Music video by Michael Jackson performing Thriller. © 1982 MJJ Productions Inc.

Michael Jackson – Thriller
Source www.youtube.com

Back in October of’65 ABC’s Shindig! broadcast their Halloween episode and showed a clip of the Monster Mash performed by Boris Karloff. The clip was lost somehow, but with scenes from that show that still remain, I was able to assemble a music video of what it might have looked like. I’ve been searching for the Karloff clip for years, and until the original is found, this will have to do. Thanks to Jason at Scar Stuff for the great remix of the Monster Mash vocal by the GRRREAT Bobby Boris Pickett!
Category: Entertainment

Tags: Boris Karloff sings Monster Mash Shindig halloween video 1965 October Bobby Pickett

Legendary computer entrepreneur and former Apple CEO Steve Jobs died at the age of 56 on Wednesday, after a dramatic fight with cancer. His death coincided with the release of the the iPhone 4S.

“We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Jobs passed away today,” Apple said in a statement.

“Steve’s brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve.”

“His greatest love was for his wife, Laurene, and his family. Our hearts go out to them and to all who were touched by his extraordinary gifts.”

His death comes only a month after he stepped down as the CEO of Apple.

Apple’s Board of Directors had quickly named Tim Cook as the new CEO, saying that Cook “demonstrated remarkable talent and sound judgment in everything he does.”

Jobs was elected Chairman of the Board.

Read entire story here

Remo Concious -’Lies’ The official music video and our ‘theme’ song on No Lies Radio

Remo Conscious is one of our independent musical artists now playing on No Lies Radio and a local activist from Oakland, California–The East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Source www.youtube.com

This is Money (The Dark Side of the Moon, 1973), from Pink Floyd, live at P.U.L.S.E; recorded at Earls Court, London, in 1994. Roger Waters, the composer of Money, is not in this show.
Current members of Pink Floyd are: David Gilmour (guitars, lead vocals) • Richard Wright(keyboards, secondary vocals, backing vocals) • Nick Mason(drums, percussion);

Lyrics:

Money, get away
Get a good job with more pay and you’re o.k.
Money it’s a gas
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash
New car, caviar, four star daydream
Think I’ll buy me a football team

Money get back
I’m all right jack keep your hands off of my stack
Money it’s a hit
But don’t give me that do goody good bullshit
I’m in the hi-fidelity first class travelling set
And I think I need a Lear jet

Money it’s a crime
Share it fairly but don’t take a slice of my pie
Money so they say
Is the root of all evil today
But if you ask for a rise it’s no surprise that they’re
giving none away

http://www.pinkfloyd.co.uk

Source www.youtube.com

Not to rush you through your summer or anything, but if you’re into music festivals, now is the time to plan your strategy, as some of the best are getting ready to roll out in August. And even if you don’t think music fests are your thing, check out the list (in chronological order)—with everything from a Hamptons fusion of fashion and indie music to a legendary DJ blowout in the UK, you might be surprised to find something that will rock your world.

1. Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival

Where: Walhalla, Michigan

When: Aug 2–7

What: Since its inception in 1976, this feminist, no-men-allowed lesbian Woodstock has brought thousands of women back to the land for a week of communally-run camping, workshops, veggie meals and live music.

The Lineup: Bernice Johnson Reagon, Toshi Reagon, MEN, Jill Sobule, Melissa Ferrick, Ferron and Bitch, Thao and more.

2. Lollapalooza

Where: Chicago

When: Aug 5–7

What: The grandaddy of alt-music festivals, begun in 1991 by Perry Farrell of Jane’s Addiction, now hosts more than 130 multi-genre artists over multiple stages and 115 acres.

The Lineup: Coldplay, Foo Fighters, Eminem, Muse, A Perfect Circle, Bright Eyes, My Morning Jacket and more.

3. Musikfest

Where: Bethlehem, PA

When: Aug 5–14

What: Big-time rock, pop and country artists hit the stage at this 10-day blowout in the Lehigh Valley.

The Lineup: Stone Temple Pilots, Maroon 5, Miranda Cosgrove, Steve Miller Band, Alison Kraus & Union Station, Steely Dan, Train, Gavin DeGraw, Nick Jonas and more.

4. Outside Lands

Where: San Francisco

When: Aug 12–14

What: A three-day fest of music, food, wine and art creates a vibrant urban village in Golden Gate Park.

The Lineup: Muse, Phish, the Black Keys, the Shins, Erykah Badu, the Roots, Arcade Fire, DeadMau5, Mavis Staples, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and more.

Read entire article here

Amy Winehouse – Me & Mr. Jones

Amy Winehouse RIP–Here’s my favorite video of Amy and it’s from 2007 live at the Isle of Wight in the UK. What a huge talent, great entertainer and musician. We will miss you and your funky downhome jazzy blues.

Source: www.youtube.com

First Posted: 7/20/11 10:39 AM ET Updated: 7/20/11 10:45 AM ET

For the first time in a while, Roseanne Barr has found herself on the tip of every smart so-and-so’s tongue. She’s blunt, surprisingly wise, hysterical and she’s showing up in more and more places.

It was her essay in New York Magazine that seemed to put her back on the map. A chronicle of struggle, success, insanity and feminism, it re-focused eyes back on a talented woman with wise cracking mouth and a complete intolerance for subordination.

Now it seems she can do no wrong. Barr’s new series, ‘Roseanne’s Nuts,’ which debuted on ‘Lifetime’ last week, is raking in ratings and praise. The setting is different than we’re used to, the Hawaii-based show has Barr managing 40 acres of macadamia nuts and a livestock farm, but her delightfully acrid personality remains.

Last night she appeared on ‘Chelsea Lately’ to talk about her new book, ‘Roseannarchy’–and smoking weed, promoting vodka and being downright nuts.

Read entire article here

World Party – Ship of Fools
Source www.youtube.com

George Carlin-Choice bit from what is now his last show. R.I.P. George, you will be sorely missed, and just when we need you the most!

Source www.youtube.com

From the album “It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” (1988). Public Enemy–This song is still relevant today and right on!

Source www.youtube.com

www.youtube.com

Source www.youtube.com

Martin Luther King – A Time to Break Silence
Starting in 1965, King began to express doubts about the United States’ role in the Vietnam War. In an April 4, 1967, appearance at the New York City Riverside Church — exactly one year before his death — King delivered Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. In the speech he spoke strongly against the U.S.’s role in the war, insisting that the U.S. was in Vietnam “to occupy it as an American colony” and calling the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
“Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.”
“At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called “enemy,” I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929 — April 4, 1968), was one of the main leaders of the American civil rights movement. A Baptist minister by training, King became a civil rights activist early in his career, leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott and helping to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. His efforts led to the 1963 March on Washington, where King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, raising public consciousness of the civil rights movement and establishing King as one of the greatest orators in American history. In 1964, King became the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end segregation and racial discrimination through civil disobedience and other non-violent means.

Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter in 1977. Martin Luther King Day was established as a national holiday in the United States in 1986. In 2004, King was posthumously awarded a Congressional Gold Medal.

Source www.youtube.com

Comedy series in which Charlie Brooker uses a mix of sketches and jaw-dropping archive footage to explore the gulf between real life and television.

From hysterical public information films to grisly crime dramas, terror spills out of almost every channel. As Charlie explores TV’s approach to fear, you won’t know whether to laugh or scream. Warning: contains traces of Michael Buerk and a semi-naked lady. Charlie Brooker argues that TV has warped our expectations of romance with a toxic combination of Blind Date and rom-coms. Do ‘soulmates’ even exist? Warning: this episode contains traces of Dirty Den and suggestive swimwear.

Source www.youtube.com

Song was written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney and was released in album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, June 1st 1967.

In 2004, music magazine Rolling Stone ranked it at number 26 on the list “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time”.

Includes Paul McCartney’s comment.

Source www.youtube.com

4/11/2011 Spike Lee-Film Producer/Director speaks out about Hollywood’s roll in creating boogie men on the screen.

Source www.youtube.com

Louis Armstrong – what a wonderful world

Source www.youtube.com

A 1971 television recording with Alan Watts walking in the mountains and talking about the limitations of technology and the problem of trying to keep track of an infinite universe with a single tracked mind. Video posted by Alan’s son and courtesy of alanwatts.com.

Source www.youtube.com

Uploaded by RussiaToday on Mar 26, 2011

Tens of thousands of protesters crowded central London on Saturday to protest government cuts to public services, streaming in from around the country with banners, balloons and whistles. Organizers of the march estimated that at least 100,000 people were joining in the demonstration, what the Trade Union Council called the largest civil society demonstration in years. Police say some protesters have thrown paint bombs and light bulbs filled with ammonia at officers. A group of black-clad demonstrators also threw paint bombs at shops and banks on the main shopping streets of Oxford Street and New Bond Street. The group had broken away from the larger march organized by the TUC to protest against government cuts to public services.

Source www.youtube.com

BASICALLY I’D LIKE TO WORK ON BRINGING TOGETHERNESS IN OUR COMMUNITY , CREATING A YOUTH COUNCIL AND AN ELDERS COUNCIL SO AS CHIEF AND COUNCILLORS CAN BE MORE ACCOUNTABLE TO THE PEOPLE .INSTEAD OF MAKING SOLE DECISIONS IT COULD CREATE A DOORWAY TO EMPOWERING OUR PEOPLE AGAIN .AND OPEN UP POSITIVE COMMUNICATION WHERE THERES BEEN A GAP . YOUTH GATHERINGS AND COMMUNITY GATHERINGS , SO THOSE THAT ARE FORCED TO MOVE AWAY CAN STAY CONNECTED . WE DEFINETLY NEED TO TAKE A STAND FOR OUR TREATY RIGHTS ,AND DEMAND OUR TREATY PAYMENTS BE RAISED FROM $5.00 A PERSON FROM THE EARLIER DAYS TO TODAYS VALUE WITH INFLATION .OUR TREATIES ARE OUR RIGHTS AND MUST BE STOOD UP FOR BEFORE WE LOOSE THEM COMPLETELY .WE COULD HAVE HEALING CIRCLES AND TEACHING CIRCLES .WE COULD ADOPT AN ELDER TO BRING THE YOUNG AND OLD BACK TOGETHER OR ADOPT A YOUTH TO HELP LESS FORTUNATE . EDUCATING THE OTHER COMMUNITIES ,SO THEY CAN UNDERSTAND THE MENTALITY OF OUR OPPRESSORS AND STAND WITH US .COMMUNITY GARDENS TO LEARN AND BECOME SELF RELIANT .JOB SHARING SO OTHERS CAN HAVE AN OPPORTUNITY TOWORK UPDATE THERE HOMES ,AND FEED THERE FAMILIES PROPERLY .FOR TROUBLED YOUTHS INSTEAD OF JAIL ,WE COULD USE COMMUNITY SERVICES .WERE THEY CLEAN UP OR CARE FOR COMMUNITY MEMBERS YARDS .TEACHING POSITIVE SKILLS .BEFORE ANYTHING WE NEED TO BEGIN TO HEAL TOGETHER .OR ANY GOOD INTENTIONS WILL REMAIN JUST THAT. WE NEED TO REALIZE HOW POVERTY WORKS DIVIDING US TO CONQUOR EACH OTHER .WE NEED UNITY AND A WILLINGNESS TO STAND FOR SOMETHING . TO BE WILLING TO MAKE SACRIFICES FOR OUR PEOPLE ,OR BE PREPPARED TO BE CONTINUALLY WALK ON .PERSONALLY I HAVE NO BAD WORDS FOR FORMER CHIEFS FOR WERE TAUGHT TO BELIEVE WE ALL CARRY A GIFT FOR EACH OTHER TO SHARE . IN THE PAST I’VE BEEN WILLING TO STAND FOR OUR PEOPLE AND FIGHT , AND HUMBLY WITH MUCH LOVE FOR OUR PEOPLE STILL WILLING TO CONTINUE .DURING PROTESTS IN THE PAST I WAS ASKED TO BE THE ELDERS SPOKESPERSON .TAKING PART IN HOUSING ,ACCOUNTABILTY FROM OUR OWN LEADERS ,ADOPTION ISSUES ,AND BETTER LIVING PROTESTS AND RALLIES .DURING A SUICIDE EPIDEMIC OPENED A 24 HOUR HOTLINE FROM MY HOME FOR TWO WEEKS ,AND ORGANIZED A 3 DAY SUICIDE WORKSHOP AND SHARING CIRCLE IN WHICH 63 KIDS ENDED UP COMMING AS WELL AS ADULTS .I’VE ALSO GONE ON THE LONGEST WALK ACROSS AMERICA CARRYING PRAYERS OF OUR PEOPLE AND REPRESENTING OUR NATION WITH OUR FLAG .CHANGES CAN WORK ,IF THE COMMUNITY IS WILLING TO TRY .IF NOT IT WON’T MATTER WHO COMES IN ,THE SAME PROBLEMS WILL CONTINUE .BUT ONCE WE BEGIN TO TRULY HEAL AND UNDERSTAND , THEN WE CAN BEGIN TO CHANGE .A SIMPLE GOAL WOULD BE TO BRING BACK THE UNITY WE ONCE HAD ,SO INSTEAD OF JUST TALKING ABOUT CHANGE ,WE COULD BECOME IT .I’M NOT HERE TO LIE FOR YOUR VOTE ,I’M HERE TO EARN IT .I’M NOT HERE TO TALK ABOUT CHANGES ,I’M HERE TO BRING THEM .ON APRIL 4TH VOTE X BRENDA EVERETT FOR CHIEF

See Brenda Everett’s Facebook page

Spotting a pumpkin identified as a gourd prompted Leigh Adams to write John Lyons. She was (and is) an expert in gourd-craft as well as the artist-in-residence at the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden. Lyons, whose website carried the photo of the pumpkin, was (and is) a garden designer and lecturer at the arboretum. Yet until Adams wrote, they had never met.  That was two years ago. They now joke that they are “as much in love as a non-couple could be.” And they have a baby, a 4-month-old garden that is brimming with art, native sages and fruit trees and is irrigated by rainwater harvested from the street.

