she came into life from glaciers imploding basalt columns ripped from geological core scarring earth, the lift of eagles broken by the roar of the ice dam fracturing giant blue heron settled eating purple frogs they all listened to the roar, even the tribes
artery of river stone, the open wound clear water, the gapping pools where Coho settle for energy, in the collecting pools of sun water where grizzly belly up and rip open dog fish bigger than children, bigger than myths
this is a memory that isn’t lamentation but clarity we can believe the history of our biophilia, our grand hope for some reckoning with the wagers who would sell every white pine for chopsticks who would let the goo of arsenic tailings settle into the bones of gorgeous rivers
you did fight that spasm, oddly enough, that odd nature in most humans, a day of recapturing the light when clouds and wind and Douglass fir trapped pheromones sailed together on Gaia’s wet morning breath, the buzz of bees harkening in the same fold of time
this is how we live a modern ghost dance no eulogies any more, just utilitarian ground truthing hard fought battles to bring the purveyors of greed to their knees, yet we drink the ferment of this life in Spokane, making celebration and war one
give each other elbows, the full arm salutation remember we worked like bees pollinating a city we see as old, tired, but a future place where some of us will ghost dance with salmon and the grandmother lynx, where caribou herds will trample lichen for miles . . . . we believed and did . . .
. . . so children will gather polished river stones from the very water in their blood pure, clean, and more than a dream because of us, each one of us together.
“My colleague Rachel Yehuda studied rates of PTSD in adult New Yorkers who had been assaulted or rapes. Those whose mothers were Holocaust survivors with PTSD had a significantly higher rate of developing serious psychological problems after these traumatic experiences. The most reasonable explanation is that their upbringing had left them with a vulnerable physiology, making it difficult for them to regain their equilibrium after being violated. Yehuda found a similar vulnerability in the children of pregnant women who were in the World Trade Center that fatal day in 2001. Similarly, the reactions of children to painful events are largely determined by how calm or stressed their parents are.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
Oh, I know I sometimes blithely say, “Violence is in the DNA of Americans.” Or, I say, “Americans are colonized, in constant fear, flight, freeze mode because of their intergenerational trauma put upon so many millions here and tens of millions outside the border of U$A.” Or, yep, “Collective Stockholm syndrome brought upon the masses through Disneyfication, McDonaldization and Infantalization.”
I am serious, though, about epigenetic trauma, and if a child witnessing pain, hate, parents shooting up, violently attack each other, poverty, drug use, all of that “stuff,” well, the DNA is in fact changed for the babe, the juvenile, as all those stress hormones — there are dozens and hundreds in concert with all sorts of other bodily functions tied to the gut and brain and cortisol interplay — they morph child into hyper-vigilant and hyper-reactive and possibly hyper-mentally disjointed teens . . . . And then what happens to them in adulthood?
You have to wonder what is in the water, meat, air, soil, Cheetos when we see this in Greece but nothing of the sort in Palestine, Ohio. I am looking at how collectively traumatized Americans are, in so many ways, from education, media, TV, militaristic leaders, linchings, the entire reservation and internment and hateful Gilded Class shitting on us.
Two trains, two countries, two derailments, two different collective responses.
Police said 12,000 people had gathered by the large esplanade in front of the parliament to demand accountability for Tuesday’s head-on collision near the central city of Larissa that has sparked widespread outrage.
At least 57 people were killed and dozens were injured when a passenger train with more than 350 people on board collided with a freight train on the same track in central Greece.
Yikes. This says a thousand things and draws upon a hundred topics in one photo: Freemont, OH protesters?
That’s vinyl chloride train cars derailed and then the company just burned the tankers, instead of paying for a slow pumping out and transfer, lreleasing, well, PCB’s, dioxins, you know, the stuff of Agent Orange. Into the air, all over the place
And so, if this isn’t vitally important to everyday life, to the crimes of Nuland-Kagan Family-Blinken-Garland-Yellen-Albright-Sherman and what occurred in their parents’ and grandparents’ lives, and then passing on those morphed genetic traits to THEM, and now we pay the price for their trauma and misanthropy, well, we are a completely blank society if we can’t get into the streets daily and fight for our rights . . . to NOT look deeply into this, and connect the dots — and there are so many dots, as in why so much hatred of Russia is coming from those Neocons, those people whose family lines were in the Holocaust — we are missing a great opportunity to see what motivates these elites.
A person’s experience as a child or teenager can have a profound impact on their future children’s lives, new work is showing. Rachel Yehuda, a researcher in the growing field of epigenetics and the intergenerational effects of trauma, and her colleagues have long studied mass trauma survivors and their offspring. Their latest results reveal that descendants of people who survived the Holocaust have different stress hormone profiles than their peers, perhaps predisposing them to anxiety disorders.
Yehuda’s team at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the James J. Peters Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Bronx, N.Y., and others had previously established that survivors of the Holocaust have altered levels of circulating stress hormones compared with other Jewish adults of the same age. Survivors have lower levels of cortisol, a hormone that helps the body return to normal after trauma; those who suffered post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have even lower levels.
PARENT’S STRUGGLE, CHILD’S RISK
A variety of studies, many using long-term medical records from large populations, have found that certain experiences affect future descendants’ health risks. —Victoria Stern
Look, these are highly complex studies, if we just use biologic-genetics-endocrine sciences studies. We do not ALWAYS have to rely on DNA material and long-term studies with petri dishes and billions of points of data to UNDERSTAND what happens in a household where parents are criminals, neglectful, mean, violent, unattentive, poor and struggling, never there, always in turmoil.
The Nazi Holocaust? The wiring of the brain man is going to be the hardest to pin down, whereas diabetes is the easiest to connect to parents passing on those traits. But truly, the brain — that gut-serotonin-reuptake connection “thing” does determine brain functioning, cognition, disposition, outlook and personality as well as the deeper psycho-biological formulations of what it is to be a human under a thousand points of stress, both in the womb and under a kitchen table shivering from fear.
What sort of Complex PTSD will never be held to account for those children and parents and all the people bombed by Ukraine in Donbass? In Syria? All those witnesses to / survivors of war, and those who wage war, wage crimes against humanity?
Alley of Angels in Donbass, erected for those victims of the Nuland-Obama-Kagan war on Russians, i.e. Maidan Coup onwards:
So what happens, then, with American Society, whereupon the media and politicians deny history, context, stories, points of view, and necessary peaks into other people’s struggles and lives? What collective amnesia, confusion, memory hole worshipping occur in a society hit with both sides of the invented liberal-conservative line, one that never existed until The Man, The Corporations, found it necessary to make the Asian, Latino, African-American as enemy, as the drain on the Majority’s lives, their concept of peace and neighborhood, their belief in myths. The Majority being The White Man/Woman!
How much early childhood and juvenile and peer trauma can we attribute to a Biden or a Trump or Pelosi or any of these elites who go to elite finishing schools, prep schools, colleges, entering the dungeons of law schools, MBA programs, International Scam institutes? Does an Albright, with her own odd biography tied to her family, get a pass, get some sort of human compensatory feeling for her belief system?
Do we see the pain and the struggle and the conflicting views and her own ego lined up in those wrinkles of life?
“It’s one thing to find out you’re Jewish… but another to find out that relatives had died in concentration camps. That was a stunning shock.”
Madeleine Albright first learned of her Jewish identity when she was 59, two weeks before being sworn in as the first female Secretary of State in U.S. history.
“It was a complicated family story,” she said in an interview.
Investigations by the Washington Post revealed that, although Albright was raised Catholic, her parents were born Jewish. She also discovered that 26 of her family members, including three grandparents, had been murdered in the Holocaust.
Madeleine Albright was born Marie Jana Korbelova in Prague on May 15, 1937, the oldest of three children of Josef and Anna (Speeglova) Korbel. In 1937, Josef Korbel was serving as a press-attaché at the Czechoslovak Embassy in Belgrade. He worked for Czechoslovakia’s first democratic president, Tomas Masaryk, who retired in 1935, and his successor, Edvard Benes.
What sort of triple epigenetic trauma lurked in her brain? Ed Bradley interviewed America’s first female secretary of state in 1997. Albright died today at 84.
Albright, the first female secretary of state in United States history, made the remarks during a 60 Minutes interview. Correspondent Lesley Stahl discussed with the then-United Nations ambassador how Iraq had been suffering from the sanctions placed on the country following 1991’s Gulf War.
“We have heard that half a million [Iraqi] children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima,” Stahl said. “And, you know, is the price worth it?”
“I think that is a very hard choice,” Albright answered, “but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”
I could go deeply into epigenetics, and this Adverse Childhood Events, a tracking system (unfortunately, on the digital data dashboard tied to performance) that does in fact take into consideration the huge uphill battle many youth have growing up in stressful and dysfunctional and non-attentive and violent and poor homes:
Of course, most of my life as teacher, mentor, journalist, social worker, activist has been entwined with the people I teach-mentor-serve-report on-advocate for and where they came from. What about my homeless female veterans? What got them to join the armed services? What caused them to use drugs and end up homeless and end up in my office talking about supports and other avenues of healing and getting a better footing I might have?
All my female clients both civilian and military were sexually assaulted, abused and raped. That trauma is complex because it is never just one blow to the head, one violent forced rape. So many things tied to the context of how and where and who it happened with, and then, the failure of our society to deal with this trauma, the failure of courts, cops and politicians.
Unfortunately, the elite, those Albright kind of folk, except younger and into tech-data-tracking-social impact investing, they are using ACEs for PROFITEERING:
A red flag for me in Gavin Newsom’s “child-friendly” proposed budget was the $45 million he allocated to screen children and adults in Medi-Cal for ACEs. I’m writing this post to express serious reservations I have about the process of developing ACE (Adverse Early Childhood Experiences) scores for people. ACEs are getting tremendous media exposure of late. While I believe this to be a crucial pubic health concern, my fear is that ACE prevention and mitigation interventions will become vehicles for “innovative” finance and will expand profiling of vulnerable populations.
I want to make it clear from the outset that I acknowledge childhood trauma does result in long-term negative health consequences for individuals. I’ve seen it in my own family. I also recognize that systems of structural racism have inflicted stress and violence on communities of color and indigenous peoples for generations, resulting in high rates of chronic illness that make them attractive targets for “social impact” schemes. People have a basic human right to treatment and care, which should not be conditioned on surveillance and having data harvested to line the pockets of social impact investors.
What concerns me about ACEs is the “scoring.”
Why should a standardized rubric developed under the auspices of one of the largest managed healthcare systems, Kaiser Permanente, label clients and structure the way a doctor, therapist, social worker, or educator can care for them? How did this tool come to have such a far reach, and whose interests will it ultimately serve?
Is a reliance on “scores” an intentionally-constructed framework that allows providers to limit their scope to “fixing” individuals and families rather than advancing a more radical approach whereby systemic causes of community trauma, trauma rooted in our country’s deep racist history, can be acknowledged, holistically assessed, and begin to be ameliorated?
And finally, will this “scoring” system be used to transform the treatment of childhood trauma into a machine for “pay for success” data speculation?
So, this level of exploitation for profit has flooded the American landscape generatioin after generation, until we are here, in that GAD moment for many — generalized anxiety disorder. Chaos, inertia, cancel society, trigger warnings, up is down, racism is okay sort of thinking.
Until someone like me who has been witness to other people’s direct trauma and who has been a trauma navigator and of course been a teacher too, within gang prgrams, tied to low income communities, prisons, elsewhere considered “on the other side of the railroad tracks” writes about it as a way of making sense of what I have seen and heard, and some of it has been horrific, beyond belief, and in one sense, some of it can’t be repeated even in a Dissident Voice newsletter.
I’ll finish this very superficial treatment of collective trauma and epigenetics with my own flipping through Showtime’s offerings, or what have you. I was attempting with open mind and heart to get into the documentary on Chelsea Manning, “XY Chelsea.”
Look, I am a friend to many communities within the LGBTQA+ grouping, and know the story of Chelsea Elizabeth Manning, born Bradley Edward Manning; December 17, 1987. A whistleblower. This documentary, however, was so self-indulgent, so steeped in a sort of dumbdowned look at a person in constant struggle that it was filled with affectations and was difficult for me to get any traction on it. I have read good accounts about Bradley-Chelsea.
I know Chelsea also got on the Podcast Circuit in March 2022 and said the most idiotic things about Putin, Russia, the SMO, Ukraine. Very very sad case of misinformed person. I won’t link one of those shows here.
So, to get through the midnight hour of insomnia, I found a gem:
Here, the YouTube blurb: Raw and unflinching examination of the courageous and remarkable life of basketball star and social justice activist Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. Born Chris Jackson, he overcame tremendous adversity to reach the NBA and found his true calling when he converted to Islam. His decision not to stand for the national anthem, however, turned him from prodigy to pariah. Told candidly by Abdul-Rauf himself more than 20 years later it’s the remarkable story of one man who kept the faith and paved the way for a social justice movement.
Look, I just came back from coaching the Special Olympics basketball team, and we have one more practice before a March 18 out of town state tournement. I work with these amazing young adults, and I was not about to tolerate at the end of my night this Manning self-indulgence.
ACEs — Manning had boozer parents, in Oklahoma, violent, and of course, poor. Abused and neglected, Bradley was a lost soul, and decided to join the military to get some meaning in his life. Chelsea states in the flick that there are many transgender folk in the armed services. Many reasons. Definitely worth looking into.
Then, well, I knew some of Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf’s story, Chris Jackson growing up in Stars and Bars KKK Mississippi, dirt poor, no father, and a mother who never told him who is father was. His older brother shot squirrels and doves and a pellet gun for food, not fun. They were always hungry.
You have to watch this film, man. It will uplift you, and it will deeply solidify in you, I hope, why this country is so traumatized, deeply spirituall lobotomized, inertia bound in terms of real history, and so so disassociative around who the real enemies are. So many incapable elite human failures pounding the war drums, so many in high and middle office stealing from us, and yet no boiling tar and pokey features and sharpened pitchforks.
Abdul-Rauf, a true hero. The best basketball athlete Shaq ever saw:
He shared how his turning point came one day when he visited his mother’s home.
He opened the refrigerator and it was empty. He went to the restroom to wash his hands. When he leaned on the sink, it collapsed on the floor. That was it.
After playing for two years at LSU, he told his LSU coach he wanted to play in the NBA.
“My mother is everything (to me)…I got to take care of her,” Abdul-Rauf emotionally said.
His coach’s response surprised him. He told him it was the best decision he could make.
He knew if he went pro, he would be able to take care of his mother. So he did.
In 1990, Abdul-Rauf was the third overall pick of the Denver Nuggets during the NBA draft.
It is a tough one, since I will not be standing for the national anthem this coming March 18, which I have always shown as my own deeply enmeshed protest of the stars and stripes, my own military trauma, and of course, like Mahmoud, my education through Fred Hampton, the Black Panthers, Malcolm X and ten thousand others.
His views about America changed, and he found that his beliefs no longer aligned with what he observed. People he looked up to changed, he noticed.
To protest oppression, he refused to stand for the American national anthem.
It stirred controversy, and some say his stance was the blueprint for what would come 20 years later when 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the anthem to protest racial injustice.
Kaepernick kneeled at a preseason game against the Chargers for the first time on Sep. 1, 2016.
“It sounds cliche, but when I say I was so comfortable with my information, I was so comfortable with my faith and my position. I was so comfortable with my belief in God and how things are going,” Abdul-Rauf said.
