Nikki Haley and Racism in the American Country

Yes, slavery caused the Civil War. Remember the Race Wars that followed. Remember the genocide of Indigenous Americans. Learn the truth.

Nikki Haley blew it with her clumsy responses to questions from her audience regarding the causes of the American Civil War and whether or not the United States is a racist nation. She bungled this during a campaign rally in New Hampshire in late December 2023. Found this sad and disturbing. Why? Because I like Nikki Haley even tho I disagree with her on a number of domestic policy and social justice issues. I won’t waste my vote as a protest in favor of a third party candidate. President Joe Biden is too timid and wobbly when it comes to national security and waging war. He did a great job up to his shameful abandonment of Afghanistan to the Taliban. Biden was nearly FDRian during his first year and a half as POTUS in the manner he pulled the nation out of the chaotic near-collapse the Usurper Trump had pulled America down into. 

Now the tribulations of being elderly have caught up to him. It’s painfully obvious, embarrassing, and dangerous. The vice president who once elevated his ticket as a candidate is equally painfully way in over her head a la the Peter Principle. Kamala Harris is now a burden. Nikki Haley, however, is razor sharp, blazingly brilliant, witty, and surgically precise. She can be folksy and wonky and a spitfire all at the same time. This South Carolinian daughter of Sikh Indian immigrants is fierce, combative, and courageous. She’s accomplished as a former two-term governor and UN ambassador. Yes, she’s too conservative for me on many domestic issues. She’s anti-woke but not asleep, a rare combination these days. She failed and continues to fail to call out Donald Trump for what he truly is: a fascist, racist, misogynistic, bigoted, bullying usurper and traitor. She even vowed to support Trump in the first Republican debate back in 2023 even tho she derides him for his chaos and even tho Trump refuses to debate. Haley may be moving towards revoking her past promise to support Trump if he’s the GOP nominee as she currently escalates her criticism of the Usurper as chaotic and incompetent. In her surprise cold opening on a recent Saturday Night Live episode in early February of this year, Haley roasted Trump as a buffoon. She challenged the goofy loser, portrayed by Nashville native, actor, and comedian James Austin Johnson, to a mental competency test. Trump, or rather the man behaving as Trump, flubbed it in the silly skit designed to drive the Red Maggots mad. Continue reading

What would the coming world war look like?

Postmodern Medieval Pandemonium with AI & Nukes

We often seemed trapped in the past regardless of how far we peer into the future. It’s part of human nature. We trust in what we know. Or, rather, we believe in what we think we know. So future world wars may be more kinetic than World Wars 1 and 2 with missiles, rockets, cyberattacks, killer robots, swarms of AI drones, economic strangulation, space combat, EMPs, and total mobilization of the nation by the state. Then as the losing side, or rather those who fear to be losing, grow desperate, they resort to messy chemical and biological weapons. At some point they unleash nuclear and thermonuclear weapons. The other side does the same almost simultaneously. Humanity and most life in Earth ends in a scared fury of omnicidal madness.

A future world war may resemble the European Wars of Religion more than the Second World War. Nation-state regimes lose their power and status as stateless-nations, religious groups, and ethnic tribes reassert themselves. In addition, other non-state actors such as terrorist groups, transnational corporations, mercenary groups, criminal gangs and cartels, and private militias continue to assert themselves. The Westphalian System of governance breaks down as a neo-feudal, neo-medievalist world with current technology rises into primacy. Instead of world government, even a democratic world republic, we get a hodgepodge of overlapping, quarreling jurisdictions waving many flags. Continue reading

The Fury of Fury

A troublesome film goes incandescent

Recently finished watching Fury. It is a strong, visceral, powerful film in its realistic depiction of combat and the horrors of war. To watch it on a tiny little screen while bouncing around in an airplane would be a grave disservice. Glad I was able to watch it on a large screen Smart TV. It’s so intense I had to stop halfway thru it last night. Glad I came back to finish it, too, as, wow, felt mesmerized, even garbled by the chaos of war. One really must be in the right frame of mind to watch this movie set at the end of the war when the Germans were sending out everyone inc little boys & girls & the elderly to fanatically defend their Fatherland from the Allied invasions…& the Nazis killed their own if they wouldn’t fight. The Germans devastated American and Allied tanks. My goodness, what we humans put ourselves and our world thru as a species. Continue reading

Is the USA a Republic or a Democracy?

Do we live in a republic or a democracy?

What kind of country do we live in?

One often hears or reads some strict conservative gleefully pointing out with a know-it-all winky wink the United States of America is a republic, not a democracy. Then you encounter progressive liberals speaking and writing frequently of the USA as a democracy. They rarely ever use the term republic. Both claim to speak for the US Constitution while lambasting the other’s interpretations. Some wryly and deliberately use the term capitalist republic, but such a label hasn’t caught on. Furthermore, one encounters so-called conspiracy theorists, people labeled as such by the mainstream mass media who ignore the fact our history is full of real, documented conspiracies from before the assassination of Julius Caesar to beyond the assassination of JFK, who warn and remind the rest of us corporate oligarchies of ultrawealthy elites, the plutocrats of the less than 1%, influence and control matters from behind the scenes. Not to mention the religious types who view us as under divine manipulation or torn between God and the Devil or between other Olde Gods. Or the UFO types who wonder or claim Alien agendas guided by NHIs or Non-Human Intelligences are at play. Others say our country is a nation-state composed of many countries, of many stateless-nations such as indigenous tribes. Yet others laugh at the notion we are a republic and point out we are an empire, a new kind of empire, an extraconstitutional empire of neofeudal transnational corporations and far-flung military bases and interdependent, neo-vassal allies. Continue reading

Why I left the Radical Left

This is not about the many serious issues we face, but about my experiences and the general mindset of the many groups reacting to these issues from the Far Left side of the spectrum

For what reason did I leave the Far Extremes? Why did I leave the Radical Left? Who cares? Well, I care, and so do the people close to me. When you’re deep in the haze of revolutionary fervor blinded by righteous struggle, Far Extremist groups don’t seem far out at all but quite normal. Go too damn far to the Right or too far to the Left, however, and it’s a buncha damn crazy people. They’re obsessed with ideology. They worship symbols as icons. Their ego is inflated with self-righteousness and a distorted sense of history. Their self-confidence is poisoned by a wild, cerebral mix of low self-esteem buttressed by delusions. They focus on what should be, what could have been, what would come to pass, and what ought to be, not on what is actually true and factual.

So many people I encountered among the Far Extremes are paranoid, revel in feeling oppressed, and live in constant, never-ending “struggle.” And the struggle never ever ends. There’s always the next revolution, another group to demonize, another cause to get enraged and bitter over, and even deaths of “those against us” to celebrate. Acceptance is alien. Forgiveness is mocked. Compassion and empathy are absent. Love is conditional, prosperity scorned unless either shared or aggregated, and we’re all expected to march, fight, and struggle. Fight! Fight! Fight! Struggle! Struggle! Struggle! The big, evil “System” is to be overthrown or infiltrated and demolished. Reform is just a mask. The complexity and range of human nature is reduced to a simple “us versus them” mentality. Science becomes religion. Religion becomes science. Economics becomes politics. Imagine what happens when the race up the Tower becomes a race to the bottom…and one breaks on thru the bottom to the other side?

Economics is held up as some kind of holy religion, but few within these cults bother to check the math. Or even apply the math. Instead most just parrot, and they parrot nonsense. If one keeps hearing 2+2=5 long enough, and hearing it spoken as true by so-called credible authorities, and echoed often by one’s peers, then guess what one assumes is true? Why bother to check the charismatic demagogue’s math? Why have the demaguru and all your new cult friends mad at you and angry enough to revile and ostracize you? Hello? History, the interpretations as well as records of people and events, is instead gazed upon as a mess of tea leaves and goat intestines in search of arrows pointing to utopian futures. Go be the future now! Yeah, right.

Radical used to be a cool word. It means to return to one’s roots. We radicals would return to our roots and rebuild the foundations of civilization. We would destroy and wipe clean the earth to rebuild a better world for all. The problem with this thinking is believing the masses, the common folk, the working classes, whatever, regardless of how difficult their lives may be, would prefer instead to live amidst carnage, destruction, and annihilation. Few of those who have endured revolutions and civil wars have any desire to keep reliving such violence, bloodshed, and hatred in the pursuit of justice. 

A major reason I left radical activism is I grew tired of ideological rigidity and cultish groupthink. History and actual economics were ignored if they did not fit group ideology. Pragmatism and practicality were scoffed at. Any serious attempt to question and challenge ideological authorities led to demonization, ridicule, and ostracism. Group ideology became group idiocy, altho those within the group failed to recognize it as such. So many so-called radical intelligentsia confused critical thinking with harsh criticism of the Other and the Other’s minions. Critical thinking skills had atrophied inside the groups I experienced. Critical thinking was instead replaced by circular thinking and the babble of confirmation biases.  Continue reading

Loose Screw Guy

~ Stories from the streets & buses of Seattle, America ~

The time’s about 8 in the morning on Veteran’s Day 2023 in the Pacific Northwest, I’m the son and grandson of United States Navy men from Virginia, and was deemed too deaf to serve when I tried to enlist way back in college. Now I jounce along on the local metro bus as it barreled down Aurora Avenue South from Shoreline into Seattle on my way to work Downtown. The bus is one of those newer red-and-yellow express lane coaches, and already it bounces like some old sad hag tossed up on a trampoline by mean kids at some stupid Animal House frat party. Gosh, I’m losing it already.

My beloved, troubled country is a wreck even tho there’s many promising things going on, too. The wrecks, however, make the evening news. So, like many sick of neverending chaos and political paralysis, I am sick of conservatives and their rigid narrowmindedness. And I’m deathly sick of liberals and their rigid, ideological delusions. I’m sick of them all. Aren’t you? Are are you still yelling at your “brothers and sisters” on the other side? Where the Hell are all the normal folks in the center? The moderates? The so-called Radical Middle? Gone, baby, gone. Gone with the flood. They’ve fled, or have themselves been radicalized by extremists.

We’re long, long gone from the 1970s and 80s when my father used to joke he was a Republican who kept voting Democrat. The centerfolks are so far gone as to be beyond desperation and resignation. Instead they burn with whatever mob comes along as beacons of rage, hate, and stupidity. I know. Aye, I know, dammit, because I used to be one of them. Used to be on the Far Left on most issues and on the Right on others. For years! Liberating myself from these political-economic cults, however, has not made life any easier. Such freedom has allowed me the liberty to see everything with absolute clarity.

Homeless young White man gets on the bus in Shoreline wearing only a white T-shirt and new, too-long blue jeans. He’s tiny, lean, bushy headed, and his jeans are bunched up over dirty sneakers. He’s babbling and gesturing to invisible people. His arms and fingers jerk in jagged jumps like bolts of lightning. He’s not at all smooth in his movements. Even his head turns in rough jerk-and-stops like a robot’s with bent gears. He scares me. Definitely would not want to end up in a fight with someone who reminds me of a rabid raccoon. Temps outside are now in the 40s. Got down into the 30s overnight. It’s wet outside. Damp and misty. He’s cold. Exhibits what seem to be signs of schizophrenia, but I don’t know for certain. He sits down hard in the seat across the aisle from where I sit, so hard its almost as if he plunged down from Outer Space.

The man seems oblivious to the cold other than pulling his t-shirt up over his face for a moment or two, then he stares around seeing thru everyone on the bus as if we’re all invisible to him, but he can see all those people invisible to us. Or entities. His speech is intelligent gibberish, and he jabs his finger around the bus as those invisible creatures up in the air. I feel if he actually saw me, and if had an axe in his hands, he would immediately render open my skull out of some mix of unrestrained curiosity and evil duty to some prehistoric old god whose call he is unable to resist. Continue reading

President Biden’s Inflection Point

Pay attention to what the American President … and the Chair of the Fed declared

Inflection Point with what’s next. On a rare, hand drawn graph…

“Good evening, my fellow Americans.  We’re facing an inflection point in history — one of those moments where the decisions we make today are going to determine the future for decades to come.” ~ from President Joe Biden’s Address to the Nation Thursday night on the 19th of October 2023.

“We’re facing an inflection point in history…”

Those words are significant. He’s preparing the world for war.

“That’s what I’d like to talk with you about tonight. “ Except he really did not further address the inflection point. Continue reading

Tears for Years over Eons of Blood

Cry. Suffer. Violence. Cry all time. People suffer. No one cares. Just make money & go go go like a UFO!

Violence carves up the news. Violence renders history. Mutilates art. Destroys life. New wars break out as yet more bloody reruns of neverending dramas. Tears flow for years and years then dry up as deserts fill with sand and dust. Years of tears. The biggest desert, however, is the ocean, and it is full of salt.

Recently watched HBO dramas The Pacific and Band of Brothers on Netflix about American units in the Second World War. Was appalled by the savagery of high intensity combat. These shows captured the ultimate essence of violence, it’s banality and senseless destruction as well as how those contradict with the necessity for violence and survival. Grim. I felt the same watching the horrors of melee combat in films set in Ancient times such as The Gladiator and The Eagle. Felt the same grimness watching the Medieval combat within The Last Kingdom series, Braveheart, and shows set in the Crusades. First World War movies such as every version of All Quiet on the Western Front and 1917. There are amazing war films and shows set in Ancient and Medieval East Asia, in Africa, in the Americas, and many others whose titles jumble together in a carnage of memories set free with tears. The glory and the heroism itself brings tears as well as the horror of heroism.

Oh, the vastness of wars stretched out over time and place. Who remembers those where many hundreds and many thousands died in longago wars and battles so remote in the mind even history buffs must look them up? There are wars lost to history where not even the names and places are remembered. Often the tribes, cities, and civilizations of everyone and anyone who could and would are extinct. Continue reading

The Anti-Woke Need to Wake Up

If you’re not woke, then you’re asleep. Time to wake up!

Those who harshly criticize and condemn Woke folks and Woke culture live in dreamy, self-righteous fantasies of Far Right hatred and bigotry with murderous intolerance of everything else. Many are well-organized and armed. They behave as a cult, and cults of any kind bring out fanaticism and stupidity.

Religious cults, political cults, personality cults, ethnic-based socio-cultural cults, sports cults, social media cults, hey, whatever, it doesn’t matter. Cults are cults, humans are humans, and the desire to belong to the point one surrenders their personal sovereignty makes them puppets for any string jerker on a power trip. Cult followers and their leaders may or may not be charismatic, but they are all wacko weird and hungry for the promises of whatever belief system they made up in their own minds and collapsed with “truth.” They’re anxious about losing whatever status and power they believe they have left. Cultists are quick to demonize anyone and everyone outside their belief system. They fail to tolerate dissent or even mere disagreement. They fail to tolerate criticism and seem unable to abide by rapid changes in the status quo. They fail to understand distinctions between criticism and betrayal. Continue reading

The Difference between the US invasions of Afghanistan/Iraq and the Russian invasion of Ukraine

Sometimes people caught up in rigid, self-righteous demonization of their own country need to learn to pick a side and crawl into bed with those they despise

A number of people for various reasons anti-this and anti-that, some nevertheless rightfully so, perhaps, are making a common error. They justify their anti-American stance against NATO’s support of Ukraine against Russia’s invasion by collapsing it into the Global War on Terror. These activists claim there isn’t any difference between the American invasions and conquest of Afghanistan and Iraq and the Russian invasion to conquer Ukraine. 

Yes, there are differences, major differences, and they are significant. Continue reading

BAN ALL INTERNET COOKIES!

ABOLISH THE HORRORS!

Free download of Cookie Monster image from clipartmag.com.

C‘mon, advertising wizards, WTF are all of you doing pushing cookies and cookie pop-ups on us? It ain’t working. [Imagine this space churning with profanity and fed-up energy!]  We HATE them! What’s taking so long for y’all to notice? These corporacratic “tools” are not even addictive so don’t even try to pretend it’s digital fentanyl. Screw fentanyl anyway as opiates are a scourge as bad as any nasty viral epidemic.

Please, for God’s sake, even if you’re an atheist, study basic 21st Century human behavioral psychology. We’re not all slobbering capitalistic Pavlovian dogs! Yes, we struggle with overconsumption, pollution, and affluenza, sure, and we all HATE WEBSITE COOKIES! How cruel it is to tease one with some faint, nostalgic reminder of hot, freshly baked chocolate chip cookies hoping such memories of happy holiday treats will make us consent to installing cookies? My goodness, I rarely write the way I am here in the now. I feel so exasperated, frustrated, and angry as this mini-essay unfolds into a diatribe as businesses continue to bobble senselessly along the edges of the Charybdis of Cyberspace. Continue reading

Trump: Indict and arrest this man

What’s the holdup? Why all the cowardice?

For what reasons are Republican politicians and their media cronies bending over backwards to protect ex-POTUS Donald Trump? Why do they screw up their faces and decry efforts to indict, charge, and arrest him as disgusting, disgraceful, or worse? Of course they holler “It’s political!” as a slur, especially when it suits them to say so. They thus live in a nest of their own lies and denial because, come on, they’re politicians! Everything is political! Understand everything has a political aspect. There isn’t anything inherently right or wrong in recognizing the political nature of human relationship dynamics. Trump, however, is a known manipulator of facts and thrives on distortions of truth. He and his ilk are why the public perceive politicians as, sadly, all rank and foul.

Trump should have been arrested and thrown in jail years ago. Cowardice and fear clearly paralyzed efforts to do so. Evidence demonstrates he was likely a Russian asset (an asset, not an agent), usurped the 2016 election, triggered and even encouraged racist, antisemitic, and neofascist violence, and engaged in an attempted a coup in 2021. Trump can and should be charged with several counts of treason as well as multiple counts of corruption. Period.

For what reason do Trump’s supporters among the GOP believe the former president is above the law? There isn’t any reason other than pious “outrage.” Are they afraid of being targeted next? Do they believe all presidents are above the law? Why do they want to go after Obama and Biden then? Have they forgotten the Founding Fathers and the early presidents they so exalt warned repeatedly of people who seek to behave as kings? Or even become kings? Or in today’s parlance become authoritarian, autocratic presidents-for-life as Trump so desperately wanted? As George W. Bush, despite the warnings of many on the Left and even on the Right, did not want? Did they not warn us of engaging in “factions” or political parties to the point one’s country takes a back seat to party politics? How in the world can such highly educated people be so stupid? Be so damn dumb? Continue reading

In Memory of Dave

A new friend passes & a movement feels his loss

Dave Thompson was a a man who saw the comedy in life and laughed often AND was also a fierce advocate for social justice and for improving the lives of working class folks and their families. Foto was cropped and modified from the one posted on the Socialist Alternative website. Unsure who took the original picture sometime during 2012-2014.

Copied & pasted directly from my posting on the Legacy website:

As time already passes into the past, I contemplate Dave’s various circles of friends, some of which overlapped for the first time at his lovely Memorial Service. I feel impressed how his friends, family, & colleagues from each circle each spoke to his brilliant intellect, his loyalty, his do-anything-not-can-do-but-will-do attitude, his quiet yet ferocious stands on controversial issues, his humbleness & lack of ego, which is rare for us political activists. Dave was funny, too. Made us all laugh together. Continue reading

The War won’t End once Ukraine pushes out the Russians

What really happens when Ukraine “wins?”

The majority of people looking at the Russo-Ukrainian War are making well-meaning but unrealistic assumptions based on short-term predictions. Or they’re so far into the future they’re already talking about coups, a revolution, or civil wars across the Russian Federation. Let’s consider some possible scenarios. As we do so, let’s remember this war did not began with the Russian invasion of February 2022 but with the Russian invasion of February 2014 in the wake of the Euromaiden Revolution of November 2013 – February 2014 in Ukraine. Their war has been going for over eight years now.

First: Ukraine liberates ALL of its territory occupied by Russia, including Crimea, and pushes Russian forced back to the pre-2014 borders. Those borders, by the way, were formally recognized as official and legitimate by the Russia in 1991 and again in 1994. Then what? Yes, what happens next? The war is not going to suddenly end. Russia has the power to wait out its enemies, except for the Mongols and the Japanese of 1905, among others. Russia can rebuild and regroup, yes, and it’s economy seems more broken now than it was at the height of Hitler’s invasion in the Second World War. Today’s version of Allied Lend-Lease programs to help Stalin’s USSR fight the Axis is now going to Ukraine to help fight the real Fascists, the Putin siloviki ultranationalist dictatorship in control of Russia.

Does Ukraine invade Russia in return? For Ukraine to invade would be a horrible mistake. Unless it’s to create a buffer zone from which the Russians can’t easily lob artillery shells, drones, and rockets any longer. Ukraine would most likely lob the same back at Putin’s forces, unless their allies stop supplying such weapons at this point. The war risks being bogged down into a frozen border conflict, which would help no one except the Russians rebuild. Another possibility is Russia collapses into civil wars, and Ukraine feels compelled to intervene on the side of anti-Putin rebel factions. Would Ukrainian military assistance be welcomed even if the Ukrainians were not conquering and annexing Russian territory but helping Russian rebels overthrow the Putin siloviki regime?

Also, if the Ukrainians push out all the Russian invaders back behind the internationally recognized 2013 borders before the war started in 2014, will the Russians resort to Putin’s threat to detonate nuclear weapons? What will NATO do then? After all, Russia now claims much of eastern and southern Ukraine as Russian territory simply because it annexed them in the wake of corrupt, coerced, and fake referendums.

Second: Let’s say Putin’s forces grind down the Ukrainians and bomb them into utter ruin and destitution. The Western allies run out of ammo and weapons and are paralyzed by their terror of Russian nuclear weapons. A weary, demoralized Ukraine, unrecognizable from Ukrainians today 9-10 months into Putin’s invasion, surrender. Then what? The Ukrainian people would be difficult to pacify. The Russian treasury doesn’t have the funds to rebuild Ukraine as Putin once dreamed Russia wouldn’t have to after rolling into people showering them with flowers. Which did not happen. Russian occupation would have to deal with sabotage, protests, partisan warfare, and endless rebellions while also struggling to keep an overstretched, multi-ethnic federation together. At the same time, however, Putin’s forces would roll up to the borders of other countries once part of the old Russian Tsarist and Soviet Empires. Those nations would feel threatened.

Third: Putin somehow manages to assassinate Volodymyr Zelenskyy and decapitate the Kyiv regime. Will the Ukrainian government collapse? Will new leaders step forward and up? Will NATO forces rush in to support Kyviv after all? Then will Putin finally use a few nukes? Continue reading

Stupid Ways Smart Activists Destroy Public Support and What to do Next

There are many ways to champion even desperate causes and draw public support for them. Lately, however, well-meaning but thoughtless activists have failed, utterly failed in generating support for their causes and programs. Makes one sad. No, their actions piss people off!!! Piss me off! Self-righteous idiots dashing about destroying incredible paintings and interrupting football games and blaming corporations and lecturing governments in the name of fringe ideologies too rigid to function in the rough and tumble of reality.

Forget about raising much money to make a difference. Forget about rallying the general public and their many institutions of religion, government, and business to support a wide range of environmental and social justice causes. As the end is apparently so nigh, why antagonize potential allies with stupid stuff when there’s so little time left to take action? To make a real difference? Makes me wanna go, “Boo Hoo Hooty Hoo!” at The End of the World. Let our art stand long after we’re all dead!

The tragedy is we do indeed have little time left as our human lifespans are so short and we reproduce so prolifically across Planet Earth. As a species, we face multiple and convergent global challenges and interlocking local problems. They blur together into a thorny thicket of so-called Wicked Problems, each one in itself a cluster of multiple apocalypses in the making. Continue reading

HAS THE WORLD CHANGED?

A Homeless Man asks a question with his pants down, but can anyone really answer?

Gawd, now I know I’m back in my beloved but gone-to-hell Seattle. While changing buses at Northgate Way & Aurora Avenue on my way home from a long trip to North Carolina, I came upon a homeless man of about 40 years old who also happened to be Black and bearded. He stood on the edge of the curb on the west side of Aurora next to the crosswalk, cupped his hands up to both sides of his face, and bellowed out into traffic:

“HAS THE WORLD CHANGED? HAS THE WORLD CHANGED?”

“WELL, HAS IT?” was my automatic response tho only in my mind.

My second response was the temptation to shout at him to pull his damn pants up, but that was before I listened to him.

Then he rhythmically pulls down his dirty gray sweat pants and shows his naked ass to the whole wide world and then swings his cock up and out across the way like the neck and head of a goose jerking forth from a lake. It looked large and waxy in the harsh, September sunshine. Pulls his pants back up with this tip of his penis perched upon his waistband like a damn peacock peeking out. Damn, I looked away, away, AWAY!, but, OH GAWD was too late as it all happened in a flurry of seconds as the crossing lights hadn’t changed yet. Couldn’t unsee this mess. Felt transfixed, no, crucified, crucified! Felt crucified by the clarity of his call and response during the middle of our long, apocalyptic slide into Armageddon. Continue reading

The Difference between the BLM Uprisings & the Jan 6 Insurrection

What is the distinction between the Black Lives Matter riots and the January 6 Insurrection? The difference is as clear as it is simple: Black Lives Matter as well as the Occupy Movement before it rose up to demand long-overdue justice and accountability. They did not seek nor attempt to overthrow and replace the United States government with a new regime. Instead they sought to reform the current government and demanded the government at all levels from local to state to federal pay attention and listen to their grievances and cries for justice and reform. The Jan 6 Insurrection, however, sought to overturn a free and fair democratic election, overthrow federal and even some state governments, and kidnap and even murder major government leaders from the Vice-President to the Governor of Michigan. There were attempts to take over state governments as far away from Washington, DC as Salem, Oregon. Records show the Jan 6 Insurrection started well before the 6th of January 2021 and continued past it. Some argue it’s still simmering. Perhaps it’s more resembles Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch before the Nazi’s ultimately successful takeover. Continue reading

Beyond Country over Party

During times of strife and division, we often hear others and sometimes ourselves responding emotionally to events seemingly beyond our control. We may remind ourselves and others to remember our priorities. We say and write slogans such as, “country over party.” Or, perhaps, we may feel events have gone so far we must put party over country “to save” the nation. Or that the working class or the ruling class, depending on where you put yourself if not in the middle, transcend politics and thus our country. Or the Goddess, God, or whatever entity you consider as the Divine must rule over country and planet. All of these perspectives, save for country over party, are destructive, self-destructive, and inevitably result in violence and loss of freedom. Here we look briefly at country over party and go beyond that slogan.  Continue reading

Taiwan can only secede from itself

Few seem to realize the only government Taiwan can secede from is itself, the Republic of China. The new US-Sino Taiwan Straight Crisis is rooted in misperceptions of history and anchored in anger, shame, and fear. The irony is the Republic of China, currently ruling only Taiwan and a few nearby islands, has existed since 1912 after the Chinese Revolution of 1911, long before the Chinese Communist Party declared the People’s Republic of China in 1949 during the civil war. The ROC had retreated to Taiwan and neighboring islands, was a semifascist military dictatorship under the Kuomintang, but only became a democracy in fairly recent years. The ROC’s transition from autocracy to democracy on Taiwan took place across the 1980s and 90s.

If Taiwan were to actually declare independence, ironically, it would be from itself, the ROC, not the PRC as the latter has never governed Taiwan. As the Republic of China has existed long before the People’s Republic of China, then it boggles the mind the PRC views the ROC as a “breakaway province” of the PRC. Each government still considers itself The One China. Perhaps it’s time to retire such an anachronistic mindset, altho the ultranationalistic on all sides froth with madness over such a progressive and liberating shift of perspective.

