Friday, May 3, 2024

Democrat President Biden and Israel's religious war in Gaza (WWIII?) vs. Democrat President Johnson and Defense Secretary McNamara’s capitalistic war in Vietnam

    Gloria Steinem wrote a book entitled, "The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off."

    The increasing large not so nice student protests in American colleges against President Biden and the U.S. Congress giving Israel weapons and munitions to destroy Gaza kinda reminds me of college students protesting against America’s war in Vietnam. 

    Kinda.

    After coming out against America being at war in Vietnam, President John F. Kennedy, his U.S. Senator presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcom X were shot dead.

    After Ricard Nixon won the presidential election on a campaign he had a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam, which turned out to be turning the war over to the South Vietnamese government and bringing his troops home. Years later, McNamara’s bool, In Retrospect: The Tragedies and Lessons of Vietnam, in which he said maybe it was a mistake, but not big enough a mistake for him not to accept a lot of money from his publisher and speaker fees for writing about his mistake.

   It came out later that Tonkin Gulf resolution, passed by the U.S. Congress, authorizing President Lyndon Johnson, to wage war in Vietnam, after he had promised on national television that he would never send American boys to die in a war in Asia, was cooked up by President Johnson and his Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

U.S. Naval Institute

    This happened on President Nixon’s watch:

Wikipedia:

The Kent State shootings (also known as the May 4 massacre and the Kent State massacre[3][4][5]) were the killing of four and wounding of nine unarmed college students by the Ohio National Guard on the Kent State University campus. The shootings took place on May 4, 1970, during a rally opposing the expanding involvement of the Vietnam War into Cambodia by United States military forces as well as protesting the National Guard presence on campus and the draft.

Twenty-eight National Guard soldiers fired about 67 rounds over 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others, one of whom suffered permanent paralysis. Students Allison Krause, 19, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, 20, and Sandra Lee Scheuer, 20, died on the scene, while William Knox Schroeder, 19, was pronounced dead at Robinson Memorial Hospital in nearby Ravenna shortly afterward.[6][7]

Krause and Miller were among the more than 300 students who gathered to protest the expansion of the Cambodian campaign, which President Richard Nixon had announced in an April 30 television address. Scheuer and Schroeder were in the crowd of several hundred others who had been observing the proceedings more than 300 feet (91 m) from the firing line; like most observers, they watched the protest during a break between their classes.[8][9]

The shootings triggered immediate and massive outrage on campuses around the country. It increased participation in the student strike that began on May 1. Ultimately, more than 4 million students participated in organized walk-outs at hundreds of universities, colleges, and high schools. The shootings and the strike affected public opinion at an already socially contentious time over the role of the United States in the Vietnam War.[10]

Eight of the shooters were charged with depriving the students of their civil rights, but were acquitted in a bench trial. The trial judge stated, "It is vital that state and National Guard officials not regard this decision as authorizing or approving the use of force against demonstrators, whatever the occasion of the issue involved. Such use of force is, and was, deplorable."[11]

    
     Most Vietnam war demonstrations  were peaceful, except for an organization called The Weathermen.

Wikepedia

The Weather Underground was a far-left Marxist militant organization first active in 1969, founded on the Ann Arbor campus of the University of Michigan.[2] Originally known as the Weathermen, the group was organized as a faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) national leadership.[3] Officially known as the Weather Underground Organization(WUO) beginning in 1970, the group's express political goal was to create a revolutionary party to overthrow the United States government, which WUO believed to be imperialist.

