How do humans know what’s edible? Nature or nuture? Pink Slime vs GMOs

Posted on April 3, 2012 by Eric Verlo

Is fellatio by nature homoerotic? SO I am going to brave the hypothesis that you can write about Twinkies without having to eat one. Actually I discovered Twinkie image aversion easily overcomes Twinkie the concept, and I don’t just mean examples like the phallic Strangelove Slim Pickens hat tip at right, excuse me? Even to look at the dubiously baked confections is unappetizing, so why do we think they’re edible? This might be a recurring quandary of mine to which short term memory blinds me. Why don’t we try to eat dirt? (Easy for a well fed person to ask.) Where do we get a hunger for breakfast cereals, but not processed pet food? Why do humans stop consuming a fruit at the seed or rind, yet question why those discards fail to interest animal life too? Taste? We grasp that fire consumes nutrients, a toaster sometimes terminally, but how do industrial processes blur how we discern between live food and dead? Is it box art? Which grocery aisle? Sugar and butter are both edible and inedible, with flour it’s the reverse –never mind, that’s not what I meant to write about, I wanted to address the sudden Soylent Greening of PINK SLIME.
I know that vegetarians deride animal flesh for being inhumanely unsavory, but since when have “food activists” been motivated by what’s “gross”? Exactly. Gross has yet to stop sausage makers, and obviously the “Pink Slime” assault on ground beef production is food industry astrotruf. It’s a PR back-burn against the real public outcry, the wildfire of resistance to Genetically Modified GMO Frankenfoods.

Four Occupy tormentors unmasked

Posted on March 4, 2012 by Eric Verlo

Occupy Colo. Springs held a NO WAR ON IRAN demo today, counter- protested by some soldiers who think any antiwar criticism of their mission fails to Support The Troops. (Horrifyingly curious don’t you think, that US soldiers would already consider war with Iran as their mission?!) Joining them it turned out, were four of OCS’s sneakiest saboteurs. I got them with one camera click! From right to ultra-right: Raven Martinez aka Briaunna Webbing aka Occupy Csprings, Michael Clifton aka Agent of Doubt, Ian Carman aka “Father” Ian, and Ryan Butler aka Ry King aka Lone Wolf.

My policy until now was not to dignify any of these Facebook twits with attention, but their rumor campaign against OCS has become so virulent and untrue, and their misdeeds are now tipping the balance. Today the entire intersection had to bear personal megaphone taunts, but I’ll say that the final straw was yesterday when I learned of misinformation they attempted to spread to the local news. Occupy CS’s hand was forced in issuing a public statement about accused-arsonist Kyle Lawrence, because someone asserted Kyle had joined a violent group that had sprung up in OCS. Uh, let’s get to the bottom of that one, shall we?

WARNING: OCCUDRAMA AHEAD. All of it boring, but these creeps need to crawl back under their mouse pads. Ignoring them hasn’t worked, and even though they crave attention, I’ll give that a try.

Exhibit A

At far right is RYAN BUTLER aka Lucky Dog, aka Lone Wolf. When he disrupted OCS GAs he went by “Ry King”.

The secretive Ryan Butler is half of the Clifton/Butler nerd team that hijacked the “Occupy Colorado Springs” Facebook Open Group. It’s got about 400 members, doesn’t represent Occupy at all, and is maintained as a launchpad for Tea Party occu-haters under the pretext of “free speech” as decided by its unlisted admins Ryan & Michael. The open group was originally created by authentic occupier Amber Hagen, who in her idealism let all participant have admin privileges. When Amber discovered that haters among the admins kept wrecking the page, she began to delete them. Michael Clifton once recounted at a meeting how he and Ryan scrambled over Skype to keep Amber from shutting them out. They hurriedly deleted Amber’s admin access, thus exiling her from her own group. This was the act that inspired Raven Martinez to do the same with the OCS Facebook community page, in all fairness I should say, to prevent others from doing it to her.

Ryan’s claim to fame in OCS came from a failed coup to share the spokesmanship monopoly held by occupothead Jason Warf, but I digress.

Ryan had to step away from OCS after legal trouble from a drunken poker game gone awry, which he tried to blame on authentic occupy vet RTG. Ryan has a criminal record of domestic violence and wears a gun in his home in violation of having lost his permit to carry. That much is not disputed. But Ryan refutes RTG’s version of the event: that Ryan pistol-whipped his ex-girlfriend, which enraged RTG and the two fought, trashing the house. Both face assault charges and Ryan’s ex has filed her usual plea to the court to dismiss any notion that Ryan abused her. Instead we are to believe Ryan tried to defend himself with a vice-grips laying about (leaves a strike pattern similar to a gun maybe), accidentally striking his ex.

I’ll add that my perspective doesn’t come from hearing RTG’s testimony, but rather from eavesdropping on private IMs sent by Ryan as he deliberated what to say by way of damage control. Anyway.

Entirely relevant here however is Ryan Butler’s favorite bragging right, his secret Fight Club-inspired “PLAN-B” CLUB (First rule of Plan-B, you don’t talk about Plan B, snore). Apparently “Plan B” is for Amendment Two fans who want an alternate plan “when the revolution fails.” Was this the pro-violence group to which Michael Clifton alluded in TV interviews? It had nothing to do with Occupy, didn’t come from Occupy, and if its membership is limited to Ryan’s friends, I’m guessing that pares it down to two: he and Clifton. Thus Clifton’s statement about his disassociation from proponents of violence was also facetious, because the above photo was taken upon their arrival at the counter-protest, they came together.

But how absolutely scurrilous to attempt to tarnish OCS with the suggestion that occupy was the breeding ground of their pro-gun Amendment Two fantasy life?!

Exhibit B

Occupying more than the center of this photo is Michael Clifton, self-appointed videographer of the local occupy, known on Youtube and DIY newsites as “Agent of Doubt”.

Michael Clifton was a very early supporter of OCS, donating water and food as he documented its progress on Youtube, each segment introduced in his best impersonation of Alfred Hitchcock, minus the wit, or substance. Let’s say Clifton’s motives started out good, what would lead him last week to step forward and break the story about arsonist Kyle having a history with OCS, packaging his videos for best consumption by the local media?

Of course the answer is simple, and we’ve seen it before. Apparently 15-minutes of personal soundbite, TV attention converted to Youtube views, trumps any consideration for possible negative blowback for the movement. Clifton actually keeps distancing himself from OCS every time he alleges to speak authoritatively as an insider. It’s laughable if it wasn’t damnable, because this time the oaf said he quit when OCS members began to plan illegal strategies. Whaaat? –leaving listeners to infer that arson was among the strategies. What kind of tomfoolery insinuation is that?

Not surprisingly, once more Clifton is defending himself against accusations of being an informer or provocateur. I make no such charge. He’s an idiot. What can you do, Colorado Springs is full of them. Am I being too harsh? Read on.

In an earlier episode in front of City Council, Clifton famously declared himself an outsider to OCS so that he could take all the credit for a –he-thought– brilliant bit of investigative deduction regarding CSPD’s billing of man hours charged for policing OCS. Our friend had videotaped an OCS march you see, and noticed there weren’t any police officers in sight, ergo, the billings must have been fraudulent, yes, ignoring the possibility the cops were plain-clothed, or observing from a perimeter, or on call, etc. So like a flat-earther who draws conclusions based on only what he can see, our intrepid Sherlock declares the CSPD guilty of fraud, and… marches straight into the local office of the FBI to make the charge! The FBI, he reports, were only too happy to accept all his video footage into evidence!

This might point to Clifton’s real reason to declare he was not part of Occupy, because a GA consensus would have vetoed his FBI idea. OCS had recently endorsed a no-snitch policy, not on anyone, not even the city, and let’s face it, not least of all I’m guessing, TO the FBI.

Thus, however unwittingly, let’s call it witlessly, Clifton is an FBI informant in the very technical sense, isn’t he?

To put a fine point on it: everyone who’s participated in OCS activities recorded by Agent of Doubt Clifton, is now on record at the FBI, in not just the lossy Youtube segments available online, but the original hi-def digital sequences, in their entirety.

And while Agent Dork has been a stalwart companion to Occupy, if only for the videos which he converts into ad-views whose revenue he “contributes” to the Occupy movement by funding his own efforts to “promote” it, so far the sum of his efforts has been to give law enforcement and the local media evidence to build a case against Occupy. Thanks a ton Agent Dork. From here onward, your camera aught to record everyone giving you the finger!

Exhibit C

I was tempted because of his sign to give Father Ian Carman a pass. Who’s to say a Department of Homeland Security employee shouldn’t consider himself part of the 99%? But after successive absences from GAs, then hiding among the haters, it might be time to take a close look at this very disruptive occupier.

Divisive behavior can be very subtle, so I’ll cut to the quick on Father Ian. He revealed to us that he worked for DHS because he wanted to explain that he had access to confidential files on certain occupiers, one of whom, supposedly a veteran, still had a very high security clearance, indicating he was likely still active duty, or perhaps in the intelligence service. Father Ian was asserting this about our high profile occupy star JWS, effectively trying to snitchjacket JWS. Come down on that whichever way you like.

Exhibit D

Raven Martinez writes on Facebook under the identity of her daughter, or the occunonymous Facebook user “Occupy Csprings”. Once a formidable OCS volunteer, Raven suddenly became my own personal raving critic. It’s been suggested that her fury bears the air of a woman scorned — I’ll delve into that further down, if I feel like it.

As reported above, the Tea Party mutiny of Amber’s Facebook OCS open group is what inspired Raven to hijack the OCS Facebook COMMUNITY PAGE. Raven might have done it with the best intentions, but did it utterly undemocratically and to everyone’s chagrin and condemnation. Here’s what happened.

Embattled by internal struggle against the very identity of mothership Occupy Wall Street, the OCS GA had adopted the moderating policy implemented by the New York OWS to thwart vanguards and saboteurs, but the Springs admins at that time were refusing to implement them. Admins were continuing to post political endorsements, conspiracy theories and statements critical of fellow occupiers. Further protocols were adopted by OCS to require admins to use their initials to identify who was responsible. Again this was ignored, and now many of the admins were refusing to attend the GAs.

One day Raven noticed important posts being deleted and snide comments being made about OCS protest actions, all being done by an admin who would not reveal his/her identity, and worst of all, in the name of Occupy Colorado Springs. An admin herself, Raven made the clever move of temporarily deleting all the other admin users on the chance that this one might be stupid enough to reveal himself by complaining about his suddenly lost access. The idiot took the bait, and turned out to be none other than OCS-permit-holder and self-important-leader Hossein Momsforpot. For shit. Well this left Raven with a dilemma. Who was going to believe that Hoss was anti-OWS? More critically, who among the admins she had deleted, could she reinstate without the risk that Hoss would convince them to reinstate his admin status with which he could then delete Raven? This was the lesson Raven had gleaned from the hijack perpetrated by Wolf & Agent Duh.

I neglected to mention that the earlier hijack was accomplished anonymously, with Ryan pretending that sole admin status was held by “his dog”. So with her hijack, Raven added her own innovation, Raven loudly proclaimed that she’d been shut out too! She planned to claim that her eventual “reinstatement” was the result of an omniscient AnonymousTM hacker who’d intervened for the betterment of the movement.

Raven’s problem was that I had just the day before publicly refused an admin appointment, and when she cavalierly let suspicions fall on occupier PJ, he promptly deleted himself. Funny story, no?

Well, although a number of very earnest admins felt slighted, oddly enough things worked out for the better after Raven’s purge because all the internal occuhating stopped, and a number of the admins who felt pushed out ultimately outed themselves as Ron Paul enthusiasts, conspiracy nuts, or single-issue MMJ addicts. In reality, no one was ejected from OCS, but having lost their control over the Facebook page, they chose to make kissoff statements and move on.

So Raven was able to coax PJ and me to share the admin responsibilities with her, and it’s a good thing too, because when Raven eventually turned against the broader OWS mission, she’ll say it was because of my personal agenda, Raven went and DELETED the Facebook page. She thought she’d done it, but Facebook has safeguards fortunately, PJ and I were alerted and able to save the 3,300 member page from oblivion.

And the rest is history in the making. Three of us administrate the community page now, we trust each other and our dedication to the values and goals of the original Wall Street occupiers, and the Facebook likes continue to rise.

Is that enough about Raven? Yes it is. She’s doing her best to vilify and destroy our efforts, but that’s as much as I want to say about her.

What the hell. Each of these four unsavory characters knows that I could say far more than I’ve divulged here. I’m already embarrassed enough to talk about them as I did, good grief. The personal attacks on me are based on nothing that I hadn’t written about on NMT, yet they persist via email and phone calls to everyone they can reach. Well, here’s my shot across the bow.

Question for the Green Cities Coalition: How “green” is alcohol?

Posted on February 19, 2012 by Eric Verlo

My friend Lotus has a few words for the Green Cities Coalition, the so-far irrelevant activist hub which purports to speak for the region’s environmentalists. One of their number will be debating a fracking proponent on Thursday, where the public will see firsthand whether the GCC is a fighter or pushover against the local global warmers. But Lotus questions why the GCC always meets in bars, and I concur. From “Geeks Who Drink” to “Drinking Liberally”, maybe our city probably owes its paucity of effective activists to the delusion that they’re getting somewhere by drinking.

Here’s what Lotus sent in reply to their latest email invitation to “Happy Hour”:

To so called Green Cities Coalition,

Does the so called Green Cities Coalition have a contract with the local bars to promote, to advertise, alcohol? Is this a source of revenue for GCC? Is that why GCC puts such a sick and inaccurate phrase (Happy Hour) in the subject of your widely circulated emails?

I have never attended a Green Cities Coalition function thus far, and will do my best to avoid your organization, and to avoid promoting GCC so long as you continue to promote the use of alcohol, and especially the Orwellian double speak use of the word “happy hour” (sic). There is nothing happy about alcohol for a very large number of the users. According to the National Association for Children of Alcoholics about 43 percent of the U.S. population has been exposed to alcoholism in their families; and about one in eight adult drinkers in the US consumes alcohol problematically or alcoholically. (Which might explain in part why many of your members apparently need to meet in bars and promote alcohol.)

In my own life I have seen lots of relatives, employees, and friends and tons of strangers destroyed physically, mentally, and spiritually to one degree or another – often completely or almost completely destroyed – by alcohol. None of the people currently attending AA meetings is likely to be able to attend Green Cities Coalition functions either because your functions are so often held in bars, where alcohol is present, and because you so often promote alcohol. The same goes of Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. So all of these people are excluded from all or most of your so called green functions.

Do a computer search for AA meetings in Colorado Springs, Denver, etc and you will see that there are thousands of AA meetings in these cities every week. Probably millions of people attempting to undo the damage that alcohol has done to them.

If Green Cities Coalition members are so addicted to alcohol that they are unable to have green functions without mixing them with alcohol, then please leave me off your email lists, and please stop calling yourselves green. Call yourselves black instead, which is often the color used to symbolize evil, for that is what alcohol is for millions of people.

I suggest you promote and consume green raw smoothies instead! If you do not know what these are, which is probably the case, then do a search. Why not promote the creation of a health food restaurant that serves green smoothies in competition with the hundreds of unhealthy bars in Colorado Springs? Stop promoting the bars (which serve not only alcohol but junk food) and start promoting health – green smoothies, health food restaurants.

Lotus

City Hall of Mirrors

Posted on November 23, 2011 by Steve Bass

As cities around the US bully Occupy groups around on park verges and college campuses, we here in Colorado Springs have not remained unscathed. Monday morning saw our friendly neighborhood “Homeless Outreach Team,” (HOT), and a much less friendly contingent from the city’s code enforcement office dismantle the previously permitted Occupy site at Acacia Park in downtown Colorado Springs. A surprisingly good-sized group materialized after midnight to vocally express displeasure at the actions of the city as rendered by the police and what appeared to be a rather callous batch of contracted laborers hired to accomplish the actual dismantling. No one got beat up or gassed. The permit surrounding which had developed controversy in our little microcosm is gone and we will now be required to redefine, restructure, and proceed without it. Personally, i feel it to be a good riddance even though we here in Colorado Springs seem to be experiencing a bit of disorientation as a result.

Dan and M.J. of the HOT team, (a redundancy, i know, but common parlance), were present for the dismantling of the tents that had been a fixture at our protest site. Some 50 or so protesters managed to flood the scene, even at the late hour of the event. Despite the relative peace between authorities and Occupiers here, the police present were fully prepared to inflict harm if we protesters had engaged in any form other than the sometimes obnoxious yelling. The whole scene, not unlike other aspects of our unusual local manifestation of the Movement, produced and continues to produce a sense of extreme ambiguity in my own psyche. I like to think of Dan and M.J. as friends, at least in a provisional sense, but i have no choice but to acknowledge that none of my closest friends would ever even think of putting me in jail or beating me up, even if i piss them off.

Tuesday a fairly large group of Occupiers attended a City Council meeting with a previously established agenda, none of which was to address Occupy directly, though it would be difficult to conjure a government meeting with an agenda that pertained to no issue encompassed by Occupy at this juncture. My own experience at the council meeting felt very much like an exercise in futility. A gentleman preceded us Occupiers with a request to restore city funding to his non-profit that helps supply transportation to disabled city residents. As the council and mayor did with our objections next, they seemed to tolerate the man’s speech and then perfunctorily ignore it. No indication of interest or intention to act was in evidence. Aimee Cox, serving as some sort of city liaison, distributed a few sheets describing the city’s appeal process in a few sentences. The remainder of the council meeting involved investment strategy and plans to extract additional money from residents in the form of utility rate hikes.

The minutiae to all this wrangling is just about as pointless to describe as anything i can picture. The clearest vision afforded by the whole scene is still one of a struggle to get things from those that control them on the one hand, while struggling to keep people from getting things on the other. There remains a sense of entitlement held both by those with little, and by those generally smug players with much. I remain convinced that the current state of affairs is fully unsustainable. The global takeover of industry and commerce by factions that appear fully unconcerned by any consideration other than personal enrichment has led to a scenario in which those at the winning end of that paradigm are in as much trouble as anyone else. Sure, if our supply of food, energy, shelter, and so on becomes insufficient those with more clout in hand may well be able to hold out rather longer than those otherwise equipped. A few survivalists will likely outlast inner city dope fiends; but what’s the point? Is the object of human interaction to feel smugger than the next guy? Who gets to feel the smuggest?

Directly attacking the intractable problems of human interaction seems as futile as ever. No amount of negotiation seems effective enough to overcome the entrenched cultural aversion to cooperation and insistence on coming out on top that has produced such a three ring circus of a society. Observe that Colorado Springs’s Mayor Bach is in office after a campaign financed largely by real estate and development interests. Really, now, do we need more buildings around here, or aren’t these activities really just the outcome of individual efforts to scrabble up money? Think about that a moment. How much human activity is nothing more than bullshit make-work designed not to be productive, but to shift money around? How much useless crap does Madison Avenue convince us we need for no better reason than to supply income to its players. I’m suggesting that most of the stupid jobs we Occupiers hear we should get so often are self-destructive bullshit. That the great majority of laws and regulations we have allowed to overwhelm our hard-won liberty, spawning the parasitic legal industry, the real estate industry, the huge regulatory bureaucracies of governments all around, and in fact most of the “work” we humans do is utterly pointless. I’m suggesting that we humans will, in fact, need to rethink our entire interaction with one another if we are to survive our own more ridiculous tendencies.

I’m hardly the first person to posit this notion. Jeremy Rifkin, for one, discussed the ideas i merely hint at above in rather more depth in his 1995 book, The End of Work. Of course, suspicious religious folk have raised an uproar at the mere mention of Rifkin for decades now, claiming him to be a Devil-worshiper, among other things. The sad truth seems to be that fundamentalists in this country and others, of Christian orientation and others, seem content to allow their Creator’s handiwork to burn to ash rather than to work together with anyone else to resolve the problems we humans have cobbled together to our own collective detriment. As little as i relish the sort of fight that generally ensues from arguing about spiritual matters, i’ll be finding it necessary to head in that direction in upcoming posts. Hold on tight, and please feel free to engage….

Fear and Loathing in Colorado Springs

Posted on November 9, 2011 by Steve Bass

Those readers following the Occupy! Movement in its many forms around the world and in Colorado Springs will be glad to hear that Tuesday culminated a difficult week for us here with a resolution of many contentious issues, and an overall commitment to unity.

The subject matter behind this particular post is closely associated with the Movement in general, but it’s more a humanity thing than an Occupy thing, overall. I hope i can get the associations to make sense, and that readers will restrain themselves from developing the erroneous notion that this is meant to be a pitch for some sort of religion. It’s not.

I went to the Municipal Court in Colorado Springs to enter a plea of “not guilty” to the charge of camping on public property because of actions executed as a part of Occupy! Actually, i was camping on public property, to put it quite plainly, and the idea behind the plea is that the action does not engender guilt even if it violates a silly and badly unAmerican, (read, “oppressive,” if we’ve become a little unrecognizable in this regard), statute. A couple dozen supporters made it to the courtroom with me, and raised enough ruckus to get Municipal Judge Spottswood W. H. Williams to threaten them all with contempt charges. The whole thing was kind of a lot of fun, really. Made me feel a little like Hoffman or Hayden, in a much smaller sense. There comes a first time for everything, and this was my first visit to a courtroom during which i was able to feel utterly unencumbered by the dark nature of my own action that had led me there. My deepest thanks to all the OCS members and especially Dennis Apuan, who put his political credibility on the line to stand with us, and brought a good deal of patriotic weight to the room as State Rep for the fine soldiers of Fort Carson.

The hearing was only that, after all, and after entering the plea, we scheduled a pre-trial conference with the City Attorney, for 22 Nov, at which a government lawyer will make me an offer i’ll most assuredly refuse and we’ll schedule a jury trial. I’ll keep you news hounds posted as things progress.

The point to this post, though, is an underlying root to the no-camping ordinance, as well as to most of the woes of the day: The Fear.

Most of us don’t acknowledge the Fear because, well, it’s scary. Instead we get angry, or attempt to maneuver ourselves into a position to control uncontrollable factors like society or competitive economies. We eschew cooperation because we’re afraid of our fellows. We make assumptions about others’ behavior and how it will effect us. We bewail the corruption of society, and begin looking over our shoulders for the punishment of God, or black-clad mercenaries coming over the horizon to herd us into frigid winter FEMA camps. We worry about hunger, poverty, inglorious death. We develop elaborate political systems and foment revolution in order to establish “security” of dubious credibility. Look around. These tactics have not ever worked after attempting repeated, redundant permutations, and there is no reasonable expectation that they ever will.

