Undercover Cops Can Wear Black Garb Too

The story from Toronto's G20 events keeps turning weirder by the minute. Yesterday morning's YouTube video: Riot police charge G20 protesters singing O Canada in Toronto was seen by over 240,000 viewers. As the day rolled on hundreds of recently released bystanders who'd been arrested in overnight draconian sweeps on Saturday night were complaining loudly in front of the microphones of beatings and abuse at the hands of police. Hundreds more still sat unfed, with no water in cramped containment cells, thousands of their family and friends chanted outside police facilities to bring attention to the plight of the mostly innocent detainees.

Later in the afternoon yesterday i watched an interview with Naomi Klein on CBC. She was great. Evan Solomon, the interviewer, let Naomi rip and wail. She'd been there in the midst of it all, she denounced the police for the off camera abuses they were carrying out while i was busy watching the 'made for tv' good police story whitewash the media was handing out. My bad, i'm guilty of not following my own advice to 'ask every question and question every answer'. Luckily Naomi and lottsa others weren't so easily misled. During one part of Naomi's rip and wail she alluded to the burning police cars as being a setup, i'd wondered like many folks why the cops abandoned their crusiers leaving the windows rolled down and why the cops let the cars burn without doing anything to respond. Naomi's take was that they let things burn with the cameras rolling to justify the outrageous undermining of civil liberties about to happen now that the 'made for tv' burning cars pictures would be running cover for them.

By this morning the authorities' stories were unraveling. One very informative article from Global Research: The Toronto G20 Riot Fraud: Undercover Police engaged in Purposeful Provocation is a must read in my opinion. In it they set out to prove that, "Toronto is right now in the midst of a massive government / media propaganda fraud. As events unfold, it is becoming increasingly clear that the 'Black Bloc' are undercover police operatives engaged in purposeful provocations to eclipse and invalidate legitimate G20 citizen protest by starting a riot.", and they do a convincing job especially with their visual proof that both the riot squad cops and the individuals doing the damage on Saturday were wearing exactly the same boots. The brand new boots are identical on both the cops and the supposed hooligans, curious indeed.

Apparently in case after case around the globe deeper investigation, especially now that the social media and youtube are everywhere, up turns substantial evidence that it's undercover cops who are infiltrating the black garbed groups. That these cop infilterators agitate for violence in the movements preperations and are the ones doing most of it. There were widespread rumors that the police used this exact tactic during the Vancouver Olympics to discredit all the game's various opponents, in Vancouver it mostly worked.

i still say cops are people too, they either obey their orders or look for a new career and a new way to feed their families. The frontline cops gotta obey their superiors, those guys obey the next higher level too, so i suppose they have the explainatory parachute of all workers-cops-military-people, 'we were just following orders'. But what about the big boys whose orders they were following? Will it be the polticans who handed down the undemocratic orders? Will it turn out that undercover cops can wear black garb too?

A Tactic Isn't A Strategy - Words Matter

By last night [Sunday June 27] Canada's media had learned the difference and had switced to correctly calling the black bloc a tactic instead of a group. The US media, at least MSM, still calls them groups, though most call them domestic terrorists too.

Words matter. Today i searched ' black bloc strategy', hoping to find a statement about the overarching startegy that this tactic was being used to accomplish. What i found was that the two words 'startegy and tactic' are used interchangably in the media, in search engines, everywhere. There were 11,200,000 for 'black bloc strategy' at Google but none of them contained any actual startegy they all were about the tactic.

From any perspective it seems that clearly defining your terms is essential to any real communication. The well educated staffs of the major news rooms understand the definations, or should. Could it be that confusion about the definations underlying the startegy/tactic usage serves well when trying avoid disscussion about goals, the meta level of this heirachy. The goal here is the overthrow of capitialism but the MSM are owned by corporations and make all their money from advertising by other corporations. Overthrowing capitialism isn't a topic that increases their bottom line and does sound like terrorism if you're the evil child of it-a corporation.

It seems the black clad kids themselves are missing this point too. They and lottsa others, including me, agree on the goal: getting rid of capitialism. The tactic of the black bloc works, the cops use pretty much the same one, uniform dress disguise to hide individual responsibility for actions both stupid and violent. What's missing is a good and all important middle idea between a goal and a tactic: a strategy. This is a big problem for the lefty paradigm of all color persuations, mine too, no clear strategy. The religous right has built a powerful movement in large part because of they effectively use and share: goals-strategies-tactics. The second rule in the Art of War is 'know your enemy'...

So, a strategy for the anti-capitialist left... tomorrow.

Capitialism is devouring the future of the cops' kids too.

A 'black bloc' is a tactic used in demonstrations for years. Each participant of a black bloc wears somewhat of a uniform. The idea of wearing this uniform is that if every single person in the Bloc looks relatively alike it is hard for the police to determine which individual did what, the clothing is used to avoid being identified. The tactic was developed in the 1980s in Europe.

The mainstream media know this, or should, yet they consistantly refer to the black bloc as a group instead of a tactic, it's annoying. It's also eye opening in that if they can't or won't understand this distinction how many others are they misrepresenting, either on purpose or out of ignorance, about everything on every issue.

During the Vancouver Olympics a small black bloc group broke a few windows and totally wiped out the budding community support for other issues like homelessness, social housing and the Olympic's enviromental footprint. Same was true in Toronto yesterday, the flaming police car led the news worldwide and the 10,000 other demonstrators and their just causes were unmentioned. If it bleeds it leads, and black bloc tactics are designed to produce visable results.

