Human rights for even Anders Breivik

Posted on April 27, 2016 by Eric Verlo

In retrospect, awarding the newly elected Barack Obama a Nobel Peace Prize was about as smartly ambitious as it gets. Everyone knows humanitarians don’t do it for the reward. A Nobel Prize is wasted if there’s not some eligible sociopath who might be influenced with the pressure to behave themselves. President Obama’s Nobel medal was an experiment in paying it forward. Who knows how much more bloodthirsty Obama might have gotten with his drones had not the Nobel committee tried to extort him with its higher expectations? The Nobel award givers took a lot of ribbing for their foolishness from those of us who weren’t idealist enough. AND SO IT COMES AS NO SURPRISE when Norway’s mass murdering overachiever Anders Breivik sued his jailers for abusing his human rights because he wasn’t getting sufficient visitors in his cushy prison suite, that the Norwegian supreme court would rule Breivik was right.

Of course they did. If you’re not going to give a death sentence to a crazed bigot who guns down 76 children, if you’re not going to throw him in a hole but instead give him a spacious accommodation, if instead of a life sentence you let him pursue university studies and limit his incarceration to twenty some years, then you don’t want to isolate your prisoner from human contact if it might appear even as a semblance of solitary confinement. Because lesser cultures do that.

Lesser capitalist flagship states isolate, execute and torture. I so appreciate that Norway wants to set a high bar, but I despair that the land of Guantanamo and waterboarding and indefinite detention and ILLEGAL detention and rendition and extrajudicial assassination and no habeus corpus can’t even see this bar to reach it.

Mark Iannicelli: Denver’s Gentle Giant

Posted on March 17, 2016 by David Lee Anderson

Who Doesn’t Love a Good Fairytale? The Story of Mark Iannicelli Denver’s Gentle Giant. Activist Mark Iannicelli was arrested in front of the Lindsey Flanigan Courthouse for distributing jury nullification literature. The nature of his crime was simply to inform citizens of their rights as a juror. Mark is a soft spoken gentle giant, always respectful. He can often be found in front of the courthouse or the Tattered Cover book store where he helps with feeding the homeless on Fridays.

Why was Mark targeted for arrest by the Sheriffs deputies ? Was Mark such a threat to society that arrest was warranted?

A non violent soft-spoken man passing out information concerning a citizens’ rights is considered such a danger that the waste of taxpayers’ money and police resources is the only solution?

And so the Fairytale begins, a man peacefully passing out small folders with innocent words, is seen as a threat to a system that operates in secrete behind closed doors, a system that would prefer the citizens remain ignorant of their rights.

Can a government that never miss’s an opportunity to tell the people they are “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Be truly free when they tremble in such fear of information.

And the very sad part of this fairytale is that Mark was granted a federal injunction against arrest by the Federal Court in Denver for the act of giving information to the public at the courthouse.

Hickenlooper shows Animas River mine waste is as drinkable as fracking fluid.

Posted on August 16, 2015 by Eric Verlo

$From fracking fluid to mine waste, Governor Hickenlooper has odd taste.$
Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper put on his usual demonstration of drinking a bottle of contaminated water to show that the Animas River is just as potable as FRACKING FLUID. What he has really shown is that the mine waste which the EPA un-dammed from the Gold King Mine into the Animas River was toxic enough to kill GIARDIA. Who drinks river water in Colorado?! The EPA may have unleashed the waste seeping from a mine closed in 1928, but the extraction industry that created it is still hard at work making more.

An Open letter to the Denver Police Department

Posted on May 3, 2015 by David Lee Anderson

I can see you, as you sit there reading this; yeah, you with the donut jelly and crumbs all over the keypad and mouse. Searching Facebook and all social media sites looking for information. Doing a little undercover spying and investigative work so that you can run back to inform your buddies on what’s going down. There is a term for that; you are a “SNITCH”. In case you don’t know, a snitch is someone who hides in the shadows gathering information so that they might betray another.

We know what information you want. What are the protesters’ plans? How many of them are there? Where will they be? What are their names? We are happy to give that information to you. Unlike you, we are not a secretive in our goals. But before we give you that info we’re going to give you a little mix of commentary and history wrapped up in the truth. You seem to get very upset when the protesters call you pigs or holler “Fuck The Police”.

Personally, I think calling you pigs is a bit of and upgrade. When every human is born there is a residue left over, it’s called, afterbirth; it serve no useful purpose, it is waste left over from making of a human being. And this is how I see you, you are the “Afterbirth” that serves no useful purpose, you are the waste product. You want and demand respect from the citizens, yet you fail to understand that respect is something that is given, not taken. Respect is given for acts of valor, courage and bravery.

Do you believe it was an act of bravery when you murdered a 17 year old girl, Jessica Hernandez, in the alley, or when you murdered Marvin Booker in the county jail? Was it courage when you pepper-sprayed a 12 year old child in Civic Center Park on April 29th? Did one of you even think to go to that child and give medical assistance or maybe an apology? Or were you too busy looking for the next victim to assault? I can only assume you are brain-dead if you think these act will gain you respect.

The advent of the cell phone camera and internet has shown who and what you really are, that afterbirth, I mentioned above.

Back in the 60s we did not have cell phones to record your criminal conduct, but if you take the time to Google “Art Winstanley” you will discover you are not the first criminal cops. Art was one of Denver’s Serve & Protect cops who was also a burglar while on duty. When Art got caught, he “Snitched” on over fifty other cops who were in the burglary ring. He began his snitching after he was served a piece of cherry pie. How’s that for serve and protect?

And somewhere in your ranks is another Art who will come forward and expose your criminal deeds against the citizen. We don’t know who or when, but you can be sure, he or she is there to snitch on the rest of you.

Now about that information you looking for; I won’t give you any names, because unlike you, I’m not a SNITCH.

How many is there of us? We are many and our numbers are growing, your days and deeds are numbered.

Where is our next action? It will be everywhere on the streets, calling you out for your criminal deeds. The days of hiding your crimes are over and we will expose you.

Steve Bass to get his day in court, but he can’t say what he was doing or why, & above all he can’t mention “Occupy”

Posted on July 26, 2012 by Eric Verlo

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.– Municipal Court Judge Spottswood W. F. Williams heard a final motion today before the AUGUST 10 trial of Occupier Steve Bass, charged with violating the city’s camping ban. The prosecution motioned to forbid from trial, “discussion of political, economic, or religious beliefs or ideology as a purported justification for the alleged acts”, and even “arguments related to the belief that the defendant’s conduct was constitutionally protected”, and in true Colorado Springs fashion, the judge GRANTED the city’s motion! YES THAT’S RIGHT, now if Bass wanted to say he wasn’t “camping,” he can’t say what else you would call it! In effect, Defendant Bass is prevented from explaining WHY he was occupying, or even THAT he was occupying, because saying “OCCUPY” is expressly forbidden. The judge will play it by ear whether to make an exception for himself during “voir dire” if selecting impartial jurors might require asking their opinion of “Occupy”. That’s IF BASS GETS A JURY AT ALL, because next, Judge Williams prompted the city prosecutor to research whether Bass was entitled to a jury of his peers for the infraction of camping…

The issue had already been resolved in an earlier hearing. Unable to find definitive wording on whether a camping ban violation invoked the right to a jury trial, the court ruled to proceed as if it did. But at today’s hearing Judge Williams related that in the interim over a casual dinner conversation, another judge informed him that the law read otherwise. So he put the question again to the prosecution. And again the citations came up inconclusive. This time however, with the clerk advised to continue the search, the decision stands at “pending”.

If Judge Williams opts to eliminate the jury, the forbidding of political or constitutional discussion is a moot point, actually two. There won’t be a jury to confuse, nor a judge either, because Judge Williams decided, by allowing the city’s motion, that the defendant has no arguments to make. Case closed. If the judge gets his way.

The point of today’s hearing was to hear not a judge’s motion but the city’s, a “motion in limine” used to reach agreement about what arguments can be excluded from the trial, often a defendant’s prior convictions which might prejudice a jury.

The core of the city’s motion was this:

…that the Defendant be ordered to refrain from raising the following issues at the Jury Trial…

1. Discussion of political, economic, or religious beliefs or ideology as a purported justification for the alleged acts, or as an issue to be evaluated by the jury;

2. Presentation of facts or arguments related to the belief that the defendant’s conduct was constitutionally protected expressive conduct;

3. Presentation of facts or arguments with the primary purpose or effect of proselytizing for the occupy movement, or otherwise using the Courtroom as a public forum;

4. Any reference to settlement negotiations with the Defendant prior to trial;

The city is guessing that because defendant Bass has passed on all opportunities to dismiss his case on technicalities, or plead for a deferred sentence, that he’s hanging on to get “his day in court.” Whatever that’s going to look like, the city doesn’t like it.

Points three and four were conceded by the defendant. No proselytizing was intended, and of course plea deals are confidential. But the discussion of #3 was amusing, because the city expanded it to mean absolutely NO MENTION of “Occupy.” Even though the defendant was cited in ACACIA PARK, in OCTOBER, under 24/7 media coverage, the prosecutor argued that mentioning OCCUPY “would be unfairly prejudicial to the City.” Further:

To admit evidence related to any political, economic, and religious debate concerning the “Occupy Movement” at trial in this matter would result in prejudice, confusion, and a waste of Court time. By allowing such testimony, the jury would be misled as to the elements of the charged offense which would result in confusion during jury deliberations. Furthermore, the prosecution would suffer unfair prejudice if the jury were allowed to consider the defendant’s private ideology…

Not only did the city fear it would lose a popularity contest with “Occupy”, it worried that the courtroom would be abused by public debate. The point was ceded by the defense because the “primary purpose” would always have been to present defending arguments, not proselytize.

The City’s request is that the Court be treated as a forum for resolving criminal disputes and not as a public forum for debate. Political, economic and religious debate should be restricted to appropriate public forums.

The prosecutor raises an incongruous irony: Steve Bass is on trial because the city doesn’t consider Acacia Park to be an appropriate forum either.

Naturally the defense objected to points one and two, though on the three particular defense strategies the city wanted to preempt, “Choice of Evils Defense”, “Defense of Others”, and “Duress”, the defense ceded as irrelevant. Judge Williams then granted points one and two with the proviso that Steve Bass be permitted to draft his own defense argument, to be presented to the court no later than the Wednesday before trial. Did you know that a defendant must have his arguments approved by his accusers before he’s allowed to make them in court?

I’m not sure it’s accurate to say that Steve Bass is going to get his day in court if he’s going to spend it gagged.

Was Steve Bass arrested for “camping” or was the city trying to curtail “Occupy”? Let’s remember that Jack Semple and Amber Hagan were arrested for taping themselves to a tent, and Nic Galetka was arrested for setting his things on the ground.

But Steve Bass won’t be allowed to mention those details.

———-
FOR REFERENCE: The city’s full motion is reprinted below:

MUNICIPAL COURT, CITY OF COLORADO SPRINGS, COLORADO

PEOPLE OF THE CITY OF COLORADO SPRINGS, Plaintiff
v.
Steven Bass, Defendant

Case Number: 11M32022

MOTION IN LIMINE

COMES NOW the Office of the City Attorney, by and through Jamie V. Smith, Prosecuting Attorney, and submits this “Motion in Limine,” moving that the Defendant be ordered to refrain from raising the following issues at the Jury Trial in the above-captioned matter:

1. Discussion of political, economic, or religious beliefs or ideology as a purported justification for the alleged acts, or as an issue to be evaluated by the jury;

2. Presentation of facts or arguments related to the belief that the defendant’s conduct was constitutionally protected expressive conduct;

3. Presentation of facts or arguments with the primary purpose or effect of proselytizing for the occupy movement, or otherwise using the Courtroom as a public forum;

4. Any reference to settlement negotiations with the Defendant prior to trial;

ARGUMENTS IN SUPPORT OF MOTION

1. Discussion of political, economic, or religious beliefs or ideology as a purported justification for the alleged acts, or as an issue to be evaluated by the jury.

The Defendant is charges with violating Section 9.6.110 of the Code of the City of Colorado Springs, 2001, as amended (“the City Code”), entitled “Camping on Public Property.” Political, economic, or religious beliefs or ideology are not relevant to any of the elements of an alleged violation of City Code Section 9.6.110, nor are they relevant to any potential defense to that City Code Section.

City Code Section 9.6.110 makes it “unlawful for any person to camp on public property, except as may be specifically authorized by the appropriate governmental authority.” Testimony or arguments irrelevant to the elements contained in that language should be exclude from trial. C.R.E. Rule 401 defines relevant evidence as “evidence having any tendency to make the existence of any fact that is of consequence to the determination of the action more probable or less probably than it would be without the evidence.” Evidence and argument regarding political, economic or religious beliefs of ideology have no bearing on the offense charged and do not meet the definition of relevant evidence.

Even if some discussion of these issues could be found to be of limited relevance, such discussion would only serve to confuse the issues and waste the court’s and jurors’ time, and would be unfairly prejudicial to the City. C.R.E. Rule 403 allows relevant evidence to be excluded when its admission would cause prejudice, confusion, or waste of time. To admit evidence related to any political, economic, and religious debate concerning the “Occupy Movement” at trial in this matter would result in prejudice, confusion, and a waste of Court time. By allowing such testimony, the jury would be misled as to the elements of the charged offense which would result in confusion during jury deliberations. Furthermore, the prosecution would suffer unfair prejudice if the jury were allowed to consider the defendant’s private ideology, as it is not an element that the prosecution must prove. Time and resources of the Court would also be wasted by allowing such testimony.

Furthermore, this Court denied the defendant’s “Motion to Dismiss-First Amendment,” on June 7, 2012, holding that City Code Section 9.6.110 is content-neutral, and that the defendant did not have a Constitutionally protected right to express his views in the manner that he chose on the date of the violation. Therefore, the sole issue before the jury is whether or not Mr. bass was camping on public property without appropriate governmental authority. Any evidence concerning political, economic or religious views that he was attempting to express through his conduct has no relevance whatsoever to any of the elements of the offense.

Discussion of the “Occupy Movement” as a political, economic or religious issue is also irrelevant to any potential defense which could be raised in this matter. Economic, political and religious beliefs or ideology are irrelevant to the following defenses that the Defendant might attempt to raise:

a. Choice of Evils Defense. C.R.S. Section 18-1-702(1) provides, in pertinent part, that “conduct which would otherwise constitute an offense is justifiable and not criminal when it is necessary as an emergency measure to avoid an imminent public or private injury which is about to occur… .” The statute goes on the state in subsection (2) that “the necessity and justifiability of conduct under subsection (1) of this section shall not rest upon considerations pertaining only to the morality and advisability of the statute, either in its general application or with respect to its application to a particular class of cases arising thereunder.” (Emphasis added.) Subsection (2) also states that:

[w]hen evidence relating to the defense of justification under this section is offered by the defendant, before it is submitted for the consideration of the jury, the court shall first rule as a matter of law whether the claimed facts and circumstances would, if established, constitute a justification.

The choose of evils defense “does not arise from a ‘choice’ of several courses of action, but rather is based on a real emergency involving specific and imminent grave injury that presents the defendant with no alternatives other that the one take.” People v. Strock, 623 P.2d 42, 44 (Colo.1981). in order to invoke the “choice of evils” defense, the Defendant must show that his conduct was necessitated by a specific and imminent threat of public or private injury under circumstances which left him no reasonable and viable alternative other than the violation of law for which he stand charged. Andrews v. People, 800 P.2d 607 (Colo. 1990).

There has been no allegation by the defense, and no facts in the police reports previously submitted to this Court, that allege a specific and imminent public or private injury would occur if Mr. Bass had not erected a tent on public property. Furthermore, reasonable and potentially viable alternatives were available to Mr. Bass to achieve his goal, such as picketing and handing out literature, on the date of violation. This was accepted as true and ruled upon by this Court at the motions hearing on June 7, 2012. it should also be noted that no state “has enacted legislation that makes the choice of evils defense available as a justification for behavior that attempts to bring about social and political change outside the democratic governmental process.” Id. at 609; see also United States v. Dorrell, 758 F.2d 427, 431 (9th Cir. 1985) (mere impatience with the political process does not constitute necessity).

b. Defense of Others. C.R.S. Section 18-1-704 describes the circumstance under which the use of physical force in defense of a person constitutes a justification for a criminal offense. Subsection (1) of that statute states, in part, that “a person is justified in using physical force upon another person in order to defend himself or a third person from what he reasonably believes to be the use or imminent use of unlawful physical force by that other person…”. The defense does not apply considering the allegation in this case. There is no allegation that the Defendant was using physical force to protect himself from unlawful force by another at any time during the violation. Furthermore, no unlawful force was used or imminently threatened against any third party that would allow the Defendant to raise the defense.

c. Duress. C.R.S. Section 18-1-708 defines duress as conduct in which a defendant engages in at the direction of another person because use or threatened use of unlawful force upon him or another person. Duress does not apply in this case. There is no evidence that anyone was using or threatening to use unlawful force against Defendant or any third party to cause the Defendant to commit a violation.

