I am not now, and will not be in the future, a candidate for public office.

I am not now, and will not be in the future, a candidate for public office.

It is inconceivable to me that my circumstances will change to a point that I become so deluded that I seek approval of a majority of voters in any venue.

For the past forty years my strong reticence has kept me from any desire to compromise personal, moral standards in business or government to attain promotions at any cost, under any circumstances. While a few people chose to resent what they believed to be “aloofness” on my part, this comes from a lack of discernment on their part.

Early in life I was done a favor by being shut out of conversations, first within family and later in the company of friends who needed far more than I to stand in front of a line or on stage.  Not being so compelled allowed me to learn more than I would have had I needed to prove how much I already knew.

Still, those people are easy to find. Not all of them run for public office, though; it seems every group of a dozen or more has at least one.

Why it is that people who do not know insist on putting themselves “front and center” is . . . there are many reasons, many paths to The Attention Center . . . 

Whatever silenced my voice while in youth matters little. What does matter is that all around us I see consequences of a lack of clarity of thinking and a lack of leadership within those who insist on grabbing perquisites of leadership without leading anyone out of any mess. Rather, accepting unearned rewards for leadership while being an obedient follower along the path to national degradation is today’s norm.

“What is seen cannot be unseen,” and I will extend this to include that our current collective circumstances were foreseen be wise men of the past such as Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson.

Millions see corruption around them and do nothing; “don’t rock the boat.” A few years ago a well-meaning associate told me, without any prior discussion of possibilities, “only a crazy person would become a whistle-blower because you’re guaranteed to lose money, career and reputation for speaking out.” Later, I did it anyway. 

The Misery Industrial Complex and Occupy Wall Street

Many familiar with international child kidnapping (ICK) know this is a growth industry. As such, it has common elements with other sources of excruciating misery that happen to be quite lucrative for other people one comes into contact with as a case runs its course.

By this I mean misery is good business; this is why it grows. Those who write about ICK on official pages, such as those of the State Department, suggest the cause is OUR recently developed age of international travel with open borders conducive to cross-border intimate relationships. I believe this places a secondary influence at the top of the list of causes.

We live in a time of misery-for-profit like never before in human history. It is as if advances in technology that alleviate miseries of the past necessitated new forms of human misery being invented.

Records are set each year pertinent to budgets for hardware of war. Bullets and bombs, aircraft and fuel, high-tech gadgets and the lowest … men with blades … are in continual production. All these add to a global metric of investments in violent means. Add to this another market of misery, that of the fear-security industry.

First there must be fear of loss or of immediate personal danger, then an industry to protect the fearful. It is an ever-increasing business here and internationally. Other people’s fear opens opportunities for a lucrative career or corporation. The intelligence industry, often a partner with private security firms, is a hybrid between private fear-protection and “national interests.” No one knows how much of government intelligence budgets are spent protecting corporate secrets and assets. Be assured it is considerable.

We have disease care to add. There is little truth in the term “health care” unless this is defined as yoga, pilates, exercise spas, amateur sports and the like; in general, investment in what keeps people healthy.  Being certain that many people do become sick is an important part of our misery industrial complex. Because disease care is about 18% of this nation’s index of metrics related to human behavior [aka “the economy] having a constant supply of sick people is critical. If by some chance millions of people took responsibility for their own health within the myriad of ways available to them, shunning the many weapons used against them, a recession would result. A mere 10% drop in the number of people getting sick or seeking disease care would, on average, cause a direct slowdown of 1.8% in gross domestic product. It likely would ripple through other sectors of human economic behavior.

Hence, we need other industries to ensure sickness within the populace, as each “wing” of our misery industrial complex requires a solid foundation. For this we have a chemical industry, parts of which include chemicals used inside and outside our homes or businesses. We grow and process our food with toxic chemicals. Cleaners used within our homes, laden with chemicals combinations to ‘freshen the air,” accumulate in our cells. We are easily fooled by these artificial sensual delights, so we poison ourselves. Of course, none of these poisons are essential to keep around. Their ultimate value is in making people sick. Lawn care? The point is to create pretty places to sit while doped up either recovering from a devastating illness, or one of more than eighty auto-immune diseases (resulting from our bodies natural defense against the poisons we absorb) or slowly but surely fading away. Chemicals are a huge industry and highly profitable, but the true value is their contribution to the misery industrial complex.

