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Growing up hippy

"Turn off the lights!" My dad would remind us. For the 1000th time. Yes, we took it for granted. But that was our way of life. Saving energy, saving electricity, saving the world — one light at a time.

Tofu or fish every night for dinner with a huge, huge bowl of salad and brown rice. Same dinner, every night.

Drive? Why not walk, or bike? It wasn't even a question. If we could walk there, we would. If it was only an hour bike ride away, we were biking it. The longer one could go without being in a car, the better. The more we saved, preserved, reserved, the better we were doing our jobs as daughters of Mother Earth.

As an actual hippy child, not just one of the 60s, I got to attend social action camps, political rallies, political conventions and speeches, and best of all – political concerts.

A hippy child did not have a television. If they did, it was placed sneakily in front of the treadmill for exercise or in the basement for movies, only.

If I ever ate meat it was not in the sight of my father. I didn't even learn how to cook it until I was 25.

Are local Democratic Party politicians covering up for war crimes?

In international law, there is little doubt that torture is a war crime. The United States, along with 149 other nations, has adopted the protocols of the Geneva Conventions. Despite an attempt by the Bush administration to define torture differently than the rest of the world, in 1993 the UN agreed that the protocols defined in the Geneva Conventions had passed into customary international law, and is thus binding on non-member states. This would make any attempts to re-define torture by any state, member or non-member, irrelevant within any international accepted legal framework.

In 1975, the World Medical Association issued the Declaration of Tokyo, which specifically prohibits physicians and psychologists from participating in torture. Closer to home, the State of Ohio has specific rules about patient rights, including laws regarding standards of care and patient confidentiality.

The tower that toppled a terrible technology

There it stood, 500 feet of insult and injury. And then it crashed to the ground.

The weather tower at the proposed Montague double-reactor complex was meant to test wind direction in case of an accident. In early 1974, the project was estimated at $1.35 billion, as much as double the entire assessed value of all the real estate in this rural Connecticut Valley town, 90 miles west of Boston.

Then---39 years ago this week---Sam Lovejoy knocked it down.

Lovejoy lived at the old Liberation News Service farm, four miles from the site. Montague's population of about 7500 included a growing number of "hippie communes." As documented in Ray Mungo's FAMOUS LONG AGO, this one was born of a radical news service that had been infiltrated by the FBI, promoting a legendary split that led the founding faction to flee to rural Massachusetts.

And thus J. Edgar Hoover---may he spin in his grave over this one---became an inadvertent godfather to the movement against nuclear power.

Witnesses at a drone hearing

This coming Wednesday the House Judiciary Committee plans to hold a hearing on "Drones and the War On Terror: When Can the U.S. Target Alleged American Terrorists Overseas?"

This is odd for a number of reasons.

1. Congressional committees usually don't do anything at all on such matters.

2. The vast majority of the men, women, and children being killed have not been targeted.

3. The vast majority of the men, women, and children being killed or targeted have not been Americans.

4. The president's nominee to direct the CIA refuses to deny that the president claims the power to kill Americans when they are not overseas, not to mention non-Americans within the United States and anyone at all overseas.

5. The three Americans we know the president has targeted and killed by drone strike in no way match up with the justifications for theoretical strikes found in the "white paper."

6. The president is targeting and killing people with a variety of technologies, not just drones.

7. The only remotely legal or moral answer to the question asked by the hearing is "never."

Mercy For Animals has once again successfully brought animal abusers to justice!

MFA’s powerful undercover investigation at a Butterball turkey facility in North Carolina has just led to even more criminal convictions of Butterball workers. On Friday, defendants Terry Johnson and Billy McBride were found guilty of animal cruelty after a bench trial.

Johnson and McBride join Butterball workers Brian Douglas and Ruben Mendoza, who were convicted in 2012 of criminal cruelty to animals arising out of the same investigation. Douglas's conviction marked the first-ever felony conviction for cruelty to factory-farmed poultry in US history.

MFA's undercover video reveals that the lives of turkeys in Butterball's factory farms are filled with fear, violence, and prolonged suffering. The turkeys confined to a life of misery at Butterball have been selectively bred to grow so large, so quickly, that many of them suffer from painful bone defects, hip joint lesions, crippling foot and leg deformities, and fatal heart attacks.

