Author:

Years ago while studying in Zurich to be a Jungian analyst, I was exposed to an aura of this great person,  Hearing the recounting of some of the exotic dreams of my fellow students only made me more awestruck.  It therefore came as a  shock when in that setting I dreamt of sitting at a small table across from Jung, a half empty bottle of wine between us, as Jung said  in a slurred voice, “Don’t believe everything I say.”

I was on my way.

Jung once said he would have  had no interest in dreams if they didn’t have meaning.  For thirty years I have been intrigued by Jung’s thoughts on the subject as well as the thoughts of others.  Therefore a recent television program on “Why we dream”  naturally caught my eye. 

It was largely a  behavioral study of REM sleep, in which,  not to my surprise, Jung’s name went unmentioned.

My purpose here is to introduce some of Jung’s thoughts to a largely uninformed public, and to explain  the reason for his omission, which is typical of scientific studies of the dream state, and reports on those studies.

The author's book

You learn many interesting things traveling on public lands following the wild horse issue in the American West.

You learn that after standing in sub-zero temperatures, attempting to document winter roundups, that returning to the relative warmth of your parked vehicle can make your glasses crack. You learn that chemical toe warmers are good as wrist, neck and “slip into your coveralls attach to your underwear” warmers as well. You learn that rattlesnakes don’t always rattle.

You learn the maneuvers the federal government will attempt to hide their actions when “managing” America’s wild herds: Maneuvers that range from lying about facility contracts to a roadblock on a remote dirt road operated by armed men who stop three woman from seeing the wild horses being captured.

On June 19, 1971 both houses of Congress passed the Wild Free Roaming Horse and Burro, act without a single dissenting vote. That act read:

 
§ 1331. Congressional findings and declaration of policy

Congress finds and declares that wild free-roaming horses and burros are living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West; that they contribute to the diversity of life forms within the Nation and enrich the lives of the American people; and that these horses and burros are fast disappearing from the American scene. It is the policy of Congress that wild free-roaming horses and burros shall be protected from capture, branding, harassment, or death; and to accomplish this they are to be considered in the area where presently found, as an integral part of the natural system of the public lands.
 

Somehow though, somewhere in the implementation of the Act, something went terribly wrong. In its findings, Congress declared, “These horses and burros are fast disappearing from the American scene.” However the agency tasked by Congress to protect and preserve these disappearing horses became transformed into a machine that removes more horses from public lands than any other force or man or nature in modern history.

As a journalist and photojournalist, this issue has become my life’s passion. Yet the pursuit of the story has now taken me to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to protect my First Amendment right to document and report the actions of our government in this issue of great public interest.

If there is nothing to hide, why go through such lengths to hide what is being done? This is hardly a matter of national security, after all.
This doomed wild horse, stampeded for miles by BLM helicopter "cowboys," has literally lost its hooves (photo by Laura Leigh)

(This article is Part III of journalist Ridenour’s political autobiography, Solidarity and Resistance: 50 Years With Che. Click here for Part I and here for Part II)
 

Grethe Porsgaard and I fell in love, in 1979. She was from Denmark and vacationing in Los Angeles. I traveled to her homeland, in 1980, where we married. At my behest, we made a go of it in her country. A major factor in that decision was that my former wife had taken our children, whose upbringing we had been sharing, from me, and had turned them against me. It would have been a negative way to begin a new love life living close to that madness. Although Grethe and I ended our marriage after several years, we remain friends.

In the first years in Denmark, I worked at odd jobs and wrote freelance, while also participating in Central America solidarity activities. In the course of that work, I met an El Salvadoran guerrilla leader in Copenhagen while he was on tour for the FMLN. We agreed that I would travel clandestinely to El Salvador where I would accompany guerrillas in the countryside, with the goal of writing a book.

This project led to my first visit to Cuba, in the autumn of 1987. My first book, Yankee Sandinistas: interviews with North Americans living & working in the new Nicaragua, had just been published by Curbstone Press in the US. At the recommendation of Cuba’s embassy personnel in Copenhagen, I offered it to Cuba’s foreign book publisher, Editorial José Martí, to publish a Spanish translation.

