[photo: The billionaire and now Trump adviser grew up amid the collapse of white rule, attending an all-white school and then a more liberal one]
The good news is that young people are resisting the giant knives of 10 million cuts deployed by a South African seemingly pro-apartheid fellow with his dodgy DOGE.
We have multiple prong crises in the United States, and that unelected “death by 10 million cuts” Musk is just the tip of the spear in this next iteration of a dying Empire.
Yes, think Empire for the USA, and forget about Hollywood versions of what “empire” might mean.
The case can be made in many ways, first with the dispossession of Native Americans and relegation of many to reservations and theft of millions of acres is pretty imperialist. The US fought a war with Mexico in the 1840s and stole a third of it. Fifty years later, it fought a war with Spain and claimed the majority of Spain’s overseas territories.
But this idea of empire isn’t just about stolen land. Many see the enslavement and then economic chains put upon Africans and African Americans as empire on steroids. That amazing US intellectual WEB Du Bois argued that black people in the US looked more like colonized subjects than like citizens. Malcolm X and the leaders of the Black Panthers agreed.
Oh, empire is also about sanctions – economic warfare to many in the global south. Currently, the European Union is splintering because of the drawdown of support by Trump and Company. Europe (I lived and worked there, including UK) was swamped by US commerce/advertising/junk.
Soft power of the Empire.
Joseph Nye popularized the term in his 1990 book The Fate of Leadership: The Changing Nature of American Power, defining it as:
“When a state persuades other nations to do what it wants, it can be called ‘soft power’: it does not need to use attacks or threats to subjugate others.”
Nye developed the concept further in his 2004 book, Soft Power: The Tools of Success in World Politics. It contains the following lines:
“Seduction is always more effective than coercion: many values, such as democracy, human rights and personal empowerment, take on a very attractive appearance.”
In his article ‘The Benefits of Soft Power,’ Nye defines “power” as follows:
“The ability to influence others to achieve desired results: ‘soft power’ – persuading others to behave as desired depends on the ability to influence people. ‘Soft powe’” is based on the ability to demonstrate certain advantages. Its resources are tools based on attraction, which will make others willingly follow your path. Conventional power politics usually means that one country’s military or economy surrenders to another. And in the information age, success depends on someone’s story winning over everyone else’s.”
There are ironically many other March celebrated dates to consider in regard to the eviscerating of safety nets undertaken by the billionaire class working with and for Trump.
Take Women’s History Month. It’s celebrated throughout the month to recognize the role of women in American history, but the Trump Administration is largely soldiered by white men.
Then, this National Reading Month is supposed to celebrate reading throughout the month. Trump is not a reader of books, for sure, as many biographers and close people to him have said. The recent state of the union address was replete with lies and complete upside down false information from this Trump.
So, National Read Across America Day (March 2) and International Women’s Day (March 8) has taken up no space on Trump’s sixth grade reading level social media posts.
Finally, think hard about another March recognition — National Employee Appreciation Day.
The death by thousands of cuts come close to my home, to this county, and to many of the professions I have worked under with various levels of intensity. My current work with adults with developmental disabilities is now fraught with clients fearful of Medicaid and housing assistance cuts. And support staff cuts.
This is the chaos Musk (some biographers say, 110 IQ there) and his henchmen are unfolding. Many in the DD Community are going to Salem to lobby for holding the line on the measly amounts of public (safety nets) assistance they receive.
This is what five-time presidential candidate Ralph Nader recently said on a radio program (Democracy Now) after Trump’s address to congress:
“Trump’s administration is going to move to slash Medicaid, which serves over 71 million people, including millions of Trump voters, who should be reconsidering their vote as the days pass, because they’re being exploited in red states, blue states, everywhere, as well. Yeah, they have to cut tens of billions of dollars a year from Medicaid to pay for the tax cut. That’s number one. Now they’re going after Social Security. Who knows what the next step will be on Medicare? They’re leaving Americans totally defenseless by slashing meat and poultry and food inspection laws, auto safety. They’re exposing people to climate violence by cutting FEMA, the rescue agency. They’re cutting forest rangers that deal with wildfires. They’re leaving the American people defenseless.”
A war on American workers, for sure, and I doubt anyone in the Trump Coterie could stand two minutes in a real debate with 91-year-old Nader without screaming, lying and stomping off. Nader’s history has been to protect the American citizen against ruthless corporations.
He’s a fighter for workers’ rights and protections. He wants protections for the American family and those less fortunate.
Trump favors the super-rich and giant corporations. As Nader stated,
“What Trump did last night was set a record for lies, delusionary fantasies, predictions of future broken promises — a rerun of his first term — boasts about progress that don’t exist.”
One favorable bit of news is that I will be hosting my radio show on Lincoln County’s KYAQ-FM, 91.7. It’s on at 6 pm, Wednesdays, and I’ll be getting into many topics not typically covered on local shows. I’ll talk to the dispossessed and laid off National Parks workers. I’ll talk to our coastal people, too, and for one of my shows in April I will talk up National Poetry Month with our state’s literary jewel, Kim Stafford.
Finding Fringe: Voices from the Edge will celebrate our activists and social and economic justice warriors. Expect science and sociology, as well as politics and arts and letters on my show. Now that’s how we celebrate reading and workers – highlighting authors and our local workforce. Deaths by a million cuts we all must fight here and now, and forever.
And this is not an essay vaunting the Democrats.
“The Democratic leadership don’t know how to deal with a criminal recidivist, a person who has hired workers without documents and exploited them, a person who’s a bigot against immigrants, including legal immigrants who are performing totally critical tasks in home healthcare, processing poultry, meat, and half of the construction workers in Texas are undocumented workers. So, as a bully, he doesn’t go after the construction industry in Texas; he picks out individuals.” (Ralph Nader, 2025)
You can get the radio shows after the fact, but for now, you get to hear some that have not yet aired on the community radio station, but which are on my Podcast channel:
Since his second inauguration, the billionaire, known for his highly discriminatory anti-immigrant mentality and behavior, has taken the toughest measures in favor of a “cleansing” that will have terrible consequences, even for unborn children.
And here we go with a continual slide into fascism, and, yes, a fascist nation turns on its own people. Fascism can also come into the light of the 21st century as techno-feudalism, another form of elite billionaires and their ground troops strangling the working class, even professional managerial class, through digital tracking, surveillance and behavioral modificaton.
Trump’s hatred of diverse workforces, hatred of equitable hiring practices and his love of class inequities will bring the chickens home to roost.
Even this nation’s economic/literal hit men (and hit women), the CIA, is worried about recruitment now that Trump is bulldozing fairness and affirmative action which is in place to level some playing fields: “We’re going to strangle off talent pipelines that were already narrow to begin with. And that’s going to deprive our intelligence community and our national security establishment of critical knowledge, talent, skills, language … that might be valuable in trying to get somebody into a foreign country,”
Black History month should be transformed into a total curriculum revamp so youth can understand slavery then, followed by the Jim Crowe era, and now with the Racist in Chief and his goons calling for internment camps and tossing people who disagree with capitalism and him – this penury, predatory, parasitic, casino capitalism – out of the country.
We are – I have many targets on my back – the Nobodies. It is instructive to read the following poem as a dirge for this country’s slide into despotism: By Eduardo Galeano
The Nobodies
Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping
poverty: that one magical day good luck will suddenly rain down on
them—will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn’t rain down
yesterday, today, tomorrow, or ever. Good luck doesn’t even fall in a
fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their
left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day with their right
foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms.
The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the
no ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life,
screwed every which way.
Who are not, but could be.
Who don’t speak languages, but dialects.
Who don’t have religions, but superstitions.
Who don’t create art, but handicrafts.
Who don’t have culture, but folklore.
Who are not human beings, but human resources.
Who do not have faces, but arms.
Who do not have names, but numbers.
Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police
blotter of the local paper.
The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.”
For Black History Month, we can see how disconnected our so-called elected officials are with the majority of working class people of all ethnicities: In a study done by Nicholas Carnes in his book “The Cash Ceiling,” he broke down how in 2018, millionaires make up only three percent of the public, yet they control all three branches of the federal government. While more than fifty percent of U.S. citizens hold working-class jobs, less than two percent of Congress has held a blue-collar job before their Congressional career.
So how can these people understand environmental racism when they are part of the problem?
Trump’s Team and many in MAGA can’t wrap their arms around the fact Black people face some of the highest cancer and asthma rates in the U.S. These rates are without a doubt linked to the environment in which someone lives, works and plays. When African-American Robert D. Bullard began collecting data in the 1970s, few understood how a person’s surroundings can affect their health. Bullard was even surprised how segregated the most polluted places really were.
Bullard was the first scientist to publish systematic research on the links between race and exposure to pollution, which he documented for a 1979 lawsuit.
“This is before everyone had [geographic information system] mapping, before iPads, iPhones, laptops, Google,” he said. “This is doing research way back with a hammer and a chisel.”
This is what Black History month means for many of my former Latino, Native American and Black college students: Highlighting and studying men like Bullard. With 18 books under his belt on this topic, Bullard’s work launched a movement, the environmental justice movement.
Imagine a presidential candidate or even president’s cabinet embracing this baseline — that everyone has the right to a clean and healthy environment, no matter their race or class.
Former vice presidential running mate with Jill Stein, Amaju Baraka states this new time strongly:
“It is Western imperialism, led by the U.S. that is responsible for the billions of human beings living in poverty, it is imperialism that degrades and destroys the earth, that makes water a commodity, food a luxury, education an impossibility and health care a distant dream. It is the rapacious greed and absolute disregard for human life by imperialism that drives the arms trade, turns human incarceration into a profitable enterprise and transforms millions into migrants and refugees because of war and economic plunder.”
Carter G. Woodson was the impetus behind today’s Black History month. In 1924, he was instrumental in the creation of Negro History and Literature Week, renamed Negro Achievement Week. The month of February has stuck, since the organizers of the first celebration picked this month because two valorized men’s birthdays fall in February: Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, the 12th and the 14th respectively.
They are trying to elevate France recognizing Josephine Baker as a hero, yet, Amy Goodman has the ability — and whatever else is going on with the Black journalist she interviews, French journalist Rokhaya Diallo — to sidestep the tribal and religious and historical and intellectual identity of this French monster, Éric Zemmour (above image).
He’s Jewish and he openly uses his Jewishness as a cuddle to get where he is today — published writer and candidate for office? Where is the money trail, that is the question. I ask this as I did get a reader’s comments (from the Dissident Voice newsletter where I am published) who is from California but has lived in New Zealand for 25 years. He’s a businessman, in hospitality, and he writes me from time to time. He is concerned with employees from South America, in his New Zealand restaurant, still skeptical of the Pfizer and how the NZ government makes it illegal to work without a series of jabs — booster madness is what 2022 will be. Just a little research on NZ —
“The corporate press is correct that Tarrant and Breivik follow the practices of the anti-Islam xenophobic movement on the rise in Europe, North America and now Oceania, but the key element they deliberately avoid mentioning is their strong collective affinity for the state of Israel.”
You know, the Christian Identity politics in the world, well, of course they are tied to Identity, and that is Christianity. The Jewish Identity politics (an entire country, Israel, Jewish, and like In God We Trust USA Christian nation) tie into of course, Jewish-ness. Zionism Identity, well, of course, Zionism is the identifier. Why would Jewish Amy Goodman not mention this person’s — Zemmour’s — Jewish identity? He’s anti-Muslim, and he’s a proponent of murder and mayhem. He’s misogynistic as HELL.
Oh, Josephine Baker —
‘Baker wrote about the injustices she had witnessed for a French paper, France-Soir. From Montevideo to Copenhagen, she gave talks about the evils of US segregation, and on 28 August 1963, she was the only official female speaker to speak alongside Martin Luther King at the March on Washington. In her French military uniform, Baker spoke about her own struggle for justice to a quarter of a million people. Looking out at the mix of races in the crowd, she declared: “Salt and pepper — just what it should be.”
Yet these actions did not go down well with the FBI, who had a file open against her since 1951 because of her “anti-United States statements and her fight for racial equality”. For 15 years, until Baker’s 60th birthday, they recorded her actions and called her a Communist Party apologist, not least because she occasionally partied with the Castro brothers in Cuba.’
Being the first black woman to become a global celebrity and to star in a major feature film – 1934’s Zouzou undoubtedly made Josephine Baker an influential cabaret siren and fashion icon. Yet she was also so much more. A Second World War spy for the French Resistance, a civil rights activist, a suspected communist sympathiser, and a single mother to twelve adopted children from all over the globe, Baker refused to dance to anyone’s drum but her own.
Her words still resonate today: “Surely the day will come when colour means nothing more than the skin tone, when religion is seen uniquely as a way to speak one’s soul, when birth places have the weight of a throw of the dice and all men are born free.”
(Ailsa Ross is a journalist living in the Canadian Rockies. She’s the author of The Woman Who Rode a Shark: And 50 More Wild Female Adventurers [AA Publishing, 2019])
So, how do we frame all of this through the lens and looking glass of racism and bigotry, a real foundation of Zionism, which is the founding force of the state of Israel? This by, Yoav Litvin, an Israeli-American doctor of psychology/neuroscience, a writer and photographer. His work can be found at yoavlitvin.com.
Early Zionists syncretised many aspects of European fascism, white supremacy, colonialism and messianic Evangelism and had a long and sordid history of cooperating with anti-Semites, imperialists and fascists in order to promote exclusivist and expansionist agendas.
In fact, throughout the past century, anti-Semites and Zionists have worked towards the mutual interest of concentrating Jews in Israel; the former as a means of scapegoating and expelling an unwanted population, and the latter to combat the “demographic threat” posed by native Palestinians. Further, both anti-Semites and Zionists construct Jews as a biological race, which needs to be segregated as part of a utopia of global apartheid.
Zionism is a racist and settler colonialist movement, which opportunistically coopts aspects of Judaism in an attempt to justify its criminal practices of apartheid and genocide of indigenous Palestinians. White supremacy is dominant within Israeli society, which privileges white-skinned Ashkenazi Jews at the expense of dark-skinned African Jews, Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews as well as African refugees. African/black Jewish communities are often denied recognition by Israeli authorities with some members even deported.
Zionism is based on a distinctly secular outlook, which embraces aggression and expansion as an acceptable response to trauma and denounces the traditional Jewish pacifist approach of viewing hardship as divine punishment for sins. The Israeli regime capitalises on a dynamic of violence and inequality reinforced by fear-mongering and the rewards of resource acquisition to promote a privileged ruling class at the expense of colonised Palestinian people. Zionist strategists manipulate the past traumas Jews have endured to galvanise support for aggressive policies that disenfranchise Palestinians.
They call it double punishment, or at least that’s what Yonathan Arfi, vice president of the Representative Council of French Jews, describes it. False narratives from Jews, and then coming from people who are Jewish. Stephen Miller, anyone? Remember his prominence in Trump-Alt-Hatred politics? So, Zemmour is Jewish, espouses supremacist views of whites (Jews over Goyim, but he doesn’t yammer too much on that), and he thinks all women are baby breeders and do not have the capacity for politics and can’t be geniuses. So, the legitimacy he claims as a Jew with his Nazi patina, well, that is the double take, double tap, double punishment.
So many will question how much Zemmour truly engages with his Jewish identity – but, as philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy argues, that has become irrelevant. Despite rigorous criticism from the Jewish community, “what Mr. Zemmour does, whether he likes it or not, [is] in the Jewish name”. (source)
They all do land with parachutes, pariahs and war criminals, one and all.
Israeli military hegemony is indeed no long-term guarantee of US interests in the region, but the scale of the US-Israel military relationship and the close synchronization of US and Israeli strategy down to the present are determined by a strategic calculus, not by sentiment. Kissinger’s comments do reflect an important shift in US policy at this time, towards greater reliance on compliant Arab regimes to preserve the status quo. But Israel’s function as a “strategic asset” is no mere rhetorical flourish of Ronald Reagan’s campaign. US policy, in 1975 as now, aimed to enhance Israel’s strategic capacity in the region, consolidate friendly Arab regimes, and to isolate and debilitate the Palestinian movement.
— “Kissinger Memorandum: ‘To Isolate the Palestinians,’” Middle East Report, 96 (May/June 1981).
In a recent interview with the New York Times, Pulitzer-prize winner Alice Walker caused much controversy by recommending David Icke’s book And the Truth Shall Set You Free, claiming it was “a curious person’s dream come true”.
Many reacted sharply to Walker’s endorsement of what is widely considered to be an anti-Semitic book, accusing her of embracing Icke’s racist conspiracy theories; others, like Palestinian-American writer Susan Abulhawa, defended Walker, claiming her ideas are anti-Zionist and not anti-Semitic. In her article, In defence of Alice Walker, Abulhawa claimed Palestinians are “killed, humiliated and destroyed in visible and invisible ways by Israel’s notions of Jewish supremacy”.
— Yoav Litvin, “The Zionist fallacy of ‘Jewish supremacy,’” Al Jazeera
This, Alice Walker, or …
Kissinger and the Tribe . . .
On December 2, Democracy Now— Read the transcript and see more of Diallo’s words.
We go now to France where we are joined by French journalist and filmmaker Rokhaya Diallo. Her latest op-ed for the Washington Post is headlined Josephine Baker enters the Panthéon. Don’t let it distract from this larger story. Thank you so much for joining us, Rokhaya. Why don’t you start off by telling us that larger story and then go into the significance of Josephine Baker being recognized?
Rokhaya Diallo: Thank you so much for inviting me. I am very happy—to me, it’s very good news to finally have a woman of color in the Panthéon, which is, as you said, one of the most prestigious places to welcome the most revered French figures. It is something that is very meaningful, because as well as being an entertainer, she was also a hero of resisting during the Second World War but also took part to the March on Washington. As you said, she was the only woman.
But there are two things that left me with mixed feelings. First, the fact that France tends to use the fact that it has been very welcoming to African Americans throughout the 20th century to picture itself as a very open and welcoming country. But the thing that we tend to forget is that while Josephine Baker was celebrated and dancing on Parisian stages, France was a very violent colonial power, so it was also colonizing Africa and Asia and also the Caribbean, and perpetrating very much violence to people who were colonized and also displaying them in what was called at that time the Colonial Exhibitions, which were basically human zoos where you could see people coming from the colony to be seen by visitors from Paris and from other regions of France.
So there was a double standard with African Americans being welcomed because they were American and didn’t have any historical agreement to settle with France. At the same time, other people of color were actually submitted to the French state.
I go back to New Zealand, because it is very easy to believe New Zealand is this great, well-run, law abiding, great place!
forty hard years of lobotomizing, dumbdowning, infantilizing, and deploying this multilayered PSYOPS of direct and covert operations have been brought to us, partially, by the Edward Bernays of the World … now we are here: Fear and Loathing in Our Delusional and Self-Incriminating Selves! (Haeder, May 28, 2023)
Trillions for Ukraine. Christ, this is 2019, from The Nation, not exactly a radical rag : Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine/ Five years after the Maidan uprising, anti-Semitism and fascist-inflected ultranationalism are rampant. By Lev Golinkin
Before the Russian invasion, CIA reports linked him to an oligarch so dirty and so mired in “significant corruption” that the State Department banned him from entering the U.S.
But now CIA propaganda portrays Zelensky as nobler than Winston Churchill and saintlier than Mother Theresa.
Will the Real Volodymyr Zelensky Please Stand Up (source)
Now now, I know we can’t in PC/PAEC (Politically Approved by Elites Correct) society point out a spade from a diamond. Ahh, even after Nakba 75? Who stopped it, a celebration-remembrance-sadness of that genocide?
Sorry, but it does matter who controls the levers of power, the narrative, the engines of Press-Propaganda-Entertainment. As well as, politics, marketing, education? Nakba is a lie. You don’t see a pattern here?
In a statement Monday, Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said, “We will fight the ‘Nakba’ lie with full strength and we won’t allow the Palestinians to continue to spread lies and distort history.”
Ahh, this commemoration, by the UN, of all organizations, is despicable, according to another Jew, and that is a-okay language, no?
In a recorded statement, Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., Gilad Erdan, said that the organization’s decision was “shameful” and would harm any efforts to find a peaceful solution to the generations-old conflict between the state of Israel and the Palestinian people.
Asking other U.N. representatives to boycott the commemoration, he said, “[A]ttending this despicable event means destroying any chance of peace by adopting the Palestinian narrative calling the establishment of the state of Israel a disaster while ignoring Palestinian hate, incitement, terror and refusal to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state.”
“UN Recognition of Palestinian Displacement Angers Israel” — One headline, and just replace, “…angers Israel” with, “…. angers Christians, Zionists, Israel-Firsters, Members of Congress, Members of the MSM, politicians, AIPAC, etc., et. …”
Shit, recognition of that Liberty, that United States SHIP, and more poison arrows launched by the Isra-Hellions:
Shit, that crime memorial is coming up, June 8 = The USS Liberty incident was an attack on a United States Navy technical research ship, USS Liberty, by Israeli Air Force jet fighter aircraft and Israeli Navy motor torpedo boats, on 8 June 1967, during the Six-Day War.
Ahh, can we protest that other anniversary? By virtue of General Assembly Resolution 273, Israel was admitted to membership in the United Nations on 11 May 1949. In the three years following the 1948 Palestine war , about 700,000 Jews immigrated to Israel, residing mainly along the borders and in former Arab lands.
Can we remember June 8 without being smeared?
For more information on Israel’s crimes, and the USS Liberty, go here: IAK.
Now transitioning to more racism and bigotry and Big Brother-ism by Jewish leaders, ZioCryptos, and the like, let’s scour the WWW for those attacks on Pink Floyd’s front man: Jews will attack Roger Waters, of Pink Floyd, and they will get countless thousands of lies published in countless broken media outfits immediately. Just Google-Gulag search: “Roger Waters and Berlin Fascism.” Hate, pure lies, and the hasbara and powerful Jewish hatred of thinking Rogers is an antisemite!
Again, a concert, and Israel speaks up.
Israel’s foreign ministry later criticized Waters on social media, tweeting on May 24: “Good morning to everyone but Roger Waters who spent the evening in Berlin (Yes Berlin) desecrating the memory of Anne Frank and the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.”
I am sorry to say that the Jewish folk I have been reading about, listening to, and researching throughout my decades, even from day one of college onward, many (not all) are indeed a clear and present danger to straight-up research and critical thinking. Then, just move over to the fact in my humble opinion, many powerful Jews hate Russia, Russians, and anyone who might dare question the UkroNazi Proxy War with Russia, started, oh, hell, way before 2014.
Self-proclaimed Jewish criminal, Kolomoyskyi is the dirty banker and the dirty funder of Zelensky:
[Photo: On the left, Zelensky in circle behind Kholomoisky. On the right, Zelensky on the campaign trail is followed by one of Kholomoisky’s bodyguards.]
But, read this Jewish rag in Isra-Hell, Haaretz | World News/
Ukraine recently requested air defense systems and training from Israel, saying that Iran would use the deployment of its weapons systems in Europe to refine their capabilities. Still, Israel maintains that it would not send military assistance to Ukraine
A senior Ukrainian official close to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called on world Jewry to push Jerusalem to arm his country with defensive weapons on Wednesday, only two days after Moscow warned Israel that supplying military equipment to Ukraine would “destroy the political relations between the two countries.”
Of course, I am disgusted by any racist group calling on “all Jews worldwide to continue the murder of Russians and Ukrainians in Donbass, and now, throughout Ukraine and into Russia.
This is merchant of death war mongering, and it has to stop, stop first by beginning to call a Jewish Fascist a Jewish Fascist when you come in contact with him or her or them: Here, more lies, blatant valorizing of a corrupt and criminal man, Zelensky!
1. The most important Jewish leader in the world (source)
The past week has turned us all into experts on Ukraine, now at the center of every conversation. Did you know how big it is? (When you lay it over the U.S. map, it stretches from New York to Chicago.) Who knew that we were actually using the Russian city names and not the Ukrainian ones (it’s Kyiv, not Kiev; Lviv, not Lvov; and Kharkiv, not Kharkov). And their president—did you know that he is Jewish?
Volodymyr Zelensky is probably the most admired Jewish leader the world has to offer right now. Before entering politics in 2018, Zelensky was a popular comedian (and you can’t get any more Jewish than that); he does not often speak about his Jewish identity, but he has never tried to hide it. In a country like Ukraine, which is still struggling with a painful legacy of antisemitism, Zelensky’s Jewishness has always been present.
For Jews across the world, Zelensky is now a source of pride: a young, inexperienced leader who is putting his life at risk for his people by leading a nation of 40 million people in opposing a ruthless Russian aggressor.
In his inauguration speech, Zelensky famously told lawmakers not to hang his portrait on their walls. “I do not want my picture in your offices: The president is not an icon, an idol or a portrait. Hang your kids’ photos instead, and look at them each time you are making a decision.”
True to form, Zelensky maintained his unassuming, direct style when crisis hit. His video messages, posted several times a day, have been helping reassure the Ukrainian people. He spoke from his office and from the streets of Kyiv, even as Russian troops closed in on the capital, and when the fighting intensified, Zelensky candidly shared with all Ukrainians the fact that he has been marked by the Russians as “target number one” and that his family is “target number two.” But when the U.S. offered to evacuate him from Kyiv to somewhere safer, he responded: “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.”
I’m writing this column on Sunday, as Russian forces, bogged down and weakened by courageous Ukrainians armed with AK-47s, Molotov cocktails, or sometimes just a large pole they picked up on the side of the street, still threaten the capital. Zelensky is leading the effort to save his nation, though most foreign intelligence services still think he’s fighting a losing battle.
So, this POS war crimes leader, Zelensky, *elensky because the letter “Z” has been outlawed, and Ukraine and Zelensky with the one-two-three punch of US and UK, with their Kill List, you have to imagine that in the USA and Canada and UK and EU and Europe, all brains have been thrown out the window, or the voice of reason has gone where?
Propaganda is administered in western nations, by western nations, across the political spectrum — and the really blatant and well-known examples of its existence make up only a small sliver of the propaganda that our civilization is continuously marinating in.
The most common articles of propaganda — and by far the most consequential — are not the glaring, memorable instances that live in infamy among the critically minded. They’re the mundane messages, distortions and lies-by-omission that people are fed day in and day out to normalize the status quo and lay the foundation for more propaganda to be administered in the future.
[…]
One of the forms this takes is the way the western political/media class manipulates the Overton window of acceptable political opinion.
It’s propaganda in multiple ways: it excludes voices that are critical of the established status quo from being heard and influencing people, it amplifies voices (many of whom have packing foam for brains) which support the status quo, and, most importantly, it creates the illusion that the range of political opinions presented are the only reasonable political opinions to have.
Then there’s the ideological herding funnel we discussed recently, which herds the population into two mainstream factions of equal size which both prevent all meaningful change and serve the interests of the powerful.
Maybe the most consequential of all the mundane, routine ways we’re propagandized is the way the mass media manufacture the illusion of normality in a dystopia so disturbing that we would all scream our lungs out if we could see it with fresh eyes.
Another of the mundane, almost-invisible ways the public is propagandized from day to day is described in a recent video by Second Thought titled “You’re Not Immune To Propaganda“. We’re continually fed messages by the capitalist machine that we must work hard for employers and accept whatever standards and compensation they see fit to offer, and if we have difficulty thriving in this unjust system the fault lies with us and not with the system. Poor? That’s your fault. Miserable? Your fault. Unemployed? Your fault. Overworked? Your fault.
Another related method of manipulation is agenda-setting — the way the press shapes public thinking by emphasising some subjects and not others. In placing importance on some matters over others simply by giving disproportionate coverage to them, the mass media (who are propagandists first and news reporters second) give the false impression that those topics are more important and the de-emphasised subjects are less so.
But then, this is another form — of propaganda . . . denial, and denigration and plain ignoring alternative views, even those that are consistent and repeated:
But it’s the 74th Anniversary of an illegitimate state, apartheid and ethnic cleansing one albet> This is how ZioAzovLensky rolls, and even the corrupt CIA-controlled Wikipedia has some facts here on the murderous Jews, Zelenksy’s mother ship, historical grounding, who called themselves Zionists, but I know very few Jews who are not ZIONISTS, overtly or covertly:
A successful paramilitary campaign was carried out by Zionist underground groups against British rule in Mandatory Palestine from 1944 to 1948. The tensions between the Zionist underground and the British mandatory authorities rose from 1938 and intensified with the publication of the White Paper of 1939. The Paper outlined new government policies to place further restrictions on Jewish immigration and land purchases, and declared the intention of giving independence to Palestine, with an Arab majority, within ten years. Though World War II brought relative calm, tensions again escalated into an armed struggle towards the end of the war, when it became clear that the Axis powers were close to defeat.
The Haganah, the largest of the Jewish underground militias, which was under the control of the officially recognised Jewish leadership of Palestine, remained cooperative with the British. But in 1944 the Irgun, an offshoot of the Haganah, launched a rebellion against British rule, thus joining Lehi, which had been active against the authorities throughout the war. Both were small, dissident militias of the right-wingRevisionist movement. They attacked police and government targets in response to British immigration restrictions. They intentionally avoided military targets, to ensure that they would not hamper the British war effort against their common enemy, Nazi Germany.
The armed conflict escalated during the final phase of World War II, when the Irgun declared a revolt in February 1944, ending the hiatus in operations it had begun in 1940. Starting from the assassination of Baron Moyne by Lehi in 1944, the Haganah actively opposed the Irgun and Lehi, in a period of inter-Jewish fighting known as the Hunting Season, effectively halting the insurrection. However, in autumn 1945, following the end of World War II in both Europe (April–May 1945) and Asia (September, 1945), when it became clear that the British would not permit significant Jewish immigration and had no intention of immediately establishing a Jewish state, the Haganah began a period of co-operation with the other two underground organisations. They jointly formed the Jewish Resistance Movement.
The Haganah refrained from direct confrontation with British forces, and concentrated its efforts on attacking British immigration control, while Irgun and Lehi attacked military and police targets.[6] The Resistance Movement dissolved amidst recriminations in July 1946, following the King David Hotel bombing. The Irgun and Lehi started acting independently, while the main underground militia, Haganah, continued acting mainly in supporting Jewish immigration. The Haganah again briefly worked to suppress Irgun and Lehi operations, due to the presence of a United Nations investigative committee in Palestine. After the UN Partition Plan resolution was passed on 29 November 1947, the civil war between Palestinian Jews and Arabs eclipsed the previous tensions of both with the British. However, British and Zionist forces continued to clash throughout the period of the civil war up to the termination of the British Mandate for Palestine and the Israeli Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948.
Within the United Kingdom there were deep divisions over Palestine policy. Dozens of British soldiers, Jewish militants, and civilians died during the campaigns of insurgency. The conflict led to heightened antisemitism in the United Kingdom. In August 1947, after the hanging of two abducted British sergeants, there was widespread anti-Jewish rioting across the United Kingdom. The conflict caused tensions in the United Kingdom–United States relations.
Putin and Russians and those of us who actually want Russia to have a safe border, peace, and zero NATO interference, see Zelensky and his Jewish Lords — Kagan Familias, Nuland, Blinken, Yellen, Sherman, Garland, and hundreds of others in the Biden White House and thousands of others in the Military Industrial Expanded (finance, computing, surveillence) Complex and millions more in the world of turning a dollar on death — as the ENEMY. Murderous, conniving, hateful, slick enemies numero uno, those espousing war with China and war with Russia.
I know Dissident Voice is reluctant to publish voices that might lean toward a Pepe Escobar critique of the Israel Hell unleashed on the world. I get it. But, the fact is violence and terror, those are right up Zelensky’s alley, and this war that UK and USA and Five Eyes and EU have unleashed will not end soon, because Ukraine in the minds of many is Israel 2.0. An added “benefit” for these monsters: Expect those weapons that USA taxpayer footed the bill for to bring down some commercial airlines in a neighborhood near-by soon.
We are a soiled Western Culture, and we have seeded the rest of the world with our feces — high tech, low tech, money, land theft, pollution, exploitation, consumerism, throw-away mentality, sanctions, blood lust, coups, supporting despots, money laundering and gold theft and assets removal. Loans from Hell, and alas, here we are, in a putrid world, a day before the big Monday Holiday, Memorial Day, and we are straddled by syphilitic monsters running the world and our own populous generally marked for death, marked as marks, these, the billionaires, the fleecers and many left and right, Jewish or not, they are Zionists and Israel-Firsters who have sold us down the Ukrainian toilet.
Israeli newspapers point out the victories?
These are THEIR graphics, and by me point these out, I am deplatformed, stopped from teaching, pushed to the excrement posts of publishing my books anywhere
But leave it to the Paranoid Former Nazis and the disgusting ADL and AIPAC and Mossad loving Israelis to attack us all attacking them:
“The depiction of an unhinged fascist demagogue has been a feature of my shows since Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ in 1980,” Roger Waters said.
“I have spent my entire life speaking out against authoritarianism and oppression where I set it… My parents fought the Nazis in World War II, with my father paying the ultimate price,” he said.
“Regardless of the consequences of the attacks against me, I will continue to condemn injustice and all those who perpetrate it.”
Waters is a well-known pro-Palestinian activist who has been accused of holding anti-Jewish views. He has floated an inflatable pig emblazoned with the Star of David at his concerts. The singer denies the anti-Semitism accusations, saying he was protesting against Israeli policies, not Jewish people.
Ah, those old days, which now would be both considered hate speech and also ground down by the ugly media and the uglier mainstream fools in college, in towns, every where.
Yep, it is a piece of shit piece of cloth for many, representing so so much death, murder, hate, and racism. Cloth, man, and alas, a symbol, for those who cry crocodile tears when they hear the National Anthem, and then for others, it is the greed and murder and Empire of Chaos-Lies-Terror in every red and white strip, every star and bar:
This stuff is not allowed on campuses, and not just Guantanamo Desantis’s Florida.
This is not anti-DIsney, but it is the Dsneyification of the world, and this is the outcome: bones, immolation, worldwide.
Old school, but you can’t get college students to analyze this without being charged with a Virginia Tech Situation — call SWAT.
I doubt you can loosely call for the execution of Corporations, CEOs, what have you. Again, Virginia Tech Situation — call SWAT on Haeder.
Ahh, if we are the biggest war profiteers, then we’ll be letting China take first place. Yep, that’s the modern college student’s response.
Ahh, I have been warned that telling my students that I was rapped on the head by cops, in Portland, El Paso, Seattle, and elsewhere, and that protest is dangerous but necessary, and that I would dare use the ACAB as an opening to discuss that Defund the Police Movement — who, what, where, when and WHY — as well as my own work as a police reporter and what I think of cops/pigs, all verbotten! Call SWAT on Haeder.
Hell, you can look this one up in Wikipedia. And babies?
Read the transcript: with the reason the poster was made, the soldier who was in the massacre!
Oh, no, trigger warnings, vicarious PTSD, verboten.
Partial transcriptof the Mike Wallace interview with Paul Meadlo in which Meadlo describes his participation in the My Lai massacre:
Q. So you fired something like sixty-seven shots?
A. Right.
Q. And you killed how many? At that time?
A. Well, I fired them automatic, so you can’t – You just spray the area on them and so you can’t know how many you killed ‘cause they were going fast. So I might have killed ten or fifteen of them.
It is a well-oiled, well-placed, complex, 3-D kind of chess machine, and it is pure killer, pure killer, and most campuses utilized Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard, Marines, DoD, BOrder Patrol, CIA, FBI, ATF, MONEY. Some of the nation’s most elite universities are deep into defense lobbying, often hiring Washington-based firms to press Congress and the Pentagon to fund their science projects.
Asked whether students or professors ever have ethical objections to working on projects funded by the Defense Department, Zuber said that “no professor has to take money from DoD.”
“We’re a bottom-up organization,” she said. “Professors make those choices.”
She also said that “if there are students who have a feeling that they don’t want to work on defense-related issues, they certainly don’t have to.” But, she added, “a whole lot seem to want to.”
Like MIT, the Association of American Universities, an alliance of 62 of the leading research institutions in the United States and Canada, advocates defense research funding.
The end result is that BABIES, kids, NEWBORNES, women, SENIOR citizens, disabled, PATIENTS in hospitals, youth on PLAYGROUNDS, are mudered, and killed, and imploded, so, then, BABY Killers is just a limited sigh — wedding parties, goat herders, and entire families at gravesites, murdered by universities, colleges, think tanks, corporations, marketing firms, law firms, retail services in the EMPLOY of the USA.
This sign? These youth? Their message? Their no war and stop the escalation and disarmament now, ahh, then, of couse, it’s triple bad, since they are free thinkers and align with New York Young Communist League.
So many more organizations working on it, working on it — no more NATO, no more Arms.
Back to the Jewish thing in Ukraine: And, well, and, who writes the narrative of Ukraine, of Zelensky, of the Jewish Apartheid State supporting the Nazis under Zelensky?
There is no way in hell you will read this story, objectively, anywhere:
The Jews are the ones behind the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and their goal is to create a new Jewish state to replace the failing Zionist project of Israel, Palestinian Islamic scholar Mraweh Nassar has claimed, as reported by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).
Nassar, whom MEMRI identified as the secretary-general of the Jerusalem Committee of the International Union of Muslims Scholars, made his claims on March 22 while speaking with Channel 9, an Arabic-language TV station in Turkey that the media watchdog says is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Now now, Dan Shapiro (New Atlanticist, err, Atlantic Council) wrote this one, and again, it’s the NARRATIVE and the MEDIUM is the MESSAGE driver, and then who gets to tell the stories and how the algorithms benefit the propagandists, shit dog, need we look further?.
Speaking to reporters this week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the future he sees for his country in unusual terms: as “a big Israel.”
Gone, he said, are hopes for “an absolutely liberal” state—replaced by the likely reality of armed defense forces patrolling movie theaters and supermarkets. “I’m confident that our security will be the number-one issue over the next ten years,” Zelenskyy added.
With Russian forces having withdrawn from around Kyiv, suggesting that Ukraine successfully repulsed the first phase of the Kremlin’s invasion, the time is right for Zelenskyy to contemplate how to prepare for the next—and potentially much longer—phase of this conflict.
But what does he mean by “a big Israel”? With a population more than four times smaller, and vastly less territory, the Jewish state might not seem like the most fitting comparison. Yet consider the regional security threats it faces, as well as its highly mobilized population: The two embattled countries share more than you might think.
So if Zelenskyy really does have Israel in mind as a model for Ukraine, here are some of the key features he might consider for adoption (some of which are already applicable today):
Security first: Every Israeli government promises, first and foremost, that it will deliver security—and knows it will be judged on this pledge. Ordinary citizens, not just politicians, pay close attention to security threats—both from across borders and from internal sources— and much of the public chooses who to elect by that metric alone.
The whole population plays a role: The Israeli model goes further than Zelenskyy’s vision of security services deployed to civilian spaces: Most young Israeli adults serve in the military, and many are employed in security-related professions following their service. A common purpose unites the citizenry, making them ready to endure shared sacrific
I ask, “Will one vapid bought-and-brainwashed media person get on with some rejiggering their knowledge:
In the face of an avalanche of brain-numbing and spiritual-lobotomizing wrong “truths” and miseducated citizens, it is still incumbent upon the misinformed, ill-informed and uninformed to attempt to learn.
Deep learning deploys a set of lenses that takes the complexities of contradictions and not-so-self-evident truths and focus into some sense of why “they” are where “they” are economically, culturally and spiritually.
The US election is over (as of Nov. 5 midnight?), but the dangerous clown show of misanthropy and hegemony marches on. I am writing this for National American Indian Heritage Month (Nov.), because Native Peoples in this part of the world are actually way beyond the rhetoric and knee-jerk responses of the bad history books of the children of the colonizers.
My Native brothers and sisters everywhere, but specifically in New Mexico, West Texas and Northern Arizona, have a deeper understanding of their own history and that of the current indigenous people undergoing eradication, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.
“Dehumanization is the first step in genocidal incitement. However, counter-annihilation is also a key feature of settler colonialism. It is the belief and practice that colonial society must annihilate Native people; otherwise, the colonizers, in turn, will be annihilated in a zero-sum calculus. It is a pre-emptive ‘self-defense’ against any real or imagined anti-colonial attack. It makes invasion look like ‘self-defense.’ It is why the chorus of Western media outlets repeat the mantra: ‘Israel has the right to defend itself.’ But the colonized are never granted the authority of self-defense or the right not to be annihilated.” — Nick Estes
Again, ‘open those eyes,’ is what I insist with students and others I intersect with in Lincoln County. Those words above are from someone most Lincoln County Leader readers have never heard of: Nick Estes, an enrolled member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is an Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota and the co-host of The Red Nation Podcast.
We can jump through superficial hoops with this 34th year of National American Indian Heritage Month, a 1990 congressional resolution signed into law by President George H.W. Bush.
The irony isn’t lost on many of us who have parsed our history, or the Bush Family’s dark legacy.
George H.W. Bush’s father, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.
Journalists 20 years ago discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.
His business dealings, which continued until his company’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave laborers at Auschwitz.
Moreover, the cry by Estes and others in the Native American rights community announce their own declaration of liberation: “Until Decolonization, Liberation, and Landback.”
This November’s not limited to those here on Turtle Island to find a space for deep reflection and education. Others around the world who are indigenous are collectively traumatized by the current genocide in Gaza and Lebanon.
“Many of the lessons people are learning are not new to me; for many this moment has been a realization that their governments are not just corrupt, but also complicit in the evils of the world, that their media is biased and that the people around them will turn their backs on a genocide being live-streamed on their social media. As an Aboriginal person living in so-called Australia, these truths have been a reality for me and my people for decades and nor am I shocked to learn of the ignorance of so many others,” states Dominic Guerrera, a Ngarrindjeri and Kaurna poet, community organizer, artist and curator.
Closer to my Central Oregon Coast home, we have groups fighting for cultural preservation and land acknowledgement. View the Future is a Yachats nonprofit collaborating with our two confederated tribes from the central Oregon Coast who are the descendants of the first people: The Confederated Tribe of Siletz Indians and the Confederated Tribe of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians.
Land Acknowledgment for tribes is more than a ceremonial point in cultural fluency. Words and declarations are the soul and spirit of Native people. You can read the two land acknowledgments at (https://viewthefuture.org/)
Find something to “hook into” this month (and every month), to acknowledge our own temporary “holding” of land here in Lincoln County or wherever you live. Forget about the elections.
Be deep in understanding why this month can be important for individual and societal change. Don’t parrot the bad history taught or just live life in an echo chamber of your choosing with “monkey do as monkey sees” superficial engagement with the issues.
Find Native writers on alternative sources like Red Nation.
Listen to Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer, academic and musician and member of Alderville First Nation.
“Although our ancestors lived through the genocide of Indigenous peoples in North America, this past year we have witnessed genocide in real-time, with technologically advanced warfare, destruction and obliteration on a spectacular scale. We’ve watched daily video footage and photos of unimaginable violence targeting families and children. We’ve read social media posts, news reports and poetry coming from Palestinians inside Gaza. And we’ve watched the very states that have dispossessed us of our homelands, supply the weapons and unwavering political support to Israel to do the same to the Palestinian people.”
Read the Time Magazine article written by his nephew.
Here, reality check for democrats and republicans:
Some legit writing here from me to be published in “legit” media around my area:
When the whole world is silent, even one voice becomes powerful
“I’d like to have enough resources, money, to take a trip somewhere. I don’t want to be homeless if housing finds out I have extra money in my bank account.”
Seems like a wish for anyone supposedly in the land of the free – not to be homeless. Variations on this goal were broached at the Oct. 23-24 self-advocacy meeting at the Best Western at Agate Beach.
More than forty people attended the planning and visioning session to carve out some future collective goal to make change a community of people living in the developmental disability and neurodiverse world. One of the main organizers of this self-advocacy event is Julie Chick, Sammy’s Place Director, a nonprofit out of Nehalem.
I attended the event wearing several hats – an educator, an activist, journalist and assisting working with clients in the neurodiverse “world” with Essential Services. Right out of the blocks I asked Chick to synthesize what she got out of the two-day meeting.
What did you find valuable in the event?
“The person-to-person connections and relationships again can be taken for granted by those that easily access their community, and can be difficult if you have no wheels or knowledge of public transportation. Relationships of all types are the bedrock of humanity, yet some of the people in our DD system had not had much opportunity to get out and make friends. These folks have been meeting though this self-advocacy work, Arc of Lincoln’s Day Services Activities, and Beach Buddies, and their circle is growing with some coming in from other counties.”
The critical mass around self-advocacy is fighting for basic rights, like lifting up the maximum allowable savings and checking account balance above the draconian $2000 law.
With such a limit on money given to or earned by people living in subsidized housing, and those receiving disability payments from the government, and other services, like personal assistants, the fear losing those hard-fought safety nets is palatable.
Connecting with others along the coast, in the seven counties situated along the Pacific, the participants were passionate and determined to come away with tools to advocate for themselves not only politically, but through better transportation services, more opportunities to make money on the side with arts and crafts creations, and better ways to make personal connections, even romantic ones.
“I want to meet people who respect me for who I am and so I can follow my dreams,” stated advocate Frank Perdue. “I don’t understand why ‘normal’ people don’t want to go out on dates with people like us. We need better opportunities to meet people who think like us.”
For anyone interested in the complexities of life as a man or woman living in the neurodiverse world, a recent Hulu documentary might be their entry point. “Patrice” follows New Jersey school crossing guard Patrice Jetter. The kids love her, and she loves them.
She is also an amazing artist, entertainer and performer. She is romantically involved with Garry, who lives with cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair. The story is about a commitment ceremony – between Patrice and Garry – since they were told their marriage quest would jeopardize their individual monthly social security stipends and their subsidized housing.
The documentary utilizes vérité footage of Patrice and Garry’s daily life, both together and apart. Their lives are at a rather challenging level just accomplishing daily routines like preparing a meal. Patrice walks with a cane and leg braces, whereas Garry uses a wheelchair and needs help into bed.
They both have their separate apartments, 20 minutes apart via bus. Also part of the movie is the handicapped-equipped van Patrice owns which breaks down for good in the documentary. Much of Patrice’s story focuses on raising funds (and awareness) around a vehicle they need – for Patrice to get to work as a school crossing guard and for Garry to live a more mobile life with his significant other. Collecting aluminum cans just won’t cut the $55,000 price tag, and alas, a Go Fund Me drive gets Patrice to that goal and the new vehicle.
Many of my current and past clients will relate well with this documentary, from the Special Olympics participation, to the end-of-the-month dilemma of $28 left for food or incidentals. The shared values and the care each of the main protagonists display should melt any cold heart, but the reality is that both democrats and republicans have stalled on a marriage equity bill allowing a legal union AND continuation of both spouses’ Social Security/Medicaid support.
Garry and Patrice had terrible upbringings and experiences during their formative years, and Patrice’s reads read like a horror story of abuse, bullying, assaults and rape. The oppression from the government agencies is just another knife in the heart. We learn that Patrice’s mother was from a family of abusers, and that Patrice’s stepfather abused her mother.
Patrice is on her own as her siblings are dead, as well as her mother. But by the end of the movie, with the Go Fund Me videos, it is clear that she has a plethora of friends and tribal family.
