Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Happy New Year!

We wish everyone a prosperous and safe New Year.

2014 looks to be one of those important and eventful years in history.

2013 was a mile-marker year for me. Another life's anniversary - It's great to be alive!

To all our readers, I'd like to thank you for your support and understanding. The plan is to keep things interesting and divergent. 1914 was a history changing year. It is 100 years in the future for some, it is a new a modern day for others. For me each day is a new challenge. I wonder what challenges face the world and this country starting tomorrow. Will it be ushering a new day of peace? One can only hope. I, personally see the peaceful becoming more peaceful and the hateful warmongers becoming more belligerent. There is a distinct difference between the living and the dead.

So, lets all toast in a shinny new 2014 with courageous optimism and hope for some serious positive changes for our prospective future on this planet.
--Joe

Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Renewal

More than 150 years after brutal slaughter, a small tribe returns home

by  December 25, 2013 5:00AM ET
After losing much of their ancestry, the Wiyots are learning their traditions in preparation for a renewal ceremony




The dancers will endeavor, as Hernandez put it, “to heal the world of all the wars we’re having now, all the atrocities — to make everything fall into place.” 
The dances won’t be based strictly on Wiyot tradition. 
 “No one knows what the Wiyot dances were like,” Hernandez said. “We’ve lost that memory. So we are learning from a Yurok dancer. We’re figuring out how to do it.” 
 None of this will ruin the ceremony for Seidner, however. 
“The world has changed,” Seidner said, “and the Wiyot have changed with it. We don’t live in redwood slab houses anymore, but we still need our traditions. We need something to hold on to. And when we gather on Indian Island, we’ll be saying, ‘We’re here, and we’re trying to put the pieces of our culture together.’”
Read the rest of the article on Al Jazeera.

In truth, we all suffer the same 150 year old loss. We should join them in this much needed time of of renewal. Perhaps we can achieve the standing we need to make and be at peace with all peoples of this Earth. 
--Joe

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Queen of the Forest and Hopeful Holidays

Occasionally you come across a little pearl that is worth highlighting. This exchange between the infamous demigod jon and his nemesis Forest Queen, recently on the Humboldt Herald, is one of these pearls.

jon makes the following statement:
"Thanks for the heads up fair wage folks! I swear I will make a meeting in 2014. Good luck on your efforts they are an important first step toward rebuilding our middle class despite every effort of the 1% to have a feudal class for some unknown reason."

The pearl is Forest Queen's response:

"Well Jon, at least you always offer up a perfect segway – “ . . .despite every effort of the 1% to have a feudal class for ‘some Unknown Reason.” “Unknown reason?” This ‘moral superiority’ of yours is a great impediment to momentum for those who are pushing and pulling humanity forward ~from the individual to the collective. You are implying Jon that our localized consciousness is lacking, and that we are globally ignorant. Your stance is invalid. [Emphasis mine]
“To know nothing of the past is to understand little of the present, and to have no conception of the future.” Nothing has changed Jon. The NWO/OWN has been around for thousands of centuries. It’s the same as it ever was . . .the Comfortably Numb slave/Master relationship that many ‘will’ not relinquish to make a stand. 
The NWO advances different ways, at different speeds, in different countries . . . but we are all marching steadily towards total domination by our rulers. REMEMBER, there is no such thing as an arms race between China or Russia and the U.S. There is no competition between those countries against each other. They are all working to advance the use of drones to CONTROL THEIR OWN PEOPLE. The race to build drones is a race to control people, waged by corporate governments on their own people in the common cause of world domination. This is NOT an arms race by governments to protect their own people against other ‘hostile’ countries. China is now referred to as the ‘Middle Empire.’ 
~i regard politicians as frauds and liars. Imagining the overthrow of the current political system is the only way i can be enthused about politics. One free thinking man, Buckmaster Fuller said; “Humanity now faces a choice: oblivion or utopia.” 
We need more critical thinkers. Critical thinking is important because it is logical, therefore includes self-defense, personal empowerment, liberal democracy in civic duty, philosophy, and the search for wisdom. ‘Valid’ vs ‘Invalid’, ‘Strong’ vs ‘Weak.’ Every field has its own specialized terminology and logic is no exception. Gun control, for example, isn’t over what “Policies” will best reduce gun violence, or how to interpret the Second Amendment. The level of resistance is rooted in “fear of government power and control.” The issue then is whether (1) it’s reasonable to think that the Federal Government poses a threat to the American people, and (2) whether private gun ownership has an important role to play in mitigating or neutralizing that threat. 
Edward Snowden vindicated, NSA to shut down in six months. Bless up the Constitution!"


