Stephen Altschuler

thoughts on environment, politics, health, life issues

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Veterans Day, Expanded

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We are all in a sense veterans. We’ve been through a lot. We’ve suffered. We’ve grieved. We’ve pounded our chests. We’ve wiped the tears from our eyes. We’ve fallen to our knees in prayer. We’ve all bargained with whatever god or higher power we bow to. We’ve died and/or lie wounded from Covid. Indeed, we’ve lost 760,000 of us to this pandemic and multiply that many more times when you figure friends, relatives, colleagues who have been traumatically affected by those deaths and long-Covid recoveries. And we’re not out of the woods yet from this lethal virus.

During the draft in the Vietnam War years, I was turned down twice for medical reasons–reasons which still affect me in my older age. Am I not still a veteran, a patriot? Subsequently, I devoted my career to helping those with mental illness, along with drug and alcohol addictions, live better lives. Many others may not have served in the military but serve in so many other ways as we have seen during this pandemic. Are they not veterans and patriots? Why must we limit Veterans Day to those who took up arms to support our country? Are not nurses who save lives in hospitals (as they did with me) loyal veterans who serve our country? Why are we not honoring them as well?

I know some will say, Well, they didn’t put their lives on the line to serve. But don’t nurses and doctors and EMTs and police and fire fighters and counselors and any service provider put their lives on the line daily to help others live safe, active, more productive lives? Where is the day to honor them? Of course, we need to honor our military veterans, but let us also honor those who selflessly serve this great country, made great by our multitude of people servants.

I also wish to call for a change to our National Anthem to America, The Beautiful, an ode to all that is good with our country, replacing The Star Spangled Banner, a hard-to-sing ode to a flag which now some so-called patriots desecrate in the exhaust fumes of their pickup trucks.

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With holidays approaching, may I recommend three of my recent books published by Sacajawea Press. They are:
Into the Woods…and Beyond. A memoir of my living alone in the woods for nearly four years, developing a deep connection with nature which I took back with me when I returned to city life.
The Valley Spirit: Living a Tao-inspired Life. A guide based on my teaching of Tai Chi and applying Taoism and Buddhism to everyday life.
Golf 360: For Current Players and Those Considering the Game. Instruction. Strategy. The Mental Game. And more, in helping you improve your play, and/or getting off to a good start if you’re just beginning.
All are available at Amazon at reasonable prices in ebook or paperback.
Thank you.

I am not so much an American as…a Citizen of Planet Earth

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With early Neanderthals and homo sapiens, there were no countries, no states, no cities, not even villages. They were simply inhabitants of Earth, living lives that satisfied their immediate needs while caring for the resources they were dependent upon for their survival. That eventually changed and people did band together into cities and countries, with allegiances to those places. They began to identify themselves with whatever city they lived in to such a degree that they would war against other cities they felt were against the interests of their city. As we know now those cities organized into countries and the wars grew more intense. There was some limited cooperation between countries but some became long time enemies involved in cold and/or hot wars. A couple of those wars were world wars where millions perished.

Nature knows of no such nationalistic boundaries or wars. When tundra swans fly from the Arctic to Washington state they have no awareness of the place name where they land, only that it is a place of warmer climate, more fresh water, and abundant food. When caribou cross over from Canada to Alaska they pass through no checkpoints or border crossings. And the swallows know not if they are in South America or Capistrano. Yes, we have seven continents on Earth, but it was only people who divided them into countries and states, and then chose common languages, customs, laws, and mission statements to unify them.

Well, few of these divisions have worked. Twenty five hundred years ago the Buddha preached to his followers that human beings were primarily motivated by greed, hatred, and delusion, and that’s pretty much the case today, resulting in war, fear, suspicion, and human-caused despoiling of Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, rivers, forests, and air. As I write people on this planet are dying of hunger, thirst, and oppression from authoritarian governments. Greed, hatred and delusion still fuel the engines of ignorance and lies.

So, yes, I am an American, but my Jewish maternal grandparents came here from Russia in the early 20th century, giving up their identity with that country to come to another place, with courage, faith, and determination, where they could live in peace and raise a family. My Jewish paternal grandparents came from Russia and Germany for the same reasons just before WWI broke out. They perhaps heard of a place that proclaimed in their founding documents, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution…” They wanted what their birth countries couldn’t and wouldn’t give them.