Compelling is Patrice’s real life friend, Elizabeth Dicker, who happens to be the Accessibility Specialist at Rutgers Center for Adult Autism Services. Elizabeth summarizes how Garry and Patrice’s situation is not just cruel, but also illogical:
“If two people are having Medicaid benefits, and then those two people get married and then they just don’t lose their benefits, how is the government making or losing any money?”
Situating the real policy issues now, after billions ($15.5 billion) were spent on the 2024 elections, we learn from advocates like Julie Chick and Frank Perdue that the limitations on Supplemental Security Income are badly out of date.
Organizations like Oregon Self Advocacy Coalition (OSAC) work hard to engage communities in advocating for the rights of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
I spoke at length with Gabrielle Guedon, director of OSAC. She was really interested in the power of the press to bring OSAC members’ struggles to the general public. She is also inviting people to read the GO! Bulletin on how to get involved in advocacy about policies.
She lives by this credo by Malala Youseif: —
“When the whole world is silent, even one voice becomes powerful.”
And, on the OSAC webpage we see she’s just like anyone you might know:
“I build miniature doll houses and make pillow cases. I love camping. I’m a carb-o-holic! I like rock-n-roll and I would love to visit Australia.”
In January 2020, just before COVID hit, Lisa, myself, and a team of advocates met with Chris Neeley, who headed the President’s Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities, a much-needed federal advisory committee that promotes policies and initiatives that support independent and lifelong inclusion. We discussed the need for all medical schools to include courses that focus on people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. We emphasized how crucial it was for hospitals and other acute-care facilities to help patients transition from pediatric to adult services. We emphasized the importance of collecting sufficient data to explain medically complex disorders. This was not about more government spending. It was about smarter investing and greater efficiency.
We spent the next few months making calls and talking with officials and gathering our own recommendations, giving special attention to the critical need for housing support for people with disabilities. We were back in Washington in May.
By this time, COVID was raging. We were all masked up and COVID tested on the way into the White House Cabinet Room. Once we got inside, we sat down with Alex Azar, the administration’s secretary of health and human services, and Brett Giroir, the assistant secretary for health, both of whom served on the White House Coronavirus Task Force. The promising agency motto stated: HHS: Enhancing the Health and Well-Being of All Americans.
Sharp, direct, and to the point, Azar exhibited my kind of efficiency with no time to waste. His first question was, “OK, why are you here?”
I made a brief introduction. Our group included a leading doctor and several highly qualified advocates. What followed was a great discussion. Something clicked with Giroir—an idea for a program everyone could agree on that would cut through the bureaucracy and control costs and also yield better and more efficient medical outcomes.
Excellent. We were making progress.
“Really appreciate your coming in,” Azar finally said, more warmly than he had sounded at the start. “I know we’re going to see the President.”
The meeting I had assumed would be a quick handshake hello with Donald had turned into a 45-minute discussion in the Oval Office with all of us—Azar, Giroir, the advocates, and me. I never expected to be there so long. Donald seemed engaged, especially when several people in our group spoke about the heart-wrenching and expensive efforts they’d made to care for their profoundly disabled family members, who were constantly in and out of the hospital and living with complex arrays of challenges.
Donald was still Donald, of course. He bounced from subject to subject—disability to the stock market and back to disability. But promisingly, Donald seemed genuinely curious regarding the depth of medical needs across the U.S. and the individual challenges these families faced. He told the secretary and the assistant secretary to stay in touch with our group and to be supportive.
After I left the office, I was standing with the others near the side entrance to the West Wing when Donald’s assistant caught up with me. “Your uncle would like to see you,” she said.
Azar was still in the Oval Office when I walked back in. “Hey, pal,” Donald said. “How’s everything going?”
“Good,” I said. “I appreciate your meeting with us.”
“Sure, happy to do it.”
He sounded interested and even concerned. I thought he had been touched by what the doctor and advocates in the meeting had just shared about their journey with their patients and their own family members. But I was wrong.
“Those people … ” Donald said, trailing off. “The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.”
I truly did not know what to say. He was talking about expenses. We were talking about human lives. For Donald, I think it really was about the expenses, even though we were there to talk about efficiencies, smarter investments, and human dignity.
I turned and walked away.
And, yes, this is an equal deformity essay, so, drum roll, Harris did what?
And, yes, bullying at school is a effing big thing, leading to depression, and, yep, suicide. But another clown just didn’t/doesn’t get it.
[Cheree Peoples outside of the apartment where she lives when her 17-year-old daughter, Shayla Rucker, is at Children’s Hospital of Orange County. Peoples was arrested six years ago for Shayla’s repeated truancy despite ample evidence given to the Orange County school showing Shayla suffers from sickle cell anemia, which leaves her in constant pain and requires frequent hospitalization.]
On the morning of April 18, 2013, in the Los Angeles suburb of Buena Park, a throng of photographers positioned themselves on a street curb and watched as two police officers entered a squat townhouse. Minutes later, their cameras began clicking. The officers had re-emerged with a weary-looking woman in pajamas and handcuffs, and the photographers were jostling to capture her every step.
“You would swear I had killed somebody,” the woman, Cheree Peoples, said in a recent interview.
In fact, Peoples had been arrested for her daughter’s spotty school attendance record under a truancy law that then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris had personally championed in the state legislature. The law, enacted in January 2011, made it a criminal misdemeanor for parents to allow kids in kindergarten through eighth grade to miss more than 10 percent of school days without a valid excuse. Peoples’ 11-year-old daughter, Shayla, had missed 20 days so far that school year.
[Cheree Peoples outside of the apartment where she lives when her 17-year-old daughter, Shayla, is at Children’s Hospital of Orange County. Peoples was arrested six years ago for Shayla’s repeated truancy despite ample evidence given to the Orange County school showing Shayla suffers from sickle cell anemia, which leaves her in constant pain and requires frequent hospitalization. (Credit: Tara Pixley for HuffPost) ABOVE: Buena Park police officers Luis Garcia (left) and James Woo escort Peoples, 33, to their patrol car on April 18, 2013. She was handcuffed and under arrest.]
Yet the penalties she once championed for truancy and the way she originally thought about the issue are foundational to how California handles truancy today. Peoples’ arrest wasn’t a freak occurrence ― it was the inevitable outcome of Harris’ campaign to fuse the problem of truancy with the apparatus of law enforcement. And Peoples is far from an outlier. There are still hundreds of families across California entering the criminal justice system under the aegis of Harris’ law.
“I think it was a good thing that she shined a light on [truancy],” Jeff Adachi, who served as San Francisco’s chief public defender from January 2003 until his death on Feb. 22, told HuffPost in February. “There is a correlation between children who fail at school and what happens later in life. [But] the idea of locking parents up, or citing them with a crime because they’re not taking their children to school — it doesn’t address the root of the problem.”
“What it ended up being, practically, is families and kids having to come to court to be told to utilize certain services in order to come to school. Which, from where I sit, is very much the job of the school district and not the job of the criminal court.” – a public defender
Serendipity, picking Viet Thanh Nyugen’s memoir, A Man with Two Faces as the main book for the memoir writing class I am teaching. Last time it was Liar’s Club and Wild and other things to haunt the student with other writers’ haunting memoirs.
Mary Karr and Cheryl Strayed, and the students learned about all sorts of ins and outs tied to those two women’s memoirs. There is countless ink on Mary and Cheryl and endless YouTube uploads of them talking, being interviewed and giving memoir writing tips to selected and wide audiences.
Patience: All I have now is my quickly decaying mind and this platform from which to scream bloody murder, so I’ll get into Viet’s book after I splay the digital page with one of my essays, with is in Cirque Journal and other places:
Hell, here’s one long ass published memoir essay:
Wrestling the Blind, Chasing Apache Horses, and Unpacking the Vietnam War
by Paul Haeder / September 4th, 2013
They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried. — Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
“What was the last best memory you have of your father?” There were eight of us, encircling him, when he asked me to recall that moment I knew my father to be at his most vulnerable point for me, his most unadorned human self. For Robert Bly, he was asking me when I first saw myself as strong (or stronger than my old man).
Bly was tired, the wild man in his Iron John wilted by age, still angular, white as snowy full-head of hair, but taxed by the expressway of poet on call to shunt the drums of war, asked to explain the smear of Abu Ghraib, and his call to duty to fight against the ideology of “war is peace” that was just getting whipped up like an unholy dust devil across his America.
To just step back a bit, I have to admit now that it’s always been my “call to duty” to be in the thick of things, to be this guy having these constant little brushes with fame. Since I was 18 . . . well, 16 if you count being an extra in a motorcycle movie with Ann Margaret and Joe Namath. Or riding away from the camera and Charlton Heston in a cowboy flick shot at Old Tucson. Once in my early twenties, I had the chutzpah to drive up to Lee Marvin’s house in Tucson and plop down my own screenplay into his hands and pitch the idea while playing tennis with him in my jeans and Tony Lamas. From Linda Ronstadt kissing me on my forehead when she arrived at one of her aunt’s house (good friend of my mom, and that day I had begged to learn how to grind corn and mold it all into green corn tamales), to Tom Waits drinking beer and smoking a blunt in the back of my VW bug after he finished a concert in Tucson, I’ve had these odd intersections with famous sorts of people.
Willie Nelson and James Crumley hoisting a few Patron’s with me near Hondo, New Mexico, at Andrew Wyeth’s place. Mashed potatoes, Swiss steak and a plate-full of peas in an El Paso cafeteria with Cormac McCarthy. “This is a story . . . a book, not fragments,” Tim O’Brien insisted while smoking a Camel outside Chope’s near Las Cruces. “Just plow through those weird little occurrences, and you’ll see the memories will start sprouting . . . goddamned different every time. Then you’ll have a book.”
I’ve always been what my thesis advisors or mentors and friends called “the handler,” or the “go-to-kid” with the ability to be older than he was, and to somehow be Every Man/Every Woman’s kid brother . . . or son. I was that twice for Kurt Vonnegut. Twice for Denise Levertov. Once for Octavio Paz and Gabriel Marquez.
Fast forward thirty years. This time, my second brush with Bly, stuck in Spokane on a Saturday, after his poetry reading to a few hundred. Robert Bly needed a post-reading tight one. He was tired, but it only took a few prods and two drinks to get him to actually remember me 21 years earlier. That was 1985. Juarez, Chihuahua. A big group of about ten hangers on mentally gyrating that overtly ga-ga-ing thing for the famous bard inside a restaurant. It was my fault, really, since I arranged the place, the crowd, and mescal spirits liberally passed around. I remember four young women – girls, really – from a private college who sang corridas with the 10-piece mariachi band. Bly was completely taken by their voices.
Let’s move back, err, forward in this case, to April, 2006. Bly had just published The Insanity of Empire, and the tannin of Bush’s war was thick on his lips as he entranced the crowd at the community college and then challenged them to remember their own call to duty:
Tell me why it is we don’t lift our voices these days
And cry over what is happening. Have you noticed
The plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting?
I say to myself: “Go on, cry. What’s the sense Of being an adult and having no voice? Cry out! See who will answer! This is Call and Answer!”
Again, Bly and me, this time 1,600 miles further north than the last time I shared rounds with him. He remembered Juarez, the reading in El Paso, and the Juarez band and that brotherhood and sisterhood of people who had arranged his appearance at the university. And Bly remembered me.
He wasn’t going to give up his question: “No, really, this is an important one . . . for men to know when that point occurs in their relationships with a father.” After a couple of bourbons, Robert Bly seemed to be saying to me it was okay if I just carried on a one-on-one with him at this pub called Catacombs. He repeated how he liked my militancy. He had read the piece I just published in the weekly “not just announcing my reading, but taking it to a higher level of consciousness by putting the you into the narrative.” He also wanted to know what it was like to be the son of a military man who not once but twice went to Vietnam as a career officer.
I pulled from his book, Iron John, widely read and widely disempowered by critics:
The older men in the American military establishment and government did betray the younger men in Vietnam, lying about the nature of the war, remaining in safe places themselves, after having asked the young men to be warriors and then in effect sending them out to be ordinary murderers.
“From the sound of it, your father was smart. Well read. College degrees. Yet he was in two wars. Korea. Then Vietnam. How does his military – his war experience — best inform you? Someone who in a mere few minutes has illustrated to everyone around this table that he is more than just a man’s man, more than just a Renaissance man. An adventurer. Going it alone in Central America. Going to Vietnam ten years ago to experience something locked inside his father. It’s important to know that moment when you first realized your dad’s humanity . . . and knew his fear.”
Desert
“I’m just going to eat rice . . . I need to get to one-forty. I’m tired of wrestling up so much, dad.”
We were following the yellow bus, two of my buddies, Schwam (138 lbs.) and Molina (125 lbs.), were crashed in the back of the 1965 bug. I was driving on a learner’s permit.
My old man seemed small next to me, skinny, his blonde hair receding dramatically in the past few months. He had dropped twenty pounds so he might make it easier on his banged up body for his second spin in Vietnam. Age 36. Already shot once. Airlifted out with a Huey co-pilot gravely wounded and the pilot zipped up in a KIA bag.
He was proud of me, even in my youthful militancy. I was really tanned, brown. Angular. Muscular. He liked it that I had college on my mind even as a freshman. Proud I was wrestling varsity at 15 years old.
“How’d you learn all that mechanical stuff?” he’d ask me while watching me retool, tune up and strip down my Bultaco and Husky motorcycles. “Funny how you never took to learning German, with your Tanta Emmy and Grandma Frieda around when you were a kid. Spanish! How’d you pick that up so quickly?”
Then he’d launch in on West Point, on some Republican senator my mom knew who might send in some appointment recommendation for me to be accepted to the Academy. Here we were hitting 65 mph, entering some of my favorite places — Upper Sonoran Life Zone, then into the Transition Life Zone. Those Desert-Grassland and Desert Riparian zones. And I was hating every last image of war and Nixon and Kissinger I ever saw in print and on TV.
He launched into why General Westmoreland was misunderstood, why Dick Nixon was even more misunderstood: “ . . . inherited a messed up war strategy from President Johnson.” One loud fight after another recalled. Strange, really, how my old man, Chief Warrant Officer Four Marvin Haeder, ended up trying to convince me of something righteous about the military, or why the USA bombing, spraying, immolating and raping Vietnam was “the right policy.”
I was obsessed with post-flashflood arroyos packed with javalina, entranced by the evenings of the a thousand tarantulas, completely taken by the dawns of one hundred zombie bufo alvaris – Sonoran Desert toads.
My old man would be in some classroom or on some mountaintop messing around with radio towers, signal relays, his secret codes while I was into the wild, launching myself into a riot of reptiles, arachnids and mammals.
While my old man showed me black and white photos of his signal corps outposts in Vietnam, images of these denuded jungle camps with eerily happy blacks, Latinos and an array of white men, I was already talking desert green toads, talking about monsoon bursts near Sedona when a thousand western narrowmouth toads appeared unbending from their 10-months suspended animation.
Snakes
Wrestling for me was a way to be as good as any warrior, tin soldier. To stay in shape for three- and five-day hikes into vast expanses Indian Country, land anywhere close to a river or drainage. Like the ones we were near — the San Pedro River drainage that passes along the Pinal Creek en route to the Salado River. My old man talked about logistics, cryptographic mumbo-jumbo, Barry Goldwater while I waxed on and on about these ancient routes, in use from 1100 to 1450 AD. The pueblos on Pinal Creek were once cosmopolitan trade centers with exports of ground pigments, turquoise, beads, and ceramic bowls. Shells from the Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.
“Your grandfather was fleet champion twice. One hundred and ninety pounds. In the Kaiser’s navy, before he became a pilot. Halberstadt CL- IV’s he piloted. Bi-planes. He would have been proud of you, though.”
Here I was, making a run through Sonora Desert , Highway 77 – the back way to Globe-Miami from Tucson, from my high school parking lot. My two buddies out like logs, and my father — three weeks from his second tour in Vietnam — bringing up my grandfather, the Iron Cross man, big WWI ace, émigré to Iowa in 1921. Failed farmer. Bread truck driver. Failed restaurant owner. The big man with mitts like Babe Ruth’s, his namesake, me, his pride and joy as he lumbered still a hard man in his last gasps with emphysema.
I slowed to a stop as I watched a seven foot bull snake move slowly into a caliche-etched gully cut-bank. “Come on Paul,” my old man pleaded as he saw me scramble over prickly pear, over dried-out saguaro ribs, blasting my body and arms into a bunch of rocks. “Rattlers out here,” he said. “Come on, Paul, be careful.”
Of course, he was wrong. There weren’t rattlesnakes moving around midday at the foot of Pinal Mountain. But the bull snake, hell, I just had to grab it, break up the monotony of the trip to our wrestling match, scare the crap out of Schwam and Molina in the back who were still nestled in with the camping gear my old man absconded from Fort Huachuca for our post-wrestling match bonding fishing trip on the west fork of White River in Apache country.
“Jesus, Paul. Stop.” I put the seven foot snake’s face into the car while my Big Red One Infantry regular army dad, with one tour in Korea as a 19 year old, one in Vietnam two years ago, one more about to be unleashed, complained like a whiny kid brother.
“If you’re afraid of this, Chief, what the heck are you going to do with the three-step viper . . . the ground cobras?” I was a smart ass, know it all, to be sure, but I was stealth, quick to know the flora and fauna of Sonora, all of Arizona, and way into Mexico. Quick to speak Spanish with my Mexican friends. Always camping with older guys, some of whom were former Vietnam War draftees who taught me about motorcycles, endless tracks of desert roads to nowhere/everywhere, and about how rotten the war was.
By the time I was 15, my father didn’t really know me. He was always gone, at schools for his cryptographic signal corps crap: Fort Rucker, Alabama; Fort Huachuca, Arizona; Fort Gordon, Georgia. He had pressed uniforms, spit-shine shoes, shiny pips and his array of ribbons all lined up via small wooden ruler.
His son with the shoulder-length mop of hair, on the other hand, had his terrariums loaded with geckos, five species of scorpions, horned toads, red racer snakes, gopher snakes, California Kings, and any injured animal he’d run across.
Bad language
It was a story of crossed DNA. My working mom gave me a long leash since I was an A student in school. Never sweating (overtly) me driving my sister’s 750 Honda at age 13. One spring break, I ended up with Navajo and Mexican friends outside of Chinle and then two weeks hiking Canyon de Chelly. At age 14. Learning what all middle school kids should learn – Arizona is not a white man’s invention.
Canyon de Chelly, a screwed up Spaniard’s mishearing of the Navajo, Tséyi, which means “inside the rock,” not canyon like white boys and girls are told. The very concept of language as a frame of self, the defining binder for culture — that inside the rock was deeper and more in tune with larger existential quandaries than the mere idea of “canyon” – floored me.
Here I was, with my old man, maybe for the last time since he was going to the killing fields of his Vietnam, the war, not the country. He was waxing nostalgic about the Army, about European history, about the Vaterland , and his weird breaking into song, Das Lied der Deutschen, our family tours in France and Germany, while I cranked up Black Sabbath on the eight-track and watched for brown eagle shadows and the first signs of desert spring bloom.
What a Mutt and Jeff routine – my blond and blue-eyed old man with aspirations for a son named after his war hero father going into the military vis-à-vis the Academy. This 5 foot nine 15-year-old brown hair and brown eyed recalcitrant son with the Afro who spoke Spanish, went out with Mexican girls, and preferred tamales and empanadas to Wiener schnitzel and strudel.
I hated the Vietnam War. Hated the war lovers in my high school. It was 1972, I was 15, and way beyond my years politically compared to most of the guys wrestling with me and slogging through high school. Canyon del Oro High School. Gold Canyon. We were the Dorados. Crazy shit. Dorados.
So many weekends diving in the Sea of Cortez. Watching Mexican fishers pulling in dorado, so-called game fish dolphin (not a mammal at all, but in the family of pompano dolphinfish ). Beautiful iridescent muscular big-headed jade fish. Second only in taste for turistas to the Guaymas jumbo shrimp.
These guys didn’t know what the hell the school was named for. Literally, “The Golden.” Golden city Spanish lust. Wacked out Conquistadors lancing the New World with germs, guns and steel. These unicorn stories of a land of extreme wealth, whose king had been covered with gold dust so many times that he was permanently gilded. A living, walking Midas. The Spaniards and Brits shoving forward with their expeditions into the Americas, sent by syphilitic kings and queens in search of El Dorado. In 1540 Francisco Vazquez de Coronado marched as far north as Kansas seeking the Seven Golden Cities of Cibola. Even the esteemed Walter Raleigh launched an expedition for El Dorado in South America, spearheading the search for the miasma city up the Orinoco River in 1595.
The Sonora was flattening out, desiccating, as the green carpeting of palo verdes thinned, the saguaros becoming spindly, and much more spread out than those pincushioning Oro Valley leading north toward Globe.
The proverbial mining town, Globe, floating fetid iron particulates in the air. All American City with red, white and blue pendants on one side of Main Street, and MIA POW black flags on the other. “Support Our Troops . . . Bring them Home Safe” all over the place.
Wrestling to Touch the Universe
This made my old man happy, as I wailed through diatribe after diatribe about the place where white men cut the earth and poisoned the waters. I kept repeating – “Not Globe . . . Bésh Baa Gow?h . . . place of metal. You think this place was discovered in 1875 when the lawless whites came out here? Really, pueblo tribes needed discovering to self-actualize?”
The Clanton Brothers from OK Corral fame ended up here. The Apache Kid and Geronimo had ties to Globe. “Bésh Baa Gow?h, ” I repeated. My two wrestling chums in unison saying, “What the hell are you talking about?”
I tried to tell these guys and my old man about the 700-year-old pueblo of the Salado culture. I wanted to ditch the wrestling match and find the old remains of one of the more advanced cultures in the Southwest. Besh Ba Gowah Pueblo near the confluence of Pinal Creek and Ice House Canyon Wash.
“Man, Haeder, we have some tough dudes to wrestle,” Molina shouted. “You think I want to hear about this Indian stuff now.”
I had heard about pushing hands from one of my older sister’s Vietnam War vet friends. Some guy named Damian who had resisted a second tour, went AWOL, and made it to the China border, somehow. Then three years later in Arizona of all places. He was a native of Vermont who spent three years on the lam in Nepal, Bhutan, India.
It was Drew Pergonaski and I who drew two wrestlers from the Arizona State Schools for the Deaf and Blind. I had heard about that sort of wrestling challenge, and the ASSDB was on our schedule in a month. But that was going to be a two-day practice session orienting the entire team on wrestling the hearing and sight impaired.
Today, in this two-bit town, it was going to be the most important five-minute tutorial of my grappler’s career given by the two wrestlers’ coach and one of the refs. I was wrestling up, too, some 35 pounds over my weight as this guy was in the 171-188 pound category. I can’t remember the fellow’s name, but he was blind, big, and had these eyes that looked like a Chuckwalla lizard’s, but clouded over like opals.
“You’ll be touching all times. During your face-offs, no breaking away . . . always bodies touching. That’s the only difference. Everything else is touch, feel, weight distribution, and a slight twitch here and muscle flex there. These guys are really good at what they do, without seeing or hearing.”
Drew drew a blind AND deaf fellow, and his instructions where the same, but the deaf part of the disability necessitated more touch by refs and it meant that Drew might hear the whistle first but the opponent might just continue through on a move.
“Hey, Paul, just like judo classes, uh?” my old man said. Like all those judo matches on the army bases we were stationed at. No, pop, no. That was using the gi. All tangled up in leg sweeps and constant yanking on the gi. This is way different, old man.
Mogollon Rim
After a draw with the hulk of a blind freestyler, onward we went toward Fort Apache Indian Reservation, leaving Schwam and Molina behind with the high school team for the bus ride back. Drew was pinned in the third round, and I drew a tie, 6-6, with my first blind wrestler. It was like pushing a hundred pound sack of potatoes and three bags of cement, all bungeed together. I never would have pinned him, and he anticipated my moves since I had to stay grappled to him, tethered, hands to hands. I couldn’t even use some of my judo flips, because this big boy felt my every move before I even thought to use them.
Rednecks in the crowd taunted Molina and Zavala, our two dark wrestlers. Calling them spicks, and this white boy — the son of purple heart recipient, bronze star, air medals for all that time in helicopters with the black box handcuffed to his wrist – jumped over the first row of seats and tried to head butt one big F-150 Ford ball cap Copenhagen chewer for the racists taunt.
I felt my old man pulling me back, and he had the guts to tell the crowd to can it: “All these boys worked hard to get here and do not need to hear that crap.” Our Dorados won, 9-5. The racists in the crowd called us “rich faggots.”
I was breathing in the ions from the Mogollon Rim, all that mixed conifer high desert Tonto National Forest flora binding with my corpuscles. Firs and ponderosa and pine rattlers and cougar, black bear, antelope and endless cascades of wildflowers.
We were headed in that weirdly 1960s light green-patina VW Beetle with Peter Gabriel and Genesis blaring on jerry-rigged four-inch speakers. Trusty Bug we had shipped from Germany to New York and then a drive out to our last family post, in Arizona.
Sky Islands
He looked vulnerable next to me — his balding head shiny with sweat, his blond hairs on his arms like current disturbed fan worms, and his big forehead showing all the signs of professorial greatness, not that of a hard-headed grunt packing a forty-five semi-automatic and M-16.
It was our last time together before he shipped out to Vietnam, on a quest to findApache trout — Oncorhynchus apache — along the west fork of the White River. Maybe it would be our last camping foray.
Mogollon Rim is part of this massive floristic and faunal boundary – the species characteristic of the Rocky Mountains are on the top of the plateau, and species endemic to the Mexican Sierra Madre Occidental live on the slopes below and on these incredible Madrean sky islands –high, isolated mountain ranges further south.
I never knew that eight years later I would end up as a newspaper reporter and hiker around one of those sky islands –pine-oak woodlands, a very specific pine-oak forest ecoregion. Chiricahua Mountains, where Geronimo hid out with his two dozen braves.
I hiked all the major Madreans in the USA – these tropical and subtropical coniferous forests biomes: the Baboquivari, Whetstone, Chiricahua, Huachuca, Pinaleño, Santa Catalina, and Santa Rita mountain ranges.
The Things We Carry
We had US Army issue pup tent shells, cookware, mummy bags, ponchos and other puke green stuff like a cot for my old man and parachute for a shade cover. I had my rice and tuna, and I cooked up cabbage and kielbasa for the Chief.
The river was within twenty feet of our A-tent, the air was settling into a nice 40-degree cool, and stellar jays were jockeying for position on alpine branches as the occasional rogue crow bombarded them. Kissing cousins species-wise.
My father collected snags and dry needles for kindling, and I quickly set to making a big fire. The Bug had been packed with gear, a small bundle of ironwood, hastily bagged canned food and meats. I had already dragged into our camp a downed ponderosa that was semi-seasoned and got to making full ax swings at it.
The speed and breathing and weight of the steady arcs felt good. My father was sitting near the river, on a folded poncho, with his pole tilted over an eddy. He was reading the business section of the Arizona Republic, a newspaper about to become part of the fire starter. He also had a public administration textbook with him, for a correspondence class he was taking for work on yet another a master’s degree.
He liked his coffee at all hours of the day and night, and I brought some green tea my older sister had left at the house before one of her jaunts to Alaska on her motorcycle. I made fire camp coffee and some hot water in the US Army issue pots. We drank from canteens.
I never knew then that maybe my father’s reluctance in filling me in on war details was his professional soldier’s version of PTSD, not even named back in 1972. My old man humored me, though, and let me go on and on about my exploits in Mexico, diving in the Sea of Cortez. My exploits hiking backcountry here and there, he listened to intently. I hated the military, Germany, wars, and so I dove into the wonders of ecosystems, the ecology of my own mind.
I was a tough kid, always pushing the training way beyond what my peers would do. I’d go hiking with two gallons of water and nothing else. Miles deep into the Catalina Mountains. I’d come back scratched up, peeling skin, something like Steve McQueen in Papillion.
Maybe that isolation was my way of rebuffing America’s earth eating, water-polluting capitalism. I know it must have congealed in the middle of juniper forest outside Payson at the bottom of Aravaipa Canyon.
First we laughed at the incredible stars and moon keeping us lit up. Then the outlandish frogs and crickets totally Igor Stravinsky crazy. That white water patch on the White River was like a mini Niagara Falls. We laughed at my old man’s flatulence from all that red cabbage I had cooked up.
At two in the morning, finally with a half hour of sleep under our belts, the pounding trees next to us woke us up. I moved like a special forces wannabe sapper, and shone the light on two large elks rutting on the birch trees near camp. Then, an hour later, we were roused by six or seven white-tail deer tromping through our camp.
Those were the days before the tipping points, before the lag time consequences of too many people, too many chain saws, too many second shadow homes and time-shares, too many paved roads, and way too many diseased grocery-store hunters wanting the thrill of blood sport.
We laughed and laughed, joking how we’d have to get back to Tucson and do a day’s crash just to rest up from our supposedly restive fishing trip.
Paints
I slept through the four a.m. rush hour of Indian paints crossing the White River into our camp. My old man wasn’t next to me in his “fart sack.” The dawn was bleeding peach and tangerine into the sky. I shined the US army gooseneck flashlight over at the flat near the cut-bank where we had been fishing.
My old man was in his skivvies, and my flashlight covered his hairy body which was like a gossamer film. l illuminated the thick wet-looking scars on his shoulders where the Chinese carbine outside of Da Nang cut threw him, missing his heart by an inch. Three crisscrossed snail tracks.
He looked strong but old at age 36. There he was, full-blood military man, history buff, someone I had little in common with, talking to two long-haired Whiteriver Apaches. Both had Winchester 30.30’s shoulder-strapped, and their horses – 10 maybe – were just lingering there, by my old man, taking gulps of water.
He was looking up at these young guys, who just nodded their heads when my old man gave them the double thumbs up. Cowboy hats, blue jeans, one had on a white t-shirt with AIM and an eagle printed on it, and the other was wearing USMC sweatshirt. They barely acknowledged me creaking out of the funny Army tent.
My old man was encircled by these incredible horses. The air was just right. A frost left the world crystalline. I had that spotlight pointed at my old man. The glow of his blond hairs oddly simian, like something along the lines of Grendel out of Beowulf.
I could hear him telling these fellows about some tidbit of history of the pinto. These palomino and buckskin Paint-Horses were incredible soaking up a rest next to the Chief, my old man.
I was amazed that this warrior, this technocratic warrior, knew something about Indian Country I did not:
“Amazing, fellows, amazing. These horses go back to Arabia. They called them kanhwa. I think it means blotched. In India, the word is pulwahri, I think, something along the lines of a white horse that flowers with black spots. And, my son, here, well, he’d know something of the Spanish origin of the horse’s name. The word is pintado, painted it means, right?” he asked, smiling at me, saluting me as the sun was lifting pine green into shadows.
These two Apache youth nodded, calmly eyeing my old man – this skivvy-wearing Grendel talking about these magnificent horses that came out of nowhere. Pawing the dirt and lapping up water. There, at the edge of the White River. It was our small last camp. Three weeks away from deployment to Indochina. A soon-to-be lost father, stuck in the Huey wake of a wet sky.
He was a teacher, then. Small-framed, vulnerable, not the hard-edged bravado of Vietnam film lore. Not the ex-wrestler from Iowa. This guy, broken by divorce, and dedicated to some mythology about Country and Commander in Chief.
He knew about those horses. I wonder how. I never asked.
The last of the darkish sky lifted with another Apache dawn. The trout skimmed the surface looking for cadis flies.
I cracked wood and stoked the embers. I was going to break my fast today and make my old man skillet potatoes and some good old Bratwurst and share with him. I had requisitioned a hearty German mustard from my mom’s pantry. A few apples would be sliced with the brats. Onions and tomatoes and chile peppers. Hot coffee.
All that German stuff simmering in those US Army pots and pans in the middle of a strangulated Apache reservation.
Bly was right. The moment the war lifted from my heart, I saw my old man. Just a guy waiting for daylight, waiting for fish. and waiting for the day he’d say goodbye to Arizona and say oh fuck to his war.
Our war.
The war in those Apaches’ blood.
The war trapped in Arabian-Spanish-English Paints.
The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness. ? Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
**the end**
This piece appeared in House Organ.
House Organ, edited by Kenneth Warren, Lakewood, Ohio, is the best print poetry monthly in the U.S. You wouldn’t know it by looking at it, but its retro look (no website) belies its rich crême-de-la-crême contents. Among the contributors: Jack Hirschman, Harrison Fisher, Vincent Ferrini (goodbye, great old man of poesy!) and many, many others.
Look, I can go from today, what’s happening now with Viet’s honorable words and stance on Gaza and Genocide, then move backwards, but truly this says it all about cancel culture, Jews, Jewish power, Israel-First millionaires and billionaires, and the zealotry of zionism in the halls of power, money, politics:
“We are joined by the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen to discuss his new book, A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial. Last week the 92NY, a major cultural institution in New York City, canceled an event with Nguyen after he joined 750+ writers in signing an open letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. His memoir explores his family’s personal history as refugees from Vietnam dealing with the impacts of U.S. imperialism. Civilian stories are war stories, too, says Nguyen. He says the U.S.’s greatest acts of anti-Asian violence occur internationally and continue today.”
I see total continuity between what the United States has done in the Philippines, in Korea, in Japan, in Laos, in Cambodia, in Vietnam and now with Palestine.
Well, I can’t hold a candle to all these reviewers’ 300-word blurbs, AKA kudos for the book: Grove Atlantic! Check them out for thos pithy, writerly sorts of punchy reactions to his book.
For me, for the students reading the memoir, and for our discussions, we all can see Viet covers that universal story of being a refugee in land that expects assimulation and genuflection.
A country that is still settler colonial in its proxies and its Projects for a New Hegemony America. Proxies here and subjugation there. He is in the land of the homeless — both the houseless and those with no tribe, no nuclear family, friendships and hopes dashed on the hard walls encircling the American mind
He’s not digging being called a boat person, and his young life in San Jose (first landing in Pennsylvania) is one where he is a man without a solid tribe. He says he was sort of a spy in his parents’ home, since he was not Vietnamese, really, through this process of American (California) schooling, that is, he spoke and read English, and was not interested in some traditional route of work work work until you drop drop drop, Vietnamese or Asian style. He also felt like a spy within his American interactions and various settings as he coursed through life determined to find that face, some new American face, but one that is steeped in Viet Nam.
San Jose!
His parents worked hard in their San Jose store, and they neglected Viet in that they sacrificed time with two sons because of the American grind — seven days a week, 14 hour days, running the business to get ahead, to get into middle class life, and to send money home to family who did not leave Vietnam as refugees, who were not considered interlopers, illegals, that is, not perjorative boat people.
Viet’s on a whirlwind tour, in book festivals, on the main stage in books stores, at colleges, on the CBS Morning show, on Democracy Now, and he was on that trajectory before signing onto a pretty benign letter asking for a cease fire in Gaza.
“People might like to think the war is done when a ceasefire is signed, but for most people who live through a war, it goes on for decades.”
The Letter in the London Review of Books
An Open Letter on the Situation in Palestine,
We, the undersigned artists and writers based in the EU, the UK and North America, are speaking out to demand an end to the violence and destruction in Palestine.
The deliberate killing of civilians is always an atrocity. It is a violation of international law and an outrage against the sanctity of human life. Neither Israel, the occupying power, nor the armed groups of the people under occupation, the Palestinians, can ever be justified in targeting defenceless people. We can only express our grief and heartbreak for the victims of these most recent tragedies, and for their families, both Palestinians and Israelis.
Nothing can retrieve what has already been lost. But the unprecedented and indiscriminate violence that is still escalating against the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, with the financial and political support of Western powers, can and must be brought to an end. By cutting off vital electricity, food and water supplies; by attempting to displace by force over one million Palestinians from their homes, with no guarantee of return; and by carrying out continual airstrikes against civilians, including those who are attempting to evacuate, the state of Israel is committing grave crimes against humanity. Its allies, our own governments, are complicit in these crimes.
Human rights groups have long condemned Israel’s occupation of Palestine and the inhumane treatment of – and system of racial domination over – Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli state. But we are now witnessing a new and even more drastic emergency. The UN expert Francesca Albanese has warned that Israel’s current actions in Gaza constitute a form of ethnic cleansing. The Israeli historian Raz Segal has described the situation in Gaza as a ‘textbook case of genocide’.
We call on our governments to demand an immediate ceasefire and the unimpeded admission of humanitarian aid into Gaza. We also demand an end to all arms shipments and military funding, supplies that can only exacerbate the humanitarian catastrophe at hand. Although these measures will not be enough to secure true justice, liberation and equality, they represent an urgent and indispensable first step. We plead for an end to all violence, an end to all oppression and denial of human rights, and a path towards a just and sustainable peace for all.
This memoir is narrated by the American Viet and the other Viet, with the voice addressing himself as you, and this book is memorial (for his mother) and history (for his ancestors and his brief life in Viet Nam and who he is as a man, Vietnamese, yes, Vietnamese American.
Well, I grew up in the United States feeling like I had two faces. On the one hand, I felt, living in my very Vietnamese household with my very Vietnamese parents, that I was an American spying on them. And I felt completely American growing up. But then, when I stepped outside of that household and outside of the Vietnamese refugee community into the rest of the United States, I felt like a Vietnamese spying on these Americans. And so I took that feeling of duality, and I infused that into my fiction, into characters, like The Sympathizer, the title — the character of that novel. And, you know, for a long time, I worked out my own emotional complications, having grown up as a refugee in the United States, feeling myself to be an eyewitness to the trauma that my parents underwent. I survived that experience by becoming emotionally numb, by not feeling things, by shutting down and not dealing with what I had seen and what I had felt.
This book is certainly tied to his mom’s amazing persistence and her own downfall, falling several times with nervous breakdowns and then the more permanent memory failings . . . because of the trauma of so much she experienced in Vietnam and as a refugee in a new land. He was on his way as a successful essayist, novelist, college prof before the shit hit the fan.
Gaza, in real time, on TV, blasted onto Telegram, all over the internet, even with Israel’s demons cutting power and cell phone service!
He is critical of American colonialism, and he has not kept his mouth shut about just what this schizophrenic country is, i.e. calling out the hypocrisy of the country, of the times, of the political nature of a society that is led by the lesser (sic) of two evils. He redacted Donald Trump, his name, from the book, as a way of exploring censorship and self-censorship, erasure, how in reality so much of America’s history and dirty laundry and exceptionally violent past/present have been redacted from Americans books and teachings and minds. As Gore Vidal said, we are the United State of Amnesia. Think of agnotology and entertaining ourselves into blind ignorance, into the death of critical thinking, into mental and physical inflamation.
The contradictions and almost bi-polar nature of being a man between two places, or in his case, a man with two faces, demands an unsettling focus on developing self through “the power of the word.”
The word has meant so much to Viet Thahn, so much so that the cancelling of his book talks’ venues has been a double whammy for him, a contradiction, but in line with the reality of the American Nightmare of not just internment camps for people, but the closing of the mind demanded of a superficial, consumeristic, capitalistic society that for more and more people is transactional and filled with the GAD and SAD of broken indidivuals and communities (General Anxiety Disorder and Social Anxiety Disorder).
[Newsflash — Celebrity disgusting voyerism culture splays opportunities for even second level books deals for third tier writers: Britney Spears is thankful to her fans for the success of her new memoir. The Woman in Me was released on Oct. 24 and has sold 1.1 million copies through its first week on sale, according to Gallery Books, a division of Simon & Schuster. The number includes pre-orders, print books, ebooks and audiobooks formats. ]
An aside . . . .
The death of his mother was the opening he had to begin the journey of this part of his life, this memoir.
And so, eventually, though, it came time to write a memoir, after my mother passed away in 2018. And I certainly wanted to write about my mother and her extraordinary life as a refugee, as a survivor, as a successful businesswoman, as a hero who in the end was destroyed by herself, by whatever was happening in her mind. And so there is a memorial for her in this book, as well. And then, finally, there’s a history, because I think it’s hard for me to separate the memoirs of myself and my family and the memorial I’m writing about my mother from the history of Vietnam and the United States, that led to war and that led to us becoming refugees.
The casualties of war are the people, the villages, the cities, the communities, the families, the cultures, the land, and the collective and individual sanity of the people, the survivors. The first casualty in war is, what, truth, or is it the victors (sic) writing the history, or the lies, or the invented drama, the self-absorbed victimhood, blaming the victims for their own dilemma? And today, bold, in your face, perpetrated by the two grand fake democracies — USA and Israel — is becoming yet another force of collective evil so so in our collective faces that many turn away, two-faced, fearful of how deeply our country — our taxes — is responsible for so much trafficked death and destruction.
[ Not that the world outside the USA isn’t just as disgusting as the current leveling of entire families and neighborhoods in Gaza: “The Boko Haram Islamic extremist group launched an insurgency in northeastern Nigeria in 2009 in an effort to establish their radical interpretation of Islamic law, or Sharia, in the region. At least 35,000 people have been killed and more than 2 million displaced due to the extremist violence concentrated in Borno state, which neighbors Yobe.
Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu, who took office in May, has not succeeded in ending the nation’s security crises both in the northeast and in northwest and central regions where dozens of armed groups have been killing villagers and kidnapping travelers for ransom. ]
I certainly do think that this memoir that I wrote, which is about my life and the lives of my parents, who came to the United States as refugees and who went through 40 years of war and colonization when they were living in Vietnam, those stories I tell in this book, and larger stores about Vietnamese refugees, in general, and about the War in Vietnam, do have a lot of relevance to what’s happening today.
One of the things that I stress in the memoir is that civilian stories are war stories, too. I look at the lives of my parents, who were not soldiers, and how they were deeply affected by war constantly. They were displaced as refugees twice. They had to leave behind an adopted daughter when they fled Vietnam for the first time. My mother had to go to the psychiatric facility in the United States three times in her life, the last time leaving her permanently disabled. And I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how the ramifications of war are oftentimes very visible for soldiers, because when we think about wars, we generally think of wars, soldiers, battles, tanks and so on, but the fact of the matter is that wars usually kill more civilians than soldiers.
And civilians bear enormous burdens, both of violence but also of ongoing trauma in the years afterwards. And that trauma is also then passed on to their families, to their children. I grew up witnessing how the Vietnamese refugee community in the United States was a traumatized community that had a very hard time dealing with its past. It was oriented towards look to the future, becoming American, and then having the unspoken consequences of the war rippling through the family and the community.
And probably the last thing to say here is that when Vietnamese Americans become Americans, it’s certainly part of the narrative of the so-called American dream, of which I’m very critical in the book, but part of the complication for me is that, you know: What does it mean to come as a refugee to the United States and then become a part of a country that is a military-industrial complex and is a settler colonial society? That’s a contradiction that I try to work through in the book.
It’s a rocky row to hoe, for sure, being a professor at UCLA, in a state that is a major Military Industrial Complex purveyor of pain and death; the state with that ugly surveillance location, Silicon Valley, plaguing the earth, man, plaguing it; and then the entire Hollywood Propaganda Industry and LaLaLandia nature of the Disneyfication of humanity.
Everything I think about California (I was born in San Pedro) can be put on that one of a million stories of disenfranchisement and racist theft. Chavez Ravine:
During the early 1950s, the city of Los Angeles forcefully evicted the 300 families of Chávez Ravine to make way for a low-income public housing project. The land was cleared and the homes, schools and the church were razed. But instead of building the promised housing, the city — in a move rife with political controversy — sold the land to Brooklyn Dodgers baseball owner Walter O’Malley, who built Dodger Stadium on the site. The residents of Chávez Ravine, who had been promised first pick of the apartments in the proposed housing project, were given no reimbursement for their destroyed property and forced to scramble for housing elsewhere.
So much about Vietnam, for its entire history BEFORE the French and American wars against the Vietnamese, is a litany of displacement, struggle, triumph, and a repeat of more and more conflict and theft and war (invading armies).
And, now, San Jose, Vietnam Town or Little Saigon, what a flippancy:
Oh, Vietnam! The one I visited, my images:
Review to be continued!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
A few hours before the reading was set to take place, a spokesperson for 92NY said the event was “postponed.”
In a statement sent to NPR, the 92NY spokesperson said the center has always invited diverse viewpoints. “As a Jewish organization we believe the responsible course of action right now is to take some time to determine how best to use our platform and support the entire 92NY community, so we made the difficult decision to postpone the October 20th event.”
Nguyen instead held the event at the McNally Jackson bookstore in Manhattan.
The poetry center’s director Sarah Chihaya and senior program coordinator Sophie Herron confirmed to NPR that they both resigned from their posts following the cancellation of Nguyen’s event, but did not comment further.
The 92nd Street Y, New York’s Unterberg Poetry Center has been a hub for literary events and readings since 1939. It has a long history of hosting canonical writers such as T.S Eliot, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, to more contemporary authors such as Sandra Cisneros and Lorrie Moore.
When contacted by NPR, Nguyen said he hasn’t been in touch directly with the board or any spokespersons from 92NY. On Instagram, he wrote:
“I have no regrets about anything I have said or done in regards to Palestine, Israel, or the occupation and war.”
And so the rest of the poetry season is cancelled. Now the rest of the 92NY’s poetry reading season – which was set to feature Emily Wilson, Roxane Gay, Tracy K. Smith, and more – is “currently on pause,” according to a 92NY spokesperson.
Pause … another word for censored, stopped, derailed, cancelled, imploded, sanctioned, forced into submission!
…all those McCarthy-Loving Feds and Politicians have tapped the nerds and software billionaires to watch our every fucking move!!!!!!!
Proof of life. Don’t mess with the SS Administration ** [**see below, way below]
Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinking badges!
The real quote from B. Traven’s book, Treasure of Sierra Madre.
“Badges, to god-damned hell with badges! We have no badges. In fact, we don’t need badges. I don’t have to show you any stinking badges, you god-damned cabron and ching’ tu madre! Come out there from that shit-hole of yours. I have to speak to you.”
(For the Spanish-deprived among you, “cabron” is cuckold, “chingar” is “fuck,” and “tu madre” is “your mother.” Clearly the dialogue was cleaned up for the film.)
Oregon offers both a standard card and a Real ID Act-compliant card. Both types of cards allow you to legally drive and prove identity and age for things such as cashing a check. *Beginning May 7, 2025, a standard card cannot be used to board a domestic flight. See the TSA website for federally acceptable documents. [Does the passport work for domestic travel starting May 7, 2025?]
Federal banking laws and regulations do not prohibit banks from requesting that you provide a fingerprint or thumbprint to cash a check. Banks may use fingerprinting as a security measure and a way to combat fraud.
Employers sometimes check credit to get insight into a potential hire, including signs of financial distress that might indicate risk of theft or fraud. They don’t get your credit score, but instead see a modified version of your credit report.
Employer credit checks are more likely for jobs that involve a security clearance or access to money, sensitive consumer data or confidential company information. Such checks may also be done by your current employer before a promotion.
Pre-employment drug tests are required by some employers as a condition of job offers.
• These tests typically screen for the presence amphetamines, marijuana, cocaine, opiates, and phencyclidine, but employers can also request testing for additional substances.
• Pre-employment drug tests help protect workplace safety and boost productivity while reducing accidents and turnover.
• Testing methods can include urine, saliva, hair, and blood, but urine is the most common.
