So, we can’t talk about Brittney, Alex Saab, Julian, Gary Webb, Snowden, Leonard, Mumia… so we can’t question who, what, where, why, when, how this basketball star gets out of jail free card others rot
so we can’t look into the belly of the beasts the USA, the WNBA, sports and million dollar paydays, or how Biden roared when he said, more blacks and mexicans in jail that 1994 crime bill he authored for more prison cells, more aggressive policing
more broken windows, broken families Biden
no, the episode of hash oil in Russia the LGBTQ basketball star no talk about anything, as the cancel culture trigger warning thespians and poets announcing anything parsing the world of politics and democrats, that it means racism, hate, homophobia, when in fact
the opposite is true, and this poem Leslé Honoré pens it’s about keeping dialogue shut down yammering about doubting toxic spills and they are not illegal
her lines kill: Be silent Or we will know That you hate Women That you hate Black People That you are Homophobic That you should be silent
but poet with Facebook following will pronounce all is done, cuz the poet loves anything that moves from a Biden mouth, and the lady is back in USA, and there it is
USA USA USA, more people incarcerated 98 percent plea “deals,” Innocence Project on steroids, and, damn, that poet jumps up and down for a star celebrity cult, and fuck the people too poor to leave debtors’ prison
and the poet says only those in diplomacy and international relations can speak about Griner,
as we have another woke-unwoke person running at her mouth sayin’ “only those I approve of get to speak.”
**Note: This poem is a reaction to put downs and shut ups for anyone doubting the Biden White House and this basketball star and the Lord of War swapped out story. Any discussion, verboten, or, if you critize the event we/you are a racist, a hater. This is the way, man/woman, and there will always be blood now when a man, woman, child doubts any narrative.
Read, “Brittney Griner and the U.S. State” by Margaret Kimberley. Note, the Lord of War (he did deals with USA, too) is free to talk, while Brittney? “Brittney Griner ended up being freed because the Russians were angry about Bout’s imprisonment. Biden eventually agreed to Russia’s terms, staged a photo opportunity with her wife, and then whisked her off to an army base where she is being reeducated, or rather reintegrated.”
There were more than 60 folk showing up in Newport, OR, at the extension center, OSU.
Yaquina Birders anchored the presentation, and there was a guest presenter with hundreds of photos at the ready. He was funny, profane, full of comedic relief, and his photos from Tanzania and Uganda, March 2020, are amazing.
I did a story on him two years ago . . . . going on three: “Doctor Dolittle with Brush and Easel.” Ram Papish is a visual artist, and you can find some of the stuff in my piece, and go to his web site.
My first observation was how the crowd was made up of participants and interested folk all in the “old” gray panther category, many older than I am: 65. No one was under the age of 55, for sure, and many people were in their 80s. All of them have aspirations for doing what Ram did — a photo safari in Tanzania and a side trip to Uganda. Again, I have harped on this fact: young people do not participate. Young people throughtout decades of my own teaching and mentoring have to have incentives and repeated harping to attend live events, sometimes events that are one of a kind with amazing authors and figures that will never come back to say, Spokane, El Paso, Las Cruces, etc.
Extra credit, a free day off from class, food, what have you.
There were no school busses, even with a few K12 science-focused kiddos for a field trip (it was 6:30 pm, Thursday night). The fact that these old folk, birders, were there, and most looked Anglo-Saxon, and then most seemed to talk about trips they have taken, you know, birder trips to Central and South America, and African countries, well, skewed toward that demographic, but what a great opportunity for kiddos to engage multigenerationally. Ram’s presentation was full of verve and vigor, and double entrendre’s.
The folk with this birder group stated it was the first in person meeting since March 2020. And, Ram and his wife Dawn and the family (aunt, uncle, brother) just got back to the USA March 15, one day before air travel was cut off and entry into Europe blocked during the Covid Madness.
The Yaquina Birders voted in a new president (Ram stepped down). It’s obvious Ram knows a lot about birds, and while he draws and paints and illustrates, this safari with his 600 mm lens and springing for a true organized photo safari with Land Rover outfitted with roof viewing got him going with amazing shots of birds and the quintessential icons of scrubland and savana: Check out that here, Flora and Fauna of Tanzania.
Here, a few iconic and exotic birds (not from Ram’s digital archive). Check out — Birding in Tanzania.
The event went on from 6:30 to 8:30 pm. The show was colorful, set up by Ram in comedic chapters, and his commentary made the ornithological reality fun and full of anthropomorphic fun. The family headed back to the US, and Ram took a trip to Uganda, and he was after the dinosaur bird, his favorite, Shoebill:
There you have it, a fun night, lots of images, lots of context and scene setting, and biology.
Ram and Dawn live in Toledo, Oregon, a few miles east of Newport. They have love birds they are fostering:
Of course, both Dawn and Ram spent time with love birds in Tanzania, photographing them in an old dead tree. His favorite birds, he confessed, are hornbills, and that I can second from my trips to Indochina.
Always tell the truth. Always take the high road. Live each day like it could be your last. Drink it in. Be adventurous, be bold, but savor it. It goes fast. — Ben, from the movie, Captain Fantastic.
Once you drive down the road overlooking Olalla Slough, you end up on a 6.7-acre paradise. Before humans emerge from the ranch-style house, the visitor is greeted by clicking of tongues, screeches and whistling.
Ram Papish and his wife, Dawn Harris, have a residence that includes an outbuilding called “The Love Shack.” No, the B-52’s song is not on a loop. Rather the colorfully painted aviary is home to a dozen parrots affectionately named, Love Birds (genus Agapornis).
There are other avian family members on the property, in another aviary — blue fronted Amazon parrot, Solomon Islands eclectus and an orange winged Amazon parrot.
I am first greeted by Dawn who has a cold soda for me in hand. I recognize her from one of the trainings I was a part of with the Oregon chapter of the American Cetacean Society as part of my certification to become an ACS naturalist. That was March 2019.
She works as the visitor services coordinator for the US Fish & Wildlife Service.
Then Ram emerges with his N95 mask in hand — we all three agreed to the interview and photo session outside.
I first met Ram at the State of the Coast conference at the Salishan Resort in Lincoln City, Oregon. That was November 2019. He imparted a tidal wave of facts and riffs about what it means to be an artist. He is king of anecdotes tied to a life as an illustrator and field biological technician.
Today, on a sunny late June 2020 day, he reiterates at his home what he told the large group at Salishan last year: He considers himself “an illustrator . . . and artists look down their noses at illustrators.”
At the State of the Coast conference, young people abounded, including youthful scientists presenting their research through the elegant process of postering, a mix of science and illustration, something very close to Ram’s heart as he considered in these parts, “The Wayside Interpretative Panel” impresario for the Oregon Coast.
The State of the Coast crowd was in awe of Ram’s hand-painted pants — colorful tufted puffins adorning his trousers is one way to get an audience’s attention.
On the minds of many at the breakout session was, “How do you become an artist?” First, Ram answered in the negative:
“When I went to college, I didn’t think I could make a living at it. I sent out dozens of portfolios to publishers and children’s book publishers. I was really naïve.”
The introduction to art class at Cornell was a turning point in his pursuit: “The professor was basically trying to teach us how to be a snobby artist. I wasn’t going to have any part of that.”
Without question, Ram’s personal and professional drive is to connect people to nature. He works on commission — paid gigs assigned by Oregon State Parks, other agencies and publishers. His drawing avocation started when he was very young; by age 14 he was designing nesting dolls.
Birds of a feather…
Ram and Dawn met in 2002, at the Newport Christmas bird count. He was a single guy and she was married at the time. The three were friends until her divorce. Ram and Dawn eventually dated and then tied the knot.
Dawn beamed ecstatic about their birding trips, including one to the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) where penguins and albatrosses were part and parcel on their birder’s log.
She’s from South Carolina, having attending K12 in S.C. Ram is originally from San Diego from a hippie family fulfilling a vagabond lifestyle.
“My father considered himself somewhat of a poet, a man of letters,” Ram says, smiling. They lived in a tent and spent time in trailer parks. “I was outside all the time.” In eighth grade the family ended up in Eugene.
He is one of five — four boys and one sister. He laughs as Dawn relays how they range in age from 40 to 50.
“Outside” for Ram meant observing nature.
Dawn’s community college years encompassed Manatee Community College in Sarasota, Florida. From there, a BS in wildlife ecology from University of Florida and an MS in the same field from Oregon State University. She ended up as a seasonal employee with US Fish and Wildlife doing work in California on seasonal wetlands and mallard duck transitional ecosystem research.
Ram, the archer
Pronouncing his name means knowing Ram (variant of Rama) is the most common male name in India, the Sanskrit origin meaning as “archer; pleasing.” Think “raw” plus “hmm.”
We have much territory to traverse around Ram’s incredible illustrations and his early proclivity for and talent with drawing.
As a couple, they fit perfectly, as Dawn, 48, and Ram, 47, frequently finish each other’s sentences. It’s obvious Dawn is his biggest fan. I ask them what makes for a good marriage, or couple. Dawn seamlessly states: “We have so many shared interests.” Those include gardening, landscaping, bird watching and travel.
While she has no artistic bent, Dawn supports spiritually and emotionally Ram’s commissions, which include wayside panel illustrations up and down the coast. He has painted more than 100 panels reflecting the area’s diverse ecosystems and flora/fauna.
His interpretations entice the visitor to reflect on the ecology but also to realize the illustrator behind the images is deeply ensconced into the land. It’s a case of love for and deep reflection of nature.
Anyone hiking around Toledo high school might hear those love birds (the parrots) and other rescued parrots this birding couple has helped settle in this exotic land (for an Amazonian bird, yes, Toledo is super exotic).
I try and find more than eight feeders and eight bird boxes on the property. As I leave their home, Dawn shows me the mason bee box they made. I am happy to recall that this April, the couple came in second statewide with 48 bird species sightings in the backyard one-day bird count.
“The earth is what we all have in common.” — Wendell Berry, Naturalist and writer
There are questions about what comes first, art or the environment. There is a passion in art, and yet for Ram, it’s nature that he works with as his universal canvas. Berry’s comment isn’t lost on Ram.
He uses water color techniques with acrylics. He is in his studio showing me the new iteration of his techniques using a computer screen, program and smart pen to design and illustrate work.
He’s working on a junior biologist book for K3 youth. It’s a cool learning tool, sponsored by the Alaskan Maritime National Wildlife Refuge. He’s got one double-page ship cut-away illustration with the goal for readers to spot 15 rats Ram has strategically drawn onboard.
As a panel illustrator Ram knows “less (text) is more.”
“No more do we have textbooks on a stick,” he stated at the conference about the old style of wayside or historical signage where page after page of text dominated markers and panels.
He utilizes the “Rule of Threes” — three seconds to read the headlines; 30 seconds to glance it over and get the gist; three minutes to read everything including the captions.
His work includes tidepool life in Pacific City, shorebird stop-over on the Bandon Marsh, tidepool explorer at Cannon Beach, sea bird islands at Ecola State Park. He has illustrations in field guides, to include Oregon birder books.
He’s a veritable encyclopedia of ecosystems, bird life and aquatic, river and terrestrial species.
In the field
The couple can’t wait for outdoor activities and group meetings to resume with the Yaquina Birders and Naturalists group, of which Ram is president.
Both Dawn and Ram have been speakers on separate occasions for the Oregon Chapter of the American Cetacean Society. Birds and their habitats are their focus, with Ram’s added panoply of art from the field.
Dawn has seen many changes in the Fish and Wildlife Services and her profession: more women. She reflects on what has influenced women to embrace nature and the outdoors.
She attributes this to the power of narratives of such female scientists like Rachel Carson (“Silent Spring,” 1962) who is considered the mother of the environmental movement and who also worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service. Add to that Jane Goodall, Sylvia Earle and thousands of female scientists and educators growing the field to include girls interested in STEM — science, technology, engineering and math.
Obviously, the STEAM. movement — add Arts to STEM — links to Ram’s avocation.
For Harris, wildlife comes first. For Ram, art comes first but his art would be a shell of itself without the integration with and interpretation of the natural world. They have no children, and their lives are intertwined with landscaping, gardening and those darned long-living rescue birds.
The whimsy Ram imparts is universal. He has some amazing paper mâché masks and animals, such as a bigger-than-life turkey vulture. Two books he illustrated and wrote for children — “The Little Fox” and “The Little Seal” both published by the University of Alaska Press — captivate the child’s imagination and wonder for the seal’s and fox’s world.
Ram reiterates he’s always willing to go to public schools to wow youth with his incredible background in art and science, while deploying his flair for public speaking to captivate young and old alike.
A fast-paced PowerPoint with all his illustrations projected on a screen are both impressive and awe-inspiring for young and old.
The best things in nature
The biggest thing Ram misses in this time of lockdown is the summer sea bird camp coordinated through the Pribilof Island Seabird Youth Network, which covers four volcanic islands in the Bering Sea. He’s been the wildlife illustrator there for more than eight years.
The camp works with youth, many Aleut, covering these areas:
• Open doors to careers in science and natural resource management.
• Increase sense of ownership and understanding of local resources.
• Provide training in marketable multi-media skills.
• Provide education in seabird ecology, research and conservation.
Dawn reiterates how disappointed Ram is now that the camp has been cancelled due to Covid-19. The youth are big losers, since they will miss the collective IQ and creativity of the staff, the comradery amongst themselves, and the amazing ecosystem splendor including 11 species of birds that breed on the island.
As part of the team, Ram works in a partnership between the Pribilof School District, the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island, the City of St. Paul, Tanadgusix Corporation, the St. George Traditional Council, St. George Island Institute, the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge and the wider scientific community.
The program’s website, http://seabirdyouth.org/ shows the amazing facial and body language of not only the youth getting so much out of the time, but also people like Ram, who in many photos has these ear-to-ear grins while he’s mentoring and instructing youth.
Both Ram and Dawn assert this is the best way for young and old to learn, engage in life long critical thinking and to continue on as mentors and teachers themselves, whether they go into educational fields or not.
Where are people — students — going to get the in-the-field and on-the-canvas wisdom Ram Papish brings to the proverbial table unless they are there, hands on, with him, in a learning environment with the tools of the trade — camera, brushes, paints, photographs and field research?
Ram qualifies as a unique illustration instructor at the Sea Bird Camp because he has also had 20 field seasons working as a biological sciences technician studying birds and other wildlife, primarily in Alaska. He’s a hands-on artist who encourages youth to create art.
What’s more inspiring to youth than an illustrator who has his work published in books and publications, including the Handbook of Oregon Birds, Northwest Birds in Winter and Oregon Birds?
His last big outing was in January, at the OSU Extension office for a talk, “Drawing on Nature: Connecting People and Wildlife Through Art.”
From paperboy to illustrator
We’re looking at the round plates adorning the kitchen where Dawn is setting up some chips and salsa. It’s a new obsession Ram is involved in creating — sgraffito. These are amazingly simple images of nature, and birds, to include one of my favorites, a kingfisher. The word is derived from the Italian, “graffito,” a drawing or inscription made on a wall or other surface (think graffiti) .
In ceramics, sgraffito is a technique of ornamentation in which a surface layer is scratched to reveal a ground of contrasting color. Ram mentioned this at the State of the Coast talk, too.
Before Ram was designing dolls, he was a paperboy. He recalls how in Eugene he was throwing the newspaper on the lawn of who would be one of his illustrator idols — Larry McQueen.
