AIDS research has failed to find cause

Posted on April 29, 2008 by JB

“AIDS research has not failed because it never found a cure … AIDS research has failed because it never found a cause”

Twenty four years and no cure, no cause, no answers. But billions of tax dollars to an established AID$ industry who refuse to look at the facts. More money has been spent on AIDS research than any other disease in the history of medicine, all with no results! Giving a weakened or compromised immune system a name, “AIDS”, is trickery. Telling us it is caused by an old and harmless retrovirus is dishonest. But treating immunodeficiency, whatever is causing it, with toxic chemo ARV drugs, that destroy DNA and bone marrow, is criminal! It’s time to get mad and get the word out and demand a reappraisal. Or accountability for the terror, stress, damage and destruction to many lives.

FACTS:
1. HIv has never been isolated as a pure virus, direct from human blood or tissue nor have control groups been used who are HIv “positive” and HIv “negative”. One must understand that HIv is a harmless passenger retrovirus, not a disease causing virus like HPV or HSV. (see 3 and 8.)

2. Isolation experiments, as recommended by the Perth Group and others, in the Presidential AIDS Advisory Panel Report of 2000, have never been done on control groups both with or without HIv. This is especially important since it is well known that thousands who test positive for antibodies for HIv remain healthy and thousands who have “AIDS” (by CDC definition) are not infected with HIv.

3. Kochs Postulates is and has been the widely accepted, time tested screen for determining whether an infectious germ or virus is causing disease. HIv fails all 4 (or 3 depending how you consider #4), of the postulates. A large effort must be undertaken to produce HIv in any quantities that are similar to disease causing virus. This is done by co-culturing HIv with leukemia cells in the lab (petri dish) or by adding growth stimulants. (See point 7 under “AIDS – Fact or Fraud”.)

4. HIv was first studied/discovered by Luc Montagnier as LAV around 1979. Montagnier admitted in 1990 that his LAV was probably benign. Robert Gallo stole Luc Montagniers work in approx. 1983 when Montagnier shared it with him. Gallo then claimed it as his own. He and the NIH were sued by the French government. Montagnier worked for the Pasteur Institute of Science. He also shared in the royalties. (see 13) Luc Montagniers LAV stood for Lymphademopathy Associated Virus. Part of the Pasteur Inst. charges in the initial lawsuit against Gallo were for Gallos claim that HIv was infectious. Regardless virus as causation of any kind of cancer, including lymphoma, is long proved false in the 70’s “Cancer Virus Program” through the Natl. Inst. of Cancer which is part of the NIH.

5. AIDS is nothing more than an acronym created by the CDC to create the categories of known diseases hypothesized as being “caused” by HIv. Suppression of the immune system however is not a disease and is caused by many things, which has led to much (purposeful?) confusion of the public. With a “positive” HIv antibodies test,(see 11,) or low T-cell count, or if in a risk group, and if showing symptoms of any one of 29 AIDS diseases as classified by CDC, any observation of those symptoms (see 19 for Africa) are now “AIDS-HIv” related and somehow deadly when most are not, all have other known causation and can be treated without antiretroviral drugs. All of this convoluted testing and categorizing adds to the numbers of HIv “positives” and then “AIDS” patient cases. Useful data for keeping the ARV drugs on the front line of treatment even though they are useless having been designed for cancer tumor therapy, and thus very harmful.

6. AZT, an ARV(antiretroviral), and other AIDS cocktails like HAART, are very toxic chemo CANCER drugs and destroy cells and terminate DNA chains. The initial trials of AZT based drugs showed wide evidence of harsh side affects, i.e. muscle wasting, organ failure, vomiting, diarrhea, destruction of bone marrow, yet FDA approved them on a fast track mandate in 1987. Many involved in the trials say these side effects were hidden. When AZT was created in 1964 it was deemed too toxic for use and was shelved. It is no “theory” that these drugs cause the very kinds of immune system destruction and breakdown that is deceitfully blamed on HIv. Admitted by the drug manufacturers themselves in their printed warnings. Why was this drug even thought to be useful for a “virus” when chemo therapy had never been used for virus treatment?

7. People who refuse AZT or the chemo drug cocktails after a “positive” HIv antibody test, remain healthy in most cases. (see risk groups #18) AIDS activists and counselors who are unaware of what HIv actually is, consistently fail to inform the “at risk” population that often call or visit them, that the HIv test is not a test for the virus. Or that the tests have disclaimers that say: “there is no recognized standard for establishing the presence or absence of antibodies to HIV-1 or HIV-2 in human blood”. And the viral load tests have the same disclaimers for what they are testing for. Besides, there is no proof of different specific HIv-1 or HIv-2 because HIv is a benign indistinguishable retrovirus.

8. The PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test is a desperate misleading attempt to detect DNA-RNA fragments of HIv retrovirus, in order to prove it is causing disease. Its inventor, Kary Mullis, rejects HIv as the cause of AIDS or anything else and says his test only amplifies and copies these fragments for study. No real disease causing cytotoxic virus needs this kind of help in it’s detection and purification.

9. HIv is non-cytotoxic.Therefore HIv cannot destroy the cells it infects. Nor can any retrovirus. In fact HIv is well known to virologists to be compatible with T-cells. Or most cells for that matter. This and transcriptease (the ability of retrovirus to insert themselves into cells RNA first, the reverse of cytotoxic virus) is the reason for their specific classification as retroviruses.

10. Real disease causing viruses can be vaccinated against in 95% of cases. But viruses are not always the cause of disease. As often in the case of scurvy, pellagra and weak immune system, it is a dietary and lack of proper exercise or nutrient problem/issue. The case of SMON in Japan was a similar search for a “virus” causation when finally the culprit was found to be a toxin. A toxin in the very drug that doctors were prescribing to SMON patients. This is what happens when “virus hunters” get carried away and take over research for professional recognition and monetary reasons. Or just plain stubbornness. Legionairres disease was a prime example of how the CDC/NIH missed a toxin causation completely and birthed a vaccine that did more harm than good. (Duesbergs “Inventing the AIDS Virus”)

11. The Western Blot HIv test is well known to give many false positives as many antibodies already in the body or other medical conditions (up to 70) can set off the non-specific protein strips in the test. All HIv diagnostic tests carry a disclaimer that the test is NOT to be used to determine the presence or absence of HIv antibodies. Regardless, presence of antibodies to HIv would mean the immune system has done it’s work and the body is protected. In reality based science anyway. In other words, it is impossible to be positive for HIv with these tests because a positive test really means you’re positive for the antibodies and negative for HIv! Thus the PCR tests and viral load(T-cell counts) became the new hope to detect fragments of HIv DNA/RNA or low immune response. (see 8, 16)

12. There are different standards of HIv positive in different states and countries! Why? If it’s a virus it’s a virus! One standard needed. But there is no “gold” standard test. Other than Kochs Postulates for virus and microbes which the CDC and NIH refuse to acknowledge or talk about or if they do they claim that Kochs method is outdated! That’s like saying the 2nd law of thermodynamics is useless.

13. Gallo/NIH received the patent on the HIv tests in the exact same week he announced the “probable” cause of AIDS in 1984. It made the NIH-CDC, Montagnier and Gallo, millions. He had no peer review and had not isolated pure HIv directly from any “infected” persons blood or tissue, at the time of announcement. He could only claim 40% of his “AIDS” patients had detectable HIv. Not anywhere close to claim HIv was infectious or the cause of AIDS by recognized science standards. But how did he determine his “AIDS” patients had HIv? By co-culturing HIv in the lab or with a growth additive. Why? Because retrovirus are weak non-cytotoxic passenger virus that do not multiply or destroy cells.

14. Gallo was involved in the Nixon “War on Cancer” program in the 70’s and helped the Natl. Inst. of Cancer to pressure Congress to fund the program with great promises of success to find retrovirus or any virus as the cause of cancer. But it failed. Luckily, the emerging AIDS “epidemic” helped to find NIH/CDC and the virus hunters a new program to keep and increase their funding and a disease for Gallos HTLV-3. At a time when Reagan needed a political solution, and as gay men were demanding an answer, HIv was acceptable because it erased blame from the gay community for the disease being a “lifestyle” or behavioral disease. But early in it’s announcements, the CDC claimed it was behavioral and called it GRID. Gay Related Immune Deficiency. This was a correct diagnosis as the first 5 cases were all same extreme sexual behavior, heavy drug use related causation. For the CDC, there was no money in a program for only gays. Thus heterosexuals had to be at risk as well. (see 18)

15. Testing people for HIv because they show “AIDS” related disease symptoms, with or without immune suppression, has become the standard line of reasoning though it is preposterous due to the falsity of the tests and absurdity of using other diseases as markers. (11) But the AIDS hysteria has swept through every corner of our medical professions, without a widely publicized critical analysis of testing procedures or reassessment allowed.

