Please contact:

and respectfully request:

You may also add something like:

All I need is a terrorist...
The spook looked around.
But, terrorists are scarce, there was none to be found.
Did that stop the spook...,?
No! The spook simply said,
If I can't find a terrorist, I'll make one instead!
          (with sincere apologies to Dr. Seuss)

HERE'S HOW YOU CAN HELP

Please contact:

and respectfully request:

You may also add something like:

“Who's ever heard before of a ‘moderate’ with a Kalashnikov.” —Robert Fisk

1. Get rid of a troublesome ambassador who had “gone native.”
2. Embarrass Barack Obama and others in his administration, such as Hillary Clinton.
3. Create an excuse for more war, bombing and violence.

“The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly,”
          —Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)

“And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect.”
          —Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)

“I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.” —Mahatma Gandhi

“100 percent of revolutions—of victims fighting their oppressors, from victims fighting their bullies—100 percent have been successful through fighting back. Through bloodshed. Zero have been successful just over simply protesting. It has never worked and it never will. You've got to fight back. That's the only way a bully knows to quit. He doesn't know words. He can't understand words. I promise you. He doesn't understand protest. If you all want to keep protesting, do that. But the serious ones, the real ones, the alpha ones, we know what it's going to take. It's only fighting back or money. That's all they care about. Revenue and blood, revenue and blood, revenue and blood, nothing else. Don't even think about it.” (2:40)

George Washington said, “I cannot tell a lie.”
Richard Nixon said, “I cannot tell the truth.”
[current president] said, “I cannot tell the difference.”

George Washington said, “I cannot tell a lie.”
Donald Trump said, “I cannot tell the truth.”
Hillary Clinton said, “I cannot tell the difference.”

“Popular revulsion for the ruling elite, however, is nearly universal.”
—Chris Hedges

PREPONDERANCE OF THE GREAT

The ridgepole sags to the breaking point.
It furthers one to have somewhere to go.
Success.

The weight of the great is excessive. The load is too heavy for the strength of the supports. The ridgepole on which the whole roof rests, sags to the breaking point, because its supporting ends are too weak for the load they bear. It is an exceptional time and situation; therefore extraordinary measures are demanded. It is necessary to find a way of transition as quickly as possible, and to take action. This promises success. For although the strong element is in excess, it is in the middle, that is, at the center of gravity, so that a revolution is not to be feared. Nothing is to be achieved by forcible measures. The problem must be solved by gentle penetration to the meaning of the situation. Then the change-over to other conditions will be successful. It demands real superiority; therefore the time when the great preponderates is a momentous time.

“The world hemorrhages. Refugees flow from its wounds.”
— Robert C. Koehler

“Behold, the Lord maketh the earth empty, and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down, and scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof. And it shall be, as with the people, so with the priest; as with the servant, so with his master; as with the maid, so with her mistress; as with the buyer, so with the seller; as with the lender, so with the borrower; as with the taker of usury, so with the giver of usury to him. The land shall be utterly emptied, and utterly spoiled: for the Lord hath spoken this word.

“The earth mourneth and fadeth away, the world languisheth and fadeth away, the haughty people of the earth do languish. The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof; because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore hath the curse devoured the earth, and they that dwell therein are desolate: therefore the inhabitants of the earth are burned, and few men left.” —Isaiah 24:1-6 (KJV)

“One possible argument you might make, is that with rising temperatures and increased atmospheric CO₂ concentrations, atmospheric oxygen concentrations would fall below the threshold where humans could successfully give birth; but then I've never seen any predictions as to possible concentrations of atmospheric oxygen in a 5C or higher world — and I'm not a physiologist.”

“What are individuals in wars today? Expendable commodities, dead or alive. Hospitals are routinely bombed, raided, looted or burned to the ground. Medical personnel are threatened. Patients are shot in their beds. Broad attacks on communities and precise attacks on health facilities are described as mistakes, are denied outright, or are simply met with silence. In reality, they amount to massive, indiscriminate and disproportionate civilian targeting in urban settings, and, in the worst cases, they are acts of terror.”