The FBI described the WUO as a domestic terrorist group,[4] with revolutionary positions characterized by Black Power and opposition to the Vietnam War.[3] The WUO took part in domestic attacks such as the jailbreak of Timothy Leary in 1970.[5][6] The "Days of Rage" was the WUO's first riot in October 1969 in Chicago, timed to coincide with the trial of the Chicago Seven. In 1970, the group issued a "Declaration of a State of War" against the United States government under the name "Weather Underground Organization."[7]

In the 1970s, the WUO conducted a bombing campaign targeting government buildings and several banks. Some attacks were preceded by evacuation warnings, along with threats identifying the particular matter that the attack was intended to protest. Three members of the group were killed in an accidental Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, but none were killed in any of the bombings. The WUO communiqué issued in connection with the bombing of the United States Capitol on March 1, 1971, indicated that it was "in protest of the U.S. invasion of Laos". The WUO asserted that its May 19, 1972 bombing of the Pentagon was "in retaliation for the U.S. bombing raid in Hanoi". The WUO announced that its January 29, 1975 bombing of the United States Department of State building was "in response to the escalation in Vietnam".[7][8]

The WUO began to disintegrate after the United States reached a peace accord in Vietnam in 1973,[9][page needed] and it was defunct by 1977. Some members of the WUO joined the May 19th Communist Organization and continued their activities until that group disbanded in 1985.

The group took its name from Bob Dylan's lyric "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows", from the song "Subterranean Homesick Blues" (1965).[10] That Dylan line was also the title of a position paper distributed at an SDS convention in Chicago on June 18, 1969. This founding document called for a "White fighting force" to be allied with the "Black Liberation Movement" and other radical movements[11] to achieve "the destruction of U.S. imperialism and form a classless communist world".[12] 

    In 1999, I took up with a woman from Ohio, who said she was one of the Kent State students sitting on the ground protesting the war in Vietnam when the Ohio National Guard opened fire on them. She and the other students who were not shot jumped up and ran away in a pod being chased by the Guardsmen. She veered left and the pod went right and she escaped. She was so disturbed that she joined the Weathermen and carried explosives in her daypack for them to different locations on the Ohio State campus. After a while, she decided that was not right for her and she quit doing it and burrowed in and kept her head down. While we were together, she was terrified of police, as a result of the Kent State shooting. She was the Muse and the model for Willa Sue Jenkins in my novel HEAVY WAIT: A Strange Tale, now a free read at the internet library, archive.org.  https://archive.org/details/sellingyourhomew0000bash
    
    Here are other juicy morsels about the Vietnam war, which never made it into American history books.

    While I was a student at the University of Alabama School of Law, married men such as myself became exposed to the Vietnam war draft. My wife got pregnant and they weren’t drafting fathers. My son was born and in the seventh week he died of what then was called crib death. I went back and forth between applying for a student deferment, which meant  inducted upon graduation, joining the U.S. Marine Corps, or doing nothing and seeing if I would be drafted by the war draft lottery. 

    Finally, I drove from Tuscaloosa to Birmingham and filled out an application for a student deferment at the Draft Board. About two weeks later, my wife realized she was pregnant. I drove back to the Draft Board and told the woman behind the desk, who helped me before, what had happened, and could I undo the deferment? She said the deferment was irrevocable. She walked over to a green filing cabinet and opened it and pulled out my file and opened it to show me whatI had signed, and said some mistake had been made. I asked, what mistake? She said I signed the wrong form and would have to apply again for a deferment. I laughed and said I would keep my father deferment and walked out of their feeling like the weight of the world had been lifted off me by God.

    Many years later, I met a woman online, who after reading about that at my blog, said she’d heard many stories of that happening at that draft board, where her husband’s mother had worked, and she thought it was her mother-in-law who was behind it. I did not ask her if her mother in law might have done it for white boys, but not for black boys. Dr. King and Malcom X viewed the Vietnam war as a rich white American man’s war, which it was. As was every American war after that. 

    In 1988, my father invited me to attend a Downtown Birmingham Rotary Club luncheon with him. This was a top shelf club, its members were prominent or children of prominent members. The guest speaker was the CEO (or President or Executive Director) of the National Geographic magazine. His topic was "Getting to Know Our Neighbors." He said the Geographic had come to think many conflicts between nations were caused, at least in part, by people not knowing much about people in other countries. He said a study had revealed that 95 percent of American high school and college students could not locate Vietnam on a map.