If anyone bothered to follow these exchanges on other blogs, SoHum Parlance II for example, I'm afraid you would find what Forest Queen said here and elsewhere was totally lost on this guy. Instead, unfortunately, what you hear is the loud and heavy sucking sound of a large parasite drowning in all that energy, recognition and acknowledgment.

Whenever it looks like the darkness is about to overcome the light, the light shines a little brighter. Here is my raised cup to all the enduring bright lights.
[Source]
--Joe

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

A Stacked Deck Works for Some

Albin appointed to 5th Ward seatTimes-Standard, Wednesday, December 18, 2013


The Nominators pick the person they want and the City Council rubber-stamps their selection. All nice, neat and tidy. This is the Democratic System at its optimum best. If you believe you have some say with your vote, better think again.

[Source]
--Joe

Friday, December 13, 2013

Killers On The Road

Reprinted from CounterPunch

Killers on the Road

The Whack ‘Em and Stack ‘Em Mentality of American Cops

by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR and ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Police work continues to be a relatively safe occupation. In the 1970s, an average of 220 officers died each year. In the 1980s, 185 officers were killed on average, with the average number dropping to 155 in the 1990s. The number of police deaths continues to decline, year by year. According to the publication Officer Down, there were only 95 “duty related” officer deaths in 2013. Forty-two of these fatalities were vehicle related. Another 14 deaths resulted from heart attacks while on the clock. Only 27 cops died from gunfire last year and several of those were shot by other cops.
Craig Floyd, chairman of the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, contends that “law enforcement remains the most dangerous occupation in America today, and those who serve and make the ultimate sacrifice are true portraits in courage.”
This is nonsense. Compared to the daily perils of being a retail clerk in a 7-Eleven or toiling on a construction site, let alone working on a trawler in the Gulf of Alaska, logging in the Pacific Northwest or working in a deep mine, policing is a fairly invulnerable trade.
But as vividly recounted by James Bovard in a piece for CounterPunch this week, it has probably never been riskier to be pulled over by a cop on one of America’s roads. Bovard writes:
“Killings by police are not a negligible proportion of the nation’s firearms death toll. Shootings by police accounted for almost 10 percent of the homicides in Los Angeles County in 2010, according to the Los Angeles Times.
“Jim Fisher, a former FBI agent and criminal law professor, compiled a database of police shootings and estimated that in the United States in 2011 police shot more than 1,100 people, killing 607.”
The public apprehension that cops are often borderline psychotic, hair-trigger-ready to open fire on the slightest pretext, virtually immune from serious sanction, is growing apace, fueled by such incidents as the dog slaughter on an interstate in Tennessee. CNN featured grainy film of the episode taken from one of the police cruisers.
James Smoak plus wife Pamela and son Brandon were traveling from Nashville along Interstate 40 to their Saluda, NC, home on New Year’s Day when they noticed a trooper following them. In Cookeville, about 90 miles east of Nashville, the Smoaks were pulled over by the trooper and three local police cars. The cops ordered them out of the car, made them kneel and then handcuffed them.
At this point the Smoaks family implored the police to shut the doors of their car so the two family dogs couldn’t jump out. The cops did nothing. Out hopped Patton the bulldog. A cop promptly raised his shotgun and blew its head off, amid the horrified screams of the Smoaks family.
Of course, the cops later said Patton was acting in a threatening manner and that the uniformed shot-gunner “took the only action he could to protect himself and gain control of the situation,” but the film seems to show Patton wagging his tail the moment before he was blown away.
Why were the Smoaks stopped by the four-car posse? Mr. Smoaks had left his wallet on the roof of his car at the filling station, and someone phoned in a report that he’d seen the wallet fly off of a car and fall onto the highway with money spilling out. Well, Mr. Smoaks won’t make that silly mistake again.
Scroll through some Middle America websites and you’ll find much fury about what happened to Patton, as an episode ripely indicative of how cops carry on these days. Here’s “Police State in Progress,” by Dorothy Anne Seese writing in the sparky Sierra Times. The Times bills itself as “An Internet Publication for Real Americans.”
After relating the death of Patton, Seese brought up other recent police rampages:
“A couple of months ago, a woman was shot to death in her car at a drive-through Walgreens pharmacy for trying to get Soma by a forged prescription. The officer who shot the woman—who had a 14-month old baby with her in the car—claimed self-defense because the woman was trying to run over him. However, the medical examiner found she had been shot from an angle to the left and rear of her position in the driver’s seat. Self defense? The officer is under investigation for second-degree murder and has been fired from the Chandler police department. However, a child is motherless, a man has been deprived of his wife and companion, the mother of his child, because his wife tried to get a drug with a phony prescription. Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s daughter did the same thing and got a slap on the wrist. It seems the law now considers everyone guilty until proven innocent, with people in high places excepted. The number of horror stories increases daily in Amerika.”
There was a time when “Amerika” was a word solely in left currency. Not anymore, if the conservative, populist Sierra Times is any guide. Check out its Whack’em & Stack’em feature about killings by cops and you’ll sense the temperature of outrage.
This is a revised version of a story that originally ran in the January 2003 print edition of CounterPunch.

