Redefining “Substance Abuse” for Fertile Women While Lead Poisoning Investigations Continue

Posted on February 3, 2016 by wordcloud9

pills-cigarettes-alcohol-620x400

by Nona Blyth Cloud

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) just issued a report that tells all women of child-bearing age they should stop drinking alcohol entirely, even if they have no plans to get pregnant, because they could possibly have an unplanned pregnancy, and any drinking might harm a fetus.

“Drinking too much for women means any alcohol use if you’re pregnant,” said Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director for the CDC, during a conference call with the media. “It’s not as much how many drinks, it’s any drinks if you’re pregnant—at any time during the pregnancy.”

The CDC has taken a hard line stance against any amount of alcohol during any stage of pregnancy—even, essentially, pre-pregnancy or could-be-pregnancy.

But other experts and activists say that such guidelines are too all-encompassing and fail to respect women’s ability to weigh risks.

The CDC has long taken a stance of “better safe than sorry.” When asked about the risk for a woman drinking very mildly while trying to get pregnant—a process that can take months or even years for some—the CDC’s Schuchat said, “We can’t put a number on that for any individual woman, but what we can say is that fetal alcohol spectrum disorders are 100 percent preventable if there’s no alcohol exposure at all,” she said. “So that’s why we say, ‘Why take the risk drinking any alcohol during, any time in the pregnancy, even before you realize you’re pregnant?’”

Rebecca Kula, a professor at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and author of “Mass Hysteria: Medicine, Culture, and Mothers’ Bodies” strongly disagrees: “We don’t tell pregnant women not to drive cars, even though we are much more certain that there’s a risk to their fetuses from each car ride than from each drink,” she said. “….. zero risk is both impossible to meet and completely paralyzing to try to meet.”

pregant woman at the wheel

Kukla argues that such guidelines are also excessively punishing. “The idea that the pleasures and routines that make up women’s days are mere luxuries that are not worth any risk whatsoever is patronizing and sexist,” she said. “And it would also turn their lives into complete hell if really taken to [its] conclusions.”

That hell is already happened to a growing number of women who have been prosecuted for substance abuse during pregnancy.

The first known indictment of an American woman for drug use in pregnancy was in California in 1977. But an appeals court ruled that lawmakers did not intend to include unborn children within the meaning of the word ‘child.’

Women have been put on trial for substance abuse while pregnant in every state except Delaware, Maine, Rhode Island and Vermont. Most of these cases have failed. But not all of them.

Arizona — In 2003, a woman was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 10 years in prison after her infant, who tested positive for crack cocaine, died shortly after birth.

Mississippi — In 2014, the state’s high court ruled that a woman whose stillborn baby tested positive for cocaine could not be charged with ‘depraved heart murder,’ but it left open the possibility that she could be prosecuted for manslaughter.

Oklahoma — An Oklahoma mother was sentenced to 15 years in prison for second-degree murder after the 2004 stillbirth of her meth-exposed baby. More recently, drug-using pregnant women have been charged with criminal child neglect.

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Word Cloud: AFRICA

Posted on January 29, 2016 by wordcloud9

Word Cloud Resized

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

One of the things that shocked me during my long-ago-summer-back-packing-through-Europe was the vast difference in scale between Europe and the United States.

  • Greece, the “Birthplace of Western Civilization,” is about the size of Louisiana.
  • Italy, wellspring of the Roman Empire, is only a smidge larger than Arizona.
  • Oregon is bigger than the United Kingdom, which sprawled the British Empire around the world.

The African continent is HUGE – so enormous, if you could cover it with the United States, Canada, ALL the countries of Central America (Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama) AND The People’s Republic of China, you’d still have a bit of Africa showing – say, Benin, with a few square miles of Togo, at the western edge.

Africa from Space

When Americans glibly speak of “African Art,” we really have no idea how wide and how deep a subject that is.

Over 40 years ago, I set foot on the African continent for only a few days in a single country – Sierra Leone. There are 16 ethnic tribes in Sierra Leone. Just standing for a few minutes on a corner in Freetown, its capital city, I began to see how different these tribes are. Facial structure, height, body type, skin color – a whole range of humanity in one smallish city – and that’s just visual – the languages, and the cultural and historical differences, those would take a lifetime of study.

