When the bureaucratic well runs dry, you as survivor of DV are on your own, especially when family and friends are riding in their own Private Idaho.
Preface: According to band member Kate Pierson, “Private Idaho” was inspired by the feeling of being trapped and isolated, like a prisoner in solitary confinement. The song originated when Pierson had a vision of someone disappearing into themselves and being cut off from the world around them.
Note that in Western Capitalism, so so many people are trapped, self-imposed, sure, but mostly dictated by the oppression, the constant celebrity cult fawning, all those elites lording over the masses; i.e., the 80 percent. Think about all the services (social, mutual aid, support, food, schooling, child rearing, aging, disability) that were not there in the first place in this Number One Nation on Earth Shit-Hole, and those that were there as threadbare services designed to clog and fail … and you get a picture of how lost we are in this putrid world.
Think about domestic abuse, AKA Battered Wife Syndrome. Think about dysfunctional courts, dysfunctional prosecutions, dysfunctional defense attorneys, dysfunctional investigators and more than dysfunctional cops and even victims rights advocates who are to lunch, or just so fearful of rocking the boat they just do the basics or do not stick out their necks for fear of being sent to HR and being put on some fucking PIP — Personal Improvement Plan!
So, when a bloke like me ground truths with one example of one woman in one county dealing with one abuser and one last straw that precipitated calling 911, the world in an oyster is the world all of you readers will engage with at one point in your life struggling to make ends meet, struggling to understand how Capitalism and Patriarchy and Forced Implosion of Services are orchestrated by some of the most sociopathic and mean “leaders” in “society.”
Stages of Grief, Disempowering the Abuser, Healing
Operator: What’s the nature of your call, ma’am?”
Victim: “I’m … I’m locked out of my house. My, he … my husband, he just tried to strangle me … suffocate me …”
Operator: “Where are you now? Are you in a safe place?”
Victim: “Oh my god, safe? I don’t know.”
Operator: “Ma’am. Where are you now? In the house with him?”
Victim: “No, no … I got away. I’m at a neighbor’s house. He’s locked himself in our house.”
My friend is now almost a year from that frantic call last November. She’s in counseling. She knows the facts, too, rattling them off while she puffs a cigarette:
· “It can take seven attempts before a survivor permanently leaves an abusive partner.”
· “Around 20 people per minute are physically abused by an intimate partner in the United States.”
· “I’ve read that around 31% of all women will experience domestic violence. Can you believe that?
· “For Black women, that statistic rises to than 40%. It’s insane how much domestic abuse goes on.”
Even after eleven months navigating and meeting with the Lincoln County courts, the victim’s assistance program, a local counselor, and a divorce lawyer, my friend is in many ways right back at the trigger point of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from the moment she got away from a couch pillow and 220-pound man forcing her not to breathe.
It’s not a disorder, PTSD (or BWS), in the traditional sense, but rather an overarching set of fears, habits, thinking processes, self-perceptions and societal norms that rush through any victim’s or survivor’s head. That incident she was surprised to read ended up in the Newport News Times the following Wednesday that chilling November evening.
That was a shock – in black and white. That same week, a grand jury indicted the abuser – the accused – on most of the charges leveled at him by the arresting deputies. A husband and wife – where she ended up fleeing to with her dog – were also called in by the Grand Jury as witnesses, as well as the investigating deputy.
That 911 call and the indictment were not stages one and two. For her, she had been forced for more than four years to leave the house, or even when they were camping together, forced to flee from his very presence because of his heavy abuse of alcohol and constant verbal and financial abuse.
He gave her a concussion two years ago. She lied to the attending medical personal saying, “I fell in a river and hit my head.”
She lived a life of isolation, developing a contrived “everything is okay” attitude, but deep down she feared that he might one day just kill her. Nights were bad when he passed out after consuming huge amounts of beer and booze. Each time she left, he attempted to reel her back, she tells me. And that worked over and over and over. Apologies, big male crocodile tears telling he’ll never do it again, and then this woman’s need to believe she was committed to marriage for the long haul.
She repeats to me – “Can you imagine if we had a child? I understand why victims of domestic abuse who have kids get priority in shelters, for services.”
My Sister’s Place is a Template Needing Replication a Thousand Times
Taking power back is one of the goals of Amber Wishoff-Martin who is the director of My Sister’s Place in Newport. She was in a whirlwind when I first made contact with her.
On her mind was on my friend’s case – Wishoff-Martin asked for the perpetrator’s name and the date my friend contacted My Sister’s Place. But Amber was in the midst of putting together a flyer for an August 15 training in Newport sponsored by Catholic Charities: “Understanding How Immigration Laws Can Help Survivors of Domestic Violence, Sexual Assault, Child Sex Abuse, Stalking, & Human Trafficking.”
I broached the issues of overworked DAs; not always trauma-informed/sensitive victim’s advocates; the nuances of defense attorneys and prosecutors meeting to “horse trade” charges to forgo or forestall a trial based on a reduced set of charges in a plea agreement.
Wishoff-Martin states she wants to be “a voice of compatibility” when looking at the challenges typical of domestic abuse prosecutions. Amber noted the County’s domestic violence diversion court is effective. In the end, though, the shortage of prosecutors and defense attorneys has “a direct impact on survivors.”
We’ll get into the benefits and services of MSP, but one organization I contacted is Portland-based, SCARS – Survivor Collective Alliance, Reach Society. Rachelle Scheele is the principal cofounder SCARS. One of the incredibly impactful aspects of this collective is the Podcasts: Survivors Speak Truth. This is an abuse and trauma survivor-run Podcast. The goal is to “elevate survivor voices and amplify survivor stories.”
Healing takes time, as all the practitioners agree. Some of that roadwork, according to SCARS and social workers, including Heidi H. Heild, thirty years in social work, is drilling down to the truth of abuse. SCARS ramifies healing from trauma through peer support: “self-advocacy, healing, outreach, education, and restorative justice.”
I asked Heidi what goes wrong, usually, in domestic violence court cases. “The lack of advocacy for the victim, revictimization through the court process.”
Her biggest push is creating more services for domestic violence victims/survivors. “Not all DV victims are alike,” Heild says. “Some need only a little help to exit abusive relationships and get on with their lives; at the other extreme are those deeply traumatized by their experiences and in need of extensive professional help to regain a basic ability to function independently. Clearly, different types and levels of service are needed.”
Just this past February, Amber wrote to the House Committee on Judiciary supporting HB2933, a $10 million increase for funding the Oregon Domestic and Sexual Violence Services (ODSVS). She spoke of the increased need for survivor services.
“Our agency, like others across the state, saw exponential growth in calls to hotlines and requests for safe, emergency shelter and services. In the last year we took over 1,300 calls on our “Hopeline,” a 24-hour crisis hotline for Lincoln County support. This was a massive increase over what we have seen in years past,” she wrote.
She emphasizes that a safe place to sleep at night when fleeing domestic violence is a life saver. In Lincoln County, last year, MSP offered 4,140 bed nights to adult survivors and 1,938 nights to their children. MSP, also known as My Safe Place, has been in Lincoln County attempting to meet the needs of victims and survivors for 42 years.
For my friend, who called MSP a week before the attempted murder, said she hit a brick wall as there was no space for her at the time. She told me she’s not throwing aspersions at MSP, but without a place to stay, she went back to her abuser, and a week later, the 911 call was made. “I went back to the abuser and here I am now ten months later as he just pled out for the attempted murder.”
End of Part Two
Here, in the public record, the impact statement, as in VICTIM impact statement: More Ground Truthing/More Reality Not Hitched to Celebrity Culture (Johnny Depp or Russell Brand or Spitzer or Epstein or Bill Clinton or Joe Biden, et al, and their abuse, or alleged abuse).
Quoted verbatim, with permission.
To the Court and to my Abuser:
I see clearly now. I see how you gained control over the years and how you targeted me from day one. By shining so bright — me the independent, multi-lingual, smart business owner — I had what you never had. You saw in me a powerful but vulnerable well intentioned human being, and you took advantage of it as all abusers do. You never treated me as your equal. I was the perfect victim for you.
I didn’t know back then, but I know now that I married a predator. It was truly scary for me when I talked with your ex fiancé, Mary, and realized how your abusive behaviors only escalated with the years. Her life was shattered, and her current life, married with children, still reflects fear for you, of you. The fact that you never did the work on yourself to heal your own traumas or anger management, that is forefront, but for a victim of more then four years of abuse, I find it difficult to empathize with you. You have continued with your hate, your misogyny and your control; you have only gotten worse. You abused Mary too and probably every woman that ever crossed your path. You’re a serial abuser.
The control you gained on me over the years was very insidious. The cycle of abuse was vicious. From complete isolation & neglect, to long periods of raging and alcohol abuse, to rejection and abandonment, among others, you wore me down and turned me into a victim of Stockholm Syndrome. You belittled me and threatened me every chance you had. You made a point to make my life miserable. You pushed me away and reeled me back in whenever you were pleased with fake apologies, crocodile tears and empty promises to change and be better. I believe you are not redeemable.
You wanted a submissive wife at home to cook, to clean and to fall under your terrible will.
You wanted a punching bag for your emotions, and I was it. That facilitated you to show your best behaviors and charming self to other people. It’s not classic Jekyll & Hide behavior, but it sure was close. Nobody really knew what was really happening behind closed doors. A living hell, that’s what it was all along, all day everyday with you. I was constantly walking on eggshells, sleeping on the couch with my purse hidden under my legs and the dog on a leash, always on a fight or flight mode. I would clean vomit and piss all over the bathroom every other day.
You would hide the car keys so I couldn’t go anywhere. You would lock me outside of the house.
You would threaten to hurt the dog if I would to go anywhere.
You would manipulate me and force me into your deviant sexual fantasies so you would have to seek sex from other women.
You would attack my integrity and make fun of my origins, my family, my friends, my accent, my height, my weight. There was always something wrong with me, any ideas I would have or everything I would do. I was criticized, blamed, and brought down every day.
You gaslit me constantly, trying to convince me that what I saw I didn’t see, what I heard I didn’t hear, what I felt I didn’t feel. That was an ongoing narcissistic plan to convince me that my reality was completely false, and that’s a serious abuse tactic & psychological torture method I have learned now while going to counseling. You were grooming me into losing every little bit of self confidence I had so you could abuse me more intensely and keep me isolated.
The way you treated me all along is a statement of who you are as a human being. Nine months in a county jail with no counseling, no group work, no substance abuse programs just makes you more of a danger to society. But not to me.
For the longest time, I tried to understand your relationship with your mother, and I finally got it: You both are the same person, you both are despicable human beings. You can’t stand each other, yet you use each other to get your evil ways. I don’t think you were born an abuser, but that you became one: forged by another one, your father and your rotten mother’s response to a husband’s abuse. The abused that becomes an abuser is classic, but it doesn’t make me feel vindicated. Everything you guys plotted against me over the years and especially since you got incarcerated were really enlightening to me. She enables you all the way and you don’t know any better than being an abuser & addict.
I have now unraveled all of your lies, including the cheating and the nasty campaign you ran amongst friends and family. Rarely mentioning that we were married, keeping me hidden so you could abuse me better, your have lied throughout this relationship, to me and to others. You also targeting vulnerable and low self-esteem women by luring them into your hotel rooms. I’m truly disgusted. By now, your life has no more secrets for me. Maybe you can find some relief in that.
I wanted to be loved.
I wanted to help.
I wanted to make you happy.
I wanted us to be team #1.
Sure, I have cried, screamed and ran away my fair share as I was reacting to this ongoing nightmare. But unlike you, I never intended to hurt, control and manipulate. I helped you through every struggle you had. I was your cheerleader. I followed, encouraged and helped you in all your projects, as crazy as they were. I was by your side every time you experienced alcohol withdrawals, when you were sick or injured. And so on.