    After the man from the Geographic finished his talk, he invited questions, The first question was, "Did the Geographic have a position on the Vietnam war?" The speaker said the Geographic had correspondents in Saigon, where there was a huge street demonstration of people carrying posters begging America to save them. The posters were in English. That demonstration was seen all over American television. It swung American sentiment from against to for American military intervention in South Vietnam.

    The speaker said the Geographic's correspondents spoke Vietnamese and they interviewed many of the demonstrators, who said they had been paid money by the Saigon government to demonstrate and carry the posters. The demonstrators did not speak English and did not know what was on the posters or why they were demonstrating. The speaker said the Geographic did some digging and learned the money for the demonstration had been paid by American corporations and the U.S. Government.  

    You could have heard a pin drop in the Rotary Club. Many of the older members, including my father, were World War II combat veterans. My father looked like he was going to throw up. He had never liked the Vietnam war. He said nothing about what the speaker had said, nor during the drive back to where he had picked me up to go to the luncheon with him. He never spoke of it later.

    In the spring of 2005, I joined a "Seekers" group, who met weekly in the Unitarian Church in Key West. The church minister, who just happened to be from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, attended each meeting. There were about ten of us. We talked about on and off beat topics. 

    One day, a fellow maybe 10 years my senior said he had worked for the CIA and was stationed with a CIA team in South Vietnam when the French were trying to retake Vietnam and regain access to its rubber trees and other natural resources. Although publicly the American government was backing France, his team's mission was to help Ho Chi Minh beat the French, so America could have access to Vietnam's rubber trees and other natural resources. He said Ho wanted to do business with America, but in the end America wanted too much. Not caring at all for Communist China, Ho sought the Soviet Union's help.  
 
    The truth often is stranger than fiction. 

    Back to the future.

    Money Circus Substack Newsletter


Students Take On Elites Over Gaza
Will they follow the 1960s and confront deeper issues?
APR 28, 2024
Students Take On Elites Over Gaza
Moneycircus

Will they follow the 1960s and confront deeper issues?  

    * Campus encampments draw on 1960s protests, spread internationally
    * Students awaken to manipulation by powerful forces
    * Will they follow the logic and confront the elites’ bigger crimes?
    * Soros is funding Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)
    * He’s not doing it for the good of scholars or Gazans
    * Billionaire cash keeps students on a leash - to redirect them in future
    * Biden admin is driven by fears for Nov 2024 election
    * Torn between youth vote and pressure from the Israel lobby
    * Non-compliance is the only path to freedom

Sloan BashinskySloan’s Newsletter Liked by Moneycircus
Religious fanatics in Israel, Gaza/Palestine/Iran and America are why Gaza is being obliterated.

Bugey libre
Not wrong but investments in gas fields (look Sunak's step father's business), real estate in Palestinian stolen land are also reasons to consider...
Sunak's family firm signed a billion-dollar deal with BP before PM opened new North Sea licences
"Rabat - As Israel ramps up its bloody, criminal ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza, pro-Palestine protesters and independent commentators in the UK have questioned the country’s prime minister’s rejection of a much-needed humanitarian ceasefire that would save countless lives...
"...Many, including netizens, have been looking for answers to explore why the British PM would disagree with a ceasefire, undertaking efforts to also know more about his family background in the search for reasons behind his cabinet’s blatant complicity in the war crimes being perpetrated on a daily basis by Israel against the Palestinian people. .
Some have suggested that one of the reasons could be the financial interests of Sunak’s family, recalling Israel’s October 30 decision to award gas exploration licences to two companies, including BP, a multinational oil and gas company headquartered in London.
The announcement came amid Israeli shelling against Gaza.
Months before the Israeli announcement, news reports in May reported on Infosys, an Indian IT firm owned by Rishi Sunak’s in-laws, which signed a $1.5 billion deal with BP in May.
Infosys is a large technology company co-founded by Sunak father in law.
News outlet the National said on August 2 that “just two months before Rishi Sunak opened hundreds of new licences for oil and gas extraction in the North Sea, an IT firm founded by his father-in-law signed a $1.5 billion deal with energy giant BP.”
This comes amid criticism from many, including opposition parties and climate change petitioners, who opposed his announcement of 100 new licences for oil and gas extraction in the North Sea."

