so i went down to red clay this weekend, knowing already that my friends wouldn't be there on account of certain, we can call it family drama, well because that's what it is. and it just wasn't the same without them there, and the people who were there, they weren't from here, and they weren't as friendly towards me, except a few. one woman, i heard her call my friends "riff raff" in reply to somebody else commenting on what a good job they'd done this year. she didn't know they were my friends she was talking about. regardless, there wasn't that feeling of community like there usually was the other times i went there before, it was all just a show, put-on. and they did do a good job, it was all prettied up, drew in a lot more people, but not any of the people who should have been there, the ones for whom red clay is their/our church. i felt like an emissary in a way, for them, the ones who weren't there this time because i was being treated like i didn't belong by the ones who came from north carolina to put on a show for the local white people. ugh

and there wasn't any drumming... wtf is up with that?

why would we send our precious children to school?

it never fails to impress me just how much children learn when they aren't shackled to a school desk all day long busy not learning

there is nothing more necessary to a healthy society than raising children. this society, being unfriendly towards the work that mothers do, keeps itself sick by raising children in sick institutions instead of at home. just because we were all sent to school and institutionalized at a very young age, doesn't mean we should do that to our own kids. we know better, we can do better. they deserve better than that. the future of our world depends on it.

unless, of course, you are okay with raising yet another generation of brainwashed thugs. i'm not.

keyboard sputum

i'm just dumping my words here where i might can find them again easier than digging through thousands of status updates at facebook... :-)

do you find people acting defensive around you all the time? maybe if you stopped attacking them, they wouldn't feel a need to defend themselves. did that never occur to you? did you think you were helping them? you were wrong. telling other people what they should do is not help, it's just bossy and mean. and you think of yourself as being soooo kind, don't you? i hate bullies.

and to everyone else, those who, like myself, are always being accused of being too defensive, standing up for yourself is not a bad thing!! your voice counts, too.

there are so many different bob dylan lyrics i could start to sing right now. what makes anyone any sort of authority over anyone else? when you assume authority over someone else's actions, thoughts, beliefs, etc, that is the same as tel...ling them they are beneath you, that you think you are somehow better qualified to make their decisions for them. that is the greatest insult of them all. and when it hurts their feelings to be so insulted, constantly, by those who think they are superior in some way or another, those bullies blame us for it, it's our fault for being too sensitive, they were only trying to help. BAH!

the divine right of kings is a lie. the only thing they were born with that the rest of us don't have is money.

and the money system is collapsing along with the other controls, as freedom draws near. now the money is nothing more than numbers in computers. that's all it is. used to just be numbers on paper, but we've "progressed" and the lie is m...ore evident to those who wish to see it for what it is. how is it that those numbers in those computers controls everything you do? where does this power come from? it certainly didn't come from the gods i believe in. it comes from fear. we are taught to be afraid so that we may think we want to be controlled. who puts this fear in our hearts? it does not come from within. who are the real terrorists?

and since i enjoy answering my own questions (even if i might be wrong) i'd say the real terrorists are the bullies, the ones who think they know what's best for other folks.

the ones who claim to be "protecting" us from some threat, real or imagined doesn't matter which, so long as we buy into the fear that allows such abuses to continue.

********

oh but there are different rules for the super-wealthy than for the rest of us. you know why. it's because they are the ones making up the rules as they go along!

who tells governments what laws to pass? chatham house does. who gets invited to meetings at chatham house? not people like me, certainly. not people like you, either. only the very very very rich and powerful get to go to those meetings, where they decide policy that affects all the rest of us.

http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/files/13276_270109miliband.pdf "managing global insecurity" (in other words, manufacturing fear)

"they will come for you anyway"

http://www.tpuc.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=324&p=2393

that very well may be. threats of horrible punishments cannot turn me into a docile sheep, or quiet my voice, because that is in contrast to what my inner spirit tells me i must do. if they wanted me in jail, or dead, for that matter, i'd already be there. and what good would it do their cause? to get rid of some housewife in tennessee that isn't bothering anyone. imagine some faceless army marching up the street bearing machine guns, coming to take me and my children away, what a joke! how could they possibly spin that into anything other than a hollywood fairy tale that the public would never buy. it is not my decision to make, what anyone else might choose to do. what is my responsibility is to decide for myself (without fear of any threats) whether to continue to live in fear and remain silent, or to speak out, at the top of my lungs, if i have to. i choose to believe that i am making a difference, not by giving my power to some group in the hopes that the group has my best interests at heart, but by standing alone and using my power to change my world in a way that benefits everyone, and not just a select few who are members of the right group.

the group has only the "good of the group" as its goal and purpose. that is how the groupthink mindcontrol works. and we don't like those words, do we? no, we don't. words like that makes us cringe, makes us cower in fear, don't they? the group tells you that individually, you are weak and pitiful and you need someone else to help you, to teach you, to lead you, to give you the right answers, because you aren't worthy of making any decisions for yourself. when you join the group, you give up your right to disagree with the majority, regardless how foolish it might be what the majority thinks. my version of anarchy is the opposite of that. it's each individual human being, no matter who they are, believing in themselves. freedom means that we get to make our own decisions for ourselves. autonomy. it means that no group, no organization, be that in the form of church or state, has higher authority than each individual's own innermost guide.

and society tells us we are wrong to believe in ourselves. we need the system. we have been so sorely abused by authority that we lose touch with that inner voice, we forget how strong we are. but there's lots and lots starting to remember. because the only way world peace will ever happen is for all of us to stand up, alone, individually, for everyone else's right to do the same.