“I recognized him from a biography of him I had been reading.”
McQueen is still around, and his biography and bibliography are deep when you go to his page on Artists for Conservation.
Here’s a snippet from McQueen’s page:
“I grew up in the small town of Mifflinburg in central Pennsylvania. Birds fascinated me from the start. With colored pencils, I attempted to draw birds that I observed on early morning forays around the neighborhood. One of the first books my parents gave me was “The Junior Book of Birds” by Roger Peterson, illustrated with a small selection of paintings done by several bird artists of the time. Each illustration in this slender book presents the bird in a full page of habitat. As a child, these images influenced my perceptions of the bird in nature, profoundly. Around the age of ten, I was given two books with impressive artwork: a 1937 edition of reproductions of Audubon’s ‘Birds of America’ and another large volume entitled ‘Birds of America,’ with illustrations by Louis Agassiz Fuertes. I have since studied the original work of these great bird artists, with veneration. The inspiration of others continues and I regard as pivotal, the paintings of the great Swedish wildlife artist, Bruno Liljefors, of early 20th Century.
At age twelve, I was invited to be a founding member of the Bucknell Ornithological Club at Bucknell University, close to my hometown. Involved with regular meetings and field-trips, I was learning about ‘ornithology’ as a subject, and my birding skills greatly improved.”
At age 15, Ram tells me he worked at a public relations firm producing illustrations for brochures and advertisements. At 16, one of Ram’s paintings was hung in the US Capitol building.
He was the political cartoonist for the South Eugene High School newspaper. “I did a lot of political cartoons.” Pen and ink drawing was his forte.
He did illustrations of jet boats for a business on the Rogue River; wildlife scenery for different chambers of commerce; designed nesting dolls of endangered species for the Nature Shop. That was by age 16.
He’s still a lifelong vegetarian, incubated at birth by plant-based diet parents. “When you grow up without eating meat, you just can’t stomach it.”
Dawn bends with Ram’s dietary choices, but she still dives into BBQ pork when she ends up back in North Carolina. Ram is experimenting with sushi — tuna — and so far, he’s faring well.
Dawn and Ram’s last trip together on a flora and fauna safari was in Tanzania on the Serengeti plain during the heart of the migration. “The power of those herds of wildlife I have not experienced before. I took around one hundred thousand photos,” he tells me.
For most of us, we will have to vicariously live those trips, through the prism of colors Ram deploys and the interpretations he makes with brushstrokes as our naturalist guide to the art of nature.
Maybe Ram really is the Doctor Dolittle of the illustrator’s world, and he is in good company, with one of this country’s more well-known “illustrators” defining his art:
“Some people have been kind enough to call me a fine artist. I’ve always called myself an illustrator. I’m not sure what the difference is. All I know is that whatever type of work I do, I try to give it my very best. Art has been my life.” — Norman Rockwell
Q&A:
Paul Haeder: What’s the most difficult aspect of wildlife and conservation settings to paint?
Ram Papish: I find people to be difficult.
PH: What would you tell a young person wanting to major in and practice with art?
RP: Start networking immediately. I worked at many different agencies and companies as a biotech that later hired me to do artwork. That type of connection building tends to pay off in the long run.
PH: What animal in the wild would you like to see and why?
RP: Helmet Vanga of Madagascar and Blue Crane (most easily seen in South Africa) are high on my bird bucket list.
PH: Thought experiment — If you believed in reincarnation, what animal would you want to come back as and why?
RP: Great Sapphirewing. They live in the beautiful high Andes and spend their days in cool comfort sipping sweet nectar from alpine flowers. Also, they are relatively free of external parasites.
PH: What do you see yourself doing in 10 years?
RP: A rainbow of different artwork including different styles, more sculpture, paintings on glass, computer-based drawings, 3D murals.
PH: Wildlife illustrations can enhance the visitor experience by “adding an extra dimension.” Can you expound on this?
RP: I feel that one of the reasons art is appealing is that it depicts reality through the filter of another person’s vision.
PH: What’s your dream commission?
RP: A series of books called “The Secret Life of Birds.” Each lavishly illustrates the natural history of a different bird species.
PH: If you Google, “greatest wildlife illustrators,” it’s all men. What is up with that do you think?
RP: Like in many professions, traditional gender roles have a strong historic influence. This will change over time.
Ukraine has good reason to believe it will not be held accountable for using them against civilians, given its Western backers’ and their allies’ penchant for using prohibited weapons on civilians without repercussions–including Agent Orange in Vietnam, depleted uranium in Iraq and Syria, and white phosphorous and dart bombs in Gaza.
The fact the Western media turns a blind eye is also a boon to Kiev.
This is what occurs with Empire, and we know the UK, USA, Five Eyes, EU, all bought and sold by the lords of war.
These people are the absolute worse people in the world, along with the engineers and technologists and scientists who will do anything to get a grant cool million here, fifty mil there. Anything to play god, play with humanity, play with the lethality of their wet horror dreams Do not let the skirts and skinny jeans fool you. These are hard, cold killers.
You can read that again. The idea is to proactively guesstimate the character and timing of oppositional narratives, and for the algorithms to produce NARRATIVE COUNTERMEASURES to stifle these embryonic developments of potential political opposition before they can even be coherently formulated and disseminated.
If that’s not the exact image of a boot stamping on a human face forever, I really don’t know what is.
And perhaps the most disturbing thing is that this entire project is (quite effectively, I might add) being sold in connection with narratives of liberalism. Of narratives pertaining to the increase of freedom, to the supplementing of individual agency, and to the bolstering of progress and human flourishing. (source)
Until we get this — dialing for war lords: one WNBA star for one Russian war lord who does business with EVERYONE:
And, the rot gut that is remore work for General Dynamics and others, I can attest, is so dispicable, since I have a family member who worked on GD web crap, internal, and he was laid off, terminated, at age 62, after more than 20 years with the company.
No severance, and in Arizona, General Dynamics forces those laid off to apply for Arizona unemployment, but, somehow, after six months or three months, GD will pony up something? This relative would have just given up, but he’s jumping through the ugly unemployment hoops, which make a person feel like he or she is a scab, a loser. And, then, the PTO check comes, and so his unEmployment was denied.
So many class action lawsuits against General Dynamics:
Former General Dynamics workers can move forward as a class in their suit claiming the company didn’t give them enough notice that they were getting fired, a Virginia federal judge ruled, finding their claims don’t require individualized inquiry.
U.S. District Judge Robert E. Payne said Monday that the workers’ claims that General Dynamics Information Technology violated the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act by failing to provide them at least a 60-day notice they were getting fired can be resolved on a classwide basis.
“The GDIT policies in the record provide flexibility as to where the employees worked, and those policies apply to the class equally without the need for an individualized inquiry,” Judge Payne said. (source) (more)
Raytheon and Patriot missiles. I taught at Fort Bliss, home of the Patriot, “first to fire . . . .” English, that is, effective writing as an Army contractor. Amazing how that $3.29 bolt for the shrouding, somewhere around 16 total, for each missile, ends up costing us hundreds of dollars each. The graft, the triple-dipping, the entire scam that is the revolving door of lords/murderers of war and the private welfare cheating companies is also part and parcel here.
Despite being banned under the UN Ottawa Treaty since 1997, thousands of anti-personnel mines litter the parks, streets, schools and homes in Donbass. Residents risk severe injuries and even death if they happen to accidentally stumble upon the tiny ‘petal’ mines.
A ‘petal’ mine is a pressure-activated anti-personnel mine. It’s small and hard to see, making it the ‘vilest’ mine. Ukraine was reported to have disposed of some six million of these petal mines it had in service. But that is clearly not the case as it has been using them to bombard residential areas of Donetsk, Lugansk and other cities of Donbass for months. Dozens of civilians who accidentally came into contact with the landmines have been admitted to hospitals in Donbass.
Emergency services, sappers and humanitarian personnel have been working hard to clear the neighbourhoods of the insidious explosive devices, while the Ukrainian army continues to bombard cities with the mines. Brave civilians help sappers to spot mines, some of them even learn de-mining techniques themself.
It will take years to remove all of the mines, according to some experts. The Ukrainian army uses Uragan multiple launch rocket systems, which are able to throw more than 4,000 mines at a time.
The documentary takes a look at the arduous mission of the de-mining campaign in Donbass. Victims of ‘petal’ mines talk about the injuries they received, while sappers describe their work on the ground and underwater. (documentary, of course, banned on YouCIATube)
Again, I have mentioned this endlessly: the military industrial complex is the finance-insurance-retail-manufacturing-food-banking-education-pharma-ag-energy-mining-chemical-science-engineering-surveillance-et al COMPLEX.
Some of the largest companies that have declined to renounce future involvement in antipersonnel landmine production are General Electric, Alliant Techsystems, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Thiokol. Some companies that have declined to renounce future involvement in production are now involved in developing technology to detect, remove, and destroy uncleared antipersonnel mines, including Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Mohawk, and Ensign-Bickford.
In the U.S., no single company is responsible for the production of antipersonnel mines from beginning to end. The Pentagon will usually award a contract to one large company which will in turn buy component parts from many other companies. Final assembly of mines is often done in government-owned, contractor-operated Army Ammunition factories. Thus, the landmine industry in the U.S. consists more of component suppliers than “mine producers” per se. Some companies that have supplied components for antipersonnel mines objected to their inclusion in this report by claiming that they are not “mine producers.”
The seventeen companies that declined in writing to renounce future involvement in antipersonnel mine production are: AAI Corp. (Maryland), Allen-Bradley (Texas), Alliant Techsystems, Inc. (Minnesota), also representing mine producers Accudyne Corp. (Wisconsin), and Ferrulmatic, Inc. (New Jersey), CAPCO, Inc.(Colorado), Dale Electronics, Inc. (Nebraska), Ensign-Bickford Industries, Inc. (Connecticut), General Electric Company (Connecticut), Lockheed Martin Corp. (Maryland), Mohawk Electrical Systems, Inc. (Delaware), Nomura Enterprise, Inc. (Illinois), Parlex Corp. (Massachusetts), Quantic Industries, Inc. (California), Raytheon (Massachusetts), Thiokol Corp. (Utah),48 and Vishay Sprague (Pennsylvania).
The thirteen companies that did not respond in writing to Human Rights Watch are: Action Manufacturing Co. (Pennsylvania), Aerospace Design, Inc. (California), Amron Corp. (Wisconsin), BI Technologies (California), Consolidated Industries, Inc. (Alabama), Day & Zimmerman, Inc. (Pennsylvania),49 EMCO, Inc. (Alabama), Formworks Plastics, Inc. (California), Fort Belknap Industries (Montana), Intellitec (Florida), Mason & Hangar/Silas Mason Co., Inc. (Kentucky),50 Primetec, Inc. (Florida), and Unitrode Corp. (New Hampshire). (source)
there is blood on every front, as barbarism wins out, seemingly
Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbel: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
They seem like small-small things — high school English class, college literature classes, university poetry classes.
I have taught every manner of writing class, well, imaginable:
remedial writing
composition
research writing
literature
journalism
fiction
poetry
technical writing
business writing
film and literature
in prisons
magazine writing
memoir writing
in/on military compounds
communications for military
gang–influenced writing
science writing
sustainability writiing
Here, coming up in March, in Seattle:
I was at an Associated Writers Program event 10 years ago, in Seattle. Very specialized event, with speakers galore, trade book fair, superstars in writing (sic) and networking and interviewing and shopping around to universities and colleges for those vaunted tenure track jobs.
Here, March 2023:
#AWP23 Keynote Address by Min Jin Lee
Min Jin Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea and immigrated to Queens, New York with her family when she was seven years old. She studied history at Yale College and law at Georgetown University. Lee practiced law for two years before turning to writing. She teaches fiction and essay writing at Amherst College and lives in New York City.
Lee is a writer whose award-winning fiction explores the intersection of race, ethnicity, immigration, class, religion, gender, and identity of a diasporic people. Pachinko, her second novel, is an epic story which follows a Korean family who migrates to Japan; it is the first novel written for an adult, English-speaking audience about the Korean-Japanese people. Pachinko has been translated into over 35 languages and is an international bestseller. (source)
A very rarified event, for sure, and in those three days, all things seem fine and dandy in the English-Lit-Composition field. It is, however, not at all well. And like everything in Capitalism, the bottom line is dollars and transactional actions and following the digital demigod into HELL.
I was railing in 1983 when I first started teaching in a graduate program. The hybrid and online classes, well, I was completely against those. You know, the slippery slope. So many issues at the University of Texas- El Paso:
more just-in-time part-time faculty with no benefits or protection hired each year
more money for losing football programs, less funding for faculty, protections, benefits, real education
giving the basketball coach god-like status
largest US Hispanic college dialing for, well, STEM dollars
a college president that stayed at the helm way too many years (decades)
a loving connection to the US military, US Border Patrol, US Deep State
money money money for buildings, and Martha Stewart campus scene building, Buthan, man, on the border of USA-Mexico
less free speech
conservativism on steroids
part-time faculty attempting to strike or discuss striking and organizing but shunted by Admin. and Governor Bush
That all-Black team in 1966 against all White team Kentucky (UTEP was Texas Western in the past)
Fewer and fewer writing demands put on students in K12 and college. Yearly. Fewer books assigned. Science teachers in K12 showing videos. More and more parents complaining about homework. New studies on how homework hurts. Libraries going digital, fewer books and more bells and whistles.
Until today, the red lines have been crossed, and we have dimwits from Yale, Harvard, the Georgetowns and Stanfords, et al, destroying the economies, the media, diplomacy, the land, the communities, the cultures, the biome, our bodies, ourselves, as they come out of those toxic high end schools and populate the Complex, for example Ray McGovern’s (CIA analyst-turned-dissident) proposition that the institutions that truly govern the United States comprise the MICIMATT, or Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank Complex.
I of course one up him by calling it the Ag-Pharma-Chemical-Oil-AI-AR-VR-Med-Ed-Psych-Legal-Finance-Real Estate-Prison Complex.
I am getting at something deeper for our Western Society, and others, vis-a-vis the bastards of the Killer App, Killer Machine Learning, Killer Artificial Intelligence tied to writing: “The End of High-School English“
The arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a program that generates sophisticated text in response to any prompt you can imagine, may signal the end of writing assignments altogether—and maybe even the end of writing as a gatekeeper, a metric for intelligence, a teachable skill.
If you’re looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding. My life—and the lives of thousands of other teachers and professors, tutors and administrators—is about to drastically change. (Daniel Herman)
Oh, it gets worse. This is a society full of posers and thespians and tap dancing around ideas, inventing subtrefuge, building a million intellectual escape hatches, millions of smoke and mirrors games, in addition to the dumb downing via screen time, scrolling, and a vapidity and lack of debate and open exchange of ideas and articulation and composition that will eventually put humanity into a giant matrix of madness as the data and our ideas and thoughts and feelings and responses are fed into the data mill in order for us mostly to be considered useless people, useless eaters, useless workers.
All my old friends just loving Zoom Rooms and webinars and MOOC’s — massive open online classes. Imagine that, an environmental writing class taught by one dude, with all the powerful graphics of Hollywood, all the bells and whistles and digital rhetoric and videos and clips and sounds and sights via computing power, all packaged by the computer and the superstar single teacher in order to deliver to all colleges, or all high schools, that one great class, Environmental and Sustainability Writing 101.