In my opinion, the black bloc needs a focus beyond mindless window smashing and a means beyond using the laudable efforts of others as a cover. When the world's leaders came to Vancouver at UBC in the early 90's the kids sat in the roads, their purpose was to stop traffic and garner media attention. It worked, the Sgt. Pepper video of the RCMP spraying the seated kids framed their message perfectly. The black bloc needs direction, and though the burning police cars was a nice TV touch, their message of resistance is obliterated by using events like a peaceful labour march to disguise themselves. It's the same type tactic as mounting military weapons on top of a hospital, nothing good comes of it. Resistance is mandatory, both collectively and individually. The little bit of property damage yesterday was miniscule compared to what the corporate empire generates every second, but the cause of raising of the anti-capitialist banner isn't advanced by dividing it's adherents.

There were no serious injuries yesterday thanks mostly, from what i saw, to the level headed response of the police. In videos i watched the police never stepped out of line, even the times i saw them provoked. The policemen and women are working class people doing a tough job, often i critize their swagger, today i applaud their restraint. 'Workers of the World Unite' the corporate frankensteins are devouring the future of the cops kids too, i don't understand why the cops aren't marching too.

End Capitalism to Save the Planet

Yesterday in Ecuador Evo Morales, speaking at the Tenth Summit of the Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), said that only the eradication of Capitalism will save planet Earth. Morales highlighted the importance of unity to promote changes in Latin America and said that native peoples have to "move from resistance to seizing power to rule themselves."

Evo is the first indigenous national leader in 500 years, his acheivements in leveling the wealth disparity in Bolvia are remarkable despite the huge resistance of the international corporate and banking elites. ALBA, formed and financed initially by Hugo Chavez, is running parallel to the G20 in Toronto. ALBA needs very little extra security, G20 needs $1billion, ALBA leaders are cheered by adoring crowds, G20 leaders are surrounded by 10ft fences, thousands of cops and now, as of noon PST, a fair bit of smoke and black masked protestors.

The G20 is capitialism, those leaders and their decisions build the skeletal framework which the corporate frankensteins use to consume the living earth. The corporations are the evil offspring of capitialism, the corporations buy the governments they want, the G20 'leaders' are owned and operated to further feed the inquenchable hunger of the rich. For capitialism there is never enough, more is its credo.

ALBA isn't.

Morales Calls for End of Capitalism to Save the Planet

Petraeus' Iraq Style Bribes Won't Work in Afghanistan

The mainstream media continues to pay homage to the 'Iraqi Surge' and its oracle Gen. Petraeus especially these last couple days since he's been FedExed in to take charge of the Pentagon's plight in Afghanistan. They always fail to mention that running parallel to the 'Surge' PR blitz was Petraeus' more occult assault on the Sunni fighters state of poverty. Petraeus' plan called for the US to 'hire' as many Sunni fighters as possible as security guards in their own villages, towns and cities-exactly what they were doing anyway-but now on the payroll of the Yanquis. It worked. The majority of the Sunni fighters were eager to continue gaurding their neighborhoods from their Shia enemies and not shoot at Americans-especially if they stayed out of those neighborhoods-in exchange for the money they desperately needed to keep their families alive.

Afghanistan is a different place, different people, different history, different issues. The insubordinate Gen. McCrystal has been busy trying to buy the hearts and minds of Afghanis for many months now. About the only consistant success he'd seen was that the private contractors hired to re-supply the forces has managed to bribe the insurgents away from the convoys. Everyday 260 huge trucks leave the port of Karachi, they all have to pass through some of the most difficult terrain in the world, the tribal villagers who control those places have charged a 'toll' for safe passage since Alexander the Great went through. Now the Americans pay the toll plus they pay extra to assure the largesse passes on to any other militants in the area who need pacifing.

McCrystal had very little luck beyond the high mountain highwaymen, Petraeus will do no better though he'll undoubtedly try. Bribing the insurgents is afterall one of the central tenents of 'counter-insurgency' and though the Western Colonial powers have lost every battle against insurgents [23-0] in the last couple hundred years, they still figure it's bound to work this time. Well it isn't.

Back during the Vietnam war returning vets told stories about how they'd have setup clinics-fresh water wells-saved the village kid's lives with antibiotics-rebuilt temples-handed out food and money, but almost invaribly some the recently saved villagers would sneek out of town on the day of the American departure and try to ambush the same US troops that just 'saved' them. The Vietnamese had the same central organizing principle as the Afghanis, resistance to the occupiers always. The same long term stratadgy, in the long run the occupiers would get tired and go home. The Afghans have been resisting occupiers for a looooooooog time, they know that sooner or later we'll go home. The villagers whose hearts we try to win or buy know we'll be leaving too. They'll take Petraeus' Iraq style bribes but they'll be waiting in the palm trees with their AK-47s and planting roadside bombs along the road outta town.

Drones coming soon to a border near you.

The ever more paranoid US was staying on course to militarize its borders when it announced it was deploying more drones along its Mexican borders. Lost in the headlines was the mention of expanding their drones, only one right now outta Fargo ND, along the Canadian border as well.

Drones, like any tool, aren't good or bad themselves, and the US in entitled to be as paranoid as it wants, but the soullessness of a robot controled by a computer jocky somewhere, with the inherent techno-mistakes at his/her fingertips, changes the whole character of our interactions. Drones cause an appropriate subconscious reaction of fear in all of us, that's part of their power. We see and hear about drones on the six o'clock news firing rockets at villagers, wedding parties, funerals and we wonder who's next.