Drugs! An essential part of the discomfort-disease misery index, and for a great many of us an important part of the misery-numbing industry. We are numb; therefore we exist. Early on in the fake “war on drugs” we were told that one drug leads to another. On any given day, one can open a YouTube video and witness testimony of a three-year old put on psychotropic drugs to modify his or her behavior, not by parents, but by “child protection services.” Children are forced to imbibe an astounding number of such drugs, nearly all of which are unnecessary. Misery vendors will do almost anything to open the “gateway” very early in a child’s life. This includes a fairly recent strategy: to expose young children, five-year olds, to graphic sexuality under a guise of “socialization, as classes in sexuality.” Included in these premature lessons are statements encouraging students to label themselves homosexual if they happen to like members of their same gender. And what five-year doesn’t? Contributions to the misery index are clear:  children are easily confused and adversely affected by too early exposure to adult sexuality, resulting in emotional damage.  Forcing children to use drugs at an early age also routinely follows separation of one’s parents and consequent alienation from one parent, usually his or her father. At the same time, it is functionally true that children are taught they can have only one biological parent in their lives. The end goal of these strategies is to ensure that children are miserable at an early age, and to treat their confusion, emotional wounds, and natural reactions with a list of drugs. Give them Soma, Orwell wrote in 1934.

The predictable results are that these children will grow older but not smarter, wiser, or any bit better able to cope with life. Additional drug use and rebellious behavior is to be expected, and it comes. The misery begun in a child’s earliest years is carried forward to make other contributions to the misery index and the misery industrial complex.  

All these techniques and factors of life have individual misery in common. I’m certain most readers can add many more misery creators perpetuated for profit, so that every person can be exploited in some way . . . every one of us.

Now, what is Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and Anonymous really about? 

Taking exception: aiding and abetting criminal acts is a crime.

Parents whose children are taken across international borders have a great deal in common with parents whose children are taken by local governments and non-governmental agencies. Between these two groups is another, parents whose children are taken across state lines with intention of keeping the other parent from accessing their children.

The suffering of all these parents is similar if not essentially the same. Emotionally healthy parents always suffer when their children are harmed physically or emotionally. However, community support, whether superficial or deeply sympathetic, appears to diminish, as a child is taken further away. The greater the distance, the fewer supporters speak out. Cases like Sean Goldman’s are a well-funded exception, and that’s what it takes to get noticed: funding.

More important than a perception of “fair treatment” within this sphere of child abductions, by Gestapo-like independent agents often backed by local police, by self-empowered agents of courts, or by court judges acting in haste without due process of law – through writs – there is a real consideration of adherence to law seldom exercised. In other words, public or community perceptions of sadness, sympathies, emotional stress, and tendencies to assume that a left-behind parent is guilty of something, along with other smoke . . . very often obscures perception of and focus on numerous laws broken in the process of separating children from one or both parents. This is especially true when one parent does retain his, or more often, her relationship.

Generally, it is assumed to be a dispute in “custody,” a term I find repulsive as it means “possession,” and children are no res, to use legal jargon; a child is not an object. The most often overlooked, or ignored, fact is that all of these cases involve serious violations of law, beginning with actions of one parent and quite often members of her family. By allowing its circumstances to continue under pretense of it being a “civil dispute,” an initial crime is compounded, as those who excuse inaction aid and abet the crime.

In cases involving international child abduction, for example, one left behind parent may file a case under The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. A great misunderstanding, or by a veil of words, a deception may result in erroneous assumptions that obligations of criminal law no longer apply to Hague cases. While the Office of Children’s Issues deals with civil aspects, obligations of criminal law remain. For example, under 18 U.S.C. § 1204 : US Code - Section 1204: International parental kidnapping, it is stipulated:   (a) Whoever removes a child from the United States, or attempts to do so, or retains a child (who has been in the United States) outside the United States with intent to obstruct the lawful exercise of parental rights shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 3 years, or both. 