“The laws of war protect enemies of the same race, class, and culture. The laws of war leave the foreign and the alien without protection. When is one allowed to wage war against savages and barbarians? Answer: always. What is permissible in war against savages and barbarians? Answer: anything.”

“Infrequently a soldier has the courage to see that what he is doing is both stupid and immoral, and walk away from it. Bowe Bergdahl did. I say, speaking as a former Marine in Viet Nam, and as a life member of both the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the Disabled Veterans of America: You have my admiration, Sergeant Bergdahl.”
          —Fred Reed

“I have been to the darkest corners of government, and what they fear is light.”
          —Edward Snowden

“To my mind, as friends – long term friends with Israel – we are obligated to speak the truth as we see it. That is what real friendship demands, especially in difficult times.

“Our disagreements will come and go, and we must weather them constructively.

“But it is important among friends to be honest and truthful about differences that we may have.”

“The people before you were destroyed because they inflicted legal punishments on the poor and forgave the rich.”
          —The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)

1. The INVASION of Libya (not Hillary Clinton's emails)
2. US support for Saudi Arabia's brutal war against Yemen
3. The use of drones, particularly for assassination
4. Executive power to start wars without congressional debate or approval
5, Nuclear DISARMAMENT (not Iran's non-existent nuclear weapons)

“I have thought since high school that 'Mending Wall' is a fine poem. Recall it was banned by the communists from collections of Frost's poems after the Berlin wall went up. Frost had a way of saying important things in a way that did not sound important. Sometimes, this is a very effective way of getting through to people.”

“Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.”
          —Robert Frost (Mending Wall)

“Therefore thus says the Lord GOD: In my fury I will let loose stormwinds; because of my anger there will be flooding rain, and hailstones will fall with destructive wrath. I will tear down the wall you whitewashed and level it to the ground, laying bare its foundations. When it falls, you shall be crushed beneath it. Thus you shall know that I am the LORD.”
          —Ezekiel 13:13-14 (NAB)

“Therefore thus says the Lord GOD: In my fury I will let loose stormwinds; because of my anger there will be flooding rain, and hailstones will fall with destructive wrath. I will tear down the wall you whitewashed and level it to the ground, laying bare its foundations. When it falls, you shall be crushed beneath it. Thus you shall know that I am the LORD.” —Ezekiel 13:13-14 (NAB)

"We are free now, we can kill now,
We can hate now, now we can end the world.
We're not guilty, she was crazy,
And it's been going on for ten thousand years!"

“The people before you were destroyed because they inflicted legal punishments on the poor and forgave the rich”
          —The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) (related by Sahih Al-Bukhari 8:778)

“‘But he has nothing on at all,’ said a little child at last. ‘Good heavens! listen to the voice of an innocent child,’ said the father, and one whispered to the other what the child had said. ‘But he has nothing on at all,’ cried at last the whole people. That made a deep impression upon the emperor, for it seemed to him that they were right; but he thought to himself, ‘Now I must bear up to the end.’ And the chamberlains walked with still greater dignity, as if they carried the train which did not exist.”

“The real secret of war for those who experience it isn't the visceral knowledge that people can be filthy and horrible, but that you, too, can be filthy and horrible.”
          —Peter van Buren

“... we have ... lost our capacity to think straight — a grievous self-inflicted wound...” —Haroon Siddiqui

“It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails.” —Nelson Mandela

“If you are poor, you will almost never go to trial—instead you will be forced to accept a plea deal offered by government prosecutors. If you are poor, the word of the police, who are not averse to fabricating or tampering with evidence, manipulating witnesses and planting guns or drugs, will be accepted in a courtroom as if it was the word of God. ... if you are poor, because you don’t have money for adequate legal defense, you will serve sentences that are decades longer than those for equivalent crimes anywhere else in the industrialized world.”

“Once you are charged in America, whether you did the crime or not, you are almost always found guilty.”

“The reality is that almost no one who is imprisoned in America has gotten a trial. There is rarely an impartial investigation. A staggering 97 percent of all federal cases and 95 percent of all state felony cases are resolved through plea bargaining.”