The idea came as a steady trickle, over 15 years, as Adams watched rain run like a small river down the gutter by her house and then around the corner. The water slipped into storm drains, leaving her with debris that included a collection of neighborhood garbage cans.

A desire to somehow tap that rain mounted, but Adams is above all things an artist and educator, so over the years, she became involved with mosaic projects at the arboretum, Five Acres School in Altadena and Piece by Piece in downtown Los Angeles. But  after the arboretum asked her to train a team constructing a “weaver’s garden” for the Los Angeles Garden Show, she became intrigued when she heard of Lyon’s business, the Woven Garden.

re on Lyons’ website was a pumpkin labeled as a gourd. Adams dashed off an e-mail. With that chiding on one of the finer distinctions of the Cucurbita genus began a friendship that would turn them both into water bankers.

It was pure kismet that Lyons is the kind of garden designer who believes that beauty starts in the soil. After meeting him, Adams went to a lecture by Paul Stamets, author of “Mycelium Running,” which stressed the ability of fungi to clean water.

Taking part in building a small permaculture garden at the arboretum only further inoculated her with enthusiasm for banking water in a garden whose soil was tightly knit by a web of fungi known as micorrhizae. Thus inspired, Adams, right, hired Lyons for help converting her backyard turf to a water-harvesting operation.

The assignment: This new garden would divert rainwater, clean it, hold at least some of it on a steeply sloped site and sustain an orchard in the hot foothills of Los Angeles County. Given the client was Adams, and the designer Lyons, it would also be studded with glass work, sculpture, native sages and lupines.

Diverting the rain meant poking holes in the curb running along her home. County officials overseeing the permitting of curb breaks were not enthusiastic. Adams remembers their response as: We’re concerned about your neighbor down the hill.

When Adams explained that she was her own neighbor — she was the last house on the block and sewer catchment — there came the question of cutting into publicly owned concrete. They could not call them “curb cuts,” the official reportedly said, who then added that the county did allow something called “parkway drains.”

Parkway drains are legal because they are usually created by homeowners to drain storm water off their property and into sewers, not to harvest rain from the street. No law prevented Adams from setting hers below grade, so as to reverse the direction of the water. Adams decided that she wanted three “parkway drains,” all of which would have shut-off valves, so she could control how much water she diverted. (The second photo from the top shows the street view, and the photo above right shows a detail of one of the “parkway drains”: a brick helps to divert runoff into the drain and toward a catchment basin called a swale, pictured at the top of the post.)

As they came up with a plan for punching holes in the curb, Lyons suggested a protocol under which they would allow the first couple of hours of a rain to wash into the storm drains, taking the worst pollutants with it.

Late last year a local building firm overseen by Lyons and Adams came in to install the drains, build the terraces and dig the swales.

“They hadn’t a clue what was happening,” Lyons said. “It was blind faith.”

New berms were piled high with local stable compost, all the better to seed the ground with contaminant-eating, growth-promoting fungi. Then the water-catching trough, or swale, was filled with logs from a felled cedar.

Why logs? They keep swales open, Adams said. “It keeps people from falling in. It keeps the dogs out.”

As the swales began to fill during the first December rains, the floating logs provided beautiful cues to Adams to shut off the intake valves. (In the photo above left, water flows into the garden during a storm; in the photo above right, courtesy of Adams, logs sink back down after a storm passes and water percolates into the ground.)

As a final safety measure, the team designed an overflow system where, if the swales flooded, the water would travel around the side of the house and out into the driveway.

But that never happened. In December, as the rain kept falling, Adams and Lyons lit up Facebook with constant postings of the logs rising and falling as their new system took in an estimated 1,500 gallons every time it filled — five times in a heavy rain. (The photo above, courtesy of Adams, shows how the water-catchment system in the upper part of the garden fits into the larger terraced plan.)

Read entire article here

Mike & Friends Blog

March 5th, 2011 9:03 PM

Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you’ll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It’s just that it’s not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich.

Today just 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.

Let me say that again. 400 obscenely rich people, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer “bailout” of 2008, now have more loot, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined. If you can’t bring yourself to call that a financial coup d’état, then you are simply not being honest about what you know in your heart to be true.

And I can see why. For us to admit that we have let a small group of men abscond with and hoard the bulk of the wealth that runs our economy, would mean that we’d have to accept the humiliating acknowledgment that we have indeed surrendered our precious Democracy to the moneyed elite. Wall Street, the banks and the Fortune 500 now run this Republic — and, until this past month, the rest of us have felt completely helpless, unable to find a way to do anything about it.

I have nothing more than a high school degree. But back when I was in school, every student had to take one semester of economics in order to graduate. And here’s what I learned: Money doesn’t grow on trees. It grows when we make things. It grows when we have good jobs with good wages that we use to buy the things we need and thus create more jobs. It grows when we provide an outstanding educational system that then grows a new generation of inventers, entrepreneurs, artists, scientists and thinkers who come up with the next great idea for the planet. And that new idea creates new jobs and that creates revenue for the state. But if those who have the most money don’t pay their fair share of taxes, the state can’t function. The schools can’t produce the best and the brightest who will go on to create those jobs. If the wealthy get to keep most of their money, we have seen what they will do with it: recklessly gamble it on crazy Wall Street schemes and crash our economy. The crash they created cost us millions of jobs. That too caused a reduction in revenue. And the population ended up suffering because they reduced their taxes, reduced our jobs and took wealth out of the system, removing it from circulation.

The nation is not broke, my friends. Wisconsin is not broke. It’s part of the Big Lie. It’s one of the three biggest lies of the decade: America/Wisconsin is broke, Iraq has WMD, the Packers can’t win the Super Bowl without Brett Favre.

The truth is, there’s lots of money to go around. LOTS. It’s just that those in charge have diverted that wealth into a deep well that sits on their well-guarded estates. They know they have committed crimes to make this happen and they know that someday you may want to see some of that money that used to be yours. So they have bought and paid for hundreds of politicians across the country to do their bidding for them. But just in case that doesn’t work, they’ve got their gated communities, and the luxury jet is always fully fueled, the engines running, waiting for that day they hope never comes. To help prevent that day when the people demand their country back, the wealthy have done two very smart things:

1. They control the message. By owning most of the media they have expertly convinced many Americans of few means to buy their version of the American Dream and to vote for their politicians. Their version of the Dream says that you, too, might be rich some day – this is America, where anything can happen if you just apply yourself! They have conveniently provided you with believable examples to show you how a poor boy can become a rich man, how the child of a single mother in Hawaii can become president, how a guy with a high school education can become a successful filmmaker. They will play these stories for you over and over again all day long so that the last thing you will want to do is upset the apple cart — because you — yes, you, too! — might be rich/president/an Oscar-winner some day! The message is clear: keep you head down, your nose to the grindstone, don’t rock the boat and be sure to vote for the party that protects the rich man that you might be some day.

2. They have created a poison pill that they know you will never want to take. It is their version of mutually assured destruction. And when they threatened to release this weapon of mass economic annihilation in September of 2008, we blinked. As the economy and the stock market went into a tailspin, and the banks were caught conducting a worldwide Ponzi scheme, Wall Street issued this threat: Either hand over trillions of dollars from the American taxpayers or we will crash this economy straight into the ground. Fork it over or it’s Goodbye savings accounts. Goodbye pensions. Goodbye United States Treasury. Goodbye jobs and homes and future. It was friggin’ awesome and it scared the shit out of everyone. “Here! Take our money! We don’t care. We’ll even print more for you! Just take it! But, please, leave our lives alone, PLEASE!”

The executives in the board rooms and hedge funds could not contain their laughter, their glee, and within three months they were writing each other huge bonus checks and marveling at how perfectly they had played a nation full of suckers. Millions lost their jobs anyway, and millions lost their homes. But there was no revolt (see #1).

Until now. On Wisconsin! Never has a Michigander been more happy to share a big, great lake with you! You have aroused the sleeping giant know as the working people of the United States of America. Right now the earth is shaking and the ground is shifting under the feet of those who are in charge. Your message has inspired people in all 50 states and that message is: WE HAVE HAD IT! We reject anyone tells us America is broke and broken. It’s just the opposite! We are rich with talent and ideas and hard work and, yes, love. Love and compassion toward those who have, through no fault of their own, ended up as the least among us. But they still crave what we all crave: Our country back! Our democracy back! Our good name back! The United States of America. NOT the Corporate States of America. The United States of America!

So how do we get this? Well, we do it with a little bit of Egypt here, a little bit of Madison there. And let us pause for a moment and remember that it was a poor man with a fruit stand in Tunisia who gave his life so that the world might focus its attention on how a government run by billionaires for billionaires is an affront to freedom and morality and humanity.

Read entire article here

George Harrison – Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth)
A beautiful song from a beautiful man- George Harrison 1943 – 2001

Source www.youtube.com

Tom Hayden

The Peace and Justice Resource Center

DateFriday, February 18, 2011 at 11:43PM

Cost of Iraq: $3 trillion [projected]
Cost of Afghanistan: $1 trillion [projected]
California budget gap: $28 billion
Wisconsin budget gap: $138 million

The details can be debated, but these figures make clear that the budget crises faced in places like Wisconsin and California can be ended by rapidly ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. California taxpayers have contributed no less than $146.3 billion to these wars since 2001; Wisconsin taxpayers, $18.4 billion. Direct monthly costs of the wars – $12.5 billion in Iraq, $16 billion for Afghanistan – are more than enough to close the gaps in those two states.

It is time for our most prominent liberal economists to broaden their analysis of the domestic crisis to include spending for these unfunded wars. Only Joseph Stiglitz has done so.

Where are the others? Are they ambivalent about ending the wars? If so, they should explain their reasons. Are they afraid of the counter-attack by the right? It is more likely that their conventional economic models simply discount the factor of war expenditures. If that’s the reason, a quick adjustment of their analysis would make a huge contribution to the national debate.

Many national liberal organizations have been silent on the costs of Afghanistan, too. For example, the AFL-CIO bluntly stated that they would not participate in last October’s march on Washington if Afghanistan was part of the platform. AARP never mentions the trillions for war, even as the dismantling of Social Security is on the horizon. Where is the NAACP? Where is MALDEF? Or the National Organization for Women?

It was important that over 100 city councils signed up as “cities for peace” during the height of the Iraq War, and a ray of hope that a similar effort is beginning today.

The domestic constituencies facing budget cuts and pension losses need to recognize that only a drawdown from war and a transfer of funds to domestic needs can turn this crisis around. The option of raising taxes is blocked by the Republicans. Further cuts will worsen the recession. The corporate community cannot be forced to invest the billions they are sitting on. Incentives for private investment cannot guarantee that job creation at home will be the result.

Our commander-in-chief, however, backed by congressional Democrats and honest fiscal conservatives, can plan and direct a responsible phase out from Iraq and Afghanistan, and the redirection of the savings to job creation and deficit reduction. It’s entirely plausible that Obama can be re-elected on such a platform in 2012.

Read entire article here

Gladys Knight and the Pips – (Everybody Wants To Be) Bourgie, Bourgie

Source www.youtube.com

Mel Brooks – To Be Or Not To Be (Extended Version)
Mel Brooks a master of comedy with his take on the Nazi’s our fascist society and the New World Order

Source www.youtube.com

Egyptian Rap Song – bmzagy remix-with pictures of Cairo

Source www.youtube.com

George Carlin – The Sanctity of Life

Source www.youtube.com

Tommy Smothers performs, “Who Do I Have To Hate To Be Your Friend?” a Smothers Brothers 2007 Live Vegas Stage Show at the Orleans Hotel, Las Vegas where he shocks the audience with a serious anti-war song.

Source www.youtube.com

Jerry Garcia & Merl-Like A Road Leading Home

Source www.youtbue.com

The Bangles – Walk Like An Egyptian

Source www.dailymotion.com

John Lennon, Yoko Ono and her Plastic Ono Band – Power To The People 1970

Source www.youtube.com

Jim Corr Interview-9/11 Truth, Shadow Government 1/21/2011

Source www.youtube.com

Patterns is an acclaimed live television drama with a Rod Serling teleplay, his first major breakthrough before The Twilight Zone.

The show’s initial incarnation occurred on the January 12, 1955 installment of the anthology series Kraft Television Theatre. Directed by Fielder Cook, Patterns starred Richard Kiley as up-and-coming executive Fred Staples. Also heading the cast were Everett Sloane and Ed Begley. [1]

Serling’s celebrated script tore apart the dynamics of the business world and earned Serling his first of his six Emmys for dramatic writing
Source www.youtube.com

Reprinted Friday, January 14, 2011

You spent the whole day yesterday worrying about today, and now that it’s here, was it worth it?

Howard Beale

We become so primal about defending our position, our sustenance, that we ignore our basic humanity. Who has time to think about such things like other people’s problems? The system turns us against our neighbors in an ultra-competitive dog-eat-dog economy. And if that doesn’t work they’ll use religion, race, or politics to divide us. Scratch that; they use it all, all the time.