...

problem is, the political system does not work. it never has, except to benefit the few at the very tippy top of that pyramid. we want to think it works, don't we? we want to believe in the "american dream" (sure you all have something similar on that side of the pond, don't you? that if we play their game well enough, we can come out on top ...well, never all the way to the top, but we can "succeed" - we can rise above).

so we are divided up into groups, building blocks, as it were, to support the pyramid, the heirarchy of power and control. and the higher up that pyramid we go, the more people we step upon for personal advance, the more we think we are better than them, those who are "beneath" us. a pyramid made entirely of sand would never support its own weight. the sand has to be mixed with lime and aggregate, made into concrete first. and how is this accomplished? mostly with what is popularly known as "education" - indoctrination into the system of control and abuse. and we are told that we should believe the good of the group comes first, and our individual freedoms matter not.

Little Cedar Mountain

for the "official" TVA government line of bullshit, click either of these links:

http://www.tva.gov/environment/reports/littlecedar2/index.htm
http://www.tva.gov/environment/reports/littlecedar/


From local Channel 9 website:

http://www.newschannel9.com/news/tva_968032___article.html/cedar_mountain.html


TVA Discusses Management of Controversial Little Cedar Mtn. Land

April 18, 2008 - 10:21AM

Richard Simms

TVA officials will be holding a public tour of a new interpretive trail at Little Cedar Mountain Small Wild Area and TVA's resource management plan for the Lower Nickajack Properties.

The area has been the subject of much controversy in recent years as developers sought more than than 600 acres of public land for an exclusive golf course and housing development. (link - s)

The TVA Board finally voted to sell the land to developer John Thornton in a trade-off deal after Thornton purchased several other tracts of lakefront property to offer in a barter deal for the Little Cedar Tract.

However TVA retained ownership of the area known as Little Cedar Mountain just South of I-24 at the Nickajack Dam Exit where the public interpretive trail will be located.

In addition, TVA is making plans for the future management of other tracts obtained in the deal known as Burns Island, the Boyd Farm and Big Cedar Mountain.

DETAILS

WHAT:
Discussion and tour of new interpretive trail at Little Cedar Mountain Small Wild Area and TVA's resource management plan for the Lower Nickajack Properties.

WHO:
TVA Endangered Species Biologist Hill Henry and TVA Watershed Team Representative Andy Lawson

WHEN:
10 a.m., Tuesday, April 22 (please note the date this story was aired - s)

WHERE:
Meet at Nickajack Dam

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
TVA has received inquiries from several organizations and the public regarding the strategy for using property acquired during TVA's Supplemental Environmental Assessment at Little Cedar Mountain in Marion County, Tenn. TVA is developing a comprehensive resource management plan on four parcels in the vicinity of Nickajack Dam -- collectively referred to as the Lower Nickajack Properties. They include Boyd's Farm, Burn's Island, Cedar Mountain tracts and TVA's Little Cedar Mountain Small Wild Area. The plan being developed defines proposed management goals, objectives, and activities designed to protect cultural and natural resources and improve public access on each tract.

Hill Henry and Andy Lawson will conduct a guided tour of the new interpretive trail at Little Cedar Mountain Small Wild Area, discuss stabilization of Burn's Island and plans for the use and access of the Boyd's Farm property.

The activities will occur rain or shine.


(also please note the lack of any mention of Native American artifacts, including bones and human remains, that have been found in the area. Also the lack of mention of any concerns regarding such artifacts. - s)

ignorance

Lakota Oyate

lakotahoyate.net

Lakota Oyate represents the voice of the free Lakota oyate (people) from what was known as the Sioux Indian reservations of Nebraska, North Dakota,South Dakota and Montana. In our freedom, we reject the colonial apartheid system that has caused genocide to our people, and to all Indigenous peoples.

Lakota Oyate emerges from the work of the Lakota Freedom Delegation. Now that we have returned from Washington D.C., we work to ensure the voice of the oyate - the Elders, children and all people - are respected and heard in the rebirth of the Lakota Nation.

We do not represent those BIA or IRA governments beholden to the colonial system, but we encourage all people to reclaim their freedom. We do not support the imposition of the "Republic of Lakotah" or its so-called "provisional government" which does not represent the will of the people nor the spirit of the Animal Nations which survive within the Elders and children.


http://lakotahoyate.net/portfolio.html

http://eeng.net/CS/blogs/smileycoyote/default.aspx


there's a lovely discussion at my zaadz blog on this topic

any additional resources that you know of, please post links in the comments!


lakotafreedom.com now redirects to republicoflakota.com
if you've been reading my blog, like ever before, you know I gots big BIG problems with Plato's Republic and any government based upon rule by an elite class of people who are somehow better suited to govern (control) us than we are ourselves and based upon the good of the group rather than what's good for each and every individual person.

The Lakota "Indians" Secede from the Union!!

Descendants of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse break away from US



WASHINGTON (AFP) — The Lakota Indians, who gave the world legendary warriors Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from treaties with the United States, leaders said Wednesday.

"We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us," long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means told a handful of reporters and a delegation from the Bolivian embassy, gathered in a church in a run-down neighborhood of Washington for a news conference.

A delegation of Lakota leaders delivered a message to the State Department on Monday, announcing they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the United States, some of them more than 150 years old.

