Nynia Chance

via Shadowproof,

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Hosts Rania Khalek and Kevin Gosztola welcomed Max Blumenthal, journalist, senior editor of AlterNet’s Grayzone Project, and author of The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza.

Blumenthal has appeared on the show before, but this time he was our guest because multiple listeners requested an episode featuring him. His interview is more than one hour.

During the show, Blumenthal addresses the root causes of the Syrian conflict as well as the failure of the left, particularly in the United States, to oppose U.S. military intervention and confront what is destroying a country.

“You might not be a leftist if you defend Wahhabism while constantly attacking the left,” Blumenthal states. “You might not be a leftist if you are an apologist for any of these rebel groups or if you are edging toward calling for the replacement of a post-colonial state with a Sunni Islamist theocracy that requires NATO or U.S. military intervention. There’s just nothing leftist about that, and none of this is possible without U.S. intervention.”

He confronts the position of much of the International Socialist Organization and journalist Anand Gopal’s recent comments on “Democracy Now!” arguing Syrian President Bashar al Assad created ISIS.

“I’ve spent a good portion of the last few months actually interviewing a number of ISIS fighters and defectors from ISIS. And one of the things I’ve made a point to do is actually ask them, ‘Why did you join this group?’ You know?” Gopal said. “And to a person, they all say they witnessed some horrific atrocity or massacre conducted by the regime. I’ve never heard anybody give another reason other than that. And so, what has happened is that the sheer brutality of the regime has led people to—some people to join ISIS, especially in the context where they see there’s not a lot of support for other groups.”

Blumenthal responds, “What [Gopal] said I don’t even think the State Department accepts anymore, which is that Assad created ISIS. Assad is responsible for ISIS’s creation. This is like essentially a neocon talking point that you’d see at the Daily Beast, and it sort of glosses over the whole history of ISIS.”

He draws attention to some of the poor coverage of the Syrian conflict by “Democracy Now!”

“The day that Donald Trump authorized 59 cruise missiles at the Shayrat airbase outside Damascus ‘Democracy Now!’s guest was Lina Sergie, who is an open aggressive advocate for Western military intervention in Syria and runs this group, the Karam Foundation, which has an advocacy arm to push for regime change.”

Blumenthal makes a critical point about the failure of the establishment left, progressives, and progressive media in general that relates to the massive refugee crisis.

“Look at how the Brexit campaign was run by UKIP, the far-right party of Nigel Farage,” Blumenthal states. “It was run through billboard campaigns across northern England and these economically devastated areas showing masses of Syrian refugees marching across central Europe, and it was warning that they’re coming your way because Europe and the globalists are going to bring them there. And in the end, 80 percent of people who voted for ‘leave’ voted on the issue of immigration. UKIP drove that campaign through the refugee crisis, and UKIP benefited.”

Blumenthal asks listeners to consider who is linking the refugee crisis to the systematic destruction of Syria by the West. It is Farage and far right and then Jeremy Corbyn, who is part of the left in the UK. But the alt-center of Labour and the Tories are in an all-out assault on Corbyn, which gives Farage the ability to capitalize off his statements on foreign policy and win greater influence among British voters.

“There has to be an alternative on the left,” Blumenthal contends. Yet, discussions in supposed left circles “refuse to make this linkage. Instead, what they’re doing in effect is campaigning for more people to be forced to flee their homes into the West and then they’ll welcome them with open arms.”

On what millions of refugees face in Europe, Blumenthal adds, “My experience in Europe is people just don’t have as much tolerance for mulitculturalism. They don’t have as much tolerance for other people. Maybe it’s different in urban areas of France and the UK, but they’re treated with outright open hostility.”

“How are stateless people in Europe going to get organized? What will happen if they’re deported again? There aren’t really any answers that I see coming from these institutional left circles, and the root issue isn’t being addressed, which is a covert proxy war which has systematically destroyed this country.”

To listen to the interview, click the above player or go here.

via Latest from Crooks and Liars,

"Repeal and go fuck yourself" does seem to be the GOP mantra these days, at least for Americans of modest means.

Source: The Hill

Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) posed for a photo with a man wearing a shirt that said "Repeal and go f--- yourself," according to an image posted online Saturday.

The shirt is from the podcast "Pod Save America," hosted by several former White House staffers during President Obama's administration.

Couple friends of the pod hanging out this morning. @jonfavs @jonlovett @TVietor08 pic.twitter.com/aT3nqiyOlu

— J (@Minnysconsin) May 6, 2017

The Twitter user who posted the image Saturday tagged former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau, a co-host for the podcast, who responded to the post.

via Collective Evolution,

Recently an article in SF Gate by Deepak Chopra and Pankaj S. Joshi, PhD – “Can There Be a Science of Consciousness?” — had this amazing quote: “By taking for granted the obvious fact that it takes a mind to do science, we’ve reached the point where science is leaving out the very component that might answer the questions that urgently need answering, not because philosophy demands it but because science does.”

As a longtime admirer of Deepak’s work, I had reached out to him on several occasions because I felt his most recent book, You Are the Universe, co-authored with Menas Kafatos, PhD, resonated with my own ideas about the significance of sequencing (or decoding) DNA.