Now, I too, possessing the genes of my grandparents, want something of life that my birth country, the United States, has tried but couldn’t and wouldn’t give me: a national commitment to insure justice for all, a democracy that encourages all eligible to vote and not suppress that right to vote, domestic tranquillity that controls guns as well or better than it controls cars, civil rights as the Constitution dictates, reparations for the progeny of those abused and defamed in the slavery era, including Blacks and native Americans, thus securing the blessings of liberty, and…turning away from excessive profits to heal the natural environment of this planet that we have so degraded. A military-industrial complex that Eisenhower so wisely warned us of. McCarthyism. The assassinations of JFK and RFK and MLK. Corporate greed and power. The present-day aftermath of slavery still staining our nation in the form of white supremacy. The threat of nuclear war or meltdowns. Systemic racism. Gun violence. Anti-maskers and anti-vaxers and anti-honest educators. The obstructionist Mitch McConnell. The obstructionists Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. The toxic insanity of QAnon. The hypocrisy of Mark Zuckerberg. The fake news of Fox News. Donald Trump and his Minions of insurrectionists, cultists, and, yes, ingenuous House and Senate GOP representatives. An ultra-conservative Supreme Court, made that way by Trump and McConnell. We are spinning, faster and faster, down a rabbit hole of no-return. Caught in a black hole of misinformation, myths, and lies, all of our own doing.

So, yes, I am American, but I am more a citizen of Earth and owe my allegiance to Earth, and devote all my remaining energies to the healing and preservation of Earth and all its oppressed people and abused environment. For the governing mission of Earth is to live and let live; to treat others–plants, wildlife, natural resources, and people–as we would like to be treated; to not judge, for in the same way we judge others, we will be judged; to find in every adversity the seed of an equal or greater benefit; to love our neighbors as we love ourselves; to truly consider the lilies of the field, and how they grow.

I declare myself an citizen of Earth, ready to call out those who degrade it. Care to join me?

A Birthday Favor

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I come to you today on the eve of my Halloween Birthday, my 76th, to ask a favor. I ask that you purchase one or both of my offerings from my own Sacajawea Press, not so much for my sake–we’ve got enough income for our needs–but for the sake of our planet, which needs extra care and attention these days as per climate change, particularly as many countries, thankfully along with the U.S., now gather in Scotland for the Cop26 summit. My press is devoted to entertainment, yes, but more to bringing healing and higher consciousness to our planet helping it survive and thrive for generations to come.

My two current offerings are Into the Woods…and Beyond, a memoir of my experience in and relationship with nature both during my four year stay in a cabin in the woods and my life in urban environs where I was able to keep ahold of my closeness to nature; and my most recent book, The Valley Spirit: Living a Tao-inspired Life, in part, a series of talks I gave to my Tai Chi classes at a community college over several years that dealt with applying Tai Chi along with Taoist and Buddhist principles to everyday life. I’ve linked them to pages in Amazon. Please consider them for yourself or as gifts to friends and relatives. There are excellent reviews of both books elsewhere on this website.

Thanks so much, and wishing each of you good health, happiness, and peace of mind on this Halloween and in the coming holiday season.

Breakable News, on the job, following the following breakable reports

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News of the people, by the people, and for the people, but that few people will have the time or the inclination to actually read.

 

On the scene at Rust.  Crack Santa Fe police, after an intensive investigation, have uncovered and revealed the actual gun and shell casing used by Alec Baldwin to shoot his director of photography and film director on the set of the movie Rust. The head detective, who we understand has taken a correspondence course in criminology, was given the gun by Baldwin and the shell was miraculously discovered embedded in the shoulder of the Director. The assistant director who gave the loaded gun to Baldwin after telling him it was a “cold gun,” and who has been accused of other such careless acts was interviewed and released after admitting he didn’t check the gun properly before handing it to Baldwin. No one has been charged with a crime, with the deceased director of photography’s 9 year old son and her husband left to grieve the loss of their beloved wife and mother, knowing that more than likely no one will be held responsible.