16. Low T-cell counts are misleading. A variety of illness, drug abuse, poor health/diet, colds, flu, disease are also responsible. Many athletic people have low T-cell counts and they can vary almost hourly. In people with detectable HIv (by PCR test), it has only been found to infect 1 in approx. 1000 T-cells, hardly enough to destroy immune response. Regardless monitoring the immune response is no way to detect specific disease. Laying in the sun will lower your T-cell count to under 200.
http://www.aliveandwell.org/html/viral_load_tcell/viral_load.html

17. Gallo claims his electron micrograph pictures are of an HIv virus, but nothing can be found by other virologists that resembles a true concentrated virus titer. It is now known that Gallo forged these pictures and was investigated for it by the NIH.

18. “AIDS” has stayed within it’s risk groups, Gay and straight male intravenous drug users, heavy drug abusers, popper users (which causes Karposis Sarcoma), hemophiliacs, and the poor malnourished living in unsanitary conditions…. instead of spreading widely across the population as we’re led to believe. It is not sexually transmittable as claimed by the CDC and NIH, but this edict spread the risk to heterosexuals. With this false claim, and Americans ignorance of virology or HIv testing, funding for research and the following prescriptions for ARV’s was increased 1000 fold. HIv is an old retro-virus that has likely been with us for 100’s of years. Farrs law for dating virus proves this as HIv models exactly to Farrs test. The body’s DNA-RNA discards many cells and retro-virus everyday. Repeat: HIv is not sexually transmittable. It is a parinatally transmitted retrovirus.

19. AIDS related disease in South Africa was and still is occurring markedly in the overcrowded poor populations where malnutrition, common persistent parasitical diseases long vanquished from western populations, lack of health care, std’s infections and unsanitary environments persist. And this is true for the new countries AIDS is supposedly invading. To make matters worse, give them toxic chemo drugs on top of their persistent diseases and already compromised immune systems, and they will die. Many die of the common regional diseases regardless due to lack of health care services, known curative drugs, and of malnutrition. For instance, researchers who have examined the supposed massive deaths reported in Tanzania, find no such evidence. (Questioning AIDs in South Africa) And the CDC has now allowed themselves to categorize many common diseases in these areas as AIDS related, WITHOUT HIv testing, due largely to the expense of the HIv tests. (see Duesberg paper below) Of course they know the the testing is a hoax regardless. As a result, AIDS cases increase lending to the deception of a pandemic. All numbers the CDC and UNAIDS uses for HIv infection and AIDS cases are false and/or completely made up estimations and projections.

20. In fact now the NIH and CDC have admitted that they do not know how HIv causes destruction to the immune system (it doesn’t but the ARV drugs, immune suppressive behaviors, poverty, malnutrition do), and they are now factoring in a co-virus as a way out of their deception. A vaccine was promised in 2 years after the announcement of the “probable” cause HIv in 1984. No cure has ever been produced because no cure is needed or possible for a retro-virus (or passenger virus) that cannot cause disease. No vaccine because HIv isn’t a real disease causing virus.

21. Scurvy (citric acid deficiency), Pellagra (niacin deficiency), Beriberi (thiamine deficiency) , SMON (toxin in drug treatment), Zantac,Tagamet-Ulcers (bacteria, Tagamet, Zantac useless), Clioquinol-Diarrhea (toxin in Clioquinol treatment), Influenza (virus) , DES – Synthetic hormone( caused cervical cancer and sterility)…………all cases that were misdiagnosed or causations ignored by the medical/scientific profession at their specific occurrences in history to the detriment of the public. And in the cases where a drug was given and was causation, it was always to the profit of the pharmaceutical industry. In some cases the misdiagnoses, sickness and death went on for years.

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From the website www.questionaids.com

Why isn’t an antibody test that’s verified by another antibody test good enough to say someone is infected with HIV?

The rationale for the use of antibody tests is that the immune system has the ability to detect foreign agents or viruses and to respond by producing antibodies that react with those agents or viruses. However, this rationale does not work in reverse. That is, the observation of an antibody reaction with a particular agent or virus does not prove that the antibody was produced in response to that particular agent or virus.

The problem with using antibodies alone to indicate infection with a particular agent or virus is twofold:

1. Antibodies can only be associated with a disease after it is shown that they are consistently generated after exposure to the pure virus. We are unaware that this has ever been accomplished with HIV.
2. Antibodies engage in indiscriminate relationships with a variety of agents or viruses. One could say that antibodies are “promiscuous,” that is, antibodies meant for one agent or virus may react with another agent or virus that is a perfect stranger. Or, to put it technically, there is ample evidence that antibody molecules, even the most pure (monoclonal antibodies) are not mono-specific, and that they cross-react with other, non-immunizing antigens.

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FROM THE DVD “AIDS – FACT OR FRAUD?” Ten reasons why HIv cannot be the cause of AIDS:

“Classifying suppression or deficiency of the immune system, that long has had causation in many things, as a specific “syndrome” caused by a harmless retrovirus, is beyond comprehension and an insult to good medicine and science…unless you’re up to no good. But then treating an immune deficiency with poison chemo antiretroviral drugs, that destroy same immune system (bone marrow) and terminate DNA chains is criminal and insane! AIDS is an immune issue and should be treated as such. In fact, the acronym AIDS should be thrown away and banished from our vocabulary.”

1. HIv, like other viruses is harmless after antibody immunity. There is no known disease or virus that has re-emerged after a mature, healthy immune system created antibodies to it.(1) Testing positive for HIv means you have the antibodies and don’t have HIv. Unfortunately many different antigens are documented to set off the protein strips in the HIv tests which makes it difficult to lend any credibility to the tests. Thus the PCR test was invented.

2. HIv does not kill the T-cells it infects. In fact T-cells are compatible with HIv. Virologists know this for a fact. Abbot Labs used T-cells to grow HIv to make the protein strips for the Western Blot test.

3. HIv does not infect enough T-cells to cause AIDS. T-cells reproduce at the rate of 5% a day. HIv, after being destroyed mostly by antibodies produced, can only infect 1 in every 500 to one thousand T-cells. There is no virus in AIDS patients, only antibodies against virus. Gallo could never find any cytotoxic virus in T-cells.

4. HIv has no AIDS causing gene. HIv is no different in gene make up than other retrovirus. There are many retroviruses in the body all the time. If HIv can cause destruction of the immune system ( thus AIDS) then why don’t the other retrovirus? Or if the other retroviruses don’t cause AIDS, why does HIv? There is no genetic reason to explain why HIv causes AIDS.

5. There is no such thing as a slow virus. Gallo and Gajdusek gave HIv magical properties. Real virus cause specific disease and do so within days or a few weeks at most. (1) Herpes is not the exception as viremially it reproduces exponentially when active and passes Kochs Postulates. HIv does not. (Page 74 Duesbergs book IAV) And Herpes when first transmitted almost immediately shows its trademark sores. Gajdusek (NIH) had a history of claiming slow and dormant virus, but never in humans. Always in the lab. Also in his early work he gave retroviruses the ability to create more than one disease. All by correlation but never through proof. In fact he and Gallo and a few other retrovirologists seemed to always discover a retrovirus in the lab, then went looking for a disease.

6. HIv is not a new virus so HIv would not suddenly cause a new epidemic. New epidemics explode across populations. HIv has remained constant in populations and has been infecting every generation likely for centuries without causing AIDS. Farrs law is used for dating virus or microbe age and HIv models exactly to Farrs law. HIv then, is not sexually transmittable nor an epidemic. It is parinatally passed.

7. HIv fails all 4 Kochs postulates. A real disease causing virus or microbe must pass every one. The postulates are:1.) A virus or bacteria must be found in all cases of the disease, actively growing in large amounts call virus titer. HIv FAILS. 2.) Virus or germ must be isolated from the host and grown in pure culture. HIv FAILS HIv has only been grown substantially in the lab using a co-culture of leukemia cells and stimulated with chemicals, never directly from an HIv infected person in large quantities. 3.) The virus or bacteria must cause the same disease when injected into a new healthy host. HIv FAILS. 4.) The virus or bacteria must be isolated and found growing again in large amounts in the newly diseased host. HIv FAILS (failing 3 it cannot pass 4.)

8. AIDS has remained in its original risk groups for over 23 years. 97% AIDS patients made up of same risk groups. 3% risk group isn’t growing.