The Fear has driven all this cutthroat competition. It’s what motivates folks to be sure they have more, more, more. It’s what causes us to petulantly demand our right to burn as much gas in our Hummers as possible, and to constantly engage in useless commerce. It motivates the lowest guy competing for some crappy job at Taco Bell just as surely as it motivates conspiratorial Rothschild backroom bankers. It motivates us to enact stupid, oppressive no-camping ordinances when someone that scares us becomes visible, oh my! We’re all deathly afraid of some horrible outcome, like someone else getting our stuff, or scaring tourists away, or enjoying some habitual pleasure we find repugnant.

The Fear is irrational! What’s the very worst that can happen to us in this life? We die? We find ourselves incarcerated or tortured? Consider, if you will, that we live our little spans, maybe a hundred years or so at the outside limit, surrounded at both ends by an unfathomable mass of toroidally twisted, multi-dimentional Eternity that not one of us will ever grasp while we live. What possible fear can be valid under this circumstance other than that we fail to live according to our own perceived Truths? I say “perceived” since only those afflicted by the Fear are afraid to examine those truths for the errors all honest thinkers know to exist within our own perceptions. If I knew my own blind spots they wouldn’t exist, right? We don’t even know what we’re afraid of mostly, though we can usually list a few if we set ourselves to the task. No one is to blame for his or her own irrational fears, especially cultural fears such as seem to be more or less universal. Many have been established by the direct influence of media that may well have been designed by nefarious folk for exactly the purpose of invoking unfounded fears in various populations. OMG! Now i’m making myself afraid! Not really–but what to do about the Fear?

“There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear,” reads a certain religious text, (1 Jn 4:18, for those with a source fetish like me). I won’t be digressing into a religious sermon here. The principle holds without the doctrinal baggage surrounding it in the context in which it nests. No matter how evil the Ideas we oppose as Occupiers, or as human beings in general, they can’t overwhelm a spirit of love. No matter the spiritual foundation or lack thereof, love can dissipate greed, fear, disappointment, embarrassment, and in fact any of the various bases for the secondary anger response we are all prone to manifesting in situations as apparently dire as the one we’re seeing now. As much as i can plainly see the bogus nature of the moves made in, say, the financial industry, (inseparable from other key industries at a certain level), applying some genuine empathy causes a mental process that can not end in hatred or vengefulness. Look guys like Greenspan or Geitner in the eyes next time you see them. They’re deeply miserable, and completely trapped in their own Fears. When it all collapses, i really hope they’re still available so we can feed them a plate of food, even if we can’t resist the temptation to ask, “What the fuck were you thinking!?”

We can’t fight fire with fire here. Battling greed with more greed, as some seeking to restore an “American Dream” involving bigger slices of a rotten pie seem to do. Revolution only spins us in circles: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” We always seem to find ourselves standing in the same spot we started, except standing in pools of blood with fewer resources after every revolution we’ve ever effected. We don’t have these options any longer. The planet is in a condition that will not permit us to continue on the deeply ingrained, competitive course we’ve followed for so long. Learning to love, to let go, to tolerate, to work together for our futures which are common whether we like it or not is the only way out of this. It’s not easy, only necessary.

I can’t tell anyone how to save anyone else, or how to convince the next guy that any of this is true. I can’t even describe the mental processes that led to these conclusions. All i seem able to do is to proceed in the direction the thoughts lead, as they come to me in a fashion that very often seems external. Examine the assertions that continue to spill out of me at 2 in the morning like this. Notice with joy that there seem to be many others reaching similar conclusions: Things are terminally fucked up and only Love can save us. If it turns out that we’re not saved, that the whole human experiment is doomed to fail, i’ll breathe my last breath in the knowledge that i walked the talk spoken by all my heroes in tongues long lost to history, or new today, or unspoken yet understood by common nature. I don’t think i’m alone. I don’t know how to be afraid of that.

#Occupy Colo. Springs Municipal Court

Posted on November 9, 2011 by Eric Verlo

OCCUPIED COLORADO SPRINGS- Attention local media, if you’re looking for authentic spokespeople for Occupy Colorado Springs, you need look no further than today’s front row. Holding the big sign is first arrestee Steve Bass, to his right: three times arrestee Iraq vet Jack Semple, arrestee Amber Hagen, arrestee Raven Martinez, and arrestee Thomas G.

Also pictured, former Colorado Congressman Dennis Apuan, Occupy founding member Jon Martinez and Socialist activist Patrick Jay. Not pictured, Joel Aigner and Hossein Forouzandeh who were speaking at a UCCS occupy teach-in.

Here’s a video of the Saturday arrests of veteran of Fallujah Timothy “Jack” Semple and Amber Hagen of the 7-11 incident. Worth the watch. ROCKSTARS!

Mark your calendars, upcoming arraignments are scheduled November 21, 29 and 30.

Raven addressed the Colorado Springs City Council today on the unconstitutionality of the no-camping ordinance being enforced to curb the Occupy protest. Here’s what she said:

As a citizen of the United States, one has a given right to life, liberty, & property. These rights are protected by both the 5th & 14th Amendments to the Constitution.

In Bolling v Sharpe, The Supreme Court interpreted the 5th Amendment’s due process clause to include an equal protection element.

The 14th Amendment states:

“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of the citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of LIFE, LIBERTY, or PROPERTY, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Knowing that sleep is a necessity of Life, every American citizen has a right to sleep, regardless of status.

“HOMELESSNESS” is considered a status.

The camping ordinance ultimately denies one the right to sleep, therefore the right to live, based on their status. How many people have been arrested for setting up a canopy, with blankets & food, to take a nap or have a picnic on public property.

Now if a homeless person sets up a canopy, has blankets and food with them, will they be told to take down their canopy under the current camping ordinance? If so, then the ordinance is based on status, therefore unconstitutional.

If not, then it leaves too much discretion in the hands of the individual law enforcement officer, making the ordinance over-broad and unconstitutionally vague.

When one is homeless, where can that person sleep? If they set up to sleep on Public property they would be violating the current city ordinance, they will be told to leave and told of a shelter to go to, being their only alternative. This amounts to incarceration in the shelter without a violation of law having been committed. This also violates ones right to due process in that it allows for arbitrary enforcement.

When you criminalize a non-criminal act of necessity, you greatly increase the possibility of that person committing other crimes, as well as decrease that persons ability to obtain employment.

State v Folks, No. 96-19569 MM found that a city ordinance which punished innocent conduct, such as sleeping/camping on public property, violated the defendant’s right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment, which is protected under the 8th Amendment.

I ask you to look at the constitutionality as well as the long term effects of such an ordinance, it starts a domino effect that negatively impacts an already hurting economy.

How much does it cost in tax payers money to pursue such a case?

We have to have change! If we want a better economy and overall society, then the government, Federal, State, & Local, must change the way they conduct business. Criminalizing acts of necessity is business, not a way to protect our American citizens.

“Definition of Insanity: Doing the same thing over & over again and expecting different results.” -Albert Einstein

Pass a new ordinance to repeal the current one.

Ye Aulde Memoir

Posted on November 5, 2011 by Steve Bass

Another old piece. These stories are distorted by romanticized memory, at times, and others likely remember them differently. I by no means intend to insult any of the real persons that lived through this stuff with a cavalier treatment of tender recollections, or harsh description of personalities or actions. Each of us always did exactly what seemed to be exactly the right things to do at the time. And there survives much, much love, which has grown and developed like it always does, in ways we never see coming.

I’m not putting these old ones up because i’m too lazy to write new. I’ll have one of those next–but some of this old stuff fits. Hope you like it.

11 May 2009

One day during the summer of 1980 my brother David was in the hospital at Case Western Reserve University for yet another open-heart surgery. The scene that day was dramatic I suppose, but for our family at the time, it was in many ways just another day. The state of the relationships between us had come to the condition that existed then because each and every incident that had occurred in the history of the Universe had added to that cumulative point. The way it came together then could have been viewed as tragic, I suppose, but we never noticed.

I don’t even remember how I got the news that this particular episode was approaching. David’s surgery that year was one of many—so many, in fact, that by now surgeons and academics had written papers on his congenital condition, and even given it a polysyllabic title. His lead surgeon, a Dr. Ankeny as I recall, had once claimed that he had “learned more from David Bass than fourteen years of medical school.” We four siblings had in effect grown up in the hospital, with the constant potential for death in attendance on a daily basis. Many years would pass between that summer and the moment I decided any of this was applicable to self-reflection, and the sweltering summer afternoon was as present and imminently experiential as any other I lived through during that period.
Our family seemed done that year. I had been out of the picture for over a year. Dad had left soon after, leaving a sour tinge in the air with those remaining, though I never blamed him. When David queued up for one more death-defying, experimental, split-chest open-heart surgery, Dad came back to Cleveland from Florida to put in an obligatory appearance.

Here was a meeting that defied conventional description. Dave, the least guilty of all our immediate family, had been deeply affected by Dad’s exit from the filial stage earlier that year. I hadn’t seen, or even spoken to Dad for well over a year, nor could our interactions prior to then be described as warm and supportive. Outnumbered by angry or indifferent family members, and perhaps less acclimated to hospitals as the rest of us, Dad was way out of his simpler, down-to-earth element.

I showed up unannounced, with glorious southern tart Candy Stone from Mobile, Alabama in tow, she in dirty bare feet, nearly illegal shorts, one of those dangerous eighties tube-tops, and very red eyes. I don’t think Dad spoke more than a half dozen words to me. His eyes told the whole story of uncertainty, pain, and failure. Dave, fresh from surgery, quite literally green, with a repulsive grey crust around his lips and appending to the tubes and what not projecting from several of his orifices, refused to see Dad. Refused to allow him in the room. Dad left unrequited to return to his exile in Florida. I didn’t see him again for many years.

Once, David, following the Dead tour in our Mom’s old family van showing all the effects of the Rust Belt, with his underage Russian girlfriend, his fiddle, and a patchouli oil manufacturing operation, got pulled over in Alabama, for sport. By this time, David was unkempt, smelly, and obviously committing some crime or another. The cops shook him down pretty good, but of course he had no contraband. He has a vice or two, but the heart thing keeps him from excess. He had that young Russian girlfriend, though, and Alabama’s finest figured they could really hang him out to dry, (dang hippie). But she and Dave convince the alpha cop to let them call her mom in New York to confirm that permission had been granted for the road trip and no heinous kidnapping was going on. The mother spoke zero English, but somehow the girlfriend convinced the cop to allow her to translate for her mother. Mother and daughter held a five minute conversation about the mental acuity of Alabama cops, duly translated as an expression of permission, and the travelers were on their way. David drawls this story on stage in his hillbilly persona, fiddle in hand. It’s hilarious.

It seemed to me for a long time that David was the only one of us to escape that little bubble of anti-reality that made up our family life while we siblings were young. Maybe he somehow managed to avoid being trapped in it in the first place, residing only temporarily, with some sort of metaphysical pass associated with potential imminent death. I don’t know, but years later, during one of the high points of my own endeavor, Renaissance Paint and Remodeling, I remember feeling jealous of David. This was a recurring sentiment, and all the more abberant for the fact that my strongest memory of it falls during a visit to Dave’s place in North Carolina that amounted to a just-in-case kind of deal before a heart transplant. Whatever the rationality or fairness of my little envy, (not real envy, mind you, but one of those little personality spikes that one notes and passes through), David is the one of us that got away the least damaged, and has lived his idiosyncratic dream out in full, down to the fine print, with joy.

Mom tells a story about my first day at school. Or maybe the second. I had asked some question that Miss Gardner couldn’t answer, and after day two, came home grousing about how those people were ignorant, and furthermore lazy, since no one had even bothered to look up a response. Mom likes to carry on about how smart her offspring are. She doesn’t usually bring up in public how warped we can be.

Mom, we brothers agree, bequeathed us a legacy of somewhat dubious mental processes. She’s nuts. We all know it. She knows it. Dad knows it. The rest of her family knows it well, and most of them recognize a common bond of familial, brand-name insanity that we all seem to share. I expect this is a more or less common thing among families, but I remain convinced that we are a bit stranger than most, at least in part because of the unique circumstances we lived through.

Back in the day, Mom’s thing was what they call control issues. The dynamic of her issues was so complex I can’t imagine I’ll ever figure it out. Some of her personality came to her by heredity from her mother, whom we call Mo. Much of it developed in that crucible of stress Dave kept heated by his repeated, continuous flirtation with death. Mom, responding to my over-the-top reaction to a pubescent hormonal tsunami, became madly obsessive with minutiae, dividing her time among us brothers and badgering us constantly in a fashion no one can really get unless they have their own experience to compare. I think she and I trapped ourselves in a sort of feedback loop that could have ended no other way.

I was out of the house for good, by the age of fifteen, for all purposes off to lead a life of crime, I suppose. For some years, I lived out my interpretation of the old Kerouac/Kesey/Abbie Hoffman mythos, on the road, in the street, an utterly directionless rebel. A good five or six years passed without more that a word or two passing between Mom and me.

I was nineteen when I came to Colorado Springs. The vague and unformulated manifesto for global revolution I had worked out in my head was on hold, kept in place by a twelve-pack of cheap beer. I had a job as an electrician, and didn’t see any reason to change that, but we actually didn’t do much of anything but work and drink beer that year.

One day Mom called to say Mike, another brother, got himself in trouble again and she expected him to “run away.” I told her to give him my number and I’d let her know when he called. He did just a few days later, and can I come pick him up over on south Circle.

Mike and I spent a couple years engaging in the sort of insanity to which we had become habituated in Cleveland. The reader will require imagination to add flesh to the story here. The statute of limitations may prevent backlash, but I don’t mean to poke at a bees’ nest, and it seems unlikely you might imagine anything more extreme than what actually took place. We weren’t stupid, though, and the business of working for wages, or relying on illicit behavior for advancement just wasn’t good enough, so we formed a construction company and went to work. That proved to be a trap. Maybe an extension of the weird, family trap that all of us have discussed so deeply, without resolution.

Mike and I had it in our minds that the working man’s habit of grousing over how management acts is crap and that if we were going to grouse, we ought to just take the reins ourselves. It turned out we were pretty good, too, in a lot of ways. We worked together for the best part of twenty years, and reached moments of national prominence in our little niche. The whole period was characterized by more bone-crushing stress and absurd, super-human feats. We had little breaks from the madness when we’d crash the business, which we did three times. We were great at getting shit done, but lousy at administration in the final analysis.

Hiring employees in the construction business kept me exposed to the street element to which I had become accustomed. I involved myself in various efforts to assist folks in their low-budget struggles, imagining still that I could somehow change the world. In fact, contrary to Mike’s primary obsession with business success, I figured the whole pursuit as a means to some vague end involving social revolution. For a while a religious experience had me involved with a church effort to “reach out” to the hoodlums that used to cruise Nevada Avenue on Friday and Saturday nights. I even managed to glean an ordination from the Baptists, though now I suspect they’d regret bequeathing me with it. My identification with street folks and the urge to help them rise above conditions has never left me. Actually I’ve worked up the notion that we could all stand to rise above conditions.

Dad. I went even longer without speaking with him than I did with Mom. He dealt with our family’s teen-aged fulguration by folding his hand and striking out on his own. Offered a transfer by his employer, the story goes, he told Mom, “I’d like you to come to Florida with me, but I don’t think I can love you anymore.” No woman in her right mind would go for that deal, and Mom didn’t fall for it either. Dad packed his company car and struck out, leaving his all-important nest egg, and everything else, behind. When David was in the hospital again that summer, that’s where Dad came from to visit him.

I had been away, and I don’t recall blaming Dad for his poor dealings with the family. He had been raised in a very old-school, European style, and he simply couldn’t handle our ways. To this day, in spite of Dad’s expression of a taste for “philosophy,” our conversations are often guarded, pregnant with unspoken truths. I still don’t know his philosophy.

Last summer Dad, my youngest brother, and I went to Montana to camp and fish, riding an outfitter’s horses into some of the most pristine wilderness left in the lower forty-eight. I had genuinely hoped to break the communication barrier that stands between us, but we had to settle for hugs and meaningful silences, for the most part. Dad still plays with his cards pressed tightly to his chest, flashing a look of panic if the conversational waters begin to threaten him with submersion. I guess he can’t swim.

Dad’s experience, it seems to me has also been different from the norm, though I’m uncertain that any human being matches that mythical standard. His family, unlike Mom’s, which fought in the Revolution, was barely American. They were proud American citizens, but their traditions came from old Europe, and they still lived communally on the old Bass farm as they had done for a thousand years.

During my childhood, whenever David was out of the hospital, we’d spend weekends at the farm with the scene looking very much like something from an era that had long since passed in this country, all Dad’s siblings and extended family eating together, playing cards, children roaming the grounds like Huck Finn. It was all rather idyllic, truly, and the moment Grandma Bass died and the farm disappeared under a layer of vulgar office towers marked the shift from one childhood to another.

Dad’s life since then became an effort to recreate those years. His brother and sister had never left the farm. Even when his brother Paul married and had a child, he stayed there on Rockside, as the place was known. I think that scene served as an anchor for my Dad, and when he retired, impressively early despite having suffered huge financial setbacks, he bought his own farm, secluded and sylvan, and moved his socially inept brother and sister in with him.

Paul was a very strange dude. Throughout his lifetime he suffered from some sort of condition that caused him to wobble quite a bit and to mumble when he spoke, like a cartoon character. I still have no idea what the actual condition was–it was never discussed in medical terms, and Paul worked, loved, laughed, and lived in a fashion perfectly suited to him. He represented another unusual facet of our lives that never seemed unusual to us, simply because it just had always been what it was. During his declining years, Paul became more and more difficult to live with, his condition developing into a matter that caused him to actually require care, rather than merely one engendering bemusement. He became cantankerous, incontinent, and dangerous to himself, given his refusal to use a cane. Dad actively cared for him, there on the new farm, forty-five minutes from a paved road, until he died a few years ago.

I couldn’t make the funeral, but I spoke to Dad on the phone as he was back in the city making arrangements. I told him I thought his dealings with Paul were among the most impressive and moving things I had ever seen. I still see it that way. The conversation, which lasted no more than ten minutes I guess, may have been the deepest we’ve ever shared.

For the past eight or nine years every Sunday, so long as I’m in town, I give away food we cook up to whomever we can get to come up to the Colorado College campus and sample our fare. Often our guests are homeless or dirt poor, but we’re not so much stipulating low economic clout as a qualifier. We’ll feed anyone. Dick Celeste, the former governor of my home state, Ohio, and once ambassador to India, comes now and then. He’s a friend, and I visit him at his home, during party season at CC. Arlo Guthrie came down to our basement kitchen once–I put him to work washing dishes. Many of the crowd I see every week are chronic though, plagued by demons I surmise to have been born in conditions similar to mine as a youth. I’ve occasionally contemplated the accusation of “enabling” bad behavior that people toss my way once in a while, but many of our regulars, some of whom I’ve known for twenty-five years, are simply never going to approach any sort of productivity. They are simply too extraordinarily damaged, and as the proverb goes, there, but for the grace of God, go I.

The Christian experience I mentioned earlier was a reflection, or maybe an extension, of spiritual drives I always apprehended. I pursued it heartily for a time, beginning my adult involvement with the sort of hands-on charity our Sunday kitchen represents in a Christian context. The Church always felt skewed to me though, and a couple years’ studying of the questions involved convinced me to adopt thinking anathema to most of my Christian friends. The exclusionary thinking shared by many church folk, in turn, began to seem anathema to me.

Something about my family and its ability to weather long, rending forces, becoming over time a stronger entity for all its roiling turbulence, seems to me akin to the aspect of the human condition that produces the wrecked lives that bring folks to visit me on Sunday afternoons. Further spiritual thinking–some would say metaphysical thinking–concerning Chaos and Oneness has encouraged me to feel like the separation between me and the crowd I serve is illusory in some indefinable fashion. When members of our family passed through periods during which we found it necessary to step back from one another, the bonds that hold us together never broke, and the etheric bonds between my soup kitchen crowd and me, and ambassadors or presidents, don’t seem breakable either. We all seem to share certain common struggles, differences arising simply from disparate approaches, variant perspectives. Our family, it turns out was never what we imagined it ought to be, but perhaps something greater, and more viable, after all.

Part of my mission in ditching the construction business for more cerebral and perhaps less lucrative pursuits at an age when many of my peers in the building industry are thinking of golf courses and retirement comes from a belief that the differences in individuals are reconcilable. Feeding people is necessary, but falls short of bridging the apparent expanse between souls. I still want to change the world, even though I understand the futility of such a grandiose notion. Utopians always fail. But I expect that each time some failure becomes apparent, we can learn a little something, and maybe the next day we can fail a little better.

No account of self-examination is ever going to be complete. I won’t be asserting anything about how I’ve come full circle. Our family will never return to the conditions of my childhood. Nor is the new generation my brothers and cousins and I have brought into the world a retread of old lives. I haven’t even touched on my own experiences as head of a new family, but my children live lives vastly different from their forbears, and even though I rather hope they can avoid some of my mistakes, I suspect they’ll be making many of their own. It seems to be in their genes to require hard lessons. But, like my tortured friends in line at CC on Sunday mornings, or those in my circle equally tortured but accustomed to fine linens, whatever they may suffer holds its own value.

We all learn what we must learn. Life is perfectly safe. Its lessons are self-taught, but deep. I genuinely plan to write a real memoir and a family history, for my kids’ sake, but by the time we come full circle, it’s too late to write about it.

Denver Daze

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Steve Bass

Occupy Colorado Springs is and has been a relatively staid affair. Our biggest marches have drawn maybe 200 participants, and the street corner has been generally host to small crowds and mostly friendly or indifferent passers by. Visits from police have been just that–visits, rather than assaults, even when the HOTT Team came to arrest me early in the morning on 18 October, and the intrepid Camping Jack on two more recent occasions. We had to take steps to force them to make my arrest. Many of the core participants at Acacia Park have never been involved in any sort of political processes at all, let alone public protestations. So when several of our number traveled to Denver last Saturday to join a boisterous crowd of around 3,000 souls emotions were high, mixed, and complex.

There can be no denying the nervous air among one van load during the trip to Civic Center Park, directly in front of the State Capitol building, on the western side. Shana expressed open fear, bless her heart, and i suspect she wasn’t the only of our number of like mind. Fear was generally dispelled by the excitement of the much larger Denver crowd, though, and as we marched around downtown under clear blue unseasonably warm Colorado skies, past the Mint, the Federal Reserve Building, down the 16th St. Mall where city employees took an unscheduled break to let us pass and bewildered shoppers either stared aghast or waved and grinned in support, up 17th St. past all the towering bank centers, and finally mounting the steps at the Capitol Building in defiance of specific instruction from city and police. Throughout the march, spirits were exuberant as cooperative bullhorn operators traded various, sometimes conflicting perspectives while our horde danced and prated along the sidewalks and streets, and we arrived at the Capitol in high, expectant spirits.

