Saturday, March 26, 2011

Illegal immigrants: God's gift to America


Thank God for illegal immigrants!

"But Jane," you might say, "those people are stealing our jobs!" Yeah right. Jobs we don't want. We're talking about diligent workers who are more than willing to perform

I'm currently reading Soledad O'Brien's new book, "The Next Big Story," wherein she states that while researching her documentary on Latinos in America, she asked a fairly broad sample of "legal" Americans if they had ever lost their job to an Illegal immigrant. O'Brien then goes on to say that she had been unable to find even one person who had lost their job to a Latino. Not even one. But I digress.


We are not only blessed but also downright lucky to have these people living and working here -- no matter how many exaggerated negative stereotypes Lou Dobbs has dreamed up.

The main ingredient that "illegal" immigrants continue to bring to our American table is one of the most valuable assets that this country has. When illegal immigrants cross that southern border, they bring hope along with them. And hope is more than just some political snake oil sold to us during the last presidential election. Hope is the stuff from which we build our future -- and America's "illegal" immigrants add this one chip to the pot that America so sorely wants and needs right now in these current war-torn and depressive times.

"Illegal" immigrants bring hope with them now, just like 'illegal" immigrants always have -- in the back of their covered wagons, stuffed into their cardboard suitcases and knapsacks and sewed into the hems of their skirts.

I myself am a direct descendant of one of the first waves of "illegal" immigrants that first brought hope to America's shores -- the original native Americans who arrived here over 10,000 years ago. And they arrived here illegally, trudging stolidly across the frozen land-bridge that is now the Bering Strait. And these immigrants brought with them two of the greatest sources of hope that we have -- democracy and respect for the land.

My great-great-great-grandfather, Chief Ballard, "illegally" immigrated to the Oklahoma territory -- after surviving a horrific Trail of Tears.

My great-grandmother, Mary Ballard, married the deputy US marshal at Tahlequah, the one who brought in the outlaw Frank James (Frank's brother Jesse busted him out of jail the next day but it's the thought that counts. My grandmother, Alta Purpus, remembered Frank being handcuffed to her parents' brass bedstead overnight when she was a girl).

I am also a direct descendant of another wave of "illegal" immigrants -- the Puritans who founded Massachusetts and Thomas Hooker who founded Connecticut and James Hooker who fought in the American Revolution. I think there is also a Tudor family connection back in there somewhere so perhaps all my daughters and granddaughters actually really ARE princesses!

Through the Thompson side of my family, I am related to the next wave of "illegal" immigrants to come over here -- African slaves who built the American South with their own hands.

I am also a direct descendant or am tied by marriage or blood to many of America's 19th-century "illegal" immigrant groups, the Eastern Europeans (through my favorite great-aunt Dixie Cohen), Danes (my grandmother married a Janssen), Germans (my great-great-grandfather was a Purpus, used to be a forester in Bavaria, had a son who was hung as a horse thief in Missouri), Chinese (the Jo family first arrived in California in 1849 and have been here ever since. Mena Jo Stillwater is a sixth-generation Californian. There aren't many other "legal" Californians who can claim that -- unless they are Mexican!), and Mexicans too (yep, I've got them in my family tree as well -- the Lozano and Hernandez families). But I digress. Again.

"So what's your point here, Jane?" My point is this. All of us Americans used to be "illegals" at one time -- or are descended from illegals. And thank God for that!

And America's latest generation of illegals, like all the other generations before them, brings with it a new sense of renewal -- and of hope.

So enough of this "illegal" crap!

PS: Soledad O'Brien also stated that Mexican-Americans and Mexican immigrants [and also Muslim immigrants and Muslim-Americans too, as far as I can tell] have now taken the place formerly held by African-Americans -- as America's most hated, despised and segregated race. And she's right. That's just pathetic.

All too many Latinos here [and Muslims too] have been spit upon, not allowed to attend schools, denied the right to buy homes and even lynched -- just like in the bad old days of the Klu Klux Klan and Bull Connor. I marched in Montgomery with Dr. King for nothing? It looks like I have.


Plus it's time for Americans to grow up and stop all this hatin'. Nothing good has ever come from hate. It eats at our souls.


PPPS: And where did this whole concept of "citizenship" come from anyway? When did citizen requirements ever become "legal"? But if I actually am a "legal" citizen of the United States, then why can't I just appoint others to citizenship as well? Sort of like "Each one teach one" or like spreading a virus around?

