Author: Paul Haeder

February 6, 2022

To the Victor Go the Spoils

As you know, I have other gigs, other ways to express ideas, and construct my own analysis in my own life. Experiences turned into philosophy. Or, anti-philosophy to invent self.

This piece is in the local rag, again, Newport, Lincoln County, Oregon. On the coast. (see story/Op-ed below — Newport News Times.)

Yes, the world is a microcosm in places wherever you find yourself, if you are willing to explore how universality is a common thread for most people, excluding the elites and rich and super-rich and sociopaths in those classes as well as down and dirty people born from a bad seed or with the evil encased in DNA. If you are willing to believe that not all humanity and all cultures frame their needs and wants and goals the same, but that we mostly want peace, prosperity, justice and a safe, clean, working world.

You can look at, say, Israel, and see that that apartheid state, that colony, well, the roots are there to apply the same sort of overall logic of oppression and land theft and human subjugation we see in the White United States of America. Imagine, ripping land away from people — Original Peoples — and then creating a policy of civilian (white) patrols and military patrols as part of an eradication policy to rid people of their ancestral land, but to rid the people altogether. Call it Indian Removal, Pacification or Assimulation, but like modern day “Israel,” the policy then was to remove people from being. From a future. From their right to travel freely. The system then got legalized, full of the lies of governments breaking treaties (all of them) to facilitate Manifest Destiny and Expansion for the rich. Those sociopaths I allude to above!

Now, again, more patronizing “month” number 12 to give lip service to Black people of this land. Black History Month now, in a time of right-wing hate of alternative (real) history and overall white disgust for the lives of Blacks now and Blacks then. This month of Netflix Black specials and other lip service fandangos seem like another blip on the screen of this out and out systemic and over hatred of people questioning their place here.

Black Lives Matter — the movement — was better than, well, nothing, and, sure, capitalism and egoism did take it down the ugly road of cooption and Hollywoodization. But. Yes, police are murderers, and so is the military, and then, defacto, we as taxpayers and citizens are part of that murder inc. See-speak-hear-rebuff no evil? Amerikkkaaah.

Then, this concept of wanting a campus with some semblance of “pacification” makes sense in this time of outright bigotry. Cancel Culture is an outgrowth of the fear porn Media have served up. Ivory Tower pencil necks, many of them in the Chosen Few class, they have messed up college, for sure. Bowing to elites, to the professional managerial class, and then fawning the super-stars of Capitalism, well, that’s the new normal for millions.

But throwing out the babies with the bathwater, that is the new normal with blogs, podcasts, YouTube shows, and infinite blathering on Instagram and TikTok lambasting everything tied to liberalism, to socialism, to a new way forward.

If you were to come back from the dead, say, dead in 1957, there would be an amazing schizophrenia buzzing in your head with all of the noise, the digital dimwit traffic, all of it, bombarding you dead sucker each second of the resurrection. To believe universities would not be subject to virtue signaling and cancel culturing, and to believe that snowflake making would not be the outgrowth of this dastardly warring, mean, racist society, that is, if you don’t get cause and effect, the why and how, then you have had to have lived in a toxic bubble of echo after echo of your own malfeasance.

What is good about Black Empowerment and Black History is certainly demonstrated by folks over at Hood Communist and Black Agenda Report, to name just a few. Black Alliance for Peace is another group. But most people do not tie into those sites, those thinkers on those sites.

The problem is that in USA, everything is turned into celebrity fawning or celebrity denigrating. Of course, Whoopi Goldberg is too rich and too stupid to understand what she was attempting to say on that stupid show about the Holocaust not being about race. She gets suspended for two weeks. Bizarre. All of it. The fact I am writing about it!

Of course, we have endless prattling and war mongering from African Americans, who should know what their place has been in the eyes of all administrations, even the one with the mixed race Obama. Blacks do not live in a democracy, and Biden is a racist, and, the systems in this country are against Black empowerment. And, yes, against worker empowerment. Against all people of color and those whites, too.

What passes for leadership is always a joke played upon Black people. The high water mark of the CBC being the “conscience of the congress” is long gone. No one can look to them on the issue of Ukraine or anything else. The people must restore the historical Black radical consensus as a matter of survival. —

Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist

“It all makes sense” that in 2022, with the fear porn of billionaires and millionaires holding a thousand axes above our heads, those of us in the 80 Percent Class, with the Holly-Dirt engine of triple lies, with the Media in bed with the Deep-Shallow-Military State, with lab coat-wearing billionaires getting platforms to yammer on and on about universal yearly vaccinations for everything on planet earth; with the world going digital before our very eyes, with privatization on steroids; with a world so confused and dazed it collapses every minute; and with the gear work of the slick and $2000 an hour racists working their magic to get the masses, the working class, the middle class, all lathered up and hateful against youth, the old, the homeless, BIPOC, educated, uneducated, sick, worn down, poor, all of this and more, as I say, it all makes sense that we are on a collision course of lack of solidarity. Big Time.

Try talking sense to anyone, and the conversation ends up spiraling into a cesspool of, well, Americana Amnesia. Americans the Children. Americans the Red-White-Blue Consumers. Americans the Nanny-Held Citizens. All those Americans Making a Buck Anyway Possible. A Little Bit of Poison in Air-Water-Soil-Food? The price to pay for capitalism. Capitalism with a big C for CANCER.

Remember, mostly, though, this America was created by religious zealots, by profiteers, mercenaries, Christian extremists, racists, superstition peddlers, peddling PR and smear and lies with a sucker is born every minute snake oil and poison gruel for children ethos.

Capitalism is the outgrowth of that theft of land and deployment of slaves to till the land, plant the crops, harvest the cotton, etc., etc.

Black History Month My Ass! We need daily rolling strikes. Shut them down, these planned pandemic psychopaths. Shut down these hoarders, these Bezos Yacht Boys. Shut the Musk Military Magic down. All of them need to be, well, you know, Exterminate All THOSE Brutes!

Black History Month Through the Eye of the Needle

It’s an adage by P.T. Barnum: “A sucker is born every minute.” In the USA, there are so many suckers now who don’t know their country’s history. It takes people from other countries to give them our history lessons.

When it comes to the struggles of Latinos, Asians, Native Americans and African-Americans, the racist systems in place – even in 2022 – work to continue making Americans more ignorant.

I’ve been teaching for going on 50 years. I’ve mentored many in community colleges, universities, K12, special programs for gifted and talented, gang intervention projects, refugee centers, military compounds, prisons, and homeless programs.

In a public arena where debate should take place by deploying critical thinking and rhetorical skills, most people who espouse banning books, who have no idea what the history of the USA is through the eyes of minorities or women, and who have no clue about other countries, I find can’t hold onto their prejudices and biases when up against smart, schooled and experienced debaters.

I’ve had many a run-in and debate with racists, sexists, and bigots. One thing they have in common is fear permeated with an undeserved sense of entitlement.

We’ve reached a point in the USA where dumb-downing vis-à-vis superficiality, lack of reading, a disregard for community engagement, and all that poisonous influence of “entertainment” consumed have created a large section of Americans who have zero concept of the power to change.

There is no doubt this country is based on exploitation, land theft, breaking every treaty signed with the First Nations tribes. This is a country that rose to success through slave labor – black slave labor. This is a country determined to expand by hook or by crook through Manifest Destiny and Imperial overreach.

It’s not to say other countries do not have these damning elements to their pasts. The point is, though, Americans are in a paradigm shift of consciousness. Black History Month is just one of many “months” or weeks to rethink bad history, lies and propaganda perpetrated by the dominant race. Native American Heritage Month and banned book week are two topics I have explored here.

The issue at hand is, of course, February’s Black History Month. The work of researchers, internationally-traveled writers, educators, philosophers, anthropologists and sociologists is solid around this emerging history.

There is no Critical Race Theory conspiracy to denigrate the “white race.”

Paul Robeson — singer, athlete, actor, and, socialist Black man — stated: “My father was a slave and my people died to build this country and I am going to stay here and have a part of it just like you…. The answer to injustice is not to silence the critic but to end the injustice.”

I consider Black intellectual, Cornel West, a friend, and I’ve marched with him in Seattle during Occupy Seattle. At Green River College, where I taught, we filled an auditorium with people wanting to hear him. I’ve written a story on him.

He’s smart, Christian, ministerial, deep into music, a writer and a public thinker. He is not a fan of Obama, Bush, Biden, Trump or Clinton. I know no person who is an avowed racist, white supremacist, or on a spectrum of angry history-denying white person I have taught and counseled who really could argue themselves out of a paper bag when faced with anti-racists. Think of anti-racists like Angela Davis (writer, Black Panther, educator) or Raoul Peck (filmmaker of HBO’s “Exterminate All the Brutes”) or Gary Howard (“We Can’t Teach What We Don’t Know: White Teachers, Multiracial Schools”).

I’ve been in Gary’s diversity workshops in Tacoma, and I have been in trainings with others, like Brown Eagle with Spokane’s Medicine Wheel Academy. I’ve worked with Winona LaDuke and have been a counselor for African-American ex-New Orleans Saints Toussaint Tyler.

Everywhere I have lived, worked and taught at I’ve found myself in a milieu of learning about other people: people that historians have lied about, that is, those whose ability to be humans and citizens in this country has been systematically thwarted through vicious systems of oppression. List some of them as sundown laws, red lining and overt racism and lynching.

When I taught mostly white students at Gonzaga University, many had never known the story of Emmett Till, the boy who was murdered by racists, and whose body was dumped in a river with a cotton gin fan wrapped around his neck.

His mother had an open casket funeral attended by thousands in Chicago. He was kidnapped, shot and disfigured by white guys because of a “wolf whistle” directed at one of the cracker’s wives. They got off free. However, with so much entitlement, they were paid for a magazine article and admitted to torturing and killing the 14-year-old Emmett August 28, 1955.

The entire world heard about Emmett’s case. His disfigured face was photographed by dozens of journalists. His murder by racist whites in Mississippi kick-started the civil rights movement, even before Rosa Parks refused to sit at the back of the bus.

I was 19 years old when President Ford officially recognized Black History Month in 1976. Plain old white guy Gerald Ford stated he wanted all Americans to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”

This was a no-brainer for me. My old man, in the Army for 32 years, recounted how three of his servicemen were refused food in Kentucky. That eatery then became off-limits for soldiers. There was a big movement to list all other places that refused service to Blacks, Latinos, Asians and Native Americans.

That was before I was born. It’s great to have these celebrations for Blacks’ accomplishments, but really, overlooked and denied now is the price African Americans have paid to reach their aims. Sometimes these struggles to live, work, vote, and excel were set into stone by racist courts, racist businesses, and racist communities.

Change is always in the wind. Let’s hope more Americans get smart sooner than later. People live their histories. Listen to them.

The post To the Victor Go the Spoils first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
January 30, 2022

Requiem for a People-Centered World Dream

My dream is to invite a reader into a room and pour a nice cup of tea . . . and then nail the door shut.

— author Charles Bowden, 2010 NPR interview

There is so much daily that expresses so much about the slippery slopes we are in globally because of predatory-penury-parasitic-pugilistic capitalism.

In the USA, on this continent, north, and south of those colonial and Manifest Destiny “borders,” the amount of both absurdity and abomination is magnified in a world of protracted panic.

It’s there, truly, the panic. Young people are offing themselves with Narcan and with opiates. There are more dreams not only deferred, but dreams turned into nightmares by a thousand cuts.

We have a world where getting into uniform, with a rifle, with a joystick for murder incorporated, is the new abnormal. Hitch up in the killing machine US Army for $50K.

If this isn’t blasphemy, then, you know we have lathered ourselves on that slippery slope of the multi-pronged Faustian Bargain.

Then, more mercenaries recruited for big bonuses: Make that the disgusting US Army,

You know how messed up the USA is, from A to Z, and the news continues to illustrate the dying empire. Paying punks to enlist in the killing machine!

FORT CAMPBELL, KY — The U.S. Army is offering its largest bonus ever for new recruits with up to $50,000 available to qualified individuals who sign on for a six-year active-duty enlistment.

The total incentive package for a new recruit is based on a combination of incentives offered for the selected career field, individual qualifications, length of the enlistment contract, and the ship date for training.

In the past, enlistment incentives for full-time soldiers could not exceed $40,000.

The Army is competing for the same talent as the other services as well as the private sector and must have the ability to generate interest in the current employment environment, according to Maj. Gen. Kevin Vereen, who leads U.S. Army Recruiting Command in its mission to fill full-time and part-time vacancies in about 150 career fields in the regular Army and the Army Reserve.

“This is an opportunity to entice folks to consider the Army,” said Brig. Gen. John Cushing, who serves as the deputy commanding general for operations under Vereen at USAREC. “We’ve taken a look at the critical (military occupational specialties) we need to fill in order to maintain the training bases, and that is where we place a lot of our emphasis.”

Now run that up against The Man who coined the term Military Industrial Complex, and a new book written by, well, shall we call that person part of the elite, part of the chosen people from Ivy League and East Coast silver spoon roots. And, in the magazine that for many is a sell-out, for sure, Jacobin: Here, the article reviewing the man and the book.

Crisscrossing the country, Butler denounced US warmaking abroad and ruling-class violence at home as two sides of the same bloody coin, telling audiences from Racine to Roanoke that America was divided into “two classes”:

On one side, a class of citizens who were raised to believe that the whole of this country was created for their sole benefit, and on the other side, the other 99 percent of us, the soldier class, the class from which all of you soldiers came.

Butler published a short book, War Is a Racket, collecting the key themes of his orations in 1935. Later, in an essay in the socialist magazine Common Sense, Butler confessed to having been a “racketeer for capitalism,” elaborating that, as “a member of our country’s most agile military force,” he had served as “a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers.” In 1936, Marine Corps informants sent to spy on the ex-general observed him speaking on a panel alongside self-identified Communists and reported that “the General appeared to us to be either insane or an out and out traitor.”

[Major General John A. Lejeune, head of the Marine Corps, calls on General Smedley Butler in camp at Frederick, Maryland in 1922. (Bettmann / Getty Images)]

And, as an aside, but a big ASIDE, we are in a time of collective cholera of the conscious, in this remote work, remote being, remote news world. Just watching the fake left, Amy Goodman, daily (M-F) with an absolute stiff arm to authority, as the Democracy Now newsroom in New York is with Goodman, solo, while her correspondents, including Juan Gonzalez, are stuck in their homes with their laptops and tiny cameras and mic delivering their fear porn.

Imagine this happening today, 2022 — Verboten, again, in the Zoom Doom of Dead Consciousness. Mask up, sit on your toilet, tune into Zoom, if you are lucky:

[Students at the University of California at Berkeley filing in to listen to Smedley Butler’s Peace Day address in 1939. (Library of Congress)]

I analyzed Juan’s book, News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media, a while back. Remember, Juan was once in the radical group, the Young Lords.

Luís Alberto Urrea, author of The Devil’s Highway, said “…in Murder City Charles Bowden plunges in head-first, without a parachute. There are moments when the book threatens to burst into flames and burn your hands.”

We are in a time of cholera of the consciousness, of infantalized masses following the dictates of a few chosen people, men and women of those classes, those groupings, the vetted and vaunted few, the ones who have been knighted by the lords of finance insurance real estate, and, more than FIRE, but the complex: Butler, War is a Racket.

Of course, it isn’t put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and “we must all put our shoulders to the wheel,” but the profits jump and leap and skyrocket — and are safely pocketed. Let’s just take a few examples:

Take our friends the du Ponts, the powder people — didn’t one of them testify before a Senate committee recently that their powder won the war? Or saved the world for democracy? Or something? How did they do in the war? They were a patriotic corporation. Well, the average earnings of the du Ponts for the period 1910 to 1914 were $6,000,000 a year. It wasn’t much, but the du Ponts managed to get along on it. Now let’s look at their average yearly profit during the war years, 1914 to 1918. Fifty-eight million dollars a year profit we find! Nearly ten times that of normal times, and the profits of normal times were pretty good. An increase in profits of more than 950 per cent.

Take one of our little steel companies that patriotically shunted aside the making of rails and girders and bridges to manufacture war materials. Well, their 1910-1914 yearly earnings averaged $6,000,000. Then came the war. And, like loyal citizens, Bethlehem Steel promptly turned to munitions making. Did their profits jump — or did they let Uncle Sam in for a bargain? Well, their 1914-1918 average was $49,000,000 a year!

Or, let’s take United States Steel. The normal earnings during the five-year period prior to the war were $105,000,000 a year. Not bad. Then along came the war and up went the profits. The average yearly profit for the period 1914-1918 was $240,000,000. Not bad.

There you have some of the steel and powder earnings. Let’s look at something else. A little copper, perhaps. That always does well in war times.

Anaconda, for instance. Average yearly earnings during the pre-war years 1910-1914 of $10,000,000. During the war years 1914-1918 profits leaped to $34,000,000 per year.

Or Utah Copper. Average of $5,000,000 per year during the 1910-1914 period. Jumped to an average of $21,000,000 yearly profits for the war period.

Let’s group these five, with three smaller companies. The total yearly average profits of the pre-war period 1910-1914 were $137,480,000. Then along came the war. The average yearly profits for this group skyrocketed to $408,300,000.

A little increase in profits of approximately 200 per cent.

Read the short book, then scale it up to today! Trillions stolen from US taxpayers, and all the apps, all the services of the private money hecklers who have gotten sweetheart contracts with every branch of the government you and I supposedly fought for. All those trillions in bribes and bailouts. Imagine that, a Trump LLC and then a CitiBank Biden BBB. And before these two scoundrels? Do the history, look at the administrations, and figure it out. Here, just one short diatribe featuring one hell of a Satan, Kissinger. Beware of the verbiage I deploy to singe this fellow and those presidents who have utilized this war criminal. I have already gotten emails threatening me for the Blog Post. And notice all those cozy photos of Henry Kissinger with all the tribes of descrutive capitalism, a la war. War on us, war on societies, war on nations, war on children, war on ecology, war on thought, war on agency, war on the human body, war on thought. “Tribalism Rules.”

So here we are, now, the kernel of this diatribe today — our faces. Oh, how we give up more and more each day, until the chip is in the back of the neck, and those bots are gathered in our organs with graphene building blocks to our souls.

Again, I harp on this one blasphemey, IRS demanding facial recognition — and that agency is for us, right? A truly representative form of democracy demands we the people have a huge say in what happens to us, and that’s not just idiotic voting, but again, “War is a Racket” is now “Banking-AI-Pharma-Med-Entertainment-Science-Education-Prisons-Law-Congress-Energy-Transportation-Chemicals-Engineering-Space-Data” ARE the Racket.” This is yet another single story that comes to us via the Net which is yet another chink in the armor of humanity plucked from our souls:

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) of the US will require people to submit a facial scan through a third party provider to make payments or file taxes online. The system raises obvious privacy concerns.

Currently, users only require a username and password to log into their IRS accounts. But starting the summer of 2022, users will need to verify their identity through a third-party identity verification company called ID.me. The change was first noticed by Krebs on Security.

So you dig a bit, and find out who these millionaires and hedge funders and social impact investors are behind this “third party” (gouging, sick profiteers) outfit, ID Me!

Nader’s good, but he can only go so far. Yesterrday, 1/20, on Democracy Now, a rare media visit for Ralph Nader, who has been locked out of board rooms, out of newsrooms, locked out of so much for decades, when his memory, his insight, his analyses are vital to institutional memory and his own sort of harping against the profiteers.

He has to beat those dead horses, multiple times, year after year . . . dead horses tied to the fact there are no real journalists in the legacy media, and that there are no cops working the FTC or DoJ or EPA or FDA. He is spot on, but he never gets on NPR or PBS or Fox or CBS. Nader is spot on about Republicans being fascistic and messianic. They are, of course, worse:

And the reporters didn’t take him to task there. The reporters, either they’re not doing their homework or they’re full of taboos. I mean, they never raise the corporate supremacy over our country. There isn’t a single agency in the federal government that isn’t influenced maximally by corporate lobbies. And Congress is swarmed by corporate lobbies. You have 500 drug company lobbyists full-time assigned to Congress, and there are 535 members of Congress. And these corporations are strategically commercializing every aspect of our society, commercializing childhood, strategically planning the tax system, the food system, the health system, fighting global warming remedies, the fossil fuel industry, ExxonMobil. They’re planning our genetic inheritance. Commercializing childhood should be a left-right issue, conservative issue. The press never asks about it. The self-censorship of the press is overwhelming. That’s why we have to have a more independent media.

We have to have — I mean, look at the coverage of Ukraine. As Katrina pointed out, if our country was invaded in a span of 40 years from the north, with 50 million casualties, what do you think we would do? Do you think we would just station troops on the northern border? We would have taken over the northern country and annexed it. And that’s why dictator Putin can get away with what he’s doing now, in terms of public opinion of the impoverished Russian people, is because they remember. They have their casualties in their families from the western frontiers, started with Napoleon.

And here we are, expanding a military alliance for arms sales for the military-industrial complex, because, as was pointed out, a condition of joining NATO is to buy the F-16 and other weapons in Eastern European countries. NATO is a military alliance organized against the Soviet Union. And now they’re expanding it in Eastern Europe and putting troops there. It’s, here we go again, a completely preventable conflict. What Putin really wants is Ukraine never to join NATO, no strategic offensive weapons in the Ukraine. He’s asking for ending strategic weapons in Europe — that is not going to happen.

But the press asks war-inciting questions. NPR asked it. David Sanger asked it. They asked war-inciting questions. It’s like Vietnam all over again. It’s like Iraq all over again. They don’t ask peace-inciting questions about diplomacy. And this is a dangerous situation, and the press just isn’t doing its job. It isn’t just Biden.

He can’t communicate how the GOP is opposed to everything that’s defined as human. You don’t make moral appeals to the GOP, like Senator Warnock just did. You show that they are opposed to sending $250 and $300 monthly checks to 65 million children, which has stopped now, and the GOP will not expand it. I mean, that’s a good political item to communicate to the American people. Those 65 million children come from conservative and liberal families who are both deprived. He doesn’t know how to communicate. The GOP knows what it wants. It’s messianic. It’s fascistic. It’s driven. And the communication from the Democrats, from the DNC to the White House, is weak. It’s anemic. And the public senses that. (source)

Finally, a story NOT covered in legacy media or left wing media. Ralph doesn’t get it yet. He still believes in his book title, how billionaires will save the world.

He’s dead wrong about the above statement/title of one of his books. And, here it is, again, social impact investing, and the soul of humanity, especially youth, being sucked up by the ultra rich and investment teams for their data and their compliance — The Internet of Bodies and Human Capital Futures Bets In Brazil

In the coming years, global financiers, will attempt to meld dynamic pricing and mobile payments with biometric digital identity, Internet of Body sensors, and blockchain smart contracts and then weave it all into an expansive spatial web meant to control our social and economic relations in both the material world and, through digital assets, rights and privileges, in the Metaverse, as well. Click here to listen to an interview I did with Bonnie Faulkner of Guns and Butter that goes into more detail about how impact investing connects to digital twins, and mixed reality.

Surely it is twisted to view communities as resource deposits of untapped data, but that is the logic of end-stage capitalism. The infrastructure needed to scale human capital finance profit are ICT (Individual Communication Technology) devices including phones, tablets, and inexpensive computers like chrome books; wearable technologies and biosensors; and 5-6G used in combination with data-dashboards that verify impact data against predictions and success metrics laid out in the terms of the deals. These are all things one finds in recreation centers in the United States now, and given inroads made by the Aspen Institute, Stanford, Harvard and the like, they will very likely become standard issue in the favelas, too. Not because any of it is good for children, but because the children’s data has value, and their compliance has value.

The Metaverse will be populated by compliant avatars. Beyond social impact, the conditioning of the young to cyborg life is going full throttle. Meanwhile for portfolio managers, children’s futures are just tranches of investment – data commodities. It’s only business. — Alison McDowell, Wrench in the Gears (dot) com!

Most people I talk with do not have the bandwidth or wherewithal to understand this next stage, end stage, capitalism into our very souls, which is fascism, inverted totalitarianism, all bunched up in a world of chaos, all drawn and quartered on the backs of us, vis-a-vis all these scams of Build Back Better variety, or UN’s sustainability goals and Universal Basic Income propaganda, and the 4IR and WEF — the fourth industrial revolution is part and parcel of the Great Reset.

This sort of stuff Alison writes about does get under many of our skins, but for the most part, I know so many people who have given up, who think that we all are data mined anyways, that we have all our info in the banking-IRS-DMV-insurance-medical-education superhighway of giving up all agency, anyway, so what’s the big deal we are being tracked, and what’s the big deal that our kids are being watched and what’s wrong with our ovaries and prostates and such being monitored by the Internet of Bodies and Nano-Things when we just have to lean back and enjoy this new world?

And I have harped for 17 years here at Dissident Voice, and decades before, in newsrooms, in classrooms, in homeless shelters, in programs for the disenfranchised, on stage, at conferences for sustainability, on my radio show, elsewhere. I have harped and harped about the false flags, about the overlords drilling into our very being, about more and more of our agency stripped from us daily, not as part of a huge democratically controlled system of community building, power to the people organizing, or we are the 80 Percent movements, but to mine our souls so we are ghosts in their machines.

The agency we have given up was with that passport, all those sick people who pressed my ass at various border control passings. Strip searched and body cavity groped twice. Then, all the shot records needed to go here and go there. All the proof of life in school (Iowa IQ tests), the SAT, the LSAT, all the tests (run by the chose people, millionaires) and all the records of accomplishment, of criminal involvement, all the credit scores and all the car blunders, all of that kept for THEM, the Complext, the Insurance, Real Estate, Finance, FIRE, millionaires who get legislation in THEIR favor passed through the tricks of pimping and prostituting and arm twisting and outright bribery.

Imagine, protests and cops rounding us up, and then court cases, appearances, the hassles, the humiliations. Try it out for size.

How many arguments have I had with MD’s who know squat about nutrition and each time challenged me and my vegetarianism? Me, running 6 miles a day, biking 30 and scrambling underwater and up hills?

How man dirty arguments about “that” history, versus a new and improved revisionist history vital to a population from which to rise up and take on the paymasters, the body snatchers, the mind thieves?

Until we are here, 2022, in a chamber of stupidity, all the dumb and worthless stuff out there, all the racists and white-priviledged perspectives out there pounding it in the heads of unsuspecting youth, K12, TikTok, YouTube, all of the Net and WWW. All the Ivy League and Oxford-trained scum who determine not only our futures, but write our histories, and what they write is almost always semi-dead wrong. Because without the voices of the oppressed, those on the streets, in homeless camps, those suffering poverty and the inflammatory disease of capitalism; i.e., fines-tolls-fees-surcharges-service fees-handling charges-tickets-code violations-late fees-taxes-triple taxations-levies-processing fees-mortgages-ball on payments-PayDay loan rigged systems — without their voices at the forefront, and in the newsrooms, inside schools, and in the publishing houses and the actual process of writing their own stories, then we have the tin ear writers and prognosticators and anthropologists and psychologists, the elite, the highly connected, the bias of the white man and white woman writing about us.

They get it wrong 90 percent of the time!

Now, if this graphic doesn’t run chills up and down your spine, then, you are not following the overlords’ script. Catch up please!

Dig down and listen, watch, read: And it’s not pretty, and it’s not slick, and it’s not all east coast, Ivy League, London Bridges Falling Down stuff.

Finally, I was reading about Charles Bowden last night. Found a piece in Literary Hub, and then went backwards to see one of his talks. Rough guy, but an amazing chronicler of people.”Eulogy for a Visionary: On the Grim Narrative Introspection of Charles Bowden — Leath Tonino Considers His Brief Correspondence with the Author of Murder City”

The piece was written and published December 2021, even though Chuck died in 2014.

Here, a gravel-voiced Chuck talking to the California Commonwealth Club. Mostly about the lies around the war on drugs. I talked with Chuck years ago, in the 199os, in Juarez and El Paso. I was working on things for the two newspapers, and he was working the narcotraficante stories. That’s a whole other story, of my life maybe some autofiction is due, but for now, here, from the young writer who wanted to interview Chuck in Tucson, but never got the chance since Chuck died at 69 in his sleep. His piece is from the heart, and good.

My first thought: Murder City, solid title.

It was 2011 and I was scraping by in San Francisco, spending hours at the public library, tinkering with writing projects, browsing the stacks during breaks. The name on the book’s spine—Charles Bowden—was familiar yet unfamiliar; essayist Rebecca Solnit, a neighbor with whom I’d recently taken a long walk, had referenced Bowden, telling me that “he could make your skin crawl by describing a Q-tips factory.” Uncertain what that meant, but eager to learn, I slipped Murder City from the shelf, intending to start it when I got home, sip some vodka, have myself a relaxed Friday evening.

Little did I know that Bowden, a veteran investigative reporter from the South-west, author of twenty-five-plus books about polluted rivers, crooks in silk suits, flies swarming over pooled blood, collapsing communities, contract killers, rattlesnakes, and desire, had a slightly different plan. In a 2010 NPR interview, he summarized his approach to crafting stories on the page: “My dream is to invite a reader into a room and pour a nice cup of tea . . . and then nail the door shut.”

So, I end with a dead man, his words not dead, the voice alive on YouTube, and what an interesting conversation it would be with him now, as it would be with Andre Vltchek, with Kevin Zeese, with David Graeber. So many others, long gone, or just gone. Even Gonzo Thompson.

I have been coming to this city [Ciudad Juárez] for thirteen years, and naturally, I have, like everyone here, an investment in the dead. And the living. Here is a story, and like all stories here, like Miss Sinaloa, it tantalizes and floats in the air, and then vanishes. — From Murder City

More from Bowden, at the Lannan Foundation.

Charles Bowden (1945-2014) was the author of scores of books including A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior; Down By the River: Drugs, Money, Murder and Family; Juárez: The Laboratory of our Future; and Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America. In Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields, he presented a devastating chronicle of a city in collapse where not just the police and drug cartel members die as violence infects every level of society. Luís Alberto Urrea, author of The Devil’s Highway, said “…in Murder City Bowden plunges in head-first, without a parachute. There are moments when the book threatens to burst into flames and burn your hands.” Bowden was a contributing editor for GQ and Mother Jones, and also wrote for Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, and Aperture. Winner of a 1996 Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction, he lived in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Post Script — One story is worth a thousand points of stabbing (not lights). Two here to end this missive. If you haven’t figured out how ugly the overlords and then the Eichmann’s are, then, gain, read, live, walk the streets:

The queen and her minimum wage payout, oh those billionaires! The pay for the 20-hour-per-week job is £9.50, or the equivalent of $12.96 an hour. That reflects the U.K.’s new minimum wage, which will rise from £8.91 an hour now to £9.50 an hour in April.

“I apologize to the person who appeared before me and to our entire community for having failed to meet the high standards that we expect of our judicial officers, and that I expect of myself,” Alexis Krot said in a statement posted on the court’s website.

The statement was dated Tuesday, days after she ordered Burhan Chowdhury to pay $100 for failing to get rid of weeds and other vegetation at the rear of his property. The judge’s apology followed a TV report about the case and criticism about how she treated the man.

“Shameful! The neighbors should not have to look at that. You should be ashamed of yourself,” Krot said during the online hearing. “If I could give you jail time on this, I would.”

Chowdhury, a native of Bangladesh, explained that he was weak with cancer. A son, Shibbir Chowdhury, said he helps his father with the yard but was out of the country at the time last year.

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January 20, 2022

Are We the Sum Total of Our Life, Theirs, Inside Our Darkest Thoughts?

There is no such thing as an ending. At the conclusion of any work of art, just like at the conclusion of any experience, what we arrive at is a site of interpretation. Every reader commits a creative act at that site. Every reader creates a version of their own artwork within their act of reading. No author can ever succeed at holding a singular ending in place, stable, unwavering. — Lidia Yuknavitch, Rumpus Interview

Telling one’s story is never easy. But it is the staff of life. A story, a memoir, anti-memoir, a story of a people, of a tribe, of a family, of a nation. We can have stories that are collectively anthropological, like Guns Germs and Steel (The Fates of Human Societies — previously titled Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years — a 1997 transdisciplinary non-fiction book by Jared Diamond. In 1998, Guns, Germs, and Steel won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book. A documentary based on the book, and produced by the National Geographic Society, was broadcast on PBS in July 2005)

We can have Debt: The First 5,000 Years (David Graeber lays out the historical development of the idea of debt, starting from the first recorded debt systems in the Sumer civilization around 3500 BC. In this early form of borrowing and lending, farmers would often become so mired in debt that their children would be forced into debt peonage).

Or, Das Kapital, also known as Capital: A Critique of Political Economy is a foundational theoretical text in materialist philosophy, critique of political economy and politics by Karl Marx. (Marx aimed to reveal the economic patterns underpinning the capitalist mode of production in contrast to classical political economists such as Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill. While Marx did not live to publish the planned second and third parts, they were both completed from his notes and published after his death by his colleague Friedrich Engels. Das Kapital is the most cited book in the social sciences published before 1950.)

But we all have read famous and not so famous people’s accounts of their lives, with some autobiographical hitching post, or some life changing event or series of events to define that person as an individual. With that, we hope as writers that we can find audience.

That the reader(s) will infer their own place in the world around what events and what creative expression of those events have done to shape us, the writer.

It is a given almost to a tee that places like Dissident Voice and myriad other places on the Internet or once just in print have facilitated the concept of story, of narrative, of frames. Here, just reading Edward Curtain’s pieces, one can see that narrative for him ties into commentary and philosophical musings in the current societal dynamics.

Story is all we have, really, and memory is what we attempt to reclaim, even though memory is faulty. Forgetting is part of the human condition, or should be, as a way of not going crazy with all the bad and horrible things that have happened to us, that we have perpetrated and that are befalling the world.

We are in our own funhouse, or madhouse. We are the sum total of all events. However, we do not deal with the sum total, that is for sure. I remember the time with John Francis, and I read his books, talked to him on the phone and interviewed him in person as he was brought to Spokane to some of the colleges I was associated with as a speaker.

Planet Walker he called himself, and he decided early on, witnessing an oil spill under the Golden Gate bridge, to stop using fossil fuel transportation and to stop talking, a vow of silence, but that went on for almost two decades. Please, watch below.

Or, if you have bandwidth, listen to some of my old radio shows put up on my personal blog, here — Podcasts, including John Francis.

I’ve been with hundreds of people as a journalist and writer, and many more as a young person who has had the benefit of growing up and traveling around places like BC, Canada, Azores, UK, Ireland, many parts of the USA, before age 13. I took those early days of listening to elders’ stories into my own avocation and beat-up career as a writer. My work may have featured their work on some environmental or social justice issue, or even in my beat reporting as a newspaper journalist. But the drilling down, and the real conversations were always about “me,” the person in some state of evolution. So many wanted to give life to their previous lives, to families, to their own trauma and lamentations. They always wanted to frame themselves, and to give me, a writer, some sense of depth to who they are.

Here, some narratives of mine still alive on the worldwide death net:

“Finding Fringe Portland, including this one — A Letter a Day for 15 Years

Real Change News, Seattle, including this one, “Two souls, nine lives.”

Only partial list of my magazine beat, “Metro Talk,” Spokane Magazine.

The Pacific Northwest Weekly Inlander. Again, partial list.

I certainly have had great people like Terry Tempest Williams and David Suzuki and Winona LaDuke provide me and millions of their readers collectively their narratives, their own steps in their very multilayered and dynamic lives. Those three are global people, and that adds to the shine of their pedigrees and their own place in our lives as readers and participants of their work, words and sightlines to the future.

Scroll down on my blog here and listen to my interview of Suzuki.

That is it, a future understood by ground truthing the past, and that is gathered through our pasts, “their” pasts, through the connectedness of their own lives, young and now, and with our own collective interconnectivity no matter how disconnected the powers that be want us to live in their own chaos.

Reclaiming the Sacred, Reclaiming the World, Reclaiming Land, Language, History. Reclaiming Ourselves. This is the process of living in the world, living inside the hell hole of Capital, but being part of the world around us, understanding the history of so much denigration, holding the amazing amounts of pain inflicted by governments, families and societies. Doing that is where story begins, even if it stays as foundational and never ends up in the actual literature of memoir writing.

I am teaching a memoir writing class, upcoming. Here on the Oregon Coast, during a time of the Omega-cron, under the gray clouds of the fear project of Capitalists and the Felons of Profits. It is a community education class, and I get a few shekels for the class of six currently signed up right now. Below is an Op-Ed just published in the Local Rag, Newport News Times.

I have hitched my own writing to my own life, the journeys, the far off worlds in my mind tied to the walkabouts, the odd journeys I have undertaken to live in the world.

Here, “Bird Stamp,” a short story, but while made up, there is so much memory and memoir-like inflections. It’s won some awards. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Here’s the text from the old newspaper where I worked — Pacific Northwest Weekly Inlander.

I am always collecting people, themes, their words, their lives, and that is through their rag-tag, sometimes, stories. Here at DV, I have had readers take the effort to send me a note, via email, sometimes in snailmail, about something I wrote that triggered their own push to tell, to story-tell. The emails have come from around this continent and the world. Seventeen years thus far.

Here is one that just came in:

“Naive Documentary (-ies) Makers Barely Scratch the Surface!”

Hey Friend! I used to live in Portland. I emailed you once. Thought we might meet up. Never happened. I’ve returned “home.” Frankfort KY. Trying an unlikely reconciliation with my brothers, both ‘trumpetateers.’ Oh well. It’s late. Very late. I’m 77. I’ve not got long, or at least not as long as I had. I haven’t been reading you recently. You lay it on thick, brother. If I may … today, though, I liked the catchy title and didn’t see your name on it. Read it though and thought: shit! this sounds like Paul. And there was your name at the bottom. Pure poetry. I thought hell this should be a pome–poem. You’re a cage rattler. Mine. I owe 1/4 million in student debt; declared bankruptcy 3 times and could another, but I’m so poor the debt collectors can’t seem to touch me (only in america!); a convicted felon (fighting with NYC cops back in the ’70s)–of course if I’d been black I’d be dead or … at least spent my suspended sentences on Rikers; jail bird, nonetheless: a year in military prison for refusing orders to the US war on Vietnam; a sight for sore eyes: a former transwoman–now a non-binary something or other; definetly a member of the 20%.

John

Ah-ah. The life captured in one paragraph, and if John was here and had the inkling, he’d be one hell of a student writer in the class, someone who could teach me a thing or two.

And, of course, how do we, the Americans, get those people like John above captured in the hearts and minds of us, the citizens, when the media is controlled by six companies, publishing is controlled by even foreign monopolies, and most movies ever

made now are perverted, broken down things, poor written, and right there at the warped end of things? People with a Hollywood or East Coast bias who see the John’s of the world as, well, useless, never want their real stories. Yet those stories are of us, the 80 percent, and need to be aired, read and discussed. Those elites deeming what is not of storytelling worth. Great survivors who might even not end up as minor characters set on a street, riffraff, homeless, poor and broken.

That is what Studs Terkel fought against, and he went into the lives of the people of his time, of his city, of this country.

That memoir writing is also couched in struggle, overcoming it, and in rare memoirs, not overcoming it. Anti-memoir memoir — fictionalized.

Memoirs are different from autobiographies because they are about specific moments in time instead of offering a look at a chronological period of time. Fictionalized memoirs are different from standard memoirs because of the inclusion of fiction or fictional writing techniques. If the names or places of a memoir are changed to protect those involved, then this would be classified as a fictionalized memoir. (Source)

+–+

I think we understand our own life experiences in narrative terms. If you consider that idea for a moment, we are walking novels. No one has a pure identity. Everyone has an identity made from everyone they’ve ever known and loved or hated, and from every experience they could process and withstand, happy or sad, arranged in memories, otherwise known as stories.

So writing my anti-memoir meant creating a composition and inventing narrative forms to convey some experiences from my life.

And writing a novel meant creating a composition and inventing narrative forms to convey some experiences—some imagined, some real—from life. The only difference involved the fact that some content doors remained closed in nonfiction, but even that’s a hoax. I opened them anyway.

I’m thrilled the two books can co-exist now. In some ways they complete one another. Fiction multiplies the possibilities of nonfiction. Nonfiction deeply informs the fiction writer’s desires and impulses and limitations. In a way, nonfiction is simply a snapshot of the edges around any given writer’s imagination. — Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir The Chronology of Water,

My own story collection, fiction, is all about fusing memoir and new journalism with hard hitting fiction. Order it from Cirque Press — keep our press alive. At Cirque Press, you will see 28 books by writers, and many books are poetry collections and novels and some memoirs. All are tributes to finding self.

Building community is so important, especially at this time. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to publish with Cirque. You do so much more than publish books. You support your authors individually and collectively and work hard to create connection. Leah Stenson, author, Life Revisited

My work there, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam. Review here at DV by Linda Ford and Street Roots by Emily Green.

The art of remaking-retelling a story

Paul Haeder, Newport News Times, 1/19/22

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**For information, go to Oregon Coast Community College

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January 12, 2022

Naive Documentary (-ies) Makers Barely Scratch the Surface!
W.E.B. DuBois: ‘To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.’

This documentary (see below, first one linked) is not news, and then, of course, it’s Trump in office blather, too. As if UK, Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Spain, Portugal are havens for social and people and environmental justice.

How Poor People Survive in the USA — vapid.

The documentarian is done, really, through the auspices of Euro trash context, POV, narrative framing. Contrarily, you have to be in the mix, in the middle, from the chambers of power, schools, colleges, social work, to real journalism, and into the mess personally, with daily fear of losing the job and seeing savings go go go. That is the slippage in the death spiral of USA.

This is a Reservation/Rez Society. Boarding School Society. Celebrity Cults. Internment Camp FEMA Village (Soon). This entire unfolding of history the past 70 years has been this big time military propaganda operation embedding into all systems. Confusion creator. Mystical hatred or subservience while praying for that blue-eyed, blond hippie Jesus. Dirt poor, and loving Trump. College student loans over $100K, and loving AOC and Biden.

The enemy for me, and I’d say for 80 percent of USA, is that grouping — colonized Eichmann’s, the upper classes, the dream hoarders, the intelligence/knowledge workers, the higher ups in education-medicine-incarceration-pharma-medicine-energy-banking-data collecting-surveillance-real estate-Chamber of Commerce-AI-science-ag-retail-logistics-transportation, and then, MIC, congressional military complex. Join the mercenary forces, and lucky you, get your teeth pulled and a GI Bill.

Bullshit.

Ahh, my old platform to rail against the system — LA Progressive! Terminal Velocity no More! Or here! Paul Haeder.

I’ve asked why the stuff I send and publish elsewhere is no longer getting up on LA Progressive. No answer! Again, this documentary is broken (above), but that is documentary making, most times — focused, rarified, gatekeeping on steroids, with people on the projects not deep systems thinkers, and a willingness to leave out a lot.

Missing:
1. Tens of millions on the edge of the cliff of eviction, foreclosure, endless bad jobs, in the car or van, bunking up with family or friends, while working for middle managers who do not care, and the upper management and the billionaires and millionaires.
2. Inflammation — Capitalism is a complete, holistic, top-down disease, creating inflammation in the veins, brain, organs, belly. But worse — cuts the thinking process, deforms the mutual aid ethos, destroys collective action, kills the ability to squat and reappropriate wealth, land, whatever.
3. The rat race of those with a roof over their heads that continue to fuel prescriptions, Disneyland la-la-land thinking, buy-buy-buy, watching sports-stars-musicians, I got mine, you better fight to get yours
4. This country, USA, is the rotting roots and DNA of Europe, of that narrator above. These are not real people, and they are so sculpted in news speak, in priviledge.
5. This documentary doesn’t get to the fabric of colonization of cities, schools, the bullshit of privatization, and this wacky religious and wacky elitist country of Indian Removal, Enslavement then and now, and Nomadlands.
6. Americans are children, and that is thanks to the Media, the Boss, foolish k-6 education, and, well, we are here now, 355 million, and this is pre-covid crazies. Now? Complete imprisonment!
Oh, hell, the list is a thousand points long: Stan Brock, Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom. This is one fellow, and great heart, but in a world of Space Suits, Billionaires and Yachts, Lies Casted in Media-Banking-Digitalization, well, one guy. “He founded Remote Area Medical in 1985 to give people in need essential health care. Since then, RAM has provided free dental, vision and basic health care to more than 740,000 people.”

Here, the documentary on RAM above, description: During the U.S. debate about healthcare reform, the media reporters and news crews and filmmakers failed to put a human face on what it means to not have access to healthcare. Remote Area Medical fills that gap; it is a film about people, not policy. Focusing on a single three-day clinic held in the Bristol Motor Speedway in Tennessee, Remote Area Medical affords us an insider’s perspective on the ebb and flow of the event, from the tense 3:30 a.m. ticket distribution that determines who gets seen to the routine check-ups that take dramatic turns for the worse, to the risky means to which some patients resort for pain relief. We meet a doctor who also drives an 18-wheeler, a denture maker who moonlights as a jeweler, and the organization’s founder, Stan Brock, who first imagined Remote Area Medical while living as a cowboy in the Amazon rainforest, hundreds of miles from the nearest doctor. But it is the extraordinary stories of the patients, desperate for medical attention, that create a lasting impression about the state of modern health care in America.

This can’t be ramped up, taken to the ultimate level? It’s socialism, brothers and sisters, the only way forward. Forget the hate that the right and the middle of the road have against socialism. They will ply the words of “one world government.” Or, the “government controlling us.” They will talk about Universal Basic Income. They will say it is brainwashing, and communism, and, well, that socialism means all rights are taken, managed, given to and taken away by some master groups of dictators. So we are dead in the water with capitalism by any means necessary: predatory, parasitic, casino, dog-eat-dog, shock therapy, zombie, trickle down nothingness.

That is, you know, vaccine passport, no. But, there is no Forced Healthcare for All. No, Massive Take Over the Empty Lots and Buildings for Massive Rehousing. No guerrilla farming everywhere. Nothing. Because, well, Capitalism is All about “We are all champions. We are all the New Eve and Adam. You can rest assured that the masters will NOT take care of you, but at least you have the stars and bars, god almighty, baby-land.”

This exceptionalism is what has detroyed many in the 80 percent. Many. They will work and think and do things against their own well-being. When you are a lost dog in this country, a limping stray, a hungry desperate pooch, well, you will jump to the master, run for the beasts of slapping, kicking, yelling, and hitting. Under the table, curled up, belly and organs exposed as its tail is between the legs.

Inflamed — Moreover, they point out how modern medicine has often missed these necessary connections—to our global detriment. What is needed is “deep medicine,” which, according to the authors, “requires new cosmologies, ones that can braid our lives with the planet and the web of life around us.”

Rupa Marya and Raj Patel spoke to YES! about the ravages of colonialist capitalism, the failures of modern medicine to treat them, and, most importantly, how a “deep medicine” approach can heal us all.

*This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Sonali Kolhatkar: Is the title of the book, Inflamed, a metaphor for what is happening to our planet and its living systems?

Rupa Marya: It’s not at all a metaphor. It’s a description of what’s happening inside of our bodies and around us on the planet and our societies. The inflammatory response is the body’s ancient evolutionarily conserved pathway to restoring its optimal working condition when it’s been thrown off by danger or damage or the threat of damage. (Source, Yes Magazine)

No jobs, no good jobs, decayed systems, penalties, bad credit, criminal offenses, drugs, booze, and bodies torn at a very young age with multiple chronic diseases, many many diseases.

https://youtu.be/YrEwPp2bG48

This is the system that the beautiful people in the sciences, in technology, in the Reset Star Chamber, all of those hoarding money and the opportunities have set loose, and these fascists want these people — us, we the people — on UBI, held as data pools — body snatchers, mind snatchers, attention snatchers, activity snatchers, all part of mining people, putting us, them, the 80 percent, in the cloud, in algorithms, in data banks, all mashed up for social impact — do as we say, follow what we command, eat-drink-think like we say, and you will get the tokens, man, the money, the slice of a 200-square-foot-per-person habitat. No pets allowed.
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January 6, 2022

Twenty Years of Teaching Science in Public School Down the Covid Drain

These are snooping, snitching, massive canceling, censorious times.