The mystery of DNA to me is as compelling a clue as the existence of the pyramids, precisely because as someone who discovered computer programming late in life, I recognized in its structure that it functions literally as an “organic programming language.”

This became apparent to me and affected me deeply after seeing a video by geneticist Juan Enriquez on TED in which he says flatly an “apple is an application; when the sun hits it the program executes, and the apple falls from the tree.

In my own book, If DNA is Software, Who Wrote The Code? — The Profound Significance of Life’s Programming Language, I explain that software (or computer code) has identical properties to DNA (and may be a stark example of inadvertent biomimicry). Extracting meaning from different symbols — in this case A, C, T, and G, which represent chemicals or proteins — allowed scientists to resurrect extinct species by “copying and pasting” DNA code.

Comparing it to other well-known types of “software,” it seemed to me that DNA, like Google, Microsoft, and Apple programs, must somehow be a product of “mind” and not simply a random evolutionary occurrence (as modern science would have us believe).

My entreaty — which came after some attempts at trying to persuade Deepak that this insight is a powerful complement to his own work — finally received a positive response; however, Deepak cautioned me, as he had done in the past, to “always remember that DNA is a construct in consciousness.”

Indeed all words — or concepts — are constructs of consciousness or mind; as even sophists must agree, the ONLY thing we know for sure is Mind — that we are here as Mind (not body) right NOW.

For many at the Science and Nonduality Conference, where I first met Deepak, even the body is a “construct” in mind — it is a word to describe something that is known only through information from the senses — like everything else.

In actuality, as Deepak would point out in support of his own contention that consciousness is ALL, there is no “separate” body. We have “overlaid” this construct on reality to reduce reality to components that we can understand and seemingly manipulate.

This is precisely the message of philosophy that Deepak urges science to finally address, and for which he makes the case so powerfully in the quote above.

Mind is the one undeniable aspect of reality that we know from direct experience.  Everything else can be seen as arising therefrom.

As Deepak so eloquently points out, all thoughts, perceptions, and sensations arise in consciousness.

One can experience this profoundly with “virtual reality,” in which one experiences that the input of information about a completely different world — that also uses the sensory inputs of touch (and perhaps even taste and smell) in addition to sight and sound — so that we cannot readily distinguish exactly what is “real.” This has given rise to anthropomorphic projections like “The Universe is a Hologram” (or simulation) in new cosmological theories among techies.

But it really comes back to the FACT of mind, and that everything we know, or think we know, is mind product. And returning to DNA as software — we protect our computer software as intellectual property — mind stuff.  Of course this is also intimately connected to our conviction that we “own” software as separate beings….

It is precisely this difficult recognition of the “facticity” of MIND that I believe can be made apparent to many through a comparison of DNA to our own software, all of which has been created as “intellectual property,” or mind product.

It was my belief, in writing my own book, that this stark recognition of apparent mind-product and the organic programming language at the heart of our own biology might finally reveal the delusion of materialism.

Other relatively recent discoveries have taken us part of the way there. The vast “invisible” portions of the electromagnetic spectrum and now the movement of information wirelessly all point directly to the inadequacy of our materially “constructed’ view of reality.

Among the constructs we have created is the notion of a hierarchy of mind — of greater and lesser intelligence. We see this in other species. Cetaceans, it turns out, have brains larger than ours, and language, so we attribute a measure of intelligence to them equal to or perhaps greater than ours.

The recognition of DNA as software — again like the ancient monoliths around our globe — point to one undeniable reality: There must exist or have once existed mind or minds far more powerful than our own.

In this context it is interesting to note that artificial intelligence is currently being used to finally attempt to use dolphin language (sonar and clicks) to actually communicate with these amazing creatures in a true “meeting of the minds.”

But if we can posit some sort of hierarchy of mind — or intelligence — then again we can see that in our own encoded intelligence — computer programming — it requires massive mental power to create a Windows operating system or a Photoshop program.

So if we ask ourselves what sort of “mind” could evolve itself as DNA — an inconceivable mass of code that as Eckhart Tolle says is the “intelligence which runs our bodies” and is infinitely more intelligent than we are — we must finally acknowledge DNA for what we now know it to be: encoded intelligence or software.

This obvious anomaly is the most inconvenient of all truths for modern science.

It should bring us profoundly back to the reality of mind as the ultimate barrier to our own continuing scientific inquiries, as it has in quantum physics.

It would require us to revise the words of Descartes to “I AM, therefore, I think.” Because clearly the being of mind, and intelligence, predates “our” arrival on the scene.

As Deepak points out, the starkest aspect of reality — Mind — and its fundamental code have been hiding in plain sight; and as Eckhart Tolle refers to it, consciousness/mind is “no thing.”

via Latino Voices,

The latest episode of our favorite queer web series for kids is tackling an often misunderstood identity within the LGBTQ community: asexuality.

“Queer Kid Stuff” is a project created by and starring Lindsey Amer alongside her sidekick Teddy. After a successful first season, the second season of QKS is tackling the nuances of LGBTQ experience in a way that is accessible and educational for children. For more complicated ideas like asexuality, Amer brings in a friend who identifies as such in order to further help explain what this word means and offer some first-hand knowledge.