Is catching U.S. citizenship something like catching the flu?

But if you are a so-called "illegal" immigrant in America and you are reading this now, then by the power vested in me as a United States citizen and with the love and mercy of God -- who has freely given America a whole tide of hopeful "illegal" immigrants all down through the centuries as His (or Her) own great gift to us -- then I hereby declare and affirm that you too are hereby made LEGAL as well.

Sorry that I don't have any fancy certificates made up for this occasion -- but if any of you new American hopefuls happen to have designed one of your own, I will officially present it to you with great ceremony -- and even give you a big hug. Welcome to America! Amen! Achoo.

Friday, March 25, 2011

Madam Jane predicts: America will never grow a pair












This was in 1951.














Tuesday, March 22, 2011


"And what did you learn from your recent trip to Antarctica?" someone asked me the other day. I learned that penguin colonies smell really bad and that penguins have no indoor plumbing. So I dealt with this problem as best I could -- rented a penguin costume, made a toilet-training video for penguins and posted it on YouTube. It was the least I could do.

"And how did that work out? Are penguins now using the potty-chair regularly or at least wearing diapers?" Who knows! And I'm not about to go back down there to find out. It's COLD in Antarctica! After spending time in to Antarctica, I'll never feel cold here in Berkeley again -- no matter how many hail-storms we have and no matter how bad climate change hits the Bay Area.

PS: Here's my penguin toilet-training video. Penguins, listen up!

PPS: Speaking of climate change, apparently the Berkeley Bowl produce market is not selling tomatoes any more -- or at least not very many. You used to be able to walk into the Bowl's vegetable section and find bunches of shelves and bins filled with tomatoes. But not any more. Not since the big freeze of 2010-2011. Now they only gots a few shelves devoted to selling big reds and Romas, and the price of cherry tomatoes from Mexico is now $3.69 a basket.

Between the price of gas now hitting four dollars a gallon, the various ice sheets hitting our tomato supply line and our deficit hitting new highs due to the cost of our new "war" on Libya, it's apparently time to resign ourselves to the price of stuff that we need going up -- and up and up. But who the freak can make spaghetti without tomatoes?

But if America actually really is seriously broke and has as huge a deficit as the governor of Wisconsin and Rush Limbaugh claim that we do, then America could never afford to continue to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan -- let alone up and bomb Libya. Lord knows that bomber fuel ain't cheap!


Imagine six or eight Brits huddled in a flimsy wood hut for several years, trying to spy on enemy battleships and U-boats that might try to sneak through the Drake Passage -- and you've pretty much got the idea of what Port Lockroy was like. Talk about your last outpost of Empire!



PPPPS: While at Port Lockroy, I also mailed a post card to my three-year-old granddaughter Mena. However, I've been back home in Berkeley for almost a month now and the freaking post card still hasn't been delivered.

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Extraordinary ordinary people: Rosie the Riveter, Wisconsinites & Tokyo firefighters

My daughter Ashley needed a ride out to Richmond (CA) yesterday because of the pouring rain. Oh, okay. But while I was out there, I also went to visit the city's relatively new Rosie the Riveter/Home Front National Park. In the rain. And I also talked with park ranger Betty Soskin while I was there.

"I like the way this park looks," I told Ranger Betty, "but isn't all this talk about how wonderful Rosie the Riveter was just one more way to mythologize and glorify war?"

"That's not true," replied RB. "I'd never ever work here if it was. This park is very important to me -- but not because of its connection with World War II. This park has meaning because it makes a record in time and shows an example of what ordinary people such as you and I can achieve -- just by working together. In the Richmond shipyards here, in the course of just a few years, American workers -- many of them female -- built over 747 vessels in a mere three years and eight months. That is a more massive achievement than the pyramids of Egypt." Or even the Great Wall of China. "And that achievement has meaning."

Ranger Betty stated that the Richmond shipyards' example offers a vision of what people can do if they work together -- ordinary people accomplishing extraordinary things.

"Yes, I think that I see what you mean," I replied. "It's like what the people of Wisconsin did when they stood up in defense of their unions. Or when the young people of the Middle East achieved regime change armed only with their laptops and a burning passion for freedom. And like what the extraordinary ordinary firefighters of Tokyo did when they got into their firetrucks and drove off to Fukushima to try, against all odds of succeeding, to put out the terrible nuclear fires there -- knowing that they might never come back alive," mirroring the heroism of the first responders at the World Trade Center on 9/11.

