Category Archives: violence

Arafat

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Global News has this up on the poisoning of Yassar Arafat.  You might recall my post on that a year ago.

A report on what polonium is here.

Not stuff to mess with, eh?

And speaking of radiation….howz about some radiated water…? Oh, I know the report states it’s not from the radiated side of the plants, but you know, I’m having a hard time trusting nuclear plant operators to tell the truth when that truth could be politically and financially damaging to their interests.   Canadians, be on the lookout for three-eyed fish sprouting feet….

 

 

First Nations continue standing up

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This is a pretty good report of the events surrounding the recent clash with the armed forces and the First Nations of Canada.

From the post:

It is of particular importance to note that – according to Augustine – the Warrior Society and the RCMP had even negotiated for the possibility that an ISL security guard would want to come and pray at the sacred fire. The guards could come and pray any time they wanted, but neither they, nor anyone else, was permitted to bring weapons of any kind to the sacred fire.

“[ISL] already knew,” says Augustine. “When we negotiated the first time, when an ISL worker comes out to the sacred fire – because they were welcome, anytime they were welcome – as long as they don’t have any weapons. [But] they could come and pray with us anytime they want. And that was part of the negotiations. They could come out at any time and pray with us, or go out the back way and shift change then.”

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I think it’s important, too, to note the First Nations people welcoming the guards into camp–as long as they were not armed.  And praying together?  What a wonderful way to seek spiritual guidance together—to seek that which feeds the Light.  I don’t believe that God would sanction polluting the Earth….and causing all the misery to humans, animals, plants, the soil, and the water that fracking does.

If you recall the previous videos on the confrontation, the female Warrior was clearly upset at them offering tobacco.  Now we see the story behind that–they offered tobacco the night before as a symbol of wanting peace for everyone.  Then the very next morning,they show up with guns drawn–even when they knew the indigenous were unarmed and seeking a peaceful way to get SWN off their land.

Here is a look at Chief Arren Sock presenting their demands to the public/press:

I think what is hard for white folks to understand is that the indigenous society is not based on hierarchical status.  Until recently, I didn’t understand all of what that means, myself, because it’s so ingrained that *somebody*  MUST be in charge.    The Chief system was something imposed upon the indigenous by the Europeans–they required someone to be spokesperson and to call all the shots.  The people were offended by this because their society was not set up that way.  As Chief Sock states in this video, he does not speak for the others.  He doesn’t tell the other indigenous what to do —they act on their own autonomy.  They see this as each person acting according to what the Creator wishes for them to do, as far as my understanding.

A couple of tweets here and here on it.   The last pic with the story behind the brave Warrior standing between a pregnant woman and this armed guard…who’s the terrorist, again…?

Another tweet here on once again labeling environmentalists as terrorists.  If you recall, when I worked for the state health dept., one of the training sessions I had included Dept. of Hysterical Security.  They did an exercise where environmentalists were going to use bio warfare by injecting food borne pathogens into food at a fair booth.  The whole scenario was outlandish and reminded me of the story of Chicken Little who ran around crazy exclaiming that the sky was falling because an acorn dropped on his head.  It makes a broad sweeping generalization about a group that is generally peaceful with a few idiots who resort to violence as a means to an end.  Unfortunately, they not only achieve their goal, but they also persuade others NOT to join the movement because they don’t condone that behavior and because, as said previously,  they don’t want to be labeled as troublemakers.  **not to mention that some of those causing trouble could be agent provocateurs who are not actually environmentalists, but paid disruptors from the outside posing as environmentalists.

Some good news here.  Glad to see someone has some sense and vision to look beyond today and the $$$ short term gain.  Just say NO to the money, honey.

JFK

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This post may be too graphic for some–fair warning:

DN featured Oliver Stone speaking on John F. Kennedy’s murder. (Stone is also doing a piece on Martin Luther King, Jr.)

In addition. REELZ is running a documentary on it, too.  They put forth the theory that it was actually an FBI agent George Hickey that fatally shot Kennedy.  He supposedly stood up in the car with the safety off and the car lurched, causing him to lose his balance.  I believe they said 12-15 witnesses had seen an agent with a rifle in a car behind the president.  Stone, however, places the fatal shot coming from the front of President Kennedy’s car.  Stone served in Vietnam and bases that on what he witnessed in the war–a shot came from the front, which is why Kennedy’s head bounces back from the force of it.  Stone brings up the inability of the FBI and others to replicate the bullets.  CBS also did a piece on it and also could not replicate three rapid fire shots from that type of weapon.

Stone also brings up another important point:  Kennedy had fired Allen Dulles.  I was unaware of that–and then he was the head of the Warren Commission??  Good Grief no wonder the investigation was so warped.  Hmmm…

The REELZ documentary makes the point that the WWII rifle used by Oswald was a full metal jacket– a bullet that would make a clean pass through a person’s body.  However, the bullet that killed the president was a different bullet that exploded upon impact–it is designed to cause as much damage as possible.  They noted several fragments in Kennedy’s brain.