I had good intentions; I wanted a lifetime marriage & partner. But you wouldn’t appreciate anything I would do for you. I did a lot for you, for us. I was a good, loving & faithful wife. I am the one that helped you keeping your head above the water. Without me, you would have sunken a long time ago. Remember the person you first met in Antigua, Guatemala? An independent & strong woman, loved and respected by everyone? Well, by the time you got incarcerated, I was barely a shadow of that person, of myself. I had checked out emotionally. I couldn’t bear any of the abuse anymore. I was at my lowest point and this is exactly where you wanted me to be so you could control, lie, manipulate, cheat and abuse me even more. You thought you had me good; I know you never thought I would call the police on you! You’ve mistaken my kindness for weakness.
I jeopardized my life to flee from you and the abuse on many occasions by flying away, driving away, leaving numerous different jobs, turning down opportunities, sleeping in the car, streets, motels, crashing at friends’ homes.
They say that it takes on average 7 times for a victim to flee her abuser for good. That’s about what it took me to stand for myself and call the police. And yes, I did come back to you plenty of times. I genuinely wanted things to work for us and help you. I loved you very much.
But I know now that I never had a real chance to make this marriage work. For you, it wasn’t about love, respect and devotion. It was all about control, manipulation & abuse. You never loved me. I am no longer ashamed I have been shackled by you because I understand the dynamics of battered wife syndrome.
I am no longer a victim.
You used everything I ever shared with you, with honesty and vulnerability, to manipulate me and keep me around. I was so scared of what would happen if I didn’t obey you. You would threaten me into withdrawing yourself from the green card application so I would be deported. You would hide my passport while you were gone on your trips so I wouldn’t escape. You would make me spend every bit of money I would make so you could control me financially. I could go on forever.
Nothing will ever excuse nor explain what happened on the night of November 11th when for the first time in my life I dialed 911. Who the fuck do you think you are to feel that’s it’s okay to assault me and contemplate killing me? You really scared me. As you grabbed me by the throat, locked my arms behind my back, stuffed my face in the couch, forced a pillow over my head and tried to suffocate me, I thought for sure I would die. You tried to kill me, Abuser!
You must have thought that I had to pay for every woman in your life that let you down and disappointed you. Or maybe you sought some kind of vengeance against women, me, with your dad’s murder anniversary coming up. It took me some time to realize it, but I surely was in great danger! There is nothing I could have done for you justify assaulting me. No trauma or addiction of yours could explain or diminish your actions. I thought about that night many times; there was no happy ending possible. I would of end up dead one day soon anyways. You were out of control and more aggressive by the day. And remember when you gave me concussion in Sedona after hitting me on the head? Remember me begging for my life as you were choking me on the bed? Those burdens are now all on you. I am washing my hands of it. I refuse to let any of the abuse you put me through define me anymore.
The person you assaulted that night exists no more. I am in process of regaining all the self confidence you took away from me, taking back control over my life and healing from all the trauma you caused me. Make no mistake, you can’t fool me anymore. Although you’ve shaken me to my core, you didn’t succeed to kill me and I am now growing stronger than ever.
That’s my biggest victory. I am finally seeing you for the monster that you are. I am standing up for myself. Unlike you, I never sought vengeance. By now, I only want you to take accountability and be held legally responsible for what you did to me. I am finding myself much more peaceful knowing exactly who and what I was dealing with. I know you know exactly what you did to me, that and how much you’ve abused me over the years and it’s going to haunt and torture your consciousness forever, no matter how drunk you get.
YOU will have to live with those thoughts ever after.The truth is that you are a danger to society. You have put me through some much abuse and you endangered me and my dog, so many times. You are an abuser in the most classic sense; you drive intoxicated; you are a predator; you are a misogynist, a narcissist, a sociopath, racist and a total fraud. What you have put me through, I don’t wish it on anybody. You are an imminent danger to women and young girls.
You have lucked out and received a plea agreement, and I know your think you have won, that you will get something over on the probation officials, that you can scam the system, and that you will drink again and even attempt to contact me. You should have received prison time.
I truly hope you will heal from your own childhood trauma, through anger management and addiction treatment, and that you will at some point be the better human being I always thought you could be, but I strongly doubt any of these will transpire.
You will hurt again and fuck it up again like you always. How was your time in jail? Just over 8 months, right? How miserable were you? That’s nothing compared to what you have put me through and what I have endured because of you. I was in a prison all day everyday living in serious fear. You plead for easier final punishment because you got scared like a little boy. You shit your pants. I was always the bigger person, not you. You can’t even face your own truth and admit your terrible behaviors and mistakes. It hurts too much to face the reality of your life full of regrets, doesn’t it?
Throughout these months, I never contacted you, didn’t contact your family nor your friends. I am commanding you to never ever get in contact with me, nor stalk me in any way, shape or form. Not me, my family, my friends. Don’t even try because I won’t hesitate to defend myself this time around. After everything you put me through, I would hope you would understand and leave me alone forever. I have given enough of my soul to the dark dark motives in your heart and head. Never again.
I’ll end this statement by saying this: For me, you are a spineless worthless piece of shit and there is no redemption for someone like you. Most importantly, you have now become a total stranger to me.
[Photo: 8-year-old girl reads victim impact statement in court after her mother was beaten.]
End Note: I’ll write something in between this piece and the last one, around the power of patriarchy, marriage dynamics, what happens in divorce court, and the bullshit intentions of abusers like this guy playing the system in those “mandatory” anger management and alcohol-substance abuse “classes.”
America’s Lawyer E64: The corporate vultures from Wall Street are harassing wildfire victims in Maui, begging them to sell their property so that greedy bankers can make a fortune off of it. The Biden administration is trying to kill a lawsuit brought by young activists fighting for a better planet, with the administration arguing in […]
The United States District Court for the District of Columbia just ruled that PETA and its co-plaintiffs, which include the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), may proceed in their First Amendment lawsuit over Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s (WMATA) refusal to run PETA ads suggesting that people “go vegan,” among other ads. The lawsuit, which was initially filed against WMATA and its general manager, will now proceed solely against the general manager.
The lawsuit takes aim at WMATA guidelines implemented in 2015 that prohibit ads “intended to influence members of the public regarding an issue on which there are varying opinions,” those that “support or oppose an industry position or industry goal without any direct commercial benefit to the advertiser,” and others. The prohibited PETA ads, available here, include appeals to go vegan and choose dairy-free coffee creamer. Others affected by WMATA’s policy include the ACLU, a nonprofit health care network that specializes in providing women with access to birth control, and conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.
“Under the guise of skirting controversy, WMATA refused PETA ads that included a poster showing a pig next to the words ‘I’m Me, Not Meat,’ while allowing a restaurant ad proclaiming, ‘Porkadise Found!’” says PETA Foundation General Counsel Caitlin Hawks. “PETA looks forward to establishing that WMATA’s advertising guidelines are inherently discriminatory and restoring PETA’s First Amendment rights to advocate in behalf of animals.”
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org, listen to The PETA Podcast, or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
Teams backed by PETA’s Global Compassion Fund have pulled out all the stops to rescue animals from the war zone in Ukraine. Teams made up of courageous animal advocates like Animal Rescue Kharkiv (ARK) rush into cities and towns that have just been liberated in order to rescue and care for the animals left behind. With support from the Global Compassion Fund, PETA Germany supplies food each month for ARK’s clinic, shelters, and distribution to other shelters and residents in and around Kharkiv. After ARK’s clinic was bombed in 2022, support from the Global Compassion Fund helped rebuild it.
PETA Germany recently spoke with Igor Sobko, deputy head of Animal Rescue Kharkiv, about what life is like in the midst of a war.
PETA Germany: Igor, please describe what a typical day is like when you work near the front lines while also managing around 800 to 1,000 animals who are currently in ARK’s care.
A day like this is full of tasks, and it goes something like this: We answer calls that come in through the ARK hotline. They’re always emergency calls. People tell us where animals are injured or in distress. Then the rescuers set off immediately—we do that in the Kharkiv region. We save the animal or animals, which can also be dangerous for us. Then we take them to the veterinary clinic that PETA Germany helped set up. After an examination at the clinic, a decision is made whether to bring them to one of the animal shelters or admit them to the clinic. We receive around 70 to 90 calls each day. Work is also being done separately on evacuating animals from the combat zone in Donbass.
The clinic is open seven days a week, from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. Thanks to PETA Germany, we also work in two wonderfully developed shelters for cats and two dog shelters. The animals are cleaned and cared for, and everything has to be as beautiful as possible and always tidy. We also have a spay/neuter project, and there’s another team that prepares the dogs and cats for departure by compiling all the necessary papers, checking their microchips, and issuing animal passports. They stay in contact with European animal shelters to secure adoptions and with guardians to arrange reunions.
There are currently 75 people working for us. The project gives them hope and the animals a future!
PETA Germany: Caring for so many animals is a Herculean task! How big has ARK become during the war?
Before the war, ARK was caring for 95 cats and 295 dogs. We had to evacuate them all from the line of fire. Our animal shelter was directly bombed at the beginning of the war, and unfortunately, animals died. We also had to help all the animals who were suddenly on the streets—the immense destruction had left them homeless. There were thousands of animals locked up in apartments in Saltivka, the most heavily shelled area at the time. People opened doors so they wouldn’t just die there. Suddenly they were everywhere—without a chance, without hope—and we immediately started taking them to safe areas in Ukraine and Europe. At the beginning of the war, that was still possible because special legal exceptions were made at the borders, but now we’re back to the normal regulations, which we strictly adhere to.
Without PETA Germany, we wouldn’t be able to help so many animals. We currently care for around 1,000 animals every day, no matter what the situation is around us. The Global Compassion Fund makes it possible for us to build these structures, and now we can keep them.
PETA Germany: How important is working closely with PETA Germany to your organization?
We’ve known PETA Germany for more than 10 years through smaller projects. For example, we worked together against the dog killings before the World Cup many years ago. We contacted PETA Germany as soon as the war broke out, and together we immediately evacuated animals to Europe—first via Poland. Since then and to this day, cooperation has been the basis of our work here. It’s not just about financial support. What I value most about working together is trust. I see unity in the special understanding of our work and in the good cooperation between the organizations. I see that the PETA Germany team’s experience allows them to identify the right plan and work with us strategically to make the best decisions in the moment. Thanks to our collaboration with PETA Germany, you, dear readers, can see what we’re doing here. PETA Germany supports us in the most difficult situations, like when we’re criticized for our work because not everyone understands our commitment to animals.
We’re always ready for any rescue and will make a plan, no matter the difficulty or circumstances—it must be done. PETA Germany and ARK will never just leave an animal behind!
PETA Germany: You also work in dangerous areas. How does the team deal with things when the job gets dangerous?
The fundamental rule of the rescue team is to adhere closely to schedules. We try to work within strict timelines, and we work with the military. This reduces the risk of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, which is the main reason people die from artillery fire, but there is also no guarantee and no certainty. We do it as strategically as possible. Working on an evacuation team means you have to be there at exactly the right time. We’ve done the analysis, and we understand that for each evacuation, it’s necessary to adhere to set times. Here’s an example of how incredibly important timing is: During one evacuation, there was a tricky situation and the Russians were very close. We had to leave exactly at 9 a.m. because we knew that there would be shelling from that point on. We were 15 minutes late and came under heavy fire. Getting out of that situation was life-threatening. The team crawled across the ground and into the trenches. They were physically unharmed, but it was close. We’re aware of how close we are to death here.
PETA Germany: You meet a lot of people who have lost everything. They give you their beloved animals to save them. Which story touched you the most?
The encounters with the military touch me the most because they give what is most valuable—their lives. In addition, they rescue and care for animals. They are very worried about them and very happy when we take them away to a safe place. Because in the long run, military bases are not places where animals can be adequately cared for. I was most touched by a situation in which a soldier, Andrey, rescued some cats. Even after he got wounded, he continued looking for a way to save them and ensure their survival. Sadly, Andrey died from gunshot wounds, but we now care for the cats he loved so much. There was also a situation in which we were evacuating a dog from Bakhmut and he didn’t want to come with us. He made it clear that we were to follow him, and he pulled his rescuer in a different direction. We decided to follow him, and he took us to a crumbling house, where there was another dog, his friend Tessa, who was too weak to walk. Of course, we took both of them with us, and both are fine! They will never be separated.