Ranger Betty seems to believe that people are basically good -- and will eventually do the right thing. "It may take a while, perhaps decades or even centuries, but eventually it happens." And that is the story of how I left the rain-soaked city of Richmond with more hope for the future than I ever had before I arrived. Thanks RB.

And Rosie's important lessons of the 1940s are still pointing us in the right direction even today. "We can do it!" said Rosie back then. And she's still right. Not only that but, by working together in this time of crisis, we extraordinary ordinary people today can take even more steps forward.


We can invent and construct so much solar, wind, thermal and other alternative energy that we'll all look back on our former dependency on oil, coal and nuclear and just chuckle at those past follies -- much in the same way that we now do toward those who thought the world was flat.

"We can do it!"

We can repossess our government too -- take it back from the rich. We can limit campaign contributions, shut down the lobbies and impeach anyone in the executive, legislative and judicial branches who still believes that corporations are persons. We can put our government back to work building infrastructure, funding education, making healthcare work and protecting and serving -- instead of just handing out OUR money to oligarchs and war profiteers. And we can hand-count our own freaking ballots.

banks that lie to us for profit and put it in credit unions that work for us instead. We can shut down banksters "too big to fail," shut down the casinos on Wall Street that happily gamble away our money and shut down those counterfeiters at the Federal Reserve. Let's make our hard-earned money work for US for a change.

"We can do it!"

And we can stop building warships for blood-thirsty, fear-mongering politicians and war profiteers -- and start building plowshares for ourselves.


My father's letters home from Occupied Japan (now donated to the Rosie the Riveter/Home Front National Park's archives BTW) were heart-felt and moving. "Today I was one of the very first Americans ever seen by residents of a small town outside of Tokyo. I think that they had been told to expect monsters and were probably surprised that we didn't have horns and tails."

When Pop came back from Japan, the ship he was on -- which was more than likely had been built by the Rosies -- got detained at Coronado and so my mom, who was a VERY determined young woman and who was sick and tired of her husband being gone, rented a rowboat, stuck us two kids in the prow, rowed out to my father's ship and waved to him from our boat.

You shoulda seen it -- hundreds of returning sailors, leaning over the rails, cheering, waving back at us and kidding my poor father. "Hey, Lieutenant Purpus! Look! There's your wife!"

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Happy St. Patrick's Day + Raymond Davis sets an example

Yelp just posted a list of various places where you could go to celebrate St. Patricks Day in the East Bay, including Fentons ice cream parlor. Fentons?

"At Fentons," Yelp wrote, "Lynsey T falls for the sweetness of her Celtic crush, the Black and Tan." WHAT! Doesn't Yelp realize that the dread Black and Tan slaughtered huge numbers of Irish-Catholic protesters in Belfast and Crossmaglen -- not to mention the ones that they murdered in Dublin, Kerry, Cork and Tipperary during the 20th-century Irish battles for independence. Yikes! Yelp, wash your mouth out with soap.

Oops, my bad. Local musician Mugg Muggles just informed me that "Black and Tan" is also the name given to a mixture of pale ale and Guinness stout. My bad. Yelp, you are forgiven after all.

But speaking of murders, let's talk about Raymond Davis, the American CIA agent in Pakistan who was caught in the act of murdering people, and was just recently set free by the high court in Lahore. Why? Because apparently there's a law in Pakistan that says if you kill someone you can buy your freedom by paying your victim's family enough "blood money" to satisfy them. Well, apparently Davis (or the CIA or, more likely, American taxpayers) just forked over two million dollars to the families of the two men who he killed -- and Davis is now a free man.

Hey, maybe we should consider doing something like that over here in America too. At the rate of one million dollars per man, then perhaps Bush and Obama could buy their way out of having caused the unnecessary deaths of approximately 5,900 American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan -- by offering up "blood money" to the families of the soldiers they killed in these two trumped-up wars. Then Bush and Obama's get-out-of-jail-free cards would only cost them, er.... Sorry, I'm bad with numbers. You do the math.

Sunday, March 13, 2011

Civil war in Libya: Is America next?


Good grief!










Friday, March 11, 2011

Wells Fargo's new "overdraft fee" racket: Fraud still going on?

Last week the Berkeley branch of Wells Fargo bank started going all ballistic on a friend of mine's telephone. Night and day, robo-dialers attacked her phone, reminding her over and over again that her account with Wells Fargo was now in collection, that she now owed Wells Fargo a whole bunch of money and that if she didn't pay up, then her credit would be totally ruined. "Totally ruined!"