For sure these border gaurding robot drones outta Fargo ain't gonna be packin missiles just cameras and spy stuff. But who knows what all information they're interested in beyond the evil terrorists. Is the CIA curious about pot growers, will they soon be using their lisecne plate recognition system to finger lovers of the demon weed, or maybe they'll start tacking their own citizens who come up everyday to fill their prescriptions at prices they can afford because of our socialist medical system. Who knows what the drones know.

Drones are tools of terrorism. The innocent people living the villages and valleys of their ancestors are terrorized everytme a drone flies by, everytime it kills those in their family or village they are terrorized. Death flies into their valley on soulless wings remotely controlled by a kid at a computer screen half a world away. The faceless robot terrorists abroad are also killing any chance the US ever had in Af-Pakistan. Drones will further poison the already deadly well of distrust along the Mexican border too. Canada's government of course will say 'please and thank you' to about anything as long as the oil bucks keep rollin in. More drones, more blackhawk helocopters, more fences, that's how you make friends, that's how you do it.
 
US to Deploy Drones to Shore Up Border with Mexico

Afghan War Rug

Afghanistan is often called 'the graveyard of empires'. i wonder if all those historic x-empires had days like today too. Today our fork tongued Emperor Obama had a chance to change horses, to change courses, away from his empire's headlong pony express ride over the Afghan cliff. He, being of forked tongue and cowardly character chose to replace Gen McChrystal with Gen. Petraeus, to signal no change in their stratedgy. How stupid, McChrystal's comments in the upcoming Rolling Stone offered Obama another chance, but like torture, health care, Guantanmo, Iraq, gay rights, billionaire bailouts, drilling regulations and permits, etc. Obama has still never seen an issue that couldn't be dodged by the application of his silver sounding forked tongue.

The 'Taliban', the terrorists, the evil ones, on the other end of our drones and tanks live in Afghanistan, they have for thousands of years. When the Soviet Union was trying to dominate Afghanistan our media called them Mujahadeen 'soldiers of god', we armed them, trained them, funded them. Now that NATO, and especially the Yanquis, have fallen prey to the 'Afghan Pschyosis' it's our kids dying in the mountain deserts.

They, call themselves Poshtun, there are at least 43 million of them living in the Afghan-Pakistan region. So that's 21 million males all of whom have dedicated, or will as soon as they turn 12, their lives to the ouster of the occupiers, us. The roots of Afghan traditions and art have faded into history but their craft and their zeal have not. While the Mujahadeen descendants defend their precious valleys from the same hideouts their forfathers fought off empires of those long past eras the women and children are busy in the villages weaving their world famous rugs. Income from weaving often provides Afghan villagers with the only source of hard currency they earn each year.

As you can see above Afghans use as a template for their art the important things around them.

My Lucky Rabbit's Foot

When i was a little kid growing up in the 50's everybody had a lucky rabbit's foot. We knew mostly Catholics, but Protestants, Jews, Arabs all owned 'em too. Boys-girls, all races, old-young, nobody really believed that a rabbit's foot brought luck, but eh, it couldn't possibly hurt and ya can never know about what ya don't know. Same for walking under ladders, black cats, and steping on the lines in a concrete walkway, nobody REALLY believed they caused bad luck but everybody changed their route if a black cat was walking by, never walked under ladders and avoided those expansion joint lines just the same.

There lots of other taboos and charms too. They were a cultural ghost from our not so distant pagan past. They are part of a verbal tradition that has handed down stories and customs through the generations that the church outlawed as the devil's work. Many ancient rituals have lived, some hidden but most in clear view. Some, like the bogey man, were used to control any potential wayward behavior. Every culture had them, just ask your grandparents.

i got my rabbit's foot so long ago its origins have faded to mystery. But it hasn't, it sits here just beside my laptop and still gets almost daily rubbing, not that i believe it matters. For at least 58 years it has sat on my dresser, lounged on my desk while i did homework, lived in my pocket through mosta college, then after a period of rest at my mom's house for a while, it has been back on the scene emanting its luck filled vibrations through my life, or not.

i've had a very lucky life, beyond even that first bit of incredible luck to have one at all, lucky to have two great daughters, to have shared my little life with them and our best friends, very lucky mud for sure. All nothing to do with my lucky rabbit's foot i'm sure, but...

The Darkness of Theocracy

The hallucinogenic datura is setting the art history world a-twitter. A piece of fruit in the bottom right-hand corner of Sandro Botticelli's Venus and Mars has caught the eye of art historian David Bellingham. He suspects that the 15th century master depicted the deities lounging with the hallucinogenic datura stramonium, also known as "poor man's acid." i got a copy of High Art: Were Botticelli's Venus And Mars Stoned? in my inbox this morning followed by another cautioning of datura's deadly potential and the danger, espeially to young experimenting kids, both very real considerations in light of our culture's church forced ignorance through this centuries long 'dark ages' we live in.

Datura was one of the power plants used by our ancestors to induce visions, the flights of witches were powered by the daturas. Almost every ancient culture has used some form of hallucinogenic drug as part of either their daily routine or religious ritual or both. When in this past century our ethno-botinists have studied the power plants of the tribes hidden away and still living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle they all knew well and used the hallucinogenic properties of everything in their enviroment flora or fauna.