His faith was bigger than the game, he said.
This was not the first time he had chosen not to stand for the anthem, but it was the first time someone had noticed.
Shit-dog, the deeply ingrained trauma of growing up, and in both Manning’s and Johnson’s cases, an absent father in variations on a theme. Chelsea struggled with identity in Oklahoma, and Mahmoud struggled with a neurological condition, a mind draining and body pounding condition that in fact made him into a god-like basketball player.
Great emotional rattling, as always, Ed. Thanks. Cảm ơn!
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I was in Vietnam in 1994 and 1996. Working on bat studies, transect of forest near the Laotian border. Age 36, with Brits. My old man was 36 in Vietnam, as a Big Red Army crypto-signal corps guy. He was shot after the bullet hit the Huey pilot dead eye between the eyes.
He surived. I interviewed many Vietnamese, but one woman who ran a Pho shop in Hanoi was really deep. She was an orphan in Hanoi in a Catholic run orphanage. She showed me some wounds on her arms from F-4 Phantom bombing runs. You know, the John McCain drinking hard in Thailand, looking for another prostitute while his family and wife back home worried about him (before he was shot down). I saw photos of the courtyard of this orphanage with the dead bodies of children and a few adult caretakers.
That in a nutshell is the War on Vietnam. The War on Everything.
You list a few wars, leaving out the war that has not been declared over — against Korea.
That “war”:
The three-year Korean War resulted in the deaths of three to four million Koreans, produced 6-7 million refugees, and destroyed over 8,500 factories, 5,000 schools, 1,000 hospitals and 600,000 homes. Over 36,000 American soldiers died in the war.
From air bases in Okinawa and naval aircraft carriers, the U.S. Air Force launched over 698,000 tons of bombs (compared to 500,000 tons in the entire Pacific theater in World War II), obliterating 18 of 22 major cities and destroying much of the infrastructure in North Korea.
The US bombed irrigation dams, destroying 75 percent of the North’s rice supply, violating civilian protections set forth in the Geneva Conventions of 1949.
The Korean War has been called a “limited war” because the U.S. refrained from using nuclear weapons (although this was considered). Yet the massive destruction of North Korea and the enormous death toll in both North and South mark it as one of the most barbarous wars in modern history.
More than 180,000 Chinese troops died in the Korean War, or what Beijing calls the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea.
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Oh, Douglas Valentine, talking about that piece of human stain, Ken Burns, and Propaganda Broadcasting System’s lies and more lies about the great balance of U$A and Vietnam in that CIA conducted “war”:
Douglas Valentine: Expectations for PBS/Ken Burns’ “The Vietnam War” (2017)
Remember, calling people Cong was a racist PSYOP term of the Edward Bernays kind. They never called themselves Viet Cong.
The First Televised War was a book that proved that TV and those newscasts actually increased support for killing fields in Vietnam. You see, while in the country, journalists and videographers took hundreds and hudreds of hours of footage, but those Mad Men in TV turned deeply disturbing and telling and contextualized footage into one minute Dan Rather episodes.
U$A had already been preened to see war as a TV thing, with all those war TV series popping up during the killing fields of Vietnam.
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I spent time with Ly Le Hayslip, and she was a keynote speaker at a 20th Anniversary of the Fall of Vietnam big event I organized in El Paso. She wrote When Heavan and Earth Changed Places, scripted into that Oliver Stone movie, Heaven and Earth. Her life, her struggle with mixed race children in California (you know, those woke ones called them spics and beaners and worse) as a divorced mother (from a US military white guy) and he dignity working to bring light to what the “war” meant to regular people is inspiring.
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I was an English Department faculty, a communist, and when I worked with Robert Bly in Spokane when he read from a book railing against Bush’s war, he made it clear that the English Departments were the most vocally against his anti-War poetry.
He was soothing me in that I too was up against reactionary English Department chairs, many faculty and university provosts and deans.
+–+
Again, I was in Vietnam for more than a year, and I have studied the war for decades. I also was a college instructor at Fort Bliss (literature and composition) and at Fairchild AF Base and at White Sands and elsewhere. I got to know the heart and soul of many of those soldiers who did end up in Vietnam and then off to Salvador and Guatemala with the dirty tricks of the CIA/DoD/NSA.
As Valentine says, CIA is organized crime, but then so is the U$A. I’ve been with sicarios in Juarez and Chihuahua who have shown me more honor and respect than some of the ex-USA soldiers I met in Guatemala continuing the work of dirty economic hit men.
The Vietnam War heralded in eco-cide, PSYOPS, off shoring torture, attacks on food, water, electrical systems. This is where the proving grounds for US Military Complex Inc. really got a foothold.
And here we are today, with a military industrial complext that is vast and so imbedded in EVERYTHING that the average American is clueless that they have death coursing through their own veins and their future offsprings’ veins.
Joan Roelofs, author of The Trillion Dollar Silence, gives a run down at how pervasive US Military Incorporated is:
The Trillion Dollar Silencer investigates the astounding lack of popular protest at the death and destruction that the military industrial complex is inflicting on people, nations, and the environment, and its budget-draining costs. Where is the antiwar protest by progressives, libertarians, environmentalists, civil rights advocates, academics, clergy, community volunteers, artists, et al? This book focuses on how military largesse infests such public sectors’ interests.
“It is perhaps the most fraught question of our time, whatever happened to the anti-war movement? In this provocative and illuminating book, Joan Roelofs penetrates deep into the inner-workings of the vast political economy of war-making, revealing how the arms cartel has consolidated its power, captured our political system, infiltrated the media and stifled dissent. At a perilous moment in history, Roelofs has given us a call to action, loud and clear enough to awaken our anesthetized consciences.” JEFFREY ST CLAIR, Editor of CounterPunch, Author, Grand Theft Pentagon
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Here,
Bruce Weigl in his tellingly brutal and straightforward poem, “Burning Shit at An Khe,” he describes in painful detail the repulsive task of cleaning makeshift outhouses:
I tried to light a match It died And it all came down on me, the stink And the heat and the worthlessness Until I slipped and climbed Out of that hole and ran Past the olive drab Tents and trucks and clothes and everything Green as far from the shit As the fading light allowed. Only now I can’t fly. I lay down in it And finger paint the words of who I am Across my chest Until I’m covered and there’s only one smell, One word.
Even more chilling is “Song of Napalm,” in which he tries to appreciate the wonder of horses in a pasture after a storm:
Still I close my eyes and see the girl Running from her village, napalm Stuck to her dress like jelly, Her hands reaching for the no one Who waits in waves of heat before her. ***
So I can keep on living, So I can stay here beside you, I try to imagine she runs down the road and wings Beat inside her until she rises Above the stinking jungle and her pain Eases, and your pain, and mine.
But the poem continues, “the lie swings back again,” and finally:
. . . she is burned behind my eyes And not your good love and not the rain-swept air And not the jungle green Pasture unfolding before us can deny it.
On the short roof outside the bedroom window, two black vultures sit, staring in. They have come to remind me of something. I put my book down and peer back at these strange looking creatures. The book: Our War: What We Did in Vietnam And What It Did to Us by David Harris. I had read it when it was first published in 1996 and it has stuck with me, as has the utterly savage U.S. war against Vietnam that killed so many millions, what the Vietnamese call The American War.
I am of the same generation as Harris, the courageous draft resister and anti-war campaigner who died on February 6. Like him, many of us who were of draft age then have never been able to extricate the horror of that war from our minds. Most, I suppose, but surely not those who went to Vietnam to fight, just moved on and allowed the war to disappear from their consciousness as they perhaps tried to think of it as a “mistake” and to live as if all the constant American wars since weren’t happening. As for the young, the war against Vietnam is ancient history, and if they learned anything about it in school, it was erroneous for sure, a continuation of the lie.
But it was no mistake; it was an intentional genocidal war waged to torture, kill, and maim as many Vietnamese as possible and to use drafted (enslaved) American boys to do the killing and suffer the consequences. It’s Phoenix Program, the CIA’s assassination and torture operation, became the template for Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, CIA black sites, hybrid wars, terrorist actions, etc. up to today. Harris writes:
[that] . . . . “calling the war a mistake is the fundamental equivalent of calling water wet or dirt dirty. . . . Let us not lose sight of what really happened. In this particular ‘mistake,’ at least 3 million people died, only 58,000 of whom were Americans. These 3 million people died crushed in the mud, riddled with shrapnel, hurled out of helicopters, impaled on sharpened bamboo, obliterated in carpets of explosives dropped from bombers flying so high they could only be heard and never seen; they died reduced to chunks by one or more land mines, finished off by a round through the temple or a bayonet through the throat, consumed by sizzling phosphorous, burned alive by jellied gasoline, strung up by their thumps, starved in cages, executed after watching their babies die, trapped on the barbed wire calling for their mothers. They died while trying to kill, they died while trying to kill no one, they died heroes, they died villains, they died at random, they died most often when someone who had no idea who they were killed them under the orders of who had even less idea than that.
That’s the truth. Unvarnished. But such historical truth hurts to consider, for it reminds us that the belief in the U.S.A.’s good intentions is a delusion. The war against Vietnam was immoral, but even that word fails to grasp it. Pure evil is truer. And to consider that war on military terms alone, one must accept the fact the U.S. lost the war despite all its military technology.
Time, that truly mysterious bird, forces us back to the past as it perpetually opens to the future – all in the meditative present. I look out the window and think how each of us lives in the time circles of our days, morning till night and then the same again and again as these small carousels carry us like arrows to the day time runs out for us. Time is a circle and an arrow within a circle and . . . pure mystery. It encloses us. And when we are gone, as is dear David Harris, the circle game goes on and on as yesterday’s wars are resurrected today. An unbroken circle of human madness. Yet many carry on in hope because conscience calls. And now is all the time we have.
I am writing this on Ash Wednesday, the day Christians begin Lent and take ashes on our foreheads to remind us of our mortality – dust to dust. Six weeks later comes Easter, the Resurrection from the dead, the day of hope. Six circular weeks celebrated every spring within the circle of every year on a calendar that moves straight ahead with the clicking of the numbers. Death, hope, and resurrection, even as history suggests it is hopeless to stop wars. That the vultures always triumph. Yet many carry it on in hope because conscience calls. And all time is now.
Yes, I look out and the vultures’ gaze reduces me to a cataleptic state for a few moments. Then the thought of David Harris and his book on the table transports me back to the past, while my vulture visitors mouth the words “Evermore, Evermore” to remind me that the same war vultures are here now and are eager for prey in the future. They devour the dead. They have never left, just as the truth about the U.S. war against Vietnam has not, if one allows it to sink in. It is a lesson not too late for the learning, for the United States warfare state has continued to wage wars all around the world. None are mistakes. It would be a terrible mistake to think so.
Cuba, Iraq, Serbia, Nicaragua, Libya, Syria, Palestine, Chile, Indonesia, China, Afghanistan, Philippines, Yemen, Somalia, Russia via Ukraine, etc. – all intentional and all based on lies. It’s the American Way, just as it was for Vietnam.
Quoth the vultures “Evermore.”
Like David Harris, I refused to go to the war but the war came to me. When I became a conscientious objector from the Marines, I avoided killing Vietnamese but their killing by my countrymen has haunted me to this day. Unlike David, who was far more courageous than I, I didn’t go to prison, although I was prepared to do so. But I learned then, and have never forgotten, that my country is controlled by blood-thirsty vultures.
Flying back in time, I remember a conversation I had with a friend on the plane to Marine boot camp at Parris Island, that infamous torture chamber in South Carolina where boys are made into professional killers. I told him how confused I was since I hadn’t been raised to kill people. Actually the opposite. As a good Catholic boy, I was taught to love others, not to kill them. No one I knew ever said they saw a contradiction. Yet here I was going to do that. It was insane. I kept conflating the slogan “The Marines Build Men: Body, Mind, and Spirit” with the advertising jingle I grew up hearing from the New York Yankees’ announcer, Mel Allen, who would intone the sponsor’s (Ballantine Beer) slogan: remember fans “The Three Ring Sign: Purity, Body, and Flavor – So Ask the Man for Ballantine.” Then there was the Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost: let us pray; men built by the Marines; purity and impurity, body, God’s body, bodies denied and maimed, killing other bodies, “In the Name of the Father and the Son and… “ It all felt so bizarre and my mind was a confused whirligig of contradictions. What the hell was I doing on that plane, I thought. Whose life was it anyway?
October 6, 1966. Zippo Squads on CBS News, setting fire to peasant huts in Vietnam. When I was younger, a Zippo lighter seemed so cool and manly. Silvery and clicky, a cigarette in the corner of my mouth. A real tough guy. John Wayne or Humphrey Bogart.
These boys were on a flatbed truck with their plastic guns as they presented themselves at a Veterans Day Parade
in Albany, Oregon in 1991. This parade was a few months after the U.S. Military won Gulf War I, otherwise know as “Desert
Storm.” The people at the parade were overwhelmed with joy that the U.S. had “ won ” another war. Little did they know
that the war was a slaughter. Like Viet Nam, the U.S. War Machine went berserk with their systematic killing and
destroying infrastructure. Every time you buy a boy a war toy, you trample his soul. In the film “ All Quiet On The
Western Front,” the key word in this title for me is the word, “ Quiet.” Soldiers stayed quiet about the horrors of war, as
they were too traumatized to talk about it. The truth is never passed down to the next generation. When it comes
their time to go to war, they are a patriotic blank slate. The entertainment of violence in the United States is a
malignant disease. When boys come home from war, they stop growing emotionally. PTSD is a state of being in
which the emotions have failed to grow to the stature of the intellect. Without help, it is a slow death sentence.
Memories. That’s what vultures can do. One look and you are gone.
In the 1960s, things were simpler. Although there were many newspapers then, and people read much more, it was television with its few major networks that fixated people. Unlike today – when there is no military draft, the realities of U.S. wars are hidden from television viewers, and the internet is regularly scrubbed of the grizzly truth of our wars – in the 1960s, bloody images from Vietnam became a staple of the evening news shows. Harris writes:
We must not forget: it was a more simpleminded age, the information superhighway was still a deer trail, and network television was taken as reality, giving the folks back home a vivid, utterly riveting look at what some of their boys were going through, a kind of visceral access available to no previous generation of Americans.
To accompany those sights and sounds, the folks back home were also given a running explanation of what was going on from their government. And the latter created the war’s second front. Unprecedented visibility ensured that in this war, the government fought one war in the paddies against its NLF and North Vietnamese adversaries and another over the U.S. airwaves, trying to put the appropriate spin on events and convince America that there really was some important reason for going through all this. There wasn’t enough political support for the war to do otherwise, and television had too much impact. The obvious consequence was that Lyndon Johnson and then Richard Nixon spent a good deal of their energy playing to the cameras, just trying to make the war look like what America thought its wars should look like.
More simpleminded it may have been, but that so-called simplemindedness together with the visual imagery from Vietnam – despite all the government propaganda – did help turn many people against the war despite Nixon’s ruthless ability to keep it running so long.
Everything is different today, except for the propaganda and the wars. A look back to Vietnam is crucial for understanding what’s happening now, for it makes absolutely clear that the U.S. government has no compunction about killing millions of innocent people for its evil ends, whatever they may be.
Then, it would destroy a village in order to save it; today, it will destroy the world in order to save it. It is the logic of madmen in the grip of evil beyond description. Yet most people repress the thought that nuclear war is very close.
