We Say Fight Back!

The Little Red Schoolhouse

Hand Middle School teacher likely to be fired for making pancakes during PSSAs

A teacher at Hand Middle School said he is being fired for serving whole-grain pancakes to his students while they took the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment last week.

Kyle Byler, who has taught eighth-grade social studies at Hand since 2013, said he was suspended without pay on April 10 after assistant Principal Marian Grill walked into Byler’s class and questioned why he was making breakfast for his students.

Byler had brought an electric griddle and made one whole-grain pancake for each test-taker to eat during the test, he said.

Within 24 hours, Byler, who parents have labeled as the “eighth-grade dad” at Hand, was called into a meeting with administrators and told he’d be terminated for causing a distraction during PSSA testing, he said.

“I don’t understand what I did wrong, to be honest with you. There was no infraction whatsoever,” Byler, 38, said in a phone interview on Monday. “At no point was it any distraction for any of the students. They worked their butts off.”

According to the Pennsylvania Department of Education, there is no rule against serving or preparing food during the PSSAs; however, “those activities would likely interfere with ‘actively monitoring’ the assessment, which is a key task,” spokeswoman Nicole Reigelman said.

School District of Lancaster officials had no comment Monday, saying in an email that it’s a personnel matter.

Alizea Rodriguez, 14, said the only distraction was when Grill entered the classroom.

‘Mr. Byler is an excellent teacher. To lose him would be a terrible injustice to his students, his co-workers and the community.’

lancasteronline.com/news/local/hand-middle-school-teacher-likely-to-be-fired-for-making/article_f0e9a46e-41b9-11e8-a943-47e429d3a4fa.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=user-share

Las Vegas (Clark County) EA will vote to leave NEA, or not, on April 25

ccea-nv.org/dev/wordpress/

Professor’s Tweet That Barbara Bush Was an ‘Amazing Racist’ Ignites a Fury

A professor of English at California State University at Fresno sparked outrage on Tuesday by tweeting that the former first lady Barbara Bush was an “amazing racist” who raised a “war criminal.”

Randa Jarrar, a tenured professor who is on leave this semester, wrote that she would never be fired because she has tenure and free-speech rights. She encouraged anyone who objected to contact the university’s president. They did, in droves.

The president, Joseph I. Castro, issued a statement offering condolences to the Bush family on the former first lady’s death and saying Jarrar was commenting as a private citizen, not as a representative of Fresno State….

“A professor with tenure does not have blanket protection to say and do what they wish,” Castro said. “We are all held accountable for our actions.”

Screen shots of Jarrar’s comments were captured and shared on Twitter before she made her account private, with a note that she is on leave from Fresno State and the opinions are her own. In one, she wrote, “Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal.”  www.chronicle.com/article/Professor-s-Tweet-That/243158

Amazing Racist Bush on Katrina Refugees

“Almost everyone I’ve talked to says, ‘We’re going to move to Houston.’ What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality.

And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them.”

A rouge prof has a message for the Orange Caligula

 

Palm Beach County’s public school administrators are ruling out raises for teachers and other employees this year after state lawmakers required that nearly all new education money be spent on beefing up school security and mental health services.

In an unusual move, leaders of the school district said this week that they could not set aside any money for employee raises in their tentative spending plan for the new school year, arguing that rising costs and a dearth of new money make substantial pay hikes virtually impossible. Teachers have received a 3.2 percent average increase in the current year.

“The outlook is poor,” said Mike Burke, the district’s chief financial officer. However, he did not rule out raises entirely.

The county’s largest employer occasionally claims to have little to no money for employee raises, then finds money once union contract negotiations begin. But this year the district’s refrain is being echoed around the state as school leaders assess the fallout from the state’s decision to bolster school security in the wake of the Parkland school massacre in February.

“To give some people raises we’d have to lay people off, given the funding we have,” the chief financial officer of Broward County schools told the Sun-Sentinel this week.

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

The Warrior at the Mall

 Skipper of the amphibious warship Somerset relieved of duties

The Navy has fired the commander of the amphibious warship Somerset following an investigation into concerns about his command climate.

