Billionaire Oil CEO Demands Scientists Terminated After Oklahoma Quake Study

The billionaire CEO of Continental Resources told a dean at the University of Oklahoma that he wanted earthquake researchers fired. In one of the most transparently oligarchic tactics we have seen yet during this 'recovery', oil tycoon Harold Hamm demanded certain scientists be dismissed following their findings that fracking wastewater disposal was the cause of the spike in Oklahoma earthquakes. Despite his protestations recently that "I don't try to push anyone around," as the following email obtained by Bloomberg, exposes, "Mr. Hamm is very upset at some of the earthquake reporting to the point that he would like to see select OGS staff dismissed."

As we noted previously, no matter what other problems may or may not be linked to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, the disposal of wastewater from oil and gas drilling almost certainly is primarily responsible for the recent spate of earthquakes in Oklahoma, normally a seismologically quiet state.

That’s the conclusion of a report issued April 21 by the Oklahoma Geological Survey (OGS), in which the state geologist Richard D. Andrews and Dr. Austen Holland, the state seismologist, said the rate of earthquakes near major oil and gas drilling operations that produce large amounts of wastewater demonstrate that the quakes “are very unlikely to represent a naturally occurring process.”

Andrews and Holland concluded that the “primary suspected source” of the quakes is not hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in which water and chemicals are injected under high pressure to crack shale to free oil and gas trapped inside. It said the source is more likely the injection of wastewater from this process in disposal wells, because water used in fracking cannot be re-used.

“The OGS considers it very likely that the majority of recent earthquakes, particularly those in central and north-central Oklahoma, are triggered by the injection of produced water in disposal wells,” the statement said. It warned that residents should prepare for “a significant earthquake.”

Oklahoma recorded 585 earthquakes with a magnitude of 3 or greater, the equivalent of the force felt in Oklahoma City at the time of the terrorist bombing in 1995. This is a significant increase from 109 earthquakes of the same magnitude in 2013. Before 2008, when fracking became a popular drilling technique in the state, there were fewer than two earthquakes in Oklahoma each year, on average.

 

Andrews’ and Holland’s report draws the same conclusions as a study last year by Katie Keranen, an assistant professor of seismology at Cornell University, who found that injecting fracking wastewater into underground disposal sites tends to widen cracks in geological formations, increasing the chances of earthquakes.

Keranen’s study, in turn, reinforces similar conclusions in a previous study by the U.S. Geological Survey, which found that earthquakes in central and eastern parts of the United States between 2010 and 2013 also coincided with the disposal of fracking wastewater.

What’s important about Andrews’ and Holland’s conclusion is that they represent the state of Oklahoma, where energy is an important industry, providing about one-quarter of the state’s jobs. Last autumn, Gov. Mary Fallin, a Republican, dismissed the problem as speculative and urged further study.

But in a statement coinciding with Andrews’ and Holland’s report, Fallin said their ability to link wastewater disposal with earthquakes was significant and promised unspecified action. “Oklahoma state agencies already are taking action to address this issue and protect homeowners,” she said.

The state’s energy industry also supports further study of the state’s recent uncharacteristic seismic activity. “Oklahoma’s oil and natural gas producers have a proven history of developing the state’s oil and natural gas resources in a safe and effective manner,” Kim Hatfield, regulatory committee chairman for the Oklahoma Independent Petroleum Association, said in a statement.

And now, as Bloomberg reports, it is clear the elites were not happy with these findings...

 

 

According to the dean's e-mail recounting the conversation, Oil tycoon Harold Hamm told a University of Oklahoma dean last year that he wanted certain scientists there dismissed who were studying links between oil and gas activity and the state's nearly 400-fold increase in earthquakes...

 

He has vigorously disputed the notion that he tried to pressure the survey's scientists. "I'm very approachable, and don't think I'm intimidating," Hamm was quoted as saying in an interview with EnergyWire, an industry publication, that was published on May 11. "I don't try to push anybody around."

Kristin Thomas, a spokeswoman for Continental, says the company has no comment.

Worse still the lies and deceit run deep...

Catherine Bishop, the university's vice president of public affairs and one of the recipients of Grillot's 2014 e-mail, didn't respond to requests for an interview, but she defended Hamm in an e-mail: "Mr. Hamm absolutely did not ask to be on the search committee or to have anyone from Continental put onto the committee, nor did he ask that anyone from the Oklahoma Geological Survey be dismissed," she wrote.