9. The CDC, WHO international profile of AIDS is inconsistent. U.S. and Europe = 90% male. Africa = 50/50 male female. U.S. and Europe fall 97% into risk groups. Africa = no risk groups.(the official UNAIDS line) The truth is the poor, malnourished living in crowded slums and shanty towns with no sanitation or clean water, or access to health care and continually fighting old parasitical diseases, are the most susceptible to immune deficiency disease, not HIv. They are the risk groups in poor overcrowded areas of developing countries. And CDC and UNAIDS have categorized all the old African diseases now as AIDS, whether HIv infection is present of not.

10. AIDS related disease occurs without HIv infection, and, most people with HIv antibodies, never develop AIDS related disease. What we see in this statement is evidence of no retrovirus in the first case or of a harmless retrovirus in the second case, that does nothing and has been cleared by immune response. Of course what is evident is that no one has HIv who has the antibodies present. If we can even verify that these antibodies are or have reacted to HIv proteins!!! And if it takes a polymerase chain reaction test to confirm that we can only find fragments of the DNA/RNA of HIv, not the HIv itself, then why is anyone worried about HIv??? Because we’ve been terribly misled by, as Duesberg calls them, the “virus hunters”.

Conclusion: HIv is not infectious nor sexually transmittable. With this information and finding of fact we should question any and all claims of disease that are supposedly caused by virus. Immediately what comes to mind are HPV, Hep B and HepC. These may be as harmless as HIv and treatment has been hyped to push people toward vaccinations that are untested and whose efficacy is not totally known.

Hunger, shortages and Wall Street

Posted on April 23, 2008 by JB

What can we expect of a capitalist system gorging itself on the misery of others? The energized “food speculators” have found another way now to skim money off of commodities (and off those producing them) by racing out of their burnt down, failing criminal derivatives scams – that are and will continue to cause job loss, retirement and savings loss, home equity loss – and into food.

This should be stopped immediately by Congress in the interests of the nation and the poorest countries that are now experiencing riots and unrest over high prices and shortages. But you can bet the millionaires in Congress are profiting from this hideous behavior and won’t do a god damn thing about it other than throw money, our money, at it. Worthless solutions from bankrupt minds.The liars in the mainstream media blame everything else but the real cause …the Wall Street vipers. This is our American culture …profit at all and any costs.

Ethanol is turning out to be a speculative tool as well, besides taking land away from corn grown for cattle feed and humans. Sugar cane, other forms of bio-fuel will become speculator targets as well. Even water! All of this investing in commodities is driven by the falling dollar created by the Fed who crashed the dollar!! Lowering interest rates and opening cheap credit windows to Wall Street floods the economy with more worthless paper. This is driving the commodities bubble as well. Investors are trying to hedge against losses from the subprime/derivatives scams. It’s all related… not as the mainstream news claims that weather or high oil prices are driving this. Bullpucky.

“According to Grünewald, “Raw materials are the mega-trend of the decade,” and his company intends to intensify its involvement in both water and agricultural stocks. MIC investment in wheat alone has already yielded profit levels of 93 percent for the 2,500 members of the club.” – WSWS

Read these two articles and see if Wall Street is mentioned: NY Sun: food rationing or Yahoo: food crisis.

How to win the war in Iraq

Posted on April 9, 2008 by Eric Verlo

How painful it must be for General Petraeus, or any operational commander in Iraq, to have to pretend a strategy, doomed to failure, and have it reflect poorly on you, all the while adhering to unspoken objectives. They’re not lying when they say we are winning in Iraq.

They, not we. The US is losing the lives of soldiers, is losing its shirt, and is losing the battle for hearts and minds, the world over. The prosecutors of the war, the industry, the oil interests, they’re winning.

If you’re after oil, or weapons contracts, or a steady buyer of ammunition, then you are winning in Iraq. The land is destabilized and most easily exploited. Bombs and bullets are expended and require fresh orders for more. Mission accomplished every damn day. For as long as our new bases are intended to last. Did McCain admit it could be 100 years?

If you’re after world conquest, there’s a precedent for making this work. Don’t look to colonialism, every last colony eventually reverts to its people. Even China is having difficulty staking its claim to Tibet.

Unless you apply the American Manifest Destiny model, along the lines of world empire building of ages past. You obliterate the enemy peoples, wipe them out, take their land, put the survivors in camps, to die slow certain spiritual deaths. Obliterate culture, purpose, and hope. Repopulate the stolen land with your people, and never look back. Native Americans are but shadows of their former selves, and the white European Americans own all. No dispute.

A more recent role model, still underway, with a high likelihood of success, the way things are going, is Palestine. Israel occupies more and more, drives the original peoples to death, despair or exile, and continuously resettles its own people on the ground gained.

Do we want just the oil of Iraq, stay the course.

Do we want peace? Hire Israeli advisers and kill those Muslims.

Homophobic violence in Mexico threatens a youth culture sub-group- The Emos

Posted on April 7, 2008 by Tony Logan

There is a wave of homophobic violence currently rolling across Mexico against a youth sub-culture group called ‘Emos’, short for ‘Emotionals’. A quick look at youtube.com shows video after video in Spanish threatening these young teenagers with violence, usually for being considered effiminate and weak. You tube should be ashamed to allow this hate material to clog up its network as it is currently allowing.

Several violent attacks have occurred against EMO teenagers across Mexico and the Mexican federal government has had to step in. One gets the idea though that it is more to protect their tourism industry than for any other reason. This government is not known for its promotion of tolerance and multi-culturalism, with the ruling party, the PAN itself, having a long history of homophobic rhetoric employed in its political campaigns.

One notable feature of this wave of homophobic violence in Mexico, was the encouragement by the semi official Mexican TV network, Televisa, in the initial attacks against Emos, but now the realization that this wave of Nazi like behavior might actually hurt Mexico’s international image has braked their zeal for abusing young teenagers. What a cowardly media Mexico has! It reminds one of Fox News right here in the US.

See Mexico’s Emo-Bashing Problem for some reportage in the US of this situation.

The Beatles were counter-revolutionary

Posted on April 5, 2008 by Eric Verlo

It sounds sexy, like “counter-culture.” But counter-revolutionaries were the Tsarist forces, or Loyalists in our hemisphere, who countered the revolutionary surges of the masses. The Beatles expressed themselves as being against the war, and Lennon ultimately gave the peace movement its anthem. But in 1968, when the Beatles were preaching peace and non-violence, Mick Jaggar was marching at the front of the student riots in London. Which actions ultimately closed down the Vietnam War? Was it Haight-Ashbury or the Left Bank? Was it Woodstock or American GIs finally fragging their officers? If you wonder why today’s pop icons say only what’s approved . . .
FLIP YOUR WIG game pieces George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr

Cynthia McKinney and Cindy Sheehan together in Mexico City!

Posted on April 5, 2008 by Tony Logan

Below, we reprint 2 speeches made in Mexico City Friday, just yesterday, April 4, 2008. The speech Greed … by Cindy Sheehan, and another speech by Cynthia McKinney that is without title.

Cynthia McKinney
Segundo Encuentro Continental de los Trabajadores
Mexico City, Mexico, April 4, 2008

Brothers and Sisters in the Movement

I am happy to be here in Mexico City where the people all over Latin
America are on the move:

On the move for justice, self-determination, and peace.

I love that you have created a Power to the People movement with your
votes that is stronger than the mightiest military force on the
planet!

With the power of your vote you have taken your countries back.

Now, all we have to do is to count all the votes in the United States
and Mexico!

In the 2000 U.S. Presidential election, an estimated six million
people went to the polls and voted, but their votes weren’t counted.

In 2000, and again in 2004, Democrats helped to install Republicans
into power rather than fight for the victory that the voters had
given them.

As a result of this kind of collusion, the Democratic majority in our
Congress has failed to impeach Bush. They have failed to institute a
livable wage, stop the multiple wars the U.S. is fighting right now,
and they have failed to protect human rights anywhere in the world,
including even at home.

That’s why I left the Democratic Party.

I refused to become complicit in war crimes, crimes against humanity,
crimes against the peace, spying on the American people, and ripping
our Bill of Rights to shreds.

And so I declared my independence from the U.S. leadership that gave
us tax cuts for the wealthy and a country 53 trillion dollars in debt
and Hurricane Katrina.

To my brothers and sisters at this Conference and in the United
States, I say:

Hands off Haiti!

Hands off Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Argentina now making a claim for
the Falklands!

Hands off Venezuela and Ecuador!

No to Plan Mexico; No to Plan Colombia! Hands off Pemex!

And finally, it was on this date, 40 years ago, that Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. was murdered.

We now know that Dr. King was murdered as part of a conspiracy that
included his own government. Hatched in the bowels of the Pentagon,
where so many other regime change operations have been hatched, the
government of the United States launched regime change at home on
Black America. We blacks in the United States have long known the
pain and the consequences of having authentic leadership snatched
from us; of having someone else pick our leaders before we pick them
ourselves.