“The commanding officer of USS Somerset was relieved of his duties April 12, due to loss of confidence in his ability to effectively lead and carry out assigned duties,” wrote Coronado-based Naval Surface Forces spokesman Lt. Andrew R. Degarmo in an email to The San Diego Union-Tribune.

Rear Adm. Cedric Pringle, commander of Expeditionary Strike Group 3, removed Capt. William Sherrod following a probe into command climate concerns that were not tied to any one event, Degarmo said.

Formerly the Somerset’s executive officer, Sherrod, 45, “fleeted up” to take command of the San Antonio-class warship on Nov. 2.

Sherrod has been temporarily reassigned to the command staff of North Island-based Naval Air Forces. He did not return telephone calls from the Union-Tribune seeking comment.  www.sandiegouniontribune.com/military/sd-me-somerset-skipper-20180417-story.html

www.facebook.com/EL4JC/videos/712694555788118/?t=71

 In Syria, militias armed by the Pentagon fight those armed by the CIA

Syrian militias armed by different parts of the U.S. war machine have begun to fight each other on the plains between the besieged city of Aleppo and the Turkish border, highlighting how little control U.S. intelligence officers and military planners have over the groups they have financed and trained in the bitter five-year-old civil war.

The fighting has intensified over the last two months, as CIA-armed units and Pentagon-armed ones have repeatedly shot at each other while maneuvering through contested territory on the northern outskirts of Aleppo, U.S. officials and rebel leaders have confirmed.

In mid-February, a CIA-armed militia called Fursan al Haq, or Knights of Righteousness, was run out of the town of Marea, about 20 miles north of Aleppo, by Pentagon-backed Syrian Democratic Forces moving in from Kurdish-controlled areas to the east.

“Any faction that attacks us, regardless from where it gets its support, we will fight it,” Maj. Fares Bayoush, a leader of Fursan al Haq, said in an interview.

Rebel fighters described similar clashes in the town of Azaz, a key transit point for fighters and supplies between Aleppo and the Turkish border, and on March 3 in the Aleppo neighborhood of Sheikh Maqsud.

The attacks by one U.S.-backed group against another come amid continued heavy fighting in Syria and illustrate the difficulty facing U.S. efforts to coordinate among dozens of armed groups that are trying to overthrow the government of President Bashar Assad, fight the Islamic State militant group and battle one another all at the same time.

“It is an enormous challenge,” said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who described the clashes between U.S.-supported groups as “a fairly new phenomenon.”

“It is part of the three-dimensional chess that is the Syrian battlefield,” he said.

The area in northern Syria around Aleppo, the country’s second-largest city, features not only a war between the Assad government and its opponents, but also periodic battles against Islamic State militants, who control much of eastern Syria and also some territory to the northwest of the city, and long-standing tensions among the ethnic groups that inhabit the area, Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen.

“This is a complicated, multi-sided war where our options are severely limited,” said a U.S. official, who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter.  www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-cia-pentagon-isis-20160327-story.html

U.S. has no evidence of Syrian use of sarin gas, Mattis says

The U.S. has no evidence to confirm reports from aid groups and others that the Syrian government has used the deadly chemical sarin on its citizens, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Friday.

“We have other reports from the battlefield from people who claim it’s been used,” Mattis told reporters at the Pentagon. “We do not have evidence of it.”

He said he was not rebutting the reports.

“We’re looking for evidence of it, since clearly we are dealing with the Assad regime that has used denial and deceit to hide their outlaw actions,” Mattis said.

Syrian President Bashar Assad denies his government has used chemical weapons. www.pbs.org/newshour/world/u-s-has-no-evidence-of-syrian-use-of-sarin-gas-mattis-says

Use of this gas IS a War Crime

Officials Confirm That Trump Bombed Syria to Validate His Tweets

Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump

Last week, the United States launched an act of war against a sovereign government because failing to do so would have cast doubt on the credibility of the statements that Donald Trump makes while livetweeting Fox & Friends.

That may sound like hyperbolic snark, or the premise of an Andy Borowitz column, but it is a plain description of the rationale behind last Friday’s missile strikes in Syria, according to multiple military and administration officials.