The public is kept in a constant state of dense negative energy, where we inevitably contaminate those around us with bad vibes, who then pass them on to their peers and so on.

Sooner or later we live in dense, negative, selfish society. This denseness has even affected the crowd that can afford to pay attention, because they are aware of the sinister methods being used to keep humanity within our shrinking prison walls. Thankfully for us, this prison of stress and manufactured division is an illusory distraction that we can ultimately free ourselves from.

Sure, we all have very real concerns about paying bills and putting food on the table. However, we must fully appreciate that we are alive and well today, just as we were three months ago when we were stressed out of our minds.

We lived the last three months in constant discomfort, distracted from reality and, despite all that, we survived. Would it not have been better to spend those three months with a positive attitude, or at least a level of comfort knowing that we’ll be fine no matter what the system throws at us?

Perhaps with this slight adjustment in attitude, we might find that we do have time to pay attention and be more productive in ways that go beyond finances. In fact, we may even attract abundance to ourselves if we understand (not just believe) that positive thoughts and energy will attract the same to us.

Surely it must be better than the alternative, which is letting the system manufacture our emotions for us. Especially when the goal of such system engineering is to keep us in a perpetual state of non-thinking denseness that limits our potential to that of a rat in a seemingly inescapable maze.

Read entire article here

After Berlin – 20th Anniversary Of German Reunification from Roland Schaller on Vimeo.

Bozz Rockband – After Berlin – In celebration of the 20th Anniversary of tearing down the Berlin Wall.

Bozz Rockband is one of our international musical artists now playing on No Lies Radio

Bill Hicks – One Night Stand Parts 1-3
Bill talks about his life on the road and being clean and sober from 1991–RIP

Black Swan-Inside Job

Black Swan Music Video
Dr. David Van Rockerchild, Rock N Roll
Source www.youtube.com

Elvis Presley Here Comes Santa Claus

Source www.youtube.com

Elvis Presley – Merry Christmas Baby

Written by Lou Baxter and Johnny Moore. Elvis recorded it during a jam session as RCAs Nashville studios on May 15, 1971. The single release was a minute and a half shorter than on the original album release, Elvis Sings the Wonderful World of Christmas. It did not chart. It was the A-side to O Come All Ye Faithful. This is the longer version…

Yeah

Merry, Merry Christmas baby
Sure did treat me nice
I said Merry Christmas baby
You Sure did treat me nice
Gave me a diamond ring for Christmas
Now I’m living in paradise

Well I’m feeling might fine
Got good music on my radio
Well, I’m feeling might fine
Got good music on my radio
Well, I want to kiss you baby
While you’re standing beneath the mistletoe

Take it home baby, take it home
Whoa whoa whoa
Rock it

I got music on my radio

I said, merry, merry, merry, merry Christmas baby
You sure did treat me nice
Yes, you did, yes, you did
Yes, you did, yes, you did

I said merry, merry Christmas baby
Sure did treat me nice
Gave me diamond ring for Christmas
Now Im living in paradise

Yeaaaaaah

I said, merry, merry, merry, merry Christmas baby
You sure did treat me nice
I said, merry, merry, merry Christmas baby
Well, You sure did treat me nice, mmmm
Gave me diamond ring for Christmas
Now I’m puttin’ it through Al’s mike

Yeaaaaa

Well I’m feeling might fine
Got good music on my radio
Well, I’m feeling might fine
Got good music on my radio, yeah
Well, I want to kiss you baby
While you’re standing neath the mistletoe

Well I’m feeling might fine
Got good music on my on my radio

Dig in James, dig in

Well, I’m feeling might fine
Got good music on my radio

Wake up Puts

Well, I want to kiss you baby
While underneath your mistletoe

I said merry Christmas baby
Well You sure did treat me nice

I said merry merry Christmas baby
Well You sure did treat me nice

Elvis Presley – Merry Christmas Baby

Source www.youtube.com

Damien Dempsey & Glen Hansard ‘The Auld Triangle’ Saturday Night Show

Source www.youtube.com

Elvis Presley – If I Can Dream-very moving and magical performance.

Source www.youtube.com

LTD – (Everytime I Turn Around) Back In Love

Source www.youtube.com

Remastered from the original ‘Milk and Honey’ master.

“Nobody Told Me” is a John Lennon song, featured as the first single released from John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Milk and Honey album in 1984. The song was originally written for Ringo Starr to include on his Stop and Smell the Roses album, but Lennon died before the song could be used. “Nobody Told Me” was Lennon’s last single to reach the top ten on Billboard magazine’s Hot 100, peaking at #5.

The B-side features Yoko Ono’s “O’Sanity”, also from the Milk and Honey album.

The lyrics make reference to “a little yellow idol to the north of Kathmandu” which is similar to a line from J. Milton Hayes’ poem entitled The Green Eye of the Yellow God. Hayes’ line was “There’s a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Kathmandu”.

Another line in the song is “There’s UFO’s over New York and I ain’t too surprised”, apparently a reference to a UFO sighting Lennon had back in 1974. He made reference to this in the liner notes to his 1974 album Walls and Bridges with the message: “On the 23rd August 1974 at 9 o’clock I saw a U.F.O. – J.L.”.

The tag line “Nobody told me there’d be days like these…” is in contrast to the old saw “My mother told me there’d be days like this.”

The video was a clipshow, as are most posthumous Lennon videos.

Source www.youtube.com

Paul McCartney SNL 12/11/2010 A Day In The Life & Give Peace A Chance

–Carry on Paul–we luv ya!

Source www.youtube.com

Janette MacKinlay

It is with a very heavy heart that I feel compelled to share the news with the Truth Movement that our beloved Janette MacKinlay, 9/11 survivor, activist, organizer, author, artist passed away yesterday morning. We will always miss her.

Janette’s book- Fortunate: A Personal Diary of 9/11

Janette lived across the street from the World Trade Center in 2001 and was not merely a witness to the attacks, but survived, along with her fellow artist and companion, Jim Lecce, when their artloft’s windows were broken and their apartment filled with dust and debris when the World Trade Center tower came down. Janette’s book, Fortunate: A Personal Diary of 9/11 is a vivid account of her experiences. She has told her story many times, in presentations, to radio, television, print media. Janette also changed as her story, and the larger story have continued to unfold over the years, granting her more and more insight into her own experience, that of other survivors, and victims’ family members, as well as a deeper understanding of the larger political realities that continue to be discovered by the truth movement. Janette’s evolution can be seen in her art and through her actions, over the years. Her story is a powerful one and I hope that someday a great filmmaker will be able to piece it together, right now it is scattered in many documentaries, many places, entwined with many other narratives. Janette was a very important bridge between many people whose lives were deeply changed by the events of September 11th.

September 11, 2001 – Janette MacKinlay in the dust near Ground Zero

I remember some things that she said again and again about the deafening noise of the towers collapse and the incredible silence in the aftermath (or maybe their ears actually were damaged and they did become literally deafened in the wake of the collapse). Janette, as well as many others suffered from post traumatic stress, in the aftermath, and she tried to heal herself through her artwork, the beautiful, gentle, ancient art of Ikebana, the Japanese art of floral arrangements. However, she knew that those immediately in the vicinity of the towers, who heard the noise, breathed the air, felt and were transformed to the marrow of their bones by an event which would forever haunt them.

When she was suddenly diagnosed with brain cancer last February, she knew instantly what the cause was – 9/11, the dust…

Dust at her apartment across the street from the WTC towers

Janette appears in the latest Loose Change documentary- Loose Change: 9/11 An American Coup, telling about how when she returned to her apartment to gather what valuables survived, not just the attack, but the looting that took place, she saved some of the dust and gave some to Professor Steven E. Jones when he realized that analysis of the dust would provide important clues into what really happened.

Janette moved back to her home in Oakland in 2001 and I only met her for the first time in 2005 when the 9/11 Commissioners were addressing the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. They are the ones who convinced Janette that they were lying and covering up the truth. I traded a copy of David Ray Griffin’s book- The New Pearl Harbour- Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 for a copy of her book. On that same day, my friend, Blaine Machan, who created the Deception Dollar gave me her name and phone number via e-mail. She was distributing some of our Deception Dollars at one of her art exhibitions.

I invited her to the Northern California 9/11 Truth Alliance meetings, and also persuaded her to become our treasurer that autumn. We became friends and worked together on many events and projects.

Janette organized the February 23, 2006 Question 9/11- A Call to Activism event

Another member of our group, who created the original http://www.sf911truth.org website also became a very good friend of Janette’s and they traveled together to New York City where she showed him where her old apartment was. By some miracle, the apartment had been renovated and was available again, and Janette and Jim decided to move back to New York City. So Janette became an amazing bridge between activists on the West Coast and activists on the East Coast, and helping and participating in, and organizing two major 9/11 Truth Conferences- The Revealing the Truth- Reclaiming the Future Conference in Chicago in 2006, and the 9/11 Accountability Conference in Arizona in 2007.

Janette with Oakland North reporter, Laura Callahan, at her home 9/2009

Janette had a beautiful home and was a wonderful hostess, and we had a lot of “mailing parties” at her home, as well as just “parties and celebrations” for many reasons (including to celebrate the wedding of Jim Hoffman and Victoria Ashley), visits of activists from other parts of the country, whom she often hosted at her home. She held a fundraiser there for the 9th Annual Northern California 9/11 Film Festival which was also a benefit for Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth and NYCCAN.

Janette with her giant Ikebana sculpture- “Wake Up Call”- note the two blue towers and the dramatic explosion…

She believed strongly in accountability and spent time in the office of Attorney-General Jerry Brown (our newly elected governor) to push him to look into and take on a new investigation into 9/11. She also approached Senator Barbara Boxer and others, and encouraged her peers to contact the media and put pressure on elected officials, as well. She had a tremendous amount of courage and heart, inspiring many people to take action. She was tremendously loyal, encouraging and supporting those who stuck their necks out to organize events, to speak, to take action.

Proud grandma with her one week old grandson, Huxley

She was proud of her two sons, Mark and Brian, and most delighted when her grandson, Huxley was born. She had planned to take care of Huxley two days a week, when suddenly one evening her speech center was impaired by the tumor and the hospital determined something was seriously wrong.

Many of us urged Janette to try some non-traditional treatments, but she had confidence in the medical profession and her sons who rushed to her side to help her through the initial biopsy, surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy.

Read entire article here

It’s as brazen as it is outrageous. At the very same time that the FCC is deliberating the fate of our open Internet, cable giant Comcast threatened to block Netflix from delivering streaming movies to Comcast’s own broadband customers.

Without strong net neutrality rules, companies like Comcast can demand fees from innovative companies like Netflix in an attempt to choke consumer freedom and coerce users to adopt its own video services instead.

Tell the FCC: Don’t let Comcast block Netflix. Support the strong net neutrality protections President Obama promised during his campaign.

Comcast only relented after it was able to extort a fee from the company that supports Netflix’s movie streaming service, Level 3. According to the AP, 3 asserts “the fee violates the principles of an ‘open Internet.’ It also goes against the Federal Communications Commission’s proposed rules preventing broadband Internet providers from favoring certain types of traffic.” ¹

It’s a critical time to speak out about this. After stalling for months, the FCC is poised to exercise its power and issue net neutrality regulations at a meeting scheduled for December 21. We expect FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski to release his draft plan for protecting an open Internet in advance of that meeting — as early as this week.

There is only one Internet, and consumers should be allowed to access any legal website, service or application on any device of their choosing (whether they’re accessing the Internet wirelessly or not). Furthermore, broadband providers cannot be allowed to employ paid prioritization schemes to give favored network access to some websites or services over others. And finally, the rules must define the terms in a way that avoids the huge loopholes favored by industry and rests on sufficient legal basis.

Read entire article here

Buffy Sainte-Marie – Universal Soldier
Source www.youtube.com

Read entire article here

Grateful Dead – Eyes of the World Parts 1 and 2

Grateful Dead perform Eyes of the World at Giants Stadium live in San Francisco, California with Bruce Hornsby on keyboards 6/17/91

Source www.youtube.com

Graham Robins – Walking In Silence
Graham is one of our musical artists from the UK on No Lies Radio

Source www.youtube.com

Elton John – Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Source www.youtube.com

Sam & Dave – Hold On I’m coming
Booker T and the MG’s are backing them up on this one!

Source www.youtube.com

Random Acts of Kindness

Source www.youtube.com

Jon Stewart interviews George Carlin 1997
Great interview with George talking about his Mother, early life in show biz and how he’s managed to stay the course all these years.

Source www.youtube.com

Reporters Sans Frontières

Published on 3 September 2010

On August 29th, 2010, Reporters Without Borders Washington DC representative, Clothilde Le Coz, visited Mumia Abu-Jamal, prisoner on death row for nearly three decades. Ms. Le Coz was accompanied by Abu-Jamal’s lead attorney, Robert R. Bryan, and his legal assistant, Nicole Bryan. The meeting took place in room 17 of the State Correctional Institution (SCI) in Waynesburg, Greene county, Pennsylvania.

Reporters Without Borders: As a journalist who continues to work in prison, what are your latest reports focused on? Mumia Abu-Jamal: The prison population in the United States is the highest in the world. Over the past year, for the first time in 38 years, the prison population declined.

Some states, like California or Michigan, are taking fewer prisoners because of overcrowding. State budgets are restrained and some prisoners are released because of the economic situation.

