The 2nd amendment and defending our families

None of us who reads this newspaper wants to give up our right of self-defense. We do not want to see our children or spouses taken by force or killed in front of us because we failed to defend them and ourselves. Jesus, seeing his own impending death, told his disciples to do what they desperately wanted to do: go get swords. And Jesus added, "… that the scripture might be fulfilled." Jesus embodied what God intended in Old Testament history.

 

And yet, we have carnage from guns almost to Old Testament proportions. We are far and away the leader in criminal homicide in the industrialized world, much of it from handguns. "The second amendment is part of the reason our nation tolerates a level of carnage and terror unparalleled in any other nation at peace. The public more or less assumes that the Second Amendment prohibits the kind of gun control regulations that effectively protect pubic safety in other countries." That's the result of extremists having their propaganda believed (UCDavisLawHistory 2nd amendment).

 

A small minority of them want all guns banned except those designed only for hunting. A larger minority, the opposing extremists pumped up by the National Rifle Association's leadership, wants us all afraid our American government will disarm us and make us defenseless. We in the media have allowed extremists on both sides to dominate the stage of the gun debate.  The result has been a boondoggle of billions for a few investors in the huge gun industry in America, and bloody carnage in our classrooms, streets and homes.

 

I suspect more of us want to return to honoring our American form of government, trusting the democratic values in our whole constitution that honor the protection of individual rights—including individual gun ownership rights guaranteed by legislation in virtually every state. We couldn't believe our Supreme Court in 2008 twisted the 2ndAmendment into this purpose with legislation-from-the-bench.  But with research and writing of the legal briefs sponsored by the NRA and the gun industry, and nowhere the investment from citizens for sanity, we got what they paid for.

 

When the dust settles, the best solution would be to have the old restrictions restored as supported by a huge majority of American gun owners then on what guns we can possess, and where in public places they can be carried. I support a return to the regulations the NRA taught at the safety class my father saw to it I attended over fifty years ago.

 

The point is clear: gun regulations worked in America then. Australia, Finland and Canada prove they can work again. Removal of those regulations led to proliferation of the very weapons we the people back in the '50's couldn't have imagined then being manufactured and marketed by our gun industry across the world, propagandized with the notion that the more guns we humans have the safer we will be. We teenagers also didn't imagine the NRA would trash their support for regulations to keep children safe from guns.

 

Now is high time to learn the history of the 2nd amendment ratification missing in our public school history curriculum. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution gave the federal government the power to raise and supervise a militia. Slave states were concerned states should have this right, at least equally.  They were afraid abolitionists would use this law to disarm or remove state militias. This was not to be. Hundreds of substantial slave rebellions had already occurred. To handle this threat, states like Georgia had issued a universal mandate for all family heads to own at least one gun to be used in local militias to search slave quarters and proactively end a potential slave rebellion. Virginia representatives to their ratification convention bitterly opposed the word "nation" in the first draft of the 2nd Amendment. It was changed to "state" amid vigorous debate over states' rights to manage and support local armed militias.  That's how it was ratified, saving our United States Constitution.

 

Thus we got the second amendment originally to guarantee what? Can it be the right of state governments' militias to break into family slave quarters at night to confiscate self-defense weapons? —Weapons that could be used to defend a spouse or child from being sold away never to return? —Or to be used, of course hopelessly, to struggle for freedom from this tyranny? This astounding history, echoing down from the Gospels of the Bible, needs further examination.

 

Is it possible our Supreme Court and nation could have drifted so far from the original intention of our 2nd Amendment? Could refusing to read this history bring a repetition in our homes of what our great-great-grandfathers' slaves suffered from government-supported raids in their homes then?

Check the following links:

 

Here's the peer-reviewed law school research paper with documents quoted and sources given:

http://www.saf.org/lawreviews/bogus2.htm

 

This is a summary of that research paper: http://truth-out.org/news/item/13890-the-second-amendment-was-ratified-to-preserve-slavery

 

Another perspective on this information:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2013/01/14/169164414/lack-of-up-to-date-research-complicates-gun-debate

 

Here's a quick sketch connecting to the gun controversy heating up again

 

http://civic.moveon.org/nradoesntspeakforme/share.html?rc=testmail&id=62736-9663000-w05CElx

 

also this

http://www.alternet.org/environment/myth-human-progress?akid=9947.144927.iQeNYT&rd=1&src=newsletter780389&t=2

 

An issue connecting to the same hyped emotion behind the gun issue:

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/14012-king-i-have-a-dream-obama-i-have-a-drone

 

My further comments (not in the column):

High school history instructors don't know this history in the constitutional ratification debates of 1780's because, as I was informed, "the texts don't go into this detail." But why are these documents and proceedings transcripts deleted from our US history texts?  The debate over the 2^nd amendment when our constitution was finally ratified by the state of Virginia in 1789 is an astounding and crucial history. It's in the details that our children get interested in history, so we have a chance not to repeat past mistakes.  When we are helpless old people we don't want our children repeating a history no one wants repeated.  The history we don't want repeated (at least that's my bias) is in the documents from the late 1700's in Virginia and the other states where constitutional ratification conventions were held, amid great controversy.