Asked about the difference between her statement and Grillot's 2014 e-mail, Bishop responded: "Please note that the bottom line is that University of Oklahoma will not tolerate any possible interference with academic freedom and scientific inquiry." She added in a subsequent message: "Neither Mr. Hamm nor anyone from Continental Resources served on the search committee."

...

Hamm has been a generous donor to the University of Oklahoma, including a 2011 gift of $20 million for a diabetes research center named after the oilman. University President David Boren, a former U.S. senator, sits on the board of directors of Hamm's Continental Resources.

In the e-mail he wrote about his meeting with Hamm, Grillot—who himself sits on the board of Pioneer Natural Resources, an Irving (Tex.)-based oil and gas company—noted that he saw Boren leaving Continental's corporate offices before he went in to see the CEO.

Profits - once again - it would appear come before public safety and while money may not be able to buy happiness, it seems to be able to buy pretty much everything else.

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'Islam must be banned': French Mayor in trouble after extreme tweets, calls to deport Muslims

© Reuters / Jean-Paul Pelissier

    

A mayor of a French town has been suspended from former president Nikolas Sarkozy's UMP party after urging a ban on Islam in the country and the immediate "escorting to the border" of those practicing the religion.

"The Muslim religion must be banned in France," Robert Chardon, mayor of the southern town of Venelles, wrote on Twitter earlier this week.

All followers of Islam should be "immediately escorted to the border," the mayor added, forecasting that the Muslim faith will be banned in France by 2027.

The controversial tweet was made by Chardon as part of an online public discussion initiated by French ex-president and UMP (Union for a Popular Movement) leader, Nicolas Sarkozy, under the #NSDirect hashtag.

Sarkozy, who is likely to run for president once again in 2027, was quick to distance himself from the comments.

"I condemn this proposal even if secularism also means fixing limits. Rights and limits go together," he wrote.

The Venelles mayor was also slammed by Twitter followers, who on their part suggested "to ban idiocy in France" instead of Islam, Sputnik news agency reported.

"In France, everyone is free to choose whether or not to believe in God, and that's just fine!" one of the users reminded, while another wrote to Chardon that he was "glad not to live in your **** town!"

At first, it was suggested that the comments didn't come from the mayor as his account on Twitter was hacked.

But Chardon confirmed the authenticity of the tweet, and expressed eagerness to defend his position.

In his interview with Le Monde paper, said he stands firm in his belief that banning Islam and deporting all Muslims is "the only solution for most of France's problems."

Muslims should practice their religion "in their country of origin," Chardon said.

According to the mayor, the understandings of this idea came to him as an epiphany, while he was taking leave to get treatment from mouth cancer.

Union for a Popular Movement vice-president, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, announced that party has suspended Chardon, who will be later removed from UMP's ranks.

"I have called for the expulsion procedure to be started for these absurd statements that in no way reflect the values and program of the UMP," Kosciusko-Morizet told AFP.

Racism and xenophobia against the country's five million Muslims have been on the rise in France, following series of terror attacks by Islamic radicals, including the deadly shooting at Charlie Hebdo satirical weekly in mid-January.

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Vaccine induced Mitochondrial disease

© Unkown

    

There is a long list of common iatrogenic (drug- or doctor-caused) diseases caused by prescription drugs or vaccine ingredients like aluminum and mercury. Dr. Gary G. Kohls says, "Common iatrogenic (drug- or doctor-caused) diseases can be caused by commonly prescribed drugs and/or commonly injected vaccine ingredients, which are making many of us highly drugged, malnourished, environmentally-toxic and also thoroughly vaccinated."

Pharmaceutical companies, the CDC and the AAP continue to recommend annual (aluminum and mercury-containing) flu shots for immature, immune-vulnerable, brain-undeveloped babies as young as 6 months of age, and for their pregnant mothers. That is all you need to know about these organizations and many more like the EPA and the FDA, all of which support the poisoning of adults and children alike.

Vaccines, the holy grail of modern medicine, is not what they tell the public it is. It is embarrassing to the entire field of medicine that pediatricians, those most responsible for babies and their health, would inject poisons directly into their blood streams and pretend to everyone, including themselves, that they are doing something good.

Dr. Kohl continues, "Many of these disorders (see list below) are actually caused by prescription drugs, vaccines and/or other toxic chemicals that are poisoning the mitochondria in our brains, nerves, muscles and other organs. Thus we are being afflicted by preventable, iatrogenic- or industry-caused diseases. Both realities are taboo subjects in the current era of mind-control by America's powerful, profit-motivated, multinational corporations in BigPharma, BigChemical, BigMedicine, BigMedia, BigFood and BigAgribusiness industries. That pervasive group prefers our ignorance, and each of them spends unlimited amounts of money to ensure it."

