Improve your soil by raking less

by Terry Ettinger

If you dread the annual fall leaf-raking marathon, we have good news for you: Raking and collecting leaves every autumn is a tradition without scientific basis. Read More…

This article came along just at the right time. I was planning on using the grass-catcher to pick up all those leave the neighbor’s tree deposits all over my lawn the next time I mowed, but now I’m just going to mulch. GREAT!

Might as well put a plug in for the Fine Gardening website. It’s been a great source of “how to” information for me.

How to Reduce Maintenance

Some time-saving tactics can make your garden easier to care for

by Sydney Eddison

This is a great article for older gardeners — lots of help and great ideas here.

–Joe

Everything Is About Something Different

“This report is about fair and honest observations and not about opinions

When you read this blog Report Number 2 and our flagship Joe Blow Report, is that what you really come away with? That we are dedicated to stimulating thought over belief? Joe recently said the following:

“In that regard, the Joe Blow Report, aside from the stated reasons (above), and we’re sure to those that read his observations here and elsewhere realize that the Report is dedicated to the “intelligent,” the “thinking” and the “reasoning” reasonable person.”

“That is why the moronic, stupid, imbecilic assaults and attacks against the object are dealt with and defined for what they are.”

On this Blog (upper right-hand corner) Joe says,

“Joe Blow’s self-evident observations on Truth, God’s gift of Equality, unalienable Rights and Justice before Peace.”

The Joe Blow Report is about stimulating those “little grey cells.” The “Third Option.”

So, when I read this by the Reverand Jeri Gray-Reneberg,

“Let’s continue to effect the changes we are committed to, but never forget that our own thinking and feelings are not the final authority and represent only one version of truth. They are far too easily influenced by pride, fear, hate and isolation. Why don’t we interact today with one person who has a different viewpoint, a different type of life? It might help to keep us humble.”

we just had to reprint her article here.

Here is her, “NORTH COAST PATHWAYS: How can we remain humble? The Rev. Jeri Gray-Reneberg/For the Times-Standard Posted: 10/17/2009“:

There are about 6.8 billion people living in the world today, yet many of us have an unprecedented ability to avoid interacting with people who disagree with us.

I can date my acquaintance with the Internet from about 1999, when we were living in a small town in southeast Nebraska. It has since changed my life absolutely. It is a very rare day when I am not on the Internet for some reason — to check e-mail, check the weather, read news headlines or to chat with my daughter who attends school over 700 miles away. Since my daughters cajoled me into using Facebook about two years ago, I have become reacquainted with friends I haven’t seen, or talked to, in 35 years. Some have changed; many seem just as I remember them. What is different now is that we have the ability to seek each other out. And each Internet site I visit, each friendship I maintain via Facebook, each version of the news I read online, help to keep me safely in the world I find the most comfortable.

As I was growing up in a small town outside Denver, we had six TV channels. (My husband, who grew up in rural Kansas, had even fewer!) Americans watched one of three network news channels. Walter Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley, and other anchors/reporters were familiar to all of us. We trusted the non-biased news reporting the networks and anchors attempted to provide. Now, as subscribers to satellite or cable TV, we have access to more than 200 channels — but most of us probably watch about a dozen regularly, the ones we prefer to watch. We can watch news programs that are slanted any way we like — but many of us still think we are getting unbiased reporting.
The effect of all these choices is that we are able to create a kind of shell around us. We can make judgments about people (and often do, based on highly partisan reporting) and have largely lost the ability to discern propaganda, or hate-speech, presented as news. Our own opinions become reinforced by the information we self-select. Many years ago, we heard about the boy whose immune system was so compromised, he lived in a bubble to isolate him from bacteria or viruses that would threaten his life. Are our lives today much different?

Even loved friends can contaminate us with their views. The fact that we trust them, that they know the same people, watch the same news and circulate the same e-mails from the same perspective, only concentrates their impact on us. And the more serious we are, or the more fearful we are, the more we lose the ability to engage in childlike laughter — to remain humble in the face of all our encounters in life.

The word “humble,” from the Latin word “humus,” which means earth, should help guide us. Every winter, on Ash Wednesday, Christians all over the world have ashes imposed on their foreheads, hearing the words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” It is one moment in the year, but a significant one. It reminds us not to take ourselves too seriously — even our own all-too-human thinking and fears.

Let’s continue to effect the changes we are committed to, but never forget that our own thinking and feelings are not the final authority and represent only one version of truth. They are far too easily influenced by pride, fear, hate and isolation. Why don’t we interact today with one person who has a different viewpoint, a different type of life? It might help to keep us humble.

——

The Rev. Jeri Gray-Reneberg is pastor of Grace Lutheran Church in Redway. She is a member of Clergy for Choice and has several years’ experience in the domestic violence field. She and her family live in Arcata.

So, what’s the “Third Option”?

[Picture Source]

–Joe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve

When I read the following article by Michael Neumann posted on CounterPuch I thought about my recent conversation with Ernie Branscomb on his blog. So, I posted his “Nationalism and the Israel-Palestine Conflict” below because it goes right to the heart of the root issue dividing all peoples, or should I say “races”?

There was an ideology sufficient to drive all those atrocities (“…Nazi ethnic cleansing that antisemitism can’t possibly explain – the genocide against the gypsies and the planned extermination of thirty million Slavs, many of whom died as ’subhumans’ in inhuman prison camps”).  It fairly stares us in the face.   It was not devised by Hitler, but by 19th Century Romantics – poets and pseudo-historians from Scandinavia across Central Europe and down into the Italian Peninsula and the Balkans.   It was not the Nazis, but Woodrow Wilson who made it a fixture of contemporary politics.  This was the ideology of ethnic nationalism.