And it is critical to know:  

 (d) This section does not detract from The Hague Convention on the 

Civil Aspects of International Parental Child Abduction, done at The Hague on 

October 25, 1980.

In spite of the clearly defined criminality of these cases, there is a working consensus to overlook this criminality and dismiss cases from initial stages of prosecution. Under similar circumstances involving child abuse, law tolerates no such tendencies; teachers or counselors are obligated to report suspicions of abuse. Officers of the court, including attorneys, are obligated to report known commissions of crimes, yet parental kidnapping, abduction, or “custodial interference” is routinely dismissed as a civil dispute.  

In effect, this veil of deception amounts to willful continuation of the illicit circumstances: 

4.18.02 Aid and Abet, 18 U.S.C. § 2 See Statute

To “aid and abet” means intentionally to help someone else commit a crime. To establish aiding and abetting, the government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt:

that someone else committed the charged crime; and that a person consciously shared the other person’s knowledge of the underlying criminal act, intended to help him or her, and willfully took part in continuing the crime, influencing to make it succeed.

A person need not perform the underlying criminal act, be present when it is performed, or be aware of the details of its execution to be guilty of aiding and abetting.

An act is done “willfully” if done voluntarily and intentionally with the intent that something the law forbids be done—that is to say, either to disobey or disregard the law.

This is exactly what happens when a police detective in a local jurisdiction ignores federal law pertinent to 18 U.S.C. § 1204: US Code - Section 1204: International parental kidnapping. Or, when a district attorney fails to issue a warrant under both state and federal law.  

When someone robs a bank and leaves the premises, hands of law enforcement are not tied from action as if it is a civil dispute between the bank and its robber. When a parent leaves a country while abducting a child, law enforcement is not precluded from action to recovery the abducted child. 

Another moot argument used is that prosecution of an abducting parent will deprive a child of a parent on whom he or she depends. No one uses this absurdity to preclude someone prosecuted for marijuana possession from imprisonment, nor are mothers who commit other felonies kept from prosecution under this deception. 

 “Selective enforcement is the ability that executors of the law (such as police officers or administrative agencies, in some cases) have to arbitrarily select choice individuals as being outside of the law.

“There is a fundamental lack of equality before the law and a clear tendency towards politically motivated prosecution, namely selective enforcement, which is illegal in most democracies in the world.” Ha’Aretz 

“Historically, selective enforcement is recognized as a sign of tyranny, and an abuse of power, because it violates rule of law, allowing men to apply justice only when they choose. Aside from this being inherently unjust, it almost inevitably must lead to favoritism and extortion, with those empowered to choose being able to help their friends, take bribes, and threaten those they desire favors from.” Wikipedia

In a context of international child abduction or under any similar circumstances it is prudent to take exception to dismissal of serious crimes as personal “civil disputes.” Yes, it happens routinely. It can be fought through exposure and in courts.

Small farms for the 21st century survival

From time to time I’m told  “progress” is one-directional, towards a better society, that science and an evolution of ideas is leading this human race out of barbarism and poverty.

Except, of course, that there are “too many people.”

The trend into cities and off rural lands is supposed to be part of this progress. Cities are “where it’s at.” This trend has been well documented by Louis Mumford in The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects, a 1961 National Book Award winner. I found it a fresh read about 45 years after first publication.

There is no doubt the movement continues, or that the organic nature of modern cities will make them more fantastic within the near future. To some extent, and for some segments of human populations, the city “works” and is livable. That tens of millions of people will begin and end their lives without traveling more than ten miles from their birthplace I have no doubt. This has been true of places like New York City and Mexico City for decades.

However, the same technology that has allowed and stimulated growth of mega-cities has great potential to disperse very large numbers of people back to the rural areas from which earlier generations have fled. I believe the future of humanity depends largely on this happening.

