Veteran's Day Merchants of Death Tribunal, Bibi

Veterans for Peace, MerchantsofDeath.org, Veterans Day 2023; Amy Goodman (DemocracyNow.org, 11/10/23); Pfc. Sandoval, Ashley Wells, Sheldon S. (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Trump's Veteran's Day message draws comparisons to Nazi leader Adolph Hitler (msn.com)

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Save the children from Israel's IDF

Media company MeidasTouch reported that Trump "echoes Hitler nearly verbatim" in his calls to destroy the "vermin," or liberals.

Tristan Snell, a former assistant attorney general in New York, added his take, as well.

Specifically, Snell quoted, “This vermin must be destroyed. The Jews are our sworn enemies, and at the end of this year there will not be a Jew left in Germany.” — Hitler, 1939.

Former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger also pointed out the post. "Meh. He's going to jail," Kinzinger wrote. "American veterans deserve a not insane leader."

Journalist [and wit] Bill Grueskin said Trump's long-winded post is "a paragraph for readers who can't handle the subtle nuances of Mein Kampf," Hitler's book ["My Struggle"]. (MSN)

• Netanyahu's war cabinet turns against him [because] as Israel PM 'unfit to lead'
• More than 1,600 Jewish Harvard alumni threaten to STOP donations as campus antisemitism worries grow
• Israel kills three more Palestinian babies (born premature in Al-Shifa Hospital IDF has bombed, deprived of fuel, and now cleared of all occupants)
• Black candidate bails out of Republican race: Tim Scott, the lone Black Republican in the US Senate, ends White House bid
• Genocide in Gaza: A call to urgent global action (MSN)
• Trump unloads on 'puppet judge' [who already convicted him of fraud and is considering his punishment] immediately after decrying 'viciousness' in fraud trial

There are calls to bring Netanyahu to the ICC on war crime allegations (dailymail.co.uk)

I would never enlist and kill for a country. They had to draft me and make me entertain them.

Palestinian groups ask ICC to arrest Israeli PM Netanyahu for war crimes and genocide

(Democracy Now!) Nov. 10, 2023: DN! speaks with Palestinian human rights lawyer Noura Erakat about a new effort to hold Israel accountable at the International Criminal Court over the asymmetric atrocities in Gaza, where Israel's monthlong air bombardment and ground assault have killed more than 10,000 Palestinians.

VIDEO: Israel revises its death toll down, Gaza death toll way up; artillery heard in N. Israel

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US must hold US accountable.

On Wednesday, three Palestinian rights groups filed a lawsuit with the international body, urging it to investigate Israel for the crimes of genocide and apartheid. The petition also calls for arrest warrants to be issued for Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, President Isaac Herzog, and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. International inaction against Israeli aggression is part of "a systematic failure to hold Israel to account for decades," as well as the "absolute double standard" applied to war crimes committed against people of the Global South, says lawyer Erakat, who was part of a team of academics and activists who came together to support the ICC lawsuit. "This is not just a crisis of international legal institutions, but also a crisis of democratic — or so-called democratic — institutions in the countries in which we live." Support DN!'s work: democracynow.org/give. Latest Shows

• Holocaust survivors call on Hollywood's Steven Spielberg to be more pro-Jewish and condemn Hamas's massacre (msn.com)

Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal

What if we cancel criminal corporations?

U.S. weapons makers to be tried by war crimes. Tribunal begins Nov. 12, 2023.

Please join us on Sunday, November 12th, 2023 at 8:00 pm (EST) for the livestreamed opening session of the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal that is holding U.S. weapons manufacturers accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The first episode will focus on Israel's aerial bombardment against the human beings in Gaza, Palestine, a historical and monumental atrocity that could not happen at this time without U.S. aircraft, missiles, and bombs produced by three of the four defendants on trial before the Tribunal:

1. Lockheed Martin
2. Boeing
3. RTX (Raytheon).

• Register HERE for Merchants of Death

"We render you, corporations obsessed with war-profiteering, accountable, answerable!"

- Dr. Cornel West, Ph.D., Member of Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal

We fund them to fight Russia and MidEast

The Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal will hold accountable — through testimony of witnesses — U.S. weapons manufacturers who knowingly produce and sell products that attack and kill combatants and non-combatants equally well.