Last Tuesday — amid reports that the U.S. was considering a strike against the Assad regime, in response to an alleged chemical weapons attack against civilians in Douma — Russia’s ambassador to Lebanon Alexander Zasypkin warned that “if there is a US missile attack, we … will shoot down U.S. rockets and even the sources that launched the missiles.”

The Fox & Friends morning crew took exception to this bluster, with one host arguing, “What we should be doing is telling the Russians, ‘Every Syrian military base is a target and if you’re there, it is your problem.’”  twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/984022625440747520?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fnymag.com%2Fdaily%2Fintelligencer%2F2018%2F04%2Fthe-u-s-bombed-syria-last-week-to-validate-trumps-tweets.html&tfw_creator=ericlevitz&tfw_site=intelligencer

www.facebook.com/RTUKnews/videos/1931692023787338/

U.S. Nuclear Submarine That Attacked Syria ‘Not Welcome’ Back to Naples, Italy

The U.S. nuclear submarine that took part in a series of missile strikes conducted by U.S., French and U.K. warships and warplanes against suspected Syrian chemical weapons sites is not welcome near the waters of one of Italy’s largest seaports, according to the city’s mayor.

Naples Mayor Luigi de Magistris wrote last week to Rear Admiral Arturo Faraone, head of the city’s port authority, complaining that the official had given permission to allow Virginia-class submarine USS John Warner to pass through the Gulf of Naples on March 20, following a two-week exercise by Western military alliance NATO. Magistris argued that he had designated the city a “denuclearized zone” in a 2015 act that sought to “prohibit docking and parking of any vessel that is nuclear-powered or contains nuclear weapons” and declared Naples a “city of peace,” according to Italian newspaper La Repubblica.  www.newsweek.com/us-nuclear-submarine-attacked-syria-not-welcome-italy-889625

Taiwan calls Chinese military drills a threat to region

Taiwan’s government said Thursday that recent Chinese military drills are aimed at intimidating the island and are a threat to regional peace and stability.

China is attempting to “pressure and harass Taiwan and seek to raise tensions between the sides and in the region,” the Cabinet-level Mainland Affairs Council said on its website.

“Taiwan’s people are very clear about this and will not accept it. We are determined in our defense of our nation’s sovereignty and dignity and will absolutely not yield to military threats or inducements,” the statement said.

Underscoring the heightened tensions between the rivals, China’s Taiwan Affairs Office issued a new warning to Taipei on Thursday against taking further steps toward formal independence.

“Taiwan independence separatist activities pose the biggest actual threat to peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait,” spokesman Ma Xiaoguang was quoted as saying. “Any plots seeking to separate Taiwan from China are doomed to failure.”

Ma was responding to a question about whether an increase in Chinese air force training flights around Taiwan was a response to comments from Taiwanese Premier William Lai in parliament that he’s a “Taiwanese independence worker,” adding that Taiwan is a sovereign, independent nation. Ma offered no details.   abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/taiwan-calls-chinese-military-drills-threat-region-54575437

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

In Puerto Rico, Stadium Lights Glow, Homes Do Not

The major league baseball games this week between the Minnesota Twins and Cleveland Indians here had dual goals: to affirm the Puerto Rican government’s position that the island was open for business again after the devastation of Hurricane Maria seven months ago, and to showcase this American territory’s unique relationship with baseball.

And then lights across the island went out again.

The second and final game went on — the mayor of San Juan promised it would — but sitting in the stands on Wednesday, it was hard to miss the disparity: running on generators earlier in the day, Estadio Hiram Bithorn, the storied stadium where the games were played, was back on the power grid by game time, while across the highway, apartment buildings and businesses disappeared in the dark, save for a few lit windows.