PETA Germany: Can you give a little insight into your feelings? How do you deal with the fact that the air raid is constantly on, you and the team see missiles in the sky, you hear bombs, and everything is destroyed? People you know are being killed—how do you keep going?
It’s impossible to get used to the loss of loved ones, friends, and acquaintances. I knew many people who are no longer alive. They were all very worthy and wonderful individuals. That’s the hardest part of this war. I realize that the war will go on for a long time, our economy will be destroyed, and there will be many more missiles. We are paying a very high price in this war. At the same time, I’m happy when we save animals and they find loving families in Europe! We reunite more than half the animals with their guardians after they’ve been separated by the war. These are very beautiful and important moments and experiences for all of us! The families send us photos of the happy animals, their home, and nice trips with them in nature. These animals survived abandonment and gunfire and are happy now. It seems to me that such happy stories provide the inspiration to live and continue working here.
PETA Germany: What would you like to say to the people reading this interview?
It’s important for us that every person reading this article understand this: We’re alive, and we’re still going! It would be nice if people felt as though they were connected to Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. Then it’s like an exchange based on compassion.
And we will feel the support of all the readers, which we need very much. The war brought us into a new reality in a single day and gave us tasks that would sometimes have been impossible if we had to handle them alone.
But we’re not alone! The insight, the support, the communication, the exchange, the help—we are infinitely grateful!
Show Your Support for Animals in Ukraine
Help teams like ARK rescue animals by donating to PETA’s Global Compassion Fund.
Children are abandoned and forgotten when a large number of Fijians leave the country for work and start new relationships abroad.
Consultant Marica Tabualevu of the Fiji-Australian Humanitarian Partnership has called for measures that would hold people responsible or accountable for forgotten children.
She said adults who engaged in such behaviour forgot they had children “left behind with no income or very little parental support” just because they did not want their partner anymore.
Tabualevu told a public consultation in Suva last Friday discussing a draft of the Child Care and Protection Bill and Child Justice Bill 2023 that too many children were being “abandoned”.
Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre’s senior counsellor advocate and community educator Ilisapeci Veibuli also called on the Fiji government to ensure there was sufficient budget to support the draft law as implementation and enforcement were important.
In a separate event, the NGO Empower Pacific said that last year more than 1040 children were counselled with the bulk of them suffering from depression.
Elena Vucukulais a Fiji Times reporter. Republished with permission.
America’s Lawyer E57: Vice President Kamala Harris might be the biggest drag on President Biden’s reelection chances because the public hasn’t been happy about anything she’s done since taking office. CNN fired their CEO last week after a pathetic year, but firing Chris Licht isn’t going to do anything to fix the problems at the […]
Republicans are using statehouses to enact the most dangerous parts of their agenda, and many of these Republicans actually ran for office without a Democratic opponent. Author David Pepper talks with Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins about why Democrats can no longer sit on the sidelines, even in deep red areas of the country – […]
Tui Rererangi Walsh O’Sullivan, 4 July 1940 — 20 May 2023
Kia ora koutau katoa. Kia ora mo o koutou haerenga i te ahiahi nei. Kia ora mo o koutou aroha, o koutou karakia mo Tui i te wa o tona harenga ki te rangi.
I whanau mai a Tui, kei Kaitaia, hei uri o Te Rarawa, i te tau kotahi mano, iwa rau, wha tekau.
Tui was born in Kaitaia in 1940 — exactly 100 years after her great-great grandfather, Te Riipi, signed the Treaty of Waitangi. She was descended, too, from a Scotsman, John Borrowdale who named his boat Half Caste — after his children. Such was the mystery of race, life and family in 19th century Northland.
Tui was the last born child of Jack and Maata Walsh, and sister of John, Pat, Rose and Michael. Maata was Te Rarawa, from Pukepoto. Tui lies alongside her at Rangihoukaha Urupa in Pukepoto. She was named Tui Rererangi, the flying bird in the sky, in honour of her uncle Billy Busby — a World War II fighter pilot.
Maata died when Tui was two years old. She and Rose and their brothers were raised by their father, Jack Walsh, his mother Maud and his sister Lil. Maud was born in Townsville. Her father was a lacemaker from Nottingham who emigrated, with his wife, firstly to Australia and then to the far North of New Zealand.
Jack was born in Houhora and died when Tui was 23. Jack’s father emigrated from Limerick.
Early in the next century, the writer Frank McCourt described Limerick, just as it had been in Timothy Walsh’s time, “It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”
It was a better world these people sought, in and with, Te Rarawa.
Tui’s story — almost 83 years — spans a time of rapid social, political and technological development in New Zealand and the world. Her contribution was transformative for the many, many, people she encountered in her professional, social and family lives.
Tui’s schooling began at Ahipara Native School. Transcending the government’s official purpose of the Native School, of “lead[ing] the lad to be a good farmer and the girl to be a good farmer’s wife” — Tui left primary school with a Ngarimu VC and 28th Maori Battalion Scholarship to St Mary’s College in Ponsonby.
Some of her friends from St Mary’s are here today, and her granddaughter, named in her honour, started at the school this year.
Disrupting social orthodoxy was Tui’s life. On leaving school, she enrolled at the University of Auckland, completing a degree in English and anthropology part-time over the next 20 years. During these years she trained as a primary school teacher, working in Auckland, Wellington, Cambridge, Athens and London.
In the past week, we took a phone call from somebody Tui had taught at Kelburn Normal School in the 1960s. Such was Tui’s impact.
I was born in Hamilton in 1970. Deirdre in Cambridge in 1973. We moved to Northcote Point in 1975 and, in 1977, Tui became the first woman and the first Māori appointed to a permanent position at what was then the Auckland Technical Institute. I remember her telling me she was going for a job interview and coming into this Church to pray that she would be successful. Deirdre and I did our primary schooling here at St Mary’s.
Being a working single parent in the 1970s and 80s was hard work. It didn’t reflect social norms, but the Auckland University of Technology, as it’s become, provided Tui, Deirdre and me with security and a home – a home that has been Tui’s since 1978.
At AUT, she developed the first Women on Campus group. She helped establish the newspaper Password, a publication introducing new English speakers to New Zealand society and culture.
She taught courses on the Treaty of Waitangi when the treaty was a subversive idea. She contributed to the change in social and political thought that has brought the treaty — that her tupuna signed — to greater public influence. The justice it promises was a major theme in Tui’s working life.
Tui was interested in justice more broadly, inspired by her Catholic faith, love of people and profound compassion. These values stood out in the memories of Tui that people shared during her tangihanga earlier in the week at Te Uri o Hina Marae.
On Twitter, like them all, a social media that Tui never mastered, a former student, some 40 years later, recalled “the sage advice” given to a “young fella from Kawerau”. As Tui remembered, for a Māori kid from the country, moving to town can be moving to a different world.
In a media interview on her retirement, she said: “Coming from a town where you didn’t know names, but everyone was Aunty or Uncle, Auckland was by far a change of scenery”.
In Auckland, Tui knew everybody. Always the last to leave a social function, and always the first to help people in need.
Tui helped establish the university’s marae in 1997. She would delight in sharing the marae with students and colleagues. Just as she delighted in her family — especially her grandchildren, Lucy, Xavier, Joey, Tui and Delphi.
She remembered Sarah Therese. Her grandchildren tell of their special times with her, and her deep interest in their lives. Last year, Deirdre and Malcolm and their children moved from Wellington to be close by. Joey and I came from Canberra for the year.
We talked and helped as we could. My job was to buy the smokes. I remember saying one day, “I’m going to the supermarket, what would you like for dinner” — “a packet of cigarettes and a bottle of wine”. That was Tui’s diet and she loved it. And it was only in the last few months that she stopped going out.
At the wake for her brother John’s wife, Maka, in November, she was still going at three in the morning. I worried that three bottles of wine mightn’t have been the best idea at that stage in life, but she was well enough to do it, and loved the company of her family as we loved being with her.
In December, she took Joey and Tui to mark their birthdays at the revolving restaurant at the Sky Tower, where she also joined in the celebration of Lucy’s 18th birthday a couple of months ago. Delphi liked to take her out for a pancake. She loved Xavier’s fishing and rugby stories.
Over the last year, she wasn’t well enough to watch her grandchildren’s sport as she would have liked, take them to the beach as she used to love, or attend important events in our lives. But she did what she could right until the end.
My last conversation with her, the day before she died, was slow and tired but cogent and interesting. We discussed the politics of the day, as we often did. She asked after Joey and Lucy, and after Cara — always concerned that they were doing well. She didn’t speak for long, which was out of character, but gave no reason to think that this would be the last time we spoke.
Her copy of my book, Indigeneity, Culture and the UN Sustainable Development Goals, published last month, is still in the post. She didn’t know that it was dedicated to her and that I had explained, in the acknowledgements, that the reasons needed more words than the book itself.
That was supposed to have been for her to read, and for her to learn, that the dedication was also from her grandchildren. She was the immediate and unanimous choice when I asked them, “to whom should I dedicate this book”.
No reira, ka nui te mihi ki tena ki tena o koutou. Kia ora mo o koutou manaaki me te aroha.
Kia ora huihui tatau katoa!
Dr Dominic O’Sullivan, Tui’s son and professor of political science at Charles Sturt University, delivered this eulogy at her memorial mass at St Mary’s Catholic Church, Northcote, on 27 May 2023. It is republished here with the whanau’s permission. Tui O’Sullivan was also a foundation Advisory Board member of the Pacific Media Centre in 2007 and was a feisty advocate for the centre and its research publication, Pacific Journalism Review, until she retired in 2018.
The death of a disabled, elderly man last summer has raised serious questions about the care given to disabled individuals all over the country. And a trial that is expected as a result of this death could have nation-wide implications. Mike Papantonio is joined by attorney Troy Rafferty to talk about this case and the impacts that it could […]
Exxon just posted record-breaking profits as Americans continue to get gouged at the gas pump. Plus, a human trafficking victim has been ordered to pay the family of a rapist that she killed $150 thousand dollars. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos. […]
America’s Lawyer E51: Multiple billionaires in the United States have been hit with subpoenas as part of an ongoing lawsuit that is trying to find out how the banking industry and other wealthy individuals helped Jeffrey Epstein commit crimes. Amazon spent more than $14 million dollars last year trying to fight labor unions at their […]
On Saturday, PETA supporters will unfurl a giant “Twenty Twenty-We” banner on the pedestrian bridge over the Fisher Freeway—across from Shed 2 at Eastern Market—urging everyone to make 2023 the beginning of the end for human supremacy. The unmissable plea features an image of a woman alongside faces of other animals in an effort to tackle speciesism, the archaic belief that other species exist solely for humans to eat and exploit.
When: Saturday, March 25, 12 noon
Where: Pedestrian bridge, near the intersection of E. Fisher Service Drive and Market Street, Detroit
“All animals feel pain and fear, desire freedom, love their offspring, have unique personalities, and value their own lives,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA’s campaign is a reminder that animals are someone, not something, and ending speciesism means making kind choices for animals at the market and beyond.”
Despite animals’ extraordinary talents, abilities, and intelligence, people use them as experimentation tools, food, clothing, or playthings because of speciesism. Not only does this mentality contribute to the deaths of billions of animals each year, it also accelerates the climate catastrophe and the spread of zoonotic diseases. To combat speciesism, PETA encourages everyone to buy only cosmetics and household products never tested on animals, eat and wear vegan, and avoid aquariums, roadside zoos, and circuses that have live-animal acts.
PETA’s motto reads, “Animals are not ours to experiment on, eat, wear, use for entertainment, or abuse in any other way.”
