Why Are Things As They Are?

We Say Fightback!

The core issue of our time is the reality of the promise of perpetual war and escalating inequality met by the potential of a mass, activist, class conscious movement to transform both daily life and the system of capitalism itself.
Such a movement may be more democratic than not, internally, but in the US it will have to be forged by a relatively small group of dedicated people with unmeasureable energy who have a grasp of what class war, and imperialist war, is, as well as the grand strategy, strategy, and tactics of insurgent resistance struggling with and fighting against a vacillating majority now witlessly won to fascism, participating in the construction of their own oppression. richgibson.com/LiveAsLambsAmongWolves.pdf

The Little Red Schoolhouse

“The task of teachers, those obscure soldiers of civilization, is to give to people the intellectual means to revolt.” Louise Michel, anarchist and Paris Communard.

New Boss Of Mich Bad Bank Failing Schools: what we have here is a failure of Mindset (not capitalism) : Teachers have a tendency to teach to the “whole” instead of the individual child, he said.
“That mindset needs to change. All 25 kids in classroom will need to have differentiated instruction to overcome deficiencies they have. That is something that does not occur in public education,” he said…Arthur Benson, a Kansas City school board member since 2008, said Covington did a terrific job there.
“Covington came in and addressed everything. He closed schools, cut $50 million from the budget, brought in Teach for America,” Benson said.
“He didn’t renew many teacher contracts, he started firing a lot of tenured teachers for cause. A lot of these were crappy teachers. He moved a lot of principals out and brought a lot in.”
Covington’s contract has upset Detroit’s teachers union. Its members were ordered to take a 10 percent pay cut this summer to help DPS reduce a $327 million deficit.
Covington will make $225,000 in his first year, plus a $175,000 signing bonus. He could make more than $1.6 million over four years..  http://www.detnews.com/article/20110901/SCHOOLS/109010401/Covington–Teachers-need-a-new-mindset

School Embedded in Capitalism: In Michigan, Tourism Trumps School Start (and MEAP Prep) Tourism operators love Michigan’s law that keeps schools from opening until after Labor Day, saying it has added one to three weeks to the season and boosted revenues 25 percent.
But the late start means teachers have fewer weeks to prepare kids for the Michigan Education Assessment Program tests that determine if schools make Annual Yearly Progress or are failing under federal and state laws. The tests start Oct. 11 this year www.detnews.com/article/20110903/SCHOOLS/109030351/1026/School-leaders-get-little-support-for-earlier-start

Is Test Prep,  Prep, Prep, Prep, Prep–cheating? Or just more school stupidity?

Teachers at Sweetwater High School who had just given standardized tests to most of their students went on to teach a five-day, 20-hour intervention course during spring break for 226 low-performers.
The struggling students, pulled from initial testing in their weakest subject, took their exams in that subject after special training.
Administrators credit the intervention and other innovations with helping bring about a marked increase in scores. Still, an anonymous complaint was filed with the state saying the additional instruction amounted to illegal test preparation.  http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2011/sep/02/mid-testing-classes-aided-sweetwater-gains/

A Forewarning to Detroit and Mich Teachers from a KC educator about the New Boss, Covington: Within one year of hire and less than a year of his start date in July, 2009, Covington had hammered out his “Right-sizing Plan” set to transform the district in three phases. Phase 1 began immediately with the announcement that half of all the schools in the district would be shuttered and with half of all “support” staff (custodians, secretaries, etc.) fired…richgibson.com/covington.htm

Monarchy To Teachers: Beat those Kids so they Stop Rioting—and get some real Men! n response to the recent riots British schools have allowed for the return of corporal punishment. The use of force and other harsh penalties is now allowed by the British government.
Such punishments, according to Education Minister Michael Gove will help “restore the authority of adults,” after the riots in London.
The Minister also said that he would like to attract more men to work in schools as teachers, especially in the elementary grades so that they could demonstrate strength.
This fall the government plans to begin a program to attract former military officers to schools.  http://english.ruvr.ru/2011/09/02/55534909.html Above, Parasitical Monarch fearful of kiddies

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

Geronimo is Winning Two of bin Laden’s wives had placed themselves in front of him. Amal al-Fatah, bin Laden’s fifth wife, was screaming in Arabic. She motioned as if she were going to charge; the SEAL lowered his sights and shot her once, in the calf. Fearing that one or both women were wearing suicide jackets, he stepped forward, wrapped them in a bear hug, and drove them aside. He would almost certainly have been killed had they blown themselves up, but by blanketing them he would have absorbed some of the blast and potentially saved the two SEALs behind him. In the end, neither woman was wearing an explosive vest.