Ernest Judd
Religion is always an excuse. 

Sloan Bashinsky
Religion is the reason for what is going on in Gaza , and I don’t find many people who see it that way. That’s not an excuse, it is why it is happening. 

Ernest Judd
The reason the Palestinians fight is because it is an EXISTENTIAL FIGHT - they are fighting for their survival;
the reason the Zio-Israelis fight is purely MATERIALISTIC, Mammon Worship. They are fighting over STUFF: they are trying to steal Palestinian land which they have no ownership of and killing the original Semites: the Palestinians.
Mammon Worship: Purely the bastardization of any religion.
Religion is merely ideology of Spiritualism.

Sloan Bashinsky
The Palestenians are not fighting in Gaza. They are being slaughtered, starved, displaced, while Hamas keeps using its October 7 hostages to try to get its people out of Israel prisons. Hamas doesn’t care about the people of Gaza, it only cares about its mission to destroy Israel. Hamas is a jihad organization. Look at its original charter, and its amended charter. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar spent a long time in prison in Israel. He figured out how Israel’s psychology works. He figured out Hamas never would beat Israel and America militarily, so he designed an attack that would get Israel to respond as it did with America’s help, to turn the entire world against Israel and America. Look at the anti-Israel/President protests at American college campuses today. I am in no way defending Israel. It is run by religious fanatics. It was a mistake to create Israel in the first place. The Scriptures of the three Abrahamic religions foretold what would happen there, and the religious freaks in Islam, Israel and America view it that way. Yes, Israel kept provoking. But so did radical Islam. President Biden should have told Israel it was on its own after he saw Israel’s response to the October 7 attack. He’s very close to starting World War III over that.  
 
Ernest Judd
And Israel will be no more.
The ending will go peacefully.
Israel will emigrate to Birobidizan, and China and Russia will keep them under spervision.
Therre is NO RELIGION behind the Red Sea Pedestrians. This is fanaticism WITHOUT religion... the dogma fits the whatever fits at that time.
Identical in projection, as the U$A "Rules Based Order" is also projected.

Sloan Bashinsky
Dream on, if Israel feels sufficiently threatened, it will use its nuclear weapons, which nobody in many online forums on this topic I have been has mentioned- Israel’s nukes. 
 If you think I’m joking, you need to spend a whole lot more time in close quarters with people who are convinced they are God’s chosen people.

    Regardless of what many American Christians and Jews think, it’s not America’s job to defend Israel because that’s the area where Jesus was born, grew up, roamed and was crucified at the behest of Jewish leaders.

   Regardless of what anyone in America thinks, Donald Trump and the January 6, 2020 riot mob at the U.S. Capitol gave all Americans the impression that violent demonstrations are the American way.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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Thursday, May 2, 2024

The Blacksmith says the way to make Mexico stop the southern border invasion pronto is cut off gringo dollars :-)

Vulcan atop Red Mountain in Birmingham, Alabama 

    I have a woman friend who married a Frenchman and they lived and worked a good while in France and in Birmingham, Alabama. She is bilingual and has dual citizenship. I met them around 1999, when we lived in the old apartment building where she and I now live today. He died a few years later, and one night he came to her in a dream and they talked about stuff, which he hoped would help her move on. Last night, she told me that she had dreamed about her own death to help her prepare for it. She is from Long Island and she worked in New York City and is very familiar with Donald Trump. She is appalled at what America has become.