So I wonder about using the term “African poet” – is it like labeling Emily Dickinson a “Western Hemisphere author” – technically accurate, yet fundamentally misleading?

Labels give me an itch between the shoulder-blades, like there’s a scope lining up behind me. And yet – the years of our childhood, the first language we hear, our gender, the very skin we live in, and the whole of our memories – become the bone and tissue of our psyches. And for a writer, they are the ink in our blood.

So there’s a little irony behind choosing “AFRICA” as the title of this week’s Word Cloud. Trying to convey the essence of an article in one word which might also intrigue a reader is sometimes the biggest challenge in writing this series.

Aside from the continent of Africa, our two poets have in common that they left their homelands and now live in English-speaking countries. And shoes as a recurring theme.

Mahtem Shiferraw grew up in Ethiopia and Eritrea, and received an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. This poet writes in flying word-banners, streaming vivid colors across the page:

look underneath: your feet are roots, your legs a forest, your body
..the earth and your mind thirsty milk for the sorrow-drenched.

Omo child - Erhiopia

SMALL TRAGEDIES

Everybody has a story 
about how they didn’t fit 
……………………………..until they do – 
and they want to tell it. 
… 
Here is how it begins; 
how you make monsters out of children 
by telling them stories 
about this other world, a world where 
they sink in clouds and color the earth 
where forests of blue lakes 
give birth to strange animals 
where adults 
are only a bleak version of themselves

… 
where stories
…………are never only stories.
…
This is how children are made; 
…
………..without intention or precision 
where orange doors and glass portals 
lead to another dimension, 
another self. 
…
Look at them command in this other world; 
they don’t hesitate, or quarrel, and they are not afraid – 
… 
they climb trees, and pick up leaves, and speak a language 
made of wild berries and honey nut combs – 
… 
they grow tall, and feed off the earth and 
drink its glazed colors, and swim through all shades of green – 
…
sodden green, lime green, bruised green, emerald eyes, muddy-greens 
of bedwaters, the blue-green of newborns laughing. 
… 
This is how 
monsters are made – 
… 
…………they fit 
…………………..until they don’t. 

 SYNESTHESIA 

Ambasha Ethiopian bread
White is a color, 
black is art. Nod to those before you. 
Brown is a sense of being, and dark only 
hovers beneath the shadows of necks – those 
who fear it most. Here is to fear. 
… 
Red are the tip of shoes of the woman 
who waited in the bathroom patiently when I was 
only three – to steal my mother’s ruby earrings. White is 
… 
the unsafe silence of bathroom walls, and their 
morbidly cubic nature. White is water running under 
my feet, the innocent screams of school children at 
lunch hour. 
…
Brown is the anomalous texture of curtains from my 
childhood home. Brown is also the parched wood 
of a small coffee-grinder my mother used. Brown as in 
the intimate angles of sharply cut ambasha my grandmother 
made, flour and water, lemon skin and cinnamon shreds, the 
dark heads of raisins, while on a cargo plane back to Ethiopia, 
the tired eyes of war-victims and their slow recovery. Brown 
is also the color of my skin, but I didn’t know it then. 
… 
Blue are the waters embedded in my grandmother’s eyes. Blue is 
the whisper of the Nile, Abbay. Blue is the color of the brave. Blue 
are the walls of empty neighbors houses and the insides of their 
living room. Blue is skimmed milk tearing the sky. 
… 
White sometimes comes back at odd hours. White are strangers eyes 
drenched in sadness. White is the uniform of doctors, the smell of 
alcohol and something mad. White is absence. Purple comes back 
…
as shoes, American shoes. Sky and blood under a quiet shadow. The 
shadow of a young tree planted in memory of a murdered teacher in 
high school. And the milky paste of over-ripe figs spurting prematurely, 
spiking insides. Purple is warmth in mid-July, when rain hails on corrugated 
tin roofs and the leaning green arms of lonely corn plants. 
… 
Yellow is crying; it’s a bell, a cathedral in Asmara? A school? Or the 
shriek of a mass funeral. Yellow is dead. But listen to black. Listen to 
black notes, black heart, listen. Black is art. Not of the artist, the art of 
being. The painful art of memory. Here’s to remembering.