 

It's already been repeated. The US government did it in Waco Texas in the 80's. Well-organized militias did it routinely, as an arm of state governments, to force entry into homes and disarm people of color in the United States well into the 20^th century, a practice originally designed to abort slave rebellions that remains with us in our fears and dreams.

 

Significantly, the landmark legal action of the Black Panther Party in California has become the foundation of the individual's rights to join in a group collectively bearing arms in public. They did so in a remarkable standoff in a courthouse in California years ago. First of all, the public display of loaded weaponry discouraged officials from apprehended disarming and arresting the Black Panthers. Secondly, the ensuing court challenge to the Black Panthers was so conspicuously against the recent constitutional 2^nd amendment interpretation that the state judiciary had to back down.  Sources of this are cited in the UCDavis lawreview paper above.

 

We just don't get it any more. Partly it's because the history of the 2^nd amendment's role in the constitutional ratification assemblies 1779 – 89 has been expunged or relegated to insignificance in modern high school history texts. That's worth examining again.

 

Slaves did not have a right to marriage or family bonding, unless granted for a time by masters, usually for breeding purposes. The prospect of giving slaves freedom, access to weapons and the right to organize to defend their homes and families, threatened the very foundation of Southern gentility.  That's what was read into the original wording of the 2^nd amendment, and blocked the whole constitutional ratification process, until the word "state" was entered in place of "nation." Controversy seethed as ratification assemblies repeatedly failed to reconcile the constitutional language granting "equal rights" with the 2^nd amendment wording granting the federal government oversight of all organized militias. With the change from "nation" to "state" in the 2^nd amendment draft, the slave state of Virginia came on board with the ratification assembly and voted for ratification of the Constitution of the United States. Thus the right of government (state government) to forceably enter sleeping quarters of certain human beings with children and confiscate weapons including guns was upheld by the 2^nd amendment to the constitution as written.  Any historians out there, gun owners like me, with comments?

--
David Graber
RR 1 Box 1211D
631 Woodley Ln
Hardin, MT  59034

406 665-3373
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org
Bonnie's email graberbj@gmail.com

Stumbling in the fog

In the foggy drizzle just past the Blue Angel speakeasy in black North Gulfport, Mississippi, we saw the stumbling figure in the glow of our van headlights. We decided to stop. The young white soldier from Keesler Air Base was spitting blood as he explained through his inebriation fog someone had taken his gun, beaten him, and dumped him out. He didn't know where he was. He said "take me back," but couldn't tell us where. We drove back to the Blue Angel, but he wouldn't get out of the van. In his haze, he thought we knew where he wanted to go and accused us of playing mind games with him. His belligerence rose as some of us laughed at his unintelligible predicament. We ended up stopping to let him out right in the middle of black North Gulfport, as his agitation was rising into violence.

 

That happened one steamy night as I was returning with a group of volunteer reading teachers who had been celebrating their teenage students' accomplishments at their headquarters, the "North Gulfport Good Deeds Association." At that time in the mid 60's, Mississippi was not funding public education for blacks. This is one of the overwhelming needs we volunteers were addressing under the leadership of my father-in-law, The Rev. Orlo Kaufman.

 

I saw no connection at the time between this event and my daytime work as a Bible School teacher in the piney woods just up the highway from North Gulfport.  I had ten teenage black girls who were present every morning on time at a rough-sawn table under a large live oak beside the red dirt road. They were children of pine tappers, blacks who cut V's in the bark of long leaf pines of the national forest for the sap to run, which they sold for a pittance to the mill that processed the sap into the turpentine and wholesaled it to paint retailers across the country.

 

A grandma warned me when I started teaching: "Don't let those girls talk. Make them read the Bible." I couldn't stop their talk. It was about North Gulfport, the Blue Angel and other speakeasies, beatings, escapes, and The Man.  I tried to follow Grandma's direction. The girls were obedient, sort of. But I still didn't get it. My father-in-law did, and he explained: "Those girls' families cannot survive on pine tapper pay. Some of them are sent to the speakeasies of North Gulfport to service soldiers and tourists who come from the north to gamble and drink off the coast and visit the speakeasies across the colored line in North Gulfport. These girls haven't gone yet."

