You can find that page here.

Living water

Ho links quantum coherence to life and consciousness. Quantum coherence is an expression of the consciousness that is behind all the life we perceive. In the interview below, she also points to her finding that water at room temperature is already about 40% quantum coherent. When I now try to picture the enormous amount of contiguous water on this planet that is thus 40% quantum coherent, I get an impression of an enormous awe-inspiring living intelligent being in which all life we know must someday arise. Take a walk along the beach, look out over the sea and muse on it.

cancelled in 2020, 2021, 2022 cuz of the planned-demic

Well well, this past Saturday, the Oregon State University Hatfield Marine Sciences Center, we had an open house of sorts — 41 displays and a keynote speaker and an abalone author bringing their wisdom and work to the public.

Here are the stats, as I was a volunteer, Shift Captain:

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• 1655 visitors
• 41 exhibits
• 124 exhibitors
• 53 volunteers

But as all of you know, this event goes way beyond the numbers.  Marine Science Day was a success because every lab committed time and energy to build an engaging and interactive display communicating your science.  Your support of the HMSC outreach mission was heard throughout the day with comments like: “Every single room we went in was filled with displays where my kids could DO science” and “I had no idea that all this was happening at the Marine Science Center”.  This event is built around highlighting your research and connecting with our community and in every way, this event was a success because of you.

There were mammal experts, bird experts, rock fish experts, whale experts; there were sea star experts, sea cucumber experts, kelp experts; there were oceanographers, weather experts, wave energy experts.

Many of the volunteers were students from the OSU programs.

Lots of families showed up, and alas, there were great opportunities to see what goes on with our tax money tied to marine sciences.

I talked with many of the researchers, of which there were master’s degreed folk considering getting a PhD. Most of the students are not from the coast of Oregon, or Oregon in the first place. They are interested in sharks, reefs, ocean bottoms, and all are tied to climate change and that sort of connection to their work.

A majority of the people in graduate programs are women. I talked with several, one in particular around her work with hydrophones and getting the sounds of whales, including our iconic gray whales tourists flock to the coast to view.

We talked about ethics in science, and she stated there aren’t classes around that, that is, the deep higher order thinking around scientism, science at all costs, science in the pocket of the corporations, the technocrats.

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

She talked about how male students are going into engineering while women are going into the biological sciences, the earth sciences.

We talked about shifting baseline disorder, that is, my reefs in the Sea of Cortez in 1970s were so robust, and not perfect for sure, but the Colorado RIVER still reached the sea back then. Now, if a dive team were to go into the places I dove, they’d be seeing their baseline of species and would then, without historical science under their belts, consider what they catalogued as what they consider the starting point for stewardship or restoration.

We talked about what she might want to do after her schooling, and she stated that she wanted to continue research, with a university.

We talked about Zoom schooling, and on-line schooling, even in the sciences, and she shook her head. She’s twenty-four years old.

I ran into Daniel Palacios, a whale researcher from Columbia. He was in the rooms where people could see his work tagging gray whales and other whales. We talked about PTSD effects on these marvelous creatures. I brought that up, how just one event — hitting that Zodiac at full throttle to chase a whale for those tags, that is, satellite monitored tags, under the whale’s flesh — might be akin to one event a human might face, running from a possible attacker in the night, and how that event for Homo Sapiens would be a critical trauma induced event, a PTSD event held the rest of her or his life.

“What does a smart whale think when these chase boats come charging after him or her, and what about the others in the pod, witnessing this trauma-induced event? Do you think about that, Daniel?”

He said he does, and he said his sort of research might be numbered because of the likelihood of that sort of trauma inducement and the fact whales are so bombarded with millions of boats and ships and noise and clutter and pollution, that the combination of all that must be creating a trauma-induciing unnatural world for them, their young, their future offspring.

Read my feature on him here: “From Colombia to Galapagos to California and OSU”

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/wmOJ53N9yPI?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

In the end, the day was okay, with clouds, rain and people coming into the Center, which is a visitor center with permanent displays and then getting to go behind the scenes into the actual labs.

There are big ideas and big research projects coming down the pike, and I’ve written about how earth sciences are just a drop in the bucket in terms of funding compared to the eye in the sky “shit.” In fact, more trillions go to satellite arrays, to terra-forming the moon or mars than goes into what actually is happeing on mother earth.

NASA requested more than $2.4 billion for Earth science in its fiscal year 2023 budget proposal. However, the omnibus spending bill enacted in late December provided just under $2.2 billion for Earth science. While that is an increase of $130 million from 2022, it comes as NASA is ramping up work on its line of Earth System Observatory missions and other projects.

At the town hall, one scientist said it was “pretty shocking” that NASA would even consider not extending those three missions given their performance and the community of researchers using data from them. Robinson again turned to financial challenges facing the overall Earth science program.

“In the case of Terra, Aqua and Aura, one of the challenges we have is that these systems, because they’ve been operating so long, they’re really expensive,” she said. NASA’s fiscal year 2023 budget request projected spending $30.7 million each on operations of Terra and Aqua and $20.5 million on Aura. One part of the senior review will be to look at reducing those operating costs, but she did offer an estimate of the range of potential reductions. (source)

But it’s even worse, since those NASA programs “looking at earth” are still space based. Here, more insight:

Earth science has long been the poor cousin of STEM programs. It takes a back seat to technology and even among the straight sciences, rocks and rivers get short shrift alongside the physical sciences—properties of matter, motion, gravity.

“It’s the least glamorous, it requires the least specialized equipment, it’s not as shiny. And the modern applications of it are less straightforward and less clear,” says Michael Walker, a high school teacher at the Village School, a 1,200-student K-12 institution in Houston.

Walker is among those calling for a bigger role for earth science in the STEM curriculum. “Our students have to start making decisions about how we use our resources, and that means they have to know what is there, how is it used, and what are the consequences,” he says. (source)

Here you go, a bonus for my Substack. ANYONE interested in funding a small subscription to the daily or at least weekly news and opinion forum?

Should We Trust Science?

Conference celebrates how the ocean connects to all of us — coastlines, people, cultures

by Paul Haeder / November 15th, 2019

Scientists working on the issue have often told me that, once upon a time, they assumed, if they did their jobs, politicians would act upon the information. That, of course, hasn’t happened. Anything but, across much of the planet. Worse yet, science failed to have the necessary impact in significant part because of disinformation promoted by the major fossil-fuel companies, which have succeeded in diverting attention from climate change and successfully blocking meaningful action.”

— Naomi Oreskes, author of Why Trust Science? and professor of the history of science at Harvard University

There were 60 of us with four facilitators asking us deep questions about the best ways to protest, preserve, rehabilitate and reimagine Oregon’s rocky intertidal habitat.

“What does make a community resistant and resilient?” Steven S. Rumrill, Department of Fish and Wildlife shellfish program leader, asked us all.

In a nutshell, this breakout session was a microcosm of Saturday’s conference, State of the Coast at Salishan Resort.

Three other leads to this afternoon session titled, “Complex and Connected: Holistic Approaches to Management in the Nearshore” — Sarah Gravem, OSU Marine Ecologist; Dom Kone, OSU graduate student in Marine Resource Management; and Deanna Caracciolo, Department of Land Conservation and Development – challenged us to think about issues near and dear to not only the scientists, but to us lay persons. We held onto the anchor question: “What makes the Oregon Coast vibrant, healthy and a visitor destination.”

Rumrill posed key brainstorming questions:

1. What are the primary drivers of variability in rocky habitats?

2. What are the key stressors and threats to them?

3. What proactive steps can resource managers take?

4. Think of five words associated with holistic management of rocky shores.

Coastal Confab Inspires Next Generation

This was the sixth year in a row for the State of the Coast, but this past Saturday’s was the first sold out gig, according to Shelby Walker with Oregon Sea Grant, main sponsor of the Gleneden Beach soirée.

The all-day session included the requisite keynote – Bonnie Henderson, author of several books, to include “Day Hiking: Oregon Coast,” “The Next Tsunami: Living on a Restless Coast” and “Strand: An Odyssey of Pacific Ocean Debris.”

Even more compelling and intriguing — and dovetailed to the State of the Coast theme of looking into the future — 28 student researchers with their poster projects displayed in the Longhouse conference room, and the 10 student artists alongside their creative endeavors, with both groups being voted on by all the guests.

Projects tied to pollution, microplastics, the Pacific heat blob, hormone mimickers, ocean acidification and more are at the forefront of these highly motivated and interdisciplinary-steeped students from Oregon State University, University of Oregon, Portland State University.

I spent time talking with Reyn Yoshioka from UO, as he explained the remarkable findings in his participation in Oregon Institute of Marine Biology’s BioBlitz in the Coos Bay area. We discussed how his team’s inventory of invertebrates would be ideal to present to city and county officials, as well as groups like Rotary clubs and chambers of commerce.

“The people with political and economic clout need to see not only the work you all do, but what really is at stake if anything threatens this incredible biodiversity,” I told many of the fledging scientists and artists.

Every single one agreed. Many asked me how they might connect to myriad other stakeholders and powerbrokers in their communities.

I introduced Reyn to OSU senior in arts Kenneth Koga, whose watercolors of various elements of a vibrant ecosystem bring the scientist’s eye in focus with a much broader scope beyond just the materialistic world and into the interpretation of nature through the artist’s lens. Reyn told me “it would have been cool” to have dancers, photographers, painters, sculptors and musicians as part of the biodiversity transect inventory.

The Arts Help Define and Contextualize Science

While we received quick teach-ins (one hour presentations of eight minutes each) from researchers looking at rocky habitats, the warm Pacific blob, Oregon’s five marine reserves, sea star wasting disease, threats to Gray, fin, blue and humpback whales on the West Coast, and the status of groundfish recovery, Marion O. Rossi, OSU Associate Dean of Liberal Arts, gave a quick snapshot of Republican Governor Tom McCall’s legacy in helping preserve our coastal habitats.

Author Studs Terkel asked McCall decades ago where the heroes of the political world are. “Heroes are not giant statues framed against a red sky,” McCall said. “ They are people who say, ‘This is my community, and it’s my responsibility to make it better.’”

Rossi and I talked about what better things might be done to bridge the divide between the sciences (and technology, engineering and math – STEM) and the arts.

Part of the conference included a rather telling – possibly debilitating – aspect of science and various stakeholders. I counted more than 21 agencies involved in just managing and setting plans for our rocky habitats. Unfortunately, there are many more agencies, bureaucracies, boards, quasi-legal, legislative, non-profit, industry groups with some sort of skin in the game tied to our coast.

Think of tide-pools, habitat for many juvenile species, kelp incubators, biodomes to invertebrates such as anemones and sea stars. One issue we tackled was the fact that we can love our coastlines to death; i.e., since we have so many visitors and local aficionados wanting to get into these areas, so many species are being trampled upon.

Ecological balance, keystone species and the entire web of life also were prominent discussion points for the speakers.

For instance, the wasting disease promulgated deeper response in coordinated research projects called STARS – Seastar Tragedy and Recovery Study. Sarah Gravem of OSU discussed the implications of this species’ decline most probably attributed to a virus as well as ocean conditions (warming) spurring the virus’ growth. In some areas along the Pacific Coast, there had been a 100 percent die-off of sea stars observed in 2018. Recovery has been slow.

The ecological consequences from this wasting disease hitting pisaster ochraceus that once was ubiquitous in our rocky shorelines (purple, orange, brown many-legged beauties) spurred a kind of domino effect.

• this predatory sea star feeds on the mussel Mytilus californianus and is responsible for maintaining much of the local diversity of species within certain communities

• compensatory predators come in when a die-off hits

• low sea star prey growth occurs upsetting the balance of the ecosystem

All these pieces to the marine puzzle make up the coast’s mosaic of life. With warming waters, the bull kelp die off, and then sea urchins populations explode and any sort of juvenile kelp that might attempt a foothold on rocky bottoms gets gobbled up by the armies of sea urchins.

Everything is connected in the coastal life in and around the sea.

Whose Oregon Is It?

The Oregon Coast Trail is a hiking trail along the Pacific Coast. The length depends on the use of ferries, and varies between 382 miles (615 km) and 428 miles (689 km). The trail is set out on the beach, paved roads and tracks.

– Traildino.com

“You know, the funny thing about aging is you can watch entire forests grow,” author Bonnie Henderson said. “Fifty years is a harvest rotation. I can say to the students here you will watch forests grow thanks to those with vision and persistence.”

The author made it clear that her love of the Oregon Coast Trail could have only been germinated through the auspices and hard work of forerunners like Governor Tom McCall who pushed the 1967 Oregon “beach bill,” making all beaches accessible to the public.

She went back farther, 1913, to Oswald West, the governor who made all Oregon’s public beaches highways for wagons, horses and cars. Fellows like state Parks chief Sam Boardman (retired 1950) increased the acreage for coastal parks almost 20-fold. Then Sam Dickens, a Kentuckian who ended up running the UO geology department, saw the value in knitting together all the trails in Oregon, along the coast.

The well-known Pacific Crest Trail is more than 2,600 miles long and takes five months to traverse in snow-free conditions. It’s a wild back-country affair, whereas the Oregon Coast Trail cuts through cities, highways towns and waysides. Henderson has traversed it many times.

She is fighting for more camping areas. She is also keen on her other position as communications director for the Northwest Land Conservancy, trying to get more land set aside for a reserve in Oswald Park near Cape Falcon. That’s a $10 million fund drive, of which the NWLD has procured half.

With the snow season hitting the Sierras and rampant fires in California and Oregon, many people had to forego their Pacific Coast Trail adventure and ended up on the Oregon Coast Trail in 2017 and 2018.

She rhetorically asked how long people have been hiking and walking along the trail. Jorie Clark, OSU Geology and Geophysics department, has looked at the shoreline changes dating back 18,000 years when the oceans along the Pacific were 450 feet lower than today. It was around 6,000 years ago when the ocean hit the current level.

There were glaciers along the coast dating back 14,000 years, but also evidence of people from Chile up to Oregon, before the land bridge, who went along the so-called “kelp highway” where they found enough refugia to survive, Henderson told the crowd.

Rejecting Cornell University — Art for Art’s Sake

Ram Papish apologizes to the group in his breakout session for a jump drive failure. He is wearing self-designed blue jeans with a collection of tufted puffins painted all over.

He currently lives and works out of Toledo, and his artwork is not only of interest to collectors. More importantly, he has worked with Oregon State Parks on 63 panels of interpretative work tied to our wonderfully varied ecosystems.

All along the Oregon Coast, at waysides and other locales, these illustrated panels are set throughout the tourists’ pathway. Here are just a few of the illustrated large panels:

• Salmon Life Cycle

• Tidepool Explorer

• Sea Bird Island

• Tidepool Life

• Shorebird Stopover

• Mixing Zone

He tells the mostly young students in the session that he had to fight hard to become successful, and he said it was just last year when he began to feel somewhat secure in his artistic profession.

He has illustrated field guides, and in his early life he spent half the year as a guide in Alaska and then the other half as an artist – 15 years straight undertaking that lifestyle. He’s an avid photographer and he has worked sculpting into his life – with works including the walrus that sticks out of the wall at Hatfield Marine Science Center.

When I went to college, I didn’t think I could make a living at it. I sent out dozens of portfolios to publishers and children’s book publishers. I was really naïve.

The introduction to art class at Cornell was a turning point in his pursuit: “The professor was basically trying to teach us how to be a snobby artist. I wasn’t going to have any part of that.”

Ram’s drive is to connect people to nature. He works mostly on commission, gigs assigned by Oregon State Parks, other agencies and publishers. His drawing avocation started when he was very young, and by age 14 he was designing dolls.

Questions abounded at his talk; he stated his interpretative panels follow the Rule of Threes –

It’s better to have less text. Over the years we went from textbooks on a stick to art pieces with no more than 300 words.

• three seconds to get the headlines

• 30 seconds to glance over the panel

• three minutes to read everything, including the captions

I ask him who his inspirations were. He rattles off Lars Jonsson and Robert Bateman. His number-one inspirator was a guy who wrote a book, Birds in Art. That was Larry McQueen, who ironically turned out to be living in Eugene where the young Ram lived. Ram saw his photo in the newspaper. It turned out Ram had been his paperboy from age 12 to 14. Ram introduced himself to McQueen and ever since he has been Ram’s inspiration.

Our Collective Potlatch

There are many challenges to our coast – to the livelihoods of the people who make money off our coast’s marine resources. There are challenges to scientists who have to spend more time stumping for grants. There are many silos of people who are gatekeepers of information but fail to abide by transparency. Tourism and sustainable economies are debated weekly in city council meetings.

Unfortunately, for many coastal people, the elephants in the room are global warming, ocean level rise and ocean acidification and hypoxia. I’ve written about researchers diving deep into those topics.

But the bandwidth of the American public, lawmakers and industry is taken up by the stumbling blocks to progress – profits at any cost and doing business as usual for the benefit of a few rich people and stockholders.

The state of the coast, as seen at the Salishan Resort, is one tied to vibrant thinkers and activists; scientists and researchers; explorers and dreamers.

On the surface, some things look hunky-dory, but when we peel back layers as both naturalists and scientists, we see a more varied and complicated picture. The State of the Coast is a multivariant symphony of sometimes syncopated and discordant arias.

Music is in the eye of the beholder, but for our coast, the people dedicated to learning and sharing are really the bedrock for the rest of us who find some niche or dream or hope in this place.

Maybe we need this sort of potlatch — the name given to most Northwest Coast celebrations – every month.

Imagine, State of the Coast as our potlatch, from the Nuu-chah-nulth “pachitle”’ (potlatch), which means “to give.” How much does the reader have to give to this vibrant and vulnerable coast? How much do you have at stake in ensuring future generations have a healthy coast?

three years of Zoom Day, and now, Zoom is taking over the environmental movement

Ahh, that was 13 (lucky thirteen) years ago. Imagine that. The story below link!!

I was Mister Sustainability, man, in Spokane: with Gonzaga, with Eastern Washington University, with Spokane Falls Community College, with Spokane Living Magazine, with KYRS Radio, with the Spokesman Review, with the Pacific Northwest Weekly Inlander, and with other venues and scoping exercises.

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I wasn’t wrong to want to belong to the Earth Day kinda people, but even then, while they were swooning over Gore and Obama, and while they pushed all the wrong buttons tied to “my version of earth and the day,” I was rebelling and rebuffing and getting a reputation as a devil’s advocate, not someone to play in OUR sandbox kinda angry white guy.

Communist, ecosocialist, anti-empire, and certainly puked out on the dirty manure politics of left (fake) and right (Nazi) politics.

Here, one little blurb (all the blogs and things on the Internet with my name on them are going, going and gone):

The rise of sustainability as a force to critique, celebrate and co-modify

Columnist reivigorated after experience with Canadian tribe

Paul K. Haeder, Down to Earth NW Correspondent

It’s been more than 16 months since I started with DTE, and what’s amazing is the output I’ve been able to develop for which the editors have given the green light parallels the range of topics I’ve been given permission to cover – starting with the timely Dispatches from Disaster series covering the Gulf Coast oil madness and the attendant issues, precipitated by Spokane biologist Marc Gauthier’s road to the Gulf, and then a movie, “Gulf Coast Blues,” here.

Some other highlights: * Want the low-down on how bad golfing can be to the planet? * You think Spokane doesn’t have articles on Hispanic farmers in the Pacific Northwest? * Want insights from an EWU water expert importing her Indian philosophy? * Thinking about the next Earth Day? How about a writing contest? * Want to learn about food and climate change? * We have the inside look on bees * We care about the beef you think you are putting into your belly * One of my favorites was a piece I wrote on beaver restoration, from another article that first appeared in Spokane Living Magazine, April 2011.

The road ahead is full of great stuff from my end, and the idea is to expose Spokane readers and other DTE aficionados to incredible stories detailing the ins and outs of the green movement, the sustainability sector, and innovators and collectives looking at deep change in their communities, and for the globe.

I may be pugnacious, and always ready to lambast the vanguard, but I don’t take this sustainability topic lightly, and thus, I fortify myself with a dearth of conferences, classes, workshops and presentations.

I’ve been a leadership student at University of British Columbia’s sustainability institute. That July 4-8 2011, class, with a large group of participants and facilitation by innovators in the sustainability world will give much fodder for interesting stories. Look for more finely-tuned and elegantly-grained ways to peel away layers of contextualizing and framing in the sustainability movement/movements. There are innovative things coming from architects, planners, and others looking toward a carbon-less, zero-emission society.

Others in the movement tie into everything from steady-state economics, to deep strategic planning for a world moving toward a century that might be ice-free and food-and-energy hungry. The science of climate change and environmental refugees and collapsing ecosystems is widening the gap between marketers and corporate giants and the reality-based models for mitigating and managing a world in tumbling economic, cultural, ecological and energy systems freefall.

Writers — journalists and poets and novelists – must tackle this topic with aplomb, grace, wickedness and fearlessness. And pick up the pace. This opening salvo is aimed at pretenders and charlatans in this green movement. Sustainability lite will be looked at in future articles. Green-washing will be another. Look for green burials, small nations sustainability projects, and our own community bill of rights, Envision Spokane. More than I can imagine and plan for will radiate into some prescient and creative story ideas.

Sometimes these journeys go down a winding path, crisscrossing my own narrative. Pasts are frames for futures, and I hope to find a deeper meaning in my own story, and all those people I have crossed paths with – as an activist, journalist, educator, and traveler.

