Original Peoples

SAN CRISTÓBAL DE LAS CASAS, MEXICO — Over the last few years, the Zapatistas in Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas have garnered very little media attention and been infamously secretive. But although they’ve shifted away from their militant stance of the 1990s and their national political campaigning of the early 2000s, the movement itself isn’t dead.
This summer the Zapatistas opened their communities to teach outsiders what it really means to be a Zapatista today—their day-to-day life and acts of resistance, and their struggles in maintaining autonomy.

Members of a First Nation in northern Alberta are occupying an access road to an oil lease site on their territory where a company intends to horizontally drill using hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, without their consent.

“Are you the guy who hates Thanksgiving?”
The man posing that question on my voicemail continued with a sharply critical comment about one of the essays I have written in recent years about the holocaust-denial that is at the heart of that U.S. holiday. My first reaction was not to argue but to amend: “I don’t hate Thanksgiving—I just think it’s appropriate to critique a celebration that obscures the reality of the European conquest of the Americas.”

Ardaga Widor has been a journalist, ship cook, one-man industrial assembling firm, teacher … in more than just four corners of Mother Earth. He quotes the Portuguese poet and pantheist Teixeira de Pascoais who said: “A man is everything he has seen and every person he has met in his life.” Ardaga is a thus a genuine One World man. Today he’s mostly engaged in the hands-on striving for (social) justice and the empowerment of cultural diversity. He also works in the field of tourism.

Brain Busting Bombs — News (faux, sic, err, persona non grata)
This is an experiment. Quickly, in tsunami like fashion, riffing with the junk of the day, picked up from mainstream madness newspaper news, and from the feeds on NPR, National Pediatric News. Other polluted pipelines from the crapper, like HuffPost, all the junk on line, etc. etc.

In October 1864 the Colony of British Columbia martyred five “Chilcotin Chiefs.” One hour before sunrise on October 26, with a crowd of 250 gathered to pay witness, the Crown hung these defenders of the Indigenous laws on a scaffold provocatively placed in a native graveyard. This event remains one of the most dramatic moments in the history of Canada’s relationship with the Indigenous Peoples.

This week:
1. Herman Wallace RIP
2. The KGB’s in da house
3. Mexico never forgives
4. Brazil’s Black Bloc
5. Pussy Riot
6. Who are the warriors?
https://ia801006.us.archive.org/15/items/FEAROFABLACKBLOC/FEAR_OF_A_BLACK_BLOC_HD.mp4
To start, click on the above video box.

Somebody once said — it was either S.J. Perelman or me, since I’ve been known to steal from him — that history is best if it’s constantly re-written. Rooting in my archives for inspiration, I came up with this chef d’oeuvre from two years ago. It illustrates how far we’ve regressed.

So, in Washington, the defeat of I-522, the genetically modified organisms, i.e. food, labeling initiative has been aided and abetted  by, well, they call it a “war in the media” with the armies of the corporations launching frontal, rear, aerial, underground, cyber and Madison Avenue assaults. So, the “media” are the balancers and arbiters of justice.

I am 57 years on the long road as an adoptee warrior.
In the past year, my adoption wariness rose to a whole new level with the Baby Veronica and Dusten Brown story. When asked how this tragedy affected me, I’d say, “I am Ronnie Brown 50+ years later. My dad would have raised me too.” I hurt to think about Ronnie. The adoption industry had won again.