Prisons in America are vast and the number of prisoners is immense. It’s impressive to see how much money is spent by the US government and how invisible we are. No one knows. Most people don’t care. Some journalists report when there is a drama in prison and think they know about it. But this is not real : it is sensationalist. You can find some good writings. But they are unrealistic. My reporting is what I have seen with my eyes and what people told me. It is real. My reporting has to do with my reality. They mostly have been focusing on death row and prison. I wish it were not so. There is a spate of suicides on death row in the last year and a half. But this is invisible. I broke stories about suicide because it happened on my block.

I need to write. There are millions of stories and some wonderful people here. Among these stories, the ones I chose to write are important, moving, fragile. I decide to write them but part of the calculation is to know whether it’s helpful or not. I have to think about that. As a reporter, you have a responsability when you publish those kind of stories. Hopefully, it will change their lives for the better.

Do you think the fact you were a reporter affected your case ?

Being the “Voice of the Voiceless” played a significant role. And this expression actually comes from the title of a Philadephia Inquirer headline after I was arrested in 1981. As a teenager, I was a radical journalist working on the staff of the Black Panthers national newspaper. The FBI was actually monitoring my writings since I was 14. My first job was being a reporter. Because of my writings, I am far better known that any inmate in America. If it were not the case, I think there would have been less pressure for the Court to create a special law to affect my conviction. Most of the men and women on death row are not well known. Because I continue to write, this is an element that would have affected the thinking of the judges and made them change the ruling for not giving me a new trial. I think they were thinking “You’re a big mouth, you won’t get a new trial”. You expect a little more from a federal Court. Because of my case, a dozen of other cases can be affected.

What do you think of the media coverage of your case ?

Once, I read that I was no longer on death row. I was sitting here when I read it. I haven’t stopped sitting here for one second.

Because I was coming from the craft, a lot of reporters did not want to cover my case because they feared they would be attached. They had to face criticisms for being partial and sometimes they were told by their editors they could not cover it. Since the beginning of the case, people who could cover me best were not allowed to. Most of reporters I worked with are no longer working. They retired and nobody took the work over.

But the press should have a role to play here. Millions of people saw what was done in Abu Ghraib. Its leader, smiling on the pictures that have been published, worked here before going to Abu Ghraib. In death row, you have people without a high school degree who can decide whether someone lives or dies. For whatever reason, they have the power to make you not eat if they don’t want to. And none of that power is checked by anyone. There are informal rules. These people can make someone’s life a living hell on a wink. When I chose which stories I want to write about, I am never short on material. From a writing perspective, this field is rich.

No matter what my detractors are saying about me, I am a reporter. This country would be a whole lot worse without journalists. But to many of them, I am an outlaw reporter. Prior to prison, in my work for various radio stations, I met people from all around the world and despite my conflicts with some editors, I had the greatest job.

The support you receive in Europe compared to the support you receive here in the United States, is very different. How do you explain the difference and do you still believe international mobilization will be helpful ?

Of course it will. The European mobilization might be pressuring the US regarding the death penalty. Foreign countries, like European ones, went through a specific history of repression. There was an in-their-bones-knowledge of what it is to be in prison. They know about prison, death row and concentration camps. In the US, very few people had that experience. That speaks to how cultures look at things in the world. In Europe, the very ideal of death penalty is an anathema.

9/11 changed a lot of things in the US. People challenging or opposing the government would not be supported anymore. The press also changed. Things that were “allowable” became unacceptable after 9/11. I think 9/11 changed the way people thought and it changed the tolerance of the media. For example, even though 9/11 happened in Manhattan and Washington DC, the jail was closed for an entire day, here in Pennsylvania, and we were locked down.

To motivate more people around your cause, it might be helpful to get an up to date picture of you, today, on death row. Does the fact that we don’t have any updated picture of you affect your situation and the ability of more people to mobilize around your cause ?

Having a public image is partly helpful. The essence of an image is propaganda. Pictures are therefore not that important. The human image is the true one. There, I try to do my best. In 1986, prison authorities took recorders from reporters and you were only allowed a pen and a paper. Now that there is only the meaning of one article left, one can make monsters and models from his article.

If the Supreme Court agrees on a new trial, only your sentence will be reviewed. Not your conviction. How do you feel about staying in prison for life, if you are not executed ?

In Pennsylvania, life sentence is a slow death row. And under the state law, there are 3 degrees of murders. The first degree is punished by life sentence or death. The second and the third ones are punished by life sentence. People do not get out. The highest juvenile rate of life sentences is here in Pennsylvania. But here is my point, in Philadelphia, there were two other cases around my time were people killed a cop. The first one got aquittal. The second once, caught on a surveillance camera, did not get a death sentence.

How do you manage to “escape” death row ?

I have written on History, one of my passions. I would love to write about other things. My latest works are about war, but I also write about culture and music. I have an internal beat that I try to keep through poetry and drums. Very few things have matched the pleasure that I get from learning music. It’s like learning another language. And to write, that’s a challenge ! A music teacher comes every week and teaches me. A whole new world is opening to me and I get a better grasp of it now. Music is one of the best thing mankind has done. The best of our lives.

Read entire article here

Chris Rock – The War on Terror
One of my favorite’s–this guy is right on!
Source www.youtube.com

The Voynich manuscript is a mysterious, undeciphered illustrated book. It is thought to have been written in the 15th or 16th century. The author, script, and language of the manuscript remain unknown.

Over its recorded existence, the Voynich manuscript has been the object of intense study by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including some top American and British codebreakers of World War II fame (all of whom failed to decrypt any portion of the text). This string of failures has turned the Voynich manuscript into a famous subject of historical cryptology, but it has also given weight to the theory that the book is simply an elaborate hoax—a meaningless sequence of arbitrary symbols.

The book is named after the Polish-American book dealer Wilfrid M. Voynich, who acquired it in 1912. Currently the Voynich manuscript is stored in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University as item “MS 408″. The first facsimile edition was published in 2005.
–Wikipedia

Source www.youtube.com

The Staple Singer’s-I’ll Take You There-classic track with photos of “there”, from The Treme in New Orleans, to Soul Train, to Watts, to Chicago, Africa and the Moon!

Source www.youtube.com

Cat Stevens (yusuf) and Ozzy Osbourne at the Rally To Restore Sanity in Washington DC

Source www.youtube.com

Junior Brown Do The Math – Live in Austin, Texas 2008 and dig the custom guitar.

Source www.youtube.com

Actress and comedian Roseanne Barr has published Jon Gold’s encyclopedic 9/11 research article The Facts Speak For Themselves on the front page of her Roseanne World blog. Under the headline “brilliant analysis, Jon Gold“, Roseanne urged her fans: PLEASE READ THIS!

Two days ago, Barr posted a blog entitled “people are saying that 9-11 was an inside bush job“, which led to a lively discussion in which she expressed her serious doubts about the official 9/11 story and invited researcher Gold onto her radio show as a guest.

Roseanne Barr is best known for her hugely successful network television show, Roseanne, which ran from 1988 to 1997.

Read entire article here

Roseanne Barr is one of my favorite human beings on this Earth. tp

Dave Chappelle – Black Bush – Very funny skit with Dave Chappell as “Black Bush” and Jamie Foxx as Tony Blair.

Source www.youtube.com

Every Saturday – Anti-War – Progressive Truth Teach-in
at 9:00am Pacific — 12 noon Eastern — 16:00 GMT
Will be archived here after the broadcast by Monday.

Democracy Now! Special: An Hour of Music and Conversation with Legendary Native American Singer-Songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie
In a Democracy Now! special, an hour of conversation and music with Cree Indian singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie. In the turbulent 1960s, she was just out of college but already famous for her beautiful voice and moving lyrics in songs like “Universal Soldier” and “Now that the Buffalo’s Gone.” Over the years, Buffy Sainte-Marie has worked with the American Indian Movement, but also with Sesame Street, and even Hollywood, winning an Academy Award for the song “Up Where We Belong” in 1982. She’s won international recognition for her music, has a PhD in fine arts, and began a foundation for American Indian Education that she remains closely involved with. We speak with the folk icon about her life, her music, censorship, and her singing and speaking out about the struggles of Native American peoples for the past four decades. She also performs live in the firehouse studio.A Democracy Now Production 10-12-2009 for transcript.

people are strange – infected mushroom & the doors
Source www.youtube.com

Rock and A Hard Place – The Rolling Stones
Source www.youtube.com

Aretha Franklin & Annie Lennox – Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves

Source www.youtube.com

Eurythmics – There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart)
Source www.youtube.com

Black Eyed Peas – “Where Is The Love?”

Source www.youtube.com

10-10 Stargate Portal
Source www.youtube.com

johnlennon | October 06, 2010

Submit your own video: www.youtube.com/johnlennon

Join us in celebrating John Lennon’s 70th birthday!

Give peace a chance.

Source www.youtube.com

Power to the People John Lennon
Source www.youtube.com

Wish he were here today…from the Dick Cavett Show.

Source www.youtube.com

Because of continuing interest in John Lennon’s politics, here is his interview with the RED MOLE (one of his most explicit and radical political statements). Thanks to Caleb for the pic.

By TARIQ ALI and ROBIN BLACKBURN

[Commentary on the interview by Counterpunch.org: Lennon recounts about how he and George Harrison bucked their handlers and went on record against the Vietnam War, discusses class politics in an engaging manner, defends country and western music and the blues, suggests Dylan’s best songs stem from revolutionary Irish and Scottish ballads and dissects his three versions of “Revolution”. The interview, which inspired Lennon to write “Power to the People”, ran in The Red Mole... As you’ll see, those were different days. The interview is included in Tariq Ali’s Streetfighting Years, recently published by Verso.]

John Lennon and Yoko Ono talk to Robin Blackburn and Tariq Ali for the left-wing newspaper Red Mole (Thursday January 21, 1971)

TA: Your latest record and your recent public statements, especially the interviews in Rolling Stone magazine, suggest that your views are becoming increasingly radical and political. When did this start to happen?

JL: I’ve always been politically minded, you know, and against the status quo. It’s pretty basic when you’re brought up, like I was, to hate and fear the police as a natural enemy and to despise the army as something that takes everybody away and leaves them dead somewhere. I mean, it’s just a basic working class thing, though it begins to wear off when you get older, get a family and get swallowed up in the system.

In my case I’ve never not been political, though religion tended to overshadow it in my acid days; that would be around ‘65 or ‘66. And that religion was directly the result of all that superstar shit – religion was an outlet for my repression. I thought, ‘Well, there’s something else to life, isn’t there? This isn’t it, surely?’

But I was always political in a way, you know. In the two books I wrote, even though they were written in a sort of Joycean gobbledegook, there’s many knocks at religion and there is a play about a worker and a capitalist. I’ve been satirising the system since my childhood. I used to write magazines in school and hand them around.

I was very conscious of class, they would say with a chip on my shoulder, because I knew what happened to me and I knew about the class repression coming down on us – it was a fucking fact but in the hurricane Beatle world it got left out, I got farther away from reality for a time.

TA: What did you think was the reason for the success of your sort of music?

JL: Well, at the time it was thought that the workers had broken through, but I realise in retrospect that it’s the same phoney deal they gave the blacks, it was just like they allowed blacks to be runners or boxers or entertainers. That’s the choice they allow you – now the outlet is being a pop star, which is really what I’m saying on the album in ‘Working class hero’. As I told Rolling Stone, it’s the same people who have the power, the class system didn’t change one little bit.
Of course, there are a lot of people walking around with long hair now and some trendy middle class kids in pretty clothes. But nothing changed except that we all dressed up a bit, leaving the same bastards running everything.

RB: Of course, class is something the American rock groups haven’t tackled yet.

JL: Because they’re all middle class and bourgeois and they don’t want to show it. They’re scared of the workers, actually, because the workers seem mainly right-wing in America, clinging on to their goods. But if these middle class groups realise what’s happening, and what the class system has done, it’s up to them to repatriate the people and to get out of all that bourgeois shit.

TA: When did you start breaking out of the role imposed on you as a Beatle?

JL: Even during the Beatle heyday I tried to go against it, so did George. We went to America a few times and Epstein always tried to waffle on at us about saying nothing about Vietnam. So there came a time when George and I said ‘Listen, when they ask next time, we’re going to say we don’t like that war and we think they should get right out.’ That’s what we did. At that time this was a pretty radical thing to do, especially for the ‘Fab Four’. It was the first opportunity I personally took to wave the flag a bit.

But you’ve got to remember that I’d always felt repressed. We were all so pressurised that there was hardly any chance of expressing ourselves, especially working at that rate, touring continually and always kept in a cocoon of myths and dreams. It’s pretty hard when you are Caesar and everyone is saying how wonderful you are and they are giving you all the goodies and the girls, it’s pretty hard to break out of that, to say ‘Well, I don’t want to be king, I want to be real.’ So in its way the second political thing I did was to say ‘The Beatles are bigger than Jesus.’

That really broke the scene, I nearly got shot in America for that. It was a big trauma for all the kids that were following us. Up to then there was this unspoken policy of not answering delicate questions, though I always read the papers, you know, the political bits.

The continual awareness of what was going on made me feel ashamed I wasn’t saying anything. I burst out because I could no longer play that game any more, it was just too much for me. Of course, going to America increased the build up on me, especially as the war was going on there. In a way we’d turned out to be a Trojan horse. The ‘Fab Four’ moved right to the top and then sang about drugs and sex and then I got into more and more heavy stuff and that’s when they started dropping us.

RB: Wasn’t there a double charge to what you were doing right from the beginning?

YO: You were always very direct. ..