“The Innocence Project has kept detailed records on the 337 cases across the [United States] where prisoners have been exonerated as a result of DNA testing since 1989. The group’s researchers found that false confessions were made in 28 percent of all the DNA-related exonerations, a striking proportion in itself. But when you look only at homicide convictions—by definition the most serious cases—false confessions are the leading cause of miscarriages of justice, accounting for a full 63% of the 113 exonerations.”

“If all of the accused went to trial, the judicial system, which is designed around plea agreements, would collapse. And this is why trial sentences are horrific.”

“It is a two-tiered system. One set of laws for us. Another set of laws for them. Wall Street’s fraud and looting of the U.S. Treasury, the obliteration of our privacy, the ability of the government to assassinate U.S. citizens, the revoking of habeas corpus, the neutralizing of our Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures, the murder of unarmed people in the streets of our cities by militarized police, the use of torture, the criminalizing of dissent, the collapse of our court system, the waging of pre-emptive war are rendered ‘legal.’”

Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.”

—60 Minutes (5/12/96)

“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.”
          —Charles Caleb Colton (Lacon, 1820)

“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.”

“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.”

“The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn;”
          —Isaiah 61:1-2 (KJV)

“Everybody knows that the plague is coming.
Everybody knows that it's moving fast.
Everybody knows that the naked man and woman
Are just a shining artifact of the past.”
          --Leonard Cohen (Everybody Knows)

# Listen to area radio and television stations and a NOAA weather radio for possible flood warnings and reports of flooding in progress or other critical information from the National Weather Service (NWS)

# Be prepared to evacuate at a moment's notice.

# Stay away from floodwaters. If you come upon a flowing stream where water is above your ankles, stop, turn around an go another way. Six inches of swiftly moving water can sweep you off of your feet.

# If you come upon a flooded road while driving, turn around and go another way. If you are caught on a flooded road and waters are rising rapidly around you, get our of the car quickly and move to higher ground. Most cars can be swept away by less than two feet of moving water.

# Keep children out of the water. They are curious and often lack judgment about running water or contaminated water.

# Be especially cautious at night when it is harder to recognize flood danger.

“Everybody knows that the boat is leaking;
Everybody knows that the captain lied;
Everybody got this broken feeling,
Like their father or their dog just died.”
          —Leonard Cohen (Everybody Knows)

“My greatest fear about the Paris attacks are that they will be used as an excuse to crack down on the Real Enemy, non-violent protesters who will come to Paris en masse later this month to demand that world leaders at the COP21 climate talks take real action to protect the Earth from further climate degradation, and maybe, horror of all horrors, end the wars which are the primary drivers of climate change.”

“The laws of war protect enemies of the same race, class, and culture. The laws of war leave the foreign and the alien without protection. When is one allowed to wage war against savages and barbarians? Answer: always. What is permissible in war against savages and barbarians? Answer: anything.” —Sven Lindqvist (A History of Bombing, p2)

1. Getting rid of a troublesome ambassador who had “gone native.”

2. Embarrassing the Obama administration months before a presidential election.

3. Providing an excuse for further military intervention.

“People are seized with a kind of madness when they take to violence. The violence carries them along, transforms them and makes them — even afterwards, when it is all over — unrecognizable.”
          — Sven Lindqvist (Exterminate All the Brutes, p19)

“They do one act of violence after another, and one deceitful thing after another.”
          — Jeremiah 9:6 (NET Bible)

Q: What were you firing at?
A: At the enemy, sir.
Q: At people?
A: At the enemy, sir.
Q: They weren't even human beings?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: Were they men?
A: I don't know sir. I would imagine they were, sir.
Q: Didn't you see?
A: Pardon, sir?
Q: Did you see them?
A: I wasn't discriminating.
Q: Did you see women?
A: I don't know, sir.
Q: What do you mean you weren't discriminating?
A: I didn't discriminate between individuals in the village, sir. They were all the enemy, they were all to be destroyed, sir....

“My mother prayed that I would be a man of some renown,
But I am just a refugee as I go ramblin' 'round.”
          —Woody Guthrie

“I have asked [Guy] McPherson and other extinctionists, ‘Why is it not possible that as catastrophic climate change kicks in, humanity will be able to soldier on as a few small bands of hunter-gatherers as it has done for all of its half million of so years of existence on the planet Earth, except the last few thousand?’ I first posed this question years ago. I am still awaiting an answer.”