Rather than anger, several people in and around the stadium, accustomed to months at home without electricity and perhaps feeling a bit of the baseball fever that the games have engendered, shrugged at the imbalance of power.  www.nytimes.com/2018/04/18/sports/baseball/puerto-rico-baseball-blackout.html

New Medicaid Requirements Signals Trump Crackdown On Public Assistance Programs

Another potentially significant move by the president last week happened without any fanfare, an executive order he signed quietly to create work requirements for people receiving federal benefits such as food stamps and Medicaid. Now several states, including Kentucky, already require people who Medicaid to prove that they work. But so far, the courts have blocked those efforts. We wanted to hear more about this, so we called Diane Rowland of the Kaiser Family Foundation. She’s done extensive research into Medicaid and other health insurance programs.

DIANE ROWLAND: The executive order really says to each of the departments, including the Department of Health and Human Services, to go to any program that provides assistance to individuals who are low income and really enforce a work requirement in order for them to retain their benefits in that program. And it’s the first time that such a order would go to programs like Medicaid.  www.npr.org/2018/04/15/602665997/new-medicaid-requirements-signals-trump-crackdown-on-public-assistance-programs

The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement and The War on Reason

www.facebook.com/TheGuardiansOfDemocracy/videos/440795613001229/

Stephen Colbert and James Comey talk Trump and Russia over Pinot Noir (Full video)

Former FBI Director James Comey sat down with Stephen Colbert on Tuesday for a wide-ranging interview that touched on President Donald Trump, the Russia investigation and…red wine.

“When you were fired, you say in the book that when it was over, you flew back on a plane to the east coast drinking Pinot Noir in a paper cup,” Colbert said during a Tuesday afternoon taping of CBS’ “The Late Show.”

He then pulled out the bottle of wine and two paper cups and made a toast with Comey.

“To the truth,” he said.

CNN was granted exclusive access to the taping of the interview  money.cnn.com/2018/04/17/media/stephen-colbert-james-comey-interview/index.html

Solidarity for Never

‘They Eat Money’: How Mandela’s SACP-ANC Political Heirs Grow Rich Off Corruption

..Corruption has enriched A.N.C. leaders and their business allies — black and white South Africans, as well as foreigners. But the supposed beneficiaries of many government projects, in whose names the money was spent, have been left with little but seething anger and deepening disillusionment with the state of post-apartheid South Africa.

While poverty has declined since the end of apartheid, inequality has risen in a society that was already one of the world’s most unequal, according to a recent report by the World Bank and the South African government.

South Africa has a large, advanced economy, an aggressively free press and a wealth of independent organizations and scholars who keep a close watch on government malfeasance. But even with its vibrant democracy, in which the details of corruption schemes are routinely aired and condemned by the news media and opposition politicians, graft has engulfed the country. www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/world/africa/south-africa-corruption-jacob-zuma-african-national-congress.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

What if the absence of strong (fake) unions is at the heart of much of what has gone wrong?

Okay, I realize the question posed in the title sounds awfully sweeping and reductionist. “What has gone wrong” is surely, as the political scientists say, “over-determined,” meaning it has so many intertwining causes, it resists being pinned down the way my title suggests.

But stick with me for a moment. Or do so if this seems even slightly right to you: The striking teachers are presenting us with a teaching moment. They are pointing the way toward a society that is better than the one we have.

First, by “what has gone wrong,” I mean the erosion of institutions whose purpose is to even out inherent power imbalances that arise in all societies and are particularly steep in our current moment. When institutions such as the vote, the courts, labor standards, anti-discrimination laws, regulations against monopoly power and reckless finance, and anti-poverty policies are under siege, a significant swath of the public, and particularly nonwhites and those with low incomes, has little recourse against the actions of those who would disenfranchise them.

While the union movement has always had its problems — no institutions are immune from their own internal power imbalances — it has always existed, back to the guilds of the Middle Ages, as a counterfoil to dynamics that today take the form of rising inequality, the defunding of a government that is increasingly dysfunctional, nonrepresentative elections, and the unfettered rise of corporate power and finance.

How does this link to the teachers’ labor actions in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona and Kentucky — none of which are radical hot spots? The connections are critical, not just because they underscore the deep and pervasive social damage done by the growing imbalances, but because they crystallize these problems in ways in which we can all relate.