• Most employers in regulated industries are required to perform pre-employment drug tests. Private-sector, non-regulated employers are not required to conduct pre-employment drug tests but can do so as long as they comply with state and local laws.
Criminal Records Check and Fitness Determination/ OAR 125-007-0200 to 125-007-0330/ Status: Permanent rules effective 1/14/2016
Overview:
The Oregon Department of Administrative Services (DAS) implemented statewide administrative rules related to certain aspects of criminal records checks on January 4, 2016 (ORS 181A.215).
These rules streamline the criminal records check process for all of Oregon. They provide guidelines for decreasing risk to vulnerable populations from people who have access or provide care.
ODHS and OHA background check rules have been updated to follow DAS rules, while maintaining specific requirements needed for ODHS and OHA employees, contractors, volunteers, providers and qualified entities.
Keystroke technology is a software that tracks and collects data on employees’ computer use. It tracks each and every keystroke an employee types on their computer and is one of a few tools companies have to more closely monitor exactly how staff spend the hours they are expected to work.
Newer features allow administrators to also take occasional screenshots of employees’ screens.
One firm providing the tools is Interguard, which uses software allows administrators to view logs of employee computer use data, including desktop screenshots of employee activity. It also alerts administrators when certain employees’ computer activity diverts from their normal patterns.
In forced arbitration, a company requires a consumer or employee to submit any dispute that may arise to binding arbitration as a condition of employment or buying a product or service. The employee or consumer is required to waive their right to sue, to participate in a class action lawsuit, or to appeal. Forced arbitration is mandatory, the arbitrator’s decision is binding, and the results are not public.
As more and more workplaces return to work in the next few months, these social distancing monitors are likely to become a minor boom industry of their own: Bloomberg News hasreported that Ford planned to enforce social distancing by having its workers wear RFID wristbands, developed by Radiant RFID, that would buzz when a worker got too close to a colleague and would also provide supervisors with alerts about employees who were congregating together in larger groups.
Another company, Guard RFID, published a blog post detailing how its technology could be used for “infection control in the workplace,” including through the use of wearable RFID tags that would “alarm when tagged individuals come within close proximity to each other.” (Guard RFID and Radiant both declined to comment on their ventures into social distancing solutions.)
“A lot of tracking of workers happens under the rubric of worker safety or ensuring that workers are not injuring or hurting themselves,” she said. “But the boundaries between that and using the data in ways that are punitive or negative are hard to establish.”
A Wisconsin company is offering to implant tiny radio-frequency chips in its employees – and it says they are lining up for the technology.
The idea is a controversial one, confronting issues at the intersection of ethics and technology by essentially turning bodies into bar codes. Three Square Market, also called 32M, says it is the first U.S. company to provide the technology to its employees.
The company manufactures self-service “micro markets” for office break rooms. It said in a press release that obtaining a chip is optional, but expects that about 50 employees will take part.
CEO Todd Westby said that the company believes the technology will soon be ubiquitous:
“We foresee the use of RFID technology to drive everything from making purchases in our office break room market, opening doors, use of copy machines, logging into our office computers, unlocking phones, sharing business cards, storing medical/health information, and used as payment at other RFID terminals. Eventually, this technology will become standardized allowing you to use this as your passport, public transit, all purchasing opportunities, etc.”
The state laws on social media passwords are intended to protect social media pages that applicants have chosen to keep private. If you have publicly posted information about yourself without bothering to restrict who can view it, an employer is generally free to view this information. However, employers still need to follow other employment rules.
Antidiscrimination laws. An employer who looks at an applicant’s Facebook page or other social media posts could well learn information that it isn’t entitled to have or consider during the hiring process. This can lead to illegal discrimination claims. For example, your posts or page might reveal your sexual orientation, disclose that you are pregnant, or espouse your religious views. Because this type of information is off limits in the hiring process, an employer that discovers it online and uses it as a basis for hiring decisions could face a discrimination lawsuit.
Your Free Speech Rights (Mostly) Don’t Apply At Work
A noncompete agreement is a contract that an employer can use to prevent employees from taking certain jobs with competitors after they leave the company. Sometimes, an employer can make signing a non-compete agreement a condition of employment. These contracts benefit a company by preventing former employees from using trade secrets to give another company a competitive advantage or starting a company that competes with a former employer.
A noncompete agreement can also be referred to as a covenant not to compete, a noncompete covenant, a noncompete clause, or simply a noncompete.
“John Doe,” of Owego, New York, was sentenced today to 57 months in prison for aggravated identity theft and misuse of a social security number. Doe used the name, social security number and date of birth of a homeless U.S. Army veteran to fraudulently obtain $249,811.93 in Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits and an additional $588,645.85 in state benefits. Doe’s true identity has yet to be confirmed.
The announcement was made by United States Attorney Carla B. Freedman and Gail. S. Ennis, Inspector General for the Social Security Administration (SSA).
United States Attorney Carla B. Freedman stated: “We don’t yet know the defendant’s name, but we know what he did. Today’s sentence justly punishes him for stealing the identity of a homeless veteran to fraudulently obtain hundreds of thousands of dollars in government benefits. Thanks to the collaborative efforts of local, state and federal investigators, we were able to bring John Doe to justice in spite of not knowing his true identity.”
SSA Inspector General Gail S. Ennis stated: “This individual stole the identity of a U.S. Army veteran to fraudulently obtain Supplemental Security Income benefits, a critical safety net for those in need. This sentence holds him accountable for his unlawful actions. My office will continue to pursue those who steal another person’s identity and misuse a social security number for personal gain. I appreciate the work of our law enforcement partners in this complex investigation and I thank Assistant U.S. Attorneys Adrian S. LaRochelle and Michael Gadarian for prosecuting this case.”
Doe was found guilty following a 4-day trial in May 2022. The evidence established that from approximately 1999 until June 2021, Doe received SSI benefits under the name, date of birth, and Social Security number of a homeless U.S. Army veteran living in North Carolina. When Doe’s use of the veteran’s identity was ultimately discovered and Doe was questioned by federal agents, Doe continued to falsely claim the identity as his own and provided agents with a photocopy of the victim’s birth certificate and Social Security card, claiming these documents were his own. Agents located the veteran and established through fingerprint and DNA analysis that Doe is not the person he claims to be.
United States District Judge Mae A. D’Agostino also ordered Doe to serve a 3-year term of supervised release following his release from prison and ordered Doe to pay a total $838,457.78 in restitution in connection with the benefits he unlawfully received under the victim’s name.
This case was investigated by the Social Security Administration Office of the Inspector General, the Tioga County Sheriff’s Office, the Tioga County Department of Social Services, and the New York State Police, with assistance provided by the U.S. Marshals Service. The case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Adrian S. LaRochelle and Michael D. Gadarian.
WE ARE WITNESSES — The American criminal justice system consists of 2.2 million people behind bars, plus tens of millions of family members, corrections and police officers, parolees, victims of crime, judges, prosecutors and defenders. In We Are Witnesses, we hear their stories.
Early one summer morning, Son Yo Auer, a Burger King employee in Richmond Hill, Georgia, found a naked man lying unconscious in front of the restaurant’s dumpsters. It was before dawn, but the man was sweating and sunburned. Fire ants crawled across his body, and a hot red rash flecked his skin. Auer screamed and ran inside. By the time police arrived, the man was awake, but confused. An officer filed an incident report indicating that a “vagrant” had been found “sleeping,” and an ambulance took him to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Savannah, where he was admitted on August 31, 2004, under the name “Burger King Doe.”
Other than the rash, and cataracts that had left him nearly blind, Burger King Doe showed no sign of physical injury. He appeared to be a healthy white man in his middle fifties. His vitals were good. His blood tested negative for drugs and alcohol. His lab results were, a doctor wrote on his chart, “surprisingly within normal limits.” A long, unwashed beard and dirty fingernails suggested he had been living rough. But the only physical signs of previous trauma were three small depressions on his skull and some scars on his neck and his left arm.
We live in an age of extraordinary surveillance and documentation. The government’s capacity to keep tabs on us—and our capacity to keep tabs on each other—is unmatched in human history. Big Data, NSA wiretapping, social media, camera phones, credit scores, criminal records, drones—we watch and watch, and record our every move. And yet here was a man who appeared to exist outside all that, someone who had escaped the modern age’s matrix of observation.
His condition—blind, nameless, amnesiac—seemed fictitious, the kind of allegorical affliction that might befall a character in Saramago or Borges.
Even if he was lying about his memory loss, there was no official record of his existence. He lived on the margins, beyond the boundaries mapped by the surveillance state. And because we choose not to look at individuals on the margins, it is still possible for them to disappear.
just for a few hours: out of the insanity of the insane and dementia patients and psychopaths ruling the world, inside and outside of government
Sure, I live along the Central Coast of Oregon. How many times, even in my small memoir writing class I am conducting, to people tell me they are “living on/in the planet’s most beautiful place.”
Just yesterday, two older ladies I met on the beach near my humble abode who were getting too close to a California sea lion. Taking pictures. So, when the animal allows Homo Consumopethicus to get close, there is something wrong.
Big animal, maybe two years old, a male, skinny, and along our Alsea River, where we mostly have 600 harbor seals hanging out on sand spits, their haul out of choice.
Yep, I yelled from a distance, but then I had a conversation with them about wild animals, the sea lions versus seals, and why this fellow needs some space — sick, skinny, fatigued, and probably on his way to mackerel heaven.
One lady’s from Boston, and the other one from Portland, now living here.
I told them about the “Land-Sea Symposium” in the Yachats coming up at 5 pm, part of the Cape Perpetua Collaborative, which sponsors the event.
Cape Perpetua Marine Reserve is one of give where I live, and the blurb on-line I repeated with a bit more force to these two ladies who I was able to get to move away from the sea lion, telling them about 500 feet rule, and how to zoom in with the dumb phone.
“It’s really great to see this kind of community response to the symposium. It shows that people care a great deal about this very special place between the land the sea.”
I went, and I did not see them there (no surprise). But it was my way of decompressing from the constant worry and shame and disgust and revolt and revulsion I have been feeling since Oct. 7, well, make that Oct. 7 1975? Shit, Iran-Contra, all the way through to now, the Hamas attempt at getting hostages free, Thousand of them locked up and tortured by the Jewish State (sic) of Israel’s thugs, well, that’s all of the Jewish Community of Israel, mas o menos.
Here, a perfect opportunity to talk with and listen to scientists and researchers focusing on tide pool creatures, sea stars, grey whales, pollinators and sea birds.
Sponsors offered beer, wine, cider and samples of various ocean-reliant foods. And pizza.
“It’s just a great way to showcase so many of the things going on here,” so says the director.
I’ve been here since 2019, and I’ve written about amazing people working on ocean and land and wetlands issues. I’ve become again a naturalists for the American Cetacean Society. I’ve worked with poor people and homeless folk, with developmental delayed clients, and I have had columns in two newspapers, one of which became a book out there on Amazon — Coastal People inside a Deep Dive: stories about people living on the Central Coast and other places in Oregon.
Here’s what we talked about yesterday:
An aerial veiw:
Before the speakers spoke, and before a benediction, and before the one fellow who catered the event read his poem at the end, I talked with many of the folks staffing the tables:
There were others — friends of Otter Rock, Mid-Coast Watershed Council, Sea & Shore Solutions, Concerned Citizens for Clean Air, Highway 101 Pollinator activists, others.
I talked with a young woman staffing the Forest Service table. She had a diorama (small) of a plover and its eggs. We talked, and she is all about outdoor education and public outreach. She is from Minnesota, got her biology degree from U of Wisconsin and she’s doing an internship here on our coast, again, taking science to the kids outside, where the world meets the mind.
Total enthusiastic person, and she’s ready to leave in December and end up in McCall, Idaho, with the University of Idaho’s outdoor education school there. MOSS.
McCall Outdoor Science School (MOSS) K12 programs aim to foster the skills and competencies necessary for people to live well in their social and ecological communities. Graduate Student Field Instructors facilitate learning experiences for youth in MOSS programs and practice using inclusive instructional strategies in their teaching practicum. Through hands-on exploration of the environment and guided inquiry, participants observe and investigate the relationships between biological, physical and social systems around them. Our goal is to help participants develop a sense of place, build scientific literacy, and develop effective communication and collaboration skills. Collaborative learning between graduate students and K12 MOSS participants allows for expansive understanding of social and ecological relationships.
I’ve been harping on this for decades — not just one MOSS school in the middle of nowhere, but in EVERY community, in all urban or suburban or rural locals. Funded by the takers, the millionaires and billionaires. It’s the only way to get young people active, turn them into activist thnkers, put revolutionary zeal into their DNA, prepping to be ready to battle the impending slipping ecosystems and weather chaos. To get them away from all the brainwashing, brain-hacking, brain-numbing, brain-slicing techno crap of the AI-VR-AR-MR variety.
I talked to a fellow from Stuttgart, who has been here, USA, with his wife working with the Forest Service, specifically with the Marine Reserves program. He speaks four languages, went to school in Quebec, has a PhD, and he’s loving working in Oregon, a world so different from oppressive Germany that I have seen that twinkle in the eyes many times in Germans transplanted here, and in places like the Sonora or Chihuahua or even Guatemala.
Joan Kittel opened the conference. She’s the person who brought to light the Amanda Trail. Read here: A poem I wrote:
Not Just One of those Tales of Another Dead Indian
bloody feet dampen soil
her DNA cleaved to earth, forced blind trek
called “a march” yet she sees through
darkness, earth torn for steel
guns, rusty crosses, parchment
proof of broken treaties
tears bleeding into wind
signatures of unholy
men worth the indigo
nothing more, promises, lies
before US Military kidnapping, white mountain
man grabbed her
fornicated, child from uncommon
law, but mother thrives
until march of tears
from beachhead south
into basalt canyons
toes bound by scars
stumbling, old blind woman
disappeared, or bones to dust
reality: Amanda De-Cuys was a blind Native American woman of the Coos tribe who traversed coastal trail 158 years ago, but not by choice.
she fled to Coos Bay, but designated runaway
she was tagged like elk, as US army men
carried-out forced march
seventy-five miles north
daughter left behind with common
law gringo, 12 of them
prodded by uniformed glory
now a land of colonization
a continent crying slow death
in 2022 mostly gray heads
gather at the grotto
rededication of new
bridge, Amanda’s Trail
statue of blind Indian
these people hold court
listen to speakers
the mulch of Oregon
forest like fungi on tongues
Yachats, hippie town
tears of Umpqua, Coos, Siletz, Alsi
forever there, a mist
a new rainbow each time
a new visitor hikes hoping
Amanda’s song is caught
in kingfisher or murre or guillemot
transmigration of natives’
souls
Kittel: “Amanda Trail, and the more recently the Ya’Xaik Trail, were built on a foundation of the truth, building trust between cultures. As such, no person-made or natural disaster will ever obliterate them. They will endure bringing joy and grace to all who walk their paths. (some more history)”
Joanne takes the pain of the Indians seriously: Professionally, Joanne is a psychotherapist who specialized in treating victims of trauma and perpetrators of trauma. Her work includes those affected by historical trauma. Joanne is a long-term member of View the Future (VtF), beginning with the organization’s earliest days. She has written and presented on the history of the First Nation People who lived in the Yachats Area for thousands of years and their forced March and internment during the 1850s. In addition to VtF, Joanne also participates as a: member and Trails Development Leader of Yachats Trails Committee, Volunteer and Trainer at My Sister’s Place, Member and Vice-chair of Angell Job Corps’ Community Relations Committee, Member of Secure Resources Advisory Committee of Siuslaw National Forest and is a past member of multiple local nonprofit Boards and groups.
The reality is I was the only one of a hundred there with a tribue to Palestine — my keffiyeh proudly wrapped around my neck!
Oh, the Coos and Siletz and Umpqua tribes had their trail of blood/tears/death, marched north, barefoot, 80 miles to the “reservation,” the military station, a prison, here in Yachats in 1860. Genocideal policies of starvation, disease and depression of spirit did the community in. In 1865, oh, those Pioneers, robbed the Coos of 900,000 acres the government “deeded” to them.
Note: The Board of the Cape Perpetua Collaborative and the staff is mostly women — Amber, jamie, Liz, Cheryl, Megan, Ava and et al. This evening was mostly old people in the audience but young people presenting and staffing the tables.
The collaborative was created in 2017, made up of conservation groups, agencies, NGOs to specifically research and conserve the Cape Perpetua area.
Yeah, the Yachats Mayor spoke, and our representative in Salem, 10th district Rep Gomberg, he pontificated. His district includes two marine reserves, including Cape Perpetua. He mentioned how a billion dollar investment in new housing was approved by the state legislature, and as is the common shit of USA capitalism and uniparty politics, there was no funding legislated for sewer and water delivery. Insane. Replicated from state to state.
We are an aging country (infrastructure), blasted into decay by Predatory-Criminal-Usury-Military Captialism. He also talked about how small cities can’t afford millions for dam mitigation or removal and construction. And there are land acquisitions we pay for (taxpayers) to get land “back” from the timber and insurance industries.
One bill of interest is tied to his interestingly open lament: “What is the greatest threat to open land, open beaches, and access to public forests and places?”
Lawyers. One trip over a root, one fall from an overhand, a scratch or broken leg, and the dirty lawyers swoop in like rabid dogs. All the litigation drains state and federal agencies, and even cities and counties face the same fucking dirty capitalist shit – sue sue sue.
There is a bill he is hoping to see get voted on so our open spaces don’t get shut down because of lawsuits draining staffing and servicing: Recreational Immunity legislation.
Okay, the first presenter! Science!
I talked with Dave Kollen with the Xerces society, named after the butterfly above, last seen north of San Francisco in 1943.
You betcha I am right there with this conservation movement having done a biological transect in Vietnam and other places to see/research on/write about the health and the sagging ecological connectivity of ecosystems, forests and jungles and reef systems.
He’s a tall guy, sort of a young Walt Whitman, with dry humor, with a country-fied accent, but his presentation hit home —
Pollinators are essential to our environment. The ecological service they provide is necessary for the reproduction of over 85% of the world’s flowering plants, including more than two-thirds of the world’s crop species. The United States alone grows more than 100 crops that either need or benefit from pollinators, and the economic value of these native pollinators is estimated at $3 billion per year in the U.S. Beyond agriculture, pollinators are keystone species in most terrestrial ecosystems. Fruits and seeds derived from insect pollination are a major part of the diet of approximately 25% of all birds, and of mammals ranging from red-backed voles to grizzly bears.
Unfortunately, in many places, the essential service of pollination is at risk from habitat loss, pesticide use, and introduced diseases.
Nerdy? You betcha:
Sure, we can see how pollinators really give us our food:
His role in the Society is working on native pollinators, and Oregon has it’s bees — over 800 species. Mostly they are solitary, nesting in the ground or inside dead limbs.
The ground nesting ones (70 percent of all bees in Oregon) face land clearing, persticides, climate change, invasive species, and so much more. Then around 30 percent of bees are renters, cavity nesters.
And, with this fact — 1,000,000,000 pounds of pesticides, fungicides, other-cides used each year — we are in some bad shape. Welcome human chronic illnesses and neurological diseases, by the boat load.
The decline of insects/invertebrates directly connects to a major decline in birds. We are talking about 3 billion birds declined worldwide last year. And most birds depend on eating invertebrates at some stage of their lives.
Coastal Greenish Blue — in the past hundred years, only 30 have been seen, recorded.
Siuslaw Hairy-Necked Tiger Beetle — almost all gone:
Our Western Bumblebee (20 species) has seen a rapid decline sine 1990. Parasites, pesticides, habitat loss, disease and off-road vehicles taking it out as a species in the West.
The final push is for no pesticides or so much less pesticide use, sure, that’s what we do in predatory and dog-eat-dog capitalism. Citizens use more pesticides on landscapes than do farmers. The toxicity of these chemicals have destroyed the entire web of life, including apex predators like Homo Consumopethicus.
There are programs I know about and have initiated in the past — Bee Cities and Bee Campuses. Go to Xerces for more info.
Next, Jamie Kish, a Tidepool Ambassador with a comedy streak that makes life fun, learning a hoot. In a word, she was a laugh a minute, and her presentation was hilarious and informative. She’s volunteered since 1999, and has worked at the New York Acquairum, Disney World, and for cruise ships in the Bahamas.
She’s a field guide and program associate. She’s been doing this for three years, and her enthusiasm for these critters and for her work with young and old giving tours of tidepool ecosystems is her dream come true.
“Being up at dawn with the first human footprint on the beach being min, this just does it for me.”
Each species in the tidepool is a character in her own tidepool tales. She is also a photographer. The audience was laughing up a storm as she recalled her work with the species and that includes human species.
This is the respite I was just after. Her biggest thrill is when people about to start her tours ask, “How are the stars doing?”
For the ochre sea stars, that were decimated with wasting disease (a virus), they are coming back big, with thick contellations and big specimens.
Infectious laugh? Jokester? Teacher having fun while students learn a shit load? Yep.
Quoting some more background: Between Florence and Yachats lies the Cape Perpetua area, a biodiverse recreation mecca home to lush coastal rainforests and deep cultural history. But past the coastline also lies the largest Oregon marine reserve. The Cape Perpetua Marine Reserve site is a 33-square mile area dedicated to conservation and scientific research. Just like parks and protected natural areas on land, there are multiple benefits of protected areas in the ocean. They conserve ocean wildlife and biodiversity. Marine Reserves sites also serve as living laboratories, where we can learn about marine reserve protections and Oregon’s ocean environment to help us maintain our seas for future generations.
Trained guides provided tidepool tours for small groups and volunteers roamed tidepools to engage with visitors about the local in habitants of the tidepools, Oregon’s marine conservation efforts and to promote marine stewardship. We hosted 2 tours/day over 25 negative tide dates. Guides and volunteers engaged with over 800 people throughout the season, with 140 people signing up for an intimate tour, which included a span of generations. Tour guests were very enthusiastic and appreciative of the program. It was really exciting to have a mix of generations and each tour brought something different in their experiences.
Next up? Oregon State University biologist and diver Dr. Sarah Gravem [photo, she motors past Sitka on her way to a kelp forest she is monitoring. Photo by Jake Metzger.]
She followed Kish on stage, and again, fun, laughs and turning science into a learning and entertaining form for the crowd, who was laughing it up as much as they did with Kish’s presentation.
Oct. 6, 2023: A few weeks ago, Sarah Gravem lowered a “ravenous, terrifying predator” from her boat down to the ocean floor off Sitka. Then she released it.
In a slow-motion drama, sea urchins fled as a pizza-size sunflower sea star oozed toward them.
Gravem explained: “I release one right in the middle and watch everybody freak out. It’s not just that they eat them, but they scare them. (Urchins) leave and they don’t come back.”
A biologist and diver at Oregon State University, Gravem is trying to understand whether imperiled sunflower sea stars are beneficial to kelp forests, which have also greatly diminished in the last decade.
Sunflower sea stars — recently decimated from the ocean off western Mexico, California, Oregon and Washington — are like wolves of the kelp forest, eating sea urchins that will overgraze if left unchecked, often with a scorched-earth result.
In Sitka, Gravem’s students and research team members have spent much of the summer working out of the Sitka Sound Science Center. Each morning, they boat out to kelp forests to study the relationship between sea urchins that eat kelp and sunflower sea stars that eat the urchins.
Sunflower sea stars can be as large as a trash-can lid. They grow up to 25 slimy arms. They are one of the largest sea stars and are the fastest, using thousands of coordinated tube feet to move a meter every few minutes. They live 30 years. And they are feared eating machines.
“Anything they can catch, they will eat,” Gravem said over the phone from Sitka as her diving gear dried. “They will shove an urchin inside their stomach and later spit out the empty shell.”
There are not many sunflower sea stars remaining in the Pacific Ocean. Sea star sunflowers are victims of a wasting disease, perhaps a virus, that killed 5.75 billion of them in a recent five-year period. It is difficult to find one today off the coast of California, Oregon or Washington.
“There used to be thousands of them marching around all the time,” Gravem said.
The sudden absence of the sea stars has been bad news for kelp forests off the Lower 48 and has been noticeable all the way up to Alaska, where there has been a 60-80% decline in the last decade.
Gravem, who has studied the sea stars the last five years, recently visited a former kelp forest about a mile offshore of Sitka, where today “there’s not even a scrap.”
Kelp forests are important because they provide fish with places to hide and provide sustenance for many other creatures.
“They’re like trees,” Gravem said, “but they’re even better than trees. Most every herbivore eats kelp.”
Kelp forests disappeared en masse following the staggering loss of sunflower sea stars.
“With no sea stars, sea urchins had gangbuster years,” Gravem said. “Some places, they increased tenfold.”
You want an hour-plus of Sarah explaining the intricacies of that web of life? LINK.
Next: Drones, geospatial research, PhD candidate, gray whales, OSU, and so we hear from Clara Bird, after Sarah. She was also attempting to be humorous, and I have heard her speak. several times, and I know her work. But for the crowd, the drone footage of those mammals are always awe inspiring.
The fact is that some drone work is positive, and scientists can get three times the observational capacity from drone footage. Clara’s work is around our special group of gray whales, the Pacific Coast Feeding Group, a unique sub-ground of east Pacific whales. Therea re around212 of them, and they are definitely well studied, photographed, and so many return to our shores, Depoe Bay, especially, so their feces and size and body mass and other aspects of their well being can be studied and compared season to season, year to year.
Her biggest work is around 8 different feediseng habits of our Pacific Coast Feeding Group (PCFG). It’s deep biology, looking at sexual dimorphism, resource polymorphism, ontogentic shifts, and individual specialization.
Depth and Body Weight Mass and length and the type of benthic zone they feed in are part of the research she does to complete her PhD next year.
This is kick-ass work, a break from my own work learning how to SURVIVE in this fucked up mess.
I’m a diver, a 66 years old who did the dive bumming at age 15 in the Sea of Cortez. I’ve written tons about that. I am in a different space, now, probably shackeled by all sorts of trauma, direct, vicarious, and my own impediments from moving forward forward where I want to be spiritually and intellectually and philosophically.
It’s sometimes for me (violins, please) rough as shit sticking out like a sore thumb, everywhere (poor me), but here, Saturday, for five hours, some people knew me, and I talked, we talked, a peer, knowing what they know, all the benefits of being a sciency kind of guy/sciency upbringing, plus a STORY Teller, me, which means I pry open quite easily — most of the time — people around me, because I am honest and honestly interested in their passions.
I live through stories. Even sciency ones! Try me. Amazon.
The fellow who is also a member of the Collaberative, Boone Ogden, catered the event, and I talked with him. He conducted the closing of the 4 hour event with a poem he wrote, “Reclaimed, Renamed.”
Good stuff, actually, and the words were full of that, “We Live in the Most Beautiful Part of the World” intonations with the deep nod/sadness/reclamation to the place we took from them, the Indians, the tribes. We name mountains after cartographers, mountains that have been sacred to tribes for centuries, named by them for centuries.
Holy places we turn into strip malls, big homes, parks and eateries. Their graves!
I’ll try and get Boone to send along the poem for reproduction. He blogs at the Chubby Vegetarian. His catering biz is Mandela Catering out of Seal Rock.
Finally? — Recovering the sacred.
I spent time with Winona in Spokane, and brought her to campus and for some of my work around sustainability. Here you go, my out-take:
Grain of Truth by Paul H. Haeder
You probably remember Winona LaDuke as the two-time Green Party vice presidential candidate, running with Ralph Nader in 2000 and 2004. You probably didn’t know that she’s an enrolled member of the Anishinaabeg Tribe from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, where she’s locked in another tough battle — this time against huge multinational corporations that want to change her tribe’s traditional way of life.
At three engagements in Spokane last week, and in some private interviews, LaDuke talked about the need to defend native peoples’ rights to the Earth. And this epic debate can fit into a single grain of wild rice — the Manoominike-Giizis strain, or the “wild rice moon” grown by her people for many generations.
This small grain of plant life serves as a microcosm of the entire sustainability challenge we all face: making sure future generations — all peoples and all species — will have a planet worth living on with ecosystems and resources to achieve spiritual and material prosperity.
LaDuke has proven to be so much more than a media darling — she’s a spiritual guide for her tribe and for the thousands she’s come across along her journey. Mixing humor with a shaman’s intensity, LaDuke has written books like All Our Relations and Recovering the Sacred.
LaDuke sees the Minnesota reservations’ practice of harvesting wild rice as vital:
“The wild rice harvest of the Anishinaabeg not only feeds the body, it feeds the soul, continuing a tradition which is generations old for these people of the lakes and rivers of the north.”
It struck me last week while spending time with LaDuke that her tribe’s battle to keep their wild rice wild, free from genetic manipulation, is a much more far-reaching illustration of what sustainability activists consider the struggle of our times: How to create an America that respects the land.
Many of us think along systemic lines, attempting to understand the steps the globe probably has to take to solve the collapsing systems, both environmental and societal. Yet we need reminding that this struggle to work with a burgeoning global human population — 9 billion by 2050 at the current 1.2 percent growth rate — needs nudging from storytellers like LaDuke.
Her struggle — our struggle — is tied to the biodiversity of wild rice, a sacred food. There are more than 60,000 acres of natural wild rice growing throughout the lakes and rivers of her tribal lands. But there are troubling parallels drawn to what’s happened to the sacred corn of Mesoamerica at the hands of the agri-business multinationals, where corn has been patented, controlled and even turned into what some call Frankenfood.
Domestication and genetic modification of wild rice threatens the genetic integrity of this plant. For more than 30 years, plant breeders have developed wild rice for commercial paddies. So today, most of the wild rice on the market comes from these paddies, almost 70 percent of it from California. “Millions of pounds of California wild rice comes into [Minnesota] to be processed,” says LaDuke, “some of that rice, if genetically engineered, would irreversibly contaminate our manoomin.”
LaDuke’s tenacity in understanding the sacred and reclaiming the wholeness of her people’s food is a valuable lesson for our times. She’s up against the juggernaut of Monsanto and Dupont, the largest seed companies in the world. Monsanto has spent $8 billion in the last few years buying up United States seed companies, while Dupont purchased Pioneer, the second largest seed company in the world.
“This concentration of control over world seed stocks is alarming to farmers on a worldwide scale, especially considering that the closer seeds seem to be held, the fewer there are.”
LaDuke puts all of our struggles into a feedback loop, connecting wild rice in Minnesota to sustainability in Spokane with the goal of creating a more independent, safe and stable food supply. “However you cut the statistics,” LaDuke says, “from the villages of India to the villages of northern Minnesota, there is a marked loss in worldwide biodiversity, and a closer hold on who controls the remaining seeds of the world.”
This issue of control took me back 32 years, to the time I was a newspaper reporter in the middle of a struggle for the soul of a mountain.
Environmentalists were trying to stop my school, the University of Arizona, from building roads and locating a large mirror telescope on Mount Graham, a 10,000-foot sky island sticking out of the Sonora Desert. Mount Graham was named after a white man who rode through the area many years ago, a Colonel James Graham, but for generations the San Carlos Apaches had referred to the entire range as “Pinaleno,” meaning “many deer.” It’s the holiest place for the Apaches, who acquire the power to become medicine men and women through singing and collecting herbs and water on that mountain.
Despite the importance and traditional use of the place, roads were cut and the telescope went up. LaDuke and I talked about that struggle, and she shared many similar struggles currently unfolding in Indian Country and elsewhere.
LaDuke’s power is in her ability to unearth the history of Native people’s struggles — and how that history is relevant today. There has been a lost connection between how the land should be used and how it actually is used — from wild rice in Minnesota to telescopes in Arizona. Reconnecting with the land is another step in the process, as her book puts it, of reclaiming the sacred.
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Until further notice, and more of my rants, here we go: I listened to Oren before the event last night!
This short film is part of 8 short, testimonial films, on the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois.) The Iroquois are embarking on an historic project about the 500-year history of the Iroquois, their relationship with Europe and America and their prophesies that, if heard, can help us navigate the oncoming changes due to climate change. This series of short films is done via their testimony, and creates the space for the Iroquois to tell their story as they strive to uphold the traditions and the legacy of their people while also protecting the central tenents of their people and their relationship and care for the Earth.
This series was created by Tree Media in collaboration with Oren Lyons, Sid Hill and the Haudenosaunee. This series was created with the support of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation and with the support of Executive Producer Oliver Stanton. For more information.
I went to the community meeting a few days ago. Around 25 people there, listening to two guests around a community bill of rights, for Lane County (Oregon). You know, the people, citizens, having the say on who and what can come into their communities.
‘…A say in what can and cannot be sprayed on their food, land, bodies, water, soil….’
I’ve done this before, and I’ll cut and paste an older old piece below, from Spokane on that town’s community rights.
But first, the angst:
Infanticide, first, in Gaza. Hell on Earth, not because this hasn’t happened before in history, but because we are here now, 2023, with Telegram and instant videos. We are supposedly ruled by the Chosen People of Israel and the Blinken-Nuland-Yellen-Garland-Kagan-Dirty-Hellion-Bargain.
Those dirty White House Thugs look like cancerous Homo Bellum. Rotting faces, slag for eyes, like a George Soros or Larry Fink or Larry Summers.
HELL on earth.
Oh, the Monster, the Oppen-Monster-Heimer:
“If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” So said Curtis LeMay after America obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki with two atomic bombs in August 1945.
For sure, there has been great difficulty in estimating the total casualties in the Japanese cities as a result of the atomic bombing. The extensive destruction of civil installations (hospitals, fire and police department, and government agencies) the state of utter confusion immediately following the explosion, as well as the uncertainty regarding the actual population before the bombing, contribute to the difficulty of making estimates of casualties. The Japanese periodic censuses are not complete. Finally, the great fires that raged in each city totally consumed many bodies.
The number of total casualties has been estimated at various times since the bombings with wide discrepancies.
The Manhattan Engineer District’s best available figures are:
TABLE A: Estimates of Casualties
Hiroshima …………………………. Nagasaki
(Pre-raid pop.): 255,000 ………. 195,000
Dead: 66,000 …………………….. 39,000
Injured: 69,000 ………………. 25,000
Total Casualties: 135,000 ….. 64,000
Hydrogen bombs, or just plain old Greek Fire!
Fire, whether from Jewish Whiskey Pete (white phosphorus) or U$A napalm, it kills kills civilians.
Katsumoto Saotome, 87, came to the door of his home in the outer reaches of Tokyo wearing a herringbone blazer, a black wool scarf tucked neatly into a vest and a black beret that he reckons makes him look like Che Guevara, the guerrilla leader in the Cuban Revolution. Saotome has practiced radicalism of a much quieter kind, insisting on preserving memories that many may prefer to forget.
Seventy-eight years ago, less than 10 miles from where he now lives alone in a low-lying neighborhood known for its moderate rents, Saotome (pronounced SAH-oh-toe-meh) survived the brutally effective American firebombing of Tokyo. Over the course of nearly three hours, an attack by the United States Army Air Forces killed as many as 100,000 people — more than some estimates of the number killed the day of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. But while the Japanese public — and the world — rightly remember Hiroshima as a living symbol of the horrors of nuclear war, the Tokyo firebombing is generally regarded as a footnote in any accounting of the war in Japan.
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I am sick to my stomach, but I soldier on: because the corporations, their lawyers, their hitmen, their PR spinners, their pimped-out politicians and lawmakers, all the Eichmann’s and Faustian Bargain Basement Mother Fuckers, they kill us with 10,000,000 cuts daily. We are firebombed by their sanctions, rules, fines, tickets, evictions, eminent domain, fees, taxes, interest rates, non-disclosure agreements, contracts, code enforcements, bust, arrests, bonds, bails, foreclosures.
Read closely how death is measured deploying better cancerous living through chemistry (outside of the implosions in Gaza).
Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), one of the most common chronic metabolic diseases, involves a complex interaction among genetic, epigenetic, and environmental risk factors. The incidence and prevalence of T2DM are rapidly increasing globally. In recent years, increasing body of evidences from both human and animal studies have displayed an association between exposure to early unfavorable life factors such as endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) and the prevalence of T2DM in later life. The exogenous EDCs can lead to disadvantageous metabolic consequences because they interfere with the synthesis, secretion, transport, binding, action, and metabolism of endogenous hormones. EDCs also have long-term adverse effects on newborns, children, and adolescents by causing increased susceptibility to T2DM in adults. This review summarizes the most recent advances in this field, including diabetes-related EDCs (bisphenol A, phthalates, chlordane compounds, parabens, pesticides, and other diabetes-related EDCs), EDC exposure and gestational diabetes mellitus, prenatal and perinatal EDC exposures and T2DM, adult EDC exposure and T2DM, transgenerational effects of EDCs on T2DM as well as the possible diabetogenic mechanisms.
So in my tiny neck of the woods, where a Danish guy with 260 acres which he just clear-cut, is shooting for helicopter spraying of poison on the land so the weeds go bye-bye and the Scotch Broom, et al go bye-bye. And the timber industry lies, gets tax abatements, and has a propaganda wing here paid for by Oregon taxpayers!
But lets talk about another part of the world: For the past couple of decades, tens of thousands of people living in rural Sri Lanka have been devastated by kidney failure due to unclear causes, also known as CKDu. Similar incidences of mysterious kidney diseases have emerged in tropical farming communities around the world.
A massive field study of the wells supplying drinking water to the Sri Lankan communities, conducted by researchers at Duke University, has identified a possible culprit — glyphosate, the active compound in Roundup, the most widely used herbicide in the world. (source)
It’s global, the instant death and slow death and disease by 10,000,000 cuts, as Gaza burns and the UkroNazi’s burn burn burn.
Progress has been made in recent years, but much remains to be done. Here are some examples of incremental advances in the fight to end herbicide use in Oregon forestry under the recent Private Forest Accord:
In early 2022, the EPA banned use of chlorpyrifos on food and feed crops, and starting Jan. 1, 2024, new Oregon Department of Agriculture rules will disallow most uses of the insecticide, including spraying on forestlands.
In 2020, then-Governor Kate Brown helped catalyze the Private Forest Accord between some environmental groups and the timber industry. Later that year, that negotiation resulted in the Oregon Legislature passing Senate Bill 1602, which increased buffers for streams and improved the system for electronic reporting and notification of neighbors within a mile of areas to be sprayed by helicopters.
But those new rules did not require any reductions in the frequency or amounts of pesticides sprayed. Environmentalists and impacted communities want the practice significantly reduced or banned altogether, and the Oregon Chapter Sierra Club will continue to work for that change. (source)
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More slogging on. Here, before the actual piece on the community meeting I attended here in Waldport, Oregon, my piece a long time ago about community bill of rights movement in Spokane when I had one of a dozen gigs surviving:
The right to community
Envisioning a new Spokane puts ‘business as usual’ on chopping block
[Photo: Local farmer Brian Estes, foreground, stands with Kai Huschke, campaign director of Envision Spokane and leader of Proposition 1 at Estes’ Vinegar Flats garden. (Paul K. Haeder / Down to Earth NW Correspodent)]
Here’s one credo that scares guys like Frank Schaeffer, son of evangelist Francis Schaeffer and author of “Crazy for God: How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back.”
“God’s Word gives women respect and respectability which they had never enjoyed in any other culture, and we must do what we can to preserve biblical standards. But it establishes the man as the head of the house.”
Now replace the word “man” with “corporation” and you have what amounts to what many in the world – not just the U.S. – see as the dictum of the 21st century: Corporations are the head of our house.
Many are fighting back this imbalance of power and justice, including grassroots groups. Via Campesino, the Transition Cities movements, even foodies are fighting the corporate “infection” to preserve rights to safe, non-genetically modified, animal-cruelty free food.
One local impetus to give people more say in how neighborhoods form and evolve is on Spokane’s November ballot. Envision Spokane, which gained 25 percent of the yea votes in 2010, is returning.
Kai Huschke, campaign director of Envision Spokane and leader of Proposition 1, cites several past movements in the U.S. to gain citizen rights – like abolishing slavery and giving full citizenship to people of color. He references a quote from Abigail Adams, urging her husband John in 1776 to treat women as equals in the Declaration of Independence:
“We are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”
A second quote,
“I saw clearly that the power to make the laws was the right through which all other rights could be secured” came in 1884 when 32-year-old Elizabeth Cady Stanton – joined by Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth – spoke at a women’s rally to gain the constitutional right to vote.
Huschke compares U.S. women getting the vote in 1920 after dozens of defeats to the heavy lifting he and his supporters must do to get a community bill of rights approved.
“Many would say that what we have today is a corporate state,” Huschke said. “Living within the corporate state there are no remedies to protecting safety, health, and welfare of communities. Adopting amendments to the Spokane’s home rule charter puts in place remedies to protect and nourish neighborhoods, river and workplaces. These amendments acknowledge our protections and that the power is with the people where it comes to significant impacts to neighborhoods and river.”
The 10 amendments to the 2009 bill of rights were defeated, Huschke said, by corporate bucks to the tune of $400,000 from Spokane Home Builder’s Association, Associated Builders and Contractors and other unlimited pro-growth groups.
Recently, the local GOP’s executive committee voted to oppose the 2011 proposition. That doesn’t faze Kai.
“The rhetoric will get turned up as the powerful, monied interests make claims about property rights being under attack and costs if the Community Bill of Rights is adopted. The same stuff was said in 2009,” he said.
“I’ve talked to people who voted against it in 2009, who said once they took the time to read it they would’ve voted yes. If I have to ask anything of Spokane voters, it’s to cover your ears and read what’s being proposed.”
When you have the Greater Spokane Incorporated throwing weight and money behind an anti-Community Bill of Rights movement, it’s easy to see the greater good.
“Spokane is long overdue in recognizing the value of our neighborhoods, our river, and workplaces,” Kai said. “We have a golden opportunity to show how to build a sustainable community. By honoring and protecting our assets we put ourselves in a position advocating for health and welfare over profit for profit sake, that other communities aren’t even close to considering.”
The history of communities gaining power back from outside agitators, carpetbaggers or corporate conglomerates is tied to public health and safety, centered around bad corporate behavior like factory farms’ waste ponds causing human and animal health issues; coal companies’ slurry lakes leaking millions of gallons of waste into rivers; quarry works that foul water; or energy companies that pollute the air along the Houston to Baton Rouge corridor where asthma and cancers are sky-high, according to CDC studies.
A community movement similar to Envision Spokane recently rose up against the energy lobby to put brakes on exploitation of shale deposits. The process known as hydraulic fracturing to get at natural gas fouls the water and has been implicated in earthquakes. Arkansas has temporarily stopped this process.
The Spokane Community Bill of Rights has its roots in a larger, more holistic frame – the Rights of Nature, something that sticks in the craws of GOP party loyalists, Chambers of Commerce and business interests.
Bolivia’s Law of the Rights of Mother Earth was enacted by President Evo Morales January 2011. It addresses that country’s natural resources as “blessings” and grants Earth rights to life, water and clean air; the right to repair livelihoods affected by human activities; and the right to be free from pollution.
Bolivia has established a Ministry of Mother Earth, a sort of global ombudsman whose job is to listen to nature’s complaints voiced by activists and others, including the state.
“If you want to have balance, and you think that the only (entities) with rights are humans or companies, how can you reach balance?” says Pablo Salon, Bolivia’s ambassador to the U.N. “But if you recognize nature has rights, and (if you provide) legal forums to protect and preserve those rights, you can achieve balance.”
Kai understands the power of people bicycling safely in Spokane with engineering and land use changes guided by citizens. He sees the power of community gardens and programs like Riverfront Farm putting disadvantaged youth to work in farming and landscaping experiential learning experiences. He sees corporations destroying community-based tools to fight their shock doctrine of financial wizards, disturbances created by climate change, or volatility of food and energy.
Communities under the current regulatory system are poorly suited to manage under the current political system, Kai insists. It’s clear that even presidential aspirants like Mitt Romney can end up tongue-tied when a citizen at a rally asked about the power and rights of corporations: “Corporations are people, my friends.”
For Envision Spokane’s backers this line of logic is a slap in the face of our own bill of rights and democratic institutions tied to a government of the people, by the people and for the people. Kai said this effort is a vital one.
“The assault on public workers from corporate interests has been daunting. There is no reason not to believe that this attack won’t carry into the private sector. In the spring the Spokane City Council passed a resolution supporting collective bargaining for city employees. The Community Bill of Rights would protect that right with binding law for all unionized city workers. There is a power grab happening across the country, and Spokane needs to make sure it protects its workers.”
Photo: Kai Huschke is building a straw bale house in the Vinegar Flats area near the Vinegar Flats community garden area. (Paul K. Haeder / Down to Earth NW Correspondent)
(The previous column is the opinion of columnist Paul K. Haeder and doesn’t necessarily reflect the opinions of Down to EarthNW, The Spokesman-Review or the Cowles Company.)
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That was 2011!! Twelve fucking years ago. Today?
*****
Community Rights, Agency Capture, Corporations as People?
I’m at the Waldport Central Oregon Coast Fire and Rescue (10/15) with twenty-two other residents listening to Holman and David Tvedt discuss the work of Lane County Community Rights.
It is a room full of gray-haired men and women, anxious to hear from these two gray panthers on their work to codify a bill of rights for Lane County citizens to write laws.
I’ve been in this rodeo before – El Paso, Seattle and Spokane, where I covered the work of Envision Spokane, a bill that would’ve enshrined on voters the right o determine the community’s health, safety and welfare.
I was hosting a radio show focused on sustainability, social justice, and environmental stewardship. I had two regular news columns – in the weekly and a monthly magazine. I was sustainability coordinator for the community college.
It was a lot of work getting people out to participate in events around clean water, clean air, food, transportation and ecosystems.
My biggest goal after codifying guest authors, film festivals, teach-ins, and Earth Day festivals was to get the so-called “younger generation” involved. It was somewhat easy since I taught at Gonzaga and SFCC, and had cohorts at Whitworth and WSU and Eastern Washington University.
Even so, I had to solicit help from local musicians, local restaurants, and merchants for entertainment, food, swill and swag.
Here, today, years later, I am in a room with older folk who are concerned to aerial spraying of herbicides on a clear cut along Beaver Creek. Tvelt has been working on forest issues since 1970. His degree in forestry informs his fight to galvanize common sense into forest management and logging.
For many in the audience they learned about the value of forests– mixed species of trees, shrubs and even weeds – as a way to help with water flows.
Hard logging reduces water flow because organic matter, downed trees and other forest dynamics are eradicated by timber companies. Tvelt recalled taking a chain saw on a four-foot downed log for a clearway on a path near Sweethome whereupon the cut produced “a full-blast flow of water . . . like a water spigot was turned on.” It lasted for two minutes.
Wells and springs are drying up in summers and in many cases year round. Pressure on watersheds can be located directly to the growth of human populations. Additionally, clear cutting and other heavy logging practices reduce the natural flow of things. This is not rocket science, and the memo on this was written decades ago.
The community meeting centered around spraying of chemicals. The News Times has run stories, letters to the editor and editorials debating acreage along Beaver Creek scheduled for helicopter herbicide application.
It’s no secret that our state’s timber industry’s practice of spraying herbicides — all of them dangerous to humans, fish and animals — has been highly controversial for decades. Studies show that up to 40 percent of the pesticides sprayed onto forestland by helicopters is blown off course from its targets (drift).