These U.S. manufacturers may have committed crimes against humanity and violated U.S. federal criminal laws. The Tribunal will hear the evidence and render a verdict. More (merchantsofdeath.org)

The CIA's secret war in Tibet

Staff Writer Paul Salopek (Chicago Tribune, reporting from Katmandu, Nepal, Jan. 26, 1997); Pfc. Sandoval, Ashley Wells, CC Liu, Seth Auberon (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

U.S. eagles are fun (wiki)

The first Americans Nawang Gayltsen ever saw had small, silver [Nazi-style] eagles pinned on their caps.

Mr. Gayltsen will never forget those eagles. They seemed auspicious, like totems of victory or success [or death from above]. Today, his face wrinkles into a sad smile remembering this.

The Americans came, he said, in a big turboprop plane, a gleaming machine that he and other awed Tibetans called a "sky ship." They wore sunglasses and baggy flight suits. They packed shiny [mass killing machines nicely called] automatic weapons on their hips. And speaking through an interpreter, they asked Gayltsen if he wanted to kill Chinese.

Wait, this is not what Hollywood told me.

"I told them I would be very happy to kill many Chinese," recalled the 63-year-old rug merchant, one of thousands of exiled Tibetans living in Nepal's picturesque Himalayan capital [Kathmandu].

"I was very young and strong then, very patriotic. I told them I would even be a suicide bomber."

The strangers, Air Force pilots working with the CIA, must have liked what they heard because on that hot day back in 1963, at a secret air base in India, they took Gayltsen and 40 other Tibetan recruits on the first airplane ride of their lives.

It was a journey that would stretch halfway around the world and into one of the murkiest chapters of the CIA's long history of covert activity in Asia: a secret war in Tibet.

[U.S.'s Secret War in Tibet]

Between the late 1950s and the mid-1960s, say Tibetan veterans such as Gaylsten and U.S. intelligence experts who corroborate their stories, the American government flew hundreds of eager Tibetan exiles to far-flung bases in Colorado (USA), Guam, and even Okinawa.

There they were trained as guerrillas against the Chinese troops who had invaded their remote [Mahayana] Buddhist kingdom in 1950.

The Tibetans, many recruited from the warrior Khamba tribe, were parachuted back into their homeland at night with submachine guns and neck [possibly heart-shaped] lockets with photos of the Dalai Lama, Tibet's [god-king] spiritual [and temporal] leader.

Some CIA trainees ended up commanding a Kiplingesque army of 2,000 [CIA assassins, the CIA euphemistically called] resistance fighters...

Their specialty was ambushing the People's Liberation Army from bases high in the cloudy mountains of Nepal [outside Tibet].

• [The USA loves war, and if you train with US, we'll teach all comers to kill and ruin people, too. Join the Empire. Come to the Dark Side, which we call the white side.]

Others dropped down through the moonlit skies of Central Asia [the Stans] never to be heard from again: At least 40 were presumed captured by the Chinese and [arrested or possibly] executed...

But what we do in Tibet stays in Tibet, right?

Today, this obscure U.S. Cold War skirmish in a high, lonely place many Americans associate with Shangri-La is a tale that both the CIA and the Dalai Lama's pacifist government-in-exile would prefer to forget. After all, China's grip on Tibet remains stronger than ever.

Yet at a time when the Dalai Lama's non-violent campaign for independence has captured the attention of Hollywood['s propaganda machine feeding the American public] -- where Walt Disney and Tri-Star are producing elegiac hymns to "lost Tibet" and Richard Gere and fellow actors champion the mountainous land's cause -- the Tibetan foot soldiers of that quixotic war are beginning to break their decades-old vow of silence to the CIA.

Most of the ex-guerrillas are grandfathers now. They run carpet factories in Katmandu or tend dusty farms [as forgotten exiles] in the foothills of western Nepal.

They admit that going public about their American connections is as much a sign of growing frustration with Tibet's languishing drive for freedom as it is a reckoning with mortality. For many, speaking out seemed a final act of resistance.

You work good with us! - Thank you, George.

"We are old, and we will be gone soon," explained Gaylsten, who says he was taught to blow up bridges by CIA instructors at Camp Hale, a now-abandoned U.S. Army base near Vail, Colorado.

