PICKING A FIGHT

• Just landed in Newark after aircraft maintenance problems interrupted my planned flight sequence of Santa Barbara-San Francisco-Chicago-Portland.  Now I won’t make it back home tonight as originally scheduled and have to spend the night in Newark… getting home a day late on Tuesday.  Had to cancel the taping of my next public access TV show on Tuesday morning. 

• I’ve been out of world news contact for several days and have not yet caught up with the latest about US-NATO intervention into Ukrainian affairs.  I did notice some comments by the recently installed US-NATO puppet government in Kiev threatening those who don’t want to follow the new ‘leadership’.  Funny how the US-NATO can barge into a country, help topple the government, and then complain when folks don’t want to go along with the show.

• Now that the US has lost in Afghanistan the scriptwriters are looking for the new “Crazy Horse on the warpath” story that will keep the gravy train flowing into the coffers of the war machine … enemy creation is at the root of the “American experiment”.  Russia as the ‘latest’ mark makes a handy story line.

• I read over the weekend that Obama’s Pentagon is sending the Navy destroyer USS Truxtun into the Black Sea as a show of the ‘grand old flag’.  This was seen by Moscow as a challenge to the Russian fleet and evidence that the US was "ramping up its military presence in the region." The Russians are right, this is just what the US is doing. Obama, the “good liberal Democrat” is doing the dirty work this time.  He is the white hat version of George W. Bush and gives the oil-i-garchy the extra bonus of keeping much of the left in their place – cowering on the sidelines.

• Our Global Network 22^nd annual conference went very well at a beautiful flowering Catholic retreat center in Santa Barbara, California.  Forty of us from many places spent hours sharing with one another – about our struggles, our fears, our times of joy, and lives of principled determination.  About 75 people attended our public forum on Saturday evening at a local church in Santa Barbara.

• We told the media repeatedly, and they actually printed our words several times in two different local papers, that we’d come to Vandenberg AFB to stand with and honor those in the community who have non-violently protested at the base for a long time.  Bud Boothe, a WW II veteran, has been vigiling at Vandenberg for 30 years.  In the high times of the 1980’s Bud repeatedly invited activists to camp on his land during large protests at the base.  We presented him with a “Lifetime Achievement Award”.

• These peace protests at US bases around the nation and worldwide are going up against the power of the military industrial complex and we are demanding an end to our growing local economic “addiction” to the war system drug.  Cancerous militarism is the new high-tech version of slavery – we are shackled to war.  One of our Global Network founders, Bill Sulzman from Colorado Springs, reported that his community has the highest level of dependency on the military in the whole nation.  They have five military bases in Colorado Springs and a slew of weapons production facilities as well.  How can we ever stop war when local communities have to rely on killing to create jobs? What does it say about the soul of our nation?

• I am proud to work with this feisty crowd in the Global Network and our allied friends.  It was often said during our gathering that there are millions of us out there around the world doing these good works.  We need to find more ways to reach out to one another and recognize that our survival on Mother Earth depends upon what each of us can contribute to this historic effort.  Let’s be friends and put down the bully stick of war, environmental degradation, and economic collapse.