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:

lady_justice

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Maps as Propaganda Tools for Large Lies

Nota bene. Lisa has noted under separate cover that a logical argument based on (anti)Semitism is wrong in every respect since both people share the common patriarch Abraham. In 2016 we’re still talking about his two sons: Ishmael and Isaac, brothers where the branches of the Semitic tree meet. Oz & Nichols.

1500 BC, Old Testament prophet Abraham banishes Hagar and her son Ishmael into the wilderness after the birth of Isaac to his aged, barren wife Sarah. Genesis, chapter 16. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
1500 BC, Old Testament prophet Abraham banishes Hagar and her son Ishmael into the wilderness after the birth of Isaac to his aged, barren wife Sarah. Genesis, chapter 16. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Today’s question: is it possible to use maps as propaganda (הַסְבָּרָה‎)?

Does a Mercator projection misrepresent land area?

On your next tour of the “Holy Land” bring home souvenir maps that follow guidelines for “Public Diplomacy: Israel.”

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An excerpt from a recent Haaretz article describing the brochure below:

“The only Muslim site listed is the Dome of the Rock. It’s clear that the map’s editors took pains to omit the Arabic names of sites in the Old City. For example, it uses the terms “Har Habait,” “Temple Mt.” and “Mt. Moriah” for the Temple Mount area, but omits what most Old City residents call it – Haram al-Sharif, or Al-Aqsa. In fact, the Al-Aqsa Mosque is illustrated but not named; the area east of it is marked as Solomon’s Stables.”

jerusalem.propaganda.tourist.map

 

Actually I remember Dr. Laurence G. Wolf once mentioning this topic around 1967 in a geography class at the University of Cincinnati. It was the year of the 1967 War, when Israel occupied the West Bank of the Jordan River, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights. Now in 2016 Israel has only returned the Sinai Peninsula (to Egypt), but no land ever to a single Palestinian: the original residents of Palestine. Before May 14, 1948 most Palestinians lived near the Mediterranean Coast

I haven’t yet found examples for the Czech map mentioned in that class but I do remember that it depicted the Sudetenland as a range of sharp teeth about to champ on a tasty morsel. The German cartographers fashioned maps to represent a clear and present danger: militant Polish horse-powered troops getting ready to thrust their force into 1939 Germany.

 

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Looks like Prague could devastate the German Reich, quick as a snap.

 

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A knife to the soft underbelly of Greater Germany, or bloody teeth? Your guess or mine I guess.

BDS and the Blacklisting of Pro-Palestinian Activists

Yesterday I learned about a pro-Israel operation you might be interested in. Propaganda online real time: Canary Mission

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It comes complete with rapid-fire context-insensitive propaganda video:

Canary Mission: Radicals Exposed

One of the links on their website takes you to organizations that pro-Israel movements view as threats. Among them BDS, Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine.

Obviously the  links do not take you to the activist website but rather to an internal link. Here is what happens when you click the Canary resource for BDS.

Canary is not about freedom, justice or equality. It’s about learning from Senator Joseph McCarthy.

BDS Movement (this site is about Freedom/Justice/Equality)

 

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Canary uses a dark agenda funded by a secret sponsor seeking to remove the privacy of innumerable activists and destroy their futures, i.e. a cleansing.

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Hasbara works by achieving a deft balance between information availability and media participation. It helps to have billions of dollars available to combat free and open society. Success depends upon promoting democratic principles on the de jure side while using fascist techniques on the de facto side. Then to proclaim that they continue the good fight as the only democracy in the Middle East: one protected by the most moral army in the world.

Corporate ownership (NYT, Time) and corporate sponsorship (NPR, PBS) permits bias to enter the news. The big lie requires billions of dollars to grow but it has shallow roots.