I just talked with a friend who is in San Francisco who has been working hard as a science teacher. He has opened up the curriculum, has worked to be in his school’s union and he has just gotten married. That’s 55, now, and he has to step down from teaching since the school teacher mandates for California are going into effect January 4 or thereabouts.

He might be against mandates because a mandate is oppressive, a dead-end to critical thinking, critical engagement. The mandates, the masking, the social distancing, the forced PCR tests, the constant fear-fear-fear. He sees what this has done to teaching, teachers, students and staff.

But the cat is out of the bag, because the National Union and his state union all are on the same sheet of Moderna-Pfizer-Fauci music. For a science nerd, someone who ended up in physics at Harvard, who has undertaken teaching high school students science, including physics, well having a one size fits all formula, without a scientific robust challenge to any theory, sticks in his craw.

Criminalizing thought, that’s what this Planned Pandemic is about: no pushback. We have talked, and I have been the liberal arts dude, with some notion that critical thinking can only be gained from liberal arts within the system of education. STEM is fine, but not in a vacuum. How we got here, today, how we are products of the history of everything.

Here, Hedges and Lowkey, and I am not sure of Hedges’ position on the vaccination mandates, and Lowkey, well, who knows. But the interview is powerful in that both talk about the prison industrial complex, and about education, and about deep thinking, truly. Literacy beyond being a serf of the ruling class and the warehouse employment class system.

Education as a key component of resistence. Resistence and pushing back on the corporate, elite paradigms. And some of those elites and oppressive paradigms are in academe/academia.

The discussion of topics in science is also something we talked about, how there are off-limits discussion, and we talked about how teachers in the old days, if they were valuable and valiant and honorable and truly mentors, that they were honored. That students and parents looked at teachers as guides, as facilitators of inquiry, learning. Showing the stepping stones to life-long learning. As elements in the pathway from youth to participatory democracy. Giving an open hand to youth as a place of dissident thinking.

But the pressure from this gentleman’s school district, the union, the honchos, is to vax up, mask up, and booster up. Schools, where the least vulnerable are being forced to take not one, not two, but many shots in this grand experiment of the SARS-MERS-CoV2-DARPA kind.

As if refusing to get a vaccination, when he is healthy, and capable of doing his own health screens at home. Imagine, how much the landscape of the Delta, Omicron and now Omega-crons have changed. How it is now a cold, or where oh where do the variants go? The seesaw, yo-yo, 180-degree turnaround of the science. Follow the science.

And he is not going to be forced to vax. And, his 20 years teaching in public school is now ended. i am not sure how much he gets from the 20 year “pension/retirement,” but he states it’s like collecting his unemployment. He has just taken a job at a very very small school.

Charter school, a tuition free charter school covering 7th and 8th grades. Two hundred students. Mostly African-American and Latinx youth. And, my friend says, right now, there is a don’t ask, don’t tell approach to Corona Madness.

You know, no mask mandates, but option. No tracking of health records. No mandates for jabs.

Yet. This is December 30, 2021. The courts have ruled against workers, and the mandates for businesses in places like WA, OR and CA are about to go wide and far. So, he is now ending his public education career.

Newly married, my friend is thinking that he is only biding his time. That the charter school, private, with parents and youth, BIPOC, and in liberal (sic) San Fran-Oakland area will be subject to the mandates.

He thought he’d be retiring at 62 with a semi-decent pension. He doesn’t want to leave the Bay area because he has to. He knows the clock is ticking. He talks of creating a pod of other like-minded teachers to open up a free school. Tutoring.

He knows that I look at things asymetrically. That the reality is this is a universal vaccination, testing, digital dashboard (health, banking, jobs, education, purchases, etc) future. You can’t get a job without being a member of the test-shot-record-big data frame. No subsidized housing without test-shot-record-big data. Proof of life, test-shot-record-big data frame, for your college course. This proof of compliance, test-shot-record-big data frame, for getting health insurance. Move this test-shot-record-big data frame to car insurance, even getting a driver’s license. Social seruit? Proof of this test-shot-record-big data cohersion compliance.

And, what if these smart students ask my smart friend, their teacher, about virus research, about big tech, about the politics of climate change, and, well, about other things that might go contrary to the test-shot-record-big data frame of things? Questioning any number of paradigms and theories and cultural expectations and prejudices and blind spots? And, these youth, many want to know what they should do after high school. How many will go from a charter school to a public school? How will they navigate mandates? And, what about what to major in if they go to college? Would all those years of school, from age 6 to 22, or to 24 or 28, be worth it? What is the value of things now and what about the future?

We talked about how young people this age want answers, want leaders, want direction, demand options and want to work with alternative solutions to today’s problems, and we know today’s supposed solutions will be problems of tomorrow.

Even questions about climate change, globalization, and where this CoV2 came from. Lab experiment gone bad? Intentional outbreak? These youth are smart.

Elaine DeWar —

These kids want answers, and they want to rumble in the jungle, truly, with smart teachers willing to take risks, willing to lead. Yet, we are in sniping times. We are in superficial thinking times. Black v. White times.

So where oh where do we go with teaching, and now, Charter Schools, and that is one messed up economic and education and investment model in most cases — Dissident Voice, Shawgi Tell!

He talked about getting farther away from urban centers, into red counties, red states, as a way to insulate himself from the inevitable. He is a Marxist, and that has been his huge disappointment — how the left has abandoned questioning authority, science, elites, agendas, mass media, propaganda, prevailing commercial interests, and more!

Of course, we could be dealing with Ayotzinapa, and the Mexican oligarchs and narcos and others hating these rural normal colleges where young people go to learn how to teach in order to teach youth and communities how to stand up to the powers. Resistance. Worker rights. Land rights!

Mexico: Documentary looks at lives of 43 missing Ayotzinapa students — A documentary will premier this week at Mexico City’s Cineteca Nacional on the lives of the 43 missing Ayotzinapa students. Filmmaker Rafael Rangel says that the full-length documentary, “A Day in Ayotzinapa 43”, featuring first hand accounts of the events and interviews with classmates and family members of the disappeared students, aims to boost awareness of another reality of Mexico that often remains hidden from the broader public.

So it goes — we can always find other people’s realities much more dramatically harsh than our own. And, teachers get these shots for other things, and, well, there is so much swirling around about how the bat virus got to this highly infectious state, who had the blood and feces of people who got infected almost a decade ago, who was funding the gain of function research. So so much, here, rightly set straight into a world of skepticism.

But, all of them in on it — the vaccination paranoia is real, and the stories, well, we are in a time of shut down, zero critical thinking, echo chambers, and this is a military propaganda campaign.

How many more shots are we to take now that we are in this Virus World?

Here, Sonia Shah, who I interviewed several times in person in Spokane on the stage and in my radio studio. We are talking January 2020. This is a time capsule moment, since so much has changed in two years:

The number of coronavirus cases has overtaken that of the 2003 SARS epidemic. Officials and scientists are racing to track the path of the virus and develop a vaccine. Twenty-two countries have reported finding people sickened with the virus. The WHO has announced a “public health emergency of international concern.”

We’re in a relatively new era of infectious disease outbreak, said prominent science journalist Sonia Shah. Diseases are sequenced faster and tracked more accurately than ever before – but they also arise more frequently, as humankind and nature collide often and with greater intensity.

Shah knows her way around infectious disease outbreaks – along with the public health, epidemiology, and social consequences surrounding them. She’s the author of the 2010 book The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years, along with 2016’s Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond.

She sat down with Direct Relief this week to talk about the likely scope of the coronavirus outbreak, the public health response – and the potential impacts.

Direct Relief: Your book, Pandemic, is a look at the major contagious disease outbreaks of modern history, including Ebola, MERS, and SARS. Considering what you’ve seen so far, how does the new coronavirus outbreak compare to other infectious disease outbreaks – in transmission, scope, or public perception?

Shah: It’s obviously one that’s causing a lot of alarm, and there’s been a very vigorous public health response, so in some ways that makes it unusual. There are a lot of outbreaks of a disease where you don’t see a big public health response, so I think that’s actually a positive.

China is doing a lot to contain it. And I think you can debate whether all those measures are worthwhile or not, but there’s no lack of attention to this outbreak.

Direct Relief: How are the epidemics of modern history different from those of, say, the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic? Why are there more frequent disease outbreaks, and what are the challenges of fighting them in the modern world?

Shah: About 60% of these new pathogens that we’re seeing, that have come out in the last 50 years or so, they derive from the bodies of animals. About 70% of those derive from the bodies of wild animals.

And that’s because people and wild animals are coming into novel, intimate contact. That allows the microbes that live in their bodies to cross over into our bodies.

Ebola, Zika virus, SARS, West Nile virus – there are any number of novel pathogens that have emerged in the past few decades that come from the bodies of animals.

Animals and people are coming into new kinds of contact because of a variety of reasons, the biggest one being that we are essentially destroying so much wildlife habitat.

What that means is a lot of animals are going extinct, but the ones that remain have to crowd into ever-tightening little patches of habitat that we leave for them. That’s more frequently not in some distant, intact forest. Instead, it’s our farms and gardens and our towns and cities.

Direct Relief: Are we better at fighting infectious disease over the past couple of decades?

Shah: I think there are some ways in which we’re getting better. The fact that we had a diagnostic for this new coronavirus so fast, that’s amazing, and that means that you can track it.

I think in terms of scientific collaboration, discovery of how these pathogens work, diagnostics, and genotyping, those are happening a lot faster now as the technology gets better. We just have so much more knowledge.

But then I think there are valid questions to be asked about whether we’re using that knowledge effectively. Just because we can know that this novel coronavirus is causing this pneumonia – not some other pathogen – is that actually helping us to contain it, or not?

I don’t think we know the answer to that question yet, and we won’t for some years, until after this whole thing blows over and we have time to analyze how it went down.

We saw this in Haiti with the cholera outbreak after the [2010] earthquake. Cell phones were relatively new at the time and it was possible for people to map how cholera was spreading just based on cell phone data.

They could see, “OK, it’s coming down this road, it’s going to be going down this trucking route, it’s probably going to lead to this village in the next week or two.”

All of that…was amazing, scientifically, but it didn’t actually help anyone prevent cholera from breaking out. We knew it was coming, but it happened anyway.

Direct Relief: Why do you think this virus has inspired such a media frenzy and such widespread fear?

Shah: I think there are some good reasons. One is that it’s similar to SARS – it’s a coronavirus, like SARS – and we know that SARS was very virulent and it spread pretty well and it got pretty far. It got to dozens of countries really rapidly and killed 800 people, and this virus is in the same family.

That said, it’s a pretty big family. There are some coronaviruses that are very mild and some that are very virulent, so just the fact that it’s in that family of viruses doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to kill a lot of people.

And I think the other good reason is that it’s respiratory. There isn’t a lot of evidence that we know how to control the spread of respiratory illnesses. Seasonal flus every year take out hundreds of thousands of people.

We try. We have vaccines, we tell people to wash their hands, we tell people to stay home when they’re sick. Do they make any headway at all? It’s hard to know. With the huge scale of flu every year, it would be hard to argue that those measures actually work.

Direct Relief: If coronavirus continues to spread into a pandemic on the level of SARS, what are the likely long-term economic and social impacts?

Shah: There’s going to be huge economic fallout from this. It’s only just starting. SARS had a huge economic impact, and that wasn’t nearly as widespread as this thing will probably be. China is clamping down on its trade routes and travel routes. How do you function in a global economy without China? We don’t know.

All of these outbreaks, when they go global, just show us again and again how interconnected we are, and how much we really rely on each other for all of our essential services.

Direct Relief: Why do you say it’s going to be bigger than SARS?

Shah: Well, because it’s only just starting. New outbreaks are being seeded right now. We know 5 million people left Wuhan before the travel restrictions were put into place, and that’s a lot of people.

Each of those people could seed new outbreaks if they are carrying the virus, and I think we’re seeing the first signs of that.

It appears to be carried by people who are non-symptomatic. That means it’s going to be really hard to contain it. I don’t think we’re anywhere near the peak or end of this thing. If it goes on on the current trajectory it’s going to be bigger than SARS.

[The virus is] not necessarily more deadly. It always seems more virulent at the beginning, because all you see are the worst cases. So as we get more information, it will probably become clear to us that it’s less virulent than we originally thought, but that doesn’t mean it can’t have a huge toll.

Because if something’s really catchy, even if it’s only slightly more deadly than a regular flu or respiratory illness that we’re used to, a lot of people can get sick and can die.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Science, and science journalists. Interesting — “The Coronavirus in Context: A Q&A with Sonia Shah, Author of Pandemic“

How does my friend field questions from youth who are on the Internet, who are on social media and the dark web and so on? How does the world shape up with all these curriculum controls, when at times, our times seem chaotic, and fearful? Youth are directionless. Attacked by Democrats and Republicans.

Biggest issues with youth is “the GAD” — generalized anxiety disorder. Big problems with the dirty water, dirty air, polluted food, contaminated oceans and repulsive airwaves and entertainment rackets.

My friend is on his journey, and he is fighting for his small family’s survival. This is not what many of us thought would play out in our lives in our 50s and 60s, but in reality Western Lives/Western Culture/Western Privilege has come at a price — all those billions of people we have stolen futures from. Capitalism. Rapacious consumerism. Rapacious tourism. Wars, war machines, subjugation by proxy.

From 10 years ago — Haeder and Real Change News, Seattle!

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

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

Fresh from a trip to Occupy Seattle earlier in the day, West praised the movement, which he said represents “a deep democratic awakening where people are finding the courage to find their voice.”

Greed has corroded society, he said.

“Market moralities and mentalities — fueled by economic imperatives to make a profit at nearly any cost — yield unprecedented levels of loneliness, isolation and sadness. Our public life lies in shambles, shot through with icy cynicism and paralyzing pessimism. To put it bluntly, beneath the record-breaking stock markets on Wall Street and bipartisan budget-balancing deals in the White House, lurk ominous clouds of despair across this nation.”

West said that in this age of fear, economic instability and employment challenges, young people must learn “to have a love of wisdom, love of your neighbors and love of justice.”

Such love, embedded in our cultural and social justice traditions, is powerful, he said.

“That Coltrane love, that subversive love. It’s there in the Occupy Wall Street movement. … When it’s organized and mobilized, love is a threat.”

Alas, privatizing schools, for investment and control, especially children, BIPOC, to militarize and technotize their minds, is the goal. Check out this site: Network for Public Education!

And, here, again, Alison McDowell, on monetizing poverty, struggle, students, for not just social control, but Internet of Bodies control.

The post Twenty Years of Teaching Science in Public School Down the Covid Drain first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
December 29, 2021

End of the Year Story of Hope
Premise

The following is a light piece on a man. The dream of becoming a tap dancer. A white kid from West Virginia (via San Fran and Guam) who got the Big Apple bug, that is, the Great White Way bug to be a hoofer on Broadway.

The man comes to me via my volunteer work at the local Chamber office, which is also an artist shop selling local pieces by local artists. This fellow was putting up his pieces of art when I showed up.

I am a collector of stories.

I am a battler against preconceived notions.

Paradigms are mostly human-constructed as a form of control. They are meant to be questioned, and challenged.

My own belief systems are tied to various stages of human self-reflection; i.e., levels of existence — nature, philosophical, spiritual, cosmic, historic, artistic, cultural, humanistic, animalistic, collective. The stories I have lived and written about, and even fictionalized, all tie to the universe stories:
- man against self
- man against man
- man against society
- man against nature
- man against god/existence
For this Dystopian world of Internet of Things, Internet of Micro-things, the newest form of conflict in the once five universal conflicts now includes
- man against AI
Given the world I exist in, given these lockdown times, these times of Fourth Industrial Revolution, this Seventh Mass extinction, which by the way, is not tied to the SARS-CoV2 event, I am not opposed to being with people who are on their journeys so far afield from where I see my journey.

In the scheme of things, this current epoch is right-in-your-face scary: Correction — 7th Mass Extinction.

In the main, scientists believe that the Earth is currently going through its sixth mass extinction event. Anthropocene is what some call it. However, was another such incident in our planet’s past that researchers had overlooked until now, according to a study published in the journal Historical Biology.

The authors of the study—Michael Rampino from New York University and Shu-Zhong Shen from Nanjing University in China—suggest that the current loss in biodiversity should perhaps be called the “seventh” mass extinction.

They say that the event in question—known as the end-Guadalupian biodiversity crisis—took place around 260 million years ago and its severity has previously been underestimated.

Massive eruptions such as this one release large amounts of greenhouse gases, specifically carbon dioxide and methane, that cause severe global warming, with warm, oxygen-poor oceans that are not conducive to marine life, Rampino said in a statement.

In terms of both losses in the number of species and overall ecological damage, the end-Guadalupian event now ranks as a major mass extinction, similar to the other five.

Again, in the scheme of things — we are a spit wad in the ocean.
- Ordovician (443 million years ago)
- Late Devonian (372 million years ago)
- Guadelupian (260 million years ago)
- Permian (252 million years ago)
- Triassic (201 million years ago)
- Cretaceous (66 million years ago)
And, my own reflection is understanding how we as individuals, small groups and entire societies and cultures, process this information, these contrasts of living in the Anthropocene, but in a state of collective cognitive dissonance. In that effort of reflecting, I seek out people on the edge — in transition, evolving, coming out of the birth canal of trauma, weathering life’s hard knocks.

Born-again Christians, end times believers and those so tied to the simple words of Christ, the man, not the head of any church, are part of that interest area for me.

Sure, it is the season, so to speak; i.e., the Yuletide. Maybe this is the impetus here.

I can’t say that all my articles are going to be revolutionary, fitted with depth of looking into the power of the people I have come to love and adore as thinkers, revolutionaries.

Maybe I was in the mood for positivity after hearing about bell hooks’ recent death. Yes, I met her, as she was appearing at a university to read from her work, and do some workshops with classes.

Here, something to digest, this cool and rousing event with bell hooks and Cornel West at the New School, seven years ago:

Why am I connecting bell hooks and this wee piece on a simple fellow who ended up not making it big time in tap dancing but did make his walkabout to end up out here of all places, the small town of Waldport (2,070 pop.), and into my fold as a writer?

Maybe, the journey he is in — all tied to a recurring dream he had in his 30s where he began his simple passage toward the belief in his god, in what he sees as his savior and humanity’s savior — is including me as a small spit wad in the ocean element. Who knows.

Interestingly, he comes to me, a pantheist. That has happened many times in my life — believers coming to me, a non-believer. A pantheist, albeit!

Yet, he spent time with me, in brotherhood, in fellowship, he might say. I wrote the following piece for the local rag, and I hope it runs there soon. I am obsessed with people’s narratives, and getting people to pursue their stories, in written form, whichever final product that might be — since books and reading are passe.

Maybe I can’t really connect my feelings about bell hooks’ death with why I wrote this story of a fellow who sees his Christ as a simple fellow, really. She said this in a talk see gave at the New School:

I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else’s whim or to someone else’s ignorance.

I heard that before, read it, in her works. Given John Whitehead‘s use of this epigram in one of his pieces, I see those words — Christian but universal — apropos for this fellow you are about to meet:

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among others,
To make music in the heart.

― Howard Thurman, “The Work of Christmas” from his book The Mood of Christmas and Other Celebrations, October 1, 1985

A Dream Deferred, A Dream Reclaimed — The Tap in Dance is in the Heart!

Listen to my feet and I will tell you the story of my life – John Bubbles, father of rhythm tap

I’m looking at Michael Mailloux’s artwork at the Waldport Chamber. Bright primitive images with golfing themes. All are whimsical, dreamy but simple and childlike. He hands me a booklet, a story of his own rebirth into a spiritual being. “The Dream” tells the reader about a series of nightmares that brought him to surrender to Christ.

My story is about a 69-year-old man who’s struggled with identity and an obsession to be a dancer. He’s a veritable ground-truthing encyclopedia of the art of hoofing.

His walkabout comes with a diverse set of characteristics:
- growing up in San Francisco, Guam and West Virginia with four sisters
- hyperactive kid who flunked a few grades and never could sit still to read
- a 6’2” basketball player with ADHD
- a passion to learn from the best tap dancers
- interrupted dreams of Broadway musical fame
- shy white guy jumping into a world of African-American hoofers
- years scraping by living in odd places
- 20 years in California teaching dancing to women’s clubs and others
- struggles with depression/ hope rolled up in a simple conjoining of Jesus Christ ‘s philosophy
“The message is simple. Like he said, the word of God should be understood by a child. All these religions and denominations are filled with laws, complications.”

He’s willing to critique Christianity, as it has played out throughout history and in our current times, as materialistic and judgmental. “I believe we have a duty not to judge people.” His bedrock is simple: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

We first met at the Chamber, quickly diving into current events, philosophy and psychology – the lockdowns, Sartre, Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung, Dante. Consequently, I decided to pen a feel-good New Year’s story with Mailloux at its center.

The beauty of being a writer is I spelunk into lives far afield from our own. After almost half a century of doing this, I have intersected with thousands of people. Sometimes the process takes minutes, or hours in the case of Michael.

Three hours later, I have a notepad filled with dates, names, places, a life.

He and his wife Kate have lived near Ona Beach for 1.5 years, after two decades in Arroyo Grande (near Pismo Beach, California). He donates his time to such projects as Grace Wins Haven in Newport.

Ain’t Misbehavin’

Eddie Brown, Baby Lawrence, Bubba Gains, Duke Ellington, Gregory Hines, Bill Robinson (Bojangles), Buster Brown, Charles Cookie Cook, Honi Coles, Bunny Briggs, and so many other major/minor characters in the tap dancing scene have influenced this nimble guy who has crisscrossed the US, from LA, Las Vegas, West Virginia, Florida, Arizona, New York.

It was after two years in the Army (ending in Alaska) when he came back to Helvetia, West Virginia, and announced to his mother he wanted to be a tap dancer.

“After I left Fort Richardson I did one semester at Davis and Elkins College on the GI Bill. I went home for the summer and helped my mom in her restaurant. I came down the stairs one day and said, ‘I want to be a tap dancer.’”

He learned the basics of tap dancing from 74-year-old Mary Elizabeth Fassig in Wheeling, West Virginia. He landed a $50 a month room and worked as a short order cook and dishwasher at a hospital. He majored in speech and theater at West Liberty College, and by chance, Mary was choreographing the play, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and invited Michael on a trip to New York to see four Broadway shows.

“The first Broadway show I ever saw was A Chorus Line. When the show was over and I walked out and saw all the people, the bright lights, I told myself, ‘I’m coming to New York.’”

He did, and landed at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. “I had no money and stayed at the YMCA.” He eventually connected with a member of the 12th Night Club (founded in 1891). Michael lived above the Carnegie Deli.

He met a young guy, Bernard Manners, who was dancing with the Legendary Hoofers. These middle aged tap dancers rehearsed at Jerry LeRoy Studio. “My eyes opened wide like globes” after Maillous witnessed rhythm time steps. While he takes his hat off to Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, Mailloux credits the “black styling of tap” for his own passion.

Any journalist worth his salt researches, even for a short piece. Readers can find, Tap Dance in America: A Short History by Constance Valis Hill instrumental for background. Check out the book by the same author, A Contest of Beat and Feet, Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History.

Mailloux has worked cleaning furniture in a rental business, developed film at the Las Vegas Hilton, worked in a Turkish restaurant/rehearsal studio — Fazil’s. He was even the Tap Dancing Car Salesman in California.

It was at Fazil’s where he saw the Copasetics practice their steps.

The root of his obsession is Baby Lawrence, who he never met in person, but for which Michael constantly practiced using a tape of one of his records to imprint upon him all the right moves and steps.

One of the biggest regrets Michael has is the fact the Black hoofers didn’t take him into their fold, professionally. “All I wanted to do was dance. When Bunny Briggs told me I reminded him of Baby Lawrence, I knew I was onto something.”

He never made it on the Great White Way, laughing how he auditioned for a part in the musical, 42nd Street. “I was too tall for the chorus.”

In Synch

Several events in his life stick: When he was heading for a show at the Bowery Lane Theater, he ran into a well-dressed fellow outside. “He told me he was a doctor whose wife had just left him. I felt so much sadness.”

He repeats this story with tears in his eyes: “I wish I had taken him to a shelter for a warm meal and place to stay. For selfish reasons I wanted to go to the tap dance gig.”

Another story is from the Big Apple, when he spotted a Puerto Rican boy who found a leaf on the ground. His mother was in a hurry, and yelled at the son to come along. “He wanted to put the leaf back onto the tree. What love he showed for that tree, because it lost a leaf.”

Michael struggled with depression, and lots of mood swings. While he says his wife Kate is the key person in his life, he still recalls the power of his mother: “My mother raised five children barely one year apart in age. When we moved to West Virginia, our family lived in a hunting cabin with no electricity, running water, or bathroom. Mom cooked our meals on a large wood burning stove and it was our only heating source through the cold winter months. She would heat the water so we could bathe in a metal boiler tub.”

He tells me he’s grateful for authentic fellowship. He and his wife struggle on two social security checks. However, his faith leads him to believe good things will come to him. His dream is to help the homeless, and those without means of support. He calls this project Getting in Synch – Serve Your Needy Community.

Tap dancing and song are still part of his life. He penned and choreographed a musical, That Rhythm Thing. He’s currently tweaking it. The play is about artists and dancers who came to New York to follow their dreams, but like in most cases, the starving artist stumbles. They are in Central Park, in a tent city, supporting each other with anything they have.

He beats out a rhythm and shows me some steps. I’ll finish with lyrics from, Copasetics Chair Dance:

When you feel blue,
The best you can do
Is tell yourself to forget it,

Life’s a funny thing

It’s really great when you sing,
And everything will be copasetic…

Never look down,
Chin up and don’t frown,
Don’t let life get pathetic.
Show a happy face to the whole human race,
And everything will be copasetic . . .

The post End of the Year Story of Hope first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
December 24, 2021

Here’s to our Health: Well, To the Health of the Profiteers!

“You know what I think?” she says. “That people’s memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn’t matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They’re all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed ’em to the fire, they’re all just paper. The fire isn’t thinking ‘Oh, this is Kant,’ or ‘Oh, this is the Yomiuri evening edition,’ or ‘Nice tits,’ while it burns. To the fire, they’re nothing but scraps of paper. It’s the exact same thing. Important memories, not-so-important memories, totally useless memories: there’s no distinction–they’re all just fuel.”

– Haruki Murakami, After Dark

I’m thinking about nuclear energy, the waste, the fallout, radioactive new elements. I’m thinking about all those antibiotics, about all those rat-roach-flie-mosquito poisons. I’m thinking about the sprayed-on litany of food enhancers (sic) and the artificial colorings, and the Round-up Ready, for sure. I am thinking about opiod deaths for 18-50 year olds in USA as the number one cause of death for that demographic, at 80 K last year.

But I am also thinking about immune-compromised folk, the gut diseases, the array of diseases of the liver, kidneys, thyroid, stomach. Really, all of those malnourished and over-nourished and oddly chemicalized humans sucking up sugar sugar sugar. All of the combinations of bad in utero bombardments; i.e., epigentics, and then all the fun once coming out of the birth canal or c-section cut. DNA collected. How many jabs at birth? Then, how many (pre-mRNA maintenance series forever) vaccinations before age 5, 8 10, 12?

But thyroids, man, they are so compromised (in women especially) because of a variety of reasons that the entire ranch has been sold down the river. Thyroid issues here; chronic pain, brain fog, gut issues, psychological issues.

Serious-serious chronic illnesses associated with thyroid issues. And, this chart below is cartoonish, but if you look into thyroid diseases and the effects, you will shiver. And this is a common problem, becoming bigger with poisons, background radiation, pregnancy, bad food, bad nutrition, stress, plastics in the air-blood-intestines. Oh, what a world, and, of course, AMA, CDC, NIAID, NIH, WHO, you name the outfit, they are so hobbled by their germ theory crap, all other things really killing people (and planet) are not only a drag on a broken medical system, but on their economy.

So, that’s just one arena-terrain of issues, the thyroid. Add up the entire issues flooding our endrocrine systems, then add up the microbiome maladies, add up the weathering of humanity under inflammatory capitalism, and here we are going into 2022.

Shoot, let’s inset doomsday #999 just to get gargantuan — the glacier down under:

The Thwaites “Doomsday Glacier” in West Antarctica is spooking scientists. Satellite images shown at a recent meeting December 13th of the American Geophysical Union showed numerous large, diagonal cracks extending across the Thwaites’ floating ice wedge.

This is new information, and it’s a real shocker if only because it’s happening so quickly, much sooner than expectations. It could collapse. And, it’s big, 80 miles across with up to 4,000 feet depth with a 28-mile-wide cracking ice shelf that extends over the Amundsen Sea.

Well, Greta and COP26, and the bagpipes of Glasgow. Another fun reality TV show, is the blank mentality of mainstream and left-stream media: how stories about Omicron and about mandated vaccination boosters x 5, and the complete loss of critical thinking when attempting to challenge the narratives/motives around the shifting baselines on steriods; i.e., fully vaxxed was one (1) J & J and two (2) Moderna’s. Now? The schedule of boosters will be determined not by doctors, not by us, not by the public, us, not by the thinkers, but by them, the elites, and those oh-so-perfectly honest and heroic folks working for Big Pharma which by the way foots the bill for most media in the mainscream, and foots the bills of many university research facilities, and foots the bill for NIH, WHO, FDA, etc.

This is the Atlantic Magazine, one of the elites’ best source of information. When I say elite, I mean highly college degreed folk, the woke folk, all those beautiful and wannabe beautiful people. Note, when you read these rags, and I include The Nation or even Mother Jones, you get no other perspective outside the mainstream Big Pharma Has All the Answers for SARS-CoV2. DARPA?

For nearly a year now, the phrase fully vaccinated has carried a cachet that it never did before. Being fully vaccinated against COVID-19 is a ticket for a slate of liberties—a pass to travel without testing and skip post-exposure quarantine, per the CDC, and in many parts of the country, a license to enter restaurants, gyms, and bars. For many employees, full vaccination is now a requirement to work; for many individuals, it’s a must for any socialization at all. (source)

I could write this entire blog just looking at the Atlantic’s story here, and how cavalier and how snobby and so tragically hip the verbiage is and the folks cited and interviewed so much on the same sheet of music, which is entirely planned. This is how these writers do their journalism — no push back, no alternative views, no outside the paradigm thinking. Here, last point I can make by pasting another paragraph:

Countries such as Israel have already done it; Anthony Fauci has been gunning for the switch. As he told me this summer, “I bet you any amount of whatever” that three shots, spread out over several months, will ultimately be the “standard regimen for an mRNA vaccine.” Even the CDC told me this week that it “may change [the] definition in the future”—a line it’s never used with me before. For a cautious government agency, that’s kind of a gargantuan leap. A new floor for full vaccination, one that firmly requires what we’re now calling booster shots, is starting to look like a matter of when, not if.

No other sources of medicine and immunology or virology to be consulted??? These writers are dangerous, but they always have been on all given topics — war, surveillance, finance, everything in the Complex. They have credos and pledges to not drill into capitalism. And that means, that this pig of a human, Tony Fauci, can play “I bet” shit word games about boosters that well, hmm, sort of work. Imagine that, funny Tony. And, what the fuck is happening in Israel? Please, look into that mess of vax madness there. “Israel.” How quickly the vaxxed lose immunity, which they never had.

Hands up, or else:

Kids who are exposed to COVID-19 can stay in class as long as they are tested in schools, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a news release on Friday.“Test-to-Stay is another valuable tool in a layered prevention strategy that includes promoting vaccination of eligible students and staff, requiring everyone age 2 and older wear a mask inside schools and facilities, keeping at least 3 feet of distance between students, screening testing, ventilation, handwashing, and staying home when sick,” the news release reads. The Test-to-Stay initiative was put into motion by the CDC to help “minimize absenteeism and learning loss which can occur during traditional quarantine at home.”

Again, read the story on “Test to Stay,” and you will get no person or journalist pusing back on the policy, on the stupidity of testing, on the masking requirements, on the 3-foot distance lies, man, so-so much wrong with this picture. (Source)

But again, it’s not the air, stupid. It’s not the water, stupid. It’s not the food, stupid. It’s not the chemicals offgassing and in every product a child first comes in contact with up until the grave, stupid. It’s coronavirus, and, it’s compliant people, labeling and creating the “Dirty You,”which in the old days (not so old) was the Dirty Jew-Japanese-Indian-Irishman-Chinaman-Gypsy-Communist-Catholic-Disabled-et al.

I am asked about climate change, as the existential set of crises for humanity. How to stop it, how to mitigate it, how to prepare for it?

Here, from friend, Joe, then my snarky answer —

Paul– It’s pretty fucking obvious the government doesn’t plan to do anything except to promote more air travel, more military use of hydrocarbons, more roads for increased auto and truck travel, more planet destroying corporate agriculture and the list goes on. Besides that most people are not willing to change their lifestyles one bit. They will continue to support the things that kill the planet as they shroud themselves in selfrighteousness because they recycle and separate their food waste and put it in their compost bins made of plastic. They will pat themselves (and on each other’s) backs as they eat organic cucumbers flown in from Chile for their Super Bowl parties. Sick cognitive dissonanced bastards riding towards Hell on earth.

+–+

Joe — And the same tools to say stop companies from forcing low wage workers working in warehouses while tornadoes are about to hit and then once those workers are killed injured and traumatized will be the same needed to reorganize humanity for a world without ice: compassion, moral compass, communitarian guidance, systems thinking, socialism, democracy, resiliency, end of economic classes, justice, integrity, regional & multinational planning, valuing safe/ food/ air/ water/ soil, those plus redistribution of work and economic well being …. some or all of these needed to solve little things (sic) and yet we can’t tackle opioid crisis or housing crisis or industrial torture factory animal crisis.

A world without ice without those human values above? Road Warrior and The Road and Minority Report and Soylent Green and Bladerunner all mashed up

Again, the loopy writing of this mainstream and influential rag, The Atlantic. “Climate Change is Going to be Gross: The thick layer of mucilage that covered the Sea of Marmara for weeks was an unsettling glimpse of climate change’s more oozy effects” by Jenna Scatena This Jenna will not interview ecosocialists or those looking at the systems of collapse. Putting one part into the system, and then looking at the system. So, all this dead algae and plankton, off-gassing, mucking up ocean floors and coming to the surface and destroying fish stocks. And yet, no one interviewed looking at how this is just a slice of the destruction pie, and that, yes, bacteria and viruses live in the muck, and, yes, they can get passed on and on and on.

Under a Green Sky by Peter Ward

Paleontologist Peter Ward’s book on mass extinctions and climate change provides a deep-time perspective that is both sobering and necessary. Under a Green Sky puts the present within a geological context while also making the climate crisis feel even more personal and pressing. Before getting that perspective in full, however, readers encounter several fetching narratives of paleontological and other scientific fieldwork across the globe. Captivating as they are, the stories are mostly used to set up later passages that aggressively dismantle an argument Ward clearly loathes: that most past mass extinctions — especially the Permian, some 250 million years ago — were caused by huge meteorite impacts. Ward takes scientists and the media to task for, in his mind, recklessly embracing impacts as the culprit du jour for nearly all prior mass extinctions, when an impact is clearly responsible for just one such die-off: the famous dinosaur-killer 65 million years ago.

Ward presents a powerful alternative model for explaining these extinctions. In short, an increase in carbon dioxide — from volcanism (in the past) or from humans (in the present) — warms the oceans enough to change circulation patterns. When this happens, sulfur-eating microbes sometimes thrive. These bacteria produce hydrogen sulfide, which, in sufficient quantities and under certain conditions, outgasses into the air, shreds the ozone layer, and poisons other living things. The warming also causes methane ice under the seas to melt and, well, burp, adding to the nasty mix. The end comes not in a bang but a stinky whimper. (Source)

Quoting: “Where is the “Misanthropocene” right now in relation to past extinction events? The chart below tells the tale. Notice that our current rise in GHG’s is essentially instantaneous in relation to past warmings which took place over thousands of years. As far as scientists can tell, the current warming from industrial civilization is the most rapid in geologic time. Ice core and marine sediment data in the paleoclimatology archive have revealed brief periods of rapid warming and there is no reason to believe modern man is immune to such catastrophic and abrupt climate events. In fact, we know that the Arctic is already warming twice as fast as anywhere else on the planet. Earth sensitivity to climate change is now thought to be possibly double that of previous estimates. An entirely different planet can result from just a slight change in temperature:

We’re about halfway towards the same CO2 levels as the Paleocene Thermal Extinction, but our speed of trajectory surpasses even that of the Permian Extinction:

In 2005, Lee R. Kump and fellow scientists published a paper describing what would become known as the Kump hypothesis, implicating hydrogen sulfide (H2S) as the primary culprit in past mass extinctions. According to OSHA, “a level of H2S gas at or above 100 ppm is immediately dangerous to life and health.” Prior to Kump’s study, the working theory had been that some sort of singular, cataclysmic event such as an asteroid strike was to blame for all mass die-offs, but Kump and colleagues proposed that a global warming-induced asphyxiation via hydrogen sulfide gas (H2S) was to blame for snuffing out life under the sea, on the land, and in the air. In past mass extinctions, volcanic eruptions and thawing methane hydrates created greenhouse-gas warmings that culminated in the release of poisonous gas from oxygen-depleted oceans. Humans with their fossil fuel-eating machines are unwittingly producing the same conditions today. The Kump hypothesis (elevated CO2 with lowering O2 levels) is now regarded as the most plausible explanation for the majority of mass extinctions in earth’s history.”

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This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
December 11, 2021

The Oil Companies Tell Us About Climate Change and Big Pharma Tells Us About Variants

They never call that Conflic$ of $ntere$t

Doctors are urging everyone to get vaccinated and boosted as cases of the Omicron coronavirus variant are popping up in more states, but the vaccine may also need to change to keep up with the mutations of the virus.

“It is, probably, one of our worst-case scenarios in terms of the combination of mutations that exist in one variant,” said Dr. Stephen Hoge, president of Cambridge-based Moderna. (source)

Again, this discussion around SARS-CoV2’s origins, and I mean, LAB origins, is so stunted that I have zero faith in the ability of people running the show and those following the show, and those who bombast and tell me to follow the science, to really have the guts and mental acumen to think outside their pathetic boxes. So, getting the low down from Moderna is not only bizarre, more than the fox watching the hens, but deeper. Here, a wrap up:

Our novel coronavirus is a LAV — live attenuated virus — derived from the work being done at University of North Carolina, the only place on earth trying to make a LAV for SARS-like viruses, which are also obviously not going to be fully acclimated to the human genome like the human influenza virus, which seems to have been with us at least since the Trojan War thousands of years ago.

Until SARS-CoV-2 is understood as a LAV that’s deattenuating towards a highly-pathogenic chimeric coronavirus that’s going through gatekeeping mutations and has no intention whatsoever of following the assumptions drawn from observing natural evolution or even the paths of the H1N1 LAVs which melted back into their original endogenous human hosts – humanity is going to continue to be standing on its head as it attempts to battle this pandemic, and misunderstanding the basic fundamental nature of what its up against.

It’s something we seem to be particularly good at, since all the way back in 1977 when the first H1N1 LAV emerged to a mass global panic, a massive push was made to create and distribute vaccines against what was thought to be a potentially pandemic strain. But it turns out that one of the ways a LAV isn’t a natural virus, is that when you attempt to vaccinate against it, neurological side-effects appear to proliferate among the vaccinated population, as the virus blows through this attempt at protection.

Because unfortunately for all of us, this isn’t the first time we’ve all been down the horrific rabbit-hole of trying to rush out an incredibly profitable vaccine against an enigmatic mystery virus that’s really a military LAV that deattenuated faster than expected. A vaccine which only provides only weak and temporary protection – but also causes wide-spread side-effects because it turns out the pharmaceutical companies were lying about their vaccine studies, and knowingly risked the lives and livelihoods of tens of millions of Americans so they could make as much money as quickly as possible: (Source)

Now, watch an old swine flu paranoia story, 60 Minutes:

So, follow the “other” science, and follow the protests. Marketed as life-saving public health measures, lockdowns triggered death and economic devastation on a global scale while doing little to slow the spread of Covid-19. Now, they’re back with a vengeance. — Grayzone.

That Moderna —this one —

Digital Health Pass: IBM and Moderna Hook Up to Capitalize on COVID Reset

Not that Whitney Webb is listened to by the mainstream and left-stream Media —

Moderna attempted to offset the bad press over having to delay the Crigler-Najjar drug with claims that they had developed a new nanoparticle delivery system called V1GL that “will more safely deliver mRNA.” The claims came a month after Bancel had touted another delivery system called N1GL to Forbes. In that interview, Bancel told Forbes that the delivery system they had been using, licensed to them by Acuitas, “was not very good” and that Moderna had “stopped using Acuitas tech for new drugs.” However, as will be explored in detail in this report as well as Part II of this series, it appears that Moderna continued to rely on the Acuitas-licensed technology in subsequent vaccines and other projects, including its COVID-19 vaccine. (Whitney Webb)

Former Moderna employees and those close to their product development were doubtful at the time that these new and supposedly safer nanoparticle delivery systems were of any consequence. According to three former employees and collaborators close to the process who spoke anonymously to STAT, Moderna had long been “toiling away on new delivery technologies in hopes of hitting on something safer than what it had.” All of those interviewed believed that “N1GL and V1GL are either very recent discoveries, just in the earliest stages of testing—or else new names slapped on technologies Moderna has owned for years.” All spoke anonymously due to having signed nondisclosure agreements with the company, agreements that are aggressively enforced.

And so we have the constant un-News from the billionaire class, Big Pharma, and the bought-out (prostituted) media. It is worth looking at this piece’s subheading,

Turns out you can’t vaccinate your way out of highly-transmissible RNA viruses in crowded commercial settings, but it also turns out that humans have a little issue trying to play God, and as so here we are.

…tied to this point by the writer, using Harvard To the Big House as his moniker:

It’s probably worth a brief moment to consider that every major industrial poultry farm on earth is stuffed to the wattles with potential viral hosts which are unable to self-segregate when they get sick like they are in wild populations, and so despite the fact that modern poultry farms have vaccination programs with 100% genomic coverage, 100% compliance, and 100% surveillance – a perfect experimental situation with far more controllability that human societies – the emergence highly-pathogenic influenza strains that easily cull half the flock in a matter of days and sometimes result in 100% mortality are a constant threat. (Bottling-Up the Quasispecies Origins of SARS-CoV-2’s Enigmatic Furin-Cleavage Site)

It’s worth reading this piece, and try to not multitasking why reviewing it, since there are genomics and virology and basic and mid-genetics cited. But you all are caring, smart and patient readers. I know. The reality is, there are no jobs in Oregon now that do not require the jab, and, for me, 64, over-educated, overly socialistic, well, how can I get a job when, well, this is what is typical of Indeed and other staffing sites put down right up front before a job description:

The State of Oregon requires all executive branch employees to complete their COVID-19 vaccination series or have an approved exception to the requirement due to a medical condition or sincerely held religious belief. Successful candidates for this position must submit vaccination documentation or be approved for an exception prior to their first day of employment. Failure to provide proof of full documentation or receipt of an approved exception will lead to withdrawal of the job offer. For more information, visit our policy listed here.

And what is a “vaccination” series, then? Is it two-three-four or every-three months a jab mentality? Is my age, 64, the kicker? Do I get to opt out of two-three-infinity shots? How easy is it to get an exception for whatever course of jabbing the state of Oregon requires, per the “Chosen Few” in the VaX Biz$, such as, well, here, December 4, 2021, DV covers one of these fellows, still alive, chosen, this elite “chosen few” — ‘Meet the “Godfather of Vaccines”’: Stanley A. Plotkin? (see Mickey Z!)

Is this existential the entire disaster and disaster mismanagement/management? A thought experiment? Ground-truthing? Or, something else?

The consciousness that biodiversity collapse is anthropogenically caused and in many cases avoidable prompts frequent use of the rhetoric of disaster to portray the human-induced shock to earth’s ecosystems. Amid such environmental distress, the collapse of biodiversity,global warming, melting glaciers, peak extraction of natural resources, structural poverty, intense pollution, high impact industries, and large zones of monocropping anticipate the scenario of a planet becoming orphaned of life. The main risks are created and increased inconsequently by men, in their infinite saga of nature domination (of which they are part, even when they do not realize it). The culture of immediacy pushes society to forget the past and to not care about the future. (Disasters, pandemic and repetition: a dialogue with Maurice Blanchot’s literature)

Look, I was on a Zoom call two days ago. Again, environmental topic; i.e., delta-wetlands “expert” zooming 41 folk. Amazingly flat, dead, and the Q & A, almost like putting in a number for the DMV. I don’t think the people running the show really get the colonization of science and outdoors sciences by this stupidity? In the Oregon-State? Making more and more people suspicious of each other, the Omicron Paranoia.

Estuaries are not only federally designated as Essential Fish Habitat, they’re a Habitat Area of Particular Concern (HAPC). The HAPC designation is for high priority areas for conservation, management, or research because they are important to ecosystem function, sensitive to human activities, stressed by development, or are rare. Habitat types within estuaries vary substantially and consist of either natural (seagrass, large woody debris, natural rock, etc.) or man-made structures. Research from OSU over the last two decades indicates that (1) the fish communities in Oregon estuaries are changing, and (2) natural estuary habitats, particularly seagrasses, play an outsized role in the feeding and growth of juveniles fishes, particularly in years of poor ocean conditions. Given that ocean conditions on the west coast are changing, maintaining healthy natural habitats may become even more important in the future.

Interesting to read Alison McDowell’s latest, Wrench in the Gears. She opened up the Pandora’s box of blockchain connections to military-money-medical madness two years ago.

Check her work — She’s burnt out, and now, reenergized with Texas, where she was recently. Texas at the petri dish for all of the 5G/6G world of digital wallets, digital medicine, digital Gulag.

I am convinced Texas is in the crosshairs of a program of blockchain human capital predation that has been in the works at least since the 1950s. They’re coming in the back door with digital identity tied to electronic government, precision medicine, personalized learning, and equity-based workforce re-skilling tied to the Dallas Federal Reserve. Academic institutions pumped up with government life science grants and defense sector partnerships are in on it, as well as back-slapping non-profits waiting on their next philanthrocapitalist cardboard check. I have seen the web of this agenda. I have mapped a good bit of it. I’ve been caught up in it too, in the enormity of it. Now I finally think I’ve mustered up the psychic energy and clarity to deconstruct it and lay the parts out for all to see. Teasing apart the Texas blockchain web might help me regain my sense of purpose, which started to slip away these past few months. (Source)

Interesting fellow, just interviewed on a Covid-19 series, and that’s not available yet for public dissemination, but here he is in an older video. Covid-Revealed. His talk here on this 13 hour series is pretty clarifying. He does know his virus history, and he is anti-Empire, and this is usually not something these doctors who question the lack of treatments, the mRNA vax, etc. question. Many of the experts fighting the vaccination narrative and the rise of the corona paranoia yammer about socialism, how the WEF and Fourth Industrial Revolution is about global socialism. WHICH it is NOT. The rich — filthy Eichmann Types below them — are not gaming the system to have truly socialism for-by-because of the people, bottom up. Try and find the series, Covid Revealed. Of course, I am watching free, but with a time-frame, and then it is for sale! Capitalism, uh?

Here, Zach Bush, January 2021, on viromes and viruses. The entire kitchen sink of microbiome.

With the Branch Covidians and their Draconian Digital Dungeon, we who resist this maximum jab-jab-jab mentality — forced medical procedures — are to be put where? Repurposed Indian Boarding Schools? FEMA camps? Think about that. No job, no home, no unemployment, no humanity!