 Kayombo “Kayo” Chingonyi was born in Mufulira, Zambia and moved to Newcastle in the UK at the age of six. After going to school in London and reading English Literature at the University of Sheffield, Chingonyi is now based in Essex. His poems are full of sound – music is only one of them.

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The beginning of Turner Diaries II(I) or the end of the Bundy insurgency

Posted on January 27, 2016 by ann li-summers

By ann summers

“Avenge me…” the Red Dawn protagonists’ father cries out, and with his passing, will LaVoy Finicum’s legacy be a 2015 novel that could become The Turner Diaries for a new generation of RWNJ. m9ya1rdyigkc78thwm5e_1_

Finicum’s 241-page apocalyptic cowboy thriller titled “Only By Blood and Suffering” is a how-to on surviving after a electromagnetic pulse or nuclear attack when your Escalade stops driving, the government has bought back all of your guns, President Bill Clinton signed away your country’s missile technology to the Chinese, the Supreme Court is loaded with lefty judicial activists and you don’t have an adequate amount of gold and “junk silver” to get by when the stock market implodes, interest rates balloon overnight and the value of the dollar collapses.

 

The major figures in the Bundy bantustan occupation were arrested and one was killed in a shootout during a “traffic stop” although it now appears to have been a tactical warrant-serving arrest on the road to Grant County, Oregon.

That this event occured away from the siege area at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge seems to suggest that the take-down was a planned FBI action executed while minimal protection was available to the Bundystani during the trip to a meeting with a sympathetic Sheriff from a jurisdiction outside of Harney County.

No LEO casualties were reported and that it was primarily a Federal action provides cover for the Oregon state and county authorities.

This may have taken place because of the resistance of the insurgency to negotiate an actual end to the armed occupation and the nature of their demands as well as a willingness to extend the siege for many months, leaving the FBI to blink first.

tarp_guy.jpg

One militia member—LaVoy Finicum, a.k.a #TarpMan—was shot and killed, though authorities have not released details about who fired the fatal shot. According to NBC News, Finicum had previously said he’d rather die than be arrested: “I have no intention of spending any of my days in a concrete box. There are things more important than your life and freedom is one of them. I’m prepared to defend freedom.” (Finicum, father of 11, was also the author of a novel, Only By Blood and Suffering: Regaining Lost Freedom.)

www.motherjones.com/…

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More interesting will be whether the fate of the insurgency will resemble that of the Montana Freemen in 1996 with multiple year jail sentences, although the death of an insurgent after none were killed in the prior Bundy standoff in Nevada could encourage or deter further sovereign insurgency activity.

The last wound-up: (Trigger(sic) Warning) Continue reading →

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Bundystani Barbarism – Going Medieval, new materialism & land jumping piracy

Posted on January 26, 2016 by ann li-summers

12522936_792911377481034_1758586121887666608_nBy ann summers

The prototypical crypto-fascists terrorizing Eastern Oregon in the USA represent largely symbolic, yet armed, direct actions performed with the occupation of federal land and structures in order to promote issues of anti-governmental resistance on the behalf of land-owning individuals and their contracts with the Federal Government.

They are attempting to establish local states as quasi-governmental entities resembling but not identical to the county land divisions in the US with legal systems based only at the local scale. They have attempted to bring their own unofficial, anti-federal legal and judicial apparatus so that its current libertarian manifestation more resembles Medieval Vehmic Law applied like interwar National Socialists rather than a revival of vigilante frontier justice for land jumping in the 19th Century.

A key component of the followers of this cult-like group call themselves Sovereign Citizens which losely overlaps a variety of US hate groups. But the ideological purposes and the appropriation of public lands resembles more of an ethnic settlement program more familiar to those in Western Asia. That it is also anti-modern is anachronistically quaint in an age that still uses small arms technology from the 19th Century but also reactionary in its pre-modern bigotry that makes racial identity still at risk in the US 21st Century.