JL: Yes, well, the first thing we did was to proclaim our Liverpoolness to the world, and say ‘It’s all right to come from Liverpool and talk like this’. Before, anybody from Liverpool who made it, like Ted Ray, Tommy Handley, Arthur Askey, had to lose their accent to get on the BBC. They were only comedians but that’s what came out of Liverpool before us. We refused to play that game. After The Beatles came on the scene everyone started putting on a Liverpudlian accent.

TA: In a way you were even thinking about politics when you seemed to be knocking revolution?

JL: Ah, sure, ‘Revolution’ .There were two versions of that song but the underground left only picked up on the one that said ‘count me out’. The original version which ends up on the LP said ‘count me in’ too; I put in both because I wasn’t sure. There was a third version that was just abstract, musique concrete, kind of loops and that, people screaming. I thought I was painting in sound a picture of revolution – but I made a mistake, you know. The mistake was that it was anti-revolution.

On the version released as a single I said ‘when you talk about destruction you can count me out’. I didn’t want to get killed. I didn’t really know that much about the Maoists, but I just knew that they seemed to be so few and yet they painted themselves green and stood in front of the police waiting to get picked off. I just thought it was unsubtle, you know. I thought the original Communist revolutionaries coordinated themselves a bit better and didn’t go around shouting about it. That was how I felt – I was really asking a question. As someone from the working class I was always interested in Russia and China and everything that related to the working class, even though I was playing the capitalist game.

At one time I was so much involved in the religious bullshit that I used to go around calling myself a Christian Communist, but as Janov says, religion is legalised madness. It was therapy that stripped away all that and made me feel my own pain.

RB: This analyst you went to, what’s his name. ..

JL: Janov …

RB: His ideas seem to have something in common with Laing in that he doesn’t want to reconcile people to their misery, to adjust them to the world but rather to make them face up to its causes?

JL: Well, his thing is to feel the pain that’s accumulated inside you ever since your childhood. I had to do it to really kill off all the religious myths. In the therapy you really feel every painful moment of your life – it’s excruciating, you are forced to realise that your pain, the kind that makes you wake up afraid with your heart pounding, is really yours and not the result of somebody up in the sky. It’s the result of your parents and your environment.

As I realised this it all started to fall into place. This therapy forced me to have done with all the God shit. All of us growing up have come to terms with too much pain. Although we repress it, it’s still there. The worst pain is that of not being wanted, of realising your parents do not need you in the way you need them.
When I was a child I experienced moments of not wanting to see the ugliness, not wanting to see not being wanted. This lack of love went into my eyes and into my mind. Janov doesn’t just talk to you about this but makes you feel it – once you’ve allowed yourself to feel again, you do most of the work yourself.

When you wake up and your heart is going like the clappers or your back feels strained, or you develop some other hang-up, you should let your mind go to the pain and the pain itself will regurgitate the memory which originally caused you to suppress it in your body. In this way the pain goes to the right channel instead of being repressed again, as it is if you take a pill or a bath, saying ‘Well, I’ll get over it’. Most people channel their pain into God or masturbation or some dream of making it.

The therapy is like a very slow acid trip which happens naturally in your body. It is hard to talk about, you know, because – you feel ‘I am pain’ and it sounds sort of arbitrary, but pain to me now has a different meaning because of having physically felt all these extraordinary repressions. It was like taking gloves off, and feeling your own skin for the first time.

It’s a bit of a drag to say so, but I don’t think you can understand this unless you’ve gone through it – though I try to put some of it over on the album. But for me at any rate it was all part of dissolving the God trip or father-figure trip. Facing up to reality instead of always looking for some kind of heaven.

RB: Do you see the family in general as the source of these repressions?

JL: Mine is an extreme case, you know. My father and mother split and I never saw my father until I was 20, nor did I see much more of my mother. But Yoko had her parents there and it was the same….

YO: Perhaps one feels more pain when parents are there. It’s like when you’re hungry, you know, it’s worse to get a symbol of a cheeseburger than no cheeseburger at all. It doesn’t do you any good, you know. I often wish my mother had died so that at least I could get some people’s sympathy. But there she was, a perfectly beautiful mother.

JL: And Yoko’s family were middle-class Japanese but it’s all the same repression. Though I think middle-class people have the biggest trauma if they have nice imagey parents, all smiling and dolled up. They are the ones who have the biggest struggle to say, ‘Goodbye mummy, goodbye daddy’.

TA: What relation to your music has all this got?

JL: Art is only a way of expressing pain. I mean the reason Yoko does such far out stuff is that it’s a far out kind of pain she went through.

RB: A lot of Beatle songs used to be about childhood…

JL: Yeah, that would mostly be me…

RB: Though they were very good there was always a missing element…

JL: That would be reality, that would be the missing element. Because I was never really wanted. The only reason I am a star is because of my repression. Nothing else would have driven me through all that if I was ‘normal‘…

YO: …and happy…

JL: The only reason I went for that goal is that I wanted to say: ‘Now, mummy-daddy, will you love me?’

TA: But then you had success beyond most people’s wildest dreams…

JL: Oh, Jesus Christ, it was a complete oppression. I mean we had to go through humiliation upon humiliation with the middle classes and showbiz and Lord Mayors and all that. They were so condescending and stupid. Everybody trying to use us. It was a special humiliation for me because I could never keep my mouth shut and I’d always have to be drunk or pilled to counteract this pressure. It was really hell …

YO: It was depriving him of any real experience, you know…

JL: It was very miserable. I mean apart from the first flush of making it – the thrill of the first number one record, the first trip to America. At first we had some sort of objective like being as big as Elvis – moving forward was the great thing, but actually attaining it was the big let-down. I found I was having continually to please the sort of people I’d always hated when I was a child. This began to bring me back to reality.
I began to realise that we are all oppressed which is why I would like to do something about it, though I’m not sure where my place is.

RB: Well, in any case, politics and culture are linked, aren’t they? I mean, workers are repressed by culture not guns at the moment…

JL: …they’re doped…

RB: And the culture that’s doping them is one the artist can make or break…

JL: That’s what I’m trying to do on my albums and in these interviews. What I’m trying to do is to influence all the people I can influence. All those who are still under the dream and just put a big question mark in their mind. The acid dream is over, that is what I’m trying to tell them.

RB: Even in the past, you know, people would use Beatle songs and give them new words. ‘Yellow submarine’ , for instance, had a number of versions. One that strikers used to sing began ‘We all live on bread and margarine’ ; at LSE we had a version that began ‘We all live in a Red LSE’.

JL: I like that. And I enjoyed it when football crowds in the early days would sing ‘All together now’ – that was another one. I was also pleased when the movement in America took up ‘Give peace a chance’ because I had written it with that in mind really. I hoped that instead of singing ‘We shall overcome’ from 1800 or something, they would have something contemporary. I felt an obligation even then to write a song that people would sing in the pub or on a demonstration. That is why I would like to compose songs for the revolution now…

RB: We only have a few revolutionary songs and they were composed in the 19th century. Do you find anything in our musical traditions which could be used for revolutionary songs?

JL: When I started, rock and roll itself was the basic revolution to people of my age and situation. We needed something loud and clear to break through all the unfeeling and repression that had been coming down on us kids. We were a bit conscious to begin with of being imitation Americans. But we delved into the music and found that it was half white country and western and half black rhythm and blues.

Most of the songs came from Europe and Africa and now they were coming back to us. Many of Dylan’s best songs came from Scotland, Ireland or England. It was a sort of cultural exchange.

Though I must say the more interesting songs to me were the black ones because they were more simple. They sort of said shake your arse, or your prick, which was an innovation really. And then there were the field songs mainly expressing the pain they were in. They couldn’t express themselves intellectually so they had to say in a very few words what was happening to them. And then there was the city blues and a lot of that was about sex and fighting.

A lot of this was self-expression but only in the last few years have they expressed themselves completely with Black Power, like Edwin Starr making war records. Before that many black singers were still labouring under that problem of God; it was often ‘God will save us’. But right through the blacks were singing directly and immediately about their pain and also about sex, which is why I like it.

RB: You say country and western music derived from European folk songs. Aren’t these folk songs sometimes pretty dreadful stuff, all about losing and being defeated?

JL: As kids we were all opposed to folk songs because they were so middle-class. It was all college students with big scarfs and a pint of beer in their hands singing folk songs in what we call la-di-da voices-’I worked in a mine in New-cast-le’ and all that shit. There were very few real folk singers you know, though I liked Dominic Behan a bit and there was some good stuff to be heard in Liverpool. Just occasionally you hear very old records on the radio or TV of real workers in Ireland or somewhere singing these songs and the power of them is fantastic.

But mostly folk music is people with fruity voices trying to keep alive something old and dead. It’s all a bit boring, like ballet: a minority thing kept going by a minority group. Today’s folk song is rock and roll. Although it happened to emanate from America, that’s not really important in the end because we wrote our own music and that changed everything.

RB: Your album, Yoko, seems to fuse avant-garde modern music with rock. I’d like to put an idea to you I got from listening to it. You integrate everyday sounds, like that of a train, into a musical pattern. This seems to demand an aesthetic measure of everyday life, to insist that art should not be imprisoned in the museums and galleries, doesn’t it?

YO: Exactly. I want to incite people to loosen their oppression by giving them something to work with, to build on. They shouldn’t be frightened of creating themselves – that’s why I make things very open, with things for people to do, like in my book [Grapefruit].
Because basically there are two types of people in the world: people who are confident because they know they have the ability to create, and then people who have been demoralised, who have no confidence in themselves because they have been told they have no creative ability, but must just take orders. The Establishment likes people who take no responsibility and cannot respect themselves.

RB: I suppose workers’ control is about that…

JL: Haven’t they tried out something like that in Yugoslavia; they are free of the Russians. I’d like to go there and see how it works.

TA: Well, they have; they did try to break with the Stalinist pattern. But instead of allowing uninhibited workers’ control, they added a strong dose of political bureaucracy. It tended to smother the initiative of the workers and they also regulated the whole system by a market mechanism which bred new inequalities between one region and another.

JL: It seems that all revolutions end up with a personality cult – even the Chinese seem to need a father-figure. I expect this happens in Cuba too, with Che and Fidel. In Western-style Communism we would have to create an almost imaginary workers’ image of themselves as the father-figure.

RB: That’s a pretty cool idea – the Working Class becomes its own Hero. As long as it was not a new comforting illusion, as long as there was a real workers’ power. If a capitalist or bureaucrat is running your life then you need to compensate with illusions.

YO: The people have got to trust in themselves.

TA: That’s the vital point. The working class must be instilled with a feeling of confidence in itself. This can’t be done just by propaganda – the workers must move, take over their own factories and tell the capitalists to bugger off. This is what began to happen in May 1968 in France…the workers began to feel their own strength.

JL: But the Communist Party wasn’t up to that, was it?

RB: No, they weren’t. With 10 million workers on strike they could have led one of those huge demonstrations that occurred in the centre of Paris into a massive occupation of all government buildings and installations, replacing de Gaulle with a new institution of popular power like the Commune or the original Soviets – that would have begun a real revolution but the French C.P. was scared of it. They preferred to deal at the top instead of encouraging the workers to take the initiative themselves…

JL: Great, but there’s a problem about that here you know. All the revolutions have happened when a Fidel or Marx or Lenin or whatever, who were intellectuals, were able to get through to the workers. They got a good pocket of people together and the workers seemed to understand that they were in a repressed state. They haven’t woken up yet here, they still believe that cars and tellies are the answer. You should get these left-wing students out to talk with the workers, you should get the school-kids involved with The Red Mole.

TA: You’re quite right, we have been trying to do that and we should do more. This new Industrial Relations Bill the Government is trying to introduce is making more and more workers realise what is happening…

JL: I don’t think that Bill can work. I don’t think they can enforce it. I don’t think the workers will co-operate with it. I thought the Wilson Government was a big let-down but this Heath lot are worse. The underground is being harrassed, the black militants can’t even live in their own homes now, and they’re selling more arms to the South Africans. Like Richard Neville said, there may be only an inch of difference between Wilson and Heath but it’s in that inch that we live….

TA: I don’t know about that; Labour brought in racialist immigration policies, supported the Vietnam war and were hoping to bring in new legislation against the unions.

RB: It may be true that we live in the Inch of difference between Labour and Conservative but so long as we do we’ll be impotent and unable to change anything. If Heath is forcing us out of that inch maybe he’s doing us a good turn without meaning to…

JL: Yes, I’ve thought about that, too. This putting us in a corner so we have to find out what is coming down on other people. I keep on reading the Morning Star [the Communist newspaper] to see if there’s any hope, but it seems to be in the 19th century; it seems to be written for dropped-out, middle-aged liberals.
We should be trying to reach the young workers because that’s when you’re most idealistic and have least fear.

Somehow the revolutionaries must approach the workers because the workers won’t approach them. But it’s difficult to know where to start; we’ve all got a finger in the dam. The problem for me is that as I have become more real, I’ve grown away from most working-class people – you know what they like is Engelbert Humperdinck. It’s the students who are buying us now, and that’s the problem. Now The Beatles are four separate people, we don’t have the impact we had when we were together…

RB: Now you’re trying to swim against the stream of bourgeois society, which is much more difficult.

JL: Yes, they own all the newspapers and they control all distribution and promotion. When we came along there was only Decca, Philips and EMI who could really produce a record for you. You had to go through the whole bureaucracy to get into the recording studio. You were in such a humble position, you didn’t have more than 12 hours to make a whole album, which is what we did in the early days.