"People should know that men died for this. These things are no longer secrets. They stopped being secrets when we lost."

Truth be told, little about the CIA's skullduggery in the Himalayas is a real secret anymore -- except maybe to the U.S. taxpayers who bankrolled it. More

• Dalai Lama's pro-CIA, anti-China brother dies in U.S. (Reuters, Sep 5, 2008) The Dalai Lama's brother, a Buddhist monk-turned-CIA "translator" who helped train pro-Tibetan murderers to become "resistance fighters" in an anti-Chinese guerrilla war in and around Tibet...
• Dalai Lama Escapes From Tibet: How and Why It Happened (Time, March 17, 2015) March 17, 1959: The Dalai Lama flees [Chinese-occupied] Tibet for asylum in India.

L.A. loses Los Angeles Times to billionaire

Editors, Wisdom Quarterly; Associated Press (ap.org)

Pedestrians look at news photos posted outside the LA Times building in DTLA. The paper is reporting its parent company is in talks to be sold to local billionaire physician Patrick Soon-Shiong. The sale is being negotiated by Tronc Inc. (formerly Tribune Publishing) for $500 million. Chicago-based Tronc owns 10 U.S. newspapers (AP).

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We still have the Pasadena Weekly, maybe OC

First it was the loss of our beloved LA Weekly (though many still haven't noticed) to a consortium of mysterious pockets, deep pockets who fired nearly everyone and kept the shell an goodwill (the intangible characteristics of a business like its name and reputation).

Now a Big Pharma billionaire has bought the struggling Los Angeles Times, not to save it but to put the final nail in its coffin. We can expect more drug ads and even less real news, with more bias and spin than McClatchey could ever give it.

Sale of LA Times to billionaire negotiated

LOS ANGELES, California - The owner of the Los Angeles Times is in talks [now completed] to sell the newspaper to a billionaire medical entrepreneur.

Who controls the media controls the money.

Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a major shareholder of parent company Tronc Inc. [formerly Tribune Publishing], would pay $500 million for the newspaper and the San Diego Union-Tribune, a person with knowledge of the deal told the Associated Press (ap.org) on Tuesday [Feb. 6, 2018] after word of the sale was first reported by The Washington Post and LA Times.

LA Times old building in downtown LA (AP)

The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the sale had not yet been finalized, said the deal was coming together quickly, but cautioned it could still fall apart [but it didn't]. The sale would come amid turmoil at the LA Times, which has suffered through years of cutbacks and a revolving door of leadership in top positions. More
 

• 

  Charles (Scott Baio) raped child actress Nicole?

  Chachi (Trump-loving Scott Baio) molested and statutorily raped Nicole Eggert
• VIDEO: I didn't do it, insists Scott Baio, well maybe the touching and stuff, but the intercourse was consensual; in fact, she seduced me
• VIDEO: He molested me every week for years, says Nicole
• Republican lawmaker accused of sexual abuse won't resign
• Uma Thurman reveals Quentin Tarantino choked her, spit in her face while filming Kill Bill
• Molested by Trump, I'm taking #MeToo to Ohio voters
• LA Police Commission finds LAPD's Kevin Ferguson’s use of force against teens in OC out of policy
• Police corruption trial coming to close in Baltimore
• Corrupt cops admit to planting guns, using GPS...
• You're not lazy you just need more...
• Elite Baltimore gun squad was stealing drugs and money... 
• “They were both cops and robbers”: police scandal...

Monks walk away from sex-abuse cases

Text: Megan Twohey (Chicago Tribune, July 24, 2011); Wisdom Quarterly

Across the U.S., temples frustrate investigators by insisting they have no control over monks' actions or whereabouts. The scourge is not limited to Catholic priests and nuns.

 

The meeting took place at Wat Dhammaram, a cavernous [Thai] Theravada Buddhist temple on the southwest edge of Chicago.
  
A tearful 12-year-old told three monks how another monk had turned off the lights during a tutoring session, lifted her shirt and kissed and fondled her breasts while pressing against her, according to a lawsuit.

