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Rolla Peace News January 12, 2016 |
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================================= Dear Friends:In this newsletter is: 1. NOON VIGIL FOR PEACE: THIS WEEK, THURSDAY, JANUARY 14, 2016 2. SCARED WITLESS 3. THE MISFIT MATHEMATICIAN (Tom's column, http://tomsager.org) a) Rose Hamid Benefits and Improves the Mob b) Slouching Toward Nuclear Annihilation c) Look What We've Done to Our World d) Where Have All the Free-Speech Enthusiasts Gone? e) They Poisoned the Water As They All Thought They Ought To
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We vigil for peace in front of the Rolla Post Office THIS THURSDAY, JANUARY 14, 2016, (and all subsequent Thursdays until peace is established) from Noon to 1:00 PM. Please try to join us. The temperature is predicted to be in the 40s. If you do not feel comfortable standing with us in front of the Post Office, please consider driving by and showing your support for our message by honking your horn and flashing a peace sign. 2. SCARED WITLESS Fear makes people stupid. If you can engender enough fear in the population, they are likely to accept whatever solutions you want to propose, if it makes them feel safe. The politicians and their pet media are milking the “Muslim terrorist” anxiety to the max, hoping to distract the people from what's wrong right here at home. We need to build walls to keep them out, then nuke their countries and take their oil, if you believe what Donald Trump and others say. And never mind that our country's infrastructure is crumbling, that millions of people are so far in debt that they can never get out, that our prisons are overflowing, our schools are failing, and health care is beyond the reach of a large percentage of citizens. The 20 richest people in the country own more wealth than the bottom 50% of all Americans. And they are using that wealth to make sure that democracy, which we no longer have, can't come back. As John Atcheson says, “Our freedom and our way of life isn’t threatened by Muslim terrorists or immigrants or un-American socialists. It’s threatened by the moneyed interests.” It's fear they are peddling, and fear is what makes a people willing to go to war, to oppress, abuse, and disrespect whole categories of people, to not care about injustice, as long as it isn't happening to them. Isn't that what terrorists do, instill fear into the masses? The plutocrats may have more sophisticated and covert methods, but it's still terrorism. 3. THE MISFIT MATHEMATICIAN (Tom's column, http://tomsager.org) a) Rose Hamid Benefits and Improves the Mob b) Slouching Toward Nuclear Annihilation c) Look What We've Done to Our World d) Where Have All the Free-Speech Enthusiasts Gone? e) They Poisoned the Water As They All Thought They Ought To ROSE HAMID BENEFITS AND IMPROVES THE MOB “It is an easy and a vulgar thing to please the mob, and not a very arduous task to astonish them; but essentially to benefit and to improve them, is a work fraught with difficulty, and teeming with danger.”Wearing a shirt which read “Salam, I come in peace,” Rose Hamid was forcibly ejected from a Donald Trump rally as some Trump supporters hurled Islamophobic epithets at her. Watch the embedded CNN interview with Ms. Hamid. How many of us would have the courage which Ms. Hamid showed in attempting to benefit and improve this mob? Sister Rose, you have my admiration! SLOUCHING TOWARD NUCLEAR ANNIHILATION North Korea claims to have successfully detonated a hydrogen bomb last week, although the seismic signature of the test does not seem to bear this out. While North Korea has received worldwide condemnation for its nuclear ambitions, the numbers tell a different story: North Korea is thought to possess at most 10 nuclear bombs. The United States has an estimated 7,200. North Korea has performed 4 nuclear tests. The United States has performed over a thousand and continues to test nuclear weapons. North Korea has no systems capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to the United States. The United States could annihilate North Korea with thermonuclear bombs delivered by airplane, submarine or ICBM. North Korea has nuked zero cities. The United States has nuked two. And North Korea, having legally withdrawn from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, is not in violation of it; while the United States remains in violation of Article VI requiring that: “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”And all this against the backdrop of the continued “modernization” of US nuclear forces and the push to deploy “battlefield usable” nuclear weapons. Sadly, it was the United States and not North Korea, that created a world in which the only way a small impoverished nation can effectively maintain its independence from big power bullying, is to gain a credible threat, nuclear or otherwise. LOOK WHAT WE'VE DONE TO OUR WORLD Welcome to the Anthropocene Epoch (the geological age of man). Actually we have been living in the Anthropocene for most or all our lives, according to a paper published this month in the journal, Science (“The Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene”, Waters et al.). The authors argue that sediments deposited worldwide after the 1950s are distinct from those deposited before 1950 in that they contain plastics, residues from burning fossil-fuels, radio-nucleides, concrete, lead and other industrial man-made substances in quantities large enough to warrant classifying the post 1950s world as a new geological epoch. Kieran Suckling cautions against the name Anthropocene, arguing that it's human power structures, not humanity as a whole, who are responsible for these changes. Sorry Kieran, but I must side with Waters et al. here. In the unlikely event that anyone is still around in a few thousand years to analyze sediments and core samples, I suspect they will say, “Look what they did to their world.” rather than “Look what human power structures did.” While some are certainly more guilty than others, we are ALL responsible. The title of this snippet is taken from a popular song of the early Anthropocene, Look What They've Done To My Song. WHERE HAVE ALL THE FREE-SPEECH ENTHUSIASTS GONE? Glenn Greenwald revisits the Charlie Hebdo murders and points out the hypocrisy of the millions who marched a year ago for free speech in Paris proclaiming, “Je suis Charlie.” Today, these free-speech advocates are nowhere to be found, as France becomes more and more repressive, silencing and jailing dissidents and critics alike. Greenwald writes: “In all the many years I’ve worked in defense of free speech, I’ve never seen the principle so blatantly exploited for other ends by people who plainly don’t believe in it as was true of the Hebdo killings. It was as transparent as it was dishonest. Their actual agenda was illustrated by how they invented a brand new free speech standard specially for that occasion: In order to defend free speech, one must not merely defend the right to express an idea, they decreed, but must embrace the idea itself.”I've also written about both the Charlie Hebdo murders and the more recent Friday the 13th murders in Paris. Like the previous snippet, the title of this one is also from an early Anthropocene popular song. THEY POISONED THE WATER AS THEY ALL THOUGHT THEY OUGHT TO Michael Moore and many others are calling for the prosecution, conviction and incarceration of Michigan governor, Rick Snyder and his cronies who switched the water supply for Flint, Michigan, a city of around 100,000 inhabitants, to the highly polluted Flint River, poisoning the entire population. In spite of these revelations, little or nothing has been done to provide the residents of Flint with safe drinking water. Hey, isn't deliberately poisoning the water supply for a major city terrorism? Why aren't these guys languishing in Guantánamo waiting to be tried by military tribunal? I have one further question: How many cities have had their water supplies deliberately poisoned by the Islamic State? A quick search of the internet turns up only alleged plots. The title line of this snippet comes from the poem, Extinction. ================== Rolla Peace News is distributed by email once a week on Tuesday evenings (except on rare occasions) and is posted on the web at http://tomsager.org (click on Grassroots Rolla: top of rightmost column).If you don't wish to get notices of peace events in the Rolla area, let me know and I'll take you off this list. If you want to be added to this list, let me know. Wage peace, Helen helenm (at) fidnet.com ### |