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Other than attempting to impose a fictive justice and system of laws based on some quasi-religious texts couching itself in secular law, they are seeking a putative kind of relative autonomy for an often not so disguised religious and racist ideology which culturally recodes or dual codes a kind of inverted apartheid secessionism that creates rural enclaves or gated communities/compounds. As though county sheriffs could be the sole source of law enforcement in any US counties pretending to be sovereign and self-governing local states.

Such a separatism is derived from an evangelizing admixture of 19th Century American religions that attempt to revise history in often fantasic origin narratives. Not unlike other fundmentalist religious ethnicities in other global areas, the return to feudal legal practices is only the first stage in the attempt to revive stylzed versions of pre-modern value that somehow ignore property claims that exclude force.

While there is some structural similarity to the utopian socialist experiments of that same period, like a variety of ideologically driven cults, a series of institutional histories help to colonize nearly entire western regions dominated by such ideologies (the state of Utah). This of course was connected to the US subjugation of native peoples common to European colonial expansion resulting in the current system which the sovereign citizens have attempted to culturally annihilate. Some versions of republicanism supporting a variety of religious evangelisms often claim to be organized in these institutional gaps created during the American age of so-called Western Expansion.

The ideological backgrounds of the extremists.  About two-thirds of the occupiers appear to have the anti-government “Patriot” movement – and more specifically, the militia wing of that movement – as their primary ideological affiliation.  The remaining one-third of the occupiers have an anti-government ideology centered on opposition to federal regulation of public lands, a movement often referred to as the Sagebrush Rebellion or the Wise Use movement.  Some of the occupiers also have associations with other right-wing extremist movements, such as anti-immigrant border vigilantes or the sovereign citizen movement.  Almost a quarter of the takeover participants have expressed some sort of racism, anti-Semitism, or anti-Muslim bigotry.

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one person’s little read Constitution

 

That this current group has not been taken into custody or prosecuted should in terms of history signal why the federal government (The State) is acting cautiously even to the point of apparent negligence. Libertarians as a nostalgic pre-modernizing sect might see this as the “redemptive” attempt of which Sovereign Citizens are a more extremist form, to return to earlier capital forms like metals or new fiat money like Bit-Coin. That these groups could even ally themselves with certain varieties of resistant anti-capitalist sentiment shows the fluidity of false consciousness as race and class contradictions become the defining feature of the collection of right-wing groups now holding the Malheur Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Oregon. Continue reading →

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After week III, another two months of Bundystani insurgency, now with moronic extra-Constitutionality

Posted on January 24, 2016 by ann li-summers

oregon-militia_1_By ann summers

Evoking New York language values, Slate magazine has now labeled the East Oregon Bundystani as Jamokes trying to enforce Shania(sic) Law in an incursion by outsiders.

We may not understand public land laws, but we understand how to be outraged about linguistic dog whistles. We may not want to worry about gun-toting crazies, but we are happy to worry about Fox News’ lopsided vision of terrorism. And while our preoccupation with getting the language right might seem depressing in this context, it’s not entirely quixotic or useless. Language represents an island of control in a vast sea of helplessness, and debating language is a way of thinking more clearly through aspects of society that elude our control. It’s a better way, at least, than marching, armed, into a building in Oregon like a bunch of … well.

As the Feds continue to maintain a low profile at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, the Oregon governor has called for their intervention and the game of non-cooperation continues. With further jurisdictional lines being better defined, and at the risk of being called “outside agitators”  the Bundy bantustan now has begun to lose the support of the Harney County community. The meeting on Tuesday that featured a visit from militia leaders in the town of Burns allowed many to see the erosion of support and rising friction between local residents and the largely non-Oregonian occupation force.  Continue reading →

Posted in American History, Civil Liberties, Civil War, Conspiracy, Constitutional Law, Countries, DHS, environment, Fascism, Fascists/Corporatists, FBI, Free Speech, Fundamentalism, Genocide, Government, Green, History, Humor, Justice, Law Enforcement, Liberals, Libertarians, Local Government, Media, Nazis/Nazism, Oregon, Police, Politics, Progressives, Propaganda, Tea Party, Terrorism, Terrorists, Treason, Uncategorized, United States | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on After week III, another two months of Bundystani insurgency, now with moronic extra-Constitutionality

Word Cloud: BARD

Posted on January 22, 2016 by wordcloud9

Word Cloud Resized

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

Monday, January 25, will be the 257th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns (1759–1796), forever the National Bard of Scotland. A widely celebrated event in his country and in many places around the world known as Burns Night, when many Scots and those of Scots heritage will meet for a Burns Supper.