• In fairness to the monks, but more so to the abused, they probably do not know that outside of pious Thailand and other Buddhist countries, where this sort of behavior may be tolerated and kept as a terrible secret behind layers of agonizing shame and dysfunctional fear, in this country, "Homey don't play that!" In other words, expect legal troubles. This is not Rome. In no way can this behavior be tolerated, condoned, excused, or covered up. It is the ruin of the monastic Sangha and Buddhism.
• U.S. has about 350 Theravada Buddhist temples 
• Buddhist temple embroiled in bitter dispute
• WHAT IS THE SOLUTION? What would allow monastics to stay on the path rather than endangering themselves, child victims, and Buddhism? Sexual contact is a serious offense; moreover, any kind of penetration means immediate and irreversible defeat and expulsion. Only practicing the meditative absorptions (jhanas) works in the long run, and only liberating insight finally frees one permanently. The Western Buddhist nun Ayya Khema explains this (at Minute 3:25) from first hand experience. This also applies for non-Buddhist clerics and monastics because the absorptions are not limited to the Buddha's teaching.
• VIDEO: "Losing My Religion" (R.E.M.)
  

Editor: Prof. Cabezon, UCSB

Shortly after that meeting, one of the monks sent a letter to the girl's family, saying the temple's monastic community had resolved the matter, the lawsuit says.
   

The "wrong doer had accepted what he had done," wrote P. Boonshoo Sriburin, and within days would "leave the temple permanently" by flying back to Thailand. "We have done our best to restore the order," the letter said.

   

But 11 years later, the monk, Camnong Boa-Ubol, serves at a temple in California, where he says he interacts with children even as he faces a second claim, supported by DNA, that he impregnated a girl in the Chicago area.

   

Monastics are often beset by defilements.

Sriburin acknowledges that restoring order did not involve stopping Boa-Ubol from making the move to California. And it did not involve issuing a warning to the temple there. Wat Dhammaram didn't even tell its own board of directors what happened with the monk, he said.

"We have no authority to do anything. … He has his own choice to live anywhere," Sriburin said.

   

A Tribune review of sexual abuse cases involving several Theravada Buddhist temples found minimal accountability and lax oversight of monks accused of preying on vulnerable targets.

   

Because they answer to no outside ecclesiastical authority, the temples respond to allegations as they see fit. And because the monks are viewed as free agents, temples claim to have no way of controlling what they do next. More

Documentary: A Thai Buddhist temple in Florida (Thomas Livezey)

A Buddhist Spring Break

Josh Noel, Chicago Tribune (NashuaTelegraph.com); TMBCC.net

The Kalachakra Stupa is one of the architectural highlights of the Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Center (Josh Noel/Chicago Tribune/MCT).

Retreats for $65 a night
BLOOMINGTON, Indiana - No matter how I searched, the Wi-Fi wasn’t there. No television, either.

Even my phone, struggling toward two bars, conspired against modernity.

But that’s what you pay for at the Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center and its 108 wooded acres just south of Indiana’s flagship university. Not that you pay much.

Renting one of the four yurts in these woods costs $65 a night. What you won’t get during your stay: what’s mentioned above. Or soap in the bathroom.

What you do get: an eight-sided, one-room yurt (plus bathroom) that’s nothing fancy but clean enough to walk across barefoot. You get a kitchenette, twin futons raised a couple of inches off the floor, a skylight and a small deck facing the woods.

And, oh, yes, inner peace.

I arrived for a weekend stay one Saturday afternoon, pulling into a parking lot long on cars with battered bumper stickers extolling President Barack Obama and freedom for Tibet. Sixteen University of Michigan students in sweatpants and ponytails were also arriving for an “alternative spring break,” as one told me.

“We’re staying here for the week while volunteering at a domestic violence shelter in town,” she said. “Wow,” I said. “Much more noble than getting wasted in Florida.” More

• GETTING THERE: 3655 S. Snoddy Road on the south edge of Bloomington, about 5 miles from the Indiana University campus. (812) 336-6807, tmbcc.net. EAT: The yurts have kitchens...