They also visited the Bolivian, Chilean, South African and Venezuelan embassies, and will continue on their diplomatic mission and take it overseas in the coming weeks and months, they told the news conference.

Lakota country includes parts of the states of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.

The new country would issue its own passports and driving licences, and living there would be tax-free -- provided residents renounce their US citizenship, Means said.

The treaties signed with the United States are merely "worthless words on worthless paper," the Lakota freedom activists say on their website.

The treaties have been "repeatedly violated in order to steal our culture, our land and our ability to maintain our way of life," the reborn freedom movement says.

Withdrawing from the treaties was entirely legal, Means said.

"This is according to the laws of the United States, specifically article six of the constitution," which states that treaties are the supreme law of the land, he said.

"It is also within the laws on treaties passed at the Vienna Convention and put into effect by the US and the rest of the international community in 1980. We are legally within our rights to be free and independent," said Means.

The Lakota relaunched their journey to freedom in 1974, when they drafted a declaration of continuing independence -- an overt play on the title of the United States' Declaration of Independence from England.

Thirty-three years have elapsed since then because "it takes critical mass to combat colonialism and we wanted to make sure that all our ducks were in a row," Means said.

One duck moved into place in September, when the United Nations adopted a non-binding declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples -- despite opposition from the United States, which said it clashed with its own laws.

"We have 33 treaties with the United States that they have not lived by. They continue to take our land, our water, our children," Phyllis Young, who helped organize the first international conference on indigenous rights in Geneva in 1977, told the news conference.

The US "annexation" of native American land has resulted in once proud tribes such as the Lakota becoming mere "facsimiles of white people," said Means.

Oppression at the hands of the US government has taken its toll on the Lakota, whose men have one of the shortest life expectancies -- less than 44 years -- in the world.

Lakota teen suicides are 150 percent above the norm for the United States; infant mortality is five times higher than the US average; and unemployment is rife, according to the Lakota freedom movement's website.

"Our people want to live, not just survive or crawl and be mascots," said Young.

"We are not trying to embarrass the United States. We are here to continue the struggle for our children and grandchildren," she said, predicting that the battle would not be won in her lifetime.

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iVC1KMTOgwiSoMQyT2LwZc9HyAgA

cultural genocide

The ruling elite use money, religion, public education, and mass media to control our lives, to make us afraid, so that we choose not to make our own decisions but rather do as we are told, and believe what they want us to believe. The homogenization of people into one world government, one world religion is all about denying us the right to define for ourselves who we are, creating an underclass of slaves whose lives exist only to support the agenda of those in power.





eight minutes into the second video, it says "the worst holocaust in human history occurred not in Nazi Germany but on American soil" If you don't watch any of the rest of it, watch that part.

The Apartheid Paradigm in Palestine-Israel

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/27/1547221


NOAM CHOMSKY

Before saying a word, I’d like to express some severe personal discomfort, because anything I say will be abstract and dry and restrained. The crimes against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and elsewhere, particularly Lebanon, are so shocking that the only emotionally valid reaction is rage and a call for extreme actions. But that does not help the victims. And, in fact, it’s likely to harm them. We have to face the reality that our actions have consequences, and they have to be adapted to real-world circumstances, difficult as it may be to stay calm in the face of shameful crimes in which we are directly and crucially implicated.

Well, I’ve been asked to talk about the apartheid paradigm and the proper response here, so I’ll do that, though not without some additional reservations. We have to recognize that there will be no clear answer as to the question of whether the apartheid paradigm applies in Israel or in Boston, right here, or elsewhere. The genre has, after all, only one example: South Africa. And there are similarities elsewhere in many dimensions, and it’s fair enough to bring them up, but there's very little point debating whether they are close enough in one or another case to count as apartheid, because that will never be settled, we know that in advance.

I’ve brought up similarities in the past, when I thought that they were appropriate. Actually, the one time I recall clearly was exactly ten years ago. That was at a conference at Ben Gurion University in Be’er Sheva. It was on the anniversary of the thirtieth year of the military occupation. And in the talk there, I quoted from a standard history of South Africa on elections in the Bantustans, which I’ll read; and just change a few words, and you'll know what it’s about.

“South African retention of effective power, through its officials in the Bantustans, its overwhelming economic influence and security arrangements, gave to this initiative of elections elements of a farce. However, unlikely candidates as were the Bantustans for any meaningful independent existence, their expanding bureaucracies provided jobs for new strata of educated Africans tied to the system in a new way and a basis for accumulation for a small number of Africans with access to loans and political influence. Repression, too, could be indigenized through developing homeland policy and army personnel. On the fringe of the Bantustans, border industry growth centers were planned as a means of freeing capital from some of the restraints imposed on industrial expansion elsewhere and to take advantage of virtually captive and particularly cheap labor. Within the homelands, economic development was more a matter of advertising brochures than actual practical activity, though some officials in South Africa understood the needs from their own perspective for some kind of revitalization of the homelands to prevent their economies from collapsing even further.”

Well, I won’t waste time expressing the similarities to the Occupied Territories, but you can do that quite easily. Ten years ago, that was the optimistic prospect for the Occupied Territories. By now, even that’s remote, and reality is far more grim than it was then. There’s no time and, I presume, no need to review the harrowing details.