 

I protested, "Isn't that illegal?  Mississippi is a dry state, and prostitution is a crime."  He replied darkly, "That's why the sheriff of Harrison County, Mississippi, has the highest income of any publicly elected official."

 

"Including our president?" I demanded. "Absolutely; way more," he said.

 

At his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Sweden, Barak Obama dismissed the power of Dr. King's dream of peace, only accepting his message of racial tolerance.  Since his Inaugural speech in January 2009, Obama has pursued policies that epitomize King's grim warning in 1967: "When scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men." He was concerned we would trust drones more than his dream of trusting the moral foundation of our nation.

 

Our nation is lost in a fog of drone inebriation. We are misguided men stumbling along trying to subdue perceived hatred of us among the world's nations without our moral or scientific moorings. No one has confronted us to disarm us; in fact, we are deathly afraid of being disarmed. While overseas I learned we are now confronted by a worldwide consensus that we are the most dangerous nation on earth, most likely to start or facilitate violent conflict. This happened since we started bombing Iraq.

 

With virtually unanimous support, even from the Tea Party, Obama has acted upon the weakness that is strong only in its power to destroy. He continues our nation's enormous gamble. There are few political risks for Obama's use of drones in our defense against terrorism. But our own amazingly strong moral and scientific heritage says we are stumbling, armed and dangerous, in a fog of confusion, spending trillions facilitating technologies of death and destruction around the world since Hiroshima.

 

Dr. King had the answer, but Obama cannot help us listen to it. We must listen on our own. He knew where we as a nation were headed before he died. He gave his life to urge us on a track to true national strength, founded upon the best democratic and Christian ideals to come out of our 1776 revolution.

 

We as a nation have a right to be proud of our heritage. But we will only find the sorrows of the empires that have expired before us if we continue choosing drones over the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. That seems to be President Obama and the nation's consensus stumbling in incoherent inebriation in the fog of perpetual war.

 

David Sirota at Salon.com: http://www.salon.com/2013/01/25/actually_obama_does_advocate_perpetual_war/

 

Norman Solomon's blog:

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/14012-king-i-have-a-dream-obama-i-have-a-drone

"Obama has not ignored King's anti-war legacy. On the contrary, the president has gone out of his way to distort and belittle it.

 

"In his eleventh month as president -- while escalating the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, a process that tripled the American troop levels there -- Obama traveled to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. In his speech, he cast aspersions on the peace advocacy of another Nobel Peace laureate: Martin Luther King Jr.

 

"The president struck a respectful tone as he whetted the rhetorical knife before twisting. "I know there's nothing weak -- nothing passive -- nothing naive -- in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King," he said, just before swiftly implying that those two advocates of nonviolent direct action were, in fact, passive and naive. "I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people," Obama added.

 

"The real foundation of the "Arab Spring" was countless workshops and teach ins across Tunisia and Egypt based prominently on research from the Albert Einstein Center

 

"Moments later, he was straining to justify American warfare: past, present, future. "To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason," Obama said. "I raise this point, I begin with this point because in many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today, no matter what the cause. And at times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America, the world's sole military superpower."

 

"Then came the jingo pitch: "Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms."

 

"Crowing about the moral virtues of making war while accepting a peace prize might seem a bit odd, but Obama's rhetoric was in sync with a key dictum from Orwell: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."

 

"Laboring to denigrate King's anti-war past while boasting about Uncle Sam's past (albeit acknowledging "mistakes," a classic retrospective euphemism for carnage from the vantage point of perpetrators), Obama marshaled his oratory to foreshadow and justify the killing yet to come under his authority."

 

The Arab Spring did not happen with a sudden spark to ignite the demand for democracy. It was founded with decades of teaching and disciplined drill at university campuses and training camps in nonviolent combat.  Gene Sharp, professor emeritus at Dartmouth, contributed American scientific research and wrote the manual on how to destroy a dictatorship and to prevent the rise of a new one, with weapons more powerful than those that tear up skin, flesh, grey matter and bone.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Dictatorship_to_Democracy.

 

In his 80's, he still is active with the organization he helped start, The Albert Einstein Institute

http://www.aeinstein.org/.

 

This side has many links to research on the power of nonviolent warfare.

 

Harvard University Law School has a large department named Program on Negotiation, with volumes of reliable research into how peace is built in human cultures averting the fog and bloody tragedy of violent conflict.  Many diplomats worldwide have graduated from this program. It is easily accessible online. Their high school/college curriculum for teaching the science of peace building is the same source I used to teach English at XiHua University in China: http://thirdside.org/

 

Much of Dr. King's work reflected his belief that Jesus was far more concerned about proper economics than he was about proper prayers. He felt that the solution to the violence in our nation at that time must include addressing the problems of ungodly economics.