These toxic sprays — used by the timber industry to kill insects, weeds and vegetation in areas that have been clear cut — drift onto land on or near homes, farms, streams and lakes.
While many of the inert ingredients and specialized mixes are industry secrets, the main pesticides include triclopyr, chlorpyrifos, Diuron and 2,4-D (one of the so-called “Agent Orange” chemicals).
Study after study has show all of these singularly or synergistically are linked to diseases and health issues, including respiratory problems, liver and kidney damage, miscarriages, and cancer.
Regulating how much poison should be allowed in food, air and water is antithetical to Michele Holman’s ethos. She’s lived 47 years in the Coast Range, tossing out the activist script of going to the state capitol to beg for redress on any range of environmental concerns.
“I got tired of the retort, ‘It’s legal . . . well settled in law.’ Just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s just.”
Agency capture, lobbying influence, campaign meddling/contributions, and propaganda on a massive scale work in favor of rich corporations, whether it is Boeing and planes or Weyerhaeuser and logging.
A recent push is for a community rights movement to catch like wildfire throughout the state. Protect Lane County Watersheds is spearheading the Rights of Nature law (supported by CELDF, Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund) to protect drinking water and watersheds throughout the county.
The old adage, ‘you can’t fight city hall,’ has dangerously morphed into: “Corporations are considered people, so you can’t stop them from doing business as usual because they have equal rights . . . and then some.”
I’ve been studying these chemicals for decades. Rosemary Mason from England is an amazing researcher who does on the ground work as well as collates hundreds of scientific field studies on that infamous weed killer used on clear-cut’s – glyphosate. You can read a journal article like this one, “The Effects of Clearcutting and Glyphosate Herbicide Use on Parasitic Wasps in Maine Forests.”
Or, a recent Duke University report, “Roundup Ingredient Connected to Epidemic Levels of Chronic Kidney Disease.” You can spend years digging through the science that never gets in front of mainstream media’s unwatchful eye.
Citizens involved in Stop the Spray at Beaver Creek are concerned for their health, as well as the health of children, grandchildren and the entire life web of our ecosystem.
Countless studies which are looking at pesticides and herbicides produce chilling findings: “For the past couple of decades, tens of thousands of people living in rural Sri Lanka have been devastated by kidney failure.”
This massive field study of the wells supplying drinking water to the Sri Lankan communities, conducted by researchers at Duke University, has identified a possible culprit — glyphosate.
When it’s in your backyard, the alarm goed off. Chilling: November 14 is World Diabetes Day. Here we go again, more reading: “Exposure to Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals and Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus in Later Life.”
Community Rights Fight-State and Federal Preemption
“One of the first things an elected official does upon taking office is to swear an oath to uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution. Unfortunately for local communities and the environment, the Commerce Clause, which gives Congress the power “to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states …” is an integral part of that constitution. According to the Cornell School of Law, “Congress has often used the Commerce Clause to justify exercising legislative power over the activities of states and their citizens, leading to significant and ongoing controversy regarding the balance of power between the federal government and the states. The Commerce Clause has historically been viewed as both a grant of congressional authority and as a restriction on the regulatory authority of the States.”
Imploring Oregon Governor Kate Brown to say “NO” the aerial spraying or to Jordan Cove’s LNG project is literally asking her to violate her oath of office and assumes she has plenary authority (or the balls) to stand up to federal preemption. She does not.
The Community Doesn’t Have the Legal Authority to Say “No”!
The existing structure of law ensures that people are blocked from advancing their rights, governing their own communities and acting as stewards of the environment, while protecting corporate “rights” and interests over those of communities and nature.
Community Rights work is a paradigm shift. It movesaway from unsustainable practices that harm communities by moving towards local self-government.
Today, policy-makers have told communities across the country that they don’t have the right to make critical decisions for themselves. They’re told they cannot say “no” to GMOs or aerial spraying. They’re told they cannot say “yes” to sustainable food or energy systems.
Through the Community Rights Movement, communities are working with CELDF to create a structure of law and government of the people, by the people, and for the people. That structure recognizes and protects the inalienable rights of natural and human communities.
I’m in the courtroom at the plea bargain hearing – aka diversionary sentencing. My friend is there – strong, professionally dressed, with her mother who had come a long way out of state to support her daughter. Behind my friend is her tribe – nine women who she has come to call friends over the course of a year. There are two men in the courtroom also supporting her.
The accused is in an orange jumpsuit with arms shackled to his waist. Two sheriff’s deputies are in the courtroom watching over him.
He has no one there for support. His defense attorney looks nervous, with reddened face.
The judge calls my friend to the witness stand where she begins reading her victim impact statement. I’ve been to many of these sorts of hearings – I know not all judges are attentive. This judge, however, is moved by the survivor’s words – all four pages, single spaced. It’s her story, and the words are directed at the accused, her husband.
He forces a gaze away from his powerful voiced wife during her catharsis. The people supporting her have tears in their eyes. Her mother is distraught hearing the details of these four and a half years of hell.
Near the end of her testimony, these words ring so true now that she’s a survivor, no longer his victim:
“The person you assaulted that night exists no more. I am in process of regaining all the self confidence you took away from me, taking back control over my life and healing from all the trauma you caused me. Make no mistake — you can’t fool me anymore. Although you’ve shaken me to my core, you didn’t succeed in killing me; I am now growing stronger than ever.
That’s my biggest victory. I am finally seeing you for the monster that you are. I am standing up for myself. Unlike you, I never sought vengeance. By now, I only want you to take accountability and be held legally responsible for what you did to me. I am finding myself much more peaceful knowing exactly who and what I was dealing with. I know you know exactly what you did to me that night and how much you’ve abused me over the years, and it’s going to haunt and torture your consciousness forever, no matter how drunk you get. YOU will have to live with those thoughts after this day.”
The judge commends the survivor for her strength, for her composure and for her ability to move ahead in her life. Not surprisingly, the defendant shows no remorse; in fact, he makes no statement or any attempt at an apology. He is emotionless.
Universal Abuse
There are around twenty folk at the Samaritan Education building where My Sister’s Place is hosting the legal services people with Catholic Charities. The discussion is domestic abuse and immigration. We listen to a Romanian lawyer and one from Columbia, originally. They work on asylum cases and special visas for those fleeing the hell of emotional, sexual, emotional abuse. As well as the economic and physical intimidation and threats. Stalking and manipulation of children also occur with folks who are undocumented and attempting to get a green card.
We get the alphabet – VAWA, U Visas, T Visas and SIJS, to name a few. Respectively, we have Violence Against Women Act; serious crimes & sex trafficking U & T visas; Special Immigration Juvenile Status.
This arena is a WHOLE other set of stories, but the bottom line is that ironically my friend who is the subject of this piece is a married woman who sought a green card during the marriage, and with the abuse, the husband threatened her with pulling away his support of her application. He contacted the immigration officials working on my friend’s case to renege his support of a green card.
I did get the survivor to contact the Arizona social worker during her fleeing to Arizona March 2022. Heild’s experience is deep:
She was the Director of Services for the first nonprofit directing a 16-bed safe home as the domestic abuse provider in Northern Pinal County , AZ — CAAFA, Community Alliance Against Family Abuse. She supervised the staff but also directed a 24-hour hotline, support groups and worked in legal advocacy.
Both Heild and Amber agree that community outreach, fundraising and volunteer programs are vital in terms of shifting the culture at large to support services and advocacy for victims of domestic abuse.
Limitations exist, according to Heidi:
“DV programs are for the most part short term solutions – average stay in a shelter 2-3 months, not enough time to deal with trauma, find housing and other basic needs. Most victims seeking shelter and services are lacking support, childcare, financial support and are considered economically vulnerable.”
The Story Never Ends – Victim to Survivor to Hero
My friend the survivor wants to tell – write her story. She advocates even now for other women fleeing abusive partners. She is out of one limbo and in another as the legal separation – divorce – from this fellow is another stage in her complete break from the abuser, his family, and friends.
She knows this series is about how abuse fits into the entire scheme of things, and my own take on her story is my take. Her story is hers to tell, and while a memoir is a worthy forum or medium, who knows where she will be in half a year, a year, five years from now.
“I’ve taken back my power,” she states. Even her opening of her statement contextualizes her life with an abuser and others’ lives: “I see clearly now. I see how you gained control over the years and how you targeted me from day one. By shining so bright – me the independent, multi-lingual, smart business owner — I had what you never had. You saw in me a powerful but vulnerable well intentioned human being, and you took advantage of it as all abusers do. You never treated me as your equal. I was the perfect victim for you.”
Each step she takes is a power step, even though she has to march through a minefield of the possibility of her abuser breaking no-contact orders and fighting for every penny in a divorce.
“I’m a different person now that I finally broke the cycle,” she tells me. “I may never be ‘that’ woman I was when he first met me, but I am reclaiming the strength qualities and moving into a new version of me.”
*****
The first National Domestic Violence Awareness Month occurred in 1987, so this October, check out local social services agency pages, but most pointedly, go to the My Sister’s Place Facebook page or their web site [https://www.msplincolncounty.org/ ] for the activities in our area tied to DV awareness and celebration of the survivors and their families.
NOTE: So, the following statement, in some form that was talked about but never written by the surivor, almost ended up in the newspaper with the survivor’s name as the final signature line, but this entire fucking broken system ontop of broken system she survived has straffed the soul and fiber of the survivor, pushing her back into victim mode/mood.
This is my putting my boots to the ground, putting my feet into her boots, my words, if I was the victim to survivor. And, still today, we have people on all sides of the political and intellectual divide still asking:
Moving from Victim to Survivor to New Life
I appreciate Paul Haeder and Newport News Times for the three-part series on Domestic Violence – August 8, Sept. 24, Oct. 13). Readers received a small view into the complications and complicities involved in battered wife syndrome.
The articles were definitely “trauma-informed.” Alas, though, I am writing this as the unnamed victim in this case. I am from Canada, I met the abuser five years ago in Guatemala, where I was a thriving business owner in Antigua.
I wanted a life of adventure and travel, and so, as a 33-year-old, finding this man seemed to be a great next step in my life.
I was wrong. I was targeted. I was manipulated. I was threatened, verbally abused, and fell into the trap of the yo-yo – leaving for a day or few weeks, but being roped back by my abuser who cried, plead, and promised to change.
I was in a sort of mental cage, a prison, and a Stockholm Syndrome.
On Nov. 12, he attempted to murder me, and was charged after the deputies had to break into our bedroom where he locked himself. I was shaking, with my dog, and without a phone as he threw my lifeline into the blackberry bushes.
The grand jury indicted him on 11 charges. He was put in jail on $750,000 bail.
My life from that point on was a dichotomy of me finding strength to begin divorce procedures, working with the DA on the upcoming trial, and working two jobs, landing a really amazing counselor, and understanding those almost five years of BWS.
I have to say that a few friends here, my sister and the investigating deputy were the only ones who did not let me down. The rest of the individuals and systems failed me. This failure speaks to the larger issue of domestic violence charges and trial and divorces landing the survivor back into a re-victimization role.
I’m not going to list specific names of those who failed me, and I have to believe I am not the only victim who has been failed in Lincoln County. The Das office failed me by slowly breaking down and opting for some odd plea agreement and fear of going to trial. Our tax-payer supported public defender failed me and other DV victims by doing her job by attempting to break me down and smear my reputation. The victims advocates were not deeply ensconced in trauma informed methodology.
My divorce lawyer failed me by only really jumping into the divorce trial a day before the actual proceeding. She was disorganized, inarticulate, and unfocused.
The judges failed me, too, including the judge who found that my years with this abuser, my supporting him in his deep alcoholism and sick days (four our of seven each week), my own concussion at the hands of this husband, all the threats and my sweat equity on the house in Waldport we built was worth a $27,500 asset award (sic) to me.
Even one of the judges failed me when I attempted to get a protective order/restraining order on my abuser’s mother who was harassing me and threatening to take my dog away. He found two out of the three precedents in my favor, but the last one stopped him from awarding me protection from an out-of-control mean mother-in-law.
I will be leaving this county soon. I have my dignity shredded, but I am mending through self-reflection, a close circle of friends and family support and my counselor who has been a lifeline for me to understand how and why I stayed in this abusive relationship and what I can do to move on with life to never be taken in by a narcissist and misogynist.
Does it take two to be part of a domestic abusive marriage? Yes, and it takes more than two. I was too hopeful, too willing to try and try again, I isolated myself, letting my family and friends down without letting them the true nature of this man’s abuse and threats.
Our patriarchal society played a part in my yo-yo behavior. The media and Hollywood also pushes some sick prejudices against women fighting back. And, unfortunately, the legal system, the mental health community, the so-called advocates, lawyers, and other “support” services have failed me.
Let it be known that I was VERY involved in my cases. The one judge at the plea agreement lauded me for being a strong, powerful woman. She listened to my four-page victim impact statement and seemed moved.
This is not about the final judgment — the money, lack thereof — but for me, with my “green card,” I now face financial challenges. My big dog is my friend and emotional support, so I’m glad the mother-in-law failed to take the dog from me (she gifted him as a puppy almost three years ago).
I will be journaling and possibly writing my memoir tied to this very unsettling and emotional significant events in my life. I’m not yet forty years old, and I have so much positive energy moving on. I will never forgive this abuser, and I will always be looking behind my back from time to time, for PTSD is a never ending mental state, even in remission.
I write this to the Lincoln County community – advocates, stakeholders, families, women, all the people who believe in justice and restitution and restorative justice: beware of broken systems that will entangle you in compassionless or incompetent pencil pushers and overworked lawyers and prosecutors. Get a counselor, for sure, quickly, and steel yourself for a threadbare system that fails victims time and time again.
And, so, THAT Anniversary too is on my mind: 22 Years Ago, October 7, 2001, US-NATO Invaded Afghanistan: It Was Presented as “Act of Self Defense.” “America Was Attacked by an ‘Unnamed Foreign Power.’”
From silly to serious, these national and international celebration days give pause for serious writers.
Shoot, here are some powerful dates to remember: 9/5, International Day of Charity; 9/8, International Literacy Day; 9/10, World Suicide Prevention Day; 9/16, International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer; 9/18, World Water Monitoring Day.
Rapidly changing global context took a new meaning over the past years, hampering the literacy progress and widening inequalities across world regions, countries, and populations. In low- and middle-income countries, the share of 10-year-old children who could not read and understand a simple text with comprehension has increased from 57 per cent in 2019 to an estimated 70 per cent in 2022.
In this context, this year’s International Literacy Day will be celebrated worldwide under the theme, ‘Promotingliteracy for a world in transition: Building the foundation for sustainable and peaceful societies’.
It is incumbent upon the reader to check out national and international days, weeks and months of recognition. Heck, K12 educators could develop curricula around deep and not-so-deep topics for each month.
Heck, National Guacamole Day (9/16) might seem like a foodie thing, but in the hands of competent teachers, the details of how the dip is made unravels some seriously environmentally and culturally damaging aspects of the avocado.
Here comes the downer: Up to 20,000 acres of forest are believed to be cleared yearly to facilitate avocado crops. Water: It takes more than 500 gallons of water to grow only 2 pounds of avocados. Yep, transportation and pesticides add to the negative outcomes of a guacamole dip.
My adopted country, Mexico, pays the brunt of the avocado farming: Avocado production is valued at $3 billion annually, ahead of Mexico’s beer and tequila industries. That money has attracted the country’s cartels.
I still have journalist buddies in Juarez and elsewhere covering avocado violence: The thugs’ tactics include “protection fees,” but much worse — cutting down swaths of forest to start their own orchards. Just like the old USA Mafia days, avocado “pickers” have been forced to work at gunpoint for no pay. Trucks full of avocados have been robbed and hijacked.
Cartels even use government databases to find, extort, and kidnap avocado farmers. In some instances, cartels directly take over the farming lands, becoming ‘informal owners’ of the fields or installing avocado orchards on protected woodlands. They ensure they get their share of a thriving industry using force, intimidation, and violence.
When I was teaching college in El Paso, we adopted a systems thinking approaches to topics. We looked at redistributive justice programs, and restorative conservation. We studied embedded/embodied energy and the impact of consumer goods and services. We did cradle to grave (life cycle) analyses.
For every great idea, there are a dozen or hundreds of negative/bad consequences.
That was September, but now we’re in October? Banning, and, in some sense, book burning, if you consider being de-platformed and demonetized on the Internet. But here, from my days as a writing and literature instructor in Oregon, Washington, Texas, New Mexico, Mexico:
The American Library Association has tracked attempts to ban or restrict access to books across the United States and “to inform the public about censorship efforts in our libraries and schools.”
Last year the ALA, documented 1,269 demands to censor library books and resources, the highest number of attempted book bans since ALA began compiling data about censorship in libraries more than 20 years ago.. Of the titles entered into this report, the majority were written by or about members of the LGBTQIA+ community or by and about Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color.
Or head over to the Project Censored, and you will understand another form of “censoring” and “banning” of stories that should be at the forefront of our critical debates about our society, our world.
Banned in the USA: Banned Books Week Celebrates its 40th Anniversary as Book Bans and Challenges to Academic Freedom Surge = Link
-Cameron Samuels is a recent high school graduate and activist from the Katy Independent School District near Houston, Texas. Cameron was named the Youth Honorary Chair of Banned Books Week (the first time the title has been awarded) for actively opposing book banning in the District as a student there.
-Nico Perrino is Executive Vice-President at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, formerly known as the Foundation for Individual Rights In Education, an organization specializing in protecting academic freedom.
That’s where I also take my students – projectcensored (dot) org. The Top 25 Most Censored Stories of 2012-2022 actually threads through how broken our reprehensive and participatory democracy is.
Take a look at the ALA’s list of challenged and cancelled books, and then go to Project Censored:
Federal Safety Agency Underreports Deaths of Offshore Oil and Gas Workers;
Injustice for Incarcerated Women in Maryland after State Defunds Prerelease Facility;
School-Issued Technology Poses ;
Surveillance Risks for Students;
Facebook’s Blacklist of “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” Stifles Public Debate;
Concerns for Journalistic Independence as Gates Foundation Gives $319 Million to News Outlets.
The presentation of the Top 25 stories of 2021-2022 extends the tradition originated by Professor Carl Jensen and his Sonoma State University students in 1976, while reflecting how the expansion of the Project to include affiliate faculty and students from campuses across North America has made the Project even more diverse and robust. The Top 25 stories of 2021-2022 have been selected from several hundred candidate stories submitted by 207 student researchers from ten US college and university campuses.
You’re biting at the bit to get into stories that were reported by valiant and intrepid reporters at less well known, or so-called alternative media sites, to discover what we need to know about our democracy, our world.
Are you willing to let (sic) educators broach these topics in the school system, i.e. 6-12 classes?
Do your own biases and contexts hold you back from allowing for more critical looks at the world around you?
While the banned books week (Oct. 1-7) is worthy of discussing with your friends and family and children, getting deeper in your lives beyond your “news” feeds and posts on social media platforms is paramount in making wise decisions based on knowledge and points of view.
In Portland, where I worked for years as educator and social worker, I went to a Peace Park near the Lloyd Center. It’s almost hidden, not a high profile site. But what I gathered from my visits was a reminder of another sort of banning. My friend, a US Air Force combat veteran friend, Rusty Nelson, spoke about peace and alternative ways to serve one’s country at a Spokane high school graduation ceremony.
His message was one of peace and asking students who were graduating to look deeper into the role of the military and politicians in exporting harm to the world, as well as bringing back that harm to the US in the form of damaged soldiers.
In Portland, I worked with soldiers, veterans, many of them homeless and struggling through substance abuse. Their problems occurred through in many cases bad leadership in boot camp. All my female clients had been sexually assaulted by their own soldiers, in the USA and sometimes in combat areas.
As a substitute teacher, here in Lincoln County, I too have felt the knife of banishment. I was asked to leave a class I was teaching when students asked about drug abuse, homelessness, and their role in understanding themes in the books I was directed to help them with – Of Mice and Men and Animal Farm.
Banning, disenfranchisement, ghosting, gas-lighting, marginalizing, manipulating facts, being found guilty without a fair hearing or airing of a situation, those are also the Scarlet Letter moments in this supposed free and open society.
I have to say to Rusty, who was permanently banned from the Spokane School system as an expert and active member of Spokane’s justice community, “Peace out, brother.” He and his wife started the Peace and Justice Action League of Spokane. Here are comments he made in 2016:
“Be creative, kind, considerate. Be involved, outspoken, radical, subversive. Stop worrying about where your next dollar is coming from, and be concerned about where your neighbor’s next breath of fresh air and drink of clean water are coming from, where your child’s next raft of information is coming from, where your next tax dollar is going, your next consumer dollar. Make your needs known to your local officials and be tenacious.”
Finally, you will hear nothing in the Mainstream Mush and Muddling and Murdering Press about this reality – Oct. 7, 2001.
Freedom to Lie Press. Here, reality. A Day of Infamy (many many of those for all the countries bombed, invaded, couped, sanctioned by the U$A)!
The legal argument used by Washington and NATO to invade Afghanistan was that the September 11 attacks constituted an undeclared “armed attack” “from abroad” by an unnamed foreign power, and that consequently “the laws of war” apply, allowing the nation under attack, to strike back in the name of “self-defense”.
The “Global War on Terrorism” was officially launched by the Bush administration on September 11, 2001. On the following morning (September 12, 2001), NATO’s North Atlantic Council meeting in Brussels, adopted the following resolution:
“if it is determined that the [September 11, 2001] attack against the United States was directed from abroad [Afghanistan] against “The North Atlantic area“, it shall be regarded as an action covered by Article 5 of the Washington Treaty”. (emphasis added)
In this regard, Article 5 of the Washington Treaty stipulates that if:
“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.” (NATO, What is Article 5, NATO Topics – NATO and the Scourge of Terrorism, accessed 24 November 2009, emphasis added; October 7, 2001. Afghanistan was invaded under the doctrine of “self-defense”)
I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a colour photograph of God Almighty — and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable.
What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.”
— Kurt Vonnegut, Bennington College Address (1970)
Something compelling and sad about that life. Kurt. Born and raised in Indianapolis, (1922-2007). Iconic. More than Slaughterhouse Five.
I remember the reading, at UT-El Paso, my first year in the English graduate program — why that, and I was working for newspapers, had a language gig, one-on-one, in Juarez with a Mexican engineer working for Packard Electric. I was deep into writing stories and a novel. Lots of cross border ruckus stuff. Drugs and some other cross-the-tortilla-curtain smuggling. That was October 19, 1983. Two feet from fame.
It may have just been a coincidence it was a Homecoming event, but he was there, speaking to graduate students in a classroom. Then after the reading, a party. The obligatory after-reading-party.
Wine, whisky, tequila. Kurt was looking for Pall Malls, and I had two packs ready — cheap cigs from Juarez. I brought a bottle of mescal, with the worm, and we talked — me, Vonnegut and two other folk. But he and I talked face to face. I had no fear, no compunction to put anyone on pedestals, and we talked about Dresden and some of my life.
I grabbed Dixie cups, threw some lime wedges into each one and poured me, Kurt and the two other people shots of the agave drink.
These guys and gals are many times inquisitive about the people who parachute into their lives — young people, like myself. Twenty-six and with a donkey cart full of stories already. I had family who survived that bombing in Dresden — in fact, my Canadian mom, divorced from my German father, had the sugar, salt, flour and grease ceramic flower containers that were buried for safekeeping in Dresden. They survived that bombing.
Vonnegut never survived that role he played as a captured US soldier picking up the carcasses of the dead in Dresden. He was deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was imprisoned in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse, schlachthof fünf (5). He survived the allied bombing.
We’re talking several days of heavy bombers from US Air Force and RAF, up to 1,350 aircraft in total, with their payloads ready for factory, neighborhood, family and town — 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices. Like all UK-American bombing, a firestorm ensued, which destroyed more than 1,600 acres of the city and more than 25,000 were killed with so many more wounded, and yet more psychologically scarred.
Kurt was one of those who never recovered. His book, Slaughterhouse Five, took years to write, coming out in 1969. It is an anti-war book. I saw him again 20 years later, in Spokane, at a reading and then, the proverbial party afterwards. Pall Malls he still chain smoked. This crowd was a bigger crowd, and I remember having that chance to go over to him and rejiggering his memory. The party in one of the faculty’s houses in New Mexico. Two horses and the fields of giant green chilies growing. And the bottle of worm-blessed mezcal.
I know this seems narcissistic, but the guy remembered me, recalled that night, and the drinking of the agave fermented elixir. He asked about that mezcal again. I repeated that I had just come back from Mexico a few years earlier, and spent time in Oaxaca where there are thousands of acres of agave plants (200 varieties) grown for tequila and mezcal. I told him about how the curanderos and even the narcotraficantes use the liquor in their ceremonies and baptismals, as in vetting their sicarios in the drug runners mafia. Hired killers.
Some of what we talked about went back to El Paso, and then he kept asking me about my life in Mexico, and the booze. He wondered why this time I hadn’t brought a bottle of the mezcal with the gusano (worm) sunk at the bottom. I told him that tequilas were becoming trendy and boutique brewed. I said that mezcal was becoming popular too, thanks to the marketing of it in Mexico on the international stage.
He told me he recalled being really inebriated, and that he had some crazy dreams. “No hangover in the morning. I so wanted to call you to let you know you were right. The dreams and the lack of headache.” He laughed hard, smoke pouring out of his mouth around bedraggled teeth.
His memory was jarred, and he laughed at something he remembered out there in El Paso. He liked the wild west aspect of the town, and the good Mexican food, and he liked the mix of people. Almost all the students who listened to him were of Mexican descent. The department — English Department — wasn’t 87 percent Latino (like the town), but we did have a few in our ranks. The school itself drew people from around Mexico, Latin America and Africa. Engineering. Nursing. Mining. Not many documented or undocumented immigrants were rooting for their children to go get a useless degree in English literature or creative writing. For the most part. In Spokane he was railing against Bush and Cheney. The neocons. He was only a few years from his untimely death.
He and I talked intensely (as intensely as Kurt could be because he always had that raspy laugh, like a two-stroke lawnmower engine choking down, barely hanging onto a spark). He laughed a lot. But when it came to Bush and war, he was serious. He talked a lot about Bush. He asked about El Paso. He asked about my own threadbare travels and even more threadbare writing (paid publishing) career (sic).
I told him the Mexican saying — “Para todo mal, mezcal, y para todo bien, también; y si no hay remedio litro y medio” — For all bad, mezcal, and for all good, as well; and if there is no remedy, liter and a half.
He asked how the hell I got from Mexico and El Paso to Spokane, to Gonzaga. I tried to squeeze in as much as I could before our talk was overcome by hangers on, the groupies. I told him that even now, after 20 years, I was still teaching as an adjunct, and that I was still organizing part-timers in a union. I also told him I was fiddling around another degree, a masters in urban and regional planning. He knew who Jane Jacobs was. The two of them lived in New York, and Kurt was also a fan of her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. He too was against the Robert Moses’ project to kill the Village, with the Lower Manhattan Expressway.
This all is percolating inside after watching the Weide documentary, Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time. The life of this man, and the life of his family, is laid out, but Robert Weide had an unusual relationship with Vonnegut — more than two decades of friendship. Lots of letters back and forth. The project about this man’s life. Weide was a fan of Vonnegut in high school. He became a filmmaker, and he wanted to capture Kurt’s life in film. This too took Weide a lifetime to produce. It’s a compelling piece, one that is about Kurt, about his failings and his features, about what his kids have to say about Kurt the dad. The ups and downs and ups and downs of his literary life. He was obsessed, and he was almost always a writer.
In so many ways, the movie is about a man out of his own time. He was too old for the Love and Peace Generation, but they adopted him with his iconic books held deep in their souls. Many Vonnegut fans were fans, having never really read his work. I’ve read six of his books, not all of the ones he wrote. I was happy about his books, but I wasn’t obsessed.
Watching this flick, I have a deeper regard for the man, for the country he believed in (one I never believed in) and his world which was big and large on one level, but in many ways, very finite and small. He was a New York and East Coast guy, and he was an icon, a guy who actors and painters and celebrities went to. In his presence, he was a simple guy. I never thought of him as literary. I have been in the company of many literary folk, poets, novelists, journalists.
This is why I adore the time I had with Kurt — limited, two feet from his fame, and now part of the fabric of my own tattered quilt. My life. Failures, mostly, in the literary sense. And this is still stuck in my craw, but I am more resigned with that fact. Timing, disposition, vision, limitations, focus, and a dream. His background is so different from my own. His parts to his whole so different than mine. I’d say nothing we have in common. Nothing, really, but writing, or the knowledge that that is a private and profound thing — to write, to make up and to be a journalist too.
In the documentary, there is a real loneliness that reverberates in this guy’s life. Watch it if you can. About a time long gone. In the context of now, too, with Nazi’s in Ukraine, with the American ghostlands, all the same actors he railed against with the Bush Family and the wars. But, a man like Vonnegut, while immense on many levels, still believed in a lot of goodness in people. Even those in politics. He held a belief that someone was good, something was good about Clinton, and this was before Obama. I can only guess what he would have thought about that charlatan, that war criminal.
They all are. And, now, seeing the propaganda machines in the USA, around the Western world, in the UK and EU, and down under, in Australia, it must be said that the same criminals who bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they are the same ones fomenting war and hatred with the psychological operations. With the corporate-legacy-mainstream-commercial media part and parcel of their slick Goebbels-Edward Bernays lying game.
Amazing to see the script flipped, and the USA supporting Nazis, and the complete revamping and rewriting of history. Putin as Hitler: What a fucking sad time making that comparison. Sick, Russia lost 27 million defeating the Germans. Putin remembers, and he never knew one brother who died in World War Two. Relatives killed and wounded. What a creepy country, USA, and it is also my mother’s birthplace, Canada, that is creepy. My grandparents from UK, Scotland, that part of the world = creepy. And, well, those Germans, what are those countrymen saying about Putin? Hitler and Putin? It makes no sense. My family was forced onto the Russian front as German conscripts. My grandfather was a pilot in World War I.
Slaughterhouse Five, and the Nazis, and the Allies. One in the same.
Imagine the time I could have spent with Kurt if I had had the chance to pull him aside, take him to Chihuahua, spend a week with him in Mexico. Imagine the education I would have gotten, and the one Vonnegut would have gotten.
Sometimes that slipstream comes from a place of mythology, a dream, some biscuit of exceptionalism. All the soured lies of history. But Vonnegut knew that. He wrote about that. Kids in high school were assigned those books.Breakfast of Champions. Cat’s Cradle. Mother Night.
Each of his poems puts a chink in the armor of the war makers. Robert Bly’s Friday night appearance at SFCC will be part touchstone for peace and part riling-up of the audience to bear witness and take action.
Bly, a preeminent American poet whose 80-year-old voice and intellect have helped to sculpt an important vision of literary art and cultural reclamation, will speak as part of Spokane Falls Community College’s “Lit Live!”
While Bly is a sought-after voice of reason and lyrical charm, his poetic pulse has been stimulated by a life alone, working far from the rarified atmosphere of college or university settings. His roots are in Mansfield, Minn., and in the furrows of hard-working immigrants where his reverence for land and people germinated.
Translator of such great poets as South America’s Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo and Antonio Machado, India’s Ghalib, Spain’s Lorca and Jim & eacute;nez, and Norway’s Rolf Jacobsen and Olav H. Hauge, Bly’s output of articles, essays and criticism is matched by his more than 40 books of poetry.
Enwrapped in solitude, Bly spins ruminations shaped by other cultures, other poets — as in “Meeting the Man Who Warns Me”:
I dream that I cannot see half of my life. “I look back, it is like the blind spot in a car./ So much just beyond the reach of our eyes, what tramples the grasses while the horses are asleep, the hoof marks all around the cave mouth…/ what slips in under the door at night, and lies exhausted on the floor in the morning.
Also slated for the Music Auditorium stage on Friday night are four male drummers, pounding animal skins as a tribute to “the wild man” in Bly’s Iron John. His 1991 book examines the dichotomy between Savage Man, who is both wounded and inflicts wounds on earth and humankind, and Wild Man, the shaman-healer, Zen priest or woodsman. In Iron John, we have a book about men and the lost energy of visions, fairy tales and the male drumbeat of power and depth. It’s a book of healing and reaffirmation of soul.
Bly also helped redirect the creative surge of Modernism’s influence on poetry by unraveling his words and lines into what Victoria Frenkel Harris has called “incorporative consciousness.” Bly believes that the poet or creative thinker must go “much deeper than the ego … at the same time [becoming] aware of many other beings.” In a sense, he believes that “leaping out” of the intellectual world and into what we intuitively hold as our own realities best explores the paradoxes of two worlds: the world of our psychic pain, and the world in which we must adjust to observing the rules.
Bly came to prominence during the Vietnam War era — a time that tore at the psychic integration of American culture. He recalls how controversial his work was then: “Most of the English teachers in the universities hated our doing ‘political poems,’ as they were called. That still happens,” he recently said about those heady days of the ’60s. “When I’m at a reception at a university these days, an English professor may come up to me and ask: ‘How do you feel now about those poems you wrote during the war?’ They want me to disown the poems. I say, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t write more of them.’”
Bly, along with David Ray, created the group American Writers Against the Vietnam War. The first important protest volume was A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War (1966), edited by Bly and Ray.
In one of his poetry collections, The Light Around the Body, Bly cast a beacon of hazy light upon the symbiotic relationship of poverty and racism and the country’s involvement in the Vietnam War.
But now, in 2006, with the stink of Abu Ghraib and Fallujah still enveloping Mr. Bush’s war, Bly speaks with singular impetus in his recent work, The Insanity of Empire: A Book of Poems Against the Iraq War. “The invasion of Iraq is the biggest mistake any American administration has ever made,” he says. “The most dangerous and greatest confrontation is between twentieth-century capitalist fundamentalism and eleventh-century Muslim fundamentalism,” he writes.
For aficionados of the poetic form, The Insanity of Empire embodies both Bly’s disdain for immoral governments and Bly as an the artful practitioner of the ghazal, an Arab poetic form:
I don’t want to frighten you, but not a stitch can be taken/ On your quilt unless you study. The geese will tell you/ A lot of crying goes on before the dawn comes.
SFCC’s literary publication, Wire Harp, and the endowment for Lit Live! will not be the only beneficiaries of Bly’s incantations on Friday night (50 percent of the gate goes to the endowment). Conscious Living — a local business that creates events including the annual Celebrating Body, Mind and Spirit Expo and A Psychic Affair — is partnering with SFCC.
As a reminder of Bly’s continuing relevance, consider that he’s an anti-war activist of long standing. In the Dec. 9, 2002 issue of The Nation, Bly was one of the first to beat the earth drum against the impending war, in his poem, “Call and Answer”:
Tell me why it is we don’t lift our voices these days/ And cry over what is happening. Have you noticed & r & The plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting?/ I say to myself: “Go on, cry. What’s the sense/ Of being an adult and having no voice? Cry out! See who will answer!”
When the bureaucratic well runs dry, you as survivor of DV are on your own, especially when family and friends are riding in their own Private Idaho.
Preface: According to band member Kate Pierson, “Private Idaho” was inspired by the feeling of being trapped and isolated, like a prisoner in solitary confinement. The song originated when Pierson had a vision of someone disappearing into themselves and being cut off from the world around them.
Note that in Western Capitalism, so so many people are trapped, self-imposed, sure, but mostly dictated by the oppression, the constant celebrity cult fawning, all those elites lording over the masses; i.e., the 80 percent. Think about all the services (social, mutual aid, support, food, schooling, child rearing, aging, disability) that were not there in the first place in this Number One Nation on Earth Shit-Hole, and those that were there as threadbare services designed to clog and fail … and you get a picture of how lost we are in this putrid world.
Think about domestic abuse, AKA Battered Wife Syndrome. Think about dysfunctional courts, dysfunctional prosecutions, dysfunctional defense attorneys, dysfunctional investigators and more than dysfunctional cops and even victims rights advocates who are to lunch, or just so fearful of rocking the boat they just do the basics or do not stick out their necks for fear of being sent to HR and being put on some fucking PIP — Personal Improvement Plan!
So, when a bloke like me ground truths with one example of one woman in one county dealing with one abuser and one last straw that precipitated calling 911, the world in an oyster is the world all of you readers will engage with at one point in your life struggling to make ends meet, struggling to understand how Capitalism and Patriarchy and Forced Implosion of Services are orchestrated by some of the most sociopathic and mean “leaders” in “society.”
Stages of Grief, Disempowering the Abuser, Healing
Operator: What’s the nature of your call, ma’am?”
Victim: “I’m … I’m locked out of my house. My, he … my husband, he just tried to strangle me … suffocate me …”
Operator: “Where are you now? Are you in a safe place?”
Victim: “Oh my god, safe? I don’t know.”
Operator: “Ma’am. Where are you now? In the house with him?”
Victim: “No, no … I got away. I’m at a neighbor’s house. He’s locked himself in our house.”
My friend is now almost a year from that frantic call last November. She’s in counseling. She knows the facts, too, rattling them off while she puffs a cigarette:
· “It can take seven attempts before a survivor permanently leaves an abusive partner.”
· “Around 20 people per minute are physically abused by an intimate partner in the United States.”
· “I’ve read that around 31% of all women will experience domestic violence. Can you believe that?
· “For Black women, that statistic rises to than 40%. It’s insane how much domestic abuse goes on.”
Even after eleven months navigating and meeting with the Lincoln County courts, the victim’s assistance program, a local counselor, and a divorce lawyer, my friend is in many ways right back at the trigger point of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from the moment she got away from a couch pillow and 220-pound man forcing her not to breathe.
It’s not a disorder, PTSD (or BWS), in the traditional sense, but rather an overarching set of fears, habits, thinking processes, self-perceptions and societal norms that rush through any victim’s or survivor’s head. That incident she was surprised to read ended up in the Newport News Times the following Wednesday that chilling November evening.
That was a shock – in black and white. That same week, a grand jury indicted the abuser – the accused – on most of the charges leveled at him by the arresting deputies. A husband and wife – where she ended up fleeing to with her dog – were also called in by the Grand Jury as witnesses, as well as the investigating deputy.
That 911 call and the indictment were not stages one and two. For her, she had been forced for more than four years to leave the house, or even when they were camping together, forced to flee from his very presence because of his heavy abuse of alcohol and constant verbal and financial abuse.
He gave her a concussion two years ago. She lied to the attending medical personal saying, “I fell in a river and hit my head.”
She lived a life of isolation, developing a contrived “everything is okay” attitude, but deep down she feared that he might one day just kill her. Nights were bad when he passed out after consuming huge amounts of beer and booze. Each time she left, he attempted to reel her back, she tells me. And that worked over and over and over. Apologies, big male crocodile tears telling he’ll never do it again, and then this woman’s need to believe she was committed to marriage for the long haul.
She repeats to me – “Can you imagine if we had a child? I understand why victims of domestic abuse who have kids get priority in shelters, for services.”
My Sister’s Place is a Template Needing Replication a Thousand Times
Taking power back is one of the goals of Amber Wishoff-Martin who is the director of My Sister’s Place in Newport. She was in a whirlwind when I first made contact with her.
On her mind was on my friend’s case – Wishoff-Martin asked for the perpetrator’s name and the date my friend contacted My Sister’s Place. But Amber was in the midst of putting together a flyer for an August 15 training in Newport sponsored by Catholic Charities: “Understanding How Immigration Laws Can Help Survivors of Domestic Violence, Sexual Assault, Child Sex Abuse, Stalking, & Human Trafficking.”
I broached the issues of overworked DAs; not always trauma-informed/sensitive victim’s advocates; the nuances of defense attorneys and prosecutors meeting to “horse trade” charges to forgo or forestall a trial based on a reduced set of charges in a plea agreement.
Wishoff-Martin states she wants to be “a voice of compatibility” when looking at the challenges typical of domestic abuse prosecutions. Amber noted the County’s domestic violence diversion court is effective. In the end, though, the shortage of prosecutors and defense attorneys has “a direct impact on survivors.”
We’ll get into the benefits and services of MSP, but one organization I contacted is Portland-based, SCARS – Survivor Collective Alliance, Reach Society. Rachelle Scheele is the principal cofounder SCARS. One of the incredibly impactful aspects of this collective is the Podcasts: Survivors Speak Truth. This is an abuse and trauma survivor-run Podcast. The goal is to “elevate survivor voices and amplify survivor stories.”
Healing takes time, as all the practitioners agree. Some of that roadwork, according to SCARS and social workers, including Heidi H. Heild, thirty years in social work, is drilling down to the truth of abuse. SCARS ramifies healing from trauma through peer support: “self-advocacy, healing, outreach, education, and restorative justice.”
I asked Heidi what goes wrong, usually, in domestic violence court cases. “The lack of advocacy for the victim, revictimization through the court process.”
Her biggest push is creating more services for domestic violence victims/survivors. “Not all DV victims are alike,” Heild says. “Some need only a little help to exit abusive relationships and get on with their lives; at the other extreme are those deeply traumatized by their experiences and in need of extensive professional help to regain a basic ability to function independently. Clearly, different types and levels of service are needed.”
Just this past February, Amber wrote to the House Committee on Judiciary supporting HB2933, a $10 million increase for funding the Oregon Domestic and Sexual Violence Services (ODSVS). She spoke of the increased need for survivor services.
“Our agency, like others across the state, saw exponential growth in calls to hotlines and requests for safe, emergency shelter and services. In the last year we took over 1,300 calls on our “Hopeline,” a 24-hour crisis hotline for Lincoln County support. This was a massive increase over what we have seen in years past,” she wrote.
She emphasizes that a safe place to sleep at night when fleeing domestic violence is a life saver. In Lincoln County, last year, MSP offered 4,140 bed nights to adult survivors and 1,938 nights to their children. MSP, also known as My Safe Place, has been in Lincoln County attempting to meet the needs of victims and survivors for 42 years.
For my friend, who called MSP a week before the attempted murder, said she hit a brick wall as there was no space for her at the time. She told me she’s not throwing aspersions at MSP, but without a place to stay, she went back to her abuser, and a week later, the 911 call was made. “I went back to the abuser and here I am now ten months later as he just pled out for the attempted murder.”
End of Part Two
Here, in the public record, the impact statement, as in VICTIM impact statement: More Ground Truthing/More Reality Not Hitched to Celebrity Culture (Johnny Depp or Russell Brand or Spitzer or Epstein or Bill Clinton or Joe Biden, et al, and their abuse, or alleged abuse).
Quoted verbatim, with permission.
To the Court and to my Abuser:
I see clearly now. I see how you gained control over the years and how you targeted me from day one. By shining so bright — me the independent, multi-lingual, smart business owner — I had what you never had. You saw in me a powerful but vulnerable well intentioned human being, and you took advantage of it as all abusers do. You never treated me as your equal. I was the perfect victim for you.
I didn’t know back then, but I know now that I married a predator. It was truly scary for me when I talked with your ex fiancé, Mary, and realized how your abusive behaviors only escalated with the years. Her life was shattered, and her current life, married with children, still reflects fear for you, of you. The fact that you never did the work on yourself to heal your own traumas or anger management, that is forefront, but for a victim of more then four years of abuse, I find it difficult to empathize with you. You have continued with your hate, your misogyny and your control; you have only gotten worse. You abused Mary too and probably every woman that ever crossed your path. You’re a serial abuser.
The control you gained on me over the years was very insidious. The cycle of abuse was vicious. From complete isolation & neglect, to long periods of raging and alcohol abuse, to rejection and abandonment, among others, you wore me down and turned me into a victim of Stockholm Syndrome. You belittled me and threatened me every chance you had. You made a point to make my life miserable. You pushed me away and reeled me back in whenever you were pleased with fake apologies, crocodile tears and empty promises to change and be better. I believe you are not redeemable.
You wanted a submissive wife at home to cook, to clean and to fall under your terrible will.
You wanted a punching bag for your emotions, and I was it. That facilitated you to show your best behaviors and charming self to other people. It’s not classic Jekyll & Hide behavior, but it sure was close. Nobody really knew what was really happening behind closed doors. A living hell, that’s what it was all along, all day everyday with you. I was constantly walking on eggshells, sleeping on the couch with my purse hidden under my legs and the dog on a leash, always on a fight or flight mode. I would clean vomit and piss all over the bathroom every other day.
You would hide the car keys so I couldn’t go anywhere. You would lock me outside of the house.
You would threaten to hurt the dog if I would to go anywhere.
You would manipulate me and force me into your deviant sexual fantasies so you would have to seek sex from other women.
You would attack my integrity and make fun of my origins, my family, my friends, my accent, my height, my weight. There was always something wrong with me, any ideas I would have or everything I would do. I was criticized, blamed, and brought down every day.
You gaslit me constantly, trying to convince me that what I saw I didn’t see, what I heard I didn’t hear, what I felt I didn’t feel. That was an ongoing narcissistic plan to convince me that my reality was completely false, and that’s a serious abuse tactic & psychological torture method I have learned now while going to counseling. You were grooming me into losing every little bit of self confidence I had so you could abuse me more intensely and keep me isolated.
The way you treated me all along is a statement of who you are as a human being. Nine months in a county jail with no counseling, no group work, no substance abuse programs just makes you more of a danger to society. But not to me.
For the longest time, I tried to understand your relationship with your mother, and I finally got it: You both are the same person, you both are despicable human beings. You can’t stand each other, yet you use each other to get your evil ways. I don’t think you were born an abuser, but that you became one: forged by another one, your father and your rotten mother’s response to a husband’s abuse. The abused that becomes an abuser is classic, but it doesn’t make me feel vindicated. Everything you guys plotted against me over the years and especially since you got incarcerated were really enlightening to me. She enables you all the way and you don’t know any better than being an abuser & addict.
I have now unraveled all of your lies, including the cheating and the nasty campaign you ran amongst friends and family. Rarely mentioning that we were married, keeping me hidden so you could abuse me better, your have lied throughout this relationship, to me and to others. You also targeting vulnerable and low self-esteem women by luring them into your hotel rooms. I’m truly disgusted. By now, your life has no more secrets for me. Maybe you can find some relief in that.
I wanted to be loved.
I wanted to help.
I wanted to make you happy.
I wanted us to be team #1.
Sure, I have cried, screamed and ran away my fair share as I was reacting to this ongoing nightmare. But unlike you, I never intended to hurt, control and manipulate. I helped you through every struggle you had. I was your cheerleader. I followed, encouraged and helped you in all your projects, as crazy as they were. I was by your side every time you experienced alcohol withdrawals, when you were sick or injured. And so on.
I had good intentions; I wanted a lifetime marriage & partner. But you wouldn’t appreciate anything I would do for you. I did a lot for you, for us. I was a good, loving & faithful wife. I am the one that helped you keeping your head above the water. Without me, you would have sunken a long time ago. Remember the person you first met in Antigua, Guatemala? An independent & strong woman, loved and respected by everyone? Well, by the time you got incarcerated, I was barely a shadow of that person, of myself. I had checked out emotionally. I couldn’t bear any of the abuse anymore. I was at my lowest point and this is exactly where you wanted me to be so you could control, lie, manipulate, cheat and abuse me even more. You thought you had me good; I know you never thought I would call the police on you! You’ve mistaken my kindness for weakness.