There had been quite a lot of friendly cops along for the march, but shortly after our arrival at the Capitol the armored legion showed up and began tactical operations to expel the somewhat rowdy crowd from its perch. I was there with my 15 year old son, so we pulled back from the danger zone when the announcement was made waving off the “unarrestable.” Adin and i observed the obscure scuffling, complete with clouds of gas, from the Park as we waited for the valiant crew of absurdly comical drag queens “manning” the field kitchen to finish the “pimp-ass risotto” we later had for lunch, flavored by tear gas. The cops cleared the Capitol steps and formed a double-lined phalanx at the eastern face of the Park, at the street edge of the sidewalk directly across from the kitchen and the hastily erected camps. The kitchen crew struggled to put a specifically verboten makeshift canopy over their operation, so the police could be sure and find them.

The police blocked Broadway for several blocks and pushed protesters off the street into the Park and stayed in a threatening stance for some 6 hours or so, waiting for the appointed hour of 7:00p when they razed the camps, apparently according to specific orders. The clearing of the street was punctuated by violence , at least some of which was beyond the pale. Photographer and protest participant Andrew Cleres was ruthlessly shot down from his tree-stand while obviously not a threat. Frankie Roper of our OCS group was transported to a local hospital after taking a “non-lethal” round to the chest, though he was not arrested and refused treatment so he could rush back to the proceedings. Cops pulled back to the street after their initial assault and held a line for several hours while listening to protesters preaching various words ranging between, “We love you; you are US,” to “Fuck off and die, Pigs!” while awaiting word to move on the camps, which they did at the appointed hour, throwing tents, food, and kitchen equipment into a city trash truck.

The police surrounded the empty camping areas afterward, and maintained their line at the street for some time, continuing to endure some very angry expressions by riled protesters. Around 8:00p they abruptly and rather anticlimactically just left, allowing protesters to claim a victory, of sorts.

Though my observations to follow may well clash somewhat with some attitudes expressed during much subsequent conversation, much of what i witnessed at as close a range as could be was very encouraging indeed. Protesters were extraordinarily courageous in the face of a volatile situation. At odds with some other observers, i suggest cops exercised pretty fair restraint. Frankie and Andrew were both rather overworked in the incidents linked above. Frankie’s foot had been rolled over by the motorcycle he then knocked to the ground when the cops jumped him, and police had no way to know that when they got him. He was not arrested. Throughout the day, during which there were only 20 arrests reported, i witnessed numerous instances of very angry protesters attempting to engage police violently. These incidents were mostly handled by the crowd by their moving in to separate the overwrought form the line of cops, and the few moments where things escalated to actual physical levels were marked by a lack of brutality by police, and an apparently strong reluctance to arrest anyone. And again, after executing announced plans to raze the camps the cops simply left the scene.

Among the most exceptionally poignant vignettes of the day was the scene at the kitchen between the clearing of the Capitol steps and its ultimate destruction. The queer high antics persisted in good humor through the entirety of the very tense day, and the line of grateful hungry continued steadily within shoulder-brushing distance of the armored squads; life, joy, and loving community on display under duress. Many protesters repeated the suggestion to police that they are fully welcome to lay down armor and join us for a sandwich and a bowl of soup, and some cops actually did so, braving the incredulous stares of their fellows before rejoining the line. All day, though more so during the march while still in a conversational mood, police expressed support for us protesters, and reluctance to be antagonistic on their own. When they returned at the close of Park hours in much smaller numbers to match the dwindling of our own, remaining protesters knew to clear to the sidewalk and no further incidents took place. By then, new supplies had been delivered by random donors, and a new kitchen was already turning out coffee and chili dogs from an adjusted position at the park’s edge.

There remains aroused spirits from many of the variously positioned players in this conflict of Ideas. Many U.S. armed forces veterans are very angry indeed at police seen as traitorous after the incident with Scott Olsen in Oakland, (don’t forget to continue to hold Scott in your prayers, if you do that sort of thing); however I, for one, am encouraged by the dramatic differences between what i saw in Denver Saturday and the stuff from my childhood where police would just wade through crowds swinging nightsticks with brutal efficiency at whomever was within range. Further encouragement came from the shift in mood the following day when much of the tension between holders of opposing opinion among our OCS core appeared to simply diffuse on its own in the face of the sheer size and intensity of the action in D-town.

My take: I am immensely proud of all the Occupiers that participated, (including perhaps most especially my son Adin, who chose to stay right up in the thick of things with us all day long), and steadfastly protected those of our own motivated beyond restraint from overstepping propriety. We are ALL one. The human race makes up a group of 100%, even if some of us need to catch up with the notion. We have a long way to go, but we’re learning. This thing will continue to be lumpy and chaotic, but we’re getting there. Because we have to, no matter what.

Occupying an empty house

Posted on October 27, 2011 by Steve Bass

My friend Maureen gets frustrated with me because i keep slinging all this outlandish stuff at her, and as one might expect, she has a hard time getting it sometimes, and an even harder time imagining that any of it might be true or practical. I keep telling her that money is over, she keeps telling me that people use money for good things. I start hanging around Occupy Wall St. and its attendant movement and she feels alienated because she lives largely from Stock Exchange investments. Maureen is not the only one with this issue; a man appeared at our GA in CSpgs last week deeply troubled by the fact that we “haters” were trying to force his grandma to eat cat food because as he noted, “Wall Street”, that is, the package of various stock offerings available there, is owned diffusely by grandmas and retirees, penny-pinchers and wheeler-dealers all over the world. My friend and this guy are both put off by the extremely jarring nature of the realizations at hand that have precipitated huge crowds of traffic-clotting protesters into the streets. (Actually that stranger stayed for the GA and came around, while Maureen has an injury preventing her attendance, so this is kinda for her, as well as everyone else).

The issue with the money that’s causing problems is closely associated with the Global nature of Occupy! and because of that, its fragmented nature. Both issues are rendered all the more discordant to many by their perceived urgency among occupiers. We want things to change right now, not after the next bullshit election cycle, but rather before we all die when the food chain collapses. Many within the movement at hand will object to what i posit here, but there really is no way around it in my own mind, so i have no choice but to put it out there. The FED, the IMF, World Bank, Bank of England, Royal Dutch, Al Rajhi, etc, etc, and their intertwined financial/military/industrial destruction machine already exist as a very solid Global beast with utterly uncontrollable and ravenous hungers. We humans are equally as Global, and Occupy! is the same. The destructive elements in this conflict as well as the creative are out of the hands of nationalistic players, and our old notions of money and its production will not save us in time. Once again, if it were gonna, it woulda.

I’ve put this educational chart up before, and if you have no motivation to look any further then i hope you’ll just go get another beer and stay out of the way. The World as we know it is a disaster, and we made it so. Don’t give me that crap about global warming is caused by dinosaur farts. We’ve dumped more toxic shit into the ecosystem in the last century than can be said to have even existed, anywhere. If Humanity can’t effect the world, like one hears on Rush, of some of those other insane programs where are all the American Bison? Passenger Pigeons? Pennsylvanians drinking tap water? Live, healthy corals? Why are so many of us completely, stubbornly ignorant of these obvious and urgent facts. It’s the Fear, of course, and it’s actually propagated deliberately by some, who fail in turn to recognize that they are trapped by it themselves. we’ll move on to the business of the Fear another time.

Plenty of accusations fly around about who caused the money crisis, the environmental crisis, and any other crisis at hand. It really doesn’t matter, and even though some players have obviously been behaving recklessly, some in succession with conspiratorial characters of some pedigree, we absolutely must give up the hatred and sort out solutions, if we want to live. There are a few links at the bottom to articles, (and one video–don’t like ’em myself), on financial and economic collapse. There are plenty more. The point is to assure you all that our monetary system, the means we’ve “developed” through haphazard mutual throat-slitting for trade and interaction among ourselves, is fucked. We can’t fix it. The “money” we’ve been passing around isn’t reflective of anything real. The “price” we pay for things has utterly nothing to do with their intrinsic worth or their scarcity in the world. This is our collective fault, not simply the fault of a couple Rothschilds and Morgans. We all scrabbled to keep up appearances and grubbed around to buy stupid shit we never needed, or even used. The numbers involved down at the FED are so unrealistic they’re meaningless, and trade imbalances and the like merely amount to spiffy terms for describing exported slavery, a kracken which is quickly coming home to roost for Westerners intent on prolonging the petro-economy for the sake of the god damn Fear. There is no money. Its value has been pilfered away by milquetoast pirates one Stewie Griffin party at a time.

The ends of the Dollar and the Euro represent terrific opportunity. Not for making more money, you dumb-ass! That’s the thinking that’s got us in this state in the first place. Some reasoned arguments exist that attempt to exonerate the financiers held up by many Occupiers as responsible for this mess. It really doesn’t matter. The people playing this game, which are all of us, have all been working at competition together ever since we began to establish societies. We didn’t know any better at the time. Now it’s apparent that the approach we’ve been taking isn’t working. If you are trapped in a mindset that insists on claiming a bigger slice of pie, or plaintively keens of the potential virtue of money if only it flows through the right hands, i’m sorry for you. Because when this all really hits the fan, you will be completely lost. We own nothing, except stuff that’s really not worth much, if you figure it in money. At some future point it may be necessary to argue these points at a higher level, because financiers are fond of obfuscation and bullshit in the literature, and hate to admit to themselves or anyone else how evilly they’ve been behaving, but soon enough the thing will collapse beyond the need to parse words.

So follow. The Earth is in the balance, because of the natural behavior of human beings when set loose to compete. Humans also have an innate drive to form societies and cooperate. The mechanisms of the old competitive game are worn, and the game is pretty much decided. We’ve already abandoned borders within the confines or the Game, only keeping nationalisms and “racial” distinctions in place when convenient to some other aspect of the Game, like the continued propagation of slavery, or the demonization of controllers of certain resources. Pull back and look a little. It’s 100% game players causing all the wars in the world, all the food shortages, all the misery. Do we really give a shit what color or religion a thirsty guy in the desert may be? Am i really worried about Iraqi invaders pouring over the horizon? Please! Even if all the current unrest and destabilization isn’t manipulated by people who thought George Orwell was writing textbooks, none of this is necessary. We don’t need petroleum, (look it up yourself fer cryin’ out loud). We don’t need to hate a bunch of desert nomads just because our shitheads set them up in business as a part of a grand scam. We don’t need to compete.

Cooperative living is so much easier and less troublesome you naysayers will be feeling really silly before this is over. It’s OK, though. It’s not so easy to see, at least for now. If it takes too long to avoid the pain you’ll see soon enough. Come see us then. What we have isn’t worth money but i am rich, rich rich! And this Manse won’t collapse, with or without money. Stay with us….

http://economiccrisis.us/
http://www.naturalnews.com/032999_financial_collapse_Euro.html
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26756
http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=16225
http://129.81.170.14/~dupre/SEEDS.pdf

Legal artistry

Posted on October 26, 2011 by NMT

(In response to questions received on another forum: “I’m curious as to why, exactly, you feel that you are entitled to stay in a public park at all?”, “What makes you feel that you are entitled to enjoy the ‘right’ of pursuing your happiness — that is, living in Acacia park — without having to contribute monetarily to the upkeep of that public facility.. Furthermore, why is it that you believe that, in the interest of effecting a change in a law which you disagree with, the best course of action is to choose to voluntarily break said law, rather than getting involved in the legal process and effecting a change in the typical fashion? After all, all that really accomplishes is an additional waste of taxpayer-funded services, in this case law enforcement.”)

I’ll reiterate again before i take this on that these are profoundly excellent questions that i think every Occupier, observer, and citizen of any country ought to contemplate deeply before entering the fray–maybe even before leaving the house this morning.

First I should clarify what may amount to a few misconceptions wrought largely by the media of late. As has been reported I am living with dear friends who find my comfort to be a valuable thing and have extended their hospitality freely absent any solicitation on my end. J. Adrian Stanley of the CS Independent has referred to me as a “technically homeless…couch[-]surf[er],” which is true, though only by certain technical legal definitions, which are generally designed to either skirt or address issues involving benefits of some sort. I am “technically” employed as the sole proprietor of the Paint Squad, a remodeling company that has been defunct for practical purposes since the media began trumpeting a new Great Depression, and the guy i had been working with abandoned the project. For the record, i collect no unemployment, disability, food stamps, or any other money or benefits of any kind from the government. Plainly stated, i have no monetary income. This is not meant to offer ethical assessment of my situation nor to elicit sympathy or whatever, but is merely offered to add perspective to my positions, and to rectify factual errors that have made it into the mix. Bear in mind i was camping at Acacia Park not out of necessity, but to effect the specific outcome that you may observe to have been effected. Note that although hundreds of campers are now down along Fountain Creek in violation of the same ordinance, they are not at Acacia Park kicking the bee’s nest with me–they have different and rather more imminent needs than i.

I believe i adequately responded to Mark’s first question by directing him to the appropriate pages here at hipgnosis. The second is a continuation of the first, with the addenda about “contributing monetarily.” A response must necessarily involve the natures of money, property and its use, and our interaction amongst ourselves as human beings. The third involves political processes and movements, civil disobedience, and my own spiritual foundation. I hope those statements enlightens the reader on the length of this post, and Mark in particular on the reason for the time taken for its development.

Some questions in answer to a question: Who owns public land? What does it mean to “own” it? Whence the resources to maintain the land, and what does that mean? We Americans have never adequately addressed these matters, and our ethical foundation for holding this conversation will remain forever spongy until we do. All land ownership in the United States harks back to the arbitrary decrees of that series of monarchies our predecessors here acknowledged to be so corrupt that a bloody war was necessary to shed the influence thereof. Land was simply declared by powerful people to be “owned” by favored sycophants, regardless of the opinions of the contemporary inhabitants. The Founders adopted the same attitudes governing property as had been utilized by their enemies. Every piece of property in the country now, public or private, is viewed through the lens of this fact. Its “ownership” is determined by arbitrary acts of murder and fiat. It’s understandable that this is the case–effecting such jarring and massive shifts in foundational thinking is never blithely easy, though it does appear simple once accomplished.

Having had an ear to the ground for some time on matters such as we are discussing , i am alert to numerous suggestion that “we” give land back to the “Indians.” This idea is as flawed as the other, and the thinking of indigenous peoples advocating it has been corrupted by our Western philosophical bias. The only genuine option uncorrupted by avarice and murder is to revert to a state of ignorance of ownership where the land is concerned. The elaboration of this notion constitutes a genuine system of political economy and i will carry it no further here, (but will link below). This is put in the mix to allow the reader to investigate further, and to establish that the following points are argued from an academic point of view rendered at least partially moot by the actual philosophical basis for the actions in question.

Be alert, Mark, that i have not been a societal parasite. I have worked and paid taxes since the age of 12, in spite of strenuous effort to limit the absurd, onerous, and unethical share the Government has taken through any nefarious means available. Maintenance at Acacia Park is paid out of city sales tax, unless i’m mistaken, which i certainly paid when i bought the sleeping bag i slept in there, the bicycle i rode to the park, the tobacco i smoked while there. Additionally, though i have not camped there in a week or so, one might readily visit the Park and ascertain that it is in a far cleaner state than before Occupiers carved out a space there, the rest rooms were locked coincident to their arrival, and the only maintenance in evidence is a guy that comes around in the morning to collect the bags of trash the Occupiers have gathered from around the whole park, and the sprinklers which still douse the tree lawns where people are camping even though watering season is so obviously over that infrastructure damage is imminent. Regardless, and without additional verbosity, the land in question is public, and we Occupiers clean up after ourselves requiring less maintenance, not more, of the City. Opposition to the notion that smaller contributions in tax payments ought to equal diminished rights to enjoy publicly held assets, with which we are endowed at birth is quite close to the heart of the Occupiers’ battles, whether individual Occupiers have become aware of the idea yet or not. We all pay for it, both monetarily and in karmic debt, or by whatever system of spiritual balance you may care to invoke. Any Rockefeller is welcome to pop a tent next to mine.

Your final point, that is, why civil disobedience rather than ordinary action is yet another that might be expanded at length. In the interest of getting this up i’ll restrain myself from that in hopes that you will recognize that i am not attempting to be glib or brusque with you here, Mark, but merely brief. Additional commentary on all these points is both available and forthcoming. Simply enough–civil disobedience, and in fact in my mind and those of many, many others, full-blown political and ideological restructuring is necessary because no approach within the confines of less strenuous discourse has worked thus far, and people all over the planet have had quite enough bullshit. If you imagine to yourself that this business of mine, or the business of Occupy in general is about camping in Acacia Park, or the stupid camping ordinance enacted but not enforced by the City of Colorado Springs then you have badly missed some very important news. I suggest you follow the links below. Visit the Occupiers, both here and in many other cities around the whole wide World right now.

This’ll do. Ask more questions! Read these links:

I’m not angry, but, hmmm… http://www.businessinsider.com/what-wall-street-protesters-are-so-angry-about-2011-10?op=1

Henry George developed a system addressing this stuff. I can’t say his system is complete, and in fact, i am personally convinced our problem as humans must be addressed spiritually. That’s a topic for another moment, and it does not detract from George’s thesis: http://www.henrygeorge.org/

This strikes me as so obvious that it could be seen as a jab, and almost feels that way, but it’s still the place to go for primary discourse on civil disobedience: http://thoreau.eserver.org/civil.html

This is obviously unnecessary, but i’ll point out once more that the reader will find an abundance of words of my own that bounce around all these topics and more. It’s all the same conversation: http://www.hipgnosis21.blogspot.com

PPCC Philo Club page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/168063276537761/

Some other discussion and reporting establishing basis: http://wwwwendolbloggercom.blogspot.com/

There’s no end. Keep looking.

Lemony Snicket on Occupy Wall Street

Posted on October 18, 2011 by NMT

“Someone feeling wronged is like someone feeling thirsty. Don’t tell them they aren’t. Sit with them and have a drink.”
–Lemony Snicket on Occupy Wall Street protests

Reprinted from Occupy Writers:

Thirteen Observations made by Lemony Snicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance

Lemony Snicket is the author of A Series of Unfortunate Events (which are NOT about the economic collapse) which includes The Vile Village (which is neither about Wall Street nor Washington, DC).

1. If you work hard, and become successful, it does not necessarily mean you are successful because you worked hard, just as if you are tall with long hair it doesn’t mean you would be a midget if you were bald.

2. “Fortune” is a word for having a lot of money and for having a lot of luck, but that does not mean the word has two definitions.

3. Money is like a child—rarely unaccompanied. When it disappears, look to those who were supposed to be keeping an eye on it while you were at the grocery store. You might also look for someone who has a lot of extra children sitting around, with long, suspicious explanations for how they got there.

4. People who say money doesn’t matter are like people who say cake doesn’t matter—it’s probably because they’ve already had a few slices.

5. There may not be a reason to share your cake. It is, after all, yours. You probably baked it yourself, in an oven of your own construction with ingredients you harvested yourself. It may be possible to keep your entire cake while explaining to any nearby hungry people just how reasonable you are.

6. Nobody wants to fall into a safety net, because it means the structure in which they’ve been living is in a state of collapse and they have no choice but to tumble downwards. However, it beats the alternative.

7. Someone feeling wronged is like someone feeling thirsty. Don’t tell them they aren’t. Sit with them and have a drink.

8. Don’t ask yourself if something is fair. Ask someone else—a stranger in the street, for example.

9. People gathering in the streets feeling wronged tend to be loud, as it is difficult to make oneself heard on the other side of an impressive edifice.

10. It is not always the job of people shouting outside impressive buildings to solve problems. It is often the job of the people inside, who have paper, pens, desks, and an impressive view.

11. Historically, a story about people inside impressive buildings ignoring or even taunting people standing outside shouting at them turns out to be a story with an unhappy ending.

12. If you have a large crowd shouting outside your building, there might not be room for a safety net if you’re the one tumbling down when it collapses.

13. 99 percent is a very large percentage. For instance, easily 99 percent of people want a roof over their heads, food on their tables, and the occasional slice of cake for dessert. Surely an arrangement can be made with that niggling 1 percent who disagree.

Should homeless camping ban apply to Occupy Colorado Springs protest? Homelessness is often also protest.

Posted on October 18, 2011 by Eric Verlo

COLORADO SPRINGS- Activist Steve Bass was arrested last night for overstaying his welcome in the city’s Acacia Park, violating the ordinance against pitching a tent in a public park. While the city is asserting that the anti-homeless no-camping ordinance ban applies to overnight free speech and assembly, and the OCCUPY COLORADO SPRINGS protesters argue that protest should be differentiated from the homeless issue, Steve reminds us that for many on the street, homelessness is their protest.

Bass has longtime experience administrating the Sunday morning soup kitchen at CC’s Shove Chapel. According to Bass, it’s not a matter of “To be or not to be” but the unalienable right to be or be somewhere else. Here’s an excerpt from his statement:

A point is advanced during the meeting [Occupy Colorado Springs negotiations with City officials] that separates homeless campers from active political occupiers. As a matter of personal opinion, though there are some real differences in context, the camping ordinance is bad law as yet untested in courts. However, having been involved with the free food biz in Colorado Springs for decades I am confident in stating that many homeless campers are in their position by choice, having opted out of a political system found onerous. I see no legitimate difference between this lifestyle of protest and the pointed expressions of protest embraced by Occupy Colorado Springs.

Other homeless campers are thus because of uncontrolled habits, some of which fall under the label of “diseased” behavior by authoritative bodies in the U.S. or because of circumstances external to their control. There are only two varieties of property in the entirety of the U.S.–public or private. If the continuously burgeoning population of homeless campers is barred from sleeping on public property, and have no means by which to acquire access to private property, they have no option at all. Others are then required by default to put them up, thus far manifest here in conditions both unsanitary and unsavory as demonstrable by the bed-bug ridden Express Inn or the Aztec Motel, or else the Salvation Army–court ordered church. Otherwise, our only other option is to incarcerate them. I maintain that an unmentioned and “unalienable” right of all human beings is simply to be, wherever that being may take place.

To be or to be somewhere else

Posted on October 12, 2011 by Steve Bass

An attempt to address a few issues presented here in as brief a fashion possible: Re: “Occupy Colorado Springs hits legal wall.” Regardless of the opinions of any observer or participant in any protests currently under way here or across the country, police are likely to follow the direction of their superiors, apart from unauthorized behavior on the part of mavericks or rogues. Jason points out that the Bill of Rights “trumps” city ordinances and statutes, and if that is not true then I am personally inclined to object strenuously and if necessary physically, in the sense that I will camp “illegally” with the occupiers during the course of the current protestations.