Yes, I know. Small farms, and a return to the backbreaking work of mule-based farming that enslaves whole families to a small plot of land, barely able to eke out an existence? Oh, yeah, another fringe-nut with old Utopian Society ideas already tried and proven to fail. Go harvest your wing nuts from your orchard . . .

Here and now, in this autumn of 2011, thousands of tons of crops in the Southeast and the Northwest have gone unharvested for lack of labor. Georgia’s Department of Agriculture reported that 11,800 jobs went unfilled, causing crops to rot on the ground, and contributed to escalating food prices. Will this trend continue?

It’s recently been reported that George Soros, the president’s primary financial backer, has been collecting farmlands like a trash hoarder collects community discards. Meanwhile, his ideological Internet “rag” AlterNet attacks the Monsanto naked agenda to incrementally gain control of the world’s food crop seed supply. Attacking Monsanto’s devious agenda is a good thing. Add to this one T. Boone Pickens, miserly billionaire, who has been buying as much underground aquifer acreage as he can, especially in West Texas. There is a pattern building.

Step back to 1979 and the publication of an extremely important book: Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity, Frances Moore Lappé (with Joseph Collins), Houghton Mifflin, 1977, Ballantine Books. It will not take a reader long to realize that premises upon which mega-cities are built and populated are flimsy, and faulty. The Green Revolution touted from the 1950s to the present was a failure for several reasons, yet it created its own myth by edict of governments supporting future billionaires involved. Critical analysis tells us that per-acre yields have dropped significantly, typically 30% or more under the food revolution, yet high-yielding small farms were forced to close, merged into mega-farms.

Thus began the modern debacle of monoculture and industrial agriculture. Lack of diversity in crops is major high-stakes roulette. Hundreds of millions of lives depend upon a narrow set of factors that may well lead to massive crop failures. It only takes one to cause a global famine.

The alternative insurance policy against global famine is small acreage farming and a return to family farming. Not only over there, but here in America. Consider this insurance that pays immediate benefits to the family involved in farming without a disaster hitting. It gets better. A five-acre plot, or even a one-acre place, is enough land to feed a family of four. In most places in the United States, a small piece of land prudently managed can free a typical family of much of their current dependency on the electrical grid, most heating or cooling bills, and a greatly reduced food bill. The cost of living can and should be greatly reduced; most families with one to five acres and a diverse selection of crops will find it easy to build a surplus at the end of most months and certainly at the sum of the year.

Raised-bed farming, permaculture, high-tunnels, earth-bermed or solar-block greenhouses, composting, goat-keeping . . . these are a few of many available options that make small farms viable today. Add to this solar and wind energy sources combined with the latest generations of storage batteries and energy inverters, and selling surplus power back to a grid utility becomes another option for many.

Still, the best reason to take steps away from the city, in addition to the above life enhancements, is that doing so gives a family far greater control over pressing issues that make all of us vulnerable. An imploding global economy, expectation that the Euro will tank, the dollar will fall, and who knows what follows all of that? To become self-reliant is the greatest gift you can give yourself and your family this year and in the near future. It also helps your community, your state, and all other inhabitants of this planet.

Things can change that fast. It is prudent to be prepared.

The problem with International Child Kidnapping

Earlier this year sensational headlines in print and online media announcing the startling discovery: approximately 500 children are retained in Japan by one parent while their other parent anguishes in the United States. There was much hype about this, 100% of that hypocritical.

Yes, the media that out-did themselves in fake alarm and concern are the same mainstream party-attendees who have known about this problem all along. It ‘s nearly as common as automobile fatalities the media never seems to omit from news reports. This is not to dismiss the tragedy of life lost in vehicular accidents, but to point to a more serious problem that MSM ignores because international child kidnapping is always a political, dirty game at the expense of tens of thousands of children.