Some of those voices I’ve been lucky to listen to and interact with bring chills in my spine – Robert Bly, Octavio Paz, Denise Levertov, Tim Flannery, several Cousteaus, and countless others. John Francis, planet walker, Novella Carpenter, urban gardener, both fine people looking within and outside in their respective communities, are just two of many who informed, inspired and entertained when I spoke with them. What about all those people from the 1970s on I’ve been fortunate enough to have interviewed and studied with?

Well, this has to be something of value to readers. What I just appropriated again, after years away from the core of some of my Southwest and meso-American Indian friends, came from the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver (here).

It’s the foundational and simple wisdom I had gained years ago from Mescalero Apaches on the White River Arizona reservation; from Tarahumara throughout the Barranca del Cobre in Mexico; from Buddhists in Vietnam who worked with some of their brethren who self-immolated during the U.S. invasion and war.

I had that wisdom inside me, and over the years I’ve been in a flurry of thinking, moving, action. The wisdom got watered down. I regained that wisdom while touring a white man’s museum in British Columbia, on July 4, 2011.

The (Kwak’wala people of that region of Canada – a First Nations tribe represented in the anthropology museum – brought some relevance back to my own three decades journey writing poetry, novels and non-fiction. How do I reveal deeply held beliefs and fears of this planet?

The Kwak’wala struggled with what they might have chosen to give to the University of British Columbia’s museum as evidence of their culture, whether those things that are hidden – Kwik’waladlakw – like wolf whistles and masks, the supernatural powers from their nation – should be gifted.

They allowed the items of the nawalakw, the hidden powers, to be represented through these incredible carvings and representations of the other worlds of their belief and human-nature system.

They grappled with this and decided that giving their wisdom to outside cultures would bring that power and create a healing bridge. In this time of silo-thinking, nationalism, xenophobia, hegemony and superstition rising, it’s clear we all have to make more effort to be heard, and to listen. In order to find the meaning in the hidden. This is the time of ecological literacy, clarity, and action. For many, dialogue must replace debate when it comes to earth systems.

+—+

Then, just a few years ago, here, in rural Oregon, on the coast (don’t let ‘the coast’ fool you cuz there are plenty of rich and not-so-rich fools out here), another Op-Ed by Haeder.

Earth should not be virtual

• Paul Haeder, Apr 16, 2021, Save

The role of a journalist is to question kooky and misleading narratives that have been foisted upon society, to include myriad of topics tied to Mother Nature.

I do not criticize the people personally, but there is something vitally wrong with this notice: “Central Oregon Coast’s Earth Day April 22, 7 to 9 p.m., using the Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82421794771.”

Last year, Zoom Day for Earth streamed because of lockdown paranoia. Now, a year later, there is something wrong with holding a single day to celebrate wind, air, soil, sea, freshwater, animals and Homo sapiens.

It should be an everyday event.

But Earth Day has always been a day of action, celebration, confrontation and dialogue. Outside!

We expect hotel rooms to be cleaned, meals to be cooked, tables to be bussed, tanks to be filled with gasoline. We expect toilets to be unclogged and roofs to be repaired. We expect grocery stores to be open. We expect roads to be repaired.

Yet, this one day, with all the available parking lots, the overlooks to the Pacific, the beach territory, the forestland, it will be brought to you and others via Zoom.

I can direct readers to any number of articles on tech people and companies making a killing with remote streaming tools. From writer V. Blue, Engadget:

“The pandemic has us all in vulnerable positions, and some tech companies are just ethics-free enough to step in and take advantage of entire populations being held hostage by COVID-19. They see us as profitable, captive data generators while their PR departments act like they did something virtuous for the greater good. Like Zoom.

Zoom happens to be a privacy nightmare with a terrible security track record — so bad that in late 2019, EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) made an official complaint to the FTC alleging “unfair and deceptive practices.”

Rachel Carson, mother of Earth Day, wrote her seminal book, “Silent Spring” (1962) but was immediately attacked and vilified by chemical manufacturers, pesticide purveyors, and marketers of “better living through chemistry.”

It doesn’t take a concert planner to locate an outdoor area where canopies can be raised, tables unfolded and a barbeque spit dug for a real Earth Day. The cleanest and most efficiently circulated air in the world swells here on our central coast.

Moving on, here is a link to a new short animated video on global warming sent my way: “Why So Little Means So Much” :

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/kpKlGQ2xZx0?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

It’s about comparing 2 degrees Celsius increase in average global temperature to a fever in a child. Produced by Portland’s Metro Climate Action Team, Pat DeLaquil shepherded the project.

Paul Haeder: What was your role in producing this animated film?

Pat DeLaquil: I came up with the concept and bounced the idea around with several MCAT members using clip art. Then we developed a script where several of us contributed to editing and refining the message. Once we were happy with the storyboard and script, I placed the task on a platform called Upwork and found an artist that did motion graphics, which are much cheaper than real animation. The entire process took well over six months.

PH: Who is the intended audience for this and how does that audience access this?

PDL: We believe we have several target audiences among people who accept that climate change is happening, but don’t realize how bad the crisis can quickly get and why strong action is needed now. e believe this group broadly includes people with children and grandparents, as well as civic groups and the faith community.

PH: Explain your background in research climate change — two sentences.

PDL: I have been a leader in the commercialization of clean and renewable energy technologies for over 40 years, and for the last 20 years, I have run a small business that develops and uses models to perform policy analyses on behalf of donors, governments and the private sector to identify optimal pathways for achieving economic development and environmental goals. I have led the formation of two clean energy start-up companies and earlier led the development of two key solar energy development projects: PV for Utility Scale Applications (PV-USA) and the 10 MW Solar Two Power Tower Project.

PH: Three reasons you believe people in the U.S. still have difficulty understanding global warming, ocean warming, ice and glacial melting.

PDL: Disinformation and deliberate politicization of the issue are strategies used by the right (dominated by fossil fuel interests and their fellow corporate oligarchs). The second reason is that most people are busy with life — just making ends meet between jobs, kids, even before the pandemic, so it’s easy to ignore or deny the severity of the issue, or just hope someone does something. Third, some people in industries that rely on fossil fuels feel threatened that all this is just a plot to take away their lifestyles.

PH: What do you hope this flick will do to move policy makers/stakeholders to work on the very difficult issue of ocean level rise/inundation, extreme weather, crop failures, unlivable urban and rural communities?

PDL: We really hope that this video will motivate people who are not yet active to become more engaged in pushing their elected officials to act quickly to combat climate change.

+—+

BIG end NOTE: It has to be made clear that the new normal should not and will not be Zoom. It will not be this bullshit world of throwing trillions at high tech companies. It will not be this world of staying compliant in our homes and gardens and tents.

Earth Day 50 years later should be a celebration of the heroes who have fought against the killers of culture and jungle and rain forest and species. Instead, after 50 years, in this shit-hole quarantine mentality, we have people who want to celebrate the Great First Extermination event, what some have called the Sixth Mass Extinction, which is really the Seventh Extinction.

Every year, more than 100 environmental activists are murdered throughout the world. 116 environmental activists were assassinated in 2014. More than two environmentalists were assassinated every week in 2014 and three every week in 2015. 185 environmental activists were assassinated in 2015.

A new report from Global Witness found that three environmental defenders were murdered every week in 2018 and many more were criminalized for working to protect the land, water and other vital resources.

[chart on killings per country[

“People are being killed because they are demanding their basic rights, in particular, the rights to access to land and to be free in their territories,” Luis Gilberto Murillo, the former governor of the predominantly Afro-Colombian state of Choco and former minister of environment and sustainable development, said on “Democracy Now!” “The way to avoid these killings is the full implementation of the peace process. There is a national commission to guarantee the protection of social leaders in the country [which] has not been convened regularly by the current government.” Source.

So, I have to say that celebratory events like Earth Day are long in the tooth. We need action. We need tools. We need fire in the belly. We need role models. We need recruitment. We need the new tools of the modern post industrial Anarchist Cookbook. We need to celebrate our own eco-warriors, and the fact the Green is the New Red. We have to fight the industries that most Americans support by stuffing their faces with cheese, swine, chicken, beef, lamb who are on a witch hunt, getting more and more Gestapo laws against peaceful protest. We have to tell young people how to fight the systems of oppression. We don’t need no stinking Earth Day kumbayah.

We need Tim DeChristopher pre-incarceration for protesting illegal land lease sales in Utah. Nine years ago, here he is speaking to youth:

Tim DeChristopher | Power Shift 2011 Keynote

Remember, if you toss a can of paint or pool acid on an SUV or Hummer, you could face 25 or more years in federal prison. Remember, if you get on the radio and attack McDonald’s burgers or attack the swine industry, or if you take photos from a public road of a High Fructose Corn Syrup plant, or if you protest with signs outside a slaughter house, or if you go to the state capital of your choice and do a little street theater about timber industry killing babies with their Agent Orange spraying, or if you put your body and life in the way of a bunch of construction machines for a telescope siting in Hawaii, well, you get the picture. This is of course not the Earth Liberation Front or Animal Liberation Front, but we all should be those people, like all people on Turtle Island who can’t trace their lineage back to Native Tribes should ALL be illegal aliens.

Earth Day is about celebrating the warriors, those that exposed Love Canal, or people like Rachel Carson who was spied on and wire tapped and tailed by feds and industry pigs. Or Ralph Nader, Dangerous at Any Speed, who was the target of mafia hit men hired by GM, Ford, you name it, just for demanding safer death trap vehicles.

Celebrate the fighters in fence-line communities: Environmental racism is real.

As documented in Richard Rothstein’s 2017 book, ‘The Color of Law,’ extensive federal, state and local government practices designed to create and maintain housing segregation also assured that polluting facilities like industrial plants, refineries, and more were located near Black, Latino and Asian American neighborhoods,” said Bruce Mirken, a spokesman for The Greenlining Institute, a public policy advocacy group in Oakland. “Extensive data show that low-income communities of color still breathe the worst air and have excessive rates of pollution-related illnesses like asthma and other respiratory problems. These problems won’t fix themselves. As we move away from oil, coal and gas to fight climate change, we must consciously bring clean energy resources and investment into communities that were for too long used as toxic dumping grounds.

In the end, if we do not push back hard and shut down the country — The Industrial Continuing Criminal Enterprises of Wall Street, Banking, Real Estate, Military, Prison, Chemical, Pesticide, Fossil Fuel, Logging, Surveillance, Hi-Tech, Medicine, Pharma — then we are just Nero Fiddling While the Entire Ranch is Razed, Logged, Polluted and Immolated by the system that most “earth days” hate to bring up — CAPITALISM.

There ain’t no new green deal if the billionaires and corporations are leading the charge, creating the conduits for profit, paying the bills of the so-called environmental movement. Green is the New Black is a book like Green is the New Red.

Environmental Racism in America: An Overview of the Environmental Justice Movement and the Role of Race in Environmental Policies

Black Lives Matter: Environmental Racism Is Killing African-Americans

In the end, we are all expendable, so why not think the earth is expendable.? We are all — the 80 percent — in sacrifice zones: food deserts, box store hell, road and highway infernos, clear cut landscape, smokestack gulags, chemical spray prisons.

Sacrifice zones: This leads to sacrifice zones, places where people, mostly of color and low wealth, live beside hyperpolluters and in harm’s way. In Houston, for example, an oil refinery, chemical plant and Interstate 610 surround the Manchester neighborhood, home to roughly 3,000 people. Not surprisingly, the cancer risk for people living in Manchester and neighboring Harrisburg is 22 percent higher than for the overall Houston urban area, according to a recent report by the Union of Concerned Scientists and Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services. Robert D. Bullard is a distinguished professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University and is often called the “father of environmental justice.”

Environmental Activists Have Higher Death Rates Than Some Soldiers

164 Activists Were Killed Defending Land and Water Last Year

My “earth day” is about taking it to the streets. It’s not about John Denver and Melissa Etheridge or Darrel Hannah or Al Gore or Bill McKibben. It’s about getting younger and younger people to the table, to the trenches. It’s about the old giving it up to the not-so-old. It’s about inviting families of loggers miners ranchers aerospace trucking to the table and showing them the value of deep ecology, food systems that are localized and regionalized, showing them the value of nutrition versus consumption. Radical means root, and we need radical change, radical activism, and monkey wrenching and celebrating those who already “got this” earth and cultural justice years ago.

Ten years ago, man, taking it to the streets, in Spokane!

Spokane’s Earth Day ‘takes to the streets’ to reach people

Spokane’s 40th anniversary Earth Day celebration will be on Main St. downtown rather than on grass at Riverfront Park.

This was about getting people who normally do not do these self-congratulatory and aggrandizement to the table — the poorer folks, who came to this event because we had 2nd Harvest there giving out food boxes AND because of all the family activities. We had school kids making bat boxes, bird houses, and bird feeders with an army of volunteers, even from Kohl’s donating some community service time. We shut the street down (like a huge thing with Police and Fire department honchos), put up a main stage, and we even had the even go into the night with local musicians playing. We had the even live on the radio KYRS-FM. We had in your face people like me, and others (though greenie weenies unfortunately predominate the so-called “nice earth day” gigs); and then the mayor of Spokane, and other politicos spoke while the main stage was powered with solar panels. We had that friction between those who believe in hope and those who fight for change and not for hope. We also made sure that Earth Day would continue in Spokane at the colleges and at public events the entire year afterwards. that was a whole other series of events a few years before that I organized, many, a year of sustainability for ALL of the city. We made sure that this one day was just the tip of the iceberg. Action, action, action. Grow, grow, grow the leadership and the army of young people.

But, alas, that was a decade ago, and alas I have gone on some really bumpy miles (thousands upon thousands of miles) away from that outpost — from English faculty, radio show host, columnist, urban planning graduate student; to union organizer in Seattle, DC, Mexico City, Bend, Oregon, to Occupy Seattle teacher; to social worker for adults with developmental disabilities, to memory care facility engagement counselor, to social worker for homeless in downtown Portland, to social worker for homeless veterans and their families, to counselor for foster teens; now a decade later — to the Oregon Coast as author, columnist, substitute teacher, and site director for an anti-poverty project in Lincoln and Jefferson counties. And more. Ten Years, a marriage, a divorce, another marriage, to Lisa, here in Waldport scratching out a living. New book out, quashed public readings, and now, five minute April 22 on the Zoom Earth Day. Crazy ass changes, and yet, at age 63, I have always predicted that if lazy ass consumer USA Murder Inc. continued to do what it always had since end of WWII, then, we would end up here — complacent, fearful, colonized, co-opted, in the belly of the beast, collectively enmeshed in Stockholm Syndrome, and more.

Support my recent work, now that the hysteria and complete lack of mental, intellectual, and spiritual acumen has occurred in the United States of Amnesia. Wide Open Eyes — Surfacing from Vietnam, short story collection.

April 22, Newport, Oregon, Zoom Day, Earth Day. Not the new normal. This is a one-time deal for me. Newport celebrates Earth Day via Zoom on April 22.

Give me Chris Hatten any day, over the self-important people who think Earth day is only about feel-good, celebrating a few more birds out on the shore because we are all sheep in this collective lock-down!

In the eye of the eagle (Here, since all my pieces on the previous link have disappeared: “In the Eye of the Eagle.”

One-Minute Q & A with Chris Hatten

Paul Haeder — What is your life philosophy?

Chris Hatten — Make the best use of your time. Time is short.

PH — How do we fix this extractive “resources” system that is so rapacious?

CH — We need to value forests for the many multitude of services they provide, not just quick rotations. Forests are not the same as fields of crops.

PH — Give any young person currently in high school, say, in Lincoln County, advice on what they might get out of life if they took your advice? What’s that advice?

CH — Get off your phone, lift up your head, see the world for yourself as it really is, then make necessary changes to it and yourself.

PH — What’s one of the most interesting things you’ve experienced — what, where, when, why, how?

CH — I have had very poor people offer to give me all they had in several different countries. Strangers have come to my aid with no thought of reward.

PH — In a nutshell, define the Timber Unity movement to say someone new to Oregon.

CH — They are people who mostly work in rural Oregon in resource extraction industries and believe they are forgotten.

PH — If you were to have a tombstone, what would be on it once you kick the bucket?

CH — “Lived.”

Here’s that really old article, man, 2010, Earth Day, referenced above at the beginning of this novella.

Spokane’s Earth Day ‘takes to the streets’ to reach people

Spokane’s 40th anniversary Earth Day celebration will be on Main St. downtown rather than on grass at Riverfront Park.

[Paul Haeder and Molly Callen on Main St., the venue for Earth Day 2010.]

Co-coordinators Paul Haeder, 53, a teacher, journalist and activist who came to Spokane in 2001, and Molly Callen, 24, a Spokane K-12 substitute teacher who grew up in Spokane, said they are “takin’ it to the streets” because urban life is expanding and because grass uses water, fertilizer and herbicides.

Molly was involved last year with a children’s activity, helping build 350 bird feeders and wanted to expand the educational component.

“I came to an early planning meeting.  Few came, so I became a co-coordinator,” said Molly, who attended Spokane Falls Community College and graduated in 2008 from Eastern Washington University with a bachelor’s degree in reading and elementary education.  “I want children to go home knowing they can grow their own food, plant flowers and make bird houses.”

Along with studies for a master’s in special education and her work substitute teaching, she has volunteered 30 hours a week for Earth Day planning.

Concerned since her teen years about animal rights, environment and human rights, Molly wants to educate people on these causes and finds Earth Day a means to do that.

There will be resources to help people learn how to live sustainably, such as alternative ways to commute without using fossil fuels—bikes, skateboards, long boards and roller skates.

To help meet a goal of drawing low-income people, Second Harvest will be at Earth Day for a two-hour food distribution.

“All we need to do is care,” Molly said.  “Then we can live intentionally and responsibly.”

Co-coordinator Paul was 14 and lived in Tuscon, Ariz., on the first Earth Day in 1970.  He remembers addressing urban sprawl and organizing the religious community to challenge a law that allowed for unregulated trapping of “God’s creatures”—kit fox, bobcats and coyotes.

He began to advocate for sustainability’s three “E’s”—equity, environment and economy.  Now the movement has added two more “E’s”—energy and education.

Through Earth Day, he hopes to inspire a new “green generation” to be active, so the world “will not be inundated in rising sea levels and surpass the tipping points into a total collapse of many of the earth’s eco-systems.”

Paul—who teaches English and literature at Spokane Falls Community College, consults with the college president on sustainability issues, writes a column in The Inlander and does the “Tipping Points: Voices from the Edge” show on KYRS Thin Air Radio—has seen first hand around the globe many parts of the environment reaching the so-called “tipping point.”

“We still have a chance to pull back and take weight off the structure, but we can’t take for granted that it will not collapse,” he said.  “Young people need to reverse the course so the earth will be livable and equitable.

“Without education and social justice, we can’t achieve energy efficiency needed to move into a post-carbon world and we can’t have a sustainable economy,” he said.

Growing up Paul lived in Paris, British Columbia, Munich and the Azores, because his father was in the military.  He earned a degree in biology, journalism and English in 1979 at the University of Arizona and a master’s in English in 1986 at the University of Texas.  Between degrees, he worked for newspapers in Southern Arizona, Mexico, Central America, Europe and Texas.

Influenced the Earth Charter sustainability movement and by liberation theology as his ethos, Paul said his environmental and social justice activism involved him in fighting environmental injustice on the U.S.-Mexican border where major U.S. companies operate sweatshop factories. 

Those factories, maquiladoras, pay Mexican workers $3 to $4 a day to produce consumer goods, using environmentally harmful processes and highly toxic substances, he said.

He is concerned that “many young people today are products of the corporate world and do not know how to live lightly.” 

“They need to gain a green sense and need to follow the operating instructions of Mother Gaia (Earth): We are not to pollute the water or air,” he said. 

Paul wants young people to know that every bite they take, everything they do, every breath they take and every cell phone call they make is political.  He wants to stop the slide into “a Holocaust of all people and genocide of all species.”

He also hopes Earth Day 2010 will reignite the interest of colleges, churches, the city and county to join in planning future Earth Days, expanding interest beyond “conservation groups, hybrid-car drivers and kayakers.”

Citing projections about global trends of population shifts to urban areas—51 percent urban in 2008 to 65 percent by 2030—he said sustainability will require planning and building communities that are denser, pollute less, have more mass transit and engage people in neighborhoods and politics.

“There’s so much work to do,” he said, pointing to challenges of global-warming denial and oil companies’ readiness to exploit reserves in the Arctic after the ice cap melts in 30 years.  “We must do more than the baby-step choices between Styrofoam or paper cups.”

Africans’ Message to Imperialism: “We Are Not Your Flunkies!”

So, good friend, Madu, who I met decades ago, at UT-El Paso. He was coming through buildings where part-time English faculty had offices. That big smile, that large voice, and an open hand. He was working the used/discount book gig: going to colleges to get books from faculty and bookstores that might have been extra copies from the respective publishers called review copies.

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So, part-time faculty like myself, in the 1980s, would order tons of these reviewer’s copies of grammar, lit, and survey collections. Then fellows like Madu might come by with hard cold cash to buy them up.

The old days when students could find alternative prices (lower) than what college bookstores would charge. Madu has that service.