Gov. Sisolak apologizes for Nevada’s role in relocating Native American children

“They ripped babies from the arms of my ancestors and brought them thousands of miles to this campus,” Stacey Montooth, executive director of the Nevada Indian Commission and a direct descendant of a Stewart student, said. “The intent was to absolutely remove all aspects of Native American culture, but I’m still here.

“Keep in mind, it was not Uncle Sam’s priority to keep track of the Native people they sent here. There were bounties put out on little Indian children. … In 2021, we’d call it kidnapping.”

An estimated 20,000 students from at least 200 tribal nations attended Stewart between 1890 and 1980, including plenty from far-flung tribes based in New Mexico, Arizona, California, Oregon, Washington and Idaho. The boarding school was just one of more than 350 such institutions once propped up by the federal government.

Some families sent their children to the school to get an education, but many were snatched off the road unbeknownst to their parents, according to Bobbi Rahder, director of the Stewart Indian School Cultural Center and Museum. (Source)

Interesting, Zach Bush looks at the political fight, the elections, as imflammation, looking at how as the candidates move closer toward the election their bodies, and their souls, are actually worn and show major breakdown of their mind-body connection. He discusses bacteria, looks at the sterilization aspect of modern medicine at war with viruses and not understanding the human microbiome — 10 to the 15th power the number of viruses in our body. Lining up for vaccines to rely on antibodies? It is not right, and it’s all tied to germ theory not being right. Listen to him, and it’s easy, and goes to biodiversity on many levels, and the air pollution, the cyanide taken into the human cell. Listen hard to the one above and then this one. It isn’t so difficult.

And to beat a dead Covid-19 horse to death, I highly recommend this interview, 25 minutes. You will understand the breadth of this fellow, Zach Bush, and he is coming at viruses, sustainability, terrain disease theory, humanity — birth and dying — from a multi-disciplinary perspective. Oh, I wish I was teaching college again, my courses on critical writing-thinking, from composition 101 to literature.

I have broached so many topics tied to systems thinking, directly relatable to students who are not majoring in English or journalism, per se, but those topics were fodder and incubators for deep knowledge and outside the thousand boxes thinking.

I am locked on Highway 101. The local college is Oregon Coast Community College, and the same people are teaching writing classes, for credit, who have been teaching that for years. There are no advanced classes or special topics classes, such as — critical thinking, research and expression in a time of conflict, runaway consumerism, media and educational control. You know, opening up the discussion with people majoring in say, nursing, or early childhood ed, or aquarium sciences. This society has for decades turned humanity into robots, silo-loving pencil pushers, err, knowledge workers on a laptop. That is exactly why we have a country of broken ideas, unrealized discussions, and flabbergasted people of all shapes and forms.

Zach Bush, on what we are — Homo Virome Sapiens!

The revolution that we are in the midst of — the massive paradigm shift that is one of the biggest scientific discoveries of human kind — is that human health does not reside within the human cell. Human health is dictated by the biodiversity that is at the center of our vitality, the biodiversity of the microbiome.

– Dr. Zach Bush
The post The Oil Companies Tell Us About Climate Change and Big Pharma Tells Us About Variants first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
December 3, 2021

That Old Green Stamps Book’s Back in Style, Digital Form

The amount of amnesia, and outright smoke and mirrors and juking the people, for and by and with the corporation at the helm, it is almost a death sentence trying to be a creative writer — a bloody novelist, no less — in this world of mass hysteria, a thinner door creaked open for legit novelists, and, well, all the world is a stage — podcasts, TikTok creations, blogs, e-zines, and on and on and on, as that Amazon Vanity Press is the new normal for those who want to get “published.”

This vaccine card, below, is not really a joke, hence, the Omega Variant, and the SARS-CoV2 Endemic, and the new and beautiful new gain of function viruses coming to a local county/country soon.

Yet, how many times does it take to repeat — Zinc, Vitamin C, E, and other highly needed anti-oxidants and other amazing natural products, synthesized, yes, like Thiamine, TTFD being the higher potency, and more, as in open windows, piped in breezes and a product called SaNoTize, the nitric oxide nasal spray, that should be in everyone’s lunchbox.

Yet, we have Fauci the Faustian Mafioso, and the concomitant of scientism lovers, all those germ theory scared cats, running the show. Any news about other disease pandemics, or global threats to humankind, well, nope, not on the playbill.

You think of forced chemical jabs, you think of forced travel restrictions, forced nasal tests, forced urine tests, blood tests, hair tests, corneal scans, fingerprints, and the like, until you go back and see how human beings have been passported into various forms of hell by the overlords of empire, resource theft, war, financial loansharking, and more.

Then, all that Big Brother/Big Nanny Gestapo in our lives, yet, yet . . . diets. All those full-spectrum empty calories, all those dyes, synthetic brews, added salts, sugars and fats, all those preservatives and enhancers and flavor poppers. That, of course, is LEGAL, accepted, taken for granted by the Capitalists, and Fauci’s job is all about Why there are so many chronic illnesses, so many gut and brain diseases, so many allergies, so many ticks, tremors, jerks, pacing, foggy brains, nervous blurts. He’s failed us, but he is a hero of the Capitalists. Nope.

So, where are the parallels to the Big Pharma Giveaway-Grand Vaccine Theft-Perennial Gouging-Endless Non-cures in other arenas of this sick society?

Well, it is the brain, but it all starts in the gut. You know that, the Madmen sell that, and the MDs and scientists have tested that. But simple rules and regulations — brakes on more disease pandemics — not possible in the disease management/disease profit industrial complex.

As a nutritional psychiatrist, faculty member at Harvard Medical School and author of “This Is Your Brain on Food,” I study how our gut bacteria can trigger metabolic processes and brain inflammation that impact memory. Existing studies point to the idea that we may be able to reduce the possibility of dementia by avoiding foods that can compromise our gut bacteria and weaken our memory and focus.

Well, this is on NBC, no less, in between the newsfeeds on NFL wins and losses, new Omni Variant, money thrown at this or that undeserving sociopath-coach-athlete-movie star, all the flooding and fires and bus-plane-train crashes. All those stories of passengers on planes going drunken berserk, and well, there are still dog trick stories in between 20 or 30 refugees drowning in the Channel and all the anti-China news (sic) shit.

Fried Foods, Added Sugars, High Glycemic Load Carbohydrates, Alcohol, Nitrates. She’s a Harvard (big effing deal) Med School nutritional psychiatrist. All those potatoes, those hot dogs, those beers, those frosted flakes, those fried clams and shrimps, darn, adding to depression, bipolar disorders, dementias, and constant brain fog and lethargy and then, well, obesity, all of that, could be reversed if we, well, reversed the social contract that capitalism has in place for the profiteers, the making money any way you can philosophy.

Choice, that’s what they will say. We have choices to grab an apple or a McDonalds deep-friend fritter. Choices, right? As the advertising is a constant overt and subliminal and habituating frame for us, from cradle to grave.

Now, we know about strokes, diabetes and cardio vascular disease. We know that that triumvirate is the real Monster on the Block. Here, good scientific reading, not on Fauci’s or Trump’s or Biden’s of CNN’s or FOX’s reading list:

Abstract

Atherosclerosis is considered a chronic inflammatory disease and an intervention targeting the inflammatory process could be a new therapeutic strategy for preventing atherosclerotic cardiovascular diseases (CVD). We hypothesized that the intestine, which is considered the biggest immune organ in the human body, could be a therapeutic target for preventing CVD. We demonstrated that oral administration of anti-CD3 antibody or an active form of vitamin D3 reduced atherosclerosis in mice via induction of regulatory T cells and tolerogenic dendritic cells in the gut-associated lymphoid tissues. Similar to regulatory immune responses achieved by oral tolerance, our method had systemic effects that ultimately contributed towards atherosclerosis reduction. Recently, we have been interested in the gut microbiota, which have been reported as highly associated with intestinal immunity and systemic metabolic disorders, including obesity and diabetes. Notably, the guts of obese individuals are predominantly colonized by Firmicutes over Bacteroidetes. The association between atherosclerosis and microbiota has been attracting increased attention, and gut microbiota have been shown to participate in the metabolism of a proatherogenic compound called trimethylamine-N-oxide (TMAO) and aggravate CVD. Our investigation of the relationship between susceptibility to CVD and the gut microbiota revealed a characteristic flora type. Here, we discuss the evidence for the relationship between the gut microbiota and cardiometabolic diseases, and consider the gut microbiota as new potential therapeutic targets for treating CVD. (Intestinal Immunity and Gut Microbiota as Therapeutic Targets for Preventing Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Diseases)

And it’s that simple, that complicated — gut-brain science, and naturopathy:

The case has been made that the microbiome constitutes an endocrine organ in itself due to its ability to produce a wide range of compounds that regulate distant cells, organs, and systems. These compounds include neurotransmitters and short-chain fatty acids, in addition to regulators of cortisol, ghrelin, leptin, secondary bile acids, and others. Further, the microbiome can make changes in its composition that are adaptive for the host – changes that can take place within a single day of altering the macronutrient content of the diet. It will revert back to its original composition within 2days of ending the trial diet. There are numerous examples of the microbiota remodeling itself in order to utilize dietary constituents for the benefit of the host . (SIBO as an Adaptation- A Proposed Role for Hydrogen Sulfide)

Then, we have to wonder where those Fauci Types are in the realm of inflammatory diseases, all the pathogens and toxins from industrial and internal combustion processes, all those additives and pesticides and fungicides and the like in baby’s food and mamma’s milk? What’s up with all that brain power on all those patents Fauci has his fingers wrapped around (3,500)? How is that concern for public health, how is that the definition of a servant of the people? Here, RFK, Jr. and Dr. David Martin: Watch. Or, watch this: The REAL Anthony Fauci with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Read Chandler Marrs, PhD., over at Hormones Matter, a place for which I have published lightly: Paul Haeder.

Going back a few years — FOUR! Falling into the Planned Parenthood Gardasil Snake Pit. And, then, Chandler’s came out a week ago — Piled Higher and Deeper: Vaccine Industry Shills

Back to the future, for sure, as that nutritional psychiatrist tells us it’s the food we eat. Not the cortisol running through our veins as a product of Distress-Inducing Capitalism. Not a product of one-paycheck-away-from-eviction/foreclosure. Nope, not this Fauci feudalism. Not the lies coming out their mouths — from Carter to Nixon to LBJ to Bush Father and Clinton and Obama and Trump and Biden. Nope, that’s not causing the strain, the stress, the overload of hormones and histamines?

Not the schedule of shots for youth, not the air they breathe, not the off-gassing, not the forever chemicals. It’s the diet, man. The diet.

And so we are back to square one. If you have the money, you have the Zoom Room. If you have the bucks, you get the organic sprouts and apples. If you have the cash, you get the extreme Cadillac medical care.

They are parasites and vampires, the rich, but they employ a lot of servants of finance and payola.

Here, not the best interview, but still, a start for many people (not those reading DV, but still, a book, a Hedges and another look at the Rich!)

The rich are different from us,” F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have remarked to Ernest Hemingway, to which Hemingway allegedly replied, “Yes, they have more money.” The exchange, although it never took place, sums up a wisdom Fitzgerald had that eluded Hemingway. The rich are different. The cocoon of wealth and privilege permits the rich to turn those around them into compliant workers, hangers-on, servants, flatterers, and sycophants. Wealth breeds, as Fitzgerald illustrated in ‘The Great Gatsby’ and his short story “The Rich Boy,” a class of people for whom human beings are disposable commodities. Colleagues, associates, employees, kitchen staff, servants, gardeners, tutors, personal trainers, even friends and family, bend to the whims of the wealthy or disappear.

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy,” Fitzgerald wrote of the wealthy couple at the center of Gatsby’s life. “They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Aristotle, Niccolò Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx all began from the premise there is a natural antagonism between the rich and the masses.

“Those who have too much of the goods of fortune, strength, wealth, friends, and the like, are neither willing nor able to submit to authority,” Aristotle wrote in ‘Politics.’ “The evil begins at home; for when they are boys, by reason of the luxury in which they are brought up, they never learn, even at school, the habit of obedience.”

Oligarchs, these philosophers knew, are schooled in the mechanisms of manipulation, subtle and overt repression, and exploitation to protect their wealth and power at our expense. Foremost among their mechanisms of control is the control of ideas. Ruling elites ensure that the established intellectual class is subservient to an ideology – in this case free market capitalism and globalization – that justifies their greed.

“The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships,” Marx wrote, “the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.”

Chris Lehmann, an editor-at-large for The New Republic and The Baffler, and the author of Rich People Things.

Watch.

Now tie this all together, and you get Capitalism as Inflammatory Disease, Viral-loading, Cancer-causing, Bacteria-laden, Fear-Mongering DISEASE!

Finally, watching that flick, Dark Waters, I am reminded of the countless movies and documentaries and books exposing the lifestyles and dark philosophies of the rich and famous. DuPont and PFOS/C-8, and the cancers, the chronic illnesses, the slow rotting deaths of humans and animals. Imagine that, forever chemicals, Teflon, in our blood. Almost as lovely as plastic in our feces.

That’s the Green Stamp book we are filling up daily with the poisons of Capitalism, all those no-stick pans and no-stick felons, across the land, across the globe. Imagine that, more dramatic flicks like Dark Waters, and then, nighty nighty. Wake up to another barrage of the rich’s crimes, and then, end the evening with a nightcap and flick.

Mark Ruffalo’s pet project. Remember what Mark said recently, and then not only backtracked that public statement, but did jujitsu to reverse course. And, yes, it was about apartheid and genocidal “Israel.”

The Avengers movie star, who appeared as Dr. Bruce Banner/The Hulk in several films in the blockbuster franchise, took to Twitter late on Monday and posted an apology after he suggested Israel had committed a “genocide” during its recent fighting with Hamas.

“I have reflected & wanted to apologize for posts during the recent Israel/Hamas fighting that suggested Israel is committing ‘genocide’. It’s not accurate, it’s inflammatory, disrespectful & is being used to justify antisemitism here & abroad. Now is the time to avoid hyperbole,” the actor posted from his personal account @MarkRuffalo. (Source)

Ahh, the hand that feeds you, be careful not to bite it. Again, Capitalism, the woke-ism, all the fake lefty defty stuff, it’s all Hollywood — thespians, the entire Western political theater, the entire interrelationship of people now on social media, on TV, in the newsrooms, in the boardrooms, every political warren, everywhere.

The power of Israel, Zionism, the apartheid state entangled in so many things, including what Oliver Stone states is “Jewish control of Hollywood and the media” still amazes many many people, even the Hulk. At least he’s green like the stamps!

When asked in an interview with the Sunday Times of London why there was “such a focus on the Holocaust,” Stone replied: “The Jewish domination of the media.” He added: “They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington. Israel has f***** up United States foreign policy for years.” (July, 2021)

ADL had to have Stone prostrated twice before accepting his apology — “The Anti-Defamation League accepted on Wednesday Oliver Stone’s second apology over remarks he made in an interview to the Sunday Times earlier this week, in which he spoke out against what he saw as the negative influence of U.S. Jews on Washington’s foreign policy.”

Upton Sinclair (The Jungle) ran for Governor of California in the 1930s, and the coverage he received from newspapers was completely biased and adversarial. However, in 1934 some California papers published installments from his forthcoming book about the ill-fated campaign titled I, Candidate for Governor, and How I Got Licked. Here’s that quote, about don’t bite the hand that feeds you, which applies to Israel, Gates, MIC, every politician, every scientist or engineer in the employ of a corporation. All of us who are three paychecks away from foreclosure or eviction.

I used to say to our audiences: It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!

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November 25, 2021

No thanks, Thanksgiving . . . National Day of Sorrow . . . Mourning

Yep, a broken record, or to update that, another one of a million cries in the dark digital dungeon to relearn history, and unlearn the rotten past. I have been looking at the Reclaiming the Sacred since I met Winona LaDuke decades ago. That’s a whole other story.

But it doesn’t matter, especially in a time of Branch Covidians and the Trump-Biden-Obama-Clinton-Bush-Carter-Nixon-Ford-LBJ Days of Wine and Roses. Full of military industrial complex disease, and forget about American Indian Movement or Joan Baez or Leonard Peltier or even that guy, Marlon Brando.

Forget about the PhDs and MDs and leaders and elders alive today from the many diverse tribes of Turtle Island.

Retail, and weepy, “Oh, cherish the time, the Thanksgiving, with family, oh cherish these holiday days with family gathered around the consumer kitchen and the fine eye for a deal tables. A day of pulling out all the paper and digital flyers to see where old Saint Nick will be going FRIDAY.”

Even lowly Time Magazine, tries to grapple with something tied to the 1863 start of Thanksgiving: “What Thanksgiving Means Today to the Native American Tribe That Fed the Pilgrims.”

I personally think that it’s just another reminder of all the horrible things that this nation has done to not only us, but all native people,” the Chairman of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, 29 year-old Brian Weeden tells TIME of that “first” Thanksgiving, adding that he and his tribe feel largely forgotten. Courtesy of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe.

That is 2021, November, in Time Magazine, the lede, as they say. We’ll see what the Matt Taibbi sorts, or Carlson types, or Trump lovers, or even all those on the Blue side of racism have to say, do, and how to act on Thanksgiving. Because, alas, as the Catholic Church is begrudgingly paying out for abuse in places like France, the rest of the white organized criminal-religious enterprises will be wringing their hands, but not righting the wrongs. Disappeared Indigenous here, everywhere. That Church, in Canada, and those graves. What a tip to the genocide iceberg.

Note what Brian Weeden says in the next citation:

For this nation to right a lot of their wrongs, they’re gonna have to own up to their racism, which they don’t want to do.

Oh, the theater is set — presidential pardon for a Tom Turkey, and the homilies by Biden and Jill, the perennial kindergarten teacher who is a college faculty member (so many of them, democrats, and white women like Jill Biden are in the end, wannabe Special Ed teachers, but in the classrooms of college students!). Yeah, Kyle Rittenhouse is with Donald LLC Trump, not putting on the Black Face this time, but in the skin of their old favorite team, The Washington Redskins. White psychopath kid is being wined and dined by white psychopath geriatric. The irony, well, there is none. Kyle will get a cherished Washington pro team war bonnet. Manufactured and assembled in, well, of course, China.

The optics are amazing, and right on line for 2024, for sure. This kid (above) has a job in the Trump LLC Republican Party juggernaut. To-Be-Sure!! And, they are having a great good white ugly boy-man time. Imagine the potential for an SUV, with Trump 2024 stickers on the bumpers and Stars and Bars noose flags on the double antennae, going for a group of protestors like these:

Yet, we still have those Nazi types, pulling from their book of sayings — this in response to my op-ed in the local conservative rag acknowledging National Native American Heritage Month — at DV, “Another Genocide Month: Plying the Ignorance of K12, USA Lower/Higher Ed.” I’ll quote this Lincoln County fellow, here:

“By all means, let’s teach history in its fullness of truth, as we ourselves learn and free ourselves from bias. The basic fact is, Stone Age tribes were crushed by more advanced and more powerful tribes, and we’re all still dealing with the outcome of the shattering of those societies.

The fact is, genocide was sporadic and not generally practiced or effective. Displacement and an often cruel paternalism was the rule. The pre-Columbus Americas were not a rustic paradise.

These were societies with their own particular pluses and minuses. When we teach the revised histories now, may it be said that among Northwest tribes, at potlatch gatherings, a rich chief might kill one or two slaves, just to demonstrate his immense wealth? (Something like the modern cliché of a rich businessman lighting his cigar with a $50 bill.) May we say that in the Four Corners area of the Southwest, villages raided other villages, killing and sometimes cannibalizing their victims? That the Aztec gods demanded bloody sacrifice of thousands of captives each year, and that the victims were cannibalized? That scalping existed in southwest and eastern North America before the entry of white settlers?”

That is the old canard, the old Mel Gibson fun in his Maya-land Holly-Dirt lies. Oh, just teach the youth ALL of each and every detail, no? Thank goodness we have this response to my article in the Newport News Times:

I appreciated Paul Haeder’s commentary (“Native American Heritage Month”) in the News-Times’ Nov. 12 “Viewpoint” on the Opinion page. I agree, our education system has not provided a very accurate view of Native American history in this country. In the early ’70s, I read Vine Deloria’s Custer Died For Your Sins. This book gave me a new historical perspective of Native American history, written by a Native American.

The Oregon public school system would benefit from exposing its teachers to the history of the Siletz Tribe of Western Oregon. It is available in the book The People Are Dancing Again, by Charles Wilkinson. I suggest that reading parts of this history should be required reading for Oregon high school students. As Oregonians, we should have at least a basic understanding of the history of what the Native Americans experienced when westward expansion crossed the Cascade Mountains.

As a resident of Lincoln County, I often read of how the Siletz Tribe gives back to this community, donating hundreds of thousand of dollars to coastal social programs. The Siletz and other tribes are writing their own history. They are alive and well, going forward, and we should celebrate that.

The writer is referencing the staid short piece I did for the News Times — “Native American Heritage Month.” This is the caliber of the responses on both sides of the historical line. Talking about the sacred sites is important, and recovering the sacred, is the only way to bring these sites into the mindset of youth after youth. Vine:

Standing on Sacred Ground: The four-part film.

A Lakota Sioux, Vine Deloria, Jr. is one of the most outspoken figures in Native American affairs. His works promote Native American cultural nationalism and a greater understanding of Native American history and philosophy. In his work, Deloria fights prejudice against American Indians while addressing current issues, such as political and treaty rights. He is also concerned with the struggle between a religious view of life and the secularization that science and industry promote. He warns that people need to re-evaluate their stance to planet earth or humans may be one of the few species that has permanently ruined their habitat.

“In a time of global turmoil, our planet needs the wisdom of people who remain one with their land. The Sacred Land Film Project gives voice to guardians of sacred sites around the world, offering hope for a new path forward.”

—Peter Matthiessen

He talks about how the Indian names are tied to bears — bears all over the plains, mountains, valleys. Bears are part of healing and prophecy. So are buffalo. Listen to him in the latter part of the talk above.

So, this Biden, yaks about “I stand with Mashpee” during his failed campaign for his failed presidency in 2020. It’s all political theater, which is a nice term for bold faced lies, and there are plenty of lies tied to Native Americans, at contact, and during those crazy fictional writings called Thanksgiving.

This May 16, Weeden became the youngest person elected chairman of the Mashpee Wampanoag, a tribe of 2,600 enrolled citizens. This tribal center is in Mashpee, Massachusetts. He and his tribe believe the biggest issue any tribe faces today— is land, holding onto it, getting it back.

I think that a lot of politicians say whatever they want to say to get elected. When they get there, it’s a whole different story. I was [part of the] White House Tribal Nations summit, and there really weren’t a lot of opportunities for leadership to address the administration. To add insult to injury, he’s going to be in Wampanoag territory on [Thanksgiving]—the supposed holiday that we don’t celebrate.

Oh Biden, part of that Inquisition:

Or, some days, he’s Jewish:

Or, is he that Redskin guy?

On Monday night, CNN aired Fight for the White House: Joe Biden’s Long Journey, a special program on the Democratic nominee’s career that included a popular photograph of Biden and one of his sons at what looks like a sports stadium (it’s not clear whether the son pictured is Hunter or Beau, who died in 2015). In the original photograph, which Biden himself posted on social media earlier this year, the kid pictured is wearing a maroon hat with the logo of the Washington football team which, until recently, used the Native American slur “Redskins” for its name. In the image that CNN includes in its documentary, the team logo has been entirely removed.

That is it in a nutshell, no? America whitewashing everything, even their own white washing.

Here, ending with the Time Magazine article:

Time: What’s the biggest issue the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe is currently facing?

29 year-old Brian Weeden: The biggest issues facing the Mashpee tribe right now are with our land, the health and general welfare of our tribal citizens, and climate change and environmental impacts. We were fine living off the land; we were smart people to the point where we knew how to navigate this world. Had people listened to us, I don’t think we’d be in the situation that we are in with global warming and everything else. But I think the biggest [singular] struggle right now for our tribe is our struggle with the federal government, which has been a battle for over 400 years.

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November 24, 2021

Everything goes Better with Coca Cola: Hitching Capitalism to Sweet Slow Death
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” — John Muir

“All things are connected like the blood that unites us. We do not weave the web of life, we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.” – Chief Seattle

The proof is in the pudding, or in this case, the soda pop! It’s complicated, but also not. When a second country to me, Mexico, is colonized by Capitalism, the results are as clear as what the billionaire class, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation class, call for — more slow death, more vulnerabilities, more money thrown at, well, shit. In this case, sugar. Fructose. Things go better with diabetes — soda.

Yes, BMGF has tens of millions invested in sugar, PepsiCo, Coca Cola, McDonald’s, Monsanto, etc. They are here for philanthropy pimping, for sure.

A picture is worth a million deaths. And, this is from rightwing, commercial loving, anti-socialism, BBC…. [‘Coca-Cola controls 73% of the Mexican fizzy drinks market, compared with only 42% in the US.’ Photograph: Alamy]

Here, a few mainstream media mush stories —
And, it is the Covid-19 narrative, man, that is cutting the brain cells of people — talk about stopping a global crisis! Defunding those stock holders and the millionaires and billionaires making money on NAFLD, cancer, diabetes: sugary death.

The global prevalence of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is approximately 25%, with Hispanic populations at greatest risk. We describe the prevalence of NAFLD in a cohort of Guatemalan adults and examine whether exposure to a protein-energy supplement from conception to two years is associated with lower prevalence of NAFLD.

This is the value of human life to the Warren Buffets, the Soros Klan, the Gates and Bezos Klans, Zuckerberg, and you then can name all those investment funds. All those retirement funds. All those investment portfolio holders. ALL of us, who have a thread of money tied to well, sugar, Coke, Pepsi, Booze, Sweetened foods. Hell, add the oil (food) and salt (food) purveyors. And we are in a time of Covid-19. It is blasphemy.

How many sugar tax bills have been shuttled by the thugs of concentrated sugars, High Fructose Corn Syrup, etc.? How many Yankees and others say that capitalism is about wonderful choices, and kids and families have a “choice” not to drink sugar drinks. Buck up and eat healthy!

This is how they think, the dirty marketers, the swines of swindles. I’ve seen sugar tax bills die in El Paso (89 percent Hispanic) and in Washington/Seattle, and in Oregon, too. Medical people, including doctors, nurses, hospitals, insurance mavens — they all invest in sugar, diabetic death.

This is emblematic of the problem — white woman, head of medicine, Mexico — [“Dr Mercedes Juan López, Mexico’s health secretary, argued against the soda tax. Photograph: Carlos Tischler/Demotix/Corbis”] If this is not part of the Eichmann Racist Evil, emanating from your heart, then you, reader, are not human!

We know it is all about Covid-19, that is, STAT, global lockdown, the end of us all, that coronaviral flu — Yet, we can harken back to Edward Bernays and his hawking cigarettes for women, pregnant ones, too. Now, Mister Frued’s Nephew Harbinger of the Worst of the Worst Propagandists, Swindler Swine Facilitator. Then, or death president, one of the dozens, Ray-gun —

Oh, hell, how about that Mexican president — “Vicente Fox, former president of Mexico, was once a Coca-Cola delivery worker.”

Okay, okay, it goes way back, selling sweet death — The Future President’s Future ex-Wife —

And, alas, if a K12 teacher, teaching social studies, history, or, hell, biology, were to go into the ill-effects of refined and non-refined sugar on the child, how HFCS is a huge issue tied to not just overweight childhood syndrome, or obesity, but all these dozens of chronic illnesses adult, and the brain fog, fatigue, hunger pangs, and how it feeds the medical fraud system called Medicine, well, that lesson would be Cancel Culture Central since, hmm, Pizza Hut (Pepsi) and Taco Bell (Pepsi) and Minute Maid (Coke) and so many other “programs, or giveaways” are tied to supporting the Swine Swindling Capitalists’ right to hook anyone on their nefarious services, products, poisons.

If you want to get rid of premature death (Covid-Coke, anyone?), then you go full communist-socialist-communitarian-It Takes a Village on the purveyors of slow, agonizing death, no? Mandatory seat belts and chairs upright and trays put away on those aluminum and plastic cigars of death, airplanes, and if you resist that, you are deep-sixed from travel on the airlines, but god forbid we put brakes and seat belts on our children’s health, and their future lives. God forbid we force food makers to make food, no poison delivery systems!

So, Fourth Industrial Revolution is real, but the anti-global confrontation of these colluding problems, it is wrong. Anything that prefigures not helping youth, and having a democratic socialist-communist form of local and national governments to clean up the air, water, education, medicine, aging, life, this is not about big brother screening your TV choices, though we know TV and Holly-Dirt has done a miraculous job of brainwashing and inciting stupidity and murderous thinking. Working globally is the only answer. Democratically. Yet, we will continue to have story after story, report after report, showing how nefarious the global capitalist, transnational penury, the trans-capital thievery, the few that own the man, unless we burn it all down.

ACADEMIA Letters:

FRUCTOSE CONSUMPTION HAMPERS GASOTRANSMITTER PRODUCTION by Elena Fauste Cristina Donis María Isabel Panadero Paola Otero Carlos Bocos, Facultad de Farmacia, Universidad San Pablo-CEU, CEU Universities, Boadilla del Monte, Madrid, Spain.

Gasotransmitters are gaseous molecules enzymatically produced by mammalian cells with a wide range of molecular and cellular effects. They are permeable to cell membranes and their levels, although low, must be strictly regulated since they work as messengers, are involved in signal transduction cascades and have specific targets in the cell (1). The first gasotransmitter described was nitric oxide (NO) as a regulator of vascular tone and macrophage activation, and later two others gases were added to the list: carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen sulde(H2S) (2). Recently, ammonia (NH3) has also been proposed as a new gasotransmitter (3). Gasotransmitter concentrations must be regulated within a specifc range as they are toxic for the cell at high levels.

Indeed, it has been proven that NO, CO and H2S inhibit cytochrome coxidase (CcOx) (4-6) and hyper ammonemia causes brain damage (7). According to the World Health Organization (WHO), non-communicable diseases are the main cause of death worldwide, with all of them sharing modifiable risk factors such as smoking, unhealthy diets, sedentarism and excessive alcohol consumption (8). In fact, unhealthy diets such as the Western diet (high in added sugars, salt and saturated fats (9)) have been related to a higher likelihood to undergo metabolic diseases such as obesity, diabetes type 2,cardiovascular diseases and hypertension (10).

Fructose, as high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) or sucrose, has been used as added sugar in sweetened beverages, processed foods and juices due to its higher water solubility and sweetening power (11), and it has been related to the increase in obesity (12), metabolic syndrome (13), non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD)(14) and insulin resistance (15). In the last decades, we and others have studied the mechanisms involved in fructose-induced metabolic disturbances and, in recent years, their connection with gasotransmitter metabolism and signaling has also become more and more evident.

Nope, you will not get this in the Build Backwards Better or Republican/Libertarian Reap Thy Profits Anyway You Can projects or media or the CDC, FDA, and the like. It’s mainstream media’s most contrary-to-business-as-usual story, and legacy media and the new media, they all require subservience to the overlords, the marketers, the advertisers, and if you look loosely, what sells on TV or on-line? Drugs, booze, food (sic), sugary stuff, treatments, insulin, blood glucose monitors, and diet pills and, well, you get the Double Bacon Cheeseburger Slathered with Eight-by-Eight-by-Eight addictive secret ingredients — 8 scoops of sugar, 8 scoops of fat, and 8 pinches of salt. Nope. How dare we even talk about messing with Swine Swindlers of Capitalism and their legions of shysters, snake oil salesmen/ women, and reaping of profits anyway they can retailers. It’s everywhere, those poisons, and Coke is just emblematic and axiomatic of the disease of consumer-rape, with just one system (soda pop), when there are thousands of systems of extracting life from the planet that do the same diseased dirty work.

More stuff I read, which again, is not on the smorgasbord table of the mainstream and off-stream mush served 24/7!
- “Why does Bayer Crop Science Control Chemicals in Brexit Britain” – Rosemary Mason
- “Does Glyphosate Acting as a Glycine Analogue Contribute To ALS” – Stephanie Seneff
- “Afterthoughts on Diaspora” – Kenneth Surin
- “How to Deal with Those Bleeping Ideas: Free Speech in the Classroom.”- Phil Venditti
- “The New Genetics and Natural versus Artificial Genetic Modification” – Mae-Wan Ho
- “Autism, Dysbiosis, and the Gut-Brain Axis” – Alex Vasquez
- “Might cholesterol sulfate deficiency contribute to the development of autistic spectrum disorder?” – Stephanie Seneff
- “Open Letter- The UK Media is silent about the Corporation that collaborated with the Nazis in Auschwitz” – Rosemary Mason
- “COVID-19 and Pesticides – A Deadly Combination” – Rosemary Mason
Now, of course, the fact there are no great water systems in Mexico, no reliable (writ large) plumbing, no graywater, storm water or sewage water collection and treatment plants, those are not the real issues capitalism wants to tackle — hint-hint! The fact that there are no free water wells, water delivery systems, no, this is not a problem to the Nestle and Pepsi and Jolly Green Giants laying waste to Mexico’s aquifers and water supplies. All of these deficits and thefts brought to us/them by Neoliberalism, the Swine Swindlers, those who let the top soda pop and beer and booze outfits run across lands globally and steal watersheds globally, not the problem. Repeat — Capitalism is STEALING and DEALING in poisons. And, then, this process is polluting bodies, at a very young age, and that is in the baby’s bottle, early, that bubbly dark stuff, Coca Cola. But, then, the dirty water, microbe-born, death waters, black pools of the twin plants, all the hard poisons leeching into Mexico’s water supplies, not the problem. No, let’s serve Coke instead of H2O, that is, fixing our human right to water. The problem, in Swine Swindlers’ hands, in their minds, is that there is not enough free unfettered take-it-all-if-you-can, capitalism, in order to hook more kids on sugary death-sicles!

But we have Killer Coke/Minute Maid to thanks:
You’ve seen this graphic above, and this one, too — that is the disease of Swindling Swines of Capitalism:

And, sure, tons of college campuses, including all those I taught at, had campaigns against Killer Coke, and in my case, I was the instigator of this as a part-time/adjunct/freeway flyer faculty member. These are teachable moments, not grand strategies to actually hobble Killer Coke and the Swine Swindlers of Capitalism. But, here, old Coke tries to buy off not just the schools and college/university campuses, but the activists — “How Coca Cola Tried to Buy Off Ray Rogers and End the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke”

It’s worth putting down the entire short piece here, quoting the above source:

Quoting — ‘For the past fifteen years, Ray Rogers has spearheaded the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke.

Rogers says it’s a campaign to hold Coca-Cola Company, its bottlers and subsidiaries accountable and “to end the gruesome cycle of violence and collaboration with paramilitary thugs, particularly in Colombia.”

“These atrocities include the systematic intimidation, kidnapping, torture and murder of union leaders and members of their families in efforts to crush their unions,” Rogers says. “In countries like Colombia and Guatemala, a strong union can mean the difference between life and death for people who dare to challenge corporate and political abuses.

In 2006, a Financial Times story labeled Rogers Coca Cola’s “fiercest foe.” Rogers and the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke are featured in a full-length documentary, The Coca-Cola Case.

Rogers says that in 2010, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce agreed to pay him $15,000 to be the keynote speaker at a luncheon in Washington, D.C. since his strategies and campaigns in fighting big business have been “so alarming and effective.”

Rogers says that Coca-Cola, a major sponsor of the U.S. Chamber, pressured the Chamber to rescind the invitation and Ray was paid a $3,000 cancellation fee which went to support the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke.

Rogers reports that in 2016 and 2017, Coca-Cola’s then CEO Muhtar Kent suggested he and Rogers should meet privately to discuss how they could resolve their differences.

“Two lengthy, no holds barred, but cordial private meetings at Coca-Cola’s office in New York City happened in May 2016 and January 2017,” Rogers’ Corporate Campaign reported last month. “Both Rogers and Kent, unbeknownst to each other, brought gifts. In the first meeting, Rogers presented Kent a container of Trader Joe’s dark chocolate coffee beans and a bottle of pomegranate juice and Ray was given a lovely handbag made by a woman in Brazil, who as part of a collective, made a living recycling Coke can flip tops as artwork ornaments in creating designer-type handbags. In the second meeting, Ray presented dark chocolate and natural juice and received bottles of extra virgin olive oil produced from Kent’s olive orchards.”

“Numerous discussions also took place with another high level Coca-Cola representative through April 2017.”

“It was made clear to Rogers that if he would ‘get off Coke’s Back’ and end the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke, he would have plenty of money to carry on whatever work he decided to do and that Coke would be willing to fund a large no-kill animal shelter in NY City which Ray wanted as his reward to end the campaign.”

“Rogers made it clear that he could not be hired by, bought off or co-opted by Coca-Cola. The only way the campaign would end, he told Coke, is if justice was served relating to Coke’s complicity in well-documented human rights abuses in Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico and the U.S. Those issues have yet to be resolved.”

Coca-Cola did not return calls seeking comment for this story.’

+–+ end story

So, above, you can’t find the trailer of The Coca-Cola Case anywhere, and you can’t stream it, and YouTube has scrubbed it. HMMM. These links are dead in the sugary ocean!
- “‘The Coca-Cola Case,’ a legal thriller about the soft-drinks titan…“
  (The New York Times — May 20, 2010)
- “The Coca-Cola Case is a fascinating portrayal of corporate irresponsibility and greed… Remember that slogan — Have a Coke and a smile? Well, this doc will leave you UN-smiling.“
  (Rabble.ca — April 8, 2010)
- “Coca-Cola does not want this particular documentary to gain a significant viewership.“
  (theSheaf.com (University of Saskatchewan) — February 11, 2010)
- “You’ll never look at Coca-Cola the same…“
  (GreenMuze — February 7, 2010)
- “the explosive new film…“
  (The Boston Herald — February 5, 2010)
- “Killer Coke? Controversial film The Coca-Cola Case draws fire from soft-drink giant.“
  (Canwest News Service — January 21, 2010)
Here is the Trailer on iTunes! Now how does this all relate to Big Pharma/Big Medicine/Big Finance/Big Food/Big Retail/ Big Ag?

How many times in one day do we need to make the analogy of Capitalism as Cancerous Disease? Or, Capitalism as Pollution? Capitalism as War Lord? Capitalism as Survival of the Fittest? Capitalism as Eugenics 201?

Or, Capitalism as the Value of Nothing Being A Lot?

How about, Capitalism as Inflammatory Disease? Check it out, even though on George Soros’ Democracy Now:

Yes, the Covid-19 story is not handled well, in part of this DN piece, for sure, but again, so much bandwidth, man, the bandwidth — the ideas of this book are powerful, and old for us lefties, us commies.

Boldly original, Inflamed takes us on a medical tour through the human body. Unlike a traditional anatomy book, this groundbreaking work illuminates the hidden relationships between our biological systems and the profound injustices of our political and economic systems. Decolonizing heals what has been divided, reestablishing our relationships with the Earth and one another. (source)

A better analysis of vaccinations versus immunization, germ theory versus terrain medicine theory, go here:

Again, highly refined and deep analysis of the Vaccination Pogrom — “Vaccination: Most Deceptive Tool of Imperialism.” Read and follow the end notes/bibliography.

The real underlying cause of deaths in epidemics is the dysfunctional health care system brought about by chronic socio-economic underdevelopment characteristic of a semi-feudal and semi-colonial society victimized by imperialism, not the loss of vaccine confidence due to the “Dengvaxia scare”.

Corporate hijacking of the health care system with the complicity of government, international institutions, mainstream medicine and various cohorts deprived the people of their right to health. Profit has become the primary driving factor in addressing a public health problem, not public welfare.

Deregulation, privatization and liberalization, the hallmarks of corporate globalization, the new face of imperialism, have practically wiped-out whatever remaining affordable basic needs and social services, especially health services, are available to the majority of the population. Worse, under the guise of economic development, big business juggernaut in mining, plantations, coal, dams and other environmentally destructive and socially disruptive mega-projects have devastated community-empowering and truly sustainable, poverty alleviating, health promoting and climate resilient initiatives.

The concomitant and worsening assaults (including extrajudicial killings) on fundamental human rights have subjected marginalized people to extreme physical, biological, psychological and social stress and have repeatedly been forced to be displaced from their land, homes, crops and other means of survival. Under these circumstances, infectious disease epidemics and other serious health problems are bound to arise and worsen. The root cause of epidemics in this country is imperialism. Liberation is the answer, not vaccination.

Here is Raj’s latest documentary, a good one, in fact — I watched it through CAGJ (Community Alliance for Global Justice strengthens the global food sovereignty movement through community education and mobilization), “After a special virtual screening of The Ants & the Grasshopper, CAGJ held a Q&A session with co-director and co-producer Raj Patel. About the film : “Anita Chitaya has a gift; she can help bring abundant food from dead soil, she can make men fight for gender equality, and she can end child hunger in her village. Now, to save her home from extreme weather, she faces her greatest challenge: persuading Americans that climate change is real. Traveling from Malawi to California to the White House, she meets climate sceptics and despairing farmers. Her journey takes her across all the divisions shaping the US, from the rural-urban divide, to schisms of race, class and gender, to the thinking that allows Americans to believe they live on a different planet from everyone else. It will take all her skill and experience to help Americans recognize, and free themselves from, a logic that is already destroying the Earth.” Raj Patel co-directed and co-produced the film with Steve James, among others; James is renowned for his 1992 documentary Hoop Dreams. Learn more about the film:

So, for vapid, checked-out, colonized, Swine Swindling Bastards and Bitches, the reality is sugar is just ONE of a million ways the Capitalist Criminals hook death, disease, penury, fear, miseducation, agnotology and violence into the mass population. Taxing Coke and sugary drinks? Hmm, how about building water systems, and Socialism, and working on the problems from a holistic and systems approach, as in disease prevention (this is anti-capitalist in every sense of these Swine Swindlers’ brains), is the only way. And abolishing poisons writ large.

Back to the BBC story! Ending this piece with facts!

Mexicans are the thirstiest consumers of sugary drinks in the world. Each gets through an estimated 163 litres (36 imperial gallons) on average per person every year – 40% more than an average American (who drinks 118 litres, or 26 gallons).

And this, says the government and the health campaigners, is a serious problem.

All too often, the headlines coming from Mexico focus on the country’s bloody drugs war – which has claimed over 100,000 lives in the past decade. Type 2 diabetes, on the other hand, kills 70,000 per year.

So acute is the problem that two years ago, in January 2014, Mexico introduced a national tax on sugary drinks and junk food – a 10% tax on every litre of sugar-sweetened drinks and an 8% tax on high-calorie food.

The effect of these on children is a particular concern – according to Mexico’s Health Ministry, the country leads the world in childhood obesity.

“About 10% of kids are being fed soda from zero to six months of age,” says Dr Salvador Villalpando, a childhood obesity specialist at the Federico Gomez children’s hospital in Mexico City.

“By the time they reach two it’s about 80%.”

Finally, before sending in this diatribe, or finalizing it, the breaking news, November 23, just proves my point on the sickness and triple sickness of Swines Swindling the World for Profits at the Expense of Our Slow Death —

They miss the point, though, in this anti-monopoly vs. pro-monopoly gambit:

The Biden administration on Tuesday sued to block the proposed merger of two sugar industry giants, arguing that that acquisition would erase competition and raise prices at a time when global supply chains are already under pressure.

The civil antitrust lawsuit, filed in federal court in Delaware, aims to stop the United States Sugar from buying Imperial Sugar. The corporations are rivals in the “already cozy” sugar industry, said Jonathan Kanter, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, in a press release.

“This deal substantially lessens competition at a time when global supply chain challenges already threaten steady access to important commodities and goods,” Kanter added.

U.S. Sugar is a Delaware corporation that’s privately held and headquartered in Florida. Imperial Sugar is owned by Louis Dreyfus, a global agricultural conglomerate based in the Netherlands. The deal is valued at about $315 million.

“As a result, fragile supply chains would be further strained, and American families would pay more for sugar and many staple food and beverage products,” the lawsuit says.

“This is a straightforward case: the merger of two direct competitors that will result in a highly concentrated market and lead to higher prices for a product that is vital to our country’s food supply,” the complaint adds.

“Simply put: this case is not a close call.”

Read the the stories on Commondreams or AP, any place, and you will not get a third rail, a different perspective, one that not only lambasts capitalism’s dirty hooked-on-poisons-food secret, but one that actually states that all sugar consumption, according to those docs and scientists pushing the Covid-19 Is the Worst Thing Ever story, is bad-bad. A little bit of heroin once in a while, nah. A little pregnant, nah.

Oh, that sugar! Oh that Columbus. Oh that 1619 Project, shedding light:

Khalil Gibran Muhammad in The 1619 Project (pages 70-77) brings attention the vast scale of slavery in sugar plantations, centered in Louisiana, where the working conditions were arguably even worse. Christopher Columbus brought sugar cane stalks on his second voyage and that it was the presence of slave labor that shifted sugar from a luxury commodity to what it is now.

In Europe at that time, refined sugar was a luxury product, the backbreaking toil and dangerous labor required in its manufacture an insuperable barrier to production in anything approaching bulk. It seems reasonable to imagine that it might have remained so if it weren’t for the establishment of an enormous market in enslaved laborers who had no way to opt out of the treacherous work.

…

The enslaved population soared, quadrupling over a 20-year period to 125,000 souls in the mid-19th century. New Orleans became the Walmart of people-selling. The number of enslaved labor crews doubled on sugar plantations. And in every sugar parish, black people outnumbered whites. These were some of the most skilled laborers, doing some of the most dangerous agricultural and industrial work in the United States.

Or, update the slavery to obesity and slow sweet death —

Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology, explores the damage caused by sugary foods. He argues that fructose (too much) and fiber (not enough) appear to be cornerstones of the obesity epidemic through their effects on insulin.
The post Everything goes Better with Coca Cola: Hitching Capitalism to Sweet Slow Death first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
November 19, 2021

Collusion: The End of Nature, Brought to us by Zoom

The only way to break through a totalitarian (lite) thinking is to continue using blunt force, or airy force, to expose this massive experiment in turning Americans into screen dwellers. The new ghetto is the screen.

The lockdown might be lifted, physically, for the Covdians, but in the minds of these people, the world is now shifting to the high tech, fiber optic, 5G/6G satellite-directed world.

Imagine this event, on the ecosystems of my area, now, a virtual event. It is embarrassing that science-minded people want public and community participation over zoom. No depth to why it has to be “virtual,” and no apologies for being so dense.

Or, are they dense? Are they loving this hybrid, virtual, remote work mentality? You know, I was just interviewed by the State of Oregon for a state job. The thing was on Zoom, and there were three there and me here. One question was around “how would you make virtual meetings and intakes more engaging . . . . ?” This is the new normal, alas, and this huge shift of bricks and mortar life, into the AI void, and with these huge (massive) transfers of trillions to a very few felons of the elite class, these scientists who have grants and faculty positions and tenure, they will not lead the way anywhere.

And their world is all fancy web-based crap, like cool photos, imaginary graphics, all compressed and collected to make people say, “Oh, isn’t it wonderful how wonderful the scientists working in the wonderful natural world are!!’