A point is advanced during the meeting that separates homeless campers from active political occupiers. As a matter of personal opinion, though there are some real differences in context, the camping ordinance is bad law as yet untested in courts. However, having been involved with the free food biz in Colorado Springs for decades I am confident in stating that many homeless campers are in their position by choice, having opted out of a political system found onerous. I see no legitimate difference between this lifestyle of protest and the pointed expressions of protest embraced by Occupy Colorado Springs. Other homeless campers are thus because of uncontrolled habits, some of which fall under the label of “diseased” behavior by authoritative bodies in the U.S. or because of circumstances external to their control. There are only two varieties of property in the entirety of the U.S.–public or private. If the continuously burgeoning population of homeless campers is barred from sleeping on public property, and have no means by which to acquire access to private property, they have no option at all. Others are then required by default to put them up, thus far manifest here in conditions both unsanitary and unsavory as demonstrable by the bed-bug ridden Express Inn or the Aztec Motel, or else the Salvation Army–court ordered church. Otherwise, our only other option is to incarcerate them. I maintain that an unmentioned and “unalienable” right of all human beings is simply to be, wherever that being may take place.

Jason points out the tenuous Constitutional position of the camping ordinances in a reasonably clear manner. The position of the police is clear and understandable, though I believe they are mistaken about the issues with city statutes; they will do as directed by others. Some of us affiliated with with the Occupiers, including I, believe arrest followed by courtroom examination of these and other questions may be seen as a good thing, and would result in the elimination of obviously untenable, ill-conceived statutes that are currently being enforced only in the most visible and problematic cases anyway.

This describes some of the entanglement of the only somewhat separate matters of Occupiers in Colorado Springs, and campers in Colorado Springs. Without more than this brief mention, it also demonstrates the erosion of liberty in this country that precipitates the protests in the first place.

Finally, to nip a little at Bryce’s bait, his “dismissive” attitude is unnecessary and dishonorable. I would personally love to see the unconstitutional camping ordinances put to the test in court. The U.S. Constitution is NOT an especially arcane piece of work, in spite of generations of lawyers’ efforts to make it seem so. Here’s a copy for you to examine: http://constitutionus.com/ . Have one of these, too: ushistory.org/declaration/document/

As an individual, merely affiliated with the fine and diverse members of Occupy Colorado Springs, I can speak only for my own motivation and opinion.

(Reprinted from Hipgnosis)

Occupy Denver recognizes Colo. AIM, mixes metaphor to Unoccupy America!

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Eric Verlo

This weekend the General Assembly of Occupy Denver recognized that its intended occupation was actually a re-occupation, of lands to which original inhabitants lay claim. On Sunday the GA consensus voiced its solidarity with the American Indian Movement of Colorado who submitted a statement for ratification. It’s reprinted below via The Sole Reader:

COLORADO AIM’S CHALLENGE TO #OCCUPYDENVER

An Indigenous Platform Proposal for “Occupy Denver”

“Now we put our minds together to see what kind of world we can create for the seventh generation yet to come.”

John Mohawk (1944-2006), Seneca Nation

As indigenous peoples, we welcome the awakening of those who are relatively new to our homeland. We are thankful, and rejoice, for the emergence of a movement that is mindful of its place in the environment, that seeks economic and social justice, that strives for an end to oppression in all its forms, that demands an adequate standard of food, employment, shelter and health care for all, and that calls for envisioning a new, respectful and honorable society. We have been waiting for 519 years for such a movement, ever since that fateful day in October, 1492 when a different worldview arrived – one of greed, hierarchy, destruction and genocide.

In observing the “Occupy Together” expansion, we are reminded that the territories of our indigenous nations have been “under occupation” for decades, if not centuries. We remind the occupants of this encampment in Denver that they are on the territories of the Cheyenne, Arapaho and Ute peoples. In the U.S., indigenous nations were the first targets of corporate/government oppression. The landmark case of Johnson v. McIntosh (1823), which institutionalized the “doctrine of discovery” in U.S. law, and which justified the theft of 2 billion acres of indigenous territory, established a framework of corrupt political/legal/corporate collusion that continues throughout indigenous America, to the present.

If this movement is serious about confronting the foundational assumptions of the current U.S. system, then it must begin by addressing the original crimes of the U.S. colonizing system against indigenous nations. Without addressing justice for indigenous peoples, there can never be a genuine movement for justice and equality in the United States. Toward that end, we challenge Occupy Denver to take the lead, and to be the first “Occupy” city to integrate into its philosophy, a set of values that respects the rights of indigenous peoples, and that recognizes the importance of employing indigenous visions and models in restoring environmental, social, cultural, economic and political health to our homeland.

We call on Occupy Denver to adopt, as a starting point, the following:

1. To repudiate the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, to endorse the repeal of the papal bull Inter Caetera (1493) to work for the reversal of the U.S. Supreme Court case of Johnson v. M’Intosh 1823), and call for a repeal of the Columbus Day holiday as a Colorado and United States holiday.

2. To endorse the right of all indigenous peoples to the international right of self-determination, by virtue of which they freely determine their political status, and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural futures.

3. To demand the recognition, observance and enforcement of all treaties and agreements freely entered into `between indigenous nations and the United States. Treaties should be recognized as binding international instruments. Disputes should be recognized as a proper concern of international law, and should be arbitrated by impartial international bodies.

4. To insist that Indigenous people shall never be forcibly relocated from their lands or territories.

5. To acknowledge that Indigenous peoples have the right to practice and teach their spiritual and religious traditions customs and ceremonies, including in institutions of the State, e.g. prisons, jails and hospitals„ and to have access in privacy their religious and cultural sites, and the right to the repatriation of their human remains and funeral objects.

6. To recognize that Indigenous peoples and nations are entitled to the permanent control and enjoyment of their aboriginal-ancestral territories. This includes surface and subsurface rights, inland and coastal waters, renewable and non-renewable resources, and the economies based on these resources. In advancement of this position, to stand in solidarity with the Cree nations, whose territories are located in occupied northern Alberta, Canada, in their opposition to the Tar Sands development, the largest industrial project on earth. Further, to demand that President Barack Obama deny the permit for the Keystone XL Pipeline, proposed to run from the tar sands in Canada into the United States, and that the United States prohibit the use or transportation of Tar Sands oil in the United States.

7. To assert that Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions. They have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their intellectual property over such cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and traditional cultural expressions. Further, indigenous peoples have the right to the ownership and protection of their human biological and genetic materials, samples, and stewardship of non-human biological and genetic materials found in indigenous territories.

8. To recognize that the settler state boundaries in the Americas are colonial fabrications that should not limit or restrict the ability of indigenous peoples to travel freely, without inhibition or restriction, throughout the Americas. This is especially true for indigenous nations whose people and territories have been separated by the acts of settler states that established international borders without the free, prior and informed consent of the indigenous peoples affected.

9. To demand that the United States shall take no adverse action regarding the territories, lands, resources or people of indigenous nations without the free, prior and informed consent of the indigenous peoples affected.

10. To demand the immediate release of American Indian political prisoner, Leonard Peltier, U.S. Prisoner #89637-132, from U.S. federal custody.

Finally, we also remind Occupy Denver that indigenous histories, political, cultural, environmental, medical, spiritual and economic traditions provide rich examples for frameworks that can offer concrete models of alternatives to the current crises facing the United States. We request that Occupy Denver actively utilize and integrate indigenous perspectives, teachers, and voices in its deliberations and decision-making processes.

Submitted 8 October 2011

American Indian Movement of Colorado

P.O. Box 292, Sedalia, CO 80135

Revolution at 2112 RPM

Posted on October 2, 2011 by Steve Bass

For Tom, the guys at Occupy Colorado Springs, and everyone else:

So, if I sit here and carry on about how we can get out of this grief under which so many of us find ourselves buried by living cooperatively, and no one plays along, it’s like division by zero, an operation that produces no definable solution and the thought of which is so troublesome it caused philosopher George Berkeley to suspect all mathematicians could be devil-worshipers on the side. Seriously. A new friend I met at Acacia Park yesterday asked where the little hullabaloo about banks and bailouts and revolution and such was happening in Colorado Springs was asking the general milieu of rabble rousers where their revolution could be expected to go. (Hi, Tom). Some of the guys there, as one might expect, were so fed up with the obviously unsupportable state of current affairs that they were almost gleefully anticipating violence and war–civil war–right here in the U.S.A.. (Hi, Pat). I certainly can’t blame anyone for thinking that way, given that I hoped fervently for exactly the same outcome from around the 3rd grade til only recently, really.

I’ve already mentioned my opinion of the futility of standard issue revolutions. We’ve tried that. It doesn’t work. We’ve tried Monarchies, ordinary dictatorships, “working-class dictatorships”, Capitalism, Communism, Socialism, Ism after Ism–none of what we’ve tried to do has worked, neither for the oppressed nor the oppressors. We’ve been dividing by zero all the while. You should look that operation in the eye some, so you know what I’m saying. It’s the same as proving a negative, or trying to work out the math of the Singularity, and if you find it difficult, one glance at a graph will turn the lights on a little for you. When I was a schoolboy, I always thought it was supremely bogus to respond to any questions about division by zero, (or other imponderables, for that matter), by asserting the answers to be “undefined” just because a conventional answer might be unsatisfactory. I was a weird kid, OK? Look at the link or find something more techie, (a little help, Kathryn?), and then extrapolate the idea to the business of social revolutions and you’ll find my point, or at least one “quantum” facet of it. You could have a look at a representation of the Ouroborus and get the same notion to materialize in your head, maybe.

The shit we’ve been doing has not worked, is not working, and will not work. The answers we’re after will not derive from the operation we’ve been attempting to apply, no matter what.

We compete. That’s just what we do. We compete against one another, against Nature, and maybe against God, though it’s not by any means compulsory for you to think of it in any sort of Divine sense, or wrestle with religious aversions for the thing to work out the same, here. That’s just me. The competition we’ve been so avid to pursue all these generations hasn’t worked any better for the atheists or the religious. If we pursue yet another bloody revolution, we’ll wind up bathing in another absurdly predictable vat of blood, and maybe you super-rich can stretch your inane Grand Game out for a few more years in your bunkers after some of us useless eaters are dispatched and used as semi-organic fertilizer. The snake will still have a mouthful of tail caught up in its throat, if it lives through this one.

Tom was serious about finding a solution when he came by our little protestation yesterday. Pat was just as serious about the blood, I’m afraid. I’ve had enough of blood, so here’s what I’m doing. See what you think. (Here comes the part that might curdle Mom’s blood a bit, but maybe not…maybe not.) I have completely abandoned ordinary reality. It’s never worked so well for me anyhow, and I was already kinda screwed when I came to this notion, so you are welcome to hold on to your own personal misery and think of me as just another hopeless crackpot, if you want–another useless eater. After all, I’m seriously just an 9th grade dropout and unemployed housepainter with bad joints and a broken back, a tragic character out of a Steinbeck novel if you will. Except I don’t feel tragic at all; I’m the happiest guy I know. No shit.

What does it mean to have abandoned ordinary reality? There are lots of angles to that so I apologize up front for the doglegs I’ll be working as I attempt to answer the question. First, I’ve given up looking for a “job”, or the hope of ownership of anything at all, including money. That doesn’t mean I’ve decided to laze around on someone’s sofa til I die of entropic dissipation; I’ve been incredibly busy since this paradigm shift, with no horizon in sight, really. There are millions of people in the shape I was in over last summer, wells running dry and bankruptcy looming while the whole time work to do abounds. I’ve just given up the game those $game pieces$ track, like a chess player laying down his king. Those guys won. It’s OK–it’s only a game, after all. I was never so good at it–never really gave a damn.

Now I find myself in a brand-new and rather sketchily mapped territory where I’m the president of my own head and nothing else, a monarch of abrogation and apostasy. So when Tom asked about a plan, I had to think about it some before I could even say as much as I am right here, right now. The two biggest differences I can define between this new approach and the other are cooperation and good ol’ hippie-dippie, Jesus freak style love and self-abandonment. And not just on my end, see. I don’t own anything, won’t own anything at least so long as I go down this path, and can’t pay for anything or support myself, or anyone else. Well then. WTF?

I’ve always given. Always. I loved Robin Hood as a kid, and I used to do things like stashing random campfire-scented homeless dudes in the back of my room at night, in hope that Mom wouldn’t discover them and put them out in the snow or, even worse, send them packing to jail. (Neither Mom nor Dad ever discovered any of them. Hi, Mom. Hey, Dad ;)) I give away food for…well that’s a fine question. When asked why I spend so much of my time on things like the Colorado College Community Kitchen, the best I’ve been able to come up with in response is that it’s just in me to do. I think it’s been some sort of psychic trade-off for the ethical compromises and outright violations to which I’ve succumbed in my lackluster prosecution of the game of property collection, which I’ve always vaguely known to be a sort of theft, just like the Marxists say. Follow me, though–the Marxists haven’t show me anything not-dysfunctional, either. (Sorry, Michele, Jon).

This new thing is about giving and receiving, and about a different way of seeing the whole picture, like when one of those optical illusions with the hidden horse and rider amongst the trees suddenly becomes apparent. Nothing changes; it’s just revealed–revelatory. I live at someone else’s house. I bring around food for everyone to eat that I never owned. I smoke tobacco that a gracious host brought to me, and hope my phone and broadband will still be operational next week. You’re welcome to pay it for me while I try to figure out how to do this with no game pieces at all. Message me; I won’t be paying for it. I’m living on a prayer, as the song goes, living on Love. You can too, I swear. Quit your shitty job at Wal-Mart’s haircutting kiosk and cut your neighbor’s hair for free. Don’t worry about game pieces. Come down to CC on Sunday and help us give away someone else’s food. Have some! Bring some pizzas from your shop to the protesters. Retire your jersey if you’re a big winner and forget about the conspicuous displays of wealth. We get it. You won! Yay for you! Now put a few families up in your east wing. Love them. Be tender. Let their hapless lost patriarchs know it’s unnecessary to numb the pain with whiskey, or whatever. It’s OK–we won’t call you a wuss, or anything.

Right now there’s Revolution in the wind. I like to read kind of a lot. It seems the handiest way to find out about shit, and I’ve read about a lot of Revolutions. It can make my head spin. If we pursue Revolution we’ll be running in circles. We’ll be eating our tails. The Earth herself is done with our bullshit, and there’s really not any more tail left to eat. Let’s get off the turntable. We’ll be dizzy for a while, but I think we can walk in a straight line if we get our bearings. Get hold of me. I’ve got these words for you all, for free. This is not a trade. I can paint your house, too, or build you a deck or something. If you want to give me something, or give something to my family, or give something to someone I don’t know and will never meet, then maybe you get it. I won’t take it as payment. I’m not in that game.

I hope this works. I’ve had enough tail. How ’bout you?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_by_zero

(Reprinted from Hipgnosis)

Yer in the Army Now….

Posted on September 29, 2011 by Steve Bass

So much has been happening lately I’m afraid this will be a big confused mess, but what th’ hey, right?

The world is in a Meltdown. Hell that’s the reason I have time for this crap, ya know? This is NOT a surprise. We’ve all known it’s been coming for a looong time now, though it’s hard to nail down that specific moment when we knew. Maybe we always did. I’ll get to how I think we’ve known, and how we didn’t know we’ve know a different time. For now, a somewhat more imminent thought. Here’s one place to find a buncha bone-chilling stats http://www.theglobaleducationproject.org/earth/index.php . The numbers are everywhere. This is only one source, and far more officious, (don’t mess with me, I used that word on purpose), sources are available. YOU look ’em up. Anyone wanting to look fuckin’ stupid can tapdance around them til–well, til the Apocalypse–and they’re not gonna change, cause tapdancin’ won’t change it. If it was gonna, it woulda! I already put it more or less in a nutshell: WE’RE FUCK-ED!!

But we’re not. We’re still breathing, still eating, drinking, fucking, pumping out babies, and so on. I have two accidental children whom I love without bounds. I genuinely thought it would be rude, at best, to sire a new Person and foist all this bullshit upon him16 years ago when the pertinent romantic interlude took place. Maybe it is, in way, but in plenty of other ways life is as always a thing of such great, broad, deep beauty that I think all potential for its fulfillment ought to be pursued. (Don’t imagine I’ve converted to Catholicism or something–that though was rather more metaphysically driven, and you should put on a raincoat if it looks like rain. Or waders if it looks like–you know ;)) Look around, though. We’re ALIVE!! More than we know. And life shows us in every discrete packet of light entering our retinas that it will rise, no matter what. We can’t kill the Earth. I rather think she’d prefer us to work this out, but she’ll be fine. We can certainly destroy our ability to live here as Humans, though.

In Consider the Lilies, I started to explain what I’m up to here. Every time I approach that question, the answers that come to me sound more and more absurdly grandiose. Save the world? I mean, reeealy! when I was a young child, like in the 3rd grade or something, (no shit–ask Mom), I was politicized and set in a frame of mind opposed to fascism, oppression, and unkindness, for lack of a better term. Everyone knows this is the course of idealism, though, right? I got out in the “real” world and it struck me that one must make some pragmatic concessions to get by. Right? We all learn this, don’t we? Usually when it “strikes” us it’s like a brick in the head. It’s usually thrown at us by some cog in the Fascist machine.

If you’ve read the earlier posts, or caught my live rant, you’ve likely been puzzled by my carryings on about money being a bad metaphor. It’s outdated poetry, good for a time, now hopelessly outdated like that ridiculous, overwrought Victorian romance shyte you may have read in college or high school. (Leave them kids alone, teacher!). “All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling, ” wrote Oscar Wilde, and the old thing has gotten us a long way, in fact, it’s gotten us right here. Fucked. Or on the cusp of some spectacular event(s).

We live in a competitive world. Whichever doctrinal approach one embraces, whether scientifically mechanistic or holding out for divine fiat, it’s the scrabbling over game pieces that has us in this sinking boat. Everyone has to have a buncha shit they don’t need, in order to display for all the other poor losers how dominant they or their team has been in the Game. This isn’t a fuckin’ game anymore, though. Look at those numbers again. Do you really think a little half-assed reduction in increase in greenhouse gas emissions over the next 100 years or whatever is going to save the human race? Get real! Do you really think we might someday pay off our $23 trillion debt, or whatever it is? What’s that shit, anyways? To whom do we owe it? When did we sign that contract? Didn’t someone steal that from us last month? Do we really think we can survive a collapse of the oceans, the food chain, the watersheds, etc, etc, and so on?

I may be grandiose and ridiculous, but I can read the writing on the wall, in the sky, on the face of the Moon. We’re gonna need to stop fiddle-fuckin’ around and wrestle this shit to the ground, or we’re all gonna die. Our kids are gonna die. Our grandkids, if we live to see them, will be mutant freaks like Goldbloom’s fly monster, just like the poor fucked up three-eyed fish around Chernobyl and downstream of a BHP Billiton mine , (BHP: Broken Hill Properties. It’s only a secret if you close your eyes, kids). They’ll die miserably, and the Earth will breathe a sigh of relief, having fought off a pestilent Virus. Or we can CHANGE EVERYTHING.

I saw a panel discussion at the community college yesterday, (PPCC). A Bahai, a Buddhist, a Pagan, and a Christian philosopher walked into a bar and the bartender said, “What is this, a fuckin’ joke?” Oh–sorry. They actually sat behind a table and spoke as cogently as they were able, and we all took them fairly seriously, if with the standard portion of salt–you know it’s still all bullshit, right? A thematic keystone was the notion that we’re all One, that it’s all All-One. You’ll notice me playing that riff for all I can wring from it. It’s got a lot of Soul, and it sounds good. When I say we’re all gonna die, I don’t mean all us minor league players. The whole stadium is collapsing. It’s already collapsed in a lot of ways. Check out my friend Skip’s posts about the Federal Reserve. Don’t be tapdancing when you read. The Fascists will die with us. Their secret bunkers won’t do. Competition is over; the game pieces are reduced to Parker Bros. parts. Cooperative living is at hand.

Only LOVE will save us. That’s right, y’all.Think that’s hokey? Sure. It is. But that’s a view from the old game. I put this shit up because I believe it. I’m just as much like water as anyone else. I’d stay comfortably here at the lowest level if it seemed for one second to me like that might be an option. It does not. It is not. Change or die. Right now. Today. Look me up. I have a couple ideas, and I bet you do too, if you were to stop concentrating on that tapdance.

There are many, many more things to say about all this. Come back and see us, eh?

Viva la rivoluzione!
Viva l’Esercito dell’Amore!

(Reprinted from Hipgnosis)

Food Jazz

Posted on September 21, 2011 by Steve Bass

The Colorado College Community Kitchen will be publishing a cookbook! Every Sunday we get a buncha random, mostly organic groceries, Thanks Whole Foods! Thanks Miller Farms!), and magick them together to feed a couple hundred people or so. April will mark the 20th anniversary of the endeavor. We never know what we’ll have to work with til we have it.

This is a bit of throw-together, after the fact like, made from 100% blind-luck stuff, plus a chicken from the freezer:

Steve’s Chicken Improv

Hack the shit out of some chicken so’s it’s in manageable, bone-in chunks.

Pan sear the chunks and throw ’em in an oven at around 375deg.
Bake til it’s not quite cooked through.

Meanwhile cut up an appropriate amount of onion–about 1 per whole chicken, and some onion-like stuff like scallions or leeks, or whatever. Wild onions are cool, and you can brag about using shit you found lying around outside that way. Put the onions separate from the other shit.

You could use some mushrooms, say, or some bell pepper, but I didn’t in this bombulous version.

Also, peel garlic, (1/2 bulb per chicken), cut up a healthy gob of fresh tarragon, (say, 1/2 onea’ those supermarket packages per chk), leaves from a few stalks of fresh oregano, and 1/2 a seeded fresh japa-leno.

Heat some olive oil in a deepish pan of appropriate size and press the garlic into the oil. Saute til golden.

Add onions, leeks, and ‘shrooms if you’re using any, and saute til the onions are caramelized. You’ll have to figure the timing of any unmentioned items on your own.

Add a buncha’ good fatty milk, the chicken, tarragon, oregano, a generous gob of decent chicken stock, (don’t be skimpy with any of this crap), scallions, jalapenos, salt, (watch don’t get carried away if you’re using salty stock), ground pepper, Worsterchestershire, a little squirt of Sriracha, a pinch of rich, dark, ground coffee, and whatever I forgot about, or you figger might make it gooder.

Cook the shit out of it till the milk reduces and put it on some rice or ‘taters, or somethin’.

Yum-diddly-iscious!

Whoa, whoa, whoa! Forgot the can of organic chopped tomatoes in that chicken thing. It goes in with the milk, &c.