We talked, and his Nigerian love, his Nigerian spirit, the fact he was in Houston, with a wife and three children, all of that, made the chats open and real. I had just had a baby girl, so we talked about her.

Then politics, Africa, my own activism around Central America, the US-Mexico border, the environment, twin plants, militarization of campuses and the border, and my own work trying to unionize part-time exploited faculty.

Global politics. Nigeria, Africa, Diasporas, evil US-backed dictators, colonialism, post-colonialism, the trauma, the long-term biopiracy of Africa, the theft of resources, and alas, imagine, 30 years later, almost, and African countries are in the grips of AFRICOM, the US vassals, the exploiters, the mining, ag, and oil thieves. Until, 2022, many are becoming failed states, famines, the entire world of data mining, Zuckerberg encircling the continent with his Metaverse, and on and on. The story of United Fruit Company, Coca Cola, Monsanto, Big Pharma, Hearts and Minds USA special forces, and proxy wars and Nationa ENdowmenr for Democracy/CIA fomenting hell.

Oh, this devil USA:

Phoenix Express 2021, the AFRICOM-sponsored military exercise involving 13 countries in the Mediterranean Sea region, concluded last week. While its stated aim was to combat “irregular migration” and trafficking, the U.S. record in the region indicates more nefarious interests. “AFRICOM military’s exercise: The art of creating new pretexts for propagating U.S. interests” (source)

Go to MR Online, and then put in AFRICOM. Or, AFRICOM and Nigeria, or pick your country. Mark my words: Everything, I say EVERYTHING, tied to the USA and UK and EU when involving African nations now, well, pure evil:

Black Alliance for Peace?

Nigeria has imperial and neocolonial trappings it must acknowledge and vehemently reject. This includes surrendering decision making about financial and credit facilities or political organization to the West, which has a significant impact on the actions of those who take political office in the country. The United States is an imperial power that operates through its neo-colonial subjects and its control over imperialist structures, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, as well as through its control over the politicians in office.

Nigerian sovereignty is reduced to mere “flag independence” because of U.S. external-policy interference and economic control. This allows the space for Nigerian elites to engage in wrongdoing—whether by corruption, nepotism or human-rights abuses. We must contextualize these instances in terms of how Western corporations and governments often enable (and encourage) such actions to preserve lucrative economic arrangements.

General elections will be held in Nigeria on February 25 to elect the president and vice president, as well as members of the Senate and House of Representatives. These elections will take place amid an unprecedented state of general crisis. Any politician or party coming into power will have to contend with an ongoing capitalist crisis. The response of any neo-colonial government is likely to  be to tighten fiscal consolidation on behalf of big business. The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) and its U.S. Out of Africa Network (USOAN) must support the antithesis of neo-colonial governance, which are self-determination and bottom-up, participatory democratic processes. (source)

This is recent, as in Oct. 2021:

Please join us for the launch of the international month of action by attending a webinar on October 1st, titled “AFRICOM at 13: Building the Popular Movement for Demilitarization and Anti-Imperialism in Africa.” Speakers from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Ghana, Guinea Bissau, and the African diaspora will discuss AFRICOM and what we can do to expel imperialist forces from the continent. Following the webinar, events will take place throughout October organized by various organizations on the African continent, in the U.S., and around the world to demand an end to the U.S. and western invasion and occupation of Africa.

BAP makes the following demands in the U.S. Out of Africa!: Shut Down AFRICOM campaign:

• The complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Africa,
• The demilitarization of the African continent,
• The closure of U.S. bases throughout the world, and
• That the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) oppose U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and conduct hearings on AFRICOM’s impact on the African continent, with the full participation of members of U.S. and African civil society.

---

Written by Tunde Osazua, a member of the Black Alliance for Peace’s Africa Team and the coordinator of the U.S. Out of Africa Network.

So, I was on Madu’s radio show, and he has run for Senate in Nigeria, and he wants to run for president. However, as he clearly states: “You have to have millions of dollars and militias to buy the votes.”

LINK.

This is his organization:

Here’s a statement from Madu:

Not rising up by Nigerians from within Nigeria and around the world beyond ethnic, regional, religious and partisan political boundaries to save Nigeria from the hands of her mostly visionless, ignorant, insensitive, inhumane, squandermanic and most painfully, corrupt and morally bankrupt drivers of government at all levels whose actions have significantly weakened her sovereignty and territorial integrity, and made her peoples so poor and vulnerable , is a sin against God and a grave infraction against humanity for which history and unborn generations of Nigerians will judge us all harshly if we fail today to act unconditionally to save the country from an imminent collapse.

….Smart Madu Ajaja

This is a serious and long-term project, the decolonizing of the world, including all those countries’ economies, the land, the people, the cultures and the individuals:

This Special Issue aims to explore the complex and contested relationship between trauma studies and postcolonial criticism, focusing on the ongoing project to create a decolonized trauma theory that attends to and accounts for the suffering of minority groups and non-Western cultures, broadly defined as cultures beyond Western Europe and North America. The issue builds on the insights of, inter alia, Stef Craps’s book, Postcolonial Witnessing, and responds to his challenge to interrogate and move beyond a Eurocentric trauma paradigm. Authors were invited to submit papers on the theorization and representation of any aspect of postcolonial, non-Western and/or minority cultural trauma with a focus predominately, but not exclusively, on literature. (Source= Decolonizing Trauma Studies: Trauma and Postcolonialism … 200+ pages!)

I talked with Madu on his radio show, and below, the show. I do cover a lot of philosophical territory, and alas, this is about Madu and his love of his country and how quickly the country of his birth has spiraled into a country of selling people as slaves, kidnapping people for organs, murder, rape, theft.

So under the cover of counterterrorism, AFRICOM is beefing up Nigeria’s military to ensure the free flow of oil to the West, and using the country as a proxy against China’s influence on the continent. And that is the issue, too, that Madu is not happy with — his country being exploited by anyone, including China. I explained to him that the USA has the military bases, the guns, and China has the contracts, the builders. In fact, Madu is spiritually exasperated at how his own countrymen turn against their own countrymen, and how there is a overlay of trauma and laziness and desperation and inflicted PTSD, including the post-colonial trauma referenced above.

USA is like a storm of ticks, locusts, mosquitos, viruses, as the syphilitic notions of Neocon and Neoliberal anti-diplomacy hits country after country like disease. A plague.

The greatest threat looming over our planet, the hegemonistic pretentions of the American Empire, are placing at risk the very survival of the human species. We continue to warn you about this danger, and we appeal to the people of the United States and the world to halt this threat, which is like a sword hanging over our heads.

–Hugo Chavez

The United States Military is arguably the largest force of ecological devastation the world has ever known.

–Xoài Pham

Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, and fulfill it or betray it.

–Frantz Fanon (source)

William Blum wrote about the illegality of the USA’s direct and indirect bombing and invasions.

Here, a bit of an update:

The Death Toll of U.S. Imperialism Since World War 2

A critical disclaimer: Figures relating to the death toll of U.S. Imperialism are often grossly underestimated due to the U.S. government’s lack of transparency and often purposeful coverup and miscounts of death tolls. In some cases, this can lead to ranges of figures that include millions of human lives–as in the figure for Indonesia below with estimates of 500,000 to 3 million people. We have tried to provide the upward ranges in these cases since we suspect the upward ranges to be more accurate if not still significantly underestimated. These figures were obtained from multiple sources including but not limited to indigenous scholar Ward Churchill’s Pacifism as Pathology as well as Countercurrents’ article Deaths in Other Nations Since WWII Due to U.S. Interventions (please note that use of Countercurrents’ statistics isn’t an endorsement of the site’s politics).

• Afghanistan: at least 176,000 people
• Bosnia: 20,000 to 30,000 people
• Bosnia and Krajina: 250,000 people
• Cambodia: 2-3 million people
• Chad: 40,000 people and as many as 200,000 tortured
• Chile: 10,000 people (the U.S. sponsored Pinochet coup in Chile)
• Colombia: 60,000 people
• Congo: 10 million people (Belgian imperialism supported by U.S. corporations and the U.S. sponsored assassination of Patrice Lumumba)
• Croatia: 15,000 people
• Cuba: 1,800 people
• Dominican Republic: at least 3,000 people
• East Timor: 200,000 people
• El Salvador: More than 75,000 people (U.S. support of the Salvadoran oligarchy and death squads)
• Greece: More than 50,000 people
• Grenada: 277 people
• Guatemala: 140,000 to 200,000 people killed or forcefully disappeared (U.S. support of the Guatemalan junta)
• Haiti: 100,000 people
• Honduras: hundreds of people (CIA supported Battalion kidnapped, tortured and killed at least 316 people)
• Indonesia: Estimates of 500,000 to 3 million people
• Iran: 262,000 people
• Iraq: 2.4 million people in Iraq war, 576, 000 Iraqi children by U.S. sanctions, and over 100,000 people in Gulf War
• Japan: 2.6-3.1 million people
• Korea: 5 million people
• Kosovo: 500 to 5,000
• Laos: 50,000 people
• Libya: at least 2500 people
• Nicaragua: at least 30,000 people (U.S. backed Contras’ destabilization of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua)
• Operation Condor: at least 10,000 people (By governments of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru. U.S. govt/CIA coordinated training on torture, technical support, and supplied military aid to the Juntas)
• Pakistan: at least 1.5 million people
• Palestine: estimated more than 200,000 people killed by military but this does not include death from blockade/siege/settler violence
• Panama: between 500 and 4000 people
• Philippines: over 100,000 people executed or disappeared
• Puerto Rico: 4,645-8,000 people
• Somalia: at least 2,000 people
• Sudan: 2 million people
• Syria: at least 350,000 people
• Vietnam: 3 million people
• Yemen: over 377,000 people
• Yugoslavia: 107,000 people (Source: The Mapping Project is a multi-generational collective of activists and organizers in the Boston area who are deeply engaged in Palestine solidarity / BDS work. For over a year, we’ve been tracing Greater Boston’s networks of support for the colonization of Palestine–and how these networks participate in other forms of oppression, from policing to U.S. imperialism to medical apartheid and privatization.)

Madu and most activist Nigerians know these facts. Big global facts. The vices the United States of America has put the world in. The dirty Empire. The global cop. And, so, Nigerians in the USA number around two million, with a few hundred thousand. Now, of course, off camera, I repeated to Madu that most Americans, oh, 90 percent of the 355 million currently residing (most illegally) here do not care about Black, Africans, Chinese, and again one American is worth a million Nigerians. It is a juggling act, being part of the Diapora, and Madu is a nurse, and he like I said ran for Senate, and lost, and he has been inspired by some youth, but again, youth are being colonized by the ticks of data. Read below the YouTube window.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/LDcxwJug-GA?start=3s&rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

So, Alison McDowell at Wrench in the Gears, and then Silicon Icarus and others are talking about the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the next colonialization of Africa. Coltan and gold may be like gold to the Wall Streeters and Transnationalists, and water and food and good land may be like platinum to the same group of thieves, but data is worth its gigbytes/terrabytes in emeralds. “French Imperialism vs. Crypto Colonialism: The Central African Republic Experiment” and “Blockchain Technology & Coercive Surveillance of the Global South” both by Sebs Solomon

So, Madu, and great honorable youth in Nigeria who want to have a free, open, clean, sustainable, cultural-centric, food security, self-imposing, country of healthy bodies, minds and ecosystems, I am sorry to report the devils wear skinny jeans, and many come to the USA from India with work permits to work and live in Seattle/Redmond to work for Microsoft/Google/Facebook and all the other devils helping put these systems in place:

At the same time, SingularityNET partnered with UNESCO’s International Bureau of Education (IBE) to establish a new curriculum for children and teens, with an emphasis on emerging technology to prepare the youth for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. According to UNICEF:

There will never be enough money allocated in the budget, qualified teachers, or places in schools for the population we have; therefore, emerging technologies like Virtual Reality allow us to leapfrog these problems and offer the hope of more affordable, scalable and better quality education.

It is striking to read that UNICEF doesn’t believe there will ever be enough money to help all of the children in the world receive a traditional, classroom, education; therefore, it’s better to invest and scale Virtual Reality education — a rather pessimistic take from the “children’s fund” arm of the UN. UNICEF Innovation Fund, has virtual reality education programs in Chile, India, Nigeria, and Ghana. In Ghana, they noted there are “challenges to accessing the necessary teaching and learning resources for students to receive quality education; which is compounded by the lack of necessary and up-to-date education materials, huge class sizes and the lack of necessary infrastructural facilities.” (source)

How many more battlefields shall honorable people like Madu enter into with no money, no militias and the kings of capital weilding more powerful digital bombs than hydrogen bombs?

For a rabbit hole or warren, go to: Silicon Icarus and see Alison McDowell’s work on the following: Alison McDowell. Or over at her blog: Wrench in the Gears. She’s expending lifetime hours looking into this evil web of Davos, WEF, the billionaires’ club, the taking over of humanity through transhumanism, blockchain, Singularity, and all the other topics the mainstream and leftstream media and blogs just won’t tackle.

• Blockchain
• Gamification
• Genomics
• Impact Finance
• Smart Cities
• Biosecurity State

This is what the Fourth Industrialization devils want for all children on earth (minus their kids and their sychophants’ kids). Soylent Green be damned!

Facebook for Madu Ajaja!

The tiredness of 10 Million Wole Soyinka will Not stop Nigeria from moving forward beyond its darkness of today…

“I gave this warning before the 2023 election in Nigeria and majority of Nigerians listened and voted overwhelmingly for Peter Obi as their president and so, for a terrorist-friendly Muhammadu Buhari to use an INEC chaired by his tribesman, Mahmoud Yakubu with a specific instruction to criminally, illegally and unconstitutionally return Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a fraudster and a US-indicted drug Baron as President-elect against the provisions of the electoral Act which he signed and with the backing of the DSS, Police and the Nigerian Army the command and control infrastructures of all which are in the hands of some of his fellow tribesmen is an affront on Nigeria and all Nigerians including Professor Wole Soyinka who MUST rise up unconditionally as patriots in defense of the sovereignty, integrity and the national security and unity of Nigeria”.

…Smart Madu Ajaja

Speaking of South Africa now, and Russia and China advancing diplomacy, not gun boat Rules Based America dis-Order,

South Africa’s participation in military drills with Russia and China is an indication that the global south are not taking orders from Washington. African nations should continue their tradition as non-aligned states.

In a remarkable display of independence, South Africa defied NATO on February 24th when it conducted naval drills with Russia and China on the first anniversary of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

Writer and analyst Steven Gruzd, sensing the anger of the imperialists, speculates: “I don’t think Western nations are going to let this one slide.”

But to date, South Africa has not been intimidated. Obbey Mabena, a veteran of the ANC’s armed wing, while not speaking for the South African government, told CNN: “By default, we are on the side of Russia. And to us Ukraine [is] what we call a sell-out. It is selling out to the west,”

[Photo: South African, Russian and Chinese officials at Armed Forces Day in Richards Bay, South Africa, February 21 2023. (Photo: Themba Hadebe KDOW.biz new)]

Paul Haeder’s been a teacher, social worker, newspaperman, environmental activist, and marginalized muckraker, union organizer. Paul’s book, Reimagining Sanity: Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber (2016), looks at 10 years (now going on 17 years) of his writing at Dissident Voice. Read his musings at LA Progressive. Read (purchase) his short story collection, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam now out, published by Cirque Journal. Here’s his Amazon page with more published work Amazon. Read other articles by Paul, or visit Paul’s website.

This article was posted on Sunday, June 12th, 2022 at 12:58pm and is filed under Africa, Children/Youth, Nigeria, Slavery, Social media, Surveillance, Technology, Totalitarianism, United Nations.

National Victims Rights Awareness week end of April

The Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) currently administers 19 grant programs authorized by the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) of 1994 and subsequent legislation.

Prosecutors’ Domestic Violence Handbook

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I’ve been assisting a friend through the legal system, the so-called criminal justice system here in Lincoln County.

It’s a domestic violence case, and while the husband is still in county jail, and while my friend has filed for divorce and is sticking it out by appearing at several court hearings – the divorce, the criminal case and a restraining order — she still feels like the victim

Lucky for me and her, I have been in this rodeo several times. Decades ago, I was working as a reporter in Tucson covering the so-called rape wave at the University of Arizona. I was a police reporter, and Linda Ronstadt’s brother, Peter, was the police chief.

He was considered progressive with his master’s degree, his certification from the FBI Academy and his hard work hiring female detectives for the sexual assault unit.

Unfortunately, my intersection with sexual assault and the legal system just continued. Here, a not so atypical headline: Judge accused of victim-blaming in comments on rape case

“We judges who see one sexual offence trial after another, have often been criticised for suggesting and putting more emphasis on what girls should and shouldn’t do than on the act and the blame to be apportioned to rapists,” she said, while sentencing a man to six years for raping a girl who was drunk.

The above is from jolly England. As is below:

The family courts are not a safe place for victims of domestic violence because some judges there hold “outdated views” on sexual violence and issues of consent, according to a letter signed by 130 lawyers and professionals.

The public intervention comes in response to a widely criticised judgment last year by Judge Robin Tolson QC in the family court, in which he ruled that since a woman had not taken physical steps to stop her partner from assaulting her it did not constitute rape.

I was a police reporter for Arizona newspapers, and then for two newspapers in El Paso. One hard case was covering two sheriff’s deputies accused and found guilty of raping those they pulled over for traffic stops.

Rape Crisis Center hired one of my instructors, a third degree black belt, to teach self-defense, and I, luckily as his student, got to help with grappling classes.

The landscape around Battered Wife Syndrome for me expanded as my younger sister in Arizona worked managing two safe houses for battered spouses. She covered the Chandler and greater Phoenix area, but one gig included Casa Grande and other locales.

The assistant police chief of one jurisdiction gave her his personal cell phone number because he was worried about his officers not taking the role responsibly in terms of investigating charges of domestic abuse.

He told my sister that he would make an “any-time of the day and night” response to an emergency involving domestic abuse. These safe houses were only as safe as the residents’ ability to stay calm and not give out the location to family and, unfortunately, their abusers.

She made that emergency call when one of the resident’s husbands had found the address and was outside in a truck threatening to drive up the driveway and crash into the Apache Junction house that sheltered eight women, five pets, six children, and three case workers.

Here, tips for judges hearing victims of domestic violence: Domestic Violence & The Courtroom Knowing The Issues… Understanding The Victim

You can call it implicit bias. Misogony writ large. The fact is, the Johnny Depp case show massive amounts of hate against women, not just Heard.

Judges need to be trained in implicit bias against women. They need training in how victims often present and how the facts may not line up perfectly, especially in a domestic violence case. There needs to be more sensitivity afforded to women. Social science must play a role in judge’s training.

The judges must be taught to consider why a woman might stay in an abusive relationship, why she might not go to the police, and why she might not have any records or proof of injuries. Why may there be no physical injuries? Why her fear may be exacerbated over time. Why she might even return to him. The court must consider these possibilities with understanding and compassion. (source)

The Newport News Times readership sees a plethora of domestic abuse cases reported in the newspaper, on blogs and social media. Those are the ones that get reported.

It may be called “intimate partner violence,” or it may just be called “spousal rape,” though many judges, cops and civilians see that as an impossibility.

I have been in a court in Spokane where a judge told the victim he had a hard time believing her that she was raped in an acquaintance rape because she did not have any signs of bruises or cuts or contusions.

That was in 2010. I ran into the same attitude in Tucson in 1978.

Have things changed? Well, my friend had never been in a criminal justice situation, so when she called the Sheriff Department, she was surprised at how cooperative and understanding the lead investigating officer has been.

The Assistant District Attorney and the Crime Victims workers have been helpful. But still, the situation is not resolved after three months, and May is another date set for another hearing. She has attempted to get a civil restraining order heard, but because her husband is locked up, that case has been moved for future hearings.

Luckily, she has applied for some crime victims’ assistance and has gotten a counselor who takes Oregon Health Plan. That counselor is gutsy, proactive and helping my friend get her head wrapped around many years of living in this yo-yo situation of leaving/returning/the abuser apologizing/then more abuse.

I could list a thousand studies and a dozen statistics around the causes and facts around spousal abuse;  the reality of a Stockholm Syndrome phenomenon and the pervasiveness of verbal, financial and physical abuse mostly perpetrated by the male partner in a heterosexual relationship.

The term ‘Battered Woman Syndrome’ was coined by Dr Lenore Walker known as the ‘mother of Battered Woman Syndrome’ in the 1970’s to understand and explain the psychological state of women suffering from ‘intimate partner violence’.

Battered Woman Syndrome has been described as a pattern of violence inflicted on a woman by her mate. It refers to a set of behaviour and psychological reactions displayed by women who are subjected to severe long term domestic abuse.

The growing body of research and judgments across several countries have shown that battered partners suffering from the battered woman syndrome are likely to use force to defend themselves and sometimes even kill their abusers because of the abusive and life-threatening situation that they are in which find themselves acting in a firm belief that there is no other way of self-preservation. (source, from India, Do You Know About Battered Woman Syndrome Faced By Domestic Violence Survivors?)

She has covered up her shame by isolating herself, but now, she is reconnecting to sister, parents and friends who see how the cycle of abuse created in a woman self-deception that the abuse was HER fault, or that something she did has triggered this fellow to lay into her.