Like it or not, Taiwan is already its own country as the ROC. It is not and never was a province of the PRC. It is not an imperial outpost of the old Japanese or British empires. It was taken back from the Japanese by the ROC Kuomintang Party at the end of the Second World War. Taiwan was never governed or administered in any way by the CCP before and after the Communists declared their People’s Republic in 1949 as the civil war ended. Taiwan and it’s neighboring islands elect and run their own ROC government, collect taxes, maintain diplomatic relations, maintain complex business relationships abroad, operates its own military and intelligence forces, and acts upon the world stage as a small but robust middle power. Taiwan therefore has no need whatsoever to declare independence as it already exists as its own country. It flourishes under the national government of the Republic of China, a regime in existence for decades before the PRC. The country even transitioned from a brutalist military dictatorship into a constitutional democracy with a robust capitalist economy. It could, however, raise a bloody ruckus by changing its name and retiring the ROC label to better reflect geopolitical reality. Continue reading

Guns in America: Paralysis, Polarization, & Do-Nothingism

Yes, address mental health care, and, yes, more importantly,
Amend the Second Amendment

The numbers make mass shootings in America look like war. Certainly feels like a war. Per the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 214 mass shootings in the United States of America with over 17,300 deaths by guns from New Year’s Day to the end of May 2022. There were 42 recognized mass shootings in the first 23 days of the month of May, then several more, then another 14 over the Memorial Day holiday weekend. This warfare seems bookended by the predatory, hate-filled slaughter of Black people grocery shopping in Buffalo, New York, and the equally hateful, psychopathic hunting down of little kids and their teachers to shoot and kill in Uvalde, Texas.

Those on the Left bellow, “Do something!” Those on the Right shout, “Do nothing!” The outrage, deflections, and self-righteous demonization boils over and continues to divide us further from doing the “something” the majority of Americans demand. Most of those in the moderate middle feel “sick and tired” of grocery stores, houses of worship, restaurants, city streets, schools, more schools, and yet still more schools getting shot up and say, “Enough is enough!”

Even the “commonsense” gun control reforms people want enacted at a federal level including strict background checks for all purchases, tighter regulation of and even banning of certain military-style firearms and types of magazines will only go so far.

We often experience the rigidity of political extremists on both sides. We see, read, and hear their demonization of each other and everyone else with the quest for opposing utopias between the libertarian right and the socialist left drowning out the voices of our vast pragmatic middle. “Mental health issues” is a term bandied about without serious action steps taken to address them.

What to do? The solution is to go to the source of the controversy, the wording of our Second Constitutional Amendment, and reform it. This shall override the ineffective crazy quilt patchwork of conflicting state and local regulations or lack thereof. It’s simple. We do what’s hard. We do what’s hard first! Continue reading

Putin is Stupid and Dangerous

*Like many bullies are*

The former President of the USA, wannabe autocrat and racist protofascist Donald Trump was, thank God, profoundly incompetent and too slimy to do anything correctly. The dictator of the Russian Federation, however, and his cowardly, quivering, greedy followers are a fucking, stupid mafia of corrupt, incompetent despots. Fucking dumbasses, every single one of them! And as dangerous as rabid rats stuck in corners of blood, madness, and fear. Putin and his nasty siloviki, the Russian intelligence/surveillance-military/security komplex, have gutted Russia to facilitate their imperialist, fascist fantasies of Glorious Empire. 

How DARE they threaten the planet with nuclear weapons! How DARE they spout lies and distortions of Eurasian history as “historical truth!” Are they aware Muscovy was initially a backwater feudal principality that despite its grandiose title as a Grand Duchy was still a part of mighty Kievan Rus’? Do they know Muscovy was part of a loose confederation centered in what is today Ukraine? And all conquered by the Mongol Empire? With Muscovy being a vassal of the Mongols? That upon independence from the Mongols/Tartars was ruled by bloodthirsty butchers such as the deranged Ivan the Terrible? Have they considered why all empires dominated history with failure? So how dare Putin thinks he can do whatever he wants to do to build an empire before he dies in office?

Vladimir Putin the Invader has been corrupted and isolated by his quest for power and supremacy. He’s sat on the throne for too damn long and has become impatient, chaotic, confused, and frightened. Putin’s become as angry as a schoolyard bully after those he beats up sneak up behind him and quickly jerk his britches down to reveal such a little man. Not even Donolf Trumpler’s “very big, very large, and very, very, very powerful” hands could come to the rescue. And what the hell Old Trumpie’s little big hands gonna do with Old Pootie anyway, pet a cheeseburger in bed? Continue reading

Ukraine/Taiwan: Be Ready Already for a New World War

Escalation towards major regional war and possible world war is in motion

Ignore the doom porn flooding the media

Be aware. Stay alert.

Ignore both blathering soothsayers and smirking pundits who all declare it’s illogical and impossible for such a little bitty border war to blow up across the world because they’re stupid enough to ignore the reality of our human minds

Tit for tat and tat for tit reactions in and over the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War is threatening to turn a local conflict brewing with violence since late 2013 into a global conflagration. These tit for tat moves escalated today between Putin’s Russia and the Western Alliance in a rapidly developing crescendo of anger, distrust, fear, hate, ignorance, greed, and even sadness amidst conflicting interpretations of history and culture.

Remember the last four world wars: the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the Great War alongside and followed by revolutions and civil wars around the globe, the Second World War, and, finally, the Cold War, a planet-wide conflict in which millions died. As one recalls these massive conflicts, keep in mind none of them began as world wars. Each one of them began as local wars that grew into regional wars. Multiple regional wars merged into a world war. Even World War II was a hodgepodge of interconnected local and regional conflicts with different timelines for each one. Each global conflict spawned a range of insurrections, revolutions, and civil wars as well.

The same will likely occur with Putin’s escalation of the Ukrainian border war into a global conflict. Only in today’s 21st Century the speed of our interwoven global communications and economies will rapidly accelerate the blossoming of such dark, bloody flowers. Cyberattacks and the reluctance to engage in massive kinetic combat may compel major enemy forces to use tactical battlefield nukes in combat. Such may quickly escalate to widespread EMP detonations and worldwide exchanges of strategic nuclear weapons between the primary adversaries.

There are significant local and regional conflicts that could easily spiral out of control and merge with others into a planet-wide war. These include the wars in and around Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia, the fighting in Kashmir with India and Pakistan on nuclear hair triggers, Indo-China border conflicts, spreading violence in Venezuela and Colombia, the interrelated wars across the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia, and a raft of others. Two of the most serious “others” are the Chinese-Taiwan conflict and the problem with North Korea as it keeps firing rockets and missiles to provoke attention. In the midst of these conflicts we face global climate change, a still-raging COVID pandemic, political instability, and economic turbulence. What to do?

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MLK Jr Blues on a Cloudy Day

We see you. And we’re not messin’ around.

Today is the official federal holy day honoring the late, murdered Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior. I’m in Seattle with my Sweetie Sweetchickens. Both of us are FV & Boostered, we don’t feel well, and she feels worse than me. We’re waiting for the results of her test for COVID-19. Got tested Saturday. So with all due respect to MLK we avoided marches, rallies, and social gatherings indoors. We chose to go for a meandering ramble up in Shoreline at Richmond Beach Saltwater Park. We need wide open spaces with healing views of big sky, open water, and a breeze. Temperatures were in the low to mid 40s. Fahrenheit.

Contemplation of stillness amidst vast spaces…and those waves of energy rippling out thru air and water.

We contemplated the winter sun, the sea, and overcast skies. To our surprise one lone boat was way out there crossing the Sound. Then it dawned upon me the Salish Sea appeared so bereft of boats because of the threat of tsunamis from earlier in the morning. Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha’apai, a submarine volcanic mountain in the South Pacific, had exploded in spectacular and deadly fashion. Tsunamis shot across the Pacific in all directions, battering other islands including Hawaii, Fiji, and New Zealand. These walls of water reached from Japan and Australia to the entire western coasts of the Americas all the way from Alaska to Chile. I wondered if any waves crashed up on Kamchatka in the Russian Far East.

In the Vast

Ahhh, yet another dreadful yet mesmerizing apocalypse. Fell into a funk as I considered the current state of voting rights in my country, the creeping and creepy push towards an American dictatorship, the clamor over civil war, multiple pandemics and not just COVID, the economy, asteroids, comets, Earth slowing down and cooling off, the paralytic crises in governments, the weather, the climate, murders and robberies…aye, twas a deep funk. So I opened wide into the mystery, the majesty, and the terror of it all.

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Afghanistan, August 2021: Ramifications

Joe Biden has severely damaged his American presidency. We can argue the history and legacy of 43 years of constant warfare between multiple sides in and over Afghanistan since 1978, but the cameras are on what’s happening now. We can repeatedly declare no one was prepared for the rapid collapse of the Afghan state with bloody chaos in the wake of Biden’s acceleration of American withdrawal despite intelligence reports to the contrary. The perception rings true, however, the events of August 2021 overshadow Biden’s progressive agenda. Who’s thinking about his trillion-dollar FDR-style bipartisan infrastructure package now?

Biden is correct most Americans want to get out of Afghanistan and indeed out of all the “forever wars.” A withdrawal wasn’t supposed to be defeat, however, and now the United States has fallen face down into the Graveyard of Empires. Biden failed to remember Americans hate losing wars more than they hate being stuck in them. Even neverending wars draining the US and its NATO Allies of blood and treasure “should” or “could” have been won despite what Clausewitz wrote of war and politics. Yes, Americans don’t like wasting time, lives, and money in endless wars in faraway, remote places distracting them from more immediate concerns back at home, but they hate losing even more. Continue reading

Health is Health

Our healthcare doesn’t need to be locked in battles over definitions & costs with sociopathic bureaucracies fixated on loss & profit

 

Top world athletes from Naomi Osaka, a professional tennis player from Japan, to Simone Biles, perhaps the leading Olympic gymnast of all time, to a group of 20 to 22 male athletes of all kinds from different nations, have compelled the rest of Humanity to pay attention to mental health issues. Different labels persist: mental health, emotional health, neurological health, and psychological and psychiatric health. Perhaps the most accurate is neuropsychological diseases and injuries, but such is too much of an awkward mouthful to speak. “Mental” is short, two syllables, and rhymes with “dental.” Thus such wording becomes part of the problem. We humans live in an ocean of language as fish swim in water and birds fly in air. We don’t always see our “water.” We don’t always see each other.

Many have speculated upon a chicken and egg type of question: which came first, the mind or the body? Did mind arise from body, i.e. matter, or did the world pour forth from the mind? It’s an inquiry dividing both scientists and mystics from the beginning of human time.

Truth is they are one and the same, body and mind are. We must grow up as a species to acknowledge such and reevaluate our healthcare systems, including the financing of our healthcare. It’s long overdue.

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Wounds of War

Visible & Silent

Reading of the current horrible war in Tigray with massacres and atrocities on all sides, especially by Ethiopian Federals and Eritreans, and watching the videos of massacres reminded me of an earlier time in my life. I was a licensed massage therapist and master bodyworker with a clinical practice in the Green Lake area of Seattle. My clients included people from all walks of life. They came in for reasons as varied as relief from pain from auto accidents, sports injuries, chronic pain, general health and well being, pregnancy, depression and anxiety, and a host of other reasons. The bulk of the people seeking bodywork were White with a smattering of Black and people of South and East Asian ethnicity. I myself am White, originally from Virginia.

Once state laws changed and insurance began to cover a greater range of treatments with what was formally called Complementarty and Alternative Medicine, or CAM, we began to see a greater cross-section of humanity upon our massage tables. I began to get a number of men, mostly slender Black men who spoke minimal English, as clients. Nearly all of them had scars from bullet wounds and sharp blades. As one of my backgrounds was world history and current affairs, I realized I was working with people seeking relief from old war wounds from the Horn of Africa. Being with these men and their injuries felt humbling, tragic, and even awe. 

As time progressed and more of these African immigrants began to open up, I felt startled to discover they were from different formerly warring groups. I worked on men who identified as Ethiopian, Amharic, Eritrean, Tigrayan, and Somali. A few were impressed I was aware of the complexities of the Ethiopian and Somali Civil Wars including the Ethio-Somali Ogaden War. I don’t know if they were combatants or refugees or both other than they were all former hostiles living peacefully as immigrants in the same city in the United States.

The horror and tragedy of multigenerational wars perpetuated back and forth across time and space hit me. Had to fight down tears. These men were all silent. They had endured bloodshed and terror and agony.

William Dudley Bass
Wednesday 30 June 2021
Seattle, Washington
USA
Cascadia
Earth
Sol

 

Copyright © 2021 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.

 

 

The Verdict: Justice Achieved

George Floyd, Derek Chauvin, and the United States of America

Encounter with Cops and Protesters in a strange demonstration

To many a surprise and with great relief, former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, a White man, was found guilty on all three counts in the murder of George Floyd, a Black man from Texas, originally North Carolina, who had recently moved to Minnesota. There was not any hung jury nor partial rendering of justice. The jury, itself composed of people from different ethnic groups including Blacks and Whites, deliberated quickly and returned their verdict to the court. The verdict took mere minutes to read out loud, and the world changed. Chauvin was found guilty of second-degree unintentional murder, guilty of murder in the third degree, and second-degree manslaughter. Sentencing is set for two weeks, why so damn far out I don’t know, but the killer will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars. Although Minnesota abolished the death penalty back in 1911, the murderer of George Floyd is more likely to be killed in prison by fellow convicts than to die of old age.

Faithlyn, my fiancé, first notified me by text while I happened to be on a break at work. We are both hard of hearing so we text to stay connected. She’s excited, riveted, and texted me “…The verdict is about to be read!” Moments later, she wrote one text: “Guilty.” Then, “On ALL counts.” Later on, she texted me it felt “so surreal.” Sent me an image of her avatar crying, “TEARS of JOY.” Full disclosure here: my Beloved is Black, Deaf, and an Immigrant naturalized as a US citizen while I am White, Hard of Hearing, and a native-born US citizen. Aye, tears of joy! Continue reading

Earth’s China – Taiwan Conundrum in a Planetary Perspective

Will these opposing sides step back from the brink?

What steps will we as a species take to peacefully unify Earth?

Isn’t national sovereignty a Twentieth Century anachronism as obsolete as the Divine Right of Kings?

Taiwan and its surrounding small islands constitute the last outpost of the Republic of China. This republic was declared on the 1st of January 1912 following the Revolution of 1911. The Revolution in turn set in motion a nearly continuous era of both internal and international warfare and massacres lasting well into the 1950s and later. 

After decades of civil war mixed with two world wars, the Communists proclaimed the People’s Republic of China on the 1st of October 1949. Although fighting still continued, the bulk of the civil war was considered over with the Communists victorious on the mainland. 

The Republic of China was declared over 38 and a half years before the People’s Republic of China was declared. Both republics still exist. It is ludicrous for the PRC in Beijing to declare Taiwan is a separatist region in rebellion against the central communist government. Are other nation-state regimes unable to see this fact? Most prefer to duck in fear or to focus on short-term financial profits. How in the world can the ROC, a national government existing nearly 40 years before another, the PRC, be considered in rebellion against the newer regime? Are not the Communists then the actual splittists engaged in separatism? They declared the civil war over in Red victory back in 1949, but wasn’t that premature? They conquered Hainan Island from ROC forces, invaded Tibet, and intervened in the Korean War all in the same year, 1950. They got pummeled in efforts to bombard and otherwise attack ROC forces on Taiwan and surrounding islands in battles and skirmishes that flared intermittently thru the 1950s into the mid-1990s. Meanwhile the PRC regime literally devoured the mainland as they sought to pacify their conquests, killing millions of fellow Chinese in the process. If anyone is in rebellion, isn’t it the revolutionary totalitarian dictatorship squatting astride the mainland in on-going revolt against the Nationalist forces held up in their island fortresses on Taiwan? Continue reading

DEFCON 5 or 4 over the Ukrainian Crisis?

A long-simmering crisis people have long shrugged off is quickly blowing up

One website in particular from among private citizens’ global military and intelligence sites held a debate on whether or not the DEFCON warning system should move from the current 5 to level 4. The majority argued persuasively in favor of maintaining the defense readiness system at 5 while a loud minority argued it should be raised to 4 even tho nothing has happened beyond localized, sporadic fighting in the Donbas, large-scale and threatening-appearing military maneuvers, which is one of the reasons countries engage in such behavior, petty name calling between the leaders, and doom porn by the few news media remotely aware of what’s happening. Another site, however, recently escalated to DEFCON 4 as military mobilizations far from Ukraine and saber-rattling has turned to repositioning doomsday weapons. What threat level is realistic here without getting caught up in alarmism or turn dismissive and in denial?  Continue reading

Remove Trump Now! The Usurper’s Cowardly Rebellion & the Hypocrisy of the Police

As of 21:46 PST today over 3,746 Americans died today from COVID-19. They join a total of 361,123 confirmed deaths and up to a half of a million more deaths likely to have been caused by the coronavirus. Mobs of fascist Far Right and Alt-Right puppets rioted in the national capital city today. They also demonstrated, often with violence, in other cities around the country, especially in state capitals. At the same time, the fascist violence stoked by Donald J. Trump, who usurped the presidency in 2016 via manipulation in plain view of arcane legal procedures, climaxed earlier today with his supporters storming the Capitol in Washington, D.C. It was an insurrection to allow an incompetent and criminal president to seize power. This was an assault on our constitutional democratic republic, not a demonstration for justice and reform. Enough is enough. Enough is enough! Remove this psychopathic, narcissistic, cowardly, and dangerous idiot at once! My God, this same man commands the most powerful military forces in the world. Think about the consequences!

Leaders of these United States of America! You in the Congress! Especially you groveling, irresponsible Republicans and moderate, afraid-to-rock-the-boat Democrats! Hey! Find your spines! Sit up! Stand up! Brave losing your jobs to vote against this would-be tyrant and his gangs of racist, sexist, conspiracy-swilling thugs and impeach Trump. Now! Impeach him again. This time convict him. Leaders of America, those of you in the Cabinet, and you, Mr. Vice President, gather up your courage and invoke the 25th Amendment. It’s in our Constitution for a significant reason. Use it. Remove this man from the White House. Install VP Mike Pence as Acting President until the moment Joe Biden is rightfully inaugurated on the 20th of January. Continue reading

I feel a dread coming…

Good Morning. I feel a dread coming. Happy New Year!

It’s a feeling, this dread, this existential, apocalyptic dread. Feel it coming round the mountain, I do. Feel it coming down the pike. It’s already loosened from our heads, this mighty dread.

I can’t help it. We live in an apocalypse of multiple, grinding, prolonged calamities. The weather turns gloomy one day, storms rage, and happy sunshine sparkles again. Then more darkness falls from skies heavy with silver and gray. The news cycles seemed trapped in their own circular inertia of addictive doom and gloom. Social media ricochets between apathy, denial, and toxic vitriol and self-righteous hatred. Facts and truths are buried under landslides of lies and illogical, insane, so-called conspiracy theories. Continue reading

Make DC the State of Douglass

Expand self-determination for people in U.S. territories…without any further delay

People of America, fellow citizens of our constitutional democratic republic, let us grant DC statehood. Let’s add the District of Columbia to the Union as a state and rename it the State of Douglass. Let’s forward similar processes with Puerto Rico and other territories. All equally deserve to be liberated from anachronistic shackles of population requirements especially on islands and other areas constrained by geography so they may all engage with their fellow Americans as full citizens able to vote for their President and Vice-President of our United States. Yes, let’s grant DC statehood now.

The District of Columbia is constrained by geography, history, and territorial conflicts. DC can exist as a state, however small, simply as it is, especially as it’s population is larger than several other much larger current states. DC can be a state without any additional territory, altho it would be to the benefit of DC to have more territory. Having a larger, viable state in and around the current DC, while a territorial, voting, and tax loss in the short term for Virginia and Maryland, would most likely in the long run be in the best interests of the greater region including those neighboring states. Continue reading

The Usurper versus The Challenger: Trump vs Biden, 1st Debate

Donald J. Trump and Joe Biden squared off tonight in the ugliest, most brutal, and cringe-inducing presidential debate I’ve ever witnessed. Many older journalists say it’s the worst such debate in U.S. history, at least in the history of television. The majority of observers pointed to one participant in particular for the emotional squalor and mean-spirited bullying, Trump, the man who kept harping upon his belief he “won” the 2016 election for president. Did he? A valid case can be made Trump usurped the American presidency. Trump hijacked the GOP as he bulldozed aside traditional conservatives, neocons, and libertarian Republicans alike. Trump barreled on to lose the popular vote by about 3 million people. The candidate and his Far Right base interfered with the Electoral College’s vetting of candidates, forced the states to ignore third party and independent candidates, and intimidated the Electors to vote for him. Faithless electors rebelled against having to vote for either Trump or the also-unpopular Hillary Clinton. Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party attempted to get votes recounted in controversial states in an attempt to move the EC towards Clinton. The EC certified him the winner, Congress then declares whom the EC certifies as the winner, and then the winner is inaugurated. Trump apparently saw far more people out upon the Mall before him on Inauguration Day than actually existed. And all of this without adding in election tampering by ex-KGB officer Vladimir Putin and the Russians. Yes, Trump is the Usurper, the Goliath in the house, and Biden stands firm as the Biblical David, the Challenger with a slingshot firing stones of truths thru Trump’s torrent of lies and distortions.

I’ve never felt such weird, unpleasant anxiety before a presidential debate before. Such debates are politically vital to the campaign, and they’re also regarded more as drama and entertainment rather than a serious debate over policy differences as to what are the best steps to address critical priorities. There was so much more at stake tonight than media-driven personality dramas. Trump pulled out his dirty mob boss attitude while Biden dug into this working class, small town, and suburban roots. Tonight’s clash proved ferocious. We stand at the brink of our own dystopian apocalypse, so if you’re one of those who doesn’t give a rip, wake up! Stop running around so oblivious and pay attention. If and once a fascist dictatorship is established, the tyrant often devours his own minions early on. Are you a minion? Or of the Resistance? Choosing doesn’t make you a “radical.”

The Challenger stood up to the Usurper in the White House tonight. A global pandemic rages as a recession worse than the Great Recession chews up our economy. Human-driven climate change is destroying our habitats. Gun violence, social justice conflicts, a partisan Supreme Court struggle, severe income inequality, an opioid epidemic, homelessness, underemployment, and Black Lives Matter versus the Police rips thru our neighborhoods like wildfire.

Perhaps conflating Trump with Goliath does a disservice to the Biblical giant. The Usurper in the White House built by Black slaves violated debate rules, ethics, morals, and boundaries. Trump demonstrated a stunning lack of respect for anything and everything. The man simply did not give a shit and delighted in throwing metaphorical turds. Trump was dangerously infantile and out-of-control as he narcissistically made the election all about himself even tho he bullied everyone around him including the moderator, Chris Wallace. There were several moments when Trump was so disrespectful and shamelessly rude Mr. Wallace, a prestigious journalist from Fox News who spent years prior with NBC and ABC, would have been justified to terminated the debate and send Trump packing. Either way, the real losers were not only the American people but people from all around the planet who deserved to hear the candidates present their platforms. Instead the world had ringside seats to witness a bully in action as a most unpresidential president attempted to hijack the first debate. 

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200,000 Dead Already: COVID-19 versus the Spanish Flu

Think about it, people

Conditions in the United States of America are on track to allow deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic to surpass those from the Spanish flu outbreak. The Spanish influenza pandemic is often held up as metric of comparison against the current pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. Think about it, people: an estimated 400,000 Americans dead in one year from COVID-19 versus 675,000 Americans dead from the Spanish flu across four waves in three years. Continue reading

Response to a Video Speech

The President and CEO of the company I work for released an internal video speech addressing support for Black Lives Matter, human and civil rights, the challenges of helming a unique business thru such turbulent times including the currently ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, and his inner struggles with recognizing his own White privilege. His presentation moved, inspired, and even humbled me as well as others. As his presentation is itself confidential, the words below constitutes my otherwise public response:

* * *

Eric. Thank you. Powerful presentation. I appreciate your empathy, especially when such a vital quality of our shared humanity seems absent among much of our national leadership. Let’s learn together our various lessons from these events as we find constructive ways to move forward beyond or even with our disagreements. At different times in our nation’s history many have spoken up for justice, representation, and, indeed, recognizance – to simply be seen, and, yes, sadly, resorting to violence when they don’t feel seen as human beings. The list is long: Native Americans, Latinx, women, Blacks, Asians, working class folks, immigrants, children, the elderly, the disabled, veterans, those with chronic illnesses, people from different religions and subcultures, people from across the spectrum of different sexual, gender, and relationship identities, on and on, as, gosh, the list of our diversity is so very rich. Continue reading

The Killing of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter Right Now, and Overhaul the Police Immediately

Sing Kumbaya later. Here’s Four Primary Points to Reform our Police First.

George Perry Floyd, a Black American, was pulled out into the street, lynched, and murdered at age 46 by four police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His killers were three White or European American cops and one Asian American cop. Mr. Floyd’s criminal background is not relevant here. The man had served his time in prison and served his Houston, Texas community for years as a volunteer. He finally moved north into the Upper Midwest to start life anew. There wasn’t one single thing George Floyd did or was alleged to have done that warranted his slow, brutal death by a man who taunted him at times with what sounded like sadistic glee.

Yes, we need major police reform now all across the United States of America. The entire United States, a constitutional, democratic republic, needs urgent reform now and desperately so. We must not abolish our police forces, but instead reform or replace them immediately in three primary areas.

First, we need community oversight that is also democratic and transparent. Every city, town, parish, tribal reservation, and county jurisdiction, if they have not yet done so must shift to democratic community oversight. This may include re-creating the role of police as defacto paramilitary enforcers to instead become community servants. Cops must live in the jurisdictions they work in as part of belonging to the community.

Second, defund, not abolish, the police. To implement what “Defund the Police!” actually means, i.e. to review funding and reallocate police resources to non-police agencies and departments such as health care, dealing with addiction, homelessness, affordable housing, public sanitation, public infrastructure, etc. Doing so will allow for a stripped down, leaner community-based police force more focused and thus more efficient on policing, i.e. to serve and protect the public. Indeed, police reform may require increasing the number of police to actually serve and protect the public while non-police agencies focus on non-police public health, housing, infrastructure, and other social services.

Third, demilitarize the police. Yes, we must move to demilitarize the police and stop the flow of military hardware from the Armed Forces to the cops. Yes, SWAT teams for certain jurisdictions, of course, but how many, where, and for whom? Reviewing the relationships between local law enforcement and the FBI, ATF, ICE, Homeland Security, etc., is a necessary aspect of such purview.

So, three reforms: democratic community oversight, defunding and reallocation of resources, and demilitarization.

There’s one more reform, one perhaps more serious than the other three and one that certainly presents difficult challenges: reports and allegations of police brutality shall be reviewed with serious efforts to break apart the insidious and unethical Police Code of Silence. This code of silence corrupts the Thin Blue Line between cops and their communities, allows for both corruption and brutality to go unchecked. Criminality and division results. Criminals, including crooked and abusive cops, must be brought to justice. Securing and upholding our individual liberties demand we all hold each other and our public servants accountable. Our singular freedoms work only if we also acknowledge and uphold our social responsibilities. One large city, Camden, New Jersey, abolished its police department largely in part to exorcise entrenched, endemic police corruption and brutality.

The latest round of killings of Black Americans by police are clearly acts of murder. Indeed, they are lynchings, abusive and hateful lynchings by those sworn to serve and protect. These murders have convulsed our country again. First Ahmaud Arbery was killed in Brunswick, Georgia on the 23rd of February this year. Then Breonna Taylor was murdered in a fusillade of bullets in Louisville, Kentucky on the 23rd of March. The sadistic, slow, asphyxiation of George Floyd on the 25th of May blew open a nation already torn apart. The deaths and injuries kept coming. They keep on coming, too. Tony McDade, a Black Transgendered man, was shot dead by cops in Tallahassee, Florida, on the 29 of May, 2020. David McAtee of Louisville, Kentucky, known as Yaya the BBQ Man, was shot dead by cops on the 1st of June 2020. The list keeps growing. Continue reading

Before you jump into a Time Machine…

Often overlooked problems of time travel to consider before you go

Hey, before you dash off and jump into the shiny, new time machine parked over there enticing you with fantasies of seeing dinosaurs and solving major historical mysteries, consider a few possibilities. Much was written in recent weeks in regards to possibly the most dangerous place in Earth’s history, the Kem Kem beds of the prehistoric Sahara rain forest. A concentration of dinosaur superpredators lived there some 100 million years ago or so during the Cretaceous Period where they clustered around waters rich in gigantic fish. Those dinosaurs inhabited and dominated three domains: land, air, and aquatic/marine. Apparently there was so much prey these carnivores didn’t waste vital energy eating each other.

A frequent observation of the palaeontologists and those who wrote of their discoveries is any time travelers visiting the Cretaceous Kem Kem beds wouldn’t last long. They would die quickly. Packs of dinosaurs wielding giant jaws spiked with huge, sharp teeth would converge on our time travelers within moments and devour them. So, yes, before you zip away anywhere in any time machine, consider a variety of safeguards. OK?