A friend told me another story recently of a marriage between hallucinogenic plants and legend. This one involves flying reindeer during the other solstice season. Apparently Aminita Mucarus, one of the most powerful and dangerous magic mushrooms, has grown wild in the tundra regions inhabited by the reindeer/cariboo and the Inuit forever. The Aminita is poisonous and eaten fresh throughout the summer it makes both reindeer and human far to sick to experiment with. But, somehow, the reindeer figured out that the urine excreted by a fellow reindeer who'd eaten them was no longer poisonous but still hallucinogenic. The Inuit watched as early each winter the cariboo/reindeer would sniff around in the new snow each morning looking for a frozen urine ball with a certain smell. The animals would eat the urine ball then, a short time later, the urine eating reindeer would start to twirl and leap into the air. What the reindeer were experiencing as mushroom induced ecstatic bursts the humans were seeing as flying reindeer. When the white folks and christianity came along centuries later they supressed the hallucinogenic mushrooms and turned the legends of the flying reindeer into guess who.

The rise and spread of the Abrahamic religions came at the cost of the pagan tribes who used the power plants like datura and magic mushrooms. Today those same forces of religious intolerance and absolute certainity believe they are serving their one true god by supporting the war on marijuana. Legalizing pot, even just in California, could be the thin edge of the wedge we on the fringe need to break through this long darkness of theocracy.

New Bridge at Cliff Gilker Park

The bridge above the falls at Cliff Gilker Park has been rebuilt. Its weight is being carried by two beams cut from the tree that volunteered for the job by falling through the old one. The other lumber was milled at a small local mill from local trees. All of the work was done by Parks employees of the Regional District and a local coast crane owner/operator. It's a perfect outcome, the new bridge is wheelchair accessible and the access trails are now being upgraded for wheelchairs as well. None of this would have been possible without the good judgement of the Sunshine Coast Regional District Parks Department. Thanks and praises all around.

Pancho and i love Cliff Gilker Park, our time spent hiking there is the best part of our day. As the seasons turn so too do the sounds of her creeks and birds, the colors of her flora, the meanderings of her fauna but in all seasons Cliff Gilker is alive and changing everyday. It's early summer now, the huclkeberries are light red, the salmonberries getting sweeter by the day, the streams are slowly dropping, and many songbirds are much quieter now that they have babies hiding in their nests. Today we met our friends again here and there along the interwoven forest trails as we do most everyday. As summer rolls along we'll enjoy all the park's many cool shady spots but today i noticed we and our forest friends stood in the parts bathed in sunlight still.

Like me, most of the friends we meet on the trails through Cliff Gilker are retired and now that our children have left home we are lucky to be able to spend our little lives with our best friends walking the trails of Cliff Gilker. Lucky too to live here on the Sunshine Coast of BC with its excellant abundant water, relatively clean air, good land and a ferry service that makes getting here as painful as possible for visitors.

We'll be back tomorrow Pancho and i. We'll smell the air, and hear the creeks roaring, we'll enjoy every minute of it. We'll have our tails up and our ears flapping, see ya there.

Absolute Certainity vs. Logical Reason

George Monbiot's article in The Guardian, 'Bogus and misdirected, yes. But the Tea Party has a lot to teach the left', does a great job of laying out the political absurdity of the Tea Party, of their ridiculous positions and arguements while still congratulating them on their commitment to their absurd causes and their 'direct action' as opposed to the political left's endless debate and inaction.

The Tea Partiers have the huge advantage of 'Absolute Certainity' that the causes they support have god on their side, unquestionable, unimpeachable, absolute. The Tea Partiers believe thay are doing the work of their god, they have something messy-many sided-reason can never have, 'Absolute Certainity'.

We poor fools who try to use logic, debate, experimentation to inform our worldview can never be 100% certain of anything. We know that once in awhile anamolous shit happens that can change our worldview. We poor fools hold ideas to be true until some new information comes long that refutes those old ideas and we subsequently form new views. We who believe in reason use: thesis + antithesis = synthesis to constantly inform and evole our worldview. Our ideas and ideals resemble Sideshow Bob's hair, the 'Absolute Certainity' folks sport a more Pat Boone look.

What a huge advantage the religious zealots have in the marketplace of minds. The zealots offer easy answers, the reasonable offer difficult choices. Little wonder that as education standards drop, as the rich get richer and times get tougher that the Evangometer is heading for an apex. To a poor fool like me all this uneditable belief crap sounds like silly horseshit used to bilk the weak of their meager means. Often a fool like me reasons that actions have reactions [another unfortunate feature of logic] and that one day the growing darkness of 'Absolute Certainity' will be replaced again by the malliable mind of reason.

"As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression.

In both instances, there's a twilight where everything remains

seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we

must be aware of change in the air, however slight,

lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."

- Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas

Touchdown Jesus struck by lightening!

Thankfully nobody was injured last Monday at the Solid Rock church in Monroe, Ohio. A six-storey statue of Jesus Christ in a Monroe was struck by lightning and burned to the ground.

The 'King of Kings' statue, one of south-west Ohio's most familiar landmarks, had stood since 2004 at the evangelical Solid Rock church along the Interstate 75 highway in Monroe, just north of Cincinnati. The sculpture showed the figure of Jesus from the torso up and was nicknamed Touchdown Jesus because of the way the arms were raised, similar to a referee signalling a touchdown in football.

Events like this happen randomly, but huge statues, especially in high exposed places as religious figures often are, get far more than their share of the action statisics show. On the other hand, if you're hangin out waitin for such a thing, this could be a 'sign'. Maybe the big one's coming. This could be BIG, not just for Monroe, best repent while there's still time.