A second SEAL stepped into the room and trained the infrared laser of his M4 on bin Laden’s chest. The Al Qaeda chief, who was wearing a tan shalwar kameez and a prayer cap on his head, froze; he was unarmed. “There was never any question of detaining or capturing him—it wasn’t a split-second decision. No one wanted detainees,” the special-operations officer told me. (The Administration maintains that had bin Laden immediately surrendered he could have been taken alive.) Nine years, seven months, and twenty days after September 11th, an American was a trigger pull from ending bin Laden’s life. The first round, a 5.56-mm. bullet, struck bin Laden in the chest. As he fell backward, the SEAL fired a second round into his head, just above his left eye. On his radio, he reported, “For God and country—Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo.” After a pause, he added, “Geronimo E.K.I.A.”—“enemy killed in action.”   www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/08/110808fa_fact_schmidle?currentPage=all

Syed Saleem Shazad: Al-Qaeda was 100 percent sure that once Washingto declared war on AQ, the ruling regimes in the Middle East would have no option but to align themselves with Washington. The 9/11 attacks were organized for a particular purpose: to provoke the United States and bring it into the Afghan trap. A Muslim backlash was certain to follow, and eventually this would lead to a direct confrontation between the West and the Muslim World. ..Victory against the West required a long struggle, planning, a winning war strategy….the second most important objective …in the wake of 9/11 and the retaliation to it was to discredit the ruling Muslim regimes by bringing up the inherent contradictions in their political alliances with the West…it would be a slow and tedious process…(Inside Al Qaeda and the Taliban p138).

www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF_QtA78kVA

Chalmers Johnson: Going bankrupt: The US’s greatest threat, January 24, 2008

There are three broad aspects to our debt crisis. First, in the current fiscal year (2008) we are spending insane amounts of money on “defense” projects that bear no relationship to the national security of the United States. Simultaneously, we are keeping the income tax burdens on the richest segments of the American population at strikingly low levels.
Second, we continue to believe that we can compensate for the accelerating erosion of our manufacturing base and our loss of jobs to foreign countries through massive military expenditures – so-called “military Keynesianism”, which I discuss in detail in my book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. By military Keynesianism, I mean the mistaken belief that public policies focused on frequent wars, huge expenditures on weapons and munitions, and large standing armies can indefinitely sustain a wealthy capitalist economy. The opposite is actually true.
Third, in our devotion to militarism (despite our limited resources), we are failing to invest in our social infrastructure and other requirements for the long-term health of our country. These are what economists call “opportunity costs”, things not done because we spent our money on something else. Our public education system has deteriorated alarmingly. We have failed to provide health care to all our citizens and neglected our responsibilities as the world’s number one polluter. Most important, we have lost our competitiveness as a manufacturer for civilian needs – an infinitely more efficient use of scarce resources than arms manufacturing. Let me discuss each of these. www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JA24Ak04.html