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Did the Spanish Flu cause the Great Depression?

Covid-19 is causing a severe recession after an economic boom built upon a foundation left shaky by the Great Recession. Similarly, did the influenza pandemic of WW1 lay the groundwork for the Great Depression after the even-shakier Roarin’ 20s boom? What’s next now? And what can we learn?

Construction booms in Seattle, the once Emerald City now known as the City of Cranes. Yet high rates of homelessness left over from the Great Recession and the Occupy revolts has led to a dead-end of cynicism, apathy, and despair ravaged by an opioid epidemic. The increase in employment masks over the high number of jobs considered dead-end, part-time, low-wage, reduced benefits, or regions scarred by stagnant economies and dead industries. So many barriers to progress! Even in a boom city! Foto by the Author, Monday 2 April 2018.

Was the “Spanish flu,” a disease pandemic whose awful memory was shoved aside by the Roaring 20s, a so-called Invisible Hand? A negative, indeed a “dead” invisible hand of capitalism at that? What lessons are relevant for us today as the new coronavirus recession arrives so soon after the Great Recession? If history does tend to repeat itself, then it helps to remember what’s often forgotten.

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Deep Civilization and the Long View on Peace

Can we “deep think” our way out of our messes?

Apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, and other forms of dystopian thinking seems to dominate both our fiction and our daily news cycle. “Fiction” includes movies, TV shows, poetry, photography, paintings, and music as well as prose. Such strains have run thru human thinking since Ancient times, of course, as one only has to look to the various holy books alone. Our obsession with all things “doom and gloom” as worldwide catastrophes, however, dealing not only with the global collapse of human civilization but with the extinction of our species, with omnicide of the biosphere, and with even the destruction of the planet itself seems to emerge en masse during the First and Second World Wars and the Great Depression. This fixation really took off during the Cold War and became even darker during the Global Long War on Terror, the Great Recession, and the unexpected rise of proto-fascist authoritarianism. The End Times have always been nigh, but never more so than at any time right now. What must we do then to deepen our thoughts, open our hearts, extend our minds, and expand our collective consciousness?

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Will Climate Change Drive Global Cooperation or World Dictatorship?

Will it? Shall we allow climate change to drive global cooperation or world dictatorship?

Either way, apocalypse looms. Doesn’t mean it’ll land in our laps, tho. Better get ready to growl. Yes, start growling.

Greta Thunberg chastised her fellow humans the world over for our collective failure to act and to act now to address the engines of our own extinction. She pointed out we already have the solutions. We know what to do. We already know what we must do to successfully address our current interlocking, wicked problems of global climate disruption, Anthropocene global warming, and the Holocene mass extinction. She doesn’t need to wait to grow up and earn her PhD. She can’t. We cannot wait. Yet we do. 

We as a species remain divided into hundreds of squabbling nation-states and thousands of quarreling stateless-nations. We remain divided by socio-economic class, ethnicity, culture, religion, politics, economics, finance, sexuality, gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality, appearance, and levels of education. So many things split us apart from one another we fail to recognize how much more we share in common as Homo sapiens of Earth, third planet from the Sun. We still argue with each other over our isms while secretly wishing all of those on the other side would simply die or somehow vanish. We debate the intricacies of global cybersecurity and of the space race between China and the U.S.A. to colonize the Moon and Mars without considering these may all be silly and moot with our world roiled by crises of our own making.

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Cooperation and Genocide in Concurrent Homo species

Evolutionary Cooperation, Prehistoric Genocides, Ancient Myths, Self-Domestication, and Humanity Now

 

Our knowledge of our and other human species has expanded rapidly. The chrono-frontiers of Homo sapiens has been pushed back to at least 300,000 years ago, further back in time than the 150 ka or kyr as initially believed. At one time we coexisted with at least eight and possibly up to ten different human species up to about 10,000 years ago. There were probably more hominin species and subspecies, too, still unidentified from the fossil records. Unknown or mystery genetic markers point to the DNA ghosts of such distant and remote ancestors.

Clearly the different hominins interbred with each other, including together with and apart from Homo sapiens. How much was consensual versus coerced is unknown, but clearly we know Neanderthals, Denisovans, and what we now call Early Modern Humans (early Homo sapiens) intermixed frequently and even lived together. The different species, not counting their various hybrids, are as follows:

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“Where are all the weapons?” asked an Incel Joker in the Store

Paranoia, revenge, & murder as fantasies in the mind being acted out wherever all the world’s a batshit crazy stage

“Where are all the weapons here?” Squirrelly Clown Dude asked me in a British accent. Like he came to America for the damn weapons. His CO2 gun with a big, plasticky pistol grip still shoots even tho it is not a “real” firearm but a sophisticated “toy.” The barrel looked primarily red and blue with an accent of white. 

This crap all started when a murderous, clown-brained incel dressed himself as the Joker, a fictional comic book character, and shot up a Batman movie in Aurora, Colorado back in July of 2012. The guy was a mass murderer idolized and revered by the incel movement. “Incel” is codeturd for “Involuntarily Celibate.” These are mostly men who view themselves as physically unattractive, even ugly, are often broke, and many of whom seem addicted to porn. Incels feel they have some degree of divine right to get laid and laid by beautiful women.

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Feedback Letter to “Giggles” regarding News Feed

Feedback note to Google in response to certain types of articles appearing in my news feed of the Google browser app on my smartfone

Hi! I appreciate most of the articles you place here for my perusal. If, however, the article’s publisher demands I provide an email address or subscribe before letting me read further, then to hell with their greedy asses! I’ve not any time for such capitalist pennysnatchery. Continue reading

“Are you hitting on me?” asked a Redneck Nazi

A vignette of unexpected homophobic dumbassery sprouting from the grotesque American intersectionality of Nazism and Trump in the Spring of 2019

War could break out in a clothing store faster than cranes can collapse. In April a crane broke apart and collapsed killing four people and injuring others. The deadly collapse occurred minutes before I was to drive into the exact spot cars were crushed. Sad. Tearful. Terrifying! Felt tragic. And sobering. Gravity is Still, the world felt on edge even as people joked and kidded and complained about things. Two burly men rambled around the urban Co-op where I worked alongside many others in the outdoor adventure and travel industry. While officially retail, our positions often felt more like education and instruction than sales alone. I felt proud to work in the Mothership. One of the perks working here was this store is one of the top three tourist destinations here in the City of Cranes. We meet so many people coming and going from all over the planet. Yes, not just from all over the city, the county, the state, and the region, not just from North America, but from all around the world! Welcome to the one city in North America with the most cranes! 

These two guys stood out, however, but so did many other people passing thru. What was different, however, is these men appeared uncomfortable in their own bodies. They energetically felt uncomfortable to me with an odd mix of quiet, minding their own bidness alertness, squirminess, and nervousness. They were dressed in everyday clothes: blue jeans, flannel shirts, and baseball caps. Dirty and greasy from long hours of hard work. Without any laundering, too. So what? I’ve dressed like that myself, altho it’s been awhile. The way they wore their clothes, however, made them stand out from the all the others who wore similar clothes. To be clear, we get a fair number of homeless people and travelers passing thru, many in various stages of being unlaundered. These two guys gave off airs, a pretense of menace, as they pretended not to pose while posing. They walked quickly and heavily, as if they were stomping but not trying to stomp so they pivoted and swung around the sunglasses and stomped quickly towards me. Bam! Boom! Bam!

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Beautiful Days before our next Civil War

“Verily, my mercy prevails over my wrath.”

– The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, describing what God had him write down.

Today is a beautiful day. Oh, my, this Friday’s a gorgeous day outside! The First of June 2018, it is. Ah, late springtime in the Pacific Northwest out here in Seattle. Feels like Summer already! Flowers are out, the birds are singing, the clouds are fluffy, and the bees are buzzing. Hope and joy ripple the air, and any sorrows subside into the majesty of these magickal, blue-sky moments.

People are outside running up and down hills, for goodness sakes. Pedaling bicycles! Out there on the lakes and rivers paddling kayaks, canoes, and stand-up paddle boards! Men and women aboard those small sailboats working together to unfurl and set the sails! Woo Hoo! Paragliding and scuba diving, too! Sweat is flying! Altho, yeah, those joggers are wearing the same clothes they wore back when they ran thru bone-chilling winds, freezing rain, and mashed, slick-as-ice snow back in the wintertime.

Yes, today is a beautiful day, and may yours be, too, wherever you are in this world of ours. It’s a beautiful day indeed, and as our country sinks into cesspools of raging neo-tribalism and slides further towards civil war past the eye-rolling, head-shaking mirth of overly optimistic deniers, may our mercy prevail over our wrath, to paraphrase God and the Prophet from an Islamic Hadith. Aye, may our mercy prevail over our wrath, yours, too, please, and mine.

We are at choice. We always have a choice. This choice is an expression of power, and we all have this power. The storms of war approach, and these are our storms. Whether one believes in any deity or sacred scripture and even if all one knows is dialogue from a TV show set after the zombie apocalypse is irrelevant. What matters is what we choose to be and do now.

Together we can choose a reign of mercy over terror and annihilation.

 

William Dudley Bass
Originally written Friday 1 June 2018
Published here Wednesday 6 March 2019
Seattle, Washington
United States of America
Planet Earth

Copyright 2018, 2019 © by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved until we humans establish our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.

Excuse me, Sir, I’m starving

Seattle, City of Cranes, 2 April 2018.

“Excuse me, Sir,” the man called out. “I’m starving. Can you help me please?”

Frank was out in the streets again struggling to move his broken body this way and that way as he pivot-twisted and zigzagged from curb to curb only to give up from exhaustion and wander right down the middle of the road, getting run over by humans in cars and trucks be damned and indeed goddamned. Spring 2018 in Seattle, Washington. Giant construction cranes hovered overhead like those gigantic Martian battle tripods in the 2005 War of the Worlds movie. The Emerald City, once the Jet City, has now become the City of Cranes, a muddy, noisy, chaotic mess of hope, despair, greed, beauty, boondoggles, and opportunity.

I shared this with Rockcatcher, one of my managers as I came into work thru the employee entrance. He earned the nickname for catching a large, softball-size rock bouncing down the mountain directly into his face when he and a few others were climbing over in the Olympics. Snagged the rock with both hands without toppling backwards down the cliff, too. Both of us, however, had encountered Frank plunging into traffic to declare his hunger.

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100 Years after the Armistice

Granddaddy in the First World War with Contemplation, Tribute, … & a Warning

The horror of World War 1 ended with a ceasefire 100 years ago today, although people continued to die by the millions in the numerous revolutions, civil wars, and ethnic conflicts left blazing on every continent except Antarctica while the Spanish flu pandemic burned grimly around the globe. My paternal grandfather, Carroll Melvin Bass, served in the United States Navy in those terrible times. He fought in the North Atlantic hunting German submarines. His ship chased and sunk subs full of sailors from the other side. Born on Sunday the 9th of April 1893, he turned 24 years old three days after the U.S.A. declared war on Imperial Germany. He achieved the rank of MM1, Machinist’s Mate 1st Class, short for Machinist’s Mate Petty Officer First Class, USN.

I remember asking him what it was like way back when I was a preteen lost in fantasies of glory. Pop, our name for him, struggled to describe his experience. He didn’t say much, and he died of cancer on Wednesday 10 March 1971 seven weeks before my 12th birthday. My paternal grandfather’s gravestone is dominated by references to his service in the U.S. Navy during World War I. In death his experiences during the Great War seemed to have formed the defining, even pivotal period of a life lived across nearly eight decades. All I can recall, however, were impressions as if splashed with black and red paint and cold, cold water.

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How to End Gerrymandering

If you are serious about working to end this abominable practice, then don’t even waste anyone’s time unless you seriously intend to replace the greater political and socio-economic system gerrymandering is embedded within.

What steps do we make to end American Gerrymandering? The solution itself is simple. Achieving positions of power to affect such revolutionary reforms will be difficult. Gerrymandering is embedded in our body politic as dense clusters of ticks with their heads pushed deep into the flesh of sick dogs. Gerrymandering is a loathsome, despicable, and corrupt practice. Anyone who supports and engages in gerrymandering should be arrested, and if convicted, sent far away to frigid prisons built on the Moon where they can draw as many lines in the lunar dust as they wish. Of course such a penal colony on Luna is a metaphor and rehabilitation is far more desirable. The point, however, is gerrymandering has to go and removing it poses challenges.

Gerrymandering itself is an expression of a sick, distressed economic and political system moving from systemic dysfunction towards paralysis and collapse. Rooting out these symptoms of a deeper, greater illness requires systemic transformation. U.S. Federal law must be changed to abolish gerrymandering. To do so, however, means we the people must find healthy ways to strip the two primary parties, the capitalist Democrats and Republicans, of their power. The rule of law must be by and for all people in reality, especially the working classes. The latter includes the professional middle class. The power to determine what the rule of law is must be established once and for all by and for all of the people and not merely for the wealthy neo-aristocrats of Capitalism, i.e. those who write the law to benefit those in power, i.e. themselves, not those they allegedly represent in this clever sham of a democratic republic.

The Duopoly of Republicans and Democrats is referred to as “The Two-Headed Snake” for a number of reasons. The majority of two-party members have far more in common than not including sharing positions thru the same so-called institutional revolving doors in industry, academia, finance, secret societies, the military, intelligence, non-profits, and nepotic pseudo-dynasties. Democrats and Republicans are anchored into systems rooted in capitalism, imperialism, racism, rigid religiosity, and ignorance. How many understand, for example, what the definition of “imperialism” is? This ignorance, including the ignorance of science, geography, and history, has gone on far too long already. This Duopoly puts party and power before people, country, and planet. We must allow independents and alternative parties to campaign and govern. The term “third party” needs to be dropped as the use of it maintains a collective mindset overdue to be purged. Americans can then begin to roll back Federal laws capping the size, shape, and architecture of the Legislative branch.

The solution to gerrymandering is simple. Abolish the existence of all legislative districts and the curse of their ever-mutating borders. We do not need separate legislative districts, and we don’t need them because we already have them. Simply declare our counties, parishes, and independent towns and cities to be legislative districts.

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Trump Usurped the Presidency when the Electoral College Failed America

YES, THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE FAILED AMERICA

ABOLISH THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE

TRUMP IS A USURPER

Donald Trump usurped the Presidency of the United States of America. He did so by exploiting divisions and corruption within the two dominant parties. Trump ascended to the  Oval Office upon the backs of the Electoral College as the electors failed to properly vet the candidates and failed to vet them independent of party and state pressure. The Electoral College of the United States failed not because Trump lost the popular vote by the largest margin in history to carry 77 more state delegates than Hillary Clinton or anyone else to win the EC vote. Thus Trump was declared POTUS with the assumption the Electoral College did its job. It did not.

The EC failed America and yes, Earth, by failing to do its Constitutional duty. As such the EC failed to consider all of America’s presidential candidates, not just those from the Democrat-Republican Duopoly, i.e. the Two-Headed Snake in bed with the Giant Octopus of Big Business and Bigger Banks. This Duopoly distracts us all with its superficial drama while deep down below “the two heads” the body of the snake quietly and pursues its agenda. This pursuit is nearly unconsciously and habitual as if programmed from long ago. As an expression of Duopoly control, the Electoral College failed to deliberate over the candidates’ qualifications and character. The EC electors failed to even consider any of the strengths, weaknesses, and integrity of any of the women and men competing to become POTUS and VPOTUS to best determine who shall most faithfully execute the responsibilities and carry the burdens of such high offices. If the electors had done so, both Clinton and Trump would most likely have been dismissed as not worthy of the office. Unethical if not illegal practices became habitual over the years to eventually become normalized. What became normalized became established and accepted as “real” and thus “legal.” The Constitution gives little guidance to the otherwise helter-skelter structure of America’s overlapping jurisdictions in regards to the Electoral College.

The EC was designed by wealthy adult White male Capitalist revolutionaries to prevent demagogues and what they feared as those demagogues’ rabid mobs of ignorant and dangerous goons from the so-called lower classes from storming the political process to take over the country. The EC allowed itself instead to be manipulated by the Fifty States and by two corporatocratic political parties to allow Donald Trump to usurp the Presidency. Events since January 2017, a mere four months ago, have cemented the disastrous results of the Electoral College process as yet another example why we must abolish this institution.

Meanwhile, the country’s gone nuts in a world already on fire. It is as if the nation’s mind is seriously afflicted with the political and financial equivalent of toxoplasmosis parasites and brain tapeworms. This is yet another example of a much deeper malaise: so many of our actions arise from fear, hurt, greed, anger, and reactivity rather than from love, forgiveness, acceptance, courage, and responsiveness. This point is acknowledged here and is best served for another time.

The Electoral College of the United States nearly fractured in early January 2017 thanks to the lack of courage and foresight among many electors. The electors allowed themselves to be intimidated by the State regimes to vote for one of the two dastardly primary party candidates. “Nearly fractured” is not the same as “fractured,” obviously, but enough EC electors threatened to vote their conscience for whom they felt would be the best for their state or threatened some kind of mutiny some were removed by their state regimes and replaced with docile and obedient people. Yes, the states suppressed elector independence as well as full vetting of the various candidates.

Imagine being told you would not be allowed to vote unless corporatocratic political party operatives in control of any one of the fifty American state regimes, a corrupt setup that would have appalled those Founding Fathers who opposed political parties in the first place, commanded you to cast your ballot for a particular candidate. And you thought you lived in a democratic republic, albeit a capitalist one, where one puts country before party.

Despite all of the obstacles placed before them, seven electors survived attempts or threats to remove them from the EC to cast their vote for candidates other than the one from their party. None of the seven voted for either Clinton or Trump. They came closer than any of their colleagues to vet at least some candidates. One Republican elector stood up and dared the other electors of the College to vote their conscience to prevent Trump from becoming President. Clinton received 232 Electoral College votes. Trump, however, received 306 votes. Trump carried more states and counties while Clinton carried more of the population who actually voted. None of these hundreds of electors, however, gathered as an actual college to vet all of the candidates and then deliberate amongst themselves for whom would best serve the interests of the American people and their United States. Most of them voted for the political party they represented rather than on behalf of the population of their state. They obeyed the demands and expectations projected by the political machinery and governments of the states, all controlled by the Democrat-Republican Duopoly. Indeed to not do so would have those electors be branded as “faithless electors,” as were those seven “rebel electors.”

Political parties were not supposed to dominate government and political systems. Yet networks of wealthy capitalist oligarchs control two of these parties. As such “their” Republicans and Democrats rule and distort the electoral process. Voting in America is a shameful and asinine mockery of democracy. Instead of voting for one despotic puppet one gets to choose between two despotic puppets cloaked with illusions of liberty, prosperity, and peace for all. The Dem-Rep Duopoly dominates all Fifty States and thus determines for whom EC electors must vote.

Enough electors cast their votes without any attempt to deliberate to thus select Donald Trump as the next President. They did so even tho Trump LOST and LOST BIG by THREE MILLION votes! In an election riddled with accusations of electoral fraud by both sides, too. Ironically much of the current evidence beginning to emerge damns the Republicans altho they’re the one crying fraud the most and the loudest as the Democrats seek to point out Russian interference in the 2016 Election. The United States Electoral College of constitutional, capitalist, quasi-democratic republic thus elected a loser as President. Continue reading

Jackie Screams in Silence

Silent are the many Class War dead buried beneath the myths of Camelot

Watching Jackie felt like eating jagged broken glass thru my eyes as if eyeballs were little, bloody mouths wired directly into my brains. The movie is intense, jarring, and rich with excellent and challenging performances. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Texas six days before Thanksgiving 1963 was a sucker punch to the American gut.

One could quibble about actress Natalie Portman’s attempt at Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy’s accent, but her harrowing performance rivets and horrifies. Portman becomes Jackie with such wrenching intensity it’s as if we’re invading the former First Lady’s privacy. The film portrays the Journalist, played by Billy Crudup, as an unnamed man but understood to be Theodore H. White, a historian and journalist turned propagandist and Camelot mythmaker.

The movie is in part a portrayal of a woman’s grief and shock at the public murder of her husband while at the pinnacle of their power. The film also, less convincingly but nevertheless disturbingly, illuminates the collusion between the chain-smoking former First Lady and the Journalist to control the public narrative and secure the myth of the American Camelot as “truth.” In its own unique way, Jackie reflects the legacy of Greek tragedy and Shakespearean drama enmeshed with blood and brains in the way of American movies.

What makes this collusion even more bizarre was Jackie’s sterilization of her dead husband’s true legacy. To his credit, JFK was in many ways a traitor to his class of wealthy, bourgeoisie capitalists, and this article addresses this further down. Jackie Kennedy, however, fought, plotted, connived, and strategized to elevated JFK to the lofty, neo-feudal status of Camelot. A powerful and determined person, she was also relentless and ferocious as she grabbed the helm of history. Continue reading

Fighting Back against Trump and the Right beyond Inauguration Day Weekend

No flash in the pan protests! Sustained demonstrations are required.

Building Massive Resistance against Trump and the Alt-Right helps build a Democratic Socialist world.

Major demonstrations are being planned across the United States of America over these two days to protest the inauguration of Donald Trump as President and Mike Pence as Vice-President. Other marches and rallies in solidarity with this insurrection are planned in other cities around the world. These protests, even in the midst of winter, are expected to be huge. Already over 25,000 people took to the streets of New York City on the Thursday before Inauguration Day to demonstrate against Trump-Pence and their ugly and dangerously stupid agenda.

It would be naïve to think all these vigorous acts of defiance, resistance, unity, and courage will have much immediate effect. And with today’s technologies at our fingertips with social media, anything is possible. Even more naïve, however, is to believe we can simply pack up and go home and plop down as if OK, look how LOUD we showed Trump-Pence and the Alt-Right we roared! No. This is a long fight shaping up. We must be prepared for a long, long struggle!

Know, too, when we on the Left fight, we win in the end. To fight and win, however, we must come together to educate and organize ourselves to fight effectively.

Consider examples in American history of what efforts activists took to win. Let’s look at our own history. Struggle takes time, and the more we fight we win. Perseverance is key. The Civil Rights Movement lasted from the early 1950s all the way thru the 60s into the mid-1970s. Significant high points were the Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 followed 10 years later by the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Then the Voting Rights Act and the Immigration and National Services Act passed in 1965, and the Fair Housing Act in 1968.

The anti-Vietnam War movement began protesting in 1964 and grew so vigorous President Lyndon Johnson of the Democrats was compelled to withdraw from seeking reelection in March 1968. These anti-war demonstrations also compelled the next President, Republican Richard Nixon, to withdraw U.S. forces from the Vietnam War in March 1973. These civil rights and anti-war protests merged with other movements as resistance to Nixon exploded yet again during the Watergate crisis. Nixon resigned the American presidency in August of 1974. The labor and environmental movements are other classic examples of struggles taking years to manifest a string of powerful successes.

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Videos and Stories from the Unfinished Struggle for Workers’ Rights at REI

Six Videos, the Petition, and our Stories…and it’s not over

Note this article with its compilation of videos is not marketed or sold for profit nor is anything in this article being marketed and sold for profit. This article and the videos within may be freely shared as long as various sources and authorship are acknowledged.

“There is one word missing. One word that makes all the difference. This word is ‘organized’. That is: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, ORGANIZED citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” It speaks to the power of people mobilization; the power of true change that starts from the bottom wing…there is a growing, if naïve belief that all you need is a lot of passion, a lot of commitment, a lot of good intentions and lots of mavericks, rebels, disruptors, contrarians and challengers and, alas, change will happen. It won’t.” – Socio-cultural change activist Leandro Herrero of Spain on the necessity for activists to organize and organize quickly.

A workers’ revolt had brewed within REI since at least 2015. Matters came to a head in July 2016 as groups of workers rose up openly in nonviolent direct action. Among their issues at stake were demands for a living wage, for secure, predictable scheduling, and for democratic representation via a union. These demands burst open the heart of the matter to reveal whether the REI Co-op would be a truly cooperative business. Or a lie.

This is our story as a brief summary from my perspective. Thus this is only a small part of our big story from only one person’s point of view from a particular time and place. Indeed, the record of this peaceful uprising may even be your story. Much work remains to be done by we the working people. Our story, your story, remains unfinished. The truth, often forgotten or unacknowledged, is we who stood up before the media for our co-op and for our fellow coworkers who wouldn’t or couldn’t were scared. Yes, at times we felt terrified! We were afraid of being fired from REI and blacklisted from securing employment elsewhere. And we stood up anyway. We stood up and spoke what needed to be said and heard. Such actions took more courage than simply feeling brave. What made it possible was the support from our collective, cooperative community of REI Members, fellow coworkers, and former coworkers.

In the beginning, actions may be led by small numbers of people determined to organize and act in such a way, as the late, great anthropologist Margaret Meade liked to point out, as to change the world. They may be resisted at first by those who insist these leaders not speak for them but say, “some few individuals.” Progress cannot be stayed. Even the most peaceful revolution has setbacks and is set upon by cynics and automatic critics as well as often ignored by the apathetic and the resigned. It is acceptable to feel afraid, and let us move forward anyway even if scared. Yes, it’s OK to be afraid. Move forward anyway. Don’t let fear stop us, but do let fear keep us alert and on top of our game. Our revolt had repercussions benefiting many workers, although success wasn’t as widespread as initially believed.

One can trace this revolt back to the influences of the 2011 Wisconsin Insurrection followed by the Occupy Uprisings of 2011-2012. Out of Occupy Seattle emerged the political campaigns of economist Kshama Sawant, the Socialist Alternative candidate, for local offices in 2012-2013. She lost her race for the Washington House of Representatives, and won her election to Seattle City Council where she has served since 2014. These struggles overlapped with and were followed by the Black Lives Matter revolts beginning in 2013 and still ongoing. They in turn help inspire the successful Fight for $15 an hour minimum wage struggles of 2014-2016. This uprising was sparked by Alaska Airline employees in SeaTac, Washington, spread to Seattle, and then reverberated across the United States in the form of fast food strikes and other direct actions organized with assistance from Socialist Alternative and allies in the labor union movement such as SEIU (the Service Employees International Union) and UFCW (the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union).

More directly related to REI, however, were the 2014 demonstrations against sweatshop labor in making products for The North Face and against REI’s partnership with The North Face. The anti-sweatshop protests were small but loud, nationwide, and even erupted in other countries. A nationwide student labor union known as the United Students Against Sweatshops or USAS (http://usas.org) organized these demonstrations at REI and TNF stores.

The international horror in the wake of the April 2013 Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh was still fresh in the general public’s mind in 2014. Over 1,130 people were killed and nearly another 2,500 injured in this disaster. A foto of an unidentified man and woman buried in the rubble still embraced even in death became famous. Their nature of their actual relationship remains unknown, and the image of their tragedy affected the world. To be clear, while up to 28 Western companies including Benneton, J.C. Penney, Joe Fresh, Zara, Primark, and Walmart were involved in the Rana Plaza collapse, this list don’t seem to include any companies associated with REI or The North Face. Even so, the Rana Plaza catastrophe left a vivid impression on people about worker’s rights in general within our globalized capitalist economy.

Sweatshop labor is slave labor where predatory capitalists, the kind of capitalists that give responsible businesses and visionary, hardworking entrepreneurs a bad name, leveraged deeply indebted people into perpetual debt bondage and exploited children for their tiny hands and nimble fingers for profit. Such vulnerable people were beaten, fed little, worked with little rest or sleep, sexually violated, kept terrified, and generally traumatized. People died and were maimed in these slave factories. The problem afflicts many companies as human slavery and trafficking is a worldwide wicked problem. To be clear, these problems existed long before capitalism, and we have the power and vision here in the 21st Century to work together and resolve these conflicts.

Patagonia and Apple were among the few to take vigorous action to tackle this problem of slavery and trafficking, but unregulated capitalist imperatives to exploit resources and cheap labor for short-term profits, socio-cultural normalization, and political power makes cleaning up these messes self-defeating. The North Face, owned by VF Corporation in Greensboro, North Carolina, was one of the worst offenders. Only in 2015 did VFC and TNF start addressing sustainability and green energy issues, but still has not addressed its use of sweatshop labor.

See: https://rankabrand.org/sportswear-sports-shoes/The+North+Face.

See: http://reisweatshops.usas.org.