“Asexual is another under-represented identity within the LGBTQIA community,” Amer told HuffPost. “It was important for us to represent and explain this identity that is widely misunderstood and stigmatized. It also gave us an opportunity to discuss different kinds of love. This is a great topic to look at for kids to better understand sexuality, what it means for adults versus kids, how to classify different relationships, and begin to think of romance and sexuality on a spectrum.”

Check out this week’s episode of “Queer Kid Stuff” above. Missed the previous installments in this LGBTQ web series for kids? Head here.

via Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines,

By Sarah Lazare / AlterNet

After the ruling, nearly 500 mothers and children were released from detention centers in Texas.

Related Entries

December 11, 2016 Noam Chomsky and Harry Belafonte Talk About Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, the KKK and More (Video)

via MintPress News,

Photo of Hellfire missiles being loaded onto a US military Reaper drone in Afghanistan by Staff Sgt. Brian Ferguson/U.S. Air Force.

The U.S. military said Thursday that it intentionally bombed a hospital in Mosul, Iraq as part of its efforts to “eradicate” Islamic State (ISIS) fighters.

The attack on the Al Salam hospital complex took place Wednesday at the request of Iraqi forces, with coalition aircraft using “precision-guided munitions,” Air Force Col. John Dorrian, spokesperson for the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS, told reporters.

He said “it’s very difficult to ascertain with full and total fidelity” that there were no civilian casualties, whether in the building targeted or elsewhere within the hospital complex.

ISIS fighters, Dorrian said, “were using the facility to fire heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades at the Iraqi security forces in the area.” The strike on the “normally protected facility” allowed the Iraqi forces “to fall back to a more defensible position,” he said.

The “protection of civilians,” he said later in the press conference, “has been a centerpiece, a foundational element of the campaign to liberate Mosul.”

The military is not carrying out an investigation but rather an “assessment” of the strike, the spokesperson added.

The battle to reclaim Mosul from ISIS fighters, which began in October, has left civilians, including roughly 600,000 children, trapped and facing a worsening humanitarian situation.

This work by Common Dreams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.

via MintPress News,

Photo of Hellfire missiles being loaded onto a US military Reaper drone in Afghanistan by Staff Sgt. Brian Ferguson/U.S. Air Force.

The U.S. military said Thursday that it intentionally bombed a hospital in Mosul, Iraq as part of its efforts to “eradicate” Islamic State (ISIS) fighters.

The attack on the Al Salam hospital complex took place Wednesday at the request of Iraqi forces, with coalition aircraft using “precision-guided munitions,” Air Force Col. John Dorrian, spokesperson for the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS, told reporters.

He said “it’s very difficult to ascertain with full and total fidelity” that there were no civilian casualties, whether in the building targeted or elsewhere within the hospital complex.

ISIS fighters, Dorrian said, “were using the facility to fire heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades at the Iraqi security forces in the area.” The strike on the “normally protected facility” allowed the Iraqi forces “to fall back to a more defensible position,” he said.

The “protection of civilians,” he said later in the press conference, “has been a centerpiece, a foundational element of the campaign to liberate Mosul.”

The military is not carrying out an investigation but rather an “assessment” of the strike, the spokesperson added.

The battle to reclaim Mosul from ISIS fighters, which began in October, has left civilians, including roughly 600,000 children, trapped and facing a worsening humanitarian situation.

This work by Common Dreams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.

via MintPress News,

A formal White House petition calling for reducing the sentence of Chelsea Manning, the U.S. soldier serving a 37-year prison sentence for leaking classified documents relating to U.S. war crimes in Iraq, surpassed 100,000 signatures which means the U.S. administration has to respond to the demand.

“We did it! Thank you so much for your love and support,” Manning said in a post on her official Twitter account. The petition was created on Nov. 14 and now forces the White House to offer a response within 60 days.

I don't know what to say. I am just grateful that I am not forgotten. You've given me hope. =') #timeserved pic.twitter.com/iKne8iA5EA

— Chelsea Manning (@xychelsea) December 11, 2016

The petition asks President Barack Obama to commute Manning’s sentence to time served after being in prison for more than six years. She has been repeatedly kept in solitary confinement which led her to attempt suicide twice.

“Chelsea has already served more time in prison than any individual in United States history who disclosed information in the public interest. Her disclosures harmed no one,” the petition said.

“President Obama, as you and the medical community have recognized, prisoners who face solitary confinement are more likely to commit suicide.”

Manning, a transgender woman, was the whistleblower who leaked to WikiLeaks secret military and diplomatic documents while working as a U.S. intelligence analyst in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad in 2010.

The online petition is part of recent efforts by Manning and her supporters as well as rights groups to change her sentence following the victory of Donald Trump in the presidential elections last month.

Manning’s lawyers formally petitioned Obama to commute her sentence in November just a few days before it was set up online, the New York Times had reported.

Manning herself wrote a letter to President Obama as part of the petition in which she assumed responsibility for her actions but said her life was in turmoil at the time of the leaks. She was confronting gender dysphoria at the time while deployed to Iraq.

She also went on to describe her treatment in prison and her multiple suicide attempts, saying: “I am not asking for a pardon of my conviction.”

“The sole relief I am asking for is to be released from military prison after serving six years of confinement as a person who did not intend to harm the interests of the United States or harm any service members,” the statement said.