In this Greta-and-Company-Can-Fly-to-GLasgow-to-Protest-Their-Governments’-Fossil-Fuel-Lunacy, many people I know are so happy now that Zoom is a fixture in their lives, and that they do not have to brave the Highway 101, or the weather, or the climate warnings. These people who might be interested in ecology and marine preserves and environmental policy are usually on the left trough of the manure pile of politics called Democrats. They are, of course, the new Brown Shirts, but call them Green Shirts, or Zoom Shirts. Their world, and the one they are ushering in since youth, have no say in how things SHOULD be run. It is not a real world, but one that is full of maps and podcasts and TED Talks and faux interactive chats and Zooms:

We are talking about 14 square miles designated as a marine reserve. Then some overflow for seabird protection area. This is, again, embarrassing. There is an interpretive center at Cape Perpetua, one that I have been at for in-person events. There are parking spaces. There are so many ways these great thinkers and planners could have organized an in-person event, even with their defective masks and asinine social distancing. That, my friends, will not happen. More and more youth are getting more and more skills with the mouse, the CAD programs, with Publisher and Photoshop. Their world is a world where billionaires own everything, and living in a van with full bed, TV, running water, hell, that is what youth are going to be having to accept as more and more dictatorial thinkers run the world, run events, run programs and educational frameworks.

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 is dedicated to the research and conservation of ocean ecosystem, where take of wildlife and human development is restricted. Cape Perpetua area also contains two Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) and a seabird protection area. Unlike the reserve, these protected areas allow limited take in their boundaries.

Within the reserve, creatures large and small live in various habitats from sand, gravel, to some of the most biologically diverse rocky intertidal habitats anywhere on the Pacific Northwest. These creatures live in a unique ecosystem shaped by the ever-changing weather and tides. Some days, strong winds will pull cold, oxygen-rich water and plankton up to the surface in a process called upwelling, while on other, more stagnant days, the water loses its oxygen and becomes hypoxic.

Because of its dynamic environment, the Cape Perpetua Marine Reserve is home to a plethora of wildlife such as whales, sea lions, seals, pelicans, cormorants, rockfish, and intertidal invertebrates that fuel a complex food web between the land and sea. (source)

It’s a fear pogrom that is both sophisticated beyond Big Brother, and yet, right to the primary brain center of reptilian stupidity and violence.

Here, Edward Curtain over at Dissident Voice, covers this fear, this divide, etc. Source.

Edward Curtin returns to discuss deep politics and what links the assassination of JFK, 9/11, and Covid-19. No president since Kennedy has dared to buck the Military-Industrial-Complex, including Trump, who is part of the same system that produced both Obama and Biden. He discusses the 1967 CIA memo which told mainstream media to use the disparaging term “conspiracy theory” to quell all deviation from the official narrative, and how this propaganda technique has continued to function from JFK to 9/11 to Covid-19. Many of the same actors involved in the MIC and 9/11 continue to be involved with the drug companies, CDC, WEF, WHO, Gates Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. It’s very obvious, but the story is so frightening people don’t want to do any homework. Too many people think there is this war going on between the right and the left, in the larger frame of reference there is no difference, it’s the warfare state against the regular people, the rich versus the poor. The 4IR is an effort for total political and economic control of peoples all over the world. He believes the purpose of the vaccine mandate is for political control. Ultimately, we are in a spiritual war. The Geopolitics & Empire Podcast conducts interviews with high-profile guests on geopolitics and international affairs seeking to gain insight from experts on both the left and the right as to the true nature of current events. Read other articles by Geopolitics & Empire, or visit Geopolitics & Empire’s website.

The tricksters are at it and have been for decades. The worker — that is teachers and faculty, too, especially — is the enemy. The students are the enemy. So many billions pumped into studying the brain, psychology, neurosciences, behavioral psychiatry, etc. I saw this in 1983 when I was a graduate student, teaching college English. Some of these long in the tooth folk, who want their Vermont or Hawaii lives, but still be the teacher of record for our campus, UT-El Paso. That’s Texas, and already in the 1980s these folk wanted hybrid classes, on-line. Imagine that, critical thinking and debating writing classes, on line! Before ZOOM.

Oh, big companies would “give” laptops to workers — Ford, IBM, HP — not as gifts, but to extract MORE work out of the 40 hour week, and that is now 50 or 60 hours. That is, well, the beginning of technology destroying every aspect of our real selves.

Now, community colleges are up shit creek, pre-planned-demic, but now, too. Imagine, more and more pieces of the state budget pie reduced for Podunk community colleges — vital places of not just learning, but community events, incubators of thinking, and connections to much more than just academia. So, more and more raised tuitions, more and more part-time faculty hired, more and more hybrid classes, and now, the Zoom Doom. Imagine, one teacher on Zoom running a class of 80, 90? This is the new normal — kill the person.

The online option seems to work for all kinds of students. When the financial-aid team returned to campus in August, Bohanon opened up her schedule for in-person appointments. For the first week, no one registered to see her. She told her supervisor she wanted to add online appointments again, and reserved 8 a.m. to noon for online and the rest of the day for in-person walk-ins. “In the morning when I come in — full,” she says. Afternoon? Nothing.” Now her schedule is full every day, but all her appointments are virtual.

The push-and-pull between in-person and online courses continues for students at Southwest, but it may be starting to shift toward the latter. One of the pieces of conventional wisdom about community colleges during the pandemic is that students often dislike or fear online learning — a refrain repeated often at Southwest. But more than a year and a half after colleges transitioned to large-scale distance learning, many of the students at Southwest who persisted have begun to favor online sections over the nearly 40 percent of courses being taught in person.

Rebuild? Time for a revolution inside K12 and higher education. Regroup? Revolt neoliberalism and illiberalism and the constant attack on education. Or, attack on schooling. Constant attack on learning! These so-called leaders have collapsed, and they have crawled under their retirement accounts, and they are seeing-hearing-speaking no evil. This is the Chronicle of Higher Education, a very retrograde, conservative, cover-their-asses-rag!

The new normal is being accepted by the masses, but the mealy mouthed academics and those on the peripheral of academia are coming out like flies on shit:

Southwest and other community colleges may just have to wait out Covid. Even if the virus doesn’t completely go away, the risks may get lower and people may become more accustomed to living with it. “I really think that’s going to be the biggest thing, is time,” Brown says, “and people feeling it’s safe to completely return to, we won’t call it normal, but like the new normal.”

If there’s one thing community colleges should not do, says Eddy, of William & Mary, it’s go back to normal. “It would be a mistake to think, I just need to wait this out to come to a time where we’re going to have more openness,” she says. After a decade of gradually declining enrollments, the pandemic has brought community colleges to an inflection point where they have a chance to — may even be impelled to — make some changes, many perhaps overdue.

Read the article, and look between the lines. These people are stating that the planned pandemic made virtual learning more onerous because students didn’t have laptops and Wi-Fi, and didn’t know what a JPEG or PDF were. Oh, you get it, don’t you? Get those students free (US taxpayer paid for) computers and free (US taxpayer paid for) Wi-Fi. Bootcamps for Microsoft Office 10.0 Adobe workshops. Get those students to be on-line warriors. Take it, and you can’t leave it or you will be cancelled from society.

And this all goes back to the Zoom event, about Cape Perpetua, about 12 miles from where I live, via Highway 101. You think there will be regard for people who want trails for hiking, trails for biking, rivers for kayaking? You think that the overlords want to have us out in nature, out along highways and by-ways? These overlords want to own the world, the land, the forests, the farms, all of it, and they want security, and they want no trespassing, and they want no by-standers and witnesses.

The scientists just take it, because that’s what mechanistic folk do — strip away the A from STEAM — Science Technology Engineering Arts and Math.

This is the motherfucker, the mentality, the demented thought process, and the messed up media, all the brainwashed fuckers of the world, in a nutshell:

“I Don’t Think We Should Ever Shake Hands Again.” Dr. Fauci Says Coronavirus Should Change Some Behaviors for Good

These are madmen:

Madman and madwoman —

Terrorists and war criminals —

Billionaires ‘R Us —

This is it, man, the last frontier — education! Covid car, online programs, internet-access solutions. If you read this site, The Chronicle of Higher Education, there is not pushback, no discussion of the 4IR, the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Oh, the senseless stupidity of it all, the Covid Van.

The post Collusion: The End of Nature, Brought to us by Zoom first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
November 12, 2021

Armistice Day Turned into Love-a-killer-Navy-SEAL Day

I’m rushing this since it is officially, November 11, the dreaded day of dishonor we call Veterans Day. Parades, ceremonies, and a fake day off—Veterans Day, observed on November 11 each year, is one of the country’s 12 Congressionally designated federal holidays. Make now bones about it — this holiday is distinct from Memorial Day: more nonsense with roots from a Civil War-era tradition of decorating the graves of deceased soldiers.

Veterans Day didn’t always celebrate all military veterans. Once tagged as Armistice Day, November 11 has roots in one of the most perverted and destructive rich man’s conflicts in history.

Go back to 1918, when a world of direct and collateral damaged souls wanted an end of what was commonly called the “Great War.” World War I had slashed and burned European landscapes, but it was the beginning of that use of deadly new scientifically-approved technology — poison gas — which got things going from thereon out, war-wise. Ecocide, genocide, and entire industries on exploding things and projectiles from space. More than 30 nations were dragged into this ugly great war of planes, tanks, bombs hitting all fronts with trenches and clouds of chlorine gas against galloping horse Cavalries. Revolutions had upended the governments of many of the combatant countries, and an influenza pandemic was sweeping the world.

On November 11, 1918 at 11:00 a.m. Paris time, an armistice came into effect.

World War I was over, but wars implanted in other countries were just beginning. 10 million men were killed in action, and another 20 million were wounded worldwide. The U.S. threw into the conflict in 1917, but it alone had lost over 116,000 lives and seen about 320,000 other casualties. These are just the ledger counts, because capitalists do not count the epigenetic trauma, the death by slow PTSD, the collective horror, guilt, shame and disease of war’s multiple fronts, victims and tragedies.

The bell tolled and silence rang at 11 a.m. Armistice day was nationwide. Multiple governors declared legal holidays. All those rah-rah veterans’ associations and groups made plans to commemorate the occasion with ceremonies, religious ceremonies, and fundraising for the American Red Cross. On November 11, 1919, the New York Times noted that people around the world would hold moments of silence at 11:00 a.m.

No great speeches on peace, no great conferences on structural violence, or why blockades are deadly, or how the financial felons of war keep on taking, or what sort of torture would be befitting of the war profiteers, or no great treatises on Wall Street’s hand in things. No War is a Racket intimations, that is, in the public at large, until, well, until 1935!

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

― Smedley D. Butler, War is a Racket

Personal History Does Not Determine Outcomes

I’m named after a grandfather, Paul Haeder, who was a lieutenant in the German Navy during World War. He was one of seven brothers, and his life in Dortmund changed when he was recruited at age 17 into the Navy, as he lived on a German tall ship, where he would spend a year learning the trade of militarism, German style. Many ports that ship went to, and alas he ended up in a tri-plane, fighting the British and French. They carried hunting rifles with them to shoot at the pilots and engines. They carried round rocks to drop on the cloth wings. They had grenades to toss on trucks and soldiers below. There was no synchronized propellers for front mounted machine guns, hence the hunting rifles.

I did grow up on the Azores (USAF father) and then in France (same father, but officer, US Army). I spent time with aunts and uncles and cousins in Scotland, England and Germany. For a child — I was precocious and always around smart people who had at least THAT history under their belts. I was in the middle of old wise adults, war survivors, and young adults with education under their belts. It was an international upbringing. I was anti-military even though I was forced to be a military brat. My father was shot twice in Vietnam, and he was wounded in Korea as a 19 year old. He was a socialist, but he was also so tied to the military — cryptography — that I blasted his philosophy out of my life. He was always supportive of my education, and he threw in bucks when I needed things to survive in college. He was not a hard-ass like myself, and alas, I did the ROTC thing with my long hair while working as a journalist for the college daily rag. I wanted to learn the insights of war makers to be a revolutionary. Look where that got me, now age 64, aging out of all relevance in this by hook or by crook country.

So, that grandfather’s brothers had all emigrated to the US, Iowa and South Dakota, and Minnesota. My grandfather was in post-WWI German, trying to survive, trying his hand at anything, including Pinkerton guard on the trains (bread trains they called them) in order to shoot to kill Germans who were starving. He didn’t last long doing that, nor did he last long in the coal mines.

Ironically, he was on the Rostock, in the Battle of Jutland.

It was a huge battle off Denmark. My grandfather was on the ship being transported to another front to fly. The ship was hit, he broke his jaw, and he held up a seaman with a broken arm and shoulder and watched that war theater between the Germans and British.

The point is that war is more than just messy. You can read about the Rostock and Jutland in Wikipedia. Whoever wrote the entry loves naval war.

Rostock also participated in the Battle of Jutland, on 31 May 1916. She served as the leader of the torpedo boat flotillas, flying the flag of Kommodore Andreas Michelsen. The flotilla was tasked with screening for the battle squadrons of the High Seas Fleet. As the German fleet reached the engagement between the British and German battlecruiser squadrons at 17:30, a pair of destroyers, HMS Nestor and Nicator attempted to attack the German battle line. Rostock and a number of the battleships engaged the destroyers, which were both disabled by the heavy German fire.[5] The battleships destroyed Nestor and Nicator and their crews were picked up by German torpedo boats.[6]

At 19:32, Rostock and several torpedo boats crossed through the German line and began to lay a smoke screen to cover the withdrawal of the German fleet. Some twenty minutes later, Michelsen detached several torpedo boats to assist the badly damaged battlecruiser Lützow. By the time the German fleet had assumed its night cruising formation, Rostock fell in with the light cruisers of IV Scouting Group on the port side of the fleet. Shortly before midnight, Rostock and IV Scouting Group came into contact with the 2nd Light Cruiser Squadron. Shortly after midnight, the British 4th Destroyer Flotilla attacked the German line, where Rostock was positioned. She joined the cannonade directed against the destroyers as they pressed home their attack. The destroyers launched several torpedoes at the Germans, forcing Rostock and the other cruisers to turn away to avoid them; this pointed the ships directly at the battleships in I Battle Squadron. Rostock successfully passed through the formation, but the cruiser Elbing was rammed by one of the battleships and disabled.[7]

In the chaos of the night engagement, Rostock’s search lights illuminated the destroyer Broke. Gunfire from Rostock and the battleships Westfalen and Rheinland smothered the British destroyer; although heavily damaged, she managed to limp back to port.[8] The ship was attacked by the destroyers Ambuscade and Contest; the two ships each fired a single torpedo at high-speed settings at a range of about 1,000 yd (910 m). One torpedo struck Rostock at 1:30, though it is unknown which destroyer launched it. Rostock was also hit by three 4 in (100 mm) shells, probably from the destroyer Broke. The disabled Rostock called the destroyer S54 to join her; S54 took Rostock in tow, at times making up to 10 kn (19 km/h; 12 mph). The pair was subsequently joined by the destroyers V71 and V73, which had been detached from the flotilla to escort Rostock back to port.[9][10]

At around 03:55 on 1 June, the four German ships encountered the British cruiser Dublin. The three destroyers went alongside the crippled cruiser and evacuated her crew, while flashing the first two letters of the British signal challenge. Smoke screens were laid to obscure the identity of the German warships. After about ten minutes, S54 departed with Rostock’s crew aboard, while V71 and V73 remained. Scuttling charges had been set in the cruiser, but to ensure Rostock sank faster, the two destroyers fired a total of three torpedoes into the ship. Rostock sank bow-first at approximately 04:25, after which V71 and V73 made for Horns Reef at high speed. Of Rostock’s crew, 14 men were killed and 6 were wounded during the battle.[11] In the course of the battle, Rostock fired some 500 rounds of 10.5 cm ammunition, more than any other German ship.[10] A second Rostock, of the Cöln class, was launched in April 1918, but was not completed before the end of the war.[12]

So, back in the USA, the Haeders — all those brothers and their families — believed that the eldest brother, Paul, had perished in the Battle of Jutland. They even held a memorial for him in Waterloo, Iowa. News back then did not travel fast.

This legacy of war is in a box. Iron Cross and other German awards. The two purple hearts and one slug dug out of my old man’s chest when his helicopter was shot down in Vietnam. Bronze star, all sorts of medals, and the tri-folded American Flag given to his wife (divorced, my mom) at his graveside service at Fort Huachuca where his ashes are in a cemetery near where I used to go javelina hunting when I was still a meat eater (age 17).

Ironically, everything in my life has been anti-war, anti-imperialism, and yet, I was a college teacher in Texas, New Mexico and Washington, working on military bases teaching college composition and literature. Before that, I was a reporter for newspaper in Southern Arizona, with one of my many beats being the US military, Fort Huachuca and the aerostat balloons in the first part of militarizing the border around drugs and immigrants.

I even taught college courses at Biggs Field, Texas, at the Sergeants Major Academy. My entire life has been pulling the scales off the eyes of my students, whose vision is infused with propaganda and false history of this country, from sea to shining sea. Many of my students agreed with Butler’s short book on the racket of war. I did get some off-the-record detailed accounts of many of those soldiers’ dealings in Vietnam, the Middle East, Central America, Africa.

What this country is all about is this smoke and mirrors gambit, facades, a disjointed fake right-left divide. What this country does around the military is more than criminal. Right from the playbook of the Roman Empire. But on steroids. So much more entangled in everything, now that the world runs on finance, trillions held in BlackRock and Blackstone and 100 banks. A world where media — books, history texts, TV, film, radio, Internet — are controlled by a dozen outfits. Who owns the world are those who need public and private armies to keep us, the 80 percent, in line. It’s keeping us in line with chaos of information, with disjointed fears, with people at each other’s throats.

Here, William Blum, in a 2014 interview on a book dealing with Obama, et al — William Blum Discusses his book, America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy

That’s the same task faced by every agency of the government which has a connection to foreign policy. The same task faced by the mainstream media. They want to make it look good. They never use the word imperialism. They never say this is a big lie or it’s totally immoral, so they’re all on the same side. They all have to find ways of putting it in the best light. That’s the joint task of all these institutions. It’s as bad as World War I. These young people, they have little idea of the extreme acts of terrorism carried out by our Al Qaeda types. I’m sure the average American shares this view that suicide bombings are inhuman, but one can raise the same questions about the average American soldier. What’s been done to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan is as horrible as anything done by Al Qaeda. So, we don’t have to look for Islamic brainwashing, we have American brainwashing.

We know about Blum’s writing tied to the number of interventions (wars, killings) the US had engaged in from 1945 to 1999, when Blum’s book concludes: Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. Portions of the book can be read at: this site:

Here, his words in an article, “A Brief History of U.S. Interventions: 1945 to the Present” Z Magazine, June 1999

The engine of American foreign policy has been fueled not by a devotion to any kind of morality, but rather by the necessity to serve other imperatives, which can be summarized as follows:

* making the world safe for American corporations;

* enhancing the financial statements of defense contractors at home who have contributed generously to members of congress;

* preventing the rise of any society that might serve as a successful example of an alternative to the capitalist model;

* extending political and economic hegemony over as wide an area as possible, as befits a “great power.”

This in the name of fighting a supposed moral crusade against what cold warriors convinced themselves, and the American people, was the existence of an evil International Communist Conspiracy, which in fact never existed, evil or not.

The United States carried out extremely serious interventions into more than 70 nations in this period.

That war debt for Germany was so crushing it took 92 years after the defeat in WWI to pay off. That is the racket of the slimy ones — the bankers, the psychologists, the propagandists, the marketers, the offence weaponry corporations, the entire system propped up by royalty of all brands, as well as the elite, the money hoarders, the purveyors of death who use soldiers, civilians, crops, rivers, hospitals, schools, industries as weapons, as the casualties of war. Don’t forget about the inept media (but really stealth and capable tools for oligarchs and militarists). The Military Industrial Complex is so much more than rivets, TNT, missile parts, bombers, napalm.

Again, back to Rusty Nelson, who was asked to speak at a commencement, and he was part of the Peace and Justice Action League of Spokane, and he worked hard at anti-war activism, and activism tied to environmental and educational justice. He said a few words in that address which got him promptly scolded by the superintendent and banned from ever stepping foot on a Spokane campus (K12) again.

This is from 2005 — Pacific Northwest Weekly Inlander, my old rag:

This issue led to an insurrection in Seattle last spring. Parents at Garfield High School didn’t want recruiters targeting kids just because they are low-income or black, and the parent-teacher-student association voted to keep recruiters out.

“One piece of research I did was to find out how many times recruiters go to Lakeside, which is our (Seattle School District’s) prep school,” says Amy Hagopian, president of the Garfield PTSA. “And recruiters don’t go there. The guy I talked to, in 10 years as a career counselor, said he’s never seen Lakeside kids join the regular military. They go to the academies, like West Point. They don’t just join the Marines.”

There appears to be a similar dynamic in Spokane. Military recruiters visit Lewis and Clark High School as little as once a year, even though they are allowed in the building as many as four times a year.

At Rogers High, the recruiters come once a month. Rogers is also the only Spokane high school with an ROTC program.

There isn’t the same sense of outrage, however, that the district isn’t sticking up for more options for the kids at Rogers.

“The Peace and Justice Action League has a campaign to educate high school students about the pitfalls of recruiting. But it hasn’t taken off. We are not seeing the interest we expected from students or parents,” says Rusty Nelson of PJALS.

“Each school is different. Some schools say come anytime you want. Others say come once a quarter,” says Capt. John Richardson, an Army recruiter in Spokane.

In Spokane, a more conservative and more low-income city than Seattle, military careers have long been an honorable choice for high school grads. The military has seen little falloff in enlistments here, Richardson says: “Our enlistments have not changed over historic numbers.”

The continuing war in Iraq and the stepped-up search for recruits “has not been a concern for the school district,” says Emmett Arndt, director of teaching and learning for Spokane Public Schools. “We perceive that a military career is a viable and high-interest career for students.”

But parents and groups such as Spokane’s Peace and Justice Action League say the pressure to get recruits has increased in recent years, and students need to be shielded from high-pressure sales.

The nation’s 7,500 recruiters had a “stand-down” day on May 20 for retraining and refocus in the wake of embarrassing, and widely publicized, ethical lapses. There were no such lapses in the Spokane office, Richardson says.

Rusty and Nancy Nelson retired from the PJALS in 2009. Both people I considered friends during my 10 year stint in Spokane. Things in the MIC and the embedded encircling business and finance realm are so so much worse in 2021. An explosion of perversity and crime in the entire offence weapon game, and the tethered industries of oppression. All those collateral casualties are worth it not just in the mind of Albright, but in the minds of all those bankers and hedge fund and politicians, et al. All of them, every single one of them. who supports and defends this country.

This image is what the robber barons and the money changers and the depopulation gurus want in every country: “During a period of hyperinflation in 1920s Germany, 100,000 marks was the equivalent one U.S. dollar.”

This story of war, this history of lies, this ramping up of rah-rah rot, oh, I could go on and on, but I am on my own deadlines, hoping Dissident Voice runs this through today on the United States of Armaments’ holy day, Veterans Day, a mental place where there are no peace colleges, no peace studies (mandatory) in K12. Yes, without that version of humanity — peace, ending cold and hot wars, stopping the deadly sanctions and blockades and financial dirty dealings — our youth are handcuffed by lie after lie after lie.

Armistice — “an agreement made by opposing sides in a war to stop fighting for a certain time; a truce.”

Ahh, 16 years ago — “War and Peace In Vietnam” by Paul Haeder, The Inlander.

Oh, do the Google gulag thing, and try and find any robust, true, four year or graduate program on “peace studies.” You know, antiwar studies, teaching teachers or thinkers to pursue the antiwar ethos, the entire complicated message of getting war out of everything. There is no antiwar movement, and you will not find Peace Colleges, but you will find War Colleges, and you will find ROTC units on Jesuit campuses. Crocodile tears for mercenaries, and SEAL teams with knives and C4 explosives. This is our guy, our book seller, our celebrity, our pardoned fellow, our hero. Chief Petty Office Gallagher, US Navy:

Not in the brig for long, for murdering prisoners — see him wrist-cuffed?

And, it wouldn’t be Disneyland, La-La Land, America, without a murderer blessed by a wannabe murderer, Trump:

Other heroes —

Our boys in uniform —

Our girls, too —

Our women in civilian clothes running amok, running the racket — “How women took over the military-industrial complex: For the first time, the nation’s defense hierarchy is no longer dominated by men” !! Below — Donald Trump shakes hands with Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson as Chief Test Pilot Alan B. Norman watches during an event in July at the White House. Hewson is one of four women to serve atop four of the nation’s five largest defense contractors. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

Kathy Warden
President and CEO, Northrop Grumman
Effective Jan. 1, 2019

Marillyn Hewson
President and CEO, Lockheed Martin
Effective Jan. 1, 2013

Phebe Novakovic
Chairman and CEO, General Dynamics
Effective January 2013

Leanne Caret
President and CEO, Boeing Defense, Space & Security
Effective February 2016

Ellen Lord
Undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment
Effective August 2017

Heather Wilson
Secretary of the Air Force
Effective May 16, 2017

Lisa Gordon-Hagerty
Administrator, National Nuclear Security Administration
Effective Feb. 22, 2018

Andrea Thompson
Undersecretary of state for arms control and international security
Effective June 19, 2018

Amen! May they all go the way of the Dodo, and I mean that figuratively. Because we know what harsh minds they have, what machinations are brewing in their violent brains, and how their violent tendencies are washed away with Georgetown and Harvard university MBA’s/JD’s and inside their rich lives and with their jet-setting ways, all part of the War is a Racket formula, updated AI and Drone and Pathogens and Satellite style, 2021.

This General,

Turned into this, thank goodness —

Ahh, Butler, stopping a coup against Roosevelt, against the elected (sic) president, and, of course, a Bush in Hand is involved:

In 1934, a colossal claim reached the American news media: There had been a plot to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in favor of a fascist government. Supposedly in the works since 1933, the claims of the conspiracy came from a very conspicuous and reliable source: Major General Smedley Butler, one of the most decorated war heroes of his time. Even more unbelievable were his claims of who was involved in the plot – respected names like Robert Sterling Clark, Grayson M.P. Murphy, and Prescott Bush. While news media at the time mocked Butler’s story, recently discovered archives have revealed the truth behind Major General Butler’s claims. (light reading source)

U.S. BUDGETARY COSTS: $8 TRILLION

The vast economic impact of the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere is poorly understood by the U.S. public and policymakers. This paper estimates the budgetary costs of war, including past expenditures and future obligations to care for veterans of these wars.

HUMAN COST: OVER 929,000

The number of people killed directly in the violence of the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere are approximated here. Several times as many civilians have died due to the reverberating effects of these wars. The methods of accounting are described in this paper.

GEOGRAPHIC REACH: OVER 85 COUNTRIES

From 2018 to 2020, the U.S. government undertook what it labeled “counterterrorism” activities in at least 85 countries, in an outgrowth of President George W. Bush’s “Global War on Terror.” This map displays air/drone strikes, on-the-ground combat, “Section 127e” programs, military exercises, and operations to train and/or assist foreign forces.

PEOPLE DISPLACED: 38 MILLION

38 million people have been displaced by the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and the Philippines.

The post Armistice Day Turned into Love-a-killer-Navy-SEAL Day first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.
November 11, 2021

Another Genocide Month: Plying the Ignorance of K12, USA Lower/Higher Ed
Here we go, what will most likely be published in the Newport News Times, two-times a week dwindling newspaper. I will then follow up, for sure, at the end of this fit-for-small-town-news column.

November is National Native American Indian Heritage Month

By Paul K. Haeder

Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.

– Chief Seattle

It’s sad to gauge the ignorance Central Coast residents possess regarding Native American history and present day activities: education, culture, arts, language and political engagement.

The month of November is mostly the only time K12 students learn about Native Americans, and even then, it is most always in the past tense and lessons about Indians as helpless “wards of the state.”

Most of my students over four decades have had trouble with the concept that hundreds of books — especially textbooks — can lie. That first week of class, we research students’ family lines – those not native come from myriad of places. We then make up a passport of those countries they or their ancestors came from.

Accordingly, I steal them for a few weeks. Eventually, we see this theft as a process of stealing their own pasts, their histories, and their very identities.

I run into people DAILY in Lincoln County, who most vociferously display ignorance and outright racism when discussing Native Americans.

However, I’ve clashed with this ignorance in other parts of the USA: Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Washington, and Oregon.

I’ve confronted college students’ parents who wanted to give my department heads a piece of their mind about the materials students in my research writing, composition and literature classes were asked to read, view and discuss.

I am embarrassed at the ignorance of who and what Columbus was and represents to many millions of people who are not Anglo Americans. Many college students do not know when the Civil War was fought (or why) or what James Madison or Frederick Douglass did.

Most do not know which Native lands their schools or neighborhoods are built upon. For sure, though, they enter the classroom with this myth of a brave fellow named Christopher Columbus “who discovered America” (sic).

Again, school textbooks have, by omission or otherwise, lied to them.

Today more than five hundred federally-recognized Indigenous nations comprise nearly three million people. Today’s doctors, lawyers, educators, nurses, construction workers and, yes, homeless, sick and substance abusers, are the descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land.

I’ve utilized interviews of, and essays by, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz to enlighten students (and de facto, their parents/ the public) on a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples.

The original peoples did resist expansionism and genocide. In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz takes readers into a deep dive debunking the official founding myth of the United States.

Part of the book and teachings give students a sense of how policy against Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize their territories, displacing or eliminating them.

This gives students who might be watching (or attending) COP26 (climate change summit in Glasgow) a sense of a worldwide effort by Indigenous activists to stop the pollution, water theft, elimination of ancestral lands through outright criminality.

Teaching about Native American history, I can challenge students to reflect upon their future, whereupon the youth understand they must act locally, learn deeply their own regions but also think and respond globally.

Global Witness’s, Last Line of Defense, looks into land defenders around the globe who have been murdered for fighting for their right to water, land and liberty. Teaching about Native American present day issues, we will broach these larger issues.

We don’t have to go far back to see how the fight in the US for Native American sovereignty is a constant reckoning with racist roots:
- In August 2011, environmental and indigenous groups launched a massive campaign designed to press President Obama not to approve Phase IV of the Keystone XL Pipeline project that would run through and near tribal lands, water resources, and place of spiritual significance.
- In 2013, the Havasupai Tribe Files a Lawsuit to Stop the Operation of a Uranium Mine.
- On April 1st, 2016, citizens of the Standing Rock Lakota Nation and ally Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota citizens, under the group name “Chante tin’sa kinanzi Po” founded a Spirit Camp along the proposed route of the bakken oil pipeline, Dakota Access. They are dedicated to stopping the Dakota Access pipeline, illuminating the dangers associated with pipeline spills and the necessity to protect the water resources of the Missouri river.
The educators I have met in the Lincoln County School District who work with the youth of Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians on the history, culture and current struggles of the Central Coast original people are amazing and should be regarded as cultural heroes.

What Local Residents Really Can’t Take

The amount of racism I experienced teaching/subbing just a year in this Coastal County is not so unusual, but still disheartening. This concept of “we beat them, so they have to eat our crow” is how the lowly, the poor speak, and the more educated, well, they have seven syllable words and books 22 people read that say the same things, but in a thousand pages.

Hick, small-town, and backwards? Nah, the great liberal city of Portland now is going after BIPOC.

Yeah, this is a story, November 3, 2021, the blue state, the build back better retrograde land:

“Analysis finds property owners in Portland’s most diverse, gentrifying areas hardest hit by code violation fines”

An analysis by a Portland city watchdog found that complaints about property maintenance have been highly concentrated in the city’s most diverse and rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods.

The report from the city ombudsman’s office made public Wednesday showed that neighborhoods with some of the fastest-rising home prices, and those with the most racially diverse residents, tend to also face the most financial consequences for property violations like overgrown grass, trash in a yard or a deteriorating building.

But back to the Native American Indian Heritage Month. I have countless fights with co-workers, members of the public, students, and more. Countless. As if I am the first asshole in their lives to put up a resistance to their racism. It is a deep racism. All the way to the core, and while I don’t pull my revolutionary anti-USA, anti-Military, anti-Anything-to-do-with-capitalism rank on them immediately, I do not stand for insipid ignorance that pushes racism as a way to delineate the victors and the losers. Again poor white trash, or rich white trash, complaining about China, about billionaires, about misrepresentative government for, by, because of the rich, the lobbyists, on both sides of the red-blue manure pile. Yet, they do not see themselves now as the losers in this billionaire’s game. Nope. Every social safety net, every infrastructure net, every security net, frayed, cut, burned, and they still believe that the Indians, or the Africans, or whomever, if they are under the thumb of this or that white great savior, so be it. But, again, these whites losing everything, including their Oxi lives, their coronary arterial clogged lives, but they do not see that as “well, we are the losers in this rich man’s/oligarchy system, so shut up and take the comeuppance delivered . . . just like we think the conquered tribes should too.”

Old Teddy — Swing a Big Racist Stick, Roosevelt, oh, that family!

When Theodore Roosevelt took office in 1901, he already had a long legacy of animosity toward American Indians.

Seventeen years earlier, Roosevelt, then a young widower, left New York in favor of the Dakotas, where he built a ranch, rode horses and wrote about life on the frontier. When he returned to the east, he famously asserted that “the most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian.”

“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every 10 are,” Roosevelt said during a January 1886 speech in New York. “And I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” (source)

And, so, what does this racist’s offspring have to say? You got it, once a racist from their loins, always a millionaire racist with loins to breed more and more racists:

“He was a man of his times,” said Tweed Roosevelt, a great-grandson to Roosevelt and interim director of the Theodore Roosevelt Association. “In his presidency, he wanted the Native Americans to experience the American dream, but to do that by assimilating. The Indian population had been shrinking for a long time, and he believed that if they assimilated, that meant prosperity for everyone.” (source)

And Build Back Better Biden, oh, man, 2021, and his level of enlightenment, whew:

There’s no federal environmental impact statement on this project, which is why we want Joe Biden to stop it. I mean, they stole 5 billion gallons of water, fracked 28 rivers out, and then they have this broken aquifer losing 100,000 gallons a day of water. They have no idea how to fix this stuff, since January. You know, it’s really horrible up here. So, you know, Enbridge has been trying to rush to get this online before the court will rule against them, because, generally, courts have not ruled in favor of pipelines. That’s the status that we have seen, you know, in the federal court ruling on the DAPL, where the federal court ordered them to close down. This is the same company. Enbridge was 28% of DAPL. And when the federal court ordered them to close down the pipe, they said no. When the state of Michigan ordered them to close down a pipe this last May, they said no. So they’re just trying to continue their egregious behavior.

It’s so tragic that, you know, on one hand, the Biden administration is like, “We are going to have Indigenous Peoples’ Day, but we’re still going to smash you in northern Minnesota and smash the rest of the country.” Same thing, you know, Klobuchar and Smith, the two Minnesota senators, shameful their lack of courage, not only for Indigenous people but for the planet, you know?

When I left there to go to the second gathering of another couple thousand people closing down the line at the headwaters of the Mississippi, shortly after that is when they came in with the helicopter and kicked up this sandstorm so everybody could get all beat up by sand. And I just want to put out: That’s a federal agency; that’s not a state agency that came in. Most of the cops have been just financed by Enbridge, but that helicopter was financed by Biden. So, we have some really — we’re really concerned that Department of Homeland Security would come in and basically assault Indigenous people in our own homeland.

— Winona LaDuke

And this is what a strong advocate for Native American truth gets in the USA: You will have to read between the crap lines of Mother Jones, if you want the entire story — Churchill is 73 now, “I Never Claimed I Was F***ing Sitting Bull“:

Standing before the crowd, the 69-year-old Churchill cut the image of the bomb-throwing radical—“a traitor,” as O’Reilly put it—that he’d been cultivating his entire life: 6-foot-5 in cowboy boots, with a long gray-black ponytail cinched with a black band and his waist lassoed with a beaded belt. He grit his teeth while talking, like he was chewing tobacco, and spat out his words with disgust. “American jockstrap sniffers,” he called his critics, in particular the academics who’d picked apart his scholarship and helped get him fired. He compared them to SS officers, to apparatchiks helping the trains of a supposedly corrupt University of Colorado system run on time. “That’s what Eichmann did,” he said. The crowd gasped with delight.

Churchill’s penchant for this comparison, ad-Nazium, runs deep. Each of his 18 books is a brick in a monumental project dedicated to proving that Native Americans were subjected to a genocide comparable to the Holocaust. The day after September 11, he published an essay describing the stockbrokers and technocrats who died in the Twin Towers as “little Eichmanns.” Right-wing media was incensed: The O’Reilly Factor aired 41 segments on him. The Weekly Standard tagged him “the worst professor in America.”

Back on the highway, Churchill stomped on the pedal and gunned it to 80 mph. He lit his last Pall Mall. “I’m only human,” he said, as the city he no longer recognized gave way to farmland and snowy peaks. He went even faster—85, 90.

It was as though he were trying to outrun Boulder, but without a clear destination in mind. The seatbelt warning screamed. “It hurts,” he said. “I’ve been hurt. No one said the fucking process of decolonization was going to be painless.”

[Ward Churchill in 2006, before he was fired from the University of Colorado. Thomas Boyd/Zuma]

So, any National Indigenous People’s month should be National Indigenous People’s Year, full of reparations, full of the white man’s own burdens cast away on some Gates or Soros or Trump Island.

And of course, it is Heineken, brothers and sisters. Of course, AMLO, el presidente de Mejico, is not socialist. Wine, soda pop, booze, beer.

In front of the cameras of a national newspaper, he showed the arid land where there used to be fruit trees:

“All of this disappeared due to lack of water; because we don’t have enough water. We do not have a permit to extract water with a well, and we would like Blanca Jimenez, the head of CONAGUA, to consider us before the large water consuming companies. Heineken has more than 12 wells, and the aquifer is overexploited.”

The Kumiai people don’t have water to plant. Óscar recently participated in an assembly and in organizational meetings for the self-determination of the Kumiai people; to defend the water against the constant assault of the corporations. He was always on the lookout to prevent wineries, foreigners or avaricious locals, (he called them “vivillos”), from taking land away from the community. (source)

This has been going on throughout Mexico’s history with those drug-dealing and neoliberal and thieving last six presidents — 36 years since they serve 6 year terms. Since 2017, Mexicali resistance groups have been defending the capital of Baja California’s water supply against foreign investment brewery Constellation Brands. Booze all with these double dealings and contracts with the state government of Baja California and its governor Francisco “Kiko” Vega.

Of course, Constellation Brands is a Fortune 500 company, an international producer and marketer of beer, wine and spirits with recognizable imported brands such as Corona Extra, Corona Light, Modelo Especial, Modelo Negra, Pacifico and Ballast Point.

Ahh, not just booze — Coca-Cola, FedEx, Walmart, Samsung and Hyundai are among the more than 400 companies stealing water and polluting rivers and water systems.

Baja California governor accuses big US companies of water theft

Man, is this coming close to home — since 1981 when I was a reporter in El Paso, the entire black lagoons and multiple strange diseases from pollutants coming from the transnational twin plants (maquiladoras) got many of us militarized against these pigs of profits. Babies born with part of their brains outside their skulls. Flesh eating parasites. More and more cancers. This is the gift that keeps on giving in capitalism, and that was 40 years ago.

And it is, of course, worse: “That corruption contributed to chronic under-funding of the state water agency, known as the Comisión Estatal de Servicios Públicos de Tijuana or CESPT, Bonilla said. To cover up the water theft, the auditor says, some companies also installed their own clandestine drainage systems to illegally discharge contaminated water into Tijuana’s already strained storm drains and canal.”

Here’s a student at Cal State Fullerton:

In a 2016 letter to Coahuila state Governor Rubén Moreira, former Mayor Leoncio Martínez Sánchez of the municipality of Zaragoza wrote, “We have no water for human consumption.”

The ache I feel from that single sentence grows in addition to anticipating the worst to come once the brewery completes its Mexicali plant. There is not one community in that city I don’t worry about. Constellation Brands damaged Zaragoza, so who’s to say it won’t hurt my home as well?

I have yet to see people move away from beers like Modelo, mainly my peers at Cal State Fullerton. — “Column: Modelo’s time is up after shady business” by Rebecca Mena

So yes, this is National Indigenous People’s Year, Decade, Century. As always, it’s about the beer, the coffee, the sugar, the needless shit of tourism and the rich and the disposable income fucks:

In October 2019, the Mexican Association of Beer Makers (ACERMEX), an organization similar to the United States’ Brewers Association, estimated the country would surpass 1,000 craft beer companies by the start of 2020, many of whom are based in the state of Baja California. But this persistent rise of beer businesses has been fraught with roadblocks, forcing scrappy entrepreneurs to fight tooth and nail to operate openly.

These obstacles range from a near-complete stranglehold of the market by Anheuser-Busch InBev–owned Grupo Modelo and Heineken-owned Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma to prohibitively expensive import taxes on ingredients. When asked what’s stifling Baja breweries’ growth, Collin Corrigan, a San Diego native and founder of Ensenada’s Cervecería Transpeninsular, just laughs. “Do you have a couple days to listen? I could go on for hours.”

So that Dutch company is still the colonizer, and those indigenous heroes are murdered so the 12 wells that this amazing man was protesting can continue to pump while thousands of people can’t grow bean, squash, tomatoes, and more. Ownership of Heineken Holding N.V is listed on the NYSE Euronext Amsterdam. Its single investment is Heineken International. It is majority owned by L’Arche Green N.V an investment vehicle of the Heineken family and the Hoyer family. All in the family, in MEXICO, Baja!

Native Americas Month, no? Turtle Island. All of the Americas.

[Óscar Eyraud Adams: A Warrior Who Defended the Water of the Kumiai People]

And then, the white guy (Louis Wilson, Global Witness senior adviser) with the British accent tells us today on Amy “Soros” Goodman this —

Absolutely. So, the stories that we hear — and they’re each, in each instance, a tragedy, but as you look at the global picture, you see a common thread: The threats against environmental activists are caused by the same forces that are driving the climate crisis. So, the same force that is pulling minerals out of the ground, that is felling trees, that is polluting our air, is also causing violence and threats against activists.

So, the case you’ve just referenced in Mexico was just a month prior to Fikile’s death. An activist called Óscar Eyraud in Tecate, in northern Mexico, had been protesting for years water access. His community, an Indigenous community there, had been denied access to traditional water resources, at the same time as a big corporation, Heineken, was granted additional access by the local government. Óscar was murdered on September 22nd. And nobody, I think, would suggest that Heineken directly organized that killing, but it’s clear that they created the conditions that made that murder possible. And it’s very difficult to see that murder, or indeed many of the other 227 murders, taking place without that resource extraction by big companies.

Link

And this is the stuff of Americans, of the consumers, the consummate consumers and thieves of cultures, both indigenous and those in conquered lands of their own doing. “Baja Beer Is Crushing It — The craft beer scene in Baja is emerging from San Diego’s shadow and coming into its own” by Beth Demmon February 10, 2020 — San Diego Magazine

This is the heartlessness of the American and Canadian and European and Australian and elites in all the other capitalist strongholds scene. Cancel Culture, for sure — no more people of the land, no more farmers of the land, no more cultures of the land, no more unique tribes and communities of the land, no more languages and arts of those people. It is all Edward Bernays, Madison Avenue and the other bourgeois sickness that is the “scene.”

And this, of course: “Every Monday night in the small community of Shiprock, New Mexico, a group of young Navajo leaders meet to decide how they will help their community. For more than seven years, the Northern Diné Youth Committee has worked to give youth opportunities to directly make changes within their community. But while the NDYC works to make changes, many members also consider their own futures, commitments to family and the world outside of the Shiprock. While they love their community, they all must consider their options both on and off the reservation.”

So there you have it — Heineken, oh, the innocence of this Dutch Company and the Family, man, the Family.

And relevant for COP26, the green porn, man, killing native communities, one activist after another. The horror, man, the horror of it all.

“Heineken Mexico has been present in Baja California for 76 years, and represents employment for 2,200 citizens, which are added to 100 employees, who operate in a brewery, in nine distribution centers and in continuous improvement,” said Escobedo.

On the other hand, Oscar Galvez, General Director of Corporate Affairs of Heineken Mexico, stated that the company’s commitment is based on the sustainable development of the country and Baja California. Proof of this is that since 2015 the company began the transition from a linear economy to a circular economy and implemented ecological chillers in which 98% of its components are recycled or reused and achieved a significant reduction in CO2 emissions.

It is worth noting that Baja California ranks fourth in beer production in Mexico and third in job generation.

The post Another Genocide Month: Plying the Ignorance of K12, USA Lower/Higher Ed first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
November 5, 2021

Quitting is a Mental Health Decision
Well well, some of us try-try. We end up having to take pittance jobs, with pitiful nonprofits, where the bottom line is, well, poverty pimping.

So in a time of Covid Capitalism, in a time of quick silver circling the drain, quitting after 5 weeks on the job may appear rash, or self-defeating.

But here is the rub — working in Oregon, on the coast, in areas that are tourist-centric, rural, redneck, we have to juggle our principles and our ethics with the prevailing job market. Social services in USA are feces factories, and in Oregon, we as a state hit rock bottom. Not to take anything away from the rock bottom that Georgia claims, as we see in the Intercept, an article, “Judge, Lawyer, Help, Case Dismissed — Atlanta’s Mental Health Problem — and Ours” by George Chidi:

About 62 percent of Georgians believe they may be foreclosed on or evicted in the next two months for being behind on payments, according to a U.S. Census Bureau survey conducted last month. It is by far the highest percentage in the United States.

There aren’t actually enough marshals to process all of the evictions that are coming. People will be forced from their homes in fits and spurts. Many residents will look for relief from Georgia’s Department of Community Affairs, which has a $1 billion allocation for emergency rental assistance from the federal government.

Good luck.

After eight months with cash in hand, the department had spent about 9 percent of its money. The federal government is probably going to claw some of the remaining cash back.

Chidi’s piece follows one woman, who lives in her feces, half naked, in Atlanta. His perspective is on mental illness, generational trauma, inept systems of oppression, and the disgusting nature of Americans. One super user person — her name is Harmony — has been to court, has been busted, has been ambulanced to the ER multiple times, has been forcefully evaluated and drugged. Tens of thousands a year just for one person. Some super users, as they are called, are costing taxpayers a million bucks or more a year in the penury-ripoff medical-mental health-nonprofit-policing systems of oppression. The housing-first model can’t work in capitalism, and the attendant mental illnesses, outright and brewing, in the tens of millions of Americans will be dealt with (sic) through fines, tolls, penalties, surcharges, fees, taxes, imprisonment, probation, handcuffs, rough sleeping on America’s streets, slow death, traumatic death.

Pretty hardboiled this country, these systems are! And, after five weeks, I had to quit a job where my requirement was supposedly to help people living in poverty, living with mental illnesses, with traumatic brain injuries, with developmental disabilities, get job ready, get their job profiles and interview skills up to speed, and to get them jobs that are in most cases, Customized. That term is a double-edged sword, really, since in Oregon, the job of employment specialists like myself is to to find competitive, integrated employment. That sounds grand, but the reality is most of the clients I have served here at this new ex-company and for years elsewhere need bridges: guys like me speaking with employers, the business’ other employees, with the client, and with an eye to part-time work with accommodations requested, i.e. some tasks removed from the job, some coaching and supervision by the social services’ agency, and a lot of check ins with the employer, as well as natural supports and the client and his or her team of service coordinators, housing support staff, parents, guardians, state brokerages, and state vocational rehabilitation, as well as mental health teams when applicable, supporting him or her.

This shit-show company (the identify and identifying characteristics have been changed herein) has headquarters two hours south of my county, and they have money making services that employ people with DD and ID, and, well, they are run by broken people, the services and the company in general. I’ve written about this before — Social services is populated with people living with a boat-load of chronic illnesses, complex PTSD, even mental illness. There are many in this field with physical disabilities. Unfortunately, these people on the coast, where I live and work, are loud, obnoxious, jealous of people with graduate degrees. They are racist, ageist, plain crude, rude and ugly in the way they talk out of the sides of their mouths. They are American, as American as this new putrid governor of Virginia, Youngkin, another racist, backward, millionaire of the private equity kind (inequity for us, the 80 percent). As American as Hunter Biden. As American as David Duke. Just on a poor scale. Trump and Jerry Springer. So many examples of the sickness of Americans, from academics, to FDA props, to your local gas station attendant.