[Upate 2023 insert:] The two above links no longer work and are kept here for historic, archival purposes as original sources that worked back in 2017.

More workers in America and more workers in other nation-states such as Bangladesh are beginning to understand this is an international issue, indeed an international working class issue. Thus an issue that demands we workers hold the capitalist classes accountable as we further organize a new mass movement across the working and middle classes to build a progressive, planetary society. It is up to us to figure out what such action steps look like. We must find ways to rise above the endless arguments over -isms and understand expanding democracy into the workplace expands democracy for all.

What the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., used to call “economic democracy” and what the progressive Left today such as Sen. Bernie Sanders call “democratic socialism” is often misunderstood by many and erroneously conflated with communism, totalitarianism, anarchy, Nazism, Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, and so forth. Those isms are not at all the same thing as economic democracy or democratic socialism. People who believe they are need to learn a few things. Indeed, this movement expanding democracy in the workplace is also an expansion of our individual liberties, human and civil rights, and social responsibilities. Equating such with dictatorship and tyranny is fearmongering feeding hysteria, polarization, violence, and ignorance.

People may disagree on approaches and degrees of this and that, debate whatever ignites their passions, but forget the Big Picture so many of us work to put together and build out. In many ways we are limited by our language. We get lost in fighting and arguing over political and economic -ism terminology from the 17th and 18th Centuries and the horrors of the 20th Century. Together we can choose to build a better local-global system for our 21st Century. Or not. The consequences are dire. It doesn’t work to go all out in support of cherry-picked progressive agendas only to bash labor unions and worker-owned cooperative businesses.

Below is the first of six videos here and is from United Students Against Sweatshops. It is a part of REI history we must remember and Corporate Headquarters wants us to forget. REI HQ preferred instead to distract people’s attention by ramping up its efforts to market the petty bourgeois abomination known as “glamping.”

Before REI workers launched their own petition for real change after so many were fired in late 2015, there was an earlier petition demanding “REI, Drop North Face Sweatshops!” I signed it myself on Monday 2 January 2017. Yes, I am ashamed to confess I was unaware of this petition until recently (2017) and didn’t realize the true nature of the anti-North Face protests back in 2014. In 2014 I was still emerging from almost two years of being homeless or semi-homeless while ill with severe depression and a cluster of autoimmune conditions. That’s no excuse, of course, and I share to give one a sense of what was experienced. As alluded to earlier, these struggles of solidarity for justice, equality, and liberty for working class people are far from over.

Max Silva, an REI Member, initiated the anti-sweatshop Petition for USAS with Moveon.org back in 2014. It still continues to gather signatures. Move On is financed in large part by billionaire George Soros. While I am not a fan all of Soros’s actions, the claims of rabid, Far Right conspiracy speculators his manipulations of geopolitics and unaware Leftist activists fund his faction of squabbling plutocrats to rule the world are not based on facts and reality. Despite such rubbish, Move On still charges hard as an activist NGO in the pursuit of good.

Review and sign the Petition to compel REI to drop North Face products here: http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/rei-drop-north-face-sweatsho-1?source=c.em&r_by=6189219.

This accelerated worker and member discontent within the Co-op. The first phase of the 2015-2016 REI workers revolt culminated on the 11th of July 2016. A small group of retail workers from across the United States, although mostly from the West Coast, showed up in Seattle to go public en masse before the media. These workers were desperate, afraid, and courageous. I know as I was one of them. My coworkers and I were scared we would lose everything, and we didn’t have much left to lose as our wages and hours were so low and random. The possibility of getting fired and losing what little we had left terrified us. Even more scary was the prospect of being blacklisted from finding other work elsewhere if we were purged. We stood up anyway. We workers took a stand.

We did so with the support of Councilor Kshama Sawant of the Seattle City Council and the dynamic staff of her office. Among them was community and labor activist Jonathan Rosenblum who helped build grassroots networks across the country from New York City to Seattle. He helped us REI activists to distill our long lists of demands into three. We did so with the determined support of Socialist Alternative and UFCW 21. We did so with the support of many Members of the REI Co-op, and we did so with the support of larger numbers of our co-workers from all across the company who felt they had to stay discreet or anonymous but who informed us privately they were still with us. 

We REI Coworkers had many, many even conflicting demands. Dozens! In just a few meetings we distilled them into three primary ones. They were, 1) immediate implementation of the $15 an hour minimum wage instead of a three-year long phase-in, 2) predictive scheduling, and, 3) we need a union. Our first two demands were met. The third was not. There remains the lack of some form of organized, internal democratic representation of us workers as a group to management.

There are several different ways towards building a workers’ democracy. One way is thru a union. Another is thru cooperative ownership of the company as a true cooperative business with democratic deliberation and planning. Or a hybrid of the two. Cooperative worker ownership and/or unionization defends hard-won gains, sustains the network, and advocates for greater democracy. There are successful examples of worker-owned, consumer-owned hybrid cooperatives, and most of them are also unionized. Clearly this struggle isn’t new but is as old as the exploited standing up to those who exploit them. Our struggles are far from over for democratic socialist representation is THE most important battle to win.

Back in the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., came to recognize there can’t be any political democracy without having economic democracy and one can’t have capitalism without war. He came to champion what we today call democratic socialism. King was assassinated in April 1968 while in Memphis, Tennessee. He’d traveled there to support striking sanitation workers and their new union. Those terms remain highly charged today. The next five videos, however, demonstrate what’s possible when people from across the working classes come together to move what many thought were immovable mountains, especially REI, the mythic icon of the American Pacific Northwest and the Great Outdoors. Continue reading

Civil War in 21st Century America?

We would destroy ourselves

“Governments without credibility devolve into chaos. … The notion of credibility is why my political preferences don’t align with either of the candidates for president.” ~ Scott Adams

“The spread of fascism in the 1920s was significantly aided by the fact that liberals and mainstream conservatives failed to take it seriously. Instead, they accommodated and normalised it.” ~ James McDougall

Three points must be understood.

  • We in the United States of America are on the edge of civil war. This would be the case regardless of who “won” this election.
  • Few want to see or hear anything about this. Most dismiss it as alarmist rhetoric or far-right wing fantasy.
  • A civil war in a large, developed superpower would be catastrophic for this planet.
  • Let me rephrase what I just wrote, ok: A civil war in the United States of America would be a horror and incredibly stupid, so stupid I want to use the F-word.
  • Here’s another: People don’t want to experience extreme distress. They don’t want to see events race from unlikely possibility to likely probability. Then it’s too late. If more people saw such changes shift from bad to worse they would act to stop war by resolving conflict peacefully.

The United States is the most polarized it’s been since the American Civil War of 1861-1865. As I write these words on the 18th of November 2016, Hillary Clinton is well ahead in the popular vote, Donald Trump is well ahead in the Electoral College count, the Electoral College has not yet voted, the polls predicted Clinton to win, the media declared Trump the winner, Clinton conceded to Trump, and Trump proclaimed himself the President-elect.

Movements are underfoot to both promote and deny Clinton a victory over Trump by having the Electoral College vote align with the national popular vote. Clinton is ahead of Trump by over one million votes with about four million votes left to count. Her margin is expected to increase dramatically.

Both the Democrat and Republican parties are broken even tho their Two-Party Duopoly maintains its dominance over the elections, debates, and state electors to the national College. Independent third party candidates proved insignificant as the majority of Americans were too polarized between Lesser Evils. At the same time about half of legitimate voters even bothered to vote as the election was viewed by so many people as rigged, corrupted, and ultimately irrelevant.

Massive demonstrations were quickly organized in many cities with the majority of the demonstrators peaceful. Initially several of these marches and protests were organized by Socialist Alternative, a small but growing national organization of Democratic Socialists who leverage Marxist dialectical analysis, in conjunction with Socialist Youth and the Occupy Wall Street-inspired Movement for the 99%. Boston, Philadelphia, Seattle, Oakland, and New York City were the focal points for these protests. Other organizations quickly moved to organize demonstrations, too.

Ongoing protest movements such as Black Lives Matter and the Standing Rock Sioux against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) and the banks financing the corporations behind the pipeline merged with the anti-Trump demonstrations. LGBTQI people marched with those protesting degradation and violence against women and immigrants. Students from high schools and colleges walked out of class to join and in many cases lead the demonstrations.

Allegations swirl around claiming George Soros, a multibillionaire member of the so-called globalist Cabal groups and backer of Hillary Clinton, financed and influenced demonstrations against Donald Trump. So far research demonstrates he hasn’t altho he may do so in the future. He has donated millions of dollars to a broad spectrum of Leftist groups in the past, but most of them are neoliberal groups such as the Open Society Foundations.

Socialist Alternative and its allies, however, rapidly organized most of the post-Election protests on Wednesday 9 November, in multiple cities via social media as they marshaled 40,000 or more people within hours. Socialist Alternative also scorned any help from the billionaire class and refuses to accept donations from Soros and his elitist ilk.

Scattered violence ripples across the nation and appears to be escalating rather than decreasing. The Southern Poverty Law Center recorded 437 reports of “hateful intimidation and harassment” by Trump supporters from the day after the election thru the 14th of November. This includes 20 reports of assaults upon Trump supporters. Most, however, were by White racists and fundamentalist Christians upon other ethnic and religious groups including immigrants and by heterosexuals against LGBTQIs.

Other reports demonstrate a surge in bullying in the schools, increase in police violence, interruptions of work, high volatility in the financial markets, and greater unpredictability across the planet as different nations, corporations, banks, and non-state groups review their options.

Protests in support of the Standing Rock Sioux water protectors, accelerated by Trump’s declared victory even tho he continues to lose the popular vote, have since spread around the nation to include demonstrations against the 38 banks including 17 banks directly financing the corporations supporting the Dakota Access Pipeline across the Missouri River and sacred tribal lands. Many others, however, seek to downplay the violence and bring people back to focus upon peace, compassion, positivity, and finding ways to move forward in spite of deep and ugly divides.

Meanwhile immigration hardliners among the pro-Trump Republican leadership propose the United States use World War II internment camps of Japanese-Americans and Japanese immigrants then in line to be naturalized as U.S. citizens as models to deal with Muslim-Americans today and track Muslim immigrants. Trump is viewed as unstable and continues to elevate White racist, sexist, and anti-immigrant extremists as well as vitriolic anti-environmentalists into positions of power.

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“Locker Room Talk” arises from Rape Culture

Donald Trump

The term, “locker room talk” doesn’t excuse anything. What many don’t get is locker room talk is another expression of rape culture. What many more don’t get is rape culture arises from capitalism.

Rape culture is so deeply embedded in patriarchal society many people aren’t even conscious and aware of its existence. Even some women dismiss locker room talk with shrugs as, “just what guys do, right?” Locker room talk is verbal violence, and verbal violence, for those still waking up to our cultural mess, is violence committed with spoken language. It’s often amplified with body language and facial expressions. Verbal violence spills over into written language where direct use of such insults may be criminalized as deadly threats, slander, and libel. When such violence is sexual, however, it’s often dismissed with eye rolls and shrugs or ignored. People who do use locker rooms are also fed up as what Trump calls “locker room talk” isn’t the norm in their locker rooms.

Donald Trump brushed off recently leaked recordings of his sexist, disgusting, and abusive comments towards women and girls as “just locker room talk.” He was called on it during the second presidential debate of this nightmarish campaign by debate co-moderator Anderson Cooper of CNN. Trump’s words were deeply disrespectful, so deeply disrespectful as to be unconscious of morals and ethics. His language described how he exploited his wealth and fame to force women to kiss and hug him. The billionaire in a fit of excited infantilism called for men to “grab” women by their genitals. Trump’s language was violent enough for others to characterize his speech as the verbal equivalent of “sexual assault.” His words are indeed violent. Trump’s talk is rape talk.

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A Foto out of Place: UFO Disinfo Confusion

Unanswered Questions

What at first seemed an incredible and informative article by one of the leading pioneers of Exopolitics became confused and tainted with disinformation from the US Navy and muddied by enthusiasm to believe a challenging story. Dr. Michael Salla’s detailed descriptions as well as his recovery from the planted disinfo makes for rapt reading. Ultimately the errors were resolved and the resulting confusion clarified. His article, however, immediately raised a number of questions for those already familiar with the narratives of whistleblowers such as Corey Goode and Randy Cramer who repeatedly fail to provide any evidence to support their testimonies. These questions arose before we even get to the controversial foto of a flying saucer on the deck of an American aircraft carrier at sea.

Were the so-called Nordic ETs a distinct species of actual Extraterrestrial origin, or were they one of the Inner Earth humanoid civilizations such as The Asgard Network with its Silver Fleet Corey Goode initially alluded to early on, or the Ansher Saturnalians that Corey Goode referred to later? Or even an interstellar descendent of breakaway human-like civilizations that left Earth long ago? Do any of these beings even exist in the first place? Just because one presents proof of employment or service does not mean the beings such whistleblowers claim to experience exist beyond the confines of their stories. A story is by some definitions a lie albeit a compelling and entertaining one.

Remember Goode’s claims these Inner Earthers developed highly advanced inner-world civilizations, developed humanoid colonies elsewhere in the Milky Way beyond our Sol star system, and fought against the Draco Empire. They also were alleged to assist the early German Secret Societies such as the Vril, but less so the later Nazi ones. What do you think of these possible connections, Dr. Salla? Anyone else? Who is satisfied with the veracity of these claims in the absence of real, tangible data? Free from circular reasoning and charisma? Answering these question will give us all a deeper understanding and greater grasp on a complex and fluid situation.

Dr. Michael Salla’s article presents a provocative and informative read. He’s been a significant contribution to the recognition and development of Exopolitics as a field. I am grateful to Dr. Salla for his diligence and thoroughness, but this time I wonder if excitement interfered with judgment ever since Corey Goode appeared on the scene with his far out tales of sphere beings, galactic slavery, Draco wars, and Blue Avian messages for spiritual ascension. It’s easy to get so caught up in the compelling testimonies of charismatic whistleblowers we forget to scrutinize and validate all of their claims. I’ve done so myself. If the bulk of their allegations are true, which does not seem to be the case here, that doesn’t mean everything they observe or each opinion advanced are equally invalid or even valid. Dr. Salla’s efforts to resolve confusion around the mystery of the fotograf, assisted by others who came forward with inside knowledge of the foto in question, are indeed remarkable in an age of trolls and flame wars. Rather than being defensive and armed with excuses, Dr. Salla was upfront, transparent, and cleared this up with aplomb. Continue reading

In the Swirl of a Dish

Petri Dish Man’s Urban Seattle Socialist Vignette

Hungry. Sun blazing in my eyes. Making me squint as my belly growled low like a dog guarding a slab of meat. Hadn’t eaten since yesterday. Felt ravenous after I spent too much of the morning in the hospital being poked, pierced, measured, and explored by fantastic doctors and their curious assistants. Prodded me like a damn bug followed by quick pecks on their computers. Felt as if I was a giant insect splayed out and peeled apart in an enormous Petri dish by mad scientists and clever kids. Who behaved as if any moment they would hobble over and slather weird baby food goo all over me to see what monsters might grow. Ahhh, yes, call me…Petri Dish Man! BAM! BAM! BAM! DON’T BAN THE PETRI DISH MAN! ran thru my head over and over, tho I dared not tell anyone at the time, as it felt so strange.

Brought back memories of being in the Battle of Seattle during the so-called Anti-Globalization Revolts, and memories of being in Occupy Seattle and Occupy Olympia. Yes, even brought back memories of being homeless during the Great Global Recession after rich, capitalist pundits declared it long over. Despite being such a proficiently medically inspected man, however, I felt grateful for Obamacare’s ACA here in Washington State. Thank goodness it covered what my employer’s private health insurance plan wouldn’t cover. I shake my head funny too, as it seemed plain old common sense for 21st Century America, indeed all of Planet Earth, to have an integrated single-payer universal health care system, a democratic economic system, a socialist system.

Thus satiated on clarity of vision, I ventured hungrily into The Dish, a funky Seattle café, for a belated breakfast. Call it brunch. Time was 11:30 am. It’s a lively little café in my neighborhood. I currently live in a small, quasi-cooperative household below the landlord’s family in a house uprooted from the I-5 Corridor running north and south across the States between Canada and Mexico. The house sits beneath three immense Western redcedar trees in the Tangletown-Latona part of Green Lake up in the middle of North Seattle. At least till the rent rockets up. Only my second visit to this cafe, too. Rarely eat out anymore. Now it’s a treat! The place was abuzz, too.

Two staffers had called in sick, however, leaving the business understaffed. Only two other people were out front serving including one new worker who admitted she didn’t know how to work anything quite yet. But they were game and smiled anyway. Big, welcoming smiles, too. They bustled in and out among crowded customers, and the one cook in back paced himself as he had to. The warm smells of cooked food swirled with exuberant colors intoxicated yours truly Petri Dish Man.

The ghost of a homeless guy watched everything right over the lip of his big orange coffee cup. He was so invisible it as was if I couldn’t see him but nevertheless still sense his presence. I felt the color of his large, tattered coat fade charcoal and gray. Was his bright orange cup just a reflection of the Sun upon a glass bowl of slivered fruit? No, he wasn’t there, just a coat and a cup and the ghost of a man who gave up everything precious but his dignity and curiosity.

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Why I’m not voting in the Washington State Democratic Caucus for anyone even tho I root for Bernie

Rally for Bernie in the Key Arena, Seattle, WA. Foto by Kristina Katayama. Sunday 20 March 2016.

Rally for Bernie in the Key Arena, Seattle, WA. Foto by Kristina Katayama. Sunday 20 March 2016.

This isn’t about Bernie. It is for integrity and strategy.

Bernie, of course, is Bernard Sanders, the Independent Senator from Vermont who calls himself a “democratic socialist.” He’s charging forward to secure the nomination of the Democrat Party as its Candidate for the American Presidency. The state caucus is today this Saturday the 26th of March 2016.

It’s unethical to play musical chairs with the fate of our nation and go play Democrat just for one day if you have no intention of actually joining the Democrats to stay a Democrat. It’s shortsighted and self-defeating to get so caught up in Bernie’s amazing rise that one short-circuits the long-term building of a new party for the 99%. If we don’t stay focused on the new movement for the working and middle classes we’re going to end up right where we started, broken upon the altars of Lesser Evilism.

Many of my friends among the Left are crossing over into the Democrat Party to vote for Bernie Sanders in the Washington State Caucus. These people are usually independents and/or members of smaller parties outside the Democrat-Republican Duopoly. Most of those smaller parties represented are the Socialist Alternative and the Green Party with a few Libertarians. While a member of both SAlt and the Greens, I have engaged very little with either in the last couple of years due to a prolonged, chronic illness and due to my work and family schedule. Bernin’ for Bernie, however, burns all across social media.

There’re a sizeable number of my comrades among these same small parties that plan to vote for Bernie if and ONLY if he secures the Democrat nomination to run for President, or, failing to do so, launches an independent bid. They are NOT voting for Bernie in the Democrat Caucus. I am NOT voting in the caucus for Bernie either. “What? What! Why not? WTF?!” is often the response.

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Lyman Glacier Melts Away: Global Climate Disruption in One Local Spot

Global Climate Disruption as exemplified in one solitary place in the Glacier Peak Wilderness of the Washington Cascades from a hiker’s perspective

Modified from Image of Mt. Chiwawa's Lyman Glacier melting away across 118 years between 1890 and 2008 per glaciology field research by Nichols College based in Dudley, Massachusetts.

Modified from Image of Mt. Chiwawa’s Lyman Glacier melting away across 118 years between 1890 and 2008 per glaciology field research in the North Cascade Glacier Climate Project by Nichols College based in Dudley, Massachusetts.

In August 2006 and nine years later in July 2015 I climbed up Spider Gap and looked down the flanks of Chiwawa Mountain upon the dirty ice of Lyman Glacier. I was shocked to behold how much snow and ice had vanished across such a relatively short span of time. This short article is my attempt to record this one example of Global Climate Disruption in one solitary spot thru my words and pictures. Far fewer pictures exist for 2006 as most of my then-extensive fotograf collections were destroyed when my house burned down back in March of 2010. For the record, the science is clear human pollution is destructive to our planetary biosphere and affects our global climate.

Lyman Glacier melting and dropping rockslide debris into Upper Lyman Lake, Glacier Peak Wilderness, Tuesday 28 July 2015.

Lyman Glacier melting and dropping rockslide debris into Upper Lyman Lake, Glacier Peak Wilderness, Tuesday 28 July 2015. This and all subsequent Fotos by William Dudley Bass & are copyrighted with all rights reserved, thank you.

Older controversies regarding global cooling have already been addressed, resolved, and discarded. Now, however, newer material emerges as we’ve become aware our solar system is undergoing numerous widespread changes as it speeds thru a section of the Milky Way Galaxy currently dense in cosmic radiation. It appears this galactic-solarial interaction may be having a much greater impact upon Earth’s climate than human pollution. This process is also not understood, and our pollution clearly makes our destabilized global climate worse. In addition, long-term planetary history demonstrates periods of global warming are followed by ice ages. Which means we really don’t know what the hell is gonna happen next. Right now, however, we in the American Pacific Northwest are entering into the third year of a drought. Although snow has recently fallen in our alpine elevations, an unusually powerful El Nino system in the wake of the Pacific Blob anomaly promises a wild, warm ride into the unknown. Continue reading

American Mussolini: Trump arises from American Exceptionalism

photoAP.1438094121616

Useless Eaters, Serial Killers, & Tyrants

Does anyone reading this take Donald Trump seriously? Do you take Donald Trump seriously? It’s so easy to dismiss his pompous and bombastic rhetoric, shallow of substance, yet cleverly spun to hook into the emotions of frustrated and enraged people. Trump is a master showman. He’s as shameless and as tricksterish as P.T. Barnum and as bellicose and banal as Mike Tyson. He ripped off and trademarked Ronald Reagan’s slogan, “Let’s make America great again.” His followers don’t care, however, as it reminds them of a nostalgic past when White men thought they ruled the world.

For the rest of us, however, as dismayed as so many of us are with the Clinton Democrats as well as the fractious Republicans, Archcapitalist Trump and the Alt-Right presents us with an opportunity. It’s beyond time to rebuild the Left. We must find new ways to build a united front between labor and environmentalists, between indigenous tribal activists and social justice advocates, between scientists and the spiritual, between military veterans and peace advocates, for Black Lives Matter and predominantly White revolutionary Socialist groups. It’s an opportunity to build new mass movements of the Left for a major new political party to challenge the Dem-Rep Duopoly. This is an opportunity to raise working class consciousness and help organize working and middle class people for a new mass working class party of the 99% to spearhead the transition from Finance Capitalism to Democratic Socialism and away from Fascism.

Let us remember a famous book, well written yet choked with racist rants and fantastical declarations. Adolf Hitler wrote out exactly in Mein Kampf what motivated him and what he intended to do. Few took him seriously, and he was dismissed as a buffoon. Hitler went on to win democratic elections in the German Weimar Republic. He consolidated and expanded his power including leveraging false flag events such as the burning of the Reichstag. Having conquered Germany, he then moved forward in his attempt to conquer the world.

Trump is no Hitler. Not even close. Adolf Hitler was an anomaly, and Nazism is extreme tyranny. Trump much more resembles Fascist bully Benito Mussolini with their mutual love of show and pomp. Mussolini lusted for power, glory, and fame. He appreciated drama for its entertainment value as well as for its psycho-propaganda usefulness. So, too, does Trump. One who seeks power, glory, and fame can never have enough of them. As Hitler did, however, Trump wrote a modestly bestselling book in which he combined his belief systems and world view with personal memoir. The Art of the Deal, written with lots of help from Tony Schwartz, came out in 1987.

While his advice is focused on capitalist business and not politics, the book encapsulates Trump’s world view and how he approaches everything. Life is for action, and successful action is all about leveraging assets and liabilities to secure the best deal. Those with the best deals win the contest. Making winning deals and managing the results gave Trump his singular life purpose and he applies it to all areas of a life for action. Such an approach naturally fed into an addiction for more power, glory, and fame.

Mussolini, however, followed a clear ideology as a Fascist Party dictator, Il Duce, The Leader. Portraying himself as a fearless strongman and demagogue, Mussolini leveraged both the capitalist petty bourgeoisie and disaffected workers to establish a Far-Right wing Empire. Trump, by comparison, doesn’t adhere to any one ideology. He seems to view ideologies as tools in toolbox to pull any one out from as he saw fit to accomplish whatever he wanted to achieve. If anything was ideological, it was Trump’s belief making deals, especially business deals, gets stuff done. Thus deal making is both show and pomp as well as melodramatic artistry. Hence, The Art of the Deal.

The Donald is a uniquely American phenomenon. He represents the dark side of American Exceptionalism. He is the epitome of Ayn Rand’s Romantic Fascist supermen. Ayn Rand herself disdained the masses as “human parasites” and considered William Edward Hickman, a serial killer who dismembered girls and called himself The Fox, her hero.

Both Rand and Hickman are twisted products of American Exceptionalism, the kind the politicians and cheerleaders of empire refuse to even acknowledge. American Exceptionalism is the watered down U.S. version of White racism and European colonial imperialism with the latter’s emphasis upon the White Man’s burden, Protestant Christianity with its Calvinist work ethic, and fantasies of Manifest Destiny as some kind of Divine Right of Empire. It’s a belief America is inherently superior to all other nation-states, was and is chosen by God as the Chosen People for the New World.

Arising out of American Exceptionalist belief systems, Rand is the Immigrant, which is ironic as The Donald and his bellicose herd are militant anti-immigrants. Rand was born into a Russian Jewish family in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) and during her early 20s immigrated to America. The Fox was as American as the Bush and Clintons. Hickman was born in Arkansas, grew up between Texas and Missouri, and spent the rest of his short life in California.

Both The Immigrant and The Fox were Exceptional Americans. From “the Dark Side,” yes, but as such they are not anomalies but as perversely normal as apple pie and guns. As such they fed the mad, crazy ugliness that captivates, hypnotizes, antagonizes, numbs, dumbs down, and distracts the mainstream public from any clear sense of unity and purpose. The lack of such vital clarity plays a significant factor in the low mass consciousness of the American working class.

Ayn Rand praises her psychopathic, slaughterhouse pedophile with language devoid of all empathy, of all sympathy, other than cold abstract admiration for her Satanic, rightwing godman:

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Grexit Crisis: Update and Reevaluation

Part 2 and follow-up to “Grexit Crisis: EU Disunion or Greater Unification?”

Sometimes the fate of the world hinges on how a seemingly local crisis is resolved or escalates. Nothing happens, however, life goes on regardless of changing circumstances, and the existence of fate itself is dismissed. So it is with Greece.

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The underlying and all consuming economic and political system itself must be not changed but transformed. Today that system is Finance Capitalism triumphant. It devours all political systems from liberal democracies to despotic tyrannies, in turn leaving Corporatocratic Fascism triumphant in politics and governments. People from before Aristotle to beyond Wallace Stevens have observed everything changes yet somehow remains the same anyway. The nature of slavery has changed, and yet, we still have slavery. And so it is with Greece.

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Open up the Debates! Letter to the Commission on Presidential Debates, July 2015

Wednesday 8 July 2015

Today I received the email below from the Green Party of the United States, and I responded by writing the following letter to the Commission on Presidential Debates. I urge you as well to compose a similar letter in your own words, even if you disagree with my political views but stand for open, fair, and inclusive public debates.

In hindsight I wished I’d added a demand for rigorous and honest debate, not rehearsed campaign slogans and sidestepping speeches designed to distract voters and avoid the responsibilities of debate. Dr. Jill Stein is once again the presidential candidate for the Greens, and she is an articulate, knowledgeable, and formidable debater. Turn her and the others lose upon the public stages of America! Again, this is not about supporting Jill Stein or any one particular candidate or political party, but about opening up a closed system that in being so closed makes a mockery of the U.S.A. as a democratic republic.

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Grexit Crisis: EU Disunion or Greater Unification?

Sometimes the fate of the world hinges on how a seemingly local crisis is resolved or escalates. So it is with Greece.