In Oklahoma, disinvestment in public schools has gone on for so long that volleyball games get rained out because of a leaky gym (and let me tell you with great authority that watching a high school volleyball game is one of life’s greatest pleasures). Textbooks and computers are ancient; one former teacher told of students “stuck with history textbooks so old that they say Bill Clinton is president.” Some districts have had to go to four-day weeks. Teachers’ salaries have, of course, been a key issue in these walkouts, but striking teachers have also insisted on reinvestment in support staff and overall funding for supplies and school infrastructure. www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/04/09/what-if-the-absence-of-strong-unions-is-at-the-heart-of-much-of-what-has-gone-wrong/?utm_term=.dd8ba3e1ed72

Oklahoma’s Teacher Walkout: How Did Something That Started So Right End So Wrong?

“We need to face reality.”

With those words from Oklahoma Education Association President Alicia Priest, the state’s nine-day teacher walkout essentially came to an end.

No one can deny that the economic situation for Oklahoma teachers is better than it was just a month ago. The threat of a strike pried a $6,000 annual raise from the Oklahoma legislature, an amount that would be substantial even in New York or California.

But that increase was approved before the walkout. As Priest called off the protests, reporters asked if additional benefits had been gained. She did not answer.

A lot of Oklahoma teachers were asking the same question. Priest’s announcement garnered hundreds of comments on the union’s Facebook page, most of them angry. Many of the commenters promised to drop their membership.

The sour taste left at the end of what was mostly a positive outcome for Oklahoma’s teachers was primarily due to the union’s shifting focus and lack of contingency planning.

OEA made four demands prior to the walkout. The biggest was a $10,000 increase for teachers over three years. Two days before the union’s action was set to begin, the legislature passed a $6,000 pay increase.

It’s tempting now to say the walkout should have been called off, but the increase was still short of OEA’s demand, the largest school districts were already on board to close schools, and the desire for a strike had a momentum of its own…

Having abandoned its goal, OEA now needed a face-saving way out. It had to wrest something from the legislature that it could sell as a sufficient reason to end the strike. The legislature did not comply, and the union’s support began to fragment.

The public employees union bailed out. School districts began to plan to reopen, with even the most supportive superintendents criticizing OEA’s strategy. It all led to a press conference announcing the end of the walkout that sounded more like a defeat than a victory.

Grassroots groups that organized independently of the unions vowed to continue their walkouts, but the OEA decision took most of the wind out of their sails. Besides, the grassroots groups had messaging problems of their own.  www.the74million.org/article/oklahomas-teacher-walkout-how-did-something-that-started-so-right-end-so-wrong/

above, former NEA president Reg Weaver was paid $686,949 for his last year in office.

Surefire Way for Teachers to Make a Six-Figure Salary

Go to work for your union.

Having combed through the IRS reports for the National Education Association and all of its state affiliates, I have amassed figures for their workforce I have not seen anywhere else before.

The union employed a total of 6,817 people in 2015-16 – using the IRS definition of employee, which is anyone who received a W-2 form that year. So it includes most temps and those who may have worked only a partial year. It also includes blue collar staff.

Nonetheless, a total of 1,637 NEA and state affiliate employees made more than $100,000 in salary alone. That’s 24 percent of the workforce.  www.eiaonline.com/intercepts/2018/04/17/surefire-way-for-teachers-to-make-a-six-figure-salary/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Intercepts+%28Intercepts%29

Gary Casteel, the UAW’s No. 2 leader, to retire (under federal investigation)

UAW Secretary-Treasurer Gary Casteel will not seek re-election and plans to retire when his current term ends in June.

His unexpected retirement comes amid a federal probe into the union and jointly operated training centers with the Detroit 3 automakers.

Casteel, 60, has not been formally named or charged with any crimes as part of the probe that initially centered on a training center between the union and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. According to a source familiar with the investigation, Casteel has not been a primary target of the U.S. probe, which federal prosecutors say involved $4.5 million in training center funds being illegally diverted to union and officials with FCA.