All the mainstream media headlines about Ukraine echo the U.S. propaganda about the American War against Vietnam. Just substitute the word Russian for National Liberation Front or Viet Cong. They are suffering extraordinary casualties. The tide is turning. “The enemy was being taught the hard way,” writes Harris, “that aggression does not pay. We were steadily destroying their capacity to fight . . . . Victory was just around the corner.”
It’s easy to laugh at the parallels until a vulture comes calling. The seeming unreality of their visitation is only equaled by the delusional nature of what passes for news today.
Quoth the Vultures “Evermore.”
David Harris was right about the 1960s when he said, “All that craziness had compromised the nation’s epistemology, rendering our accustomed patterns of knowing dysfunctional.” This is true a thousand times over today. If the ‘60s were simpler times, the digital internet revolution and AI have scrambled many people’s minds into a morass perfectly suited for today’s government lies. “Not only was it hard to know what was really going on,” he writes of Vietnam, “but it was even hard to know how we would know what was really going on if we stumbled over it.”
Then came a shocking surprise: the Tet Offensive that began on January 31, 1968 when everything became quite clear. This massive attack by the NFL and VC was “the mother of all such epiphanies.” All official lies were exposed and any prominent dissenter to these lies about the war had to be eliminated, thus Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated in quick order by the government that would go on for seven more years to wage its genocidal war against the Vietnamese and neighboring Cambodia and Laos.
That was long ago and far away, but it’s worth contemplating. No one knows what exactly is around the corner in Ukraine. But then, I didn’t expect two vultures to visit me with their warning.
I’m just passing on their message. Epiphanies happen. But so do cataclysms.
All time is now.
Although David Harris has died, he and the many others, such as Randy Kehler, who were caged in federal prisons for resisting the draft and opposing the war against Vietnam, live on to inspire us to believe that if we resist the warmongers, someday all free birds might chant in unison “Nevermore.”
Here’s their story, a revelatory film about David and those who refused the siren song of evil: The Boys Who Said No
Sure, greenwashing is what Jay called it a long time ago: Greenwashing was first coined in the 1980s by environmentalist Jay Westerveld. The term was in reference to a hotel policy about reusing towels in order to “save the environment,” but in reality, it was just a policy aimed at customers’ environmental sensibilities to reduce laundry costs.
Source: Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries
I was calling this green washing many terms, variations on the theme of greenwashing, such as green-scamming, green-sheening, and eco-porn. Here, a 1992 article, man:
Eco-pornography is the advertising of a product as “environmentally friendly,” when in fact, some unmentioned aspect of the product (or its production and distribution) has notably deleterious effects on the environment. Ecological impact is such a difficult thing to define in terms of the processes of production (as further discussed below), one is hesitant to single out specific corporations as ecopomographers, lest they be unfairly vilified, but it might be informative to mention some egregious examples of false environmental advertising.
According to Bob Garfield, ad critic for Advertising Age Weekly, the most offensive environmental advertisement “is a General Motors corporate ad in which [the company is] congratulating America for 20 years of environmental progress. After spending three decades doing everything in [its] power to weaken, inhibit, and delay environmental legislation…,” this ad is arguably misleading. General Motors is not the only auto manufacturer guilty of greenwash. Adweek chose a Toyota commercial in which a young woman lauds recycling and her Toyota in the same breath, as one of the worst advertisements of 1990. Said Adweek, “The only Earth-minded tie-in…is the woman’s declaration that, until she can save the world, she’ll buy a Tercel and save money.” (source)
This all seems pretty mild, some 32 years later. It is the driving concept of an Al Gore in his 10,000 square foot mansion flying around the world in private jets, going to Davos and the World Economic Forum and COP#Infinity, lecturing us, we the people, on why Styrofoam and regular lightbulbs are bad bad bad. Well, darn, he has several mansions, one in Tennessee and then one in California: Al Gore’s California home consumes more electricity in 1 year than the average US family uses in 21 years.
Now that’s some eco-porn, man. It’s THAT finger, man, you all know it: from cops to teachers, to city council persons to DMV workers, that FINGER.
Man, Liz Warren, another pornographer —
Elizabeth Warren believes that strengthening the “effectiveness” of the U.S. military is consistent with the Green New Deal. Her bill doesn’t demand that the U.S. military be reduced in size or scale.Nor does it mention that the U.S. military is the world’s largest polluter and user of oil and fossil fuels. Instead of turning the Green New Deal into concrete policy, Warren has placed her attention on renovating the one thousand U.S. military bases that exist domestically and abroad. The so-called “policy wonk” of the 2020 elections appears to be more concerned with creating “green” bombs than a “green economy.”
The U.S. drops a bomb on another nation every twelve minutes . It is no wonder that U.S. military, which serves as the armed body of the state responsible for protecting the interests of Wall Street, fossil fuel corporations, military contractors, and monopolies of all kinds, is treated as a trophy by all sections of the U.S. political class. The U.S. military embodies American exceptionalism claiming to spread democracy and freedom to lands near and far. Holidays such as Memorial Day and Veterans Day are designed to remind Americans of all races and classes that the U.S. is exceptional because of its large military footprint. Instead of seeing this footprint as bombs, sanctions, or deadly raids, Democrat and Republican politicians alike believe that the U.S. military permanently signifies American greatness. (source)
Green bombs, man, and cleaner jet fuel for bombers. That’s the green deal, the eco-porn at its height? Though we have more, as in the figure of the actual “Greens” of Germany:
A motion seeking a ceasefire in Ukraine and another opposing the supply of heavy weapons to Kiev were overwhelmingly rejected by delegates. Green Member of the European Parliament, Sergey Lagodinsky, lambasted the argument of one delegate who warned that Europe would be wiped out after the first nuclear bomb dropped, saying that Ukrainians “cannot defend themselves with sunflowers.”
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock vehemently advocated the delivery of more weapons and heavy battle tanks to Ukraine. “We support Ukraine, not despite the fact that we are a party of peace and human rights, but because we are a party of peace and human rights,” she stated to justify her advocacy of war.
Party leader Ricarda Lang supported her, saying, “I am convinced we have to deliver more weapons, we have to react faster. The time for hesitation is over.”
Well well, recall how Germany “got rid of” coal and smelting and all of that carbon polluting fun stuff. It’s called offshoring your carbon footprint. All those Southern Hemisphere nations (and Russia) do all the cooking, blasting, mining, milling, and welding of Germany’s fancy bridges and highrises. This is Anna:
Now that is real eco-pornography. Not to the max, but really, this is what the greening of the world means — flights to Ukraine, trillions dumped into weapons, trillions put into satellite, trillions here and trillions there, now that is green pimping to the max. You know, keeping the bankers safe with those diesel and gasoline powered metal and titanium battle tanks, missile launchers, helicopters, jets.
Now here is some real violent eco-porn. Just the headline is triggering. A warning: “Green New Army? NATO Wants Eco-Friendly Tanks — NATO’s tanks may be getting solar panels.” (sourcessources)
We get the triple pornography, right, as the USA, the US military, occupies one-third of Syria and steals the oil. Now that is icing on the pornography cake. “The United States forces present in Syrian territory without the consent of the government or the approval of the United Nations, today looted a new batch of oil and transferred it to Iraq.” (source)
Man, I am feeling the green in that raping of a country’s resources. And those hootches above, with solar panels? Nah, not any for Haiti, or Syria or Turkey:
Sure, this rant was precipitated by an article from a real “legit” source, Yale 360 Enviornment. Title: “As Millions of Solar Panels Age Out, Recyclers Hope to Cash In.” The entire green pornography has captured the EU, Canada, USA, other outfits of empire until we have the lunacy of solar panels galore, but with the unintended (nah, very intended, very predictable) consequences of unfettered capitalism pushing the dirty panels (check out the lifecycle and embedded energy and external costs of that solar panel — again, stuff has to be mined, moved, milled, smelted, cooked, chemicalize, and shipped AND then, darn, into the landfills they go after 25 years of use) into the entire eco-pornography game.
Next, the panels are ground, shredded, and subjected to a patented process that extracts the valuable materials — mostly silver, copper, and crystalline silicon. Those components will be sold, as will the lower-value aluminum and glass, which may even end up in the next generation of solar panels.
This process offers a glimpse of what could happen to an expected surge of retired solar panels that will stream from an industry that represents the fastest-growing source of energy in the U.S. Today, roughly 90 percent of panels in the U.S. that have lost their efficiency due to age, or that are defective, end up in landfills because that option costs a fraction of recycling them.
You see the trifecta here of green porn? Selling panels as a panacea, of course, that means SELLING (profitting from the so-callled “helping the planet’s climate heating”) the goods, mining the minerals and then, yep, they have an end life cycle, and instead of mandating recycling them and making better and longer (durable) solar panels, it’s let the market pimp, prosttitute, steal, hoard, tax, fine, certify. ALL for profit. What could go wrong, no, profitting from green washing?
Again, the word “value” comes into play with eco-pornography: By 2050, the value of raw materials recoverable from solar panels could exceed $15 billion.
It gets wonky, this LCA just for ONE type of photo-voltaic panel: “Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of perovskite PV cells projected from lab to fab” Ah, note that this is only to the fabrication level. Not all the embedded energy and expelled energy to mine, smelt, move, chemicalize, produce, move, install, AND then uninstall and then either throw away or “recycle.” No cradle to cradle shit here.
Like I said, wonky: “cradle to gate” is yet more of this eco-pornography terminology.
Perovskitephotovoltaic cells (PVs) have attracted significant worldwide attention in the past few years. Although the stability of the power conversion is a concern, there is great potential for perovskites to enter the global PV market. To determine the future potential of perovskites, we performed a cradle-to-gate environmental life cycle (LCA) for two different perovskite device structures suitable for low cost manufacturing. Rather than examining current laboratory deposition processes like dipping and spinning, we considered spray and co-evaporation methods that are more amenable to manufacturing. A structure with an inorganic hole transport layer (HTL) was developed for both solution and vacuum based processes, and an HTL-free structure with printed with back contact was modeled for solution based deposition. The environmental impact of conventional Si PV technology was used as a reference point. The environmental impacts from manufacturing of perovskite solar cells were lower than that of mono-Si. However, environmental impacts from unit electricity generated were higher than all commercial PV technology mainly because of the shorter lifetime of perovskite solar cell. The HTL-free perovskite generally had the lowest environmental impacts among the three structures studied. Solution based methods used in perovskite deposition were observed to decrease the overall electricity consumption. Organic materials used for preparing the precursors for perovskite deposition were found to cause a high marine eutrophication impact. Surprisingly, the toxicity impacts of the lead used in the formation of the absorber layer were found to be negligible. Energy payback times were estimated as 1.0–1.5 years.
So for the average greenie, well, this stuff is WAY beyond their “green washing wet behind the ears” knowledge base: “Deposition Process – The PLD process involves the use of high-power laser energy focused on a target to evaporate its surface in vacuum or different low-pressure ambient gas. From: Laser Surface Modification of Biomaterials, 2016
The pornography is also in the rhetoric, the motivations of technologists, technocrats, scientists, the lot of them working on these highly technical projects. It is driven by the bizarrely human quest to see if we can do it mentality. That quest is of course driven by profit motives. Not so much about saving the world.
Dystopia is the end product of having billionaires and collective lobbies of Eichmann’s and Mengele’s and Edward Bernay’s and Tom Friedman’s rule the world, as Top Dog Green Pimps but also Top Green Bordella Owners.
Look how superficial this marketing crap is — “raw materials”. What’s the energy, cultural, economic, and societal outlay for that?
The most commonly used photovoltaics consist of monocrystalline or multicrystalline silicon. The main negative environmental impact of these panels comes from the production phase and include:
The energy consumed during production of the panels and the emissions released during production
Water consumption
The release of some hazardous byproducts [18].
The environmentally relevant substances released during the production phase of silicon solar panels are fluorine, chlorine, nitrate, isopropanol, SO2, CO2 and respirable silica particles and solvents.
However, over the course of their lifetime, crystalline solar panels generate 9-17 times the energy used to produce them, depending on their placement and efficiency. Also, depending on the type of PV technology, the clean energy pay back takes place in one to four years. Once in place, solar systems using photovoltaics are 100% emissions free. The production of 1,000 kWh of solar electricity reduces emissions by nearly 8 pounds of sulfur dioxide, 5 pounds of nitrogen oxides, and more than 1,400 pounds of carbon dioxide. (follow the money, the financing, the banking, the investing, the scamming of government-taxpayer funds)
Talk about some slick green porn? So all that renewable energy just comes from heaven. Those dams, those solar panels, those wind turbines, all the wires, plastics, rubbers, strategic metals, transportation, MINING. Ccomes from Green Heaven! Whew!
You want to get wonky? I’ve written about this before — the single use shopping bag legislation/laws. The reality is that paper bags are bad bad bad. And, in reality, the single use bags, if used properly, go into a small gabage pail in the house, and many are used as bags for produce in the fridge and for poop/cat liter. Triple reuse power of the bag. Again, unintended consequences. Countless millions of lifetime hours spent just one aspect of greening the economy:
Summary and recommendations The authors are satisfied that they have achieved their goal to provide a comparative assertion among the six types of grocery carrier bags included in the report based on their respective potential environmental impacts. The carrier bags selected were those in most common use in the United States and the underlying data were, as far as is possible, based on United States data.
Our results are based on a study of twelve environmental impact categories. Our results show that reusable LDPE and NWPP bags will have lower average impacts on the environment compared to PRBs if the reusable bags are reused for a sufficient number of grocery shopping trips. However, according to a recent national survey, a majority of consumers do not reuse their reusable bags for this sufficient number of trips, especially for LDPE bags. Moreover, 40% of people forget to bring their reusable bags with them to the store and half the people who prefer NWPP bags used PRBs at their most recent shopping trip. In addition, only 15% of people follow the recommended cleaning procedures to ensure safe use of reusable bags.
Our results also show that Paper bags, even with 100% recycle content, have significantly higher average impacts on the environment than either of the reusable bags or PRBs. Many of the regulations now in place or being considered in the United States encourage consumers to use reusable bags through banning PRBs and imposing a fee on the use of Paper bags. (Californians Against Waste, 2013) (Florida Department of Environmental Protection, 2013) A number of grocery chains in non-legislated areas provide Paper bags and sell various reusable bags. Our results in this study show that these regulations and policies may result in negative impact on the environment rather than positive.
Even though Paper bags come from a renewable resource and are easily recycled, it is likely that they are not the best environmental choice. Reusable bags should only be preferred if consumers are educated to use them safely and consistently, and reuse them enough times to lower their relative environmental impacts compared to PRB alternatives.
Our recommendation, based on our work in this study, is that consumers should be given a choice between reusable bags and PRBs and that any of these should be preferred over Paper bags. Most important is that much more attention should be focused on educating consumers to make an informed choice of which bags to use by providing them facts—facts about reusable bag use, facts about proper recycling or disposal of PRBs, facts about the potential environmental impacts of their choices—based on sound scientific evidence. (check it out — 194 pages just for the PRB — plastic retail bag)
I was a sustainability director for a community college in Spokane, the first in the town with several colleges as anchors there. I did a lot of fairs, talks, teach-ins; I had famous authors come into town to speak, to be on my radio show, and I featured many in my articles for the weekly newspaper and the monthly magazine and a blog with the daily newspaper.