2x.01 Grexit Crisis

Greece and Europa, and yes, the world is at yet another unsteady crossroads. We look at the Grexit Crisis within the context of the Bigger Picture here in this article. The outcome of today’s Grexit Crisis may plunge us further into recession and depression, or begin to turn things around for the working class everywhere. The Grexit Crisis may trip us closer into a nuclear world war, which, seriously, already looms far closer than many realize or most want to think. Or in a much more preferable outcome so rearrange the balance of military and geopolitical power as to make such a conflagration unlikely. The European Union could fracture, as seems likely, as it is primarily a non-democratic financial treaty organization, or draw itself together into a truly democratic political federation where the working classes assert more socialist power.

The leaders of the European Union, under pressure from the Troika, today gave Greece and its Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras five more days to submit another set of proposals. The Troika demanded the new proposals be worded as if the Greek government is, ironically, responsible to save the Eurozone from financial catastrophe and possible economic collapse. It’s as if those political puppets of the capitalist plutocrats are crying, “Save us by further enriching the banksters who engineered this damn mess in the first place!”

The creditors of the Troika composed of the European Central Bank (ECB), the International Monetary Fund, and the European Commission (EC as the executive body of the EU), demand repayment and greater austerity from a nation unable to do either. The Troika has manipulated and exploited Greece and sucked it dry. If anything, the banksters, those pro-Troika gangsters in business suits, praised as educated standard bearers of capitalism, behave as financial vampires. Anchored in bastions of global financial power, they are determined to uphold the domination of finance capitalism as a form of neo-fascist tyranny over Europa. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the woman who stared down Vladimir Putin and made him squirm in his chair earlier this year, comes across more and more as another cold-hearted Margaret Thatcher. We are all in a global class war, and the Grexit Crisis is a major battle in our struggle.

Much fear and paranoia has been and continues to be projected out into the mainstream mass media as well as some of the alternative ones. The pro-Troika side fears whatever they do or don’t do with Greece will set a bad example for the rest of the Eurozone. If they bail out Greece, then other nations within the EU will expect something similar. If they kick out one nation, then the others would fear being kicked out in the future, too, including for any hidden purpose with debt burdens as an excuse to cover the real reasons. If Greece exits the Eurozone, thus the Grexit, Greece exits the European Union. How else can the Greeks stay in, as the EU is not a political union of equals but the result of an economic treaty between unequal members?

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Not Too Late to Rescue our Planet Earth: An Urgent Review

Vote Yes for Democratic World Government

“Extinction is not something to contemplate. It is something to rebel against.”

— Dr. Helen Caldicott, one of Jim’s heroines.

2x.VWG.Unknown

This is a critically important book. Its message is urgent. Democratic world government is an idea whose time is now. Our species stands at the threshold of global upheaval and possible extinction. A convergence of challenges unique in human history threatens to overwhelm us, and a cooperative worldwide response via a constitutional planetary democracy with a socially responsible economy represents the most effective way to address these issues. First, however, we must choose to create these new human systems for our planet. Jim Stark of Canada has come up with a novel yet simple approach to help us get there.

This book is a rare integration of vision and pragmatism. Jim Stark advocates a grass roots, internet-based Global Referendum along with paper mail-in ballots. The ballot proposition is simple and direct. One votes “Yes” or “No” for “Do you support the creation of a directly-elected, representative, transparent, and democratic world parliament that is authorized to legislate on global issues?” Early polls indicate a majority of people around the world and across many different religions and ethnic groups would vote yes if they could. Nation-state regimes, including the non-democratic United Nations, will also have a choice. They can work together with this movement, or be by-passed. In regions of severe repression, warfare, and socio-political-economic upheaval voting may not be possible. And it is a start. It’s start toward achieving a dream many have had for centuries.

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Cold War Blues: A Review

Long overdue recognition for a nearly forgotten part of the Cold War

Image of the Amazon kindle edition cover of Jim Stark's book.

Image of the 2010 Amazon kindle edition cover of Jim Stark’s 1989 book.

Cold War Blues: The Operation Dismantle Story is unique. Jim Stark’s book is a rare and worthy addition to our history of this enigmatic and most dangerous war. First, this book is original history, i.e. a primary source, from the Cold War. It’s not a rehash of espionage dramas, combat ops, or Cuban Missile Crisis politics. It is a detailed account of this planet-wide conflict on a personal level from the anti-war camps. Specifically it addresses the rise and fall of the Operation Dismantle campaign of 1977 – 1985. What makes the book an especially novel read is it’s written in memoir fashion from the perspective of a Canadian pro-peace and anti-nuclear weapons activist, not those espousing American or Soviet viewpoints. One hears the desperation and hope of those within other nations compelled to choose sides in a glacial world war that more than once almost erupted into thermonuclear Armageddon.

Jim and his fellow Canadian activists carved or threatened to established a third front to challenge not just Soviet Communist totalitarianism but the hypocrisy and murderous arrogance of the Western Capitalist, anti-Communist regimes. “Yes, I managed to piss off both superpowers at times,” wrote Jim.[1] Operation Dismantle became a major force to be reckoned with not only in Canada but also with the Americans as it came close to stopping the deployment of U.S. cruise missiles including those quietly armed with atomic warheads into sovereign Canadian territory. Continue reading

The Already Thirty-Five Years’ War

1979-2014 and still counting!

Pope Francis denouncing global violence as "a piecemeal Third World War."

Pope Francis denouncing global violence as “a piecemeal Third World War” at Redipuglia Cemetery where 100,000 Italian soldiers killed in the First World War are buried in Italy near its border with Slovenia, 13 September 2014. Agence France Presse (AFP).

We have been engaged in a nearly continuous but rarely acknowledged war for thirty-five years. It began in 1979, twenty-two years before the terror attacks of 9/11. This war is fought around the globe as a patchwork of campaigns between various factions of multiple and shifting alliances. Even Pope Francis recognized this odd and gruesome conflict as a “piecemeal third world war.” Although the combat is small in scale, it has at least two characteristics of a world war: 1) the sheer number of nation-states, stateless-nations, and non-state groups engaged, and 2) fighting and bombing on every continent save Antarctica.

This war has also been called the Middle East’s version of Europe’s Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) and the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453) due to its widespread, confusing, and desultory patterns of overlapping conflicts and aims. Yet this war is barely recognizable as one long war. Even fewer see the direct relationships between the capitalist system and warfare. The more people see and openly acknowledge we have been in an ongoing war for at least 35 years, the greater we experience a long, overdue change of perspective. The sooner more and more people recognize this long war and numerous others are driven largely by capitalism with its systemic exploitation of ethnic and religious divisions to better access and control natural resources and transportation routes, the sooner we develop strategies to end war. A deep shift in perspective may shift how we approach and resolve this conflict. First we need to see what we are doing.

The morning after airstrikes and cruise missile attacks on homes and buildings destroyed by the United States, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates in Syria with France and the U.K. planning to join the campaign against the Islamic State, 24 September 2014.

Two days after the People’s Climate March in 2,200-2,500 cities across the planet and the morning after airstrikes and cruise missile attacks on homes and buildings destroyed by the United States, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates in Syria with France and the U.K., already in Iraq, planning to join Dutch forces in the Syrian campaign against the Islamic State, 24 September 2014.

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Global Climate Disruption, Capitalism, and the Opportunity for Democratic Socialism

HUMAN-CAUSED POLLUTION, DRAMATICALLY WORSENED BY CAPITALISM, CONSISTENTLY EXCEEDS POLLUTION FROM VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS TO CAUSE SEVERE CLIMATE CHANGE INCLUDING GLACIER MELT, GLOBAL WARMING, SUPERSTORMS WITH EXTREME WEATHER AND TEMPERATURE OSCILLATIONS, AND TUNDRA THAW WITH MASSIVE METHANE RELEASE AND REVIVAL OF LONG-FROZEN PREHISTORIC MICROORGANISMS

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West Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier melts into Earth’s Southern Ocean.

 

 

Antarctica and Greenland

“Remember the front page of The Seattle Times one day last week, a week ago last Monday?” I asked the other participants in the room as I held up a copy from 12 May 2014. The lead article was adorned with a dramatic photograph of West Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier melting in slow yet accelerating collapse into the Southern Ocean. The image was beautiful. Huge. The photo made this crisis feel Leviathan. It felt personal. Still does. For me seeing this news report was my “Oh Shit!” moment, my big “Oh Shit!” moment.

This crisis, this moment also presents an opportunity for those of us on the Revolutionary Left. We’ve been engaged in struggles to unify the working classes and others among the 99% to build a Democratic Socialist civilization atop the wreckage of our Capitalist system for a long time. This is now our time, and it will stay our time but only if we make it so. Climate change will not wait. Capitalism will not wait as it continues to bind the world into an iron net of digital tyranny and financial despotism. The logical conclusion of Capitalism is globalized Fascism and self-destruction as what’s left of our biosphere is ruined in the desperate scramble for anything to eat, steal, sell, or blame. The twin disasters of Capitalism and climate change seem slow and twisting. Yet they accelerate toward one disaster after another. Neither crisis will wait for anyone or for anything.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, the UN IPCC, released a new and disturbing report earlier this Spring of 2014. It firmly established the primacy of anthropogenic or human-made causes of climate change over other factors. The scientists involved drove home climate change is a long-term problem with a severe impact upon our biosphere. Indeed, there will be multiple severe effects. This likely will produce unexpected surprises. Perhaps the surprises won’t be as dramatic as a world war or an extreme climate yo-yo but something more subtle such as the resurrection of dormant prehistoric bacteria and viruses released from thawing tundra.

Scientists earlier this year discovered giant viruses reanimating out in the Siberian tundra. The world is warming up. The Arctic tundra is thawing out. Methane gas is escaping from the permafrost. Frozen mammoth specimens are found in spectacular condition. And the largest known viruses, so far, are reviving. The most recent one is an enormous Siberian Pithovirus 30,000 years old. These giant viruses are still alive. They’re infecting and killing the local amoeba population. Scientists consider it easily probable other prehistoric pathogens, frozen alive for tens of thousands of years, may escape as temperatures rise to cause pandemics of deadly diseases among contemporary humans, livestock, and crops as well as wild plants and animals.

30,000 year old amoeba-killing Pithovirus from Siberia. Image by Julia Baroli & Chantal Abergel, IGS, CNRS/AMU, 05 March 2014.

Giant 30,000 year old amoeba-killing Pithovirus from Siberia. Image by Julia Baroli & Chantal Abergel, IGS, CNRS/AMU, 05 March 2014.

We are vulnerable as a species. Adaptation and preparation will prove crucial although exhausting. We’ll encounter limits as we run out of options. Most importantly, however, is we move forward with great speed and urgency to implement significant, indeed revolutionary changes. We do not have much time. We do, however, have choices and proven strategies.

A Democratic Socialist alternative, for example, will allow our species to establish a common front to address this Capitalist-induced destruction of our planet. We must first build such a unified front. Here in Seattle, those of us in the Socialist Alternative are positioned to provide leadership and inspiration to working people during this time of worldwide climate disruption. A majority of citizens recently elected Kshama Sawant, a teacher, economist, and activist in the Socialist Alternative, to the Seattle City Council in 2013 over a long-entrenched Democrat. Together with other labor activists we successfully spearheaded a rough and tumble drive to raise the minimum working wage to $15.00 an hour.

Numerous other groups are active as well in the struggle for our environment. Most of them are focused on singular issues such as stopping the coal and oil trains, tackling fracking, reducing carbon dioxide emissions, cleaning up polluted areas, and transitioning away from fossil fuels to green renewables. There has been a patchwork of local and regional successes, but many have been reduced under repeated onslaughts of Big Business as Capitalists seek to deepen their grip on our society. The Corporatocracy is relentless in its pursuit of resources to fuel its expansion of power. We’re focused, however, on local-global economic and labor issues. Yet climate change won’t wait for workers to wake up and take charge of our economy. Nor will the Capitalists in power wait for us workers to rise up. Earth’s environmental crises, however, won’t wait, not for anyone. Within the past year we Democratic Socialists achieved remarkable successes locally. We’ve been driving hard in a most difficult struggle to improve the lives of workers and their families. Economic and environmental issues are mutually intertwined. Will we take this opportunity?

Look at the picture of those melting glaciers in West Antarctica again.

James Yungel of the NASA team captured the photo. The “collapse of massive portions of the Antarctic ice sheet” appeared “inevitable.” Indeed, the speed of melting and collapse with rising seas is faster than initially feared. The epic disaster unfolding across our southernmost continent was deemed “unstoppable.” Mother Jones even shouted, “Holy Shit!”

This calamity is global. It was visible. You can see it all around without the immediate drama of human beings with their towns and cities ravaged by wars and earthquakes. Yet it could conceivably help bring an end to the current global civilization humans have built here on Earth. The melting West Antarctic ice sheets reinforce the idea global climate change, including global warming, is really global climate disruption.

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Response to a Concerned Small Business Owner over 15 NOW

Earlier this month I posted a link on one of my social media sites to an essay I wrote the night before, “Yes, $15 an hour minimum wage, NOW!” Among the people who responded along a spectrum between yes and no were two from my native state of Virginia. Let’s call one of them Brigid, which, of course, is not her real name. Brigid, a progressive liberal more radical than many and as mellow as a Summer pond at twilight, expressed concern about us activists moving too fast to raise the minimum wage. She thought proponents for $15 now would be wise to slow down and take more time. After all, why rush it and mess it up for all of us?

More captivating, however, was a wrenching inquiry from a friend of mine back East. He was a small business owner who ran a small but bustling bakery and café. My friend, let’s call him Isaac, declared raising the minimum wage up to $15 an hour “would put” him “out of business in one month.” Unless, he said, he jacked up his prices. I could hear him as he pounded his fist upon the countertop as he continued. “The socialist-workers rights-stick-it-to-the-man person in me loves it, but I am the man here. This seriously would break me,” he wrote. “Why do this if prices just rise in concert with pay?”

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Yes, $15 an hour minimum wage, NOW!

Fight for 15, Fight for the Working Class, Fight for Justice, Fight for Freedom. Solidarity!

Fight for 15, Fight for the Working Class, Fight for Justice, Fight for Freedom. Solidarity!

Those who argue against raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour do not get it. These naysayers spin broken webs of economic facts and figures rooted not in the reality of our natural environment but inside the charts and computer algorithms of a virtual world divorced from physical reality. It’s not about the money. I want to stand up and shout, “It’s not about the money; it’s about people! Real live human beings! It’s about relationships, our relationships! It’s about class war.”

Life is Struggle. The working classes get life is a struggle. So do artists and small business owners. So do the unemployed, the underemployed, the homeless, the foreclosed, the laid off, the poorly paid, the uneducated, the overeducated, students deep in debt, the hungry, the sick, the pissed off.

This is part of our struggle to build Democratic Socialism. As such we seek to remove banksters and Corporacrats from power. Get them out of out of politics and government. We work to reclaim democracy from the grip of the rich. We intend to go further and put democracy and justice into business, into the workplace, and into the marketplace.

This struggle is part of finishing what the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., started. He knew we couldn’t have political democracy until we also have economic democracy. This is not about the stupidity of self-righteous fools who ridicule the spelling and grammar of hardworking low-wage workers such as myself, but for democracy based upon human rights and social responsibilities instead of property rights and financial violence.

We understand this is an issue of ethics and even morals. We get in a way sheltered pundits do not the Great Global Recession did not end in 2009. Indeed, this worldwide almost-Second Great Depression continues to grind on and on without any clear end in sight. These are hard times for large numbers of people from the poor to the middle.

Remember bad times don’t last forever. We must remember our victories during times of discouragement. We must remind ourselves during those moments when we just wanna quit all this will pass. So, yes, stop and rest a bit. Then get back up and keep going. Because we’ve already come a helluva long way! We learn, adapt, and adjust. Together we recalibrate, grow, and evolve. Ours is the search for what works and best serves us thru inquiry, action, results, and analysis. It is the Dialectical process.

You keep going. We all keep going. We go. Action is better than indulging in cynicism, apathy, and do-nothingism. Struggle serves to move us hard working people from enduring ever more suffering-to-barely-survive to rise up to stand in our power and thrive.

The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., reminded us in the last speech he made before he was assassinated he’s “been to the mountaintop,” he stood up there and looked over and saw the Promised Land. He knew all of us would get there. We will get there, and we will get there together!

 

William Dudley Bass
8-9 April 2014
Seattle, Washington
Cascadia

See:

Fight for a $15/hour Minimum Wage, <https://www.15now.org>.

Sign up here ASAP to register for the national conference scheduled for Saturday 26 April 2014 for raising the minimum wage: Onto the Ballot, Into the Streets, <https://www.15now.org/april-26>.

Let’s unite and give each other our support!

Also see William  Bass’s earlier article, “Raise the Minimum Wage,” with its extensive list of Sources, at <https://williamdudleybass.com/raise-the-minimum-wage>.

***

Copyright © 2014, 2015, 2016 by William Dudley Bass.

All Rights Reserved until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship

of and for our Earth and Solarian Commons.

Thank you.

 

Blundering into Armageddon

Are our leaders mad? Are they deliberately setting the stage for a series of interlocking wars and economic collapses? All to look like accidents? Our leaders’ heartless mistakes of opportunity may indeed wipe out millions, even billions. For what? Are they are prepared to absorb extreme costs as the price to pay for extreme victory? Or are our leaders clueless? Are they just fucking stupid? Reacting with military precision directed with sloppy, nationalistic stupidity to converging crises overwhelming common sense, good judgment, and cooperative intelligence? And what the hell are We the People gonna do? Are we going to just read about it in a tweet the next day after half the world blows up? “Good morning! 1/2 earth blown up…the end looks better n movies & cool, i can still tweet!”

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Violence and Nonviolence are Tools

Is Nonviolence a Tactic, Policy, or Principle?

Is Violence Pragmatic and Necessary?

Both can be ineffective. Both can be effective.

It’s not Violence vs. Nonviolence.

It’s Violence and Nonviolence, and

how they’re leveraged for success.

Violence, nonviolence, and civil disobedience are tools in the great struggle against tyranny and oppression. They have been used in the great class war against the Global Financial and Political Elites. They still are. These tools are strategies and tactics based upon values and principles. Violence and nonviolence are no more anything else than the term Global War on Terrorism is rife with misnomers. Terror is a feeling. It’s an immediate physiological response to a reactive emotion. Flight or fight or freeze and still piss your pants. Terrorism is a tactic in crime and war. It’s been pointed out repeatedly one cannot wage a military campaign against tactics. Instead, one does so with strategies and tactics against enemies using terror as a tactic.

Many of us confuse nonviolence with being a rigid “thing.” Growing numbers of people continue to feel inspired by the fierce stands Mahatma Gandhi and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., took for nonviolence. Ironically, both were murdered almost 20 years apart during periods of violent civil strife. Their deaths sparked even greater outbreaks of violence.

Even so, many people view nonviolence as an inviolate colonnade of pillars holding up temples of peace as if such abstractions of mind existed out in the physical world. Nonviolence, a tool, has come to be regarded as religious doctrine by many people. Instead of a tactic, however, it’s another invisible but real, to them, flying buttress supporting the invisible architecture of an abstract cathedral. By doing so, these believers in the holiness of this abstract tool risk bringing everything they stand for collapsing down upon them in bloody ruin.

The proponents of nonviolence, upholding Gandhi and King and even Buddha and Jesus, often dismiss or suppress any challenge to nonviolence. Who would dare question nonviolence? I imagine the Global Elites and the security and intelligence apparatus under their control appreciate being the only ones to dispense violence while not receiving any in turn. Nonviolence helps keeps them in power.

Don’t make any abstraction of mind so rigid an ideology it cripples effective action. It doesn’t matter if it’s politics, religion, economics, or tradition. Those nouns, those words stand for concepts with definitions held within the abstract mind. Which means we make it all up in our heads and call it “real.” If enough people agree yes, it’s real indeed, and then we label it “consensual reality.” And so we go, as brilliantly collapsed as ever. All abstractions are tools.

The most effective toolboxes have a modest variety of choices. It is the same during resistance against oppression and struggles for justice, equality, and liberty. We struggle against the class war of the financial elites, against institutionalized racism, corporatism, sexism, corruption, and fascism. We struggle for social, environmental, and economic justice. We struggle for power. Aye, we struggle for the power to determine our own lives together.

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Raise the Minimum Wage

It’s not about the Money

Up Close and Uncompromising! The front of one of the famous Red T-Shirts worn by volunteers for Kshama Sawant's Socialist Alternative Campaign for Seattle City Council, Position 2, the 5th of November 2013. Photo by William Dudley Bass.

Up Close and Uncompromising! The front of one of the famous Red T-Shirts worn by volunteers for Kshama Sawant’s Socialist Alternative Campaign for Seattle City Council, Position 2, the 5th of November 2013. Photo by William Dudley Bass.

Those who argue against raising the minimum wage do not get it. The naysayers spin broken webs of economic facts and figures rooted not in the reality of our natural environment but inside the charts and computer algorithms of a virtual world divorced from physical reality. It’s not about the money. I want to stand up and shout, “It’s not about the money; it’s about people! Real live human beings!”

I really want to jump up and yell, “It’s not about money, you insert language most foul!” Such verbal intensity, however deliciously vulgar, would just rile up the troll militias, so I won’t cuss here. It’s challenging enough to feel compassion and empathy for my fellow human beings, including those who exhibit cruelty and heartless stupidity. No matter. We all suffer. Everyone single one of us experiences suffering. Life is Struggle.

The working classes get life is a struggle. So do artists and small business owners. So do the unemployed, the underemployed, the homeless, the foreclosed, the laid off, the poorly paid, the uneducated, the overeducated, students deep in debt, the hungry, the sick, the pissed off. Reformers understand action is better than indulging in cynicism, apathy, and do-nothingism. Revolutionaries understand reform only goes so far before it dead ends in a mirage. Struggle serves to move the working classes from enduring ever more suffering to survive to rising up to stand in their power and thrive.

During these bleak but exciting times I volunteered for Kshama Sawant’s openly Socialist campaign for Seattle City Council. I joined with other veterans of the Occupy Uprisings from the Green Party of Seattle and the Seattle branches of the Socialist Alternatives to serve to get her elected. Other Socialist Alternatives ran strong campaigns elsewhere, especially Ty Moore in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

It proved a tight race. Still counting ballots days after the Election. We rocked the city and made waves across the nation. Ripples were felt around the world. It was an astonishing experience. A small, highly disciplined organization raised well over $110,000 and marshaled over 300 volunteers, many of them part-time volunteers such as myself. What helped us stand out in addition to our red t-shirts was our uncompromising stand for a $15.00 an hour minimum wage.

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Our Current Capitalist-ProtoFascist System as Faux Democracy vs. Neo-Communism and True Democracy

Our human reality as complex social mammals will always banish ideological rigidity to the shadows and destroy all efforts to build any and all Utopias.

Every time.

Perceptions

Perceptions Matter. What People think is true but isn’t vs. What’s so & thus is true vs. What’s possible, especially for us to create once we learn to work together.

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Lessons from Class Warfare and the Death of Occupy

An Analysis of the Successes and Failures of the Occupy Uprising, Occupy’s Comparison with Previous Recent U.S. Revolts, and What’s Likely to Occur Next

Occupy Wall Street! Occupy Earth! Occupy Love! What is our one Demand? WHAT IS OUR ONE DEMAND?

Occupy Wall Street! Occupy Earth! Occupy Love! What is our one Demand? WHAT IS OUR ONE DEMAND? Image altered from the Commons.

Occupy, of course, is not dead. The residue of the movement continues to smolder among the ruins of the Great Global Recession. An occasional flare-up bursts forth in protest here and there. In the underground of cyberspace, however, there lives a vibrant hum of activity. Instead of dramatic visibility in parks and streets, many in the Occupy movement carried their ideals, values, and freshly exercised practices away to their homes, farms, businesses, and neighborhoods.

A new alternative civilization is emerging from the osmosis of Occupy into the greater culture at large. A good term to describe this organic yet deliberate dynamic planetary community is the Breakthru Civilization. We’re breaking thru old paradigms and ways of being that no longer serve humanity as these obsolete ways aid in the destruction of life on Earth. Breakthru from love and respect for life to love and respect our selves, one another, and our planet. It is a difficult challenge to move forward towards hate, fear, and violence with compassion, forgiveness, and love armed with nothing more than aware minds, open hearts, and firm backbones. Yet this Breakthru accelerates the expansion of individual awareness and mass consciousness to understand and embrace Socialism as perhaps the only immediate alternative to the current system dominated by Capitalism and corporatist fascism.

The number of activists has dwindled since those promising days from September 2011 to May 2012. They certainly no longer reflect the greater 99%. Instead, Americans woke up to the reality of economic inequality and class war. Occupy called attention to this invisibly visible ugliness so vividly the topic of class warfare was debated among Republicans and Democrats during the 2012 Presidential Elections. Yet Occupy itself subsided into the nooks and crannies of local neighborhoods.

What happened? Especially after so much occurred in the beginning to astonish and galvanize people around our planet?

Before I answer those questions, we must acknowledge and celebrate Occupy’s multiple successes. Occupy left enough of a significant impact, certainly in the short term as this story has yet to run its course, to perhaps catalyze a larger and more multifaceted transformation than is often realized. It’s still too new. So let’s celebrate a few successes:

"The Extreme Inequality is Killing us - our Commons, our Democracy." Syd Fredrickson in Occupy Seattle, October 8, 2011.

“The Extreme Inequality is Killing us – our Commons, our Democracy.” Syd Fredrickson of the Green Party in Occupy Seattle, 8 October 2011. Photo by William Bass.

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Summer Twilight of the Burning Sky

The following anomalous event occurred one summer in the early 1970s in rural Prince Edward County, south-central Virginia. It remains unexplained.

This weird incident happened about five or six years after my family and I experienced an unidentified flying ship over the fields and woods behind our farmhouse. Those two experiences may have nothing to do with each other except both were strange and were dismissed, ridiculed, or explained away by our American Government.

Our paranoid Cold War fears intensified after the anomaly occurred this particular hot and sweaty summer evening. I was a young teenager back then. A group of us kids played outside in a grassy cow pasture between my house and the neighbors’. Joe, my younger brother, was running around with us, too. Our parents were out and about in their respective yards. The fireflies were already out, winking on and off along the edge of the woods bordering the field even though there was still plenty of light left. We called ’em lightnin’ bugs. The sweet smell of wild honeysuckle drifted in from the bushes growing thick along the edges of the fields. We jerked alert as we found ourselves and everything around us bathed in glowing light. It happened fast. BOOM without sound.

“Whoa, look!” shouted one friend in awe. “Look at the sky!”

“Oh, wow!”

“What the hell is that?”

“I sure don’t think it’s Jesus comin’ back. Don’t hear no trumpets a blowin’.”

“Trumpets, shit. Maybe the Russians are bombin’ us.”

“Or aliens from Outer Space!”

“Whoa, look at that! Hey, over there, too. Oh man, the sky’s on fire!”

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Amend the Second Amendment: An Immodest Proposal

Amendment II
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

This is the second of the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, those collectively regarded as the Bill of Rights. The Second Amendment was ratified on December 15, 1791. That’s a little more than fifteen years after the American Declaration of Independence and eight years after the Peace Treaty of Paris ended the American Revolutionary War. It became known as the “Right to Bear Arms” amendment.

Note the Constitution lacks any direct reference to individual self-defense.  Instead we have a muddled Second Amendment that declares a stand for the right to bear Arms. Not swords, battle-axes, legs, or cannon, but arms as in firearms as in guns. It doesn’t proclaim a right to self-defense. Indeed, there is not any reference whatsoever to any right of self-defense. Which is interesting, isn’t it?

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Guns, Madness, and Mass Shootings as the Perfect Storm of Blowback hits Mount Rainier


U.S. veteran Benjamin Colton Barnes, proud of his guns, in
a photo from Pierce County Sheriff Department archives. Note
the high-capacity magazine clips on both firearms.

This undated photo provided by Mount Rainier National Park shows park Ranger Margaret Anderson. Anderson, 34, was fatally shot Sunday, Jan. 1, 2012, at Mount Rainier National Park in Washington state, according to the National Park Service.
Ranger Margaret Anderson, Mount Rainier
National Park, Washington State. Photo
from MRNP archives.

New Year’s Day 2012 began as if Doomsday had arrived way too early from out of the prophesized Mayan Apocalypse. By the time the one-man war of Army veteran Benjamin Colton Barnes ended, two people are dead with four more injured, two of them critically wounded, three children left without parents, and communities across the United States, including Mount Rainier National Park were devastated. It’s almost a year, too, after Rep. Gabby Giffords and a number of others were shot with many killed in Tucson, Arizona. Excuse my lack of professionalism, but WTF?