2. Presentation of facts or arguments related to the belief that the defendant’s conduct was constitutionally protected expressive conduct.

Any claim by the Defendant that his conduct was protected by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution is not a proper issue to be raised before the jury in this case. This is a constitutional defense that was already raised by the Defendant in his “motion to Dismiss-First Amendment,” and which was denied by this Court on June 7, 2012. The Court ruled as a matter of law that the Defendant’s alleged conduct was not a constitutionally protected form of expression.

3. Presentation of facts or arguments with the primary purpose or effect of proselytizing for the occupy movement, or otherwise using the Courtroom as a public forum.

It is anticipated that the Defendant will attempt to use this trial as a public forum to assert his political, economic, and religious views on the “Occupy Movement.” Courtrooms are not public forums. People v. Aleem, 149 P.3d 765 (Colo. 2007). This Court has the authority to restrict political speech within the courtroom and preserve its purpose as a forum for adjudication of criminal disputes,m so long as the restriction is reasonable and viewpoint neutral. Id. The restriction requested by the City is both reasonable and viewpoint neutral. The purpose of this Motion is to limit the evidence presented in this matter to the offense charged and potential defenses thereto. The Motion is also viewpoint neutral as the City is not taking a stance on political, economic, or religious issues and would not request that the Court do so either. The City’s request is that the Court be treated as a forum for resolving criminal disputes and not as a public forum for debate. Political, economic and religious debate should be restricted to appropriate public forums. To allow Defendant to raise thee issues would be contrary to legal precedent and the rules of evidence.

4. Any reference to settlement negotiations with the Defendant prior to trial.

C.R.E. 408 excludes from permissible evidence compromise or offers to compromise. Plea negotiations fall under this rule and may not be discussed in the presence of the Judge or Jury.

The 4th Combat Brigade, 4th Infantry Division, 2nd Battalion, 12th Regiment, Lethal Warriors, self-styled Berserkers

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Eric Verlo

Neighbors of Ft Carson probably know that soldiers in the 12th Regiment, 2nd Battalion, 4th Infantry Division of the US Army 4th Ivy go by the team name of “LETHAL WARRIORS”. It may boost egos, but wouldn’t you think it limits their deployment options? You could hardly expect host populations to think “Lethal Warriors” would qualify as PEACEKEEPERS for example. Who welcomes lethal force to deliver humanitarian aid? Well never mind that, because it gets worse.

The 12th Regiment members are also proud that they’re considered “BERSERKERS”. And they know what that means. Do you? The 12th gets called in when command doesn’t want one raghead left standing. Get your rage on, light up a village and leave no survivors as a lesson to the villages nearby. You’ve got to “embrace the carnage” to be a berserker apparently. The term is self-explanatory, and so probably the soldiers don’t know berserker referred to the Norse warriors who threw themselves into a rage before laying waste their adversaries. Whether augmented by drink, drug or mental illness, the practice of deploying berserkers was OUTLAWED BY THE 10TH CENTURY. Do the soldiers of the 12th know their fighting anti-ethos has been a war crime for a full millennium?

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.

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.

Emma Goldman on Direct Action

Posted on September 23, 2010 by Eric Verlo

Yes it was Emma Goldman who said “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”
It was no mere quip. The turn of the last century activist was a fierce advocate of every social reform and was ultimately exiled to Europe for challenging forced conscription. Do you wonder what else Goldman had to say, about political violence, prisons, patriotism, puritanism, the traffic of women, suffrage, poverty, birth control, and the struggle of minorities? Far from being a cynic, Goldman offered an alternative to the false hope of the ballot box.

What does the history of parliamentarism show? Nothing but failure and defeat, not even a single reform to ameliorate the economic and social stress of the people. Laws have been passed and enactments made for the improvement and protection of labor. Thus it was proven only last year that Illinois, with the most rigid laws for mine protection, had the greatest mine disasters. In States where child labor laws prevail, child exploitation is at its highest, and though with us the workers enjoy full political opportunities, capitalism has reached the most brazen zenith.

…

It may be claimed that men of integrity would not become corrupt in the political grinding mill. Perhaps not; but such men would be absolutely helpless to exert the slightest influence in behalf of labor, as indeed has been shown in numerous instances. The State is the economic master of its servants. Good men, if such there be, would either remain true to their political faith and lose their economic support, or they would cling to their economic master and be utterly unable to do the slightest good. The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue.

The political superstition is still holding sway over the hearts and minds of the masses, but the true lovers of liberty will have no more to do with it. Instead, they believe with Stirner that man has as much liberty as he is willing to take.

…

Universal suffrage itself owes its existence to direct action. If not for the spirit of rebellion, of the defiance on the part of the American revolutionary fathers, their posterity would still wear the King’s coat. If not for the direct action of a John Brown and his comrades, America would still trade in the flesh of the black man. True, the trade in white flesh is still going on; but that, too, will have to be abolished by direct action. Trade-unionism, the economic arena of the modern gladiator, owes its existence to direct action. It is but recently that law and government have attempted to crush the trade-union movement, and condemned the exponents of man’s right to organize to prison as conspirators. Had they sought to assert their cause through begging, pleading, and compromise, trade-unionism would today be a negligible quantity. In France, in Spain, in Italy, in Russia, nay even in England (witness the growing rebellion of English labor unions), direct, revolutionary, economic action has become so strong a force in the battle for industrial liberty as to make the world realize the tremendous importance of labor’s power. The General Strike, the supreme expression of the economic consciousness of the workers, was ridiculed in America but a short time ago. Today every great strike, in order to win, must realize the importance of the solidaric general protest.

Direct action, having proven effective along economic lines, is equally potent in the environment of the individual. There a hundred forces encroach upon his being, and only persistent resistance to them will finally set him free. Direct action against the authority in the shop, direct action against the authority of the law, direct action against the invasive, meddlesome authority of our moral code, is the logical, consistent method of Anarchism.

Will it not lead to a revolution? Indeed, it will. No real social change has ever come about without a revolution. People are either not familiar with their history, or they have not yet learned that revolution is but thought carried into action.

Here’s the full essay from which the above was excerpted, where Goldman cites Emerson, Wilde, Burroughs, Thoreau and GBS to laud the promise of anarchism and direct action.

ANARCHISM: WHAT IT REALLY STANDS FOR

ANARCHY.??

Ever reviled, accursed, ne’er understood,?
Thou art the grisly terror of our age.?
“Wreck of all order,” cry the multitude,?
“Art thou, and war and murder’s endless rage.
“?O, let them cry. To them that ne’er have striven?
The truth that lies behind a word to find,?
To them the word’s right meaning was not given.?
They shall continue blind among the blind.?
But thou, O word, so clear, so strong, so pure,
?Thou sayest all which I for goal have taken.?
I give thee to the future! Thine secure
?When each at least unto himself shall waken.?
Comes it in sunshine? In the tempest’s thrill??
I cannot tell–but it the earth shall see!
?I am an Anarchist! Wherefore I will
?Not rule, and also ruled I will not be!?
?
JOHN HENRY MACKAY.

THE history of human growth and development is at the same time the history of the terrible struggle of every new idea heralding the approach of a brighter dawn. In its tenacious hold on tradition, the Old has never hesitated to make use of the foulest and cruelest means to stay the advent of the New, in whatever form or period the latter may have asserted itself. Nor need we retrace our steps into the distant past to realize the enormity of opposition, difficulties, and hardships placed in the path of every progressive idea. The rack, the thumbscrew, and the knout are still with us; so are the convict’s garb and the social wrath, all conspiring against the spirit that is serenely marching on.

Anarchism could not hope to escape the fate of all other ideas of innovation. Indeed, as the most revolutionary and uncompromising innovator, Anarchism must needs meet with the combined ignorance and venom of the world it aims to reconstruct.

To deal even remotely with all that is being said and done against Anarchism would necessitate the writing of a whole volume. I shall therefore meet only two of the principal objections. In so doing, I shall attempt to elucidate what Anarchism really stands for.

The strange phenomenon of the opposition to Anarchism is that it brings to light the relation between so-called intelligence and ignorance. And yet this is not so very strange when we consider the relativity of all things. The ignorant mass has in its favor that it makes no pretense of knowledge or tolerance. Acting, as it always does, by mere impulse, its reasons are like those of a child. “Why?” “Because.” Yet the opposition of the uneducated to Anarchism deserves the same consideration as that of the intelligent man.

What, then, are the objections? First, Anarchism is impractical, though a beautiful ideal. Second, Anarchism stands for violence and destruction, hence it must be repudiated as vile and dangerous. Both the intelligent man and the ignorant mass judge not from a thorough knowledge of the subject, but either from hearsay or false interpretation.

A practical scheme, says Oscar Wilde, is either one already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under the existing conditions; but it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to, and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish. The true criterion of the practical, therefore, is not whether the latter can keep intact the wrong or foolish; rather is it whether the scheme has vitality enough to leave the stagnant waters of the old, and build, as well as sustain, new life. In the light of this conception, Anarchism is indeed practical. More than any other idea, it is helping to do away with the wrong and foolish; more than any other idea, it is building and sustaining new life.

The emotions of the ignorant man are continuously kept at a pitch by the most blood-curdling stories about Anarchism. Not a thing too outrageous to be employed against this philosophy and its exponents. Therefore Anarchism represents to the unthinking what the proverbial bad man does to the child,–a black monster bent on swallowing everything; in short, destruction and violence.

Destruction and violence! How is the ordinary man to know that the most violent element in society is ignorance; that its power of destruction is the very thing Anarchism is combating? Nor is he aware that Anarchism, whose roots, as it were, are part of nature’s forces, destroys, not healthful tissue, but parasitic growths that feed on the life’s essence of society. It is merely clearing the soil from weeds and sagebrush, that it may eventually bear healthy fruit.

Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think. The widespread mental indolence, so prevalent in society, proves this to be only too true. Rather than to go to the bottom of any given idea, to examine into its origin and meaning, most people will either condemn it altogether, or rely on some superficial or prejudicial definition of non-essentials.

Anarchism urges man to think, to investigate, to analyze every proposition; but that the brain capacity of the average reader be not taxed too much, I also shall begin with a definition, and then elaborate on the latter.

ANARCHISM: –The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.

The new social order rests, of course, on the materialistic basis of life; but while all Anarchists agree that the main evil today is an economic one, they maintain that the solution of that evil can be brought about only through the consideration of every phase of life,–individual, as well as the collective; the internal, as well as the external phases.

A thorough perusal of the history of human development will disclose two elements in bitter conflict with each other; elements that are only now beginning to be understood, not as foreign to each other, but as closely related and truly harmonious, if only placed in proper environment: the individual and social instincts. The individual and society have waged a relentless and bloody battle for ages, each striving for supremacy, because each was blind to the value and importance of the other. The individual and social instincts,–the one a most potent factor for individual endeavor, for growth, aspiration, self-realization; the other an equally potent factor for mutual helpfulness and social well-being.

The explanation of the storm raging within the individual, and between him and his surroundings, is not far to seek. The primitive man, unable to understand his being, much less the unity of all life, felt himself absolutely dependent on blind, hidden forces ever ready to mock and taunt him. Out of that attitude grew the religious concepts of man as a mere speck of dust dependent on superior powers on high, who can only be appeased by complete surrender. All the early sagas rest on that idea, which continues to be the Leitmotiv of the biblical tales dealing with the relation of man to God, to the State, to society. Again and again the same motif, man is nothing, the powers are everything. Thus Jehovah would only endure man on condition of complete surrender. Man can have all the glories of the earth, but he must not become conscious of himself. The State, society, and moral laws all sing the same refrain: Man can have all the glories of the earth, but he must not become conscious of himself.

Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings to man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and society are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fulfilled only through man’s subordination. Anarchism is therefore the teacher of the unity of life; not merely in nature, but in man. There is no conflict between the individual and the social instincts, any more than there is between the heart and the lungs: the one the receptacle of a precious life essence, the other the repository of the element that keeps the essence pure and strong. The individual is the heart of society, conserving the essence of social life; society is the lungs which are distributing the element to keep the life essence–that is, the individual–pure and strong.

“The one thing of value in the world,” says Emerson, “is the active soul; this every man contains within him. The soul active sees absolute truth and utters truth and creates.” In other words, the individual instinct is the thing of value in the world. It is the true soul that sees and creates the truth alive, out of which is to come a still greater truth, the re-born social soul.

Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony. To accomplish that unity, Anarchism has declared war on the pernicious influences which have so far prevented the harmonious blending of individual and social instincts, the individual and society.

Religion, the dominion of the human mind; Property, the dominion of human needs; and Government, the dominion of human conduct, represent the stronghold of man’s enslavement and all the horrors it entails. Religion! How it dominates man’s mind, how it humiliates and degrades his soul. God is everything, man is nothing, says religion. But out of that nothing God has created a kingdom so despotic, so tyrannical, so cruel, so terribly exacting that naught but gloom and tears and blood have ruled the world since gods began. Anarchism rouses man to rebellion against this black monster. Break your mental fetters, says Anarchism to man, for not until you think and judge for yourself will you get rid of the dominion of darkness, the greatest obstacle to all progress.

Property, the dominion of man’s needs, the denial of the right to satisfy his needs. Time was when property claimed a divine right, when it came to man with the same refrain, even as religion, “Sacrifice! Abnegate! Submit!” The spirit of Anarchism has lifted man from his prostrate position. He now stands erect, with his face toward the light. He has learned to see the insatiable, devouring, devastating nature of property, and he is preparing to strike the monster dead.

“Property is robbery,” said the great French Anarchist Proudhon. Yes, but without risk and danger to the robber. Monopolizing the accumulated efforts of man, property has robbed him of his birthright, and has turned him loose a pauper and an outcast. Property has not even the time-worn excuse that man does not create enough to satisfy all needs. The A B C student of economics knows that the productivity of labor within the last few decades far exceeds normal demand. But what are normal demands to an abnormal institution? The only demand that property recognizes is its own gluttonous appetite for greater wealth, because wealth means power; the power to subdue, to crush, to exploit, the power to enslave, to outrage, to degrade. America is particularly boastful of her great power, her enormous national wealth. Poor America, of what avail is all her wealth, if the individuals comprising the nation are wretchedly poor? If they live in squalor, in filth, in crime, with hope and joy gone, a homeless, soilless army of human prey.

It is generally conceded that unless the returns of any business venture exceed the cost, bankruptcy is inevitable. But those engaged in the business of producing wealth have not yet learned even this simple lesson. Every year the cost of production in human life is growing larger (50,000 killed, 100,000 wounded in America last year); the returns to the masses, who help to create wealth, are ever getting smaller. Yet America continues to be blind to the inevitable bankruptcy of our business of production. Nor is this the only crime of the latter. Still more fatal is the crime of turning the producer into a mere particle of a machine, with less will and decision than his master of steel and iron. Man is being robbed not merely of the products of his labor, but of the power of free initiative, of originality, and the interest in, or desire for, the things he is making.

Real wealth consists in things of utility and beauty, in things that help to create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring to live in. But if man is doomed to wind cotton around a spool, or dig coal, or build roads for thirty years of his life, there can be no talk of wealth. What he gives to the world is only gray and hideous things, reflecting a dull and hideous existence,–too weak to live, too cowardly to die. Strange to say, there are people who extol this deadening method of centralized production as the proudest achievement of our age. They fail utterly to realize that if we are to continue in machine subserviency, our slavery is more complete than was our bondage to the King. They do not want to know that centralization is not only the death-knell of liberty, but also of health and beauty, of art and science, all these being impossible in a clock-like, mechanical atmosphere.