Yeah, I was skeptical of all the rah-rah, and I was lambasted for putting down COPs and Gore and Obama and the so-called new green deal. I even was trained in sustainability education and monitoring. American Planning Association:
When I was in Vancouver, for the Summer Institute for Sustainable education, I was the ONLY person questioning the motives of big outfits like Unilever and Proctor and Gamble and others tied to this “sustainability” initiative. I like being in that position, the outsider, the questioner, ebut really, there can be sort of an emptiness in being around these people at universities, especially the University of British Columbia. I talked to mayors, planners, business leaders, and others who were hyper glassy eyed about sustainability — Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Investing.
Green washing, green pornography, green sheening, and now, green hushing: A trend known as “green hushing” is growing as companies are increasingly choosing not to publicise details of their climate targets in an attempt to avoid scrutiny and allegations of greenwashing, a new study showed. This of course is a double whammy:
“If green hushing becomes a trend, it will make inspiring some of the climate laggards even harder,” she said. “As long as companies are transparent about their progress, and communicate that in a transparent way, then they can’t go wrong.”
The conservation industry says 2020 is its “super year.”[1] It wants to set aside thirty percent of the globe for wildlife, and divert billions of dollars away from reducing climate change and into “natural climate solutions.”[2] This would be a disaster for people and planet. Conservation was founded in the racist ideology of 1860s USA but it committed thirty years ago to becoming people-friendly. It hasn’t happened. There will be more promises now, if only to placate critics and funders like the U.S. and German governments, and the European Commission, which are paying for conservation’s land theft, murder and torture.[3] More promises will be meaningless. No more public money should go for “Protected Areas” until the conservation bodies recognize their crimes, get rid of those responsible, and hand stolen lands back, with compensation. Conservation NGOs must also stop cozying up to mining, logging, oil, and plantation companies.
And it only gets worse, much worse. Reading articles and watching videos from Alison’s “Wrench in the Gears” can take us all to a more nano-level of the green washing to the max concept, as in profits on data, on wearables, on digital dungeons. Here’s a recent one, but go backwards and catch up on that entire investing and AI-VR-AR scheme: “God’s Eye View Part 6 – Every Man Thus Lives By Exchanging“
You will get very few people going into these weeds:
Based on what I am seeing in the Web3 space, I’m picturing a new NGO culture emerging in which Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), with a pretense of tokenized cooperative governance, manage legions of platform laborers all tied to ledgers and wearable tech. Algorithms weigh individual needs against those of the collective and mete out payments for digital public goods production. Officials, whether they understand it or not, are setting citizens up to become precarious impact commodities for high frequency options trading. One hand washes the other as the masses are made to power the matrix and build out digital empire. Everyone plays their assigned role in the spectacle advancing the plot without wrapping their minds around the game they’re in or comprehending what the stakes are. (McDowell)
The unification of traditional finance and so-called ‘Decentralized Autonomous Organizations’ propels the evolution of legal abstractions to digital standards. These standards, along with their legal counterparts, form the infrastructure for the large-scale control of society through impact finance, revamped educational credentials, digital health records, fake environmentalism, geo-fencing, smart cities, internet-enabled nanotechnology and all of the other crazy ‘use cases’ such technology makes possible. The move towards robust CBDC networks by central banks all over the world, provides even more momentum to this future. (source)
Yikes, I am going deeper and deeper off-topic, except it really isn’t off topic. It’s all about “who makes the money, who controls the food, who controls the data, who controls the ants/prols/Us?”
Elites, man, rubbing elbows with technocrats and coders and geniuses: From Wrench in the Gears:
Adam Smith opens his “Wealth of Nations” with a story of the efficiencies created in a pin factory where workers were assigned discrete tasks along the production line, the division of labor expanded production netting significant profits for the factory owner. Later, in chapter four, Smith writes, “Every man thus lives by exchanging,” a quote inscribed on one side of a luxurious bronze gas lamp located in the atrium just outside the Debate Room at Old Parkland in Dallas, the city’s most elite corporate address.
Building off energy futures trading, the Dallas old guard is making its move to set up markets in human capital management, led by the Commit! Partnership with Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan standing in the shadows. That lamp stands opposite an elaborately carved portico topped by a large gilded owl. On either side are four paintings. The upper tier shows Watson and Crick and their DNA model on the one side and on the other side Steve Jobs with an orange Apple desktop showing the Pixar movie “Up.” Below is FDR and Eisenhower on one side and Churchill and Truman on the other. What this says to me is that we’re being pulled into a new “war,” a war on consciousness and human agency even as we are being told mythic stories about scientific progress.
The last couple of generations has amply demonstrated that meetings of corporate heads, NGOs, politicians, and celebrities are not going to solve the crises of climate and biodiversity. Those attending are amongst the major contributors to the problems, and least willing to accept any change which might threaten their position. They argue over statements that no one actually applies, or even intends to, and which are replete with clauses ensuring “business as usual.” The meetings and declarations attract an enormous media circus, but are akin to the emperor’s workshop, with hundreds of tailors busily cutting suits of such rarefied material that they don’t cover his nakedness. (source)
Cory Morningstar, investigative journalist and environmental activist explains how the Green New Deal for Nature was created by the UN in 2009 to monetise nature and create economic growth, Cory points us to build local resistance, to build strong alliances and to protect our lands, waters and communities with No Deal for Nature.
I just got back from the Lincoln County courthouse. Supporting a victim of BWS, battered wife syndrome, also called domestic abuse, spousal abuse. The punk was arrested Nov. 12, 2022, and he is still in county jail, on $750K bail.
All cases of women who are in a relationship — my friend was in this abusive marriage almost 5 years — who return to the abuser (in his case, verbally and economically abusive, to the point of triple woman hating and keeping bank accounts in his name, including keeping the vehicles and house in his name) are different on many nuanced levels, but they all have that case of Stockholm Syndrome, that case of once being full of chutzpah, but something inside them has caused them to not see the destruction of a killing inside their boyfriend or husband.
The case is meandering in the judicial system. The public defender (my money, tax payers’ money) can get extensions on this case. More discovery. The grand jury indicted the guy three days after the attempted suffocation and other charges. He’s not out, and the DA forwarded a 5 year prison plea (down from a lot more time if convicted by 12 member of a jury and the book thrown at him). However, this guy is such a narcissist and know-it-all, he is probably conjuring up all sorts of machinations.
In the end, the victim, my friend, is in hyper-vigilance even though both of them have no family or friends or any roots at all in Oregon. He’s in jail, and while his mother hired a private investigator to go fishing for character witness statements, the bottom line is what happened Nov. 12 is on the criminal justice record.
Yet, today, more crap, more bogged down systems. Over 26 cases heard by one judge from 9 to 11 am. Many have been given extensions for more time to have paperwork and evidence forwarded. It is a bogged down system of judicial inertia and lawyer lagging.
She’s divorcing him, so that is a separate case, again, heard today, but forwaded on for more extension, and because this guy is in jail, things get slowed down.
She got a restraining order approved with a measley $1000 payment to keep the hous in order, but the previous judge failed to initial that section of the Protection Order, and so she is back filing another one. He did not contest the first one, but now he is contesting this exact same one, under the orders of his mother, or someone. The judge warned that if he gave any statements in this protective order that it could have some bearing on his criminal case.
That’s messed up, this judge giving this fellow legal advice. Told him to plea the Fifth.
So, here we have a divorce, civil protection order and criminal trial.
She’s got her green card, and she finally has a counselor working with her on domestic violence with C-PTSD as the main issue. Her father from Canada visited and so too did her sister. For years my friend did not tell them about the full extent of this guy’s abuse.
I know the judicial system, but each new year, the system gets further bogged down, and the public defenders as a group are in crisis — not enough money made and absolute triple the caseload which should be allowed.
Broken broken broken. Remember Ross Perot, and NAFTA and that famous (among other things) statement during the 1992 presidential campaign that if NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) was not a two-way street, it would create a “ giant sucking sound ” of jobs going south to the cheap labor markets of Mexico?
Think of Capitalism as that broken broken broken sound. As in broken down to our bones broken by over policing, over taxing, over burdened, over worked, and under represented to include that tearing sound of social services safety nets frayed and almost immolated. Broken!
So here we are, no, with May 3 set for a settlement conference? This is something initiated some 26 years ago, since the court systems are broken and clogged, so now, this guy did not accept the plea, and so the judge stated that she will schedule the criminal case for trial, but a settlement conference is possible, so the ADA and the PD agreed to meet. The courtroom would be a neutral one (sic) and a judge would hear the strengths and weaknesses in both the prosecution’s and the defense’s cases. The defendent would be there in orange jumpsuit and shackles, and my friend would be there too.
A bargaining game, a sort of please settle (plea dice throwing) theater between the DA’s office and his Public Defender. Imagine that. All this time, all the time deputies came out, served a warrant on him, all the jail paperwork, the court paperwork, all the money paid for judges, clerks, ADAs, support staff, all the cops and all the infrastructure keeping this dance going.
Very hard indeed for someone, my friend, who is getting counseling now, after having one counselor who just stopped answering phone calls (that’s medical abandonment, but that’s a civil matter, yet another labyrith to course through).
Healing is a singularly tough thing in Capitalism when money buys power, representation, creates all the bells and whistles, etc., for the rich.
Ahh, broken criminal justice system 101.
Here, from Cindy Sheehan, an example of the criminal injustice system and the medical injustice system killing an elderly woman who was having a stroke. This is what needs defending, this broken, corrupt, polluted society? If you do not hate the thought of Zelensky in yet another photo op, yet more trillions to that country, then you are subhuman, like the Ukrainian leadership and Nazified military. Here, read this an weap:
I really don’t have too many words for this horrid event.
This poor lady apparently had a stroke and broke her ankle, and she was asked to leave the hospital, but she couldn’t.
So, what happened then? The compassionate (Nazis) workers at the hospital took pity and decided to treat her? Nope, they called the gestapo, I mean police, and she died in their custody.
Wait, I do have words—-remember during the past three years when we, the ones who rejected the Devil Juice, or rejected the dirty face nappies—were told that we were going to “kill Meemaw,” even if we were those Meemaws?
Remember when we were told that we could not go see our loved ones in hospital, or nursing facilities, so they had to die alone to prevent us from killing them? Or, grandparents and grandchildren were separated, not by miles, but by government diktat?
We live in Garbage Land where the Garbage People’s hospitals don’t heal, they kill, and where law enforcement doesn’t protect us, it protects the killers!
Don’t go to the hospital? We know that thousands of people were killed by stasi-protocol during the “pandemic” and counted as Covid deaths.
What if we lived somewhere other than Garbage Land and this poor woman could have been the one to call law enforcement and they would have come to help her and force the ER to treat her? Fuck.
I am distraught over this, but how many times does something like this happen off-camera? (Sheehan)
Oh heck, I can end this short diatribe with the end of the English Major. Sure, I got a couple of those degrees. Sure, not all in these humanities departments are stalwarts, but compared to S.T.E.M. folk, who will do any Eichmann thing to make bucks, to have job stability, to keep in the slipstream of the American Dream, they are not bad. Drugs, chemicals, applications, drones, rockets, surveillence tools, missiles, propaganda, all those amazing things that have intended and unintended consequences, so making bank means keeping silent, so S.T.E.M. are the quiet ones, the scientists and technologists and engineers who for the most part keep their mouths shut . . . for a price . . . a Bargain . . . . Faustian Bargain!
According to Robert Townsend, the co-director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project, which collects data uniformly but not always identically to internal enrollment figures, from 2012 to 2020 the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six per cent. Tufts lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while suny Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates—standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges—saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half. In 2018, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point briefly considered eliminating thirteen majors, including English, history, and philosophy, for want of pupils. (source)
“Enrollment in the humanities is in free fall at colleges around the country. What happened? by Nathan Heller
Imagine, forever chemicals in all living things. Science. STEM!
A new analysis finds that more than 330 species of animals across the globe – from polar bears to squirrels – carry in their bodies a class of chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also called PFAS.
Known as “forever chemicals,” because they do not break down as many others do, the substances have been linked in humans to risks for cancer, low birthweights, weakened childhood immunity, thyroid disease and other health problems.
Research has already shown that 99% of Americans have PFAS in their bodies. But this report released Wednesday by the Environmental Working Group shows more than 120 different forever chemicals were found in the blood serum or bodies of birds, tigers, monkeys, pandas, horses, cats, otters and other mammals.
Over 12,000 products have this shit in them. And the diseases? Studies have linked PFOA to kidney and testicular cancers, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, and other serious ailments in highly contaminated communities such as Parkersburg, West Virginia. Very low doses of PFAS in drinking water have been linked to immune system suppression including reduced vaccine efficacy and an increased risk of certain cancers, studies have found. PFAS are linked with reproductive and developmental problems as well as increased cholesterol and other health issues, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
You will not see some efficient, for-by-with-because of We the People judicial system holding to account these monster companies, again, companies that depend on, well, S.T.E.M. students. The humanities? Well, it is more than “just” English lit majors. In fact, if done right, the entire college and K12 systems would be integrating languages, arts, history, writing, literature, anthropology, and of course music, dance, theater and philosophy and ethics and so much more into an across the curriculum template, but instead, we have this sickness for more more more to keep the engines of capitalism going, a predatory and casino capitalism which is now bio-security, security, surveillence capitalism going. Until we have this disjointed and bizarre religion of science and engineering and technology as some panacea for the crumbling American empire.
Without the “A” in S.T.E.A.M, all we have are Eichmanns from a different mother. Arts.
And it all comes down to those in STEM who don’t give a shit about discourse, debate, history, knowledge outside their fucking field of intended and unintended dirty consequences. I have said this a hundred times in hundreds of articles, it all comes down, now, to that Freudian slip, that dirty man, Edward Bernays:
It’s not like they even hide their intent. The notorious World Economic Forum has been forthcoming about their plans for the rest of us. The forum’s founder, Klaus Schwab, even wrote a book about it, titled “Covid-19: The Great Reset.”
Within his vision of how society should be engineered going forward, Schwab’s stand on “stakeholder capitalism” sounds altruistic at face value. But what he doesn’t mention is that his vision includes the same group of elites controlling even more aspects of our lives. Envisioning themselves as “trustees of society” they will continue to profit from the results of that expanded control. He recently publicly stated at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs:
“What the fourth industrial revolution will lead to is a fusion of our physical, digital and biological identity” explaining how upcoming technology will allow authorities to “intrude into the hitherto private space of our minds, reading our thoughts and influencing our behavior.”
This concept does not give me a warm and fuzzy feeling…
These elite decision makers don’t hide their hypocrisy either. When these elite groups meet to discuss (our) future, they often talk about how we (the Masses) need to reduce our carbon footprints. No mention that they arrived to their mountaintop retreat meetings individually, in their own private jets, (no jet-pooling for them!) wasting more resources in one event than the average person ever could or would in their day to day lives..
Like it or not, or believe it or not, social engineering is not new. For those who don’t believe in or understand the concept of social engineering, I suggest watching the 2002 BBC Documentary “The Century of the Self” about the life of Edward Louis Bernays (1891-1995).
It’s fascinating, enlightening and to be honest, more than just a bit creepy.
Bernays, the Austrian-American nephew of Sigmund Freud, was almost single-handedly responsible for re-purposing the concept of “propaganda” in America into “Pubic Relations.” Sounds much more innocent, doesn’t it?