In my case, the supervisor unloaded on me — on day one — her personal life, her own prejudices, demonstrating all sorts of sad non-supervisorial ticks and attitudes. Unprofessional seems to be her middle name. She had to unload on me about her own broken family background, her own personal struggles, and all of the bad stuff. She’d say, “Well, this is between you and me … and if you try to throw me under the bus, watch out.”

Funny how this field attracts broken people, and when you put these people into a supervisorial role, they take it seriously — boss, man. Broken bosses!

Seriously, a fifty-something single mother of four boys expected the “yes, boss” crap from me. She is seriously flawed, and on day one she trashed the state workers, the counselors I had to work with since they are the people who refer clients to this nonprofit, which profits off of the homelessness, the intellectual disabilities, the mental and psychiatric disabilities, the trauma, the life circumstances of their clients.

Having a supervisor, or manager, telling me “I’m a beaner,” and then laughing that she has “Mexican roots,” and then thinking and saying, “Yes, it may be crude and racist, but I am okay with it.”

A boss who is confused about LGBTQA+, about transgenderism and transitioning, and yet, she has a military-based (Navy) son who is marrying another man, and that is how this redneck, broken world is — still calling people faggot, as an enduring term. She laughed about it.

Again, this messed up, crude, disgusting country (yes, you can call anyone anything you want to in the privacy of your home, in the open air of your backyard and amongst your sick family and friends) is broken from top to down. But this is day one, day two, and on and on, of a low paying job.

I quit yesterday, and my tendered resignation was about all sorts of terrible things this supervisor was doing. You are left out there in the middle of the muck when the boss ma’am is racist, sexist, loud, cussing, and yakking about her dating life, yakking to me, a man disinterested in this crap, and, me, someone who just wanted to get down to brass tacks with clients and their support network.

The company is run by a guy who is ex-military, Army, and the entire organization is full of broken, sick and troubled people. There you have it, no, troubled, sick, broken people working with adults with broken lives, troubled minds, sicknesses from developmental disabilities and beat down emotionally and physically by weathering and the trauma of foster care and group homes and bad-bad families and schools.

At the heart of it all, read Patrick Lawrence, “The Manufacture of Decline — Americans suffer the same disabilities as the Europeans of 1919: They cannot think. They cannot speak plainly among themselves.”

It is sobering, to put the point mildly, to sit in America in 2021 and read the reflections of a writer sitting in Paris 102 years ago. The world America made in the post–1945 years has ended just as the Great War ended the world Paul Valéry, born in 1871, knew as his own.

And Americans suffer the same disabilities as the Europeans of 1919: They cannot think. They cannot speak plainly among themselves.

They are, in a phrase, manufacturing their own decline as they flinch from the world as it is in this, our post–American century.

It makes sense that I would unfold this catharsis from my life in this attempt at closure, at DV, a newsletter, “a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and social justice.” It makes sense that I tell the world — a few readers — that is — things stink in Denmark, or Detroit, or Oregon. This is called ground-truthing, and as I age out of this society (aging out means that this society gives shit about you, gives shit about your background, gives shit about your great licks and qualities, your travel and depth of life), the micro/macro aggressions heaped up on the feces pile that these people, low or high, rich or poor, broken or semi-fixed, closeted tyrants or semi-narcissists, just grows.

Failure after failure, I have weathered, leaving these trauma-inducing places behind. I have a thousand stories, or more. Maybe the nonfiction book or anti-memoir memoir, about all the people I have worked with, taught, reported on, been with throughout my walkabout. Again, who buys, who reads, who cares?
- How the Salvation Army Lives Off (and thrives with) a Special Brand of Poverty Pimping
  Part-One: The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous and the Salvation Army’s Faith-based ‘One Treatment Fits All’
- Brother/Sister Can You Spare a Warm Shelter? What we see behind the faces of a homeless family
- Insanity of Social Work as Human Control — Contemporary penal institutions are not often the penitentiaries themselves, but, are immersed within communities, manifesting in social welfare programming
- Death by a Thousand Cuts: When the Cures of Big Pharma are Worse than the Diseases; The more chemicals, drugs, vaccines, additives, toxins they make, the more difficult it is to escape from big business’ straight-jacket
In this eco-porn world now, where all we hear is about COP26, again, again, and again, Deja vu, the same rotting messages. Climate capitalism has always been the agenda, and so in Glasgow, we expect something different?

Jesus. This is fossil fuel financing, fossil fuel usury, the tipping point of their multiple disruptive economies, pitchman of all pitchmen: Bill Gates.

Gates set off on his environmental crusade aboard a superyacht, which environmentalists say are among the world’s worst ecological offenders. According to Turkish news reports, he sailed the azure waters of the Aegean on LANA, a 354-foot yacht described as “one of the most luxurious superyachts in the world.” The boat includes eight staterooms, a golf range, a cinema room, a pool and massage rooms. It accommodates 12 guests and 31 crew members, and rents for more than $2 million a week, according to a Monaco-based yacht rental service.

LANA was followed by the Wayfinder — a 223-foot luxury “supply boat” that is believed to be owned by the billionaire and was used to house his 30 bodyguards for the weeklong trip, according to Turkish news reports.

[Superyachts like LANA (top) and the Wayfinder are some of the most exclusive in the world and dump 7,020 tons of CO₂ a year, making them the worst asset to own from an environmental standpoint. Anadolu Agency via Getty Images]

Really, that is the contrast today, folks — finishing up my time with this poverty pimping outfit at 5 PM PST, Nov. 3, and the kicker is that according to service coordinators in my county, the supervisor for whom I argued failed to do her due diligence around mandatory reporting. Clients who have paychecks shorted, and who have bosses abusing them verbally. Each person in the developmental disability world who claims this to be happening, well, it is called financial exploitation, and as mandatory reporters we have to report it to an investigatory agency. I pushed this anti-Mexican, anti-transgender boss to do something, but her words stuck: “It’s not your job to get into the middle of that.”

Yet, it is our job to report it, alas, and not analyze or parse the words of a person living with developmental disabilities when she or he reports financial abuse/exploitation.

That is a good evening, November 3, to quit this shit job, and leave these bullshit people.

But the fight is on, not just in DD Services. Oregon, the masked-up, blue state, retrograde and defiantly backward place, has these health care outcomes:

The white paper explores the impact consolidation has on patients and communities and highlights current trends in Oregon. Key findings from the report include:
- The number of independent hospitals and physicians in Oregon is dwindling. The number of independent hospitals in Oregon has declined by 43 percent since 2000. The share of physicians affiliated with health systems in the Portland metro area grew from 39 percent in 2016 to 71 percent in 2018.
- Oregon’s most competitive healthcare market is not only highly concentrated, but also one of the priciest in the nation. In 2017, Portland had the 14th highest healthcare prices out of 124 large metro areas across the nation. In addition, the amount Oregonians paid for their healthcare increased nearly 29 percent in four years, outpacing the rate of inflation.
- Consolidation could exacerbate health disparities in Oregon. Experts argue that when hospitals raise prices, resources are redirected to facilities that cater to privately insured individuals (who are disproportionately white and high-income) as opposed to those that care for Medicaid patients (who are disproportionately Black, brown, and people of color).
- Following affiliation, rural hospitals are more likely to lose access to services, such as onsite imaging, outpatient nonemergency care, and obstetric and primary care.
- Reproductive, gender-affirming, and compassionate end-of-life care are at risk. Several large, religiously-affiliated healthcare entities are governed by ethical religious directives that prohibit or impose barriers that reduce access to these services. Past mergers have put reproductive, gender-affirming and compassionate end-of-life-care at risk, as could future ones.
And, just in the Portland area, the mental health outcomes, coming to, or already in your neighborhood/city/state:
- Typical caseload: 100+ clients
- Care provider turnover rate: 40%
- Wait time for appointments: 4-6 weeks
It’s no wonder Oregon ranks 51st in the country for mental health outcomes—behind every other state and Washington DC. (source)
Fitting, and so I quit, left, tendered my resignation: This is a crisis beyond crisis,

Clients feel abandoned by staff who leave due to low pay and poor conditions.

— Community Behavioral Health Survey, 2016

Ending with the Intercept story, this is the emblematic one issue tied to a thousand issues of our time. I just do not know how any sane person can look at these judges, cops, DAs, governors, senators, representatives, White House officials, administration armies without the thought of taking an old trusted Louisville Slugger to their blanks _____(fill in the blank).

Harmony lay in a 6-foot-wide stream of her own waste, swaddled in a blanket infused with feces. She propped up her matted head on her right arm, looking up at two downtown ambassadors from the community improvement district who had come out to ask her to move for the fourth time in a week. They needed to pressure wash the sidewalk.

Harmony is not her real name. Atlanta’s powers that be know who she is.

Phillip Spillane, a good friend of mine among the ambassadors, had called 911 to get paramedics to take her to Grady Hospital that Friday. He has made this call about once every two weeks, when the state of Harmony’s squalor becomes too much to bear for an observer with a soul.

I came upon them as paramedics were piling back into a Grady ambulance. I watched them drive away, an impassive expression on the face of the paramedic in the passenger seat as she watched Harmony, who remained on the sidewalk.

It was the same expression on the faces of most of the people walking by. I’ve seen it every time I’ve come downtown to Atlanta to talk with her. It’s not that passersby don’t notice her, but people make an immediate mental calculation about their ability to help someone in this kind of distress. The social reaction — the human reaction — left over is a carefully deliberate nonchalance meant to provide some dignity to a person in a state of public humiliation and to retain some dignity of their own on the scene of a moral catastrophe.

Of course, some people realize that they’re about to step in her shit and can’t keep from scowling.

This story starts with Harmony. It does not end with her. (George Chidi)
The post Quitting is a Mental Health Decision first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

October 28, 2021

Dog Food for Homo Sapiens: Rendered Road Kill for All

The they, of course, are the capitalists. The bankers. The mortgage companies. The housing agencies. The alphabet soup of agencies which will squeeze blood from turnips and your progeny’s progeny.

The media is the medium for their poison, all those tricks of the mind, subliminal and overt, messages that cause chaos, the mass hysteria, the constant fear, the rage against the ‘other.’ And, the other are our fellow citizens, victims, most of us, sliding and slipping and slurrying down the proverbial drain.

Housing management companies; i.e., apartment management companies, now property management companies. We are talking about putting people out on the streets management companies. Black Rock or Black Stone, or the top (largest) property management companies in USA are evil doers, in the words of the criminal, George W. Bush. Terrorists in our own land.

Here, The 7 Deadly Sins of Rental Property Management, all in black and white and color a la PDF.

Take a look at the number of “units” these thieves “own,”; i.e., manage! National Multifamily Housing Council — 50 Largest Apartment Managers

Again, the ‘they’ in the subheading are those who look at citizens as, well, semi-useless renters, eaters, drivers, patients, breathers, breeders. UNITS as in a person’s home, shelter, abode, gathering place, roof-running water-place-to-raise-a-life-or-a-family. In the hands of management companies, who are in Gucci suits and are beholding to the devils of capitalism: money schemers, bond holders, the top echelon of this Ponzi scheme. No national red alert state by state around eviction moratorium running out, or the exorbitant rents and sickening inflated cost of houses, new or preowned? Instead, this Tweedle-dee and Tweedledum Administration is saber-nuke rattling with China and Russia. Instead, this Brokeback Administration is pushing Jab of the Month on every living mammal in the USA. But real change, real safety, real social contracts? Never in the Art of the Deal shit-hole that is the Democratic and Republican mentality, which is for us, useful idiots, mental disease!

I have dealt with some of these property management (killer) outfits. Recently, with one of my clients — homeless veteran, diabetes, amputated leg from the knee down, other chronic illnesses — I went through email-telephone-snail mail hell. Zero response about his one apartment we landed that needed some ADA addition so he could get out of the bloody apartment in his wheelchair. I’ve written about Pinnacle (number three on that list above with 172,000 ‘units’). My client had a Rotary Club and Boy Scout unit and a construction company ready to put in a sound, safe, nice pathway so he could exit and enter his apartment.

Read: “Once a US Soldier, Always Wounded, Always Losing!”

I Began My Career Working with Homeless Veterans. Here's What I Learned | Inc.com

Nothing from Pinnacle after hours spent attempting a two-way communication with them. I did get an apartment manager, in the Portland apartment complex office, who was from Ukraine, and who was, again, in this shit-hole country, afraid of rocking the boat, afraid of really helping me get to the top brass. Even the top brass, via email and snail mail, did not respond. You can’t even pull the old wounded military veteran with chronic illness card to get to their heart-strings, because, they have no heart — just a big set of investment-banking-real estate accounts.

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

Michael Hudson, again, explains how messed up we are in USA with this rentier system. This system of penury, three steps to poverty hustle. And Corporate/Mainstream Media are in with this scam. Don’t get confused with the title, Super-imperialism, Michael Hudson’s book. He goes to the heart of this USA scam:

So, I am talking about even redneck Texas, Dallas, where working class folk are seeing that $1,100 a month one bedroom apartment rent jump to $1,800 in November. Just like that, oh, that Lone Star Shit Hole State. But wait, that jump is happening all over the land. Every rotten governor who dares go on TV to express their Jab-Jab-Jabberwocky and their Unvaccinated-Going-to-get-sacked-turned-away-from-everywhere-no-medical-help-no-entitlements-no schooling sick fascist soft-shoe Vaudeville Big Pharma Blue Face bullshit, well, they are the Paper-Pharma Tigers, with state legislatures as pimped out by corporations and US Chamber of Commerce shits to the point of massive infrastructure failure, pot holes as big as DMZ craters, dirty water, dirty air, zero housing for the 80 percent, no bus drivers for the kiddos. This is America, the land of the Survival of the Fittest, of Richest, or Most Connected, or Most Sociopathic!

They are real overtly slimly too tall De Blasio’s! “Droves of city government retirees are preparing to pay thousands annually to keep their existing health insurance rather than taking a chance on a new cost-cutting plan.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio and DC37 Announce Tentative Contract Agreement on Wednesday, July 2, 2014.

This is what these whippersnappers in the Blue States and Red States do — privatize EVERYTHING, since we are almost useless eaters and useless breathers. Useful, to them, as they call us their “useful idiots.” Title any way you want to: “Retirees Flee City Medicare Program as Deadline Looms for Move to Private Health Plan” or, “New York City Retirees Refusing to Eat the Medicare Advantage Dogfood“

So, no rent control, no national housing plan, no holding the US Chamber of Commerce and the other 10,000 thuggery lobbying groups for the building and paving and clear-cutting industries to the people’s standards. And, yes, a few brethren send me link and story after story and link. It’s what I have been feeling and seeing since age 13. Yes, the ugly reality of kill squads, School of the Americas, in Central America. Yes, in Arizona, age 13, after years overseas, seeing the government, the administrations, and their policy of undocumented folk from US-spit upon countries and their death squads coming over the borderline, illegally. Imagine that, people as illegals, and worse, as aliens, from another planet! Media and the newspapers I worked for, I fought those terms — illegal alien. Sick sick roots of this slaver country. Look at this, 15 years ago, with the old web site, Dissident Voice: “This Land is Their Land, and We Are the Illegal Aliens.”

Here, Ferlinghetti — from that little book, Poetry as Insurgent Art!

What are poets for, in such an age?

What is the use of poetry?

The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it. (A voice in the wilderness!)

If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this means sounding apocalyptic.

You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerors with words.

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti, pp.2-3

This headline, in the context of housing crisis, job crisis and, well, the supply chain made up crisis, which Michael Hudson talks about above with Blumenthal and Norton. “Biden says US will go to war with China to defend Taiwan”!

US President Biden bluntly declared at a Town Hall meeting on Thursday that the US was committed to going to war against China in defense of Taiwan. The statement is another provocative step that undermines the basis of US-China diplomatic relations and intensifies the already acute tensions between the two countries. (source)

These are not normal human beings, any of them in these dastardly administrations — Nixon-Ford-Carter-Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama-Trump-Biden. Oh, historically, it gets much much worse. Just the health care crises after crises, and get some slice of the National Health Services in Britain which my aunts and cousins and uncles in the old days used as ways to be treated with dignity for medical ailments. It’s all gone the way of dog food, Reagan/Thatcher, on down the line, Blair/Clinton, Obama/Trump/Biden. More news and analyses coming from a hip-hop guy, than anything from the Fox-MSNBC-CNN-Et Al crap:

Speaking of those great health authorities, those alphabet soup acronym junk science folk from our own FDA, get a grip on this during the planned pandemic:

That FDA, even reported on brokeback NBC: ‘Even the website of the approved product, R.J. Reynolds’ Vuse, which offers “7 Bold Colors, 3 Premium Flavors, 3 Nicotine Levels” along with sleek accessories like pretty “racing wraps” and holsters, says on top: “WARNING: This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.” But the FDA claimed that with vaping, “the potential benefit to smokers who switch completely or significantly reduce their cigarette use, would outweigh the risk to youth.” Apparently the argument is: It’s OK if young people get addicted to vaping nicotine because they will now be able to buy e-cigarettes to later quit.’

You know, the FDA in cahoots with the other great Pharma Folk, the self reporting Jewish Family, a la Sackler/Purdue:

Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

Oh, it’s on Hulu, and it is a protracted, goofy drama of the St. Elsewhere kind. SO protracted, so long, but from Macy’s book. Oxycontin. Man, that dope in the white-blue-yellow-pink pill. Talk about emblematic of Pfizer/Merck/GSK/The Lot of them!

Curtis Wright was the FDA’s deputy director overseeing anesthetics and addiction products during the time OxyContin was being approved. In this position, Wright played a key role in allowing the deceptive marketing that suggested OxyContin was non-addictive. Particular focus has fallen on a special label issued by the FDA specifically for OxyContin which read “Delayed absorption as provided by OxyContin tablets is believed to reduce the abuse liability of a drug.” As depicted in Dopesick, this label was used by sales representatives to sell OxyContin as a treatment for moderate pain to skeptical doctors like the one played by former Batman star Michael Keaton. However, Purdue had conducted no actual studies to support this claim and Wright knew it. In Dopesick, FDA employees also confirm the person who approved of this label was Curtis Wright. (source)

Nah, we can’t call these people evil. We can’t call their business dealings illegal. We can’t call into question their ethics. We can’t question where they developed such sick marketing. We can’t look at their origins, their friends, their rabbis, their associations with family lines that go way back. That, my kind reader, would be, well, in the words of racists and fascists, anti-Semitic?

Sackler Family Exits Bankruptcy Trial Over Purdue Pharma's OxyContin - Bloomberg

Well, I guess I can leave the origins stories up to the, well,

Times of Israel —

“How the Sackler family built a pharma dynasty and fueled an American calamity”

In ‘Empire of Pain,’ Patrick Radden Keefe details the humble Jewish immigrant roots of Purdue Pharmaceuticals, and how it is evading justice despite being behind the opioid crisis

In the 1960s, esteemed psychiatrist/genius ad man Dr. Arthur Sackler cemented his family’s massive fortune when his marketing strategy transformed diazepam, better known as Valium, from just another drug produced by his client Hoffman-La Roche into the top-selling “wonder” drug in the United States between 1968 and 1982.

Though the Jewish-American Sackler, whose parents immigrated to the US from Eastern Europe, initially encountered antisemitism, the wealth that he brought his family helped change all that.

Along with his psychiatrist brothers Mortimer and Raymond, Sackler would see enormous success marketing pharmaceuticals directly to doctors. The family delved into philanthropy in addition to pharma, and the name once snubbed by antisemites soon adorned prestigious educational and cultural institutions, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Louvre.

Yet more stories coming from friends that define CAPITALISM, and that is the C which is the big Corrupt, Colluding, Conspiratorial, Contagious, Calamitous, Corrosive, Cancerous. That is the soft shoe here — the C-C-C-C-C-C-C of Capitalism, with those Seven Deadly Sinful C’s! And just to make a quick aside, sort of the Robin Leech, The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous detour, get a load of this set of seven deadly sinful C’s: Living: “The Super-Rich Are Forming a New Exclusive Club. For $180,000, a three-year membership includes investment opportunities, access to West Point generals, confidential support groups and private getaways.” (source, again, the 7 Sinful C’s Bloomberg News [sic])

Nah, never off with their heads!

Richard Branson, from left, during an R360 networking tennis match with Michael Cole and Christopher Ryan, a former Tiger 21 chair in Texas and Puerto Rico and chief executive officer of GoBundance, a professional networking group.

[Tag: Richard Branson, from left, during an R360 networking tennis match with Michael Cole and Christopher Ryan, a former Tiger 21 chair in Texas and Puerto Rico and chief executive officer of GoBundance, a professional networking group. Courtesy of R360]

And these fella’s are controlling the narrative around 5/6G, Fake Green Capitalism, World Economic Forum’s “The Deplorables/Barely Useful Idiots Will Be Soylent Green” project of massive anal and biometric and cellular surveillance, and, then this bizarrely vapid story about “the only way to save the earth — read, saving/protecting/growing the billionaires’ and millionaires’ wealth, power, ego, land, families — is with, err, the billionaires’ and millionaires’ great know-how and techie future.”

An aerial view of the an expansive reef with clouds in the sky.

Oh, Canada, the tail and hind teat of USA: “Why we must embrace geoengineering and other technologies to stop the climate crisis” by Jaqueline McLeod Rogers, University of Winnipeg. I’ll quote her, and just the two paragraphs say it all for me, and alas, while I do come from academia, albeit remedial college courses, writing courses, a la adjunct/freeway flyer, I have to say that my dealings with sustainability and green pornography/greenwashing experts over the years (yes, I ‘graduated’ from the University of British Columbia’s Green/Sustainability Summer Institute mumbo-jumbo course) has pretty much gelled the reality: most academicians are very-very much corruptible and corrupting, back to the 7 Very Sinful C’s of Capitalism:

Diplomacy aside, it’s time to do more than agree to cut emissions. Some scientists say an engineered climate recovery must be taken seriously, with aggressive and deliberate management strategies put in place. We need to cultivate citizen interest and government support for research into the development of large-scale geoengineering projects.

As a media and communications scholar, I cannot argue that one science is superior to another. My research examines how Marshall McLuhan’s thinking about technology relates to the current climate crisis. Drawing on the work of McLuhan and others, I believe there are emerging technological options of urgent interest to citizens committed to a sustainable future, and we need to pursue these rather than holding onto remnants of a new normal. (source)

It all comes down to reset after reset, the great openly brazen and powerful Very Seven Very Deadly Very Sinfully C ‘s of the Worst System for Humanity and Earth Ever Devised, Capitalism! Corrupt, Colluding, Conspiratorial, Contagious, Calamitous, Corrosive, Cancerous

So many truths, so many millions of stories, so many people dazed and confused. This is the trickster veil that the overlords of capitalism have dished out for the planet. The USA has taken it hook, line and sinker:

No one group has done more to damage our global agriculture and food quality than the Rockefeller Foundation. They began in the early 1950s after the War to fund two Harvard Business School professors to develop vertical integration which they named “Agribusiness.” The farmer became the least important. They then created the fraudulent Green Revolution in Mexico and India in the 1960s and later the pro-GMO Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa since 2006. Money from the Rockefeller Foundation literally created the disastrous GMO genetically altered plants with their toxic glyphosate pesticides. Now again, the foundation is engaged in a major policy change in global food and agriculture and it’s not good. (source)

There you have it, way before 10 a.m. PST, October 23, eight days before the CDC-Fauci-FDA approved Halloween, this blog to never end all blogs. Blots on us all, and, Plague Upon All Their Houses. Just reread, scroll back up, and you get the idea as to whose heads must roll. And it is just a short list. You’ve read about other heads that must roll in many other of my diatribes or rants. Righteous indignation? Nah, calm forward thinking starting 51 years ago when I was just a wee one.

Oh, shoot, back to the future, again:

Max Blumenthal question: “Are current politicians basing the corona measures on incorrectly established scientific principles?”

Mattias Desmet: I think so. Here, too, we see a kind of naïve belief in objectivity that turns into its opposite: a serious lack of objectivity with masses of errors and carelessness. Moreover, there is a sinister connection between the emergence of this kind of absolutist science and the process of manipulation and totalitarianisation of society. In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, the German-American political thinker Hannah Arendt brilliantly describes how this process took place in Nazi Germany, among other places. For example, nascent totalitarian regimes typically fall back on a ‘scientific’ discourse. They show a great preference for figures and statistics, which quickly degenerate into pure propaganda, characterized by a radical “disregard for the facts”. For example, Nazism based its ideology on the superiority of the Aryan race. A whole series of so-called scientific data substantiated their theory. Today we know that this theory had no scientific validity, but scientists at the time used the media to defend the regime’s positions. Hannah Arendt describes how these scientists proclaimed questionable scientific credentials, and she uses the word “charlatans” to emphasize this. She also describes how the emergence of this kind of science and its industrial applications was accompanied by an inevitable social change. Classes disappeared and normal social ties deteriorated, with much indefinable fear, anxiety, frustration, and lack of meaning. It is under such circumstances that the masses develop very specific psychological qualities. All fears that haunt society become linked to one ‘object’ – for example, the Jews – so that the masses enter into a kind of energetic struggle with this object. And onto that process of social conditioning of the masses, a completely new political and constitutional organization subsequently grafts itself: the totalitarian state.

Today, one perceives a similar phenomenon. There is widespread psychological suffering, lack of meaning, and diminished social ties in society. Then a story comes along that points to a fear object, the virus, after which the population strongly links its fear and discomfort to this dreaded object. Meanwhile, there is a constant call in all media to collectively fight the murderous enemy. The scientists who bring the story to the population are rewarded with tremendous social power in return. Their psychological power is so great that, at their suggestion, the whole of society abruptly renounces a host of social customs and reorganises itself in ways that no one at the beginning of 2020 thought possible. (source)

Oh? So, this discussions can’t happen because the overlords, their masters, the Seven Sinful C’s of Capitalism, the planned resets, all of that trump us barely useful eaters, readers, watchers, walkers, drivers, patients, renters, dreamers, breathers, sleepers, consumers!

Max Blumenthal, “Foreign Agents #10 – Covid and Mass Hypnosis w/Dr. Mattias Desmet

The post Dog Food for Homo Sapiens: Rendered Road Kill for All first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

October 20, 2021

Generational, Historical, Familial, Capitalism Trauma

Whew, the realities of so many people as part of the walking wounded in high and low places. The landscape in USA, now Canada, UK and parts of Europe, where the Capitalists buff their gold-plated toilets and polish their collection of cars, there are hundreds of millions of people, rudderless, broken, flayed, laid prostrate from the emptiness of the consumerism, the bright lights and the smoke and mirrors. Everywhere in these lands there are masses of people faking it, living in la-la land. So much mental illness. So many variations on a theme of poor spiritual and intellectual hygiene.

The scriptwriters — the powerful who employ the torturers, the marketers, the legal vultures, all those barkers and salesmen, all those sociologists and psychiatrists, all of them, who are in the business of behavior modification — they too are broken, but in a criminal way. Thugs in Brooks Brothers suits. Hit men and hit women in the boardrooms of defense corporations, in mining corporations, in all the dirty corporations that make up the M.I.C. and the many headed poisons serpent of “contractors,” building roads, offices, runways, towers, systems of chaos as they help the Amerikkkan Empire extract, steal, rob, extort from those in the global south, in developing and under developed countries, from sea to naval cruising sea.

I’m around a lot of trauma, as a teacher, journalist and social services professional. I am right there in the middle of trauma, seeing first hand generational and familial trauma after trauma. There in the middle of epigenetics, I see how civic and cultural trauma mixes with familial trauma; the fact is most people are in various layers of dysfunction. Forget about the self-esteem issue as anything serious, but we do have a deeper discussion around this country’s Collective Stockholm Syndrome, or the General Anxiety Disorders so many young citizens and immigrants have. Yes, there are dark forces here to facilitate the continuation of trauma upon trauma. That rolling trauma creates inflammatory diseases, and a sort of stasis and emotional septicemia.

The warehousing of youth in public K12 gulags, oh, what a continuation of multiple traumas, including dumb-downing and highly sophisticated propaganda and agnotology. The commercialization (privatization) of everything in a child’s life has generated empty vassals for the junk of retail, buy-buy-buy and death of agency. The pimping for companies to gain the attention and the heart and soul of children, that is the order of the day. All those endless vapid hours upon hours on social (unsocial) media, all the rot of Netflix-Amazon Prime-Hulu-Redbox, it facilitates the draining of creativity, chutzpah, and strength. All of the syphilitic “artists” who make noise with groins exposed and skin pummeled with absurd tattoos, they too are part of the soft trauma, but oh killing kids softly. Selling those kids to drive themselves to pot, now, THC, CBD’s, to lobotomize their ability to launch a fight. The kids are already in the loop of trauma after trauma before they punch their first digital time clock. Here, the short list of what is adverse childhood events — No ACES up our sleeves, but the rich and controllers love these traumas since they create broken, half-living, flagging people. These people the rich can make many trillions on:

parents divorcing
one or both parents addicted.
poverty
no real adults who are mentors, kind
criminality or incarceration of adults in their lives
bad food
bad role models
bad birth
bad diet
lack of inquiry or inquisitiveness of those around
a world/households that are addicted to TV, sports, the lizard brain mush of entertainment
physical and verbal abuse
low birth weight
crime in and around the neighborhoods
no public or safe public spaces
parents who are never there
parents who are products of abuse
parents who are children, chronologically or just intellectually
warring criminal elected officials, from the Five Star General all the way to the county commissioner
constant reminders of polluted neighborhoods and lack of investment in public-social spaces.

Proof is in the lead pipes!

“Racism Plays a Major Part”: Like in Flint, Lead Pipes Leave Benton Harbor, Michigan, with Toxic Water

It is a laundry list, for sure. And, as a professional, working with these realities is part and parcel part of a day. When I clock out, though, I am challenged to meet the same level of trauma informed care and compassion when the criminality, the stupidity, the infantilization, the McDonaldization, the boorishness, the stupidity, criminality, addiction, all of it, hits me in my personal and neighborhood space.

I’ve stated that I am not going to give a criminal Trump or Clinton or Obama or Biden a break just because we know for a fact there are any number of epigenetic defects and familial rot-gut backgrounds, and mental hygiene issues ramrodding these powerful leaders. Trump and his bad daddy and his narcissistic personality disorder or Clinton’s sex addiction or Biden’s dementia. All of that is a given when looking at powerful and rich leaders, from Oprah to Bezos, from Dick Cheney to his daughter, Liz. Those rich and famous and powerful are one hell of a lot of a few hundred million people who are messed up on many levels.

Power, megalomania, egomania, lying, looting, lechery, sure, that is the result of throwing trillions at them, allowing them to break the law, allowing them to subjugate the 80 percent of the world, entire countries/continents with their filthy designs and projects of unlimited power, unlimited criminality.

Sometimes I wake up to a few kudos in my email box after one of my pieces or articles ends up read and appreciated. Other times, I am called stupid, a fool, and depending on the topic, an idiot, as in Covidiot!

Some bloke from Canada sent in to me a long email October 13. You know, inferring out right, stating, no one has a right to question the planned pandemic paradigm as seen by his medical officer in his province, or our grand wizard, Saint Fauci; or none of us at DV has the brains to call mandates criminal, nor to question this concept of lack of informed consent. You know, forced jabs for the greater good of all is what this bloke states. The Canadian is okay with losing your job, your housing, your freedom if you dare not get the jab. Everyone is stupid who might, for a thousand different reasons, question exactly what’s going down with lockdowns, quarantines, lock-ups, terminations, broken supply chains, unimaginable profits for the rich, the drug makers, military in a time of economic downturn. Anyone questioning the origins of the Franken-SARS, or the validity of the mRNA gene hack. God forbid anyone question why so many get put on ventilators, and why simple and inexpensive measures, like nasal sprays with nitric oxide or massive doses of Vitamin C and Zinc and steroids and anti-virials might knock down or knock out the so-called Covid-19.

I can certainly reproduce the email in question, but it meanders, saying that some of what I have written is okay by him, but he’s mad that DV has spiraled down with these writers questioning lock-up/lock-down. But I like the response from another email person/friend, when I forwarded this Canadian’s ire against my rant to him— Back at Ground-Truthing Again and Again and Again

Paul — This fellow’s reaction doesn’t surprise me. Today on the site he refers to as, “writers for the gross fool who runs Global Research out of Montreal” there is an essay about a commercial airline pilot dying in flight. The video is a Stew Peter’s production that is definitely alternative production. The Doctor he interviews is a health economist of right wing persuasion. Stew Peters patterns his production similar to Alex Jones complete with selling products at the end of his videos. There is all kinds of stuff on Global Research that is on the fringe of loopy.

The same can be said of numerous other sites. But because these are alternative sites (Mint Press, Consortium News, Grayzone, Dissident Voice) doesn’t mean that some of what they say might be true or at least something to think about. This fellow who attacks you obviously gets his information from mainstream corporate media which is equally suspect and won’t allow anyone on their broadcasts that question the vaccines. Corporate media has been in lockstep from word go with the emergency use mRNA vaccine manufactures.

I’ve lived long enough to know that sometime the dissenting voices are the ones that turn out to be right. In the last week there has been three small aircraft that have crashed in California for no apparent reason. One was a doctor in southern California. As of yet I haven’t read anything as to the causes of these accidents. There was a military doctor several weeks ago calling for the grounding of military pilots after being vaccinated.

We are starting to see corporate media reports of supply chain collapse. Docks are jammed up with cargo ships, return containers are not being returned to the ports, lack of truck drivers, etcetera. All this in a world of efficient computer programs designed to make everything run smoothly and all of a sudden it doesn’t work. Truckers can’t get their required certifications for drug tests thereby preventing them from driving. The same is happening for just about every industry that moves freight. But Amazon keeps going. The big shippers keep going. The small guys get sidelined.

Doesn’t all this look suspicious to this complainer? Like maybe something else is happening here? Banks are getting free money pumped into the repo market daily from the Federal Reserve and still the supply lines are plugged up like a constipated buffalo. I wonder if Bruce links any of this with economics or is it all just COVID related because some people refuse to get vaccinated because they’ve been hit with a stupid stick as he pontificated?

I noticed this critic started all of his rant with what a environmental warrior he was at a job because he discontinued the use of herbicides to spay weeds around power poles and his sending of transformer to England to be incinerated thirty five years ago. I wonder if he ever thinks for a second that those chemicals he discontinued the use of were all approved by the EPA, FDA or the CDC or at least to be allowed to be used until there was such an outcry by the public that it was impossible for the power companies to continue there use. Or that the BLM and forest service still use some of those chemicals today.

Do you think the Canadian ever wonders why some of those people that don’t want to get the jab might just not trust those agencies approval of these experimental vaccines based on the history of these agencies? I doubt he does.

Arguing with self righteous people like him, Paul, is like wrestling with a pig in the mud. All of a sudden it dawns on you that the pig enjoys it.

Pig Rassle generates minimal mudslinging

There are many many self righteous people who believe only a select few have the right to discuss the prevailing issues around coronavirus, SARS-CoV2, Covid-19, etc. MDs can only discuss the human medical conditions, engineers can only discuss engineering, aerospace scientists have the floor on all things space, economists, all things monetary. This is the bloody collective delusions of the white race, truly, the colonizers, the race that came into these lands, Turtle Island, and raped, ravaged, roiled the land with fire and pesticides. The murdering savages, those Puritans, those Hudson Bay Company men, those Carnegies, those Rockefellers, Oppenheimers, the entire bastards in the 5 percent, they are the true lords of truth, lords of information. Anyone else stepping outside their wheelhouse, well, off with their heads.

Off with their heads, I say: Scientists!

The EU authorities’ assumption that glyphosate does not spread through the air has been disproven. The results of the German study “Pesticide pollution of the air” prove that glyphosate and dozens of other pesticides are traveling through the air for miles into national parks and cities. The analysis was initially published in 2019 and has now been peer-reviewed by independent scientists and published in the journal Environmental Sciences Europe. It was commissioned by the Bündnis für eine enkeltaugliche Landwirtschaft and the Umweltinstitut München and is the most comprehensive data set on pesticide pollution in the air in Germany. However, the EU authorities responsible for the approval process concerning the use of glyphosate have so far excluded air transport.

And, wise words from the email writer who contacted me, again:

“Paul: It has been known for years that Roundup travels through the air. The ag agents in my county in California held seminars for the farmers forty years ago where they said farmers could face fines and have their beloved Roundup restricted if they sprayed it when it was windy, not that any farmer ever faced a fine or stopped doing so. There was spotting on leaves where Roundup droplets had landed that ag agents would point out the cause as being from airborne Roundup. Just more proof of Capitalism killing everything for the profits of a few. ”

Logistical and Technical Exploration into the Origins of the Wuhan Strain of Coronavirus (COVID-19)

An immediate international moratorium on all dual-use gain-of-function research must be instated and all existing experimentation must be autoclaved, only greed and hubris have ever been served by attempting this type of genetic manipulation. Humanity does not need a vaccine against HIV derived from a coronavirus, nor do we need to be tinkering with genetic material that holds the potential to wipe a significant percentage of us off the face of the Earth.

Failure to embrace such a ban may effectively become a death sentence for our species, assuming we aren’t already on our last mile. Reinstate the global moratorium on “gain-of-function” research. Sign the petition here!

Do you want to know how many people in the Western world want to hear that the batty bioengineered SARS-CoV19 was manufactured at the University of North Carolina, and under the auspices of Fauci and His Gang? Read up, study, and learn how this virus was bio-engineered at the spike-protein genes which was already done at UNC to make an extraordinarily virulent coronavirus.

Oh, all the news unfit to print, that is the continuing criminal enterprise system of America, of USA Media, of the Disorientation of the Discourse, and with all those felons and futures thieves and tax evaders and country coup d’état lovers in office, in the senate, congress, executive branch, US military, state department, CIA, all the posts tied to US Patriot Act, and then all the military contractors outright lying and loving their bank accounts, in-house ones, and off-shore. Land, real estate, mutual funds, private stocks, under the table deals, this is the White Savior, man, so anything tied to Pfizer or to any of the scum, it should be a slam dunk to not only doubt their motives and word, but to outright demand their heads.

I lose more people on this stuff, every day, just asking them to listen, read, consider!

Why does Christina Parks, Ph.D., object to the idea that a “vaccine passport” will reduce COVID rates? And why don’t African Americans and Ph.D.’s want the vaccine?

Parks, whose Ph.D. is in cellular and molecular biology, addressed those questions and more on the latest episode of “The Defender Show,” where she told the show’s host, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., that mandating something to be injected into somebody’s body is “just ridiculous,” and vaccine passports are “blatantly illegal.”

Parks said there are two reasons she objects to vaccine mandates and passports: lack of informed consent and lack of science to support them.

Parks explained how mRNA vaccines were never designed to prevent transmission of the pathogen, even though they were marketed that way. All you have to do, she said, is read and understand the clinical trials.

Watch and learn, The Defender.

The real agenda of those billionaires: first the forced jabs, the biometrics, the implants, transhumanism 5.0. 5 G and 6 G up your rectum.

Billionaires Eye Robot Weapons to Protect Themselves From the Rest of Us

From Caitlin Johnstone —**quoting her

In 2018 the influential author and professor Douglas Rushkoff wrote an article titled “Survival of the Richest” in which he disclosed that a year earlier he had been paid an enormous fee to meet with five extremely wealthy hedge funders. Rushkoff says the unnamed billionaires sought out his advice for strategizing their survival after what they called “the event,” their term for the collapse of civilization via climate destruction, nuclear war or some other catastrophe which they apparently viewed as likely enough and close enough to start planning for.

Rushkoff writes that eventually it became clear that the foremost concern of these plutocrats was maintaining control over a security force which would protect their estates from the rabble in a post-apocalyptic world where money might not mean anything. I encourage you to read the following paragraph from the article carefully, because it says so much about how these people see our future, our world, and their fellow human beings:

‘This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time.’

Something to keep in mind if you ever find yourself fervently hoping that the world will be saved by billionaires.

LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman has said that more than half of Silicon Valley’s billionaires have invested in some type of “apocalypse insurance” such as an underground bunker to ensure they survive whatever disasters ensue from the status quo they currently benefit so immensely from. ** end quote!

Back to the top — generational trauma, structural violence, environmental racism, killing us all with the military industrial complex, with those neocons and neoliberals, both fucked up parties, Demons and Inquisition, democrats (sic) and republicans (sic). The amount of trauma upon trauma on people now, just a few dozen months after the March 2020 big triple lie of planned pandemic, to mask or not to mask, to quarantine, or not to quarantine. To social distance or not. All the while there were thousands of doctors and others with cures, with ways to weather the corona flu, without hospitalization, intubation, the rest of the sick sick Soylent Green scenario.

Again, War is a Racket, Big Pharma is War, Capitalism is a Continuing Criminal Racket. War is Peace, and Up is Down. Here, Lowkey and Ho, talking about a very slim view of capitalism a la Iraq and Afghanistan. This is it, the big rip off. Oh, if they really wanted to save us from the virus, the pollutants, the antimicrobial resistance, all of it, now wouldn’t these narcissist criminals, Trump and Biden et al, go after all those people who have stolen trillions? Trillions for, hmm, clean water systems for USA and the globe. Clean farms? Great schools? Medical clinics EVERYWHERE? There are many many millions of heads that have to roll to start from scratch, to get the people’s and the planet’s revolution up and running. Could be your senator or your uncle, mom or banker. Many many murderers have to go, no?

Listen/watch: Just one shitty exercise in theft and murder. Imagine all the other rackets!

The post Generational, Historical, Familial, Capitalism Trauma first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

October 14, 2021

Back at Ground-Truthing Again and Again and Again

Time and time again, the left sites just keep pushing all those international stories, all those stories tied to this or that political party head, and while China is important, and while we know the dirty deeds of Blinken to Pompeo, all the way back, we still miss out on the common people, us, the little ones.

Sure, this is a trending story, in California, tied to the vaccine mandate, the hysteria, the fascism:

The University of California, Irvine has placed their Director of Medical Ethics, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, on ‘investigatory leave’ after he challenged the constitutionality of the UC’s vaccine mandate in regards to individuals who have recovered from Covid and have naturally-acquired immunity.

Last month Kheriaty, also a Professor of Psychiatry at UCI School of Medicine, filed a suit in Federal court over the mandate.

“Natural immunity following Covid infection is equal to (indeed, superior to) vaccine-mediated immunity. Thus, forcing those with natural immunity to be vaccinated introduces unnecessary risks without commensurate benefits—either to individuals or to the population as a whole—and violates their equal protection rights guaranteed under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment,” Kheriaty wrote in a Sep. 21 blog post.

“Expert witness declarations in support of our case include, among others, a declaration from distinguished UC School of Medicine faculty members from infectious disease, microbiology/immunology, cardiology, endocrinology, pediatrics, OB/Gyn, and psychiatry,” the post continues (click here to read the rest).

…there is now considerable evidence that Covid recovered individuals may be at higher risk of vaccine adverse effects compared to those not previously infected (as seen in studies here, here, and here, among others). -Dr. Aaron Kheriaty

This issue, though, is more important on a local level for schmucks like me, who are overeducated, aging in a hateful society, left of left in a centrist and capitalism hard left/right contradictory world. I am back at a job, and the pay is embarrassing, and the fact that I am in a rural county with rural thinkers and with a service economy tied to beach combing, fishing, crabbing and vacation rentals also contributes to precarity.

You think I am ready to leave to go somewhere else, to some big sophisticated city, some harbinger of high tech and military industrial complex to find more sustainable and lucrative work? Each day, my skill sets, my background, all the ground-truthing and other on the job training, all the travel, all those deep learning moments in my life in several fields, all of that is mush to the masters of academia, the masters of companies that are small and large, getting on the gravy train of city, county, state, national and international money. Tax cheats and welfare queens and kings are those in the complex, the big C for the CRC, Corruption Racket Complex — military-banking-ag-energy-prison-pharma-education-medicine-mining-chemical-AI-surveillence-real estate-insurance-prison-legal-media-entertainment.

Yep, bad that an environmental lawyer was under ankle bracelet house arrest for more than two years and faces six months in jail for contempt as a lawyer who sued the pants off of Chevron for killing and polluting communities south of this border. Sure, the hellfire and brimstone of this rotting empire is addictive, with all these blogs and newsfeeds and whatnot tapping into the lizard part of the collective American brain.

Judge Loretta Preska, an advisor to the conservative Federalist Society, to which Chevron is a major donor, sentenced human rights attorney and Chevron nemesis Steven Donziger to six months in prison Friday for misdemeanor contempt of court after he had already spent 787 days under house arrest in New York.

Preska’s caustic outbursts — she said at the sentencing, “It seems that only the proverbial two-by-four between the eyes will instill in him any respect for the law” — capped a judicial farce worthy of the antics of Vasiliy Vasilievich, the presiding judge at the major show trials of the Great Purges in the Soviet Union, and the Nazi judge Roland Freisler who once shouted at a defendant, “You really are a lousy piece of trash!”

full image — Original illustration by Mr. Fish

So, note the “proverbial two-by-four between the eyes” comment from this judicial devil . . . . From a multimillionaire “judge.” Imagine that! If I told a pig that exact same thing, after stopping me for a dangling mud flap on my minivan, just think what might happen to me. Or if I told that she needed a proverbial two by four between the eyes to a judge during my trial or someone else’s? Or, to the boss, uh? Or to the teacher if I was an 11th grader. Or, to the drill sergeant? Or the TSA guy smelling my feet at the airport.

This judge is human scum, and while this is of national and international importance, I have been in courtrooms (local, small and midsized town) where women lost their children, where drug addicted got the book thrown at them, where homeless rough sleepers were fined and incarcerated, where people more sane than this judge were committed to mental ward. This is the truth about systems of oppression, about modern white civilization, a fucked up rule of law lawlessness. This is it in our world. But it happens every day a few ten thousand times. To we the small ass people.

Now, multiple that by a factor a ten thousand — try suing Boeing, or Pfizer or FDA, or Ford, or General Mills, or Bayer, or Trump Towers or Bank of America, or Amazon, or Google, or the manufacturer of the air bag in the minivan or the pretzel maker your kid is choking on.

Now, bring it back to a real perspective. Local, where cities have no money for infrastructure, where medical systems are threadbare at least, or missing altogether. No country for old men, for young people, for the sick, disabled, poor, mentally challenged, psychiatrically impaired. This is a country for no regular people.

Yet, we will hear the media mental midgets yammer on and on about us bumkins, us flyover fucks, deplorables, or deploying any other laundry list of pejoratives or socio-psych mumbo jumbo for their elite brains to find more ways to subjugate the many in the name of profits, and in the words of their deep alter egos — “The world of elites and beautiful and worthy and good members of society have to deal with these useless breeders, breathers and eaters. Really, all we want is what’s best for the masses, for these misbegotten, less than high IQ, and multiple-dysfunctional people who in some cases, well, don’t mean to be useless eaters, breeders, breathers, existers. But we can corral them into good deeds, and we can make so much money from their faults, chronic illnesses, their low IQ’s, their inbreeding, their constant bad bad bad decisions in life. Their mistakes and pain and dysfunction are our opportunity to make society the way we want it designed, with a few trillion of profits in greenbacks to boot. But we would never say this outright to Anderson Cooper or Oprah or NPR or what not.”

But reality is always local, no matter how much bullshit college sports and pro football teams and idiotic Republican and Democrat lying and spewing interferes with their noggins. For example, the outfit I work with, as a social services guy, doesn’t ask our clients — developmental and intellectual disabled adults — if they have had “the jab,” but rather, they ask: “If an employer asks you to provide proof of vaccination, will that be a problem?”