I jeopardized my life to flee from you and the abuse on many occasions by flying away, driving away, leaving numerous different jobs, turning down opportunities, sleeping in the car, streets, motels, crashing at friends’ homes.
They say that it takes on average 7 times for a victim to flee her abuser for good. That’s about what it took me to stand for myself and call the police. And yes, I did come back to you plenty of times. I genuinely wanted things to work for us and help you. I loved you very much.
But I know now that I never had a real chance to make this marriage work. For you, it wasn’t about love, respect and devotion. It was all about control, manipulation & abuse. You never loved me. I am no longer ashamed I have been shackled by you because I understand the dynamics of battered wife syndrome.
I am no longer a victim.
You used everything I ever shared with you, with honesty and vulnerability, to manipulate me and keep me around. I was so scared of what would happen if I didn’t obey you. You would threaten me into withdrawing yourself from the green card application so I would be deported. You would hide my passport while you were gone on your trips so I wouldn’t escape. You would make me spend every bit of money I would make so you could control me financially. I could go on forever.
Nothing will ever excuse nor explain what happened on the night of November 11th when for the first time in my life I dialed 911. Who the fuck do you think you are to feel that’s it’s okay to assault me and contemplate killing me? You really scared me. As you grabbed me by the throat, locked my arms behind my back, stuffed my face in the couch, forced a pillow over my head and tried to suffocate me, I thought for sure I would die. You tried to kill me, Abuser!
You must have thought that I had to pay for every woman in your life that let you down and disappointed you. Or maybe you sought some kind of vengeance against women, me, with your dad’s murder anniversary coming up. It took me some time to realize it, but I surely was in great danger! There is nothing I could have done for you justify assaulting me. No trauma or addiction of yours could explain or diminish your actions. I thought about that night many times; there was no happy ending possible. I would of end up dead one day soon anyways. You were out of control and more aggressive by the day. And remember when you gave me concussion in Sedona after hitting me on the head? Remember me begging for my life as you were choking me on the bed? Those burdens are now all on you. I am washing my hands of it. I refuse to let any of the abuse you put me through define me anymore.
The person you assaulted that night exists no more. I am in process of regaining all the self confidence you took away from me, taking back control over my life and healing from all the trauma you caused me. Make no mistake, you can’t fool me anymore. Although you’ve shaken me to my core, you didn’t succeed to kill me and I am now growing stronger than ever.
That’s my biggest victory. I am finally seeing you for the monster that you are. I am standing up for myself. Unlike you, I never sought vengeance. By now, I only want you to take accountability and be held legally responsible for what you did to me. I am finding myself much more peaceful knowing exactly who and what I was dealing with. I know you know exactly what you did to me, that and how much you’ve abused me over the years and it’s going to haunt and torture your consciousness forever, no matter how drunk you get.
YOU will have to live with those thoughts ever after.The truth is that you are a danger to society. You have put me through some much abuse and you endangered me and my dog, so many times. You are an abuser in the most classic sense; you drive intoxicated; you are a predator; you are a misogynist, a narcissist, a sociopath, racist and a total fraud. What you have put me through, I don’t wish it on anybody. You are an imminent danger to women and young girls.
You have lucked out and received a plea agreement, and I know your think you have won, that you will get something over on the probation officials, that you can scam the system, and that you will drink again and even attempt to contact me. You should have received prison time.
I truly hope you will heal from your own childhood trauma, through anger management and addiction treatment, and that you will at some point be the better human being I always thought you could be, but I strongly doubt any of these will transpire.
You will hurt again and fuck it up again like you always. How was your time in jail? Just over 8 months, right? How miserable were you? That’s nothing compared to what you have put me through and what I have endured because of you. I was in a prison all day everyday living in serious fear. You plead for easier final punishment because you got scared like a little boy. You shit your pants. I was always the bigger person, not you. You can’t even face your own truth and admit your terrible behaviors and mistakes. It hurts too much to face the reality of your life full of regrets, doesn’t it?
Throughout these months, I never contacted you, didn’t contact your family nor your friends. I am commanding you to never ever get in contact with me, nor stalk me in any way, shape or form. Not me, my family, my friends. Don’t even try because I won’t hesitate to defend myself this time around. After everything you put me through, I would hope you would understand and leave me alone forever. I have given enough of my soul to the dark dark motives in your heart and head. Never again.
I’ll end this statement by saying this: For me, you are a spineless worthless piece of shit and there is no redemption for someone like you. Most importantly, you have now become a total stranger to me.
[Photo: 8-year-old girl reads victim impact statement in court after her mother was beaten.]
End Note: I’ll write something in between this piece and the last one, around the power of patriarchy, marriage dynamics, what happens in divorce court, and the bullshit intentions of abusers like this guy playing the system in those “mandatory” anger management and alcohol-substance abuse “classes.”
While August 19 was International Humanitarian Day, just a short stone’s throw from the Waldport Post Office is a hub of volunteers and one director feeding the soul of the needy on a weekly basis. For manager Nicole Person, her 10 years of service with Meals on Wheels in Waldport have been a lesson in humility and nutritional needs of those receiving the hot and frozen meals.
Most of the 55 meals that are delivered by volunteers go to housebound recipients who are elderly, and many of the volunteers are also elderly but able-bodied and capable of driving those meals to the worthy recipients.
As an historical aside, the Meals on Wheels program started during World War Two, in London, as the so-called “blitz” crumbled people’s homes and disenabled them from preparing and cooking meals.
Nicole points out this home-delivered meal program throughout the U.S. significantly improves diet quality, reduces food insecurity and ups the quality-of-life among the recipients.
For those concerned about tax dollars and so-called entitlement program expenditures, the Meals on Wheels program reduces taxpayer funds allotted to hospitals, nursing homes or other expensive community-based services.
The 62-year-old Nicole lives in Seal Rock, but her life started in Los Altos, California, where she graduated from Saint Francis High School (Mountain View). She’s worked in Atlanta for Health Unlimited, a supplement company. She graduated from Stevens College in Missouri.
The bottom line for Nicole and her volunteers is bringing the gift of food to folks aging in place. Like the local postal delivery person, volunteers for Meals on Wheels sometimes become the first line of defense for people living in precarious situations.
There is a plethora of disadvantages for an aging population we all face, as either aging folk or family with aging relatives in our midst:
• The economy is out of control in terms of unending inflation; the safety nets are being defunded by both political parties, so there is increased pressure on health services; many jobs are unfilled, so older people in need of income end up in jobs that are too physically demanding which put them at risk for mental and physical harm.
• The biggest concern is the atomization of our society, where families are pulled apart and cast themselves far and wide, away from aging parents and grandparents who are in need of home maintenance support and transportation needs.
• The biggest issue is, of course, not just mobility, but finding a group of people for social support, people to interact with, to break bread with and just to be in their presence.
The Meals on Wheels for our area covers Linn, Benton and Lincoln counties. It is part of the Oregon Cascades West Council of Governments Community Services Program. The COG has been providing meals in our area for 43 years.
Around 500 meals are prepared daily for Siletz, Toledo, Lincoln City, Newport and Waldport in Newport. According to the program parameters, any individual or a couple in which one member is 60 or older, as well as Native Americans 55 and older, is eligible for delivered meals. Those with mobility restrictions and other Medicare provisos can get frozen meals also delivered to cover seven days a week.
Nicole Person is proud of Waldport’s volunteers and the community at large for supporting the Meals on Wheels program. The blurb on the pamphlet I picked up there says it all: “Meals on Wheels is much more than just a meal. It’s also a link to your community. Seniors eligible for Meals on Wheels know that they’ll not only have a nutritious meal each day, but also a short, friendly visit and safety check by our dedicated volunteer drivers. If you don’t answer your door when our driver arrives, they won’t just leave your meal and drive away. Special efforts are always taken to find out if you need help, and any concerns are reported quickly and appropriately.”
For summer months, the hot meal program only covers Mondays and Fridays because the Waldport Wednesday Market unfortunately takes up much parking. Additionally, Nicole stressed her aging volunteers and on-site meal recipients should not be put at risk attempting to find parking or crossing the street during the 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. market hours.
The three-day-a-week hot meals program starts up again in October, but again, those who are eligible in our area can get a meal a day through the frozen meal program.
The Waldport program serves Yachats and Seal Rock, as well as folk up the Alsea River. Thousands of hot meals a year are prepped in Waldport as well as the delivery of frozen packaged meals for eligible homebound citizens.
While this piece initially highlighted International Humanitarian Day, Meals on Wheels does fit that definition. The saying, “it takes a village to raise a child,” can be applied to a larger arena: “It takes a village to support a person in a humanitarian crisis.”
We have record-high humanitarian needs around the world. The 2023 World Humanitarian Day built on that metaphor of “a collective endeavor to grow global appreciation of humanitarian work.”
The Waldport Meals on Wheels is doing humanitarian good for each individual served, the volunteers and for the larger community. Nicole Person is just one of many people working to ease food insecurity and to increase the community-based safety net.
The most difficult aspect of writing about BWS — battered wife syndrome or intimate partner violence — is that as a man, I have to embrace reality: gender violence is not just fostered by the socialization of men to be more powerful than women, but for so many judges, lawyers, DAs and the public, this relationship is considered a two-way street with both man and woman to be equally responsible for the victimization.
This patriarchal false balancing then continues to socialize many men to believe they have a right to create the need to abuse power and to control women. It’s that vicious cycle of seeing dad abuse mom, and then becoming an abuser himself.
I’m writing this because I believe truth telling — my own bearing witness to just one BWS case in Lincoln County over the course of more than a year and a half — can be instructive to the reader.
I will say upfront that the experience here in Lincoln County has been far from a bed of roses for my friend, who is young (40), and is independent, strong and intelligent. But after those years of abuse by a drunkard, and then the 911 call last year, she thought she had finally unmasked the failures she kept beating herself up for and finding some safe space from which to spend time to change.
Is it possible for an abusive man — who had intimated murdering her would be easily covered up — to be rehabilitated? Can a man be restored — a man raised by a macho father; an angry arrested-developed male vociferous in his misogyny; a violent guy; and a big-time narcissist and alcohol abuser?
This is a story in many parts, and the survivor — my friend who was both victim and psychologically connected to the abuser — is still in the process of dealing with the outfall of suffocation, then calling 911, seeing the sheriff deputies respond, witnessing her husband struggle in handcuffs, and herself appearing in front of a grand jury who indicted the accused on more than 10 charges.
That was more than 10 months ago, and as I write this, the fellow is about to be released as part of a diversionary agreement, AKA a plea agreement. He will be in Judge Sheryl Bachart’s domestic violence special court.
This is a story of unending “to be continued” phases in her life, in her family’s life and her friends’ lives.
Getting people — victims, survivors, counselors, and others — to respond to a journalist’s question, both on the record and named, is daunting. “I can talk all day in group therapy with victims of domestic violence, but those are safe spaces,” said one counselor from Arizona with more than 30 years in the field of social work, including running so-called safe houses.
“But imagine me identifying myself in the newspaper, with my credentials and current place of work presenting myself as a feminist and pretty critical of the judicial, policing and social services fields in regard to domestic violence and how those systems treat the victim? I’d be pulled onto the carpet, for sure.”
Referring to a person who is going through the legal hurdles of fighting for her life by calling 911, “a victim” is not considered politically correct in feminist circles, one former woman’s studies professor (again, asking to not be named) said to me (I worked with her at Green River College years ago).
However, the woman who coined the term, “Battered Wife Syndrome,” believes using the word “victim” for a woman in the midst of the abuse even after calling the cops is correct: “Until battered women take back some control over their lives, they may not truly be considered survivors.”
Lenore E. Walker wrote a seminal article, “Battered Woman Syndrome“, published in Psychiatric Times, July 8, 2009, explaining the crime of battering tied to the psychological hell a woman goes through in this BWS.
“A battered woman needs to feel validated when she describes the abuse. This can be done by emphasizing the positive things she did to protect herself and her children if they were involved. Tell her that no matter what she may have done or said, no one deserves to be abused,” Walker wrote in the piece. “Be careful not to ask or even intimate that she might have done something to provoke the batterer. Such questions will not create the rapport that facilitates empowerment-nor do they create a safe space for the woman.”
My own experience with domestic violence spans decades as I worked the police beats early as a newspaperman (starting at 18) in Tucson for the college daily, and then continued with police beats for newspapers in Southern Arizona, West Texas and Spokane.
The crux of this self-referential three-part look at domestic violence survivors, and scrutinizing the systems in place that “deal with” the abused and the abusers, is my own experience working with this friend living in Lincoln County who in March 2022 reached out to me for assistance to leave her abuser.
I barely knew her then, but consider her to be a great friend of my wife and mine.
The fact she ended up in Arizona, with my own sister, a seasoned statewide social worker, Heidi Haeder-Heild, assisting her, that was not enough to break her out of the battered wife syndrome. She returned to Lincoln County a few months later, lured by the hope of a changed husband, entranced by the idea that she had changed and that change would convince the husband she was a worthy wife, friend, woman to never be put down, economically isolated and physically abused.
Those hopes ended with a 911 call she frantically made on a Friday night in November 2022.
Bayside Cellars (Waldport, OR) proprietor just getting started — Community Journalism gets to the soul of humanity and our connections to the larger world. First appeared in Newport News Times
Pulling out all the skills one gains through living, working and surviving can turn a dream into a going concern. One Waldport entrepreneur is digging being her own boss, expressing creativity in her hospitality business and turning into the toast of the town. Bayside Cellars is Shauna Flynn’s wine “bar” inspired by her years in the catering and food business and her desire to provide a meeting place for Waldport residents and visitors.
The joint is located a stone’s throw away from the Port of Alsea.
I met Flynn a year ago while bicycling along the streets of wild and wooly Waldport. I saw the sign, “Bayside Cellars,” noticed the deep red Adirondack chairs out front, and espied the open front door, so I jumped off my saddle to see what was up.
Conceptually, being part of a node of eateries — the Azul Mexican restaurant, Salty Dog, Pacific Sourdough, Lazy Dayz Café, two crab joints and the soon-to-be finished, Chill — makes sense to Flynn as a way to garner a critical mass of people interested in dining and wining.
That day a year ago our sky was blue, and surprisingly there was no wind to speak of, and the temperature was barely breaking 58 degrees.
Flynn asked me questions, and I got to talking about some of my current and recent interests and gigs working to help adults with developmental disabilities get jobs; helping veterans get service-connected disability status hearings and housing; assisting homeless families and individuals find housing.
Two things struck Flynn deeply, which opened up the floodgates of her telling me about her journey to include several iterations of herself as a woman: my work with foster youth in the Independent Living Program and my assistance for a friend currently going through the legal hurdles of seeing her husband/abuser get his due justice.
“I’m a product of a foster background, so I know exactly what sorts of things foster youths have to face,” she said while showing me around the two-room wine and small bites business. “And I am a survivor of a long-term domestic abuse relationship.”
She showed me around the sitting rooms, the small kitchen, and the back “cellar” where chilled wines and beers fill chillers.
Wine love and a place to break bread
On one of the walls of her business, the word LOVE is spelled out with old metal letters. She repeated that her tasting business is all about the love she put into it and the love she hopes people can find just meeting here.
When Flynn speaks about love, she’s not talking Hallmark stuff.
“So many women I talked to this evening told me they know no one in Waldport, but tonight, they met new friends,” Flynn told me at her grand opening July 7. “I think of this wine tasting business as a meeting place, a safe place for people to get reacquainted and to find new friends.”
I circulated during the opening, talking to short-term residents, visitors and others who were third generation Walportians.
I met the owner of the Pacific Sourdough Bakery, as well as a few of her bakers and salespeople. People were not exactly in their cups when they opened up to me.
One 40-year-old from Bend introduced me to her mother and stepfather. Her five-year-old son was engrossed in a game on the phone. This woman and I bonded as she is a K12 teacher, in ESL, living and working in Bend. Her fellow teachers were considering a strike vote for better wages, smaller class sizes and more counselors.
“I’m telling you, education — the teaching profession — has gotten so bad, really so bad. But on a better note, there’s my mom. She’s from here, and lives in her mother’s house. I went to school here. I think it’s great that Shauna opened this place up for people to actually have conversations, Flynn said.”
I’d say the demographics the opening night was 70 percent female, with a median age of 60. I talked with an old timer (80) who was his wife’s designated driver; he wanted to tell me about a memoir he is writing covering his U.S. Navy days stationed in Malaysia.
Flynn rang a bell, and another raffle ensued; the crowd — around 40 — was engrossed in their ticket numbers.
Before sitting down to have a serious discussion with Flynn, I hit up her LinkedIn Page, always an interesting way to see a person’s public persona:
• 20-plus years of real estate experience;
• 20-plus years of hospitality experience.
“I’ve worked half of my life in real estate and the other half of my life in hospitality, and both at the same time. Began a life in real estate straight out of high school, years of independently building one successful career that later lead me in becoming a successful nationwide commercial loan broker. I built my hospitality career in different parts of the world, playing key roles and winning awards in restaurant and event management to most recently helping to create and build extremely successful multi-million dollar catering companies.
“I’m a landlord, an entrepreneur, a volunteer and strong supporter of my community. I use my intuition, experience, creativity, passion and drive to carry me through to my next project with confidence and intend to exceed in whatever it is I decide to tackle along the way.
“I’m checking off my life goals one box at a time and also helping people along the way. You won’t find me at the finish line … you’ll find me helping others make it there too. It’s not just about the destination, it’s about the journey.”
She puts her money where her mouth is. Shauna has been a mentor for Big Brothers and Sisters of America; a dog foster mother for Imagine Peace For Pups Foundation; and a kitchen volunteer for Portland’s Rescue Mission.
When I stopped by a few weeks ago, she was in the middle of pricing her inventory. She talked about having her small business available for any group wanting to raise funds or a gathering place for any kind of confab. We talked about Grace Wins staying afloat with a new director, and Shauna said: “I’d be honored to help them help with any fundraiser.”
We discussed the Newport mayor’s resignation tied to alleged racist and anti-LGBTQ remarks. “I’m all in full, rainbow flag all the way. It’s way past time for that way of thinking (anti-BIPOC and LGBTQA talk) to go away.” She’s thinking about having a sidewalk chalk art contest soon, as another way to bring people together while giving part of the proceeds for groups fighting for the homeless.
Living in chaos
The 40-year- old was born in Vernonia, Oregon. While she graduated from Vernonia High, having competed on the JV and varsity volleyball teams as well as being class president, her life was not always a bed of roses. Her parents divorced when she was four, and alas, she was brought up, in her words, by a woman who was not caring, not a nurturing mother.
“It was daily abuse by her. There were five children, and the brothers ran away from home. I was in fifth grade when I was placed in foster care.”
She moved around to various foster homes, including ones in St. Helens and Clatskanie, but ended up being adopted by the last foster parents in Scappoose.
“It was a good break from my mom’s abuse. I was so much happier away from her.”
At 16, her prom night was ruined by her mother, who attacked her, messing up her fancy hair-do and the prom dress her adopted sisters bought her.
She credits good teachers and involved coaches for her thriving and excelling. “I wasn’t a bad kid, but I had challenges because of the verbal abuse at home. Some learning disabilities. I thrived because I had people who actually cared for me, and their eyes lit up when I was in their presence.”
Again, this is a tale of emancipation, a story of surviving, and a narrative of going beyond the bad cards dealt a woman.
A slow reader early on, she was almost held back in second grade, but she impressed the teacher who had never called on her when Shauna read the advanced readers’ section of a book.
She recalled when in fifth grade she won a writing contest and was invited as one of only a few to a writing festival. “That was the year I went to foster care, so I missed the festival.”
I asked her what she wanted to do when she got older, and she said that in the yearbook she wrote, “In 10 years I want to be happy with a VW van traveling around the U.S.”
She ended up marrying one of the sons of her foster parents, right out of high school. She had been working at Subway for four years when she met a woman who gave Shauna her business card. She worked as a Realtor with Windermere. Shauna asked her how one becomes a Realtor, and soon after she was hired on, and even got half her license paid for by the Scappoose office.
“I think I might have been the youngest licensed Realtor in Oregon at age 19.” She cleaned homes, managed apartments and for two years she didn’t even have a car.
She ended up taking old listings, some of which had been on the market for 10 years, and becoming a rock star. She also did appraisals for banks.
Fast forward to Hawaii, and she’s working at the Hard Rock Café in Waikiki. She got her real estate license there as well. She got to see the world, but not in the microbus. She loved Italy, traveled throughout that culinary standout. She also had been divorced and started dating an Italian, who admitted he had a fiancé one year into the relationship.
She traveled to Sydney, Australia, and worked at the Tap Room, one of the best pubs in Australia with all sorts of celebrities like Nicole Kidman hanging out there.
She told me she learned about good beer and wine working there, and her goal was to get a two-year visa to work in an Australian vineyard to learn all the ins and outs of wine making.
The many iterations of a woman not interrupted
The reality is this business owner has had more than four stages or variations on a theme in her life. She did talk at length about domestic abuse, to include several relationships she had with men where she was abused. We talked about the ACE’s scale used in K12 – adverse childhood events. Shauna had many ACE’s in her youth, witnessing her mother with other men, the physical abuse, the verbal abuse, a missing biological father, financial struggles, and more.
In my work with foster youth, the strikes against a successful young adulthood are pretty plentiful in similar situations as Shauna’s. But she overcame most of them, worked her fingers to bone, and had dreams, big ones.
Her Achilles Heel, she admits, were those bad intimate relationships. The put downs, lack of a mother even noticing a daughter’s accomplishments, physical violence, all of that, it’s a recipe for entering into abusive relationships.
Now she’s got the great friend and boyfriend, Jason, who lives and works in Vancouver, having put down more than 24 years in the bread business. Shauna’s swung some financial deals to land a duplex in Southeast, Portland, both units now being rented. She also has a duplex in Waldport, where she lives on one side and rents out the other side as a short-term vacation unit.
The Bayside Cellars is just getting off the ground, with Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays open to the public. Then the other days she is availing herself to head up special events like weddings, anniversaries or any sort of event that requires her culinary skills and wine pairing acumen.
For the Waldport Chamber of Commerce in September, Bayside Cellars is hosting the food, wine and beer.
She’s looking to promote Bayside Cellars for many special events. As a one-woman show, with a duplex in Portland to attend to, the one in Waldport, and now with a condo she just signed for in Tulum, Quintana Roo, Mexico, she’s a busy woman.
Her goal is to give people that safe, clean place to meet and talk. She is engaging with her customers, no longer that shy kid who ended up not talking publicly until fifth grade. Her pet peeve continues to be supporting the hospitality business, and making sure folk know that tipping wait staff and cooks is the right thing to do.
She thinks Waldport has much potential, and hopes to see the businesses and political leaders marketing it as a walkable and bikeable town. She thinks a dog park or two would make Waldport highly attractive to visitors. “Most of my short-term rental residents have a dog or several.”
She emphasizes that young people come into Lincoln County, from Portland or Eugene, and they prefer a rental over a motel. She wishes people would be more accommodating to that demographic.
Shauna Flynn is a member of the Waldport community, and she wants people to feel as if they can contact her for any catering ideas. She ran her own one in Portland, Buenos Dias, and she made the Portland Monthly summer edition in 2019.
Just imagine these bit-sized culinary delights Shauna has concocted: All on skewers.
Chimi-roja masa bite — fried up Three Sisters Nixtamal Masa, served up with zucchini and radish, and topped with red chimichurri sauce. Or Pequeños rellenos — colorful, sweet mini peppers stuffed with Willamette Valley quinoa. Or, think of this at your next anniversary soiree: Carne asada with chimichurri. Maybe coconut shrimp?
Maybe she’ll get that VW Van and travel Lincoln County with her bites and wine samplings. Who knows what’s next for Shauna Flynn, a woman never interrupted.
New psychology research shows maltreatment in childhood is linked to alexithymia in adulthood. Its etymology comes from Ancient Greek. The word is formed by combining the alpha privative prefix ἀ- (a-, meaning ‘not’) with λέξις (léxis, referring to ‘words’) and θῡμός (thȳmós, denoting ‘disposition,’ ‘feeling,’ or ‘rage’). The term can be likened to “dyslexia” in its structure.
Hang on now. In this Anglo American culture, in this 1492 culture, in this Manifest Destiny Culture, a trail of tears is that history, compounded by the rapidity of media and lies and secrecy and propaganda, and patriotism and a country of war war war abroad.
The idea is we are collectively held by the toxic glue of retail disease, consumer society, throw-away philosophy — land theft, cultural appropriation, gunboat diplomacy, xenophobia, and after generations, we are here, in this moment, 2023, but it is so much worse.
Maybe there were some discussions on a national level when the US fire bombed (napalmed) Tokyo, murdering civilians in our patriotic pyre. We knew which cities had ancient building practices of wood and paper and lacquer. Maybe there was some moral outrage over the murders at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Ahh, even now, the caveats — Over 50% of Tokyo’s industry was spread out among residential and commercial neighborhoods; firebombing cut the whole city’s output in half. Some modern post-war analysts have called the raid a war crime due to the targeting of civilian infrastructure and the ensuing mass loss of civilian life.
It was the night of March 9 to 10, 1945. Most of Tokyo was asleep. This was despite the present risk of bombs dropping from the sky —after all, Japan had by then been engaged for four years in the conflict that became known as World War II.
While in the midst of an uneasy slumber, the city’s residents were suddenly awoken. Flames engulfed their homes, shelters and streets. Panic set in. People sought cover where they could, many jumping into rivers in a bid to escape the savage heat.
Some 100,000 people died that night, including children. Many burnt alive where they slept. The cause? Incendiary devices were used in the raid, and Tokyo — a city largely made of wood and paper at the time — ignited like a massive bonfire.
Later, the world learned of Operation Meetinghouse, the code name of that night’s firebombing attack by the United States Army Air Forces on Tokyo.
Look, I am around a lot of people, and I observe as well as talk and probe. Over time, say, since I was starting as a beat reporter at age 18, oh, in 1974, I have learned the collective trauma of victims outside the USA — Vietnam, Cambodia, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Belize, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras. And inside this place, all the domestic trauma, including on several reservations where I called aunts and uncles of friends my aunties and uncles.
My mom was born in British Columbia, so I know personally that place’s extruded trauma on original peoples.
Over time, just as a city reporter, beat cop reporter, and then more probing assignments, I saw and absorbed the trauma this society — this country’s ugly history has been laid bare but covered up well — and just getting under the nails of Memory of Fire in Latin America lends pause to the entire project of the Newest Project on the Latest American Century.
In his book, Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (Nation Books; May 25, 2009), Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano tells a history of the world through 600 brief stories of human adversity, focusing on people often ignored by history. Several passages of the book were read. The guest interviewer was John Dinges. They also discussed Mr. Galeano’s 1971 book, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, which Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez gave to President Obama during the Fifth Summit of the Americas in April 2009. They talked about Mr. Galeano’s life and career, including military regimes, book bans, and repression — Video.)
All the winds of hell unleashed by the Anglo Franco American Germanic forebearers, well, here we are, halfway done with 2023, and we have a society so bad, so broken, so distracted, so traumatized, so checked out, so vapid, so dumbdowned, so heartless, so disconnected, so xenophobic, so patriotic, so miseducated, so misled, so screwed up by the snake oil of our times, and so propagandized and polluted physically, intellectually and spiritually, that a psychological descriptor for traumatized individuals fits the entire society (minus a few million).
Alexithymia has been associated with various impairments, including difficulties in emotional processing, identifying facial expressions, and understanding and relating to the emotions of others. It is also considered a risk factor for psychopathologies such as affective disorders, self-injury, personality disorders, and eating disorders.
Individuals with alexithymia often experience challenges in their interpersonal relationships, exhibiting limited socioaffective skills, decreased empathy, and a tendency to avoid close social connections. (The paper, “Child Maltreatment and Alexithymia: A Meta-Analytic Review,” was authored by Julia Ditzer, Eileen Y. Wong, Rhea N. Modi, Maciej Behnke, James J. Gross, and Anat Talmon.)
I’ll run another couple of paragraphs describing this research, and, yes, it focuses on child maltreatment, but to be honest, maltreatment is beyond the family and close relatives. Maltreatment is in the K12 school/prison system. The school to prison pipeline is one avenue of the mistreatment. But then, the school to Ivy League is another trauma. School to MBA program. School to military pipeline.
It can be in the backgrounds of Blinken or Obama or Bush or Clinton or Trump or Biden, or for their children — maltreatment is the lies these men and their women have flooded our world with. The outright open killing and murdering of people we sanction, those we disturb because we do not like their governments, they are in a dulled and numbed emotional spectrum.
Young adults going to war, sure, complex PTSD, but what about the destruction of war on the target countries, and the collective hell each generation that follows a war-torn country, what do they face?
The victims are in trauma, and so are the victimizers’ citizens, the so-called electorate here which pays taxes for these killings are also in the trauma zone.
Emotional abuse and emotional neglect are found to be the strongest predictors of adult alexithymia. These types of maltreatment, which are often more implicit and harder to recognize than physical or sexual abuse, can hinder the development of secure attachment between caregivers and children. Parlay this to the collective, the society at large, you know, it takes a society-village to raise a child. Look at this village, man, just look at the horrors unleashed in this VILLAGE.
“Child maltreatment encompasses more than physical and sexual abuse; it also includes emotional abuse and neglect, which have profound and enduring consequences,” Ditzer told PsyPost. “Through my research, I found that difficulties identifying and expressing emotions are most likely in adults who experienced emotional abuse and neglect. This highlights the critical importance of how we communicate with children.”
“I hope that readers are inspired to be more mindful of the messages we convey to our children through our words and the way we say them, as emotional abuse and neglect prevention can make a significant difference in children’s emotional well-being long-term. Generally, I hope to bring more attention to the topic of child maltreatment and its consequences.”
Look, I was at a grand opening of a small wine tasting business in my small town yesterday. I met the woman opening it a year ago, and she told me her story — in foster youth, abused there big time, and then in an abusive relationship for 17 years, and she got her real estate license and she made some good moves and so she owns a duplex here which she rents and one in Tulum which she rents and she has this business.
So, a 68-ish woman and I got into it waiting for the doors to open. I was talking to someone who asked what I was doing and what I was working on. I told them my work with homeless folk, civilians and veterans alike.
This vacationing woman said she was a retired parole officer, and she point blank told me, “I have no sympathy for druggies. It was their choice. It is all their fault.”
Talk about a trauma drenched and giving woman. I told her that was absurd, that every female veteran I worked with had been sexually assaulted by their own men in boot camp or sometimes overseas on duty. That many had injuries from absurd 20 mile hikes with 100 pound rucksacks on. Torn ligaments, protruding discs, and bad hip joints from parachuting.
And she blithely said, “I guess it was time for me to retire. I have no empathy.”
Retire, man, on our dime, and how long did she serve (sic) as a parole or probation officer, and how long did she just despise those criminals?
Where do they get this attitude, and this is not an anomaly? Believe me, I have duked it out with people my entire late teens and through all of my adult life. This retrograde, this trauma flooded society, again, collectively, we can call it Stockholm Syndrome, relating and empathizing with your captor. Valorizing them. We do that daily.
But this is emotional stunting, emotional victimizing, and eventually, a blindness to our humanity. And here we are, in 2023:
The United States will be sending depleted uranium munitions (DU) to Ukraine, reported The Wall Street Journal on June 13. This was written three months after Pentagon spokesperson Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder stated March 21 that to his knowledge the U.S. would not do so. (Los Angeles Times, March 21)
The announcement about sending DU munitions comes despite voluminous documentation about the devastating consequences of breathing in the radioactive dust caused by these weapons.
So, wherever I go, this emotional deadness, literally translated as “no words for emotions” is the major virus of the world now. And it keeps growing, attacking man, woman and child. Numb, dead, well, it is deeper than that. Our government and our corporations and our churches and religious leaders, all the marketers, all the armies of cops and code inspectors and fine levelers and repossession experts and tax men and eviction experts and on and on, they have killed our collective emotional souls whereupon this new Tokyo fire bombing is now Ukrainian DU bombing.
China has translated “Metal of Dishonor-Depleted Uranium,” a groundbreaking book compiled 25 years ago by the International Action Center (IAC) warning of the devastating consequences of deploying DU munitions. It couldn’t be more timely.
The preface to the Chinese edition warns:
Depleted uranium weapons are not only harmful to their targets, but also harmful to the soldiers who operate the weapons, civilians around depleted uranium — and even their descendants. It caused bodily harm and threatened the future natural environment [in countries where it was used].
At the same time, this book calls for the joint boycott and abolition of depleted uranium weapons and the realization of interactive exchanges and peaceful coexistence on a global scale.
There is so much disconnection to participatory and angry and direct action democracy that we have story after story telling us we can’t govern ourselves … until we are about to start a war in Venezuela, Cuba, China, and then into Russia. We are sick collectively:
He should be shot, of course, because he is a rabid rat. Beyond repair. A serial killer on the loose, but because of the deadened heart and brain of the collective Westerner, this guy just appears as yet another abuser, to be respected, regarded well and listened to: Individuals with alexithymia often experience challenges in their interpersonal relationships, exhibiting limited socioaffective skills, decreased empathy, and a tendency to avoid close social connections.
“Years or even decades later, they can kill adults and children who stumble on them.”
Think about this, and you will understand how murdering Koreans in the 1950s was okay, then in Vietnam, then in Cambodia, then in Iraq, and then, well, name the country, and the USA has its hands on the killing machine and coup creating throttle. All that is okay, right? With Kissinger at 100 getting his next year of fame in interview after interview (sic — they are not real journalistic interviews, I have you know), how can a society collectively even move forward with a war criminal now giving sage advice?
This is 2023, and even children are not respected in this so-called Shining City on the Hill:
An aged Native-American chieftain was visiting New York City for the first time in 1906. He was curious about the city and the city was curious about him. A magazine reporter asked the chief what most surprised him in his travels around town.
“Little children working,” the visitor replied.
Child labor might have shocked that outsider, but it was all too commonplace then across urban, industrial America (and on farms where it had been customary for centuries). In more recent times, however, it’s become a far rarer sight. Law and custom, most of us assume, drove it to near extinction. And our reaction to seeing it reappear might resemble that chief’s — shock, disbelief.
But we better get used to it, since child labor is making a comeback with a vengeance. A striking number of lawmakers are undertaking concerted efforts to weaken or repeal statutes that have long prevented (or at least seriously inhibited) the possibility of exploiting children.
Take a breath and consider this: the number of kids at work in the U.S. increased by 37% between 2015 and 2022. During the last two years, 14 states have either introduced or enacted legislation rolling back regulations that governed the number of hours children can be employed, lowered the restrictions on dangerous work, and legalized subminimum wages for youths.
Iowa now allows those as young as 14 to work in industrial laundries. At age 16, they can take jobs in roofing, construction, excavation, and demolition and can operate power-driven machinery. Fourteen-year-olds can now even work night shifts and once they hit 15 can join assembly lines. All of this was, of course, prohibited not so long ago. (source)
Do you need to go back into Anglo Saxon history? Dickens anyone?
Do you need a lesson on capitalism and exploitation? Now, this history, this collective thinking and collective subconsciousness, this alternative way of being a human being, it is part of the abuse, from cradle to school to job to grave:
Hard work, moreover, had long been considered by those in the British upper classes who didn’t have to do so as a spiritual tonic that would rein in the unruly impulses of the lower orders. An Elizabethan law of 1575 provided public money to employ children as “a prophylactic against vagabonds and paupers.”
By the eighteenth century, the philosopher John Locke, then a celebrated champion of liberty, was arguing that three-year-olds should be included in the labor force. Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, was happy that “children after four or five years of age could every one earn their own bread.” Later, Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, would opt for four, since otherwise, society would suffer the loss of “precious years in which nothing is done! Nothing for Industry! Nothing for improvement, moral or intellectual.”
American “founding father” Alexander Hamilton’s 1791 Report on Manufacturing noted that children “who would otherwise be idle” could instead become a source of cheap labor. And such claims that working at an early age warded off the social dangers of “idleness and degeneracy” remained a fixture of elite ideology well into the modern era. Indeed, it evidently remains so today.
When industrialization began in earnest during the first half of the nineteenth century, observers noted that work in the new factories (especially textile mills) was “better done by little girls of 6-12 years old.” By 1820, children accounted for 40% of the mill workers in three New England states. In that same year, children under 15 made up 23% of the manufacturing labor force and as much as 50% of the production of cotton textiles. (source)
Here we are, in constant upheaval, constant fight-flight-freeze-cower-forget-trauma-fear-hate-disappear. The emotions, that is, after two, four, six generations have disappeared on the normal human spectrum. No words for emotions, man.
[Photo: This is what fascism and brown shirts look like.}
Zelensky returned home with five Azov commanders, who were initially taken prisoner by Moscow during a months-long battle to defend the port city of Mariupol.
Today it is still a challenge for the European Union and Spain in particular to carry out effectively the management of sub-Saharan migration, as promised. It is necessary that its humanitarian projection be comprehensive and safe.
A study published in the Informing Humanitarians Worldwide, deconstructs the vision of Africa as a continent of mass displacement and international migration.
The report explains that the largest migratory flow in Africa is between countries on the same continent. According to the International Agency for Migrations IOM, only 14 percent of the planet’s migrants were born in Africa. 53 percent of African migration is within the same continent, only 26 percent goes to Europe. Africa, then, is characterized more by being a continent of internal refugees than international migration.
The World Bank says nearly 80% (560 million) of the 700 million people who were pushed into extreme poverty in 2020 due to COVID policies were from India. Globally, extreme poverty levels increased by 9.3 per cent in 2020.
The lack of drinking water in Montevideo, “the first case in the world of a capital city that reached such a situation of collapse”. The daily dilemmas in the metropolitan area: what is said in the street and at the fair. The difference between the “water emergency” announced by President Lacalle Pou, and the ongoing environmental, sanitary and economic crisis. The impacts on people at risk, and on inequality among those who cannot afford the essentials. With fresh water reserves at 2%, with no drinking water at the taps, the chronicler says: “We crossed day zero without knowing it.”
“Coffee with water without salt, coffee with fresh water”, shouted the street vendor at the Tristán Narvaja fair on Sunday. (source)
It is so much, so much maltreatment, in the womb, then carried through the air, both the digital waves and air ways. It is the pain of the rich shitting on us, and after generations of this, we are seeing more and more people unable to conjure up what should be ire, disrepect, hate, disgust, denigration, murderous thoughts heaped upon those killers of the likes of a (F)uckerberg or Fink or any number of millions of millionaires and all the 3,000 billionaires. This is how these people beat the populations down:
While advocating for police abolition in his philanthropic efforts, Zuckerberg takes a different stance when it comes to his personal security.
Meta corporate disclosures show that the Facebook parent company has provided extraordinary levels of personal security protections for its leading officers. Zuckerberg received $13.4 million in personal security costs in 2020, then $15.1 million in 2021, followed by $14.8 million last year, for a total of $43.4 million in security costs over the last three years.
The funds, the disclosure noted, are used for “security personnel” guarding Zuckerberg and the “procurement, installation, and maintenance of certain security measures for his residences.”
So, his schizophrenia (it is about messing with the sheeple’s minds) just leaves most young people pummeled.
The tech tycoon’s company has spent more than $40 million on Zuckerberg’s personal security over the past three years — while at the same time his family-run foundation has donated millions of dollars to groups that want to defund or even abolish the police.
Since 2020, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has donated $3 million to PolicyLink, the organization behind DefundPolice.org, according to investigative reporter Lee Fang.
The anti-cop group boasts on its website that it funds efforts to “diminish the role of policing in communities, and empower alternative visions for public safety,” though it fails to list what those substitutes may be.
CZI, which Zuckerberg founded with wife Priscilla Chan, has also donated more than $2.5 million to Solidaire, Fang reported, which seeks to do away with policing.(source)
If you recognize this in yourself, a friend, a loved one, then you get what is coming: affective disorders, nonsuicidal self-injury), personality disorders, and eating disorders. Moreover, the consequences of alexithymics’ emotional deficits extend beyond intrapersonal difficulties. Alexithymia interferes with individuals’ interpersonal relationships as they exhibit shortcomings in understanding and relating not only to their own emotions but also to the emotions of others. (source)
I’m back at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport Oregon, part of the Oregon State University campus harboring marine mammal-fisheries-benthic-ocean researchers and students.
The topic: How humans decimated whale populations through hundreds of years of industrial whaling, leaving some species and populations on the brink of extinction. But despite these impacts, many whale populations have made remarkable recoveries, demonstrating the ability of threatened and endangered species to bounce back from intense human pressure.
The presenter: Joshua Stewart, a new faculty member at OSU’s Marine Mammal Institute, PhD from Scripps Institute of Oceanography.
The running joke with Stewart last night was he WAS not Bradley Cooper, and so he let people know not to be too disappointed that instead of that overpaid undertalented Holly-Dirt guy (my phrasing) we were in for a presentation by a nerd, a passionate whale guy, and young at that!
He’s been focusing on the Southern Right whale and the Antarctic minke, but his interest is also around the many species of whales/cetaceans not recovering despite whaling and hunting of those species having been stopped decades ago.
The history of whaling as a commercial endevour goes back to the Basques, a thousand years ago, going after the Right Whale, so called southern Right whale. Then after a few centuries with simple boats, things got going, and in fact the Basques went for Northern Right whales with larger ships. They had a 500 year monopoly on commercial whaling.
The big push in whaling occurred in the 1700s, Nantucket, and that included the big ships of Moby Dick fame. Then, into the 1800s and 1900s the ships had steam engines, and alas the range for these whalers extended far and wide. Processing ships were introduced, with diesel engines and factories on board, and with the advent of massive industrialization for the two “great” wars, the whalers got explosive harpoons and fast engines.
So, whereas for more than 700 years the blue and fin whales were too fast for the simple whalers, hence they were not being decimated by the whalers of that age. In the 1950s, however, as Stewart stated, more than three million whales were killed, which he calls the largest cull of wild mammals in the world. Many species became “commercially extinct,” i.e., the few numbers left in these species were not profitable enough for the big commercial operations.That included blues, sperms and fin whales.
I cut my teeth in the early 1970s on fighting whaling, that is, the commercial whaling tyranny. That effort globally — stopping whaling — super-charged the first Earth Day:
We are now 53 years later, and guys like Stewart, 35, is looking at declining whale populations, including the Southern Resident Orcas:
There are 73 (total) of these distinct salmon eaters left, and the issues around climate change, habitat degradation and their prey availability play into any researcher’s tool chest. Many of these iconic animals generations ago were part of the live capture “industry” to supply killer whales to theme parks.
The issue around sea traffic, the noise from that traffic, the pollutants in that Salish Sea (Vancouver and Seattle area), the food stock (Chinook salmon) and climate change play into the degradation of the Southern Residents, as their offspring are coming out smaller, stressed, and a skinny whale triples the probability of dying in the first year of life.
There were around fifty of us there, March 23, and the auditorium allowed for the first time the beer and wine drinkers to bring in their libations. There were fellow researchers in attendance, as well as students, both graduate and undergraduate. As far as the public, it seems that most people going to these talks are associated with academia or marine research. As I point out time and time again — where are the K12 kids? This was a 6 pm event. Stewart’s slide show/Power Point was good, and he is young (he kept alluding to the fact he is doing research on the backs of old-timers still working as researchers). This is an existential crisis in my mind. Having like minded, fellow marine wonks at an event is NOT enough in 2023. It’s barely anything, really. There are no outreach programs for K12 and families and fisher folk, and since this is after school hours, there seems to be no way in hell of getting high schools students who are interested in science and math and engineering in general to come out to these events. America is a cultural waste land, and one with dream hoarders ruling over the rest of us.
This is the echo chamber that is science, in my estimation. I can’t fault the students there from OSU, or the retired faculty or the active faculty, but this sort of event I have attended in the hundreds over the course of 50 years as a diver, then student of marine sciences, journalist, writer, educator and sustainability “wonk.”
There are no avenues now in 2023 built-in to go above and beyond, and surely, the happy hours/social hour from 5 to 6 pm could have been an hour where students got a little tour of the Hatfield which does have a public access educational center:
Yes, we have the Oregon Aquarium, a commercial marine park of sorts. And the Hatfield Visitor Center does get public attendance, but the K12 schools here in Lincoln county need to do outreach. We also need crab and fisher folk here to to have an open discussion with these wonky folk like Joshua Stewart who may or man not agree with the mitigation ideas, including limiting catches, closing seasons, biodegradable lines, and more.
Back to Stewart, AKA “not” Bradley Cooper: His work looks at the last two decades of declines with spring chinook salmon, through the San Juan Islands up to Vancouver Island. That’s an 85 percent decline in those salmon. As the orcas’ food stock, that means their lives are now in peril because of all those other factors, including food availability.
Here on the Coast we have the iconic gray whales, coming from breeding grounds in Mexico and Central America, making their way to the Arctic. We have whale watching as one tourist attraction, as the gray whales hang out here and push volumes of water into the sand to eat the anthropods that make small tubes as their feeding ritual. The only whale — a baleen whale, filter feeder, that is — which does this sort of feeding is “our” gray whale.1
So, those gray whales, while in a state of recovery and delisted from the Environmental Species Act list, are still experiencing massive die offs, and the food they get in the Arctic is losing its own biomass, that is, the body weight has declined by one-third in the last fifty years.
So, like orca, gray whales are being studied now with drone photography, and the body shapes can be tracked over entire lifetimes. The lower the weight, the tougher it is on the individual and species in general.
Line entanglements are a big issue, as fishers use lobster and crab “pots” in the tens of thousands on our coast and east coast, with a buoy at the surface. Whales get entangled, and some live days, months and even a year with the gear in tow.
And, ship strikes are becoming a bigger and bigger issue not just on the USA’s coast, but worldwide.
Obviously, if there are more Fraser River spring Chinook salmon, then there will be a healthier Southern Resident Killer Whale population. But fish stocks are declining, and so many other factors play into the marine mammals’ overall health worldwide.
Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare’s? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel’s great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at all. Why then do you try to ‘enlarge’ your mind? Subtilize it.
While gray whales were almost hunted to extinction, with 1,000 left, they have been delisted from the ESA — now estimated to be around 20,000 total population. However, researchers like Joshua are looking at these UME’s, Unusual Mortality Events.
There are so many issues that marine mammals face in this industrialized, highly toxic and waste heavy modern society. Lobster/crab gear entanglements are possibly a small problem when compared to the microplastic now found in the zooplanton’s, anthropods’ and the whale’s bodies. Add to that mercury and PCBs, and we have a triple toxic soup for the mammals.
We can imagine what the carrying capacity is for one whale species, and these researchers have “cool” jobs when they get to go out to sea and chase whales and tag them and photograph them and collect their feces, for sure. Here, yet another piece from my work attending these Science on Tap Hatfield events: Whales and People: A Tragedy! (note: you will see two live links referenced here in this story, which are now no longer available; I have a sneaking suspicion that the university’s thugs, PR spinners, got to the publisher of Discover Our Coast, to knock out all articles tied to OSU that I wrote!)