In his first campaign, he was recruited by President Woodrow Wilson to Wilson’s Committee on Public Information created in 1917. Wilson tasked Bernays with intentionally using propaganda to influence the American population to willingly engage in World War I. (source)
Until we are here, where judges still wear black robes, and where the systems deem us as children, or as sheep. This courtroom was with a judge who treated the people on the other end of the phone line (it gets phoned in now, injustice) like imbeciles or children. Bernays is the monster of the century. That 2002 documentary is rough and out of favor now, but telling.
Students have neither the wisdom nor the experience to know what they need to know.
— Gregory Petsko.
STEM will do shit for humanity. Truly. Listen to my interview of Gregory Petsko, “Science and the Arts/Humanities: A Marriage Made in Heaven” — scroll down:
We talked about this essay, “Save university arts from the bean counters” by Gregory Petsko Nature volume 468, page1003 (2010) Scientists must reach across the divide and speak up for campus colleagues in arts and humanities departments, says Gregory Petsko.
Teamwork, physical activity, positive reinforcement and community recognition and participation.
This year’s Lincoln County Special Olympics basketball teams will be hitting Turner, Oregon for state wide championship games.
Getting there has been a team effort: state level Special Olympics staff and administrators; our local Lincoln County directors, Donna and Eric Thorpe; family and friends; volunteers; and the players.
From 2020 up to part of 2022, the face-to-face S.O. games and practices were put on hold. This year, the basketball participants in Lincoln County number more than 20. Our Saturday practices have parents, grandparents and supporters watching these athletes hit the court and do their warm-ups, skills activities and scrimmages.
Did I mention FUN? As one of the coaches, I have seen these participants go from reluctance to beaming happiness to get energized by safe fair competition.
As part of Disabilities Awareness Month (March), all people celebrating the gains made with such legislation as the Americans with Disability Act understand how difficult it has been to get young and old living with developmental, physical, and intellectual disabilities into the hearts and minds of mainstream society.
My early work was with United Cerebral Palsy of Oregon and Southwest Washington. My clients were people with an array of disabilities, not just cerebral palsy. My training was centered around putting people first, working with clients on their dream jobs, and helping shift a prejudicial culture into a fair one. That is, I worked with Portland area employers and businesses to encourage hiring clients with dreams and aspirations of independence through a job.
My work was around “carving” jobs or “specialized” employment. There were really only two or three degrees of separation: many of the hiring managers, business owners and workers in these businesses have lived experiences with family and friends who have a disability.
People first language is about thinking of young and old as people “living” with a disability, which isn’t the only defining factor in their lives.
There are five important federal laws protecting individuals with disabilities from discrimination in employment and the job application process: Americans with Disabilities Act; Rehabilitation Act; Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act; Vietnam Era Veterans’ Readjustment Assistance Act; Civil Service Reform Act.
This is just a short list of the protections this society has decided are important for our fellow citizens living with autism, fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, cerebral palsy, Fragile X and a number of other developmental/intellectual disabilities.
Shifting from housing, employment, and education rights for all citizens including those with developmental-intellectual-psychological disabilities, we grasp the importance of activities of daily living as another engine of inclusion. The arts and athletics are part and parcel of inclusion.
I’m working with athletes as part of the Special Olympics program, but I have attended competitions in what is called Special Olympics Unified Sports. Right now, 1.2 million people worldwide take part in Unified Sports. Unified Sports joins people with and without intellectual disabilities on the same team.
This blending of those living with and those without intellectual disabilities creates a win-win-win situation. This program puts these participants in a unique position of support, understanding each others’ unique talents and certainly teamwork.
Unified games include highly skilled basketball players assisting those utilizing wheelchairs and walkers. There are “able” bodied athletes who guide individuals with Down syndrome take shots. Even the officials allow for leeway with traveling and breaking of the three-second rule inside the key.
When I was a high school wrestler in Arizona, one of the most rewarding and challenging matches I had was with the Arizona State School for the Deaf and Blind in Tucson. I was grappling at 163 pounds, and my matches with ASDB were tougher than some of the ones I had in mining towns like Globe and Ajo.
I did follow through later at university volunteering with judo and swimming coaching for youth with disabilities. I even had the opportunity as a dive master to assist an organization providing specialized underwater wheelchair-dive equipment for divers who were physically challenged.
Eunice Shriver founded Special Olympics in 55 years ago. Shriver (1921-2009) envisioned the impact sport competitions have, believing the same positive influence would benefit people with disabilities. The creation of S.O. at the first Special Olympics Games, held at Soldier Field in Chicago, Illinois, in 1968 is the athletic competition’s birth.
Tim Shriver put it best: “If you look at her brothers and sisters and all that they accomplished, no one will stand any higher than my mother.” (source)
Life changing, life enhancing, life affirming. Special Olympics Oregon serves over 12,000 participants each year through sports, education, and athlete health programs at no cost to the athletes and their families. That’s the win-win-win we can all celebrate in March.
Working with individuals with psychiatric disabilities is pretty challenging, i.e. since getting folk housing and work is almost impossible because of the triple bias of our cutlure around: The National Institute of Mental Health reports that as many as 1 in 4 adults in the United States will suffer from a diagnosable psychiatric condition in any given year. Being in a college environment can be helpful to students with psychiatric disabilities as it often provides a structure and routine that aids students in the recovery process. Many psychological conditions are treated using a combination of medication, therapy, and support. Because of the social stigma that often accompanies psychiatric disabilities, students may be reluctant to disclose their needs for accommodations. (source)
Amazing how many people live with these, and we can see that there are co-occurring disorders. Imagine, being born with an intellectual disability which is categorized as a developmental disability. For example, within the context of education and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), a law that aims to ensure educational services to children with disabilities throughout the nation, the definition of IDD and the types of conditions that are considered IDD might be different from the definitions and categories used by the Social Security Administration (SSA) to provide services and support for those with disabilities. These definitions and categories might also be different from those used by healthcare providers and researchers.
It might be helpful to think about IDDs in terms of the body parts or systems they affect or how they occur. For example:
Nervous system These disorders affect how the brain, spinal cord, and nervous system function, which can affect intelligence and learning. These conditions can also cause other issues, such as behavioral disorders, speech or language difficulties, seizures, and trouble with movement. Cerebral palsy,Down syndrome, Fragile X syndrome, and autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are examples of IDDs related to problems with the nervous system.
Sensory system These disorders affect the senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell) or how the brain processes or interprets information from the senses. Preterm infants and infants exposed to infections, such as cytomegalovirus, may have reduced function with their eyesight and/or hearing. In addition, being touched or held can be difficult for people with ASDs.
Metabolism These disorders affect how the body uses food and other materials for energy and growth. For example, how the body breaks down food during digestion is a metabolic process. Problems with these processes can upset the balance of materials available for the body to function properly. Too much of one thing, or too little of another can disrupt overall body and brain functions. Phenylketonuria (PKU) and congenital hypothyroidism are examples of metabolic conditions that can lead to IDDs.
Degenerative Individuals with degenerative disorders may seem or be typical at birth and may meet usual developmental milestones for a time, but then they experience disruptions in skills, abilities, and functions because of the condition. In some cases, the disorder may not be detected until the child is an adolescent or adult and starts to show symptoms or lose abilities. Some degenerative disorders result from other conditions, such as untreated problems of metabolism. (source)
In a society with all priorities upside down, where preventative health care is counter to capitalism, where precautionary principle is laughed at, where war against nations and war against ecology-community-culture-people-thought prevails, imagine the uphill battle in the arena of recognizing people born with developmental disabilities, and the entire suite of challenges with mainstreaming, inclusion, respect.
Did that human stain get disqualified for making fun of a report with a disability? Remember? Trump waved his arms in an bizarre and mocking manner at a rally in South Carolina while talking about a comment made by Serge Kovaleski. Kovaleski has a chronic condition called arthrogryposis, which limits the movement of his arms.
No immediate calls for him to stand down and go the way of the Dodo. All those Trump supporters living with adults and youth with developmental disabilities. All those veterans with physical disabilities. Imagine how easy it would be to disqualify all these human stains for who they really are.
Here, the trailer of Alien Boy:
You have to feel rage after watching Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse, a feature-length documentary six years in the making by director Brian Lindstrom chronicling the life and death of Portland, Oregon, punk rock poet James Chasse, whose life ended on September 17th, 2006 at the hands of Portland police officers following “behavior” that they deemed “suspicious” enough to warrant a brutal beating that Chasse with 26 broken bones in 16 of his ribs and with a punctured lung. Chasse was also tased during the altercation. Within an hour of this one-sided altercation with Portland police, Chasse was dead in a cell where he’d been dragged unmercifully despite his own pleas of pain and suffering. Even in a world where we know those living with mental illness are often misunderstood and mistreated, Chasse’s encounter is particularly devastating and horrifying.
Chasse, diagnosed with schizophrenia as a teenager, was 42-years-old on the night that he died in an altercation that was seen by dozens of witnesses and captured on video casting significant doubt on the testimony provided by the Portland police officers involved in the altercation. Where they reported a man to be “combative,” most witnesses described Chasse as far more frightened. Hospital security camera footage shows some of the main officers involved in the altercation bragging about the incident and treating the obviously suffering man with continued brutality.
Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse vividly and painfully captures Chasse’s lifelong struggles with schizophrenia while also examining in detail the actions of the police officers responsible for his death, officers who were never charged and never held accountable nor whom never accepted any responsibility for his death beyond stating that they followed police procedures.
It never ends, these stories of how people with disabilities are attacked verbally and physically. On March 18, 2006, Otto Zehm was beaten, shocked and hog-tied by police officers in a north Spokane Zip Trip, after he was accused erroneously of theft. He died two days later at a Spokane hospital. Thompson was the first responding officer.
On March 18, 2006, Zehm was in a Zip Trip in north Spokane when he was confronted by Officer Karl F. Thompson Jr., who was responding to an erroneous report that Zehm had stolen money from the ATM where he cashed his checks. After a struggle that included police baton strikes, Taser jolts and the arrival of six other officers, Zehm was hog-tied and a medical mask intended only for use with a dedicated oxygen supply strapped over his nose and mouth. He stopped breathing and died two days later.
Then, on May 21, 2012, the Spokane City Council closed one chapter of the excessive force case by finalizing the $1.67 million settlement with the family of Otto Zehm. The deal was reached in mediation between city representatives, including the mayor and Zehm family attorneys.
The idea is those working with youth and adults with disabilities, including Special Olympics, get more out of the experience than the actual athletes we coach and mentor.
We all start out as kiddos:
Growing up: Otto Zehm in a class picture at Stevens Elementary during the 1977-78 school year.
What is being paid for being sick . . . a human right, the right thing to do, a luxury?
Again, these missives by yours truly do not rattle the world in terms of prominence and great analytical deft tied to geopolitics, politics, global issues, the proxy war(s) and more. It’s called Ground Truthing, and for some, it is BORING, unseemly, just plain old pedestrian.
However, I disagree, making a point to push the POV, the narrative, the autobiographical as true journalism, true discussion of how rotten and rotting Capitalism is, and then how each step/rung of the broken ladder is emblematic of how disaster and usury and casino capitalism does its dirty deeds. Sy Hersh may have a story that is making the rounds, even though the logic and the tell-tale historical comments from neocons proved beyond a doubt the private pipeline was blown up by USA, a la collective lackeys in NATO.
So here it is, simply: I had to throw in yet another towel, this time for a part-time gig in crumbling Lincoln County (certainly reflective of other crumbling counties, except this one has multimillionaires building milion dollar-plus homes on the sea while the county is being gutted worker wise because there is NO housing for slave wagers.
That gig was school bus driver. I have friends who have done that gig, and my hat is off to them. But, alas, one slice of one job pretty much can be scaled up to the fact that capitalism is about absolute exploitation, to the point of murder in the name of working sick.
Here we are, with drivers, many of whom are over 62 years of age, many in their late 60s, and some in their seventies. And, the work conditions include working inside closed in offices that are petri dishes and cesspools for viruses. Imagine that, a school bus driver working while coughing and spitting up green and black mucus. Here, the barely one hour (2/17) old resignation letter:
Dear So and So:
Yes, I’ve put my feet into the First Student pond and have learned this is not my best option for part-time work. The main reason is drivers working sick and passing along those so-called “colds.”
The reality has been made clear to all of us by First Student employees that Lincoln County has a driver shortage. That is the unfortunate nature of this coastal location. However, when a driver is sick, he or she should take days off to recuperate and to not pass along the disease. Ideal? That’s an entirely different discussion. Furthermore, I have observed many times just at the Waldport yard, drivers push through and continue working while sick.
My issue is being stuck in an enclosed tiny yard office with no open air circulation and the heater blasting with sick employees. Add to that scenario, the enclosed buses and sick drivers. You know all about these conditions as managers.
Look, I have worked in many places, including K12 schools in several states, in prisons, and in twin plants with hundreds of workers in Juarez, to name a few congested places. I’ve never gotten sick!
However, the so-called crud that has been circulating here in the Waldport (it’s a viral upper respiratory illness) yard just continues to get passed on to the next and the next driver. Exposing myself to enclosed small spaces isn’t my idea of getting better and well. One driver I monitored with was hacking up so much that he looked pretty pale; unfortunately, that gentleman told me he had the lung infection for weeks. On top of that, the poor gentleman ended up with cardiac issues and had to stop driving his route.
And, of course, we have youth riding the buses, and just yesterday one student was spitting up pretty nasty mucus and when we picked him up from Excel, the paraeducator who released him stated he couldn’t come back to school until he was seen by a doctor or greatly improved. She stated this poor youth was spitting up black mucus in the classroom.
I never get colds, the so-called flu or respiratory illnesses, UNTIL now. Coughing bus drivers packed into a small space at 6 am, well, that’s more than some petri dish incubating a virus ready to be passed from one driver to the next.
In any case, too bad for me. I was enjoying the possibility of getting behind the wheel of a bus. I knew the risks there with students, but I was assured that I could open windows and blast the driver fans to circulate the stagnant air (not foolproof to avoid a virus, or fungal infection, but still, better than nothing).
Am I too sick to do a two hour run today? Of course not, that is, I am not in bed and running a fever. Am I contagious? Of course I am, that’s how viruses work. How long are we contagious with the so-called crud? You can spread the common cold from a few days before symptoms appear until all of the symptoms are gone. Most people will be contagious for up to 2 weeks. Symptoms are usually worse during the first 2 to 3 days, and this is when you’re most likely to spread the virus.
Staffing shortages, determined people who work through all their illnesses and ailments, and a system — First Student — that seemingly forces contagious people to work and then possibly pass around a mutating virus is not the rodeo I want sign up for.
This is much more worse than some thin skinned punk like me jumping ship. In reality, the revolving disease conveyor belt is what is killing people, old people, and again, there are special needs youth who are especially vulnerable, and in the mainstream classrooms, there are many many youth with allergies, chronic illnesses and compromised immune systems. The sprays, the antimicrobial junk, the stupidity of closed in classrooms, or classrooms in general, all of that, plus bad food, bad air and bad medicines and jabs, we have these super varients and super bugs and new bugs, all mixed up because US is a society of closed in thinkers, broken on every level, both in preventative medicine, and just working with people with major physical and psychic issues.
There are no free clinic, no free dental outfits, for people who do not have insurance or anything that covers preventative and immediate ailments, so we work sick. Again, I could have stuck it out, but truly, I have had this crud for a week, and this morning, I didn’t think the upper respiratory system would be so clunked up since I take a million micro grams of amazing supplements and tons of veggies and fruits in smoothies and get outside and find sun hitting my face whenever I can.