I am proud to join this international movement for
self-determination; for justice and for peace. Despite today’s
difficulties, we must never let our dream be deferred. We in the U.S.
gain inspiration from your successes here so we can carry the
struggle to every nook and cranny of the United States.

Que vivan los pueblos de america!

Cindy Sheehan -Key Note Speech “GREED”
Segundo Encuentro Continental de los Trabajadores
Mexico City, Mexico, April 4, 2008

First of all I would like to thank the International Labor Council and the Electrician’s Union for such a warm welcome and I would like to assure you all, my brothers and sisters that I represent millions of North Americans who are in solidarity with you, because we are also plagued with an illegitimate President!

Once, a couple of years ago, I was getting a pedicure in the deep south in the USA, of all places, and my pedicurist was a Latina from Mexico. She lived two hours from where she and her husband owned the shop and she left her young son home with her mother-in-law for six days a week, while she and her husband toiled at the shop. She was very sweet and sympathetic to my situation as a mother whose son was killed in Iraq, but she looked up from my feet at one point and asked me: “Why do you Americans have to have everything. If you all weren’t so greedy, I could still live in my country with my family.” Greedy? Hmm? Her earnest and passionate comment gave me much to think about.

Dictionary.com defines greed as the rapacious desire, especially for wealth or possessions

Greed is also one of the seven deadly sins and I know more than most Americans that the same twisted drive for, not just a fair share of prosperity, but ALL the prosperity is what caused my son’s death and, similarly, my nail persons’ need to have to leave the beloved country of her birth.

Greed is not what drives Latin Americans to try and cross the border to go north, existential necessity is; but corporate-capitalist greed is what makes the dangerous journey necessary. Building walls on the border is not the way to solve the immigration “problem” just as invading two countries and killing innocent civilians was not the way to solve the terrorism problem. Healing the systems of oppression that cause immigration is the way to solve the “problem.” People in Latin America want the right to not have to emigrate. Like my pedicurist, they want to be able to make a good living in their own countries.

In a study done by the Economic Policy Institute in 2004, it was found that 5% of the US population owns 58% of the wealth and only 1.2% of the wealth is owned by 40% of our citizenry. I am sure if a similar study were done, this disparity would be much wider in these days of irresponsible corporate bailouts while Americans are losing their homes at the rate of 250,000 a month and the war economy has made the fat cats astronomical profits while robbing our communities of essential services and needed infrastructure improvements. The Milton Friedman model of disaster capitalism, which Naomi Klein exposes so well in her book, Shock Doctrine, is responsible for economic disaster from New Orleans to Baghdad and the basic underlying root sickness of this is greed.

Statistics can be easily manipulated as we know the statistics reporting the “success” of free trade agreements such as NAFTA are. Facts, numbers and experiential data cannot be so easily manipulated, though. In the years since the Clinton administration (with the support of my Congressional opponent, Nancy Pelosi) foisted NAFTA on our continent, both Mexico and the US have lost farmland and good paying jobs. Many of our manufacturing jobs have gone overseas to Indonesia or China and the Wal Martization of our cultures creeps up on us unchecked and corporations such as Wal Mart have been the main beneficiaries of NAFTA to the detriment of working class people in both countries.

What can we do to improve the situation and reclaim our prosperity from the control of the 21st Century Robber Barons and slave-traders?

First of all, “free” trade treaties should be replaced with fair trade agreements. Small business owners and workers should be protected from being crushed under the heels of multi-national corporations. Any agreement should have protection for workers. A worker who makes shoes, computers, cars, or grows crops should make the same livable wage in Mexico or China, as they would in America. There would be no incentive for off-shoring jobs or relocating manufacturing plants if workers in China made the same wages as workers in America.

All workers should be guaranteed the basic human right of being able to belong to a union. Unions elevate the conditions of workers and families and should remain a strong political force for good and not allow them selves to be beaten into submission or weakness by governmental or corporate pressure. (But aren’t the corporations and governments so intimately linked these days in their fascistic oppression of us average citizens?)

The fragile ecology of our planet must be protected in these agreements and the same standard of sustainability and environmental protections should be uniformly recognized and practiced globally.

Small farmers should be protected from the encroachment of “agri-giants” and their lands protected from the eminent domain of greed.

I know there are many more solutions and a comprehensive platform of “No human left behind” would guarantee the rights of all humans to safe and plentiful food and drinking water; shelter; good and free education; sustainable employment; security and safety from US corporate-militarism; and the basic rights that were guaranteed of: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

For far too long, the United States of America has greedily gobbled up too much of global wealth and resources and our chickens of greed and violence are coming home to roost. As alarming as these trends are, we North Americans are only slightly beginning to feel the ravages of what we have been manufacturing and exporting for years: death and destruction. A new paradigm of global sharing and caring must be implemented and today is the beginning.

Today, as we commemorate and mourn the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr who was assassinated 40 years ago in Memphis, Tn; and as I mourn the murder by the war machine of my son Casey, who was killed in Sadr City, Baghdad 4 years ago today—we must renew our commitment to peace and justice to honor their sacrifices and the sacrifices of others who have also gone before us. We just celebrated the birthday of Cesar Chavez who dedicated his life to the most marginalized and exploited of workers and I am constantly inspired by the devotion of people like Dr. King, Casey and Cesar Chavez andI hope that we all take inspiration to rededicate our lives to peace and justice.

We must build upon the coalition that we have gathered here in this beautiful and historic place to include every group that we are a part of. We can no longer say that we have to focus on “one” issue, because all the issues are the same. My country is waging deadly and lost-cause occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and so many groups in my country say that we have to focus on bringing our troops home and not become “distracted” by other issues. Profound economic inequality and unchecked greed is the root cause of these occupations as it is the root cause of the occupation of Palestine by Israel and all the violence in the world’s hot-spots today.

In our coalition, we must educate our brothers and sisters that equalizing prosperity and neutralizing greed are the solutions to these acute problems.

I also stand here in solidarity with my brothers and sisters who are working in the Legitimate Government of Mexico to prevent the illegitimate government from privatizing PEMEX. The oil of Mexico belongs to the people of Mexico, and if I can’t be here with you all to block the crimes with my body then I will definitely be with you in spirit.

Thank you for allowing me to speak. It has been an honor to be here.

St Baldrick patron saint of subservience

Posted on April 3, 2008 by Eric Verlo

What is the point of shaving one’s head in the fight against cancer? You raise awareness of the continuing plight of cancer victims? You show solidarity with those afflicted? You normalize what kids can only regard as the stigma of chemotherapy? I’m not exactly sure. To be crass, I wouldn’t jump off a bridge just because my friends are suicidal. I’m not sure shearing one’s hair is not a more profound abasement than it looks.

Raising money for cancer feeds three coffers: medical care, medical research or media advertising. This year our local St Baldrick’s has set a goal to raise $150K for the cause. That’s a lot, considering these are pledges based on goading your friends about whether they will or will not dare to go bald. Let me ask you however, $150K buys a fraction of what in the medical world? It buys how many seconds on TV?

What is fund-raising for cancer but a secondary tax for funds to support a health care system, and no funds still flowing to the patients?

I’m sorry to be disrespectful of cue-baldness, or to exacerbate the stigma, but what do shaved heads denote historically? Captive peoples? Prisoners, soldiers, eunuchs, slaves. Today we explain it as a hygienic necessity when concentrating people in close quarters, or for spartan utilitarianism. But there’s a solitary reason people’s heads are shaved who have no say in the matter. Control. They are easily identified en masse, and their individuality is not only demeaned but effaced.

Chemo patients who lose their hair are thereby marked for their involuntary subjugation to man’s imperfect medicine. More instructively, they are victims of our imperfect, reckless, even murderous technologies. Should we not fight against the toxic causes of cancer, sooner than symbolically queue into the ranks of its unfortunate collateral damage? And how can we fight this foe with our highest potency?

Since ancient times, slaves were shorn to prevent them from blending in with free people. Shaving has served that function ever since: to preempt thoughts of escape, desertion, or assimilation. Early religions stressed letting your hair be. He who retained their hair retained their power. Even today, politicians and celebrities fare much better who have a full head of hair.

Many traditions still call for beards to be grown unrestricted. This de-emphasizes the individual by appearance at least. Similarly women are expected to cover themselves to varying degrees, also perhaps to equalize their haphazardly distributed differences.

I personally prefer a society of revealed and clean-shaved faces because it allows for people’s unique identities. Scientists might argue that craniums are equally unique. I suspect that’s true, most appreciably to biometric scanners. I’m unsure about the benefit to the community of man of appearing uniform, yet having individuals detectible at security portals or by surveillance cameras. You want unanimity among people except to their overseers?