    We have a mutual friend, whom I have known since childhood. A fabulous sculptress, she lived long stretches in Mexico, Canada and Europe, and she speaks their languages. She is not impressed with Donald Trump and is appalled with what America has become. She recently was commissioned to do a sculpture that might cause radical Islam to come after her the way it came after Salman Rushdie after this book The Satanic Verses was published. When I asked her if she was trying to get killed, she said everyone dies and she had heard that getting sliced up by a machete stops hurting after a while.

    Both amigas urged me to get a passport so that I can leave America if it goes totally off the rails. I told them that I’m glad they can do that, but I don’t have a passport and am too old and ailing physically to make such a move, and I have two doctors who keep patching me up so I can keep peeing and shooting off my mouth and painting bullseyes on my front and back. I told the gal from Long Island last night that America is the leaky ship I’m on, and in a gallows or dark humor way, the religious freaks and the politicos left and right in America provide plenty to entertain and get me into mischief. 

    Yesterday, my tech friend Bob, who is the reason The Redneck Mystic Lawyer Podcast came into existence and quite a few of my books are free reads in the internet library, archive.org, and I will live quite a while on this world after my body gives up the ghost, texted me:

Have you seen anything from a Democrat in Washington DC that accurately deals with the US Mexico border? I know nothing has been done or even given lip service by Republicans. It is very difficult to see any solutions coming from our current groups of politicians.

    Around dawn today, I dreamed about a fellow named Pablo and Mexicans. Yesterday and last night, I read online and saw on TV that Donald Trump promised to shut down America’s southern border and deport a lot of Spanish people back to Mexico, if he is elected. I read online yesterday that Mexico has started stopping people from leaving Mexico for America. Pablo Escobar, the Columbian cocaine lord, and the Mexican drug cartels just naturally came to mind.

    I replied to Bob this morning.

I think I dreamed about this last night. I think three things got Trump elected in 2016. The Democrats ran crooked Hillary Clinton; Trump promised America’s Christian right that he would put their ilk on the US Supreme Court; and Trump promised he would build a wall between America and Mexico, and Mexico would pay for it. Trump got some of the wall built, and it had no noticeable effect on the invasion from Mexico, and Mexico paid nothing for the wall that had no noticeable effect. President Biden and most Democrats think the more Spanish people allowed in through Mexico, the better. I think they have lost their fucking minds and are making the Mexican and Columbian drug cartels feel like they died and went to heaven. All Trump had to do when he was President to make Mexico stop the invasion, which Biden could have done, was stop Mexican manufactured products and services and fruits and vegetables from coming into America, and stop Americans from going to Mexico with their money, and stop people in America from sending money to people in Mexico, until Mexico stopped the invasion. How long with no gringo dollars before Mexico stopped the invasion? A month? That the very stable  Wharton School of Finance graduate Make America Great Again geious did not do that when he was president demonstrates just how fucking dumb he really is. Or, he figured it out but didn’t want the cartels to send machetes after him. Or, his balls are so small that his dick couldn’t think about anything but the next pussy he would grab. That his adoring MAGAs didn't call him out on that speaks volumes about their grey matter and patriotism. Santa Anna is laughing his fucking ass off.

    In an entirely different blacksmith humor universe, this happened yesterday at The Periodical Compass Sutstack newsletter:

POETRY 

The Blacksmith’s Poem

My Poems

I—a blacksmith,

Hath forged my way o’er steel and fire,

Upon beckoned hands and molten metal

I layeth down sword and shield.

I fan the flames of the furnace.

Chiseled in the ages rests my frame,

Hammering of the efforts draweth out

the iron of my life. 

Copper, Silver, and Gold composeth 

the whole alloy of mine own spine.

The Lord hath quenched my flame, 

and again I am aflame anew,

Casting aside all doubt, 

tempering each shaping 

of mine own life.

I—a blacksmith,

Hath forged my way.