Ron DeSantis is clearly running for President. So we need to understand a lot more about his character. Would he be a President who would take care of our families in tough times? Would he care about the struggles Americans are faced with day to day? We can learn a lot about our Presidential wannabe […]
Boni was unable to use her back legs after being attacked by a large dog. The team rescued her a few months ago and transported her to a partner clinic in Hungary, where veterinary experts devised a treatment plan to help her recover from the neurological problem causing the temporary paralysis.
After months of required quarantine and treatments, Boni is now at an animal shelter in Germany. A veterinarian there is overseeing her continued treatment, and the team has every confidence that the growing girl will soon have full use of her back legs and become the newest member of a loving family!
Rescuers Help Severely Hungry Horses
PETA Germany and partner Animal Rescue Kharkiv have overcome tremendous odds to secure food for 35 skinny horses. Three Ukrainian women rescued the abandoned equines, but the war and harsh winter weather have made finding a reliable source of straw and desperately needed nutritious food difficult. Thanks to the team’s hard work to import the provisions each month, the beautiful horses now have fresh bedding and are eating their way to healthy weights.
Orphans Care for Abandoned Animals
When abandoned animals sought refuge at an orphanage in Mykolaiv, the team began providing them with the dog and cat food they needed. They’re also keeping the children at that orphanage engaged with their donations of colorful PETA Kids’ booklets.
More Than a Year of War and Fighting Back for Animals
Don’t miss the images of the many grateful dogs and cats who rely on the team’s food deliveries to stay alive:
Thanks to the generosity of Global Compassion Fund donors, this truck—outfitted with expandable cages to transport animals safely—is in action in Ukraine.
How You Can Help Animals
PETA Germany and its partners’ determination and grit have helped thousands of animals in Ukraine survive famine, injuries, and other traumatic experiences. PETA Germany’s volunteers put their own safety on the line every day as they deliver food and veterinary care and transport animals out of the war zone. Global Compassion Fund donors make this work possible, and you can join the many who are helping animals in Romania, Turkey, Ukraine, and elsewhere by donating today!
March 7, 2023: Gunfire has broken out in Omsyhoon between villagers and police, a volatile situation that’s making it impossible for PETA-supported veterinary clinic staff to reach injured donkeys and other weary animals who rely on their free care. The government had promised to compensate villagers each month after limiting the number of animals who work in tourism, but when the payments apparently failed to come through, animal handlers began protesting, and things quickly became violent.
The PETA-supported clinic uses its mobile facility to provide working animals with free care each day, and it’s their only hope for relief. The staff treats those suffering from painful limbs, infected wounds, and other problems that result because handlers neglect their health, beat them, deny them adequate water and food, and force them to keep moving up and down the 900 crumbling stone steps to the monastery. We’re on standby, awaiting the opportunity to reenter Petra and help animals in the surrounding villages.
If you’re reading this, you probably care about fighting climate change. But what does that actually mean to you?
Chances are, youtake it to mean supporting climate change mitigation: reducing the flow of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy.
But there’s another aspect to the fight against climate change:adaptation. Adapting to life in a more dangerous climate involvesbuilding resilience to weather shocks — for example, by constructing a seawall or planting crops that can withstand droughts and floods.
Mitigation is vastly more popular than adaptation. Of all the funding directed toward fighting climate change globally, over 90 percent goes into the mitigation bucket. And I can’t claim to be surprised: For years, I’ve mostly focused on that bucket, too. I saw mitigation as the way to solve climate change, while adaptation seemed like putting a Band-Aid on one of the world’s biggest problems.
And yet, who determines the time scale of our response to that problem?
For many people — especially poorer people in poorer countries — the problem is now. Climate change is already flooding their homes and causing them heatstroke. It would be unjust for richer countries that disproportionatelycreated the problem to say “we get to determine the time scale of the problem, not you, and we’re deciding to frame the problem as a future event to be mitigated.” Climate change is also a present event, so solving it also means addressing the problem as it exists today.
“If you look at some river that’s started flooding now, no matter what we do in even the next 100 years, these rivers are going to continue flooding,” said Miriam Laker-Oketta, a Uganda-based research director at GiveDirectly, a nonprofit helping the world’s poorest.
She was referring to the fact that it will take decades to decarbonize the world’s energy supply, and meanwhile all the carbon we’ve emitted and keep emitting will continue to warm the atmosphere for hundreds of years. Money spent to mitigate emissions will pay off over the long term but do little to protect a country from climate change right now.
“We need to increase the amount that’s dedicated to helping people adapt,” she told me.
One approach to adaptation is to direct funding to governments so they can build up the infrastructure — whether that’s a seawall or a new irrigation system — to reduce the impacts of shocks. These big public goods are definitely important, and they should get a larger share of climate financing than they do today. But implementing major projects like these can take time. If you’re, say, a smallholder farmer whose food and income source is about to be wiped away by a climate change-enhanced cyclone, you don’t have that time.
So a nascent approach to adaptation aims to help vulnerable people by giving them just-in-time cash transfers. That means free money, no strings attached, that recipients can use to improve their resilience in the days or weeks before extreme weather hits. Researchers can pinpoint when and where it’ll hit thanks to advances in data availability and predictive analytics. Recent experiments show how successful this approach is, making the case that anticipatory cash transfers should play a bigger role in climate adaptation.
How just-in-time climate cash transfers work
Humanitarian relief organizations are used to doing two things: helping people out after disaster has already struck, and helping them out by giving them stuff. A hurricane strikes, and in comes the Red Cross or the United Way with water and tarps for victims.
Just-in-time climate cash transfers turn that model on its head.
We know from research on poverty alleviation that cash is preferable because it gives people the agency to buy the things they really need, as opposed to what outsiders think they need. And it can be disseminated much faster than goods, thanks to cellphone-based banking. Cash is now considered the baseline standard for challenges like poverty alleviation, with other interventions judged on whether they’re superior to cash.
And in the past few years, evidence is mounting that cash works very well for climate adaptation, too. Let’s look at three examples.
In July 2020, data-driven forecasts of river levels in Bangladesh showed that many households were about to experience severe flooding. The World Food Programme sent 23,434 households around $53 each a few days prior to and during the floods.
The preemptive action turned out to be a great bet. Those floods ended up being some of the worst and longest in decades: Over a million households were inundated, and food markets and health services were disrupted.
Compared to households that didn’t get a cash transfer, households that did were 36 percent less likely to go a day without eating, 12 percent more likely to evacuate household members, and 17 percent more likely to evacuate their livestock.
And the impacts were surprisingly durable. As the study authors write, “Three months after the flood, households that had received the transfer reported significantly higher child and adult food consumption and wellbeing. They also experienced lower asset loss, engaged in less costly borrowing after the flood, and reported higher earning potential.”
Soon after, the World Food Programme also tried anticipatory cash transfers in Somalia and Ethiopia, with similarly positive results: The cash infusions protected communities’ food security and livelihoods from the worst impacts of a forecasted drought.
The trigger was activated for the first time in November 2021, and since March 2022, emergency transfers have been sent to 15,400 drought-affected households. These transfers have allowed farmers to get help three to five months earlier than they would if they were just relying on traditional humanitarian aid. And receiving the support earlier meant they were less likely to have to resort to coping responses with costly social effects like reducing food consumption or pulling kids out of school.
Knowing how climate-vulnerable Malawi is, GiveDirectly gave 5,000 farmers in the Balaka region two payments of $400, one in April and one in October, to coincide with key moments in their agricultural schedule. October is also the beginning of the wet season, when 95 percent of precipitation falls, meaning it’s when cyclones and extreme weather are most likely to occur.
Simultaneously, a group called United Purpose gave the farmers trainings on climate-smart agriculture, irrigation practices, and soil conservation. GiveDirectly and United Purpose had coordinated on timing, but they didn’t inform the farmers of the connection because they didn’t want to make the farmers feel they were expected to spend the cash on building climate resilience. They wanted the cash to be truly unconditional.
The results so far are promising. More farmers are using better seeds (which are drought- and flood-resistant), more are intercropping (which improves fertility), and fewer are going hungry (specifically, there was about a 60 percent drop in the proportion of recipients who went a whole day without eating).
For Laker-Oketta, the research director at GiveDirectly, it’s clear that anticipatory cash transfers for climate adaptation are a good idea. “The cash we give is not sufficient to put up a seawall — that’s something governments have to do,” she said. “But the lowest-hanging fruit is actually giving people agency to make certain decisions they need to make now. The question is not, ‘Does cash work?’ but, ‘What is the right amount, frequency, and timing?’”
Now, GiveDirectly is planning to experiment with the timing. They want to see if getting cash to people mere days before a weather shock, as opposed to weeks before, improves resilience more. So they’re launching a pilot with the government of Mozambique to give out just-in-time transfers, sending people around $225 just three or four days before the next flood strikes.
In January, they began pre-enrolling individuals in vulnerable villages, which are selected by overlaying poverty maps, population data, and flood risk maps. That way, people will be able to get fast payments directly ahead of likely storms during the rainy season in March and April.
“The best adaptation is to be rich”
Climate mitigation and climate adaptation, along with poverty alleviation, are all absolutely crucial if we want a safe and just world. They’re also expensive, with mitigation projects alone slated to cost trillions over the next decade. How should the world divide funding between them?
When it comes to climate financing, the United Nations has called for a 50/50 split on mitigation and adaptation. But what we see so far is still more like 90/10 in mitigation’s favor — a sore point at last year’s COP27 climate conference in Egypt. And instead of giving poorer nations additional money for adaptation, some rich nations have diverteddevelopment aid — which is already insufficient —to fund more mitigation projects.
Charles Kenny, an economist and senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, thinks that’s a terrible idea. As he’s written, foreign aid would be a drop in the bucket if it’s diverted to mitigation projects. But it can have a meaningful impact on countries with small economies by reducing poverty and fostering development (including infrastructure, health, and education). And development is a vital adaptation defense for these countries because it makes them less vulnerable to climate change.
“The best adaptation is to be rich,” Kenny told me. “Take the same size earthquake or cyclone or hurricane, and the number of people who die is considerably smaller in richer countries and even richer neighborhoods of countries.”
In other words, climate adaptation and reducing poverty go hand in hand.
That’s part of why Laker-Oketta, the GiveDirectly research director, said her organization didn’t worry about whether recipients would spend their unconditional cash on building climate resilience or on something else. “If someone makes the decision to spend the money on something else, it means that was their priority at that time,” she told me.
For Laker-Oketta personally, climate resilience was very much the priority the day we spoke. It’s currently supposed to be the dry season in Uganda, where she lives, and yet it was raining. Just hours before our call, her office flooded.
“I believe a lot of people who want most of the funding to be focused on mitigation are people who are not being directly affected by climate change right now,” she said. “Their only worry is, ‘If the climate gets worse, then I’ll be affected as well, so can we put as much as is necessary into preventing me from being part of those people who are affected?’ But if you’re living in a place where it’s flooding right now, then you’re going to think differently. Right now, what I need is a way to stop the rain from coming in!”
You didn’t need to hear it from me that the USA is subjected to some of the most insane and inhumane policies tied to the criminal injustice system; tied to mass public K12 education; and corporate overlording; or anti-union activities; also to taxation; or finance; and health care; tied to infrastructure care; or tied to retirement protection. I’ve written about social work and social services many times, and the terrible outcomes of those I have served: just released from prison; pregnant teenagers; foster youth, 16 to 21 years old; veterans and their families deemed homeless and medically fragile; folks with substance abuse issues as well as living homeless; gang-influenced youth; inmates in a federal correctional institution; community college students; active duty military; lifelong learning senior citizens; adults with intellectual, developmental and psychological disabilities.1
Enough, already. Plenty more where those stories came from!