Since the Enlightenment, the west has been enamored of its face. These days with makeup, chemical or scalpel, we can augment our face to suit us. Hair is where we have daily autonomy over how the world perceives us. It can conform or not, complement us or disguise us. Where our bone structure might be God-given, a hairdo, wig or hat is entirely ours to command.

Modern culture has accepted the shaving of facial hair such that we barely see it as an obeisance to the new norm. That Samson lost his strength owing to an involuntary trim, is not to me an abstract lesson.

Poetry Slams slam poetry

Posted on March 26, 2008 by Eric Verlo

Poetry Slams have reduced our most elevated literary genre to the arena of Hallmark Cards. Can you imagine compelling Longfellow to extemporize on the spot, faced with one-upping a fast-rapping carnival barker? Perhaps Oscar Wilde could have risen to the challenge against a ghetto phoenix such as Eminem, but Eminem is not representative of the norm. We have to acknowledge the aberration of genius.

These days we are prepared to recognize the profound in autism. Improvised mental acuity may be the specialty of some few, but it will remain a statistical improbability that such genius resides in your neighborhood. I’d say poetry voice-offs in malls or coffee shops, with contests open to all comers, are most likely efforts in philistinism. Like all things pop, crap for crap tastes.

Poetry appreciation in common circles is for reading not writing. Poetry writing is therapy fodder, meant for no further than the support group circle.

I say more art appreciation, less gluing of noodles to paper plates painted gold. Otherwise to a passerby, unschooled like the majority have become, poetry is an abysmal cacophony of disjointed near-sighted observations, shall I compare thee to a navel on the half-gazed?

Intestinal design

Posted on March 14, 2008 by Marie Walden

Barf bag Finnaviation

Can you figure out what this is? Look closely and think, think, think. This particular item has been singled out of thousands of similar items for Best Design honors.

Check out my blog at Culture Chakra for more juicy tidbits.

Horton Hears Your Fetus

Posted on March 12, 2008 by Eric Verlo

Do you remember the lesson of Horton Hears a Who? No matter how small, everyone matters. Fox has brought the theme to the animated screen and not-unlikely bedfellows are seizing on the message. Under the revival tents, the anti-abortion preachers want you to glean something further from Horton: that the very life of a tiny embryo could depend on you, if only your inner elephant can be persuaded you hear its call.

Although, they’re are not talking about the embryos deliberately created en vitro by fertility clinics, terminated when too many have taken to the uterine wall. Nor babies miscarried, nor still-born. Do the pro-life Hortons not hear them?

Let’s agree that abortion is tragic, and shouldn’t be bandied about as a lifestyle choice like a Brazilian wax or a boob job. Personally I’d prefer our culture wasn’t so enthralled with promiscuity. Don’t encourage drinking if you can’t live with the car wrecks. Don’t paint sex as the ultimate of fulfillments if your society has set as acceptable norm a procreative age over a dozen years later than we are biological capable.

Fighting Fifth Avenue and mankind’s propensity to hedonism is doubtless harder than bringing the hammer down on a pregnant teen. Shouldn’t the church come down on immorality instead of its victims? Abortion is a hard choice, like any harsh dilemma. We euthanize cats and dogs when there become too many. A “domestic” animal designates those in man’s care, which live to serve us, and die according to our dinner plan. We ride our horses but leave them to the French to eat. To our credit we show a reluctance to face nature’s difficult choices.

Religious beliefs have been the ultimate causes of war, justifying killings in fanatical number, to this present day. Religion is always behind genocide. What is it about pre-infanticide that’s got zealots so indignant?

Is this about an egg and sperm’s right to wed? Or about the church’s prerogative to mandate pregnancy? I think to a large extent, it’s about enforcing puritanism, the better to reserve the sex drive for manipulating people. You can’t have your masses contentedly debauched, they must be repressed and thwarted, being lured by sex to get married and pregnant to breed the next batch of easily motivated worker/consumer drones.

I admire the Right to Life credo that all life is sacred. But is it? Right to Lifers remind me of pedigree animal rescue outfits, only THEIR breed is sacred enough worth saving. What about other forms of life? Owls? Whales, small fish? Are these pious folks practicing vegans, concerned not to exploit any living being? Do they feed themselves like the Buddhists monks who consume liquids through a strainer, careful not to swallow even a flea?

The pro-lifer’s concern is not for the human being small person, it’s only for the unborn baby. And it’s only for the unborn of their likeness, and more than likely from their neighborhood. Other cultures’ offspring are mere driving factors of overpopulation, unless they are our colonial suppliers of cheap labor.

And what about already born babies? Or babies -or tiny children- belonging to foreigners, right now being shot at by our troops? Where is the Right to Life alarm about people we are depriving of life? Horton’s lesson was that others matter, regardless of size. Would that mean not just little people? What of adult people being exploited, tortured or condemned to death, who is concerned for their right to life?

One of the charms of Dr. Seuss is that his myriad creatures represent an incalculable gamut of fantasy beings. Horton does not hear a baby elephant for example, he hears a WHO. The Whos of Whoville are not of his world at all, and might well inhabit a forth dimensional anthill as far as Horton can figure. Would this not be quite the humanitarian message for religious nuts preoccupied only for their own? Miserably too, they are not obsessed with precisely their own, but about YOUR own, whom they claim as theirs to save. Their daughters are having abortions, to the last, I can assure you that.

The your-baby demagogues are motivated by penance, for deed past or to come, but instead of flagellating themselves, they’re beating on your daughter. They are concerned for the right to life of her baby, to be conceived unprepared for and un-afforded. They stand for that baby’s right to the unending cycle of ill-parenting, vocational training, indebtedness, and life of servitude.

Dr. Seuss lived long enough to see the Religious Right’s interest in exploiting the Horton Hears a Sinner theme. Both Theodor Geisel and his widow publicly repudiated the holier-than-thou interpretation being used to agitate against abortion. But now his earthly voice is extinguished, and we can see Pro-Lifers don’t respect the dead either.

The PPJPC and the old firehouse

Posted on March 2, 2008 by Eric Verlo

Once upon a time the PPJPC met in an old firehouse. Coincidence.

I’m thinking about a little fire department, getting along just fine, no major fires to deal with, and community support ebbing for lack of concern about fires. The firehouse has to organize bake sales and fundraisers to keep itself going, and before long they get pretty focused on bake sales. And then there’s a fire.

You might think that everyone would agree you call firemen in the case of fire, except for the fire department staff which had situated itself best for baking cookies and raising money. They don’t have the constitution for fighting fires, and so it becomes up to the volunteers to assemble themselves for the task. They undertake the work, trying not to resent the paid firemen now cookie sellers. But the fund-raising activities are now so well-oiled that they can’t spare their buckets for the brigade, nor their water for the fire. And some complain about the firefighters’ boots getting the floors too muddy, or the wet coats making others wet. And there’s even grumbling about the amateurish performance of the firefighting, worrying that it will impact negatively on cookie sales.

Of course another adverse impact on cookie sales, has to do with the people who originally supported the fund-raiser. The volunteers now manning the hoses are the people who would be the regular bake sale patrons, but have come to see that the fireman funds no longer go toward the firefighting.

And then there are the ideological divides, about how fires must be fought or not fought. Directly, or metaphorically, arguing between applying fighting and non-fighting skills. Some believing that you can fight the core of what causes fires, by holding bake sales. There is something undeniably hopeful about the idea that everyone can come together over a plate of homemade cookies.

Of course we can argue all day about the conspiratorial theory that some fires are set deliberately, or that similar elements find it beneficial to cultivate a culture which glamorizes fires, accepts them as inevitable, or at the very least, becomes incapable of putting them out. Those elements promote an attitude which disparages the uncool, traditional values of calling for fires to be put out, and by wile or guile, sabotage the preventive infrastructure assembled by the community, leapfrogging the common wisdom which had led the community to build the firehouse and hire the firemen in the first place.

Springs Culture Cast has party for Craig Richardson and Klayton Elliot Kendall of Springs Culture Cast

Posted on February 26, 2008 by Eric Verlo

Craig Richardson spars with Babette The Smokebrush is feting the first anniversary of the Springs Culture Cast enterprise on Thursday night. I love the work Craig and Klayton are doing to illuminate our city’s culture scene. Every weekday the two assemble a four minute segment on local arts. I especially like when their delivery swerves into the theatrical, but I can’t laugh forever at their sledgehammer self-promotion.

Radio segway: “It’s time for the Springs Culture Cast:”

Underwriter credit: “Springs Culture Cast is brought to you by…”

Intro: “Welcome to the radio edition of Springs Culture Cast.”

Reporter: “Hi I’m Craig Richardson with Springs Culture Cast… ”

“…This segment of Springs Culture Cast was produced by Craig Richardson and Klayton Elliot Kendall.