It is customary at a formal Burns Supper for a speaker to rise after the meal and the first round of recitations to deliver a discourse known as the Immortal Memory. It is not a standard set of words, but instead the speaker’s view of the life and work of Robert Burns. This is both an honor and a responsibility placed upon a member of the company considered an able orator, but the Immortal Memory must also capture the Bard’s wit and humor, and even his bawdy side which shows in the songs like “How can I keep my maidenhead.” For all that he was a child of tenant farmers, and worked the land himself for much of his life, Robert Burns was a very complex man.

Here are just three of his many poems and songs. If you’d like to follow custom — read them aloud.  Don’t let the Scots dialect throw you. Play a bit o’ the pipes music on your machine, take a wee dram of a single malt whisky – lubricates the tongue – an’ hae a’ it.

 

Scots Wha Hae

Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led;
Welcome to your gory bed,
……….Or to victory!

Now’s the day, and now’s the hour;
See the front o’ battle lour;
See approach proud Edward’s power—
……….Chains and slavery!

Wha will be a traitor knave?
Wha can fill a coward’s grave!
Wha sae base as be a slave?
……….Let him turn and flee!

Wha for Scotland’s king and law
Freedom’s sword will strongly draw,
Freeman stand, or freeman fa’,
……….Let him follow me!

By oppression’s woes and pains!
By your sons in servile chains!
We will drain our dearest veins,
……….But they shall be free!

Lay the proud usurpers low!
Tyrants fall in every foe!
Liberty’s in every blow!—
……….Let us do or die!

bannockburn

Scots Wha Hae is one of the most famous poems written by Robert Burns, and certainly one of the best expressions of his intense nationalism. This poem is his tribute to Robert the Bruce, who in 1314 roused his troops before the Battle of Bannockburn, for a victory in which Scotland kept its sovereignty against the forces of the Kingdom of England. It also calls up memories of William Wallace, who defeated an English army at the Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297.

Scotland’s independence from England ended at the battle of Culloden in 1745, so it was too risky for Burns to openly express such patriotic sentiments, and the poem was originally published anonymously. Scots Wha Hae was quickly set to music, to two different traditional tunes, but the first tune, ‘Hey Tuttie Tatie’ became the standard choice.  It is now the party song of the Scottish National Party, sung at the close of their annual national conferences.

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Bundystani insurgency now tries to sell bantustan timeshares instead of exit plan

Posted on January 19, 2016 by ann li-summers

By ann summers

The Fluffy Unicornists (provisional) are now counting on red rural poverty in a blue state with some old anti-Federal standards from the militia playbook. Fortunately, counter-fundraising has now raised over $20,000 to organizations representing those attacked by the current bantustan occupants of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge.1236fea7e821d6bf_1_

PowerPointFAIL seems to have occured with no Monday presentations on the “exit plan” made available to the media as promised last week. Rather, as Oregon Public Broadcasting reports, the presentation in Crane, Oregon resembled a “pitch for a timeshare”.

The lights dimmed and on came a short film with dramatic music. 

But rather than white sandy beaches, the projected images depicted dramatic landscapes of the American West.

In the nearly three hours that followed, the Bundys and a few of their core supporters led a room of largely Harney County ranchers through a presentation. At times it took on the tone of a civics lesson — one that included readings from pocket Constitutions distributed beforehand. At other times, speakers seemed to invoke the fiery passions of a preacher delivering a sermon from the pulpit…

“I promise, that if you stand, others will stand with you,” (LaVoy) Finicum said. “If you stand, God will stand with you. But God cannot stand with you if you do not stand.”