Just outside the Solid Rock church some curious onlookers were seen scooping up pieces of the statue's foam from the nearby pond to take home with them. Darlene Bishop, a church co-pastor said , "This meant a lot to a lot of people, it will be back," she said. "but this time we are going to try for something fireproof."

Original artist offers help with new Jesus statue

The Afghan Poppy Blight

About one third of Afghanistan's poppies have been hit by a blight, a virus who's spread was helped along by this spring's higher than normal rainfall and winds. The poppy farmers, who feed their famlies with the money they earn from their plots, know that blights and diseases come and go, that they are a part of nature. But still the blight and loss of opium production will hurt those farmers far harder than farmers of other crops.

There is, i just learned, a two year supply in storage of legal morphine for phamacutical use and a three year supply to fill addicts and users demands. So with such a huge backlog opium prices won't rise as quickly, or as much, as say the price of wheat or bread due to Sask. flooded fields and lowered harvest this coming fall. If the praries grow less wheat each individual farmer's overall income is helped by the higher prices the lower overall supply creates. To bad for our Mujahadeen poppy growing farmers, the worldwide drug cartels are so oversupplied that wholesale prices, at least at the mud hut door level, won't budge.

Outlaw farmers everywhere have similiar problems. Demand for intoxicating drugs continues to climb, supply also continues to grow [pun intended]. The mafia types have siezed control of the milleniums long connection between grower and stoner. The Andian coca culture has existed in peaceful harmony since before time, the neolithic agriculturalists grew marijuana for fun and hemp for fiber, the far easterners have used opium as long. Afghanistan's opium farmers face the same problems as BC's outlaw pot growers, or Peru's cocaleros, the middlemen-the bankers-the cartels-the gangs have turned them all from fun into money.

Criminals want to get rich quick, feel entitled to a free lunch and believe it's around every new corner. Outlaws farmers grow just enough to 'get by and get high', know that 'you reap what you sow', and give thanks for their blessings. The small Afghan farmers will survive the temporary road bump of this blight, they'll survive this latest empire's delusion of military victory. They'll survive the sandstorms and their theiving governments. So will the rest of us.

Yesterday was Che Guevara's birthday, sorta

Ernesto Che Guevara’s birth certificate records his birthday as June 14, 1928. His real birth date was May 14, 1928. The birth certificate was doctored because the family wanted to protect Che’s mother from scandal that would come about due to her being pregnant at the time of her marriage.

Agree with them or not, Che lived his short life by his ideals, he had many great ideas also, he's said to have been a brilliant military mind. Che left a life of comfort behind, he worked equally hard for the leper as the revolution. There's a great book and movie, The Motorcycle Dairies that capture's the portion of Che's life when he turns from his medical degree and wealthy family in Argentina toward a solution, toward Cuba and the revolution.

Che Guevara is one of my heroes, he knew the difference between ideas and ideals, ideas are subject to debate, ideals aren't. Viva Cuba!

A crop from this 1960’s photograph of Che by the photographer Alberto Korda has become one of the most famous image of our times. It has become a symbol for freedom and liberty.

BP Is A Symptom, Not A Disease

All the major media and every arm of the US government are unanimous, BP is the villian and that's that. The blast feels like a gale force wind. As a rule, any undirectional propaganda blitz by our 'leaders' deserves two responses. First, like most disasters, 'duck and cover'. Second, 'ask every question, question every answer'.

It's easy to see why BP is wearing the scarlet letter, they did exactly what every other corporation does but they didn't get away with it. Every other oil company, is thanking their lucky stars it wasn't them. They all bribed congress, they all paid off the regulators, they all had the absolute minimum of safety technology demanded of them by the rules writtten by those compromised legislators and enforced by those indebted regulators.

They, all the energy giants not just the oily ones, all corporations in general, serve one master-shareholder profits. Same story for the banks and their massive fraud/bailout fiasco. The job of the management is to minimumize costs and maximize income. If safety costs are better minimized by bribing governments and regulators than actually doing the work required the managers are duty bound to bribe away.

The duty of all our governments is to serve it's 'real' citizens and protect their common wealth. Seems to me BP is doing, and has done, exactly what it's empowered by law to do. The government is doing and has done the opposite. The villian is the big lie necessary to justify the existing conditions which bless consumption over conservation, greed over need and profits over people. BP is a symptom, not a disease.

A Fighting Chance

The global class war is "unfolding as it should", to quote Pierre Trudeau.

Todays' article Is there a Global War Between Financial Theocracy and Democracy? by Les Leopold is being re-run on every news website i go to. It's a heartbreaking historic overview of how the banks have taken over our world, overtaken its political institutions and furthered the cause of the rich in the global class war.

The Greek Government are holding a fire sale. Pretty much all public assets are on the block. It's the IMF's 'Structural Adjustment Program' 101. Cut spending on all health, education, welfare, infrastructure, every service but never raise taxes on the rich or their banks and corporations. Who's next? Spain, Ireland, Italy...What about you, the consumer. How's your 'Debt to Asset' ratio? If you're a typical N. American it's at least as bad as Greece's. The richos aren't just out to punish the Greeks for their cavalier attitude to taxes and water bills or their insistance on long paid vacations, they're after every benefit no matter how long fought and hard won they were by our ancestors.