Moving on: Here, the latest mainstream media-press account, again, a day late, a few hundred million dollars short: Oregon is facing a drastic shortage of mental health care workers. The state needs as many as 35,000 new workers by some estimates to fill the mental health care needs in the state. But people interested and willing to go into the field are facing high barriers to doing the work. What can be done to change the system, and open up the pipeline of behavioral health care workers?
It’s way beyond the crappy pay, the student loans, the overloads, the lack of respect, poor management, lack of trauma informed managers, and so much more. The value in this society is big time sports, big time corporate jobs, big time doctors and CEOs and administrators and, well, you get the picture: if I am paid $17 an hour to be a case manager, and then a toilet and bedroom cleaner with an Air B & B gets $21 an hour, and if a bus driver for schools gets $19 an hour, and if some of us volunteer and get diddly squat from tax write offs for all that work, and, you get the idea: money for nothing, and the Value of Nothing.
Until we have 250 elementary students to one counselor, when we have rotating visiting nurses, when we have K12 teachers swamped with the stupidity of curriculum and the stupidity of the local community hobbling teaching; when we have the hands on stuff cut — auto mechanics, construction, floral arranging, orthotics, pet techs, even beauty classes, all of that, including leather working, ceramics, graphic arts, film making, radio broadcasting, gardening, husbandry, basket weaving, well, we are in this mess of digital gulags and the deadening of the Homo sapiens into Homo erectus algorith consumo retailopethicus.
I’ve seen the blasphemy daily, as foster and group homes are going by the wayside for troubled youth and youth and adults living with DD-ID-PD. We have care homes going by the wayside, and we have retirement and terminal medical care facilities costing someone $6,000 a month for one room and pretty basic food. More and more people are paid this $15 an hour shit wage for a vital job, and additionally, they have to drive drive drive to work, and then, put in incredible stressful hours up to sometimes 10 or 12 hour work days. With some of the most despicable bosses around. Pressure pressure pressure. Forget about the fact that non-profits are for-profits, and those retirement-care facilities are monopolized by a few dozen across the land. Speaking of bullshit jobs:
We are at that crossroads of wondering just how far the human brain and spirit can take now, 2023, with the cascading of big-time issues penetrating the souls of people, stripping us bare, stripping our immune systems, and culling our brains. Good people. Vulnerable people. We are trapped in a world of complexities and counter-intuitive thinking and rationalizations, but those complexities are nothing compared to C-PTSD: complex post traumatic stress disorder. More than just a label. The foisting of so much media madness, too, on top of our personal hells, and then add to that, the reality of capitalism as a “search and destroy the competition/ mom and pop/ bricks and mortar/ people-centered businesses” sort of law of the “jungle,” Lord of the Flies style.
We have trauma deeply repressed, unprocessed, hidden, sort of hanging there, in the psyche, and alas, a trigger will pull the anxiety into the bloodstream until a whole lot of mental and shaking comes along.
It is not just a dog eat dog adventure into chaos, and more than bizarre allusion of the law of the jungle crap. Capitalism is scorched earth devaluation of humans policies. The economies of scale is for the shareholders and top brass, not for some nirvana of great benefit to the rank and file. There is so much ugliness and cut-throat shit that the world today serves up, on top of atomized families, communities, friendships; on top of the sink or swim nature of things in AmeriKa. Imagine, facing all of that PLUS the traumatic disorders.
Trauma is a psychic wound that hardens you psychologically that then interferes with your ability to grow and develop. It pains you and now you’re acting out of pain. It induces fear and now you’re acting out of fear. Trauma is not what happens to you, it’s what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you.
— Gabor Mate, Oct 14, 2019
Inside, hidden, pushed down, recriminated, hated, laughed at, and as the Anglo Saxon credo says, “Keepa stiff upper lip, bloke.” It’s bad enough that the systems — education, politics, local governance, media, Press, family, government business, bureaucracies — are against the 80 Percent: those that do not have political, real estate, employment, financial, familial, networking clout. But the so-called representatives we “vote” in and who are picked by those we vote in are working for THEM, the point zero-zero-zero One Percent; the One Percent; the Five Percent and possibly the rest of the 15 percent. Representation and clout and power for the 20 percent, more or less. Of course, there is the Faustian Bargain for the 15 Percenters. There is the Eichmann Syndrome. There is the lock-step belief in the hope that providing support for the elite and their legions of manipulators will get you away from decay: neighborhood, school system, environmental, familial, fraternal, transactional decay.
The world’s 85 richest individuals possess as much wealth as the 3.5 billion souls who compose the poorer half of the world’s population, or so it was announced in a report by Oxfam International. The assertion sounds implausible to me. I think the 85 richest individuals, who together are worth many hundreds of billions of dollars, must have far more wealth than the poorest half of our global population.
How could these two cohorts, the 85 richest and 3.5 billion poorest, have the same amount of wealth? The great majority of the 3.5 billion have no net wealth at all. Hundreds of millions of them have jobs that hardly pay enough to feed their families. Millions of them rely on supplements from private charity and public assistance when they can. Hundreds of millions are undernourished, suffer food insecurity, or go hungry each month, including many among the very poorest in the United States.
— Michael Parenti)
A decaying society pays off (benefits handsomely) for the 19 or 20 Percent. And the cognitive dissonance and the collective Stockholm Syndrome mixed witht he GAD — general anxiety disorder — weathers the shit out of us, the 80 Percent. Until we have a shortage of mental health/social services heroes (oh, shortages left and right, and everywhere one cares to look). We need navigators for almost everything in this legalistic, contractualized, atomized, disassociative society, since everything in the pipeline we need to survive, i.e. safety nets, is almost impossible to interpret and understand. People need help with bills, debts, loans, health care, insurance, housing, medical needs, and mental health. The house we live in may have some fancy furniture and amazing kitchen and bathroom redos, but if the roof leaks (and it’s leaking like a sieve), then the entire half a million dollar home is a goner, sooner than later. Flooded, soaked, warped, moldy and a tear down soon.
Think of the mental health of a child as the roof for that child’s psychic and humanistic house, world, well being. Think of the totality of those in and around that child suffering from the leaky roof. Think of the collective community in and around the youth with the leaky mental health roof gushing water onto them. No amount of Advance Placement classes and super duper athletic training will help build a child into a teen and then into an adult with some normalcy and balance and internal strength without the leaky roof being fixed, maybe R & R-ed, but absolutely not full of holes.
Lifeblood and gut-brain connections are connected to the holism of grand positive mental and spiritual health. The gut-brain-hormone-immune system is all predicated on sound mental health, and learning what trauma is, then stopping it, preventing it, and, of course, patching it up, i.e. treating it. Therapies are the construction processes for that leaky psychic roof.
And so, depression, general anxiety disorder, the new ailments of social media and Facebook shaming, and the disassociative links to all that time on tablets and surfing the internet, and hooking into a Zoom Doom room for every class, every human (sic) interaction. Think of the shame of people in the USA for being so, well, collectively stupid, impotent, flagging, when it comes to the reality that celebrities, the rich, the famous, the leadership, the administrations, the governors’ offices, the entire shit show is worthy of complete deconstruction and dismantling or imploding, yet, we are still in this continuum of never pushing the edge of the envelope and standing down those systems of exploitation, abuse, scamming and general anxiety setting progroms.
This is normal, but today, a diatribe like this would get you Tazed, hog-tied, thrown in jail, and put into a mental ward:
I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it.
We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV’s while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad – worse than bad. They’re crazy.
It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’ Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot – I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street.
All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!’
So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell,
‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’
I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell –
‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!’
Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get mad!… You’ve got to say, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis.
But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: “I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”
It’s normal, that reaction, no, and we should embrace the roots of any sort of explosion of emotion that fits this “Anger moment.” But beware: I have been a social services practitioner, and the people in it and at the managerial level are not the right folk for the job in so many cases. And, while I always connect these diatribes to my own journey, AKA struggle, this is more than about the stupidity of people in my neck of the woods — Lincoln County — who have passed me over on more than a dozen or so attempts to get employed here in this rural county as a social services practitioner. That is the way of the middling, the milquetoast, and I have to say the attitude of ignorant and destructive human beings in social services. There is no way in hell it seems that any of these middle brow folk can see me as a co-worker at the county, state or city or nonprofit level to be a case manager or social services navigator.
Here we are, then, stuck in the dead pan of AmeriKa, where conformity is the way of the sheeple, the lemming. Following the crowd or buying into the good old broken system, this is the way of the Yanqui. Oh, they say over and over — “You can’t fight City Hall. I’m just one person. They are too powerful and we are too weak.” AmeriKans have caved!
Until, well, sorry to say, the 80 Percent are begging for life support. Begging for basics. In this upside down world of an earth moving closer and closer to nuclear hell, all because of a few elites, a few money changers in Jesus Christ’s story, people are hobbled and strangled by the oppressiveness of elites running the show and ruling the roost. Money changers a la War Mongers, a la Big Pharma, a la Larry Fink and Blackrock, so many tens of thousands of top dog criminals. Can you imagine those Pseudos buying that old time religion story, Matthew 21:12!?
The crowds replied, “This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee.” Then Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those selling doves. And He declared to them, “It is written: ‘My house will be called a house of prayer.’ But you are making it ‘a den of robbers.’
Imagine that sanity, daily: distrupting the disruptors? Well, try this out for size: This is 2022 IRS 1040 filing time, but maybe also a time for 100 million USA households to declare Zelensky and his sidekick wife as OUR dependents, our WRITE-OFFS, our DEDUCTIONS. That’s $2,000 each, at $4,000 total, and with 100,000,000 filing that way, as the dirty Ukrainian couple as our “children,” hell, we’ll get back some of the drug-gun-offshore money of the Ukrainian Nazis the USA Criminal Enterprise has stolen from our taxpayer coffers to throw at Zelensky’s war — count that $400,000,000,000 total for 100 million 1040s filed with the ugly couple as our dual deduction of $4,000. That’s four hundred billion $$.
In our pockets. And then, hmm, how about massive rolling strikes. IN concert with Mutal Aid. Can you imagine all the people suffering mental illness, all the hardships of children in today’s day and age, and especially now, when there are still putrid sorts yelling at the youth that they have it easy. “Try growing up in the Great Depression. Or during World War Two.” We have to take things back or all hell will break loose. Mental Hell, that is.
Here’s one version of trauma —
And, another version:
‘Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice’ by Raj Patel and Rupa Marya takes the reader on a medical tour of the human body and reveals the relationship between our biology and the injustices of our political and economic system such as racism, poverty and colonialism. Patel and Marya ultimately offer a cure of “deep medicine” to heal our bodies and the world by reconnecting to the earth and each other.
We come down to this, uh? Canada, USA, Africa, South America, Mexico, anywhere we find the clergy! I have a friend in Australia, part of the victim class of native Australians who were despoiled and abused by clergy, in this case the robed and frocked monsters of the Catholic Church. This is one trauma piled onto another, until a victim is powerful but still at age 60, say, waylaid by the news of yet another blasphemy of humanity getting prime time news coverage recently: Do these people have no dignity, no access to a bottle of barbituates and fifth of vodka? More lies, convicted but found not-guilty? Blasphemy. There are Nine Circles of Hell. Welcome to one of them, Cardinal, where there will undoubtedly be a few hundreds of millions of others awaiting you there.
Cardinal George Pell, 81, died in Rome on Jan. 10, the Vatican has confirmed. A leading Australian Catholic and close advisor to Pope Francis, the cardinal had participated in the funeral of his friend, Pope Benedict XVI, just last week.
Pell, the former archbishop of Melbourne and Sydney, became the third-highest ranked official in the Vatican after Pope Francis tapped him in 2014 to reform the Vatican’s notoriously opaque finances as the Holy See’s first-ever finance czar. He spent three years as prefect of the newly created Secretariat for the Economy, where he tried to impose international budgeting, accounting and transparency standards.
He has been living in Rome since his release from an Australian maximum security prison in 2020 after spending 404 days in solitary confinement after being wrongfully convicted in December 2018 on charges of the abuse of two altar boys in Melbourne in 1996.