Anarchism cannot but repudiate such a method of production: its goal is the freest possible expression of all the latent powers of the individual. Oscar Wilde defines a perfect personality as “one who develops under perfect conditions, who is not wounded, maimed, or in danger.” A perfect personality, then, is only possible in a state of society where man is free to choose the mode of work, the conditions of work, and the freedom to work. One to whom the making of a table, the building of a house, or the tilling of the soil, is what the painting is to the artist and the discovery to the scientist,–the result of inspiration, of intense longing, and deep interest in work as a creative force. That being the ideal of Anarchism, its economic arrangements must consist of voluntary productive and distributive associations, gradually developing into free communism, as the best means of producing with the least waste of human energy. Anarchism, however, also recognizes the right of the individual, or numbers of individuals, to arrange at all times for other forms of work, in harmony with their tastes and desires.

Such free display of human energy being possible only under complete individual and social freedom, Anarchism directs its forces against the third and greatest foe of all social equality; namely, the State, organized authority, or statutory law,–the dominion of human conduct.

Just as religion has fettered the human mind, and as property, or the monopoly of things, has subdued and stifled man’s needs, so has the State enslaved his spirit, dictating every phase of conduct. “All government in essence,” says Emerson, “is tyranny.” It matters not whether it is government by divine right or majority rule. In every instance its aim is the absolute subordination of the individual.

Referring to the American government, the greatest American Anarchist, David Thoreau, said:

“Government, what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instance losing its integrity; it has not the vitality and force of a single living man. Law never made man a whit more just; and by means of their respect for it, even the well disposed are daily made agents of injustice.”

Indeed, the keynote of government is injustice. With the arrogance and self-sufficiency of the King who could do no wrong, governments ordain, judge, condemn, and punish the most insignificant offenses, while maintaining themselves by the greatest of all offenses, the annihilation of individual liberty. Thus Ouida is right when she maintains that

“the State only aims at instilling those qualities in its public by which its demands are obeyed, and its exchequer is filled. Its highest attainment is the reduction of mankind to clockwork. In its atmosphere all those finer and more delicate liberties, which require treatment and spacious expansion, inevitably dry up and perish. The State requires a taxpaying machine in which there is no hitch, an exchequer in which there is never a deficit, and a public, monotonous, obedient, colorless, spiritless, moving humbly like a flock of sheep along a straight high road between two walls.”

Yet even a flock of sheep would resist the chicanery of the State, if it were not for the corruptive, tyrannical, and oppressive methods it employs to serve its purposes. Therefore Bakunin repudiates the State as synonymous with the surrender of the liberty of the individual or small minorities,–the destruction of social relationship, the curtailment, or complete denial even, of life itself, for its own aggrandizement. The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice.

In fact, there is hardly a modern thinker who does not agree that government, organized authority, or the State, is necessary only to maintain or protect property and monopoly. It has proven efficient in that function only.

Even George Bernard Shaw, who hopes for the miraculous from the State under Fabianism, nevertheless admits that “it is at present a huge machine for robbing and slave-driving of the poor by brute force.” This being the case, it is hard to see why the clever prefacer wishes to uphold the State after poverty shall have ceased to exist.

Unfortunately, there are still a number of people who continue in the fatal belief that government rests on natural laws, that it maintains social order and harmony, that it diminishes crime, and that it prevents the lazy man from fleecing his fellows. I shall therefore examine these contentions.

A natural law is that factor in man which asserts itself freely and spontaneously without any external force, in harmony with the requirements of nature. For instance, the demand for nutrition, for sex gratification, for light, air, and exercise, is a natural law. But its expression needs not the machinery of government, needs not the club, the gun, the handcuff, or the prison. To obey such laws, if we may call it obedience, requires only spontaneity and free opportunity. That governments do not maintain themselves through such harmonious factors is proven by the terrible array of violence, force, and coercion all governments use in order to live. Thus Blackstone is right when he says, “Human laws are invalid, because they are contrary to the laws of nature.”

Unless it be the order of Warsaw after the slaughter of thousands of people, it is difficult to ascribe to governments any capacity for order or social harmony. Order derived through submission and maintained by terror is not much of a safe guaranty; yet that is the only “order” that governments have ever maintained. True social harmony grows naturally out of solidarity of interests. In a society where those who always work never have anything, while those who never work enjoy everything, solidarity of interests is non-existent; hence social harmony is but a myth. The only way organized authority meets this grave situation is by extending still greater privileges to those who have already monopolized the earth, and by still further enslaving the disinherited masses. Thus the entire arsenal of government–laws, police, soldiers, the courts, legislatures, prisons,–is strenuously engaged in “harmonizing” the most antagonistic elements in society.

The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.

Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statutes can only increase, but never do away with, crime. What does society, as it exists today, know of the process of despair, the poverty, the horrors, the fearful struggle the human soul must pass on its way to crime and degradation. Who that knows this terrible process can fail to see the truth in these words of Peter Kropotkin:

“Those who will hold the balance between the benefits thus attributed to law and punishment and the degrading effect of the latter on humanity; those who will estimate the torrent of depravity poured abroad in human society by the informer, favored by the Judge even, and paid for in clinking cash by governments, under the pretext of aiding to unmask crime; those who will go within prison walls and there see what human beings become when deprived of liberty, when subjected to the care of brutal keepers, to coarse, cruel words, to a thousand stinging, piercing humiliations, will agree with us that the entire apparatus of prison and punishment is an abomination which ought to be brought to an end.”

The deterrent influence of law on the lazy man is too absurd to merit consideration. If society were only relieved of the waste and expense of keeping a lazy class, and the equally great expense of the paraphernalia of protection this lazy class requires, the social tables would contain an abundance for all, including even the occasional lazy individual. Besides, it is well to consider that laziness results either from special privileges, or physical and mental abnormalities. Our present insane system of production fosters both, and the most astounding phenomenon is that people should want to work at all now. Anarchism aims to strip labor of its deadening, dulling aspect, of its gloom and compulsion. It aims to make work an instrument of joy, of strength, of color, of real harmony, so that the poorest sort of a man should find in work both recreation and hope.

To achieve such an arrangement of life, government, with its unjust, arbitrary, repressive measures, must be done away with. At best it has but imposed one single mode of life upon all, without regard to individual and social variations and needs. In destroying government and statutory laws, Anarchism proposes to rescue the self-respect and independence of the individual from all restraint and invasion by authority. Only in freedom can man grow to his full stature. Only in freedom will he learn to think and move, and give the very best in him. Only in freedom will he realize the true force of the social bonds which knit men together, and which are the true foundation of a normal social life.

But what about human nature? Can it be changed? And if not, will it endure under Anarchism?

Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet, how can any one speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed?

John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?

Freedom, expansion, opportunity, and, above all, peace and repose, alone can teach us the real dominant factors of human nature and all its wonderful possibilities.

Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.

This is not a wild fancy or an aberration of the mind. It is the conclusion arrived at by hosts of intellectual men and women the world over; a conclusion resulting from the close and studious observation of the tendencies of modern society: individual liberty and economic equality, the twin forces for the birth of what is fine and true in man.

As to methods. Anarchism is not, as some may suppose, a theory of the future to be realized through divine inspiration. It is a living force in the affairs of our life, constantly creating new conditions. The methods of Anarchism therefore do not comprise an iron-clad program to be carried out under all circumstances. Methods must grow out of the economic needs of each place and clime, and of the intellectual and temperamental requirements of the individual. The serene, calm character of a Tolstoy will wish different methods for social reconstruction than the intense, overflowing personality of a Michael Bakunin or a Peter Kropotkin. Equally so it must be apparent that the economic and political needs of Russia will dictate more drastic measures than would England or America. Anarchism does not stand for military drill and uniformity; it does, however, stand for the spirit of revolt, in whatever form, against everything that hinders human growth. All Anarchists agree in that, as they also agree in their opposition to the political machinery as a means of bringing about the great social change.

“All voting,” says Thoreau, “is a sort of gaming, like checkers, or backgammon, a playing with right and wrong; its obligation never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right thing is doing nothing for it. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.” A close examination of the machinery of politics and its achievements will bear out the logic of Thoreau.

What does the history of parliamentarism show? Nothing but failure and defeat, not even a single reform to ameliorate the economic and social stress of the people. Laws have been passed and enactments made for the improvement and protection of labor. Thus it was proven only last year that Illinois, with the most rigid laws for mine protection, had the greatest mine disasters. In States where child labor laws prevail, child exploitation is at its highest, and though with us the workers enjoy full political opportunities, capitalism has reached the most brazen zenith.

Even were the workers able to have their own representatives, for which our good Socialist politicians are clamoring, what chances are there for their honesty and good faith? One has but to bear in mind the process of politics to realize that its path of good intentions is full of pitfalls: wire-pulling, intriguing, flattering, lying, cheating; in fact, chicanery of every description, whereby the political aspirant can achieve success. Added to that is a complete demoralization of character and conviction, until nothing is left that would make one hope for anything from such a human derelict. Time and time again the people were foolish enough to trust, believe, and support with their last farthing aspiring politicians, only to find themselves betrayed and cheated.

It may be claimed that men of integrity would not become corrupt in the political grinding mill. Perhaps not; but such men would be absolutely helpless to exert the slightest influence in behalf of labor, as indeed has been shown in numerous instances. The State is the economic master of its servants. Good men, if such there be, would either remain true to their political faith and lose their economic support, or they would cling to their economic master and be utterly unable to do the slightest good. The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue.

The political superstition is still holding sway over the hearts and minds of the masses, but the true lovers of liberty will have no more to do with it. Instead, they believe with Stirner that man has as much liberty as he is willing to take. Anarchism therefore stands for direct action, the open defiance of, and resistance to, all laws and restrictions, economic, social, and moral. But defiance and resistance are illegal. Therein lies the salvation of man. Everything illegal necessitates integrity, self-reliance, and courage. In short, it calls for free, independent spirits, for “men who are men, and who have a bone in their backs which you cannot pass your hand through.”

Universal suffrage itself owes its existence to direct action. If not for the spirit of rebellion, of the defiance on the part of the American revolutionary fathers, their posterity would still wear the King’s coat. If not for the direct action of a John Brown and his comrades, America would still trade in the flesh of the black man. True, the trade in white flesh is still going on; but that, too, will have to be abolished by direct action. Trade-unionism, the economic arena of the modern gladiator, owes its existence to direct action. It is but recently that law and government have attempted to crush the trade-union movement, and condemned the exponents of man’s right to organize to prison as conspirators. Had they sought to assert their cause through begging, pleading, and compromise, trade-unionism would today be a negligible quantity. In France, in Spain, in Italy, in Russia, nay even in England (witness the growing rebellion of English labor unions), direct, revolutionary, economic action has become so strong a force in the battle for industrial liberty as to make the world realize the tremendous importance of labor’s power. The General Strike, the supreme expression of the economic consciousness of the workers, was ridiculed in America but a short time ago. Today every great strike, in order to win, must realize the importance of the solidaric general protest.

Direct action, having proven effective along economic lines, is equally potent in the environment of the individual. There a hundred forces encroach upon his being, and only persistent resistance to them will finally set him free. Direct action against the authority in the shop, direct action against the authority of the law, direct action against the invasive, meddlesome authority of our moral code, is the logical, consistent method of Anarchism.

Will it not lead to a revolution? Indeed, it will. No real social change has ever come about without a revolution. People are either not familiar with their history, or they have not yet learned that revolution is but thought carried into action.

Anarchism, the great leaven of thought, is today permeating every phase of human endeavor. Science, art, literature, the drama, the effort for economic betterment, in fact every individual and social opposition to the existing disorder of things, is illumined by the spiritual light of Anarchism. It is the philosophy of the sovereignty of the individual. It is the theory of social harmony. It is the great, surging, living truth that is reconstructing the world, and that will usher in the Dawn.

Mark Twain: Oh Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds

Posted on August 3, 2010 by NMT

“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be Thou near them!

“With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe.

“O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells;

“help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead;

“help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain;

“help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire;

“help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief;

“help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it

“— for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord,

“blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!

“We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts.

“Amen.”

-from Mark Twain’s The War Prayer

Beyond MLK worship: Beyond Vietnam

Posted on January 15, 2010 by NMT

“A time comes when silence is betrayal. That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.” —
Martin Luther King Beyond Vietnam: Time to Break the Silence
Full text of 1967 speech below.

Riverside Church, New York City, 4 April 1967

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines:

“A time comes when silence is betrayal.”

That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation’s history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don’t mix, they say. Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.

“I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.”

In the light of such tragic misunderstandings, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church — the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate — leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.

I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia.

Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they can play in a successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reason to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.

Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the NLF, but rather to my fellow Americans, who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.

The Importance of Vietnam

Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

“For the sake of those boys,
for the sake of this governent,
for the sake of hundreds of thousands
trembling under our violence,
I cannot be silent.”

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years — especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

For those who ask the question, “Aren’t you a civil rights leader?” and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: “To save the soul of America.” We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath —
America will be!

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

“Surely we must see
that the men we supported
pressed them to their violence.”

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission — a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for “the brotherhood of man.” This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men — for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the “Vietcong” or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?

Finally, as I try to delineate for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

Strange Liberators

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond to compassion my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them too because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

“Before long they must know
that their government has sent them
into a struggle among Vietnamese,
and the more sophisticated surely realize
that we are on the side of the wealthy
and the secure
while we create hell for the poor.”

They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation, and before the Communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its re-conquest of her former colony.

Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not “ready” for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination, and a government that had been established not by China (for whom the Vietnamese have no great love) but by clearly indigenous forces that included some Communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.

For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to re-colonize Vietnam.

Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of the reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at re-colonization.

After the French were defeated it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva agreements. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators — our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to discuss reunification with the north. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by U.S. influence and then by increasing numbers of U.S. troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem’s methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real change — especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy — and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us – not their fellow Vietnamese — the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go — primarily women and children and the aged.

“Somehow this madness must cease.”

They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one “Vietcong-inflicted” injury. So far we may have killed a million of them — mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation’s only non-Communist revolutionary political force — the Unified Buddhist church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators?

Now there is little left to build on — save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call fortified hamlets. The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these? Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These too are our brothers.

Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front — that strangely anonymous group we call VC or Communists? What must they think of us in America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the south? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of “aggression from the north” as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.

“We must continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam.”

How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent Communist and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will have no part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them — the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again and then shore it up with the power of new violence?

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

So, too, with Hanoi. In the north, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which would have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again.

When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered. Also it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva agreements concerning foreign troops, and they remind us that they did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.

“When machines and computers,
profit motives and property rights
are considered more important than people,
the giant triplets of
racism,
materialism
and militarism
are incapable of being conquered.”

Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard of the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the north. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor weak nation more than eight thousand miles away from its shores.

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless on Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor.

This Madness Must Cease

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words:

“Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.”

“A nation that continues
year after year
to spend more money on military defense
than on programs of social uplift
is approaching spiritual death.”

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play.

The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways.

In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war. I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:

• End all bombing in North and South Vietnam

• Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.

• Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos.

• Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam government.

• Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva agreement.

Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We most provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country if necessary.

Protesting The War

Meanwhile we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible.

As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nation’s role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

“If we do not act
we shall surely be dragged down
the long and shameful corridors of time
reserved for those who possess
power without compassion,
might without morality,
and strength without sight.”

There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy-and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military “advisors” in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said,

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken — the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway.

True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.”

It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.”

The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.”

This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a Communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

The People Are Important

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.” We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain.”

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept – so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force – has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John:

Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.

Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says :

“Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.”

We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The “tide in the affairs of men” does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: “Too late.”

There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on…” We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.

We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world – a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter – but beautiful – struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:

Once to every man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God’s new Messiah,
Off’ring each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever
Twixt that darkness and that light.
Though the cause of evil prosper,
Yet ’tis truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold,
And upon the throne be wrong:
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch above his own.

Identity of CIA bomb victims spill forth

Posted on January 4, 2010 by Eric Verlo

US forces in Afghanistan suffered an unprecedented setback this weekend when a suicide bomber was able to blow to smithereens a gathering of CIA operatives in an outpost in Khost Province. Seven agents were killed and six injured, and a great tragedy is that these covert deaths, like that of the security contractor killed with them, are not counted as official casualties of war, to weigh against the public conscience for us to wonder, was it worth it? These were professional killers and torturers whose names are now withheld to protect their families.