Dr. David Brownstein said, "More and more children continue to get the MMR vaccine even though a 2004 CDC MMR study was falsified to hide the fact that the MMR vaccine was found to significantly increase the risk of autism in boys who received it. Our children are currently suffering with an autism epidemic as nearly one in fifty children currently have autism. Where are the Congressional hearings? Where is the media?"

"All classes of psychotropic drugs have been documented to damage mitochondria, as have statin medications, analgesics such as acetaminophen, and many others. Mitochondrial damage is now understood to play a role in a wide range of seemingly unrelated disorders such as schizophrenia, diabetes, Parkinson's disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, and nonalcoholic steatohepatitis. Recently it has become known that iatrogenic (physician or treatment-caused) mitochondrial damage explains many adverse reactions from medications," writes Dr. John Neustadt and Dr. Steven Pieczenik.

Americans spend nearly 20% of their GNP on health care—far more than any other developed country and yet have the worst health in the world and part of the reason for that is that they vaccinate and prescribe more pharmaceutical drugs than anywhere else. If there were any validity to vaccines and the pharmaceutical paradigm, you would think they would have better health for it. However because vaccines and most drugs are mitochondrial poisons Americans are very sick and getting sicker as every year passes.

Dr. Yehuda Shoenfeld, an Israeli clinician who has spent more than three decades studying the human immune system, and has been called the "Godfather of Autoimmunology" is pointing his finger at vaccinesand their ingredients including the toxic metal aluminum - as a significant contributor to the growing global epidemic of autoimmune diseases. This is when the immune system turnes on itself in a wide array of diseases from type 1 diabetes to ulcerative colitis and multiple sclerosis.

In a recent articlepublished in the journal Shoenfeld and colleagues issue unprecedented guidelines naming four categories of people who are most at risk for vaccine-induced autoimmunity. "Many reports describe post-vaccination autoimmunity strongly suggest that vaccines can indeed trigger autoimmunity. Defined autoimmune diseases that may occur following vaccinations include arthritis, lupus (systemic lupus erythematosus, SLE) diabetes mellitus, thrombocytopenia, vasculitis, dermatomyosiositis, Guillain-Barre syndrome and demyelinating disorders. Almost all types of vaccines have been reported to be associated with the onset of ASIA."

Mitochondria are the power houses of the cell providing the body with over 90% of the energy it needs to sustain life. Mitochondria take in sugars and proteins from the food we eat and produce energy called ATP that our bodies use to function properly. Mitochondrial disease (mito) is a debilitating and potentially fatal disease that reduces the ability of the mitochondria to produce this energy. When the mitochondria are not working properly, cells begin to die until eventually whole organ systems fail and the patient's life itself is compromised.

Aluminum is a Poison

Aluminum is a poison; what are pediatricians doing injecting it directly into the blood streams of children? A PubMed search on aluminum and "toxicity" turns up 4,258 entries. Its neurotoxicity is well documented. It affects memory, cognition, psychomotor control; it damages the blood brain barrier, activates brain inflammation, depresses mitochondrial function and plenty of research suggests it is a key player in the formation of the amyloid "plaques" and tangles in the brains of Alzheimer's patients. It's been implicated in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and autism and demonstrated to induce allergy.

A 6-year-old girl from Colorado received FluMist, a flu vaccine, and about a week later "became weak with multiple episodes of falling to ground" and "difficulty walking," according to a case report filed with federal health officials and obtained by . The girl grew increasingly weak and feverish and "became more limp, appears sleepy, acts as if drunk," the report said. She was hospitalized and underwent surgery and was finally withdrawn from life support. She died on April 5, 2008 according to the report.

Toxic aluminum adjuvants that have been added to virtually all infant and adult vaccines for the past 70+ years sustains the belief that pediatricians, their parent organizations and the federal government are chemically raping everyone they convince to get vaccines. That is why I wrote a book called and have given it away freely for the past 10 years. There is no safe dose of aluminum or mercury, which unbelievably is also present in some vaccines.

The CDC/AAP (American Academy of Pediatrics)-mandated immunization schedule ensures that a total of nearly 5,000 micrograms of the mitochondrial toxin aluminum will be injected into the average American baby by the time he or she reaches 18 months.