The Problem of the Geronimo/Osama Subject Dissected in context: 60 Minutes: “When was the first indication that you had found the right place, that bin Laden was in there?”
President Obama: “There was a point before folks had left, uh, before we had gotten everybody back on the helicopter and were flying, uh, back to base, where, uh, they said, uh, ‘Geronimo, uh, is, uh, has been killed, and Geronimo was the code name for bin Laden’.”
Now the issue becomes one of interpretation. The analogy takes the story of Geronimo and associates it with the story of Osama bin Laden. They were both hunted and pursued by the military forces of the United States. They both successfully eluded capture for a lengthy period of time.
There are problems with the analogy. Geronimo was never captured; he formally surrendered to General Nelson A. Miles, under specific terms of surrender, and was shipped off to St. Augustine, Florida. He was eventually permitted to go to Fort Sill (the U.S. military fort, not the present day town) in the Indian Territory (now called the State of Oklahoma). He finally died there in his nineties, while officially still a U.S. prisoner of war. (In 1918, Prescott Bush and some Yale classmates, who were fellow Skull and Bones members, claimed to have robbed Geronimo’s grave and stolen his skull for ritual purposes.)
According to the late esteemed political scientist Chalmers Johnson, Osama bin Laden was “a former protégé of the United States.” Johnson further explained: “When America was organizing Afghan rebels against the USSR in the 1980’s, [bin Laden] played an important role in driving the Soviet Union from Afghanistan and only turned against the United States in 1991 because he regarded the stationing of American troops in his native Saudi Arabia during and after the Persian Gulf War as a violation of his religious beliefs.” (Source: Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, 2001, pp. 10-11).
Johnson concludes his comments about bin Laden in Blowback by writing: “Thus, the attacks on our embassies in Africa, if they were indeed his work, are an instance of blowback rather than unprovoked terrorism. Instead of bombing sites in Sudan and Afghanistan in response, the United States might have better have considered reducing or removing our large-scale and provocative military presence in Saudi Arabia.” (Ibid.)
Given that Geronimo was never a protégé of or supported by the United States against some invading power such as the Republic of Mexico, a comparison between the two men on this score is inaccurate. But there also may be an unintended irony in the analogy that emerges by comparing the imperial contexts of the two stories. That context is pinpointed by the concept and hubris of the American Empire, which Chalmers Johnson wrote so brilliantly about in his last three books: The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, 2004; Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, 2007; and Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope, 2010.  http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/ict_sbc/geronimo-was-the-code-name-for-bin-laden/

We Have not Forgotten the Highway of Death (and neither have they)

New York Times reporter Maureen Dowd wrote, “With the Iraqi leader facing military defeat, Mr. Bush decided that he would rather gamble on a violent and potentially unpopular ground war than risk the alternative: an imperfect settlement hammered out by the Soviets and Iraqis that world opinion might accept as tolerable.” In short, rather than accept the offer of Iraq to surrender and leave the field of battle, Bush and the U.S. military strategists decided simply to kill as many Iraqis as they possibly could while the chance lasted. A Newsweek article on Norman Schwarzkopt, titled “A Soldier of Conscience” (March 11,1991), remarked that before the ground war the general was only worried about “How long the world would stand by and watch the United States pound the living hell out of Iraq without saying, ‘Wait a minute – enough is enough.’ He [Schwarzkopf] itched to send ground troops to finish the job.” The pretext for massive extermination of Iraqi soldiers was the desire of the U.S. to destroy Iraqi equipment. But in reality the plan was to prevent Iraqi soldiers from retreating at all. Powell remarked even before the start of the war that Iraqi soldiers knew that they had been sent to Kuwait to die. Rick Atkinson of the Washington Post reasoned that “the noose has been tightened” around Iraqi forces so effectively that “escape is impossible” (February 27, 1991). What all of this amounts to is not a war but a massacre.  http://deoxy.org/wc/wc-death.htm

A Quick Bibliography  on September 11, 2001 and Beyond:

Steve Coll: Ghost Wars

Paul Fitzgerald: Afghanistan’s Untold Story

Philip Gourevitch & Errol Morris: Standard Operating Procedure

Hodson: Under a Sickle Moon, a Journey Through Afghanistan

Hopkirk: The Great Game, The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia

Chalmers Johnson: The Nemesis Trilogy

Rahul Mahajan: The New Crusade

Alia Malek: Patriot Aces: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice

Lila Rajiva:The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American Media

Ahmed Rashid: Taliban; Jihad; Descent Into Chaos

Research Unit for Political Economy: Behind the Invasion of Iraq

Shazad: Inside Al Qaeda and the Taliban

Waller: Beyond the Khyber Pass, the Road to British Disaster in Afghanistan

DVD Reminder: Sir No Sir

Full online Sir No Sir version video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4045645915938136883