(Reprinted from Hipgnosis)

Another Lick

Posted on September 21, 2011 by Steve Bass

Guess I’m on a roll, so–speaking of shit you find lying around outside: The Pikes Peak region is “semi-arid” and pretty sparse, so far as dinner plate items from Nature’s bounty are concerned. “Pioneers”, (which of course is proto-Orwellian for “conquerors”), had rather more game around til they killed it all for the sheer glee of it, so if your caught out now things can be even rougher. To top off the chicken thingy I used strictly ingredients found outside. Lying around.

Take and harvest a bunch of prickly pears–the fruit are nice and ripe at this very moment! Use a razor sharp knife, and don’t take more than half the fruit from a single plant. Thank whomever you like to Thank as you harvest, and be gentle. We caused our Moms enough grief as teens; we don’t need to carry on so with our Mother.

Find some other kind of berries or other fruit for variety, anything that’s not apt to poison you will do just fine, as will skipping it.

Hunt down some kinda wild mint. There are several varieties around. Keep track of your living stash and you can harvest till the Apocalypse. The shit’s like weeds, only tasty.

OK, wild honey. You really can, I promise, find bee trees by following bees. Look for a good field of flowers and be patient with the difficulty of the task. Even if it takes all summer, it’s worth it. WATCH OUT FOR BEARS! I’m not joking at all about that one. It’s even more important to exercise great care when harvesting, given the delicate position of bees, lately, and their crucial function to the current Manifestation. Also, they might sting you, but that’s minor. Use smoke to quiet their anger–if you are serious and find a good tree, it’s worthwhile to get hold of a smoker from an apiary supply^. Agave nectar would probably render a more “authentic” version of this, if such a thing exists, but you’ll have to figure out how to get it yourself, (let me know). This is strictly a thing of mine, but I can’t believe no indigenous gatherer ever worked it out before.

One thing–I used a little lemon juice, both for flavor, and for its marvelous preservative quality. It’s not necessary, by any means, but if you want the effect and if you really want to be a purist and go all native and shit, you’ll need to sort out a local source of citric acid. Or, duh–it dawns on me the pricklies probably suffice for that, too.

I used the other half of the jalapeno from the chicken thing, too, which I found in it’s natural environment at the bottom of a Whole Foods donation box. It’s awful tricky to find a wild pepper around here, but not impossible….

Pluck the fuzzies from the pears and seed them. You can blanche and peel them very much more easily, but the skin has half the flavor and even more of the nutrients. Besides, the plucking offers an excuse for sitting around a table with your family without an idiot box blaring inanities, though I recommend blaring some jammin’ tunes. Look me up on Facebook and I’ll post some for you.

Put all the ingredients except the honey in an appropriately sized saucepan, add a little water so it don’t burn while the juices are coming out, cover, and simmer til you get sick of simmering.

Add honey to taste and use for ice cream, a kind of chutney, or whatever. Mixes well with cream, too, if you’re not too aggressive about the process.

Best when built as a family project from top down, side-to-side, and suffused liberally con molto amore!

(Reprinted from Hipgnosis)

Holmes Sweet Holmes

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Steve Bass

For NMania1: Thanks for the Voice
And for Bob Holmes: I love you Bob, I swear. But you deserve this.
Don’t feel too sad–I deserve much worse.

Way back in May of this year, I promised this to a guy who “sold” me a free newspaper in Denver for a $1 suggested donation. He said he was a writer for the same paper, which addresses issues surrounding homelessness in the same city. He was interested in the state of those affairs in Colorado Springs, where I live, and, given that I’ve been in the free food biz for 26 years, and that I have, in fact been homeless myself, I had to think I was in a unique position to afford some perspective. I also posted an, (untitled ), bit on the same topic clear back on 12 April of 2010, wherein I promised a follow-up. Things have worked around to a moment where changes have taken place in both the homeless community of our town and in my schedule that render ripe the moment. A year and a half ago, I described a little of the circus-like scene in our town surrounding the homeless campers. Here’ a bit more flesh, spiced with perhaps a bit more vinegar. Don’t get all touchy, now.

Colorado Springs has always been pretty friendly to street-runners, at least since 1984 when I got here. I got to know my way around when I hit town as a 20 year old apprentice electician and found work for the–ahem–generous wage of $6.00 an hour. Within a year, I had fallen in with some folks at Calvary Chapel downtown in the same building occupied by our town’s token “liberal” free paper now. We gave away sandwiches and such, among some other, more ideologically driven activities. I’ve been in on this little pastime of mine in one capacity or another ever since, from various angles, and with variable motivation. (Spiritual vagaries aside, nothing is ever about just one thing). What I mean to point out is that I have been around long enough to have a little feel for the pulse of the thing, nothing more.

When I’d written about all this earlier in the orphaned posting noted above I mentioned some stuff I’ll not mention again, since you can go to that one to see, easily enough: http://hipgnosis21.blogspot.com/2010/04/so-colorado-springs-is-unusual-place-it.html . This follow up addresses the biggie. That’s right IT HASN’T WORKED.

I’m no prophet. God has yet to send me any memos. All I did earlier was interpret the writing on the wall that was there for anyone to see, in big scrawling, blocky letters. I think anyone looking could read them clearly enough, including Bob Holmes, if he hadn’t been in his customary, red-faced, squinty-eyed, self-imposed insensate condition. That doesn’t count for an honest mistake, Bob!

Now, here’s a little secret–sshhh! The camps are back. I can’t speak for the general level of brain power amongst drunken, whacked out homeless guys, but even the blankest screen among my favorite crowd has developed an ingrained self-preservatory wiliness. So you won’t see them sprawled along the highway like a middle class Somali neighborhood, like before. And I’m not gonna tell you where they are. The cops simply must know already, and my friends don’t need another three-ring fiasco. But, truckloads of enabling aside–I freakin’ told you, Bob!

I have an absolutely gigantic boatload of my own, patented bool-shyte to sling about all this, (imagine that), but here’s a little teaser before I have to go actually do something this morning. At this moment of extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, (watch Wall street, now, y’all), we really ought to notice the shit we’ve been up to all these, say 10,000 years, isn’t working. Let’s switch to a genuinely loving thing.

Buon compleanno ad una nuova Rivoluzione. Viva l’Esercito dell’Amore!

The Wall Street protest needs PIZZA!

Posted on September 18, 2011 by NMT

The #OCCUPYWALLSTREET protesters are pulling their second overnight, anticipating a showdown when traders and bankster return to the financial district on Monday, and especially as international delegates arrive for the UN General Assembly. So you’re not there, what can you do? Remember in the thick of the Madison confab, when pizzas arrived courtesy of Egyptians in Tahrir Square? Do that! USDOR Tweets are favoring Liberato’s Pizza, who’ve restocked for fresh orders, but the more eateries who receive calls, the broader will be the demonstration’s support. Here’s a list of nearby pizzerias, but chose whatever food YOU would like, and don’t look for solidarity from corporate chains.

Liberato’s Pizza (via Seamless)
17 Cedar Street, New York – 212.344.3464

Adrienne’s Pizzabar
54 Stone Street New York – 212.248.3838

Underground Pizzeria
3 Hanover Square, New York – 212.425.4442

Caruso’s Pizza & Pasta
140 Fulton Street, New York – 212.267.2927

Masterpiece Pizzeria
2 Rector Street, New York – 212.349.4500

Harry’s Italian Pizza Bar
2 Gold Street, New York – 212.747.0797

Cucina Bene Pizza
41 Exchange Place, New York – 212.635.0345

Cordato’s New York
94 1/2 Greenwich St, New York – 212.233.1573

Majestic Pizza
8 Cortlandt Street, New York – 212.349.4046

Rosella Pizzeria
164 William Street, New York – 212.619.826

Zeytuna
59 Maiden Lane, New York – 212.742.2436

Big Al’s Chicago Style Pizza
9 Thames Street, New York – 212.964.3269

Grotto Pizzeria & Restaurant
69 New Street, New York – 212.809.6990

Silly honeybee, High Fructose Corn Syrup is for kids, American humans, fat

Posted on August 27, 2011 by Eric Verlo

If you’d like one reason to despise corporate honey producers, how’s this? Humans come by honey because of the largess of bees. Beekeepers harvest the surplus as honeybees go about –what we’ve learned is their more critical responsibility for human interests– pollinating our crops. Unfortunately it’s become more profitable to milk the hives of more of the honey and leave sugar water or High Fructose Corn Syrup for the hardworking honeybees. Yes it’s killing them.

Never mind it’s suspected as the leading cause of why American honeybees are dying off, it’s crude and parasitic. There might have been a time we’d say it was un-American.

HFCS-induced obesity and diabetes is too gentle a fate for greedy beekeepers. Likewise for cattle farmers who sell the milk, leaving their calves to nurse on a concocted dilution containing cow’s blood and other dairy substitutes — care to wager HFCS is not among them?

You can avoid Big Agra honey, and no doubt any processed foods which market themselves as containing honey. Although, you might check the label, most often the corporate nutritionists have already swapped out your honey for HFCS.

Who has got their boot on Rawesome Foods and the CA organic movement?

Posted on August 15, 2011 by NMT

It’s tempting to urge organic growers to push ahead with sustainable health communities, agents of the corporate food distopia be damned, but here’s what happened to Rawesome Foods: raided by Feds, food stocks destroyed, arrests and prohibitive fines. How do you combat a police state prohibiting all breaches of Big Agra’s strangle-hold on world health? Natural News has an idea, publicize the names of the Federal Agents persecuting the raw dairy evangelists. Friends and loved ones might be able to talk some sense into them. Remember, in principle these health regulators are the good guys. So whose office has got their boot on the California organic food movement? Scarlett Treviso, Terrence Powell, Kelly Sakir, Siobhan Delancey, Michelle LeCavalier, & FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg. Here’s how to contact them, this is your local farmer’s time of need.

Unless they’re an appointee from an industry lobby group, a professional who pursues a career in public health is more than likely interested in the public’s health. It’s up to you to bring them up to nutritional speed.

Scarlett Treviso, Senior Special Investigator, (mastermind of first raid on Rawesome Foods, heavily involved in intimidation tactics against raw dairy farmers across California) California Dept. of Food and Agriculture, Milk and Dairy Food Safety division. Office phone: 949-716-8913, Email: streviso@cdfa.ca.gov

Terrance Powell, Bureau Director, Specialized Surveillance & Enforcement Bureau of Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. 5050 Commerce Drive, Baldwin Park, CA 91706, Phone: (626) 430-5150, Fax: (626) 851-3758. Email: tpowell@ph.lacounty.gov

Kelly Sakir, assistant District Attorney of Los Angeles County. Phone: 213-582-3394. Supervisor: Steve Cooley. Phone: 213-974-3512. Public Information Officer: Sandi Gibbons. Phone: 213-974-3525

Siobhan DeLancey FDA Press Officer, participated in the investigation of Rawesome, covers Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. Phone: 301-796-4668. Email: siobhan.delancey@fda.hhs.gov

Michelle LeCavalier, Environmental Health Specialist III at the Department Of Health Services: 1501 Capitol Avenue, Suite 6001, Sacramento, CA 95814-5005. Supervisor: Jesus Urrutia, Chief EHS, 6851 Lennox Ave. # 310, Van Nuys, CA 91405. Phone: (818) 902-4470

Angelo J. Bellomo, Director of Environmental Health for the County of Los Angeles, 5050 Commerce Drive, Baldwin Park, CA 91706. Phone: (626) 430-5100. Fax: (626) 813-3000. Hotline: (888) 700-9995. Email: abellomo@ph.lacounty.gov

Margaret Hamburg, FDA Commissioner. Phone: 301-796-5000. Main FDA number: 888-463-6332. Email address #1: margaretahamburg@aol.com. Email address #2: Margaret.Hamburg@fda.hhs.gov

Need 15 reasons to eat organic food?

Posted on August 14, 2011 by NMT

Organic foods are higher in nutrients, free of neurotoxins, growth-supportive, not pesticide factories, not water-polluters, ecologically sustainable, economically sustainable, better tasting, not gas-ripened, safer for farm workers, conducive to wildlife, less likely to be cancer-causing, free of antibiotics and hormones, tried & tested, and supportive of biodiversity. Read on, from Care2 make a difference:

15 Reasons to Eat Organic Food

1. In study after study, research from independent organizations consistently shows organic food is higher in nutrients than traditional foods. Research shows that organic produce is higher in vitamin C, antioxidants, and the minerals calcium, iron, chromium, and magnesium.

2. They’re free of neurotoxins–toxins that are damaging to brain and nerve cells. A commonly-used class of pesticides called organophosphates was originally developed as a toxic nerve agent during World War I. When there was no longer a need for them in warfare, industry adapted them to kill pests on foods. Many pesticides are still considered neurotoxins.

3. They’re supportive of growing children’s brains and bodies. Children’s growing brains and bodies are far more susceptible to toxins than adults. Choosing organic helps feed their bodies without the exposure to pesticides and genetically-modified organisms, both of which have a relatively short history of use (and therefore safety).

4. They are real food, not pesticide factories. Eighteen percent of all genetically-modified seeds (and therefore foods that grow from them) are engineered to produce their own pesticides. Research shows that these seeds may continue producing pesticides inside your body once you’ve eaten the food grown from them! Foods that are actually pesticide factories…no thanks.

5. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that pesticides pollute the primary drinking source for half the American population. Organic farming is the best solution to the problem. Buying organic helps reduce pollution in our drinking water.

6. Organic food is earth-supportive (when big business keeps their hands out of it). Organic food production has been around for thousands of years and is the sustainable choice for the future. Compare that to modern agricultural practices that are destructive of the environment through widespread use of herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, and fertilizers and have resulted in drastic environmental damage in many parts of the world.

7. Organic food choices grown on small-scale organic farms help ensure independent family farmers can create a livelihood. Consider it the domestic version of fair trade.

8. Most organic food simply tastes better than the pesticide-grown counterparts.

9. Organic food is not exposed to gas-ripening like some non-organic fruits and vegetables (like bananas).

10. Organic farms are safer for farm workers. Research at the Harvard School of Public Health found a 70 percent increase in Parkinson’s disease among people exposed to pesticides. Choosing organic foods means that more people will be able to work on farms without incurring the higher potential health risk of Parkinson’s or other illnesses.

11. Organic food supports wildlife habitats. Even with commonly used amounts of pesticides, wildlife is being harmed by exposure to pesticides.

12. Eating organic may reduce your cancer risk. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers 60% of herbicides, 90% of fungicides, and 30 percent of insecticides potentially cancer-causing. It is reasonable to think that the rapidly increasing rates of cancer are at least partly linked to the use of these carcinogenic pesticides.

13. Choosing organic meat lessens your exposure to antibiotics, synthetic hormones, and drugs that find their way into the animals and ultimately into you.

14. Organic food is tried and tested. By some estimates genetically-modified food makes up 80% of the average person’s food consumption. Genetic modification of food is still experimental. Avoid being part of this wide scale and uncontrolled experiment.

15. Organic food supports greater biodiversity. Diversity is fundamental to life on this planet. Genetically-modified and non-organic food is focused on high yield monoculture and is destroying biodiversity.

Is there an energy drink that’s safe or nutritious or worth drinking? A look at Lost, Bawls, Bing, Reed’s and Pimpjuice

Posted on August 5, 2011 by Eric Verlo

Lost Energy, not found in Bawls, Petey's Bing, Reed's Elixir, or Pimp Juice
Short answer, not really. But we’re feeling left out of the excitement, even if it’s addled. Reed’s Natural Energy Elixir is probably the most interesting (sparkling filtered water, cane sugar, pineapple juice, honey, fresh ginger root, lemon juice, lime juice, green tea leaf, ginseng, goji, acai, camu camu, jiaogulan & L-theanine) but won’t deliver the jitters to suit energy drink junkies. It’s sort of like Herbal-X was to Ecstasy. Colorado local Petey’s Bing is a “natural” concoction with bing cherries, ginkgo biloba, ginseng, acai & flax seed extract (plus caffeine, taurine & guarana for the obligatory heart palpitations), but cuts its cane sugar with Sucralose to reduce the calories, so until they consider natural stevia, shelve Bing with Tab/Fresca. Pimpjuice has acai juice, grape extract, green tea extract, pomegranate juice, pear juice & yerba mate to supplement the usual suspect stimulants. The legendary Bawls ties with …Lost for best taste in popular polls. But doesn’t “Lost Energy” say it all? Our serotonin-leaking masses are being pitched caffeinated supplements to make up for what’s gone missing from their dead processed food.

Are you there God? it’s me Anders. The impersonal diary of Oslo Bomber and Mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik.

Posted on July 25, 2011 by NMT

So there’s a Mexican vigilante drug ring declared itself a law-keeping fraternity of the Knights Templar, now the Oslo gunman/bomber claims accreditation. The “2083” manifesto which Anders Behring Breivik released through a carefully harvested email list includes a curious diary/progress log, including this passage after a technical setback on day 42:
“I prayed for the first time in a very long time today. I explained to God that unless he wanted the Marxist-Islamic alliance and the certain Islamic takeover of Europe to completely annihilate European Christendom within the next hundred years he must ensure that the warriors fighting for the preservation of European Christendom prevail.”

That’s about as much as God, spirituality, or conscience make an appearance. Breivik’s candid musings share the desensitized voice of his favorite TV show. And he may be the first real serial killer to use emoticons.

I think that Breivik’s affable, sometimes self-deprecating, mostly aggrandizing voice comes straight out of DEXTER, obviously not by chance his favorite show. Though the television character means to depict a loner, there’s a discordant charm which Breivik, probably like a typical Dexter fan, doesn’t have any idea is a horribly ironic incongruity.

Most relevant perhaps is that Breivik is a veteran of the occupation of Iraq. You wonder if Norway will now think hard about its role in the continuing occupation. Maybe sending its mercenary-mentality personalities to sow their oats in a war zone contaminates more than their young men’s consciences.

Breivik’s favorite computer game, a first person shooter, involves racially-variated combatants.

What the media is calling Breivik’s “manifesto” is mostly copy-and-pasted information he gathered from the net: the history of the Knights Templar and lots of how-to for aspiring allies. We’ve bypassed the explosives how-to to present the account of his day to day travails, including this gem, Day 70:

it is hard work for one person and I am really beginning to understand why Mr. McVeigh limited his manufacturing to 600kg. He probably encountered much of the issues I did and he probably had to learn everything the hard way just as I have done.

However psychologists will choose to describe him, Breivik isn’t stupid, or religious. We’ve annotated this excerpt by highlighting some of the cultural supplements with which Breivik was augmenting his diet, with intentional consequences and perhaps not.

April – 2011
On April 6th I leased a car (short term lease), from AVIS; a silver grey Fiat Doblo van with 735kg of carrying capacity. They would charge my credit card with 810 euro per month. I needed this car as I had an introduction meeting with a farm owner the next day. I removed all the AVIS insignias so the car would pass as my own.

I had previously made initial contact with the owner of an appropriate farm through an online real estate forum for farms etc. At this point in time I had regularly searched for farms with 30-100 decare of farmland the past 6 months and had around 10 potential leads, all within 4.5 hours driving from the capitol [Oslo].

I had an introduction meeting with the owner, Petter and his girlfriend Tonje, around April 7th. They were around 37 years old and it turned out Petter was renting out the farm for the next 2.5 years due to the fact that he was going to jail for the specified period. He was reluctant to state exactly what he was being incarcerated for but he mentioned something about renting the place to someone who had used it as a marijuana farm. So I assumed that he was somehow implicated. I presented myself in an optimal way and it paid off; the couple seemed to love me, considering me to be the ideal candidate. It is times like these that your acquired experience/competence in sales will pay off. A good salesperson is also a very talented psycho-analyst. So it’s all about identifying the persons pains/problems/worries and saying what the individual wants to hear.

I wanted to move in as fast as possible, for example from April 1st, but as he was scheduled to leave for prison on April 19th and Tonje wanted to live there until May 1st, this wasn’t a possibility. Petter came to Oslo on April 10th and we signed the contract. I was now significantly closer to initiating the manufacturing phase…!

At this point in time I lived with my mom, in order to conserve as much of my funds as possible.

On April 9th, I was inflicted with a virus by my mother and I came down with something that later appeared to be a very resilient throat infection. FFS, this is what happens when you live with people hanging out with hypochondriacs…! It was the third time she had infected me the last two years and I was very pissed off and frustrated. The manufacturing phase was SO close, in only 20 days and now I’m potentially neutralized for the next three weeks… I decided to ride the illness out as I thought it would pass within the week, but it proved to be very resilient. My energy levels dropped by more than 50% and I eventually ended up with an antibiotics treatment.

It was now April 25th and I was finally back to normal. I had spent the past couple of weeks playing through Dragon Age II and a couple of other newly released games. Awesome! The good news was also that I would be practically immune to any bacterias and viruses for the next 3 months, in the most critical of all phases, as my immunity system had been boosted and rejuvenated significantly by the virus. My training regime had suffered and I had lost a couple of kilograms of muscle mass but most if not all other practical things were now in place for the manufacturing phase.

On April 27th I made the order for the fertilizer which were to be delivered a week later. Prior to making this order I had officially registered my company as an agricultural entity, with emphasis on the growing of specific crops, and I had gotten my official production number (a farming number) allowing me to make orders from the national farming supplier. If they were to screen me they would see that my company was linked to a farm that had 90 decares of fertile land so all was well.

The last week in the capital I spent a lot of time with friends, partying and attending various social events. I knew that it would be the last chance, for a very long time, I would enjoy their presence.

I had somewhat of a liquidity problem though, as I had to transfer a deposit equivalent to three months rent – 3,750 euro in addition to the rent for May; 1,250 euro.

This payment ate up a great deal of my remaining liquidity so I would shortly solely rely on my 10 credit cards with a total of 29,000 credit… As the weekly cap on all credit cards are capped at around 800 euro, I started withdrawal of funds from 3 cards.

Events on the farm from May 2nd 2011 to June 23rd 2011

This log contains a lot of what can appear as “wining” but it serves to reflect my mental state during the stay, a relatively detailed log of events and how I overcame the obstacles that arose. It can also serve as an educational guide or a blueprint for which the goal is to create a more efficient time budget. Learning from other people’s mistakes is always preferable to making them all yourself. It should be possible to drastically reduce the time spent on preparation, assembly and manufacturing based on the experiences shared in this log.

Monday May 2 – Day 1:
I drove up to the farm (2-2.5 hours from the capitol) with my newly leased Fiat Doblo with all the equipment and gear/clothing I needed. I spent most of the day moving and getting my equipment and gear into place.