Also just last week the American Civil Liberties Union and some LGBTQ rights groups lobbied Obama to change the sentence to time served.

“The sole relief that Ms. Manning is seeking is to be released from military prison after serving over six years of confinement — longer than any whistleblower in the history of our country,” the ACLU said in the letter which was co-signed by more than a dozen LGBTQ rights groups.

© teleSUR

via Global Research,

The Democratic Party is doing incalculable damage to itself by shapeshifting into the party of baseless conspiracy theories, groundless accusations, and sour grapes. Hillary Clinton was already the most distrusted presidential candidate in party history. Now she’s become the de facto flag-bearer for the nutso-clique of aspiring propagandists at the CIA, the New York Times and Bezo’s Military Digest. How is that going to improve the party’s prospects for the long term?

It won’t, because the vast majority of Americans do not want to align themselves with a party of buck-passing juveniles that have no vision for the future but want to devote all their energy to kooky witch-hunts that further prove they are unfit for high office.

The reason Hillary Clinton lost the election is because she is a polarizing, untrustworthy warmonger. Period. Putin had nothing to do with it.

And the same rule applies to the major media that has attached itself leech-like to this pathetic fairytale. Here’s a clip from the Times headline story connecting FSB-agent Trump with the evil Kremlin:

American intelligence agencies have told the White House they have “high confidence” that the Russian government was behind the theft of emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee. …

The attack on the congressional committee’s system appears to have come from an entity known as “Fancy Bear,” which is connected to the G.R.U., the Russian military intelligence service, according to an official involved in the forensic investigation…

Clinton campaign officials have suggested that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia could be trying to tilt the election to Mr. Trump, who has expressed admiration for the Russian leader. (Computer Systems Used by Clinton Campaign Are Said to Be Hacked, Apparently by Russians, New York Times)

If there was a Pulitzer Prize for fearmongering innuendo or spurious accusations, the Times would win it hands-down. As it happens, readers have to delve much deeper into the article to find this shocking disclaimer:

But the campaign officials acknowledge that they have no evidence. The Trump campaign has dismissed the accusations about Russia as a deliberate distraction…..

No evidence???

They got nothing. NOTHING!

All they have is a few anonymous agents who refuse to identify themselves speculating on alleged hacking incidents that (they surmise) were the work of Vladimir P. Strangelove in his remote Soviet Cyber-war bunker. That’s not even enough material for a decent spy thriller.

But, of course, all this bunkum about “Fancy Bear” and  “Russian military intelligence” and the “high confidence” of (unnamed) US intelligence agents is enough to scare the hell out of many readers and leave them with the impression that the Kremlin is up to its old Cold War tricks again.  The Times editors are wise enough to know that it’s quite easy to tap into 40-years of anti-Soviet brainwashing and convince the gullible sheeple that Washington and Moscow are still mortal enemies. It would have been helpful if the Times had given the story a bit of context, that is, pointed out that the US has relentlessly expanded NATO eastward establishing military bases in all of the former Soviet satellite states, toppled the Moscow-friendly regime in Ukraine, and built nuclear weapons sites in east Europe just a few hundred miles from Moscow.

The Times writers might have also noted that this latest propaganda campaign against Russia could very well be the result of Moscow’s triumph over US-backed militants in Syria that are facing a decisive defeat due in large part to Russian involvement. In other words, the Times and the other US propaganda organs are functioning as they always do, whipping up public sentiment against the “evildoers” so Washington can drag the country into another imperial war of expansion. The whole “hacking” mantra fits perfectly with the Pentagon’s hybrid war strategy which manipulates information in order to shape public perceptions and gain support for another round of genocidal violence in some far-flung location. (Raqqa, perhaps?)

Do you think that bloodthirsty Hillary would be on-board with such a plan?

Of course she would. Hillary never met a war she didn’t like.

But let’s cut to the chase: Putin didn’t lose the election for Hillary. Obama did. People wanted change, and they didn’t get it, so they moved on to Door Number 2: Donald Trump. Take a look at these three short clips from a recent survey from PEW Research and you’ll get a feel for what really happened in the election:

The Republican Party made deep inroads into America’s middle-class communities in 2016. Although many middle-class areas voted for Barack Obama in 2008, they overwhelmingly favored Donald Trump in 2016, a shift that was a key to his victory…..In 2016, Trump successfully defended all 27 middle-class areas won by Republicans in 2008. In a dramatic shift, however, Hillary Clinton lost in 18 of the 30 middle-class areas won by Democrats in 2008…

Overall, Democrats experienced widespread erosion in support from 2008 to 2016. Their share of the vote fell in 196 of the 221 metropolitan areas examined. The loss in support was sufficiently large to move 37 areas from the Democratic column to the Republican column…

Not coincidentally, Democrats also were more likely to have lost ground in manufacturing-dependent areas. Of the 56 communities with a relatively large share of manufacturing jobs, Trump picked up victories in 15 metro areas that had supported Obama in 2008 and held onto another 29, leaving only 12 communities in the Democrats’ column.  (GOP gained ground in middle-class communities in 2016, Pew Research)

Get it? The Dems lost ground everywhere because Obama didn’t deliver the goods. That’s reason number one. Second, Hillary didn’t address the issues that ordinary working people really care about. And what they care about is the economy. Money, security, jobs. Is that hard to understand?