But some Americans –God bless them– will not be denied the deification of their downed warriors, and so some families have gone public about the loss of their mercenary kin. Thus we have names, and Facebook memorials, to the men and women who commit the clandestine crimes for which the rest of the world holds us accountable. But first, a word about what they were doing.

Forward Operating Base Chapman caught my attention because that’s the kind of military post which protects the celebrated school building projects of Greg Mortenson, and Khost Province is one of his territories. It turns out that the US Army is also busy [re]-building schools, and boasts 53 in Khost. Also, for reasons of deteriorating security, FOB Chapman was no longer housing US military, but instead was strictly for private firms contracted to the reconstruction, except now journalists are at liberty to say that the camp was always known to be “not regular” — code for CIA.

“Although Chapman was officially a camp for civilians involved in reconstruction, it was well-known locally as a CIA base. Over the past couple of years, it focused on gathering information on so-called high-value targets for drone attacks, the unmanned missile planes that have played a growing role in taking out suspected terrorists since President Barack Obama took office. The Haqqanis were their principal target.

” ‘That far forward they were almost certainly from the CIA’s paramilitary rather than analysts,’ said one agent.”

So FOB Chapman was used for a drone command post. Not controlling drones, but gathering intelligence about where to target their missiles. I’d be curious that what had been an “underground gym” for US soldiers, where the dozen CIA officers were meeting their informant/surprise-bomber, wasn’t being put to an altogether more menacing function by the CIA. Obviously on this particular occasion it was a briefing room/wake.

It’s conjectured that the CIA at FOB Chapman was targeted because the local Taliban had suffered one too many CIA drone attacks. Other accusations emerge that the CIA had recently killed Afghan detainees while in custody, in their effort to break the Haqqani network. One reporter’s source phrased it: “Those guys have recently been on a big Haqqani binge.”

The CIA is not releasing the name of the bomber, reportedly an informant “candidate,” but strangely his name is being reported in the Arabic press. He was a Jordanian doctor named Khalil Abu Hammam Mellal Al-Balawi, of the Beer Al-Saba’a family, codenamed “Abu Dajana Al-Kharasani,” a supervisor on the Al-Hisba internet forums, where so-called official al-Qaeda communications are regularly transmitted. His identity might explain how a visit with this “informant” warranted the attendance of a dozen agents, including a high ranking officer from Kabul and the Khost station chief.

The station chief was reported to have been an agent in Afghanistan for 14 years, since the days of the so-called Alec Station which was tasked with tracking the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. She was a loving mother of three, so it’s possible her identity is being concealed until her family can be extracted from the region.

The first agent to be identified publicly was Harold Brown Jr., 37, of Bolton, Mass., whose father thought he worked for the State Department. Before the “State Department,” Brown worked for Science Applications International Corp.

The next to be identified was Scott Michael Roberson, 39, of Akron, Ohio. He was a policeman when he wasn’t a CIA security officer. Robertson co-founded the Metro Atlanta Police Emerald Society and was a member of the Iron Pigs, a national motorcycle club for police and firefighters.

Another of the CIA agents wasn’t American at all, but a member of the Jordanian royal family. The body of Capitan As-Sharif Ali bin Zeid Al Awn has been returned to Jordan with much pomp and ceremony, without an official report of the incidence of his death, the family unable to explain what he was doing in Afghanistan, except to deny accusations that he was employed by the CIA.

The lone non-CIA victim was security contractor and former Navy SEAL, Jeremy Jason Wise, 35, of Virginia Beach. Wrote the WSJ: “Today, the CIA and President Obama acknowledged that seven of those killed were CIA agents. No one would say who employed the eighth American.”

(Except he was really the seventh American, because one of the dead was a Jordanian.)

UPDATE: It’s now revealed that Jeremy Wise was employed by Xe/Blackwater, who admit now that two of the CIA victims were Blackwater.

With suicide bombers all over the news, from the successful to the pantywaist, as blogs spill over with nuke-em-all comments which reveal Americans seem perfectly comfortable with the idea that peoples are collectively accountable for the deeds of criminals among them.

Or the deeds of insurgents aka freedom fighters, about whom you or I might disagree.

US Blackwater goons for example, have been let off the hook for the Nisour Square atrocity in Iraq. According to our neoliberal world order, Iraq should be able to track miscreants with drones, and since we refuse to bring them to justice, lay waste entire American neighborhoods and schools if informants report they are nearby.

I’ve certainly always argued that Americans are all of us responsible for the crimes our government is committing. Even with our combatant criminals killed in battle, I’m not sure that the people who cheered them on don’t still owe their victims responsibility.

Stop recycling your aluminum

Posted on December 15, 2009 by Eric Verlo

It’s been a foregone conclusion among eco-minded folk that foremost of the consumer waste, aluminum should be recycled. We don’t –but it comes from a curious development: we’ve run out. For some time now, we just haven’t had any aluminum to recycle. Can you think of a food item of any value that comes packaged in aluminum? Evidently it escapes us. Now we don’t even have to put that bin out to the curb. Virtually the same can be said for glass and hard plastics. Where possible, we STOPCYCLE.

Vaneigem on energy as commodity

Posted on December 6, 2009 by Eric Verlo

NMT’s in-house Situationist has been conceptualizing a way forward well expressed in this May 2009 interview of Raoul Vaneigem:
“We are being “offered” biofuels on the condition we agree to transgenic rapeseed farming. Eco-tourism will accelerate the plundering of our biosphere. Windmill farms are being built without any advantage to the consumers. Those are the areas where intervention is possible. Natural resources belong to us, they are free, they must be made to serve the freedom of life. It will be up to the communities to secure their own energy and food independence so as to free themselves from the control of the multinationals and their state vassals everywhere. Claiming natural power for our use means reclaiming our own existence first. Only creativity will rid us of work. …

Freeness is the only absolute weapon capable of shattering the mighty self-destruction machine set in motion by consumer society, whose implosion is still releasing, like a deadly gas, bottom-line mentality, cupidity, financial gain, profit, and predation. Museums and culture should be free, for sure, but so should public services, currently prey to the scamming multinationals and states. Free trains, buses, subways, free healthcare, free schools, free water, air, electricity, free power, all through alternative networks to be set up. As freeness spreads, new solidarity networks will eradicate the stranglehold of the commodity. This is because life is a free gift, a continuous creation that the market’s vile profiteering alone deprives us of.”
–Raoul Vaneigem, 2009

Interviewed by Hans Ulrich Obrist, for e-flux, Journal #6. See original article or the copy mirrored below:

In Conversation with Raoul Vaneigem

Hans Ulrich Obrist: I just visited Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, who have written an appeal to Barack Obama. What would your appeal and/or advice be to Obama?

Raoul Vaneigem: I refuse to cultivate any relationship whatsoever with people of power. I agree with the Zapatistas from Chiapas who want nothing to do with either the state or its masters, the multinational mafias. I call for civil disobedience so that local communities can form, coordinate, and begin self-producing natural power, a more natural form of farming, and public services that are finally liberated from the scams of government by the Left or the Right. On the other hand, I welcome the appeal by Chamoiseau, Glissant, and their friends for the creation of an existence in which the poetry of a life rediscovered will put an end to the deadly stranglehold of the commodity.

HUO: Could we talk about your beginnings? How did your participation in situationism begin, and what was your fundamental contribution? At the outset of your relationship with the SI, there was the figure of Henri Lefebvre. What did he mean to you at the time? Why did you decide to send him poetic essays?

RV: I would first like to clarify that situationism is an ideology that the situationists were unanimous in rejecting. The term “situationist” was ever only a token of identification. Its particularity kept us from being mistaken for the throngs of ideologues. I have nothing in common with the spectacular recuperation of a project that, in my case, has remained revolutionary throughout. My participation in a group that has now disappeared was an important moment in my personal evolution, an evolution I have personally pressed on with in the spirit of the situationist project at its most revolutionary. My own radicality absolves me from any label. I grew up in an environment in which our fighting spirit was fueled by working class consciousness and a rather festive conception of existence. I found Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life captivating. When La Somme et le reste [The Sum and the Remainder] was published, I sent him an essay of sorts on “poetry and revolution” that was an attempt to unify radical concepts, Lettrist language, music, and film imagery by crediting them all with the common virtue of making the people’s blood boil. Lefebvre kindly responded by putting me in touch with Guy Debord who immediately invited me to Paris. The two of us had very different temperaments, but we would agree over a period of nearly ten years on the need to bring consumer society to an end and to found a new society on the principle of self-management, where life supersedes survival and the existential angst that it generates.

HUO: Which situationist projects remain unrealized?

RV: Psychogeography, the construction of situations, the superseding of predatory behavior. The radicality, which, notwithstanding some lapses, never ceased to motivate us, remains a source of inspiration to this day. Its effects are just beginning to manifest themselves in the autonomous groups that are now coming to grips with the collapse of financial capitalism.

HUO: The Situationist International defined the situationist as someone who commits her- or himself to the construction of situations. What were those situations for you, concretely? How would you define the situationist project in 2009?

RV: By its very style of living and thinking, our group was already sketching out a situation, like a beachhead active within enemy territory. The military metaphor is questionable, but it does convey our will to liberate daily life from the control and stranglehold of an economy based on the profitable exploitation of man. We formed a “group-at-risk” that was conscious of the hostility of the dominant world, of the need for radical rupture, and of the danger of giving in to the paranoia typical of minds under siege. By showing its limits and its weaknesses, the situationist experience can also be seen as a critical meditation on the new type of society sketched out by the Paris Commune, by the Makhnovist movement and the Republic of Councils wiped out by Lenin and Trotsky, by the libertarian communities in Spain later smashed by the Communist Party. The situationist project is not about what happens once consumer society is rejected and a genuinely human society has emerged. Rather, it illuminates now how lifestyle can supersede survival, predatory behavior, power, trade and the death-reflex.

HUO: You and Guy Debord are the main protagonists of the situationist movement. How do you see Debord’s role and your role?

RV: Not as roles. That is precisely what situationism in its most ridiculous version aims at: reducing us to cardboard cut-outs that it can then set up against one another according to the spectacle’s standard operating procedure. I am simply the spokesman, among others, of a radical consciousness. I just do what I can to see that resistance to market exploitation is transformed into an offensive of life, and that an art of living sweeps away the ruins of oppression.

HUO: What were your reasons for resigning from the group?

RV: Following the occupation movements of May 1968, we knew that some recuperation was afoot. We were familiar with the mechanisms of alienation that would falsify our ideas and fit them neatly into the cultural puzzle. It became clear to us, during the last conference in Venice, that we had failed to shatter those mechanisms, that in fact they were shattering us from the inside. The group was crumbling, the Venice conference was demonstrating its increasing uselessness, and the only answers put forward were commensurate with the self-parody we had fallen into. Dissension intensified to the point of paranoid denunciation: of betrayals of radicality, of breaches of revolutionary spirit, of dereliction of conscience. Those times of catharsis and anathema are now long past, and it might be useful to examine how it is that we sowed the seeds of failure for which the group ended up paying such a heavy price. The shipwreck, however, did not indiscriminately sweep away to the shores of oblivion all of us who participated in the adventure. The group vanished in such a way as to allow the individuals to either consolidate their radicality, disown it, or lapse into the imposture of radicalism. I have attempted to analyze our experimental adventure in Entre le deuil du monde et la joie de vivre [Between Mourning the World and Exuberant Life].

HUO: You have written a lot on life, not survival. What is the difference?

RV: Survival is budgeted life. The system of exploitation of nature and man, starting in the Middle Neolithic with intensive farming, caused an involution in which creativity—a quality specific to humans—was supplanted by work, by the production of a covetous power. Creative life, as had begun to unfold during the Paleolithic, declined and gave way to a brutish struggle for subsistence. From then on, predation, which defines animal behavior, became the generator of all economic mechanisms.

HUO: Today, more than forty years after May ‘68, how do you feel life and society have evolved?

RV: We are witnessing the collapse of financial capitalism. This was easily predictable. Even among economists, where one finds even more idiots than in the political sphere, a number had been sounding the alarm for a decade or so. Our situation is paradoxical: never in Europe have the forces of repression been so weakened, yet never have the exploited masses been so passive. Still, insurrectional consciousness always sleeps with one eye open. The arrogance, incompetence, and powerlessness of the governing classes will eventually rouse it from its slumber, as will the progression in hearts and minds of what was most radical about May 1968.

HUO: Your new book takes us on a trip “between mourning the world and exuberant life.” You revisit May ‘68. What is left of May ‘68? Has it all been appropriated?

RV: Even if we are today seeing recycled ideologies and old religious infirmities being patched up in a hurry and tossed out to feed a general despair, which our ruling wheelers and dealers cash in on, they cannot conceal for long the shift in civilization revealed by May 1968. The break with patriarchal values is final. We are moving toward the end of the exploitation of nature, of work, of trade, of predation, of separation from the self, of sacrifice, of guilt, of the forsaking of happiness, of the fetishizing of money, of power, of hierarchy, of contempt for and fear of women, of the misleading of children, of intellectual dominion, of military and police despotism, of religions, of ideologies, of repression and the deadly resolutions of psychic tensions. This is not a fact I am describing, but an ongoing process that simply requires from us increased vigilance, awareness, and solidarity with life. We have to reground ourselves in order to rebuild—on human foundations—a world that has been ruined by the inhumanity of the cult of the commodity.

HUO: What do you think of the current moment, in 2009? Jean-Pierre Page has just published Penser l’après crise [Thinking the After-Crisis]. For him, everything must be reinvented. He says that a new world is emerging now in which the attempt to establish a US-led globalization has been aborted.

RV: The agrarian economy of the Ancien Régime was a fossilized form that was shattered by the emerging free-trade economy, from the 1789 revolution on. Similarly, the stock-dabbling speculative capitalism whose debacle we now witness is about to give way to a capitalism reenergized by the production of non-polluting natural power, the return to use value, organic farming, a hastily patched-up public sector, and a hypocritical moralization of trade. The future belongs to self-managed communities that produce indispensable goods and services for all (natural power, biodiversity, education, health centers, transport, metal and textile production . . .). The idea is to produce for us, for our own use—that is to say, no longer in order to sell them—goods that we are currently forced to buy at market prices even though they were conceived and manufactured by workers. It is time to break with the laws of a political racketeering that is designing, together with its own bankruptcy, that of our existence.

HUO: Is this a war of a new kind, as Page claims? An economic Third World War?

RV: We are at war, yes, but this is not an economic war. It is a world war against the economy. Against the economy that for thousands of years has been based on the exploitation of nature and man. And against a patched-up capitalism that will try to save its skin by investing in natural power and making us pay the high price for that which—once the new means of production are created—will be free as the wind, the sun, and the energy of plants and soil. If we do not exit economic reality and create a human reality in its place, we will once again allow market barbarism to live on.

HUO: In his book Making Globalization Work, Joseph Stiglitz argues for a reorganization of globalization along the lines of greater justice, in order to shrink global imbalances. What do you think of globalization? How does one get rid of profit as motive and pursue well-being instead? How does one escape from the growth imperative?

RV: The moralization of profit is an illusion and a fraud. There must be a decisive break with an economic system that has consistently spread ruin and destruction while pretending, amidst constant destitution, to deliver a most hypothetical well-being. Human relations must supersede and cancel out commercial relations. Civil disobedience means disregarding the decisions of a government that embezzles from its citizens to support the embezzlements of financial capitalism. Why pay taxes to the bankster-state, taxes vainly used to try to plug the sinkhole of corruption, when we could allocate them instead to the self-management of free power networks in every local community? The direct democracy of self-managed councils has every right to ignore the decrees of corrupt parliamentary democracy. Civil disobedience towards a state that is plundering us is a right. It is up to us to capitalize on this epochal shift to create communities where desire for life overwhelms the tyranny of money and power. We need concern ourselves neither with government debt, which covers up a massive defrauding of the public interest, nor with that contrivance of profit they call “growth.” From now on, the aim of local communities should be to produce for themselves and by themselves all goods of social value, meeting the needs of all—authentic needs, that is, not needs prefabricated by consumerist propaganda.

HUO: Edouard Glissant distinguishes between globality and globalization. Globalization eradicates differences and homogenizes, while globality is a global dialogue that produces differences. What do you think of his notion of globality?

RV: For me, it should mean acting locally and globally through a federation of communities in which our pork-barreling, corrupt parliamentary democracy is made obsolete by direct democracy. Local councils will be set up to take measures in favor of the environment and the daily lives of everyone. The situationists have called this “creating situations that rule out any backtracking.”