Symptoms

According to the NCADV, a person experiencing abuse may:

• feel isolated, anxious, depressed, or helpless
• be embarrassed or fear judgment and stigmatization
• love the person who is abusing them and believe that they will change
• be emotionally withdrawn
• deny that anything is wrong or excuse the other person
• be unaware of the type of help that is available
• have perceived moral or religious reasons for staying in the relationship

The person may also behave in ways that can be difficult for people outside the relationship to understand.

These behaviors include:

• refusing to leave the relationship
• believing that the other person is powerful or knows everything
• when things are calm, idealizing the person who carried out the abuse
• believing that they deserve the abuse

The impact of an abusive relationship can continue long after leaving it. For some time, the person may:

• experience sleep problems, including nightmares and insomnia
• have sudden intrusive feelings about the abuse
• avoid talking about the abuse
• avoid situations that remind them of the abuse
• experience feelings of anger, sadness, hopelessness, or worthlessness
• have intense feelings of fear
• have panic attacks or flashbacks to the abuse (source)

The criminal justice system is clogged. The public defenders in Oregon are in crisis mode – too many cases, and many lawyers went into defense as a way to illicit justice for the accused. However, law school debts of $200,000 and salaries of around $65,000 to $110,000 don’t jive with their education, training and experience.

Earlier this year, the American Bar Association published a report finding that Oregon barely had 31% of the public defenders it needed to provide adequate criminal defense to those facing criminal charges. That’s something that public defenders themselves have known and experienced first hand for many years. Carl Macpherson, executive director of the Metropolitan Public Defender, says the shortage that’s developed is unconstitutional and unethical. He says part of the problem is an increasing number of people who are entering the system because of a lack of other services, like mental health and substance abuse treatment. And, judges are dismissing cases if a needed public defender isn’t available.

“This is not a public defender crisis,” Macpherson told OPB. “This is a total public safety system failure.” (source)

I even organized, through SEIU in Seattle, public defenders who were in our union. In that city and in hundreds other, the accused are not getting full defenses. That means that many accused and guilty folk are getting plea agreements that are not fitting their crimes.

Innocent people are not getting defense.

And victims like my friend have to course through a system that is bogged down by a legal Byzantine bureaucracy, as well as just a shortage of judges, Assistant District Attorneys and public defenders. And the judges, man, and the dirty dealings of defense attorneys utilizing restrictive laws stating a victim can’t bring up a pattern of past abuse in a case involving the 911 call that got the charges leveled against the abuser.

I try to stay calm and neutralized, but the fact is cops are bad, judges are freaks, and prosectuors and assistant prosecutors over charge the case hoping for fear factors to have the defendent plea to a lesser charge. There is no fire in the belly of many prosecutors, and what the hell does that mean in the scheme of things. Forget about these people — cops, judges, prosecutors, victim advocates — being truly trauma informed and trauma activated supports

We conducted a narrative analysis of anecdotes shared by judges (n = 20) who preside over Domestic Violence Protective Order (DVPO) hearings to examine how biases and misperceptions shape decisions in DVPO cases. We found that judges rely on biases to sort cases as “true domestic violence” compared with “frivolous cases.” In the anecdotes they shared, judges often used gendered stereotypes to depict litigants, and many judges felt that DVPOs had limited efficacy in preventing violence. We argue that important cognitive insights are revealed by interview participants during the spontaneous act of storytelling. In the case of judges, their biases could lead to DVPOs being denied in situations when they are warranted. (source = Judging Domestic Violence From the Bench: A Narrative Analysis of Judicial Anecdotes About Domestic Violence Protective Order Cases)

The years of counseling she faces will be something she herself will have to pay for. The fear of retribution when the fellow gets out is another hurdle she will have to face.

Very few women I have worked with in Portland who are homeless, some of them veterans, and others drug abusers, reported to authorizes domestic abuse. So they have gone untreated.

At least my friend has garnered enough supports and chutzpah to fight for her right to be heard and right to healing. The “system,” however, is not so accommodating. Some call our justice system broken.

My friend will utilize this system in however many pieces it has be broken into.

Note: This is an evolving situation, coming to several heads soon. It is impossible for a victim to always keep her eye on the prize — going through hearings and settlement conferences and hearing that cases are weak unless there is absolute major physical harm and bruises and broken bones. Absolutely surreal but again, misogynistic. Hateful.

The list of resources out there putting fear into any plantiff, any woman calling the cops because of a flair up and attempted murder is endless:

Discounting Women: Doubting Domestic Violence Survivors’ Credibility and Dismissing Their Experiences

It’s great there is discourse and awareness and groups and associations tied to domestic violence help and litigation; however, the reality is jurors are biased and judges are biased and DA Offices are overwhelmed, and alas, even if the perpetrator spends time in jail for failing to make bail, the idea of getting no charges against the guy, no felony assault or attempted homicide, well, that runs chills up the spines of victims.

Not that prison has a million resources for getting these idiots and predators turned around, i.e anger management, classes to take repsonsiblilty fo crimes, and other forms to recenter males to understand they are the problem, and they are psychologically messed up with this abuser’s mindset and psychological profile.

Again, maybe King County (Seattle) has a more aware and progressive system to deal with victims and prosecute abusers. But the fact is go across state line, from WA to Oregon, and we get a whole set of other laws and methodologies in prosecuting these cases.

From county to county, too, can determine a positive and aggressive prosecution, or a dead on arrival one.

Here, from that handbook cited above:

Domestic violence is a pattern of behavior that one person in a relationship uses to gain power and control over their current or former spouse, intimate partner, girl/boyfriend or family/household member. Domestic Violence is a broad category that includes behaviors ranging from seemingly trivial to lethal, inflicted mostly upon women. Domestic violence (DV) is one of the most prevalent and serious crimes handled by prosecutors across the country.1 Approximately 1 in 4 women will experience DV in her lifetime and 1.3 million women are victims of DV each year (National Coalition Against DV). DV is complex in that it is entrenched in a greater context of gender, racial and social inequity that has unfairly shaped societal attitudes about how and why it happens as well as who it happens to. 2 The late King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng called domestic violence the most serious criminal justice issue communities face and called domestic violence a “crime against the human spirit.” (source)

Part Two = Bats . . . Conversations in a time of Plague . . . What’s Love Got to do with it?

[first appeared in Cirque Journal, 2023, #25]

Therein lays the problem of this conversation in a time of plague. Calling a spade a spade is one thing, but this naming of the “new” Vietnamese tropical bat, Murina beelzebub, displays both the fear in and the foolishness of the human species. What all those bats, civets, pangolins and myriad of other animals I interacted with in Indochina depend on is connected  tropical forests for survival. The web of life is certainly not understood by most scientists, especially the virologists stuck in germ theory, stuck in a bio-safety level four lab, with moon suits and all the equipment and sacrificial rodents and apes to play god with, or worse, to dance with the devil.

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Bats are especially vulnerable due to ongoing deforestation in every region they’re found. We knew this before the French pulverized parts of Indochina, and we knew it during the American War on Vietnam, and I knew it in 1994. Today, we are more than in a time of plague – exploding myths, a propaganda exercise global and digital in scope.

I am thinking now, 2022, of Edward Curtain, a magnificent essayist, or shall I say, he turns the essay into an interlinking memoir of universal vigor. Words from him can for many be raptures – enrapturing into philosophical depths, raptures of the mind, spirit and glory of finding love in all the right places. What’s love got to do with it is we have only ourselves to look to in the end for our own personal answers:

The person with whom we are all most intimate is oneself.  It’s just the way it is.  I don’t mean that in some oracular Delphic ‘know thyself’ way, or in any deep psychoanalytical sense, but very simply.  We have our own thoughts and feelings that come and go like breaths, most of   which never get expressed in words.  Together with our actions, including speech, they make up our lives.  We try to anchor them with photos and memorabilia and lots of things, but time has no mercy; it sweeps us all away. Then our things remain for a while until they become a burden  to those who remain, and then the things go. As the song reminds us, ‘We come and go like a   ripple on a stream.’

Hell, who knows if this is accurate, attributed to Heraclitus, but for me it is apropos, confounding, too — No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

I’ve used this and a dozen other quotes to ice break classes, to have fellow travelers (students) look at one epigram, deep dive into it, so they might find not only literal and denotative meanings, but so they can apply a sense of personal self and life passage to the quote.

Projection into the future, a new self, that self, hidden, but certainly trapped in our heads from the time of birth, and the birth of recognition, as butterflies alight on chubby baby legs on a beach, or through the shadows of dusk and the capes of wind where that Azores bat makes me, for the first time – me, my, his being, me, outside my “self” into the skies of another mammal.

+–+

We were ecologists, seeping into the mud, crossing leech-infested engorged rivers, jumping over cobras, dancing under the canopy as gibbons threw feces and branches at us. We were hunting for some personal connection to the diversity in the biodiversity game, hoping to unlock other forms of passion beside just knowing things in the scientific way.

We came to THEIR land to find OUR selves. That is what love is, really, a passion to unravel humanity’s connectivity, and to push away the fears that capitalism has feed up since its lofty reckoning with people, land, hopes and dreams. Imagine, carving up South America: Portugal gets Brazil, and Spain gets the rest . . . . Edicts from the Holy See. God, Country, Mother Be Damned! This is the deadly game of capitalism – there is no love in it, and the getting is the game. Accumulation, consumerism, all the throwaway in the waste stream is anti-love, and it all draws closer and closer each year in a self-hate, a sort of misanthropy against self, against humanity.

We are not rubbish, and we are not Soylent Green, yet from all that emanates out of the powers that be, from all the literature and video games and movies, that seems to be the thesis of the day – humanity is the disease, the cancer, so be done with it, and this way shall be our way, as the folks at Davos and partners of the World Economic Forum and Aspen Institute, et al. They have the narratives all written, either in plain sight or under their secret plague blankets.

I write to stop the plague. I visit with people outside my frame to learn how to continue to love people.

I just talked to a radical thinker, a farmer, who decided to email me and arrange a day to drive out to the coast where I live and have a beer and talk. Great guy. He’s been an inventor, been a restaurant owner, and now he is working a farm, three acres.

He sought me out in an act of love. Love being that innate desire of wanting the human touch.  His isolation from many friends and family — who have decided to cut ties because of his deep analysis of things during the lockdowns and mandates for this batty virus — propelled him to contact me vis-à-vis one of the radical sites where I have been publishing for 17 years.

Human and humane touch, and while I can be sort of an anomaly or freak of in the natural/predisposed/ prepackaged order of things in this country, yes, and I am naturally bombastic, recalcitrant, a regular A-1 ODD (oppositional defiance disorder), the reciprocation was an act of love on my part. Jef was seeking more than validation, more than a safe harbor from which to discuss and stay attuned to what we both agree is one positive aspect of Homos sapiens – critical thinking. We were having a conversation – we covered a lot of ground, from the bioweapons programs, to permaculture, transition cities, the staged economy, great thinkers like Ed Curtain, and others. That is the act of self-awareness and validation demonstrating humans can be cooperative, thinking, caring, and set in some mutual aid ethos.

That is what those bat caves represent and symbolize for me. And a hundred other conversations, in other times of plague – the plagues centered around the oppression, the suppression, the depression, the inflammation, enslavement that this Un-United States of Amnesia under capitalism which has unleashed plague after plague through the powerbrokers and power hoarders of the world – trillionaire companies like BlackRock and Vanguard, as well as the billionaires and millionaires working their rackets. Murder Incorporated as a moniker for the USA is not my term. Far be it for me to steal so many prescient concepts of what this country is, has been, has become, is becoming and will be in 10 years. Try a century from now. Not even a ghost of ourselves will be in the air. The digital memory will be theirs, not ours. The Great Reset is upon us.

I am not sure how many reading this even knows what the great reset is. So be it.

But Jef reached out, drove out from Albany, Oregon, and we broke bread (tortillas) and hoisted brew. One telling comment he made, for me as super emblematic of our times, and even for my own time working as an educator and social worker, is the desperation of youth:  “My wife is an elementary teacher, and she says they are being trained on how to spot a suicidal youngster. What the fuck is going on? Elementary students over the past year have doubled and triple their suicide rates. Elementary kids. Overdosing on opioids. Goddamn this entire thing is crazy.”

Therein lays the critical thinking we traversed. The cause and the effect of those suicides, turning around to see now what the effects have turned into new causes for ever more new effects.

 Effect/cause/cause/effect. This is what is missing in deep dive discourses across the land.

But I go back to bats – Chiroptera. My Arizona days, after leaving the Azores and Paris and Germany (all those bats and gargoyle creatures throughout the Old World, I do recall). Running through the desert, into the mountains, I encountered riot after riot of animals – reptiles like Gila monsters, mammals like kit foxes, amazing arachnids like battalions of tarantulas after a monsoon, and sci-fi bugs like Palos Verdes beetles. And, the bats. In caves, under ledges, in abandoned buildings, inside mine shafts, hanging from cottonwoods. Typically, it was the vampires and the free-tails which entranced me, but I loved the the lesser long-nosed bat (Leptonycteris curasoae yerbabuenae), and the Mexican long-tongued bat, Choeronycteris mexicana. So many encounters I’ve had with these mammals since they give birth and raise their young in southern Arizona from early spring through summer.

Just the list of the more than two dozen bat species in Arizona is remarkable, poetic:

Ghost-faced bat Mormoops meglophylla
California leaf-nosed bat Macrotus californicus
Mexican long-tongued bat Choeronycteris mexicana
Lesser long-nosed bat Leptonycteris curasoae
Yuma myotis Myotis yumanensis
Cave myotis Myotis velifer brevis
Occult little brown bat Myotis lucifugus occultus
Long-eared myotis Myotis evotis
Southwestern myotis Myotis auriculus
Fringed myotis Myotis thysanodes
Long-legged myotis Myotis volans
California myotis Myotis californicus
Western small-footed myotis Myotis ciliolabrum
Silver-haired bat Lasionycteris noctivagans
Western pipistrelle Pipistrellus hasperus
Big brown bat Eptesicus fuscus
Western red bat Lasiurus blossevillii
Southern yellow bat Lasiurus ega
Hoary bat Lasiurus cinereus
Spotted bat Euderma maculatum
Allen’s lappet-browed bat Idionycteris phyllotis
Townsend’s big-eared bat Corynorhinus townsendii
Pallid bat Antrozous pallidus
Mexican free-tailed bat Tadarida brasiliensis mexicana
Pocketed free-tailed bat Nyctinomops femorosaccus
Big free-tailed bat Nyctinomops macrotis
Greater western mastiff bat Eumops perotis californicus
Underwood’s mastiff bat Eumops underwoodi

Missing from the list is the vampire, the vampire bats, a species of the subfamily Desmodontinae, also of the  leaf-nosed variety found in Mexico, Central and South America. They latch onto birds (turkeys) or cattle for a blood diet, a feeding trait called hematophagy.

I’ve seen the bats lapping up blood from the backs of cattle in Chiapas and Guatemala. I have talked to local ranchers and farmers, and guano collectors. I have talked with a few Mexican biologists. All about bats. This is a fascinating creature, and the 1,400 known species of bats cover almost a third of all mammal species, but not many are into hematophagy. Most bats suck nectar and dive for insects, fish, lizards, snakes.

The vampires were once in synch with nature, integrated into a balanced food web, until  the “conquest” by Spain, when the blood, cross, steel and germs introduced cattle and horses and the corrales, which gave the species, Desmodus rotundus, or the vampire bat, an immobilized source of blood. There were not many of these vampiros before the Spanish invasion, since they fed (lapping up the blood) of the pavo, wild turkeys.

For Desmodus rotundus, every corral was a cafeteria, so the number of vampire bats in Mexico has been growing steadily for centuries. Think of life out of balance, Koyaanisqatsi, or Life-Unraveling from Cohesion,  this one incursion into the land with these domesticated bovine creating a huge population explosion.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/v6-K-arVl-U?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

Alas, those unsuspecting cows and horses don’t just end up with open wounds, however, since vampire bats often leave them with paralytic rabies. The reaction of a rancher watching many of his animals die slow, horrible deaths, that is a sight to behold, and who cannot empathize with his desire to seek out the bats’ home and blow it to kingdom come.

This fear of bats —  this misidentification of all bats as vampires — has put so many non-blood sucking species in peril, on the brink of extinction. Caves are blown up, or the openings are caged with chicken wire. All those millions of pounds of insects scooped up by the insectivores are now back as miniature demons in the out of whack food web. Whereupon, millions of gallons of insecticides are applied to “handle” the crop-eating and parasite-laden pests.  The vicious cycle of man’s continuing fear, and lack of critical thinking and deep holistic understanding of how to stay in balance with the cycles of nature, with the food web – with bats – has much to do with our current epoch:  a world soon to be without ice.

I can go back to the movie, Koyaanisqatsi, which is actually a Hopi word defined as “life of moral corruption and turmoil” or “life out of balance”. Getting deeper into the word, the prefix koyaanis– means “corrupted” or “chaotic”, and the word qatsi means “life” or “existence”. The film actually adds to the meaning – “crazy life, life out of balance, life in turmoil, life disintegrating, and a state of life that calls for another way of living.”

+–+

We went to several caves, and we met some resilient guano collectors. We ate and slept in the caves, and the food – canned tuna and hard ramen noodles – came in contact with everything. There were no antiseptic wipes. We drank river water treated with iodine. Lots of quart-sized bottles of beer. The Brits chain smoked. We played cards on the earth. Bats flew above, around, near, and on two occasions, slammed into my hat.   Bia Hanoi, 333 and some Chinese brands we sipped during the breaks between rush hours. We carried out what we packed in.

One night I woke up shivering, around 3 am, before the rush hour back to the caves, and I pulled a huge black centipede from the thin piece of canvas I was using for a bedroll. Welts, shivers, temperature of 40 Celsius (104 F). Oh, the vagaries of roughing it in a country of dragon boats, Russian busses, endless streams of bicycles and motorcycles, dogs running around, and poor and good people. Plastic bags and junk stacked to the moon and back.

Bats, magnificent and weird bats. The cataloguing was haphazard, and one of the fellows was wanting to get (discover) a bat yet to be catalogued by Western science, and then he’d write about it, get a short article in the Mammalian Journal. Help with his doctoral dissertation.  Cheers. He was a Scotsman, age 23, talking to me, 36. Asking me about the war, the American War on Vietnam, the affects of it at home, etc.

I reminded him of his history, UK’s: Operation Masterdom  but  also known as the Southern Resistance War (Vietnamese: Nam Bộ kháng chiến) by the Vietnamese. This was a a post– World War II armed conflict involving a largely British- Indian and French task force and Japanese troops. They went up against the Viet Minh, the Vietnamese communist movement, for control of the southern half of the country, after the Japanese surrender. The Brits lost.

I reminded him that arms were being sent by the Brits to South Vietnam. I reminded him plenty of Brits fought in Vietnam, through resignation and then enlisting in the armed forces of Australia and New Zealand. Canadians enlisted in US forces. Plenty of covert operations were carried out by Britain. Britain officially recognized and supported South Vietnamese President Diem who requested help and received it: British Advisory Mission to South Vietnam (BRIAM).

Down the mountain we slogged – dirty, disheveled, stinky. We ended up in one of the villages not located on our maps. We drank Bia Hoi by the gallon — draft beer. The kids and old people watched us from the slated walls. Definite oddities, as the guys had long hair, and the two women had shaved sides and beads in the back, braided. Red-haired Ian, with huge flowing scarlet beard. Doctor Viet helped with the translation. He was gulping green tea, steamy in the night air.

We drank and ate with miners, farmers and foresters. I ended up in a constant arm-wrestling match with all number of guys. We were in close quarters, and like all of Vietnam, it seemed, there were old and young, boy and man, some females, grabbing our hands as we walked through their small rural/outback town. We were on display, and back at the beer garden, slash restaurant (the lady and man who owned it let us crash there at night on benches and tables for a small fee), more people came out to see who these vagrants were.

We talked about bats, showed them a book of bats we used for identification purposes. We got one lead after the next on caves close by. Endless caves. Huge colonies. Amazing stories of flying foxes bigger than the dogs they were eating. One older lady that first evening brought our science troupe seven deep fried bats. Horseshoe.  Down the hatch, bloke.

Most people were healthy, yet the men smoked cigarettes and bongs-full of tobacco. The women chewed betel nut, as the telltale aftereffect of dark stained teeth when they smiled. I asked to try some and they laughed, but I persisted. The numbing effects of a mild narcotic were not unlike the first few chews of a coca leaf.

Bats, for sure, and that love’s gotta have it for the people riff was running through my head, no matter how far away we were culturally, how unusual our thinking styles might have been. People of the land, simple people, survivors, cutting, slicing, gutting, shooting, frying, boiling, mashing anything around them to survive. To eat. I loved them inside, my own way. With these words, too. Then, and now.

Coffee plantations and fields of tea plants: all these operations were locally-supported through local labor, but the products and the profits are shipped out of the region, many times lugged overland to China or in container ships to Europe.

The coffee and tea operations were cutting into more and more of the forest. More and more checkerboard pieces of land appeared. More and more fractured so-called habitat for any number of animals – reptiles, amphibians, birds, ground mammals, larger species like deer, and the elusive Asian tiger. And the people came to settle in order to work the plantations, and, alas, more trails up into the woods, more hunting, more rattan cutting, and, the bats. Caves to traverse, deeply spelunked, for that rich fertilizer,  guano. Hunting in the dark for bats to eat. And then, down the hills and mountains, maybe great hornbills sacrificed for brooms sold at markets. Brooms of magnificent feathers. That is not ecology, Vietnam style.