Tuesday May 3 – Day 2:
I built the fume hood from the PVC plates and screws that was enclosed in the box. It was like an IKEA set and after a few hours I had completed it. Despite of the suppliers assurances they had forgotten to include the 10 cm diameter plastic fume hood tube so I wasn’t able to plug in the dust collector fan. I placed the hood on a regular 50 cm wooden living room table. I placed the 25kg heavy fan on a 1.5 meter high shoe shelf that I just flipped over. I placed it next to one of the living room windows so that I could cut out a plastic sheet using the same measurements as the window. I opened up one of the windows and taped the plastic sheet with duct tape on the window frame and cut a 10cm diameter hole where the tube was supposed to come out. This is the optimal way of doing it as you won’t have to cut in the wall or other surfaces.I would have to pick up a bendable vent tube tomorrow. I also covered the rest of the windows with curtains to block anyone trying to peek through. The fume hood was a very simple construction so if I had more time I would probably just build one myself and save 500 euro in the process.

Wednesday May 4 – Day 3:
Finished creating the metal skeletons for the blast devices and completing other practical issues relating to gear and equipment.

Thursday May 5 – Day 4:
I started to grind the aspirin tablets today, at first using a mortar and pestle. After a few hours my hands hurt and I realized this method wasn’t going to work out for this quantity. I decided I wanted to try an untraditional method by pouring the tabs on a large plastic sheet on the floor, using gravity to crush them with my 20kg dumbbell. This method worked excellently and I was done in about 4 hours. Tonje, the owners girlfriend, called me that evening. Apparently she was taking a 2 week vacation to Gabon and she was leaving this Monday. What a blessing! She said she would come and pick up some equipment from their storage room in the barn once she came back. I reckon I can manage to complete everything within the next two weeks, providing I work hard and efficient!

Friday May 6 – Day 5:
Started to synthesize acetylsalicylic acid from aspirin. Failed badly and ended up with converting the acetylsalicylic acid to worthless salicylic acid goo (at this point in time I didn’t know it was salicylic acid but It seemed very difficult to dry the substance). The guide I was using was significantly lacking. I realized I didn’t have any other contingency plan and I began to somewhat panic. As I was unable to find any solution online the next two hours I began to lose heart. As I had discarded my digital library of explosives guides I tried to locate guides, searching online with anonymizer software, for a completely different booster compound. As I realized that this task could take a week or maybe two my motivation and morale at plummeted. If I couldn’t even synthesize the first phase of the easiest booster how on earth would I manage to synthesize DDNP?! My world crashed that day and I tried to develop an alternative plan. I went to a restaurant in the northern town that evening and enjoyed a three course meal. I later watched a few episodes of “the Shield”.

Saturday May 7 – Day 6:
The only rational approach to this problem is to search online until I find a proper guide to synthesize aspirin powder into pure acetylsalicylic acid. After several hours of research my findings were extremely discouraging. All the guides I had found; mainly university level chemistry projects, required a suction filter pump and a chemistry air dryer. The even more discouraging news was that even with this equipment none of the university students managed to get a better yield than 30%! Omfg, this would mean that even with the equipment I would never acquire, my total yield would not surpass 30% which would severely cripple the overall plan… I went to another restaurant that evening (I find it an effective method for getting my morale up) to create a new plan. In any case; I appear to be fundamentally fucked If I cannot manage to find a solution soon.

Sunday May 8 – Day 7:
Failure is not an option for me. I continued my search on methods for the purification of salicylic acid online. After many hours of searching the net, using various search phrases, I managed to locate a single YouTube clip, with very few hits, which explained in detail an unconventional method for synthesizing acetylsalicylic acid from aspirin. However, the guy was using a suction filter pump and a laboratory air dryer but I figured I could bypass this requirement by using more funnel filters and by using an air drying method. According to the guy on the movie, he managed to achieve a 70-80% yield! This method seemed to be viable and I would try to create a batch the next day.

Monday May 9 – Day 8:
I tried the unconventional method for synthesizing acetylsalicylic acid with a promising result. I couldn’t actually confirm that the product I had was in fact purified acetylsalicylic acid so should I take a chance and manufacture it all using this method? Considering the fact that I had wasted so much time, I decided that I had no other choice than to initiate mass production even though I risked ruining all my aspirin. Because if I were to wait for a small batch, It would simply take too long, so I had no other choice than to take this calculated risk.

Tuesday May 10 – Day 9:
Considering the fact that I had wasted so many days and literally been at a standstill I felt a sudden need to create an evacuation plan as I didn’t have any. What would I do if the owner’s wife caught me, or the neighbor or anyone else? I needed to work out a plan for this potential scenario. The evacuation plan involved a 10 minute evacuation. I would have to pack my largest backpack with survival gear and related equipment, including survival rations, 10L of water, weapons, ammo and suitable clothing. I started to prepare the above.

Wednesday May 11 – Day 10:
I completed packing an evacuation kit. I felt a lot more safe and prepared for any emergency once I was done. When I returned from the southern town later that day, I saw two military 12 man teams, armed to the teeth, just 2,000m south of my farm. The largest military base in the country is located just a few kilometers north-east of my farm and their territory extends almost all the way down to my property. They have notified all their neighbors, me included, that they are conducting a large military training session as to prepare a new division of soldiers for the war against the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan. It’s quite ironic being situated practically on top of the largest military base in the country. It would have saved me a lot of hassle if I could just “borrow” a cup of sugar and 3kg of C4 from my dear neighbor 🙂

Thursday May 12 – Day 11:
As the acetylsalicylic acid purification and the rest of the picric acid production required a substantial amount of mineral and distilled ice cubes I spent the whole day converting water to ice cubes; a total of 50L converted whereas 20% of it was from mineral water. I ended up completely filling up a very large freezer with ice-cube-plastic-pocket-sheets.

Friday May 13 – Day 12:
As the acid manufacturing went too slow I bought more funnels at the local store, to up the production rate. I continued to synthesize acetylsalicylic acid from aspirin that day.

Saturday May 14 – Day 13:
I continued to synthesize acetylsalicylic acid from aspirin.

It’s the Eurovision finale today. I just love Eurovision…! 🙂 It’s a lot of crap music but I think it’s a great show all in all. I’ve seen all the semi finals and will take the time of to watch it later today, online. My country has a crap, politically correct contribution as always. An asylum seeker from Kenya, performing a bongo song, very representative of Europe and my country… In any case; I hope Germany wins!

Sunday May 15 – Day 14:
At the last batch of preparing pure acetylsalicylic acid my hot plate stirrer broke down. The magnetic mechanism stopped working. Fuck, Chinese piece of shit equipment, I should have rather paid more to get good European quality machinery…! What should I do now? Creating picric acid and DDNP without a magnetic hotplate stirrer would be very labor intensive and difficult and ordering a new product from a national supplier would take at least two weeks… I really don’t have much choice in the matter. I’m ordering a new plate today and I can focus on the non-chemistry tasks until I receive it.

I managed to completed to synthesize the last batch of acetylsalicylic acid from aspirin without my hot plate stirrer. I now had to dry it. After scraping out all the content from the filter papers I spread the content evenly on several plastic boards. At first I put the boards in normal room temperature, but as this proved to be a very slow method I ended up placing the boards in a small room with a oven at maximum temperature (around 30ªC). In retrospect I realize I would have saved several days by just drying the purified acetylsalicylic acid in a Pyrex dish in the oven at 50-70ªC, but even now I am not sure what effect heat above 30ªC would have on the acid. I am 70% certain it would be the optimal method though as this oven method works (confirmed) on drying both PA and DDNP.

Monday May 16 – Day 15:
Mixing up and further drying all the acetylsalicylic acid on the plastic boards.

Tuesday May 17 – Day 16:
Since I cannot continue on the chemistry phase, due to the lack of a hot plate stirrer, I started boiling my sulfuric acid outside. I initially bought 3 specialty induction plates (flat porcelain) but they didn’t function as my 2L beakers didn’t cover the minimum diameter required for the induction plates to function. I began with one hot plate and created boiling stones by crushing a few small lab beakers. The boiling stones only made the boiling more difficult and complicated so ended up without the use of boiling stones.

Wednesday May 18 – Day 17:
Continued boiling, now with three regular plates for maximum efficiency. Boiled after dark as the smoke generated as the acid surpassed 70% was so thick and compact that it would surely alert neighbors even several miles away.

Thursday May 19 – Day 18:
Wanted to set on a plate, boiling sulfuric acid, while I did some shopping in the northern town. I noticed someone lurking outside the door and saw the neighbor. There was a BMW in the upper barn area he was going to fix up for the owner. As I was about to go outside in full protective suit, he almost saw me before I saw him. I helped him push out the car and gave him the gasoline required to drive it to his place. I’m going to stick to nighttime boiling from now on to reduce my exposure to any unwanted surprises. I was very lucky today, something I cannot take for granted in the future.

It’s essential to create as much goodwill you can from the neighbors. Use any opportunity to generate goodwill from them. This goodwill will be returned indirectly by them not probing and investigating. If you get a visit from neighbors, be polite and friendly, offer them sandwiches and coffee, unless it will jeopardize the operation. The goodwill generated is likely to be to your benefit later on.

Friday May 20 – Day 19:
Finished boiling sulfuric acid

Saturday May 21 – Day 20:
Went to the capital to pick up a few parcels; 5 large packages of micro balloons and 50 more liters of distilled water. I also purchased a 50kg weight dumbbell set for fertilizer grinding, costing 700 euro, as it would most likely be the best way to crush the fertilizer prills using this method.

On my way home to the farm I noticed what I believed to be a civilian police vehicle south of the southern town (30km from the farm). At this point in time I remembered I had forgotten to turn on the lights on the car since I tested out my blue LED lights the day before. Hmm, they should have stopped me for this violation. Very weird. As I came closer to the farm I noticed what I believed to be another civilian police car. Damn, I got a really bad feeling about this and my instincts told me I was about to be apprehended. Too many red flags were lit. I stopped 500 meters before the farm entrance and had a smoke, preparing mentally for a potential welcoming party at the farm. What should I do if I was about to be SWAT raped by a 6 or 12 man team? I didn’t have any weapons available as they were all inside the main house. Should I make a run for it, if so, where would I go? Would I have time to fetch my evacuation kit, and should I try to get it and shoot my way out?

After the break I approached the farm, and turned on the fog lights on the car so that I could have an advantage should they approach me from the front. I stopped 50 meters north of the main house and I was shocked at the sight that awaited me…! The barn door was wide open!!! Someone was here! They were probably circling me right now or waiting for me inside the main house! I waited 20 minutes with the fog light aimed straight at the direction I expected them to come from. Perhaps they are not here, maybe they just installed monitoring equipment like they often do? I entered the house, picked up the glock and searched the house and the barn. Nothing. I began searching for monitoring equipment, nothing…

Paranoia can be a good thing, or it can be a curse. The barn door had probably been opened by the wind. I decided then and there that I would not allow paranoia to get the best of me again. If they were to come for me one day, there was really nothing I could do about it, so it would not be constructive to worry about it.

Sunday May 22 – Day 21:
Started relocation of fertilizer. Broke down a 600kg bag into 13-14 x 50kg bags, loaded in the truck, drove 100 meters and carried them with a “carry trolley” into the barn. Did a full 600kg bag. Was exhausted.

Monday May 23 – Day 22:
Initiated the fertilizer grinding phase. I was unsure whether I had to pulverize the fertilizer or not. Most guides said it was a positive thing as some fertilizer prills are coated with an anti-absorbing layer. I crushing a small batch, placed it in a plastic bag and soaking it in diesel, I also prepared another small bag of prills and soaked that in fuel to see whether it would absorb any liquid. Updated log

Tuesday May 24 – Day 23:
The prills had not absorbed any diesel at all, during the last 24 hours, so I concluded that the only approach is to pulverize the 5 x 600 bags of 27-0-0 AN fertilizer. I cleaned the concrete floor in the barn thoroughly and poured 50kg of fertilizer prills on it, spreading it evenly so that I could roll the 50kg dumbbell back and forth to crush it, and then use a broom and spade to gather up the pulverized AN before it had absorbed a lot of moisture from the air. I was sure that this method would work as I managed to semi-crush the prills with my 20kg dumbbell. If a 20kg dumbbell almost could do it, then surely, a 50kg dumbbell would ensure excellent grinding. I estimated that I could grind 50kg within 20 minutes, 3 times faster than any other method I had heard of.

To my great disappointment, crushing the prills with the dumbbell failed miserably. The prills were only partially crushed and rolling the dumbbell proved to be an especially labor intensive experience. Also, the crushed prills absorbed moisture much faster than anticipated so the time required for me to crush 50kg (2 hours) would result in more or less AN powder fully saturated with water moisture… Fuck, why can’t anything go as planned???? And the dumbbell set cost me a total of 750 euro and now it has proven to be worthless… What do I do now?

Wednesday May 25 – Day 24:
As this was a big setback, I decided to seek comfort and attempting to erect my morale, which was currently in the toilet, at the restaurant in the northern town, ordering a three course meal while readjusting the plan. I had previously heard of a Marxist terrorist traitor in the early 70s. I believe he was called Baader or could it have been Meinhof, terror prostitutes for the Soviets and loyal dhimmi whores of the Islamic Ummah. Anyway; I remember reading about him using electrical mixers to crush AN prills in his apartment. Apparently, he had purchases several crates of these mixers and used several simultaneously for efficiency. I’m going to test this out shortly. If electrical mixers/blenders from the 70s could do it then surely; new modern blenders can!

Thursday May 26 – Day 25:
Shopping for blenders. Bought around 12 – stationary and handheld, different brands for testing.

Friday May 27 – Day 26:
Started crushing fert prills, testing out the various blenders. More than half of them where completely useless as the shape of the container prevented proper circulation of the prills after crushing them. A suitable blender will ensure flawless circulation and result in a fully crushed batch within a reasonable time frame. Found a perfect blender; Electrolux. which was able to fully crush 95% of the prills, in portions of 0.5-0.7kg within 20-35 seconds.

Saturday May 28 – Day 27:
They had the Electrolux stationary blender in limited supply so I had to drive all day to purchase 6 from three different cities.

Sunday May 29 – Day 28:
Continued relocation of the fertilizer. Did another 600kg bag.

Monday May 30 – Day 29:
Completed the third 600kg bag. I could hardly move my fingers and I was certain that I had damaged them permanently. I decided to limit the process to three bags as the work required to process 5 bags (3000kg) would simply be too exhausting for one person…

Tuesday May 31 – Day 30:
I had to rest the whole day as I was completely exhausted…

Wednesday June 1 – Day 31:
Updating log

Thursday June 2 – Day 32:
I saw a car driving through the property while I was surfing the net. As I went to greet him I noticed he was taking pictures of the farm. He, around 50-60, said he was a tourist wanting to take landscape pictures. His actions and body language indicated however that he was lying. My instinct told me that he was a police officer. I offered him coffee and suggested he should go down to the river bank as it was the optimal place for taking photos. I noticed that he continued to take pictures of the farm. When he approached the house I chatted with him again. From what I understood, reading his body language and between the lines, he worked for the police and he was following up on the “marijuana farm” case. He disclosed that his daughter was a drug-sniffer-dog trainer. He was probably taking pictures in relation to this case. I told him that some people had set up a marijuana farm here a few years back. He seemed surprise, although he probably knew that already. This encounter was a concern for me for a few days, but I decided to just forget it as it wasn’t anything to do about it if he was to return. I’m just glad I gave him a good impression.

I decided to begin crushing the fertilizer using four Electrolux blenders simultaneously. However, it made a lot of noise so I decided to do this work from 23:00 to 07:00. I managed to complete 5 x 50kg bags, mixing in diesel 4 times per bag to distribute it evenly, then closing both the inner and outer bags properly using 5 individual pieces of duct tape. It is essential to hurry to place the crushed AN into the bag as it will begin to draw moisture from the air immediately after it is crushed, even while being inside the blender container.

Friday June 3 – Day 33:
Continued crushing prills and mixing with diesel. I got into a good routine and managed to complete 10 bags. Very exhausting. I spent around 1 hour for each of the first few bags the day before, but managed to increase efficiency so that I completed 1 bag every 40 minutes (optimal achievement was 1 bag per 32 minutes). 20 bags to go… 2 of the blenders broke after processing 12 bags, even though I used it on the lowest power alternative. Replaced them with new ones.

Saturday June 4 – Day 34:
Completed 6 bags.

Sunday June 5 – Day 35:
Completed 4 bags. 2 more blenders broke down. I have to buy a couple of new ones tomorrow.

Monday June 6 – Day 36:
Bought two more blenders. Completed crushing 1,600kg of fertilizer prills and mixing with diesel. I’m going to save the last 200kg and possibly use it as an “inner charge” mixed with purified RC fuel (nitro methane). I will most likely only have enough nitro for 1 x inner charge though. After completion of the grinding, it was prills and AN dust all over the place :)) My green AN-crushing clothing were now grey… Surely, I’m going to die from cancer within 12 months as I must have gotten a lot of this crap into my lungs even though I used a 3M mask… It took a while to clean it all up to prepare for the next phase.

Watching “The Shield”, a couple of episodes each day on average. I downloaded all 7 seasons in the start of May.

Tuesday June 7 – Day 37:
Went to the capitol and picked up the new hot plate stirrer that had arrived.

Wednesday June 8 – Day 38:
Started synthesizing picric acid, completed 1 out of 10 batches.

Thursday June 9 – Day 39:
I heard someone parking their car outside the house today. It was one of the neighbors wanting to buy the current crop as animal food. As I hadn’t had the time to plant a crop of my own, the current one was primarily timotei [Timothy Grass] and clover – used for food to cows and sheep. We discussed the issue for a while and I explained my situation to him. We agreed that he could harvest the current crop. He would return within 14 days to initiate the harvesting. I offered him a good price. As we strolled down to the field I was somewhat concerned that he would notice the fume hood fan pipe sticking out of the living room window…

Continued synthesizing 2 and 3 of 10 batches of picric acid and placing the finished compound to dry. It took a long time to complete the nitration of the acid due to the fact that I only had 1 hot plate stirrer. If I had 3 I would be able to complete all the PA within 2-3 days. Damn, something went wrong with these two batches. The solution was red and it failed to nitrate properly. I concluded that I must have used a bottle containing 37% sulfuric acid, instead of the required 90% +…

Friday June 10 – Day 40:
Continued synthesizing 4 and 5 of 10 batches picric acid and placing the finished compound to dry. I placed 50g of my best batch in the oven to prepare for testing and to use it for DDNP manufacturing. Potent PA should burn when lit with flame.

To my great disappointment, nothing happened when I did the fire test…! What the hell, how is that possible, it was completely dry and that particular batch was manufactured perfectly according to specifications!? I did everything according to specifications… Could the compound I have manufactured be inert???? Unfortunate circumstances rams cock in arse once again…! I started to have serious doubts and my morale and motivation started to shatter…

I concluded that given the recent events, I would now have to move forward with operation B, at least continue to complete all preparations for this as the primary operation seemed to wither away.

Saturday June 11 – Day 41:
As I was doing research on the net, a thunder storm approached, but it was still very far away. I have never had any problems with electrical overcharges the last 15 years because I always use specialty electrical outputs with gas cylinder electrical overcharge protection. Suddenly my PC made a relatively large bang, and the electricity went out. Once electricity was back on I noticed that my PC was dead. FFS, not again… As it was in the evening, I couldn’t fix it until Monday…

I prayed for the first time in a very long time today. I explained to God that unless he wanted the Marxist-Islamic alliance and the certain Islamic takeover of Europe to completely annihilate European Christendom within the next hundred years he must ensure that the warriors fighting for the preservation of European Christendom prevail. He must ensure that I succeed with my mission and as such; contribute to inspire thousands of other revolutionary conservatives/nationalists; anti- Communists and anti-Islamists throughout the European world.

Sunday June 12 – Day 42:
Although highly demoralized, I decided to do one last test of the PA compound. I decided to create a batch of DDNP using my best batch of picric acid. This was to be my last attempt to move ahead with operation A. I didn’t have much faith in creating such a difficult compound as DDNP when I couldn’t even manage to create a decent batch of PA… I spent most of the day preparing that batch of DDNP, then drying it in the oven for 4 hours.

Monday June 13 – Day 43:
I prepared a test device today and drove off to a very isolated site. The test bomb was composed of a 3g DDNP primary and a 30g PA secondary. If this test would fail, I would abandon operation A and move forward with the non-spectacular operation B.

I lit the fuse, went out of range and waited. It was probably the longest 10 seconds I have ever endured…

BOOM! The detonation was successful!!! 🙂 I quickly drove away to avoid any potential unwanted attention, from people in the vicinity. I would have to come back a few hours later to investigate the blast hole, to see if both compounds had detonated.

A few hours later, after returning from a restaurant in the southern town to celebrate this success, I went back to the blast site to evaluate the detonation. The DDNP primary detonated successfully but the dry picric acid booster did not detonate at all. So I confirmed that the PA was not inert, just of a very low purity grade. This could be sorted as I would now move forward with purification after completion of the last PA batches. Today was a very good day as I really needed this success.

Tuesday June 14 – Day 44:
Continued synthesizing picric acid and placing the finished compound to dry.

Wednesday June 15 – Day 45:
Continued synthesizing picric acid and placing the finished compound to dry.

Thursday June 16 – Day 46:
Began purification of the PA compound.

Friday June 17 – Day 47:
At this point in time, considering that this project has taken much longer than anticipated, I was in a serious liquidity squeeze. The fertilizer invoice on 4,500 euro should have been paid on May 19th. I had called to the company and asked for an increase grace period and they said it was ok as long as I paid before June 8th. This was almost 10 days ago and I received a follow up notice today stating that they would forward the invoice to the credit collection company on June 22nd. In addition to this; the farm rent for July, 1,250 euro, was due on June 25th and the invoice for the fume hood, the hot plate stirrer and my secondary fan, which I wasn’t even going to use, 2,800 euro, was due on June 26th. This would mean that I would officially default on the payment and receive a credit warning, which would basically blacklist me and thus preventing me from renting a car, as the car rental companies always perform a credit check. Needless to say; this problem could sabotage the whole operation and I needed to sort this out asap or the operation would be over before it had even started… I needed to acquire 8,550 euro within a week! As I had 1,500 in cash and in my primary account, I decided my only choice was to aggressively withdraw funds from all my 10 credit cards but even that wouldn’t be enough because of the weekly capacity limit. I called the farming supplier and made an agreement where I would pay half the amount now and the rest in July. They agreed. After aggressive cash withdrawal I managed to acquire the necessary funds, which allowed me to keep my head above the water until mid July.

At first, I thought I would manage to create enough picric acid booster material (1.5kg in total) to disregard the addition of AL powder. But considering the fact that I would only manage to produce aprox 200-300g of booster I had no choice than to continue to prepare my 150kg of aluminium powder for addition in the ANFO.