We’re now approaching George Bush's historic Annapolis conference, as it’s called, on Israel-Palestine, so we can anticipate a flood of deceit and distortions to set the proper framework. And we should be prepared to counter the propaganda assault, which has already begun. Just to pick a couple of examples, Bostonians could read in the Boston Globe a few days ago that at the Taba Conference in January 2001 -- now quoting -- “Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak accepted ideas floated by President Bill Clinton that would have produced a Palestinian state in 97 percent of the West Bank and 100 percent of Gaza,” but these forthcoming gestures failed. The evil Palestinians refused Israel's generous offers, keeping to their time-honored insistence on seizing defeat from the jaws of victory and proving they’re not partners for negotiation.

Well, there’s one fragment of truth in this conventional fabrication: there was a conference in Taba. And, in fact, it did come close to a possible settlement, but the rest is pure invention. In particular, the conference was terminated abruptly by Prime Minister Barak. The truth is completely unacceptable, so the facts are either suppressed, as they generally are, or, as in this case, just inverted. And we can expect a good deal more of that. Actually, the truth about the Taba Conference merits attention. That week, in one week in January 2001, that was the one moment in thirty years when the United States and Israel abandoned the rejectionist stance that they have maintained in virtual isolation until the present.

And that may suggest some thoughts about another familiar fairytale that you could read about a couple of days earlier in the New York Times, where the respected policy analyst and former high government official, Leslie Gelb, wrote that every US administration since 1967 has privately favored returning almost all of the territory to the Palestinians for the purposes of creating a separate Palestinian state. Note the word "privately." Crucial. We know what the administrations have said publicly. Publicly they have rejected adamantly anything remotely of the sort ever since 1967 -- ’76, when the United States vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for a two-state settlement on the international border, incorporating all the relevant wording of UN 242 -- it’s the basic diplomatic document to which Washington appeals when it’s convenient. The US veto -- it’s worth bearing in mind -- is a double veto. One part of the veto is that the actions are barred, of course. And it’s also vetoed from history, as in this case, so you’ll work really hard to find it, even in the scholarly literature.

Sometimes the public rejection of a separate Palestinian state is more articulate and considerably more extreme, so it takes a George Bush no. 1, who is reputed to be the most hostile to Israel of US presidents. In 1988, as you know, the Palestinian National Council formally accepted a two-state settlement, and the Israeli government responded. This was the coalition government of Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir. They responded by issuing a formal declaration that there can be no additional Palestinian state between Jordan and Palestine -- “additional” because for Shimon Peres and his Labor coalition, Jordan already was a Palestinian state. It’s a view that’s attributed to the right wing, but that’s mistaken. This is Shimon Peres. The United States reacted to that with what was called the Baker Plan -- James Baker, Secretary of State. The Bush Baker Plan endorsed Israel's position without qualification and went on to add that any Palestinian negotiators would have to accept that framework, namely no second Palestinian state in addition to Jordan. That’s Bush no. 1, the alleged critic of Israel, and the respected diplomat James Baker. Again, the truth is inconvenient, so virtually none of this was reported, and you’ll have to work -- search hard to extricate it from the web of self-serving propaganda that dominates commentary and reporting, of which Leslie Gelb's article in the New York Times is a typical, but not unusual, example.

Well, I’m not going to go on with that, but the diplomatic record is one of uniform rejectionism, apart from the week in Taba, and unilateral rejectionism, increasingly so. By now, virtually the entire world agrees on the two-state international consensus of the past thirty years, pretty much along the lines that were almost agreed upon at Taba. That includes all the Arab States, who actually go beyond to call for full normalization of relations with Israel. It includes Iran, although you won’t find that published here, which accepts the Arab League position. It includes Hamas; its leaders have repeatedly endorsed, called for a two-state settlement, even in articles in the US press. That also includes Hamas's most militant figure, Khaled Meshaal, who’s in exile in Syria. And it includes the rest of the world. Israel rejects it, and the United States backs that rejection fully, not in words just, but in actions.

Bush no. 2 has gone to new extremes in rejectionism. He’s declared the illegal West Bank settlements must remain part of Israel. That’s in accord with the Clinton position, expressed by his negotiator Dennis Ross, who explained that what he called “Israel's needs” take precedence over Palestinian wants. That’s Clinton. But the party line remains undisturbed. Facts don’t matter. Bush, Rice and the rest are yearning to realize Bush's vision of a Palestinian state -- somewhere, someplace -- persisting in the noble endeavor of the longtime honest broker.
Well, what’s happened in the past is -- of course, rejectionism goes far beyond words. It includes settlement programs, the annexation wall, closures, checkpoints, and so on. Settlements increased steadily right through the Oslo years, peaking actually in Clinton's last year, the year 2000, right before the Camp David Accords. And the story is now being repeated before our eyes -- shouldn’t surprise us.

So to take just one example, with the Annapolis conference approaching, Israel has just confiscated more Arab land to build a bypass road from Palestinians -- I’m quoting now -- “in order to push the Palestinian traffic between Bethlehem and Ramallah deep into the desert and effectively bar Palestinians from the central part of the West Bank." That’s part of the so-called E1 project, which is designed to incorporate the town of Ma’ale Adumim within Israel and effectively to bisect the West Bank. “With such policies” -- continuing to quote -- "With such policies enacted by the government, the famous Annapolis conference is emptied of all meaning long before it convenes." This is quotes from the Israeli peace organization Gush Shalom. All of this is backed by the honest brokers in Washington and paid for by US taxpayers, who, incidentally, overwhelmingly join the international consensus, in opposition to their own government. But that’s not what we’re going to hear.