“To explore our video archives, please visit us online at Springs Culture Cast dot com.

“For Springs Culture Cast, this is Craig Richardson.”

Mad Scientists

Posted on February 17, 2008 by Tony Logan

No, this is not about scientists that are mad about the Bush Administration’s manipulation of scientific data. This is about insane scientists that are forecasting a better world ahead with the invention of human-machine cyborgs. Machines will achieve human-level artificial intelligence by 2029, a leading US inventor has predicted.

It’s clear that Nazi science lives on and is a totally accepted part of our own American social culture and mindset, since after all, nobody is too upset at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston for seriously cheerleading at its annula meeting for being able to possibly design such a future world. Who in their right mind would want to though?

4 weeks now till the next St Paddy’s

Posted on February 16, 2008 by Brother Jonah

You know, the cops handled me pretty much the same way when I was chair-bound from my injuries, lo, these many years ago.

What got my Irish up, and I had to shame a few members of the crowd, really loudly in front of their kids too, was they were screaming for the other floats and parade members to run us over, they cheered when the piggies put the choke-hold on Frank and cheered when they slung Elizabeth to the ground like that.

And then tried to shout me down because “They’re Fighting for YOUR Right to free speech”…

yeah, right.

Free to say whatever you want as long as you have police permission first.

If they were in Belfast or worse yet Dublin they would have been Informants for the British. That’s their level of loyalty to the culture.

They would also be really stupid about trying to hide their collaboration, and the IRA, instead of just killing them, would have taken them out in the middle of a slum street and shot them in the kneecaps.

Mark them as snitch-bitches for the rest of their unnatural lives.

Because that’s the level of their intelligence, and the equal but opposite level of the contempt the IRA would have held for their coward asses.

The cops would have been simply shot down in the street.

It’s in the percentages

Posted on February 3, 2008 by Eric Verlo

Apparently 30% of the most recent batch of Army recruits do not have a high school education. And by the Army’s own findings, 30% of soldiers returning from our occupations have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. And a Colorado Springs school district has revealed that 25% of the children of the Fort Carson new arrivals are “Special Needs” students. Americans, and Colorado Springs in particular, have to live with these percentages. Are we 25% screwed or 30% screwed? At least we don’t have to look at these guys across the sights of their guns. Iraqis do, and over one million dead Iraqis it may now be deduced were 100% screwed.

I mean it, I find it an absolute nightmare to imagine soldiers in positions of authority, making life and death decisions over others, who don’t know right from wrong, history from high stakes poker, or intelligence from drunken stupor. How do you reason with someone whose only motivation is their next beer? Where they’d just as soon shoot you dead than worry about regretting not shooting you?

It’s a war crime to subject civilian populations to rule by incompetents. Just because Americans elect a certified idiot for president is no indication that anyone else, certainly not a more cultured society, would want their lives overseen by uneducated amoral brigands.

Unprincipled Colorado Springs businessmen salivate at the houses, cars, loans and strippers they can sell to uneducated soldiers. Colorado Springs residents better think hard about whether they make good neighbors.

SPOILER ALERT- Election 2008 outcome

Posted on January 31, 2008 by Eric Verlo

If you are enjoying tuning into the latest news, hoopla and dramatic tension of the 2008 horse race, you may want to ignore Florida and skip this post. In darkroom terms, over the last months, ballot prospects have been exposed, developed and stopped. Florida, as in the past, is the fix.

It’s going to be John McCain versus Hillary Clinton, with McCain to win. Which will be no worse outcome than we have now, nor indeed than what might have appeared to be a Democrat alternative.

The American empire is marching onward to slaughter, there’s less and less deliberating about doing otherwise. We embrace militarism, we advocate military intervention, our culture celebrates the simplistic charm of the simple-headed, we mistake might for right, and we cheer self-destructive greed uber alles.

All your women are belong to us

Posted on January 29, 2008 by Eric Verlo

AYBABTU variant: All Your Babes Are Belong To Us. In ancient days when kingdoms conquered each other, the winners would slaughter the vanquished males and keep the females for themselves, to augment their own number. Warring cannibals still do the same when they raid rival villages. They kill the men, eat them to acquire their power, and take the girls for brides or for slave labor.

It would seem tribal prejudices aren’t entrenched when it comes to another culture’s women. Is this because foreign females are less threatening, or because coveting another’s spouse transcends bigotry? Westerners fantasize that Native Americans raided the pioneer settlements to take captive the white women on account of their white beauty. I doubt it. Women are smaller than men and can be dominated, wives and laborers being more or less the same thing.

Western society seems preoccupied to fetishistic extremes with the safety of its white women, while negligent about the fate of those of darker skin. But does that mean we are not interested in non-white women? Of course not. The recent focus on trying to introduce western education into Islamic cultures is strategically targeting young Muslim girls. It seems altruistic, but follows the usual pattern of male-mankind’s predatory nature.

Naturally the benefits of separating girls from their communities serves the need of human traffickers, for the sex trade but to a much bigger degree, all industrial applications.

Look at the Maquiladoras on the Mexican border, where US manufacturers have relocated to exploit cheap Mexican labor without having to ship products too much further to reach American consumers. Look into those factories, they are full of women.

Look at the sweat shops in our port cities, where non-citizens labor undocumented -or falsely documented- they’re women.

The work camps set up in the US territories to skirt our labor laws and duck import tariffs are also full of women. Indeed clothing mills and electronics factories across the globe are staffed predominantly with women. Men are left with the construction, transportation and extraction industries, the labor issues of which affect the industrialist bottom line not the least.

We may guard our white women closely, feigning paternal self-interest, but we’re after all women, for the traditional role of indentured servitude.

Polly put the kettle on

Posted on January 15, 2008 by Marie Walden

Greg Mortenson in Khanday There is nothing more thrilling than being the wild one on the outer edge of the pack, seeing the horizon more clearly than those safely ensconced in the middle of the herd. It isn’t easy being a lonely maverick, relying on animal instinct to find hidden dangers, while other more domesticated souls happily munch nuggets of truth dispensed by politicians and mainstream media. But someone has to lead the way.

I thought I’d found an opportunity to indulge my inner maverick. I had high hopes that the Three Cups of Tea avalanche was hiding lots of neocon propaganda, a pitiful campaign to convince those of us with bleeding hearts that, indeed, our government is engaged in noble warfare against terrorism in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the training ground for Islamic fundamentalists determined to wipe out Western culture. After all, who would know the terrorist’s heart better than Greg Mortenson who has spent much of the past fifteen years in remote Himalayan villages developing relationships with local leaders and gaining an understanding of these tribal cultures?

Well, I’m disappointed to admit that, after finishing the book, I am smack in the middle of the Mortenson love fest. Other than forgetfulness, disorganization and a chronic lack of punctuality, I can find no fault with this man (I feel like Pontius Pilate). After the 9/11 attacks, the book gets a whole lot better. The writing, literally painful to read in the first half, begins to flow in such a way that you are not constantly mindful of the fact that you are reading.

Political intrigue, physical danger, unflinching bravery, and an uncanny ability to discern the good guys from the bad guys–always in pursuit of his mission of educating the rural poor–does make Mortenson seem larger than life. So much so that co-author David Oliver Relin stops mentioning his physical stature in every paragraph.

The complexity of tribal societies makes for interesting reading. Puppet governments in big cities have no standing in remote mountain villages. Tribal councils and religious leaders in Iran interpret and enforce the law. Mortenson makes an interesting distinction between warlords who take tariffs from opium smugglers to create private militias and commandhan who plow the profits into the people’s welfare. One bad, the other good. He makes few moral judgments of the mountain people and their ways, poppy production included. He saves his scathing indictments for the US government and its minions, and seemingly refuses to cooperate or be used by them in any way.

I hope I can find a front row seat tonight and catch Mortenson’s eye. I want to give him the oft-sought-but-ever-elusive Mango wink of approval. Some maverick, she.

Greg Mortenson’s own cup of tea

Posted on January 10, 2008 by Eric Verlo

In his own words, Greg Mortenson is quite a bit more revealing about his motives in Pakistan. Pax Americana is definitely a subtlety lost on him.

Central Asian regions where CAI has financed construction This map is from the Central Asia Institute‘s own brochure. It shows the parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan where Greg Mortenson’s CAI has helped finance community building projects. I thought the shaded area formed an interesting buffer zone along the border to… CHINA! Is that region of greater interest peacewise than the war-torn borders facing Afghanistan or India?!

The current Independent features a cover story on Mortensen, to promote his Jan 15 Colorado College appearance. It turns out he’s as inarticulate as his dictation of Three Cups of Tea suggests. Here’s how Mortenson regards his unwitting Islamic accomplices:

…we bring in mullahs who support girls’ education. We have two ex-Taliban who are now teaching in our girls’ schools and have become some of our biggest proponents. It’s somewhat similar to an ex-smoker or an alcoholic who has changed and becomes very against smoking or drinking.

