This article highlights some of so-called “progressive” Portland’s destructive urban renewal policies from the past, tying them to modern day gentrification in black neighborhoods. Some clear thinking commenters on the article point out that this goes beyond racism and point to the expansion of both Interstate 205 and 405 which tore through working class white neighborhoods on both the east and west side of town. Conclusion? City governments are not the friend of the lower classes, regardless of their race. The solution to this problem is more neighborhood autonomy and resistance to tax subsidized development, be it private or public projects.

Portland Mecury

That redlining made Albina the black cultural center of Oregon in the late 1940s and 1950s, with North Williams as its beating heart. The corridor was lined with small black-owned businesses: groceries, bakeries, record shops, churches, pool halls, bars, and jazz clubs. Despite the difficulty getting loans, 57 percent of neighborhood residents owned their homes.

Then came another beast: destructive, progressive urban planning. Portland today is lauded for its forward-thinking urban planning, but renewal in the city during the 1950s and 1960s can be glibly summed up as: Determine a neighborhood is a slum, bulldoze neighborhood, make way for progress!

In 1956, voters approved a measure to build Memorial Coliseum smack in the middle of the Eliot neighborhood—its construction demolished 476 houses, half of them home to African Americans. That same year, the Federal Aid Highway Act made money available to build I-5, which sliced through Eliot’s western flank. In 1966, the city applied for federal urban renewal funds to demolish the homes and businesses on 25 blocks around North Williams and Vancouver so Legacy Emanuel Hospital could expand. In its application, Portland planners explained that the neighborhood had “the greatest concentration of Portland’s urban blight,” noting that the area had “approximately 75 to 80 percent of Portland’s negro population,” along with poor housing quality, high unemployment, and high crime rates. Despite protests from the neighborhood, I-5 and the hospital project tore down about a total of 1,100 housing units. Then funding fell through and the expansion died, leaving empty lots along Williams and Vancouver as the scars of progress.

I think I have a new hero. Primitivists and aspiring guerrilla fighters take note!

Mountain man scares owners of remote Utah cabins

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — He’s eluded authorities for more than five years, a mountain man who roams the wilderness of southern Utah, breaking into remote cabins in winter, living in luxury off hot food, alcohol and coffee before stealing provisions and vanishing into the woods.

Investigators have clawed for clues, scouring cabins for fingerprints that match no one and chasing reports of brief encounters only to come up short, always a step behind the mysterious recluse.

They’ve found abandoned camps, dozens of guns, high-end outdoor gear stolen from the homes and trash strewn around the forest floor.

But the man authorities say is armed and dangerous and responsible for more than two dozen burglaries has continued to outrun the law across a swath of mountains not far from Zion National Park. He’s roamed across 1,000 square miles of rugged wilderness where snow can pile 10 feet deep in winter.

And while there have been no violent confrontations, detectives say he’s a time bomb. Lately he has been leaving the cabins in disarray and riddled with bullets after defacing religious icons, and a recent note left behind in one cabin warned, “Get off my mountain.”

“You wouldn’t want to come across that guy,” said Iron County Det. Jody Edwards, who has been working the case since 2007.

Theories about his identity have ranged from two separate men on the FBI‘s Most Wanted List — one sought for the 2004 killing of an armored-truck guard in Phoenix, another for killing his wife and two children in Arizona. Some have also speculated the man may be a castaway from the nearby compounds of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the polygamous sect run by jailed leader Warren Jeffs.

The FBI recently discounted the theory that the man was the fugitive sought in the armored-truck guard killing after authorities got the first pictures of him from a motion-triggered surveillance camera outside a cabin. The photos showing a sandy-haired man in camouflage on snowshoes, a rifle slung over his shoulder, were taken sometime in December.

“We believe that is not Jason Derek Brown,” FBI special agent Manuel Johnson told The Associated Press.

Edwards wasn’t so quick to rule out the possibility, given the close resemblance to the 42-year-old Brown, who was raised Mormon and is a highly educated, well-traveled avid outdoorsman.

Johnson said the FBI has considered the possibility that the cabin burglar may be Robert William Fisher, described as a survivalist, hunter and angler who authorities say killed his family then blew up their house in Scottsdale, Ariz., in 2001. However, at 50 years old, Johnson is doubtful it’s the man in the surveillance photos, who appears much younger.

So while detectives believe they are getting close, buoyed by the recent photos, the shadowy survivalist remains an enigma. No missing person report appears to fit, and fingerprints lifted from cabins have yielded no match.

Meanwhile, cabin owners are growing more frightened by the day and are left wondering who might be sleeping in their beds this winter.

“He’s scaring the daylights out of cabin owners. Now everyone’s packing guns,” said Jud Hendrickson, a 62-year-old mortgage advisor from nearby St. George who keeps a trailer in the area.

In November 2010, Bruce Stucki, another cabin owner, said a burglar broke into his cabin through a narrow window, pried open a gun case with a crowbar and laid out the weapons but took none. At a nearby cabin, the man reportedly took only the grips from gun handles.

“He could stand in the trees and pop you off and no one would know who killed you,” Stucki said.

Some cabins he has left tidy and clean, while others he has practically destroyed, even defecating in one in a pan on the floor.

“He should know he’s being followed, but I don’t think this guy is normal in any way,” said Stucki, who, like many cabin owners, has a lot of his own theories.

“He’s anti-religious, waiting for the mothership to come in,” Stucki speculated.