In a few days, the publishing house director told me that they wished to publish my book and had assigned a translator to it. Delighted, I signed a formal contract. Later, I saw Fidel hold a four-hour speech in the convention center and hung on to every word. It was true what was said about his abilities as a speaker: he was the world’s greatest orator. And what a memory he had! He could start off somewhere and go around the world describing how it was and how it is, and do so without notes or even water, and seemingly all in one long breath.

Just the year before, the government had launched a period of “Rectification of Errors and Negative Tendencies” as a response to economic and political stagnation. The leadership now realized that copying the Soviet Union’s Economic Management and Planning System for 15 years had been a mistake. Rectification was aimed at diversifying domestic production, reducing dependency on the mono-culture export of sugar, stemming market-economy tendencies, and emphasizing volunteer labor.
Author Ron Ridenour burns his US Passport in front of US Special Interests Section building in Havana

“Pakistan must do more.”

That statement by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has become a laugh line in Pakistani drawing rooms.
The 9/11 attacks resulted in 2,996 deaths — 246 on the planes,2606 in towers and on ground, 126 at the Pentagon. The attacks justified an invasion of Afghanistan, the Iraq War and also attacks on the America’s “ally in war on terror,” Pakistan.

The US has come a long way since. The policy of extrajudicial killings survived the Bush/Cheney era and has intensified from an estimated 45 attacks under Bush to 200 under Obama.

Few of those killed in these attacks have been militants. Most have been civilians. Indeed, according to the New American Foundation, only 2% of deaths have been of militants. But hey, that’s ok. That’s why the term “collateral damage” was coined, right?

The Pakistan Army has been engaged in a non-conventional war since 2001, resulting in millions being displaced and in civil amenities being destroyed. Yet there is now increasing pressure from the US on Pakistan to have out army target the region of our own country called North Waziristan.

Pakistan, the US says, needs to “do more.”

Or else!

In an article carried by the Pakhtoonistan Gazette on 10th April 2011, Muhammad Tahir comments on a White House report claiming that Pakistan has no “clear path” to defeat militants on its soil.

My humble submission, dear readers, is: Neither does the USA.

However, Pakistan needs to “do more.”
US drone attacks in Pakistan are killing mostly civilians, plus any lingering affection for America

As a boy I knew old Lonnie Chase, who clammed for a living in the waters of Cape Cod.  Not known for his erudition, his words were short and pithy.  I remember his response to my question regarding the weather. After gazing skyward, seeming to be pondering the clouds,  he would always answer, “Might rain, then ‘gin, might not.”
 


Was Lonnie being a wise man  or a fool?  I choose the first.  From sitting hours in his dingy in the bay, he had learned to trust ambiguity.  For him, there was something controlling the weather that was unpredictable, something his Indian blood told him was beyond our understanding. 
 

Lonnie had never gone to school, and he couldn’t even write his name, yet he was a superb craftsman of small boats.  I marveled at his obese frame as he’d sit by the stove chewing tobacco, a spittoon beside him, as he and his friend Long John discussed things beyond the ability of a ten-year-old boy to grasp.  A few adults sensed his worth as a member of the local community, but thanks to his unkempt ways, most characterized him as a local one-man blight on the neighborhood.
 

There are others who are more famously hard to characterize when it comes to wisdom. Take Einstein, whose often peculiar and errant behavior also included a strong display of wisdom.  I had once thought of writing that knowledge and wisdom were mutually exclusive, the one being occluded by the other, but Einstein gives the lie to such an assertion.
 


In his case we have the element of genius, of course.  But van Gogh, also a genius, demonstrates that genius and wisdom don’t necessarily go hand in hand.  
 
 How about wisdom and age, then, which is really the subject of this article?
Sidharta: A wise man or a fool?

Cupar, Scotland–This county town of Fife, is not exactly a news hot spot. Probably the last big story here was the landing of Italian balloonist Vincenzo Lunardi nearby in 1785 at the end of a 43-mile flight from Edinburgh.

However the small town’s sleepy Sheriff court is about to host a key legal case involving a US student from New York and two anti Israeli protestors who have been charged with racism.