The interference by the Secret Service, CIA, as well as other agencies is a red flag.  The physician who was to perform the autopsy in Dallas insisted that the body stay there until it was performed, but the Secret Service would not allow it.  The physician protested that this was state law– in order to protect the chain of control (I think that’s the right term).  They basically told him they were in charge and he best get out of the way.   So they took the body and when the autopsy was performed in D.C., they were contaminating the area with wall-to-wall agents and interfering with the physical evidence and the autopsy itself.  Red flags all over the place.

Stone brought up some great points when asked if Kennedy was a warmonger–he was instead an advocate of Peace.   He didn’t feel the need to bomb the hell out of another country to prove himself being “tough on war” or that the U.S. was superior in weaponry.   He makes the case that Kennedy, had he lived, would have stopped the Cold War.  While Stone is speaking about that, I think of the much ballyhooed Reagan by the conservatives and how Reagan stopped the Cold war.  Pfft.  The Soviet Union was impoverished and could not continue the arms race.    Reagan was a war hawk.  He wasn’t into Peace.  He thought of anyone seeking peace as a Commie Hippie.  I can only wonder at the number of people whom have been turned away from seeking peace just so they wouldn’t be called a Commie.  I know that I wouldn’t want to be labeled a Communist (or terrorist).  (Same with environmentalists –those that would support it but don’t publicly because of fear of being labeled troublemakers?)  People don’t realize that those names are thrown out to do exactly that–make something out to be the opposite of what it is so that people will find it distasteful.   When Martin Luther King, Jr. started speaking out against the Vietnam War, and advocating for the poor, he, too, was labeled a Communist.

(Side note–It’s tough to see the footage of Walter Cronkite announces President Kennedy’s death.  Still brings tears.)

The question that needs to be asked is:  who stood to gain from it??  Follow the money…and those deadset against Kennedy’s seeking peace instead of war…

Here is an account by Carl Oglesby in the book “From Camelot to Kent State” — a good book on the personal history accounts of the 60s:

I was ten years older than the SDS kids.  I was running the technical publications dept. at Bendix Aerospace Systems Division of the Bendix Corporation in Ann Arbor:  per defense work, rockets and missiles and electronic subsystems, some moon stuff, some supersecret Vietnam stuff.

[…]

The reaction to the Kennedy assassination really blasted me loose.  I was at work, of  course, like most everybody else.  It was Friday, a half hour or forty-five minutes or so after the guy was announced dead, I wondered down to the personnel office to talk to my pal, the personnel manager, Tony, and I said, “Tony, we should take the flag down.”

He didn’t want to do it.  He said, “Well, when we get word.  When we’re told by corporate headquarters to put the flag at half-staff.”    And we got into a big argument in the hallway about that, about whether or not we needed to hear from corporate headquarters about putting the flag down.  Did the flag belong to corporate headquarters?  Was that what that was about?  That Bendix owned the flag?  Did it own the country?  Big fight.

Then I went up to Mahogany row, a couple of floors up, to check out with some guys I knew up there, who I thought would be more reasonable, and in this one office they had the Scotch out.  The ripple of excitement, the thrill that ran through the Bendix Systems Division when the word came of Kennedy’s death, and with it the implicit word that now we got Johnson.  It was like—I don’t know how to describe it.  It was almost a physical tremor.

Before, there was gloom, because for one thing Kennedy had canceled out a big contract we had.  We were building something called the Eagle missile that was supposed to go on a certain airplane.  Well, the airplane didn’t exist, and it wasn’t going to exist, either.    So Kennedy logically figured out why build the missile?  But this didn’t seem reasonable to “corporate headquarters.”  which was real pissed at having lost the Eagle missile system.  Well, that was the mood people were in.

The next minute Kennedy gets popped.  A minute after that, the Scotch is out, because the contracts are coming back.  And they did!  By God, they did.  I couldn’t shrug that off.

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Mi’kmaq not backing down

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Checking in with the First Nations protestors in Canada….

SWN refuses to acknowledge they are trespassing on First Nations land and continue to use that land for fracking, despite the protests.  My understanding is that they have started a fire blockade today at noon.

Someone posted a link to this video that captures in pictures when words fail…

…at 1:25 and 1:38, look at the concentration of teargas on ONE individual!!

….at 1:56,and the next photo should have the caption underneath with one word:  COURAGE

…at 2:12 full disclosure:  both sides had dogs.  Gotta love their sense of humor.

…at 2:19…<sigh>….really? Is this man armed?  He appears to be unarmed and of smaller stature than the SWN security officer.