From this it becomes easy to see why Woodrow Wilson setup the Third National Bank, the Federal Reserve Banking System, or at least went along with it and its “elastic currency.” Later Wilson stated

“A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the Nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men… We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world—no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men.”

To that end and the want to prosecute war to enforce political ends, paper money was printed to pay the cost because there was nothing in reserve as a consequence of President Richard Nixon’s in 1971, causing inflation to grow, which according to John Maynard Keynes, 

“By a continuous process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method, they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some”.

 It is through this mechanism that the illegitimate opinion-driven ideologues and fanatical believers looted middle-class America and stole their moral standing within the World and left them a fractured melange of contentious races. All that’s necessary is scare everyone a little bit, put a little fear in their hearts then throw them some common “hope” and they all follow along like happy little puppydogs just like the Palestinian people.

What give the Jew the moral high ground? According to Michael Neumann it is the sovereign Jewish State — Israel in occupied Palestine. The Arab Palestinian, however, has no state, no sovereignty, no legal rights and, therefore no moral legitimacy because of their sub-standard status. No never you mind that the Jews with help and support from their American and European friends took and occupy that “state” land by force of arms. They took from another what did not belong to them and used it to justify their right to use it to establish their legitimate right to exist.

Fearsome Words?

By MICHAEL NEUMANN

In April of this year I was invited by the Canada-Palestine Parliamentary Association to speak at one of their meetings.  The meeting was to have taken place in the Parliament building in Ottawa, where I have spoken previously without incident.  John Ivison, in the National Post newspaper, published a not particularly vicious or unbalanced attack on me, deploring the invitation.   After this, without any contact with me and without seeing the content of my talk, the meeting was ‘postponed’.    It is now clear that the postponement was permanent.

This might seem spineless, but it involved more than the National Post article.

Ivison reports that Alykhan Velshi, director of communications for Immigration Minister, Jason Kenney, had the following to say:

“In a free country like Canada, Mr. Neumann has the right to air his noxious views. The corollary, of course, is that we can and must criticize them. Neumann’s farrago of cant, conspiracy theory and hate are completely repugnant to our government, and we make no apology for saying so.”

Bob Rae (former Ontario premier, former head of the New Democratic Party, now a high-ranking Liberal Party leader) is reported to have been ‘”surprised and disappointed” that the parliamentary group thought Mr. Neumann had something positive to contribute’.

Here is the alleged farago of cant, conspiracy theory and hate – unaltered since before the attacks.  Readers may judge for themselves whether the allegations have merit.

* * *

Nationalism and the Israel-Palestine Conflict

For a brief period in the 1970s I worked in the Vancouver used book trade.   I got to know a legend among booksellers -  Bill Hoffer.   Bill was a skilled purveyor of Canadian first editions and a great bluffer.  Once I found him in earnest and extended conversation with one of ‘his’ authors; later I asked Bill whether the guy’s stuff was any good.   “I don’t read it,” said Bill, “I just sell it.”.

Bill told me that the secret of the used book business was ‘gaining moral ascendency’ over the customers (whom he called ‘civilians’).   This meant making them feel like you were more knowledgeable about and more committed to whatever they were interested in.    Intimidate the customer a bit, and your business flourishes.

The Israelis gained moral ascendancy long ago; some reputed people called ‘the Arabs’ never had it.  This involved more than PR skills.   It also involved terrible confusions about nationalism.   They’re the secret weapon of the Zionists and the secret weakness of ‘the Arabs’.

Zionist ideology has always departed from a question:  every people has its state; why not the Jews?   A ‘no’ answer would tie you to that evil of evils, antisemitism.  The rights of ‘the Jewish people’ meant Israel had a morally titanic ‘right to exist’.   It meant that the relentless expansion of Jewish settlement was, far from a mortal threat to the non-Jewish inhabitants of the area, the mere completion of the long Jewish Odyssey.  It was just part of the long journey home.

As for the Palestinians, they described themselves as Arabs.   This sounded like they *had* a home; it was the whole Arab world.  If their ‘Arab brothers’ would not take them in, well, that was no fault of the Zionists.   So if the Palestinians were squeezed ever further into unlivable enclaves, it was the Arabs who were to blame.   The Arabs would rather dispute a tiny strip of their vast possessions than grant the Jews their little homeland.

These claims – we’re just a people like any other, we just want to go home – are the last bastion of lsrael’s crumbling moral stature.   It is hard to imagine a more inappropriate public relations ploy.  Israel’s rhetoric of peoples and homelands constitute a rejection of everything we ought to have learned from the Nazi era.   The confusions that sustain them not only raise racial crusading to a moral imperative; in other ways they bring unjust disrepute and demoralization on the entire so-called Arab world.

If we cannot see the harm in talk of peoples and homelands, it is because our obsession with antisemitism has blinded us to the true origins of Nazi ideology.   Before the Nazis, antisemitism was prevalent all over Western Europe.   There were ugly incidents, one or two outrageous miscarriages of justice, but no genocide and nothing remotely resembling the peasant pogroms of Russia and the Ukraine.   As for Germany, my Jewish parents, born and raised there, staunchly maintained that it was the least antisemitic country in all of pre-Nazi Europe.   Why then is the Nazi genocide attributed to antisemitism, which clearly was necessary but not sufficient to produce it?   And what about the aspects of Nazi ethnic cleansing that antisemitism can’t possibly explain – the genocide against the gypsies and the planned extermination of thirty million Slavs, many of whom died as ’subhumans’ in inhuman prison camps?

There was an ideology sufficient to drive all those atrocities.  It fairly stares us in the face.   It was not devised by Hitler, but by 19th Century Romantics – poets and pseudo-historians from Scandinavia across Central Europe and down into the Italian Peninsula and the Balkans.   It was not the Nazis, but Woodrow Wilson who made it a fixture of contemporary politics.  This was the ideology of ethnic nationalism.