Perhaps only available on VHS, the story of the lost Russian Tank (historical fiction) The Beast

An online Basic: The US Base Structure Report: www.defense.gov/pubs/pdfs/2009Baseline.pdfThis understates the number, omitting the bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the forthcoming one in Yemen. Also not listed are foreign bases that grant access rights to the US military. The 2009 BSR claimed 4,742 bases in the US, 121 in our territories, and 716 foreign. Some have estimated the foreign bases as nearer to 1,000.

and, of course, Marx: Capital; The Communist Manifesto

Lenin: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism; State and Revolution

Al Syzmakski: Imperialism; The Capitalist State and the Politics of Class.

Robert Fisk on the Dishonest Literature of September 11 2001 and The Motive: But I’m drawn to Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan whose The Eleventh Day confronts what the West refused to face in the years that followed 9/11. “All the evidence … indicates that Palestine was the factor that united the conspirators – at every level,” they write. One of the organisers of the attack believed it would make Americans concentrate on “the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel”. Palestine, the authors state, “was certainly the principal political grievance … driving the young Arabs (who had lived) in Hamburg”.    http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-for-10-years-weve-lied-to-ourselves-to-avoid-asking-the-one-real-question-2348438.html

Chris Hedges on The Empire’s Strikes on Libya: Once the Libyans realize what the Iraqis and Afghans have bitterly discovered—that we have no interest in democracy, that our primary goal is appropriating their natural resources as cheaply as possible and that we will sacrifice large numbers of people to maintain our divine right to the world’s diminishing supply of fossil fuel—they will hate us the way we deserve to be hated. Libya has the ninth largest oil reserves in the world, which is why we react with moral outrage and military resolve when Gadhafi attacks his citizens, but ignore the nightmare in the Congo, where things for the average Congolese are far, far worse. It is why the puppets in the National Transitional Council have promised to oust China and Brazil from the Libyan oil fields and turn them over to Western companies. The unequivocal message we deliver daily through huge explosions and death across the occupied Middle East is: We have everything and if you try and take it away from us we will kill you.  http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/libya_here_we_go_again_20110905/

The international Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

When the BBC References MARX, something is Afoot (a specter is haunting…) As a side-effect of the financial crisis, more and more people are starting to think Karl Marx was right. The great 19th Century German philosopher, economist and revolutionary believed that capitalism was radically unstable.  …More and more people live from day to day, with little idea of what the future may bring. Middle-class people used to think their lives unfolded in an orderly progression. But it’s no longer possible to look at life as a succession of stages in which each is a step up from the last…..As capitalism has advanced it has returned most people to a new version of the precarious existence of Marx’s proles. Our incomes are far higher and in some degree we’re cushioned against shocks by what remains of the post-war welfare state.
But we have very little effective control over the course of our lives, and the uncertainty in which we must live is being worsened by policies devised to deal with the financial crisis. Zero interest rates alongside rising prices means you’re getting a negative return on your money and over time your capital is being eroded.
The situation of many younger people is even worse. In order to acquire the skills you need, you’ll have to go into debt. Since at some point you’ll have to retrain you should try to save, but if you’re indebted from the start that’s the last thing you’ll be able to do. Whatever their age, the prospect facing most people today is a lifetime of insecurity. …This state of perpetual unrest is the permanent revolution of capitalism and I think it’s going to be with us in any future that’s realistically imaginable. We’re only part of the way through a financial crisis that will turn many more things upside down.
Currencies and governments are likely to go under, along with parts of the financial system we believed had been made safe. The risks that threatened to freeze the world economy only three years ago haven’t been dealt with. They’ve simply been shifted to states.
Whatever politicians may tell us about the need to curb the deficit, debts on the scale that have been run up can’t be repaid. Almost certainly they will be inflated away – a process that is bound to be painful and impoverishing for many.
The result can only be further upheaval, on an even bigger scale. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14764357