Sloan Bashinsky | Substack

In the spring of 1995, this poem fell out of me in my home in Boulder, Colorado:

Earth-
the sacred prism
through which souls are refracted
into their elemental parts,
purified in Holy Fire,
then one-forged
and sent on their way
to not even God knows where,
simply because they are all
unique emanations of God,
Evolving…

A few months passed and I dreamed of a huge, black, ominous storm headed toward me. On waking, I went into a trance and was lying on my back on a huge black anvil under a huge black blacksmith pounding me with his huge black hammer in his red hot forge. I came out of the trance and this poem leaped out of me.

I am the blacksmith

This storm is my forge

You are my carbon gemsteel 

I hammer into my black diamond lasersword

to cut lightning and thunder into stars and gold

and slice hail and snow into diamonds and rainbows

A few months later, my marriage suddenly ended. 

I went to Nepal, after the travel agent said good luck getting a flight on such short notice, and I asked her to look anyway, and she was astonished to find a flight out in a few days. 

I took a bus from Kathmandu to Pokhara, to trek up to Annapurna Base camp. I was really out of shape, and I was traveling alone and moving very slowly. 

Exhausted, wet from rain, cold from altitude, emotionally wrecked, flooded with dreams, visions and revelations that could not have come from anything Carl Jung would have recognized, I went to sleep in a lodge where I had stopped and had a hot shower, a 1-gallon metal bucket of hot water for 50 cents, to use to soap down head to foot and put the bucket above my head and rinse my hair and body. I ate dinner, decided to give up and head back to Pokhara, and went to sleep. 

I dreamed of riding my bicycle where I had lived before flying to Nepal up the road from Homewood past the statue of Vulcan the Blacksmith on Red Mountain overlooking Birmingham, my hometown. Half way up the grade, I gave up and turned the bicycle back down toward Homewood and lost control of the bicycle and was headed into a wreck off the road when I woke up. 

I decided to keep trekking up to Annapurna Base Camp, which is where mountain climbers staged before climbing huge peaks that dwarfed the Colorado Rockies. The next morning, the rain was gone, the sun warmed me up and I felt reborn and resumed the trek upward. 

On my right side was Fishtail Mountain, its peak looked like a whale’s tail. It was said the gods lived there and people not from Nepal were not allowed on it. 

I spent some time beside a beautiful whitewater river, which my canoe, kayak, C-1 and C-2 river rat friends and I would have loved to paddle back when I was a river rat. I was exhausted and I said out loud that I never wanted to climb another mountain. 

When I reached Annapurna Base Camp and checked into the lodge, the sky was clear. I took my 50-cent shower and had my 1 dollar meal, dal bhat, which all the sherpas, porters and trek guides took at 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. every day. I went to bed with the other trekkers, looking forward to getting up to see the sun come up over Fishtail and light up the towering peaks across from it. 

The next day was foggy, and trekkers from all over the world and I hung out in the lodge drinking tea, sharing stories, playing cards, and eating meals. Same the next day. The next morning was clear, and we walked up a hill behind the lodge to watch the sunrise. 

As the sun cleared Fishtail and lit up the towering peaks, I saw the blacksmith in front of the peaks, as tall as they were. I went down onto one knee, thinking I would hear, “The father and I are one.” Instead, I heard, “The son and I are one. The son and I are one.” I was trembling, holding back tears, wondering what that meant? 

I walked down to the lodge, paid my bill, and headed back down, having no clue how many more mountains I would climb, how many more whitewater rivers I would paddle, how many more furnaces I would be in- not imagining the hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis I would be in- nor how many cobras and black widows would bite me, nor how many lions, tigers, bears, great white sharks, orcas, crocodiles and T-Rexes would eat me. And, I would somehow survive. 

It would be years before my addled mind realized the blacksmith was the Christ, who would be joined by Melchizedek, and later by Kali, and they all had at me in their forges over and over and over again. I take no credit for any of it, except I didn’t kill myself, and for all know, something stayed my hand.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com 


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Monday, April 29, 2024

Hey America religious right, what would you do to Jesus if he walked among you today?


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