In my vaccine book, I write extensively about mercury, in the form of Eli Lilly & Company's Thimerosal, which has been in most infant and adult vaccines for several generations and was only removed from a number - but not all - of them when the AAP pleaded with the vaccine manufacturers to remove it from all vaccines.

Beware of Vaccine Propaganda

On the site we read that "the internet is stuffed with garbage. Anti-vaccination websites make the front page of Google, and fact-free "news" stories spread like wildfire. Google has devised a fix - rank websites according to their truthfulness." The kind of truthfulness they are looking for will of course support the continued slaughter of public health through the use of poisons in medicine and everything else because there is a lot of money to be made poisoning people.

The essay, argues the case that inevitably the web will eventually be assimilated into a Chinese-styled and content restrictive enforcement system. In terms of medicine this is a horrifying conclusion that should disgust us all.

What can we say about a race of beings that deliberately poison their young? We know that psychopaths walk among us and it is my belief that many of them are involved with vaccines and their administration. We have a new definition of evil and terrorism. It revolves around people who poison babies and smile when doing it. It involves around wearing white coats to fool everyone about their intentions. It involves a medical belief system that is rammed into doctors minds in medical school by cruel men and women doctors who break their Hippocratic Oaths with every breath.

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1921: Black Business District in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Attacked, Aerially Bombed and Razed, Victims Dumped in Mass Graves

From the PPT, CPB doc:

May 31st, 1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma.  The ‘Negro Wall Street’ district of the Greenwood neighborhood is bombed from the air.

Whites invade the enviable black business district, looting, burning, killing.

The police commandeer private planes. The 101st Airborne is flown in. A load of dynamite is dropped. 75 instantly killed. Hundreds of homes and businesses destroyed.

Four truckloads of bodies are shoveled into mass graves along the Arkansas river.

4,000 black men, women, and children arrested and placed in concentration camps, where they are required to carry ‘passes’.

The city quickly re-zones the neighborhood so that the railroad can be run through, thus completing the destruction of that neighborhood.

Wikipedia states that on May 31 and June 1, 1921:

An estimated 10,000 blacks were left homeless, and 35 city blocks composed of 1,256 residences were destroyed by fire. The official count of the dead by the Oklahoma Department of Vital Statistics was 39, but other estimates of black fatalities vary from 55 to about 300.

The events of the riot were long omitted from local and state histories. “The Tulsa race riot of 1921 was rarely mentioned in history books, classrooms or even in private. Blacks and whites alike grew into middle age unaware of what had taken place.”

One official, the police chief, was found guilty of “failing to take proper precautions for protecting life and property, and for conspiring to free automobile thieves and collect rewards.”

“No legal records indicate that any other white official was ever charged of wrongdoing or even negligence.”
Black Wall Street neighborhood after the massacre and being razed:



Of the wider trend of this kind of violence in the US during that period, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Elliot G. Jaspin has documented in his book, Buried in Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America, that whites in the US, mainly in the period of about 1900 to about 1920, engaged in extraordinarily widespread, mass “racial cleansings” of large areas in which black people lived.

White terrorists would form mobs and drive out the black people, torturing and killing those who could not escape or refused to leave.  The US government allowed the practice and did not punish or rectify it, and many of the cleansed counties remain entirely white today.

Records, like those from the Black Wall Street massacre, abound of harrowing escapes as white mobs fired at black civilians in their neighborhoods and burned down their houses, forcing people to flee through forests and creeks, hide in wells, or simply get on trains at gunpoint and go away.

Crucially, Jaspin also documents why this history is almost entirely unknown in the US: people either deny or try to explain away racial cleansings [and many other crimes of their society], through tactics such as using euphemisms, making excuses, or, the tactic perhaps most seen today, blaming the victims.

George Orwell wrote: “The nationalist not only does not disprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”

Lynchings of black people were also a frequent occurrence during, before, and after this period.
Harvard scholar Garikai Chengu notes:

A lynching was a quintessential American public ritual that often took place in front of large crowds that sometimes numbered in the thousands. Historian Mark Gado notes that, “onlookers sometimes fired rifles and handguns hundreds of times into the corpse while people cheered and children played during the festivities”.

…in 1899 the Springfield Weekly described a lynching by chronicling how, “the Negro was deprived of his ears, fingers and genital parts of his body. He pleaded pitifully for his life while the mutilation was going on…before the body was cool, it was cut to pieces, the bones crushed into small bits…the Negro’s heart was cut into several pieces, as was also his liver…small pieces of bones went for 25 cents…”. Such graphic accounts were the norm in the South, and photos, were regularly taken of the lynched bodies on display and made into postcards that were sent all over the country.