One actor, one make-up team making him or her pretty, this one dude or dudette, with all the finely tuned editing and polishing of a documentary narrator, teaching not one on line course, but teaching that one course to a thousand schools or hundreds of school districts. Of course, there is no teaching under this model.
Unfortunately, almost EVERYTHING in the Atlantic Magazine is rotten to the core, in that it allows for a narrow range of beliefs, perspecftives, takes on Capitalism, and certainly any huge criticism of Big Data, Big Spying, Big American Exceptionalism will be plied away. So this tepid essay ends with amelioration, a bad brew of wrong headed thinking:
Everything is made up; it’s true. The essay as a literary form? Made up. Grammatical rules as markers of intelligence? Writing itself as a technology? Made up. Starting now, OpenAI is forcing us to ask foundational questions about whether any of those things are worth keeping around.
Our lack of literacy, lack of ability to express complex ideas even in simple essays, and our rotting to the core MSM “journalism,” all the lack of multiple sides to a topic, say, you know, how Russia got to Ukraine in 2022, all of that, mixed in with celebrity culture, overpaid elites lecturing and dictating and judging us, the rest of us being schooled by sociopaths, patronizers, and those who have no ground truthing, so we get here.
Google (as in a verb) Tiananmen Square, and you get “massacre” in the first 30 pages of results. When I was teaching Community College students writing, back in 2016, that search produced a variety of perspectives. Now? You have to have enlightened teachers herding students toward a Boolean search, as in, ” Tiananmen Square and Counterpunch.” You’ll get this at the top: JUNE 6, 2017 “Tiananmen: the Empire’s Big Lie.”
So, writing instruction goes with debate instruction goes with rhetorical approaches to reading and research and contructing an argument, or any other form of writing, i.e. Process, Analysis, Comparision and Contrast, Exemplification, Narration, Cause and Effect, etc.
I just had this Tiananmen Square conversation with a French Canadian from Montreal. Years and years of the lies about Tiananmen Square produce brainwashing, agnotology, lack of robust thinking, and just taking the narrative from plethora of “choices” on how to bad mouth China.
So, AI, and apps that write for you, and those that think for you, and those that filter for you, and those that cancel real debate for you, and those that create confirmation bias for you, or those teachers on line and in MOOCs who are milquetoast or one-sided or who are oh-so-Harvard/Columbia/Georgetown/Yale educated (miseducated) and who feed you bastardized concepts and positions, and so here we are. I told the Canadian, who has a brother who is a capitalist on steroids, who was in China for decades, married there, speaks the language, that his bro’ can be even more misguided or misinformed or broken as a thinker just on Tiananmen.
As the country and the world looked on with fascinated disbelief, the protests swelled beyond authorities’ control. Anger, frustration, tensions built, reaching a shattering climax in the early morning of June 4. And the rest, as they say, was history.
But which history? In the nearly three decades since the tragedy, Beijing-unfriendly forces worldwide — mainly Western countries and anti-CPC Chinese — have unfailingly staged commemorations to remind everyone how frightful the Chinese Communists were, and are. It would be less egregious if their narrative were true, but it is not. In fact, the story, spun immediately during and after Beijing’s crackdown, is one of greatest propaganda hoaxes in modern times.
In essence, it says that Chinese authorities massacred unarmed student protesters demanding democracy, slaughtering thousands and even tens of thousands in and around Tiananmen Square. Extensive subsequent research and many eyewitness accounts have shown conclusively that none of this is true. The most reliable estimate, from many sources, was that the tragedy took 200-300 lives. Few were students, many were rebellious workers, plus thugs with lethal weapons and hapless bystanders. Some calculations have up to half the dead being PLA soldiers trapped in their armored personnel carriers, buses and tanks as the vehicles were torched. Others were killed and brutally mutilated by protesters with various implements. No one died in Tiananmen Square; most deaths occurred on nearby Chang’an Avenue, many up to a kilometer or more away from the square.
More than once, government negotiators almost reached a truce with students in the square, only to be sabotaged by radical youth leaders seemingly bent on bloodshed. And the demands of the protesters focused on corruption, not democracy. (source)
Again, if the colleges have courses on how to run-build-maintain drones, and turn that into a bachelor’s degree, then you understand why writing and reading outside the rotting businesses associated with college now is unnecessary, and on the chopping block. I interviewed this fellow, Gregory A. Petsko: Scroll down to the seventh one, radio interview, here on the Podcasts on my blog.
The following letter to George M. Philip, the president of the State University of New York at Albany, prompted by the proposed elimination there of French, Italian, Russian and classics, was originally a blog post at Genome Biology and is reprinted here with permission of the author.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you have trouble understanding the importance of maintaining programs in unglamorous or even seemingly “dead” subjects. From your biography, you don’t actually have a Ph.D. or other high degree, and have never really taught or done research at a university. Perhaps my own background will interest you. I started out as a classics major. I’m now professor of biochemistry and chemistry. Of all the courses I took in college and graduate school, the ones that have benefited me the most in my career as a scientist are the courses in classics, art history, sociology, and English literature. These courses didn’t just give me a much better appreciation for my own culture; they taught me how to think, to analyze, and to write clearly. None of my science courses did any of that. (Open Letter to SUNY Albany)
Yeah, the dead-end Academia. And like my friends who love Zoom Doom and will never go out anymore where they can participate in group gatherings around talks and lectures and what have you, so many creeps will go for AI anything.
Daily, minute by minute, language is disassociated with reality, and those Sunday talk shows are blasphemies of logic, truth and facts. Imagine that, as they lie lie lie about Putin and Russia. Even George Soros Democracy Now brings on the milquetoast neoliberal, Jeffrey Sachs who gives more on why, what, when, who, where, how of Russia’s move into Donbass and then the rest of Ukraine happened than 99 percent of the mainstream/mainliners: “Jeffrey Sachs: A Negotiated End to Fighting in Ukraine Is the Only Real Way to End the Bloodshed.”
Until language gets us the un-Manly Man of the Year, on Time’s cover.
There you have it, writing whittled down to a movie script, lies and thespians and comics, dressed up to be nothing more than a paper tiger. Imagine that, no?
But that’s Time, man:
Harold Pinter:
In 1958 I wrote the following:
‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’
I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?
Then, the Novel Prize acceptance speech: 2011. Read it. Write something about it. One your own. No dumbdowning apps, not voice to text crap. Get sometone to give you a thinking and critical debate assignment. Think Think Think. Remember, hardly ANYONE knows about Gary Webb. Only 18 years ago, and so prescient for what is happening today with the insane mainstream corporate media: “Eighteen Years Ago Today, Journalist Gary Webb Was Murdered After Exposing CIA Drug Trafficking” Oh yeah, Covert Aciton Magazine and Consortium News. On that list of unreliable news sources!
The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.
Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it. (Pinter)
It makes sense that good journalists have to take a cold hard look at facts. That they don’t take a side, per se, and look at as many angles of a story that is humanly possible. Even under those provisos, we still find missing a lack of humanity in this entire propaganda “game” of Western Mauling Mainstream Media, in all the photo ops with this dirty man, Zelensky, and all the parading of billionaires like AdamSandler, Ben Stiller, Sean Penn and others with this dirty man, Zelensky. None of that makes sense when put up against the human toll of war. The lack of negotiations, again, on the shoulders of a small elite, rabble, really, not the smartest and most caring humans in the so-called box.
The left, right, middle, others, seem to use the news of this SMO — Ukraine v Russia, NATO v Russia, USA v Russian, Britain v Russia, Europe v Russia, Canada v Russia — as a bizarre point making exercise. History lessons? Looking at a glacial shift from EuroTrash Landia and Klanada and U$A as stalwarts of exceptionalism and doing good for all humanity, these non-journalists and stenographers use death as their play box, smirking and laughing, with all the rambling, repetion, all of it, while people DIE.
Again, revisit the German-made, All Quiet on the Western Front: Get a sense of how sick the leaders of the world were then, and, of course, sicker yet today, with all the supposed history under their belts.
Yes, the making of the film is sort of daft, but, still, go find the film, watch it, no interruptions, no popcorn. It’s still amazing, in this time of USA-Israel-EuroTrashLandia-Klanada, we are being guided by worthless humans arm chair quarterbacking and gleefully reporting on Kiev or Moscow, and tracking the sociopaths in Biden’s Horrible Administration. Like chess pieces on a grand chessboard.
So many years ago, from a sad writer, but so true now!
“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”
― D.H. Lawrence
Oh, the American soul is made up of Ivy League MBA’s, Poli-Sci grads, lawyers, all propaganda queens and kings. Slick, LGBTQA+ and full of Disneyland glee. Humanity, today, at nanosecond speed, with endless censoring, endless split hair lies, endless fake news, endless vapid history, endless people fomenting death, we have learned NOTHING. Even the Greta Thurnberg folks, 350.org, weigh in on “supporting” Ukraine, a Nazi regime, coup regime, a regime that has been a CIA stomping ground for 70 years.
This is some sick stuff, and I interviewed that Bill 350.org McKibben in 2005, and he told me on my radio show to give Obama a chance when he was first knighted as president.
The article was entitled “Solidarity with the People of Ukraine.” It proclaimed that “Ukraine, a peaceful democratic nation, is under a brutal military attack by Russia’s President Putin.”
These are not humane people. Look at their glimming faces:
This dude spends so much time pushing his faith. My god, what faith:
Q: What’s your faith history? How were you raised?
BM: I’ve been a good mainline Protestant of many flavors over the years. I was born in California and baptized as a Presbyterian. Then we lived in Toronto for five years, so I started Sunday school at the United Church of Canada. And then we moved to the suburbs of Boston where the local flavor was Congregationalist and I belonged to a high school youth group in the United Church of Christ. And then I moved up to the mountains (the Adirondacks) as a young man where the dominant flavor was Methodism. So now I’m a Methodist. (source)
He is the enemy, Bill:
McKibben wrote in February that it was “amazing to watch people across the planet rallying to the defense of brave Ukraine—choirs singing outside Russian embassies, soccer teams refusing to play Russian teams. And it’s wonderful to watch governments rise to the occasion: shutting off airspace to Russian airplanes, or kicking them off international banking protocols.” (source)
Oh, those Harvard educated folk, McKibben, a terrible man for sure. words like “rallying” and “wonderful to watch” and “choirs singing outside Russian embassies” what a loser. What a loser who is very very dangerous since he is a professor, a professing son of a you-know-what. What an American. What a Christian hypocrite. What a grifter.
More than cognitive dissonance he is displaying It is a concerted propaganda tour de force by yet another worthless human. Foundation for McvKibben is ignorance and misleading his followers (greenie weenies) down the brainwashing world. How many articles or books or talks has this idiot missed? (yes, ad hominem galore here, and no apologies given).
These people, or these cold, skinny jeans, Facebook posting woke (unwoke) people getting their 15 months, minutes, years of fame, the are emotional, historical, intellectual terrorists. What an ugly world we live in, as how in hell can anyone listen to a 350.org spiel, without condemning this quote above or the essay (sic) he wrote on his substack (source) . Green Warfare. That’s the 350.org way, and the way of my literary associations. Here, Orion Magazine, features four writers from Ukraine, and not one of the essays doubts the work of their own government, 2014 Maidan, all the killing in Donbass, security measures for Russian speaking Ukrainians. Total BS navel gazing crap: “Silence and Air Raids: 4 Essays from Wartime Ukraine: Four writers report from the ground in Odesa” (source) And, no comments section for these four self-indulgent pieces. Not that people do not have the right to write about the horrors of war, or being in a country where war is being unleashed. Of course those are important, but these essays are divorced from history, from nuance, and that is so wrong and sad and so greenie weenie and liberal lite as it gets!
Bill McKibben calls the U$A “an arsenal of democracy.” Whew. Read the rebuttle to this fool’s words: “Bill McKibben: Greenwashing U.S. Imperialism’s Russia Rivalry, War Moves in Ukraine …a Call for Debate” by Raymond Lotta:
Bill McKibben’s outlook and program are not going to lead to where he might, in his heart, want it to lead: to green energy. But Bill McKibben is playing a leading role in putting an environmental canopy on the anti-Putin bandwagon… and objectively acting to bring environmental activists and broader progressives into an embrace of the strategic aims and war preparations of U.S. imperialism against its imperial rivals. It is chauvinist to the core and morally despicable.
I’m challenging Bill McKibben to respond to my critique and to publicly debate the nature of Ukraine conflict, and why only revolution – not capitalism – gives humanity a chance to address the climate emergency. The stakes for humanity and the planet could not be higher.” (source)
I was watching All Quiet on the Western Front for a second time yesterday. I have recently watched again, The Thin Red Line. Oh, so many more zoning out affairs to validate how many deaths this capitalist and fascist regime has unleashed on humanity. Russia, and China, just validating them, well, I have lost contacts who will not debate Russia and Ukraine or China or greenwashing and green pornography.
China? The entire history in less than 90 minutes. Watch:
[ This is a long, but extremely informative explanation of China’s “Century of Humiliation” and will leave no doubt in your mind as to why China wants a unified society and a powerful military. Historian Carl Zha of the Silk & Steel podcast joins me to talk about China’s “Century of Humiliation” at the hands of Western powers and how it connects directly to US-Chinese tensions today. – How the US has repeatedly made treaties and agreements with China only to betray them when US interests demand; – The West’s historical use of Hong Kong and Taiwan as hubs to destabilize and dominate over the rest of China; The historical use by the West of China for cheap labor and for markets to exploit; The threat China faced for lacking a strong military and a unified population; The clear motivations China has for a military and political system used to protect itself from further interference and exploitation.]
Scott Ritter has a role in dissecting the Special Military Operation, and he does interview Russians, for god’s sake, which is rare. You don’t see this in the MSM, for sure, and all the usual CIA and State Department suspects are there, without any regard for Russia. Very bizarre times, for sure. Bizarre that USA journalists will not interview Russian experts, or Russian people. Very sick indeed.
However, the laughing and goofiness of guys like Ritter is still upsetting to me:
Yeah, it’s not all gloom and doom, but so many people are making hay off the deaths of hundreds of thousands. Again!
The numbers of civilians and conscripted soldieres and the collateral deaths and then the starvation, the early deaths, the PTSD and physical ailments, the disease, all of that from wars? Even rotten Wikipedia has something on that:
Some disgusting number of 1.64 billion have died in all wars throughout human existence (where do they come up with numbers . . . ?). Bizarre estimates, no? Sanctions Kill. And, the lifeblood of nations are the children, the unborn, the offspring, so war stunts humanity, Homo Sapiens. Billions have been destroyed by wars. And, here we are, in 2022, these rotten people with suits and smiles determining deaths directly on the battlefield, and then, the collateral damage:
Smiles, EU:
Sick sick sick people, run by these continual criminal enterprises:
And this is acceptable, CEOs, women, running-ruining the world:
“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
A close look at the ecology and health of Pacific Coast Feeding Group gray whales in Oregon waters
by Paul Haeder / December 1st, 2022
It was a good live crowd — over a hundred folk, November 30, at Hatfield’s new classroom building, Gladys Valley Marine Studies Building Auditorium. And another 100 in “attendance” on the Zoom Doom.
I’m a member of the Cetacean Society International, and the American Cetacean Society, and unfortunately for the Oregon group, their meetings and live speakers have retreated to the digital dungeons, never having face-to-face meetings anymore in Newport. That is the sham and the shame of this new abnormal. Even this OSU event had the live component, with a bistro in this overpriced new building, and beer and wine, also available. Fancy auditorium no?