This entire planned bioweapon has done the first stage of a five stage freefall. First, messing with bat viruses and messing with gain of function and serial passage and so much more tied to mRNA and DNA morphing has created this new stage of the next stage of making people pawns in the controlled demolition of work, safety nets, food safety nets.
Now, I’ve written about my job applications here over four years, and the interviews, and then, the rejections. Amazing, no, and I have yet another today, from the same County outfit for the same position I applied for and interviewed for less than a year ago. I went onto that Oregon government jobs page, logged in, and, bam, I see (it’s depressing) dozens of job applications since 2013.
Well, I am not a lying, cheating dude like King Sisyphos, but it seems so apropos the image above.
Again, so many people in the billions have it so much worse than I do, don’t get me wrong. Yep, and here we are with my country (sic) that sanctions Syria, that is playing this CosPlay with Elensky (remember, ZioAzovNaziLensky banned the letter “Z” in his comedy central country). How many dead or soon to be or long to be dead in Ohio? While Biden and his Bumblers shoot down weather balloons, and while the EU sanctions Russia in the form of “no more toilets of port-a-potties”?
Hundreds of thousands on the brink of death and disease in Turkey and Syria, while the weather balloons get shot down:
But really, AMR — There’s even an awareness week in November, and then, see the dumb-downed video below informing adults about AMR!
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) happens when microorganisms (such as bacteria, fungi, viruses, and parasites) develop the ability to continue to grow, even when they are exposed to antimicrobial medicines that are meant to kill them or limit their growth (such as antibiotics, antifungals, antivirals, antimalarials, and anthelmintics).
As a result, the medicines become ineffective and infections persist in the body, increasing the risk of spreading to others.
World Antimicrobial Awareness Week (WAAW) is celebrated from 18-24 November every year to improve awareness and understanding of antimicrobial resistance. The 2022 theme is ‘Preventing Antimicrobial Resistance Together’. It encourages all sectors to use antimicrobials prudently, to work together and strengthen preventive measures addressing AMR.
Now, I wonder why workers go to work sick? Cuz they miss the office, the driver’s seat, the forklift, the hospital food? Never ever do these oppressors ask what is wrong with the SYSTEM?
Year after year, as cold and flu season approaches, employers, their managers and their HR departments remind workers to stay home if they’re sick.
Year after year, employees come to work anyway—with bad colds, full-blown flu and other maladies.
They do it despite warnings that by coming to work, sick employees risk infecting others, who, in turn, can go home and infect their families. All it takes are cold or flu germs left on the workplace’s microwave or elevator buttons, bathroom faucet handles, coffee machines or refrigerator handles to spread illness.
Accountemps’ online survey, which included responses from 2,800 workers employed in offices in 28 U.S. cities, found that:
One-third said they always go to the office with cold or flu symptoms.
Most employees who admitted to going to work while sick live in Charlotte, N.C., and Miami.
54 percent of those who report to the office with cold or flu symptoms said they do so because they have too much work to do. Most respondents who said they report to the office while ill because of an overwhelming workload were from New York City, Minneapolis and Miami.
40 percent said they went to work ill because they didn’t want to use a sick day.
Miami, Phoenix and San Diego professionals felt the most pressure from their bosses to be present when sick.
More employees ages 25 to 40 reported going to work sick than respondents of other ages. (source)
Well, let’s deep six this piece now. I could go on and on about collective bargaining (this outfit, First Student, is anti union, though there are school districts that get the unionization as part of the deal). Go to the Cinncinattie headquartered First Student and see what they do by gaming the tax payers, since this is that famous (infamous) public-private partnership, AKA ripoff.
The PR spin makes it sound like a philanthropy: “Today, First Student, the leader in home-to-school transportation in the Northwest, announced it has agreed to assume 30 school bus routes initially awarded to its competitor Student Transportation of America (STA), acknowledging it could not provide the district with sufficient drivers or buses to fulfill the terms of the contract awarded in April 2021. First Student delivers reliable, quality services, including full-service transportation and management, special-needs transportation, route optimization, and scheduling, maintenance, and charter services with a fleet of about 44,000 buses. (source)”
Let me say that for Lincoln County School District, the contract, I was told, was $1 million for 2022, and will be renegotiated for more. That’s 11 schools, and the diesel is paid for by TAXPAYERS. And, this million dollars doesn’t include field trips and sports trips. Those are extra gravy train.
It is all a fraud, and when you figure out First Student is a Belgium equity firm, you get the picture: With a workforce of 50,500 employees and a fleet of 44,050 vehicles, the company bus fleet drives over 550 million miles every year. Formerly a division of FirstGroup, First Student was sold to EQT Infrastructure on 21 July 2021.
One of the great enduring disasters over the last half a century is the relentless assault on the notion that government is, in fact, an *efficient* force for good. That attack has been carried out by the endless droning on by media talking heads, politicians and “economists” that somehow the private sector is more efficient and better managed than government services. No matter how many times CEOs bankrupt their companies or loot companies for outrageous pay and benefits, the myth of private sector “efficiency” continues and also, as an aside, breeds the unconscionable attack against government workers.
It’s almost comical actually and exposes how deeply ideological the canard of private sector “efficiency” really is. It’s an attack on government as an idea by those who want to enrich themselves endlessly and want no countervailing force to slow down their robbery of the people. It’s a fraud—on the facts, on the numbers. (read on = source)
Oh, we are all pawns in this madness, in these billionaires’ and millionaires’ schemes to steal from the public, and boy do they steal. First Student was involved in a lawsuit in Oregon, class action, involving wage theft. This is a rampant problem with bus drivers who show up early, have to get the bus through an 90 point inspection in the dark, and have only so much time to do that before the route starts.
Here, the letter response to my resignation. It could have been worse:
Thank you for your detailed account of the situation at the Waldport office. When I am not on route myself, I make it a habit to visit all areas and check in with our employees. As I am currently driving a bus, I am not able to visit while employees are on the premises. This means that I need to rely on lead drivers and other staff to provide operations reports to me on a regular basis.
I am also sorry that your experience with First Student has been so negative. I understand your concerns; however, I do not agree with your statement that we force ill employees to report to work.
I expect an employee who shows any symptoms of an illness that could be contagious to inform management within the parameters of our Attendance Policy. This way we can be prepared for the next run that needs to be covered. Of course, there are moments when we have last minute callouts, during which we have to make quick coverage decisions. Another issue is that employees/areas decide not to report any illnesses to management. As already mentioned, I rely on those reports to make the decision to send someone home…and I am known for sending people home when they are sick.
Again, I appreciate you sharing your thoughts, as they lend themselves as points of constructive criticism, and opportunities for improvement. I wish you the best for your future.
Your final check will be processed today.
Respectfully, D
There you have it. As if I didn’t know the attendance policy or that last minute cancellations due to health occur (there were many in my few weeks with the company). As if I don’t know what “forcing” people to work sick really means when you are flagging and in need of income in a place where prices are out the roof, and when a company like First Student DOESN’T pay for sick leave early in our tenure. And what is PTO, that formula, after a year, working 20 hours a week, plus or minus?
Oh, the trillions poured into war offensive machines and bombs and weapons, and, USA is using Civil War era braking systems. Now, where is ZioAzovNaziLensky to the rescue? Can he beg from London and Berlin for some millions to help the Yankees fix their old, broke train and rail systems?
Railroad workers have warned people in power that a disaster of this magnitude could happen without stricter rules and safety measures on trains. We need the Department of Transportation to take this seriously and force companies to use braking technology that will save lives. Right now, most train companies, including the Norfolk Southern train that derailed in Ohio, use braking technology from the Civil War (yes you read that correctly).
So extrapolate from one incident, one train, one derailment, and then build upon the scaffolding: America is broken, but intentionally and with criminality at its core. With the lobotomized populus in various forms of Infantilization, Stockholm Syndrome, Battered Worker Syndrome, as well as GAD — general anxiety disorder — how difficult is it for Mad Men and other Marketers, propagandists, behavior manipulators, endless Presstitutes Spewing Viral-Tinged Lies to pull a million things over the collective eyes of the citizens?
The C19 game, the planned pandemic, the incredible death of the old, isolation, thuggery and outright fascism, no wonder now the USA will accept any stupidity the media feed them — Chinese tactical war balloons; aliens in our midst; Ukraine is winning a war; a nuclear attack by the USA will not result in counter-measures, so, a limited nuclear was is completely acceptable; unlimited taxdollars moved away from the possibility of good, of infrastructure, of health and mental counseling safety nets, of all those issue easily addressed — poverty, a majority of older Americans withOUT enough money to make it into old age and decripity, failing education, the dropping out of teachers and doctors and nurses and so many other necessary professionals — into the pockets of the most corrupt CEOs and middle managers and that old Comedy Team of Zelensky and the Azov!. Oh, this is the corruption on every level that is capitalism. Corruption to the point of a declaration of war, i.e. planning, setting up, conducting and finishing up the blowing up of a pipeline (Imagine if Russia or China sent underwater torpedo drones to the USA’s Gulf Coast looking for Shell and Texaco pipes to blow up!).
Not only have both gained huge export surpluses from the jump in gas prices, Norway has directly replaced Russian gas to the tune of some $40 billion per year. From 2023 the United States will appear in that list in second place behind Norway, following the opening in the last two months of two new liquefied natural gas terminals in Germany, built to replace Russian gas with U.S. and Qatari supplies.]
Pres. Biden: “If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
Reporter: “But how will you do that, exactly, since…the project is in Germany’s control?”
Biden: “I promise you, we will be able to do that.”
In a sick sort of way, this is A-Okay, under a Republican POTUS or Democratic POTUS. “If we don’t do it, get it, steal it, destroy it, then China will. It’s all ours to do with what we want.”
This is the Americanism spewed daily, and I will highlight my own disgust watching the Stupor Bowl Sunday sickness, a first for me in over 20 years.
But continuing looking at the managed decline of USA:
My fellow struggling folk and those with a few more shekels in their retirement accounts, believe in the possibility of the end of the world through nukes or climate chaos, but no way in hell seeing/imagining the end of Capitalism — it is casino, predatory, syphillitic, disaster, inverted totalitarian CAPITALISM I am talking about, no doubts about it. Daily, the examples pop out like hernias in old working men and women as they toil away in their 70s and 80s until they plop dead or stroked out on the job. These are the bus drivers, the school bus drivers:
they hate unions
the hate progressivism
they long for a time (their past) when there really were things better for the majority (Not True) — it’s a psychological impediment, sort of a glorification of the past even when the past was messed up and full of turmoil and struggle
they are working sick, daily — for example, these school bus drivers . . . . A million dollar annual contract to service 11 schools, and the company gets the diesel free from the county, and that annual contract is only for school days and school, back and forth. Add on special events and sporting events where kiddos and their teachers and coaches need to travel to another town, another county, and that too is another add on, separate contract.
Do you see how much it costs just to live in the 80 Percent Group? How much money is siphoned from worthy projects into war and the whoring world of politics and pork barrels and out and out graft and cost overruns and missing tens of billions of dollars unaccounted for monthly.
So, you end up with transportation — just one modality — completely broken by CAPITALISTS and Capitalism:
+–+
Again, one example, one group of circumstances, and then extrapolate these into all the other arenas and issues in this country. Does it make sense that 69 year olds are working with pleurisy, pneumonia, heart disease . . . hacking, coughing, feverish, spitting up sputum galore? They are short handed, and the system of Capitalism ruling a public contracts — public school transportation — is made to fail, made to break. Without strong public service and community service ethos, without a system of managing resources and managing human “resources,” and spending to keep youth educated (yes, we need total revamping of K12, and community colleges and state universities need major overhauling), we will never have people thinking driving a bus for a year or two to make money and get experience and to give back to the community is an absolute grand thing.
Instead, we have retired folk, some scraping by badly, others not doing terribly poor economics wise, waking up a 4am to get to work at 6 am. Try being on a bus with Covid19 unruly youth, hacking up all sorts of new diseases because of lockdowns, antibiotic resistent microbes and those new and more powerful vaccine-induced varients.
Note: I do not get sick, yet, after a month of hundreds of students on busses, 6 to 18 years of age, and then all these old people hacking up amazingly disgusting nasal, throat and lung matter, I have a “cold” of sorts — a ring around my throat and in the upper bronchial area, tightness and some of that hack-up ugliness. Throughout the entire 2019-2022 planned demic, no colds, gut issues, nothing, and I have been exposed to hundreds of people.
These issues — working sick, working almost dead — just are never put into the equation of Capitalism Kills . . . or, A Military Industrial Complex Lust Destroys. There is always talk about the Half Time show, or those leeches — actors and celebrities — acting as Dunkin Donuts workers, or drive thru burger servers and how cute and cool those Pizza Hut ads are . . . And did you see the child slavery and economic war ads for EV cars by Kevin Bacon and his daughter (Hyundai — that company you know, the one with the child labor issue — Hyundai Motor Co said it is in talks with the U.S. Department of Labor to resolve concerns about child workers in its U.S. supply chain, and the company is taking corrective actions after a Reuters investigation found children as young as 12).
Well, no, multimillionaire talentless Bacon did NOT do THAT public service ad, but the same old dumb-downing infantile ad pushing EV automobile hell is what he soft shoed like a bloody elementary kid.
While there are all sorts of containments in society (see Forte’s list below), the worst kind is cultural.
The kettling of free speech. The horrific bandwagon propaganda, forcing youth to never color outside the lines, or to deviate from the redneck line of thinking. And when I mean redneck, it’s Democratic party stuff, the rednecks like Pelosi or Schumer or Biden, not just the Duck Dynasty freaks. “Redneck” I have reappropriated to mean, well, just plain old American — white, brown, Native, Asian Black. Anyone who wakes up every day and believes no matter what and no matter how bad things are that America — U$A — is invaluable to human and other animal kind.
Forte discusses the next manufactured virus, as in SARS-MERS-Watch OUT Krakan. However, the real virus which is spread liberally, and has been since the founding slave owners, has been a belief in property rights above all else (except in cases of takings, emminent domain), and the rights of Corporations hands down do supercede the rights of the public, the environment, communities. We might not be able to fight city hall, but trying to fight GM, GE, GMOs, Bayer, Pfizer, you name the grand wizards of unethical and illegal finance and capitalism on steroids, impossible since they have the lobbies, the lawyers, and the politicians, and they write the laws.
So bad the mess we got ourselves into that we end up in self-constainment . . . .
Until we have this national religious holiday, this Stupor Bowl, this 12 hours of coverage on the day of, and a whole year leading up to the Bowl of millions of minutes of TV or digital ink covering College and then Professional Football. Children (aldults), wearing 4X jerseys with whichever racist mascot fits their particular multi-billion dollar team, with team owners and overlords and media monsters who might make them blush if they really knew who they were, their heroes too.
The players? All pawns, all lackeys, but highly paid ones. This pissing contest, the guys and gals who know players, their stats, their lifestyles, their religions, their families, the whole shooting match, oh, this is the stupor in the toilet bowl and in professional and university-college sports. Taking the mind off the prize, that is, distraction, but worse. Containment.
You have to have skin in the game, a dog in the fight and some commitment to something during this sick day. As I stated before, I put myself through the pre-game and some of the game to just see what sort of crack and opium and booze and sedatives are being delivered by Madison Avenue, the Stenographers, the bombast of entertainment and info-tainment and sports entertainment.
Imagine that, the first time two people identifying as Black on opposite teams as starting quarterbacks — Eagles and Kansas City. The personal profiles of those heathens were sappy, and the worst I have seen ever.