Before proceeding let me forestall a predictable objection.  I intend to trace the ravages of ethnic nationalism, not by any means to make Zionists into Nazis.  It is entirely unnecessary to take this false step, which would obscure rather than clarify the repellent aspects of Zionism.  The offspring of ethnic nationalism are a nasty brood, but of course the Nazis were in a league of their own.

Wilson legitimized this atrocious doctrine during the peace negotiations that ended the First World War.   Wilson’s own secretary of state, Robert Lansing, anticipated its consequences all too accurately:

“The more I think about the President’s declaration as to the right
of ’self-determination,’ the more convinced I am of the danger of
putting such ideas into the minds of certain races. It is bound to be the basis of impossible demands on the Peace Congress and create trouble in many lands.

“What effect will it have on the Irish, the Indians, the Egyptians,
and the nationalists among the Boers? Will it not breed discontent,
disorder, and rebellion? Will not the Mohammedans of Syria and
Palestine and possibly of Morocco and Tripoli rely on it? How can it
be harmonized with Zionism, to which the President is practically committed?

“The phrase is simply loaded with dynamite. It will raise hopes which can never be realized. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives. In the end it is bound to be discredited, to be called the dream of an idealist who failed to realize the danger until too late to check those who attempt to put the principle in force. What a calamity that the phrase was ever uttered! What misery it will cause!”

For his prescience Lansing incurred Wilson’s disfavour and was forced to resign.  He seemed a fussy old spoilsport, unwilling to grant peoples their rights  – peoples, or, as he puts it in the language of his era, races.   Could he not see the progressive implications of Wilson’s doctrine?   Did he not understand that the self-determination of peoples – races, ethnic groups – was a sacred human right?

Well, one person did, the person who wrote:

“If the race is in danger of being oppressed or even exterminated the question of legality is only of secondary importance. The established power may in such a case employ only those means which are recognized as ‘legal’. yet the instinct of self-preservation on the part of the oppressed will always justify, to the highest degree, the employment of all possible resources.

“Only on the recognition of this principle was it possible for those
struggles to be carried through, of which history furnishes magnificent examples in abundance, against foreign bondage or oppression at home.

“Human rights are above the rights of the State.”

Ah, human rights, which belong not only to individuals but to ‘peoples’.   This champion of human rights was Adolf Hitler, writing in Mein Kampf.  (Murphy translation, line 4084, Volume I, chapter iii)

Hitler ‘understood’ that peoples had a right to their homeland.   The ‘national’ part of National Socialism was not civic nationalism, the nationalism that calls on French, German, American, Italian or Spanish *citizens* to cherish and defend their countries.   It was ethnic nationalism, the nationalism of ‘peoples’, races, who did not have a homeland, or who had suffered a diaspora or historic wrongs.  Hitler held that the German people had suffered both and was threatened with extinction.  The Germans wanted their homeland back, all of it.  Every other people had its homeland; why not the Germans?

Of course this was nonsense.   The ‘German people’ was a bit of a fiction, and the borders of their ‘homeland’ were founded largely on historical myths irrelevant to contemporary rights and wrongs.   But despite the most awful and obvious fulfilment of Lansing’s worst nightmare, we have never abandoned Wilson’s and Hitler’s endorsement of ethnic nationalism.   It infects even our condemnations of ‘the Germans’ for the Nazi era.

To condemn ‘the Germans’ means this:  even if you’d spent the war in an orphanage because your parents had died in street battles with the Nazi black shirts, you would share in the Germany’s collective guilt.  You share in it not because of anything you have done, but because you were, by birth, a German.  We might call this ‘collective responsibility’, but that’s just a respectable name for racial guilt, the guilt of a ‘people’.   From the rubble of the Nazi empire, the rubbish of ethnic nationalism rises up and takes an honoured place among our orthodoxies.  From this rubbish comes the right of a fictitiously collective ‘Jewish people’ to a ‘homeland’.

That link is explicit.  The Nazi conception of a Jewish people lies at the heart of Israel’s famous right of return.   Don’t take my word for it.   Listen instead to the AMERICAN-ISRAELI COOPERATIVE ENTERPRISE (AICE), which describes itself as “a nonpartisan organization to strengthen the U.S.-Israel relationship by emphasizing the fundamentals of the alliance – the values our nations share”.   To explain in what sense ‘Jews’ have a right to return to their homeland, the AICE states that “At present, the definition is based on Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws: the right of Return is granted to any individual with one Jewish grandparent, or who is married to someone with one Jewish grandparent. As a result, thousands of people with no meaningful connection to the Jewish people theoretically have the right to immigrate.”  AICE neglects to mention that such persons also have the actual right to immigrate, and to obtain citizenship.  On the other hand,  a stateless Palestinian refugee, perhaps living a precarious existence in France, has no such right of return, even if his ancestors inhabited Palestine itself for a thousand years.  Palestine, it seems, is not is the ‘homeland’ of Palestinians, but only of the Jews.

‘Jew’, in other words, does not refer to those who espouse Judaism or embrace Jewish culture. ‘Jew’ means ‘of Jewish ancestry’.   In virtually every Canadian jurisdiction, ancestry is explicitly cited as a prohibited ground of discrimination.   Ancestry is just a contemporary stand-in for the older notion of race and is generally used in references to racial discrimination.(**)   Like skin colour, it’s something you cannot change, and therefore a particularly repugnant basis for determining civic status.