Lynchings were sanctioned by the US government, as they were not prevented and went unpunished.
In the US today, Chengu continues, the:

…police state assassinates the Black victim twice. Once by way of lynching and again to assassinate the victim’s character so as to justify the public execution [blaming the victim].

Chauncey DeVega notes at Alternet:

American Exceptionalism [the US state-worshiper’s version of “Our God is the One True God”] blinds those who share its gaze to uncomfortable facts and truths about their own country.

The burned to death images of the black body were a form of mass culture in 19th- and 20th-century America.

DeVega gives some samples of reports on how lynchings were carried out:

Two thousand people gathered for the killing, some taking a special excursion train from Atlanta for the purpose. The leaders of the lynching stripped Hose, chained him to a tree, stacked wood around him, and soaked everything in kerosene. The mob cut off Hose’s ears, fingers and genitals; they peeled the skin from his face. They watched, a newspaper reported, ”with unfeigning satisfaction” as the man’s veins ruptured from the heat and his blood hissed in the flames.

Another lynching:

“Great masses of humanity flew as swiftly as possible through the streets of the city in order to be present at the bridge when the hanging took place … the Negro was … taken to the City Hall … crowds of men, women and children turned and hastened to the lawn.

“On the way to the scene of the burning people on every hand took a hand in showing their feelings in the matter by striking the Negro with anything obtainable, some struck him with shovels, bricks, clubs, and others stabbed him and cut him until when he was strung up his body was a solid color of red, the blood of the many wounds inflicted covered him from head to foot.

“Dry goods boxes and all kinds of inflammable material were gathered, and it required but an instant to convert this into seething flames. When the Negro was first hoisted into the air his tongue protruded from his mouth and his face was besmeared with blood.

“Life was not extinct within the Negro’s body, although nearly so, when another chain was placed around his neck and thrown over the limb of a tree on the lawn, everybody trying to get to the Negro and have some part in his death. The infuriated mob then leaned the Negro, who was half alive and half dead, against the tree, he having just strength enough within his limbs to support him.

“As rapidly as possible the Negro was then jerked into the air at which a shout from thousands of throats went up on the morning air and dry goods boxes, excelsior, wood and every other article that would burn was then in evidence, appearing as if by magic. A huge dry goods box was then produced and filled to the top with all of the material that had been secured.

“The Negro’s body was swaying in the air, and all of the time a noise as of thousands was heard and the Negro’s body was lowered into the box.” “No sooner had his body touched the box than people pressed forward, each eager to be the first to light the fire, matches were touched to the inflammable material and as smoke rapidly rose in the air, such a demonstration as of people gone mad was never heard before. Everybody pressed closer to get souvenirs of the affair. When they had finished with the Negro his body was mutilated.

“Fingers, ears, pieces of clothing, toes and other parts of the Negro’s body were cut off by members of the mob that had crowded to the scene as if by magic when the word that the Negro had been taken in charge by the mob was heralded over the city. As the smoke rose to the heavens, the mass of people, numbering in the neighborhood of 10,000 crowding the City Hall law and overflowing the square, hanging from the windows of buildings, viewing the scene from the tops of buildings and trees, set up a shout that was heard blocks away.”

In another lynching:

…fingers and toes were cut off, his teeth pulled out by pliers and finally he was castrated. It still wasn’t enough. Irwin was then burned alive in front of hundreds of onlookers (Brundage, p. 42).

DeVega continues that white torture and execution of blacks:

…was a ceremony

… with distinct practices, that symbolically purged the black body from the white polity…

The rendering of spectacular violence against non-whites paid a psychological wage to white people that helped to create a type of social cement for White America, one that covered up its own intra-group tensions of class, religion, and gender. This racial logic continues in the present with a racially discriminatory criminal justice system, the murder by police of black and brown people, and how

white Americans support such unfair treatment

.

…

A 2001 report on the destruction of Black Wall Street “included the commission’s recommendations for some compensatory actions, most of which were not implemented by the state and city governments. The state passed legislation to establish some scholarships for descendants of survivors, economic development of Greenwood, and a memorial park to the victims in Tulsa. The latter was dedicated in 2010.”



@_DirtyTruths

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Acceptance of reality is key to ending the suffering of emotional pain

    

All of us experience pain. This pain might stem from losing a loved one, losing a job, ending a relationship, being in a car accident or undergoing any other kind of trauma or situation.