Here Mortenson describes how his schools convince Muslim communities to enroll their girls:

We even use good old-fashioned Western capitalism. We go and tell a mullah: If I want to marry a girl in your village, how many goats do I owe you? He might say five goats. If she has a fifth-grade education, how many goats would I then have to pay you? And the answer would probably be 15 to 20 goats. A goat is usually $30 to $40 each.

And then we tell the mullah: If all the girls are educated, just think of how much more wealth you’d have. Then you can see his eyes get bigger.

At least Mortenson is up front about the Capitalist invasion for which he plays scout. Evidently the untapped region’s girls are for sale, and once educated they’ll have value-added for mercantilism.

American society tends to glorify education for its own sake. What “education” is CAI providing to the Muslims exactly? Do CAI’s texts teach that secular culture is intent on the eradication of spiritual culture? Is the CAI curriculum simply favoring western indoctrination over an Islamist counterpart? I’ll let Mortenson show his hand:

perhaps the most controversial, is our Islamic studies for about two or three hours every week. It’s very tempered, and we include in that learning the differences between Sunni and Shia. We’ve also added what you might call religion studies, or learning about different faiths or religion.

In a monotheistic society you need that like emperor penguins need tap dancing lessons. Imagine the uproar if we tried to teach New Life Church kids that the faith of their parents was only one extreme of many! A good idea no doubt, but unlikely to provoke a peaceful reaction.

POSTSCRIPT
Our junior high student came home yesterday with three promotional pieces about Three Cups of Tea in advance of Mortenson making an appearance at her school. Do you wonder how he’s getting such press? One of the pamphlets instructs the children about how they can “Help Three Cups of Tea (3CT) surge:” (My emphasis, their slip of the forked tongue)

1. Recommend 3CT to at least one person or place: family, friend, colleague, book club, professor and teacher, student, and places of worship. It also makes a great gift! (You’ve got to be kidding me! 3CT practically screams you’re illiterate.)

2. Visit 3CT website…

3. Recommend 3CT for ‘One Book – One Read’ at http://www.loc.gov/loc/cfbook/one-book.html (please don’t).

4. Recommend 3CT as a University or college-wide… read http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/articles/070607/7summer.htm (YGTBFKM)

5. Ask bookstores without 3CT to stock the book, especially airport bookstores. (?)

6. Send 3CT with a personal note to your Senators and/or Representatives (US legislators, why?)

7. Write a ‘letter editor’ [sic] to suggest 3CT and to support education and literacy… to promote peace, economic development and prosperity. (Emphasis mine. Co-opting Muslim girls for Capitalism promotes peace how?)

8. Ask magazines, newspapers, or radio station [sic] to review 3CT (they suggest sending a copy)

9. Learn about the power of girls’ education… in What Works in Girls Education (by Neocon think tank author Barbara Hertz)

10. Learn about grassroots book promotion…

11. Suggest 3CT to Oprah: http://www.oprah.com/email/reach/email_showideas.jhtml

12. Suggest 3CT to C-Span 202-737-0580.

13. Write a book review on Amazon.com, bn.com… (No need, it’s getting slammed! Too bad my Junior High principle isn’t getting a clue. Are our teachers illiterate too?)

14. Start Pennies For Peace in your school, library, or place of worship… http://www.penniesforpeace.org

Billions for war, but apparently we need only pennies for peace.

Hopefully 3CT’s proceeds are going toward peace. (Marie reports their financials say it’s “up to 7%,” so hey, they do mean single-cent figures!) Perhaps Mortenson can earmark some of the Coins for Cultural Sensitivity.

POST-POSTSCRIPT
The Amazon reviews are uproarious! But 3CT trolls are loading the funniest with bad marks where it asks Do you find this review helpful, so you’ll have to look fast. I’ll reprint a couple below.

By the way, Three Cups of Tea, One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace… was originally released as Three Cups of Tea, One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations. It wasn’t selling the mission?

I’ll work up my own slipcover for Mortenson’s speaking engagement, with help from the comments below. Hopefully he’ll be good-natured enough to sign it:
Three Cups of Tedium: One Man’s Mission to be a Dhimmi
-A Condescending Westerner who attempt to “educate” Muslims.

(This is part 2 of 3 pieces: a review of the 3CT book, the promotion around the book tour, and Mortenson’s public appearance.)

Ancient Costa Rica for sale

Posted on January 5, 2008 by Marie Walden

Denver-Art-Museum-Libeskind The kids are still on Christmas break and are starting to show definite signs of cabin fever. To stave off a domestic implosion, we took a trip up to the Denver Art Museum yesterday. The DAM recently opened a spectacular addition designed by Daniel Libeskind, the architect chosen to rebuild the World Trade Center site. But I had an ulterior motive. I’d recently read about the DAMs 16,000-piece assemblage of pre-Columbian and Spanish Colonial art, including one of the world’s largest collections of Costa Rican artifacts, nearly 2,000 items, donated to the museum by Denver businessman, Frederick Mayer, and his wife. I wanted to check it out.

We’re planning a trip to Costa Rica. Although not much is known about pre-Columbian Costa Rica in comparison to the high cultures of Mexico and South America, recent excavations have uncovered numerous artifacts, including jade carvings. Jade is green and pretty and shiny, perfect for an art lover of my caliber, so I wanted to see it for myself. Call it a bit of research before hitting the craft markets in Sarchi!

Sure enough, Eric and I lost ourselves in a huge room filled with thousands of artifacts. Stone, ceramic, textiles, gold and, oh yes, jade. After an hour or so, we’d barely made a dent in the pre-Columbian collection. Vowing a subsequent visit to the Spanish Colonial galleries, we left to collect the kids before their art experience became Night-mare at the Museum.

As always, looking at ancient artifacts leads me into lofty reverie of past worlds and bare-chested warriors. But this time I couldn’t help but wonder about Jan and Frederick Mayer as well. Certainly amazement and appreciation for their commitment to art and to philanthropy. But really, how on earth had one couple managed to collect this much art from a small Central American country? And why aren’t many of the beautiful pieces residing in Costa Rica, teaching and providing inspiration to Costa Ricans? Especially because Costa Rican pre-Columbian history is not nearly as well-documented as that of its neighbors.

Costa Rica has taken significant measures to protect their natural environment from exploitation. Nearly 20% of the land is set aside for preserves, parks or refuges of some sort. But after my trip to the Denver Art Museum, I’m thinking that perhaps Costa Rica should endeavor to protect other national treasures, especially art created by the hands of largely unknown ancestors, from passionate and well-meaning American oilmen.

Jade museum Costa Rica I will visit the museums in San Jose and let you know how they measure up against the breathtaking Denver Art Museum, with its encyclopedic collection of pre-Columbian Costa Rican artifacts–and hopefully return with a few shiny jade replicas of my own!

The Spears sisters genetic tree stump

Posted on December 22, 2007 by Eric Verlo

Dumbshell Britney Spears’ little sister is having a baby. The clan are mega millionaires, why shouldn’t they decide what they please? Clearly they’ve already decided a premature preteen nose job is fine, even if your face is going to outgrow it. Time for another!

Baby at sixteen. Please. A young mother in Bangladesh is on her third by sixteen. Young Indonesian tsunami survivors were starting second families by sixteen.

What does the Spears pregnancy say about American teens in general, ill-served by abstinence-only sex-ed, who are finding themselves pregnant? Most of those young mothers do not have media fortunes to fall back on and can expect basically lives of uneducated hardship. Historically, before public education, before the middle class, girls were pregnant as early as nature provided to yield the next generation of workers. Their witless beaus as well were shackled to prospect-less futures.

Appropriately enough the Spears celebrity news critics treat this development like it was a stumbled performance on American Idol. What does this mean for the profile-challenged Spears’ career? What advice can they offer to improve viewer poll reception in the next round? Will Nickelodeon dump pregnant Jamie Lynn from Zoey 101 because her figure may no longer be believed as a sixteen year old passing as a middle schooler. Oh my God. Forget about dumping the errant Bratz Doll because she presents too skewed a role model to America’s preteens.

Why are our culture deciders glamorizing White Trash?

In other Trailer Park news, a worker at a Lowes store discovers that a coworker is his biological mom who had given him up for adoption. What does that say about genetic self-determination? Even with new parents he couldn’t roll further than a mega store aisle from that tree.