People are afraid because things are getting worse not better. Their standards of living are slipping, they’re worried about their retirement, their jobs, their health care, and the pile of debt their kids have accumulated to go to college. They’ve lost confidence in the media, the congress, the courts and the president who promised change but never lifted a finger for working people his entire time in office.

That’s why Hillary lost, just look at the research.

The Democrats have no vision for the future, and without vision, the party will disintegrate which is precisely what’s happening. The Democratic Party is disintegrating before our very eyes. This latest “Russian hacking” diversion is just speeding along the process.

via Tiny Buddha,

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” ~Frank Herbert, The Bene Gesserit “Litany Against Fear,” from the novel Dune

When I was very small, my grandmother would watch me while my parents were at work. Nana often wanted a break, and her house held very little to stimulate a pre-schooler, so she’d put a VHS tape in and sit me down in front of the TV.

The movie she put in most? La Bamba.

Maybe you’ve seen it, maybe not. I’ll give you a bit of history. It’s the life of Ritchie Valens, leading up to that fateful night he, Buddy Holly, and the Big Bopper all died in a fiery plane crash in Iowa.

So that was my introduction to air travel.

I probably watched that movie twice a day for months at a time. I can still vividly picture the opening scene’s fiery mid-air collision.

I haven’t seen La Bamba since I was seven or eight, but the deep, primal fear of flying it instilled in me lived on until I was almost thirty.

Now slide forward to my teenage years, and the first time I gave up a free trip to New York City, and then a class trip to Australia, because I was afraid. Then to my early twenties, when I passed up vacations and travel outside the country. I limited the colleges I wanted to apply to based on whether or not they were in driving distance.

And then, somehow, when I ended up moving all the way from Georgia to upstate New York for school, I drove that distance in a U-Haul, and didn’t see my family for years because it was too far to drive again. When I finally did see them, three years later, I drove the fifteen-plus hours (one way), most of it in snow.

Not everyone needs to fly to have a happy life, but I think I did. I wanted to travel all over the world, but most of all, I hated that something so mundane was holding me back from anything. I needed to get over it, but I didn’t know how.

I tried self-hypnosis and guided hypnosis. I tried just “sucking it up.” I tried learning the mechanics of flight so I’d understand, rationally, that it was safe. I considered drugging myself with tranquilizers and having my family haul me onto an airplane while I couldn’t think about it. But the fear lingered on for fifteen years after I decided I wanted to end it.

The One Thing That Finally Helped Me Move Past My Fear

I first bought the book Dune, by Frank Herbert, when I was in high school. I first read it about eight years later, when I could find interest in more than the cover art. Since then, it’s become my favorite book. My husband and I are reading it together now, me for the second time and him for the first.

It’s a huge book. Epic, engrossing, transcendental—just like my fear of flying. If you haven’t read it, do. I can’t recommend any other book as highly, and not just for the literary value or entertainment, but also for the lessons it teaches—not overtly, not preachy.

Dune teaches environmentalism, politics, race and gender issues, religion, and philosophy without saying it. When you read it, you internalize all of those issues without even realizing it.

And that’s where I found the beginning of the ending to my fear.

There is a mantra repeated several times, taught to the Bene Gesserit, a sect of women who are highly trained in physical and mental arts that skim the border between possible and impossible in our world. That mantra is the Litany Against Fear, quoted at the top of this essay. The Bene Gesserit, and the son of one, our hero in Dune, use the mantra to remind themselves not to bother with fear.

It goes beyond looking in a mirror and telling yourself “you’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and doggone it, people like you,” as Stuart Smalley said on SNL.

In Dune, the Litany Against Fear can change the entire mental space of the character reciting it. Its value is that it allows a person to defeat the chaos fear brings to our minds. If they defeat that chaos, Dune’s heroes can get through suicidal situations, or mentally slow their life processes down so they don’t need air for half an hour. While that kind of physiological control is probably outside of our human abilities, the value is still apparent:

We can alter our response to fear.

How Fear Causes Chaos

Fear is a natural response, but it brings chaos with it. Our heads fill up with black, chaotic thoughts, and depending on how strong the fear is, we’re left stuck, unable to act. This is what happened to me with my fear of flying. I was stuck, constantly, in a state of indecision: I wanted to go places. I wanted to accept invitations. I couldn’t.

Maybe if I wait a day or two, I could, I would think. But I never did.

What Dune teaches us with the Litany is thathumanity can overcome fear where animals can’t. Our primal urge when confronted with fear is to run, hide, escape. But as humans, we don’t have to do that. We don’t have to react just because fear acts.

The second half of the Litany reads:

I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

There is the answer to the chaos fear causes.

There is no inherent problem with fear. The problem comes when the fear remains because then that chaos lives on, affecting our minds and bodies with its insidious, chronic destruction.

When I first read the passage containing the full Litany, I got chills. I realized I was facing this fear of flying over and over, day after day, without resolution, when I could just face it once, let it pass over me and through me, and once I’d landed, I could look back and there would be nothing.