As Les Leopold says, "We shouldn't kid ourselves about the pitched battles ahead. Fighting back won't be easy, and winning will be even harder. People in country after country will have to mobilize themselves in defense of each nation's right to provide its people with a decent quality of life. In my opinion, that includes sustainable jobs with decent benefits and a solid public infrastructure that promotes equity, protects the vulnerable and enriches the environment."
"Unfortunately, no one can guarantee that democracy will prevail in the war against financial theocracy -- just recall the totalitarian chaos in Europe during the Great Depression. But don't count it out, either. It's true that many of us regular folks have been diverted by the media, distracted by the Internet or lulled into a stupor by pharmaceuticals. But when we realize that we've been shoved into a corner with no way out, we'll act. A popular struggle will begin. And when it does, we'll at least have a fighting chance..."

The Vuvuzela, Weapon of Mass Delerium

After watching only part of each of the first two World Cup games yesterday it dawned on me that the vuvuzela could easily evolve into a poor people's weapon of mass delerium as easily as it has already caused near pschyosis in soccer-football fans around the globe. Imgine what could happen in Tibet if the South Africans donated all their surplus vuvuzelas, after the World Cup ends, to the markets in Lhasa. Just pass 'em out to the Tibetan kids, in a couple days the Chinese would start leaving on the train back to China, in a week or so it'd look like a mini flood, before long they'd all be gone and the Tibetans could hold a quick vote on independence and future immagration policies.

Imagine even more vuvuzelas being given away in the East Jerusalem markets. Just send out the kids near any of the damn Isreali settlements, let 'em start blowin and i bet those 'ol Zionists will start another exodus pretty damn quick. Mighta worked in Iraq too if it'd a been thought up in time. How about kids in Kabul and Kandahar, bet they could drive the Yankees and NATO nuts in no time.

So grab the remote and hit the mute button if you're planning on checking out the World Cup this coming month, it could be your only hope of retaining any amount of sanity come early July.

For Everyone's Sake, Ban The Vuvuzela

The Happiness of Having Less

The tiny Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan, thought of by many as the model for Shangri-La, uses a different yardstick to measuse the well being of its residents. The king, Jigme Wangchuck, works to raise Bhutan's Gross National Happiness saying that it would be the goal of his reign to make “Gross National Happiness more important than Gross National Product.”

In time, they began to measure nine domains that affect happiness:

Psychological well-being or mental health

Physical health

Time or Work-life balance

Education

Cultural vitality and expression

Social connection and relationships

Environmental quality and access to nature

Quality of governance…

And finally...

Material well-being.

Tha article linked below details many of the resources used by researchers to weld together the overall arguement that once an individual, group or nation's income surpasses its basic needs further income does nothing to raise the happiness level of any of them. In fact further accumulation of material possessions lowers the happiness index of each as they aquire more and more stuff.

In the city of Victoria, BC, civic organizations formed a Happiness Partnership and conducted a scientific sampling of the nine domains of happiness in their city. You can take the survey yourself: http://survey.dialogueresearch.com/. To conclude, happiness rises in inverse proportion to both material possessions and wants.
 
The Progressive Politics of Happiness - Nearly a hundred years ago, when thousands of women left the dismal textile mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts, to demand a better life, they carried banners which read: WE WANT BREAD AND ROSES TOO. Bread and roses were the twin goals of the old labor movement; higher wages to buy the bread; shorter working hours to smell the roses.

BP bids for Adwords Ads just like everybody else.

BP bids for Adwords Ads just like everybody else. Adwords and Adsense, Google's huge profit engines, use a speed of light bidding process to determine which advertiser's ads get run in which positions in the side and top bars that contain the 'sponsored links' when Google returns your query to its search engine. Google's ad's can't be 'bought' by BP or anyone else. BP is running a huge multi-media advertising campaign part of which is its Adwords and Adsense ads.

i've run a few different Adwords-Adsense campaigns through the years. BP's, though larger, is no different than the ones i've setup and run. BP puts a top price [bid] on how much it'll pay everytime a surfer clicks on one of its ads when it appears on Google's site and a seperate, usually smaller, top amount it'll pay when it's ads that appear throughout the web on pages that contain related keywords get clicked on. Plus BP chooses how much it total it'll pay each day thereby limiting the number of times it's ads appear, once BP has spent all its daily budget its ads are done running until tomorrow [it's being estimated that BP is spending $10,000 a day on its Google campaign]. Further, BP can define which countries it wants its ads run in, at this point they are running almost exclusively on Google.com, the US version, in fact i haven't seen one BP Adwords ad at Google.ca here in Canada.

So, BP is doing exactly the same thing every capitialist company does in exactly the same way and the mainstream media's widespread use of the term 'buy', seen everywhere these last few days refering to BP's ad campaign, is either intentionally misleading or just plain ignorant. All of the media outlets understand how Google's Adwords works, they all use Adwords themselves as well as compete with Adwords for advertising revenue. The term 'buy' in the headlines [like below] are being used to misinform readers on one level but also to undermine Google's 700lb advertising gorilla.

Google's Adwords setup can be gamed in a couple of ways. First, and i see lots of evidence that this is already widespread, like BP, anybody can bid on that top spot on Google's return page. Any Google Adwords account holder can bid on the search term 'oil spill', for instance. Many companies and enviromental groups are bidding against BP for that top spot, the higher they bid the more BP must bid in order to appear which is exactly what's happening on the US's Google.com. Second, we as individuals can undermine BP's advertising/propaganda campaign by clicking on their ads in Google's sponsored links areas whenever they appear on your computer in response to your relelvent keyword searches at Google. Not only does BP pay everytime someone clicks through to one of its ad campaign's landing pages but the more often they are clicked on the quicker each day BP's budget is exhusted thereby stopping its ads and allowing other ads from other points of view to rise to the top.