Another video here on the mistreatment of the protestors taken in:

 

 

 

First, Do No Harm…

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…is what doctors affirm when they get their degrees.  But the Bush/Cheney Administration demanded physicians and other medical professionals to abandon that rule and devise ways of torturing people.  Some of these people were innocents who ended up at Guantanamo because their accuser was paid some cold, hard cash….

My understanding is that if a member of the military is required to do something that is against their ethics, they have the right to respectfully refuse the order.

Just imagine if they had….

Some physicians do care, however, and marched on Washington….

I wonder if they had closed their offices for a day in protest…or God forbid, if they refused to implant  a new heart in the Dark One Cheney in protest…

 

Blackfish

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CNN has aired the Orca documentary Blackfish–specifically the captive Tillikum that killed trainer Dawn Brancheau.  Not only did he kill her, but another trainer twenty years before, and there was a dead man found on Tillikum’s back, mysteriously appearing one morning.  As the researcher states during the documentary, orcas are not known to attack human beings while they are free–it’s only in captivity that they have attacked humans.  My recent post on OSHA (or Sea World) refusing to release information on their protocol.

Before, when I commented on the Blackfish doc, I remarked how the “whale song” made me cry.  I didn’t understand why at the time….but now I am wondering that this whale’s cry is from being separated from its family and/or a mother whale being separated from her child….knowing that these mother whales cry as a human mother would after having her child taken away….it makes sense.

I posted a link on the Fu Manchu blog on an organization fighting  to stop holding whales captive.   It’s a brutal, selfish practice and it needs to stop.

At the closing scene of Blackfish, they show the orcas swimming freely as they were meant to, and how spirited they were–their dorsal fins are proudly straight–not flopped over like Tillikum’s.  It is awesome to watch them.   As I watch that segment, it occurs to me that perhaps if they took Tillikum back to the Washington State area where they captured him, perhaps he could find his family and rejoin them?   I know that sounds like a long stretch, because he has been in captivity so long, but I would think that his mother would recognize him.    It would be worth it giving it a shot.  He deserves that.

 

Diane Ravitch on Melissa Harris-Perry

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Diane Ravitch was on Melissa Harris-Perry, and had a wonderful discussion on public education.   I wish they could have had more time to go in-depth about it, but I’ll take it.  You’ll have to click on each link separately, because NBC has chosen to not run them in sequence.

 

Broad and Clinton

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I posted these links in a comment on Diane Ravitch’s blog yesterday, but they are still awaiting moderation….so I thought I’d post them here:

Bill Clinton’s Big Ideas for education.  Note the mention of Eli Broad in the audience.

From the article:

One of his big ideas for U.S. education: “We have to move toward somewhat local operational control but a national commitment to a longer school year, better trained and better paid teachers, to principals and superintendents who can actually be held accountable for results

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What the hell does that mean?  Oh, I forgot for a second that he’s a politician speaking doublespeak….let’s try to deconstruct, shall we?

“local operational control for a national commitment”  =  we have to be sure we have toadies willing to foist this crap onto the kids even when it’s evident that it is detrimental to them, by holding onto tax dollars paid by the public and not releasing them until these schools follow our mandates.

“better trained” = teachers that are pressured into teaching to the test so that their kids will pass (and not feel like idiots) so their school won’t “fail” and be closed…..to reopen with for charter profiteers.

“better paid” = bwahahahahahahaha

“principals and superintendents who can be held accountable”  = what does “held accountable” mean, anyway?  By what standards?  Who decides? Gates? Broad? Clinton? Rhee?

Bill Gates and Clinton Global Initiative.

Note the Big Brother aspect of videotaping teachers….always done with a positive twist–to “improve” the teachers’ performance.  Um-hmmm….to monitor the teachers to ensure that they teach only the rigid No Child Left a Mind.

And the final sentence says it all:

It is startling, however, to hear Gates state so bluntly the power of teachers.

He is concerned that they may be able to thwart his plans. And Gates isn’t someone who is used to being thwarted.

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Joanne Barkan’s excellent piece that I’ve posted before but bears repeating.

More news from Diane:  Eli Broad secretly funded anti-public school, and anti-union initiatives.    I see that Broad has the politician doublespeak down:  he publicly states he is for something, but then he funds efforts against that very thing.  Yep–keep people off balance and questioning, that’s the key.  Note that Gov. Brown felt compelled to be “nice” to Michelle Rhee to keep in good favor with Eli Broad to get the tax increase passed.  That’s how they work it, folks….kiss the toad and he just might turn into a prince….

This is also more proof that these folks are not paying enough in taxes if they have this kind of money to throw around….and why Citizens United needs to be overturned.

Someone posted this quote:

“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.” –Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Absolutely, Dr. King.  Absolutely. And the ability to think critically with creativity with character is not going to be had with a for-profit school run by hedge fund managers who see kids as machines to be built with little regard for humanity, democracy, and potential.