Incoming UAW boss was aboard $1,600

bus ride cited in scandal

Gary Jones, the presumptive incoming UAW president and a longtime union accountant, was witness — the union says unwittingly — to some of the spending during 2015 conventions in California that has drawn federal prosecutors’ attention in a festering scandal.

The Free Press has learned that Jones was among several passengers on a $1,600 ride from a transportation company that was cited in an indictment last month. Another passenger on the Palm Springs-to-San Diego trip was former UAW Vice President Norwood Jewell, who retired suddenly after his home was raided by FBI agents in November 2017.

Jewell is not among the seven people charged so far in the case, in which prosecutors say Fiat Chrysler Automobiles funneled money meant for autoworker training to UAW officers in an effort to influence contract negotiations.

No one has suggested that Jones was involved in improper conduct, and the union vigorously objects to any suggestion that he should have noticed anything amiss in Palm Springs. The union argues that hundreds of people were there and Jones had his own busy schedule.

Jones has declined repeated requests to talk with the Free Press.

In January 2015, he was among UAW officers at meetings held in the desert resort town where thousands in spending has been tied by federal prosecutors to corruption involving the Fiat Chrysler National Training Center, operated jointly by the auto company and the union.

Jones, a UAW regional director, is described as a detail-oriented accountant whose fastidious approach is just what the union needs in its top post as it seeks to move past the scandal.

A March criminal indictment of Nancy Adams Johnson, the union’s No. 2 negotiator with FCA, said she illegally spent thousands in training center money in Palm Springs that month on personal items such as golf clubs and fancy shoes; $4,587 for a meal at LG’s Prime Steak House; $6,900 at the Renaissance Resort & Spa; and the $1,600 trip to San Diego.

The presence of top officials in the company of someone who allegedly was improperly spending thousands of dollars caught investigators’ attention, the Free Press was told.   www.freep.com/story/money/cars/2018/04/20/uaw-gary-jones-california-fca/523484002/

UAW wins election at Harvard; student workers organize a new layer of Enemies

After a high-profile battle at one of the nation’s most prestigious universities, Harvard student workers have elected to join the UAW with 56% in favor of organizing.

The National Labor Relations Board tallied the ballots and declared Friday a vote of 1,931-1,523 in favor of joining the Harvard Graduate Students Union-United Auto Workers, ending a multi-year effort that included litigation.

Harvard officials were ordered in December 2017 to hold a new election after the labor board ruled voter lists provided a year earlier by the school were incomplete.

Aaron Bekemeyer, 28, of Bloomfield Hills, a Ph.D. student in history, noted that a great-grandfather of his worked in a Ford plant. Bekemeyer said it never occurred to him that he might experience UAW membership while working at Harvard, but “I was really happy to be able to continue the process of giving workers some democratic power in the workplace.”

With this latest vote, more than 15,000 academic workers across the Northeast have chosen UAW representation over the past four years, bringing the national total to 75,000 academic workers. They include adjunct professors, graduate teaching assistants and researchers based at the University of California, University of Washington, New York University, University of Connecticut, Boston College and The New School in New York and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.  www.freep.com/story/money/cars/2018/04/20/uaw-wins-election-harvard-student-workers-organize/537610002/

April 17, 1961 Bay of Pigs (next steo, Soviet Puppet caudillo nationalist)

Fidel Died and Raúl Resigned, but Castros Still Hold Sway in Cuba

For the first time in decades, Cubans have a president whose last name is not Castro.

But as the new president, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, who turns 58 on Friday, takes his first strides to govern an economically distressed country that is perennially in crisis, he will do so with a ring of Castros, and their various spouses and children, around him.

Fidel Castro died in 2016 at 90, and his eldest son, nicknamed Fidelito, killed himself this year. But Raúl Castro, who stepped down on Thursday after two terms as president, remains the leader of the Communist Party and the head of the armed forces. And other Castros run the intelligence services and the vast military conglomerate that manages most state business. One of them is Raúl Castro’s most trusted bodyguard. Another is a lawmaker who supports gay rights.  www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/world/americas/cuba-castros-communism.html

Fidel Castro: The CIA’s 7 Most Bizarre Assassination Attempts

Fidel Castro survived no fewer than 634 attempts on his life, according to his former secret service chief.