Google's Adwords and Adsense programs have made Google billions of dollars in the last decade, they are a powerful advertising tool that focuses advertising dollars directely at people who search for terms closely related to the topic or object being advertised. Google/Yahoo's directed advertising schemes are very powerful especially in view of the fact that the majority of people don't know what 'sponsored links' even are, but that power, like the power of a reservoir behind a dam, or the computational power of your computer can manifest different outcomes depending on how it's used.

Knowledge is power. If you have a small budget and a big idea Google's Adwords and Adsense can be harnessed, even one individual, to challenge the schemes of the rich. Learn enough about Adwords and Adsense and you'll see how easy it is to launch your idea out into the river where the big money and the big ideas flow.

BP Buys 'Oil' Search Terms to Redirect Users to Official Company Website


Is it Unethical for BP to Buy Google Ads on Oil Spill-Related Keywords?

The Vague Shadowy Corporate People

Corporate “people” are very dangerous as we're learning again in the Gulf. The flesh and blood humans making the choices between safety and shareholder profitability are forced by law to do the latter but the corporation they serve bears the liability of those choices and the choosers get to sail off into a golden sunset. Meanwhile the corporations have insurance and limited liability laws to protect them.

PB says verbally they'll pay all the costs but in writing they add 'that they are libel for'. Just like in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina the insurance companies left holding the multi-billion dollar bags will quickly go bankrupt. BP will do everything it can to avoid joining them. BP is just about to pay $10billion to shareholders, that money should be set aside to cover the future costs their bad choices produced. BP will never be able to pay the full costs, most of them aren't financial. The US will end up borrowing more money to cover the human losses somewhat but the enviroment will pay the lion's share.

Real people are being shafted by the vague shadowy corporate people who've carved a legal cave in the mountain of common sense. i realize the article below is US centered and so is the Gulf of Mexico example but we all face the same demon, the 'corporate person' demon. Perhaps the US will lead us all out of this mess via the Amendment route, they got us in it with a weird Supreme Court non-decision in the early 1800's. i propose a trade: the 'personhood' rights the corporations now hold be traded to the mydrid millions of living stakeholders who form the web of life that sustains us real people.

Real People v. Corporate “People”: The Fight Is On - The Supreme Court says corporations can spend as much money as they want on political advertising. Millions of Americans say they've had it.

Helen Thomas Resigns Amid Whirlwind

Helen Thomas has been a pain in the ass for every White House during the last 50 years. Now at age 89 she's on the ropes because she either misunderstood a question and answers' larger implications or let slip an indiscreet remake like all of us have.

Helen's comment yesterday was in two parts. First she said, "Isrealis should go back where they came from" then added "Isreals should get out of Pasestine." A sentiment shared by many, wether Isreali supporters or not. Many Isrealis aren't Zionists, many see the occupation of Palestine as weakening the political Isreal as well as the religious. So, to me, her !st comment was directed toward the illegal occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza.

Helen's second comment has instantly transmogrified into a call for the Jews re-emmigration to Germany-Poland-Russia-etc when she was actually being asked where original exodus had come from. Helen tripped up. Helen's problem navigating the polemic, pajoritive filled minefield of discourse on all topics Isreali is shared by us all. Isreal is a country, a political-geographic entity, and is just as subject to criticism as all others. Zionism is a racist, colonial, political system disguised as a prophetic religious revelation. Judaism is a 5,000 year old religion complete with all the hocus-pocus of all religions and as such shouldn't be criticised any more than any other religious delusion.

After all these years Helen tripped in the minefield. i hope she regains her feet quickly. Helen is a 'Bad-Ass' she speaks the truth to power, we need her and many more like her.

We need a new drug.

Just finished Big Jump in Oil Tankers in Vancouver's Port at the Tyee.ca . Great article. From it i learned that the flow of tar sands crude through Burrard Inlet has been quickly rising in the last two years, and will more than double again soon. The proposed Enbridge Gateway pipeline to Kitimat is stirring strong public opposition, but in the meantime, tanker traffic on the B.C. coast through the Port of Vancouver is quietly being scaled up virtually under the radar.

Kinder Morgan's pipeline from Haines Alberta to North Burnaby has had  its capacity recently expanded to 300,000 barrels per day - almost 60 per cent of the proposed volume of the Enbridge Gateway pipeline in Northern B.C. Kinder Morgan plans to further expand the pipeline capacity to 700,000 barrels per day as soon as possible. Safety is an even bigger issue through the Vancouver Port because of the treacherous waters and the huge numers of smaller tankers that the Vancouver Port's conditions dictate.

'Safety' sounds like such a HUGE word to me right now as i nightly watch the oil soaked birds being hauled from the Gulf of Mexico. Everyday we burn more oil not less, everyday we exhaust more tons of crap into our common atmosphere. The Gulf blowout is a tiny fraction of the amount we exhaust each and every day into the air we all share, we just don't see the full cost as easily as we do the Gulf's slick or dead birds, but it's there coating our lungs, fouling our world, changing our climate and killing our fellow earthlings.

We need a new drug.

Horde Proof Fencing

There's always an upside, even to economic collapse. On the way to whatever does finally sink this ship of fools our culture has become, there will be a few winners and lottsa losers. i say, go long on HPF - Horde Proof Fencing, a product perfectly positioned according to many leading economic forcasters.