Even now it’s the same; if you’re an unknown artist you’re lucky to get an hour in a studio – it’s a hierarchy and if you don’t have hits, you don’t get recorded again. And they control distribution. We tried to change that with Apple but in the end we were defeated. They still control everything. EMI killed our album Two Virgins because they didn’t like it. With the last record they’ve censored the words of the songs printed on the record sleeve. Fucking ridiculous and hypocritical – they have to let me sing it but they don’t dare let you read it. Insanity.

RB: Though you reach fewer people now, perhaps the effect can be more concentrated.

JL: Yes, I think that could be true. To begin with, working class people reacted against our openness about sex. They are frightened of nudity, they’re repressed in that way as well as others. Perhaps they thought ‘Paul is a good lad, he doesn’t make trouble’.
Also when Yoko and I got married, we got terrible racialist letters – you know, warning me that she would slit my throat. Those mainly came from Army people living in Aldershot. Officers.

Now workers are more friendly to us, so perhaps it’s changing. It seems to me that the students are now half-awake enough to try and wake up their brother workers. If you don’t pass on your own awareness then it closes down again. That is why the basic need is for the students to get in with the workers and convince them that they are not talking gobbledegook. And of course it’s difficult to know what the workers are really thinking because the capitalist press always only quotes mouthpieces like Vic Feather* anyway.

*Vic Feather 1908-76 was General Secretary of the TUC from 1969-73.

So the only thing is to talk to them directly, especially the young workers. We’ve got to start with them because they know they’re up against it. That’s why I talk about school on the album. I’d like to incite people to break the framework, to be disobedient in school, to stick their tongues out, to keep insulting authority .

YO: We are very lucky really, because we can create our own reality, John and me, but we know the important thing is to communicate with other people.

JL: The more reality we face, the more we realise that unreality is the main programme of the day. The more real we become, the more abuse we take, so it does radicalise us in a way, like being put in a corner. But it would be better if there were more of us.

YO: We mustn’t be traditional in the way we communicate with people – especially with the Establishment. We should surprise people by saying new things in an entirely new way. Communication of that sort can have a fantastic power so long as you don’t do only what they expect you to do.

RB: Communication is vital for building a movement, but in the end it’s powerless unless you also develop popular force.

YO: I get very sad when I think about Vietnam where there seems to be no choice but violence. This violence goes on for centuries perpetuating itself. In the present age when communication is so rapid, we should create a different tradition, traditions are created everyday. Five years now is like 100 years before. We are living in a society that has no history .There’s no precedent for this kind of society so we can break the old patterns.

TA: No ruling class in the whole of history has given up power voluntarily and I don’t see that changing.

YO: But violence isn’t just a conceptual thing, you know. I saw a programme about this kid who had come back from Vietnam – he’d lost his body from the waist down. He was just a lump of meat, and he said, ‘Well, I guess it was a good experience.’

JL: He didn’t want to face the truth, he didn’t want to think it had all been a waste…

YO: But think of the violence, it could happen to your kids…

RB: But Yoko, people who struggle against oppression find themselves attacked by those who have a vested interest in nothing changing, those who want to protect their power and wealth. Look at the people in Bogside and Falls Road in Northern Ireland; they were mercilessly attacked by the special police because they began demonstrating for their rights. On one night in August 1969, seven people were shot and thousands driven from their homes. Didn’t they have a right to defend themselves?

YO: That’s why one should try to tackle these problems before a situation like that happens.

JL: Yes, but what do you do when it does happen, what do you do?

RB: Popular violence against their oppressors is always justified. It cannot be avoided.

YO: But in a way the new music showed things could be transformed by new channels of communication.

JL: Yes, but as I said, nothing really changed.

YO: Well, something changed and it was for the better. All I’m saying is that perhaps we can make a revolution without violence.

JL: But you can’t take power without a struggle…

TA: That’s the crucial thing.

JL: Because, when it comes to the nitty-gritty, they won’t let the people have any power; they’ll give all the rights to perform and to dance for them, but no real power…

YO: The thing is, even after the revolution, if people don’t have any trust in themselves, they’ll get new problems.

JL: After the revolution you have the problem of keeping things going, of sorting out all the different views. It’s quite natural that revolutionaries should have different solutions, that they should split into different groups and then reform, that’s the dialectic, isn’t it – but at the same time they need to be united against the enemy, to solidify a new order. I don’t know what the answer is; obviously Mao is aware of this problem and keeps the ball moving.

RB: The danger is that once a revolutionary state has been created, a new conservative bureaucracy tends to form around it. This danger tends to increase if the revolution is isolated by imperialism and there is material scarcity.

JL: Once the new power has taken over they have to establish a new status quo just to keep the factories and trains running.

RB: Yes, but a repressive bureaucracy doesn’t necessarily run the factories or trains any better than the workers could under a system of revolutionary democracy.

JL: Yes, but we all have bourgeois instincts within us, we all get tired and feel the need to relax a bit. How do you keep everything going and keep up revolutionary fervour after you’ve achieved what you set out to achieve?
Of course Mao has kept them up to it in China, but what happens after Mao goes? Also he uses a personality cult. Perhaps that’s necessary; like I said, everybody seems to need a father figure.

But I’ve been reading Khrushchev Remembers. I know he’s a bit of a lad himself – but he seemed to think that making a religion out of an individual was bad; that doesn’t seem to be part of the basic Communist idea. Still people are people, that’s the difficulty.
If we took over Britain, then we’d have the job of cleaning up the bourgeoisie and keeping people in a revolutionary state of mind.

RB: …In Britain unless we can create a new popular power-and here that would basically mean workers’ power – really controlled by, and answerable to, the masses, then we couldn’t make the revolution in the first place. Only a really deep-rooted workers’ power could destroy the bourgeois state.

YO: That’s why it will be different when the younger generation takes over.

JL: I think it wouldn’t take much to get the youth here really going. You’d have to give them free rein to attack the local councils or to destroy the school authorities, like the students who break up the repression in the universities. It’s already happening, though people have got to get together more.
And the women are very important too, we can’t have a revolution that doesn’t involve and liberate women. It’s so subtle the way you’re taught male superiority.
It took me quite a long time to realise that my maleness was cutting off certain areas for Yoko. She’s a red hot liberationist and was quick to show me where I was going wrong, even though it seemed to me that I was just acting naturally. That’s why I’m always interested to know how people who claim to be radical treat women.

RB: There’s always been at least as much male chauvinism on the left as anywhere else – though the rise of women’s liberation is helping to sort that out.

JL: It’s ridiculous. How can you talk about power to the people unless you realise the people is both sexes.

YO: You can’t love someone unless you are in an equal position with them. A lot of women have to cling to men out of fear or insecurity, and that’s not love – basically that’s why women hate men…

JL: …and vice versa…

YO: So if you have a slave around the house how can you expect to make a revolution outside it? The problem for women is that if we try to be free, then we naturally become lonely, because so many women are willing to become slaves, and men usually prefer that. So you always have to take the chance: ‘Am I going to lose my man?’ It’s very sad.

JL: Of course, Yoko was well into liberation before I met her. She’d had to fight her way through a man’s world – the art world is completely dominated by men – so she was full of revolutionary zeal when we met. There was never any question about it: we had to have a 50-50 relationship or there was no relationship, I was quick to learn. She did an article about women in Nova more than two years back in which she said, ‘Woman is the nigger of the world’ .

RB: Of course we all live in an imperialist country that is exploiting the Third World, and even our culture is involved in this. There was a time when Beatle music was plugged on Voice of America….

JL: The Russians put it out that we were capitalist robots, which we were I suppose…

RB: They were pretty stupid not to see it was something different.

YO: Let’ s face it, Beatles was 20th-century folksong in the framework of capitalism; they couldn’t do anything different if they wanted to communicate within that framework.

RB: I was working in Cuba when Sgt Pepper was released and that’s when they first started playing rock music on the radio.

JL: Well hope they see that rock and roll is not the same as Coca-Cola. As we get beyond the dream this should be easier: that’s why I’m putting out more heavy statements now and trying to shake off the teeny-bopper image.
I want to get through to the right people, and I want to make what I have to say very simple and direct.

RB: Your latest album sounds very simple to begin with, but the lyrics, tempo and melody build up into a complexity one only gradually becomes aware of. Like the track ‘My mummy’s dead’ echoes the nursery song ‘Three blind mice’ and it’s about a childhood trauma.

JL: The tune does; it was that sort of feeling, almost like a Haiku poem. I recently got into Haiku in Japan and I just think it’s fantastic. Obviously, when you get rid of a whole section of illusion in your mind you’re left with great precision.

Yoko was showing me some of these Haiku in the original. The difference between them and Longfellow is immense. Instead of a long flowery poem the Haiku would say ‘Yellow flower in white bowl on wooden table’ which gives you the whole picture, really….

TA: How do you think we can destroy the capitalist system here in Britain, John?

JL: I think only by making the workers aware of the really unhappy position they are in, breaking the dream they are surrounded by. They think they are in a wonderful, free-speaking country. They’ve got cars and tellies and they don’t want to think there’s anything more to life. They are prepared to let the bosses run them, to see their children fucked up in school. They’re dreaming someone else’s dream, it’s not even their own. They should realise that the blacks and the Irish are being harassed and repressed and that they will be next.

Read entire article here

Robert Mirabal: Valley of Dreams

Source www.youtube.com

Eric Clapton & JJ Cale doing a JJ Cale tune “Call Me The Breeze”

Source www.youtube.com

Read entire article here

A classic by The Carpenters – “A Song For You”

Karen Carpenter 1950 – 1983 Considered to have one of the greatest voices of all time.

Source www.youtube.com

Luciano Pavarotti and James Brown It’s A Man’s World

Source www.youtube.com

9/11 Lessons From Star Trek

Source www.youtube.com

If you are a Grateful Dead fan – and in the Bay Area, there should be a lot of you – you’ll be interested to know that the former home of the grand poobah himself, Jerry Garcia, is up for sale.

Read entire article here

The classic 1985 music video for the hit song from the Back To The Future trilogy. Featuring Christopher Lloyd.

Huey Lewis & the News-”The Power of Lover” from Uncle Charlies in Marin where he played for years before being discovered…

Source www.youtube.com

He went into the hospital two months ago for back surgery, and the doctors found a heart condition. He had a heart attack and a stroke and probably an infection. He may never be able to write another book or make another speech. I do not have all the facts, but if he is able someday to at least work on his computer, that would be very positive.

I am praying for Dr. Griffin and his family. He has left a legacy with his books that will survive for hundreds of years. He even mentioned me in one of his books. But right now I am praying that he will recover. I don’t really know how bad it is. My friend from the Scholars for 9/11 Truth called him and his wife related this information to us.
Read entire article here

Source www.youtube.com
“Loose Change” by Remo Conscious one of our musical artists

Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Charlie Sheen has blasted the cowardly corporate media response to his “20 Minutes With The President” letter, slamming the press as “hopeless lap-dogs” for failing to address a single one of his 20 bullet points on 9/11 while ignoring completely his challenge to publicly debate 9/11 truth debunkers.

Sheen’s open letter to the President, which took the form of a fictionalized account of a meeting between the two in which Sheen grills Obama about the unanswered questions surrounding 9/11, received widespread media coverage and was featured in thousands of newspaper stories, online articles and TV segments. Awareness of the subject only increased after the subsequent release of a You Tube video in which Sheen personally appeals to the President to answer the questions.

However, not one single mainstream media report adequately covered even one of Sheen’s 20 bullet points that were listed in the article and backed up by a substantial online bibliography.

Indeed, scores of corporate media hit pieces completely fabricated the content of Sheen’s letter, attributing phrases to him that he had never made in an attempt to portray Sheen as abrasive and “insulting” to 9/11 victims and their families, despite the fact that the majority of family members share Sheen’s questions.

Fox News was one of many corporate media outlets to claim that Sheen had stated “that Bush/Cheney planned it all,” when in reality he had said no such thing. The media merely manufactured this spin so that they could politicize the issue, make it partisan, and then attack Sheen as just another deluded Hollywood liberal.

Claims that Sheen directly accused President Bush of planning 9/11 were erroneously carried by hundreds of media outlets despite the fact that the actor never made any such statement. The fact that the press had to invent a strawman stance and put words in Sheen’s mouth to then attack him on proves how scared the media is of the power of the actual questions that Sheen asked in his letter.

In a statement released to Prison Planet.com, Sheen chastised the media response as nothing more than a “mendacious side-show” performed by journalists he describes as “hopeless lap dogs”.

Sheen slams the press for following “a desperate, juvenile and transparent script” in response to his letter after they collectively “attacked the man and ignored the facts”.

“We can no longer allow these cowards and shills to contaminate the reservoirs of truth. In addition to their slanderous folly, they have ignored my very public challenge to a debate on Larry King Live. If these cockroaches had but one shred of courage, they would embrace this opportunity,” states Sheen.

Sheen also released to Prison Planet.com the e mails that he sent to the White House following the publication of his letter to Obama. After his request to meet with Obama was rejected by Obama’s staff, Sheen made another request to meet with Obama, this time accompanied by 9/11 family member Bob Mcllvaine who lost his son on September 11. Sheen has yet to hear back from Obama’s staff regarding his follow-up request.

Read entire article here

Featured, Politics, US, World — By Kathleen Wells on June 17, 2010 at 7:10 am

Co-authored by Roseanne Barr

It is time for American Jews to demand that Obama instruct Israel to obey international law.

Well-known actress and comedian, Roseanne Barr, has been a consistent and persistent voice for decades against some of the acts committed by the state of Israel.  Specifically, she has vigorously, unflinchingly, unequivocally, uncompromisingly, and courageously called upon Israel to end its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

With this latest incident of the flotilla raid by Israeli commandos, we sat down for a talk.