At the end of the talk, I asked Joshua to look at the glass half EMPTY. A few in the crowd were not happy about “ending on a negative note” (Yikes, this is academic in a nutshell). His biggest fear is climate change, which is warming seas, that is, where certain areas of the ocean are heating up faster than others. Sea ice is melting earlier and capping over later (according to the past 80 years or more data), and food stocks for marine mammals are become less and less.
This is the continuing story of extinction, and the supreme right of homo sapiens consumopithecus to rule the world, rule all species, and rule even a majority of our own species in this criminal and corrupting and colluding Capitalism. And, well, green washing and green pornography have taken center stage, man, in the so called sustainability arena. I was head of many sustainability initiatives. Here, a long time ago: Sustained Discussion And, from a standing column I headed up, Metro Talk: Facing uncertainty, the Inland Empire needs more than a global warming bucket list
So much work put into research and documentary making. But is it all echo chamber, now that the world is run totally by banks, hedge funds, Blackrock, Vanguard, Pharma-Media-Military-Congressional-Mining-Oil-Gas-Prison-Insurance-Surveillance-IT-AR-Digital Complex? Empty Nets, Emptying Oceans, Farming the Sea, and Soylent Green is People?
On a happy note, the crowd at Hatfield drank locally produced IPA’s, Oregon wine and locally backed pasteries. There was not mention of Greta’s honory doctorate from Helsinki, and Putin was not blamed for the the UME’s.
All was well at OSU, as if the world outside was outside of the bubble that is academia. Your choice, Stewart or Cooper!
I’m back at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport Oregon, part of the Oregon State University campus harboring marine mammal-fisheries-benthic-ocean researchers and students.
The topic: How humans decimated whale populations through hundreds of years of industrial whaling, leaving some species and populations on the brink of extinction. But despite these impacts, many whale populations have made remarkable recoveries, demonstrating the ability of threatened and endangered species to bounce back from intense human pressure.
The presenter: Joshua Stewart, a new faculty member at OSU’s Marine Mammal Institute, PhD from Scripps Institute of Oceanography.
The running joke with Stewart last night was he WAS not Bradley Cooper, and so he let people know not to be too disappointed that instead of that overpaid undertalented Holly-Dirt guy (my phrasing) we were in for a presentation by a nerd, a passionate whale guy, and young at that!
He’s been focusing on the Southern Right whale and the Antarctic minke, but his interest is also around the many species of whales/cetaceans not recovering despite whaling and hunting of those species having been stopped decades ago.
The history of whaling as a commercial endevour goes back to the Basques, a thousand years ago, going after the Right Whale, so called southern Right whale. Then after a few centuries with simple boats, things got going, and in fact the Basques went for Northern Right whales with larger ships. They had a 500 year monopoly on commercial whaling.
The big push in whaling occurred in the 1700s, Nantucket, and that included the big ships of Moby Dick fame. Then, into the 1800s and 1900s the ships had steam engines, and alas the range for these whalers extended far and wide. Processing ships were introduced, with diesel engines and factories on board, and with the advent of massive industrialization for the two “great” wars, the whalers got explosive harpoons and fast engines.
So, whereas for more than 700 years the blue and fin whales were too fast for the simple whalers, hence they were not being decimated by the whalers of that age. In the 1950s, however, as Stewart stated, more than three million whales were killed, which he calls the largest cull of wild mammals in the world. Many species became “commercially extinct,” i.e., the few numbers left in these species were not profitable enough for the big commercial operations.That included blues, sperms and fin whales.
I cut my teeth in the early 1970s on fighting whaling, that is, the commercial whaling tyranny. That effort globally — stopping whaling — super-charged the first Earth Day:
We are now 53 years later, and guys like Stewart, 35, is looking at declining whale populations, including the Southern Resident Orcas:
There are 73 (total) of these distinct salmon eaters left, and the issues around climate change, habitat degradation and their prey availability play into any researcher’s tool chest. Many of these iconic animals generations ago were part of the live capture “industry” to supply killer whales to theme parks.
The issue around sea traffic, the noise from that traffic, the pollutants in that Salish Sea (Vancouver and Seattle area), the food stock (Chinook salmon) and climate change play into the degradation of the Southern Residents, as their offspring are coming out smaller, stressed, and a skinny whale triples the probability of dying in the first year of life.
There were around fifty of us there, March 23, and the auditorium allowed for the first time the beer and wine drinkers to bring in their libations. There were fellow researchers in attendance, as well as students, both graduate and undergraduate. As far as the public, it seems that most people going to these talks are associated with academia or marine research. As I point out time and time again — where are the K12 kids? This was a 6 pm event. Stewart’s slide show/Power Point was good, and he is young (he kept alluding to the fact he is doing research on the backs of old-timers still working as researchers). This is an existential crisis in my mind. Having like minded, fellow marine wonks at an event is NOT enough in 2023. It’s barely anything, really. There are no outreach programs for K12 and families and fisher folk, and since this is after school hours, there seems to be no way in hell of getting high schools students who are interested in science and math and engineering in general to come out to these events. America is a cultural waste land, and one with dream hoarders ruling over the rest of us.
This is the echo chamber that is science, in my estimation. I can’t fault the students there from OSU, or the retired faculty or the active faculty, but this sort of event I have attended in the hundreds over the course of 50 years as a diver, then student of marine sciences, journalist, writer, educator and sustainability “wonk.”
There are no avenues now in 2023 built-in to go above and beyond, and surely, the happy hours/social hour from 5 to 6 pm could have been an hour where students got a little tour of the Hatfield which does have a public access educational center:
Yes, we have the Oregon Aquarium, a commercial marine park of sorts. And the Hatfield Visitor Center does get public attendance, but the K12 schools here in Lincoln county need to do outreach. We also need crab and fisher folk here to to have an open discussion with these wonky folk like Joshua Stewart who may or man not agree with the mitigation ideas, including limiting catches, closing seasons, biodegradable lines, and more.
Back to Stewart, AKA “not” Bradley Cooper: His work looks at the last two decades of declines with spring chinook salmon, through the San Juan Islands up to Vancouver Island. That’s an 85 percent decline in those salmon. As the orcas’ food stock, that means their lives are now in peril because of all those other factors, including food availability.
Here on the Coast we have the iconic gray whales, coming from breeding grounds in Mexico and Central America, making their way to the Arctic. We have whale watching as one tourist attraction, as the gray whales hang out here and push volumes of water into the sand to eat the anthropods that make small tubes as their feeding ritual. The only whale — a baleen whale, filter feeder, that is — which does this sort of feeding is “our” gray whale. ((Here’s another piece: Gray Whales Are Dying: Starving to Death Because of Climate Change; and another: Understanding the ocean’s web of life; and another: Experts paint sobering potential for sea change.))
So, those gray whales, while in a state of recovery and delisted from the Environmental Species Act list, are still experiencing massive die offs, and the food they get in the Arctic is losing its own biomass, that is, the body weight has declined by one-third in the last fifty years.
So, like orca, gray whales are being studied now with drone photography, and the body shapes can be tracked over entire lifetimes. The lower the weight, the tougher it is on the individual and species in general.
Line entanglements are a big issue, as fishers use lobster and crab “pots” in the tens of thousands on our coast and east coast, with a buoy at the surface. Whales get entangled, and some live days, months and even a year with the gear in tow.
And, ship strikes are becoming a bigger and bigger issue not just on the USA’s coast, but worldwide.
Obviously, if there are more Fraser River spring Chinook salmon, then there will be a healthier Southern Resident Killer Whale population. But fish stocks are declining, and so many other factors play into the marine mammals’ overall health worldwide.
Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare’s? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel’s great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at all. Why then do you try to ‘enlarge’ your mind? Subtilize it.
While gray whales were almost hunted to extinction, with 1,000 left, they have been delisted from the ESA — now estimated to be around 20,000 total population. However, researchers like Joshua are looking at these UME’s, Unusual Mortality Events.
There are so many issues that marine mammals face in this industrialized, highly toxic and waste heavy modern society. Lobster/crab gear entanglements are possibly a small problem when compared to the microplastic now found in the zooplanton’s, anthropods’ and the whale’s bodies. Add to that mercury and PCBs, and we have a triple toxic soup for the mammals.
We can imagine what the carrying capacity is for one whale species, and these researchers have “cool” jobs when they get to go out to sea and chase whales and tag them and photograph them and collect their feces, for sure. Here, yet another piece from my work attending these Science on Tap Hatfield events: Whales and People: A Tragedy! (note: you will see two live links referenced here in this story, which are now no longer available; I have a sneaking suspicion that the university’s thugs, PR spinners, got to the publisher of Discover Our Coast, to knock out all articles tied to OSU that I wrote!)
At the end of the talk, I asked Joshua to look at the glass half EMPTY. A few in the crowd were not happy about “ending on a negative note” (Yikes, this is academic in a nutshell). His biggest fear is climate change, which is warming seas, that is, where certain areas of the ocean are heating up faster than others. Sea ice is melting earlier and capping over later (according to the past 80 years or more data), and food stocks for marine mammals are become less and less.
This is the continuing story of extinction, and the supreme right of homo sapiens consumopithecus to rule the world, rule all species, and rule even a majority of our own species in this criminal and corrupting and colluding Capitalism. And, well, green washing and green pornography have taken center stage, man, in the so called sustainability arena. I was head of many sustainability initiatives. Here, a long time ago: Sustained Discussion And, from a standing column I headed up, Metro Talk: Facing uncertainty, the Inland Empire needs more than a global warming bucket list
So much work put into research and documentary making. But is it all echo chamber, now that the world is run totally by banks, hedge funds, Blackrock, Vanguard, Pharma-Media-Military-Congressional-Mining-Oil-Gas-Prison-Insurance-Surveillance-IT-AR-Digital Complex? Empty Nets, Emptying Oceans, Farming the Sea, and Soylent Green is People?
On a happy note, the crowd at Hatfield drank locally produced IPA’s, Oregon wine and locally backed pasteries. There was not mention of Greta’s honory doctorate from Helsinki, and Putin was not blamed for the the UME’s.
All was well at OSU, as if the world outside was outside of the bubble that is academia. Your choice, Stewart or Cooper!
Robin Waples: University of Washington (NOAA Fisheries, retired)
Topic: On the shoulders of giants: Under-appreciated studies in salmon biology with lasting influence.
In 1675 Isaac Newton wrote, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
This idea epitomizes the way that science progresses by incremental steps, punctuated occasionally by major breakthroughs. But often it is the case that neither these ‘giants’ nor their research are well-known or even routinely recognized.
I discuss four such studies conducted in Oregon that have had a profound influence on scientific developments in salmon biology in subsequent decades:
1) a 1960s study of southern Oregon Chinook salmon that was the first documentation of what has come to be known as the Portfolio Effect;
2) a 1970s study of Deschutes River steelhead that was the first attempt to empirically evaluate genetic differences between hatchery and wild fish;
3) a 1980s study of family size variation in Oregon coho salmon that helped pave the way for entirely new lines of research; and
4) a 1980s report on age structure and relative fecundity for Oregon Coast Chinook salmon that provided crucial empirical data to help parameterize models of the rates of genetic drift and loss of genetic variability in Pacific salmon.
I attended the talk just to be in situ at this Hatfield Marine Sciences Center and see what this 76-year-old fellow had to say = Robert Snowden Waples, Jr., born in Berkeley, California. He attended Palo Alto High School, where he excelled in swimming; he went on to Yale to major in American Studies and to swim, competing with the likes of future Olympians Don Schollander, John Nelson, and Mark Spitz.
He has been at the forefront of wild salmon (and now hatchery salmon) research. He has been cited more than 25,000 times, has a plethora of articles, and he is credited with helping put some teeth in the endangered species act for salmon wild species. That is, he and others worked on the various genetic lines within species so they might get special categorization.
The ESA was set forth to bring a species to a status where it doesn’t need that endangered status. There are more than 50 percent of salmon species listed under the ESA.
The Bristol Bay sockeye salmon fisheries has been and up and down situation. There are 20 to 30 different stocks of Coho salmon, and with sockeye, resiliency, representation, and redundancy are key to keeping this ecological area sustainable, Robin states.
While the talk was dry, and there were no photos or videos, graphics from Madison Avenue, he did his talk hoping the audience there was keyed into learning about the top four articles influencing him and the science of salmon research. The first article he cited was “Biocomplexity and Fisheries Sustainability” concerning fall Chinook salmon on the Sixes River, OR.
Crazy science, including the slow work looking at adult returns using interesting criteria — fast to the ocean once hatched in home stream; a little time in the estuary after hatching; a lot of time in the estuary; a lot of time in home tributaries; yearlings staying in fresh water for a year.
What helps with survivability. While the 2, 3 , 4 and 5 year returns included mostly those in the third group = a lot of time in the estuary before maturing and heading to sea. This was done in 1965, without Google, the internet and so many other tools.
The next article on Robin’s top four list includes looking Deschutes summer steelhead and the genetic differences in growth and survival of Juvenile Hatchery and Wild Steehead Trout, Salmo gairdneri.
The question posed in the 1970s research includes: What if there were no hatchery fish? That is, what would that effect be on wild fish? They call that hatchery supplementation since so many wild stocks (more than 50 percent) are endangered, in peril.
The research Robin goes over gets even more deep in terms of genetics and determining the status of coho salmon from WA, OR, and CA. That one was published in 1995.
Lots of work on wild populations and reproductive isolation and life history traits — they can be adapted to local areas.
He cited Valley Creek, near the Sawtooth mountains, where the salmon move from the ocean 900 miles away up to around 6,500 feet in elevation.
Of course, the questions from the audience include: what about the effects of climate change on the salmon community. Robin says there are tons of studies on how salmon sustainability will be changed by warming land and ocean areas. The southern range will have a more difficult time. The northern area will see salmon expansion as the ice recedes and the water gets warmer.
The big questions are around what sort of evolutionary changes can help them keep up. These are called evolutionary rescues, but he says warming seas might be too quick for that rescuing to occur.
Reduction in forests and such stream imperilment really affects salmon. Non-point source pollution is huge. More people are changing the land, through urbanization and agriculture. Rainfall and impervious surfaces add pollution loads. Robin states that there is great support for salmon, and most recent polls show 70 to 80 percent of people want to work with salmon mitigation and are willing to pay more for salmon survival and be taxed, as opposed to the spotted owl, with only gets 10 percent backing for massive tax increases to save them.
While Robin is not a fan of techno fixes, he is for more streamside tree planting for shading the homes of salmon to lower water temperatures. And making sure water from rainfall gets back into the system clean.
He notes that trout have been put everywhere around the world (trout being a cousin of salmon), and he notes that steelhead and chinook have been put into Patagonia rivers starting a hundred years ago. New Zealand has also introduced Pacific salmon there.
Here’s the talk,
I got to talk with Robin for a few minutes. We talked about his American Studies degree, and how he taught English at the University of Hawaii. And what got him into the sciences. We also mulled over why there is such a disconnect from his and his fellow scientists’ research and the average person including the fisher people who live here in our rural community fishing for rock fish, shrimp, crab, halibut, and other species.
Also discussed was the issue tied to K-12 students NEVER being at these events. And, alas, the problem of higher education pushing MBA programs and programs around coding and software application creation.
I introduced him to some of my work, with David James Duncan, with David Suzuki, and Tim Flannery and dozens of other groups, including Save Our Wild Salmon. And there is my “Interview with David James Duncan.”
How’d you end up in the Inbred Northwest… What act of fate dragged your Texas butt up here… You exchanged West Texas, Cormac McCarthy, real Tex-Mex food and sun for this? Or some variation on that theme greeted me when I first bivouacked in Spokane after heading to El Norte from “I fought the law but the law won” Bobby Fuller El Paso, Texas.
It was a hell of a Salmonidae journey, hitching my adult body and soul to the Pacific Northwest in the form of the Inland Empire, Spokane — “largest city between Seattle and Minneapolis,” they kept telling me. My olfactory memory burst with narrative skills by traveling the region as reporter, educator and environmental activist. Man, the work I did on writing about removing those four lower Snake River dams. Pieces on sustainable agriculture in Washington. Stories on the power of storytelling in this region of Earth.
This place is full of river-teeth; the place of Ice Age Floods’ erratic boulders dropped 12,000 years ago from ice rafts in the middle of the Willamette Valley; the ramming tectonics and ring of fire. Luckily for me, writers like Rick Bass, Lizzie Grossman, David James Duncan and so many others kept me busy as a desert salmon looking for some home stream back to the Pacific.
I left Sonora and then Chihuahua for Inland Salish land, where 24 distinct languages once ruled.
NpoqÃniscn, or Spokane. For thousands of years the Inland Salish people here built permanent villages along these powerful rivers in order to connect to their lifeblood and make benedictions to brother-sister salmon. Over three million acres made up their distinct territory, and later other Indians introduced them to horses and plank houses.
It’s a place that encompasses a kind of hope trapped in the way the sun hits water through a stand of cedars and towering Douglas firs. “Sun People” Spokane is translated as, though I’ve talked to a few Spokane scholars who say it’s more closely, “the color of the sun reflecting through the water on a salmon’s back.”
That story dredging is what makes a place, place. The legend about my new home is even more poetic: “There was once a hollow tree. When an Indian beat upon it, a serpent living inside made a noise which sounded like spukcane, a phonetic sound without meaning in the tribe’s language. So, one day, as the tribe’s chief thought about those sounds, these vibrations reverberated from his head. Spukcane then blossomed to mean, ‘Power from the brain.’”
Even a thousand years ago marketing rued the day — Spukanee is what they ended up calling themselves. Children of the Sun.
One of my trips deeper into the spiritual and intellectual fabric of this place (new to me starting May, 2001) was with a contemporary Caucasian writer — David James Duncan. We were talking about dam breeching, slack water rivers, President Bush, war, salmon recovery, and writing. That was April 2008:
I’ve been surprised from time to time by the American people’s eagerness to vote for ways to increase their own suffering and their children’s destitution and Mother Earth’s degradation. But I refuse to despair. Salmon are my totem creature and salmon don’t despair. They keep trying to return home to their mountain birth houses and create a beautiful new generation no matter what kind of hellhole industrial man has made of their rivers. Mother Teresa spoke with the heart of a wild salmon when she said, ‘God doesn’t ask us to win. He only asks us to try.’ I’m in the business of trying. I leave the scorecard to the Scorekeeper.
That journey for me, those tallies by the proverbial Scorekeeper as Duncan frames it, is tied to salmon, as the corpuscles of that species have been in my bloodline for centuries. The blood of Celts and of Scots. Why not? The word “salmon” is from Old French: salmonem, salmo, maybe even from salire.
Salire — to leap.
My mother was born and raised in British Columbia, Powell River. The stench of the largest pulp mill in the world at that time was rotting the alveoli of her lungs and hundreds of others’ respiratory tracks, eventually resulting in emphysema, or what is referred to as COPD.
I remember from one stay there how I noticed a line of cars at the town’s free car washes when the day shift switched to night shift. Acid releases, ash snows, rotten egg winds, and automobile paint flaking.
Both her parents were from Ireland and Scotland ending up on the Sunshine Coast. Some call it Sechelt (shishalh) First Nation land, again, Salish (coastal).
I remember pulling in Coho and King salmon, huge ones in the 1960s. In fact, one that I hooked was close to my eight-year-old’s size, at seventy-five pounds. My Uncle Ted (not by blood, but my grandparents’ friend and boarder) had to take over for me, pulling on the rod with his tobacco-stained hands. His own tired lungs wheezed and rattled while he wrestled the magnificent muscular Chinook close to the gunnels while directing me to gaff it.
Here I was, on this boat along this dark-dark forested coast, with Uncle Ted, friend of my Irish-Scottish grandparents. Son of a chief, from the Sliammon Reserve, 20 miles north of Powell River.
That deep red heart and liver were still connected after Ted gutted it quickly — after some word in his native language he exhorted while proceeding to smash the salmon’s head. He put the heart and liver into an old bucket, the one we used to piss in. As I watched the rhythm of that seven-year-old fish’s power train still pulsating with life in salt water, after being eviscerated, dog fish sharks surfaced near us and gulls dive-bombed our foredeck. Just along the beach a mother and her two cubs paraded around that brown bear way, scenting our kill.
That was almost five decades ago.
Strawberries, spuds and these Douglas firs that stayed with me as shapes long after any J. R.R. Tolkien dreams.
Olfactory memory. I recall those smells on a dive boat off Honduras. I remember the taste of Sockeye blood when I was snorkeling off the Baja peninsula into the thrashing sailfish that was in the grips of a 12-foot hammerhead’s jaw.
Once in Vietnam, along the Laos border, in a bat cave with British and Vietnamese scientists, I tasted that Sechelt cedar fire when Uncle Ted took me and my sister to the “reservation” for a potlatch. Dried smoked salmon was on my deja vu mind in 2006 when I was with Nez Perce friends digging camas in a field near Lolo Pass, Idaho.
It’s cliche but apropos to think some of us are shaped by anadromous destinies, like the salmon, biologically programmed millions of years ago by small but mostly large geologic transformations, and the ice barriers, leaking rivers and creeks caused by melting ice. What got salmon going was the changing nature of the oceans cooling some 30 million years ago.
Theories abound, but the prevailing science says they started out as freshwater fish. Moved to the cold Pacific where nutrient rich waters attracted their ancestors.
That destiny to move, to follow some ancient walkabout song or subsonic calling, it’s been an arousing part of my life. I was born on the ocean — San Pedro, California — and then moved as an infant to the Sunshine Coast in British Columbia.
We moved like migrating salmon, hitching our lives to the tether of my old man’s military profession. I ended up teething on the island of Terceira, part of the Azores, Portugal, about 1,600 km west from Lisbon and 3,680 km east from New York City.
Fish, bread, saints and milagros. Miracles. And stories of fishermen hitting the open waters with poveiro boats launched from the Port of Póvoa de Varzim. Thirty oarsmen making it all the way to Newfoundland. Cod, sardine, ray, mackerel, whiskered sole, snook, whiting, alfonsino and salmon.
Also, tuna, migratory and strong. They’ve been recorded by modern biology traveling some 5,000 miles in 50 days. Albacora these fishermen call them.
Piano wires, hooks and barracuda brought up from the depths. I ate their flesh around beach fires, using colorful upturned boats as barriers from the whipping winds. These fishers talked of sperm whale hunts and monsters from the depths west in the Puerto Rico trench.
A uma profundidade de cinco milha, oito quilometros. More than 26,400 feet down.
Later in college, while working as a dive master in the Sea of Cortez, I was boning up for the History of Hispania course I was taking at the University of Arizona. I read about a 1755 earthquake in an undersea “fracture zone-subduction zone” off Portugal — near the Azores. It generated a giant tsunami that went both directions, as far as Caribbean islands. It killed more than 100,000 people and destroyed the city of Lisbon. It sapped Portugal as a going concern — European power — impacting in grand scale not only the religious thinking of the time but philosophical constructs.
Salmyo, Portuguese for salmon. Some of those old salty dogs talked about fishing a river along the Spanish border — Rio Mino — for salmon.
Atlantic salmon.
For me, Pacific salmon, a calling in Salish. Words whispered by the prince and his salmon people, lured me away from that walkabout. We ended up as a family moving to Paris, France, and then Munich and Edinburgh. We harbored in Arizona, where I became, of all things, a dive master. Then, Mexico, Central America, Belize. West Texas, New Mexico.
That home stream, that electromagnetic pull, got me to Spokane. I ended up working on a study guide for six through eight graders for Claire Rudolph Murphy’s Tsimshian tale, The Prince and the Salmon People.
I am here, in Vancouver, having traveled from Seattle via Spokane. I just finished work on two magazine pieces around the 70th Anniversary of Hanford, the Manhattan Project, also couched as the A-bomb. That was 2013. My pieces were on downwinders — those people throughout Washington, Idaho, Montana, California and Oregon hit with bursts or radioactive iodine 131. Secret government experiments during the cold war. Millions of gallons of radioactive waste in tanks buried along the Columbia.
The iodine 131 came with the winds and settled into feed, hay. The milk runs to Spokane from Pasco carried the radionuclide with them.
Stories of three-eyed salmon. Sheep born with two heads. My Nez Perce and Yakima Indian friends speak about young girls with cancers. Diseased thyroids for people in their twenties. Aches, pains, stomach ailments, early deaths. Stories of the Pacific Northwest, really, as those waters around Hanford leech into the mighty Columbia as it makes it way to the Pacific.
Salmon made me a storyteller. I have a sockeye tattooed on my right calf muscle. I listen to those sidebar stories. I listen to writers born in the Pacific Northwest. Born to tell the story of their own returned journey.
It’s a story etched in fossils a hundred million years old. Over and over, the stories, yet what is literacy unless we embrace the knowledge that rivers and streams have to be clean, unimpeded, free-flowing, and cold in order to harbor life, to make the salmon. To make warm-blooded storytellers.
David James Duncan:
To learn to live with the earth on the earth’s own terms is more important to me than literacy. I lived on the Oregon Coast at a time when the most ancient Sitka spruce groves in the world were being converted daily into the LA Sunday Times. There was, in my view, nothing in the Times’ stories of that era that compared in beauty or import to the trees that were slaughtered to create the newspapers. The news those trees were emitting was something invisible, called oxygen. The news those trees published constantly was keeping the planet alive. We killed them in the name of literacy.
Robin Waples: University of Washington (NOAA Fisheries, retired)
Topic: On the shoulders of giants: Under-appreciated studies in salmon biology with lasting influence.
In 1675 Isaac Newton wrote, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
This idea epitomizes the way that science progresses by incremental steps, punctuated occasionally by major breakthroughs. But often it is the case that neither these ‘giants’ nor their research are well-known or even routinely recognized.
I discuss four such studies conducted in Oregon that have had a profound influence on scientific developments in salmon biology in subsequent decades:
1) a 1960s study of southern Oregon Chinook salmon that was the first documentation of what has come to be known as the Portfolio Effect;
2) a 1970s study of Deschutes River steelhead that was the first attempt to empirically evaluate genetic differences between hatchery and wild fish;
3) a 1980s study of family size variation in Oregon coho salmon that helped pave the way for entirely new lines of research; and
4) a 1980s report on age structure and relative fecundity for Oregon Coast Chinook salmon that provided crucial empirical data to help parameterize models of the rates of genetic drift and loss of genetic variability in Pacific salmon.
I attended the talk just to be in situ at this Hatfield Marine Sciences Center and see what this 76-year-old fellow had to say = Robert Snowden Waples, Jr., born in Berkeley, California. He attended Palo Alto High School, where he excelled in swimming; he went on to Yale to major in American Studies and to swim, competing with the likes of future Olympians Don Schollander, John Nelson, and Mark Spitz.
He has been at the forefront of wild salmon (and now hatchery salmon) research. He has been cited more than 25,000 times, has a plethora of articles, and he is credited with helping put some teeth in the endangered species act for salmon wild species. That is, he and others worked on the various genetic lines within species so they might get special categorization.
The ESA was set forth to bring a species to a status where it doesn’t need that endangered status. There are more than 50 percent of salmon species listed under the ESA.
The Bristol Bay sockeye salmon fisheries has been and up and down situation. There are 20 to 30 different stocks of Coho salmon, and with sockeye, resiliency, representation, and redundancy are key to keeping this ecological area sustainable, Robin states.
While the talk was dry, and there were no photos or videos, graphics from Madison Avenue, he did his talk hoping the audience there was keyed into learning about the top four articles influencing him and the science of salmon research. The first article he cited was “Biocomplexity and Fisheries Sustainability” concerning fall Chinook salmon on the Sixes River, OR.
Crazy science, including the slow work looking at adult returns using interesting criteria — fast to the ocean once hatched in home stream; a little time in the estuary after hatching; a lot of time in the estuary; a lot of time in home tributaries; yearlings staying in fresh water for a year.
What helps with survivability. While the 2, 3 , 4 and 5 year returns included mostly those in the third group = a lot of time in the estuary before maturing and heading to sea. This was done in 1965, without Google, the internet and so many other tools.
The next article on Robin’s top four list includes looking Deschutes summer steelhead and the genetic differences in growth and survival of Juvenile Hatchery and Wild Steehead Trout, Salmo gairdneri.
The question posed in the 1970s research includes: What if there were no hatchery fish? That is, what would that effect be on wild fish? They call that hatchery supplementation since so many wild stocks (more than 50 percent) are endangered, in peril.
The research Robin goes over gets even more deep in terms of genetics and determining the status of coho salmon from WA, OR, and CA. That one was published in 1995.
Lots of work on wild populations and reproductive isolation and life history traits — they can be adapted to local areas.
He cited Valley Creek, near the Sawtooth mountains, where the salmon move from the ocean 900 miles away up to around 6,500 feet in elevation.
Of course, the questions from the audience include: what about the effects of climate change on the salmon community. Robin says there are tons of studies on how salmon sustainability will be changed by warming land and ocean areas. The southern range will have a more difficult time. The northern area will see salmon expansion as the ice recedes and the water gets warmer.
The big questions are around what sort of evolutionary changes can help them keep up. These are called evolutionary rescues, but he says warming seas might be too quick for that rescuing to occur.
Reduction in forests and such stream imperilment really affects salmon. Non-point source pollution is huge. More people are changing the land, through urbanization and agriculture. Rainfall and impervious surfaces add pollution loads. Robin states that there is great support for salmon, and most recent polls show 70 to 80 percent of people want to work with salmon mitigation and are willing to pay more for salmon survival and be taxed, as opposed to the spotted owl, with only gets 10 percent backing for massive tax increases to save them.
While Robin is not a fan of techno fixes, he is for more streamside tree planting for shading the homes of salmon to lower water temperatures. And making sure water from rainfall gets back into the system clean.
He notes that trout have been put everywhere around the world (trout being a cousin of salmon), and he notes that steelhead and chinook have been put into Patagonia rivers starting a hundred years ago. New Zealand has also introduced Pacific salmon there.
Here’s the talk,
I got to talk with Robin for a few minutes. We talked about his American Studies degree, and how he taught English at the University of Hawaii. And what got him into the sciences. We also mulled over why there is such a disconnect from his and his fellow scientists’ research and the average person including the fisher people who live here in our rural community fishing for rock fish, shrimp, crab, halibut, and other species.
Also discussed was the issue tied to K-12 students NEVER being at these events. And, alas, the problem of higher education pushing MBA programs and programs around coding and software application creation.
I introduced him to some of my work, with David James Duncan, with David Suzuki, and Tim Flannery and dozens of other groups, including Save Our Wild Salmon. And there is my “Interview with David James Duncan.”
How’d you end up in the Inbred Northwest… What act of fate dragged your Texas butt up here… You exchanged West Texas, Cormac McCarthy, real Tex-Mex food and sun for this? Or some variation on that theme greeted me when I first bivouacked in Spokane after heading to El Norte from “I fought the law but the law won” Bobby Fuller El Paso, Texas.
It was a hell of a Salmonidae journey, hitching my adult body and soul to the Pacific Northwest in the form of the Inland Empire, Spokane — “largest city between Seattle and Minneapolis,” they kept telling me. My olfactory memory burst with narrative skills by traveling the region as reporter, educator and environmental activist. Man, the work I did on writing about removing those four lower Snake River dams. Pieces on sustainable agriculture in Washington. Stories on the power of storytelling in this region of Earth.
This place is full of river-teeth; the place of Ice Age Floods’ erratic boulders dropped 12,000 years ago from ice rafts in the middle of the Willamette Valley; the ramming tectonics and ring of fire. Luckily for me, writers like Rick Bass, Lizzie Grossman, David James Duncan and so many others kept me busy as a desert salmon looking for some home stream back to the Pacific.
I left Sonora and then Chihuahua for Inland Salish land, where 24 distinct languages once ruled.
NpoqÃniscn, or Spokane. For thousands of years the Inland Salish people here built permanent villages along these powerful rivers in order to connect to their lifeblood and make benedictions to brother-sister salmon. Over three million acres made up their distinct territory, and later other Indians introduced them to horses and plank houses.
It’s a place that encompasses a kind of hope trapped in the way the sun hits water through a stand of cedars and towering Douglas firs. “Sun People” Spokane is translated as, though I’ve talked to a few Spokane scholars who say it’s more closely, “the color of the sun reflecting through the water on a salmon’s back.”
That story dredging is what makes a place, place. The legend about my new home is even more poetic: “There was once a hollow tree. When an Indian beat upon it, a serpent living inside made a noise which sounded like spukcane, a phonetic sound without meaning in the tribe’s language. So, one day, as the tribe’s chief thought about those sounds, these vibrations reverberated from his head. Spukcane then blossomed to mean, ‘Power from the brain.’”
Even a thousand years ago marketing rued the day — Spukanee is what they ended up calling themselves. Children of the Sun.
One of my trips deeper into the spiritual and intellectual fabric of this place (new to me starting May, 2001) was with a contemporary Caucasian writer — David James Duncan. We were talking about dam breeching, slack water rivers, President Bush, war, salmon recovery, and writing. That was April 2008:
I’ve been surprised from time to time by the American people’s eagerness to vote for ways to increase their own suffering and their children’s destitution and Mother Earth’s degradation. But I refuse to despair. Salmon are my totem creature and salmon don’t despair. They keep trying to return home to their mountain birth houses and create a beautiful new generation no matter what kind of hellhole industrial man has made of their rivers. Mother Teresa spoke with the heart of a wild salmon when she said, ‘God doesn’t ask us to win. He only asks us to try.’ I’m in the business of trying. I leave the scorecard to the Scorekeeper.
That journey for me, those tallies by the proverbial Scorekeeper as Duncan frames it, is tied to salmon, as the corpuscles of that species have been in my bloodline for centuries. The blood of Celts and of Scots. Why not? The word “salmon” is from Old French: salmonem, salmo, maybe even from salire.
Salire — to leap.
My mother was born and raised in British Columbia, Powell River. The stench of the largest pulp mill in the world at that time was rotting the alveoli of her lungs and hundreds of others’ respiratory tracks, eventually resulting in emphysema, or what is referred to as COPD.
I remember from one stay there how I noticed a line of cars at the town’s free car washes when the day shift switched to night shift. Acid releases, ash snows, rotten egg winds, and automobile paint flaking.
Both her parents were from Ireland and Scotland ending up on the Sunshine Coast. Some call it Sechelt (shishalh) First Nation land, again, Salish (coastal).
I remember pulling in Coho and King salmon, huge ones in the 1960s. In fact, one that I hooked was close to my eight-year-old’s size, at seventy-five pounds. My Uncle Ted (not by blood, but my grandparents’ friend and boarder) had to take over for me, pulling on the rod with his tobacco-stained hands. His own tired lungs wheezed and rattled while he wrestled the magnificent muscular Chinook close to the gunnels while directing me to gaff it.
Here I was, on this boat along this dark-dark forested coast, with Uncle Ted, friend of my Irish-Scottish grandparents. Son of a chief, from the Sliammon Reserve, 20 miles north of Powell River.
That deep red heart and liver were still connected after Ted gutted it quickly — after some word in his native language he exhorted while proceeding to smash the salmon’s head. He put the heart and liver into an old bucket, the one we used to piss in. As I watched the rhythm of that seven-year-old fish’s power train still pulsating with life in salt water, after being eviscerated, dog fish sharks surfaced near us and gulls dive-bombed our foredeck. Just along the beach a mother and her two cubs paraded around that brown bear way, scenting our kill.
That was almost five decades ago.
Strawberries, spuds and these Douglas firs that stayed with me as shapes long after any J. R.R. Tolkien dreams.
Olfactory memory. I recall those smells on a dive boat off Honduras. I remember the taste of Sockeye blood when I was snorkeling off the Baja peninsula into the thrashing sailfish that was in the grips of a 12-foot hammerhead’s jaw.
Once in Vietnam, along the Laos border, in a bat cave with British and Vietnamese scientists, I tasted that Sechelt cedar fire when Uncle Ted took me and my sister to the “reservation” for a potlatch. Dried smoked salmon was on my deja vu mind in 2006 when I was with Nez Perce friends digging camas in a field near Lolo Pass, Idaho.
It’s cliche but apropos to think some of us are shaped by anadromous destinies, like the salmon, biologically programmed millions of years ago by small but mostly large geologic transformations, and the ice barriers, leaking rivers and creeks caused by melting ice. What got salmon going was the changing nature of the oceans cooling some 30 million years ago.
Theories abound, but the prevailing science says they started out as freshwater fish. Moved to the cold Pacific where nutrient rich waters attracted their ancestors.
That destiny to move, to follow some ancient walkabout song or subsonic calling, it’s been an arousing part of my life. I was born on the ocean — San Pedro, California — and then moved as an infant to the Sunshine Coast in British Columbia.
We moved like migrating salmon, hitching our lives to the tether of my old man’s military profession. I ended up teething on the island of Terceira, part of the Azores, Portugal, about 1,600 km west from Lisbon and 3,680 km east from New York City.
Fish, bread, saints and milagros. Miracles. And stories of fishermen hitting the open waters with poveiro boats launched from the Port of Póvoa de Varzim. Thirty oarsmen making it all the way to Newfoundland. Cod, sardine, ray, mackerel, whiskered sole, snook, whiting, alfonsino and salmon.
Also, tuna, migratory and strong. They’ve been recorded by modern biology traveling some 5,000 miles in 50 days. Albacora these fishermen call them.
Piano wires, hooks and barracuda brought up from the depths. I ate their flesh around beach fires, using colorful upturned boats as barriers from the whipping winds. These fishers talked of sperm whale hunts and monsters from the depths west in the Puerto Rico trench.
A uma profundidade de cinco milha, oito quilometros. More than 26,400 feet down.
Later in college, while working as a dive master in the Sea of Cortez, I was boning up for the History of Hispania course I was taking at the University of Arizona. I read about a 1755 earthquake in an undersea “fracture zone-subduction zone” off Portugal — near the Azores. It generated a giant tsunami that went both directions, as far as Caribbean islands. It killed more than 100,000 people and destroyed the city of Lisbon. It sapped Portugal as a going concern — European power — impacting in grand scale not only the religious thinking of the time but philosophical constructs.
Salmyo, Portuguese for salmon. Some of those old salty dogs talked about fishing a river along the Spanish border — Rio Mino — for salmon.
Atlantic salmon.
For me, Pacific salmon, a calling in Salish. Words whispered by the prince and his salmon people, lured me away from that walkabout. We ended up as a family moving to Paris, France, and then Munich and Edinburgh. We harbored in Arizona, where I became, of all things, a dive master. Then, Mexico, Central America, Belize. West Texas, New Mexico.
That home stream, that electromagnetic pull, got me to Spokane. I ended up working on a study guide for six through eight graders for Claire Rudolph Murphy’s Tsimshian tale, The Prince and the Salmon People.
I am here, in Vancouver, having traveled from Seattle via Spokane. I just finished work on two magazine pieces around the 70th Anniversary of Hanford, the Manhattan Project, also couched as the A-bomb. That was 2013. My pieces were on downwinders — those people throughout Washington, Idaho, Montana, California and Oregon hit with bursts or radioactive iodine 131. Secret government experiments during the cold war. Millions of gallons of radioactive waste in tanks buried along the Columbia.
The iodine 131 came with the winds and settled into feed, hay. The milk runs to Spokane from Pasco carried the radionuclide with them.
Stories of three-eyed salmon. Sheep born with two heads. My Nez Perce and Yakima Indian friends speak about young girls with cancers. Diseased thyroids for people in their twenties. Aches, pains, stomach ailments, early deaths. Stories of the Pacific Northwest, really, as those waters around Hanford leech into the mighty Columbia as it makes it way to the Pacific.
Salmon made me a storyteller. I have a sockeye tattooed on my right calf muscle. I listen to those sidebar stories. I listen to writers born in the Pacific Northwest. Born to tell the story of their own returned journey.
It’s a story etched in fossils a hundred million years old. Over and over, the stories, yet what is literacy unless we embrace the knowledge that rivers and streams have to be clean, unimpeded, free-flowing, and cold in order to harbor life, to make the salmon. To make warm-blooded storytellers.
David James Duncan:
To learn to live with the earth on the earth’s own terms is more important to me than literacy. I lived on the Oregon Coast at a time when the most ancient Sitka spruce groves in the world were being converted daily into the LA Sunday Times. There was, in my view, nothing in the Times’ stories of that era that compared in beauty or import to the trees that were slaughtered to create the newspapers. The news those trees were emitting was something invisible, called oxygen. The news those trees published constantly was keeping the planet alive. We killed them in the name of literacy.
Tax time is coming around for the year, 2022, April 15 in the U$A = The Year of Water Tiger, and that Zodiac went completey 180 degrees the other way:
The 2022 year of the water tiger promises a 15 year of positive changes. Your business will be stable, and finances will flow smoothly throughout the year. This year is favorable for new love and relationships. However, you are advised to make savings that might be needed in the future.
You might know where I am going with this. My spouse and I will pay through the nose these poll and toll taxes. The complete rip-off of our household. Recall, we pay taxes on other things daily, and alas, we get double and triple taxed so Warren Buffet can say this shit:
Buffett’s secretary since 1993, Debbie Bosanek, sat next to her boss just hours after being invited by the president to the State of the Union address, where the president made her the face of tax inequality in America. Bosanek pays a tax rate of 35.8 percent of income, while Buffett pays a rate at 17.4 percent.
“I’ll be a fair amount higher, 8 or 9 points higher,” Buffett said of his own tax rate in an appearance on CNBC Monday. “But the differential between me and the rest of the office, not just my secretary but the rest of the office, was greater than that. It’ll be closer, but I’ll probably be the lowest paying taxpayer in the office.” (source)
Nah, most people reading this will say he earned his money, right? And, well, Capitalism means we listen to the hoarders, the economists, the bankers, the pie in the sky billionaires lecture us on why they make billions and why we struggle to make rent: not working hard enough. You do not hate Jaime Dimon, Larry Summers, Michael Bloomberg, Bezos, Soros, Larry Fink? This is just part of another complete list short compared to global population, but in the multiple trillions of dollars of thievery. If you do not have a dart board or bullseye, then get one to take out some of that anger.
You know what Europe is mired in now — a war economy (sic) which is no economy at all. Devolution. Pain and cuts to social service in the death by 10,000 cuts. Building drones to kill children? Buttons for those flak jackets? Diodes for those missile payloads? You don’t need me to link all the stories on how the UK and Europe in general is suffering 40, 60 and 100 percent increase in food bills, let alone their tripling of energy costs. Go do your Google Gulag search yourself. Here, a little history:
So, now, the European plan is to bring back conscription, new killing fields, flaunting the armed services service as some sort of youth enhancement thing, you know, since these Macron’s and Scholz’s and the others are such self-sacrificing millionaires. This is what they want? Kid soldier? Yep.
So, sure, this is an undercount, as always when dealing with government stats = Roughly 20 percent of the federal budget is dedicated to defense and security, which can be understood as the percent of tax dollars spent on the military. Look, the VA is a behemoth, and this is an undercount, too = There’s $161.3 billion (an increase of $8.6 billion or 5.7 percent) in mandatory funding in 2022 for benefit programs inclusive of Compensation and Pensions, Readjustment Benefits, Housing and Insurance. Oh, so all that untreated C-PTSD, all the chaos in veterans’ and their families’ lives. All the overpolicing, the courts, all of that, tied to MILITARY. How much does that cost us, taxpayer, and lost lives and denuded families? Strike up the band:
A parable, to begin: in 2016, the 136 military bands maintained by the Department of Defense, employing more than 6,500 full-time professional musicians at an annual cost of about $500 million, caught the attention of budget-cutters worried about surging federal deficits. Immediately memos flew and lobbyists descended. The Government Accountability Office, laying the groundwork for another study or three, opined, “The military services have not developed objectives and measures to assess how their bands are addressing the bands’ missions, such as inspiring patriotism.” Supporters of the 369th Infantry Regiment band noted that it had introduced jazz to Europe during World War I.
How could such a history be left behind? A blues band connected effectively with Russian soldiers in Bosnia in 1996, another proponent argued, proving that bands are, “if anything, an incredibly cost-effective supplement” to the Pentagon’s then $4.5 billion public affairs budget. When the dust cleared, funding for the bands was not cut, because the political cost entailed in reducing the number of them by, say, half would have been enormous. The resulting $250 million in annual savings, on the other hand, while a significant sum for most government agencies, would have produced the almost unnoticeable difference of three one-hundredths of one percent in the Pentagon budget. (source)
Every bead of sweat in the USA goes into the military, spying — from DoD, NSA, CIA, FBI, to all those police units from Seattle to Selma, to all the universities with contracts with DoD, et al, all the crap, the junk on computers, all those software applications, pharma to viruses to ecological studies/research, all of it, beyond freeways and highways and waterways and airwaves, all of it is tied to the military, so screw that 20 percent of your tax dollar going to military offense estimate. It’s a lie. It’s more like 60 percent.
And, you can’t separate this onion, man. All the billeting, building, burgers, buttons, bombs, all of it, the USA taxpayer foots that bill. We have thrown hundreds of billion$ at Israel, in direct taxpayer money, and then these black budgets, and then, alas, it all comes down to Israel selling back what we GAVE them:
These figures are undercounts, so we need to multiple by 10: To date, the United States has provided Israel $158 billion (current, or non-inflation- adjusted, dollars) in bilateral assistance and missile defense and …
As Israel has become a global leader in certain niche defense technologies, Israeli defense exports to the U.S. market have grown substantially.17 According to one report, the U.S. military purchased $1.5 billion worth of Israeli equipment in 2019, representing a five-fold increase from two decades before. In addition to the U.S. purchase of Iron Dome (see below), the United States has purchased, among other items, the following Israeli defense articles: Trophy active protection systems for M1 Abrams tanks, enhanced night-vision goggles, laser range finders for the U.S. Marines, helmets for F-35 fighter pilots, wings for the F-35, and a system of towers, electronic sensors, radars, and cameras for use along the U.S.-Mexican border. The U.S. Army is currently evaluating whether to purchase Rafael’s SPIKE Non-Line of Sight missile to be mounted on AH-64E Apache Helicopters. (limited source)
Even excluding all of these extra costs, America’s $84.8 billion in aid to Israel from fiscal years 1949 through 1998, and the interest the U.S. paid to borrow this money, has cost U.S. taxpayers $134.8 billion, not adjusted for inflation. Or, put another way, the nearly $14,630 every one of 5.8 million Israelis received from the U.S. government by Oct. 31, 1997 has cost American taxpayers $23,240 per Israeli. It would be interesting to know how many of those American taxpayers believe they and their families have received as much from the U.S. Treasury as has everyone who has chosen to become a citizen of Israel. But it’s a question that will never occur to the American public because, so long as America’s mainstream media, Congress and president maintain their pact of silence, few Americans will ever know the true cost of Israel to U.S. taxpayers. (source)
Again, lies, since aid to Israel in the form of, well, cultural, education, scientific aid, all of that soft money, is in fact MILITARY aid/$$ since that country is a full-fledged military society, bombing Syria as I write this, bulldozing Palestinians into the ground. Then, the Ukraine project? Israel loves that war. How much has the USA and its vassals thrown into Ukraine since 2000?