Solidarity Forever

From Susan Ohanian: Chicago AFT’s Lewis Declares Unity with Bosses and Common Core: …announced plans to implement the Common Core State Standards curriculum, a national initiative to improve student performance in key subjects such as math and reading by favoring comprehension and analysis over rote memorization. . . . And worse. . . The article continues:
. . . Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis said Tuesday that the state standards curriculum adds a “breadth and depth” of instruction that has eroded away in this era of high-stakes testing.
“We know how important it is for our students to not just skim the surface, but to dig deep and do some really good work,” Lewis said. “We’re very excited about this.”
Lewis said the union recently received a grant from the American Federation of Teachers to develop lesson plans for the state standards curriculum that would be introduced this year, including a component for English Language Learners. “We want people to understand, there are no silver bullets, there are no magic bullets (in education),” Lewis said. “The best way to roll these things out is to work together.” … David Coleman’s two hour Bringing the Common Core to Life, presentation at the New York State Education building, April 28, 2011. Coleman points to his alliance with the AFT:
There is no voice in these standards stronger than the voice of teachers who demanded that we focus on what matters most and provide the time for teachers to teach and for students to practice. That includes formal organizations like the UFT in New York City and the AFT statewide and NYSUT, who are deeply(CTU pickied up a $600,00 grant for this, from the Gates gang and AFT) much more at susanohanian.org/show_research.php?id=438

Fake Labor Day: AFL-CIO +Obamagogue Mamage Decay + Get Ranks to Chant, “Oppress Us Best! Oppress us Better and Longer! ” Throughout the speech, the union crowd kept chanting “four more years.”  http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/09/05/business/AP-US-Obama.html?hp (in the speech, a great Freudian slip from the demagogue, Obama, “if the Republicans want to save our Company…” not country, but company: the corporate state defined).

One More Time, Unionites, Concessions Don’t Save Jobs. It’s like giving blood to sharks. More! The Farmington Public Schools Board of Education today announced it has ratified a two-year teacher contract with its teachers union that will save the district nearly $9 million.
The new agreement between the board and the Farmington Education Association, which represents about 900 district teachers, calls for a 20 percent employee contribution for health care benefits, a freeze in wage increases and a freeze in the progression of the wage step schedule.
The agreement covers the 2011-12 and 2012-13 school years. Officials say the contract represents a 5 percent reduction in total compensation and benefits for the teacher group.  http://www.detnews.com/article/20110901/METRO02/109010447/1026/schools/New-Farmington-teacher-pact-to-save-$9M-over-2-years

Spy versus Spy

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjVI8q0Sk2o

Gadaffi and the CIA/MI6, Hugs to Bombs: Documents found at the abandoned office of Libya’s former spymaster appear to provide new details of the close relations the Central Intelligence Agency shared with the Libyan intelligence service — most notably suggesting that the Americans sent terrorism suspects at least eight times for questioning in Libya despite that country’s reputation for torture. www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/world/africa/03libya.html?_r=2&hp

Juan Cole and the CIA? Juan Cole is a brand name that is no longer trusted. And that has been the case for some time for the Professor from Michigan. After warning of the “difficulties” with the Iraq War, Cole swung over to ply it with burning kisses on the day of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. His fervor was not based on Saddam Hussein’s fictional possession of weapons of mass destruction but on the virtues of “humanitarian imperialism.”
Thus on March 19, 2003, as the imperial invasion commenced, Cole enthused on his blog: “I remain (Emphasis mine.) convinced that, for all the concerns one might have about the aftermath, the removal of Saddam Hussein and the murderous Baath regime from power will be worth the sacrifices that are about to be made on all sides.” Now, with over 1 million Iraqis dead, 4 million displaced and the country’s infrastructure destroyed, might Cole still echo Madeline Albright that the price was “worth it”? Cole has called the Afghan War “the right war at the right time” and has emerged as a cheerleader for Obama’s unconstitutional war on Libya and for Obama himself.
Cole claims to be a man of the left and he appears with painful frequency on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now as the reigning “expert” on the war on Libya. This is deeply troubling – on at least two counts. First, can one be a member of the “left” and also an advocate for the brutal intervention by the Great Western Powers in the affairs of a small, relatively poor country? Apparently so, at least in Democracy Now’s version of the “left.” Second, it appears that Cole’s essential function these days is to convince wavering progressives that the war on Libya has been fine and dandy. But how can such damaged goods as Cole credibly perform this marketing mission so vital to Obama’s war? www.counterpunch.org/2011/08/30/meet-professor-juan-cole-consultant-to-the-cia/