HUO: Might the current miscarriages of globalization have the same dangerous effects as the miscarriages of the previous globalization from the ‘30s? You have written that what was already intolerable in ‘68 when the economy was booming is even more intolerable today. Do you think the current economic despair might push the new generations to rebel?

RV: The crisis of the ‘30s was an economic crisis. What we are facing today is an implosion of the economy as a management system. It is the collapse of market civilization and the emergence of human civilization. The current turmoil signals a deep shift: the reference points of the old patriarchal world are vanishing. Percolating instead, still just barely and confusedly, are the early markers of a lifestyle that is genuinely human, an alliance with nature that puts an end to its exploitation, rape, and plundering. The worst would be the unawareness of life, the absence of sentient intelligence, violence without conscience. Nothing is more profitable to the racketeering mafias than chaos, despair, suicidal rebellion, and the nihilism that is spread by mercenary greed, in which money, even devalued in a panic, remains the only value.

HUO: In his book Utopistics, Immanuel Wallerstein claims that our world system is undergoing a structural crisis. He predicts it will take another twenty to fifty years for a more democratic and egalitarian system to replace it. He believes that the future belongs to “demarketized,” free-of-charge institutions (on the model, say, of public libraries). So we must oppose the marketization of water and air.¹ What is your view?

RV: I do not know how long the current transformation will take (hopefully not too long, as I would like to witness it). But I have no doubt that this new alliance with the forces of life and nature will disseminate equality and freeness. We must go beyond our natural indignation at profit’s appropriation of our water, air, soil, environment, plants, animals. We must establish collectives that are capable of managing natural resources for the benefit of human interests, not market interests. This process of reappropriation that I foresee has a name: self-management, an experience attempted many times in hostile historical contexts. At this point, given the implosion of consumer society, it appears to be the only solution from both an individual and social point of view.

HUO: In your writing you have described the work imperative as an inhuman, almost animal condition. Do you consider market society to be a regression?

RV: As I mentioned above, evolution in the Paleolithic age meant the development of creativity—the distinctive trait of the human species as it breaks free from its original animality. But during the Neolithic, the osmotic relationship to nature loosened progressively, as intensive agriculture became based on looting and the exploitation of natural resources. It was also then that religion surfaced as an institution, society stratified, the reign of patriarchy began, of contempt for women, and of priests and kings with their stream of wars, destitution, and violence. Creation gave way to work, life to survival, jouissance to the animal predation that the appropriation economy confiscates, transcends, and spiritualizes. In this sense market civilization is indeed a regression in which technical progress supersedes human progress.

HUO: For you, what is a life in progress?

RV: Advancing from survival, the struggle for subsistence and predation to a new art of living, by recreating the world for the benefit of all.

HUO: My interviews often focus on the connections between art and architecture/urbanism, or literature and architecture/urbanism. Could you tell me about the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism?

RV: That was an idea more than a project. It was about the urgency of rebuilding our social fabric, so damaged by the stranglehold of the market. Such a rebuilding effort goes hand in hand with the rebuilding by individuals of their own daily existence. That is what psychogeography is really about: a passionate and critical deciphering of what in our environment needs to be destroyed, subjected to détournement, rebuilt.

HUO: In your view there is no such thing as urbanism?

RV: Urbanism is the ideological gridding and control of individuals and society by an economic system that exploits man and Earth and transforms life into a commodity. The danger in the self-built housing movement that is growing today would be to pay more attention to saving money than to the poetry of a new style of life.

HUO: How do you see cities in the year 2009? What kind of unitary urbanism for the third millennium? How do you envision the future of cities? What is your favorite city? You call Oarystis the city of desire. Oarystis takes its inspiration from the world of childhood and femininity. Nothing is static in Oarystis. John Cage once said that, like nature, “one never reaches a point of shapedness or finishedness. The situation is in constant unpredictable change.”² Do you agree with Cage?

RV: I love wandering through Venice and Prague. I appreciate Mantua, Rome, Bologna, Barcelona, and certain districts of Paris. I care less about architecture than about how much human warmth its beauty has been capable of sustaining. Even Brussels, so devastated by real estate developers and disgraceful architects (remember that in the dialect of Brussels, “architect” is an insult), has held on to some wonderful bistros. Strolling from one to the next gives Brussels a charm that urbanism has deprived it of altogether. The Oarystis I describe is not an ideal city or a model space (all models are totalitarian). It is a clumsy and naïve rough draft for an experiment I still hope might one day be undertaken—so I agree with John Cage. This is not a diagram, but an experimental proposition that the creation of an environment is one and the same as the creation by individuals of their own future.

HUO: Is Oarystis based on natural power, like the Metabolist cities? Rem Koolhaas and I are working on a book on the Japanese Metabolists. When I read your wonderful text on Oarystis, I was reminded of that movement from the 1960s, especially the floating cities, Kikutake’s water cities. Is Oarystis a Metabolist city?

RV: When Oarystis was published, the architect Philippe Rothier and Diane Hennebert, who ran Brussels’ Architecture Museum at the time, rightly criticized me for ignoring the imaginative projects of a new generation of builders. Now that the old world is collapsing, the fusion of free natural power, self-built housing techniques, and the reinvention of sensual form is going to be decisive. So it is useful to remember that technical inventiveness must stem from the reinvention of individual and collective life. That is to say, what allows for genuine rupture and ecstatic inventiveness is self-management: the management by individuals and councils of their own lives and environment through direct democracy. Let us entrust the boundless freedoms of the imaginary to childhood and the child within us.

HUO: Several years ago I interviewed Constant on New Babylon. What were your dialogues with Constant and how do you see New Babylon today?

RV: I never met Constant, who if I am not mistaken had been expelled before my own association with the SI. New Babylon’s flaw is that it privileges technology over the formation of an individual and collective way of life—the necessary basis of any architectural concept. An architectural project only interests me if it is about the construction of daily life.

HUO: How can the city of the future contribute to biodiversity?

RV: By drawing inspiration from Alphonse Allais, by encouraging the countryside to infiltrate the city. By creating zones of organic farming, gardens, vegetable plots, and farms inside urban space. After all, there are so many bureaucratic and parasitical buildings that can’t wait to give way to fertile, pleasant land that is useful to all. Architects and squatters, build us some hanging gardens where we can go for walks, eat, and live!

HUO: Oarystis is in the form of a maze, but it is also influenced by Venice and its public piazzas. Could you tell us about the form of Oarystis?

RV: Our internal space-time is maze-like. In it, each of us is at once Theseus, Ariadne, and Minotaur. Our dérives would gain in awareness, alertness, harmony, and happiness if only external space-time could offer meanders that could conjure up the possible courses of our futures, as an analogy or echo of sorts—one that favors games of life, and prevents their inversion into games of death.

HUO: Will museums be abolished? Could you discuss the amphitheater of memory? A protestation against oblivion?

RV: The museum suffers from being a closed space in which works waste away. Painting, sculpture, music belong to the street, like the façades that contemplate us and come back to life when we greet them. Like life and love, learning is a continuous flow that enjoys the privilege of irrigating and fertilizing our sentient intelligence. Nothing is more contagious than creation. But the past also carries with it all the dross of our inhumanity. What should we do with it? A museum of horrors, of the barbarism of the past? I attempted to answer the question of the “duty of memory” in Ni pardon, ni talion [Neither Forgiveness Nor Retribution]:

Most of the great men we were brought up to worship were nothing more than cynical or sly murderers. History as taught in schools and peddled by an overflowing and hagiographic literature is a model of falsehood; to borrow a fashionable term, it is negationist. It might not deny the reality of gas chambers, it might no longer erect monuments to the glory of Stalin, Mao or Hitler, but it persists in celebrating the brutish conqueror: Alexander, called the Great—whose mentor was Aristotle, it is proudly intoned—Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Napoleon, the throngs of generals, slaughterers of peoples, petty tyrants of the city or the state, torturer–judges, Javerts of every ilk, conniving diplomats, rapists and killers contracted by religions and ideologies; so much high renown carved from baseness, wickedness, and abjection. I am not suggesting we should unpave the avenues of official history and pave the side alleys instead. We are not in need of a purged history, but of a knowledge that scoops out into broad daylight facts that have been obscured, generation after generation, by the unceasing stratification of prejudice. I am not calling for a tribunal of the mind to begin condemning a bunch of undesirables who have been bizarrely put up on pedestals and celebrated in the motley pantheons of official memory. I just want to see the list of their crimes, the mention of their victims, the recollection of those who confronted them added to the inventory of their unsavory eulogies. I am not suggesting that the name of Francisco Ferrer wipe out that of his murderer, Alfonso XIII, but that at the very least everything be known of both. How dare textbooks still cultivate any respect for Bonaparte, responsible for the death of millions, for Louis XIV, slaughterer of peasants and persecutor of Protestants and freethinkers? For Calvin, murderer of Jacques Gruet and Michel Servet and dictator of Geneva, whose citizens, in tribute to Sébastien Castellion, would one day resolve to destroy the emblems and signs of such an unworthy worship? While Spain has now toppled the effigies of Francoism and rescinded the street names imposed by fascism, we somehow tolerate, towering in the sky of Paris, that Sacré-Coeur whose execrable architecture glorifies the crushing of the Commune. In Belgium there are still avenues and monuments honoring King Leopold II, one of the most cynical criminals of the nineteenth century, whose “red rubber” policy—denounced by Mark Twain, by Roger Casement (who paid for this with his life), by Edward Dene Morel, and more recently by Adam Hochschild—has so far bothered nary a conscience. This is a not a call to blow up his statues or to chisel away the inscriptions that celebrate him. This is a call to Belgian and Congolese citizens to cleanse and disinfect public places of this stain, the stain of one of the worst sponsors of colonial savagery. Paradoxically, I do tend to believe that forgetting can be productive, when it comes to the perpetrators of inhumanity. A forgetting that does not eradicate remembering, that does not blue-pencil memory, that is not an enforceable judgment, but that proceeds rather from a spontaneous feeling of revulsion, like a last-minute pivot to avoid dog droppings on the sidewalk. Once they have been exposed for their inhumanity, I wish for the instigators of past brutalities to be buried in the shroud of their wrongs. Let the memory of the crime obliterate the memory of the criminal.
³

HUO: Learning is deserting schools and going to the streets. Are streets becoming Thinkbelts? Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt used abandoned railroads for pop-up schools. What and where is learning today?

RV: Learning is permanent for all of us regardless of age. Curiosity feeds the desire to know. The call to teach stems from the pleasure of transmitting life: neither an imposition nor a power relation, it is pure gift, like life, from which it flows. Economic totalitarianism has ripped learning away from life, whose creative conscience it ought to be. We want to disseminate everywhere this poetry of knowledge that gives itself. Against school as a closed-off space (a barrack in the past, a slave market nowadays), we must invent nomadic learning.

HUO: How do you foresee the twenty-first-century university?

RV: The demise of the university: it will be liquidated by the quest for and daily practice of a universal learning of which it has always been but a pale travesty.

HUO: Could you tell me about the freeness principle (I am extremely interested in this; as a curator I have always believed museums should be free—Art for All, as Gilbert and George put it).

RV: Freeness is the only absolute weapon capable of shattering the mighty self-destruction machine set in motion by consumer society, whose implosion is still releasing, like a deadly gas, bottom-line mentality, cupidity, financial gain, profit, and predation. Museums and culture should be free, for sure, but so should public services, currently prey to the scamming multinationals and states. Free trains, buses, subways, free healthcare, free schools, free water, air, electricity, free power, all through alternative networks to be set up. As freeness spreads, new solidarity networks will eradicate the stranglehold of the commodity. This is because life is a free gift, a continuous creation that the market’s vile profiteering alone deprives us of.

HUO: Where is love in Oarystis?

RV: Everywhere. The love affair, as complex as it is simple, will serve as the building block for the new solidarity relations that sooner or later will supersede selfish calculation, competition, competitiveness, and predation, causes of our societies’ dehumanization.

HUO: Where is the city of the dead? In a forest rather than a cemetery?

RV: Yes, a forest, an auditorium in which the voices of the dead will speak amidst the lushness of nature, where life continuously creates itself anew.

HUO: Have you dreamt up other utopian cities apart from Oarystis? Or a concrete utopia in relation to the city?

RV: No, but I have not given up hope that such projects might mushroom and be realized one day, as we begin reconstructing a world devastated by the racketeering mafias.

HUO: In 1991 I founded a Robert Walser museum, a strollological museum, in Switzerland. I have always been fascinated by your notion of the stroll. Could you say something about your urban strolls with and without Debord? What about Walser’s? Have other strollologists inspired you?

RV: I hold Robert Walser in high regard, as many do. His lucidity and sense of dérive enchanted Kafka. I have always been fascinated by the long journey Hölderlin undertook following his break-up with Diotima. I admire Chatwin’s Songlines, in which he somehow manages to turn the most innocuous of walks into an intonation of the paths of fate, as though we were in the heart of the Australian bush. And I appreciate the strolls of Léon-Paul Fargue and the learning of Héron de Villefosse. My psychogeographic dérives with Guy Debord in Paris, Barcelona, Brussels, Beersel, and Antwerp were exceptional moments, combining theoretical speculation, sentient intelligence, the critical analysis of beings and places, and the pleasure of cheerful drinking. Our homeports were pleasant bistros with a warm atmosphere, havens where one was oneself because one felt in the air something of the authentic life, however fragile and short-lived. It was an identical mood that guided our wanderings through the streets, the lanes and the alleys, through the meanderings of a pleasure that our every step helped us gauge in terms of what it might take to expand and refine it just a little further. I have a feeling that the neighborhoods destroyed by the likes of Haussmann, Pompidou, and the real estate barbarians will one day be rebuilt by their inhabitants in the spirit of the joy and the life they once harbored.

HUO: What possibilities do you see for disalienation and détournement in 2009?

RV: This is a time of unprecedented chaos in material and moral conditions. Human values are going to have to compensate for the effects of the only value that has prevailed so far: money. But the implosion of financial totalitarianism means that this currency, which has so tripped us up, is now doomed to devaluation and a loss of all meaning. The absurdity of money is becoming concrete. It will gradually give way to new forms of exchange that will hasten its disappearance and lead to a gift economy.

HUO: What are the conditions for dialogue in 2009? Is there a way out of this system of isolation?

RV: Dialogue with power is neither possible nor desirable. Power has always acted unilaterally, by organizing chaos, by spreading fear, by forcing individuals and communities into selfish and blind withdrawal. As a matter of course, we will invent new solidarity networks and new intervention councils for the well-being of all of us and each of us, overriding the fiats of the state and its mafioso-political hierarchies. The voice of lived poetry will sweep away the last remaining echoes of a discourse in which words are in profit’s pay.

HUO: In your recent books you discuss your existence and temporality. The homogenizing forces of globalization homogenize time, and vice versa. How does one break with this? Could you discuss the temporality of happiness, as a notion?

RV: The productivity- and profit-based economy has implanted into lived human reality a separate reality structured by its ruling mechanisms: predation, competition and competitiveness, acquisitiveness and the struggle for power and subsistence. For thousands of years such denatured human behaviors have been deemed natural. The temporality of draining, erosion, tiredness, and decay is determined by labor, an activity that dominates and corrupts all others. The temporality of desire, love, and creation has a density that fractures the temporality of survival cadenced by work. Replacing the temporality of money will be a temporality of desire, a beyond-the-mirror, an opening to uncharted territories.

HUO: Is life ageless?

RV: I don’t claim that life is ageless. But since survival is nothing but permanent agony relieved by premature death, a renatured life that cultivates its full potential for passion and creation would surely achieve enough vitality to delay its endpoint considerably.

HUO: The Revolution of Everyday Life was a trigger for May ’68, and you have stated in other interviews that it is your key book that you are continually rewriting. Was the book an epiphany? How did it change the course of your work? What had you been doing previously?

RV: The book was prompted by an urgent need I was feeling at the time for a new perspective on the world and on myself, to pull me out of my state of survival, by means other than through suicide. This critical take on a consumer society that was corrupting and destroying life so relentlessly made me aware and conscious of my own life drive. And it became clear to me very quickly that this wasn’t a purely solipsistic project, that many readers were finding their own major concerns echoed there.

HUO: The Revolution of Everyday Life ends on an optimistic note: “We have a world of pleasures to win, and nothing to lose but boredom.”⁴ Are you still an optimist today?