In another example of crack police work, investigators delving into the Gabby Petito murder and Brian Laundrie suicide mistook Laundrie’s mother for Laundrie when she emerged from the family’s Mustang wearing a ball cap a few days after Laundrie went hiking at a nearby wilderness park. “They had similar builds,” said the local sheriff, explaining in detail the explanations of the explaining surveillance officers. “We made a mistake,” he explained in further detail. Meanwhile, none of the explaining detectives could explain why no one had asked the parents if they asked Laundrie when he returned from his trip West–the one he and Ms. Petito took with much fanfare, “Where’s Gabby?” and, if so, what was his reply? The sheriff merely explained that his family only referred all questions to their lawyer who explained that Laundrie’s parent had nothing to explain, he explained. Our investigative reporter Manuel Explandito finally got tired of all the “explanations” and abruptly, without explanation, left to cover the story of a cat up a tree down the block.

In the midst of a world-ending climate crisis that shows no signs of resolution, a Breakable research team found that 99.99% of the world’s population is continuing to live their lives exactly as they did yesterday and have no plans to change. One of our reporters followed up with a question to a resident of the world, “Are you concerned?” Whereupon the resident, sweating profusely, answered, “About what?”

School board members across the nation are receiving death threats from parents who don’t want any actual verified history to be taught to their children for fear their children will begin to hate their own white skins and perhaps even try to rip off their skins if they are told about how the country was built on the whipped backs of Black African slaves and how the West was won over the bodies of dead Native Americans who had been living there for about ten thousand years before the Europeans came and took the land away from them. Our reporter on the scene asked a parent what it was they wanted, to which the parent heatily replied, “I’ll kill those m…..f…….ers!”

Our Washington correspondent John Dillinger conducted a round table discussion with U.S. representatives Margorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, along with senators Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley but had to end the session before it got started since Green refused to wear a Covid-required mask, Boebert refused to check her gun at the door, Gaetz insisted on bringing a young female friend with him, McConnell began to filibuster the meeting, Cruz excused himself saying he had a plane to catch to Cancun, and Hawley had to give some Proud…, er interested citizens a tour of the Capitol building. Oh, one other impediment to the meeting…An uninvited Donald Trump muscled his way to the head of the line saying the meeting was a lie, a hoax, a sham, and was convened without his knowledge. He is suing Breakable for a hundred million and demanding an apology for defamation of something or other. (If nothing else, Breakable News at least gets the names right!)

Breaking News from Breakable’s up-to-the-weekly ticker tape: China invades Taiwan but immediately surrenders when Taiwan cuts off China’s supply of computer chips. Taiwan takes over mainland, sending Xi Zinping to a “reeducation center” in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in Northwest China.

And that wraps it up for today, dear readers. We recommend you spend the rest of the day in a deprivation tank, masked and without access to cell phone or Facebook. We call it The Cold Turkey Cure.

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Once again, we recommend a couple of books you might want to check out, that make good deprivation tank reading. They are Into the Woods…and Beyond; and The Valley Spirit: Living a Tao-inspired Life, both written and published by Yours Truly of Sacajawea Press. You’ll find them at Amazon with reviews at stephenaltschuler.com. Many thanks.

Working

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It’s curious that there are so many people choosing not to look for work these days. I see many signs for help wanted throughout the community, practically begging for applicants.  I can certainly empathize with the non workers. In my career as a worker, I found, generally, businesses were intent on screwing workers…

To continue reading this post, please go to breakablenews.substack.com. Thank you.

2024

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The date looms like Orwell’s 1984. I dread it yet I welcome it. It represents the last hope of ending Donald Trump and his Republican allies’s assault on our democracy. The coup that Trump put into effect in 2020 is still happening. We’ve just been through the first phase. Trump has laid the groundwork for his retaking the presidency whether he wins the election or not. He has planted seeds of distrust, disbelief, disinformation, and disingenuousness into the minds of Republican and Independent voters. He has the electorate where he wants it. As polls show, most of those who support him are the unvaccinated, the anti-maskers, and those who still believe The Big Lie that Trump won the last election.  The courts, the audits, the recounts all show that he did not win, but because he continued with his harangue of vitriolic lies, people started believing him, and despite all evidence to the contrary, swallowed his bait hook, line, and sinker. He is a compulsive con man, and Teflon Don has been getting away with it all his life. He always seems to intimidate, insult, and disabuse enough of his ever-changing opponents so as to deflect from his obvious guilt and displace it onto others.