I did a story on this building in its construction stage, here:
I covered a conference, too, again, three years ago, when the local rag let me write a long form column on a regular, paid basis: “Should We Trust Science? (Conference celebrates how the ocean connects to all of us — coastlines, people, cultures”)
I have written about my love of ecosystems, marine systems, and my dive bum days, and of course, I have also have written stories on ecosystems and marine biology, etc. There are many stories still to be told, but last night’s talk by Leigh Torres, Associate Professor, Department of Fisheries and Wildlife and Oregon Sea Grant, was a recap of all the work she and her graduate (PhD and MS) students have been doing on gray whales, including the distinct Pacific Coast Feeding Group, numbering around 250.
There were other scientists there, and there were many young students from the OSU Hatfield Marine Science Center. Older retired folk were there, and I had a sense that most people there were somehow associated with the university, with marine sciences, directly or through a relative engaged in that avocation.
As I’ve said before, there are many women going into the sciences, and you can see Leigh below with her skiff and her female graduate students working on drone surveillance and other forms of research to get more data on the gray whales on our coast.
A talk like this is all about loving those cetaceans, and our PCFG draws people from around the country to our coast for whale watching. May through October, they are here feeding. Depoe Bay is a great spot to watch.
Below images and videos, and at the end, is the actual Power Point Presentation from the Nov. 30 presention.
These scientists want to know why the Pacific Group is sticking around our coast and not heading to the Arctic with the majority of gray whales. The whales all calf in the waters of Baja. Then, the trip north. They number for all groups around 20,000.
Basic ecology and animal-mammal biology mean looking at how they “are” in their environment, what their hormones show, and what is happening to their prey. The fact this Pacific Feeding Group is in highly human-influenced/disturbed waters is also a point of research. Then, of course, we have their prey as well as in noise and as in boats coming up to them, and as in the crab pots that cause entanglements.
And, those strikes, those hulls and propellers hitting whales:
Diet for these whales?
As part of the research they look at the energy of whichever species the gray whale eats, as seen above. And, since 70 percent of the prey is mysid shrimp, the scientists want to know what those animals have in their bodies.
We are THE plastic species, as is the entire ocean. The gray whales have small fiber plastic — microplastics — and then beads in their feces. They are eating prey that has plastic in their bodies, and they also scoop up water and dirt that also have plastic in it.
In pregnant and lactating females, the amount of this zooplankton they have to consume is 1.5 to 2 tons of prey a day. The bio-accumulative effect of the plastics is huge under those tonage numbers.
The underwater Go Pro Cameras give some cool images of gray whales in action. The poop or fecal samples give the scientists the cortisol levels — stress hormone — in the animals. There are unusual mortality events, one big one happening in 2014 in Mexico. Many of those animals were emaciated. Many animals die, and sink to the bottom of the ocean.
The estimated 14.3 million to 23 million microparticles of plastic per ton of shrimp they eat HAS to have an effect on total physiology of the animals.
Then we have the entire web of life — sea stars, kelp, urchins, the zooplankton, all of that.
We have urchins going up in population, as the health of kelp, zooplankton, and gray whales feeding zones is declining. Sea stars eat urchins, as do sea otters. We have no marine otters here on the coast of Oregon, and the sea star wasting disease has decimated that species, allowing for more urchins, which eat young kelp. Kelp beds are rookeries, and the zooplankton/ meroplankton need that web of life.
The grays need that zooplankton to survive.
The end goal is to get this PCFG categorized as a distinct subspecies, to have them protected.
Again, science in a time of climate disruption, pollution, over-harvesting, and disturbances in food webs is both interesting and reliant upon year after year of more and more data, more and more bearing witness to declines in species. As the scientists get smarter with smarter tools, the general population and politicians at large get dumb and dumber.
Here’s a fact: One of the most dynamic and depressing jobs in the world is being a sea turtle expert. I remember him at the Bioneers events I was a part of, Wallace J. Nichols. Here, quotes:
Ocean plankton provides more than half of our planet’s oxygen.
Education should be based on simple awareness: Awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: This is water.
Cool, and depressing, because species are going, going and gone.
We see here on the pages of Dissident Voice pieces on climate change, climate change fatigue, climate change cover-ups, climate change as a hoax, and climate or is or is not related to CO2 released into the atmosphere.
Because education and discourse and the media all entwine to create silos and camps and sort of groups of people unwilling to talk, or learn, we are in big trouble.
Species like whales have always been the mega species that get to your hearts — you know, mammals, out there in the big blue, animals that were once land animals.
The science is cool, and expensive, and, yes, all those folk at the auditorium, I am not sure if they’d show up for homeless veterans and families stuck in the woods with leaky tents and zero chance at housing because of felonies, evictions, etc. talk.
We are an interesting species, are we not?
And, the reality is we do not need to have year after year of studies from hundreds of scientists around the world to wonder what the microplastics are doing to us, mammals, as they spread and embed in our bodies, inside cells, you know, it is sort of NOT the thing we should be accepting in mother earth — forever chemicals, PFAS’s, neurotoxins in babies, well, you get the picture.
More science to study cigarettes to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that smoking hurts lungs? That smoking most definitely causes cancer?
Since the sun is hot, it gives off energy in the form of shortwave radiation at mainly ultraviolet and visible wavelengths. Earth is much cooler, so it emits heat as infrared radiation, which has longer wavelengths.
[The electromagnetic spectrum is the range of all types of EM radiation – energy that travels and spreads out as it goes. The sun is much hotter than the Earth, so it emits radiation at a higher energy level, which has a shorter wavelength. NASA]
Carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases have molecular structures that enable them to absorb infrared radiation. The bonds between atoms in a molecule can vibrate in particular ways, like the pitch of a piano string. When the energy of a photon corresponds to the frequency of the molecule, it is absorbed and its energy transfers to the molecule.
But back to whales! We have a planet that is under huge stress. The lifestyles of the rich and famous and disgustingly insane billionaires and millionaires, and of course, the upper part of the collective west, they are the killers. WE throw away giga tons of food, products, things each year. WE do not build for durable and long-lasting effect, anymore. Throw it all away, and out with the semi-used, in with the new style. Planned and perceived obsolensence. What is the embedded and life cycle of everything? We are wasteful and dirty.
It’s cheaper to toss the helicopter overboard than to bring it home. Agriculture is at war with nature, with ecosystems, with all the real natural services mother earth gives.
But the yammering and yammering about how greenhouse gasses do nothing to warm the planet, to acidify the oceans, or that pollution doesn’t cause acid rain, all of that, plus how many species of meat for humans are destroyed because of Avian flu or salmonella or lysteria or, well, you get the picture, none of it is put together to look at what capitalism is, really. Barbarism, savagery.
Oh, the isle of rabid men: The Whole Foods decision comes after the Marine Stewardship Council and Seafood Watch recently pulled their lobster endorsements over concerns about risks to rare North Atlantic right whales from fishing gear. Entanglement in gear is one of the biggest threats to the whales, they said.
Yep, those democratic governors, and jobs, and, a way of life:
“MaineSenators Susan Collins and Angus King, Representatives Chellie Pingree and Jared Golden, and Governor Janet Mills today released the following statement after the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) announced plans to temporarily suspend their certification of Maine’s lobster fishery. In their decision, MSC acknowledges that while the Maine fishery meets standards for sustainability and environmental impact and is unlikely to cause harm to right whales, it is unable to certify any fishery that is not in compliance with federal regulations – a standard MSC believes the fishery does not meet due to the ongoing litigation in CBD v. Ross.”
Today’s decision by the Marine Stewardship Council to temporarily suspend certification of Maine’s lobster fishery is the result of a years-long campaign from misguided environmentalist groups who seem to be hellbent on putting a proud, sustainable industry out of business without regard to the consequences of their actions. While the Maine industry met the highest standards for environmental sustainability and impact, the current pending CBD v. Ross court case led by the Center for Biological Diversity, Conservation Law Foundation, Defenders of Wildlife, and the Humane Society of the United States made certification impossible. This litigation is based more on activism than evidence and is putting livelihoods in jeopardy.
So, designating the PCFG as a distinct and need-to-be-watched/protected species will then, hit not just the crabbers, but our Makah:
Makah Whaling – A Gift from the Sea
Whaling and whales are central to Makah culture. The event of a whale hunt requires rituals and ceremonies which are deeply spiritual. Makah whaling the subject and inspiration of Tribal songs, dances, designs, and basketry. For the Makah Tribe, whale hunting provides a purpose and a discipline which benefits their entire community. It is so important to the Makah, that in 1855 when the Makah ceded thousands of acres of land to the government of the United States, they explicitly reserved their right to whale within the Treaty of Neah Bay.
Makah whaling tradition provides oil, meat, bone, sinew and gut for storage containers: useful products, though gained at a high cost in time and goods.
The Makah Whale Hunt
To get ready for the hunt, whalers went off by themselves to pray, fast and bathe ceremonially. Each man had his own place, followed his own ritual, and sought his own power. Weeks or months went into this special preparation beginning in winter and whalers devoted their whole lives to spiritual readiness.
Men waited for favorable weather and ocean conditions and then paddled out, eight in a canoe. They timed their departure so that they would arrive on the whaling grounds at daybreak.
Paddling silently, whalers studied the breathing pattern of their quarry. They knew from experience what to expect. As the whale finished spouting and returned underwater, the leader of the hunt directed the crew to where it would next surface. There the men waited.
We are in weird and broken times. War, war makers, war manufacturers, billionaires in Monaco with Lamborghini’s with Ukraine licensce plates. Sunny place the size of Central Park but with shady deals. Billions disappeared for ZioAzovNaziLensky. Billions, man, and the money is being made vis-a-vis crypto currency; the scams, all of the money laundering, and we sit and watch the world burn.
Jobs of whalers, jobs of tobacco farmers, jobs of gun-bullet-missile makers, jobs of all those alphabet agencies, jobs of the hedge funders, jobs jobs jobs on the chopping block . . . and what about that way of life jeopardized . . . the survival of the dirties, meanest, most monster-like species. One giant Faustian Bargain on a planet that, well, you climate change deniers, you techno fascists, you gurus of WEF and great reset, disbelieve then that the planet is in bad shape.
And, the auditorium was filled with middle and upper middle class folk, probably more PhD’s in one room ever along the Oregon coast, and they had the fancy salads, triple Americanos, hoppy drafts and local wines.
For a talk, man, and Leigh is good, but to be truthful, the talk was high school level, really. And, she’s given the same talk three years ago, live, in the Newport library, for the local American Cetacean Society, before those people went underground, in the Zoom Doom Rooms, never to be seen again at a live event.
These are strange times. Whale watching for a feel-good touristy cause, but whale watching boats are part of the problem. There are calls to curb the watcher boats in Puget Sound. Here, a great interactive series:
Man-Woman, versus beasts. All that hi-tech equipment, all the plastics in the scientists’ tool kit, all the gasoline and diesel and electricity expended to research. Yes, these people have their hearts in the right place, but scientists are still data freaks, and they do not have hard spines when the world needs steeled spines in the mix. All that state-funded, taxpayer-paid-for bricks and mortar and all the money spent to create these institutions of higher learning, yet, these smart people are not on the front lines, and god forbid we talk about CAPITALISM, because, colleges, all the grants, all the bells and whistles, it’s still about CAPITALISM.
But the Makah?
The 1855 Treaty of Neah Bay could not be clearer: The U.S. government agreed the Makah Tribe, natives of the northwest tip of the Olympic Peninsula, had “the right of taking fish and of whaling.”
Yet across nearly a century, the tribe has organized just one whale hunt, a much-protested outing in May 1999. Starting in the 1920s, the Makah stood down from whaling because of global over-harvest of whale populations. With the once-endangered Eastern North Pacific gray whale population now flourishing, the tribe should be allowed to resume the traditional, treaty-guaranteed hunts around which generations of Makah built a culture.
Species survival is no longer a reason to stop the Makah from hunting whales. Researchers estimate there are almost 27,000 Eastern North Pacific gray whales today, though the Western North Pacific population remains endangered. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has tracked the status of these pods of whales for years and considers the current Eastern numbers approximately the maximum the habitat can sustain. (source)
Paul Haeder’s been a teacher, social worker, newspaperman, environmental activist, and marginalized muckraker, union organizer. Paul’s book, Reimagining Sanity: Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber (2016), looks at 10 years (now going on 17 years) of his writing at Dissident Voice. Read his musings at LA Progressive. Read (purchase) his short story collection, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam now out, published by Cirque Journal. Here’s his Amazon page with more published work Amazon. Read other articles by Paul, or visit Paul’s website.
We are in a rape culture. We have a million examples in this neoliberal and neocon country of that. We have the fact of one out of 12 or 15 girls and women losing their viriginity through sexual assault. We have what, one out of five in this country experiencing sexual assault by the time they hit 40 years of age.
The reality is we have Clarence Thomas as one of the Supremes, with his sick attack on Anita Hill, as well as girls and women at large, and then the frat boy Kavanaugh, more male human stain. Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, 55, is a professor of psychology at Palo Alto University who grew up in the suburbs of Washington DC. She’s also a research psychologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine. And her testimony was lambasted by a lot of men. Joe Biden attacked Anita Hill during her testimony to try and keep the Criminal Clarence off the bench. Dear reader, you can provide countless examples of rape culture, misogony, and the unending attack on women.
It is a worldwide phenomnem. Sure, we can get the New York Post or Jerusalem Post reporting on this most recent incident, without really getting under the molting skin of Western Culture:
A Pakistani father has been arrested in the suspected honor killing of his 18-year-old daughter in Italy after she refused an arranged marriage, police said Friday.
Shabbir Abbas was taken into custody in his village in the eastern Punjab province last week after a tip-off by Italian authorities and local police, senior police official Anwar Saeed Kingra said.
The suspect’s daughter, Saman Abbas, was last seen alive in late April by neighbors outside her family’s home in the farm town of Novellara, near the city of Reggio Emilia.
A few days later, a Milan airport video showed Saman’s parents, who had reportedly been pressuring her to marry a man she had never met, catching a flight to Pakistan.
Abbas’ arrest comes just days after a body was discovered in a shallow grave in an abandoned building near the Pakistani family’s home. (source)
Of course, violence, as we say, domestic violence, is a specific sort of hatred and overt misogyny. Yeah, Israel and so many other countries do their thing against innocent people because they know destroying teens and old men and old women destroy the cultural safety net.
Beware of anything tied to religion, tied to USA and Israel, too — it’s not just (sic) an honor killing. These demons in Israel know what they are doing to the dignity and mental health of young women. Here,
A Palestinian woman filed a complaint after being subjected to an intimate search. Her story reveals the tip of an iceberg of Israeli misconduct, excuses, and cover-ups at the highest levels of the security and justice establishment.
by Kathryn Shihadah
In recent weeks, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz has been reporting on a disturbing case opened in 2018 by the Israeli State Prosecutor’s Office. The story reveals Israel’s official complicity with the intimate body search of at least one Palestinian woman, and Israel’s investigative agency’s unwillingness to police its own.
Israel has a long history of strip searching women and children, first revealed by If Americans Knew in 2007 (see this and this) and in number of additionalreportssince.
Following is a recent egregious example, and complicity at the highest levels of the Israeli security and justice establishment.