A frame grab from a video released by the Israel Defence Forces shows what the IDF says is an activist hitting Israeli soldiers on a ship heading toward Gaza on May 31. (IDF/Reuters)

Kathleen Wells: Roseanne, talk to me about being Jewish and what it means to you.

Roseanne Barr: Coming out of the closet is hard, but I am going to do it in this [interview with you].  I am an observant Jew!  Now my secret is out

May Hashem guide these words from my lips to the ears of the world:  END THE BLOCKADE ON GAZA NOW  ‘B’ruch Hashem.

I was taught at my Grandmother’s knee and on her lap that Jerusalem is the City of Holy Alchemy — spiritual, mental and physical.  There, righteous souls soar straight to heaven.  The city, she told me, is the heart of the vow that we take every year when we remember the story of how we who were slaves once walked out of slavery into freedom and began to write law that would bring into being a divine utopia.

Kathleen Wells: You are a Kabbalist, which means you study a discipline and school of thought concerned with the mystical aspect of Rabbinic Judaism, correct?  And being a Kabbalist means you study the Tora, (the “teachings” of God, in the Tanach and Rabbinic literature) and consider that study an inherent duty of observant Jews, correct?

Roseanne Barr: Judaism is an interpretation of Kabballah. Kabballah is from the oral tradition, called the women’s tradition.  It’s also a method of meditation to integrate the mind’s severed parts into one working and immovable force for good on earth.

Kathleen Wells: Based upon that study, do you believe that Jews have a righteous claim/inheritance to Israel, i.e., a right to be in Jerusalem?

Roseanne Barr: Jews have a connection to Jerusalem that has not been broken or altered for many centuries, despite ongoing attempts to force us to deny that fact, including torture,  expulsion, being burned at the stake, ghettoized, gassed and incinerated.  When we are still around after a while of that, then we are greatly rewarded and sometimes allowed to live in unparalleled luxury.  This is a terribly bi-polar existence.  It is as if we are the world’s moral hostages, its scapegoat.

Kathleen Wells: However, critics will say that non-Jews are merely taking the word of Jews – the Torah — and that there is no grant deed signed by God which gives Jerusalem/Israel to the Jewish people.   What do you say to those critics?

Roseanne Barr: The deniers (who are both Jew and Gentile) are so very fascinated by their scapegoat’s mind, its might and strength, its hold and hope, that the worst of the world’s mad scientists studied the “Jewish mind,” specifically the “memory banks” of Jewish human guinea pigs in thousands of well documented experiments that took place under Mengele in Nazi hospitals disguised as “labor camps.”

I have read Mengele’s notes and books about him that tell how he sought to map the brain’s synapses regarding memory, and to attempt to affect and alter what in the Jew was irreversibly programmed to connect with Jerusalem, despite Diaspora.

I just want people to know all of this, before they say the Jews do not belong in Palestine/Israel or that we have no real history there.  We do and have always lived there.  Of that there can be no doubt, at least to us. Truth is truth.

Does this mean that there should be a brutal and undemocratic theocracy in the Middle East which has the world’s fourth largest army?  NO. Does that mean that all the Jews who live there now should be deported back to Poland and Germany and America? NO.

At the end of the Passover story, we say, “Next Year in Jerusalem!”   We say, “If I forget thee, Jerusalem, may my right arm wither, die, and fall off.”

I asked my grandmother why it was that Jerusalem meant so much to those like us.  She explained to me that Jerusalem’s promise was not just for the Jewish people, but for the world, because it was to become the first international city of peace and brother/sisterhood.  I was taught that in the Messianic age, there will be no more religion, because divine justice will descend to earth, and there will be no more separatism or division.  We say, “G-d is One.”  One planet, one people, one G-d, or we used to, before the great rewriting of all of our prayer books, which happened when I was about ten years old, in the early sixties.

As the books got more and more Zionist and less and less socialist, my entire generation, at least a large percentage of it, simply left Judaism.  We became Buddhist and Hindu and atheist or agnostic, all of which (except Christian) were more in keeping with peaceful self-transformative ideas that did not bow down to militarism.

Judaism is one of the last of the world’s matrilineal philosophies.  Matriarchies are always the cultures that patriarchy attacks and decimates, because they don’t spend all their money on the military like patriarchy does.  They are easy prey. Patriarchy is a bully notion, which if you will notice NEVER attacks a nation that can defend itself. Zionism is patriarchal and sets Judaism on its head.

Every Shabbat, Jews pray for the peace of the Shekkinah, to descend on Jerusalem/the world.  Our traditions tell us that the highest level of G-d is female, that She is the Sabbath bride, and She brings peace,  beauty, and judgment tempered by mercy into our circle every seventh day.  Right now, She is pretty upset with the way we have poisoned her foundation, Malchut, which is the Earth.  She is belching and getting over-heated, and we had better look out.  This is our last warning, I think.

These holistic and holy ideas are what I was taught about Judaism. They have been culturally wiped away by some post-Holocaust hyper-masculine militaristic Halliburton-fueled war machine that teaches about blood and honor, with none of the spirituality that I learned just fifty years ago.

Our prayer books then, back in the Sephardic synagogue of my childhood in Salt Lake City, Utah, (“The Congregation Montefiore”) were very different than prayer books are today.  I remember when they “updated” them in the early sixties and they became all about the Holocaust and the state of Israel.  The “children of Israel” was replaced/updated with the “the people of Israel” and our Uncle Ben was instructed to say ‘Shabbat’ and not ‘Shabbos’ anymore.

The pigeon Yiddish that my parents spoke was updated into Hebrew.  I remember being very distraught at the rewrites, because I had been told that we were never to allow even one letter to be changed in the Torah.  I feared that there was going to be a price to pay, and maybe I was right.  Maybe, not.

Kathleen Wells: This is complex and compelling.  What and where are the answers?  How can peace descend upon the Middle East?  Palestinians are Muslims and Christians, not Jewish — they don’t read the Torah.  And they hold as tightly and deeply to their traditions and religion as you do yours.

Roseanne Barr: I hold to nothing but envisioning international peace and utopia.  We all have many more things in common than not. I’ve tried to get to the very bottom of the whole subject, and I say it’s the entire world’s fault, not just Israel’s and not just the Jews’, for allowing the terrible crimes against humanity, the ethnic cleansing that is happening in Gaza right now. No government in the Middle East is innocent. Wars make the stock market go up, so no one in America is innocent either, nor anyone anywhere where capitalism reigns.

Occupation is wrong, collective punishment is wrong, and the use of white phosphorous on a captive population is wrong. Zionists are wrong, Hamas is wrong, Bibi is wrong, Obama is wrong, Saudi Arabia is wrong, Egypt is wrong, Jordan is wrong, Russia is wrong, Turkey is wrong, as are the Pope and the evangelicals, and all who do nothing about this terrible failure of humanity.  To me, the only hope at all is the power of grandmothers crossing cultural and religious lines to make peace together.

Kathleen Wells: Talk to me specifically about the Gaza blockade/occupation.

Roseanne Barr: When I think about the blockade and the occupation and the illegal settlements and the breaking of international law and of maritime law that Israel is indeed guilty of, as well as the use of white phosphorous on a captive people who share our DNA and look just like us and act just like us and do what we would do were our positions reversed, I cannot bear it.

I actually double over; I weep and sweat at night.  I recoil from the arrogant and immoral denial of the suffering of people who are living under occupation.  My stomach turns over and my soul withers when I remember that we said we, of all people, would never let this happen on earth again.

I cannot even think politically about it, or religiously either anymore, because it seems divisive to do so, and that is not what is needed now.  I think that I have to find a way to help, to stop this terrible spiritual Waterloo, this ethnic cleansing of ourselves!  These are our cousins!  Obama can make peace between Palestine and Israel.

Kathleen Wells: What are you doing…?

Roseanne Barr: Every Shabbat I meditate for an end to the neocons and their self-destructive agenda that is pushing the entire world to the brink of war.  I write letters to Jewish people. I blog everyday about Jerusalem. I have traveled the world, including parts of Palestine to talk to women about peace. I show up and argue with Zionists, Christians and anti-Zionists, too, all over the world.  I also pray with all of the above, and find that group prayer settles disputes well.

People think I am crazy to think that we can actually have peace if we get a council of grandmothers together to write just laws and peace treaties that work for all.  I have spoken in private homes and in synagogues and Kabballah centers for almost twelve years about how the Jewish people are being given the greatest opportunity to make peace in the world right now, and that if we don’t take this moment, it will seal our doom. I am sure of it.  We are to beat our swords into plowshares and to make peace and brotherhood in Jerusalem, in order to bring Mashiach — the messianic age — A SOCIALIST PARADISE!  I just want to say this, because it ‘s never said, it seems.

I fear that we have destroyed not just innocent people, but ourselves, in Gaza.  I ache for all of the people of my DNA, the Palestinians — poor, abused and suffering, wondering how long the bombings will go on and whether there will be food or water tomorrow, of dead bodies rotting in the streets and no medicine for children.

I ache for the Jews who live in fear, too, always.  My G-d, what can I do?  Can I go there? Can I walk food and supplies in myself?  How can I live without attempting to alleviate unnecessary suffering, instead of being a part of its cause?  How can I keep my soul and be a Jew now? It torments my mind.

I am not ready to let go of the idea that utopia can indeed exist on this earth now, that separatism and duality will evolve into cooperation and understanding.   I was not raised a Zionist, but a socialist, as were most Jews before the Holocaust.  This is now, and we all need a reboot of our programs and a lot more empathy for all that is alive.

Kathleen Wells: There are collective fears/concerns that many Jews have that the Palestinians and others in the Middle East would like to see Israel wiped off the map.

Roseanne Barr: Being hated and hunted and blamed for your own suffering makes people kind of testy, nervous, and on edge, and often fundamentalist and extreme.  Bombs get thrown only when people cannot honestly talk together.  Women on both sides of the occupation have been betrayed by their male leaders, who have less interest in helping their own than in ripping them off, just like what is happening to the women in America right now.

Kathleen Wells: What do you think of U.S.-Israel relations?  What do you say to American Jews and to President Obama?

Roseanne Barr: I was asked what message to give to the President by someone who attended a lunch with him where Jewish American opinion was invited.  I told my friend to tell Obama that he must end the embargo on Gaza.  Two weeks later, the flotillas sailed and were attacked in international waters.

It is time for American Jews to demand that Obama instruct Israel to obey international law.  Our people died for international law — laws that prohibit collective punishment and captivity, deportation, and acts of terror against an unarmed and captive population. The cost of the blood on our hands if we do not demand this now will be the loss of our souls, which, unlike the Holocaust, we cannot survive.

When the world is shown the crimes against humanity that have been executed in our names, there in that ghetto called Gaza, I fear there will be no more Judaism left in Zionism at all.  Eighty percent of young American Jews under the age of 30 are not Zionists, according to Zogby polls.

G-d exists nowhere but in our own hearts.  If our hearts are deadened to each other, then they are also deadened to G-d!  We are ridiculed by our own if we say we care about the suffering of the other side.  Are we not capable of loving those who are unlike us, nor those who are like us but disagree with us? This is not who we are.

Kathleen Wells: Talk to me about the dynamic between Israel and Iran?

Roseanne Barr: Is Israel going to attack Iran now?  Israel cannot survive a war with Iran.  This terrible programming is incorrect.  It is lemming programming.  Evangelicals are pushing for Armageddon, the final solution to the Jewish problem.  Wake up America! Wake up Israel! Wake up world!

A Jew is required to correct his thinking and transform the world for the better, but Zionism has changed every single corner of Judaism now. I think the only hope is to go back to a pre-Holocaust socialistic interpretation of Torah.  What are the Zionists fighting for? Land?  For what? Strip malls and movie theatres and tract housing?

They always say that they feel like they want to “undo the Holocaust,” to make sure that it doesn’t happen to the Jews ever again.  I guess this is what happens to people who have lived through “shock and awe.”  The Palestinians will probably keep “defending” themselves forever, too, and doing things to make sure the fighting continues.  But, maybe not.  I know they have grandmothers who want peace there, too.

Jews, this is NOW!!  You are not slaves any longer!  You are not being gassed and hunted now! You are living in great relative wealth compared to the rest of the world.

Kathleen Wells: Supporters/defenders of the state of Israel say that Hamas sends rockets into Israel and that justifies/makes reasonable Israel’s actions/blockade of Gaza.

Roseanne Barr: Sixteen Israelis were killed in one year by Palestinian rockets, so Israel killed 1600 Palestinians.  Israel, by a factor of ten, has killed more civilians than its enemies.

More people die in gang violence in LA in a month than are killed by Palestinian rockets in Israel in a year. If a gang killed one hundred members of the opposing gang for every one of them killed, the entire state of California would step in to put an end to both sides of the whole miserable operation, and that is what Obama must do.

Jerusalem is prophesied to become the city of international brotherhood, and that idea is the central force in Torah. So why not help it happen now? May G-d forgive us all for our cruelty, in that we quibble while tiny little innocent children starve and die.  We deserve to blow sky high every single one of us.

Kathleen Wells: I can hear the critics now.  They will say: You are religious, but this is a political issue.   And that you can’t conflate religion and politics — religious beliefs cannot be used to solve political issues and political problems.

Roseanne Barr: I have to say that I agree with you, but that is not what is happening here or there. Neocons in America made an unholy deal with the evangelicals and took over not only America’s government, but Israel’s government.