 

Whether that figure is accurate or not, Cuba’s iconic dictator provided an almost-mythical adversary for what became an obsessive, error-prone assassination campaign by the CIA.

The agency’s attempts to kill Castro ranged from the calamitous to the comical. Many of them were detailed by the Church Committee, a special Senate subcommittee headed by Decomcratic Sen. Frank Church in 1975.

Following Castro’s death Saturday, here are seven of the most remarkable.

1. The Exploding Cigar

www.nbcnews.com/storyline/fidel-castros-death/fidel-castro-cia-s-7-most-bizarre-assassination-attempts-n688951

Netflix Premieres 8-Part Original Documentary Series, ‘The Cuba Libre Story’

The Netflix Original titled “The Cuba Libre Story” weaves together over 50 exclusive interviews with experts and eyewitnesses of Cuban history – both from within and outside the island. The 8-episode series brings together followers and opponents of Fidel Castro and his predecessor Fulgencio Batista. Viewers will hear from Juan Antonio Rodriguez Menier, former chief of Castro’s secret service; Nikolai Leonov, head of the KGB in Latin America from 1953 onwards (and Vladimir Putin’s former boss and mentor); from Marita Lorenz, Castro’s former lover; and Carlos Calvo, Castro’s former bodyguard. We hear from Cynthia Duncan, granddaughter of Mafia boss Meyer Lansky; Leonardo Padura, Cuba’s most famous novelist; and Egon Krenz, East Germany’s last head of state and personal friend of the Castro brothers.

Thirty-Five Years of Comintern Publishing: A Balancesheet

The effort was inspired from the start by the belief that despite a vast transformation of the social and political environment, the ideas of the Communist International spoke to our times. The International’s early years marked a high point of revolutionary Marxism as a global force. Close to a million members were organized in dozens of political parties spread across every continent, coordinated by a leadership and publishing apparatus in Moscow in the newly established Soviet republic. Their influence was extended by allied organizations focused on youth, women, trade unions, anti-imperialist solidarity, defense of victims of oppression, and other fields of work.

At each of its world congresses, a multilingual team of stenographers took down a record of the proceedings, and by the 1921 congress they were publishing this material within ten days. Think of it as a Comintern version of YouTube, containing thousands of pages of published debates and documents. News bulletins went out every few days, backed up by a journal hundreds of pages long – and all of it in four languages.  portside.org/2018-04-14/thirty-five-years-comintern-publishing-balancesheet

Spy versus Spy

IN THE ENEMY’S HOUSE
The Secret Saga of the FBI Agent and the Code Breaker Who Caught the Russian Spies (and the bottomless lies of the CPUSA)
By Howard Blum
Illustrated. 317 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $29.99.

In writing about the events and the back story surrounding the espionage case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Howard Blum, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, seems at first glance to be going over well-trod territory. But “In the Enemy’s House” is not a mere rehash. Instead, it is an account of the two men who were principally responsible for tracking down the Rosenbergs: Robert Lamphere, an F.B.I. counterintelligence agent, and Meredith Gardner, the most experienced and able code-breaker working for the United States government.

Blum succeeds in making comprehensible the difficult story of how code-breakers unraveled a system of encrypted Soviet messages that eventually became known as the Venona files (and started being released in 1995). He has also managed to write a book that is not an academic work (although it is informed by a careful reading of numerous academic volumes) but a gripping detective thriller. The reader gets into the minds of the two men, accompanying them in the tense but eventually successful effort to uncover a major Soviet network. Blum bases his work on Lamphere’s own 1986 autobiography, “The FBI-KGB War: A Special Agent’s Story” (written with Tom Shachtman), together with interviews with Lamphere conducted by others, and also on many conversations with Gardner’s relatives, various F.B.I. files and personal papers from the two men’s families. He paints fascinating portraits of the “reticent, inaccessible” Gardner and of the meticulous Lamphere, who stayed on track though constantly challenged by his superiors.