RV: “Pessimists, what is it you were hoping for?,” Scutenaire wrote. I am neither a pessimist nor an optimist. I try to remain faithful to a principle: desire everything, expect nothing.

HUO: What is the most recent version of the book?

RV: Entre le deuil du monde et la joie de vivre [Between Mourning the World and Exuberant Life].

HUO: What book are you working on at the moment?

RV: I would love to have the resources to complete a Dictionary of Heresies, so as to clarify and correct the historical elements included in The Movement of the Free Spirit and Resistance to Christianity.

HUO: The question of temporality also brings us to Proust and his questionnaire (see inset). What might your definition of happiness be in 2009?

RV: Living ever more intensely and passionately in an ever more intense world. To those who sneer at my ecstatic candor, I reply with a phrase that brings me great comfort: “The desire for an other life is that life already.”⁵

HUO: Do you have unrealized projects? Unrealized books, unrealized projects in fields other than writing, unrealized architectural projects?

RV: My priority is to live better and better in a world that is more and more human. I would love to build the “urban countryside” of Oarystis, but I’m not just waiting patiently, like Fourier at the Palais Royal, for some billionaire to decide to finance the project only to lose everything to the financial crash a minute later.

HUO: What about your collaborations with other artists, painters, sculptors, designers, filmmakers?

RV: I don’t collaborate with anyone. At times I have offered a few texts to artist friends, not as a commentary on their work but as a counterpoint to it. Art moves me when, in it, I can sense its own overcoming, something that goes beyond it; when it nurtures a trace of life that blossoms as a true aspiration, the intuition of a new art of living.

HUO: Could you tell me about Brussels? What does Brussels mean to you? Where do you write?

RV: I live in the country, facing a garden and woods where the rhythm of the seasons has retained its beauty. Brussels as a city has been destroyed by urbanists and architects who are paid by real estate developers. There are still a few districts suitable for nice walks. I am fond of a good dozen wonderful cafés where one can enjoy excellent artisanal beers.

HUO: Do you agree with Geremek’s view that Europe is the big concern of the twenty-first century?

RV: I am not interested in this Europe ruled by racketeering bureaucracies and corrupt democracies. And regions only interest me once they are stripped of their regionalist ideology and are experiencing self-management and direct democracy. I feel neither Belgian nor European. The only homeland is a humanity that is at long last sovereign.

HUO: You have used a lot of pseudonyms. Je est un autre [I is an other]? How do you find or choose pseudonyms? How many pseudonyms have you used? Is there a complete list?

RV: I don’t keep any kind of score. I leave it up to the inspiration of the moment. There is nothing secret about using a pseudonym. Rather, it is about creating a distance, most often in commissioned work. This allows me to have some fun while alleviating my enduring financial difficulties, which I have always refused to resolve by compromising with the world of the spectacle.

HUO: A book that has been used by many artists and architects has been your Dictionnaire de citations pour servir au divertissement et a l’intelligence du temps [Dictionary of Quotations for the Entertainment and Intelligence of Our Time]. Where did that idea come from?

RV: It was a suggestion from my friend Pierre Drachline, who works for the Cherche Midi publishing house.

HUO: You have often criticized environmental movements who try to replace existing capitalism with capitalism of a different type. What do you think of Joseph Beuys? What non-capitalist project or movement do you support?

RV: We are being “offered” biofuels on the condition we agree to transgenic rapeseed farming. Eco-tourism will accelerate the plundering of our biosphere. Windmill farms are being built without any advantage to the consumers. Those are the areas where intervention is possible. Natural resources belong to us, they are free, they must be made to serve the freedom of life. It will be up to the communities to secure their own energy and food independence so as to free themselves from the control of the multinationals and their state vassals everywhere. Claiming natural power for our use means reclaiming our own existence first. Only creativity will rid us of work.

HUO: Last but not least, Rilke wrote that wonderful little book of advice to a young poet. What would your advice be to a young philosopher-writer in 2009?

RV: To apply to his own life the creativity he displays in his work. To follow the path of the heart, of what is most alive in him.

_{Translated from the French by Eric Anglès}

Leave it to pirates to run honest bourse

Posted on December 5, 2009 by Eric Verlo

With investment bankers trying to weasel another broker’s percentage from a carbon-credit trading system, comes a living example of rudimentary venture capitalism. In Haradheere, Somalia, there’s a stock market for pirates, by comparison, something benefiting all participants.

The pirate’s market is no middleman’s monopoly. It works just like the collectives of investors who floated Britain’s privateers and the Dutch East Indies Trading Companies, just two examples of crown-sanctioned adventure-mercenary conquerors. Had you wondered why the definition of “float” includes the economies participant to navigational buoyancy?

Got a boat, a weapon, a tip on an incoming treasure galleon? Invest the pirates with your contribution and reap a stake in the rewards. Every successive stock market since the formative times, from commodities, to insurance, to futures, etc, have well surpassed the illegitimacy and immorality of the seafaring pirate variety.

Sang the Pirate King in The Pirates of Penzance: Away to the cheating world go you, Where pirates all are well-to-do.

While the corporate media decries the savagery of the lawless Somali coastal enterprises, sophisticated traders descend upon COP15 to extort a cap-and-trade protection racket from a world desperate to arrest climate change.

The pirate bourse is a reminder of what purpose the stock markets used to play. If you had a money-making idea, and needed investors, that’s where you went. But to describe a business proposal as germinating from an idea, is to peddle platitudes defining entrepreneurship as being about intellectual innovation. In practice, business opportunities chiefly present themselves from licenses obtained from the state, to operate lucrative monopolies. It usually takes the combination of disproportionate profits and manageable risk to interest wealthy investors.

I think I enjoy this Somalia juxtaposition particularly because Wall Street can’t get a piece of the pirate action. Only those with real pirate commodities need apply. And of course, only those financiers brave enough to circulate in a “pirate’s lair” like Haradheere. So the suddenly infamous Dalsan Bank of Haradheere is basically for scrappers and warlords only, and certainly no whites need apply, unless it’s to be ransomed.

Here’s a snippet from yesterday’s Reuters article:

Piracy investor Sahra Ibrahim, a 22-year-old divorcee, was lined up with others waiting for her cut of a ransom pay-out after one of the gangs freed a Spanish tuna fishing vessel.

“I am waiting for my share after I contributed a rocket-propelled grenade for the operation,” she said, adding that she got the weapon from her ex-husband in alimony.

“I am really happy and lucky. I have made $75,000 in only 38 days since I joined the ‘company’.”

If it sounds like a personal testament for a get-rich-quick scheme, it is! But unlike the television infomercials, this bourse is grounded in providing a legitimate function in Somalia.

Note that the ransom from which Ms. Ibrahim expects to profit was paid for the release of a “tuna fishing vessel.” For those who want to judge the pirates like terrorists, the inconvenient characteristic about the Somali pirates is the role they play as coast guard for a national government not up to the task. Somalia’s inability to police its waters means that international boats visit to plunder the fisheries and dump toxic waste. Illegally, obviously. The fishing villages of Somalia suffer the most, and it’s from their workforces that the pirates recruit their expeditions. The pirates arrest the wrongdoers and assess large penalties and criminal fines before the lawbreaking crews are released.

Olbermann offers Obama an out

Posted on December 1, 2009 by Eric Verlo

Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment on Afghanistan is being summarized as telling President Obama to Get Out Now. Olbermann’s words stir our enthusiasm, but he leaves damning loopholes as far as I am concerned. The MSNBC newsman conditions his advice to the president with “unless you are right,” then at the end, showing a tact far too reckless, he tells Obama to “listen to yourself.”

No. That’s not why we elected Barack Obama.

The inexperienced senator had no record. Our hope didn’t spring from a demonstration of ability. Obama was elected for the hope he offered because he appeared to be listening to the American people. It would probably have been inconceivable to imagine then that Obama could not but respond to the unprecedented surge of electoral participation prompted by George W. Bush’s wars.

Listen to the people Mr. Obama, and no one else. To ask Obama to listen to himself is to offer him entirely too much slack. Give an authoritarian leader too much rope, that’s more rope he has to hang you.

And then there is no “unless you are right.”

What is that but a straight man’s setup? That line is for the President to show America how sure he is of his decision. The people want a leader who’s offering supreme confidence, so Olbermann is holding the door. He goes on to frame the challenges posed by Afghanistan, as surmountable by a qualified prez. Olbermann invites the President to be “precisely right.” Isn’t that exactly what will sooth the viewers, after Obama has famously taken so much time to arrive at a decision?

But there is no “unless you are right.” Unless Olbermann meant it with an implied irony. But he didn’t. He didn’t say unless black is white, or up is down. Olbermann allowed for the possibility that an escalation could be right.

“If not, Mr. President, this way lies Vietnam.”

IF NOT Olbermann says. Doesn’t he mean no if and or buts?

When Walter Cronkite finally spoke out about Vietnam, and declared the war un-winnable, it was not because it had become un-winnable. It had not transformed into a quagmire, the chance for victory had not escaped us. The illegal and immoral subjugation of the Vietnamese people was never a winnable strategy. Like Iraq and Afghanistan, it was a predictable calamity, a crime. Moral observers knew it from the beginning.

America did not LOSE Vietnam, and we will not LOSE Iraq and Afghanistan. We DESTROYED those landscapes and millions of lives, and we continue to “finish the job.” It’s an immeasurable, apocalyptic tragedy.

If Barack Obama escalates in the footsteps of Lyndon Johnson, it will similarly be no mistake. The travesty is that the American people have once again been waylaid in their determination to find a leader to represent their desire for peace.

Here is the text of Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment:

SPECIAL COMMENT
By Keith Olbermann
Anchor, ‘Countdown’
Mon., Nov . 30, 2009

Mr. President, it now falls to you to be both former Republican Senator George Aiken and the man to whom he spoke, Lyndon Johnson. You must declare victory, and get out.??

You should survey the dismal array of options in front of you — even the orders given out last night — sort them into the unacceptable, the unsuccessful, and the merely un-palatable, and then put your arm down on the table and wipe the entire assortment of them off your desk — off this nation’s desk — and into the scrap heap of history. ??

Unless you are utterly convinced — willing to bet American lives on it — that the military understands the clock is running, and that the check is not blank, and that the Pentagon will go to sleep when you tell it to, even though the Pentagon is a bunch of perpetually 12-year old boys desperate to stay up as late as possible by any means necessary — get out now. ??

We are, at present, fighting, in no particular order, the Taliban; a series of sleazy political-slash-military adventurers, not the least of whom is this mountebank election-fixer Karzai, and what National Security Advisor Jones estimated in October was around eight dozen al-Qaida in the neighborhood.??

But poll after poll, and anecdote after anecdote, of the reality of public opinion inside Afghanistan is that its residents believe we are fighting Afghanistan. That we, Sir, have become an occupying force. Yes: if we leave, Afghanistan certainly will have an occupying force, whether it’s from Pakistan, or consisting of foreign fighters who will try to ally themselves with the Taliban.??

Can you prevent that? Can you convince the Afghans that you can prevent that? Can you convince Americans that it is the only way to un-do Bush and Cheney policy catastrophes dating back to Cheney’s days as Secretary of Defense in the ’90s? If not, Mr. President, this way lies Vietnam. If you liked Iraq, you’ll love Afghanistan with 35,000 more troops, complete with the new wrinkle, straight from the minder-binder lingo of Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22.”??

President Obama will be presenting an exit strategy for Afghanistan. The exit strategy that begins by entering still further. Lose to win, sink to swim, escalate to disengage. And even this disconnect of fundamental logic is predicated on the assumption that once the extra troops go in, when the President says “okay, time for adult swim, Generals, time to get out of the pool and bring the troops with you,” that the Pentagon is just going to say “Yeppers.”??

The Pentagon, often to our eternal relief, but just as often to our eternal regret is in the War business. You were right, Mr. President, to slow the process down, once a series of exit strategies was offered to you by men whose power and in some case livelihoods are predicated on making sure all exit strategies, everywhere, forever, don’t really result in any service-man or woman actually exiting.??

These men are still in the belly of what President Eisenhower so rightly, so prophetically, christened the military-industrial complex. Now and later as the civilian gray eminences with “retired” next to their names, formally lobbying the House and Senate and informally lobbying the nation through television and the printed word, to “engage” here, or “serve” there, or “invest” everywhere, they are, in many cases, just glorified hardware salesmen. ??

It was political and operational brilliance, Sir, to retain Mr. Bush’s last Secretary of Defense Mr. Gates. It was transitional and bipartisan insight, Sir, to maintain General Stanley McChrystal as a key leader in the field. ??

And it was a subtle but powerful reminder to the authoritarian minded War-hawks like John McCain, and the blithering idiots like former Governor Palin, of the Civilian authority of the Constitution it was a picture drawn in crayon for ease of digestion by the Right, to tell our employees at the Pentagon, to take their loaded options and go away and come back with some real ones.??

You reminded them, Mr. President, that Mr. Gates works for the people of the United States of America, not the other way around. You reminded them, Mr. President, that General McChrystal is our employee, not our dictator. You’ve reminded them Mr. President. Now, tonight, remind yourself. Stanley McChrystal.??

General McChrystal has doubtless served his country bravely and honorably and at great risk, but to date his lasting legacy will be as the great facilitator of the obscenity that was transmuting the greatest symbol of this nation’s true patriotism, of its actual willingness to sacrifice, into a distorted circus fun-house mirror version of such selflessness.??

Friendly fire killed Pat Tillman. Mr. McChrystal killed the truth about Pat Tillman. And that willingness to stand truth on its head on behalf of “selling” a war or the generic idea of America being at war to turn a dead hero into a meaningless recruiting poster, should ring essentially relevant right now.??

From the very center of a part of our nation that could lie to the public, could lie to his mother, about what really happened to Pat Tillman, from the very man who was at the operational center of that plan, comes the entire series of plans to help us supposedly find the way out of Afghanistan? We are supposed to believe General McChrystal isn’t lying about Afghanistan???

Didn’t he blow his credibility by lying, so obviously and so painfully, about Pat Tillman? Why are we believing the McChrystals? Their reasons might sound better than the ones they helped George Bush and Dick Cheney fabricate for Iraq, but surely they are just as transparently oblivious of the forest. ??

Half of them insist we must stay in Afghanistan out of fear of not repeating Iraq, while the other half, believing Bush failed in Iraq by having too few troops, insist we must stay in Afghanistan out of fear of repeating Iraq. And they are suddenly sounding frighteningly similar to what the Soviet Generals were telling the Soviet Politicos in the 1980s about Afghanistan.??

Sure it’s not going well, sure we need to get out, we all see that. But first let’s make sure it’s stabilized and then we get out. The Afghans will be impressed by our commitment and will then take over the cost of policing themselves, even though the cost would be several times their gross national product. Just send in those extra troops, just for awhile. Just 350,000.

I’m sorry, did I say 350,000? I meant 35,000. Must be a coffee stain on the paper. Mr. President, last fall, you were elected. Not General McChrystal, not Secretary Gates, not another Bushian Drone of a politician. You. On the Change Ticket. On the pitch that all politicians are not created equal.??

And upon arrival you were greeted by a Three Mile Island of an economy, so bad that in the most paranoid recesses of the mind one could wonder if the Republicans didn’t plan it that way, to leave you in the position of having to prove the ultimate negative, that you staved off worldwide financial collapse, that if you had not done what you so swiftly did, that this “economic cloudy day” would have otherwise been the “biblical flood of finance.”??

So, much of the change for which you were elected, Sir, has thus far been understandably, if begrudgingly, tabled, delayed, made more open-ended. But patience ebbs, Mr. President. And while the first one thousand key decisions of your presidency were already made about the economy, the first public, easy-to-discern, mouse-or-elephant kind of decision comes tomorrow night at West Point at eight o’clock.

You know this, Mr. President: we cannot afford this war. Nothing makes less sense to our economy than the cost of supply for 35,000 new troops. Nothing will do more to slow economic recovery. You might as well shoot the revivified auto industry or embrace John Boehner Health Care Reform and Spray-Tan Reimbursement.

You know this, Mr. President: we cannot afford this war. Nothing makes less sense to our status in the world than for us to re-up as occupiers of Afghanistan and for you to look like you were unable to extricate yourself from a Military Chinese Finger Puzzle left for you by Bush and Cheney and the rest of Halliburton’s hench-men.