Neocon Zionists and Christian Zionists must abandon the warmongering. They have demonized those of us who are observant Jews (socialists) and called us self-haters.  This is the truth:  Self -haters are those who want endless war and suffering, not those who want peace.

Seriously, neoconservative evangelical Christian Zionists are not doing G-d’s work at all.

All of the problems between Israel and Palestine can be solved in a day, if we take religion out of things.  It is merely a labor issue, as everything really is.  Nothing is really a religious issue at all; it just serves to keep people from blaming the oligarchs.  Religion is the only thing that keeps the poor from killing the rich, and that is why it’s so huge in the USA right now.  The workers get the Bible and the bosses get the money.

Kathleen Wells: Are most of the neocons Jewish?

Roseanne Barr: Many are.  Well, Bill Kristol, who is the architect of the neocons, is.  Ever read the magazine The New Republic?

Jon Stewart always has Kristol on his show and that’s why I am so upset with Jon.  You say that religion and politics are not mixed, but, yes, they are, especially in Israel. The entire Zionist thing got co-opted by evangelicals.   They finance about seventy percent of Israeli tourist trade.

The thing that infuriates me and I have argued this with all of the neocons, is that many Christians believe that all Jews must die in Israel during their terrible Armageddon story in order for Christ to return.  They vote pro-Israel, occupation and settlements, hoping that war will break out and my people will die there.  They are close to being neo-Nazis.  I told the mayor of Jerusalem this after he followed me around Jerusalem demanding that I make a tourist film with him thanking American evangelicals to use as a fund-raising tool.  He told me that Israel can’t survive without them because Jews are no longer visiting or supporting the economy there. I said if Jew haters are our only hope, then that should be the end of it.  There was fallout for me.

I took the whole Book of Revelations to Jews and explained the Nazi-like philosophy behind their support of Israel, and they just laughed and said, “It doesn’t matter what they believe. The guy (Jesus) isn’t coming back.  So what?”  I said, “Their support includes agitating for war with Iran, which to them is Magog. Armageddon is the war of Gog and Magog.”  It draws closer.

Listen to Palin drop hints about all the Jews in America moving there. Their thinking is for real and their think tanks write about it all the time.   I read it all from what the Pope writes about Israel and the Jews to what the Mormons say in their opinions on the same stuff and the Christian think tank, which is called The Family.

Kathleen Wells: What do you say to the Zionists?

Rosanne Barr: The Palestinians have agreed to renounce their previous beliefs that Israel should not exist.  Neocon Zionists are SORE WINNERS!  Come on now, I am an American Jew. I will never allow anyone to destroy Israel, and that includes the right wing idiots in Israel.  I will make permanent Aliyah there and become President, or stand naked at the top of any mountain, if it will help. I want solutions and, in fact, I demand them, because I know that they are possible.  Compromise and solve problems.  I swear to G-d it is the time for that. The time for Tikkun Olam (repentance that transforms the world).

Everything on this earth right now is about labor and slavery.  War is the only American export left that anyone wants to buy from us.  Nice work, neocons!  Nice work, evangelicals!  Nice work, Reagan, and Bush! Nice work, Zionists! Nice work, MEN! Sometimes I think we should be like Solomon and wire the whole place for doom.

The biblical story celebrating Solomon’s wisdom says he ordered a baby, the object of dispute, sliced in half, knowing that the woman who backed out of the deal first was the baby’s real mother. She was awarded the baby.  After we wire Jerusalem to blow sky high, we will settle the score once and for all between Islam and Judaism.  The one who wants peace will win.  It’s in the book of war, for chrissakes. The winners will love Jerusalem the most, and that means they will love peace and brotherhood and international law the most.

Kathleen Wells: Where do we go from here?

Roseanne Barr: Rachel Corrie, a Jewish American young woman, who stood in front of an Israeli bulldozer and bet her life that her fellow Jews would not kill her, lost the bet and was plowed under the wreckage of the Palestinian home she tried to defend. She knew no moral person could remain silent when the government who supposedly speaks for it inflicts suffering on innocent captive children.

Yesterday, my friend told me that a group of Jews who live in Germany are bringing in a boat filled with Jews to break the blockade, to place Israel in the position of having to kill Jews who oppose the neocon Zionist version of who we are.  It is quite perfect, understated and Jewish — the most profound of soundbites in this battle for hearts and minds.  We are all Rachel Corrie now! We are coming from Germany to save ourselves in this part of Jewish history.

Where do we go from here?  We love each other! May the light of peace descend on the world.  NOW!

May the spirit of Rabin, of Camp David re awaken in all the world’s people, now. May what was so close ignite and burn down all fear and hatred, on every side of us.  May we find a way to make peace, and restitution.

Read entire article here

THE FANTASTIC FOUR AT THE U.S. SOCIAL FORUM!

My wonderful host in Detroit, civil rights lawyer Julie Hurwitz; Marjorie Cohn, distinguished author and immediate past president of the National Lawyers’ Guild, and Colonel Ann Wright of Code Pink – fresh from the Gaza Flotilla!  What glorious company I got to keep at the Social Forum!Pittsburgh-based activist, hellraiser & unionmaid Anne Feeney’s monthly email news… and your feedback!

Wednesday, September 01, 2010

SEPTEMBER 2010 – Anne Feeney’s Fellow Travelers’ Advisory – VOLUME SIX #6

SEPTEMBER 2010 – Anne Feeney’s Fellow Travelers’ Advisory – VOLUME SIX #6

Immediate Destinations:  Radiation and Chemotherapy…

IN THIS ISSUE:

Health News

Thank you thank you thank you thank you

I’m a GRANDMA!!

Union Song Contest

Labor Day 2010

Family News – Happy Birthday Amy!

Photo Archive Request

September 1, 2010

Pittsburgh, PA

Health News…

In the words of William Bendix (The Life of Riley) – What a revolting development this is!

My hair mostly fell out yesterday, so Julie gave me a buzz cut with his beard trimmer.

Now I know why Chandler wears a hat – It’s cold with no hair!

It was a month ago that Julie’s best friend, Per Forsberg, ordered a lung CT scan for me.  (He’s a doctor in Julie’s hometown of Smedjebacken.)  He was afraid I might have blood clots in my lungs the way that I was coughing.  I had to go to the next little town over, Ludvika, for the test.  They did it at the hospital there.

A young medical student was in charge at the ER that day.  When the CT results came back I could tell from the look on his face that he had devastating news for me.  What he said though, was:  “I am so sorry to tell you that we have found a fast growing tumor on your esophagus and windpipe.  It’s very large – around 11 cm – and in addition to the complications with your esophagus and windpipe this tumor is also putting terrible pressure some major weasels.”

The dead serious look on his face as he described the pressure on my major weasels made me start to laugh.  He was embarrassed, of course, realizing he had grabbed the wrong word.  His mind racing, he started again…

“Wessels!  Major Wessels!”

I think I had already figured out that he meant vessels.  But I will be forever grateful to this young doctor for making me laugh – not just at that moment – but every time I’ve told anyone the story of my diagnosis.   Indeed, from that day on, we have referred to this tumor as “the weasel.”  Sometimes when the weasel is in there doing rodeo tricks with my esophagus or windpipe I have had these terrible chest pains.  I think this first round of chemo has finally subdued the weasel to the point that those episodes are over.

I returned to Pittsburgh and had a bronchoscopy and biopsy at Shadyside Hospital.  It’s small cell lung cancer, caused by smoking.  This tumor couldn’t really be surgically removed without completely resectioning lots of parts.  But the oncologist says that this type of tumor is very “chemo-reactive” and will disappear entirely with an aggressive course of chemo and radiation. Subsequent brain MRI, CT scans, bone scans and Pet Scans have confirmed that the cancer is confined to the tumor and to the nearest lymph node.  Because it hasn’t spread anywhere else, I have a 20% chance of living out my lifespan.  Four out of five people with my diagnosis will have a recurrence of the cancer within two years and it will not respond to treatment.  I think I’m a likely candidate for the 20% group.  It’s been almost ten years since I quit smoking.  I’m in great health otherwise.  Singing all these years has kept my lungs very healthy and young.   I am treating at the Hillman Cancer Center.  It’s part of the UPMC behemoth.  People travel from all over to get to this center for cancer treatment, so I’m lucky to have it in my own back yard.

Starting on Tuesday, I’ll be having two radiation treatments daily for three weeks.  In addition to that, on Wednesday I’ll have six hours of chemo, Thursday two hours of chemo, and Friday, two hours of chemo.

When I’ve finished up the radiation, I’ll do another round of Chemo on September 29, 30 and October 1st.

Three weeks later, another round of chemo, and then I’m finished with treatment.

There are a number of possible complications, but I’m hoping to avoid them.

For ongoing medical updates, please visit http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/annefeeney

Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank You THANK YOU!!

One of my huge concerns as I began canceling all of my shows for 2010 and 2011 was certainly financial.  The bills are rolling in at a startling rate.  Even though my insurance is pretty good, I’ve had about $8000 in uncovered medical bills since July.  Even if I manage to get Social Security Disability and the Musicians’ Union Disability Pension, I won’t receive my first payments until at least February of 2011.

I know that so many people are really struggling right now that I was reluctant to ask for financial help from you.  It looks like most people really took my request of last month to heart.  People who are indeed struggling sent me their best wishes (lots of them are on my guestbook … http://annefeeney.com/guestbook.html ),  some hilarious and touching letters and cards, and their prayers and hopes for my recovery.  Perfect!

And lots of you with an extra $50 sent it my way. I am so touched, so heartened by this rally to my recovery.  I won’t have to worry about money for a while.  It’s amazing to me. I have almost 10 months of basic expenses sitting in the bank right now.  I’m working on individual thank you notes, but I have so little energy, it’s going to take me a while to get everyone thanked.  Please don’t send me more than $50 – I’m hoping enough folks will come through at $50 that I won’t have to seek out any larger donors…

I would still welcome your contribution.  You can send it to:

Anne Feeney

2240 Milligan Ave

Pittsburgh  PA  15218

or via the “Donate” button located about 5 inches down on the right hand side this page.

I hear there are some benefit shows being planned in Detroit, Eugene, Pittsburgh … It’s all very overwhelming and inspiring to me.  If I had ever had any doubt about my so-called career choice, it’s been put to rest by this amazing outpouring of love and affection and generosity from you, my friends.    I’ve so loved the reminiscences enclosed in your letters.  I’ve been feeling a little like Tom Sawyer at my own funeral …. some of these notes are practically eulogies.  I’m glad that folks are feeling a little sentimental when they write.  I’m feeling pretty sentimental these days myself.

So keep those cards & letters & love tokens coming – they absolutely are the highlight of every day.

I’m a GRANDMA!!

Little Sebastian Edward Berlin arrived five days early on August 22, 2010 weighing in at 5 lbs. 4 oz and almost 19 inches.  He’s perfect in every way.  Monique is doing well after an emergency C-Section.  Her Mom and Dad were in Quito for the birth.  Dan was in the delivery room.  I can’t wait to hold the little fella in my arms!  In the meantime, we have webcams, and I get to see Sebastian almost every day on the camera.  He is so precious.

LABOR DAY 2010

My plan was to be in Pullman, in Chicago, for Labor Day this year.  My friend Mike Hobbs has written a beautiful article about the Pullman Strike.  I’m sure he’d be happy to send you a copy.  You can write him at mhobbs(@)grics.net to request a copy.  His article concludes with a quote about the strike from historian Virgil J. Vogel – “(The Pullman Strike) was a glowing light to prove that in a world governed largely by acquisitiveness and rapacity, there were still enough people responding to a different drummer, to give promise that freedom for the oppressed was not a utopian dream but a practical goal..”

This Labor Day I salute all my brothers and sisters who have made the same idealistic stand against corporate greed – at Hormel, at Eastern Airlines, at Pittston, at Staley, at Bridgestone/Firestone, at Caterpillar, at MSI, at AK, at Conn-Selmer, at PAL Technologies, at Pottsville Hospital, at Canonsburg Hospital, at Ravenswood, at Hercules and at countless other places.  It’s been my honor and privilege to stand with you, then and now.

UNION SONG CONTEST

It’s still too soon to actually vote in the union song contest, but you can go and preview  the entries at http://members.unionsongcontest.org/entries There are some great songs to listen to there.  And I hope you’ll all vote for my entry, “War on the Workers,” when the contest officially begins on Labor Day.

Read entire article here

The greatest song of Bobby Womack ever.

Source www.youtube.com

The economy of the U.S. is in a deflationary spiral. Nothing can stop it — except monetary reform.
1. No more national debt. Nations should not be allowed to borrow. If they want to spend, they have to take the political heat right away by taxing.
2. No more fractional reserve lending. Banks can only lend money they actually have.
3. Gold money is NOT the answer. Historically gold ALWAYS works against a thriving middle class and ALWAYS works to create a plutocracy.
4. The total quantity of money + credit in a national system must be fixed, varying only with the population.

Source www.youtube.com

John Lee Hooker Boom, Boom

Source www.youtube.com

Many Requested this song…Its really good, Amy’s Vocals soar on this track. Rare B-Side to “Take The Box” from her masterpiece Frank.

Amy Winehouse – “Round Midnight”

Source www.youtube.com

World Party Ship of Fools
Source www.youtube.com

Tribute to Daryl Hall. “Rock Steady” from the, “Our Kind of Soul” CD.
For More Of Daryl: http://www.livefromdarylshouse.com

Source www.youtube.com

Amy Winehouse – Me and Mr. Jones live on the Isle of Wight

Source www.youtube.com