“Have you read any of my work? Do you have any understanding of biology and ecology? If not, there is no point in having a discussion with you. Uninformed conversation is frustrating and not useful. Ergo, a waste of precious time.”

“There isn't enough good land to go around and what happens when our cities flood or bake in a heatwave and people exit en masse for the good-ol' countryside? This is why I've said that your family is probably better off in the long run living next to a toxic-waste dump than growing tomatoes on an organic farm. We're all going to have to live with our toxic waste and of course many will die from cancers and other nasty diseases. But those who have lived with toxic waste for several generations will have an evolutionary advantage, having already taken the first tentative steps in adaptation. Perhaps that's the true meaning of ‘Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.’”

“O come with me my little one, we will find that farm,
And grow us grass and apples there and keep all the animals warm.
And if by chance I wake at night and I ask you who I am,
O take me to the slaughterhouse, I will wait there with the lamb.”

“Where were you when the United States put me — the only person and only black face investigated over a 10-year period of time — on trial in federal court on Espionage Act charges, claiming that I am a traitor to national security? When the prosecution used against me the same issues from my discrimination case that I had not been allowed to pursue in civil court? When a jury without a single black member found me guilty, even when the FBI itself said there was no evidence?”

“This latest federal prosecution, and the public branding of these two activists as ‘domestic terrorists,’ highlights the strikingly severe targeting over many years by the U.S. government of nonviolent animal and environmental rights activists. The more one delves into what is being done here — the extreme abuse of the criminal law to stifle nonviolent political protest or even just pure political speech, undertaken with tragically little attention — the more appalling it becomes. There are numerous cases of animal rights activists, several of whom spoke to The Intercept, who weren’t even accused of harming people or property, but who were nonetheless sent to federal prison for years.”

“But there’s something deeper driving this persecution. American elites are typically willing to tolerate political protest as long as it remains constrained, controlled, and fundamentally respectful of the rules imposed by institutions of authority — i.e., as long as it remains neutered and impotent. When protest movements adhere to those constraints, they are not only often ineffective, but more so, they can unwittingly serve as a false testament to the freedom of the political process and the generosity of its rulers (they let us speak out: see, we’re free!). That kind of marginal, modest ‘protest’ often ends up strengthening the process it believes it is subverting.”

“The report that bin Laden was unarmed, summarily executed and his body dumped at sea, suggests that there is far more to the story then we are being told. In fact, it puts the whole affair in doubt. The militarists must really be scraping the bottom of the barrel if they have to resort to a stunt like this to garner support for their wars.”

“After a ten-year-long manhunt, the most-wanted man in history is found unarmed and undefended, summarily executed and his body dumped in the ocean. If you believe that, I got a bridge I'll sell you cheap — it goes over the Skagit River in Washington on Interstate 5.”

“A monopoly on violence is a terrifying monopoly to hold.” — Deborah Orr

“California was a Garden of Eden,
A Paradise to live in and grow;
But believe it or not, now it's boiling hot,
'Cause it ain't got the H-2-O.”

“If dollars were seconds,
in just 12 days, you would have 1 million dollars.
in 30 years, you would have 1 billion dollars.
in 30,000 years, you would have 1 trillion dollars.
China's banks have lent 15 trillion dollars in the last 5 years.
U.S. commercial banks lent 15 trillion dollars in the last 100 years.
China has made 6 gigatons of cement in the last 3 years.
U.S. has made 4 gigatons of cement in the last 100 years.
China is building enough highways - every year - to cross the U.S. twice.
They are building whole cities no one can afford to live in.
If everybody in China lit their farts on fire all at the same time,
it would be the equivalent of 400,000 Hiroshima nuclear bombs.
Which is also how much we are heating up the earth every day.
If debt is the promise of future growth, then say good bye to life on earth.
We have to tax fossil energy and mass agriculture to pay people to
carbon charr soil and grow organic foods for themselves.”
          -— Whoazzer (top comment)

“History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew.
But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.”
          —E.L. Doctorow

More of Tom's Blog

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2013-14 2011-12