And most of all, and those of us who have watched these first nine months trust both your judgment and the fact you know this, Mr. President: unless you are exactly right, we cannot afford this war. For if all else is even, and everything from the opinion of the generals to the opinion of the public is even, we cannot afford to send these troops back into that quagmire for second tours, or thirds, or fourths, or fifths.

We cannot afford this ethically, Sir. The country has, for eight shameful years, forgotten its moral compass and its world purpose. And here is your chance to reassert that there is, in fact, American Exceptionalism. We are better. We know when to stop making our troops suffer, in order to make our generals happy.

You, Sir, called for change, for the better way, for the safety of our citizens including the citizens being wasted in war-for-the-sake-of-war, for a reasserting of our moral force. And we listened. And now you must listen. You must listen to yourself.

Subcomandante Marcos on LA OTRA

Posted on November 5, 2009 by Eric Verlo

Reading more about the Tohono O’odham, I came across this speech by the EZLN’s masked leader Subcomandante Marcos, delivered at a 2006 tribal gathering of SW Native American insurgents. It’s about the other Mexico, in solidarity with the other Americas: “La Otra.”

Compared his words to President Obama today telling the tribal summit in DC: “You will not be forgotten.” Sounds like a eulogy.

Doesn’t it? Or simply another white man’s empty promise. It appears to me that Obama is playing the forked tongue white man to Americans of every color, giving them assurances that they are now in good hands, yet turning his back on them all when the speeches are through. It’s Obama the great equalizer, making sure that all Americans, Red, White, Brown and Black, get treated like they’re black.

EZLN: A Meeting with the O’odham
By Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos

La Otra – The Other Mexico
October 26, 2006

Bueno, Compañeras and Compañeros:

First we just want to thank the Monroy family, who is receiving the Sixth Commission and the Karavana’s compañeros, who are giving us lodging here, in… Rancho el Peñasco is it called? Thank you Compañeros and Compañeras. And thank you to all of you who have endured the six hours that we have been here, and I hope you have a little patience for what I am going to say.

We especially want to thank the traditional O’odham authorities. Don José, Doña Ofelia – I don’t see her anymore – Is Doña Ofelia still here? No? Brenda, Doña Brenda? They’re not here either, what a pity. Doña Alicia? Well, that’s what happened to us. The traditional authorities went away and we came to listen to them. No? But Don José is here, as I want to bring a message from the indigenous Zapatista communities to the Tohono O’odham people, and also for the Navajo and Cherokee people.

What the compañero, the Purépecha chief Salvador said, from the National Indigenous Congress, also represents our thinking. The traditional O’odham chief, Doña Ofelia, pointed out something that we already see in the papers. That thing that a few people are promoting here, the National Indigenous Convention, is a lie. It is really directed by someone who was an official under President Vicente Fox, and later was unemployed and is now involved with the National Indigenous Convention, which is really a movement to support López Obrador. The Indian peoples don’t interest them. The documents, which they are presenting, which those people are distributing, make no mention of the San Andrés Accords, which have cost blood and death not just to Zapatistas, but to more than 40 Indian peoples, tribes and nations of Mexico, who are in agreement with that struggle. We are in agreement with what was expressed by Doña Ofelia, the O’odham traditional authority.

“We are Zapatistas. We live in the last corner of this country. We are of Mayan roots. We are people of Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Tojolabal, Chol, Zoque and Mam roots.” And it is our custom at times to speak, when we speak with other Indian peoples, to use a symbolic language with tales and legends – ”sometimes we speak about our history, our goals, with tales, legends and symbolic language, and in this time that we have this message for the O’odham and Navajos and Cherokees, we take this root.” To pass on this message that the Compañeros sent me to tell you, we will use that resource. Our elders, our chiefs, say that the gods made the world, that they made the men and women of corn first. And they specifically put the heart of corn in them. But the corn ran out and some men and women didn’t get a heart. The color of the earth ran out, and they began to look for other colors. Then, the heart of corn touched people who are white, red or yellow. So there are people here who don’t have the dark color of indigenous people, but they have the heart of corn, so they are here with us. Our oldest ones say, our chiefs, that the people who didn’t get a heart, took care of it later, they occupied the empty space with money, and that it doesn’t matter what color those people have, they have a heart that is the green color of money. And our old ones also say that, every once in a while, the land seeks to protect its O’odham Representative Doña Ofeliaand Subcomandante Marcos children, the men and women of corn. And that a time comes – which is when the night is the most difficult – when the land gets tired and needs those men and women to help it live.

They were killing our people with diseases, we were going to disappear, just like the Kiliwa people are disappearing, a few hundred kilometers from here where we are, where there are only 54 families left. And of them, only four speak the Kiliwa language here in Mexico, on this side.

We want to say to the O’odham nation, to the Navajo – I don’t know if Michelle is still here? No, not her either, well, we don’t have any messenger, I hope that someone tapes it… pardon me, Michelle. What happened is that in our land, our chiefs – I am a Subcomandante, because I am not the chief – my chiefs are men and women like Doña Ofelia, like Don José, 100 percent indigenous. And it fell on me – together with other compañeros – to do other work.

We were already dead and we were called upon to become warriors, according to our legend. And as we were dead, we became what we are: shadows. And in a strict sense we are that: “shadow’s warriors or warriors of the shadows.” And January 1, 1994, on the wall of a bank in San Cristóbal de las Casas, appeared a sign that we painted which said: here we are the forever dead, dying again, but now to live. And that was the message that we were giving to the rest of the world: that in this country and on this planet, one had to fight and be willing to die to be able to survive.

In the story that we are telling – or what they ordered us to tell you – the land protected us after the Spanish invasion, and it made us survive and resist the North American invasion, and it made us live. And after the invasion of money or big capital, the land that made us survive is at the point of dying, precisely because of those above. If you think that they are going to conform themselves to seeing us as poor people, without schools, without medicine, you are wrong: they want us to disappear completely.

For entire decades we have been living with diseases, without education, scratching the earth to be able to take some produce from it. Now they also want that land. The Escalera Nautica will mean the total disappearance of the Yoreme, the Mayo, Cucapá and Yaqui peoples from the whole coast of Sinaloa, Sonora, Baja California and Baja Sur, for hotel and tourist businesses. There’s not going to be anything more than deceit from the government, for the Yoreme, the Yaqui, the O’odham, the Cucupá and the Kiliwa.

The governments and those who lead them want that land to convert it into a commodity. If we permit that, this land is going to be destroyed. And that which protected us, that made us survive, is also going to die. And if that land and that world die, there will be no reason to fight, or to live, or to study.

What we are proposing here is that we have to unite as Indian peoples. Land dies the same way in O’odham, Navajo, Cherokee, Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Purépecha and Náhuatl territory, and we must unite, but not only in Mexico, but on the whole continent.

They, those who are up above, have already shown for hundreds of years, for centuries, that the only thing that they have done has been to destroy the earth. No more – “no more that’s enough” – it’s sufficient. Now we have to take the land’s destiny and its defense into our hands. Don’t leave it one minute more in the hands of the rich. We, those who have the color of the earth and hearts of corn, without regard to our skin color – we have to do it, because if we don’t, the whole world is going to disappear.

To the one who has money, what’s happening is not important. O’odham and Navajo territory is now a territory of death. Your fields, where your culture flourishes, is where poor Mexicans are killed, families who try to cross to the other side. The O’odham and Navajo people cannot permit that. You know that they are converting our lands, besides, into their garbage can: we are their garbage dumps. Toxic wastes, nuclear wastes, are not going to the residential zones, not in New York or Washington: they are going to Indian lands. And land is like the human body; one cannot inject poison into one part without affecting the rest. They think that they will only poison O’odham and Navajo land. They are going to poison everything and they are going to destroy it.

As the National Indigenous Congress compañero said: “we came to invite you, not to ask the government, but to get rid of it.” Not to be praying that the North American and Mexican governments respect O’odham territory, which is divided by the borderline. And we know that the borderline crosses through your people’s ceremonial center. We want that border to disappear, so that once again the O’odham, Navajo and Cherokee nations exist, as well as our peoples, because they already demonstrated that they cannot conduct this world and take it to a good end. We have to do it, not just for our Indian peoples, but for all humanity. Therefore, we say that our struggle is for humanity and against neoliberalism.

We wanted to invite you to join this movement, which is called the Other Campaign, so that as Indian peoples, the history of each 100 years is not repeated again. It is going to be repeated, but one part is going to change.

In 1810, we struggled for independence against Spanish power; in 1910, against the landowner’s power. In 2010 – and even before – we will struggle against the power of money. But, differently than the 200 and 100 years before, now the Indian peoples will have to be respected. The same thing will not occur again: that another comes to power and the Indian peoples disappear again, or suffer the same poverty and scorn. Therefore, as Indian peoples, we form separately inside of the Other Campaign, and separately we talk to each other and separately we make agreements.

Those who are up there above, compañeros and compañeras of Sonora – Yaquis, Yoremes, Cucapás, O’odham – are only going to deceive you. They are going to buy off one or two of you, they are going to take them on a trip – like traveling around with those who distributed the paper just now – around the world, but their people are going to disappear. And if you are the leaders, it is certain, they are going to take you to hotels, or to the conventions those that the politicians have, but your people are going to disappear. And photos of your leaders are going to come out in the newspapers, but the garbage dump is going to poison your land.

And there will be many gatherings and declarations, but our poor Mexican men and women are going to continue dying on Navajo land, or on the land of the O’odham. Those things are not going to change if we continue believing in those above.

And that’s what the Sonoran government is going to do, after this meeting you are going to see it. It is going to declare that it will resolve the indigenous problem, it is going to seek you out and it is going to invite you to the big hotels; it’s going to give you good food, and it is going to put papers in front of you to sign. It is going to give you some aid and some credit. But nothing, absolutely nothing, is going to change in your territories.

The San Andrés Accords, which are the ones that represent the agreement of more than 40 peoples, tribes, nations and neighborhoods of the Indian peoples of Mexico, they say one thing that everyone forgets they say: that indigenous territory is indigenous. No one can do anything in indigenous territory if the community doesn’t accept it. Not putting a garbage dump, or a hotel, not even crossing through your territory without permission from the authorities – which is certainly what the compañera Ofelia was complaining about, and about which we also complain.

That is what we are saying wherever we go. And in this case, we were thinking that we were only going to talk with the O’odham people, or with Indian peoples, but how good it is that you arrived from many places. And especially, the people who are struggling on the other side in the United States, also with Indian peoples, and also with this injustice, this war of annihilation there is against the undocumented.

A little while ago when we were coming here, we crossed the border, there in Sonoyta, we crossed over on the other side and later we returned because we had to come here. But the big extension of the desert was seen and I was thinking – I imagined what all the compañeros from the Karavana – what it was going to mean crossing that desert, without food. If the heat or the cold doesn’t kill you, the Minutemen kill you, or the ranchers, or the motorcyclists, or La Migra. And no one was going to take count, not even the university studies. If we, as Indian people, do not unite… We are proposing a continental gathering of all the original peoples of these lands, in October of the coming year, when 515 years of the “discovery” are completed. Now it was good! 500 years are enough to show that they couldn’t.

And if the governments of the United States or Mexico didn’t see us when we were few, we will see if the world doesn’t see us when all the Indian peoples of this continent – from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska – unite and begin to tell of all the injustices and struggles. And that gathering is going to be in Northwest Mexico, near the border – which does not exist for us – in other words near the Oodham, Navajo, Cherokee, Cucapá, Kiliwa, Yoreme, Yaqui land, where we have been all these days. In a few days, we are making agreements with each other and taking votes, perhaps next month this call that we are proposing will come out.

That is more or less what we want to tell you. I hope you can pass the message to the traditional chiefs: Ofelia, Brenda, Alicia – Don José is here – Michelle: I ask a favor that you pass it to the Navajo people, the compañera with the Cherokee people.

We only ask you that, we are going to talk directly among ourselves and make an agreement. The next time that we come my chiefs will come, I will not come, they sent me first to see how it was. I report to them and then they will come, those that command me, because that is our way.

That is what we want to say, compañeros and compañeras. Many thanks, Good Night.

CH2M pushes UAE Masdar as model PRT

Posted on November 5, 2009 by Eric Verlo

In writing about the recent PPSBN Sustainability conference, I failed miserably to highlight the keynote speaker Nancy Tuor, who represented CH2M Hill as a model green corporate citizen. Ms Tuor, the “Group President and Executive Sponsor for Sustainability” at CH2M Hill, had headliner status at the conference because she is Program Manager on the MASDAR ‘Green’ City development in the United Arab Emirates, a smoke and mirrors project if ever there was, and it’s smoke from burning oil.

According to the program for this week’s conference in Colorado Springs:

CH2M HILL is the delivery partner for the first phase of the MASDAR development, a carbon-neutral and zero-waste sustainable city nestled in the heart of Abu Dhabi—the first major hydrocarbon producing nation.

First, a sustainable city built on income generated by fossil fuel is an oxymoron. Second, UAE’s efforts appear to be centered on securing the technological rights to new sources and practices before their monopoly on oil expires.

MASDAR is a comprehensive Abu Dhabi government program to address the issues of sustainable energy sources and environmental practices. The program is focused on developing and commercializing advanced and innovative technologies in renewable, alternative, and sustainable energies.

In other words, their definition of sustainable is much like the military’s, they want to sustain their profits.

Minneapolis Confidential‘s Ken Avidor contacted NMT about another outlandish aspect of CH2M’s green charade in Masdar. It relates to an announcement which Nancy Tuor made at the conference:

MIST delays impact PRT schedule. At a sustainability conference in Colorado Springs on November 3, 2009, Nancy Tuor, CH2M Hill’s program manager for the MASDAR ‘Green City’ in the United Arab Emirates, announced that the personal rapid transit (PRT) system will open to public use in about six months.

It seems a central showpiece of the Masdar development is a Personal Rapid Transit system which always fails to materialize. As Avidor writes:

You may have seen blog posts and news stories about a “sustainable” city in the United Arab Emirates called Masdar. One of the supposed “green” features of the Masdar project is a “Personal Rapid Transit” (PRT) system. It turns out the PRT system is a joke… but what do expect from a country where a prominent royal family member tortures people and has it all documented on video.

One of Avidor’s astute readers makes the point that the US tortures people, and documents it on video as well. So much for that dig at UAE, but Avidor’s central criticism stands. PRT projects worldwide are being lauded with out merit, but of critical relevance, PRTs are being used as stalking horses to thwart the finite budgets which metropolitan regions have for mass transit.

Interestingly, Avidor’s blog posts are being dogged by two detractors who can’t sing praises enough for PRTs. Maybe they’re new technology freaks who want to see Jetsons fantasies in their lifetimes. Maybe they believe the argument against mass transit, that contemporary man doesn’t want a community experience when he commutes. If they aren’t PRT industry shills, they should at least concede that no number of personal pods will accommodate the masses. They’re luxury hogs who don’t want to share the ride.

As cars sank the trolleys, so could PRT smoke and mirrors sink trains and subways. But the rich man has no need for mass transit. Why not get the taxpayers to fund something that will be available to only he: personal transit. Where there’s no room for the masses. It’s the same strategy the rich use to fund their charter schools at the expense of public schools.

Where the rich are fleecing the needy, you can always count on Colorado Springs to sign on.

Wastebuster Magic Dave Therault

Posted on October 2, 2009 by Eric Verlo

Magic Dave has been spotted in Waterbury, CN, via Youtube. Therault and colleagues are the Wastebusters, a Mythbusters parody to debunk IDLING MYTHS. It’s a PSA for a new Connecticut law against idling cars.

Ten reasons to oppose I-70 expansion

Posted on September 13, 2009 by NMT

Stop I-70 expansion High Country Earth First has set its sights on halting expansion of Interstate 70 through Colorado. This is more than a fight over urban neighborhoods, or Rocky Mountain foothills to be despoiled. The expansion of I-70, like I-29 and others, is about bulking up America’s commercial trucking thoroughfares, the infrastructure critical to greater NAFTA globalism, and the veins into which America feeds its addiction to oil.

Here’s the HCEF flier being distributed to Denver residences.

TOP TEN REASONS TO OPPOSE I-70 EXPANSION

Environmental Racism – More than 90% of the people in Elyria / Swansea neighborhood are people of color and about 30% are officially low-income. Even the government’s official Draft Environmental Impact Statement admits the expansion would have a disproportionate impact on minority and low-income people.