Blum’s book is especially valuable in rebutting the dwindling few who still believe the Rosenberg case was about the government seeking to curb the civil liberties of dissenters.  www.nytimes.com/2018/04/10/books/review/howard-blum-in-the-enemys-house.html

How the CIA Tricked (bought) the World’s Best Writers

There’s a generation of lit mags that thought of themselves as apolitical. The Paris Review is one, maybe The Kenyon Review is another. They were influenced by the New Critics—less engagement with history and more engagement with the text. Anyway, flash-forward to maybe 2010, I think; I belatedly saw a New York Times story about Immy Humes’s film Doc, and there were those blurbs about The Paris Review’s alleged CIA ties, or Peter Matthiessen’s alleged CIA ties, and I thought, I’m interested in this. [Harold “Doc” Humes was a Paris Review co-founder, Immy Humes his daughter. Doc was released in 2008.] Why would an apolitical magazine interest the CIA?  www.thenation.com/article/cia-tricked-worlds-best-writers/

Perhaps better…

The Magical Mystery Tour

‘Shut Up, Satan’: Rome Course Teaches Exorcism, Even by Cellphone

Andrés Cárdenas sat in the back of the auditorium, opened his folder and took careful notes as a Catholic cardinal with decades of experience casting demons out of possessed bodies gave a master class on how to yell at the devil, rid Muslims of black magic and purge Satan on your cellphone.

Father Cárdenas, a Colombian priest, wrote vigorously as the 89-year-old instructor, Ernest Simoni, explained that although exorcisms — what he called “a spiritual scientific instrument” — can be practiced on Muslims, “they stayed Muslims after.”

Cardinal Simoni, who is Albanian, also said that fasting sometimes helped the possessed, but that often you had to play hardball with Beelzebub by saying things like “shut up, Satan.”

After jotting it all down, Father Cárdenas, 36, explained he had come to Rome to learn about exorcisms “because it is a gift” he wanted to share with his parishioners back in El Espinal. He was one of 300 Roman Catholics — mostly clerics but also lay men and women furnished with authorization letters from their bishops — to attend the 13th annual, weeklong “Exorcism and Prayer of Liberation” course that organizers hoped would recruit and train armies of potential exorcists to confront spreading demonic forces.

Participants paid about $372 (simultaneous translation was $309 extra) to attend the sessions, which were sponsored by conservative Catholic groups and held at the Pontifical University Regina Apostolorum, run by the conservative Legionaries of Christ religious order.

The would-be exorcists blamed the internet and atheism for what they see as a spike in evil, but the urgency evident in the course also seemed to have something to do with a growing conservative view that the church has gone astray under Pope Francis, and that end times had drawn nigh.

The pope recently had conservative heads spinning when he was quoted, incorrectly according to the Vatican, by an Italian reporter with credibility issues as not believing in hell. “Beyond what is tolerable,” the American cardinal Raymond Burke, a leader of the conservative resistance to Francis, said at the time.

In fact, the pope often speaks about the devil.  www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/world/europe/exorcism-catholic-church.html

End of the world 2018: David Meade breaks silence on April 23 APOCALYPSE DATE

THE end of the world could be at hand according to hordes of conspiracy theorists who are certain the apocalypse will start on April 23. Chief conspiracist David Meade has now spoken out to address the doomsday conspiracy fears.

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The Best and Worst Things in the History of the World

May 5 , 2018–200 years soon.

www.facebook.com/kaorazen/videos/10154282779161239/

If you’re celebrating International Dark Sky Week, Michigan is the place to be! Check out this amazing time-lapse shot last night at Tahquamenon Falls. If you look closely, you’ll see some action from the Lyrid meteor shower!

www.facebook.com/mlive/videos/10156449276888896/

So Long

Conservationist known as a caretaker for Kenya’s orphaned elephants dies at 83

• Conservationist Daphne Sheldrick died of breast cancer on April 12, according to the conservation organization she founded.
• Born in Kenya, she spent her life working to care for orphaned elephants in Kenya and fighting to save the species through her advocacy.
• She started the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, named for her husband, in 1977.

Conservationist known as a caretaker for Kenya’s orphaned elephants dies at 83