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/14005-a-mighty-stream-martin-luther-king-jrs-faith-guided-him-to-a-commitment-to-economic-justice

 

A short explanation of Dr. King's nonviolent strategy, its power, and how we as a nation reject his message and his understanding of what makes us a great nation: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/14034-dulling-down-dr-kings-message

 

Nearly all of Dr. King's recorded speeches are available online, on youtube and other sources. Just use a search engine with words like "Dr. King nonviolence Vietnam economic justice."

--
David Graber

Hardin, MT  59034

graberdb@gmail.com

guns vs doctors

 

 

-- Doing the math

THE FOLLOWING CONTENT BANDIED ABOUT IN THE MEDICAL PROFESSION IS NOT ENDORSED BY THIS WRITER, AND IS OFFERED ONLY FOR READERS' CONSIDERATION

Doctors

(A) The number of physicians in the U.S. is 700,000.

(B) Accidental deaths caused by Physicians per year are 120,000.

(C) Accidental deaths per physician is 0.171

Statistics courtesy of U.S. Dept of Health and Human Services.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 

  Now think about this: Guns

(A) The number of gun owners in the U.S. is 80,000,000. (Yes, that's 80 million)

(B) The number of accidental gun deaths per year, all age groups, is 1,500.

(C) The number of accidental deaths per gun owner is .0000188

Statistics courtesy of FBI

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 

So, statistically, doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerous than gun owners.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 

Remember, 'Guns don't kill people, doctors do.'

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 

FACT: NOT EVERYONE HAS A GUN, BUT Almost everyone has at least one doctor.

This means you are over 9,000 times more likely to be killed by a doctor than by a gun owner!!!

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 

Please alert your friends to this alarming threat.

We must ban doctors before this gets completely out of hand!!!!!

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 

Out of concern for the public at large, We withheld the statistics on lawyers for fear the shock would cause people to panic and seek medical attention.

 

THE WRITER OF THIS BLOG DISCLAIMS ANY RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE CONTENT OF THIS OR ANY OTHER LINKS OR IMPORTED MATERIALS

--
David Graber

Hardin, MT  59034

graberdb@gmail.com

2nd language immersion and the bilingual bonus

 

The recent meeting critically examining the $877,000 three-year funding of the Apsaalooke Preschool Language Immersion Program revealed misconceptions (see Big Horn County News January 2).

 

Late spring of 2002 I sat with a Buddhist monk in his tiny bedroom in a Tibetan village in the Eastern Himalayas.  He was proud to write in Tibetan script the name of his family house where we were guests for the night (I still have the page). He explained that houses in this small village had a spiritual life, and that their names were more important than the names of the individuals who lived there.

 

He also explained that his writing had only recently become legal. We had just walked to his bedroom from his tiny temple. It had been the only one in the village for years, since the Communists had destroyed the old temple. Here he had persuaded local Communist authorities for permission to teach children to pray. Inside the round domed hut hardly eight feet across was a brass/gold prayer wheel with a trench worn into the dirt floor where little feet had packed down the dirt while little hands rotated individual small prayer wheels. I imagined, as I spun one of the little wheels, the whole apparatus turning, wheels in a wheel. Undetected by the authorities' periodic inspection were the papers tucked between stones in the walls where children, between prayers, had practiced writing in Tibetan and had hidden their treasured work.

 

Now, he said, the children learn in two languages in school, Tibetan and Hanyu (Chinese). They can pray now at the larger, newer temple. But children still were coming to his tiny temple, and he relished his opportunity to continue teaching them their heritage ways, singing the chants while rotating the prayer wheels, continuing to tread their bare feet in the depressed circle in the dirt.

 

Tibetan language has become generally more acceptable to party bosses in Western China, but they are still prone to crack down, reflecting the worldwide tendency of hegemonic cultures and nations to denigrate minority languages and culture. We in Big Horn County are, with the new immersion program at Crow, forging an exception.

 

But we need a better understanding of the research on 2^nd language acquisition and its benefit for academic success. We need to know that ethnic minorities do access a unique benefit for academic success in the dominant language when their heritage language gains the respect of the dominant culture. It works by promoting 2^nd language immersion instruction for five-year-olds in their minority culture. A most crucial finding is that recovery of a heritage language is a boon, not a distraction, from learning the dominant language.  And such instruction improves chances of successful entry into the larger culture.