For the information of US readers, in Scotland the Sheriff isn’t some John Wayne figure with the star on his chest, but is rather the bewigged judge presiding over the local court.

This case centers on an incident at nearby St. Andrews University, where two students are facing racially aggravated conduct charges after allegedly making comments and gestures critical of the State of Israel
and its flag.

Press reports are already in danger of prejudging the case, with headlines such as the one reading “St. Andrews University students in court to face anti-Semitism charges” that ran in the local daily, The Courier.

According to one of the charged students, Paul Donnachie, “Whilst in the room at the student residences of an individual who I considered a friend, Chanan Reitblat, I placed my hands down the front of my
jeans and onto an Israeli flag which belonged to him, accompanied by comments to the effect that Israel is a terrorist state, and is guilty of many civilian deaths.”

He continued, “The action was not malicious. However, it sparked a great deal of political debate amongst our group of friends within our Hall of Residence, whereby the nature of the State of Israel was
discussed.”
The Cupar Sheriff's Court will decide if protesting Israel's military is 'anti-Semitic'

Forty-seven governments on the Untied Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) will discuss and decide, beginning at its May 30th session, what to do about an unusually candid and truthful report in the world of international politics.

The Report of the Secretary-General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka was delivered to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on March 31 concerning both alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the last phases of the 26-year old civil war that ended May 19, 2009, and the consequences for approximately 300,000 Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) and, by extension, for the 2.7 million Sri Lankan Tamils, who were the losers in the war. Some 13% of the Sri Lanka’s 21 million people are Tamil.

After receiving the report, which calls for investigations into these allegations, Ban Ki-moon stated that he did not have the power alone but that one of three UN bodies could request such action by either the General Assembly or the Security Council or the Human Rights Council.

The panel—chairman Marzuki Darusman (Indonesia), Steven Ratner (US), and Yasmin Sooka (South Africa)—was commissioned by the Secretary General, June 22, 2010, after Sri Lanka’s government had failed to rehabilitate or reconcile with the Tamils affected by the brutal war. According to the panel’s finding, the war caused up to 40,000 civilian deaths in its last eight months. Also killed were several thousand government soldiers and combatants of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

The Panel began its work in September 2010 but had to conduct its research outside Sri Lanka as the government refused this United Nations body permission to enter its country. The Panel could interview many eye witnesses, however, who were eventually released from military camps after months of detention—in many cases after paying bribes—or who were able to escape the war zone towards the end on boats provided by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Several ICRC workers and other humanitarian employees were killed by government military shelling.

Beware of Americans…Bearing Gifts
 

By Shaukat Qadir
 

I am sure everyone knows this but merely to ensure we are on the same grid, a policy has one or more aims to be achieved in a specified period and spells out how the said aims will be achieved. While I have no intention of fleshing out a policy in this article, I will merely seek to emphasise the need for one and suggest what it should be aiming at. Pakistan has been without any policy since Ayub Khan’s decline in 1964!

Let us start by looking at what every ordinary citizen of any country, including Pakistan, wants. First and foremost is security: Not just security of life and limb or security from neighbouring enemies, but also food security, water security, job security, economic security, energy security etc. The list is long, and he/she wants to live in peace, so as to have the right to ‘pursue happiness’.

If this is all what we need, do we have any of these? Quite right, we have none! Why not? Because, apart from the rampant corruption at all levels of those in authority, we are engaged in a war that is sapping all our resources! Make no mistake, this is our war; the ‘enemy within’ poses an existential threat, greater than any external power does.

But why did this war begin? Why did the once loyal Mehsud, Afridi, and Mohmand turn against us?

If we hark back in time, in 2001, the Pakistani Pashtun and all Afghans were celebrating US intervention in Afghanistan. It would liberate them from Taliban oppression. Within a year, American arrogance, their suspicion of all Afghans, their utter disregard for local customs and culture, could result in only one thing: Another Afghan freedom struggle from an oppressive foreign force. The US called it a resurgence of the Taliban and al Qaeda! In time it did become that, because the US converted a legitimate struggle for freedom from an army of occupation into ‘Taliban linked to al Qaeda.’