Investigators say they have found several of the man’s unattended summer camps, what they initially thought were left behind by “doomsday” believers preparing for some sort of apocalypse because of the remote locations and supplies like weapons, radios, batteries, dehydrated food and camping gear.

Edwards said two camps found a few years ago were stocked with 19 guns. One of the camps also had a copy of Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild,” a book about a young man who died after wandering into the Alaskan wilderness to live alone off the land.

The cabin burglar has managed to avoid being seen all but twice over the years, each time retreating into the forest.

In recent weeks, it took detectives an entire day to reach a remote cabin after getting a report that lights had been seen on inside overnight. It turned out they were solar-powered lights on the porch, and the cabin was empty — another dead-end.

The coffee and alcohol the survivalist favors plays into some cabin owners’ assessment that he could be a castaway from the nearby twin towns of Hildale or Colorado City on the Utah-Arizona border. The so-called lost boys are said to be regularly booted from the polygamous sect there by elders looking to increase their marriage opportunities with young women.

Unlike members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which discourages consumption of alcohol and coffee, many of the Mormon fundamentalists imbibe.

Detectives aren’t sharing their latest assessments but “we’ve got a lot of leads” from the surveillance photos, Edwards said. “I would say we’re very close to making a positive ID on him. We just got to catch this guy.”

To cabin owners in southern Utah, he remains a spooky and menacing figure.

“We feel like we’re being subject to terrorism by this guy,” Hendrickson said. “My wife says flat-out she’s not going back to our trailer until they catch him.”

Low-Income Republicans Say Government Does Too Little for Poor People: Pew Survey
Huffington Post

Low-income Republican voters say the government does too little for poor people, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

Over half of Republican-leaning registered voters earning less than $30,000 a year — 57 percent — say the government doesn’t do enough to help the poor, while only 18 percent of these say it does too much, Pew found. By contrast, of Republican voters earning more than $75,000 annually, 44 percent say the government does too much for the poor, while 21 percent say it does too little.

Nevertheless, the survey finds low-income Republicans distrust the government almost just as much as their more wealthy counterparts. Eighty-five percent of poorer conservatives said they trust the government “only some of the time” or “never,” compared with 91 percent for wealthier Republican voters.

The poorer voters surveyed were much more likely to agree, however, with the statement that “a few rich people and corporations have too much power in the U.S.” Among low-income Republicans polled, 70 percent agreed with that statement, compared with just 39 percent of wealthier likely Republican voters.

Though the survey was conducted early in October, its results come on the heels of Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney’s latest disarmingly candid statement on his priorities.

“I’m not concerned about the very poor,” former Massachusetts Gov. Romney said on Wednesday. “We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it.”

Low-income Americans do benefit from a variety of programs, but the safety net doesn’t catch everyone.

From Leonard Peltier Defense Offence Committee

Recently, as many of you know, an act was passed and signed into law that allows for indefinite detention of American citizens without charge or trial. This is perhaps the final straw, the final nail in the coffin of American freedom, the end of habeas corpus and due process. “We will do as we please.”

We Indians said it for generations: If they can kill us indiscriminately, they will do it to anyone. If they can take our land, they will do it to anyone. If they can kidnap our children and take them to prison schools, they will do it to anyone. If they can starve us and lie to us, they will do it to anyone. If they can wrongfully imprison us, they will do it to anyone. Now, sadly, this is another Indian prophecy fulfilled. “We will do as we please.”

Our ancestors and tribal people all over the world prophesized a time of upheaval and great change. I believe that time is fast approaching. I believe a part of this is the government’s ongoing overreach of its authority—until the people rise up and tell Washington, “You will NOT do as you please! We are NOT your slaves! We will NOT be subjugated! We will NOT be ruled by an iron fist! We will NOT allow you to steal our liberty or our justice!”

My friends, my relatives, my supporters—Be a part of this latest, perhaps the last “Indian uprising”. Make your voice heard! Be a part of the brave Movement to come, the Movement that will change the course of human history. Make change and hope and peace and justice a part of your personal legacy. Be the change that you envision and know in your heart must take place.

Do this, and on the day you take your last breath and prepare to meet Creator, you will know your life on this Earth was well spent. Close your eyes knowing you used your breath and energy to Creator’s good purpose. Smile as you cross over knowing you changed the world so that the next seven generations can know a good life. Do these things and know that I am with you. I will embrace you as my relations—in this life or the next.

The elite want you to be quiet and take your medicine. This article is a bit creepy. Is it the Holy Church discussing how to squash heresy? No, it’s your progressive intellectual elite discussing how to craft a better man.

Does Google have a responsibility to help stop the spread of 9/11 denialism, anti-vaccine activism, and other fringe beliefs?
by Evgeny Morozov at Slate

In its early days, the Web was often imagined as a global clearinghouse—a new type of library, with the sum total of human knowledge always at our fingertips. That much has happened—but with a twist: In addition to borrowing existing items from its vast collections, we, the patrons, could also deposit our own books, pamphlets and other scribbles—with no or little quality control.

Such democratization of information-gathering—when accompanied by smart institutional and technological arrangements—has been tremendously useful, giving us Wikipedia and Twitter. But it has also spawned thousands of sites that undermine scientific consensus, overturn well-established facts, and promote conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, the move toward social search may further insulate regular visitors to such sites; discovering even more links found by their equally paranoid friends will hardly enlighten them. Is it time for some kind of a quality control system?

People who deny global warming, oppose the Darwinian account of evolution, refuse to see the causal link between HIV and AIDS, and think that 9/11 was an inside job have put the Internet to great use. Initially, the Internet helped them find and recruit like-minded individuals and promote events and petitions favorable to their causes. However, as so much of our public life has shifted online, they have branched out into manipulating search engines, editing Wikipedia entries, harassing scientists who oppose whatever pet theory they happen to believe in, and amassing digitized scraps of “evidence” that they proudly present to potential recruits.

A new article in the medical journal Vaccine sheds light on the online practices of one such group—the global anti-vaccination movement, which is a loose coalition of rogue scientists, journalists, parents, and celebrities, who think that vaccines cause disorders like autism—a claim that has been thoroughly discredited by modern science.

( More … )

Pacific Northwest Indians go hard. Fuck the system. First Nations, AK Natives, American Indians, tool up. Prepare your minds and bodies. Warriors, step forward.

99% of cops make the rest look bad.

How Not to Celebrate an Anniversary
From the Declaration of Independence to the NDAA
by WILLIAM LOREN KATZ at Counter Punch

As 2011 ended the U.S. Senate voted 92 to 6 for the McCain-Levin amendments [S 1867] to the National Defense Authorization Act, and President Obama signed it. In the name of fighting terrorism, an astounding majority of Democratic and Republican leaders granted unlimited authority to the President [and future Presidents] and the Army to arrest anyone, citizen or foreigner, here or abroad, and imprison them in Poland, Pennsylvania, or Guantanamo or anywhere else — indefinitely. 92 of our Senators agreed the detained could be denied access to attorneys and loved ones, and “enhanced interrogation” rather than legal procedures would determine if they are guilty of terrorist plots. True, some rigid Constitutionalists and Libertarians from Senator Rand Paul on the right to the ACLU on the left have condemned S 1867 as a threat to our core beliefs and democratic system. But S 1867 swept through with the President’s signature on the 135th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence.

Actually celebrating our founding document while undermining of its principles also marked the Declaration’s Centennial year of 1876. That year what might be called a federal-state task force that included a majority of members of Congress and the Supreme Court, and the President chose to override the Declaration’s bold assertion of liberty, the Constitution’s “more perfect Union” and Abraham Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom.” They did so to serve an unholy alliance of northern railroad builders and land speculators, unrepentant former slaveholders and assorted white supremacists — and their obedient lobbyists and media. What followed was a severe and simultaneous assault on the basic rights of Native Americans and African Americans that sent the country careening in a new direction.
( More … )

This is a problem that comes from an all or nothing battle in the political realm. We could really use a separation of race and state, here.

Banning of Books Signals Revolution in Tucson
by Brenda Norrell at Censored News

TUCSON — Outrage was the response on Saturday to the news that Tucson schools has banned books, including “Rethinking Columbus,” with an essay by award-winning Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko, who lives in Tucson, and works by Buffy Sainte Marie, Winona LaDuke, Leonard Peltier and Rigoberta Menchu.

The decision to ban books follows the 4 to 1 vote on Tuesday by the Tucson Unified School District board to succumb to the State of Arizona, and forbid Mexican American Studies, rather than fight the state decision.

Students said the books were seized from the classrooms and out of their hands after the vote banning Mexican American Studies, including a book of photos of Mexico. Crying, students said it was like Nazi Germany and they have been unable to sleep since it happened.

The banned book, “Rethinking Columbus,” includes work by many Native Americans, as Debbie Reese of Nambe Pueblo reports. The book includes:

Suzan Shown Harjo’s “We Have No Reason to Celebrate”
Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “My Country, ‘Tis of Thy People You’re Dying”
Joseph Bruchac’s “A Friend of the Indians”
Cornel Pewewardy’s “A Barbie-Doll Pocahontas”
N. Scott Momaday’s “The Delight Song of Tsoai-Talee”
Michael Dorris’s “Why I’m Not Thankful for Thanksgiving”
Leslie Marmon’s “Ceremony”
Wendy Rose’s “Three Thousand Dollar Death Song”
Winona LaDuke’s “To the Women of the World: Our Future, Our Responsibility”

Read the rest at Censored News.

From AI/AN ATS

I’d like to address the title of this website. First off, I have an affiliation with Attack the System, an anarchist website maintained by the American Revolutionary Vanguard. The name “Attack the System” is an acknowledgement that we Native Americans and Alaska Natives have, through the course of our history, been at odds and at war with various European imperial powers on and off since the 15th century. It is an acknowledgement that this struggle continues into the present day.

Simply put, we are the native inhabitants of a land that is the home base of the greatest, most deadly empire this world has ever seen. We were among its first victims. The American Revolutionary Vanguard seeks to overthrow this empire by gathering together those demographics, populations, sub cultures, races, ethnicities, and political tendencies in North America that are under direct attack by the system. Few have been more abused by this system than we Native Americans. But this is not a pity party. This is a counter attack.

The various themes of this website will acknowledge the following:

• American Indians and Alaska Natives have, over the course of our history, been under the rule of an imperial power.
• Our traditional tribal structures of clan, kin and tribe have been systematically dismantled by the US and replaced by entities more familiar and friendly to the empire.
• The empire has crushed militant, independence minded Natives (through COINTELPRO targeted at AIM and through older wars between tribes and the US before that) and incorporated upwardly mobile middle class Natives through US founded Tribal Governments, Alaska Native Corporations and public sector social service programs.
• Despite the amount of resources that have gone toward these new tribal entities, many Native communities exhibit third world conditions. Before the coming of the white man and his empire, we were independent, self sufficient and sovereign.
• The US Empire continues to steal land and resources from our homelands. At one time this was done overtly through outright war. Today it is done through corporate plutocracy, often with the aid of our own tribal entities.
• Our way forward is to re-embrace our traditional tribal structures of clan and kin and pursue sovereignty at that level. This is our safety net, our economy, and the essence of who we are.
• The tribal organizational model is difficult to defeat and is particularly effective against a centralized enemy.
• The US Empire is in decline. As it grows weaker, it will lose its ability to maintain world dominance and will focus it’s efforts internally and continue to loot, steal and murder in Indian Country as well as the rest of America.
• During this decline the empire will be vulnerable to the efforts of a pan secessionist alliance of regions, states, religious and ethnic enclaves, Native tribes, nationalists of any and all stripes, and lifestyle and political sub cultures.

Ultimately the survival of our people depends on our ability to organize an effect resistance movement now, before it is too late. Our tribal governments are largely dependent on the US Government for their existence, and they will either go down with the sinking ship that is the US Empire, or they will seek to ally with or set up their own totalitarian regime in a power vacuum.

The history of our respective clans, bands and tribes reaches back into an age of legends. That we are here today is testament to the strength and foresight of our ancestors. It is these qualities that have brought us through many troubled times. It is these qualities which we need now. Warriors, step forward.

From AI/AN ATS

Thanks to the American Indians for Ron Paul facebook page.

Fuck Obama and fuck the system. Ron Paul is the only candidate who is a threat to the system. Is he a racist? Maybe. But he is the only candidate who would stop the US Empire from cluster bombing brown people in their native lands on the other side of the planet. So do I care whether or not he voted for MLK day? Not really.

From the American Indians for Ron Paul Facbook Page:

Many american indians/native americans have fallen for Obama’s lies and pandering to our people.I hope we can wake up more tribes to the idea of freedom and liberty.

Over hundreds of years the government has destroyed tribes self reliance and used them to perfect their techniques to enslave people. Most tribes are so dependent on government’s welfare that they think they can’t survive without it.

Although Indian welfare is based on treaties and is promised to us, it shows the most obvious example of the more you let government control you the more helpless you become.

Don’t fool yourself by thinking giving up even the slightest to such a bully won’t lead to them coming back again. Each time they will demand more from you and each time you will become weaker. The weaker you become the easier it is to take more from you. You will inevitably find yourself backed into a corner with nothing left but to offer enslavement for their mercy to allow you to even exist. Any attempt to regain independence will be met with near impossible regulations aimed at crushing your spirit and numbing your pride.

The only chance Left to Save America and quite possibly the world is electing Ron Paul this November to prevent the 2012 doom prophecy that is becoming more evident everyday in world news. No matter what you believe, come the fall of 2012, major changes will happen.

Just make sure you are on the side of truth and knowledge. Ignorance is bliss until regret strikes with searing misery. Then a consuming helplessness will deliver the horror that is reality who most chose not to see.

The time to wake up now is essential,we must Stand up as individuals and demand the freedom we are owed.

Article by Bruce Schneier

Have you wondered what $1.2 billion in airport security gets you? The TSA has compiled its own “Top 10 Good Catches of 2011“:

10) Snakes, turtles, and birds were found at Miami (MIA) and Los Angeles (LAX). I’m just happy there weren’t any lions, tigers, and bears…

[...]

3) Over 1,200 firearms were discovered at TSA checkpoints across the nation in 2011. Many guns are found loaded with rounds in the chamber. Most passengers simply state they forgot they had a gun in their bag.

2) A loaded .380 pistol was found strapped to passenger’s ankle with the body scanner at Detroit (DTW). You guessed it, he forgot it was there…

1) Small chunks of C4 explosives were found in passenger’s checked luggage in Yuma (YUM). Believe it or not, he was brining it home to show his family.

That’s right; not a single terrorist on the list. Mostly forgetful, and entirely innocent, people. Note that they fail to point out that the firearms and knives would have been just as easily caught by pre-9/11 screening procedures. And that the C4 — their #1 “good catch” — was on the return flight; they missed it the first time. So only 1 for 2 on that one.

And the TSA decided not to mention its stupidest confiscations:

TSA confiscates a butter knife from an airline pilot. TSA confiscates a teenage girl’s purse with an embroidered handgun design. TSA confiscates a 4-inch plastic rifle from a GI Joe action doll on the grounds that it’s a “replica weapon.” TSA confiscates a liquid-filled baby rattle from airline pilot’s infant daughter. TSA confiscates a plastic “Star Wars” lightsaber from a toddler.

In related news, here’s a rebuttal of the the Vanity Fair article about the TSA and airline security that featured me. I agree with the two points at the end of the post; I just don’t think it changes any of my analysis.

Student mid-wife pays $10,000 in “restitution” to the medical board for delivering a baby in an emergency situation.

Article by Stacy Guzzo

Less than four miles from the Shrine Auditorium where Lim received her award, a different midwife’s journey has taken place over the last few months. Instead of joyous recognition and award money, this story has been one of pain, fines, and conviction. In October and November, midwife Katie McCall spent her days fulfilling 240 of her 280 hours of community service, part of a punishment deemed appropriate by a Los Angeles judge for then-student midwife McCall’s choice to stay with the laboring mother when no other midwife could be found available to oversee her at the time of birth and the couple refused to go to the hospital. In addition to performing a potentially life-saving technique to help the baby birth safely despite a shoulder dystocia, Katie also stopped the mother’s hemorrhaging due to a retained placenta. A bystander—not the birthing family— lodged a complaint to the California Medical Board about Katie’s decision to catch the baby and tend the mother without a supervising midwife. This eventually turned into a criminal investigation and Katie was arrested and charged with practicing medicine without a license. A jury convicted her despite hundreds of letters of support. Katie, a single mother of two children, was ordered to pay $10,000 in restitution to the medical board, perform 280 hours of community service (including 40 hours of hard labor), had her license (issued in 2010) revoked, was put on probation, and was forbidden from working in her trained profession. The raw, humbling, and inspiring journey is partially documented in her blog.

Read the rest.

This serves as an important reminder to think about how our communities handle returning combat veterans. John Robb predicts that it will be crucial to capture the primary loyalties of combat veterans in the coming years.

• Lots of these guys are combat vets.  They are typically the least employable given their training.
• There are many more yet to come.  Hundreds of thousands have yet to be laid off.  Big defense cuts are coming as the budget continues to gush red ink.  
• Unemployment is going to get much worse in the next couple of years.

IF we keep going in this direction, and there's no reason to think we won't, these young men find new groups to care for them and they shift their loyalties to new gangs/mafias/cartels/militias etc. at a pretty amazing clip.  Given the danger this shift in primary loyalties represents for the future, going it alone isn't an option.  You need a community at your back.  

See:  US Military + Gangs for more

Ex-soldier in Mount Rainier killing stationed at deeply troubled base
msnbc.com

By M. Alex Johnson, msnbc.com

Updated at 8:50 p.m. ET: Brandon Friedman, an Army combat veteran in Afghanistan and Iraq and author of the highly regarded memoir “The War I Always Wanted,” warned against linking post-traumatic stress disorder or conditions at Joint Base Lewis-McChord to Barnes’ alleged behavior.

There’s “obviously no question of a tie between combat and PTSD,” Friedman said in a Twitter message to msnbc.com. “But having PTSD doesn’t signify a propensity to murder Americans.”

Mount Rainier National Park remains closed until at least Saturday, park officials said.
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Barnes was from Riverside County, Calif., and as a teenager attended a community day school for expelled and troubled students, the Press-Enterprise newspaper reported. A young man who answered the door at the family’s home said the family had no comment, the paper said.

Original post: The Iraq war veteran believed to have killed a park ranger Sunday was last stationed at a Washington base considered among the military’s most troubled facilities, where suicides and violence among service members have reached record levels.

Authorities said they believed Benjamin Colton Barnes, 24 — who was found dead Monday, apparently of hypothermia, in Mount Rainier National Park — shot and killed Park Ranger Margaret Anderson, 34, on Sunday. He is also believed to have shot and wounded four people, two of them critically, earlier in the day at a New Year’s party in Skyway, near Seattle, authorities said.

Barnes, a private first class, was discharged from the Army for misconduct in 2009 after he was charged with drunken driving and improperly transporting a privately owned weapon at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash. Lewis-McChord has drawn national attention for widespread problems with post-traumatic stress disorder among service members returning from Afghanistan and from Iraq, where Barnes served in 2007 and 2008.

In July, the mother of Barnes’ young daughter said in court papers seeking a protection order that he “has possible PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) issues,” NBC station KING of Seattle reported. In seeking sole custody of the girl, she said Barnes was suicidal and “gets easily irritated, angry, depressed and frustrated.”

The woman said Barnes had numerous weapons in his home, including firearms and knives, adding: “I am fearful of what Benjamin is capable of with the small arsenal he has in his home and his recent threat of suicide.”

A year ago, the military newspaper Star and Stripes rated Lewis-McChord as the most troubled base in the entire U.S. military, with multiple criminal and military investigations under way into troops’ behavior and the quality of the medical and mental health care for service members returning from the war.
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And that was before the base set a record for presumed suicides in 2011, with 12, according to military statistics scheduled to be released this month but obtained by The Tacoma News-Tribune.

The Army directed base officials last year to focus specifically on the mental health of members of the 5th Stryker Brigade, which saw heavy action in Afghanistan in 2009 and 2010. Barnes served with a Lewis-McChord Stryker brigade, although officials said they didn’t immediately know whether it was the 5th.

The problem isn’t confined to Lewis-McChord. In a paper for the Army War College last year (.pdf), Army Col. Ricardo M. Love reported that “veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) at an alarming rate.”

A 2008 RAND Corp. study indicated that 18 percent of all service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 had “PTSD or major depression.” Only about half seek treatment, it said.

“Although Commanders are conducting tough and realistic training prior to deployment, the high number of returnees diagnosed with PTSD indicates we are not doing enough,” Love concluded.

But the problem is especially severe at Lewis-McChord, which the Los Angeles Times profiled as “a base on the brink” just last week.

“I can tell you that in the last two years, we have had 24 instances in which we contacted soldiers who were armed with weapons,” Bret Farrar, police chief in nearby Lakewood, told the newspaper. “We’ve had intimidation, stalking with a weapon, aggravated assault, domestic violence, drive-bys.”

The issues have come to widespread public attention after Lewis-McChord’s heaviest year of deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, where 18,000 soldiers from the base served in 2009-10.

The base, near Tacoma about 50 miles south of Seattle, has seen numerous violent incidents, leading to several charges and convictions of soldiers for serious crimes. According to The Seattle Times, they include:

• Pfc. Dakota Wolf, 19, who is charged in the stabbing death Nov. 30 of a 19-year-old woman in a Seattle suburb while AWOL.
• Sgt. David Stewart, 38, who killed himself and his wife after leading authorities on a high-speed chase in April. Their 5-year-old son was found dead at home.
• Spc. Ivette Gonzalez Davis, 24, who was sentenced to life in prison in August 2010 for shooting two soldiers and kidnapping their baby.
• Sgt. Sheldon Plummer, who was sentenced to 14 years in prison for strangling his wife in February 2010.

Ribbon Farm
Excerpt below. Are we aspiring barbarians? Planting and harvesting civilizations?

———————————————-

The Barbarians and the Civilized

The most famous lower and higher barbarians in history are Genghis Khan and his grandson Kublai Khan respectively. They represent the classic historical pattern of interaction between pastoral nomads and civilized peoples.

The pattern is a simple one: a settled civilization grows old, stupid and tired, and a vigorous barbarian culture swoops in and takes over from the top, and gradually gets civilized and stupid in turn, until it too is ripe for destruction by pastoral nomads on its periphery.

Modern Europeans since the time of Gibbon (Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) have managed to rejoice in a rather contradictory view of themselves: they celebrate their dual origins in the vigorous barbarian cultures of the North and the exhausted cultures of antiquity. Over the protests of modern Italians and Greeks, Northern Europeans have successfully managed to appropriate for themselves the role of “true” stewards of the achievements of Greece and Rome, cultures that their barbarian forbears were instrumental in destroying (if you want to know which origin myth is closer to the hearts of Europeans, look no further than the tattoos of white gangs in prisons: they tend to be drawn from Scandinavian mythologies).

Here’s a rather suggestive piece of European history that illustrates the barbarian/civilized dynamic. In the traditional account of the “civilization of Europe,” wine played an interesting role. The Gauls (so the story goes, according to Gibbon) became Romanized first, as Roman wine-making techniques spread to what is today modern France. The Goths were interested in many of the luxuries of Rome, but the one that tempted them the most was wine, which they grew to prefer over the cruder spirits they themselves distilled.

I don’t want to hang my entire theory of civilization on this little item, but it is interesting that the barbarians were civilized, in part, through the temptations of an addiction: better booze, the refined product of an agrarian accumulation culture.

Enough examples, let’s note the two interesting questions that emerge, that deserve analysis:

First, how is it that apparently “inferior” cultures have repeatedly swooped in and destroyed and/or taken over “superior” cultures? Why was Genghis Khan able to take over China, and how did his grandson successfully create the Yuan dynasty? How did Arab armies conquer the vastly more civilized and sophisticated Persian society? How did Turks pretty much take over most of South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa? Going further back, how did the Proto Indo-European (or “Aryans”) take down the entire Bronze Age family of civilizations?

Second, given the astounding win record of the “barbarians” against the “civilized,” how come history isn’t written from the point of view of the pastoral nomads? Why aren’t the histories of Egypt, Greece, Rome, Babylon, Persia, India and China sideshows, with pride of place being given to Mongols, Turks, Arabs and Northern Europeans (pre 1000 AD)? Isn’t history supposed to be written by the winners?

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No-Tech Magazine

“The major role of the eunuch in ancient societies was a political one. Eunuchs were the perfect guardians of harems and provided safe companions and secretaries for royal ladies. They could also be entrusted with the very highest offices of state with no fear that they would want to muscle in and start their own dynasties. Less susceptible than other men to corruption and persuasion by sexual means, they were the ideal politicians and civil servants. Their reputations could not be sullied by the accusations of rape, paternity suits and other scandals that so often blight the careers of public figures.”

“The first civilization deliberately to select eunuchs as officers of state was the Assyrian Empire, which dominated the Near East during the early first millenium BC. The practice was continued by its successors, including the Persian Empire, founded by Cyrus the Great (559-529 BC) who, according to the Greek writer Xenophon, ‘selected eunuchs for every post of personal service to him, from the doorkeepers up’. Eunuchs were becoming powerful in China during the same period. They were especially influential under the Han Dynasty (202 BC – 220 AD), when some held tremendous power simply because of their looks, and it was normal for emperors to have as many male favorites as the recommended magical number of wives. But most were of the professional variety, trained for a career in government.”

“The Roman civil service also employed eunuchs, despite the bans on castration imposed by various emperors. And, although the custom was condemned by the Church, the zenith of ‘eunuch power’ in the Roman world actually came after it was Christianized, under the Eastern Roman (Byzantyne) Empire, which ruled from Constantinople (Istanbul) between AD 395 and 1453. Thousands of young men entered public service by being castrated, providing the empire with some of its most distinguished state secretaries, generals and even Church leaders.”

Quoted from: “Ancient Inventions”, Peter James and Nick Thorpe, 1994. Image: the Roman castration clamp, an invention that enabled much safer castration than earlier methods by avoiding damage to the penis.

…. or we’ll pay them $100! Apparently the Deputy Attorney General needs to go back to school and learn about the difference between correlation and causation!
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Alaska Dispatch

Nearly a half-dozen parents of chronically absent Alaska school children now have more to deal with than the school principal or attendance counselors nagging them. Because their children aren’t making it to class after weeks, months and in some cases years of warnings and fines, the parents are facing criminal charges.

The action comes as school districts around the nation launch different strategies to lure absent students back to class. In Camden, N.J, 66 high school students will earn $100 each, provided they attend anti-truancy sessions and keep their attendance up over the next several weeks. The Camden students should be thankful they don’t live in Fort Worth, Texas, where students can earn $40 for anonymous tips to police about kids who cut class. Meanwhile, prosecutors in Indianapolis, Ind., are following an approach similar to Alaska’s, but different in that the criminal crackdown targets parents of truant children 11 years old and younger.

Alaska is focused on kids under 16. In June, Nome District Attorney John Earthman filed charges against four parents — a couple and two single moms — from the tiny villages of Wales and Shishmaref along the Bering Strait. They face multiple counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a misdemeanor that carries a maximum penalty of one year in jail and a $10,000 fine.

While it’s the first time Earthman has pursued the criminal charge in his region, parents in the Kotzebue area have already found themselves in the same predicament. At least two cases have recently been charged there, and another three have recently been charged in the Anchorage area. It’s difficult to know how often prosecutors are resorting to this criminal charge because state records aren’t searchable by offenses alone.

The heightened effort to get more students attending class more often could become a homework assignment for the Alaska Legislature when it next meets in Juneau. Prosecutors say the state’s existing truancy laws contain some ambiguity that could use clarification. Still, there’s a good reason Alaska law requires children between 7 and 16 years old to attend school, said Deputy Attorney General Rick Svobodny.

“The correlation between truancy and murder is higher than the correlation between smoking and lung cancer,” he said.

Students who drop out of school are more likely to become murderers than those who get their diplomas, while those who aren’t being supervised by parents or teachers are more likely to drink, do drugs, and generally be at risk for a wide variety of juvenile delinquent activity, Svobodny said. These statistics fuel Svobodny’s mission to reduce truancy by making it a priority within the Department of Law.

“I am a career prosecutor. I don’t want to see any more people murdered. Given that correlation, I want to keep kids in school,” he said. “It’s one of the few ways that we can deal with a societal issue. To police officers and (district attorneys), it is an advantage to keep kids in school because hopefully it will reduce our case load in the future.”

Read the Rest

Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s ‘Dear Leader’ Dictator, Dead at 70
Bloomberg.com

Kim Jong Il, the second-generation North Korean dictator who defied global condemnation to build nuclear weapons while his people starved, has died, state media reported. A government statement called on North Koreans to “loyally follow” his son, Kim Jong Un.

Kim, 70, died on Dec. 17 of exhaustion brought on by a sudden illness while on a domestic train trip, the official Korean Central News Agency said. Kim probably had a stroke in August 2008 and may have also contracted pancreatic cancer, according to South Korean news reports.

The son of Kim Il Sung, North Korea’s founder, Kim was a chain-smoking recluse who ruled for 17 years after coming to power in July 1994 and resisted opening up to the outside world in order to protect his regime. The potential succession of his little-known third son, Jong Un, threatens to trigger a dangerous period for the Korean peninsula, where 1.7 million troops from the two Koreas and the U.S. square off every day.

“Kim Jong Il inherited a genius for playing the weak hand and by keeping the major powers nervous, continuing his father’s tradition of turning Korea’s history of subservience on its head,” said Michael Breen, the Seoul-based author of “Kim Jong Il: North Korea’s Dear Leader,” a biography. “We have entered an uncertain moment with North Korea.”
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John Robb
Global Guerrillas

One thing is a certainty: when the global economy tanks, black/grey markets and smuggling networks will zooom.  This new commercial layer will suddenly be everywhere and you will interact with it constantly.  NOTE:  this contact less so if you are a) one of the lucky ones in the emerging global ne0-feudal financial aristocracy or b) in a networked resilient community.  So, learning about how black markets and smuggling works is smart. 

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On that note, here's some unusual insight from Melissa Dell, a doctoral student in (Forensic) Economics at MIT.  She has written an excellent paper on Mexico's war on drugs.  Here are her insights into the business dynamics of the Mexican Drug War:

1. Black markets/smuggling networks act like businesses.  They hire, fire, compete, partner, and optimize.  The rules are a bit different though. 
2. There will be a diverse mix of local and national organizations.  49% of Mexico's 320 drug producing municipalities were controlled by major organizations.  51% by local gangs.  Local gangs ally with major organizations for transhipment of product to the United States.  So, the lesson is to organize early at the local level and defend your turf (in Mexico's case, the production is drugs, but in the future it will be the production of nearly everything). Partner with the national/regional groups for distribution as necessary.
3. There will be lots of national/regional smuggling/criminal organizations and they won't be monolithic.  For example, in 2011, Mexico had 16 major trafficking groups.  This level of fluidity and diversity is the result of decentralized decision making.   Local gangs make many of their own decisions in order to compartmentalize failure.  However, this works against organizational integrity at the national/regional level since autonomous local gangs can switch affiliations easier.  
4. The election of "law and order" politicians/parties at the local level increases violence.  Here's why: Law and order politicians increase police activity.  Increased police pressure weakens the gang currently in control of a municipality.  It usually doesn't destroy the gang in charge (unless the police themselves become an informal militia that replaces the local gang's economic role).   A weak local gang is often attacked by new rival gangs intent on taking over the municipality.  This means:  gun fights/battles, lots of bodies, collatoral damage, kidnappings, etc..
5. If a smuggling route can't traverse a town due to a crackdown, it will reroute to an optimized alternative.  The optimal path within a complicated road network isn't obvious without analysis.  Melissa found that Dijkstra's algorithm works well as a way of predicting the new route.  What this may mean to you?  Crackdowns in other municipalities may cause your municipality to suddenly become a node in a smuggling network.  
6. General effects. When a town becomes a node on a smuggling route, informal sector wages fall 2.5% due to the ability of smugglers to extract protection money (primarily from poor people). It also leads to a fall female workforce participation (fear).

The New York Times

Here’s one way it works. The Agriculture Department pays about $1 billion a year for commodities like fresh apples and sweet potatoes, chickens and turkeys. Schools get the food free; some cook it on site, but more and more pay processors to turn these healthy ingredients into fried chicken nuggets, fruit pastries, pizza and the like. Some $445 million worth of commodities are sent for processing each year, a nearly 50 percent increase since 2006.

The Agriculture Department doesn’t track spending to process the food, but school authorities do. The Michigan Department of Education, for example, gets free raw chicken worth $11.40 a case and sends it for processing into nuggets at $33.45 a case. The schools in San Bernardino, Calif., spend $14.75 to make French fries out of $5.95 worth of potatoes.

The money is ill spent. The Center for Science in the Public Interest has warned that sending food to be processed often means lower nutritional value and noted that “many schools continue to exceed the standards for fat, saturated fat and sodium.” A 2008 study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that by the time many healthier commodities reach students, “they have about the same nutritional value as junk foods.”

Nothing to see here, folks.

The Oregonian

Youtube Video

The US Empire includes a collection of occupied Tribal Nations. Time to start hitting back. Build your clan. Create a shadow government in the spirit of our decentralized clan/band system. Build you clan/bands capacity to provide for its people. Network with other clans. Be ready.

Compare and contrast Bloomberg’s localized statism with the Norman Mailer Mayoral Campaign and their message of power to the neighborhood. Bloomberg says his NYPD is the 7th largest army in the world, Mailer advocated for community safety and policing to be decentralized to the neighborhood level. Bloomberg says “The cities and mayors are where you deal with crime, you deal with real immigration problems, you deal with health problems, you deal with picking up the garbage.” ATS and our message of pan-secession says that these sort of issues are best handled at the neighborhood level. We do not advocate for thousands of Bloombergs running city level mini-states across the country. Instead we advocated for millions of communities, self governed as they see fit.

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Politicker NY

http://www.politickerny.com/2011/11/30/mayor-bloomberg-i-have-my-own-army-11-30-11/

“I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world. I have my own State Department, much to Foggy Bottom’s annoyance. We have the United Nations in New York, and so we have an entree into the diplomatic world that Washington does not have,” Mayor Bloomberg said.

At first, Mayor Bloomberg sounded he was outlining why three terms as mayor was enough experience in public office for him, but he quickly switched gears and began characterizing City Hall as the perfect preparation for the White House because it allowed him to buck the Beltway establishment get real on-the-ground knowledge.

“I don’t listen to Washington very much, which is something they’re not thrillled about,” Mayor Bloomberg said. “We have every kind of people from every part of the world and every kind of problem.”

Mayor Bloomberg explained that, unlike Washington politicians, mayors are people of action.

“The difference between my level of government and other levels of government is that action takes place at the city level,” Mayor Bloomberg said. “The cities and mayors are where you deal with crime, you deal with real immigration problems, you deal with health problems, you deal with picking up the garbage.”

From Contrary Brin
By David Brin

Even conservatives now admit that conservatism has changed.  Take the Ronald Reagan who Republican activists idolize in abstract; in real life he raised taxes, increased regulations, signed environmental laws, and (worst of all) negotiated countless compromise give-and-take, pragmatic measures in tandem with a Congress run by the other party. As did Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley, giants who argued with genteel courtesy and who revered both knowledge and intellect, especially science.  Even the most fervid Tea Party aficionado would avow that today’s GOP has little room for such things – as Goldwater and Buckley themselves proclaimed, to their dismay, before they died.

In this analysis, I’d like to focus on one of the directions that conservatism has gone a-wandering.  But note first: I’ll try to do this without taking a single position that could fairly be called even slightly left-of center – by the old standards at least.

My entire critique will be from what used to be a completely conservative perspective. You’ll know this by the historical figure whom I cite above all others.

It begins provocatively, with prominent online commentator John Robb, who offers a simple… and clearly-correct… explanation for the gross mismanagement of the U.S. economy in the 21st Century – an appraisal that seems both tragically on-target and stunningly ironic. Ironic in ways I plan to elaborate — and I expect you’ll not look at the hoary old “left-vs-right” axis in the same way, ever again.

For starters, Robb shows that the patron saints of modern libertarianism and conservatism — including Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek — were right in their core message…

…. proving that today’s peculiarly myopic libertarians and conservatives are wrong in theirs.

The Smithian Fundamental

In order to grasp that apparent contradiction, let’s start by asking: what did Smith and Hayek say?
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Link

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