For the homeland to *belong* to the Jews is for them to have *sovereignty* there.   Thus Article 7(a) of Israel’s Basic Law stipulates that “A candidates’ list shall not participate in the elections to the Knesset if its objects or actions, expressly or by implication, include…  negation of the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people.”  The Jewish people, in other words, are sovereign, and hold the power of life and death over all non-Jewish inhabitants under state control.  Lest this seem overdramatic, note how the Israeli ministry of justice commented on a court case in March 2009:  “The State of Israel is at war with the Palestinian people, people against people, collective against collective.”(***)

So a miracle appears among us.   The very ideology of homelands and peoples under whose auspices the Jews were all but exterminated has become the sustaining ideology of Israel, a state devoted to Jewish ethnic sovereignty.   This is why we always hear that Israel – not Israelis – has a right to exist.   What matters are not the citizens of a state, but the state itself, the totemic icon of ‘the Jewish people’.   The fatal confusion that legitimized ethnic nationalism at the Paris Peace Conference now legitimizes Israel itself.   When Zionists suggest that the French and Germans have a right to their states, they conveniently forget that this means the *inhabitants* of France and Germany, not those of some French or German *ancestry*, not a ‘people’ in the sense of an ethnic group.  (The world was outraged when it suspected that Britain’s ‘patrial’ immigration laws were designed to favor those of ethnically British ancestry.)   But ‘the Jewish people’ have a right to their state, and this is supposed to be some lofty ideal.   Why?  Because ethnic nationalism has taken on the cloak of civic nationalism, and we are too stupid to notice.  Had ethnic nationalism not shed a single drop of blood, we should still be ashamed for crediting its mystique of peoples, historical wrongs, collective vices and virtues, ineluctable destinies.   Abstractions and myths that could not even gain entrance to a university’s ivory towers flow daily from the lips of supposedly practical people.

Zionists bought into ethnic nationalism because it served them well.  ‘Arabs’ bought into it too, partly as a reaction to Zionist colonization.   It has not been enough to say:  the Zionists wish to impose racial sovereignty on these Palestinian individuals; this in unacceptable.  One must also ask:  are not the Palestinians a people?  is Palestine not their homeland?   do they not also have a right of self-determination?  But if ethnic nationalism has given the Palestinians some chance at meeting the Zionists on their own terms, it has on the whole served ‘the Arabs’, and therefore the Palestinians, badly.

In the Middle East, ethnic nationalism has always been greeted with polite acceptance and a certain embarrassment.  The idea that all Arabic speakers shared in being Arabs began life, like most ethnic nationalisms, as an almost literary adventure.  It originates in Syria, where progressive Christians developed it to counter Ottoman rule.  The British, through T.E. Lawrence ‘of Arabia’ quickly seized on it enrol some inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula in the same cause.  After 1919, the Syrian and Arabian strains of this doctrine met in uneasy coexistence.  The British installed Arabian rulers in Syria/Lebanon and Jordan, not without complaints that their new subjects were ‘not Arabs’!  It was again the British, in the 1940s, who presided over the foundation of an ‘Arab League’, partly as a move to keep the French from re-establishing their position in Lebanon.

One of  the League’s founding members was Egypt.  This might bring a smile to some of you who know the Middle East, because you have heard Egyptians make disparaging remarks about ‘the Arabs’ who frequent the nightclubs along the Nile, or listened to an elderly Egyptian tell you the story of just when he first discovered he was an ‘Arab’.   But the myth of an Arab people is more than a successful British ploy.  It took deep roots when Gamel Abdel Nasser fashioned it into a ideology of resistance to Western colonialism, not to mention a convenient tool for extending Egyptian power.  As an oppositional creed, everyone from Berbers who hate ‘the Arabs’ to Egyptians who despise them to Palestinians who feel abandoned by them will proudly claim their Arab identity against the insults and depradations of the West.

Yet all know better.  There are inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula who may plausibly be called Arabs.   Most other Arabic speakers have little in common with these ‘Arabians’, and little sympathy for their culture or traditions.  As for ‘Arab nationalism’, no longer is there a Nasser to fashion it into a progressive force; it has withered on the vine.  Yet if Arab ethnic nationalism never gained enough force to harm others, it gained enough prominence to put the so-called Arab world at the losing end of moral ascendency.

The Arabs, understood as the ensemble of Arabic speakers, are by no stretch of the imagination ‘a people’.  They pay a heavy price for this dubious self-description.  On the one hand, it associates every Arabic speaker with every crime of every other Arabic speaker – this holds even for some whose native tongue isn’t Arabic but who live in officially ‘Arab’ countries.  It is as if the Sudanese ‘Arab’ militias were the armies of a ‘people’ encompassing the Syrians of Tyre and the Berbers of Marrakesh.

Perhaps this bad press is a mere annoyance.   But there is worse.   Not only the rest of the world but ‘the Arabs’ themselves have come think they are somehow a hopeless case:  why on earth can’t they unite?   Why don’t they do more for the Palestinians?   Why the endless bickering and mistrust?  ‘The Arabs’ in these respects seem like perennial losers incapable of self-government, markedly inferior to ‘the Jews’.   This impression is only partly countered by savvy remarks about an ‘Arab street’, always on the verge of rising up against their rotten rulers, yet never, it seems, more genuinely committed to the Palestinians than a fan club to their favorite football team.   To the extent that unsustainable attempts at constructing an Arab identity have contributed to the decline of Middle East secularism, they have also contributed to the rise of fanatical religious extremists.   This too has hurt the Arabic-speaking world.

Not only does Arab nationalism make ‘the Arabs’ look bad; it also obscures what is good.   When Arab states support and sustain the Palestinians, it is much more from genuine altruism than from bogus racial solidarity.  But to the extent that Arabs do not do all that is expected of them – do not take in the Palestinians, do not invite them in as fellow-Arabs, the reason is simple.   The Palestinians are not fellow-Arabs.   They have no home, no ‘homeland’ if you like, but Palestine.   Wondering why their ‘brother Arabs’ do not to take them in makes as much sense as wondering why Northern Irish Protestants would not welcome as brothers their ‘fellow Anglophones’ from Dublin or Watts or the slums of Kingston, Jamaica.