2022 is also critical to Trump although even if the Dems hold on to both houses, he will distort the election returns to try and make it appear that actually the Republicans succeeded. That is his way. He can’t help himself. He’s been living his life that way and can’t stop even he wanted to. His niece Dr. Mary Trump, a definitive and trustworthy voice, has made that clear in her book and on her TV interviews. It is up to Democratic voters–moderates and progressives–to send a resounding message to the Trump cult in 2022: a message so loud and so unified that there can be no challenges, no believable lies, no court cases, and no snake oil rallies to the contrary. That is the only way to beat this man and his surrogates and nail the coffin on his political grave.

Trump wants to be a sovereign–a der Fuhrer–in a country that has never known a dictator. He wants that kind of power. The people around him and who vote for him want him in that kind of autocratic, fascistic position. Even during our Revolutionary War were there people, many people, who were loyal to the King of England. They were aristocrats, elite, and slavelords who figured their slavocracy would continue under a monarchy. There were even the Appalachian poor and so-called Borderlanders who figured they could keep their autonomy that insured their sovereignty over their neighborhoods and wilderness territories. They didn’t really care who won the war for independence. Their mostly lawless lives would stay the same either way. Those were the Steve Bannons, the Mitch McConnells, and the Donald Trumps of today. They care not a whit for a United States. They want only discord, disunity, distrust, dismantling, and disrupting, with our democratic form of government being the object of their disdain.

Using a wide-angle lens on this vast country of ours, I see deep polarity. Red and Blue mostly, with minor disagreements among the Red, and major disagreements among the Blue. A smaller group of Independents, suburban Whites mainly, who often tip Federal elections one way of the other, lean mostly to the Red side. Subsequently, I see the Red side, the Republicans, retaking one or both of the houses of Congress in ’22, leading to Trump retaking the presidency in ’24. If so, this will, for all intents and purposes, mark the end of the American experiment as we’ve known it. Devolution will follow much as the Roman empire devolved centuries ago, or the Greek empire before that, or Hitler’s empire did after just a few years in their attempt at world domination.

Trump and his followers will drag this country down to its own low and often evil levels of intellect, morality, and intolerance in a very short amount of time.

Think about it…but not too long before you take some sort of action to counteract this prediction of perdition.

The Gabby Petito Murder: A Breakable News Investigation of the Investigation

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Breakable News, the news you love to hate to love, has examined the ongoing investigation of the now confirmed murder of 22 year old Gabby Petito and has some key questions which the mainstream press and let rush over the waterfall. Here we go:

  • To the FBI investigators who searched the Laundrie house in North Port, Florida and who then brought the parents of Brian Laundrie “inside for questioning,” as CNN put it. A common sense first question they might ask the parents would be when Brian came home driving the van which belonged to Gabby, did you ask him, “Where’s Gabby?” We would expect such as a question since Gabby was well liked by the family including Brian’s sister who lauded Gabby for the close relationship she had with Brian’s young nephews who liked the affable young woman very much. If you did ask that question, how did the parents reply to what Brian said at that point? How did he seem when you asked that question? How did he look? How did he behave? What exactly did he do after you asked that question?
  • Now after that question was asked, assuming it was asked, (for if it was not asked, why was it not asked), did you then inquire as to the whereabouts and well being of Gabby (another logical question a parent might ask of their son’s fiancé)? If so, how did he reply, verbally and behaviorally? Did he seem different than usual? By the way, what time did he arrive, and how did he seem physically and emotionally when you first saw him? Were you both present when he arrived? Was anyone else in the house?
  • How long did he stay with you before he left for the nature reserve? At any time during his stay with you, did you ask of the whereabouts and well being of Gabby? If so, what did he say? If not, why did you not ask him this?
  • At any time after he arrived, did you call the home of Gabby’s parents? You surely knew them since they were childhood friends for many years, true? Did you know Gabby’s parents? Did Brian or you try to call Gabby’s parents to see if Gabby got in touch with them and see if they of her whereabouts and whether she was OK?