Pollution – I-70 expansion would multiply the long-term impact of noise and air pollution on the community in Elyria / Swansea. Emissions of some air pollutants are expected to increase by 50% in the next 20 years if I-70 is expanded. During the three years of construction, additional noise and air pollution would be created.

Displacement – I-70 realignment would demolish 18 to 53 homes in Elyria/ Swansea. The neighborhood post office would be lost, and residents would have to travel 2 or 3 miles to the nearest post office. Many low-income residents will have to find housing outside of Denver, increasing community destruction.

Job Loss – I-70 realignment would displace 52-58 businesses. The National Western Stock Show, which hires many local residents for temporary labor, would be moved to a new location. Other neighborhood emplowers will also be displaced by expansion or re-routing. Food Access – One of the two grocery stores in the neighborhood, a Latino grocery, would be demolished. The area of North Denver is already underserved by grocers; eliminating more only increases the problem.

Recreation – The I-70 realignment plan would place a vehicle bypass near Elyria Park, increasing vehicle noise, and would create new barriers to the Park by way of increased traffic. This will further the death of the neighborhood by making it even less enjoyable to live in.

Hazardous Wastes – Construction would disturb over 100 acres of hazardous materials sites where arsenic, lead, cadmium, and contaminated soil and groundwater are located. Increased trucking on I-70 will bring greater amounts of haz-mat through the area as well, increasing the risk of accidens and spills.

Land Use – The plan requires over 300 acres of urban land acquisition including 10-41 residential properties, 101-142 commercial properties, and 17 acres of Open Space, space that could be used for homes, schools, gardens, playgrounds, parks, and, more.

Cost – Expansion would cost between $1.3 and $1.9 billion, plus $7 to $10 million yearly in additional maintenance. This at a time when human services is facing massive cuts and education is on a $300 million chopping block.

Wildlife – Realignment would destroy 220 acres of resident mule deer area, 205 acres white tail deer overall range, 50 acres bald eagle winter range and winter prey, 21 acres prarie dog habitat, and increased invasive/noxious weed infestations.

The real solution isn’t expanding the highway, but reducing the traffic. Rather than displacing a neighborhood, destroying the environment, and contributing to global warming, lets create solutions that reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and cars.

The I-70 expansion, what is it? The Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) has decided that Interstate 70, the main east/west freeway through Denver needs to be expanded in the section which passes through north Denver, from its intersection with I-25 to Quebec street.

There are two main proposals being considered by CDOT. The first would expand the current viaduct from six to ten lanes and keep I-70 in its current location. The second proposal, and the one favored by the power brokers in Denver, is to reroute (detour) I-70 north from its intersection with I-25 along the Platte river/Brighton boulevard area, and then connect up with highway 270 to where in reconnects with the current I-70 path at Quebec street. This expansion/detour would be eight lanes and add roughly 2 miles to the length of I-70 through this section. The cost for these proposals ranges from 1.25 to 2 BILLION dollars. Either expansion will gut the neighborhoods of Globeville, Elyria, and Swansea, and increase air pollution in other North Denver neighborhoods. These plans are discussed in detail in the Environmental Impact Statement which can be found at www.i-70east.com/

But do we even need an I-70 expansion? CDOT justifies this expansion by saying that we need to expand I-70 to meet future traffic needs, based on growth in the eastern suburbs. However, this urban sprawl is completely unsustainable and may not even happen considering the housing market. The real reason CDOT wants to expand I-70 is to decrease congestion for cross-country truck traffic. Minor slowdowns in urban areas can cost trucking companies millions of dollars; CDOT is really working for the trucking companies, not us.

There’s no real reason to expand I-70. And considering the costs, financially and otherwise (see other side) it seems like more than just a stupid idea but also a downright bad one. Several groups are working to prevent the expansion. They need you to succeed.

Email: [email protected] to get involved.

Enchanting place names of Ethiopia

Posted on August 16, 2009 by Eric Verlo

I found this travel poster for Ethiopia, the African ally with whom the US harasses Somalia and Sudan. But it features pictures of lynched black men, and was circulated by OSPAAAL, Cuba’s Tri-continent alliance.

“Some of the far away places with charming names that tourists should visit:

ALEM BEKAGNE
The biggest prison in East Africa.

KAGNEW
US strategic military base for “technical” espionage.

ADOLA MINES
Where 20,000 men waste away doing forced labor.

MASSAWA
Important Ethiopian-US-Israeli naval base for the control of the Red Sea.”

You had a good home but You Left (You’re Right!)

Posted on July 9, 2009 by Brother Jonah

Your Recruiter LIED to you so you Left (You’re Right!) Classic Basic Training marching cadence chant.
You’re all supposed to be “in step” because if you have a single person planting his left foot forward while everybody else is planting the Right, a Column Left or a To the rear, March! command or any other won’t work out correctly.
If The Military is such a good career move, why would the Pikes Peak or Bust Rodeo and others have to donate the proceeds to “Military Charities”?

Go on Craigslist and in Barter and Free classifications, and Rants & Raves you find military families, especially right before payday, begging for FOOD. Food which is subsidized at the Commissary, the Post Exchange and the Base Exchange.

And, these families, they’re not kidding. They actually ARE hurting.

But the Recruiters still Lie through their teeth. Daily.

They even have special programs TARGET-ing poorer kids, Minorities…

In Hispanic and Black neighborhoods the recruiter drives around in a “tricked-out” Hummer with a sound system blaring Hip-hop, the recruiter himself is going to be Ethnically Matched to the neighborhood or barrio, and a younger guy, and even with that will be TRAINED in Street Talk as though it were a foreign dialect.

Are they foolin’ the 18 year olds (17 and dropped out of school if yo’ Momma signs you in)? Apparently not. They give out their pamphlets to pre-teens.

Recruiting Children for a Later Date With Death.

For the 17 and 18 year olds, they break out the Economic Opportunity and the closely related Educational Opportunity bullshit.

But then, the U.S.O., Red Cross, Pikes Peak or Bust Rodeo… they come right along and spoil the lie. Because those organizations have to scramble to raise funds, beg a little less obviously…

But the Recruiter Lies are spoiled only if the kids see or hear or read something like this.

All y’all young dudes who want to sign up, try this first… when you turn 16 and can legally do it, volunteer at the VA hospital.

Hang back a little, don’t crowd, let the Human Misery speak for itself. And the humans who are suffering that misery. Go around emptying the wastebaskets and dry-mopping the floor in the waiting rooms, listen to the guys and ladies talking to each other, listen to their stories about how the VA is screwing them.

Volunteer at the U.S.O. and there are others, fill out forms for the guys and Ladies.

See people and talk to them and try your best to help them when the VA screws them.

When a guy is dying from a service related cancer like you get with Agent Orange or from the Uranium Poisoning, that the VA officially denies even exists, try to help him get his basic medical needs tended to.

Volunteer to read or sing to the guys in a Persistent Vegetative Coma. Or the guys who can’t communicate, can’t see, but are conscious under the bandages.

Keep in mind when you’re doing it that some of these guys are laying there with half their body mass taken off by American fire.

Then when you see the Recruiter rolling through the ‘hood jamming some tunes…

See all the young kids flocking around eager to be part of the next Children’s Crusade…

Eager to be lied to, eager to be seduced into the Glorious War.

Listen to the commercials again, watch with fresh eyes as they Army/Navy/Air Force/Marines tell the parents of kids too young to legally join on their own to go ahead and sign the papers for their sons and daughters.

Telling young guys who are dropping out of High School that somehow the Army is going to pull off a magic trick that will get them into College and a highly paid profession.

Because you KNOW, don’t you, that if Yo Momma is signing you in, that means you’re not 18 and there’s very little chance that you completed High School.

And that those commercials are aimed at the guys who are having trouble in school and about to drop out anyway.

When the Recruiter rolls through the ‘hood blasting the jams, walk up to him and tell him, in front of his intended victims, that he’s a damned liar. Print this up and make your OWN pamphlets.

I’m not saying commit acts of violence against him, or vandalism.

That perpetuates the Hate cycle and nothing more.

Even though it would be entertaining to watch one get dragged out of his tricked out Liar-Mobile and having a case of Advanced Whoopage liberally applied, don’t do it.

Confront Hate with Hate and everybody loses. Confront the Hate and the Lies with truth.

It’s our only weapon, and it’s more effective than all their bombs, and guns, and Air-shows, and “see how many chinups you can do” demonstrations, all their pamphlets and commercials and their Tricked Out Humvee can ever be.

You know how I can tell? Because they’re having so much trouble trying to recruit people that they’re going after the young kids now.

The kids are getting smarter and asking more questions. The Army loses. Too bad, so sad. They shouldn’t be trying to convince Kids to go and kill for the “super-patriots” so the “super-patriots” can make money off their lives, and deaths, and the lives and deaths of those people whose countries are being stolen for their resources.

The “super-patriots” who like Bush and Cheney and Wolfowicz and Limbaugh and O’Reilly, aren’t going to enlist and when they had to do so, they had their parents buy their way out of the Draft.

They expect YOU to die for THEIR comfort and riches. And pay you so little for it that your families will literally have to Beg in order to survive.

Two Right Wing Talking Points from Shooter von Brunn

Posted on June 30, 2009 by Brother Jonah

Straight from the horses ass, Rush Limbaugh (and Mark Levin) and straight into the obligatory Shooter’s Manifesto. This makes three that failed in their attempts to suicide themselves to Right-Wing-Glory, worshipped by the American Taliban as fallen martyrs… but in the case of Adkinsson, Church Shooter who was aiming to shoot the children on stage when the gun was finally wrestled away from him, and von Brunn, and not a coincidence The Same Shit KVOR talk radio puts out, President Obamas birth certificate and George Bitch’s non-existent service record. First up, Contestant George B.

Seems the Right Wing Cult have been instructed by their High Priests to mock any attempts to prove that George coWard Bush didn’t finish out his Service Obligation. it was in both shooters manifestos.

Trouble is, the disputed discharge papers, “proven” false by none other than George Bush Sr’s Counterfeit Experts, who got their expertise by forging documents for anti-Nazi and anti-Communist groups…

Were the ONLY papers that actually demonstrate George Bush Jr actually serving. At All.

A convenient fire at the National Archives is to blame for that. Or so the Right Wing say.

President Obamas Birth Certificate, an issue pushed by Neo-Nazi group StormFront and their willing mouthpieces Levin, Limbaugh and Jerome Corsi, centers on a document thoroughly investigated by the FBI, DHS, DoJ,I.C.E., CIA and DoD, (Pentagon) amongst other Groovie Initials.

All of whom were under the direct command of “the decider” George Bitch.

None of them found any fault with the documentation.

So that leaves a couple of explanations, three in fact, all of them unpalatable to the Right Wing Para-Religious Cult.
The government investigative teams the Right Wing Cult keeps saying are “keeping us safe” at the expense of a few rights and freedoms that nobody important was using anyway are suddenly incompetent to detect a forged birth document, thus the billions upon billions of dollars spent on them were wasted.

These same government teams were part of a vast Commie Liberal plot to put a Sleeper Agent in power, in which case the same scenario about their usefulness at the expense of Public Funds and those rights which nobody important was using anyway.

More likely

The Birth Certificate is in fact valid and the only possible use the Right Wing Cult has for keeping the shit stirred is to wire up lunatics to attack other Americans

They’ve done a spectacular job of Domestic Terrorism so far.

Re-enacting and Celebrating Genocide… Just Like Skokie…

Posted on May 20, 2009 by Brother Jonah

As immortalized in the classic Film “The Blues Brothers” where a group of dim-wits put on Historically Authentic Military Uniforms (of the SchutzStaffel) and marched through a largely Jewish suburb of Chicago.

So, on Territory Days, can those of us who are of Indian descent expect to see these guys celebrating the American Genocide?

cannon

wannabees...

Now, I KNOW somebody will point out that there are still American Indians alive today.

And say that therefore the Genocide and the attempted full-on Extermination of AMERICANS never happened.

Like the Smallpox Blankets,
or herding the Indians onto the U.S. version of the Warsaw Ghetto,
the mass slaughter of the American Bison (Buffalo, TaTonka…)
encouraged and enforced by the U.S. Army in a policy to starve out the plains tribes.

Colonels Custer and Chivington both making the statement that killing the women and children was necessary
because “nits make lice”
and killing off the men without slaughtering the women and children would be a waste of time,
you have to kill the Breeders.

And in a way, they’re almost right.

The bastards FAILED… we’re still here in spite of the Mass Murders.

By the same token, if they want to judge the U.S. Genocide as “false” on those grounds they would have to judge the Nazi Genocide as “false”

And they can dress up and pretend to be the perpetrators of the Racist Murders and laugh and joke and pretend that it was somehow righteous…

But there will be some, especially ME right here, right now….

Who will call you on it, and remind you that such displays are like these…

nazis

more nazis

klan

more klan

Might I remind gently that the largest actions the Klan has staged in the past three decades have been attempts to terrorize Native Americans and Immigrants by putting on Period Costumes

wannabees...

And marching through the towns, villages and neighborhoods where we live.

Like Old Colorado City… where I personally live.
Have a Nice Skokie/Selma/Birmingham…

Swine flu pandemic, my ass

Posted on April 28, 2009 by Marie Walden

1976 swine flu epidemic mandated vaccination Do you have an uneasy sense that someone’s trying to pull the wool over your eyes? Does the hullabaloo over a looming swine flu pandemic seem a bit overblown? The World Health Organization (WHO) has raised the pandemic alert level (a 6-point scale) to 4 and is considering moving it to 5 today, with only 7 confirmed deaths worldwide! Keep in mind that seasonal flu kills 40,000 every year in the US alone, so why the sudden grave concern?

I don’t claim to understand all the factors at play here, but one thing I do know: I am FAR more concerned that my government will use manufactured fear somehow to my detriment — likely another lost civil liberty or two and large profits or other benefits to a chosen few — than I am about contracting the demon swine flu.

A few facts to bolster your immune-to-bullshit system:

–Thus far, only 97 cases of so-called swine flu have been definitively identified worldwide, mostly in Mexico (26 confirmed, 7 deaths) and the U.S. (64 confirmed, no deaths). About 1600 suspected cases, including 159 deaths, are reported in Mexico. Sad as this is, it does not add up to a pandemic swine flu outbreak. We love to make this shit up for some reason. Remember the one million Americans who were supposed to die of swine flu in 1976? WHO has forgotten about them, I suppose, because they refused to become cooperative statistics.

–The virus at issue has nothing to do with swine. In fact, it hasn’t been seen in a single animal. And you can’t possibly get it from eating pork which I see as an unfortunate truth, because a good reason to stop eating pork would be a welcome silver lining to this “worldwide health crisis.”

–No existing vaccines can prevent this new flu strain. So no matter what you hear – even if it comes from your doctor – don’t get a regular flu shot. They rarely work against seasonal flu and certainly can’t offer protection from a never-before-seen strain.

–Speaking of this strain, it doesn’t seem to have come on naturally. According to the World Health Organization, this particular strain has never before been seen in pigs or people. And according to Reuters, the strain is a ‘genetic mix’ of swine, avian and human flu. Was it created in a lab? We don’t know yet, and I doubt we’ll find out anytime soon.

–The drug companies are getting excited, and that’s never a good thing. According to the Associated Press at least one financial analyst estimates up to $388 million worth of Tamiflu sales in the near future – and that’s without a pandemic outbreak. Imagine the payday when everyone begins to flip out!

–Let’s not forget that Tamiflu comes with its own problems, including side effects like nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, headache, dizziness, fatigue, cough — the very symptoms it purports to relieve! But, oh well, at least the drug company benefits financially from Tamiflu sales. No one benefits if we don’t take it, which makes the whole pandemic thing seem like a wasted opportunity.

–Vaccines for this flu strain won’t have to jump through all those annoying hurdles like clinical trials for safety and effectiveness (which, if you know anything about the FDA, are usually a waste of time anyway). That won’t, however, stop the government from mandating the vaccine for all of us – a very likely scenario. And if the vaccines are actually harmful — killing people, for example, which they certainly will be — the vaccine makers will be immune from lawsuits. D’ya suppose they could bottle up some of that fail-safe immunity for the rest of us?

“Swine flu” is endemic to a sick system created by pigs. Your best defense against swine flu – your only real defense in any manufactured health crisis situation – is a bullshit-proof immune system.

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