The ethnic nationalism of the Zionists is a big success; that of ‘the Arabs’, to their credit, a big failure.  Perhaps we overestimate the extent to which the West can contribute to resolving the Israel/Palestine conflict, not least because we are so dead set in regarding the ‘Arab world’ – which has given Israel a bloody nose on more than one occasion – as a bunch of losers.   But certainly Western peacekeeping initiatives, especially from Canada and the US, are undermined by the painfully obvious efforts of our leaders not to adore the Israelis too passionately, and not to despise ‘the Arabs’ too thoroughly.  Unfortunately ‘the Arabs’, now fond of their fictitious identity, are complicit in creating this bias.

This has to change, but it cannot change without abandoning the revolting principles we have so blindly espoused.  That will not be easy.  We are so bemused by the lovely vision of peoples determining themselves, we cannot see that ethnic self-determination is, in the real world, a quest for racial sovereignty, not a bid to enter some international folk dancing festival.   We take the Zionist adoration of Israel, its commitment to racially Jewish rule of Palestine, as a paean to freedom and human rights.  We look up to Israel for precisely what should make us abhor it.   The ’self-determination of peoples’ is a poison set in the very heart of our humanitarian ideologies.    Neutralize it and Israel will lose its moral ascendency.

Michael Neumann is a professor of philosophy at a Canadian university.  He is the author of What’s Left: Radical Politics and the Radical Psyche and The Case Against Israel.  He also contributed the essay, “What is Anti-Semitism”, to CounterPunch’s book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism.  He can be reached at mneumann@live.com

Notes.

(*) http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Politics/return.html

I am not the first Jew to find the founding concept of Zionism unacceptable, and long ago a much more committed Jew went further than I.   Lessing J. Rosenwald, president of the American Council for Judaism, expressed himself as follows – in 1944:  “The concept of a racial state – the Hitlerian concept- is repugnant to the civilized world, as witness the fearful  global war in which we are involved. . . , I urge that we do  nothing to set us back on the road to the past. To project at this time the creation of a Jewish state or commonwealth is to launch a singular innovation in world affairs which  might well have incalculable consequences.”

(**)Even countries that appear to discriminate on the basis of ancestry do not in fact do so.  For example, the UK’s ancestry visas do not: “The visa enables people aged 17 or over whose grandparents were born in the UK to come for four years and eventually apply to stay”  (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1579415/Britain-may-abolish-ancestry-visa.html)    So the ultimate criterion is residence, not ancestry.  Not so Israel.

(***)The Ministry of Justice, March 2009, commenting on whether Israeli citizens can bring spouses to Israel if they come from a ‘hostile country’ or from the occupied territories:  http://www.avnery-news.co.il/english/index.html

2012 isn’t the end of the world, Mayans insist

MEXICO CITY – Apolinario Chile Pixtun is tired of being bombarded with frantic questions about the Mayan calendar supposedly “running out” on Dec. 21, 2012. After all, it’s not the end of the world.

Or is it?

Here are some interesting links:

Apocalypse 2012 Antichrist Conspiracy 33 David Flynn Temple Ark Covenant End Times Prophecy

Brian Dunning’s inFact – The 2012 Apocalypse

And our personal favorite from  Drunvalo Melchizedek - There are 8 segments, so be sure to listen to all of them:
(Don’t let the German fool you, it’s all English.)

Based upon our observations, something will happen. Exactly what, well . . .

We’re not sure. When we are we’ll let you know.

Kind of leary of doing anything real drastic right now, like selling my home and moving to a little higher elevation. Living right on the ocean might not be the smartest thing to be doing. When I was a kid our part of Southern Humboldt was overrun by all the Seventhday Adventists — Something about heading for the hills in preparation for the return of Jesus Christ. Looking back today, I’d say it was probably just a good excuse to get out of LA.

According to Drunvalo Melchizedek whatevers going to happen could happen anytime. Maybe its time to make peace with your God and your neighbor. [Photo]

–Joe

Mitchell pushes Middle East talks – Is this a joke?

In the face of Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s foreign minister’s latest statement (below) this is just another one of President Abama’s pretty facades. Considering his recent Nobel Peace Prize Award, the world continues to hope against hope in this world-class betrayer. What’s he betrayed? Why, all that hope . . .

The Jews objective from day one was to justify taking Palestinian land by discrediting and rejecting the Palestinian people as anyone equal to them. By so doing and with a lot of help from their friends they managed to get most of the world to buy into their lie — that that land, somehow by divine right belongs to them. If the past 60 years of occupation has shown the world anything, it proven that the Jews never wanted peace. Now that they have proven, unabashed and undisputed champions in both Republican and Democratic Administrations they feel no qualms about speaking the truth. How can they not, when they’ve declared war on the Palestinian people?

Israeli official: No peace deal for many years

Foreign minister’s comments cast a pall over the U.S. envoy’s latest efforts

msnbc.com news services

updated 5:00 a.m. PT, Thurs., Oct . 8, 2009

JERUSALEM – Israel’s powerful foreign minister Thursday said he would tell a visiting U.S. Middle East envoy that there was no chance of reaching a comprehensive peace deal with the Palestinians for many years.

Peacemaking policy in Israel is decided by the prime minister’s office, and not the foreign ministry. But Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman carries significant weight in Israeli decision-making, and his is a sentiment common among confidants of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

[Lieberman is due to meet President Barack Obama's Middle
East envoy, George Mitchell, in Jerusalem on Thursday
to discuss, among other issues, the stalled peace process.]

“I will tell him clearly, there are many conflicts in the world that haven’t reached a comprehensive solution and people learned to live with it,” Lieberman told Israel Radio.

‘Spreading delusions’
Lieberman said that anyone who thinks the two sides can soon reach a deal ending their decades-old conflict “doesn’t understand the situation and is spreading delusions.”