His conviction was upheld by an appeals court in March 2019, but he always protested his innocence and was the first cardinal to be imprisoned on such charges. The full bench of Australia’s High Court unanimously squashed his conviction in 2020, and he decided to return to Rome, where he had previously served in various positions under Pope Francis. (Source)
There are thousands of priests who have never been excommunicated or jailed for their rape crimes. I recall when I was in El Paso, and there were some priests from Spokane Diocese in El Paso. I never inquired there, but until later. Then, just by chance, I ended up in Spokane years later, and ahh, there was the answer to El Paso and Spokane priest connection: the ones charged up in Washington, in Spokane, got sent to the border, where the “little brown ones and the brown people would just be happy to have some wise, white priest from the sophisticated Northwest tending the flock.” That’s what one Jesuit said to me, quoting one of his bosses. Send away the rapists to the other outposts, in this case, La Frontera, the border.
There are so many multiple trauma’s just in the ether, such as the head Federal Reserve Mafiosa — how does his continence settle with you?
Ahh, the fed chief, or this cabal? Vice President Joe Biden, flanked by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, sits with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on February 7, 2015, before a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany.
Yep, that’s $17 or $20 an hour with clients suffering under a massive overload of trauma, both physical and mental. Those leaky roofs, the spiritual and psychological shelters and protective covers that need attending to before almost anything else, they are gaping, and yet ‘this country tis of thee’ throws trillions away, burns it up, memory holes it, until we have all of us on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Again, I am a communist, so these two blokes below are not my normal everyday peeps I’d be hanging with, but I am certainly around so many people who are bought, sold and delivered in this exceptionalist wasteland, that I learn how to converse and have open dialogue and debates. But listen to Scott Ritter here. Have you ever seen this guy on Amy Soros Goodman’s Democracidocy Now? On any of the mainstream media? But listen to him, man. This is serious stuff, and he tells it like it is that Blinken should be immediately sacked, and that there is no one sane person in the Biden Administration, and that there are no nuclear arms control panels.
And we wonder why so so many people are on the verge of a complete melt down:
The trail of tears throughout the old colonies and the neo-colonies is epigenic trauma of the generations. The collateral damage. The Madeleine Albright murders by 1,000 economic sanctions cuts, it never just ends with her or that generation or time frame. Over 500,000 dead was-is-will forever be worth it in her psychopath’s mind. How many generations are lost and affected?
Fight until the last Ukrainian. Worth it! Yeah, death by 10,000 cuts.
•U.S. EPA fish testing in 2013–2015 had a median PFAS concentration of 11,800 ng/kg.
•Even infrequent freshwater fish consumption can increase serum PFOS levels.
•One fish serving can be equivalent to drinking water for a month at 48 ppt PFOS.
•Fish consumption advice regarding PFAS is inconsistent or absent in the U.S. states.
This is just one insult to humanity, one multiple aspects of how rotten the world is, and so, how are those children supposed to process this? Forever chemicals, all those hormone-disrupting, diabetes-creating, immune system-depleting, cancer-causing, brain fog-inducing shit chemicals/poisons/toxins that the great CEOs and the “follow the science Über Alles” or else bullshit people have put upon humanity and ecosystems?
And how do we get powerful, self-actualized, community-driven, socialist-minded, anti-authority youth activated when they have mental health disturbances via a thousand injustices?
Remember it seems so long ago, 1988? That other criminal, Ronald Reagan, and the 1988 campaign for POTUS, surely a position only megalomaniacs, narcissists and sociopaths can find themselves happy in their own element?
Former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis knows about the damage that disability can cause–even its mere mention. In this keynote address given to the symposium on Presidential Disability and Succession held at Northeastern University in Boston last spring (2014), Dukakis reflected on his famous 1988 presidential campaign that, largely at his expense, redefined negativity in presidential politics, in particular the fictitious allegation that he had a history of mental illness. A distinguished professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Northeastern University, Dukakis also spends each winter quarter at UCLA as a visiting professor in the Luskin School of Public Affairs. He remains active in both politics and public policy, canvassing for Democratic candidates such as Elizabeth Warren during her 2012 Senate campaign and promoting policy initiatives through the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern, which he affectionately calls a “think and do tank.” The three-term governor (1975-1979 and 1983-1991) was voted Most Effective Governor by the National Governor’s Association in 1986. After his first term in the late 1970s he lost a nasty primary election to Ed King, whom he would later defeat to reclaim office. Though it wasn’t apparent at the time, for Dukakis, that 1978 campaign would serve as a precursor for the attack politics that were unloosed during the 1988 presidential campaign. In the remarks that follow, he offers a candid assessment of how not going negative may have cost him the presidency, and how an offhand remark by President Reagan (quickly retracted) caused the press to obsess over Dukakis’ health record for the better part of a week–enough to slow his momentum during a crucial stage of campaigning. (Campaigns and disability: When an incumbent president questions his potential successor’s mental health status during the campaign)
Leaders in Aotearoa New Zealand’s Pacific community believe the appointment of the country’s first deputy prime minister of Pacific descent will bring positive change.
Incoming Prime Minister Chris Hipkins — who is taking over the reins from Jacinda Ardern just nine months away from the general elections — chose Carmel Sepuloni as his deputy yesterday.
She also made history 15 years ago when she became New Zealand’s first Tongan MP.
Reverend Setaita Veikune of the Methodist Church of NZ told RNZ Morning Report the Kelston MP’s promotion would serve as an inspiration for the younger generation, particularly girls.
“This is a visible example of what we can achieve and proof that for our people, the sky really is the limit,” she said.
“Carmel being a Tongan, Samoan woman as deputy prime minister, is a profound contribution in my opinion to eliminating negative stereotypes and reducing unconscious bias against us.
“This alone does more for our communities than many realise, such as reducing advancement barriers, which are biased against us in different spaces.”
Historic moment
Pacific community leader Sir Collin Tukuitonga told Morning Report this was a historic moment not just for their community, but the whole country.
“I think it’s a statement of ourselves as a nation that perhaps we’re maturing and being serious about inclusivity.”
Sepuloni’s experiences and networks in Pasifika and Māoridom communities would bring benefits as she supported Hipkins’ leadership, he said.
Veikune hoped Sepuloni — who currently holds portfolios for social development, Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC), and arts, culture and heritage — would work to bring the Pasifika community forward with her.
“I find her very strong in her quiet and humble way . . . She brings strength, courage, and determination, to do what is required, and I believe her humility is something that will take us forward greatly.”
In an interview with E-Tangata in 2017, Sepuloni said she had thought of entering politics from a young age, with the ambition of helping create a fairer society.
“Interestingly, growing up — and friends still remind me of this — I used to say that this is what I would do. That I would be a politician. And they found it so funny at the time,” she said.
‘Unfairness around us’
“We can see the unfairness unfolding around us, whether it be health statistics or educational outcomes. Pay inequality. All of those things that we see in our own lives, our families’ lives, and our communities. So, I think it’s really difficult not to feel political in some way.”
As Minister of Social Development for the past five years, Sepuloni has been steadily reforming the system via measures including raising benefit levels, adopting a less punitive approach to sanctions and overseeing a review of the Working for Families welfare scheme.
Writing in the Herald at the time of ram raids last August, Sepuloni reflected on her time as an at-risk youth educator with tertiary students.
“I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t, and punitive approaches to young people – or people in general, really – already experiencing complex challenges don’t. I liken it to pushing someone over who is wanting and trying to get up, while yelling at them to get up.”
But in 2021, a report from Child Poverty Action Group found almost three years on from the Welfare Expert Advisory Group’s 42 recommendations for overhauling the system, none had been fully implemented.
Sir Collin Tukuitonga . . . “Perhaps she will have a bit more sway and influence in getting . . . things done.” Image: University of Auckland/RNZ Pacific
Sir Collin said it would be tough to lay all of the blame on Sepuloni alone — it was more complex than that.
Building consensus
“She would have to build consensus from among a number of parties to get those implemented, she has moved on some of the recommendations but I think it’s a bit rough to just put it on her.
“There will be expectations and some would say she’s now in a deputy prime minister role that perhaps she will have a bit more sway and influence in getting these things done.
“There’s no question there are serious social issues in our communities that need to be addressed, I expect that Carmel would need to lead that process of building consensus and acting on those priorities.”
While Sir Collin acknowledged he was among those who criticised the government in the early days of the covid-19 pandemic over the “sluggish and slow” response to the outbreak in Pacific communities specifically, he said they got it right in the end.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
“There’s no time to lose when animals need us” is the unofficial motto of PETA Germany’s Ukraine rescue team, whose brave members comb through the bombed-out shells of once-bustling cities, risking their lives to help all animals in need.
PETA Germany and its partners’ determination and grit have helped thousands of animals in Ukraine survive famine, injuries, and other traumatic experiences. PETA Germany’s volunteers put their own safety on the line every day as they deliver food and veterinary care and transport animals out of the war zone. Read on for stories of just a few of the thousands of animals who have been helped by this invaluable work.
PETA Germany’s rescue team risked their lives to drive to Lviv just days after the invasion of Ukraine began, a dangerous journey into a battle-torn country made even more hazardous by heavy snowfall and icy conditions. They met with brave volunteers who had traveled more than 300 miles within Ukraine from a shelter in Kyiv with nearly 90 homeless cats and dogs. Then PETA Germany drove the animals to Poland, a safe haven where they could be placed for a chance at adoption. Since this first rescue mission, PETA Germany has helped save the lives of more than 1,650 animals.
After hearing about the plight of Evgenia—along with her 3-year-old twins and their cat and dog companions—who thought escape from Bucha with her whole family was impossible, PETA Germany prepared to help them.
After Russian soldiers had left Kyiv and the streets had been cleared of mines and the dead bodies of civilians, the rescue team made the harrowing journey through the war-scarred country to reach Evgenia and her family. The perilous trip was long and frightening, but after almost 30 hours on the road, Evgenia, the twins, and the animals arrived safely in Germany.
When PETA Germany and its partner Animal Rescue Kharkiv (ARK) met Atya the dog, she was suffering on the street, cowering in fear in a puddle of her own blood. Her shoulder had been blown to bits by a barrage of bullets.
The team helped rush her to a clinic, where a veterinarian was able to remove the shrapnel from her wounds and save her shoulder. Although she has healed physically, she needs emotional support to help overcome the strain of her ordeal. Today she’s at a partner center in Budapest that helps animals recover from trauma. Thanks to PETA Germany and its partners, Atya is able to live in a pack of dogs who have helped her regain her confidence.
Help Animals in Ukraine Today: Give to the Global Compassion Fund
Thousands of animals trapped in a war zone like Atya was have been saved, thanks to the rescue teams that willingly risk their own lives. All PETA Germany’s hard work in Ukraine is made possible by the generous supporters of the PETA’s Global Compassion Fund. Please make a donation to help the group rescue even more animals in the war zone.
Of course, King was murdered by the Deep State on Steroids:
Both the Jowers and the Wilson allegations suggest that persons other than or in addition to James Earl Ray participated in the assassination. Ray, within days of entering his guilty plea in 1969, attempted to withdraw it. Until his death in April 1998, he maintained that he did not shoot Dr. King and was framed by a man he knew only as Raoul. For 30 years, others have similarly alleged that Ray was Raoul’s unwitting pawn and that a conspiracy orchestrated Dr. King’s murder. These varied theories have generated several comprehensive government investigations regarding the assassination, none of which confirmed the existence of any conspiracy. However, in King v. Jowers, a recent civil suit in a Tennessee state court, a jury returned a verdict finding that Jowers and unnamed others, including unspecified government agencies, participated in a conspiracy to assassinate Dr. King. (source)
“Volodymyr Zelensky Talks Hopes of War Ending During Golden Globes Video Message: ‘There Will Be No Third World War. It is not a trilogy,’ the Ukraine president said in his impact video message.”