Atheist Ad Campaign Launches in Midwest

DES MOINES, Iowa - An ad campaign publicizing atheist views is again appearing on the sides of Des Moines buses, letting nonbelievers know they are not alone during the holiday season. Ads by the group Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers sparked a free-speech debate in Des Moines last summer and prompted changes in advertising policy at the Des Moines Area Regional Transit Authority. The latest ads, which appeared on Monday, read "Being good for goodness sake" against a blue background with snowflakes. More>>

• "If he was hungry, he would've fed him"
• Needy turn to cyber begging for cash
• Kindness amazes family of 10

China's "Shangri-La" is a real dream

A street in China's officially recognized Shangri-La (Chicago Tribune/Ashley Colby).

SHANGRI-LA, China -- If you've ever dreamed of finding Shangri-La -- that mythical mountain paradise made famous in James Hilton's novel The Lost Horizon -- it's time to wake up. These days, the elusive Shangri-La isn't that hard to find. It's in China's Yunnan province.

• Buddhism (Chicago Tribune)

It might not be exactly what you had in mind, however. When I arrived in Shangri-La, it was cold and raining, and there was a cow eyeing me as it lapped up water from a bucket in the Old Town, a patchwork of wooden houses on narrow streets. Not exactly the shining pathways and endless enlightenment I imagined, but I had just gotten there.

Shangri-La, with a population of more than 100,000, is nestled in a valley near the edge of the Tibetan Plateau in far south-central China, about 1,000 miles northwest of Hong Kong. In the far distance are glimpses of Himalayan snow-capped peaks hiding behind much lower mountains that hug the city.

In the late 1990s, with the expanding Chinese middle class thirsty to spend tourist yuan, several Chinese provinces started claiming they were the true Shangri-La. The government saw an opportunity and proposed that each place prove through empirical research that its physical characteristics match those in the novel. Several years later, Zhongdian County in Yunnan province was granted the title.

People come to get a glimpse of Tibetan Buddhist culture. Getting into Tibet can be difficult for tourists. Shangri-La, however, lies just outside the formal Tibet Autonomous Region but well within the plateau where Tibetans reside. More>>

Europe overflows with spiritual sites

Rick Steves (ChicagoTribune.com, 7/5/09)

Looking down over the ancient Pagan, and later Druid, spiritual site in Stonehenge, UK

For years, my travels have prompted me to think about religion. When I got my history degree at the University of Washington, one of my favorite classes was History of the Christian Church. For years, I have believed that people who enjoy getting close to God should pack their spirituality along with them in their travels.

• Visit Europe in America

Here are some magical experiences in Europe that spiritual people would enjoy -- from conservative Catholics to Buddhists, to tree-huggers to Methodists, to curious European bus drivers who have never thought about this while on a tour before.

• Attend an evensong service in one of England's many historic cathedrals. You will be surrounded by men and boys singing their hearts out for the glory of God today, in a church built for the glory of God hundreds of years ago. You are in the middle of a spiritual Oz as 40 voices sing Psalms...
• In Santiago de Compostela, in the far northwestern corner of Spain, stand in front of the cathedral at midmorning to greet the daily batch of well-worn pilgrims...Anyone walking through Santiago with a backpack probably is a pilgrim. Some 80,000 are expected in 2009. If a backpacker walks past, I spin around to see the scallop shell dangling from the pack as it has from the rucksacks of pilgrims for more than a millennium. I love the idea that the first guidebook ever written talked up "going local, packing light, and watching out for pickpockets" for pilgrims traveling the Camino de Santiago more than 1,000 years ago.
• Experience the latest in European monasticism in Taize, a few miles north of Cluny in central France. Here, thousands of mostly young European pilgrims ask each other, "How's your soul today?" The community welcomes Christians from various sects: Orthodox, Protestant, Catholic. At any time there are several thousand here from about 100 countries enjoying a weeklong retreat. When the bells ring, worshippers and white-robed brothers file into the long, plain, modern church. Taize-style worship is a cycle of Bible readings, meditative silence...
• Rome is the capital of the "Seventh Continent" -- more than a billion Roman Catholics spread across every nation, language and ethnic type. Swahili-speaking sisters, Romanian theology students, extended Mexican families, and American tourists converge on Rome.
• Throughout Europe, regardless of your religion, if you are seeking an experience beyond the material world, there are special places where you can go to feel the spirit. More>>

Rick Steves (ricksteves.com) writes European travel guidebooks and hosts travel shows on public television and public radio. E-mail him at rick@ricksteves.com, or write to Box 2009, Edmonds, WA 98020.