--Joe

Saturday, December 7, 2013

You Are Being Watched...

[UPDATE :: December 9, 2013]

Local Law Enforcement Using NSA Methods To Spy On Cellphones


Juan Cole posted this:

FBi Laptop Camera Snooping and Orwell’s 1984: Side by Side ComparisonBy  | Dec. 7, 2013 |Jon Schwartz ( @tinyrevolution ) posted this to Twitter. It is a side by side comparison of a passage from “1984″ to the news report from a former senior FBI official that the FBI can turn on the laptop cameras of individuals without activating the red light that shows the camera is operating.

The Washington Post broke the story. If the FBI is doing this without a warrant it is yet another nail in the coffin of the US 4th Amendment, which guarantees people the right not to have government snoop through their personal effects without evidence of wrongdoing and a judge’s permission.

Obama continues to shred the U. S. Constitution and the American people cheer him on.
--Joe

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Howling Hypocrites

Here's an excerpt from The Black Agenda Report well worth reading:

Obama & Holder Win Court Case, Keep Thouands in Prison Under Unfair 80s Crack Sentencing Laws
"On mass incarceration in general and the reduction of these unfair, unjust sentences, our first black president and attorney general are howling hypocrites, saying one thing and doing another. Their hypocrisy is enabled by traditional black civil rights organizations like the NAACP-LDF, who refuse to make a political issue out of Obama's and Holder's hypocrisy. The “civil rights” establishment is in a bind. They claim to oppose mass incarceration and the prison state, although they've only just learned the phrase “mass incarceration” and cannot fix their lips to say “prison state.”
 But since their first priority is boosting the political fortunes and careers of their peers in the black political elite, who we affectionately call our black misleadership class, they are unable to call the devil in charge of mass incarceration by his name, if that devil has a black face."

Pretty much says it all. Click here to continue reading the complete article.
--Joe

Monday, December 2, 2013

An Act of War?

I've been waiting for this to happen.


China plan to quit dollar infuriates US

The decision by the Central Bank of China to no longer accumulate foreign exchange reserves in dollar has infuriated the United States, an analyst says.


Finian Cunningham made the remark in a Sunday column for Press TV amid escalation of tensions between US and China over Beijing's enforcement of an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ). 

“The escalation of military tensions between Washington and Beijing in the East China Sea is superficially over China’s unilateral declaration of an air defense zone. But the real reason for Washington’s ire is the recent Chinese announcement that it is planning to reduce its holdings of the US dollar,” he wrote.

Cunningham said China “move to offload some of its 3.5 trillion in US dollar reserves” poses “a mortal threat to the American petrodollar and the entire American economy.” 

“China - the second biggest economy in the world and a top importer of oil - has or is seeking oil trading arrangements with its major suppliers, including Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela, which will involve the exchange of national currencies,” he wrote, warning that the development threatens “the petrodollar and its global reserve status.”

Cunningham said Beijing’s November 20 notice about plan to “shift its risky foreign exchange holdings” in US dollars for other currencies “is a harbinger that the American economy’s days are numbered.” 

“But, in the imperialist, megalomaniac mindset of Washington, the ‘threat’ to the US economy and indebted way of life is perceived as a tacit act of war. That is why Washington is reacting so furiously and desperately to China’s newly declared air corridor. It is a pretext for the US to clench an iron fist,” concluded the analyst. 
[http://www.presstv.ir/]
--Joe