Viet and I talked about ecology, and biodiversity. At the time there was no word in Vietnamese for ecology. Or at least no groups of words to define it as a holistic concept — he was a tree expert with some engineering background who happened to fall into a job with the Hanoi Biological Institute. But drilling down, we did find common language for this field of biology that describes the relationships of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings. The idea of one species being a large part of the whole is not always understood in most cultures. You know, take one colony of bats out of the equation, and in 10 years, you have children with skin lesions and with GI issues and tumors in the mouths of older people. Because of the pesticides!

How is that bat connected to us, the food, the air, the soil, and then we talked about the insects, the pests, the crop eaters, and even mosquitoes bearing malaria and other diseases, how in places like Mexico, the amount of poisons applied to crops goes up each year, and the pests that once were food for the bats, well, they are at war with the farmers.

Then, those toxins, those bug killers getting into the food chain, and through bioaccumulation in other species, like fish they eat, the toll comes later, in other forms of human degradation, including covered-up chronic diseases.  We talked about the eagle, American Bald Eagle, and the application of DDT throughout the land cutting into the reproductive tracks of eagles and causing shells to thin, which in turn resulted in broken incubating eggs. Near extinction.

In Vietnam, and elsewhere, there is a rare mountain-hawk eagle, also known Hodgson’s. So many animals in Vietnam are on the edge of extinction, including the water buffalo black-crested gibbon; Indochinese tiger; red-shanked douc; Siamese crocodile; Vietnam flying frog; Vietnamese gecko; Delacour’s langur; banded eagle ray.  The Indochinese tiger is probably extinct, as is the Javan rhinoceros and Northern Sumatran rhinoceros. So many  different bird, snake, and frog species are extinct in Vietnam, but actual numbers are unknown.

War, suffering, food, starvation, the will of one species, man, to live above all others.

Man, at the top, the progenitor of the Seventh Mass Extinction, it our tribute to over consumption and throwaway everything society, our Anthropocene.

+–+

So many of us even now in this great critical thinking extinction event – lockdowns, mandates, de-platforming, delisting, stopping the scientific method of testing and retesting hypothesis — want to know origins. Simple stuff, for most thinking humanity. How did we get bogged down in Afghanistan, or Vietnam? How did we allow the social safety nets to get frayed and shredded? How did we become so reliant on other countries’ farming and manufacturing? How possible is it that there’s life outside our galaxy? Is there water on Mars, and if so, so what? How do we get back to a precautionary principle and holistic approach to human health? First do no harm, isn’t that the medical credo, and where is it now?

The origin stories – who was on Turtle Island before “contact,” and what was that land bridge all about? Who were the ancient seafarers? How are we the sum total of the virome’s and biome’s magnificent interplay of bacteria and viruses?

We want history, and we are – some of us – looking at history with new lenses, new information, much more deeper considerations and intersectionalities. If there are social determinants of health, then there are determinants of vaccine policy tied to decades of research, both open scientific research and the nefarious stuff of governments/militaries looking for weaponizing almost anything on earth, including bacteria and viruses?

If science can give us napalm, white phosphorous, depleted uranium ammunition, well, what else is science cooking up under the auspices of money-making, profits, and, well, paranoia vis-à-vis weaponizing?

The story of bat research goes way back. The bat is a good example of diversity, since there are 1, 400 species, or more yet to be discovered. More than two decades of “paranoia” around bioterrorism have ramped up U.S. funding for a “subgenre of viral surveillance that entails hunting and studying previously unknown viruses in wildlife.”

 “Outbreak prediction,” goes beyond just tracking diseases that affect people. The public health officials have relied on this for almost a century to understand the precursors and causes of epidemics. This new viral research is all about “discovering” the most dangerous pathogens before they jump to humans. But is that just it, discovery?

Again, many of us are for this robust form of research – basically hunting viruses in remote locations and then transporting, storing, and experimenting on the most dangerous pathogens. Many of us like myself are doubting the real value of this pursuit of viruses which have yet to infect people. In fact, we believe that this method of research could be the fuse that ignites the bomb, the next and the next and the next pandemic .

There is much evidence this SARS-CoV2 is all about that sort of accident, those sorts of genetic and serial passage experiments. Some of the groups and government agencies are corrupt, and many individuals  over the past twenty-four months have sought out my opinion about secret military and military-private sector research on disease, on ways to weaponize viruses.

Yet, if this were an essay on the history of bioweapons, on the Nazis, Japanese, Americans and the Russians working on various biological and chemical weapons, which are in simple terms, weapons of mass destruction, or mass death, then we’d be looking at an entirely different method of presenting the evidence, history, perspectives, quotes and conclusions. And implications.

This is the Conversation in a Time of Plague, however, looking at my own relationship with words. Accordingly, many times throughout even this writing process, my words are sounding hollow, anachronistic , empty. Given the subtext to this essay or my position, that is, of having a deep love of earth and people and those interrelationships with my own fears, doubts and frailties, now, in 2022, as I hit the speed limit of 65 years of age, almost each paragraph sounds off kilter, not of my time, or of “their” time.

Who the hell wants to read this batty shit?

I knew that fruit bats are natural hosts of the Nipah virus, which can cause brain swelling, seizures, comas, and ultimately death in humans. We found out the Zika virus, which causes babies to be born with very small heads and other potentially deadly birth defects, was isolated in a rhesus monkey. MERS, the coronavirus that causes Middle East respiratory syndrome, was traced to camels from Saudi Arabia. And HIV infects baboons and chimpanzees, and whether it jumped species naturally or with a little help from science, the virus is responsible for killing 36 million people worldwide.

The current plague of silence, in this unfolding Decade of Corona, speaks of palm civets sold in markets, and then this SARS found in horseshoe bats living in remote caves in Ynnan Province infecting miners.

However, I embrace those bats, the pathogens, the love of evolution, this human terrain of ups and down, starts and false starts. I love the brains and the discourse which was so elegant and humane, before this love and death in a time of plague, or pandemic, or as it is now, endemic.

I was with many bat species, colonies and individuals, and I upset their homes, their flight patterns by playing scientist with “real” scientists. That was the essence of a truckload (vectors) of pathogens entering my body, and my mind. I like this statement from a pathogen person:

“Squirming, clawed and toothy animals bite and scratch during collection of body fluids. Teeth and talons easily penetrate the thin gloves required to maintain dexterity when handling fragile wildlife. And overhead, angry bats release a fine patina of virus-laden urine aerosols,” as infectious disease specialist Michael Callahan wrote of his virus-hunting expeditions. “The fact that researchers are not infected every time they do a field collection is a question that continues to stump us.”

That bat lady from China was featured in a Scientific American article, “How China’s ‘Bat Woman’ Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus, in June 2020. Her name is Shi Zhengli. And just up until mid-2020, there was a robust exchange of research and knowledge between China, USA and other nations.

But in the time of coronavirus, the discourse has been scuttled.  That’s the bat crazy angle of this I am coming from. Listen to her quoted in the article: The efforts paid off. The pathogen hunters discovered hundreds of bat-borne coronaviruses with incredible genetic diversity. “The majority of them are harmless,” Shi Zhengli said. “But dozens belong to the same group as SARS. They can infect human lung cells in a petri dish and cause SARS-like diseases in mice.”

In Shitou Cave—where painstaking scrutiny has yielded a natural genetic library of bat-borne viruses—the team discovered a coronavirus strain that came from horseshoe bats with a genomic sequence nearly 97 percent identical to the one found in civets in Guangdong. The finding concluded a decade-long search for the natural reservoir of the SARS coronavirus.

The horseshoe bats, man, are my friends in those caves along the Laotian border. The entire unfolding of today, as I write this, for me, is interspersed with my own evolution in this world – a dangerous one, for sure, since for me, Capitalism is a disease, and it is closing in on more and more people, not as something to benefit them, but for which to exploit them, and to rub them out, as Jimmy Cagney said.

The screws are being tightened. The propaganda has been set forth a hundred years ago. Our planned and perceived lives and deaths are all marketed, and put into play. There are both overt and covert agendas, and there are still some of us who want to see through the power plays, expose the actors in this theater of the dominance, and report on the suppression, oppression and obsessions the marketers (tin soldiers for the billionaires) foist upon children as soon as they are born!

*–*

Now, how is this going to connect and do a bang-up job concluding an essay on bats? You see, even with my love of nature, my engagement with people, in other places, through their own eyes, mine, as they are  Eyes Wide Open, I still have this sense that even the crazy ones like those that reach out to me across states and oceans (I don’t mean crazy in that way, so hold your horses, Cancel Culture) are actually the ones that count. They have a truth in them from decades living their own truths in a world of lies.

Some call them batty.   

Maybe the key for me know is what Jean-Paul Satre said, succinctly – “Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”

The formulae have already been sketched out. We know what is right from wrong, deep down, if we decide to traverse that dark cave and explore the hidden meaning of being a man or woman in this world. What it is to be with bats, with the flights in and out of our own dark caves … that will always be the wave of human touch in me. Ironically, it is the bat which pulls the human from me.

Even in that darkness, there is light, and the bats are blended into space, that obsidian trench which for them is home and roost, the place of supplication to the energy god, and where they rest, we tear into. But we know deep down the flight of the bat is true, as is the gait of a wolf, even one espying a lamb out on old Jake’s ranch.

Ready for reconfirmation, or some moment in struggle when recharging of life is the memory. This is it, a bat essay, tied loosely to love of humanity – that humanity – struggling, for sure, and most times losing the battle. But to have that chance to be in the middle of bats, or on a reef with a hundred small hammerheads overhead, that is the shape of dreams and nightmares, both the balance of being alive in our time.

Bats . . . Conversations in a time of Plague . . . What’s Love Got to do with it?

Part One

Cirque #25 [first appeared in current Cirque Journal]

The lie lulls or dreams, like the illusion. The truth is the only power, cheerful, inexhaustible. If we  were able to live only of, and for truth: young and immortal energy in us. The man of truth does not age. A little more effort and he will not die. – Albert Camus

We were up high in a cave, near the border of Laos. The one Vietnamese with us, a scientist, Viet, wondered what kind of crazy mad dogs and Englishmen we were.

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He and I were the same age, 36, and most of the team members were in early 20’s, and one guy from Canada was 20.

Viet and I discussed his work on rural farming and the system of getting rice farmers to breed fish in the paddies, and to use fish to eat/take to market and utilizing fish poop to fertilize. Snails breed and live in abundance, too, for eating/market purposes.  The water is actually cleaner this way for boiling consumption. Simple design, but lots of resistance and some hurdles to traverse. Even small two-light bulb output low flow power generators, dropped in the water that slurries of through gravity, that’s another one of Viet’s passions.

Viet is one of hundreds of people I have come to love for their minds, souls and life’s passageways out of struggle and poverty (the war against Vietnam by France and USA, et al, for Viet and his family, tragedy piled onto tragedy), to a sense of purpose, a bit of calm. That calm is gained with intellectual fellowship.

We drank green tea and talked a lot.

I wonder about him, now, as 28 years have passed. His family, job, the state of Vietnam, the rapaciousness of capitalism conquering markets, tying up land, building exclusive resorts, and his own health with the additional pollutants in air, water, soil. The climate crisis. All of that, and then, of course, how’s he doing under this new plague, the other one, this bat plague and the attendant plague of various forms of fascism and mental and physical lockdown?

I wonder as life and death moves like a circle of locusts through the land, inside cities, in rural places, within families. I can’t shake Ouroboros from my mind. Snake shaped as an eternal biological cyclic of renewal or a cycle of life, death, and rebirth. The real snake I share the house with, ball python, leaves old skin sloughed off monthly, a transmigration of soul, his previous soul left for me to remark. Remade, in a sense, and the molt is the leftover negative of his (we call him Copernicus) life, monthly.

If only humans understood this transmigration. What a species we might become.

How can I touch the Ouroboros  without thinking of a kind family man, Viet, who was not thrilled with my proclivity for finding real snakes in the hills and jungle. I did talk about the silver Ouroboros around my neck, the snake biting its own tail. I attempted to let him know that while it is a fertility symbol in some religions, with the tail of the snake a phallus and the mouth womb, that for me I hold it as circle of universal light, knowledge and rebirth, second birth, and death and struggle. Mine.

Circle, an encircling of my own beginning-middle-end-beginning.

I wonder about the symbol now, Ouroboros, in this propaganda operation lifting capitalists and technocrats above everyone . . . how-out- of synch are most scientists I know about, communicate with and read . . . being out of balance inside cages lined with hubris, well, that is the plague upon all of us. The battiness of our time. Shut-down conversations. A place now where love is not a driver for our relations and relationships.

This is a plague of gigantic proportions, as scientists as mad in the head as Mengele dance with the devil, fill-in for Mother Nature, tinker with genes, extend and retract lifespans at the push of a gene editor, with contagions hacked and transmissibility amped up.

The reverberation echoes deep inside me since my life has been one of discovery and open dialogue, critical and systems thinking, research and discourse, mutual aid and writing.

So many days the past two years for me have displayed spiritual near dead-ends, where meaning is stripped like that molting snake’s skin from my own grounding, or lack of grounding. Conversations are clipped, and deep dives into logic and ethos, they are blips, like sand between dry fingers.

The work in Vietnam 28 years ago was all about embracing constructs way outside my own, and the discussions and deep excavation of those around me and myself were both beautiful and challenging, sometimes rough.

In Vietnam, on this biological survey, I was the lone American, age 36, the same age as my old man who was shot (wounded badly) in Vietnam, farther south of where we were setting up a dark bird net to carry out a haphazard bat collecting sweep.

+–+

The dragon shaped smoke billowing in the village tethered me to other people, and with the British graduate students yammering about this or that Vietnamese fag (cigarette) and beer, I demanded a shift out of their meanderings.  I wanted to leap into the darkness and float to the small earthen floor homes and sit and drink tea, gulp homemade whisky and watch the plastic figures on their tiny TVs while attempting to talk about their world, and mine.

So I wrote in my journal.

The news, music and dramas were coming in from China broadcasters. It was surreal but familiar, rural, a place I had already been all my life.

Zither music ricocheted off near yelping dogs. The water buffalo pulled up air and mud with the sound of their reverse slurps conjoined like a dozen bowling balls smashing into a bog.

Time to think, time to contemplate. Again, the beauty is not always in the moment, but from a memory of a day before, maybe. The climb up was muddy, and everyone was wet. This was not a well-outfitted science team. Brits don’t always think of all the things to make it – roughing it — a little more bearable.

We dug our own latrine at base camp, cooked food on open fires, and there was one generator, and that was not for nighttime lighting. I crossed rivers (during the rainy season, so it was more like a wrestling match fully head in with leech-loving rapids) to resupply. The Russian motocross bikes we had bogged down and failed most of the time.

Now, the memories are raw, in the slipstream of poetic embrace, with some journalistic objectivity mixed in. At times, in the constant rain, isolated, in that jungle and in the primary forest, loneliness did mess with the mind.

Yet, there were always the Vietnamese and ethnic minority families we came across. And the deep recesses of limestone. Caves. The snakes, too, in trees, vipers and unmatched beautiful thin ones, as thin as flute reeds.

Caves of the mind and spirit, that’s an easy leap. Thinking of what we were doing as science and the fun of busting butt climbing through the underbrush, I knew that was a good thing, but the late night cave ceiling encounters  and bats fluttering in and out, and the primitive villages down below (we hit five caves in five different places), and my own sense of mortality – the gut diseases, the shivers, the cuts and fungus between toes, and the wipeouts with the Minsk 250 cc motorbikes – this also shaped my stream of thought, the consciousness connected to these mates, and the idea of where I was.

Never another Vietnam. Those homeless guys I worked with back home. The military bases where I taught college classes. Guys like Tim O’Brien, The Things they Carried, and others I had run into back home as a journalist and literary hanger on, that too was evocative for me, in-country, on the edge of Laos. Real biodiversity work, but a haphazard way of shaping my feelings there.

I was the only American, and they came to know, not that kind of American.  That was pointed out so many times. And the Vietnamese sought me out too, well, to embrace, arm wrestle, ask me what I thought of their country. My pretty nice diver’s watch they all touched, wanting  to feel its weight.

“Is it real Rolex? You go under waves with it? Can we trade? Submariner, good shit!”

Amazing things were offered as trade – a huge chunk of jade bigger than a softball. A rare looking archeological carving of a turtle and tiger. A broken down 100 cc motorcycle. An M-16 rifle.  Two book manuscripts that looked like they were from 1500, AD, Chinese or Korean.  One gentleman offered to put me up for a year in his raised house on the edge of town. Just for the watch.

They all wanted to know what we were looking for in the caves. Again, ecology was not a word in the Vietnamese language, even with the scientists at the biological institute in Hanoi where we had gone before getting deep into primary forest.

I wrote many passages about what Vietnam is, what the war is, and what ecology might look like in a poor country, one where people were literally left starving to eat, grass, bugs, and, bats.

This last cave went back pretty far, like an esophagus of our childhood’s worst nightmares. Monster chasing you into the night. Roaring and dark mouth, widening. Then, the sounds of bats way up, clinging before the appointed hour to break away and scurry into air for their eating hours, another evil memory soundtrack from movies. Rush hour out. Timed, this circadian urge, or the shape of sky with the sun over the horizon and filaments of photons hitting their eyes. Or electromagnetic fields emanating from heavens and bouncing into stones and valleys after the sun spills over into our night. Or the sounds of gnats and moths and dozens of other species turning sky into conveyor belts of feeding, breeding and flying toward light, or anything shiny or scaly.

The urge to leave and fly as mammals into the night, that is the wonder. The cycle of in and out, and then the hibernation, sometimes months at a time, depending on the bat species. Amazing species to learn from.

The corona virus blues, all that experimentation, all those samples collected. Specimens of viruses morphing from phase to serial phase. Labs, scientists, lights, hood ventilation, moon suits, all the research, and the nefarious ones, in spook-land, and the military, there, capturing data, unpublished reports and studies.

I had no thoughts of that stuff in 1994 – pre-Covid SARS-CoV2 –C-19 blues. What three decades does to the shifting baselines, to the knowledge base, to the collective consciousness.

+–+

There are eight of us, and the seven of them smoke, with Viet only taking an offered rolled cigarette infrequently. We are not making fire, not making hot tea, not lighting the rocky floor with flames. Some have flashlights and some have head lamps.

Music below is clichéd ghostly. In the distance are the shapes of knobby up-thrust rock formations covered in matty jungle. Around us to the west us are hills, carpeted with picked-over jungle and then well-used paths leading to mountains, alpine, elfin and misty hidden cliffs.

The goal is to get bats going out (and then, later coming in), pull them gingerly out of the forgiving netting, measure them, weigh them, take notes, photograph them, and then, let them go their merry ways out to the hunting grounds.

In the dark, essential, with focused beams of light on their, well, let’s call them faces only a mother bat would love. These are not the faces of those fruit bats (flying foxes) illustrating the book, Stellaluna which I read to my newborn child a year and a half after leaving Vietnam.

Echolocation. More than 1,400 species of bats around the world (we’re still discovering more). Most bats are endangered. Many bats are sick. Homes, caves, caverns, outcroppings and trees are contaminated with the whistling, chopping, sawing, bulldozing, burning, spraying, digging, razing, desiccating, polluting, damming efforts of man.

This is just one animal, one part of the biodiversity equation (oh, each bat species has its own niche, which is amazingly complex, cooperative, competitive, symbiotic, parallel with other species) but still illustrative  of the  never- ending story of Western scientists (white guys and gals, mostly) parachuting into someone else’s world and ramming through this or that study, this or that report, this or that deep analysis or any variety of  scurrying bio-blitz, transect of THEIR land, of THEIR people, of THEIR species, of THEIR habits.

I was loosely part of that parachuting into Vietnam, with wide open eyes, an open line of communication, and what I knew, more of less at the time, was all that love having everything to do with my own curiosity and haggard walkabout in life. Why I went to Vietnam — to help people back home exorcise their demons.

I also knew I was different, un-American, a product of that Vietnam War, and I was unabashedly anti-imperial, and that included being anti-Britain, in many forms, to go along with my anti-American (USA) frame of reference almost anywhere I went, reported on and taught at.

To then come to now, 2022, with Wuhan, World Military Games, DARPA, University of North Carolina, Anthony Fauci, EcoHealth Alliance, and other topics for which I have done deep dives into with hundreds of others into the sciences – that science, around viruses, and then, the darker side, bioweapons research around “those” viruses – facts, unresolved debates, all of that, not just locked up in my head, but swirling around like bats in, well, a cave, or would that be the belfry?

*-*

It began, or at least as we know it through the massive media system of command and control, with the end game selling us on a constant diet of fear: fear of not having enough, fear of not fitting in, fear of falling behind, fear of life, fear of death, fear of loneliness, fear of the unknown, fear of the known, fear of forgetting, fear of poverty-eviction-foreclosure-bankruptcy-prison.  The madmen of Madison Avenue intersecting with PT Barnum (that sucker born every nanosecond, now) and with Edward Bernays and the Chicago Boys and witch hunts, the Dulles Brothers and J. Edgar Hoover, and, well, so many tendrils to the root of evil for which this essay is not digging up.