As with all circular logic, publicity, and media spectacle, truth is taking a back seat. And recruiting even non-Oregon, scofflaw ranchers for a “signing ceremony” of Federal contract breach resistance may prove only to be far too little too late for a Unicorn prarie fire. That they are trying the same ploy from the Nevada standoff only demonstrates the onset of desperation in the Bundystani ranks, making the claim of a “million acre” Bundy homeland as bleak as any legal bantustan.

The occupiers of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge took their crusade to end federal land ownership to a new level Monday, imploring local ranchers to tear up their government grazing contracts. 

Standing before a crowd of about 30 in the dining room of a high desert hot springs resort near Crane, the leaders of the armed standoff urged those gathered to “lay claim” to the area’s federal lands.

A “signing ceremony” is planned Friday where ranchers will sign documents renouncing their obligation to pay fees tied to the federal grazing allotments, said spokesman LaVoy Finicum.

Critics of Ammon Bundy and his followers occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge have launched a protest designed to line the pocketbooks of Bundy’s opponents. The campaign, founded by a pair of brothers from Oregon, is known as G.O.H.O.M.E., an acronym that stands for Getting the Occupiers of Historic Oregon Malheur Evicted.

Continue reading →

Posted in Civil Liberties, Conservatives, DHS, DOJ, environment, Fascism, Fascists/Corporatists, FBI, Fundamentalism, History, Law Enforcement, Libertarians, Local Government, Media, Neoconservatives, Oregon, Progressives, Propaganda, State Government, Terrorism, Terrorists, Theism, Uncategorized, United States | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Bundystani insurgency now tries to sell bantustan timeshares instead of exit plan

Bundystan now riddled with bulletpoints as Fluffy Unicornists seek Freedom Vanilla creamer

Posted on January 16, 2016 by ann li-summers

tufte-wallpaper_1_By ann summers

TarpBoy LaVoy, the Fluffy Unicorn whisperer of Eastern Oregon, like most of his band of Unicornists has been coming out from his tarp in anticipation of Groundhog Day, one of the few days in Pennsylvania where fewer marmots get whacked as varmint / pests. Similarly Friday’s 7pm meeting may have been postponed because the annual coyote hunt begins at the same time in the Burns, Oregon area.

In other predator news as the third week of the standoff begins, the eagerly anticipated announcement of an exit plan from the bantustan has been postponed with an excuse that the Friday community meeting lacked a venue even as the Unicornists have had plein aire  / al fresco press conferences before. Continue reading →

Posted in American History, Civil Liberties, Civil War, Conservatives, Conspiracy, Constitutional Law, DHS, environment, Fascism, Fascists/Corporatists, FBI, Free Speech, Fundamentalism, History, Humor, Law Enforcement, Libertarians, Local Government, Media, Nazis/Nazism, Neoconservatives, Oregon, Politics, Propaganda, Racism, Revolutionary War, Society, Terrorism, Terrorists, Theodore Roosevelt, Treason, Uncategorized, United States | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Bundystan now riddled with bulletpoints as Fluffy Unicornists seek Freedom Vanilla creamer

Word Cloud: BEGINNINGS

Posted on January 15, 2016 by wordcloud9

Word Cloud Resized
by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked
    – William Butler Yeats, “A Coat”

Irish Harp

from A Cloak

by Denise Levertov

And I walked nakedlevertov_David Geier print 1983
from the beginning

breathing in
my life,
breathing out
poems,

            arrogant in innocence . . . . .

Denise Levertov (1923–1997) was born in Ilford, nine miles northeast of London’s Charing Cross. Her mother was Welsh, with a mystic in her ancestry, but her father was a Russian Hassidic Jew who converted to Christianity. He emigrated to the UK, where he became an Anglican pastor, but he was also a scholar — a prolific writer in Hebrew, Russian, German, and English.

“My father’s Hasidic ancestry, his being steeped in Jewish and Christian scholarship and mysticism, his fervour and eloquence as a preacher, were factors built into my cells.”