What the two sides should do, he said, was to come up with a long-term interim arrangement that would ensure prosperity, security and stability, and leave the tough issues “to a much later stage.”

This approach runs counter to U.S. efforts to reach an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal quickly. Obama has declared that establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel is a vital U.S. interest. Also, Israel would not find a Palestinian partner for putting off a resolution to the conflict indefinitely.

Obama brought Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas together in New York last month in an effort to jumpstart talks that broke down months ago. So far, no breakthroughs have been announced.

Since the New York summit, Mitchell met with representatives of Netanyahu and Abbas in the United States, and returned to the region this week. He was to meet with Lieberman and Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Thursday and has sitdowns planned with Netanyahu and Abbas for Friday.

Israeli media reported that a Mitchell aide told local journalists Wednesday that the envoy’s visit was not likely to conclude with an announcement on talks resuming.

“We’re going to continue with our efforts to achieve an early relaunch of negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, because we believe that’s an essential step toward achieving the comprehensive (Mideast) peace to which I earlier referred,” Mitchell told reporters as he entered a meeting with Israeli President Shimon Peres on Thursday.

Settlement construction
Lieberman’s view does not bode well for U.S. attempts to restart negotiations.

Mitchell has been laboring for months to pressure Israel to curb settlement construction. Israel has agreed to limited and temporary restrictions on building in the West Bank, but has resisted a total freeze. It has rejected any limitations on construction in east Jerusalem.

The Palestinians want the West Bank and east Jerusalem for part of their future state, along with the Gaza Strip, now ruled by Islamic Hamas militants.

Abbas has said repeatedly that he wouldn’t go back to the negotiating table without a freeze. He also demands that talks begin where they broke off, with a promise from Israel that all issues will be on the table. Netanyahu has said he wouldn’t be bound by the previous Israeli government’s actions.

Abbas could be hard-pressed to back down now that he’s dropped efforts to bring Israel before a war crimes tribunal in connection with its winter war in the Gaza Strip.

Nearly 1,400 Palestinians were killed in the war, including hundreds of civilians. Israel, which lost 13 civilians and soldiers in the war, launched the campaign to end years of Hamas rocket fire on Israeli border towns.

[Photo]

–Joe

Today’s Salon article by Garrison Keillor,

Cut Republicans out of healthcare!

“Let them make do with aspirin and hand sanitizer. Meanwhile, the money we save will pay off the deficit” concludes by saying:

Thirty-six years of bitter battle over Roe v. Wade and what has it gotten us? If the decision were overturned tomorrow, not much would change. The question would revert to the states, and some would permit the termination of pregnancy, others wouldn’t. Meanwhile, the effect of the battle has been quite other than what the Catholic Church could have wanted, the unleashing of angry demons, the poisoning of the body politic.

Conservatives and liberals can agree on the basics — that the nation wallows in debt, that it is shortsighted of the states to cut back on the most essential work of government, which is the education of the young, and that somehow we have got to become a more productive nation and less consumptive — but the ruffles and flourishes of Washington seem ever more irrelevant to the crises we face. When an entire major party has excused itself from meaningful debate and a thoughtful U.S. senator like Orrin Hatch no longer finds it important to make sense and an up-and-comer like Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty attacks the president for giving a speech telling schoolchildren to work hard in school and get good grades, one starts to wonder if the country wouldn’t be better off without them and if Republicans should be cut out of the healthcare system entirely and simply provided with aspirin and hand sanitizer. Thirty-two percent of the population identifies with the GOP, and if we cut off healthcare to them, we could probably pay off the deficit in short order.

It’s time to dump the dead-end issues that have wasted too much time already. Old men shouldn’t be allowed to doze off at the switch and muck up the works for the young who will have to repair the damage. Get over yourselves. Your replacements have arrived, and you should think about them now and then. Enough with the shrieking. Pass healthcare reform.

Maybe we should do the Republicans the favor of taking away their Social Security and Medicare benefits as well. Then when “push comes to shove” we could start thinking about sending that “thirty-two percent” to Alaska.

–Joe

This was the picture that greeted me Saturday, September 19, 2009.

“Eureka water, sewer rates set to rise,” NO THANKS TO THE EUREKA CITY COUNCIL!

The City Council examined an analysis of next year’s water and wastewater rate increases Thursday night, with council members weighing in on the change. The analysis estimated that customers would see a 53 percent increase in water rates over the next five years. For next year’s combined water and wastewater rates, the city expects an increase of $8.22 for residential customers and more substantial increases for some commercial customers.

Who do these people represent? The people who voted them into office? First it was mandatory garbage collection, then its mandatory recycling and now mandatory higher water and sewer rates. President Obama wants mandatory health insurance imposed on everyone too. We certainly can’t have some slacker refusing to pay his or her fair share.

This “peachy” cop-out by the new guy, Frank Jager says it all, “It’s going to be a hard pill for everybody to swallow — it’s not something I want to force on people but we don’t have a choice,” he said. “The sewer systems are falling apart, the water system needs to be addressed.”

NO CHOICE? If what he says is true, then someone was either awfully incompetent, negligent or he’s full of bull. There is always a choice – the easy choice, loot the people you’re supposed to represent, then blame them.

If you need a good example of why Joe Blow blames the voters for these people’s self-serving actions, drop by the Humboldt Herald Blog and read some of the comments about another waste of time demonstrated before this self-same City Council, voicing your worthless opinions: Mandatory garbage vs. the Tri City Weekly.

Maybe these “representatives” would be better advised to spend their time formulating some inventive solutions rather than wasting their time trying to “educate” us dumb people with all the deep pockets. Maybe it’s time to re-educate these bought and paid for representatives with a few home-grown solutions since “representative” government certainly doesn’t work when they think and act like these people think and act.