Magical Mystery Tour

Ireland: See No Evil and the Raping Goes Forward: The July report, the fourth in a series of scathing Irish government reports into sexual abuse by priests and evidence of a widespread cover-up, found that clergy members in the rural diocese of Cloyne had not acted on complaints against 19 priests from 1996 to as recently as 2009. The guidelines adopted by Irish bishops in 1996 required that abuse cases be reported to the police.
The report pointed a finger at Rome for encouraging bishops to ignore the reporting guidelines.
The report cited a confidential letter to the bishops of Ireland from the Vatican ambassador in 1997, in which he said that he had “serious reservations” about the child-protection guidelines, and that they violated canon law.
The Cloyne Report said that letter “effectively gave individual Irish bishops the freedom to ignore the procedures” and “gave comfort and support” to priests who “dissented from the stated Irish church policy.”  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/world/europe/04vatican.html?_r=1&hp

The Worst Thing in the History of the World

Workers Killing Workers in Detroit (and elsewhere) : The nights have been deadly: At least 38 people were shot and eight died from the first day of summer, June 21, to Aug. 21, in the 48205 ZIP code, a 6.5-square-mile slice of the city north of Coleman A. Young International Airport roughly bordered by Eight Mile, Hoover, Conner and Kelly.  http://www.detnews.com/article/20110902/METRO01/109020387/Cruel-summer-in-Detroit’s-deadliest-neighborhood

Confusion about Murdering Gay People: Prosecutors may face an uphill climb in retrying a former Oxnard middle school student who shot a gay classmate to death during a morning computer lab three years ago, a former district attorney said Friday.

“These are extremely difficult cases,” said Michael Bradbury, the longtime district attorney in Ventura County.

“The public may see a straightforward murder case, but this case is far more complex, firstly, because of the age of the defendant at the time of the act and, secondly, the manner in which he was raised by his parents, which was clearly dysfunctional and by all accounts horrific,” Bradbury said.
The raw emotions of the case make the outcome of a second trial “highly unpredictable,” the former prosecutor said.Jurors were unable to reach a decision in the case, even after 17 hours of deliberations and the option of convicting Brandon McInerney of murder or the less serious offense of voluntary manslaughter. A judge declared a mistrial Friday.  http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/09/a-2nd-trial-in-gay-slaying-case-could-be-risky-former-da-says-.html
Prosecutors vowed Friday to immediately retry McInerney for fatally shooting Larry King, a 15-year-old student who’d begun to wear makeup and women’s attire to school.

Best Thing in the History of the World

When a Moment of Self Help is Vital, This Works, sad to say: Two armed women who were targeted by criminals opened fire on their would-be assailants in separate incidents Thursday, police said.
A 70-year-old woman was inside her home in the 15700 block of Sorrento on the city’s northwest side at about 12:50 p.m. when two men — one of them described as between 15 and 18 years old — tried to break in through her window.
The woman was waiting for them, police said.
“The victim … fired shots,” according to the Detroit Police 24-hour crime report. “It is unknown if the shots took effect. The suspects fled.”
The woman was not injured, police said.
About two hours after the thwarted break-in, a 40-year-old woman got into a gunfight with two men who tried to carjack her, according to police.
The woman was driving her 2002 Chevrolet Impala with two companions, another woman and a man, when she parked in front of a local business at St. Clair and Warren on Detroit’s east side at around 2:50 p.m. Thursday. Police say two armed men approached the driver and demanded she surrender her vehicle.
At some point during the attempted carjacking, the suspects, one of whom was described as a 17-year-old boy, fired shots.  “(The) victim … returned fire,” the police report said. “It was unknown if any shots took effect.”
The would-be victims were not hurt.   www.detnews.com/article/20110903/METRO01/109030368/Women-took-action-against-would-be-assailants-in-separate-incidents