Her parents home-schooled her. She showed an enthusiasm for writing from an early age.
At 12, she sent some of her poems to T.S. Eliot, who replied with a two-page letter of encouragement. She was 17 when her first poem was published.

Her first book of poetry, The Double Image, was published when she was 23 years old.

Casselden Road, N.W. 10

raimy window with lanternFor Marya

The wind would fan the life-green fires that smouldered
under the lamps, and from the glistening road
draw out deep shades of rain, and we would hear
the beat of rain on darkened panes, the sound
of night and no one stirring but ourselves,
leaning still from the window. No one else
will remember this. No one else will remember.

Shadows of leaves like riders hurried by
upon the wall within. The street would fill
with phantasy, the night become
a river or an ocean where the tree
and silent lamp were sailing; the wind would fail
and way towards the light. And no one else  
will remember this. No one else will remember.

When The Double Image appeared in 1946, she was hailed by Kenneth Rexroth as “the baby of the new Romanticism. Her poetry had about it a wistful Schwarmerei [zeal] unlike anything in English except perhaps Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach.  It could be compared to the earliest poems of Rilke or some of the more melancholy songs of Brahms.”

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Fluffy Unicornists prepared to announce their withdrawal plan: “Honor without Prosecution”

Posted on January 13, 2016 by ann li-summers

 

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one persons’s paramilitary cosplay & Roman fasces is another’s…red crayon

By ann summers

While tarp boy LaVoy announced that the Bundy gang will reveal their “exit Plan” on Friday at 7pm at a venue yet to be determined although the Burns, Oregon National Guard Armory would provide that ironic Harper’s Ferry touch, the armed militants continue to hold the Wildlife Refuge and have liberated grazing land to encourage Fluffy Unicorns to run as free as French Vanilla Creamer.

The announcement comes a day after the militants destroyed a public fence at the refuge and county residents demanded at a community meeting that Bundy and his group leave.

The first of many anticipated takeovers of federal facilities by the Bundystan Insurgent Fluffy Unicorns (BIFU) in the Bantustan enclave occured near Burns Oregon as the Malheur Wildlife Refuge was taken over by a clan led by Cliven Bundy’s offspring who surprisingly have had in-and-out privileges to go into the town for snacks. Unfortunately since most local residents do not support their actions their takeover seems like an invasion. And yet in a satire of “frontier justice” the lawlessness of the insurgency comes with its own judiciary:

A self-proclaimed “U.S. Superior Court judge” who has been involved in past property rights protests in other states arrived Tuesday in Burns with plans to convene an extra-legal “citizens grand jury” that he said will review evidence that public officials may have committed crimes. Bruce Doucette, a 54-year-old owner of a computer design and repair shop in suburban Denver, told The Oregonian/OregonLive, that he made the trip at the request of Harney County residents. He said he met with the armed occupiers of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge to hear their evidence, which he called “significant,” that government officials have committed crimes.

Little persons are expected to join and enhance the diversity of the insurgency as references to WeethePeople are numerous. Fortunately the Feds do have a handle on the whole operation and regardless of the seeming tolerance of BIFU activities including their liberating of 80 acres of grazing land yesterday, the FBI probably has a good eye on the situation.

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Hi Y’all  I’m in my whole armor, protecting sovereign land for Lebensraum

They could be dismissed as a nuisance, a loose network of individuals living in the United States who call themselves “sovereign citizens” and believe that federal, state, and local governments operate illegally. Some of their actions, although quirky, are not crimes. The offenses they do commit seem minor, including regularly false license plates, driver’s licenses, and even currency…

The sovereign-citizen threat likely will grow as the nationwide movement is fueled by the Internet, the economic downturn, and seminars held across the country that spread their ideology and show people how they can tap into funds and eliminate debt through fraudulent methods. As sovereign citizens’ numbers grow, so do the chances of contact with law enforcement and, thus, the risks that incidents will end in violence. Law enforcement and judicial officials must understand the sovereign-citizen movement, be able to identify indicators, and know how to protect themselves from the group’s threatening tactics.

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“Put On The Whole Armor of God” Ephesians 6: 13-17 t-shirts & tactical gear

 

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