 

When we visited Tibetan regions of Western China, ethnic minority language teaching was just being discovered as useful for learning Chinese. Focusing on Tibetan in those tiny dirt-floor huts really did help those children learn how to learn Chinese, contrary to most Chinese Communist Party bosses of the Tibetan region. Needless to say, the battle is not yet won, especially in Tibet proper, where a rebellion against Chinese domination is ongoing.

 

It's not won here in Big Horn County either, where the report in the paper reflected the prevailing error that learning Apsaalooke in head start will somehow interfere with Crow Indian children learning English, and ultimately retard their academic progress. This is also still a battle in Arizona and California, two states where a sizeable and powerful segment tries to control the research information and the debate.

 

Fortunately tribal education officials listen to people like Janine Pease, whose research was crucial to win this grant. Her experience and scholarly background helps promote the primary focus of immersion: so that Apsáalooke five-year-olds are grounded linguistically in their heritage language enough to grow and flourish in English skills beyond their peers by age 12. This is the age where the well-known "bilingual bonus" usually kicks in for children learning in two languages at age 5. She knows that successful bilingual instruction is having high quality models of both languages available to children. Adults speaking with children in immersion programs need fluency in both languages used for instruction. They need instructional materials in both languages to make instruction in all subjects a source of language growth. Teachers well trained in skills of 2^nd language instruction are essential for five-year-olds to reach their bilingual bonus potential when they are twelve.  Even more important is leadership healing from a deprecatory attitude toward Apsáalooke language in our schools, as reflected in the report on this meeting. So yes, we have some real challenges in Big Horn County in achieving the bilingual bonus all our children deserve.

 

Extending the concept further leads me to wish my own grandchildren, now in elementary school, would have had the benefit of head start instruction offered with immersion in Tsestsestáhes (Cheyenne) or Apsáalooke (Crow). Those are the languages that cry out from the soil of this county. This is where we live, and those languages can become the beneficial 2^nd language for children of any ethnic background born and raised here. I'm assuming some parents would join me taking up the offer, but hope no one would promote rigidly mandating a 2^nd language immersion instruction for all children, as is now done in China with English, taught by caring teachers with miniscule English language knowledge.  

 

Further information and hundreds of links to online sources can easily be found by searching online or in a library. Use these search words: L2 language acquisition research bilingual bonus.

 

--
David Graber

Hardin, MT  59034

graberdb@gmail.com

Useful Panic

Panic is a natural human reaction to danger, whether it is real, imagined, or imposed by the fears of others.   Panic can cause foolish fast choices that are downright dangerous. Panic can also be useful to motivate observation, avert real dangers, and save lives.   We've all experienced plenty of both types in our lives.

An example of useful panic happened to me during a recent hike with my grandkids.  Even though it occurred quickly, the details are etched clearly in my mind.   We could see the sun sinking into the distant Beartooth mountains as the five of us walked along a pine ridge near Hardin. We were soaking in those last warm rays of a beautiful summer afternoon as we walked along a high slippery cliff of sand rocks sloping toward the west. Unbeknownst to us, we weren't the only ones enjoying those warm rays.  There was a young rattler on a flat expanse of rock tilted toward the setting sun directly in our path.    

I was alerted to the "e-eek!" of my daughter mixed with the hiss of panic-activating rattles. It was time for us to respond to the panic with reason, not foolish jumping off the cliff. We retreated a few steps and adjusted to a safer route as the rattler slid off in the opposite direction (see greenwoodback40.blogspot.com). It was done. No one was hurt, and we continued immersed in the setting sunlight along that sand rock cliff east of Hardin.

Through this past election year our media has been pervaded with a different kind of panic—panic designed to cloud our reason and distract us from meaningful action. We watched our usually credible media flooded with wild charges of conspiracy theories and hoaxes, usually attributed to our president, Big Government, environmentalists, the CIA, etc. We are still hearing panic-peddlers proclaiming they're taking away guns, coal plants, jobs in Big Horn County, ranch land, freedoms, our minds via CIA-engineered controls, etc.

 

It's amazing that people are ready and willing to panic over these non-existent threats, while denying the reality of very real changes happening to our planet.  Evidence of serious climate crises continues to mount, with faster than expected changes being reported every day.   Arctic ice is melting at a higher rate than initial projections, while ocean levels continue to rise, and increasing numbers of destructive storms pummel our country's shores.  In 2012, extreme weather and other climate-related events cost the U.S. a billion dollars. Our biggest insurance companies, our defense department, and even our major corporations are already retooling for lower fossil carbon consumption.

Climate change is not a hoax. It's as real as that rattler coiled ready on that rock beneath my granddaughter's footfall. The Bible also calls us to pay attention to our environment. We humans have been placed on this planet and empowered by our Creator to tend it.