Hopelessness and dispair are rampant, huge and seemingly intractable problems surround us. One resolution is to take the long term perspective, in the long run the bacteria will eat all the gulf oil, the planet will neutralize our carbon gluttony, the climate and geology will continue on their dance and all human history will be condensed to a thin ribbon of stainless steel debris in the sedimentary deposits of the future.

So looooooooooooooong term, we, the rogue primate, aren't really much danger to the planet just ourselves and the mllions of other species we're taking down with us. Midterm, say the lifespans of our grandchildren, say now 'til 2100, if the collapsers are right, it's gonna be a rocky road. Securing certain things like water, food and tools now, before things fall apart, might prove to be essential to survival. Those folks who live on the land now, who grow their own, could well be overrun by emmigrating urban refugees, food refugees.

During this next century, the midterm, hordes will be leaving the cities. Every farmer will be using some type of 'horde proof fencing' to protect their harvest. Short term, just behind owning good land with good water, air, drainage and the tools to make it all happen, the best short term solution to most things is a six pack and a joint.

Guy Mcpherson says, "You and I didn’t start the fire of empire. But we’re about to see it extinguished". So sell all your 'investments' in capitialism's future, sell your bank stocks, dump your commodities, your financials, your indexed mutual funds cause they're all gonna tank. Go long on HPF.

Einstein said, "in the longterm, we're all dead", but maybe not. Get a glimpse of one of the first players in this new exploding market at: Walls And Zombies: How To Prepare Your Home developed by the U.S.Zombie Tactical Squad who offer 'Protection from the Undead'. The possibilities are almost endless.

Wolfram Alpha - WOW

Today an old friend sent me a link to an amazing website, Wolfram Alpha, the world's first computational knowledge engine, offered for free on the web. It is an online service developed by Wolfram Research that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine would. It's an answer engine .

This application could change the information searching habits of millions maybe billions of cybernaughts. i've now wasted/spent two hours asking it questions. You're gonna love it.

Watch the preview when you have the time and it will boggle your mind.

There are no limits to what you can do with this website...it is a "keeper!"

Watch the Introduction first:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

Then save the Site in your favorites:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

The Mother of all Conspiracies

How can we have a clear view of the headlines each day when the history we've been taught has been controlled and manipulated by the wealthy and powerful for so long? One answer is look into things for yourself. Pick a topic, it doesn't seem to matter which one, there's plenty of e-information on all sides of every issue now.

It was back in '66 the first time an impotant topic snuck up on me. It was history class, my senior year of High School. WWII was the topic, the assignment was to write a big paper on some important aspect of it. Back in those days everyones' lives, and those of their parents, were still very directly effected by the terrible losses of that war. There was tons of information on WWII everywhere, the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor should have been an easy ride to a good mark. My goal in all school assignments back then.

Those times were tumultuous, JFK had been assissinated a few years earlier, the rumors of conspiracy and coverup were everywhere. Then came LBJ and the deaths caused his Gulf of Tonkin lies. Maybe it was the times, anyway, i started at my local library, then went to the Williams College library a few mles away, the sources all agreed, the whole story was in every public library.

What an eye-opener it turned out to be. Pearl Harbor was a setup. The US needed an excuse to get into the war. The leadership sacrificed thousands of innocent lives to achieve their political goals. My paper got written, the teacher, who'd lost a brother in the war, hated it, but the shitty mark was more than balanced in the long run by the glimpse i'd caught of how 'truth' was in the eye of the beholder, how we all wear cultural blinders and that 'believing is seeing'.

Now, 46 years later, the secret attack on Pearl Harbor is commonly called 'The Mother of all Conspiracies'. The JFK book in yesterday's blog is an eyeopener too. Both of them have the advantage of age, with the passing years more and more info has squeezed out, more researchers have had time to dig. It' also interesting to watch the present moment unfold into history through the different perspectives and spins of governments and media. The future of the Gaza strip barracade- 40km long, 9km wide, by Isreal will be interesting to watch unfold in the next little while. Try Aljazeera.net for a counter-balance to our MSM's tunnelvision, after all, two tunnelvisions are beter than one, perspective wise.

JFK and the Unspeakable

A few days ago i finished JFK and the Unspeakable - Why he died & Why it matters by James W. Douglas. To quote Princton Law Professor Richard Falk, "This book should be required reading for every American citizen."

Everyone of a certain age remembers where they were when they heard the news of JFK's murder in Dallas on Nov. 23rd 1963. i was in geometry class, sophmore year of high school. Politics and world affairs at any depth were still wel beyond my event horizon. The Cuban Missle Crisis kinda shook everybody's complacency tree, few things sharpen the mental focus like impending total destruction. But mostly, i chased basketballs, baseballs and tried to figure out girls [still haven't succeeded at that].

Douglas book lays out in detail the less than 3 short years of JFK's presidency. He tells the behind the scenes story of the Bay of Pigs, the Missle Crisis, Vietnam, the Cold War, and most importantly, how JFK was slowly but surely turning away from the Pentagon, from the CIA, from the military industrial complex his predessor Eisenhower publically warned him about. JFK was turning towards pacifism, toward detente, and away from the unspeakable.

i was a teenager back then but when i saw Jack Ruby gun down Oswald on national TV even i could smell a rat. Jack Kennedy's murder on that deadly Dallas day began the turning of a generation away from automatically accepting authority. My turning continues. Read JFK and the Unspeakable, it very well might give your turn a new momentum.