In 2015, Shin Bet and Israeli military personnel raided the home of a Palestinian woman suspected of having links with Hamas (the elected body ruling in Gaza) in order to confiscate cell phones and tablets. The woman cooperated, and the Israelis located the devices. They still needed to find a SIM card.
A high ranking Shin Bet officer (male) apparently told an Israeli military officer (also male) to order a body cavity search – an act that was not only unjustified, but may be considered rape and sodomy.
The military officer ordered the woman to be taken to a room and stripped, and two female soldiers (one a doctor) to perform the search; that is, she was searched twice. Nothing was found, and no one along the line of command questioned or reported the order (the SIM card was later found in the woman’s bedroom).
This rambling preamble is a way to set the stage, sort of speak, to a simple case (very complicated, actually) of how one 38 year old woman from Canada (who I just met in February) got hooked by a 36 year old from Arizona in their 5 year long relationship where the man drank daily into black out drunkenness, and, continuously attacked her, defamed her, humiliated her, exacted complete control over her. Intimate violence is one term for this. Yes, a woman who speaks and reads three languages, who had her own restaurant in Guatemala, and who is bright and confident, has a family — parents and sister — in Canada — but she was set into a trap where her good nature and her vulnerability (cultivated early, from her youth, as well as from how she was brought up, and from her family’s own issues with abuse) was exploited by a very mean, Doctor Jeckle, Mister Hyde guy who, of course, has his own victimhood as a youth by a horrible father and horrible mother.
The writer accusing Donald Trump of raping her 27 years ago said the former U.S. president defamed her a second time last month by falsely telling his social media followers that he had not known her and the rape never happened.
E. Jean Carroll, a former Elle magazine columnist, made the accusation in a lawsuit she plans to file on Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 24, accusing Trump of battery over their alleged encounter at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan. (source)
Biden?
When alleged rapists are members of a group Trump likes, however, he is more sympathetic. In 2013, in response to the Pentagon’s annual report on sexual assault, he tweeted: “26,000 unreported sexual assults [sic] in the military-only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?”
“I do remember her telling me that Joe Biden had put her up against a wall and had put his hands up her skirt and had put his fingers inside her,” LaCasse said. Tara Reade, as detailed in a previous NPR report, has accused Biden of pinning her against a wall in the hallway of a Capitol Hill building and penetrating her vagina with his fingers in the spring of 1993.
The Biden campaign denies the alleged incident, as do longtime Biden staffers whom Reade worked for at the time.
The Biden campaign did not specifically respond to the latest developments, but pointed NPR to its previous statement, which said that the alleged incident “absolutely did not happen.” Biden has not addressed the accusation himself.
AMERICA’S ACCOUNTABILITY PROBLEM is being laid bare. Once a global superpower, today jeers of “failed state” better describe our geriatric empire. Having survived impeachment, America’s acquitted president poorly navigates an unclear future as a pandemic rages and a recession looms, leaving hundreds of thousands dead in its global wake. An embattled population barrels toward a national election between two accused rapists and known liars: President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joseph Biden. (source)
I’m getting there, toward the Domestic Violence platform from which to continue, but this context is needed to validate how both the abuser and the victim is put into a cultural overlay and underlay of what makes people think they are or are not abusers, how victims see themselves, what the society sees and doesn’t see, how courts to and do not validate spousal abuse, and this amazingly complex issue of a victim’s mind rewiring to develop this yo-you of returning back to the abuser, and how Stockholm Syndrome is very real when it comes to domestic violence. Here, rape culture, and if you are smart, delve into news, study Hollywood, study so much in this society — and I am a male, so I have been in situations as a police reporter, a high school athlete, teacher of military personnel, and more, which gives me insider insight from males who have some of the most evil things to say about women, wives, girlfriends, daughters, et al.
Rape is the nation’s most underreported violent crime, according to U.S. Justice Department statistics, as survivors fear that juries will believe the perpetrators, not them, and if they pursue justice, they may suffer further physical, economic, or social harm.
Honor killings, murdering women land defenders, raping boys and girls in wars, the football macho culture, the Hollywood dramas, hell, even Marilyn raped by Zanuck:
In Joyce Carol Oates’ 700-page novel, Blonde, the lead character is usually named as Norma Jeane, the name Monroe was born with and known by until her movie career took off. Later, she is “Marilyn Monroe”. During the second world war, the novel’s Norma Jeane works at Radio Plane, a company doing war work – and the future star did work at such a company. Later, when she finds fame, she marries first “the Ex-Athlete” and then “the Playwright” – transparent references to Monroe’s husbands Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller.
Sexual experiences, mostly miserable ones, dominate Blonde – with an emphasis on the tyranny and treachery of many of her men. Early in the book, Norma Jeane is raped by a Hollywood studio mogul who is allotted the name “Mr Z”. The rape scene is graphically written, sparing no detail. “Mr Z” has been interpreted as a thinly veiled reference to the founder of Twentieth Century Fox, Darryl Zanuck. The real-life Monroe recalled “casting couch” sex encounters . . . .
Rape. Sexual assault, but rape. Forced, unsolicited, not wanted forced sex. Biden, Clinton, Trump, et al.
The hero, the baseball freak? Beat the crap out of Marilyn, which is Domestic Violence. So many doubt he did it, and alas, this is where we are in 2022.
The DiMaggio character’s last scene in “Blonde” is when he confronts her back at their hotel room. He calls her “a (expletive) whore” and gives her a beating so violent that director Andrew Dominik apparently thought it would be more dramatically effective to take it off screen.
Was DiMaggio really so controlling and abusive? Did he truly lose it over “The Seven Year Itch” scene? In many ways, this view of DiMaggio is true, according to biographies, news reports and eyewitness accounts.
DiMaggio was “obsessed” with Monroe, tried to control his wife’s career, discouraged her from taking roles that reinforced her sexualized blonde-bombshell image and wanted her to dress more modestly and not outshine him in public, Slate reported.
If Monroe didn’t comply, DiMaggio became physically abusive, Slate reported. Monroe’s plight is confirmed by his son, Joe DiMaggio Jr., who once recalled waking up to “the sound of my father and Marilyn screaming,” the New York Post reported in 2014, citing the book, “Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love” by biographer C. David Heymann.
“After a few minutes, I heard Marilyn race down the stairs and out the front door, and my father running after her,” DiMaggio Jr. continued. “He caught up to her and grabbed her by the hair and sort of half-dragged her back to the house. She was trying to fight him off but couldn’t.”
Monroe also confirmed that her participation in “The Seven Year Itch” led to the end of their marriage. She was quoted as saying, “exposing my legs and thighs, even my crotch — that was the last straw,” according to Biography.com. (source)
Photographer George S. Zimbel recalled everything going deathly quiet as DiMaggio, present for filming the scene, stormed away from the set. A violent fight followed at their hotel, according to Zimbel.
I’ll give the list here, first, and then continue with the personal story:
One in every four women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime.
An estimated 1.3 million women are victims of physical assault by an intimate partner each year.
Historically, females have been most often victimized by someone they knew.
Females who are 20 – 24 years of age are at the greatest risk of nonfatal intimate partner violence.
Most cases of domestic violence are never reported to the police.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, on average, more than three women and one man are murdered by their intimate partners in this country every day.
In 70 – 80% of intimate partner homicides, no matter which partner was killed, the man physically abused the woman before the murder.
It is estimated that anywhere between 3.3 million and 10 million children witness domestic violence annually.
Boys who witness domestic violence are twice as likely to abuse their own partners and children when they become adults.
Thirty to 60% of perpetrators of intimate partner violence also abuse children.
The cost of intimate partner violence exceeds $5.8 billion each year, $4.1billion of which is for direct medical and mental health services.
There are 16,800 homicides and $2.2 million worth of (medically treated) injuries due to intimate partner violence annually, which costs $37 billion.
Fifty percent of battered women who are employed are harassed at work by their abusive partners.
Approximately one-half of the orders obtained by women against intimate partners who physically assaulted them were violated.
More than two-thirds of the restraining orders against intimate partners who raped or stalked the victim were violated.
Intimate partner violence affects people regardless of income. (source)
What follows is a 1,000 word piece that will appear in the Newport News Times, the local twice-a-week newspaper in my neck of the woods. Will appear around Dec. 20. You know, the holiday season when more domestic abuse situations explode like a festering stye.
Black and Blue – Domestic Violence is a Tale of Multiple Abuses
By Paul K. Haeder
The month of October and the color blue signify yet another “awareness” month (October). Domestic Violence is an issue that should be, unfortunately, recognized and dealt with 24/7, 365 days a year. Every single day! December historically has been the month when DV cases/incidents rise.
In Lincoln County, spousal abuse ranks high on many of the crimes ending up on the police blotter.
This newspaper covers plethora of arrests tied to assaults that are indeed in the realm of domestic abuse. In many cases alcohol and drugs are the driving force behind many cases. We can get deep and say an abuser probably comes from an abusive childhood, but it’s difficult to conjure up sympathy for a man who punches, strangles or stabs his spouse.
Front page newspaper stories about accused abusers are both dramatic and informative for the community, but the reality for the abused seeing a headline and reading a detailed story of her perpetrator’s arrest is both unsettling and validation.
This County has a major lack of so-called “services” for those impacted by domestic abuse. There are no multiple so-called safe houses for sheltering the victim (My Sister’s Place), or easily accessed dynamic programs to assist victims (and a victim includes both the spouse and children and pets when families are involved).
The Lincoln County District Attorney’s office has decent prosecutors, for sure, and there is a Victim’s Assistance staff doing amazing things; there are even so-called Domestic Violence-focused judges in this neck of the woods. I have personal experience with a sheriff deputy investigating a case of wife abuse which encourages me about the character of some cops.
Imagine, a deputy telling a victim that “. . . it’s not your fault, this guy targeted you, and you are powerful, smart and worthy of a loving, respectful relationship.” This deputy in fact lives in my community, Waldport, with three children and wife. I see how invested he is in creating a safe community for all of us.
Unfortunately, for women, the cycle of abuse includes the yo-yo motion of both psychological factors and the action of returning to their abusers. The relationship that involves physical and verbal abuse is one of co-dependency and actual physiological changes in the woman’s brain.
We can call the Stockholm Syndrome-like actions of a victim a “dual relationship between the power of the abuser and the weakness of the abused.” Obviously, high profile and highly successful women – CEOs, business owners, et al – can be that “victim,” as well as any sort of woman on various social determinant spectrums that predicate economic, psychological and educational outcomes.
People in marriages and relationships whose partners are abusers can develop Stockholm Syndrome towards any person who has an eerie degree of power over them. We see this with anyone in interpersonal relationships with — husbands, wives, partners, parents, grandparents, children.
I’ve seen this up close and personal here in Lincoln County with several people who have reached out to me and my resources to flee abuse. The syndrome is built on a foundation of fear, threats, and isolation, and is generally believed to require victims’ belief that they can’t escape the situation they’re in.
The foundational ingredient (or poison or dark magic) is these “small acts of kindness” on the part of the abuser, whether real or perceived. Behind all that darkness, the abuser’s own actions are looked at “as a source of the flame of something to live for.”
This entails a complex set of cultural, interpersonal, and psychological elements. The abuser can be seen as a monster – and there are outright monsters I have seen as a reporter, case manager and brother of a sister who managed safe houses and DV programs in Arizona – or a charmer.
Some of the common personality factors in an abuser include narcissism, low self-esteem and a long list of elements to include:
A history of abuse in one’s family or past
Being physically or sexually abused as a child
A history of being physically abusive
A lack of appropriate coping skills
Untreated mental illness
Drug or alcohol abuse
Socioeconomic pressures or economic stress (studies show a higher incidence of abuse in lower-income communities)
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
Emotional dependence and insecurity
Belief in strict gender roles (e.g., male dominance and aggression in relationships)
Desire for power and control in past relationships
While there may be a history of attitudes accepting or justifying violence and aggression in American society, as well as studies citing the US as a rape culture, the fact is women especially have so many challenges accepting they are abused, believing that they are not responsible for the abuse and not falling into despair and creating their own isolation as the abuser’s perceived and real power over a woman’s life dominates.
The cycle of mental, economic and physical abuse inside a relationship that is abusive includes the psychodynamics of perpetrator and victim. The idea of understanding one’s victimhood in whichever culture a woman lives (some men of course are victims, too) is to dig deep into that culture’s treatment of families, women, mental health as well as how it embraces the sociological determinants of mental health outcomes including lack of economic stability, substance abuse, and one’s own self-worth.
Two quotations, one from a male and a female survivor, give hope during this holiday season, when abuse seems to heighten:
You survived the abuse. You’re gonna survive the recovery.
You are not the darkness you endured. You are the light that refused to surrender.
**Call 911 when in danger. Contact My Sister’s Place/My Safe Place, Lincoln County, for help: (541) 574-9424; Crisis Hotline: (541) 994-5959**
+–+
The Early Roots
Oh, it starts with the parents of the parents. That is for sure. So, my Quebec friend, her own mother’s life in a small town near Montreal, or somewhere, involved brothers. Four brothers sexually assaulting her. Imagine that. And then, years later, a niece — daughter of one of those brothers — doing the same to his daughter, and alas, the mother of my friend, we’ll call my 38 year old friend, Domineque, went to court, had her niece file charges, and then, the old man after months of trials and tribulations, was found guilty of child abuse. That 30 year old niece, the day after the guilty verdict — not really justice served — died of a drug overdose.
My friend’s parents, let’s say, Cindi and Clement, married as sweethearts, at the age of 16. The old man, Clement, he was a motorcycle mechanic, then car mechanic and then car salesman. The two of them had two daughters, my friend Domineque and her sister Julia, let’s call her.
Parents who bought an old home and remodeled it and fixed it up. My friend and sister learned the skills of doing that sort of house fixing, and her mother was all hands on deck too. I have seen photos of the place outside Montreal. Upstairs and downstairs, two suites.
I have this friend’s story pretty complete, certainly from the start of when Domineque met this guy, let’s call him Daniel. Met in Guatemala, where she was running a cool eatery in Antigua. The guy was another traveling dude, drinking and living off of his old man’s inheritence.
All stories begin in the womb and before conception, for sure. We call this epigenetics, and cultural and family histories. How your DNA runs and develops, well, think grandparents and beyond.
This paper reviews the research evidence concerning the intergenerational transmission of trauma effects and the possible role of epigenetic mechanisms in this transmission. Two broad categories of epigenetically mediated effects are highlighted. The first involves developmentally programmed effects. These can result from the influence of the offspring’s early environmental exposures, including postnatal maternal care as well as in utero exposure reflecting maternal stress during pregnancy. The second includes epigenetic changes associated with a preconception trauma in parents that may affect the germline, and impact fetoplacental interactions. Several factors, such as sex‐specific epigenetic effects following trauma exposure and parental developmental stage at the time of exposure, explain different effects of maternal and paternal trauma. The most compelling work to date has been done in animal models, where the opportunity for controlled designs enables clear interpretations of transmissible effects. Given the paucity of human studies and the methodological challenges in conducting such studies, it is not possible to attribute intergenerational effects in humans to a single set of biological or other determinants at this time. Elucidating the role of epigenetic mechanisms in intergenerational effects through prospective, multi‐generational studies may ultimately yield a cogent understanding of how individual, cultural and societal experiences permeate our biology. (source)
So, the story is that hypervigilance, and how the brain is rewired just in the uterus is pretty complicated. Also, nurture — a household with parents that have lived through their own trauma — think of my friend’s mother raped by four brothers, and what was that household like, i.e. father, mother, discipline, projection of parents’ failings onto their offspring, etc.