In grotesque mockery of its own Constitution, the United States Government continues its overreaching neo-imperial agenda. We invade Iraq for the oil, for revenge against Saddam, and to outflank Iran and thumb our noses at Russia and China. We spend more money on our military than the next 17 countries combined. Yet we don’t help our veterans. And anytime you send people into combat, battles, and wars, guess what? Real, live human beings – men, women, and children are killed and maimed, often in horrific manner. Many in our Armed Forces return with damaged minds. Not everyone, but many more than most admit.

Since our government is so deep in debt and has been played by the banksters, it implements austerity measures and cuts services. National Park services get cut. Rangers get less support.

Bankster and corporatocratic manipulation of finances, markets, political elections, and government leads to illegal wars and economic disruption.

Illegal wars are still real wars. Our young men and women kill and injure other human beings. Many of our men and women are themselves killed and injured. All survivors witness great destruction. The Americans return home, and some of them break down, fall apart, and go crazy. And usually not in ways that engender sympathy.

A government short on money begins by cutting then chopping services. “Our” Federal Government begins by eviscerating federal institutions. Not nearly enough health care is provided for our veterans and their families, especially psychotherapy and counseling. It’s easier, faster, and cheaper to build flashy new weapons and weapons systems. Other federal services get cut, including the national park service.

Benjamin Colton Barnes was a former soldier in the United States Army. He served in the Iraq campaigns of 2007-2008 during the Global Long War on Terror. A private first class, he served in communications while deployed into Iraq. Barnes was also released from the military with a misconduct discharge for a string of offenses.

At a New Year’s Eve 2011 party in Skyway, a satellite town on the edge of the Greater Seattle Pugetopolis, Washington State, a number people brought guns including military weaponry to show off, brag, and posture. The rest of us would likely call them “gun nuts,” a term I reserve NOT for those who respect the firearms they collect and the responsibilities the right to possess a firearm demands, but for those who are immature, violent, and spoiling for a fight. The latter are consumed with egoitis. Barnes was at the party with several hot dates, all of them guns.

Posturing and bragging led to bruised egos. The ego is easily wounded when one’s skin is so thin. Arguments escalated into threats escalated into a gun battle. The details remain murky, but so far it appears Barnes took on the others, big bad soldier from Iraq he is, or was. In the ensuing firefight Barnes shot four people. Two of them were grievously injured and remain in critical care.

Barnes fled the party early in the morning of 1 January 2012. He drove off in a car with guns, knives, ammo, and survival gear. He raced into Mount Rainier National Park to hide out in the middle of the Cascade Mountains. Mt. Rainier remains one of the world’s most dangerous volcanoes, is more massive of a mountain than any of those in the Himalayans, and soars skyward to 4,392 meters or 14,411 feet above sea level. The Mountain dominates the Pacific Northwest and is the black hole of severe winter storms. It receives astounding amounts of precipitation. Its vast slopes are blanked with heavy, deep snow, thick forests, and icy glaciers.

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Violence: After Newtown

There are days and there are nights when the best way to face horror and tragedy is to go right into it, into the pain, and not turn away.

The recent gun massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, touches us all on some level as our lives are so intertwined. A young man, Adam Lanza, sick with perhaps more than one illness, shot dead 20 young boys and girls, seven adults, and then took his own life. His illnesses are termed “psychological” or “mental” even though all such disorders stem from the body as mind arises from brain activity. Reports claim he shot many of these people numerous times. He was so accurate with his gun that there were no survivors among those he shot.

Police reports claim he used a Bushmaster .223 caliber Remington AR-15, a semiautomatic rifle. It’s a demilitarized version of the Army’s Vietnam-era M16 and is categorized as an assault rifle. Our national ban on assault rifles expired in 2004. Adam Lanza also allegedly carried two handguns and several hundred rounds of ammunition including high-capacity magazines for the Bushmaster. He stole these weapons from his mother, a registered gun owner, whom he killed first.

Regardless of deep emotions and strong beliefs inflamed by such murders, this massacre of schoolchildren as young as six and seven years old aroused a nation. Indeed, it aroused the world. We are once again reminded that even though we divide ourselves over politics, religion, and ethnicity, we are still one species sharing one planet.

Many issues are at stake here. What is most striking is even though so many people have staked out rigid positions on the various issues; many more are willing to engage in dialogue about them for solutions. That is good news and feels long overdue.

Let me name the dragons we finally have the courage to face as a nation. Keep in mind that to name something is to identify it and to some degree rob it of its power. To name something is to respond without reacting and thus we take on being responsible. By taking on responsibility, especially after first accepting what has happened even if we don’t like it, we become cause in the matter, not victims of circumstance.

Below I name our dragons:

This is an issue of emotionally laden language between groups of people who label each other “gun nuts” versus “gun grabbers.” The issue is the capacity and the willingness to set such divisive blame and shame language aside, or the incapacity and unwillingness for people to do so. Can we stop calling each other names?

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We’re at the Brink of War

We are at the brink of war. You won’t find this being addressed in our current run of debates between Republicans and Democrats here in America. When I say “war,” I refer to major regional or world war, not the Global Long War on Terror. The black hole of world war is opening right now in the Middle East.

Allied countries, despite their angry rhetoric with each other, are lining up against other allied countries that also squabble among themselves. Common self-interests in the midst of extreme crises have a way of polarizing nations into opposing armed camps. This whirlpool of destruction will quickly pull in a succession of nations from all over Earth. Ongoing smaller wars around the world will likely merge into a planetwide conflagration as fast as news zips through cell phones and the Internet.

You will find little news of these urgent matters in the majority of the mainstream mass media, although tidbits surface now and then. I search through military and intelligence sources, scan news from both the far right and the far left, and sift through educated opinions from ivory tower pundits to conspiracy theory gurus. There is a lot out of detailed information out there, but so little for the public to readily see.

Why is something so vitally important kept out of the public discourse?

Several reasons exist. Primarily no one in power really wants all-out war and thus they seek to ignore or deflect attention away from its buildup. Why not inform the public? We can handle the news.

Many in the know understand such a war will crash the world economy during this Great Global Recession. An economic collapse will lead to greater environmental destruction and possibly famine. Survivors will ravage our environment even further for energy and resources in order to rebuild. We’ve not as a species experienced the collapse of a complex global economy on such a scale before. No one in their heart wants this in their legacy.

Because such a war will upend significant elections such as the American electorate voting for Obama or for Romney or other candidates. No candidate wants a war on their hands in a war-weary nation. Right? After all, we’re inundated with doom and gloom and jokes about the end of the world because it’s the year 2012.

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Public Control of the Money Power similar to Civilian Control of the Military

We need to establish public control of the money power. We must transition away from central bank currency such as Federal Reserve Notes to printing our own currency. Money is currently dominated and controlled by the international central banking system and national tax regimes. In the United States that means the Federal Reserve System, the Big Banks, and even the IRS. Our money is controlled, dominated, and even owned by private interests among the Global Financial Elite and their Allies behind the facade of the Fed and our banking system. Even our Department of Treasury and many government regulators are beholden to the central banks and transnational financial institutions that dominate Wall Street and thus Main Street.

Our money is not truly “our” money. Not yet. The principle of civilian control of the military power serves as a model to apply.

On June 23, 2010, American President Barack Obama relieved General Stanley McChrystal of command of global Allied forces in Afghanistan. It was a quick and decisive stroke by a President often criticized for prolonged deliberation or by war hawks as “not man enough.” The sacking of McChrystal has been compared to President Abraham Lincoln’s firing of General George B. McClellan in the U.S. Civil War and of President Harry Truman firing General Douglas MacArthur in the Korean War.

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Don’t Waste Your Vote on Obama or Romney

Don’t waste your vote on two-headed snakes. Do not vote for Democrat Barack Obama or Republican Mitt Romney. Vote independent.

Please don’t get me wrong, as both President Obama and former Governor Romney are fundamentally good men. They do, however, represent the lock on power the two major parties have on behalf of the Financial – Power Elite and their Allies. They already dominate our political landscape from Washington, D.C. to the most remote county. Any major party candidate, left and right, it doesn’t matter one whit, is constrained by dependence on sponsors and handlers. As such they will continue to undermine your Constitution. Their actions increase or allow for others to increase the power of the 1%ers over the rest of us 99%.

Republicans and Democrats rile us up and tear us apart over social issues and yet they differ little on true and significant reforms. There is little or no real movement to address the truly serious and potentially catastrophic issues we face today as not just Americans but as a species sharing this planet.

Instead our major politicians debate like entertainment celebrities and offer bland, band-aid solutions as they stay the course straight toward the edge of the cliff. For example, none of their ballyhooed economic and financial reforms will make a lick of difference until drastic reforms of the Fed, the international central banking system, fiat currency, the tax regime, and the ruptures between our economy, energy, and the environment are resolved.

Over the years you’ve likely heard the mantra warning citizens not to waste their votes on third party, alternative, or independent candidates. We the People are encouraged to give up and surrender to the reality that politics are a corrupt circus dominated by Big Everything – corporations, banks, political parties, special interests, and the military-industrial-surveillance complex. So we are told don’t waste our votes on any candidate who is not a Democrat or a Republican.

I say don’t waste your vote voting for the major party candidates. Save yourselves. Save your counties, towns, parishes, cities, states, territories, wards, and districts. Save your country. Save America. Save Planet Earth. Vote independent. Vote third party. Vote for liberty and the constitution. Vote against the tyranny of a gridlocked, two-party system that divides people emotionally over hot button social issues like abortion but otherwise are the same.

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Seeing Chris Guillebeau in Seattle for his new $100 Startup Book

Yesterday morning I sat down with a cup of strong Irish tea to catch up on a ton of email. I didn’t get very far before I discovered Chris Guillebeau was scheduled to speak that night at Town Hall Seattle. I’ve never met the guy, and his writings expressing his unique way of thinking about our world provoke and inspire me. I love his blog The Art of Non-Conformity: Unconventional Strategies for Life, Work and Travel. He has a book out with the same title that also stirs the pot, your pot, with relish. It stirred my pot for sure.

Fueled up with a late afternoon cup of coffee, I hustled downtown and promptly got lost. I make the same stupid mistake every time by parking in the wrong underworld garage then meandering around in the labyrinthine maze atop the Convention Center lid over the freeways. I caught myself ranting on the phone to my wife as I tried to get her to come meet me, but she was too far away to arrive anywhere close in time.

She listened with more patience than me as I caught myself getting angry. Feeling silly, I burst out laughing at what a fool I was. I cooled off quick and chilled out. There were more important things to do than get wiggy over buses and cars, and, boom, Town Hall. Wow, I’ve never happened upon it so quickly. I could hear the Universe poking me and saying, “So, there!”

It was only $5.00 to get in to Chris Guillebeau’s presentation Downstairs at Town Hall. Wow. And between the time I paid $5.00 and scurried back from the bathroom the numbers of people in the room had swelled from about a dozen to well over a hundred folks. As more poured in the staff flung open the partition curtains and arranged more rows of chairs. And still more people arrived.

Chris Guillebeau is a tall, lean, young man who lives with his wife Jolie in Portland, Oregon. Apparently she lets him travel as long as he promises to keep coming back home to her. He’s never worked a real job and has been self-employed most of his life. Chris is a world traveler and adventurer who’s been to, as of last count, 183 nations. He’s a salesman, volunteer activist, writer, entrepreneur, networker, published author, and a blogger with a global following.

I think of Chris Guillebeau as a type of guerrilla Seth Godin as he operates on a much smaller budget than that genius on the Hudson. Chris has demonstrated he’s a man of action and vision, probably in that order, and is both proud and humble.

In person he’s courteous, friendly, easy-going, and piercing. Up on stage he is an acute, attentive listener with a quick mind. Chris bows before his mentors and his followers and acknowledges he wouldn’t be anywhere without both. He demonstrates a gift for speaking with a certain cadence right into the ears and minds of another’s listening. And his stories are … amazing. What people do to move forward when they choose to move is awe inspiring. His unique perspective on the Great Global Recession with his mix of gloomy realism and optimistic opportunism inspires. I could feel the whole room bend forward in … wow, in gladness, in hope. But don’t get your hopes up too high. Chris Guillebeau is much too pragmatic and down-to-earth to be anyone’s messiah.

Chris is on a whirlwind tour across North America to market his new book, The $100 Startup: Reinvent The Way You Make A Living, Do What You Love, And Create A New Future. He presents his two primary themes: “freedom” and “value.” He is all about freedom. He is for each person establishing their freedom – if they choose to do so. It is a choice, and he points out too many people give up before they even get going as they believe being free is just too hard, too much work, too expensive, etc. And he is aware to be truly free and independent is only true within the context of our interdependent networks. Chris is also a big stand for value and redefines value as something a person creates to share with others. It doesn’t do any good to invent or create the most astounding thing only to hide it or use it for extorting extreme prices.

There are other themes, too. Our current economic hard times are truly HARD TIMES. Everywhere he goes Chris encounters many, many, way too many highly qualified, educated, and skilled human beings out of work or underemployed. Either they lost their jobs or their businesses failed. When Chris saw over 300 supereducated people apply for a low-level clerical position for $14 an hour with 0 benefits, he knew the system is broken.

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Faith vs. Data vs. What’s Really Important

Seth Godin, a master blogger and bestselling author over in New York highlighted, once posted on the tension between faith and data. First, allow me to distinguish between those two words.

I define “faith” as a belief in something without any evidence and often in the face of evidence to the contrary. Boiled down having faith is the desire to believe. And humans want to believe what they wish to be true.

Sometimes faith is a negative. Witness, for example, all the bloodshed committed and endured in the name of religions, notorious for demanding faith in many things for which there is no empirical evidence and with each religion claiming competing and opposing “truths” for faiths at odds with each other. Religious institutions demand faith from their followers.

And yet faith is what drives people to push on through great hardship and challenge to ultimately succeed. Faith inspires people to attempt and actually achieve amazing things often in the face of ridicule, harassment, even “proof” held up and waved in their faces to demonstrate their foolhardiness. Faith triumphs. But is it really important?

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Grassroots Global Democracy Online: Vote Now

Almost a year after I first urged people to vote and to vote “YES!” in the Global Referendum for Democratic World Government, humanity continues to blunder toward global collapse where worse case scenarios are fast becoming the most likely scenarios. Those who sound the warnings may as well be shouting into the hurricane for even more seem eager to ignore and deny the mountainside of complex troubles avalanching down upon us.

Those who are aware wonder what more can they do if anything. Many struggle alone or in small groups in the cause of their choices, large organizations have gone deep to stay alive but focus upon only one cause, with much of their energy diverted to fundraising, while the rest of us feel resigned, cynical perhaps, apathetic, demoralized, even depressed. I call this the “whatever syndrome,” as in when you tell someone that this time the sky really is falling or the wolves are actually killing and eating the sheep they just shrug their shoulders, mumble “Whatever,” and go back to doing whatever they happen to be doing. “Whatever,” right?

Folks, there IS something positive each one of us can do.

Vote “Yes!” for a Democratic World Parliament. And do it now. I voted “Yes.” Tell others to do it, too. Go to the website, http://www.voteworldparliament.org and vote.

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Citizens United vs. FEC: Corporate Power Corrupts Planetary Democracy

Democracy lost on January 21, 2010. It is a significant loss in the on-going war (let’s cut to the chase here folks, this ain’t “tension” between factions within a national democracy; it’s a war for global domination between those favoring American democracy versus the transnational corporate elite).

The case in question is Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The United States Supreme Court rule 5-4 in favor of Big Business and the financial elite and their power to corrupt our political elections and thus buy out our governments at all levels. The Corporatocracy won another round in its efforts to not just influence but also dominate the government of the most powerful nation-state on the planet. Little noticed in the outcry is that labor unions also achieved a victory, although unions have been in decline for decades now and are dwarfed by the financial elite.

This ruling gives more power to the principle known as “corporate personhood.” Human beings create corporations. They outlive people, often influence and dominate society at all levels from local neighborhoods to international, and are composed of people from numerous nation-states who are often not citizens of the countries in which corporate power is wielded.

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Global Disaster Response in Haiti a Prelude to Unification?

The giant Indian Ocean and Asian earthquake and tsunami of December 2004, which claimed about 230,000 lives and probably more from the East African coast to the Indian subcontinent to Indonesia and Thailand, caused the entire planet to vibrate. It also elicited the first truly global response to a humanitarian disaster. We even saw two former American presidents of opposing political parties, George H. W. Bush the Republican and Bill Clinton the Democrat, working together and working together as friends to help lead the relief and reconstruction efforts.

The May 2008 Typhoon Nargis disaster in Myanmar/Burma was a potential international aid response but was thwarted by the military junta in power. There were and have been other significant disasters, many that did elicit aid from different countries responding to a crisis in another, including famines, but nothing of the scale of the global response to the 2004 tsunami.

In Haiti in the wake of the devastating January 2010 earthquake we see it again and in a more evolved fashion. The response to the quake was immediate, far more immediate by the United States, for example, than it’s response to its own 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster. In fact strong aftershocks continue as I write.

Our response to Haiti’s crisis is beyond international; it is global. Fellow human beings from around the planet have rallied to support their own in a small nation-state ravaged even before the giant quake by decades of poverty, dictatorship, coups and low-level civil wars, military occupation, economic exploitation, and environmental destruction.

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Farewell, Atlantis: Goodbye to a Beacon for a United Earth

Atlantis the lost continent may lay buried under the mud at the bottom of the sea, but Atlantis the space shuttle soared high into Space. Captain Christopher Ferguson, United States Navy and a NASA astronaut, is the Commander of the last space shuttle. Not only is the last shuttle for America but also for the world.

The only other one was the Soviet Buran that flew once, unmanned, and then was shut down. In some ways the Buran was a superior vehicle and in other ways not. In any case, no other nation-states are positioned to launch such massive ships. The Soviet Union no longer exists, and the United States has become an overextended and nearly bankrupted empire. It now depends upon the Russian Soyuz to transport humans and supplies to the International Space Station. Unless something goes awry, Atlantis has 12 days to complete its mission.

Atlantis blasted off to cheers and tears this morning of 8 July 2011. This mission is the 33rd for Atlantis and the 135th for NASA’s shuttle program. Almost a million people came to watch the Cape Canaveral, Florida and the NASA Kennedy Space Center may well turn into Postmodern ghost towns. Thirty years of glory with its share of tragedies stirs powerful emotions. Many people remain passionate about the exploration and colonization of Outer Space. Not just Americans, but people from all around the world. Russia, China, India, Brazil, the European Union, even Iran.

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Space Exploration: Will it Help Unify Earth?

The less than two hundred human nation-states of Planet Earth appear doomed to endless squabbling and bloodshed despite grand proclamations of international cooperation. And who can blame them? Our problems feel too vast and overwhelming for the average person including our politicians to understand.

It is easier to go to war and kill each other. It is easier to pollute our environment. It is easier to bail out our faux economy with made-up money. It is easier to go shopping, buy shoes for the kids, and get drunk while watching the latest celebrity scandals on television. Nuclear disarmament in an age of terrorism? Biological warfare? Global warming and climate change? Global climate disruption? Global warming leading to ice ages? Fundamentalism and extremism on the rise in most religions? Poverty? Disease pandemics, hunger, bigotry and discrimination, pollution, deforestation, desertification, overpopulation and mass extinction of species along with weapons of mass destruction freak us out. What are we to do?

Go to Mars.

Explore the Solar System.

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Global Demilitarization: Forgotten Challenges for Today and Tomorrow

Revision of a 2009 Article for Today:

In an October 2009 interview in Time Magazine, Kofi Anan, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations, was asked whether or not “the U.N. should be given the authority to intervene militarily in situations like Darfur.”

“I’m not sure the member states are ready to give the U.N. a standing army….It’s a question of will. And I don’t think you will see a U.N. army,” Mr. Anan replied.

As local crises converge into global crises and threaten to overwhelm us, as the movement to create a democratic world government continues to move forward, national and ethnic military forces will remain perhaps the greatest obstacle to such a government. There exist today a number of different global citizens and democratic world government parties, alliances, coalitions, and institutes.

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Does the U.N. want Global Unity? Will Global Unity be Democratic?

Revision of 2009 Article for 2012:

The majority of New York’s citizens are frazzled this September 2009 by the traffic jams caused by the gathering of the United Nations General Assembly. People wished the whole crowd of dignitaries including undignified celebrity politicians and petty tyrants as well as Neocon-Neolib architects of what seemed to many as the New World Disorder would all go away to another country.

People in other cities and other countries are probably glad the U.N. is not in their town. We all need to remember, however, we may be many countries but one world, many ethnicities but one species. Our finite resources are being consumed by wars and competition between peoples rather than cooperation to address the global crises of our time.

American President Barack Obama, during his first address to the U.N. General Assembly, on 23 September 2009, noted the serious challenges confronting us all these days. He listed some of them, including terrorism, nuclear proliferation, climate change, poverty, protracted wars, pandemic disease, the pursuit of peace, and the global economic recession.

Echoing similar themes of global cooperation from his Berlin Speech in May of 2008 and his Inauguration Speech in January 2009, he declared “Those who used to chastise America for acting alone in the world cannot now stand by and wait for America to solve the world’s problems alone. We have sought – in world and deed – a new era of engagement with the world. Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges.”

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Only Human Beings Have Rights, Not Human Organizations

Courageous people are demonstrating against corporate and bank domination of the American political process and protesting against the abomination of corporate personhood. It is an inspiring call to freedom, a nonviolent call to wake up and occupy, a call based upon a fundamental understanding corporations are not people. We the People of this country…and I would add of everywhere else on our Planet Earth, need to remember some crucial points.

Yes, corporations are not human beings. Corporations, as are any other organizations, are formed by and are composed by individual human beings working in concert and by agreement. Only individual human beings have rights. Human organizations do not have rights. Human beings have rights as individuals because they are human beings, not because individual people are a member of some organization. Human beings as social animals are people, and the people are composed of individual persons.

Corporations are not people. A corporation or any other organization, formal or otherwise, is not a person. Any law stating otherwise exercises fraudulent representations of what a person is and must be repealed. I am reminded of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s distinctions between just and unjust laws, his spotlight on the criminal abuse by authorities of just laws, and his reminder “everything Hitler did was legal.”

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We’re Building a BREAKTHRU Civilization for Love! Occupy Civilization with Love!

Massed demonstrations for Occupy Seattle/Occupy Earth/Occupy Everywhere/Occupy Love. Downtown Seattle, WA, Cascadia, Saturday 15 October 2016.

Massed demonstrations for Occupy Seattle/Occupy Earth/Occupy Everywhere/Occupy Love. Downtown Seattle, WA, Cascadia, Saturday 15 October 2011.

Kristina Katayama Bass going deep at Occupy Seattle/Occupy Earth, Saturday 15 October 2016.

Kristina Katayama Bass going deep at Occupy Seattle/Occupy Earth, Saturday 15 October 2011.

Things are coming together even as things appear to break apart. We are blessed, as I choose to feel blessed even during these hard times, to live during a time of great ferment, upheaval, transition, and possibilities. “Yes!” is the Answer before the Question is asked. More and more of us are standing up for love, for LOVE, as we reclaim our civilization from the brink of Collapse. We can choose to THRIVE!

No to the 1%’s Breakaway Civilization! We’re building a Breakthru Civilization! For Love. Occupy your civilization. With Love. Yes!

Our human civilizations have merged to become one planetary superculture; or rather ours are in a transition of integration. We are already one species descended from many sharing one planet. We are waking up into and claiming the reality of our own interdependence, rather than the illusions of separation and independence or the tyranny of dependence. Our choices are many.

Among them are we must choose between liberty, interdependence, community, democracy, love, compassion, power, peace, sustainability, and unification worldwide. Or give in to the juggernaut of Empire and fear, of dependence and slavery, of shame and separation, of force and fundamentalism, of war and perpetual violence, of exhaustion and collapse. Which do you choose?

We can break our global civilization down into three parts. They are Mainstream Civilization, which is the host for the parasitic Breakaway Civilization, and the co-existing and emergent alternative, what I’ll call the Breakthru Civilization.

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Democratic World Government as Global Networks of Local Communities

Imagine local communities in our towns and cities, in our counties and parishes, in our states and provinces, in our countries around the world voluntarily networking together in some new form of confederation, a worldwide planetary confederation. Imagine establishing new communities or transforming currently existing local communities into autonomous or semi-autonomous geo-political bioregions. Now imagine all of these same local communities and their regions networked together around the world into a global cooperative as postmodern democratic world government. Imagine what’s possible here, as in what’s really possible. Because it is.

Yes, it’s time to stop thinking in terms of the past. It’s not even yesterday anymore. We’re here now, and the future is the future. We need to reclaim our future as a blank slate, as not having occurred yet, not the projection of our past way of thinking beyond now.

Democratic World Government is a loaded term, isn’t it? Many call it DWG to distinguish it from the NWO, or New World Order. And what is government anyway? What does the word “government” mean? It’s just a word, these are all words, and we use language to influence and even create our reality. We shape and mold our individual perception of what’s real as well as agree with others as to what constitutes our consensual reality. Well, language evolves. It evolves in conversation, in writing, in speech, in dialogue, and among communities. If we learn to be mindful and present, if we practice conscious awareness, what realities can you and I create together with others?

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WATUN: Establishing the World Alliance to Transform the UN for Earth Democracy

Foreword: This essay was revised from one first written in September 2009. As such it maintains the perspective of that year.

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Momentum is beginning to develop for the DWG (Democratic World Government) movements. Some individuals and organizations desire to bypass or even abolish the current United Nations. This is understandable as one considers the undemocratic structure of a large bureaucracy that continues to prop up legions of squabbling nation-state regimes.

Others, however, seek a more pragmatic approach that involves working with what already exists and reform the UN. Another group combines vision and pragmatism to go even further: 1) to not just reform the UN but transform the United Nations, and 2) couple this with the Global Referendum on Democratic World Government, a grass roots effort poised to go “viral” planet-wide.

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YES! Vote “Yes” for YOUR Democratic World Government

Foreword: Written a little more than three years ago, the premise advocated for remains the same. Many twists and turns have occurred since 2009, and the world is closer than ever to the possibility of a significant regional, even “true” world war, economic demise, and socio-political turmoil. The nonprofit NGO Vote World Government has since renamed itself Vote World Parliament (VWP) and invited me to serve on its Board. I accepted the honor with gratitude. VWP’s website is now found at:

https://voteworldparliament.org/.

Please go there and vote. Thank you.

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YES! Vote “Yes!” for YOUR Democratic World Government

As humanity continues to blunder toward global collapse where worse case scenarios are fast becoming the most likely scenarios, good people around the world wonder what they can do if anything. Many struggle alone or in small groups in the cause of their choices, large organizations have gone deep to stay alive but focus upon only one cause, while the rest of us feel resigned, cynical perhaps, apathetic, demoralized, even depressed. I call this the “whatever syndrome,” as in when you tell someone that this time the sky really is falling or the wolves are actually killing and eating the sheep they just shrug their shoulders, mumble “Whatever,” and go back to doing whatever they happen to be doing.

Folks, there IS something positive each one of us can do.

Vote “Yes!” for Democratic World Government. And do it now. I voted “Yes.” Tell others to do it, too. Go to the website at:

https://voteworldparliament.org/,

(formerly http://www.voteworldgovernment.org/ and vote.

This is a worldwide internet-based voting via global referendum. You can find out more about it at its companion website:

http://www.rescueplanforplanetearth.com/.

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Restructuring Our Human Economy

We must restructure our economy. Our human economy is out of balance with our planetary biosphere and throws our world civilization into turmoil and upheaval. There are steps we can take to make effective changes.

Temporary solutions such as so-called bailouts and stimulus plans are short-term fixes that, while they may appear necessary, may do little to stop economic collapse. They may in fact increase its severity. Especially since the short-term advantages of bailouts is wasted. Greedy banksters who chose to pack their pockets with bailout money, for example, squander the time gained to institute the necessary radical reforms.

Those who wield real power such as the superwealthy families who own or if they don’t actually “own” certainly control and influence the international bank cartel, the Corporatocracy, and the levers of government and business will find themselves atop a vast, crumbling pyramid. The ultrarich have accumulated vast power and many of them live in splendid isolation.