Pain is inevitable. It is part of being human. Often, however, we add to our pain and create suffering, according to Sheri Van Dijk, MSW, in her book Calming the Emotional Storm: Using Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills to Manage Your Emotions & Balance Your Life.

In the book, Van Dijk focuses on four sets of skills in dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), which was developed by psychologist Marsha Linehan, Ph.D. Van Dijk shares insights on everything from validating our emotions to being more effective in our lives to getting through a crisis to improving our relationships.

We create suffering by not accepting reality. For instance, we say things like "It's not fair," "Why me?", "This shouldn't have happened" or "I can't bear it!" writes Van Dijk, a mental health therapist in Sharon, Ontario, Canada.

Our instinct is to fight the pain, she writes. Normally, this instinct is protective. But in the cases of pain, it backfires. We might avoid our pain or pretend it isn't present. We might turn to unhealthy behaviors. We might ruminate about our suffering, without doing anything about it. We might turn to substances to forget the pain.

Instead, the key is to accept your reality. "Acceptance simply means that you stop trying to deny your reality and you acknowledge it instead," Van Dijk writes.

Acceptance does not mean that you approve of a situation or that you don't want it to change. Acceptance is not a synonym for forgiveness, either. It doesn't have to do with anyone else.

"It's about reducing your own suffering," Van Dijk writes. So if you were abused, you don't have to forgive the person who abused you. Acceptance means accepting that the abuse occurred.

"Acceptance is simply about whether or not you want to continue spending so much time and energy experiencing all of these painful emotions about a situation," she writes.

Forgiveness is optional, according to Van Dijk. But acceptance is necessary for moving forward.

Acceptance also doesn't mean giving up or being passive about a situation. For instance, Van Dijk shares the example of a woman who was dating a man who didn't want to get married or have kids. However, she did. She was hoping that he'd change his mind. After two years together, she realized that she had to accept the reality of her partner's decision. And she had to decide whether to stay in the relationship or find someone who wanted the same things.

As Van Dijk writes, "We can't act to change things until we recognize them as they really are."

Acceptance is powerful. Once we accept reality, our anger tends to decrease. The painful situation loses the power it has over us. While the pain doesn't go away, the suffering does.

Here's a list of additional tips and insights on how to accept reality from Van Dijk's thoughtful must-read:

• Make a commitment to yourself to accept the reality of a certain situation. Notice when you find yourself fighting back and saying things like "But it's not fair." Don't judge yourself for not being able to accept your reality. It's natural for our thoughts to return to this place. Like learning any new skill, it takes time, practice and patience. Acceptance doesn't happen overnight. More painful situations will take more time and practice.
• Refocus on acceptance. Remind yourself that you're choosing acceptance and why this is important to you. You might say to yourself, "It is what it is. I decided to work on accepting this situation because I don't want to have this power over me anymore. I'm going to keep working on accepting this."
• Make your own list of things you'd like to accept. Start small with situations that are less painful. This helps you practice and builds your confidence. For instance, start with accepting that you're stuck in traffic, standing in a long line or have to change your plans because of bad weather.
• Try breaking overwhelming situations into smaller pieces that are easier to accept.
• Focus on the present. Don't try to accept something in the future, such as "you'll never have a long-term relationship." We have no idea what the future holds. Instead, you might work on accepting that you're currently not in a relationship — if that's bringing you suffering.
• Don't try to accept judgments. Van Dijk worked with a woman who said she was having a hard time accepting that she's a bad person. She came to this conclusion because she used drugs and couldn't accept help from loved ones. But what she really needed to work on accepting were these realities - not the judgment of supposedly being a bad person.

Again, emotional pain is part of all our lives. However, we create needless suffering when we don't accept reality. We stop ourselves from making healthy changes. When we practice acceptance, we let ourselves move on, we open the door to freedom and we take steps to improve our lives. Acceptance can be hard. But it's something we can practice.

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Train robbery: DEA agents steal 16K in cash from 22 year-old traveler

© unknown

    

Joseph Rivers was a 22-year-old aspiring music video producer from outside of Detroit who managed to painstakingly save $16,000 for a music venture.

He was on an Amtrak train moving to Los Angeles to pursue his dream when his life's savings were stolen from him.

According to the Albuquerque Journal, "A DEA agent boarded the train at the Albuquerque Amtrak station and began asking various passengers, including Rivers, where they were going and why. When Rivers replied that he was headed to LA to make a music video, the agent asked to search his bags. Rivers complied."

