The Native American holiday

Petula Dvorak has this up on the Native Americans and this holiday we celebrate.

The Native Americans I talked to said they’ve all heard of someone who doesn’t celebrate the holiday the way it’s presented in food magazines and Hallmark television specials. But all the people I talked to said they hold on to the original message that the Wampanoag had that day — a harvest feast to give thanks.

“Thanksgiving is like every day for us. Giving thanks is a big part of the native cultures. So the basic message of the holiday, that’s still part of who we are,” said Ben Norman, 32, a member of the Pamunkey tribe in Virginia.

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And that’s what it means to me, too—being thankful for every day and every meal and all that is provided for us.

The Native Americans recognize that all is connected.  What we do over *here* affects something over *there*.  We cannot take and take and take without there being repercussions.  The traditional Native Americans humbly acknowledge that with taking only what they need.

The Europeans described America as a wilderness.  The Native Americans knew better and carefully managed the great ecosystem–you could drink from any river or stream….the fish were plentiful because they weren’t overfished and they didn’t contain mercury and other toxins…you could breathe…

They were portrayed as heathens that needed “saving” by missionaries.  Instead of trying to understand their spirituality, the Europeans sought to force their religion upon them.  Native Americans don’t have Churches where one goes to pray once a week and then forget everything that is taught…rather, they see spirituality in everything they do—everything is connected to the Creator.

I just wanted to acknowledge their culture and all that was lost.

My other posts on Native Americans here, here and here.

 

 

More adventures in gluten free cooking

So…there weren’t any gluten free pie crusts at the grocery, and I was going to go without pumpkin pie, my favorite at Thanksgiving.  But I just couldn’t imagine a Thanksgiving without it…

I saw rice flour was available, with a pie crust recipe, and decided to attempt it.  So, I’m following the recipe, and I get to the end, where you roll it out.  Then it says to cut the crust in slices, and put the slice into the pie pan.  I kid you not.  Normally, one just rolls out the crust and put it as a whole piece into the pie pan.  I thought, “well, this will be interesting…”  Some slices were put in place neatly, and others….well…let’s just say the crust looks like a patchwork quilt. Heh.  Oh well, I’m sure it will taste okay. (she says with fingers crossed).

Oh, and to Joe Donnelly–yeah, I will have a Happy Thanksgiving, thanks to my family.

While I’m working in the kitchen,  I have the TV station tuned to the 70s music station.  I hear some familiar notes…but it’s the middle of one of my favorite songs, Dialogue, Parts 1 and 2, by Chicago (Robert Lamm).  In perhaps the last ten years or so, I’ve only heard Dialogue on the radio once….even on the 70s stations.  I have to wonder at the reasons for it after this station cut off the first part of the song, which asks people to examine their consciences.  The song is as relevant today as it was when it was written:

Don’t it make you angry the way war is dragging on?
Well, I hope the President knows what he’s into, I don’t know

Don’t you ever see the starvation in the city where you live
All the needless hunger all the needless pain?

Thank you for the talk, you know you really eased my mind
I was troubled by the shapes of things to come

Well, if you had my outlook your feelings would be numb
You’d always think that everything was fine

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On to lighter subjects–we got about 3-4 inches of snow last night.  I love it. I think I’m the only person in Indiana who loves snow.  Pookie likes it, too–she’ll put her nose deep into the snow, and come up with a snow “beard”…looks so comical it makes me laugh.  They’ve got warnings for northern Indiana, however, with 7-10 inches expected in the northwest corner (lake effect from Lake Michigan).

Hope everyone has the comfort of food and those you love around you this holiday.

Many Blessings to you…

75th Anniversary of Kristallnacht

Germans observed the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht (night of broken glass) when the assault against the Jews began in earnest.

It’s hard to watch the video of it.  The pure hatred of the dark ones sends chills down my spine.

(kind of like the war on the poor, children (public ed.), and the elderly (Social Security) and the overreach of the NSA in the U.S. now, eh?)

JFK

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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First, Do No Harm…

…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…

 

Education News

Diane Ravitch highlights a blog by David Greene. 

From the post:

When Hinshaw compared the rollout of these school policies with incidences of A.D.H.D., he found that when a state passed laws punishing or rewarding schools for their standardized-test scores, A.D.H.D. diagnoses in that state would increase not long afterward.

Nationwide, the rates of A.D.H.D. diagnosis increased by 22 percent in the first four years after No Child Left Behind was implemented.

~~~~~~~~~

Bingo. Greene says it’s not a causal, but yeah, I disagree.  It’s certainly one of the causes, in addition to toxins in the environment and probably GMO’s.  

And it’s not that the kids are suddenly stricken with this subjective “disease”—rather, they are a) made to feel inferior by testing that isn’t really able to define what their brain cells are capable of (potential); and b) put under pressure by teachers and parents who must teach to the test in order for the school to keep from being downgraded to “failing” in order for them to get the money from the Federal gov’t to keep the school open….and do it all again the next six months….

That is a HUGE burden to put on a kid.  For shame.

He links to A World Without Privacy by Joe Nocera of the NY Times.   He talks of “The Circle” of a hybrid of internet companies like Google, F_cebook, and Twitter and the information they gather.    Even if you don’t subscribe to the last two, your privacy can be taken away from you by family members and friends who do use them.    That is probably how Nocera’s acquaintances/colleagues were connected to him. 

And they say you should not expect privacy in today’s world.  I say, unless you express in writing your willingness for someone else to have private information, then, yes, you have an expectation….and a right to privacy.  And giving up the right to privacy should not be coerced, as in, you have to click on this agreement to use our website.

The reality of austerity

This will be coming our way if something isn’t done.

The Economic War of Israel

Edward Teller has one of the best posts up I’ve seen on the situation in Israel. There are ways of waging war that don’t require planes dropping bombs…

Max Blumenthal explains in the 2nd video  how control of food is tantamount to control of people.   A poignant point he makes was the destruction of the herds of Buffalo to starve out the Native Americans.  They were forced to adopt the grain-based diet including fry bread, which we now know is very unhealthy, especially if one is gluten intolerant.  As Blumenthal highlights, the Native Americans now have issues with diabetes.  I would go a step further and say this also may be linked to alcoholism….as I believe there is a link with diet and alcoholism.

Henry Kissinger’s words flashed in my mind as Blumenthal spoke of the Israelis destroying chickens, and other livestock so that the Palestinians could not provide for themselves.   More quotes of Henry Kissinger.

I skipped over the first video to see his take on the market.   When I viewed it, I was stunned, to say the least.  American rightwing talking points about President Obama not being a U.S. citizen, of being a Muslim, and calling him a n***er, etc.  Wow.  Just wow.   And the gal who said she was “politically aware” but didn’t know who Benjamin Netanyahu was? For real?