This can get really deep, and of course, my friend has never had real emotional and spiritual roadwork on her life’s stressors duiring her formative years, let alone through five years of this domestic violence-abuse-denigrating period.
In a nutshell, my friend was treated as overly dramatic, and terms like “you are crazy . . . you are over dramatic . . . you are over-senstive” are also part of her early life. She was put into a mental institution, against her will, when she was in her teens, in Quebec. That in itself is early trauma. Then, she wanted a bit of freedom and wanted to live with her sister for a while, and parents basically said, “If you go to her and live with her, do not expect to come back.”
We know this is not how to treat youth. We know that provincial folk in a small town near Montreal can bring with them some retrograde ideas of what it means to raise two daughters. Both daughters struggled with weight gain, and there is super anxiety with her older sister.
My friend decided to travel. She ended up going to Mexico and Central America, Dominican Republic and elsewhere. A good friend in DR, working for an NGO, well, that was also a bright spot in her life. My friend ended up in Guatemala, opened up a breakfast place that was so popular she expanded it.
She met this fellow, Daniel, who was kicking around Guatemala. There are many expatriates who are cultural leeches, leaving their own rotten lives behind, or running away from their own dead mentality. Lording over the lesser people, the brown people, these people bring with them toxins.
As all abusers start off, they can rope in people. My friend, Domineque, was dynamic, well known, outgoing, and this guy just did his ugly charm of tall and handsome and confident.
Of course, I know about other relationships my friend had, and they were abusive in some ways. This is the reality of epigenetics and family (early childhood) dynamics. It gets complicated.
Guatemala is generally a sexist society, and when I was there and when she was there, seeing 15 year old girls with a baby on their back, we know that that child is the product of rape, family rape, brother or father.
Think about that? This karma, man, this background energy, negative energy, with these Europeans and Americans and Canadians down there to drink cheap, eat cheap, play the hippie or post-hippie game of cultural appropriation. Many bring bucks, so when you go to these towns, you see lots of eateries and bars and businesses owned by expats.
The Great Santini
In his new memoir, The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son, Pat Conroy confesses, “I hated my father long before I knew there was a word for hate.”
Donald Conroy, a highly decorated Marine pilot who fought in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, lived by a warrior’s code. His son says, “Dad’s job description was to kill our nation’s enemies, and nothing in his job hinted at any obligation to be a good father or husband.”
Now, 15 years after his father’s death, Conroy, who turns 68 on Saturday, is asked if he misses him.
“A great deal,” he says with a crooked smile. ”I miss how we argued and fought. I miss his total lack of modesty. I miss how, despite everything, he could make me laugh.” (2013, source)
Here, this Daniel’s old man was an air force pilot. Then a commercial airline pilot. Two sons, and he was already forcing them to do shots of hard booze at age 13. He was mean, a cheat, conservative, and hateful toward women, and he ended up being killed by a girlfriend after years of divorce separation from Daniel’s mother. Daniel and his brother hate their mother, hate women, and here we are — young guy with hundreds of thousands of dollars in inheritance-life insurance.
This Daniel went to school at ASU, was a drinker, got hurt so his footballing ended, and there you have his life — a dad who beat him, who even used a BB gun as a game to shoot both sons. Hate, booze, bad mother, bad dad, a family of lies and hidden truths, and an old man who got stabbed to death by a girlfriend who he abused.
All of this — and again, it’s complicated how the bad dad and the bad mother and the extended family (where the hell are grandparents and aunts and uncles?) can course through the cortex of a developing brain. The cycle of abuse, you’ve all heard. You bet we can drill down and figure out why Biden and Trump and Blinken and Obama and Clinton and et al are so bad, so hateful, so misogyny, so slick, so blunt and borish and dangerous to the world. As an activist and socialist-communist, I can’t spend a lot of mental space forgiving the monsters of the world because of their epigenetics and family dynamics and early childhood adverse experiences.
Read Pat Conroy, here:
Conroy, the oldest of seven kids, says his father was actually worse than the fictional and tyrannical Col. Bull Meecham.
But a strange thing happened after the novel became a movie starring Robert Duvall.
“My dad, always in denial, treated it all as fiction, like I had made it all up, not toned it down. To prove that, he reinvented himself. After my mother divorced him (in 1975) he had the best second act I ever saw. He became the best uncle, the best brother, the best grandfather, the best friend.”
[…]
After two divorces, Conroy’s third wife, novelist Cassandra King, “got him “to clean up my life,” as he puts it. “Eat better and stop drinking.”
He’s still hefty, with rosy cheeks, deep blue eyes and a hearty laugh. He married King a week after his father’s death in 1998, and credits her for “a long repair job on the shape and architecture of a troubled soul.”
In his memoir, Conroy writes, “I don’t believe in happy families.” One of his siblings committed suicide. Four others, including himself, have been suicidal at one time or another, he reports. And he’s estranged from his 31-year-old daughter, Susannah, who’s mentioned in his acknowledgments with an invitation: “The door is always open and so is my heart.”
But what if he had a happier childhood? Would he still have become a writer?
“I hope so,” he says. When he talks to writing students, “some seem to envy me, that I had a terrible dad and this ridiculous family that gave me so much to write about.”
He tells them, “Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.”
Had he grown up happier, “I probably would be a different writer, maybe a kind of sun-struck Florida novelist like Carl Hiaasen, who’s so hilarious.” (source)
Who Are We?
Hey, I’m not perfect. I was a perfectionist, highly engaged political, highly aggressive as an activist and college teacher. I was writing a lot, and my daughter paid the price for my exposing her to really adult topics of war, ecological destruction, and my own failings in a capitalist society to learn how to play well in the normals’ sandbox, how to keep my mouth zipped if I was around ideas that were harmful or wrong, and that has had a lasting and epigenetic effect on my daughter who is in her 26th year. Divorce didn’t help, and she was bullied in school, and I didn’t know that was the case. Her journey is hers to tell, so I’ll stop there. She is an empath, supersensitive and working with counselors.
Oh, we need deep reflection on why women have been subject to so much hate, so much sexualization, so much Weinstein and Epstein sickness. So much trafficking. Old work:
Violence Against Women, Definition:
“Any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life” DEVW (UN General Assembly in its resolution 48/104 of 20 December 1993)
Accordingly, violence against women encompasses but is not limited to the following:
(a) Physical, sexual and psychological violence occurring in the family, including battering, sexual abuse of female children in the household, dowry-related violence, marital rape, female genital mutilation and other traditional practices harmful to women, non-spousal violence and violence related to exploitation; (b) Physical, sexual and psychological violence occurring within the general community, including rape, sexual abuse, sexual harassment and intimidation at work, in educational institutions and elsewhere, trafficking in women and forced prostitution; (c) Physical, sexual and psychological violence perpetrated or condoned by the State, wherever it occurs.
This is the background fodder for males like Daniel to believe he is above and beyond all laws of nature and ethics and emotional connection to fellow humans. TV, sports, power structures, SCOTUS, or any of them: Texas? All of them, subhumans, and I was in Texass teaching and reporting when this piece of human stain was running for governor!
This is the old adage — you are what you hear, see, do, read, watch, learn, dream of, believe, hold true, deeply wish for. The opposite, too — you are what you DON’T hear, see, do, read, watch, learn, dream of, believe, hold true, deeply wish for. Over time, this all plays out in so many ways — in the sand box, playground, classroom. Ophelia Syndrome anyone?
I have a friend who is fond of saying, “If we both think the same way, one of us is unnecessary.” The clone, the chameleon personality is the Ophelia Syndrome in another form. One reading of Ophelia’s suicide later in Hamlet suggests that because she has nothoughts of her own, because she has listened only to the contradictory voices of the men around her — Laertes, Polonius, and Hamlet –she reaches a breaking point. They have all used her: “She is only valued for the roles that further other people’s plots. Treated as a helpless child, she finally becomes one . . . . Her childishness is just a step along the regression tosuicide, a natural,if not logicalCsolution to her dependence on conflicting authorities.
The Ophelia Syndrome manifests itself in universities. The Ophelia (substitute a male name, if you choose) writes copious notes in every class and memorizes them for examinations. The Polonius writes examination questions that address just what was covered in the textbook or lectures. The Ophelia wants to know exactly what the topic for a paper should be. The Polonius prescribes it. The Ophelia wants to be a parrot, because it feels safe. The Polonius enjoys making parrot cages. In the end, the Ophelia becomes the clone of the Polonius, and one of them is unnecessary. I worry often that universities may be rendering their most serious students, those who have been “good” all their lives, vulnerable to theOphelia Syndrome rather than motivating them to individuation. (source)
So much in society that splays women into roles that they should not be put into. It is difficult to rise above society, and in many ways, the women that want power become the women that want to be like men. Feminism is a fight against war, capitalism, and we can see how messed up today we have war mongers of all LGBTQA persuasions.
Feminism is a global cry that offers us a roadmap in which “we” means all women and “all women” is what provides us answers. Facing the “us first” of those who advocate for the criminal alliance between capitalism, patriarchy, and imperialism, we say “us, together.” For this reason, women from all parts of the world have taken to the streets to make this purple horizon visible, in which we struggle for peace in Ukraine, which in turn means dismantling the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Regarding this “all,” we do not forget anyone. We also struggle with the Sahrawi women against the murderous regime of Mohammed VI of Morocco and his alliance with Europe. We struggle with Palestinian women against Israel’s Washington-funded apartheid to control a region of the world that has not been allowed to decide their own fate. With Yemen, with Sahel, with all places around the world, we as women know that now, right now, when everything is being fragmented, divided, polarized, simplified, and forgotten, we must pause, reflect, and provide a collective response: a feminist agenda for peace. Because yes, we knew how to achieve hegemony, and yes, we can create a new framework in face of neoliberalism.
We must situate our view of the world, which expands analyses, builds alliances, and creates processes of cooperation, solidarity, and mutual support, always looking at those who suffer, who are exploited, oppressed, and rendered invisible. This is also why, while the war summit is organized in my town, Madrid, we are organizing the Peace Summit “No To NATO.” (“Feminism Is a Global Cry Against War “. . . . Nora García on the role of feminism in building anti-capitalist peace)
To be honest intimate partner violence stems from the sickness of capitalism (I’m looking at it now from a captialist country, and not denying all the ugliness of honor killings and acid thrown on women and all the violence of the Taliban sorts). Garcia is so right: “And we say: never again peace between the classes and war between the peoples. We will cry again together: peace between the peoples, war between the classes!”
In one sense my friend Domineque’s husband is a product of toxic male machoism, product of a monster of a military dad, product of a mother who decided money and homes were worth her own sacrifice, and I do not know this Daniel’s mother’s background, though I have talked to her on an earlier escape from Daniel by my friend, and she admitted her son was an alcoholic, and she even footed the bill for my friend (her daughter-in-law) to get her and her dog out of Oregon, with the rental car, and such.
Now, though, this same mother-in-law rushed to Oregon from Colorado, and the first thing she did upon arrive 3.5 hours later from Portland in her rental car was to go to her daughter-in-law who is in the house they shared, and demanded her son’s wallet, phone, passport and personal belongings. He’s got a restraining order on him, and that includes violating it by contacting ANYONE to confront my friend Domineque.
This woman is in her 60s, and she took time off her high school teaching job to do what? I did not see her at her son’s arraignment where the ADA read off the charges, and then a long list of prior criminality, dating back to 2003, to include assault, DUI, and another domestic violence case. She wasn’t there to see her pathetic son on Zoom listen to the next court date. And, the ADA also mentioned this guy’s phone calls in jail, to include telling a friend to go to his wife’s house to get his passport and cell phone, and he also in another phone call told someone he wasn’t going to prison, that he would run, and then, of course, the call to mama to harass his wife, her daughter-in-law.
This retrograde woman, his mother, it’s as if she’s throwing acid on all women:
[NEW DELHI, INDIA – JULY 30: Laxmi Aggarwal (23), and Nasreen (one name, 33) in the balcony of the new campaign office Stop Acid Attacks in New Delhi. Aggarwal was only 16 when a man threw acid on her face and hands for refusing his proposal. She remained hidden behind the veil for many years. But this year, buoyed by the anti-rape protests and a new law against acid attacks, Aggarwal found the courage to come out and join the campaign. Since then she has become a sort of the poster-child of the campaign against acid attacks. For the first time, India established specific penalties for the crime, and now the Supreme Court directed the government two weeks ago to regulate acid sales and award quick money for medical treatment for the survivors. Not to lose on the momentum generated by the anti-rape activism and the new law, acid attack survivors are now coming together to push the government to enforce the court’s orders, demand rehabilitation and planning street plays to raise awareness about the prevalence of the crime in Indian cities. ‘It is very important to show the face, people should see the horror. Hiding the face is the same as staying silent,’ Aggarwal said. (Photo by Rama Lakshmi/The Washington Post via Getty Images)] (source)
There are heroes, and they are in danger, for defending the LAND, the next and next and next generation:
In this context, women defenders are perceived as a threat because they question and jeopardize the power structures that are based on class privileges and gender discrimination. Moreover, they routinely and clearly denounce just how harmful it is for humanity to continue supporting a system that permanently exploits life on the planet. These women are the victims that most suffer the consequences of the loss of access to land and natural resources.
In addition to the risk that women defending the rights of the land, the territories and the environment have to face, they also have to withstand the difficulties derived from living in rural areas, from belonging to farming communities, from being afro-descendants or indigenous, from being women or from their sexual orientation or diverse gender identity. (“Women defenders of the land and the environment: silenced voices”)
All of this, believe it or not, gives males their entitlement, their self-absorbed resentment, their hate of women, therefore their hate for mothers, aunts, sisters, daughters, grandmothers.
We as women are always in this work, staying active, even though many want to put out the flame that we have inside us. But we are always giving a little bit more firewood so that the flame stays active. Despite the struggles, there is always a woman there supporting the cause.Maria Magdalena Cuc Choc
It’s appaling to see women go against their own gender, but that is the way of money, power, twisted capitalism, and xenophobia. This anti-feminism from women, well, part of the brainwashing and stupidity of humanity, at the expense of fighting for common cause:
The categories for why these women reject feminism are as follows, in order from most commonly written about reason for rejecting feminism to the least, and further explained:
Equality for all a. Any comment made by a woman that deems feminism unfit because it b. doesn’t give equality to all c. Women shouldn’t get more rights or get away with more than men, that is not equality d. Example: “Equality does not equal superiority.” (Post-31)
Enjoys being a mother and a wife a. Any comment made by a woman that states she doesn’t need or want feminism because she enjoys being a mother and a wife and that feminism doesn’t agree with this lifestyle b. Any comment that refers to their male significant other loving them and treating them right so they don’t need feminism c. Example: “Being a wife and mother is the greatest source of joy in my life.” (Post-2)
In favor of men or looking from a man’s point of view/feminism is only for women a. Any comment that advocates for the male, trying to prove that men are important because they believe feminists hate men/ Any comment that states that feminism only fights for women’s rights, and ignores men’s rights b. Example: “I love men and value their human rights.” (Post-37). c. Example: “Focusing on only women will never bring equality.” (Post-20).