The 150kg of AL came in 4 hermetically sealed drums each containing around 37kg of AL. After reading the “security precautions”, however, I was completely freaked out. The drum openings where wielded with a soft metallic substance so it would be difficult to open them without taking extreme risk. The warnings stated; contact with oxygen will risk detonation of the AL powder, contact with metal, concrete and even plastic will significantly increase the chance of static electricity which can cause a detonation. Friction and shock can also cause detonation. Close proximity of oxidizers (gas, diesel) or close proximity to electrical outputs etc. can cause detonation.

I first planned on creating an outdoor mechanism that allowed me to thrust a steel spear like object, by using gravity, creating a 3 cm hole in the top of the drum. However, I ended up taking a regular knife and starting to file down the wielded enclosement, even if it involved high risk. At this point in time I was very concerned for a potential detonation. If the barrel of AL powder was to detonate and I somehow survived, I would probably lose both arms instantly severely. The blast wave/flame would probably cauterize my wounds resulting in an extended and extremely painful death. The most pragmatical approach to solving this potential problem was to place my loaded glock 34 close to the work area. And if I survived a detonation, losing both my arms, I could still fire a round to my head, in order to prevent un-necessary suffering using my toe to trigger.

Eventually, I manage to file open the enclosement. I then considered putting the drum upside down in one of my empty fertilizer bags to prevent the presence of high levels of oxygen.

This method proved to be too exhausting since I had to hold up the 37kg drum with my hands. I ended up with putting a large 3 x 4m plastic sheet on the concrete floor and carefully pouring the AL powder out of the opening. Small clouds of dust began to generate but nothing happened. I carefully continued until the drum was empty rolling the side of the drum in a circular pattern from the center of the AL powder already poured out, until the drum was empty. There were small clouds of AL powder generated but the biggest one was aprox 20 cm in diameter, which settled down after a while. I continued after the small clouds had settled. It’s also worth noting that I had closed all the windows of the cellar basement so the humidity was relatively high, while oxygen level was below average.

In any case, this method worked well and I had gathered all the AL powder on the sheet, and thus preparing it for the addition to the ANFO.

Since I had solved the AL problem, I continued the purification of the PA.

Saturday June 18 – Day 48:
I woke up at 11:00 and checked my phone. There was an SMS sent 09:30 from Tonje, the owners girlfriend. She said she was ON HER WAY UP to pick up some equipment from the barn!!! Omfg; considering the fact that it’s a 2-2.5 hour’s drive from the capitol she would be here in about half an hour!!! I’m so fucked! She has a large storage room in the back of the barn and she would need to pass all my ANFO bags to get there. I would need 12 hours minimum to relocate the 1.2 tons of ANFO, not to mention de-construct my chemistry rig, fume hood, fan and clean up all the beakers etc spread all around. And the living room is full of yellow stains. It seems I will be left no choice than to use my glock and initiate the evacuation plan!

I called her up. Luckily she hadn’t left yet. Thank God! I fed her a story which resulted in us agreeing that she would come on Monday around 20:00. That was a real close one… I spent the rest of the day on purifying another batch of picric acid and relocating 1.2 tons of ANFO bags, storing them in the storage area between the corn silo and another room. I refer to this area as the spider cave or the spider room as there is no lighting there and it is spider webs all over the place. It is a lot of old junk in this room covered with spider webs.

Sunday June 19 – Day 49:
I spent much of the day relocating equipment and storing them in the second floor of the house. I covered all the stains on the floor with a rug and covered the living room table with a blanket.

Monday June 20 – Day 50:
I spent the day purifying a batch of PA and cleaning all the beakers for storage. I went all over the property to ensure that it would be presentable for today’s visit. There was a 37kg pile of aluminium powder on plastic sheet I was unable to move so I covered it up as best as I could. There was also a lot of stains on the work bench in the barn I was unable to do anything about. Then there was the 1.8 tons of ANFO bags and equipment stashed in the spider cave. I covered it up properly but she would easily notice the diesel smell from the bags and uncover it if she went in there… The fate of the whole operation relies on her not noticing. She came to the farm around 20:30. We talked for a while and she said she wanted to stay the night, sleeping in one of the outhouses. It was late in the evening so she wanted to spend the next day getting things from her storage room. I said it was fine and I fed her a story about me having to salvage much of the fertilizer for long term storage, seeing that I would not be able to sow the planned crop (sugar beets) due to too much rocks in the soil. I needed her to be prepared in case she went into the spider room. I just hope she would let me know if she got suspicious the next day so I could take necessary action…

Tuesday June 21 – Day 51:
I woke up earlier that day to ensure that she didn’t start sniffing around in the house without me being there. At this point in time I figured it was a 50% chance she would get suspicious enough to contact the authorities. I made her some sandwiches and coffee later that day and we chatted for a couple of hours in the living room of the main house. It would seem as she hadn’t noticed anything, at least this is how I interpreted her tone, body language and judging from the topics we discussed. She went off later that day, and I figured that I would very shortly get a visit from the authorities if she forwarded her potential suspicions. In any case; there was nothing I could do if it came down to that…

Wednesday June 22 – Day 52:
I reinstalled Windows 7 on my PC hoping that it would solve my network problems. It didn’t work and I figured it had to be the network card or the phone line itself. I drove to the PC-repair guy in the local town and delivered it. It should be ready by tomorrow. I continued to prepare the chemistry equipment for getting ready to manufacture all DDNP batches. When I was done I completed the last purification batch of the unpurified picric acid and ended up with several liters of PA liquid that had to be chilled. I then drove to the local town and bought three portions of Chinese takeaway. Beef with noodles and fried rice, yummy!. I took an early night as I didn’t have any PC.

Thursday June 23 – Day 53:
I went to the PC-repair guy in the local town today and he brought very good news. Apparently, it was only the network card that had short circuited so he had replaced it with a new one and I should now finally be able to get online. Once back at the farm I got online and paid the outstanding on the remaining of my 9 credit cards so I wouldn’t default on any of the outstanding amounts. When I was about to log into the site of the 10th and last credit card provider my PC went poof and the power went down in the house! Seconds later I heard a large thunder. What the hell, not again!!! And it isn’t even raining ffs. I was able to get the PC running again without problems but my DSL-modem short circuited from the lightning strike as an electrical surge went through the phone line again. How is it possible to be this unlucky?! Only two hours after I’ve had my PC fixed nature comes and rapes me again… Thank god it was only my DSL-modem was destroyed as I have two extra DSL-modems left… ;P Nevertheless, my morale took a small dent and I decided to get it back up by watching two episodes of Rome and enjoying nice Chinese takeaway. Later that day set up the fume hood and fan, carrying it down from the second floor, carried down the PA liquid in all the beakers down to the cold cellar, awaiting further chilling in the refrigerator. I then prepared for the first large batch of DDNP, halfway completing it before putting the semi finished product in the fridge.

Friday June 24 – Day 54:
I continued on the second stage of the first large DDNP batch today, relocated some of the containers with PA liquid from the cellar to the fridge and updated the log. I couldn’t start another badge due to the fact that I only have two 2 liter beakers, very annoying. The worst part about synthesizing formulas with a lacking amount of equipment is the downtime due to waiting for natural heating or chilling of compounds. The whole house is stinking of chems now. DDNP liquid smells like fresh egg fart… <3 And I had to close all the windows to contribute for the liquid to reach room temp faster. All these chemical fumes can't possible be very healthy... I would have probably died from cancer within the next 12 months ;P Saturday June 25 – Day 55:
Finished first large batch of the DDNP today. The result, after drying should be approximately 5-12g after purification. As the first half of the PA liquid had been chilled in the fridge for 18 hours I went ahead and funnel filtered out the crystals. As this was supposed to be the best batch of PA I was extremely disappointed to see that there had been minimal precipitation of crystals in the liquid. It should have been 15g of crystals for each liter but it turned out to be 2g per liter. The only rational explanation is that the purification method I am using is significantly flawed. However, considering the fact that I tried putting ice in the beakers and even putting them in the freezer with poor results, I really do not know what has gone wrong. The only alternative reason would be that I used a flawed manufacturing method of PA or that I should have purified the acetylsalicylic acid prior to initiating the PA manufacturing. As I can’t really do anything at this point regardless, I would like to think it’s the purification method and not the manufacturing method.

After I had scraped out the yellow PA crystals and the brown DDNP crystals putting them in plastic boxes and placing them in the cold cellar I went to do some shopping in the northern town. There is a festival and there was a lot of things happening, a fair, various food stands, concerts etc. Since this town has a limited variety of fast food I decided to drive down to the southern town, eat and pick up some Chinese takeaway. There was a relatively hot girl on the restaurant today checking me out. Refined individuals like myself is a rare commodity here so I notice I do get a lot of attention in both the southern and the northern town. It’s the way I dress and look. There are mostly unrefined/un-cultivated people living here. I wear mostly the best pieces from my former life, which consists of very expensive brand clothing, LaCoste sweaters, piques etc. People can see from a mile away that I’m not from around here.

Later that day I initiated a new batch of DDNP. As I completed the first phase I noticed one of my two 2L beakers had a large crack in the bottom and drops of liquid was coming out. I was very lucky the beaker hadn’t completely cracked open as it would have destroyed my hot plate stirrer for sure. I remember there was a tiny crack that appeared during sulfuric acid purification when I was boiling as a madman outside. Now the beaker is ruined. To be honest; I’m surprised this hasn’t happened earlier as I’ve abused these two beakers excessively. I made a mistake by buying only two 2L beakers instead of 4-5. That mistake has cost me at least 3-4 days in total. The loss of this beaker poses a significant problem as I relied on these two beakers to take me through the whole manufacturing process. If I go down a size and use the last 1L beaker I have left (I managed to break one during washing after boiling all the sulfuric acid outside. it will take me an extra day to complete the DDNP manufacturing. I’ll see what I’ll do later today.

While waiting for the liquid to reach 4ªC in the fridge I went to train for the second time since I came to the farm. I used two backpacks, one in front and one on the back, with a total weight of 27kg. In addition I filled a container with 5L of liquid and held it with my left and then right arm partly stretched out in front of me. I took a 20 minute walk with these weights and it was a great exercise. As always I take protein powder + creatine before and after the exercise to maximize the outcome. I’m almost out of my steroid/winstrol tabs now as this project has taken significantly longer than expected. I only have a few days left worth of tabs so I have to sort this out in the coming days. I was thinking of traveling back to the capitol and restock after I complete the DDNP production. Damn, the most annoying thing about synthesizing DDNP is that you have to wait 12 hours for the liquid to reach 4ªC in the fridge, later on you have to wait 3-5 hours for the compound to chill from boiling to room temperature and at the last phase you need to wait 12-18 hours for the liquid to go from 4ªC to room temperature. In other words, one batch of DDNP takes approximately 40 hours. If I had 6 x 2L beakers instead of 2, it would allow me to complete 3 batches in less than 2 days (45 hours), instead of having to spend more than 5 days (120 hours) due to lack equipment…

Sunday June 26 – Day 56:
Completed the second and third phase of the second batch of DDNP. I moved the last batch of PA liquid from the cellar to the fridge. Updating log.

I am noticing increased pressure from my friends and family to come visit me at the farm. I am countering by saying I will be done with this seasons work within x weeks, and that they are more than welcome to visit me then. This has worked for 2 months now, but this pressure will increase progressively as I delay.

Monday June 27 – Day 57:
Filtered out the pure PA crystals from the last batch of PA water after chilling it in the fridge for 12+ hours. Cleaned out all the beakers. Completed the last stage of the second batch of DDNP. Initiated the first stage of the last batch of DDNP. As I have now re-initiated my training I did a workout later that evening.

Tuesday June 28 – Day 58:
Continued on the last DDNP batch. Went to the northern town to do some errands. Updating log. Later when searching online for efficient DDNP purification methods; I just learned that when acidifying the sodium picramate solution during DDNP manufacture, H2S and SO2 is released, which is potentially deadly. Crap, and I’ve been inhaling that diarrhea gas for three days now! I didn’t even bother turning on the fan in the fume hood on a couple of occasions during that stage…

Wednesday June 29 – Day 59:
Completed last batch of DDNP. I was now facing the task of purifying it, but was uncertain how to approach this. Was it necessary to purify it at all? How much would the VOD (velocity of detonation) suffer from not purifying it? Would it cut the VOD in half? My whole operation depended on the VOD from my primary being able to detonate the secondary explosive. After a few hours of research online I found that mixing the unpurified DDNP in acetone, then filtering it to another beaker with a lab filter or alternatively two coffee filters and then boiling the acetone away over a hot water bath, would be the optimal approach as the precipitation method with ice cold water method apparently didn’t work for those that tried it. The problem now was that I only had one conical flask and one porcelain boiling dish (100ml) suitable for this type of purification method. I feared that this method would take a very long time with the lack of equipment. As I didn’t have much choice I began the purification process. I managed to purify 1/3 of a batch (I had three batches) in 3 hours. As I got the hang of it I managed to reduce the time spent to 2 hours. Watching Spartacus – Blood & Sand, a brilliant series :-). It’s my favorite one, in addition to Rome, Battlestar Galactica, Caprica and Stargate Universe! <3. The Shield, Dexter, Sleeper Cell, Vampire Diaries and True Blood are good as well. All the series adhere to the multiculti ideology but such is life for the time being.

Thursday June 30 – Day 60:
This house is infested with beetles. Just now I was about to reach for a chocolate in my goodie bag and a beetle had crawled in, ffs. And an hour ago, when I was putting on my nitril gloves to do another DDNP purification cycle, something was crawling in one of the fingers 🙁 Needless to say, I freaked out… After that I started killing every little insect in view. And I’m up to 18 just in the last hour… Parts of this house is from 1750 so it’s probably several bug colonies in the walls.

I haven’t slept at all since yesterday, trying to complete the last DDNP purification. That will complete the chemistry phase and I can move on to the last ANFO –>ANALFO phase. Addition of aluminium and micro balloons to the 1.8 tons of ANFO. But before I start the last phase, I need to travel to the capitol for resupply.

When I went inside the barn yesterday, a window had loosened and laid smashed on the floor. There are several signs of noticeable wear outside as well. Three large trees has blown down and two panels on the side of the barn has blown off. Anyone seeing this must think I don’t give a damn… I haven’t had the time or energy to sort that out yet. Perhaps when I’m done with the chemistry phase…

As I’ve now completed the purification process of 25g of DDNP (I will save an additional batch of unpurified 12g as backup), it’s time for me to wrap up the chemistry phase. I do have 50L of impure nitro methane (30% RC fuel) in the barn but it’s a bit tricky to purify it. I will see what I can do about it tonight. If I can’t find an appropriate purification method I’ll just skip the NM altogether. In any case; I can now dismantle the lab, again…

I talked to my friend, Peter, after missing one of his inc. calls earlier. He is visiting his girlfriend in a nearby town and wanted to stop by the farm… I fed him a story about me going to the capitol and it worked, for now… However, it would not be suitable to receive visitors here as anyone stopping by would eventually understand that things are not what they seemed. I have to be careful not to answer his calls while he is so close to the farm. Manipulation and deceit can quickly turn around and act in your disfavor, if you are not careful. I guess I have been somewhat reckless in regards to maintaining my social network. Choosing complete isolation and asocial behavior, in phases like these, would probably be a more pragmatical approach for ensuring secrecy. However, complete isolation and asocial behavior can also defeat the whole purpose if you end up losing the love for the people you have sworn to protect. Because, why would you bless your people with the ultimate gift of love if every single person hates you?

Friday July 1 – Day 61:
Ok, I have now completely dismantled the lab and stored all the equipment in boxes on the second floor. Removed all the glass from the broken window near the work bench in the barn and fastened a plastic sheet with duct tape.

It is now 8 days since I was forced to drastically reduce my winstrol intake and 2 days since I ran out of both winstrol and DBOL tabs. I’m noticing slight symptoms of withdrawal resulting in loss of muscle mass (down 3kg from my peak at 96kg). I’m also low on no-Xplode and protein powder. I need to restock in the capitol. Damn, Peter is visiting his girlfriends sister in central Norway and Marius is unavailable due to work.

Saturday July 2 – Day 62:
Going over the travel route for both plan A and B for the upcoming event, familiarizing myself with the driving routes and plotting in destinations in my Garmin GPS. I went to the gym and did a really hard workout. I was surprised I managed to lift as more or less as much as I could when I was at my best, in late April. However, I had to cancel the program half way because I was getting dizzy. Damn, just too long since I properly worked out.

Nice, I have enough winstrol for 20 more days (10mg x 100 tabs). I should have ended this cycle after 6-7 weeks though and I am now on my 9th week… Not healthy at all and I’m concerned about my liver values.

I took my mom out to dinner this evening, then hooked up with Axel for a coffee afterwards, discussing politics. Oh, how I missed these discussions… 🙂 Went back to the farm late in the evening.

Sunday July 3 – Day 63:
Raining again… I planned to extract the armor cache today (the Pelican 1620 case I buried July 2010) or initiate evaporation purification of my 50ish liters of nitro methane, RC fuel. But I will have to wait for the first sunny day. Will have to begin the final phase shortly, the mixing of AL and micro balloons in the ANFO. I think I’ll take a day off prior to the upcoming phase shift and just download some new trance tunes. Lange feat. Sarah Howells (amazing voice) has three songs I haven’t yet downloaded;

Lange Ft. Sarah Howells – Fireworks (Club Mix),
Lange Ft. Sarah Howells – Out of the Sky (Original Mix) and
Lange feat. Sarah Howells “Let It All Out” (Lange)

Noticing that the testo withdrawal is contributing to increased aggressiveness. As I’m now continuing with 50mg it will most likely pass. I wish it would be possible to somehow manipulate this effect to my advantage later on when it is needed. Because the state seems to very efficiently suppress fear. I wonder if it is possible to acquire specialized “aggressiveness” pills on the market. It would probably be extremely useful in select military operations, especially when combined with steroids and ECA stack…! It would turn you into a superhuman one-man-army for 2 hours! <3 Monday July 4 – Day 64:
Updated log for a few hours. I then began the preparations for a trip to extract the armor cache, I had dug down a year ago in July 2010. I am really concerned that someone has somehow found the cache. It would be a significant setback if that was to be the case. Or what if moisture had somehow penetrated the pelican case I used. It would be possible considering the fact that the area where the cache is located has permafrost during winter.

I did not look forward to this extraction trip as I had nightmarish memories from digging down the case in the first place, 12 months ago. The location is in a mosquito infested area and combined with the labor intensive nature of this sub mission, I remember it as a painfully exhausting and dreadful experience.

After packing the necessary supplies for the trip, I went by a hunting store and purchased upgraded ammunition (200 SP rounds, costing 300 euro) for my .223 Ruger Mini 14.

After a few hours driving I reached the destination. It took me around 30 minutes to locate the grave as I had camouflaged the dig sight very thoroughly, covering it with tree stumps etc. As expected, there was a big welcoming party waiting for me… Oh my, apparently, due to their great feast a year ago the mosquito population had seemed to triple for that particular spot… To counter this, I wore a raincoat which served to protect me from insect bites. However, laboring intensively in an air tight raincoat is extremely painful, even dangerous. I generated at least 2L of sweat by the time I was done so I had to constantly hydrate from my camel back. After two and a half painful hours I had extracted the armor crate and its content. Considering the fact that I do not have a secondary pistol, I disregarded filling up the crate with survival gear which was the original plan.

As for the content of the crate, it was in perfect condition. Not a single drop of liquid had penetrated the crate and no moisture had entered the rubber seal whatsoever. This means that one can bury electronic devices as well without it being affected at all!!! 🙂 These Pelican cases are simply amazing for this purpose. I’m sure you can bury it for several years, even below permafrost, perhaps up to 10 years, before the rubber seal rots away. I’m very impressed!

I arrived at the farm late in the evening. My neighbor had started harvesting my crops, as was the agreement made earlier.

Tuesday July 5 – Day 65:
Spent a few hours on ammunition administration. Replaced most of the .223 HP (hollow point) rounds with SP rounds. According to my research; HP rounds for .223 tend, 80-90% of the time, to not mushroom as intended, which defeats much of their purpose. SP (soft point) on the other hand, at least for the .223 caliber, are more suitable for the purpose of inflicting maximum damage to vermin. I did other practical tasks this day including coloring some of my equipment black with permanent markers of various sizes. Emptied the armor case. Lol, I forgot I had put a batch of DBOL, winstrol and ECA stack in the case :-). Nice, now I don’t have to make more ECA stack tabs from scratch.

I realize that if I am apprehended with all this equipment I will have serious problems trying to explain its intended usage…

Wednesday July 6 – Day 66:
Changed the tertiary charge setup, and planned the last manufacturing phase accordingly in regards to ANALFO mixing. I will be creating 19 x 50kg bags containing 43kg of ANFO, 6.45kg of AL (15%) and 1.2kg of micro balloons (2.7%). After that I will create 13 x 50kg bags containing 46kg of ANFO, 2.3kg of AL (5%) and 1.2kg of MB (2-3%). Re-located most of the ANFO from the spider cave to the processing bench.

Thursday July 7 – Day 67:
Re-distributed the micro balloons from the 16kg bags into 13 individual plastic bags each containing 1.2kg. Prepared 35 such bags – equivalent to 2.5% of the 50kg fertilizer bags. Started to do the same with the aluminium powder, re-distributing them from the 36kg metal drums to individual plastic bags each containing 6kg. Finished 6 such bags, but after further consideration I will use 5kg instead of 6. I realize now that many of the warnings concerning aluminum powder is nothing more than scare mongering, probably to limit the legal liability of the producer. It is much safer to handle than people might expect, even in the micro fine 400 mesh (63 microns) powder I have. I have generated multiple clouds of aluminium and nothing has gone wrong. Just be very careful and you’ll be fine.

As I was working on weighing the micro balloons on my gram weight, using my 3M full face mask, I noticed an itch on my nose. That’s when I saw a large black beetle on the inside of the mask…FFS. Freaked me out. I usually check for insects every time I wear gloves or the mask, but I must have missed it this time.

The neighbor is still harvesting my field outside. He originally told me it would only take 6 hours total but it’s the third day now… As long as he is lurking around on my property he is going to slow me down significantly as I have to take extra security precautions. Not to mention I have to delay the nitro methane evaporation outside until he’s done. I could probably have done it inside, but considering the fact that methane forms potentially explosive/flammable vapors I’m not readily keen on evaporating the RC fuel inside.

Friday July 8 – Day 68:
I opened the remaining two aluminium drums and re-distributed the content in plastic bags (regular shopping bags). I then completed to weigh the content of the bags on a gram weight resulting in 18 bags a 5kg (10-12%), 10 bags a 2.35kg (5-6%) and finally two bags a 6.5 kg for the inner drum charge.