 

Jesus commands us to pay attention to our surroundings in the latter days, and have a firm grip on reality as we trust in God and his way. Like false prophets then, today we let our media lull us away from responsible observation of our God-created planet. They give us blinders so we see only false assurances that every little thing is all right, and life will go on fine without changing our path.

 

It's past time for us to experience some useful panic over this issue, while we can still take some action to mitigate the consequences.   There are certainly steps we can take short of leaping off the cliff or denying that change is occurring.   Let's listen to the 97% of scientists who are saying that humans play a role in these observable changes.   While it's hard to hear about the implications, maybe it's time to stop hoping the most devastating consequences will occur after our time on this earth is finished.   Maybe folks of my generation have the luxury of retreating to fatalism, but this won't help my grandchildren or their children.

 

As the new year approaches, let's consider the long term future of our home and the role we should play in preserving it.  For 2013, let's resolve to engage in some useful panic and let the other kind go.

 

A good place to start researching climate crisis is Kivalina, Alaska, a town about the size of Hardin on the NW coast along the Bering Sea:

http://truth-out.org/news/item/13505-engulfed-by-arctic-waters-residents-on-the-frontline-of-climate-change

These American citizens, in spite of struggling to keep their citizenship, are suing the biggest oil companies to force them to pay for their resettlement because their forced removal from their village is because their energy use industry caused the loss of protective sea ice and the rising of waters of the Arctic ocean. Also check out the book by Christine Shearer, Kivalina.

 

Here is the story of Richard Muller, a Koch-funded scientist who has recanted from the hoax of the climate crisis ignorers and now admits global warming is real and human-caused: http://www.democracynow.org/2012/8/2/climate_skeptic_koch_funded_scientist_richard

After years of denying global warming, physicist Richard Muller now says "global warming is real and humans are almost entirely the cause." The admission by Muller, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and founder of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, has gained additional attention because some of his research has been funded by Charles Koch of the Koch brothers, the right-wing billionaire known for funding climate skeptic groups like the Heartland Institute. "We could make the scientific case more solidly than had been made in the past," Muller claims. "I think this does say we do need to take action, we do need to do something about it."

 

Here are two more links:

http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/video/chasing-ice-time-lapse-cameras-capture-rapidly-melting-17744758
http://guardianlv.com/2012/12/global-warming-10-myths-and-facts-everyone-should-know/

 

Here's some commentary on what we as citizens are up against to address the climate crisis, and what to do about it. http://sojo.net/magazine/2013/01/come-hell-and-high-water

It's the fossil fuel industry itself—not the members of Congress they buy in droves each election season, but the real powers that need to hear our cry of panic, even from Big Horn County, to change their course instead of focusing on the rosy sunset of fossil fuel profits. "Ignoring the damage they've already caused, these people spend hundreds of millions of dollars each day looking for new fossil fuels. And they spend hundreds of millions each year making sure no government stops them. They're like the tobacco industry at this point, except that instead of going after your lungs they're going after the lungs of the planet."

 

http://sojo.net/magazine/2012/11/divest-fossil-fuels-now
"…it's the underlying business model of the fossil-fuel industry that's the problem. They're making more money than any corporations in the planet's history, and they're doing it by altering the chemistry of the atmosphere. They're outlaws—not against the laws of the state (given their financial might they get to write those), but against the laws of physics. You can have a healthy fossil fuel industry or a healthy planet, but you can't have both."

And this from a conservative source only recently coming around to the reality of climate crisis: .

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-01/its-global-warming-stupid

 

 

 --------

David Graber

graberdb@gmail.com

Hardin, MT

 

Light in the Darkness of Newtown

The massacre of innocents in Connecticut brings a pall of darkness over the nation. Yet, in the midst of the darkness, there is new hope we will regain the civic good will that used to restrain carnage such as this.  We in Big Horn County share the nation's concern about the pathology of individuals attracted to such violence by life experiences and media.  Unfortunately, it's a pathology involving more than a few bad individuals. There is a more pervasive mindset that contributes to opportunities for the disturbed among us to act out their violent fantasies.   

 

It surprised me to learn recently that gun violence in the United States now ranks with that of Somalia, a country known for its ongoing brutal civil wars.  Since Columbine there have now been thirty mass murder events, with this one among the very worst.  I think most of us know that total gun control is not the best solution to this horrific situation.  We know that tighter gun control laws and enforcement of those laws will not necessarily end killing sprees.  Sadly, reducing access to weapons won't guarantee a reduction in severely deranged individuals among us.  

 

A useful direction would be to address the national mindset that required twenty beautiful children, and seven adults, to pay a horrific price for one man's freedom to shoot the guns of his choice. 