To return to my question — as they did when Afghans sought their freedom from the Soviet occupation, the Pakistani Pashtuns bordering Afghanistan, girded their loins to assist their Afghan brethren. This time, Pakistan did not want them to. And in 2004, we decided to kill the most outspoken of those Pashtuns, a wazir called Nek Muhammad.

His murder was the watershed. We had a rebellion on our hands because we were preventing our tribal Pashtun from assisting their Afghan brethren in their freedom struggle against an army of occupation: The Americans, of course. So all Pakistan suddenly became American, kafirs, legitimate targets for religious fanatics to kill, and we are more vulnerable and accessible for them to target. So we are faced with an existentialist threat and we die. This was the first gift we got from the US.

Without tracing all the history, where do we stand today as far as the US is concerned? Anybody, who is anybody in the US, is baying for our blood. We are traitors to them and branded American-kafirs by our enemy within. Obama now tells us that when the Navy SEALs came to get Osama, they were “in sufficient numbers and prepared to retaliate to any response by the police or Pakistan’s security forces”.

They also gifted us Raymond Davis, hundreds of him. When we agreed to give him back, it was on the condition that all other Raymonds also leave. The CIA has not forgiven us and recent drone attacks are again killing more civilians than militants. If the Raymonds can no longer stoke unrest in Pakistan, the drones can!

As far as the promised financial aid is concerned, we receive a mere trickle, each time with another threat of severance if we fail to obey our Lords and Masters in DC. Even the Coalition Support Fund (CSF), intended to compensate a small portion of the expense incurred by the military in this war that has been forced on us by the US and Musharaf’s capitulation, is long overdue by well over a billion dollars.

The US has its own litany of complaints but we have ours. Isn’t it time to file for divorce?

Morning after in the courtyard of the Osama Bin-Ladin compound, following the US SEAL raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan

The stunning victory in last week’s elections by the pro-independence
Scottish National Party was a result which was supposed to be
impossible.

Scotland, after all, ceased to be an independent country in 1707, when it was
forcibly joined with England to form Great Britain.

The union took place against a background of popular riots put down by
troops and has been controversial, to a greater or lesser degree, ever
since.

In 1999, following years of agitation and its endorsement in a
Scotland-wide referendum, the Scottish Parliament reconvened with
powers over a wide range of domestic matters such a health, education,
planning, etc.

The new parliament was designed with an electoral system rigged so that it
would supposed be impossible for any one party to win a majority — the explicit intention being to prevent the SNP from using it as a stepping stone
to independence.

The May 5th result, which gave the SNP 69 seats in the 129-seat
parliament has thrown all this into the melting pot and raises the
real possibility of Scotland taking the next step to becoming a full-fledged independent country.

SNP leader Alex Salmond, who master-minded the stunningly successful campaign, plans to wait until the second part of the parliament’s five-year term before
putting the question of secession to an all-Scotland referendum for decision.
Scottish voters showed a surge in support for the independence party. Will they do the same in a referendum on independence?

Berlin — The debate continues: Was the killing of Osama bin Laden justified? Perhaps a rather useless debate since he is now most certainly dead. But despite their distance in time and space some flashbacks insist on recurring, right next to terrible images of those two planes and the two huge buildings collapsing in New York ten years ago. (No, make that three buildings!)

I for example still think about that Cuban plane which exploded on October 6th 1976 in the Caribbean, killing the 5 crew members and all 73 passengers, including the entire champion fencing team of Cuba, many of whom were still teenagers. All four men directly responsible for this horror had ties to the CIA which, it was later revealed, knew of the bombing in advance.

Then I must go back to an event fifteen years earlier, in April 1961, when an attack unit, armed, trained, financed and transported by the CIA, after destroying many Cuban airplanes on the ground, invaded the so-called Bay of Pigs in the south of that country. Perhaps as many as 4000 Cubans were killed while fighting off the attack.

Those mainly responsible for the Bay of Pigs invasion, then CIA-Director head Allen Dulles and two presidents who approved the action, Eisenhower and Kennedy, are no longer alive.
I learned as a kid that “sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.”
Some of the victims of the bombing of a Cuban airliner, orchestrated by CIA terrorists