Well, in fairness, it should be added that there is occasional public criticism of the settlement programs. So in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, there was a favorable review of a very important study, which has just been translated into English, Lords of the Land by Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, which bitterly condemns the US-backed Israeli programs in the West Bank and the takeover of Israeli political life by their advocates. It’s a strong and important book.

The review, however, goes on with conventional fairytales. Among them, it tells us that within the Green Line in Israel itself, Israel is what it calls a “vibrant democracy” in which non-Jews have equal rights and, unlike the West Bank, there are no Arab villages made inaccessible, because their roads have been dug up by army bulldozers. Well, again, there’s a fragment of truth in the description. So take, for example, the village Dar al-Hanoun in the so-called Triangle, Wadi Ara, it’s older than the state of Israel, but it’s one of the innumerable unrecognized villages in Israel. So it’s true that there’s no road dug up by bulldozers, and the reason is that there’s no road. No road is permitted by the state authorities, and no construction is permitted. No services are provided. That’s not an unusual situation for Palestinian citizens, who are also effectively barred from over 90% of the land by a complex and intricate web of laws and administrative arrangements. Technically, that was overruled by the high court seven years ago, but, as far as I can determine, only technically. And we may recall that in the United States it took over a century for even formal implementation of the Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing equal rights to all persons, and actual implementation of it is still remote a century-and-a-half later.
Well, let’s turn briefly to the important question, the most important question: what can we do about it? Here, it’s useful to think about the apartheid analogy, and it’s useful to remember a little history.

In 1963, the UN Security Council declared a voluntary arms embargo on South Africa. That was extended to a mandatory embargo in 1977. And that was followed by economic sanctions and other measures -- sometimes officials, countries, cities, towns -- some organized by popular movements. Now, not all countries participated. In the United States, the US Congress did impose sanctions over Reagan's veto, but US trade with South Africa then increased by various evasions, along with concealed support for South African terrorist atrocities in Mozambique and Angola, which took a horrendous toll. It’s about 1.5 million killed and over $60 billion in damage during the Reagan years, the Reagan years of constructive engagement, according to UN analysis. In 1988, the Reagan administration declared Mandela's African National Congress to be one of the world's most notorious terrorist groups -- that’s 1988 -- while it described RENAMO in Mozambique merely as an indigenous insurgent group. That was after it had just killed about 100,000 people, according to the State Department, with, of course, US-backed African support. Thatcher's record was similar or maybe worse. But most of this was in secret. There was just too much popular opposition.

And the popular opposition made a difference. There was a very significant anti-apartheid movement decades after the global decision of the Security Council to bring apartheid to an end. In 1965, boycotts and other measures would not have been effective. Twenty years later, they were effective, but that was after the groundwork had been laid by activist, educational and organizing efforts, including within the powerful states, which is what matters in an ugly world.

Well, in the case of Israel-Palestine, the groundwork has not been laid. The quotes that I just gave are perfectly representative examples; you can fill them out in books, yeah. The kind of popular measures that were effective against apartheid by the late 1980s are not only ineffective in the case of Israel-Palestine today, but in fact sometimes backfire in harming the victims. We’ve seen that over and over. It’s going to continue until the organizing and educational efforts make real progress. It’s not just the United States; the European Union is hardly different. So, for example, the European Union does not bar arms deliveries to Israel. It joined the United States in vicious punishment of Palestinians, because they committed the grave crime of voting the wrong way in a free election. And there was very little internal protest in Europe. Populations support the international consensus, but they don’t react when their governments undermine any hope for its realization.

Well, in the coming weeks and the longer term, there's plenty of educational and organizational activity that will have to be carried out among an American population that happens to be largely receptive, though deluged with propaganda and deceit. And it’s not going to be easy. It’s never been easy. But much harder tasks have been accomplished with dedicated and persistent effort.

MIT Professor Noam Chomsky, speaking recently in Boston at a conference called “The Apartheid Paradigm in Palestine-Israel,” sponsored by the Palestinian Christian organization Sabeel.
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Frank Zappa - censorship debate

glumbert - Hilarious debate with Frank Zappa about censorship

on this date in history

November 12, 1969
Seymour Hersh, an independent investigative journalist, in a cable filed through Dispatch News Service and picked up by more than 30 newspapers, revealed the extent of the U.S. Army's charges against 1st Lt. William L. Calley at My Lai, a Vietnamese village.


http://www.berkeley.edu:80/news/media/releases/2004/10/11_hersh.shtml

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh spills the secrets of the Iraq quagmire and the war on terror
By Bonnie Azab Powell, NewsCenter

BERKELEY – The Iraq war is not winnable, a secret U.S. military unit has been "disappearing" people since December 2001, and America has no idea how irreparably its torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison has damaged its image in the Middle East. These were just a few of the grim pronouncements made by Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter Seymour "Sy" Hersh to KQED host Michael Krasny before a Berkeley audience on Friday night (Oct. 8).

The past two years will "go down as one of the classic sort of failures" in history, said the man who has been called the "greatest muckraker of all time" and (paradoxically) the "enfant terrible of journalism for more than 30 years." While Hersh blamed the White House and the Pentagon for the Iraq quagmire and America's besmirched world image, he was stymied by how it all happened. "How could eight or nine neoconservatives come and take charge of this government?" he asked. "They overran the bureaucracy, they overran the Congress, they overran the press, and they overran the military! So you say to yourself, How fragile is this democracy?"