Imagine a society brought up on duck and cover as a way to stave off nuclear annihilation. That science. That propaganda. That delusion.

That psychological fear of not being, or, of being this or that undesirable thing, for which has been preset, goes back hundreds of years, maybe more, but for us, now, 2022, this is the land of make-over after make-over; take-over after cooption;, left-over after trickle-down, with the constant amnesia and marketing of lies, fabrications, half-truths and mythologies as the conduit for the fear of not having or fear of having. The process of studying this phenomenon, as in anthropological terms, is, agnotology which is using historical forensics to delve into the process of unknowing.

In this time of plague, corona plague, where oh where is the study of deliberate, culturally-induced ignorance or doubt?  Throughout the land, throughout all those chambers of power, it seems, there is a hard and soft sell of a product, idea, concept, and much of this is through the constant publishing of inaccurate or misleading scientific studies. Propaganda as weapon, but also as teacher and marketer. Dangerous times. Mother and father, propagandists at birth.

Toward some ends, this agnotology illustrates a sort of paralysis, not just analysis paralysis, but this overlay in our culture of “more knowledge of a subject leaving us more uncertain – unknowing — than before.”  It leaves many dry, confused, in a Stockholm Syndrome empty gut land of overeating, overspending, overdreaming.

The news broadcasts, already jimmy- rigged to confuse and colonize the average person, drew us in. It was lightning speed, the Wuhan lab, the plague, or in this case, a corona virus, setting us up with a novel awakening of the monsters and mobsters that are the characters of those many circles of hell Dante obsessed over.

For some, this was a military propaganda operation, and then others drew from history – a container ship full of papers, reports and books on the nefarious ways of the Western mind. We do not need to start with Josef Mengele, and we can go way back, seeing how Turtle Island, how all of the southern parts of America, was colonized using a sophisticated and effective contamination of not just the land and the spirit, but of the body.

It was religion ruled by the bank.

Before 2020, we had been looking into many plagues –bioweapons programs of the USA, in concert not just with the Department of Defense (offense) and DARPA, Fort Detrick, Plum Island, etc.,  but with the assistance of the web of scientists at private Tier One and state universities cooking up toxins, poisons, weapons of mass destruction. The same science that produces an X-Box is behind the illegal and murderous drone assassination program of Barak Obama,  or  the total awareness snooping programs and hacking which Edward Snowden uncovered.

The same marketing gurus and regulatory bodies that pumped out the many devilish heads of The Oxycontin Crisis are working their dark arts in the Corona Crisis. Except, now, since beginning in 2020, there are no real conversations, no critical debates about policies, about experimentation, about informed consent. We went from hating Pfizer and Johnson and Johnson, and Monsanto and Bayer, et al, to, well, fill in the colonizing methodology now deployed.  You can question “that” science, but not “this” science.

We are in a timeframe that leaves us on our own and then even though it is survival of the richest or healthiest, we have collectively been engineered to have a mob mentality on so many topics, tied to the drug companies, the government overreach, the cancel culture in academia, in the sciences and medicine.

Watching bats almost 30 years ago from a ledge overlooking a Vietnamese village, I am here now, in a world that is, to use the pejorative, more than just batty. Or bats in the belfry.

+–+

Big-eared, Pearson’s horseshoe, round-leaf, Himalayan whisked, Chinese rufous, large myotis, all bats we identified, in their indignant struggle to get out of our nets and our gloved hands.

A rush, for sure, since my bat days started when I was seven, in a cabana on the Costa del Sol. I was enlisted to shoo away or capture a bat that had gotten into the little hideaway my family had rented for two weeks in Spain.

But really, bats and I started at age half a year. After my birth in California, my family took us to the Azores. Imagine that, the only mammal endemic to the islands is a bat — the Azores noctule (Nyctalus azoreum) found in the dry forests of the Azores. That was also in my dreams as a four-month-old and 4-year-old, all products of those shadows and darks shades the skies when we went out for evening walks, first me in a stroller and then pumping chubby legs to keep up with adults.

Always looking up. Avian and aerial lives of my dreams and thoughts. Even as a diver 16 years later, I’d go 90 feet down, and then, stop, looking up at life, at oceanic life with a sun filtering through. Inside the riot, part of the riot of marine life. Water is soul craft.

Bats’ destinations were always in my mind. Where do they come from? How do they hunt at night? Where do they mate? What do they eat?

Batty conversations later in life were tied to the bats under Lake Austin, in Texas, and the big rush of bats at Carlsbad Canyons. Bats were always on my mind, I guess since I was a child on the Azores when an old skinny, dory-exhausted, bent-over fisherman  whose name I have forgotten showed me and my sister that one bat species – later in my life filed away as,  “Kingdom: Animalia ; Phylum: Chordata; Class: Mammalia; Order: Chiroptera; Family: Vespertilionidae; Genus: Nyctalus.”

He had it in a huge off-green glass jar. I watched it flutter, trying to escape the prison and the photons.

Always watching the science journals for any new news on bats, that was me. In 2011, lo and behold, in that  same locale where I had been seven years earlier, three new bat species were “discovered” in Vietnam.

A small one, for sure, of the tube-nosed variety. Leave it up to the Hungarian scientist with the Natural History Museum to call it a tiny demon — “We chose the name Beelzebub to reflect the dark ‘diabolic’ coloration of the new species and its fierce protective behavior in the field,” said Gabor Csorba of the museum.

All the bats I held at bay had fierce dispositions. A given, really, since their modus operandi is to survive, and get out of the clutches of the evil demon, Homo sapiens. As I knew in 1994, bats represent a third of the known mammal species in South East Asia. As is true now,  the correct number of bat species in the region may be twice current count.

I must have held a hundred individual bats inside those caves.

End, Part One!

surfing the Israel-First- dominated Netflix for flicks will paint you into a echo chamber of Hell on Earth!

Yep, that is not an antisemitic thing, the subtitle, or the rest of I write herin. You know, some of us have looked critically at the media: I’m a journalist who actually took real journalism classes, did the lab newspaper in Tombstone, did the editing and reporting for the Daily Wildcat in Tucson for UofA, did an internship in Phoenix, and worked for dozens of newspapers, in small and large cities. Every reporting beat possible . . .

Studying for a masters to teach college writing and composition and other cool courses like beginning news writing, literature, film, poetry fiction, and more, yes, I did a deep dive into Media, Media studies, scholarship around the Press and entertainment, et al.

Yep, aspiring novelist with a New York literary agent, I studied that arena, big time. Who controls publishing, and why, and how . . . . You betcha it isn’t antisemetic to point out a spade when you see one!

Union organizing in Seattle for the big Purple One, SEIU, more insight into who and why they are in unions . . . and today, or last night, that is, come on, I am not seeing anything in the TV or limited series Landia on Jewish extremists in Israel, or elsewhere. I am not seeing deep dramatizations and coverage of what it takes to bomb Gaza and go home and have a chicken and hummus meal. You know, no Meathead “All in the Israeli Family” stuff, for sure. But what material, oy veh, what material for sit-coms and situational dramas. So many crimes there in Isra-Hell, so much of a legacy of criminality, that is, before it was an Isra-Hell state, and up until now. You will find Mossad and Israelis stirring the proverbial dangerous pots everywhere, so, why not a decent look at “them,” instead of all those looks at “us.”??

This is the way of the controllers and the controlled opposition.

Back to my two minutes of hate, and watching a mini-series last night. Getting into something on one of the streaming/screaming channels, I opted for the three-part series on Norway and the Nazi and really just German occupation of that country. Imagine that, 1940, and here we are, 2023, and Norway throws whatever it can to the Nazis in Ukraine. The hatred of Russians and Russia is truly not just schizophrenic, it’s absolutely retarded.

War Sailor,

Yes, a flick which is following a few people: Alfred “Freddy” Garnes (Kristoffer Joner) and his friend Sigbjørn “Wally” Kvalvåg (Pål Sverre Hagen) and Freddy’s wife, Cecilia (Ine Marie Wilmann) and 3 kids. But it is about cognitive dissonance for me, since Norway is a duplicitious place, before NATO it was, but now, and a dangerous place for sure. Who would have thunk they support Germany today, the largest economy in the EU, a la Brussels. Bandera, all those Azov Nazi’s, and here we are, 2023: Finland now a nuclear power, soon, that is, as a lapdog of USA USA.

The statistic is that was one out of nine merchant saliors were killed at sea by the Germans, and their U-Boats, and they were hitting merchant ships, with civilians, many of whom were oufitted with kids, since Norway conscripted boys at age 16, and some were younger.

Quite a death, at frigidity and drowning at sea, with a torpedo hit, all the explosions, all the fires, the steaming engine oil on skin, sizzling hot metal, shards bursted into all directions.

My namesake is my grandfather, and I have written about him. Paul Haeder was a Navy pilot in World War I, from Dortmund, in Germany. Young and forced to train 18 months on a three mast tall ship. Then pilot school, and tri-planes.

He was on the Rostock in the Battle of Jutland, and that ship went down in the largest Naval Battle ever, and he was in the water with a broken jaw holding up a wounded soldier who had his left leg blown off.

They watched the battle from the water, and then the Axis and Allies picked up their dead and wounded with that proverbial white flag.

The sickenss of the merchants of death (never call those sons of bitches and bitches “CEOs of the Military Industrial Complex,” or call them “heads of defense companies” — they are all to be hated, scorned, and they are evil, ending up on all levels of Dante’s Circles of Hell) includes now idiots on Fox and CNN, and then machos like Scott Ritter (he’s not all bad in some of his “stuff”) talking about Ukraine and Russia. And, hell, all those others with podcasts and blogs who write and broadcast in those cold, heartless ways about the meat grinder, about the lies and propaganda of Ukraine and the countless analyses of the EU, USA, UK, Russia. Ritter is okay when he is emotional about the Nazi’s in Ukraine, and his own name listed on a kill list which has been approved, essentially, by USA USA Make America Great Again.

This is virtually fucked on a dozen levels. Dozens. Don’t get me started, man, from the people I meet in the beach community I live in, to people who I publish literature with, they are pure war mongers, selective seeing-hearing-speaking. Shame on them, and they are virtually war mongers in Democrat Party goofball clothes.

Scott Ritter, former UN weapons inspector and ex-Marines intelligence officer, joins Max Blumenthal to explain how the US has supported online kill lists maintained by the Ukrainian government. Blumenthal and Ritter address the malign objectives behind their own inclusion on such lists.

Battle of Jutland, and it was big: Jutland: The Great Naval Duel of WWI, The Battle of Jutland was the only major clash of battleships in World War I, fought in the North Sea near Denmark in 1916. Go to the CIA Wikipedia for more information.

So, watching this series and the drama and the fear those civilians displayed, and the look into their wanting to head out and go “AWOL” even though they were not in the Norweigan military, and then the PTSD of some of the characters.

The U-Boat scene where four Norweigans are on flotsam planks, one 16 year old with a blown-off leg, well, the Krauts gave them morphine, a kit with canned food, and that was it.

The boy was euthanized with the morphine, and one of the Norweigans, a religious nut, was going crazy about the two other Norweigian men being Satan, the devil’s workers for putting the boy out of his misery.

Then, a little slice of some other stuff tied to British bombing a Danish school – Freddy’s wife and children and others in an apartment building were bombed by British airmen.

This is a chapter of World War II that’s not discussed often, particularly not in the United States. In 1940, Germany occupied Denmark. During this time, the Danish government and King were able to rule until Germany put the country under direct military occupation in 1943. That was the state of Denmark when the bombing happened two years later.

The Danish resistance was supposed to bomb the Gestapo headquarters in Aarhus. It was a plan that saw the resistance align itself with the British. And on some level, it worked. Operation Carthage resulted in the destruction of Gestapo headquarters, the release of 18 prisoners, and the disruption of Nazi activities. But part of the raid was mistakenly aimed at a nearby school.

In the middle of the raid, a de Havilland Mosquito — a type of British aircraft — hit a lamp post. That miscalculation was enough to damage the plane’s wing, causing it to crash into the Jeanne d’Arc School. The horror didn’t stop there. Several other bombers in the second and third waves mistakenly took the school for their target.

This onslaught resulted in the deaths of 125 civilians. Eighteen of those victims were adults, many were nuns, and a staggering 86 of those deaths were children. It’s a truly chilling story that Borndahl captures.

So, today, with April 3 hitting the news cycle, all the lying and whoring politicians, military midgets, all the Blinkens and the merchants of war and hell talking about war drumming and China. This is the sickness of a brain dead society — brain dead through delusionial thinking, stupidty in the media, the limelight disease, the amazingly amnesiatic way of the rabid dogs of America, from Elon Musk giving Starlinks to Ukrainians (that’s a merchant of death with a pot pipe) and now his Space X is pumping satellites into space for US military’s grid of defense-offense tools to dominate the world. These are war criminals, muder profiteers, but worse — cold, steely eyed misanthropes who get money thrown at them, get on TV and cable new for endless attention, and they are less honorable than a sicario or punk Juarez hit man/ hit child. Now look at this toad, and this is what passes as staged nothingness, with little Botox and and bubble brain-assed women and men in Mainstream Mush Media fawning: Cruz, or Rubio, or a ten thousand strong cabal of freaks that get 99 percent of cable and TV news attention, all to be hated daily.

Yes, so, I truly believe these people are cancers, but worse, viruses, and prions like Mad Cow Diseased burgers fed to us, even we vegetarians can’t get away from the dirty meat grinding freaks.

And the broken and broken records on UkroNaziLandia, or if you call it, Land of the New David-Churchill.

Then, the bubbling bravado humor of Ray McGovern, and can he get on another shtick:

They all are economic hitmen, all ex-CIA/Colonels/Spies, now seeing the light, what this freak show calls Redemption, and in the shadows, in the place of elephants in the room, the Neocons, the destroyers of Goyim, of cultures.

Again, there is no hatred for these people, and they need to be hated — all of the Neocons, all the administrations, all the beknighted ones in any POTUS cabinet, and then the manure piles in media-banking-finance-entertainment-press-education- et al, they are the spores killing us all not so softly: Bovine spongiform encephalopathy is the BSE of mad cow disease throughout the land. They need to be HATED and eradicated, and I know I know, such terrible words from a socialist-anarchist!

More more more of that old time “I had my coming to Jesus-Moses-Allah-Money moment: “Retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich argues America’s leaders are woefully out of touch with reality, and unable to adapt to a changing world. Unless they are wrenched from power, the twilight of the American empire will be one filled with catastrophe after catastrophe. Andrew Bacevich is a retired army colonel and Emeritus Professor of History and International Relations at Boston University. He is also the cofounder and president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.”

In the end, these are the worst of times:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way–in short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

Yep, so, I have so many military people under my belt — as a military dependent for Marvin, CW4 Haeder, both in the Air Forde and US Army. My own shit hole time in the military. All the newspaper reporting of military folk down at Fort Huachuca and Fort Bliss and Fairchild Airforce Base. Hell I taught at the Sergeants Major Academy at Biggs Field:

And to tell you the truth, even with those homeless veterans I assisted, and most Americans in the military and those who identify as veterans, they are either natural born killers, racist to a Tee, or crocodile tear infants of the patriotic diseased kind. I was with the Starvation Army:

The Salvation Army’s Special Brand of Poverty Pimping

Nothing’s free, man, and the Starvation Army is at its worse.

Again, we do not need Orwell’s two minutes of hate, man, but we need our own agency, our own ability to have higher order thinking AND then still come at them — the controllers, the manufacturers of consent, the PSYOPs rulers, the merchants of death and those money changers — with HATE. Come at them with emotions but with critical discourse.

None of that man. Because this country and Klanada and EuroTrashLandia and United Inbred Kingdom, Australia, Isra-hell, New Zealand, they are a’’ breeding grounds for hate a la Anglo Saxons =

But the hate can be an equal opporutnity emotion. I have people who are dyed in the wool democrats, who think Oprah and Michelle and Barak are the best things since Aunt Jemima gluten free pancake mix and low glycemic fake maple syrup.

Yeah, Zelensky, the new David my ass unless they are meaning, David Ben-Gurion:

The term “terrorist” often gets used as a general-purpose epithet intended to consign a disliked state or group to perpetual isolation and punishment. Used in this way, the label of “terrorist” becomes a substitute for careful analysis of policy toward the state or group in question. Usually, the object of the labeling has indeed used terrorism — but so have many others who don’t get labeled the same way and may even be treated as friends and allies. If the operative notion is “once a terrorist, always a terrorist,” then there are many shady histories that warrant examination.

Consider, for example, as Benjamin Netanyahu — who has flung the “terrorist” label at least as freely as anyone else — is finally being pushed out of the prime minister’s job in Israel, the histories of some of his predecessors. Menachem Begin, who held that job in the late 1970s and early 1980s — longer than anyone except Netanyahu, David Ben-Gurion, and Yitzhak Rabin — had an earlier career as a hard-core terrorist. As leader of the Irgun group during World War II, Begin conducted a campaign of attacks, focused principally on British government and police targets, intended to drive the British out of Palestine — while Britain was busy waging a war against the Nazis. 

Here, some reality from Texas Bentley,

A radically different, even disquieting interpretation of what could well be the pivotal battle of this entire conflict. He calls a Ukrainian a spade, a Nazi. He has skin in the game. He’s a Christian Communist. Get over it, readers.

Now, imagine a thousand, or even a hundred, drones swarming across the Front and into a major city full of civilians. If even a few civilians or soldiers were killed by poison gas, how long do you think it would be before videos of them convulsing and choking to death in the streets got on social media and panic starts?  Ukrop media says the drones will be used to sow panic, “in Crimea”, but there are no major population centers within drone range in Crimea. But Donetsk/Makeevka and Gorlovka are literally on the front lines, and heavily populated. It is no secret that there are not enough gas masks for the soldiers here, much less for the civilian population in these cities. If you were a nazi terrorist with a thousand swarming drones and chemical weapons, where would you use them? In the empty rubble of Bakmut? The open fields on the way to Melitopol? Or in the major cities of Donbas?

I am not a military genius, but I have read Sun Tsu, Von Clauswitz, Patton, Rommel, and Che Guevara. I have studied history. And I have played a lot of chess,  and I have learned from all of the above. I am, as Scott Ritter recently pointed out, not an “intelligence officer”, but unlike Ritter, I am intelligent. As a combat veteran, I have learned that the most important skill a soldier can have is to clearly see and analyze reality, and from this understanding, be able to predict what the enemy will do next, by putting myself in my enemy’s position and asking myself what I would do if I were him.

Book review of Gary Brumback, Life’s Triangles and America’s Power Elites (2019)

Paul Haeder:

Americans are in their own tight spot now: keeping on the lights, fridge half full, Super Bowl projected on plasma TV, the latest model of Jeep in the driveway, work that eats at the soul and the body.

 To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

—Auguries of Innocence, by William Blake

There is an American Native game, counting coup, which is both rarefied and possibly the answer to the male testosterone/female co-opting of testosterone that has given rise to Civilizational humanity since the so-called fertile crescent gestated the evil arts of subjugating man, woman, child and ecosystems to a small cabal of landowners (sic) who got humanity to work for food.

I always go to Daniel Quinn and other neotribalists to look at the long-range, way back, to give some justification to a tribal and hunter-gatherer past that for many of us is locked in our genes, accessible to fewer and fewer people daily as the world becomes a landmine of DNA-warping, cell-depleting, culture-sapping madness orchestrated by white men (mostly).

In our cultural mythology we see ourselves as having left tribalism behind the way modern medicine left the leech and the bleeding bowl behind, and we did so decisively and irrevocably. This is why it’s so difficult for us to acknowledge that tribalism is not only the preeminently human social organization, it’s also the only unequivocally successful social organization in human history. Thus, when even so wise and thoughtful a statesman as Mikhail Gorbachev calls for “a new beginning” and “a new civilization,” he doesn’t doubt for a single moment that the pattern for it lies in the social organization that has introduced humanity to oppression, injustice, poverty, chronic famine, incessant violence, genocide, global warfare, crime, corruption, and wholesale environmental destruction. To consult, in our time of deepest crisis, with the unqualified success that humanity enjoyed here for more than three million years is quite simply and utterly unthinkable.

— Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization: Humanity’s Next Adventure 

What’s lovely about my own intersection with Gary Brumback – the author of the book this review-dash-screed is enveloping: Life’s Triangles and America’s Power Elites: Can the Living Field be Leveled?  — is that Gary reached out to me and solicited my comments and possible endorsement of this book (he’s a regular contributor to Dissident Voice), through the auspices of one of modern civilization’s double-edged swords – the world wide internet.

I think it’s both unreal and uniquely human to reach out across the digital universe, and when someone who is connected to me through my words, and finds some linkage, then I believe that’s sign enough to make some connection deeper, or revealing.

It’s gutsy for this 84-year-old former organizational psychologist to have reached out to me (I’m not now your typical thinker and writer), and the proof is in the pudding when it comes to his writing and then how the diner/reader of those ideas, through the grist of his words and grammar (courses) gets the true taste (or terroir) of the author’s (chef’s) orchestration of ideas and composition.

As many readers of my work know, I am captivated by holism and systems thinking, and many times I am looking at life – universalities — through my own optics. I understand the drive to want to understand how tidal wetlands work and how elephant seals can go down 7,770 feet for up to two hours without succumbing to the bends or nitrogen narcosis.