Think of that Goebbels-Mengele-Hitler moment, would you? I had a friend who was watching these multimillionaire frauds, the beautiful people (sic) would laugh at her and at me — she’s going through domestic violence hell, divorce hell, with systems that make the victim feel and be guilty. Me? I can write circles around most of those Holly-Dirt frauds, but alas, I am a communist, so, those frauds wouldn’t touch me with a social distancing stick of a thousand yars while all masked up and girdled up with a ZioAzovNaziLensky blue and yellow half assed flak jacket.
Imagine, how many Goyim, Gentiles, even Christians (not all UkroNazi’s are hard-core Nazis and Satanists) are not dead and wounded in the latest meat grinder the little dictator Zelensky is heading up? And he spoke to the Golden Shower Award Recepients while they, 12,000 were KIA-ed and another 13,000 wounded? Some of the UkroNazi soldiers had frostbite on many many feet and toes and fingers, while the multimillionaire war monger, Zelensky, spoke to the cocaine and 12-step Botox folk.
You think King would be angry?
No message of peace from Julian Assange’s wife or father? No real heroes of peace and reconciliation speaking at the dumb-down awards. No heroines of journalism at the awards, uh?
“A major effect of junk politics — its ceaseless flood of patriotic, religious, macho and therapeutic fustian — is to pull position after position loose from reasoned foundations,” writer BenjaminDeMott noted (Hedges and Hedges).
And so, all the creeps in politics, all the heads of corporations, the heads of universities, even military generals, and of course, the Press, Media, they are all two-bit actors, like ZioAzovNaziLensky. (Note: I went to the story on Golden Globes ZioLensky appearance, and it is absolutely disgusting. Sean Penn said the most ludicrous thing, and ZioAzovLensky said nothing, really, pure tripe. Read at your onw risk, and, of course, WWKD — What Would King Do?
And that my kind readers, I know for a fact, would be putting steam under King’s collar if he were around today to see this complete blasphemy of humanity actually entertaining nuclear war, limited strikes, and more war here, there, and everywhere. And a mixed race woman, as VP!
Here, enough of these fascists and perversions of humanity.
King:
The following (scroll down a bit) ran today, Jan. 11, in the little twice-a-week rag out here on the Central Oregon Coast —
It’s mellow for me, not exactly milquetoast, but still the reality if this USA and Canada are racist countries based on Anglo Saxon invasions and pogroms of genocide and land theft and subjugation and insanity. Get those Puritans and Smith Colony and Pilgrims and Mayflower folk here so the City of London to this day can hold it’s genocidal sway over much of the world, even in this post/new colonialism.
From Zinn’s People’s History of the United States: In that first year of the white man in Virginia, 1607, Powhatan had addressed a plea to John Smith that turned out prophetic. How authentic it is may be in doubt, but it is so much like so many Indian statements that it may be taken as, if not the rough letter of that first plea, the exact spirit of it:
I have seen two generations of my people the…. I know the difference between peace and war better than any man in my country. I am now grown old, and must the soon; my authority must descend to my brothers, Opitehapan, Opechancanough and Catatough-then to my two sisters, and then to my two daughters-I wish them to know as much as I do, and that your love to them may be like mine to you. Why will you take by force what you may have quietly by love? Why will you destroy us who supply you with food? What can you get by war? We can hide our provisions and run into the woods; then you will starve for wronging your friends. Why are you jealous of us? We are unarmed, and willing to give you what you ask, if you come in a friendly manner, and not so simple as not to know that it is much better to eat good meat, sleep comfortably, live quietly with my wives and children, laugh and be merry with the English, and trade for their copper and hatchets, than to run away from them, and to lie cold in the woods, feed on acorns, roots and such trash, and be so hunted that 1 can neither eat nor sleep. In these wars, my men must sit up watching, and if a twig break, diey all cry out “Here comes Captain Smith!” So I must end my miserable life. Take away your guns and swords, the cause of all our jealousy, or you may all the in the same manner.
When the Pilgrims came to New England they too were coming not to vacant land but to territory inhabited by tribes of Indigenous peoples. The governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, created the excuse to take Indigenous land by declaring the area legally a “vacuum.” The Indians, he said, had not “subdued” the land, and therefore had only a “natural” right to it, but not a “civil right.” A “natural right” did not have legal standing.
The Puritans also appealed to the Bible, Psalms 2:8: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.” And to justify their use of force to take the land, they cited Romans 13:2: “Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.”
*****
Heroes — A million of them, but for now, Paul Robeson, King and Malcolm X (NPR, be careful):
King would be proud of this hero,
Ana Belen Montes has repeated history by saying what she said during her trial 21 years ago: the US government’s policies against Cuba are very harsh and she behaved according to her conscience rather than the law. She added: “I felt morally obligated to help the island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values and our political system on it.”
If alive, King would be protesting and getting jailed for this hero:
The U.S. imperialists “want Alex Saab like they want Julian Assange to suffer,” charges human rights and international law expert Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, who the United Nations’ Human Rights Council appointed to serve as a special rapporteur.
What is the great “crime” Alex Saab is accused of committing, that caused this South American diplomat to be physically pulled off of a jet while refueling at a remote African island, imprisoned, and reportedly tortured there for about a year before being kidnapped to the U.S.A.?
The U.S. has no extradition treaty with Cabo Verde. Saab was simply seized and flown to Miami without any notification to his lawyers or family. (Source)
And, King, if he were alive, what might he have been doing to free and condemn USA-UK-Sweden-Australia-The World for this hero? Assange.
King would be holding this book, and thousands of others, exposing the cruelty of Capitalism and USA:
Part One of review and discussion of Linda G. Ford’s Women Politicals in America: Jailed Dissenters from Mother Jones to Lynne Stewart (Part Two)
I was born a protester … My mother had to go to the school a lot and talk to the principal.— Dorli Rainey
I am being jailed because I have advocated change for equality, justice, and peace. … I stand where thousands of abolitionists, escaped slaves, workers and political activists have stood for demanding justice, for refusing to either quietly bear the biting lash of domination or to stand by silently as others bear the same lash.— Marilyn Buck, at her 1990 sentencing (epigram in Linda Ford’s book, Women Politicals in America)
Yeah, I sure do miss King as a topic in schools, as a centerpoint to our thinking about war and materialism and predatory and parasitic capitalism! Here, today’s Op-Ed in our small rural county, Lincoln County!
MLK Jr. 56 years ago stated a point more relevant today than a half century ago: The systemic flaws of America have incubated the “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.”
This MLK Jr. Day was so deemed by Congress in 1994 to mark the holiday as “a national day of service.” Martin Luther King was born Jan. 15, 1929. I’ve done plenty of service-in-service-community service projects with students over the 29 years of the day’s relevance: river clean-ups, working in food kitchens, getting blankets and tents to homeless folk, cleaning up graffiti, and having teach-ins and drive-by photo shoots of neighborhoods.
Here’s this German-Irish white guy (me) today writing about the power of not just King and his activism, but the power of so many people in the civil rights and anti-racist movement who transformed my point of view on so many global and national social justice issues.
In addition, King, for me, would not be so vaunted without my study of Malcolm X. Or Paul Robeson, Emmett Till, Rosa Parks, and so many activists in the Black Liberation Movement.
For this county [with 89.1% white, .09 percent African American, 1.5 percent Asian, and then 4.1 percent American Indian and Alaska Native], the concept of not just celebrating King, but drilling down deeply into what he represents/-ed might fall on deaf ears. Putting him into historical context, i.e. learning about those around him before he rose to fame and afterward, adds to the value of King’s prominence.
I had a father who was shot in Korea as a 19 year old and then in Vietnam as a 36 year old. He was in two branches of military as a regular uniformed soldier; for 32 years total. He was always supportive of my journalism, my teaching, my college pursuits, but more importantly, he backed me on my activism. He was a student of history, and the history I embraced wasn’t what mainstream historians were delving into.
For example: Cesar Chavez and his work — National Farm Workers Association, which later merged with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee to become the United Farm Workers labor union. John Trudell, son of a Santee Dakota father and a Mexican mother, who was a poet, song writer, performer and activist.
In this county and in other places, just what does it mean to a majority of the country to give pause around King’s work? The “I Have a Dream” speech will be played in parts, over and over. I have emphasized his letter to clergy and other white leaders, in his jailhouse essay titled, “Letter from Birmingham Jail” written in longhand April 15, 1963.
King’s letter: “In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action. We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known.”
He also penned from the jail, “The Negro is Your Friend.”
This third Monday in January marks the birth of Dr. King Jr. We need to go beyond a few lines played back from the “Dream” speech or some of the black and white images of his 1963 march on Washington
Throughout my college teaching – in heavily military populated El Paso, Tucson, Las Cruces, and Spokane, including instruction on military bases and posts – I got students to think deeper about King’s life, work, and teachings. Having students read, analyze and discuss his April 4, 1967 speech against the Vietnam War, delivered at New York’s Riverside Church a year to the day before he was assassinated, I ended up rallying sophisticated critiques of King’s impact on the USA.
It was the Vietnam War in King’s time, but my students were facing the Panama Invasion, Grenada, Kuwait, Iraq, contras in Nicaragua, dirty US-backed wars in Guatemala, Afghanistan, and so many other so-called interventions and these proxy wars. Some were Vietnam and Korea combat veterans.
This speech was eviscerated by mainstream Press, including the New York Times and dozens of large daily newspapers. That was the point of having this speech and the Jail speech looked at and parsed – self-critique as a people, as a nation.
King’s first point in drawing the connection between ending racism at home and curbing militarism abroad had to do with the waste of precious resources:
“I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.”
My father was his soldiers’ advocate, having verbally defied some of the businesses in the South that refused to serve his fellow uniformed men in the Big Red One (Latino and Black Americans).
I never got to challenge my CW4 father with so much of history I absorbed. For instance, Costs of War Project at Brown University estimates that the United States is militarily still engaged in 85 countries, enabling or prosecuting wars in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Yemen and beyond. Maintaining over 750 overseas military bases have unfortunately spun spending for military purposes out of control, more than at the height of the Vietnam or Korean Wars.
If Dr. King were alive today, he would be expounding against the state of our foreign and domestic policies, and would despair at all this war mongering, especially now with China in America’s sights. An arms race with China is anathema to King’s hopes and dreams of a socially, economically and culturally just world.
King was the antiwar preacher, and he is so right about those triplets – militarism, materialism and racism.
A popular budget hotel chain is being sued for allowing sex trafficking to take place right under their noses and for failing to do anything about it, even as the warning signs were all over. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins talks with attorney Carissa Phelps about the lawsuit. Click here to find out more about the Red Roof Inn […]
Who among us wouldn’t agree that abuse and oppression are wrong? Racism is wrong. Sexism is wrong. Speciesism is wrong. But what are we doing about it? Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. asked, “What are you doing for others?” and gave a reminder that “[a] time comes when silence is betrayal.” By rallying for civil liberties and speaking out against inequality, he exemplified his own words, showing that “[t]he time is always right to do what is right.” Taking his statements and calls to action to heart, PETA speaks out against violence and oppression because every animal is someone.
Opposing injustice isn’t a matter of choosing a single issue and ignoring all others. It is acting on principle against all injustice. Picking which ugly “-isms” to stamp out, like plucking this grape and that from a bunch, will never be how social justice reform works. Ableism, homophobia, sexism, speciesism, racism, and transphobia are all linked by one common theme: a supremacist attitude.
Martin Luther King Jr. reminded everyone that we should fight all injustice, not limit ourselves to a single issue. #MLKDaypic.twitter.com/hXl94mgzDw
Biases are born of ignorance. We discriminate against others who may not look exactly the same as “we” do but, if we are honest, clearly demonstrate that if you burn them, they scream just as we do; that they experience maternal love just as we do; and that they desire freedom just as we do.