From My Lai to Abu Ghraib

That fragility clearly unnerves him. Hersh summarizes his mission as "to hold the people in public office to the highest possible standard of decency and of honesty…to tolerate anything less, even in the name of national security, is wrong." He tries his best. More than any other U.S. journalist alive today, he embodies the statement that "a patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government," a belief defined by the conservationist Edward Abbey.

His country has not always thanked him for it — neocon Pentagon adviser Richard Perle has called Hersh "the closest thing we have to a terrorist," while his 1998 book on John F. Kennedy's administration, "The Dark Side of Camelot," cost him many friends on the left. But Hersh's reputation remains more bulletproof than most. The author of eight books, he first received worldwide recognition (and the Pulitzer) in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War. 1982's "The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House," painted Henry Kissinger as a war criminal and won Hersh the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times book prize in biography.

Most recently, as a staff writer for the New Yorker, Hersh has relentlessly ferreted out the behind-the-scenes deals, trickery, and blunders associated with the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Back in May 2003, he was the first American reporter to state unequivocally that we would not find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (A mea culpa from a Slate journalist who doubted Hersh on WMDs also inadvertently confirms his prescient track record.) And in April of this year, he broke the story of how U.S. soldiers had digitally documented their torture and sexual humiliation of Iraqis at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The several articles he wrote for the New Yorker about Abu Ghraib have been updated and edited into his latest book, "Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib."

"Bush scares the hell out of me"

Hersh came to Berkeley at the invitation of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism and the California First Amendment Coalition. His appearance in the packed ballroom of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Student Union was the fitting end to a week of high-profile events in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement.

The Hersh event began only minutes after the second debate between President George W. Bush and John Kerry concluded. Krasny naturally asked Hersh — who had watched the debate at North Gate Hall stone-faced in the middle of a rowdy crowd — what he thought of the match.

"It doesn't matter that Bush scares the hell out of me," Hersh answered. "What matters is that he scares the hell out of a lot of very important people in Washington who can't speak out, in the military, in the intelligence community. They know in ways that none of us know, the incredible gap between what is and what [Bush] thinks."

With that, he was off and running. One could safely say that for the next hour, Hersh proceeded to scare the hell out of most of the audience by detailing the gaps between what they knew and what he hears is actually going on in Iraq.

While his writing is dense but digestible, in person Hersh speaks with the rambling urgency of a street-corner doomsayer, leaping from point to point and anecdote to anecdote and frequently failing to finish his clauses, let alone his sentences. His train of thought can be difficult to catch a ride on. This evening, it was a challenge for Krasny to slow him down long enough to get a word or question in edgewise. For example, here's a slice of raw Hersh on the current situation in Iraq:

I've been doing an alternate history of the war, from inside, because people, right after 9/11, because people inside — and there are a lot of good people inside — are scared, as scared as anybody watching this tonight I think should be, because [Bush], if he's re-elected, has only one thing to do, he's going to bomb the hell out of that place. He's been bombing the hell of that place — and here's what really irritates me again, about the press — since he set up this Potemkin Village government with Allawi on June 28 — the bombing, the daily bombing rates inside Iraq, have gone up exponentially. There's no public accounting of how many missions are flown, how much ordnance is dropped, we have no accounting and no demand to know. The only sense you get is we're basically in a full-scale air war against invisible people that we can't find, that we have no intelligence about, so we bomb what we can see.
And yet — despite the more than 1,000 deaths of U.S. soldiers and the horrific number of Iraqi casualties — Bush continues to believe we are doing the right thing, according to Hersh. "He thinks he's wearing the white hat," he said, adding that is what makes this administration different from previous ones whose hypocrisy Hersh has exposed. Bush and the neocons "are not hypocrites."

Enter the utopians

"I think it's real simple to say [Bush] is a liar. But that would also suggest there was a reality that he understood," explained Hersh. "I'm serious. It is funny in sort of a sick, black humor sort of way, but the real serious problem is, he believes what he's doing." In effect, Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and the other neocons are "idealists, you can call them utopians." As Hersh understands them, they really believe that the solution to global terrorism began with invading Baghdad and will end only with the transformation of the last unfriendly government in the Middle East into a democracy.

"No amount of body bags is going to dissuade [Bush]," said Hersh, despite the fact that Hersh's sources say the war in Iraq is "not winnable. It's over." As for Kerry's war plans, Hersh said he wished he could tell him to stop talking as if the senator's plan for Iraq could somehow still eke out a victory there. "This is a disaster that's been going on. It's a civil war, the insurgency. There is no 'win' anymore in this war," he argued. "As somebody said, 'We're playing chess, they're playing Go.'"

Later, Hersh shared something he had yet to write about. Sources were suggesting that the many acts of domestic terrorism in Iraq that U.S. officials have been attributing to suspected Al Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi are in fact a smokescreen set up by the insurgents. "They decided to wage war against their own population," he said. "It's a huge step, with enormous consequences.…The insurgency has simply deflected what they're doing onto this man. And we fell for it."

What is worse, he said impatiently, was that because U.S. forces had "privatized" so many of Iraq's institutions, it had decimated the job market in the country."This is why Bush can talk about 100,000 people wanting to go work in the police or in the army. It's because there's nothing else for them to do. They're willing to stand in line to get bombed because they want to take care of their family," he said.

