Don.
No wifi and a poor cell data connection and having to do it on an iPhone is tough.
Add in the difficulty of trying to be precise in my thoughts and ideas that swirl ever faster and, well, I'll get there .

Stop These Fucking Wars

peace(working on it)

I don't think anybody reading these Essays wants violence. I most certainly don't want it!

But anybody who doesn't fear that that violence is coming isn't paying attention!

Really, socio-political change comes only two ways: the ballot or the bullet. And the 2016 Presidential Election, especially the "Democratic" Party's dishonorable antics therein, showed the American People that the ballot has failed, that elections now result the way the richest Americans desire, regardless of what actions the rest of us take.

And we've now had a foretaste of the inevitable consequences at Charlottesville, Virginia over the past few days.

To paraphrase Mad Magazine's Alfred E. Newman: Yes, me worry!

Make dirt not war!

. . . and then shared a video about the ecological restoration of the Loess Plateau in China. Wow.

Can't go the violence route.

And wetterau just posted a short essay on going "Towards Beauty."

I think there is a theme here.

Maybe the left should focus on ecological restoration projects that also benefit communities.

No one is thinking about this right now, but we are currently turning agricultural America into a Loess Plateau. When Big Ag fails, and it will fail (being completely dependent on mined fertilizer in Western Africa - which will run out), we will have the empty dust bowl fields of the Loess Plateau.

We need to start reversing this trend. I would very much like to take the family farm in Iowa (80 acres), and return it to it's former splendor and go a step further by making it into a food forest. There are numerous natural springs on the property that were tiled. Don't know what my siblings would think of that though!

This is what I am trying to do here in Texas.

What about a movement to create food forests everywhere . . . whether they be rural or urban?

Sure . . . we run progressive candidates, but the work of the people is to grow food. Annuals, but as many perennials as possible.

but what I have seen happening at too many peaceful protests is cops in their riot gear and they bring military equipment and this is what creates most of the violence.

Look at what happened at the DAPL protests. Those people were protesting very peacefully, but that didn't stop the police from bringing their military gear and equipment to use against them.
I don't know what frightened the cops so much that they needed to drench the protesters with water while the temperature was well below zero.
This was just sadism under authority.
Remember one woman was shot by a rubber bullet and was at risk of losing her arm.
What did those protesters do to have to be met with so much violence?
They sang songs and chanted. This must have been very frightening and scary to the cops.

The DAPL protests were overseen by TigerSwan, a private mercenary company. They were able to illegally invade people's computers so that the cops knew who to target.
These protesters were unarmed as were the OWS and BLM protesters, but both were brutally broken up by the cops who were following Obama's DHS orders.

Look at what happened yesterday at the Nazi protests. There were many people who brought their own guns and military equipment to it. Look at how the cops reacted to them. They did nothing for over an hour while people were getting hurt.

Does anyone think that if the BLM protesters had guns that they would be allowed to protest for over an hour? Hell no. They would have been treated in a very different manner.

So I'm all for peaceful protests, I just don't think that TPTB will allow them .

The biggest strike in US history was broken up by the railroad owners.

Eugene Debs and the Kingdom of Evil

Here's a small taste of it. I hope that people will read take the time to read this.,
We saw what happened to the OWS protests and protesters when they threatened TPTB. Obama's DHS worked with mayors all over the country and they were brutally broken up. Chase gave the New York police department almost $5 billion for fighting back against the protesters.

Debs burst onto the national stage when he organized a railroad strike in 1894 after the Pullman Co. cut wages by up to one-third but did not lower rents in company housing or reduce dividend payments to its stockholders. Over a hundred thousand workers staged what became the biggest strike in U.S. history on trains carrying Pullman cars.

The response was swift and brutal.

“Mobilizing all the powers of capital, the owners, representing twenty-four railroads with combined capital of $818,000,00, fought back with the courts and the armed forces of the Federal government behind them,” Barbara W. Tuchman writes in “The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914.” “Three thousand police in the Chicago area were mobilized against the strikers, five thousand professional strikebreakers were sworn in as Federal deputy marshals and given firearms; ultimately six thousand Federal and State troops were brought in, less for the protection of property and the public than to break the strike and crush the union.”