When you find someone that can truly represent the people rather than themselves and their worthless opinions and belief systems, let me know. Will you?

–Joe

10,000 plants pulled by CAMP raids

John Driscoll/The Times-Standard
Posted: 09/05/2009 01:30:26 AM PDT

“An estimated $3 million worth of marijuana was seized in a raid on U.S. Forest Service land outside Willow Creek on Thursday. … “

What does CAMP do with THREE MILLION DOLLARS of pot? They burn it, that’s what!

Let’s see, $3,000,000 divided by 10,000 plants comes to $300 a plant. The question we should all be asking is, how much taxpayer money did each one of those plants actually cost to erradicate and burn? 

When there is NO money to pay for school busses for our children and grandchildren, or money for the elderly, the two parts of our society that needs help them most, the State of CA has millions to spend on something as frivolous as harvesting POT. For some reason the Sheriff’s Department deemed it important to make the distinction that the pot wasn’t grown by local small-time farmers. They say, ”written material and personal belongings found at the site indicated that an organized drug trafficking organization was behind the grow.” That’s really BAD! Drug traffickers in Humboldt County justifies the cost . . .

If all CAMP and all their allies are doing is going after the “organized drug traffickers,” who benefits? Must be the local boys and girls. Good way to drive up the value. Hey, we got THREE MILLION DOLLARS worth of worthless pot. Who benefits from this make-work program?

What I really like is how John Driscoll for the Times-Standard just rolls out the various spokesperson’s dribble as if it was the god’s-gospel truth. Then when these same “people” are asked to explain, the conveniently hide behind some “BS” excuse like “inquiries from the media” need  “to be cleared through the agency’s Washington, D.C. office.” Then follow-up by saying their enquiries were not returned by deadline.” 

Thus the newspaper rubberstamps what the government agencies want people to know and ends further reporting.

When more money is needed for schools and other essential programs why would the City of Arcata interfere in a developing tax base? The other front page article on Saturday’s Times-Standard, “Danco considers bypassing Arcata council for Creekside Homes annexation” offers up this choice bit of nonsense.  This says it all: “I (Councilman Shane Brinton) certainly understand their perspective and I know it can be frustrating to jump though the hoopsthat government sets up, but those hoops are there for a reason.” Jump through the hoops? Government? Mayor Mark Wheetley and Councilman Shane Brinton take a lot upon themselves when they say it is “the government” that’s putting up the hoops. Who are the people that won’t address the request? Why my goodness:

Mayor Mark Wheetley and Councilman Shane Brinton said they didn’t see the need to meet on the issue again.

”I thought our message was pretty clear,” Wheetley said. “We said that there were just too many other issues in the mix.”

He added that the council wanted to utilize staff time and resources for other projects that were at hand.

These are just some of the reasons the Joe Blow Report tries to stay out of these kinds of political mix, mash messes. It’s rather hard to do when your children and grandchildren are expected to travers Eureka on foot this year just go to school when they had bus transportation last year. When it comes to the people and what benefits them the most, “government” takes care of their own first. Remember, the police work for, protect and serve the “government,” not the people.

–Joe

. . . and The Cyber Bullies

Yeah! That’s me behind that lovable face.

Who is the “me”? For all you know, Joe Blow can and could be anybody. Actually, he’s not really hiding. So, why not just identify him? Or, is it them? Who knows?

Joe Blow is NOT anonymous, either. Joe Blow is an Internet identity that when seen is instantly recognized and understood to represent a certain personality with well-established characteristics. He’s no different than Elmo, or Kermit with a little bit of Miss Piggy thrown in. All anyone really needs to know about Joe Blow is posted for all to see:

Number One Nobody! Born in Eureka, (Fifth generation) raised in Humboldt County. World traveled and life educated. American refugee. Lives forever.

The Joe Blow Report’s purpose for existence is also clearly posted for all to see:

This report is about fair and honest observations and not about opinions.

The governing principle driving that purpose is also posted:

Everything Is About Something Different

Joe Blow is here to ferret-out the “hidden agenda.” This is the reason the Joe Blow Report exists. If possible, to find the hidden, the covert, the subterfuge, the deception, the scheme, to show the truth behind the lie. Ultimately, to expose the liar; the “wolf in sheep’s clothing.” To quote an old saying: Neither Joe Blow, the Joe Blow Report nor its writer(s) have an “ax to grind.” That means: “Have a dispute to take up with someone or, to have an ulterior motive/ to have private ends to serve.”

Joe Blow knows there are risks involved in such an endeavor, but that is not why he or she, (or is it they?), write behind the pseudonym, Joe Blow. Joe Blow is and always was a “NOBODY”! To objectively write “observations” he must remain a “NOBODY.” To become “somebody” is to interject personality with the logical worthless opinions that accompany that person(s). For Joe Blow to lose his state of obscurity would destroy his Report.

Bullies, we all know, exist by sucking off of other people they believe are only there to serve their wants and needs. Anyone that doesn’t conform to that bully’s opinions is a direct threat to that bully’s existence. They live only to control and will sink to whatever depths of deprivation necessary to achieve that goal. The transparent reality of a successful bully is to threaten violent assault on their victim’s person, property, family or whatever they think is important to evoke an emotional response; either anger or fear.

Joe Blow clearly understood the risks of promoting such a Weblog. That is why he clearly posted the Report’s purpose under:

More About Joe Blow

Please be aware that the Joe Blow Report speaks for itself. You may or may not agree, but just remember, that is your issue. The Report is offered as a free gift to whomever desires to read it. Please accept it as such. The Report respects the rights of all individuals to be who and what they are. All the same there are consequences for what each individual does and does not do. If the Report stimulates a little thinking, it has fulfilled it’s purpose.