How did things come to such a sorry pass? I'm not sure, but I think it may have involved Wells Fargo breaking both local and federal laws -- again.

My friend's telephone nightmare all started when T-Mobile claimed (probably erroneously because she had disconnected her service with T-M months ago) that my friend owed it hundreds of dollars. And as a result, T-Mobile quietly tiptoed into my friend's Wells Fargo bank account and basically gutted it for everything that was in there -- and more. The local branch of Wells Fargo basically handed T-Mobile the farm.

"Here, take everything that this person has in her account and just to make sure that you're completely happy, we'll throw in a few hundred dollars more that isn't even IN her account," Wells Fargo apparently told its buddies at T-Mobile.


Wells Fargo is now giving away its own money? But why? Why wasn't the bank following its normal procedure, blocking my friend's account and telling T-Moblie to get stuffed? As far as I can figure out, it's because Wells Fargo bank makes a huge amount of their profits from charging overdraft fees.

However, there's a catch here. If there are no overdrafts in people's bank accounts, then Wells Fargo can't charge any overdraft fees, right? So apparently it has been standard practice at Wells Fargo, despite a whole ship-load of computer software designed to prevent it, to "accidentally" let a whole bunch of these so-called "overdrafts" just happen. Oops.

"But Jane," you might say, "that's illegal and Wells Fargo has already been sued and forced to pay back over two million dollars to the customers that it ripped off by using this fraudulent practice. Wells Fargo KNOWS that this business practice is illegal. They have already been told by a federal court to cease and desist."


And why else would Wells Fargo make a "shadow line of credit" loan to my friend, thus giving their own money away? Nothing else makes sense.


And just in case you don't have time to read the whole thing, here are a few choice quotes from the judge's orders in this matter:

"THE SHADOW LINE: The last step in the three-step plan was executed in May 2002. Wells Fargo implemented a practice involving a secret bank program called 'the shadow line.' Before, the bank declined debit-card purchases when the account’s available balance was insufficient to cover the purchase amount. After, the bank authorized transactions into overdrafts, but did so with no warning that an overdraft was in progress.


"Internally, Wells Fargo called this its 'shadow line,' as in shadow 'line of credit.' The amount of the credit ceiling per customer was and still is kept secret. Again, customers were not even alerted when shadow-line extensions were made to them — until it was too late and many overdraft fees were racked up.

"In this program, the bank correctly expected that it would make more money in overdraft fees than it would ever lose due to 'uncollectibles' (i.e., overdrafts that were never paid back).

"Bad Faith and the Shadow Line: The third initiative was 'overdraft via POS' — the extension of the shadow line to debit-card purchases in May 2002. As a result of this change, Wells Fargo began authorizing debit-card purchases even though the account was already overspent.


PPS: If something like this has happened to you too, here's a link to an application that you can fill out in order to become part of a class-action lawsuit against Wells Fargo yourself:

And Wells Fargo isn't the only bank that is doing this either. Apparently, many more national bank chains are also happily cleaning out their customers' accounts. That's bank robbery! That's pathetic.


PPPS: When my friend went in to Wells Fargo today and asked a bank officer about all the many fees that it is now charging her, she was told, "These new fee charges are different from the ones in the lawsuit." And what big difference is that? Apparently these new fees are being called "overdraft protection" fees instead of just fees at the point-of-service. Yeah, but the result is the same -- Wells Fargo is still raking in hundreds of dollars in completely unreasonable fee charges, just from this one account.

If Wells Fargo is charging hundreds of dollars in unreasonable "overdraft fees" to just one of its customers, imagine how much money it is raking in from all the rest of its victims/customers!



Wednesday, March 09, 2011

Total access: Using the other 90% of our brains

For years, scientists such as Albert Einstein and William James have been telling us that we human beings only use 10% of our brain capacity. Wouldn't it be marvelous if we could use the other 90%? Can you imagine all the great ideas that we might be able to come up with?

Great literature -- we'd all become Shakespeares!

Great art -- I wanna be Michelangelo!

Great science -- Einsteins on every corner, they'd run out of Nobel Prizes!

Great music -- your child would truly be baby Mozart.

Great humanitarians -- would you rather be Buddha or Jesus?

Or perhaps the opposite might happen and we'd end up with more Hitlers, Stalins, Atilla the Huns and Dick Cheneys. Oh crap.

But how do you go about accessing the other 90% of your brain? Meditation? Dreaming? Hitting the books? LSD? Peyote?