“Just face your fear,” is way easier said than done. We all know that. But what if you looked at it differently? What if you didn’t tell yourself it would be okay, that it’s not actually as scary as it seems, that everything would be fine?

I’ve heard that fear kills you over and over, when instead you could die just once at the end of a good life.

What if you told yourself: I know I’m afraid. This is really scary. But, I’m doing this anyway because every time I fear this thing, it kills me over and over—just as much as if the plane really did go down. I may have to face the fear again in the future, but each time I do, I’ll be better at it and stronger than it.

Because you can’t go through life letting fear stop you, or you’ll never start anything. And you’ve got a life for a reason. You’re meant to start something amazing with it. But you’ve got to accept your fear first.

Don’t try to get over fear. Go through it, instead.

Let yourself be afraid the first time you do something that scares you. Let yourself feel the fear for a moment, and then acknowledge it and let it flow past you.

Destroying the Chaos and Moving Past Fear

When I fully internalized that realization, I knew I would never let fear dominate me again. I was afraid of flying, but so what?

I got a single line from the Litany tattooed on myself, where few people would see it, and written backwards so that whenever I stood in front of a mirror, I’d see it, read it, and remember it.

The day I first stepped onto an airplane, I stood in front of the mirror for a long time, staring at that tattoo. I told myself I was afraid. I told myself we might crash. And then I got on the plane.

Now I look back and there’s nothing there.

About Holly Ostrout

Holly Ostrout is a writer, minimalist, certified Project Manager, and the founder of www.CreateAlchemy.com, where her goal is to teach 10,000 overwhelmed, ambitious women how to destroy chaos in their lives with personal rituals so that they can focus on what truly matters: their passions. If you’re ready to kill the chaos, you can grab a free worksheet to help you get started right here.

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via Good News Network,

Over the last five years, San Francisco’s Presiding Judge John Stewart and his colleagues have dismissed over 66,000 arrest warrants for quality-of-life crimes, such as sleeping on the sidewalk. His logic? People living in poverty do not deserve to be put in jail just because they’re too poor to pay a fine.

via Shadowproof,

As President Barack Obama’s administration comes closer to an end, the number of civilians killed by United States drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen is at least 500, according to data compiled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Nearly all of the drone strikes were a part of the Obama administration’s institutionalization of a targeted assassination policy, where alleged terrorism suspects or individuals with ties to terrorism organizations were placed on kill lists for execution without charge or trial.

The Obama administration put out a report [PDF] on December 5 summarizing the “legal and policy frameworks” it relied upon in pursuing war. The second half of the report particularly focused on “targeting efforts” or targeted assassinations, which “comply with all applicable international obligations, domestic laws, and policies.”

Under the guise of transparency, the Obama administration’s report presents policies as constrained and restrained in order to guard against any concerns that it will leave behind an assassination complex that President Donald Trump will take advantage of and abuse. But the reality is the administration redefined a number of concepts and definitions so that extrajudicial killings can be justified. The administration also refuses to acknowledge and compensate civilians impacted by drone strikes.

If Drone Killing Is Legal, Why Hasn’t Obama Apologized To Innocent Victims Of Strikes?

The legal charity Reprieve represents a Yemeni man named Faisal bin Ali Jaber, who sued the Obama administration because innocent family members were killed in a drone strike in Yemen. It notes the Obama administration publicly insists its policy of drone killing is lawful, even as it fights in federal court to prevent legal accountability.

“If President Obama truly believes that drone killing should be lawful and transparent, why is his administration fighting tooth and nail to avoid the scrutiny of American judges in Jaber v. Obama? Why won’t the President simply come clean and apologize to Faisal bin Ali Jaber for the killing of his innocent family members?” Shelby Sullivan Bennis, Reprieve attorney for Faisal bin ali Jaber, asked.

During the summer, the Obama administration claimed 64-116 “non-combatants” were killed by CIA or United States military drone strikes. The number was preposterously low and effectively erased the deaths of more than 400 civilians, including children.

Documents provided to The Intercept by a whistleblower showed the U.S. military designates people killed in strikes as “enemies killed in action” or EKIA. As journalist Jeremy Scahill described, “Unless evidence posthumously emerged to prove the males killed were not terrorists or “unlawful enemy combatants,” EKIA remained their designation.”

The source of the documents called the process “insane,” but added, “We’ve made ourselves comfortable with that. The intelligence community, [Joint Special Operations Command], the CIA, and everybody that helps support and prop up these programs, they’re comfortable with that idea.” And the source also described official U.S. government statements minimizing the number of civilian casualties inflicted by drone strikes as “exaggerating at best, if not outright lies.”

When “non-combatants” or civilians are killed, U.S. intelligence agencies posthumously analyze whether those killed, who were not the specific target, happened to perform tasks beneficial to a terrorist organization. They go back and assess postings online and determine whether people, who were not senior operational leaders, shared ideology with the group. If any such evidence is found, they are treated as combatants.

Obama has repeatedly suggested, “Before lethal action may be taken, the United States must have ‘near certainty’ that the terrorist target is present and that non-combatants will not be injured or killed.” But throughout his presidency, “national security” operations clearly have flouted this standard.