Voting rights act as needed as ever

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear a challenge to the Voting Rights Act in the case of Shelby v. Holder. On the same day, across the street in the congressional rotunda, a statue honoring Rosa Parks will be unveiled. And one week later, the nation will celebrate the 48th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the march from Selma to Montgomery that helped spur President Johnson to champion the act.

The Voting Rights Act has helped fulfill the nation’s commitment to inclusion — to a big tent democracy that guarantees to all citizens the right to vote. Yet many fear that the right-wing “Gang of Five” on the Supreme Court will once more display their scorn for judicial restraint and strike down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires pre-clearance of any voting rules that might impinge on minority participation in states and counties with histories of racial discrimination.

Top U.S. terrorist group: The FBI

A careful study of the FBI's own data on terrorism in the United States, reported in Trevor Aaronson's book The Terror Factory, finds one organization leading all others in creating terrorist plots in the United States: the FBI.

Imagine an incompetent bureaucrat. Now imagine a corrupt one. Now imagine both combined. You're starting to get at the image I take away of some of the FBI agents' actions recounted in this book.

Now imagine someone both dumb enough to be manipulated by one of those bureaucrats and hopelessly criminal, often sociopathic, and generally at the mercy of the criminal or immigration courts. Now you're down to the level of the FBI informant, of which we the Sacred-Taxpayers-Who-Shall-Defund-Our-Own-Retirement employ some 15,000 now, dramatically more than ever before. And we pay them very well.

Then try to picture someone so naive, incompetent, desperate, out-of-place, or deranged as to be manipulable by an FBI informant. Now you're at the level of the evil terrorist masterminds out to blow up our skyscrapers.

War's Lingering Phantoms

“War’s lingering phantoms haunt every society.”

As two hellish, costly and needless wars struggle toward collapse, this is the time — now, right this minute, before the next false alarm goes off — for us to look honestly at the cost and quality of national security based on militarism. It’s time to squeeze the romance out of war and get it through our heads that war is not inevitable.

War is just another form of mass murder. Its core principle is dehumanization — of all participants, the enemy and the good guys. This is because you can’t hate, dehumanize and train to kill “the other” without dehumanizing yourself and damaging your soul.

“Kill! Kill! Kill, without mercy, Sergeant! . . . Blood! Blood! Bright red blood, Sergeant!”

The dehumanization happens at an individual level, to soldiers who, in basic training, go through an intense process of overriding their humanity and establishing “muscle memory” that allows them to kill on command; and who then participate in the killing of the enemy — often enough, in our current wars, the killing of civilians, including children — in battle situations.

Ohio residents shut down fracking waste storage facility

New Matamoras OH – Ohio residents and allies from numerous environmental groups including Earth First! have disrupted operations at Greenhunter Water's hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” waste storage site along the Ohio River in Washington County. Nate Ebert, a 33-year-old Athens County resident and member of Appalachia Resist!, ascended a 30 foot pole anchored to a brine truck in the process of unloading frack waste, preventing all trucks carrying frack waste from entering the site.

Over one hundred supporters gathered at the facility, protesting Greenhunter’s plans to increase capacity for toxic frack waste dumping in Ohio. Greenhunter is seeking approval from the Coast Guard to ship frack waste across the Ohio River via barge at a rate of up to half a million gallons per load. The Ohio River is a drinking source for more than 5 million people, including residents of Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. Test results from multiple frack waste samples reveal high levels of benzene, toluene, arsenic, barium, and radium, among other carcinogenic and radioactive chemicals.

According to NBCi.com, at least 10 people were arrested.

Guns, not the Klan, are the real threat

Chicago suffers unbearable levels of gun violence, yet the victims remain largely silent. They travel from funeral home to graveyard, rather than march from church to gun shop. The president is applauded when he calls for action on gun violence, but before his plane leaves the tarmac, more are shot, including even the sister of one of the young children standing behind him during his address.

If we are to free ourselves of this terror, we will have to change our minds.

Victims of tyranny have three options. They can adjust, they can resent but turn anger inward, or they can fight back.

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