 

We need the old gun laws back in place when I was a teenager. Those regulations were designed to protect human lives while supporting responsible use of guns.  Hunting and self-defense were primary reasons to own guns then (see my previous column, AUGUST , 2012 "How we got gun un-control"). Weapons designed smaller and smaller with larger and larger capacity for better concealment and more convenient slaughter of massive numbers of people, such as the Bushmaster 223 and newly marketed high-capacity handguns used in this and recent mass murders, were unknown then.  What military weapons did exist were far larger. Yet working models were rightly kept out of the hands of the consenting general public. That was the right mindset.  

 

As a nation, we have somehow lost our common sense when it comes to weaponry. We have stiff government regulations covering access to driving cars, purchase and use of drugs, and handling of dynamite and fireworks. Such regulations keep our children safe from deranged people or dangerous deadly devices of all kinds—except for guns.

 

Years ago, public will resolved to reduce deaths from car accidents.  We decided as a collective society that we were losing too many human lives to motor vehicle tragedies.   We took a multifaceted approach to reducing the loss of human life, including improved road design (shoulders, guard rails, banked curves), car design (safety glass, gas tank placement), and legal safeguards (speed limits, DUI laws).   The result of these efforts was a drastically reduced death rate from that of the 60's and 70's.

 

Over the same time period that auto transportation became safer, advances in gun technology have combined with legal relaxation of gun regulations to increase the ease and efficiency of death-delivery. Ironically, our advanced American technology, with ongoing handgun design improvements, has now made mass murder alarmingly easy and efficient. While we regularly recall toxic bottles from China or ineffective child care seats, our nation has chosen to deregulate guns. This is in no small way related to a massive media onslaught from the NRA and the gun industry. Marketing has been astonishingly effective in encouraging people to overcome common sense when it comes to the safety of our most precious little citizens.

 

Cholera used to kill lots of people.  So did automobile accidents and urban fires. We've been able to address and reduce the senseless loss of life associated with these hazards.  What seems to be missing in this situation is a rational discussion of strategies to solve the problem.  Our nation is stuck in a national hysteria that has hamstrung our access to a broad-based solution.  Rand Paul, a prominent politician, just sent me an email wanting me to fear that Obama, the United Nations, and our federal law enforcement people are now conspiring together to confiscate my guns. Paul's many followers are claiming last week's tragedy has nothing to do with guns. Cars don't kill people? People do? It's like saying cholera and tuberculosis had nothing to do with germs.

 

So no, just restoring rational gun safety regulations to consistency with our own history and with that of other developed nations of our planet will not alone solve our half-century plague of gun homicide. But it would be a good start toward a rational, investigative science-based discussion leading to real changes. The gun industry and the NRA could restore themselves to their role in our nation as advocates for safety and government regulation of our arsenal of weaponry, and my guns will be accessible for any inspection. But this won't happen under their current leadership. This is not the time for President Obama or other federal government officials, religious leaders or gun industry representatives to shrink from rational dialogue.  Let's work together toward restoring the safety of our children and our own capacity to access basic, American common sense in the face of tragedy.  

 

This ends the column as published in the Big Horn County News. Further information:

 

2010 Advent column, "Strengthening America Against Evil":

http://greenwoodback40.blogspot.com/search?q=advent

 

BACK IN 1990, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) issued this warning: "The religious community must ... take seriously the risk of idolatry that could result from an unwarranted fascination with guns, which overlooks or ignores the social consequences of their misuse." Two decades later, about 660,000 more Americans have been killed by guns, with a million more injured.  Continued on this link: http://sojo.net/magazine/2013/01/9mm-golden-calves

 

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/11/jared-loughner-mass-shootings-mental-illness

 

http://audio.commonwealthclub.org/audio/podcast/cc_20121101_gunviolencepanel.mp3

 

A rational approach:

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13358-four-ways-to-stop-gun-violence

 

 

 

 

--
David Graber
RR 1 Box 1211D
631 Woodley Ln
Hardin, MT  59034

406 665-3373
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org
Bonnie's email graberbj@gmail.com

Hoaxes and Suffering Hanyackers

 

It seems like greedy and thoughtless people have been with us since the beginning of time. Some of these people have become better than others at using their "gods" to justify catastrophic actions. After all, anyone who is able to acquire great wealth and power to wreak large-scale havoc on the world must be a divine favorite.

This system of belief has also been used to shield against seeing the consequences of irresponsible actions. Many wealthy, powerful "rulers in high places" justified greedy choices by blaming God (or their gods) for resulting damage to other people and the environment. Unfortunately, this pattern doesn't just reflect ancient history. 