Hersh has been accused many times of sympathizing with "the enemy," and told that his publicizing of incidents like the My Lai massacre and the Abu Ghraib torture only fan the flames of anti-American sentiment around the world. He related that he's been asked if he feels guilty about the beheadings of two Americans who were wearing uniforms like those worn at Abu Ghraib. "As if the Iraqis needed me to tell them what's going on in that prison!" he responded. He also repeated a question often posed to him: "Was it immoral to go in … [T]he idea that Saddam was a torturer and a killer, doesn't that lend a patina of morality to going after him?" The answer to that one, he said unsmilingly, "is of course, Saddam tortured and killed his people. And now we're doing it."

In addition to adding more details to the woeful chronology of the Abu Ghraib scandal, in which the military stopped the abuse only after Hersh's story brought it crashing down onto front pages around the world — four months after it was first reported to the Department of Defense — Hersh speculated on why those dehumanizing techniques had been used. He was sure that they were not, as some have claimed, the "stress outlet" or other spontaneous recreational ideas of young soldiers from West Virginia. Instead, he said, they were the outgrowth of a massive manhunt for information, any information, about first Al Qaida, the Taliban, and then the Iraqi insurgency:

My government has a secret unit that since December of 2001 has been disappearing people just like the Brazilians and the Argentineans did. Rumsfeld decided after 9/11 that he could not wait. The president signed a secret document…There's a team of people, they fly in unmarked planes, they fly in Gulfstreams, they have their own choppers, they don't carry American passports, and they just grab people. And maybe in the beginning I can understand there was some rationale. Right after 9/11 we were frightened, we didn't know what to do …
The original idea behind the sexually humiliating photos taken at Abu Ghraib, Hersh said he had heard, was to use them as blackmail so that the newly released prisoners — many of whom were ordinary Iraqi thieves or even civilian bystanders rounded up in dragnets — would act as informants. "We operate on guilt, [Muslims] operate on shame," Hersh explained. "The idea of photographing an Arab man naked and having him simulate homosexual activity, and having an American GI woman in the photographs, is the end of society in their eyes."

And the fact that Americans had perpetrated such acts — and refused to take responsibility for it — ended America's role as any kind of moral leader in the eyes of not just the Middle East, but the world, Hersh railed. He talked about an Israeli, a longtime veteran of the troubles between his country and the Palestinians, who had emailed him to say, in essence, "We've been killing them for 40 or 50 years, and they've been killing us for 40 or 50 years, but we know that somewhere down the line we're going to have to live with those SOBs…If we had treated our Arabs the way you treated them in Abu Ghraib, the sexual stuff, the photographs, we couldn't live with them. You guys do not begin to understand what you've done, where you have put yourself in the Arab world."

"They just shot them one by one"

There was more — rumors of atrocities around Iraq that to Hersh brought back memories of My Lai. In the evening's most emotional moment, Hersh talked about a call he had gotten from a first lieutenant in charge of a unit stationed halfway between Baghdad and the Syrian border. His group was bivouacking outside of town in an agricultural area, and had hired 30 or so Iraqis to guard a local granary. A few weeks passed. They got to know the men they hired, and to like them. Then orders came down from Baghdad that the village would be "cleared." Another platoon from the soldier's company came and executed the Iraqi granary guards. All of them.

"He said they just shot them one by one. And his people, and he, and the villagers of course, went nuts," Hersh said quietly. "He was hysterical, totally hysterical. He went to the company captain, who said, 'No, you don't understand, that's a kill. We got 36 insurgents. Don't you read those stories when the Americans say we had a combat maneuver and 15 insurgents were killed?'

"It's shades of Vietnam again, folks: body counts," Hersh continued. "You know what I told him? I said, 'Fella, you blamed the captain, he knows that you think he committed murder, your troops know that their fellow soldiers committed murder. Shut up. Complete your tour. Just shut up! You're going to get a bullet in the back.' And that's where we are in this war."

The story seemed to leave Hersh sincerely, deeply saddened. While his critics may call him a "muckraker" and unpatriotic, on Friday night it was obvious that Hersh takes the crumbling of America's image, very, very personally.

"My parents were immigrants," Hersh said. "They came here because America meant something…the Statue of Liberty and all that stuff, because America always was this bastion of morality and integrity and a place for a fresh start. And it's right in front of us, not hidden, that they've taken this away from us."

9/11 ....not!

nuh-uh, not gonna talk about what happened on this date in history. Sorry. Nobody wanted to talk about Hiroshima or MLK, Jr. so I won't talk about 9/11/2001.

Labor Day

link

McGuire introduced his idea formally at a meeting of the Central Labor Union on May 18,1882. "Let us have, a festive day during which a parade through the streets of the city would permit public tribute to American Industry," he said.

things Grampa says, part 3

I got rather upset that nobody wanted to talk about Hiroshima, and called Grampa. I said nobody wants to talk about what happened, but how can we make sure it never happens again if we don't talk about history and learn from it? He said to me that he's given up on changing the world, that he used to think he could make a difference. He said, "World War One was supposed to make the world safe for Democracy. World War Two was the war to end all wars. And look where we are today!" I told him that he has made a huge difference in many people's lives, probably way more than he realizes, and that's all that counts.

Pride

No matter what amount of brainwashing, humiliation, torment, and torture they endure, some people still have their pride. This is the threat perceived by those who seek to control people. This is why the most proud people throughout history have always become targets for oppression and cruelty. If we all become targets, if we all learn to be proud, they can't zero in on any one of us.

on this day in history...

such a horribleness, unspeakable horribleness. link Today, let us focus our energies on preventing such a thing from ever happening again, let us pray our hearts out for the soldiers of the world, that they might find the inner strength to accept moral responsibility for their actions, and do what is right and good as dictated by their hearts, rather than blindly obeying orders.

the significance of 4/7/47

My father was born 4/7/47. When he became ill...

back up a minute to elaborate...