His $16,000 was in a bank envelope found by DEA agents. He tried to explain that he had problems withdrawing money from out of state banks in the past and that he was moving to Los Angeles. The feds did not believe him.

Joseph called his mother to corroborate his story. The feds didn't believe her either.

He was charged with no crime, nothing on him was 'suspicious', but the DEA took his money and never gave it back.

All of the sudden Joseph Rivers' progress in life was crushed by the state.

an Albuquerque DEA agent said.

So far this year, DEA agents have stolen over 38 million dollars in cash and goods from people assumed to be guilty.

In 2014, they collected $3.9 billion in civil asset seizures. Only $679 million of the money and assets were deemed "criminal".

Be careful where you take your cash. You could get robbed by some people on the street, federal agents in an unmarked vehicle. The only difference is you can't defend yourself from a federal agent without being killed or incarcerated.

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Past is prelude: 1921: Black business district in Tulsa, Oklahoma, attacked, aerially bombed and razed, victims dumped in mass graves

© Unknown

    

An otherwise poor and uninformative documentary (funded by Pennsylvania Public Television and Corporation for Public Broadcasting) on the US bombing and burning alive of 11 residents, adults and children, of the MOVE house in Philadelphia, 1985, begins with one minute (10:30 to 11:30) on the rarely-mentioned 1921 onslaught, aerial bombing, and incineration of the "Black Wall Street" business district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, by white mobs, including the KKK and government forces.

From the PPT, CPB doc:

May 31st, 1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma. The 'Negro Wall Street' district of the Greenwood neighborhood is bombed from the air.

Whites invade the enviable black business district, looting, burning, killing.

The police commandeer private planes. The 101st Airborne is flown in. A load of dynamite is dropped. 75 instantly killed. Hundreds of homes and businesses destroyed.

Four truckloads of bodies are shoveled into mass graves along the Arkansas river.

4,000 black men, women, and children arrested and placed in concentration camps, where they are required to carry 'passes'.

The city quickly re-zones the neighborhood so that the railroad can be run through, thus completing the destruction of that neighborhood.

Wikipedia states that on May 31 and June 1, 1921:

...a group of white people attacked the black community of Tulsa, Oklahoma. It resulted in the Greenwood District, also known as 'the Black Wall Street' and the wealthiest black community in the United States, being burned to the ground.

An estimated 10,000 blacks were left homeless, and 35 city blocks composed of 1,256 residences were destroyed by fire. The official count of the dead by the Oklahoma Department of Vital Statistics was 39, but other estimates of black fatalities vary from 55 to about 300.

The events of the riot were long omitted from local and state histories. "The Tulsa race riot of 1921 was rarely mentioned in history books, classrooms or even in private. Blacks and whites alike grew into middle age unaware of what had taken place."

One official, the police chief, was found guilty of "failing to take proper precautions for protecting life and property, and for conspiring to free automobile thieves and collect rewards."

"No legal records indicate that any other white official was ever charged of wrongdoing or even negligence."

© Unknown

    

Black Wall Street neighborhood after the massacre and being razed:

Of the wider trend of this kind of violence in the US during that period, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Elliot G. Jaspin has documented in his book, Buried in Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America, that whites in the US, mainly in the period of about 1900 to about 1920, engaged in extraordinarily widespread, mass "racial cleansings" of large areas in which black people lived.

White terrorists would form mobs and drive out the black people, torturing and killing those who could not escape or refused to leave. The US government allowed the practice and did not punish or rectify it, and many of the cleansed counties remain entirely white today.

Records, like those from the Black Wall Street massacre, abound of harrowing escapes as white mobs fired at black civilians in their neighborhoods and burned down their houses, forcing people to flee through forests and creeks, hide in wells, or simply get on trains at gunpoint and go away.

Crucially, Jaspin also documents why this history is almost entirely unknown in the US: people either deny or try to explain away racial cleansings [and many other crimes of their society], through tactics such as using euphemisms, making excuses, or, the tactic perhaps most seen today, blaming the victims.

George Orwell wrote: "The nationalist not only does not disprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."

Lynchings of black people were also a frequent occurrence during, before, and after this period.

Harvard scholar Garikai Chengu notes:

A lynching was a quintessential American public ritual that often took place in front of large crowds that sometimes numbered in the thousands. Historian Mark Gado notes that, "onlookers sometimes fired rifles and handguns hundreds of times into the corpse while people cheered and children played during the festivities".