It may be useful to look at acts of abuse committed today and imagine them through the more critical eyes of future generations or to put ourselves in the shoes of the oppressed, because if we believe what Dr. King famously said—that “[i]njustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”—we must do exactly that.
“[T]here comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right,” Dr. King said.
Dr. King summoned up his courage and did and said what was right. We must do that, too, if we are to heed his call. Animal rights is not some poor cousin of other rights movements any more than women’s rights is a lower cause than others. All struggles to achieve social justice are equally important to support. “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people,” said Dr. King. In his honor and for those who are oppressed, speak out against all forms of discrimination—often and with pride.
One of the most effective ways to do this is to speak up to usher in change. Reach out to your representatives and urge them to pass animal- and human-friendly legislation. You can start by asking your local, state, and national representatives to support PETA’s food justice campaign, an initiative to redirect subsidies from the meat, egg, and dairy industries toward incentives to grocers in food deserts to stock vegetables, fruits, and other healthy vegan foods. Follow our simple guide to letter-writing to start making your voice count:
Western “liberal democracies” are just totalitarian regimes with more money and better narrative management. The US-centralized empire controls the global south with bombs, bullets and blockades and controls the rest of us with mass-scale psychological manipulation.
Sure it’s more pleasant to be sitting where we are rather than at the barrel of the gun, but don’t confuse pleasantness with freedom. It’s nice that here they let you criticize your government and buy whatever you can afford at the store. It would be pleasant to live in a vat with your brain plugged into a virtual world of endless pleasure, too, but it wouldn’t be freedom. Psychological tyranny is still tyranny.
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You’ll never get change as long as propagandists are able to convince a critical mass of people not to push for change. You’ll never stop depraved agendas as long as propagandists can manipulate a critical mass of people into consenting to those agendas. Propaganda is enemy #1.
Every other solution people talk about is secondary to the problem of the empire being able to psychologically manipulate a critical majority of people. Voting strategies, organizing, activism, protests, none of these things will get off the ground as long as public perception is controlled.
The good news is that public trust in the mass media is at an all-time low while our ability to share unauthorized ideas and information with each other is at an all-time high. The bad news is it still hasn’t been enough, and online censorship is increasingly suppressing dissent.
This is the front line of the revolution. Everything else comes second, because until you deal with the fact that our enemy has the most powerful narrative control machine in the history of civilization, none of your other revolutionary ideals will ever be able to manifest. The imperial spin machine should therefore be our primary target. Attack the empire’s news media and its manipulators in Hollywood and Silicon Valley, expose their lies, and weaken public trust in those institutions so that people can no longer be manipulated by them.
Every positive change in human behavior — whether individual or collective — is always preceded by an expansion of consciousness. All we need to do is expand public consciousness of what’s really happening. The more people wake up, the more people will be available to help us.
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Every healthy impulse gets twisted by our rulers. The push toward equality for women got twisted into doubling the workforce and slashing worker pay. The push for racial equality and LGBT rights gets twisted into having to vote for abusive imperialist political parties. The healthy impulse for global worker solidarity sees imperialist narrative managers finger-wagging at leftists that they must display “solidarity” with protesters in empire-targeted nations and with Ukrainian soldiers fighting in a US proxy war. Everything healthy gets twisted.
None of this means those healthy impulses are now unhealthy. Just because the narrative managers are twisting them toward sickness doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still want health. The problem isn’t social justice movements etc, it’s the manipulations that get placed overtop them. This is why I put so much emphasis on overthrowing imperial narrative control. The empire’s ability to manipulate the dominant narratives in our society is what keeps us ineffective and confused. Until we can crush their ability to twist perception of reality, they’ve got us.
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Opposing US warmongering against China offers the antiwar left an area in which they can publicly outperform and surpass the antiwar right, because most of the rightists who are good on opposing warmongering against Russia are absolute dogshit when it comes to making peace with China. There’s a small faction of US libertarians who are good on both Russia and China, but pretty much everyone else on the right is only good on Russia.
Most leftists could do a much better job on opposing warmongering against China, which appears to be headed toward a truly nightmarish confrontation in the coming years. Doing so would let the antiwar left reclaim some of the public ground it’s lost to the antiwar right. Best case scenario, the true left rebuilds its reputation as a real antiwar force and reclaims some of the public sympathy that has gone to the right. Another positive scenario would be the antiwar right responding by stepping up its game and getting less horrible on China to remain relevant.
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It’s actually a good thing that young people are becoming more sensitive and demanding more sensitivity from their world. The world is troubled because there isn’t enough sensitivity, not because there’s too much.
The world needs softer hearts, not harder hearts. It needs more people leaning in with curiosity, not leaning back with cold apathy. It needs more emotional intelligence and less emotional sedation. We’ve seen what a world ruled by hardened men looks like. It isn’t good.
Keep growing your sensitivity. Keep peeling the callous from off your hearts. You cannot be bowled over be the beauty of the world if your eyes are covered in cataracts of insensitivity. Thick skin makes for lousy sex.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
This Friday, Mumia Abu-Jamal faces what could be his last chance for a new trial to consider newly discovered evidence that casts doubt on his 1982 conviction for murder. The journalist and former Black Panther has spent 41 years in prison for the death of police officer Daniel Faulkner, for which he has always maintained his innocence. His lawyers say evidence in boxes discovered in the…
The launch of a New Zealand project to produce more Pacific news and provide a “voice for the voiceless” on the islands has highlighted the neglect of that field by Australia and New Zealand — and also problems in universities.
The new development is the non-government, non-university Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN), a research base and publishing platform.
Its opening followed the cleaning-out of a centre within the Auckland University of Technology (AUT) — in an exercise exemplifying the kind of micro infighting that goes on hardly glimpsed from outside the academic world.
Cleaning out media centre The story features an unannounced move by university staff to vacate the offices of an active journalism teaching and publishing base, the Pacific Media Centre, in early February 2021.
Seven weeks after the retirement of that centre’s foundation director, Professor David Robie, staff of AUT’s School of Communication Studies turned up and stripped it, taking out the archives and Pacific taonga — valued artifacts from across the region.
Staff still based there did not know of this move until later.
The centre had been in operation for 13 years — it was popular with Pasifika students, especially postgrads who would go on reporting ventures for practice-led research around the Pacific; it was a base for online news, for example prolific outlets including a regular Pacific Media Watch; it had international standing especially through the well-rated (“SCOPUS-listed”) academic journal Pacific Journalism Review; and it was a cultural hub, where guests might receive a sung greeting from the staff, Pacific-style, or see fascinating art works and craft.
Its uptake across the “Blue Continent” showed up gaps in mainstream media services and in Australia’s case famously the backlog in promoting economic and cultural ties.
The PMC Project — a short documentary about the centre by Alistar Kata in 2016. Video: Pacific Media Centre
Human rights and media freedom The centre was founded in 2007, in a troubled era following a rogue military coup d’etat in Fiji, civil disturbances in Papua New Guinea, violent attacks on journalists in several parts, and endemic gender violence listed as a priority problem for the Pacific Islands Forum.
Through its publishing and conference activity it would take a stand on human rights and media freedom issues, social justice, economic and media domination from outside.
The actual physical evacuation was on the orders of the communications head of school at AUT, Dr Rosser Johnson, a recently appointed associate professor with a history of management service in several acting roles since 2005. He told the Australia Asia Pacific Media Initiative (AAPMI) in response to its formal complaint to AUT that it was “gutting” the centre that the university planned to keep a centre called the PMC and co-locate its offices with other centres — but that never happened.
His intervention caused predictable critical responses, as with this comment by a former New Zealand Heraldeditor-in-chief, Dr Gavin Ellis, on dealing with corporatised universities, in “neo-liberal” times:
“For many years I thought universities were the ideal place to establish centres of investigative journalism excellence … My views have been shaken to the core by the Auckland University of Technology gutting the Pacific Media Centre.”
Conflicts over truth-telling The “PMC affair” has stirred conflicts that should worry observers who place value on truth-finding and truth-telling in university research, preparation for the professions, and academic freedom.
The Independent Australia report on the fate of the PMC last weekend. Image: Asia Pacific Report
The centre along with its counterpart at the University of Technology Sydney, called the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism (ACIJ), worked in the area of journalism as research, applying journalistic skills and methods, especially exercises in investigative journalism.
The ACIJ produced among many investigations, work on the reporting of climate policy and climate science, and the News of the World phone hacking scandal. It also was peremptorily shut-down, three years ahead of the PMC.
Both centres were placed in the journalism academic discipline, a “professional” and “teaching” discipline that traditionally draws in high achieving students interested in its practice-led approach.
All of which is decried by line academics in disciplines without professional linkages but a professional interest in the hierarchical arrangements and power relations within the confined space of their universities.
There the interest is in theoretical teaching and research outputs, often-enough called “Marxist”, “postmodern”, “communications” or “cultural studies”, angled at a de-legitimisation of “Western-liberal” mass media. Not that journalism education itself shies away from media criticism, as Dr Robie told Independent Australia:
“The Pacific Media Centre frequently challenged ‘ethnocentric journalistic practice’ and placed Māori, Pacific and indigenous and cultural diversity at the heart of the centre’s experiential knowledge and critical-thinking news narratives.”
Yet it can be seen how conflict may arise, especially where smaller journalism departments come under “takeover” pressure. It is a handy option for academic managers to subsume “journalism”, and get the staff positions that can be filled with non-journalists; the contribution the journalists may make to research earnings (through the Australian Excellence in Research process, or NZ Performance Based Research Fund), and especially government funding for student places.
There, better students likely to excel and complete their programmes can be induced to do more generalised courses with a specialist “journalism” label.
Any such conflict in the AUT case cannot be measured but must be at least lurking in the background.
What is ‘ideology’? Another problem exists, where a centre like the former PMC will commit to defined values, even officially sanctioned ones like inclusivity and rejection of discrimination.
Undertakings like the PMC’s “Bearing Witness” projects, where students would deploy classic journalism techniques for investigations on a nuclear-free Pacific or climate change, can irritate conservative interests.
The derogatory expression for any connection with social movements is “ideological”. This time it is an unknown, but a School moving against an “ideological” unit, might get at least tacit support from higher-ups supposing that eviscerating it might help the institution’s “good name”.
What implications for future journalism, freedom and quality of media? Hostility towards specific professional education for journalism exists fairly widely. The rough-housing of the journalism centre at AUT is indicative, where efforts by the out-going director to organise succession after his retirement, five years in advance, received no response.
The position statement was changed to take away a requirement for actual Pacific media identity or expertise, and the job left vacant, in part a covid effect. The centre performed well on its key performance indicators, if small in size, which brought in limited research grants but good returns for academic publications:
“On 18 December 2020 – the day I officially retired – I wrote to the [then] Vice-Chancellor, Derek McCormack … expressing my concern about the future of the centre, saying the situation was “unconscionable and inexplicable”. I never received an acknowledgement or reply.”
Pacific futures Journalism education has persisted through an adverse climate, where the number of journalists in mainstream media has declined, in New Zealand almost halved to 2061, (2006 – 2018). AUT celebrated 50 years of journalism teaching this week.
The latest Pacific Journalism Review . . . published for 28 years. Image: PJR
However new media are expanding, new demands exist for media competency across the exploding world “mediascape”, schools cultivating conscionable practices are providing an antidote to floods of bigotry and lies in social media.
The new NGO in Auckland, the APMN, has found a good base of support across the Pacific communities, limbering up for a future free of interference, outside of the former university base.
It will be bidding for a share of NZ government grants intended to assist public journalism, ethnic broadcasting and outreach to the region. While several products of the former centre have closed, the successful 28-year-old research journal Pacific Journalism Review has continued, producing two editions under its new management.
The operation is also keeping its production-side media strengths, such as with the online title Asia Pacific Report.
Independent Australia media editor Dr Lee Duffield is a former ABC correspondent and academic. He is a member of the editorial advisory board of Pacific Journalism Review. This article is republished with the author’s permission.
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