At one point in time way back in the 1960s, I ate some mescaline down at Big Sur -- and it was immediately revealed to me that NATURE is the most important thing in the world. According to Mescalito, living within the context of trees and grass and mountain vistas and fresh air offers the most meaning to the human brain that there is. As the day wore on, however, both Mescalito and I began to think that perhaps pancakes were the most important thing.

But taking mescaline didn't make me a genius either. Don't try it at home.

"Go to college! That will make you smarter!" my mother always told me -- back during a time when women were just supposed to stay home and play-act at being June Cleaver. So I went off to college. Got a masters degree too. But did that make me a genius? I wish. And it didn't make any of those Yale and Harvard graduates who run the Federal Reserve into geniuses either. It just made them better crooks and liars and helped them to figure out new and better ways to keep their butts out of jail.

In these crucial times, it is so very important for the human race to use more of its brain capacity and to evolve. We have been basically thinking like cavemen for all too long. For instance, take the situation in Libya. When confronted with a desire on the part of his people to obtain more democratic institutions, Muammar
Gaddafi responded exactly like the most primitive caveman might have. He started killing people, his people.

And what has been America's answer to problems in Afghanistan, Tripoli. Washington, Wall Street and Wisconsin? Pissing contests that involve violence and threats. That's not evolution or wisdom. That's Neanderthal.

But perhaps the next generation will do better than our generation has done. To paraphrase one of my favorite bumper stickers which now reads, "Imagine a world where EVERY child is wanted, nurtured, protected and loved: World Peace in one generation!" -- maybe if we want and nurture and protect and love the next generation instead of just stealing its future, perhaps we can also get more geniuses as well as just more whirled peas.

Jill Bolte Taylor is a brain scientist who was given a rather strange research opportunity: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions -- motion, speech, self-awareness -- all shut down one by one. Then she worked really hard to get all of her brain functions back. Maybe we can learn something from what happened to her and build on her experiences as well.

I've also heard that art, music and other forms of creativity can also expand our brains -- and make us better at math too. According to an article in the Harvard Educational Review by Eric Jensen, “Research from the studies discussed in [Arts With the Brain in Mind] and the experience of countless classroom educators support the view that visual arts have strong positive cognitive, emotional, social, collaborative, and neurological effects.”

And, given all this well-researched information, what are the powers-that-be in America doing with it right now? They're making major cuts to funding for our art museums, school music programs and literature grants in order to have more Moolah to invest in their bloody, useless, uncivilized and paleolithic wars. Good thinking? Hardly.

Eating healthy stuff is supposed to be good for your brain too. Nothing processed. No sugar. No artificial sweeteners. Breast-feed your kids. That kind of stuff.

And while looking for ways to get a spacecraft to the moon,
one NASA scientist used to deliberately work himself to exhaustion, fall asleep, dream about the answers to his problems, wake up suddenly, and have his wife hurriedly write down what he had learned from his dream before the solutions were forgotten.

But I don't have a wife -- so no deep thinking or going to the moon for me. I'm screwed.

PS: Speaking of music, I just starred -- well, sort of -- in a new punk-rock music video!

Wednesday, March 02, 2011

Rewarding non-violence in Palestine: Send pizza to the West Bank as well as Wisconsin

Yeah well, talking about injustice in Palestine is always a thankless task. But we still gotta do it because Palestine is still a big thorn in the foot of the Middle East and if the Middle East ain't happy, then ain't nobody happy -- at least nobody who likes to drive cars.

If you want Middle Eastern gas in your tank without having to spend a bunch of trillions of dollars more on war toys in order to steal it at gunpoint, then you are gonna have to come to terms with ending the illegal Palestine occupation.

"But Palestinians send rockets into Israel! And they have suicide bombers! We have to support the occupation because Palestinians are violent!" you might say. But are they? Violent? Not really. Not any more. That's just old-skool thinking.

For approximately the last ten years, more and more Palestinians have become non-violent in the tactics they have used to protest against being illegally occupied by
one of the largest and most combat-ready armies in the world. But are Palestinians getting any kind of recognition, kudos or rewards at all for having gone all non-violent? No. Hell no. Nothing, zip, nada.

For over fifty years, Palestinians had already tried the old "Red Dawn" armed-resistance scenario and it hadn't been working.
And so in approximately the last ten years they have noticeably changed their tactics and given non-violent protests a try instead. But so far the only results that have resulted from Palestinians' non-violent protests have been to get shot at -- and shot at and shot at -- by one of the largest and most combat-ready armies in the world.