Femininity a. Any comment in which the woman states that she enjoys being feminine, and believes feminism doesn’t agree with femininity b. Example: “I like to be treated like a lady by a gentleman.” (Post-52)
I am not a victim/I am not oppressed a. Any comment by a woman that states feminism makes women into victims, and they don’t feel victimized/Any comment by a woman that states feminism tries to fight for women who are oppressed but isn’t helping or they aren’t feeling oppressed b. Example: “I am not a ‘victim’ there is no war against me.” (Post-140) c. “We don’t need feminism because oppression is universal and has far more to do with how wealthy your parents are rather than whether or not you have a Y chromosome.” (Post-33).
I am too self-confident and responsible of my actions a. Any comment made by a woman that states that a woman rejects feminism because she doesn’t need an excuse or wants to shift blame on anyone else and believes that’s what feminism does b. Example: “I don’t need feminism b/c I can take responsibility for my insecurities and I don’t need to blame other people for my problems!” (Post-119)
Feminist groups are a negative group a. Any comment that suggests they don’t need feminism because it is a very negative group (angry women, misogynists, a cult, etc.) b. “Feminist culture has become cannibalistic….a cult rejecting free-thinking.” (Post-44).
There is a significant difference between men and women we must acknowledge a. Any comment that states women and men are treated differently because they are different and we must accept and embrace that and feminism doesn’t b. “Men and women are inherently different, and that’s great!” (Post-17)
My future or current children won’t need feminism/I won’t teach it to them a. Any comment in which the woman doesn’t believe that feminism will be useful for her children in the future b. “I don’t need feminism because I want my boys to grow up knowing what TRUE equality is.” (Post-26)
Rape related issue a. Any comment that claims feminism tries to shift the blame in a situation involving rape b. Example: “My rapist was a woman!” (Post-8)
I am against modern feminism a. Any comment where a woman states that she doesn’t need modern feminism in her life specifically for various reasons b. “I don’t need modern ‘feminism’ because I don’t need others to fight my battles for me.” (Post-116). (Women Against Feminism — a study of comments on one website)
Call the Midwife, err, Cheerleaders/Bombardiers — How Bad is this so-called awake culture, dynamic, grand exceptional culture of Manifest Destiny and Monroe Doctrine has a million threadbare elements to its so-called great democracy (not)? Again, the sickness of Empire, 2022:
[President Donald Trump shakes hands with Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson as Chief Test Pilot Alan B. Norman watches during an event in July at the White House. Hewson is one of four women to serve atop four of the nation’s five largest defense — offensive murder incorporated contractors. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images]
So, with ALL of this and more, the child is raised into a hell of a rotten man. Not just talking Trump or Biden, but this Arizona Daniel. He has grandparents in New Jersey who do not know his rap sheet. He has charmed men and women into believing he’s just a regular guy, travel loving guy, builds houses, uses people to help him build houses. There is a dark side, yep. Wasn’t it that creep of a subhuman, Jordan Peterson, who said what? Canadian psychologist who gets endless copy and money for speaking? This is one warped guy, but not unusual: Jordan Peterson thinks there is ‘a bit of Hitler in everyone’ Now, the flipside is that he was questioned by another false journalist trying to say Putin is a Hitler. Amazing, no, how turned around the world has become in a few months.
I would say most women in the world want clean air, water, soil, families, and children. They do not want war, and they did not want constant bombing from the Nazi’s in Urkaine, and then this effete guy, Zelenksy, running around like some Academy Award-Emmy Award splat lying and conniving. AHH, Putin just spoke with the mothers, man:
Russian President Vladimir Putin held a personal meeting on Friday with the mothers of Russian soldiers. He said that the country’s leadership, and he personally, regards their sons as heroes.
Putin revealed that he proposed the meeting with the mothers of soldiers because he wanted to hear their opinions, their firsthand experiences and information they have received from the frontlines. “A lot of information comes to me from various sources, but your assessments, your opinions, ideas and suggestions – that’s a completely different matter,” Putin said, adding that he will try to make sure that everything discussed during the meeting is taken into account and used in real life “to the maximum.”
It’s an aside, but really, this country is insane, both Pelosi or Schumer, and the women wearing that Blue and Yellow are supporting Nazism. Here, a different take on Putin talking to the mothers:
It’s all very complicated, how misanthropic and misogynistic this world is. And, a great book, by Linda G. Ford, on the maltreatment of women radicals/politicals.
In The Eye of the Beholder: USA History of Imprisoning Women Politicals
Part One of review and discussion of Linda G. Ford’s Women Politicals in America: Jailed Dissenters from Mother Jones to Lynne Stewart
Long Live the Armed Struggle!
Part Two of book review, and … The Revolution Will Not Be Televised or plugged onto Twitter, or in the Streets with Your Placards, or Sending in ‘Save the Whale’ Postcards
[The Night of Terror: When Suffragists Were Imprisoned and Tortured in 1917: After peacefully demonstrating in front of the White House, 33 women endured a night of brutal beatings.]
It all matters, and so, 2022, November, she calls the cops after the guy she’s been married to for 5 years grabbed her hair, her throat, used a pillow to attempt suffocation, and threw he down — facedown — for more suffocation. She has it on cell phone video, and she called the cops from a neighbor’s since he tossed her phone into a half acre of blackberry bushes. He locked her and the dog out of the house. She got the deputies there. They were in the front and the back. They knocked on the door, he opened it, then shut and locked it. They had to call a DA for a search warrant, and two hours later, they got into the house, and he locked himself into the bedroom, and they asked him to open up. They kicked in the door. He struggled. He told them it was an illegal search warrant.
All of this has those years of back and forth, leaving for a few weeks to Canada, or, to a hotel, but always returning. She was isolated, and he had the truck in his name, the house, and they did not share a bank account. Why? Why didn’t she leave? Brain rewiring, upbringing, and so much more.
One of the questions we hear time and time again is “Why doesn’t she just leave?” (source)
We need to stop blaming survivors for staying and start supporting them to enable them to leave. By understanding the many barriers that stand in the way of a woman leaving an abusive relationship – be it psychological, emotional, financial or physical threats – we can begin to support and empower women to make the best decision for them while holding abusers solely accountable for their behaviour. Here are just a few of the reasons that prevent a woman leaving:
Danger and fear; Isolation; Shame, embarrassment or denial; Trauma and low confidence; Practical reasons; The support isn’t there when they need it! This is a good article on the why’s: “The Dirty Secrets About Why Women Don’t Leave Abusive Relationships: This is why we have an epidemic of domestic violence” by Michelle Jaqua
Sure, you get the Psychology Today story: “Common Reactions of the Brain to an Abuser”
Several important ingredients that contribute to someone’s “addiction” to their abuser are oxytocin (bonding), endogenous opioids (pleasure, pain, withdrawal, dependence), corticotropin-releasing factor (withdrawal, stress), and dopamine (craving, seeking, wanting). With such strong neurochemistry in dysregulated states, it will be extremely difficult to manage emotions or make logical decisions.
None of this makes any sense, since we are limited creatures in this Disneyfied and Infantilized culture. But throughout Catholic Societies, throughout so many cultures over time, women have been attacked, forebidden, foreclosed, imprisoned, limited, held back, held down and raped, assaulted, murdered. Nothing those of us in the main can tell themselves that sometimes there are many grays to a theory, and that counterintuitive arguments are absolutely necessary to understand this toxic relationship scenario. Lots of articles on how the brain is wired and responds to stress: “Cultural Differences in the Impact of Social Support on Psychological and Biological Stress Responses”
Social support, not just family and friends, is the key to why there are so many breakdowns in women wanting out but not finding the mettle to get out. Most domestic violence cases get thrown out of court, we have to remember. We have so much animosity for those who are willing to go against powerful men, as we see in the #MeToo movement, and so much more.
It does drill down into the brain of a girl from Quebec, no matter how much chutzpah she had as a youngster. People are targeted everyday by scheemers, by bilking artists, by thieves, systems of oppression, by so many in this dog-eat-dog society. So a woman in an abusive relationship is facing so much culturally, and, to be honest, the brain is just so rewired to process all those hormones and chemicals a certain way. Glutton for punishment may sound cool when it’s a workout fiend or weightlifter or marathoner, but there are many chemical markers that keep people in dangerous and retrograde and addictive situations.
I could go on with this story: She’s got victims assistance folk helping. Even people I introduce her to in the co-op give her hugs. The nurses at the hospital. In the DA’s office. She has female Assistant DA, female judges and now a female lawyer for the divorce. She has found out other things about this guy, and she is still reeling from how she ended up with someone she didn’t know. He cheated on her, and his big deal now is getting the house into his mom’s name. He is up for $750,00 security gond, and even his public defender is female. My friend has been hugged by many females. She’s been to one domestive violence support group. This is an uphill battle, but her mother is now on board, not blaming her, not telling her to just leave and go back to Quebec. Her sister has come around. Her old man, I have spent time with, and my own modeling of support and in-your-face advocacy is showing him that people care about his daughter. I didn’t know her before February 2022. My own spouse said, “Well, she reached out to you, so now you are responsible for how to help her.”
Every day is a new day. He will be served divorce papers in Jail. She is selling tools and toys of his to raise money for the attorney’s retainer — $2500. Everywhere she goes she hears of a story after a story of women who also were in abusive situations. Ten years, 20 years, with kids. Luckily, there are no children involved. She has lost 5 years of her life, but she is strong.
As I say, she’s had an interesting and dynamic and traveling life. But her story is hers to tell. Through her eyes.Through all the calluses on her soul, heart, feet. She wants to writer a haunted house on the beach story, and she should write it, and her memoir! The next few weeks, with plea bargains, with the bs of divorce, and property (he’s controlled all the money and deeds to the house), well, it’s a fragile time and powerful time too. She loves this neck of the woods/world, but the associations with this criminal man, this abuser, well, and the house they have, she’ll never be able to buy out his share, and, housing here sucks. Her life is one of outdoor security cameras, flinching at every branch outside cracking (deer) and door jams and so much more.
She reads the articles, This is March 2022. May the judges all die early deaths: “She said her husband was abusive. A judge took away her kids and ordered her arrest.” The judge in Julie Valadez’s custody case found her disruptive, questioned her credibility and put out a warrant for her arrest. A rare appellate victory is now giving her case a fresh look, but Valadez still is fighting for her four children. (Wisconsin).
And, ending on a good note would be myself putting my reputation and lived experiences and radical communism on the line.
“The Court does not find credible Ms. Valadez’s other allegations of abuse and battery, including uncorroborated allegations of sexual abuse, physical abuse, stalking and property damage,” Michael J. Aprahamian concluded.
The judge acknowledged that Ricardo Valadez, whom he described as an alcoholic, had lied to the court about his sobriety. Still, he wrote, “As a general matter, the Court found Ms. Valadez not credible.”
We are counting on a different outcome since thus far all the people involved courtwise, DA wise, Judge wise, have been wise, empathetic and aware of the cycle of abuse and the reality of murder in the first degree if guys like this get out . . . . He’s already stalked a fiance in 2010. Rich parents, and they picked up and left without a trace.
The celebration was lively: in the small town of Waldport, Oregon, a few hundred finally gathered to see the statue’s unveiling. We heard a Gulf Coast guy, Truman Price, a violinist, play music on his fiddle reminiscent of the tunes of 1880s which would have been played by the historical person cast in bronze. A sculptor showed up, Peter Helzer, and his daughter, too, who was on the banjo with Truman and another fellow playing guitar. The story is of a slave, brought to Oregon by his “owner,” James Southworth. Oh, those Oregon Black Exclusion laws initiated in 1844, stating that any Black individuals or families attempting to settle here would be whipped 39 times, and repeated until they left. The Oregon Constitution in 1859 made it illegal for African Americans to live in Oregon. That law was repeated in 1926.
The state of Oregon, man, whew. When I was working in downtown Portland, two of my social services colleagues, both Black, said they had not seen the amount of racism in Portland compared to Texas and Georgia where they had came from. “It’s not overt, more like sort of hidden, but these white colleagues, liberals, they say some pretty racist stuff to say, profess. They might think it’s passive bigotry, but the state’s history, the sundown laws, and the racist cops and sheriff departments all speak to me as a black man who is definitely feeling the racism.”
So, Louis Southworth was sent to the Nevada and California gold fields in the 1870s by his enslaver, and he came back with money he saved from work, but mostly from entertaining camps with his fiddle. He bought his freedom at age 28, lived in Buena Vista, did blacksmith work while learning how to read and write.
He came out to this area, Oregon, on the Pacific, Alsea, homesteading with his wife; about five miles up the river from Waldport.
He ran a ferry, moving people, hay and other cargo. He ended up chair of the school board, and donated land for the schoolhouse and still played his fiddle.
So, 2022, Nov. 19, the fun was had by all, and there is land dedicated to a Southworth Park, and the statue will be placed there, and there will be more cermonies. The donated land Southworth gave for the first schoolhouse is now a field where the park will be built, named after him, with the statue.
I have the text of the dedicatory remarks made by an African American, Zachary Stocks, who is executive director of Oregon Black Pioneers. He set the record straight on the life and times of not only Southworth, but how his story is that of all Blacks, then, and now. It is an odd thing that this town, which is partially built on burial grounds of the first people, Alsi (Salish folk), is putting up a statue of a Black American, who bought his freedom using the fiddle as his conduit to freedom.
There are no dedicatory memorials to the Siletz and Alsi. I’ve written about that before, and down at Devil’s Churn, there is a cemented-and-walled-in cave with a really hard-to-read sign telling the odd visitor who might stray off the path and go over rocks to see the sign mostly covered by bushes. Traditional clamming grounds of tribes. I’ve talked to people who have lived her 50 years and they never ventured off the paved path at devil’s churn and seen the sign. Here’s my poem about Amanda, a Native Woman forcefully marched to Yachats, barefoot and blind. “Not Just One of those Tales of Another Dead Indian“
Again, these stories, these events, since I’ve been around the world, embroiled in social justice movements, anti-racism movements, and, well, I have my take on the history of the USA and the world. Here, Peter and Zach, taking off the cover to give the crowd the Louis statue of him fiddling.
Here, Carol Van Strum, next to Louis. She’s been featured in several stories I’ve written, and her fiction novel, The Oreo File, has a mixed race protagonist and lots about Louis Southworth. Read my piece on Carol and her fight against the forest service and state with their sprays (pesticides) that have caused genetic damage and other chronic illnesses: “A real-life Toxic Avenger”
She also has her own story of a Black son, Jordan, who was put in jail for a murder he did not commit: Read my piece on his story, and Carol’s here: “A letter a day for 15 years and 9 months.” She came down from her Five Rivers house, 30 minutes away, to meet the artist and to give him a copy of her book, signed. I was there taking 100 photos, talking to various people I knew and those I just met.
Here, Peter is messing with a 110 year old violin an elderly lady from Waldport (she actually is from all over, and said this violin was made in Iowa, and she was a concert violinist until she broke her neck and could no longer play).
Here’s Zach’s organization website, Oregon Black Pioneers. Here’s just some of what he said at the ceremony:
Just before his death in 1917, it was reported that Louis Southworth was denied a military pension because his name wasn’t recorded in the volunteer lists. And this, despite a testimonial written on his behalf by his former commanding officer. In response, 218 Oregonians sent in donations totaling $243 to help cover Louis’ living expenses in his final days. Some of those people might be relatives of folks in this room. But it saddens me, that someone who had achieved so much would be forced to live on the charity of others.