 

My mother told me her story of a similar hoax that caused pain, sickness and death in the Southern Plains in the late 20's. She was a little girl when she first heard the stories from relatives farther west. Her father was one of some three million young men seeking their fortunes in the southern plains. These men ended up spending most of their daylight hours hanging onto two plow handles behind two horses every spring until the prairie sod froze in the fall, turning over virgin prairie sod row after row. They came to be labeled in the bars of Kansas towns as "hanyackers."

 

This system of exploitation was promoted and not just by the many pioneer farmers, but by Wall Street wheat investors. At that time, mile upon mile of golden wheat grew in the newly turned topsoil of the heartland prairies. People living in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and South Dakota in the late 20's thought the bounty would never end. It was, to millions of farmers and a few wealthy investors, a permanent wealth-generating resource. My mother was one of those who believed that all was well, as she was told that her Kansas wheat farm was too far east for the dust storms to reach.

 

Eventually the rains stopped and my grandparent's crop shriveled, along with that of their neighbors. One July afternoon the fields lay with little residue under a hot clear Kansas sky. The wind stilled, the birds stopped singing, and the chickens went to the barn. A dark rolling bank of clouds rose from the northwest horizon to darken the sky.  My grandparents, informed by relatives farther west, knew what to do. My mother was ordered indoors.  The windows were shut and wet bed sheets were draped over cracks. She remembers her father going out to check on livestock, and to similarly drape wet burlap around barn windows, as darkness fell and the wind rose to a furious level. She remembers sticking her finger into cracks in the west wall of the house to stop dust from pouring in, driven by the wind. Her father came in and they waited out the storm into the night. It only happened once to them. They were more fortunate than most.

 

Almost a century later, we are still struggling with the effects of the large-scale topsoil depletion of the 1920s.   Soil scientists are belatedly recognizing the catastrophic death of billions of beings in every cubic inch of soil when prairie sod is busted.  Without these microscopic creatures, production of soil nutrients for plant health ceases, and must be externally applied for plant growth. We live with that legacy and effects of misunderstood human-created additives to soil to this day.

 

It took more than a decade to undo this hoax of the never-ending wheat bounty from just plowing and planting. Government agents were paid and deployed to convince farmers to start strip cropping their wheat between rows of fallow and planting hedgerows around fields, efforts to hold the fragile soil from blowing into the wind. Some churches began supporting the evidence for more responsible farming practices and a great soul-searching allowed farmers to connect stewardship of the Lord's provision with care for the environment, especially that of the soil. That's the tradition into which my parents were born, like many of our Big Horn County ancestors. But many remained in the darkness, unwilling to look at the real options.

 

During this Christmas season, I'm reminded of how Jesus dedicated his life to bringing the light of truth to bear on many hoaxes, including that of greed trumping virtue.  Mary's eloquent song (St.Luke 1, 46f), expresses her hope that her unborn child will bring a new understanding to the world. I also have hope that as we seek to emulate the life of Christ we will not overlook Mary's "Magnificat." We can overcome our human tendencies to value immediate rewards for a few over prosperity for all.  History has shown that kingdoms that rise this way still fall. Edifices of power on their thrones are still cast down.  The "people who walked in darkness" of hopelessness and despair, those losers and low life, still come around to see a great light. Truth again becomes a legitimate pursuit, and human life, especially that of the "least of these," flourishes as the "rich go away empty," and the "hungry are filled." In early Christianity, this was the heart of the advent message.

 

The following is continued from my incomplete column in the Big Horn County News December 4, 2012:

 

It's true right now. See the new documentary Chasing Ice, soon to appear in Billings. For now, check this web link to a 59-year-old committed Bill O'Reilly fan just after watching it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xzw1dZNWiL8

 

The "hoax of global warming" is in reality the big money-perpetrated hoax that we can continue greedy consumption of fossil energy, and that the consequences to climate are legitimately placed in God's hands. We are living on the cusp of the most catastrophic climate change in recorded history. Unlike previous changes, this one is connected to our behavior. The science is conclusive. Governments, the energy industry, insurance agencies and our pentagon are already deep into strategic planning on climate change. The only questions are what kind of planning, for how soon, with what degree of human catastrophe. There's also the question, as in the dustbowl days when farmers kept breaking prairie sod years after the dust storms started, of how long we will persist in ignoring basic changes needed, and how long we will hide behind our theology about God's providence when our greed violates his basic ethics about compassion for all creation.

 

It really is in our corporate hands as human inhabitants of the planet.  I hope we as a nation do not prepare to enter the wars almost sure to break out with roots in climate catastrophe. I hope we will start now to alleviate the severity and build infrastructure in keeping with our historical commitment as a nation to human rights.

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT  59034
graberdb@gmail.com