That is the reality now — adults barely surviving, after their whole lives have been spent in special ed programs and being evaluated, separated, roomed, housed and institutionalized, and many coming from proverbial messed up families, dysfunction being the functional word — I have to navigate more of the same systems of oppression-poverty inducing-safety net fraying eating at our communities’ very souls. The chances of getting part-time work in a field tied to the five F’s (food, fur, factory, filth, foliage — restaurants, dog cleaning, warehouses, janitorial, and landscaping) are already slim, as so much is stacked against these folk. Think about the propaganda around “those with developmental disabilities are more vulnerable to the covid so they need to be vaxxed first” ideology.

Many clients were so scared that they were more or less forced into getting the Pfizer or J & J, both mRNA biomedical experimental treatments. Most live in supported housing, and most of these in group homes, sanctioned by the state, so the vaccine mandates are not just inferred, but demanded. Boosterism (booster x, y, z, omega) will continue to run rampant. More will be sick. Some will die, or course.

The reality is I know people who are losing jobs, and they are not sitting on piles of cash like a lot of professionals you might read about that are opting out of the forced chemical jabs. These people do not have the luxury of taking a stand with unlimited credit card limits, or fully owned homes, or hobby gardens out back with the swimming pool. These are people who read up about this planned pandemic, who take precautions, who listen to experts. Their choice is to not get jabbed.

Imagine, being a teacher, PhD in physics, after 20 years, and you have 130 accrued sick days (paid) and you refuse to do the jab but accept the draconian test and mask. You are still going to be fired, or put on unpaid leave, and those PTO days you have accrued, well, forget about them.

“LEAKED GRANT PROPOSAL DETAILS HIGH-RISK CORONAVIRUS RESEARCH
The proposal, rejected by U.S. military research agency DARPA, describes the insertion of human-specific cleavage sites into SARS-related bat coronaviruses.” (source)

This is reality for one of my friends. Forget about the death proclamations of the Death Cult of Fauci. This guy is criminal, and he has sold millions a bill of goods. This bill of goods is dangerous, deadly, injurious.

A bill of goods, man, the lies, the continuing criminal enterprises, and then, remade, make overs, etc. Take these middle of the road news sites: Robert Scheer is not my favorite, but this takes the cake, no, as he appears as Mister New York Times and Most About USA is Good Scheer. So, no doubts about this fellow joining up with the CIA, and then now in Holly-Dirt?

This is the very celebrity culture that Chris Hedges rails against. This is a sick little blurb here promoting Scheer’s podcast of this criminal — CIA is a criminal outfit of the highest order.

A former CIA officer and Emmy award-winning creator of the hit FX series “The Americans” about two Soviet agents living secretly in Washington during the Cold War, Weisberg offers a refreshing perspective on the tense relationship between the two countries throughout his work. He joins Robert Scheer on this week’s “Scheer Intelligence” to talk about his latest book, “Russia Upside Down: An Exit Strategy for the Second Cold War,” in which he examines how he, like so many Americans, got Russia wrong.

The author tells Scheer about his childhood growing up in a liberal Jewish household in Chicago, Ill. before studying Soviet politics at Yale University and joining the CIA, eager to do his “duty as an American” and fight what he considered then to be the “evil” Soviet empire. Now, after years of writing fiction about the Soviet Union in novels and TV scripts, Weisberg has decided to reflect on the historical events that he briefly played an active role in during his brief time at the CIA as the Soviet Union was collapsing through a more critical, factual lens. Based on both his personal experience as well as detailed research, Weisberg dispels common misconceptions about Russia that he once held to be true in “Russia Upside Down.”

Here we go: More meaningless Hollywood-CIA-millionaire stuff that the average Joe in Tucson or Portland, in Kansas or Utah has zero connection to. But we get he is Jewish (hmm, why this?) a Yale graduate (Yale being a CIA-Imperialist school), and lover of CIA and USA (when he was young — what puke). Fiction writer, and now a book writer and TV series producer, wow, what a radical. This is the upper echelons of America Putridity, and you couple that with his millions thrown at him as a Holly-Dirt thing, and we have the mini-Celebrity fawning.

Scheer Intelligence Is America’s View of ‘Evil’ Russia Merely Projection?

The Americans: The Complete First Season (DVD) — More TV junk!

I was at a hospital two weeks ago, and the nurses must have thought I wasn’t awake (I never sleep in a hospital, in jail, or on a plane). They talked about the Samaritan Hospital system they work for introducing a “no vaccine, no medical service” protocol. They did not sound happy about it. And here we have it yesterday:

Leilani Lutali, foreground, and Jaimee Fougner pose for a photo, Thursday, Oct. 7, 2021 in Colorado Springs, Colo. Lutali recently found out her hospital wouldn’t approve her kidney transplant surgery until she got the COVID-19 vaccine. Even though she has stage 5 kidney disease that puts her at risk of dying without a new kidney. (AP Photo/Thomas Peipert) — source

A hell of a country, and a hell of a “follow the science” kind of messed up system, no? Idiots of the Biden-Obama variety, like Thom Hartman, are yammering on and on about how these hospitals have a right to refuse un-jabbed folk. This is it for the liberals — you eat junk food, you drink booze, you suck on fags, you drive recklessly, you think this or that anti-Democratic Party thought, then we, the good beautiful, Hillary-Obama-Harris have a right to cut you off, cut you down, chop you off at the knees!

Many people I speak with and communicate with are tired of the pro-pro-pro forced jab perspective we are getting from the leftist Counterpunch, and from St. Clair.

I am referencing “Roaming Charges,” Counterpunch, 10/8/2921, from the anti-science pro-some-science get-out-of-that-science’s way thinking coming from some of the articles posted on the site. Very sad in many ways, so sad that there is not a robust discussion of the vaccination that we see on Dissident Voice, even Mint Press, and especially Off–Guardian and Left Skeptics. Here, bullet points, direct quoting from “Roaming Charges”:

+ I’m against any exemptions (our social contract should require either all of us to get it or that the jab be completely voluntary ), but if there’s a religious exemption there should be one for philosophy, too. “Dr. Anthony Fauci says he’s worried that people resisting COVID-19 vaccine shots based on religious grounds may be confusing that with a philosophical objection.”

+ Merck is selling its high-touted new Covid pill Molnupiravir, whose development was federally financed by NIH and the Department of Defense, back to the U.S. government for 40 times what it costs to make.

+ These people, if you want to call them that, seem to have taken their “tactics” from the Westboro (“God Hates Fags”) Baptist Church which used to (and I suppose still does) scream their godly obscenities at mourners during the funerals of people who died of AIDS.

+ Anti-vaxism is itself a kind of brain-eating virus…A Cumberland, Maryland man murdered his brother and sister-in-law in their Ellicott City home last week because his brother, a local pharmacist, had administered COVID-19 vaccines.

+ Cuba began vaccinating its population 150 days ago. In that time, it has administered 192 doses per 100 people. In contrast, the US began its vaccination program 297 days ago and has managed to administer only 119 doses per 100 people. The Covid death rate in Cuba is: 684 per million. The death rate in the US is: 2190 per million. This seems to provide pretty clear evidence that the embargo has been placed on the wrong country for the last 60 years. (end quote)

And therein lies the problem with fake leftists — attacking even doctors and virologists and journalists and educated/educators who have doubts about the entire pandemic and mRNA and coronavirus multiplicity of very pro-pro Capitalist and pro-pro Authoritarian and pro-pro Government Bureaucracy rhetoric. The reality is Cuba is not jabbing its people with mRNA: “All of Cuba’s vaccine candidates—Abdala, Soberana 1, Soberana 2, Soberana Plus, and Mambisa, are subunit protein vaccines, like the Novavax vaccine. Crucially, the vaccines do not require extreme refrigeration, are cheap to produce, and are easy for the country to manufacture at scale. They are made by fermentation in mammalian cells, a process Cuba already uses for monoclonal antibodies.”

Now, we are worried about more of the celebrities, this time, a professor who was sacked —

Now, think about any criticism against any university, when you are employed by the institution. I was employed by the University of Texas at El Paso. I was an English Department faculty, part-time, a radical, and I fought like hell for adjuncts, for students, etc. I was part of a group of students as a faculty member who made a human chain to stop the group of overweight sheriff posse dudes dressed up as Conquistadors on horses strutting on campus. That was 1992, the 500th anniversary of that evil contact we call Columbus Day. The El Paso Times ran a front page photo of these undercover cops jumping out of the bushes, and wrangling students, clobbering male and female with forearms to the neck. I was right in the middle, and I had to answer for myself to the Provost and president.

This is what a university, then, in 1992, was encapsulated inside, under a rich white president, a campus that was and still is 80-plus percent Mexican-American, Latinx, now. You can’t protest without our permission and our approval of signs!

More cities are recognizing Native Americans on Columbus Day

This was a campus that introduced a free speech zone out of the way of foot traffic. A state sponsored school, with a limited small postage stamp of land near dumpsters where people can gain the public square for protesting. And the campus Nazis demanded permission, permits, and full written details of the “protest” or “information gathering.” Now, sure, talk about Covid, about Nuremburg protocol, about mandates, about those who have the jab and those who do not. Talk about NIH and Fauci and the shadowy origins of the SARS-CoV2, or the doctors who have protocols to stop not only Covid patients getting on ventilators, but getting patients out of the hospital and back home in recovery zone. Not allowed.

These articles are verboten on campuses:

And, if I was still on that campus, how quickly would I be sacked for criticizing a campus– that pushes the Hispanic University of the World theme while colonizing Hispanics (mostly Mexican Americans) — for lock-step falling into the fold of the Corruption Racket Complex — military-banking-ag-energy-prison-pharma-education-medicine-mining-chemical-AI-surveillence-real estate-insurance-prison-legal-media-entertainment? This campus is the whoring field of military, aerospace, drone and weapons makers, and even more nefarious. What ugly optics! Four Star Murder Bomber Air Force General all smiles and the PhD’s just lapping up the uniform!

So, back into that ground-truthing — try being a radical, a revolutionary, a critic of bureaucracies and corporate mandates and this sort of bullshit on a local level. UTEP is a sell-out, an embarrassment, but so are most all the colleges and universities in this shit hole. (Source) I have gone up against every single college and university I have taught in. EVERY ONE. Can you imagine bringing this into the classroom — anti-war, anti-military, anti-corporation discourse and readings and critical thinking debates? Shit! Then, this? Pfizer Exposed!

And while the big house is for us in the 80 percent, the ground-truthing in your neighborhood is littered with the poisons of that Complex, the Continuing Criminal Enterprise called capitalism.

[The aim of the international bankers was] nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.

— Professor Carroll Quigley, Tragedy & Hope, p. 324 (source)

Finally, another point from a friend: “Fishy Felonious Fraudulent Fauci: Read Whitney Webb’s latest.”

During the panel, the moderator—Michael Specter of the New Yorker—asked the question: “Why don’t we blow the system up? Obviously, we just can’t turn off the spigot on the system we have and then say ‘Hey! everyone in the world should get this new vaccine we haven’t given to anyone yet,’ but there must be some way.” Specter then mentioned how vaccine production is antiquated and asked how sufficient “disruption” could occur to prompt the modernization of the existing vaccination development and approval process. Hamburg responded first, saying that as a society we are behind where we need to be when it comes to moving toward a new, more technological approach and that it is now “time to act” to make that a reality.

Several minutes later, Anthony Fauci stated that the superior method of vaccine production involves “not growing the virus at all, but getting sequences, getting the appropriate protein and it sticking in on self-assembling nanoparticles,” essentially referring to mRNA vaccines. Fauci then stated: “The critical challenge . . . is that in order to make the transition from getting out of the tried and true egg-growing [method] . . . to something that has to be much better, you have to prove that this works and then you have got to go through all of the critical trials—phase 1, phase 2, phase 3—and show that this particular product is going to be good over a period of years. That alone, if it works perfectly, is going to take a decade.” Fauci later stated that there is a need to alter the public’s perception that the flu is not a serious disease in order to increase urgency and that it would be “difficult” to alter that perception along with the existing vaccine development and approval process unless the existing system takes the posture that “I don’t care what your perception is, we’re going to address the problem in a disruptive way and an iterative way.”

During the panel, Bright stated that “we need to move as quickly as possible and urgently as possible to get these technologies that address speed and effectiveness of the vaccine” before discussing how the White House Council of Economic Advisers had just issued a report emphasizing that prioritizing “fast” vaccines was paramount. Bright then added that a “mediocre and fast” vaccine was better than a “mediocre and slow” vaccine. He then said that we can make “better vaccines and make them faster” and that urgency and disruption were necessary to produce the targeted and accelerated development of one such vaccine. Later in the panel, Bright said the best way to “disrupt” the vaccine field in favor of “faster” vaccines would be the emergence of “an entity of excitement out there that’s completely disruptive, that’s not beholden to bureaucratic strings and processes.” He later very directly said that by “faster” vaccines he meant mRNA vaccines.

The Bright-led BARDA and the Fauci-led NIAID in just a few months’ time became the biggest backers of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, investing billions and co-developing the vaccine with the company, respectively. As will be explained in Part II of this series, the partnership between Moderna and the NIH to co-develop what would soon become Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine was being forged as early as January 7, 2020, long before the official declaration of the COVID-19 crisis as a pandemic and before a vaccine was proclaimed as necessary by officials and other individuals. Not only did the COVID-19 vaccine quickly become the answer to nearly all Moderna’s woes but it also provided the disruptive scenario necessary to alter the public’s perceptions of what a vaccine is and eliminate existing safeguards and bureaucracy in vaccine approval. (Watch the 2019 Universal Flu Vaccine event here.)

As Part II of this series will show, it was an alleged mix of “serendipity and foresight” from Moderna’s Stéphane Bancel and the NIH’s Barney Graham that propelled Moderna to the front of the “Warp Speed” race for a COVID-19 vaccine. That partnership, along with the disruptive effect of the COVID-19 crisis, created the very “Hail Mary” for which Moderna had been desperately waiting since at least 2017 while also turning most of Moderna’s executive team into billionaires and multi-millionaires in a matter of months.

However, Moderna’s “Hail Mary” won’t last – that is, unless the mass administration of its COVID-19 vaccine becomes an annual affair for millions of people worldwide. Even though real-world data since its administration began challenges the need for as well as the safety and efficacy of its vaccine, Moderna – and its stakeholders – cannot afford to let this opportunity slip through fingers. To do so would mean the end of Moderna’s carefully constructed house of cards.

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October 2, 2021

You Will Need No Stinkin’ Badge if you Want to Die in a Gutter

Nah, we are not a society ready for deep discussion and debate about work, forced revealing of health information, forced mRNA jabs, and more. So, here we are, a teacher, ready to be gone gone gone. Andy Libson has drawn a line in the sand.

The decision of where a person will draw a line comes to our show hosts. We speak to Andy Libson about the decisions he is being forced into at his own job. Workers and students across the nation are being mandated to submit their status or proof of the COVID injection. This has caused many to face a “choice” between their “freedoms” or their livelihoods. Get jabbed or be terminated and ostracized in a society where the obligation to get injected by the government is being encroached in almost every sector of our society. This episode poses the question…”where will you draw your line?”

At 1 hour and 37 minutes, Kenny and Eduardo and Andy discussing how Andy is handcuffed with San Francisco School District provisos of giving the school district his vaccination status, and if he has a medical or religious exemption, that too.

You see that information is really not protected in some red file in HR. The administration in his school has it, and, really, when you listen to this, any parent who comes in and says she saw teacher Andy without a mask (she could lie, of course), then she would have a right to ask about HIS vaccination status.

There are no five ways to look at this — it is a culture of snitching, but worse: fear, and accommodating the worst of the worst concepts of always treating humans as guilty-dirty-useless-sick-unvaccinated before proving otherwise. And there is no proving, since there is no discourse. All information is being banned, and the pigs in administrations, pigs in the CEO class (sic) and those HR fools who listen to lawyers and default to the most common denominator: workers are not to be trusted.

Now, this might be pulled from Fuck You Tube, since Andy and Eduardo and Kenny are having a conversation about risks, intended risks, unintended risks, the subterfuge, the fascist policies of compulsory this, compulsory gene therapy, and forced dictates. This is not controversial, in any other time, other baseline. But that shifting baseline syndrome has rotted the brains of the liberal (faux) class, and the rampant/rabid stupidity of people who label those of us who WANT more information, who want to RESEARCH, who want to delve into the shit that is corporate crime and bureaucratic crime and group think and lies are truth, and newspeak.

Here’s JJ on a Bike, and those creeps, those sexist pukes like Howard Stern, Sean Penn, Bill Maher, et al, the wouldn’t last a minute with this fellow talking about the Covid origins. And the origins of this Covid-19 are important — WAY important tied to the entire lock-up mentality, the entire rush for Warp Speed untested non-vaccines. It just is a little hindrance, no, on exactly how the SARS-CoV2

This is the new lay of the land, not wanting to talk, to research, to listen. JJ: Pittsburg scientist, and this is March 2020!!!

You think Physics Teacher Andy Libson — before he’s sacked — could show this episode to seniors and discuss what scientific inquiry is? Hell, I couldn’t show this in a college level writing class without a whole lot of pain: just one student complaining; just one passing fellow teacher complaining. Or what about having this essay as a reading piece for discussion and response?

“COVID-19 Detention Camps: Are Government Round-Ups of Resistors in Our Future?”

by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / September 29th, 2021

“No doubt concentration camps were a means, a menace used to keep order.”

— Albert Speer, Nuremberg Trials

It’s no longer a question of whether the government will lock up Americans for defying its mandates but when.

This is what we know: the government has the means, the muscle and the motivation to detain individuals who resist its orders and do not comply with its mandates in a vast array of prisons, detention centers, and FEMA concentration camps paid for with taxpayer dollars.

It’s just a matter of time.

Over at Dissident Voice, here.

The question that needs to be begged is what will the SFSD do when they access this episode of What’s Left . . . and they have tons of snitches? Remember, these are mostly spineless administrators, out to lunch school board members, lock-step thinkers in the hierarchy in unions. These are schools that have fully-SWAT outfitted pigs on campus, “resource officers,” and these are schools that let the armed mercenary services on campus to recruit, but they would never let an antiwar, anti-military peace loving group on campus, or even Veterans for Peace, or Coffee Strong.

Right!

This stuff was verboten —

Coffee Strong: Listening to the GI Voice at Fort Lewis

And, just breaking now, Shit-ehh-Fornia, and its bizarre Governor, mandating k12, 6 years of age to 20, the jab. This is how these people roll.

Gavin Newsom just announced that California would become the first state to mandate eligible students attending public and private schools be vaccinated against Covid for in-person instruction.

According to KFI News in Los Angeles, “The governor is directing the California Department of Public Health to add the COVID vaccine to other vaccinations required for in-person learning.”

This would have NEVER been accepted treatment of young kids, in 2019! The rich see us all as diseased!

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September 30, 2021

It’s What the Babies Eat: Inflammatory Capitalism in Mush

Again, you can’t shuttle through the headlines, the so-called news, without having spasms and fits. You will not get journalists doing shit to really go after the capitalists, uh? Baby food. And these transnational Wall Street thieves, these stockholding companies, not even a slap on the wrist. So, if I as an unjabbed person goes into a public place, and then the rabid fascists find out, they then can call the cops, do a citizen’s arrest, and take my ass down, zip ties and all. But, do these billionaires and multimillionaires get hog-tied or frog-marched into court, and have their ill-gotten profits used for a reparations fund for all those babies? Dream on:

Baby Food Makers Kept Selling Products with Arsenic Levels Exceeding FDA-Approved Limits

HEADLINESEP 30, 2021

Baby food manufacturers allowed products contaminated with heavy metals to remain on store shelves — even after dangerous levels of the toxic chemicals were detected in their products. That’s according to a new congressional report released Wednesday, which found baby food makers Gerber and Beech-Nut failed to recall infant rice cereals tested to have arsenic levels above FDA limits.

This is how these felons roll, these dirty rotten propagandists, the smoke and mirrors crowd, the polluters, all those elites and money grubbers:

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is image-14.png

Going from baby food to land, forests, indigenous rights, we can see more putridity of the White Savior Civilizations (sic) facilitating the land rapists and the water polluters. This is not outrageous in Can/Klan/Ada?

In Canada, a judge has ended an injunction granted to logging company Teal-Jones, which the court says was used to crack down on activists at the Fairy Creek watershed blockade in a way that violated their civil liberties and infringed on press freedom. Police have arrested over 1,000 land defenders, often violently, as they fight to protect the remaining trees in Vancouver Island’s ancient forests. The First Nations-led protest is Canada’s largest act of civil disobedience. Click here to see our coverage of this issue

It’s a simple formula, a simple illustration of how syphilitics the ruling class is, and here, “David Graeber’s bestselling book Debt: The First 5000 Years revolutionised our understanding of the origins of money and the role of debt in human societies. But intellectual revolutions take time, and David’s sudden and untimely death left this revolution unfinished. David’s widow Nika Dubrovsky has established ‘The Fight Club’ to keep David’s unique way of challenging conventional wisdoms alive. Each ‘Fight’ will pit leading advocates of different visions of how society functions against each other. The inaugural fight, to mark the first anniversary of David’s death, is a debate between the renowned economists Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and Michael Hudson, author of And Forgive Them Their Debts. Thomas Piketty wrote the preface to the tenth anniversary edition of Debt: the First 5000 Years. Michael Hudson’s anthropological research into the origins of money and debt in ancient Sumeria was the basis of much of David’s analysis in that book. Join us for an unmissable encounter between two celebrated and highly influential economic thinkers as they debate: what is money and what is debt? What are the most serious problems of today’s finance-capital economies? And what are the best remedies?”

Finally, the new brisk and slick predators, those capitalists, those impact bond folk, the algorithms, the mining of our minds, bodies, dreams, aspirations. Wrench in the Gears, a long one, with lots of sources to click on to enhance Alison’s work:

This past week someone sent me a paper on augmented cognition. As I read it, a number of pieces clicked for me about earlier research I’d done into executive function. I wanted to preserve the thread, so I captured it in the screen shots below. Follow along to see how grit and resiliency intersect with Metaverse navigation and soul theft.

Also, this week Philadelphia School Superintendent William Hite briefed the Federal Reserve. Listen carefully to hear him setting up human capital bond markets in ed-tech, social emotional learning (SEL), nutrition, and tele-health via public-private partnerships with “philanthropic” predators.

This is accepted behavior, accepted “follow the science” bullshit; accepted state paid for university research; accepted elite school work and disgust? This is what Americans cannot handle:

Wrench in the Gears!

So, how can lead in Flint’s water be a big deal? Arsenic in baby food? Arresting protestors in Canada? Think about how polluted media are, how broken universities are, and how confused and full of Collective Stockholm Syndrome the public is. This last comment is pretty telling:

The post It’s What the Babies Eat: Inflammatory Capitalism in Mush first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

September 29, 2021

One Degree of Separation: There Will be Parasitic Capitalism’s Blood

This year’s NDEAM theme is prescient: “America’s Recovery – Powered by Inclusion.” October 2021.

The power of acceptance in this diverse world will follow the arc of social justice; however, it’s a long journey, still, in 2021.

When I was 15, I had to do community service for ripping through the Tucson desert with my unlicensed motorcycle while I had no driver’s license. For three months, I read poetry, drama and letters to people in the last stages of their lives at a hospice.

When I sat with some of these patients, I was both humbled by and shaken awake to life’s fragility. My favorite person was Gloria, who was on her last stages with a tube running from her 60-pound inoperable tumor to draining ghastly fluids.

We talked about her days in theater, and I read plays to her, including Shakespeare’s Othello and Sam Shepherd’s, Curse of the Starving Class. I met her 55 year old daughter with Down Syndrome.

Disability, or handicap, and other phrases like terminally ill, vegetative state and bed-ridden flummoxed me into a state of wokeness.

I am still working with drama and engaging people who fit the Disability Month profile: adults with developmental and intellectual disabilities.

This awareness campaign — started by Congress 33 years ago – is close to my heart since I’ve worked as a trained customized employment specialist, initially with United Cerebral Palsy of Oregon.

This work was in the tri-county Portland area, and successes were high points in my life, probably more so than the clients’ lives. Helping land jobs for people who have challenges and face unimaginable hurdles tied to discrimination, stigmatization and poverty is rewarding.

There have been big changes in how we relate to people living with disabilities; however, prejudice and disenfranchisement are still prevalent. Discrimination against those with a developmental disability is high.

The “National Snapshot of Adults with Intellectual Disabilities in the Labor Force” was commissioned by Special Olympics. The facts are sobering:

Only 44% of adults with ID aged 21-64 are in the labor force. This is compared to 83% of working-age adults without disabilities who are in the labor force.
21% of working age adults with ID are unemployed. This is compared to less than 8% of adults without disabilities who are unemployed.
28% of working age adults with ID have never held a job.
Only 34% of adults with ID aged 21-64 are employed.

In Lincoln County, adults with intellectual disabilities work in grocery stores, hotels, landscaping businesses, restaurants and other settings. State agencies are committed to making sure adults have the opportunity to work in competitive environments.

However, stigma and unique circumstances make it challenging to get job placement: many with DD/ID can’t work more than PT jobs; transportation is problematic; and many need a job coach on site to ensure successful day-to-day activities.

Historically, in 1941, National Employ the Physically Handicapped week cracked open the nut. In 1962 “physically” was removed. 1973 harkened the Rehabilitation Act declaring discrimination on the premise of disability was illegal. Then, more headway: Education for All Handicapped Children Act (1975).

Thirty years ago, Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law, guaranteeing access to work and prohibiting discrimination against individuals with physical or intellectual disabilities.

Today, more families and communities are comprised of an increasing number of people who live with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Still, today, those wanting integrated employment that have an employment specialist assisting in customized employment face roadblocks.

Cultural change must galvanize this philosophy of “it takes a village to ensure the safety, health and well being for all our fellow citizens.” That means business owners must step up to the plate.

In the words of Mister (Fred) Rogers himself: “Part of the problem with the word ‘disabilities’ is that it immediately suggests an inability to see or hear or walk or do other things that many of us take for granted. But what of people who can’t feel? Or talk about their feelings? Or manage their feelings in constructive ways? What of people who aren’t able to form close and strong relationships? And people who cannot find fulfillment in their lives, or those who have lost hope, who live in disappointment and bitterness and find in life no joy, no love? These, it seems to me, are the real disabilities.”

Ahh, that’s the piece coming out in the Newport News Times, above. The reality is I have 750 words to work with, no graphics, and alas, no polemics. And, yes, this concept of disabilities of a wide variety should be on everyone’s minds now, in 2021, the Year of the Jab, the Year of the Long Haul, the Year of Weathering, the Year of the Haves Putting the Screws Down on the Haves Not!

You see, the injuries caused by the felony offenders, Pfizer and their mRNA experimental what not, those are disabilities to be argued over for years to come. Lawyers lines up, judges bought and paid for through the ugly world of Capitalism — adding these prefixes: predatory, usury, chaotic, casino, disruptive, mafia, and so many other terms for this predation and rip-off scam. Structural violence is built into the system, and whether you are injured by glyphosate encrusted foods, or the unending cascade of carcinogens and neuro-toxins put out by the great believers in “better living-chronic illnesses through chemistry”, or injured by the jabs, or the bioweapon that is the perfect triple storm, or just by the endless threat of eviction-incarceration-bankruptcy, homelessness, medical-educational indebtedness, all that Repo that is the Republic, there ain’t no Demon-crat or Repulsive-can to come to anyone’s rescue. Prostitution is honest compared to these continuing criminal enterprise winners in government-big business-big finance-military-tech-Pharma-et al.

Transmission electron micrograph of SARS-CoV-2 virus particles.

Old news:

A GRANT PROPOSAL written by the U.S.-based nonprofit the EcoHealth Alliance and submitted in 2018 to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, provides evidence that the group was working — or at least planning to work — on several risky areas of research. Among the scientific tasks the group described in its proposal, which was rejected by DARPA, was the creation of full-length infectious clones of bat SARS-related coronaviruses and the insertion of a tiny part of the virus known as a “proteolytic cleavage site” into bat coronaviruses. Of particular interest was a type of cleavage site able to interact with furin, an enzyme expressed in human cells.

The EcoHealth Alliance did not respond to inquiries about the document, despite having answered previous queries from The Intercept about the group’s government-funded coronavirus research. The group’s president, Peter Daszak, acknowledged the public discussion of an unfunded EcoHealth proposal in a tweet on Saturday. He did not dispute its authenticity.

Disability — what pray tell is that? There are dozens of chronic illnesses that generate many levels of loss of abilities; i.e., disabilities. I work with all sorts of disabilities, and all sorts of chronic illnesses go hand in hand with disabilities, especially with homeless and those who are fighting addiction and poverty and incarceration. Then, the luck of the roulette wheel — intellectual, developmental and psychiatric disabilities.

Anyway you cut it, this is the Land of Chronic Illnesses. Food and factories, and the filth in prescriptions and in the peddled crap of fast food, junk food, packaged food. The chronic illnesses are at birth, and many are tied to all the hormone disruptors and neurotoxins and gut and brain discombobulations. We are really in a world of hurt, with so many with fatigue, fatty livers, kidney malfunctions, obesity, all the drug injuries from the Pharmaceuticals, and so much more of the pollution, single point source, and all of it mixed together into a veritable pureed mush of poisons in the food, soil, air, water, airwaves and just living in a mass psychosis society. . . . Where the rich, undeserving, celebrity of every dirty kind, play god, and determine who and what and where and why and how we are as people. Elites are the cancer of cancers.

And then, you have this human tick, Trump, and boy what a sick world of people who would never ever let this guy forget who he is — racist, fascist, undeserving, soiled un-Man, Donald Trump (and his followers and bootlickers)

‘The poor guy’

Referring to the 2001 article (published by the Washington Post) at a South Carolina rally on Tuesday night, Mr. Trump called Mr. Kovaleski “a nice reporter”.

“Now the poor guy, you gotta see this guy,” he continued, before launching into an apparent impression of Mr. Kovaleski, waving his arms around with his hands at an odd angle.

“Uhh, I don’t know what I said. Uhh, I don’t remember. He’s going like ‘I don’t remember. Maybe that’s what I said.’”

Mr. Kovaleski has arthrogryposis, a condition that affects the movement of joints and is noticeable in his right arm and hand.

A New York Times spokeswoman told news site Politico: “We think it’s outrageous that he would ridicule the appearance of one of our reporters,”

The original Washington Post article by Mr. Kovaleski said that authorities in Jersey City “detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops while they watched the devastation on the other side of the river”.

Since Mr. Trump’s claims about Muslim Americans celebrating 9/11, the reporter has said he does “not recall anyone saying there were thousands, or even hundreds, of people celebrating”.

Yeah, October, the month when the folks like Fauci and Trump and all the other enablers of pain and disaster capitalism should be set to sea. We all are useless breathers, eaters, walkers, sleepers, in and out of wheelchairs, what have you, to the rich! Hence, the planned demic, bioweapons 6.0. May they all rot in proverbial hell.

LEAKED GRANT PROPOSAL DETAILS HIGH-RISK CORONAVIRUS RESEARCH

The proposal, rejected by U.S. military research agency DARPA, describes the insertion of human-specific cleavage sites into SARS-related bat coronaviruses (source)

Disabilities month, indeed!!!

The post One Degree of Separation: There Will be Parasitic Capitalism’s Blood first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

September 26, 2021

Banning Books is just One Form of Closed Mindedness, Close Democracy

Note: I try and keep the plates spinning in Newport-Lincoln County, where I live, write and work. So, this piece came out in the rag, The Newport News Times, a Wednesday and Friday newspaper sucking wind for sure, but still, a newspaper. This is what the community standards can take, so after this piece, I’ll comment, take out the machetes, and blaze through what it really means, Banning Books (ideas/curricula/discussion/debate/protest/public displays/thinking) .

Books Unite Us. Censorship Divides Us. American Library Association. ala.org/bbooks

Banning Books – An American Tradition that Should be Stopped

site-logo I cut my teeth in El Paso as a graduate TA teaching English – writing, composition, remedial reading, literature – in the early 1980s. That’s when librarians were robust, gutsy and on the front lines of free speech. They helped develop library materials and organize talks around Banned Books Week (September 26 – October 2).

I also peddled stories and books as a fiction writer, and I was the Sunday book reviewer for the El Paso Times. My raison d’être was to make sure my writing and everyone else’s was made available to me, my students and my colleagues.

Throughout the next forty years, I’ve headed up talks and readings celebrating diverse voices and works from people outside the Eurocentric dominant force in our traditional K12 and higher education arenas. Books by Caribbean, Mexican, South American, Central American, Native American, Iranian or Ethiopian writers were not just curiosities. For many of my students, reading Sandra Cisneros, Edwidge Danticat, Sherman Alexie or Zora Neal Hurston created a deep and long-lasting interest in their own cultures, in education, in lifelong reading and in bringing into focus the power of their own identifies reflected in others’ writing.

This year’s banned book week is tantamount to motivating as many people as possible to understand active and passive censorship.

There are entire lists of books removed from high school libraries. There are all kinds of books that are targets of school boards, parents groups, religious groups and political advocacy committees. As a writer, I know my published words are not always appreciated by a variety of readers. I write with many hats on, and in that capacity, I am able to cross the Rubicon many times: from poetry, to fiction, to essays, to polemics, to blogs, to traditional journalism, and more.

I’ve faced down bigotry and hate for books I have put on my syllabi. I have had people walk out of my readings and those of more important people like Winona LaDuke or Tim O’Brien. Walking out is one’s right, and so are bigoted diatribes.

However, stopping the publication of books and demanding books be removed is not a right. I was teaching at a state community college in Washington when I faced a student who demanded I give her an alternative text for – The Fight Club. Ironically, we looked at various themes in that book, and the writer, Chuck Palahniuk, was coming to town and opening himself up to talking with my students.

That English class included other books that got under the skin of other students and/or their parents (mind you, this was a college class, not a religious school). Bringing writers to campus and having students read their books is part and parcel what educators must do to open minds and create critical thinking.

College deans, department heads, provosts and even presidents must protect that right of freedom to read.

Yes, students in high school have a right to have a history teacher assign Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. Or a film teacher has a right to assign her under-18-year-old students, I Am Not Your Negro and Exterminate All the Brutes to delve into filmmaker Raoul Peck’s work.

Reading Fahrenheit 451 and then comparing Raymond Bradbury’s work to François Truffaut’s 1966 version or the 2018 adaptation directed by Ramin Bahrani is vital to learning. Today, cancel culture rests in identarian politics.

Misinformation campaigns around the 1619 Project or what “critical race theory” are ongoing. This muddies the water of opening up critical thinking skills for both educators and students.

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman posits the future would look similar to the one depicted in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel, Brave New World. Postman explains that the only way to avoid this fate is to see and question what we’re seeing rather than blindly trusting the media.

Others predict a world unfolding closer to 1984, the George Orwell’s classic. Others might choose to riff with and analyze Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale. All those books have been put on some school district’s banned book list: driven by a fervor seated in xenophobia, lack of understanding of what literature is, and deeply held conservative beliefs.

Cancelling out books is akin to burning them. We all know where that led the world. This year’s theme — “Books Unite Us. Censorship Divides Us.”

+–+

All right, then, end of the Op-Ed for the newspaper that is in a pretty typically odd community, though Newport does have that “dichotomy”: lots of professors and researchers at the Oregon State University Hatfield Marine Sciences center, and the NOAA team posted here, and, those people from Oregon who have a few college degrees who ended up with summer homes here, now turned into full-time homes AND then the service economy, the logging industry, the fishing industry. You have to look at that, too, which is the divide in America, partially self-directed, and certainly directed by the elites, the billionaire class, the military-media-propaganda overlords.

When you see red vs blue, when you see cultural wars and the religious zealotry of the Christians, and when you have K12 so flagged and flogged, so vapid of real learning, real community- based learning, real critical thinking, then we get these divides. And, while the beautiful people, the managerial class, those in the upper income brackets far away from us, in the 80 Percent, well, they may have some Buddhist retreat or outward bound or special science camp to send their young ones, the reality is they especially, and those of us in the 80 percent, have adults and then youth and then each new brood epigenetically forced into sheeplehood and ignorance of who the enemy is, as Ralph Nader put down here:

If you think elementary, middle, and high school students know too little history, geography, and government, try asking them about the corporations that command so many hours of their day, their attention, what they consume, and their personal horizons.

Howard Zinn published A Young People’s History of the United States (2009), to go with his best-selling pioneering work, A People’s History of the United States (1980), but he didn’t do justice to all the modern corporate controls of just about every facet of American life, including educational institutions.

Today, school children are engulfed by corporate apps and software, textbooks biased toward the corporate definitions of an economy, and myths about “free markets.” For years free school materials and videos produced or sponsored by business groups, including the coal and nuclear industries, have flooded elementary classes. Our report: Hucksters in the Classroom: A Review of Industry Propaganda in Schools by Sheila Harty (1979), documented this mercantile assault on education. Students even take tests designed by corporate institutions. (DV– “Teach Youngsters about Corporatism’s Harms”)

Yes, this lack of disclosure and exposure around how curricula and school junk and colleges and university endowments are predicated on what the rich, the powerful, the gigantic, the corporations, the MIC want included and not included in teaching, books, materials, etc., it might even been worse than that.

To the left of this piece is a list of DV-recommended books. I’ve read many, and I’ve written two of them. Few people I know, however, read books, and those they do, are insipidly bad, soap opera porn, feel good and how to do/be/see/eat/cook/make money books.

Fiction, and hardcore deeply researched and lived books on China, on Mexico, on all those countries that are shit-holes in the eyes of Biden/Trump/Lesser Evils, they aren’t read by the so-called managers of democracy, the administration, the honchos-as appointed to all those governmental positions. The books aren’t read by the generals or the CEOs.

The books on really the core of the problems globally and locally are not read by the people who need to be taken to the woodshed for a real tutelage of the mind by the people who live in, say, North Korea, and know the language and have books with 80 pages works cited and endnotes.

The Zuckerberg, the USA Today, the ticker-tape of Fox-UnNews and CNN (Clinton/CIA UnNews Network) and then all the followers in media looking for less gray, fewer second and third page jumps, they are part of the problem of killing knowledge, curiosity, deep thinking and robust public arena smart dialogue.

Echo chambers, sure, the have always been there, especially if you end up in groups like the Chamber of Commerce or any group that pushes a group-think and allegiance to a narrow (usually pro Capitalist/pro Business/pro USA/ pro Empire mentality.

It only gets worse, this banned books concept. The reality is that the Newport News Times would NEVER run a piece, a long one, on people (let’s give them degrees and long titles and decent worldviews) who might be looking into lockdowns, the legality of lockdwons/lockups, the origin of DARPA jabs, the history of USA bio-poison-toxin weaponry research). NEVER.

Putting my byline on that too, as a journalist, would subject me to threats, death threats, deplatforming, and probably termination. I’d not get gigs teaching (there are not many) at the local community college. Even if I wrote the piece as traditional long-form journalism, pulling in too-man-to-count experts on virology, on vaccines, on medical procedures, on the history and politics of medicine and bioweaponry research and the illegal doings of the Big Pharma. Nope.

So, that is a form of banned books, vis-a-vis the gatekeepers, those community standards, all those aspects of Edward Bernays and Josef Goebbels concocted 9 Forms of propaganda, the one that marketers really utilize, BandWagon. This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is image-11.png

I’ll list more of those techniques below. But, again, it is what isn’t taught, what isn’t allowed, what isn’t debated, what isn’t filmed/acted/written about that is what signifies as a ban. Think of all the books that were written, and alas, those are now gone, gone, gone.

The person who controls the spigot, the information channels, the medium for the messages, controls the narrative. Having Americans unlearn all the bad things, all the insipidly racist, retrograde, misogynistic, xenophobic, anti-people of color shit that comes across the desks of teachers, educational planners, curriculum designers and then into the folders and Google Chromebooks, that is a huge task.

Bad habits die hard, or long.

We need a 12-step program for re-centering this generation so they can breed the next and they the next of real thinkers. And I am not just come fly on the wall, or Pollyanna. I have fought hard in the colleges and universities and newsrooms and social work domains for a real sense of social justice, but also deep knowledge based thinking, and what I have come across is the dumb-downing of everything.

Sure, we can listen to Henry Giroux and Chris Hedges, but again, they’re two elites in their fields (millionaires with a small “m”). They never interview or have on their shows lesser known or unknown people on who might set the record straight.

While Hedges goes after/attacks the celebrity culture, he is still colonized by it in some form, always going to the person with laurels and with titles and books.

Yes, this a good interview, but I guarantee few like me will watch is, and the elites will never watch it:

Then, sure, Giroux and Hedges get to some facts, but again, they go for the Republican Party and the Conservatives and Rightwing Racists as their whipping posts.

They are far from knowledgeable around how poorly placed those Democrats are, those mandate fuckers, all those incredibly bad nightmarish Democratic Governors are.

CH: Welcome to On Contact. Today, we discuss the age of manufactured ignorance with the scholar, Henry Giroux.

HG: Power, when it’s invisible, becomes all the more powerful, to use that term. But I think there are two issues here for me about neoliberalism in relation to your question, that are really central. One is it operates off the assumption that there’s no such thing as social problems, that there are only individual problems. And this notion that we’re ultimately and individually responsible for everything that happens to us literally depoliticizes people because it makes incapable of translating private issues into larger, systemic considerations. So there’s this question of this really putrid notion of market-based individuals, and this inability to translate and bring together, and connect issues that would give people a full understanding of the world in which they live in, what they may be able to do about it. Particularly as it affects their everyday lives.

Show:

Yes, so much more could be written about what isn’t in the curriculum, how British Petroleum (BP, the new marketing tool after the blowout of millions of gallons of crude in the Gulf of Mexico — Deep Horizon, anyone?) designed the geology and other sciences curriculum in California. Monsanto gives money to Washington State University, so you think those departments are going to have an easy time of challenge Round-up and GMOs?

Come on — I was in Spokane, wrote about this stupidity, and alas, this is a form of censorship that takes place and never makes the news like Michael Pollan did:

A book chosen by a Washington State University committee as appropriate food for thought for all incoming freshmen will not be distributed at summer orientation after a member of the board of regents raised concerns about the work’s focus on problems associated with agribusiness.

WSU’s president said the decision to halt the “common reading” program was related to the university’s financial crisis.

In “Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals,” author Michael Pollan discusses the social, political, moral and environmental implications of the food people eat.

A selection committee picked the book for this year’s WSU common reading program, which provides freshmen with a work that crosses academic disciplines and can be incorporated into study throughout the year. (source)

UPDATE: Washington State University reinstates freshman reading of ‘Omnivore’s Dilemma’

Imagine, all those books taken off the shelves of public libraries. This is not just a ban To Kill a Mockingbird moment.

This is not silly, either, and Banned Books week does what it does, for sure, but, again, would Ward Churchill be invited to campus to read from one of his books, or the essay that got him un-tenured?

…what I think we’re witnessing fifty years on is consolidation of precisely the kind of entity extolled by then-U/Cal Berkeley president Clark Kerr in his 1963 book, The Uses of the University. For those unfamiliar with the tract, Kerr likened what he preferred to call “multiversities” to governmentally/corporately-owned factories—albeit, “knowledge factories”—wherein managers such as himself employed to oversee a worker force—the faculty—whose job it was to convert raw material—that is, students—into the finished product or products desired by the owners, all with maximal efficiency. Sound familiar? (Churchill)

Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2019
View the Censorship by the Numbers infographic for 2019

The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom tracked 377 challenges to library, school, and university materials and services in 2019. Of the 566 books that were targeted, here are the most challenged, along with the reasons cited for censoring the books:

George by Alex Gino

Reasons: challenged, banned, restricted, and hidden to avoid controversy; for LGBTQIA+ content and a transgender character; because schools and libraries should not “put books in a child’s hand that require discussion”; for sexual references; and for conflicting with a religious viewpoint and “traditional family structure”

Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out by Susan Kuklin

Reasons: challenged for LGBTQIA+ content, for “its effect on any young people who would read it,” and for concerns that it was sexually explicit and biased

A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo by Jill Twiss, illustrated by EG Keller

Reasons: challenged and vandalized for LGBTQIA+ content and political viewpoints, for concerns that it is “designed to pollute the morals of its readers,” and for not including a content warning

Sex is a Funny Word by Cory Silverberg, illustrated by Fiona Smyth

Reasons: challenged, banned, and relocated for LGBTQIA+ content; for discussing gender identity and sex education; and for concerns that the title and illustrations were “inappropriate”

Prince & Knight by Daniel Haack, illustrated by Stevie Lewis

Reasons: challenged and restricted for featuring a gay marriage and LGBTQIA+ content; for being “a deliberate attempt to indoctrinate young children” with the potential to cause confusion, curiosity, and gender dysphoria; and for conflicting with a religious viewpoint

I Am Jazz by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings, illustrated by Shelagh McNicholas

Reasons: challenged and relocated for LGBTQIA+ content, for a transgender character, and for confronting a topic that is “sensitive, controversial, and politically charged”

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Reasons: banned and challenged for profanity and for “vulgarity and sexual overtones”

Drama written and illustrated by Raina Telgemeier

Reasons: challenged for LGBTQIA+ content and for concerns that it goes against “family values/morals”

Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling

Reasons: banned and forbidden from discussion for referring to magic and witchcraft, for containing actual curses and spells, and for characters that use “nefarious means” to attain goals

And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson illustrated by Henry Cole

Reason: challenged and relocated for LGBTQIA+ content

And so it goes. Imagine all the ideas stopped and flailed and all the books never written but should have been written. Imagine all the ignorance peddled by marketers, publishers, media, government, corporations. Imagine all the harm done with these lies. Wars and genocide, started and perpetrated because of knowledge and thinking bans. You think Turkey wants the Armenian Genocide in their k12 history books. Israel and the Nakba in their books? The Nanjing Massacre or the Rape of Nanjing in those Japanese books? Right!

Planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence used to be taught by yours truly around the consumer/retail war, the Story of Stuff. Planned and perceived obsolescence is now really agnotology, and the erasing of people, the caste systems being set loose and the Fourth Industrial Digital Gulag Revolution. No little newspaper like the one in my county will deal with these topics. Why should it when the reality is giant schools like WSU try a ban, or the papers of record, the big ones, throughout the land, to include the NYT and WaPo are in so many ways rotten to the core, in the service of the Military Congressional Industrial Complex and the billionaires and giant corporations.

Onward, to the propaganda, those Mad Men/Mad Women and the USA and EU and Capitalists Murder Incorporated!

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This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

September 26, 2021

Banning Books is just One Form of Closed Mindedness, Close Democracy

Books Unite Us. Censorship Divides Us. American Library Association. ala.org/bbooks

Banning Books – An American Tradition that Should be Stopped

This year’s banned book week is tantamount to motivating as many people as possible to understand active and passive censorship.

College deans, department heads, provosts and even presidents must protect that right of freedom to read.

Misinformation campaigns around the 1619 Project or what “critical race theory” are ongoing. This muddies the water of opening up critical thinking skills for both educators and students.

Cancelling out books is akin to burning them. We all know where that led the world. This year’s theme — “Books Unite Us. Censorship Divides Us.”

+–+

If you think elementary, middle, and high school students know too little history, geography, and government, try asking them about the corporations that command so many hours of their day, their attention, what they consume, and their personal horizons.

Howard Zinn published A Young People’s History of the United States (2009), to go with his best-selling pioneering work, A People’s History of the United States (1980), but he didn’t do justice to all the modern corporate controls of just about every facet of American life, including educational institutions.

Today, school children are engulfed by corporate apps and software, textbooks biased toward the corporate definitions of an economy, and myths about “free markets.” For years free school materials and videos produced or sponsored by business groups, including the coal and nuclear industries, have flooded elementary classes. Our report: Hucksters in the Classroom: A Review of Industry Propaganda in Schools by Sheila Harty (1979), documented this mercantile assault on education. Students even take tests designed by corporate institutions. (DV– “Teach Youngsters about Corporatism’s Harms”)

Bad habits die hard, or long.