Oh, yes, it’s tax time, and I have a tax preparer in Arizona, and she’s okay in terms of some knowledge about the world, but she watches Maddow and CNN and CNBC, and she is Jewish as is her husband, so she has told me she is not up on Ukraine and Russia (doesn’t all the stuff I bring to her) but that propaganda and fake education that are in the air, 24/7, all of that have created colonized minds, even smart ladies like this tax lady, not really knowing the deal in Maidan and Coups and the Neocon Jewish project. And, while she goes through our measley tax forms and measley losses in our retirement accounts, I am seething mad, man, seething. Our county is depressed, economically, as are hundreds and hundreds of counties throughout the land, but we foot that thief’s bills — Zelensky:
Economic support to the Ukrainian government, which goes directly to the Ukrainian government to allow continuing operations since the war has disrupted its own mechanisms for raising revenue; and
U.S. government operations and domestic costs related to Ukraine, which covers the increased expenses to government agencies for operations like moving embassy personnel and prosecuting war criminals. It also includes $2 billion for support to energy companies, particularly the nuclear industry, to offset higher supplier costs. Some observers might exclude the energy subsidy as only tangentially related to the war in Ukraine. This tabulation includes the item since the administration categorized it as Ukraine related. (again, a propaganda and cover-up operation, pro-pro war, pro-pro-pro Ukraine — CSIS)
This YouTube on the infection of war and military in Hollywood is superficial, not deep, not the whole ugly taxdollar picture:
There is so much lying about what is happening in Ukraine, that those lies — PSYOPS of the highest level, and those presstitutes, the stenographers for the military and neoliberal cabal of Nuland-Blinken-Kagan Family-Sherman-Yellen-Garland-Biden-Power et al, — they have colonized the American mind, man. And in Europe. Imagine, the largest industrial terrorism in a long while, against Nordstream/Germany, and Sy Hersh covering it with plenty of others before him covering it, as an operation done by USA Inc., and now, we get these USA and German newspapers saying the pipeline was blown up by Oceans 6. With a billionaire’s yacht. This is the stuff of not dumbdowning, but Hollywood script writing.
Amazing how much money we the taxpayer pay in taxes and then feed the dirty machines of Amazon Studios, Showtime, Hulu, Netflix, HBO, the lot of them, with their sick and propagandistic and pro=pro=pro War and CIA crap, that now, we have Ocean’s Six on a yacht with two scuba divers bombing Nordtream.
Here’s a good but wordy look at that lie: Russia Captures East Bakhmut, Zelensky Admits Importance: Intel: Nord Stream Attack 6 Guys (actually, the story says, one woman) & A Boat.
UPDATE – U.S. journalist Seymour Hersh says, "they can't be that stupid" in reaction to NYT's article claiming a "pro-Ukrainian group" carried out the Nord Stream attacks. pic.twitter.com/SB2RK9Xekk
All of this crap is paid for by you and me, by my spouse and my daughter. On and on and on.
Norway wants it. UK wants it. France, too. Forced military mercenary service/disservice. While neighboring Lithuania decided to reinstate conscription in 2015, and Estonia never abolished it, Latvia chose no change. Classes on national defense were introduced in schools, along with summer camps for practical skills. My goddamned tax dollars, with my measley social security checks, $3.60 a gallon for gas, $4 for a dozen eggs, and, well, taxes taxes and taxes for our house since the money is going to, well, Vanguard and Blackrock and pipsqueaks like ZioLensky and Bibi.
Because the assistance is drawn from a variety of sources — and because it’s not always easy to distinguish between aid that’s been authorized, pledged, or delivered — some analysts estimate the true figure of the U.S. commitment to Ukraine is much higher: up to $40 billion in security assistance, or $110 million a day over the last year. This assistance is believed to be playing an important role in the advances Ukraine is making in an ongoing offensive to retake territory seized by Russia earlier this year; the cities of Kupiansk and Izium are reported to have just been liberated. What is clear is that the volume and speed of the assistance headed to Ukraine is unprecedented, and that legislators and observers are struggling to keep up.
I have seen how my tax lady has been PSYOP-ed into delusional thinking, like this one: I saw two “reports” putting Ukrainian soldier losses at 100,000 and Russian losses at 180,000. Amazing this crap still flies around. Ukraine lost the war in April 2022. The mercenary forces of NATO and USA and other demented countries have thrown junk and killer junk at Ukraine. USA is spending money on AWACs and satellite time and so so much on this war. But it’s an eight to one deal, really, UkroNazi’s dead v. Russians.
Taxes, taxes, taxes. And we throw money at Europe, and gut Europe at the same time. Here, more of the insanity:
Max Blumenthal interviews Heinrich Bücker, founder of Berlin’s COOP Antiwar Cafe, about his prosecution at the hands of the German state for publicly denouncing Germany’s military aid to a Ukrainian government that reveres World War II-era Nazi collaborators and incorporates neo-Nazi battalions into its military. Bücker also discusses that state of the German antiwar movement as it gathers momentum following mass protests after the February 24 first anniversary of the Ukraine proxy war.
These are our allies, though we bugged German politicians’ and military personnel’s phones, and then the Nordstream, man. This is what my taxes pay for: “U.S. journalist Seymour Hersh says, “they can’t be that stupid” in reaction to NYT’s article claiming a “pro-Ukrainian group” carried out the Nord Stream attacks.”
And so, am I mad as hell and can’t take it anymore? Are you?
And under Biden Incorporated, how many more agents hired for the IRS? “Do you make $75,000 or less?” tweeted House Minority Leader Slug/Leech Kevin McCarthy. “Democrats’ new army of 87,000 IRS agents will be coming for you—with 710,000 new audits for Americans who earn less than $75k.”
The Inflation Reduction Act, a landmark climate, health care and tax package that passed the Senate on Sunday and is expected to head to Biden’s desk after the House approves it on Friday, includes roughly $78 billion for the IRS to be phased in over 10 years. A Treasury Department report from May 2021 estimated that such an investment would enable the agency to hire roughly 87,000 employees by 2031. But most of those hires would not be Internal Revenue agents, and wouldn’t be new positions.
My colleague Rachel Yehuda studied rates of PTSD in adult New Yorkers who had been assaulted or rapes. Those whose mothers were Holocaust survivors with PTSD had a significantly higher rate of developing serious psychological problems after these traumatic experiences. The most reasonable explanation is that their upbringing had left them with a vulnerable physiology, making it difficult for them to regain their equilibrium after being violated. Yehuda found a similar vulnerability in the children of pregnant women who were in the World Trade Center that fatal day in 2001. Similarly, the reactions of children to painful events are largely determined by how calm or stressed their parents are.
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
Oh, I know I sometimes blithely say, “Violence is in the DNA of Americans.” Or, I say, “Americans are colonized, in constant fear, flight, freeze mode because of their intergenerational trauma put upon so many millions here and tens of millions outside the border of U$A.” Or, yep, “Collective Stockholm syndrome brought upon the masses through Disneyfication, McDonaldization and Infantalization.” I am serious, though, about epigenetic trauma, and if a child witnessing pain, hate, parents shooting up, violently attack each other, poverty, drug use, all of that “stuff,” well, the DNA is in fact changed for the babe, the juvenile, as all those stress hormones — there are dozens and hundreds in concert with all sorts of other bodily functions tied to the gut and brain and cortisol interplay — they morph child into hyper-vigilant and hyper-reactive and possibly hyper-mentally disjointed teens … And then what happens to them in adulthood?
You have to wonder what is in the water, meat, air, soil, Cheetos when we see this in Greece but nothing of the sort in Palestine, Ohio. I am looking at how collectively traumatized Americans are, in so many ways, from education, TV, militaristic leaders, lynchings, the entire reservation and internment and hateful Gilded media Class shitting on us. Two trains, two countries, two derailments, two different collective responses.
Police said 12,000 people had gathered by the large esplanade in front of the parliament to demand accountability for Tuesday’s head-on collision near the central city of Larissa that has sparked widespread outrage.
At least 57 people were killed and dozens were injured when a passenger train with more than 350 people on board collided with a freight train on the same track in central Greece.
Yikes. This says a thousand things and draws upon a hundred topics in one photo: Freemont, OH protesters?
Vinyl chloride train cars were derailed and then the company just burned the tankers, instead of paying for a slow pumping out and transfer, releasing PCBs, dioxins, you know, the stuff of Agent Orange. Into the air, all over the place. And so, if this isn’t vitally important to everyday life, to the crimes of Nuland-Kagan Family-Blinken-Garland-Yellen-Albright-Sherman and what occurred in their parents’ and grandparents’ lives, and then passing on those morphed genetic traits to THEM, and now we pay the price for their trauma and misanthropy, well, we are a completely blank society if we can’t get into the streets daily and fight for our rights to NOT look deeply into this, and connect the dots — and there are so many dots, as in why so much hatred of Russia is coming from those Neocons, those people whose family lines were in the Holocaust — we are missing a great opportunity to see what motivates these elitists.
A person’s experience as a child or teenager can have a profound impact on their future children’s lives, new work is showing. Rachel Yehuda, a researcher in the growing field of epigenetics and the intergenerational effects of trauma, and her colleagues have long studied mass trauma survivors and their offspring. Their latest results reveal that descendants of people who survived the Holocaust have different stress hormone profiles than their peers, perhaps predisposing them to anxiety disorders. Yehuda’s team at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the James J. Peters Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Bronx, N.Y., and others had previously established that survivors of the Holocaust have altered levels of circulating stress hormones compared with other Jewish adults of the same age. Survivors have lower levels of cortisol, a hormone that helps the body return to normal after trauma; those who suffered post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have even lower levels.
PARENT’S STRUGGLE, CHILD’S RISK
A variety of studies, many using long-term medical records from large populations, have found that certain experiences affect future descendants’ health risks.
— Victoria Stern
Look, these are highly complex studies, if we just use biologic-genetics-endocrine studies. We do not ALWAYS have to rely on DNA material and long-term studies with petri dishes and billions of points of data to UNDERSTAND what happens in a household where parents are criminals, neglectful, mean, violent, unattentive, poor and struggling, never there, always in turmoil. The Nazi Holocaust? The wiring of the brain man is going to be the hardest to pin down, whereas diabetes is the easiest to connect to parents passing on those traits. But truly, the brain — that gut-serotonin-reuptake connection “thing” does determine brain functioning, cognition, disposition, outlook and personality as well as the deeper psycho-biological formulations of what it is to be a human under a thousand points of stress, both in the womb and under a kitchen table shivering from fear. What sort of Complex PTSD will ever be held to account for those children and parents and all the people bombed by Ukraine in Donbass? In Syria? All those witnesses to / survivors of war, and those who wage war, wage crimes against humanity? Alley of Angels in Donbass, erected for those victims of the Nuland-Obama-Kagan war on Russians, i.e. Maidan Coup onwards:
So what happens, then, with American Society, whereupon the media and politicians deny history, context, stories, points of view, and necessary peaks into other people’s struggles and lives? What collective amnesia, confusion, memory hole worshipping occur in a society hit with both sides of the invented liberal-conservative line, one that never existed until The Man, The Corporations, found it necessary to make the Asian, Latino, African-American as enemy, as the drain on the Majority’s lives, their concept of peace and neighborhood, their belief in myths. The Majority being The White Man/Woman! How much early childhood and juvenile and peer trauma can we attribute to a Biden or a Trump or Pelosi or any of these elites who go to elite finishing schools, prep schools, colleges, entering the dungeons of law schools, MBA programs, International Scam institutes? Does an Albright, with her own odd biography tied to her family, get a pass, get some sort of human compensatory feeling for her belief system?
Do we see the pain and the struggle and the conflicting views and her own ego lined up in those wrinkles of life?
“It’s one thing to find out you’re Jewish… but another to find out that relatives had died in concentration camps. That was a stunning shock.” Madeleine Albright first learned of her Jewish identity when she was 59, two weeks before being sworn in as the first female Secretary of State in U.S. history. “It was a complicated family story,” she said in an interview. Investigations by the Washington Post revealed that, although Albright was raised Catholic, her parents were born Jewish. She also discovered that 26 of her family members, including three grandparents, had been murdered in the Holocaust. Madeleine Albright was born Marie Jana Korbelova in Prague on May 15, 1937, the oldest of three children of Josef and Anna (Speeglova) Korbel. In 1937, Josef Korbel was serving as a press-attaché at the Czechoslovak Embassy in Belgrade. He worked for Czechoslovakia’s first democratic president, Tomas Masaryk, who retired in 1935, and his successor, Edvard Benes.
What sort of triple epigenetic trauma lurked in her brain? Ed Bradley interviewed America’s first female secretary of state in 1997. Albright died at 84.
Albright, the first female secretary of state in United States history, made the remarks during a 60 Minutes interview. Correspondent Lesley Stahl discussed with the then-United Nations ambassador how Iraq had been suffering from the sanctions placed on the country following 1991’s Gulf War. “We have heard that half a million [Iraqi] children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima,” Stahl said. “And, you know, is the price worth it?” “I think that is a very hard choice,” Albright answered, “but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”
I could go deeply into epigenetics, and this Adverse Childhood Events, a tracking system (unfortunately, on the digital data dashboard tied to performance) that does in fact take into consideration the huge uphill battle many youth have growing up in stressful and dysfunctional and non-attentive and violent and poor homes:
Of course, most of my life as teacher, mentor, journalist, social worker, activist has been entwined with the people I teach-mentor-serve-report on-advocate for and where they came from. What about my homeless female veterans? What got them to join the armed services? What caused them to use drugs and end up homeless and end up in my office talking about supports and other avenues of healing and getting a better footing I might have? All my female clients both civilian and military were sexually assaulted, abused and raped. That trauma is complex because it is never just one blow to the head, one violent forced rape. So many things tied to the context of how and where and who it happened with, and then, the failure of our society to deal with this trauma, the failure of courts, cops and politicians. Unfortunately, the elite, those Albright kind of folk, except younger and into tech-data-tracking-social impact investing, they are using ACEs for PROFITEERING:
A red flag for me in Gavin Newsom’s “child-friendly” proposed budget was the $45 million he allocated to screen children and adults in Medi-Cal for ACEs. I’m writing this post to express serious reservations I have about the process of developing ACE (Adverse Early Childhood Experiences) scores for people. ACEs are getting tremendous media exposure of late. While I believe this to be a crucial pubic health concern, my fear is that ACE prevention and mitigation interventions will become vehicles for “innovative” finance and will expand profiling of vulnerable populations.
I want to make it clear from the outset that I acknowledge childhood trauma does result in long-term negative health consequences for individuals. I’ve seen it in my own family. I also recognize that systems of structural racism have inflicted stress and violence on communities of color and indigenous peoples for generations, resulting in high rates of chronic illness that make them attractive targets for “social impact” schemes. People have a basic human right to treatment and care, which should not be conditioned on surveillance and having data harvested to line the pockets of social impact investors.
What concerns me about ACEs is the “scoring.” Why should a standardized rubric developed under the auspices of one of the largest managed healthcare systems, Kaiser Permanente, label clients and structure the way a doctor, therapist, social worker, or educator can care for them? How did this tool come to have such a far reach, and whose interests will it ultimately serve? Is a reliance on “scores” an intentionally-constructed framework that allows providers to limit their scope to “fixing” individuals and families rather than advancing a more radical approach whereby systemic causes of community trauma, trauma rooted in our country’s deep racist history, can be acknowledged, holistically assessed, and begin to be ameliorated? And finally, will this “scoring” system be used to transform the treatment of childhood trauma into a machine for “pay for success” data speculation? I believe it will. (“ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience) Scores: Part of the “Pay for Success” Plan? Feb. 5, 2019, Wrench in the Gears, Alison McDowell)
So, this level of exploitation for profit has flooded the American landscape generation after generation, until we are here, in that GAD moment for many — generalized anxiety disorder. Chaos, inertia, cancel society, trigger warnings, up is down, racism is okay sort of thinking. Until someone like me who has been witness to other people’s direct trauma and who has been a trauma navigator and of course been a teacher too, within gang programs, tied to low income communities, prisons, elsewhere considered “on the other side of the railroad tracks” writes about it as a way of making sense of what I have seen and heard, and some of it has been horrific, beyond belief, and in one sense, some of it can’t be repeated even in a Dissident Voice newsletter. I’ll finish this very superficial treatment of collective trauma and epigenetics with my own flipping through Showtime’s offerings, or what have you. I was attempting with open mind and heart to get into the documentary on Chelsea Manning, XY Chelsea.
Look, I am a friend to many communities within the LGBTQA+ grouping, and know the story of Chelsea Elizabeth Manning, born Bradley Edward Manning; December 17, 1987. A whistleblower. This documentary, however, was so self-indulgent, so steeped in a sort of dumbed-down look at a person in constant struggle that it was filled with affectations and was difficult for me to get any traction on it. I have read good accounts about Bradley-Chelsea. I know Chelsea also got on the Podcast Circuit in March 2022 and said the most idiotic things about Putin, Russia, the SMO, Ukraine. Very very sad case of misinformed person. I won’t link one of those shows here. So, to get through the midnight hour of insomnia, I found a gem:
Here, the YouTube blurb: Raw and unflinching examination of the courageous and remarkable life of basketball star and social justice activist Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. Born Chris Jackson, he overcame tremendous adversity to reach the NBA and found his true calling when he converted to Islam. His decision not to stand for the national anthem, however, turned him from prodigy to pariah. Told candidly by Abdul-Rauf himself more than 20 years later it’s the remarkable story of one man who kept the faith and paved the way for a social justice movement.
Look, I just came back from coaching the Special Olympics basketball team, and we have one more practice before a March 18 out-of-town state tournament. I work with these amazing young adults, and I was not about to tolerate at the end of my night this Manning self-indulgence.
ACEs — Manning had boozer parents, in Oklahoma, violent, and of course, poor. Abused and neglected, Bradley was a lost soul, and decided to join the military to get some meaning in his life. Chelsea states in the flick that there are many transgender folk in the armed services. Many reasons. Definitely worth looking into.
Then, well, I knew some of Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf’s story, Chris Jackson growing up in Stars and Bars, KKK, Mississippi, dirt poor, no father, and a mother who never told him who is father was. His older brother shot squirrels and doves with a pellet gun for food, not fun. They were always hungry. You have to watch this film, man.
It will uplift you, and it will deeply solidify in you, I hope, why this country is so traumatized, deeply spiritual lobotomized, inertia bound in terms of real history, and so so disassociative around who the real enemies are. So many incapable elite human failures pounding the war drums, so many in high and middle office stealing from us, and yet no boiling tar and pokey features and sharpened pitchforks. Abdul-Rauf, a true hero. The best basketball athlete Shaq ever saw:
He shared how his turning point came one day when he visited his mother’s home. He opened the refrigerator and it was empty. He went to the restroom to wash his hands. When he leaned on the sink, it collapsed on the floor. That was it. After playing for two years at LSU, he told his LSU coach he wanted to play in the NBA. “My mother is everything (to me)…I got to take care of her,” Abdul-Rauf emotionally said. His coach’s response surprised him. He told him it was the best decision he could make. He knew if he went pro, he would be able to take care of his mother. So he did. In 1990, Abdul-Rauf was the third overall pick of the Denver Nuggets during the NBA draft.
It is a tough one, since I will not be standing for the national anthem this coming March 18, which I have always shown as my own deeply enmeshed protest of the stars and stripes, my own military trauma, and of course, like Mahmoud, my education through Fred Hampton, the Black Panthers, Malcolm X and ten thousand others.
His views about America changed, and he found that his beliefs no longer aligned with what he observed. People he looked up to changed, he noticed. To protest oppression, he refused to stand for the American national anthem. It stirred controversy, and some say his stance was the blueprint for what would come 20 years later when 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the anthem to protest racial injustice. Kaepernick kneeled at a preseason game against the Chargers for the first time on Sep. 1, 2016. “It sounds cliche, but when I say I was so comfortable with my information, I was so comfortable with my faith and my position. I was so comfortable with my belief in God and how things are going,” Abdul-Rauf said. His faith was bigger than the game, he said. This was not the first time he had chosen not to stand for the anthem, but it was the first time someone had noticed. It cost him his home, which the Ku Klux Klan burned down, and his NBA career.
Shit-dog, the deeply ingrained trauma of growing up, and in both Manning’s and Johnson’s cases, an absent father in variations on a theme. Chelsea struggled with identity in Oklahoma, and Mahmoud struggled with a neurological condition, a mind draining and body pounding condition that in fact made him into a god-like basketball player.
I was calling it many variations on the theme, greenwashing, many many propagandistic things, like green-scamming, green-sheening, and eco-porn. Here, a 1992 article, man, so long long ago, almost forgotten :
Eco-pornography is the advertising of a product as “environmentally friendly,” when in fact, some unmentioned aspect of the product (or its production and distribution) has notably deleterious effects on the environment. Ecological impact is such a difficult thing to define in terms of the processes of production (as further discussed below), one is hesitant to single out specific corporations as ecopomographers, lest they be unfairly vilified, but it might be informative to mention some egregious examples of false environmental advertising.
According to Bob Garfield, ad critic for Advertising Age Weekly, the most offensive environmental advertisement “is a General Motors corporate ad in which [the company is] congratulating America for 20 years of environmental progress. After spending three decades doing everything in [its] power to weaken, inhibit, and delay environmental legislation…,” this ad is arguably misleading. General Motors is not the only auto manufacturer guilty of greenwash. Adweek chose a Toyota commercial in which a young woman lauds recycling and her Toyota in the same breath, as one of the worst advertisements of 1990. Said Adweek, “The only Earth-minded tie-in…is the woman’s declaration that, until she can save the world, she’ll buy a Tercel and save money.” (source)
This all seems pretty mild, some 32 years later. It is the driving concept of an Al Gore in his 10,000 square foot mansion flying around the world in private jets, going to Davos and the World Economic Forum and COP#Infinity, lecturing us, we the people, on why Styrofoam and regular lightbulbs are bad bad bad. Well, darn, he has several mansions, one in Tennessee and then one in California: Al Gore’s California home consumes more electricity in 1 year than the average US family uses in 21 years.
Now that’s some eco-porn, man. It’s THAT finger, man, you all know it: from cops to teachers, to city council persons to DMV workers, that FINGER.
Man, Liz Warren, another pornographer —
Elizabeth Warren believes that strengthening the “effectiveness” of the U.S. military is consistent with the Green New Deal. Her bill doesn’t demand that the U.S. military be reduced in size or scale. Nor does it mention that the U.S. military is the world’s largest polluter and user of oil and fossil fuels. Instead of turning the Green New Deal into concrete policy, Warren has placed her attention on renovating the one thousand U.S. military bases that exist domestically and abroad. The so-called “policy wonk” of the 2020 elections appears to be more concerned with creating “green” bombs than a “green economy.”
The U.S. drops a bomb on another nation every twelve minutes . It is no wonder that U.S. military, which serves as the armed body of the state responsible for protecting the interests of Wall Street, fossil fuel corporations, military contractors, and monopolies of all kinds, is treated as a trophy by all sections of the U.S. political class. The U.S. military embodies American exceptionalism claiming to spread democracy and freedom to lands near and far. Holidays such as Memorial Day and Veterans Day are designed to remind Americans of all races and classes that the U.S. is exceptional because of its large military footprint. Instead of seeing this footprint as bombs, sanctions, or deadly raids, Democrat and Republican politicians alike believe that the U.S. military permanently signifies American greatness. (source)
Green bombs, man, and cleaner jet fuel for bombers. That’s the green deal, the eco-porn at its pinnacle? Though we have more, as in the figure of the actual “Greens” of Germany:
A motion seeking a ceasefire in Ukraine and another opposing the supply of heavy weapons to Kiev were overwhelmingly rejected by delegates. Green Member of the European Parliament, Sergey Lagodinsky, lambasted the argument of one delegate who warned that Europe would be wiped out after the first nuclear bomb dropped, saying that Ukrainians “cannot defend themselves with sunflowers.”
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock vehemently advocated the delivery of more weapons and heavy battle tanks to Ukraine. “We support Ukraine, not despite the fact that we are a party of peace and human rights, but because we are a party of peace and human rights,” she stated to justify her advocacy of war.
Party leader Ricarda Lang supported her, saying, “I am convinced we have to deliver more weapons, we have to react faster. The time for hesitation is over.”
Well well, recall how Germany “got rid of” coal and smelting and all of that fun carbon positive polluting stuff. It’s called offshoring your carbon footprint. All those Southern Hemisphere nations (and Russia) do all the cooking, blasting, mining, milling, and welding of Germany’s fancy bridges and highrises. This is Anna:
Now that is real eco-pornography. Not to the max, but really, this is what the greening of the world means — flights to Ukraine, trillions dumped into weapons, trillions put into satellites, trillions here and trillions there, now that is green pimping to the max. You know, keeping the bankers safe with those diesel and gasoline powered metal and titanium battle tanks, missile launchers, helicopters, jets.
Now here is some real violent eco-porn. Just the headline is triggering. A warning: “Green New Army? NATO Wants Eco-Friendly Tanks — NATO’s tanks may be getting solar panels.” (sourcessources)
We get the triple pornography, right, as the USA, the US military, occupies one-third of Syria and steals the oil (uses Syrian soil as an Israeli proving grounds bombing area). Now that is icing on the pornography cake. “The United States forces present in Syrian territory without the consent of the government or the approval of the United Nations, today looted a new batch of oil and transferred it to Iraq.” (source)
Man, I am feeling the “green” in that raping of a country’s resources. And those hootches above, with solar panels? Nah, not for Haiti, or Syria or Turkey:
Sure, this rant was precipitated by an article from a real “legit” source, Yale 360 Environment. Title: “As Millions of Solar Panels Age Out, Recyclers Hope to Cash In.” The entire green pornography has captured the EU, Canada, USA, other outfits of empire until we have the lunacy of solar panels galore, but with the unintended (nah, very intended, very predictable) consequences of unfettered capitalism pushing the dirty panels (check out the lifecycle and embedded energy and external costs of that solar panel — again, stuff has to be mined, moved, milled, smelted, cooked, chemicalize, and shipped AND then, darn, into the landfills they go after 25 years of use) into the entire eco-pornography game.
Next, the panels are ground, shredded, and subjected to a patented process that extracts the valuable materials — mostly silver, copper, and crystalline silicon. Those components will be sold, as will the lower-value aluminum and glass, which may even end up in the next generation of solar panels.
This process offers a glimpse of what could happen to an expected surge of retired solar panels that will stream from an industry that represents the fastest-growing source of energy in the U.S. Today, roughly 90 percent of panels in the U.S. that have lost their efficiency due to age, or that are defective, end up in landfills because that option costs a fraction of recycling them.
You see the trifecta here of green porn? Selling panels as a panacea, of course, that means SELLING (profitting from the so-callled “helping reduce/mitigate/stave off the planet’s climate heating”) the goods, mining the minerals and then, yep, they have an end life cycle, and instead of mandating recycling them and making better and longer (durable) solar panels, it’s “let the market pimp, prostitute, steal, hoard, tax, fine, certify.” ALL for profit. What could go wrong, no, profitting from green washing?
Again, the word “value” comes into play with eco-pornography: By 2050, the value of raw materials recoverable from solar panels could exceed $15 billion.
It gets wonky, this LCA just for ONE type of photo-voltaic panel: “Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of perovskite PV cells projected from lab to fab” Ah, note that this is only to the fabrication level. Not all the embedded energy and expelled energy to mine, smelt, move, chemicalize, produce, move, install, AND then uninstall and then either throw away or “recycle.” No cradle to cradle shit here.
Like I said, wonky: cradle to gate is yet more of this eco-pornography terminology.
Perovskitephotovoltaic cells (PVs) have attracted significant worldwide attention in the past few years. Although the stability of the power conversion is a concern, there is great potential for perovskites to enter the global PV market. To determine the future potential of perovskites, we performed a cradle-to-gate environmental life cycle (LCA) for two different perovskite device structures suitable for low cost manufacturing. Rather than examining current laboratory deposition processes like dipping and spinning, we considered spray and co-evaporation methods that are more amenable to manufacturing. A structure with an inorganic hole transport layer (HTL) was developed for both solution and vacuum based processes, and an HTL-free structure with printed with back contact was modeled for solution based deposition. The environmental impact of conventional Si PV technology was used as a reference point. The environmental impacts from manufacturing of perovskite solar cells were lower than that of mono-Si.
However, environmental impacts from unit electricity generated were higher than all commercial PV technology mainly because of the shorter lifetime of perovskite solar cell. The HTL-free perovskite generally had the lowest environmental impacts among the three structures studied. Solution based methods used in perovskite deposition were observed to decrease the overall electricity consumption. Organic materials used for preparing the precursors for perovskite deposition were found to cause a high marine eutrophication impact. Surprisingly, the toxicity impacts of the lead used in the formation of the absorber layer were found to be negligible. Energy payback times were estimated as 1.0–1.5 years.
So for the average greenie, well, this stuff is WAY beyond their “green washing wet behind the ears” knowledge base: “Deposition Process – The PLD process involves the use of high-power laser energy focused on a target to evaporate its surface in vacuum or different low-pressure ambient gas. From: Laser Surface Modification of Biomaterials, (2016)
The pornography is also in the rhetoric, the motivations of technologists, technocrats, scientists, the lot of them working on these highly technical projects. It is driven by the bizarrely human quest to see if we can do it mentality. That quest is of course driven by profit motives. Not so much about saving the world.
Dystopia is the end product of having billionaires and collective lobbies of Eichmann’s and Mengele’s and Edward Bernay’s and Tom Friedman’s rule the world, as Top Dog Green Pimps but also Top Green Bordella Owners.
Look how superficial this marketing crap is — “raw materials.” What’s the energy, cultural, economic, and societal outlay for that?
The most commonly used photovoltaics consist of monocrystalline or multicrystalline silicon. The main negative environmental impact of these panels comes from the production phase and include:
The energy consumed during production of the panels and the emissions released during production
Water consumption
The release of some hazardous byproducts [18].
The environmentally relevant substances released during the production phase of silicon solar panels are fluorine, chlorine, nitrate, isopropanol, SO2, CO2 and respirable silica particles and solvents.
However, over the course of their lifetime, crystalline solar panels generate 9-17 times the energy used to produce them, depending on their placement and efficiency. Also, depending on the type of PV technology, the clean energy pay back takes place in one to four years. Once in place, solar systems using photovoltaics are 100% emissions free. The production of 1,000 kWh of solar electricity reduces emissions by nearly 8 pounds of sulfur dioxide, 5 pounds of nitrogen oxides, and more than 1,400 pounds of carbon dioxide. (follow the money, the financing, the banking, the investing, the scamming of government-taxpayer funds)
Talk about some slick green porn? So all that renewable energy just comes from heaven. Those dams, those solar panels, those wind turbines, all the wires, plastics, rubbers, strategic metals, transportation, MINING. Whew!
You want to get wonky? I’ve written about this before — the single-use shopping bag legislation/laws. The reality is that paper bags are bad bad bad. And, in reality, the single use bags, if used properly, go into a small gabage pail in the house, and many are used as bags for produce int the fridge and for poop/cat liter. Triple reunse, as opposed to us buying heavier small bags for pails and poop. Again, unintended consequences. Countless millions of lifetime hours spent just one aspect of greening the economy:
Summary and recommendations The authors are satisfied that they have achieved their goal to provide a comparative assertion among the six types of grocery carrier bags included in the report based on their respective potential environmental impacts. The carrier bags selected were those in most common use in the United States and the underlying data were, as far as is possible, based on United States data.
Our results are based on a study of twelve environmental impact categories. Our results show that reusable LDPE and NWPP bags will have lower average impacts on the environment compared to PRBs if the reusable bags are reused for a sufficient number of grocery shopping trips. However, according to a recent national survey, a majority of consumers do not reuse their reusable bags for this sufficient number of trips, especially for LDPE bags. Moreover, 40% of people forget to bring their reusable bags with them to the store and half the people who prefer NWPP bags used PRBs at their most recent shopping trip. In addition, only 15% of people follow the recommended cleaning procedures to ensure safe use of reusable bags.
Our results also show that Paper bags, even with 100% recycle content, have significantly higher average impacts on the environment than either of the reusable bags or PRBs. Many of the regulations now in place or being considered in the United States encourage consumers to use reusable bags through banning PRBs and imposing a fee on the use of Paper bags. (Californians Against Waste, 2013) (Florida Department of Environmental Protection, 2013) A number of grocery chains in non-legislated areas provide Paper bags and sell various reusable bags. Our results in this study show that these regulations and policies may result in negative impact on the environment rather than positive.
Even though Paper bags come from a renewable resource and are easily recycled, it is likely that they are not the best environmental choice. Reusable bags should only be preferred if consumers are educated to use them safely and consistently, and reuse them enough times to lower their relative environmental impacts compared to PRB alternatives.
Our recommendation, based on our work in this study, is that consumers should be given a choice between reusable bags and PRBs and that any of these should be preferred over Paper bags. Most important is that much more attention should be focused on educating consumers to make an informed choice of which bags to use by providing them facts—facts about reusable bag use, facts about proper recycling or disposal of PRBs, facts about the potential environmental impacts of their choices—based on sound scientific evidence. (check it out — 194 pages just for the PRB — plastic retail bag)
I was a sustainability director for a community college in Spokane, the first in the town with several colleges as anchors there. I did a lot of fairs, talks, teach-ins; I had famous authors come into town to speak, to be on my radio show, and I featured many in my articles for the weekly newspaper and the monthly magazine and a blog with the daily newspaper.
Yeah, I was skeptical of all the rah-rah, and I was lambasted for putting down COPs and Gore and Obama and the so-called new deal for climate-nature-ecosystems. I even was trained in sustainability education and monitoring. American Planning Association:
When I was in Vancouver, for the Summer Institute for Sustainable education, I was the ONLY person questioning the motives of big outfits like Unilever and Proctor and Gamble and others tied to this “sustainability” initiative. I like being in that position, questioning, pushing, but really, there can be sort of an emptiness in being around these people at any university, especially at the University of British Columbia. I talked to mayors, planners, business leaders, and others who were hyper glassy eyed about sustainability — Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Investing. They listened, and some of the stuff I brought up to them was like speaking Greek. You know, caring for communities and their cultures FIRST, as opposed to making green on green!
Green washing, green pornography, green sheening, and now, green hushing: A trend known as “green hushing” is growing as companies are increasingly choosing not to publicize details of their climate targets in an attempt to avoid scrutiny and allegations of greenwashing, a new study showed. This of course is a double whammy:
“If green hushing becomes a trend, it will make inspiring some of the climate laggards even harder,” she said. “As long as companies are transparent about their progress, and communicate that in a transparent way, then they can’t go wrong.”
The conservation industry says 2020 is its “super year.” It wants to set aside thirty percent of the globe for wildlife, and divert billions of dollars away from reducing climate change and into “natural climate solutions.” This would be a disaster for people and planet. Conservation was founded in the racist ideology of 1860s USA but it committed thirty years ago to becoming people-friendly. It hasn’t happened. There will be more promises now, if only to placate critics and funders like the U.S. and German governments, and the European Commission, which are paying for conservation’s land theft, murder and torture. More promises will be meaningless. No more public money should go for “Protected Areas” until the conservation bodies recognize their crimes, get rid of those responsible, and hand stolen lands back, with compensation. Conservation NGOs must also stop cozying up to mining, logging, oil, and plantation companies.
And it only gets worse, much worse. Reading articles and watching videos from Alison’s Wrench in the Gears site can take us all to a more nano-level of the green washing/pornography/gestapo to the max, as in profits on data, on wearables, on digital dungeons. Here’s a recent one, but go backwards and catch up on that entire investing and AI-VR-AR scheme: “God’s Eye View Part 6 – Every Man Thus Lives By Exchanging“
You will get very few people going into these weeds:
Based on what I am seeing in the Web3 space, I’m picturing a new NGO culture emerging in which Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), with a pretense of tokenized cooperative governance, manage legions of platform laborers all tied to ledgers and wearable tech. Algorithms weigh individual needs against those of the collective and mete out payments for digital public goods production. Officials, whether they understand it or not, are setting citizens up to become precarious impact commodities for high frequency options trading. One hand washes the other as the masses are made to power the matrix and build out digital empire. Everyone plays their assigned role in the spectacle advancing the plot without wrapping their minds around the game they’re in or comprehending what the stakes are. (McDowell)
The unification of traditional finance and so-called ‘Decentralized Autonomous Organizations’ propels the evolution of legal abstractions to digital standards. These standards, along with their legal counterparts, form the infrastructure for the large-scale control of society through impact finance, revamped educational credentials, digital health records, fake environmentalism, geo-fencing, smart cities, internet-enabled nanotechnology and all of the other crazy ‘use cases’ such technology makes possible. The move towards robust CBDC networks by central banks all over the world, provides even more momentum to this future. (source)
Yikes, I am going deeper and deeper off-topic, except it really isn’t off topic. It’s all about “who makes the money, who controls the food, who controls the data, who controls the ants/prols/Us?”
Elites, man, rubbing elbows with technocrats and coders and geniuses: From Wrench in the Gears:
Adam Smith opens his “Wealth of Nations” with a story of the efficiencies created in a pin factory where workers were assigned discrete tasks along the production line, the division of labor expanded production netting significant profits for the factory owner. Later, in chapter four, Smith writes, “Every man thus lives by exchanging,” a quote inscribed on one side of a luxurious bronze gas lamp located in the atrium just outside the Debate Room at Old Parkland in Dallas, the city’s most elite corporate address.
Building off energy futures trading, the Dallas old guard is making its move to set up markets in human capital management, led by the Commit! Partnership with Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan standing in the shadows. That lamp stands opposite an elaborately carved portico topped by a large gilded owl. On either side are four paintings. The upper tier shows Watson and Crick and their DNA model on the one side and on the other side Steve Jobs with an orange Apple desktop showing the Pixar movie “Up.” Below is FDR and Eisenhower on one side and Churchill and Truman on the other. What this says to me is that we’re being pulled into a new “war,” a war on consciousness and human agency even as we are being told mythic stories about scientific progress.
The last couple of generations has amply demonstrated that meetings of corporate heads, NGOs, politicians, and celebrities are not going to solve the crises of climate and biodiversity. Those attending are amongst the major contributors to the problems, and least willing to accept any change which might threaten their position. They argue over statements that no one actually applies, or even intends to, and which are replete with clauses ensuring “business as usual.” The meetings and declarations attract an enormous media circus, but are akin to the emperor’s workshop, with hundreds of tailors busily cutting suits of such rarefied material that they don’t cover his nakedness. (source)
Cory Morningstar, investigative journalist and environmental activist explains how the Green New Deal for Nature was created by the UN in 2009 to monetise nature and create economic growth, Cory points us to build local resistance, to build strong alliances and to protect our lands, waters and communities with No Deal for Nature.
The post Green Death: Love in a Time of Green Pornography first appeared on Dissident Voice.
I just got back from the Lincoln County courthouse. Supporting a victim of BWS, battered wife syndrome, also called domestic abuse, spousal abuse. The punk was arrested Nov. 12, 2022, and he is still in county jail, on $750K bail.
All cases of women who are in a relationship — my friend was in this abusive marriage almost 5 years — who return to the abuser (in his case, verbally and economically abusive, to the point of triple woman hating and keeping bank accounts in his name, including keeping the vehicles and house in his name) are different on many nuanced levels, but they all have that case of Stockholm Syndrome, that case of once being full of chutzpah, but something inside them has caused them to not see the destruction of a killing inside their boyfriend or husband.
The case is meandering in the judicial system. The public defender (my money, tax payers’ money) can get extensions on this case. More discovery. The grand jury indicted the guy three days after the attempted suffocation and other charges. He’s not out, and the DA forwarded a 5 year prison plea (down from a lot more time if convicted by 12 member of a jury and the book thrown at him). However, this guy is such a narcissist and know-it-all, he is probably conjuring up all sorts of machinations.
In the end, the victim, my friend, is in hyper-vigilance even though both of them have no family or friends or any roots at all in Oregon. He’s in jail, and while his mother hired a private investigator to go fishing for character witness statements, the bottom line is what happened Nov. 12 is on the criminal justice record.
Yet, today, more crap, more bogged down systems. Over 26 cases heard by one judge from 9 to 11 am. Many have been given extensions for more time to have paperwork and evidence forwarded. It is a bogged down system of judicial inertia and lawyer lagging.
She’s divorcing him, so that is a separate case, again, heard today, but forwaded on for more extension, and because this guy is in jail, things get slowed down.
She got a restraining order approved with a measley $1000 payment to keep the hous in order, but the previous judge failed to initial that section of the Protection Order, and so she is back filing another one. He did not contest the first one, but now he is contesting this exact same one, under the orders of his mother, or someone. The judge warned that if he gave any statements in this protective order that it could have some bearing on his criminal case.
That’s messed up, this judge giving this fellow legal advice. Told him to plea the Fifth.
So, here we have a divorce, civil protection order and criminal trial.
She’s got her green card, and she finally has a counselor working with her on domestic violence with C-PTSD as the main issue. Her father from Canada visited and so too did her sister. For years my friend did not tell them about the full extent of this guy’s abuse.
I know the judicial system, but each new year, the system gets further bogged down, and the public defenders as a group are in crisis — not enough money made and absolute triple the caseload which should be allowed.
Broken broken broken. Remember Ross Perot, and NAFTA and that famous (among other things) statement during the 1992 presidential campaign that if NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) was not a two-way street, it would create a “ giant sucking sound ” of jobs going south to the cheap labor markets of Mexico?
Think of Capitalism as that broken broken broken sound. As in broken down to our bones broken by over policing, over taxing, over burdened, over worked, and under represented to include that tearing sound of social services safety nets frayed and almost immolated. Broken!
So here we are, no, with May 3 set for a settlement conference? This is something initiated some 26 years ago, since the court systems are broken and clogged, so now, this guy did not accept the plea, and so the judge stated that she will schedule the criminal case for trial, but a settlement conference is possible, so the ADA and the PD agreed to meet. The courtroom would be a neutral one (sic) and a judge would hear the strengths and weaknesses in both the prosecution’s and the defense’s cases. The defendent would be there in orange jumpsuit and shackles, and my friend would be there too.
A bargaining game, a sort of please settle (plea dice throwing) theater between the DA’s office and his Public Defender. Imagine that. All this time, all the time deputies came out, served a warrant on him, all the jail paperwork, the court paperwork, all the money paid for judges, clerks, ADAs, support staff, all the cops and all the infrastructure keeping this dance going.
Very hard indeed for someone, my friend, who is getting counseling now, after having one counselor who just stopped answering phone calls (that’s medical abandonment, but that’s a civil matter, yet another labyrith to course through).
Healing is a singularly tough thing in Capitalism when money buys power, representation, creates all the bells and whistles, etc., for the rich.
Ahh, broken criminal justice system 101.
Here, from Cindy Sheehan, an example of the criminal injustice system and the medical injustice system killing an elderly woman who was having a stroke. This is what needs defending, this broken, corrupt, polluted society? If you do not hate the thought of Zelensky in yet another photo op, yet more trillions to that country, then you are subhuman, like the Ukrainian leadership and Nazified military. Here, read this an weep:
I really don’t have too many words for this horrid event.
This poor lady apparently had a stroke and broke her ankle, and she was asked to leave the hospital, but she couldn’t.
So, what happened then? The compassionate (Nazis) workers at the hospital took pity and decided to treat her? Nope, they called the gestapo, I mean police, and she died in their custody.
Wait, I do have words—-remember during the past three years when we, the ones who rejected the Devil Juice, or rejected the dirty face nappies—were told that we were going to “kill Meemaw,” even if we were those Meemaws?
Remember when we were told that we could not go see our loved ones in hospital, or nursing facilities, so they had to die alone to prevent us from killing them? Or, grandparents and grandchildren were separated, not by miles, but by government diktat?
We live in Garbage Land where the Garbage People’s hospitals don’t heal, they kill, and where law enforcement doesn’t protect us, it protects the killers!
Don’t go to the hospital? We know that thousands of people were killed by stasi-protocol during the “pandemic” and counted as Covid deaths.
What if we lived somewhere other than Garbage Land and this poor woman could have been the one to call law enforcement and they would have come to help her and force the ER to treat her? Fuck.
I am distraught over this, but how many times does something like this happen off-camera? (Sheehan)
Oh heck, I can end this short diatribe with the end of the English Major. Sure, I got a couple of those degrees. Sure, not all in these humanities departments are stalwarts, but compared to STEM folk, who will do any Eichmann thing to make bucks, to have job stability, to keep in the slipstream of the American Dream, they are not bad. Drugs, chemicals, applications, drones, rockets, surveillence tools, missiles, propaganda, all those amazing things that have intended and unintended consequences, so making bank means keeping silent, so STEM are the quiet ones, the scientists and technologists and engineers who for the most part keep their mouths shut — for a price, a Bargain, Faustian Bargain!
According to Robert Townsend, the co-director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project, which collects data uniformly but not always identically to internal enrollment figures, from 2012 to 2020 the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six per cent. Tufts lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while suny Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates—standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges—saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half. In 2018, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point briefly considered eliminating thirteen majors, including English, history, and philosophy, for want of pupils. (source)
“Enrollment in the humanities is in free fall at colleges around the country. What happened? by Nathan Heller
Imagine, forever chemicals in all living things. Science. STEM!
A new analysis finds that more than 330 species of animals across the globe – from polar bears to squirrels – carry in their bodies a class of chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also called PFAS.
Known as “forever chemicals,” because they do not break down as many others do, the substances have been linked in humans to risks for cancer, low birthweights, weakened childhood immunity, thyroid disease and other health problems.
Research has already shown that 99% of Americans have PFAS in their bodies. But this report released Wednesday by the Environmental Working Group shows more than 120 different forever chemicals were found in the blood serum or bodies of birds, tigers, monkeys, pandas, horses, cats, otters and other mammals.
Over 12,000 products have this shit in them. And the diseases? Studies have linked PFOA to kidney and testicular cancers, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, and other serious ailments in highly contaminated communities such as Parkersburg, West Virginia. Very low doses of PFAS in drinking water have been linked to immune system suppression including reduced vaccine efficacy and an increased risk of certain cancers, studies have found. PFAS are linked with reproductive and developmental problems as well as increased cholesterol and other health issues, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
You will not see some efficient, for-by-with-because of We the People judicial system holding to account these monster companies, again, companies that depend on, well, S.T.E.M. students. The humanities? Well, it is more than “just” English lit majors. In fact, if done right, the entire college and K12 systems would be integrating languages, arts, history, writing, literature, anthropology, and of course music, dance, theater and philosophy and ethics and so much more into an across the curriculum template, but instead, we have this sickness for more more more to keep the engines of capitalism going, a predatory and casino capitalism which is now bio-security, security, surveillance capitalism going. Until we have this disjointed and bizarre religion of science and engineering and technology as some panacea for the crumbling American empire.
Without the “A” in STEAM, all we have are Eichmanns from a different mother. Arts.
And it all comes down to those in STEM who don’t give a shit about discourse, debate, history, knowledge outside their fucking field of intended and unintended dirty consequences. I have said this a hundred times in hundreds of articles, it all comes down, now, to that Freudian slip, that dirty man, Edward Bernays:
It’s not like they even hide their intent. The notorious World Economic Forum has been forthcoming about their plans for the rest of us. The forum’s founder, Klaus Schwab, even wrote a book about it, titled “Covid-19: The Great Reset.”