Dad was drafted into the VietNam War. It was at his physical they found that he suffered from amyotrophic lateral schlerosis (ALS), aka Lou Gehrig's Disease. His father died way too young of "paralysis" as did many other men in the family, going way way back. He was labeled 4F and did not serve time in the war. That's a very good thing. Dad was often a violently tempered person, especially when he had been drinking, though terrified of firearms of any sort. I remember one time he screamed like a woman in an old B terror movie when a family friend had a handgun in his truck. Okay, so he had ALS, and the death sentence that comes with it.

He was also gay and so self-centered that even though he was married (in spirit if not on paper) to a wonderful man, it wasn't beyond him to give freely of himself to whomever it pleased him to do so. Like far too many other gay men in the 80's, he contracted HIV which soon exploded into full blown AIDS.

During a medical trial in which he participated, it had been discovered that dextromethorphan (cough syrup) not only stopped the progression of his symptoms of ALS but also made them go away. Apparently there weren't enough people who had this benefit from taking the medication, and it was never an approved treatment, though Dad continued to take it until he began AIDS treatments many years later. Stopping the dm, ALS quickly progressed, eventually affecting not only his speech and motor skills, but his heart as well.

He was a very sick man by the age of 46 when he passed away. From the time Mom left him up to the end, I spoke with him nearly every Saturday morning on the phone. It had been an ongoing subject of conversation between us that 47 was a magic number for him, and if he could hang on until his 47th birthday, he would beat the disease(s) plaguing him. He didn't quite make it.

My Daddy

So, in honor of his birthday, and perhaps in attempt to help hold myself together today, I'm going to post about Dad. He was an interesting character, to say the least. Far from perfect, his one flaw was his arrogance and self-centeredness (is that even a word?). But when he became terminally ill, for the first time in his life, he started thinking about other people besides himself. He learned humanity and compassion, there at the very end. And I think that makes it that much harder to not have him around anymore.

Robert Scott Coleman was born April 7, 1947 (that's 4/7/47 - this is important, pay attention) in rural Virginia. He was a very beautiful child, as he later became a very beautiful adult, and was also exceptionally bright, oh, and gay. Not a great environment for a beautiful gay boy to grow up in, I'm sure. His father died when he was very young, and everyone says that's why his mother was so crazy and abusive. I don't know, but I didn't know her back then either. I remember looking at old photos when I was quite small and asking him who the pretty little girl was. Dad and Gramma just laughed that loud horsey laugh they shared, and told me it was my Daddy. So, naturally, I thought my father must have been a little girl when he was young. He always got a huge kick out of it when I asked him questions that began with "when you were a little girl..."

I have no doubt that my parents really loved each other, as far as either of them was able. But they were very young, and it takes more than love to keep a marriage together. I remember sitting by my bedroom window every day there at the married student housing at Yale, looking up the hill into the parking lot, hoping Mom wouldn't decide not to come home. And every evening, I would see her headlights and know she hadn't been pushed past her limit just yet. What pushed her past that limit was coming home early and catching him in bed with his male lover, with us kids in the next room. To this day, she denies every bad thing that I remember ever happened in my childhood, and there was lots of bad. There was good too, and I remember each and every bit of good very clearly, but Daddy had a drinking problem and like I said, never thought of anyone but himself, and never knew anything about parenting except his mother's abusive style of violent punishment and hair-trigger temper.

So Mom packed the car and took us back to Virginia that night. It must have been very hard on her, being a single parent in the 1970's, but it couldn't have been as hard on her as it was on us kids when the parents of the other kids in school found out our father was gay and wouldn't let us play with their children (I still refer to that particular small town in Virginia, near Fredericksburg, as "bigot-town" - and they call themselves a village!). At that point, I still knew nothing about homosexuality, and "gay" was just a word, the worst thing you could call someone else, but I had no idea what it meant. To my point of view, the abuse suffered at the hands of other children was far worse than anything my parents ever did to me.

Dad continued his graduate studies at Yale Divinity School until he ran out of classes to take and they made him graduate... with a 4.0 average, no less! After we left, he and Doug had moved into a cozy little apartment over a small grocery store on Cumberland Avenue in New Haven. Dad worked as a ground's keeper for this creepy billionaire old dude who seemed to really enjoy watching him work without a shirt on, while studying about religion. He had been a Methodist minister back in Virginia, before moving to Connecticut to attend Yale. At one point, later in his life, when I was in college and contemplating studying philosophy or religion (I did eventually go back to school and earn a degree in philosophy after his death), he told me that the more he learned about Christianity, the less he agreed with it.

Upon graduating with the first of what would become three different master's degrees, he moved with Doug to Brooklyn to work at the Botanic Garden. While there, he took classes at the Bronx Botanic Garden (I think) and earned a degree in horticultural therapy, and had the job of keeping up the therapy garden for disabled visitors to the BBG as well as the children's garden. I think he also worked in the library there at some point, but my memory isn't so clear, maybe Doug worked in the library. My favorite part was that the therapy garden was designed to accommodate wheelchairs, with raised plantings, but also was made for blind people with plants that you could experience with your other senses such as smell, touch, and even hearing.

and that takes us up to about 1980, or maybe more like 1983 or 4...