While Hedges goes after/attacks the celebrity culture, he is still colonized by it in some form, always going to the person with laurels and with titles and books.

Yes, this a good interview, but I guarantee few like me will watch is, and the elites will never watch it:

Then, sure, Giroux and Hedges get to some facts, but again, they go for the Republican Party and the Conservatives and Rightwing Racists as their whipping posts.

They are far from knowledgeable around how poorly placed those Democrats are, those mandate fuckers, all those incredibly bad nightmarish Democratic Governors are.

CH: Welcome to On Contact. Today, we discuss the age of manufactured ignorance with the scholar, Henry Giroux.

HG: Power, when it’s invisible, becomes all the more powerful, to use that term. But I think there are two issues here for me about neoliberalism in relation to your question, that are really central. One is it operates off the assumption that there’s no such thing as social problems, that there are only individual problems. And this notion that we’re ultimately and individually responsible for everything that happens to us literally depoliticizes people because it makes incapable of translating private issues into larger, systemic considerations. So there’s this question of this really putrid notion of market-based individuals, and this inability to translate and bring together, and connect issues that would give people a full understanding of the world in which they live in, what they may be able to do about it. Particularly as it affects their everyday lives.

Show:

Come on — I was in Spokane, wrote about this stupidity, and alas, this is a form of censorship that takes place and never makes the news like Michael Pollan did:

A book chosen by a Washington State University committee as appropriate food for thought for all incoming freshmen will not be distributed at summer orientation after a member of the board of regents raised concerns about the work’s focus on problems associated with agribusiness.

WSU’s president said the decision to halt the “common reading” program was related to the university’s financial crisis.

In “Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals,” author Michael Pollan discusses the social, political, moral and environmental implications of the food people eat.

A selection committee picked the book for this year’s WSU common reading program, which provides freshmen with a work that crosses academic disciplines and can be incorporated into study throughout the year. (source)

UPDATE: Washington State University reinstates freshman reading of ‘Omnivore’s Dilemma’

Imagine, all those books taken off the shelves of public libraries. This is not just a ban To Kill a Mockingbird moment.

…what I think we’re witnessing fifty years on is consolidation of precisely the kind of entity extolled by then-U/Cal Berkeley president Clark Kerr in his 1963 book, The Uses of the University. For those unfamiliar with the tract, Kerr likened what he preferred to call “multiversities” to governmentally/corporately-owned factories—albeit, “knowledge factories”—wherein managers such as himself employed to oversee a worker force—the faculty—whose job it was to convert raw material—that is, students—into the finished product or products desired by the owners, all with maximal efficiency. Sound familiar? (Churchill)

Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2019
View the Censorship by the Numbers infographic for 2019

The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom tracked 377 challenges to library, school, and university materials and services in 2019. Of the 566 books that were targeted, here are the most challenged, along with the reasons cited for censoring the books:

George by Alex Gino

Reasons: challenged, banned, restricted, and hidden to avoid controversy; for LGBTQIA+ content and a transgender character; because schools and libraries should not “put books in a child’s hand that require discussion”; for sexual references; and for conflicting with a religious viewpoint and “traditional family structure”

Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out by Susan Kuklin

Reasons: challenged for LGBTQIA+ content, for “its effect on any young people who would read it,” and for concerns that it was sexually explicit and biased

A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo by Jill Twiss, illustrated by EG Keller

Reasons: challenged and vandalized for LGBTQIA+ content and political viewpoints, for concerns that it is “designed to pollute the morals of its readers,” and for not including a content warning

Sex is a Funny Word by Cory Silverberg, illustrated by Fiona Smyth

Reasons: challenged, banned, and relocated for LGBTQIA+ content; for discussing gender identity and sex education; and for concerns that the title and illustrations were “inappropriate”

Prince & Knight by Daniel Haack, illustrated by Stevie Lewis

Reasons: challenged and restricted for featuring a gay marriage and LGBTQIA+ content; for being “a deliberate attempt to indoctrinate young children” with the potential to cause confusion, curiosity, and gender dysphoria; and for conflicting with a religious viewpoint

I Am Jazz by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings, illustrated by Shelagh McNicholas

Reasons: challenged and relocated for LGBTQIA+ content, for a transgender character, and for confronting a topic that is “sensitive, controversial, and politically charged”

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Reasons: banned and challenged for profanity and for “vulgarity and sexual overtones”

Drama written and illustrated by Raina Telgemeier

Reasons: challenged for LGBTQIA+ content and for concerns that it goes against “family values/morals”

Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling

Reasons: banned and forbidden from discussion for referring to magic and witchcraft, for containing actual curses and spells, and for characters that use “nefarious means” to attain goals

And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson illustrated by Henry Cole

Reason: challenged and relocated for LGBTQIA+ content

Onward, to the propaganda, those Mad Men/Mad Women and the USA and EU and Capitalists Murder Incorporated!

Thumbnail of frame 6

The post Banning Books is just One Form of Closed Mindedness, Close Democracy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

September 23, 2021

Take Down this Blog, or Else!

No no no, that is not too harsh. Sub-humans? Really, that’s wrong, off the mark or just plain mean?

One of a thousand examples pulled from my file cabinet — I was substitute teaching in the Lincoln County School District. At the High School in Waldport. You know, short notice, no notes from the teacher of record. And English class. He calls me on the phone while I am taking roll for first period. Juniors and seniors. I have written about this before, and that fact comes into play soon, just wait.

Of Mice and Men and then, Animal Farm. Talk about both books. Characters, themes, critical thinking, applications to today. Under my belt, hundreds of classes I have taught, in colleges, universities, special programs and even in K12 districts.

Oh, so, the discussion comes around to special education, developmental disabilities, homelessness and substance abuse. Talking about how the luck of the draw and the luck of biochemistry still plays in our world, just as they did in Orwell’s and Steinbeck’s made up but very real worlds.

I notice a female student leaving class during the robust discussion. Then one more. End of the first period, the punk (yes, it’s okay to call a human, a punk) vice principal is outside and then comes inside. He asks me if I am teaching the students, and that two students came to his office upset, in tears, saying that I said that they would not amount to anything, that they would become homeless and drug addicted.

Now, that was the first of several red-flags. Really? In my entire lifetime, never would those words pop out of my mouth, but this fellow was all worried, as I found out 45 minutes later, because one of the students was the daughter of a school board member.

Okay, next class, we talk about Animal Farm, about the amount of industrial farming in the world that now exists, about the pollution and the miscarriages and the pollutants that cause all sorts of cancers and mental disabilities. Again, for some reason, the same female student was in that class, and she grabbed another girl and left the classroom.

The students in the classroom were interested in what we were talking about, asked lots of questions, and it was obvious that they were sheltered from so much, which is apropos of the failing k12 systems around the USA, and in rural backwater places like Lincoln County.

Before the class time was over, this bulldog of a vice principal is outside the classroom, in the hallway, and he motions me to come to the door. “Please retrieve your bag and belongings. I am escorting you off campus.” This is while the class was still in session, and alas, there was no reasonable discussion, no getting to the root of the misinformation, the root of the terrible lack of critical thinking skills and the bizarre phone call the student made to her mother!

This guy was basically told by me: “I have no recourse, no one to discuss what this is about? This is the most unprofessional treatment I have incurred in my decades teaching. This is wrong, shows bad judgement and now what lessons are you teaching these young people ESCORTING me off campus?”

Yep, I tried to gain an audience with the school principal, with the outfit that staffs this school district (out of Tennessee, we being in Oregon). In the end, this poor student from a poorly educated family with poor excuses for parents and this poorly suited administrator in his poorly thought out way made not only my life difficult for teaching there, at that specific school, but the powers that be banned me from all 12 schools in all the county locations.

Freedom to write . . . unless you criticize some lofty or bottom of the barrel “power that be”

I have talked with others who did some substituting in the district and in that school specifically. Hands down, they felt the administrators, the principals and the district to be pretty lackluster, to say the least, and in many ways, completely unprofessional. Teaching for these people was akin to babysitting and managing chaos. “No teaching ever gets done in that district as a substitute.”

Oh, so these stories I wrote, again, as I have developed before in other articles, were scoured from the internet. You see, a year later, I am in that same school, working with adults who need job coaching, for an entirely different outfit, and alas, the bulldog, unprofessionally, and this is after hours since I was helping an adult get into the janitorial work she was hired to do and was gifted a job coach, on the premises, me, as part of the job development I underscored in this process.

This guy, again, after hours, with no one in the school except janitors, comes to me, and again, motions for me to come out in the hallway. This is how American rednecks work — the put the power of their stupidity to test. He asked what I was doing, and it took me a few sentences to explain that I was working for another nonprofit, working with this person, shadowing her, and that my job coaching was part of making her successful. This bulldog appreciated my position and the valiant effort of the adult working as a paid janitor for the company, Sodexo, which has the contract for these schools in this county and throughout the land.

I reminded him that he was disrupting my work with the individual, and then he mentioned that he was concerned because of the articles I had written about him. Well, I wrote piece about the entire system, not just about a bulldog vice principal. The funny thing, though, is that these articles were not up in any county or state news organ. They were on Dissident Voice and a few other places. The school district, at taxpayer expense, utilizes a data mining/surveillance company to scour the internet to find any information or negative press tied to the District. This bulldog mentioned the articles to me, or rather, “Not exactly journalism.”

I informed him, with my client stopped working and looking at us converse, that this job was this job. That I was not there to discuss the previous experience as a substitute or to discuss what he thought or didn’t think of my writing. Again, he spoke from both sides of his mouth, basically saying all was fine, but then he called the supervisor for Sodexo, and then I got a call from the Sodexo supervisor working with my client.

This is the fabric of American stupidity and mean-spiritedness, and I doubt many of the people who are writers and researchers, authors and professors, and the like have any real idea about the day to day, nitty-gritty of attempting to survive in America society as someone who tells the truth, stands up for himself and his clients and students and readers. Sure, many in academia get booted, and deplatformed and blacklisted, don’t get me wrong.

Reality in la-la-land

The image above the mural is from the Alsea Bay bridge, of the Alsea River running to the Pacific. Amazing sight, and, those are harbor seals there on the sand spit, and somewhere to the right, where I live.

Again, the un-ceded lands of the Alse: We call the reservation, Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians. The town I live in is not land that was purchased or rented from the tribe. We also are partially built on an Indian burial ground. Above this is the mural of “tribal” people, in Waldport, next to a beat-down but busy bar and grill. This is it for this town of 3,000, which is along Highway 101 where thousands of RVs and SUVs daily come up and down this coastline looking for beach, food, beer, boating, crabbing and Air B & B living. No history of the tribe, and the fact the US government in 1855 “gave” the Siletz a million acres, which, of course, today, consists of 3,600 acres. Those squatters, those illegal aliens, you know them as the Oh Pioneers, like locusts, stealing tribal land. Breaking the law of the land — that President in the White House — as soon as they hitched up oxen to wagons and headed to the Oregon Territory.

I’m thinking hard about the realities of this broken down society, how deeply embedded the cancel culture, book burning mentality, twisted law making are to the day-to-day existence of people who would dare question the narratives, the paradigm, the orthodoxy, the history of ANYTHING spewed from the bowels of controllers, industries, government overseers, school boards, community groups whose job is to keep in check any outliers or rabble rousers. I am thinking back to the Lincoln County School District idiots who would treat another human like they treated me, for allowing students to ask questions about homelessness, drug addiction, disabilities, poverty.

I fault the entire system for this form of thinking — all the pseudo-left, all the hard-right conservatives, all the people who worked for Goldwater and then turned to the Democratic Party (Hillary Clinton’s MO).

All of them are substandard, far from any statesmen or stateswomen. Presidents who are dumb, mean, assaulters, criminals are heart, grifters, propagandists, bad speakers, crazy thinkers, all in bed with power, which is capitalism’s pitbulls and enforcers and head honchos. Billionaires and millionaires, and multimillionaires and billionaire lobbies control them, and the narrative —

Then, things get really nuanced, when billionaires go after other billionaires, and it is all lies, a show, and kabuki theater —

“When we look at the pandemic we’re going through, when we look at the issues in our political process that we’re going through … it’s misinformation and mistrust that’s been seeding by social networks like Facebook that we need to keep our eye on,” Benioff said.

“It may not have cost them … but it’s cost all of us,” the billionaire tech entrepreneur added. “At some point, somebody is going to say, ‘Wow. This is the source of a lot of these problems.’ You look at what’s going on in the pandemic and the amount of information that’s just plain wrong that’s on there, this has to stop.”

Benioff has not been shy about criticizing Facebook in the past, including in 2018 when he suggested the company’s platform was addictive and damaging for society. “Facebook is the new cigarettes,” he said then.

Benioff’s comments Tuesday follow a series of revelations in the Wall Street Journal that shed light on how Facebook has repeatedly elevated profits over the health and safety of its users. Facebook has pushed back on that reporting and the newspaper of publishing a “mischaracterization of our work and impugning of the company’s motives.”

Benioff referenced the recent Wall Street Journal stories and said he believes it’s clear that at Facebook “trust is not their highest value.”

Yep, that billionaires, Benioff — tracking everything. And that is never questioned by the mainstream and corporate owned media.

What we are seeing now, is the real-time implementation of a true biometric surveillance state, to monitor and record everyone’s health status, a design to map out our entire existence on this planet. A future where we collect, store and share our own digital W3C verifiable credentials and not just for vaccines but for antigen and antibody testing plus any other new digital cashless and banking credentials.

Indeed, this is true ‘digital identity as a service’. This is a big part of the digitalisation of ourselves and of our lives, our new digital twins, manoeuvring towards a one world digital identity platform and one that would ultimately determine what types of access is given or indeed taken away from us depending on our health, social and financial attributes and carbon impacts. (source)

Back to the dashboards, the complete files, the extra files. You know, the shifting baseline is shifting in nanoseconds. There was a time when pigs/cops had no right to stop your car without a valid reason, and we also had the right to step out of the car, and refuse a glove compartment or trunk inspection. We once were given some leeway, and there were never any urine analyses, never these deep background checks, never these lengthy reference checks. It was a time, again, I am talking about most patriarchy, white males, where you (a white male, not a hippie, mind you, but . . . ) could go their merry way without cops stopping them.

Of course, DWB or DWI, driving while black, or driving while Indian, those are a given, but we now have DWP, driving while poor. Certainly, DWAVFS, driving with a van for sleeping, that too is illegal. These tough militarized police departments with their “unions” and unending Blue Lives Matter racists, they are part of the problem, not part of any solution. Yet, this is it for America.

Imagine a college class I organized, say, around the book, and this quote, To quote Alex S. Vitale, author of The End of Policing: “It’s time for everyone to quit thinking that jailing one more killer cop will do anything to change the nature of American policing. We must move, instead, to significantly defund the police and redirect resources into community-based initiatives that can produce real safety and security without the violence and racism inherent in the criminal justice system.”

What hell would I have to pay for even creating a special topics class around that topic? In traditional state community colleges, or even so-called liberal arts colleges. Here, the colorful books:

Imagine how quickly that syllabus would be challenged before the class even got printed up in the catalogue. The reader might think that the colleges are liberal, but liberal means conservative, and the So Called Liberal Press is right of Hillary Clinton, who was a Goldwater Girl. There are wackos on both sides of the conservative, reactionary, pro-America political line, and we have principals being sacked based on stupidity around Critical Race Theory?

Parents, teachers, and students were furious when a beloved high school principal in Texas was suspended from his post at Colleyville High School last month. Dr. James Whitfield, the school’s first Black principal, was put on administrative leave after being accused of pushing critical race theory in the school’s curriculum. Now, it seems as if their attempts to save him were all in vain. On Monday night, the Grapevine Colleyville Independent School District voted unanimously not to renew Whitfield’s contract.

After a lengthy discussion about budgeting and tax rates, board members opened the floor to community members who had prepared speeches to share in support of Whitfield. After being warned by the board that there would be no “noise or clapping” during the segment, nearly three dozen attendees took to the podium on Whitfield’s behalf.

Monday’s meeting was not the first time the community spoke out about what they said was unjust treatment of Whitfield. Students planned school walkouts, and parents have been vocal on social media about their support of Whitfield. At the meeting, a graduate of Colleyville High School who said she also served for 15 years as the assistant coach for a couple of the district’s school’s debate teams, said, “Maya Angelou said, ‘When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.’ … Dr. Whitfield has also shown us who he is: He is warm and welcoming to his students… he is also a man of principle. He has also shown us that he is willing to hold us accountable as a diverse community where white voices have long drown out diversity… We should all talk less and listen more to Dr. Whitfield.” As applause broke out and the board had to remind attendees that there would be no noise of any kind, a district parent stood up to make a speech.“I started a petition in support of this gentleman over here,” the woman said while pointing in the direction of Whitfield. “That petition now has 2,200-plus signatures.”

This goes both ways, of course — how many liberals want the heads of people who question their orthodoxy. Think Mark Crispin Miller—

Or, how about a journalism class on all the nefarious and overt and covert things that happen in that profession to keep stories out of the headlines, buried or deep-sixed:

THE TOP 25 CENSORED STORIES OF 2019-2020

The presentation of the Top 25 stories of 2019-2020 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. IN 2019-2020, Project Censored reviewed over 300 Validated Independent News stories (VINs) representing the collective efforts of 308 college students and 32 professors from 19 college and university campuses that participated in the Project’s Campus Affiliates Program during the past year.

I will be posting the Banned Books Week piece I did for the local newspaper, and it is tepid, because, alas, we have to self-censor, and the small rag — the Newport News Times — can only handle so much truth, so much reality. We are on some real shaking ground, here, just pushing the envelope, and in the county south of ours, the school district, teachers and parents and groups are fighting about critical race theory being taught in the K12.

There is no critical race theory being taught in k12, we know that. These are schools that still do the national anthem, the pledge of alliance, still have turkeys, Indians and pilgrims adorning the walls during Thanksgiving. The reality is schools are just dealing with some breaking through the canon, breaking through the white supremacist dominance of textbooks and school boards with giving voice to deeper analyses of this country’s heritage and history.

The schools are not engaging in a rewriting of history, but exposing more history. There is no critical race theory going on in bloody insipid public K12. But the lunacy, which is what white racists peddle, crosses the pond, now, doesn’t it?

The War on Critical Race Theory

The critics want to wipe clear the actual history of racial oppression that is baked into the social and economic structures of the US.

“The materials echo essays sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, which calls CRT ‘the new intolerance’ and ‘the rejection of the underpinnings of Western civilization.’”

On the eve of losing the presidency, Donald Trump issued an executive order in September banning “diversity and race sensitivity training” in government agencies, including all government “spending related to any training on critical race theory.” He was prompted, apparently, by hearing an interview with conservative activist Christopher Rufo on Fox News characterizing “critical race theory programs in government” as “the cult of indoctrination.” (President Biden ended the ban as soon as he took office.) In March Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, introduced a bill seeking to ban the teaching of CRT in the military because—he charges without argument or evidence—it is “racist.” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis banned CRT from being covered in Florida’s public schools for “teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other.” Republican majority lawmakers in the state of Idaho prohibited the use of state funding for student “social justice” activities of any kind at public universities and threatened to withhold funding earmarked for “social justice programming and critical race theory.” Lawmakers in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Utah are following suit.

Similar attacks are afoot abroad. In Britain a government minister declared in October that the government was “unequivocally against” the concept, even though records show that the phrase “critical race theory” had never once been uttered in the House of Commons before that time. And a British government “Race Report,” commissioned by Boris Johnson in the wake of last year’s Black Lives Matter protests, was just released amidst considerable controversy for its reductive definition of racial discrimination as nothing but the explicit invocation of skin color. For the French, criticism of a “decolonial” turn in the academy is being invoked to do the sort of political silencing that CRT has been advanced to do by conservatives in the United States and Britain. (Never mind that decolonialization—as a term, a politics, and a field of study—was around well before CRT.) President Emmanuel Macron and his ministers have castigated the importation of “certain social science theories” from “American universities” for leading to “the ethnicization of the social question,” and prominent intellectuals have denounced discussions of race. Philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff, whose earlier work tracked the history of anti-Semitism, indicts contemporary anti-racist critics of the French state as guilty of “anti-white racism.” An assistant attorney general in Australia insisted an anti-racism program should not be funded because “taxpayer funds” were being used “to promote critical race theory.” (Black Agenda Report)

But again, this is how this country operates — a sack of lies built upon more lies on top of more lies . . . . Until, well, even those who think they are being progressive, pan out to be fascist. You see, if you believe any of the lies about capitalism, exceptionalism, about the good of America, or that this is a democracy, then, you can’t shed all the scales on your eyes.

We have people calling for people’s jobs, heads, lives in this new fascism, which is old in many ways — follow the science? Right, that science that has given us, all those wonderful things Rachel Carson barely mentioned in her book, Silent Spring. 10 worst drug recalls in history. 6 things Big Pharma doesn’t want you to know! Well, just add to this by a factor of 1,000. Then, pick your category — 10 worst chemical manufactured, 10 worst foods created, 10 worst medical procedures ever invented, 10 worst things psychiatry does to you . . . . And, 6 Big things fossil fuel, Big Ag, Lawyers, Real Estate, Insurance, et al DO NOT WANT YOU TO KNOW.

Simple stuff, like America’s number one butchered protein, chicken, as you recall, is the healthy (sic) meat (sic): “Modern farming methods means more and more supermarket chicken meat has white stripes — actually, pockets of fat — running through it. In fact, the vast majority, or 99%, of all store-brand chicken sold in major U.S. supermarkets is impacted by muscle fatty deposits called “white striping,” according to findings released on Monday by the Humane League.”

Yes, there is a thuggery group, that is, lobbying and lying and protection racket for every product under the sun. That’s how corporate fascism works, and then this statement by that chicken group: “Broiler chickens raised for meat are bred to gain weight rapidly, reducing the amount of food and water needed before slaughter. Still, factory-farmed chickens grow so quickly that the birds frequently can’t hold up their own body weight, with muscle replaced with fibrous tissue and fat.

The Humane League report was dismissed as unscientific by the National Chicken Council, which likened white striping as similar to marbling in red meat.”

The point is clear — if a teacher were to create a class around environmental impacts of the logging and timber industry, or the fishing industry, in these here parts — Oregon Coast is all about clear-cutting and by-catches — that teacher would be sacked. This is how capitalism works, and the k12 system is nothing to shake a stick at, and alas, colleges are bought and sold to the corporations in so many departments.

Yep, a photo says a 1,000 words:

Cutting it down the old fashioned way.

Clear-Cutting in Brazil | National Geographic Society

All dead and dying, thrown back into the sea — by-catch.

What is Bycatch? Understanding and Preventing Fishing Bycatch

For every thousand reports pointing out the pain, death, destruction, pollution of product or process X and Y, there will be a massive campaign arranged by lawyers with the help of Spin Masters, Communication Experts, Marketing Gurus, Propaganda Peddlers and more, including Congress and Senate prostitutes, attempting to shunt reality away, so we can all live in their realities of more death, dying, injury, pain, loss, seepage, toxicity. Again, War is Peace, and Lies are Truth!

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September 22, 2021

So You Go Deaf at a Protest: MIC/MICC at the Helm

*Military Industrial Complex, or Lawrence Wilkerson’s, Military Industrial Congressional Complex*

You get a story on the supposed Havana Syndrome, and then you also get the concept of mass psychogenic illness (you know, it’s all in your head, buster, those heart palpitations, the sweats, the throbbing veins, after getting mRNA “vaccinated”) explained, and, well, no huge outrage on these weapons of mass destruction created by USA, Israel, UK, France other shit-holes. None. Yes, of course, China and Russia, they have their directed energy weapons, their lasers, their rail guns.

As a collective, we just take it up the rear end daily, a thousand times, with these illustrations of the perversion of the inventors (scientists) and the CEOs and their armies of Eichmanns and then their armies of wrench turners and computer motherboard makers to help build these tools of oppression and murder. .

Get this one here:

The United Kingdom deployed an American-made Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), in essence, a sound cannon, during the London 2012 Olympics. Products like LRAD represent a shift from military to domestic usage of directed energy weapons, Dawson noted, explaining:

DEW manufacturers seem to be developing more hand-held versions of what was industrial-scale military weaponry. So they are transitioning from something that was the size of a truck used in Afghanistan or Iraq and turning it into something more like a taser that can be held by a police officer. In fact, the Taser Corporation, as well as other manufacturers of crowd-control weaponry, are listed in the WikiLeaks files as being manufacturers of directed energy weapons.”

LRADs are used at airports to deter wildlife from runways. But they are also commonly used by law enforcement against protestors, such as at Occupy Oakland, the George Floyd protests, and at the 2017 Women’s March.

[An EU police officer deploys an LRAD near a popular refugee crossing point on the Greek – Turkish border, May 21, 2021. Giannis Papanikos | AP]

LRAD focuses a piercing and unbearable noise at those at whom it is pointed, leaving targets dizzy and suffering headaches. It is undoubtedly effective, but also poses a risk to human health. The National Institutes of Health advises that permanent hearing loss can begin when exposed to sounds of more than 85 dB. Yet police LRADs are capable of producing sounds of higher than 150 dB. There are serious concerns that the LRAD will be used liberally and illegally to disperse peaceful demonstrations. This is already happening: in 2017, the city of New York was forced to pay $748,000 to Black Lives Matter protestors targeted with LRAD. The NYPD suspended its use.

So, look at the thug, with earplugs and fake mask on, while using a weapon turned on refugees. Now if this is not a picture of the Great White Sadistic Race, then, I can’t begin to help you, kind reader.

Our tax dollars at this murderous work —

Read Alan MacLeod’s piece here — Havana Syndrome, Directed Energy Weapons, and the New Cold War

It’s the supplements, stupid!

So, from illegal and unethical and monstrous weapons against we the people, to the power of the Food and Drug Administration’s prostitutes in the employ of Big Pharma and Big Med:

Yep, emergency use authorization to approve the universal jabbing of hundreds of bottles of boosters on the wall, that FDA is something else —

Resveratrol, a plant-derived polyphenol found in grapes, could be eliminated in supplement form like pyridoxamine (B6) was a number of years ago due to an FDA back-channel that lets Big Pharma turn supplements into drugs. If Big Pharma asks the FDA to remove resveratrol, the agency’s job of eliminating these supplements is made much easier if it gets the “mandatory filing” requirement that it wants. We need to fight for major changes in the law and to block this “mandatory list” from ever passing to protect our access to important supplements.

Resveratrol has been available as a supplement for years. But we know from FDA documents that the agency rejected a “new supplement” notification for resveratrol, stating that resveratrol doesn’t meet the legal definition of a supplement because a drug company started investigating it as a drug in 2001, and the agency has no evidence that resveratrol was sold as a supplement before that date. This means that the drug company could, at any time, petition the FDA to remove resveratrol supplements from the market. This is what happened to pyridoxamine, a form of B6, and it still isn’t available as a supplement even though no drug ever came to market; it could also happen to CBD and l-glutamine.

So, imagine, all those supplements, all those proven natural elements to keep us out of the medical system. Out of the death chambers of doctors’ offices and mass murder hospitals. You know, this FDA and CDC and NIH group of liars, or in some camps, poison delivery villains:

Rumble — Expert Testimony provided by Dr. Christina Parks, Ph.D, to the Michigan House of Representatives in hearing on HB 4471. This is an unedited screen recording. This science of viruses, what they can and cannot do, and that is a huge discussion point, though I see this doctor talking to glazed eyes in the Michigan House — Eight minutes to get illuminated so please, watch. This absurdity, using boosters of those mRNA jabs to stop the Delta Variant? Makes zero sense. Listen, watch, and enlighten yourself.

If there are no national leaders, folks with bully pulpits, with media stages, to really drill down on the absurdity of this country, these trillions lost/stolen of our tax dollars, then the cascading number of stories will continue to come out with no umph, no fanfare, no repercussions.

The Pentagon doesn’t care that it snuffed out innocent lives in an airstrike; it does that all the time and its officials would do it a lot more if that’s what it took to secure their futures as lobbyists, consultants, board members and executives for defense industry corporations after they retire from the military. And the mass media don’t care either; they only cared about this one particular highly politicized airstrike during a withdrawal from a military engagement the mass media vehemently opposed.

“Pentagon acknowledges Aug. 29 drone strike in Afghanistan was a tragic mistake that killed 10 civilians.” Can you believe that headline? Not “admits” but “acknowledges”. Not “killed children while targeting an aid worker based on flimsy evidence” but “was a tragic mistake”. How many times did New York Times editors rewrite this? Imagine if this had been a Russian airstrike.

It’s the CIA (and assassinations) Stupid!

And so, we get back to the USA, CIA, all those nefarious mutants from the UK, Israel, et al. I was almost five when Dag Hammarskjoild was murdered (1961). This documentary goes around the evidence, gets into the ugly reality of MI6 and CIA and apartheid whites wanting to eradicate the Blacks in, well, Black Africa. Lo and behold, the documentary that looks into the UN chief’s murder exposes another reality — a clandestine group using fake medical doctors and fake clinics to inoculate Blacks (poor, of course) with HIV, to help spread the deadly virus.

Former President Harry Truman told reporters two days after Dag Hammarskjöld’s death on Sept. 18, 1961 that the U.N. secretary-general “was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said ‘when they killed him.’”

The mystery of the second U.N. secretary-general’s death festered until the 2011 book Who Killed Hammarskjöld? by British researcher Susan Williams, who uncovered new evidence that pointed to the likelihood that U.S., British and South African intelligence had a hand in his death in a plane crash in Northern Rhodesia, today’s Zambia. He was on his way to negotiate a cease-fire in Katanga’s separatist war from the Congo.

Williams’ findings led to an independent commission that called on the U.N. to reopen its 1962 probe in the killing, which ended with an open verdict. “The possibility … the plane was … forced into descent by some form of hostile action is supported by sufficient evidence to merit further inquiry,” the commission concluded.

All roads lead to hell, when it comes to USA, Israel, UK, EU and Canada. Exterminate all the Brutes!

“I wanted to push the boundaries of conventional documentary filmmaking and find a freedom to tell this story by any means necessary.” Director Raoul Peck sits down to discuss the creative intentions behind documentary series Exterminate All the Brutes.

Check out more on Dag over at Consortium News —

Oh, the truths of the day, around 6 million people dead because of the War on Terror. Six million!

New Byline Times report which found that

“at least 5.8 to 6 million people are likely to have died overall due to the War on Terror – a staggering number which is still probably very conservative.”

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September 19, 2021

Masters of Illusion: Sociopathy from the Very Rich on Down

Nothing Changes With the Rich!

You just can’t make this stuff up as a fiction writer (also, see below, at the end of this piece**). Demonic, but sturdy. Boring actuarial folk, or in this guy’s case, making loot illegally in the legal channel that is Illegal Wall Street:

Thomas Peterffy became one of the world’s richest people by mastering risk on Wall Street. Building his Mediterranean-style mansion seven years ago on a vulnerable stretch of Florida’s Palm Beach Island was a matter of seeing the odds clearly once again. The consequences of climate change will play out over decades, and Peterffy is 76 years old.

“I don’t have a care about it at all,” he said over lunch at Mar-a-Lago earlier this year, just down the street from his home. “If something needs to be done to save it,” he added, “it’s not going to be my problem.” The founder of Interactive Brokers Group has a fortune of more than $21 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Thomas Peterffy with Lynne Wheat in Palm Beach in 2017 (Nick Mele/Patrick McMullan/Getty Images)

Glaser is building a new waterfront mansion designed by architect Kobi Karp, replacing a now-demolished estate owned by Jeffrey Epstein.

Seawall installation at property on the intracoastal in Palm Beach.

Nice guy, uh? And even younger ones, in the billionaire class, they whisper that, though they do have bullshit smoke and mirrors philanthropies and foundations to, well, shelter taxes and corrupt the world more with their sociopathy. In the old days, it would have been, “Eat the Rich,” “Kill the Rich,” “Banish the Rich.” Now, though, since they have created a vampire class of millionaires and media mental midgets with millions stashed away, the Rich Are a Protected Class. Until we get daily reminders of the collective insanity of Western culture, Western capitalism, Western cults. This is the rich, giving a damn about the future, or, spending millions and billions on their vaults and prison garden homes. Then, there are 10,000 in Del Rio, Texass:

a group of people in a forest: Large Migration Surge Crosses Rio Grande Into Del Rio, Texas

The temporary camp has grown six-fold since Monday and more migrants are expected in the coming days. Del Rio Mayor Bruno Lozano made a disaster declaration Friday. “I had thought that the alarm was sent on Monday. This is setting the nuclear bomb alarm that this is no longer sustainable or acceptable,” he said. Congressman Tony Gonzales, a Texas Republican, is calling on the Biden administration to come up with a solution for the chaos. “Please get engaged, get involved, do something. This is unsustainable. This is not America. This is not the way things should be,” he said. “Folks are coming over and across as if there is no border.” Also Friday, CBP closed the Del Rio Port of Entry and re-routed traffic.

Elevating a property in Palm Beach.

I have years of writing about and researching urban planning, regional planning, all the gold, silver, platinum of LEED/Sustainability/New Urbanism building. It is a mighty thing to have a few degrees from elite schools (my schools, they are not elite), and then getting placed into the star chambers of planning, architecture and design. To the point of, the Eichmanns are deep into this lie, and there is really, the way they want smart cities and internet of bodies for the future, no global warming, no global climate chaos, no collapsing systems, water shortages, deaths in the millions annually just from air pollutants. No deaths in the hundreds of thousands because of higher and higher bulb temperatures. No reality about water shortages, failing sewage treatment, endless fires, pests-poisons-pestilence vis-a-vis profits at any cost, at costs to anyone or anything, albeit, not against the elite and star chamber folk. The reality is if you believe in capitalism, in all for one, or that technology is going to get us out of the muck, then, you are a denier. The worse kind!

If this doesn’t tell it all, here we are, the great profession (sic) of planners (misshapers, building and real estate protection racketeers) having yet another fake event, virtually. Imagine that, so planners are supposed to be on the land, in the muck, in neighborhoods, looking at systems, ecosystems, people, communities, towns and mega-cities, and, here the gutless wonders are, well, hiding again, in underwear and Snoopy slippers. This was a group I was sort of a member of when I was getting my graduate degree in , well, urban and regional planning:

Save the Date: 2021 OAPA/APA WA Virtual Joint Planning Conference

The 2021 conference continues with the theme of Growing Together Virtually, recognizing the importance and challenges of planning for evolving communities, large and small, in these challenging and polarizing times. The conference will offer more sessions than last year, allowing for greater variety in session content.

Oh, in polite company, we can’t call this a bunch of fucking shit, no? All the communities now within communities, the so-called subcommunities, struggling with forced jabs, forced passports, forced scrutiny, forced surveillance, facial recognition just to enter a football game or concert. Work, sure, servicing those maskless wonders with masks on, but not enough cash to pay the rent, or, all the cash for the rent. No health care, nothing of those safety nets that the RICH have, and do not get goofy on me to profess that the rich do not have entire lobbies upon lobbies in their sophisticated protection racket. The planners — many of them looking for sustainability and gardens and walkability and healthy small downsized living — in the end buckle under the weight of bureaucracy and the rich and powerful controlling the narrative and their own money stream. Look, I understand that every arena I have entered into since, oh, age 13, those places are sacred to liberals, lights, conservative, lights, and that I would also be an outlier or outcast anywhere, or the enemy in some regard, but now, it is way beyond “enemy” or “persona non grata” I represent. It is a matter of outcasting, men, an untouchable, while the APA-WA branch, peddles more lies, meaningless doublespeak:

“What is Planning? Planning is a dynamic profession that works to improve the welfare of people and their communities. Professional planners make great communities happen by working with civic leaders, businesses, and citizens to envision new possibilities and solutions to community problems.”

I wonder what the planners might do around those Haitians, all those cities that are in disrepair, all the rough sleepers, the homeless-in-vehicles, the sheltered-in-basements/garages/hotels. How to plan, man, those smart cities, those hipster places, those virtual venues, the Zoom Rooms, the isolation chambers, the places of mediocrity sold as cutting edge Musk-Apple joints. Imagine, maybe in a year, the Planners can hook into the Bezos Ejaculatory Space Suit Freaks, and have a live feed with Bezos and ask him what’s next in planning cities around his Gestapo-Gulag-Retail-Surveillance-Cloud world. In so many ways, I found the planning profession to be vapid, dead of creativity, and certainly no rabble rousers or deep thinkers in the bunch. They talk a good talk, but in the end, their jobs are the work of the real estate, developer, building and construction lobbies, and the planners I know would never speak up at a Chamber of Commerce meeting. They are the epitome of Eichmann, updated and retrofitted for Cancel Culture and Oh So Hip Stylists.

How about his Salem group, Salem for Refugees? You think planners would want to create grants for people like me to study the dynamics of community building-engagement-employment around these newest immigrants?

With the unfolding situation in Afghanistan, thousands of people are fleeing their home and looking for protection in the US. We have been preparing for refugees and SIV cases. Now we are preparing to also provide resettlement services for individuals who have been identified as special risk (journalists, NGO workers, humanitarian workers, political activists, etc.). Due to the rapid nature of the situation, this group of individuals will have a special Parolee status which will allow for immediate work authorization but limited access to State social services or Medicaid benefits. We need your help in bridging this gap and providing for the needs of these people. In an effort to bring Afghan Evacuees to Salem, the State Department has given us an early approval as an affiliate of World Relief and we are now an official Resettlement Agency! We will begin receiving cases through the Afghanistan Placement Assistance Program and in January for all other refugees through the Reception and Placement program!

The good old days when we truly hated the rich:

In 1920, Wall Street reporter Edwin Lefèvre derided “some wretchedly rich people” in a Post article called “The Annoyances of Being Rich Today.” Without naming names, Lefèvre detailed conversations with bankers and heirs about their gripes with imperfect service and ungrateful butlers. One rich man told the author that he feared a revolution was afoot after he asked a waiter for bread and — instead of silent obedience — the response came: “Sure thing!” Others complained about accusations of vanity or the prospect of their service staff seeking higher wages.

Lefèvre sums up the groans of the plutocrats by casting wealth as a sort of illness:

I am convinced that there is a definite social disease which we may call gold poisoning. When a man has too much gold, some of it gets into the system; through the pores, it almost seems. It causes deafness and affects the sight. These ailments, gold deafness and gold blindness, are responsible for most of the annoyances of which the stricken rich so bitterly complain today. Instead of seeing or hearing, they are merely aware of a rumbling sound—the tread of their fellow men marching toward them, armed with bombs, bitterness, and taxes.

John Stuart Mill called the rich, “the unearned excrement.” Oh, what a day it would be to see that again, lifted up high, daily, in the media, but this is a world of valorizing the rich, listening to the liars and grifters — the thespians — and all the handlers, the hangers-on the rich-super rich employ to massage their messages.

Larry Glickman, a professor of history at Cornell University, says he has used this clip in one of his classes to illustrate the criticism of so-called robber barons of the late nineteenth century: “In the Gilded Age, ‘capitalist’ was really a term given by its enemies to people who had earned wealth in an unfair, immoral way, so a lot of small business men said something similar to what Hickenlooper said.” Glickman says the distrust of robber barons (or capitalists) comes back to the question of hard work. “There was this idea that you had labor producing things, and that accumulating wealth through honest production was a good thing,” he says, “but there was a new class of people called capitalists getting their wealth through unproductive, exploitative ways.” (Saturday Evening Post).

** So, Bloomberg the Billionaire with Billionaire Bloomberg News, has the answer for inequities, which in any other language is, well, wage theft, tax fraud, tax evasion, thievery of a general nature, war profiteering, penury, slave/sweatshop economy. The news just continues with these abhorrent items:

Amazon’s massive new distribution centers, soon to be surrounded by infrastructure built to serve workers, are being compared to Gilded Age company towns. While many are aghast at the idea, fellow billionaires are praising it.

The e-commerce empire founded by Jeff Bezos will offer the American working class a better option than scraping to get by in increasingly expensive cities, investment adviser Conor Sen wrote in a Friday oped for Bloomberg, the financial news outlet whose namesake is billionaire former New York mayor and failed presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg.

“Let’s call them ‘factory towns,’” Sen suggests, apparently in an effort to avoid the baggage that accompanies the concept of “company towns.” Popular in the late 19th century among the new breed of mega-corporations – railroads, steel mills, and the like – many of these dormitory communities held workers as veritable prisoners, paying them in scrip that was only redeemable at the company-run store and retaining groups of thuggish Pinkerton “detectives” to stamp out any attempts to unionize. (source)

Yet, Bezos is a joke with the power of deflection, the power of the rich to believe his own dirty secrets of domination. No number of jokes piled on by the millionaire comedian class or insightful (sic) commentaries by the millionaire presstitutes can buckle the Amazon formula. Here, the sweatshops of Amazon, providing slaves with, well, boxes of time out:

Amazon offers 'wellness chamber' for stressed staff - BBC News

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September 15, 2021

Beast of a Nation: Banality of Evil and Peppy Propagandists

I like to get down to brass tacks, into the muck, since I have been in on all aspects of academia and journalism, environmental activism, literary arts, and social work. I’m not pulling some trump card here, but in my more than six decades of confronting these amazingly dead-from-the-head-up members of the 80 percent, and those of the 20 percent, I have seen the complete shut down of discourse, critical thinking and shame.

They really do not care about their people. They really do not care about their patients. They really do not care about their troopers. They really do not care about their students. They really do not care about the homeless, the women in Afghanistan, the Blacks Lives, and all the other BIPOC folk. Crocodile tears and thespian performances do not equate to caring for people. This country, and the West in general, is one giant stage of actors and actresses.

It doesn’t matter if it is Kamala Harris, Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, Macron-Johnson-Trudeau, no matter who is in the acting part, they do not care about the homeless, the disabused, the marginalized.

It could be Howard Stern one moment giving nationwide bits of perverted advice, or it could be the head of the teachers’ union, Randi Weingarten, or it could be the head of the CDC, Microsoft, Apple, FDA, CIA, ICE, ATF, FBI, NAACP, ACLU, no matter, but they all have their limits toward basic freedoms and rights. One day a hero, but the next day scum.

I am talking about the mandates, the hard rule of outcasting, caste creation, and new stitched-on scarlet letters (a la digital dashboards). What is going on while the divide and conquer chatter and discord unfolds on corporate media and in the boardrooms of major and minor companies, in schools, universities, state, county, city agencies, and with the feds, while we watch sports, await Broadway opening up, line up for cruise ships, and eat-drink-&-be-merry in La-La Land.

The reality is clear — there are so many ways to disenfranchise the lot of us: Those who want to stop the mandated experimental jabs, the mandates for useless masks, the absurdity of social distancing and quarantines. Those of us who want robust discourse. Those of us who want to look at the evidence. Those of us who want to uncover the subterfuge. There are great pieces of journalism and deep and passionate opinion pieces on all of this — DARPA, WEF, Fauci, gain of function, Event 201, Dark Winter, and Fourth Industrial Revolution. More. However, when you get into the day to day weeds, with our jobs, our workplaces, with those administrators, things are not looking great.

I had the sickly unhealthy luxury of getting in on a huge national web call/Zoom with a major Human Resources management service, talking about what the thousands of companies they represent can do to force employees to go under the knife, err, jab. These people — your bloody neighbors, the soccer moms, the camping dads, the aunts who take the kids to museums, the grandfathers who have backyard gardens — are none other than the complete embodiment of Eichmann. The Eichmann Syndrome.

These are the $400,000 a year professional managerial class (sic) people running the HR departments, looking at the three major airlines (swooning over them) for the jab mandates — everything from weekly testing AND a $200 a month additional premium to health insurance, to allowing for a religious exemption for a vaccine (sic) but with unpaid forced leave. Whirlpool, man, bribing a $1000 for each employee now to go under the jab.

These HR people are looking at distinguishing jabbed from unjabbed, and they are utilizing all those HR tools in their toolboxes, thankful of the monopolies and big corporations for blazing the trail to take away the right to a livelihood, to informed consent, to travel, to basic human interchanges. They are writing the rules now as I write this around those of us who “get Covid and have to leave work,” but they are sly Eichmanns, as they are nuancing of the new normal of FMLA (family and medical leave act) laws, paid time off for recovery or hospitalization around Covid. They want to make it impossible to live on planet earth without subjugating oneself to the jab . . . and I mean, JABS, since booster x has a human biophysical life of three months, so bring on the Covid 18-pack. The bottom line is, today, September 14 will be harkening in a very different world in a month.

The lawyers are working long and hard to force the jab, to force employees to bend and falter, in order to kick out as many miscreants as possible. This is what your large HR groups are talking about as we debate Saudi Arabia, or 9/11, and as we look at the Continuous Wars, and as we look at cops down under pounding grannies’ heads for coming out to protest.

Typical HR booklets: Case Study: Protecting & Defending Intellectual Property; 5 Measures to Battle Construction Site Theft; Cybertheft & Participant Accounts: A Fiduciary Responsibility?; 6 Best Practices for Fraud Prevention; From Seed to Sale On-Demand Webinar Series: COVID-19 and Cannabis Operations. You get the picture: all about protecting the company, the rich folk, the administrators, stockholders, et al.

Yet the partisan pattern persists throughout, with Democratic majorities favoring vaccine passports in nearly every situation (from 53 percent for indoor drinking and dining to 77 percent for international travel) and at least a plurality of Republicans opposing them (from 48 percent for international travel to 65 percent for indoor drinking and dining). Stores are the only venue where more Democrats oppose vaccine passports (40 percent) than favor them (37 percent).

Sensing a political minefield, the Biden administration has so far deflected the issue of vaccine passports, vowing only to provide guidance for nongovernment initiatives in the days ahead.

“The government is not now nor will we be supporting a system that requires Americans to carry a credential,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said Tuesday. “There will be no federal vaccinations database and no federal mandate requiring everyone to obtain a single vaccination credential.”

Yet the Yahoo News/YouGov poll suggests the White House could, in theory, play some role in the process. Asked whether “the U.S. government” — as opposed to U.S. businesses — should require “Americans to provide proof of COVID-19 vaccination before participating in certain higher risk activities (travel, concerts, sports games, etc.),” more Americans say yes (46 percent) than no (37 percent).

It’s as if people somehow thought the neoliberals, the democrats, the polite ones, the freaks of nanny statism, would somehow just stick to LGBTQA and transgender bathrooms issues (not). It is the tyranny of stupidity, and I have mentioned this in many pieces here and elsewhere, when you deny authority, when you question the paradigms, when you go up against administrators, college presidents, social services nonprofit CEO poverty pimps, well, the price is more than ostracizing and triangulating. It is the social isolation of the castes these people have set out, in their professional managerial class power.

You don’t need to lecture someone like me on the dirty dirt of republicans, at the governor level, on down. They are despicable. Yes, I am with groups who are against mandates, forced medical experiments on people that contain right wing religious freaks, and cops and fire fighters. These — right wing religious zealots, cops/pigs and overpaid firefighters — they are contrary to almost everything I have fought for, and they have been the despicable ones, too.

This is not a provocative image, pre-Covid:

But it is now. Imagine this image: But, of course, the dude on the right, well, he has zero concept of communism, but alas, these are strange times — leftists fighting the Draconian measures aligning with, well, cops and dudes like that — “the final variant is called communism.” Funny stuff, since the variants are all about capitalism, and the final conclusion to all this is about the point zero zero one percent riding roughshod over us, with the help of their elites and the Eichmanns. Those communist countries like Cuba and China have, well, non-mRNA true vaccines. But, little do they know, these AmeriKKKans.