The Fake Woke Bowl. And, all those hundreds of thousands of dollars for fuel and flight crew, for the flyover, yet another Woke Moment:
“For the first time in a Super Bowl, we will have an all-female flyover crew to kick off Super Bowl 57”
Here an African-American writer:
Super Bowl 57 is the Blackest, most woke Super Bowl ever. Sorry haters! | Opinion We had the Black national anthem, Rihanna and two Black starting quarterbacks for the first time ever. This wasn’t the Super Bowl. This was Wakanda.
In the first half, after Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce scored, he broke out a highly NSFW version of the “stanky leg” dance. I’m going to count that as part of the The Black Super Bowl, too.
Yes, some of this is tongue-in-cheek, but a lot isn’t. The Super Bowl has become not just a game or a party, but also in some ways a mirror for us all. It reflects what we love, what we believe in, what we hate, what we want, what we don’t. (Freeman, U$A Today)
You get it, right? Amazing stories of derailment (one in Ohio, daily many times around the world). You get more and more evidence of the planned pandemic as a huge PSYOPS and military operation, both the SARS-CoV2 and the jabs. You get the fake war in Ukraine, with a dirty poliltician, a thief, an abuser of his people, of the Slavs, or the Goyim — Zelensky — getting onto every Zoom giant screen TV event on earth; into all the chambers of the Anglo Saxon powers, and the Jewish ones, too. Imagine that, a stupid dirty thing, the super bowl, reflecting “what we love, what we believe in, what we hate, what we want, what we don’t.” This is from a Black man, my word.
Alas, the containment is in the hip-hop, the jazz of old, the thieves who stole the money of Black musicians, and the white muscians who stole the lyrics and music of Black musicians. And entire fleets of aircrafts craft carriers chugging along with those middle men and middle women, all snuggled together with the Crypto Cool Ones, with the PayDay Loan fellows, plotting to strip every penny from us, the Contained. It is a giant pawn shop, USA, a giant Repo outfit, and we have the performers (everyone in this racket is a thespian).
Oh, the irony, oh the containment. Rich and famous, loud and luscious, overhyped and undereducated. Millionaires. Billionaires. And, again, the redneck, too, singing bombs bursting in air:
Oh, three fellows stood up in the Moose Lodge, with the beer, the green tinted big screen, the crappy speakers, and alas, tears in their eyes, and others stood up too, and they all put their hands over their hearts, you know, pledge allegiance to the flag.Or, oh say can you spy, by the dawn’s early robbery . . . they vauntingly swore to send havoc and war from sea to shining sea!
Man oh man, it’s all in the method, in the madness of saying you’ll bomb, and then denying, and then a few months later, regaling in the destruction of Germany’s (an ally?) pipeline!
Pres. Biden: “If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
Reporter: “But how will you do that, exactly, since…the project is in Germany’s control?”
Biden: “I promise you, we will be able to do that.”
We are being contained, and with the next and the next manufactured virus, things will be worse:
“What is a public health approach to crime?”
We have a basic outline of an answer. A “public health approach to crime” involves:
Hierarchy: white collar crimes are excluded; the focus is on crimes alleged to have been committed by members of the working class, particularly youths.
Emergency: implementing extraordinary measures, which can venture into the extra-legal domain; also, this heightens executive power. Democratic debate is neither invited nor factored into any of the decision-making.
Totalitarianism: crackdowns combined with surveillance, are an attempt to close down a social system. Police become the new instruments of “public health”.
Lockdowns: borrowing from/imitating the Chinese–originated and Chinese–promoted policy and practice implemented to “fight Covid,” which Trinidad like so many other countries imported, there is an invention of an existential crisis that requires radical containment measures.
IndiscriminatePunishment: collective punishment, on all members of a designated socioeconomic sector, without any evidence or formal charges laid, without any trials, and even without a logic that rationalized the action as fair or appropriate.
Economic intervention: the state assumes the right to intervene in an industry, by force, and cancel the exercise of the right to private property.
Confiscation: the state then places itself in charge of the occupied industry which was targeted by the lockdown. (Max Forte)
Well, enough said. I had all sorts of tangents and meaningful critques on that Stupor Bowl to carry forth with. A million teachable moments. But I am too tired of the railing today.
Tied of the United States of Amnesia:
NSA spying row: Denmark accused of helping US spy on European officials. The Defence Intelligence Service (FE) collaborated with the US National Security Agency (NSA) to gather information, according to Danish public service broadcaster DR. Intelligence was allegedly collected on other officials from Germany, France, Sweden and Norway. Similar allegations emerged in 2013. (BBC)
Oh yeah, the billion dollar distraction festival was about the 51 commercials aired:
The brand that promotes itself as a fresh-food alternative to mass produced pet fare was founded less than a decade ago and prevailed as the first of its kind. It was also the first “sentimental” ad to win since 2015 with Budweiser’s “Lost Dog.”
Ad Meter panelists were tasked with voting on all 51 commercials from Super Bowl Sunday, rating them on a scale from 1 to 10. Below are complete results in order of average score. (here, and it is disgusting, man, that Americans and U$A Today concentrate — confusion, distract, contain — Americans with this shit!) source
At least I received a few emails on Super Bowl Sunday regarding some of my missives here. Read those fans’ notes:
Hello- Nine years ago I was diagnosed with a nonverbal learning disability. I am now pushing 62, and in reality no better off. I mean it is better to know what it is that’s derailed so much of my life, but without NLD being in the DSM, there isn’t much help out here for us well into adulthood.
I don’t know about some of the stuff in the article, like the pollution and politics, seems to me since I was born in ’61, not much progress has been made in helping those of us born with this sort of crap. I will say, as far as politics go, the conservative would have no problem withholding or restricting aid and killing a thousand of us with real developmental disabilities to keep one person who does not deserve such aid from getting it. I also have PTSD from my fourth grade math teacher throwing her stapler at me for not understanding long division and percentages. Seriously, I had a nervous breakdown at nine years old because of the way I was abused by my goddam teachers.
I have been perennially underemployed and undereducated, have no savings to speak of or any real hope for a meaningful future. That’s life in the most ‘civilized’ nation in the world living with a Nonverbal Learning Disability. I know some fare better, some fare worse, but for me this description is accurate.
Ever notice that all these Quote “health professionals” at the CDC, FDA on down to the local Health Department wonks that pushed like crazy to force everyone to get vaccinated with the experimental mRNS vaccines have fallen silent on the greatest threat to health there is? Talk about a Bandwagon. Every one of them parroted the Bullshit coming out of Joe Biden and Anthony Fauci’s mouth. But not a single one of these health care providers at every level said a damned thing when Joe Biden told the citizens of this country and the world to prepare for nuclear Armageddon.
The greatest threat to not only human health but to all life on the planet including the planet itself and these health care officials are totally silent.
Am I the only one on earth that noticed this? What the fuck is wrong with these people? What the fuck is wrong with humanity that the greatest threat to their existence goes completely un-noticed and allowable? Do they really believe vaccinations are more important that a chickenshit deranged banty rooster president like Joe Biden’s nuclear mission to wipe Russia off the face of the earth thereby killing life itself?
Great piece Paul! Thank you. You are fighting the system in a war that involves attempting to work with it, and in the messages you spread in the process. A never-ending fight, of course. Have you thought of putting a well-chosen collection of your essays into a book, in order to reach a larger audience, one that involves more people than those already in the choir?
M—
+–+
Buffalo Wings, Super Nachos, Bud, Bacardi, Bombs Bursting in Air. Imagine that: a religious holiday, come rain or shine, 9-11 or Maidan, as Americanos sit like rendered meat watching meat get crushed while hundreds of thousands have been burned and ripped apart in America’s Complete Proxy War in Ukraine. Imagine that, hundreds of thousands dead, three times as many wounded, and an entire country and certainly Russia, traumatized by America’s total war.
Set in postwar London, “Alfie” features Michael Caine as a chauffeur bent on promiscuity. After impregnating his girlfriend he takes off on vacation. He continues his life of womanizing, but he can’t hide forever. A misfortune strikes and Alfie is forced to face the product of his ways.
This not the crux of the question, since I was a monogamous dater and monogamous husband. It’s more centered around the discordance and dissheveled nature of humanity in the Western world, which unfortunately is the litmus test for much of the world now, which is another conundrum for me: why the hell would Japan or Oaxaca or Istanbul give a shit about McDonalds, Disneyland, Top Gun and disposable diapers? How viral is Western consumerism and retail disease? How diseased are the people of the world to buy into a disposable culture, from the ketchup containers to the children to the old people?
Marketing, man, and that is a very sophisticated psychological end game. The end run around is the pervasive marketing of everything, and the fake quality of modern humans. All about selling or acting or putting on a show.
Yeah, I’m writing this on the heels of yet another attempt to have a job tied to some civil and social justice gig. I got the call for a 15 minute interview Tuesday, with the fair housing coalition of Oregon, working in four rural counties as an outreach-educator specialists, getting stakeholders (I dispise that term) to get around a table, or in a room or on Zoom to understand the rights of renters, tenants, and home buyers.
Up my alley, and alas, I have worked around the housing “issue” for several decades, as an urban and regional planning grad student, and then with clients in Seattle, Spokane, Portland, Vancouver, and on the Oregon Coast.
Two people interviewed me, and one big question was what I thought of how poverty has come about. Oh how it all ties into Capitalism, about the Gildeed Age, about the first Anglo Saxons coming to this “New World” and exploiting the original peoples. Exploiting as in murdering. Stealing land. Polluting the land. Moving them off the land. Re-educating them. Turning the real people into savages. Enslavement and dedigration. Haves and haves not. You know, workers, laborers, even the professional managerial class, at the whim of the One Percent and the Five percent. You need poor people to make a buck, and you need poverty to be rich. You know, toil and labor to make the gilded ones money.
But it is deeper, sort of like economic sanctions on countries like Cuba or Venezuela — sanctions against the majority of people in Capitalism to pay the fines, fees, tolls, poll taxes, taxes, add-ons, service fees, tickets, violations, late charges, penalties, and the mortgages.
All those millions working hard to stay afloat, and then some medical emergency, some run-in with a lawyer or insurance company or the law, and bam, the semi-stable household is put into a spin — economic, spiritual and existential spin.
There will always be a PayDay monster lurking in Capitalism. There will always be scammers and legions of thieves who get away with it in CAPITALISM. Poverty makes millions money — cops/pigs, courts, judges, schools, governmental program managers, workers in all those so called welfare divisions. You get it! Take a child out of a home, and you will find dozens of workers and managers managing that Child Protective Services intervention-destruction.
In any case, I got a second interview, this time in front of seven people and with an hour to dog and pony my self into their midst. Provide a seven minute Zoom teaching modality or Power Point. Also tell us what a strategy would be to undertake an outreach program in Clatsopo, Tillamook, Lincoln and COlumbia Counties. One educators and outreach honcho, and what would you do and who would you engage to get this off the ground?
One hour equaled five hours or more of prep. I actually called county commissioners in two of the counties. I did much research on all the places that might be engaged with low income folk or people of color. The obvious thing is to get into the faith communities, with support services like work source and Department of Human services departments, and even school districts and landlord groups.
Here, what I was being asked to get ready for:
Here are some details about the interview.
It will be about an hour long. The whole team will be there.
One question for you to prepare in advance: Talk about how you would conduct an outreach campaign to raise awareness of fair housing in rural Columbia, Clatsop, Tillamook and Lincoln Counties. Who do you think would be most important to reach and what would your strategies be for reaching them?
At the end of the interview, we will ask you to conduct a seven-minute training on any topic you like. We want to see what your facilitation style is like. We will make you a cohost on Zoom so if you have a PowerPoint to share, you can.
I talked to one woman originally from Michigan who was a county commissioner in Clatsop COunty. She had spent much time in Portland, and she told me that she had lived experience in Lansing, Michigan as a white woman who witnessed red-lining and major discrimination against Black Americans in their attempt to get affordable housing.
She had that poster of Che on her wall.
“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.”
― Ernesto “Che” Guevara
She gave me great insight into her county, and how the rural-urban divide has a crass and prejudice guiding mark — “These trust fund babies or super rich come into our Oregon Coast Communities and think that the IQ for our rural residents is 30 points lower than from their urban locales. Everyone comes here to be served and waited on, even for a couple of days. Everyone, even the struggling middle class, want that two or three days of pretending to be like the rich — fancy food, big hotel, and loads of beach fun and trinket buying.”
I even talked to the president of the Landords Assocation, and I interviewed another commissioner, with the eye toward their opinion on how an outreach campaign might work in their respective communities — counties with 27K, 50K, and 42K populations. Rich homes, arts, retired, and then the linen changers, the cooks, the medical technicians, the teachers, you know, coffee shop workers, bussers, cooks, even the simple laborers to keep those amenities and Martha Stewart homes, kitchens and decks prettified.
The lack of housing is huge, and affordable housing is few and far between. Of course I am a socialist, and these systems of oppression and exploitation have to go. Homes and apartments and mixed neighborhoods have to be run by us, the people, the new American government, and, sure a few can get in on building and designing, but there should never be a society where rents are artificial for investment and profits. A one bedroo apartment for how much in Seattle, Chicago, here? And what are those wages of the linen changers and hotel cleaners?
It will take so many tens of millions to strike against this super exploitative system, and we need a public commons, public utilities, public health, education and transporation. Housing has to be part of that, not some bogus HUD lie, which is predicated on which insane political party is in office. Safe, affordable housing. That human right!
Fact: In 1948, the United States signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), recognizing adequate housing as a component of the human right to an adequate standard of living.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination. (source)
Oh, well, that job went the way of the Dodo, as many of my job applicatons have: “Hi Paul, Thank you so much for your time and energy today in the interview and the obvious passion you have towards social justice. We didn’t feel that you were the right fit for this position at this time and we are going to continue our search. Again, thank you for your time and energy. Sincerely, S”
There are thos buzzwords — “energy” and “passion” and” social justice.” AND, “not the right fit.” I will not get into the errors of their ways, or the dynamics of being 66 and being interviewed by all women except one, but all in their 30 something age range, two hitting forty something. Spilt milk? Sour grapes? Come on, that missive tells me shit about the interview, about anything, really . . . Me thinks there is prejudice here, including age, gender and alas my white skin. I’m a communist, which I did not disclose, but certainly they might have Googled me, and then, you get the semi-half picture of me (right . . . little of what I write or how I express myself gives anyone doing a cursory search of men much to know about me . . . . the real me).
How do I then deftly move from housing as a human right, and the discrimination of this culture on all levels, but also in housing, against the non-White non-Hispanic, into the next and the next topic, and how will I be able to tie in what I have expressed above into issues around, say, the County where I live giving students-parents until Wednesday proof of up-to-date vaccinations, or some sort of exception? While the Covid Crack Shots are not mandatory, but imagine what sorts of shots these kids have received outside of the mRNA madness, and to honest, most kids have been double boosted.
Oregon requires immunization against 11 vaccine-preventable diseases:
Tetanus
Pertussis (whooping cough)
Polio
Varicella (chickenpox)
Measles
Mumps
Rubella
Hepatitis B
Hepatitis A
Hib (Haemophilus influenzae type B) – only for children under five years old
Less humorous explanation of the monkey business: the C-19 potions are designed, financed, and made by DARPA/DOD/BARDA and related clown agencies via consortia of defense contractors including Pfizer who are paid huge sums of money, are not in control of the entire supply chain and product, and are promised protection by the government. The paperwork Pfizer submitted to the FDA reflects this fact: it is a prop in a play called “vaccine development and approval” and that’s why it looks so unprofessional, full of gaping holes and obvious fraud. The FDA is of course fully complicit in this and continues to pretend to “authorize” these military biowarfare agents as pharmaceuticals.