So. If Americans truly want peace in the Middle East and cheap gas in their tanks, perhaps instead of continuing to give billions of dollars in military aid to
one of the largest and most combat-ready armies in the world as it illegally occupies Palestine, perhaps we should try something else and actually start REWARDING Palestinians for their efforts to be non-violent -- while still trying to express their deep frustration with being constantly under the thumb of a violent and illegal occupation force.

And if we truly want to reward and encourage Palestinians for trying to be the next Gandhis, then what can we do?

"Order Pizza!"

Hey, it worked in Wisconsin.

I have friends in the small Palestinian town of Ni'lin and every Friday for the last several years, they have bravely gone out and non-violently protested the seizure of their small quiet town by one of the largest and most combat-ready armies in the world -- and these ordinary towns-people are getting gassed, shot at and killed one by one. However, non-violence, while heroic as hell and very New Testament and all that, isn't really working for them so far because one of the largest and most combat-ready armies in the world clearly doesn't give a rat's behind about Palestinians.

So I am suggesting that you do to my friends in Ni'lin the same thing that the people of Egypt did for the people of Wisconsin. "Order Pizza."

Is there a pizza place in Ni'lin that takes credit cards? If so, give me its e-mail address and, instead of waiting patiently for Hillary Clinton to do it, I'll reward these non-violent protesters myself -- and order them pizza.

And imagine if everyone else in the world who could afford to spare a few dollars also barraged
one of the largest and most combat-ready armies in the world with pizzas as well? Problem solved. Cheap gas for all.

And then what if we also barraged Wall Street, K Street, the Federal Reserve and even the Taliban with pizzas? It's the volume that counts.

PS: Everyone's always talking about ending America's huge deficit. Hey that's easy to do. Just make major cuts in our out-of-control military spending, duh. And then let's replace all those pricey Bradley tanks and luxurious F16s with pizzas.

Let's build a huge wall of pizza (deep-dish Chicago-style with anchovies and olives) all around our shores and forget about the rest of America's "empire". And then let's turn America back into a country that is self-sufficient in manufacturing again. And let's start by manufacturing pizzas.

"But Jane, that's just crazy!" Not as crazy as wasting our country's resources and patrimony on manufacturing weapons -- cold merciless steel weapons designed only to kill, maim and hurt.

PPS: In his recent article on US polices toward Israel, Israeli peace activist Jeff Halper stated that, "Israel is the number-two supplier of arms [in the world]."

And of course we all know who is the Number One supplier of arms.

So why is everyone relying on the United States and Israel to be in charge of keeping the peace -- both in the Occupied Territories and in the rest of the world?

Isn't that a bit like expecting two very hungry bears to be in charge of guarding a honey tree?

PPPS: Even Thomas Friedman of the New York Times has a few unkind words to say about Israel, believe it or not: "Israel’s previous prime minister, Ehud Olmert, had to resign because he was accused of illicitly taking envelopes stuffed with money from a Jewish-American backer. An Israeli court recently convicted Israel’s former president Moshe Katsav on two counts of rape, based on accusations by former employees. And just a few weeks ago, Israel, at the last second, rescinded the appointment of Maj. Gen. Yoav Galant as the army’s new chief of staff after Israeli environmentalists spurred a government investigation that concluded General Galant had seized public land near his home. (You can see his house on Google Maps!)"

Perhaps we should be sending the Israelis some pizza too.

PPPPS: What if all of us little people from all over the world who are sick and tired of being bossed around by military thugs, bullies and sadists for the sole reason that their, er, guns are bigger than our guns -- what if we all got together and refused? Refused to be soldiers, refused to make weapons, refused to murder, refused to...just refused. Then what would happen?

Ultimately it's all in the numbers.

For every one of the bullies, sadists and thugs that hide behind
the largest and most combat-ready armies in the world, there are at least 99 more of us who are sick of all this bloodshed.

Tunisia, India, Egypt, South Africa, Jesus and the American South have all shown us that non-violent tactics really do bring about peace -- if you have the numbers. In fact, Tunisia and Egypt apparently even consciously took a leaf from Ni'lin's non-violent playbook. So. Let's put all of the world's largest and most combat-ready armies on notice. "Chill out now -- or else risk ending up like Mubarak, Bull Connor, apartheid and the British Raj."

We're armed and dangerous too -- we've got pizza!