The mainstream media and every inflated politician that I know of are incapable of telling the truth about international child kidnapping (ICK). On July 3, 2011, I witnessed via Cspan a charade of testimony before a congressional subcommittee on the subject. Sean Goldman was the front-line, the first  parent to speak to the subcommittee on behalf of tens of thousands of left-behind parents. His testimony was almost compelling. It may have been compelling if he were addressing a group who intend to do something about this ICK problem, or whose knowledge of ICK was as fresh as they pretended it to be.

The phony reactions of the committee were obvious to anyone whose eyes and ears were open, or to any one of us who’ve had first hand knowledge of these matters. I do sense that many of the audience attendees and other speakers addressing the panel with personal perspectives may have believed that panel was learning of the problem for the first time.

I don’t believe any congressperson has been so out-of-touch with reality that he or she has been unaware  of these serious international crimes before July 2011. If so, what is that person doing in Washington, D.C. representing anyone other than one’s own personal interests?

      Why would two years pass since both the House of Representatives and the United States Senate voted unanimously (the senator who voted “present” had already purchased the White House) to petition Brazil on behalf of Sean Goldman . . . and still none of the above had caught on to one of the most grievous issues in the world today?

This is the problem with international child abduction: That the MSM and the powers-who-would-be (if they were not compromised by those who own them) choose to dismiss this spreading epidemic as a sad consequence of two people not able to remain married. This is one of the big lies about ICK; it’s one of the most frequent porkies used to dismiss case after case from political arenas in which it truly exists. Politicians and their appointed counterparts, their true partners in crime, pass off their personal responsibilities for using children as pawns in this very corrupt game of chess onto alienated left-behind parents doing, mostly, all possible to bring their stolen children home.

Instead of powers-who-would-be doing what is right for abducted children, they throw their responsibilities back to the left-behind parent. They do whatever is necessary to sweep the matter under their hand-made Persian carpets. They leave left-behind parents to fend for themselves, and in my personal experience with Senator Merkley of Oregon, actively aid in covering up crimes committed within the State Department Office of Children’s Issues.

Those given responsibility of fulfilling obligations of the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction have been working against left-behind parents rather than for the children the Hague Convention was written, negotiated, signed and enacted to protect. Proof of this is in the fact that my son Mathew remains in Israel today. Had not there been corruption within the Office of Children’s Issues, an attitude of United States’ subservience to Israel, willingness on the part of numerous people within the State Department and Senator Merkley to cover up the abandonment of United States child-citizens to foreign countries . . . my son would have returned to Oregon years ago.

The State of Israel kidnaps American children. Bob Geldof might agree that Israel also knowingly and willingly aids and abets abduction of British children.

If a parallel can be drawn, treatment left-behind parents receive by United States governments, at multiple levels from local police to the highest person in the State Department, is as if to say to a rape victim: “We will take your statement and your evidence. We will pass it along to the district attorney’s office. They may or may not decide to issue a warrant. You will not be notified of the district attorney’s decision, as there is no need for you to know.” This is exactly the importance given to international abductions, in spite of a book value of seven to twenty years’ imprisonment if convicted. It is about the same as no one being prosecuted or convicted of rape, ever, despite overwhelming evidence.

      Again, proof of these statements is in the fact that, after four years and nine months since my son has been abducted to Israel, I have not yet seen a photograph of him nor conversed with him since he entered that country. This is the same nation that made an international case for the release of the captive tank driver Galid Shalit, and paid a ransom in excess of one thousand (1053) prisoners to gain his return. During his captivity, Shalit was allowed to communicate with his family, occasionally, and photographs were shared. What will it take to persuade the State of Israel to release Mathew Ismalon-Nagy, or even to transmit his recent photograph, or his school grades, to his father?

Activism . .

"Folks are always going to attack the activist, or rather they are going to cherry pick which activist they are going to attack. Usually with slim or little knowledge of what is actually going on. And there are always
wingnuts that attach themselves to any group which gives even a squeaky clean image group a somewhat tarnished image.

"If you are an activist and do it so people will praise you, then you're in the wrong "business." Activism is a damned if you do, damned if you don't kinda thing." 


Lynda

[posted in  OHG  -  Yahoo group on Organic Gardening]