But inherent in that learning and yearning, I understand the power of attracting forces, both physics and metaphysics, and the value in coincidences, both mathematical and magical, and more and more, daily, I am grasping the reasoning for my own living and thinking and breathing. Here I am on the Oregon Coast (central) just having done my first day’s class to be a certified marine mammal (and to help tourists/visitors understand the other zoological and ecological concerns) naturalist. I was about to fiddle with my short story collection which is coming out in several months from Cirque Press, and I was also prepped to blog from my post here in Otis, Oregon.

Instead, I answered the email call from Gary to take a look at his book and write up something. What interests me most about fellows like Brumback is his tenacity to not only understand the world around him using a variety of tools from his 84 years on the planet, but also his desire to be one among us as writers – anti-authoritarian thinkers who deeply question the role of this country in the upsetting of people and cultures throughout the globe.

“Call of Duty” is what I see my role now turning 62 next week. I have engendered good will and hard learning in thousands of students, at public gatherings where I “ran the show” (a hat off to Ed Sullivan) and in my writing, big and small. I’ve written three-parts to my hell-hole experience working with homeless veterans at the Starvation Army in Oregon. But in reality, the linchpin for me is my call of duty, call and answer, to carry forth in any way possible, the message of revolt. Speaking of revolt, I remember hanging out with Robert Bly on two occasions – one time in El Paso as we made it over to Juarez for tequila, and another time 23 years later in Spokane with bourbon and quietude. I wrote a promo article for his appearance in Spokane as part of Get Lit!. His poem, “Call and Answer,” is powerful, even at 17 years old.

I bring this up as a tangent to describe some of what I interpret as the core value in Gary’s new book:

Call and Answer

Tell me why it is we don’t lift our voices these days
And cry over what is happening. Have you noticed
The plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting?

I say to myself: “Go on, cry. What’s the sense
Of being an adult and having no voice? Cry out!
See who will answer! This is Call and Answer!”

We will have to call especially loud to reach
Our angels, who are hard of hearing; they are hiding
In the jugs of silence filled during our wars.

Have we agreed to so many wars that we can’t
Escape from silence? If we don’t lift our voices, we allow
Others (who are ourselves) to rob the house.

How come we’ve listened to the great criers—Neruda,
Akhmatova, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass—and now
We’re silent as sparrows in the little bushes?

Some masters say our life lasts only seven days.
Where are we in the week? Is it Thursday yet?
Hurry, cry now! Soon Sunday night will come.

It is the Saturday of my life, most likely, as I just spent sometime at Cascadia Head, where the Salmon River and the Pacific Ocean battle it out during the various tides ebbing and flowing. Alone, with harbor seals popping their heads up, and their partner, a river otter, watching me look at two bald eagles looking for seal placenta to gobble up.

Here, visiting Canadian photographer Isabelle Hayeur who is on a residency at Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, is shooting the Oregon Coast. The Canadian is here on the Pacific Coast of Oregon for first time, and her residency continues her exploration of water and land, people and ecosystems — to show the changes to the ecosystems caused by humans. Here, that Cascadia Head shot and the Salmon hitting the Pacific near Lincoln City, Oregon.

I know for sure as the colluding forces of capitalism – a real misanthropy of both the mind and body – eat at my exterior, the very simple act of movement — with my plodding bag of bones — if I am to survive in this sick world of capitulation of both parties working to mine the last corpuscles of the workers and working class — is sometimes herculean. It’s my Saturday, as Bly states, but I am not sure of this writer Gary’s place in time, if it’s Thursday for him, or Sunday.

I’m not saying this is the 84-year-old Brumback’s position, but I know his clarion calls are what Bly states clearly in these stanzas from this small poem –

We will have to call especially loud to reach
Our angels, who are hard of hearing; they are hiding
In the jugs of silence filled during our wars.

Have we agreed to so many wars that we can’t
Escape from silence? If we don’t lift our voices, we allow
Others (who are ourselves) to rob the house.

Brumback is looking to reach those angels of our better selves, and he is wanting the cries of great writers and thinkers, alive and passed on, to push out the silence that is engulfing the entire body politic and public of this ripped-off-land-and-killing-natives country that has made more than a trillion pacts with the devil, a foundation that daily reverberates as the grand Faustian bargain of keeping silent for the few spoils of capitalism.

Americans are in their own tight spot now: keeping on the lights, fridge half full, Super Bowl projected on plasma TV, the latest model of Jeep in the driveway, work that eats at the soul and the body. The bargain, I believe, Brumback is not so quick to go quietly into the night, as this book uncovers the full weight of an old man’s lamentations and ruminations.

His book is compelling for those young minds that have been colonized and whose hearts and souls have been metastasized by consumer culture, the true bedrock of capitalism. Small intonations of the country’s history and this current manifestation of corruption are the drumbeats to his march forward in this quickly drawn book of very big historical ideas unleashed for the uninitiated mind.

Back to the that Native American counting coup allusion I begin with: It’s sort of what I see unfolding as my own literary device while reading Brumback’s book, Life’s Triangles and America’s Power Elites. “Coup” for the Lakota and others was counted to establish position in the tribal honor system. Status mattered, and competition to count the greatest coup was intense. Here’s the beauty of this bravery – getting close enough to touch an enemy with a coup stick without causing him harm.

The self-styled book is by former organizational psychologist Brumback, who counts his own coup many times in this book, as he wanders through the history of the United States, with both whimsy and with a Quaker’s eye toward justice. He uses a variety of wide angle and telephoto angles in order to look deeper at the simple equation of the rich — with military might behind them — controlling the destiny of the country – us, its inhabitants – and the insecurity of the planet, from all the other inhabitants of 192 countries plus the flora and fauna of the planet’s Gaia.

Here, for the Lakota, killing an enemy far away or at long range did not count as a coup. Moreover, winning by overwhelming numbers counted as a “non coup.” Bravery involving a solitary warrior in a headlong battle charge that was climaxed by touching, with no lethal tap of a stick, now that was a coup, as Indians harmlessly touched an enemy with wooden sticks for the purpose of counting coup.

In so many ways, Brumback’s book “touches”—counts coup — upon the enemies of humankind, with myriad of histories of this country since first contact with those Lakota, et al. The writer delves into the mess of the United Snakes of America utilizing quick riffs while cracking open these causal relationships of greed, power, hierarchy, elitism, pathology in this country’s early years and now advancing into today’s predatory capitalism and parasitic economics (or our Shock Doctrine derived from our Monroe Doctrine), Brumbuck is interested in.

He’s also demonstrating another sort of intellectual “counting coup” in a sense since Brumback touches the enemy with his own touchstones and short pithy points connecting to the current state of global affairs.

His goal, it seems, is to consolidate a lot of his writing over his 84 years on planet earth and to codify a body of work he’s studiously read and then to bring himself to some conclusion that there might be some hope for his children and grandchildren. His belief in organizational psychology as a determinant of how bloody sociopathic the not-so-modern corporation is and how that pathology has twisted and turned (morphed) into a gigantic toxic and self-replicating broken set of laws regulating the elite’s projects of domination and extermination is the umbrella covering his writing.

Oscar Wilde is right when defining a cynic in his work, Lady Windemere’s Fan, with Lord Darlington quip : “A person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

From Raj Patel’s first chapter, The Value of Nothing, Patel can help me understand Brumback’s criticism of capitalism and his somewhat of a defense of it in some idealized state that hasn’t yet existed:

From its inception, the free market has spawned discontent, but rare are the moments when that discontent coalesces across society, when a sufficiently large group of people can trace their unhappiness to free market politics, and demand change. The New Deal in the United States and the postwar European welfare states were partly a result of a consortium of social forces pushing for new limits to markets, and a renegotiation of the relationship between individuals and society. What’s new about this crisis is that it’s pervasively global, and comes at the last moment at which we might prevent a global climate catastrophe. But the breadth and depth of both these crises reflect how profoundly our society has been transfixed by free market culture. To understand how this will affect us in the twenty-first century, we need to understand how it began, and to ask why today’s markets look the way they do

Here, the book Gary sent me, in a nutshell, which Brumbuck puts in his own book’s preface:

Here’s a quick overview of this book. It’s a substantial distillation of and addition to my relevant books and articles on the subject.

The first chapter may seem very abstract and academic, but believe me, it is about very real matters, life itself. This chapter lays the groundwork for understanding why the power elite do what they do and what happens when they do it.

The second chapter explains the very nature of power and introduces my concept and illustration of the “power tower” with the elite at the top and the “les Misérables” at the very bottom with several levels in between.

Chapter Three probes what makes the power elite “tick” by looking inside their “black boxes.” When you read this chapter, you will understand that I don’t flippantly ascribe evil motives and evildoing to the power elite.

Chapter Four thoroughly describes and explains the power elite’s “badvantages,” my term for situations and circumstances that give advantage to bad behavior. For example, “our” government gives many handouts to its master, Corporate America.

Chapter Five describes the seemingly limitless bad behavior of the power elite and their functionaries of the corpocracy.

I want to warn you about Chapter Six. It is a true horror story of the consequences of the power elite’s evil doing. By the time you have finished reading this chapter you may be a bit depressed if you believe it is credible. As an antidote I’ll try to inject some homespun humor now and then, starting now. “There is no beating around the Bush, he is what he is.”

And finally, Chapter Seven asks whether the power tower with its power inequality can be changed to the power rectangle with its power equality; in other words, can the living field finally be levelled? This question explains the question mark at the end of the book’s subtitle. Putting there instead an exclamation mark would have been sheer balderdash.

What his book does is galvanize much of his reading – and respect for – other writers who have peered through the looking glass of the Military-Prison-Financial-Ag-Chemical-Education-Legal-Patent-Pharma-Med-IT-AI-Real Estate-Insurance-Education Complex to discover the truths many of us in the anti-authority/ anti-hierarchical/pro-humanity/ pro-universal rights of nature have discovered through our discourse, our deep and fledgling philosophies, and our own experiences in the insanity echo chamber that is modern and post-modern America.

He dedicates this book to Howard Zinn, and Brumback mentions that other books he himself has written could not have been envisioned or codified without the teachings and writings of Zinn:

I am also dedicating this book to the late Howard Zinn, the author of a book on American history that is a must read! I dedicated my previous book to him, which shows how indebted a follower I am. Like my previous book, I could not have written the one you have in your hands were it not for Mr. Zinn’s illuminating history book that tells the true history of America [A People’s History of the United States, 2005]. The power elite understandingly hate Mr. Zinn’s book. The former governor of my home state, for example, was gleeful upon hearing of Mr. Zinn’s death and promptly banned his book statewide from high school curricula. Is it any wonder that my high school history classes in the 1950’s remain the same today, “trivialized, militarized and numbing?”

What I love about this Will Rogersian approach to history Gary brings to this book is the power of his short, deliberate passages outlying the rules and madness that have been fomented in the name of a small elite in this country. He captivates himself in each section, as if new to the material himself, embarking on a self-styled journey to tell what he knows and what he’s read.

This book is a compilation, a Popular Mechanics and Farmer’s Almanac of Brumback’s autobiographical intersection at explaining how capitalism is a game of manipulated vestiges of a global usury past, where Fiefdoms and Kingdoms and unholy alliances of dictators and religions have splayed humankind. No matter where Gary treads, he comes up with the same underpinning for the book, and his other books and probably all his other writings, as well as his own conundrum now in advanced age:

I’ll finally end this long Preface with two questions and an advance notice about my choice of certain nouns and pronouns.

First question: do you think on the one hand that there is a tolerable difference between a handful of evil doers choosing villagers in a far-away land and then bombing them to smithereens in our names and on the other hand the many millions of us letting it happen?

Second question: do you think the surviving loved ones blame the few or us in general? You can tell my answer by my varying use in the text of nouns versus pronouns. For example, instead of writing “the military bombs innocent people,” I will occasionally write “we bomb innocent people” to emphasize that whatever is done by a certain few is being done in our names. Since you might find this practice irritating if I always do it, I will do it only occasionally.

Here in the preface, Brumback sets up the entire tome on a simple proposition – what is done and said by/in Las Vegas/USA stays in/with those living/working/dying in Las Vegas/USA.

The contradiction is blaring, though, as one of my friends, Andre Vltchek states in his humanitarian and global writing – that the rest of the world, that is, the world other than Western Civilization, i.e. Europe/EU, UK, USA, Canada – pays for its/our so-called “higher standard” of living, higher level of economic/environmental/health well-being, and its/our unlimited (seemingly) time to ponder its/our own rotten and degenerate selves.

Through the eyes of someone (Gary’s unblindered eyes, as he states it in his book) in this country, USA, who believes that capitalism somehow can be fixed or somehow is derived from a fair system of checks and balances (however, capitalism always relies on growth and continual growth, antithetical to anything we know about the limits of growth, the finite systems), I venture close to proposing to Gary another set of principles needed to live as Homo Sapiens in this world, tied to retrenchement and a form of ecosocialism, far from any new and improved or regurgitated capitalism: we are living in a closed system of planet earth, and the fragility of the commons (air, water, sea, land, food) now is even more pronounced with ecosystems collapsing (Sixth Mass extinctionon steroids) from over over-harvesting, over-polluting, over-rearranging/razing.

Ecosocialism is Utopian, but so are we as writers and thinkers:

Ecosocialism is a vision of a transformed society in harmony with nature, and the development of practices that can attain it. It is directed toward alternatives to all socially and ecologically destructive systems, such as patriarchy, racism, homophobia and the fossil-fuel based economy. It is based on a perspective that regards other species and natural ecosystems as valuable in themselves and as partners in a common destiny.

Ecosocialism shares with traditional socialism a passion for justice. It shares the conviction that capitalism has been a deadly detour for humanity. We understand capitalism to be a class society based on infinite expansion, through the exploitation of labor and the ransacking of nature.

Ecosocialists are also guided by the life-ways of indigenous peoples whose economies are embedded in a classless society in fundamental unity with nature. We draw upon the wisdom of the ages as well as the latest science, and will do what can be done to bring a new society, beyond capitalism, into existence.

I go back to Andre Vltchek who looks at the polluting effects of capitalism on cultures wide and far, tied to the so-called artist :

You say “European cultural institutions”, and what should come immediately to mind are lavish concerts, avantgardeart exhibitions, high quality language courses and benevolent scholarships for talented cash-strapped local students.

It is all so noble, so civilized!

Or, is it really? Think twice!

I wrote my short novel, “Aurora”, after studying the activities of various Western ‘cultural institutions’, in virtually all the continents of the Planet. I encountered their heads; I interacted with the ‘beneficiaries’ of various funding schemes, and I managed to get ‘behind the scenes’.

What I discovered was shocking: these shiny ‘temples of culture’ in the middle of so many devastated and miserable cities worldwide (devastated by the Western imperialism and by its closest allies – the shameless local elites), are actually extremely closely linked to Western intelligence organizations. They are directly involved in the neo-colonialist project, which is implemented virtually on all continents of the world, by North America, Europe and Japan.

‘Culture’ is used to re-educate and to indoctrinate mainly the children of the local elites. Funding and grants are put to work where threats and killing were applied before. How does it work? It is actually all quite simple: rebellious, socially-oriented and anti-imperialist local artists and thinkers are now shamelessly bought and corrupted. Their egos are played on with great skill. Trips abroad for ‘young and talented artists’ are arranged, funding dispersed, scholarships offered.

Carrots are too tasty, most would say, ‘irresistible’. Seals of approval from the Empire are ready to stamp those blank pages of the lives of still young, unrecognized but angry and sharp young artists and intellectuals from those poor, colonized countries. It is so easy to betray! It is so easy to bend.

Please note I am not comparing Gary or his book to other writers or their books/writing, some of whom he cites liberally throughout this latest one. I believe in a new way of book analysis, or reviewing a book – by putting myself into the stream of consciousness that cascades for someone like myself who in the process of reading will take to heart how closely or far away that content resonates with my own life and my own writing. It is the power of a book like Gary’s to incite not only my own deep introspection about what it means to be an American, someone who has worked (albeit struggled by not getting bought and sold by corporate America, but still . . . sold down the river in the careers I’ve held), but also what it means to be counter to almost anything and everything this country produces as a national collective consciousness.

His thesis for the book is tied to his own backing of organizational psychology. He uses these equations to illustrate where he’s coming from:

Anyone’s Equation:
Person + Context = Person’s Behavior + Consequences

Any Organization’s Equation:
Organization + Context = Organization’s Behavior + Consequences

Any Nation’s Equation :
Nation + Context = Nation’s Behavior + Consequences

Of course, every person, every organization, every nation has their own equations, sort of like a unique DNA code. The specific details in any equation can change from day to day, except some of the details for chronic habits like that of America’s endless warring and spying change less.2 A nation, therefore, over the entire course of its history may have gone through zillions of its more significant equations with varying details in the input side.

Thus, what anyone, any organization or any nation do throughout their lives depends on themselves and their contexts. Behavior never happens without both and will never be fully explained without both.

Beyond his background in psychology, Brumback looks to his writing now as a way to express his historical knowledge of America’s bloody programs of subjugation and to militate his belief in non-violence as he was reared as a Quaker.

He sets up the book by talking about his background working with organizations, treating them sort of speak to heal themselves, which in the end he sees as impossible under the current structures of limited liability companies and the bigger transnational corporations that are rapacious in every way.

Brumback alludes to working a long time for industry, the US federal government and non-profit research business. The power of the company man, and his own background in academics (a rather conservative and lock-step group think cabal), he admits, muted his criticism of the Viet Nam War as he was then (1960-75) fearful of endangering his career and his family.

He talks of being a “recovering” academese reader, writer and talker, and his book is far from any sort of style found in the pedantic journals where members of the nefarious the American Psychology Association dump their stories on.

Brumback: This book is therefore as deliberate ‘street write’ as I can make it, a conversation, although one-way with you.

Interestingly, he gives us 12 Facts (as seen in a Jan. 23, 2019 Dissident Voice piece) that are not truths that have embedded into the American mindset, the American propaganda of historical warping, lying and outright censorship. There is a reason why this country goes into zombie or dervish mode when two multi-billion dollar organizations, Rams and Patriots, under the umbrella of a white patriarchy elitism called the NFL, watching entitled, redneck or mute millionaire players whose ultimate contribution to society is to sell cars, beer, Viagra and the lies of empire on their way to permanent Traumatic Brain Injury hell.

• False Fact: The American Revolution was fought to free the people from suppression by King George and his chartered corporations.
• False Fact: “We the people of the United States——-do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
• False Fact: We are the “United States of America.”
• False Fact: America is a democracy.
• False fact: America’s Civil War was fought to free the slaves.
• False fact: America’s wars have been unavoidable and just.
  False Fact: Whistleblowers are traitors.
• False Fact. Our nation’s military represents the best this country has to offer.
• False Fact. America’s war veterans are heroes.
• False Fact: To rationalize its own excesses, including its hand-outs from the government, corpocratic capitalists spout the theory of trickle-down economics as a rationalization for their own hefty welfare benefits, arguing that more money at the top will eventually trickle down to the bottom in the way of jobs.
• False Fact: The rich say the poor get what they deserve.
• False Fact. Public services need to be privatized because government is inefficient and costly.

In many ways, Brumback has both fun moments and sarcastic fluidity with these American exceptionalist delusions throughout his book, but he is serious about launching a straightforward attack on the elite’s continual degradation of the citizenry of this country: hollowing out our “symbolic democracy” through the systematic formula of penury, debt slavery, theft of the commons resources, the rapacious appetite to despoil ecosystems and communities, the socializing of the externalities of their dirty businesses and then in turn privatizing all the profits; and, finally, their basically illegal, unethical and unconstitutional ways of going about their wealth and political power accumulation.

What I like best about this book is the earnestness that Brumback brings to the page. He is there to guide the reader into the hall of mirrors and house of horrors that embody America. He is a troubadour for truth and unraveling the seemingly complexities of the elite’s rule over the majority, the 90 percent of us who are not any part of the Point Zero Zero One percent’s project of human annihilation.

In the end, Brumback hits back at the idea of nature versus nurture, at the very end of the book:

Recall in Chapter 3 that I included genetics as an input in the black box. Our genetic history simply can’t be denied. But when it comes to being bad or good morally speaking, what do we know about the role of genetics, and does it really matter?

Psychologist Stephen Mason concludes that “some people are, quite simply, born bad.”

Not so concludes psychologist Dacher Keltner. “He finds that positive emotions lie at the core of human nature.

Two diametrically opposed conclusions. My conclusion is that while babies are innocent at the instant of birth because they have not had time to behave badly, some will eventually do so habitually, and some won’t. What role nature plays in influencing their behavior is immaterial in my opinion. What matters from a practical standpoint is the question of how to deal with the resulting wrongdoing.

What’s your opinion?

While we can argue over epigentics and the complete failure of the human seed and human semen to produce unadulteratedly since the products of capitalism, i.e. toxins, from Teflon to aromatic particulates, from Atrazine to PCBs, from glyphosate to flame retardant, from mercury to cesium, have overtaken humanity and all zoological systems.