Within his vision of how society should be engineered going forward, Schwab’s stand on “stakeholder capitalism” sounds altruistic at face value. But what he doesn’t mention is that his vision includes the same group of elites controlling even more aspects of our lives. Envisioning themselves as “trustees of society” they will continue to profit from the results of that expanded control. He recently publicly stated at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs:
“What the fourth industrial revolution will lead to is a fusion of our physical, digital and biological identity” explaining how upcoming technology will allow authorities to “intrude into the hitherto private space of our minds, reading our thoughts and influencing our behavior.”
This concept does not give me a warm and fuzzy feeling…
These elite decision makers don’t hide their hypocrisy either. When these elite groups meet to discuss (our) future, they often talk about how we (the Masses) need to reduce our carbon footprints. No mention that they arrived to their mountaintop retreat meetings individually, in their own private jets, (no jet-pooling for them!) wasting more resources in one event than the average person ever could or would in their day to day lives..
Like it or not, or believe it or not, social engineering is not new. For those who don’t believe in or understand the concept of social engineering, I suggest watching the 2002 BBC Documentary “The Century of the Self” about the life of Edward Louis Bernays (1891-1995).
It’s fascinating, enlightening and to be honest, more than just a bit creepy.
Bernays, the Austrian-American nephew of Sigmund Freud, was almost single-handedly responsible for re-purposing the concept of “propaganda” in America into “Pubic Relations.” Sounds much more innocent, doesn’t it?
In his first campaign, he was recruited by President Woodrow Wilson to Wilson’s Committee on Public Information created in 1917. Wilson tasked Bernays with intentionally using propaganda to influence the American population to willingly engage in World War I. (source)
Until we are here, where judges still wear black robes, and where the systems deem us as children, or as sheep. This courtroom was with a judge who treated the people on the other end of the phone line (it gets phoned in now, injustice) like imbeciles or children. Bernays is the monster of the century. That 2002 documentary is rough and out of favor now, but telling.
Students have neither the wisdom nor the experience to know what they need to know.
— Gregory Petsko.
STEM will do shit for humanity. Truly. Listen to my interview of Gregory Petsko, “Science and the Arts/Humanities: A Marriage Made in Heaven” — scroll down:
We talked about this essay, “Save university arts from the bean counters” by Gregory Petsko Nature volume 468, page1003 (2010) Scientists must reach across the divide and speak up for campus colleagues in arts and humanities departments, says Gregory Petsko.
How do I then deftly move from housing as a human right (my last piece in DV is about housing, a job, my interviews, and getting the boot, i.e., not getting hired for a job I am perfect for — What’s It All About, Alfie?), and from the discrimination of this culture on all levels, but also in housing, against the non-White non-Hispanic, into the next and the next topic on my mind?
Vaccination Bandwagon gone rogue
How will I be able to tie in what I have expressed in THAT piece into something around the issues, say, confronting the County where I live giving students-parents until Wednesday to prove their kiddos are up-to-date on vaccinations, or some sort of exception? While the Covid Crack Shots are not mandatory, anymore, that is, but really, it’s the bandwagon effect that makes them “mandatory” (why now have your children NOT gotten that life affirming, life saving mRNA?). Imagine what sorts of shots these kids have received outside of the mRNA madness, and to be honest, most kids have been double boosted.
Oregon requires immunization against 11 vaccine-preventable diseases. They are given in many iterations, many boosters, and, well, go to the CDC here: Birth to 15 Months and then scroll two inches to here: 18 Months to 18 Years
Tetanus
Pertussis (whooping cough)
Polio
Varicella (chickenpox)
Measles
Mumps
Rubella
Hepatitis B
Hepatitis A
Hib (Haemophilus influenzae type B) – only for children under five years old
Those listed above are only a fraction of what the CDC lists. It is absolutely scary. You do not need RFK, Jr., to tell you why so many jabs mixed in with other jabs at birth and during the first 6 years of life are bad news bears. (Oh, man, the anti-RFK, Jr., bandwagon is huge!) And it’s not just about a perservative:
A new film airing in May, Injecting Aluminum, looks at a specific aspect of the vaccine “debate” through what easily is the one giant Gordian knot metaphor of the entire vaccine injury and death history – the adjuvant aluminum hydroxide developed in the 1920s as the “best” optimizer of the immune response when injecting the disease.
The subtitle of 90-minute film by director Marie-Ange Poyet, How Toxic are Vaccines?, really takes the air out of the sails of the pro-vaccine-and-never-question-the-vaccinologist zealots. In fact, it’s the Gordian knot we can cut away: disentangling an impossible knot but cutting that damned thing, or finding a loophole through creative and robust outside the box thinking:
Turn him to any cause of policy,
The Gordian Knot of it he will unloose,
Familiar as his garter
— Shakespeare, Henry V, Act 1 Scene 1. 45–47
Any critical thinking around what goes into a hypodermic needle and injected into baby’s body, that then is the new Labelling Questioners as Anti-Science Bandwagon!
Get into the weeds to understand this SARS-MERS thing, the Covid 19 thing, those bio-tech untested mRNA jabs: “When ‘Mutated Lab Made Viruses’ Are Used on Captive Monkeys…
Less humorous explanation of the monkey business: the C-19 potions are designed, financed, and made by DARPA/DOD/BARDA and related clown agencies via consortia of defense contractors including Pfizer who are paid huge sums of money, are not in control of the entire supply chain and product, and are promised protection by the government. The paperwork Pfizer submitted to the FDA reflects this fact: it is a prop in a play called “vaccine development and approval” and that’s why it looks so unprofessional, full of gaping holes and obvious fraud. The FDA is of course fully complicit in this and continues to pretend to “authorize” these military biowarfare agents as pharmaceuticals.
*****
But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence… illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.
— Ludwig Feuerbach (Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity)
Even Hegel understood the problems engendered by Capitalism. And in the sixties Debord tracked the direction of western capitalism and sketched with remarkable clarity the history and also created a sense of aesthetics that felt innately radical and subversive. Seeing the fundamental sickness of the Capitalist system was not new. Today, nothing is left of that radical quality, certainly not in the arts or academia. Increasingly there is a rote reflexive hatred of Marx, Freud, Communism, Mao, Stalin, and Fidel. The Frankfurt School is attacked, more from the left than the right, and self identifying left publications embrace the most reactionary of positions (Jacobin comes to mind, of course) on the pandemic protocols. And capitalism is viewed as if it is Nature, a god created fact. — John Steppling
Pre-employment Google Check Bandwagon & the All-Female Band?
But, in the end, this latest job rejection, what is it all about, Haeder, many ask? Do they Google you and find THESE anti-this, anti-that, pro-this, pro-that articles and then see you/ME are/is not part of their band wagon?
I have been interviewed more than a dozen times here in Lincoln County (Pop. 50,000) the last 24 months. Every interview “team” has been comprised of 100 percent female (she, her, hers) about 90 percent of the time, and then other times, six out of seven, she-her-hers.
I grew up with strong women — my mom had to divorce her first husband because he had Vancouver, BC mafia after him for gambling debts. She was an amazing force in Paris when we were kids over there, and amazing in Tucson, when she ended up there after divorcing my father, US Military. She had to bury her daughter at 23 after she was struck on her motorcycle in Kamloops. My grandmother Kirk, another strong Scottish woman, who ended up in Canada working her tail off. Aunt who opened a fancy restaurant with two other strong women. Aunts that were midwives, and aunt who was a nurse who managed her husband’s surgical and general medicine practice. Strong women left and right. My wife is an incredibly strong woman on many levels, not just because she puts up with me, but her entire life has been struggle and trauma and success!
Ahh, but now, in my world, with so many not-so-strong women in my midst interviewing me, which is a form of critical judgement, and to be truthful, the fix is in when it comes to me, one lone guy, now older, applying for case managers and non-profit this or that position, and the team that interviews me and for which would be working with the new hire are all women.
Band Wagons, man. Circle those wagons from whichever self-righteous perch you and your clan find yourself in.
Again, this is all speculation, but you gotta be me to know speculation is also reality! Even when it comes to vaccinations and what the band wagon effect does to society (today, 2/12, that big band wagon event — Love it, or Leave us Star Spangled Banner, F-18 Super Bowl Flyover).
But, here I am, working with mostly women, as a special Olympics basketball coach. And, while I get turned down for a four-county kick-ass job I am more than passionate about and qualified for, I am on the Special Needs bus to learn how to drive that bus and get to know the routes and students.
So, this essay shifts to the band wagons within the female persuasion clan.
Now now, there are many parents coming out to support these teams, and while there are two-gender homes, many of the special youth have been growing up with moms, aunts, grandmothers.
Facts: The unfortunate correlation between a child with special needs and a marriage, though, is that the amount of participation from each parent can vary based upon how they are handling the issue emotionally. Tragically, there is a high rate of men who simply focus on work while leaving a mother to raise the child at home, creating a distance. This is not true for all fathers. However, far too often we receive phone calls from mothers who find themselves addressing their child’s needs on their own, either due to divorce or simple emotional distance.
Not all men are the ones who cave and leave, that’s for sure. But I am seeing over several states a majority of women caregivers, parental figures, and social services providers, aides, teachers, and such.
I wouldn’t exchange all the rewarding work I have done with both youth and adults with developmental disabilities for this kick-ass job I just got “railroaded out of.” You see, the job I applied for was compliance worker for Fair Housing Coalition of Oregon. That was Oct. 2022. No word until two weeks ago, 2/2/2023. Asking me if I’d put my resume and cover letter into the ring for this outreach specialists since the person writing me thought I was definitely qualified to do the job.
WAR Bandwagon (Crocodile Tears When They Strike up the Band, Super Bowl Sunday!)
Oh that web so many people have woven in their personal and work lives. Tangled when we practice to deceive is what Walter Scott had as one famous lines in Scott’s epic poem, Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field. My entire life has been that complicated web, but not because I have gone out to deceive, but because I have not set forth deception, and I have been true to myself, honest with others, and forthright in a world where more and more people are “acting” and playing roles with a modicum of heart in their work if it involves social work. There are great people in social services, don’t get me wrong. But more and more the world of that arena is all about acting, Thespian crap, show and tell, bells and whistles, and now “Your Zoom Presence — How to Make Yourself into a Star” is what rules.
I could go on and on, but this is a minor speed bump in my road called life. Pissed off? Sort of, but not really, though angry at the systems of repression and oppression and how the world I sort of run in is now made up of the ghosting and cancelling and intolerance of this modern end game of confirmation bias and only listening to what one bandwagon is blasting on its Propaganda Speakers.
Until I am still working as a school bus trainee in progress. With old people with their biases and backward thinking, and me, again, not on their bandwagon. Imagine, old guys telling me they hate Russia and Russians. No, they are not from Russia, nor did they have anyone from Russia or who fought in the Great Patriotic War. They just hate people they have never met, rendezvoused with or broke bread with. All those horrific propaganda movies, all that Russia Gate lunacy (Bandwagon), and yet, these 77-year-old truckers who are now school busing, hate a people and country they never knew or will never know.
Oh,my, they are equal opportunity racists, because they hate China and Chinese equally. That is one earth-killing nuclear war bandwagon!
And theses bus drivers hate their $19 an hour part-time bus driving gig, with precious K12 cargo, and hate the three cameras in the buses and the smart tablet that tracks acceleration, idling, route, stops, hard stops, but they will never begrudge a dollar to the obscene pimps of war: This is America’s Biggest band playing in that Bandwagon called MIC:
All that money going to new nuclear missiles, strategic bombers (the newly revealed B-21), submarines and so on, which in total will cost $1.7 trillion, according to congressional numbers—all in all an impressive escalation. So, $1 billion for each bomber made by Northrop Grumman (the Air Force began planning for the B-21 in 2011 and awarded the major development contract in 2015. The B-21 is expected to make its first flight in 2023 and enter service by 2027) is no big deal. Imagine that, one guy has to pay for hearing aids, at age 77, to the tune of $7000 or $9000 for a pair. Imagine the cognitive dissonance and retrograde thinking and imploding critical analyses skills with that two plus two equals three equation.
So it goes, sisters and brothers. You get older, you get more radical with each day, you get tired of lies, fakes, faux concepts, marketing, and merchandizing death and co-option, and then you, or I, become not jaded or cynical, but emancipated. Or even more decoupled from the fraudulent nature of almost every angle and every silo this sad sack of a country has propped up to destroy the world.
You realize you have never been on any bandwagon, so, as James Howard Kunstler states, we are in a Cluster Fuck Nation Bandwagon.
Final Run of that Big Bandwagon — DoD!
This is 24 years behind the times: “A Brief History of U.S. Interventions: 1945 to the Present” by William Blum, June 1999. And I know several of the parents today wondered why I left my cap on, turned away from the American flag, bowed my head, and looked sad when the stupid Star Spangled Banner came on the speakers at the beginning of the tourney. I was already standing in the bleachers, but I usually sit, bow my head, and leave my hat or cap on.
One of Blum’s last points in 2017: “The Anti-Empire Report #153: Cold War Number One: 70 years of daily national stupidity Cold War Number Two: Still in its youth, but just as stupid”
The Cold War strategist, George Kennan, wrote prophetically: “Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.”6
Writer John Wight has described the new Cold War as being “in response to Russia’s recovery from the demise of the Soviet Union and the failed attempt to turn the country into a wholly owned subsidiary of Washington via the imposition of free market economic shock treatment thereafter.”
And there this rambling essay ends. Stupidity and cancel culture and ingrained hatred of Russia and Venezuela and Cuba and Nicaragua and Iran and Chine and North Korea, those are the drools coming from a half-brained rabid society. The spiritual rabies crosses all political boundaries, all camps, all silos.
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature.
Children learn more from what you are than what you teach.
― W.E.B. DuBois
It’s liberty or death. It’s freedom for everybody or freedom for nobody. …. I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those that do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the systems of exploitation.
Set in postwar London, Alfie features Michael Caine as a chauffeur bent on promiscuity. After impregnating his girlfriend he takes off on vacation. He continues his life of womanizing, but he can’t hide forever. A misfortune strikes and Alfie is forced to face the product of his ways.
This not the crux of the question, since I was a monogamous dater and monogamous husband. It’s more centered around the discordance and dissheveled nature of humanity in the Western world, which unfortunately is the litmus test for much of the world now, which is another conundrum for me: why the hell would Japan or Oaxaca or Istanbul give a shit about McDonalds, Disneyland, Top Gun and disposable diapers? How viral is Western consumerism and retail disease? How diseased are the people of the world to buy into a disposable culture, from the ketchup containers to the children to the old people?
Marketing, man, and that is a very sophisticated psychological end game. The end run around is the pervasive marketing of everything, and the fake quality of modern humans. All about selling or acting or putting on a show.
Yeah, I’m writing this on the heels of yet another attempt to have a job tied to some civil and social justice gig. I got the call for a 15 minute interview Tuesday, with the fair housing coalition of Oregon, working in four rural counties as an outreach-educator specialist, getting stakeholders (I despise that term) to get around a table, or in a room or on Zoom to understand the rights of renters, tenants, and home buyers.
Up my alley, and alas, I have worked around the housing “issue” for several decades, as an urban and regional planning grad student, and then with clients in Seattle, Spokane, Portland, Vancouver, and on the Oregon Coast.
Two people interviewed me, and one big question was what I thought of how poverty has come about. Oh how it all ties into Capitalism, about the Gilded Age, about the first Anglo Saxons coming to this “New World” and exploiting the Original peoples. Exploiting as in murdering. Stealing land. Polluting the land. Moving them off the land. Re-educating them. Turning the real people into savages. Enslavement and denigration. Haves and haves not. You know, workers, laborers, even the professional managerial class, at the whim of the One Percent and the Five percent. You need poor people to make a buck, and you need poverty to be rich. You know, toil and labor to make the gilded ones money.
But it is deeper, sort of like economic sanctions on countries like Cuba or Venezuela — sanctions against the majority of people in Capitalism to pay the fines, fees, tolls, poll taxes, taxes, add-ons, service fees, tickets, violations, late charges, penalties, and the mortgages.
All those millions working hard to stay afloat, and then some medical emergency, some run-in with a lawyer or insurance company or the law, and bam, the semi-stable household is put into a spin — economic, spiritual and existential spin.
There will always be a PayDay monster lurking in Capitalism. There will always be scammers and legions of thieves who get away with it in CAPITALISM. Poverty makes millions of people money — cops/pigs, courts, judges, schools, governmental program managers, workers in all those so called welfare divisions. You get it! Take a child out of a home, and you will find dozens of workers and managers managing that Child Protective Services intervention-destruction.
In any case, I got a second interview, this time in front of seven people and with an hour to dog and pony my self into their midst. Provide a seven minute Zoom teaching modality or Power Point. Also tell us what a strategy would be to undertake an outreach program in Clatsopo, Tillamook, Lincoln and Columbia Counties. One educator and outreach honcho, and what would you do and who would you engage to get this off the ground?
One hour equalled five hours or more of prep. I actually called county commissioners in two of the counties. I did much research on all the places that might be engaged with low income folk or people of color. The obvious thing is to get into the faith communities, with support services like work source and Department of Human services departments, and even school districts and landlord groups.
Here, what I was being asked to get ready for:
Here are some details about the interview.
It will be about an hour long. The whole team will be there.
One question for you to prepare in advance: Talk about how you would conduct an outreach campaign to raise awareness of fair housing in rural Columbia, Clatsop, Tillamook and Lincoln Counties. Who do you think would be most important to reach and what would your strategies be for reaching them?
At the end of the interview, we will ask you to conduct a seven-minute training on any topic you like. We want to see what your facilitation style is like. We will make you a cohost on Zoom so if you have a PowerPoint to share, you can.
I talked to one woman originally from Michigan who was a county commissioner in Clatsop County. She had spent much time in Portland, and she told me that she had experienced living in Lansing, Michigan as a white woman who witnessed redlining and major discrimination against Black Americans in their attempt to get affordable housing.
She had that poster of Che on her wall.
At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.
She gave me great insight into her county, and how the rural-urban divide has a crass and prejudice guiding mark — “These trust fund babies or super rich come into our Oregon Coast Communities and think that the IQ for our rural residents is 30 points lower than from their urban locales. Everyone comes here to be served and waited on, even for a couple of days. Everyone, even the struggling middle class, want that two or three days of pretending to be like the rich — fancy food, big hotel, and loads of beach fun and trinket buying.”
I even talked to the president of the Landords Assocation, and I interviewed another commissioner, with the eye toward their opinion on how an outreach campaign might work in their respective communities — counties with 27K, 50K, and 42K populations. Rich homes, arts, retired, and then the linen changers, the cooks, the medical technicians, the teachers, you know, coffee shop workers, bussers, cooks, even the simple laborers to keep those amenities and Martha Stewart homes, kitchens and decks prettified.
The lack of housing is huge, and affordable housing is few and far between. Of course I am a socialist, and these systems of oppression and exploitation have to go. Homes and apartments and mixed neighborhoods have to be run by us, the people, the new American government, and, sure a few can get in on building and designing, but there should never be a society where rents are artificial for investment and profits. A one bedroom apartment for how much in Seattle, Chicago, here? And what are those wages of the linen changers and hotel cleaners?
It will take so many tens of millions to strike against this super exploitative system, and we need a public commons, public utilities, public health, education and transportation. Housing has to be part of that, not some bogus HUD lie, which is predicated on which insane political party is in office. Safe, affordable housing. That human right!
Fact: In 1948, the United States signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), recognizing adequate housing as a component of the human right to an adequate standard of living.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination. (source)
Oh, well, that job went the way of the Dodo, as many of my job applicatons have: “Hi Paul, Thank you so much for your time and energy today in the interview and the obvious passion you have towards social justice. We didn’t feel that you were the right fit for this position at this time and we are going to continue our search. Again, thank you for your time and energy. Sincerely, S…!”
There are those buzzwords — “energy” and “passion” and” social justice.” AND, “not the right fit.” I will not get into the errors of their ways, or the dynamics of being age 66 and being interviewed by all women except one, but all in 30 something age range, two hitting forty something. Spilt milk? Sour grapes? Come on, that missive-whatever-rejection-note tells me shit about the interview, what was missing, what I did right, about anything, really. Me thinks there is prejudice here, including age, gender and alas my white skin discrimination. I’m a communist, which I did not disclose, but certainly they might have Googled me, and then, you get the semi-half picture of me (right … little of what I write or how I express myself gives anyone doing a cursory search of men much to know about me — the real me).
Oh well, another interview bites the dust, another quippy essay in the can.
Note: For a Continuation of this diatribe around bandwagons and following the sheeple, go to Dissident Voice, “Let the Bandwagon Play On!”
The insanity of America just never slips, as the men and women who have done an amazing bunch of PSYOPS on the American public since, oh, hell, before Randoph Hearst’ and Pulitzer’s Yellow Journalism, are coming at us like gangbusters. The military wars being plotted now, the economic wars of old and present, the war against nature, the war against people through agriculture and chemical bombs, these are all colluding and connected issues. We are in a War Regime. Let’s try and blast away and look as some of the wars waged from different silos and see if we (I) can pull it all together. It gets rocky, I know, this roller coaster, but the point of an essay (sic) like this is to illustrate the splatterings you the reader could see in one half hour of news feeds. Here, let’s start with the lies, again, a war on logic, truth, critical debate:
They are graduates of Ivy League, of those power house schools that have visiting adjuncts from the military, from Neocon and Neoliberal institutes, from previous administrations, from industry, from the shadows of the world. Just see which law schools the Supreme Court injustices are graduates of. Currently, the court is split 4-4 between Harvard and Yale law graduates. Breyer attended Harvard, as did Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch. Sotomayor and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh attended Yale.
Peer into their backgrounds, their families, their histories, their origins, their clans, their relationships, their networking, their peers, their inside jobs, their vaunted lives. The place for, by and with the people is run like a giant K-Street Lobby for the Top 1,000 corporations. With all the fanfare of a military parade. Tears in our eyes with rockets bursting in air. War against common sense.
The same Supreme Court honchos were lawyers elsewhere: Six in 10 sitting federal appeals court judges are former corporate lawyers. We define a “corporate lawyer” here as a lawyer who has achieved partner status at a corporate law firm—such as the large firms known collectively as Big Law—or has served as in-house counsel at a large corporation. This would mean lawyers who briefly worked as associates at corporate firms at an early phase in their careers would still be eligible for the federal bench. (source)
Federal judges, local judges and then those corporations served by superstar $2000 an hour lawyers who work hard for chemical-ag-military-media-banking-finance-insurance-medical industries. All those which make up the War Complex. Until we are here: General X says the USA is at war against China by 2025. General Y puts that war against China by 2027.
The photo above, god help us, in the minds of these corporate types and Raytheon Guys like General Austin might be something they are plotting for Russia. Their form of rational war. I like this photo cutline blurb for the one below: Rockets have hit peaceful neighborhoods once again. Why does Kiev continue its policy, if not purely out of hate?
The question being posed above comes from Vladislav Ugolny, a Russian journalist based in Donetsk. (source)
At least ten rockets hit central areas of Donetsk on Saturday morning, damaging three residential buildings, a local Russian official has reported in his Telegram channel.
One of the projectiles fired by Ukrainian forces hit an apartment building in the Kievsky district. While rescuers continue to search for survivors under the rubble, preliminary information suggests that there were three people in one of the apartments.
So, let’s get back to the superstructure of wars, whether they are hot ones, proxies, or economic; including propaganda wars. Now, this is a regime (Ukraine post-Maidan) outfitted, trained, directed by the Europeans and Americans. This sort of terror into civilian neighborhoods is the Israeli Project of Hell and intimidation against Gaza and Palestine. And from my perspective, the average Joe and Janet shopping for eggs is not about to question the trillions spent for war monger Military Offensive Weapons manufacturers, and these citizens/consumers will not question the hate we are told to build up toward that Axis of Evil, a la George W. Bush. You wake up hating Russia and hating China and wonder why, but really because those dictums and orders are in the news, on TV, in movies, and in the schools, bars, and cafes. That is the only way in America to get through the day at a shit job with a shit boss with shit wages under a shit-storm economy, with the winds of contamination about to whip up more people-killing and plant-stripping fun.
War with Russia. This is actually calmly discussed on the Sunday un-News Shows. Why? Because of a Jewish President in Ukraine huffing and puffing like Woody Allen in some two-bit role with a penis and a piano? This is 2023, and Blinken, Nuland, Kagan, Garland, and Yellen, and an entire audience of Jewish folk raised to think, plot and laugh are chuckling at this irony: This guy is running an Azov, SS, and Nazi loving crew of supremacists and Russia haters in Ukraine, and he too is part of the heralded Jewish people in government:
“All the Jews Biden has tapped for top roles in his new administration from secretary of state to attorney general, a diverse cross-section of American Jewry is set to fill seats at the incoming president’s Cabinet table and elsewhere in government” (Times of Israel). There is celebration here and abroad with Biden’s picks.
Biden’s choices reflect a diverse cross-section of American Jewry and possess expertise gleaned from decades of experience in government, science and medicine and law.
Here’s a rundown of the Jewish names you should know as the Biden administration begins. (source)
If you are not sickened yet from the above, then you are sub-human. For sure. How many thousands of celebrities and rich guys and gals go to Zelensky’s knees to pray? This is the leader of the most corrupt country in Europe. He’s a murderer, thief and helping the USA proxy nuclear death. What a guy.
“Presumably there is money,” said Konstantin Sidorenko, a consultant anaesthetist at the institute, when we first met in July. “But for some reason that money doesn’t reach the most important places, like intensive care. So it means we have to earn everything ourselves.” (source)
The phrase “earn everything ourselves”, he explained, is a euphemism for taking bribes, though Sidorenko was quick to point out that this wasn’t something he wanted to do. He led the team of doctors running intensive care, so he was responsible for the institute’s most vulnerable patients. Clinically, he felt he had no choice but to take the money.
So, war against the people, against simple safety nets and infrastructure, another sort of death by a thousand economic bombs. Until we have, way before Maidan, across the pond in Arizona, these sorts of warriors against the war mongers killing nature, in this case, desert.
“The anthill,” said Doc, “is sign, symbol and symptom of what we are about out here, stumbling through the gloaming like so many stumblebums. I mean it is the model in microcosm of what we must find a way to oppose and halt. The anthill, like the Fullerian foam fungus, is the mark of social disease. Anthills abound where overgrazing prevails. The plastic dome follows the plague of runaway industrialism, prefigures technological tyranny and reveals the true quality of our lives, which sinks in inverse ratio to the growth of the Gross National Product.”
Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang follows four unlikely companions who – angered by the destruction of their beloved southwestern American desert by ever-expanding industry – turn to sabotage.
The gang is comprised of the wise and eloquent Doc Sarvis, the strong-willed Bonnie Abbzug, the “incorrigibly bucolic” Seldom Seen Smith, and the brutish, testosteronic Vietnam vet: George Hayduke. These characters come from diverse backgrounds, but are unified in the conviction that no one has a right to destroy the the impeccable and essential wilderness they cherish.
So they disassemble bulldozers, they blow up assembly lines, they uproot survey stakes… you know… eco-terrorist stuff. They come together to strike back against the oil companies, coal companies, and mining companies destructively extending their greedy paws into the pristine desert of the American southwest.
Again, revert back to the who’s who in federal courtrooms, and who writes the laws to make property destruction crime numero uno. These are the crimes of the future, now, eco-terrorism:
“To those who have studied radical movements, the unprecedented prosecution of environmental activists represents the end of an era,” Vanessa Grigoriadis wrote in Rolling Stone in 2006. “Four states have already passed legislation—drafted by a right-wing lobbying group that represents 300 major corporations—that classifies any act of property destruction motivated by environmental beliefs as ‘ecological terrorism.’”
When Grigoriadis wrote that, FBI had recently called radical environmental activists “the number one domestic terrorism threat,” despite the fact that damage was suffered by property, and human casualties were rare. (That description has since been downgraded to “one of the most serious domestic terrorism threats in the U.S. today.”) (Source)
War war war against protest, even if readers here have some acid reflex thinking about ELF.
Imagine that: dozens of years in federal prison for burning up some SUV’s, or burning down some property owned by a Confined Animal Feeding Operation. Imagine being thrown in jail and prison for filming abuse of animals in cages and pens. Imagine that, these Cheeseburger laws, so called food disparagement laws: The “Cheeseburger Bill” which makes it illegal for people to sue food companies for making them obese.
Yesterday [10/19/2005] the House of Representatives once again passed the Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act, which purports to protect food sellers from liability for the consequences of their customers’ overeating. I say “purports” because I’m not sure the bill (which has not been considered by the Senate yet) would make much of a difference in the sort of litigation that inspired it.
Then, another area of attack, that is, war against health, war against the child’s body and mind: Fat, sugar, salt, and artificial flavorings and High Fructose Corn Syrup Super Size drinks, and the endless jocks and celebrities hawking this junk food, and then, of course, normalizing pizza for school lunches washed down by chocolate milk and with a side of French fries, none of that causes diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity! Imagine that, food deserts, and food price gouging where an apple or pre-made salad is more expensive than a burger and fries from one of your favorite national dirty chains.
Imagine all of this advertising and subliminal mind warping and behavior modification happening at age 10 days, whenever the baby sitter puts the TV on while rocking baby to sleep. This is yet another form of war being unleashed upon us. To believe there is no conspiracy of HFCS and sugary drinks and processed foods and sat, sugar, salt and other secret ingredients that get the average five year old lusting after Twinkies, 7/11 hotdogs, bags of Doritos and a Big Mac or Whooper delivered 24/7 through advertising (another form of war), then you haven’t been paying attention. Nah, how dare we journalists put two and two and two together. We can get sued. Therefore, another form of war, a war against journalists.
Here’s on fellow on one famous show (Oprah) who ended up in a war — against the Cattleman’s Association which is then a war against lawyers, politicians and fast-food burger joints. Here, I had Howard Lyman staying at my house in Spokane. He was on my radio show, and he was interviewed by me for a stage presentation, and he was also written about by yours truly:
“My name is Howard Lyman and I am a recovering meat eater … dairy consumer … factory farmer.” Something for an Oprah show? Dr. Phil’s forte?
The Oprah reference is an accurate one for Lyman, the former operator of a super-industrialized livestock lot and dairy farm, now author (Mad Cowboy and No More Bull, both co-written with Glen Merzer) and advocate of vegetarianism, animal rights and stewardship of the land through sustainable agriculture. It was during an April 1996 Oprah show that the fourth-generation Montana cattleman — now living in Ellensburg — “let the cattle out of the bag” by confronting a spokesman for the National Cattleman’s Beef Association about the practice of feeding vegetarian ruminants their own kind. He suggests that the practice is a bizarre cannibalistic ritual set upon the industrialized meat-raising system to satisfy greed and the bottom line.
On the show, Lyman asserted that he and thousands of other cattle operators had been feeding their herds dead cows — downer cows put down because of cancer, viral diseases, genetic anomalies and mysterious neurological ailments — mixed with parts from butchered cows, including pulverized cow manure.
The proverbial cow pie hit the fan when it was acknowledged that this practice had rendered America’s beef supply susceptible to Mad Cow disease (BSE, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy), which had already taken its toll in the United Kingdom just a year earlier. Lyman, known as the “Mad Cowboy” or the “Vegan Rancher,” continues to speak out about abuses in industrial diary and beef operations like the one he ran outside Great Falls, Mont.
Lyman saw the light after more than 20 years of using road-kill and slaughtered cows as ground-up feed. After hundreds of gallons of antibiotics. After daily chemical fogs to douse flies — the No. 2 bane of feedlot operators “after bovine diseases in their various forms.” In the feedlot business, that pesky fly takes a toll on huge operations because of all those cattle unnaturally crammed into one small space.
“With every cow in a pen producing 25 pounds of manure in a day,” Lyman says, “the flies can get so thick that they actually threaten a cow’s ability to breathe.”
“Better farming through chemistry” was Lyman’s mantra before his transformation, so he attacked the insect problem on an industrial scale.
“Early in the morning I would fill up a fly fogger with insecticide and spray great clouds of it over the whole operation,” Lyman writes in his book. “The insecticide would of course fall into the feed and the water of the cattle, as well as on the trees and the grass and the crops.” (source: Haeder, “Cowboy Critic”)
So, Lyman did a huge mea culpa and ended his war against the land and against confined animals, to become an eco-warrior, a vegan for his own health, and a writer and mini-celebrity.
More and more wars tied to pharmaceuticals. Here, some comments I made over at Hormones Matter:
War against environmentalists. The proverbial tip of the iceberg. Artificial estrogen DES, nuclear winds, hormone disrupting plastics, vaccines, insecticides, GMOs, etc. And we are now in a time of Ag-gag laws which are in the news around animal cruelty cases, but much worse, we are in what Will Potter calls, Green as the New Red.
Several human studies have reported different adverse health outcomes induced by high early in utero DES exposure, such as structural anomalies of the cervix, uterus, and fallopian tubes, leading to difficult pregnancies, infertility, spontaneous abortion, preterm delivery, and stillbirth. (Source)
Like communist witch hunts by McCarthy, today for-profit felons and their felonious associations like the Cattleman’s Association and the entire alphabet soup groups that are bribe-minded lobbying organizations are going after people — researchers, scientists, citizens — who would dare expose the massive environmental pollution and human harm these industries have promulgated.
Call it the Cheeseburger bill or food disparagement laws. I brought Howard Lyman to my college as a faculty member. Remember him? Sued along with Oprah Winfrey for talking about “mad cow disease and our meat industry?
Twenty-two years ago.
War on the planet, via the ocean!
Look, when a society — the entire Trumpland and Obamaland — can tolerate children, adults and the aged to be poisoned by lead in Michigan, and no heads rolled, and no trial for the governor, well, we are in a time of corporations ruling us all through their henchmen and henchwomen: politicians for sale. When we allow, now under the current administration (sic), offshore oil platforms to reduce blowout safety, well, we are in a time of insanity.
A war against critical thinking. We’ve allowed education to teach our children how to NOT think critically, and how NOT to become participants in democracy. We are in a time when a bad TV reality show host is leader (sic) of the free (sic) world. The Rock and Facebook’s Zuckerberg are now putting their toes into the 2020 presidential run up. Whew! DES is the tip of a continental iceberg of people, animals, land being toxified! Our famed nuclear tests? Testing for those war weapons!
Quote:
New research suggests that the hidden cost of developing nuclear weapons were far larger than previous estimates, with radioactive fallout responsible for 340,000 to 690,000 American deaths from 1951 to 1973.
The study, performed by University of Arizona economist Keith Meyers, uses a novel method (pdf) to trace the deadly effects of this radiation, which was often consumed by Americans drinking milk far from the site of atomic tests.
From 1951 to 1963, the US tested nuclear weapons above ground in Nevada. Weapons researchers, not understanding the risks—or simply ignoring them—exposed thousands of workers to radioactive fallout. The emissions from nuclear reactions are deadly to humans in high doses, and can cause cancer even in low doses. At one point, researchers had volunteers stand underneath an airburst nuclear weapon to prove how safe it was. (source)
My own life here in the Pacific Northwest intersects with that big lie — a little radioactive fallout is good for you. That Hanford was set up to supply the nuclear material for those nuke-tipped missiles, and unintended consequences include a war against the people and their land. My two-part story below:
I won a first place big time journalism (mainstream) award for these stories above, but, alas, I am wondering exactly how effective any amount of written commentary/investigative journalism or documentary film recording the crimes of the capitalists and chemical purveyors and punishment profiteers, et al., really does to change people?
Back to the Economic War Games. I remember the 2011 Academy Awards given out to Charles Ferguson for his documentary, Inside Job. While he attempted to say something at the microphone, like, “Not one economist who was part of this economic meltdown has lost his or her job,” the band struck up loudly and Oprah Winfrey scuttled him off stage.
Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job is the first film to expose the shocking truth behind the economic crisis of 2008. The global financial meltdown, at a cost of over $20 trillion, resulted in millions of people losing their homes and jobs. Through extensive research and interviews with major financial insiders, politicians and journalists, Inside Job traces the rise of a rogue industry and unveils the corrosive relationships which have corrupted politics, regulation and academia.
Very few people I know saw the movie, and alas, we are in 2018 which is a time of economic cholera — the rich steal more and the middle class and poor class and working class lose it all.
There are no new disasters about to unfold. They are here, man! I hate to be a harbinger of bad news, and it’s difficult being in this role because Americans, I find, want to see a silver cloud and touched by an angel in all things. But we need more critical thinking and more exposing of the crimes of the few onto the masses, us, the people!
Example of this time of environmental cholera:
War Against Bees. Pollinators are rapidly dying, and they account for 75 percent of all food grown — i.e. pollinated? Do we have a massive movement to ban the culprits of bees’ colony collapse?
The widespread decline in bees and other pollinators is worrying because they fertilize about 75% of all food crops, with half of pollination being done by wild species. Pesticides, habitat destruction, disease and climate change have all been implicated in bee declines, but relatively little research has been done on the complex question of which factors cause the most damage.
War against the entire web of life. So what kind of species are capitalists who would create chemicals that poison air, water, soil, and the entire food web? War against the food web. The DES scandal is one in a million, some of which have been documented with little mitigation or remediation; most not exposed in any sense of the word through the mainstream or side stream press.
*****
I was listening to Cory Morningstar this morning, and it was great to hear her recommendation at the end of the interview when the interviewer asked her what can people do to stop the juggernauts of 6 G, crypto cages, social impact bonds, digital dashboards, compliance computers, WEF, Davos, You will Own Nothing, Sucker mentality of the elites, and the Internet of Nano Things, Internet of Bodies. Call this the digital and AI-AR-VR Wars. Her answer was refreshing — Learn about demolition. The interviewer asked what she meant, and Cory stated as I paraphrase — Get some background in learning how to create, set, and detonate things, since the juggernauts are all in forward motion, as Minority Report came and went and then got improved for the billionaires in order to watch us all and predict which people are eco-terrorist that, anti-government this.
War against crimes not committed:
Cory Morningstar joins us to discuss Climate Activism/Green New Deal, The Great Reset, Digital ID systems, Public Health, Smart Cities, and more
“We are embarking on an inescapable and irreversible technological enslavement… This we know: the planet will not be saved by those that have destroyed it.”
Simple military tools of war. Well well. I have had lots of “courses” on how to set Claymore mines, how to work with dynamite and with some other stuff like grenades and even C4. I’ve been around Rocket Propelled Grenades, and M-60 machine guns, and, more, which I will not talk about here. I taught college courses to military, and I am a sponge. So, this commie teacher even got to have fun in the desert (New Mexico, El Paso, Texas, Tucson, other places) with some of my students who brought out the “toys.” Yes, I have had my time in the US military, and that is a whole other story, dishonorable to me. My father was in the Air Force and Army for a total of 32 years. I have messed with many things. I have been exposed to sniper weapons, SWAT crap, more.
The problem today is that the demolition squads are now hobbled and registered and held at bay with surveillance and such. Oklahoma City bombing? Was that a war against the government as we were told by mainstream media? Inside the vehicle was a powerful bomb made out of a deadly cocktail of agricultural fertilizer, diesel fuel, and other chemicals.
Again, though, go deep, pull back the covers and body bags, and you get:
At most, the truck bomb would have taken out the flooring on the first and third floors. Partin believed that bombs were placed inside the building at key points to destroy its supports.
Cory might want some folk to get ready for bringing down the towers and 5 G mini convex units, but the CCTV and Keyhole Satellites and RFID chips, man, we are fucked. The war now is Total War.War against citizenry.
Here it is, those from the test, from the fallout! And there’s no hell to pay from the scientists, pencil pushers, military, politicians, corporations waging war on us all. None.
Note: This piece has been sent to the local newspaper, Newport News Times, which is not a shadow of a shadow at once a week hard copy. Imagine that, no? Death of newspapers because? Social Media? Internet? No more readers? Bad management? Gutting of newspapers for stock holders? What the heck?
Valentines Day, for me, is that Vagina Monologues. Sure, we are on the brink of nuclear disaster with this great Grand Old Flag land pushing and pulling for Russia responses for all that shaking going on in Ukraine and Russia.
Published in over 48 languages, performed in over 140 countries and recently heralded by The New York Times as one of the most important plays of the past 25 years: Ensler’s hilarious, eye-opening tour into the last frontier, the forbidden zone at the heart of every woman. A show that’s rocked audiences around the world, this groundbreaking piece gives voice to a chorus of lusty, outrageous, poignant, and thoroughly human stories, transforming the question mark hovering over the anatomy into a permanent victory sign. With laughter and compassion, Ensler transports her audiences to a world we’ve never dared to know, guaranteeing that no one who reads The Vagina Monologues will ever look at a woman’s body the same way again.
Performing The Vagina Monologues inspired her to create V-Day, the 22-year-old global activist movement to end violence against all women (cisgender and transgender), those who hold fluid identities, nonbinary people, girls and the planet.
The movement has grown, unfortunately, since violence against girls and women continues. Acid throwing freaks. Rapists that get off scott free. The dirty Netflix shows of sex-ploitation and exploitation. It is a seesaw world, with more and more women excelling in college/university, in sciences, in other arenas, some not so hunkydory:
From the executive leadership of top weapons-makers, to the senior government officials designing and purchasing the nation’s military arsenal, the United States’ national defense hierarchy is, for the first time, largely run by women.
As of Jan. 1, the CEOs of four of the nation’s five biggest defense contractors — Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and the defense arm of Boeing — are now women. And across the negotiating table, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer and the chief overseer of the nation’s nuclear stockpile now join other women in some of the most influential national security posts, such as the nation’s top arms control negotiator and the secretary of the Air Force.
It’s a watershed for what has always been a male-dominated bastion, the culmination of decades of women entering science and engineering fields and knocking down barriers as government agencies and the private sector increasingly weigh merit over machismo.
And, as Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson told POLITICO, it’s also the result of “quieting that little voice in your head that doubts whether you can do that next job or take on that special assignment.”
“I think there’s critical mass, where you have enough women that they’re getting noticed,” said Rachel McCaffrey, a retired Air Force colonel and executive director of Women in Defense, a career development and networking organization affiliated with the National Defense Industrial Association, a leading industry group.
Nearly a dozen female executives and defense leaders who spoke to POLITICO said having more women at the top affects companies and defense agencies in ways large and small — from questioning stale assumptions about the smartest way to develop weapons and provide services for the military; to negotiating better deals for the taxpayers when buying airplanes, tanks, rockets and ships; to recruiting and retaining the best and the brightest engineers and policy wonks. (source)
I’ll let the piece below rest as it may or may not get published in our wee dwindling newspaper. I doubt it will be run since there is less space for deeper (1,000 word) analyese; and more and more people want to use the Op-Ed space to yammer on about short term rentals, complaining about Californians coming into our county and raising real estate prices, and timber and fishing industries.
In 2011, City of Joy opened its doors in Eastern Congo with the goal of building a peaceful and transformational community for women survivors of violence.
V-Day is not Just a Valentine for your Sweetheart
Okay, so this newspaper is almost down for the count, limited to a once-a-week hard copy publication. Therefore, I know my viewpoints better be good, hard hitting and relevant.
Not all topics are going to be warm and fuzzy. On this Valentine’s day, attempt to think about violence against women. The significance of V-Day is a response against violence toward women, girls and the planet. Here in Lincoln County women and girls face all levels of violence.
The V-Day movement is tied a 1996 one-woman play written by Eve Ensler, called the Vagina Monologues. She interviewed more than 200 women from a wide range of ages and cultural backgrounds, whereupon so many of them opened up, baring their souls tied to sexual violence.
One key question was, “What would your vagina say if it could talk?” Over the years, V-Day has become a catalyst promoting creative events to increase awareness, raise money and revitalize the spirit of existing anti-violence organizations.
The Monologues also generates broader attention to stop violence against women and girls.
So what’s a white male writer stepping his toes into these waters? First, let me say that if you read the police blotter in this county, or if you attend public criminal hearings at the courthouse, you will see the level of violence in the household in general is skyrocketing.
Police calls cover the gamut, but one ugly reality is the number of spousal violence calls, especially violence against wives and girlfriends. My own early roots as a reporter in Tucson were ensconced into the music scene and the police beat. That entailed covering a special rape squad set up by Linda Ronstadt’s brother Peter who was the Tucson police chief for more than 10 years.
I was 19 covering a lot of sexual violence against both students and young/old women living around the University of Arizona campus. I covered Take Back the Night rallies – started in the early 1970s in Belgium, but quickly spreading to college campuses and across global communities: from remote Canadian towns to bustling Calcutta streets, from Ivy Leagues to military bases.
While doing my judo and scuba diving thing, I also took a few feminist literature classes, volunteered with Rape Crisis organization, and assisted my sensei with grappling classes, as in self-defense for women.
Fast forward to Spokane, Washington: I was teaching at many venues as a composition and writing instructor, to include Gonzaga University. There, a Vagina Monologues rendition was being rehearsed by various students, including those in the Women’s Studies Club.
That was 21 years ago, and the president of the Jesuit University banned college sponsorship of the “Monologues,” citing Christian values and supposed pushback. One of my cohorts, philosophy professor Mark Alfino, argued against the banishment, telling a standing-room-only crowd of 200 people the ban was a threat to academic freedom.
“It’s a weak faith that doesn’t welcome challenges,” Alfino said. “Academic freedom is not an open-ended license to say anything without impunity. Academic freedom is an openness to the responsible expression of ideas.”
Here’s the deal – some of my students asked me to pen an opinion piece supporting the Vagina Monologues held on campus, as a way to bring in the Gonzaga community and public in by both attending the play but also opening up dialogue around campus rape.
That same semester one of my students (she told me in an office visit) had been the victim of campus rape, unfortunately, the type of violence seen on many campuses: fraternity parties, lots of booze and frequent spiking of women’s drinks with “roofies” (Rohypnol, a clear liquid 10 times stronger than Valium).
I also had a weekly hour-long radio show covering public affairs where I interviewed many heavy hitters in the sciences, publishing, arts, and social justice fields. I didn’t get Eve Ensler on the show, but I had two guests talking about sexual violence and the power of the Monologues, as well as one woman from Somalia who talked about her own forced female genital mutilation.
I discussed both in a written Op-Ed and on my radio show my own issues with the clergy. I had come from El Paso, and there as a reporter, I covered two cases of Catholic priests charged with child rape. These fellows from the Spokane Diocese were accused there, so both were sent south to the border; back then I didn’t know Spokane from Shinola.
I went on to discuss the Catholic Church’s “penis problem,” getting into some of the history (in the thousands) of priests around the US and Canada and world with multiple accusations each of sexual assault. I brought up the Indian Boarding Schools, too, where sexual assault was occurring.
I took the banishment of the Monologues on campus seriously, and I even questioned the president’s claim that “many boosters and supporters” had spoken to him about their concerns with the play being performed on campus.
Oh the irony: the Gonzaga students put on a wonderful performance, and the public, the GU community, including staff, faculty and some priests, were just a few hundred yards off campus at a hotel ballroom for these young women’s performances which helped as a fund-raiser for the V-Day nonprofit that works to stop rape, battery, incest, female genital mutilation and other violence against women.
I am a better person for doing my little part – a published viewpoint and radio rant. Not so ironically, thought, I was told (off the record) by my department chair I would not be hired to teach at GU, per the “upper administration’s orders.”
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