In 2013, McClatchy Newspapers reported on leaked documents that showed, “Drone operators weren’t always certain who they were killing, despite the administration’s guarantees of the accuracy of the CIA’s targeting intelligence and its assertions that civilian casualties have been ‘exceedingly rare.'”

“Drones Are All Over My Brain”

The Obama administration employed what is known as signature strikes, which targeted individuals who engaged in patterns of behavior that made them suspect. The administration also launched so-called double tap strikes, where it would attack individuals who rescue wounded people or pick up the pieces of the dead.

A 2012 report, “Living Under Drones [PDF],” from the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic of Stanford Law School and the Global Justice Clinic at the New York University School of Law highlighted this tactic.

“We and other people are so scared of drone attacks now that when there is a drone strike, for two or three hours nobody goes to [the location of the strike],” a father of four, who lost a leg in a drone strike, confessed. “We don’t know who [the victims] are, whether they are young or old, because we try to be safe.”

The same report detailed the impact on children, who have to live under the constant threat from drones. On March 17, 2011, Saeed Yayha was injured by “flying shrapnel.” He now has to rely on charity to survive and sees drones as demons or ghosts in the night:

“I can’t sleep at night because when the drones are there,” Yayha shared. “I hear them making that sound, that noise. The drones are all over my brain, I can’t sleep. When I hear the drones making that drone sound, I just turn on the light and sit there looking at the light.”

Clinical and forensic psychologist Dr. Peter Schaapveld conducted an assessment of the psychological impact of drone strikes. What he found most disturbing was how the strikes turn children into “hollowed-out shells.” They lose their “spark.”

According to Channel 4 News, Dr. Schaapveld met a young girl whose father said she “vomits every day, and also when she hears aircraft, or drones, or anything related.” She experienced recurring nightmares and dreamt of “dead people, planes and people running around scared.”

It made children not want to go to school. They no longer could form relationships with other children and make friends. As Kat Craig, the legal director at Reprieve concluded, this shows their use amounts to a “form of psychological torture and collective punishment.”

Not to mention, with attacks on wedding convoys and funerals, the strikes breed resentment toward the United States that fuels violent extremism.

In testimony at a congressional briefing on November 20, 2013, Entesar Qadhi, a Yemeni youth leader described what it was like in her village to fight al Qaida and drive members of the militant group out of her village.

“We were told that drones are used to target al Qaida and only al Qaida, but the reality is my village didn’t know al Qaida [until] after those drones” started hovering over our skies, Qadhi said. When her village and their tribes “enter into armed clashes” with al Qaida militants, the Yemeni government provided no support except for the drones.

“Drone strikes actually make al Qaida people more popular because of the fact that they are striking inside of our villages, which makes the presence of Qaida justified in our place,” she stated.” They’ll kick out al Qaida militants, but then those militants will return when drones hover over the village again.

This human example of the impact of Obama’s policy was reinforced in a story published by The Washington Post on May 29, 2012. It reported, “An escalating campaign of US drone strikes is stirring increasing sympathy for al-Qaida-linked militants and driving tribesmen to join a network linked to terrorist plots against the United States.”

Photo by the White House on Flickr.

Targets On Kill List Apparently Attacked Multiple Times, Leaving Hundreds Of Children Dead

The extent to which the Obama administration does not know who exactly it is killing is rather incredible. Reprieve analyzed [PDF] drone strike data in 2014 and found “targets” were reported killed multiple times in Pakistan. “Missed strikes on these men killed 874 people. They resulted in the deaths of 142 children.”

“Eighteen men in Yemen were reported killed or targeted multiple times. Missile strikes on these men killed 273 others and accounted for almost half of all confirmed civilian casualties and 100 percent of all recorded child deaths,” according to Reprieve’s analysis. “In targeting Ayman al Zawahiri, the CIA killed 76 children and 29 adults.”

“In the six attempts it took the US to kill Qari Hussain, a deputy commander of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), 128 people were killed. including 13 children.” Also, “Baitullah Mehsud was directly targeted as many as seven times, during which 164 people were killed, including 11 children.”

“From 2004-2013, children suffered disproportionately in Pakistan. The pursuit of 14 targets killed 142 children. Only six of these children died in strikes that successfully killed their target (21 percent success rate).”

Despite the staggering evidence of civilian casualties, the Obama administration still expected the public to believe only 64-116 “non-combatants” were killed. It could not even bring itself to label those acknowledged few as civilians. They were “non-combatants,” not specifically targeted but, perhaps, they should never have been in the vicinity of “targets” the military or CIA “engaged.”

Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a 16 year-old U.S. citizen, was killed in Yemen by the U.S. government in October 2011, just weeks after his father, Anwar, was targeted and assassinated. Press secretary Robert Gibbs said if Abdulrahman wanted to avoid death he should probably have had a “far more responsible father.”

“If they’re truly concerned about the well-being of their children, I don’t think becoming an al Qaida jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business,” Gibbs added.

Claiming The Authority To Kill U.S. Citizens Abroad

One can draw a parallel between Gibbs’s statement and how U.S. law enforcement has excused the killing of young black boys by blaming their parents for not being good role models. The Obama administration cited the fact that courts that have determined police, who use lethal force on suspects, may not be violating the U.S. Constitution.