Is Donald Trump, the sociopath that he is, friend and abuser with Jeffrey Epstein and Roy Cohn, and that Donald whose father is in a Woody Guthrie song for the old man’s racism, well, is that president (sic-sic) who represents the ills of the father and the unfettered protection of his elite class and the muscle of his casino thugs, is Donald, with NPD (narcissistic personalty disorder), responsible for his hatred, racism, lies, and power hunger? Or is it his upbringing, or his mama’s womb months, or the people around him?

That’s the crux of the book, really: Brumback is asking the reader to judge for ourselves the depth of the conspiracy of the rich toward absolute control of the majority. Is there true evil in the world, or are all children borne of original sin?

Those toxins and carcinogenics and structural violence systems were created, marketed, sold, defended, patented by men/women, in corporations. The socipathic definition of a corporation is the same as the person, but can we give a free ride to the majority of people in the corporation who are just to recoin my favorite phrase, Little Eichmanns?

In any sense, the embodiment of the Hudson Bay Company is the message in the Heart of Darkness, which reflects the individual as sociopath and the LLC as sociopathic, as the amorality of corporations is obvious from a million cases we all can tap into from the written record. That these companies — polluters — have gained personhood is compelling, from the start of this country’s slide deeper and deeper into the morass of capitalism — set forth 133 years ago in 1886 in the Supreme Court case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, This obscure case set the precedent that corporations have some rights under the 14th Amendment and were given de-facto personhood.

So, then, we have given corporations even higher status in this personhood allusion/legal definition in the Citizens United Case . What sort of person is a corporation?

Are they philanthropic and kind to their neighbors or are they the kind of people who will slit your throat to take your wallet?

For most of us in the Brumback class, we see the very nature of the corporation as both amoral and sociopathic.

They exist to make money, regardless of the social consequences. And they have gotten legal protections from the consequences of their crimes — a true Mafioso or cartel paying off the politicians and the cops and judges to gain unimaginable wealth and power over us, the 90 percent.

A sociopath and a corporation have identical incentive structures and motivations:

• Both sociopaths and corporations exist for the sole purpose of self-centered goals—sociopaths want a variety of things (money, power, sex, etc.) while corporations are solely focused upon making money.
• Neither has an internal sense of morality and, barring intervention from a more powerful authority, both are willing to exploit others in service of their goal; just as how a sociopath may be willing to lie, cheat and steal their way through life, a corporation is willing to use child sweatshop labor to depress costs.
• Both sociopaths and corporations are constrained through risk/reward analysis—sociopaths weigh the value or pleasure of doing something immoral against the legal/social risks, while corporations weigh the profit of their actions against the cost of legal/social actions against their agenda.

In the end, we have to develop both sensitivities and thick skins in this gambit called This American Life. Brumback makes his claim to some of those contradictions and dichotomies in his book. He can be contacted by the reader here for more information on ordering the book. Gary Brumback.

I sign off with the words of Eduardo Galeano whose Memory of Firetrilogy sets deep in my soul. From an interview:

I want to be an honest man and a good writer, as James Baldwin was. I greatly admired him. He once told a story that I used in the third volume of Memory of Fire. He was very young, and he was walking down the street with a friend, a painter. They stop at a red light. “Look,” says the friend. Baldwin sees nothing, except a dirty pool of water. The friend insisted: “Look at it, really.” So Baldwin takes a good look and sees a spot of oil spreading in the puddle. In the spot of oil, he sees a rainbow, and the street moving, and people moving in the street; and he sees madmen and magicians and the whole world moving. The universe was there in that little pool. On that day, Baldwin said, he learned to see. For me, that’s an important lesson. I am always trying to look at the universe through the little puddles in the streets.

This Land is Their Land, and We Are the Illegal Aliens
by Paul K. Haeder

RE: April 7, 2006

Man oh man, that’s 17 year ago, and boy isn’t that a huge passage of time.

Today, the 31st of March?

“The fight for equality must be fought on many fronts — in urban slums, in the sweatshops of the factories and fields,” said Martin Luther King, Jr., in a telegram to Chavez after a UFW electoral victory. “Our separate struggles are really one — a struggle for freedom, for dignity, and for humanity.” 

The roots of Chavez’s effectiveness lay in his ability to connect on a human level. 

“He never owned a house. He never earned more than $6,000 a year. Yet more than 40,000 people marched behind the plain pine casket at his funeral, honoring the more than 40 years he spent struggling to improve the lives of farm workers.” 

Chavez was once asked: “What accounts for all the affection and respect so many farm workers show you in public?” 

He replied: “The feeling is mutual.”

Well well, into Spring 2023 and the madness and insanity have overtaken all parts of the Collective (delusional) West . . . So, anything around heroes like Chavez and Dolores Huerta, completely lost in the slip-stream of censorship. This schizophrenia, mass psychosis, collective Stockholm Syndrome, Infantilization, Hollywood-ization of education (sic); the Trump derangement syndrome, the China Will Get All the Minerals and Oil and Food psychosis; the slippage of detante, the lingering manure smell of people from the Ivy League to the elite league . . . Rough and tumble idiots with millions in their pockets.

You know, a world where there are no kids marching against Nato, Proxy Wars, against the Impending nuclear war. A continuing Criminal Enterprise and the Protection Rackets, all of that, on top of the mish-mash of self-collapsing arguments, and I can only imagine what the K12 students are mixing with their Pabulum today . . .Thanks goodness for Newsome:

California Assembly Bill 418 (or AB 418) is looking to stop the manufacture, distribution or sale of any food products in the state that contain either the chemical potassium bromate, red dye No. 3, propylparaben, brominated vegetable oil or titanium dioxide.

These chemicals are found in popular foods like Skittles, Nerds, Little Debbie baked goods and Starburst.

Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel introduced the bill, saying in a press release Californians shouldn’t have to worry the food they buy “might be full of dangerous additives or toxic chemicals.”

Unchecked suburbanization. The Military Industrial Complex a la California. You know, this is it for the Collective California. Yep, booze, burgers and bottles of Coke, A-okay for the child. All those video games, all the propaganda mush of Holly-Dirt, and, well, we know what Capitalism is about, no? It all is smoke and mirrors, green washing and green porn . . . And worse.

Is the Newsome or the politicians going to ban military recruiters in California? No more flyover jets during all those Sunny California games? Is San Diego going to refuse nuclear powered subs and carriers and their payloads, too, from entering the waters of Sunny Southern Californa?

Skittles, man, and this is the insanity of incremental IQ plummeting. From grape boycott to Little Debbie muffins.

Dolores Clara Fernandez was born on April 10, 1930 in Dawson, a small mining town in the mountains of northern New Mexico. Her father Juan Fernández, a farm worker and miner by trade, was a union activist who ran for political office and won a seat in the New Mexico legislature in 1938. Dolores spent most of her childhood and early adult life in Stockton, California where she and her two brothers moved with their mother, following her parents’ divorce.

According to Dolores, her mother’s independence and entrepreneurial spirit was one of the primary reasons she became a feminist. Dolores’ mother Alicia was known for her kindness and compassion towards others. She offered rooms at affordable rates in her 70 room hotel, which she acquired after years of hard work. Alicia welcomed low-wage workers in the hotel, and often, waived the fee for them altogether. She was an active participant in community affairs, involved in numerous civic organizations and the church. Alicia encouraged the cultural diversity that was a natural part of Dolores’ upbringing in Stockton. The agricultural community where they lived was made up of Mexican, Filipino, African-American, Japanese and Chinese working families. (source)

Here I am, digging up from the graveyard of Haeder polemics, from Dissident Voice, in my early days writing stuff that got published by “them.”

It makes sense to revive the concept of, we all are illegal aliens, the conquest of discovery, in a time of plagues: i.e. the fools and fascists stopping Chicano studies and Black studies and all sorts of very critical new-revisionist history to flip the script on the White Man’s Burden.

This is at the heart of 50 or 60 percent of Americans. Of every color:

“We are all illegal aliens.” It’s a bumper sticker many of us on the frontlines of the fight against the United States’ government’s assault on Central Americans plastered on our car bumpers down El Paso way.

Flipping the script:

That was in the 1980s.

You know, when Reagan was running amuck ordering his captains Ollie North, McFarland, Casper Weinberger, the whole lot of them, to send bombs, CIA-torture manuals and US agents in order to aid terrorist contras and other despotic sorts in killing hundreds of thousands of innocents in civil wars in Salvador and Guatemala and El Salvador.

We worked with women and children who had witnessed fathers, uncles and husbands eviscerated by US-backed military monsters. Victims of torture, in Texas illegally. You know, what those brave Smith and Wesson-brandishing, chaise-lounge Minutemen of today would call aliens.

We worked with people in faith-based communities, mainstream churches, and non-profits throughout El Paso, Juarez and the general area known as La Frontera. Everyone I met working with in this refugee assistance stint had humanitarian blood coursing through their veins. We were proud of our law-breaking work — we gave refuge to terrorized and sometimes half-dead civilians.

We were called lawbreakers by the Reaganites and the Minutemen of that time. Communists. Pinko-fags. Those were the good old days of low-tech surveillance and simple FBI lists.

But what we did was human and humane, in the tradition of that very universal (with roots in Quakerism) belief in bearing witness and acting upon that which has been judged as unjust and inhumane.

Of course, we were up against the laws of this land and coarse politically driven judges who denied victim after victim permanent or temporary status while seeking asylum in the US.

We have so many stories of people sent back who were at best imprisoned, and in the worse cases, mutilated, disappeared, and murdered.

Guatemalan and Salvadorans, that is. Your readers don’t want to hear the narratives and visualize the descriptions of photos of those victims of torture. Ghastly things happened to teachers, nuns, medical workers and farmers, more heinous than what we’ve heard happened in the cells of Abu Ghraib.

We were there to assist, but more importantly to bear witness to our country’s terror campaign. Some of us got so riled up that later in our lives — me included — we hoofed it to Central America. Kicked around. Wrote articles for the few newspapers in this country that even cared about poor, misbegotten, displaced people of Latin America.

But no matter how hard-nosed we became, or how much we could withstand the photographs of women’s sliced backs and beheaded fetuses, we couldn’t shake the images of the children of torture at this two-story refugee house, Annunciation House. It was full of scruffy looking East Coast volunteers who had hooked up with Ruben Garcia, the House’s director, through Catholic services organizations. It was their stint with public service, their spiritual duty calling. Part of their degree plans. But most were converted and slammed hard by the violence their charges had suffered under.

Those PTSD-induced cartoons those children drew sucked the air out of even the hard-ass border patrol guys who used to “dump” the Central Americans at Ruben’s door at all hours of the night. Who can believe it now, that once upon a time official INS and border patrol officers knowingly let their perps go — knew that Ruben and his volunteers could salve emotional and physical wounds of these tortured crossers.

Their chance at freedom. Except for the piss-ant judges. And the memories of pregnant aunties being raped, their fetuses cut out alive, speared, and the laughing Reagan-loved military punks in the highlands and jungle.

Annunciation House was bulging at 100 people — disheveled lives jammed in. Beans always cooking. Songs. Mattresses and piles of donated clothes. Guitars strumming. Gueros, the white ones, and the Chicanos would help with in-takes — asylum transcripts, translation, dotting all the i’s and t’s. Help with getting jobs. Odd jobs in the community. Help with making sure the refugees didn’t get caught again.

But it was always those by-the-letter-of-the-law jurists helping confound the torture. More than 70 percent of our brothers and sisters seeking asylum in the US were denied entry by some fat cat, cocaine-sniffing immigration judge who usually had a friend in the back pocket of some Bush or buddy of Bush somewhere.

Then it was trying to get the denied victims off to Canada without being caught. You remember, the Canada back then which used to open its borders to refugees.

The judges and politicians and Minutemen all professed, “Send them back. Those aliens broke our immigration laws.”

But “we are all illegal aliens” as a rejoinder went much further than USA’s mayhem in Mesoamerica. We worked in solidarity with the housekeepers, bricklayers, agricultural workers and so many other worthy Mexicans who worked their butts off in the US for little pay and much less respect.

These were workers who crossed the Rio Grande to find low-paying jobs with American families and businesses — working for mayors, bigwigs, even on government contracts. In Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, elsewhere. With a wink and a smile by the American exploiters.

Mojado — wetback. Squatter. Beaner. Illegal alien. These were the more tame epithets.

But let’s not kid ourselves about the genesis of this new round of empowered Latinos fighting against racist laws put forward by the dispassionate conservatives running the ship of fools in DC.

This is not a country of legal immigrants. It’s a country based on colonialists, undocumented white people who helped displace native tribes through broken laws and genocide.

It’s a country based on illegal occupation of native lands and on Mexico’s lands, pure and simple. Colonialists protected by Federal laws that deemed free white people as the only ones who had the right to be fully-fledged citizens.

Manifest destiny was a violent racist act to seize lands illegally. Everything this country’s current anti-Mexican and pro-Apartheid border war proponents stand upon — all that doctrine and those so-called laws — is based on illegally seizing lands of Native tribes.

And worse — laws that “removed” natives. Laws that starved natives. Laws that approved of eradicating native families, entire tribes.

The current massive turnout of students and workers alike in this country’s major cities is a testament to these Americans’ backbone to fight this new exclusionary law — HR4377 — a Washington, DC-inspired racist act that has its roots in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Many Americans do express a certain humanity and dignity for the people many deem aliens, but it’s not awe-inspiring that some citizens of Denmark or Limerick, Ireland, obey the so-called immigration laws of this country during their initial years as landed immigrants.

Let’s make no bones about the motives of Jim Sensenbrenner, the author of this racist House bill: He sees those brown-skinned south-of-the-border lettuce pickers, linen washers, house framers, and their US-borne children as, what? “Alien gang members terrorizing communities.”

Anyone spouting that we are a nation of immigrants and laws has a disease, what George Orwell called the illness of doublethink.

And until those many white Americans stop spewing that this is their land, a land of their laws, and a land made for Christians, the racist Minutemen will ramp up their gun brandishing on the southern and northern borders. And racist politicians will continue to play on the fears of uniformed constituents and try and pass the 21st Century’s racist exclusionary laws.

I wonder what these modern-day Nazis would say about those children’s cartoons — images of bodies floating in rivers. Blood-soaked church walls. Military men with their M-16s trained on men while others were in their rape hunch. Beautiful jungle birds flying in the sky next to US-paid-for helicopter gun ships spraying the corn fields below. Dead mommies cradling dead babies.

Yeah, I’m an illegal alien. We all are illegal aliens, under the laws of these creeps in high office. Humanity and caring and simple benedictions for suffering so much, those are alien traits only held by a minority in this country of exclusion. Yeah, those creeps on hate-radio and in the newspaper columns and on Capitol Hill, sure, they recognize all of us who see the lies and fight the injustice as aliens.

And the children whose post-traumatic cartoons brought tears to men and women who had been in Vietnam. Simple Crayola colorings brought tears to a county sheriff who had survived drug runners shooting up his town and unearthed bodies.

Yeah, we are all illegal aliens. Except them.

Old bio: Paul Haeder worked in Central America and Mexico writing for newspapers during the 1980s and early 1990s. He’s currently in Spokane, Washington, as an instructor of writing at Spokane Falls Community College and writes sustainability-energy-environmental pieces for the towns weekly, Pacific Northwest Inlander.

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Ahh, another old one revived. I wrote a piece for the El Paso Times, but I can’t find it on the web (I have clips of almost everything I have published in hard copy form).

Rhyming Not Necessary But Some Assembly Required – Poetry

Paul Haeder: With a liberal dose of simile, any number of cultural and natural events hearken the phrase, “Blank is like poetry in action.”

This sense of viral isolation, dread and global make-over (for good and worse) gets the proverbial juices flowing of our local and national bards. It’s not a stretch to say there are many people on our coast and farther east who consider themselves to be “poets.”

With a liberal dose of simile, any number of cultural and natural events hearken the phrase, “Blank is like poetry in action.”

Ever see a dolphin in the wild under water? Ever see Carl Lewis compete in the long jump? Ever see a skateboarder compete in an extreme sports competition? Ever see a peregrine falcon dive at over 220 miles an hour?

“Poetry in action.”

April is deemed National Poetry Month. Through the work of the Academy of American Poets who saw the success of other celebrations such as Black History Month (February) and Women’s History Month (March), writers, poets and teachers helped found Poetry Month.

The aim is simple:

• highlight the extraordinary legacy and ongoing achievement of American poets,
• encourage the reading of poems,
• assist teachers in bringing poetry into their classrooms,
• increase the attention paid to poetry by national and local media,
• encourage increased publication and distribution of poetry books, and
• encourage support for poets and poetry

Where I now live, the Oregon Coast celebrates writers – poets – through conferences, workshops, organizations and, of course, readings. For now, like the summer Olympics, the live lyrical works and in-your-face performances by poets have been cancelled.

However, there are on-line options. Our own count librarians are putting up more resources up and are encouraging poets (and other writers) to record their performances. AAP’s web site has plethora of live filmed readings and activities for young and old.

I asked the Toledo, Oregon, head librarian her take on the written word’s value in a time of crisis. Deborah Trusty stated: “So, the value of literature is great, as it has always been because it speaks to the universal human experiences. ‘Now,’ whenever now is for anyone, is always a good time for literature and an opportunity to contemplate the deeper feelings and experiences of what it means to be a human BEING.”

Yes, poetry can be dreaded, only because it has been poorly taught and presented.

Portland poet Marianne Klekacz states clearly, “ I think many people are intimidated by poetry, a reaction that probably dates back to middle or high school. Elementary school students seem to get it immediately, because, I suspect, they haven’t had the imagination trained out of them yet.”

She told me she once hosted the annual William Stafford birthday party in January and the April Poetry Month readings at the Newport Library. “My book [“When Words Fail”] was published in 2009. It can be found in the library, but since that is now quarantined, if you’ll send me a mailing address, I’d be happy to send you a copy.”

William Stafford is one of the country’s preeminent poets, one whose work is relevant in this time of Covid-19. His son Kim (also a Willamette University faculty member) was poet laureate of Oregon until last year.

Here are some definitions of poetry:

Mary Oliver — “Poetry isn’t a profession, it’s a way of life. It’s an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.”

Salvatore Quasimodo — “Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.”

Rita Dove — “Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”

James K. Baxter — “The poem is a plank laid over the lion’s den.”

When I requested writers in our area to tell me what they believe the value of poetry is, many failed to respond. A sign of poetic solitude? A dystopian look at the world from one of the country’s most beautiful places from which to create words, music, art, dance and more?

Marianne was profuse in her responses, as was the Toledo head librarian. Marianne recommends Peter Sears’ work – he was Oregon’s poet Laureate a few years ago.

She said, “I got involved with poetry late in life, pretty much by accident, and have wallowed in it ever since. I probably have more books of poetry (as opposed to books about poetry) than the Newport Library.”

Poet Leanne Grabel too recommends Sears. “Peter was a friend. I used this in classes often to teach metaphor. Taught in lock-down residential treatment. Kids loved this.” Here is the Sears poem Leanne adores.

My Emptiness Rides in the Back Seat, Propped UP

Don’t look now but that’s my emptiness smiling at us
from the back seat of the car with the hat on that’s too small.
I give him hats that fit and he chucks them out the window.
Then flops over, face down,
probably laughing his eyeballs out. I prop him up.
Maybe I should get him like a baby chair.
Or tape him to the back seat.
Yesterday he caught me looking at him
in the rearview mirror.
That smile, I can’t take it.
I threw fresh mints back over my shoulder at him
as hard as I could.
I threw the towel at him that I use to wipe the windshield
and almost piled into a Dodge 4×4.
That’s it. I stop the car, take him out, sit him
on a wooden bench in the park, and walk back to the car.
Yeah, just leave him there.
He’s my emptiness, I can do what I want with him.
He’s such a baby. Maybe he should have to do it on his own.
Well, I barely get around the block
when I whip the car around and head back for the little whuss.
I mean, how long can he last on his own?
So I am getting out of my car
when I happen to glance at the back seat.
There he is, my emptiness, with one of those dumb hats on,
waving my car keys.

[“Witnessing War, with Carolyn Forché” — The author of What You Have Heard Is True talks about her political education in El Salvador, by Patrick Iber]

Over at Dissent Magazine, there is a great interview of Carolyn Forché.

[“Witnessing War, with Carolyn Forché” — The author of What You Have Heard Is True talks about her political education in El Salvador, by Patrick Iber]

I cut my teeth on Forché. She ended in El Salvador in the 1970s and 1980s. After, she toured the US — 49 states in a sort of Blitzkrieg of truth telling about the despotic regime in Salvador propped up and trained by USA. Americans doubted her experiences, denying the realities of the death squad imperium of the School of the Americas murder college.

I spoke with her at the University of Arizona where she appeared at the Poetry Center, and I met her years later at a reading at the University of Texas — El Paso. Heck, here is an old Dissident Voice piece I did, This Land is Their Land, and We Are the Illegal Aliens

I ended up working with Salvadoran refugees in El Paso, and that story was written several times, including the El Paso Herald Post which then sent it out to their sister newspapers.

Here, a recent update of that experience with Casa Annunciation, Shifting Baselines in a Time of Climate Change, Systems Stagnation, Life and Death in a Time of Amnesia

Here, some art therapy from some of the children at the refugee center.

Again, there is this huge tension between MFA/masters of fine arts creative writing “poets” living off of tenure track jobs, and those of us who are revolutionary. This poem, by Forché, is powerful, now, and then, 1978:

The Colonel

WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man’s legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves.There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground. –May 1978