All of this demonstrates how Louis Southworth seemed to live multiple lives. Slave and freeman; laborer and entrepreneur; squatter and homesteader; soldier and pauper; excluded and included. Louis was not just a jolly old man living quietly in the background. He actively participated in some of the most significant events in the history of Oregon.
And more than perhaps any other person, Louis’s time in Oregon spans the most transformational moments for Black Americans in the state. Consider this– around the year Louis Southworth was born, York the first Black person to reach Oregon by land, died, likely less than 200 miles away. The year Louis Southworth died, Mercedes Diez, who would go on to become Oregon’s first Black judge in the 1970s, was born. Louis is a link in the chain of historic Black individuals that stretches from 1770 to 2005!
That is how close we are to the past. A great colleague of mine named Richard Josey once posed an amazing question at a museum conference. He asked, “What kind of ancestor will you be?”. Let’s look to the example of Louis Southworth, whose story and accomplishments have inspired people, then and now. And whose resiliency was matched only by his generosity. A truly historic person.
I did learn from several farmers, including Tom Bailey, that when the facility was being built, many African Americans were brought into this dryland of Washington on the Columbia River. The Tri-Cities of Richland-Kennewick-Pasco. There was a part of town where the blacks lived, there were a few black establishments including bars and stores, and black churches. The justice for these workers was harsh, or should I say, the injustice. That facility was being built in the 1940s. I was shown some of the places, both still standing and others decrepit and falling apart.
Then, in Portland, Vanport, I got my education on that racist history. Here, a website, Hidden History:
Race is not a topic we often discuss in public settings, at least not explicitly. We are told we are in a “postracial” landscape, yet race is the number one determinant of access to health care, home ownership, graduation rates, and income, as the data from the Urban League of Portland below show.
We can’t understand these disparities without understanding history. I didn’t grow up in Oregon; I moved here to attend high school. It wasn’t until I had the privilege of attending a presentation by Darrell Millner, founder of Portland State University’s Black Studies Department, that I learned Oregon was created as a white utopian homeland. That Oregon was the only state that entered the Union with a clause in its constitution forbidding Black people to live here. That the punishment originally meted out for violating this exclusionary law was the “Lash Law”: public whipping every six months until the Black person left the state. That this ideology shaped Oregon’s entire history and was reflected in the larger history of this nation. — Walidah Imarisha
Again, laborers, workers, coming to Portland in the 1940s to help sustain the construction of homes, warehouses, other buildings for its rapid growth. Vanport was built as a temporary housing solution to Portland’s rapidly growing population. At its peak it housed nearly 40,000 residents, close to 40 percent were African-American. But an unusually wet spring in 1948 created a hole in the railroad dike blocking the Columbia River, and it erupted into massive flooding. City officials didn’t warn residents of the dangerously high water levels and opted not to evacuate. The town was wiped out within a day and 18,500 families were displaced, more than a third African-American.
So, the Albina section of Portland was the only place for Blacks, but with these displaced folk, some of which were taken in by other families, black and white, they had no other place in Portland to live. Many left the area. Now? Gentrification, racist policing, and, yep, with my Masters in Urban Planning, lots of redlining and zoning issues tied to making African Americans personas non grata. It’s disgusting.
The great Southern Migration, years after Southworth passed on in 1919. Many now living in Stumptown know nothing about that migration of Black men and women arriving to Portland by the many thousands, increasing Portland’s black population tenfold in a few years. Between 1940 and 1950, the city’s black population increased more than any West Coast city other than Oakland and San Francisco.
It was part of a demographic change seen in cities across America, as blacks left the South for the North and West in what became known as the Great Migration, or what Isabel Wilkerson, in her acclaimed history of the period, The Warmth of Other Suns, calls “the biggest underreported story of the 20th century.” From 1915 to 1960, nearly six million blacks left their Southern homes, seeking work and better opportunities in Northern cities, with nearly 1.5 million leaving in the 1940s, seduced by the call of WWII industries and jobs. Many seeking employment headed West, lured by the massive shipyards of the Pacific coast. (Source)
Here we are in this complicated story, 2022, where Native Americans have been pushed out by the Old World coming into this continent for making money, exploiting land, moving immigrants to lay claim on land for faming and settlements with no regard to the hundreds of American Indian tribes. The Indian war last over three hundred years, from 1602 to 1926. Almost every buffalo in the 60 million population was exterminated, as a way to kill American Indian culture.
I’ve got some time at Fort Huachuca, the home of the Buffalo Soldier, the African American union soldiers who also did their duty to help pacify and exterminate the Indians. The First African American troops to arrive in Arizona at Fort Huachuca were the Buffalo Soldiers in the 1890s — the 9th and 10th Cavalries. The Fort Huachuca Buffalo Soldiers distinguished themselves in the Spanish American War and the charge up San Juan Hill.
The African American Soldier At Fort Huachuca, Arizona, 1892-1946 American Plains Indians who fought against these soldiers referred to the black cavalry troops as “buffalo soldiers” because of their dark, curly hair, which resembled a buffalo’s coat and because of their fierce nature of fighting. The nickname soon became synonymous with all African-American regiments formed in 1866.
You can read my piece coming out Nov. 23 here at Dissident Voice, you know, for National Day of Mourning. The so-called Thanksgiving (for whom?). Again, the Southworth story is amazing, but it conjures up many issues tied to the Indian Removal actions of the many who came into their lands and stole. Sure, the series, The English, is just one aspect of those dirty Anglo Saxons coming out here to kill Indians: Yeah, it is a six part romance thing:
Or Terrance Malick’s, The New World:
Or the Redford produced, The American West.
Complicated feelings for me living on burial ground, by the Alsea River, in the old part of Waldport, and I can almost see that field, that soon-to-be Southworth Park. So many homeless, so many domestic violence cases, so many Native youth in schools here doing not so well. So many backward thinkers, and then all the transplants, who, well, they go to the Southworth show, but would they come to a lecture and viewing on Black Panthers’s struggles, or for on “In Prison My Whole Life – Mumia Abu-Jamal (Documentary)”
I am Not your Negro and Exterminate all the beasts:
Here, I’ll let Zach have the last word:
All of the images feature a seated Louis Southworth wearing a shabby coat and holding his fiddle. In one, he is facing away from the camera in his living room, and in the other where he is looking directly into the camera with a smile. The former was used on the cover of Elizabeth McLagan’s landmark 1980 book, A Peculiar Paradise: A History of Blacks in Oregon, 1788-1940; the latter is featured on Louis’ headstone in Crystal Lake Cemetery in Corvallis. The epitaph reads “A bit of heaven’s music here below”.
Louis’ smile is infectious, and when you look at him, it almost feels as if you know him personally. No doubt, these photos continue to inspire appreciation for Louis. But unfortunately, we should question why these photos were made, and what they were meant to represent to viewers in 1915.
John Horner was not a journalist, but an anthropologist at Oregon State University, and the founder of the city’s first museum. He was a proponent of phrenology, and in his lab, he studied human skulls which he had stolen from Native graves to try and find proof of racial hierarchies. In 1931, he was hired to investigate a grave site at Three Rocks –not far from here—and determined that one of these skulls had [quote] “an extremely thick skull, indicative of negroid characteristics”. This skull too, was taken back to Horner’s lab for study.
Why would this anthropologist take photos and write an article about Louis Southworth? I can’t help but think of the staged images of Indigenous peoples that anthropologists and photographers used to document the tragedy of the supposedly-“vanishing” Indians. Edward Curtis’ “The North American Indian” had been first exhibited only eight years earlier. It seems to me that Horner was making a similar documentation of Louis. No one was suggesting that Black Americans were disappearing from Oregon in the 1910s –in fact, Oregon’s Black population was the highest it had ever been—but Louis represented something different. He too, was the last of his kind. The last of the enslaved Oregonians; the last trace of the “Old South” which had emigrated west during the pioneer days.
White Oregonians could be pleased by the “Uncle Lou” they saw in the newspaper, while at the same time, be virulently opposed to the growing Black progressive class in Portland. The same year this article was printed, Oregon voters rejected a ballot measure to repeal the state’s ban on interracial marriage, and rejected a measure to remove the Black exclusion language from the Oregon Constitution, even though it was no longer legally enforceable.
It still was a moving day for me, for sure, in its own way. I also told Zach and a few others I’d be writing something about the event, but to not expect some inverted Triangle News Piece. I can never take away the genuine feelings people yesterday expressed for this history, this man, and the park.
the Jesus factor comes to mind: what would that guy do with debts 20 years moldy, second mortgages long forgotten, a loan sometimes to save a family now creeping up like a ferryman in arrears, foreclosures like tsunamis Zombies in the night that giant sucking sound of evictions
the beaches here are spotted with tents . . . guys cooking Campbell’s, listening to Guns ‘n Roses, not a Hooverville, shared pots of stew, but loners with smart phones, toothless smiles
rotgut then, Depression era blindness rum now called Kraken, for slavers and their stories of giant squids taking down dark as hell rum in barrels floating in Caribbean waters natives got free booze destined for England
now there’s twenty-ounce IPAs, cough syrup mixes no ginger Jake to splay hands and feet into paralysis we use vapes today, THC CBD mixed with meth
some I see in parking lots tipping close to sixty women who work the linens $140 a night hotels, $500 a day B & B’s, bedding down in old sagging Ford explorers, one woman with arthritic heavy golden lab said good night as she sardine-stuffed herself into 1998 Honda Accord
smell the roses, rotting politicians, all you creatives counting millions, stashing fancy cuts of Kobe in third commercial freezers, your palaces rigged with solar panels, churning turbines replacing peacocks
then my mother’s country I see “peaceful assisted death” plied more and more, people in poverty, reality of loneliness chronic isolation look forward to pentobarbital approved by the state Justin Trudeau jet-setting photo-op frat boy
as his citizens – brethren not — can’t get shelter, bodies battered death by assistance, covered in warm blanket on gurney, hypodermic loaded with barbitals last act of kindness . . . eugenics Canadian style, on the cheap social services, one clean shot better than a house and a clinic
these guys in Oregon have it like kings compared to the Canadians, even get free bicycles, and at least they live like boy scouts scurrying to find tarps for another king tide
So, Day Two of the Disinformation class, and there is CLaire Wardle telling is about gray language, disinformation, context. She is on a roll with vaccine disinformation on Google, TikTok, Facebook and Twitter and the Internet. It’s as if she is a shill for the Pharma mafia:
Claire Wardle studies the impact of misinformation on society. Her particular focus is the role journalism plays, both in terms of amplifying falsehoods but also the journalistic interventions that can slow down conspiracies and rumors.
So, this is a Zoom Doom one-way lecture, and she does lecture, and she is saying so many wrong, misrepresented things. And, in Zoom Doom, we have chat. And, I posted a few links. It’s fucking chat, and alas, the 250 others on the Zoom Doom, mostly Portuguese and Spanish speakers, can either go with her bizarre and unprofessional Zoom talk, PowerPoint, or spend time watching each chat message. This is what I got from the University of Texas moderator:
Paul, I ask you to be polite to the specialists who are giving much of their time to share their knowledge with us, Thanks You, Juan Torres
This woman cites Newsweek, BBC, Nato, CDC, mainstream media as reliable sources. She also looks at other countries, as in Africa or Middle East, and citing how they are being duped by anti-vax disinformation. Crazy that these 250 journalists are being propagandized by a woman who comes off as this technical and subject matter expert. She calls PR agencies as either PR agencies or Dark PR agencies.
This is the narrative, the baseline, the shifting baseline. She goes for Trump, vaccine and barely mentioned Russia. These poor poor young journalists being brainwashed, because they obviously are not going to other press outlets:
Even the unreliable and deep state BBC had stories on:
The British government ran a secret “black propaganda” campaign for decades, targeting Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia with leaflets and reports from fake sources aimed at destabilising cold war enemies by encouraging racial tensions, sowing chaos, inciting violence and reinforcing anti-communist ideas, newly declassified documents have revealed (source)
Or even The Intercept, again, not exactly radical: TRUTH COPS: Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinformation
She goes on and on about how disinformation agents influencing media, and it is QAnon, 4Chan, but never never did she question how government, the USA, very CIA tied organization pushing false information, propaganda. lies. And she also talks about how our role in the media amplify misinformaiton. She cites the FDA as reliable. She cites all the usual suspects as reliable, i.e. Pfizer, MIC, etc.
I put this link in, too:
This woman is bizarre, and his sloppy British accent sounds like Margaret Woodhouse, remember her? These poor journalists will never ever get deep into what is REAL disinformation.
“Blowback” can also be applied to U.S. propaganda, particularly the CIA’s “black propaganda” that was designed for an overseas audience, but found its way back to U.S. media and U.S. domestic politics. The CIA’s efforts in Europe to blame the Kremlin for the assassination attempt against the Pope in 1981 were highlighted by the New York Times, and then widely distributed throughout the mainstream media. The disinformation campaign to charge the Soviet Union with non-existing efforts to build a naval base on the island of Socotra off the coast of South Yemen even found its way into a presidential briefing by the newly-appointed Gerald Ford.
“Declassified Australia’s Peter Cronau flags and analyzes a report by researchers at Stanford University and Graphika about a massive secret propaganda operation being run out of the U.S. The report, from late August, has been buried by the Western media.” I am sure these poor journalists never go to Consortium News:
[Targeting Russia, China, Iran, Central Asia, and other Middle East countries, the U.S. military’s Information Operation to spread propaganda is the most extensive program of covert pro-Western Information Operations on social media ever revealed. (Stanford Internet Observatory)]
She continues on and one, and 90 minutes in, she continues to push that the bad actors are Russians, Venezuelans, Iranians, and how the Legacy Media are the good guys. Again, I put in a few citations in the chat before Juan tells me to can it.
Total pharma advertising spending topped $6.58 billion in 2020, according to Kantar measured media. That’s just a notch above the 2019 total of $6.56 billion, but still noteworthy in a year that saw U.S. advertising spend drop by 13% overall.
Pharma’s big-picture advertising stability includes behind-the-scenes budget shifts, however, as pharma companies moved dollars from some ad channels to others. Pharma spending on digital video—desktop and mobile—increased 43%, while print and out-of-home channels dropped by 16% and 81%, respectively, according to Kantar. (Fierce Pharma)
This Margaret Woodhouse (I actually liked that woman) Claire is just arrogant and talks down to eh Zoom Doomers, and that’s the fabric of this idiotic correspondence crap:
It is like talking to a wall, these people, how they have their narratives, their baselines, their prejudices. You think they have access to this? “Big pharma and health care: unsolvable conflict of interests between private enterprise and public health”
A landmark paper on Game Theory showed that individual maximization of profit necessarily endangers the public good, and since the problem has no technical solution, “it requires a fundamental extension in morality” (1). We propose here that public health, as a public good, now emerges as a grave example of this problem.
And then, the next speaker, digital mercenaries. She is talking about Cambridge Analytica, which now we are getting into the cognitive science of misinformation and manipulating.
One of the most urgent and uncomfortable questions raised in The Great Hack is: to what extent are we susceptible to such behavioural manipulation? Facebook and Google have amassed data vaults with an unprecedented volume of information on human beings. This goes far beyond the data that you choose to share on their platforms to include the vast amounts of data tracked as you engage with the digital world.— Joe Westby
Giannina Senini is the next speaker. A real journalist:
Giannina Segnini(link is external) is Director of the Master of Science Data Journalism Program at the Journalism School at Columbia University in New York.
Paul Haeder, Author 
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