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Rushing into the Second Great Depression

Foreword: First written in late 2008, this is prescient four years and a month later as 2012 is now rolling. Since then there have been more Fed-engineered bailouts of American financial institutions and corporations as well as of European Union ones. Wars continue their relentless spread around the world, and the Euro appears to be in collapse unless the EU becomes a political union by coercion, i.e. nondemocratic. Iran was rocked by revolts and the Arab Spring swept through North Africa and the Middle East. Europe erupted into anti-austerity revolts including a violent insurrection across the UK, Occupy Wall Street protests have spread across the U.S. and then the world with mass demonstrations in places as far away as Russia, China, and Nigeria.

Yet the suave talking heads of the mainstream mass media continue to reassure us things are getting better, look on the bright side, ignore the dark, ignore those stinky hippies protesting in the street (never mind many of them are unemployed and foreclosed-upon middle and upper class people), but go stand in long lines to go shopping to buy overpriced junk with credit cards instead. Things are indeed getting better. Forgive my cynicism, as I detest cynicism, but this time, I say “Yeah, right.”

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Rushing into the Second Great Depression

No beast slouching to Bethlehem here, folks. We’re tearing into the Second Great Depression. We’re accelerating as we go, too. The nations of the world are racing to get through it as fast as possible. And yes, although some are using the term “Great Recession,” this event is far more complex and destructive than a mere economic downturn that drags on for a couple of quarters. We’re upon the cusp of a depression, the Second Great Depression. It will be as different from the first as the Second World War was from the First World War.

One of the most bizarre aspects of this approaching perfect storm, excuse me, we are already in it, is the number of talking heads in the mainstream mass media telling us it’s not so bad and don’t worry, as things will get better simply because we’re “resilient.” Many factors converged to trigger this economic and financial catastrophe. Pragmatic steps need to be taken fast. If not, then this growing calamity will demand a drastic and radical response.

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Let’s Work Together We People of Earth

World government is coming, one our children and grandchildren may well live in. The beginnings of it are already here. While a number of good citizens have created the blueprints and models for a variety of democratic governments for a united Planet Earth, unfortunately the dominant paradigm is the specter of Global Empire. Wake up, wake up, people! Let’s work together We People of Earth. It’s time for us to build our Democratic World Government for our Spaceship Earth.

Our choices are not between whether or not we reclaim our various national sovereignties versus establishing a world government. Our choice is what kind of world government do we allow? What manner of planetary regime do you help establish? Will it be world government by the people, of the people, for all people, or by self-selected masters over the rest of humanity? We the People of Earth, including you, have choices. We choose which way we turn.

Will our world government be one of freedom and democracy, or tyranny and dictatorship? Will it be one of openness and transparency, or one of secrecy and elitism? Will there be ongoing and increasing poverty and financial distress, or abundance of prosperity with equality of access to opportunity for all? Will it be a regime that focuses on the hard work of liberty or the illusion of security? Will this coming world government be one that plunders our common resources, accelerates climate change, and allows our environment to be destroyed or will it establish responsible stewardship for our planet?

I choose freedom and democracy. I choose liberty for all people and myself. I choose wealth over poverty. I stand for our economy to be rooted in environmental reality with ourselves in control of our own money. And I stand vehemently for an economic system that puts human beings before corporate profits. Put people before profits, and all of us profit as a rising tide lifts all boats and civilization advances. Put profits before people, however, and the corporations increase their power, the middle class is driven into poverty, capital flows into the hands of the relatively few families that compose the global financial elite, and social breakdown accelerates.

How about you? What do you choose? What do you stand for?

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Frankenstein Monsters and Blowback in the Middle East, Central and South Asia

Frankenstein monsters of humanity’s own creation stalk the blood-soaked Middle East. In the midst of heated emotions and bloodshed between Israelis and Palestinians, we often loose sight of the origins of such conflicts and end up taking sides. Instead of taking sides the world should unite and go in as a massive planetary police action to stamp out wars, arrest the perpetrators on both sides, and try them in a world court of law that recognizes war itself as a crime. We don’t have such firm institutions yet, unfortunately, and the ones we do have are not necessarily democratic or transparent.

The bloodshed in Gaza, Congo, Iraq, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Somalia and elsewhere drives urgency for us to create a democratic planetary republic. We witnessed political fragmentation, ethnic strife, and economic manipulation in the name of “democracy” and “independence” during the breakup of the Soviet Empire and the shattering of Yugoslavia. We see it again in the bloody turmoil all across Africa and many other places as well from Nepal to Indonesia to the Amazon. But let us regress to the horrors nationalism and superpower plays have created in the cauldrons of the Middle East.

This is the most complex superpower mess. We will consider the hypocrisy and consequences of the Global War on Terror and how it grew out of the Byzantine power plays and insidious manipulations of the Cold War. The most damaging, complex, confusing, and dangerous area for which the whole world continues to pay a bloody price is the Middle East, that historic crossroads of humanity that stretches from North and East Africa into South and Central Asia and intrudes into the European Balkans and Caucasus. The greatest concentration of the world’s oldest civilizations lay in this region as well as the origins of many of the planet’s dominant religions. So let us look at the labyrinthine Middle East from the perspective of the Soviet-American Cold War and its consequences.

As a reminder, it must be noted that during the following series of local and global conflicts spinning out of the Middle East, at the same time the Rockefeller family and others of the financial elite were strangling the U.S. and global economies. Their primary intent was two-fold. First, to keep the U.S. dollar solvent and thus the dominant currency worldwide at great cost to Americans. Secondly, to dismantle under both Democrat and Republican presidents (Carter and Reagan followed by the Bush-Clinton-Bush administrations) the earlier anti-monopoly trust-busting reforms of Republican Teddy Roosevelt and the New Deal revolution of his cousin Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt.

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The Gaza Mess: Is Global Intervention Needed?

Today is Monday 29 December 2008. Already Jewish Israelis have killed more people in their airstrikes on Hamas and Palestinian Arabs in Gaza than Muslim terrorists based in Pakistan killed in Mumbai, India a month ago. While tensions between India on one hand and Pakistan and Bangladesh on the other seems to have subsided, at least for now, they have exploded between Israel and not just Hamas but the Arab and Persian streets.

It is time for the international community to unite, invoke global sovereignty, and launch a massive planetary police intervention to stop this local and regional cycle of hatred, revenge, madness, and stupidity once and for all. This situation is so serious it warrants acceleration of human cultural evolution toward democratic planetary union.

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Mumbai: Opportunities Lost

A Postscript Foreword:

The following essay was written soon after the Mumbai attacks and massacres on Wednesday to Saturday of 26-29 November 2008. At first blame was placed upon India’s own restive Muslim population. Sporadic Hindu-Muslim-Sikh communal riots still tend to break out now and then, and Kashmiris fighting for independence from India sometimes strike India.

Subsequent investigations uncovered the terrorists were not Indian at all but Pakistani Jihadists from Lashkar-e-Taiba, based in Pakistan. The same group was responsible for the December 2001 terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament in New Delhi. Both likely involved the Pakistani ISI. In both 2001 and after the Mumbai attack India and Pakistan came close to war. Their last major war was the Kargil War of 1999. Minor yet deadly on-going wars include the Kashmiri War and the Siachen Glacier War.

Both India and Pakistan, nominal allies in the larger Global War on Terror, are on opposite sides of the battle when it comes to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, and their own frontier including tribal-autonomy issues over Punjab and Sindh. In fact, soon after the Mumbai attacks, Pakistan, while denying anything to do with the attacks at first, massed troops along the border even while fighting Taliban and al-Qaeda forces along the AfPak border.

Mumbai presented humanity with a novel opportunity. It especially presented India and Pakistan such an opportunity to rise up over their ridiculously infantile yet murderous differences. Even China, Russia, and the United States and perhaps Afghanistan missed a significant opportunity with far-reaching implications to help facilitate peace between these nuclear-armed nation-states.

What follows is an in-depth view into the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, what the world came close to without much general awareness in the mainstream mass media or the populace at large, and unfolding scenarios. All-out destruction is still possible even as Mumbai recedes into the past, the situation in Kashmir remains highly inflamed, and tensions are high between India and China along their borders. The situation inside Pakistan has deteriorated so greatly many consider the nation a failed state. Perhaps more disconcerting, the relationship between the United States and Pakistan worsen with sporadic violence and open distrust breaking out between the two. Continue reading

Remember the Pygmy Holocaust

A holocaust has been going on under the radar of the world’s media and the canopies of the African rainforests. “Never again!” has become an empty cry as one genocidal massacre after another continues to pinball through our post-World War II history.

Little known is the on-going extermination, enslavement, and even cannibalism of the Pygmy people. Yes, you read that right. Cannibalism. While Pygmies have not risen in armed revolt against any government nor engage in combat against any armed faction in the Great African War, they are nevertheless hunted down like wild game animals, killed, and eaten. By other people. Continue reading

Congo: Nkunda’s Terror in the Great African “World War”

Foreword 2011:

Within this narrative we’ll study the rise and fall of Laurent Nkunda, a renegade general in the Congo Wars against the backdrop of Central African history. These Congolese conflicts are in turn part of the Great Central African War or the so-called African World War, a series of parallel, overlapping, and interlocking local and regional wars. Nkunda exploited the resulting chaos to set himself up as a warlord. He carved out his own little empire among the Virunga Mountains, the African Great Lakes, and other border areas of Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi.

At the height of his power, Nkunda came close to bringing down President Kabila of the Democratic Republic of Congo, humiliated larger United Nations military forces in the region, and was wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. Some thought it possible he could unify Tutsi tribes across international borders, take over the DRC, and attempt to conquer an empire. His pride proved to be his own undoing. In a classic story evocative of Shakespeare’s plays reflecting the foibles of human nature everywhere, Laurent Nkunda was responsible for his own undoing. Continue reading

Two Days After Veteran’s Day 2008

Veterans’ Day 2008 in the United States has come and gone now. It originated as Armistice Day to celebrate the armistice that ended combat on the Western Front in Europe in the First World War. It evolved into Veterans’ Day within the U.S.A. to honor veterans of all America’s wars. In other countries involved in the First World War it is still remembered as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day. Major hostilities officially ceased with the German surrender in 1918 at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

Called the Great War, the War to End all Wars, it was neither the first nor the last world war, although it was the most terrible up to that time. Nor did it end with the signing of the Armistice. The actual peace treaty officially ending the war wasn’t signed until 1919 and fighting continued on other fronts as the international slaughter morphed into a vast, interconnected network of revolutions and civil wars across several continents and included great violence in Russia, Germany, China, the Middle East, Mexico, and elsewhere.

The so-called Spanish influenza pandemic swept around the planet in the wake of the First World War and killed more people than the war itself. The wars spawned by World War I eventually converged into the Second World War such that some historians include the violence of 1914-1945 with the Great Depression in between all one monstrous war. Some go further and include the Cold War of 1945-1991 as the last phase of a truly Great War.

My grandfather, Carroll M. Bass of Richmond, Virginia, served in the U.S. Navy in the Great War. All I can remember from family stories of that time is that he was out in the Atlantic Ocean hunting German U-boats as part of an anti-submarine unit. There was always present the fear of being torpedoed, blown up and sunk in unimaginably deep, cold water. A medal lies on my desk, an old tarnished coin-like medal. Face-up is an image of what I fancy is woman in a long dress waving good-bye or hello with a smaller, encircled image of the Goddess of Justice. On the back is inscribed, “Presented by the citizens of Richmond, VA to C.M.B. (illegible) in grateful recognition of patriotic service in the World War, 1917-1918.” Continue reading

Obama: Our First World President?

Postscript as Belated Prologue: Voting for Barack Obama for U.S. President proved to be one of the biggest and most embarrassing mistakes of my life. As I write this almost five years after I voted for this brilliant, captivating, but mediocre man who waffled as much as he smiled, I’ve come to loathe Obama as much as I despised Bush I & II. I’ve since disowned the Democrats as well as the Republicans and wish them both a speedy death into the garbage cans of history.

In the wake of the still-ongoing Great Global Recession with its corresponding economic, financial, environmental, and social turmoil, I’ve also disavowed and spurned Capitalism. All attempts to reform Capitalism with the most generous and heartfelt of intentions failed. Finance Capitalism still wins out. FC is also known as Predatory, Disaster, and Crony Capitalism for a reason. Capitalism conquers Democracy and leads to Fascism and Imperialism New, reformed kinds of cooperative Socialism and Neo-Communism is far more desirable. In 2012, I voted against President Obama and for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party.

Obama won, and I became further engaged in the Green Party of Seattle. The Greens stand the best chance during these uncertain times to build pragmatic bridges between the Far Left and the Mainstream Middle where I live in the United States of America. I would say the same thing in regards to the Libertarians as building bridges between the traditional, conserve-Conservatives and Libertarians of the Far Right and the Mainstream Middle. What follows serves as the power of illusion, desperation, manipulated rebellion, and, yes, the deliberate deception and continual betrayal of the American people as well as the rest of Earth. ~ the Author, 19 July 2013.

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Barack Hussein Obama is now President of the United States of America. He was inaugurated today this Tuesday of 20 January 2009. To the relief of many, George W. Bush handed over the reigns of power without declaring martial law. After all, “W” wanted to get back to his ranch outside Crawford, Texas. Obama’s elevation to the Presidency is historic for a number of reasons, many of them obvious and oft commented on. What is not so obvious is that unofficially and energetically he is, at least for now, the de facto President of Planet Earth.

This became clear during his Berlin speech in the Spring of 2008. There he addressed throngs of people as a citizen of the world to point out nations of the world must work together to resolve the numerous challenges facing all humanity. We ARE one people. Today in his Inauguration speech he again alluded to the need for our community of nations to work together. Obama is energetically the unofficial President of the World. Take note. This is a historic first. And it is to be celebrated.

National sovereignty is as obsolete as the divine right of kings. An integration of personal and global sovereignty may well evolve to replace this outmoded and violent concept. We today have a planet of co-dependent nation-states and dependent stateless-nations. Yet nations still exist and their institutions can be leveraged in mass collaboration. We all must learn to work together to resolve a convergence of severe global crises unique in human history. Continue reading

“How did Republicans become Communists?”

“Obama is a Socialist!” We heard such slogans shouted and banded about by U.S. Republicans in the waning days of the American Election of 2008. Arizona Senator John McCain and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, the respective Republican candidates for President and Vice-President, used the S-word in an attempt to fire up conservatives and scare the hell out of mainstream moderates. Few bit, however.

First, most Americans realize and accept they have some form of mixed economy where free market capitalism operates inside a container of government regulation and control and that was what saved us from the Great Depression and the Second World War. Yes, many Americans also realize their economy has a tint of socialism in it, but unlike Communist regimes the U.S. does not spout Marxist rhetoric or squash liberties and freedoms or slaughter millions of it own people like the Communist states of Soviet Russia, Red China, the Khmer Rouge, or North Korea. So McCain and Palin’s claims of “Socialism!” fell flat. Many people yawned, and many Republicans felt embarrassed.

It’s hard to yell “Socialist!” when you identify yourself as a Red Stater. Hey, hasn’t anyone else noticed that the U.S. Republican Party identifies itself with the term “Red State?” Has anyone else noticed that ultra-conservative Republicans identify as “Reds?” It must drive a conspiracy theorist wacko to think hey, the Communists actually won the Cold War after all by infiltrating and silently taking over its archenemy those U.S. Republicans. Continue reading

Obama Stands Tall…and the World Wakes Up…in 2008

Postscript as Belated Prologue: Voting for Barack Obama for U.S. President proved to be one of the biggest and most embarrassing mistakes of my life. As I write this almost 5 years after I wrote the original essay, I’ve come to loathe Obama as much as I despised Bush I & II. I’ve since disowned the Democrats as well as the Republicans and wish them both a speedy death into the garbage cans of history. In the wake of the still-ongoing Great Global Recession with its corresponding economic, financial, environmental, and social turmoil, I’ve also disavowed and spurned Capitalism.

All attempts to reform Capitalism with the most generous and heartfelt of intentions failed. Finance Capitalism still wins out. FC is also known as Predatory, Disaster, and Crony Capitalism for a reason. Capitalism conquers Democracy and leads to Fascism and Imperialism New, reformed kinds of cooperative Socialism and Neo-Communism is far more desirable. In 2012, I voted against President Obama and for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Obama won, and I became further engaged in the Green Party of Seattle.

The Greens stand the best chance these days to build pragmatic bridges between the Far Left and the Mainstream Middle where I live in the United States of America. I would say the same thing in regards to the Libertarians as building bridges between the traditional, conserve-Conservatives and Libertarians of the Far Right and the Mainstream Middle. What follows serves as the power of illusion, desperation, manipulated rebellion, and, yes, the deliberate deception and continual betrayal of the American people as well as the rest of Earth. ~ the Author, July 19, 2013.

* * *

“Obama rocks!” my daughter Kate shouts, pumping her fist high in triumph. She’s three and a half weeks away from her 10th birthday, and she is excited about politics for the first time in her life.

I realized for the first time just how ashamed I felt to be an American under the Bush-Cheney Regime. I have both supported and opposed various policies of different administrations over the years, demanding the light of truth be shined on any and all things. Despite terrible things done by Americans over the course of U.S. history I was proud of what we achieved. I was proud of what we stood for even in the midst of our imperfections. Continue reading

A Retrospective: Political Parties and an Endorsement for the American Presidency 2008

Postscript as Belated Prologue: Voting for Barack Obama for U.S. President proved to be one of the biggest and most embarrassing mistakes of my life. As I write this almost 5 years after I once endorsed this man, I’ve come to loathe Obama as much as I despised Bush I & II. I’ve since disowned the Democrats as well as the Republicans and wish them both a speedy death into the garbage cans of history. In the wake of the still-ongoing Great Global Recession with its corresponding economic, financial, environmental, and social turmoil, I’ve also disavowed and spurned Capitalism.

All attempts to reform Capitalism with the most generous and heartfelt of intentions failed. Finance Capitalism still wins out. FC is also known as Predatory, Disaster, and Crony Capitalism for a reason. Capitalism conquers Democracy and leads to Fascism and Imperialism New, reformed kinds of cooperative Socialism and Neo-Communism is far more desirable. In 2012, I voted against President Obama and for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Obama won, and I became further engaged in the Green Party of Seattle.

I feel the Greens stand the best chance these days to build pragmatic bridges between the Far Left and the Mainstream Middle where I live in the United States of America. I would say the same thing in regards to the Libertarians as building bridges between the traditional, conserve-Conservatives and Libertarians of the Far Right and the Mainstream Middle. What follows serves as the power of illusion, desperation, manipulated rebellion, and, yes, the deliberate deception and continual betrayal of the American people as well as the rest of Earth. ~ the Author, 19 July 2013.

December of 2011 is half over now, and the Election of 2012 is already in overdrive. As a group, the Republicans have seen many of their candidates make fools of themselves. The Democrats demonstrate an astounding lack of spine and decisiveness. Together they antagonize the general American Public. Nor have the Green Party, the Libertarians, or even an Independent party emerged with viable candidates.

Certainly there isn’t anyone who ignites people with passion and vision. The other minor parties field extremists who may in all fairness have a few good ideas but also many terrible and certain impractical ones. New groups have emerged fielding alternative ways to choosing our leaders, such as the Americans Elect and the Win Win Revolution (see their URLs below).

The Tea Party revolt was hijacked by the ultraconservative superrich and after a great noise faded from prominence. The Occupy Wall Street movement exploded worldwide and made an even greater ruckus, initially appealed to a broad majority of American citizens. Support for OWS may be fading.

Police intimidation combined with a growing perception among the 99% the general assemblies of those groups camping in public spaces may be internally hijacking OWS with their own radical agendas. Efforts to unite both “TP & OWS” by Venn diagram-wielding visionaries have yet to bear results. It’s still too early to tell what will arise come Spring from the Winter of both groups. Continue reading

Stages of Collapse

“Collapse” here refers to the process and stages a civilization descends through as it falls, crumbles, and collapses into extinction. Or manages to turn itself around at pivotal points on the way down before its too late. The term originated from the title of Dr. Jared M. Diamond’s pivotal 2005 book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

What human-made forces and institutions kill most people? History provides the answers. Political and religious institutions kill the most as they shape our beliefs, perceptions, and cultural reactions to reality. Civilizations arise within these structures. As nomadic hunter-gatherers settled down and began to congregate and work together in increasing levels of complexity, their populations expanded. Cities develop as local villages, markets, and fortifications merge and consolidate. Continue reading

Homeless along the Freeway

She stood surprisingly tall and alert but worn out and desperate. Unwashed blonde hair hung over gray-white skin. Her clothes were ragged, drab, and yet rich with color all at once. Bands of red, purple, and green zigzagged through the fibers of a dirty Sherpa hat pulled down tight. A turquoise scarf was wrapped around her neck and flung over her shoulders. Her eyes flickered between the waning control of high intelligence and the growing impulses for beastly survival. She looked real. She was real.

Upon the edge of an exit ramp off the freeway along which traffic thunders through Seattle, she stood there in mismatch boots holding up a ragged cardboard sign. It stated:

COLD

HUNGRY

I NEED MONEY

PLEASE!

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Twittering the Revolution to Facebook at the Occupation of the Washington State Capitol

 Click on any picture to enlarge the foto. Click again to diminish it.

Monday 28 November 2011

Good Morning! It’s 5:43am here in Seattle, & I’m proud to announce my oldest daughter Morgan got her first letter of acceptance to college (University of Portland in OR), my middle one Kate made straight A’s on her rc, & my youngest Talia can make a violin sing. And I’m off to help Occupy the State Capitol & Legislature down in Olympia, WA today. 5:46 am.

Crowds roaring & more buses roll in & dropping people off from all over WA. OCCUPY our Capitol & Legislature! In Olympia. 11:17 am.

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Why the Hell Can’t We Grow Up?

American’s dislike and distrust of their government and their politicians is at an all time high. Such sentiment is echoed around the world against governments everywhere. Occupy Wall Street has exploded across the United States and across Earth. People are disgusted, fed up, mad, and scared. And we Americans are polarized between ourselves as never before, with the possible exceptions of the 1850s and 60s and a hundred plus years later the 1960s and 70s. Both were periods of intense civil strife and turmoil.

“The solution to the problem is pretty simple,” wrote Michael Scott Brooks as he expounded upon what I assumed to be his reference to our local, national, and global challenges, “People just need to grow up.”

He’s a friend and a local leader in the mythopoetic men’s movement. This is perfect synchronicity, I thought, as my wife Kristina and I had a similar conversation hours earlier. But I challenged him.

“We’re all at different levels of evolution,” I posted back. “Gotta learn to work together as we are with what we have. Now that’s hard work!” Remembering our shared love of poetry and its power through the ages to move sages, warriors, and common folk alike, I signed off with “It’s time for a Poem.”

“I think some of you are missing my point,” he retorted to all of us.

Well, y’know what? Scott’s on to something. Why the Hell can’t we grow up?

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Original American Thanksgivings Redux: Lessons for Today and Tomorrow

 

Thanksgiving: What was, What happened, What's possible.

Thanksgiving: What was. What happened. What’s possible.

As an American one of my favorite holy days is Thanksgiving. Yes, Thanksgiving. And as much as I love the food and the sense of community I feel, for me it really isn’t about food, family, and friends. It’s more for being aware of and the expression of gratitude and appreciation. We give thanks on Thanksgiving.

It’s a time to pause and reflect, to slow down and be aware of what is. It’s a few moments to be thankful for all the things we take for granted.

Thanksgiving has a dark side, too. It’s often glossed over and forgotten in history books and magazine articles. For a short time Thanksgiving blended together Native American Indian and European-American traditions in celebrations rich with the fragile promise of two very different racial cultures co-creating a new, hybrid civilization. This failure ranks as one of the great tragedies of human history, and one of the greatest unsung ones.

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Collapse is a Choice

Collapse is a choice. We can choose to work together across Planet Earth for life, liberty, health, and prosperity or for global collapse and omnicide. Wait, let me say it plainer. We can choose to work together for life or die. Remember, wherever you live right now is on the same planet in the same biosphere as people in other neighborhoods on the far side of the globe. Except, of course, for a few spacefarers who hope to come back to their beautiful and precious world below.

Our species, as far as we know, originated in East and maybe Southern Africa and has spread all over Earth and walked on the Moon. We can choose to pull together or die. Retreating into your fortress with stockpiles of supplies or fighting other people over race, religion, nationality, language, geography, resources, and violent politics will not help anyone and shall make things worse. You, yes, I’m talkin’ to you, men and women and children, must get over your rage, your shame, your fear, especially fear that is all made up in your minds as False Evidence Appearing Real. Because there are real things out there to be truly afraid of but nothing to be paralyzed by.

Our news is full of doom and gloom, from the mainstream mass media to alternatives on the furthest fringes. In the midst of all the negatives the majority of politicians and their pet economists are saying what most people want to hear and wish could be true: “Folks, things ARE getting better. These trends prove it. See, this and that are going up while that and this are going down. It is a new day for another new beginning again! Yes, times are hard, but they don’t last forever, and this is proof they’re not.”

Meanwhile many of those who know better and know otherwise, regardless of their ethnicity or their political or religious beliefs, are shaking their heads “No, you idiots!” while stomping around in circles pulling out the remains of their hair then sighing in frustration. I confess to having done some of that myself before I remind myself to breathe and wiggle and breathe again then be still. Conservatives and Liberals, Socialists and Libertarians, Progressives and Regressives; across party lines you will find a rising tide of dissent, dismay, anger, and resignation. The magnitude and reality of Collapse simply overwhelms.

It does not have to be this way. Collapse is a choice. We don’t have to be automatons to our own reptilian and mammalian brains or even our subconscious. We don’t have to react with fight or flight or freeze to what’s coming at us right now. Engaging in blame games and one-upmanship is merely another way of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic as she sinks forever into the cold North Atlantic.

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Empire of Bases for Wars without End

Hey, guess what, folks? It turns out the leaders of the United States don’t even know exactly how many American and Allied military bases exist. Furthermore, the number of wars the so-called, unofficial but still real Euro-American Global Empire is engaged in does not match the official count. Because there are more violent military and intelligence operations occurring simultaneously than Empire wants to admit. When Special Forces engage in covert hostilities behind enemy lines of a state or quasi-state we are not technically at war with, or when the CIA fires drone missiles into countries that we’re also not technically at war with, isn’t that “war?”

There are two ways the great, borderless superpower of today behaves in a similar fashion to empires of old.

During the height of many large, polyglot empires from the Roman to the Mongol to the British, the imperial Center, i.e. the homeland realms, were often in a state of prolonged peace.  Except, of course, for an occasional civil war for control of the state. The majority of the population enjoyed the illusion of a peaceful world of trade and commerce free of war. What they actually meant, however, were their cities and countryside were free from invasion.

The far-flung borders and colonies of these empires, however, were often in a state of chronic warfare. These conflicts included tribal wars, local ethnic rebellions, and frontier guerrilla wars. There were unique situations where off and on border wars raged between large empires without either committing fully to what would have been a Phyrric victory. Ancient History buffs may note one case in particular, the Roman-Parthian Wars. A Modern example would be the American-Soviet Cold War, although the Soviet Empire  collapsed at the end of it.

Today, the dominant region of the Euro-American Global Empire is called “the United States Homeland.” “Homeland” is a post-9/11 term that recalls a time not all that long ago when the Nazis emphasized Germany as “the Fatherland.” The Soviet Communists did the same with Russia as “the Motherland.” The focus has shifted from American liberties and protecting Constitutional rights to enforcing Homeland Security with domestic surveillance and militarization. The militaristic and ultranationalist “feel” these terms evoke is quiet different from the peaceful, loving reverence many feel for “Mother Earth and Father Sky” for example.

The second similarity is the vast number of military garrisons empires establish to maintain control of far-flung regions, whether it is political control, to promote and protect certain religions and corporations, to defend against enemies, to hold territory, or to allow for safe commerce to flow. These imperial frontiers and colonies were dotted with numerous forts, castles, and other fortifications. The First and Second World Wars destroyed the concept of “forts.” Now they are called “bases.” Forts became something preteen boys built back in the bushes from which to lob rocks and sticks at one another.

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Remember YOU are the Government! Where are you shut down?