Joe Blow fully understands that whatever is posted on the Internet or printed in newspapers or spoken on television or on the radio bears the responsibility for being PUBLIC property, albeit sometimes copyrighted. Let’s hope that those Joe observes and reports about understand that as well. In other words, if you do not want to read or hear about someone’s observations, keep quiet! Or if you’re going to stand up on a soapbox in a public place and spout off you’d better be ready for a rotten egg or two.

Diatribe personally attacking the messenger,  is not welcome.

No where in the recorded history of these Reports does Joe Blow single-out any individual, group, business, political organization, religious organization, sexual orientation, nationality, government, country or any of the many other diverse peoples whose sole reason for existence is to promote or denigrate other people or issues for special and personal assault. To produce credible observations Joe Blow must remain neutral — no personal, political, religious or any other bias.

These Weblog Reports are dedicated to thinking people. If the bigoted racist, the stupid, inane,  moronic, paranoid, vacuous bully, or the ideologue believer that’s locked into the Dark Ages, is offended by this, then so be it. They need to grow up and get a life.

That is how they expose the truth of themselves. Merely infer that what they say or write is lacking some sense of knowledgeable logic or that they ignorantly made a “simpleminded” mistake then sit back to see if it was a simple mistake or a malicious and deliberate deception. If it was a mistake or a simple error in judgment, people will usually acknowledge it, correct the problem and simply move on. However if they were deliberate and malicious, they get extremely angry, go ballistic and personally attack with all kinds of foul and malicious accusations. That is how they show everyone exactly who and what they are. They are thus judged by what they do and say and everyone is a witness to that judgment. At that point the Universal Law of Karma is enforced and these people receive exactly what they sowed.

Joe Blow’s life endeavor is to practice the four governing principles of “The Four Agreements” as documented by Don Miguel Ruiz.

1. Be Impeccable With Your Word
2. Don’t Take Anything Personally
3. Don’t Make Assumptions
4. Always Do your Best

Sometimes bullies can be very intimidating, specially when they threaten your family, your property and livelihood, making a perfect application of these Agreements very difficult. It’s in the trying that defines the character.

It is in this “trying” that the Joe Blow Report finds inspiration in a world of bullies, descending into chaos and the Dark Ages.

–Joe

The Report has been a bit critical with the staff and management at the Times-Standard of late, but occasionally they DO come through. The following article by John M. Crisp about lessons learned (?) worth thinking about.

John M. Crisp (jcrisp@delmar.edu teaches) in the English Department at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas. So, right away this means he’s head and shoulders smarter than the most of us, right?

He writes: What we learned from Vietnam. If you want to know what “he” learned read the following. It’s well worth your time. Specially, all of you people that believe in the latest “Hope Messiah.”

THE DEATH of Robert McNamara creates an apt occasion to consider the Vietnam War. For many Americans, it’s already ancient history. In fact, most of my students know more about the Civil War than about the decades-long Southeast Asian conflict that consumed millions of lives.

But for Americans of a certain age, Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense during much of the war, represents that episode in our history better than anyone. When he died last week at age 93, he was one of the last of the men responsible for carrying on the misguided conflict that became “McNamara’s war.”

The Vietnam-era presidents are long gone: Eisenhower, who provided resources to the wrong side for at least a decade before American troops arrived; Kennedy, whose misgivings about the war were eliminated with his assassination on Nov. 22, 1963; Johnson, who escalated Vietnam into a real war; and Nixon, who perpetuated the bloodshed long after the war, in practical terms, was over.

The generals are gone, as well: Maxwell Taylor, Earle Wheeler, William Westmoreland, Creighton Abrams. And with the death of McNamara, so are most of the young civilians — the “whiz kids” chronicled by writer David Halberstam — who administered the war according to their flawed faith in the organizational and management capacities of the corporate world. About the only principal left is Henry Kissinger.

But there are still plenty of survivors of the Vietnam War among us, late-middle-aged men — and a smaller number of women — who honorably performed what they believed was their duty when they were young. Others survived long after the war ended, but eventually couldn’t cope with what the war had done to their lives. And there are the old people who never fully recovered from the loss of a child among the 58,000 American soldiers who didn’t make it home.

The irony, of course, is that even though the effects of the wars we fight linger long after the details themselves are forgotten, we rarely learn anything from them. The generals are famous for always fighting the last war. But the politicians and the rest of us don’t learn much either, especially from a war like the one in Vietnam, whose purposes and goals were vague and dubious to begin with.

So, 35 years later, if we bother to think about the war, at all, we find ourselves wondering what all the suffering was for.

A few days after McNamara died an Oliphant political cartoon pictured him being welcomed warmly into hell by Satan himself, as demons nearby celebrate amid the flames. A character asks, “Is Henry the K here yet?”

Both these men have a lot to answer for, but this judgment seems harsh. Our criticism of them should be tempered by the fact of our continued willingness to use war in the service of our interests, rather than as a last resort.

At present, we’re carrying on two undeclared wars in the midst of considerable uncertainty about their purposes, benefits, or goals. We’re desperate to portray Iraq as a “victory,” but the predictable increase in civilian deaths and the threat of chaos before we’ve even left the country challenge that depiction.

And while the war in Afghanistan seemed like a worthy cause eight years ago, many Americans have only a vague sense its purpose now and no clear concept of how our current tactics can achieve that purpose in a land that has served as a sinkhole for the armies of the great powers for generations.

So, as the deaths — Afghani civilians and Americans and 15 British soldiers in the last 10 days — mount in Afghanistan, this war calls for a scrupulous re-examination of its goals and our capacity to reach them.

Perhaps we know what we’re doing in Afghanistan. But at one point the “best and the brightest” thought they understood Vietnam perfectly. Years later we discovered, after great national cost, that unquestioning faith in our leadership was unjustified.

When you see the current betrayal, you’ve got to know it’s still UNJUSTIFIED.

[Internet Source]

–Joe