She’s a real doll

Posted on December 17, 2007 by Marie Walden

Over the weekend I saw Lars and the Real Girl, a strange but funny movie about a mentally-ill introvert who, much to his concerned family’s delight, finds a “girlfriend” on the internet. The girlfriend, Bianca, it turns out, is actually a Real Doll, a life-sized anatomically correct silicone woman, created by Abyss Creations in California and sold for upwards of $10,000. The entire community sweetly honors the “relationship” while Lars works through deep psychological issues resulting from his mother’s death at his birth.

The brilliance of the movie is that it causes us to gain an uneasy acceptance of something that would otherwise seem perverse and completely laughable. Yet Lars is not, by any stretch, a normal guy, so our acceptance is tenuous. What type of real man is satisfied substituting a silicone representation of a woman for an actual relationship? Abyss Creations has sold thousands of Real Dolls and have an order backlog even as we speak. So who is purchasing these things? Maybe the same man who leaves his wife sleeping upstairs while spending hours looking at internet pornography? The guy who can’t handle the complexities of a real relationship with a flesh and blood female?

At the core, Real Dolls and pornography appeal to the same man. Both give the illusion of love–a travesty of love–created for poorly mothered or often-rejected men. For once these men have control over the omnipotent feminine. The unattainable girl. The instrument of rejection. That intense and infantile vulnerability to the female is turned on its head. The female is now submissive, expendable, interchangeable. Performing for you! Wanting only you! Loving only you!

Ryan Gosling, who plays Lars in the movie, is quite charitable in his assessment of the men who own Real Dolls. “There’s a whole culture of guys out there who have these dolls, and they have very intimate relationships with them. Part of it is sexual, but a lot of it is emotional. One guy goes hang gliding, and he takes his doll to watch, so that he has someone to support him in the things that he likes to do. Some guys cook with them and have dinners; they’re part of the fabric of their life. So, all of this is possible. … I think it’s a romantic idea, that love’s not a transaction. It’s something you have to give, and you give it freely to whoever and whatever you want.”

Okay, I can’t disagree. It’s plenty romantic. Objectification of women is the epitome of romance. In fact, it’s the definition of romance…an artistic work that deals with sexual love, especially in an idealized form…an idealized form like a silicone doll or a stylized airbrushed photograph.

Bio-fuels destroy land

Posted on November 6, 2007 by Tony Logan

We are living the end of cheap oil, and bio-fuels are being proposed by multinational corporations and the Pentagon as an ecologically sound alternative to fossil fuels. But are they really?

When we factor in the conditions of the already degraded landscape of modern industrial agriculture we can see that bio-fuels will accelerate the destruction of land without being able to put a significant dent in energy needs.

George Monbiot addresses this issue some in his commentary The Western Appetite for Biofuels Is Causing Starvation in the Poor World Or check out this United Nations report.

We must be careful when the mass wasters of natural resources get behind a supposedly GREEN ‘solution’. We must ask ourselves if their ‘reforms’ and solutions’ actually improve things, or will they just lead us deeper into the abyss of economic and ecological collapse the world now faces?

The sick American public on Iraq and Iran

Posted on October 31, 2007 by Tony Logan

Recent polls show that over 60% of Americans now are opposed to continuing the Iraq War. That’s the good news, but now the bad. Zogby poll Some 52% of Americans support a new war, that being one with Iran.

And now the even sicker news. Some 1/3 of the American public thinks it perfectly OK to use nuclear weapons on Iran, too. This is what the US public has arrived at thinking, after helping kill way over 1,000,000 Iraqis in the last decade and a half. Is this sick or what?

How did American society reach such a level of sick criminality? It shouldn’t be believed that it is fear at all. The stated fear of being under the possible threat from foreign WOMD is sheer excuse for supporting a criminality from one’s own government, similar to how Germans once stated a societal fear of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy. Acting illogical like this is based on a desire to be world thugs, same as it was with Hitler’s ascendancy

Despite the honks of support we get when we do vigils and demonstrations against the Iraq War, we should be cognizant that the American public continues to be overwhelmingly totally supportive of US militarism. They ‘support the troops’. We live in a totally sick national culture of support for cruelty and criminality. We should not forget that for even one second, so what can be done?

The few of us willing to take a public stance of opposing the main stream must be as bold as possible, and continue to show our stance of being against this new war that Hillary Cheney and Dick Clinton are trying to push off on the world. We cannot get sidelined into other issues and activities that seem more comfortable to do. We must be as public as possible about opposing the new set of lies that have been let fly.

No War with Iran! And throw these torturers and assassins that head up our government in jail where they now belong. Supporting their new plans for international terrorism needs to be stopped.

Shame on the majority of our citizens for playing stupid so long. It certainly won’t get you to heaven either here or when you die.

Masked crusader of illiterary legend

Posted on September 28, 2007 by Eric Verlo

America humiliates Mexico for the Zimmerman Telegram
All Pikes Peak Reads has chosen this year’s library recommendation: ZORRO! Did you know that was a work of literature? Dumas, you think? R.L.S.? This choice follows To Kill a Mockingbird, Frankenstein, Treasure Island, and Alice in Wonderland. All accessible to younger readers to be sure, and literary to boot. I have no argument with Isabel Allende’s Zorro [prequel], to entice the participation of Pikes Peak area adults, but what for the children? Charles Lamb? Harold Lamb? Did Zorro capture their prolific imagination? No, the kids get to read not the Legend of Zorro, but ABOUT the legend of Zorro. Great, so it’s not literature, at least it’s history. Is it?

Not even.

It turns out Zorro sprung from a post-WWI pulp serial The Curse of Capistrano written by screenwriter Johnston McCulley. The black mask and cape were added by Douglas Fairbanks in his 1920 portrayal, and the rest is [film] history. So Zorro is Tinseltown legend, and the historical setting inverts itself from there. The Hispanic colonial rule of California against which Zorro rebelled never existed in that too-rural territory. But it sure creates a convenient boogey man from which the United States can feel better liberating the early Californians. Zorro, in Spanish “The Fox” being the surrogate advance scout, extending justice over the objections of the despicable Spaniards until the cavalry can arrive. The adventure published on the heels of US belligerent fight-picking with Mexico. So much for history.

A Zorro legend lacks even for historical precursors. Robin Hood might be the closest example, except according to legend, Robin Hood was a man of the people, not a rich man robbing for the poor. Zorro’s Don Diego follows more the Alexander Dumas model of The Count of Monte Cristo, avenging having been usurped of his noble birthright. Since the Enlightenment and the suspicions it cast on the divinity of monarchist rule, official chroniclers have been tasked to remind the masses that a “fox” could never be more cunning than his betters unless he was of uncommon blood. Noble deeds can only be expected of noblemen, hence the term. This stereotype has always trumped the Puss in Boots or Horatio Alger stories coming from steerage. The Count begat Zorro begat Batman begat the Green Hornet begat the George Soros secret funding mystique. Now we even speculate that Robin Hood, had he existed, must have been a disenfranchised noble. Likewise Jack the Ripper. Common man can’t even get credit for crime.

To be clear, the oligarchs know their people won’t buy rule by divine right, but we do respect Darwin’s survival of the fittest. And certainly fitness and advantage are hereditary. Only those fit shall rule.

I extend this deference of heritage to my real life heros, but is it warranted? Che Guevara was from the privileged class and is lauded by the counter-culture as the most heroic revolutionary figure of our time. But ultimately, and conveniently, a tragic failure. On the other hand, the truly effective populist reformers of modern times have all been of ordinary birth. Counting backward, Morales, Chavez, Mandela, King, Lumumba, Castro, Gandhi, Mao, Lenin, Marx.

Would Zorro stand up as an Easop’s fable or does he subvert man’s self-wisdom? Gotham cannot fend off its criminal elements without super-just Richie-Rich Bruce Wayne, thankfully completely benign in his vigilante despotism and not the least bit a corrupted-absolutely Nero or perverted Gilles de Rais, donning a Blue[-blood] Beard to mask his nightly reconfiguration of injustice.

Pikes Peak Reads is part of Laura Bush’s unholy surge, the library extension of the Every Child Left Behind travesty devastating our education system. Even if the choice of reading about a fictional legend was made locally, it doesn’t surprise me. The third grade of our well-regarded elementary last year followed The Legend of Sleepy Hollow with a lesser known Washington Irving legend: Batman! The former coincided with a Discovery Channel premiere of Sleepy Hallow and the latter turned up at the megaplex, it was: Holy tie-in with the H.E.W. Batman! A new beginning!

I’ll eat Zorro’s hat if Isabel Allende’s precursor, Zorro, a new beginning, isn’t coming to the screen this year, or isn’t precursing a sequel, which would make it what, a cursor[y] Hollywood incarnation? Next year the Pikes Peak pick, left for the children to decide, will be the legend of another masked, caped crusader, a legendary Italian everyman, and ever too mortal, Mario of the Brothers franchise.

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