Do you see why Breakable launched our investigation of the investigation? It’s looking like another Keystone Kops episode, kind of like those involving Tiger Woods and Donald Trump. We got most of our questions from watching detective shows on TV so we’re not talking about any genius needed here to know what to ask. And there’d really be no reason to withhold the parent’s answers from the press. Did mainstream reporters not ask the questions we are asking? If so, we may be in deeper hot water than we think since that would undermine the reliability of the mainstream press which is very problematic for an already teetering democratic society.

Breakable News is “just saying.” We’ll keep you updated, based on more insights and questions we obtain from our subscription to BritBox. And…our hearts do go out to the family of Gabby Petito.

All Countries Reap What They Sow

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A farm reaps what it sows. So does a country.  So does Afghanistan. And so does the United States. The direction a country takes comes from past roots, and, as with a plant, if those roots have not been nourished and tended properly, a country can grow sick, weak, and often die. We’ve seen it happen with many countries and cultures throughout history. Greece, Rome, Nazi Germany, Czarist and Communist Russia, Vietnam, China, Fascist Spain, Italy, Portugal, and, Trump America.

The U.S. and its NATO allies have finally pulled out of Afghanistan. The Taliban have reconquered the country and are once again in charge. It is not the fault of any country except Afghanistan for that happening. President Obama poured 300,000 troops into that country in an attempt to bolster its military and its government in a monumental effort to strengthen and stabilize Afghanistan. Ultimately that effort failed, but Barack gets an A for trying. Even Trump gets a high mark for attempting to negotiate with the Taliban to bring some semblance of order to this chaotic country. And no one can blame Biden for wanting to exit this “forever war.” It was none of these presidents’ fault for the Taliban taking back control. The root causes lie in the history of this war-torn nation, which goes back to 1880 as a nation, but marks its origins to the Bronze Age some 5000 years ago. It was once known as central Asia’s roundabout, for its diverse trade routes leading in various directions. For that reason it was strategically important, and, so, fought over by many cultural groups for thousands of years. In the modern age, the Russians were the first foreign power to try and muscle its way into control of the many cultural groups that made up this country. They failed and were followed by the Brits who also failed, followed by the Americans in 2002, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in an attempt to root out Osama bin Laden and his al Queda terrorists who were responsible for 9/11. That invasion failed when bin Laden escaped, but for some reasons, the Americans stayed. But rather than concentrate on building a strong Afghanistan, President Bush took his eyes off the prize by shifting most of his efforts to his ill fated war on Iraq in 2003.

Are you still with me? It is complicated, isn’t it? But you can see how the radical-Islamic Taliban filled numerous vacuums over the years, and with financing from foreign interests like Iran were able to build a formidable military force and recruit thousands. And remember, the Taliban are Afghans, mostly from rural areas, and not some foreign power so they have much support within the country. Despite their brutal reputation for fundamentalist extremism, their consistent argument about driving foreigners out of their country is a powerful one.

Now, we and the rest of the “civilized” world look at that war weary country, lament its fate, and hold our collective heads in our collective hands, fearing the worst. The Taliban, with its harsh, medieval Sharia Law, has proven to be quite cruel after taking power in the past. But given its history, and the history of central Asia, that should be no surprise. What I can fault is the lack of planning for a calm transition/evacuation after allied troops were pulled out. Both Trump and Biden received poor advice and intelligence around the strength and intent of the Taliban once U.S. troops were removed. It took them all of nine days to conquer the entire country, throwing the populace into a panic. This showed a lack of competence and empathy on both presidents’ part–much expected of Trump but certainty not of Joe Biden. He should have known better and planned for a more orderly and timely evacuation.

Afghanistan now is sowing what it has reaped, and there isn’t much, other than weak words and ineffective economic sanctions the West can do about it. Its fate is in the hands of its people alone, as history has shown. And history has certainly shown how people can and do rise up and overthrow a government that is not acting in the country’s best interest.