...in 1899 the Springfield Weekly described a lynching by chronicling how, "the Negro was deprived of his ears, fingers and genital parts of his body. He pleaded pitifully for his life while the mutilation was going on...before the body was cool, it was cut to pieces, the bones crushed into small bits...the Negro's heart was cut into several pieces, as was also his liver...small pieces of bones went for 25 cents...". Such graphic accounts were the norm in the South, and photos, were regularly taken of the lynched bodies on display and made into postcards that were sent all over the country.

Lynchings were sanctioned by the US government, as they were not prevented and went unpunished.

In the US today, Chengu continues, the:

...police state assassinates the Black victim twice. Once by way of lynching and again to assassinate the victim's character so as to justify the public execution [blaming the victim].

Chauncey DeVega notes at Alternet:

American Exceptionalism [the US state-worshiper's version of "Our God is the One True God"] blinds those who share its gaze to uncomfortable facts and truths about their own country.

The burned to death images of the black body were a form of mass culture in 19th- and 20th-century America.

DeVega gives some samples of reports on how lynchings were carried out:

Two thousand people gathered for the killing, some taking a special excursion train from Atlanta for the purpose. The leaders of the lynching stripped Hose, chained him to a tree, stacked wood around him, and soaked everything in kerosene. The mob cut off Hose's ears, fingers and genitals; they peeled the skin from his face. They watched, a newspaper reported, "with unfeigning satisfaction" as the man's veins ruptured from the heat and his blood hissed in the flames.

© Unknown

    

Another lynching:

"Great masses of humanity flew as swiftly as possible through the streets of the city in order to be present at the bridge when the hanging took place ... the Negro was ... taken to the City Hall ... crowds of men, women and children turned and hastened to the lawn.

"On the way to the scene of the burning people on every hand took a hand in showing their feelings in the matter by striking the Negro with anything obtainable, some struck him with shovels, bricks, clubs, and others stabbed him and cut him until when he was strung up his body was a solid color of red, the blood of the many wounds inflicted covered him from head to foot.

"Dry goods boxes and all kinds of inflammable material were gathered, and it required but an instant to convert this into seething flames. When the Negro was first hoisted into the air his tongue protruded from his mouth and his face was besmeared with blood."

"Life was not extinct within the Negro's body, although nearly so, when another chain was placed around his neck and thrown over the limb of a tree on the lawn, everybody trying to get to the Negro and have some part in his death. The infuriated mob then leaned the Negro, who was half alive and half dead, against the tree, he having just strength enough within his limbs to support him.

"As rapidly as possible the Negro was then jerked into the air at which a shout from thousands of throats went up on the morning air and dry goods boxes, excelsior, wood and every other article that would burn was then in evidence, appearing as if by magic. A huge dry goods box was then produced and filled to the top with all of the material that had been secured.

"The Negro's body was swaying in the air, and all of the time a noise as of thousands was heard and the Negro's body was lowered into the box." "No sooner had his body touched the box than people pressed forward, each eager to be the first to light the fire, matches were touched to the inflammable material and as smoke rapidly rose in the air, such a demonstration as of people gone mad was never heard before. Everybody pressed closer to get souvenirs of the affair. When they had finished with the Negro his body was mutilated.

"Fingers, ears, pieces of clothing, toes and other parts of the Negro's body were cut off by members of the mob that had crowded to the scene as if by magic when the word that the Negro had been taken in charge by the mob was heralded over the city. As the smoke rose to the heavens, the mass of people, numbering in the neighborhood of 10,000 crowding the City Hall law and overflowing the square, hanging from the windows of buildings, viewing the scene from the tops of buildings and trees, set up a shout that was heard blocks away."

In another lynching:

...fingers and toes were cut off, his teeth pulled out by pliers and finally he was castrated. It still wasn't enough. Irwin was then burned alive in front of hundreds of onlookers (Brundage, p. 42).

DeVega continues that white torture and execution of blacks:

...was a ceremony ... with distinct practices, that symbolically purged the black body from the white polity...

The rendering of spectacular violence against non-whites paid a psychological wage to white people that helped to create a type of social cement for White America, one that covered up its own intra-group tensions of class, religion, and gender. This racial logic continues in the present with a racially discriminatory criminal justice system, the murder by police of black and brown people, and how white Americans support such unfair treatment.

...

A 2001 report on the destruction of Black Wall Street "included the commission's recommendations for some compensatory actions, most of which were not implemented by the state and city governments. The state passed legislation to establish some scholarships for descendants of survivors, economic development of Greenwood, and a memorial park to the victims in Tulsa. The latter was dedicated in 2010."

    

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