This person below, well, both, are really part and parcel of the fascism that has been unleashed in USA in several iterations, and following US Patriot Act and the forced shoe donning at airports, we as a country are insipidly inane and accepting of all the wrong kinds of authority. Now, with the dementia democrats in office, the blue bloods, we are now forced to fall under their thumbs, and follow the science religion of a very suspect, dead-end route.

HR So, this meeting I snuck into, with HR fantastics swooning over Walmart’s vaccine policies and the “joints for vaccination” schemes, they are the people I have been warning my students and homeless clients and veterans and others about in order to learn from and defeat. This Rochelle is a monster in so many ways, and Fauci is too. We can’t even get one day of a Lancet article by two former FDA heads without Saint Fauci chiming in —

The current evidence on COVID-19 vaccines does not appear to support a need for booster shots in the general public right now, according to an international group of vaccine scientists, including some from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the World Health Organization.

The current evidence on COVID-19 vaccines does not appear to support a need for booster shots in the general public right now, according to an international group of vaccine scientists, including some from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the World Health Organization.

“Current evidence does not, therefore, appear to show a need for boosting in the general population, in which efficacy against severe disease remains high,” the scientists write in a new opinion piece, published Monday in the medical journal The Lancet.

The authors of the paper include two senior FDA vaccine leaders, Dr. Philip Krause and Marion Gruber, who will be stepping down in October and November, the FDA announced late last month. No further details were released about their retirements, although they sparked questions about whether the departures would affect the agency’s work.

United Airlines has mandated that all U.S. employees be vaccinated against COVID-19 or face termination. Those granted exemptions will be put on unpaid leave.
*Justin Sullivan/Getty Images*

Two senior leaders in the US Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine review office are stepping down, even as the agency works toward high-profile decisions around Covid-19 vaccine approvals, authorizations for younger children and booster shots.

But Fauci is now attacking these two who wrote in the Lancet their concerns, and they are not anti-vaccination folk. Speaking of the Lancet: —

A shocking admission by the editor of the world’s most respected medical journal, The Lancet, is saying that medical research is UNRELIABLE AT BEST IF NOT COMPLETELY BOGUS! Lancet editor, Richard Horton “… states bluntly that major pharmaceutical companies falsify or manipulate tests on the health, safety and effectiveness of their various drugs by taking samples too small to be statistically meaningful or hiring test labs or scientists where the lab or scientist has blatant conflicts of interest such as pleasing the drug company to get further grants.”

This statement ties in perfectly with the article we have had on our website and been recommending for almost five years now from the World’s Leading Expert on Medical Research, Dr. John Ioanidis from Greece. Dr. Ioannidis told the Atlantic Monthly in an article titled “Lies, Damn Lies, and Medical Science” that 90% of medical research is tainted if not outright bogus due to influence from the industry. (source)

But the HR consultants who charge millions for their services (sic) to companies on what to do with employees, with all the vagaries of those darned dirty and messy real people, now under the Covid Stain of Fascism, they all got their jabs because they are compliant, and they make individually amazing amounts of money for their, well, services. These are the dream hoarders, the true believers in taking as many rights away from people vis-à-vis workplace rules, regulations, laws, steps, credos, trainings, and more, to the point of creating entire legions of, well, the untouchables, the unhireables, terminated for noncompliance. These are mean folk, Hillary and Obama and Biden loving folk:

Obama, the dance man, 60th b-day party, during Covid Maskless Madness?

Performers At Barak Obama's 60th Birthday Share Photos Before Being Told To Delete Them

No mask for AOC, the capitalist entertainer, but all the servants? You betcha!

Notice these freaks, while the press crew, well, has to mask up.

This is it for the great masses, as the screws get screwed down tighter and harder each minute. The news is vapid, and the depth of coverage on almost anything is boiler plate or pre-ordained by the commercial media honchos. And this is the final nail in the coffin for teachers,

To all of my American Federation of Teachers (AFT) union brothers and sisters across America I call upon you RIGHT NOW to immediately LEAVE THE AFT in protest as a moral obligation.

Randi Weingarten HAS FIRED ALL UNVACCINATED STAFF IN ALL AFT FACILITIES ACROSS THE COUNTRY.

So that’s not teachers, that’s secretaries, accountants, lawyers, custodians, doormen, etc…

I personally can and will NEVER return to the AFT as long as Randi is president and as long as this segregationist policy is in place.

The issue of AFT membership is no longer about what AFT does and doesn’t do FOR US as educators, it is now much bigger than that. IF you continue to pay dues to the AFT you are financially supporting a blatantly discriminatory and corrupt multi-million dollar organization.

Please stop supporting them right now. Vote with your money AND LEAVE THE AFT NOW! This is bigger than whether or not YOU still have a PCR testing option at your job or not. This is about choosing your side — do you stand with rank-&-file workers who choose to make their own medical decisions? OR do you stand with the biosecurity state?

Giving even one DIME to the AFT is supporting the biosecurity state. End that support right now!

Please spread this far and wide to all AFT members. We will post at our webaite very soon.

All the best;

www.TeachersForChoice.org

Viewpoint: AFT's Refusal to Challenge Democratic Establishment Leaves Every Teacher Behind | Labor Notes — Biden and Randi — Team USA.

I don’t know what else to say, since so much of what is behind the biosecurity state, the mandates, all of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is tied to high tech and surveillance capitalism, much of which comes from the bowels of military, Israel, the chosen few.

In the final act of the 2011 film “Contagion,” people wore bar-coded wristbands to prove they had been inoculated against the deadly, pandemic virus. But in 2021, of course, the vaccinated will be able to use a blockchain-powered smartphone app, according to IBM and Salesforce.

The two tech giants are partnering up to help businesses and public spaces smoothly reopen as newly authorized COVID-19 vaccines become more available by integrating IBM’s Digital Health Pass with Salesforce’s web-based employee management platform.

“At the start of the pandemic, many organizations deployed simple COVID-19 screenings, such as self-reported health surveys, to support re-entry to workplaces and other institutions,” said Paul Roma, general manager of IBM Watson Health.

And this is not about health safety, about a shot passport. This is about moving everything into those HR digital libraries, containing background checks, drug screenings, mortgage records, all addresses lived at, court records, education records, criminal records, defaults on loans, credit reports, and, no, not too far fetched, an entire digital library of things written-snapped-photographer-tweeted-downloaded on the World Wide Web. And yet, again, just one little hour listening to the HR wonks talk about all the great things companies can do to coerce, cajole, conspire, contain, and co-opt their employees into doing anything: first the jab, and next some cool nanoparticle atomized air product, to calm the masses, to get more productivity, to erase emotions, what have you.

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This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

September 5, 2021

Local Man Overcomes Illiteracy One Tutor at a Time

September 8 makes 54 Years of celebrating International Literacy Day

Benjamin Spock, M.D., Author of Baby & Child Care — An eloquent plea that Americans recognize the appalling frequency of illiteracy…a tragedy which handicaps–occupationally, politically, and emotionally–a third of the citizens of our rich, ‘advanced’ country. referencing, Illiterate America, Jonathan Kozol

Note: This is a pretty mellow piece below (parts 1 & 2), for the local, Newport News Times, where I have published. Here, an archive, of sorts, of some of my articles and op-eds.

+–+

In elementary school he was put in special ed because of learning and reading delays. The label followed him all the way through high school. He graduated from Toledo High School with an IEP Diploma.

He worked as a landscaper and janitor; he struggled to live on his own because he could not read.

However, he’s a survivor. For years, he’s been working at a mill operating a large Caterpillar. He’s wanted to learn how to read for more than two decades. At age 36 the proverbial light bulb went off on August 3, 2021.

Reading tutors who worked through Mid-Valley Literacy Center rendezvoused to assist this man’s reading. One of the tutors is my friend, and she reports her “student learner” is reading sometimes fluidly. She’s been at this since March, meeting him in Toledo once a week.

My friend hails from Chile, and has been a teacher locally, as well as a substitute in Lincoln County. She’s fluent in Spanish and English, and works as a professional translator. Maria, a library tech, and another tutor have been working with this young man for six months.

More than 43 million adults in the US cannot read, write or do basic math above a third grade level. That’s one stat, and professionals I work with – I’ve been an English and writing teacher for more than three and a half decades, in El Paso, Juarez, Mexico, Spokane, Seattle, Portland, other places – say the actual figure is much higher, around the 60 to 80 million mark.

In one diverse study, 80 percent of people trying to properly install an infant car seat failed one or more steps because of “an inability to follow directions written at a 6th grade level.”

Other stats point out if the US was to increase average reading grade levels to the 6th grade, an additional $2.2 million a year would be added the economy.

Maria’s student is looking to move into an area of the mill where reading instructions and understanding safety manuals are a must. Getting out of the seat of a bouncing, loud log loader will also help him strengthen his longevity at the job.

I have worked with this student. He lives on his own, does amazing engine work on his truck, and he eventually wants to get certification and open up his own car repair shop.

He tells me that he was picked on beginning in second grade, for his inability to sound out words and lack of skills to do “read alongs.” This stigma is common in Lincoln County. Poverty, one-parent family dynamics, and other adverse childhood events (ACES) impact youth’s ability to learn at grade level.

Others are born with some form of developmental disability. We are seeing as a society more youth entering our primary schools with learning/intellectual disability – a phrase that stigmatizes people.

I’ve worked with adults as a supported employment professional in Seattle, Portland, Gladstone, Beaverton and Lincoln County; and assisted adults in advocating for themselves in order to land jobs and keep those jobs. Reading, writing and math sometimes are impediments, either individually, or collectively.

However, all those services Oregon has set up around supported employment and housing do give people a hand up. Maria’s student has had dozens of folk come into his life, informally, who started reading sessions, but all quickly moved on. Maria, 78, is dedicated to this gentleman.

She reports to me that “he is finally reading, sometimes pretty complex sentences. He has a big smile on his face now when we meet.”

Maria’s student is one of millions worldwide who should be valorized for succeeding. All our hats should be off for this local man: September 8 is International Literacy Day. “Since 1967, International Literacy Day (ILD) celebrations have taken place annually around the world to remind the public of the importance of literacy as a matter of dignity and human rights, and to advance the literacy agenda towards a more literate and sustainable society. Despite progress made, literacy challenges persist with at least 773 million young people and adults lacking basic literacy skills today.”

+–The End–+

This is what guiding and assisting look like:

Linda Perez (L) and her guide Alvaro Herrera (R), Tokyo, Japan, Aug. 31, 2021.

[Linda Perez (L) and her guide Alvaro Herrera (R), Tokyo, Japan, August 31, 2021. | Photo: EFE]

My first story on this fellow, from illiterate in March to reading in August:

Literacy is a matter of life and death, happiness or penury

I used to get my elbows up into many literacy projects as an English and writing faculty member at community colleges, universities, prison school programs and writing/journalism workshops for people who are exploited because of their status as low income or as former felons, and those homeless citizens as well as adults living with developmental and intellectual disabilities.

Events like “Banned Books Month” (October) or National Poetry Month (April) I worked hard to promote/support. Big journalism organizations like Project Censored and groups like Reporters without Borders are still in my blood.

I am now working again in a small rural community dotted with small towns. I am not only supporting folks with job development and on-the-job training and coaching, but I am helping two Lincoln County citizens with reading literacy.

In my situation with Shangri-La, these two are adult men in their 30s who are seeking reading literacy programs.

It may come as a surprise to citizens, lawmakers and politicians alike, but Lincoln County does not have a literacy center. There is no one-stop place for people who need literacy tutoring, whether they are functionally illiterate in their English skills as a U.S.-born citizen, or those who are English as a second/third language learners.

I’m working with a Salem group, Mid-Valley Literacy Center (founded in 2009). Vivian Ang is my contact who is helping train Newport and Toledo-based citizens to help tutor my two clients. This is not an easy task, and Vivian, with more than 20 years of tutoring including at Chemeketa Community College, says it’s hit or miss.

“I do not have any experience with assisting an adult with a learning disability (developmental disability) to learn how to read,” she has repeated to me several times.

An adult who drives a car, works at a factory, runs a large piece of construction equipment, lives on his own and presents as a “regular sort of guy” can be in one of the most dire of circumstances — functional and complete illiteracy.

Wanting to learn how to read when you are in your 30s takes guts. There are stigmas for someone who can’t read an insurance form or simple job application.

The need is high in Lincoln County for adults like this client of mine — born in Newport and educated in Newport’s K-12 system, including special education classes — to learn how to read. But we have many from Mexico, Guatemala and other countries in our communities where learning how to read and speak English is more than just a step toward better pay.

Vivian tells me a story about an Oregon woman, from Mexico, illiterate in English, who had a sick daughter who needed medication to improve. The prescription stated, “Take this medication once a day.” In Spanish, once is the word for the number 11, so, tragically, the mother followed the prescription contextualized in her Spanish reading abilities. At 11 times a day, after a few days, the medication killed her two-year-old daughter.

Navigating housing, employment, the legal system, utility companies, landlords, cultural activities, and representative politics are basically off limits to a person who can’t read or write. The amount of exploitation, fines, fees, garnishments, late payments and other penalties is a regular occurrence for people who can’t read and write.

According to the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy (founded 1991), low literacy in the USA costs us as a society $2.2 trillion a year. According to U.S. Department of Education, more than half of U.S. adults aged 16 to 74 years old (54 percent or 130 million people) lack proficiency in literacy, reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.

For my many clients across the board, lack of reading, low reading levels and functional illiteracy can be linked to poorer health, low levels of civic engagement and low earnings in the labor market. On average, more than 70 percent of people following the seventh grade reading level for instructions on how to install an infant car seat fail to follow the proper steps.

I am enlisting tutors for my two clients. I have a librarian and a library technician on board. Three retired women living in Toledo and Newport, too. One of my client’s workplaces is stepping up and paying the nonprofit Vivian runs for the materials and training. That general manager is also providing a private space with internet access to his worker (I’ll call him Samuel) who is illiterate.

He tells me, “I wish I had 22 Samuel’s working for me. He’s an incredible worker, reliable, goes the extra mile.”

+–END--+

So, as an endpoint, I have to express the complete dissatisfaction with K12 and college and university settings, whereby the stuff (sic) taught is broken, stuffed and starved lies, with some of the most fearful or disruptive professors, principals, administrators and school boards ruining our youth, and our young adults’ minds. Lest we forget great workers for real education, fighting colonialism in Latin America and Africa. Oh, we need anti-capitalists, anti-imperialists, anti-billionaire workers to bring real education to our people, intergenerational, on the land, away from dark hallways, 30 desks and chairs to a room, away from the atomization and disparity of capitalist miseducation:

Freire’s work and practice have inspired what has become a worldwide critical pedagogy movement. Cabral is a centrally important, yet mostly unacknowledged, influence of this movement. In the last prepared book before his death, subtitled Letters to Those who Dare Teach, Cabral’s influence on Freire seems to have remained central, as he insisted that “it is important to fight against the colonial traditions we bring with us.”

The Portuguese colonization of Guinea-Bissau was backed by Spain, South Africa, the United States, and NATO. Summarizing the pooled imperialist power wielded by Portugal in a report on the status of their struggle Cabral (1968a) elaborates: In the basic fields of economics, finance and arms, which determine and condition the real political and moral behavior of states, the Portuguese government is able to count more than ever on the effective aid of the NATO allies and others. Anyone familiar with the relations between Portugal and its allies, namely the USA, Federal Germany and other Western powers, can see that this assistance (economic, financial and in war material) is constantly increasing, in the most diverse forms, overt and covert. By skillfully playing on the contingencies of the cold war, in particular on the strategic importance of its own geographical position and that of the Azores islands, by granting military bases to the USA and Federal Germany, by flying high the false banner of the defense of Western and Christian civilization in Africa, and by further subjecting the natural resources of the colonies and the Portuguese economy itself to the big financial monopolies, the Portuguese government has managed to guarantee for as long as necessary the assistance which it receives from the Western powers and from its racist allies in Southern Africa. (Source)

Read the piece,

“How Amílcar Cabral shaped Paulo Freire’s pedagogy: Frantz Fanon’s influence on Paulo Freire’s thought is well known, but the Brazilian educator also drew considerably from Amílcar Cabral, the revolutionary intellectual from Guinea-Bissau”

The post Local Man Overcomes Illiteracy One Tutor at a Time first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

August 31, 2021

Little Deaths . . . Finding Solace Inside One’s Heart

The consensus is in — no choice, no life, no job, no nothing, without a passport. That medical, DNA scan, the retina scan, all biological systems covered, that all-encompassing passport that lists every move, every moment, every job, every purchase, every fine, penalty, tax, rental, home, significant or insignificant emotional and economic and familial event, captured in a chip. Americans are spoiled, for sure, as are Europeans, and Canadians. That mostly encompasses the Great White Hopes of those respective “countries.” The rest of us, in these “first world” environs are struggling, even with debit and credit and La-La Land accoutrements ad infinitum.

These new times in the west are old times, bubbling up, really, from the early conquest days of razing Indian families, destroying and taking over and plowing through villages, lands, territories. Entire rooms at elite Ivy League universities and museums with drawers and boxes of Native American skulls, bones, skins, eyes, belongings, sacred objects. It is the way of the Egyptologists, and it is the way of the Crusades. Pillage, set villages on fire, and now, set states and countries on fire with fear and terror campaigns in order to exact total compliancy. Services, labor, debt, future payments, extracted from us, capitalism’s marks. Victims. Useless eaters-breeders-breathers-squatters.

Here, from David Rovics, musician and protestor, with some great stuff on Dissident Voice over the years, just coming back from Denmark (and other countries in his gig line). He embraces progressivism and the forced jabs. He is a good fellow, who interviewed me, and we talked about other things tied to the ugly side of leftists and their canceling culture, censorship, etc., but this conversation about jab/mask/remote lockup mandates has not happened yet. I still have room in my brain to listen to what he says, though he misses so many points here:

Despite the prevalence of disinformation platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube being as popular in Denmark as anywhere else that doesn’t have the good sense to ban them, the anti-vaccine movement and anti-lockdown movement in Denmark never grew to the proportions of such movements in the US, Germany, France and elsewhere. But unlike those aforementioned countries, in Denmark most people have a well-founded reason to trust the government on matters of public health and safety.

In Denmark, if anyone jaywalks, they’re usually either a foreigner or an antisocial type. The overwhelming majority of Danes would never do that. This is also true in Germany and some other countries. Americans and Brits and others visiting from abroad tend to make typically American and British individualistic, antisocial assumptions about this conformist behavior. They see a crowd of Germans or Danes standing at a crosswalk, waiting for the “walk” signal, even if there’s no traffic in any direction, and they see something scary, from Children of the Corn or some other horror movie, a bunch of zombies who can’t think for themselves, or are afraid of getting a ticket. (source — David Rovics)

That’s a whole other set of discussion points from this tour he had in Denmark about what democratic socialism is, what society is, how science and government should be trusted (really?). Jaywalking and shoot, tossing banana peels on the side of the road. How dare us lazy, supercilious and egotistical North Americans! Yankees!

The unfolding global hysteria is congealing into even more lovely by-products of Big Pharma as Dictatorship. It comes in many forms and offshoots, for sure. The main functions of Western society are broken — neoliberal and conservative values (sic) have gutted infrastructure, have thrown trillions of bucks-euros to the few, have propped up this society into a very effective kleptocracy, have imbued a dog eat dog set of beliefs into a slew of folks.

We are at the point where billionaires and their lackeys in high places set the narrative, tone, and write the legislation, laws and force zero delimits on corporations and government in this “we the people” system we supposedly “fought” for. There is collapse, after collapse, after collapse, and it is apparent in the lack of governance over decades, and the adventures of imperial overreach, too.

In daily lives, professional managerial class actors are hitting the middle/upper middle class stratum, economically, through the systems of pain, fines, fees, tolls, penalties, regressive taxation, permits and litigation that eat at us, the 80 percent, from the soul and the brain and the body. We are in a time of most people not being able to navigate “the system,” and that can be any system — school, medical, social security, DMV, courts, and any number of systems of oppression and subjugation. So it is a time of chaos, now Covid Chaos, moving into more Chaos.

Teachers should be a priority for Covid vaccines, unions and others say - POLITICO

“People are fed up,” says Winni Paul, a management consultant whose clients have included campuses and higher-education groups. “The graciousness, the compassion, the ‘we do it for the students, we do it for the work’ — that’s gone.”

And I am with a group of teachers from many states, who are now scrambling to figure out what to do with the forced jabs, the forced proof of jabs, the forced masking, all of that, and many will not submit to the experimental mRNA, many have looked into these DNA-alternating medical devices, and they feel alone, big time. Their AFT (American Federation of Teachers) union has caved, and they see in big cities and small, all venues requiring, soon, a passport, CDC-approved vaccination card.

Delta airlines is forcing non-vaccinated employees to pay an additional $200 a month premium, AKA fine for not being jabbed. Oh, that was yesterday (August 25), and that will not be the end of it. Fools like Thom Hartman advocate ER physicians having the right to refuse treatment to anyone coming in — motorcycle accident, heart attack, broken leg, stroke — who are not vaccinated.

This is the Brave New World already outlined by the eugenicists of the 1920s, of the Modest Proposal of Swift’s time, of the middle passage days of tossing overboard hundreds of sick shackled slaves in one one-way crossing. Multiply that by hundreds of ships, tossing human beings for the sharks, alive, shackled in chains. It is the genocidal policies of empires and their corporate thugs (overlords) in despoiling cultures, murdering millions, and enslaving regions for their rubber, silver, gold, lithium, any number of things the capitalists call loot and booty. Pirates compared to the thieves from history and today seem like Fred McFeely Rogers in comparison.

See the source image

Even a saint, Fauci, he is a titan of terror in his old man’s way — “over his 50-year career with the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to address the cause, to prevent or cure the exploding epidemics of allergies and chronic disease that Congress charged him with curtailing. The chronic disease pandemic is his enduring legacy. Those ailments now debilitate 54% of American children compared to 6% when he joined NIAD.” (source — RFK Jr.)

In this group of teachers, daily there are emails announcing more and more statewide jab mandates, and the teachers that have to pay twice-a-week tests, if not jabbed, well, it is filling up those school districts; and many now in this group want out, since their email boxes are filling up. Teachers, youngish and not, with no money in the bank, really, and no place to go, since I predict all new rental agreements throughout the land (except in some Breaking Bad locales) will require proof of jab x, jab y, jab z, jab infinity.

The playing field shifts hourly, and while I have a literary reading manana, in Portland, for this hour, at least, the restaurant and community room demands all to be masked. There is no shot record demand, YET, but that’s on the horizon, since Oregon is the first state to reinstate mandatory outside masking policies. But the venue’s other locations, well, the rock and roll and progressives, they want to see vax cards or proof of SARS-CoV2 free tests. The Crystal Ballroom

It doesn’t matter how many millions of people worldwide are not happy with mRNA experimental chemicals forced into the bloodstream and across the blood-brain barrier; not happy with the bioweaponry aspect of Operation Warp Speed; not happy with the therapeutics that have been disavowed and censored, which could have saved millions of lives, possibly. One size fits all, baby. This news aggregator and news maker site, well, it is almost scrubbed from all search engines:

These stories above and below are verboten in the minds of tens of millions, hundreds of millions Westerners — even though there are robust stories on other topics, besides Fauci, jabs and mRNA, and fascism in this places.

I am finding people fighting, for sure, against mandates. Hell, my one time with the doctor recently points to this: “While I did get the vaccination, I am against mandates. I am against forcing people against their will to get this. I am of the mind that people have the right to make up their own minds.” He’s older, maybe 70, is a DO, and I know the university where he adjunct taught and matriculated from, Touro University Nevada (TUN) (a private university in Henderson, Nevada. It is part of the Touro College and University System.Touro University Nevada is a branch campus of its sister campus Touro University California.)

My niece is there, in her second year, and my DO stated, his one word of advice for her is, Cash. “Tell her to write notes to family and friends, and state: ‘please send cash.’” The doctor likes me, and he’s a jokester. He told me reads a lot, and that he did work in Amazonian for years, “saving one life at a time.” He is looking at my recent stress test, and alas, getting a cardiologist on board to maybe do more investigation on some electrical anomalies when I got up to 160 beats per minute, that is another example of the failed capitalist system: there are none here on Highway 101 on the central coast, and getting one to see me could take weeks, out of the cities of Salem or Corvallis. This is the state of medicine, after decades of gutting taxation of the rich and the corporations (who are getting us sick) and years turning medicine into a bizarre insurance scam, where doctors spend more time on the computer screen than with the patient.

So, this next reset is all about pushing more and more people into fewer and fewer public spheres, pushing people away from outliers or those defiant and dissident like me and millions. It is about controlling the masses, setting forth sophisticated bandwagon forms of propaganda, and setting afire all forms of community gatherings and robust discussions of the millions of topics of the day.

With this teachers’ group, the messages are coming in:

Governor Pritzker just announced mandatory vax for all IL teachers

Here is Dr. Peter McCullough talking about the dangers of vaccines, among other things: Basically, the vaxxed are projecting all the havoc they themselves are wreaking even as “life is pretty much back to normal among the vaccinated,” as many are bragging onto the unvaxxed. Many op-eds in publications like WaPo and the NYT are filling their pages with doctors martyring themselves and declaring they won’t treat unvaxxed anymore (to cheers from bots and humans alike in the comments section) and normalizing ending friendships based on vaccination status. But they are the super spreaders. They are the ones making children and Grandma sick. This is scapegoating at its finest.

Some great work is being done by Mike Williams @ Sage of Quay. Also, great Common Law shows being done by Crrow777 Radio Alfonso Faggiola and Lena Pu.
Want to see a man stand up to the controllers? Check out Paul Unslaved . You can also gain a little insight from some of the good First Amendment auditors like Long Island Audit.

California AB455 – this bill, if passed, will mandate the C19 vaccine for all CA employees and for CA citizens to enter any establishment except church and grocery stores:

Doctor McCullough video.

Rally against this action set for September 8th
Some good news: a touching video of resistance to vaccine mandates in France (i cant verify the authenticity but hope it is real)

Twitter.

Lastly, ICYMI – Illinois’ Vax Verify – vaccination verification is tied to Experian – meaning residents will have to go through a one-time verification process through Experian to access their vaccination records. So stating the obvious – this is opening the door increasingly towards a social credit system.

Vaccine Verification Portal.

Then this from one of the people on this list wanting the mandates and the draconian measures stopped:

Just a quick note: This Sunday will mark 58 years of me being active in the political sphere. Back in ’64, it was as a Goldwater volunteer. Some 6 years later, i switched sides, a consequence of the Vietnam War, the counterculture, ecological crisis,… And became much more of an activist. I have no love whatsoever for the right. But I’ve also seen the “left” act at critical points as a defender of the capitalist status quo, particularly as a consequence of the dominant tendency within the left to accept the state as if it were an institution acting on behalf of society as a whole, rather than the instrument of class power it has been since it emerged in history thousands of years ago. Both left and right (and “center”) are fully on board with the onrushing police state, while each proclaims itself to be defending the interests of humanity against the others. People need to look to themselves for solutions, and learn from historical movements, including anarchists and anti-statist socialists.

Connecting the dots is easy on one hand, but to get people to see this entire terror theater as planned is another can of GMO worms. Here, this is certainly a global, or EU, story worth a million lines of digital ink: Why do the experts on Science Advice for Policy by European Academies fight for higher pesticide exposure by Rosemary Mason

I heartily accept the motto,—”That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,—”That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men and women are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

— Henry David Thoreau, Resistance to Civil Government, 1849

Succinctly, Communist approaches to anti-statism center on the relationship between political rule and class struggle. Karl Marx defined the state as the institution used by the ruling class of a country to maintain the conditions of its rule. To this extent, the ultimate goal of communist society was theorized as both stateless and classless.

We are at 8 billion, and the planet is run by Blackstone and BlackRock and around 30 financial organizations, and around 140 corporations. The bottleneck is what the planned pandemic was all about — getting people to run away from sanity, common sense, and running into the various insane asylums. For anyone to question why some of us — who are way beyond just coming out from under the Capitalist-Media-Education rock — might doubt the purveyors of capital, scientism, control, policing, finance and corrupt drug companies, well, that is where I am now — “since the majority of people are in line for the jab, what’s your fucking lunatic problem?”

Here, Chris Williams, and, yes, on ecosocialism — hmm:

The distortions that go on under capitalism are so obscene it’s hard to wrap your head around it sometimes, on a micro level as well as a macro level. I was riding on the subway and I took a couple of trains and I was looking at the ads. The average American sees about 3,000 ads a day. One ad was for a credit card, and this is the slogan for the credit card—“Less plastic, more human—Discover it is human.” Discover is the card that they were advertising. In other words, you can actually be more human by having this type of credit card. Another ad, and this gets to the quality of life, that I pass by was about online delivery of food—how you can order online instead of having to phone somebody—and the ad read, “You’ve perfected the odds of getting to third base faster. Food delivery date night.” The obscenity and depravity of capitalism knows no depths to which it will not plumb.

This is something that Karl Marx talked about quite a bit. He was speaking at the anniversary of the People’s Paper in 1856, and I think this resonates far more with us now than it did even in his time.

On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman Empire.

That kind of sense of decay pervades our world as it is currently structured. He goes on:

In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary: Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labor, we behold starving and overworking it; The newfangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want; The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character.

At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force.

John Bellamy Foster on ecosocialism: “Ecological resistance in the twenty-first century has more and more been informed by the development of Marxian ecology and ecosocialism more generally. However, as ecosocialist analysis has grown, various divergent branches of thought have emerged, often in conflict with each other. Based on the conviction that clarity about capitalism’s relation to the environment is indispensable for the strategic understanding of present-day struggles, this talk will present some of the new research within Marxian ecology, bringing together the core issues of the expropriation of nature and the metabolic rift, and seeking to unite the ecosocialist movements of our time.”

Another set of notes from another teacher on this V is for Vendetta Vaccines email group — I’m calling it that as a joke:

I just attended a workshop for religious exemptions, and will forward the email for any of those who wish to attend. I am also happy to share insights and notes I took to help out anyone who wishes to take this route. However, I would like to share some notes and important information discussed in this workshop.
First, if you are part a union or teachers union, Collective Bargaining needs to take place. Many unions did not have a seat at the table and have sent cease and desist letters that could delay the mandates. Remember the unions represent both the majority and the minority of their union members and even if there is only 15 percent against the mandates, those individuals should be represented. It was recommended to call your Labor Relations Representative or Union Rep to see if they have sent a cease and desist letter or are planning on it. Key word is the Collective Bargaining aspect of the unions and you may be able to ask them to do so.
Additionally, I think if you are able to file for a religious exemption it is a good way to buy time. The common law approach may be a good option for those who do not have an option. Realistically, for Californians we are a Right to Work state, and employers have the right to fire and hire at will. With either method there is a possibility of job termination which has to be considered, and I do not know exactly how the outcome has been going for individuals who have filed religious vs. common law approaches. That said I do know there have been many religious exemptions accepted and there is an appeals process if denied. If you are on a timetable and need to be vaccinated by a date that is closely approaching, the religious exemption is probably more likely to be one way to hold onto employment a little longer. My understanding of the common law approach is that it can be more time consuming because legal notices have times frames for notices, responses, and actions to take place and may not work with your deadline which again can lead to termination. Because California is an At Will Work state there may be risk to filing for any unemployment as well, so all these things should be considered before deciding which route to take.
I am not saying one option is better than the other, I am just presenting them as Option A or Option B, because I think we all have differences in our personal situations. One may work better for you personally than the other. That said, we should also have our plan B in place if neither work. Helping each other is essential and it will be good to share with one another what has worked and what hasn’t, and I do not want to argue either method, just help out in any way possible. Our differences in ideology are unimportant to me at this time. I believe there is a good portion of us, who are strong personalities, opinionated and intelligence — and these may be the wonderful unifying qualities that have brought us together at this critical time to fight for our humanity.

GoFundMe for a new novel, or old one, I am fixing up to get published!

Take up the White Man’s Burden, send for the best ye breed,
Go bind your sons to exile, to serve your captives need –
new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child…
Take up the White Man’s burden, the savage wars of peace.

— Rudyard Kipling (1899)

The post Little Deaths . . . Finding Solace Inside One’s Heart first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

August 23, 2021

They Might Be Giants

When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

― Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings

It’s become clear to me that almost anyone penning anything that gets stuffed into any number of hundreds of “news” or “opinion” digital dungeons believes that their take on the world, on global affairs, on the political nightmares, on the various financial and military and digital happenings and what have you is, well, somehow theirs is a uniquely formed commentary to add something new and penetrating to the already hundreds of daily articles on Afghanistan or on the Pan-Plan-En-DEMIC.

I’ll give it to them, for sure, but how many pieces containing more or less 90 percent similar views and “facts” on a given subject really do much for humanity. I see the world from a different lens, and sure, it’s fun to rumble in the jungle looking at Biden-Wall Street-MIC-Trump-Celebrity Culture-Scientism-Entertainment-Media-Medicine-Et Al, but when I get down to brass tacks, I look at the ground level stories, sometimes about one person or family or situation at a time, to understand the larger issue of this perverse, predatory and people-killing Capitalism.

Yep, of course, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Earth Charter, and the Golden Rule, those are great starts to abide by. Survival International, looking at and from indigenous communities’ perspectives and needs, that too is A-Okay. Yet, sometimes, it’s one person at a time to understand the fragility of belief systems, or economic systems that not only rape-pollute-colonize land-air-water-soil-life, but put so many of my fellow women and men behind the eight ball, AKA, in the sights of those ruthless elites and their armies of Eichmann’s and thugs.

A mark and sucker and victim and limping along-useless-eater-but-useful-exploitable-breeder may be born every nanosecond in the eyes of the overlords of corporations and the boardroom beasts of banks and Military Everything/Everywhere Industrial Complex, but to winnow through that and spend time with one of those soon-to-be-victims-of-capitalism, for me, that is the narrative flow and truth I am more interested in these days.

Big City Boy in a Townie Coastal Hamlet

It does feel lonely out here, even among the 600 harbor seals just outside our door, on sand spits in their haul-outs after going for the salmon running up and down the Alsea River. A hundred bird sightings, sure, in a month. Green hitting the Pacific. A constant snake of cars and RVs and logging trucks up and down Highway 101. A pretty cool bridge just outside the window on the near horizon.

I’ve written about this area, the original home of the Alsi Tribe, a place, like in most of Turtle Island, which was never given or sold to and rented to the white man. We are, in so many places, entrenched on sacred and holy ground, on burial mounds.

This day, a few days ago, I was kicking up speed on the bicycle when I saw a fellow — big, nice sternum-touching beard — unloading cedar pickets from a truck into a garage. It’s a nice family home on a corner near the USPS, and I have been trying to get help putting up a cedar fence, so, much so that it’s been four months, or three, since the first fellow came out, said he’d do it, and never followed through. Two others came out, and two others failed to follow through.

Let’s call him Clint, and I said hello, and he seemed a bit skeptical of me showing up inside his fence, but soon, we hit it off. I asked about his fence, and he gave me the names and numbers for a landscaping team, father-son, that did his work for him. He made sure to let me know they were not bonded, and, well, that’s the way I want to go. The father-son is Mexican. The son, let’s call him Enrique, went to school with Clint. The middle school in Waldport.

“When he was first here, all he’d do is draw farm equipment and fields of corn. He didn’t speak English, but he did say, ‘I want go home Mexico.’ He’s my friend, and he speaks and read English so well that he helps his father with he contracts and bills and translation.”

While I was anxious to contact Pedro’s Landscaping, I spent time with Clint to learn his story. That is how I roll, and within one 25-year-old’s story the entire country and entire financial and entire educational and political system sometimes are anchored.

He was on a two-month respite before resuming the Alaska fishing he’s been engaged in shortly after he dropped out of high school. He’s got buddies who also dropped out, but who also got hooked into the drug scene, boozing and helping justify the criminal injustice systems of cells, ankle bracelets, militarized cops, overpaid arrogant judges, DAs who lie, and all the attendants in the system.

Clint never got into drugs, and he said his drinking — not super heavy — just interfered with his relationship to his girlfriend who is the mother of their six-year-old daughter. So he quit.

Clint was brought up by an alcoholic mother and never had much to do with a violent and absent father. Clint did not like school, and he says he probably had this or that learning “issue,” but in the end, Clint got his act together, left school at 16, never looked back, and never got a GED. He stated that he bought the house I was at age 22, and that last year he made upwards of $130,000 as a fisherman for Alaskan fleets. For most of his friends who did graduate high school, they are living poor lives, working for minimum wage, still living with parents; and some with college, they are straddled with minimum wage jobs and huge school loan debts.

This story is not the story of those elites from the Ivy League or the top (sic) 100 schools. I know because I have been to a few of them (not getting my degrees from them, however), and I have family that tends to rah-rah those schools, as if they are the Holy Grail. I have met with and interviewed many people (authors, scientists, creatives) from those so-called elite institutions. I have organized for a union at Georgetown U. I have been to a huge conference in Mexico City with higher education people, mostly adjuncts, many of whom come from elite schools. Even in my three degree programs at state colleges/universities, many of my professors were graduates of the elite schools. I was never impressed with those laurels.

But the point is that I consume so much from the elites’ research, from their books, from their journalism, and from their literature as in fiction. It is a daily reminder of the chosen few either leaving out the 80 percent of the USA population, or writing about us. Writing about Adverse Childhood experiences, ACES. Writing about socio-economic determinates of life, success, failure, perseverance, incarceration rates, poverty, medical health outcomes. The elites writing about high blood pressure, about African Americans’ weathering taking them out earlier than their white counterparts; about racist environmental policies. The elites and chosen ones even write the scripts for Breaking Bad shit, or all the novels and such penned in American Mainstream Literature. The elites take our pulse in the doctor’s offices, in the school offices, in the financial offices. The elites prosecute us, persecute us, penalize us, tax us, redline us, vilify us, joke about us.

So Clint is there, working hard, even offering to help me pick up cedar pickets and the supplies two hours away in Eugene, to save a buck. Clint with his eye toward fixing up the place and selling it. “I want to get out of this town. I’ve lived here my entire life.”

He’s got American Terriers, or bulldogs, what a lot of people mislabel as pit bulldogs. He had Pedro’s Landscaping build a fence, and he had it go six feet tall facing the road for the dogs. Under penalty of Waldport City ordinances, however, it has to be 42 inches, with 48 more or less allowed. The judgment was/is to cut it down to 42-48 inches. The verdict is to fine a $1000 a day for the violation. He was in rough waters in Alaska, fishing for those elites loving their fish fresh. Imagine that, the city code Nazi’s, at a $1000 a day. Similarly, the fine for some elderly disabled woman up the road, in Newport, was $1500 for front yard grass too long. This is the elites’ game. City managers with binoculars, and now drones with CCTV, looking in people’s yards, looking for weeds, or old automobiles propped up on bricks. Looking for fences too high (sic) or buildings on the property bigger than 10 x 20 feet that will need a permit pulled, a permit that, of course, costs money.

[So, this fellow in the trailer above, set up along the beach, in Waldport, and it was in daylight. I am not sure if he intended to camp there for the night, but the City Manager called the rent-a-sheriffs. They forced him off the property. I talked with the two deputies. They say more and more people are “squatting.” They talk about how it is a $3000 bill to the county and cities for removing trailers or broken down RVs. They seemed sympathetic, but at $30 an hour plus double, $60, an hour overtime, the cops are making out like bandits in a county that still pays $13 an hour at checkouts and in hotel rooms as maids.]

That’s an aside, for sure, since it was a day before I met Clint, but it is, again, emblematic of the failures of empire, and I don’t need no stinking commentary to add to the failures of Afghanistan, of the money managers, of the World Economic Forum. Failures of the Trump and Biden camps, spewing bullshit. I don’t need to add to the discourse on how bad Canada is/was with Haiti. Add to the EU’s sickening siding with USA on Venezuela. Do I need to add to the Israel question? Just wading into that muck gets one not only cancelled, but Mossad-ed out, Eighty-Sixed.

If I penned something like this, from Linh Dinh, I’d be Googled out of existence in USA:

White Flagged America,

When Ichiro played in the Major Leagues, he was always hounded by a mob of Japanese journalists and photographers, starting with the first day of Spring Training.

Sick of this, he told an interviewer he wished they would just disappear.

“From your life?”

“No, from this earth.”

The USA, though, is not being pestered but deformed, debilitated and, well, frankly destroyed by a host of people, many of whom you may not have heard of, so let’s us:

Imagine there’s no George Soros, No Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch or Klaus Schwab, too. No Jeff Zucker, Mark Zuckerberg, Arthur Sulzberger, Jonathan Greenblatt, Larry Fink, David Solomon, Robert Iger, Charles Scharf, Jamie Dimon, Steve Schwarzman, Jeremy Zimmer, Len Blavatnik, Andy Slavitt, Jeffrey Zients, Anthony Fauci, Jessica Rosenworcel, Janet Yellen, Gary Gensler, Betsy Berns Korn, Mort Fridman or, what the hell, Nancy Pelosi also, mostly because she’s so icky.

Even more than most lists, it’s highly incomplete, but you get the idea. Or maybe not. It’s too eclectic, you say, if not confusing. What do they have in common? They are all social engineers, out to remake America in ways that have nothing to do, at least initially, with the wishes of its majority, so there goes your democracy. As new norms are relentlessly propagandized, legalized then imposed, most Americans will learn to embrace their newly cowed, castrated selves.

The point is that Clint has a family, and is dealing with the Man in many forms. Fence too high. Viscous dog ordinance, even though his dogs are not vicious. He even almost got run over by some business woman, while Clint was on his Harley. He posted that fact on the local city Facebook page, and, well, it was taken down. No cussing, no threats, and respectful, but that was too much for the FB administrator.

Like many in his camp, who dropped out of High School and ended up doing something, working hard, yes, in a dangerous profession, Alaska fishing, he wants a few acres out of town, to grow food, raise a family, home school children, and maybe get a rig so he can move logs and such to keep money flowing in. We are talking about age 35 as his goal.

I taught in those schools where he and his Mexican friend, Enrique, went. The K12 system before the planned endemic was bad-bad-bad, and now, it is a complete shit show. This fellow works, his wife works and he is honest. The systems of oppression have not gotten him yet, nor have they gotten him down, and he is a success. And another load of Elites will write about that guy, the white guy, though, as I found out, he is from a Guatemalan Spaniard father.

Elites (white, many identifying as Jewish) writing about poverty, about the white protestant in the USA, about the poor, the druggies, about the criminals, about Latinos and Blacks and Asians. These Elites, the Chosen Ones, have a direct line to publishers, producers and the like. And they will write on and on about all those demographics they themselves are only witnesses to, or somehow involved in from the middle/upper middle/rich class point of view.

Millionaire union heads, like that one with the American Federation of Teachers. Look at her:

Again, Enrique and Clint, they are the Americans, the ones working hard. Before I shift to Enrique, the final moment in Clint’s driveway was when we both heard a blood curdling scream. A 12-year-old boy was screaming across the street. “Oh, that’s Alan, and he is severely autistic. He lives with his grandmother. His mom was a meth user while she was pregnant, and his father is a piece of shit, violent, a thief.”

It turned out that Alan was messing with a T-ball bat, and hit a rock accidently up to a second story window, and broke it. “No, no, no,” he screamed and cried. “I can’t pay for that. I am in trouble. I can’t pay for that.”

His grandmother came out, and settled the boy down. I recognized Alan (pseudonym) from my substituting up the hill at the middle school, in the special education room. The grandmother was wrinkled before her time, and she had to get to a PT appointment, but had no car, no driver’s license. She told us that the apartment owners will just tell her to pay for a window installer. “The owners do nothing around here for us.”

Autism, drug abuse, all those elite doctors and psychiatrists, all those practitioners, all those TED Talk celebrities, lecturing the world on childhood diseases, all the intellectual disabilities, all the chronic illnesses, chronic depression, chronic poverty, chronic criminality, chronic failures, yep, expect another load of books coming out during this endemic, from the white elites, mostly east coast, many, the Chosen People, making their money and lecturing us, even high-horsing people like me who is just as educated in the college sense, and more traveled, and, hell, more experienced in many more fields than the elites who have podcasts or get onto Democracy Now or CBS or CNN.

Back Breaking But Honest

Enrique and his dad, Javier, came out, and we talked about the fence project. In Spanish. Javier has been in USA for 20 years. Five children, four born in Mexico. His hat was emblazoned with Hildago and the eagle and the serpent. He and I talked a lot about Mexico, since I have traveled all over, and we swapped stories about the jungle, la selva, and places like Palenque, and where his family hails from, Mexico City. He works hard, pays workers $25 an hour, under the table, and we talked about narcos and politicians and why Mexico, with 80 percent of the population good and hardworking, family oriented, how it is that the military, corrupt mayors/governors/senators/presidents and the drug kingpins and their thugs have overtaken the land. All those drugs in the noses and in the veins of North Americans, Europeans!

We talked about Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata.

If there is not justice for the people, let there be no peace for the government.
I’d rather die on my feet, than live on my knees.
The land belongs to those who work it with their hands.
Emiliano Zapata

This is reality, and Javier states that he can’t find young guys to work as landscapers and fence builders. At $25 an hour. “They’d rather work minimum wage in a fast-food restaurant. Inside. Watching their phones. It is not how I grew up.”

Complicated, my relationship with Mexicans, people of the land, manual laborers. They to me, in most instances, are princes, when they are good and loyal and don’t end up drinking and womanizing. In any case, I have more robust conversations with guys like Javier than I do with any number of liberals or Trumpies or friends who identify as woke and hippy.

I have nothing in common with the very people I ended up in a graduate program — regional and urban planning. Code enforcers. The developers’ amigos. Cushy jobs with cities and counties. Beautiful people. Hikers and bicyclists. Professional Managerial Class who travel here and there and talk about walkability, about New Urbanism, about sustainability design. But at the end of the day, they are facilitators of the construction (building and paving) tycoons. They talk a nice game around LEAD Platinum and Climate Change mitigation, but in the end, they, for the most part, are just cogs in the system. Not squeaky wheels. Very disheartening for me.

These fellows — Clint, Enrique and Javier of Pablo’s Landscaping — they are not going to read this blog, they are not going to buy my books, they are not going to attend a literary reading planned for August 27 in Portland. That is the shame and the sham of this Capitalist society — that my bright idea on community spaces, on education, on collectivism, on intentional and shared communities isn’t scaled up — generating the various levels of strata, casts, deplorable people, disposable people, all the useless breeders/breathers/eaters, in the minds of the elites.

Imagine a world where right out the gates we have pre-school in gardens, in teepees, around fires, with others older there, to teach. Outdoor experiences. Learning to grow, fish, harvest, can food. Building tiny homes for the houseless. Doing the work of cutting wood and making woodcut art. All the hands on learning, and the play acting, the art, the music. Real teachers, and real communities, and, from cradle to cradle. No more warehousing of youth. No more jobs just for the shitty health insurance. No more school-to-complaint little or big Eichmann enforcer or follower. No more warehouses for the poor.

Yeah, this is still a land of Bubbas and Sweet Mean Charlottes. A land of ignorance and just plain mean, and racist. But look at Clint. Look at Enrique. Look deeper into the hearts of these people who are for all intents and purposes NOT mainstream subjects for the elites’ studies or projects. Do all people need to write poetry? Well, maybe. Play music? Of course. Create art and sculptures and blow glass and use a potter’s wheel and grow lettuce and learn how to guy fish and poultry, learn how to build a fire on the land, and in the belly. Yep!

Of course, a majority of the 80 percent will respond with dignity, interest and collective knowledge way beyond any cabal of elites determining the futures and histories and lives of us, the lowly Eighty Percent.

It is a dream, and we all might be giants!

Check it out — Dissident Voice: “All the World’s a Stage . . . Except in our Own Backyards! all it takes is a cool seven million smackeroos to build that field of dreams

The post They Might Be Giants first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

Author: Paul Haeder

Literacy is a matter of life and death, happiness or penury

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