Saturday July 9 – Day 69:
I started mixing the ANFO with the micro balloons and the aluminium powder. I completed 2 bags a 50kg. It was very labor intensive, much more than I imagined as I had to first open the ANFO bags, then distribute 12.5kg of the content into a plastic 50L masonry bucket. I then poured the content into a plastic 100L masonry bucket. As much of the ANFO was packed into hard lumps I had to crush them with a rubber hammer. I then started to crush the smaller lumps with my hands until the ANFO was powdered. I then poured 25% of the micro balloon bag inside the bucket and mixed it (it will create clouds of micro balloon dust as you mix it), following by doing the same with the aluminium powder. Clouds of aluminum powder will be generated and the whole area will be covered in AL dust including your clothing, your hair, and every item you might have in a 5m radius. This is problematic as you end up spread AL dust everywhere as you walk around. I ended up assigning “mixing clothing and shoes” which I took off every time I left the room. It’s the only thing you can do to prevent spreading it somewhat but you will still get stained by AL. I considered using a hazmat suit or my different kind of lightweight dust suit but the problem is that it gets too hot when combined with intensive labor like mixing.

As the ANALFO mix was complete I then poured the mix into an empty 50kg fertilizer bag. This took 30 minutes so processing a full 50kg bag of ANFO creating ANALFO took 2 hours. After I had prepared 2.5 bags of ANALFO I was exhausted and decided to take a break. Mixing ANALFO is very messy and it’s especially annoying that you get aluminium dust everywhere.

Later that day while I was enjoying a meal, the neighbor stopped by. As I had just completed the mixing session I still had AL stains in my face and powder in my hair. I tried the best I could to quickly wash it off but my hair still had a silver tone and it looked very weird. The neighbor asked if he could fertilize my fields and remove some rocks as this would increase the yield of animal fodder by 100% (the current crop). As this meant that he would get several people to work on my property for a week’s time I declined telling him that I had plans of my own.

Later that day, while I was watching an episode of True Blood, I saw a large van driving by the house and parking next to my car. There were at least 4 people inside. Nice, I thought; it’s probably a SWAT team coming to skull-fuck me. The farmer must have tipped them off… Thank God, it was only 4 Polacks looking for worked and I sent them on their way. It would have been tempting to hire them to mix my ANALFO… <3, hadn't it been for the fact that they would have understood what was up :-) Later that evening I put a large plastic container box with 8L of 30% nitro methane/18% oil/52% methanol outside to test the evaporation method. Theoretically; the methanol should evaporate before the nitromethane starts to evaporate. As such; you just let the mix evaporate down from 8L to aproximately 4L. This should leave you with aprox 60% nitro and 36% oil which is, according to my sources, 100% more efficient as an oxidizer as diesel when mixed with ANFO or ANALFO. According to my source; 25-40% nitro is as efficient as diesel, so anything higher purity is better. Sunday July 10 – Day 70:
I mixed one more bag of ANALFO manually. There must be a better way than this… One single bag in 2 hours!? I will try to use my electrical concrete mixer instead. I bought it second hand for 150 euro. I am just very worried about three things when using a concrete mixer; the friction caused by the electrical stirrer, ANALFO/ANFO/AL in direct contact with metal, a spark from the electrical system. As these three factors can cause a detonation, I will keep my glock 34 close by in case I somehow survive an explosion… I feel I don’t have a choice as mixing manually is just too fatiguing and time consuming. I need a method that allows me to mix at least 1 x 50kg bag every hour or faster. In any case; let me die another day…

The use of my electrical concrete mixer to blend the ANALFO went without much complication. As usual, I worry too much about safety… <3 I poured in 46kg of ANFO and activated the mixer. The large and small lumps would not be crushed so I had to crush them with my hands manually. I then went on to mixing in the 1.2 kg of micro balloons and the 5kg of aluminium powder (400 mesh/63 microns, leafed). It generated significant AL dust clouds and it didn't mix optimally. However, I was able to complete one bag of ANALFO in 90 minutes so I was able to improve my blending per bag by 30 minutes compared to the manual method. Also, using the concrete mixer is much less fatiguing. Perhaps with time, I will be able to reduce this to 60 minutes per bag. In any case; it is hard work for one person and I am really beginning to understand why Mr. McVeigh limited his manufacturing to 600kg. He probably encountered much of the issues I did and he probably had to learn everything the hard way just as I have done. My RC fuel (30% nitro methane, 18% oil, 52% methanol) has been allowed to evaporate for 26 hours now (average 20-25C daytime, 10-15C nighttime) and the mix has now reduced its mass by 50%, from 7.8 liters to 3.9 liters. I poured the liquid into a 4L container. I noticed that the evaporation took considerable longer during the night. I'm a bit concerned regarding the exothermic nature of methanol. Methanol absorbs moisture from the air and the water it absorbs has the same evaporation temperature as nitro methane. I have been unable to research exactly how much the absorption ratio is compared to the evaporation ratio as little information is found online regarding this purification method. If my assumptions are grossly incorrect, and the research I found was false, I will end up with an inert goo which will ruin the detonation completely. If I'm right, however, the oxidizer I will end up with will be more than twice as powerful than diesel and will reduce the need for a booster to detonate the ANFO/ANALFO. The inner charge I will end up with will be 50kg of ANALNM (Ammonium Nitrate ALuminium Nitro Methane). Regarding the purification of RC fuel; I did however find dozens of distillation methods from advanced to less advanced but the problem is that you need a decent distillation rig and even if you have the equipment, it is quite complicated and very dangerous to isolate the nitro methane that way. According to my overall research regarding nitro methane purification the most pragmatical approach, given my limited resources, is to just do an evaporation purification. I have a total of 72 liters of RC fuel with an average nitro methane percentage of 28%. In any case; I feel I've been really slacking the last week and I really need to step up the pace now. At least now, everything is set so I don't have to research any more techniques and methods. Monday July 11 – Day 71:
Mixing 3 bags (alr done 4)

I reserved a rental car today, from AVIS, the same company I’m already renting my primary car from. There was not enough credit on the card for a deposit so I had to go to the northern town and transfer 2000 euro to it.

Considering the fact that I am currently working on the most dreadful task, I bought a lot of exquisite food and candy today. I really need to recharge my batteries and increase my morale before initiating the ANALFO mixing. Good food and candy is a central aspect of my reward system which keeps me going. It has proven efficient so far. Occasionally, if I’m really not keen on doing a specific sub task, I take a red bull, a shake of noXplode or an ECA stack – to get a jump start before jumping into something I’m not looking forward to – f example extremely lame or labor intensive tasks or tasks involving great risk of injury or death.

I continued to purify, through evaporation, the RC fuel today, pouring 32L into four different plastic containers. I had marked the containers with a permanent marker for 2L, 4L and 8L which allows me to see how many percent it has evaporated. I put one in the outhouse, to test whether inside evap would be better, and three outside. I placed them all in the outhouse before I went to bed to prevent the batches from being ruined in case of rain during the night. I noticed the batch I left in the outhouse (at around 15C) had only evaporated by 1L, in comparison to the others (20-25C) which had evaporated by 3L, which indicates that outside evap is preferable.

The mixing of AL powder and micro balloons with the ANFO is a truly dreadful task. Not only is it extremely messy; it is very labor intensive as well, not to mention that you have to work using the 3M gas mask. I hate this task. It’s the most dreadful job I’ve encountered during the whole operation… However, I’ve finally managed to find a good mixing routine for the ANALFO. Basically; considering the fact that the whole process with mixing is extremely messy, I could not take any smoking breaks or leave the work bench area at all. As soon as I initiate the mixing I literally turn into the tin man…, with a layer of AL dust all over me. As it is really difficult to remove this dust from the surfaces it touches, I end up smearing the stuff on my face (it gets on the inside of my mask when it touches the rubber straps) and on my fingers etc. To keep an acceptable pace I am therefore forced to work without a break for 5 hours (or until I complete 4 x 50kg bags). I’ve managed to reduce the work needed to complete one bag from 1.5 hours to 1.2 hours. The most time consuming aspect are all the ANFO lumps I have to crush manually with my fingers. The electrical cement mixer is really helpful though, and not dangerous to use at all, and will reduce the amount of time spent on each bag by 40 minutes (from 2 hours manually, to 1.2 hours with a cement mixer). I realize this is a vulnerable phase though, as it will be hard to conceal AL dust and hard to clean surfaces with AL smearing.

Tuesday July 12 – Day 72:
Evaporated RC fuel outside and mixed 4 bags (200kg) of ANALFO.

Found a good method to determine nitromethane vs. methanol content:

The boiling point of methanol is aprox 63ªC while the BP of nitromethane is aprox 100ªC. However, there is an even easier way to determine NM content. Just weigh it! Methanol is extremely light and nitromethane extremely heavy.

Methanol = 800g per liter
Motor oil = 875g per liter (might be wrong)
Nitromethane = 1195g per liter
(Water = 1000g per liter)

A gallon of Methanol = 3.78L * 800 = 3024g
A gallon of Motor Oil = 3.78L * 875 = 3307.5g
A gallon of Nitromethane = 3.78L * 1195 = 4517g
(A gallon of water = 3.78L * 1000 = 3780g)

I added water just in case due to the exothermic nature of methanol (it absorbs water/moisture from the air). In any case; it will now be easier to figure out which of my completed 8 batches of purified RC fuel has the highest NM content, simply by using a gram weight.

Wednesday July 13 – Day 73:
I cleaned my 3M gas mask today. It was full of AL powder/smearing and the multifilter were full of AL dust. Unfortunately; these are my last multifilters (particle and vapor filter combined) so I can’t replace them. I do have a couple of sets of particle filters but I believe they won’t be of much use to filter the diesel fumes when mixing ANALFO.

Continued to evaporate RC fuel outside and mixed 2 bags of ANALFO. After mixing the second bag I began to experience dizziness, blood pressure elevation and nausea, classical symptoms of excessive short-term exposure of diesel. Diesel is a vicious substance as it is absorbed even through most glove material. Nitrile gloves are best, neoprene somewhat good but vinyl gloves provide little or no protection. At this point in time, the clothing I am using to mix ANALFO are more or less soaked in diesel and I knew it was not healthy. But the problem is that using a hazmat suit for mixing is problematic as it will be very hard to labor while wearing it. I have another chemical suit that are more comfortable than the hazmat suit so I will try using that for the last batch. Diesel poisoning isn’t lethal, but will weaken your body over time. However, excessive exposure over a long period of time can shut down your kidneys, which will obviously be lethal. To somewhat counter all the crap I’ve been exposed to the last two months I’m using anti-toxin tabs (herbal supplements strengthening the liver and kidneys), protein supplements, creatine and a multitude of mineral/vitamin supplements.

Thursday July 14 – Day 74:
I’m not feeling so hot today. I’m in a weakened state atm. most likely due to diesel poisoning. It shouldn’t take more than 24 hours before my immune system has defeated the negative effects of this exposure. I hope I haven’t been overexposed as it may lead to acute kidney shutdown. Needless to say; I’m going to use my protective suit to mix the last 4 bags today. Finished the last 4 bags. Using the protective suit (fertilizer sprayer suit, used by farmers) proved to be better than expected, except the fact that I completely soaked my t-shirt and boxer with sweat by the time I was done.

Planning a train trip to the capitol tomorrow. I have to get up at around 06:00 tomorrow. Will do some errands while I’m there including picking up a van from AVIS car rental company (carrying cap 1340kg).

Damn, I was hoping the last 4 batches of RC fuel would be finished before the trip tomorrow.

Total weight of ANALFO, 18 bags = 900kg + 50kg ANALNM (inner charge) + 130kg (1 person + gear) + 80kg (mini MC) = 1160kg. The max carrying capacity of Volkswagen Crafter is 1340kg but it’s safer to leave a certain safety margin, just in case.

Friday July 15 – Day 75:
I took the train to the capitol today to pick up the car I had reserved. Took a taxi from the train station to the car rental company. Came back to the farm late in the evening.

Saturday July 16 – Day 76:
Took a taxi to the train station in the northern town to pick up the car. Did some errands and went back to the farm. Started removing the car rental sticker with the rubber-eraser-drill-bit. I had bought 4 of these specialty drill erasers which are designed to remove decor from cars. I used one and a half bit before I was done but there were significant traces left on the car. I treated the surface with a spray on de-greasing chemical three times but there were still some quite noticeable traces left. Will try a couple of more times tomorrow. Finished the last evaporation-purification of the RC fuel.

Sunday July 17 – Day 77:
Continued removing traces of the decor on the rental car. Washed twice with acetone then another round of degreasing. There are still significant traces but at this point I do not have time to take additional measures.

An unknown car drove in to the front yard today. As I went out to greet them I noticed it was just two women who had taken a wrong turn.

The neighbor started collecting the animal-fodder-balls from the field today. His activities delayed my work for several hours.

I weighed the 9 batches of purified RC fuel. I have a lot more than I need so I will just use two of the best batches.

Weighing 1.8L in a 2L beaker on a gram weight:

Batches 1-4 were evaporated from: 25% nitro, 12% oil, 63% methanol from 7.8L to 3L

Batches 5-9 were evaporated from 30% nitro, 18% oil, 52% methanol, from 7.8L to 3.9L

All the batches have an unknown water content (exothermic properties of methanol ftl.)

Batch 1: 1759g
Batch 2: 1753g
Batch 3: 1738g
Batch 4: 1730g
Batch 5: 1786g
Batch 6: 1779g
Batch 7: 1784g
Batch 8: 1771g
Batch 9: 1770g

Weight tests were somewhat inconclusive so decided to do an additional fire test, taking 20ml from the best batches and using a stop watch to see how long the flame burns.

Batch 1: 1:49 min Batch 5: 1:53 min

Fire test proved somewhat inconclusive but my gut feeling tells me that I should go for batch 5 and batch 7. It should be more than 50% nitromethane in the two batches.

Will create secondary detonator to be detonated from ANALFO, without booster in addition to the detonator with booster from the ANALNM inner charges). Will add a delay fuse of +30 sec for the secondary detonator. I feel this is the safest option if somehow the ANALNM mix proves to be a disaster.

Needless to say, I’m really not sure about the potency of the RC nitro oxidizer. My calculations indicate that the nitro content can be as low as 30% but I cannot confirm this as my weight estimate for the oil might be incorrect. In addition; I cannot verify the water content of the mix.

In any case; for the ANALNM material I will go for:

38kg AN 6L RC/nitro oxidizer 6kg AL 1.2kg MB

Total: 51.2kg of material

Monday July 18 – Day 78:
I completed the inner charge. However, the drum only had enough space for approximately 40kg of ANALNM. I poured the finished product into 2 x double plastic bags, the inner bags of the 50kg fertilizer bags. There were no problems at all mixing everything together in the concrete mixer. However, since I only made one inner charge I wish I had purchased pure AN (98%) from ice packs as it would be more potent than the 27-0-0 (85%ish) – farmer (C)AN.

Will have less time to update log from now on…

That night, after dark, I loaded in everything in the van. Still need to strap it properly in place though.

Tested gear.

Exhausted!!! Good workout though. I’m drinking 4 x protein shakes per day now to maximize muscle generation. At this point in time I should be fearful, but I’m just too exhausted to think much about it.

Placed PA to dry during the night.

Tuesday July 19 – Day 79:
Dried 1 out of 4 batches of PA/DDNP in the oven at 50-70ª C. First batch took 9 hours, wtf!! This is going to delay everything… Created anti-friction/shock stuffing by cutting up a madras and placing it in three layers in a card board box. I’ll use these to transport the booster and detonators separate from the main cargo.

Started packing down gear, filled diesel/gasoline on cars and mini-MC. Tested mini-MC. Treaded a fuse inside a surgical tube and tested it. There were 75 cm of fuse so it should burn for 75 seconds.

Due to the lack of oxygen in the tube it burnt in less than 2 sec!! Damn, I’m glad I checked this beforehand… No surgical tube then…

Went to a higher quality restaurant in the southern town and feasted. Yummy! Ive been working extremely hard the last few days and I’m completely exhausted. I have been using ECA stack to help keep this pace. Looks like I will have to take one more today…

Currently drying batch 2 out of 4. Hopefully I will complete it before I go to bed.

Dry PA etc. Test PA. Pack and load gear during day, Go to sleep at 22:00

06:30 – drive 1 Small, there 10:00 train back (11:00), there 14:00, taxi, there 14:30 drive 2. (there 17:00) Check area. Go to bed 18:30

Wednesday July 20 – Day 80:
Wake up at 02:30. Start downloading movie at 02:30, 05:30 Eat + pack, start seeding at 06:00. Done 08:30. Leave 08:30 Drive 1, Back 09:30 Drive 2 There 10:00 Leave There 10:45

Thursday July 21 – Day 81:
Drive 11 hours straight to Kautokeino, sort out cheap hotel

Friday July 22 – Day 82:
Initiate blasting sequences at pre-determined sites. Test dirt for gram of gold per kg. Have enough material for at least 20 blasts. Start capitalization of project as soon as I have results. Time is running out, liquidity squeeze inc. Call/email all my investor contacts with updated online prospectus/pdf.

This is going to be an all-or-nothing scenario. If I fail to generate acceptable precious metals yields, in combination with swift initiation of the capitalization for securing the areas I will be heavily indebted. I must complete capitalization of the mineral extraction project within August at latest! When I have the required seed capital I will have enough funds to employ the services of professional blasting engineers.

If all fails, I will initiate my career with a private security firm in conflict zones to acquire maximum funds in the shortest period of time to repay the debts.

First coming costume party this autumn, dress up as a police officer. Arrive with insignias 🙂 Will be awesome as people will be very astonished 🙂

Side note; imagine if law enforcement would visit me the next days. They would probably get the wrong idea and think I was a terrorist, lol :o)

Optimal time budget, one person –
ANFO: 3 x 600kg, PA: 3 x 0,5kg, DDNP: 3 x 10g

If I had known then, what I know today, by following this guide, I would have managed to complete the operation within 30 days instead of using almost 80 days. By following my guide, anyone can create the foundation for a spectacular operation with only 1 person in less than a month even if adding 2 “resting” days! 🙂

Day 1: Moving and getting your equipment and gear into place.
Day 2: Installing all equipment – fume hood, fan etc.
Day 3: Finishing the metal skeletons/cylinders for the blast devices and completing other practical issues relating to gear and equipment.
Day 4: Creating an evacuation/emergency strategy, packing an evacuation kit (survival gear etc.)
Day 5: Grinding 2.5kg of aspirin: 30 minutes with blender, manufacture of acetylsalicylic acid from aspirin (4 hours) + drying in oven (4 hours per batch x 3)
Day 6: Manufacture of acetylsalicylic acid from aspirin (4 hours) + drying in oven (4 hours per batch x 3)
Day 7: Boiling sulfuric acid using 4 cooking plates outside, from 23:00-07:00, 15-18L->5L of 90% +
Day 8: Boiling sulfuric acid using 4 cooking plates outside, from 23:00-07:00, 15-18L->5L of 90% +
Day 9: Creating Picric Acid (6 out of 12 batches using 3 x hot plate stirrers)
Day 10: Creating Picric Acid (12 out of 12 batches using 3 x hot plate stirrers). Completed
Day 11: Purification of Picric Acid
Day 12: Purification of Picric Acid
Day 13: Purification of Picric Acid. Completed
Day 14: Creating DDNP
Day 15: Creating DDNP. Completed
Day 16: Relocation of 27-0-0 fertilizer. Break down a 600kg bag into 13-14 x 50kg bags, load in the truck, drive to location where you are going to crush them if needed.
Day 17: Relocation of fertilizer. Break down another 600kg bag into 13-14 x 50kg bags.
Day 18: Relocation of fertilizer. Break down the last 600kg bag into 13-14 x 50kg bags.
Day 19: Initiate fertilizer grinding phase using 4 stationary blenders simultaneously. It will take aprox. 30-40 minutes to complete a full 50kg bag of ANFO, including the addition of the diesel and sealing the inner and outer bag with pieces of duct tape. It should be done nighttime between 23:00-07:00 as it’s quite noisy. The task also includes filling 20L plastic containers with diesel, and then breaking each 20L container down to 4L containers (empty distilled water containers) Complete 9 x 50kg bags of ANFO.
Day 20: Complete 9 x 50kg bags of ANFO.
Day 21: Complete 9 x 50kg bags of ANFO.
Day 22: Complete 9 x 50kg bags of ANFO. Completed.
Day 23: Mix in 2.5% (by weight) micro balloons and 10-15% (by weight) aluminium powder into the now hardened ANFO.
Day 24: Mix in 2.5% micro balloons and 10-15% aluminium powder into the now hardened ANFO.
Day 25: Mix in 2.5% micro balloons and 10-15% aluminium powder into the now hardened ANFO.
Day 26: Prepare trucks for transportation.
Day 27: Prepare trucks for transportation.
Day 28: Prepare trucks for transportation.
Day 29: Completed

The following chart illustrates labor required vs. risk of apprehension for individuals who are NOT already on any watch list.

Risk vs. Labor Time required to complete Risk of apprehension

1 person 30 days 30%

2 person 20 days 60%

3 person 16 days 80%

4 person 13 days 90%

5 person 12 days 90-95%

The old saying; “if you want something done, then do it yourself” is as relevant now as it was then. More than one “chef” does not mean that you will do tasks twice as fast. In many cases; you could do it all yourself, it will just take a little more time. AND, without taking unacceptable risks. The conclusion is undeniable.

I believe this will be my last entry. It is now Fri July 22nd, 12:51.

Sincere regards,

Andrew Berwick
Justiciar Knight Commander
Knights Templar Europe
Knights Templar Norway

In another section, Breivik anticipated the aftermath of his deed:

I have been thinking about my post-operational situation, in case I survive a successful mission and live to stand a multiculturalist trial. When I wake up at the hospital, after surviving the gunshot wounds inflicted on me, I realize at least for me personally, I will be waking up to a world of shit, a living nightmare. Not only will all my friends and family detest me and call me a monster; the united global multiculturalist media will have their hands full figuring out multiple ways to character assassinate, vilify and demonize. They will possibly do everything they can to distort the truth about me, KT and our true objectives, and attempt to make even revolutionary conservatives detest me. They will label me as a racist, fascist, Nazi-monster as they usually do with everyone who opposesmulticulturalism/cultural Marxism. However, since I manifest their worst nightmare (systematical and organized executions of multiculturalist traitors), they will probably just give me the full propaganda rape package and propagate the following accusations: pedophile, engaged in incest activities, homosexual, psycho, ADHD, thief, non-educated, inbred, maniac, insane, monster etc. I will be labeled as the biggest (Nazi-)monster ever witnessed since WW2.

I have an extremely strong psyche (stronger than anyone I have ever known) but I am seriously contemplating that it is perhaps biologically impossible to survive the mental, perhaps coupled with physical torture, I will be facing without completely breaking down on a psychological level. I guess I will have to wait and find out.

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Are you there God? it’s me Anders. The impersonal diary of Oslo Bomber and Mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik.