Month: April 2016

Ramallah Mix

Source: Ramallah Mix

I keep current with Palestine. I witness to counter the countless billions of dollars extinguished every day for the united status of quo. In a large enough way I am personally complicit: The State Department issued a passport that verifies my identity.

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This is abject primal fear, the kind that arrive when you are out of your mind frightened. It is not a simple detention. 

Palestinians on their own soil live everyday life in a police state every day. It’s just ironic that Israel is a front-runner in the race for fascism.

Video from December, 2015: holiday season.

Did you know that children throwing stones, reported throwing stones, thought to throw stones or not throwing stones are housed in Israeli prisons? The military uses GPS systems to locate a child’s bedroom for 2:00 A.M. visits.

Many Israelis enjoy the occasional guffaw. Who could even think of being offended by humor on a theme of Rachel Corrie pancakes. No one is suggesting that the society might be depraved, decadent or disgusting. Just wondering why I am so thin-skinned and sensitive. Why does that denim have a dark stain?

Thanks Thlwn for posting this video today on Twitter, and for being who you are. Grateful for the thankless task you serve, for your ability to garner humor in the face of evil most banal. It’s not an easy job.

I don’t read about this stuff in the New York Times. I don’t hear about this stuff on NPR. I don’t see this stuff on PBS.  So here I am reporting for duty.

Thanks for reading.

 

 

 

Stanley Cohen in THE SHADOW

In America principles are goods placed on sale to the highest bidder. Career paths are paved with bricks forged by selling yourself out at every opportunity.

Cash in your chips at the next square and move on to another chance for a sell-out.

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Guardians of integrity are rare beasts on our fruited plain. Experience has taught me that wealth management is incompatible with free and open society. But weapons of wealth management are the coin of our realm.

A kind and gentle hint: the system is gamed.

Marking my 50th post on this blog, I leverage what goes for my political capital (49 previous articles) by suggesting that

STANLEY COHEN UN-CAGED AND STILL UN-DAUNTED

become essential reading for billziegler1947 readers.

THE SHADOW is the sole remaining underground newspaper in New York, the home of Stanley Cohen and the only living boy in New York. Mr. Cohen is following the same principled path he began in 1969 and his principles are not for sale.

Imagine that you are looking for a source for truth on Palestine. It’s right here on @StanleyCohenLaw all day long.

But if you need an additional source for truth on that occupied land, consider the words of anthropologist Jeff Halper. He graduated from Hebrew Union College in 1969, the same year I graduated from another Cincinnati institution on Clifton Avenue. I am presently reading and recommending his

War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification

Jerry Rubin is best known as one of the Chicago 7 of ’68, he was also a fellow University of Cincinnati alumnus who decided that selling stock portfolios was the new revolutionary act.  Rubin gave an address in Cincinnati the late 60’s. That was before joining the “revolution” on Wall Street as the Reagan era began.

I was still at U.C. during Naksa (’67 War) learning  geography from Laurence G. Wolf.

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Today, speaking truth to power is the best way I know to find yourself in a Gulag.

Israel is a state recognized completely and thoroughly by the United States and a few South-Pacific island territory/nations. The prisons in Israel are legally available for detaining pre-teen Palestinians, indefinitely. Not the vision evoked by Leon Uris’ Exodus, more like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

But if you are looking for an investment opportunity for idle dollars, prisons are wise investments. Billions of dollars accrete to a single individual. It’s where the smart money goes.

Good luck on your career path.

Alea jacta est.

 

 

Tolstoy, Schumacher, Climate Change & Veganism

Personal integrity requires living ethically. Climate change threatens the livability of this planet for countless species. Veganism is not Shmeeganism.

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Pete Seeger let us know where we stand politically! I call it a metaphor for this election year and a perspective from the Smothers Brothers Show in 1967. I had a Pat Paulsen bumper sticker on my ’63 Corvair in 1968.

Waist deep in the Big Muddy! 

And the big fool says to push on!

Veganism is still a minority constituent of the body politic. But it’s good idea to stand on the side of truth.

Throwing a snowball on the Senate floor is as helpful for understanding the significance of two (2) Celsius degrees as an answer from genesis by ken ham.

Meanwhile Steve Inskeep throws softballs on NPR. Disclosure: Inskeep has been in my craw since replacing the inimitable Bob Edwards on Morning Edition. Just saying.

Celebrating ignorance and arrogance is exceptionally American. Global economies based on the trillion-dollar solutions of fossil-fuels, slave-labor, misogyny, ultra high-tech weapon systems and private prisons drive critical thinkers into exile. Intentionally.

Gross is our domestic product. Strength is our ignorance.

I sit on a man’s back, choking him, and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by any means possible, except getting off his back.

Leo Tolstoy had his pulse on humanity. Select anything he wrote and discover splendid presence and prescience, including veganism and anarchism. Quotes

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The Long Failure of Western Arms

  • Tolstoy: Writings on Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence (1886)

Yes. If it’s a good idea Tolstoy wrote about it from 1828 to 1910. He stopped writing by dint of death: a century plus six years.  

E.F. Schumacher offered the planet some important advice in 1973, roundly and soundly dismissed at the time, but I sense a resurgence, at least a spirit of hope.

From Globalisation for the Common Good Initiative, a perspective on E.F.

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Thanks for reading.

Stanley Cohen Interview in The Villager: #UpTheRebels

Very good news for everyone who follows, does not follow or has never heard of Stanley Cohen: the unchained man is unchanged and is taking up where he left off. Somewhere on this small planet we all share.

stanley-1-600x399-sarah-fergusonA recent interview by Sarah Ferguson in The Villager lends us an update on a life in progress: weeks before the Panama Papers exposed protection already available to the routinely protected. You don’t get into the business of defending the most marginalized clients on Earth because it’s lucrative and gives you circumstances, fame and pomp. Ours is a prison/military economy.  Slave labor keeps prices down.

The IRS sought hidden funds but found none, so they sentenced Mr. Cohen for alleged but unproven hidden funds and sent him to the Canaan (Northwest PA) prison campus for 11 months of prison American style. Click your way over to  Caged but Undaunted for details.

Stanley and I are both staunch friends of Palestine.

benny.koval

Benny Koval

Injustice flourishes in America. Justice vomits.

Short class today. Easy homework assignment. Compare and contrast these two (2) similar Justice Systems:

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