“But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence… illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.”
Ludwig Feuerbach (Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity)
Even Hegel understood the problems engendered by Capitalism. And in the sixties Debord tracked the direction of western capitalism and sketched with remarkable clarity the history and also created a sense of aesthetics that felt innately radical and subversive. Seeing the fundamental sickness of the Capitalist system was not new. Today, nothing is left of that radical quality, certainly not in the arts or academia. Increasingly there is a rote reflexive hatred of Marx, Freud, Communism, Mao, Stalin, and Fidel. The Frankfurt School is attacked, more from the left than the right, and self identifying left publications embrace the most reactionary of positions (Jacobin comes to mind, of course) on the pandemic protocols. And capitalism is viewed as if it is Nature, a god created fact. (John Steppling)
But, in the end, what is this all about, Haeder? I have been interviewed more than a dozen times here in the last 24 months. Every interview “team” has been comprised of 100 percent female (she, her, hers) about 90 percent of the time, and then other times, six out of seven, she-her-hers. I grew up with strong women — my mom had to divorce her first husband because he had Vancouver, BC mafia after him for gambling debts. She was an amazing force in Paris when we were kids over there, and amazing in Tucson, when she ended up there after divorcing my father, US Military. She had to bury her daughter at 23 after she was struck on her motocycle in Kamloops. My grandmother Kirk, another strong Scottish woman, who ended up in Canada working her tail off. Aunt who opened a fancy resturarant with two other strong women. Aunts that were midwives, and aunt who was a nurse who managed her husband’s surgical and general medicine practice. Strong women left and right. My wife is an incredibly strong woman on many levels, not just because she puts up with me, but her entire life has been struggle and trauma and success!
Ahh, but now, in my world, with so many not-so-strong women in my midst interviewing me, which is a form of critical judgement, and to be truthful, the fix is in when it comes to me, one lone guy, now older, applying for case managers and non-profit this or that position, and the team that interviews me and for which would be working with the new hire are all women.
Again, this is all speculation, but you gotta be me to know speculation is also reality!
But, here I am, working with mostly women, as a special olympics basketball coach. And, while I get turned down for a four-county kick-ass job I am more than passionate about and qualified fo, I am on the Special Needs bus to learn how to drive that bus and get to know the routes and students.
Now now, there are many parents coming out to support these teams, and while there are two-gender homes, many of the special youth have been growing up with moms, aunts, grandmothers.
Facts: The unfortunate correlation between a child with special needs and a marriage, though, is that the amount of participation from each parent can vary based upon how they are handling the issue emotionally. Tragically, there is a high rate of men who simply focus on work while leaving a mother to raise the child at home, creating a distance. This is not true for all fathers. However, far too often we receive phone calls from mothers who find themselves addressing their child’s needs on their own, either due to divorce or simple emotional distance.
Not all men are the ones who cave and leave, that’s for sure. But I am seeing over several states a majority of women caregivers, parental figures, and social services providers, aides, teachers, and such.
I wouldn’t exchange all the rewarding work I have done with both youth and adults with developmental disabilities for this kick-ass job I just got “railroaded out of.” You see, the job I applied for was compliance worker for Fair Housing Coalition of Oregon. That was Oct. 2022. No word until two weeks ago, 2/2/2023. Asking me if I’d put my resume and cover letter into the ring for this outreach specialists since the person writing me thought I was definitely qualified to do the job.
Oh that web so many people have woven in their personal and work lives. Tangled when we practice to deceive is what Walter Scott had as one famous lines in Scott’s epic poem, Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field. My entire life has been that complicated web, but not because I have gone out to deceive, but because I have not set forth deception, and I have been true to myself, honest with others, and forthright in a world where more and more people are “acting” and playing roles with a modicum of heart in their work if it involves social work. There are great people in social services, don’t get me wrong. But more and more the world of that arena is all about acting, Thespian crap, show and tell, bells and whistles, and now “Your Zoom Presence — How to Make Yourself into a Star” is what rules.
I could go on and on, but this is a minor speed bump in my road called life. Pissed off? Sort of, but not really, though angry at the systems of repression and oppression and how the world I sort of run in is now made up of the ghosting and cancelling and intolerance of this modern end game of confirmation bias and only listening to what one bandwagon is blasting on it’s Propaganda Speakers.
Until I am still working as a school bus trainee in progress. With old people with their biases and backward thinking, and me, again, not on their bandwagon. Imagine, old guys telling me they hate Russia and Russians. No, they are not from Russia, nor did they have anyone from Russia or who fought in the Great Patriotic War. They just hate people they have never met, rendezvoused with or broke bread with. All those horrorific propaganda movies, all that Russia Gate lunacy, and yet, these 77 year old old truckers who are now school bussing, hate a people and country they never knew or will never know.
Oh,m they are equal opportunity racists, because they hate China and Chinese equally.
And they hate their $19 an hour part-time bus driving gig, with precious K12 cargo, but they will never begrudge a dollar to the obsene pimps of war:
All that money going to new nuclear missiles, strategic bombers (the newly revealed B-21), submarines and so on, which in total will cost $1.7 trillion, according to congressional numbers—all in all an impressive escalation. So, $1 billion for each bomber made by Northrop Grumman (the Air Force began planning for the B-21 in 2011 and awarded the major development contract in 2015. The B-21 is expected to make its first flight in 2023 and enter service by 2027) is no big deal. Imagine that, one guy has to pay for hearing aids, at age 77, to the tune of $7000 or $9000 for a pair. Imagine the cognitive dissonance and retrograde thinking and imploding critical analyses skills with that two plus two equals three equation.
So it goes, sisters and brothers. You get older, you get more radical with each day, you get tired of lies, fakes, faux concepts, marketing, and merchandizing death and co-option, and then you, or I, become not jaded or cynical, but emancipated. Or even more decoupled from the fraudulent nature of almost every angle and every silo this sad sack of a country has propped up to destroy the world.
This is 24 years behind the times: ” A Brief History of U.S. Interventions: 1945 to the Present” by William Blum, June 1999. And I know several of the parents today wondered why I left my cap on, turned away fromt the American flag, bowed my head, and looked sad when the stupid Star Spangled Banner came on the speakers at the beginning of the tourney. I was already standing in the bleachers, but I usually sit, bow my head, and leave my hat or cap on.
One of Blum’s last points in 2017: “The Anti-Empire Report #153: Cold War Number One: 70 years of daily national stupidity Cold War Number Two: Still in its youth, but just as stupid”
The Cold War strategist, George Kennan, wrote prophetically: “Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.”6
Writer John Wight has described the new Cold War as being “in response to Russia’s recovery from the demise of the Soviet Union and the failed attempt to turn the country into a wholly owned subsidiary of Washington via the imposition of free market economic shock treatment thereafter.”
And there this rambling essay ends. Stupidity and cancel culture and ingrained hatred of Russia and Venezuela and Cuba and Nicaragua and Iran and Chine and North Korea, those are the drools coming from a half-brained rabid society. The spiritual rabies crosses all political boundaries, all camps, all silos.
“The essential Americansoul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature.
“Children learn more from what you are than what you teach.”
― W.E.B. DuBois
“It’s liberty or death. It’s freedom for everybody or freedom for nobody.” …. “I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those that do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the systems of exploitation.”
1 in 3 women on the planet will be beaten or raped during her lifetime
by Paul Haeder / February 5th, 2023
Note: This piece has been sent to the local newspaper, Newport News Times, which is not a shadow of a shadow at once a week hard copy. Imagine that, no? Death of newspapers because? Social Media? Internet? No more readers? Bad management? Gutting of newspapers for stock holders? What the heck?
Valentines Day, for me, is that Vagina Monologues. Sure, we are on the brink of nuclear disaster with this great Grand Old Flag land pushing and pulling for Russia responses for all that shaking going on in Ukraine and Russia.
Published in over 48 languages, performed in over 140 countries and recently heralded by The New York Times as one of the most important plays of the past 25 years: Ensler’s hilarious, eye-opening tour into the last frontier, the forbidden zone at the heart of every woman. A show that’s rocked audiences around the world, this groundbreaking piece gives voice to a chorus of lusty, outrageous, poignant, and thoroughly human stories, transforming the question mark hovering over the anatomy into a permanent victory sign. With laughter and compassion, Ensler transports her audiences to a world we’ve never dared to know, guaranteeing that no one who reads The Vagina Monologues will ever look at a woman’s body the same way again.
Performing The Vagina Monologues inspired her to create V-Day, the 22-year-old global activist movement to end violence against all women (cisgender and transgender), those who hold fluid identities, nonbinary people, girls and the planet.
The movement has grown, unfortunately, since violence against girls and women continues. Acid throwing freaks. Rapists that get off scott free. The dirty Netflix shows of sex-ploitation and exploitation. It is a seesaw world, with more and more women excelling in college/university, in sciences, in other arenas, some not so hunkydory:
From the executive leadership of top weapons-makers, to the senior government officials designing and purchasing the nation’s military arsenal, the United States’ national defense hierarchy is, for the first time, largely run by women.
As of Jan. 1, the CEOs of four of the nation’s five biggest defense contractors — Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and the defense arm of Boeing — are now women. And across the negotiating table, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer and the chief overseer of the nation’s nuclear stockpile now join other women in some of the most influential national security posts, such as the nation’s top arms control negotiator and the secretary of the Air Force.
It’s a watershed for what has always been a male-dominated bastion, the culmination of decades of women entering science and engineering fields and knocking down barriers as government agencies and the private sector increasingly weigh merit over machismo.
And, as Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson told POLITICO, it’s also the result of “quieting that little voice in your head that doubts whether you can do that next job or take on that special assignment.”
“I think there’s critical mass, where you have enough women that they’re getting noticed,” said Rachel McCaffrey, a retired Air Force colonel and executive director of Women in Defense, a career development and networking organization affiliated with the National Defense Industrial Association, a leading industry group.
Nearly a dozen female executives and defense leaders who spoke to POLITICO said having more women at the top affects companies and defense agencies in ways large and small — from questioning stale assumptions about the smartest way to develop weapons and provide services for the military; to negotiating better deals for the taxpayers when buying airplanes, tanks, rockets and ships; to recruiting and retaining the best and the brightest engineers and policy wonks. (source)
I’ll let the piece below rest as it may or may not get published in our wee dwindling newspaper. I doubt it will be run since there is less space for deeper (1,000 word) analyese; and more and more people want to use the Op-Ed space to yammer on about short term rentals, complaining about Californians coming into our county and raising real estate prices, and timber and fishing industries.
In 2011, City of Joy opened its doors in Eastern Congo with the goal of building a peaceful and transformational community for women survivors of violence.
V-Day is not Just a Valentine for your Sweetheart
Okay, so this newspaper is almost down for the count, limited to a once-a-week hard copy publication. Therefore, I know my viewpoints better be good, hard hitting and relevant.
Not all topics are going to be warm and fuzzy. On this Valentine’s day, attempt to think about violence against women. The significance of V-Day is a response against violence toward women, girls and the planet. Here in Lincoln County women and girls face all levels of violence.
The V-Day movement is tied a 1996 one-woman play written by Eve Ensler, called the “Vagina Monologues.” She interviewed more than 200 women from a wide range of ages and cultural backgrounds, whereupon so many of them opened up, baring their souls tied to sexual violence.
One key question was, “What would your vagina say if it could talk?” Over the years, V-Day has become a catalyst promoting creative events to increase awareness, raise money and revitalize the spirit of existing anti-violence organizations.
The Monologues also generates broader attention to stop violence against women and girls.
So what’s a white male writer stepping his toes into these waters? First, let me say that if you read the police blotter in this county, or if you attend public criminal hearings at the courthouse, you will see the level of violence in the household in general is skyrocketing.
Police calls cover the gamut, but one ugly reality is the number of spousal violence calls, especially violence against wives and girlfriends. My own early roots as a reporter in Tucson were ensconced into the music scene and the police beat. That entailed covering a special rape squad set up by Linda Ronstadt’s brother Peter who was the Tucson police chief for more than 10 years.
I was 19 covering a lot of sexual violence against both students and young/old women living around the University of Arizona campus. I covered Take Back the Night rallies – started in the early 1970s in Belgium, but quickly spreading to college campuses and across global communities: from remote Canadian towns to bustling Calcutta streets, from Ivy Leagues to military bases.
While doing my judo and scuba diving thing, I also took a few feminist literature classes, volunteered with Rape Crisis organization, and assisted my sensei with grappling classes, as in self-defense for women.
Fast forward to Spokane, Washington: I was teaching at many venues as a composition and writing instructor, to include Gonzaga University. There, a “Vagina Monologues” rendition was being rehearsed by various students, including those in the Women’s Studies Club.
That was 21 years ago, and the president of the Jesuit University banned college sponsorship of the “Monologues,” citing Christian values and supposed pushback. One of my cohorts, philosophy professor Mark Alfino, argued against the banishment, telling a standing-room-only crowd of 200 people the ban was a threat to academic freedom.
“It’s a weak faith that doesn’t welcome challenges,” Alfino said. “Academic freedom is not an open-ended license to say anything without impunity. Academic freedom is an openness to the responsible expression of ideas.”
Here’s the deal – some of my students asked me to pen an opinion piece supporting the “Vagina Monologues” held on campus, as a way to bring in the Gonzaga community and public in by both attending the play but also opening up dialogue around campus rape.
That same semester one of my students (she told me in an office visit) had been the victim of campus rape, unfortunately, the type of violence seen on many campuses: fraternity parties, lots of booze and frequent spiking of women’s drinks with “roofies” (Rohypnol, a clear liquid 10 times stronger than Valium).
I also had a weekly hour-long radio show covering public affairs where I interviewed many heavy hitters in the sciences, publishing, arts, and social justice fields. I didn’t get Eve Ensler on the show, but I had two guests talking about sexual violence and the power of the “Monologues,” as well as one woman from Somalia who talked about her own forced female genital mutilation.
I discussed both in a written Op-Ed and on my radio show my own issues with the clergy. I had come from El Paso, and there as a reporter, I covered two cases of Catholic priests charged with child rape. These fellows from the Spokane Diocese were accused there, so both were sent south to the border; back then I didn’t know Spokane from Shinola.
I went on to discuss the Catholic Church’s “penis problem,” getting into some of the history (in the thousands) of priests around the US and Canada and world with multiple accusations each of sexual assault. I brought up the Indian Boarding Schools, too, where sexual assault was occurring.
I took the banishment of the “Monologues” on campus seriously, and I even questioned the president’s claim that “many boosters and supporters” had spoken to him about their concerns with the play being performed on campus.
Oh the irony: the Gonzaga students put on a wonderful performance, and the public, the GU community, including staff, faculty and some priests, were just a few hundred yards off campus at a hotel ballroom for these young women’s performances which helped as a fund-raiser for the V-Day nonprofit that works to stop rape, battery, incest, female genital mutilation and other violence against women.
I am a better person for doing my little part – a published viewpoint and radio rant. Not so ironically, thought, I was told (off the record) by my department chair I would not be hired to teach at GU, per the “upper administration’s orders.”
Paul Haeder, Author 