“Where the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a threat of serious physical harm, either to the officer or to others, it is not constitutionally unreasonable to prevent escape by using deadly force,” the Obama administration noted. “If the suspect threatens the officer with a weapon or there is probable cause to believe that he has committed a crime involving the infliction or threatened infliction of serious physical harm, deadly force may be used if necessary to prevent escape, and if, where feasible, some warning has been given.”

This is the legal rationale the Obama administration adopted to justify the killing of the radical Islamic preacher and propagandist, Anwar al-Awlaki. Anwar’s father attempted to bring a case in court in 2010 to challenge the Obama administration on whether it had the constitutional and legal right to assassinate his son.

The Center for Constitutional Rights and American Civil Liberties Union argued, “Outside of the context of armed conflict, the Constitution and international human rights treaties the U.S. has ratified prohibit the state from depriving persons of life without due process, except as a last resort to protect against an imminent threat of deadly harm.” Anwar al-Awlaki was targeted away from the battlefield in Afghanistan and his placement on a kill list “flew in the face of the plain meaning of the law’s imminence requirement.” However, a district court in Washington, D.C., dismissed the lawsuit.

Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout, via Flickr

Displacement of Clear Legal Standards With a Vaguely Defined License to Kill

It was this same year that Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, authored a report that raised serious concerns before the Obama administration carried out the vast majority of its drone strikes. Alston argued in the fight against terrorism “too many criminal acts” are “re-characterized so as to justify addressing them within the framework of the law of armed conflict,” which is exactly what the Obama administration did.

“New technologies, and especially unarmed combat aerial vehicles or “drones,” have been added into this mix, by making it easier to kill targets, with fewer risks to the targeting state,” Alston wrote. “The result of this mix has been a highly problematic blurring and expansion of the boundaries of the applicable legal frameworks – human rights law, the laws of war, and the law applicable to the use of inter-state force. Even where the laws of war are clearly applicable, there has been a tendency to expand who may permissibly be targeted and under what conditions.”

Alston added, “Moreover, the states concerned have often failed to specify the legal justification for their policies, to disclose the safeguards in place to ensure that targeted killings are in fact legal and accurate, or to provide accountability mechanisms for violations. Most troublingly, they have refused to disclose who has been killed, for what reason, and with what collateral consequences. The result has been the displacement of clear legal standards with a vaguely defined license to kill, and the creation of a major accountability vacuum.”

Since the Obama administration’s report contends its drone killing policies comply with international law, it is also important to note the following from Alston:

Although the appeal of an armed conflict paradigm to address terrorism is obvious, so too is the significant potential for abuse. Internal unrest as a result of insurgency or other violence by non-state armed groups, and even terrorism, are common in many parts of the world. If states unilaterally extend the law of armed conflict to situations that are essentially matters of law enforcement that must, under international law, be dealt with under the framework of human rights, they are not only effectively declaring war against a particular group, but eviscerating key and necessary distinctions between international law frameworks that restricts states’ ability to kill arbitrarily.

It was not until 2012 that the Obama administration responded to pressure from civil liberties and human rights groups to show the public what its legal basis was for using lethal force against terrorism suspects overseas, including U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki. But the administration declined to release documents. Officials instead feigned transparency by giving policy speeches, making offhand remarks during public interviews, and leaking details anonymously to news media. At the same time, the administration fought in federal courts and would neither confirm nor deny the existence of a CIA drone program that was well-known to exist.

Invoking Nixon’s Bombing of Cambodia To Justify Targeted Assassinations

The phrase “imminent threat” has been so redefined by the Obama administration that Justice Department officials argued in a “white paper” that “decision makers” cannot possibly know all the al Qaida plots planned at any given moment. They can never be confident no plots will occur. There may be small windows for action. So, the United States government never needs “clear evidence that a specific attack on US person and interests will take place in the immediate future” in order to carry out attacks on a target.

President Richard Nixon’s carpet bombing of Cambodia was cited in this “white paper” when the Justice Department asserted it found no “authority for the proposition that when one of the parties to an armed conflict plans and executes operations from a base in a new nation, an operation to engage the enemy in that location cannot be part of the original armed conflict, and thus subject to the laws of war governing that conflict, unless hostilities become sufficiently intense and protracted in the new location.”

In other words, a president can expand a war into any additional countries because Nixon customarily violated international law and bombed Cambodia while the U.S. was at war in Vietnam.

The Obama administration is well aware of the kind of power the executive branch has claimed by institutionalizing a system, where terrorism suspects are placed on kill lists. When Mitt Romney ran for president against Obama in 2012, the administration was worried about what Romney may do. Officials sought to develop a set of “rules” in the months prior to Election Day that would place some more constraints if a Republican were elected.

Now, Donald Trump will be president, and he will have a vast apparatus for carrying out targeted assassinations. He will be able to order the deaths of individuals in countries where it is known drone and airstrikes have taken place, as well as in countries, where U.S. drones have not been used to kill.

Trump will be judge, jury, and executioner, but it should not be all that much different from what Obama did as president. The only difference will be the person with the authority to sign off on who lives and who dies.

This is the second in a five-part series on the warfare and “national security” operations of the Obama administration. The first part examined the human cost of eight years of war under Obama. In the next part, the administration’s policies for capture and detention will be examined ahead of a Trump presidency.