One of my most influential trainers is Harv Eker of Peak Potentials out of Vancouver, British Columbia. He constantly reminded my fellow students and me that “Your inner world creates your outer world.”  OK. Thoughts and emotions lead to actions. The unconscious mind really drives the conscious mind to leverage the body to create and implement, or to regress and shut down.

Harv, dressed in black and highly animated up on stage, was dynamic. “Now stand up and say it out loud,” he urged. “Together!” We stood up from our chairs and all said together “My inner world creates my outer world.” It is as true for communities and organizations of human beings as well as for individuals. Harv went on to remind us with loud enthusiasm “How you do ANYTHING is how you do EVERYTHING!”

I live in the United States of America. A native of Virginia, I’ve lived almost two decades in the City of Seattle which overlays King County in the western part of Washington State. It is April 2011. Recently, close to midnight last Friday, April 8th, the American Federal Government narrowly averted a total shutdown. A partial shutdown was underway. The Republicans and Democrats, the two major parties that currently dominate U.S. politics, are more interested in bloodless civil war than in peaceful cooperation and bipartisanship. As large groups, they approach the art and craft of politics, including compromise, as schoolyard bullies with regressive, reactive emotional intelligence. Yes, individuals stand out for collaborative policy making, but they are run over by tsunamis of angry and divisive people more intent on destruction and ideological purity rather than creation and pragmatic innovation.

In my own state of Washington the financial warfare 3,000 miles back east has infected our state and local government. The state government is paralyzed with decisions regarding budgets, taxes, and services. The city and county governments where I live are engaged in unrelenting, neverending battles over mass transit issues and other services costing more than what is available to spend. Other governments in other areas of the world seem really shut down or in a state of warfare, from Afghanistan to Libya to Ivory Coast and elsewhere. The European Union is lurching from one financial crisis to another. The United Nations is bereft of power and agreement.

Back home Americans rail against the Government shutdown. Some even call for it, bring it on, they say; let it force us over the brink to see what happens, clean house, etc. etc. Others scramble to prevent it from happening and to maintain a status quo. Neither approach is healthy and neither is sustainable. The underlying issues, fundamentally who and what controls the Money Power, is barely recognized and not even addressed. And yet, we the people are at choice here.

We are the government, are we not? Have we abdicated responsibility to those with the money and the power and the media skills? Have we forgotten government is of the people, by the people, for the people? That the institutions of government from the global to the local are composed of fellow human beings? That “all these governments” are our governments? That the government is us?

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Electoral Reform is Urgent, Overdue, and Needed Now

Electoral reform is urgent. Many proposals have been presented in numerous countries including the United States over the years with few results. There is too much inertia within the Establishment. The political machines and the transnational corporations including the Big Banks controlling them easily resist such threats to their power.

It’s easy for them to do so as they control the voting: they simply vote “No!” when real change is presented. We jerk about like puppets on strings and deride one another as “sheeple” or  “bloodthirsty communists” or “capitalist pigs.” Aren’t you tired of that? I’m tired of it.

What will work? It will take noisy mass movements out in the streets combined with quiet and deliberate political actions to legally and openly infiltrate the Establishment by winning at the ballot box to initiate changes. If we can actually win power even when we win an election. And it seems too late as so many challenges demanding significant transformation, not just change, are avalanching down upon us all.

Electoral reforms are a must as it will allow us to more effectively and radically address our problems. Open, free, and fair elections under the eyes of impartial observers and vote collectors and counters are vital for any functioning republic. Elections are one of the cornerstones of Democracy. This is especially so for a democracy such as the United States of America that is a constitutional federal republic.

Yet we find our political parties and the electoral process corrupted by Big Money, i.e. private control of the money power. Two dominant parties, Republicans and Democrats, work together so much to control elections at all levels from the national to the state and local they are often detested as “the two-headed snake.” Together they accept financial support from the same corporations to such a degree many politicians are generally considered “bought.” Such corporations leverage this special relationship to finance powerful lobbying groups to advocate on their behalf.

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Abolish Political Parties from Our Elections

Yes, abolish political parties from electoral campaigns at every level. Ban them from lobbying on behalf of their agendas. Ban them from endorsing candidates. Ban them from organizing front organizations, shell companies, PACs, shell NGOs, and other rackets on behalf of candidates and party agendas. Ban political parties from giving money, assets, and even volunteer services to candidates.

The term “candidate” refers here to both human beings running for elected office or nominated for an appointed position as well as proposed legislation including laws, bills, referendums, etc.

Abolishing political parties and any similar organizations from the political process is a necessary, even urgent electoral reform. Many may view it as a radical reform. Which it is, especially when you consider one of the earlier meanings of the word radical is “root.”  Returning to our roots, in a sense, as the American Founding Fathers abhorred the concept of political parties.

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Turning Points? The Occupy Movement Keeps Spreading Amid Rapid Change

The Occupy Wall Street movement is alive and growing rapidly. It continues to expand and spread despite early cries of an early death. Even in the face of ridicule and dismissal the movement continues to defy predictions. The mainstream mass media and the punitive pundits among the 99% who’ve sided with the 1% continue to scoff at the protesters as “stinky hippies and punk rockers,” or “communists, socialists, anarchists,” even “racists.”

These lackeys for the 1% ignore the masses of families with children, middle-aged professionals, blue- collar workers, and just regular folks supporting OWS at their peril. This mass welling up of dissent and “I’m not gonna take it anymore!” protests has reached a tipping point where anything can happen.

People are pissed off! More and more people are getting pissed off! Yet they’re not retaliation in the form of mass violence and rioting. And the dismissive chattering harpies of the mainstream media reveal their own ignorance.

Several recent events are worth looking at as harbingers of change. These points of note are: Continue reading

Harbinger of Civil War? From Compromise to Conflict: America Gets Positional and Forgets How to Get Along With Itself

INTRODUCTION: This essay was first published in early August 2011. It is reprinted here with few changes such as “Harbinger of Civil War?” added to the title.

Occupy Wall Street had not yet erupted. The Arab Spring was in the throes of a Summer of Conflict. The UK was in flames and the rest of Europe was rumbling. Inside the U.S.A. disenchanted and angry people by first hundreds then thousands rallied and marched as the Tea Party in 2009, 2010, and 2011. That wave seemed to crest with rallies in Washington, D.C., some with over a million participants.

In Madison, Wisconsin in February 2011 an uprising among the workers, sparked by teaching assistants against the harsh cuts of Republican Governor Scott Walker, broke out that electrified America. It was primarily non-violent and was embraced by so many different groups of Americans including Police officers. This uprising lasted well into April and at one point over 100,000 people and then 185,000 poured into the streets. In many ways the Wisconsin Uprising was a precursor of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

As “the Empire Strikes Back” against the Occupy movement with heavy handed militarized police, we see the current escalation of violence and intimidation. At the same time Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt erupts into days of at first peaceful protests against the military dictatorship with dozens of demonstrators killed by militarized police. In the following article we revisit the underlying tensions leading to the widespread protests we see today.

The Author

Wednesday 23 November 2011

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Several essays I read recently by different pundits and news analysts gave me pause. They addressed different points of the same view. Much has been written about the rising vitriol in American public discourse with the spread of far-right and far-left extremism to infect the great middle.

Note the resurgence of armed militias and racist groups with the rampant rise of violent hate groups first under President George W. Bush with many more under President Barack Obama. The tragic shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D) and others around her this past January triggered a national debate that went beyond passion to inflammatory rhetoric. We have become a nation polarized and divided that refuses to get along with itself.

There have been calls for a military coup, threats of martial law, and fears of riots. Even the specter of a possible civil war or revolution has been raised as our nation reaches levels of polarization not seen since the 1850s with the possible exception of the 1960s. The uprisings sweeping across North Africa and the Middle East with rioting and protests in Europe and elsewhere, including the American state of Wisconsin, have been hailed as harbingers of similar upheaval here at home. London burns as I write. So many cities across the United Kingdom are in flames the term “riots” has given way to “insurrection.”

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UFO Encounter in Virginia

Classic flying saucer image from the Rex Heflin Orange County case in Southern California, 3 August 1965, the same general time period the Bass Family encountered a UFO in Southcentral Virginia. Except their's wasn't saucer shaped. From: http://www.ufoevidence.org/photographs/section/1960s/Photo305.htm

Classic flying saucer image from the Rex Heflin Orange County case in Southern California, 3 August 1965, the same general time period the Bass Family encountered a UFO in Southcentral Virginia. Except their’s wasn’t saucer shaped. To their surprise, the UFO they saw was a sphere. From: http://www.ufoevidence.org/photographs/section/1960s/Photo305.htm.

My entire family of origin had a vivid UFO experience back in the mid to late 1960s. The event was exciting, even amazing, and also at moments terrifying. For years afterwards this encounter affected my family and me in unexpected ways such as the odd actions of the FBI and weird behavior among certain people involved with this incident including myself. Ever since then I’ve had a deep, personal interest in so-called “Unidentified Flying Objects” and the controversies UFOs generated.

Despite some apprehension I feel it’s time to tell my story and some of what I’ve discovered since then. My story is long overdue, too. As I stand for transparency and full disclosure, I feel strongly all of us Americans, indeed We the People of Planet Earth need to know the full truth whether or not others feel we can “handle it.” Indeed, I stand for full and immediate disclosure of all information from all organizations and institutions private and public regarding UFOs and the immense complexity of what’s alleged to have gone on in some cases for millions of years and what goes on in our current timeframe.

The list of what so many credible whistleblowers are claiming is long, overwhelming, unexpected, and goes far beyond flying saucers, claims of galactic empires, alleged free energy, and underground bases. They include numerous species of ETs/ESs/EDs/IDs (extraterrestrials, extrasolarials, extradimensionals, and inter- or intra-dimensionals), Majestic 12 and other hypercompartmentalized units within Earth nation-state regimes, various breakaway civilizations, ancient even prehistoric ET and human civilizations with ruins supposedly throughout the Sol System, the Secret Space Programs (SSPs), the alleged Inner Earth civilizations, secret societies, the mythical German role, the Cabal/Illuminati/Elitist crime syndicates and factions, black budget ops and other USAPs or Unacknowledged Special Access Programs, advanced and hidden technologies and scientific discoveries, global economic and financial manipulation and fraud on unprecedented scales, debunking and disinformation campaigns, grotesque medical and genetic experiments on many lifeforms including Earth humans, widespread human trafficking and slavery, Solarian bases, possibilities for a Star Trek-style civilization, exopolitical ramifications, orbs and plasma life forms, an apparently extreme intergalactic A.I. or Artificial Intelligence menace more omnicidal than nuclear weapons, new understandings about the nature and possibilities of consciousness, and considerations regarding densities versus dimensions and biological evolution with spiritual ascension. The claims are staggering. Many of the claims listed above simple feel unbelievable.

The lines between so-called academic research, mainstream mass media, alternative media, and so-called conspiracy theory first dissolve into murkiness before becoming clearer. Everything one thinks they think they know regarding consciousness, compassion, health, money, politics, religion, spirituality, war, genetics, science, energy, love, relationships, and the definition of life may well be turned upside down and inside out. No, shall be. Let’s return, however, to where and how my involvement in this labyrinthine entanglement began and back to what occurred.

Our family UFO encounter happened on a warm late afternoon after I was home from grade school following a long ride on a yellow school bus. It was dinner time. I think it was early Autumn, although it could have been Spring. I sat around the dinner table with my younger siblings. They were my sister Beth and brother Joe. Our mother bustled about in the kitchen. Our kitchen was a big farmhouse kind of kitchen, and the dinner table was pragmatically placed there off to one side of the room. Dorothy Ussery Bass was my Mama’s real name, but most people who knew her called her Dot. It feels strange to me the actual events of almost four decades ago were so dramatic I remember them in great detail, but, alas, I can’t recall whether it was Spring or Fall.

We had a table full of food, however, a big family dinner farmer-style. We kids began to shove food into our mouths, which annoyed Mama. We were supposed to say grace. My Dad, William M. Bass, known as Bill, was away where he worked up the hill at “the Barn.” As the large cow barn with the enormous hayloft dominated the center of our dairy farm as some Medieval Great Hall, we simply called it “the Barn.” The rest of the farm’s buildings circled around the hill and ridge. The family business had long been named Riverview Dairy Farm from the proximity of Big and Little Sandy Rivers as they looped around the estate. We were in the Rice – Sandy River – Green Bay belt of northeastern Prince Edward County. This area’s in turn is located in Southside Virginia, i.e. Virginia south of the James River, in the Piedmont of rolling hills, woods, ravines, and cultivated fields.

Mama was mad because we’d started chowing down before we said the Blessing. Dad wasn’t expected home until later. As we munched down into our dinner, we heard an unexpected ruckus. Daddy burst through the back door into the house.

“Come quick!” he shouted. “There’s a flying saucer out back!”

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Give a Damn! Occupy Seattle! My Impressions from a Few Hours on the Streets

William Bass @ Occupy Seattle! Rally & March. Foto by Syd Fredrickson, Saturday 8 October 2011.

William Bass @ Occupy Seattle! Rally & March. Foto by Syd Fredrickson, Saturday 8 October 2011.

For the first time in ten years I felt We the People had Purpose. Purpose with a capital P. And greater clarity than the mainstream mass media would dare admit. As zombies staggered down Wall Street chasing dollar bills recently, at least they gave a damn.

The mainstream mass media think it’s cute when crowds of otherwise “normal people” dress in bloody rags and paint themselves up as zombies to parade about setting new zombie world records. The same media, however, heap scorn and ridicule upon all those “crazy people” costumed as zombies to protest the insane gluttony of Wall Street and its cronies. Well, at least those zombies give more than a frakkin’ hoot. They gave a damn.

When elderly war veterans, middle-age White ladies hobble together down the street with old hippies, tattooed punks, the newly homeless, Native Americans, grizzled union workers, and white-collar office workers, all getting in the way of our fellow 99-percenters willing to slave away for the Puppet Masters among the 1% superwealthy, well, we have an insurrection, folks.

A young man in Downtown Seattle held up his sign and challenged us: “GIVE A DAMN!”

Damn right.

GIVE A DAMN!

Bright, blue letters blazed neon from cardboard on a wooden slat stick.

It’s time. Leave the Parties behind. Coffee, tea, water, and whiskey; milk and soy, almond whatever. It’s time. Time to get to get serious.

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Occupy America: Let’s Dump the Term “Homeland”

“This land is your land, this land is my land
From California, to the New York Island
From the redwood forest, to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.”

(Words & music written in 1940 by Woody Guthrie, 1912 – 1967.)

It’s time to dump the term “Homeland” as a synonym for America and erase it from our vocabulary. What the hell is this word anyway? A gang of vipers in suits and ties dreamed it up after 9/11, that’s what. Neo-Cons and Neo-Libs working the Rep-Dem two-headed rattlesnake. Yes, I lost a family friend from Virginia and his wife in the plane that hit and disintegrated inside the Pentagon. But I don’t support this mutant Patriot Act and Department of Homeland Security.

Never mind Benjamin Franklin, one of the American Founding Fathers, wrote back in 1759 “Those who would give up Essential Liberty, to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” Or even earlier in 1738 when Franklin warned “Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power.”

Do mind security is an illusion even today. The term “Homeland” is an abomination and so is the despotic department named after it. Dump the name, abolish its Department, and reorganized the institution into a leaner, more integrated agency which stands for freedom rather than neo-fascist tyranny in the disguise of pseudo-democracy all dressed up pretty for the election prom.

Look what fellow monstrosities inspired such a grotesque abomination as “Homeland:”

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Occupy Wall Street? Occupy the Banks! Seize the Fed!

William Bass @ Occupy Seattle! Rally & March. Foto by Syd Fredrickson, Saturday 8 October 2011.

William Bass @ Occupy Seattle! Rally & March. Foto by Syd Fredrickson, Saturday 8 October 2011.

Occupy Wall Street?
Why stop at the door?
Occupy the Banks!
They made us all poor.
Seize the Fed!
Think we’re dead?
We’re far from beat!

The Occupy Wall Street protests are spreading across America. They’re growing in number. Other demonstrations for causes specific to different local and regional areas are merging into the national tapestry of Occupy Wall Street. Now protestors gather in the nation’s capital for Occupy Washington, D.C. A loose, leaderless web of networks with many different causes, there is one overarching theme: people are fed up with “corporate greed.” Even some individual military personnel, both veterans and those still in uniform, from different branches came out in support of the demonstrations. One old Army veteran posted one of his buddies from the Marine declared he “didn’t fight for Wall Street, but for America.”

The United States of America at its worse is a schizophrenic place. It is a constitutional democratic republic on paper with a once vibrant and prosperous economy. As such America is a beacon of hope and admiration for much of the world. The best aspects of America continue to inspire people. There is, unfortunately, the nightmare side of America with its muddied racism, genocide of Native American Indians, massive penal system, great economic disparity, out of control intelligence agencies, CIA torture in secret prisons, multitudes of military bases scattered across Earth, and gruesome clandestine medical and biochemical weapons experiments.

Our United States is also part of a growing global empire in the making. As such the U.S.A. is also the bastion of finance capitalism where corporations and big banks dominate and influence politics. The political machinery is deeply corrupted by the Corporatocracy and not just in the nation’s capital. The money gamers heavily dominate the so-called pillars of democracy, the Executive Branch, the Legislative Branch, and the Judicial Branch. What results?

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Veterans Day 11/11/11 – Remembering Horror to Stand against War for Love, Peace, and Light

Most of us, including myself from time to time, forget the significance of acknowledging today. This 11th day of November 2011 dawns as arbitrary numbers from an artificial calendar. Popularly transcribed as 11/11/11, it has become wrapped in New Age mysticism as if something prophetic is to occur simply because of how numbers line up and combine in people’s minds. It also marks Remembrance Day among the victorious Allies of the First World War (1914-1918). It began as Armistice Day and, certainly in the United States, evolved into Veterans Day. Much was lost in the process, including remembering much of the world once agreed to outlaw war.

The First World War was known simply as the Great War for many years. People simply didn’t know what else to call it. The term “world war” was used, but it wasn’t the first or the last. It didn’t begin in a vacuum either. As do many large conflicts, this Great War arose from a convergence of smaller wars. While the Armistice of the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of the year 1918 marked the formal end of combat on the Western Front, the war continued elsewhere around the world.

The Great War morphed into a viper’s nest of local and regional wars around the planet. They eventually converged into the Second World War with such violence many historians consider the period 1914-1945 as one war much as we look back upon prolonged and widespread conflicts of old as singular wars with multiple phases and theaters.

We’ve forgotten the horror of it all. As veterans and survivors die out our memories become those of old photographs in old textbooks. While the First World War wasn’t the first, it was the first global war of industrialized mass slaughter on a scale previously unknown anywhere in history. The horror of industrial combat shocked Europeans and the rest of humanity. Battlefields had mutated into vast human slaughterhouses filled with broken charnel.

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Envisioning Future Networks Now

With so many people choosing to become entrepreneurs, what does that look like? Especially during this Great Recession? What 3 trends may be developing? Trends you can jump on and drive?
Our Great Recession is far from over, and its trajectory continues to defy many experts and pundits alike. Why’s that? Many keep looking to the future while staying stuck in the past. Our current economic mess, and it is a mess regardless of what label historians will ultimately stick on it, is just as different from the “first” Great Depression as the Second World War was from the First.

Many changes are happening, and are happening faster and faster. Globalization, relocalization, sustainable economics, the linkage of environmental and social responsibility to economics and finance, integrated and mobile digital technologies, and the global long war on terrorism all squeeze the status quo.

Amid all this pressure, however, opportunities await and trends are discernable. As alchemists once believed they could transmute lead to gold and we do know intense pressure transforms carbon into diamonds, so too can you generate value from great change. Continue reading

Asteroid 2005 YU55 zooms inside Luna’s orbit as it zips by Earth for a Happy Birthday

Asteroid 2005 YU55, Radar Imagery from Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex, CA, 7 November 2011.

Asteroid 2005 YU55, Radar Imagery from Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex, CA, 7 November 2011. Wikipedia.

A big but small asteroid rapidly approaches Earth as it karooms around our solar system. And just in time for my wife Kristina’s birthday. On its merry way Asteroid 2005 YU55 shall pass inside Luna’s orbit as our moon revolves around Planet Earth. It’s a bit too close for comfort for such a large rock barreling through space, but all government officials and NASA scientists involved are calmly warning us not to worry. It most likely won’t hit us, “too close” is not the same as “direct impact,” and besides, it won’t wipe out all life on Earth. It won’t even smack the moon. I imagine them scampering back out of sight hunched over gnawing on their fingertips. Or blissfully ordering another cup o’ Joe.

YU55 only 400 meters across, darn it. Way too small for the excited little boy in me who revels in blowing shit up. That’s the size of about four football fields lined up side-by-side. Big American football fields, too. Scientists advise us to imagine a giant bowling ball the size of an aircraft carrier, which, of course, doesn’t look a thing like a bowling ball sailing through space. It’s that big. And there were bigger ones once upon a time. And many more still out there.

The one that smashed into what’s called the Yucatan and the Gulf of Mexico today to exterminate most of life on the planet including the dinosaurs was about 25 times longer and over 15,000 times more volume. Still, I can’t help but wonder if today’s my last day on Earth. At least I got to wish my wife “Happy Birthday” this morning. As I’m still a mammal with a reptile brain, I got urges to satisfy later tonight! Especially before we go extinct.

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Iran, Syria, & Pakistan: Feint, Bluff, or World War?

Gold has shot up again and is close to $1,790 an ounce even as the U.S. Dollar strengthens at the same time. That’s somewhat unusual. Dollars generally go up in value as gold declines, and gold strengthens as the Dollar drops. (See http://www.kitco.com/ for details). In addition both Crude Oil commodity prices are up (WTI or West Texas Intermediary, the global oil benchmark, and the Brent from North Sea deposits, but see http://www.oil-price.net/ for details).

This is not simply because the European Union is tanking over the euro, anti-austerity rebellions, and internecine squabbling between its member states. There has been a parade of recent disclosures revealing much more regarding Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program, the covert war between the U.S.A./E.U./Israel/Saudi Arabia and the Iranians as well as mounting tensions between the U.S.A./NATO and Pakistan. The Libyan War winds down as Syria plunges into civil war as President Bashar al-Assad threatens to go down fighting and take the whole Middle East with him. It’s Monday, November 7, 2011.

While the mainstream mass media is preoccupied with riling up opinions over Kim Kardashian’s divorce from Kris Humphries or Justin Bieber’s alleged sexual dalliances with older young ladies, it ignores or whitewashes the massive military buildups currently underway across an expanse of territory and nations from Europe to North Africa through the Middle East into Central and South Asia. Not to mention Africa. Or East Asia. Or Latin America. Or back home on the streets of America and Europe and their Allies.

What’s going on? What’s really going on that is either being downplayed or ignored by the mainstream mass media? Or cast in a certain patriotic or threatening light?

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“Bobby’s shot! Bobby Kennedy’s been shot!”

When we first learned Bobby Kennedy was assassinated

Hot, muggy day in farm country Virginia. Late spring, not yet Summer. The Solstice was about two weeks off, but all practical purposes it was Summer with school soon to be out for the season. Humid with a hint of afternoon thunderstorms, the air was pungent with honeysuckle flowers and tree pollen and the promise of picnics in the shade and swimming in lakes.

I was outside in the yard playing. My little sister and brother were probably around somewhere, playing with me, but I don’t remember them this particular day. I just remember my Momma, and Daddy, too, a little bit.

We grew up on Riverview Dairy Farm in Prince Edward County, Virginia. Outside of the town of Farmville. Earlier in the late 1950s and early to mid 1960s the Civil Rights movement had swept across the South and into Prince Edward Country. Racial desegregation and integration efforts polarized whole communities, shut down the schools, and brought Mike Wallace to Farmville for the Evening News and Prince Edward County before the Supreme Court of the United States.

Vietnam and Southeast Asia burned overseas and riots and urban guerrilla warfare kept erupting all around the United States. We were still in the thick of it all, this second revolution or quasi-civil war or whatever you wanted to call these rock’n’roll times, with no end in sight. As time would tell, these Troubles would grind and rumble on till 1975. Though many in the Occupy Wall Street and Everywhere on Earth movement today claim to draw their inspiration as much from these turbulent times as from the Arab Spring.

The sharp staccato roar of the gasoline-powered farm tractor washed over us as Daddy drove it around and around the pasture out back. We were used to that awful mechanical racket, however, and other than a glance over now and then paid it no mind. It was a green and yellow John Deere 420 with a wide, adjustable-width front end manufactured back in the mid-to-late 1950s. Dad sat up in there turned sideways in the seat as was his custom, one hand on the steering wheel, the other gripping the big fin of the rear fender as he made sure the tractor and the mower and the line of hay and the lay of the land were in perfect alignment. He wore blue denim jeans, a white, short-sleeved T-shirt, and a khaki baseball cap. Back then he smoked Camel cigarettes, too.

I heard a shriek. Loud one, too. Momma! I stood up.

The back door of the house slammed open and Momma sailed down the stairs. I remember her in slow motion, dressed in white clothes, had on a white skirt or dress. Black hair thrown back. Her legs wide as a ballet dancer’s leap. She raced shouting toward my father as he rounded the side of the pasture closest to our backyard. By then I was running there, too.

“Bobby’s shot!” Momma yelled. “Bobby’s been shot!”

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Our Worldwide Economic House of Glass and Cards

 

As I write this November of 2011 as our pie-in-the-sky economy crumbles, the tallest building yet constructed on our planet by human beings is the Burj Khalifa. It is a stunning achievement of human engineering, beauty, perseverance, collective international teamwork, and magnificent awesomeness. This skyscraper tower also reflects the ultimate distraction of egoic pride, shortsighted and archaic nationalism, and cooperative stupidity and waste. The crowning achievement of building such a giant is the perfect example of Finance Capitalism at its finest worse.

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Untangling the Octopus

Cartoon.02_Federal_Reserve_1912_Coming_Money_Trust

The Octopus as viewed in 1912 on the eve of the Bankers’ Coup of 1913.

Alfred Owen Crozier, an attorney and activist from Michigan, Ohio, and New York, drew the above cartoon in 1912. He warned the public of the banksters before the Bankers’ Coup of 1913 issued in the Federal Reserve System and the Internal Revenue Service. The Octopus was the first illustration to grace the interior of his 1912 book, U.S. Money vs. Corporate Money, “Aldrich Plan,” Wall Street Confessions! Great Bank Combine! In 1913, Crozier testified against the Federal Reserve System, originally proposed by the Aldrich Plan as the National Reserve Association.

The Octopus as viewed in 2011 in the midst of the worldwide Occupy revolt.

The Octopus as viewed in 2011 in the midst of the worldwide Occupy revolt.

The Octopus represented the art of 1912. Almost a hundred years later, in October 2011, three complex-systems theorists crunching algorithms determined 43,000 TNCs (Transnational Corporations), represented by all the dots in the 3D image, dominated the global economy. Among these are 1,318 core companies with interlocking ownerships. The collectively controlled 20% of global operating revenues and another 60% of global real (manufacturing revenues.) Of these 147 formed a supergroup of <1% controlling 40% of the total network. The majority were Big Wall Street Banks and investment firms.

See “Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world,” in New Scientist at http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-revealed–the-capitalist-network-that-runs-the-world.html

and “The network of global corporate control” at http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.5728v2.pdf.

Interlocking Relationships and Web of Control.

Interlocking Relationships and Web of Control in 2011. Capitalism, especially Finance Capitalism, now dominates politics, governments, academia, NGOs, markets, businesses, and finances locally, regionally, and all across the planet.

Over time we see a much more convoluted and intricate network of interlocking, non-democratic entities formed. This has grown to dominate politics and governments as well as marketplaces and businesses around the planet. Perhaps the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street and Everywhere movements can find common ground. Neither will they or anyone else, however, be successful in political, economic, and financial reforms unless we go straight to the hearts of the Beast. The foundation of radical reform is simple in concept and shall be challenging to execute: We the People of Earth must establish public control of the money power similar to civilian control of the military power. Such public control must be transparent and accountable with all information open to public audit.

NOTE: This is from a from a larger work in progress looking at the de facto Euro-American Global Empire, which may be more correctly termed a Postmodern and neo-feudal Empire of the Money Power.

William Dudley Bass
2 November 2011
Seattle, Washington
Cascadia

Copyright © 2011, 2016 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship of and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.